Archaeology Today

Sometimes :rofl:

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The storm that did Rungholt was a whopper. It swept across Ireland, Britain, the Low Countries, and northern Germany, causing at least 25,000 deaths, according to the Guardian, in an event now known as the Grote Mandrenke — or the Great Drowning of Men.

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Double impact, probably:

I vaguely remember seeing a documentation about how Steinheim was an iron meteor and the Celts used to collect tiny iron droplets scattered all over the place and forge blades out of them. But I might remember this wrong and confuse it with something else.
Maybe @Doctor_Faustus can clear this up.

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I think you might confuse it with the discredited hypothesis that there was a similar impact in the Chiemgau? That’s one of these pseudoscience things that was pushed by TerraX despite not being taken seriously by anyone. They posited that the Romans and or Celts (depending on the flavour of the month) made weapons out of meteor iron from it.

https://www.final-frontier.ch/chiemgauimpakt

That said, meteoric iron was used to make weapons, even before the iron age, as we know from Tutankhamun’s grave 


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Romans sometimes poured liquid gypsum over the clothed bodies of the dead in their coffins prior to burying them. As the gypsum hardened and the bodies decayed, this practice preserved the position and contours of the dead, as well as the imprint of burial shrouds and other clothing.

image

https://www.soillogic.com

Funny, Liquid “Gypsum” doesn’t list burials as an application in their marketing materials.

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And as you probably know, iron from the Cape York meteorite was used for centuries by the Greenland Inuit, until noted asshole Robert Peary stole it and sold it to the American Museum of Natural history in New York.

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It Works Rachael Harris GIF by Lucifer

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IMG_9008

IMG_9009

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Yeah, I know, glib throwaway dismissive gif. But still, the rebuttal is


OK, so there’s nothing genetic about language, that should be clear to everyone (but it seems it isn’t, go figure). So just because a population might have genetic markers of descent from a given ancestry doesn’t mean they spoke the same language, or even language family, as those ancestors. At best you might be able to surmise major population transfers, but that says little to nothing about what language they spoke, or what happened to that language as it went. (To take as examples: English is the first language of many in, say, Nigeria. That isn’t going to show up in any DNA analysis, now or in a couple of thousand years.)

It also assumes that those populations didn’t have contact with other areas/populations/languages. Which is nonsense. We know that the inhabitants of Ireland were in contact with those of Britain, with those of Gallia, and they traded with Germanians, Romans, Phoenicians, 
 More the point, we know that tribal names in Ireland were connected with, or descended from, or part of, Celtic tribes across Europe. The biggest one being the Belgae, which was across Gaul (and from which was named Belgium), south of Britain around Winchester, and can be surmised in the Irish myths of the Fir Bolg, which can be read as “the Men of the Bag”, but also as “the Belgian Men”. Is there a direct connection? Are they continuations of the same Celtic nation? We don’t know at this point, but it’s at least as suggestive.

Also, there are linguistic similarities between Goidelic and the Celtiberian language, most strongly evident in that it looks like Celtiberian was a Q-Celtic language. There are elements of phonology and etymology either in common, or closely evolved in the same direction.

According to the Irish News, Mallory believes there was no subsequent invasion or settlement of Ireland until the arrival of the Vikings in the 8th century AD.

“Many linguists will be forced to reconsider a model of Irish origins that they had presumed was linguistically implausible,” Mallory said.

[citation needed]

Mallory added that the only other plausible explanation for the origin of the Irish language is that a more recent source of Irish developed in the Bronze Age or Iron Age.

What if, and this is spitballing here, what if the other descendants of the Beaker people were in communication with Ireland the whole time? What if the reason his analysis doesn’t show an invasion or settlement between the first Beaker People and the Vikings is because any settlement was done by other descendants of the Beaker People?

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More like Dr Scholls:

image

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I’ve poked around the net a bit to find out if Dr. Scholl’s sandals are maybe made out of birchwood which would appeal to my sense of poetic symmetry, but no luck so far.
What I’ve found so far suggests that the sandal wasn’t developed by Dr. William Mathias Scholl (1882 – 1968), but by his nephew William Scholl (1921 - 2002).
Anyway, I had no idea they were from Chicago.

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I know it sounds irrational, but those wooden soles were actually quite comfortable. They were shaped so that the natural tendency of your toes to grip a bit when walking was supported. Loved those sandals.

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The Beaker Bell culture,

Sad The Muppet Movie GIF by Muppet Wiki

This would explain a lot


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Beaker Bell

Sorry, pedant alert: it’s bell beaker.

They’re beakers shaped like bells, not bells shaped like beakers, or what the article misunderstands as

beaker-shaped drinking vessel[s]

Every beaker is beaker-shaped after all


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I recall learning that, in Ireland at least, they were used for holding cremation remains. I had never thought that they were drinking vessels. In Ireland it isnt common to use the term beaker to mean something you would drink out of.

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Interestingly enough, the bell beaker culture are known for not having cremated their dead (with exceptions, of course). Instead, they have very distinctive crouched inhumations, where men and women face in different directions.



That said, this isn’t my period or area of specialization, so it might be different in Ireland.

As for the word beaker, it might just be archaeological terminology, but it always means a small handle-less drinking vessel in my understanding. Of course, that doesn’t mean that bell beakers were exclusively used for drinking. It’s just a typological name.

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