Indiana Jones in Egypt, Etc.

The NYT has an interesting story about archeologists digging into the work-a-day world of ancient Egypt, as opposed to the traditional big money pyramids and the like:

"This is a really amazing site, at the cutting-edge of recent Egypt archaeology," said Stuart Tyson Smith of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the project. "Digging into towns, you get the full range of life, not the very narrow view of society as seen from the top, from the rich and elite."

Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist who uncovered remains of settlements for workers who built the pyramids at Giza, said that at Dr. Moeller’s site he inspected layers of sediments showing occupation extending back 5,000 years to the dawn of Egyptian civilization and forward to the early Islamic period in the first millennium A.D. The silos are near temple ruins from about 300 B.C.

And I want a pangolin. Unrelated, I know, but so cute.

Oh, and while I’m being random, the NYT also has this story on Jamaican jerk, with the following quote from Zora Neale Hurston:

The American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston chronicled an overnight boar hunt with the Maroons in 1939. "Towards morning we ate our fill of jerk pork," she wrote. "It is better than our American barbecue. It is hard to imagine anything better than pork the way the Maroons jerk it."

Said story made me want to go back to Jake’s and ask around to find the closest roadside jerk that weekend…

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