Høl Strand, Listed, Bornholm, Baltic Sea.
Author: Michael Shanks
Sycamore Gap — a rhetoric of remains
Landscape with monument. [Link] [Link] One of the most photographed trees in the UK, standing alongside Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, east of Steel Rigg by Milecastle 39, in the northern borders of the Roman Empire. October 2020. In the early hours of September 28, 2023, the tree was cut down by Daniel Graham and Adam…
Cloud study with monument
In the wake, John Constable 1821. [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link] Bathing House, Howick Estate, Northumberland UK. Eighteenth-century cottage, remodeled 1813-15.
ripples in deep time
Ripples in the sand of a 330 million year old river delta. Carboniferous deep time. In the distance, the steel boiler of the trawler Tadorne, wrecked in 1913. Howick Burn, Northumberland UK. An archaeological sensibility.
Don Lavigne — archaeological epigram
Epigram — a concept Don Lavigne was on campus last Friday (Nov 21) to give what was a fascinating talk about ancient Greek epigram — short texts inscribed on something, typically a stone, base, offering, tomb, votive dedication, statue. Don didn’t offer a philological account of epigrams simply as texts. Instead he explored a media…
Tony Harrison — poet, playwright, radical Classicist
Poet and playwright, inspiration and colleague, Tony Harrison died yesterday. Widely acknowledged for his extraordinary poetic and dramatic verse, for his daring translation, he might also be remembered as an archaeological poet of classical antiquity — someone who habitually dug into the strata of Graeco-Roman (and medieval) remains and reworked them not as past history, as…