Science

What I am reading, and what I once published. The address of this page is hoodedhawk.com/science.

What I’m reading in the literature

I keep an eye on the archaeology coming out of Nature and its sister journals — partly for its own sake and partly because it keeps running into the ground my coins came out of. This is the week’s list, newest first, with a line on each about what it actually says.

Week of 6–10 September 2026

Ruins of ancient Asian city show engineering prowess and organizationNature · 9 September 2026news

Liangzhu, in the Yangtze delta, was built about 5,000 years ago on waterlogged ground: mounds raised above the flood, dams upstream, and a city wall. The argument is that the site was chosen despite the difficulty, not because of it.

Liangzhu ran on organised labour without coinage of any kind — the dams and walls were paid for in obligation, not money. Worth holding next to the Lydian trite in my own collection: the earliest coins are a thousand years younger than these dams, and cities this size were built long before anyone needed a portable store of value.

Denisovans from southwestern China and their subsistence strategiesNature · 9 September 2026paper

Bianfu Cave in Yunnan. The excavation reports specialised hunting, stone tools made on the spot for the job in hand rather than carried, and heavy working of bone — a picture of how Denisovans actually lived rather than of who they were.

Ancient proteins identify various Denisovan remains from Southwest ChinaNature · 9 September 2026paper

The companion piece: bone fragments and teeth identified by the proteins that survive in them, long after DNA has gone. It fills in a part of the map where Denisovans were expected but had not been found.

The method is the interesting part: identify the object when the obvious evidence is gone, from what survives. That is exactly the problem with a coin worn past its legend — you attribute it on fabric, style and metal instead, and the confidence you can claim depends entirely on how good the reference series is.

How landscapes shaped the spatial foundations of cities in pre-state ChinaNature Cities · 8 September 2026paper

Neolithic settlement patterns read against the terrain. Where a place was easy to reach shaped where towns clustered — and that relationship changed as China moved towards a unified state.

Isotope analysis reveals mobility of the earliest cattle herds in northern EuropeScientific Reports · 6 September 2026paper

The Swifterbant people of the Netherlands farmed, hunted and gathered together from about 4240 BCE. Human remains are scarce, so the isotopes in their cattle stand in for them: where the animals moved says where the people did.

This is metal-source analysis with hooves. Isotope ratios locate a cow the way lead isotopes in a coin's silver locate the mine it came from — and both run into the same wall: recycling. Remelt old silver, or move a herd twice, and the signal is a mixture of places rather than one of them.

Community-based archaeology reinforces Indigenous cultural resilience to climate change in AlaskaCommunications Earth & Environment · 8 September 2026comment

An argued piece rather than a result: the Arctic is warming about four times as fast as the world as a whole, sites are eroding into the sea, and the author holds that excavation there should be led by the communities whose history it is.

Maya and the pre-Columbian Americas

A standing list rather than a weekly one. Nature’s archaeology feed reaches the New World only a few times a quarter, so these are gathered by hand and kept here as they turn up.

An undisturbed Maya city, Minanbé, found in the Campeche jungleThe Art Newspaper · 1 July 2026news

Ivan Šprajc’s team, three decades into a survey that has turned up more than eighty sites in the Central Maya Lowlands, found a 15-hectare city intact: a 13-metre pyramid in Río Bec style, plazas, palaces, and fourteen stelae and altars. Its name means “there is no road” in Yucatec Maya. One stela carries the date AD 849 and a decapitation scene.

AD 849 is the detail to sit with. That monument went up perhaps two generations before the region emptied — a state spending on display right at the end. The numismatic parallel is exact and slightly grim: the late Roman bronzes I collect are often the loudest, and issues do not get humbler as an order fails.

El Palmar Stela 46: the earliest Long Count date in the Maya LowlandsAncient Mesoamerica · 15 June 2026paper

A three-metre carved stone at El Palmar, Campeche, showing a ruler in a feathered headdress holding what looks like a jaguar head. Its inscription reads 8.7.1.0.0 — AD 180 — more than a century earlier than any Long Count date previously known from the lowlands. Kenichiro Tsukamoto and Javier López Camacho led the work.

Two ways to date a thing, and this is the good one. The Long Count is absolute: it counts from a fixed zero, so a date is a date forever. My Athens New Style tetradrachm is dated the other way — by which magistrates were in office — which is why its chronology is still argued over and why de Callataÿ had to rebuild the sequence from hoards. A civilisation that writes 8.7.1.0.0 has handed you the answer; one that writes two names has handed you a puzzle.

Over 20,000 pre-colonial earthworks in southwestern AmazoniaNature · 29 July 2026paper

A survey of earthworks across southwestern Amazonia that revises the pre-contact population sharply upward — the forest was worked, built in and lived in at a scale the standing trees hide. Nature ran two news pieces alongside it (the find and what it means for population).

This is a survival-rate argument, and it is the same statistics as a die study. Count what is left, model how much of it was lost, infer the original. Numismatists estimate an issue’s true size from how often the same die reappears among surviving coins; these authors estimate a population from how many earthworks the lidar still sees. Both answers live or die on the loss model, not on the counting.

Collective labour and the sustainability of pre-Hispanic field systems in La MojanaNature Sustainability · 11 August 2026paper

The raised fields and canals of La Mojana, in northern Colombia, worked on a floodplain for centuries. The argument is about what kept them working: collective labour, maintained across generations, rather than any single engineering trick.

A Maya wetland settlement at Birds of Paradise, BelizeNew York University · March 2026news

Excavation of a wetland field complex in northwestern Belize turned up the largest collection of architectural wood found inland, from a period when the nearby cities had already been abandoned — people farming the wetlands after the centres went quiet.

“Collapse” keeps turning out to mean the capitals stopped, not the people. The same correction happened in Roman Britain, and it is why a site’s latest coin is such treacherous evidence: it dates when the money stopped arriving, not when the place emptied.

El Jefeciño: a Maya site found on the Maya Train route, YucatánArchaeology Magazine · 29 April 2026news

About eighty structures across nearly 250 acres, found during the archaeological survey that ran ahead of the Maya Train construction.

Rescue archaeology, which is most archaeology: the site was found because a railway was going through it. Worth remembering how much of what we know arrived this way — and how much of the coin record is the same accident, hoards turned up by ploughs and pipelines.

The feeds themselves

The raw feeds these lists are drawn from, newest first — open one to see what has come in. They are read when this page is built, so they are as fresh as its date at the foot.

Nature — archaeology12 shown

The feed the weekly list above is drawn from.

ScienceDaily — archaeology12 shown

Press-release summaries, so quicker and looser than the journals.

phys.org — archaeology12 shown

A wide net: this channel carries the social sciences too.

PNAS — the New World, this issue1 shown

PNAS publishes the whole of science each week; this is filtered to the Americas and to archaeology.

My own papers

The chemistry I did in the 1990s, at the Oregon Graduate Institute and before: EPR and EXAFS spectroscopy of copper and chromium centres. These pages have been here in one form or another since 1999.