loss and history’s physiognomy
An elegy for the UK countryside Item in the BBC Magazine. Half a century ago, probably even in the last two or three decades, the UK countryside had a definite purpose. It was essential to the entire country, because it was where much of our food was produced, which meant employment. Today we depend on [...]
the individual in (contemporary pre)history
More on what we leave behind in Wired magazine’s August issue – and how tracks through cyberspace can be crucial clues to who we are and were – Raising the dead A water-well digger found the body. It was 1968, and Wilbur Riddle was tromping around Eagle Creek, off Route 25 in backwoods Kentucky, scavenging [...]
forensic archaeology
At the scene of crime anything might be relevant. An item today from The Scotsman Sue Black was a teenage schoolgirl in Inverness when Renee MacRae and her son Andrew vanished in November, 1976. Yesterday, the renowned forensic anthropologist was back near her home city hoping to help solve one of Scotland’s most enduring mysteries [...]
the archaeological imagination
Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter, [...]
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 [...]
media archaeology – hearing the past again
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Getting back into the groove News of some more fascinating media archaeology in Berkeley – recovering sound from wax cylinders too delicate to touch. Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale and other characters from history may soon be able to speak again, as scientists perfect techniques to recover [...]
Julian Thomas and the dangers of scholasticism
Julian Thomas (Manchester University) and Mike Pearson (Wales, Aberystwyth) were the opponents in the defence of Jonna (Ulin) and Fiona’s (Campbell) dissertation in Gothenburg (see my blog entry for June 11). Something has been bugging me since then about Julian’s criticisms of their work. Jonna and Fiona make a basic proposition that archaeology is performance. [...]
BorderLine Archaeology
In Sweden, Gothenburg, for Fiona Campbell and Jonna Ulin, defending their joint PhD Dissertation, Borderline Archaeology. Fiona on Labyrinths; Jonna on family archaeology. And performance to deal with both. A remarkable combination And manifested also in a great web site – where you can get the book. This is a site that aims to bridge [...]
responsive media – improvisation, neosemy, and synaesthesia
Sha Xin Wei visited our New Media group (Mellon funding) yesterday – Wednesday. He is an old friend of many of the group – did his PhD at Stanford. Is now a part of the Topological Media Lab at Georgia Tech. He was talking about his work on “responsive media”. Particularly with the performance group [...]
the uncanny preservation of curse-laden mummies
archaeological archetypes Daily Telegraph | News | Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia This story has it all. High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air. Local officials, [...]
media and the archaeological witness
- photoshopic abuse in Iraq Sam has put me on to a Salon.com article – A picture is no longer worth a thousand words. “Which photograph of Lance Cpl. Ted Boudreaux and two boys in the desert is the real thing? No one knows for sure, in the age of Photoshop.” Salon journalist Farhad Manjoo [...]
telemediated mythology
Dial M For Manchester – community art project – (area) code – a project in material monumentality and the (archaeological) layering of social time and memory tied to new media technologies … (area) code is a community-centered project created by British artist Jen Southern and mobile communications innovators centrifugalforces. Signs placed online and throughout the [...]
globalization, or what?
Cabo San Lucas, Bahia California Family vacation this week. Some of the concrete building reminds me of southern Europe – the rebar sticking up ready for the second storey when the owners have enough money. But what of the small neighborhood stores here that are the same as those I knew so well in Greece? [...]
making things makes people
Barry (Katz) is presenting the first lecture in his Design History class for the mechanical engineers (ME110). We are having a running conversation (some two years old now) about design – completely agreeing that things make people as he puts it here this morning. The more subtle point holds too – that this dissolves the [...]
the economy of the gift and the concept of the virtual
Phil writes This is an interesting concept – the virtual gift. [Link to slashdot] Digitus1337 writes “Wired has an article up about a new online service known as ‘FunHi.’ You sign up and join a community, and give your fellows gifts, but as Wired has reported, ‘these are not ordinary gifts. They’re purely digital: little [...]
sense of place – matters of resolution and augmented reality
Phil and Peter have come across the California coastline site. High resolution aerial images, overlapped so you can travel the length of California’s coast. Tied to a map too. They were commenting on the effect of presence the site and images achieve. Not an effect of “being there” – but being able to see so [...]
quotidian flux
Scanning the excellent detritus.net – dedicated to pratctices of recycling culture – I came across Mark Napier’s work. Barbie dolls (have a look!), found imagery in New York, and “negative space – an attempt to scan my entire appartment”. OK – it doesn’t get very far and is a little too whimsical for me, but [...]
Garbage – our most intimate relationship with the environment
Bill Rathje and I have a plan, a dream to create a center for garbology. Building on his twenty five years of sifting through garbage and digging land fill sites to show how wrong is our perception of discard and waste. Building on my obsession with matters archaeological. Not just garbage and rubbish. Everything from [...]
the body and presence – uncanny things
What meaning cannot convey Two seven hundred year old mummies found in Peru – reported in the Sydney Morning Herald on 25 February [Link] A man of about 35 and a boy of 5. The man had one eye open and “you can see his eyeball. It’s perfectly preserved.” When the workers moved the body, [...]
manifesting archaeology
Joe Moore, retired photographer, is shedding light on California’s contradictory history. With a 132k dollar grant administered by the state library, Joe, librarians and archivists are gathering letters, family documents, court records, songs and photographs, about 800 documents, for an internet archive about slavery in California – the state that likes to think it entered [...]
sensory memory
The British Library has just launched a new web site devoted to the accents and dialects of the north of England, fast disappearing. Collect Britain, putting history in place. You can listen to recordings made from the 1950s of people talking about everyday life. They are saturated in locality. And just the sounds, intonation, cadence [...]
Archaeologists with attitude
Colin Renfrew in Stanford. Here to join me and Bill Rathje in a conversation about archaeology, for our book Archaeologists with Attitude. Gave a fascinating talk this evening – “The Sapient Paradox: cognitive archaeology from institutional facts to material realities”. He sketched out his interest in what he called material engagements – how people get [...]
Performance research
Canton, Cardiff. Talking with Mike Pearson. Performance practice as research – something that is on the agenda in UK universities. Can theatrical performance (or a novel, or painting) be classed as research? Being there – Tri Bywyd: a work of theatre/archaeology by Brith Gof 1995 Barry Eisler, the novelist and my good friend, came along [...]