A Nashville resident making flood repairs has uncovered what is likely a Native American burial ground.

State Archaeologist Mike Moore told The Tennessean the remains found in a Bellevue yard are between 500 and 1,000 years old. He saw evidence that the bodies were placed in limestone slab coffins, also known as stone-box graves.

New one on me, I did not know of stone box graves in that area before now. Probably the most underreported natural disaster of the last year (the flood, that is).

Renovation of a South Side park will move forward now that an archaeologist has determined that it’s only named for Indian burial mounds and not home to them.

The city shut down excavation at Indian Mound Park after the Ohio Historic Preservation Office asked it last week to make certain that the park, at the northwest corner of Obetz Road and Parsons Avenue, wasn’t a historical site of Native American activity.

Actually, I guess that’s a good thing, all things considered.

A new trail has been launched to highlight the Solent’s rich coastal heritage – both above and below the water.

Visitors on land can discover the information on conventional leaflets and interpretation panels.

However boats can sail to yellow buoys marking shipwrecks in the Solent. Calling a dedicated phone number relays a message about the wreck beneath them.

“I love mystery stories,” she said.

Her specialty is the epiclassic era, A.D. 100-900 in Mexico, which includes the Mayans and their infamous calender that ends in 2012 and has caused some consternation around the world.

“They had a specific time they started their calender and all their time is calculated from there,” Garing said. “The Mayans were one of the first to make use of the concept of zero. Their base was not 10 but 20.”

Oh, and there are 500 days remaining.

I’m reading a paper on. . . .turds:
Rhode, D. 2003. Coprolites from Hidden Cave, revisited: evidence for site
occupation history, diet and sex of occupants. Journal of Archaeological
Science 30:909-922.

Yes, turds. I’ve been starting research into public health in hunter-gatherer populations and one of the most basic group behaviors that would contribute to the health of the group would seem obvious: disposing of “personal waste” outside of the immediate living areas. Haven’t found any refs specifically going into the spatial distribution of turds in relation to apparent living areas, although I seem to recall something along those lines at some point in my graduate career (I may be thinking of food wastes however). I fear I may have to go back to monographs or excavation reports where they may have been mapped in to find the actual distributions. . . most papers deal with the contents of the turds rather than their locations, although that will be important as well.

So, yes, your humble correspondent will have his mind in something resembling a sewer this evening.

Archaeologists trying to unravel the history behind an 18th century ship excavated from ground zero have found some important maritime clues: birdshot pellets, musket balls and small cannon shot the size of golf balls embedded in the ship’s wooden planks.

Why on a merchant ship? There were New Jersey “gangsters” who hid in the marshes of the Hudson River and attacked ships as they entered New York Harbor, said Warren Riess, 62, lead maritime archaeologist and historian working on the dig. Some of the remnants also may have come from weapons the ship’s own crew used to protect it.

“There were still some pirates in the Caribbean at the time, but there were also gangsters in New Jersey who came out of the marshes and did some nasty things,” he said.

Not a whole lot new, but a couple of interesting items mentioned.

oette Marie Rex lives west of remote Escalante in southern Utah, but she’s no homesteader: An excavation by archaeologists from Brigham Young University unearthed evidence that the site of Rex’s inn may be one of the oldest inhabited places in the area.

The prehistoric dwelling place, called the North Creek Shelter Site, is behind Rex’s bed-and-breakfast and has been known for decades. But it wasn’t until 2003 that archaeologists began digging through layers of cultural eras until they stopped 12 feet down at the Paleoarchaic period, which dates back to at least 9,000 B.C.

“We knew of pictographs and petroglyphs, but suspected there might be a village,” said Rex, who owns the Slot Canyons Inn.

Over the last two decades, John Coleman Darnell and his wife, Deborah, hiked and drove caravan tracks west of the Nile from the monuments of Thebes, at present-day Luxor. These and other desolate roads, beaten hard by millennial human and donkey traffic, only seemed to lead to nowhere.

In the practice of what they call desert-road archaeology, the Darnells found pottery and ruins where soldiers, merchants and other travelers camped in the time of the pharaohs. On a limestone cliff at a crossroads, they came upon a tableau of scenes and symbols, some of the earliest documentation of Egyptian history. Elsewhere, they discovered inscriptions considered to be one of the first examples of alphabetic writing.

It’s not like there hasn’t been any work at Kharga; do a search on “kharga oasis in prehistory” for several links to some earlier work, and the Macdonald link (a PDF) shows that others (unless they were associated with this project as well) have been looking for much the same things. Especially note that, yes, those intrepid explorers (and darn good archaeologists) Caton-Thompson and Gardner, were out there in the 1930s.

Doesn’t detract from this, obviously, but other fairly substantial remains are known.

I don’t eat a lot of meat anymore, not particularly for health or ethical reasons, mostly because I don’t care for it much (except for BBQ, of course). I was never much of a steak eater either. I was never particularly good at cooking the dumb things either; too hard to get the right mix of being done and being tender. But eh, whatever, I don’t miss it much (beef steaks, that is).

Except we were at the grocery store today and they had t-bones on sale. Two big hunks of meat for $10. Decent meat! Steak-and-eggs meat! Meat-and-potatoes meat! Hence, I regressed back to 1950s Man and made a couple of steaks on the grill. No spices, no nothing, just meat — with Adolph’s meat tenderizer, due to the ArchaeoWife’s continuing use of braces which requires very tender meat.

And corn on the cob. And pea salad. The only things missing from the plate were potatoes and Jell-O salad. Or just a bit of side salad.

And apple pie for dessert.

Behold, I am a mid-century Man and I have grilled my steaks over an open flame. The meat took up over half the plate. It was pink and tender and delicious.

The only thing missing was a Schlitz.

I kinda like steak sauce although I don’t have any now (never eat steak so why bother?). I was an A1 man, although I could get into Heinz 57 as well. These days I think I would prefer it plain. Seasoned with salt and pepper only.

And tomorrow I hit the gym and then head up in my Mustang to do fieldwork. In the rain.

I can feel the testosterone dripping off of me like a leaky gasket.

UPDATE: And then I watched football.

[slightly edited as well]