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Treasure!

Uncle B lost a spring in the long grass today, so I dug out my metal detector. It was pretty grubby after ten years in the closet, but a new set of batteries and – works!

By the time I’d got it together, he’d found his thing in the grass without my help, so I decided to do a pass around the garden. And look! I found – a big rusty bolt! It’s still got the nut!

Yes. Well.

Uncle B kindly bought me this detector when we first moved in (because, you know, Tudor farmhouse) and then I found out all the fields around me are protected land. No detectoring allowed. So I went up and down my own lawn like a sad person and found a lot of shit like this. Gosh, people have thrown out a lot of metal junk over the years.

Completely coincidentally, we’ve been re-watching one of our favorite programs from a few years back: the Detectorists. It’s seriously one of the best written and acted programs I’ve seen. I don’t think I’ve ever recommended it on the blog, though, because an awful lot of the humor is around modern English village life. I don’t know how well it would travel.

But what do I know? Uncle B loved MST3K.

June 7, 2021 — 7:14 pm
Comments: 11

Somebody got some poor customer service

They’ve unearthed a 2,300-year-old year old curse under the floor of the Athenian agora. It was a ceramic jar filled with the skull and lower leg bones of a young chicken. It was pierced by an iron nail (more of an iron spike, if you ask me).

On the outside – written by two different hands – were the names of as many as 55 people (a lot of the writing was worn away) and words that may mean “we bind.”

That’s when the Gregorian chants started.

Okay, Gregorian chants are not really appropriate for ancient Greek curses, but I haven’t seen many horror movies about ancient Greeks. “We bind” kind of creeps me out, for some reason.

Anyway, because it was under the marketplace, leading speculation is that these two were in a lawsuit with the names on the jar, probably craftsmen. Apparently, trials were common in Athens at the time and a bit of a spectator sport.

I have to think our legal system would only be improved by the addition of nail and chicken bone curses.

June 3, 2021 — 8:12 pm
Comments: 3

Soggy

The second day of the Doggerland conference was a little more accessible. The thing that struck me most was right at the beginning: it wasn’t just Doggerland. A very considerable amount of coastline all over the world was drowned by seas that rose for thousands of years. The amount of land lost during this period equals roughly the land mass of South America.

It’s all the black areas in the picture above (this image worked so much better in color).

This is significant because those coastal areas would have been the most hospitable to human habitation at the end of the last ice age. In other words, much of the archaeology of Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic cultures all over the world is perhaps still there, waiting to be found under the silt off the eastern coastlines of everywhere. Woo!

Have a good weekend, fellow Neanderthals!

May 7, 2021 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 18

That was heavy going

Okay, I knew the Doggerland conference was for archaeology professionals and not scum like me, but it was still heavier going than expected.

Like, there was the man who talked for half an hour about the chemistry of how DNA breaks down over time, with molecular orbital diagrams and long strings of equations. And after half an hour of this, he concluded by saying they found DNA evidence of walnut, walnut didn’t grow in Western Europe at the time, so it is probable evidence of both humans and trade.

See, the dumbed-down-for-weasels, popsci version would be just that last bit.

Still and all, every one of the talks had an interesting bit, so it’s worth attending day 2.
Excuse me, my puzzler hurts.

May 6, 2021 — 7:56 pm
Comments: 7

And now for something much farther afield

Photo by Jakub Hałun. I’ve cropped it and made it monochrome.

Behold, the Plain of Jars! It’s in Laos. They’ve found a bunch more in the jungle.

These things are seriously large – like, ten feet tall – and they know eff-all about the people who made them. The speculation is that these jars were used as part of funerary practices – to allow bodies to be picked clean before burial as bones. But why would they need so many? Did everyone have a family corpse jar?

They’ve found some more conventional burials (conventional for us, anyway) nearby that they can date to 2,500 years ago. They have no idea if the burial people had any relationship to the jar people. The burials were often capped with a round stone elaborately carved on the underside.

The idea of re-using other people’s sacred spaces is something that came up in that day-long course on West Yorkshire burial mounds. There was one mound in particular that started as a pit, with very old bones at the bottom (which showed signs of cannibalism). A couple more later burials higher up in the pit. When it was level with the ground, there were several more burials that had earth over them, so it began to become a mound. I believe there were a few cremation urns in there, which is late mesolithic. The mound kept growing until it finally assumed the shape we see today. The last burials were Anglo-Saxon, which is thousands of years more recent (and a whole ‘nother people).

Speculation is that the original pit must have been covered with a marker of some kind so they could find it again.

If you find the Plain of Jars at all interesting, I recommend hitting the link and then following the other links embedded in the article. They leads to lots more pictures and data.

Speaking of prehistory, a reminder that the two-day conference on Doggerland is coming up Thursday and Friday. I shall have my nose in a Zoom all day, but I’ll let you know if anything interesting turns up.

May 5, 2021 — 8:27 pm
Comments: 5