Jacquetta Hawkes - National Portrait Gallery

Jacquetta Hawkes – antiquarian

This morning Christine Finn interviewed me for her new BBC documentary about Jacquetta Hawkes (1910 – 1996). So much more than an archaeologist, Jacquetta Hawkes was a fascinating latter-day antiquarian. This is why her academic archaeological colleagues tried so hard to make her marginal. And she was a woman. Hawkes was notorious when I was…

hybrid Humanities – Ben Cullen

On the anniversary of the untimely and sudden death of Ben Cullen in 1995. [Link] [Link] [Link] Ben Cullen thought beyond conventional distinctions under a fresh evolutionary notion of humanity as deeply hybrid – material and immaterial, personhood and artifact, species and thing. Humanity: an undecidable, in Derrida’s sense. The lens through which he approached…

Olivier – Le sombre abîme du temps

Laurent Olivier’s wonderful book Le sombre abîme du temps has just appeared in translation (as The dark abyss of time: memory and archaeology) – [Link] Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces, that presence is filled with the past, that the future…