BC Vintage

It might have come to your attention that this blog has been ever so slightly comatose of late. This has been going on for far too long and will not do any longer.

I graduated from Durham last summer, and life has largely been boring since then, in the little speck of Surrey I call my home. (Nothing is very exciting here, unless chain coffee-shops and Americans in 4-wheel drives excite you.) Luckily, I’m starting my MA at UCL this autumn. It looks like an amazing programme — I can’t wait!

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that I really rather miss Archaeology. Reading about it, taling about it, and writing about it. And so I’ve decided to dust off this little blog and give it a Grand Revival and Relaunch. New name, new look, less faffing around, more cool Archaeology! That’s the plan, anyway. I’m hoping to write at least once a week about some cool archaeological thing that will, hopefully, be of interest to somebody.

I heard a few minutes of an episode from BBC 4’s A History of the World in 100 Objects series a few days ago, so I went onto iPlayer to listen to all the episodes so far. It’s a series of short radio epsiodes in which the Director of the British Museum retells human history through artefacts in the Museum.

(Through the infinite wisdow of the BBC, it’s also available as a podcast, so those outside the UK can listen to it, too.)

My favourite episode so far is the one about the 10 000 BC Swimming Reindeer. It’s a crazy beautiful piece, for one thing. I love the realism in it, and that they mention in the programme itself that prehistoric art has all manner of styles. There’s a sort of narrative that you get taught where the Ancient Egyptians didn’t know how to draw children, and then the Greeks invented perspective, and then we went through realism and came out the other end with impressionism and surrelaism &c &c. And I think it’s very silly. It’s that same old hangup people seem to have about prehistory. Either the ancients were wise and had all sorts of deep spiritual knowledge that we’ve lost, or they were stupid monkey-men and couldn’t do anything.

There’s some talk about religion and art, too. I’ve never studied that connection in depth, but I think it may be a bit simplistic to say art was always connected to religion to begin with, and now is completely separate.

In any case, the series is quite interesting and nicely presented, and I’m looking forward to it moving on to other time-periods and objects I’ve not heard about before. (Also, I’ve just listened to the last part in this section, and the next section is going to focus on “food and sex”. How can I not look forward to that?)

Everyone knows mummies are awesome. At least they should. If you’re not convinced, look at the cool medical things you can do with them:

Ancients ‘had heart disease too’
Hardening of the arteries has been found in Egyptian mummies – suggesting that the risk factors for heart disease may be ancient, researchers say.

Bringing us the exciting revelation that rich Egyptians only drew themselves pretty and thin, but actually overate all the time. It is pretty cool, you must admit. Here are these bodies of people from 3500 years ago, and we can see what diseases they had, and learn something useful.

I am amused that the BBC feels the need to inform us that the Egyptians weren’t hunter-gatherers, though. Hunter-gatherers are obviously building huge temple complexes and cities all over the place all the time, so I can totally see where the confusion could come from.

Also, “[Lady Raj] predated Moses by 300 years”? I mean, I’m neither an Egyptologist nor a Bible scholar, but have we decided that Moses was a real person now? I was under the impression the consensus was that the Exodus out of Egypt was pretty much made up, since the Egyptians never used much slave labour in building the Pyramids anyway… but hey, I could be wrong!

Mummies are great. They’re super-useful and informative, and I think they make history feel more personal. If you know what someone ate as their last meal and what valley they grew up in it makes the past a lot realer, less like a story you’re making up in your head about another world.

I’m a bit iffy on how they’re presented in museums sometimes, though. I visited the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology this summer, and had a look at their Ötzi exhibit (awesome!) and their mummy-themed special exhibition, and they had a South American mummy just sort of lying in an otherwise empty case, curled up in one corner, like it was cowering against our looks. It was a little creepy, and seemed quite disrespectful, context-less at best. Looking at dead bodies is always in danger of becoming voyeuristic, but there’s good and bad ways to do it. An actual human body of one actual individual from the past makes history seem more personal, but then I think you also have to treat those bodies accordingly.

In conclusion: mummies are awesome.

I posted this on my personal blog the other day, but since it’s Archaeology-related, I thought I might as well cross-post it. Including an awesome but unrelated picture and link! 8D

Speaking of Asia (well, I haven’t spoken of Asia yet, but I will below. I’m sure you can wrap your mind around the crazy time-travel.), one of the Masters students in Global Economy gave a presentation about markets in medieval China to-day. It was quite cool, if somewhat depressing that we were uber-lucky to have someone who could read books on medieval china and tell us what they said. It was only really basic stuff, as well. T_T

Practically an entire continent worth of archaeological knowledge is blocked to me because of language? Really? It all just makes me even more interested in that part of the world.

ANYWAY. CROSS-POSTIN’ TIME.

Yesterday, I realised that I had an unread email from myself in my “ideas” folder (presumably I’d left it unread to remind myself to look at it), and it reads, in its entirety:

“Early domestication in mid + far east. Trade?”

Thank you for the specifics and elaboration there, past!Hellen.

I think it was things I was reading about and wanted to research more in future. (I really wish there was some sort of module on Asia I could’ve taken. What, is the Far East not interesting enough for you, Durham? D:)

It’s funny how things work out, though. Read the rest of this entry »

Having seen the latest two episodes of Bonekickers, I’ve discovered the show’s aim: to re-write The DaVinci Code in progressively more ridiculous ways. I quite literally laughed out loud at the continuity announcer’s “The legend of King Arthur comes alive next on Bonekickers…”

And then one of the secret masonic brotherhood of people hunting for Excalibur threw himself in a well and DISSOLVED. Trufax.

It’s like oldskool Doctor Who and Time Team had a secret love-child, abandoned at birth and adopted by Dan Brown.

 Going off to dig in a week! Excitement! Even though I will probably not get threatened by any secret societies at all. Rare, but it happens occasionally.

I’ve been lazing around and have nothing archaeological to post, so here are some comics from about a year ago when I was doing uni fieldwork at Catcote. Woo, content recycling! XD

I have some incredible ability to attract and retain dirt. More even than everyone else on a site. Presumably I use up all the dirt, so there’s none left for them.

This year, I’m going here for my fieldwork. It should be exciting, according to the professor who’s organising for me and three other students to go there, you find treasure in the European Iron Age. Also, I can use my German skills. So, when I get back from there in September, I will actually have something to write in this blog!

xkcd

Hm… Archaeology is probably even more to the left from that. Sociology, but IN THE PAST. Except for when it’s also a bit of Biology and Chemistry IN THE PAST. Staying far away from Mathematics, though. *shudder*. Except for, you know, statistical analyses of data and all that.

I love having such a mongrel discipline.

My boyfriend heard about this story on the radio a few days ago and linked me to it because he thought I might be interested.

Men Fighting Over Women? It’s Nothing New, Suggests Research

ScienceDaily (Jun. 4, 2008) — Men may usually settle it over a drunken brawl in the pub or perhaps a verbal spat — but new evidence has shown for the first time that fighting over women in prehistoric times could have been worse than that.

A mass grave of skeletons investigated by Durham University-led researchers suggests that neighbouring tribes from prehistoric times were prepared to brutally kill their male rivals to secure their women.

…

The gist: 34 skeletons from about 5000BC were found buried in a pit in a village in SW Germany, all having suffered a violent death. Using isotope analysis they discovered that some were from the area, some from a different one, and though the immigrant dead were men and women, only men and children from the village were killed, which leads them to conclude it was a raid for women.

What makes me wonder, though, is if you’re going to steal women from another village, why take some of your women with you and risk them being killed? What was so special about the women from that particular village? Was it a village particularly rich in something and was the raid for resources and oh yeah let’s take these women with us, as well? That’s the only explanation I can come up with except for the ol’ ‘ritual’ standby.

Maybe the great resources meant they were all well-nourished so the women were amazingly beautiful? XD

Of course if it was a “a cycle of revenge between rival groups”, the non-local women might have been ones captured in a previous raid and joining the fight. Or they had a grudge to settle.

Don’t you hate the way SD always gives you enough information to be interested, but not enough detail to satisfy? I’m going to see if I can find out what volume of Antiquity this was published in.