This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
So, what's new this week?
I don't know if anyone else keeps up with http://www.ablogabouthistory.com/ - it links to new history/archaeology stories every day.
Interesting recent link [http://sciencenordic.com/mysterious-code-viking-runes-cracked] to the cracking of a viking runic code, and interestingly many of the messages seem quite playful ("Kiss me" was one of them), giving a great insight into culture at the time. I'm not a specialist in this area by any means but hopefully more will come from this in the future it seems interesting.
Don't know if this necessarily counts as a new development, but here's a recent story about the history of marijuana, with a focus on legalization in the USA (some of it breaks the twenty year rule, so ignore the second half if you like). Either way, you gotta love the Reefer Madness gif.
Came across it doing a bit of work to prepare for leading tutorials on The Black Candle, an ode to temperance written in 1922 by Canadian women's rights activist and magistrate Emily Murphy. Especially since we're in BC, I'm expecting lots of laughs tomorrow.
Edit: formatting
Recent museum events count, right?
I've been following the coverage on the sinkhole disaster at the National Corvette Museum. [They are planning on displaying the damaged cars for a few months before they are restored.] (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/21/corvette-museum-sinkhole/5674659/)
I've been looking into developing museum disaster preparedness plans lately and this whole situation has been interesting to watch unfold.