dendrochronology
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2015Afternoon tea with my friends Åke and Petra inspired me to re-run this post from March 2010. Professional dendrochronology is still almost entirely a black-box in-house endeavour, that is, it is still not great science. Field archaeologists: when you saw your wood samples for dendro, get two samples and send one to the amateur community! They practice open data sharing. Check out Åke & Petra's web site!
How 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…
gregladen | July 30, 2014Mark Your Cosmic Calendar: 774/775
One wonders if anyone felt it. Did Charlemagne feel it as he led his forces across Pagan Saxon Westphalia, knocking down Irminsuls and making everyone pretend to be Christian or else? Did the people of Bagdad, just becoming the world’s largest city, notice anything aside from their own metro-bigness? Did the Abbasid Caliph Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi have the impression something cosmic was going on that year, other than his own ascendancy to power? Or was it mainly some of the Nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere that were changed, not forever but…
illconsidered | October 19, 2010Readers here are probably already familiar with the Wegman report "strange scholarship" scandal but if not read up on it a bit at Eli Rabbet's place. The mess goes much deeper, but the relevant aspect is an ongoing plagarism investigation into Wegman by George Mason University. The GMU investigation was pushed forward by a formal complaint by Raymond Bradely because passages from his text, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, were copied and placed verbatim, uncited and without quotation marks into Wegman's report.
Now, to the subject of this post. I don't recall…