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…
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Ovidiana — archaeological theatre
Becoming stone [Link] [Link]
Nolan’s Odyssey (3) — the collapse of civilization and the shape of history
Performing the archive — a study in theatre/archaeology In July I posted a response to Nolan’s Odyssey [Link] — an old story, I argued, but not the one that was being talked about. The movie faithfully restages not Homer but a nineteenth-century grand narrative of civilization and its fall. A month of reviews and a…
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (1) – an old story, but not the one that’s being talked about
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…
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…