Anthropology Blogging

"The Venus Project is an attempt to bring world peace and all the nations together. If you don't want war, killing, [?] crime you have to redesign the way society works, you have to declare all the Earth's resources as a common heritage of all the world's people [...] We don't go to another country to bring democracy, we go there for their resources. Oil, metal, cheap labor. We don't go to

As a tribute to the passing of the 1996 Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska last February 1, Time Travelling offers the readers two of Szymborska’s poems about tarsiers and monkeys. Animals, especially primates, figure in many of her poems as a critique of humanity’s relationship with each other and with the natural world.   Tarsier I [...]

I'm traveling this week, participating in the Roundtable of the Middle Palaeolithic of Italy hosted by the Center for Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies(http://camnes.org), which takes place in Florence this coming Thursday and Friday (Feb. 9-10, 2012). I'm really looking forward to it, and looking at the final program, it sounds like a good range of perspectives and regional records

«Savoir-faire – Mit Kopf und Hand, die experimentelle Archäologie erzählt» Museum Schwab – 28.05.2011 -26.02.2012 A man with a long grey ponytail, dressed in yellowish leather clothes assembles a stone axe. A little later we see him stalk through the forest with a hafted stone axe in hand, looking for a victim. After a while [...]

Another update on the Marden henge longtailed arrowheads. H. Anderson-Whymark has made a great attempt on reproducing the arrowhead. He notes the importance of the thinnes of the blank and the amount of time it took to produce this example, in comparisons to most other oblique arrowheads. Like this:Be the first to like this post.

The name “Cahokia” comes from one of the constituent tribes of the Illinois Confederacy, a group of several semi-autonomous “tribes” or “villages” that occupied much of what is now the state of Illinois and parts of some of the surrounding states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Staunch allies of the French throughout most of [...]

Here’s a nice discussion on clicktivism and the protest movement: Like this:Be the first to like this post.

Shorter can be better. Bryan Hockett has a short (five pages) paper in press in Quaternary International entitled "The consequences of Middle Paleolithic diets on pregnant Neanderthal women," and it is a must-read for anyone interested in prehistoric nutrition. In a nutshell, what he does here is consider what the hypothesized Neanderthals caloric requirements proposed by a number of recent

For reasons that should become clear fairly soon, I've had experimental archaeology videos on my mind lately. In many cases, actually seeing segments of an experimental study play out can convey so much more of the experience itself than summary tables and graphs, which really take the human element out and often don't do justice to some of the phenomena observed as they unfold. I saw a couple

So, Chilean police have arrested a truck driver with 5 tonnes of "endangered" glacier ice. My first thoughts were of the tragic irony: poor people worsening an environmental catastrophe (glacier degradation) probably to mitigate its effects (droughts) in what affordable way they could conceive (theft in response to water supply being privatized). Then the denial forecast kicked in: Climate

I love Academia.edu - I think it's a fantastic way for papers to reach the broadest possible audience, and it's made me aware of many studies I wasn't aware of. While I'm not necessarily the best Academia citizen myself (I really should start following some people), it's really been a tremendous help in tracking down some papers published in obscure sources that might have otherwise taken me an

Microliths, superstars of the Mesolithic lithic industries in Europe. They come in many shapes and yes even sizes. Somehow we are all captivated by the image of the hunter, stealthily moving through the green undergrowth at the edge of a forest clearing or through a shallow gully in the moors, it seems. It is in [...]

Regardless of exactly how many people lived at Cahokia, it’s clear from recent research that the population of the site and its immediately surrounding area grew immensely in a short period of time in the eleventh century AD. As Timothy Pauketat points out in the 2003 article that I was discussing earlier, the scale of [...]

Things have been busy as I’ve been preparing to head back to Cambodia in just over a week.   Before I go, I thought I’d share a few interesting links: - The NY Times has an interesting story about the growth … Continue reading →

Reblogged from Cebu Daily News: A 1 p.m. curfew and a 30-minute time limit on whale shark watching in Oslob town, Cebu, are among several guidelines proposed by a technical working group (TWG) led by the Provincial Capitol. The time limit will prevent stressing the marine animals, who have been getting intense public attention from [...]

Course of events:     a) Animal rights activists are raided by police     b) Journalist cover the case Can you guess what's next? Probably not...     c) Journalist is labelled 'extremist' and persecuted Can you guess the country? No, not the glorious nation of Kazakhstan. The USA. Get the facts straight for yourself: Check out Green is the new red blog and/or book which is about the

The greatest of the Mississippian mound centers, by far, is Cahokia. This vast site contains numerous mounds and is located in the American Bottom area of southwestern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from the modern city of St. Louis, Missouri. This is a highly strategic location, very close to the confluence of the two largest [...]

And So do WE Like this:Be the first to like this post.

The previous blog has apparently ruffled some feathers. A blog of course is not a scholarly article and need not be peppered with citations. It is an opinion piece, a mere two cents in the ongoing conversation about the incident in Oslob. In the Facebook page of the Marine Wildlife Watch of the Philippines, the [...]

One of the major advantages Southwestern archaeologists have over those studying other areas of prehistoric North America is a very solid chronology, based primarily on tree-rings and extended by diagnostic pottery types that in many cases changed rapidly. As a result of this chronology, in many parts of the Southwest unexcavated sites can be dated [...]

From the inimitable Matt Cartmill: "The trick in discovering evolutionary laws is the same as it is in discoveringlaws of physics or chemistry-namely, finding the right level of generalization tomake prediction possible. We do not try to find a law that says when and whereexplosions will occur. We content ourselves with saying that certain sorts ofcompounds are explosive under the right

Cebu Daily News recently reported two injured whale sharks in the seas off a coastal barangay of Oslob, Cebu. One whale shark had a spear driven to its body and another got struck in the head by a motorboat’s propeller. The incident had drawn widespread condemnation from all sectors of Cebuano society. A local officer [...]

Huffington Post / Camp Lejeune Water Contamination Cover-Up Hinted In Navy Letter The U.S. Navy is asking government investigators to suppress information concerning the toxic water scandal at the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune, according to a letter obtained Thursday by The Huffington Post. [...] Government watchdogs and environmental advocates said they interpret the letter as further evidence of

I enjoyed the first season of Masterpiece's show Downton Abbey very much, and like many people, sat down to see the first episode of the second season last Sunday. The new episode wasn't bad at all, although it felt like the writers crammed down a lot of points today to set the stage for what I assume will be the "real" developments that follow. But this seems as good a time as any to remark on the show's strengths and weaknesses. Julian Fellowes, the creator of Abbey, wrote Robert Altman's Gosford Park and I remember watching that movie alone in my dorm room, a bad pirated print with bad sound (the overlapping Altman-style dialogue didn't help matters). The murder mystery at its center was interesting and kept me watching, yet there were these surreal things that didn't quite gel: the wet, rainy opening sequence, with the picture of the wet maid keeping an umbrella over her mistress was one. What was the movie's point, I wondered. And then, it all came together in a kind of moment...

This is my first morning by the dock after a long holiday vacation. A nice sunrise to start the work year is always a welcome respite. Happy new year everyone! Like this:Be the first to like this post.

Tim De Chant at Per Square Mile has an interesting post discussing an article by Ruth Mace and Mark Pagel in which they did a statistical analysis of the distribution of Native languages at European contact in North America and found that the density of languages correlates inversely with latitude (when controlling for land area) [...]

I just watched DIRT! The Movie for free at dotSUB. A really good movie about soil and the importance of a healthy biosphere of rich biodiversity. Takes a couple of detours (ie one about various spiritual connections to soil) that may seem weird depending on who you are and is quite a bit pro-organic agriculture but all in all a good, educational movie about not just soil, but about deforestation,

While leafing through the collected works of W.H. Auden, I chanced on a short poem that is very apt to the times we are in. Last year, we saw dictators fall one after another in the Middle East and, in the case of the Philippines, the ongoing trial of ex-Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo over the plunder [...]

This blog article can also be accessed at Anthropology Corner. The southern end of Puerto Rico is a place one could easily associate with old Western films because of its crusty and brown rolling hills. The mighty central cordilleras, a rugged spine of verdant forest across the island, trap the moisture that should have been [...]

In 1827 William Clark, who had attained national fame as co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition more than 20 years earlier and had gone on to a successful career as an Indian Agent and governor of the Missouri Territory, obtained title to 37,000 acres in western Kentucky along the Ohio River that had been [...]