Posts

January 23, 2013

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When I was an undergrad in 1990 we were taught that all six periods of the Scandinavian Bronze Age were 200 (or in one case 300) years long. The most recent radiocarbon work shows that they all had different lengths and were more likely 130-280 years long. And the periods with the most abundant metalwork…

January 22, 2013

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4:03 PM | Scholarship Outside the Academy

Today's Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on PhDs who choose to work as independent scholars - "Some PhDs Choose to Work Off the Grid" - in which I was quoted as a formerly independent academic: For Kristina Killgrove, being an independent scholar was only ever a step on the way to getting an academic job, which had always been her goal. After earning a Ph.D. in anthropology in 2010, she knew she had to keep churning out scholarship to be competitive on the job market. Over three […]

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5:08 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 12 (Review)

The Corpse in the Canopy Episode Summary Hodgins and Angela wake up groggy to Michael Vincent crying and a corpse in a canopy dripping blood onto their faces. Flower petals surround MV, and Hodgins immediately suspects Christopher Pelant, as they are from Crocus sativus, used in ancient Egyptian rituals to the sun. Brennan comes out to the house to look at the corpse and determines from the superolateral corner of the eye orbit that the victim was male. Hodgins wants the […]

January 20, 2013

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11:22 AM | Cantabrian Prehistory & Albert I of Monaco

Just over two years ago Prince Albert II of Monaco visited the northern Spanish region of Cantabria (Fig. 1). Whereas Albert II is accustomed to travelling abroad to represent his small principality at diplomatic events, sporting competitions and the like,…Read more ›

January 18, 2013

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1:50 PM | Best Danefae of 2012

Most prosperous countries have legislation for what kinds of archaeological finds a citizen has to hand in to the authorities. In Denmark, still using a Medieval term, such finds are termed danefae, “property of the dead”. And here is Danish TV4′s list of the top-10 such finds of 2012. All but one of them have…

January 17, 2013

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1:20 PM | Hindawi Responds

The Scholarly Open Access web site says that Open Access journal house Hindawi Publishing may show some predatory characteristics. I’ve simply called Hindawi “dodgy”. Their Chief Strategy Officer Paul Peters commented here on the blog and then swiftly replied to some questions of mine, showing that the firm realises that its on-line reputation is important…

January 16, 2013

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5:36 PM | Saltsjöbaden Train / House Crash

Damn, I must have ridden those very train carriages thousands of times! The crash happened just four stops up the commuter train line from where I live. My wife and I went there this morning with our camera. Details here. .

January 15, 2013

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9:42 PM | Two Bodies Found On Costa Concordia

Two passengers' bodies lost in the cruise ship disaster are reportedly found in a hard-to-reach area of the vessel. ->

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1:20 PM | December Pieces of My Mind

Selected Facebook updates: Dreamed that a podcaster had mixed ham, celery and rice crispies into my favorite tea leaves. Was very angry. Green tea leaves accumulate in our house way faster than we use them. Bothers my logistics brain. Misread a headline on a lady’s magazine. “A Retro-Style Wedding” became “A Hetero-Style Wedding”. Genital lambada,…

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5:32 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 11 (Review)

The Archaeologist in the Cocoon Episode Summary A parachutist stuck in a tree finds a large cocoon with a dead body in it near a wrecked car. The Jeffersonian team comes out to the woods to investigate. While Saroyan is noticing that the car's upholstery has been wiped down, leaving blood only in the seat cushion, Brennan and Hodgins are up in a cherry picker slicing into the cocooned body and getting Hyphantria cunea web worms dropped on them. Through all the cocoon […]

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4:16 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 10 (Review)

The show is back from winter vacation, and these episodes are doozies. I'll save most of my vitriol for the second episode, though, as this first one was pretty innocuous. Here we go... The Diamond in the Rough Episode Summary Sweets is watching a live program where host Palmer Haston explores paranormal abnormalities. The host stumbles on a skeleton completely encrusted in gems at the base of a quarry. Brennan's excitement over the reporting of the first known case […]

January 14, 2013

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11:20 PM | Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 1 & 2 (Discussion)

Week 1 Topic Last Monday was the first week of Presenting Anthropology, in which I introduced myself and my thoughts on the need for anthropologists to be more public about our work. The students also mentioned their current engagement with social media and other forms of presentation - most are active on slightly more private spheres (e.g., Facebook), but some were already tweeting about their lives, ideas, and research. In order to get them thinking about the progression of the […]

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7:59 PM | GPS Error Directs Driver 900, Not 90 Miles

A Belgian woman on her way to Brussels ends up in Croatia. ->

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6:28 PM | NASA's U-2 Clandestine Cover Story

When Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, NASA was ready with a detailed cover story. ->

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5:32 PM | Try It, It Tastes Just Like...Hog Rectum

This American Life looks at whether hog rectum could pass as calamari. ->

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1:20 PM | Recent Archaeomags

Current Archaeology #273 (Dec) has an interesting feature on an 18th century ship of the line found hidden as a construction kit under the floor of a workshop at a naval dockyard in Kent. The timbers were re-used, but not in an economically or structurally rational way. Instead the greatest possible amount of ship’s timbers…

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12:50 PM | Why Don't People Get The Flu Shot?

Most Americans don't get the flu shot despite urgings from public health officials. Why not? ->

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3:00 AM | Subway Riders Shed Pants for a Day

Subway riders around the world took off their pants and rode the subway on Sunday.

January 12, 2013

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1:20 PM | Quaint Local Pronunciation

My boss at the Academy of Letters used to head the National Archives. Here’s a story he told over coffee the other day. Some decades ago a delegation of Swedish archivists was driving across the American Midwest to visit a Mormon microfilming facility. Stopping in a small town for lunch, they noticed that it had…

January 11, 2013

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1:20 PM | Scam OA Journals: Who’s Fooling Whom?

Two years ago I was dismayed to find that a pair of crank authors had managed to slip a pseudo-archaeological paper into a respected geography journal. Last spring they seemed to have pulled off the same trick again, this time with an astronomy journal. Pseudoscience is after all a next-door neighbour of interdisciplinary science. When…

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2:52 AM | Scale Model Discovered for Florence Cathedral

Italian archaeologists uncover what appears to be a model for an engineering masterwork. ->

January 10, 2013

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6:43 PM | Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 1 & 2

As I'm requiring students in my graduate seminar on Presenting Anthropology to become (at least slightly) public anthropologists this semester, it's only fair I should blog about how the course is shaping up and what we've been discussing. I've already posted the syllabus (and you can get a PDF through the AAA's teaching materials exchange), but the reading list is more of an evolving pile of links to various media. So I thought I'd post the list for each topic (two weeks of […]

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1:20 PM | Thoughts of Violence Past in a Peaceful City

Ferdinand Balfoort contributes a guest entry upon a recent ancestral pilgrimage to Stockholm. I gladly agreed to write something for the blog after being introduced by Martin to a book by Frans G. Bengtsson about Early Modern Scottish brigades (and brigadiers) in the Nordic region including Sweden. I visited Stockholm in December on my quest…

January 09, 2013

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7:00 PM | Hindawi: Another Dodgy OA Publisher

Hot on the heels of the hapless Science Publishing Group, I have received solicitation spam from another dodgy OA publisher, Hindawi Publishing in Cairo, with another odd on-line archaeology journal. The Journal of Archaeology has 71 academics on its editorial board. And a strangely generic name. What it doesn’t have is any published papers yet,…

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8:00 AM | Heap of Cattle Bones May Mark Ancient Feasts

More than 100,000 bones were found in an abandoned ancient Corinth theater.

January 08, 2013

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4:32 PM | Baby Bones Were Trash to Romans

Not really. But the occasional news story pops up trying to make us think that the Romans (or Greeks or Carthaginians or whathaveyou) were chucking their infants with the household trash. And those news stories are invariably based on sketchy details about excavations without much consideration for taphonomy, or what happens to bodies after death and burial. In June of 2010, the media fervor was over the so-called "brothel babies" found in Buckinghamshire dating to the mid-2nd […]

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1:20 PM | November Pieces of My Mind

Selected Facebook updates: John Lennon offers a grammar lesson: “A working-class hero is something to be”. It’s an adjective and a noun. Not a verb. A friend of mine is rehearsing Orff’s Carmina Burana and not loving it: “I’m liking the work less with every rehearsal and we’re performing it three times in one week,…

January 07, 2013

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9:03 PM | Ancient Remedies Found in Shipwreck

An ancient doctor likely knew the composition of the medicines loaded aboard a doomed ship preparing to sail into the Mediterranean. But it would be another approximately 2,200 years until anyone else learned the ingredients of the six grey pills, ... ->

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1:20 PM | Valkyrie Figurine From Hårby

Etymologically speaking, ”valkyrie” means ”chooser of the slain”. The job of these supernatural shield maidens in Norse mythology is to select who dies on the battlefield and guide their souls to Odin’s manor, where they will spend the afterlife training for the Twilight of the Gods, the final battle against the forces of chaos. After…

January 06, 2013

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1:37 PM | Henniker's visit to Serabit el-Khadim, Sinai, around 1820

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