Update – the actuality of the archaeological past

I have contributed little to this site Since 2016. I have been writing (Greece and Rome: a new model of antiquity [Link]), running experiments in fieldwork (Project Borderlands [Link]), exploring applied archaeology (with a host of organizations and corporations), asking questions of the proper role of the academic, the researcher, the scholar. In this contemporary…

materiality of the invisible

Yesterday I had the great honor to open a remarkable exhibition of artworks at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht – multiform institute for fine art, design and reflection Curators: Lex ter Braak, Director of Van Eyck and Huib Haye van der Werf, Head of Artistic Program. The exhibition runs through The Van Eyck Academie, Marres,…

archaeology in the making – biographies

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]…

Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?

Peter Miller’s piece about design thinking and history, more accurately archaeology (because archaeology deals with the past-in-the-present), is in the latest edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?. Here are some highlights that convey a key message – that human centered design and design thinking, about which I…

the culture of the Academy – lessons from design thinking

Across on archaeology.org Chris (Witmore) has taken issue with a comment  Tim Ingold has made about the notion of a symmetrical archaeology.[Link] Symmetrical Archaeology? Like many others, Archaeologists regularly  do all they can to separate what they do from what they study, their work in the present from the past, past artifacts from the stories…

the culture of archaeology

Highway 128 Boonville California Since I moved to the United States a dozen years ago, I have spent a good deal of time in Northern California in a small back woods town called Boonville in the Anderson Valley on Route 128 as it makes its way to the Mendocino Coast. Always an agricultural community, logging,…