For nearly five decades, a scientific loner guarded a great labyrinth of lines on the desert floor near the small Peruvian town of Nazca. Day after day, until she was too elderly and too ill for such solitary work, Maria Reiche set out into the barren vastness with camera, compass, and papers, mapping thousands of […]
I shouldn’t say this. In fact, as someone who covers the field of archaeology for a living, I probably shouldn’t even be thinking this. But I find myself wondering increasingly whether it’s time for some dirt archaeologists to relinquish one of their great pleasures, namely the beloved rite of summer: field season. I say this […]
On the taxi ride there, I felt a little ill. The long, sleepless flight to Lima, a dodgy lunch that was coming back to haunt me, and the abrupt swerving and lurching of the taxi through the congested streets of the Peruvian capital—all seemed to be taking their toll. By the time I and my […]
The morning begins. I’ve been awake a good hour but I’m not really, truly awake until I reach the woods with my husband and our dog Max. In the dappled light of late spring, with soft green leafdom almost enveloping us, we slip him loose from the leash. Max lifts his head. He catches a […]
Even the dead kept watch. They sat upright in their graves, men and women, and faced the river, waiting, it seemed, for the waters to roil again with massive, steel-grey fish. The sturgeon, barbeled giants with rows of bony scutes down their backs, appeared each spring in Serbia’s Danube Gorge, after battling the current all […]
Each July, along the dappled stream banks of Kodiak Island, just off the Alaska coast, a weedy looking wildflower produces a few dark-blue hooded blossoms. There is nothing particularly memorable about the appearance of Aconitum delphinifolum. Its leaves are thin and rather spiky. Its scrawny-looking stem cannot hold the weight of its flowers: its neighbors […]
A few days ago, while I was out hiking in southern Arizona’s early morning heat with Jason De Leon and his students, I heard mention for the first time of Mexico’s Santa Muerte, or Saint Death. Our destination for the day was a small archaeological site hidden away in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest, but De […]
If you were sitting in front of a computer in China right now, you wouldn’t be reading this. Nor would you have seen Cameron’s post about a snail invasion on Monday or Michelle’s piece yesterday on a poem inspired by Marie Curie. In fact, when you tried to open our website, your computer would have […]