more on those items from Blombos Cave – a case for scepticism 75 000 year old shells claimed as beads – Blombos Cave, South Africa I was arguing a few days ago on 17 April [Link] that the case for these shells being evidence of a modern human mentality was fragile, to say the least,…
posts
media archaeology – Prelinger’s story
Warren at Stockstock has pointed me to the great story of how Rick Prelinger came to start building his archive of ephemeral film – the unofficial, the everyday, the ignoble, the detritus, the humble [Link] Meantime also have a look at some of the movies made at last years Stockstock festival out of old media…
romantic pasts and archaeological crimes
There has been an increase in the theft of ancient artefacts from Dartmoor, a fabulous ancient landscape in the UK, reports the BBC. So the Dartmoor National Park Authority have started implanting electronic RFID tags in the stones themselves to mark and track stone crosses and troughs in their jurisdiction. This time though it is…
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…
telemediated mythology
Dial M For Manchester – community art project – (area) code – a project in material monumentality and the (archaeological) layering of social time and memory tied to new media technologies … [Link to (area) code] If this comes off it will be fascinating.
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…