archaeology
gregladen | October 24, 2008Welcome to the 22 October Edition of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival. The previous edition of this carnival was on Clashing Culture. The Home Page of Four Stone Hearth is here, and the next edition will be at Archaeoporn.
And now, on with the show!
Archaeology
What is "The relevance of archaeology?" According to A very remote period indeed...
archaeology is the only discipline that can provide us with a relatively objective measure of how things were in the past, even following the advent of writing.
"But don't archaeologists, being academics, often eat their own…
aardvarchaeology | October 23, 2008
I've been using Garmin's handheld GPS navigators since the spring of 2005; two models running the same firmware. They have been invaluable in archaeological fieldwork, pinpointing finds and test pits swiftly and accurately in situations where you would once have counted steps to the nearest landmark and put an X on a small-scale map. GPS has also helped me a lot when driving, and lured me to seek out over 600 geocaches.
But recently I discovered a really annoying glitch in Garmin's firmware, having to do with the coordinate readout.
The machine is able to use many tens of different…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2008
Erik Nylén in 1987, holding a ship's vane inspired by 11th century ones, standing in front of Krampmacken, a replica of a 12th century sailing boat. "Krampmacken" means "the brine shrimp". Photograph by Rune Edberg. Thanks Rune!
One of my archaeological heroes turned 90 last Saturday.
Professor Erik Nylén is huge in Swedish archaeology. His name is associated with any number of important fieldwork and publication projects, and also with a strongly pro-science movement during the 60s and 70s where fieldwork and labwork methods were greatly improved. One of Erik's big ideas was wholesale…
aardvarchaeology | October 20, 2008
Fornvännen ("the Friend of Ancient Things") is one of the main journals of Scandy archaeology and Medieval art. It's been issued 4-6 times a year since 1906, for the past several decades on a quarterly schedule, and I've been a co-editor since 1999. The first 100 volumes have been scanned and are available on-line. Later issues are appearing on-line too with a 6-month delay, though we haven't quite ironed out the routines for that yet.
Issue 2008:3 recently came from the printers. Here's what's in it:
Hans Olsson and Katherine Bless Karlsen present an Early Mesolithic (c. 6900 cal BC) site…
gregladen | October 19, 2008Plant and animal fossils recently discovered from an island in the Bahamas tell a story of habitat change and human involvement in local extinction.
These finds are reported in a paper by Steadman et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Most people with an interest in natural history know about one or more regions that were at one time covered by "a great inland sea." For instance, if you live in the American Midwest, you probably know that much of this region was covered by such a sea, evidenced by extensive limestone beds and other geological manifestations. As…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2008Recently I organised a few days' excavation that didn't turn up the kind of stuff I was hoping for. Still, I brought some materials home that may serve to shed some light on what exactly it was we dug into. All those nondescript little pits, all those sooty hearths full of cracked stone -- when were they made and used?
Enter radiocarbon. This dating method works on anything organic, that is, anything with carbon in it. Running one sample costs about $500, so you have multiple reasons to be smart about which samples you send to the lab. I thought my thinking about this might interest you, Dear…
gregladen | October 14, 2008A team of archaeologists working offshore from Haifa, Israel in the Mediterranean has discovered both direct and indirect evidence of human tuberculosis. This is important because, if confirmed, the TB cases date to 3,000 years earlier than expected: The disease should not be in skeletons this old. Also, this research seems to indicate that Tuberculosis did not originally arise in cattle to be later transmitted to humans, but rather, the other way around.
The site is called Alit-Yam, and it is a 9,000 year old Pre-Pottery Neolithic village. This site is about two or three hundred meters…
aardvarchaeology | October 8, 2008The fifty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Clashing Culture. Archaeology and anthropology, and all from the perspective of mashpi'im!
Mashpia (Hebrew: ×שפ××¢â) lit. "person of influence," pl. Mashpi'im (Hebrew: ×שפ××¢××â) is the title of a rabbi or rebbetzin who serves as a spiritual mentor in Tomchei Temimim (the Chabad yeshiva), in a girls' seminary belonging to the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, or in a Chabad community.
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me, not to the old submissions address. The next open hosting slot is on 19 November. All…
gregladen | October 7, 2008The Science Museum of Minnesota recently developed an exhibit called "Race: Are we so different?" This exhibit is now at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and will be in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans, Kalamazoo, Boston and Washington DC between now and June 2011.
If you get a chance, go see it.
In the meantime, a review of this exhibit has just been published in the current issue of Museum Anthropology, authored by Mischa Penn, Gil Tostevin, and yours truly, Greg Laden.
As one of the authors, it is obvious to me that this paper is brilliant! But I…
aardvarchaeology | October 5, 2008Everybody with an interest in anthropology and archaeology -- it's time to contribute good new blog entries to the forthcoming Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. You needn't have written them yourself: if you've found something worth reading recently, submit it to Thomas at Clashing Culture.
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2008In Sweden, the County Archaeologist's office decides where contract-archaeological fieldwork is needed, how much it can be allowed to cost the land developer, and which excavation unit should do the work. Ãsa at Ting & Tankar reports (in Swedish) about a recent case where the County Archaeologist's representative went quite a bit farther than that in overseeing some contract fieldwork.
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2008Here's another whine about academic employment in Scandy archaeology.
Yesterday my PhD diploma turned five years old. This means that I have now, at age 36, ascended to heights where I am automatically considered over-qualified (or simply failed) for a forskarassistent entry-level assistant professor's position at Swedish universities. Having done research full-time for the past 14 years and published about 120 pieces of archaeological work, I allow myself to believe that I am not an entirely failed scholar. It's an over-populated labour market.
In the past five years I have applied for…
aardvarchaeology | September 25, 2008
Ammunition is extremely easy to find with a metal detector. Cartridges are large chunks of brass, which would make them obtrusive even if they were just spheres. But they are in fact sheet-metal cylinders closed at one end, which means that whatever orientation they have in the ground, there is usually two metal planes reflecting the detector's signal. They shrill like mad.
Above is a pic of two cartridges I picked up at Sättuna today. The left-hand one is the most common type in Swedish farmland, used mainly to hunt large mammals, but also I believe in standard-issue army rifles of the…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2008We finished digging today. Tomorrow I'll take a few more charcoal samples and return the tools to the units that lent them to me. The dig closes eight days earlier than planned.
A week and a half of digging has identified the following phases on site, none of which were known to us beforehand:
Scattered lithics, knapped and then abraded by wave action on a beach. Mainly quartz, some hälleflinta/leptite, a little flint, one chip off a ground greenstone axe. Also a complete greenstone adze that permits us to date the assemblage to the Middle Neolithic about 3000 cal BC, but more likely the…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2008The fiftieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Yann Klimentidis' Weblog. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about Belqas, a town in the north-western corner of the Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt.
Belqas comprises in its jurisdictions the well known resort of Gamasa. Belqas is also known for its natural gas fields in the region of Abu Mady. Belqas remains a mainly agricultural region, although it supports some industrial activities such as sugar, rice and plastic factories. Belqas has a very old secondary school which is known to graduate good highly qualified students. This school…
aardvarchaeology | September 22, 2008Everybody with an interest in anthropology and archaeology -- it's time to contribute good new blog entries to next week's Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. You needn't have written them yourself: if you've found something worth reading recently, submit it to Yann at the Yann Klimentidis Weblog.
aardvarchaeology | September 22, 2008Early experiments with tinned food led to a number of lead-poisoning cases, particularly among people who had nothing but tins to eat. Recent work by Norwegian researchers Ulf Aasebø and Kjell Kjær has documented yet another case, the hitherto mysterious deaths of seventeen seal hunters on Svalbard in 1872. Says Kjær, "Inside the tinned food we found so much lead, that it hung like icicles inside the cans". This prompts me to re-run a blog entry from March 2006.
The hatter in Alice in Wonderland was mad as a March hare. Hares go nuts in the spring simply out of randiness. But hatters went…
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2008My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I'm not feeling particularly down about it, but the fact is that we're getting the second worst possible results.
The worst result would be to mobilise all this funding and personnel and find nothing at all. We're certainly not there.
The best possible result would be to find all the cool things the metal detector finds had led me to hope for, viz the foundations of a 6th century aristocratic manor. We're not there either.
The second best result would be to find other cool things than the ones I had expected, say, something with quite…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2008
We finished machining away the ploughsoil today, and I reckon we've uncovered about 800 square meters. I have a permit for 1200 sqm, but I stopped here. The landowner doesn't want us to expand in the most interesting direction where we have more cool metal-detector finds. And the directions that remain to us are out of the metal-finds swarm and downhill.
Sunken features everywhere, and the team has been busy cleaning away remnants of the ploughsoil, finding the edges of features, sectioning many. None with any finds worth writing home about though. Pete/Fozz did find a seltzer bottle sherd:…
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2008Adele and Laura joined us last night, and so we were thirteen people digging at Sättuna today plus Niklas the excavator virtuoso. We continued to strip away ploughsoil, uncovering lots and lots of dark splotches underneath, and the team sectioned and sieved about 25 such sunken features visible in the surface of the natural subsoil. Most are functionally indeterminate, some are hearths, one or two are postholes.
Very few finds in the features, a little bone and fired clay. One did give a fair number of find types including a piece of modern window glass, and as the demarcation between its…