The Maasai in Tanzania are being abused by UNESCO’s henchmen and their own government in the name of “conservation” even though they have stewarded the land in question for generations. Fortress conservation is anti-Indigenous, pro-capitalist, and IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY WORK. svlint.org/NCATW
Had to write my first cover letter for career 2.0, and it took all my strength not to yap about archaeology exp.
Also coworkers keep strangely-cheerily saying “not anymore” when I mention being an archaeologist, and it is in my soul so deeply that I will refer to myself as such until the day I die.
Have you ever considered not speaking to women scholars you don’t (or do!) know, like that? It’s gross, actually.
Anyway, men do not interact because y’all are so condescending all the time.
…which I am not personally an expert on, but supports my final point in the thread about human mobility. It’s funny because in my draft I made a joke about how any Bronze Age expert would talk your ear off about Beakers! But I expected people to take it the wrong way.
This just further corroborates something archaeologists have been talking about across time periods AND geography: people were more mobile and well-connected in the past than we tend to assume. We don’t give the Ancestors enough credit for their curiosity, wanderlust, and desire for new markets!
Folks were from Scotland, Ireland, the Continent, and even North Africa! But we also got signatures from Scandinavia, BEFORE the Viking Age.
It is entirely likely there were Norse-born and Norse-speaking people at Bamburgh just minding their business generations before Vikings plunder Lindisfarne.
If you looked at my teeth, you’d get the signature for NYC tap water (best tap in the world, baybee).
We were getting signatures for this elite burial ground from pretty much everywhere EXCEPT locally.
We know this because when isotope analysis was about to break out, we had the opportunity to test evidence from our rescue dig to protect the Bowl Hole burial
ground (7th/8thC) south of the Castle.
Basically, wherever you grow up, your diet leaves a signature in your teeth!
- Bamburgh was clearly part of a North Sea network that stretched to Scandinavia before the Vikings had any idea of all the juicy monastic booty (loot, not butts) ob Lindisfarne, just a few miles north of us.
Okay now to tie it back to Bamburgh, because that’s what you are all waiting for:
- The citadel of Bamburgh (Bebbanburh) got its Old English name a few generations after Ida, an Anglian king, took control in 547CE (before Ræedwald down in Suffolk was a even twinkle in his parents’ eyes).
and ultimately a group of Scandinavians who settled Normandy and integrated into Romance-speaking communities. (By the way, don’t get me started on how much I love Anglo-Norman linguistics…save that for a rainy day.)
If we are being really (overly) simplistic, overlapping cultural and linguistic communities migrate to England three times in less than a millennium: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from what is now Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, followed by the Vikings from Scandinavia,
I now wonder, is Beowulf a retcon? Are Scandinavians giving their stories and manifestations of kingship legitimacy by using/describing “Anglo-Saxon” burial practices? It’s all so deliciously twisty and self-referential!
The authors cite a scholar who believes the English ship burials (re)ignited the Scandinavian ship burial practice. So how does this square with the Beowulf story probably taking place before the Sutton Hoo burial?
(The Beowulf manuscript btw is the Nowell Codex from late-10thC/early 11thC England, though most scholars (myself included) think it was probably recited for centuries before that.)
link it extremely closely to the epic Beowulf. The thing about Beowulf is that it takes place NOT in England, but Scandinavia, and almost definitely BEFORE the Sutton Hoo burial. This was *pre-Viking* Scandinavia known as the Vendel Period!
The UK’s Big Effin Deal ship burial is Sutton Hoo (6th/7thC), who we believe is the king of East Angles, Rædwald. Scholars value that discovery for a number of reasons (challenging the idea of “Dark Ages” for Britain, metallurgical technology, excavation techniques, etc), but we also link it
Oh I have thoughts! Strap in.
I was so tickled to see you RTed onto my feed! I’m trying to show a little decorum with my full name after my networking at Kzoo last year but I cannot guarantee I will remain couth on this platform. 😂
Used the word “popemaxxing” on another new social media site and accidentally almost immediately went viral. I KNEW TWITTER WAS THROTTLING MY GENIUS.
Deeply insulted by most difficult class today; not normally one to take things so personally as I have healthy self-esteem as a scientist and humanities scholar/practitioner. I did NOT deserve disrespect of that class today, and it really made me second-guess whether I have a future at this school.
becoming an astronaut to obtain 40 minutes of peace
Free Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and all the peoples on this one planet we have who have been oppressed for the sake of greed and white supremacy.
One day, hopefully before it’s too late, we will truly be doing things like this for all humankind instead of for the bottom lines of a few extractors.
I wouldn’t be an anthropologist if I didn’t believe deep down that humanity is amazing and worth saving and trying to be better every moment forward even when we have lost our way, so this Artemis II moment is a really big deal that is making me cry!
Anyway it makes me think of that bombs falling as feminism meme because like yeah we are going to the moon repping the actual moon goddess and including women this time but we are also totally going to lead to the privatization and militarization of the moon and space. 😡
As much as I worry about how the return to the moon is going to lead to extraction and possibly the destruction of the moon, I still feel like I need to watch this launch that feels BARELY publicized (probably because America is doing so much Bad right now).
Mine is the 2023 report that the West Tofts handaxe with the central fossil was not intentional aesthetic choice. The research is thoughtful; I just want (in my heart) to use it as another example of humans loving fossils for an even longer time before the medieval ecofacts I have encountered! 😅
You’re not going to refute it; maybe you aren’t ready to evidence-wise, but it just FEELS wrong, and of course you can’t say that because you’re a scientist. What is that paper or book for you?
Scholars and professional scientists: do you ever read preliminary research or peer-reviewed publications that lay out a completely reasonable argument with evidence but in your heart, you’re just like “no” and quietly close the PDF?