It's a posthole! It's a rubbish pit! It's an elk-trapping pit with the remains of a wooden catch box at the bottom! No -- it's a hearth. A Four Stone Hearth! The eleventh carnival in the series, to be precise. And it's all about humans. As the poet put it,
"Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what's botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!"
This is where we all pretend to be human.
- MC at Neurophilosophy digs into a racist neurology paper by anthropologist Robert Bennett Bean, published in 1906.
- Yann Klimentidis has piece about the relationship between genetics and perceived racial divisions.
- Pierre at AHIMKAR discusses new dendro dates from Medieval Kalmar, one of Sweden's main cities at the time. In Swedish!
- Henrik at Recent Finds belatedly realises that the graves he's been desecrating lately were not in fact somebody else's ancestors.
- TigerHawk reports about an all Native American paramilitary unit detailed to track bin Laden using "indigenous knowledge".
- Brian at Old Dirt, New Thoughts offers a piece about the uses of archaeological seashell finds for climate history.
- Tim at Remote Central and Anthropology.net takes a look at a hypothesis suggesting that short legs in primates are an adaption for aggression, as well as conferring advantages when climbing trees. Then he reviews controversial evidence suggesting the presence of early humans in Mesoamerica.
- Chris at Northstate Science looks at the relationship between archaeology and creationism. (It's what he was made to do).
- Kris at About:Archaeology presents recent finds of Polish Late Palaeolithic Venus figurines that have just been published.
- Finally, my own contribution: a piece about nudity in Scandinavia.
The next Hearth will be kindled on 28 March over at Afarensis. Just remember, he likes tart and yummy banana peels, not the sticky sweet stuff inside. Stay on his good side and he hardly ever flings poo at you. Free social grooming and delousing included.
[More blog entries about archaeology, anthropology; arkeologi, antropologi.]
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A Trondheim colleague has kindly invited me to head a session at the Nordic TAG conference next May. T.A.G. means "Theoretical Archaeology Group", and denotes a series of annual conferences rather than a defined group of people.
Post-modernist hyper-relativism unexpectedly rears its ugly dying head in the form of a call for papers from one Tera Pruitt for the otherwise respectable Archaeological Review from Cambridge.
I've been asked to write an opinion piece about the future of Swedish archaeology for a high-visibility venue. This, as you can imagine, I enjoy doing a lot. Here's an excerpt from the piece as it's looking at the moment.
It looks like a three pig hearth.
*sings* "Mustafaaaa, babeee, I wanna park my roadster in your three-car garage"
Hey Martin, this is very unfair. It's hard enough for us archaeology bloggers to attract an audience when we write about shellfish or dendrochronology without having to compete with you writing about "naked Scandinavians". Even I clicked on your story first!
Panem et circenses, man. (-;
Thanks! I tried to trackback to this entry and got an error, so I'll just comment here. I enjoyed this edition a lot.