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There is a deep seam that lies astride the history of European archaeology - on one side you have the hero-explorers, men and women who...

When Clémence Royer died on February 7, 1902, she took with her into oblivion perhaps the last human brain that believed in and aimed for...

When you picture an anthropologist, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a person in khakis sitting at the edge of a tribal...

Culture is not a thing. It is a negotiation, an ongoing tumult of borrowings and innovations hung upon a skeleton of previously...

As Isabella Bird, in her seventieth year and in the middle of her last great adventure, sat across from the Sultan at Marrakesh, telling...

Harriet Boyd Hawes was cursed from birth with an overabundance of Purpose. She was ever in search of a Problem to solve, and possessed...

The art of Strenuous Living is one we usually associate with the generation of nervous over-achievers who grew up after the US Civil War,...

The 1960s and early 1970s were the Rock Star era of palaeoanthropology, when each year seemed to bring a stunning new glimpse into the...

Cultures are strange creatures. What you can do and say, who you can love and when, who you may kill and how, are all subject to the...

As the tide rolls out, a woman in a hardened bonnet and loose fitting clothes scrambles across the crumbling cliffs of Lyme Regis, a...

There is hardly a name in science more encrusted with bad faith generalizations and well-meaning but ahistorical hagiography than that of...

In a tent in Iraq, an Englishwoman attempts to sleep as mice crawl over her body and cockroaches look on from the walls. She is...

When it comes to bones, immortality is far from a sure thing. We generally think that the road from bone to fossil is a straight-forward...