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
Sex!
Ignoring Captain Boner and the topsoil strippers for a moment, there’s something odd about this photo that I can’t quite put my finger on. It features this years winning entry to the ‘2009 Sexiest Field Crew’ competition – a global search led by sexyarchaeology.org to find the new vanguard of dirty pretty things destined to inherit the earth.
The ragged trousered archaeologist
I once worked with a Project Manager whose stock response to all requests for more resources was uncompromising.
‘People live, people die, get over it,’ he’d grumble in his thick Scottish accent, like a Yorkshire man with all the generosity squeezed out of him. Read more
Rumsfeldian Archaeology
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know… Read more
