"To honor Prince's legacy in Minnesota and beyond, the Purple Rain suit in our collections will be on view at Minnesota History Center  starting tomorrow (April 23, 2016). Visitors can view the suit for free during normal museum hours, which begin at 10 am tomorrow. There will also be a space for remembrances. Extra kudos and thanks to all our staff who worked so hard to prepare the suit for viewing by the public!" MHC on Facebook   For you ‪#‎Prince‬ junkies this is pretty sweet. This is the original live recording of Purple Rain  at a benefit show from 1983 of which a lot of it made it to the album. And kind of like VH1 Pop Up Videos (that dates one a bit!) it has interesting info in the caption bar.  

A well said statement from Cherokee Nation Principal Chief regarding the U.S. Department of the Treasury's decision to remove Andrew Jackson from the front of the $20 bill and replace him with abolitionist Harriet Tubman. "Andrew Jackson defied a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and forced the removal of our Cherokee ancestors from homelands we'd occupied in the Southeast for millennia. His actions as president resulted in a genocide of Native Americans and the death of about a quarter of our people. It remains the darkest period in the Cherokee Nation’s history. Jackson's legacy was never one to be celebrated, and his image on our currency is a constant reminder of his crimes against Natives. It's been an insult to our people and to our ancestors, thousands of whom died of starvation and exposure and now lie in unmarked graves along the Trail of Tears. This is a small but meaningful vindication for them, and for our...

While I respect the writings of Dr. Shaena Montanari  and her conclusion that Archaeologist Semir Osmanagich is wrong about his interpretation of his recent discovery is Bosnia "Archaeologist Semir Osmanagich, known as the “Bosnian Indian [sic] Jones”,  says a 3 meter wide stone ball found in the forest of Visoko Valley in Bosnia was made by an unknown civilization that used to live in the area over 1000 years ago, but there are many reasons to cast doubt on this outlandish claim." she has made an egregious error. This is no "Concretion", it is obviously a scale model of the Death Star.     Alternatively is might be evidence that the Real Indiana Jones was actually based in fact. (hat tip to Tom Hesser!)   http://www.forbes.com/sites/shaenamontanari/2016/04/18/that-massive-stone-sphere-in-bosnia-is-probably-not-from-a-lost-civilization/

"Marshall revealed in his interview that the latest installment will be a “continuation” of the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull story."" Please God, no. That is all. http://screenrant.com/indiana-jones-5-crystal-skull-continuation/  

Luxor, Egypt The Discovery Of The Century? I was unfortunately not able to attend the press conference today in Egypt, but Mamdouh Eldamaty, the Egyptian antiquities minister said it best about the results of the radar scans, “It could be the discovery of the century.” Eldamaty went on to describe the results of the work that Hirokatsu Watanabe, a Japanese Radar specialist conducted in November 2015. Watanabe was brought in after Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist, analyzed high-resolution images of King Tut's tomb that suggested there were straight lines in the wall that had been missed by previous researchers. These lines are suggestive of the architectural methods used when sealing a room, which indicated there could be rooms beyond King Tutankhamun's tomb chamber.  These lines, previously hidden by the color and the tombs stones' texture. Is it Nefertiti? Who knows? It could very well be a temporary chamber used during the rush construction project for Mamdouh Eldamaty, the...

Sorry for the delay! I never even officially opened up ShovelBums for entries for the 2016 Field Schools and there were already 150 when I finally got around to publishing them today! Please share this link to the field schools and suggest your prof advertise your field school on ShovelBums and reach the worlds largest targeted audience of students of Archaeology, Anthropology and related disciplines! http://shovelbums.net/l/2016-field-schools     http://shovelbums.net/l/2016-field-schools

Every archivist and anyone who has ever taken a digital image, filled out a spreadsheet, logged a GPS location has the same flickering fear in the back of their mind - "what happens if this data is wiped out?". I lay awake some night fretting about this on the global scale. We are at the dawn of an era of unprecedented access to knowledge, but as quick at the Royal Library of Alexandria became nothing but a memory of lost potential cultures prosper and fade throughout history. And if an event of a great of enough magnitude (pick your plausible collapse of modern iteration of civilization scenario and apply) occurs, so does such a vast epoch of potential knowledge.       in 2013 researchers at University of Southampton in the UK first announced that they had developed a potential prototype and over the last three years have refined the process to the point where they...

Donald Trump Proves that there is no such thing as Intelligent Design.      

A few months ago, after the last mass shooting, I saw the estimated intervals between mass shootings in the US in a Mother Jones article. I counted ahead from that date and made a note on my calendar that according to their estimates there would be another by December 4th...  Mother Jone's article Inside The Race to Stop the Next Mass Shooter  by Mark Follman

SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a Lake Superior storm on November 10, 1975, with the loss of the entire crew of 29. When originally launched on June 7, 1958, she was the largest ship on North America's Great Lakes, and to this day she remains the largest to have sunk there. The Edmund Fitzgerald had taken on a load of taconite iron ore in Superior, Wisconsin on November 9th and was making was to Detroit, Michigan. The Fitz was caught in a fierce Lake Superior storm with near-hurricane force winds and 11m waves. Around 7:10pm on November 10th Captain McSorley's last message to the nearby freighter The Anderson said, "We are holding our own." A few minutes later, with no distress call her crew of 29 perished, and no bodies were recovered. Gordon Lightfoot's song: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.         Captain ERNEST M. MCSORLEY (September 29, 1912 – November 10,...

Thanks to the internet, the wisdom of Presidential candidate Ben Carson has been preserved and will heretofore save archaeologists, and egyptologists in particular, the hassle of having to wonder about what those crazy pyramids in Egypt were for.  As Carson told the 1998 graduating class of Andrews University: “My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain,” Carson said. “Now all the archeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big (if you stop and think about it. And I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time to store that much grain.” On the positve side Dr. Carson does clearly NOT give the aliens credit for building the pyramids! It is worth spending the 15 minutes watching the entire speech. One of my favorite lines is where he says this, but I think he is really...

Koko - The gorilla  almost any practicing anthropologist alive today feels a kinship with received kittens for her 44th birthday. Watch this great video:    

#ColumbusDay #IndigenousPeoplesDay #October12th Bartolomé de las Casas, who served with Columbus but later became an advocate for Indigineous rights described how Columbus and his men treated these people in The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account: “They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house,” de Las Casas wrote. “They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the...

From Thursday October 1st to Wednesday October 7th any institution of higher learning may post an academic teaching position for free. From October 8th-31st any institution may pay a flat fee of $100 and post as many individual ads for positions open in their system. NOTE: This does not apply to any institution position that is a CRM position unless over 50% of that position is a teaching capacity.   Why ShovelBums? I thought that was for my undergrad archaeology students and Masters students in the summer?   Nope. Where do you think so many of you best and brightest ended up after they graduate? We all recognize that Archaeology and Anthropology are an academic pyramid scheme of sorts. Every year 100�⒠�s of institutions all around the world produce numerous exceptionally bright and well educated graduates who quickly learn that breaking into academia is a tough gig. So what happens to these former students? Yes...

  Nicholas Reeves  from the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona got to give  the interview quote ever archaeologist wants to give in their life:   “ To be honest, I feel numb,” Nicholas Reeves, the archaeologist who first proposed the existence of the hidden rooms, said in his Luxor hotel room, after inspecting the tomb. “This has been part of my life now on a daily basis for more than a year. ” " If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, " Reeves told the BBC. " But if I'm right, the prospects are frankly staggering. ”   So what is the fuss? Factum Arte, a Spanish group specializing in the replication of artistic works, conducted detailed scans of Tutankhamun’s tomb for a replica model. Nicholas examined the high resolution images and  saw fissures that he believes indicate the presence of two sealed doors in the tomb's north and west walls. With genetic evidence suggesting that Nefertiti...

Totally true and hard science here folks. This weekend Mars will be as big as Your own Full Moon and Uranus (depending on your viewing distance).   As for Mars being viewed from earth and appearing as big as the moon, it is never, ever, going to happen.

  A big honkin' gate recently excavated in Israel by  Aren Maeir, of Bar-Ilan University in Israel may very likely marks the entrance to Gath. The home of Goliath of David vs Goliath fame described in the bible. At it's time occupation it might have been the largest city in the region.  More from LiveScience :   

What is the best song that sums up the life of an archaeologist? I was in Copan, Honduras when the Joshua Tree by U2 came out in March of '87. Mail was slow and expectations were high when someone finally got the cassette mailed to them. But this song made me me chuckle thinking of the fate of all archaeologists: "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" So what's your best example of a song that sums up the life of an archaeologist? (Please provide a link to the track if possible, or the lyrics) Post here or on facebook  

Rexdale Henry, 53, a member of the Choctaw tribe and a lifelong community activist was found dead in his cell on July 14th.  Rexdale, who coached stickball and was a candidate for the Choctaw Tribal Council from Bogue Chitto was arrested for failure to pay a fine. "Rexdale W. Henry, 53, long-time Native American civil-rights activist and beloved leader in his Choctaw community, was found dead in his cell in the Neshoba County Jail in Philadelphia, Miss., sparking family and friends to seek an independent autopsy, reports Countercurrent News. Henry’s body was found at around 10:00 a.m. on the morning of July 14, about 30 minutes after he was last seen alive. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is allegedly investigating the case, but, knowing the history of Neshoba County, Henry’s supporters (justifiably) aren’t satisfied with just that... At a time when the nation is focused on the terrible circumstances of the brutal death of Sandra Bland, it is critical...

VIA Jezebel - Thanks for the heads up Lucy! Key & Peele's Pirate Chantey Is the Feminist Anthem of the Summer 77,557 91 Madeleine Davies Filed to: COMEDY 7/09/15 5:50pm   “I once met a lass so fine. She was dunk on barley wine. I’d been at sea for months a three. I knew I could make her mine. And the lass was past consent! So it was off with her we went,” growls pirate Jordan Peele. Don’t despair, though. There’s a twist! Sing it with me! “A woman has a right to a drink or two without worrying about what you will do! We’d say ‘YO HO,’ but we don’t say ‘ho,’ ‘cause ‘ho’ is disrespectful, yo!”