– some thoughts on reading Sue Alcock … The past is manipulated by people who come after. Memories and re-collections – traces of the past – help make us what we are. The importance of the past is so clear in the spate of books and articles about the ancient Olympics and their relation to…
posts – matters of design
Doug Bailey’s new book – prehistoric figurines
Doug’s book on prehistoric figurines is now in production.[Link to Routledge] This is the blurb Prehistoric Figurines is a radical new approach to one of the most exciting but poorly understood artefacts from our prehistoric past. The book explores the ways that people use representations of human bodies to make subtle political points and to…
Greek Olympics?
An intelligent comment today in the NYT on the mismatch between modern and ancient Olympics [Link – “The Way We Live Now: What Olympic Ideal?” – Daniel Mendelsohn (Princeton)] (Thanks to Jody Maxmin for putting me on to this.) Main point – the Greeks were very different to how most people imagine them to be….
Graflex Speed Graphic 1947 – media archaeology
I have decided our lab needs to take seriously the materiality of media. Not just the picture – but its texture, style, feel, ambience, aura, substrate – and its instrumentality – how it came to be made, by what means, agency, mechanism. So I have been buying old cameras. The Graflex Pacemaker Speed Graphic arrived…
exo-garbology
A couple of recent entries have been on the connections that run through garbage, science fiction, space exploration and archaeology. [Link] [Link] Here is more from Bill (Rathje) on exo-garbology – connections with the pioneering spirit of exploration, and memorabilia. A piece of his from 1999. On June 17 this year (1999), Air Force trackers…
Exo-Archaeology
Yesterday Bill (Rathje) commented on space junk. [Link] I asked him to say more about garbage and archaeology in space. He reminded me of something that was in a recent article of ours (Michael Shanks, William Rathje and David Platt, “The perfume of garbage: modernity and the archaeological” – last issue of the journal Modernism/Modernity,…