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…
archaeology
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,…
Doug Bailey’s new book – prehistoric figurines
Doug’s book on prehistoric figurines is now in production.[Link to Routledge] This is the blurb Prehistoric Figurines is a radical new approach to one of the most exciting but poorly understood artefacts from our prehistoric past. The book explores the ways that people use representations of human bodies to make subtle political points and to…
Exo-Archaeology
Yesterday Bill (Rathje) commented on space junk. [Link] I asked him to say more about garbage and archaeology in space. He reminded me of something that was in a recent article of ours (Michael Shanks, William Rathje and David Platt, “The perfume of garbage: modernity and the archaeological” – last issue of the journal Modernism/Modernity,…
the individual in prehistory
Could Stonehenge Skeletons Be Its Bronze Age Builders? – 24 Hour Museum This is the second (or third) recent attempt to connect individual burials with the making of Stonehenge (see my comments on ). They come from Wessex Archaeology. OK – so let’s accept that people built Stonehenge, not spacemen or giants or wizards. These…
origins of agriculture
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Farming origins gain 10,000 years Humans made their first tentative steps towards farming 23,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. Stone Age people in Israel collected the seeds of wild grasses some 10,000 years earlier than previously recognised, experts say. These grasses included wild emmer wheat and barley, which…