Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter,…
archaeological imagination
Graflex Speed Graphic 1947 – media archaeology
I have decided our lab needs to take seriously the materiality of media. Not just the picture – but its texture, style, feel, ambience, aura, substrate – and its instrumentality – how it came to be made, by what means, agency, mechanism. So I have been buying old cameras. The Graflex Pacemaker Speed Graphic arrived…
extreme archaeology
Cornelius has put me on to a new archaeology TV series in the UK –Extreme Archaeology – from Channel 4. It runs 20 June to 8 August – eight programs. These are the people that brought you Time Team – the archaeologists who tackle a site in a weekend. Here they are to tackle sites…
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…
mass producing the past
The Cultural VR Lab at UCLA this week reached the Humbul Humanities Hub – the definitive portal for online resources in the humanities. There’s a lot here – many ancient sites and places (they like ancient Rome) reconstructed in that clean look of rendered architectural models. And they all look the same … Truly, and…
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….