Second session tonight of the new course for Stanford Continuing Studies – seeing how the ideas in my new book come across to a live audience. [Link] Last week I set the scene with the accounts of origins that we accept as lying behind human history: revolutionary events precipitating the emergence of modern humans, agriculture,…
archaeology
interbreeding Neanderthals?
Great story in the Washington Post a couple of days ago – Caveful of Clues About Early Humans. Archaeologists have been exploring an almost inaccessible cave in Romania, diving through icy underground sumps and making dizzying vertical climbs for the sake of a collection of fossil human remains washed into the cave 35,000 years ago….
“The massacre of Mesopotamian archaeology”
More reports of the damage done to cultural heritage in the Middle East in The Daily Star (Lebanon) NASIRIYA, Iraq: In the southern Iraq desert, the standing structures of ancient archaeological cities dot the horizon – majestic monuments to times long gone.? Untouched for thousands of years, historic temples, palaces, tombs and entire dead cities…
augmenting past realities – and a connection with artificial intelligence
How should we reconstruct the past? Is the ideal Virtual Reality and photorealistic simulation? A CGI (pre)history? Under the supposition that this would be like it was back then? My line is that this would be the death of the past. It forgets the material ruin, the archaeological condition that is our cultural and historical…
Apparatus of Scholarship
Thanks to the many friends and colleagues who have emailed me or commented on my piece about Jennifer Wallace’s new book Digging the Dirt – and particularly Jennifer for responding so thoughfully. [Link] The book is well-written and a good read. But Jennifer, I complained, doesn’t indicate her sources and complementary discussion of her topic…
the archaeological imagination
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,…