VIA NPR Marking Historic Moment, South Carolina Removes Confederate Flag  JULY 10, 2015  8:32 AM ET EYDER PERALTA Twitter Jaluladin Abdul-Hamib shouts "Take It Down" on the grounds of the South Carolina State House back in June. Win McNamee/Getty Images During an emotional ceremony and amid popular cheers, the Confederate battle flag was brought down from a 30-foot flagpole that sits on the grounds of the State House in Columbia, South Carolina. The ceremony was conducted by South Carolina State Troopers, who marched in formation in front of a cheering crowd of hundreds. Slowly, they cranked the flag down from the pole, rolled it up and marched out. The crowd chanted, "USA! USA! USA." The flag was first flown over the state's Capitol dome in 1961, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Civil War. But it was kept there as a protest against the Civil Rights movement. After calls from African Americans to remove it,...

Great news for anyone with Irish Catholic ancestors who is into genealogy. The National Library of Ireland (NLI) has announced today a website dedicated to presenting over 390,000 microfilm images dating from the 1740's to the 1880's covering 1,091 parishes throughout Ireland. These are primarily baptismal and marriage records and can be accessed at the Catholic Parish Registers at the NLI .  http://registers.nli.ie  

Note: This is iOS only right now. It will be coming to other platforms soon. This is great news! Facebook has introduced a way to actually prioritize who you see on your news feed (though it caps at 30 unfortunately). It has also simplified who you are friends with (anyone have crazy uninformed friends on their list? lol!) that you choose not to follow (or want to refollow).  It is very easy to access:   1: Go to the facebook App and click "More" in the lower right corner:       2: Scroll down until you see "News Feed Preferences" under Settings:       3: Viola! There you go. Prioritize away! But keep in mind Facebook inserts a star into your news feed so you can see who you have prioritized...but so can your friend/relative looking over your shoulder!        

Have a safe 4th everyone! And remember the lesson my friend Arnie showed me when I found him on a country road in Texas or Arkansas. Don't Drink & Drive.  

From Slate: Usually, when we say “American slavery” or the “American slave trade,” we mean the American colonies or, later, the United States. But as we discussed in Episode 2 of Slate’s History of American Slavery Academy, relative to the entire slave trade, North America was a bit player. From the trade’s beginning in the 16th century to its conclusion in the 19th, slave merchants brought the vast majority of enslaved Africans to two places: the Caribbean and Brazil. Of the more than 10 million enslaved Africans to eventually reach the Western Hemisphere, just 388,747—less than 4 percent of the total—came to North America. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 million brought to Spanish Central America, the 4 million brought to British, French, Dutch, and Danish holdings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 million brought to Brazil...   Read more and watch the awesome two minute video :   

Justice Roberts references the Aztecs, Kalahari Bushmen, the Han Chinese and the Carthaginians in his dissenting opinion on the right of Gay Marriage:   The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judg- ment. The right it announces has no basis in the Consti- tution or this Court’s precedent. The majority expressly disclaims judicial “caution” and omits even a pretense of humility, openly relying on its desire to remake society according to its own “new insight” into the “nature of injustice.” Ante, at 11, 23. As a result, the Court invali- dates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthagin- ians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?   I find that to be a strange dissent for obvious reasons:  ...

The ShovelBums version of the Kübler-Ross 5 Stages of Grief when losing/breaking your first trowel My long time friend Penny DuFoe Minturn posted today that she had lost her first trowel - which she mentioned has been around since a project we were together in '88 at Pueblo Grande - which is where my First Trowel actually broke (but that's another story). So I wrote this for her (see the bottom for a link to another 5 stages of grief on Trowel loss that has been pointed out to me).     Just as the Chinese philosopher Laozi (c 604 bc - c 531 bc) said in the Tao Te Ching (Laozi 581 bc)  "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" every archaeologist begins their career with their First Trowel. In the US it is often a Marshalltown, while a few outliers favor Goldblatt and in the UK the WHS is...

Fossilized human footprints believed to be of an adult male, adult female and a child and estimated to be more than 13,000 years old were discovered on Canada's Calvert Island, which is located on B.C.'s central coast and is accessible only by boat, float plane or archaeologists who are really looking to get away from civilization. Archeologist Duncan McLaren said there is evidence of a Remnants of an fire pit near the footprints and that radiocarbon dating indicates the charcoal materials are 13,200 years old.  Duncan is preparing to duplicate those tests to confirm the results. "We're very excited about it," Duncan said, to no-one's surprise. While there are earlier signs of footprints at Monte Verde in Chile, these are the earliest in North America. And lets be honest - if archaeologists can win a carbon dating peeing contest by simple numbers, we will narrow down the geographic area until we do! Regardless this is an...

Thanks to  Lorna Richardson for this! ‏ @ lornarichardson Check out Colleen Morgan's new poll for archaeologists " Do you still use film in archaeology? Or are you purely digital "

Do you still use Film Photography in Archaeology? (update) Posted on   June 25, 2015   |   Leave a comment Five years ago I  posted a poll regarding digital vs film photography  in archaeology. I’m finally publishing a lot of my writing about photography (I know, I know!) and I’d like an update on this poll. If your browser is messing up the poll interface below you can go to this link to take the poll:  http://shovelbums.net/l/digital-or-film-colleen  

  Devil's Den Corpses at Devil's Den after the battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, 1863. Today, it is a tourist attraction.   ‘Photographers would come along with their wagons and set up on the battlefield. They'd drag bodies to different places and pose them. It was a very new medium, so everything was fair game.’  Angela Atkinson, ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park See and Read more at:  http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ng-interactive/2015/jun/22/american-civil-war-photography-interactive      

As an anthropologist at heart if makes me very happy to see a large company take a public stance on supporting diversity with such a positive LGBTQ friendly commercial. So what if it is ultimately about marketing? This company is using their resources to make a loud, powerful and public statement on television and other media that most groups could never hope to have the resources to reach.  They currently have about 3,000 views on their youtube extended version. It is well worth watching and sharing.

Happy Father's Day! So whose your daddy? Watch this great video by Jurian Möller a Dutch graphic designer that beautifully illustrates the last 550 million years of evolution of your daddy!  Julian not only gives you a running tabulation of the species visualized and the corresponding dates, but he also gives you a great grandfather+ generation count! The grandfather count tops out around 317,000,000.  The video takes you from your dad (who I is THE modern man) to primate ancestors, amphibian and all the way to Animalia and back again in seconds. IMHO this video is a brilliant depiction of where you came from. Something to reflect on this Father's Day.  I am not affiliated with Jurian in anyway, but if you want to own this animated artwork that he has put into a 30-meter-long book, you can order it from his website here:  http://evoboek.nl/en/       Happy Father's Day (with Ham)     Happy Father's Day (without Ham)...

I do not believe these are OSHA approved. I have said enough.  

In honor of Vince Gaffney & Co announcing the discovery of "Super Henge" near Stonehenge  (aka "Mini Henge") I thought you all might enjoy Ylvis singing "Stonehenge".              

Last time I talked to Vince Gaffney was at an SAA conference late at night hours before his flight when I gave him some Melatonin to try to fight the jet lag on his was back across the pond. Always an energetic bloke it is great to see him and his team continuing to push the boundaries of knowledge with their mad remote sensing skills. For fun you can watch  Ylvis sing Stonehenge! Vince is part of the collective team completing a four year investigation by Birmingham, Bradford, St. Andrews and Nottingham in the UK and  Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Austria and  the University of Ghent. into what lies beneath the greater Stonehenge’s landscape as far out as Durrington Walls. Their combined efforts have resulted in one of the most intense surveys of an  11.7 km^2 area ever conducted by archaeologists. The survey has resulted in the discovery of what is being called a "Super Henge"...

Target Target Target... Archaeologist's Don't Dig Dinosaurs!

{iPhone crashing Bug FYI} If you happen to get a message and your phone restarts there are some easy solutions. Go to your photos and select one and then send it two the # that sent you the text and iMessages will start working again.     An iPhone bug is making phones crash when a certain text is sent     IMAGE: FLICKR,  AFAGEN BY RONALD CHAVEZ 1 hour ago A newly discovered iOS bug is crashing iPhones and leaving users without access to the Messages app. Users who receive a mysterious string of characters in a text are noticing their Messages app will consequently crash, and in some cases, the phone will automatically reboot, according to  9to5Mac . The issue was first  posted to Reddit . SEE ALSO:  7 Ways to Preserve Your Battery Life on iOS 8     The text is partially in Arabic and includes unicode. It's not so much...