archaeology
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2010While reading up on the subject, I'm writing the introductory remarks for a study of Bronze Age sacrificial sites. In January I put a couple of paragraphs up here about the possibly redundant distinction between retrievable hoards and irretrievable sacrifices. Here's some more, about ritual and rational behaviour.Ritual and rationality
As Richard Bradley has argued at length (1995), the distinction between ritual and domestic behaviour is not very helpful when dealing with prehistoric societies. One may easily think that "ritual" equals "irrational" and thus "functionally inexplicable".…
neurophilosophy | March 22, 2010THIS is the left cerebral hemisphere of an 18-month-old infant who lived some 800 years ago. Such finds are extremely rare, because nervous tissue is soft and normally begins to decompose soon after death, so this specimen is unique in that it has been far better preserved than any other. Although reduced by about 80% of its original weight, many of its anatomical features have remained intact. The frontal, temporal and occipital lobes have retained their original shape; the gyri and sulci (the grooves and furrows on the surface, respectively labelled G and S, above) are easily recognizable;…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2010
Web gems have been sent my way.
ASPEX, makers of scanning electron microscopes, offer to scan your sample for free and post the image on their site. Finally you can learn about the micro-structure of your tear-duct sleep gunk!
Pablo Zalama Torres makes lovely replicas of archaeological pottery.
An amateur volunteering for the Stardust @ Home project has probably discovered "the first known sample of matter ever collected from the local interstellar medium". Space dust!
James Randi has come out of the closet. Congratulations, Randi! Your houdinesque escape will make it easier for other gay…
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2010How long ago was the time of Emperor Augustus? Most educated people, including professional historians and archaeologists, will reply "about 2000 years" if you ask them. But a considerable number of amateur dendrochronologists say "about 1800 years". And because of an unfortunate peculiarity in how professional dendrochronologists work, it is very hard to convince these dissident amateurs that they are wrong. Because they're actually thinking straight given the data available to them.
If you look at published dendro curves for the transalpine provinces of the Empire, you find that they…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2010Last June a well-preserved mass grave was found near Weymouth in Dorset, southern England. It contained the skeletons of 51 decapitated young men and later-teen boys. At first the burial was dated through the inclusion of Roman-era potsherds. The pit itself had originally been a Roman quarry. But now some of the skeletons have been radiocarbon-dated and ten have been analysed for stable isotopes. As it turns out, the date is most likely 10th century and the men came from Scandinavia. Looks like a Viking raiding party that had bad luck. An interesting and very unusual find! It sort of lets us…
grrlscientist | March 10, 2010tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, ancient DNA, aDNA, molecular biology, molecular ecology, archaeology, paleontology, fossil eggshell, extinct birds, giant moa, Dinornis robustus, elephant birds, Aepyornis maximus, Mullerornis, Thunderbirds, Genyornis, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club
Elephant bird, Aepyornis maximus, egg
compared to a human hand with a hummingbird egg balanced on a fingertip.
To conduct my avian research, I've isolated and sequenced DNA from a variety of specimens, such as blood, muscle, skin and a variety of internal…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2010
Spring has reputedly reached certain areas way south of where I still shovel snow daily, and with it comes Antiquity's spring issue. This is of course an intensely interesting journal, and not solely because the summer issue will feature that opinion piece of mine that I quoted from on the blog recently. In the following are some highlights. All links will give you abstracts and then present you with a pay wall.
Lisa Hodgetts of the University of Western Ontario (!) offers a paper on lithics & bone sites of the period 2400-1800 cal BC, located on the Fjord of Varanger, an area that is…
laelaps | March 1, 2010An adult chimpanzee in Bossou, Guinea uses hammer and anvil stones to crack nuts as younger individuals look on. From Haslam et al., 2009.
Before 1859 the idea that humans lived alongside the mammoths, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats of the not-too-distant past was almost heretical. Not only was there no irrefutable evidence that our species stretched so far back in time, but the very notion that we could have survived alongside such imposing Pleistocene mammals strained credulity. Contrary to what might be immediately expected, however, it was not Darwin's famous abstract On the Origin…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2010
I'm happy and relieved. A 73-page paper that I put a lot of work and travel into and submitted almost five years ago has finally been published. In his essays, Stephen Jay Gould often refers to his "technical work", which largely concerns Cerion land snails and is most likely not read by very many people. Aard is my attempt to do the essay side of what Gould did. The new paper "Domed oblong brooches of Vendel Period Scandinavia. Ãrsnes types N & O and similar brooches, including transitional types surviving into the Early Viking Period", though, is definitely a piece of my technical work…
gregladen | February 24, 2010A half century of struggle has resulted in more than a little change, which we hope is still ongoing.
I was moderately disturbed to see, while watching a brand new documentary on human evolution, credit for the "discovery" of a particular fossil given to a man who had not in fact discovered the fossil. What was interesting about this mis-attribution is that a DIFFERENT guy who is also not the discoverer usually gets the credit. So, my first thought was "What were these two arguing about that led to this outcome, where the more powerful person got the credit?" and my second thought was "…
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2010
I got a great letter from Reggae Roger Wikell, which I publish in translation with the permission of Roger and Mattias Pettersson with the awesome metal hair. For context, note that these two scholar friends of mine are the area's foremost authorities on Mesolithic sites that have ended up on mountaintops due to post-glacial shoreline displacement. The lithics there are mainly quartz.Not all that glitters is quartz.
Yesterday we had a planning meeting with Dr. Risberg [quaternary geologist and the Stockholm area's main shoreline displacement guy]. We're going to core bogs at high elevations…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2010The non-profit Center for Desert Archaeology is located in Tucson, Arizona and publishes a fine magazine, Archaeology Southwest. These generous people contacted me one day out of the blue and offered me a complimentary subscription. On Monday issue 23:3 (summer '09) reached my mail box on snowy Boat Hill, and I was soon enticed to read it from one end to the other thanks to its fine graphic design, its lovely photographs and its exotic theme. I learned a lot!
Archaeology Southwest 23:3 is dedicated to Paleoindian archaeology in Arizona, New Mexico and the Mexican state of Sonora. The…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2010The respected Finnish archaeology annual Fennoscandia Archaeologica has gone on-line! Every single paper from 1984 to 2007 is now available for free on the web site of the Archaeological Society of Finland. It's a great resource for scholars. For instance, the volume for 2007 includes seven largely critical debate pieces on the Susiluola cave that has been interpreted as Scandinavia's first Middle Palaeolithic site. Are there in fact any modified lithics from that cave? Or is it all eoliths and wishful thinking?
Apparently, this does not however mean that Fennoscandia is an Open Access…
aardvarchaeology | February 15, 2010The somewhat elusive central thesis of M.C. Jenkins's new book Vampire Forensics is that original European vampire folklore was based upon misinterpretation of the slow decay that occurs when you bury a body deep. Particularly so during epidemics, when upon discovery an unusually well-preserved corpse might be made into a scapegoat to explain why people were dying. Disregarding the whole Bela Lugosi cape-and-accent thing, a vampire was originally a restless corpse that drained the health of the living -- not necessarily by actually sucking their blood.
The book is mistitled: its long opening…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2010I'm studying sacrificial deposits made by people of a lo-tech culture in Sweden 3000 years ago, largely in wetlands. This was long before any word relevant to the area was written. The objects were mainly recovered during the decades to either side of 1900. Yesterday while trawling through back issues of the Journal of Wetland Archaeology I came across a really cool paper on a similar theme. It's about wetland deposits made by lo-tech people and excavated during the 20th century. But in this case the stuff was still being deposited in the 19th century AD, the objects are perfectly preserved,…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2010I'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.
Swedish academic archaeology should continue its on-going voyage back towards health and sanity, away from the pretentious introverted nadir of a decade ago, and be a robustly empirical science. We should return to a stricter definition of what archaeology is and what we will allow archaeological research funding to be used for. I submit, without any pretence to originality…
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2010The eighty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Krys at Anthropology in Practice. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 10 March. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.
And don't miss Ed Yong's piece on the first genome for a prehistoric human, a Bronze Age Greenlander who's spent 4000 years in permafrost!
gregladen | February 9, 2010Or not.
A repost
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.
It turns out that up-rightedness (bipedalism), which would free the hands, evolved in our ancestors a very long time (millions of years) prior to our first record of stone tools. The earliest upright hominids that are…
milhayser | January 29, 2010
We inspire each other with our everyday actions and attitudes--monkey see, monkey do. On The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer describes an experiment in which individuals who observed their peers choosing carrots over cookies were more likely to make the same thoughtful choice themselves. Jonah explains that self-control "contains a large social component" and plays a very important role in our development. But what can you do when everyone beats their heads against the same wall? On Aardvarchaeology, Martin Rundkvist recounts the "tragicomical" history of bog reclamation, which has…
aardvarchaeology | January 28, 2010As part of the reading course I've set myself on Bronze Age sacrificial finds, wetland archaeology and landscape studies, I'm reading a new book whose title translates as "Swedish bog cultivation. Agriculture, peat use and landscape change from 1750 to 2000". It's about various ways that Swedes have tried to make use of wetland in the past centuries. The sites I'm studying are mostly in wetlands, and mostly they have been identified when finds have surfaced during the kind of projects the book covers. Its main focus is on the Swedish Bog Cultivation Society, that operated from 1886 to 1939.…