Weekly Roundup of History, Archaeology and Writing Wisdom October 25-31

I’m a day or so late putting up my weekly post of my favorites around the web. I’ve been getting myself back into the habit of writing my full word count everyday with a lot less daily book promotion, and since I’ve been away from this my historical mystery for a while and got myself into a muddle, that took a lot of focus. I didn’t spend much web time, so my pickings are slim. And I took much of Sat and Sun to vegetate with a good book and no screen time. I enjoyed that! I did  manage to get the grocery shopping done, but otherwise pretty darn lazy. Sometimes that’s the best prescription for a tired brain.

Here are the posts I enjoyed this week:

Street View for the Bronze Age. A team working at the bronze Age site of Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios on the island of Cyprus is trying to create an app to virtually reconstruct ruins via ones phone so that these decidedly “ruined ruins” can come alive to untrained eyes. Very cool. The photo I’ve included here is one my husband took last spring. You can see the white tent roof over the Neolithic ruins across the road and he got a good overview of the Bronze Age site with the column that is featured in the reconstruction this app has done. Click here 

Something completely new to me from a 10,000 yr old archaeological site: fingerprints. The well-established dig at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, has uncovered small chunks of fired clay with fingerprints in them. The finds were photographed using Reflectance Transformation Imaging and then converted into 3D images and are now under study. Apparently they can tell gender and whether adult or child. Not sure exactly what else they hope to learn, but I’m always intrigued at what new techniques can unravel about the silent past. Click here

Interesting post on History Imagined about identifying accurate occupations for characters in historical fiction. The post talks about checking Census data and lists a number of sources such as genealogical websites. So much precise information available to those who write what feels to me such “modern” history, although I realize the 18^th C seems a long time ago to most people. Try working with the 13^th century BCE! Thanks to Caroline Warfield for gathering this info. Click here