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

Native American Archaeology isn't the only archaeology of North America. There is the historic period, generally referring to that period after Columbus landed about 500 years ago, and, of course, there's the odd bits of Norsemen over at L'Anse aux Meadows by about 1000 AD.

But since the entire human history of the continent began about 15,000 years ago (or so, quibbling found elsewhere), well, that means there's a lot to be said.

Being an Americanist by training, I have said a lot about Native American prehistory here over the years; but getting it all together and publishing it in one nicely accessible place is something I'm only just now getting together. Here's a head start:

• Populating America
• Pre-Clovis
• Paleoindian
• American Archaic
• Mississippian

More to come...