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,…
the academy
the mission of contemporary Classics
– some thoughts on reading Sue Alcock … The past is manipulated by people who come after. Memories and re-collections – traces of the past – help make us what we are. The importance of the past is so clear in the spate of books and articles about the ancient Olympics and their relation to…
Julian Thomas and the dangers of scholasticism
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….
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…
what Iran means to archaeologists
Guardian UK – Chicago’s Oriental Institute woos Iran with return of ancient tablets Three hundred ancient clay tablets which helped to provide information on the languages and daily life in the Persian empire 2,500 years ago are on their way back to Iran. The tablets are being returned by the oriental institute of the University…
collaborative archaeology – the Severan Marble Plan of Rome
The BBC have picked up on Stanford’s Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project.[Link][Stanford Report – details] The Forma Urbis Romae, also known as the Severan Marble Plan, was a giant marble map of ancient Rome that hung on a wall in a building, the Templum Pacis, near the forum. It measured 60 feet wide by 45…