On January 7, 2026, news broke that the United States repatriated seven ancient Egyptian objects that had been seized years earlier by U.S. authorities. The list wasn’t flashy in the way blockbuster museum icons are, but it mattered: pieces like a mummified fish and a...

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons  In the early twentieth century, few figures loomed larger over American anthropology than Aleš Hrdlička. (I admit, I’m still working on the pronunciation). As curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution,...

  For much of the twentieth century, archaeology in North America operated within a reassuringly narrow window. The prevailing view held that humans arrived near the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 13,000 years ago, spreading rapidly across the continent once...