Link here to a short biography. This page also has a link to his bibliography.
Dig site unearths ancient Klallam village
It started last August with construction workers' haphazard discovery of a few discarded seashells, essentially ancient table scraps that often provide the first clues to long-ago societies.
Now, the artifacts and remains unearthed from the silty grounds of a state Transportation Department construction site on Port Angeles Harbor number in the hundreds.
Among the finds revealed publicly yesterday were hundreds of skeletal remains, along with pieces of shelter and tools for daily life in an ancient Klallam Indian village -- discoveries that some archaeologists now say make the site one of the most significant cultural finds ever in Western Washington, and potentially beyond.
"This site is remarkably intact, and it's enormous," said Lynn Larson, the archaeological dig's principal investigator and an archaeologist for 25 years. "I've never seen a site that big."
HUGE site and ultimately a very important one. One of the points of this story is that it is a mitigation effort (by previous agreement) and everything must be removed or left in place to ultimately be destroyed. Something like this could have been excavated over years and years. Of course, the presence of human remains would prevent that from happening so perhaps it's for the good overall.
New twist on out-of-Africa theory
Early humans made love, not war, according to new DNA analysis presented at a genetics conference that gives a new twist on the out-of-Africa hypothesis of human origins.
U.S. researcher Professor Alan Templeton of Washington University, St Louis, debunks the prevailing version of the out-of-Africa hypothesis, which says early humans migrated from Africa and wiped out Eurasian populations.
Instead, they bred, he told the Genetics Society of Australia's annual conference in Melbourne this week.
Templeton said his evidence didn't support the so-called replacement theory in which African hominids caused the extinction of other Homo species.
Too bad this didn't go into more detail, but it did raise a good issue, that of the definition of "race". On the one hand, it did suggest we ought to drop "race" as a concept since it's almost entirely a cultural construct and has no empirical biological basis. On the other hand, it's been a dead issue for years among scientists, who now generally only speak of breeding populations, not races. But the uselessness of the racial concept does need to be thoroughly outed and done away with in common parlance, for the most part. We at ArchaeoBlog think it may still have some utility in terms of identification. For example, when unidentified skeletal remains are found, it is useful to publicize whether they belong to a Caucasian, Negroid, Amerind, etc.
This whole topic could elicit pages and pages of commentary, but we'll just leave it at that.
New Sierra artifacts may shine new light on Donner Party
Newly discovered bone fragments and wagon train artifacts may help separate truth from myth in the Donner Party's 157-year-old tale of starvation, cannibalism and redemption, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported.
Forest Service officials scheduled a news conference near Truckee Wednesday to discuss the latest findings of archaeologists digging and sifting soil this week at Alder Creek Camp on national forest land about 30 miles west of Reno.
They are investigating what is believed to be the camps of the George and Jacob Donner families that were trapped in the Sierra during the terrible winter of 1846-47. A Discovery Channel team last summer found the campsite by using ground-penetrating radar.
We'll just refrain from making the numerous obvious jokes.
Ancient Skeleton Collection Yields Cancer Clues
A new study of over 3,000 human skeletons in a Croatian archaeological collection suggests that cancer is more common today than at any point in humankind's history, the report's authors say.
A team of Croatian archaeologists and medics studied ancient human remains dating from 5,300 B.C. to the mid-19th century. The bones, which came from 21 archaeological sites scattered around the eastern European country, are stored at the Skeletal Collection of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb.
Examining the ancient skeletons, researchers found scant evidence of the telltale imprints that some cancers leave.
"While cancer is the number one or two killer in most developed countries today, it was very rare in antiquity," said Mario Slaus, who led the study. Slaus is an anthropologist with the department of archaeology at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Make sure you read the whole thing. The current, much larger, cancer rate is due to the longer life expectancies of today's populations.
We'll do the fieldwork! Roman artefacts found near pub
Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of a Roman fort and a Stone Age settlement near a pub in Chesterfield.
Experts were called in when developers discovered the artefacts on land underneath the Old Feather's Pub on Lordsmill Street.
Some of the pottery dates back to the 1st Century AD.
Maria Barnes from Chesterfield Museum said the discovery indicates the town's Roman settlement was larger than previously thought.
"Most of the evidence of Roman settlement is the centre of Chesterfield and this gives us proof that the civilian settlement around the fort extends further south than we previously thought," she said.