more on those items from Blombos Cave – a case for scepticism 75 000 year old shells claimed as beads – Blombos Cave, South Africa I was arguing a few days ago on 17 April [Link] that the case for these shells being evidence of a modern human mentality was fragile, to say the least,…
the shape of history
plotting the past – the first modern humans in South Africa, and a scenario for the first farming villages
A couple of recent press comments about new discoveries have caught my attention because of what they reveal about the way academics build their careers and how archaeological field projects get turned into stories about the past. Basically it comes down to this – archaeologists want their site to be the discovery that will rock…
making things makes people
Barry (Katz) is presenting the first lecture in his Design History class for the mechanical engineers (ME110). We are having a running conversation (some two years old now) about design – completely agreeing that things make people as he puts it here this morning. The more subtle point holds too – that this dissolves the…
Dunstanburgh, Northumberland
English Heritage, the government agency reponsible for managing the historic environment in the UK, has posted a web diary of a fascinating survey done last November of Dunstanburgh Castle in the north of England. [Link] This is one of my favorite places. I have been visiting, photographing, teaching and writing about it for as long…
origins
16 March – I made a comment about the discovery of the earliest human symbols. My old friend Cornelius Holtorf is surely right to point out that this story of “first occasion” belongs with a metanarrative of “origins”. The story – this was where things first began to look like they are today. The problem…
obsessions with who did it first
“Early human marks are ‘symbols’” – a BBC report headline today. A series of parallel lines engraved in an animal bone between 1.4 and 1.2 million years ago may be the earliest example of human symbolic behaviour. University of Bordeaux experts say no practical process, such as butchering a carcass, can explain the markings. But…
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