Happy New Year! Ever wonder why January 1 is observed as New Year’s Day in the Gregorian calendar? I went on a journey to find a rationale for this unusual choice; biased by years of studying ancient Mesoamerica, I found it odd that with the winter solstice so close, the year began at an apparently… [Read more…]
October 19, 2011
The story in ArtDaily caught my eye for a couple of reasons. First, there was the headline: Researchers at SMU-led Etruscan dig in Italy discover ancient depiction of childbirth – first of its kind ever found. Yet another “first of its kind ever found”, I thought, sighing about the media (again). But then I took… [Read more…]
January 18, 2011
“We end with pepper, and we’re going to begin with porn.” Now, that’s an eye-catching sentence. Or really, since this is a broadcast made available by BBC Radio, an ear-catching sentence. In 2010, the BBC collaborated with the British Museum to produce a history of humanity– through descriptions of 100 objects. The series is fabulous… [Read more…]
November 20, 2010
(with apologies to the popular revolt against the TSA…) 348 articles, and counting. And that’s just the English language press… Google News reports at least 74 articles in Italian and another 50 in French. That’s how much news coverage Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has received for his decision to have a statue of Mars… [Read more…]
October 24, 2010
A recent visit to the Royal Ontario Museum’s exhibition “The Warrior Emperor and China’s Terracotta Army” got me thinking again about the topic of women warriors. The famous Qin dynasty (221 BC- 206 BC) terra cotta statues dominated the first galleries. But then there was another room with smaller Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) terra… [Read more…]
July 26, 2010
The most unusual archaeological job I ever had was back in graduate school, and it remains the only archaeology job I did wearing three-inch heels. As a student at the University of Illinois, I was drafted along with a friend to stand near the pedestal on which the newly discovered Birger figurine was displayed at… [Read more…]
June 16, 2010
The daily Scotsman reported on June 15 that “The Orkney Venus has been named in a shortlist of three for the Best Archaeological Discovery category in the 2010 biannual British Archaeological Awards”. The find is truly important: the object under consideration is almost unprecedented in Neolithic archaeology of Great Britain, and is visually striking, as… [Read more…]
June 5, 2010
“Her name is synonymous with power and glamour”: so starts an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer prompted by the opening of a new exhibit that opened this week at The Franklin Institute. Which raises the question: what is the relation between an archaeology of sex and gender and the long-standing fascination of the public, shared… [Read more…]
May 10, 2010
The fourth and final section of my course, “Archaeology of Sex and Gender”, which provided the opportunity to develop the book Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives, asks students to put the theoretical approaches to understanding sex/gender in the past into practice. Student groups will have already been formed following week 10, when each student is asked… [Read more…]
May 8, 2010
By the last week of the third part of the course, students are finally ready to begin to address one of the major drawbacks of much of the archaeology of gender: the way it elides sexual practices and experiences. By juxtaposing archaeological, art historical, and documentary history approaches to sex work and celibacy, we leave… [Read more…]
January 2, 2012
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