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Occasioned by a comment on my recent entry on the movie Avatar and the Gaia hypothesis, here's a re-run of a blog entry from March 2006. As comments to a recent entry, I've had an interesting discussion about environmentalism with a friend. We both agree that biodiversity and ecological systems should...
Tech Note: Help Me Choose a Smartphone
Four years ago (when I had only been blogging for a month) I asked my readers what kind of smartphone I should get. Nobody replied, but I got some advice elsewhence and bought a Qtek 9100. Then, two years ago, I asked the same question again and got lots of...
Population Will Come Down -- We Choose How
It's time for the annual Global Population Speak Out. We all know that in order not to crash the planet we need to consume less energy and raw materials and we need to emit less pollutants. But it doesn't seem to be generally known that nothing an affluent Westerner does...
Went skiing twice. Went skating on Lake Källtorpssjön at the Hellas sporting centre under the watchful eye of the Nacka radio masts. There's a snow-ploughed circuit there, but it hadn't been ploughed recently so there was a lot of snow to contend with, plus ice cracks and a stiff cold wind,...
Great flocks of fieldfares (Turdus pilaris, björktrast) are hanging around Boat Hill, feeding off the frozen parkland rowan berries instead of migrating. They're so ruffled up against the cold that they're hardly recognisable as the streamlined summer birds we're used to. Their cousins the blackbirds sit alone like big black...
As part of the reading course I've set myself on Bronze Age sacrificial finds, wetland archaeology and landscape studies, I'm reading a new book whose title translates as "Swedish bog cultivation. Agriculture, peat use and landscape change from 1750 to 2000". It's about various ways that Swedes have tried to...
Archaeolog
RUIN MEMORIES: Materiality, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past
Numerous studies have focused on modernity’s destructive effect on traditional life- worlds, the desertion of villages and the ruination of rural areas. However, the fact that the modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalized pasts,......
Yes we can! But so what? Some observations on contemporary archaeology
James Symonds (University of Oulu, Finland) For more than 150 years archaeology has had a clear purpose, to sketch out the topography of the past from the pinnacle of the present. Like the traveller’s gaze in Shelley’s Ozymandius, archaeologists have......
Fields of artifacts: archaeology of contemporary scientific discovery
The times when artifacts come to light - the moments of discovery as it were - are crucial moments in that they precipitate discussion and argument amongst scientists about what is real and what is not, what is natural and what is artificial, how the artifacts got to be...
Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference 2009
John M. Chenoweth (UC Berkeley) From October 16 to 18, participants met at Keble College, Oxford, for the 2009 CHAT conference. Over 30 papers engaged with the theme “Modern Materials: the archaeology of things from the early modern, modern, and......
Tara 2009 Symposium: Live Webstream
The UCD School of Archaeology, in association with the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, is hosting a symposium entitled Tara – From the Past to the Future. ------------- LIVE WEBSTREAM: http://www.ucd.ie/archaeology/tarasymposium2009/livestream/ ------------- Featuring approximately forty papers by......
Michael Shanks' intervention into Tara 2009
Michael Shanks has intervened in the proceedings of the Tara 2009 Symposium at UCD via iChat from Stanford University. You can read his paper here: http://documents.stanford.edu/MichaelShanks/400 ------------------------- Ian Russell - www.iarchitectures.com......
Cronaca
Copyright madness infects Australia
The CNN writeup is more balanced, but the BBC's better highlights the outrageousness of the underlying issues: The Australian band Men at Work are facing a big legal bill after a court ruled it had...
A life-size bronze sculpture of a man by Alberto Giacometti has been sold at auction in London for the world record price of £65,001,250. It took just eight minutes for bidders to reach the...
Inspired by Hollywood cowboy films, researchers have delved into the science of gun fights. Scientists discovered that people move faster when reacting to something than when they perform "planned actions". This is not at...
The first of 250 British and Australian soldiers whose remains were recovered from a World War I battlefield in northern France has been reburied. The unidentified soldier, who died in the 1916 Battle of...
Source of Trajan's aquaduct found at last
The long-sought source of the aqueduct that brought clean fresh water to ancient Rome lies beneath a pig pasture and a ruined chapel, according to a pair of British filmmakers who claim to have...
A clever bit of detective work by US scholars and scientists has proven that one of the jewels of the University of Chicago’s manuscript collection is, in fact, a skilled late 19th- or early...
Middle Savagery
William Kentridge’s “Monument”
William Kentridge’s Monument is a captivating short animated film about the unveiling of a statue dedicated to the South African work force. This monument comes to life, and continues to suffer under the elite white regime. This celebration and memorialization of past injustices fails in its goal to silence or...
Since I’ve moved I’ve never bothered to get internet at home, nor do I have a television or for that matter, a home phone. This has helped tremendously with dissertation reading and writing, but has cut down significantly on my time to answer student emails, blog, build things on Second...
Photoshop for Archaeological Publication – Seeds
Part of our excavation strategy at Tall Dhiban is to “float” a sample of dirt that we excavate. So up on the site we collect about 30L of dirt out of the context we are currently digging up and send it to the lab house, where Alan (and company) diligently...
The Hunt – Archaeological Machinima
I’ve posted about machinima and archaeology before, and posted a short effort that I made last Spring. This time we have a slightly longer effort that is part of the result of a class that Ruth and I were teaching called “Serious Games and Virtual Worlds for Archaeology and Imagining...
When I talk to people about recreating clothes and architecture in Second Life, I often use the example of shoes to illustrate a point. I liked to draw when I was younger, but hands and feet were always a bit problematic for me. This was often fixed by a illustrating...
Organizing my citations (and my thoughts!) for my dissertation has been consuming most of my time, but I wanted to give a brief Tumblr-like set of links to things that have come my way lately. John has a great post about Caddo Mounds State Historic Site, aka the George C Davis...
Talking Pyramids: Ancient Egyptian Pyramids» Talking Pyramids: Ancient Egyptian Pyramids News
Friday Photo: Pigeons & Pyramids Panorama
A distant perspective of the pyramids of Menkaure, Khafre and Khufu shot from the south-east corner of the Giza plateau. The persistent presence of the pigeons on the plateau has been a concern for a number of years now. They have made a habit of nesting in crevices...
Ancient Egypt News for Friday 05-02-10
Nubian Pyramids This morning saw a continuation of the rewrapping of the mummy known as the “Anonymous Man”. There will be one final day on Tuesday when they’ll wrap things up…literally. Sorry, couldn’t resist that one. There was a very brief but interesting video on the website of Dr Hawass...
Back in the Lab with Anonymous Man
The Brooklyn Museum is back in the lab today to follow on from where they left off on Tuesday. Shelly is once again live blogging the event on Twitter, and posting photos, which can be viewed here on this post. Just like on Tuesday, you can send your questions and comments to...
Ancient Egypt News for Thursday 04-02-10
Hieroglyphic Sex Graffiti by Quinn CC BY SA On the 4th floor of the University of Chicago, home of the Oriental Institute, was found this peice of graffiti – in ancient Egyptian hieroglpyhs. Quinn Dombrowski, who discovered the graffiti asked an Egyptologist at the university to translate it. It...
Ancient Egypt News for Wednesday 03-02-10
Limestone Boundary Stela of Sety I Quite a few readers ‘tuned in’ this morning (or yesterday, depending on your location) to watch the Related posts:Ancient Egypt News for Wednesday 02-12-09 Ancient Egypt News for Wednesday 20-01-10 Ancient Egypt News for Wednesday 25-11-09 ...
Re-wrapping a Mummy Live in the Lab!
The Brooklyn Museum returns to the lab today to re-wrap the “Anonymous Man” to prepare him for display in the Mummy Chamber exhibition. Shelly Bernstein, the Brooklyn Museum’s Chief of Technology, is live blogging the event again on Twitter, coming to you direct from the lab. She’ll be giving...
Paul K. Manansala's Blogs
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News blog for AsiaPacificUniverse.com, a website providing news, forums, information and other features focused on the Asia Pacific Rim region and Asian Pacific Islander Americans....
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Testimony of the spade
A seminar on Archaeology in Stockholm County
The county administrative board of Stockholm holds a seminar on archaeology in Stockholm County on Thursday February 4th that I’ll attend. Seminars The Stone Age landscape at Albyberg, Haninge by Michel Guinard, SAU Korsnäs revisited – an ongoing research project on middle...
I got older a few days ago, one of the presents managed to find its way over here; a deck of cards. Now this might not seem like much but there was some though behind this, I’ll get back to that. The game is called Killespelet which if I understand...
J.D. Salinger has past away at age 91, an eccentric and legendary author best known for his Cather in the Rye (1951). Catcher is a great read but my favourites are his debut novel A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948) and Franny and Zooey (1961). Now Salinger is one of those...
The entrance to the Museum of Medieval Stockholm, in the background to the left is the royal castle and the Old town and to the right Sveriges Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament building). For those of you that are not familiar with Stockholm, it’s the capitol of Sweden; the city was founded during...
Reopening of the Medieval Museum of Stockholm
Tomorrow I’ll attend the reopening of the Medieval Museum of Stockholm. Officially it opens at 1400 but I got an invitation, btw thanks, to the opening ceremony at 1200 so if you’re attending- see you there! Magnus Reuterdahl ...
I’ve just opened up the covers of Thomas McGuane – Ninety-Two in the shade (1973). A long time ago, at least it seems that way, I worked in a second hand record and book shop in Jönköping. It’s closed now but I am still in contact with the owner and my...
Archaeology in Europe
Aviation archaeologists' Londonderry Spitfire search
Two aviation archaeologists are to come to Northern Ireland to search for a lost WWII Spitfire.Gareth Jones and Steve Vizard have been keen to unravel the mystery of the missing aircraft. They believe it's buried underground on the site of City of Derry Airport, the former RAF Eglinton air base....
Save Palaeography at King's College London
Please sing the online petitionTo: Professor Richard Trainor, Principal, King's College LondonThe Chair of Palaeography at King's College in the University of London is the only one of its kind in the UK, and is of fundamental intellectual significance to a broad and interdisciplinary scholarly community as well as...
Roman skeleton unearthed in Sleaford
Buried deep under the ground for centuries, a long-forgotten Roman skeleton has been unearthed in Lincolnshire.The skeleton, whose age and gender remain a mystery, was uncovered during a dig at The Hoplands in Sleaford.Little is known about the ancient figure other than the fact it was buried face down and...
Helman Tor: Bronze Age hut circle uncovered
A BRONZE Age hut circle near Lanlivery, on Helman Tor, has been revealed by conservationists.Nine volunteers met at the Cornwall Wildlife Trust's largest nature reserve last Saturday, which takes in the tor and the surrounding 217 hectares (536 acres), and stripped back gorse to show off the monument.Mid Cornwall reserves...
Greece: New Underwater Archaeological Site Designated Off Polyaigos Island
A shipwreck located off the small uninhabited Cycladic island of Polyaigos in the central Aegean will be designated as an “underwater archaeological site” by Greece’s Culture Ministry, the institution’s representatives announced recently.The shipwreck, first spotted in 2004, was initially explored by underwater archaeologists in the fall of 2009, the Athens...
Long lost theory on Silbury Hill is uncovered
Letters that lay undiscovered in national archives for more than 230 years suggest that Silbury Hill, the enigmatic man-made mound that stands between Marlborough and Beckhampton, may have originally be constructed around some sort of totem pole.Historians have uncovered in the British Library in London letters written in 1776...
ScienceDaily: Archaeology News
Lost Roman law code discovered in London
Part of an ancient Roman law code previously thought to have been lost forever has been discovered. The breakthrough was made after piecing together 17 fragments of previously incomprehensible parchment....
Cave reveals Southwest's abrupt climate swings during Ice Age
Ice Age climate records from an Arizona stalagmite link the Southwest's winter precipitation to temperatures in the North Atlantic, according to new research. The stalagmite yielded an almost continuous, century-by-century climate record spanning 55,000 to 11,000 years ago, a time the Southwest flip-flopped between wet and dry periods. The finding...
Fossil footprints give land vertebrates a much longer history
The discovery of fossil footprints from early backboned land animals in Poland leads to the sensational conclusion that our ancestors left the water at least 18 million years earlier than previously thought....
Ancient pygmy sea cow discovered
A near-complete skull of a primitive "dugong" has been discovered, illuminating a virtually unknown period in Madagascar fossil history....
Climate change does not always lead to conflict
Bronze age farmers adapted to drought. The climate change that took place in Mesopotamia around 2000 BC did not lead to war, but in fact led to the development of a new shared identity. Although increasing drought often leads to competition and conflict, there seems to be no evidence of...
Study pits man versus machine in piecing together 425-million-year-old jigsaw
Reconstructing ancient fossils from hundreds of thousands of jumbled up pieces can prove challenging. A new study tested the reliability of expert identification versus computer analysis in reconstructing fossils. The investigation, based on fossil teeth from extinct vertebrates, found that the most specialized experts provided the most reliable identifications....
About.com Archaeology
What on Earth? Two Books from Bloomsbury
When I was a little girl, my parents bought us an encyclopedia at the grocery store. You bought them one volume at a time, as I recall, they were bound in ersatz leather and they had a peculiar smell to them that I carry to this day. I spent a...
Fieldwork in Focus: Owyhee River Valley, Oregon
Washington State University's 2010 field season in the Owyhee River Canyon of southeastern Oregon is the seventh season for the project directed by Dr. William Andrefsky, Jr. Excavations at the Birch Creek site, a large pit house village will be held between May 24 and June 25, 2010. Field director...
Interactive Map of the Silk Road
As the first truly international trade network, the Silk Road was constructed as a series of trackways stretching out across the vast deserts and mountains and waterways of Asia. ...
Fieldwork in Focus: Berefet, Gambia
Today's Fieldwork in Focus comes from Liza Gijanto of Syracuse University, who describes the upcoming excavations at Berefet, Gambia. The St. Mary's College Department of Anthropology announces plans for its 2010 Gambia Field Study Program. This will be the College's eighth biennial field study program. The program began...
A pair of 2000-year-old trousers was reported in Antiquity this quarter; and you wouldn't think it, but the story of their construction is a fascinating one that illustrates the crossing of cultures in the 2nd century BC along the Silk Road between the Han Dynasty capital of Chang 'An and...
The Human Spark: Brain Matters
In "Brain Matters", the third and final episode of PBS's documentary The Human Spark, narrator and host Alan Alda has his brain scanned, and learns about recent research into the mechanical structures of the human brain. Such research has led scholars to believe that the range of capabilities that make...
Archaeology News
Archaeology and the struggle for Jerusalem
"I like to travel and when I travel, I like to have a guide book. Here in Jerusalem, that guide book is the Tanah, the Bible." This is how guide Asher Altshul likes to start his tours at the expansive City of David archaeological site in Jerusalem....
Stonehenge's secret: archaeologist uncovers evidence of encircling hedges
The Monty Python knights who craved a shrubbery were not so far off the historical mark: archaeologists have uncovered startling evidence of The Great Stonehenge Hedge....
Greece: New Underwater Archaeological Site Designated Off Polyaigos Island
A shipwreck located off the small uninhabited Cycladic island of Polyaigos in the central Aegean will be designated as an "underwater archaeological site" by Greece's Culture Ministry, the institution's representatives announced recently....
Kashmir to boost tourism by renovating monuments
By Bilal Bhat, Srinagar, Feb 3 : The Jammu and Kashmir Government is aiming to boost tourism by renovating heritage sites....
1,400-year-old brooch found in turf fire
THE ritual of clearing out her turf-fired Stanley range turned to delight for Kerry woman, Sheila Edgeworth, when she discovered a 1,400-year-old brooch dating from the early Christian period among the ashes....
Scott County claims damage to historic place
The first battle of Punished Woman's Fork was in 1878, on land about 16 miles north of Scott City....
Beyond Stone and Bone
If you are not Catholic, you may not have heard yet that the Vatican has decided to put the very famous Shroud of Turin on public display for six weeks, beginning on April 10th. Exhibitions of the controversial shroud–believed by many devout Catholics to be the winding cloth that...
The Staffordshire Hoard Appeal
Come April 17, we may know the fate of the Anglo-Saxon hoard found last July. That’s the day that £3.3 million (about $5.37 million) is due–the price museums, charities, municipalities, and ordinary heritage-conscious UK taxpayers have to come up with, or risk having the hoard sold on the open market....
Of Crystal Skulls and Pyramids
I just returned from the Annual Meeting of the AIA, the Archaeological Institute of America, which was held in sunny Anaheim this year. The meeting gave me an opportunity to look for new stories for our website and for the magazine (a successful endeavor) and to catch up with colleagues,...
Well, we’ve rolled the calendar over once again. Here, at the start of 2010, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at some of the archaeological stories that were in a century ago. Lacking a time machine, I turned to the News in History website (www.newsinhistory.com)....
What can a pinch of dirt from the Alaska permafrost tell us about the extinction of mammoths and prehistoric horses? An awful lot, says an international team of researchers headed by James Haile, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. By sequencing ancient mitochondrial DNA from soil samples and dating...
Paleoanthropology and studies of human evolution have long been dependent on discoveries of fossils, with each discovery producing scholarly claims and counterclaims—monkey, ancestor; ancestor, monkey–that eventually advance our knowledge of how we became us. With Neanderthals, for whom we have the most extensive fossil record, the debate in the popular...
Yahoo! News Search Results for archaeology
Visiting archaeologist enlightens campus (The Wooster Voice)
This past Monday, the College’s archaeology department hosted a visit and presentation by archeologist Michael L. Galaty of Millsaps College, Jackson, Miss., who described to students his research with the Shala tribe in Albania, entitled the Shala Valley Project. Galaty spent field sessions with the Shala tribe from 2005-2008. The...
Local/briefs for Sunday, Jan. 31 (Grand Island Independent)
Archaeology group to meet in Grand Island...
Archaeology and the struggle for Jerusalem...
Photo of the Day, February 4, 2010: Run Down High-Rise (Bostonist)
Image tagged Bostonist by Future Impaired . Earlier this winter, Aperture magazine ran a story about urban archaeology with photographs and commentary by Andrew Moore. The images of decay and neglect were arresting—juxtaposing an incredible level of rich detail with a feeling of surreal emptiness. This well-lit, nicely exposed image...
Madeira grad part of top 10 find (Community Press & Recorder)
Andras Nagy was featured not once, but twice in 'Archaeology,' a magazine published by the Archaelogical Institute of America....
Festival of British Archaeology (Times Education Supplement)
1990-2010: 20 Years of Archaeology for Everyone! Festival of British Archaeology 2010: Saturday 17th July to Sunday 1st August The Festival of British Archaeology is the annual extravaganza of heritage events coordinated by the Council for British Archaeology....
SEAArch - The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog
Explaining the hobbit’s small brain
A new paper published in BMC Biology may possibly reconcile the small size of the Hobbit’s brain with tool use – one of the arguments against the hobbit being a new species as it is assumed that for something as sophisticated as tool use – you’d need a pretty big...
Secondary jar burial discovered in Laos
The Earth Times reports that the Middle Mekong Archaeological Project has discovered the first instance of a secondary burial in Laos. Read detail accounts of the recent fieldwork in Laos on the MMAP blog. Iron Age discovery uncovers prehistoric burial customs in Laos The Earth Times, 22 January 2009 The...
Additional tourist villages planned for Borobudur
More funding is being allocated to set up tourist villages in a bid to increase tourism at Borobudur. photo credit: hildo trazo Borobudur to Woo Visitors With New Tourist Villages Jakarta Globe, 20 January 2010 The government plans to develop more tourism villages around ninth-century Borobudur Temple in Yogyakarta to draw...
Phnom Penh museum receives pre-Angkoran statues
Four statues, two of Buddha and two of unnamed male deities, discovered in Kampong Speu province have been safely deposited with the National Museum in Phnom Penh. The statues are rare examples that date before the Angkor period. Museum lauds pre-Angkor statues Phnom Penh Post, 21 January 2010 Four pre-Angkorian religious...
The remains of King Le Du Thong (1679-1731) was reburied earlier this week in a ceremony mixing traditional and contemporary practices. The remains of the king were uncovered in the middle of the last century and were housed in the Vietnamese History Museum until reburial. King Le Du Tong to be...
Spotlight on the Da Nang Museum of Cham Culture
This news feature highlights the Champa Museum in Da Nang, which has grown to be one of the major museums on the Cham Culture. Da Nang museum grows into centrepiece of Cham culture Vietnam Net Bridge, 22 January 2010 Built in 1915 it houses nearly 2,000 sculptures made by the Indian-influenced...
BBC News and Sport Search: archaeology
Skeleton uncovered at Roman dig
A skeleton is among Roman artefacts found at the site of a planned housing estate in Lincolnshire....
Aviation experts in Spitfire hunt
Two aviation archaeologists are to come to Northern Ireland in the next few weeks to search for a lost WWII Spitfire....
School Reporters from Trinity High School in Manchester research their own history through family artefacts. Their investigation is part of the BBC's A History of the World project which looks at the history of the world in a 100 objects....
Avenue of diseased trees felled
An avenue of horse chestnut trees planted in the 1930s at Avebury is cut down due to disease....
Work starts on £3m football site
Work on a much-delayed new £3m community football facility in Oxfordshire gets under way....
WWI soldiers reburied in France
The first of 250 First World War soldiers who were killed in the 1916 Battle of Fromelles is reburied with full military honours....
David Gill's Blogs
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History of the British School at Athens
A discussion of the people, excavations, research and events associated with the British School at Athens...
Ancient World Bloggers Group (AWBG)
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Personal comments about Swansea, South Wales....
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