Elizabethan coins found in Staffordshire farmer's field declared treasure

BBC: "Elizabethan coins found in farmer's field declared treasure" Sep 23

Seventeen coins from the Elizabethan era discovered in a Staffordshire farmer's field have been formally declared treasure by a coroner. Five groats of Mary I of England and two groats, two sixpences, four threepences and four half groats of Elizabeth I of England were found by metal detectorist Sam Egerton and his friends. "It's a really great feeling," said Mr Egerton from Uttoxeter, who made the discovery in January 2023, after taking up the hobby the year before. The coins will be now valued, with the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery interested in acquiring them for its collection.

Why? What are they "evidence" of? What does this find tell us about Elizabethan society, what does the precise findspot tell us about the organization of the Tudor landscape there (or its re-organization)? What other finds did these "friends" make that were not declared and what relationship were they in qwith the other features of teh site's archaeology (pottery scatters, tile scatters, shifting property boundaries)? Was this in fact a commercial artefact huynting artefact grabfest? Will there be a full and detailed Treasure Report illuminating the archaeology of the field it was found in? Or are the British arkies still going off on the object-centred tanget of pseudo-archaeology, ignoring context and archaeology of trashed and exploited SITES (and their place in landscapes)? Why is this non-news treated as "news"?

MAGAdiots and Today's Archaeology Students

 

In a recent public appearance, US presidential candidate Donald Trump claims immigration policies are failing because in a certain Ohio town, he'd heard, immigrant families are kidnapping and killing their white neighbours' cats and dogs to eat them. A whole lot of his supporters are flocking to social media to "prove" that this really is happening all over the US, including this guy, reposting what an anonymous snooping neighbour reports:

BTW, many Bosnians are Muslims. But there is an issue here, apparently in US schools they don't teach people (or MAGA folk simply do not learn what was presented in class) the difference between carnivore and herbivore dentition. Duh.

But this is a more general issue, society is moving away from the countryside. Here just two decade or so ago, many kids even in the cities, would have a grandma that lives on a little homestead in the country with a cow and chickens who they'd visit or stayed with. Today this is less frequent. Many kids grow up in a concrete desert and the meat comes  pink and bloodless in little plastic pack (and if there were so much as a millimetres long fragment of the quill of a feather in the poultry, the customer would be back in the shop with a complaint about contamination). My son-in-law had never been up close to any livestock bigger than a hamster until I took the family megalith-gawping in the UK and  he was aghast to learn he was to walk in the same field with curious ("dangerous" as he saw it) cows. 

Teaching archaeology to students who have very little idea of how crops grow, what ploughing looks like, how livestock behaves, never met a farmer was an unnerving experience for me, a slightly different generation with different experiences, and brought up in the countryside to boot.  How will archaeology teachers cope in the future.

Oh, by the way, the spitroast was a sheep and the Bosnian guy's neighbour owes him a apology. 

Where the Antiquities Go?

Here's an interesting presentation in the degree of participation of various countries in the World economy...(I got it here). How does the movement of portable antiquities reflect this division of wealth? What other factors (legal, cultural etc.) affect this?

 

Impossible Granite Vases in Egypt: The Toshka Gap

The YouTube video "Impossible Granite Vases in Egypt: by The Toshka Gap" by "Night Scarab" is an informative ands sober look at the claims made by the YouTube pseudoarchaeologists about "lost ancient civilizations" with their supposed "lost technologies" based on these stone vessels, which are dated deepp into the pre-dynastic period. Criticisms have been made of attempts to measure items from the antiquities market and try to use this as "evidence" of a "lost advanced technology". Sometimes proponents of these models attempt to rescue the idea by citing excavated examples. One example has been YouTuber Ben van Kerkwyk from "Uncharted X" making a number of claims about a few well-made, supposedly ancient Egyptian vases from a burial site name Toshka. The video demonstrates pretty convincingly that what is quoted as "evidence" of this, too, it is a false claim. No stone vases were found by Wendorf in Toshka, nor is the photo most often used by the YouTubers from Toshka. This is part one of a short series.

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Posted on YouTube by Night Scarab 5/9/2024 (25,113 views)

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So many more of these glib claiims made by clickbait-farming YouTubers need fact-checking like this.

Kensington Rune Stone

Jahannah James (@jahannahjames 1.6 million followers) attempts to resurrect the "Kensington Rune Stone" often used in discussions of "Vikings in North America" - obviously totally oblivious to the rather extensive literature already explaining it. There is an informative answer from Fredrik Trusohamn at "digging up ancient aliens" (at the moment, rather fewer followers): https://diggingupancientaliens.com/episode-70-the-kensington-runestone.html. More people interested in sensationalist bullshit, than rather more down-to-earth presentations.

Darwin Award in Poland - Kaboom

              The scene of the avoidable tragedy            

Darwin Award contendeant in Poland, metal detectorists here too are not the sharpest knives in the drawer: "Kilkanaście wybuchów w stodole. Sąsiedzi wciąż nie mogą wrócić do swoich domów" TVP2

In the village of Ryczyca near Siedlce, a fire and a dozen or so explosions occurred in a barn where hazardous materials were stored [...]. There could have been one person inside [later confirmed one man was dead and he reportedly belonged to a local metal detecting group PMB]. 32 village residents were evacuated.[...] According to junior brigadier Paweł Kulicki, press officer of the Municipal Commandant of the State Fire Service in Siedlce, firewood, explosives from the Second World War, and LPG cylinders were stored there. - When the first units arrived, explosions could be heard. The wooden barn building was on fire - he says. Firefighters conducted the operation from a distance from the beginning. - Maintaining maximum safety rules, using natural elements that could protect us from fragmentation. There were at least a dozen explosions - explains Kulicki. The building burned down, the fire was brought under control. All that remains are ashes.

The neighbours have not returned to their homes as the firemen and sappers had not yet entered the area to take care of any remaining munitions. Already, the story and comment on the need to regulate the hobby on a Polish archaeology-centred Facebook page ("Detektoryści - fakty i mity/ Detectorists Facts and Myths") has received the first of what'll be a long series of abusive and threatening comments... Detectorists are a breed apart and the same all across Europe. . .

Since, for the reason highlighted above, the possession of such WW2 "souvenirs" is forbidden by law, this was a detectorist/collector flouting that law - and it seems the neighbours knew. And the police? 

Göbekli Tepe Excavator Loses his Cool Over Stratigraphy Comments I

One of the Excavators of Gobekli Tepe posted on Twitter notification that another interim report has appeared (Dr. Oliver Dietrich @odietrich_ · Jul 25, 2023 Hot off the press, the first comprehensive paper on Building F and it’s pillar reliefs at Göbekli Tepe „Early Neolithic imagery in flux. A case study on the reliefs of Building F at Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey“ #Archaeology #GöbekliTepe https://journals.uni-lj.si/DocumentaPraehistorica/article/view/13604). [Special] Building F had most of the internal fill excavated out in 2006-8. Only the upper levels of its structure were exposed, the building has not been dissected to reach the pre-construction features and in that form, it is a discrete structure. So in the light of the fact that initially it was reportedly excavated using a three-layer notation, where (in a nutshell) "I" was modern layers, "II" was a spread of rectangular structures and "III" were sunken oval 'special buildings'. It is clear that instead of actual layers, these were building phases. It remains unclear how the stratigraphy was documented and the excavated material collected. This new report can be expected to contain such information. 

Sadly, like a lot of the publications concerning this key (and already controversial) site, the main focus was on the "things" excavated, in this case even the "ancient art". But the stratigraphy of the building was shown. But not very well, and in a rather disturbing form. On Twitter I asked about this: 

It's easy to publish the excavated "things", pillars are easy to document, but what we need is the "timely publication" of the stratigraphy. It seems to me one very oblique section through the complex 3D stratigraphic structure (where are the edges of layer [lower pit fill] "1"?) is less than satisfactory as a record of anything. Besides which, the disposition and nature of the structure's infill shown in the section drawing and the photo of the same section, simply do not match! The nature and position of the lower interface of "layer 7" for example. I do not see how these "layers" are defined, there is an unnumbered layer between "5" and "3" (!) What is shown as "layer 4" to the right of the pillar has two parts quite clearly differing in rubble content, that rubble being a spill extending into 2, surely.

To illustrate my point, I used this extract of the published photo of the trench's northern profile that I added a section of the photo of the same profile, adjusted for scale. It seems quite clear to me that there are significant differences, which is documentation, and which is decorative infilling? (because they cannot both be documentation of the stratigraphic sequence and a basis for understanding site formation processes and assemblage 'taphonomy'). 

There is also a problem publishing (in the absence of other information) just the one section that cuts obliquely across layers some of which will most likely have come into the sunken area of the building from behind the section, rather than merely one side of it.

Anyway  Dr. Oliver Dietrich @odietrich_ did not answer the question, or refer me to any report that details the actual methods of excavation. He decides to go for insults:

Cutting off an image and telling me a layer is not numbered? Highly professional on your part. And, as you are an archaeologist, you surely know that an image in full sunlight does not show all colour differences/ that layers are also defined by differences in the sediments etc. 

Hmm, I think it is fairly clear (though I admit I did not explain it in detail- this was Twitter) that I have taken a PORTION of the published section to illustrate the point I was making. I chose the bit between the bench and the standing stone, as these provided fixed points against the disposition of the stones could be judged in both (besides which it is utterly unclear what happens at the left end of that section).

The layer that is not numbered is the layer that I said was not numbered. I assumed that "5" referred to the slumped part of the wall, and "6" the truncation of that same wall. It seems not: 

Paul Barford @PortantIssues · 19m Eh? What and where is the number of the black layer on the right between the collapsing wall (5) and layer "3"? There is NOTHING "unprofessional" in questioning a publication, that is why we publish our results, no? Yes, if you actually read what I wrote, you will see that I am not referring merely to "colour" but precisely the density, disposition, actual shape and size of the rock fragments in the photo, versus the way the drawing depicts them. We could also look at the relationship between the lower interface of Layer 7 and the top of the pillar. But the main issue is that one oblique section obviously cannot be the only record of a complex 3D series of deposits.

I think we need less emphasis on the excavated "finds" and more on the context.

Dr. Oliver Dietrich @odietrich_ · 15m 

5. 5 is the number of the layer. 

Paul Barford @PortantIssues · 13m 

So what is the number of the wall? 

Dr. Oliver Dietrich @odietrich_ · 10m 

Why does it need a number? 

O k***a... Excuse my Polish, That surprised me.

Paul Barford @PortantIssues Well, yeah. Heinrich Schliemann did not number them either, I was hoping things had come on a bit since then. How many stratigraphic units can we see in this photo? The DAI has dug out some of the soft bits, leaving selected hard bits. How many, what are their 'relationships? 3:54 PM · Sep 1, 2024

Picture in public domain of surfaces of what seems to have been excavated as "Layer II" and "Layer III":

Nobody on Twitter wanted to count. What actually is happening here? From this overview shot this looks like the excavation methods of G.P. Bushe Foxe at Wroxeter, where he dug down until he hit something hard, a wall stump or floor, which he left upstanding. I think we should be expecting here where the DAI is a guest in Turkey applying their best techniques, we should be seeing there something more like Graham Webster's work at Wroxeter at least, if not Philip Barker's.  No? Let us see what future publications show us. But please no more digging until they've published what they have and we can assess the effectiveness for post-excavation processing of the current excavation and recording methods.