Engagement through estrangement: Barthes and Brecht visit the prehistoric museum
Engagement through estrangement: Barthes and Brecht visit the prehistoric museum Bear with me…. this might be a long one. Hopefully, I’ll manage to be engaging while discussing engagement! This post draws together responses to recent blog posts about one big thinker (Barthes) and finally gets some thoughts from my undergraduate work about another big thinker … Read more
This Much I Know - Starting a PhD
Reblogged from sophiecoulombeau: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness! It’s that time of year again. The air is crisp, the leaves are falling and York is suddenly thronged with freshers, both undergrads and postgrads – some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, others clearly already suffering from the first of many appalling hangovers. I arrived here in York … Read more
Day of Archaeology post: Mystery, Diversity and the Joy of Archaeology
(THIS POST WAS WRITTEN FOR DAY OF ARCHAEOLOGY 2012 AND WAS POSTED HERE) Human beings are odd beasts. So much more than political animals, our ‘habits’ are so varied that they sometimes seem far from habitual. Capable of action on all scales, from building enormous monuments that take millions of people over many generations to … Read more
Unpacking chronology – why time depth matters to archaeology
I think about time rather too much. The Mesolithic began 400 generations ago – give or take a dozen or so. You could sit hand-in-hand with your mum on your left, and if the process could be continued, you would get around the perimeter of a running track and have a Mesolithic person within reach … Read more
Some thoughts on academia.edu
Academia.edu – The positives Free advertising The search engine optimisation on academia.edu is excellent. Even if your organisation provides you with a profile webspace it is unlikely to rank higher in searches than your academia.edu page. Further, if like many academics today, you aren’t completely defined by the work you do with one institution you … Read more
Archaeology, communities and the public
On a chilly November afternoon in York, archaeologists of many kinds gathered at the University of York’s Department of Archaeology for a half-day conference titled: Archaeology and the material past in the public realm organised by the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP). The event was co-sponsored by York Archaeological Trust.The day’s programme … Read more
Thinking about things – two and a half days at the British Museum
How should we be thinking about deep prehistory? What formats are suitable for what sorts of discussion? Are some formats better suited to engage with ideas or theoretical perspectives while others are more appropriate to presenting data, broad-brushed syntheses, detailed analyses and so on? How should we maintain links across period specialisms and interest in … Read more
Red Earth CHALK
On Sunday 9 October 2011 some friends and I attended Red Earth CHALK at Wolstonbury Hill near Brighton. This performance/installation piece used the landscape of one of the highest hills in the South Downs. The piece drew on the fact that the site has Bronze Age earthworks of various kinds that some archaeologists suspect had earlier … Read more
