archaeology
gregladen | November 18, 2008The oldest genetically identifiable nuclear family met a violent death, according to analysis of remains from 4,600-year-old burials in Germany.
Writing in the journal PNAS, researchers say the broken bones of these stone age people show they were killed in a struggle.
Comparisons of DNA from one grave confirm it contained a mother, father, and their two children.
The son and daughter were buried in the arms of their parents.
gregladen | November 14, 2008... or should I say "Archeology."
Analytical Archaeology by David Clarke is a medium size blue book about methods in archaeology that, during the 1970s and 1980s was probably required reading in all graduate level method and theory archaeology classes. It may still be in many cases. Clarke was one of the founders of "processual" archaeology. Processual archaeology represented a theoretical shift in archaeology to come into closer alignment with broader anthropological theory extant at the time, in the post Willey and Phillips (1958) period when every tenth paper about archaeological…
gregladen | November 14, 2008An excellent read: Muslim Sailors, a Skeptical Redux
In a recent issue of Skeptic, Tim Callahan discusses the issue of ancient astronauts and lost civilizations.(1) This is perhaps one of the most frequent and popular theories of pseudo-archaeology, and certainly an area of concern ripe for a skeptical assessment.(2) Overall, Callahan does an admirable job in addressing the common theories of hidden secret civilizations, and it is good to see the inclusion of more recent Raelian ideas, which are generally seen as too off base for archaeologists to even bother discussing them. However,…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2008
Here's some characteristically excellent photography by my friend Lars of Arkland. He's recently moved to Visby on Gotland, a big old limestone slab in the Baltic Sea, where he's the Hauptnetzmeister of the National Heritage Board. The funny thing about the above picture is that it shows young vandals/graffiti artists to have a conscious and highly traditional perspective on the cultural heritage. Much more traditional than today's heritage administrators, who worry endlessly about whether their perspective is democratically informed, in touch with the times etc. While these administrators…
aardvarchaeology | November 11, 2008
Last Thursday I went to Norrköping and checked out the Town Museum's collection of prehistoric metalwork. Most of it is decontextualised, but I did manage to collect some useful data on the movements of my 1st Millennium aristocrats across Östergötland.
Among the things I handled was, unexpectedly, the Tåby statuette. It's a stray find from a field near Tåby parish church. Arthur Nordén published it in Fornvännen 1924 and suggested a Late Medieval date about AD 1400. I don't know if the piece has been discussed in print since. It looks neither quite like Bronze Age figurines nor Early Iron…
aardvarchaeology | November 7, 2008
[More blog entries about archaeology, astronomy, pseudoscience, skepticism, vondäniken; arkeologi, astronomi, pseudovetenskap, skepticism, vondäniken.]
In this guest entry, German SciBling Florian Freistetter of Astrodicticum Simplex offers a translation of his report from a recent lecture by a spaced-out visionary. Now if only I could say that I've never been fooled by this sort of thing...
A few weeks ago, on 17th October, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a lecture by Erich von Däniken with the title Götterdämmerung, "Twilight of the Gods". The great hall in Jena's Volkshaus…
aardvarchaeology | November 6, 2008The fifty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Archaeoporn. 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 3 December. 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 latest Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | November 5, 2008
When you've finished an archaeological excavation, you always produce an archive report describing the results. Most excavation units these days actually publish their reports in small print runs. If you're lucky enough to find something really interesting, you should also try to publish it in a journal, anthology or monograph. This is good for you, because it enhances your academic qualifications, and it's good for research, because it makes new data available to colleagues and opens up a discussion of the new finds.
In the summer of 2005, me and my friend Howard Williams directed the…
aardvarchaeology | November 4, 2008
Next week I'm scheduled to give talks in two venerable Swedish cathedral towns.
On Wednesday afternoon the 12th I'll speak at the Wikipedia Academy Conference in Lund under the heading "Inclusion/exclusion. How obscure subjects can you write about in Wikipedia?". I'm also gonna talk a little about science outreach, live blogging my research and the importance of amateur volunteers for my work. This event is booked full, but there's a wait list.
The following day, Thursday the 13th at 18:30, I'm speaking about my main research project at the County Museum in Linköping under the heading "A…
aardvarchaeology | November 3, 2008
A year ago I showed some pictures of particularly cool finds that Claes Pettersson and his team from Jönköping County Museum had made in 17th century urban layers near their offices. One of them was the above clay mould depicting King Gustavus II Adolphus. Claes believes that it may have been used to make candy. Now he knows where the motif came from.
The mould is actually a contact copy of a 1631 royal medal used to decorate military officers. And among Claes's finds is a piece of yet another mould copied from a coeval medal, this one an equestrian portrait. Muses Claes, "What have they…
aardvarchaeology | November 1, 2008The other day I took a look at how the European Science Foundation's ERIH project grades journals in Scandy archaeology. Dear Reader Ismene pointed me to a corresponding list put out by the NDS, "Norwegian Data Support for the Social Sciences". While ERIH recognises three impact grades plus ungraded journals, the NDS has only two grades plus ungraded. Here's the list of relevant journals.
Grade 2
Acta Archaeologica
Fennoscandia Archaeologica
Norwegian Archaeological Review
Grade 1
Current Swedish Archaeology
Fornvännen
Journal of Danish Archaeology
Journal of Nordic Archaeological Science…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2008The European Science Foundation has a project called the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH).
... there are specifities [!] of Humanities research, that can make it difficult to assess and compare with other sciences. Also, it is not possible to accurately apply to the Humanities assessment tools used to evaluate other types of research. As the transnational mobility of researchers continues to increase, so too does the transdisciplinarity of contemporary science. Humanities researchers must position themselves in changing international contexts and need a tool that offers…
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2008Carl Lipo at Evolution Beach has been kind enough to recommend Aard to his readers. He characterises me as "a big advocator for science based archaeology in the classic 'New Archaeology' sense". It's not the first time I've been called a New Archaeology guy, and I don't consider it unflattering, but I do feel that it calls for a few comments.
Archaeology emerged as a scientific discipline with the work of C.J. Thomsen in the early 1800s. It's a worldwide crazy quilt of regional subdisciplines that needn't communicate much. I don't need to know anything about Chinese archaeology to be able to…
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2008
One or more boat burials have just been excavated on the Estonian island of Saaremaa! Rich weapon burials with multiple inhumations, provisionally dated to the 8th century (though I'm pretty sure they'll turn out to be 9th century). Check out the Salmepaat blog!
Via Kristin Ilves on the Swedish archaeology mailing list.
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2008The fifty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Archaeology and anthropology, and all dedicated to the memory of Bertrade de Montfort!
The oft-married Count Fulk IV of Anjou was married to the mother of his son in 1089, when the lovely Bertrade caught his eye. According to the chronicler John of Marmoutier, "The lecherous Fulk then fell passionately in love with the sister of Amaury of Montfort, whom no good man ever praised save for her beauty. For her sake, he divorced the mother of Geoffrey II Martel..." Bertrade and Fulk were married, and they became the…
gregladen | October 25, 2008Corn (maize) was domesticated in the earlier part of the Holocene in Mexico from a wild plant called teosinte. Subsequent to the discovery of this area of origin by MacNeish, a great deal of research has gone on to track the spread of maize across the New World, its diversification, its effects on Native American lifeways, and so on.
How do you tell if corn was grown in a particular area? There are several possibilities, including looking for pollen in swamps and lakes or at archaeological sites, finding macro-fossils (don't be fooled by the name .. macrofossils are tiny, like individual…
aardvarchaeology | October 25, 2008Carina Andersson and Rickard Franzén at the Swedish National Heritage Board have put together a report in Swedish titled "What Does Contract Archaeology Really Cost?". Their answer to the question is, briefly, "less overall than the County Archaeologists would actually allow". County Archaeologists all over Sweden put out lots of contract work to tender and select who will do each job at what budget. And the archaeologists on average keep well within these budgets. Very likely, this is helped to a great extent by sites that look promising but turn out to be duds.
Another way of answering the…
gregladen | October 24, 2008There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years.
By an increased rate of evolution, the authors mean an increased rate of adaptive change in the genome. By recent times, the authors mean various things, depending on which part of the analysis you examine, and depending on what is meant by "increased." ... In other words, the timing of an event that is not really an event (but rather a change in rate of something) is hard…
aardvarchaeology | October 24, 2008The Swedish Research Council has just announced its 2008 project grants for research in the humanities and social sciences. 106 out of 993 submitted projects (10%) have received funding. Only two archaeologists got money: Thomas B. Larsson (b. 1953) who works with the Scandinavian Bronze Age, and Susanne Berndt Ersöz (b. 1959) who works with Turkey in the Last Millennium BC. Grant recipient Lena Larsson-Lovén (b. 1956) works with Roman dress, which places her in a border zone between art studies, history and archaeology.
As I have previously documented, you need to be about 42 and a recent…
aardvarchaeology | October 24, 2008Yesterday I gave a talk at a seminar organised by my friends in the Djurhamn project. This was interesting from a scholarly, a professional and a social point of view.
Not least piquant was that I ended up chatting briefly with two ladies whom I have criticised sharply in various media over the Ales stenar sign-post debacle. One was very friendly, telling me that she welcomed my voicing frank opinions, in a way that was too sweet to appear condescending. The other, whom I once offended pretty badly already during the Kristian Berg conflict, had a more restrained demeanour. In her talk she…