655 years ago in the Nordic Bronze Age, a teenage girl was buried in a peat bog wearing a short skirt and crop top, “the best-preserved example of a style now known to be common in northern Europe during the Bronze Age.” #archaeology
on 02025-12-17the #Czech Venus of Dolní Věstonice was found with kilns! ceramics #archaeology
on 02025-10-108000 BCE was “pre-pottery Neolithic” (type site: Jericho) because Mesopotamia didn’t have vessels made of #ceramics, but the oldest known pottery vessels are from Jiangxi from 18000 BCE (in Xianren Cave), and the #Czech Venus of Dolní Věstonice is from 29000–25000 BCE. #archaeology
on 02025-10-10“the last known Native manufacturer of stone arrowheads (...) Ishi, which means “man” in the Yana language, is an adopted name. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave him this name because in the Yahi culture, tradition demanded that he not speak his own name until formally introduced by another Yahi.[2] When asked his name, he said: “I have none, because there were no people to name me”, meaning that there was no other Yahi to speak his name on his behalf.” #archaeology #genocide #human-rights #history
on 02025-09-29“Retouch is the act of producing scars on a stone flake after the ventral surface has been created.[1] It can be done to the edge of an implement in order to make it into a functional tool, or to reshape a used tool.” #archaeology #scouting
on 02025-09-29“The Prehistoric Bone Tool Assemblage from Grivac (Central Serbia)”, January 2013, by Selena Vitezović, Archaeological Institute of Serbia, including an antler retoucheur (“retouching tool”). #archaeology #scouting
on 02025-09-29#Otzi #archaeology #video: he had a “retoucheur” made of an antler point pressed into the end of a wooden handle with just the end of the antler pointing out, which Smiti Nathan explains here was used to sharpen flint blades. Maybe like an “Ishi stick” that didn’t use up precious copper. It looks sort of like a pencil, and presumably you would sharpen the wood to expose more antler when necessary. Mentions that it’s in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology along with his corpse.
on 02025-09-29photo of the oldest recorded transaction from 5000 years ago #archaeology #humor
on 02025-09-06overall article on thermal #energy-storage stoves like #Russian-stoves, #ondol, #dikang, etc. #energy #archaeology
on 02025-09-03#PDF #paper explaining that no #honey has ever actually been found in #archaeology of tombs in #Egypt
on 02025-07-20Tintagel castle on a rock off Cornwall is central to #King-Arthur legend? #archaeology
on 02024-11-27Maybe humans in Brazil 25000 years ago? According to 1491 author Charles Mann. #archaeology
on 02023-07-13#archaeology #colombia #murals #Amazon #petroglyphs in "Cerro Azul"
on 02023-07-12Kermes was an old-world cochineal-like red #dye made from insects, dating back to at least the Neolithic, but now replaced by cochineal. #archaeology #history
on 02022-05-27#paper on low-density urbanism in the Amazon. #archaeology
on 02022-05-26Karahan Tepe is 11k-13k years old and may be older than any other city or protocity, and its megaliths are 6500–8500 years older than the previously oldest ones at Ggantija in Malta. Necmi Karul of Istanbul University is the head archaeologist of Tas Tepeler, the region. #archaeology https://archive.ph/ER5d9
on 02022-05-21a Bronze Age battle 3200 years ago (1250 BCE) on the banks of the Tollense River near the Baltic Sea, 120 km from Berlin #archaeology #Germany
on 02021-03-02#Paper on a timber-framed well found in Leipzig in 2012 framed with tusk tenons, built by the Linear Pottery culture around 5000 BCE. #archaeology
on 02020-10-01Hypothesis that the Roman dodecahedra were for sling bullet quality control, and a modern method of #3D scanning using Fluorinert displacement. “Modernization of an Ancient Technology to Provide New Scanning Applications” #archaeology
on 02017-07-1325 new fragments of “Dead Sea Scrolls” of uncertain provenance found in antiquities markets #archaeology
on 02016-10-10almost all non-Africans trace our descent to a single emigration from Africa 50 000 years ago, with near-immediate divergence; there’s a competing hypothesis by Mait Metspalu of an earlier dispersal, 120 000 years ago. But that would be before the #Toba catastrophe, 75 000 ± 900 years ago. #archaeology
on 02016-09-24A chapter from Livio Catullo Stecchini’s #ebook “A History of Measures”, based on his doctoral dissertation (sometime in the mid-20th-century?), about ancient #metrology and the #archaeology of Mesopotamia. The images are lost, but the chapter claims that the Sumerian cubit was close to twice 249.7 mm and was divided into 30 “fingers” or, I suppose, šusi, and that earlier Sumerologists who believed in a 16-finger #Sumerian “foot” were misinterpreting a single statue from a temple dedicated by Sumerian regent Gudea. Also he derives pre-metric European units of measure from Mesopotamian and Babylonian-Egyptian units.
on 02016-09-11#archaeology of the 312-grave cemetery in Varna, #Bulgaria, shows that at least that #Copper-Age people had strong social stratification and patriarchy 6500 years ago, from 4600 BCE to 4200 BCE, followed by a bloodless civilizational collapse around 4000 BCE, perhaps due to #climate-change.
on 02016-08-12a ball of plant-fiber thread preserved after fire damage for 3000 years in a bog. #archaeology
on 02016-08-03The game of #Senet was played for 3000 years, ending only 1500 years ago, but now its rules are lost to #history; the rules reconstructed in #archaeology result in a boring game. #games #archival
on 02016-07-11Images of ancient Roman #weaponry #history #archaeology
on 02016-06-28804 bamboo slips buried since about 300 BCE (near the end of the Zhou) were found in 1993 in the tomb of an elderly teacher of Crown Prince Heng of Chu, now part of #China, one of the #Guodian-tombs. #archaeology #history #archival
on 02016-04-20It seems like we might have found some #books from the #history of #China from before #Qin-Shi-Huang burned everything, smuggled into Hong Kong in 2008, now at Tsinghua University, being studied by Li Xueqin. It’s not totally clear from the article how many there are and whether they’re one #archaeology find or several, but I think it says they were buried around 300 BCE, near the end of the Zhou, just a century before Qin Shi Huang and stolen from one of the #Guodian-tombs in 1993 in the village of Guodian, in Hubei province; 1200 slips were bought by the Shanghai Museum at the time. Dartmouth paleographer Sarah Allan has written a new book about them, Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts, with a translation of four Confucian texts; an annotation and translation of the 800 Guodian slips is Scott Cook’s The Bamboo Texts of Guodian. #archival
on 02016-04-20how writing grew out of counting and #accounting #history #archaeology
on 02016-02-10Nick #Szabo writing on the #archaeology of #money and how it relates to seals, rituals, and I suppose implicitly #Bitcoin, though he wrote it in 2002.
on 02015-08-14