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Hi, everybody. From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

I've gotten to cover a lot of fascinating topics here on Tides, and I've gotten to meet a lot of wonderful people.

Nothing makes me happier than when those two things come together, especially when we can share the state of a rapidly evolving field with y'all.

New studies are appearing on the ancient Americas every week, and many of them are

generating big headlines in news outlets you've probably seen. But what do the actual experts think

about those developments? Today's guest is both one of those wonderful people and one of those experts.

Dr. Shane Miller is now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama after a number of years at Mississippi State University. He is a returning champion as a guest on this show, and he is an expert on the archaeology of the early Americas. Shane, thank you so much for being here today. I'm glad to be here, man. So it's been a couple of years since we chatted here on Tides, and I thought that I thought that what we could do today is just kind of go over what are people talking about in the field? What's going on? What kind of sites are people digging? So from your point of view, what have been the biggest developments in the archaeology of the Americas over the last couple of years? What's going on? Man, I was thinking about this after you set me like a list of questions that you're likely to ask.

And I was like, all right, now, what are some big things that have happened?

And I almost feels cliche at this point to say it, but I still feel like there are ancient DNA and just DNA-oriented articles that are coming out early regularly now, not just North and South America, but around the world.

And in some ways, if you study what I study, you have to have not only like continental scale, North and South Americaica wherewithal to kind of read that literature

but you also have to read like the east asian and uracian ancient DNA literature and try to follow

that as best as you can and i have to be honest when i was in grad school like my background's like

stone tools dirt and, and reading ancient DNA

just feels like so at the edge of my circle of confidence. So that's like really like the hard part

of being archaeologies. You have to be well read in a lot of different fields. That's the most

exciting. And I think for a lot of us,

the most challenging to kind of get our heads around us, be able to critically evaluate that

literature and think about how the insights from the ancient geneticists, how that actually

articulates with what we see on the ground in terms of the archaeology.

So I think that's a big one.

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