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Imported from BC Vintage.
Roman remains in York are ‘elite’ African woman (BBC)
Archaeologists have revealed the remains of what they say was a “high status” woman of African origin who lived in York during Roman times.
Academics say the discovery goes against the common assumption that all Africans in Roman Britain were low status male slaves
I admit that this article made me totally gleeful, because any archaeological proof of multiculturality in Britain makes up for the fact that I didn’t have the resources and detailed knowledge to write a scathing article about that “native British” thing. (By the way, the online comments on the Daily Mail article about this discovery are very amusing.)
It is surprising to me, though, how surprised everyone is by this. The Roman Empire was diverse, by our standards; I thought that was an accepted fact these days. I thought at first the “common assumption” the BBC article talks about must be the common, unthinking assumption of general, uninterested people who have never really looked at a map of the Roman Empire, had their last history lesson in primary school, and just remember some pictures form children’s books of white men in togas, but the same tone is everywhere. The Guardian article calls it “startling diversity”.
Well, I’ve not read much about the history or historiography of Roman Britain, so I maybe it really is startling. It could be that until now historians have, for good reasons or bad, really assumed Roman Britain wasn’t particularly diverse, as little sense as that makes to me on the face of it.
I really wish I could get my hands on the Antiquity article that all this is based on, to read the researchers’ thoughts on how surprising and new their findings are. Buuuut unfortunately I am an academic outcast and can’t. T_T How many months until I start at UCL now?
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Tags:Africa; Archaeology; current events; Europe; Great Britain; Roman Empire
Um, so much for updating once a week. It’s not been the best few weeks, productivity wise, but I am striking things off my to-do list like crazy today, so hopefully that’ll change.
Anyway, space! Remember how I started this blog with some rambling fantasies about Space Archaeology? (Apparently I wanted to write a dissertation that was basically speculative fiction? Idk. Still want to write that book, though.) Well, it’s “only” the Moon, but I still thought this was super cool:
California ‘protects’ Apollo 11 landing site on Moon (BBC)
California has named a new site a state historical resource – despite the fact that it is not on Earth, never mind in the US state.
The site where Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969, the first US landing, is now included on the state’s register.
The unusual move by the California State Historical Resources Commission aims to protect more than 100 items left by US astronauts on the Moon.
They include tools, a flag, footprints, food bags and bags of human waste.
Mmm, poopbags. Serisouly, though, I think this is a good sign. The hope, I hear, is that the landing site will be declared a World Heritage Site eventually. Seems sort of self-evident, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine it not becoming one.
I don’t know why California, though. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the US as a unit to register it? Though I presume more than one group is allowed to claim something as having historical value. I hope. ¬_¬
Oh, and I have a new answer to give now, when my parents ask if there’s even anything left for Archaeologists to dig up. Obviously there is, but it hadn’t occured to me to say: “And we’re making new stuff all the time.”
This is also kicking off some odd thoughts for me about looking forwards and backwards at the same time; moving forwards in space exploration but preserving the debris of our milestones as we do. Though really, that’s what we always have done, barring the collapse or wilful destruction of a civilisation. It certainly brings into sharp focus the fact that history isn’t a foreign country were people wore silly clothes and talked in a weird way and did things that hardly matter to our lives these days. History is what happened yesterday, and it will be what we’re doing now. I’m not sure what I conclude from that yet; perhaps just that people should pay more attention.
I am a forward-looking person and a backward-looking person (and I enjoy the present, as well). Though I in no way think it’s irrelevant, I sometimes feel an odd conflict between my chosen profession and my interest in technology and the future and all of that cool stuff. I don’t think I should have to chose one or the other, though. I think I can be forward-looking and backward-looking. I mean, if you approach the future without bothering to learn from the past, you’re just going to make an arse out of yourself, aren’t you.
And as for Archaeology, if you acknowledge it has — or should have — an impact on the present (which I do), then it’ll also influence the future. Let’s just hope we do our job right.
Apparently I can’t post to this blog without going off on a philosophical ramble about what Archaeology means to me and/or the world in general. Well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe one day I’ll even write something coherent on the subject before a new idea occurs to me.
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Tags:Archaeology; current events; ponderings; Space; Space Archaeology; the future; the Moon; usa
It might have come to your attention that this blog has been ever so slightly comatose of late. This has been going on for far too long and will not do any longer.
I graduated from Durham last summer, and life has largely been boring since then, in the little speck of Surrey I call my home. (Nothing is very exciting here, unless chain coffee-shops and Americans in 4-wheel drives excite you.) Luckily, I’m starting my MA at UCL this autumn. It looks like an amazing programme — I can’t wait!
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that I really rather miss Archaeology. Reading about it, taling about it, and writing about it. And so I’ve decided to dust off this little blog and give it a Grand Revival and Relaunch. New name, new look, less faffing around, more cool Archaeology! That’s the plan, anyway. I’m hoping to write at least once a week about some cool archaeological thing that will, hopefully, be of interest to somebody.
I heard a few minutes of an episode from BBC 4’s A History of the World in 100 Objects series a few days ago, so I went onto iPlayer to listen to all the episodes so far. It’s a series of short radio epsiodes in which the Director of the British Museum retells human history through artefacts in the Museum.
(Through the infinite wisdow of the BBC, it’s also available as a podcast, so those outside the UK can listen to it, too.)
My favourite episode so far is the one about the 10 000 BC Swimming Reindeer. It’s a crazy beautiful piece, for one thing. I love the realism in it, and that they mention in the programme itself that prehistoric art has all manner of styles. There’s a sort of narrative that you get taught where the Ancient Egyptians didn’t know how to draw children, and then the Greeks invented perspective, and then we went through realism and came out the other end with impressionism and surrelaism &c &c. And I think it’s very silly. It’s that same old hangup people seem to have about prehistory. Either the ancients were wise and had all sorts of deep spiritual knowledge that we’ve lost, or they were stupid monkey-men and couldn’t do anything.
There’s some talk about religion and art, too. I’ve never studied that connection in depth, but I think it may be a bit simplistic to say art was always connected to religion to begin with, and now is completely separate.
In any case, the series is quite interesting and nicely presented, and I’m looking forward to it moving on to other time-periods and objects I’ve not heard about before. (Also, I’ve just listened to the last part in this section, and the next section is going to focus on “food and sex”. How can I not look forward to that?)
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Tags:Archaeology; Art; Blog; Media; prehistory; radio
Everyone knows mummies are awesome. At least they should. If you’re not convinced, look at the cool medical things you can do with them:
Ancients ‘had heart disease too’
Hardening of the arteries has been found in Egyptian mummies – suggesting that the risk factors for heart disease may be ancient, researchers say.
Bringing us the exciting revelation that rich Egyptians only drew themselves pretty and thin, but actually overate all the time. It is pretty cool, you must admit. Here are these bodies of people from 3500 years ago, and we can see what diseases they had, and learn something useful.
I am amused that the BBC feels the need to inform us that the Egyptians weren’t hunter-gatherers, though. Hunter-gatherers are obviously building huge temple complexes and cities all over the place all the time, so I can totally see where the confusion could come from.
Also, “[Lady Raj] predated Moses by 300 years”? I mean, I’m neither an Egyptologist nor a Bible scholar, but have we decided that Moses was a real person now? I was under the impression the consensus was that the Exodus out of Egypt was pretty much made up, since the Egyptians never used much slave labour in building the Pyramids anyway… but hey, I could be wrong!
Mummies are great. They’re super-useful and informative, and I think they make history feel more personal. If you know what someone ate as their last meal and what valley they grew up in it makes the past a lot realer, less like a story you’re making up in your head about another world.
I’m a bit iffy on how they’re presented in museums sometimes, though. I visited the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology this summer, and had a look at their Ötzi exhibit (awesome!) and their mummy-themed special exhibition, and they had a South American mummy just sort of lying in an otherwise empty case, curled up in one corner, like it was cowering against our looks. It was a little creepy, and seemed quite disrespectful, context-less at best. Looking at dead bodies is always in danger of becoming voyeuristic, but there’s good and bad ways to do it. An actual human body of one actual individual from the past makes history seem more personal, but then I think you also have to treat those bodies accordingly.
In conclusion: mummies are awesome.
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Tags:Archaeology; current events; Egypt; medicine; Mummies; news
I posted this on my personal blog the other day, but since it’s Archaeology-related, I thought I might as well cross-post it. Including an awesome but unrelated picture and link! 8D
Speaking of Asia (well, I haven’t spoken of Asia yet, but I will below. I’m sure you can wrap your mind around the crazy time-travel.), one of the Masters students in Global Economy gave a presentation about markets in medieval China to-day. It was quite cool, if somewhat depressing that we were uber-lucky to have someone who could read books on medieval china and tell us what they said. It was only really basic stuff, as well. T_T
Practically an entire continent worth of archaeological knowledge is blocked to me because of language? Really? It all just makes me even more interested in that part of the world.
ANYWAY. CROSS-POSTIN’ TIME.
Yesterday, I realised that I had an unread email from myself in my “ideas” folder (presumably I’d left it unread to remind myself to look at it), and it reads, in its entirety:
“Early domestication in mid + far east. Trade?”
Thank you for the specifics and elaboration there, past!Hellen.
I think it was things I was reading about and wanted to research more in future. (I really wish there was some sort of module on Asia I could’ve taken. What, is the Far East not interesting enough for you, Durham? D:)
It’s funny how things work out, though. I’m interested in East Asia because it’s strange and exotic and I don’t know anything about it, but also because I happen to be learning Japanese. And I’m learning Japanese because in 2006 I picked up a Teach Yourself Japanese book from a used book shop in London. (And I did that because some of my friends were taking it in school and I’d seen it and thought the writing was cool.*)
(And then I met Tim and he got me into anime and now no-one will ever believe me when I tell them I’m not a weabo. T_T Anyways…)
But hey, why is squiggly moon-writing a bad cause of academic interest? What other reason should I have for being interested in the spread of East Asian domestication? I’ve always been in favour of curiosity and interest for their own sake. When I was on my dig in Portugal there was a girl there who said she was getting disillusioned and depressed with Archaeology because she couldn’t see the point in it all, in digging something up if it only resulted in destroying the thing we were studying, if there might be better techniques to do so in the future. And it made me think, but why do I need a purpose?
If you’re going to give Archaeology any sort of mission for the betterment of humanity, I would say it’s keeping the facts straight and stopping people using the past for their own political agendas (I am unsure about people like neo-pagans misrepresenting the past to justify holding festivals at Stonehenge. They’ve got it wrong, but they’re not hurting anyone, so perhaps I can give them some slack). I am really into that, but the main reason I’m studying archaeology and want to be an archaeologist is just that I want to know. I’m interested in the past and I want to know what happened, just for the knowledge’s own sake. And yeah, I could’ve gone into Biology or I could do languagey translation things and contribute to the greater good of humanity somehow, but I just happen to be passionately curious about this thing. What’s wrong with that?
*I’ve always been attracted to the written word**, and other systems of writing. When I was little I had some books from my grandmother written in Fraktur, and I loved them because I had to make an effort to decipher and read them. The Roman alphabet is just too easy and boring for me, apparently.
** (go go footnote withing a footnote power!) I also think best when I’m writing. I was emailing my tutor with a question about my dissertation I was stuck on the other day, and I answered it for myself while I was writing it out. We had a workshop in school once on different types of learning and such, and when they told me I had a literary intelligence, they sure weren’t kidding.
I think this post needs a completely unrelated picture and link to complete it.
So much win.
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Tags:Archaeology; Asia; ponderings
I say, this is some fascinating architecture, would you mind awfully asking the natives to stop bleeding all over it?
Man, I had a post all written up about religion and politics and how they can stay out of my archaeology kthx, but the examples that prompted it were all in Palestine and Israel, and then just as I was about to finish it up and post it everything went to hell over there. And I was already worrying a little about coming over all academic and colonialist (damn you Current Issues lectures and the Internet! Being self-aware, it is such a bore XD), or something like that, so no. I will save my whining over biased approaches to ancient sites until some point in time when not quite so many people are getting killed right next to them.
I might still complain about religion and the ridiculous way it skews analyses of Middle Eastern archaeology, because Europeans are doing that, too, and I can shout at stupid old Europeans and religious people all I like, right? Right.
I don’t know, guys. I learned how to identify point of view bias in historical texts in high school, but I have to admit I’m a little late to the party where self-awareness is concerned. Wait what, I am a comfortably middle class white European university student and other people aren’t? And this affects my views? And other people might get offended when I tell them what to do with their history? SHOCKER.
I think I have to formulate some sort of… ethical policy, I suppose, for my blogging. What is it ok for me to make light of, where are the boundaries, am I just going to dismiss it all as political correctness and say what I like? Because surely I have a right to an opinion on the things I am learning about and care about. But I do not want to be too big of an arsehole, either, if at all avoidable.
I was pretty sure when I started that blogpost in December that it’s the trained professionals who should “own the past”. And I still think I archaeologists should be the ones that get to poke everything and interpret it, rather than stupid religious people or politicians who want to validate their position. But I need to be a little sensitive when people are blowing each other up over those same positions, right? Or wait, is this the time to take that position even more assertively? Because an unbiased approach to the past might help in preventing people killing over it. (This is why I blog. I am completely literarily-minded. Things are just so much easier to think through in text.)
I should have just become a Marine Biologist like I wanted to when I was seven. No-one’s human dignity rests on the back of a cephalopod.
Does this all even matter, for some silly blog no-one even reads? But then, I should figure this all out now, before I go any further and get involved in some actual academic debates. Speaking of, I think we’re having a debate on what priority protection of archaeological materials should take in times of war, which might be relevant to my interests. Or it might not, because Current Issues ‘debates’ have been really sort of uninspiring so far. And it might all be about WW2 and Stonehenge, or something.
I do have an essay I’m going to turn into a post, on ley lines, which is sure not to offend anyone except possibly Paul Devreux and people who like him, and that I really couldn’t care less about.
Comment, foo! // Comment at Archaeoblogogy
Tags:Archaeology; blogangst; blogging; current events; I'm a noob; Middle East
Having seen the latest two episodes of Bonekickers, I’ve discovered the show’s aim: to re-write The DaVinci Code in progressively more ridiculous ways. I quite literally laughed out loud at the continuity announcer’s “The legend of King Arthur comes alive next on Bonekickers…”
And then one of the secret masonic brotherhood of people hunting for Excalibur threw himself in a well and DISSOLVED. Trufax.
It’s like oldskool Doctor Who and Time Team had a secret love-child, abandoned at birth and adopted by Dan Brown.
Going off to dig in a week! Excitement! Even though I will probably not get threatened by any secret societies at all. Rare, but it happens occasionally.
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Tags:Archaeology; Bonekickers; lulz; tv
I’ve been lazing around and have nothing archaeological to post, so here are some comics from about a year ago when I was doing uni fieldwork at Catcote. Woo, content recycling! XD
I have some incredible ability to attract and retain dirt. More even than everyone else on a site. Presumably I use up all the dirt, so there’s none left for them.
This year, I’m going here for my fieldwork. It should be exciting, according to the professor who’s organising for me and three other students to go there, you find treasure in the European Iron Age. Also, I can use my German skills. So, when I get back from there in September, I will actually have something to write in this blog!
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Tags:Archaeology; Art; fieldwork; I draw stuff; lulz
This evening, I pimped out this blog to a few LiveJournal Archaeology communities, and also asked if anyone knew of any other archaeological blogs to add to my reading list. I got a few links back and wow, I feel like a noob now, what with these actual archaeologists blogging about actual archaeology. But then, I haven’t read much of any of them yet, and besides, this is A Learning Process™. I am learning. Woo!
Indeed, I have learned something already. I knew about Biblical archaeology, from those very nicely produced but nevertheless quite silly documentaries on the History Channel about where the Garden of Eden may have been etcetera, and while I have nothing against consulting the documentary evidence, that’s basically what my dissertation is, d’you think the “historical document” you filter all your results through could not be the one that’s spent the entirety of it’s 2000-ish* year lifespan being re-written, edited, translated, and re-translated to fit the tastes of whoever was in power at the time?
In any case, there is apparently also this thing called Afrocentrism, being the belief that Everything Ever OMG came from Africa, which I suppose at least makes a change from Everything Ever OMG coming from Aliens and/or/via Atlantis. I think I have vaguely heard of this – it’s like the New and Improved Noble Savage for the 21st century! - but not really in connection with Archaeology. Is it an American thing? Or is it just too silly to mention in a lecture? I think it’d be good to at least know a little bit about misuses of the field, but then it seems that all anyone cares about here is processualists vs post-processualists, and our education in matters of theory pretty much stops in the 80s. I can only hope that next year in Current Issues there will be some, you know, current issues. And not just another lesson about good ol’ Gordon Childe or how crazy Ian Hodder is. I know about the history of archaeological thought now, you’ve been telling me about it for TWO YEARS. I want to join some current debates.
I suppose that’s another reason to keep a blog and read them.
*Well, a bit less, probably, or maybe a bit more, depending on whether you count Jewish predecessors or not.
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Tags:afrocentrism; archaeological theory; Archaeology; Biblical Archaeology; blogging; current events
Hm… Archaeology is probably even more to the left from that. Sociology, but IN THE PAST. Except for when it’s also a bit of Biology and Chemistry IN THE PAST. Staying far away from Mathematics, though. *shudder*. Except for, you know, statistical analyses of data and all that.
I love having such a mongrel discipline.
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Tags:Archaeology; comics; lulz; multidisciplinarianism is decasyllabic; xkcd