Beltane at Butser Ancient Farm, UK It is May 1 – Beltane. Beltain is the spring festival of the Celtic religion and, like other major Celtic events, was a fire festival: the ‘good fire’ was burnt for purification, for healing, for light, for growth. According to Caesar, the Iron Age Britons would construct huge wicker…
posts – matters of design
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…
trauma and the past
Lunch with Jonathan Greenberg today – Stanford Law School. He specializes in conflict resolution and has a particular interest in national partition in the wake of the withdrawal of imperial powers and decolonisation – Korea, India, Palestine, Vietnam, and, of course, Iran and Iraq. He sees partition and the narratives and feelings it generates as…
the uncanny preservation of curse-laden mummies
archaeological archetypes Daily Telegraph | News | Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia This story has it all. High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air. Local officials,…
archaeology and photography – splinters in the eye
Last Thursday I was commenting on digital manipulation [Link] This got me thinking again about two recent collections of David Carson’s photography – The Book of Probes and Trek. Superficially there is a lot of play in these on focus and resolution – abstraction in a dissolved image, recognition that there may be something in…
more archaeological remediation
– Aperture Magazine It is quite a week for archaeological photography. [Link] [Link] The latest issue of Aperture [Spring 2004] has three photographers who work with remediated, digitally reworked imagery. Bringing together past and present with all sorts of tensions and layerings. Loretta Lux does spooky portraits, very mannered, in an old painterly style of…