You begin to interest me…vaguely
The newest issue of the journal Geoarchaeology is a festschrift for Karl Butzer, author of Archaeology as Human Ecology, who passed away in 2016.
The journal includes articles on the Negev, Mexico, and Guatemala, as well as a paper on the geoarchaeological examination of a mass grave site from the recent Iraq War. All open access and can be downloaded for free.
The Worked Bone Research Group, part of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) has just published the proceedings from the 10th Meeting of the WBRG, held in Belgrade in 2014. The book contains over 40 articles on worked bone from both prehistoric and historical archaeological sites.
The book, Close to the Bone, is edited by Selena Vitezovic and can be downloaded for free at the WBRG site.
Newspapers from 1836 to 1922 will be digitized and made available through the Library of Congress thanks to a grant from the NEH:
So what’s the new thing I learned from the recent DNA-and-other-scientific-techniques analysis of the infamous Piltdown hoax fossils? Some people use the word “caveat” as a verb.
There it is, in the middle of the nicely open access article:
However, we caveat this by emphasizing that Bornean orang-utans have suffered from habitat loss and range fragmentation, two processes that can result in rapid shifts in the geographical distribution of genetic lineages (p. 7)
The internet helpfully tells me that the use of caveat as a verb in modern usage is considered awkward, and is most closely associated with Alexander Haig of “I am in control here” fame. Haig was a decade or two ahead of his time in his tendency to turn nouns into verbs.
There are a few caveats (“noun: a warning or proviso of specific stipulations, conditions, or limitations” -the OED) that may be worth keeping in mind regarding de Groote and colleagues’ article.
In combination, the geometric morphometric analyses link the Piltdown I mandible and Piltdown II molar; traditional morphometrics link the mandible with the canine, and ancient DNA analysis links the canine and Piltdown II molar. Therefore, given the nature of the context, we consider it highly likely that the Piltdown hoaxer(s) used a single orang-utan specimen originating from southwest Sarawak to construct parts of both Piltdown I and II (p. 7)
Reference:
DeGroote, I., et al.
2016 New genetic and morphological evidence suggests a single hoaxer created ‘Piltdownman’. R.Soc. Opensci.3:160328. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160328
The special commemorative 50th-anniversary issue of the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology is available free online for a limited time via Taylor & Francis:
Table of Contents:
Editorial: ‘The greatest of these is charity’; 50 years of Post-Medieval Archaeology Alasdair Brooks
A short history of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology Harold Mytum
The medieval to early modern transition in a digital age: new developments relevant to the study of domestic buildings David H. Caldwell & Catriona Cooper
Globalization and the spread of capitalism: material resonances Audrey Horning & Eric Schweickart
Cities in the modern world
Peter Davies & Greig Parker
The archaeology of industry; people and places Marilyn Palmer & Hilary Orange
The post-medieval rural landscape: towards a landscape archaeology?
Jemma Bezant & Kevin Grant
The material culture of the modern world Mary C. Beaudry & Natascha Mehler
Standing buildings and built heritage
Adrian Green & James Dixon
Where the battle rages: war and conflict in Post-Medieval Archaeology Natasha N. Ferguson & Douglas Scott
The contemporary in post-medieval archaeology Laura McAtackney & Sefryn Penrose
The archaeology of post-medieval death and burial Layla Renshaw & Natasha Powers
Obituary: Lawrence Butler (1934 – 2014)
Harold Mytum
Well, this could turn out badly. Hopefully the zooarchaeologist is using hyperbole to encourage Fish and Wildlife to figure out their own rules.
If a “huge” load of scientifically valuable prehistoric animal bones aren’t returned soon to the Museum of the Aleutians, they may end up in the trash in Canada, according to a frustrated scientist in Victoria, British Columbia, who is encountering tax problems while trying to avoid international legal difficulties.
It turns out that the $6,000 set aside for shipping three shrink-wrapped pallets of nearly a half million bones back to Unalaska is causing financial headaches for the private research firm, Pacific Identifications, according to zoologist and treasurer Susan Crockford.
“We had to pay taxes on these funds to carry them forward to this year. We are unwilling to pay taxes on these funds for yet another year,” Crockford said in an email to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It means that if we cannot get the import permit required to ship the material by August of this year at the latest, we face having to do something unconscionable to professional archaeologists and research scientists: send all 57 boxes to the dump.”
Most likely, no federal permits are needed, according to Andrea Medeiros, a Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman in Anchorage, since the bones came from Native corporation land, and not federal property, under the terms of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. However, Fish and Wildlife Service officials were still reviewing the requirements of international treaties involving endangered species and migratory birds.
Read the rest at Alaska Dispatch News
The Landmarks Preservation Commission of New York City is looking to hire a part-time archaeologist to assist with the review of cultural resource surveys, maintain a website, and assist in other duties.
Standard archaeology job qualifications apply, and New York City residency is required within 90 days. For more details, including pay rate, see the NYC Careers site.
A one-day conference focusing on the Archaeological Curation Crisis in the 21st Century will be held Saturday, April 23 at Marlboro College in Brattleboro, Vermont. The meeting is organized by the Conference on New England Archaeology. For more information, visit the CNEA .
All of the archaeological site reports produced by the Charleston Museum since 1975 are now available for free download.
Charleston Museum Archaeology Reports
From the official press release:
The Charleston Museum is pleased to announce that archaeological site reports, produced by its Archaeology Department, are now available online. Comprising 56 reports, the bulk of which were prepared by Curator of Historical Archaeology Martha Zierden, they cover a variety of Lowcountry projects, including urban, plantation and military sites.
The publication of a site report is the final phase of any archaeological project and contains all of the details of a project, from site history and fieldwork discoveries to enumeration of recovered artifacts. Many reports also include detailed assessments from specialists, who analyzed animal bone, examined soil samples for pollen or parasites, or focused on particular artifact types.
The Museum, which has sponsored a program in historical archaeological research in the Lowcountry since the 1970s, is excited to be able to make this information available to the public, thanks to a recent website upgrade and the efforts of several staff members. Curator of Historical Archaeology Martha Zierden notes “because of their limited production and distribution, site reports are often hard to find. Now decades of research from the Museum are available to everyone.” Director Carl Borick added that these reports “are an invaluable window into the Charleston area’s past, and an excellent example of the dedicated research efforts of Martha Zierden, Ron Anthony, and other staff members, who have made a critical contribution to the Museum’s mission.”
Before eminent archaeologist John Cotter passed away in 1999, he donated much of his personal library to his colleague Anthony Boldurian and the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. As they sorted through the books, file folders, and papers, they found something completely unexpected: a plastic sandwich bag with two neatly wrapped Clovis fluted points inside.
Cotter is best known as one of the pioneers of American historical archaeology, but he began his career studying Paleoindian archaeology, earning his M.A. in 1935. He had originally planned to write his dissertation on the Clovis material from Blackwater Draw, but by the time he returned to graduate studies at Penn in the 1950s, he had switched his subject to the excavations he had done at historic Jamestown, Virginia with the National Park Service. Yet he always maintained an interest in Paleoindian archaeology, and in fact his final publication, with Boldurian, was titled Clovis Revisited.
One of the points was labeled with his name and the location “Western Kentucky 1939.” At that time, Cotter was the state supervisor of the Archaeological Survey of Kentucky, and much of his time was spent examining the multiple excavations underway and ferrying supplies and artifacts to and from the laboratory, but there is no other contextual information for this point.
The second point is unlabeled, but made from a type of chert (Vera Cruz jasper) found in eastern Pennsylvania. The authors don’t say how difficult it was to figure this one out, but they matched this point to a photo of a fluted point found in New Jersey and published in one of the early articles on Paleoindian stone tools, Edgar B. Howard’s 1934 “Grooved Spearpoints.” That New Jersey point was in the collections of the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, where Cotter became a professor and curator. The authors found a drawing of the same Clovis point in the appendix of Cotter’s 1935 thesis.
The projectile point is part of the Newbold collection, accumulated by a New Jersey gentleman farmer in the second half of the nineteenth century. Michael Newbold would pay his workers as much as five cents for artifacts they found on his farm in Burlington County. After his death, the then-new University Museum acquired his collection – decades before anyone knew how old those fluted points were.
How did they end up among the paperwork? It seems likely Cotter was working with the specimens (he was particularly interested in a specific diagnostic characteristic, called basal polish or basal edge grinding, that both points have) in his office and at some point –perhaps even after his death– the bag holding them got bundled up with related articles and filed away in a bookshelf. It’s a nice example of lost artifacts being found again.
Reference:
Boldurian, Anthony T., Justin D. McKeel, and Mason G. Pickel
2012 Gifts from an archaeologist’s bookcase: John L. Cotter’s library. North American Archaeologist 33(2):193-237.