Archaeology

Just in case you have a few days to do nothing but surf...a hospital stay for instance, each of these sites will be good for at least 2 hours.


http://www.nakedscience.org/ The Naked Science Society, founded in 1989, is a privately funded organization devoted to the development of a philosophy that evaluates human culture from a scientific perspective. Humans are part of a scientific civilization, and knowledge and its integrity are crucial for the survival of our species. Science is only the Latin word for knowledge, and for our culture to survive, the pursuit of knowledge must be our destiny.

http://intarch.ac.uk/index.html Internet Archaeology is the first fully refereed e-journal for archaeology and publishes articles of a high academic standing which utilise the potential of electronic publication. Internet Archaeology is published by the Council for British Archaeology and hosted by the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. (Stag's note....they have come a long way from when they were using the local hospital's cat scan to chart out the coppergate helm!)

http://www.archaeology.co.uk/ This is the website of Current Archaeology, Britain’s leading archaeological magazine. Or rather, two magazines, for Current Archaeology, which deals with British archaeology, has now been joined by Current World Archaeology. Here you can explore both magazines, and the articles they contain.
There is also the listings section, based on the Archaeology Handbook, which tells you how you can go on an excavations, and lists the many organisation of all sorts that make up British archaeology. And there is also a mass of other miscellaneous information. Good reading! (Stag's note....nice casual reading...what you should have under your belt if you plan to write a book about Roman Britain)

http://www.antiquityofman.com/ (Stag's note.....a real attempt to place archaeology into its place as history. With all the difficulties that we as 21st century mortals have with history! Even history which we have a thorough knowledge of. How then do you interpret pre-historic artifacts? The author, Mikey Brass, believes there are universal constants....motherhood, drunkenness, competition for resources and so forth which make good tools with which to do the interpretation.)
The copyrighted provision of summaries of past and current academic thinking, research projects and debates available here illustrate that our past is not reconstructed by archaeologists and historians, but rather constructed. Archaeological facts cannot speak for themselves. Rather, the material remains are marshalled, compared and manipulated by scholars who are active participants operating within their own social contexts to support mutually inclusive and exclusive hypotheses of past behavioural patterns.

http://archaeology.about.com/cs/newandusedbooks/fr/feder2.htm (Stag's note... perhaps the above is a little deep for a beginner. Thats fine... this site will provide you with the terminology, and might even a direction if you wanted to go into the field!) Linking to the Past is an interesting experiment in the use of web-based instructional materials. It is, first and foremost, an introduction to archaeology, in standard format, with chapters (called Units) on various topics in archaeology, such as laws supporting archaeological research, survey methods, dating, predictive models, stone tools, paleobotany, economic and social aspects. The breadth alone is pretty unusual for your basic text. But what Feder does is include a CDRom version of the book, with additional information.

http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/kevin.greene/wintro3/ (Stag's note....another guide. But this one is for second year students!)

There, that should be some good reading! Better than trying to figure out the DaVinci code.