Almost-immortal - Vermilion

what’s that quote that goes something like ‘love humiliates you, hate cradles you’ ????

Actually, ancient glass, having been rather neglected by archaeology for decades, is a pretty exciting topic in scholarship right now. The main thing is that glass persists–it’s very stable. After fabric rots and metal turns to a scrap of rust, there will lie a necklace, still scattered across a chest that itself has turned mostly to earth. 

Bead typologies, for example (that is, the classification of different styles/shapes/decorative motifs/colors) can allow scholars to trace trade routes, as they study the distributions of different bead types over time and geography. Glass production is kinda industrial in nature, not like spinning or beer that make good cottage industries. It was often produced in one place, and then sold on to artisans elsewhere, and then the beads themselves were traded across entire continents. 

Chemical analysis of the glass can do even more to trace routes, since different compositions and incidence of different mineral contaminants can allow archaeologists to trace glass production to individual sites, thousands of years after the fact. It’s dizzying, really.

The downside is that for a long time, archaeologists regarded beads as unimportant trinkets, and antiquities dealers understood that they were easy to take and easy to move. So an awful lot of the most exceptional beads we have from the distant past spent time in private collections or uncategorized drawers somewhere in a museum back room, so they’ve lost much of what we could have learned from their original provenance. Maybe we’ll be able to turn new analytical tools on some of these to reconstruct more of their past.

Lighthousekeeping, Jeanette Winterson (transcript under the cut) 

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- `04 may  - main languages: hun, eng - learning: spanish - english major  - i intend to post book stuff and reviews, and uni/academia things in general  - i read mainly fantasy + classics

my storygraph

I'm not actually smart, I just prep for a class like I'm going into battle

Happy pride month to the tiny cowboy and tiny Trojan man from Night at the Museum

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[image description: screenshot of highlighted text from an article that reads, “whenever I read a poem, I’m asking, “Does this save my life a little?” /end description]

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Let it pass; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)