I recently wrote two stories for Archaeology magazine about the clash of history, science, and culture in the American Southwest. The main piece in the Nov/Dec issue juxtaposes Navajo claims to famous prehistoric sites, such as Chaco Canyon, with new archaeological data. This latest material evidence reinforces the strong scientific consensus that the Navajo didn’t…Continue Reading…
From 3 Quarksdaily, an intriguing post flows from this question: Will historians and archaeologists a few thousand years from now believe that scientists in the mid-twentieth century split the atom? That they even created a nuclear bomb? There’s a good chance the answer will be “no.” The author, Sam Kean, argues that our collective behavior…Continue Reading…
This thoughtful essay argues for reconciling the institutional divide between history and archaeology. Daniel Lord Smail, a professor of history at Harvard, writes that The discovery of “˜deep time’ during the middle of the 19th century has long been understood as a transforming moment in the histories of biology, archaeology and geology. We are only…Continue Reading…
© 2024 Keith Kloor. All Rights Reserved.