Ethno-archaeology
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ROGUECLASSICIST’S BULLETIN December 29, 2024
21 hours ago
09 August, 2011
Cartoon Archaeology
As a break from postholes, here are some more cartoons to celebrate the holiday season, which always a bit of joke in England, not least because of the weather, especially if you are digging.
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9 comments:
Bullet hole! That takes me back.
[Stalled cairn, Northern Isles]
Bang-slap inbetween the "horns" forming the entrance courtyard (or whatever you want to style these structures as)
Large pit w/inhumation, containing carefully arranged equid. Ok not obviously 3rd millennium BC, but ...
until the skull was lifted, and the circular "poleaxe" hole, or whatever, was related to the lead rattling around in the cranium.
And "Trains". You ain't having a dig at a certain Museum of London director are you by any chance? :D
The one that ordered the "Roman concrete" to be bottomed?
Mind you, there are not a few tales that I could tell of being ordered, against all advice and under protest, to attack the Pleistocene (at high latitudes), or the Cretaceous.
Hi Dustbubble, Thanks for the comment- truth stranger than fiction; great story about the cairn, conversely I've known of police cordons around ancient burials; as for the 'train' - it could be I was inspired by certain incidents - but it could happen to anyone.
I've worked on sites like that; how deep would you like this feature?
Somewhere there is a great book of archaeological stories waiting to be written . . . .
Great site BTW Geoff, just hope you can keep it running in these days of non-existent-developer led archaeology. :[
I've seen your button, but the family I quit digging for have first dibs, so I'll have to run it past my Financial Controller. Maybe extra-nice breakfast in bed would swing it ..?
But just to say you've restored my faith in the trade.
I vaguely remember silently weeping in (manly!) frustration at one particularly braindead and cultish TAG. And then going on a disgraceful bender. Shortly before I quit in despair.
(And yes, I could understand everything they said. That was the problem.)
So here's to ye Geoff, you're a braver man than me.
And I've been having just massive fun with TurboCad, Mount Pleasant, and a couple of big roundhouses (the ones in private enclosures). Stairs! Doh! Of course!
Thanks for the positives - I too have sat through TAG wondering how they can get away with such nonsense - They work for a University - and academic freedom means you can write your own job description, fabricate some wacky version of the past and call it archaeology, and, this is the downside, blackball any student who does not believe in your magic powers to look into the minds of people in the past.
PS have you spotted the stairs at Mount Pleasant?
Oh knackers. The last one ought to be http://tinypic.com/r/t6s4kp/7
Thanks for the links Dustbunny, impressed by your efforts on turboCAD, glad to see I am not the only one thinking about these things; but this is a complex topic to discuss so I wont comment in detail in this box.[happy to correspond]
As you may have noticed, many academic archaeologists have simply projected their own structural illiteracy onto the the past, given up , and decided to make up stuff about how people felt about living in buildings - back of beer mat archaeology posing as scholarship, what's staggering is that intelligent people fall for, and support these conceits.
Interesting point about the circular disks; the one on the right looks like those from Ballina, Mayo, not familiar with the one on the left; Although I am wary of comparing very simple shapes, as in Stone & timber 'circles'.
I spent several years working on Mt Pleasant- because it is so regular, but I did not start to understand these structures till I looked at Woodhenge, because what is important, is the irregularities. Joining the dots in regular structures is easy, but without a structural rational, and some concept of assembly, it does not necessarily signify anything - quite the reverse; a horizontal timber cannot 'pass through' vertical ones at different heights.
To be honest, I don't have a good enough CAD system/computer to peruse the detail of construction on a timber by timber basis, so I won't commit myself on the detail of these buildings.
My guess is that the roof of the Sanctuary my be quite 'spire'like in nature, my current analysis consist of an 12 or 14 layer drawing showing the principle sets of rafters.
The problem here is that it is too complex to present in a simplified to form, and can only realistically be presented as a full engineering CAD model.
There have been good cartoons in Antiquity editorial (as I remember from my students yers in library .>))...
Hi d'obo; thanks for the comment, I am not familiar with the cartoons you refer to, but sadly, archaeology has become an even more fruitful area for satire in recent years.
Thanks Andessa, I'll read that as a smile.
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