Julian Thomas (Manchester University) and Mike Pearson (Wales, Aberystwyth) were the opponents in the defence of Jonna (Ulin) and Fiona’s (Campbell) dissertation in Gothenburg (see my blog entry for June 11). Something has been bugging me since then about Julian’s criticisms of their work. Jonna and Fiona make a basic proposition that archaeology is performance….
ruins and remains
the individual in prehistory
Could Stonehenge Skeletons Be Its Bronze Age Builders? – 24 Hour Museum This is the second (or third) recent attempt to connect individual burials with the making of Stonehenge (see my comments on ). They come from Wessex Archaeology. OK – so let’s accept that people built Stonehenge, not spacemen or giants or wizards. These…
the conservation of transience
Fascinating piece of restoration highlighted by Architecture Week 2004 | June 18 – June 27 Organised and Managed by Arts Council England Long before upstart trader Nick Leeson put the boot into Barings Bank by secretly running up more than $1bn of liabilities, financial difficulties had scuttled one of the key assets of the bank’s…
counterfactuals and fakes
– the implications of the question “what if … ?” The ancient historians Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel are two colleagues of mine at Stanford. “Who killed Harry Field?” Ian sees himself as a social scientist of the ancient world – building models of how antiquity worked, models that are general enough to apply beyond…
BorderLine Archaeology
In Sweden, Gothenburg, for Fiona Campbell and Jonna Ulin, defending their joint PhD Dissertation, Borderline Archaeology. Fiona on Labyrinths; Jonna on family archaeology. And performance to deal with both. A remarkable combination And manifested also in a great web site – where you can get the book. This is a site that aims to bridge…
media archaeologies – Iraq
Jack (Mitchell) in my Classics Department here at Stanford came out with a great point about all the imagery of abuse coming out of Iraq. [Link] The digital image has a material force – the image itself, maybe borrowing its authority from the materiality of analogue photography, affects. The image is pre-discursive – that is,…