The early use of poison is one more indicator of an advanced repertoire of behavioural and technological traits that have characterised our species from the earliest times.
The so-called ‘prison tree’: over time, myth has coalesced into a ‘fact’ for which there is no evidence.
Author provided
There is no evidence to support the marketing of an ancient boab in Western Australia as a tree that once held Aboriginal prisoners. The story is a myth that elides the tree’s deep significance to Indigenous people.
Are we headed to a magnetic reversal and all the global disruption that would bring? Enter archaeomagnetism. A look at the archaeological record in southern Africa provides some clues.
Marcoo was a 1.4 kilotonne ground-level nuclear test carried out at Maralinga in 1956. The contaminated debris was buried at this site in the 1967 clean-up known as Operation Brumby.
Author provided
History is writ large in the remote areas around Woomera and the Nullarbor: from the fossils of microscopic, cell-like creatures to ancient stone tools to the deitrus of rocket tests and the painful legacy of the Maralinga atomic blasts.
Children representing the diversity of contemporary multicultural Australia stand near a sign depicting an ‘idealised’ white Australia. Blackwood Recreation Centre, South Australia, 2015.
Photo: C. Smith
How might an Aboriginal person in the Northern Territory experience racism? There are many material signs that can make a person feel excluded from society.
Alongside a road, under the ground a medieval manor lies waiting.
ender4000/Lost City of Trellech
In an ideal world, students might visit original cave sites to see ancient paintings in their natural setting. This isn’t possible, so the idea of an artificial cave set-up at a university was born.
The 2007 midwinter solstice illumination of the main altar tabernacle of Old Mission San Juan Bautista, California.
Rubén G. Mendoza/Ancient Editions
At many Spanish missions in the US and Latin America, the rising sun illuminates the altar on the winter solstice or other symbolic days. To the faithful, these events meant that Christ was with them.
Researchers ran computer simulations that take into account environmental variability and geographical setting to investigate how early explorers made it to these tiny, remote islands in the Pacific.
Conflict archaeology is disturbing – students need to be prepared.
ChameleonsEye/www.shutterstock.com