If I am now going to admit that I did not really catch on about the stuff going on with the skeleton in the carpark thing, it makes me feel self-conscious. But thank goodness I have a lovely friend at the other end of the world who did - and who sent me the links to the BBC radio site yesterday, in time for me to catch the Great Announcement.

Long story short: There have been several years' work in trying to trace the burial place of Richard III of England, and they finally found him. Skeletal as well as DNA analysis strongly hints to the skeleton belonging to the king. And you can read more in this report here, where there are also lots of extra links.

That is also a very nice presentation of archaeology for the public - very well done.

It feels enormously, deliciously nice to be back home again after several weeks of being only there for a very short breather and then off again to something somewhere. Even though I enjoyed all the away-time a lot – Christmas with the family, New Year with friends, the EAC with colleagues – I am now really content with being home for some time, getting stuff into order and taking care of all the interesting things that were on the back-burner all this while. And catching up on cuddling the cat!

But you probably want to know about the conference much more than about how happy I am to be home again, so…

 The EAC took place in two locations - one of the university buildings (which was ample room for the ~100 participants of the conference) and at St Fagan's, a little ways outside Cardiff. It started with a very nice meet-up in the Pen and Wig on Thursday evening and then went into a tightly-packed programme of papers all Friday long. The topics were varied and interesting, and I enjoyed most of the papers very much. (With a few, I had some trouble understanding everything, since the speakers sometimes mumbled a little, but that's to be expected.) 
I especially enjoyed the paper about the ovens used for cooking on the Mary Rose, which was a totally astounding contraption that I'd love to cook in. Well, maybe not really, seeing as it's for feeding about 500 people.

After the papers, there was wine, snacks and a poster session before almost all of us walked off to a conference dinner.

Saturday we were taken to St Fagan's in a bus that seated 70 persons (though the persons it was intended for were much younger than archaeologists usually are), which was a little cramped but must have looked very amusing to anyone watching the bus spit out almost 70 adults instead of the schoolchildren that its bright yellow colour would lead one to expect.

The papers at St Fagan's were as nice as those the day before, but unfortunately the weather was not. Any open air museum will look much nicer in sunshine and good weather than in fog, grey clouds and drizzling rain - but I still enjoyed having a little walk around the premises and peeping into a few of the houses.

As all conferences, this one was too short, and unfortunately I was quite tired and not up to my best networking abilities. There's always the trade-off at conferences between a programme packed full of papers*, getting much into a short time, or leaving lots of room for questions and socialising at the cost of having fewer presentations. Cardiff EAC clearly opted for a full programme which left me more exhausted than I would have wished. So somehow I have the feeling that I could have gotten more out of it - but then one never knows what will follow later. At least I did manage to deliver my talk, do a spinning presentation and meet a good number of new people, as well as catch up with old aquaintances. And hear about a number of very interesting topics!

While Maney sells its journals and journal issues at prohibitively high prices for a mere mortal such as I, they do hand out open access stuff now and then - very nice! Apart from them having a "Journal of the Month" with lots of free access to back issues of said journals, there's an occasional extra free access thingie.

Such as the one I got an email about today - some of the top articles for a stack of archaeology or archaeology-related journals are available for free online. And since there is no info page for the offer on Maney's websites (at least not where I could find them), here's the relevant bit of the email copied for you, with a little table-tweaking so it all fits onto the page:

Click on the images below to view a selection of the journal's best content and download any articles highlighted in green. Be sure to close the lightbox on each journal page before clicking on the next journal link!

Arms & Armour	Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites
English Heritage Historical Review	Environmental Archaeology
European Journal of Archaeology	The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice
Industrial Archaeology Review	Journal of Conflict Archaeology
Journal of Field Archaeology	Journal of the British Archaeological Association
Levant	Medieval Archaeology
Palestine Exploration Quarterly	Post-Medieval Archaeology
Public Archaeology	Studies in Conservation
Tel Aviv	Terrae Incognitae
Vernacular Architecture	Yorkshire Archaeological Journal

Have fun!

I have stumbled across two new things (thanks to mailing lists) that might be of interest.

The first one is a French publication about reconstruction and reconstitiution in archaeology, with ideas or articles from several different countries. The main texts are French, but there are English summaries to go with them.
The volume is published online, can be downloaded for free, and you find it here.

Secondly, Rainer Schreg is pondering the unusual layout of an early medieval settlement and how modern thought might influence our interpretation on Archaeologik. That one's not French, but German.

Thirdly, on Archivalia, there's an article about German copyright law and the possibilities to publish online as Open Access - looks like there are quite a few possibilities! Fittingly, that one too is German.

At Schauhuette, the last part about the current excavation in the church has been posted. It's part four, though it will be less interesting for those of you who do not understand German, since it's mostly explanations, no more time-lapse excavation bits.

In completely other news, I have discovered a new programme that is quite useful for freelancers, or for anyone else who wants to track computer-use time. It's called ManicTime, the smaller version is free, and it tracks the applications that you open and how long you spend on them. No starting or stopping of a time-tracking tool needed, plus you can see how long you procrastinated by hanging out on facebook or reading webcomics or whatever.

And while I'm at it, here's another very useful tool: AntiTwin. It looks for file duplicates in one or more folders and has a really convenient possibilities to sort out files for deletion. Freeware for private users too - life is good.

You remember the post about the actual digging out of a skeleton? A second part of this has now been put online by Mattis Hensch of the Schauhuette:




And there's one more video of the anthropological examination of the skeleton as well - you find the link to the video here.

If you are interested in Vikings and Viking Archaeology, you probably know that there is L'Anse aux Meadows, a Norse or Viking settlement in Canada. This was the first, and up to now only, known proof for the arrival of the Norse in Vinland (that's how they seem to have called the fabled continent way, way over the sea).

Now I have stumbled over an article published in National Geographic, and there is a second settlement where finds very, very strongly indicate that it was not made by indigenous population. The finds are from Baffin Island, in Canada, far above the Arctic Circle and north of Hudson Bay. Archaeologist Patricia Sutherland looked at the finds, made in the 1980s by a missionary, in the archive of a museum in Quebec in 1999 - and found out that the yarn which was part of the finds is a match for thread finds from the Norse colony in Greenland. Since the indigenous people of Baffin Island did not spin, this is the first very strong hint it was a Norse colony.

Recent excavation in the place seem to corroborate this - they found whetstones. But isn't it nice that the yarn finds opened up the way?