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 […]

Letters from the Dead

A recent email from a stranger posed a query as to what to do with Native American artifacts in her possession. I’ve never found the answer to be an easy one. The woman didn’t take much. She called it, “a small box of artifacts, a few really nice perfect arrows and a couple that where truly made […]

The Story I Never Wrote

Last year, I abandoned a story. It happens, journalists don’t write every story they think they might. But this one I still think about. It started innocuously enough. A paper caught my eye about looting and archaeology. The premise was somewhat counterintuitive: the author argued that in places where the economic situation was particularly dire, […]

All the Other Franklins

  “What happened to Franklin is, in its way, a trivial question. He had a wooden ship in the Arctic and no idea what he was doing – what do you mean, what happened to him? But we still ask why. “ – Adam Gopnik, Winter (2011) As of a week ago, we have an […]

Redux: What to Wear on an Ice-Age Sea Voyage?

  If you were one of the 14 (a made-up number) people who read this back when LWON was publishing wonderful posts but was otherwise just a baby staggering around on inept little feet, we apologize for repeating ourselves.  Anyway, you probably weren’t.  One of the 14. Several superb posts on one of my favorite […]

Redux: Survivor Woman

Heather posted this on July 16, 2010, a time when we had probably 13 readers so apologies to all 13. She’s referring to a post Ann wrote about being dead wrong about some science. She also testifies to the physically horrifying life of an archeology writer. Yesterday, my colleague Ann Finkbeiner fessed up to one […]

Secret Satans: Archaeology

“Is it the mummies?” Tom asked. When I confessed my fear of archaeology to the LWON crew, Thomas Hayden immediately blamed the undead. Or long dead. Which was quite reasonable, really. But I’m a lapsed biologist; I like decay. I like a lot of other things about archaeology, too. I like its stories about people […]

Redux: Let Sleeping Neanderthals Lie

This post was originally posted on 8/12/2010, so probably not everybody’s already read it and it’s  really nice.   I (Ann speaking) love Heather’s first story here, and I love her second one.  I love the idea of people saying, “Come warm yourself by our fire.” Last summer, while roaming around Ecuador on a magazine […]