Biography: Interrogations, Observations, Studies – “BIOS” – is a seminar workshop running this year at Stanford Humanities Center and organized by Anne Duray and Thea De Armond – [Link] Yesterday I shared some thoughts on my collection, with Bill Rathje and Chris Witmore, of conversations with archaeologists – the book Archaeology in the Making [link]…
storytelling and narrative
Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance
Yesterday The Revs Program was at Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance – one of the greatest car shows in the world [Link] Some of our students attended the show as judges to award The Revs Prize for the most historically significant car in the show – a 1963 Porsche 901 prototype belonging to Don and Diane…
genuine simulation
A couple of weeks ago I took a fabulous drive on a rough Montana ranch road in a 1927 Vauxhall with Miles Collier and Murray Smith. The car was the genuine article, but could the drive, in this between-the-wars archetypically English car, be said to be authentic, in the far reaches of Montana and so far from…
matters of authenticity and simulation
Is Disneyland authentic? This is a question I have pondered for a number of years, since I visited what was Eurodisney in 1992 (and explored in my book with Mike Pearson – Theatre/Archaeology – [Link]). It is too easy to say that Disney is superficial, or fantasy, or ideology. Here are a couple of cases…
medium and message – Disney
We are visiting Disneyland – it always fascinates me. Last night – World of Color – a spectacle. Cathedral of Light, Lichtdom – as Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, called his great stagings of the gathering of the people before their leaders (the images above are of Nuremberg in 1936). This is not to say that…
Ben Cullen
On the anniversary of the untimely and sudden death of Ben Cullen in 1995. [Link] [Link] [Link] I dedicated my book, The Archaeological Imagination [Link], published in April, to Ben. It is seventeen years today since he died. Uncanny. I wonder what I would say to him about the book, that might reveal how much…
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