Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[PDH]

I always thought "corn" was wheat in England.  Though I have read about it meaning "staple grain" thus why maize becomes corn in North America.

[Jacob]

"Korn", in Danish just means grain. I'd expect that old English "corn" has the same meaning.

I believe I read somewhere that "corn" meaning maize is a shortening. It was originally called something like "Aztec corn", but over time the "Aztec" part got dropped.

[Jacob]

From wikipedia:

The word "corn" outside the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand refers to any cereal crop, its meaning understood to vary geographically to refer to the local staple.[32][33] In the United States,[32] Canada,[34] Australia, and New Zealand,[35] corn primarily means maize; this usage started as a shortening of "Indian corn".[32] "Indian corn" primarily means maize (the staple grain of indigenous Americans), but can refer more specifically to multicolored "flint corn" used for decoration.[36]

[Syt]

"Korn", in Danish just means grain.

Same in German.

Well, it can also mean grain schnapps made from rye or wheat etc.

[The Brain]

In Swedish "korn" has come to just mean barley.

[Josquius]

Don't the Brits call any kind of cultivated cereal corn? Americans would use grain.

I don't know about now but I think they did - corn is an Old English word. So when English-speaking settlers encountered maize, they called it corn because it was another grain like wheat, rye, buckwheat or whatever else.

Corn was known it just didn't mean the same thing

When I was a kid at least we would call fields of what I think was wheat, corn fields.

Maize is sweetcorn or corn on the cob.

Fingers crossed America isn't killing our language here too.

[Maladict]

In Dutch koren could mean wheat, rye or barley. But not maize, or things like oats or buckwheat.

[garbon]

Don't the Brits call any kind of cultivated cereal corn? Americans would use grain.

I don't know about now but I think they did - corn is an Old English word. So when English-speaking settlers encountered maize, they called it corn because it was another grain like wheat, rye, buckwheat or whatever else.

Corn was known it just didn't mean the same thing

When I was a kid at least we would call fields of what I think was wheat, corn fields.

Maize is sweetcorn or corn on the cob.

Fingers crossed America isn't killing our language here too.

[viper37]

Don't the Brits call any kind of cultivated cereal corn? Americans would use grain.

I don't know about now but I think they did - corn is an Old English word. So when English-speaking settlers encountered maize, they called it corn because it was another grain like wheat, rye, buckwheat or whatever else.

Corn was known it just didn't mean the same thing

really?  I had no idea

I looked up other articles, in French and English, and they used "grain" instead

[viper37]

"Korn",

the only Korn I know :Phttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRGrNDV2mKc

again, thanks to everyone providing the meaning of corn/korn in old Europe

[Josquius]

When I was a kid at least we would call fields of what I think was wheat, corn fields.

Maize is sweetcorn or corn on the cob.

Fingers crossed America isn't killing our language here too.

I'm not going to pretend it's life or death stuff but the slow obliteration of my native culture is something I disapprove of. The American media is a major contributer to this, particularly in recent years.

[jimmy olsen]

Police in Spain recover a rare Iberian sword, over two thousand years old and in excellent condition

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/25/spanish-police-recover-rare-2000-year-old-iberian-sword?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1637843932

[viper37]

In Sweden, runes translate the climatic anxiety of the Vikings in the 9th century

The news excites runologists, those scholars who study mysterious inscriptions written in a forgotten German alphabet. One of the best-known texts, visible south of Stockholm, refers to a natural disaster, says a book listed by the Swedish daily Today's News.

Like many Swedes, Lars Linder, the author of the article in Today's News, saw the Rök stone with his own eyes. Almost 4 meters high, it stands near a church of the same name, covered with a strange engraved text, painted in red: some 760 signs dating back to the beginning of the IXe century, considered the longest runic inscription in the world. Then, "Like millions of tourists", he left a bit skeptical. "For in all its monumental and pagan expressiveness, the stone is rather inaccessible."

The punctuation is random, the words lack space and are written in Old Norse, a medieval Scandinavian language, which is partially unknown. Since then, "The space left for interpretation is almost vertiginous [...]. By comparison, the cryptologists who cracked German codes during WWII had an easy task ", ironise Lars Linder.
Major climate disaster

Until recently, the text was generally accepted as a fragment of Norse mythology referring to the warlike exploits of a king in the WEe century. But here is that last year, four runologists assured to have broken the code. One of them, Henrik Williams, recounts it in a book published this fall in Sweden, The Stone of Rök and the End of the World.

According to these researchers, the inscriptions hint at a major climate disaster that occurred around the same time, better understood recently. Between 536 and 547, three major volcanic eruptions in Iceland darkened the skies and blocked the Sun for many years, especially in the North, resulting in years of extreme cold, poor harvests and famine.
"A sort of ceremonial prayer"

"This recent discovery had already led researchers to understand the Ragnarök, the Nordic apocalypse, in a new way: the story of the ice winter and the Fenris wolf devouring the Sun seems in fact to be an expressive representation of the how the Iron Age Scandinavians saw the great cataclysm ", note Today's News.

The majestic Rök Stone can now be interpreted as "A sort of ceremonial prayer". With its obscure formulation, it "Can therefore both indicate the end of time and the events of which the inhabitants of IXe century must have had precious memories: the terrible death of the Sun, then its resurrection ". Is Henrik Williams right? "Emerging from all the details, and despite objections and question marks, a picture slowly emerges, both believable and evocative", concludes the author of the article.

[The Brain]

The Rök stone is totally awesome.

[Sheilbh]

Don't know why but prehistoric stuff normally doesn't interest me, but this is fascinating - the article has an interesting family tree diagram:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/dec/22/worlds-oldest-family-tree-costwolds-tomb-hazleton-north-long-cairn-dna

World's oldest family tree revealed in 5,700-year-old Cotswolds tomb
DNA analysis of bodies in Hazleton North long cairn finds five generations of an extended family
Mark Brown
Wed 22 Dec 2021 16.16 GMT

An analysis of DNA from a 5,700-year-old tomb has revealed the world's oldest family tree, shedding "extraordinary" light on the importance of family and descent among people who were some of Britain's first farmers.

A research team has examined the bones and teeth of 35 people in one of Britain's best preserved neolithic tombs, near the village of Hazleton in the Cotswolds. The results, said Dr Chris Fowler of Newcastle University, are nothing short of "astounding".

The researchers have discovered that 27 were biological relatives from five continuous generations of a single extended family. The majority were descended from four women who all had children with the same man.

"It tells us that descent was important," said Fowler. "When they were building these tombs and deciding who to include in them, certainly in this case, they were selecting people who were close relatives of the people who were first buried there. They have this close connection to their immediate ancestors and that extends over several generations.

"Family was important and you can see that with the inclusion of some very young children in the tomb as well."

The tomb, known as the Hazleton North long cairn, is divided into two L-shaped chambered areas and fresh research also shows that the dead were buried according to the women they were descended from. That shows, the study concludes, "that these first-generation women were socially significant in the memories of this community".

The prehistoric group of people in question lived around 3700–3600BC and were some of Britain's first farmers, with the tomb constructed about 100 years after cattle and cereal cultivation had been introduced from continental Europe. It would be another 700 years before construction started on the most famous neolithic legacy, Stonehenge.

Archaeologists know that the people moved around the landscape and were probably herding animals as they did so. They consumed dairy products and had a protein-rich diet and they made pots for storing and cooking food. The latest research shows that family ties also mattered to them.

The research is a collaboration between archaeologists from the universities of Newcastle, Central Lancashire, Exeter and York, and geneticists from the universities of Harvard, Vienna and the Basque country. The conclusions – the first study to reveal in such detail how prehistoric families were structured – are published in the journal Nature.

"This research is really important because it allows us to see what's going on in neolithic society," said Fowler. "They are carrying out these burial practices that are tracing lines of descent ... they are projecting their community forward into the future.

The DNA analysis has revealed ages, genders and family ties. "We have built up a much more detailed biographical picture of those individuals which makes them much more relatable to us as people," he said.

Fowler said similar studies of tombs in Ireland had concluded that remains were not biologically related, which makes the Hazleton North discovery "quite an extraordinary result".

Researchers also found that males who today we would call stepsons were adopted into the lineage, suggesting "blended" families can't be considered just a modern phenomenon.

Iñigo Olalde, the lead geneticist on the study, said using the latest technologies in ancient DNA recovery had allowed the team "to uncover the oldest family tree ever reconstructed and analyse it to understand something profound about the social structure of these ancient groups".

Fowler said the task now was to look at other neolithic tombs to see if a similar pattern existed.

Ron Pinhasi, of the University of Vienna, said: "It was difficult to imagine just a few years ago that we would ever know about neolithic kinship structures. But this is just the beginning and no doubt there is a lot more to be discovered from other sites in Britain, Atlantic France, and other regions."