Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Archeaology
Grand forces have shaped American biology across the past sixty-six million years, from the Paleocene to now.
It was the lead-up to a presidential election, an unsettling late summer for many Americans since the hugely popular incumbent, Theodore Roosevelt, was declining to run for president a second time.
The archaeologist who discovered the real Jamestown debunks myths, and answers age-old mysteries about North America's first successful English colony.
Elaborate earthworks engineered 2000 years ago by an impenetrably mysterious people still stand in astonishing abundance throughout the Ohio River Valley.
Robert Maslowski and I made our way carefully across the tobacco field, trying not to disturb the neat rows of freshly plowed furrows.
In the underpinnings of our cities, in desolate swampland, beneath coastal waters—wherever the early settlers left traces of their lives—a new generation of archaeologists is uncovering a lost world
CROUCHED IN an L-shaped pit, a foot below the surface of the forest floor, John Ehrenhard, an archaeologist with the National Park Service, is contemplating a piece of charred wood.
A seasoned campaigner’s look at the never-ending war between archaeological fact and archaeological fraud
In 1961 three rockhounds found an unusual nodule near Olancha, California. It contained ceramic, copper, and iron components and seemed obviously man-made.
Arkansas saves fragments of the rich but distant past.
There is something almost atavistic in the appeal of an archeological dig.
Peale’s Greatest Triumph
During the spring of 1801 Charles Willson Peale learned of a remarkable discovery—the huge bones of an “animal of uncommon magnitude” had been found in Orange and Ulster counties north of New York City.
IT’S A PETRIFIED MAN!
IT’S A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY IDOL!
IT’S A HOAX!
ITS THE CARDIFF GIANT!
One morning in early November of the year 1868 three men appeared at the railroad depot in Union, New York, just outside Binghamton.
A bitter feud among the bones
In the early 1870’s two American scientists began a vicious personal contest for position and eminence in the world of science.
An eminent scholar argues that its inscription is only a hoax.
Magnificent Central American ruins, overgrown by the thickening jungle, testify to a sophisticated culture already ancient when Columbus sailed
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