Archaeology Thread

[ASUHATER!]

#globalbeardowns

[azgreg]

[Merkin]

[dovecanyoncat]

I want to get back to Egypt so badly. It's kinda tough to visit widely there without heavy guide use.

[84Cat]

Not exactly archaeology

[84Cat]

[Chicat]

The responses are great too.

[Merkin]

[Chicat]

This Tweet thread is pure gold...

[scumdevils86]

This Tweet thread is pure gold...

Awesome

[azgreg]

That is one of the best Twitter threads I've had the pleasure to read.

[RichardCranium]

This Tweet thread is pure gold...

The guy makes reasonably good points, of course. Indy isn't an archeologist... he is a fictional character in a fictional movie - the principle of "suspend your disbelief" applies.

But he does make an egregious error in his criticism when he claims that you cannot drink alcohol in a Muslim country. I know for a fact that that is simply not true. Of course they do have stringent restrictions that have to be followed, however, international tourists can easily find worthy libations just about anywhere they go.

And I do mean 'just about anywhere'. A friend just returned to his home in the UK after a weekend 'lads adventure'. He and 4 of his friends checked into a luxury hotel in Morocco for a few days of decadence only to find out that the hotel was next door to a Mosque and was dry as the Sahara. They didn't go thirsty though, they just had walk a bit farther than what would normally be the distance from the elevator to the bar.

[Merkin]

[ASUHATER!]

Apparently a newly found Roman villa floor mosaic near Verona Italy.

[azgreg]

Looks like whatever plans they had for their trench just changed.

[scumdevils86]

Reminds me of how much Time Team I've watched lately. Almost the entire series.

[Jefe]

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/treas ... ns-1881264" target="_blank

An Antiquities Dealer Buried $2 Million in Treasure in the Rocky Mountains a Decade Ago. Now, an Intrepid Explorer Has Finally Found It

Five people are said to have died in search of Forrest Fenn's hidden treasure.



Clues:

[Merkin]

[UAEebs86]

[84Cat]

[Merkin]

[Carcassdragger]

Looks just like a taco stand in Mexicali. Cool!

[Carcassdragger]

Have some pics of cool Indian sites we've visited but can't figure out how to put images from my phone here.

[UAEebs86]

Have some pics of cool Indian sites we've visited but can't figure out how to put images from my phone here.

You have to post them on an image hosting website and post the links here. (Like imgur or ImageShack)

[scumdevils86]

That pompeii stuff is amazing

[wyo-cat]

Reminds me of how much Time Team I've watched lately. Almost the entire series.

Big fan of Time Team, too.

The characters make the show. Tony, Mick, Francis, Phil, Rakshaw...

It’s been great viewing for lockdown.

[scumdevils86]

I watched a lot of Time Team at the beginning of lock down. Started it up again as there's a YouTube channel that's been adding a bunch more episodes lately

[wyo-cat]

Yes, they started last week. There’s also more commentary coming. I saw one with Helen Gaeke.

[84Cat]

[Merkin]

Huge cranium?



I know human bodies is not archaeology, but thought this was interesting anyway.

[Longhorned]

Poor guy. I realize that great white sharks are misunderstood and not intent on attacking humans, and that it's supposedly fine to swim with them under the water without the protection of a cage. But I saw the documentary at the Flandrau planetarium where the divers are down there with great whites, and it got pretty chippy. Those sharks clearly knew what they were dealing with, and the divers are just constantly poking their faces with the spears to put space between themselves and those ready jaws.

[UAdevil]

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/th ... d=msedgntp

The 10 biggest recent archaeology discoveries

[azgreg]

[azgreg]

[Merkin]

[Carcassdragger]

Just finishing up a week of visiting the Mayan cities of Chichen Nitza (been there before), Uxmal, and Palenque.

Uxmal especially blew my mind with huge pyramids, and elevated plazas and palaces.

I think its so interesting that European descendants tend to think the old world was more advanced than the new world. Yet the Mayans knew about the solar system, that our planets and others orbit the sun, could predict eclipses, and tracked comets through time-all at a time that the common thought in Europe was that the world was. flat

[Longhorned]

Uxmal is my favorite archaeological site in the world.

Europeans had all that astronomical knowledge, too. It's hard to tell what European peasants thought about the universe up to 1492, but educated people knew the earth was round. I think the understanding of cosmic mechanism grew out the application of the compass and rule in stone masonry on building sites in early Greek times, and then thinkers started using those same tools to theorize about how the world was put together. But from 2D diagrams to 3D models, the circle and the sphere were the usual way of picturing the world.

[Chicat]

For all the colonization talk of “taming the savages”, there were just as many people living in the Americas as there were in Europe but somehow Native Americans hadn’t poisoned their water and soil and didn’t suffer from diseases and premature death at nearly the rate of Europeans. This was because they understood the necessity of bathing and oral hygiene, keeping their food clean, staying separated from domesticated animals, allowing crops to grow somewhat wild, and not drinking downstream from where they bathed or where animals defecated.

[Carcassdragger]

My understanding is that it is currently dogma by anthropologists that, very soon after the new world was "discovered", smallpox was vectored in and that it spread very quickly ahead of European exploration and wiped out 95% of the native population. By the time the Europeans came to various parts of the new world, the native societies were destroyed and hadn't recovered-even 100 years later. This is why they were so easy to subjugate.

Before smallpox, vast, complex societies thrived in the new world.

[Chicat]

My understanding is that it is currently dogma by anthropologists that, very soon after the new world was "discovered", smallpox was vectored in and that it spread very quickly ahead of European exploration and wiped out 95% of the native population. By the time the Europeans came to various parts of the new world, the native societies were destroyed and hadn't recovered-even 100 years later. This is why they were so easy to subjugate.

Before smallpox, vast, complex societies thrived in the new world.

This is true. Although it wasn’t just smallpox. There were other diseases, plus good old fashioned murderous violence.

This is also the reason why it became an advertised calling to “civilize” the natives. If you came to a village and there was just a handful of starving people you might think they would need your civilizing influence too. Meanwhile what they really needed was for 9 out of every 10 people not to suddenly get sick and die out of nowhere.

[Longhorned]

One of the more recent focuses of historians is the post-conquest agency of indigenous Americans, beyond how Europeans enslaved and exploited them while destroying their culture. What did the Atlantic mean to them in the transatlantic world? How did they cross it themselves and encounter the "new world" of Europe? What new possibilities did they make in the wake of the destruction (which, of course, the Europeans found was to destroy in turn).

There's also some really interesting new stuff on the transatlantic origins of white supremacism as early as the 1490s.

[ASUHATER!]

My understanding is that it is currently dogma by anthropologists that, very soon after the new world was "discovered", smallpox was vectored in and that it spread very quickly ahead of European exploration and wiped out 95% of the native population. By the time the Europeans came to various parts of the new world, the native societies were destroyed and hadn't recovered-even 100 years later. This is why they were so easy to subjugate.

Before smallpox, vast, complex societies thrived in the new world.

That's what I've read. Some native societies were decimated by smallpox and other diseases decades before they ever encountered Europeans. By the mid 1600s the Europeans discovering uninhabited wild lands in North America were really just finding recently depopulated areas that had many more people even 30 years earlier.

[ASUHATER!]

One of the more recent focuses of historians is the post-conquest agency of indigenous Americans, beyond how Europeans enslaved and exploited them while destroying their culture. What did the Atlantic mean to them in the transatlantic world? How did they cross it themselves and encounter the "new world" of Europe? What new possibilities did they make in the wake of the destruction (which, of course, the Europeans found was to destroy in turn).

There's also some really interesting new stuff on the transatlantic origins of white supremacism as early as the 1490s.

I saw something recently about how "whiteness" was something that was partially created as a justification for slavery. Before the 17th century or so, europeans didn't see themselves as white...they saw themselves as English or Spanish or Hanoverian or Venetian. But once slaves were used, they needed justification and "otherness" and created the whole white people are the chosen race thing.

[Merkin]

My understanding is that it is currently dogma by anthropologists that, very soon after the new world was "discovered", smallpox was vectored in and that it spread very quickly ahead of European exploration and wiped out 95% of the native population. By the time the Europeans came to various parts of the new world, the native societies were destroyed and hadn't recovered-even 100 years later. This is why they were so easy to subjugate.

Before smallpox, vast, complex societies thrived in the new world.

That's what I've read. Some native societies were decimated by smallpox and other diseases decades before they ever encountered Europeans. By the mid 1600s the Europeans discovering uninhabited wild lands in North America were really just finding recently depopulated areas that had many more people even 30 years earlier.

Climate change too caused many civilizations to disappear, among them the Mayans who had to deal with a tremendous drought and the struggles with other civilizations for limited resources.

[Longhorned]

One of the more recent focuses of historians is the post-conquest agency of indigenous Americans, beyond how Europeans enslaved and exploited them while destroying their culture. What did the Atlantic mean to them in the transatlantic world? How did they cross it themselves and encounter the "new world" of Europe? What new possibilities did they make in the wake of the destruction (which, of course, the Europeans found was to destroy in turn).

There's also some really interesting new stuff on the transatlantic origins of white supremacism as early as the 1490s.

I saw something recently about how "whiteness" was something that was partially created as a justification for slavery. Before the 17th century or so, europeans didn't see themselves as white...they saw themselves as English or Spanish or Hanoverian or Venetian. But once slaves were used, they needed justification and "otherness" and created the whole white people are the chosen race thing.

Pretty much. But now we see that starting to take hold already in the first years after Columbus hit the West Indies. They thought race was fluid, and that whiteness was caused by a "Christian" diet. If you ate maize, beans, avocados, tomatoes, chili peppers, etc., you'd turn brown. Then when they started to enslave Africans, and their enslaved people got sick, they'd feed them white people food just enough to get their strength back, but then stopped before they started to turn white. And I'm dead fucking serious.

[RichardCranium]

This is introductory text to episode 2 of a 3 part PBS series "Race: The Power of an Illusion". The introduction touches briefly on the origin of "white supremacy".

Race: The Power of an Illusion (Episode 2)

Links to the other episode introductions are on the page. There is a button to order the video on the page, I don't know if it is available any other place.

[wyo-cat]

They used to believe that VD started in the Americas among the “savages,” and salty sailors brought it back. Osteoarcheologists found several collections of bones in Europe and the UK that showed signs of VD killing people prior to colonizing the new world.

White folk brought over the clap, too.

[Merkin]

The Starčevo culture liked big butts I cannot lie.

[Chicat]

Looks like a Pixar mom.

[Merkin]

Looted by the English in 1897. Although only very few are being returned on a permanent basis.

and on England being really bad guys