Archeaology

Grand forces have shaped American biology across the past sixty-six million years, from the Paleocene to now.

It was the lead-up to a presidential election, an unsettling late summer for many Americans since the hugely popular incumbent, Theodore Roosevelt, was declining to run for president a second time.

Finding the Real Jamestown

William M. Kelso | Winter 2008, Summer 2025

The archaeologist who discovered the real Jamestown debunks myths, and answers age-old mysteries about North America's first successful English colony.

Mound Country

Michael S. Durham | April 1995

Elaborate earthworks engineered 2000 years ago by an impenetrably mysterious people still stand in astonishing abundance throughout the Ohio River Valley.

Robert Maslowski and I made our way carefully across the tobacco field, trying not to disturb the neat rows of freshly plowed furrows.

Digging Up The U.S.

Robert Friedman | August/september 1983

In the underpinnings of our cities, in desolate swampland, beneath coastal waters—wherever the early settlers left traces of their lives—a new generation of archaeologists is uncovering a lost world

CROUCHED IN an L-shaped pit, a foot below the surface of the forest floor, John Ehrenhard, an archaeologist with the National Park Service, is contemplating a piece of charred wood.

Martians & Vikings, Madoc & Runes

Dean R. Snow | October/november 1981

A seasoned campaigner’s look at the never-ending war between archaeological fact and archaeological fraud

In 1961 three rockhounds found an unusual nodule near Olancha, California. It contained ceramic, copper, and iron components and seemed obviously man-made.

A Heritage Preserved

T. H. Watkins | October/November 1980

Arkansas saves fragments of the rich but distant past.

There is something almost atavistic in the appeal of an archeological dig.

Unearthing The Mastodon

Charles Coleman Sellers | August/September 1979

Peale’s Greatest Triumph

During the spring of 1801 Charles Willson Peale learned of a remarkable discovery—the huge bones of an “animal of uncommon magnitude” had been found in Orange and Ulster counties north of New York City.

The Giant In The Earth

Stephen W. Sears | August 1975

IT’S A PETRIFIED MAN!
IT’S A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY IDOL!
IT’S A HOAX!
ITS THE CARDIFF GIANT!

One morning in early November of the year 1868 three men appeared at the railroad depot in Union, New York, just outside Binghamton.

Professor Cope Vs. Professor Marsh

James Penick Jr. | August 1971

A bitter feud among the bones

In the early 1870’s two American scientists began a vicious personal contest for position and eminence in the world of science.

The Last Stone Age American

C. W. Ceram | August 1971

The Case Of The Kensington Rune Stone

Erik Wahlgren | April 1959

An eminent scholar argues that its inscription is only a hoax.

“Savages Never Carved These Stones”

André Emmerich | February 1959

Magnificent Central American ruins, overgrown by the thickening jungle, testify to a sophisticated culture already ancient when Columbus sailed

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.