And not enjoying it quite yet.
Well, I like being in my own large and relatively uncluttered house with my adoring felids, but. . . . .eh. You know.
July 28, 2012
July 27, 2012
Vampire archaeology update
For those who read the archaeoblog on June 6th of this year, there is an update on our Bulgarian vampire story. The vampire has been reburied and ritually laid to rest by the “Bulgarian Indiana Jones” — Nikolay Ovcharov.
Earlier in June, Bulgarian archaeologists in the Black Sea town of Sozopol found the grave of a medieval noble whose skeleton had a metal spike in its chest, an apparent precaution ritual against vampirism designed to prevent the dead person from rising from his grave as a vampire. Within a few weeks, the discovery, which made global headlines, was followed by a couple of more instances of unearthing of medieval graves bearing signs of rituals against vampirism.
Unlike the first “vampire” in Sozopol, however, the one whose grave was uncovered by Ovcharov and Vachev in Veliko Tarnovo did not have a spike in his chest but was buried with his hands and feed tied, and with pieces of ember placed inside the grave. According to ethnographic experts, these are signs of a medieval ritual designed to prevent after-death vampirism.
Also unlike the other medieval “vampire“, whose grave was found in Sozopol, and whose skeleton has been taken to Bulgaria’s National History Museum in Sofia, the “vampire” found in Veliko Tarnovo was reburied by Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov after it was studied by the archaeologists.
As part of the ritual, red wine was poured on the remains (I assume this is symbolic of blood, like other rituals that use ochre?). Obviously times are tough if wine only comes in 1-litre disposable water-bottles:
July 26, 2012
Oh that Mona Lisa smile … did she take some secret to the grave?
Perhaps I should have saved this for Halloween, but
Researchers are searching for Lisa Gheradini, that who we usually call Mona Lisa. Excavations of a crypt at a nunery in Florence have revealed several skeletons, with video and news article postings of the project.
The team began digging up the convent’s new cement floor last year, after fresh documents confirmed that Gherardini, the wife of rich Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, had lived in the convent after her husband died and was looked after by her two daughters, who were nuns.
She was eventually interred there.
Video and news article at:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-25/archaeologists-close-in-on-real-mona-lisa/4153160
July 25, 2012
Embarrassing find of … er … a “marital aid” thought to be fungus
Proving yet again that fact can be stranger than fiction. (Or if this is fiction, someone has a WICKED sense of humor). A friend of mine (a primatologist) sent me a link to this news story about a village in China (Liucunbu, near Xian) where an artifact from a well turned out to be a naughty sex toy. I thought this might be a prank story, but ABC picked it up, so that lends credibility to the story in my mind. You could say that the mistaken fungus Ganoderma lucidum has gone “VIRAL”. The whole thing is nicely written with double-entendres, however, such as this short quote:
Villagers from Liucunbu, a rural community outside western Chinese city of Xi’an, encountered the sex toy while drilling a new well shaft. Hard-pressed to identify the flexible, fungi-like object, perplexed residents alerted the local news station, which immediately sent reporter Yunfeng Ye to the scene.
[....] The report opens with Ye proclaiming the discovery of the mysterious object, the likes of which “not even an 80-year-old local man has seen.” Villagers crouch around the object, floating innocently in a water-filled bucket. “It has an eye and a nose, but we don’t know what it is,” says a man who was among the drillers who discovered the sex toy.
Describing the object’s qualities in explicit detail [....]
Oh, my, someone had fun writing that story. Xian is much more famous (in my mind) for the tomb of Qin Shi Huang Di.
Legend has it that the actual tomb of the emporer has a map of his empire with his body at the center. Above him are the stars of his realm, represented by pearls in the tomb’s ceiling. Scarily enough, the map also contains 100 rivers of his empire, created with mercury in the floor of the tomb. I don’t think I want to be the one to excavate that tomb.
On the Road. . . .with ArchaeoBlog
An update from the road. I’m typing this slowly, not so you can read it that way (yuk yuk) but am on the old iPad with its virtual keyboard. T the public library.
Nothing exciting going on so far save for some adventures involving thunderstorms, rerouting, refueling, and being stranded in the Milwaukee airport (nearly) for not having a true credit card with which to rent a vehicle. Things went uphill from there,happily.
Hot here, 101 a couple of days ago, 95ish today. Very dry, looks like a typical Seattle summer with all the dry lawns. been doing virtually nothing of any archaeological import,although the other morning I was surprised to read a little lure in Smithsonian from a few years ago about my friend Dolores Elkin an Argentine archaeologist. Will have some historicalish photos next week.
Ciao.
July 24, 2012
No finds or news today, the 115th birthday of Amelia Earhart
Today’s July 24, 2012 Google doodle:
A $ 2.2 million expedition to the Pacific island of Nikumaroro has come back with no airplane parts or other new evidence for the presence of Amelia Earhart. They do have tons of sonar data and video to analyze, however, so massive gobs of data are coming back with the expedition. (In my mind, data come in dribs or gobs, depending on the amount).
This follows some former archaeoblog posts earlier this year, and in the past, as well as many press releases and news updates and conference findings over the past few years. The one I remember most vividly (at an archaeology conference I attended) was the shoe found on Nikumaroro.
Other finds from 2007 and other visits to the island included some burnt turtle bones that Earhart and Noonan may have eaten, a “freckle cream” jar that was announced earlier this year, coke bottles, a salt shaker, human bones (found in the 1940s & now missing), a sextant (also found earlier & now missing), aluminum and plexiglass sherds, part of a period zipper, mirror fragments, and some possible rouge.
My favorite summary of the evidence comes from:
http://archaeology.about.com/od/pacificislands/a/king_ae.htm
but there are other pages out there. I found a photo of the ground at the seven site, and visually finding items in the coral hash looks very challenging to me. If you are really interested, a very detailed set of information is available at the TIGHAR.ORG website, and I have found their wiki interesting (you can see photos of the seven site, historic photos, maps, etc, at the TIGHAR wiki called “Ameliopedia“).
P.S. You can thank me for not using my alternate title for this post “Waiting for the other shoe to drop.” That is really, really a bad title, no?
July 23, 2012
Billed as “more rare than gold” — archaeologist finds important De Soto site literally in his yard
Archaeologist Ashley White has found artifacts on his property in Marion County, Florida, that strongly indicate that he has found the site of Potano, visited by De Soto in 1539. Temporal and cultural identification of the artifacts comes from the minting date of a Spanish coin found at the site, and the technological attributes of the chain mail (manufactured by methods that went out of favor by the 1600s). They also found a domesticated (European-introduced) pig jaw at the site, and glass beads found there are consistent with the date and cultural affiliation. I love it when dating can be done without expenive radiometric procedures, and I also love it when zooarchaeology can come to the rescue. Personally, I have been fascinated with the De Soto’s travels in what is now the U.S. for several years (especially the descriptions of the Yazoo area), and the more I learn about DeSoto, the weirder his life story seems to be. It wasn’t until 1997 that I learned he died in Arkansas and it wasn’t until 2003 (I’m just slow) that I realized that he also traveled to South America and was one of the first Europeans to interact with the Inca (whether you consider that to mean “Inca people,” “Inca empire,” or “Inca/King” — it works for any of the meanings of that word).
I am totally convinced by the evidence that this is a De Soto site, and here’s the clincher: Jerald Milanich is quoted saying:
There is absolutely no doubt that is a De Soto contact site, and I am 99.99 percent sure this is the town of Potano
For more links (text and some maps & photos):
http://www.gainesville.com/assets/HTML/DeSotoSitemap/DeSotoSiteMap.htmlhttp://www.ocala.com/section/TOPIC0212
http://www.gainesville.com/assets/HTML/DeSotoTravelsInFlorida/DeSotoTravelsInFlorida.html
July 22, 2012
More road work … in Onalaska, Wisconsin
Even when our fearless archy blogger is on vacation in Wisconsin, archaeology surrounds him.
Road work is a common way to find sites, and also a common reason to “mitigate” sites that are already known. The site under Highway 35 in Wisconsin had been found earlier, but new construction activities meant more archaeological investigations, and a high density of features (mostly pits) and some bone fragments (possibly human) were found — more than anticipated. If the bones are human, that creates repatriation issues for local nations (descendants) under NAGPRA. The site is late prehistoric, Oneota culture. One of the interesting things they found was a bison hoe, which is very common further west with Plains Village tradition (a co-eval culture). Whether the item go there through trade or from Oneota people traveling west to hunt bison, it is intriguing. This time period tended to be one where groups defended themselves against other groups (Plains Village folk constructed defensive bastions and ditches, for example), so evidence of interaction and/or travel between cultural areas is interesting.
July 21, 2012
Did someone say “gold”?
More gold news to follow earlier gold news (July must be the month of pure gold). Two god necklaces were recovered from two newly-discovered Roman tombs in Debelt (Bulgaria). The tombs were not discovered by using written records, GPR, magnetometry, shovel tests, or many of the other standard methods employed in archaeology. They were discovered by the most common method, luck. A cement truck was too heavy for a local road, ruining the road and caving in the surface. That road surface turned out to be the marble slab on top of one of the tombs. Bad luck turned to good luck, turned to gold.
Another great thing about gold, is that it allows me to dwell on the following photo:
July 20, 2012
And here’s what I look like today
I am currently waiting for my radiocarbon dating results so that I can make plans on how to date the rest of my sediments. I took a 143-cm long core at an archaeological site. I was hoping to get at least a 3,700 year sediment record, but I am thinking what I got was only recent/historic sediments. There are ways of checking, and I am thinking of using 137Cs (which is an unstable isotope of Cesium with a short half-life of only about 30 years ) or using 210Pb (which is also short lived, in the archaeological sense, with a half life of 22.3 years) to get chronological control on my relatively young sequence. As they say, archaeologists will do almost anything for a date (but we hate waiting or getting bad results) …
