Four Stone Hearth #99: The last two-digit edition

Mamma mia! Would you believe it's the 99th time we light this old four stone hearth to come together and rap about all things blog-ological anthropologica! I tried to shake things up a bit and diversify the offerings for this edition, to put a bit more emphasis on things non-archaeological/paleoanthropological, so without further ado, pull up a log,pour yourself a nice drink and enjoy!

Let me start with a shameless UC Denver plug and link to my colleague and next-office neighbor Marty Otañez's blog, Sidewalk Radio. I propose to you three videoblogs on the anthropology of contingent faculty, the occupational health and safety concerns of day laborers in Colorado, and one student's experience in our department.

Shifting to matters linguistic, let me point you to posts by Steve Chrisomalis about the origins of the word chairperson and its socio-historical context, and by Ben Zimmer about recent research on the endangered Inuit language Inuktun. Glen at Paleoglot also looks at origins in a post on the word kinnor while Jonathan Jarrett takes a critical look at recent claims that spoken Pictish has finally been decoded.

Turning to archaeology, Magnus Reuterdahl reports on his experience at the Swedish National Heritage board’s course on historic landscapes while Martin Rundkvist picks apart a recent study that tries to link the myth of Phaeton to an actual meteor crash in Antiquity. Speaking of taking apart, you should also definitely look at Chris Carl Feagans' very good smackdown of recent claims about having found the remains of John the Baptist that have lately come out of Bulgaria. Jumping west a continent and landing in the US Southwest, the Gambler's House presents a discussion on the dental evidence for agriculture. And if you want a glimpse of what life in the field is like for a Mediterranean archaeologist, then by all means check out Colleen Morgan's series of posts from her field projects in Greece and Jordan.

Greg Laden provides an interesting discussion of how "persistent ethnic differences in test performance may be entirely an artifact of the method used to 'adjust' the test." Switching gears somewhat, Bonn Aure provides a discussion on Visayan sorcery and witchcraft. And to touch on the news of the week re: the brouhaha about the Cordoba Center in NYC, Savage Minds has a pieces on the semiotics of islamophobia. And if you haven't read it yet, check out Krys D'Costa at her new digs at Scientopia and her wonderful three post series on coffee, a much loved topic here at AVRPI.

Turning now to bones and non-human primates, Raymond Ho discusses cercopithecine cheek pouches, Casey Sorrow repors on primate deaths in two zoos (a bummer, so here's a link to a report about a new orang baby at the Denver zoo) , and Zinjanthropus muses about orang metabolism. Bone-wise, the big news of the week, of course, was the discovery of ca. 3.4 million year-old cut marked bones in Ethiopia.

Alright, I'm already late putting this up (my apologies!), so that wrap's up the 99th edition of FSH. Installment #100 will be hosted over at Aardvarchaeology, so contact Martin if you want to submit a post!