Photos taken by folklorist Gustav Henningsen of the folk magic performed in rural Galicia, Spain, in the 60s.
1) Amulet worn by a cow to make her give milk again 2) Ritual to cure jaundice 3) Ritual to remove the evil eye from a kid 4) Cattle going over the remains of a bonfire lit in St. John’s night 5) Divination method by wise women 6) Funeral
dear archaeology tumblr people who keep adding things onto my dream post: i now worry about all of you
I feel like I had an anxiety dream one time that I kept stumbling out of my bed to try to excavate my unit, which was simultaneously existing both in the spot it was supposed to be on a site, and also sunk directly into the carpeted floor of my bedroom. Can’t remember much more than that though.
Okay I just remembered that back in 2016 after I had spend a solid 2 weeks of 9-hour days excavating a mass secondary interment (55 disarticulated skeletons in a grave about the size of a bathtub; more bone than soil), I woke up in the middle of the night and started rooting around in the folds of my quilt in the dark, because I knew I had just lifted out a femur from the grave and set it down somewhere, but where was it? I have to put it in the tray to move it to the lab!
An international team of researchers, led by Dr. Asier Gomez-Olivencia of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and including Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam, has provided new insights on one of the most famous Neandertal skeletons, discovered over 100 years ago: La Ferrassie 1.
“New technological approaches are allowing anthropologists to peer even deeper into the bones of our ancestors,” said Quam. “In the case of La Ferrassie 1, these approaches have made it possible to identify new fossil remains and pathological conditions of the original skeleton as well as confirm that this individual was deliberately buried.
The adult male La Ferrassie 1 Neanderthal skeleton was found in 1909 in a French cave site, along with the remains of an adult woman and several Neanderthal children. Read more.
In a cramped stone grave beneath the medieval town of Imola, Italy, a 1,300-year-old woman lies dead with a hole in her skull and a fetus between her legs.
The fetus, now just a collection of tiny bones trailing below the mother’s skeletal pelvis, was likely delivered in the grave through a phenomenon called “coffin birth” — essentially, when an unborn child is forced out of its mother’s womb by posthumous gases after both mother and child have died.
It’s a rare sight in archaeology — but rarer still might be the peculiar circular wound bored into the mother’s skull.
Archaeologists from the University of Ferrara and University of Bologna attempted to unwind the mystery of this mother’s and child’s deaths in a new study published in the May 2018 issue of the journal World Neurosurgery. According to the researchers, these remarkable skeletal remains may present a rare Middle Ages example of a primitive brain-surgery technique called trepanation. This procedure involved drilling or scraping a hole into the patient’s skull to relieve pressure and (theoretically) a whole host of medical ailments. In this case, sadly, that relief may not have been enough. Read more.
