I'm planning to spend a large chunk of my time today on proofreading - the book has been printed, and I am wielding my Red Pen of Doom and am marking it up. It is always amazing and slightly (or more than slightly) frightening how much of a difference the printout makes. I can proofread someone else's article okay on a screen, but with my own writing or with longer things, nothing can beat a printout and the old-fashioned pen.

While I am reading, you might want to have some words to look at, too. So here are links to provide you with fodder:

First of all, 2015 is the anniversary of the English Magna Carta - and the surviving four copies have actually met for the first time ever. Here's a blog post about their meeting. (And about them.)

Isis at Medieval Silkwork writes about ground fabrics for embroidery. (Those that I know are mostly linen, by the way, with a very few silk ones thrown in. And I've found out that if you are doing counted work, there's a limit to how unbalanced a fabric can be to still have a nice-looking embroidery - distortion, anyone?)

More reading? As in book form reading? Here you go.

Penelope Walton Rogers has her own press now, Pangur Press, and she's starting off with free .pdf versions of some of her earlier publications - including the two volumes from York about textiles and textile production.

There you go. Have fun reading!

It's time to shower you with links again! So here you go...

Are you looking for a movie to watch on Halloween? Here's a list of 10 horror movies featuring archaeologists.

If you prefer some real-life horror, how about this: the Swedish government wants to close all of the Swedish archaeological institutes in the Mediterranean. No joke. Archaeologik has done an article about this, in German; there is a petition running against the closure. If you want to sign (please do, and please spread the word), there is an explanation at the bottom of the English translation of the letter.

For those of you interested in the history of People of Colour, check out this tumblr "bookshelf" with free downloads - the books are concerning early modern and modern time.

In case you are looking for an excuse to visit Rome, there's a Protolang conference planned for September 2015, with the CfP open.

And finally, a very interesting video on how a seemingly small change in environment can have huge effects: Wolves in Yellowstone.

There's two things online that I recently heard about, downloadable for free.

One is the conference proceedings of Computers in Archaeology from the 2012 conference: Archaeology in the Digital Era: Papers from the 40th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA)
 and the second thing is Christina Petty's thesis about the warp-weighted loom, both in archaeology and in current practice, available here.

They have accumulated again, those pesky links. Or are they pesky? You might want to decide for yourself. Here they are:

Cathy posts a review of Marianne Vedeler's book "Silk for the Vikings".

Jonathan Jarrett has put together a resources page you'll definitely want to check out.

There's a German article about silk relics (tunic pieces) from the fourth century.

King Richard III has undergone multi-element isotope analysis, and seems to have liked his booze, judging from that.

That's it for today - now I'll go back to my presentation writing.

Well, yes, I know it isn't. Yet. Would be nice, though!

My parents dropped by yesterday evening, having been in the area, and we had an impromptu cooking session together with two friends, serving them a nice three-course meal. That was a lot of fun, but also a bit exhausting - and now I'd much prefer today to be Saturday, or at least Friday.

So while I am trying to bring my brain into gear, you are getting links (again). One of them is a book review on "Experimental Archaeology" by John Coles. Another friend and colleague recommended that book to me, saying it would be a very good read. The book is from 1979, so it's not the newest work about ExpArch, but seems to be worth a look.

Speaking of books, Doug is posting about Archaeology and publishing, another series of posts, starting with #1: Formatting. If you, like so many others, use Word for your work and wish to do layouting, I recommend taking a look at editorium.com - when I was layouting and tweaking my PhD thesis for handing it in, their information did help me a huge lot. And while it's not easy-peasy, my impression is that Word will do everything you want it to - if you know how to kick its (micro-)soft little backside hard enough and in the right way. (Mind you, it might mean having to record and edit, or write, a macro or two. Expands the horizon. Never a bad thing.)

Just in case you are looking for even more blogs to read, I will send you (again! that guy is on a roll) over to Doug's blog. He's doing an archaeology blog round-up, which lists not only the blog title, but also gives a link to each post of the last week. That's a brilliant idea, since you can get a first glimpse of how active a given blog is, and sometimes see what direction the posts take, guesstimating from the post titles. There are definitely a few blogs among those listed that will find their way into my feed reader. I'm also very happy that my own blog was featured in the very first post of that new series!

If you are interested in Near East (archaeology) stuff, you might find this interesting: The Netherlands Institute for the Near East is offering their out-of-print publications for free download. This is always a glorious thing and I'm utterly happy about each museum or publisher who does this! (I was particularly delighted about York and the MET.)

Also online: The Robin Hood project from the University of Rochester (Nottingham would have been funnier, though). It's a database of texts, images, bibliography and information about Robin Hood and other outlaw stories.

And finally: LARP is entering the archaeological record. (LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing - which means you dress up in an appropriate way and head out to play a part in a non-scripted or sparsely scripted adventure story with other people.) (Did anyone reading this actually need the explanation, I wonder?)

Yesterday I received an e-mail telling me about a free e-book from one of my lovely colleagues... and that did make my day.