Curiosities @ Sapiens.org

Photographs from Russia's war on Ukraine dissolve an archaeologist's fondness for a Soviet-era sculpture.

Hannah Marie Wormington and Cynthia Irwin-Williams grew up in a time when women were banned from some anthropology classrooms, yet they forged successful careers and set examples as supportive and inspiring leaders.

A Black cowboy named George McJunkin, who died 100 years ago, found a site that would transform scientific views about the deep history of Native Americans in North America.

Museum curators have occasionally embellished archaeological finds with compelling but questionable stories. Consider the Field Museum’s “Magdalenian Girl.”

Ancestral memorials from Kenya called vigango have been stolen and sold as “art” around the world. An anthropologist working to return them wonders what the spirits experience when they are displaced.

It is beautiful when museums go beyond returning objects toward “propatriation”—collaborating to commission new objects for display.

For years, archaeologists working in Mesa Verde National Park have been looking for evidence of where Ancestral Puebloans harvested the thousands of trees they used to build their elaborate cliff dwellings.

An anthropologist—and identical twin—grapples with different cultural understandings of twinship.

How did cannabis—a plant humans have been using for more than 10,000 years—become so vilified in the U.S.?

Archaeologists in New Mexico are pioneering surprising research methods—involving tree rings, pottery, and blasts of light—to explain why wildfire suppression doesn’t work.

An archaeologist’s hip surgery prompts him to reimagine the experience of a Puebloan woman who survived a terrible fall centuries ago.

One museum’s saga of returning stolen vigango statues to Kenya reveals how repatriating sacred objects is both the right thing and a very hard thing to do.

A history of masks reveals how humans have used them to hide, disguise, transform, and protect themselves.

An archaeologist explains why figuring out an object’s age is harder than you think.

With COVID-19 making its way around the United States, people are emptying stores of toilet paper. Archaeology throws a light on other bouts of odd consumer behavior.

After floating in a sensory deprivation tank and visiting Dave & Buster’s, one anthropologist ponders our ancient ancestors’ soundscapes.

New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon showcases magnificent structures that were built on ingenuity. By contrast, the state’s Rio Rancho Estates was built on fraud.

An archaeologist ponders memorials—from the Monti gate to the Taj Mahal—and finds clues about the reasons people want to be remembered.

Commonly held views of ancient history are often colored by what survives in the archaeological record—and by cultural biases.

On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, an archaeologist and curator imagines the inventor and artist teleported to our time.

Westerners have long shunned obese people, and this attitude now pervades much of the globe. Was this always the case?

The long history of Native American tribes is nowhere to be found on modern maps. So the Zuni decided it was time to create their own kind of cartography.

Museums are full of wonderful things. Museums are irreplaceable repositories of priceless things that help us understand our place in the universe. But that’s not to say that every object in every museum is valuable, special, or important. An acquire-and-preserve-at-all-costs acquisitions philosophy has led many museums to curate objects and specimens that simply aren’t worth keeping.

For many years, scholars believed oral history was no more accurate than mythology. It turns out they were wrong.

An archaeologist explores how shoes have embodied our identities through the ages.

We can continue our obsessive, harried pursuit of new technology, or we can relax and enjoy life more—but we can’t do both.

Toilet paper is now such a routine part of our lives that we rarely give it any thought. That boring reality, however, should make us think—because toilet paper is an artifact, a technology, and is therefore grounded in culture.

Embalming is just one among the world’s wide variety of funeral practices, and in a sense it’s as ordinary as any other. Then again, it’s pretty strange.

People who were part of the Hopewell culture ventured far and wide to obtain large quantities of raw materials.