I love a good shrine, don't you? Here are some archaeological studies of shrines.

• What is a 'shrine' anyway?
• Yazilikaya, Hittite shrine in Turkey
• Minoan Peak Sanctuaries
• Hofstadir, Vikings in Iceland
• Inca Ceque System
• Inca Road Shrines
• Delphi, classical Greek shrine
• Huaca de la Luna, Moche in Peru
• Gottschall Rockshelter, Wisconsin
• Great Churches of the World

Faithful Reader Malcolm Davidson sends along this quotation to add to our pile:

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC). 55 BC. De Oratore, Section 120

• De Oratore
• Cicero: A Biography
• More Quotations

I've more or less lost count, but I believe this is Quotation #220.

I can't decide whether to laugh or cry, but here is the best use for a crystal skull I've seen to date---as a bottle for selling vodka.

The website has a ludicrously long, yakkity video essay from actor Dan Ackroyd about crystal skulls and why they're just so darn groovy. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be anything else on the site except some mystical, archaeology-like graphics. God knows whether the vodka's any good.

Says Ackroyd, "According to (glass maker) Bruni, no one has ever attempted to make a bottle of such quality and complexity as I hold in my hand."

Uh huh. Ah, what the heck. Think how neat it would look sitting on the wet bar.

• Crystal Head Vodka
• Crystal Skulls, Indiana Jones and Damien Hirst

Hmm. Mysteriously, in the time it took to put this together, the video on the page no longer runs for me. Maybe you'll have better luck with it...

Every year, that ridiculously unimportant journal, The Annals of Improbable Research (or AIR), awards Ig-Nobel prizes, in a ceremony held on the grounds of (where else?) Harvard University. This year, a couple of archaeologists won an Ig-Nobel. Congratulations, guys!

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE
Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.

REFERENCE: "The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach," Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino, Geoarchaeology, vol. 18, no. 4, April 2003, pp. 433-60.

• More 2008 winners
• Live Webcast of the IgNobel Ceremonies
• Annals of Improbable Research