Ten years ago today, Netscape went public. Rumor hath it that Jim Clark needed money to buy a boat, so he took the company public. One can, arguably, say that this date in 1995 started the tech bubble that eventually burst in early 2000, and made the Internet -- together with blogs in general, and ArchaeoBlog in particular -- as more than academic tool, possible. Before that, the Internet was mostly restricted to the geek set at universities, where we (yeah, yeah, we're included in that) mostly used it for playing some form of semi-graphical D&D, Leather Goddesses of Phobos (heh), or other semi-naughty and/or incredibly nerdy games, not to mention chatting on BBSs and IRC.
Netscape and their browser made the Web accessible to nearly everyone. No more text-based graphics and cryptic Unix commands to get online, just double-whack an icon and, bingo, you're out there. It really was the event that launched a thousand IPOs.
And in doing so, it put the cost of publishing at very nearly zero. No more printing, marketing, and selling of work; you could write stuff, plop it on a server somewhere, and everyone around the world with a browser could read it, and more importantly, comment on it either by email or within the browser. This has caused academia and the publishing community dependent on it in something of a bind. Yeah, you can place your writing out on the Web without cost and without a peer-review process (thought some would argue the Web community can act as a super-peer-review as we mentioned yesterday), and have it distributed to as many as wish to view it. That means an awful lot of crap gets out there. But it also means that an awful lot of non-crap gets out as well, and eventually what does make it out there has to stand on its merits. Sort of the ultimate in market-based discourse.
Needless to say, with a new medium there have been plenty of naysayers. All of a sudden, the biggest danger to our poor helpless children was the vast variety of porn out there for easy viewing (erhm, so we've heard anyway), and stalkers ready to prey on the unsuspecting youngsters. There have also been those who have lamented this supposedly impersonal form of communication in favor of good old person-to-person conversation. We're somewhat sympathetic to this latter sentiment, since we're familiar with how disconnected many in the Geek Set can be; one person we know of got so used to typing conversations at people that when he was having real conversations he would often unconsciously be tapping his fingers against his leg as he spoke.
So, we carry on with this experiment and see where it goes. And wish to hell we'd had enough disposable income in the late 1990s to play the stock market, darn it.
But you know, we defer to Ann Althouse on what this new form of communication means, because we can't really say it any better:
I understand -- really, I do -- how someone who doesn't feel moved to blog and doesn't enjoy reading blogs might feel dispirited by all the blogging. And I agree that face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication. I'd even go so far as to say that -- in its highest manifestations -- it's the best thing.
But blogging is just writing, and like other writing, it has aspects that are better than conversation:
It can reach beyond the people you know.
It can reach people in the future, including the people you know.
It can reveal things that cannot come up in ordinary conversation.
It can allow one person to contribute a larger share of the ideas than would be seemly in conversation.
It lets you leap over your immediate physical environment.
More archaeology later, after we've done some work on the history of geological fieldwork in the Fayum Depression.
Update: More news
Zooarchaeology 'Mammoth' find in Kansas
Highway workers in Wichita, Kan., have dug up what could be a prehistoric tusk from a woolly mammoth.
They were digging about 17 feet under an old highway Friday when they found what appears to be a huge tusk. A supervisor says they stopped digging with machinery immediately when they struck what appeared to be bone, and uncovered the rest by hand.
The highway department has called in archaeologists to help uncover the rest of the tusk and verify its age and origin.
The department says the site is being protected.
That's the whole thing.
Sometimes they're worth something Smugglers lead archaeologists to discovery of Iron Age site in Zanjan
Artifacts recently confiscated from smugglers by the Zanjan Cultural Heritage and Tourism Department (ZCHTD) have led to the discovery of an Iron Age site near Anzar village in Iran’s Zanjan Province.
“Following the confiscation of the artifacts from smugglers near the village, they led us to an Iron Age site, including a cemetery and settlement,” ZCHTD archaeologist Abolfazl Aali said on Sunday.
“One of the smugglers had unearthed 22 intact clay artifacts, a number of beads made of silica, and bronze and copper relics, such as daggers and bayonets, during his excavations in the cemetery,” he added.
Chatty Egyptians Egyptologist Discovers Ancient Gossip
Ancient Egyptians gossiped about a bald queen, royals who had affairs, missing bodies, homosexuality, harem intrigue and more, according to a noted Egyptologist.
Lisa Schwappach-Shirriff, curator of California's Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, which houses North America's largest collection of Egyptian artifacts, recently found evidence for tabloid-like gossip in the museum's eclectic archives and elsewhere. The findings suggest humans always have enjoyed chatting about personal or sensational information concerning others.
They also reveal what officials communicated through their official artwork and hieroglyphics.
Not sure what the picture of a stelae is supposed to be. It doesn't appear to contain any of this so-called gossip. So don't bother clicking on it.
Lost
Buddhist relics dating back to the third century have been discovered recently during an excavation project by a group of archaeologists and historians from the Orissa Institute of Maritime and South East Asian Studies in Jajpur district of Orissa .
'Kesa Stupa', considered to be the earliest Stupa in the Buddhist texts and some evidences of Toshali Nagar, the headquarters of the Kalinga, were discovered during the excavation. It was carried out under the aegis of the State's culture department at Tarapur Hill in Orissa's Jajpur district, close to the Lalitgiri-Udayagiri and Ratnagiri Buddhist complex.
CSI: Craighall
A grave discovery as joiner digs up 300-year-old bones
A 300-YEAR-OLD murder mystery has been unearthed after an amateur archaeologist stumbled across human bones on a construction site.
The remains were discovered on the site of the new Queen Margaret University campus in Craighall, Musselburgh.
And it is now believed the bones are the remains of a female murder victim, as one of them appears to have been severed by a knife or another sharp instrument.
But although police were informed of the find, they are not launching an investigation because the remains have lain in the ground for almost 300 years.
Politics! Media bias! The Anchoress argues that the NY Times minimized the importance of Jerusalem in its reporting of the finding of David's Palace.
Also involves this story about the finding of the Pool of Siloam.
Child mummy update Biblical-Era Child Mummy Resurrected
The mummy of a little Egyptian girl who lived 2,000 years ago has undergone a high tech resurrection.
The resulting 3D interactive model of the mummy represents the world's most detailed mummy visualization.
A powerful Stanford University AXIOM Siemens scanner generated 60,000 ultrathin, multidimensional image slices of the child versus the 1,700 that were taken of King Tut by other researchers earlier this year.