Update: December 2022 – slow archaeology

“Our brains aren’t designed for multitasking”, my dear friend Cliff Nass, mathematician, cognitive scientist and psychologist, warned me a good long while ago – and he’d written a book about it! “It will slow you down and cloud your reasoning.” OK — I’m still working on the same big three projects as back then. But…

Studio update – Spring 2022

This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…

sampling and re-presentation

Sampled pigments from mine tailings. Amelia Colliery, Shankhouse, Cramlington, Northumberland UK. Closed 1938. One of many coal mines in south east Northumberland. The pit heap was notorious for its internal burning – hence the red and orange oxides. Non-representation. Post-phenomenology. Part of project Borderlands – [Link]

Thomas the Rhymer

Thomas of Ercildoune and the tower at Bemersyde. Project Borderlands – [Link]. In the wake – Walter Scott, Wizard of the North – 1831 – [Link]. Durat Opus Vatum – Thomas Percy 1765.

property, legacy, heritage, and a case for connoisseurship

Project Borderlands – [Link] More reflections on the entanglement of property and colonialism, taste and upbringing, class and inequality. [Link] [Link] [Link] In the early 1700s Admiral George Delaval, wealthy from a career in the Royal Navy, diplomatic service and from overseas investments, bought his old family estate from an impoverished cousin. He hired Sir…

decolonizing the museum

Another contribution to an ongoing discussion at Stanford around the future of Classics and the Humanities [Link]. Colonial loot In 1897 a British military force burned and looted, murdered their way through the capital city of the kingdom of Benin in west Africa. It was another dreadful act aimed at securing political and economic control…