Guardian Unlimited | Ramblers barred from ancient mound Image – earthrod.co.uk Access is to be denied to the great earthen mound to the north of Stonehenge – Silbury Hill. Yes, it is receiving too much damage. But what interested me was that this feature of an earthen landscape has been reclassified a building. (As part…
the shape of history
origins of agriculture
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Farming origins gain 10,000 years Humans made their first tentative steps towards farming 23,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. Stone Age people in Israel collected the seeds of wild grasses some 10,000 years earlier than previously recognised, experts say. These grasses included wild emmer wheat and barley, which…
counterfactuals and fakes
– the implications of the question “what if … ?” The ancient historians Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel are two colleagues of mine at Stanford. “Who killed Harry Field?” Ian sees himself as a social scientist of the ancient world – building models of how antiquity worked, models that are general enough to apply beyond…
neolithic miniature figurines
Doug Bailey has finished his study of neolithic figurines from south east Europe – a fascinating treatment that ranges from early farmers to Barbi Dolls – a superb comparative work in visual culture. He presents a much needed correction to Maria Gimbutas’s fantasy treatment. It will be published by Routledge very soon. The way archaeology…
trauma and the past
Lunch with Jonathan Greenberg today – Stanford Law School. He specializes in conflict resolution and has a particular interest in national partition in the wake of the withdrawal of imperial powers and decolonisation – Korea, India, Palestine, Vietnam, and, of course, Iran and Iraq. He sees partition and the narratives and feelings it generates as…
the uncanny preservation of curse-laden mummies
archaeological archetypes Daily Telegraph | News | Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia This story has it all. High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air. Local officials,…