Replaying Homer — Theatre/Archaeology. Notes on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. The Odyssey, adapted from Homer and directed by Christopher Nolan. Even before its release on July 17, the movie generated much discussion and commentary. Historical accuracy – helmets from the wrong period, Viking ships in the Bronze Age, and an Agamemnon that looks like Batman. Fidelity to Homer’s…
archaeology
Infrastructural imaginaries
Chris Ford and I are in a conference in Cambridge UK. The archaeological imagination applied to urban architecture, planning, design. Hosted by the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, this global conference on Situated Imagination and Imaginaries of Urban Futures brings together over 70 scholars, practitioners, and artists from around the world for a day to…
Welsh memories in a Cretan landscape
I am on a short visit to Crete. Elounda, Lasithi. Out east. Past the prehistoric ruins of Malia, to where Chris (Witmore) and I drove in the Renault convertible on an impromptu photo shoot. It’s been twenty five years since. Another visit now to liquid commingling times. A dappled landscape I look out over a…
Some archaeological notes on futures studies
The Janus Maneuver Hindsight, foresight, and futures studies Everyone, it seems, is a futurist now. Here are some loosely gathered thoughts on why an archaeology of design may be a missing foundation. These are notes – so expect inaccuracies and mistakes of memory (hopefully minor). After Janus – the divine principle of looking both back…
Newsletter — Stanford Archaeology Center
Prospective reflections on 2025-26 Acting with nature — prehistory My new book Archaeologies of Nature: Activating the Archive, written with Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter and Turin, is now complete and in production. Open Access — it will be available as PDF in June 2026. We use an archaeology of artworks to probe human relationships…
An academic gift economy: what Stanford H-STAR and mediaX got right
A reflection after the Danish H-STAR fellowship reunion, University Southern Denmark, Odense, May 22-23 2026 Last weekend I joined a reunion of the Danish researchers — twenty-five or so of us — who had passed through Stanford’s H-STAR fellowship between about 2010 and 2015. It was organized by Connie Svabo, whom I hosted at Stanford…