More legacies of antiquity, reworkings of what remains. Displacements. Funerary portraits. Loss and the burden of interpretation. I have been posting some photographs of statues from the extraordinary collections in the Glyptotek in Copenhagen. The museum also holds a large collection of funerary reliefs from ancient Palmyra, the oasis city in Syria that once served as…
cultural property
Museum of Classical Archaeology
Plaster casts. Basement, Museum of Classical Archaeology, Peterhouse, Cambridge. 1976. Reprinted 2026. A precocious teenager, student of Classics, I was visiting Cambridge to talk with archaeologist David Clarke. With extraordinary generosity he gave a couple of hours to me to discuss not antiquity, but prehistory, how the field was a corrective and antidote to the…
Statue – at prayer
“Man at prayer”. Egypt. 13th dynasty c1700 BCE. Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
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…
Sycamore Gap — a rhetoric of remains
Landscape with monument. [Link] [Link] One of the most photographed trees in the UK, standing alongside Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, east of Steel Rigg by Milecastle 39, in the northern borders of the Roman Empire. October 2020. In the early hours of September 28, 2023, the tree was cut down by Daniel Graham and Adam…