passim in passing

It's that time again! Third year of my #dayofarch posts... repost now from Day of Archaeology ! If you're dying to see how they've changed over the years, have a look at 2011 ( augmented reality! ) and 2012 ( i reveal myself to be the tooth fairy )... Really, I work at the Natural History Museum in London (and tweet at @brennawalks ). And if you didn't already know, I'm part of the collective Tumblr of awesome that is Trowelblazers  ( @trowelblazers ). We get all excited about inspirational female pioneers in the trowel-blazing arts :) So! Archaeology, huh? Life outdoors? Fresh air? Meh. Up to your hips in muddy water in February, more like it. That's why I went and got myself a speciality.... TEETH! Yes. I am a living, breathing example of the incredibly rare animal... the Dental Anthropologist . And yes, that's a real thing. What do I do? Well... today, I'm hashing out some code that will preform a simple spatial analysis that will tell...

repost of my favorite ever #trowelblazer post! Gearing up to go into the field, so it's all about Turkey at the mo... Halet Çambel, third from left, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Image: Murat Akman Archive.  Professor Halet Çambel is one of the most fascinating #trowelblazing women you never heard of. From a family of staunch friends of Atatürk himself, she was encouraged to participate in sport and represented Turkey in fencing at the 1936 Olympics--becoming the first-ever Muslim woman to compete in the Olympic games. Her stance there was unflinching; offered an opportunity to meet the Fürher himself she steadfastly refused . She studied archaeology at the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Turkey and building her career as an archaeologist, her poet and architect husband following her out into the field. She excavated the Hittite fortress of Karatepe , where she uncovered a sort of Hittite 'Rosetta Stone' with both Hittite and Phoenician scripts and still mana...

a repost from over at Trowelblazers HQ from last month.... Snippet reproduced from Kober's 1949 letter to J. Sundwall from the Johannes Sunderwall archive of the Library Åbo Akademi , reproduced by kind permission of the University of Texas Digital Repository from the Alice E. Kober archive created by Professor T. Palaima &  D. Tosa Alice Kober (b. 1906, d. 1950) has been recommended for a #trowelblazers post since just about the inception of the site, and now that this once forgotten figure has hit the news again ( bbc ! and this wonderful new york times piece by Margalit Fox, author of a recent book on cracking Linear B) we thought we'd quickly introduce you to the lady. By all accounts a self contained woman, whose meticulous cataloguing of the signs of the Linear B script uncovered at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans was instrumental to its decipherment just a few years after her untimely death, it is wonderful to see the archive created by the meticulous resea...