Finding Bosutswe: Modern Archaeology vs. Indiana Jones
To most of the world, the image of an archaeological dig comes from the movies. You remember: in the first Indiana Jones movie, there's an iconic moment when Indy is standing at the archaeological site in Tanis, peering through a theodolite, with hundreds of Nazi-paid workmen around him. He is alone, above the crowd—the only crew member he talks to in the whole movie is Sallah, his faithful foreman. The perfect, tanned, obsessed, isolated scholar.

Claude Levi-Strauss Dies at 100
Belgian anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died on October 31, 2009, at the ripe old age of 100. His impact on anthropology (and archaeology as a subset of anthropology) was so earth-shattering that it's hard to remember what anthropology was like before him. Claude Levi-Strauss, drawing by Pablo Secca Lévi-Strauss wa

Beer and Archaeology
Now, don't get me wrong. Archaeologists do have a reputation for drinking an ocean of beer at the end of their working day, but that is besides the point. I recently heard about an inventive public archaeology venue, being carried out in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—surely one of the beer-making capitals of the world.

Environmental Collapse of the Nasca
According to a little press release I received late last week, David Beresford-Jones from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge has been leading a team investigating the environmental impacts of agriculture on the Nasca civilization in Peru.

Woolley at Ur
From 1922-1934, archaeologist C. Leonard Woolley excavated at the Sumerian city of Ur, an ancient tell located in what is today very southern Iraq, funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.