Letters From
Letter from Wisconsin March/April 2026
People of the Sacred Voice
The Ho-Chunk Nation safeguards a legacy that includes an underwater cache of ancient canoes
RECENT Letters From
Letter from France January/February 2026
Neolithic Cultural Revolution
How farmers came together to build Europe’s most grandiose funerary monuments some 7,000 years ago
Letter from Mongolia November/December 2025
Building the Black City
Why the nomads of the Uighur Empire constructed a medieval urban center like no other
Letter from Greece September/October 2025
Searching for Washingtonia
How archaeologists located a forgotten nineteenth-century utopian community
Letter from Williamsburg July/August 2025
A New Look at an Old City
Archaeologists are reconstructing the complicated 400-year history of Virginia’s colonial capital
MORE Letters From
-
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
(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
-
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
-
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
(Courtesy Roger Atwood) -
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
(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
(Courtesy Raven Garvey)