Getting on with AI: a factory in Hesse, Germany

With Sabine (Remdisch) I recently spent time at Rittal’s plant in Haiger, Germany — by some measures the most advanced factory in the world manufacturing equipment enclosures for data centers — and I have been thinking about it ever since. What impressed me was not the automation as such. It was the coordination of temporal…

Becoming stone — death and transfiguration

Stevns Klint, Denmark. Connie Svabo and I are visiting this extraordinary geological site that achieved World Heritage status in 2014. She was part of the team that developed the concept for the superb new visitor center [Link]. Here is a vitalist and hylozoic commentary. Exposed limestone and chalk geology. Højerup old church. The beds of…

Welsh memories in a Cretan landscape

I am on a short visit to Crete. Elounda, Lasithi. Out east. Past the prehistoric ruins of Malia, to where Chris (Witmore) and I drove in the Renault convertible on an impromptu photo shoot. It’s been twenty five years since. Another visit now to liquid commingling times. A dappled landscape I look out over a…

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…