Letters From

Letter from Nigeria July/August 2024

A West African Kingdom’s Roots

Excavations in Benin City reveal a renowned realm’s deep history

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Letter from the Catskills May/June 2024

Ghost Towns of the Ashokan Reservoir

An archaeologist investigates how construction of New York City’s largest reservoir a century ago uprooted thousands of rural residents

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(Courtesy the New York City Department of Environmental Protection)

Letter from Nicaragua March/April 2024

Who Were the People of Greater Nicoya?

Archaeologists are challenging long-held assumptions about Mesoamerica’s influence on Indigenous peoples to its south

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Letter from Rome January/February 2024

Secrets of the Catacombs

A subterranean necropolis offers archaeologists a rare glimpse of the city’s early Jewish community

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Letter from El Salvador November/December 2023

Uneasy Allies

Archaeologists discover a long-forgotten capital where Indigenous peoples and Spanish colonists arrived at a fraught coexistence

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  • Letter from Vesuvius September/October 2023

    Digging on the Dark Side of the Volcano

    Survivors of the infamous disaster rebuilt their lives on the ashes of the A.D. 79 eruption

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    (Courtesy Girolamo Ferdinando De Simone)
  • Letter from Patagonia July/August 2023

    Surviving a Windswept Land

    For 13,000 years, hunter-gatherers thrived in some of the world’s harshest environments

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    (Courtesy Raven Garvey)
  • Letter from the American Southeast May/June 2023

    Spartans of the Lower Mississippi

    Unearthing evidence of defiance and resilience in the homeland of the Chickasaw

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    (Kimberly Wescott and Brad Lieb, Chickasaw Native Explorers Program 2015)
  • Letter from the Faroes March/April 2023

    Lost History of the Sheep Islands

    New evidence shows that the remote North Atlantic archipelago was settled hundreds of years before the Vikings reached its shores

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    (Polhansen/Adobe Stock)
  • Letter from Ethiopia January/February 2023

    Exploring a Forgotten Jewish Land

    Using oral history, texts, and survey, archaeologists search for traces of a once-vibrant religious community

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  • Letter from Australia November/December 2022

    Murder Islands

    The doomed voyage of a seventeenth-century merchant ship ended in mutiny and mayhem

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    (Roger Atwood)
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