Jun 14 2009
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Hiatus
This blog is on summer hiatus as I spend two months in Portugal and Italy.
Here are a couple of other sites where you can get archaeology news in the meantime:
May 24 2009
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My own review of the exhibition now on view.
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‘Sandy ash produced by a volcano that erupted 456,000 years ago might have helped a huge ancient Roman complex survive intact for nearly 2,000 years despite three earthquakes, according to research presented last week in Rome.
‘X-ray analysis of a wall sample from the Trajan’s Market ruins in Rome showed that the mortars used by ancient Romans contained stratlingite, a mineral known to strengthen modern cements.’
Roman Ruins Survive the Ages Thanks to Volcanic Ash: Discovery News
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Zahi Hawass - The Search for Antony and Cleopatra (via heritagekeymedia)
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Archaeology Magazine Blog » Check Your Venus Fantasies at the Door, Gentlemen
“The idea of the figurines as early pornography is, in my opinion, a dated one, deriving as it does from a time when early anthropologists observed only male hunters carving stone and ivory. Women, early researchers assumed, lacked the physical strength to carve such hard materials. But a detailed search of ethnographic sources by Linda Owen, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, in the 1990s revealed the opposite: women from a number of Arctic and Subarctic societies did indeed work stone and ivory on occasions. “
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Archaeolog: Archaeology, Science Fiction, and Pop Culture
“The ghost of Indy is hard to stamp out. Everywhere archaeologists gather, we complain about how archaeology is portrayed in pop culture: it’s sensationalistic, cheesy, misleading, schlocky! It gives people the wrong impression of what archaeology is.”
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Greek archaeology: Making merry at Knossos
A review of Cathy Gere’s book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.
‘ARCHAEOLOGY is an inexact science, as Sir Arthur Evans, a flamboyant early practitioner, knew. However painstaking the digging process, an excavator can always promote an extravagant theory under the guise of interpreting the finds.
‘Cathy Gere, a British academic, has written a stylish and original cultural history of Knossos, which slots Evans and the Minoans into a broader, modernist world. Anxiety is always present. The Minoans’ most fervent admirers, Ms Gere notes, were all “trying to make sense of some of the weightiest themes of modernity—the death of God, the woman question, the human appetite for war.”’
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Greece to ban gum and high heels from parts of Acropolis
This is terrifically sensible.
“Greece is to ban chewing gum and high heels at parts of the Acropolis, saying they are inflicting irreparable damage on the ancient monument.”
