Sarah Aitchison

@saraha73.bsky.social

Archives and cocktails. Mainly cocktails, to be honest.

hello from Nantes where it is 38 degrees and I am finding out that it may in fact be possible for me to feel so warm I don't actually enjoy drinking a little glass of wine on a terrace, something I didn't believe was scientifically possible

Some stray thoughts on gap-filling. Take them for what they are 1. Gaps in archives are not like rips in clothing; they don't have a well defined and wholly known, or in the broadest sense wholly knowable, shape or extent. You can't cut a patch for them or fill them with putty and smooth them over.

Peter Whitewood@pwhitewood.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Rebranding a hallucination as a ‘critical confabulation’ that can fill archival gaps is a big no from me.

Here’s an ancient amber bear to wish you a happy weekend! Carved some 10,000 years ago, it washed up on a beach at Fanø in Denmark from a submerged Mesolithic settlement under the North Sea. National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen 📷 by me

My photo shows a small figurine of an amber bear carved some 10,000 years ago during the Danish Mesolithic period. The bear is seen in profile facing right. The legs are incomplete. The ears, muzzle, and mouth are defined. The figurine is displayed on a small metal stand. The display lighting shines on the bear’s head and neck enhancing the translucence of the orange coloured  amber. The neck of the bear has a polished groove suggesting it was once suspended on a cord. Length 6.5cm.

It was found in 1991 on a west coast beach of the Danish North Sea island of Fanø.

It is one of a small number of amber animal figurines from the Baltic Sea region which have been assigned to the Mesolithic period by means of a typo-chronological approach.