chorography – then and now

Chorography – a workshop at Durham University July 10 2012 – [Link] Summer fieldwork. I am less focused on the excavations at Binchester this year [Link]. I am pulling together my long-running research into the region – the English Scottish borders. How do you tell of such a place? All that is there, and has…

Old Amsterdam – Café Scheltema

The way things used to be? Talking heritage with Rob van der Laase [Link] – the way the past is cleaned up, filtered, extraneous matter removed – that we might more appreciate a clear narrative – that this did indeed happen here. Here – a remarkable untouched remnant of a meeting place, famously associated with…

this happened here – presence and authenticity in an archaeological sensibility

Gary (Devore) has brought my attention to a remarkable new publication from the Panstwowe Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau [Link] “The Auschwitz Album” or “Lili Jacob Album” comprises about 200 photographs taken by the German SS and depicting the arrival of a transport of Hungarian Jews at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp in 1944. This new collection takes 31…

Ruin memories

I have just received a copy of World Crisis in Ruin; the Archaeology of the Former Soviet Missile Sites in Cuba from Mats Burström, Anders Gustafsson and Håkan Karlsson. Another fascinating archaeology of the contemporary past. The 1962 Missile Crisis is a well-known episode in the Cold War and twentieth-century history. It is documented in…