Archaeology
Category archives for Archaeology
David L. Clarke and Analytical Archaeology (Or, ‘The Life of a Graudate Student’)
Posted by Greg Laden on 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”…
Pre Columbian Contact Archaeology
Posted by Greg Laden on November 14, 2008 An 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…
When the corn weevil knocks, we are all doomed.
Posted by Greg Laden on November 14, 2008 Maize weevil, Sitophilus zeamais [usda] … or the corn rust or the corn root cutter or whatever pathogen that comes along that cannot be fought off with a cleverly concocted combination of chemicals. This is because all we eat is corn, or so it seems. In a paper just published in PNAS, scientists use stable…
Research on The Origins of Maize (Corn)
Posted by Greg Laden on October 25, 2008 Corn (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…
Study Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on October 24, 2008 There 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…
The Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival: October 22nd edition.
Posted by Greg Laden on October 24, 2008 Welcome 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!
The Bahamas Yield Amazing Fossil Finds
Posted by Greg Laden on October 19, 2008 Plant 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…
Tuberculosis Detected in Bones from 9 kya Israeli Neolithic Site
Posted by Greg Laden on October 14, 2008 A 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…
Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting
Posted by Greg Laden on October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like…
Review of SMM Exhibit on Race and Racism
Posted by Greg Laden on October 7, 2008 The 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…
Major Blunder in Science Reporting will Fuel Creationist Claims
Posted by Greg Laden on September 12, 2008 Life Science Teachers: Take special note! This is not yet an error in the mainstream press, but there is an error afoot, currently represented in the widely read slashdot, which I imagine will propagate. The purpose of this post is to alert you to this problem and prepare you for the occasion when you run…
When Where’s Waldo Meets the Fifty Foot Buddha
Posted by Greg Laden on September 8, 2008 George Bush’s Army has been in Afghanistan for years looking for one guy, Osama Bin Laden (no relation). They have not found him het. Meanwhile, archaeologists working in Afghanistan have found a 19 meter (62 feet) tall statue of Buddha. This is in the vicinity of the Bamiyan Buddhas which were destroyed by the Taleban…
Olympic Voyeurism: The Naked, the Nearly Naked, The Prideful, and The Annoyed.
Posted by Greg Laden on August 16, 2008 Watching (collecting data for the boycott) men’s Olympic water polo, it occurred to me that the little tiny bathing suits the men wear were absurd. Why not just skip the bathing suit and get on with it? As I was thinking this, the commentators on the TV were learnin’ me something new closely related to…
Stone Age Graveyard Reveals Lifestyles of a Green Sahara
Posted by Greg Laden on August 14, 2008 A remarkable find in North Africa is reported in PLoS. Information has just been released on this new archaeological site in a formerly much greener Sahara. This will provide an interesting physical unerpinning for the recent work on a “Genetic Map of Europe” (see this summary by Razib) and a new perspective on the movement…
Evolution and Domestication: Foxes
Posted by Greg Laden on August 5, 2008 Its all about selection for flight distance. (Oh, for plants, that’s dispersal distance!)
The seductive siren of soft tissue preservation: Ancient dinosaur flesh wasn’t ancient. Or dinosaur flesh.
Posted by Greg Laden on July 29, 2008 An ugly fact killing a beautiful hypothesis I’m not mentioning any names, and don’t ask me any details. In fact, don’t repeat this story. Some years ago, when I was a mere graduate student, a fellow student working in an unnamed country in Africa discovered a very very old stone artifact. To this day, this…
The Origins of the Evil Eye and Horticultural Fertility Cults?
Posted by Greg Laden on July 13, 2008 It has become axiomatic that the use of adornment by humans is some sort of symbolic act, and thus is linked to the human symbolic and linguistic mind. The human symbolic and linguistic mind is the trait that we axiomatically believe to be the derived human feature … the cladistic apomorphy that makes us human…
Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival: The Fourth Of July Everything is Just Fine We’ve Got It Under Control In America Edition
Posted by Greg Laden on July 4, 2008 (… makes me laugh .. ) The previous Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival was Four Stone Hearth Number 43, here, at Swedish Extravagaza. It was the Lard Edition. Go check it out. The home page for Four Stone Hearth is here. The next edition, due on or about July 16th, will be at YOUR…
Pile On
Posted by Greg Laden on June 26, 2008 Join Zuska and her commenters in a pile on regarding the Smithsonian Magazine’s recent article on the archaeology of southern Africa. It’s racist, it’s sexist, and it’s even anti-Neanderthal. (The article, not Zuska’s post) Regarding the writing about the use of stone tool technology in the article: It says, “could be women – but no…
Cursus, this cursus may be cursed!
Posted by Greg Laden on June 14, 2008 A team led by University of Manchester archaeologist Professor Julian Thomas has dated the Greater Stonehenge Cursus at about 3,500 years BC – 500 years older than the circle itself. They were able to pinpoint its age after discovering an antler pick used to dig the Cursus – the most significant find since it was…
New Hominid Fossil from Tanzania
Posted by Greg Laden on April 26, 2008 One of the most important evolutionary transitions in human prehistory was the rise of modern humans (Homo sapiens) from earlier hominids. A newly reported fossil from Tanzania provides an important new data point necessary to understand this transition.
Did sexist white males cause the extinction of the woolly mammoth, or was it climate change?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 7, 2008 Ever since 3,599 years ago humans have been asking the question “Why did our furry elephant go extinct?” What caused the woolly mammoth’s (not to be confused with the also-woolly mastodon) extinction? Climate warming in the Holocene might have driven the extinction of this cold-adapted species, yet the species had survived previous warming periods, suggesting…
Berry Go Round #3
Posted by Greg Laden on March 26, 2008 Welcome to Berry Go Round #3, the blog carnival deicated to all things botanical. The previous installment, Berry Go Round #2, is located here, at Further Thoughts. If you would like to submit an item to the next Berry Go Round, you may use this handy submission form. The Berry Go Round Home Page is…
Tower of London Lions
Posted by Greg Laden on March 25, 2008 Two 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…
pre-Columbian use of rafts to transport goods
Posted by Greg Laden on 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. … [This] supports earlier evidence documented by…
Squat Toilets, Sexy People, and The Nature of the Internet
Posted by Greg Laden on March 19, 2008 Coturnix, of A Blog Around The Clock, was puzzled to find that one of his blog posts … How to use a Squat Toilet … was receiving a record amount of attention from the internet, after languishing for nearly a year on his blog. His post consists of a photograph of a squat toilet of…
Colonization of the New World
Posted by Greg Laden on March 6, 2008 There 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.
Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People
Posted by Greg Laden on March 6, 2008 There 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…
The Origin of the Chicken
Posted by Greg Laden on February 29, 2008 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…
When the Maya sang the blues …
Posted by Greg Laden on 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…
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