An archaeology of thought
I doubted if Daeng would find anything of interest within. An hour later, she was revealing the smallest skeleton I have ever seen.
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Film Review – Apocalypse Now Redux
When they arrived on set, they held a feast that included dancing and chanting that lasted nearly two days. It also included the ritual slaughter of a water buffalo
War Classics: ‘The Face of Battle’
The Vietnam War and associated public distaste for military intervention also provided a challenge as to how the study of warfare was conducted and presented.
Beyond the sea
Humans in the late Palaeolithic lived mainly on the coastline at a time when sea levels were up to 100m lower than they are today, meaning much of the archaeology of this period now lies below the waves.
Excavating the Lowlands and Borders
The Scots borders have it all in terms of archaeological content. Within a discrete area, this column spans the Neolithic through to the post-medieval period
Brigit: Irish goddess turned Christian saint?
She is a goddess of poetry, medicine, and blacksmithing, but there is no mention of the fire that becomes associated with her sainted counterpart.
Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963)
These same people would not hesitate to wear a scarab-ring taken off a dead man’s hand… Their objections – their opinions even – are an offence to science.
Excavating Glasgow and Edinburgh
This was the first evidence for the cult of Mithras in Scotland, and it changed our view of Roman religion on the northern frontier.
On the origins of ‘woke’
Most of us would guess that this was a word of recent coinage, but it first occurred in the lyrics of a 1938 song by the blues singer Lead Belly
Time to do it right
What Lehner’s team found was a far-flung complex of houses, storage galleries, kitchens, dormitories, and offices. The ‘Lost City of the Pyramid Builders’ saw light.
Life and death
The British Museum said that it would continue to use the word ‘mummy’, but would use the name of the mummified person wherever this was known
The 22nd Indo-Pacific Prehistory Congress
Myanmar is a newcomer to the study of South-east Asian prehistory. Twenty years ago, I joined a group of colleagues to visit, at the invitation of the Myanmar government, the first Bronze Age site to be discovered there.
Film Review: Lebanon
Lebanon is a powerful vision of men at war, made real and intense by the fact that we never once move outside the tank, and only see the outside world from the interior.
War Classics – The Guns of August
Tuchman aims to explore how a series of political and military decisions, often based on personal factors, faulty intelligence, or naïve assumptions, gradually escalated tensions to the outbreak of war.’
Detectorists and levelling up the heritage sector
the programme dramatised one of the essential differences between detectorists and archaeologists: the first are interested in objects (preferably ones that are worth a bob or two), the latter in knowledge.
Excavating the Hebrides
the star of the show is undoubtedly Cladh Hallan in the south of the island, famous for its Bronze Age ‘mummies’, the earliest evidence of deliberate mummification found in Britain.
Minerva: cultivating wisdom
A deity of wisdom and war, born fully grown, and armed, from the head of her father Zeus/Jupiter, Minerva – and her Greek counterpart Athena – played an important part in Greek and Roman religion.
Excavating Orkney and Shetland
before I leave the Mainland, I must mention one other site of this era, the stunning Neolithic house at St Ola, just south of Kirkwall… Here was discovered the oldest art yet found on the islands.
Tennyson, Chaucer, and ‘problematic’ poets
The treatment of Tennyson and Chaucer stands as a warning to us all not to adopt similarly reductive techniques in our interpretations of history, heritage, and archaeology.
Becoming an archaeologist
Archaeology is not immune to wider social changes… the #BlackLivesMatter movement focused attention on the colonial pasts of many nations and on the challenges of the post-colonial present.