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A young woman hurried across the flat, trailing footprints. At times she slipped. At times she stretched to cross a puddle. She carried a child and possibly a container for water, or food, or perhaps a bag of firewood or stones for making tools.
By Hannah Sherk Los Alamos National Laboratory typically calls to mind cutting-edge advances in national security, but a recent project had its scientists looking back to a nearly 500-year-old conflict. LANL chemists, in a partnership with archaeologists from the Coronado Institute, are using high-tech instruments to examine artifacts from a long-buried battle.
By James E. Snead On September 1, 1912, Charles Fletcher Lummis—author, “anthropologist,” and impresario of the American West—made a note in his diary. “Hunting Miss Deuel,” he wrote; “en vano.” Lummis coded his journals in what might today be called “Spanglish,” and this particular scribble referred to Elizabeth Deuel, whom he had met two weeks previously.
![A group of children and adults stand among trees in a cacao plantation, some looking at the camera, surrounded by leaves and cacao pods. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/01-1-400x225.jpg)
By Jason S. Shapiro The main benefit of this cacao is a beverage which they make called Chocolate, which is a strange thing valued in that country. It disgusts those who are not used to it, for it has foam on top or a scum-like bubbling.José de Acosta, 1590 Chocolate and I have a long history.
In an ancient city brimming with monuments to her last 400 years, most of the people who lived and died here between 1610 and the turn of the twentieth century—and some even later—have no monuments.
By Paul Weideman Messing with the matrix. That’s one of the problems with the modern-day fad of stacking stones into cairns in wilderness areas. Cairns are an age-old method of marking trails, but those that are constructed for less serious reasons at archaeological sites can cause irreparable damage.
![Several people stand atop and beside crumbling stone ruins in a rocky, overgrown landscape under a partly cloudy sky. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/12-2-2-400x225.jpg)
By Paul Reed “Our churches are being attacked and our people can’t go to them to pray. It’s a fight against white men with gold in their eyes.”—Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee) In this tumultuous year of 2020, the wind whistles through an apparently vacant Chacoan landscape, dominated by uplifted sandstone mesas and a few solitary buttes.
![Aerial view of an archaeological site on a hillside with excavated areas and surrounding desert landscape, mountains in the background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/scan10-1-400x225.jpg)
By Jason S. Shapiro In 1915, the world was consumed by a devastating world war—but it was also the year that a tall, thin, Danish archaeologist made his second trip to New Mexico in order to study the archaeology of the Galisteo Basin in the northern Rio Grande Valley.
![A glowing plasma is contained within a glass tube, surrounded by metal rings and scientific equipment in a dark laboratory setting. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/7large-400x225.jpg)
By Jason H. Shapiro If I could save time in a bottleThe first thing I'd like to do Is to save every day'Til eternity passes awayJust to spend them with you.Jim Croce The plasma laboratory at the Center for New Mexico Archaeology in Santa Fe is filled with the background hum of vacuum pumps.
![Six people stand above and look down into a pit, framed by wooden beams and a rope pulley system, under a clear sky. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/1-2-2-400x225.jpg)
By Cordelia T. Snow and Stephen S. Post “I rebuilt the Palace of the Governors at my own expense.” Versions of those same words have been spoken by Spanish, Mexican, and American governors—and several museum directors—for more than 400 years.
