My thoughts and love with Boston tonight. It’s always been my other home, and what happened today made me sick.
Heading home on Wednesday for the conference. The boy and I were going to spend Sunday night and Monday in Boston since he’s never been there before… Now I don’t even really know what to show him.
MEET “Skeleton number 116”.
Sadly, she does not have a name. But what we do know is that she lived in York 700 years or more ago; she was 46 when she died – and she had leprosy.
The woman was one of a number of skeletons unearthed during an archaeological dig in the churchyard of what was once St Stephen’s, in Dixon’s Yard off Walmgate, a few years ago.
Her leprosy would have been very noticeable in her life – her nose would have been infected, and her hands crippled.
In the Middle Ages, lepers were often shunned.
Sarah Maltby, director of attractions with the York Archaeological Trust, said: “They were thought to have the disease because they were being punished by God”. The disease was also thought to be highly infectious.
Read more.
A trove of Neanderthal fossils including bones of children and adults, discovered in a cave in Greece hints the area may have been a key crossroad for ancient humans, researchers say.
The timing of the fossils suggestsNeanderthals and humans may have at least had the opportunity to interact, or cross paths, there, the researchers added.
Neanderthals are the closest extinct relatives of modern humans, apparently even occasionally interbreeding with our ancestors. Neanderthals entered Europe before modern humans did, and may have lasted there until about 35,000 years ago, although recent findings have called this date into question.
To learn more about the history of ancient humans, scientists have recently focused on Greece.
“Greece lies directly on the most likely route of dispersals of early modern humans and earlier hominins into Europe from Africa via the Near East,” paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen in Germany told LiveScience. “It also lies at the heart of one of the three Mediterranean peninsulae of Europe, which acted as refugia for plant and animal species, including human populations, during glacial times — that is, areas where species and populations were able to survive during the worst climatic deteriorations.”
“Until recently, very little was known about deep prehistory in Greece, chiefly because the archaeological research focus in the country has been on classical and other more recent periods,” Harvati added.
Harvati and colleagues from Greece and France analyzed remains from a site known as Kalamakia, a cave stretching about 65 feet (20 meters) deep into limestone cliffs on the western coast of the Mani Peninsula on the mainland of Greece. They excavated the cave over the course of 13 years.
The archaeological deposits of the cave date back to between about 39,000 and 100,000 years ago to the Middle Paleolithic period. During the height of the ice age, the area still possessed a mild climate and supported a wide range of wildlife, including deer, wild boar, rabbits, elephants, weasels, foxes, wolves, leopards, bears, falcons, toads, vipers and tortoises.
A 6,000 year old Tenerian skeleton found in the Sahara with its middle finger in its mouth.
Sarah excavates a British Period well at 74 Spanish Street. In the foreground are remnants of a 19th-century post hole (center), a 19th-century trash deposit (front right), and an early 18th-century trash deposit (front left). Photo courtesy of the City of St. Augustine’s Archaeology Division.
A small team of archaeologists working from satellite images hinting at a buried structure have uncovered the corner of a monumental complex with rows of rooms around a large courtyard, believed to be about 4,000 years old.
“The size is breathtaking,” says Jane Moon, a University of Manchester archaeologist who heads the expedition. Ms. Moon says the walls of the structure are almost nine feet thick, indicating that the building was of great importance or indicated great wealth.
The discovery is even more significant because of its location more than 10 miles from Ur, on what would then have been the banks of the Euphrates River – the first major archaeological find that far from the city.
Ground stone use-wear analysis: A review of terminology and experimental methods
“Methods, terms, and experimental results are presented as standardized concepts for the analysis of ground stone tools. Recent experimental and microscopic research techniques applied to the study of ground stone tools have broadened the recognition of use-wear patterns. Building on the research of tribologists who study wear in order to prevent it, wear mechanisms have been identified that are distinctive to the relative nature of contact between two stone surfaces in addition to the nature of substances worked between contacting surfaces. Tribological wear mechanisms identifiable on stone surfaces include surface fatigue, adhesion, abrasion, and tribochemical interactions, each of which are continuously in play, so that what we see depends on when the wear process was interrupted. Other important factors influencing surface wear are the durability and texture of the rock type selected for tool use.
► Use-wear analysis on ground stone tools is described. ► Macroscopic and microscopic use-wear patterns are defined. ► Ethnographic models are used to design exploratory experiments. ► Experiments standardize methods and terms derived from tribological research” (read more).
(Source: Journal of Archaeological Science 2013, in press)
Indigenous people that lived in southeastern Brazil in the late 1800s shared some genetic sequences with Polynesians, an analysis of their remains shows. The finding offers some support for the possibility that Pacific islanders traded with South America thousands of years ago, but researchers…
Posts around these parts will probably slow down over the next few weeks. Going to try to queue some stuff up to post once a day, but as it is finals, and this is graduate school, I’m feeling crazy.
I’m jealous of everyone who gets to attend the SAA this year (hopefully next year I’ll be presenting). If anyone is around New England, I’ll be giving a poster session at the annual Conference on New England Archaeology on April 20 at the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology in Andover, MA.
I’ll be heading out for field season sometime in late May, so posts in general will be slow until I relocate myself.
That Shovelbums.org now belongs to the SAAs? Am I just being paranoid?
It doesn’t! It was an April Fool’s joke. If you clicked on the link it Rickrolled you.
