I am amazed that I can sniffle and sneeze (due to hay fever) when the day before there was snowy sleet coming down.

I am amazed that simple (or seemingly simple) tasks can take up so much time, and energy, and nerves.

I am amazed that time is rushing by so quickly. (It's not getting better either! Why can't time slow down for a change?)

I am amazed that so much stuff is accumulating, for example on my workdesk, and here I am trying hard to get it sorted out to make some more space.

I am amazed by the number of (work-related) books that I have, and that I still have not sorted them all (which is partly due to the lack of some shelf space, but mostly to my strategy of working on it just a very little at a time).

I am amazed on how much time one can sink into personalising and installing and adjusting stuff onto a smartphone which is not even going to be used as a phone - just as a media centre and small, lightweight, serves-in-a-pinch internet access thingie.

Maybe I should work on being less amaze-able? And on writing more amazing blog posts, not those about me being amazed?

(Clearly, the word of the week: amazed. And I promise that tomorrow I will get some coffee before posting here.)

Remember that I said food is a tricky thing for archaeologists? It has gotten even tricker very recently, since a group of archaeologists discovered, per experiment, that cooking fish can screw up radiocarbon dating. (They write about dating pots in the article; technically it's dating the organic residue trapped in the pot that is dated.) The article has links for more info in Danish.

Speaking of cooking: Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg are working on publishing their collaborate research about Viking food and cooking in a book, called "An early meal". There is an info page on facebook (you do not need to have an account for that) if you want to read more.

And now... coffee.

Food is a difficult topic for archaeologists. Not because we are notoriously picky about our food or because we don't appreciate it. In fact, archaeologists are more like locusts only with an even wider spectrum of what they eat, a rather larger belly than your average locust has and an additional penchant to swipe bits of the buffet decoration if it is properly archaeology-themed.

Food is a difficult topic because it's so perishable. It's a very rare thing to find food residue in an archaeological excavation; a bit similar to textiles: you can find tools (spindle whorls or pots), sometimes you find tiny little bits of evidence pointing roughly in a direction (like a small bit of fabric that allows you to determine fibre type and weave, or charred and thus preserved grains that allow you to determine the species), and very very rarely, in a very lucky situation, you find something that really allows you to reconstruct a tiny part of daily life back in history (such as an almost complete garment, or the residues of a meal that can be analysed completely).

In some cases, we know what was eaten - charred grains, animal bones and fish bones can give a hint as well as the pits and stones of fruit. But we still don't know how stuff was combined, and much of the evidence is not collected at all, because the small bits (fishbone? grape pit? both really small) can only be found if the soil is put through fine sieves or even sluiced to recover small bits. That's a lot of work, needs the appropriate equipment, and is usually only done for a very small part of the excavation where there is a high probability of a good yield of small stuff, if at all.

All that said, here is a link to a blog/webpage where someone has collected the archaeological evidence for food finds in Britain, making it available via web and a database. Go foodies!

First of all, here's a funny one for all of you pushing pictures around for a hobby, or for a living: 8 ways to drive a graphic designer mad.

If you want some different kind of madness, possibly with a little more relation to medieval times, you can try this: Cooking with quicklime instead of fire, the 13th century way.  (I'd prefer a fire, though. I think it's safer.)

There's a (small, but existent) stack of colourfully printed paper on my desk. Most of the sheets are obsolete now, though - and I will dump them, with a little bit of ceremony, into my wastepaper basket later on.

These last days, I've been working on a new information leaflet for the workshop programme that Sabine, David and myself are offering, for joint venture information in the future. The leaflet evolved from incorporating a few nice ideas but being unfortunately quite ugly (in retrospective) to looking really, really nice and offering plenty of information - largely to mostly due to the help of a friend.

I have learned several things during the course of making this, among them why layouting programmes make it possible to snap items to a grid; that more reference lines are better than fewer reference lines until you pass that point where it's too many reference lines and you do not know which one was for which purpose; that the first idea is not always the best one when doing layout work; and that someone who has actually learned the craft sees the problems, and the possible solutions, much faster than someone just dabbling (yes, I know, that's a thank-you-Captain-Obvious).

Now I only have to wrap it all up and get it to the printer. Yay! And then? On to the next adventures.

The maiden voyage of the Bronze Age boat has taken place, and you can watch a video of very happy people paddling right here:



Apparently, they named her Morgawr. There's also a summary video including a few scenes from the launch and maiden voyage, called "We Made a Boat", on their playlist.


And now we will hop to the far future (to be precise, to post-medievalism) because Palgrave is offering one issue of Postmedieval, the journal, for free. They sound... interesting. Go have a look.

Spring is finally here in force. How do I know? Easy. Hayfever has struck, with a vengeance, over the weekend.

Now, fortunately, my share of this astonishingly frequent ailment is not too bad, but I can feel it when I overdo exertion outside in pollinated air, and since I enjoy being outside in the early spring... well, that happens. Which results in sneezing, an itchy nose and itchy eyes as well as the feeling that I am not functioning at full power. Depending on how bad this is, I can shrug it off as "well, happens" or get seriously annoyed by it. (The symptoms also seem to get me more tired faster, resulting in me needing even more sleep. I should have been born a cat, probably.)

Since I've had this affliction, I have regularly managed to find out that while there are gazillions of pollen forecasts, I would much rather have a source for yesterday's forecast (or even better yesterday's actual data). I don't even know yet which pollen are the evil ones for me; I know which ones I do react to in general, but that does not tell me how much each of the three candidates is to blame. Because of too little data.

It was the same this weekend. On Sunday, I tried to find out what was in the air mostly on Friday and Saturday - no luck. But this morning, I found something even better: An online pollen/hayfever diary. You record the region where you have been, your symptoms (type and severity), can add additional remarks - and the symptoms are then correlated with the actual measured amount of pollen in that area. Yay! I'll be testing this to see if it works. After all, knowledge is power...