Britain's Bronze Age Mummies (Time Team)

Bronze Age freaks, articulated display skeletons, mummies and other weird stuff.
Beam to you tv.  1 hr episode.




Click settings for subtitles, then click your preferred subtitle language.

Barbarians Don't Need Archaeology or Cursive (Tony Robbins)

Sir Tony Robinson (the narrator of Time Team) is in the news recently (Guardian) concerning the removal of archaeology and certain other subjects from the A-Level GCE exams in Britain.

For all intents and purposes, the British GCE is the college entrance equivalent of the SAT or ACT in the United States, also required for a high school diploma.

This follows a general trend in the West to gouge out everything that isn't one of two or three core subjects, but 'reading' may be too controversial or discriminatory to last much longer itself.  Much of this is being driven by institutional reaction to social change and trends, but there is also modern pedagogical cancer that views learning as a statistical science; achieve the most economical effort with minimal divergence in outcomes.

At one time adults taught and children learned with the goal of becoming roundly capable and independent citizens, maybe some would even become enlightened.  Now it's all metric-based bullshit.

I guess barbarians don't need to know cursive, speaking, music, history or archaeology.  We shouldn't challenge students.  In a way, that makes sense.

Scanned 3D Beaker Skull

Call for Boggers (Guardian UK)

I just entered a contest to blog on an archaeology/anthropology topic for the Guardian UK.

The submission page is rather simple; click on the link and it'll take you to an easy day question form. I know that some of you commenting on this blog have blogs, degrees and professional experience, so just want to throw this out there for the hoodied masses.

I'd post my submission but I'm running through airports this evening.  My own idea was concerning the destruction of our archaeological heritage and landscapes.  Let me know if you submit something and good luck!

Creating Ancient GeoSpatial Model (Pellegrini, Pouncett, Pearson, Richards, 2016)

An Isotope Geostastical Model via Nature:  Supplementary excel on burials [here].

All previous human mobility studies have compared ancient individuals directly against various geologies that imprecisely deduced that person's history of movement.  The authors spend some time describing why this is problematic, the obvious problem being that without context, the isotopic values are even more difficult to interpret.

What they do here is slightly different in that they look at the variation of an area and subtract the obvious movers (or account for greater variation).  They presume that the majority of non-misfits are local (and on predicted values by the local geology) and then create a profile for what a local of a given area looks like.  (I read it quickly, but I think that is close to the reduced version)

This is part of steady drip from the Beaker People Project. 

Tooth enamel oxygen "isoscapes" show a high degree of mobility in prehistoric Britain
Pellegrini, M. et al. Tooth enamel oxygen “isoscapes” show a high degree of human mobility in prehistoric Britain. Sci. Rep. 6, 34986; doi: 10.1038/srep34986 (2016)
Abstract

A geostatistical model to predict human skeletal oxygen isotope values (δ¹⁸O_p) in Britain is presented here based on a new dataset of Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age human teeth. The spatial statistics which underpin this model allow the identification of individuals interpreted as ‘non-local’ to the areas where they were buried (spatial outliers). A marked variation in δ¹⁸O_p is observed in several areas, including the Stonehenge region, the Peak District, and the Yorkshire Wolds, suggesting a high degree of human mobility. These areas, rich in funerary and ceremonial monuments, may have formed focal points for people, some of whom would have travelled long distances, ultimately being buried there. The dataset and model represent a baseline for future archaeological studies, avoiding the complex conversions from skeletal to water δ¹⁸O values–a process known to be problematic.