When not climbing in the Alps, or searching for rare plants in a distant desert, I am the curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress, and a lecturer in bioarchaeology and historical linguistics in the Odyssey Program and at the Osher Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where in Spring 2022, I will be teaching Archaeology & the Science of Pandemics and the Archaeology of Writing in the Ancient Americas. I am the author of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times bestseller, MAP: Exploring the World. My writing and research has also been featured in many media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, the BBC, CBS News and NPR’s All Things Considered. My most recent book, Collecting for a New World, examines the history of the archaeological collections at the Library of Congress, where I also write the Excavating Archaeology Series for the blog, Worlds Revealed. My forthcoming book, Exposing the Maya: Early Archaeological Photography in the Americas will be out in summer 2022.
Most Recent Posts
- Lost Pages and Hidden Libraries: my quest to find the first book printed in the Americas April 27th, 2022
- Visualizing Injustice: Early NAACP Cartographers and Racial Inequality in America January 18th, 2022
- To Have Traveled So Far: The Provenance and History of the Kislak Encounter Paintings October 27th, 2021
- A Book Tied Up in Knots September 6th, 2021
- Finding John Huston’s Feathers August 16th, 2021
- Summer Reading Projects or How to Become Levi-Strauss July 26th, 2021
- A Culture of Stone: carving the marble vessels of the ancient Americas July 22nd, 2021
- Eternal Abstractions: Looking at the Burial Urns of Santa Maria July 6th, 2021
- Chi Mobi: Writing Timucua in Seventeenth Century Florida July 5th, 2021
- Of Shattered Jade and Broken Pottery: Solving Tatiana’s Puzzles May 31st, 2021