Jacquetta Hawkes and the Personal Past

Christine Finn’s wonderfully sensitive documentary about Jacquetta Hawkes was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 yesterday – [Link] [Link] Truly, a human past. Here are my earlier comments – [Link] Jacquetta Hawkes from Michael Shanks on Vimeo.

Bill Rathje

Bill Rathje died last Friday. Inventor of garbology, pioneer in anthropological approaches to contemporary material culture, expert in ancient civilizations, prescient, daring, and, above all, a great and warm person, larger than life. He had been ill for a long while, but I always thought he’d get better when his doctors found the right medication,…

Jacquetta Hawkes - National Portrait Gallery

Jacquetta Hawkes – antiquarian

This morning Christine Finn interviewed me for her new BBC documentary about Jacquetta Hawkes (1910 – 1996). So much more than an archaeologist, Jacquetta Hawkes was a fascinating latter-day antiquarian. This is why her academic archaeological colleagues tried so hard to make her marginal. And she was a woman. Hawkes was notorious when I was…

hybrid Humanities – Ben Cullen

On the anniversary of the untimely and sudden death of Ben Cullen in 1995. [Link] [Link] [Link] Ben Cullen thought beyond conventional distinctions under a fresh evolutionary notion of humanity as deeply hybrid – material and immaterial, personhood and artifact, species and thing. Humanity: an undecidable, in Derrida’s sense. The lens through which he approached…