One of the things that never cease to fascinate me in regards to archaeology is this wild, delightfully weird mix of the old and the new. You dig up something (or it is preserved some other way), and there you are, analysing the craft skills of some person long dead and probably forgotten. (Most people are, after all, a few hundred years into the future.) Here, it helps if you know a bit about natural materials, traditional tools and traditional, old-fashioned crafts methods. And then the new stuff comes in, where the archaeologists use the new technologies in order to learn more about the old ones. DNA analyses, protein analyses, strontium isotope analyses. The good old radiocarbon-dating, let's not forget that, but with refined methods these days and using calibration curves made in collaboration with dendrochronology. Electron microscopy, in a number of different flavours. When it comes to finding out what was once there instead of the ubiquitous archaeological brown in textiles, HPLC (the high-pressure liquid chromatography) is not the only thing these days to try and find out more about dyes applied long, long ago.

It's a delight, really. Even though there's still limits, obviously - you have to have to know about the possibilities, have to have the opportunity for the research, and need the possibility and the permission of the caretakers to take samples of your piece, or, with the non-destructive methods, it needs to be either brought to the lab for analysis or the tool has to be brought to the object. In all cases, a combination of time, knowledge, money, effort, and support is necessary, coming from different people involved. Realistically, that means there is much less cutting-edge, new-fangled stuff and most recent methods research done than there could be, in an ideal world.

It's still great. Every little bit of new tech for old stuff never stops to delight me. It's even better when there's names involved that I know (and thus people that I know). Like in this (already a few years old) article about looking at textile residue on a metal brooch. It was published in a physics journal, and it's open access, so you can join me in my delight.

I stumbled across this yesterday or so, and found it somewhat amusing and interesting. It's a (modified) speed reading check that places all the words at one point, so you don't have to move your eyes when skimming a page. 

So now I have found out that I can read fairly quickly (which is no real surprise, I knew that already).

While I can skim stuff very quickly, and read fast, I have more enjoyment in reading when I am not going for high speed. And if the text is very complicated, or in another language that I don't know very well, obviously I need to go even slower than the normal cruising speed. This shenanigan of putting all words in one spot, though, doesn't seem like really practical to me. Usually when I skim, it's to check if a text is relevant for me, or to find the bits that are. For that, I need to go over the page, turn the page, do the next one, rinse and repeat. Or, if it's on the computer, scroll and skim. In both scenarios, training the eye movement to do the skimming is essential, and that is exactly what this in-place speed reading leaves out fully. And even if I have a full text that I want to read quickly, it would mean having an app or something that converts the text into this format, then reading it. What happens if there's something I have to process, though? Or if I have a short lapse of concentration? Then how can I go back to the proper bit and re-find my place?

Which means... interesting, yes. Useful, well, probably limited, at least for me.

I think I posted about the German thing with potato salad before at some point, but I recently stumbled across a potato salad discussion on reddit and, well, it sums the thing up very nicely as there being one thing all Germans can agree on: 

There should be potatoes in a potato salad. 

All the rest? Depends. There's the dressing with mayo fraction, the dressing with oil and vinegar fraction, there's some that put in yoghurt. There's onions or not, radishes or not, cucumbers or not (and those pickled or not). Eggs. Bacon. Peas. Most people have a favourite version, often the one their gran or mom made (though if you ask me, the best one ever was the one my gran made. Even if others come close). 

So if you ever wondered what a real German potato salad looks like, the answer is probably: Use potatoes, and whatever else you enjoy.

(My gran's version went like this: Marinade an onion, diced, in the pickle liquid of pickled cucumbers, the German style one pickled in vinegar and a bit of sugar. Add cubed pickled onions. Boil potatoes, peel, cut into slices, add to mixture. Add in hot broth and let cool until only warm, then add a little bit of mayonnaise, salt, maybe pepper. Once it's fairly cool, add a sliced, hard-boiled egg per person. Let cool off completely and serve.)

I spent a lovely hour this afternoon preparing a joint presentation with a French colleague - about a garment find she had studied, and presented at the NESAT in Warsaw. Our plans include making a reconstruction of the thing, which is... a medieval underpant fragment. It's very exciting, and I am all looking forward to it, and today I saw close-up images of the seams and stitches and now I have itching fingers. It will have to wait until I have all the data, and a plan, though, so... deep breaths, and patience.

Braies, or breeches, or underpants, or however you want to call them are one of the bits that we know about, but by far not enough. There's mostly pictorial evidence, and a bit of written stuff that is not always really clear, and next to no surviving pieces at all, so anything that makes it to today in a recognisable way is like a double win in the lottery. Imagine my excitement when I first saw images of the piece! It's of course not complete, but there's plenty of it left to have a really good idea of the original looks.

There's some other balls up in the air - still trying to do some re-organising here, still working on the big thesis translation project (a little each day, in the hopes it will add up quicker than math says it will), some shop stuff planning for things, and research/reconstruction requests that need a little attention now and then, but are still in the evaluation and pre-planning phase, so nothing is firm and decided yet. It's a kind of limbo that is always exciting, but I have learned to not get too excited too early.

The calendar is also slowly starting to fill up with things; here, too, some are still in the early stage, but I am hopeful they will come through and I'll be out and about to some really wonderful events in 2026.

So... ordering and sorting stuff here is still progressing. My appointment was no issue either; it took me a little longer to walk (carefully, because of slippery streets) from the station to where I needed to be, and the same on the way back, but it was no big deal.

By late afternoon, everything had thawed much more, so the errands were also no problem. Now, however, I am looking forward to the weekend - after the last few bits that I have to do today will be dealt with. And hopefully on Monday I'll get somewhat further with the book sorting... do you know that effect when you'd need to add one single book at a specific place in the shelf, but there's no more room for it, so you need to move one of the books from there to another shelf, and it's the same thing there, and all of a sudden you realise that the one book will cause a cascade through all your bookish belongings, or at least almost all?

Yes. This. This is exactly what is happening here, so some of the non-book stuff will have to move somewhere else, or find new homes at some other place. The little cat also reminds me that I wanted to clear some more space again on my desk, because it's getting cramped here and she wishes to stretch out more.

You see... things have been clearly laid out, and I know what I have to do on Monday!

It is, for a change, quite cold around here. The last several winters, we had a little bit of snow now and then, and maybe a few days of below zero, but this year, there's actually frost and cold and snow for more than just three days in a row.

Somehow, it feels like I'm not used to that at all anymore. Fortunately I have warm things to wear when going outside, and there's several different options still working to get me from where I am to where I need to be (and that even though I was too lazy to put the winter tyres onto my bike, as it was never necessary in the last years, and now I question that decision). However, it seems like I'm not the only one who has gotten out of the habit on how to live in a winter. There was lots of snow coming down one night, with the result of buses stopping service for a few hours - greeted, obviously, by a lot of clamouring about how this is totally out of the question and inacceptable.

Eh. We were taking a walk on that evening and there were plenty of cars taking little slides on the street. Yes, I can get that not getting your transport is shitty, but I can still understand the decision taken to stop bus service during these snowfalls. (I am fully aware that it's much easier to be understanding here if you were not one of the people caught out and with no possibility to get from A to B as planned.)

However, and more generally speaking: There is no guarantee that mobility will be possible at any time and without restrictions. Things can always happen, and if the weather gets more extreme, we will all have to learn how to figure that in, much more than most people are currently used to. There's always been delayed flights due to snow and ice. (Well, for that relatively short time in our history when there were commercial flights.) There's always been issues with icy, slippery roads in the winter time, and car crashes due to this. (Again, in the slightly longer, but still overall very short time... you know.) There's also always been issues with ships sailing in wintertime, or more generally in seasons with difficult weather in the corresponding area.

Back in the Middle Ages, there were times when some places were not accessible during some times of the year. Heck, still in the 19th century that was the case for some mountain valleys. But this seems not to fit in with the modern concept and self-image of being able to do anything, anywhere, and at any time.

Our modern comforts are not a matter of course. Some of them, I'd argue, are a true luxury - such as strawberries in winter, or flights cheaper than trains - and they are not without price. We can get the impression that with modern machines, modern medicine, modern science, modern computers, everything is possible. It is not, and there's many, many people each day that get to experience this in their own life every single day.

For tonight, there's a weather warning for large parts of Germany, with prediction of snow and/or rain, so it might be quite uncomfortable tomorrow. I have an appointment to get to in the morning, so I hope it won't be too bad around here, and I won't have too much trouble to get there. (No, it can't be postponed.) Then we'll probably just stay home and won't budge for the rest of the day - we did postpone visiting a friend, because of the weather warnings.

Here I am, back from the winter break. There's a bit of chaos around me, as, of course, the "going through stuff to tidy things up" was not finished within the break... and I still have a hard time throwing stuff away. Ah well. One thing to work on during the new year!

While I was on break, there was a little interview happening for an ORF radio show (and podcast): In "Betrifft: Geschichte", school children were asked to send in their question about things in history. I happened one day to get asked if I'd be willing to answer one about protection from weather and sun.

The little piece has been aired already, and the short version is available here for a few more days. The slightly longer podcast version will be online for six months, and you can find it here. Both are, I should mention, in German!