More on what we leave behind in Wired magazine’s August issue – and how tracks through cyberspace can be crucial clues to who we are and were – Raising the dead A water-well digger found the body. It was 1968, and Wilbur Riddle was tromping around Eagle Creek, off Route 25 in backwoods Kentucky, scavenging…
ruins and remains
forensic archaeology
At the scene of crime anything might be relevant. An item today from The Scotsman Sue Black was a teenage schoolgirl in Inverness when Renee MacRae and her son Andrew vanished in November, 1976. Yesterday, the renowned forensic anthropologist was back near her home city hoping to help solve one of Scotland’s most enduring mysteries…
the mystery of the locked room
In a piece called Three Rooms – published in the Journal of Social Archaeology June 2004 issue and as a traumwerk/wiki, I tracked the case of David Rodinsky. He walked out of his one room apartment in Whitechapel, London one morning in 1969, and never returned; the door was unlocked over a decade later to…
the archaeological imagination
Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter,…
exo-garbology
A couple of recent entries have been on the connections that run through garbage, science fiction, space exploration and archaeology. [Link] [Link] Here is more from Bill (Rathje) on exo-garbology – connections with the pioneering spirit of exploration, and memorabilia. A piece of his from 1999. On June 17 this year (1999), Air Force trackers…
Exo-Archaeology
Yesterday Bill (Rathje) commented on space junk. [Link] I asked him to say more about garbage and archaeology in space. He reminded me of something that was in a recent article of ours (Michael Shanks, William Rathje and David Platt, “The perfume of garbage: modernity and the archaeological” – last issue of the journal Modernism/Modernity,…