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
/1 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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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

theatlantic.com/education/arch… 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

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
/1 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

https://twitter.com/FlintDibble/status/1013869173355708416

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?”
/1 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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@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
/1 @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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A #ClassicalZooarchaeology flamingo thread (in 20 tweets)

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…
/1 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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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
/1 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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