the constant hunt for the trowel

a uk college blogger; a jumble of archaeology, history, anthropology and artwork from a student at cirencester college, with a bit of deer-blogging mixed in.

[archaeologicalnews]

Major corridor of Silk Road already home to high-mountain herders over 4,000 years ago

Using ancient proteins and DNA recovered from tiny pieces of animal bone, archaeologists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography (IAET) at the Russian Academy of Sciences-Siberia have discovered evidence that domestic cattle, sheep and goats made their way into the high mountain corridors of southern Kyrgyzstan more than four millennia ago, as published in a study in PLOS ONE.

Long before the formal creation of the Silk Road—a complex system of trade routes linking East and West Eurasia through its arid continental interior—pastoral herders living in the mountains of Central Asia helped form new cultural and biological links across this region. However, in many of the most important channels of the Silk Road itself, including Kyrgyzstan’s Alay Valley, a large mountain corridor linking northwest China with the oasis cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, very little is known about the lifestyles of early people who lived there in the centuries and millennia preceding the Silk Road era. Read more.

[theolduvaigorge]

“Tiny 23,000-year-old mammoth ivory figurine discovered in the Bryansk region of Russia“

(Source: @Jamie_Woodward_ on Twitter)

[theolduvaigorge]

“…a picture of a healed spiral fracture, right tibia and fibula. Middle Holocene Baikal.“

(Source: @Angela_Lieverse on Twitter)

[archaeologicalnews]

New technology reveals secrets of famous Neanderthal skeleton La Ferrassie 1

An international team of researchers, led by Dr. Asier Gomez-Olivencia of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and including Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam, has provided new insights on one of the most famous Neandertal skeletons, discovered over 100 years ago: La Ferrassie 1.

“New technological approaches are allowing anthropologists to peer even deeper into the bones of our ancestors,” said Quam. “In the case of La Ferrassie 1, these approaches have made it possible to identify new fossil remains and pathological conditions of the original skeleton as well as confirm that this individual was deliberately buried.

The adult male La Ferrassie 1 Neanderthal skeleton was found in 1909 in a French cave site, along with the remains of an adult woman and several Neanderthal children. Read more.

[archaeologicalnews]

This Medieval Mother Had a Gruesome 'Coffin Birth' After Medieval Brain Surgery

In a cramped stone grave beneath the medieval town of Imola, Italy, a 1,300-year-old woman lies dead with a hole in her skull and a fetus between her legs.

The fetus, now just a collection of tiny bones trailing below the mother’s skeletal pelvis, was likely delivered in the grave through a phenomenon called “coffin birth” — essentially, when an unborn child is forced out of its mother’s womb by posthumous gases after both mother and child have died.

It’s a rare sight in archaeology — but rarer still might be the peculiar circular wound bored into the mother’s skull.

Archaeologists from the University of Ferrara and University of Bologna attempted to unwind the mystery of this mother’s and child’s deaths in a new study published in the May 2018 issue of the journal World Neurosurgery. According to the researchers, these remarkable skeletal remains may present a rare Middle Ages example of a primitive brain-surgery technique called trepanation. This procedure involved drilling or scraping a hole into the patient’s skull to relieve pressure and (theoretically) a whole host of medical ailments. In this case, sadly, that relief may not have been enough. Read more.

[heaveninawildflower]

Silver drachm of Ephesos with image of a bee (Ephesos, Ionia). 480-450 B.C.

Image and text courtesy MFA Boston.

[archaeologicalnews]

Archaeologists Closer to Finding Lost Viking Settlement

A lost Viking settlement known as “Hóp,” which has been mentioned in sagas passed down over hundreds of years, is said to have supported wild grapes, abundant salmon and inhabitants who made canoes out of animal hides. Now, a prominent archaeologist says the settlement likely resides in northeastern New Brunswick.

If Hóp is found it would be the second Viking settlement to be discovered in North America. The other is at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland.

Over the decades, scholars have suggested possible locations where the remains of Hóp might be found, including Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick (on the east coast of Canada), Nova Scotia, Maine, New England and New York. However, using the description of the settlement from sagas of Viking voyages, along with archaeological work carried out at L'Anse aux Meadows and at Native American sites along the east coast of North America, an archaeologist has narrowed down the likely location of Hóp to northeastern New Brunswick. The likeliest location there? The Miramichi-Chaleur bay area. Read more.

[thesilicontribesman]

Swinside or Sunkenkirk Neolithic Stone Circle, near Millom, Lake District on the Winter Solstice 2017.

A beautiful and largely intact prehistoric stone circle with a view of estuary and mountains on a clear day. Today on the Winter Solstice, it was silent, remote, eerie but strangely serene.

[hideback]

Henri Breuil (French, 1877-1954)

Watercolors based on Prehistoric Cave Paintings

Licking Reindeer, Font de Gaume, Dourdogne, France

Bison, Mammoths, Reindeer, and Horses, Font de Gaume, Dourdogne, France

Crouched Bison, Altamira, Spain

Mooing Bison, Altamira, Spain

[theolduvaigorge]

“A medieval surgeon used 3 rivets to attach a copper plate over a deep wound on a man’s upper sword/axe arm - so successfully that there was time for new bone to form over the implant before the man’s death in a Swedish monastery (via [Historiska])” 

(Source: @DrSueOosthuizen on Twitter)

[whereshadowsmakeshadows-deactiv]

[linguisten]

The College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots

THERE ARE MANY WAYS A college student might spend spring break. Making an archaeological breakthrough is not usually one of them. In his first year at Harvard, Manny Medrano did just that. “There’s something in me, I can’t explain where it came from, but I love the idea of digging around and trying to find secrets hidden from the past,” Medrano says. With the help of his professor, Gary Urton, a scholar of Pre-Columbian studies, Medrano interpreted a set of six khipus, knotted cords used for record keeping in the Inca Empire. By matching the khipus to a colonial-era Spanish census document, Medrano and Urton uncovered the meaning of the cords in greater detail than ever before. Their findings could contribute to a better understanding of daily life in the Andean civilization.

[gendernihilistanarchocommunist]

Medrano noticed that the way each cord was tied onto the khipu seemed to correspond to the social status of the 132 people recorded in the census document. The colors of the strings also appeared to be related to the people’s first names. The correlations seemed too strong to be a coincidence. After spring break, Medrano told his professor about his theories.

“I just remember being pretty excited, that, ‘Wow! I think the guy’s got it,’” Urton says. “There were a couple of things that didn’t add up and I’d point that out and he’d take it back and work on it for a week or two and come back and he would have understood something about it at a deeper level.”

Medrano worked with Urton over the next several months and the two compiled their findings into a paper which will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Ethnohistory in January. Medrano is the first author on the paper, indicating he contributed the bulk of the research, something Urton notes is extremely rare for an undergraduate student.

Sabine Hyland researches Andean anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. She has read Medrano and Urton’s forthcoming paper and describes their discoveries as “thrilling.”

“Manny has proven that the way in which pendant cords are tied to the top cord indicates which social group an individual belonged to. This is the first time anyone has shown that and it’s a big deal,” Hyland says.

Urton is now optimistic that the six khipus examined in the research could serve as a key to decode the hundreds of others he has in his database. The colors of the cords as they relate to first names could hint at the meanings of colors in other khipus, for example.

“There’s a lot we can draw on from this one case,” Urton says.

But what’s most exciting to Urton and Medrano is the potential to better understand Inca history from the indigenous point of view. As Medrano puts it, “history has been written from the perspective of the conquerors and to reverse that hierarchy is what I see this project as doing.”

this is fucking amazing

[nemfrog]

“Stag hunting, drawing on rocks, Southeast Spain.” Die Kunst der Naturvölker und der Vorzeit. 1923.

[lesbianshepard]

my favorite out of context quotes from my archeology professor so far in no particular order

and floridians are just as human as you and me!

and the moral of the story is that there are no deadly snakes native to alaska

you might know this guy as one of the only archaeologists cool enough to be mentioned by indiana jones

it’s my dream to have my name said by harrison ford

i’m not going to apologize for having this class at 6am because you paid for it and it’s your fault. 

we don’t all dress like lara croft. i tried to get it to be a thing on a dig and my colleagues yelled at me. 

they were pretty good archaeologists except they were too racist to realize anything they found. 

i take back what i said about us not dressing like lara croft because lewis binford here is wearing nothing but short shorts and a cowboy hat. take notes for an academic halloween costume!

archaeologists can be good artists! not me, though. or anyone i know. but if you can draw just know you have options.

sometimes you find dead bodies when you dont really expect it and you just have to deal with it

archaeologists are the only people allowed to get exited when they find corpses. 

once i ruined thanksgiving dinner when i told my family i had gotten my degree in archaeology and my uncle commented he liked dinosaurs too

the closest i’ve ever been to a grizzly bear is when i left my glasses in my tent on a dig in alaska,  saw a big rock in the distance, and almost screamed

[lesbianshepard]

additional quotes

ah yes. archaeologists. or, as i love to call us,  pottery analysts

i mean he was kind of a good guy for helping us beat britain but he owned slaves so that really cancelled it out.

archaeology is like cultural anthropology, except after you interview the person you turn around and shoot them in the head.

do not use trees! trees are bad! don’t do it!

usually you find shards, but it’s super exciting when you find a really big shard

it’s basically like a waterpark, except you’re fully clothed and walking through a dark tunnel knee deep in muddy water. so, basically splish splash.

 i dont believe in curses but my colleagues and i like to encourage the idea of them so people stop touching our stuff

usually, you would find a knife in a kitchen. or underneath your pillow to really freak out your roommate who is a history nerd and has no idea why you would sleep with a knife under your pillow and he’ll get really scared and freaked out and okay i’m getting off topic

no matter what the other scientists say, archaeology is a real science.

don’t worry, i promise you, and whatever government agency that’s spying on me right now,  that i’m not a crazy communist trying to overthrow the government

by now you’ve noticed the big “POP QUIZ” written on the board. there isn’t one, but i wanted to see the looks on your face when you saw it. but you’re all dead inside so it’s not really funny.

everything was fine except the citizens of pompeii just woke up dead the next day

the number one question you should ask when you read old archaeology papers is “how the hell do you know?”

nothing pisses off old men more than young people asking “why” and “prove it” so do that as often as possible

this is incredible! all it takes is a computer the size of this room!

[lesbianshepard]

even more from the margins of my notebook!

when in doubt, it’s ritualistic

coprolites are the only shit archaeologists get excited over

i know the only reason you’re not laughing at my hilarious jokes is because it’s early 

they called it the garbage project. which is also what people call the projects i work on when we apply for funding.

what you have to realize is that people are fundamentally weird. they do weird stuff now and they have done it thousands of years ago.

things come and go but pottery is forever

i dont know if you all know this but moose are terrifying abominations. 

and today’s lesson is about the difference between dirt and soil!

please, please, please do not eat old butter you found buried in a bog.

normally i would say this blackboard is a feature because it isn’t portable and can’t be moved but this is a community college so who knows

[lesbianshepard]

one of my biggest fears is that this will get so many notes that someone in the class will see it and show it to the professor and he’ll realize half the notes ive been taking in class are jotting down the weird shit he says

[coriniumcernunnosii]

Corinium Museum, Cirencester; Medieval Period

Wool Mark of John Fortey (d. 1459 From his brass in Northleach Parish Church

my notes; Monumental brasses are a kind of memorial which grew in popularity during the 13th century, allowing detailed representations of the dead to be made for much less money than full stone or wooden effigies, which could be laid into the floors and therefore take up much less space. They were a favoured style of funerary art until the 16th century across Europe, the vast majority of these brasses survive in England (totalling around 4000). A great many of these are found in the eastern counties, although there is a large concentration of them around Cirencester, Northleach, and Lechlade.

[archaeologicalnews]

Mixing the ancient and the new—preserving rock art at the touch of a button

Some of the world’s most ancient art could be protected with a new app designed by Newcastle University heritage and software experts.

Rock art – also known as cups and rings – is under threat. Made by our Neolithic and Early Bronze Age ancestors between 6000 and 3800 years ago, it is mostly found in the countryside. There are more than 6,000 panels in the UK and Ireland – but increasing population densities and agriculture, along with climate change, pose a danger to it.

That’s where the new app comes in. GPS locates the site of the rock art, and users then log its condition. It registers the state of the motifs and any potential threats – such as damage from being driven over or livestock. Read more.

[coriniumcernunnosii]

Corinium Museum, Cirencester; Medieval Period

The Wool Trade (my notes)

The production of wool was enormously important to England for many centuries, and for the Cotswolds in particular. The climate and terrain of the area made it idea for rearing sheep, and the native sheep breeds were prized for their rich golden wool. Towns and villages grew up along the trade routes, merchants amassed large amounts of money which was spent on lavish houses, and grand “wool churches” were built on the proceeds. A great number of the herds were owned by the numbers of Abbeys established in the area, furthering the success of already growing power of the church. By the 1100s, 50% of the economy of the Cotswolds was based in the rearing of sheep for their wool, and by the 14th century this was true for the income for the entire country.

Cirencester sits at one of the major crossroads in a prime location for both moving wool and other goods to and from major ports, but also for transportation into the Stroud valleys, which still contain a huge concentration of textile mills.

The Cotswold Lion

Sheep have grazed on the Cotswold hills for more than 2000 years. The most famous breed was the Cotswold Lion, the producer of a long curly fleece which became famous throughout Europe. An ideal wool for dyeing, it became a favourite for spinning and weaving. Merchants grew rich and built many churches with their profits.

This fine example (in image 2) comes from a local flock by the name of Noent, his own name is Emperor. Kindly donated by Mr E Freeman.