the uncanny preservation of curse-laden mummies

archaeological archetypes Daily Telegraph | News | Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia This story has it all. High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air. Local officials,…

picking up the pieces – “Disaster Archaeology”

The Boston Globe is running a piece today about “Disaster Archaeology”[Link] When Richard Gould, an archaeologist at Brown University, took a walk in Lower Manhattan in October 2001, his trained eye fixed on a gravelly dust strewn on dumpsters and fire escapes that cleanup crews had missed. Looking closer, he saw that the coating contained…

plotting the past – the first modern humans in South Africa, and a scenario for the first farming villages

A couple of recent press comments about new discoveries have caught my attention because of what they reveal about the way academics build their careers and how archaeological field projects get turned into stories about the past. Basically it comes down to this – archaeologists want their site to be the discovery that will rock…

Athens Olympics – archaeology and ideology

Of course, many archaeologists and classicists cannot resist this years Athens Olympics – pressed into service, celebration and self promotion. The New York Times ran an article on March 9 under the title When the games began: Olympic archaeology. Richard Martin put me onto it. The International Herald Tribune ran the same yesterday as Olympics:…