Make a Slate Plaque (Jonathan Thomas)

This is a pretty cool idea.  Very easy project for an archaeology aficionado.  I think I might give it a try once I get my free time back and I have the luxury of goofing off.

They're just using floor slate, the same you could buy at any home improvement store for $2 a square foot.

I'm guessing these are students of archaeologist Jonathan Thomas. 



(Clearly some students are better than others!!)



And then the finishing touches.

Genomic Sequencing of Philistine Cemetery (National Geographic)

Via National Geographic...by Kristen Romney

This is a story on the unprecedented discovery of a Philistine Cemetery in Ashkelon, Israel.

I think everyone knows about David and Goliath or Samson and Delilah or the capture of the Ark of the Covenant.  Since this appears to be the first actual cemetery found of the famed Philistines, a lot of questions may be answered about the supposedly Indo-European people.

Genetic analysis may help confirm where the Philistines actually came from; Crete is a likely candidate.  This would be the first time a people associated with the Sea Peoples would have been analyzed.

PHOTOGRAPH BY TSAFRIR ABAYOV via national geographic

"An international team of researchers is currently conducting DNA research, isotopic analysis, and biological distance studies to determine the origin of the population of the Ashkelon cemetery, as well as their relation to other groups in the area. Since the majority of the burials date to at least two centuries after the initial arrival of the Philistines—which may have involved generations of cultural exchange and intermarriage—direct insights into their original origins may be complicated."

Palest Captives of Rameses III (Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, commons)

See also [Alien Minorities in Cyprus and Crete]

and [here]

Bokpot Yusef Interview (ثقافة بيل بيكر)

Here's an interview just posted with Bokpot Yusef on a Moroccan nightly news channel.  It starts about 1:20

Captioning isn't available for this stream yet.  Yusef is an archaeologist that has written extensively on the Bell Beaker phenomenon of Morocco.  Several of the Moroccan Beakers are on the burial pages.

This cave is d’Ifri n’Amr ou Moussa.  This becomes more clear as some of the artifacts are displayed.


I'll put it on the interviews page with the others.  Youtube has auto-captioning when the poster enables.  It's a mouse click. From there you can have auto-translation.

>See also Moroccan Genes at  http://moroccandna.blogspot.com/

ثقافة بيل بيكر

Lidé kultury zvoncovitých pohárů (Národní muzeum)

Good luck with the Czech, no subtitles...

Narrated by Elizabeth Peterkova

Czech Man Buries Dog Finds Woman (Blesk.cz)

A man in Budkovice, Moravia Czech Republic walked into his backyard with a shovel to dig a grave for his pet dog and instead began to dig up the grave of a Beaker woman.  This from Blesk. 

You can the north arrow below that shows the orientation within the grave.  At her head is the funerary beaker at at her feet were two more containers, one is like a little handled jug and the other looks like a plain beaker.

Beaker woman (FOTO: www.uapp.cz)

The buttons of her cloak are interesting because rather than a simple v-perforation, there appears to four perforations along with remnants of the button thread.

Another cause of intrigue was a group of bone links about her pectoral area, either a necklace of some sort or some kind of attachment to another decoration.  (I'm using a translator on several pages and it's garbled)

(FOTO: www.uapp.cz)