Anthropology News

JANUARY 16, 2025

The social life of these clothes had a shift, akin to the widely discussed binary shift from commodity to gift within anthropological discourse. These make me wonder at the many silently maintained museums of absence that form an unofficial archive of conflict, telling stories that official histories often overlook.

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Anthropology.net

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

Image credit: The Natural History Museum via Alamy Stock Photo) The Role of the Pinky in Early Tool Use The researchers observed that the pinky finger played a significant role in grasping, particularly in early hominins like A. These findings point to a progressive evolution of dexterity and fine motor skills within early hominins.

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Anthropology.net

FEBRUARY 8, 2025

A decolonized retelling of this discovery must acknowledge their role in unearthing one of the most important fossils of the 20th century​ Decolonizing Paleoanthropology The Taung Child is not just a fossil—it is a symbol of the complicated history of paleoanthropology in Africa. Current Anthropology , 53(S6), S000-S000.

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Anthropology News

MARCH 27, 2025

When MySpace lost 50 million songs during a server migration , it wasnt just a glitchit was a reshaping of independent music history, determined by infrastructure choices rather than cultural value. The ability to preserve history is a form of power, and that power is rarely in the hands of the public. But migration is never neutral.

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Anthropology News

JANUARY 23, 2025

1933-2024 Credit: Penny de los Santos Sally McLendon (1933-2024) Sally McLendon was an American scholar of Indigenous languages, cultures, and histories in North America, with a special focus on the Indigenous languages and communities of Northern California.

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Anthropology for Beginners

SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

The presentation of the findings of archaeology to the public cannot avoid difficult political issues, and the museum curator and the popularizer today have responsibilities which some can be seen to have failed. Naturally, intangible cultural heritage is more difficult to preserve than physical objects. New York: Thames and Hudson 2.

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Sapiens

OCTOBER 30, 2024

Since European contact, Indigenous people have struggled to protect the lands —which outsiders often describe as a vast “ outdoor museum ”—from vandalism and desecration, organizing through formal and informal channels for the protection of the Bears Ears landscape. As managers of federally protected lands in the U.S.

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Anthropology News

SEPTEMBER 12, 2024

A Reflection on the 2023 Ivan Karp Workshop in Museum Anthropology, organized by the Council for Museum Anthropology Spot-lit sweeping ceramic vases made by the artist Dame Magdalene Odundo were the centerpieces of the exhibition Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects presented at the Gardiner Museum from October 2023 to April 2024.

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Anthropology.net

FEBRUARY 24, 2025

Within a few decades, they built an empire that stretched from the Eurasian steppe to the heart of Central Europe, reshaping political landscapes and leaving an imprint on European history. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0094-2 Examines the genetic history of steppe populations, including the Scythians, Sarmatians, and early Turkic groups.

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Sapiens

JANUARY 31, 2024

The morning of my 26th birthday, I woke up to incredible news for my field of evolutionary anthropology: For the first time, the study of human evolution won a Nobel Prize. Such interest also distracted from the breakthrough’s Nobel-worthy value: answering scientific questions about species’ history and evolution.

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Sapiens

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

While studying to become a physician, I was one of the lucky few who had the chance to also study human genetic evolution and its impact on health—topics missing from most medical curricula but central to fields such as biological anthropology. The reason lies deep in human history. were not the result of scientific investigation.

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Sapiens

APRIL 16, 2024

Pseudoarchaeology, or “alternative history,” draws major attention and casts itself as legitimate. Beyond Hancock’s creations, Ancient Aliens dominates the History Channel. Some universities are defunding and dismantling programs in archaeology , history , anthropology , art history , ancient languages , and classical studies.

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Anthropology.net

DECEMBER 13, 2024

By analyzing distinctive genetic markers, researchers quantified this percentage, shedding light on the enduring impact of interbreeding events in human evolutionary history. Dr. Benjamin Peter from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology explained, “We show that the period of mixing was quite complex.

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Anthropology for Beginners

DECEMBER 20, 2023

Colonial archaeologies denigrate non-Western societies to the status of static yet living museums from which the nature of the past might be inferred. The unchanged and living museum like character has been used in legitimizing the colonial rule over its subjects.

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Sapiens

OCTOBER 7, 2024

My name is Chip Colwell, a SAPIENS anthropology magazine, part of Wenner-Gren Foundation. I’m an archaeologist anthropologist who started writing in the anthropology publication about 15 years ago and had the seed idea of what would become SAPIENS and brought it to fruition. That topically we are focusing on anthropology.

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Anthropology News

SEPTEMBER 16, 2024

This potential harm to tangible heritage raises the ire of conservationists across government agencies, museums, universities, and other non-profit organizations. The post Seeking Ever-Elusive Treasures: Reflections on Collective Memory and Spectrality of the Past appeared first on Anthropology News.

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ASHP CML

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Principal Faculty Joshua Brown is professor of history emeritus and former executive director of the American Social History Project and professor of history at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Halls Professor of the History of Art (emerita) at Indiana University. He is a noted scholar of visual culture in U.S.

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Sapiens

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

Many museums are reckoning with the colonial legacies of the human remains and cultural objects in their collections. I wondered if any people before me who utilized his remains for their research had ever pieced together his storyor even contemplated how he got to the Natural History Museum in London. No bullet holes.

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Anthropology News

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

For six weeks, we spent 40 percent of our time at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) office and 60 percent of our time at partner institutions: the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH) and the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC). Luckily, they’re only one stop apart.

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Anthropology News

APRIL 22, 2024

Activists in Jeju, like Choi and Hong, revisit the history of 4.3 South Korea’s space program is one of the many state projects through which conflicting memories of the nation’s modern history of decolonization, ideological conflict, democratization, and development come to surface.

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Sapiens

FEBRUARY 18, 2025

On Rusinga Island, a grassroots group is celebrating the field assistants who helped find famous fossils and inspiring future generations to study science and ancient history. His village was an expensive 12-hour bus ride from the Nairobi National Museum , where most of Kenyas fossils are housed, studied, and displayed.

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Anthropology News

DECEMBER 18, 2024

The limits of collections research and digital access flashed like a neon sign when we first partnered as graduate students for an undergraduate course on museum anthropology and community collaboration. We see care for museums as an understanding of our role as stewards and as makers of physical and digital ecosystems.

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Anthropology News

DECEMBER 3, 2024

Hearst Museum of Anthropology taken by colleague Linda Waterfield. Born and educated in New York City, he matriculated at Yale University in 1970, graduating in 1974 with a dual degree in art history and anthropology and a senior thesis on the Japanese tea ceremony. Two central points of his analysis deserve attention.

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ED Surge

JANUARY 6, 2025

A scholarly book or article about history or philosophy counts. So does a local oral-history project, an art exhibit, or a dinner-table conversation about books, movies, or music. Like air, humanities-driven work is everywhere but taken for granted, so much a part of life its easy to overlook.

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