Ishtar - 🧜‍♀️😷☢️🏳️‍🌈

Gosh yes!
I prefer it to all other fibers for spinning. Halaf folks used it, iirc. Super useful fiber

💜 ty.

It's been a while. I need to find all of my notes. I did take extensive notes and I put a lot of the specimens under the scope.

I haven't done much archeology this year because the US is a shitshow and I'm just trying to make it, but I hope to get back to getting a grad after the midterms

An antler bobbin with flax, and a drop spindle

I found a picture of the finished product, but I'd have to dig for the rest of it. It's fun to do, if you have the time to make the tools and the clothing, for extra fun.

I also wore approximate Neolithic clothing, and learn that you can't wear leather leggings when harvesting because when you bend your knees will stick in the leather due to the humidity of when you harvest lol fun little bit of data lol

I did and I posted it mostly online at the time. I was still doing my archeology classes and stuff so I wasn't going to be publishing it officially.

I have to go find all the pictures. I even lost 2/3s to fusarium 😱

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わあ！本当にきれいですね。私も絶対着たいです。

Ty!!
I remember doing that a couple years ago. I did it the Neolithic way, I mean as well as we can extrapolate lol and boy was it a lot of work. I still have some of that flax and use it for spinding on projects now and then

the algorithm saw into my heart and said “ah ah ah, no you are not, dipshit.” and served me this video of a woman doing basically *exactly* what I’d been thinking of doing. she worked so hard for over a year and came up with about 24” of usable linen yarn at the end. amazing! but also I’m tired.

Hooray, and well done!

I did that a couple years ago using only Neolithic tools and techniques, as best as they are understood. Definitely a fun unrewarding process, though plenty of work lol

Ishtar: a woman with a mask and a black shirt sitting before a plastic tray with artifacts to clean

In the US in my state we have a lovely society. We have lots of volunteers, many who have never had any archaeological education. They learn on the job, and we have a certification program for that. I'm in a weird place as I did go to uni for it, but I also don't do it professionally 😂

Same. I ended up doing computer science and then finally went back to college for archeology much later. I could work at a site now, but I can't afford to. So instead I volunteer at sites we don't have enough resources. You might have an archeology society/org in your area

So if you want to ask more XRF questions, you can just ask me directly so We don't drive @tessmachling.bsky.social bananas 🍌 with replies 😂

There are a bunch of other techniques, such as neutron-based spectrometries, which can do this as well. There's not really one technique, and it depends on what you want to find, how much you want to mess an object up, and most importantly...money 😭😭😭

Archeology never has money 😭😭😭

Technically, there's results in low resolution, a phenomenon called pile up, and some other fun. Suffice it to say, those signal to noise ratio.

You can XRF at different angles and measure the return to infer how surface level a signal is, but this is complicated and needs to be in a lab

There's a number of ways:

Destructively, you could sample the interior and test it. You can also increase the energy of the x-rays in the XRF so that they penetrate deeper, but the fluorescence has more material to pass through on its way back which will cause disruption to the signal

Yeppers!
I happen to adore spectroscopy, and there's a zillion types. It's amazing how much inferential data you can get from things. The one I've done the most is gamma spectroscopy, which identifies if and why something is radioactive. Unrelated, but fun at parties lol

Like if you scan a ceramic, you might only detect what's in the glaze or paint, but not the paste (the ceramic material), leading to a lot of mistaken interpretations of things. There are techniques to combat this, but they are complicated and often have drawbacks.

We were talking about how a lot of people will use this technique against an artifact, but usually only the surface layers are excited. People will sometimes mistakenly believe they're getting the whole picture of an item instead of just the actual surface layers.

Energy dispersive X-ray emissions fluoroscopy. Sometimes called x-ray fluoscopy.

You shoot energetic particles at something exciting the electrons around its atoms. They will release this excess energy as fluorescence. Each element has a characteristic emission so you can identify them this way

💜🫂

I'm actively avoiding the news.

The right where I live is pushing as much insanity forward as possible as they know they probably only have a few months until the midterms end that. I'm just worried how much they get through before then.

I'm avoiding it as much as possible for mental health lol

Nifty. I love you intricate work on that piece. I'd love to wear it lol

Yeah, It's such a big issue in XRF that most of the training courses and videos bring it up immediately. Bruker and flir do lol

After 15 yrs of xrf work, I've learned that the only thing simple about it is making a mistake 😂

I need to refresh myself on statistics. I've taken it at university, but I think it's a good idea to refresh yourself every couple years. It's probably one of the most important types of math to understand or just about any science lol

I mean how do you write a paper without it?

Nifty! Ty

Surface treatments will definitely mess up xrf 😭

Yeah, if you crank up the ma on the xrf you can go deeper, but then you returns get all messed up. I've had to explain that too far too many people 😂

Beautiful torc, for sure!!!!

That's the question I was going to ask as he doesn't quite look like pure gold, and the tarnish is a bit confusing when I look at it.

Has anyone xrf'ed it?

It's absolutely gorgeous, and looks a fair bit like my contemporary one that I wear daily, but thicker and with some additional detail

The Snettisham H7 torc a wire rope neck ring torc with decorated cushion terminals

One of the torc terminals with dummy rivets decoration.

So yesterday I went on an adventure to see a torc!

A torc I've been wanting to see for some time, which I'm pretty sure is the sibling of Newark and Netherurd, made/finished by the same hand...

Say hello to The B52 (AKA Snettisham torc H7)! ❤️

#Archaeology 🏺

Well I adore my therapist. Unfortunately, she flatly told me that she doesn't know of anybody to recommend in the area. My area seems to have a lot of really bad ones. It's actually an urban place near two major cities on the East Coast, so it's really weird that there's nobody good here

Well it's the American psychiatric situation as far as I can tell. It's not even remotely our biggest problem right now but it's definitely an annoying problem that harms a lot of people. We have so much to fix and now we're set back like 20 years