English Heritage, the government agency reponsible for managing the historic environment in the UK, has posted a web diary of a fascinating survey done last November of Dunstanburgh Castle in the north of England. [Link] This is one of my favorite places. I have been visiting, photographing, teaching and writing about it for as long…
ruins and remains
designing text
I want to pick up a comment or rather link that Sam left on the Blather site entry – to Eric Benson’s blog. Archaeological text generation – Markov chains … The official definition of a markov chain is: A model of sequences of events where the probability of an event occurring depends upon the fact…
the uncanny
There is a sense of the uncanny to the village in Scotland that has been discovered to go back 5,500 years. [Link] Ralph Waldo Emerson: English Traits, Stonehenge: “We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny stones.” (1856). The Uncanny? The return of what is no longer…
temporal continuity
Britain’s oldest continuously inhabited village (from Stone Pages). Further to the matter of continuity – 5 March 2004 Dreghorn in Ayrshire, Scotland, has been revealed as Britain’s oldest continuously inhabited village after the remains of an ancient settlement were uncovered by builders. North Ayrshire Council granted permission for a development of 53 new houses at…
negative pasts
Earlier today I mentioned an abhorrent positivity in those archaeologies that see the past as mirror to the present and ignore the mess and suffering of history. Here are some comments of mine on negative archaeology from an article with Bill Rathje and David Platt that is about to appear in the journal Modernism/Modernity. It…
everyday mess
Philip has pointed me at blather – an extraordinary concatenation of fragments of text – the remains of thoughts, imputed conversation, remarks, ruminations, pontifications – the mess of everyday discourse … As Philip puts it Basically, you take a dictionary and throw out the definitions. Then you let everybody define the words themselves. Then make…