Skip to main content

Home/ Indie Nation/ Group items tagged weapon

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
John Lemke

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female | Tor... - 0 views

www.tor.com/...e-viking-warriors-proof-swords

identification viking warriors female 2014 indienationnews

shared by John Lemke on 04 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • By studying osteological signs of gender within the bones themselves, researchers discovered that approximately half of the remains were actually female warriors, given a proper burial with their weapons.
  • I'm a historian who studies burial in the early middle ages, and the burial of women with weapons is one of my specialties! I'm in the process of publishing research about a woman buried with a spear in the 6th century, and am excited to see this important topic being discussed here outside the ivory tower at Tor.com.
  • The key thing to note is the word 'settlers': the article is arguing that women migrated from Scandinavia to England with the invading Viking army in the 9th century. Several of these women, the article notes, were buried with weapons, but they are still far outnumbered by the armed men. Most of the women settlers mentioned in the study were buried with 'traditional' female outfits: brooches that held up their aprons.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Archaeologists have been using bones to identify the biological sex of skeletons for the past century, but when burials were found which didn't fit their notions of 'normal,' they tended to assume that the bone analysts had made a mistake. This is not entirely unreasonable, because bones are often so badly decomposed that it is impossible to tell the sex of the person. But I can point to cases where the bones clearly belong to a woman, and the archaeologists insisted that it had to be a man because only men were warriors. That's modern sexism plain and simple, and bad archaeology. But thankfully, archaeologists in recent decades have become aware of this problem, and as a result, more and more women are showing up with weapons!
  • But women with weapons are still a minority, usually fewer than 10% at any given cemetery.
  • First, we're just talking about graves (because that's what survives for archaeologists to dig up). Just because a woman is buried in an apron, does not mean she wasn't a warrior before she died. There was no rule (as far as we know) that warriors had to be buried with their weapons.
  • Second, we can't be sure that everyone buried with a weapon was a warrior. We find infants buried with weapons sometimes; they clearly weren't fighters (though perhaps they would have been had they grown up?). Weapons were powerful ritual objects with lots of magic and social power, and a woman might be buried with one for a reason other than fighting, such as her connection to the ruling family, ownership of land, or role as priestess or magical healer.
John Lemke

Tear Gas Is A Banned Chemical Weapon, But US Lobbying Made It Okay For Domestic Use... ... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...tic-use-boy-do-we-use-it.shtml

gas banned chemical weapon 2014 indienationnews law legal

shared by John Lemke on 19 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Years later, there was a push to officially renounce the use of chemical weapons in war, which became the chemical weapons treaty... but it included exceptions for domestic use.
  • I frankly think that we don't know much about the long-term effects, especially in civilian exposure with kids or elderly or people in the street who might have some kind of lung disease already. There's very few follow-up studies. These are very active chemicals that can cause quite significant injury, so I'm concerned about the increased use of these agents. [....] I'm very concerned that, as use has increased, tear gas has been normalized. The attitude now is like, this is safe and we can use it as much as we want.
John Lemke

Feds confiscate investigative reporter's confidential files during raid | The Daily Caller - 0 views

dailycaller.com/...confidential-files-during-raid

2013 reporter indienationnews seizure yourrights privacy raid legal law due+process

shared by John Lemke on 26 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A search warrant obtained by TheDC indicates that the August raid allowed law enforcement to search for firearms inside her home.
  • The document notes that her husband, Paul Flanagan, was found guilty in 1986 to resisting arrest in Prince George’s County. The warrant called for police to search the residence they share and seize all weapons and ammunition because he is prohibited under the law from possessing firearms. But without Hudson’s knowledge, the agents also confiscated a batch of documents that contained information about sources inside the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, she said.
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20▼ items per page