Update: December 2022 – slow archaeology

“Our brains aren’t designed for multitasking”, my dear friend Cliff Nass, mathematician, cognitive scientist and psychologist, warned me a good long while ago – and he’d written a book about it! “It will slow you down and cloud your reasoning.” OK — I’m still working on the same big three projects as back then. But…

Studio update – Spring 2022

This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…

fictive realism – Ray Harryhausen’s model making

There’s an exhibition of the stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen running at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – [Link]. I vividly remember first seeing his magical movies in the 60s and 70s. The infamous fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963); Pegasus the winged horse in Clash of the Titans (1981). Paul Noble…

resonating pasts – Alan Moore

In our exploration of historical narrative, Gary Devore and I have been looking at the work of Alan Moore, graphic novelist. Of note is his Voice of the Fire (1996), a concatenation of voices echoing over 6000 years through Northampton, England, his home town. Here are a couple of pages in From Hell (1989-1996) conveying…

Update – the actuality of the archaeological past

I have contributed little to this site Since 2016. I have been writing (Greece and Rome: a new model of antiquity [Link]), running experiments in fieldwork (Project Borderlands [Link]), exploring applied archaeology (with a host of organizations and corporations), asking questions of the proper role of the academic, the researcher, the scholar. In this contemporary…

update – summer 2016

The book on Greece and Rome with Gary (Devore) [Link] is close to being done. We’ve chosen to offer a quite different kind of account of antiquity and we’re delighted with the scope of its underlying model and perspective (archaeological and focused on the topic of membership of body politic). It’s the success of our…