While I've been absent from blogging, interesting stuff has accumulated - plus new things came in, like this note today:

The Guardian: German anthropologist exposed as fraud.

The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands has made its collection of public domain images freely available on the net, and is very content with the outcome. There's a paper about it here.

And the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremburg is planning an exhibition on early modern dress - due to start sometime this year, as far as I understand the plan.

Something technical to round it up - should you be worried that some spammer might have access to your email and personal data, you can use this handy Identity Leak Checker to find out.

And once more, a slew of tabs has accumulated in my browser,  so it's high time for me to post those links and close the things...

The "Kaiserchronik" will get a new edition, thanks to a British University.

A Norwegian Iron Age tunic is going to be reconstructed in a joint project between two museums and a number of crafters.

English Heritage is offering backlist monographs as free pdf downloads.

A German food discount chain is selling antique coins for collectors - Archaeologik has a wonderful rant about that (in German).

Even more links are brought to you by ossamenta.

Oh, and finally? Mosaics. Old ones.

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.

I just found out that this week is Open Access Week. Yes, it's nice and comfy here under my rock, thank you for asking.

I found out, by the way, from an email sent to me by Maney. The email says they are partaking in Open Access Week - and my first reaction was "yay free access to articles!". Turns out that was wrong, though.

The email tells me about the very generous offer of 50% off the fees if you want to publish an article as OA with them. Yes, that's right - Maney is one of the "author pays for OA" journals, and their fees are quite hefty. Even with 50% off, you'll still shell out between 400 and 1000 USD. Erm... thanks, but no thanks. In my universe, the One Rule still stands: the author never pays. Yes, I know that publishers have to eat, too, and that their money does not come from publishing for free and giving away the published articles, too. It comes from selling what they have published - and I still think that it is fair to pay for what you want to read, provided it is not what Germans call a "Mondpreis" (moon price, literally - an astronomical sum that is totally unrealistic). I'm also convinced that a reasonable pricing of articles, especially older ones, would raise their income far enough that a fair-for-everybody model will be possible. (Or would you hesitate for a second to pay one or two dollars for immediate access to a paper that interests you? Instead of being asked to shell out 30+ dollars, even though the article is several years old and you do not know whether it will really help you on with your research, or not?)

You can laugh about the pricing yourself here. Incidentally, the page also offers the full list of OA articles published with Maney. I do not wonder why there are so few... (There is one about spinners and yarn regulation in 1550-1800 that might be of interest to you, too, written by John Styles.)

If you want to read some more, you can go to Paperity, an article aggregator of OA articles. (I found that via www.openaccessweek.org, by the way. The site seems to try for promoting OA, but also seems fairly small, impact-wise, and it has a layout that is a bit confusing to me.)

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.

Jstor has launched a new thing called Jstor Daily - you can find it here. The idea behind it is to take news articles from normal news and link them up with science related to them. It sounds like a nice idea!

If you prefer reading science stuff right away, maybe this thesis is something for you:
Christina Petty, Warp-Weighted Looms Then and Now. Anglo-Saxon and Viking archaeological evidence and modern practitioners. It's a brand-new thesis, and it is downloadable for free. Enjoy!

There is, as usual, a stack of things to do today... before I leave for London tomorrow. I can't believe it is tomorrow already. Good thing that my presentation was finished before I left for Tannenberg (well, apart from that one last picture I have to scan and place today, and from going through it once more to make sure I will stay in time.) Somehow, this year, the autumn is chock full of things to do and of dates to keep. Yesterday was thus incredibly busy, and today will be no less so. At least life won't be boring anytime soon!

While I am refilling my travel necessaire and packing the things for the demonstration bits of my presentation, you can amuse yourselves with some links.

For example the snark about the media treatment of a grave at Powered by Osteons.

The British Library has an interesting post about whether to wear white gloves or not.

Doug is doing a series about crowdfunding archaeology.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is offering fellowships; information and the possibility to apply for a fellowship are on this page.

Finally, an excerpt from The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing: Traditional Recipes for Modern Use by J.N. Liles about dyeing on fermentation vats.