Author: Michael Shanks

midsummer

by Michael Shanks

Fieldwork in the English/Scottish borders. Molly and I were out late this midsummer evening, walking and talking – at Bamburgh, court and capital of the Kingdom of Northumbria in the seventh and eighth centuries. Below us, on the beach, (we found out via Gilbert (Cockton) on Facebook) Alex Braidford was capturing the strawberry moonrise –…

place/event – the Titanic (or not)

by Michael Shanks

Places are always associated with happenings – actualities, potentialities, imaginings, documented or not. place/event Here’s a variation. In 1935-6 the liner RMS Olympic was broken up at Jarrow on the River Tyne, and hotelier Algenon Smart bought the fittings from the First Class dining room for his hotel, the White Swan in Alnwick, Northumberland. The…

narrative fallacy and a fridge magnet

by Michael Shanks

At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Between 1880 and 1890 Vincent Van Gogh produced over 2000 artworks, and, so the story goes, died in poverty and mental illness, never having sold anything. Thereafter his genius was gradually discovered and he was acknowledged as a key figure in the history of art. Tortured and misunderstood…

returning

by Michael Shanks

The past comes back to haunt in all sorts of ways. This is a key feature of the archaeological imagination. It may be something like “this happened here”, or “this was the way it was, and still is”. And, as archaeologists, as all of us do – we return, revisit, rehearse, reiterate, repeat. This familiar…