BBC Science/Nature has picked up on the occurrence of red ochre dating back 90k years at Qafzeh cave, Israel (after a recent article in Current Anthropology). Associated with burials, the pigment is taken to indicate symbolic and ritual thought (red=dead). The typical argument then goes that this is a momentous leap in human evolution. And…
Author: Michael Shanks
Ben Cullen
Ben Cullen died eight years ago today in Cardigan, Wales. He was only 31. He had the same birthday as my daughter Molly; died on my parents wedding day. He was a great friend. Ben’s big idea was that biological organisms and things are not always as radically different as we usually hold. Viral phenomena…
chaos – thinking hypertext – and how place is such an indeterminable category
My class on Eight Great Archaeological Sites in Europe has delivered its site reports in our wiki Traumwerk. They write about Stonehenge and Tell el Amarna, Olympia, Pompeii, Knossos and Monte Polizzo. Their interests appropriately go all over the place and are very difficult to contain. This collaborative hypertexting (once people get their heads round…
Modernism/modernity – an archaeological glossary
Winding up the paper with Bill Rathje and David Platt on the perfume of garbage. Here is something I wrote for the introduction to the special issue of Modernism/Modernity. We have outlined what may be called the duplicity of the archaeological object and have tracked aspects of some archaeological modernisms that work upon this duplicity,…
Three windows
A wonderful new project is on its way from Abram for our experimental work on cultural information and databases. It is a system that displays on your screen and records (for future playback) a random selection of three items (in three browser windows) from a cultural database such as our wiki Traumwerk. What associations will…
Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory
Conference – Bristol UK – encounters between past and present CHAT – Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory – great new project starting in a conference that wants archaeologists to think – archaeology merging more with the study of contemporary material culture. As long as it is realized that materiality only makes sense in terms…