The question of when people arrived in North America can be contentious, but my eyebrows rose slightly at this Union-Leader story about a dig in Keene which claims to have found signs of people from 12,000 years ago. That’s very, very early - the Clovis settlements in western North America, generally considered the oldest except [...]

Franklin Pierce University has the coolest team I’ve ever seen: the Hurling Ravens, an atlatl team. The atlatl is a a sort of throwing spear used by societies that hadn’t really developed the bow and arrow, and the team is part of the Anthropology Club. There’s an interview with the team captain in Archaeology magazine (read it here), which has this wonderful quote:

The site “InformationIsBeautiful.net” has created a lovely info-graphic listing and shredding various silly ideas associated with 2012, the Mayan calendar, galactic arrangements and whatnot. You can see it here, and certainly should. It lists lots of ridiculous ideas that I didn’t know existed, even beyond the obvious errors in astronomical calculations and ethnography (Mayans and [...]

It has always been assumed that people lived on, fished from and generally used the Isles of Shoals well before Europeans arrived, but hard evidence has been lacking. Now an archaeology program has found what this report from Cornell, which ran the program, says are the first prehistoric stone tools discovered there.
The report says the [...]