You know what is useful in any kind of research endeavor? In addition to the expected copious amounts of caffeine, a disregard for the fact that your life is finite, and the merciful existence of takeaway food services while working overtime, that is.1 Tables! And this got me thinking: when did tabular accounts appear in ancient Mesopotamia? Or in other words: was there a cuneiform alternative for programs like Excel and Calc, that are so ubiquitous today? As with many questions we try to answer here at Bildungblocks – and one of the primary reasons that these blogs are often published irregularly – this matter turned out to be way more complicated then you would expect at first. But one could argue, if only for my own sanity, that such complications make a topic merely more intriguing than it already is.
Category Archives: Archeology
Dragon Myths and Dinosaur Bones
Dragons and dinosaurs. Not only does a substantial amount of children make one of these their entire personality for a while, but many adults are still highly interested in anything related to these respectively magical and prehistoric organisms.1 It is therefore only natural that both obsessions are regularly combined. And this has, amongst other things, led to the question we try to answer in this week’s blog: was it encounters with dinosaur bones that formed the basis for myths about dragons?
Prehistoric Stories
Did humans tell stories in the time before writing was invented? Of course they did! But the proof that still exists for such prehistoric narratives is, as you can imagine, rather indirect.1 As such, if we want to know what kind of stories were told back then, we are faced with a difficult undertaking. But this undertaking is worth the effort, because tales – as we saw with our foray into the environmental humanities – have much to teach us about the human condition in any day and age.
The Lost Children of Archeology
As with young parents who postponed to find a babysitter for Saturday night, children have long remained a background issue for many of the archeologists that study humankind in the Ice Age. 1 Both the parents and the archeologists obviously have their reasons, understandable as well as less understandable. But as befits a blog on the humanities, and with apologies to any young parents out there, today we are going to focus on the archeologists. Why did children up until recently constitute a rather minor concern for these scholars? And could our knowledge of the distant past profit from centering the younger humans more? Those questions – and more! – will be answered below. These answers are mostly sourced from a great book on the subject, Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children by paleolithic archeologist April Nowell, which I cannot recommend enough for those whose interest is piqued.2