Book of Archaeology Quotations
I am happy to announce that my first book, The Archaeologist's Book of Quotations, has just been published by the Left Coast Press.
The book contains over 300 quotations from articles and books by archaeologists over the past 200 years, as well as from movies and music and comics and other bits of pop culture, presented in chapters on fieldwork and ethics and whether archaeology is a science or not.
I had a blast putting it together: hope you like it too.
- The Archaeologist's Book of Quotations, Left Coast Press
Should the Streets of Pompeii be Buried?
The Streets of Pompeii is a walking tour of the ruins of Pompeii, one of two Pompeii walking tours that were assembled from photographs taken by several tourists and posted on Flickr, among other places.
Pompeii Street. Photo by Mossaiq
Recently, blogger Archaeopop wrote about a new Google Street View of Pompeii, developed with the full cooperation of the Italian government to give a boost to tourism in their country. Google Street view is video shot at ground and stitched together so that the user can get a personalized stroll through an area. While the tool is a little hard to use at first, when you try it, pretty soon you'll be gliding through the streets of Pompeii staring at ruins in amazement.
Archaeopop is of the opinion that, given the technology afforded by Google Street View, the Italian government should rebury the site, in the interest of preservation. Like the Upper Paleolithic art gallery called Lascaux Cave, Pompeii is suffering from over-exposure to climate and visitors, and Archaeopop believes that the best thing to do is as the French government did for Lascaux: do an interactive, detailed recording project and close it off to visitors. What's your opinion?
- Streets of Pompeii Walking Tour
- Archaeopop: Google Street View comes to Pompeii! Can we rebury it now?
- Google Street View: Pompeii Ruins
- Lascaux Cave, the French government's website
Help Wanted: Contributing Writer for Archaeology
About.com is looking for a professional writer with the background and experience in archaeology and history to cover the sub-topic of Pre-Columbian history in the Americas for my website, Archaeology @ About.com.
An ideal candidate would be an archaeologist, history professor/teacher, or historian who can write knowledgeably for a broad audience on topics related to the Pre-Columbian history.
The contributing writer needs to be capable of expressing complicated concepts and history in simple, practical language, and write for a non-academic audience. Candidates should be able to convey what makes this time period interesting, and should have a lively and engaging writing style. Candidates should have previously published writing--either online or in print--and should be able to secure, with rights to publish, high quality photos of historic sites.
Finally, the successful candidate should be willing and able to work in a collaborative environment with an editor and the current Archaeology Guide.
- Read more about the Contributing Writer position in Precolumbian History and other openings in our CW program.
Fieldwork in Focus: Rio Puccha, Peru
The 2010 season of the ongoing investigations of the Huari-Ancash Archaeological Project will be held in the Rio Puccha valley of Peru. The Huari-Ancash project has been run by Bebel Ibarra of the University of Paris since 2004; and Margarita Brikyte of the project staff sent along this description.
Students at the Huari-Ancash Archaeological Project. Photo courtesy Huari-Ancash Archaeological Project
The aim of this year's archaeology and bio-archaeology field schools is to learn of the lifestyle of the prehispanic population in the valley of Rio Puccha, Peru. Our project revolves around funeral aspects and ancestral cults of Peru's Early Horizon (Chavin, ca. 900-300 BC) and Early Intermediate Horizon (Recuay, ca. 300 BC-600 AD). We are undertaking archaeological excavations in order to obtain information which helps us understand these subjects. From an ongoing analysis of the excavated human remains we seek to learn the kinship ties of the bygone peoples. The project is supported by the Archaeological Museum of Huaraz, Instituto Nacional de Cultura, the Municipality of Huari and the Instituto de Estudios Huarinos.
The project this year will include two archaeology field schools (June 13-July 5, 2010 and July 8-August 3, 2010), and a bioarchaeology field school, concentrating on the human remains (June 13-July 5, 2010). For more information please visit the project website or contact project director Bebel Ibarra at bebel_chavin@yahoo.com
Traveling the Silk Road: A Photo Essay
Last month, a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History opened, called "Traveling the Silk Road". The exhibit features Silk Road artifacts and displays about that vast network of roads which connected the far-flung communities of Asia, from Chang'An in China to the Roman empire, beginning in the second century BC.
In honor of this new exhibit, I've constructed a photo essay comparing some late 19th/early 20th century photographs of Silk Road caravans and markets with the displays in the museum, using some photos provided by the AMNH and others from the U.S. Library of Congress.
The exhibit itself is scheduled to run between November 15, 2009 and August 15, 2010. If you're in the New York City area sometime in the next several months, be sure to drop in!
- Traveling the Silk Road: A Photo Essay
- Traveling the Silk Road, Official Exhibition webpage at the AMNH
- Information Highway: Camel Speed but Exotic Links, review of the exhibition by Edward Rothstein in the NYT
- Along the Silk Road, background
Megafaunal Extinctions and Preclovis
Faithful reader Norah writes: "I read in the paper this week about the disappearance of woolly mammoth and other large-bodied animals at the end of the Ice Age, and how the disappearance happened earlier than first thought. How does this affect what we understand about pre-clovis? Is this support for the presence of humans in North America before Clovis?"
Read more...Vinland
Vinland is the name of the legendary place described in the Viking sagas that was said to have been founded by Leif Ericson on the North American continent. But its connection with the Viking archaeological site in Newfoundland called L'Anse aux Meadows is fraught with controversy. Canadian archaeologist Birgitta Linderoth Wallace has studied L'Anse aux Meadows for the past forty years, and has developed some interesting notions about that precise issue. Wallace's work, published primarily but not exclusively in the 2006 book Westward Vikings: The Saga of L'Anse aux Meadows, isn't often cited, but in my considered opinion, should be.
This woodcut showing Erik Bloodaxe's widow Gunnhild Gormsdóttir inciting her sons to take possession of Norway is from Erik Bloodaxe's Saga, as it was published in Snorre Sturlassons's Heimskringla in 1235. Although Erik Bloodaxe's Saga isn't part of the Vinland sagas, it's one of numerous other Viking sagas. Image uploaded by Christian Krogh
During the first studies at L'Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s, the original excavators rather overdid their reliance on information provided in the Vinland sagas. The Vinland sagas are four manuscripts written in the 11th-13th centuries AD, which describe the adventurous ramblings of the Norse in Iceland, Greenland, and the North American continent. Relying on any historical record for archaeological evidence is dicey, even if the records are confirmed to be authentic manuscripts. The Vinland Sagas are not factual records. They're legends, written down decades or centuries after the described events, and as such they can't be trusted to contain "just the facts". That certainly wasn't the writers' intent: they intended to tell a good story, to glorify an ancestor, to keep the ancient legends alive, or some other intention now lost to the ages.
The early over-reliance on the Viking sagas as fact led later scholars to ditch the sagas as completely untrustworthy; some dismissed the discoverer Leif Ericson as a literary myth. But Wallace bravely cracked open the sagas again, and combining archaeological evidence and historical records has discovered some fairly interesting things, particularly about what Vinland might have meant and whether L'Anse aux Meadows can be tied to a specific place named in the Vinland Sagas.
Read More about Vinland
- Where is Vinland?
- The Vinland Sagas
- L'Anse aux Meadows
- Guide to the Viking Age
Wallace, Birgitta Linderoth. 2006. Westward Vikings: The Saga of L'Anse aux Meadows. St John's, Newfoundland: Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador in association with Parks Canada.
Wallace, Birgitta Linderoth. 2003. L'Anse aux Meadows and Vinland: An Abandoned Experiment. Pp. 207-238 in Contact, Continuity, and Collapse: The Norse Colonization of the North Atlantic, edited by James H. Barrett. Brepols Publishers: Trunhout, Belgium.
National Geographic Expedition Week: Bob Ballard at Gallipoli
I admit right up front that I haven't seen the video "Deep Secrets: The Ballard Gallipoli Expedition", because it wasn't made available to us journalist types prior to the program, which airs on the National Geographic channel Wednesday November 18th. All I know for sure is what is in the press kit.
However, by poking around on the Internet, I have discovered some information on the wreck illustrated in the photograph provided—it is the wreck of a Class E Australian submarine scuttled during the Battle of Çanakkale, on April 30, 1915. HMAS (His Majesty's Australian Ship) AE2 was identified in 1998 by an Australian team led by Mark Spencer; perhaps one of the topics discussed include new discoveries about that. Anyway, see the Reader's Guide to Expedition Week 2009 for what I was able to come up with.
- Bob Ballard at Gallipoli, including what resources I could find that relate to the story
- Deep Secrets: The Ballard Gallipoli Expedition, from National Geographic
NatGeo Expedition Week 2009: Hunt for the Samurai Subs
On Tuesday, November 17, 2009, National Geographic's Expedition Week presents a new video documenting the underwater archaeology discovery of three imperial Japanese submarines, all scuttled by the American forces off Oahu in 1946.
CGI Image of the I-201 Fast Attack Japanese Imperial Navy Submarine. Photo credit: (c)Wild Life Productions
"Hunt for the Samurai Subs" is entertaining and educational, and contains lots of interviews with members of the Japanese and American navies, as well as 1946 footage from one of the American servicemen who watched some of the purposeful scuttlings of the unmanned ships.
This is the kind of stuff that I like to see from National Geographic, well-researched, with interviews from the people concerned and lots of context. Several CGI images of what the subs would have looked like help understand the technology, and the search techniques are explained and illustrated well.
Read my full review and see a couple of additional photographs in National Geographic Expedition Week 2009: Hunt for the Samurai Subs.
- Hunt for the Samurai Subs: A review and two more photographs
- Hunt for the Samurai Subs on National Geographic Week
- Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL) on Samurai submarines
NatGeo Expedition Week: Search for the Amazon Headhunters
This year, like last year, National Geographic Channel plans to dedicate this coming week to airing new exploration videos. This year, like last year, they were kind enough to send them along to me to review. Four of the seven new videos are related to archaeology, and, like last year, I will provide a guide to the interested reader, including context and additional reading for those viewers who might want to research a little deeper.
Tsantsa Head in the Quito Amazonia Museum. Photo © Diverse Productions, Ltd
I wish, I really wish I could say that I liked the first video, Search for the Amazon Headhunters, which premieres on Sunday, November 15, 2009. Last year's Expedition Week had several really wonderful videos, based on scholarly research, and god knows there aren't anywhere near enough of those in the world. But Search for the Amazon Headhunters is just not up to what I've come to expect from National Geographic—which doesn't mean it isn't worth watching, just not for the reasons you might expect.
Here is the first installment of my reviews and context analysis for National Geographic Expedition Week 2009: Search for the Amazon Headhunters. I'll post reviews of the later videos as we get closer to their air dates. See what you think and feel free to argue with me!
- Search for the Amazon Headhunters, viewer's guide and review at About.com
- National Geographic Expedition Week 2008, viewer's guide at About.com
- National Geographic Expedition Week 2009, official home page
- Piers Gibbon, official website