AlunSalt

These are my links for 16th of November through 18th of November:

The Academic Journal Racket « In the DarkTelescoper explains how academic publishing works. The only thing that would improbe the post would be the theme from 'The Naked Gun' in the background.
A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’ – NYTimes.comYou can make arguments in [...]

Around the eighteenth and nineteenth century antiquarianism came into vogue. People were becoming aware that there was a long pre-biblical past and one way of finding out about it was to crack open some of the many ancient monuments that littered the landscape. The gentry would go out for a picnic at the weekend and [...]

The big idea is something Mike Parker Pearson has been pushing for a long while. Stonehenge is a place for the dead, and important in funerary rites. With the evidence he’s gathered it looks plausible.

Entrance to Newgrange passage tomb. Photo (cc) Sophie Robson.
One of the problems with archaeoastronomy is that it’s quite hard to find an archaeological site where you can be certain astronomy was important. Even Stonehenge is problematic. A lot of people think it was related to sunrise or sunset at one of the solstices, but there’s [...]

Rice fields. Photo (cc) mackaysavage.
I’m making a note of this because I missed it when I was on campus today. There’s a report in Nature on the discovery of the earliest damming in prehistoric China. From the Register-Guard:
Stone Age Chinese began cultivating rice more than 7,700 years ago by burning trees in coastal marshes and [...]

The shafts in Silbury Hill are to be re-opened and archaeologists are going to enter the engimatic monument for the first time in around forty years. One of the reasons why Silbury Hill is so enigmatic is that it wasn’t built with any shafts – which is the big problem on the site.
In fact there’s [...]

View of Stonehenge facing the Midwinter Sunset
Stonehenge has no shortage of mystery. One of the big ones is the lack of people in the landscape. Stonehenge is clearly the product of a large community, but until now there has been no evidence of these people. The Stonehenge Riverside Project has announced that they have now [...]

Looking for archaeological evidence of the Celtic Calendar is problematic. With up to eight potential targets for significant alignments it can be a matter of faith whether a monument is aligned accurately to a specific sunrise or just facing a general sunrise direction. It has been argued that the Coligny Calendar is independent correlating evidence, [...]

In theory an equinox should be easy to define. It’s the point halfway between the solstices. However, in what way do we mean halfway? Halfway in space or halfway in time? Or something completely different?

There is a problem in archaeology, which Francis Pryor neatly encapsulates in at the start of his book Britain BC:

Stories have plots and themes, and I have fashioned this book around what I think are the most important. But inevitably I have had to omit an enormous amount of significant material, simply because it fell [...]