Introduction to Archaeology, Period 5

[the-ascended.livejournal.com]

Daniel's looking quite excited today.

"Now, hopefully you've all brought in your artifact examples," he said. "I want you to look at what you've each found, and discuss them.

Now, who wants to go first?"

Comments

Re: Discuss artifacts

[strongestgirl.livejournal.com]

"In the 4th week of the dig at Hierakonpolis in Egypt, they found what appeared to be beads on a string, or at least preserved in their origonal order in the corner of a tomb that they thought had been plundered. When the photographer asked the workers to clean up the site a little to get a good shot of the discovery they realised that this was more than just a string of beads as each brush stroke revealed more of the iridescent disk-shaped medallion around which the beads had been wound."

Pippi shows a picture of the shell disk-shaped medallion (http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/hierakonpolis/thumbnails/medallion.gif)

"The actual string that held the tiny beads, which were less than 1mm in diameter, had long since disintegrated, so keeping the assemblage in place was delicate work. After full photography and mapping, they took up segments of beads, of which there were about 1,000, in groups of ten beads at a time, foil wrapped and numbered so that they could be restrung in the exact pattern."

Pippi shows a picture of more beads (http://www.archaeology.org/image.php?page=interactive/hierakonpolis/jpegs/beads5.jpeg)

Examination of the shell disk by a... archaeozoologist" Pippi stumbles over that word. "...showed that it was made from the shell of the local freshwater mollusk Spathopsis rubens, that had been carefully cut out, smoothed down and then pierced by drilling. Since prehistory, unmodified shells of this bivalve have also been used as scoops or containers to hold cosmetics."

Pippi holds up a final picture of the restrung amulet and beads (http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/hierakonpolis/thumbnails/restrung.gif)

"As you can see, it's very pretty."

Re: Discuss artifacts

[strongestgirl.livejournal.com]

"There was also some interesting things that Hierakonpolis and Windover had in common... But that was involving people bits. And I wasn't sure if people bits counted as an 'artifact'."