The Biggest Poo in History

Struggling for something to blog about this morning, I suddenly thought:

‘I know, I’ll do the biggest poo in history!’

Well… obviously I won’t do it personally. Talk about performance anxiety!

‘Yeah, is that the Guinness book of records? Can you send Norris McWhirta round, I’ve got a big job for him.’

No, no, no. Even if I did score a personal best, the Victorian invention of flushing has removed all but the most troublesome of floaters. Short of notifying the Coast Guard of the imminent danger to shipping, I’d be left with only a fisherman’s tale and a warm glow. That was until archaeology tore up the rulebook, and in the clearest indication yet that you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps, invented a special branch of poo related science designed to record past accomplishments for posterity. Read more

The Photographic Archive of Irish Archaeology

The camera never lies, or so the saying goes, unless it happens to be the archaeological site camera, in which case it’s bums, well and truly, on fire.

Not that site photos are faked or airbrushed. In fact they are quite the opposite, aiming for a heightened level of objectivity – a sanitised vision designed to enable future generations to reinterpret the evidence in a different light. The soil is cleaned back and the crumbs dusted away, perhaps even dampened down. Tools are carefully removed and the archaeologists themselves edge discretely out of shot, waiting for clouds to pass whilst their colleagues point and click.

But what record does this leave of the people who actually dug the site? What were they called? What did they think? Where are they now? Read more

Checkered Pasts – The Lewis Chessmen Unmasked

Exhibition Review – National Museums Scotland

Few would consider the popular computer game Grand Theft Auto – notorious for its adult content and violent themes – to be a reliable witness to our daily lives. But 800 years from now, if all that survived of our modern world were scant archaeological remains and a copy of this controversial game, what conclusions would archaeologists of the future draw?

The Lewis Chessmen are some of the most famous treasures to have emerged from Scottish soil, and 30 of the original 93 ivory pieces are now the subject of a major new travelling exhibition from the National Museum of Scotland. The exhibition centres on new research recently published in Medieval Archaeology, including an analysis of the facial features of the chess pieces by forensic anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson. This is the ‘unmasking’ of the exhibition’s title, and the curators have sought to explain the relevance of this new work to what we already know about the hoard through folk tales and archaeological evidence. Read more

Astroarchaeology (or the law of unintended consequences)

‘Shoot for the stars, and you might hit the moon,’ the kindly teachers used to tell me whenever I wanted to do anything more complicated than tie my own shoelaces, and I’m sure they said the same thing to Louis Armstrong when he said he wanted to walk on the moon.

Well it’s now 41 years since him and Buzz Lightyear did just that, and while we can be pretty sure those NASA boffins were probably shooting for the moon all along, the endeavour stands as testimony to a brilliantly realised ambition. Everyone knows the ‘one small step for man’ speech that Armstrong made as he stepped foot on the moon, but his parting words, uttered under his breath as he clambered aboard Apollo 11, have been less well publicised. Read more