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?)

I am one of these people that open lots and lots of tabs in the browser. A non-tabbing browser, for me? Unthinkable. I rarely have few enough tabs open that horizontal scrolling is not necessary.

And, of course, the browser gets unwieldy. And the tabs tend to be too many for easy use... so a while ago, I installed the add-on called Pocket, which lets you read things later. The most patient of all husbands uses his to temporarily store pages, which he, indeed, does read later. And then removes from the list.
I wanted to use it in a similar way, especially for things that I wanted to blog about later. That worked well for about, oh, a month or so... when it got entirely too easy to push stuff there and forget it. These days, I have oodles of pages to go through in that thing, and I could probably toss out 95% of them because it is now too late, or it is not that interesting anymore, or...

More recently, I have added TooManyTabs to my Firefox. It adds a bar below the rest of the menu lines, and it has a limited number of rows (which you could up at any time, but it means taking the action, not just adding more stuff). So now I have 6 rows which I can use to store things, thematically, that I think I will need soon(ish). And when I want to add more for a new topic... I have the strange idea that I might be able to make myself empty an old one first.

One of the rows, you guessed it, is filled with things that I thought might be an interesting thing to blog about. Most of them are just links - so here you go:

Harry Ransom Manuscript Image Database. 215 manuscripts from between the 11th and the 17th century.

A find of 3000 year old trousers, excavated in China.

Paleolithic engravings in stone - the first in Germany (article in German).

A blog post about the hypothesis that the Roman dodecahedrons may have been knitting aids. (That is more or less exactly my reaction when I first heard about that. Also, the total killer in any way, even if the Romans had had knitting: Efficiency, that technique has it not. And efficiency is, otherwise, seen everywhere in crafts. Even in the Romans' crafts.)

Aaand that has cleared the long overdue "to blog about" row of tabs. More (and fresher!) things to blog about can now go there... to lie and ripen and grow old, because too many other things seem much more important or urgent to blog about. You know how these things work, right?

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.

You all know what to think of archaeologists, right? We are the brothers and sisters of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft... not.

When I was still studying, one of the colleagues explained to us about the public image of archaeology, about the problems with bad press (or not-easy-to-understand press), and how to deal with press people and journalists. What I remember from that as the most important lesson is: It's not the journalist's job to learn about archaeology. It is your job, as the interviewed archaeologist, to give the journalist correct and concise information, in a way that he or she can easily use it for the piece. That was highly helpful!

If you want an in-depth treatment of the topic, you are in luck: Doug has written a multi-part blog post about archaeology and journalism, and I highly recommend reading it if you are in any contact with press people or journalists, even if you are not an archaeologist. Go read part I of Archaeology and the Press right now.

(To top things off, he's also posting about Archaeology Publishing at the moment, another series of posts... also very informative.)

Free stuff! On the Internet! Who would have thought it, right? Apart from... all of us?

Here are some exciting things for you to enjoy. At least I find them exciting. Especially this one, about which I learned at the LonCon, from one of the lovely English Heritage folks:
English Heritage Research Department Reports Database. The Research department of EH has recently put all their reports online, and they are free to download and peruse. There is a keyword search, and "textiles" yields 190 reports.

You are still here? Next one, then.
Maney Publishing is featuring Postmedieval Archaeology as their Journal of the Month - which means that the last 6 issues (3 years) are free to read and download during September.

In case you prefer to read conservation literature, you can visit the Bibliographic Database of the Conservation Information Network, BCIN for short.

Too many words, too little pics? Heather sent me this BBC article link, which I pass on to you. The TL;DR version: someone has uploaded millions of pictures from 1500 - 1922, auto-tagged for search convenience, all copyright-free. Here's the direct link to the flickr site.

Anyone still here?

No?

Good. Thought so.

This post is personal, and it's health-related. If that is the last thing on earth you want to read on this blog, I'm sorry and suggest you go somewhere else for today's reading. It's personal, and I usually try to limit personal things here, due to different reasons - but this is something I feel a need to blog about.

There's such a thing as invisible illnesses. Invisible illnesses are, well, invisible (just like the name hints), and that is one of the hardest things about them.
If you break your leg, you go to the hospital and get a cast - and everyone can see that you have a damaged leg and will thus not be able to do some things. However, if you have an invisible illness...

And there are many, many invisible illnesses - in all levels of severeness. Diabetes. Lupus. Chronic Fatigue. Hashimoto's. Depression. And lots and lots more. Being invisible, it's quite probable that nobody will tell you to go see a doctor. To make things even more nasty, these things can sneak into your life better than any ninja - they can come on so gradually you never even realise something might be wrong, until you suddenly realise that things are so bad you can't do this, or that, and that too.

I've been losing energy and instead gaining weight slowly and steadily over the past few years, with no discernible changes in my eating patterns. I've also started getting slightly swollen feet in summer heat. It crept in really slowly, really gradually, and I could not see any pattern to when my feet would be bloated and when they would not. Movement helped, sometimes, as did propping them up. Since my legs are too short for most chairs, I thought maybe sitting on too-high seats was partly to blame. I tried drinking lots and I tried drinking little, without effect, and finally I just sighed and thought it might be a part of getting older, and the body's changes that go with it.

Then the last bit of last year and the start of this year got very, very busy - big museum projects, preparing events, and the NESAT conference. I was feeling fatigued before, but after NESAT, it seemed like I just could not recover. I had no energy left. I woke up thinking about the things to do that day, feeling good enough to tackle them all, but by the time I had been to the bathroom and found my way the 6 or so metres to my desk, I was all tired and lackluster again. Clearly, something was wrong. Really wrong. The ninja had finally stumbled into the spotlight.

So I did what I always do when something is wrong, or a problem: I read the Internet. This time, I read what felt like all of it. And found out that I might have issues with my thyroid, and possibly general hormone levels, and that both might be connected to auto-immune problems. And those, in turn, might be connected to food intolerances that are so low-level, or developed so gradually, that I just never keyed on to them. I got myself a doctor's appointment, but that would be about two weeks of wait. Clearly, something had to happen before that.

Since I had already read about all the Internet (haha), I had stumbled across lots of sites connecting gut health to overall health, especially to auto-immune issues and disorders. They all recommended special diet versions that differ in details, but are all basically aiming to rule out anything that might irritate at first, then gradually re-introducing elements to test whether they are tolerated or not. So I decided to take the plunge, and I opted for one system recommended by a doctor that specialises in hypothyroid issues. (Basically, it was just to pick one of them. A proper strict one, because I like to jump into things full throttle. Even when I'm sick.)

That was a diet that rules out about everything except vegetables, meat, fruit that are not too sweet, and herbs. That was a large change, but to my great relief, it did work almost instantly. I won't count the first three days or so of it, because you never know how much of a placebo-effect that was, but after the first days, I lost quite a bit of water weight, the swelling in my feet went down, and I had more energy again. Still not up to normal levels, still needing more rest than usual, but it was definitely an upward trend.

Meanwhile I had that doctor's appointment, and nothing looks so very bad - I lacked a few vitamins and minerals, and thyroid levels were not perfect, but also not too far out of the ordinary. Now I am in the stage of figuring out what is good for me, food-wise, and what is not. That is a lengthy process with a goodly amount of documentation and deduction (and some guesstimates), and it makes eating not at home a little difficult - so I have turned into a person that lugs food around, just in case. The first few culprits are already found, too - though my tastebuds really love fried or cooked onions, the rest of me does not agree that they are a good thing. And then I had two oat biscuits recently, which tasted lovely but raised havoc later. There are a lot of things left to test and try, but at least I can find out what works and what doesn't. (There is, by the way, no other sure way to determine food intolerances but the elimination-provocation approach; any tests are iffy at best, a waste of money at medium, and harmful due to wrong outcomes at worst.)

The curiousest thing, to me, is that I never had any discernible issues with any of the foods that are now off-limits or suspect before. It just drained my energy and made me less healthy overall, to a point where I could not function well anymore. If this happened to me, it could happen to someone else, with as little clue about why things become harder as I had. And that, dear readers, is why I think this is an important thing to share.

So... should you suspect a food intolerance doing bad things with your guts and your life, I can tell you, from my own experiences, that an elimination diet may sound awful, but might be just what you want. I won't say it is easy - you have to go without a lot of things for a few weeks, after all, and with many things for quite some time until you have re-introduced them. It's not all bad, though. My appreciation for high-quality foods, my cooking-fu, my knowledge about the human innards and the human immune system, and my resourcefulness in packing food* have all benefitted from this diet change. As has my appreciation for my friends, who after a short second of being shocked did their very best to support me and went several extra miles, in some cases, to make sure that I could eat with them. Friends are wonderful. Feed them to the best of your abilities - they might return the favour one day when you really need it.




* Very soon, I developed a more-or-less-healthy apprehension that I might get hungry and not find something that I could eat, resulting in packing emergency food (and plenty of that) in case of travel. The masses of food that I brought to Herzberg? Ridiculous. (Just enough, though.) Considerable amounts of food also travelled with us to England, and then through England, for our vacation. (Optimised for packing space and weight-to-nutrition-ratio, of course.)
For parties and similar things, I also found that it is immensely helpful to have something to eat that is both delicious or appealing to me and safely within the limits of the current diet - just in case everyone else enjoys something I cannot have. Food envy, to me, was the thing I feared most, and the "pack your own" strategy works beautifully for that.

I have told you about the people, the podcasts, my presentation... but not, yet, about the books. As was to be expected, there were a lot of books at LonCon, at various places. There was a library where everybody was invited to take home a book (or as much as you could carry during the last two days). There were plenty of book-seller stalls in the Dealer's Hall, offering everything from used books for small money to signed special editions, wrapped in cellophane. (I did not enquire after their prices. For me, books are there to be read, and while I try to treat them kindly, I do not mind if they look used after a while. That's their point - to be read. At best, again and again and again.) And, of course, a lot of new ones, freshly out.

Such as my friend Gillian Polack's new time travel novel Langue[dot]doc 1305. Obviously, I had to get a copy of that one. A time-travel novel written by a proper historian! And so new it's not even the real book yet, but the uncorrected proof version. Only very few of these were printed, so if you want to give that a read, you should be quick... or have to wait for the final version. Gillian, by the way, has a lovely quirky evil sense of humour, which I know all too well through our endless chat conversations when we work together on our co-writing project. Go buy her book, it will make her happy, and she deserves that. Go buy all her books, while you are at it.

Our two right-hand table neighbours also sold books - Clare Davidson writes YA fiction about hidden races in our world, and you can have a look at what she writes and read excerpts here. Chuck Ian Gordon writes fiction about near-future AIs in MMORPGs, and there are excerpts of the German original and the English translation on his website, too.

I also went to one of the used book stalls and made good use of a ten-pound note and their offer to get a 6th book for free if you buy five. Well... I scored a book by Spider Robinson that is not from his Callahan chronicles (which, if you like puns, is a total must-read). And then I picked things that sounded interesting and that I did not know yet - one book by David Brin, who with "Rivers of Time" now has become one of my favourite authors. The "Exiles Trilogy" by Ben Bova, and that is another author I want to read more of. Plus some others that I have not read yet and that did not ring any bell. Yay surprise books!