There's this thing about superheroes: They have superpowers. Each, usually, their own, and they range from superstrength (Hulk smash! Superman! And don't forget Pippi Longstocking) to mind-reading to throwing fireballs to flying to freezing things and whatnot else.

Well. Flying and smashing and being superstrong might all be cool... but if I'd get to choose a superpower, it would be Universal Incredible Language Skills - as in speak, read, and understand any language like a talented native speaker. toBecause that would make things so much easier. Archaeologists still publish their research in their home language, usually, so if you are looking for things outside your own country or language area, you need to at least know about some basic terms in your goal language to have a chance of finding stuff.

On a side note - there's pros and cons for publishing in your home language as well, of course. If you publish in English, you might have colleagues in your own area who don't find the research; if you publish in your language, it won't be as visible from outside your language area. Unless, of course, your home language is English. Then you're lucky - though you might then be one of the people who, when young, never got far with learning a foreign language because you could always get by with your own...)

Anyways, I was able to find a lot of non-German and non-English articles and books and publications when I was working on my thesis, and had to brush up my language reading skills considerably to be able to handle them. For some of the very exotic things, I had help from friends and family (my Dad was able to help with the Czech articles, and I had friends and fellow students help with Polish, and Icelandic; plus people to ask about the finer points of Middle High German. I also had some help for the not-so-exotic-but-still-hard-for-me Italian.

I was a lucky lady to find all that help. It didn't hurt either that I quite like languages, and that I had lessons in English, French, and Latin in school (though I was so bad at Latin that it doesn't really count), and learned a bit of Dutch, Spanish, and Swedish while at Uni. In most of the languages I can read, my passive understanding skills are way, way, WAY better than my active skills - which is to say I can read simple everyday things in newspapers and more or less understand the gist of them; I can read archaelogical papers and understand them (better than the news in most cases, funnily); but I will have a hard time understanding spoken language and will probably not be able to speak beyond very limited, very simple short sentences. I also have a sort of mashed-up language slurry in my brain for some groups; for instance, I read "Generic Scandinavian" and it will take me a while and some thinking to be able to tell Danish or Norwegian apart. Telling those apart from Swedish is easier, but I will still have to take a second look. My Spanish is so bad that it once took an Italian guy about 15 minutes of me talking at him to realise it was Spanish, not Italian. (It was a fun conversation nevertheless.)

So. Superpower of choice - Universal Language Skills.

In case you should happen to have them, or in case you happen to read Finnish, you can find the original documentation of excavations, plus a lot of other resources, at Kulttuuriympäristön Palveluikkuna. Have fun!

Pantone decides on a "Colour of the Year" each year, and for 2020, their choice is "classic blue". As a blue-loving person, I do approve... though I like all kinds of blue, not only classic.

Science has a little news article about what our modern civilisation will leave behind for future archaeologists. (Or alien xeno-archaeologists, if humans go extinct.)

This link will bring you to an image of a tablet-weaving frame in a medieval manuscript. Just because.

The Museum of London has a post about pointed shoes (and sodomy!).

I've recently looked into medieval mittens for a bit, and one rather nice one can be found in the Museum of London, on permanent display in the exhibition. It's interpreted to be a work glove and dated to the 15th century.

If you're very fond of this thing, you could actually buy a print of it from the MoL (or buy a print of a number of other find pictures).

There's more photos online, taken privately and stashed in a forum archive - you can find the photo list with full-size images via this link. Images 184-195 show the leather mitten. (I found some of the images via larsdatter.com. I then found the list thanks to knowledge from days long gone past, when I wrote html in a text editor and learned about the structure of web addresses... shows again that you never know when some weird knowledge may come in handy.)

Archaeology usually is the discovery of quite, um, durable stuff. There's a good reason why ceramics are the key find category, and also key dating things - ceramic objects were a staple of daily use as vessels, containers, and tableware plus a few other things; thus they were subject to change over time, with changing tastes and preferences of the buyers. There's quality differences in clay, and in production quality. Rim forms change over time,  quickly enough to be useful for dating (though in some cases still keeping things vague). Best of all for the archaeologist, ceramic is rather breakable and the shards cannot be recycled as easily as broken metal can be, or destroyed as used-up wooden items can.

Eggs, now, eggs are a totally different thing - and not something you usually find. Not even eggshells, as they are basically a thin mineral shell, which tends to dissolve in the soil - doubly so in acidic soil, which most environments have.

However, as unlikely as it is, an excavation in Berryfields in the UK has hit the Roman era jackpot and unearthed, literally, four chicken eggs from Roman time - one of them intact. You can read more about this in the Current Archaeology article here (including a picture of the egg).

I confess that the first thought I had when I saw the title of the article, even before I clicked the link, was "Yay Jurassic Parc!" as in chickens are basically small dinosaurs, and it would be beyond cool to get the DNA from that egg and clone a real, honest-to-goodness Roman era chicken. Be.Yond.Cool.

Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, the article mentions nothing about DNA analysis or chicken cloning. Still. I'm hoping. It's basically the closest we can get to a time-machine transporting a past chicken into our day, right?

I've recently mentioned the Open Access books available at OApen.org - and I've found now that the books available include Karina Grömer's book about prehistoric textiles, both in the German and the English version. You can find them here - enjoy!

The Danish museum group has published a catalogue of their finds, which means 100,000 pictures. It's freely available, open access, and it includes archaeological glass beads from Ribe, among many, many more things.

Not all finds have pictures yet, and you will have to search in Danish, but it definitely is worth a look. ("Tekstil" is the correct spelling for textiles.) So... go check out the catalogue of the Sydvestjyske Museer!

There's a lot of wonderful colleagues in my field (and it's a small field, so you get to know most of them after a while). One of them is Eva Andersson Strand, who has been doing textile archaeology for a very, very long time now. She's also one of the people who feel strongly about the importance of practical work in textile research and reconstruction, and that tools and their use are a wonderful way for us to learn about the past processes in making textiles.

I've had a good number of discussions about spinning with her, which were always vastly interesting - even though we're not completely in agreement in regard to a few things. But I feel that discussions like these are one of the ways that we, together, as a field of science, can progress.

And by now you're probably wondering why I am writing this - well, Eva and her work are featured in a long and very nice article in Science News (for which I was also interviewed, about one of our favourite discussion topics - the influence of the craftsperson vs. the tool in spinning). The article is a well-deserved praise of her research efforts, on a variety of textile tools and techniques, and worth a read - I hope you'll enjoy it!