spectral stone
The Coquet Valley in Northumberland is fascinating me. [Link] Around Lordenshaws, across from the market town of Rothbury, are many carved rock surfaces, typically associated with farming communities from the fourth to and millennia BCE, maybe earlier and maybe later. Birky Hill I met Stan Beckensall, school teacher in Rothbury, rock art enthusiast, some thirty [...]
haunted media
Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now. They have haunted me ever since. It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again – [...]
post mortem
Photographs taken after the death of a child were popular in the mid nineteenth century. Daguerreotype, 1850s, eastern USA.
Found photos
Fascinating website of photographs found undeveloped in old cameras – [Link - westfordcomp.com] Camera c 1947. (Thanks again to Sam (Schillace) for this link.)
everyday horror and repressive normality
An archaeological sensibility I regularly post about the horror that lies just beneath the surface of things, everyday normality rooted in the uncanny secret lives of things – have a look at Horror and disclosure – a scene of crime clings to its past Joe (Adler) has just sent me word of Die Familie Schneider [...]
rural pursuits – crop circles and prehistory
On the subject of rural relationships [Link] [Link], Tim Dilworth, freelancing for National Geographic TV, contacted me last week about crop circles around Stonehenge – and we are definitely in the season for this kind of thing … Here are some extracts from our conversation. TD There are a couple of points I’d really like [...]
the look of history – New York after 9/11
So just as I was finishing my short comment today about images and the physiognomy of history [Link] under the question – what does historical change look like? Al Bergesen (in Tucson) sent me this picture of the New York Skyline … my son is a photographer and took the attached image of the NY [...]
archaeological intimacy – on looking at everyday things
Meg Butler left a wonderful story as comment on the photos of the apartment in San Jose. Both the pictures and your comments remind me of a small town in Texas that I visited. My first impression was of a dying town. It isn’t on a main highway or interstate, it isn’t touristy in any [...]
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 [...]
media archaeology – Laurence Olivier recycled
Laurence Olivier has been resurrected for a film role. A new movie – Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – uses old footage of Olivier, with dubbed voice, as the villainous leader of killer robots threatening civilization. The style, judging from the trailer, is wonderfully retro and noir – looks very reminiscent of Fritz [...]
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, [...]
the uncanny
There is a sense of the uncanny to the village in Scotland that has been discovered to go back 5,500 years. [Link] Ralph Waldo Emerson: English Traits, Stonehenge: “We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny stones.” (1856). The Uncanny? The return of what is no longer [...]
horror and disclosure – a scene of crime clings to its past
A couple in the UK are suing their home’s former owners for not disclosing that the house had been the scene of a murder twenty years ago. [Link] Dr Samson Perera, a dental biologist at Leeds University UK, murdered his adopted daughter, Nilanthie, in 1985 and buried the dismembered body around the house and garden. [...]
