First of all, the good news: The 14C-Dating of the Ribe mitten is fully financed, and the initiator is, accordingly, quite happy. Thanks to all of you who helped funding! If you have not helped funding yet and are sort of sad that the others did it without you: You can still pitch in, any extra money will be used for additional analysis of the piece. Ideas on further research are including the stitch type used, wool analysis, and yarn analysis. For the previously blogged English instructions on how to fund on the Danish site, click here.

The petition against the full cut of heritage conservation funding in one of Germany's federal states has led to some political discussion... but with no clear statements yet. You can read a short piece about that on Archaeologik (in German). The petition still lacks about 1.400 signatures to reach its goal, so if you have not signed yet, please do so and spread the word, there are still 30 days left to go. The text on the petition site itself is in German. If you need to get up to date on what it's about first, you can read my blogpost about it or go to the DGUF who initiated it; they have an English translation on their webpage.

And a last one - I have posted a link to the petition against food patenting before, but it seems as if there's more in the works: an EU law to make almost all traffic of non-industrially produced seeds illegal. When I first read about that, I thought it was a belated April Fool joke, but no, it looks like they really mean it. I found a link to the draft proposal here, and I'll keep my eyes open for protests against this. If you know more, please share in the comments!

I grew up in a house without a microwave - mostly because nobody in my home felt like this would be necessary, but partly also because my gran, many years ago, had head surgery with an inset metal plate and was not allowed near working microwaves.

So my first contact with microwaves, apart from a few times of seeing them in use at a friend's house, was when I studied; and the most I used it was for warming up the milk for my coffee (I'm fond of coffee with lots of milk, and it's much nicer when said milk is warm).

Our kitchen later was more or less too small to conveniently fit a microwave in, so we never got one. I was thinking about getting one approximately, oh, once or twice a year or so, whenever it would have gotten in really handy... but now, I don't think I will ever want one.

Why? A young lady, several years ago, conducted an experiment with plants for her school science fair. Two plants were watered with pre-boiled (and then cooled-down) water, one boiled in a pot on the oven, one boiled in the microwave. This seems to have made a small tour of the Internets back in 2011, but I only stumbled across it these days.

There is also a lot of weird pseudo-scientific information tossed around regarding microwaves, with a goodly-sized bit of scaremongering. Things like microwaving your food will make you more receptive to thought-control. Reading the comments on some of these articles... they are quite hilarious quite often.

Anyway, there is an easy way to test whether the plant-death thing is true (provided you have a microwave): just do it for yourself. It's an experiment, it is meant to be reproduced for sake of outcome verification. Take two healthy plants, keep them in a similar place, water them both with normal water for a bit until they have acclimatised and you can be sure they are both well, and then start the test. (And if you do, please let me know what the outcome was!) Myself? I will add "is possibly not good for you" to my list of things that speak against getting a microwave. That, by the way, has other things on it like "no proper space for it", "will take up lots of space while only getting used rarely" and "means production of another appliance which is not very green". And then I'll go on like before, with my trusty oven and my set of pots and pans.

The Internet is a lovely thing, and a great time-sink, and a great help plus sometimes a hindrance - but you know all that.

The Internet has also provided me, during the last two or so weeks, with means to soften my chronically tense shoulders. I have the tendency to hunch my shoulders and tense up shoulder and neck muscles when things are taxing, and unfortunately forget to relax when it gets better again until it's way, way too late. So I have decided to do something about that and keep doing it, and searched Youtube for stuff to relax.

That, in turn, brought me to yoga videos - and they really helped to relax my shoulders. Should you feel inclined to try some shoulder relaxing stuff too, you can check out doyogawithme.com - there's quite a few different stretches for office yoga, a longer and a shorter shoulder sequence, and even full yoga classes. And it's all free as well, so there's a good opportunity to try out whether this works for you or not. Enjoy!

Remember that I said food is a tricky thing for archaeologists? It has gotten even tricker very recently, since a group of archaeologists discovered, per experiment, that cooking fish can screw up radiocarbon dating. (They write about dating pots in the article; technically it's dating the organic residue trapped in the pot that is dated.) The article has links for more info in Danish.

Speaking of cooking: Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg are working on publishing their collaborate research about Viking food and cooking in a book, called "An early meal". There is an info page on facebook (you do not need to have an account for that) if you want to read more.

And now... coffee.

Food is a difficult topic for archaeologists. Not because we are notoriously picky about our food or because we don't appreciate it. In fact, archaeologists are more like locusts only with an even wider spectrum of what they eat, a rather larger belly than your average locust has and an additional penchant to swipe bits of the buffet decoration if it is properly archaeology-themed.

Food is a difficult topic because it's so perishable. It's a very rare thing to find food residue in an archaeological excavation; a bit similar to textiles: you can find tools (spindle whorls or pots), sometimes you find tiny little bits of evidence pointing roughly in a direction (like a small bit of fabric that allows you to determine fibre type and weave, or charred and thus preserved grains that allow you to determine the species), and very very rarely, in a very lucky situation, you find something that really allows you to reconstruct a tiny part of daily life back in history (such as an almost complete garment, or the residues of a meal that can be analysed completely).

In some cases, we know what was eaten - charred grains, animal bones and fish bones can give a hint as well as the pits and stones of fruit. But we still don't know how stuff was combined, and much of the evidence is not collected at all, because the small bits (fishbone? grape pit? both really small) can only be found if the soil is put through fine sieves or even sluiced to recover small bits. That's a lot of work, needs the appropriate equipment, and is usually only done for a very small part of the excavation where there is a high probability of a good yield of small stuff, if at all.

All that said, here is a link to a blog/webpage where someone has collected the archaeological evidence for food finds in Britain, making it available via web and a database. Go foodies!

Spring is finally here in force. How do I know? Easy. Hayfever has struck, with a vengeance, over the weekend.

Now, fortunately, my share of this astonishingly frequent ailment is not too bad, but I can feel it when I overdo exertion outside in pollinated air, and since I enjoy being outside in the early spring... well, that happens. Which results in sneezing, an itchy nose and itchy eyes as well as the feeling that I am not functioning at full power. Depending on how bad this is, I can shrug it off as "well, happens" or get seriously annoyed by it. (The symptoms also seem to get me more tired faster, resulting in me needing even more sleep. I should have been born a cat, probably.)

Since I've had this affliction, I have regularly managed to find out that while there are gazillions of pollen forecasts, I would much rather have a source for yesterday's forecast (or even better yesterday's actual data). I don't even know yet which pollen are the evil ones for me; I know which ones I do react to in general, but that does not tell me how much each of the three candidates is to blame. Because of too little data.

It was the same this weekend. On Sunday, I tried to find out what was in the air mostly on Friday and Saturday - no luck. But this morning, I found something even better: An online pollen/hayfever diary. You record the region where you have been, your symptoms (type and severity), can add additional remarks - and the symptoms are then correlated with the actual measured amount of pollen in that area. Yay! I'll be testing this to see if it works. After all, knowledge is power...

It's Friday, I have a heap of work (among them several things that need to be dealt with soon, sooner, soonest) and no idea where all that time of all that week went to.

In addition, I am fresh out of a glorious idea of what to post today - so instead you get a gratuitous cat picture.





Of a relaxed cat.

Because cats are always something postable on the IntarWebz, right?