It’s the episode title that’s been making us giggle for months! We’re FINALLY examining the famous Chalcolithic ice-mummy just in time for the 30th anniversary of hikers stumbling upon his body. We’ll explore the archaeological methods and evidence that tell us about who Ötzi was, what his life was like, and how he died. Umlauts will, no doubt, abound.

Remember that time we did a whole series on the human family tree and then finished talking about evolution forever because we were all done? HA! OF COURSE WE AREN'T DONE! There have been some amazing new discoveries in the human fossil record since that series dropped, so we're here to update you on what our family shrubbery looks like now. We journey to Siberia, the Philippines, China, and other places, and our story gets a whole lot more complicated! We love to see it.

This week, Amber tells Anna the story of Nabonidus, King of Babylon, who, mid-kinging, tootled off to the Arabian desert for a decade to worship the moon god, Sin. But is that the whole story? Of course not. Tune in to learn what Nabonidus was maybe really doing out there.

This week, Anna and Amber take a tour of some of the libraries of the ancient world. We visit Mesopotamia for the origins of writing and the heartland of administrative paperwork, hit up Africa for the oral traditions of the Griots, browse the stacks of oracle bones in China, and...yes, talk about the Library of Alexandria.

It's our 150th episode! Wow! This week we're starting our Back To School series with a short primer on stratigraphy. How do archaeologists divide a site into time periods? How did people first figure out that layers of sediment accumulate over time through different processes? How many dirt/soil/sediment puns is Anna capable of making in roughly forty minutes? We’ll find out.

This week, we’ve got an episode that started off as a funny title and became a topic. There are many possible reasons for abandoning a site, and there are plenty of examples from the archaeological record. We’ll look into evidence for climate change, conflict, natural disaster, and other reasons for abandonment (not all at once; that sounds like a really bad place to live). Plus, Anna and Amber do Dickens.

Welp. We finally got here. In this installment of Field Season, Amber and Anna take a trip to the semi-mythical world of cinematic archaeology. Who inspired the character of Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr.? Did the Indiana Jones franchise leave a lasting impression on archaeology? Plus--we've got a whole roundup of fellas that likely influenced the American public's perception of what an explorer should look like.

How do we capture a sense of the experience of living in a landscape of the past? What did the past smell like? What did it feel like? How can we understand ancient people's mindsets, perceptions, intentions, and emotions? Will Anna end up deeply confused? Tune in to find out!

On this sponsored episode, Anna and Amber talk about the Nazca culture of coastal Peru. There's so much more to talk about than the famous Nazca Lines. There's gorgeous ceramics, ingenious irrigation, trophy heads, cactus tripping, and much more!

People in the past looked up at the stars and planets, too. How did ancient cultures perceive the night sky? How did they explain the movement of celestial bodies? How did astronomy figure into ancient religion, calendars, city planning, and more? Was it aliens? Nope, but it was pretty much all math. Sorry.

This week, we talk about the first (known) human arrivals in this region, waaaay way down at the tip of South America, and the archaeological remains that tell us how they lived. We've got a cave of hands, commentary from Charles Darwin, old old feet, fish ears, and SO much more!

In 1953, archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon and her team uncovered human skulls covered with plaster and decorated with shells to resemble human faces. These Neolithic artifacts may be one of the earliest known examples of human portraits. In this sponsored episode, we’ll dig into the discovery, the site of Jericho itself, and the lives of the people who buried the skulls in the first place.

Listeners, once again, life has come at us like a poorly written simile, so we're releasing a previous Patreon episode. And once again, we are so deeply grateful for your patience and support. Thank you for sticking with us. As an extension of March Madagascarness, we head back to the island with our (ill-fitting) primatology hats on. Anna put together a fun script about giant extinct lemurs, tiny not-extinct lemurs, and even creepy aye-aye fingers, but somehow Amber managed to have a full on meltdown about a lemur named Maki.

It's Amber's birthday episode! Since she loves historiography, we're taking it back to one of the earliest historians, Herodotus. How did he think about the past, and how did that influence historians who came after him? What did he get right, and what did he get wrong? What's up with that weird boat, those mummy enemas, the flying snakes, and the giant ants? Listen and find out!

We haven’t covered much archaeology from the Amazon Basin on the show, but this week, that changes! Instead of being the primitive groups early European explorers reported on, people lived in the Amazon Basin region for thousands of years by adapting to their landscape as well as modifying their environment to suit their needs! Somehow, we suspect that you, listeners, are not shocked.

This week, Anna and Amber celebrate some of the lesser-known mummies of the world. Amber shares her hometown mummies, while Anna spins the stories of a smoke-dried philosopher, a legendary Lama, and...a winery? Plus, one Egyptian mummy thrown in for good measure.