You begin to interest me…vaguely
This mid-nineteenth century basket, on display as part of the passenger pigeon exhibit at the New Jersey State Museum, is on loan from the Schoolhouse Museum in Ridgewood, NJ. It is similar to a stool pigeon basket shown in French’s The Passenger Pigeon in Pennsylvania.
If a shovel is your pick, here’s your pick. The Sweethome [edit: now it’s part of the Wirecutter] takes reviews seriously, and they lay out their background research, testing methods, and justification for their rankings clearly. Just published is their review of round point shovels by Tim Heffernan.
Definitely read the original article for details, but the clear winner is from Bully Tools, a red-handled shovel with a 14-gauge blade weighing in at a svelte 4 pounds, 6 ounces.
You may have relied on a Razor-Back shovel, but they (model 2593600) get dinged for an unfriendly seam on the socket of the blade. Several other brands are also evaluated, all of them at least a step up (in quality and price) from the least expensive shovels so common in hardware stores and Home Depots.
For special occasions (i.e., rock, slag, tree roots) The Corona AS90300 gets the nod. It’s all-steel construction means it weighs almost twice as much as the Bully and costs three times as much. A more budget-friendly option is the heavy duty Razor-Back 45020, which has a solid steel shank that should be effective at levering your way through rocky soil or chunking out hardpan at one-third the price of the Corona.
Why does the American Swedish Historical Museum have an exhibit on Indian motorcycles? Because one of the founders of the Indian Motorcycle Company, Carl Oscar Hedstrom, was an immigrant from Sweden. The museum, located in Philadelphia, has several motorcycles and other artifacts on display. While there, you can also pick up some herring and lingonberry preserves at the gift shop.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports Special Issue Call for Papers: Turkey Husbandry and Domestication: Recent Advances
The turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) is the only domesticated vertebrate to originate from North America. Its history of use and domestication is therefore of great importance to understanding the process, timing, practice and spread of New World animal husbandry. This special issue therefore brings together recent research papers that advance our understanding of turkey use and domestication through inter-disciplinary work involving skeletal morphology, paleopathology, osteometry, stable isotopes, and DNA analysis. We seek papers that span the entire history of turkey use and domestication from their earliest appearance in the archaeological record to their colonial period diffusion outside the Americas. Geographic coverage is sought from all areas of the species historic range including Mesoamerica, the American Southwest, and Eastern North America to generate more dialogue among researchers independently studying the topic in these cultural regions. Evidence documenting turkey transport outside the Americas is also relevant to this topic. Papers that demonstrate advances in inter-disciplinary and scientific approaches to studying turkey use and domestication are particularly welcomed.
Schedule:
First draft of manuscripts due: August 1, 2015
Notification of Acceptance/Revisions: Sept. 2015 (anticipated)
Final paper production deadline: Nov/Dec. 2016 (anticipated)
Expected Publication date: Spring 2016
Submission Guidelines:
Submissions to the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports are made on-line using through the Elsevier Publishing system. Through the on-line system, you will be able to submit your manuscript directly to the special issue. Registration, on-line submission login, and author guidelines are available at http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-archaeological-science-reports/.
Optional open access publishing (on a per article basis) will be available for this special issue.
All submitted papers will be subject to regular peer-review procedures. Papers should not typically exceed 5000 words (excluding tables and references) and should not have been published previously nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere in any other format (print or electronic).
Please contact the lead guest editor, Erin Thornton (erin.thornton@wsu.edu), for additional information.
Assembled by Clara Darko.
Almost a half century of the The Bulletin, the Journal of the New York State Archaeological Association, is now available online. Volume 1, published in 1954, to 1999’s Volume 115 can be downloaded for free at NYSAA’s site. While visiting their site, see if you can spot the photo of Harrison Follett’s camp at Lamoka Lake.
Being rather parochial, I never realized that the phrase “Norwegian handball star” existed, let alone described an actual person. Nor did I think I would learn this from a blog called Cooking with Archaeologists
and no, they are not an ingredient in someone’s soup, although it is, in part, a cookbook:
It’s about recipes, and digs, and communal living. Check it out, and find out how nice a Norwegian handball star can be: Cooking with Archaeologists
