minor amazing thing of the day
special for all you anthro majors....
a while back, my (extremely awesome) manager lent me a disc of scans of some of his old comic books. naturally, this is pretty awesome to begin with, since reading old pulpy anything is kind of a little window into the past, and besides, who doesn't love some cheesy old Batman comics?
it so happens that in an effort to make these retro books beneficial to the youth (or something), the editors found it necessary to publish a page full of educational facts on any given subject in each issue. in one of these issues, the topic was the use of flags and heraldry throughout human history, and it contains the following sentence (italics are mine):
"For example, last year when archaeologists in India excavated the sites at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, they found illustrations of soldiers carrying large wooden boards as standards."
i don't know about you guys, but when i took Anthro 101, they kind of glossed over this recovery--that is, the study of the Indus Valley sites--as something that everyone in the field kind of takes for granted... ancient history in the study of ancient history, if you will. so it's just a special kind of amazing to 1) see this treated like a big deal, and 2) have access to something so old that the discovery of Mohenjo-Daro was still news. (The comic dates from '50 or '51, I think, which just doesn't put it into the same perspective as the archaeology references do. it's 60 years old, which doesn't really do it justice either.)
a while back, my (extremely awesome) manager lent me a disc of scans of some of his old comic books. naturally, this is pretty awesome to begin with, since reading old pulpy anything is kind of a little window into the past, and besides, who doesn't love some cheesy old Batman comics?
it so happens that in an effort to make these retro books beneficial to the youth (or something), the editors found it necessary to publish a page full of educational facts on any given subject in each issue. in one of these issues, the topic was the use of flags and heraldry throughout human history, and it contains the following sentence (italics are mine):
"For example, last year when archaeologists in India excavated the sites at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, they found illustrations of soldiers carrying large wooden boards as standards."
i don't know about you guys, but when i took Anthro 101, they kind of glossed over this recovery--that is, the study of the Indus Valley sites--as something that everyone in the field kind of takes for granted... ancient history in the study of ancient history, if you will. so it's just a special kind of amazing to 1) see this treated like a big deal, and 2) have access to something so old that the discovery of Mohenjo-Daro was still news. (The comic dates from '50 or '51, I think, which just doesn't put it into the same perspective as the archaeology references do. it's 60 years old, which doesn't really do it justice either.)