In theory: the death of literature
An intelligent feature in The Guardian by Andrew Gallix on Tuesday 10 January. The topic – “we’ve heard it all before” – [Link]. “We come too late to say anything which has not been said already,” lamented La Bruyère at the end of the 17th century. The fact that he came too late even to [...]
Boonville, California
I have been photographing these old apple trees for over ten years now. Relics of an outdated rural economy. Location – Mountain View Road, Boonville, Anderson Valley, northern California. The valley is now increasingly dominated by vineyards.
Ruin memories
I have just received a copy of World Crisis in Ruin; the Archaeology of the Former Soviet Missile Sites in Cuba from Mats Burström, Anders Gustafsson and Håkan Karlsson. Another fascinating archaeology of the contemporary past. The 1962 Missile Crisis is a well-known episode in the Cold War and twentieth-century history. It is documented in [...]
Olivier – Le sombre abîme du temps
Laurent Olivier’s wonderful book Le sombre abîme du temps has just appeared in translation (as The dark abyss of time: memory and archaeology) – [Link] Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces, that presence is filled with the past, that the future [...]
Heritage as design (continued)
Felipe Criado Boado (CSIC, the Spanish National Research Council and INCIPIT, the Institute of Heritage Sciences in Santiago de Compostela) is with us in the Archaeology Center for a couple of weeks. This evening he lectured about the way his new institute is approaching heritage. Heritage – the footprint of memory and oblivion – a [...]
racing experiences (2) – Laguna Seca
A fascinating week for the Revs Program at Laguna Seca Racetrack. Coordinated effort to document the driving experience – historic cars – and the community who cherish automotive heritage. Raising the profile of automotive studies, taking seriously this vital iconic part of the contemporary past. As Mark Gessler – HVA (Historic Vehicle Association) and FIVA [...]
the Classical and the Romantic
Belsay, Northumberland. Early nineteenth century. Visiting with Bianca (Carpeneti). As pure a contrast between the Classical and Gothic Romantic as can be imagined. Here is something I have written to appear in my forthcoming book “The Archaeological Imagination” – to my embarrassment and frustration still in (final) revision. Sir Charles Monck decided not to restore [...]
Beamish – quiddities
Beamish – Living Museum of the North – [Link] Historical textures of the everyday. I first wrote about Beamish in my book with Chris Tilley – ReConstructing Archaeology (1987) [Link] Focusing on the narrative that frames the museum, I hated the clichéed, static, and ideological experience it presented of the north-east of England. There is [...]
landscape aesthetics and the ideology of pleasure
The Dun Cow, Durham. Early evening. In conversation with Bianca (Carpeneti). My early morning runs are troubling me deeply … these encounters with a sublime picturesque [Link] [Link] [Link] Photo – dawn on Holy Island. Watercolor – J.M.W. Turner (exhibited 1829) (the castle in the background) Turner’s figures in the landscape (they are on the [...]
the aesthetic of the past
Out running – jet lag gets me up rather early – here at about 5.30 am local time. Lindisfarne, Northumberland – sixteenth century military architecture and a nineteenth century industrial facility turned into a wealthy man’s holiday home (Edward Hudson, proprietor of magazine “Country Life” commissioned Edwin Lutyens to oversee the conversion – very tasteful). [...]
Song Dong | YBCA
Song Dong at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well is a large-scale installation called Waste Not. It comprises over 10,000 items ranging from pots and basins to blankets, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes, and stuffed animals collected by the artist’s mother over [...]
petrified forest
The Petrified Forest is playing at the wonderful Stanford Theatre (1925 restored cinema showing Hollywood movies). In todays Guardian – an evocative “Country Diary” set in Borth, near Aberystwyth, west Wales, where we used to live. Another petrified forest on the coast and taking us back to the days of the Welsh epic sagas. Photo [...]
Bentley B35AE
Fuel cap. Bentley B35AE, built at the Rolls Royce Derby works in 1933. Raced by Eddie Ramsden Hall in the 1930s and then again at LeMans in 1950. Now part of the Collier Collection in Naples, Florida. My lab is working towards the launch of a new initiative at Stanford, the Revs Program, which will [...]
past personality
Latest on the excavations of Binchester Roman town – [Link] David Petts has posted an x-ray made by Jenny Jones of one of the artifacts found this summer – [Link] It didn’t look like much when it was found. It turns out to be a stylus – for writing on wax tablets. Evidence for literacy [...]
Montana
Jeff Dexter. Rocking C’s Ranch, Montana. Cattle country. Looking for Cooler Cave: full of bison bones. Petroglyph. Dry Range, Rocking C’s. My first visit to this vast landscape of the American sublime. Faint and evocative traces of the Native American past everywhere.
Durham Miners Gala
Durham City UK The annual celebration of a great industry and labor movement, once a living force, now a memory, nostalgically inspiring at best, after Thatcher’s neo-liberal ideology and political spite closed all the coal mines in the UK and devastated the pit villages. More photos – [Link]
Dere Street | Chew Green
In the North East of England for the Binchester excavations – Vinovium.org. Dere Street, the Roman road that passes through Binchester, here runs north across what is now the English-Scottish border. There was a medieval village – Kemblepath – up here in the wilds of Upper Coquetdale. On the site of Chew Green, the Roman [...]
Norham Station
I can’t help but be fascinated with what is slipping from memory and becoming “history”. And the romance of the railway. Just found a wonderful site called “Forgotten relics” – it has a page on a favorite village of mine (the castle straight out of Scott’s “Marmion”) on a branch line in the Scottish borders [...]
undecidability – the fake?
Grote Markt, Brussels. Here to explore European initiatives in cultural heritage policy – [Link]. The central (medieval) square – destroyed by French bombardment in 1695, rebuilt by 1699, sacked by revolutionaries in the late 1700s, heavily restored in the late nineteenth century. Considered something of a fake by the natives of Brugge and Antwerp, with [...]
