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…
cultural politics
Heritage — making futures
A critical-heritage complement to the Janus Maneuver – [Link] More notes on futures studies. A second component to the same conclusion: that working with the past is a way of making futures. Convergence — the “Janus Maneuver” and heritage futures In a recent post I made the case for “The Janus Maneuver” [Link] — that…
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…
Tony Harrison — poet, playwright, radical Classicist
Poet and playwright, inspiration and colleague, Tony Harrison died yesterday. Widely acknowledged for his extraordinary poetic and dramatic verse, for his daring translation, he might also be remembered as an archaeological poet of classical antiquity — someone who habitually dug into the strata of Graeco-Roman (and medieval) remains and reworked them not as past history, as…
Archaeological Theatre
Visiting the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen [Link]. What an experience of archaeological theatre! [Link] I discovered the work of Danish neo-classical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 – 1844) at the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge in 1977, when its collection of plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was still housed in my college…
Creative Pragmatics
Our new book — Creative Pragmatics for Active Learning in STEM Education is published this week. Here’s a personal introduction and the first chapter. edited by Connie Svabo, Michael Shanks, Chungfang Zhou, Tamara Carleton with contributions from (in order of appearance): Andrew Pickering, Jesper Bruun, Søren Nedergaard, Gabriele Characiejiene, Martin Niss, Amalie Thorup Eich-Høy, Maiken…