"To honor Prince's legacy in Minnesota and beyond, the Purple Rain suit in our collections will be on view at Minnesota History Center  starting tomorrow (April 23, 2016). Visitors can view the suit for free during normal museum hours, which begin at 10 am tomorrow. There will also be a space for remembrances. Extra kudos and thanks to all our staff who worked so hard to prepare the suit for viewing by the public!" MHC on Facebook   For you ‪#‎Prince‬ junkies this is pretty sweet. This is the original live recording of Purple Rain  at a benefit show from 1983 of which a lot of it made it to the album. And kind of like VH1 Pop Up Videos (that dates one a bit!) it has interesting info in the caption bar.  

A well said statement from Cherokee Nation Principal Chief regarding the U.S. Department of the Treasury's decision to remove Andrew Jackson from the front of the $20 bill and replace him with abolitionist Harriet Tubman. "Andrew Jackson defied a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and forced the removal of our Cherokee ancestors from homelands we'd occupied in the Southeast for millennia. His actions as president resulted in a genocide of Native Americans and the death of about a quarter of our people. It remains the darkest period in the Cherokee Nation’s history. Jackson's legacy was never one to be celebrated, and his image on our currency is a constant reminder of his crimes against Natives. It's been an insult to our people and to our ancestors, thousands of whom died of starvation and exposure and now lie in unmarked graves along the Trail of Tears. This is a small but meaningful vindication for them, and for our...

While I respect the writings of Dr. Shaena Montanari  and her conclusion that Archaeologist Semir Osmanagich is wrong about his interpretation of his recent discovery is Bosnia "Archaeologist Semir Osmanagich, known as the “Bosnian Indian [sic] Jones”,  says a 3 meter wide stone ball found in the forest of Visoko Valley in Bosnia was made by an unknown civilization that used to live in the area over 1000 years ago, but there are many reasons to cast doubt on this outlandish claim." she has made an egregious error. This is no "Concretion", it is obviously a scale model of the Death Star.     Alternatively is might be evidence that the Real Indiana Jones was actually based in fact. (hat tip to Tom Hesser!)   http://www.forbes.com/sites/shaenamontanari/2016/04/18/that-massive-stone-sphere-in-bosnia-is-probably-not-from-a-lost-civilization/

"Marshall revealed in his interview that the latest installment will be a “continuation” of the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull story."" Please God, no. That is all. http://screenrant.com/indiana-jones-5-crystal-skull-continuation/  

Download the March 24th ShovelBums Newsletter in PDF format 150+ Field Schools now online at ShovelBums! Field Schools  Over 150 field schools are online and ready for your viewing. Summaries of each are below. If you have not submitted your field school yet and you want to reach over 17,000 professionals immediately post yours on ShovelBums for only $25. And if you can't swing the $25? Drop me a note and I will waive the fee. it is a terrible business model, but it is the best for your program and for your potential students.  You can submit your field school using this link:    Submit Your Field School Heading to Disney for the SAA's? Have as much of a blast as archaeologists can at Disney! And don't be a bunch of pretentious curmudgeons, relax, have some fun! I was hoping to be able to make it this year but just can't justify it in my...

Luxor, Egypt The Discovery Of The Century? I was unfortunately not able to attend the press conference today in Egypt, but Mamdouh Eldamaty, the Egyptian antiquities minister said it best about the results of the radar scans, “It could be the discovery of the century.” Eldamaty went on to describe the results of the work that Hirokatsu Watanabe, a Japanese Radar specialist conducted in November 2015. Watanabe was brought in after Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist, analyzed high-resolution images of King Tut's tomb that suggested there were straight lines in the wall that had been missed by previous researchers. These lines are suggestive of the architectural methods used when sealing a room, which indicated there could be rooms beyond King Tutankhamun's tomb chamber.  These lines, previously hidden by the color and the tombs stones' texture. Is it Nefertiti? Who knows? It could very well be a temporary chamber used during the rush construction project for Mamdouh Eldamaty, the...

  Asia - China - Yangguanzhai Field School - 2016 Deadline   2016-06-01 The prehistoric village of Yangguanzhai (YGZ) dates to the Middle to Late Yangshao period (4,000-3,000 BCE), and it is one of the largest of its kind. The site is located in the Jing River Valley, approximately 25 kilometers north of the ancient city of Xi’an in northwest China. YGZ has a moat, a row of cave dwellings, subterranean houses, child urn-burials, and extensive pottery kilns. In the coming 2016 season, the project will continue working in the northeast portion of the site. There are multiple possible excavations that we will undertake including: refuse pits, a potential large building and a nearby child urn burial, and the cemetery adjacent to the settlement. In order to gain a better understanding of the overall settlement system of the region, we will also conduct survey work at the nearby Neolithic sites of Manan and Huiduipo. Asia -...

Africa - Egypt - Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP), Egypt Archaeological Field Training - 2016 Archaeological field training at the Giza Pyramids in Egypt. This intensive five-week field-study program, takes place at the Old Kingdom settlement site of Heit el-Ghurab, as part of Ancient Egypt Research Associates' multi-disciplinary archaeological project. The program provides five academic credits awarded by the American University in Cairo. Africa - Ethiopia - Shire Field School - 2016 Deadline   2016-11-01 Located in the Shire region of Northern Ethiopia, this field school will allow students the opportunity to excavate a site which is virtually unexplored. The site, the region, and its complex cultural heritage, provide important information on the sub-Saharan counterpart of the Greco-Roman world. This societies economic base of agriculture and trade resulted in close contact with the North, and an adoption of early Christianity. The Shire Archeological Project concession comprises of extensive ancient remains dating from the prehistoric to the...

Skip to content Skip to main navigation Skip to first column Skip to second column     SHOVELBUMS Where your future in archaeology begins...     Home Add Your Field School View Field Schools Register Login Reset Password   Archaeology & Anthropology Field Schools Archaeology & Anthropology Field Schools Search Add Entry Region  ( 148 / 5  ) Asia / Pacific / Australia ,  Canada / North America ,  Central / South America / Caribbean / Atlantic ,  Europe / Mediterranean ,  Middle East/Africa Type  ( 119 / 17  ) Anthropology ,  Bioanthropology ,  Classical Archaeology ,  Data Visualization (3D, Animation, etc) ,  Ethnographic  ...  Africa - Egypt - Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP), Egypt Archaeological Field Training - 2016 Deadline   2015-05-31 Archaeological field training at the Giza Pyramids in Egypt. This intensive five-week field-study program, takes place at the Old Kingdom settlement site of Heit el-Ghurab, as part of Ancient Egypt Research Associates' multi-disciplinary...

Sorry for the delay! I never even officially opened up ShovelBums for entries for the 2016 Field Schools and there were already 150 when I finally got around to publishing them today! Please share this link to the field schools and suggest your prof advertise your field school on ShovelBums and reach the worlds largest targeted audience of students of Archaeology, Anthropology and related disciplines! http://shovelbums.net/l/2016-field-schools     http://shovelbums.net/l/2016-field-schools

Every archivist and anyone who has ever taken a digital image, filled out a spreadsheet, logged a GPS location has the same flickering fear in the back of their mind - "what happens if this data is wiped out?". I lay awake some night fretting about this on the global scale. We are at the dawn of an era of unprecedented access to knowledge, but as quick at the Royal Library of Alexandria became nothing but a memory of lost potential cultures prosper and fade throughout history. And if an event of a great of enough magnitude (pick your plausible collapse of modern iteration of civilization scenario and apply) occurs, so does such a vast epoch of potential knowledge.       in 2013 researchers at University of Southampton in the UK first announced that they had developed a potential prototype and over the last three years have refined the process to the point where they...

Donald Trump Proves that there is no such thing as Intelligent Design.      

A few months ago, after the last mass shooting, I saw the estimated intervals between mass shootings in the US in a Mother Jones article. I counted ahead from that date and made a note on my calendar that according to their estimates there would be another by December 4th...  Mother Jone's article Inside The Race to Stop the Next Mass Shooter  by Mark Follman

SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a Lake Superior storm on November 10, 1975, with the loss of the entire crew of 29. When originally launched on June 7, 1958, she was the largest ship on North America's Great Lakes, and to this day she remains the largest to have sunk there. The Edmund Fitzgerald had taken on a load of taconite iron ore in Superior, Wisconsin on November 9th and was making was to Detroit, Michigan. The Fitz was caught in a fierce Lake Superior storm with near-hurricane force winds and 11m waves. Around 7:10pm on November 10th Captain McSorley's last message to the nearby freighter The Anderson said, "We are holding our own." A few minutes later, with no distress call her crew of 29 perished, and no bodies were recovered. Gordon Lightfoot's song: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.         Captain ERNEST M. MCSORLEY (September 29, 1912 – November 10,...

Thanks to the internet, the wisdom of Presidential candidate Ben Carson has been preserved and will heretofore save archaeologists, and egyptologists in particular, the hassle of having to wonder about what those crazy pyramids in Egypt were for.  As Carson told the 1998 graduating class of Andrews University: “My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain,” Carson said. “Now all the archeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big (if you stop and think about it. And I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time to store that much grain.” On the positve side Dr. Carson does clearly NOT give the aliens credit for building the pyramids! It is worth spending the 15 minutes watching the entire speech. One of my favorite lines is where he says this, but I think he is really...

Koko - The gorilla  almost any practicing anthropologist alive today feels a kinship with received kittens for her 44th birthday. Watch this great video:    

#ColumbusDay #IndigenousPeoplesDay #October12th Bartolomé de las Casas, who served with Columbus but later became an advocate for Indigineous rights described how Columbus and his men treated these people in The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account: “They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house,” de Las Casas wrote. “They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the...

From Thursday October 1st to Wednesday October 7th any institution of higher learning may post an academic teaching position for free. From October 8th-31st any institution may pay a flat fee of $100 and post as many individual ads for positions open in their system. NOTE: This does not apply to any institution position that is a CRM position unless over 50% of that position is a teaching capacity.   Why ShovelBums? I thought that was for my undergrad archaeology students and Masters students in the summer?   Nope. Where do you think so many of you best and brightest ended up after they graduate? We all recognize that Archaeology and Anthropology are an academic pyramid scheme of sorts. Every year 100�⒠�s of institutions all around the world produce numerous exceptionally bright and well educated graduates who quickly learn that breaking into academia is a tough gig. So what happens to these former students? Yes...

  Nicholas Reeves  from the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona got to give  the interview quote ever archaeologist wants to give in their life:   “ To be honest, I feel numb,” Nicholas Reeves, the archaeologist who first proposed the existence of the hidden rooms, said in his Luxor hotel room, after inspecting the tomb. “This has been part of my life now on a daily basis for more than a year. ” " If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, " Reeves told the BBC. " But if I'm right, the prospects are frankly staggering. ”   So what is the fuss? Factum Arte, a Spanish group specializing in the replication of artistic works, conducted detailed scans of Tutankhamun’s tomb for a replica model. Nicholas examined the high resolution images and  saw fissures that he believes indicate the presence of two sealed doors in the tomb's north and west walls. With genetic evidence suggesting that Nefertiti...

Totally true and hard science here folks. This weekend Mars will be as big as Your own Full Moon and Uranus (depending on your viewing distance).   As for Mars being viewed from earth and appearing as big as the moon, it is never, ever, going to happen.