academia so dark it’s dead

he/him || 30 || anthropology major || adhd

[archaeothanatology]

blanket content warning for discussion of (and occasionally depiction of) human and animal death and remains. depictions may be illustrated or real. i will not be tagging these, follow at your own discretion, and please feel free to block me if you need to. i am willing to tag other things if needed, so don’t hesitate to ask

about

i’m G (he/him), an anthropology major with previous premed experience. i’m a non traditional student— i spent a lot of time either out of school or in a radiography program that fell through due to covid. now instead of xraying living people’s bones, i’m just interested in dead ones. main blog is @msterdoctorman

my tags

aesthetic stuff / my diagrams and drawings / all original posts

[goth-queen]

[stranglerfigpudding]

i don't care about monday's goals, tuesday wednesday dig some holes, thursday clean my mandibles, it's friday i'm a bug

[theannoyingmosquitoinyourroom]

happy its friday im a bug friday!!

[archaeologistproblems]

I fully thought this was about being an archaeologist, excavating and cleaning bones, until the very last word.

[silveve]

mandibles didn’t tip you off?

[archaeologistproblems]

My dude, a jawbone is properly called a mandible:

[moniquill]

[dannyvantass]

This Alaskan parka is windproof, waterproof — and made from bear intestines | CBC News

It's waterproof. It's windproof. It's lightweight and durable. And it's made from the intestines of two bears, painstakingly cleaned and sew

I really wanted to know more about this, especially how the water proof stitching works. Here's more information on this project, and hopefully more in the future!

[tehnakki]

This is amazing! I need to make a note to play around with that water proof stitch technology soon.

[cryptotheism]

The unsavvy talk about furries like they're some hypersexual excretion of modernity, but drawing animal-people is one of the top 10 neolithic human activities. It's up there with collecting berries and producing clay figures of fat women.

[victusinveritas]

[dariaendresen]

Sedlec ossuary, Kutná Hora (Czech republic).

Own 

[ducissatenebrarum]

Funerary Figurine known as Tödlein, ca. 19th century, Southern Germany.

Rare miniature funerary figurine known as a Tödlein. The human skull carved from bone as the body lies in its mini casket adorned with a mother-of-pearl cross. A time when death was apart of everyday life and when it was normalized to carry reminders of said death.

[ecrituria]

Ever since I took a class on material culture and the significance of things and objects in our lives, I’ve started taking note of relevant readings I come across. For those interested, below is a partial list:

Objects of Despair: Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them.

Fake Meat | Mirrors | Mars | Drones | The 10,000-Year Clock

Concrete: The Most Destructive Material on Earth (more on The Guardian’s “Concrete Week”)

The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls by Rainer Maria Rilke

AirPods Are a Tragedy

Thinging the Real: On Bill Brown’s “Other Things”

Sum Effects: “Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions.”

A janitor rescued migrants’ possessions from a border facility’s trash. Now they’re art.

Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. by Sherry Turkle

Friendly Floatees

Great Pacific garbage patch

Plastic: an autobiography by Allison Cobb

Curating the Anthropocene: “Imagine a future archeologist on a dig in what was once downtown Los Angeles, excavating, exposing layers of history, like the paleontologists at the La Brea Tar Pits are doing today, finding bones of saber-toothed cats, mammoth, and dire wolves. What does the archeologist of the future find?”

[camillepagliadisliker]

The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard

My master thesis on The Bed

[twoblogger]

It kind of fucks with me that somebody killed ötzi the iceman because ötzi himself is like whatever but the silent presence of human hands that drew back the string of the bow that shot the arrow that killed him is crazy. the idea that there were various people involved in that situation and while one of them has had his last hours painstakingly reconstructed and studied to no end, the others now only exist insofar that an arrowhead had to get into his shoulder somehow. imagine killing someone and then suddenly your entire existence is only a vague shadow implied by the fact that you killed them. much to consider

[twoblogger]

Testing the mummified bone marrow of ötzi to figure out his ancestry whole time there’s definitely another person, maybe more than one, standing in the room with us but I can never see or speak to them because I only know them through the assurance that they were there too in the form of one single arrowhead. I hate prehistory so much it’s unreal

[angel-derangement]

I hate it too tbh

[byjove]

Cemeteries are not wastes of space. Historical cemeteries ESPECIALLY are not wastes of space. The fact developers are continuously foaming at the mouth to destroy them and put a strip mall up in their place should make you even more determined to help maintain them. In urban areas, they are a haven for wildlife. They are a green space. If you are too afraid of death to utilize them for that purpose, that is on you.

[katelyn-danger]

At the risk of sounding stupid, I just found out how long the stone age lasted. In my head it's about as long as other historical time periods, a couple thousand years before ancient egypt, and conceptually looks like a bad car insurance commercial. Nope! Dead wrong! The stone age lasted for 3.4 MILLION YEARS.

[crosspollytaupe]

Okay wow i would not have guessed millions. Maybe in like the tens of thousands? But definitely would have way undershot.

[katelyn-danger]

I told my wife and they said "Yeah, modernity is a recent and strange invention"

[backwardsorbust]

Oh yes! Hello I am wife. And these are the oldowan tools:

The first image is my favorite, the iconic oldowan hand axe, but you'll note there's a wide range of other tools crafted for everything from crushing nuts and stones, to awls and engraving devices. There is some evidence, albeit hotly debated, that these tools MIGHT have been used in ancient burials. Maybe. This is up for debate because these tools are THREE MILLION YEARS OLD. They pre date homo sapiens and homo erectus. They pre date the ice age. Hell, they pre date the fucking ice caps. We don't think humans were burying their dead as we understand it today, but maybe?? These were made by homo habilis, or the "handyman", so named for their invention of tools.

It makes me feel very small to look at these, like looking up at a starry sky.

[werewolf-transgenderism]

I literally CANNOT read the words "supine" or "prone" in anything without thinking about that post that's like "supine is when you lay on your s(u)pine and prone is when you lay on your pronis"

[keepcalmandcarriefischer]

Humanity is not going to last forever. Like all the species that came and went before us, so we will some day come to an end.

That means that some day, someone will make a pot of soup, and it will be the last pot of soup ever made...

[luthied]

We have found 5000 year old burnt porridge that someone threw away rather than try to clean.

This fills me with great comfort because while one day, there may be no more soup made by humans somewhere burnt soup in a pot will remain.

And maybe. Just maybe. Someone will come along and find those remains. Analyze them. Recreate them. Maybe soup will be made again by hands we do not know of.

[mythopoeism]

early homo sapiens b like help i cant stop making bowls . help i cant stop domesticating plants and animals. help i cant stop developing language and architecture and religion

[pricklydyke]

ok im obsessed w this tag

[iwearmygreencoatatnight]

once in grade 6 I saw a 'pottery making club' in a ditch on the schoolyard- I assume at some point someone realized there was actually good quality clay in the ditch and when I walked up there were about a dozen 12 year olds sitting around the few girls who had brought their water bottles out to mix the clay, and a designated spot to put the finished bowls and tablets, and people going off and collecting sticks to make designs with and i really think that's the natural state of the human race

[roomba-with-knives-taped-to-it]

In elementary school I learned that you can make paint out of certain sedimentary rocks on the playground if you crushed them and mixed with water and at one point I had up to 25 kindergarten through third graders making cave paintings on the underside of the slides

[xphilosoraptorx]

The nature of man is such that every so often, someone recreates the neolithic era.

[voyageofbran]

Yeah, every recess

[variablejabberwocky]

#that's because at the core humans want art and community and funny little objects to put stuff in

[s0fixa]

Cemetery gate, Portugal. Here I wait you, is written above the gate. 

[thoodleoo]

nothing like looking through a roman replica artifact website and encountering the section of wonderful penis wares

[thoodleoo]

my apologies for failing to link the humble penis wares website earlier. be free