How Long Ago Was the Past? - Ep 168

When does “The Past” start, and how far back does it go? How long did it take people to get places in the past? How do we attempt to hold the vastness of time and geography in our minds? Not well, especially in an audio medium, but we’re excited to blow your minds.

Links

• The Greatest Animal War (Nautilus)

• The last slave ship survivor and her descendants identified (National Geographic)

• How Far Can A Horse Travel In A Day? (8 Facts) (Deep Hollow Ranch)

• RGS-IBG Expedition Handbook (Royal Geographical Society)

• Speed Under Sail of Ancient Ships (Transactions of the American Philological Association)

• An Ordinary Ship and Its Stories of Early Globalism: World Travel, Mass Production, and Art in the Global Middle Ages (Journal of Medieval Worlds)

• Royal Road (Livius.org)

• ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World (Stanford University)

• Modeling Ancient Population Structures and Movement in Linguistics (Annual Review of Anthropology)

• Convergent geographic patterns between grizzly bear population genetic structure and Indigenous language groups in coastal British Columbia, Canada (Ecology and Society)

• Human mobility and innovation spreading in ancient times: a stochastic agent-based simulation approach (EPJ Data Service)

• Optimising human community sizes (Evolution and Human Behavior)

• Size of human groups during the Paleolithic and the evolutionary significance of increased group size (Behavioral and Brain Sciences)

• The Oaxaca Barrio in Teotihuacan: Mortuary Customs and Ethnicity in Mesoamerica's Greatest Metropolis (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

ArchPodNet

• APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com

• APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet

• APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet

• APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet

• Tee Public Store

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

The Good Old Days: Prehistoric Inequality - Ep 123

This week's episode is a listener-sponsored one! Ancient hunter-gatherers are often painted as egalitarian, with all members contributing to the needs of the group. But what does evidence from prehistory say about things like access to nutrition, or care for the sick or injured? Are there cases where some individuals were clearly treated differently from others? How far back can we go to find clues? Stay tuned, sleuths.

Links

• Did agriculture create inequality? (Scientific American)

• Hunter-getherer envy (SAPIENS)

• Issues with using modern forager groups as proxy for ancient ones (Evolutionary Anthropology)

• The earliest deliberate burial? (SAPIENS)

• Sunghir burials (SAPIENS)

• Different types of burials at Sunghir (Antiquity)

• Status-symbol scapulae? (Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

Green Sahara: The African Humid Period - Ep 85

The grass is always greener on the other side (of the Holocene). What is today a vast and inhospitable home to many people and creatures was, between ten and five thousand years ago, a lush environment replete with lakes, forests, and grasses. We examine the first clues that suggested a Green Sahara to researchers, explore the technologies and societies that lived there, and contemplate what the Sahara’s past might suggest about its future.

Links

• Megalakes in the Sahara? A Review (Quaternary Research)

• Saharan Dust Blows Across the Atlantic (NOAA)

• The emergence of pottery in Africa during the tenth millennium cal BC : new evidence from Ounjougou (Mali) (Antiquity)

• Ounjougou

• Technological and Cultural Change Among the Last Hunter-Gatherers of the Maghreb: The Capsian (10,000–6000 B.P.) (Journal of World Prehistory)

• Capsian (Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology)

• The 8,000-year-old dugout canoe from Dufuna (NE Nigeria)

• Africa’s oldest boat set for exhibit in Nigeria (Africa Times)

• First dairying in green Saharan Africa in the fifth millennium BC (Nature)

• History of the Domestication of Cows and Yaks (ThoughtCo)

• Chad Genetic Diversity Reveals an African History Marked by Multiple Holocene Eurasian Migrations (American Journal of Human Genetics)

• End of the African Humid Period (NOAA)

• End of the African Humid Period (Nature)

• Climate Change in North Africa: The Past is Not the Future (Climatic Change)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

The Dirt Potcast: Ceramics in Archaeology - Ep 58

This week, we’re talking ceramics! Anna and Amber explain how bits of pottery aren’t called shards, but do hold lots of secrets (and sometimes blood!), the role of ceramics in archaeology, evidence for amateur and student potters, and how Amber clearly didn’t miss her calling as a ceramic artist.

Links

• Basic Concepts: Pottery in the Archaeological Record (Archaeology Review)
  [https://ahotcupofjoe.net/2007/01/basic-concepts-pottery-in-the-archaeological-record/]

• Ancient Chinese pottery confirmed as the oldest yet found (The Guardian)
  [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/28/ancient-chinese-pottery-oldest-yet]

• Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) in the Study of Archaeological Ceramics (Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Ceramic Analysis)
  [https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199681532.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199681532-e-24]

• Thule tradition (University of Waterloo)
  [http://anthropology.uwaterloo.ca/ArcticArchStuff/thule.html]

• Ceramic Technology of Arctic Alaska: An Experimental and Adaptive Craft (Teal Sullivan)
  [http://www.tealsullivan.com/ceramics/arcticpottery/]

• How to Make an Unfired Clay Cooking Pot: Understanding the Technological Choices Made by Arctic Potters (Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory)
  [https://www.jstor.org/stable/25653111?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents]

• Muweilah (Universes in Universe)
  [https://universes.art/en/art-destinations/sharjah/archaeological-sites/muweilah]

• Prehistoric Children Working and Playing: A Southwestern Case Study in Learning Ceramics (Journal of Archaeological Research)
  [https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/jar.57.4.3631354]

• The Dirt Book Club!
  When Clay Sings (via WorldCat) [https://www.worldcat.org/title/when-clay-sings/oclc/340283]

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast