online exhibition, first nation

virtual exhibit (British Columbia, Canada), [Doig River First Nation]
Dane Wajich - Dane-zaa Stories and Song: Dreamers and the land,
http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Danewajich

hunter-gatherer societies altering their environments

hunter-gatherer societies altering their environments - intentional or not
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112124572
 
August 23, 2009
Archaeologists who study early hunter-gatherer societies are discovering that even the simplest cultures altered their environments, whether they meant to or not.
 
For example, aboriginal people in Australia burned huge areas to change the landscape so they could hunt animals more easily. Perhaps the most famous example is the way mastodons and giant sloth and other ice-age animals were killed off by roving bands of hungry humans...
[National Public Radio, npr.org]
article on coastal exploitation appears in the journal Science

thinking about Ch. Darwin's "Origin of the Species"

http://scienceblogs.com/bloggingtheorigin
[chapter by chapter modern re-reading of Darwin's The Origin of Species;
or see the original text at www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles]

physical anthro; archeology - Exhibition, "Written in Bone"

on display at the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC) until February 2011,
Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17^th Century Chesapeake

and the webcomic presentation, http://anthropology.si.edu/writteninbone/comic

 

photo preview [13 views]

Indonesian tribe picks Korean alphabet as official writing system

via Korean Studies Discussion List <http://us.mc580.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=koreanstudies@koreaweb.ws> http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2009/08/06/56/0302000000AEN20090806001200315F.HTML [compare to] ...other instances in the past where other cultures attempted to adopt Han'gu(l / Choso(n'gu(l as their written language only to have it be rejected, no? I don't recall as it has been a long time since I read Kim-Renaud, Y-K. (ed) 1997. The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure. Anyway, this is a very interesting language development that *gasp* for once doesn't involve romanizations. =-=-=-= follow up: The case of using hangeul by one of Indonesian tribes as a practical systemof writing is funny. It is one more ?success? of local nationalists in theera of globalization, when the state sponsors such "experiments"! Koreanalphabet is excellent only for the Korean language, but is almost unsuitablefor the transmission of sounds, which are absent in the Korean language. Inthe Soviet Union in 1920-30?s attempts were made to create scripts fornationalities, which had no their own script on the basis of the Latinalphabet. This letter alphabet, as well as Cyrillic, is much more suitablethan Korean letter-syllabic alphabet, for transcription of all kinds ofsounds through a combination of letters or diacritics. But the grandioseexperiment failed. It is difficult to believe that the Korean experimentwill last for long. ---Lev Kontsevich [Moscow]

lesson plans - ancient Jordan, ancient Israel

Daily Life in Ancient Times: Archaeology of Israel and Jordan
July 1 - July 24, 2009
 -- directed by Rhonda Root and Gloria London --
sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities
 
http://home.earthlink.net/~galondon/NEH2009/

old bones in Spain (1.2mya)

"In the field of human evolution which is what I'm in, Atapuerca is a world reference site," Quam says. "This is the richest fossil bearing deposits in the world. And every single site in Atapuerca that has been excavated has yielded human remains, which is something that is very unusual."
Last year, the team uncovered a 1.2 million-year-old jawbone fragment from a species known as homo antecessor. It's the oldest hominid fossil ever found in western Europe.
 
Near the railway trench, another site yielded human remains of 28 individuals, dating back at least half a million years. The Spanish paleontologist believes it's a mass grave.
 
"This was a collective act, something a group did with its dead," Arsuaga says.
full story; or mp3 download
--from NPR.org Morning Edition 3 Aug. 2009