The tasty dried meat product called jerky, available nearly everywhere, and made of nearly every conceivable kind of meat, has a name which is derived from the South American version called ch'arki.

Although preserving meat in a smoked, salted or freeze-dried way was certainly not (only) invented in South America, ch'arki refers to a preserved meat from the highland Andes of Peru, and it is and was made primarily (but not exclusively) from llama and alpaca meat. Ch'arki's archaeological history is pretty slim, Jim (if you'll pardon the expression), so we have to rely on ethnographic reports on traditional cooking methods. That makes it a pretty interesting story...

• Read more about Ch'arki
• Read about the Schlep Effect, an interpretive methodology derived by archaeologists
• Read about Llamas and Alpacas

I don't know about you, but I've always been confused about llamas and alpacas. In zoos I've visited, they looked pretty similar to me, and never having done much study on them, well, all I knew was they were domesticated in South America, somewhere high in the Andes.

It turns out they are pretty similar. The wild forms of the species evolved from the same creature some two million years ago. Both were domesticated in the same time and place, and, like their distant camel cousins, both were and are used for meat, and their dung was and is used for fuel. But each came from a different wild camel form and each has a distinct and very useful quality that made both of them vital for the survival of the cold climate Andean herders who turned them into domesticates.

• Read the history of Llamas and Alpacas
• Or their cousins, Bactrians and Dromedaries
• More Animal Domestication Stories

Abri Pataud is an important Upper Paleolithic cave site located at the base of a bluff in the Dordogne valley of south central France, one of several sites in this part of France that can be seen by visitors.

Pataud (the "abri" just means "cave") has fourteen occupations dated between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, including crucial Gravettian and Aurignacian occupations with lots of evidence for Upper Paleolithic art work--drawings, paintings, carvings, personal ornaments, even a venus figurine.

Best of all, it was excavated by Hallam Movius in the 1950s and 1960s. By all accounts, Movius did a stellar piece of excavation and recording, particularly for his era, and although his notes are as yet unpublished, they are extensive enough to be used to support modern scholarly research sixty years later.

• Read my summary of research at Abri Pataud
• Plan your visit to the museum

For some mysterious reason, faience--that striking turquoise colored stuff used as fake precious stones in Mesopotamia and Egypt beginning some 5500 years ago or so--has always fascinated me.

A new article in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science describing the cementation production technique gives me an excuse to freshen up my piece from 2007, and find this terrific photo from the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis in Uzbekistan.

• Read more about the latest research on faience

Matin M, and Matin M. 2012. Egyptian faience glazing by the cementation method part 1: an investigation of the glazing powder composition and glazing mechanism. Journal of Archaeological Science 39(3):763-776.