Random Archaeology and History blog

It's just because I study archeology and thought a side blog for it would be cool White queer

[byjove]

someone needs to make a database of all the Neolithic tombs in Britain and if they have been excavated yet and what was found

[byjove]

I need to make like a fandom wiki for ancient monolithic structures in the British Isles

[archeohrshl]

Those kind of databases are made by students, teachers and/or specialists in this field and is usually only available to them or if you have a very good reason to ask for it.

Idk what's the laws in the UK, but in France we have an national archaeological map where every single archaeological site that has been excavated (as programmed, preventive or ancient digs) and listed somewhere are displayed (with dates and references and all that) but again, it's only available to specific people on specific demands. (and it's not really up to date because the government doesn't give the money to have people filling it up fast enough).

On the "if they have been excavated yet" part there's two issues. First, you would need to know if a site is indeed a neolithic burial ground or not, which is only feasible through a dig, a diagnostic or non-invasive scanning (the last one usually not being as informative as the others), so the "yet" is not really feasible. Second, if the site hasn't been excavated, it's an extremely bad idea to divulge it to the public since idiots will always try to go there to "find gold" or some other shit and that will destroy the site (and yeah, ok, archaeologists do also destroy sites, but it's done in an organised and scientific manner that brings results and understandings).

[meirimerens]

Hello! I have a question 🙋‍♀️ What do you mean by birth canal? Is it related to how caves are often metaphors for wombs in art or something else altogether?

haiii 🙋 so it is one part of the whole thing, caves have been noted as having a womb-like Thing to them not just in art but also um. in general

(those are not painted caves, just normal caves. Well "normal" you know how Nutty Putty is. fun fact second one used to a sanctuary to Artemis, now is used as adjacent to a sanctuary to Mary-Magdelene, and women who want kids bring eggs or little figurines. we on some uterine shit)

but I mostly meant in mythology. okay so in cave art interpretation[grabs your ankle] stay here. this is interesting. so in cave art interpretation we're actually kind of stumped and we've been stumped for decades. the interpretations are many, but none is really truly fully applicable to all, or even to many, and the various interpretations come with seven billion caveats ("hunting magic" interpretation? -> likely not, because painted fauna ≠ hunted fauna *possible exception? southern african rock art, because there still exist hunter-gatherers who are carrying myths and memories associated with the rock art, but pre/proto-historic hunter-gatherers ≠ contemporary ones, but they're a good interpretative source still; "shamanic transe" interpretation? -> likely not, as we do have rock art done in shamanic transes such as in north america and they're very formally different from European cave art, and you likely would not have been able to draw with such attention to proportions etc while zoinked out of your gourd, but "not drawn in a shamanic transe" ≠ "not drawn in a shamanic context, or by a shaman, or within a shamanic society"...)

However☝️ one of the newer interpretations, which takes into account the placement of the figures[I am still holding you firmly not letting you leave], is that european cave art, at least in Some very prominent instances, could have been made in the context of a cosmogonic myth of Cave Of The Origins (cf. Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, who I'm sure I've mentioned before). okay now this is truly a Everything Looks Like A Nail situation. once you're mildly aware of this theory Everything Looks Like A Cave Of The Origins. it is one of the few basic foundational myths of humanities (basically of all the How Did We Get Here myths of all cultures, you have plenty, but they actually all derive from a handful of bases), that all creatures on earth were born of Hole In Ground. Hole In Ground is the primordial Mother of everything. (hence... one could say... the proliferation of Mother-Earth goddesses). as such, cave art in some instances COULD be articulated around the function of describing/transmitting/expressing the myth of Cave Of Origins/Mother Hole-In-Ground. And for context, what made me write the post is this 👇 general disposition of the Lascaux cave

looks fucked doesn't it. it's tears-pulling irl. anyways you're noticing the Passageway + the rocky crop, and that's we're focusing on. if I were to give my own interpretation of it. and it just an interpretation. fed by and built upon what I've already learned and read about both Lascaux and cave art as a whole. If I were to interpret it in a crazy way. and my sibling in Cave I'm insane. this is what I'd do of it.

I won't lie to you when you're in the Bull Room and you have the Passageway in your sights I will not lie to you that shit looking like () with a visible Hole where the rocky outcrop/upside-down/dead horse is I'm not lying. hence I why believe Some Level of Birth Canal symbolism could be true AND real in there. And I am building my case with in mind the interpretations, that scientists made from studying the order in which were painted the animal, that the animals are painted in order and with the attributes of the season of their heat period, meaning lascaux Could be a transcript/expression of a myth/story of the cycles of seasons, and as such life and rebirth.

I'll say it ☝️ I find it less Birth Canaly than Niaux, where the experience is truly like this

Michel Lorblanchet also mentions how the progression of the realism of the figures the closer you get the entrance of Pergouset cave leans to him credibility to the conceptualization of the cave as, if not a mother-type, some kind of "pre-life" state, where the further from the light creatures are the more amorphous, chimeric, "unfinished", etc they are, and become more and more realistic as they come close to the light/outside world, and this shift towards realism is marked by

That's right.

And where are you before you are born? There exactly.

Tldr

Oh my fucking god dude didn't mean to make it this long. but it was such a nice trip we took together isn't it :)

[archeohrshl]

The issue with being French is that you'll hear about how laws work in other countries and go pikachu face because some stuff seem absolutely insane

[byjove]

Re your post about the carpark. there are so many cases of people building carparks and the like over historically significant places in the UK. There's a lot of historical stuff and not a lot of space. It's our favourite hobby at this point. In London there was a Roman Temple which had had a shopping centre built over it or something.

There's been drama going on for the past decade because they're trying to build a high-speed railway but can't connect all the bits because it can't avoid crossing places that have been deemed of "historical interest" and so construction has been banned.

Wow, it’s crazy they’ve actually shot down the idea of a high speed railway due to the potential of disturbing historical sites because they have destroyed so many Neolithic sites for roadways that could have been moved 6 feet to the side AND ALSO they were legitimately floating the idea of building a tunnel under Stonehenge to alegiate congestion on the A303. You would think high speed rail and having a less car-centered society would actually help persevere these sites…

The “well, the whole island is a site of historical importance, of course we had to build this carpark over an 8th century cemetery” kind of makes sense in an incredibly densely populated area like London where the whole city is built on 2,000 years of rising and falling civilizations, like how oysters scaffold themselves on the empty shells of other oysters.

The problem with knowingly building a carpark on top of an incredibly important archeological site is that you’re eventually going to have to tear that carpark up to get to that archeological site. It’s not economical. It’s bad for historical preservation. Though Britain is relatively small, so much of it is scarcely populated outside of major cities. The screenshot I posted was from an ancient monastery outside of the town of Saint David’s in Wales, which is a very idyllic and somewhat rural region of Pembrokeshire. You go on Google Maps and it is miles and miles and miles of fields, some with Neolithic sites but mostly just flat agricultural land. Except for the place they built a carpark, which was directly on top of an 8th century cemetery. TO WALES’S CREDIT, they removed the remains because they were endangered by costal erosion and the carpark project but it is still utterly ridiculously that apparently the only place for a carpark was directly on top of the cemetery.

[byjove]

Wait, let me show you, it’s so absurd it is hilarious.

location of the carpark and a view of the surrounding beach

archeological dig at the site of the chapel

[clevermanka]

🍁 Xavier 🍁 (@xavierck.com)

Here are 543 images (1.5GB) of items at the Philadelphia Museum of Art arms and armor exhibit You're free to use them for anything, even c

[the-ocean-is-trans]

casual reminder that this museum has their entire collection digitized and available free for public use: https://art.thewalters.org/ and they have armor/weapons there

[blackbearmagic]

I'm watching a talk by Svante Pääbo from 2014 and drowning in my emotions.

[blackbearmagic]

Did you know that the first Neanderthal DNA sequencing we did was of a sample taken from the humerus of the type specimen, Feldhofer 1 (also called Neanderthal 1)?

because I did not know that

What I did know is that the Neander Valley (Neanderthal in German) where the fossils were found was named for Joachim Neander, whose surname is a Greco-Romanization of Neumann, which yes, means "new man"

the New Man was found in New Man Valley in 1856

and in 2010, we found fragments of mitochondrial DNA in the New Man's bones

[blackbearmagic]

Pääbo brings up that a question he and his team got asked a lot was "is 1-2% Neanderthal DNA a lot or a little?" and his response is going to haunt me for weeks.

He shows a diagram and explains that, well, you share 50% genetic similarity with your parents, and 25% similarity with your grandparents... roughly 12% with your great-grandparents, and 6% with your twice-greats... 3% with your thrice-great grandparents, and 1.5% with your fourth-great grandparents

So, he says, if you look at it quantitatively, it would be as if one of your ancestors six generations ago were a Neanderthal.

[blackbearmagic]

I need to express how utterly insane that is to think about.

It's been ~40,000 years since the extinction of the Neanderthals and the end of any fresh influxes of genetic material from their species.

Every time in the last ~40,000 years that human chromosomes have recombined and divided into sperm and egg cells, some of our inherited Neanderthal sequences were, statistically, going to get lost. They would have ended up on a sperm or egg cell that was not used in the creation of offspring, and fall out of the lineage. And yes, lost sequences could be "added back" by someone from a different lineage who still carried them, but...

It's been, again, roughly forty thousand years since we had the chance to get new Neanderthal DNA, or get back "lost" sequences from one of them.

Assuming 20-year generations, that's two thousand generations of humans.

And yet, quantitatively, the average person alive today is six generations' worth of genetic similarity away from a Neanderthal.

[the-haiku-bot]

I need to express

how utterly insane that

is to think about.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[wafflelovingbatgirl]

Everytime I read a paper about experimental zooarchaeology I hope that the researchers involved in say, butchering a fish with stone tools or smashing deer long bones to see what damage results from the efforts get marrow out also made a tasty stew or roast out of them.

If I was to do experimental archaeology that included fire, cooking, or animal butchery, I would include photos of the tasty dinner I made. Or at minimum the marshmallows I roasted over that fire.

[rhysintherain]

Dr. R has done a bunch of this stuff, and in every occasion I've heard, the archaeology was secondary to the food processing.

Like... We're here to smoke salmon, so it's a perfect time to fillet them using stone tools.

Or we have a group of hungry students who've been digging all day, lets make earth oven venison so we can eat and do archaeology at the same time.

And Dr. R has definitely put photos of the food in his presentations, if not his papers.

So at least in BC, you never have to worry about the experimental archaeology food. It was delicious.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[archaeologistproblems]

Extremely relatable content as an archaeologist.

[archaeologistproblems]

Archaeologist problems: slightly losing my mind laughing at this choice to translate the French "blé" (which I see as wheat; grain) throughout the English version of the book into "corn" as a generic cereal crop. Corn. A crop from the New World. In a book about houses in the Middle Ages when nobody in Europe knew what the hell "corn" was.

And then checking etymonline.com out of curiosity, and finding out that technically, yeah, "corn" isn't wrong, it's just kind of weird to use it this way in a 20thC context. WHAT.

[en-theos]

ok who confused the archaeologists again

[en-theos]

please don't baffle the archaeologists, it triggers their alcoholism

[en-theos]

common misconception but confounded is NOT the natural state of the archaeologist. stop confounding them

[en-theos]

all archaeologist know how to do is dig, brush, and forage for sherds. a group of archaeologists is called a 'survey'. any and all info they source from 'real people with real skills and knowledge and common sense duh'. resourceful little creatures

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[ancient-rome-au]

"average Hellenistic warlord named three cities after himself" factoid actually just statistical error. the median Hellenistic warlord named one city after himself. Alexander III of Macedon, noted disaster bisexual and conqueror of the Achaemenid Empire, was an outlier and should not be counted.

[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.

[wiki-but-made-them-up]

[kayla-denker]

People love to make fun of Archeologists for how often we say objects were used ritualistically, as if we overuse that designation or just say it when we a don't know what something was used for. But that's only because people don't stop to think how full of ritual all of our lives are.

The meme is actually correct for the most part, hotdogs are ritually consumed during baseball games. Lots of people only even eat hotdogs if they're watching baseball. The expectation for us to eat turkey on thanksgiving is another example of us ritually consuming food. Drinking coffee every morning is another ritual we do. Going to the gym several days a week is a ritual.

"Ritual" doesn't necessarily mean "religious."

[blueiscoool]

900 Artifacts From Ming Dynasty Shipwrecks Found in South China Sea

The trove of objects—including pottery, porcelain, shells and coins—was found roughly a mile below the surface.

Underwater archaeologists in China have recovered more than 900 artifacts from two merchant vessels that sank to the bottom of the South China Sea during the Ming dynasty.

The ships are located roughly a mile below the surface some 93 miles southeast of the island of Hainan, reports the South China Morning Post’s Kamun Lai. They are situated about 14 miles apart from one another.

During three phases over the past year, researchers hauled up 890 objects from the first vessel, including copper coins, pottery and porcelain, according to a statement from China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA). That’s just a small fraction of the more than 10,000 items found at the site. Archaeologists suspect the vessel was transporting porcelain from Jingdezhen, China, when it sank.

The team recovered 38 items from the second ship, including shells, deer antlers, porcelain, pottery and ebony logs that likely originated from somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Archaeologists think the ships operated during different parts of the Ming dynasty, which lasted from 1368 to 1644.

Many of the artifacts came from the Zhengde period of the Ming dynasty, which spanned 1505 to 1521. But others may be older, dating back to the time of Emperor Hongzhi, who reigned from 1487 to 1505, as Chris Oberholtz reported last year.

Archaeologists used manned and unmanned submersibles to collect the artifacts and gather sediment samples from the sea floor. They also documented the wreck sites with high-definition underwater cameras and a 3D laser scanner.

The project was a collaboration between the National Center for Archaeology, the Chinese Academy of Science and a museum in Hainan.

“The discovery provides evidence that Chinese ancestors developed, utilized and traveled to and from the South China Sea, with the two shipwrecks serving as important witnesses to trade and cultural exchanges along the ancient Maritime Silk Road,” says Guan Qiang, deputy head of the NCHA, in the agency’s statement.

During the Ming dynasty, China’s population doubled, and the country formed vital cultural ties with the West. Ming porcelain, with its classic blue and white color scheme, became an especially popular export. China also exported silk and imported new foods, including peanuts and sweet potatoes.

The period had its own distinctive artistic aesthetic. As the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art writes, “Palace painters excelled in religious themes, moralizing narrative subjects, auspicious bird-and-flower motifs and large-scale landscape compositions.”

The shipwreck treasures aren’t the only recent discoveries in the South China Sea, according to CBS News’ Stephen Smith. Just last month, officials announced the discovery of a World War II-era American Navy submarine off the Philippine island of Luzon.

By Sarah Kuta.

[slimetony]

Just tried to play an ancient flute and it started filling the room with this awful miasma that wont go away

[slimetony]

Why does staff still allow people funnier than you to leave tags on your posts. They should have fixed that by now

[failcringegf]

picture this, i give you a glass bottle and tell you to open it, but bottle openers are forbidden, how do you do it?

[failcringegf]

im talking about this bitch btw

you cant twist it off :)

[omnybus]

Concept: Baba Yaga house walking around on chicken legs, being followed by one of those plastic Fisher-Price play houses on baby chick legs

Excuse my 15min rush art job, but I just HAD to draw this

Still love this concept. Here’s a redraw that was NOT sketched in 15min while waiting in line at the DMV

[fairytaleslive]

In the Russian fairytale fantasy film The Last Warrior: Root of Evil (Последний богатырь: Корень зла, 2015) the two cottages have eggs that hatch to reveal their offsprings: little cottages. Do with that information what you want…..

[beatrice-otter]

For people who have ever wondered “why in the world would anybody imagine a house on legs” or thought “they must have been drunk when they came up with the idea” let me introduce you to a very typical storehouse used across Scandinavia and into Slavic areas:

This type was used mostly by the Sámi, the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula. They’re mostly nomadic, and would build these storehouses (Áittit) up off the ground so that bears and wolves couldn’t get into them while they were elsewhere.

Other groups in Scandinavia and Russia also used elevated storerooms; the Norwegian word for them is “stabbur.” Norwegian ones are still elevated off the ground but are often not as high (because they lived right next to it year round) and often had walls around the legs so you could store non-food items that animals wouldn’t care about in a weather-proof room.