Episode 225

Spooktember: Nothin' Fancy, Just Necromancy!

Welcome to SPOOKTEMBER! In previous years, Amber has treated Anna to a month of stories and studies from the ghoulish side of archaeology and anthropology. This year, since we moved to biweekly episodes, we're extending the season! This week, it's first of four lightly haunted topics with (!!!!) MINIMAL BUMMERS! We're talking about necromancy, the practice of communing with the dead via ritual. We explore a cave full of lamps and skulls, climb into a ghost pit, and flip through some Babylonian spellbooks. Let's ponder the OB together!

Placement of ancient hidden lamps, skulls in cave in Israel suggests Roman-era practice of necromancy (Phys.org) (cn: images of human remains)

Oil Lamps, Spearheads and Skulls: Possible Evidence of Necromancy during Late Antiquity in the Te’omim Cave, Judean Hills (Harvard Theological Review) (cn: images of human remains)

​​The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (via Internet Archive)

Talking Heads: Necromancy in Jewish and Christian Accounts from Mesopotamia and beyond (via Academia.edu)

Second Millenium Antecedents to the Hebrew 'Ôḇ (Journal of Biblical Literature)

How to perform necromancy with Irving Finkel (via YouTube)

Fragment of a clay tablet (British Museum)

Necromancy in Ancient Mesopotamia (Archiv für Orientforschung)

In case you, like Anna, missed the orb-pondering meme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pondering-my-orb

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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.