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
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
Riders on the storm
It’s a common misconception that the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In fact that’s a lie.The rain in Spain falls mainly in Ireland. Thanks a million Amigos!
And just as Eskimo’s have 17 thousand different words for snow, field archaeologists have at least double that number for rain. From the tundra-cold sideways strain, to the fine micro drizzle that gets you wetter than if you’d jumped headfirst into a lake, the archaeological palette is finely tuned to rain’s many qualities of wetness. Read more
The Unrepeatable Experiment
There’s an enduring myth that archaeology is an ‘unrepeatable experiment’, a bit like loosing your virginity with a sheep. Or perhaps that description just applies to people with a speech impediment.
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m an Archie… Acheu… I dig up old stuff.’ Read more
Garbology
Obviously everyone here’s familiar with ‘The Rock’ and his great work ‘Doom’. You all know the story – a rooky Space Cop gets sent to a distant Martian colony (for crimes he didn’t commit) and finds that a team of hapless scientists have accidentally opened an inter-dimensional portal leading straight to the gates of hell. Some demons escape, people get eaten – it’s all very unsavoury. Read more
The Nasty in the Pasty
In olden days, if you wanted the latest statistical assessment based on predictive medical science as to how long you’d got left to live, there wasn’t any point logging on to http//:www.deathclock.com. A blank screen would have just flashed the obvious:
Nasty, Short and Brutish. Read more
