It apparently took some seriously bad mojo to go up against 17th-century witches. According to the Sept.-Oct. Archaeology magazine, U.K. researchers opened and analyzed the contents of a rare intact “witch bottle,” which was buried to ward off spells. Inside were “bent pins, a nail-pierced heart made of leather, fingernail clippings, belly-button lint, and hair, all swimming in a bath of 300-year-old, nicotine-tinged urine.” I don’t know about witches, but I’m certainly going to stay away from it.

British Archaeology magazine, which originally reported the witch bottle story, writes in a follow-up that witch bottle beliefs apparently live on in the U.K. and beyond:

A builder wrote to say he had renovated a house in Cardiff, built in 1895, that had witch bottles buried under two of its fireplaces. Even more astonishing, a police inspector in Sebringville, Ontario, Canada, wrote to say he had–just weeks ago–apprehended a man with a plastic bottle containing urine and razor blades, “for protection from bad people.”

Sources: Archaeology, British Archaeology

Image by the Greenwich Foundation, courtesy of British Archaeology.

Abandoned tree houses don’t disappear when kids grow up. Many still exist, not far from residential areas, left as artifacts of youth. Dr. Martin Rundkvist, an archaeologist who writes the blog Aardvarchaeology (part of the ScienceBlogs network) ruminates on the “ruins of childhood” that can be found simply by walking through the woods near people’s homes. Originally posted in 2006, his recent re-post was prompted by another abandoned tree house discovery. In a beautiful blend of science and nostalgia, Rundkvist writes about how the relics now live on as modern-day archaeological discoveries.

(Thanks, BoingBoing.)

—Erik Helin

Image by Chris Darling, licensed under Creative Commons.

 In the Autumn issue of the American Scholar (article not available online) writer Elyse Graham highlights the innovative archeology and chemistry work of Andrew Koh. On the island of Mochlos, near Crete, archaeologists were stumped by a Bronze Age building. They knew it was a factory, but they couldn’t figure out what it made. So they called on Koh, then a chemistry grad student, to do some analysis. Fed up with the time consuming and costly procedures of lab work, Koh started using a Polyvap, a portable machine typically used in food science. Thanks to device, Koh cracked the archaeological mystery, and figured out that the building was a perfume factory. The finding was a key to unraveling other mysteries on the island. Now, after innovating the field of archaeochemistry, Dr. Koh is a classics professor, and he's been teaching his techniques to his fellow scientists. -- Julie Dolan