Sublime

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent colle... See more

At Wetwang Slack, careful digging and dating allowed the sequence of burials in the cemetery to be disentangled. Clusters formed around primary interments – typically, an older woman buried with beads would be the ‘founder figure’ – her grave forming a focus for subsequent burials of more women, with or without beads. Those gendered clusters also m

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Archaeologists have seen how the flattish hierarchies of the fifth century, reflected in modest architectural and material displays of rank and wealth in cemeteries and settlements, became more differentiated during the following century. At settlements like Mucking and West Stow, where social rank was at first expressed within households, dominant

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As material barriers, many of the larger linear earthworks of the Early Medieval landscape functioned most effectively to control the movement of livestock. Small armies might ignore a ditch and bank or climb over or around it; cattle and sheep are much less inclined to scale something as massive as the Wansdyke, especially if they are being herded

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