Thanks to a colleague tweeting, I stumbled across this really nice article about really nice research regarding the influence of our culture on how we perceive, for example, fairness. Or see the world. Or how easily we are fooled by optical illusions.
The research team's paper is titled "The Weirdest People in the World?”, it's 58 pages long (well, including the abstracts) and available for free online (just click the link).

When I read the article, I was instantly reminded of Chimamanda Adichie's speech about the danger of a single story... which sort of goes into the same direction. It's also a beautiful speech, and very thought-provoking, and I can really recommend it.

In case you have no time or no desire to follow those links, I can tell you in a nutshell what I personally am going to take away from this: It's hard to judge people from a distance; it's easy to fall into your own preconceptions that are based on your own background; it's way too easy to suppose that everyone else will see things similarly to you while that is probably not the case. And the further you get away from your own culture the greater the differences will probably be. Which also applies to getting away from your own culture in time - with the added complication that you can travel to pacific islands and try to figure out the cultural differences, but you can't travel back to the ninth century to do the same. So, just to be on the safe side, we should suppose that those medieval folks did think, and act, and perceive things much differently from us today.

There are things that are fast and easy to do, there are things that aren't, and then there are things that will just gobble up all the available time and then some. Just like most of yesterday was gobbled up by finalising that reviewed (and thoroughly re-worked) paper.

The most interesting thing about it? The three proofreaders (thanks again! you did great work) sometimes totally agreed on which phrasing was totally crappy, and sometimes totally did not agree. I got to pick and choose, somehow.

So today I'll spend a half hour more on the last bit of the thing, finalising it for submission, and then I will get rid of it. Finally. Whew.

It makes me wonder, however. How much time is writing a paper supposed to take? I suspect there will be a huge range of timespans eaten by paper-writing, and probably time spent is not correlating directly to paper length. Or even paper importance.

There is that article that I am writing (or, rather, re-writing according to the suggestions made by the reviewers). It's about, who would have thought it, the never-ending spinning experiment. And it is driving me nuts.

Why? Well, for one thing, I am trying really hard to get some proper plots out of the thing. Which, according to my instructions and due to the help of a lovely person who knows R should be no problem... but my modules keep crashing, not reacting, or not giving me the results I need.

And then there's the citations. I have read in gazillions of publications that "thick yarn is made with heavy spindles"... and of course I did not take that as a note. And now I need to add a few more references to this, and it seems I cannot find them anymore. This is probably due to the fact that many of these books or articles were quite basic, or not typical scientific reference literature - but it makes it not easier to re-find them. So I will be shamelessly blegging:
Do you know a book (preferably something like a beginner's guide) or an (archaeological) article about hand-spindles and hand-spinning where heavy spindles are linked to thick(er) yarns? Please tell me in the comments. That would be really helpful.

I have (of course) made use of the Cambridge Journal offer, but regrettably did not find much of interest for me in the 2012 yield of articles. (Though admittedly my topics are a bit special.)

There is also the journal "Internet Archaeology", a peer-reviewed online journal that has its back issues under an open access policy since this month. My check yielded no textile-related stuff, but for those of you who do not have such a narrow focus, here's the link. Enjoy.

It's hard to believe how time flies by - it's January 10 already, and tomorrow evening, Karina Grömer will be visiting Erlangen to give a presentation about the Hallstatt textile finds and their reconstruction.

In case you are interested, it is a public lecture starting 18.15 in the Kollegienhaus in Erlangen - more information about the lecture series, place and time can be found on the website of the institute.

I'm looking forward to this!

If you've been more than marginally interested in the epidemic called "Black Death" that wrought havoc on the population in the Middle Ages, you may have caught that there was a (sometimes quite heated, I gather) dispute about whether it was the Plague as we know it today, or something entirely else, or a mutation of the Plague, or a combination, or whatever. And I confess I was leaning towards "something else", too, just like a lot of other scholars.

But now they did it. You know, those archaeologists and other scientists? These guys that poke around in old stuff, messing around with our nice familiar concepts of history, dragging home old bones and potsherds and lumps of clay and textile and rusty metals? They did it. They found the DNA of the Bringer of Black Death.

And it's Yersinia Pestis.

Their research is published in an open-access peer reviewed journal (oh, we so need more of those), and you can read the whole article for yourself. Good old Yersinia. Wreaking documented havoc on mankind since 541.

I'm blogging late because I got caught up reading an article that I found (again) via medievalists.net - about medieval sexuality and "erotic" images in medieval art.

The article touches on one of the core questions for any interpretation of historical circumstances: How much does our modern view of things influence our interpretation or appreciation? Sexuality and eroticism are one of the topics very much touched by our modern perceptions, and things have gotten looked at from different angles since the rise of feminist and queer perspectives - a good thing in my eyes, since it helps us re-evaluate our interpretation and our own premade (mis-?)conceptions when approaching medieval art.

Oh, and you can find the abstract and link to the pdf article here, at medievalists.net.