Teacups and Ponderings

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

You know what’s awesome?  Research.  You know what’s not awesome?  Not being able to get access to research because it’s stuck behind a paywall and you don’t belong to an institution/your institution doesn’t subscribe to that particular journal.

FEAR NOT.

Here is a list of free, open access materials on a variety of subjects.  Feel free to add if you like!

GO FORTH AND LEARN SHIT, MY FRIENDS.

Directory of Open Access Journals- A compendium of over 9000 journals from 133 countries, multilingual and multidisciplinary.

Directory of Open Access Books- Like the above, but for ebooks.  Also multidisciplinary.

Ubiquity Press- Journals covering archaeology, comics scholarship, museum studies, psychology, history, international development, and more.  Also publishes open access ebooks on a wide variety of subjects.

Europeana-  Digital library about the history and culture of Europe.

Digital Public Library of America- American history, culture, economics, SO MUCH AMERICA.

Internet Archive- In addition to books, they have music and videos, too.  Free!  And legal!  They also have the Wayback Machine, which lets you see webpages as they looked at a particular time.

College and Research Libraries- Library science and information studies.  Because that’s what I do.

Library of Congress Digital Collections- American history and culture, historic newspapers, sound recordings, photographs, and a ton of other neat stuff.

LSE Digital Library- London history, women’s history.

Wiley Open Access- Science things!  Neurology, medicine, chemistry, ecology, engineering, food science, biology, psychology, veterinary medicine.

SpringerOpen-  Mainly STEM journals, looooong list.

HathiTrust:  Open accss to a lot of historical books and articles. Granted, download is locked to institutions, but it’s browsable.

Canadian Conservation Institute: Lots of resources for handling material cultural objects

Perseus: Classical Greek and Roman texts, sometimes multiple versions. Searchable.

Persée: Database of French hist/arch publications. Some censoring of photos, likely due to copy-rights held by individual institutions.

PLOS: Public library of science. What it says on the tin.

Society for Historical Archaeology: A great resource for dating finds.

Oh man, thanks. That’s really interesting….

They must have been in the girls’ school. I googled the name and got this:

Innominates- “Nameless”. The three pelvic bones (Illium, Ishium, Pubis), which are all clearly named.

I promised a million years ago that I’d make a post analyzing my thoughts about The Beast and this is probably the month to do it. I have a LOT to say about him.

Before I actually make the big post, there’s one thing I think is worth mentioning–there’s a lot of creeps and creatures that look intimidating and scary in Over the Garden Wall. But only one of them is actually monstrous.

That’s a running theme in OTGW. The gorilla is really your boyfriend, just trying to get help. The “ghost” is just as scared of you. The killer dog is just sick because it ate something bad. The real threats, like Adelaide or Lorna, tend to be presented as friendly or helpful before they attack. 

and floridians are just as human as you and me!

and the moral of the story is that there are no deadly snakes native to alaska

you might know this guy as one of the only archaeologists cool enough to be mentioned by indiana jones

it’s my dream to have my name said by harrison ford

i’m not going to apologize for having this class at 6am because you paid for it and it’s your fault. 

we don’t all dress like lara croft. i tried to get it to be a thing on a dig and my colleagues yelled at me. 

they were pretty good archaeologists except they were too racist to realize anything they found. 

i take back what i said about us not dressing like lara croft because lewis binford here is wearing nothing but short shorts and a cowboy hat. take notes for an academic halloween costume!

archaeologists can be good artists! not me, though. or anyone i know. but if you can draw just know you have options.

sometimes you find dead bodies when you dont really expect it and you just have to deal with it

archaeologists are the only people allowed to get exited when they find corpses. 

once i ruined thanksgiving dinner when i told my family i had gotten my degree in archaeology and my uncle commented he liked dinosaurs too

ah yes. archaeologists. or, as i love to call us,  pottery analysts

i mean he was kind of a good guy for helping us beat britain but he owned slaves so that really cancelled it out.

archaeology is like cultural anthropology, except after you interview the person you turn around and shoot them in the head.

do not use trees! trees are bad! don’t do it!

usually you find shards, but it’s super exciting when you find a really big shard

it’s basically like a waterpark, except you’re fully clothed and walking through a dark tunnel knee deep in muddy water. so, basically splish splash.

 i dont believe in curses but my colleagues and i like to encourage the idea of them so people stop touching our stuff

usually, you would find a knife in a kitchen. or underneath your pillow to really freak out your roommate who is a history nerd and has no idea why you would sleep with a knife under your pillow and he’ll get really scared and freaked out and okay i’m getting off topic

no matter what the other scientists say, archaeology is a real science.

don’t worry, i promise you, and whatever government agency that’s spying on me right now,  that i’m not a crazy communist trying to overthrow the government

by now you’ve noticed the big “POP QUIZ” written on the board. there isn’t one, but i wanted to see the looks on your face when you saw it. but you’re all dead inside so it’s not really funny.

everything was fine except the citizens of pompeii just woke up dead the next day

the number one question you should ask when you read old archaeology papers is “how the hell do you know?”

nothing pisses off old men more than young people asking “why” and “prove it” so do that as often as possible

But then again. Perhaps… what we’re really dealing with… is something far more terrifying.