Sepp’s book (see yesterday) has got me thinking again about presence and liveness. It is that temporal issue at the heart of archaeological experience – being there, in the presence of the past. Mike Pearson and I circled around this in our long collaboration on theatre/archaeology. A label we adopted because it suggests associations, rather…
Author: Michael Shanks
the body and presence – uncanny things
What meaning cannot convey Two seven hundred year old mummies found in Peru – reported in the Sydney Morning Herald on 25 February [Link] A man of about 35 and a boy of 5. The man had one eye open and “you can see his eyeball. It’s perfectly preserved.” When the workers moved the body,…
horror and disclosure – a scene of crime clings to its past
A couple in the UK are suing their home’s former owners for not disclosing that the house had been the scene of a murder twenty years ago. [Link] Dr Samson Perera, a dental biologist at Leeds University UK, murdered his adopted daughter, Nilanthie, in 1985 and buried the dismembered body around the house and garden….
art market dirty dealings
It was the way the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York described its plans for 57,000 square feet of extended gallery space that caught my eye: “We have a sacred obligation to put this material on view,” said museum director Philippe de Montebello [BBC link] He is talking about 5000 Graeco-Roman artifacts, currently in…
new guide to the discipline
Just out – Blackwell’s Companion to Archaeology. An academic guide. I did the chapter on politics and archaeology. The argument is the one I first made back in the 1980s, when it was deeply unfashionable, that archaeology is a contemporary project, and archaeologists don’t discover the past, they work on what is left. Here is…
Tolkein, world building, and archaeological memes
Last month I was thinking about archaeological antecedents for the Tolkein movies. The visualization of the books was very reminiscent, for me at least, of northern European prehistory. OK so Tolkein was immersed in epic sagas. And the design team clearly complemented the conceptual design with details drawn from archaeological finds, most notably Sutton Hoo,…