They have accumulated again, those pesky links. Or are they pesky? You might want to decide for yourself. Here they are:

Cathy posts a review of Marianne Vedeler's book "Silk for the Vikings".

Jonathan Jarrett has put together a resources page you'll definitely want to check out.

There's a German article about silk relics (tunic pieces) from the fourth century.

King Richard III has undergone multi-element isotope analysis, and seems to have liked his booze, judging from that.

That's it for today - now I'll go back to my presentation writing.

Now can I please find my enthusiasm for the work week?

Before I settle down to tackle a myriad of things that need doing, you'll get an update. On stuff.

I have recently discovered another online learning site, called Coursera. You can sign up for a lot of courses about a myriad different topics there, teaching you stuff from art to statistics. I've started to learn a bit about the latter (including signing up for a course on R programming), and I'm very curious to see how it will play out.

Also recently, also something I learned: Grains are actually fruit, not seeds. See here. The site this article is on is... interesting, since it ranges from explanations of the difference between twin and double rooms (in a text that, to me, seems rather long to say the one has two normal beds and the other one two-person-sized bed), to explanations such as the one linked above.

And for those of you in the area: Stockholm library is offering journal access to library card holders, with journals linked to the databases VITALIS and LIBRIS, both relevant for archaeologists. A shame I live so far from Stockholm.

Just in case you are looking for even more blogs to read, I will send you (again! that guy is on a roll) over to Doug's blog. He's doing an archaeology blog round-up, which lists not only the blog title, but also gives a link to each post of the last week. That's a brilliant idea, since you can get a first glimpse of how active a given blog is, and sometimes see what direction the posts take, guesstimating from the post titles. There are definitely a few blogs among those listed that will find their way into my feed reader. I'm also very happy that my own blog was featured in the very first post of that new series!

If you are interested in Near East (archaeology) stuff, you might find this interesting: The Netherlands Institute for the Near East is offering their out-of-print publications for free download. This is always a glorious thing and I'm utterly happy about each museum or publisher who does this! (I was particularly delighted about York and the MET.)

Also online: The Robin Hood project from the University of Rochester (Nottingham would have been funnier, though). It's a database of texts, images, bibliography and information about Robin Hood and other outlaw stories.

And finally: LARP is entering the archaeological record. (LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing - which means you dress up in an appropriate way and head out to play a part in a non-scripted or sparsely scripted adventure story with other people.) (Did anyone reading this actually need the explanation, I wonder?)

I am one of these people that open lots and lots of tabs in the browser. A non-tabbing browser, for me? Unthinkable. I rarely have few enough tabs open that horizontal scrolling is not necessary.

And, of course, the browser gets unwieldy. And the tabs tend to be too many for easy use... so a while ago, I installed the add-on called Pocket, which lets you read things later. The most patient of all husbands uses his to temporarily store pages, which he, indeed, does read later. And then removes from the list.
I wanted to use it in a similar way, especially for things that I wanted to blog about later. That worked well for about, oh, a month or so... when it got entirely too easy to push stuff there and forget it. These days, I have oodles of pages to go through in that thing, and I could probably toss out 95% of them because it is now too late, or it is not that interesting anymore, or...

More recently, I have added TooManyTabs to my Firefox. It adds a bar below the rest of the menu lines, and it has a limited number of rows (which you could up at any time, but it means taking the action, not just adding more stuff). So now I have 6 rows which I can use to store things, thematically, that I think I will need soon(ish). And when I want to add more for a new topic... I have the strange idea that I might be able to make myself empty an old one first.

One of the rows, you guessed it, is filled with things that I thought might be an interesting thing to blog about. Most of them are just links - so here you go:

Harry Ransom Manuscript Image Database. 215 manuscripts from between the 11th and the 17th century.

A find of 3000 year old trousers, excavated in China.

Paleolithic engravings in stone - the first in Germany (article in German).

A blog post about the hypothesis that the Roman dodecahedrons may have been knitting aids. (That is more or less exactly my reaction when I first heard about that. Also, the total killer in any way, even if the Romans had had knitting: Efficiency, that technique has it not. And efficiency is, otherwise, seen everywhere in crafts. Even in the Romans' crafts.)

Aaand that has cleared the long overdue "to blog about" row of tabs. More (and fresher!) things to blog about can now go there... to lie and ripen and grow old, because too many other things seem much more important or urgent to blog about. You know how these things work, right?

Yesterday I received an e-mail telling me about a free e-book from one of my lovely colleagues... and that did make my day.

You all know what to think of archaeologists, right? We are the brothers and sisters of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft... not.

When I was still studying, one of the colleagues explained to us about the public image of archaeology, about the problems with bad press (or not-easy-to-understand press), and how to deal with press people and journalists. What I remember from that as the most important lesson is: It's not the journalist's job to learn about archaeology. It is your job, as the interviewed archaeologist, to give the journalist correct and concise information, in a way that he or she can easily use it for the piece. That was highly helpful!

If you want an in-depth treatment of the topic, you are in luck: Doug has written a multi-part blog post about archaeology and journalism, and I highly recommend reading it if you are in any contact with press people or journalists, even if you are not an archaeologist. Go read part I of Archaeology and the Press right now.

(To top things off, he's also posting about Archaeology Publishing at the moment, another series of posts... also very informative.)

Free stuff! On the Internet! Who would have thought it, right? Apart from... all of us?

Here are some exciting things for you to enjoy. At least I find them exciting. Especially this one, about which I learned at the LonCon, from one of the lovely English Heritage folks:
English Heritage Research Department Reports Database. The Research department of EH has recently put all their reports online, and they are free to download and peruse. There is a keyword search, and "textiles" yields 190 reports.

You are still here? Next one, then.
Maney Publishing is featuring Postmedieval Archaeology as their Journal of the Month - which means that the last 6 issues (3 years) are free to read and download during September.

In case you prefer to read conservation literature, you can visit the Bibliographic Database of the Conservation Information Network, BCIN for short.

Too many words, too little pics? Heather sent me this BBC article link, which I pass on to you. The TL;DR version: someone has uploaded millions of pictures from 1500 - 1922, auto-tagged for search convenience, all copyright-free. Here's the direct link to the flickr site.

Anyone still here?

No?

Good. Thought so.