Fragment of a fresco panel with a meal preparation, Roman, c. 1. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy the Getty’s Open Content Program.
• “This is the most significant early medieval female burial ever discovered in Britain. It is an archaeologist’s dream to find something like this.” (The Guardian)
• The history of The Silver Palate Cookbook. (Eater)
• “Evergreen conifers are among our oldest tree species. Picture a serene triceratops crunching on a pine tree and you won’t be too far off. Maybe all those years on the planet, surviving radical changes in climate and epochs of mega and mini-fauna, is part of why we attribute to firs characteristics like perseverance and endurance.” (NewYorker.com)
• On the missing arms of the Venus de Milo: “There was no real evidence for most of this. It was a hunch, and a rather bizarre one at that. But that was how archaeology worked and no one saw any reason to disagree.” (History Today)
• Secret talks regarding the Elgin Marbles. (Artforum)
• “Armored dinos may have used their tail clubs to bludgeon each other.” (Science News)
• “After an eight-year effort to recover DNA from Greenland’s frozen interior, researchers say they’ve managed to sequence gene fragments from ancient fish, plants, and even a mastodon that lived 2 million years ago.” (MIT Techonology Review)
• “The Texas Rangers Bicentennial Is a Time to Reflect, Not Celebrate Mythology.” (Texas Monthly)
• P.G. Wodehouse, lovable hack. (Gawker)
• The history of hiding and erasing abortion access in America. (n+1)
• This week in obituaries: Bob McGrath, Kirstie Alley, Julia Reichert, Bernadette Mayer, Alan Jinkinson, Meg Wynn Owen, Peter Cooper, Hamish Kilgour, Nick Fisher, Mills Lane, George Herring, Pablo Milanés, William Hammond, Dominique Lapierre, Rodney Peppé, Jim Stewart, Francesc Vendrell, John Prados, Jim Kolbe, and Nick Bollettieri.