Tag Archives: Archaeology and Anthropology

Niede Guidon, a Brazilian archaeologist whose work called into question a longstanding theory of how the Americas were first populated by humans, and who almost single-handedly transformed a hardscrabble region of northeast Brazil into the Serra da Capivara National Park, died on Wednesday at her home near the park, in São Raimundo Nonato. She was 92. Marian Rodrigues, the park’s …

One day in the year 79, Pompeii came under fire. The explosion of nearby Mount Vesuvius sent a mushroom cloud of ash and rock into the atmosphere, pummeling the ancient Roman trading hub and resort in a ceaseless hail of tiny volcanic rocks. Many residents ran for their lives, trying to find safety with their loved ones before searing volcanic …

Phoenicians no doubt traveled to and from Carthage, he said, and over the six or seven centuries of its Punic life many probably relocated there and had families, but they could not have amounted to more than a tiny fraction of the population. “Certainly there’s no evidence of a regular supply of Phoenician women to become male colonists’ wives,” Dr. …

Gladiators battled lions and other wild animals in the arenas of the Roman Empire. But for all the tales of glorious combat depicted in ancient texts, marble reliefs and mosaics and then retold in movies and other modern media, archaeologists have never found direct physical evidence, like the skeletons of gladiators bearing animal-induced wounds. At last, proof of classical combat …

I was drawn to the outskirts of Cairo by the colossal complex in the desert — a towering site that arose over decades, built at unimaginable expense, with precisely cut stones sourced from local quarries; a set of buildings whose construction, plagued by extraordinary challenges, spanned the reigns of several rulers; a collective cultural testament, the largest of its kind, …

It may not have been the tax-evasion trial of the century — the second century, that is — but it was of such gravity that the defendants faced charges of forgery, fiscal fraud and the sham sale of slaves. Tax dodging is as old as taxation itself, but these particular offenses were considered so serious under Roman law that penalties …

For decades, fishermen sailing off the coast of Taiwan have sometimes discovered fossils in their trawling nets: the bones of elephants, buffalo and other big mammals that lived tens of thousands of years ago, when the sea level was so low that Taiwan was linked to Asia by a land bridge. But in 2010, a Taiwanese paleontologist was presented with …

The 6,500-year-old hunting kit contained pieces of a spear thrower and a boomerang, as well as wood- and stone-tipped darts. It was found in a cave in West Texas near the remains of a small fire, and a pile of well-preserved human waste — evidence of those who had once sheltered inside. The weapons, discovered over the past several years …

Ralph Holloway, an anthropologist who pioneered the idea that changes in brain structure, and not just size, were critical in the evolution of humans, died on March 12 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90. His death was announced by Columbia University’s anthropology department, where he taught for nearly 50 years. Mr. Holloway’s contrarian idea was that it wasn’t …

Avocados are true superfoods: dense, buttery scoops of vitamins, fat and fiber, all in a hand-size package. We worked for a long time to make them this way. According to a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, people in what we today call Honduras made avocados a part of their diets at least 10,000 …