Posts

December 06, 2012

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1:20 PM | Finding And Classifying Forgotten Sites

I haven’t blogged much about my research lately. One reason is that I am only working with it at ~50% this academic year since I’m teaching in addition to my usual 25% editor’s job. Another is that I’m in an intensive desk-based data collection phase, which gives rise to a lot of hypotheses and hunches…

December 05, 2012

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1:20 PM | Danish Journal of Archaeology

Mads Dengsø Jessen of the National Museum of Denmark wrote me to say that he and his colleagues are re-launching the old Journal of Danish Archaeology (1982-2006) as Danish Journal of Archaeology at Taylor and Francis On-Line. Three papers will hopefully come on-line before Christmas, and further ones will see rolling electronic publication from then…

December 04, 2012

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8:35 PM | Swedish Skeptics 30 Years

Today is the Swedish Skeptics Society’s 30th birthday! It was started in 1982 on inspiration from the American organisation CSICOP (est. 1976). I’ve been a member since 1996 and now I’m the society’s sixth chairman. So, what does a skeptical society do? We’re a science-friendly resistance movement. We fight quack medicine, newspaper horoscopes, spiritualist mediums,…

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6:47 PM | 3D Printing in Bioarchaeology

So, one of the things I bought with my start-up funding was a MakerBot Replicator 2.0. I've been interested in 3D printing for a while now, really ever since I saw the results come out of a printer at my husband's CS department at Duke University back in the early 2000s. This seems to be the year of the desktop 3D printer, though, with a huge variety of offerings from different companies at very reasonable prices. I decided to go with MakerBot, since they were well-reputed and […]

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8:48 AM | Passive Pacifist

For over 20 years I have received Pax, the journal of the Swedish Peace Society. I have always read it as a matter of duty. Rarely has it interested me much. I am a passive pacifist — a passivist, as a radical relative of mine once wrote me from prison, where he had been put…

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4:44 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 9 (Review)

The Ghost in the Machine Episode Summary The Jeffersonian team and the FBI find a largely skeletonized body in a greenhouse. Based on the shape and placement of the eye orbits, Brennan thinks the victim was male. Based on the partial fusion of the distal radius and acromion of the shoulder, she estimates him at 13 to 14 years old at death. *smoke fade!* Close your mouth, Tempe. At the Jeffersonian, the remains are xrayed, and a bunch of old fractures are found to the […]

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3:00 AM | Rock Steady Remnants: Megalith Pictures

Want to see some of the most amazing megaliths on earth? Check out these astounding stone monuments with our Megalith Pictures gallery.

December 02, 2012

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10:47 PM | Boardgame Review: Beer & Vikings

Beer & Vikings – of course I had to review this new Italian boardgame, the follow-up to 2011′s Sake & Samurai in the “Spirits & Warriors” series. Let me say at the outset that the game art shows little influence from actual Viking Period material culture and the text shows little influence from Old Norse…

November 30, 2012

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8:23 PM | Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XXIII

All your bioarch news from the Roman world for the month of November. It's been a pretty good month for skeletons, particularly in England... Roman-era Finds Rome and Italy Tibiae of the Roman "giant" and a normal tibia for scale. (Credit: Simona Minozzi, via National Geographic.) 3 November. A new mausoleum has been found in Rome along the ancient via Tiburtina dating to the 1st-4th centuries AD. No mention of skeletons, though. 9 November. Published this month […]

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12:08 PM | Odd & Annoying Survey Methodology

Our municipality has contracted a survey firm to evaluate the after-school activities for children that it supports. Circus school, piano lessons etc. Questionnaires have been sent to (some? all?) enrolled children. My kid is in three of these activities. I got three almost identical questionnaires, interpreted them as a mail-merge glitch, responded to one and…

November 29, 2012

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9:24 PM | NEW EXHIBITION: Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East

The Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse Scotland, United Kingdom Friday, 08 March 2013 to Sunday, 21 July 2013 http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/exhibitions/cairo-to-constantinople-early-photographs-of-the-middle-east

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7:20 PM | Forensics Student Presentations - Fall 2012

My forensic anthropology class has begun presenting their final projects. So this week, we got treated to a bunch of experimental sharp/blunt/ballistics trauma (on pigs), a re-creation of the mouse-in-the-MtDew-can case (spoiler: the animal in the water decomposed faster than the one in the Dew), a presentation on one of the historically black cemeteries in town, and a facial reconstruction. I was surprised at this last one, as I've given this assignment a few times in the past, […]

November 27, 2012

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9:58 PM | Annushka

I found this lovely portrait on Wikipedia. 18th century portraits almost exclusively show people with European looks. But here a Russian painter has painted a Kalmyk girl in 1767. The Kalmyks are a Western Mongolian group living in south-west Russia. The girl looks just like Juniorette’s buddy whose parents are from Afghanistan and Korea! This…

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4:51 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 8 (Review)

The But in the Joke Episode Summary A clandestine artist papering over a billboard trips over his glue bucket and falls to the ground, landing on decomposing human remains and getting stuck to them. The FBI takes the artist back to the Jeffersonian, where he and the remains are scanned with some mysterious scanner. The pelvis is large and rugged, which for some reason suggests to Fisher that it was from a Caucasian male. Hand-waving about upper margin formation on the […]

November 26, 2012

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9:12 PM | Boardgame Retreat

This past weekend saw my third annual boardgaming retreat: 48 hours in good company at a small Nyköping hotel during the slow season, all meals included. Me and my buddy Pieter took a walk upriver to the first bridge and back past the castle ruin late on Saturday night, but otherwise I spent my waking…

November 22, 2012

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9:58 PM | We Can’t Figure Out Theodicy Either, Swedish Church Admits Frankly

All the monotheistic religions have a problem known as Theodicy or The Problem of Evil. Simply put, it’s the question “How can there be evil and suffering in the world?”. The religions in question posit that their god knows everything that happens, so he isn’t ignorant of the shit that’s going on. And they posit…

November 20, 2012

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11:07 AM | Dom Raphaël de Monachis, Champollion's Coptic Teacher

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3:52 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 7 (Review)

The Bod in the Pod Episode Summary The episode opens with the Jeffersonian team on the beach inspecting a plastic pod full of decomposed human remains. Brennan waxes on about all the fecal coliform bacteria and chemical contaminants in the ocean. Although she initially claims she can't "determine gender" of the remains by looking through the pod, she shakes it like a Magic 8 ball, and the skull floats up so she can see the angular eye orbits and large mastoid process, which […]

November 19, 2012

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5:14 PM | #DH23 or Why I Finally Decided to Start a Blog

I’ve always wanted to have an ‘academic’ blog, but, for one reason or another, there has always been something distracting me from setting one up. DH23Things has proved to be the perfect excuse for me to finally embark on this…Read more ›

November 18, 2012

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8:18 PM | My Kid’s School Takes All Pupils On Festive Procession To Church

The former Swedish state church has been reasonably independent for twelve years. Now Juniorette’s school plans to send the kids walking in festive procession with flaming torches to the Swedish church’s local branch for an “Advent gathering”. Good fun no doubt, and Juniorette would probably be most displeased if I made her stay in school…

November 16, 2012

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2:47 PM | NEW BOOK: Le dessinateur Cherubini et la Grammaire de Champollion

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November 14, 2012

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3:29 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 6 (Review)

The Patriot in Purgatory Episode Summary The episode opens with five of Brennan's interns -- Bray, Edison, Vaziri, Abernathy, and Fisher -- gathered around a corpse with a chainsaw in its chest. Saroyan tells them to await Brennan's orders. Immediately they become suspicious, and Abernathy starts a differential on the chainsaw victim -- he was ripped through the xiphoid process, fluid on the 4th and 5th left ribs. Fabric is found in the cut that transected the xiphoid process, […]

November 13, 2012

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5:54 PM | Nutrition and Well-Being in the Roman World: The Evidence from Human Bones

On Sunday, I returned from Rome, where I participated in the one-day conference Nutrition and Well-Being in the Roman World: The Evidence from Human Bones. The conference was organized by Kim Bowes, a classical archaeologist at U Penn who is also the professor-in-charge of the school of classical studies at the American Academy in Rome. Bowes recognized the growing interest among classicists (especially classical historians) in the information that human skeletal remains can tell […]

November 11, 2012

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7:49 PM | Pieces Of My Mind

These days I usually stick short updates of things I’m thinking about on my Facebook feed, and use the blog for longer pieces. But some of those snippets make me kind of happy, so here’s a selection of recent ones. I never give money to beggars. Instead I make an annual donation to Stockholm’s biggest…

November 08, 2012

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9:55 PM | Flute Clock Reborn

My part-time employers the Academy of Letters are charmingly unworldly in a muscular way. They’re not a government body and are beholden to nobody except King Gustav III who laid down their bylaws in the 18th century. He hasn’t cramped their style in quite a while. And they are quite comfortably funded indeed through various…

November 06, 2012

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4:34 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 5 (Review)

The Method in the Madness Episode Summary Two opera-singing sanitation workers notice a decomposing body as it falls out of one of the trash bins they're emptying. At the scene, Brennan notices the large sciatic notch and the dorsal margin of the pubic face, which suggests she's looking at the remains of a female in her early to mid 20s. Hodgins finds eggs from Cochliomyia macellaria (blowflies) with larvae greater than 4mm in length, suggesting the woman has been dead for 36 hours or […]

November 04, 2012

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12:14 PM | An Obelisk in Exile at Kingston Lacy

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November 02, 2012

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6:52 PM | Pros and Cons of Osteobiography

Traditionally, skeletal analysis in search of answers about human lives has fallen into two camps: the study of populations is the purview of bioarchaeologists, who want to know more about life in the past, and the study of individuals is the purview of forensic anthropologists, who want to put a name with the set of bones they have in front of them. This line has started to blur over the last few years in that bioarchaeologists are realizing they can craft stories of individual lives […]

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10:25 AM | Fornvännen’s Spring Issue On-line

Check it out in full, for free! Kim von Hackwitz on miniature Middle Neolithic battle axes around Lake Mälaren Roger Wikell & Jörgen Johnsson on the re-discovery of a runic inscription on a cliff side near Stockholm Herman Bengtsson & Christian Lovén on indications in Medieval church art about the contents of a lost longer…

October 31, 2012

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1:20 PM | Medieval Norse Trappers On Baffin Island

Icelandic sagas and a single archaeological site in Newfoundland document a Viking Period presence of Norse people in the Americas. Now National Geographic’s November issue has a piece on new work (here and here) in the field, lab and museum collections by Dr. Patricia Sutherland of the Memorial University in Newfoundland that points to a…