Excavating Death
The hilltop cemetery at Carrowkeel contained an overwhelming number of children’s graves, and the painstaking recovery of their fragile bones was both a poignant and unsettling encounter. It was eerily reminiscent of momento mori – the anonymous bones once displayed in medieval churches calling all bystanders to witness: remember that you too will die. For most of the time such thoughts were cast firmly aside, but in quiet moments I sometimes wondered whether the ethical professionalism surrounding me on site (not to mention the unruly gallows humour in the site hut) was also an attempt to insulate our modern sensibilities from what would otherwise be a frightening experience: facing the dead, and by reflection, our own mortality. Read more
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.’ Read more
The top ten sites of the Celtic Tiger
Many people will be aware of the handful of contentious Irish sites that made international headlines during the heady years of the Celtic Tiger for all the wrong reasons – Carrickmines Castle, Woodstown, and Lismullin on the Tara M3. These sites gained notoriety for either holding up the progress of a developing nation or being bulldozed to line the pockets of the profiteering political elite, and the archaeological story was often lost in the cross fire. 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. Read more
The wrong way man
London tales 1: the wrong way man
Walking to get my paper this morning, a car pulled up beside and asked for directions. Cheerfully (though completely unintentionally) I sent them the wrong way. They were long gone before I realized my mistake, and as I continued to the shop I pondered their fate with mounting concern. Where would they go? How long would it be before they realised? Would they have enough food to see them through the night? 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? Read more
Kentish Sites and Sites of Kent
A miscellany of four archaeological sites, by Phil Andrews, Kirsten Egging Dinwiddy, Chris Ellis, Andrew Hutcheson, Christopher Philpotts, Andrew B. Powell and Jörn Schuster
Unfamiliar with the quaint customs of the south-east, when I first read the title of this monograph I assumed it had been written for the demented. Discrete enquiries subsequently revealed it’s actually based on the local saying that if you’re born to the east of the river Medway you’re a ‘Kentish Man,’ and west of the river you’re a ‘Man of Kent.’ Read more
Celtic Tiger Archaeology – the view from afar
Like Vincent Vega in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction, describing to Jules Winnfield why he digs Europe, what has struck me most about working as an archaeologist in Britain and Ireland are the ‘little differences.’ Not just the differences in terms of the sites or artefacts that I actually found, but also the differences in how the archaeology is actually dug. Example: compared to the long-handled Irish shovel, the British shovel has a short handle barely three feet long, and they swear that anything different would break their backs. And in Ireland the archaeology cops (council archaeologists) can’t tell you what to do. 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. Read more
Welcome to WordPress!
There comes a moment in the lifecycle of every blog, when the writer confesses apologetically for not posting for days… weeks… months… years… leaving their imagined throng of eager readers starved of drip-fed pearls of wisdom. Write frequently and often, or so the mantra goes, for only then will your loyal band of readers be arsed to come back for more. And so, as sure as night follows day, yet another inanity gets belched into the ether, memorialised in desperate hope that our nebulous and oh-so-beautiful e-personalities won’t loose ground in the ‘add-me’ turf war that now stands in for social interaction… Read more
