Unfortunately: Hackers on anti-Egypt spree bury Egyptology journal in the sand
Hackers waging war against Egyptian websites have forced the closure of Egyptological, a journal on Egyptology.
Egyptologist Kate Phizackerley, who published the web periodical with Andrea Byrnes, has also closed down her personal blog for the same reason. Egyptological was shut down after it was “targeted by a professional hacking group as part of an onslaught on Egypt-related websites” during a wave of unrest that started late last year.
The hackers see Egyptology sites as “representing a form of political threat”, according to Phizackerley. For now, she has abandoned hope of restoring Egyptological and her personal website after negotiations with the hackers broke down.
Fuck you, hackers.
Pardon the French.
From The Israeli Antiquities Authority Archive. I did a bit of searching, there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot as of yet, but it’s a good start.
A recent paper on the PLOS Genetics open-access journal (Sankararaman S, Patterson N, Li H, Pääbo S, Reich D PLoS Genet 8[10] 2012) looks at a topic that has been subjected to much debate over the years – the interbreeding of Neanderthals and modern humans. The abstract for the article, entitled The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans, which is free to access, is as follows
Comparisons of DNA sequences between Neandertals and present-day humans have shown that Neandertals share more genetic variants with non-Africans than with Africans. This could be due to interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans when the two groups met subsequent to the emergence of modern humans outside Africa. However, it could also be due to population structure that antedates the origin of Neandertal ancestors in Africa. We measure the extent of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the genomes of present-day Europeans and find that the last gene flow from Neandertals (or their relatives) into Europeans likely occurred 37,000–86,000 years before the present (BP), and most likely 47,000–65,000 years ago. This supports the recent interbreeding hypothesis and suggests that interbreeding may have occurred when modern humans carrying Upper Paleolithic technologies encountered Neandertals as they expanded out of Africa.
The PLOS paper has inspired the National Geographic to put together a useful summary of recent research findings about Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, challenging some of the older preconceptions, quoting various experts, including Chris Stringer, and bringing together the information from some relatively recent articles. As with the PLOS Genetics article, the emphasis in the article is on interbreeding with our fair selves, and the degree to which Neanderthals may have displayed “human” traits. If you’ve not had chance to follow the recent work on the subject and feel like sitting down with an easily digestible roundup of it, this is a good place to start.
My first foray into both of my fields of study at the same time: Public Health in Ancient Egypt
Here’s the abstract:
Most studies of health and illness in ancient Egypt concentrate on disease and other maladies affecting individuals and the medical treatments administered to individuals. However, the concept of public health has received comparatively little attention, largely because the practice of public health has been seen as a fairly modern phenomenon tied to purely scientific notions of the sources and causes of illness and disease and their prevention. Nevertheless, even in the absence of a true germ theory of disease, the ancient Egyptians did possess an understanding of the social context in which many disease conditions occurred and took steps to prevent and alleviate certain conditions at a group level. From fairly basic public health practices, such as the removal of trash to peripheral locations, to reasonably sophisticated theories on the origin of disease and the widespread promulgation of preventive practices, ancient Egypt shows that even in pre-scientific complex societies an awareness of the social context of health and disease existed. Egypt and other ancient societies developed strategies to deal with health and wellness on a community and national level and thus are amenable to study using modern public health theory.
So, whaddayathink?
Mine! Monument Survey of Calvary Catholic Cemetery, Seattle, Washington.
It’s not entirely exhaustive, but gives a good summary of the main findings. Sadly, I neglected to acknowledge all of the assistance I received from commenters here on inscription translations and such. My bad.
Andie sent this link along to QuarryScapes Publications. Haven’t looked through it much yet though.
Andie passed this link along for a freely available paper: Archaeology and Knowledge: The History of the African Provinces of the Roman Empire
I’ve perused the first couple of pages and it’s fairly typical for the 1970s and early 1980s: What is archaeology anyway?
I begin with the proposition that archaeology is at best a methodol- ogy, and at worst a mere technique, by which we acquire a certain type of knowledge about the past.
Someone else once remarked that “Archaeology is what archaeologists do” or something to that effect. I’d never really looked into what classical archaeologists were doing with all the theoryfying that American and some Europeans were doing in the Great New Archaeology phase. Probably not sitting around contemplating the hypothetico-deductive model and nomothetic classifications. . . . .
Anyway, it’s being dumped to the ol’ iPad for further reading and I suggest y’all do something similar.
U of Chicago has Karl Butzer’s classic Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt available for download as a PDF. Really a classic study on both early Egypt and the “cultural ecology” philosophy. Kinda big, but worth snagging and reading if you have a mind to.
Online paper alert: Eva-Lena Wahlberg’s MA thesis The Wine Jars Speak: A text study is available online.
