archaeology
gregladen | January 9, 2009I think of her now as the Tea Lady, because she was drinking tea when I met her and had an English accent to go along with her English colonial outfit. She was one of the first native white South Africans I had met on my very first trip to that country. And now the Tea Lady, who was in fact a volunteer for the local historical society of a small town a couple hours drive north of Pretoria, was chugging her way up this steep, gravelly mountain path with the rest of us trailing behind gasping for breath.
This is the view looking up the Mwaridzi Valley from the eastern
entrance of Historic…
aardvarchaeology | January 8, 2009Daniel of Neuroanthropology has made an excellent roundup of last year's best anthro blogging. Check it out!
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2009Back in July I panned the History Channel's documentary on the peopling of North America, Journey to 10,000 BC. Their publicist then sent me a recent re-issue of a 2005 film about adventurous archaeologists, The Real Tomb Hunters -- Snakes, Curses and Booby Traps. Here are my impressions of that picture.
Real Tomb Hunters, though not a very good documentary, is far better than Journey to 10,000 BC. This is because a) it doesn't rely on cheezy computer animation, b) it aims much lower, intending only to be exciting, not to present any research results or debates. We get to follow a number of…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2009The fifty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. 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, weeks from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
amillikan | December 24, 2008After an expedition through the Sarahan sands of Morocco, ScienceBlogger Darren Naish from Tetrapod Zoology has returned to share astonishing essays and photo documentation of his journey. "Our primary aim was to discover Cretaceous dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other fossil reptiles," Naish wrote in Part 1 of his four-part blogumentary, but he also encountered exotic living creatures along the way—jerboas and fennecs and agamas, oh my!
aardvarchaeology | December 22, 2008Blogging's been low what with many boxes to unpack and no broadband connection. But things are getting into shape at home. Hope I find the electric drill tonight so I can get some of the paintings up off the floor.
Archaeology Magazine is a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America and so tends to concentrate on areas of the world where US archaeologists work. I recently got a complimentary subscription and received the Jan/Feb issue, whose cover story is a richly illustrated feature piece about Maya beauty ideals (abstract available on-line). My dentist was fascinated to see the…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2008The fifty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Greenbelt. 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, a bit more than a month from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
gregladen | December 13, 2008 What was Neanderthal-Modern Human interaction really like? Fifty four teeth (some of which are fragments) and nine other bones dating to about 40-43,000 years ago represent the "most recent, and largest, sample of southern Iberian late Neanderthals currently known."
These and some closely related remains may indicate that these Middle Paleolithic holdouts were kissing cousins of nearby anatomically modern humans. Or maybe not.
We know that Neanderthals occupied all of Europe for over 125 thousand years during a period known (from the artifacts) as the "Middle Paleolithic." During…
neurophilosophy | December 12, 2008
Archaeologists have unearthed a 2,000-year-old skull containing what they believe to be the remains of a fossilized brain, while excavating a site at the University of York.
Rachel Cubitt, one of the researchers on the dig, felt something moving inside the skull and noticed "an unusual yellow substance" when she peered through an opening in its base.
Later on, a computed tomography (CT) scan performed by neurologists at York Hospital revealed that the skull contained a shrunken brain-shaped structure. Further analyses will now be carried out to establish whether the yellow substance is…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2008
Gold disc brooch from King's Field, early 7th century. This cloisonné ornament has lost all the garnets that originally filled its gold-walled cells. BM 1028.a.'70.
From my buddy Barry Ager at the British Museum comes big news: the museum has launched a state-of-the-art on-line catalogue. Search here.
In Stockholm, being aye-tee savvy Scandies, we have of course had this sort of thing for years and years already at the Museum of National Antiquities. Search here. But admittedly our collections don't quite have the BM's scope.
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2008Another career whine.
Applying for academic jobs that are invariably given to people who are much older than me, I've come across a frustrating conundrum.
In Scandyland, it takes about seven months from the application deadline to decide who gets an academic job. This is because the selection process is guided by two or three external referees. The department doesn't get to choose the person they want, but they can pretty much choose the referees, and so influence whether they'll be likely to get e.g. an empiricist or a theoretician.
Now, one of the most important assets an academic can…
aardvarchaeology | December 8, 2008
Working with the Gothenburg Historical Society's metal detector group at Sättuna near Linköping in the spring of 2007, I was fortunate enough to be on site when Niklas Krantz found the thirteenth gold foil figure die known to scholarship. These dies were used in the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries to make tiny images of gods or rulers out of gold foil. The beauty of the dies is that the figures themselves are too small and light to trigger a most metal detectors. Not so the dies. And finding one of them is more interesting than finding a foil figure, since the die documents a site where the…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2008
Here's something neat. Annika and Bengtowe Angare are photographers and digital retouch artists (check out their site and hover your cursor over each picture!). They've photographed the early-16th century sword I found at Djurhamn in 2007 and stuck it point first into the find spot on a vintage map of Djurö!
This post is timely as I have a short talk scheduled for tonight about my work at Djurhamn. Wish me luck!
Thanks to Annika & Bengtowe for permission to blog publish their © image.
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2008The fifty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Cognition and Culture. 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 31 December, less than a month from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
gregladen | December 1, 2008This is my best bud Stephanie relaxing in her rock.
I have a whole series of photographs of Stephanie inside rocks. I think it is utterly hilarious that in an entirely unrelated stream of events, a friend of hers (whom I do not know) asked her to model for a photography class she was taking, and ended up shooting her has an earth mother goddess sort of thing emerging from a mossy spot in the ground. And here she is hanging out inside rocks. Must be something about Stephanie.
But wait, there's more...
The rock iteslf is gneiss. In fact, it is very nice gneiss. Gneiss is a metamorphic…
aardvarchaeology | November 28, 2008
Here's something pretty damn cool: Ossington airbase in Nottinghamshire, England. From 1942 to 1946 it was an RAF bomber airfield, and then it reverted to farmland. Just look at the big X on the aerial photograph from Google Maps. Six decades of abandonment, and it's an archaeological landscape!
Thanks to Kai for the tipoff.
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2008
Chris, the most highly allocthonous of the SciBlings, just did something neat over at his place that immediately called for emulation. He's a geologist, and he's graphed what periods of Earth's history he's been studying when. So, Dear Reader, here's my graph: not as pretty as Chris's, but hopefully legible. You may note that I specialise in the later 1st Millennium, that my work in the Neolithic must be rather superficial, that I have never worked with the Mesolithic nor the Early Iron Age nor the Middle Ages, and that I plan to return to Bronze Age studies next year.
Oh, and one more thing…
amillikan | November 24, 2008Last week, scientists positively identified the bones of Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer credited with scientifically formulating the idea that the universe is heliocentric and prompting the 16th century scientific revolution. To be sure that the bones were actually those of Copernicus, the scientists compared DNA from the unmarked remains found in a grave beneath Frombork Cathedral with DNA collected from the pages of one of Copernicus' books and found them to be identical. Using computer modeling software, his face has been virtually reconstructed.
aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2008Polish bishop asks archaeologists to find the unmarked grave of Nicolaus Copernicus under the floor of Frombork Cathedral. Archaeologists find a damaged burial including a jawless skull, and note that it's a male of the right age and with signature wounds visible on contemporary portraits of the astronomer. But they're still not quite sure if they have the right bones. So they do something extremely smart.
They vacuum a book known to have belonged to Copernicus, kept in a library in Uppsala, and they get little bits of human hair out of it. Then they have the hairs and a number of bones and…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2008The fifty-fourth 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 17 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.