This extraordinary scene from a 348-long muslin painting called “Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley” was done by an American artist named John J. Egan in 1850. Looking carefully at the details, you can see that white Americans are using their black slaves to open up an American Indian burial mound. The […]
Indigenous Burial Mounds Read More »
When you were a kid, did you learn that the first humans in the Americas crossed over the Bering land bridge about 12,000 years ago? Scholars have overturned this chronology completely, but it held away for many years in part because of this type of spear- or knife- head technology featured here, which is the
Clovis Culture and Migration Read More »
This is a colorized photograph of an unusual geographic formation that no longer exists — but for hundreds of years, it marked a major river system in the southern part of the U.S.. Known as “the Great Raft”, it was a terrific log jam, made up of season upon season of washed-away trees. Cedar, cottonwood,
This is a fanciful rendition of the Spanish _conquistador_ Hernán Cortés (d. 1547), dressed as an Ancient Roman centurion. The imagery is unusual for a number of reasons: first, Cortés was the main player that brought about the destruction of the Aztec Empire, which happened over a thousand years past Ancient Rome’s heyday. The artist
Hernán Cortés in New Codex Read More »
If you look for more than a second at the squiggles on this image, you will soon make out patterns of squares as well as some long lines joining them. These images made huge headlines in the fields of archaeology and history this month because of what they have revealed about an ancient civilization in
Ancient Civilization Discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon Read More »
Today (September 16, 2023) several students from Shippensburg University’s history department travelled with Dr. John Bloom and me to the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, an American Indian site in eastern Pennsylvania. The first slides you see come from the sandstone overhang that made a natural roof for the Meadowcroft encampment, as well as the main area
Meadowcroft Rockshelter Read More »
These statues are some of the remaining examples of “mushroom stones” from the Ancient Maya people. They testify to the usage of psilocybin by indigenous Central Americans that goes back hundreds of years. The second photo shows a real-life example, called Psilocybe Mexicana. The Central American consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms for ritual purposes was brought
Hallucinogenic Mushrooms for Central American Rituals Read More »
A contemporary image of this hero — who died in 1512 — does not exist, but this painting of the indigenous Taíno (who hailed from the modern island of Haiti/the Dominican Republic) called Hatuey is my favorite. Painted by Lacoste, it shows his face in a triumphant smile. And though he was burned at the
You’re looking at a recreation of a funerary site from ancient Ecuador, where these three levels of human remains were unearthed in 1980 as builders were getting ready to construct an airport at the capital city of Quito: a total of nine vertical burial tunnel-chambers were found. These bodies date from 680 CE, to a
Chicha and Ecuadorian Burials Read More »
This is Acoma Pueblo, aka “Sky City,” and one of the oldest continually inhabited places of north America. Located on a nearly 400-foot mesa, it dates back as early as 1100 CE and has been a home to the indigenous Acoma people of modern New Mexico ever since, preserving ancient customs and beliefs even as
This is Sequoyah, a Cherokee American who lived from about 1770-1843 and is a rare example of an illiterate person who created a written language. Sequoyah was born in what is now Tennessee and demonstrated skill in a wide variety of crafts: he made jewelry, invented better dairy farm equipment, and forged iron. Observing the
Sequoyah and the Cherokee Alphabet Read More »
These rock carvings from southern Wyoming date to the early 1600s and relate to the ancestors of the Comanche and Shoshone American Indians. Clearly pictured is a scene with a rider on a horse. The choice of subject — horses among indigenous Americans — is also the focus of a groundbreaking study published in _Science
Indigenous Americans and Horses Read More »
On today’s history menu we have a special duo-treat: art, as well as a revised theory about women hunters in early human cultures. And both stories are bound in the spear-throwing devices known as “atlatls”. An atlatl (the name is in the Aztec language Nahuatl because the Spanish saw the Aztecs using it, but
This is a shagbark hickory tree from New Jersey, and the likes of this species used to be far more common to America’s eastern forests than they are today. The same holds true for pignut hickory, black oak, and white oak trees (as well as beech, pine, hemlock and larch). And these all have some
How Indigenous American Burning Practices Shaped the Eastern Forests Read More »
At the time of the Spanish discovery of the Americas, the Timucuan peoples were the largest linguistic group around modern Florida and Georgia, numbering about 200,000. They were not united peoples but lived in different groups, sometimes hunting and gathering, other times farming, but their culture was rich (see second image for Timucuan lands in
Timucuan Amerindians Record Their Written Language Read More »
Catoctin Mountain Park — situated right next to Cunningham Falls State Park, is in north-central Maryland and is run by the US National Park Service. Its 5,120 acres overlook the Monocacy Valley. Back in 1935, the area was put under the CCC to be fostered as a public recreational area. Cunningham Falls State Park has
Catoctin Mountain Park and Cunningham Falls Read More »
One of the coolest Indigenous American weapons was the blowgun, which was developed well before the Columbian exchange. You can see painted on this ceramic from the modern Guatemalan Highlands from the Late Classic Maya period (CE 600-900) a row of hunters holding their blowguns as they return from a hunt (this image is a
The Invention of the (Poisoned) Blowgun by South American Peoples Read More »
These projectile points were discovered in a 9,000 year-old grave at Wilamaya Patjxa in southern Peru. Archaeologists immediately diagnosed the burial items as part of a hunter’s toolkit and assumed that the person they were buried with was a high-status male from an ancient hunter-gatherer community. However, DNA analysis revealed that the hunter was actually
Ancient Peruvian Weapons and Evidence for Early Women Hunters Read More »
The excavations of the Ancient Maya world have continued to reveal surprises, and in 2020 two fascinating stories about urban water supply made headlines. Both were about the city of Tikal (known as Yax Mutal among the ancient Maya), but one was much sadder than the other. Tikal was an epicenter of power and was
Classical Maya Water Reservoir Technology Read More »
In the four corners region of New Mexico, a population of ancestral Pueblo people settled for a few centuries around the first millennium CE and built magnificent structures and created beautiful pottery like this pitcher (dating between 1075-1150 CE), fostering a relatively large population in the arid region. Archaeologists call this the Chaco Canyon civilization,
Chaco Canyon’s Pottery and Gendered Work Read More »
