Archaeology: Golden boy

The boy with the golden tooth: a 1593 case report of the first molded gold crown.

The case of the Boy with the Golden Tooth, a "miracle" in a remote village in Silesia, in what is today southwestern Poland, was reported extensively in 1593. Here we report that the hoax, perpetrated by someone close to the family and with knowledge of goldsmith techniques, is the first documented case of the use of a molded gold crown. Using period instruments available to goldsmiths and a 0....

Software Archaeology

some situation, trying to understand what you’re looking at and how it all fits together. To do this, you must be careful to preserve the artifacts you find and respect and understand the cultural forces that produced them. But we don’t have to wait a thousand years to try to comprehend unfathomable artifacts; code becomes legacy code just about as soon as it’s written, and suddenly we have exa...

Industrial Archaeology

The Industrial Revolution is arguably one of the most important social phenomena responsible for shaping the modern world. Of course, some historians and economists have long contended that this was or was not a ‘‘revolution’’ in the strictest sense of the word and scholars still debate whether the use of this metaphor is problematic. Most writers agree that this was not an event, but rather a ...

Landscape Archaeology

1. The Concept of Landscape: Past and Present 1.1 Perceptions of the Landscape and their Reflection in the Arts 1.2 Contemporary Views of the Landscape in Philosophy and the Natural Sciences 1.3 The Landscape Phenomenon in Contemporary Archaeology and Anthropology 2. Sites and Monuments in the Context of Landscape 2.1 The Birth of Interest: Founding Fathers 2.2 New Impulses: Crawford and his Di...

On Evolutionary Ecology, Selectionist Archaeology, and Behavioral Archaeology