When the University of Cape Town discovered skeletons in its archive that had been unethically obtained and used, they set about restoring justice to the bones and the community they came from.
An anthropologist works in American Samoa, taking advantage of the island’s longstanding tattoo culture to tease out the effects tattoos have on the body’s immune function.
Native American burial mound at Lake Jackson Mounds State Park, north of Tallahassee, Fla.
Ebaybe/Wikipedia
In just five Florida Panhandle counties, sea level rise could swamp more than 500 archaeological sites that tell the story of when and how Native Americans lived along the Gulf Coast.
People have been modifying Earth – as in these rice terraces near Pokhara, Nepal – for millennia.
Erle C. Ellis
Ben Marwick, University of Washington; Erle C. Ellis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Lucas Stephens, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology e Nicole Boivin, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
Hundreds of archaeologists provided on-the-ground data from across the globe, providing a new view of the long and varied history of people transforming Earth’s environment.
Is privacy what you can’t see, or where you don’t look?
Kamil Macniak/Shutterstock.com
Privacy starts with the body and extends to digital data. There are few rules governing what companies can do – yet people can’t effectively protect their own privacy.
A new IPCC report has called for radical changes in food production to avoid catastrophic climate change. Rice-fish farming and mixed crops could help.
A man pushes a wheelbarrow past a sign in Liberia during the West African Ebola outbreak.
AHMED JALLANZO/EPA
Shelley Lees, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine e Luisa Enria, University of Bath
A proper understanding of community dynamics and local beliefs can inform medical interventions that are capable of establishing positive and productive relations with local communities.
The tortilla business can become an unexpected way out for former gang members.
Cibelle Estrelinha/Flickr
Dennis Rodgers, Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID)
Being part of a gang may increase the chance of dying young, but when gang members leave their old lives behind, they can find that their street smarts come in handy.
It’s unlikely your ancestors were the first to set foot here.
Fred Harvey, Kansas City/ Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
An anthropologist who’s researched the dispossession of Native Americans and their enduring connections to ancestral places sees the value in asking ‘whose land are you on?’
Far from being a technical, commercial instrument, money can be a social and political construct that has immense radical potential.
Archaeological visualization of Angkor Wat at sunset, with site map at upper right.
Tom Chandler, Mike Yeates, Chandara Ung and Brent McKee, Monash University, SensiLab, 2019
Many tourists hold an outdated romanticized image of an abandoned temple emerging from the jungle. But research around Angkor Wat suggests its collapse might be better described as a transformation.
Livestock, like these goats in the Rift Valley of Tanzania, are critical to household economies in East Africa.
Katherine Grillo
Pastoralism is a central part of many Africans’ identity. But how and when did this way of life get started on the continent? Ancient DNA can reveal how herding populations spread.
Stucco frieze from Placeres, Campeche, Mexico, Early Classic period, c. 250-600 AD.
Wolfgang Sauber/Wikimedia
Many people think climate change caused Classic Maya civilization to collapse abruptly around 900 A.D. An archaeologist says that view is too simplistic and misses the bigger point.
Despite our differences, when it comes to babies, we communicate the same way all over the world.
Chiến Phạm/Unsplash
Research suggests that parents and babies communicate in remarkably similar ways despite striking variation in cultural practices.
Examining chicken intestines, reading the tea leaves, watching the markets – people turn to experts for insight into the mysteries that surround them.
Manvir Singh
Hidden forces are always at work in the world, and people always want to control them, a cognitive anthropologist explains. Enter the human universal of shamanism.