A few thoughts about this Humanities article making the rounds
1) if declining humanities enrollments are due to misperception of low value, then WE need to do better job selling ourselves... #humcomm needs to be the new #scicomm
2) Humanities (and social sciences) departments need to reward public engagement that highlights the value and relevancy of our disciplines to modern society. We need to highlight to everyone what they can learn from our rigorous methods and nuanced approaches into humanity
3) Humanities departments need to adapt. The article points out that newer, identity related fields have been successful during this crisis (ethnic, gender, and cultural studies). These are still minor components of most traditional humanities departments' course offerings
4) The article also points out that disciplines that combine humanities and science have fared well. Humanities and social sciences need to teach the contextualization of scientific ideas & data. We need to be good at science so we can teach students how science impacts humanity
5) Yet, if you look at job postings (as I do obsessively), I simply see so many offerings for tenure-track posts framed in a traditional mold (w/ the exception of some digital humanities posts). I know academia changes slowly but c'mon profs on search committees.. We need change!
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This #archaeology thread describes the “Agora Bone Well” published today by Maria Liston, Susan Rotroff & Lynn Snyder
Over 460 humans (mostly infants) & 150 dogs were thrown in the well. They tell a heartbreakingly vivid tale of all-too-ordinary life & death in ancient Athens
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The well was excavated 80 yrs ago by Dorothy Burr Thompson and was located downtown in Hellenistic Athens. After the building on this plot of land was abandoned, the well became a convenient dumping spot
The bones & artifacts were thrown in the well between 175-150 BC
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The well was cut thru bedrock & lined w/ clay tiles. Thompson wrote that bones first started appearing 13 meters down (42 feet). Skulls & bones became so common that at one point she simply wrote “more vile bones of dogs, etc.” Digging bones in a deep well wasn’t an easy job!
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This #ClassicalZooarchaeology thread is about ancient Greek sacrificial feasting. I want to focus on what the animal bones can add to our understanding of this important topic. While there are several good overviews of sacrifice in texts & art, bones offer new perspectives
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Sacrificial ritual was associated with Greek polytheism, which was extremely diverse & constantly changing. So, sacrificial ritual was pretty diverse across time and space
If you want an intro to Greek polytheism, you can also check out the thread below
Instead of going into exceptional sacrifices (next month, I’ll do a thread on dog sacrifice when @ASCSAPubs publishes the Agora Bone Well), this thread focuses on the canonical bones burned for the gods. The advantage w/ this focus is it’s easy to combine texts, art, and bones
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This thread is about archaeological artifacts and how we think about them. Heck the first step is to even figure out what to name them. I’m gonna pull out two examples: Athenian ceramic vessels and Paleolithic stone tools to think about “what’s in a name?”
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Archaeologists have to deal with all kinds of artifacts. Usually they’re even just fragments of an artifact.
To be honest, a lot of times we can’t really identify these artifacts or how they were used. But, we’ve gotta call them something
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Sometimes it seems easy. Take a look at the ceramic objects in the image below. What would you call these objects? And unless you’re already familiar with Greek ceramics, I bet there’s one that you aren’t sure what to call it.
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@sportzak OK time for a Greek religion 101 thread! B/c it's complicated
Greek religion was polytheistic. And in practice it included a far wider range of deities than our popular imagination would suggest
Probably no two Greeks followed the exact same cults
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@sportzak Let’s tackle the traditional Greek deities first. In practice, it’s better to think of them as cult figures than deities.
There were many Athenas! And even many Poseidons, Zeuses, Heras, and more.
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@sportzak The Athena in the Odyssey was a literary/mythical figure
She is not Athena Parthenos (the virgin), worshiped at the Parthenon, who was different from that of Athena Nike (victory), both in Athens, who different from Athena Alea who was worshiped in Arcadia (temple at Tegea)
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Over lunch I checked out depictions of dancing flamingos from 5000+ yrs ago. h/t @ArchaicAnimals for drawing my attention to the super-cool image below
The research-hole didn’t take me where I thought it would…
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If you google around, these rows of dancing flamingos are depicted on vessels from Upper (southern) Egypt. They come from the cultural group labeled Naqada from predynastic Egypt, before the country was unified under a Pharaoh (we’re talking approx 4000-3000 BC)
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The research was made easy because the @metmuseum has many beautiful Naqada artifacts available online
Of course, I’m gonna show you all the best ones, like this vessel with feet or this figurine made of hippo-tusk ivory
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Introducing #ClassicalZooarchaeology
This is my 1st thread highlighting how animal bones can answer important questions in the ancient Mediterranean #Zooarchaeology is often thought of as a niche study, but it relates to traditional forms of evidence #scicomm#humanities
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When we think of #Classics, ancient texts are often prioritized. Animals were an important topic for ancient authors
For example, according to the TLG the lemma hippos (horse) is the 13th most common term in Homer’s Iliad (417 mentions). Horses were important to epic warfare
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It’s no surprise that animals – especially plow oxen – are important to Hesiod’s agricultural poem Works and Days
But texts don’t tell the whole picture about #AncientAnimals
Pigs are only mentioned once in Hesiod: boars should be castrated on the 8th day of the month (WD 790)
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