Posts

April 02, 2013

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3:31 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 21 (Review)

The Maiden in the Mushrooms Episode Summary A couple on a scavenger hunt finds a body covered in mushrooms in the dirt floor of an abandoned building.The Jeffersonian team and the FBI are called to the scene. Hodgins identifies the variety of mushrooms as ganoderma, enokitake, bunapi-shimeji, and hypholoma. The frontal eminence and orbital margins tell Brennan the skeleton is from a Caucasian female. Cranial sutures suggest she was in her mid-20s at death. Based […]

April 01, 2013

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10:23 PM | Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XXVII

New Finds Colchester ringfenced burials (credit) 8 March - Remarkable Ringfenced Burials from Roman Colchester (CurrentArchaeology). Wooden ditches and fences dating to the 2nd-3rd centuries AD appear to mark inhumation burials in Colchester. These clusters are unusual in terms of burial practices in this time and place. 9 March - Domus Aurea: Skeletons of Unknown Burial (Il Messagero). This Italian news piece reports on a 5th century AD graveyard lying atop Nero's palace. […]

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9:33 PM | Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 11&12 (Readings)

Kids Challenge When did you first learn what anthropology was? My favorite quotation from Kurt Vonnegut goes: "I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own […]

March 29, 2013

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6:28 PM | Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 9&10 (Video Projects)

Last week in class, we discussed video media and anthropology. Mostly, we shared videos that we liked and disliked. But we also talked about which anthropological subfields work best on video -- the consensus was that all of them work, but that linguistic anthropology is probably the most difficult to translate to video. Then again, none of the students is a linguistic anthropologist, so this could be class bias. We all also liked videos that practiced "edutainment" -- […]

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6:00 PM | Gate to Hell Found in Turkey

The ancient Plutonium, a poisonous cave found in Turkey, was believed in Greco-Roman mythology to be the portal to hell.

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6:00 PM | 'Hell's Gate' Was Real: Photos

Italian archaeologists have discovered in Turkey the long-sought Plutonion, or Pluto's Gate, a site believed to be a portal to the underworld in Greco-Roman religion.

March 28, 2013

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2:56 PM | Displaying the Famous Political Dead

Preservation of a body is an interesting phenomenon, whether it be the evanescent embalming at a funeral home to prevent the body from decaying at the wake, or preservation for hundreds of years as is the case with Rosalia Lombardo in the Palermo catacombs. Embalming is a three-fold process of sanitation, presentation and presentation. While the process … Continue reading »

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12:11 PM | Making Peace With Kraftwerk

I used to be kind of angry and disappointed with Kraftwerk. The only album they put out after I started listening to them was 1986′s Electric Café which is OK but not great, and after that, no new material. But now I look at their catalogue and think, hey, from 1974 and for seven years…

March 27, 2013

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4:20 PM | Stone Age Phallus Found in Israel

Some remarkable traces of Stone Age life were unearthed including a pit of burned bean seeds and a carving of a penis.

March 26, 2013

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11:24 AM | Sacrifice Based On Settlement and Subsistence

Sacrifice is a delicate subject. It can be voluntary or forced, but interpreting who these people were without text can be extremely difficult. When any hint of sacrifice is found at an archaeological site, it is often sensationalized. Sacrifice is actually defined as the making of a sacred act, coming from the latin sacer for … Continue reading »

Turner, B., Klaus, H., Livengood, S., Brown, L., Saldaña, F. & Wester, C. (2013). The variable roads to sacrifice: Isotopic investigations of human remains from Chotuna-Huaca de los Sacrificios, Lambayeque, Peru, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22238

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2:53 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 20 (Review)

The Blood from the Stones Episode Summary A body is found in a car in an abandoned parking lot on federal land, necessitating the FBI and the Jeffersonian to investigate. Based on the state of desiccated tissue, Saroyan puts time of death at 5 to 7 days ago. Brennan notes that the body decomposed in two different ways, owing to microclimates in the car. (At the lab, Hodgins notes the presence of Necrobia rufipes from cool, dry climates and cheese skippers from hot, humid […]

March 25, 2013

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7:51 PM | The Sacred Blue String of Ethnic Identity

In this well-written, painstakingly annotated and beautifully designed book, physicist Baruch Sterman (with contributor Judy Taubes Sterman) traces the history and prehistory of a certain blue pigment, along with its cultural and religious significance through the ages. It’s what the Torah and Talmud calls tekhelet, and it’s made from a gland harvested from Murex sea…

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3:11 PM | NeanderKamomil: A Soothing Solution You Can Trust

Did Neanderthals Self-Medicate? I first came across the work of Dr Karen Hardy (ICREA, Spain) and colleagues on ancient dental calculus at the European Association of Archaeologist‘s annual conference in Helsinki last August. In a session entitled ‘Not Just Meat: The Role of…Read more ›

Hardy K, Buckley S, Collins MJ, Estalrrich A, Brothwell D, Copeland L, García-Tabernero A, García-Vargas S, de la Rasilla M, Lalueza-Fox C & Huguet R (2012). Neanderthal medics? Evidence for food, cooking, and medicinal plants entrapped in dental calculus., Die Naturwissenschaften, 99 (8) 617-26. PMID: 22806252

White, D. (1997). Dental calculus: recent insights into occurrence, formation, prevention, removal and oral health effects of supragingival and subgingival deposits, European Journal of Oral Sciences, 105 (5) 508-522. DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0722.1997.tb00238.x

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March 22, 2013

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1:20 PM | Kay Glans Mourns Authoritative Newspaper Discourse

Kay Glans used to edit the literary pages of Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden’s main conservative* newspaper, and Axess Magasin, a conservative Swedish arts & social sciences mag that also has a TV channel. The latter’s standard is high, and I’ve been particularly pleased to find repeated staunch rebuttals of post-modernism there. What I don’t like much…

March 21, 2013

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9:23 PM | Digitally Mapping Graveyards

Over the past few weeks I have been working on mapping a cemetery in a Geographic Information System (GIS) as both part of a class and part of my own research. I received a number of question and comments on Twitter from readers asking how this was done and what exactly I was doing. What … Continue reading »

Herrmann, Nicholas (2002). GIS Applied to Bioarchaeology, Journal of Cave and Karst Studies, 64 (1) 17-22.

Sayer, D. & Wienhold, M. (2012). A GIS-Investigation of Four Early Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: Ripley's K-function Analysis of Spatial Groupings Amongst Graves, Social Science Computer Review, 31 (1) 71-89. DOI: 10.1177/0894439312453276

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11:31 AM | Registration Opens For European Skeptics Conference

Registration has opened for the 15th European Skeptics Conference. Hie thee there and register NOW, because there’s only 400 tickets! Here’s the confirmed (still evolving) line-up: Anna Bäsén (Sweden): Undercover Health Journalism Chris French (UK): Psychological Perspectives on Paranormal Belief and Experience Maria Berglund (Sweden): Våra opålitliga hjärnor: hur fel vi uppfattar världen och hur…

March 20, 2013

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2:42 AM | Bones - Season 8, Episode 19 (Review)

The Doom in the Gloom Episode Summary A woman wakes up, groggy from having been injured in the back of her neck. She grabs her gun and heads for the door. When she opens it, a fireball engulfs her, mostly destroying her body. Booth doesn't like the "crispy" ones. The Jeffersonian team and the FBI are called out to the scene. Judging by the oval shape of the obturator foramen, the victim was female, and the granular appearance of her pubic face suggests she was in her […]

March 19, 2013

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10:35 PM | London’s Newest Plague Pit

claimtoken-5149b056b7c8b The Crossrail project is aimed at creating a 73 mile railway in southeast London. Concerns raised about the new fast and efficient railway was that it could destroy archaeological resources but also that the dig may reveal some ancient diseases. During the debate over passing the bill to begin construction, it was raised that … Continue reading »

Schuenemann VJ, Bos K, DeWitte S, Schmedes S, Jamieson J, Mittnik A, Forrest S, Coombes BK, Wood JW, Earn DJ & White W (2011). Targeted enrichment of ancient pathogens yielding the pPCP1 plasmid of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108 (38) 52. PMID: 21876176

Antoine D (2008). The archaeology of "plague"., Medical history. Supplement, (27) 101-14. PMID: 18575084

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March 18, 2013

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12:23 PM | Gutsy Student Exposes My Modernist Leanings

After only one day of my teaching, one of my Kalmar students has already twigged that there’s a funny discrepancy between the course’s post-modernist meta-archaeological syllabus and the opinions voiced by his main teacher from the lectern and elsewhere. Fearlessly he goes for my jugular on the course blog, where all the students have to…

March 17, 2013

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5:20 PM | Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 9&10 (Readings)

Video Challenge We anthropologists are, quite honestly, not the most fashion-forward academics, tending to prefer jeans or flowy, tribal-print dresses to other disciplines' sharp professionalism. And we don't tend to seek out opportunities to be on camera, to perform for an audience, preferring to sit back and take an etic approach to watching other humans enact culture. There has always been interest in anthropology from the mainstream television media, though, in the form of documentaries […]

March 16, 2013

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1:20 PM | Hedge-Wizards and Hedge-Parsons

The Grey Mouser, along with Fafhrd the Northerner hero of Fritz Leiber’s genre-defining sword & sorcery story cycle, is the archetype of the Dungeons & Dragons thief. He began his career however, Leiber informs us, as apprentice to a “hedge-wizard” who taught him some simple magical cantrips. I never understood what a hedge-wizard was, until…

March 15, 2013

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5:19 PM | Choose Your Ethnic Slurs, Kid

Juniorette’s best buddy Betty looks a lot like Juniorette and is almost like a second daughter to me. Her mom is Korean and her dad is Turkmen, great people both. The other day Betty got into a fight at school with another girl who started calling her names. (Betty, by the way, is a very…

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3:30 PM | Black Death Skeletons Unearthed by Crossrail Workers

Remains unearthed of 13 people are thought to be victims of the plague.

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1:50 PM | Medieval Knight's Tomb Found under Parking Lot

Archaeologists in Edinburgh uncovered a carved sandstone slab, decorated with markers of nobility.

March 14, 2013

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3:36 PM | St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick was born in 387 CE in Great Britain, not Ireland, and he was considered a pagan for the early years of his life. When he was 16, he was captured by Irish marauders and taken back to Ireland as a slave. Over the next 6 years, he worked for his Irish masters as … Continue reading »

March 12, 2013

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8:15 PM | February Pieces Of My Mind

Some Facebook updates. Bolsängen: an Uppland smallhold whose name (thanks to the Swedish method of making compund nouns) means “the sexual intercourse bed”. The Poupon mustard brand got its name from the firm’s coprophiliac founder, who liked to encourage his staff with a friendly “Poop on, guys! Poop on!” I’m helping Adele Adkins with some…

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12:00 PM | Ring-Fenced Burials from Roman Colchester

Sometimes, when we discover burials through archaeological excavation we don’t find markers or above ground indicators that the burial was located there. The cemetery is found because of construction, agriculture, aerial survey, surveying or other methods. For example, a historic cemetery in the US may have been marked with wooden grave markers or crosses but … Continue reading »

March 11, 2013

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7:12 PM | Roman Diet Media Coverage

On March 1, my article, "Food for Rome," came out in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. It's gotten some media attention, so here's a collection of relevant links if you want to know more and don't want to read the article: LiveScience, March 1, "Most Ancient Romans Ate Like Animals," by Stephanie Pappas. While the title is pretty laughable, the piece is quite good. Polit.ru, March 5, "The Main Food of the Ancient Romans Was Millet" (title translated by google from the […]

March 10, 2013

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9:00 PM | Bronze-Age Donkey Sacrifice Found in Israel

The young donkey that was carefully laid to rest on its side more than 3,500 years ago.

March 07, 2013

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3:20 PM | Stone-Age Skeletons Unearthed in Sahara Desert

The skeletons date between 8,000 and 4,200 years ago, meaning the burial place was used for millennia.

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