News round-up

Thought I'd pop in this afternoon with a few of latest archaeo-headlines:

• Top archaeologists condemn Israeli plan to rebuild Herod's Tomb. Restoration, as opposed to conservation or preservation, is often a bad idea especially for archaeological sites. This plastic full-scale version of Herod's tomb, which was excavated 5 years ago, seems like a really bad idea. What do the builders hope to gain?
• One man's mission to save Kurdistan's history. While this man's intentions seem good, this sends an awful message to others (ahem: private collectors) who think it is their duty and privilege to "save" antiquities from the rest of the world. It especially doesn't help in this case where he is basically breaking the law. All archaeological objects uncovered in Iraq, whether through licit or illicit means, are property of the State. Look it up.
• Iraq's National Museum recovers lost treasures. This BBC report has a good message (the return of ancient objects back to Baghdad), but it completely fails to credit the millions of U.S. dollars spent to refurbish the museum including many of the 28 galleries that are completed.
• Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt to open at California Science Center in May. For folks in Los Angeles, this should be fun! 
• The fermented cereal beverage of the Sumerians may not have been beer. Buzz kill, man! One scholar thinks there is not enough conclusive evidence that actual alcoholic beer, as we know it, was produced in ancient Mesopotamia.
• Iraq plans historic artifact showcase in mobile fairs around the world. Maybe this is a translation issue, but I think the author meant a traveling exhibition. The article doesn't mention U.S. venues, but be on the lookout I suppose.

Games need not be board-ing

What can I say? With a full-time job (that I am extremely grateful for), publications to write, and other commitments, it has been darn near impossible to find time to blog. I barely find time to Tweet relevant archaeology stories, but I am finding that venue at least a bit easier than the full micro-narratives one comes to expect from blogs. Life is all about prioritizing our time and well, the blog, I'm afraid, is coming up very short. Perhaps strict 'tweets' if the way I ought to proceed?

While I meditate on that, here was a fun little story in Discovery News last week on ancient board games. Readers of this blog (when it was active, that is) will remember I have a keen interest in ancient games. One of these days I might even have some free time to explore the subject further. For example, one book that has been on my radar for quite some time now is Ancient Board Games in Perspective. Papers from the 1990 Britsh Museum colloquium edited by Irving Finkel [2007]. Any other recommendations out there?

Ancient Egyptian game of Senet (from Discovery News)

I only have three things to say about the Discover article. First, it focuses solely on board games as a past time of the elite, but of course we know every segment of the population in the ancient world was playing games of some sort like "roll the animal knuckle bones" (early form of dice) that didn't require a board. Second, while the article goes beyond the ancient world to give examples of board game development in the United States and elsewhere, it fails to mention the role of the Muslim world which, during the Medieval period in the Middle East, transmitted board games like chess invented in India or Afghanistan to Europe where it became a fixture of society.

Third, I found it mildly amusing (and my husband might too) to see that a "relevant" video embedded within the article discusses the question of "why are video games addictive?" This is a comparison of apples to oranges of course. Do you know anyone who is addicted to Monopoly or Scrabble the way people can get addicted to Call of Duty or (recently) Skyrim? Video games are an immersive environment the way board games can never be, though aspects of strategy, heightened anxiety, and pleasure in winning are present in both mediums.

Academic publishing

I recently read an amazing post by Savage Minds that discusses a subject I am quite passionate (opinionated?) about: academic publishing. Now before you stop reading, here is how it applies to archaeology and you, my non-academic audience. Archaeologists, especially those on the tenure-track at universities, live by the mantra "publish or perish." Peer-reviewed articles and books are traditionally the ticket to "success" in our field. Unfortunately the journals and books I am talking about you have probably never heard of.

That's primarily because commercial academic publishers have been running a racket. Professors and grad students put blood, sweat and tears into their research and reports using your tax payer dollars through federal funding sources. We then turn over all copyright and permissions to the publishers who hold the research hostage behind exorbitant book prices or online access fees. The result, as Ryan at Savage Minds points out, is this horrible cycle where grad students are shooting themselves to publish in these closed access publications to get a job and get tenure to then tell their grad students they need to publish in these same publications.

Thankfully we are starting to see some change. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is now requiring grantees of the Archaeology Program to report and disseminate the results of their research as widely as possible through such data management services as Open Context and The Digital Archaeology Record (tDAR). Many publishers will also grant permission for authors to post their individual journal articles or book chapters (for an edited volume) on their personal websites or Academia.edu--all an author has to do is ask! (copyright addenda also help). Some journals are also beginning to offer web-only open access content.

For my non-archaeologists friends out there though, I wonder: is this enough? Shouldn't the research that you, essentially, are paying for be free and available to you? To encourage this sea change, shouldn't tenure be based on a balance of peer-reviewed publications and mainstream outlets for public outreach like popular magazines or even blogs?

News Wrap-Up

It has been ages and ages since I posted here. My apologies! Here is a quick rundown of what is happening in Near Eastern Archaeology and related fields these days:

• The Iconography of Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East is a handy online guide for identifying ancient gods and demons using visual sources (User note: the database is currently only in Swiss German)
• A 2,800-year-old stone lion statue from a gateway was excavated at Tell Tayinat in Turkey. See Tayinat project page as well.
• Look! A beer archaeologist!
• Stone reliefs depicting a chariot race scene uncovered in western Turkey
• Hear the bell last heard 2,000 years ago (?) in Jerusalem
• Zahi Hawass discusses his departure
• 4 charged in smuggling Egyptian antiquities
• 10 best historical novels

Some ancient beer ingredients including chamomile, dates, oregano (image from Smithsonian Magazine)

Return of antiquities

Do you agree that antiquities from the Middle East currently residing in European and American museums should be returned to their "countries of origin?" My question spawns from a New York Times article on Wednesday and the recent surge in restitution cases in the last few years. The most outspoken country has, of course, been Egypt, but Italy and Greece have also been actively seeking the return of "their" artifacts. Now Turkey is weighing in. Read the article and tell me your opinion:

Turkey Presses Harder for Return of Antiquities
By SUSANNE GÜSTEN (New York Times)

ISTANBUL — After years of pleading in vain for the return of Anatolia’s cultural treasures from Western museums, Turkey has started playing hardball. And it is starting to see some results.

This month, Germany reluctantly agreed to return a Hittite statue taken to Berlin by German archaeologists a century ago. “It was agreed that the statue will be handed over to Turkey as a voluntary gesture of friendship,” the German government said after weeks of negotiations between the countries’ foreign ministries.

Days later, Ankara announced it was stepping up a campaign to obtain a breakthrough in a similarly longstanding dispute with the Louvre in Paris over an Ottoman tile panel that went to France in 1895.

The 16th-century ceramic, one of the finest surviving examples of Iznik ceramic art, once decorated the tomb of the Ottoman Sultan Selim II on the grounds of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. While the Louvre continues to maintain that the panel was acquired legally and is not eligible for restitution, Turkey says it was removed from the tomb by a French collector who replaced it with a fake and sold the original to the Louvre.

The statue being surrendered by Germany is a stone sphinx that guarded a gate in the Hittite capital of Hattusa in central Anatolia between 1600 B.C. and 1200 B.C. Taken to Berlin for restoration in 1917 by German archaeologists excavating the site, it was not returned to Turkey, but incorporated into the collection of the Pergamon Museum, where it remains on display.

The two artifacts head a list of cultural treasures from Asia Minor spanning several millennia that Turkey wants returned from the museums of half a dozen Western countries, including the United States and Britain.

The list ranges from a small stele in the British Museum in London to the great Pergamon Altar, centerpiece of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and includes such items as the top half of a Roman statue in possession of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the bottom half of which is on display at Antalya Museum in Turkey.

Read the rest of the story here.