Category: Archaeology

Three new anthro-blogs

Readers of Glossographia may be interested in three new anthropology blogs that have popped up over the past month:

Archaeogaming focuses on the intersection of archaeology and video games, and promises to be a lively discussion – it’s brand new this week!  Those of you who may not be up-to-date on differences between artifact types in the Elder Scrolls series may nonetheless be fascinated by the most recent post, ‘Video Game Archaeology in Meatspace‘, where Andrew Reinhard deals with the science and ethics of the recently announced excavation/looting to take place in Alamogordo, New Mexico at the site of the infamous Atari Dump Site where, purportedly, 14 truckloads of unsold E.T. cartridges were discarded and cemented over in 1983.

Bone Broke is authored by Jess Beck, a former student of mine who now studies bioarchaeology at the University of Michigan and whose blog will feature material on osteology and other related topics.  I particularly like her post ‘Taylorism and Teaching‘ where she develops a research protocol for evaluating the evolution of the hand and/or the qualifications of undergraduates for industrial line work (hold the comments on the job prospects of anthro majors, please).

The Human Family seems at first glance to be what would result if you brought Zombie Lewis Henry Morgan to life and sat him in front of a computer.  But far from just recapitulating classic theory in kinship and social organization, the author brings it into contemporary relevance with his discussion of ‘Pedigrees, genealogies, and same-sex parents‘, showing the continued practical applicability of kinship studies for modern biological and social relationships.

Maya Decipherment blog / research tool

Last week, a nice article came out about Mayan epigraphy and specifically about David Stuart’s Maya Decipherment blog.    Don’t be fooled by the title – this isn’t about Zooniverse-style crowdsourced science (which has its own merits and challenges), but about the way that the blog is being used for early discussion and review of new ideas by very prominent scholars (which Stuart clearly is) – not supplanting peer review but in parallel to it.  I particularly like the article’s emphasis on the ongoing and collaborative nature of Maya epigraphy (while acknowledging that it can be an incredibly contentious field at times).    I would, however, like to propose a moratorium on the journalistic use of the word ‘mysteries’ in reference to archaeological findings.

New book announcement

I have just added a major new page for my new edited volume, Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger.    You can find more information on the book, including purchase information, by following the link.

Numerals inside the Great Pyramid

A couple of weeks ago all the news was about some new red ochre markings found in a shaft on the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza (a.k.a. the Pyramid of Khufu), identified using an exploratory robot. That was pretty cool. But if you’re a professional numbers guy (as I am) you’ll be doubly excited to learn that it is probable that those marks are hieratic numerals. If this interpretation is correct, these are almost certainly mason’s marks used to indicate some quantity involved in the construction. Other than the fact that I would like all news outlets to stop calling them hieroglyphs (they aren’t – the hieratic script is a cursive Egyptian script that differs significantly from the hieroglyphs, and the numerals look nothing alike), this is really cool. I do want to urge caution, however: this does not imply that the Great Pyramid was designed along some sort of mystical pattern or using some numerological precepts. It actually doesn’t tell us even that the marks indicate the length of the shaft (as Luca Miatello suggests in the new article) – it could just as easily be 121 bricks in a pile used to make a portion of the pyramid. I am also not 100% convinced of the ‘121’ interpretation – the 100 could be a 200, very easily, or even some other sign altogether, for instance. But the idea that numerical marks using hieratic script would be made by the pyramid-makers is entirely plausible and helps show the role of hieratic script in the Old Kingdom. Although it’s hardly going to revolutionize our understanding of Egyptian mathematics, it may well help outline the functional contexts of the use of numerals in Old Kingdom Egypt.

Pseudo-writing in the news

I promise I didn’t plan it this way – if I’d known about the article I’d have included it in my post earlier this week – but there’s a good short piece on pseudo-writing in New Kingdom Egypt at Past Horizons, about work being done by Dr. Ben Haring. At the workers’ village of Deir el Medina, one of the richest sources of our knowledge of daily life in the New Kingdom, ordinary (cursive, hieratic) script is found alongside a nonlinguistic system of marks used by tomb makers as personal marks of identity, and many writers were familiar with and used both systems, thus refuting the notion that pictograms are supplanted once phonetic writing comes along. The question of influence of hieratic script on this system of marks, and vice versa, is a rich line of intellectual inquiry.