Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Image description: a faded blue plastic bottle with a white lid. The label reads, in Italian, “Nuovo Dolomit per vetri” End ID.
This is a bottle that once contained glass cleaner. It was made in the 1960s, and only recently found washed up on the beach in Ferrara, Italy. It’s now part of a museum called Archaeoplastica, which is, as the name suggests, all about old plastic, and uses it to raise awareness about plastic pollution. The fact that this bottle is still intact, even legible, after 50 years in the Mediterranean is frankly insane.
National Geographic’s got an article about this museum, or you can check out the museum website - it’s in Italian, but you can either plug it into a translator or simply scroll through the pictures in the digital museum, it’s pretty mindblowing.
In 2008, archaeologists discovered fragments of flutes carved from vulture and mammoth bones at a Stone Age cave site in southern Germany called Hohle Fels. They were carved and played by Homo sapiens. These flutes are ancient, dating back 42,000 to 43,000 years, making them the oldest flutes in the world.
The oldest Homo sapiens flutes, that is. There is at least one flute made by a Neanderthal that is older. Found at a Neanderthal campsite at Divje Babe in northwestern Slovenia, the Neanderthal flute is estimated to be over 43,000 years old and perhaps as much as 80,000 years old.
The video above features Ljuben Dimkaroski, who plays trumpet for the Ljubljana Opera Orchestra, and who helped archaeologists figure out how to play the prehistoric flute. Don’t worry! He is playing a clay replica, not the original.
God, the sound of this went right through me, right to my soul, and tugged.
In the Arslantepe site, Turkey, excavations carried out in the 1980s found swords and daggers forged with an arsenic-copper alloy, between 45 and 60 cm long, about 5,000 thousand years old. antiquity.
Archeologists excavating graves in the Altai mountains found an even older, very well-preserved pair of shoes. These bedazzled boots were worn by a Scythian woman around 300–290 BCE. They are made of leather, textile, tin (or pewter), and gold. The shoes are in exceptionally good condition because of the low temperatures in the region, so the ground in which they were buried was frozen.
The condition of the sole sparked theories as to how the beads and the crystals are still perfectly in place. Some say that the shoes were made specifically for the burial; others speculate that it belonged to a high-ranking woman who didn’t have to walk a lot, or it was just the Scythians’ lifestyle to spend most of their time on a horse. A more interesting theory proposed by historians is that the soles of the Scythians’ shoes were an important accent of their attire, as they were visible to others while sitting in front of a fire and socializing. (x)
Absolute worst case scenario: You find a body that should be there but when you come back it’s gone
“Guys? Where’d she go?”
She’s behind you
Me [beating at the bog body with a shovel]: WE. DIDN’T. TAKE. SITU. PHOTOS. YET. Get back in that hole! You can go for a walk after.
The fact that I can picture myself and pretty much all of my archaeologist colleagues grabbing a shovel and doing this last bit just makes it that much funnier.
god this has to be one of the dumbest things i spent 5 minutes on but it sprouted fully formed in my brain the second i saw this post
Reconstructions made from the ancient skeletons found at archeological sites:
The Whitehawk Woman. She lived in England around 5,000 years ago and was buried with great care. She was also buried with a newborn infant, and died aged between 19 and 25 years old. Researchers believe she died during or very soon after childbirth. Her bones indicate she was otherwise in good health.
Adelasius Ebalchus. He lived in Switzerland 1,300 years ago, and was in his late teens/early twenties at the time of his death. His gravesite indicated he came from wealth, and his bones showed he was well-nourished. His bones also showed that Adelasius suffered a lingering infection; archeologists believe he most likely died from lung inflammation.
The Slonk Hill Man was found semi-crouched in a grave near the seaside town of Brighton, England — in the same area as the Whitehawk Woman. Their lives, however, were separated by nearly 3,000 years. The Slonk Hill Man lived during Britain’s Iron Age. The reconstruction artist (an archeologist and sculptor) described him as being “very good looking”, tall, muscular, and in robust health at the time of his death. There were no obvious signs of what caused his death.
The Wari Queen. She was found in 2012 by a Polish-Peruvian archeology team, entombed in an underground mausoleum in El Castillo de Huarmey, Peru. She lived approximately 1200 years ago and died in her sixties. Her bones indicate she led a leisurely life, and her decayed teeth indicate a diet high in sugar (most likely she regularly drank the sugary corn-based beer, chicha). Other artefacts in her chamber suggest she was an expert weaver — a very highly-valued craft.
if an archaeologist says an artifact was probably for “ritual purposes” it means “i have no fuckin clue”
but if they say it was for “fertility rituals” they mean “i know exactly what it was for but i dont want to say ‘ancient dildo’”
Back in the day I worked at a certain very famous and very high caste art museum in the US as a junior curator. Part of my job was to catalog the objects in the museum database. This includes details like provenance, measurements, and a visual description of what the object looked like.
Like I said, the museum was a pretty snotty institution. It’s got a LOT of objects it’s way famous for possessing, but nobody knew about the absolutely massive collection of Moche erotic pottery it had because the curators were totally embarrassed by this stuff.
Some examples:
Pretty hot shit, right? They never, ever put any of this stuff on public view or published it in any catalogues but - we legit had like several hundred pieces of Moche ceramics in the “dirty pots” category. Anyway, I was left alone to just do my job with regard to the database for several years, ok? And I figured, well, these’re accessioned objects in the museum’s collection - better get down to bidness.
I catalogued every goddamn bestiality, necrophiliac, cocksucking, buttfucking, detached penis, and giant vulva drinking cup in that collection. I’d be like,
A drinking vessel in form of a standing man wearing a tunic and cap. He holds an oversized erection in his hands and stares into the distance (note I did not say “like he’s hella-constipated”). The vessel has a hole at both the tip of the penis as well as around the rim of the figure’s head, thus forcing the drinker to drink only from the penis or risk spilling wine all over themselves from the top of the vessel. Red and orange slip covers the surface of the piece.
Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently the deep seated fear of these objects that the curators exhibited was meant to spread to me as well, but - no one ever gave me that memo, because I guess Midwesterners reproduce asexually. When the curators understood that I had catalogued all of these objects in addition to the other, non-sexy pieces in the collection, they were apparently livid, but knew they had no legs to stand on in terms of getting pissed at me for it.
I visited the museum’s online public access database a few years back and - every single description I wrote of these pieces has been totally neutered to say something like Male figural vase.
Long story short? Just call a dildo a fucking dildo. It’s all gonna be ok, I swear.
This is absolutely the MOST unusual reblog I have ever tagged with what is probably my second-favorite tag, “talk to me about your work.”
