The Boston Globe is running a piece today about “Disaster Archaeology”[Link] When Richard Gould, an archaeologist at Brown University, took a walk in Lower Manhattan in October 2001, his trained eye fixed on a gravelly dust strewn on dumpsters and fire escapes that cleanup crews had missed. Looking closer, he saw that the coating contained…
cultural politics
origins
16 March – I made a comment about the discovery of the earliest human symbols. My old friend Cornelius Holtorf is surely right to point out that this story of “first occasion” belongs with a metanarrative of “origins”. The story – this was where things first began to look like they are today. The problem…
Athens Olympics – archaeology and ideology
Of course, many archaeologists and classicists cannot resist this years Athens Olympics – pressed into service, celebration and self promotion. The New York Times ran an article on March 9 under the title When the games began: Olympic archaeology. Richard Martin put me onto it. The International Herald Tribune ran the same yesterday as Olympics:…
the (new) archaeological intellectual
K. Kris Hirst runs the archaeology guide at about.com. As well as the usual stuff, she also has a series of curiously eclectic quotes on archaeological themes. The one posted yesterday, Quote 25, was Keith Bassett on the new intellectual, from an article in Environment and Planning 1996. A sound, if familiar, comment on the…
art market dirty dealings
It was the way the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York described its plans for 57,000 square feet of extended gallery space that caught my eye: “We have a sacred obligation to put this material on view,” said museum director Philippe de Montebello [BBC link] He is talking about 5000 Graeco-Roman artifacts, currently in…
manifesting archaeology
Joe Moore, retired photographer, is shedding light on California’s contradictory history. With a 132k dollar grant administered by the state library, Joe, librarians and archivists are gathering letters, family documents, court records, songs and photographs, about 800 documents, for an internet archive about slavery in California – the state that likes to think it entered…
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