You begin to interest me…vaguely
So this looks interesting. And expensive. Have to wait a week to see just how expensive, though, as prices haven’t been released yet. AT Overland’s new Tacoma Habitat, an aluminum composite camper shell/rooftop tent, fits on a five-foot truck, is 15 feet long when open, and won’t make your Toyota pop a wheelie when you put 600 pounds on the mattress in the overhanging part.
More details at Adventure Trailers.
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.
Yes, its actual name is the Sprinter Extreme. Expect to see it picking up the garbage at Jurassic World. Actually, it’s a dump truck with fake (?) mud on it. But it’s Extreme!
The MSU Campus Archaeology site has a new post by Katy Meyers Emery about a Frozen Charlotte doll found in one of their digs.
The name comes from a poem, and later a song, about a young woman who, not wanting to cover up her pretty dress, refused to dress warmly for a long sleigh ride with her beau. When they arrived at the party, he discovered, to his horror, that Charlotte had frozen to death.
The small, inexpensive dolls do not have moving limbs – i.e., they look frozen. They were quite common in the mid to late 1800s, and may also have been easily lost or broken, as they turn up not infrequently on historical archaeological sites.
The photos below show some of the Charlottes (as well as other toys and trinkets) excavated from house sites in a former late nineteenth century working class neighborhood in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Images from:
Howson, Jean, and Leonard G. Bianchi
2014 Covert-Larch: Archaeology of a Jersey City Neighborhood. Data Recovery for the Route 1&9T (25) St. Paul’s Viaduct Replacement Project Jersey City, Hudson County, NJ. Cultural Resource Unit, The RBA Group, Inc.
The original post is at MSU Campus Archaeology
Just published and open access is a new article that demonstrates the value and potential of 3D scanning and printing for osteological identification of passenger pigeons and other extinct or rare animals.
Some zooarchaeologists have been producing 3D images of animal bones for a while now. This article describes the next step, the creation of actual physical replicas (which they dub “artifictions”, as opposed to artifacts) using 3D printers. The practical goal is to increase the reliable identification of animal species (especially rare or difficult to distinguish ones) in archaeological faunal assemblages, which now is dependent on the zooarchaeologist having ready access to a large and varied collection of actual animal skeletons. Why aren’t digital representations of bones enough?
because the scale of digital models is based on the size of the screen upon which they are viewed, making identifications by direct comparison difficult. Artifictions, however, can be scaled accurately and physically placed alongside actual skeletal elements to enable more direct visual comparison and identifica-tion of specimens, comparable to the use of a reference specimen from a comparative skeletal collection. Additionally, the 3D scanned models can be used for species identification based on selected point-to-point morphometric measurements. (p. 16)
For examples, the authors use the passenger pigeon and the harelip sucker, a freshwater fish that, like the passenger pigeon, went extinct near the beginning of the twentieth century.
While there are still some technical (and budgetary) limitations with the 3D printing process, they argue convincingly that “this is the only non-commercial approach that will make available physical representations of skeletal elements from extinct species for quick distribution to a large number of researchers.” (p. 19) Efforts are underway to make these models available for download. Next, somebody needs to buy me a 3D printer.
Reference:
Manzano, Bruce L., Bernard K. Means, Christopher T. Begley, and Mariana Zechini
2015 Using Digital 3D Scanning to Create “Artifictions” of the Passenger Pigeon and Harelip Sucker, Two Extinct Species in Eastern North America: The Future Examines the Past. Ethnobiology Letters 6(2):15-24.
Edit: Or not. Either it was a glitch on Springer’s part, or an extremely short term offer. The books no longer appear to be free. It was nice while it lasted.
Springer has made a big chunk of its catalog of archaeology and other scientific and technical books freely available for download. There are almost 400 archaeology and anthropology books available, including Dent’s Chesapeake Prehistory, Odell’s Lithic Analysis, most/all volumes of the Encyclopedia of Prehistory, and many more. Titles include underwater archaeology, geoarchaeology, historical archaeology, and biological anthropology. See the books at Springer.
The famous leg lamp from the classic film A Christmas Story was created by the movie’s production designer, Reuben Freed. But how could it not have been inspired by this Archaic Greek leg vase, created in the early sixth century B.C. and on display in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto?
One of the original endangered species is about to be delisted. The Delmarva fox squirrel (Sciurus niger cinereus) will be removed from the endangered species list by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service after populations have rebounded to an estimated 20,000 individuals throughout most of the Delmarva Peninsula (eastern Maryland, southern Delaware, and a tiny piece of Virginia). When it was listed as endangered in 1967, the DFS’s range had been reduced to a small portion of Maryland. The DFS is about twice as big as the more common and widespread gray squirrel (S. carolinensis) and has been described as more laid back – they prefer to quietly roam around forest floors rather than race through trees.
Overhunting and habitat destruction accounted for their endangerment, and they have not been able to adapt to the modern suburban and urban environment as well as the gray squirrel. Stable populations of other subspecies of fox squirrel exist in many states in the eastern half of the United States, but fox squirrels are not found in New Jersey (where they were probably extirpated by the early 1900s) and New England.
More on Fox Squirrels:
3D Fox squirrel skull (not Delmarva)
Citizen Science: Gray Squirrels versus Fox Squirrels in Chicago
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Information
The Peabody Museum of Harvard University announced a test of a recently developed technique that can identify the animals to family or species from extremely small amounts of animal tissue (bone, skin, and other material containing collagen).
Peptide Mass Fingerprinting correctly identified 89 percent of the samples to at least the family level. For more information, see the Peabody Museum announcement.
Open to female zooarchaeologists currently enrolled in graduate school, the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship includes a $1,000 award and a plaque. Nominations for the award are due December 15, 2015.
The official description:
In honor of the late Dienje M. E. Kenyon, a fellowship is offered to support a female archaeologist in the early stages of graduate zooarchaeology training, Kenyon’s specialty. An award of $1,000 will be made. To qualify for the award, applicants must be enrolled an M.A. or Ph.D. degree program focusing on archaeology. Strong preference will be given to applicants in the early stage of research project development and/or data collection, under the mentorship of a zooarchaeologist.
Any submission for the Dienje Kenyon Fellowship is required to have 1) a 1500 word statement of proposed zooarchaeology research towards which the award would be applied, 2) a curriculum vita that clearly indicated when graduate studies began. These materials should be sent as an email attachment (Microsoft Word format) to the committee chair. Additional materials are described below.
For more information: