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28th February 2010 at 6:23 pm

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

26th February 2010 at 7:28 pm

Spaaaaace

[BC Vintage]

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.

Comment, foo! // Comment at Archaeoblogogy
Tags:Archaeology; current events; ponderings; Space; Space Archaeology; the future; the Moon; usa

19th November 2009 at 7:06 pm

Mummies are awesome.

[BC Vintage]

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

15th February 2009 at 12:02 am

I’m not dead!

[BC Vintage]

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

14th June 2008 at 3:04 am

In which I feel my noobity.

[BC Vintage]

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

8th March 2008 at 2:35 am

Life is so unfair

[BC Vintage]

Mesopotamia 5 years on

As the fifth anniversary of the Second Gulf War approaches, there’s new evidence of the scale of damage done to ancient archaeological sites by the looting of antiquities that followed.

Using satellite images, Dr Elizabeth Stone has documented the damage done to thousands of sites, many of them barely known to archaeologists.

McGuire Gibson, who warned of the danger before the war started, says these sites hold the key to the origins of civilisation.

BBC World Service: Science in Action* (mp3 file of the episode)

Damn it, don’t destroy everything before I’ve had a chance to go there you bastards.

Why do people loot archaeological sites? Are they trying to grab some of their heritage and save it from invading forces, or do they just want to sell it to collectors? Or some of both? It’s irritating, in any case. It frustrates me to no end, all the information we might have gathered if they’d left all those sites well alone. All that lost data.

I wish I had a chance to go see this.

Whenever I hear about the Middle East/Mesopotamia, especially in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, I realise that it really is my favourite area and time period. How this translated to me doing my dissertation on Mediterranean trade… well, yes, I do, because of feasibility and availability of materials and possibly a little bit because I’m still finding out exactly where my interests lay, and the terms to describe them with, thanks to the lectures and talks I attend.

I went to the Durham Archaeology department’s Postgraduate Open Day last week (there were hardly any 2nd years there – everyone was a bit surprised to see me), and while there’s a taught MA strand on Egypt, India, and the Middle East, none of the research MA foci they have really grab me. But I’m starting to think it might be a good idea to do a taught MA in any case, maybe I still need a bit more guidance before I go off on my own ways. :)

*(Yeah, I listen to the World Service. This is because I am a big dork and have no life.)

Comment, foo! // Comment at Archaeoblogogy
Tags:Academia; Archaeology; current events; Near East

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