The Janus Maneuver Hindsight, foresight, and futures studies Everyone, it seems, is a futurist now. Here are some loosely gathered thoughts on why an archaeology of design may be a missing foundation. These are notes – so expect inaccuracies and mistakes of memory (hopefully minor). After Janus – the divine principle of looking both back…
archive 3.0
Newsletter — Stanford Archaeology Center
Prospective reflections on 2025-26 Acting with nature — prehistory My new book Archaeologies of Nature: Activating the Archive, written with Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter and Turin, is now complete and in production. Open Access — it will be available as PDF in June 2026. We use an archaeology of artworks to probe human relationships…
Crystalline Memories of Deep Time
Claus Spangsberg at the Rundetaarn, Copenhagen [Link]. With Connie (Svabo) on the last day of the exhibition – Crystalline Memories of Deep Time. Part of our ongoing collaboration around art-science, research-creation [Link], scholartistry [Link], creative-pragmatics [Link] – and mobilized through FNUG, her lab at University of Southern Denmark [Link], and Studio MS at Stanford [Link]….
Digital Humanities — a zombie concept
This is part of my long-running commentary on the current state and future of the humanities, including what gets called digital humanities. Nudged by a symposium at Stanford There was a symposium at Stanford last week (November 14-15) called “The Futures of Antiquity in an Age of Digital Data and AI”. Credit goes to faculty…
Archaeological Theatre
Visiting the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen [Link]. What an experience of archaeological theatre! [Link] I discovered the work of Danish neo-classical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 – 1844) at the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge in 1977, when its collection of plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was still housed in my college…
Robert Longo’s archaeological sensibility
An exhibition of works by Robert Longo at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art [Link]. Raft at Sea 2016-17 Longo traces photographs in charcoal. Large scale charcoal drawings. Of photographs. Blow-ups — upscaled photographs — traced projections. Iceberg for C.D.F (Caspar David Friedrich), 2015-16; The Western Wall, 2011 (Jerusalem) Stand back and you see the BIG…