Four Stone Hearth #35, Giants are Real Edition

Good morning how are you?

Welcome to another edition of Four Stone Hearth, the blog carnival for anthropology, from physical to cultural, from archaeology to linguistic, and everything between the corners. There are a lot of great articles to spotlight this edition, and so I will cut to the chase, and do the dumb things I gotta do.

The first post is a bit of a dark horse riding up, Past Discussed Quarterly (PDQ) is a new journal of online archaeology and history looking for submissions for the first volume at the end of February.

We are looking for any articles on medieval, ancient and prehistoric subjects, as mentioned on our homepage. Additionally if you are a more modern historian and would like to contribute, we will have a section on Digital Publishing. Your opinions would be welcome.

Because our only home is bone, we must ask the question, how sleepless is the egg knowing that which throws the stone foresees the bone? An answer provided by Archaeozoology, which has an article on astragali through time.

The astragalus, or talus, is also known as the knucklebone. Worked and unworked astragali have formed part of non-food material culture in many societies, being used as divination tools, gaming pieces, amulets, ‘worry beads’, dice, and other things (Dandoy, 2006: 131). They are depicted on ceramics, in statuary, on medallions and coins, in oil paintings and in the comic pages of Sunday newspapers (Dandoy, 2006: 131). In short, they are ubiquitous.

While I didn’t write the words you hear me singing, Mark Dingemanse writes about the words others use. Recently he wrote about Ideophones in G|ui.

it comes from G|ui, a Khoisan language of Botswana. To Africanists, expressive words from Khoisan languages are of special interest because Khoisan has been claimed on various occasions to lack ideophones, otherwise thought to be one of those linguistic traits that characterize Africa as a linguistic area.

I should warn you, when looking at the article by the Moore Group, to be careful what you pack. The known, the unknown, and the under-known. Look at what she found, digging all around. At an excavation at Corofin, they found an interesting arrangement of remains, as well as other numerous other skeletons.

The discovery by Moore Group archaeologists of the skeletons of 58 people, believed to date from Early Christian times at Corofin, Co. Galway, provides the first palpable evidence of a previously unknown early settlement in the area. The find was made during development work for a housing estate in 2006.

While I spent my whole life just digging up my music’s shallow grave for the two songs in me and the third one I just made, Blue Collar Scientist has no problem discussing the three-stage colonization of America in review.

Andrew Kitchen, Michael M. Miyamoto, and Connie J. Mulligan report in PLoS-ONE on their development of a three-stage model for the colonization of the Americas by Homo sapiens. This issue is of deep interest to anthropology outreach in Alaska.

In the city, the streets are paved with diamonds and there’s just so much to see, but life still might be hard in some regards. Human Macroecololgy offers discussion of an article that focuses on the role of urban life on human reproduction.

A recent perspective by Ruth Mace published in Science (subscription required) gives a perspective on the demographic transition – the transition to reduced fertility rates among wealthy nations and economic classes. The argument is based on the costs of childrearing that seem to increase with urbanization and the lowered rates of infant and child mortality that can accompany city life in contexts where sufficient health care and sanitation are available.

I’ve got a fang, glistening white triangular tooth, and its all the domain of Hominin Dental Anthropology, which offers a review of a pair of articles dealing with the domestication of plants. yum.

We are all benefactors to domestication and the control of our environment, whether you are an active participant or not. This post is based on a set of papers from the June 29^th, 2007, edition of Science

Today it is impossible to meet James Ensor, Belgium’s famous painter, thieves in France dug up a variety of archaeological art and forgeries of modern art. Judith Weingarten has a run down of the article on here Zenobia blog.

Where once was a painted picture of a landscape with temples, gardens, fountains, a Greek assembly place and a walled residence, you’d have seen nothing but empty scraped-off plaster. That doesn’t mean you could not admire it nonetheless — but only if you visited quite another swish house … in Paris. Mais oui!

Who can say why the blue canary in the outlet in by the light switch who watches over you is blue, but Kris Hirst discusses the how and why of Maya Blue at her blog.

Thompson recovered one hundred human skeletons and hundreds of objects sacrificed by the Maya between about AD 500 and the Spanish conquest. Many of the objects recovered by Thompson are currently curated in Chicago’s Field Museum, where they recently provided Wheaton College archaeologist Dean Arnold and coauthors with new information about the tenacious turquoise pigment known as Maya Blue.

Let’s drink, drink this town is so great. Drink, drink cuz it’s never too late. To what do we owe these words, and more importantly what do we drink? Why as anthropologists, a Hot Cup of Joe, where Carl Feagans proves that it is never too late, as his article will on Mesoamerican research is being written as I type this.

Apparently Maya elites and royalty weren’t the only ones building temples and pyramids. And the mystery of the blue pigment used in Maya pottery and murals has been solved.

Without a doubt, I can say that piece of dirt, that is all I’m standing on today. Of course, sometimes this dirt hides interesting points, such as a neolithic amber hoard, broad to us all by Aardvarchaeology.

he spotted something interesting on the ground. Jensen happens to have much experience of machine operation at archaeological digs. It turned out that he had managed to identify a pit in the subsoil filled with thousands of amber beads: an Early Neolithic votive deposit datable around 3500 cal BC.

Ed Yong, at Not Exactly Rocket Science offers up a post about a wicked little critta, the rat and its effects as it has moved with humans.

Humans have explored the entire face of the planet, but we haven’t done so alone. Animals and plants came along for the ride, some as passengers and other as stowaways. Today, these hitchhikers pose one of the greatest threats to the planet’s biodiversity, by ousting and outcompeting local species.

Sometimes food isn’t about cuisine or fancy preparation, but making sure my dues get paid. Greg Laden discusses how roots may have been just such a fallback food in human evolution.

Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can’t find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the morphology of an organism, including in the fossil record, than changes in preferred food strategies.

Well we gotta escape from the Planet of the Apes and Afarensis makes it clear just how important an act this might be, when they’ve got weapons.

Until that report, the regular making of tools for hunting and killing mammals had been considered uniquely human behavior. Over a span of 17 days at the start of the 2006 rainy season, Pruetz saw the chimps hunt bush babies 13 times.

There were 18 sightings in 2007. It would appear the chimps are getting creative. …

Istanbul was Constantinople now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople been a long time gone, Constantinople. Because of such problems, archaeologists need to keep track of place and time. Jim West, at his new blog, posts information on efforts to improve on access to such information for the Levant. (It’s a bit off topic, but since I spent two years there, I also want to point to his article about Union Theological Seminary’s new president).

Sorry for the miserably worded post title- it’s the only thing I could come up with which summarizes this excellent site in the short space provided for such titles. With thanks to Antonio Lombatti (which is Italian for Anthony of the Gifted Mind and All Seeing Eye).

I took my boat for a car, but who knows, depending on your opinion of boats and cultural evolution, it might not be just me. For more on this, check out anthropology.net.

They find that functionality (traits that affect whether or not the occupants of the canoe will survive or not) changes very little, whereas symbolism in canoe design (such as aesthetic, spiritual, and decorative) changes much faster. From this observation, they conclude that “cultural change, like genetic evolution, can follow theoretically derived patterns,”

They wouldn’t understand a word we say, so we’ll scratch it all down into the clay half believing there will sometime come a day someone gives a damn maybe when the concrete has crumbled to sand. We’re the Mesopotamians
Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh. Thankfully, they do care today, and finally, they can understand cuneiform. Unfortunately, this makes the loss of Mesopotamian remains all the harder to bear. Remote Central offers an article about a recent video showing the effects on Dr. Donny George Youkhanna.

The main impression that comes across is the shock and anguish on the face of Dr. George, who tells us that there are sights of destruction within the museum which he feels it better for us not to see, and it’s also clear that the death threats made against members of his own family have also played their part in his decision to quit Baghdad for the US.

So thank you again for coming to join this tour of anthropology blogs for the second half of February 2008. The next Four Stone Hearth will be over at Afarensis. If you have a submission, send it to submit@fourstonehearth.net, or if you want to host, write to host@fourstonehearth.net.

At the end of the tour
When the road disappears
If there’s any more people around
When the tour runs aground
And if you’re still around
Then we’ll meet at the end of the tour
The engagements are booked through the end of the world
So we’ll meet at the end of the tour (all lyrics by They Might Be Giants, various).

UPDATE: Because history wants you, they made a mistake,there are still three articles that showed up in my mailbox this morning.

Over at Testimony of the Spade, The stone it called to me (And now I see the things the stone has shown to me) A rock that spoke a word (An animated mineral it can be heard), specifically its a rune stone.

Sm 55 is situated in Byarum parish, Jönköping County, Småland at the river Lagan. It stands more or less in its original place but has been turned, originally the inscription was facing south now it face west southwest.

There are a lot of mammals, from the embryonic whale to the monkey with no tail so the warm blood flows with the red blood cells lacking nuclei through the large four-chambered heart maintaining the very high metabolism rate they have. But as Remote Central discusses, it might be more difficult to divide some of these mammals from their brothers than one might think.

Homo heidelbergensis is a name for a kind of “Archaic Homo sapiens” but it is doubtful if it should be considered on the one hand to be a single species or on the other a separate species from either Homo erectus or Homo sapiens.

Finally, Tim at Remote Central also posts this about Neanderthal settlements in the Arabian Gulf: You’re older than you’ve ever been. And now you’re even older. Well, not exactly that, but something to the effect.

Interesting report from last year, detailing a find from Barakah, Abu Dhabi, U.A.E., which, according to the linked article, pushes back the earliest known human artefacts in this part of the Arabian Gulf from a relatively recent 7,500 years ago, to as much as 150,000 years ago.

I think that’s finally it, see you next time at Afarensis.

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