Thursday, May 14, 2009
Mysterious prehistoric statuette
I wrote an article yesterday for Science NOW, the magazine's online news site, about a remarkably well-endowed figurine discovered in southwestern Germany. (This link disappears behind a pay wall in a month.) The headline (and the article, to be fair) make it sound more prurient than it may have been. I was spanked in the comment section by folks who say it could well have been a fertility charm.
The difficult thing about these debates is this art was made 35,000 years ago -- that's longer than most of us are capable of comprehending, frankly, and the gap in terms of culture is so vast as to be impossible to close. Whenever I talk to archaeologists (about almost anything) they start by saying "we can never know what object X was used for," and then proceed to offer all kinds of guesses. A nearly irresistible temptation.
The difficult thing about these debates is this art was made 35,000 years ago -- that's longer than most of us are capable of comprehending, frankly, and the gap in terms of culture is so vast as to be impossible to close. Whenever I talk to archaeologists (about almost anything) they start by saying "we can never know what object X was used for," and then proceed to offer all kinds of guesses. A nearly irresistible temptation.
Labels: breasts, conard, figurine, pornography, science, statuette, tuebingen
Nasca lines
Once again, catching up after a long delay, partly prompted by the conviction that Blogger isn't serving my needs. (Anyone know how to make an RSS feed work?) Last fall I went to Peru for several stories, including one on the Nasca lines that is in the current issue of Archaeology. You can read the abstract here.
Labels: Archaeology, dai, nasca, peru, reindel
Game night
Wildly tardy with this post, but the April issue of Wired featured an article I wrote on the growth of German board games in the US. German classics like Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan are making waves in the US market, which is good for folks who find Monopoly dull, dull, dull.
Labels: board, catan, game, settlers, wired
Friday, March 20, 2009
Cologne archive collapse
A little late with this, but I wrote about the consequences of the Cologne City Archive collapse for Spiegel a few weeks ago. A major disaster for historians, and for the city's collective memory.
Labels: archive, city, collapse, cologne, spiegel
Monday, February 23, 2009
Atlantic Food Fight
I had my first article published in The Atlantic last month. It was about US Army cooks competing at the International Culinary Olympics in Erfurt, Germany last year. They had to cook a three-course meal for 150 on a camo-painted field kitchen in six hours. The menu: "Seared tuna, smoked trout, and poached salmon over a seaweed salad; herb-infused turkey breast with sweet potatoes, cranberry johnnycake, and bacon-wrapped green beans; and a chocolate-mousse crunch cake with apricot-and-cherry sauce."
It was good stuff.
It was good stuff.
Labels: army, atlantic, cook, olympics
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Man Playground
This month's Wired has a brief piece I did on a curious theme park near Kassel, in central Germany. It's called the "Maennerspielplatz," or "Man Playground," and is designed to fulfill a certain set of masculine fantasies -- the ones that involve mud and heavy machinery, mostly. For a few hundred euro, you can spend a day riding quad bikes, driving bulldozers, operating front-end loaders and bombing through the forest in SUVs.
Could this work in the U.S.? I'd point to insurance issues as a major reason why not. The park's founder also noted that driving SUVs offroad isn't a big deal in America, where there's plenty of open space and federal land available for people to trash. Germany's environmental laws make that sort of thing a lot harder.
Finally, as the folks posting in the "comments" section online point out, there's a large segment of the male population that probably wouldn't be all that interested -- namely the guys who do this kind of thing for a living already. Just goes to show one man's work is another man's play, I guess.
Could this work in the U.S.? I'd point to insurance issues as a major reason why not. The park's founder also noted that driving SUVs offroad isn't a big deal in America, where there's plenty of open space and federal land available for people to trash. Germany's environmental laws make that sort of thing a lot harder.
Finally, as the folks posting in the "comments" section online point out, there's a large segment of the male population that probably wouldn't be all that interested -- namely the guys who do this kind of thing for a living already. Just goes to show one man's work is another man's play, I guess.
Labels: germany, maennerspielplatz, wired
Friday, December 26, 2008
Roman Battlefield Discovered
A few weeks back (how time flies around the holidays, huh?) I took a day trip to a forest outside of Hanover to check out a really cool find: a Roman battlefield in the middle of Germany dating to about 200 AD. This is odd, because most people thought the Romans left Germany pretty much alone after AD 9, when they got their clock cleaned by some sneaky barbarians in the Teutoburg Forest.
But apparently not. The archaeologists found almost 600 artifacts, from Roman sandal nails to spear and arrowheads, buried just underground, and hope to find lots more when they go back this spring. I wrote about the initial find for Spiegel and Science.
But apparently not. The archaeologists found almost 600 artifacts, from Roman sandal nails to spear and arrowheads, buried just underground, and hope to find lots more when they go back this spring. I wrote about the initial find for Spiegel and Science.
Labels: Archaeology, artifacts, battlefield, Roman, science, spiegel
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Land of the Headhunters
Last summer, I met a group working on a really cool project at the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin. Anthropologist Aaron Glass was working with William Wasden, a tribal historian and singer from the Kwakwakw'wakw tribe in Canada, to document a collection of the tribe's artifacts held in the museum's collections.
Glass recently completed another really cool project with the Kwakwakw'wakw, presenting a series of film screenings and concerts on the West Coast and in New York and Washington. I covered the project for Smithsonian, and am hoping to one day see the film myself.
Labels: aaron, curtis, film, glass, headhunters, kwakwakw'wakw
Friday, November 21, 2008
Dumb Political Moves, Wikipedia Edition
A left-wing German politician with a shady past as a Stasi bodyguard took on Wikipedia's 600+ million users last week and, well, lost. Had he just left well enough alone, he might have stayed in happy semi-obscurity. But when he filed a court injunction to have the German portal for Wikipedia shut down because he took offense at some of the details in his entry on the site, he drew far more attention to his character flaws and guaranteed himself a place in Internet censorship infamy forever.
Dumb. Almost as dumb as signing up for a job with the East German Secret Police in the late 1980s.
Dumb. Almost as dumb as signing up for a job with the East German Secret Police in the late 1980s.
Labels: germany, heilmann, lutz, spiegel, stasi, wikipedia
