Episode 239

Get to Work!

Greetings, fellow workers! In observance of May Day, which in many parts of the world is a day for celebrating and acknowledging the struggles of workers in the labor movement. In that spirit, we bring you an episode about work.

How do we define "jobs" in the archaeological record? What can skeletons tell us about what people did every day? What was it like to be a monument worker in ancient Egypt? Tune in for all this and more!

Show Notes

The Eloquent Bones of Abu Hureyra (Scientific American)


Neandertal Humeri May Reflect Adaptation to Scraping Tasks, but Not Spear Thrusting - PMC


https://phys.org/news/2012-07-unique-neandertal-arm-morphology-due.html



EA5634 ostracon (British Museum)

The Strikes in Ramses III's Twenty-Ninth Year (Journal of Near Eastern Studies) 

A letter of complaint to the Vizier To (Journal of Near Eastern Studies) 

Hard Work-Where Will It Get You? Labor Management in Ur III Mesopotamia (Journal of Near Eastern Studies) 

The Forgotten History of New York’s Bagel Famines (Gastro Obscura)

SWCA Environmental Consultants in Salt Lake City Join Teamsters (International Brotherhood of Teamsters)

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.