(The final assignment for my archaeology class is to come up with an outline for a unit on a topic which was not already covered in the course. Here's my offering ( Read more... )

I grew up eating a lot of food traditional to my Canadian ancestors. We rarely purchased pre-made baked goods, and my mother baked almost everything from scratch. My family were gatherer/hunters, and much of our food came from our farm or from the wilds. I grew up cooking on wood stoves and over campfires with wood we gathered with our dog or ( Read more... )

About ten years ago, I studied metal arts at craft college. My focus was in the creation of jewellery and other small metal objects. I studied the history of jewellery as part of my curriculum, and we learned about ancient techniques. One of the techniques we studied was granulation. Granulation is a technique in which tiny, uniformly-sized ( Read more... )

Long before archaeology was ever called archaeology, there were people going around searching for historical artefacts. In particular, people sought out holy relics. A holy relic is a part of a venerated person, or a piece of an artefact associated with that person. Although many of the relics are fake (it's been said there were enough splinters ( Read more... )

My next archaeological homework assignment is a fun one. I pick an archaeological site, provide some clues, and you get to see if you can guess where it is. Here goes ( Read more... )

In August of 2012, the search for Richard III's remains began, and on the very first day of the dig, his body was discovered underneath a car park in Grey Friars, Leicester (1). I've kept half an eye on this story for a while. Richard III is a fascinating character, and the eponymous play is one of my favourite works by Shakespeare ( Read more... )

We cannot escape the past. Everything we touch and see is from the past. Our present is so fleeting that it has left us before we have even become aware of it. The question of who owns the past is misleading, for the past owns us. All we can do is create and imagine based upon what it gives us ( Read more... )

This was my first attempt at making a webcast, and my last assignment for my archaeology course. The video's a bit clunky, but I hope you find the story interesting. If my video editing skills were better, there'd be much more audio. I did all the photography and videography here.

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When I was about four or five years old, I was hard at work at my grandmother's house in Fredericton, NB, making mud pies. I had a few implements: a saucer, a bowl of water, bucket, trowel, and rake. I had already picked a bunch of the brilliant red berries which grew on the deadly nightshade vines growing rampant, and now I was digging away at ( Read more... )

I have decided to research three very different forms of corpse deposition for my archaeology homework: ( Tibetan sky burial, the self-mummification of the Sokushinbutsu, and space burial )