archaeology
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2008
I just popped out for a burger at Arbee's, and I chose a seat with a good view of the full moon riding high over a Shell gas station. On the wall of the station was a large luminescent white sign bearing the words "Build Your Life on Eternal Truths". Chapel Hill has a huge number of churches, most being very small and privately run by their pastors, so I guess what the Shell proprietor really means is "Make sure to follow a culturally sanctioned subset of the many commandments in the Bible". Or perhaps "Spend a lot of your time participating in church rituals and talking about Christian…
aardvarchaeology | January 17, 2008
Around the time when a senior academic retires, she will, if she's lucky, receive a Festschrift. The word is German and means "celebration publication": typically, it's an anthology put together by her colleagues and students. The contents of a Festschrift often vary wildly in quality and level of ambition: solid research papers occur alongside humorous reminiscences of travels and travails endured while the august old professor was still a lanky undergrad.
Now, here's something unusual from Norway: archaeologist Jenny-Rita Næss's Festschrift is being published as a web site. So far, seven…
aardvarchaeology | January 16, 2008The thirty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Archaeology and anthropology and anthropology and archaeology!
Also, don't miss the 78th Skeptics' Circle over at Skeptical Surfer.
purepedantry | January 16, 2008From a previously unexamined skull, scientists have established that 8 foot long, 1,500 pound rats roamed South America 4 million years ago:
Imagine a rodent that weighed a ton and was as big as a bull. Uruguayan scientists say they have uncovered fossil evidence of the biggest species of rodent ever found, one that scurried across wooded areas of South America about 4 million years ago, when the continent was not connected to North America.
...
Its huge skull, more than 20 inches long, suggested a beast more than eight feet long and weighing between 1,700 and 3,000 pounds.
Although British…
aardvarchaeology | January 16, 2008Here's breaking news.
Many European archaeologists feel bad about Nazi archaeology in the past. In my opinion, this is usually way overstated: a few of our pre-War colleagues were Nazis, which was opportune at the time, but archaeology had (and has) nothing like the kind of political oomph necessary to take any significant part in actually giving the Nazis power. Archaeologists are political opportunists by necessity because we're so poorly funded, which is one reason that everybody in the field today is a humanistic liberal like myself. We are now in general neither more nor less good-…
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2008
Conservation of the early-16th century sword I found back in August continues apace at Studio Västsvensk Konservering. Its preservation is exquisite, and as usual with conservation of metal objects, a lot of new discoveries are made in the lab. Check out Vivian Smits' photographs!
This is clearly a battle-worn weapon that has been lost during combat. The edges have several fresh parry nicks that would have made the sword hard to sheathe, damage that would have been seen to after the fighting's end. But the sword was most likely dropped into the sea.
Update 16 January: Vivian Smits adds, in…
aardvarchaeology | January 14, 2008Western European archaeology is largely a humanistic tradition where many scholars have little knowledge of the natural sciences. For instance, I myself haven't studied natural sciences in any organised way since high school. Still, in my field, I'm known as an unusually science-orientated guy. (Just look at me now, merrily blogging away at Sb.) I believe that human societies are to a fairly large extent shaped by human nature, which has long been controversial in anthro circles. I also favour stringent methods of data collection and analysis: archaeology should study and interpret its object…
aardvarchaeology | January 10, 2008
I had a meeting with my geophysicist buddy Immo Trinks of the National heritage Board the other day, and he showed me an amazing Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey from Borre in Vestfold, Norway.
Borre is Norway's equivalent of Old Uppsala, with a large cemetery with huge barrows. One was obliterated by road workers in 1852, yielding a fairly well-preserved Viking Period ship burial of the Oseberg / Gokstad / Tune type, which sadly does not survive. Some copper-alloy metalwork from the grave gave the Borre Style its name, defined by knotwork with nicked ridges and Mickey Mouse heads.
The…
gregladen | January 8, 2008Pumice is rock that is ejected from a volcano, and has so much gas trapped in it that it can float. So when a pumice-ejecting volcano (not all volcanoes produce pumice) goes off near a body of water, you can get a raft of rock floating around for quite some time. By and by, water replaces the gas within the rock and it sinks. Like a rock. So, you can get layers of pumice on the bed of lakes, seas and oceans. A forthcoming paper in Deep Sea Research I describes two such pumice deposits of "Drift Pumice" in the Indian Ocean.
The fact that the two deposits are more or less on the surface of…
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2008
Turquoise mosaic dragon and bronze bell in rich male burial at Erlitou, phase II, c. 18th century BC.
A really good historical source is coeval with the events it describes, or it may even form a part of those events, such as in the case of a land deed. It is written by a knowledgeable participant in the events, one who is not strongly politically biased or whose bias is at least known. And any statement in a good historical source is ideally corroborated by other independent good historical sources.
Now, in no part of the world is there any historical source older than the first proto-…
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2008Field archaeology has its perks, one of which is the interaction with the public. Most site visitors are simply full of polite interest. A few tend to be local patriots who wish to reaffirm that their neck of the woods was once enormously important. And then there are those who, well, possess more curiosity than knowledge, shall we say.
A colleague at the Stockholm Town Museum told me a story about this latter group. He was digging in the Old Town once, when a person approached his trench and looked intently at his spoil dumps. After a while this person stooped and picked a small stone out of…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2008The Swedish Skeptics Society (VoF) has just announced its annual awards. The Popular Enlightener for 2007 is none other than my friend Jonathan Lindström, the guy with the Neolithic kids' book! (I abstained from voting, being heavily biased in his favour.)
States the press release, "He receives the award for his pop-sci books where he relays, in words and images and with endless curiosity and stellar pedagogics, the latest advances in astronomy, cosmology, natural history and archaeology. Jonathan Lindström's books are a pure pop-sci pleasure for all ages to gather around."
The 2007…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2008The thirty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Walking the Berkshires. Archaeology and anthropology, oh my!
Also, don't miss the 77th Skeptics' Circle over at White Coat Underground.
aardvarchaeology | December 27, 2007Guest entry! Charles Redwine treats us to some really good finds porn with commentary: 17th and 18th century native American pottery from Kasita/Cusseta near Columbus, Georgia in the US. Unfortunately, Charles found out that there was some problem with the publication rights to the pix, so he asked me to remove them from the entry on 31 December.
Chattahoochee Roughened Ware: large jar
The town of Kasita was, at least as referenced in some sources, the "White" or "Peace" capital of the Lower Creek people from the early 17th century to their expulsion from Georgia in 1827-28. The Lower Creek…
gregladen | December 26, 2007No, not here, this is not the National Geographic Blog. Here, at the National Geographic Blog...
But wait, don't go there yet, I want to make a quick comment...
With almost no exceptions, and one of those exceptions is a Pyramid, the finds that National Geographic sees as most important are dead bodies, often mummies, sometimes piles of skeletons.
Is it possible, I ask you, that this is what archaeology is all about? No way, man! This is, perhaps what National Geographic, or the readers of National Geographic, is all about. And sure, this stuff is cool. But really, give me a break.…
aardvarchaeology | December 22, 2007Two pieces of news to illustrate the state of the academic labour market in Swedish archaeology.
The good news is that an old coursemate of mine has secured a teaching job. He's 46, he completed his PhD in 1999, he's got a decent publication record, he has solid teaching experience and he has unusually ample formal training in university pedagogics.
The bad news is that the job he has been given is 30% of full time ... limited to a period of four months ... in a city located 580 km from where he lives with his wife.
Dear Reader, are you by any chance a professional academic? Would somebody…
gregladen | December 21, 2007Plant 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 | December 21, 2007
Yet another piece of news about Bob Lind's most recent archaeoastronomical caper (previously covered here and here).
The Scania County Archaeologist has had an independent contractor assess and document the damage done to an Early Iron Age cemetery by Lind and former geology professor Nils-Axel Mörner. The men's interventions will be repaired and the site's protected area will be enlarged, but no charges will be pressed. It's an unusual case as Lind made his unauthorised interference with the site known through a press release!
Here are a few choice quotations from contract archaeologist…
aardvarchaeology | December 19, 2007
Responding to my call for archaeopix, Dear Reader Kristi offers us two pages out of her June 2005 travel journal, recording a visit to Björkö / Birka, site of Sweden's first town c. AD 770-970. Explains Kristi:
"I sketched the things that made an impression on me, from the island and the Birkamuseet. [...] Art journaling, such as that in my scan, is very popular as a means of documenting amateur archaelogical, historical, and biological interests"
News to me, though I'd heard of scrapbooking which seems to be somewhat similar. Any more art journalers or scrapbookers around here? Somebody…
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2007The thirtieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Greenbelt. Archaeology and anthropology to satisfy even the most demanding of connoisseurs!
While I'm at it, Dear Reader, let me ask you to please send me some good archaeological photographs or drawings, with a brief explanation of what they show, to be published here on Aard. Fame and link love can be yours!