Vidi
Links that I’ve bookmarked in the past few days should be below the fold.
Found via Old is the New New. Genius!
Good lord no! I hate digging, that’s why I survey. But apart from that it’s hard to refute.
A discussion from the House of Lords on the PAS. It’s great to see cross-party support, but it would be better to see the government accept it did something right in helping set up the PAS.
If you can get to Valencia, there’s news of an exhibition of finds from the House of Ariadne (House of the Coloured Capitals) at the Prehistoric Museum there. They’re looking at how the house changed over time. In Spanish.
Zaragoza is going one better than Valencia. They’re reconstructing the Battle of Cannae in Playmobile toys. Those unmoved by plastic elephant-driven carnage can watch the plastic gunpowder driven carnage of the American Civil War instead.
Some very good comments on the poor PR strategy which many archaeology departments pursue. Archaeologists can hardly complain about pseudoarchaeology if they’re not doing a good job of getting information out.
K. Kris Hirst notes a paper published in Science recently which argues the Clovis-first model of populating the Americas is dead. It’s a huge surprise to me. I didn’t know anyone was still pushing the Clovis-first line. Monte Verde, a site in Chile which dates back a couple of thousand years before Clovis. She notes the same. If you want to re-write the textbooks, the populating of the Americas would be a good field to work in.
The Bath Tub has what the Chinese say are the oldest playable musical instruments. I don’t know if anyone has given the highly controversial 70kyr Croatian(?) bone flutes to a musician to play to see if they have sensible scales.
How do you teach students to use appropriate reference sites?
A review of a major exhibition of Babylonian artefacts at the Louvre which will later tour to Berlin and London. You may want to book early, it looks impressive. In Spanish
“In constrast with sensible construction workers, archaeologists use the smallest possible tools to move the largest possible amount of dirt.”
“Prehistoric archaeologists tend to concentrate on societies not possesing a written language.”
I imagine you’ll being seeing/have seen this everywhere over the web, so I’m not sure there’s a lot I can say that would be original. It’s big loss to humanity’s collective imagination.
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