Archaeology · 04. October 2017

Historic Environment Scotland has partnered with the Glasgow School of Art to create an app that lets users take a virtual tour of Maeshowe, a massive chamber tomb, older than Stonehenge, and central to the Orkney archaeological complex. Orkney is an archipelago just north of Scotland and its islands are home to some of the most stunning archaeology in Western Europe. The core archaeological sites, consisting of henges, settlements, and burials, are collectively known as “the Heart of...

Editor's Blog · 20. June 2017

Göbekli Tepe is a site that upended everything we thought we knew about building, eating, drinking and living our Neolithic lives like they’re golden.

Editor's Blog · 16. June 2017

It sounds preposterous but I ran across a book called The Baking Powder Controversy written in 1904 by A. Cressy Morrison. It’s a two volume, 964 page tome and while not a riveting page turner, he does call the “controversy” the “Baking Powder War” by the second paragraph in the preface. Some wonderfully delightful lines follow. For example, in reference to baking powder, Morrison writes, “An unanswered indictment hangs like Damocles’ sword over the head of a captain of...

Editor's Blog · 09. June 2017

Let’s talk about poop. Poop comes up a lot in archaeology - something they do not tell you in graduate school. But it’s a thing that runs the gamut from you as a pooper yourself to them, the people who lived and pooped on that archaeological site you’re working on. But let’s start with you. Imagine you’re a young archaeologist pooping in the woods for the first time in your life because the site you’re excavating is too far away from anywhere to not dry camp. Or imagine that...

Editor's Blog · 24. January 2017

A long time ago cultural anthropologists earned their stripes by going into remote regions of the planet and embedding themselves with a group of people who theoretically had never been in contact with “the outside world.” Our cultural anthropologist would spend at least a year living amongst the people, speaking their language, observing their customs, and documenting those observations so that an accurate account, or ethnography, of the culture group could be produced. As we all know the...

Editor's Blog · 24. December 2016

In 1955 a local store placed an ad in the newspaper in an effort to generate Christmas sales. The ad encouraged kids to call Santa directly and provided a phone number where he could be reached. In an odd twist the number printed had a typo so instead of calling Santa, children called the crew commander on duty at the Continental Air Defense Operations Center. The commander played along and in 1958 NORAD made tracking Santa an official thing. Fast forward 58 years and that thing has become a...

01. December 2016

If I had a time machine I would have a lot of fun. Here's my shallow list of the top five places I would go.