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This fabulous headdress worn by Claudette Colbert in the 1934 production of Cleopatra went on to be used again in 1938, when it was worn by Phyllis Welch as Jane Van Buren in Professor Beware.

Costume Credit: Veryfancydoilies

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* big royal jewelry

* ancient temples

* decoding a long lost language

* dinosaurs

What actually gets us excited

* that time we were lucky with the weather

* when the digger knows his job

* lifting skeletal remains and the ribs don’t break

Things that are where they shouldn’t be. Bonus points if it’s obsidian

Hitting virgin sediment before hitting the water table

Conspicuously dense and diverse berry patches

When the temperature is Just Right™ for fieldwork

When the car has really good aircon travelling from site in the afternoon

One of the Indigenous representatives on a fieldsurvey goes “hey i wanna show you something” (it is ALWAYS something worth looking at)

a member of the public shows up to talk and DOESNT say “found any gold????” but actually knows things about the site

Things that are where they shouldn’t be AND that make the senior archaeologists blurt out “well thats weird”

So if you find a piece of obsidian at a site and go “huh, I wonder where that came from?” There’s a solid chance you can send it to someone with an XRF gun and they’ll be able to tell you.

The berry patches thing isn’t as widely recognised or utilised in applied archaeology (although it really, really should be), but Chelsea Armstrong has done some amazing work with descent communities that combines ethnobotany and archaeology, and has found that the density and diversity of food plants, especially trees and shrubs, is higher near old village sites than in “wild” forest.

These forest gardens were cultivated by indigenous communities before contact, and even after the people were removed from their villages they continue be incredibly productive sources of food.

There’s an abandoned village site on crown land near where I grew up that is surrounded by a circle of extremely dense berry bushes. At a site where I worked a few years ago, the area was covered in patches of native wild mint. A site I visited that was home to a very wealthy precontact village there was considerably more Saskatoon berry shrubs than anywhere else in the area.

Neurallink is a fucking awful company whose marketing materials and CEO are outright lying as to their products' supportable potential. But they're not big enough to actually have killed 3,000 primates. Most significantly, we know that the the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a lawsuit against a UC Davis lab for invasive and deadly brain experiments on 23 intelligent primates.

The Physician Committee points out in its complaint that Neuralink and UC Davis staff failed to provide dying monkeys with adequate veterinary care, used an unapproved substance known as “Bioglue” that killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains, and failed to provide for the psychological well-being of monkeys assigned to the experiment.

I worked in a neuroscience lab that did work with one (1) rhesus monkey. His name was Beckett. Beckett had better healthcare than a university undergraduate. Hell, it took less hoops to get some experimental studies involving undergrad volunteers up and running than it was to do one experiment with Beckett wherein he got to sit in a chair and eat grapes.

See, the paperwork regarding experiments with animals was intense. I spent three days filling out the forms and going back and forth with the ethics board to let us do experiments on terminal mice wherein they'd peacefully be put under anesthesia and never wake up from surgery. As in we were putting a sick mouse to sleep and had to be 100% sure it would not be in any pain or distress. Screwing up and causing a mouse harm or killing it outside of these exact bounds? You'd be lucky if you ever got to work with a mouse again.

Not only that, but since an animal was expected to die in the experiment, we had to report how many we needed in the experiment and then how many actually died. And if the latter number was higher, you better believe the ethics board would be on our case demanding to know what the actual hell happened.

(There's a plaque, by the way, in the labs, in remembrance of all the animals whose lives we ask for in the pursuit of science. It's right there when you walk in.)

The paperwork and restrictions get more and more complex and strict the higher up the "evolutionary chain" you go up. If you MUST use an animal model, you use the lowest one on the chain that can meet your requirements. As in, why use frogs if you can use zebrafish? Why use fish if you can use fruitflies? Why use a living creature at all if your computer simulation is good enough? And if you can't give a good answer, your proposal should be denied.

Back to the monkeys and Beckett. Monkeys, or "non-human primates" as they're often known as, are usually at the top of this chain. Ideally, you treat them like humans who are unable to consent for themselves. Which means they need advocates for them. Beckett pretty much had a vet assigned just to him. If he so much as had a sniffle, the vet had the power to veto any and all experiments he'd be involved in until he was feeling better.

This was important because if your lab had a monkey and that monkey died for reasons other than "natural causes" that the ethics board did not okay? There was going to be an investigation and if they didn't like what they found, not only would your lab never get another monkey again, but there was a damn good chance you'd be barred from working with any and ALL animals.

So from this perspective, "23 monkeys dead" should be read a very specific kind of shock and disgust. One dead should have made any kind of ethics board hit the breaks on this shit and start asking pointed questions as to "why".

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, there is an answer to the question of "what happens to monkeys who can't be used in research anymore?"

They're sent to the farm.

During Postwar occupation by Americans, Japan was experiencing massive shortages for the raw materials needed to make soy sauce nationwide, and was forced to rely on exported materials from America to make production. A single American woman named "Ms Appleton" was given total control of apportioning all American soy bean rations to companies, how much, and to who. She had no knowledge of soy sauce, allegedly.

She apparently had so much power over Japanese soy sauce production that she could singlehandedly shape its future by threatening to not give soy beans to any company, family, or factory which did not utilize her specific requirements of semichemical fermentation (reduced from chemical fermentation, since it was that abhorrent). These days, the term soy sauce is distinct from traditional shoyu, and requires distinguishment because of such a radical difference the two products are.

Here's the problem, folks:

I can find absolutely no evidence that Ms Appleton ever existed. There are no sources about this specific period in Japanese history that I'm able to definitively confirm. All of the sources which reference Ms Appleton are referencing in circles with each other; there is no listed source for any of them. Kikkoman's official English website is a veritable goldmine of information regarding this piece of history, with an entire 4 size 13 paragraphs. It not only gives me a first name, Blanche, but also tells me she worked for General Headquarters and that her policies and decisions shaped governmental policies heading into the future.

Except any variation of searching for Ms Appleton, Ms Blanche Appleton, and so on gives me absolutely no information about her ever existing. By appending keywords such as Ms Blanche Appleton+soy sauce, or Ms Blanche Appleton+GHQ, we can find the same couple of sources that are circling each other--or, in the case of the latter, only Kikkoman.

But there is NOTHING else. I'm getting pageantry from some minnesotan town; I'm getting world war 2 veteran records and obituaries when trying to follow that route; I'm getting k-12 teachers and a Titanic survivor named Charlotte. There is no fucking evidence of a Blanche Appleton to substantiate these claims.

And this is fucking massive. Because there should be way more information on her if this was the case; she was apparently powerful and influential enough during the occupation that she could singlehandedly enforce whatever arbitrary rules she wanted on the soy sauce industry and they had to comply or else have no product at all. That level of power is fucking insane. Imagine having so much raw influence over Japan that you could order them to completely renovate and change how they produce and make SOY SAUCE, literally one of if not THE most important thing in Japanese culinary history--and yet there's absolutely zero reference to this outside of like, three specific sites, and none of them have sources, or if they do, they source those sites.

What the fuck is happening here? There shouldn't be radio silence about this woman. There should be records of her policies, there should be legal documents in America which record how she apportioned out American exportation of soy beans to Japan, there should be sources talking about this woman's ability to transform Japan's soy sauce production so heavily that today only 1% of all soy sauce is made with pre-WW2 traditional techniques.

So if she's that big a deal then why does she not exist?

This is a translated page of Kikkoman's .co.jp website, with an apparent picture of Ms Appleton.

But this says that she has an apparent good knowledge of soy sauce brewing--directly contradictory to the Kikkoman.com claim that she had "no experience". And it also claims she was in charge of GHQ, which I'm going to assume is a mistranslation, but still.

I am at the point where I am genuinely considering the possibility of Blanche Appleton never having existed. There is the chance that Kikkoman invented an 'ambassador'-type person with high influence in the General Headquarters during the occupation to grant itself apparent influence/validity/power above the rest of the competition. "The woman who controls all soy materials coming into Japan visited our main factory and said she liked us :)".

It's incredibly fitting that my first act of serious investigative journalism is about soy sauce. Like, I'm a little annoyed at how on brand this is for me. Of course I'm overly invested in this weird little nitpick about soy sauce. Of course I'm making this the government's problem.

It's currently 12:14AM. I have just learned that a private individual submitted a research query to the Japanese National Diet Library in 2008 regarding any information or proof of Blanche Appleton in relation to soy sauce production.

The researchers found absolutely no reference or evidence of her that was not directly related to the Kikkoman company, even after trawling the archives of the Asahi Shimbun Newspaper since 1945.

This information was told to me by a follower of mine--who asked to be anonymous. So right now we have evidence that Japan as an entity cannot find evidence of Blanche Appleton ever existing within relation to soy sauce production. And I can't find evidence of Blanche Appleton existing in obituary records, nor any publicly available birth/deaths.

Right now there seems to be more and more evidence that Miss Blanche Appleton was a complete invention of the Kikkoman Company possibly dating back nearly a hundred years. But why?

If nothing comes back from my Freedom of Information Act request, I'm going to be contacting Kikkoman directly. I'm not going to just let this slide. People have been noticing this since at least 2008. Who is Miss Blanche Appleton? Why would she be faked by Kikkoman? What's the point of this lie, and if it's the truth, if she was real, why can't I find any proof of that?

I have an active Ancestry.com account, so I made a guess at her birth year and hit paydirt basically immediately

Ms. Blanche Appleton was born Blanche Harriet Schnitzer, October 22, 1903, in Manhattan, New York City, the only child of affluent immigrant parents who were apparently very invested in her education. I found records of at least two international trips with her parents before she turned twenty. Here's her passport photo from her original application in 1922, to compare against the above photo:

(cut for record dumps and original documents ahoy)