archaeology
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2008
Local newspaper Ystads Allehanda reports on new fieldwork in Ravlunda by amateur archaeologist Bob G Lind and retired geology professor Nils-Axel Mörner. The last time the two enthusiastic gentlemen interfered with the Iron Age cemetery in question, they were reprimanded by the County Archaeologist. Now they are clearing brush from the site in order to make their imagined Bronze Age calendar alignments clearer.
Future plans include magnetometry mapping. Mörner is quoted as believing that this technique will allow the pair to map individual ancient footprints in the subsoil, because in his…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2008The thirty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology from outer space!!!
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
gregladen | March 25, 2008Two lion skulls found during excavations at the Tower of London originated in north-west Africa, genetic research suggests.
The big cats, which were kept by royals during medieval times, have the same genetic make-up as the north African Barbary lion, a DNA study shows.
Experts believe the animals were gifts to English monarchs in the 13th and 14th centuries.
...
The two well-preserved lion skulls were recovered during excavations of the moat at the Tower of London in 1937. They have been radiocarbon dated to AD 1280-1385 and AD 1420-1480.
Rest of the story here.
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2008
Bajs-Arne ("Shitty Arnie") is the family cat. Saturday, in a clumsy attempt to check out the view from the kitchen window, he overturned an hibiscus and created an archaeological pottery assemblage. It consists of a complete Swedish 2000s flower pot, a complete Swedish 1940s glazed China soup plate that the pot had been sitting on, and a large sherd of a Chinese 1990s glazed China soup bowl that had been plugging the drain hole in the pot. Shitty Arnie hopes to publish a note on the assemblage in a near-future issue of the Newsletter of the Department of Pottery Technology, University of…
gregladen | March 21, 2008
Oceangoing sailing rafts plied the waters of the equatorial Pacific long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, and carried tradegoods for thousands of miles all the way from modern-day Chile to western Mexico, according to new findings by MIT researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
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[This] supports earlier evidence documented by Hosler that the two great centers of pre-European civilization in the Americas--the Andes region and Mesoamerica--had been in contact with each other and had longstanding trading relationships. That conclusion was based on an…
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2008As I mentioned the other day, I'm hoping to do some Bronze Age research once my current project about Dark Ages magnate farms is done. The Swedish Research Council's annual application deadline is less than two weeks from now, and I've put a grant proposal together. The project title is
In the Landscape and Between Worlds. Bronze Age Sacrificial Sites in the Lake Mälaren Area.
The text is just two pages, and it's all about the research, no financial details. Dear Reader, I'd appreciate it if you would have a look and perhaps offer some constructive criticism!
Update 26 March: I've submitted…
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2008Having done some surface investigations with non-destructive methods, a group of volunteer investigators including Patti Hearst's Sharon Tate's sister calls for the excavation of the Manson Family's last hideout.
"Vass said that, considering the quantity and the types of markers of human decomposition found, the cadaver dog's response, and the probing exercise, he found enough evidence to warrant further testing at a deeper level and a full-scale excavation at Barker Ranch, according to the report he issued to law enforcement."
Thanks to Luanne Efird for the tipoff.
[More blog entries about…
aardvarchaeology | March 13, 2008Lore Sjöberg at Wired celebrates the achievement of recently deceased gaming wizard Gary Gygax with an entertaining look at what it would be like if Dungeons & Dragons characters behaved like archaeologists.
May 16
We have nearly finished our initial survey of the outer flagstones of the dungeon entrance. Already we have made wonderful discoveries! Initial tests indicate that the stones may have come from an open pit quarry near the Elonges River, nearly two miles from here! Also, we were attacked by a Phantom Fungus and lost two more graduate students.
Thanks to Johan Lundström for the…
neurophilosophy | March 12, 2008
(AP Photo/Greek Culture Ministry, HO)
This skeleton, exacavated recently in the town of Veria, some 75km west of Thessalonika, provides evidence that the ancient Greeks performed sophisticated neurosurgery.
The remains, dated to the 3rd century A.D., belong to a woman aged around 25, who appears to have died as a result of a failed craniotomy which was performed to treat a severe blow to the crown of the head.
The large hole above the eyes is precisely cut, suggesting that the skull was perforated with specialized instruments and not a sharp stone.
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2008PLoS ONE, the Open Access science journal, has finally published something with an archaeological bent: a fine genetics paper about the original peopling of the Americas. As part of their effort to stimulate scientific conversation about the journal's papers, they've put a "Journal Club" on-line where discussion can take place. Myself and Greg Laden offered initial remarks on the paper, and now the mike is free for anyone who wishes to contribute.
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2008
The thirty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Archaeology and anthropology, and this time dealing exclusively with koryÅ«. Explains Wikipedia: "KoryÅ« is a general term for Japanese schools of martial arts that predate the Meiji Restoration (the period from 1866 to 1869 which sparked major socio-political changes and led to the modernization of Japan). While there is no 'official' cutoff date, the dates most commonly used are either 1868, the first year of the Meiji period, or 1876, when the HaitÅrei edict banning the wearing of swords was pronounced."
The next…
gregladen | March 6, 2008There is a fairly new paper in PLoS on the colonization of the New World. It is the latest in a series of attempts to synthesize biogeography, climate change related paleoenvironmental reconstruction, genetics, and archaeology.
The authors draw these conclusions:
These results support a model for the peopling of the New World in which Amerind ancestors diverged from the Asian gene pool prior to 40,000 years ago and experienced a gradual population expansion as they moved into Beringia. After a long period of little change in population size in greater Beringia, Amerinds rapidly expanded into…
gregladen | March 6, 2008There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were "human endemic cretins."
From the abstract of this paper:
... We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital hypothyroidism leads to severe dwarfism and reduced brain size, but less severe mental retardation and motor disability than neurological endemic cretins. We show that the fossils display many signs of congenital hypothyroidism, including…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2008
Sweden's first town was a place called Birka, frequently mentioned in Viking Period written sources such as Rimbert's book about Bishop Ansgar. The town was on an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm. Its remains are extensive and highly visible, and have been the object of constant archaeological attention since the birth of the discipline. Nevertheless, there's a tendency among local-patriotic amateur scholars all around the Baltic to try to argue that Birka was in fact located in their favourite spot on Earth. This is so common that it's a running joke in the trade. In the following, my…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2008
Yesterday I began my return to the Bronze Age. For most of my career I've mainly worked with the Late Iron Age, a period that dominates the landscape of agrarian Sweden completely through its cemeteries and place names. But my first published piece of research, indeed the first research I ever did, concerned the Late Bronze Age. And now I'm thinking of going back there once my current book project in Östergötland is done.
My old Bronze Age studies, I'm ashamed to admit, involved no field trips and hardly any artefact studies, but lots of archive work. I had no driver's license, hardly any…
aardvarchaeology | March 4, 2008In 2005, when Howard Williams and I and a bunch of hard-working people excavated a Viking Period boat grave at Skamby in Östergötland, we found a funny little silver pin. It wasn't in the grave, it was found just outside the edge of the superstructure, near the ground surface, though technically in a culture layer of the 2nd century BC. I've been trying off and on to find parallells to the pin, showing its picture to a lot of knowledgeable people, to no avail. Everybody has the same impression as myself: it doesn't quite look like anything from Swedish Prehistory. So in a recent paper I co-…
gregladen | February 29, 2008
Photograph of a chicken. Click to see larger version. From PLOS article cited in blog post.
Where and when were chickens domesticated?
From whence the humble chicken? Gallus gallus is a domesticated chicken-like bird (thus, the name "chicken") that originates in southeast Asia. Ever since Darwin we've known that the chicken originated in southeast Asia, although the exact details of which one or more of several possible jungle fowls is the primal form has been debated. The idea that more than one wild species contributed to the early chicken has been on the table for a long time,…
gregladen | February 29, 2008... it was time to skip town.
I'm going to Mayaland in a few weeks. I know nothing about Mayan archaeology, even though I attended graduate school at one of the world's premier locals for the study of Mesoamerican archaeology. Since I was working towards a double PhD (in Biological Anthropology and Archaeology) I was allowed to "skip" one major subfield in each. Feeling ambitious, I skipped New World Archaeology (since I was already a New World archaeologist) and Anatomy (since I was really interested in Anatomy). That way I actually covered everything. But, my New World Archaeology…
aardvarchaeology | February 27, 2008
The thirty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Archaeoporn. Archaeology and anthropology is quite a lovely and ladylike pastime for us ladies!
The next open hosting slot is on 9 April. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must be a lady, like me.
aardvarchaeology | February 27, 2008My involvement in the skeptical movement and science blogging has caused me to think about my professional relationship to the concept of science. Archaeology is a social science in the US and one of the humanities in Europe: in neither case is it seen as a natural science, the kind that gets to call itself "science" without any qualifier. Archaeology is dependent on the methods of natural science, but its object is to learn about culture, not nature, a distinction that many including myself find useful.
In Swedish and many other languages, the word for science doesn't denote the natural…