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
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
World Beard Championships
Garibaldi – not just a deliciously tasty tea dunker consisting of currants squashed between two thin, oblong biscuits (more than a little reminiscent of an Eccles cake).
A Garibaldi is also a beard of distinction, and a recognised sub-division in the ‘Full Beard’ category of The World Beard Championships. As sported here by home grown Beard talent James Hood, the Garibaldi should be round and wide at the bottom (no longer than 20 cm from the bottom of the lower lip) and the moustache may not be separated from the beard or made prominent. 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
The Iron Age Round-House
Considering their prominence in the archaeological record and the quantity of sites that have been excavated, it is surprising there has never been a book-length synthesis of Iron Age round-houses published before now. Rising admirably to the challenge, Harding has been Abercromby Professor of Prehistory at Edinburgh for the last thirty years, and here he presents a personal selection of sites drawn from this extensive experience. Read more
Field Research Procedure
Archaeological Investigation, by Martin Carver
There was once a time when archaeologists could rebut all criticism of their professional judgement with the simple retort: ‘the spade never lies.’ Whilst history is written by winners, archaeological excavation reveals the past as it was, unsullied by the duplicitous meaning of words. At least that was the holding line, until Philip Greigson pointed out that even if ‘the spade cannot lie, it owes this merit in part to the fact that it cannot speak.’
