Category: Archaeology

“Almost any collection is a good collection”

Making use of museum-based collections — even, or especially, from sites excavated nearly one hundred years ago — is essential to regional research. Julia A. King writes about collections-based research in the first of a series of posts on collections and curation at the SHA’s website. King’s insight comes from her work on the “Colonial Encounters: The Lower Potomac Valley at Contact, 1500-1720” project, which synthesized data from over 30 archaeological sites in Maryland and Virginia.
One unsurprising conclusion: “Perhaps the most troubling issue we observed is a disciplinary mindset (for want of a better phrase) which continues to foster the never-ending field season, resulting in un-cataloged or under-cataloged collections along with no site report.”

Read it at SHA.org

How Ancient Egyptians Did Math

Mathematician David Reimer on how Ancient Egyptians did their maths, and how it was different from modern mathematics.

In an article for The College of New Jersey (where Reimer is a math professor) he says:

the Egyptian way of thinking about math is deeply satisfying. “Today, we’re taught to do math in a step-by-step way—you do this step, then this one, then this one. If you follow exactly what you’re told, you get the right answer,” Reimer says. “But in Egyptian math, there are any of maybe five to eight tools that you can apply. It’s not a mindless algorithm; it’s more like a Sudoku puzzle.”

And he wrote a book about it:

Count Like an Egyptian

Infant Burials, Antler Foreshafts at c. 11.5kya Site in Alaska

Ben Potter and colleagues’ work at the Upward Sun River Site in Alaska is making news, and the Smithsonian has the best headline:

Ice Age Babies Surrounded by Weapon Parts Found in Alaska

Foreshafts and bifaces from the Upward Sun River Site, Alaska. Source: University of Alaska-Fairbanks/Ben Potter/Smithsonian.

Details are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (subscription required):

New insights into Eastern Beringian mortuary behavior: A terminal Pleistocene double infant burial at Upward Sun River

If Iron Man Was an Archaeologist…

…he would wear a suit like this:

Archaeologist Theotokis Theodoulou testing the Exosuit.
Archaeologist Theotokis Theodoulou testing the Exosuit. Image from ABlogtoWatch.com

That’s Greek archaeologist Theotokis Theodoulou testing out a new underwater suit that will allow him to work on underwater archaeological sites for extended periods without worrying about the bends.

It’s like a personal submarine that you wear.

They gave it to an archaeologist.

And he’s looking for the missing parts of the Antikythera Mechanism.

The Antikythera Mechanism. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported by Marsyas.

Martha’s Anniversary: Passenger Pigeon Events

With the 100th anniversary of the death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, only days away, Ectopistes-related events are happening everywhere. Here are some to look forward to over the Labor Day weekend and beyond:

Passenger Pigeon Weekend at the Cincinnati Zoo. 

Held at the original home of Martha and co-sponsored by the Ohio Ornithological Society, this event includes a Friday night cocktail party, a Saturday symposium with Joel Greenberg and others, and birdwatching opportunities.

Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History

Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America has been open since late June. Martha herself can be found here. The Smithsonian is also having a twitterchat about Martha on September 2, 2-3 P.M. EST. Check out #Martha100.

MassMoca

Artists Sayler/Morris have created a new art exhibit at this fascinating museum in North Adams, Massachusetts,  that contemplates the life and death of the passenger pigeon. Here’s more from the museum’s press release:

Eclipse consists of a massive 100-foot video projection, screens on the walls and ceiling of MASS MoCA’s four-story atrium. The video loop shows a flock of passenger pigeons in reverse-negative silhouette lifting out of a life-sized tree, accompanied by sound design consisting of layers of digitally processed human voices. The exhibition offers a space for reflection with a limited-edition artist publication that will include writings by Kolbert, original photography by Sayler/Morris, and archival images.

Eclipse officially opens on September 1.

Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College, Easton PA

Michael Pestel’s multimedia art exhibition Requiem, Ectopistes migratorious, “ metaphorically places Martha at the center of the installation in the form of a human-scale birdcage, encouraging visitors to contemplate extinction—of the passenger pigeon, of other species, and perhaps even author Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.” It opens September 1 with a presentation by the artist, music, and readings.

Beloit College Center for the Sciences, Wisconsin

On September 8, Steve Kuehn will give a talk entitled The Prehistory of “The Feathered Tempest”: Passenger Pigeon Zooarchaeology in the Upper Midwest focusing on pigeon bones from archaeological sites in Illinois and Wisconsin.

A Shadow Over the Earth: The Life and Death of the Passenger Pigeon

The University of Michigan Museum of Natural History created this exhibit, which is being presented at many venues throughout the country, including the Florida Museum of Natural History, the New Jersey State Museum, and the Harbor Springs Area Historical Society. Many locales are supplementing the display with material from their own collections.

More Free Archaeology Articles from Taylor and Francis

The Day of Archaeology is, yes, just one day long, but, as part of the celebration, Taylor and Francis is making 100 archaeology articles free to download for the next month and a half.

The free haul includes a wide assortment of papers from the Norwegian Archaeological Review (Theory! And Vikings!), World Archaeology (Is there a happier way to start your abstract than “Unusual funerary behavior is now an exciting area of research”?), Azania (the bananas in Africa debate, and more), Danish Journal of Archaeology (Including Mesolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age research. And more Vikings),  and Time & Mind (Rock art, archaeoacoustics, and a little more unusual funerary behavior).

Check out the actual titles at Taylor & Francis’s 100 free archaeology articles.

To Do: View Rock Art in Aruba

I have to go here someday:

Rock art from Fountein Cave, Aruba. CC. Source: wikipedia.org Photo by Nvvchar, Creative Commons BY 2.0.

The rock art of the Caquetío people, according to archaeologist Harold Kelly of the National Archaeological Museum Aruba, includes geometric, zoomorphic, and anthropomorphic motifs in red, white, brown, and black. The art at one site, Cunucu Arikok, stands out for its complexity, variety, and quantity. “The combination of white and red colors in a single depiction is something that is not only unique for rock art of Aruba,” says Kelly, “but also the rest of the Caribbean, as far as we know.”

Malin Grunberg Banyasz  www.archaeology.org

 

Seneca Subsistence and Trade in the Eighteenth Century

A recent study of bones from an early historic Iroquois site includes a comparison with the much earlier animal bones from the Lamoka Lake site as well as some interesting passenger pigeon finds.

Adam Watson and Stephen Cox Thomas studied animal bones from the early 18th century Townley-Read site in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. The Seneca who lived at the site may have hunted deer year-round. Deer hides, as well as furs from other animals, would have been traded with European colonists. The detailed taphonomic analysis also indicates that deer bones were likely processed to extract the fat-rich grease from the spongy portions of the bones. This is usually considered to be evidence of nutritional stress, but they make the case that processing for bone grease was “a planned accumulation of resources rather than an ad hoc response to seasonal food shortfalls.” (p. 115)

Also of interest is the identification of passenger pigeon bones from one feature at the site. Passenger pigeon, of course, tends to be present at prehistoric archaeological sites in the region with good bone preservation, but in this case, four of the bones are from immature pigeons, providing good evidence specifically for the procurement of squabs in the springtime.

A small number of American eel bones, in contrast, are more likely to indicate fishing in the fall, when eels are heading downstream to spawn.

As a whole, the assemblage has some interesting differences from both earlier and later archaeological sites in New York.  The authors provide a detailed and well-researched analysis of the animal bones from this Iroquois site to make the point that “the evidence for economic resilience and stability at Townley-Read contradicts a narrative of pervasive and unimpeded decline, and reinforces the importance of continuing to build and test empirical models grounded in both local and regional archaeological and historical data.” (p. 115)

Watson, Adam S. and Stephen Cox Thomas

2013The Lower Great Lakes Fur Trade, Local Economic Sustainability and the Bone Grease Buffer: Vertebrate Faunal Remains from the Eighteenth Century Seneca Iroquois Townley-Read Site. Northeast Anthropology 79-80: 81–123.

 

Northeast Historical Archaeology Open Access Articles

CNEHA, the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology, has recently made most articles in their journal, Northeast Historical Archaeology, freely available. The most recent articles (2010 and newer) are still restricted to members, but that leaves almost forty years of articles available for download.
From the first issue, you can read Dick Pin Hsu’s “The Joys of Urban Archaeology” on the excavation of the Revolutionary War period Fort Stanwix in New York. There’s also Rebecca Yamin’s early article on Raritan Landing in New Jersey  and a personal favorite, a guide to agricultural drainage systems by Sherene Baugher, from which the following figure is taken.Baugher drainage