June 11, 2005

• Astonishing. Impressive. And I want to read more about these folk.
• [this is awesome] Absolutely astounding and fascinating. Can't wait to see the results of more research on this. Thanks, Abiezer.
• David Keys is one of the best things about The Independent I always think - don't know many other papers with an archaeology correspondent. I googled the names of some of the archaeologists he mentioned hoping for more, but this seems to be all there is so far (though one of them cropped up in that stroy about the oldest pornographic statue that I think was posted a while back!)..
• Fascinating. Thanks Abiezer_Coppe.
• Are there no photos or even drawings of this? This kind of stuff fascinates me.
• Thanks Abiezer_Coppe. There's also this other article linked from the same page. There's nothing else in the news reports on google that I could see (that weren't just lifted from The Independent).
• I agree, this is great. One can't help wondering if these people were a northerly extension of the pre-Indo-European so-called "Old Europeans" researched by Marija Gimbutas and represented by, among others, the Trypillian culture of the Ukraine (Abiezer--could these or these be near kin of Mr. Keys' longhouses and substantial villages? The Old Europeans definitely went in for extensive temple complexes. Check out Malta. As regards "pornographic" statues, gentlemen, one man's pornography is another woman's religion... For those who aren't up to wading through Gimbutas, though she's well worth the wading, Mary MacKay has a couple of entertaining novels on the arrival of the Indo-Europeans in Old Europe.
• Color me skeptical. When I see it in a refereed journal, I'll take it seriously.
• Color me skeptical. When I see it in a refereed journal, I'll take it seriously. Googling Harald Stäuble (with the umlaut that is missing in most press releases, which explains why his name doesn't show up in the non-umlaut searches) retrieves some actual scientific papers and congresses. See also Landesamt für Archäologie.
• Googling Harald Stäuble... You boys ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Do you know how many innocent old ladies reading this may get the wrong idea entirely?! I am reminded of the year a couple of good friends (who were an item, and no threat at all to my virtue) gave me a little computer game for Christmas. I told my mother that they had given me some software. There followed a Pregnant Maternal Pause, and then my mother said, "Katherine, how well do you know these men?
• How can this be possible? The earth is only 4400 years old. Perhaps one of these is the city Cain built where he knew his wife.
• Pornography is in the eye of... Why do we assume from our superior twenty-first-century point of view that the depiction of an act of copulation (or a male with an erection, for that matter) was intended to be pornographic? It may very well have been (and probably was) a religious object. Did it ever occur to you that non-Christians might be apalled at the sight of Christian priests encouraging small children to commit a symbolic act of cannibalism in celebration of a ritual act of human sacrifice?
• I certainly agree that a good deal of projection seems to take place in our interpretation of the past LaGatta. In my case I focussed the part of the story where the sacred enclosures were speculated to have been surrounded by ramparts to keep the oi polloi away from sullying the Mysteries. I sighed and thought here is the beginning of priestcraft in this world, whose lies and trickery have been the bane of our civilisations ever since. But that's my prejudices showing and doubtless little to do with whatever the hell was going on in the environs of Dresden all those millenia ago.
• It's only a matter of time before they discover the Fogotten City at the mountains of madness in Antarctica, leading to the return of the Great Old Ones! IA! IA! ;E
• I love the British. Where else can you send a mail order for a scale model of an Old European longhouse?
• A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity
• So... If *goods are (were) not commodities in the modern sense but rather “valuables,” symbols of status and recognition* let's put our own failing monetary system on that basis today. Then the only question to settle is not how the banks and gornernment lackeys are screwing us, but rather just this one question: is it art?
• Archaeologists uncover Palaeolithic ceramic art: Ceramics found on the coast of the Adriatic attest to a hitherto unknown artistic culture which flourished during the last Ice Age, thousands of years before pottery was commonly used.
• ...and those Palaeolithic ceramic craftsmen became known as... Hairy Potters.
• Oh, oh, oh, NOOOOOOOOO!! You should be ashamed, foop! Go to the corner. I expect you to apologize to all of us later.
• what about my username does NOT say "terrible punster"?
• Europe's oldest prehistoric town unearthed in Bulgaria