Posts tagged Archaeology
Past lives caught in the dust of trees
Jul 28th
I’m currently working at the Annals of Botany to help out with their social media side. There’s a bit more to it than subtly dropping links to their site, like this one. At the moment I’m struggling with the Facebook integration, but there’s a fun side too. I wouldn’t have browsed AoB if I’d not been hired, and that means I would have missed out on papers like Phytoliths in woody plants from the Miombo woodlands of Mozambique by Julio Mercader and his team at Calgary. I’ll admit the article title doesn’t say much to the layman, but it’s actually something deeply cool that I didn’t find out about till my MPhil.
If megaliths are big stones and microliths are small stones like arrowheads, then phytoliths are clearly phyto-stones. Phyto- in this case meaning plant.
Phytoliths are microscopic stones formed in some plants. When a plant’s roots draw up water they also draw up the minerals dissolved within it. In the case of the silica this gets pulled out of the water and deposited either in the cells or between the cells. The exact shape of the phytoliths varies on the part of the plant the silica is deposited in, the availability of More >
Do we need an Industrial Archaeology?
Jul 24th
Cromford Canal. Click for larger image.
It’s easy to take a World Heritage Site for granted when it’s on your doorstep. I had thought of shooting a short portfolio of Cromford for a competition. They required ten photos. After looking into the project I’ve decided that the competition isn’t going to happen for me, but a short photo essay on Cromford, or possibly the Derwent Valley Mills, remains an interesting idea.
Industrial Archaeology can get short shrift from other archaeologists. Often there’s written records, plans and for some places oral accounts of work at a site. Is Archaeology necessary? Mark Henshaw, the Archaeology Dude, makes a good argument that Archaeology can draw multiple lines of evidence to inform histories of the past. I wouldn’t discount that, and I think his point, Archaeology isn’t just about digging, is very important from an American perspective because there Archaeology is seen as a branch of Anthropology. In the UK you’re more likely to see Archaeology paired with History or Classics. So do we really need Industrial Archaeologists when there so many Early Modern Historians.
I think another factor Archaeology brings is spatial thinking. Looking at the early days of the professionalisation of Archaeology in Britain, one of the More >
What does the new henge mean for Stonehenge?
Jul 22nd
Confusion at Stonehenge
I don’t know.
I think the coverage at places like the BBC are good, David Gregory found it exciting and I thought his story was a good read. However there are too many details missing from the reports to come to any conclusions. That’s not a complaint about the coverage, the mass-media isn’t an archaeological journal. It’s not even a gripe about publication by press-release because Mike Parker Pearson showed last year that news leaks out, so why not give the brief details out properly?
On the other hand the Birmingham team are looking at the landscape and, from reading the reports, I’ve no idea where this new site is in relation to Stonehenge. It’s almost certainly in sight of Stonehenge, but then the landscape round there is littered with barrows, Bronze Age burial mounds. The location will affect how we see the landscape. This henge isn’t to be confused with Bluestonehenge, the site found by the river Avon near Stonehenge last year. It’s also not Woodhenge, despite being made of wood, because that’s a different site near Durrington Walls, which is another site that has been in the news in recent years.
There’s not a lot I can say about the More >
Survey: How do you know you’re doing it right?
Archaeological surveys tend to be samples of a site. How do you know you’re doing it right when you can’t see the artefacts you’ve missed? Couldn’t you be missing large chunks of information because it’s not what you’re expecting to see? David Pettigrew guest blogs at The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World,
OU-USA excavate in Greece Athens, Ohio
Julia Dose has some great photos of a dig happening just outside Athens.
Thanks to @billcaraher for correcting me. I was just struck by the photos.
Astronomy at Ston̈ehen̈ge for the 2010 Summer Solstice
Jun 18th
I’ve been busy, recently and I’m likely to stay that way for a while, hence the lack of posts. Still, I’m hoping to be able to take a trip to Stonehenge this year to see the solstice. That’s why my prediction is that it will be cold and wet and thick cloud will prevent anything interesting making an appearance. However, if there are clear skies, there could be plenty to see over Stonehenge this solstice.
Natural AstronomyThere’ll be plenty to see in the evening sky after sunset at 9.26pm. To the west Venus will be extremely bright at magnitude -4.0 (the lower the number the brighter something is). When you see it you won’t be able to mistake it for anything else. That will be setting at a quarter to midnight, so there’ll be plenty of time to see it.
Position of the planets at sunset. Click for full size.
Moving to the left, are Mars, Saturn and the Moon. Mars will be magnitude 1.3 so it won’t be the brightest thing in the sky, Arcturus and Vega will be brighter but it’ll still be easy to find. If you’re struggling find the Plough. The two pointer stars that point up to the Pole More >
Blogging Archaeology at the SAA
May 15th
Colleen Morgan has put forward a proposal for a Blogging Archaeology session at the SAA conference. My concern was that an explict blogging session would be case of preaching to the choir. Technophobes would have the convenience of skipping all the awkward talks in one package. However I think she’s proven me wrong. I think she’s got some useful ideas that could benefit from a conference session, in particular thoughts on privacy. I think this is a potential headache, especially if courses are going to encourage students to blog. It could be useful to help distinguish between anonymity and pseudonymity, and a conference might be the place to tackle this kind of question head on.
Sadly I don’t anticipate attending the SAA conference, but if there’s one session that will break out beyond the conference, then you’d expect it to be the one about blogging. You should keep an eye on Colleen’s blog Middle Savagery for more developments, but really Colleen is full enough of interesting ideas that you should be reading her blog anyway.
Planets and Anomalies in the Antikythera Mechanism
May 14th
Mathematicians have a concept, Omega, that is defined as something so huge that any attempt to define it actually defines something smaller. In a similar vein I reckon that any attempt to describe the ingenuity of the Antikythera Mechanism actually ends up describing something less ingenious instead. More research on the device has been published recently in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. I realise that people might be dropping on to this entry from a search engine, without having read any of the earlier posts, here’s a quick recap of what the mechanism is. (more…)
Is ‘religion’ one of the hard historical archaeological problems?
Apr 14th
Michael E. Smith lays down an interesting challenge at Publishing Archaeology: What are the hard problems in Archaeology? What questions haven’t archaeologists answered and aren’t likely to answer any time soon? A couple of ideas come to mind. I’ll start with the easier problem to express.
Is an ancient history or archaeology of religion a sensible project?I’ve got an interest in ancient science, but one of the things most people researching ancient science would agree that science in the ancient world didn’t really exist. There’s something that’s a more systematic inquiry about nature, but something like natural philosophy would be a better description for the classical world. I’m not sure that the same term would work for other societies because philosophy carries a lot of baggage too. So when academics talk about ancient science, there’s this undercurrent that we’re not talking about science. Ancient science is not the same as modern science.
I’ve got an interest in ancient religion too. I’m not so interested in the content as such, more religion in a socio-political context. That’s something you can say that makes sense to modern people. If you said the same thing in the ancient world they’d think you were mad. It’d be More >
Preserving a culture in wild honey
Mar 23rd
“What is heritage?” sounds like the kind of essay question a lecturer might set when they run out of inspiration. It depends where you ask it. In some places it’s a question that carries a sting for the unwary. In the UK it’s almost always old buildings. Sometimes it’s very old buildings, but we build our heritage around the things we build. Sometimes a place can have a historical potency, like a medieval battlefield, but usually we insist that something leaves a mark before we acknowledge its historicity. It’s not surprising. The UK is an industrial society. It’s a settled society. So is the rest of industrialised world. So how to you even start to examine the heritage of a non-industrial society? Is the very concept of heritage loaded in a way that disempowers some peoples? Mick Morrison, Darlene McNaughton and Justin Shiner have a paper
