presence and liveness

Sepp’s book (see yesterday) has got me thinking again about presence and liveness. It is that temporal issue at the heart of archaeological experience – being there, in the presence of the past. Mike Pearson and I circled around this in our long collaboration on theatre/archaeology. A label we adopted because it suggests associations, rather…

Ben Cullen

Ben Cullen died eight years ago today in Cardigan, Wales. He was only 31. He had the same birthday as my daughter Molly; died on my parents wedding day. He was a great friend. Ben’s big idea was that biological organisms and things are not always as radically different as we usually hold. Viral phenomena…

archaeology needs bold science

A seminar with Bjørnar Olsen and and Chris Witmore at Stanford Archaeology Center. Our title Innocence regained? Is there a new consensus in archaeology? An alternative case for bold thinking. I wrote Social Theory in Archaeology and Reconstructing Archaeology back in the 1980s partly because I was so disenchanted with archaeological thinking – we wanted…