Again, better late than never are a couple of links I’ve seen over the last month that are worth having a look at: A History of Visual Communication, from cave painting to computer design, via Kottke. I especially liked the earliest sections from cro-magnon cave painting to the Nazca Lines. I’m still working through the later sections! What happens to your blog post when you click publish, from Wired.

There’s the beginnings of an interesting discussion here and here about using archaeological data in Second Life, or using Second Life as a teaching resource. I’m more interested in the first idea, of publishing your excavation as an “experience” rather than as some data and a report. I hadn’t even realised that you could link to external datasources in Second Life, but apparently you can, and people are already using this to release their own GIS projects.

A few days late (but better late than never, hey?) are a couple of the archaeology-related posts I’ve spotted on my travels: Erik Kansa has a piece on “Archaeological Openness” on the Ancient World Bloggers Group (actually the AWBG is worth a bullet point of it’s own as a relatively new archaeological blog), in relation to the recent Science Commons Open Data Protocol - this should be really interesting once archaeologists get their head around what it will mean for them;

Archaeologists Bill Quinn and Declan Moore had a flash of insight about the mound they were about to excavate-whilst suffering from a big hangover. Burnt mounds are found all over the place, and they date from prehistoric to medieval times, but no one has been sure what they were actually for. They consist of mounds of burnt stones and an adjacent trough of stone, usually with a water course nearby. The usual interpretation is that they are for cooking, but other people have posited that they were saunas.

I finally got around to a bit of a site re-design last night- it’s a fairly straightforward modification of the original light theme, and sorts out a few issues I’d been having with custom php and text widgets. Actually, I should confess that I’m a complete loser when it comes to the design part of web-design, so I got my web-designer hubby to help with it. Thanks Barry! Those of you that tend to visit only through your rss reader won’t, of course, be able to see any difference, so if you fancy popping around for a look at the new design, come on in, I’ll put the kettle on.

Archaeology magazine (courtesy of my new colleague Joseph) has an article on archaeological evidence for the first ever historically recorded zombie attack, in Hierakonpolis in Eygpt, 3000BC. The article explains that: n 1892, a British dig at Hierakonpolis unearthed a nondescript tomb containing a partially decomposed body, whose brain had been infected with the virus (Solanum) that turns people into zombies. In addition, thousands of scratch marks adorned every surface of the tomb, as if the corpse had tried to claw its way out!