Vidi VII

I’m experimenting with a new RSS aggregator. These are some interesting links its caught recently.

I’ll start off with sex. Tony Keen has been to see the Seduced exhibition at the Barbican and has written a review of it. I was planning to try and get to see it, combining it with the Terracotta Army, but it doesn’t look like that will happen now. Mary Beard has another opinion from earlier in the year.

The Megalithic Portal has news of sex and destruction but not in a “did the earth move for you?” way. Apparently permits for building may have been issued by the Greek Ministry of Culture in exchange for immoral acts. The Times has the full story.

It’s just destruction which is the problem for the Laetoli footprints, according to the Grauniad. John Hawks has comments and link back to the story in Nature.

Paigah Tombs. Photo (cc) Lakshmi Prabhala

Destruction is the problem for the Paigah Tombs in India, according to the Times of India. The tombs are one of the twelve sites that make up the Seven Wonders of Hyderabad. It looks like astonishing architecture, and twenty families have moved into the gatehouse. The story is all about the damage they do to the site and the besmirching of its beauty. I’d be interested to know more about the situation which led to so many families moving in.

There’s news of tombs in the UK. The ARLT’s blog links to the opening of a tomb at Boscombe Down, dating from the Roman period. It looks like an interesting discovery.

Another interesting discovery is noted by the National Museums Liverpool Blog. It leads to more information which sifts the truth from the media reports about a Viking ship at Meols. It seems I won’t be pushing past small children to see the boat when I’m in Liverpool later this year.

If I were in the Palaeolithic then it is quite likely that I would be surrounded by young children, if a new interpretation of flint-knapping is correct. Afarensis has details of papers which suggest that a lot of flint chips dating from the Middle Palaeolithic might be due to poor quality chippers rather than poor quality flint. The presence of children in the Middle Palaeolithic would explain where all those adults archaeologists seem to find come from. It might sound daft, but archaeologists tend to be quite bad when it comes to thinking about children. They’re happier with rocks.

Rocks and landscape general are the issues of two posts from the award-winning In the Middle which I won’t get time to comment on. Jeffery J Cohen has comments on Chris Tilley’s The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. There’s quite a discussion going on in the comments. A follow-up post is by Karl Steel who looks at some of the anthropcentricism in Tilley’s work. He also wonders what Tilley’s work says about power. I may write on Tilley’s ideas in the future. This week I was re-reading some of the stuff he says about Wales.

Wales in general, and Gwynedd in particular is the connection to the Antiquarian’s Attic’s meme on seven weird things about Gruffydd ap Cynan. If you’re English that’s pronounced the same way it’s written. It’s easy enough to read.

Also easy enough to read is Carl Pyrdum’s new URL. While buying gotmedieval.com he discovered the value, or lack of it, given to other medieval peoples. Women were particularly hard done-by.

Another group of people who were undervalued were the PKAP team, who were at the AIA meeting with their poster. It is a very good looking poster. It’s a real work of art.

There’s three functions for art, according to Middle Savagery. It’s based on the work of Hewitt and Jordan which is on display in Leeds.

You’ve probably noticed by now that one link leeds leads onto the next, but sometimes the connections take a bit of fabricating. The fake Gulf of Tonkin incident is connected with considerably less strain to the recent Straits of Hormuz sabre-rattling by Sam Hardy at the samarkeolog. Things are not necessarily what they seem.

Things not being what they seem is the subject of the final link, with a hat-tip to In Small Things Found, Ancient jets? The amazing flying beings at forgetomori examines small Columbian artefacts which appear to be prehistoric representations of jet planes. It turns out this might not be the case. Yes, there’s a post on the Saqqara plane too.

I’ve seen other things too, but they may get longer posts.