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)

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From The Vault: Portrait of a Podcaster on Fire - Ep 167

This week, we bring you another episode from behind the Patreon paywall. Sure, the title is a stretch, but it's hard coming up with a topical joke about portraiture! This month we dive into some early examples of representing individuals in ancient art from several times and places. Amber inexplicably takes umbrage with the entirety of Byzantine art, and both hosts question what is a face and what is a couple of lines that sorta look like a face.

Links

• The oldest known portrait of a human—usually interpreted as a woman—sculpted from mammoth ivory (via ResearchGate)

• 26,000 years of capturing the human face (Inspiring Ancestry - Genealogy & DNA)

• The woman from the Dolní Věstonice 3 burial: a new view of the face using modern technologies (Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences)

• Archaeologists Discover an Ancient Portrait of Young Jesus in an Abandoned Israeli Church (Artnet)

• The Oldest Modernist Paintings (Smithsonian)

• Scientists Analyze Faiyum Portrait Pigment (Archaeology)

• Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits From Roman Egypt (The Met)

• Egyptian Mummy Portrait Mysteries Solved (Artsy)

• Old Masters (The Guardian)

• The diagnosis of art: facial nerve palsy in ancient Rome (Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine)

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How Do We Know What We Know? - Ep 166

There are a lot of misconceptions in archaeology that are often perpetuated simply because people don’t think about how the information they take for granted came to be. How do archaeologists know what people were doing in the past? Actually, how do we know anything at all? How do we know what didn’t happen? Tune in and find out!

Links

• Archaeologists Dig For Clues (via WorldCat

• Is there a Solutrean-Clovis Connection in the American Colonization? (ThoughtCo)

• Who really discovered America? The Solutrean hypothesis is the latest in a long line of theories about the discovery of the New World (Skeptic)

• Five Breakthrough Signs of Early Peoples in the Americas (Sapiens)

• The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas (Science)

• People Were Chipping Stone Tools in Texas More Than 15,000 Years Ago (Scientific American)

• Rejecting the Solutrean hypothesis: the first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe (Guardian)

• Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer? The Impact of Gender Studies on Hunter-Gatherer Research (A Retrospective) (The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers)

• Mammoth FAQ (We Hunted the Mammoth)

• Man the Hunter. The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man's Once Universal Hunting Way of Life (via Google Books)

• Female hunters of the early Americas (Science Advances)

• Did prehistoric women hunt? New research suggests so (The Conversation)

• This Prehistoric Peruvian Woman Was a Big-Game Hunter (Smithsonian)

• Whole-genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia (Genome Research)

• The Starchild Project (New England Skeptical Society)

• Oldest case of leukemia discovered: Prehistoric female skeleton shows signs of this cancer (ScienceDaily)

• Leukemia in Ancient Egypt: Earliest case and state-of-the-art techniques for diagnosing generalized osteolytic lesions (International Journal of Osteology)

• A history of true civilisation is not one of monuments (Aeon)

• What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West (WorldCat)

• The Amazon Rainforest Was Profoundly Changed by Ancient Humans (The Atlantic)

• Thera (World History Encyclopedia)

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From the Vault: "Ancient" "Astronomy" - Ep 165

This week, Amber is finishing grad school applications and Anna had some vaccine booster side effects, so we bring you an excerpt from an episode of Dirt After Dark! Amber brings Anna (kicking and screaming) along on an exploration of some space weirdos who interpreted various bits and pieces of archaeology and ethnography to show that there's another mystery planet out there, and it's out to get us. And also bring us civilization? Anyway, it gets really weird, and we hope you enjoy the ride.

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Thanksglyphing - Ep 164

We’re shaking things up this year, and instead of doing a ThanksViking episode, we’re peeking into the world of Maya and Aztec art and writing. The Maya wrote using a system of around 800 glyphs--the Aztecs used as many as 2,000. We won’t get to ALL of these, but we’ll talk about how these writing systems developed, how they were used, and the role they played in the lives of the Aztec and Maya people.

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