Ossamenta

I looked at last year's End of the Year review, and had a bit of deja vu. This has been another Christmas spent writing PhD applications. Hopefully I'll have better luck with these ones.

Otherwise, 2015 has been quite a good year for me. Workwise I've been occupied with one Roman semi-urban site with a huge bone working deposit and one Iron Age - Roman rural site with lots of Iron Age ritual deposits, i.e. weird semi-articulated or whole animal burials often in pits. All the recording has been done for the last one, and in January I'll write the report. I'd like to find time to write an article on the bone working deposit - they are not that common from Roman sites, and this one is quite odd compared to other published ones.

I went to the PZG meeting in August, where we discussed interesting new research and methods of dog/fox/wolf identification. Then in the beginning of September I went to Glasgow for the EAA conference and had a great time! It was followed up with a short holiday in Edinburgh (it's only an hour away from Glasgow, so whyever not?). I apologise for not having written up the conference report yet. I tried to do some tweeting, but I fear this tweet summarizes my conference-tweeting experience. On the other hand, I like twitter as a snapshot commentary and I will definitely keep using it. On the third hand, I'm enough old-school not to have notification of incoming tweets/emails, so it's more an intermittent use than ongoing tweeting for me.

Research-wise, I did some recording of sheep pelves for a sheep sexing study, but I've realised that I need more data (of course...) so my research continues next year. I'm also looking forward to doing the assessment (i.e. preliminary recording and analysis of potential in a bone assemblage) for an Oxford college kitchen assemblage.

In the current bone assemblage I'm recording I came across a sheep burial (probably remains from a feast - deposited in a pit right at the entrance to a big enclosure and with chop marks on the ribs) that made me raise both my eyebrows in a 'you got to be kidding me'- way.

The pelvis looked like the castrated sheep in English Heritage's collection, but the horn cores looked like typical ram horn cores... I'm working on the theory that this is a relatively late* castrated sheep, and that pelvis shape will override horn core shape in the complicated way hormones can shape the body. Definitely a case of more information needed, damnit! I can see myself trying to get hold of records of other sheep burials just to build up a dataset. This would be particularly relevant if late castration will have a difference in how horn cores and pelves develop.

It's unfortunate that most animal bone assemblages come from food and butchery waste, where the bones are only individual fragments, entirely disassociated with the animal they came from. Such a difference from research on human remains, where we (mostly) deal with the entire person and can see how diseases/traumas could affect the whole body, not just single body parts.


*: The flocks from EH's collection had to follow modern day animal welfare regulations, which state that castration of livestock must occur within the first few days after birth.

Spotted on the New Book Display shelves in the fabulous* Sackler library in Oxford (dealing with archaeology, classics and art history):

Gitte Hansen, Steven P. Ashby and Irene Baug (eds) (2015) Everyday products in the Middle Ages. Crafts, consumption and the individual in northern Europe c. AD 800-1600. Oxbow Books.

I’ve heard about this book for a while now, but was waiting to see it in the flesh, as it were, before deciding to buy or not. And it seems like a highly useful book if you are interested in basic consumer goods, its production, the craftspeople and the consumers in Medieval northern Europe.

The list of contents is up at the publisher, and it has quite a variety in its topics, from general articles on craftspeople, to pottery and glass imports, leather working, bone and antler working, textiles, stone working, iron production and blacksmithing.


*: not because it’s particularly fancy – it’s not – but because they have so much useful and interesting stuff.

It's the end of the first conference day and I'm knackered. Talks from 8am to 6pm - I filled nine A4 pages in my notebook. But it was interesting talks, on topics as shattered as scientific analyses of Roman eggshells, written records on 14th century sheep houses, and medieval urban waste managements. And then there was a party afterwards in the greenhouses in the botanical gardens. I was too busy taking notes to tweet someting - hope you weren't too disappointed. Tomorrow will be a bit easier: the talks only lasts until half past three. Hopefully I can find some time to see the Hunterian museum.

This was the 10th anniversary of the Professional Zooarchaeology Group, and it was held in Fort Cumberland, a 18th century fort in Portsmouth where (parts of) Historic England have their offices. There were lots of good talks, celebratory cake and wine, a guided tour of the fort, and a very interesting workshop on identifying dogs from wolves and foxes, as well as sexing dogs.

( cut for serious length )

It's been a lovely but very busy weekend. It was the 10th anniversary of the Professional Zooarchaeology Group, and in honour of that the meeting stretched across the whole weekend, and not just the Saturday. It was held in Fort Cumberland, the listed 18th century fort on the outskirts of Portsmouth, where Historic England, the research part of English Heritage, is. The topics for the meeting were Roman zooarchaeology and dogs. We were also treated to a guided tour of the fort (more interesting than I had assumed - if you get a chance, don't miss it). After the meeting, we had dinner together at a fish restaurant at the seafront and on Sunday we had an excursion to Portchester Castle (probably the only medieval castle that was built within a Roman fort (and still has the Roman walls standing!) and Fishbourne Roman palace.

And now I have to deal with the aftermath of the meeting: contact the people I need to contact about various things, decipher my notes and re-write them, and do an Ossamenta post about the talks. My handwriting is not the tidiest, but when I write really fast, trying to keep up with a speaker, letters can be lost, transposed or only the mere rudimentaries of them gets put to paper. Luckily I at least know the context of the talk.



It says "variability within towns". Obvious, right?

There's so many things going on in my life now that I've been neglecting this blog a bit, and in particular letting the interesting links build up. I hope I can get rid of a fair few in this post.

- Author Nicola Griffith wrote an interesting post about elves, gender, Anglo-Saxon medical practice and how this was changed by Christianization.

- Another author (and historian), Kari Sperring did an half-hour talk at Exilicon on the real history of the three musketeers (video)

- A newly discovered velociraptor ancestor with feathers.

- In line with strange and mysterious ritual stuff, an Iron Age site in Dorset produced composite animals deposited in pits: A cow with horse legs, a sheep with an extra head at its bum etc. It will be very interesting to read the subsequent research and see what they can find out about Iron Age beliefs.

- Isotope research have revealed some very interesting things over the years, often upending our previous beliefs and assumptions. The newest thing that's come to my knowledge is a study of the famous Egtved girl in Denmark. She's one of the Bronze Age oak coffin burials that were excavated in the late 19th and early 20th century, where circumstances had managed preservation of organic remains, and they are subsequently our main source for Scandinavian Bronze Age clothing. Researchers took isotope samples from her teeth, hair, nails as well as from her clothing and found out that she wasn't Danish at all! (nor was her clothing) The isotope signatures point elsewhere, possibly what's now southeastern Germany (the geology is consistent with this, but more importantly (as this type of geology is found elsewhere) the archaeological record indicates a relationship between Denmark and this area during the Bronze Age). Correlating hair growth rate and several samples along one strand of hair, they also found that she had been going back and forth between Denmark and the other region (probably NW Germany) during her last two years in life. (A more detailed article in Danish)

- Of course, sometimes science makes things more boring. A DNA analysis of the hair tufts and hair cords found on the Norse settlement The Farm Beneath the Sand on Greenland changed the species identification from bear, bison and muskox (signifying trade with North America) to horse and goat (not signifying trade with North America).

- Neanderthal bone flutes were apparently made by hyenas, not Neanderthals.

- There's a new theory on why the wooly mammoth became extinct: osteoporosis may have "helped".

- The Paston Letters is one of the largest archives of 15th-century English private correspondence, comprising about 1000 letters and documents including petitions, leases, wills and even shopping lists. They offer a unique glimpse into the personal lives of three generations of the Paston family from Norfolk over a period of 70 years. A large part of the collection have now been scanned and put online at the British Library's website.

- If you are in New York, don't miss the Medieval rings exhibition at the Met museum.

- Pottery enthusiasts might like this intact wine vessel found in Early Medieval layers in the Danish town Ribe.

I am going to the EAA! Train tickets have been bought, and I'm hoping to find accommodation via Airb'n'b (hostels are not bad, but there is always a risk of loud drunk people in the middle of the night). And once payday has come, I'll register for the conference. Travel and accomodation are definitely prioritized as they are more time crucial when you want to get the cheaper options.

I went to Matthew Collins' talk on his work on Medieval parchment and DNA at the University's Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art (RLAHA) last Tuesday, and it made me so enthusiastic about all the cool things you can find out through research. Sometimes work is a bit repetitive and it's good to take the time to digest the new research that is happening. His (and his colleagues') work is really interesting. Since parchment is essentially dried skin it contains DNA, much better preserved than that in leather objects found on archaeological digs. And by using a rubber you can extract bits of DNA - no need to actually destroy parts of the parchment, just send in the scraps to the laboratory - and see what animal the parchment was made of, what sex it was, and potentially track breeds through time. He also said that if you could digitize manuscripts to such high resolution that you could see the hair follicles you could potentially see if it came from a young or adult animals (much smaller distance between follicles in young animals). Unfortunately most manuscript digitizations are not done to such high resolution, as researchers have been focussing on the actual text and images on the pages. There are probably hundreds of thousands of Medieval manuscripts and legal documents in UK archives, not to mention what's out there in the rest of Europe (and in museums/archives in the rest of the world). Such a massive source!

After over ten years as a zooarchaeologists, most bones have a certain ordinariness about them. It's butchery waste, sometimes industrial waste, and the occasional buried animal. Even if it's artefacts or pathologies you would at least have spotted similar bones in books or articles. But now and again you find a bone that makes you go WTF?

The latest one came from an Iron Age pit from a large settlement in Oxfordshire. It's a cheek part of a horse mandible with a smooth hole in it. Unfortunately we only have one half of the mandible, but I assume it was originally part of a set (as opposed to cattle mandibles, the two sides of horse mandibles are fused). The hole is smooth on all edges, so it couldn't have been suspended stationary for all its use - if so, only one part would have been smooth. The cord may have been large enough to fill the hole entirely, but it must have moved occasionally in order to smoothen the edges.

I have no idea how to interpret this. I have never seen anything similar in any book or article. Are we dealing with the partial remains of a horse head that was displayed and later discarded? I know that the classic definition of "ritual" being an "All-purpose explanation used where nothing else comes to mind" (recommended book, btw), but I can't think of any other way to explain this.





Close-up of hole

Spring has finally sprung, and as my mood picks up again with the longer daylight hours, I'll try to get into the the habit of posting more often. Remember, this blog is not dead, just occasionally a bit dormant.

In the ongoing saga of my Ph.D. attempts, it has turned out that there might not be enough assemblages of enough large size to do all the things I wanted to do. Sigh. I talked to a colleague about my options, and she adviced me to go for one of my alternative research ideas. Naturally, that was the most vague and least pre-researched one. So now I'm back in the library all evenings and checking that I have enough material for it to work. It's slow going. But at least they have a lot of books and journals, not limited to those within the UK border. Hopefully I'll have assembled a decent amount of data by the end of the month and can see if the new Ph.D. idea is doable.

Otherwise it's been the classic grumble of "if only I had more money"* - not only because most of my Ph.D. problems could be solved that way: German universities seem to be happy to accept most Ph.D. students, but the drawback is that you have to fund your 3-4 years of ph.d.ing yourself by grants or money in the bank. Last year, or possibly the year before, an interesting conference on environmental urban archaeology was announced on the ZooArch mailing list and I carefully printed the email to remind me to check for papers as the time drew near. Naturally I only just recalled the conference, and sure enough: lots of interesting papers, but not only did the early bird option end mid-March, what with travel and accommodation even €120 would be too expensive for me right now. I'll just have to see if any of the talks ends up on Academia.edu or in journals later on... I will have to have the same approach with the European Archaeology Association's annual conference as well. It's in Glasgow this year and, again, interesting talks and sessions. I'm particularly interested in the wool session and Lee Broderick just posted his abstract on the use of waste to interpret trade and craft in Medieval towns (probably for the dirt session). And yes, you can apply for travel and registration cost grants, but as an employed independent researcher who is neither presenting a poster, a talk or chairing a session, it would be extremely unlikely for me to get one. And I don't begrudge the Ph.D. students who get them. They probably earn less than I.

But I have to put money aside for next year. Not only is it the ICAZ (International council for ArchaeoZoology) every-four-year-conference, but that year's theme for the International Medieval Congress in Leeds is Food, feast and famine. The IMC has been on my wish list for many years, and now there is actually a theme that is really relevant to my work! I had to sit on my hands to not attempt to present a paper - as much as I would have loved to do that, I'm actually way too busy right now and adding more important things is not going to help.

*: Money this year is going towards one pair of handmade medieval shoes for re-enactment (finally! proper shoes that suits my time period!!!) and a holiday trip home to Sweden.