The selection for this week covers the last two weeks: We might not give much thought to eyeliner today, dismissing it as a beauty product that highlights and enhances the eye, but the ancient Egyptians had a different purpose for lining their eyes: preventing eye infections. At Body Horrors, Rebecca Kreston has the scoop on [...]

Featured in my ResearchBlogging.org column this week: At Bones Don’t Lie, Katy Meyers discusses what we can learn from grave goods. Kristina Killgrove examines biological and cultural processes of childbirth via the lens of mother-fetus burials at Powered By Osteons. Can the ways we eat influence our ability to taste? Possibly. At Inkfish, Elizabeth Preston discusses the independent evolution of taste (or lack [...]

Featured in my ResearchBlogging.org column this week: First, a fantastic discussion that encompasses our relationship to the environment and the importance of local knowledge: visit Safari Ecology to learn about the importance of the plant Commelina to the Maasai. The hop over to Originus to learn how archaeologists identify dwelling sites in the absence of physical remains. While we’re [...]

Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. This week [...]

Citizens of the Ancient World seem to have made a solid go at “going green.” Ongoing research by Harriet Foster and Caroline Jackson (2010) revealed hints of color deriving from previously blown glass in colorless glass, indicating that Romans often reused glass, adding batches of broken vessels into the raw material from which they fashioned [...]

Recent years have brought considerable riches for those of us interested in human evolution and 2012 proved no exception. New fossils, archaeological finds and genetic analyses yielded thrilling insights into the shape of the family tree, the diets of our ancient predecessors, the origins of art and advanced weaponry, the interactions between early Homo sapiens [...]

GIBRALTAR—Jordi Rosell removes a thumbnail-size piece of reddish-tan bone from a sealed plastic bag, carefully places it under the stereomicroscope and invites me to have a look. Peering through the eyepieces I see two parallel lines etched in the specimen’s weathered surface. Tens of thousands of years ago, in one of the seaside caves located [...]

NEW YORK CITY—Who brewed—and then enjoyed—the first beer? The civilization responsible for the widely beloved beverage must have been a very old one, but we don’t yet know who first brewed up a batch of beer, Christine Hastorf explained in a March 10 lecture at New York University on the archaeology of beer. Hastorf, a [...]

Talk about vintage footwear—an international team of archaeologists has discovered the world’s oldest leather shoe. One thousand years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, the 5,500-year-old shoe was perfectly preserved by the cool, dry conditions in the sheep dung–lined cave in Armenia where it was found. "We thought initially that the shoe [...]

Archaeologists have unearthed 270 pieces of engraved ostrich eggshell dated to around 60,000 years ago from a site called Diepkloof in South Africa’s Western Cape province. The fragments constitute what the researchers say is the “earliest evidence of a graphic tradition among prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations.” As such, the finds help to illuminate the emergence of [...]

Technology in art supplies moves fast, and there are tons of amazing ways to enable new creative explorations appearing all the time. Wacom Inkling Pen. Lytro Light-Field Cameras. Terraskin paper made from stone. Innovations, especially digital ones, leave a swath of devastatingly outdated art materials in their wake. The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies curated [...]