The face of a 6,000-year-old man Steve Burrow, 22 January 2010 The Penywyrlod Head The Penywyrlod Skull. One of the few complete Stone Age skulls yet to have been discovered in Wales. A rare Stone Age skull discovered in a burial mound in Powys has given scientists the opportunity to reconstruct the face of a 6,000-year-old man, revealing that he was no hulking cave man but in fact very similar looking to modern man. In June 1972 at Penywyrlod, near Talgarth in Powys, a farmer began to quarry loose stone blocks from a grassed-over mound in one of his fields. The stone was to provide hardcore for his farmyard. It didn't take long before he came upon some larger stone slabs which lined a hole leading deeper into the mound. Within this chamber were piles of human bone. Prehistoric burial mound The farmer contacted Hubert Savory, an archaeologist at the National Museum and an expert in prehistoric burial mounds, and Savory came to see the new find as soon as he could. This discovery must have come as a considerable surprise to him as archaeologists had been mapping burial mounds in this part of Wales for generations. Yet here was the largest and best preserved example in Powys — it had been completely missed! An excavation revealed that the mound was a type of tomb in use from around 3,600 BC. It consisted of a rectangular stone mound which widened at its southeast end. Here the walls of the mound bowed inwards to create a forecourt. Piercing the sides of the mound were several stone-lined chambers, like the one the farmer had found. A complete skull The skull, partway through the reconstruction process carried out by Caroline Wilkinson of Dundee University. By the time the excavation finished, the remains of at least six people had been found in the tomb chambers. But the star find was a complete skull — a very rare discovery — which belonged to a man who had died in his mid-20s. The skull reveals no obvious cause of death, although it does tell us something about the man. His teeth were in good condition, but his nasal bones were slightly crooked and he had suffered from an inflammatory scalp disorder. The bones of his skull had also failed to fuse completely — the result of an inherited condition which would have caused him no inconvenience but would have given him a broader forehead than normal for the time, and a dimpled chin. Facial reconstruction The finished face, cast in bronze resin and currently on display in the Origins Gallery of National Museum Cardiff. As a skull, the man's story ends there, but in 2005 Caroline Wilkinson from Dundee University was commissioned to produce a forensic reconstruction of his face. Caroline's work involves taking a plaster cast of the skull and positioning pins on it to indicate the likely depth of flesh at a number of key locations. These depths are based on measurements from the faces of modern people of similar racial type. Clay is then used to build up the layers of muscle, before skin and hair are added. The style of hair cut and facial hair is of course subjective. The figure revealed is startling. This was no hulking cave man; 6,000-year-old man looks as modern as anyone walking the streets today. The people who built this tomb and buried their dead in a pile of bones may have followed cultural traditions that seem strange to us, but they were not primitives. We are not better than them, just different. Article author: Dr Steve Burrow, Earlier Prehistorian, Department of Archaeology & Numismatics, Amgueddfa Cymru
To e or not to e? Mari Gordon, 19 January 2010 A couple of years ago we were being told that everyone was talking about changes to the supply chain. Today the book industry "buzz" is undoubtedly ebooks. In fact, I'd bet that more words are being written about this issue than are being e-read – estimates on the size of the market are still 1%-2%, even in the USA. This first wave of users are the 'early adopters', people who habitually use new technology, whatever it's for.First, there were the usual 'death of the book' noises, which have been emerging every now and then ever since the invention of newspapers (or probably since the invention of moveable type itself). Curiously, the fact that this premise has been discredited several times doesn't stop it re-emerging. In reality books align themsleves fairly quickly and eventually benefit from whatever was meant to sound the death-knell (remember how after VHS videos came out, cinema attendance rose?). The content crosses the platforms, whatever the medium or the technology. Newspapers publish books. Films and tv programmes have tie-ins. And publishers are exploring ways of spreading their content across online, broadcast and print. The online content adds value to the book experience, it's not yet replacing it.Booksellers now have to find a way to maximize on these opportunities, as selling coffee and DVDs isn't the answer (just ask Borders UK – oh, you can't). Some publishers are already blurring the lines, or even eradicating the traditional route to market – booksellers – entirely. Amazon, playing cuckoo in the nest, is simply gobbling up other people's content and selling it packaged as an Amazon product. It buys rights to content and publishes ebooks that can only be read by the ebook reader Kindle – produced by Amazon. The same will be true of the forthcoming Kindle 2. And when you download your book you don't actually own it, you just sort of licence it – if it's deleted or withdrawn you lose access to the content. Imagine buying a new book from Blackwell's only for a bookshop assistant to turn up at your house some time later and take it back! (Actually that wouldn't happen if only because they don't get paid enough to make house calls. Booksellers are among the best qualified, best-informed and worst paid employees anywhere.)The Kindle and other ebook readers are probably the reason ebook reading is still marginal to the market. The reading experience isn't great, as on the whole the screens are smallish and black and white. As pieces of kit they're expensive (average £250-£400) and limited in what they do (no video, for example). In fact most ebook users (53%) are using their laptop instead. Another common complaint is the lack of quality and range of books available. There are only 250,000 titles available for Kindle in the UK (350,000 in the USA, none in Canada); that might sound a lot but over 100,000 new titles are published every year in the UK.For publishers, the pricing is the major issue. We can't for the life of us decide what ebooks should cost. Most existing and potential readers – over 80% - believe ebooks should be cheaper than print books. But, cheaper compared to what? Paperback? Hardback? Book club edition? And should it be available before or after the paperback release? Publishers have already seen supermarkets loss-leading on trade titles, should the value (not price) of their product, brand or author be even further undermined? And then there's the debate over author royalties, which the Society of Authors believe should be higher than the current 15%-20%, given the larger margins available to the publishers.Soon, however (March, actually), a new ereader enters the market. We're going to get the long-awaited 'iPod moment'. Apple are making a press announcement on 27 January, which is expected to end much speculation and say that in March they launch their own ereader. An ereader is already available as one of the thousands of Apps for the iPhone, and it will probably be the kind of multifunctionality and style we expect from Apple that will change the ebook reader landscape, for the better, if more expensive – the Apple version is expected to retail at about admin:edit_field,000. By doing more and doing it better, Apple will bring the 'added value' to the experience that other ereaders haven't. Apple don't launch products until Steve Jobs believes they've got something special. Some years ago he said he wasn't interested in the ereader market – but, a long time ago, he said that about mobile phones… At least one very major publisher, HarperCollins, is already in talks about making ebooks available for the Apple hardware (iSlate?), possibly via iTunes.Of course, there are still the whines of "you can't read an ebook in the bath" and so on; hey - only 6% of us say that the bath is our favourite place to read, so there goes that argument. Sustainability is a more valid concern: I wonder how much carbon we'll using as we charge up our ebook readers, what nasty materials they're made out of and what happens to them all when we thrown them away.Once we get to know and, undoubtedly, love the iSlate, answers will emerge for some of these issues, and publishers can continue their experimenting with multiple, complimentary formats, while hopefully maintaining the true value of creative, high-quality content.
The big chill Chris Owen, 18 January 2010 How the weather has changed since my last blog. Just before Christmas, we were reporting on the warm wet weather and how the bulbs had started to grow early as a result.Since then, temperatures have dropped and snow has fallen all over the country! Most schools have been closed and our young scientists have had the chance to play in the snow. For schools that have been open, it’s been difficult to record, with many reports of ‘frozen thermometers’ or bulbs deep below the snow.So what does all this cold weather mean for our bulbs, farmers and global warming?For the bulbs: If your bulb started to grow before Christmas, it will probably still be the same height today. In other words, it will have stopped growing – until it gets warmer again. Some plants may be damaged by the frost and as a result may not flower – but most should be ok.Farmers from the Really Welsh farm reported: ‘We should have started picking the earliest variety of Daffodils already and they are normally out in the supermarkets by now. If you look at the picture taken on the farm – you will see that they are nowhere near ready for picking. The daffodils that were a week or two ahead at the end of November have not grown at all since before Christmas. This is because Daffodils need temperatures of above 6 degrees in order to grow. If this weather continues we will not have any daffodils for a few weeks.’Is global warming still happening? You could be forgiven for questioning if our planet is warming when it’s so cold outside, but sadly the overall temperature of our planet is still set to rise as carbon dioxide levels continue to increase. Global warming is about the overall temperature of the planet rising. There will always be some colder winters and hotter summers – that’s a natural variation. But when we look at the average temperature of the planet over the last century it is definitely rising and scientists are in no doubt it will continue to rise.For Wales, global warming doesn’t mean more sunshine, but warmer and wetter summers and more erratic weather like flash floods and gales.Daffodils from Taiwan. Here is a picture sent to us from Chao-mei an environmental teacher based in Taiwan. She says: Hello, Professor Plant, Do you know the daffodils have bloomed in Taiwan? It reminds me of the beautiful UK spring. I have shown children in Taiwan how to keep a nature diary by looking at your blog. It’s very helpful. I teach children at the Cheng-long Wetland Education Centre and this is our blog page, it’s only in Chinese sorry.Feed the birds. Visit our woodland blog to see pictures of St.Fagans wildlife in the snow. Plus find out how to help your garden birds to survive this winter or take part in the Big Schools' Birdwatch.Many ThanksProfessor Plant
The Welsh language today 15 January 2010 A success story? Like many minority languages, Welsh has had to struggle for survival. It was one of the first languages to be threatened by the spread of English across the globe. Only a fifth of the population of Wales is able to speak the language. Apart from some very young children, everyone who speaks Welsh in Wales can also speak English. However, in terms of endangered languages Welsh is very much a success story. The 2001 census showed that, for the first time in over a century, the number and the percentage of Welsh speakers are actually increasing. In 1991 there were 508,000 speakers or 18.7% of the population. In 2001 that number had increased to 582,000 speakers, representing 20.8% of the total population. Paradoxes Map showing distribution of Welsh speakers, 2001 census. There are some interesting paradoxes: the regions where there are high percentages of Welsh speakers aren’t necessarily the places where the greatest number of Welsh speakers live. For example, you’re more likely to hear Welsh spoken in the west of the country than in the east. In Gwynedd, 69% of the population are Welsh-speaking, while in Cardiff only 11% can speak the language. However, more Welsh speakers live in the cities and towns than in the countryside and there are more Welsh speakers in the south than in the north. The number of Welsh speakers in Gwynedd, for example, is around 78,000. This is actually less than Carmarthenshire, where only half of the population is Welsh-speaking, but the total number is 84,000. While there has been an increase in the percentage of Welsh speakers in anglicised areas such as Cardiff, there has been a decrease in the number of electoral divisions where over 80% of the inhabitants can speak Welsh. The two main factors that have led to the encouraging upturn in the number of Welsh speakers have been the success of Welsh-medium schools and the growth in the number of adults who are learning the language. For the third time in succession, census results have shown an increase in the number of young people speaking Welsh. 26% of people under 35 can speak Welsh — an increase of 9% since 1991. There are also Welsh speakers living outside Wales. Surveys commissioned by S4C, the Welsh television channel, estimate that there are more than 200,000 Welsh speakers living in England. There is a Welsh colony in the Chubut province of Argentina where some of the descendants of the original 19th-century settlers are bilingual in Welsh and Spanish. Example: a Welsh speaker from Caernarfon Gwil Pritchard introduces himself in Welsh. This is a video clip of Gwil Pritchard, a young Welsh speaker from Caernarfon, Gwynedd in north-west Wales speaking in his local dialect. Although he is bilingual in English and Welsh, Welsh is still very much the majority language of the community in which he lives. In the next chapter you can hear him talk about his linguistic background and dialect differences between Caernarfon and nearby Bangor, with a translation provided in English. Known as ‘Cofi’ Welsh, the speech of Caernarfon town is a rare example of a Welsh-language urban dialect. Caernarfon Welsh — an urban dialect Gwil Pritchard talks about Caernarfon Welsh. I grew up in Caernarfon. The language of the home was Welsh. That was true of the area around Caernarfon too. The people we knew in that area, friends and family, they all spoke Welsh. The same thing was true in the schools too — primary schools, secondary school, everything was in Welsh. Living in Caernarfon, you get the feeling that in a way it’s a language of its own. Just the accent and the little words you use are different to other places. Other people notice that too, when you talk to them. The difference between Bangor and Caernarfon to start with. They’re only nine miles apart, but in Bangor they’re famous for their 'ayes', because they say 'aye' after everything. In Caernarfon it’s 'ia' after everything. And when I say after everything, I mean everything. This is the kind of thing people say — “You going out tonight?” – instead of replying 'ia', they’d have to say “'Ia, ia?'”
From Wales to New Zealand Dafydd James, 13 January 2010 As you may have seen reported in the press, I have decided to take up the post of Chief Executive at the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. It has been far from easy to reach this decision for a variety of personal and professional reasons; and, to say that it represents a big step would be something of an understatement.It has been a privilege to serve as Director General of Amgueddfa Cymru. During this time, I have truly come to appreciate how integral culture is to Wales's national psyche and how we should never lose sight of its importance in underpinning Welsh society and shaping the nation’s future. Our recent work regarding the positive contribution our museums make to Wales highlighted this fact, and we are committed as an organisation to working with other cultural organisations in Wales to take this research forward. Wales has strong cultural assets, and there is a job to be done in turning these into a more distinct brand and marketing them more effectively, both within Wales and beyond. There is a real danger, particularly during recession, of thinking that it’s not worth worrying about culture but it is incredibly important to our country and our economy.I am excited about the challenges and different perspectives that I will face in this new role, but undoubtedly my approach will be shaped by my experiences here in Wales and Northern Ireland. Museums can't shy away from telling national stories, no matter how intricate or controversial they may be, and Te Papa is world famous for its innovative approach to demonstrating how culture and community memory has moulded the history and identity of New Zealand's communities.I won't be leaving immediately. Over the next six months, I will continue to update this blog and look forward to remaining involved with a variety of projects including St Fagans and the redevelopment of the West Wing.
