Archaeology

Ancient Maya civilization—known for its cities, monumental architecture, ceramics, hieroglyphic writing, and advanced understanding of mathematics and astronomy—suffered a major demise between the tenth and eleventh centuries. The causes continue to be...

Harvard University's 1650 charter founded a multicultural educational setting when it committed the new institution "to the education of the English and Indian Youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness." The Harvard Yard Archaeology Project...

The 1978 discovery of the Great Aztec Temple in downtown Mexico City riveted the international archaeological world. This monumental shrine dedicated to the Aztec war and rain gods had been buried beneath the city’s main plaza since the sixteenth-century...

The earliest evidence of artwork made by modern humans, Aurignacian art, was created more than 35,000 years ago and has been found in French, German, and Romanian archaeological sites. Randall White will discuss the rich corpus of Aurignacian painting...

The Peabody Museum has conducted archaeological research in the Maya site of Copan, Honduras, since the 1890s. One of Copan’s most iconic elements is a staircase made of over 620 blocks carved with Maya glyphs. Dating back to the eighth century CE, this...

The earliest complex societies found in the Western Hemisphere developed under very different environmental conditions. The Maya, for instance, emerged in the tropical lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, a region with high seasonal rainfall and rich...

The eruption of the Mount Toba supervolcano in the Indonesian island of Sumatra74,000 years ago brought about an era of severe environmental degradation that decimated populations of Neanderthals and modern humans. Archaeological evidence suggests that...

The Classic Maya made a critical distinction between the ordinary daily movement of humans and sacred, formal movement. Stephen D. Houston examines a rich inventory of glyphic references, imagery, and formal routes to show how linear movement formed the...

The Peabody Museum was founded at a time of epistemological and political turmoil, seven years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and one year after the end of the Civil War. The chaotic decades following the war proved to be an...

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was the first American fair to feature anthropology. The new discipline had its own building, supervised by Frederic Putnam, then director of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum.It competed, however, with...