Archaeology
Category archives for Archaeology
How do you tell the women from the men in Copper-Age Eastern Europe?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 15, 2013 Apparently, the women have jugs.
Finally, the Mayan Apocalypse Explained
Posted by Greg Laden on November 16, 2012 
In a moment of what may have been trance induced ague, my friend John McKay uttered a few words about Twinkies and the Maya that made a certain amount of sense, but something was still missing. But then it hit me like a loaf of bread. Wonderbread. Which, in Afrikaans, means “Miracle Bread” (you probably…
Across Atlantic Ice: Clovis Origins
Posted by Greg Laden on November 11, 2012 I want to talk about the book Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. It was written by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, both highly respected archaeologists. The point they make in the book is very simple: An important archaeological culture known as the “Clovis” is actually a European culture that traveled east…
Seven Thousand Year Old African Dairy
Posted by Greg Laden on June 21, 2012 
Pastoralism is the practice of keeping and herding animals such as cattle, goats and sheep, and using the products they produce, including meat, hide, bone, horn and of course, dairy. In the old days, armchair archaeologists thought that pastoralism would have been a phase of cultural adaptation following hunting and gathering and preceding horticulture (the…
The Personal Benefits of Doing Archaeology: Subversive subsurfaces.
Posted by Greg Laden on March 20, 2012 In discussing the relevance of archeology to anything, there is an easy answer provided by my friend Peter Wells, a specialist in Culture Contact and the Central European Iron Age. Peter tells his students on the first day of class that “Archaeology is the study of everything that happened anywhere, any time, with any human…
A word or two about tobacco, and some neat and new research
Posted by Greg Laden on January 11, 2012 Over the last few weeks I’ve run into a few misconceptions about tobacco, as well as some interesting news, so I thought I’d share. If you already know some of this, forgive me, not everyone else does. First, tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum, is a member of the Solanaceae family of plants, which from a human perspective…
Tradition!!!!
Posted by Greg Laden on November 18, 2011 Tradition. Not just a song from Fiddler on the Roof. You know the refrain: “The Papa, the Papa! Tradition.” It’s a great play but it is firmly rooted in the patriarchy, as “tradition” often is. There are many ways to define “tradition” and we can look it up somewhere and have a flameware over dictionary…
The Origin of Wine
Posted by Greg Laden on July 27, 2011 With Julia spending the summer and most of the fall in The Republic of Georgia, I’ve been thinking about various political and historical aspects of that country, and one of the things that is claimed to be true is that wine was first invented there. Recently, someone asked me (always ask the archaeologist esoteric stuff…
How are art and human evolution related?
Posted by Greg Laden on June 13, 2011 My interest is in developing a plausible evidence-based story of how modern humans emerged from ancestral species. This means guessing at what features of humans make us “human” and attempting to see the emergence of each of these features in the fossilized record of our bodies (bones) and behaviors (artifacts and archaeological sites). This question…
Art and Human Evolution at the Black Dog Cafe
Posted by Greg Laden on June 9, 2011 Please join Abbi Allan and me at the black Dog Cafe next Tuesday. Art and Human Evolution – June 14, 2011 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Are humans the only creatures who create art? At what point in human evolution did artistic creations become separate from tools, become art for arts’ sake? What in us…
Falsehood: “If this was the Stone Age, I’d be dead by now”
Posted by Greg Laden on May 1, 2011 It is generally thought that life expectancy in the past was less that it is today for our species as a whole and in the case of industrialized countries in particular. However, this belief counts as a falsehood not because it is untrue (it is, in fact, true) but because many people get this idea…
What is your comfort zone?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 13, 2011 Today, I took out the trash. I may or may not have taken the trash out last week, but I can tell you that the last time I did take it out, whenever it was, I had to drag the trash barrel across ice. Yesterday I went to the gym without a coat or jacket.…
King Tut Goes Home
Posted by Greg Laden on January 13, 2011 Remember this?
Amelia Earhart’s Finger Found in Pacific?
Posted by Greg Laden on December 16, 2010 If you go to a place where humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years and bone happens to be well preserved, you will find bits and pieces of people on a regular basis. If you go to a Polynesian island and look for bones you are more likely to find a turtle or…
King Tut’s Tomb Discovered!!!
Posted by Greg Laden on November 29, 2010 A frail elderly woman would have a hard time walking a few blocks, from her apartment to the subway, then from the subway to the MET, with winds gusting to near hurricane strength. So, the patron of the arts and of archaeology, who happened to be a cousin of my first wife, called around to…
Introduction 2 Archaeology
Posted by Greg Laden on November 19, 2010 Video 1: Dan meets Alice, Alice pwns Dan. Video 2: Dan meets Alice, gets her name wrong. Dan pwned again.
Two Archaeology Related Videos
Posted by Greg Laden on November 18, 2010 First, this one that Julia just sent me: Then, this one I just made. It’s experimental.
Why do women shop and men hunt?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2010 Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)? This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The…
Stones, Bones, Shards Dirt
Posted by Greg Laden on September 1, 2010 Natalie Munro (UCONN) and Leore Grosman (Hebrew University) have reported an interesting site dating to about 12,000 years ago in northern Israel. It is interesting because it seems to be the remains of feasting, a specific activity that any cultures around the world engage in. I’m actually writing something about feasting and related activities, so…
To Jeffers with Jaf: A trip across time, space, and culture.
Posted by Greg Laden on August 17, 2010 There is a swath across the map of Minnesota that runs northwest to southeast across the state, separating the major biomes of the eastern two thirds of the country, and for complicated reasons. North, it is colder, south warmer. Much of the moister in the region, especially in the summer, comes from the Gulf of…
Why did the Tasmanians Stop Eating Fish?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 8, 2010 Georges Bank is a very large shallow area in the North Atlantic, roughly the size of a New England state, that serves as a fishing ground and whaling area (these days for watching the whales, not harpooning them) for ports in New England, New York and Eastern Canada. Eighteen thousand years ago, sea levels were…
How did the victims of the Plinean Eruption of Vesuvius die?
Posted by Greg Laden on June 27, 2010 Even at the most extreme edges of the flow of stuff out of the volcano Pompeii, at the far edge of the mud and ash that came from the volcano’s explosion, the heat was sufficient to instantly kill everyone, even those inside their homes. And that is how the people at Pompeii, who’s remains were…
Australian cave painting could be 40 kya, depicts megafauna
Posted by Greg Laden on May 31, 2010 This just in from OZ: Scientists say an Aboriginal rock art depiction of an extinct giant bird could be Australia’s oldest painting. The red ochre painting, which depicts two emu-like birds with their necks outstretched, could date back to the earliest days of settlement on the continent. It was rediscovered at the centre of the…
Framing the Pacific Garbage Patch
Posted by Greg Laden on April 1, 2010 Various environmental organizations have been using imagery of dead baby birds with toothbrushes in their guts and solid floating masses of garbage to describe and raise alarm about what has become known as the North Pacific Central Garbage Patch. Yet, the small but important amount of research that has been done there shows that the…
Great Moments in Human Evolution: The Invention of Chipped Stone Tools
Posted by Greg Laden on February 10, 2010 Or not.
How to shoot down a Zeppelin
Posted by Greg Laden on December 28, 2009 … in Indiana Jones Staff of Kings Co Op mode. Which we figured out and is so hard to do I thought I’d share it.
Neolithic Cannibalism
Posted by Greg Laden on December 6, 2009 Cannibalism has been documented again and again in archaeological contexts, as part of normative human behavior. Here’s a recent report (I’ve not looked yet at the original) from the German Neolithic: Archaeologists have found evidence of mass cannibalism at a 7,000-year-old human burial site in south-west Germany, the journal Antiquity reports. The authors say their…
Oscar J. Polaco has died
Posted by Greg Laden on October 26, 2009 From his colleague, Eduardo Corona-M, via the Zooarch list server: He was a great researcher at the Instituto Nacional de AntropologÃa e Historia and taught zoology at Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas in the Instituto Politécnico Nacional. In 2006 he received the Fryxel Award by the Society of American Archaeology. For many year he promotes…
Cultural Preservation: The Blue Shield
Posted by Greg Laden on October 17, 2009 Corine Wegener interviewed by Scott Lohman
Oldest Wall Painting
Posted by Greg Laden on October 10, 2009 A very early example of painting inside a built structure is being reported from Syria.
, which is now available for the 
