archaeology
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2009To celebrate Charles Darwin's bicentennial, Dear Reader, let me tell you about a less well-known way in which his great idea was misunderstood or misappropriated. You may have heard of social Darwinism and eugenics. The former took Darwin's description of long-term biological change and applied it as a prescriptive excuse for not showing compassion to the poor and weak. The latter held that a species that was protected from selection pressure by such compassion would degenerate and all its members become weak. Both are thoroughly discredited.
The Origin of Species appeared 150 years ago in…
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2009The sixtieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Middle Savagery. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 11 March. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2009The University of Helsinki has something called a Collegium for Advanced Studies, whose aims are:
to enhance scholarly excellence within humanities and social sciences;
to endorse dialogue between different academic orientations;
to provide an innovative environment for concentrated study;
to encourage theoretical and methodological reflection in research;
to promote international visibility of Finnish research and interaction between scholars from all over the world.
Every year the Collegium offers a number of researcher positions concentrated on interdisciplinary work. Helsinki is the…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2009The Stockholm County Museum has just put my report on last summer's fieldwork at Djurhamn on-line (in Swedish). As you may remember, I blogged about it at the time (here, here and here). The results were actually a bit of a let-down after the sword I found in '07.
gregladen | February 8, 2009First I thought: "... noooo.." Then, I thought: "hmmmmmm."
Hat Tip Miss Cellania.
gregladen | February 7, 2009A fresh look at ornate 1000-year-old vases from New Mexico's canyons has unearthed a surprise: They were used as mugs to drink chocolate. The findings are the first record of the food in North America, long before its introduction in colonial times. They also reveal that chocolate was an expensive delicacy enjoyed by few during elaborate rituals.
here
aardvarchaeology | February 7, 2009Standing in line to board the jet to Sweden yesterday, I read over a woman's shoulder in Times Higher Education that ERIH, the European Reference Index for the Humanities, is scrapping its A-B-C-nil grading system (previously discussed here in October). It's come under heavy fire because of the fundamental differences between the natural sciences and the humanities. There is no such thing as independent Swedish chemistry or medicine, but there's any number of fields of research in the humanities that are almost entirely confined to single countries. As Horace Engdahl pointed out last year,…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2009
The Pillar of Eliseg, being the remains of an inscribed 9th century cross, sitting on a barrow of probable Early Bronze Age date.
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday with Howard and his students on field trips into north-east Wales and back across the border into Cheshire and Shropshire. I got to see the area under highly unusual circumstances: covered in snow and lit by an unclouded sun. Beautiful! We've seen the early church site of Shotwick, the Cistercian abbey ruins of Basingwerk and Valle Crucis, the hillfort of Oswestry, the Offa's Dyke and Wat's Dyke defensive walls and the stone crosses…
purepedantry | February 4, 2009
Imagine the size of the mice it would eat:
Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake's vertebrae suggest it weighed 1140 kg (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 metres (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip. A report describing the find appears in this week's Nature.
Drs Jason Head and David Polly carried out much of the quantitative work behind the discovery whilst working in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London; they identified the position of the fossil vertebrae which made a size estimate possible. Now based at the University…
aardvarchaeology | January 30, 2009The fifty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 11 March. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | January 28, 2009Fornvännen -- Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research has had a number of different cover designs over the past century and the colour of the stock has varied. Starting with the first issue for 1966, it has had a beige rusticated cover. Starting with the current issue, 2008:4, it suddenly has a pale grey rusticated cover. My buddy Leif at Arkeologi i Väst speculates as to why this may be -- is it because I got a steady job working with the journal? No. We had to change the cover paper because the makers of the beige stuff suddenly quit offering it! Leif also has some incisive comments about…
aardvarchaeology | January 22, 2009As we welcome the Obama administration into its first period, everyone at Sb is eager to see it restore science to its rightful place in US policy making and political culture. Now, from an archaeologist's point of view, there is one area of US law where science is sorely lacking. And in this case, it's not the second Bush administration's fault. Actually, this is an area where US law has lagged behind that of the rest of the developed world for as long as there has been a developed world.
What is science's rightful place in US cultural heritage management law? It should be everywhere, while…
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2009Back in August I blogged about a manuscript where a scholar appealed to Thomas Kuhn's old theory of paradigm shifts in order to evade criticism of their work. At the time I couldn't give the real details as I had received the manuscript in my capacity as journal editor.
I've said before that I consider it an editor's duty to correct muddle in debates, both in the interests of scientific advancement and to help contributors avoid looking silly. So I wrote to the scholar in question and asked her to work some more on her contribution, specifically to address more of her opponent's substantive…
aardvarchaeology | January 20, 2009
Bronze candlesticks, early 15th century, made in Germany or Flanders. Top: Rute parish, Gotland. Height c. 18 cm. Photograph by R. Hejdström. Below right: Fragment from Tåby parish, Östergötland. Photograph by M.R.
Back in November I checked out the enigmatic Tåby figurine and blogged about it. Now I've found out what it is: it's part of a 15th century candlestick and there's a complete specimen in the Gotland County Museum. The Gotland specimen was kept above ground, in use and in repair from the Middle Ages until recently at a farmstead in Rute parish. Arthur Nordén wasn't aware of it, but…
aardvarchaeology | January 18, 2009Thanks to a good metal detectorist and a swift response by British Museum archaeologists, all English Iron Age aficionados can now enjoy and study a hoard of 824 indigenous gold stater coins, buried in AD 15 or shortly thereafter. The hoard was in a plain pottery vessel, buried in a rectilinear cultic structure near Wickham Market, Suffolk. It's the largest Iron Age gold coin hoard reported from Britain since 1849.
In Sweden, we don't have a single coin deposited at such an early date, and it wouldn't surprise me if the Danes don't either (though they do have other very cool imports of the…
gregladen | January 16, 2009This is an old story being resurrected wiht new data:
Biblical diet 'unhealthy'
A new study into the diet of ancient Israel has revealed that far from being 'the land of milk and honey', its inhabitants suffered from the lack of a balanced diet.
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2009The fifty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Moneduloides. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 28 January, two weeks from now 11 February. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | January 13, 2009If by a "steady job" you mean one that is contracted to last until retirement, then I have had only one in my life so far. In 2002, Roger Blidmo gave me a steady job with his contract archaeology unit Arkeologikonsult. I left it after only a few months as my dig was done and written up, as the unit had no further digs lined up at the time, and as I had received funding to study Vendel Period metal detector finds from Uppåkra.
Today I have signed up with the Royal Academy of Letters for the second steady job of my life. It's actually just a change in the formal circumstances around my work as…
gregladen | January 11, 2009One of the most interesting and exciting stories in science is that of the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a climate event that had important effects on human history, and that has been reasonably linked to some of our most important cultural changes, and ultimately some evolutionary changes as well. That is one reason why it is interesting. In addition, the Younger Dryas was a pretty big deal ... a climate change or something like a climate change that caused massive changes all around the earth, and fairly recently. But the cause of the Younger Dryas is at present unknown, although…
gregladen | January 11, 2009I have had a lot of students of whom I'm very proud because of their accomplishments both in research and generally. One of these students is Mark Foster, who is one of a very small number of undergraduates to engage in significant research at some of the key East African chimpanzee research sites. Unfortunately for me, I can't take a lot of credit for Mark's excellent research, because I played a much smaller role in working with him than did others, but I am still very happy with his successes.
I've got a peer reviewed paper by Mark that I'll be reviewing soon. In the mean time, have a…