February 17, 2021
Lisa Maher (Anthropology, AHMA) with her colleague Danielle MacDonald (University of Tulsa) direct the excavations at Kharaneh IV in Jordan, where in 2016 they discovered the charred skeleton of a woman on the floor of a hut that had been lit on fire for the cremation of the body around 17,000 BCE. Their discovery pushes back the date for the earliest burial of individuals in structures by nearly 10,000 years.
The discovery was published in the March issue of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, and was covered by Science News and Archaeology.