Athens Olympics – archaeology and ideology

Of course, many archaeologists and classicists cannot resist this years Athens Olympics – pressed into service, celebration and self promotion. The New York Times ran an article on March 9 under the title When the games began: Olympic archaeology. Richard Martin put me onto it. The International Herald Tribune ran the same yesterday as Olympics:…

the (new) archaeological intellectual

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…

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…