Bits and Bobs of Interest

The Amphipolis Tomb

In my last post I reported that the results of the analysis of the bones from the tomb at Amphipolis, Greece had been announced. This, predictably, has led to a tidal wave of speculation about the identities of the five individuals.

Speculation on this topic will continue for some time, and perhaps there will never be definitive answers. Alas, that is the nature of the beast. I think the following quote sums things up quite nicely actually:

"Archaeology is like a jigsaw puzzle, except that you can't cheat and look at the box, and not all the pieces are there."

More here.

Applying Archaeology to Today's World: Part 2

A couple of posts back I started looking at how the findings of archaeological research might be applied to understanding contemporary issues and problems.

Here is another relevant example: a review of an interesting looking book written by Eric H. Cline, a Professor of Classics and Archaeology at The George Washington University in Washington D.C., that delves into some of the causes that archaeology and related disciplines tell us contributed to the downfall of Bronze Age civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean - causes that are relevant to today's world, such as climate change, war, and scarcity of resources.

Rome's military women have been hiding in plain sight

As was noted in another post, the study of the material remains of human activity in the past is often complemented by the study of historical records, where available, in order to gain a 'more complete' picture of the past. I noted that often the historical records that are available have been written by those from a particular section of a society, leaving other sections of that society 'historically disenfranchised'. These people's story may, however, be salvageable through the archaeology. Women are an example of a historically disenfranchised section of many past societies - often deprived of a voice in a history written mainly by men.    

A nice example of archaeology bringing the lives of women in the past to light comes from Classical Archaeology (concerned with the Greco-Roman world) and is described in a recent New Scientist article. As noted in that article:

  

Only men could join the Roman army, and during his reign from 27 BC to AD 14, the emperor Augustus forbade rank and file soldiers from marrying, a ban that lasted nearly two centuries. Classical texts on the Roman army have little to say about women.

As a result, for many years scholars believed that no women were attached to the Roman army. But as is seen in the article that I linked to above, archaeology is now telling a somewhat different story!

X-rays reveal words in Vesuvius-baked scrolls 

And finally for now, here's a pretty cool example of the use of technology in archaeology that has been brought to my attention. Researchers are using X-Ray technology to decipher letters on previously unreadable Herculaneum papyri carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. This eruption is more commonly associated with another Roman town that fell victim to its effects - Pompeii.

Thanks for reading,

Nick.