Right, another sideblog, just what I needed...

Skeleton of a Scythian queen and her jewelry, found in the Chertomlyk barrow, near Nikopol, Katerynoslavsk Governorate (today Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine)

Headdress and ornaments of the clothes of the priestess Dimitra / Demeter, found in the tomb.

Cuneiform tablet counting beer for the workers. Circa 3100-3000 B.C, from Uruk in what is now southern Iraq. Now in the British Museum.  

The beer on the tablet is represented by a jar with a pointed base. Food is symbolized by a head eating from a bowl (bottom left). The semicircular imprints (possibly made by the edge of a finger) stand for the measurements. 

icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down

cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)

pyrrhic task: you can get it done but it's going to cost you

medean task: you can get it done and you don't care what it costs you

dionysian task: task that might not be -better- if you do it drunk, but -will- definitely be more fun

hegelochic task: it was a simple job, but your name will be recorded in the annals of history for how impressively you fucked it up

task of theseus: a project for which the parameters have changed so many times that you're not sure it IS still the same task

This helmet was made using the skin of a porcupine-fish that was killed and then carefully dried. The front edge is lined with vegetable fiber and human hair, and it's equipped with coconut-fiber ties that were used to fasten the helmet onto the wearer's head.

Above: another porcupine-fish helmet from Kiribati

Helmets with this design are also known as te barantauti, and they were created as part of a traditional costume that was worn by the warriors of Kiribati (an island nation located in the South Pacific). Most of the surviving examples date back to the mid-1800s.

Above: a porcupine-fish helmet displayed with a high-backed cuirass, wrist-guard, and sword, c.1800s CE

Te barantauti were typically worn with body armor that was crafted from coconut-fiber and stingray skin, along with braided wrist-guards covered in shark's teeth, high-backed cuirasses, and wooden swords, spears, and daggers studded with stingray spines and shark's teeth.

Above: wrist-guards and cuirasses from Kiribati, c.1800-1880 CE

In some cases, the warrior's helmet was crafted from coconut-fiber instead. The same material was also used to construct sleeves, belts, and "overalls" that effectively covered the rest of the body.

Above: a coconut-fiber helmet with a full set of armor

The porcupine-fish helmets provided very little protection -- they were primarily created and used as a way to intimidate enemies during ritual combat.

Above: an armored warrior from Kiribati, mid-1800s

As this article explains:

The men of Kiribati were famed for their fierceness, and when it came time for battle, they dressed the part, in head-to-toe armor made from coconut fiber and stingray skin. Their weapons were wooden swords lined with sharks’ teeth.

The crown jewel of Kiribati armor, though, was a spiky helmet made from the porcupinefish. A member of the blowfish family, a porcupinefish looks like an adorable big-eyed cartoon character—until it’s threatened. Then, it sucks water into a cavity between its body and skin and inflates to several times its normal size, stiffening the spines that usually lie flat.

Porcupinefish helmets, known as te barantauti, were made by capturing one of these agitated, puffed-up porcupinefish, killing it, peeling the skin away from the body, and drying it. The spiny skin that remained was reinforced with coconut-fiber padding and fashioned into a brittle helmet.

Though the helmets offered little in the way of actual protection, they instantly made their wearers appear bigger, taller, and more formidable.

For Kiribati warriors, this intimidation was more important than protection from death. That’s because in traditional Kiribati culture, a person who took someone’s life—even in a fair fight—paid with their most prized resource: their land. So instead of going for the kill, warriors sought to wound and humiliate their enemy. Fish-skin and coconut-fiber offered just the right amount of protection.

Above: a shark-tooth sword from Kiribati, c.1800s CE

Unfortunately, most of the surviving helmets, weapons, and pieces of armor are now housed in Western museums:

Over the years, dozens of these helmets made their way into museums across the globe, while few remain in Kiribati. The Smithsonian actually has three, the British Museum five, and Sweden’s Världskulturmuseerna “at least eight,” according to their digitization curator Magnus Johansson. One te barantauti even wound up at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, in the tiny town of St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

Over the last four decades, since Kiribati gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1979, the armor has taken on a new meaning—as a potent symbol of local culture. It features on tourist trinkets, but also stamps and school mascots. “The armor is not just a garment to me,” says Rareti Ataniberu, an I-Kiribati craftswoman. “It is a piece of art, a craft.”

Sources & More Info:

Hakai Magazine: Kiribati’s Porcupine-Fish Helmets were More about Drama than Defense

Atlas Obscura: The Mystery of the Puffer-Fish Helmets of Kiribati

Pacific Presences: Fighting Fibres: Kiribati Armour and Museum Collections

Time Magazine: Why Indigenous Artifacts Should be Returned to Indigenous Communities

The Museum of New Zealand: Te tauti from Kiribati

Denver Art Museum: Shark-Tooth Sword

This artifact was unearthed from the "Treasury of the Shrine" at Zakros, which is an archaeological site located on the island of Crete (part of modern-day Greece). Created by a Minoan artist at some point around 1600-1450 BCE, the carving depicts an unknown lepidopteran (i.e. moth or butterfly) with its wings held upright. The gray discoloration was acquired when Zakros was razed to the ground in 1450 BCE.

According to this article:

The palace complex of Kato Zakros is one of the most important buildings in Minoan Crete. The site is located in the far-east part of Crete, in a coastal location of great strategic and economic importance.

The "destruction horizon" recovered around the complex includes thousands of ceramic vessels, but also hundreds of artifacts of rare materials, many of which were imported from other regions in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean, such as the Peloponnese, the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, Cyprus, Egypt and the Near East. The finds from the undisturbed "Treasury of the Shrine" in the West Wing of the complex includes more than a hundred ritual objects used in palatial ceremonies and is considered the most important assemblage of such items that has been hitherto unearthed in Minoan Crete. 

The peoples of ancient Crete and Mycenae typically used butterfly motifs as symbolic representions for the souls of the dead, as butterflies have long been associated with concepts like transformation and rebirth.

I think this is the first time I've ever written a post about something that qualifies as both an artifact and an arthropod!

Sources & More Info:

Harvard University: Publication of the West Wing of the Minoan Palace of Kato Zakros

Illustrated Guide to the Herakleion Museum: Ivory Butterfly

Zakros: The Discovery of a Lost Palace of Ancient Crete: Page 145 and Page 148

This headdress was discovered at Star Carr, which is an archaeological site located in North Yorkshire. More than 30 other deer-skull headdresses (also known as frontlets) have been unearthed at the same site, all dating back to the Mesolithic period, c.9000-8000 BCE.

Above: one of the other headdresses from Star Carr

According to this article:

The most famous of the Star Carr finds are the enigmatic headdresses crafted from deer skulls, with holes drilled into them and parts of the antlers removed. Some headdresses are smaller than others, and could have been worn by children.

The headdresses are uncommon artefacts, with only three similar objects known elsewhere (in Germany), which raises the question of why there are so many at Star Carr.

Above: deer-skull headdress from Star Carr

The holes that were carved into each skull were likely used to secure the headdress onto the wearer's head.

Above: another frontler from Star Carr

The purpose and significance of these artifacts remains unclear. Some experts believe that they were worn as hunting disguises, while others argue that they served a ceremonial purpose. Those two theories may not be mutually exclusive, as this author points out:

The initial dichotomised interpretations offered by Dr. Graham Clark as to the frontlets’ purpose have characterised their discussion for the vast majority of the latter 20th century as either a shamanic headdress or a hunting disguise. More recently, however, researchers have critiqued this dichotomy, noting that many hunter-gatherer worldviews afford little meaningful distinction between functional and symbolic actions.

It can be argued that as shamans are widely regarded as playing a key role in negotiating human/animal relations and hunting luck, an artefact which aids the corporeal transformation of a human body into that of a deer could be used in both capacities interchangeably. Certainly, the contexts into which the frontlets were being deposited at Star Carr suggests that a complex set of meanings were attached to them.

Sources & More Info:

The British Museum: Headdress

Current Archaeology: A Survival Story: Prehistoric Life at Star Carr

Star Carr Volume Two: Studies in Technology, Subsistence and Environment: Antler Frontlets

Star Carr Archaeological Project: Antler Headdresses

York Archaeology: Mesolithic Marvels: Conserving the Star Carr Headdresses

PLoS One: Technological Analysis of the World’s Earliest Shamanic Costume

This artifact is nearly 1,900 years old. It's housed in the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection at the National Museum of Berlin, which provides a more detailed description:

The doll's torso is made of flexible stuffing covered in linen, while the head is framed by a magnificent turban-style hairstyle of real hair. The delicate face, its appearance enhanced by large almond-shaped eyes and a small mouth, is almost entirely concealed beneath it.

Above: a close-up of the doll's head and face

The figure is adorned with tiny pieces of jewelry that were crafted from gold, and its neck, wrists, and ankles are also encircled by gilded leather cuffs:

The doll wears a poncho-like dress with an embroidered neck opening over a short undergarment of finer linen. The jewelry is exceptional. The earrings are made of genuine gold leaf, and the rings around the neck, ankles, and wrists are made of leather with a gold leaf overlay.

This makes the doll one of the most luxurious of its kind, suggesting it likely belonged to a child from a wealthy family. The hairstyle allows for parallels to be drawn between female hairstyles from the time of Emperors Hadrian (117–138) and Antoninus Pius (138–161).

This doll has a height of just 14.5cm (5.7 inches).

Sources & More Info:

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Source (non Aboriginal)

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

They’re ancient footprints preserved in a former lake bed in what is now the desert. Like this is ancient lakes I’m talking about.

Now what is special about these footprints is how detailed they are and the fact they’ve been preserved by the desert for 20,000 years. They’ve been studied, and they’re able to tell who made them.

A mother with a baby who was carrying it on her left hip and the swapped and put it on her right, with a man who had one foot and was using a cane to help him move. But what warms my heart the most is there was a child with them. These 20,000 year old footprints show the child doing what kids still do now. 20,000 years ago the kid ran away from the group, was called back and returned. They can see it in these ancient footprints, something every parent has had to do.

That’s what’s so special about these footprints Willandra Lakes area.

Lake Mungo especially should be talked about way more. It’s a very important topic to talk about too. Because Lake Mungo also has a darker history.

In the 60’s and 70’s bones were found in the lakebed. These bones were graves, and were then stolen without the knowledge or permission of the indigenous tribes of the area. They were 40,000 years old. They are instrumental in the history of Australia because they proved what the indigenous peoples of the continent and their oral history have been saying for centuries. That they’d been here forever. The presence of these bones proved that, at the cost of their rest.

Taking these bones was wrong. There’s no other way to say it, regardless of the fact that these bones and other artefacts have proven that Indigenous Australians have inhabited for at least 50,000 years, and that is only bolstering the now widely agreed upon 65,000 years.

The bones that were taken were repatriated in 2022, but a study done by La Trobe University, where they laid out fake bones in 2014 found that in two weeks almost all had been stolen. People still feel entitled to the bones that are not theirs. Aboriginal Australians have been through so much genocide and evil systemic oppression. The Australian State does not have any treaties with any Aboriginal nation. There’s ones at the state level but not federal. The First Nations cultures here are the oldest living cultures on the planet.