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!

Well... at least in the Wall Street Journal.

Janet Stephens, a professional hairdresser, has researched and tried to re-model Roman hairstyles (the ones often said to have been wigs). I have personally never really bought into that theory, so I'm very happy to see that someone has managed to do it on non-wig hair (and is also quite sure it can be done normally).

Go read the lovely little article about the Roman hairdressing (also because it involves needles and thread).

Meanwhile, I will be here and very happy about the bit where a journal editor says that this was something that needed a craftsperson, and that no normal scholar would have written such a piece as the article published in 2008, "Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)Pins and Needles."(Published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, in case you now really want that.)

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.