Rubrics for an online magazine

    So, I decided to take up Erin's suggestion for the blog post, and am critiquing Love Archaeology magazine with my group's rubric. I picked love archaeology because we came across it while looking at archaeology magazines for idea, and Erin said she loved that magazine so I figured it would be a good choice for evaluation. The first thing I noticed when perusing a couple issues of the magazine (specifically issues 1 and 2), is that our rubric criteria is far too specific. We included number of sites, quality of sources and ideas/research questions as 3/5 of our rubric marking scheme. I didn't realize until after Erin handed back our rubric, that we hadn't included some pretty important categories. By browsing Love Archaeology, I noticed that we were missing some pretty important things in our rubric.   Had I graded Love Archaeology with our initial rubric, it would have scored pretty low because our criteria doesn't work with every academic magazine. The magazine definitely has originality, subject knowledge and an aesthetically pleasing overall format. Out of those three aforementioned qualities, our rubric only had the last one as part of it. Lesson learnt? Rubrics are more tricky to make than one would think. I now have more sympathy for professors deciding how to grade assignments.

Elephants and the concept of Death

    I took the title for my post right from the Chapter 7 title from our textbook, The Archaeology of Death and Burial. In the chapter, Pearson writes a blurb on whether animals understand the concept of death, in ways to similar to humans. He talks briefly about Goodall and her chimps and then gets right into discussing one of my favourite things in the world: elephants.

Elephants greeting. Source: Wikipedia

     I've been obsessed with elephants since as far as I can remember so I was pretty stoked to read about them in a school textbook. I have so many elephant related items, my apartment looks like a shrine to the great elephant species! Anyways, Pearson goes on to talk about how African elephants bury and grieve over their dead. As I carried on reading the article, I got recollections back to a documentary I watched I few years back. I wish I could remember the name of it so that I could re-watch it; it was pretty amazing. However, Pearson brought me right back. 

    Upon seeing the bones or carcass of another elephant, a family will stop and investigate them, even if the elephant was unrelated to the group. The ritual includes touching the bones gently with their trunks while remaining very quiet, covering the body with leaves and grass, and if the elephant belonged to their own, staying with the body for days or weeks at a time.

Just beautiful.

   I've even heard stories of elephants burying sleeping humans whom they thought had perished. I love reading tid bits such as those Pearson included in our readings because it's interesting to step outside the lens of human experience of death into the broader awareness of how other species understand death. 

On a mostly related note, while trying to find the name of that documentary I watched, I found this awesome Cracked article titled "5 Mind-Blowing Ways Animals Display Human Emotion". Check it out: http://www.cracked.com/article_20141_5-mind-blowing-ways-animals-display-human-emotions.html

Changing the landscape with burial monuments

     For our group case studies, my group is looking at Early Bronze Age Ireland. Specifically looking at difference amongst three different burial types: wedges, cists and tumuli (more commonly known as mounds). We want to see if there is any general geographical pattern occurring in the differing burial types, in addition to differences in cremation and inhumation. Pictured below are pictures of the three types we are looking into (as I'm sure most of you don't know the diff, I sure didn't until further research!).

Parknabinna Wedge Tomb in Clare County,  Ireland

Knowth burial mound, created around 2000BC

A cist tomb courtesy of Wikipedia 

    After Friday's class, in which Erin lectured about specific burials in the Valley of the Kings, I started thinking about why people bury their dead in specific ways. I remembered that the Egyptians changed the form of burial for Royalty from a highly visible venue (the Great Pyramids of Giza) to a far less obvious resting spot. They consciously made the choice to bury their royalty in what may seem a less grandeur way in an attempt to stop thieves from raiding the valuable grave goods. It's fascinating the variety of ways we, as humans, choose to bury our dead. It's easy to forget that the whole 6 feet under in a standardized plot isn't the way it has always been. Even in Early Bronze Age Ireland, in a relatively small span of time (approximately 500 years) and in a small geographical area, there was a variety of ways in which people changed the landscape in order to dispose of the dead. Learning about what some of the other groups are doing for their projects further enlightens this notion: humans are pretty creative in a plethora of ways!

Not a caveman, jury's out on sexual orientation

   Oh, where to start with this? He isn't even a caveman! 2500 BC is Mesolothic/borderline Bronze Age. That is some serious shoddy reporting. Know your facts people! However, I think the main problem is that the media isn't reflecting on how one can tell sexual orientation through the archaeological record. Where is the evidence that this man was attracted to other males?    In an article posted by the Huffington post, one of the archeologist who excavated the find is quoted as saying "[we] believe the man was probably homosexual or transsexual,". That is a bold statement to make. I think it is far more likely that this is a case of an alternative gender or misdiagnosis of sex. Perhaps, if the sex was diagnosed correctly, the man was taking on a female's role for some unknown reason. If we can hypothesize that in some cases where women are buried "as men" it is because of a role they took on in life (not a gender role, but rather a societal role), then we should be able to think of this as an option for the inverse. Either way, debating a skeleton's sexual orientation is pretty much pointless unless there is some serious supporting evidence in the form or texts or the like in direct association with the skeleton.