English Heritage, the government agency reponsible for managing the historic environment in the UK, has posted a web diary of a fascinating survey done last November of Dunstanburgh Castle in the north of England. [Link] This is one of my favorite places. I have been visiting, photographing, teaching and writing about it for as long…
Author: Michael Shanks
origins
16 March – I made a comment about the discovery of the earliest human symbols. My old friend Cornelius Holtorf is surely right to point out that this story of “first occasion” belongs with a metanarrative of “origins”. The story – this was where things first began to look like they are today. The problem…
obsessions with who did it first
“Early human marks are ‘symbols’” – a BBC report headline today. A series of parallel lines engraved in an animal bone between 1.4 and 1.2 million years ago may be the earliest example of human symbolic behaviour. University of Bordeaux experts say no practical process, such as butchering a carcass, can explain the markings. But…
designing text
I want to pick up a comment or rather link that Sam left on the Blather site entry – to Eric Benson’s blog. Archaeological text generation – Markov chains … The official definition of a markov chain is: A model of sequences of events where the probability of an event occurring depends upon the fact…
sense of place – matters of resolution and augmented reality
Phil and Peter have come across the California coastline site. High resolution aerial images, overlapped so you can travel the length of California’s coast. Tied to a map too. They were commenting on the effect of presence the site and images achieve. Not an effect of “being there” – but being able to see so…
the uncanny
There is a sense of the uncanny to the village in Scotland that has been discovered to go back 5,500 years. [Link] Ralph Waldo Emerson: English Traits, Stonehenge: “We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny stones.” (1856). The Uncanny? The return of what is no longer…