Middle Savagery

A Portrait of the Archaeologist as a Young Woman.

This blog is one of the best archaeology blogs out there. Add this blog to My Feeds.

Assessing the Future Landscape of Archaeological Communication

Mar 8, 2010 6:16pm

Put your meta-mega education nerd hats on! A couple of months ago the Center for Studies in Higher Education here at UC Berkeley (with help from the Mellon foundation) conducted an intensive survey about digital media in education. It’s titled: Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of...

The Virtual World of Çatalhöyük (Turkey): Okapi Island in Second Life

Feb 28, 2010 2:02pm

This is the talk that Ruth and I are giving this Wednesday here in the department. It will mostly be an overview with some machinima added in and bits from my Archaeologies paper. If you happen to be in the Bay Area, come and bring your lunch! ...

Is this your archaeological deposit?

Feb 27, 2010 5:52pm

Isthisyourluggage.com purports to be the product of a person’s hobby–buying lost luggage from the airlines, photographing the contents, and putting the photos online. At first I was suspicious–the photos haven’t changed since 2009, the design work is really clean and the domain name is registered through an anonymizing proxy. But...

Where is Single Context Archaeology?

Feb 23, 2010 1:05pm

When I first walked onto site at Çatalhöyük in 2006, I felt pretty confident of my excavation abilities. While I wasn’t an old field hand, I had more excavation experience than most grad students and had worked as a professional archaeologist as well. To my great chagrin, I found out...

“With archaeology we stake our claim to the future by finding our past”

Feb 9, 2010 12:24pm

I’m taking Ruth’s Archaeology and Film seminar this semester and our first assignment was: A themed mini-project in one medium. Due 9 February. The common theme among all the projects will be: “With archaeology we stake our claim to the future by finding our past”. You can choose any medium that...

A Mild Retraction – BBC’s 100 Objects

Feb 8, 2010 4:21pm

Over the weekend I was listening to more of the BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects and I feel that I have to take back some of my enthusiasm for the series. The broad generalizations that the host makes about the artifacts and the conclusions drawn about modern...

William Kentridge’s “Monument”

Feb 4, 2010 11:15am

William Kentridge’s Monument is a captivating short animated film about the unveiling of a statue dedicated to the South African work force. This monument comes to life, and continues to suffer under the elite white regime. This celebration and memorialization of past injustices fails in its goal to silence or...

Archaeology Podcasts

Feb 3, 2010 11:28am

Since I’ve moved I’ve never bothered to get internet at home, nor do I have a television or for that matter, a home phone. This has helped tremendously with dissertation reading and writing, but has cut down significantly on my time to answer student emails, blog, build things on Second...

Photoshop for Archaeological Publication – Seeds

Feb 1, 2010 4:32pm

Part of our excavation strategy at Tall Dhiban is to “float” a sample of dirt that we excavate. So up on the site we collect about 30L of dirt out of the context we are currently digging up and send it to the lab house, where Alan (and company) diligently...

The Hunt – Archaeological Machinima

Jan 31, 2010 8:31pm

I’ve posted about machinima and archaeology before, and posted a short effort that I made last Spring. This time we have a slightly longer effort that is part of the result of a class that Ruth and I were teaching called “Serious Games and Virtual Worlds for Archaeology and Imagining...