My archaeology news source sent me an article from Britain’s The Independent, posted online on Wednesday, that has caused a little stir because it reports on a “previously unknown language”. But what caught my attention was this sentence: The tablet revealed the names of 60 women – probably prisoners-of-war or victims of an Assyrian forced… [Read more…]
May 4, 2012
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a tabloid that few outside the academy will have heard of, and fewer insider the academy actually read than might be indicated by its ubiquity in campus administrative offices. It becomes relevant to many new or nearing completion PhDs because it contains employment ads. While the image conjured up… [Read more…]
March 18, 2012
Catching up with reading recent archaeology news, I am coming late to the Cambridge Archaeological Unit’s report that they titled Mystery of Anglo-Saxon teen buried in bed with gold cross. Great website from Cambridge University, lots of good long contextual quotes, and a sympathetic subject: a teenage girl buried with a piece of craftwork comparable… [Read more…]
March 2, 2012
I am waiting (impatiently) for yesterday’s UC Riverside press release to get picked up by the mainstream media. The press release tells us that Contrary to popular belief, women played a central role in Maya society before the arrival of Spanish explorers in the early 16th century, a University of California, Riverside graduate student has… [Read more…]
February 5, 2012
This one is going to be very meta: the focus of my discussion is my own writing in another blog. In response to a provocation from a politician with a loose hold on historical facts, yesterday I posted (on What Makes Us Human) a deconstruction of his claim that “marriage” had been a relationship between… [Read more…]
January 29, 2012
Archaeologists seem to have a love/hate relationship with sexuality. We are wary of the easy projection of modern sexual identification onto objects made in very different contexts in the past. On the other hand, while sexualization is a form of exoticization, so, of course, is de-sexualization. What got me started thinking about the balancing act… [Read more…]
January 2, 2012
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…]
November 12, 2011
Once upon a time, the kinds of things we could know about ancient populations were highly generalized. Now, through the work of people like Kristina Killgrove, that is changing– and you can be part of making it happen. I couldn’t be more happy. A while ago (a loong while ago) I started writing a blog… [Read more…]
August 27, 2011
I have been waiting to see how long it would take the mainstream press to make the obvious joke about news the New York Times recently reported, that a protein called osteocalcin, which is produced by bone-forming cells called osteoblasts, binds to a specific receptor on cells of the testes. Male mice that were unable… [Read more…]
August 9, 2011
Last year I asked the rhetorical question “Are dead babies good evidence for a Roman brothel?” My post rehearsed a number of reasons to be skeptical of the widely reported story about a Roman British site being described as a brothel. Centrally, I objected to the claim that Roman women had “little or no access… [Read more…]
May 13, 2012
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