The Neolithics of Stony Run

The path I take in the mornings has a stream, Stony Run, running along one side.  The path and the stream are in a tiny wooded floodplain you could throw a rock across.  The floodplain and stream are more or less maintained by Baltimore city and by the surrounding community associations – “maintained” as in, […]

The Calendar Made of Earth

This post originally published May 12, 2015 With a calendar and Google Earth on my computer, you’d think I wouldn’t need the horizon any more, but I find I need it more than ever. After 15 years living in the same house tucked into the West Elk Mountains of western Colorado, I moved this winter […]

A Repatriation

I attended a repatriation of artifacts and bones under Native American claim recently. The remains of 41 people and the artifacts buried with them, retrieved from an archaeological collection, went back in the ground. There’s not a lot I can write in detail. Returning the dead of a millennia-old village is an involved procedure and […]

They Paved the Maya World and Put Up a Parking Lot

A few weeks ago I published a story in Hakai about the hidden story of the ancient maritime Maya. It’s not the first time I’ve written about the Maya – in fact, for a while there it was a bit of an obsession. I’ve always found ancient Mesoamerican history fascinating. Partly, I just love history. […]

Redux: Hard Times in the Younger Dryas

    Summer’s been long and hot. Usually, I’m still enjoying it by August, but this time, winter is looking sweeter than ever. This post originally ran in January 27, 2015, and is about being colder than I ever had before, and about a time North America was colder than it had been in thousands of […]

The Archaeology of You

We were walking through meadows of dry grass on our way to a friend’s house when I stopped with my gal in a lone ponderosa grove where I once lived. I showed her what had been my porch and the place where I had a wood stove, all of it gone now. My front door […]

Dig at Homolovi

Today you get a poem, or prose with line breaks, about an archaeological dig and what happened there. Please take this post with a grain of salt, or sand, and enjoy.   East of Winslow, a tarp tied at six points pumps like an enormous drum Wind does not stop, not even to breathe, Hot […]