The heavily studied yet largely unexplained disappearance of ancestral Pueblo people from southwest Colorado is “the most vexing and persistent question in Southwestern archaeology,” according to the New York Times.
Vultures carve lazy circles in the sky as a stream of tourists marches down a walkway into Colorado’s Spruce Canyon. Watching their steps, the visitors file along a series of switchbacks leading to one of the more improbable villages in North America — a warren of living quarters, storage rooms, defensive towers and ceremonial spaces […]
What if you had access to an online research tool that provided a vast knowledge base about humans and their historical relationships with their physical landscapes?
A new study conducted in part by Washington State University researchers Brian Kemp and Timothy Kohler suggests that dogs may have first successfully migrated to the Americas only about 10,000 years ago, thousands of years after the first human migrants crossed a land bridge from Siberia to North America. The study looked at the genetic […]
Washington State University researchers have detailed the role of localized climate change in one of the great mysteries of North American archaeology: the depopulation of southwest Colorado by ancestral Pueblo people in the late 1200s. In the process, they address one of the mysteries of modern-day climate change: How will humans react? Writing in Nature […]
There’s a mythology about the native Americans—that they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature. It’s easy to create narratives when there is no written record. But archeology keeps its own history and a new paper finds that the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions killed in wars and genocides, was not the […]
Remember playing “The Oregon Trail” computer game in middle school? As a pioneer leading your family westward in a covered wagon, you hunted virtual deer, rabbits and bison—but not too many. You had to leave enough game animals alive to sustain your party until you reached Oregon. And along the way, you were subject to […]