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
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…
material ironies
The Chapman Family Collection at the Saatchi Gallery in London I love the ironies and humor– they look like old wooden ethnographic fetishes – until you see the MacDonalds logo.
A way of thinking
East End of London. Looking for a house on Princelet Street. Alessandra Lopez Y Royo puts it all this way – archaeology is a way of thinking.
The perfume of garbage
Beginning work with Bill Rathje and David Platt on a paper for a special issue on archaeology and modernism for the journal Modernism/Modernity This is how we begin with the World Trade Center There is something profoundly archaeological about the experience of 9/11 and its aftermath. Less than a month after the attack a meeting…
Looting Baghdad Museum – why we should, or shouldn’t care
We want stories rather than things! Just got the July/August issue of Archaeology Odyssey. Cover – “Rape of an Iraqi museum”Photo – a turbaned head rolling on the floor amidst scattered papers and debris. A headline and image of crime and destruction. We have heard a lot about this in the media since April –…