middlesavagery:

Proper number forms for international archaeology! http://instagr.am/p/K76Kb0voDV/

theatlantic:

Does It Matter Where You Go to College?

Meet Ben. He’s a high school senior from a middle class family in Massachusettes who is choosing where to attend college next year. He’s down to two schools: prestigious Boston College, or the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, his state’s top public campus. Even with the generous financial aid package from BC, he would still graduate with a big mound of loans. UMass, meanwhile, would be more than $15,000 a year cheaper.

Which should Ben pick? Prestige or price?

With the cost of higher education climbing every year, and student debt surpassing $1 trillion, more and more young people will have to decide whether to make that trade-off. It begs the question: Does it really pay to go to an elite university, financially speaking?  Researchers have been investigating this issue since at least the 1980s. And their findings tend to show that when it comes to future earnings, where you go to college counts.

Read more.

(via npr)

alphacaeli:

oldowan:

This year I have read over 740 applications for positions or money in academe – jobs, postdocs, research fellowships, grad awards, collaborative grants and more. In the course of reading applications I’ve noticed a few small things that are consistently seen in applications and that I feel should not be seen in applications, however modest their degree of offense might be. Since some of these are things that are not routinely covered by the many very good guides to writing applications, I thought I would share them.

1. If there is a topic, theme, organizing rubric, archival holding, or logic specified for the thing to which you are applying, say very clearly and very visibly what, precisely, you will be doing with or contributing to that topic, theme, logic, etc. It’s not enough to mention the topic, theme, logic in a clause at the end of a sentence, nor to send your standard, unaltered job letter or research proposal. Don’t assume that it is obvious how you will fit. If there is a series of questions in the application (How will your work contribute to existing conversations? What stage are you at? What will you do during the time period comprehended by the grant?) make sure you address every single point, even at the risk of sounding programmatic. (This last mostly for applications for grants or fellowships.) All reviewers of applications love when a proposal says “my scholarship will speak to your focus on Will Ferrell studies in the following ways: x, y, z.” It may feel simplistic to you but it’s a great help to reviewers who might be reading, say, 740+ applications in the course of a year. You can be fancy in other parts of the application, but be simple when saying what, exactly, you will do with the position/grant, and why.


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/04/30/essay-how-write-good-applications-jobs-or-grants#ixzz1tdzNbR55 
Inside Higher Ed 

Very apropos.

(via jangojips)

This.

If there’s one thing that the controversies surrounding the Diggersand American Digger reality shows have taught us, it’s that the general American public still does not know how to tell the difference between historical archaeologists, and the treasure hunters who are currently on their TV screens. Furthermore, this lack of public knowledge helps to make our protests sound like the “ivory tower elite” complaining because we are the only people who should be allowed to use the very resource of which we also claim to be guardians.  We talk a lot in archaeology, anthropology—and even academia in general—about being more “public” or becoming “public intellectuals;” the reality, however, is that we are still not doing enough.

lovearchmag:

Coffee Munsell Chart by Sexy Archaeology

(via rocks-n-bones-deactivated201203)

cennoreth:

So over at Old Dirt, New Thoughts, there’s a post about the life history of a point, some stories, and some thoughts about how and why people reuse artifacts.  It’s really interesting and has very little to do with what I’m going to say here.

From that post, here’s a summary of the life history of the point shown above:

Inspection of this artifact shows some critical details regarding the patina and the breaks. First the haft broke and the point was either lost or discarded. Over time, a patina covered the point’s surface including the break at the haft. Much later someone retouched one edge of the blade and the tip broke. Both the retouch and missing tip have exposed the original flint beneath the patination. This pattern of old breaks, new breaks and retouch suggests that the broken point was found, resharpened, used and broken by a second person many years, perhaps hundreds of years, after its use by the original owner.

I wanted to take this opportunity to think out loud about how I take my pictures, since I took the photo for that post and I had to do it twice.  I took two sets of pictures of this point because Brian told me he wanted to talk about the life history of this point and I hadn’t noticed that I’d washed out the broken tip in the first shot.

In the first photo, I lit it in a way that brought out the flaking on the main surface of the point better, but the broken portion is mostly indistinguishable in color from the patination on the rest of the point.  This is important, because the patination on this material (Knife River flint) takes a long time to form - meaning that the break (and the retouch!) occurred a long time after the point was originally made.  

Usually for a point, I just put the main light source in front of the tip, fairly close to and nearly level with the artifact, sometimes below it, with a second light for fill further off, higher up, and at the other end.  This gets the most dramatic shadows and tends to make the flaking really obvious.  It also gets fairly even lighting over the whole artifact.  That’s how I took the first image.  

In the second photo, you can see that the break at the top of the left is brown.  This one is the result of mostly the same theory of how to light a photo of a point, but with the light at the tip, the one meant to bring out the flake scars, twisted to one side to keep it from hitting the break head on and washing it out.  This meant more shadow on the other edge, though, so the flaking there nearly vanishes.  Part of this is also because of how I had to adjust the second light.  Since the main light was only really lighting half the point, I had to move the second light closer, which filled in some of the shadow I was trying to create.

I’m a little disappointed with how changing the lighting between the first and second pictures affected the shadow in the flake scars on the rest of the point.  The shadows are a lot less drastic, and the flaking on the side on the right is a lot harder to see.  To be fair, I didn’t have to change the lighting on this side, but apparently when I was doing this it was very important to me to have the coloring on both sides match?  I do like the way the change in the lighting brings out the translucency of the material in that thin, retouched edge.  Even the patina on this piece is slightly translucent, and I think the second photo does a little better job of bringing that out.

There are two essential questions that help me get through my day as an archaeologist.

1. Why is that like that?

Everything around you is the way it is for a reason. If something doesn’t match the expected natural state, then clearly something has happened to it. This change could be natural or cultural, a single event or multiple, but something has happened. What happened?

Some things are obvious. Some can be explained with some thought. Others can’t be explained. Still others can be easily dismissed, but probably shouldn’t be.

Nothing should be dismissed without a reason. But, I don’t have time to delve into the nuances of every little detail of a site, so the second question gives me a reason to dismiss a detail.

2. Is this relevant to my archaeological interpretation? 

Seriously, we’re working on a budget. Don’t waste time figuring out things that have no relevance to your project. Describe it so that it might be useful to others, and then move on.