News

UW’s Todd Surovell Named a President’s Distinguished Scholar

A University of Wyoming professor of anthropology has been named a President’s Distinguished Scholar in recognition of his ex...

UW-Based Research Shows Early North Americans Made Needles from Fur-Bearers

A Wyoming archaeological site where people killed or scavenged a Columbian mammoth nearly 13,000 years ago has produced yet a...

UW Assistant Professor Receives Funding for Hunting in Wyoming Project

Nikolas Sweet, an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming Department of Anthropology, is among four recipients of th...

UW Anthropologists’ Research Unveils Early Stone Plaza in the Andes

Two University of Wyoming anthropology professors have discovered one of the earliest circular plazas in Andean South America...

UW’s Doering Receives Rare Archaeological NSF CAREER Grant

Bree Doering is still processing the news that she is the first University of Wyoming anthropologist to receive one of the mo...

Archaeologists may have uncovered a Bronze Age metropolis in Kazakhstan’s steppeNov 18, 2025 || Upon the open grasslands of what is now Kazakhstan, there once stood a Bronze Age settlement that may have served as a center of exchange and power around 1600 BC. The settlement — called Semiyarka and nicknamed “The City of Seven Ravines” for its location overlooking a network of valleys — was first discovered in the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until an international group of archaeologists surveyed the area starting in 2018 that its impressive size and potential importance within the Eurasian Steppe came to light.

Stable isotope chemistry reveals plant-dominant diet among early foragers on the Andean Altiplano, 9.0–6.5 cal. ka Jan 24, 2024 ‖ Current models of early human subsistence economies suggest a focus on large mammal hunting. To evaluate this hypothesis, we examine human bone stable isotope chemistry of 24 individuals from the early Holocene sites of Wilamaya Patjxa (9.0–8.7 cal. ka) and Soro Mik’aya Patjxa (8.0–6.5 cal. ka) located at 3800 meters above sea level on the Andean Altiplano, Peru.

Mining the Past: Anthropology Professors Uncover Wyoming's First Coal Mining TownWinter 2024 ‖ What if you could open a time capsule left by Wyoming's first coal miners? In a way, that's exactly what University of Wyoming Department of Anthropology Associate Professors Alexandra Kelly and Jason Toohey are doing in Carbon City, Wyoming's first coal mining town, which was established in1868 near Medicine Bow.

Men are hunters, women are gatherers. That was the assumption. A new study upends it.July 1, 2023 ‖ For decades, scientists have believed that early humans had a division of labor: Men generally did the hunting and women did the gathering. And this view hasn't been limited to academics. It's often been used to make the case that men and women today should stick to the supposedly "natural" roles that early human society reveals.