Blood, Guts ‘n’ DNA
There’s probably all three if you’re a victim of the Bubonic plague. The Archaeozoologist has the gruesome details of how Black Death has been identified as Yersinia pestis. I’m perfectly ok with the idea of examining a victim of the Black Death, it’s the idea of drilling into someone’s teeth that makes my skins crawl.
Sticking with the Black Death, Per Omnia Saecula has a post on Medieval DNA and Modern Medicine commenting on an abstract of an article I’ll have to read Will a cemetery excavation establish a link between the Black Death and resistance to AIDS?
Via Sociolingo’s Mali comes the news that blood has been identified on artefacts from ancient Mali, using a new non-invasive method to examine the patina. Use of arefacts can leave a residue on them, but often it’s not enough to be able to identify what it is. If the technique is practical for regular use then in the future museums shall echo with cries of “£#@&ing hell, it’s ANOTHER one they dug up without using gloves!”
Glen Gordon at Paleoglot has been looking at the Piacenza Liver and Finding structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap Part 1 and Part 2. The Piacenza Liver is an artefact which supposedly reveals the Etruscan view of how the universe works, and it’s tied to haruspicy the art of reading entrails. I’ve lost my opinion on Etruscan cosmology in recent months. I used to think they had an influence on other peoples. The idea was that when laying out a city a priest would stand with his back to the north and lay out an orthogonal grid. Archaeological evidence suggests that could be an anachronism, and Glen undermines this further by pointing out that the liver does not neatly fit the ideas described by Martianus Capella. As he points out there is a bit of a problem of relying on one Roman author in the 5th century AD for details about a non-Roman cosmology of the 2nd century BC and earlier.
The Archaeozoologist has also been cat-blogging. It seems that cats were domesticated in the Near East - except they weren’t quite. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the first felines that domesticated humans were found in the Near East. The giveaway is a series of genetic markers in cats which can be traced back like we would for human ancestry.
Technology
K. Kris Hirst at About.com has an entry on The Compositional Analysis of Glass. If you’re working on an ancient site then glass can be a really exciting find. In these days of mass production it’s easy to forget how beautiful a piece of glass can be.
Sebastian Heath talks about the future of PRAP, xhtml 2.0 and archaeological databases. The Pylos Regional Archaeological Project is a pioneering project in terms of getting useful information out onto the web where other people can re-interpret the data. I’m told that the project is actually based around Χορα, but that transliterates to Chora, which is not a good site to name a Regional Archaeological Project after.
Middle Savagery has the question What colour is Çatalhöyük and has a video of archaeologists giving their answers.
From Ancient History Ramblings are thoughts on Academic YouTube. Remixing and mashing could add a new dimension to academic debates.
The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World weblog points to podcasts of AIA sessions, which is probably the only way I’ll be attending the AIA conference in the future. It’s probably not the end of the conference as we know it though. 
Discoveries
The Finnestorp War Booty Sacrifice now has a website. This is a Migration Period offering according to Martin Rundkvist which makes it Viking and thus immediately very cool. I can’t really say much more as the website is in Swedish, but the photos are very nice.
Magnus Reuterdahl has been looking at cup-marks in Swedish boulders and questioning whether or not they’re cup-marks at all. Cup-marks are small holes gouged into the rock, if they were in the UK I’d expect them to date from prehistoric period, but I don’t know the dates for Swedish cup marks. They’re very difficult to make sense of, and if some cup-marks aren’t cup-marks then it could be even harder.
Azthib at In Small Things Found, blogs on the re-discovery of the Lost city of Patiti in Peru and compares it to the other lost cities which get found on a regular basis.
Religion and Belief
Conspiracy Theories as Historical Just-so Stories at Archaeoporn is an excellent explanation of why secret conspiracies simply don’t cut it as historical explanations. It’s not that they must be wrong, but if we accept one conspiracy without evidence what stops us from having to accept all conspiracies. It’s not what we know, but how we know it that matters.
Does religion evolve? asks John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts. If you find that a hard question, then exempt your religion, that’s the divine will. What about all the other false religions? Do they evolve?
Antoninus Pius has an homage to Janus, or at least doors.
The sadly too-regular section on looting an destruction
Here’s a blog entry I missed from last week’s Make Loans Not War discussion. It’s a neatly understated reply to the suggestion that victims of the art market shouldn’t make war. Does the request for the return of stolen art objects constitute a declaration of war? Kwame Opoku thinks it’s a matter of law not war and the war analogy simply works to justify the unethical actions of collectors. It’s a interesting view. If I steal a car and fence it abroad then it’s theft. The criminals involved in the case and I all get locked up. If I steal the Crown Jewels would that be an act of war? Is it a crime or do I get to demand the loan of other artworks as compensation for handing the stolen goods back?
Is there a difference between a reasonable and an ethical acquisition policy? David Gill finds that James Cuno’s answers leave something to be desired.
Troels Myrup Kristensen has a brief comment on the question “How Do Museums Obtain the Antiquities They Exhibit?”
Full Circle has a Pagan view of the damage to rock art in Western Sahara, and compares it to the damage done to sites in the UK.
Ed Darrell has a post Historian (and lawyer) traps thief of history on eBay. I am wondering how many illegal items have to be listed before eBay decides it has a problem.
Travel
Troels Myrup Kristensen finds the ancient ruins of Mexico A World Away from Rome with photos of Teotihuacan. The murals are stunning.
The Moore Group are probably good people to ask for advice if you’re planning a cruise. They’ve put up a paper from the Bulletin of the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology on the Tayleur Wreck. The Tayleur was on her maiden voyage from the British Isles to Melbourne in 1854 when she sank off Dublin Bay. The wreck might not be as famous as the Titanic, but on the plus side it didn’t suffer the indignity of having Celine Dion sing about it.
Pleasure
Finally can Art be nothing but Pleasure? Plato sets a puzzle at Kenodoxia.
Thanks for linking! But this bit kinda threw me:
“This is a Migration Period offering … which makes it Viking”
The Migration Period ended about 540. The Viking Period is usually taken to begin at Lindisfarne in 793.
My mistake. I thought the Migration period ran later. Clearly I know even less about Scandinavian archaeology than I thought
Nonetheless it remains cool.
It is extremely cool.
The Scandies have two periods in the 1st Millennium when they make a lot of noise on the Continent. The Migration Period starts with the Huns and ends 150 years later with the rise of the Merovingians in the West and Imperial rehabilitation under Justinian in the East.
The Viking Period starts with Lindisfarne and ends 300 years later when all the target areas have become peopled with badass Viking descendants. (-;