The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2011 It’s Alive / Discover Magazine

(Notable)

For those seeking life on Mars, it is the best of times and the worst of times. Nearly 35 years after NASA’s twin Viking robots eased down onto its ruddy surface, there is still no incontrovertible evidence that living organisms ever existed on the fourth planet from the sun. Few researchers accept one scientist’s claims that the 1976 Viking experiment detected life. The brief frenzy over possible fossils in a Mars meteorite has fizzled. And even after billions of dollars’ worth of adorable rovers and eagle-eyed orbiters

The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2011 Collapse? What Collapse? Societal Change Revisited/ Science Magazine
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CAMBRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM—At midnight on 24 August, 410 C.E., slaves quietly opened Rome's Salaria gate. The waiting Visigoths poured through the narrow passage, trumpets blaring and torches held high. The first sack of Rome in 8 centuries has often been cited as the moment when one of the world's largest, wealthiest, and most sophisticated empires died a violent death. For researchers struggling to understand how societies collapse, Rome's fall has served as a model and a touchstone.

And yet an eclectic group of

2009 Gene S. Stuart Award from the Society of American Archaeologists for a series of stories on the Indus civilization for Science Magazine. The award committee cited his “thoughtful, informative, understandable, and sensitive articles about archaeological research” written “with great clarity.”

About Gene S. Stuart Award

An award to honor outstanding efforts to enhance public understanding of archaeology, in memory of Gene S. Stuart (1930-1993), a writer and managing editor of National Geographic Society books. The award is given to the author of the most interesting and responsible original story or series about any archaeological topic published in a newspaper or magazine.

The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2007 Inside the Restoration of the Amirya Madrassa /  Discover Magazine
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With foundation walls three feet thick, the Amiriya, a 16th-century palace and mosque in Rada, Yemen, has weathered earthquakes, monsoons, and tribal warfare. The ruler who sponsored the monument, Sultan Amir ibn Abd al-Wahhab, had a residence on the second floor. The first floor contains this courtyard.

It took almost 15 years of labor with wooden tools and dental instruments to clean the stucco in the prayer hall. Beneath the whitewash, every crevice was filled with dried carpet-beetle larvae.

The Amiriya is by

The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2006 Damning Sudan / Archaeology Magazine
(Notable)

The Land Rover is stuck, and the Manoosir tribesmen aren’t lending a hand. In Sudan, where African generosity meets Arab politeness, this means trouble. Even our easygoing Sudanese driver tenses. A few miles downstream from this dusty mud-brick town on a remote bend of the Nile River, Chinese engineers are building the massive Meroe Dam that as early as next year may flood the villagers’ homes, fields, and more than 100 miles of fertile valley. And archaeologists working to save what they can of this largely

The Best of Science and Nature Writing  2003 Treasure Under Saddam's Feet / Discover Magazine
(Winner)

You are drifting down the sluggish, muddy Tigris River on a reed raft, headed for a prominent spur of rock rising from a broad plain. Upon the rock stand the massive walls of brightly painted temples. Just behind them soars a brilliantly colored temple tower, or ziggurat, nearly 200 feet high, with a pair of smaller ziggurats in the background. Beyond sprawl the roofs of vast royal palaces housing magnificent reception halls and sealed underground tombs.

As the boat docks, sunbaked sailors and stevedores unload