K. Kris Hirst runs the archaeology guide at about.com. As well as the usual stuff, she also has a series of curiously eclectic quotes on archaeological themes. The one posted yesterday, Quote 25, was Keith Bassett on the new intellectual, from an article in Environment and Planning 1996. A sound, if familiar, comment on the…
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everyday mess
Philip has pointed me at blather – an extraordinary concatenation of fragments of text – the remains of thoughts, imputed conversation, remarks, ruminations, pontifications – the mess of everyday discourse … As Philip puts it Basically, you take a dictionary and throw out the definitions. Then you let everybody define the words themselves. Then make…
mass producing the past
The Cultural VR Lab at UCLA this week reached the Humbul Humanities Hub – the definitive portal for online resources in the humanities. There’s a lot here – many ancient sites and places (they like ancient Rome) reconstructed in that clean look of rendered architectural models. And they all look the same … Truly, and…
photoblogs
Archaeology shares a great deal with photography. Particularly time and a temporality of actuality. Here is how I descibe it in my wiki entry on the archaeological (also mentioned on 10 December). Four archaeological temporalities: Recollection It is not only that archaeologists gather fragments and build collections. Like memory, the work of archaeology is re-collection…
how the copy constitutes the original
Gavin Lucas was with us this week, talking about archaeological fieldwork. He described to us how archaeologists use mimetic machines for copying the past into the present. This is how I would put it – At the heart of our archaeological interests is the archive – we collect, codify, make and manage inventories. It is…
quotidian flux
Scanning the excellent detritus.net – dedicated to pratctices of recycling culture – I came across Mark Napier’s work. Barbie dolls (have a look!), found imagery in New York, and “negative space – an attempt to scan my entire appartment”. OK – it doesn’t get very far and is a little too whimsical for me, but…