In-pursuit-of-knowledge-blog - Everything Is Interesting!

Marc Crockett

everyone should watch Atlantis: The Lost Empire. it really sparks wonder and curiosity towards other civilizations!, living and dead. (and Milo Thatch is very clever.)

“The State of  Archaeology”

Such a scary title right? Well, boy oh boy do I have an adventure for you today.

So, I was at a really bougie historic preservation conference because my bosses were presenting. The last panel I went to was supposed to cover the kinds of issues with Cultural Resource Management (CRM) the state was coming across. 

They ended up talking about how all of this would kind of be fixed if we had more funding from the state and more robust laws surrounding archaeological materials.

But this was a room of basically only archaeologists, and mostly professional archaeologists over the age of 35. We were in such an echo chamber. I was the only “young” student there.

SO. I start getting pissed because the same people just kept practically saying “but HOW do we fix our funding problem, we have such AWESOME sites.” “oh, the public is definitely a vital piece to archaeology” but no one was saying the (what I thought was) obvious.

TL;DR If archaeologists want to fix their problems, they need to DO something about it instead of sitting in an echochamber. WE need to make sure the public knows what we do, and more importantly, WHY it matters. We need to make sure the information we disseminate is not just for ourselves in the present, but for the public, for EVERYONE, and for everyone in perpetuity.

Something for my dad from the nature trade - a piece of Precambrian-era petrified wood! I thought he would enjoy it and he does, it’s a truly lovely little piece.

NOT!Anatomy but still interesting.

I took this picture in Beijing last week, and posted it to my FB, asking followers to guess what the stick the cop was holding, was for.

One person got it right.

don’t fight to prove you’re right- fight to become right. Even- perhaps especially- when that means switching sides.

hate doesn’t just happen. war doesn’t just happen. And we are definitely not “right” enough to kill or bring pain to anyone… // Hina Syeda

Matt Hovland - Land of Hov

Lioconcha Hieroglyphica is officially my favorite mollusc

This Medieval Italian Man Replaced His Amputated Hand With a Weapon

Archaeologists have found a fascinating puzzle in the shape of a man’s remains dating back to medieval Italy. It looks like this guy went through life with a knife attached to his arm, in place of his amputated hand.

The skeleton in question was found in a Longobard necropolis in the north of Italy, dating back to around the 6th to 8th centuries CE. Hundreds of skeletons were buried there, as well as a headless horse and several greyhounds, but this particular skeleton stood out.

He was an older male, aged between 40 and 50, and his right arm had been amputated around the mid-forearm.

The researchers, led by archaeologist Ileana Micarelli of Sapienza University in Rome, determined that the hand had been removed by blunt force trauma, but exactly how or why is impossible to tell. Read more.