This week, Anna has some big questions about the Pleiades, a group of bright, beautiful stars also known as the Seven Sisters. The myth of seven sisters that were turned into stars is remarkably consistent across multiple cultures. Also, it's always seven sisters, even though you can really only make out six with the naked eye. So what's going on? IS IT ALIENS?? No, of course not. It's much more interesting than that. Tune in to learn just how long humans have been telling each other stories under the stars.

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How did Neanderthals organize their domestic spaces? How do you make a cave cozy? How did people keep track of familiar places tens of thousands of years ago? What's cooking at Chez Neanderthal? Tune in to learn more!

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Join us for a tasting session along the timewine (TM) of human history! Is the human capacity to digest alcohol an evolutionary advantage? Are drunk apes chill apes? When did the first deliberate grape fermentation occur? How did a Greek wine cauldron end up in a Celtic burial in France? What's up with wine terms?

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Anna and Amber chat with Dr. Tracie Canada a socio-cultural anthropologist whose ethnographic research uses sport to theorize race, kinship and care, gender, and the performing body. We talk about the lived experiences of Black athletes, the role of sports in human society, the many health implications of a contact sport, and more.

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We’re back! Here’s what’s new, what’s changing, and what will be the same.

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Truly we are talking ancient history, since “Cladh Hallan: A Story in Several Parts” was episode 18. That was way back in 2018, long before the content that was migrated to the APN feed. This may be the first time some longtime listeners (including you?) have heard this story, and we’ll round it out with some additional context for the subject matter.

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Theater as public entertainment has taken many forms throughout time and among different cultural groups. We’ll hop through various times and places to look at the places where performances were held, the types of pieces performed, and the role of theater as an emotional pocket dimension.

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There have been an awful lot of news stories lately featuring “lost” sites or structures “revealed” by the effects of drought and climate change. Way to look on the positive side, I guess! We’ll take a look at some of these sites and more broadly, the effects of climate change on current archaeology. Both of your tired hosts were a bit punchy during recording, so this episode is ever so slightly goofy despite the gravity of the topic. But we hope you enjoy it!

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The Benin Bronzes have received media attention lately in a series of newsworthy announcements to repatriate them to Nigeria from various museums in North America and Europe. What are these alliterative artifacts, and how did thousands of them disappear from the Kingdom of Benin only to appear by the hundreds in museums overseas?

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Anna saddles up to lead Amber on a faunal adventure! We’ll discuss the changes that happen when humans start influencing animal breeding. We’ll also cover the origin stories of a few of the most prevalent domesticated species. But don't worry, we cover some examples of "non-typical" domestication too, plus a case of animal coworkers. We’ll even tackle the question… have we humans domesticated OURSELVES??

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At last, an episode about a Lost Kingdom! (except people knew it was there the whole time).

For the first half of the first millennium CE, Himyar was based in what is today Yemen and flourished thanks to its role in inter-regional trade. We’ll discuss the political landscape of ancient southern Arabia, the conversion of the Himyarite dynasty from polytheism to Judaism, and recently published research on environmental factors that contributed to the Himyarite state’s decline and eventual conquest.

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Anna is sick this week, so we've been unable to record new episodes. But rather than leave you hanging, we're releasing a lightly trimmed version of the latest episode of Old News. We've got human bone jewelry, the first Black Baptist church in colonial America, alleged art crimes, some seriously inclement weather, and more!

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This week, Anna and Amber debut a new (occasional) series: Site-Seeing! There are so many archaeological sites out there, and some of them tend to overshadow others. In order to learn about and showcase some lesser-known sites, your hosts will each present a brief exploration of a site previously unknown to either of them. This time, we feature Djenné, an ancient city in what is today Mali, and Ban Chiang, in what is today Thailand.

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We've asked this on the show before, but..what did the past smell like? In this episode, we talk about some of the ways that researchers are finding and recreating some ancient aromas. We also get speculative about smellscapes and honk the Clown Horn of Orientalism at some perfumes. Get your sniffers ready, this one's fun!

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To wrap up our inaugural Summer Blockbuster series, Amber leads us on a mission to Pandora with Avatar (2009). Rather than exploration of the culture of the indigenous Na’vi population (or maybe in addition to), we’ll examine some of the philosophical underpinnings of the franchise and discuss the book that completely changed Amber's intellectual trajectory.

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Amber guides Anna through the jungle of the 2006 film Apocalypto...but hopefully a little less racistly than director Mel Gibson did! We’ll talk about human sacrifice, what was (and was not) going on in Maya culture in the 15th century CE, and the movie’s ending that couldn’t be more on the nose if it went “boop!”

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Welcome to a month of Summer Blockbusters, where we talk about the archaeology in movies that aren't Indiana Jones! This week, it's the 2021 film The Dig, starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan. We'll talk a bit about the film, but mostly about the real site portrayed in it--the Anglo Saxon burial at Sutton Hoo. This site was key to rewriting the understanding of post-Roman Britain, and was especially meaningful as a symbol of English national identity during WWII.

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“The Sea Peoples” is a term that refers to a seafaring culture of unclear origin that bopped around the eastern Mediterranean and adjoining areas around 1200-900 BCE. There are ancient Egyptian murals and reliefs that depict battles against these unnamed adversaries, but no definitive labels or helpful texts. So who were the Sea Peoples? We’ll discuss some theories, and probably not reach any conclusions apart from “wow people really care a lot about this, huh?”

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Y'all, it has been a TOUGH WEEK. You can tell because Anna somehow manages to get the episode intro WRONG after doing it correctly nearly 200 times. But we're just gonna keep swimming! We couldn’t do a month-at-sea theme without talking about shipwrecks. And it’s not just pirate ships and the Titanic, either. We’ll discuss all kinds of underwater assemblages and the ways in which shipwreck archaeology helps us understand travel, life, commerce, connectivity, and more.

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