passim in passing

 Wow, so i have not been very good about maintaining this site, have I? but now I have something new to talk about -- and in really so many of the finest words ;) Yep, new book!  If you want to know more about just how monogamous monkeys can be, why grandmothers are so suspicious, and what on earth we are doing as a species taking so long to grow up, then feel free to preorder ;) https:// linktr.ee/growinguphuman

Q: Uh, you seem to have fallen off the face of the earth. Why is that? A:   I ran away to a Greek island, got a lot of writing done, worked with an honest-to-god group of superheroes volunteering to help the plight of refugees, spent two months in a basement in Turkey, got a lot of writing done, and, you know, stuff. It's been some time, eh? Not that you would have noticed my absence -- my science rants have found a new home on the Cosmic Shambles Network , where not only can you see me sarking about the future of our species , but there are a ton of other great writers too. I've been doing talks and events too - Cheltenham Science Festival with Adam Rutherford, Pontus Skoglund, and Alice Roberts; Nine Lessons with Robin Ince and his gang of insane scientists, and more to come in 2019! But EVEN MORE EXCITING -- I've got an agent!  The amazing Ella Diamond Kahn is now saddled with the task of taking my writing out into the world, and coming back with money, ...

So... I realise I haven't updated this, much less ranted, for some time. This is partially excused by the fact that I've been in France, Italy, the UK, Greece and Turkey for varying amounts of time over the last five months. But it's not like I wasn't WORKING. Jeez. We had an epic field season on Kythera in August, which was a triumph of fieldwalking spirit over footwear-themed adversity. Also, Satch and I made matching hats in honour of our Antikytheran legacy. Field hats in the Antikytheran style. Gonna need longer gaiters. Schematic of boot failure mechanics (Day 20). September became a string of pretty fun book promo adventures, including the first ever Wales National Botanic Gardens Science Festival, New Scientist Live , and Ada Lovelace Day Live .  You can even hear some of my talk ( a combo of bones and TrowelBlazing , what a treat, right???) on the ALD Podcast from around 27:00. I'm not tiny. It's just a really big desk. All of w...

Just a quick little snippet here to post a link to the Books Interview i gave to Times Higher. Thinking a lot about my reading habits as summer approaches (and interminable drives/flights to field and beyond), thought I'd leave this here as a reminder that there is more to the world than just academic writing... :)

oh HELLO. Welcome to whatever time zone this is (and you will have to work it out on your own because I sure as heck don't know). Finally back from what feels like a very epic bi-coastal tour of the States. Essentially, I seem to plan my travel the same way I bowl -- I start off in the middle, then kinda scatter to either side, totally missing the pins in the middle. All apologies to the pins in the middle!  But had a great time up and down the west coast, guerrilla signing books in independent bookstores, talking, driving, more talking, flying, again, with the talking... you get the idea. One of the major amusements was getting the chance to do interviews while I sounded more or less American again (thanks Mom for the accent coaching). I was totally thrilled to be interviewed in Science Magazine's Books podcast, which you can find here . I also got to do a fun, more long-form chat with Rachelle Saunders from Science for the People , which may be the most America...

Not so long ago, I got a backstage tour of the magical world of google... meatspace google. It is arguably much prettier than real google, which doesn't have a large section of a London routemaster stuck awkwardly in a corridor. AFAIK. Anyhow, it was very fun exploring what a global corporate empire might look like if it was allowed to wear whatever it wanted to school everyday (hint: there would be a Wall of Dogs). I also explored power posing, which was less successful. But the whole point was, of course, to talk to interesting people about interesting things, to which end I brought along an epic powerpoint and pretty much went through an entire undergrad course. In an hour. Available now, if you wish to hear and see what that sounds like. Bonus if you make it through to the end, when i get asked my favorite (off camera) / least favorite (on camera) question about whether I think civilisation is going the way of the buffalo.

Now out! I had such a terrific time recording this (thanks Max! thanks Ian!).  According to Captain Podcast Max S, our long and discursive sound check (I think we got through most of the neolithic) was perhaps the most informative yet recorded, a badge of honour I am sure. Though presumably not actually included on the recording... https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2017/mar/28/built-on-bones-the-history-of-humans-in-the-city-science-weekly-podcast You can also listen along on any of the usual suspects: Itunes , Soundcloud , etc I will also just mention that it was very surreal, the  experience of being totally isolated from outside media (ironically, because we were recording our own) while events in the outside world took a dramatic turn. I went into the studio to record the podcast  right as news started to filter through that 'something' had happened in Westminster; it wasn't until after the recording we realised that people had been killed so horribly. I...

So, a little while back I had a terrific time writing t his piece for History Today . I was given pretty free reign to charge around talking my second favourite subject (after teeth) -- TrowelBlazers . We had our big Raising Horizons launch coming up and we were all scrabbling away to bring the sheer awesomeness of Women Who Dig to a wider audience. However, in the excitement of telling the story about Hilda Petrie and her climb up Khufu and the time Margaret Murray won WWI (she put a hex on the Kaiser, you know), I got a bit distracted. Margaret Murray TrowelToon by Gabe Moshenska As a very kind reader of History Today pointed out, I'd gotten the details of the redoubtable Amelia Edwards's companion on her historic, and life-changing, trip down the Nile wrong. Amelia was the force behind Egyptology in the UK, cheerleading dashing youngsters like Flinders Petrie (just try imagining him without the beard. No, right?) and more critically, setting up the Egypt Exploration S...

As part of the long process of thinking about the book (especially now that people are reading it, and asking awkward questions like 'wait how do the genetics of pig domestication work again?') I've been doing some additional writing. This was a longer piece for Guardian Cities that I really enjoyed thinking about; I've now decided Annie Besant is one of my personal heroes. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/feb/22/tale-four-skulls-what-can-bones-teach-about-cities She's been arrested* for everything you ought to be arrested for as a Victorian lady - feminism, reproductive rights, atheism, and anti-colonialism.  Besant was a rather prolific writer who turned her talent into a crusaders' sword -- she wrote passionately about injustice, and had a special feeling for those women who felt the hand of opprobrious society most heavily. In 1888, she wrote about a kind of 'white slavery' in London's East End , starting off a torrent of accusatio...

Properly pleased to see such a stellar review in that rather august instrument, The Times (register for free access), for Built on Bones! Tom Whipple has masterfully identified key draws of the book, primarily chattiness and Alan Rickman references. 

Ok, yes, there was a long hiatus. This has a lot to do with the number of countries I have seen fit to wander through in 2016 (special shout out to the elderly Peugeot convertible for making it around the UK, France, Belgium, Luxembourg--finally!--Germany, Austria, Spain, and Italy this summer). This also has to do with the fact that I have been writing a lot -- there was a book, which I may have unobtrusively mentioned , but also some very fun pieces while wearing my other hat as part of Team TrowelBlazers.  I am very fond of this piece in February's History Today , so if you have a chance take a look. There are jokes about how awful the poetry in 'Girl's Own' magazines of the Victorian era is; if you want to see how I managed to shoehorn that into a story about heroines of the digging sciences, you'll have to read the damn thing ;) As we ramped up to the Raising Horizons launch (more on which over at TrowelBlazers) we've had a great run of pieces celebra...

So, I spent this week doing a lot of things. One of my favorites was freaking about my photoshopped proximity to lifetime hero author Neil Gaiman and actual cool writer E lif  Şafak. For information: generally, archaeological book reviews are TERRIFYING. People with PhDs in very obscure and nuanced aspects of the past read something you've written, agree with 90% of it, but spend three pages telling you off for misunderstanding the fundamental holistic interconnectedness of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Or something-- the ruthlessness is all part of the fun. So imagine my surprise when I got my first book review in Reader's Digest ... and it was nice . Obviously, feel free to buy my book and disagree rabidly with whatever per cent of it makes you happiest.

Slowly, slowly, this blog is creaking back to life; mostly so I have a forum to explain myself when the book eventually comes out (Feb 23, UK / May 7 USA). But there are some amazing things going on in the world of the past that don't involve me digging up skeletons: the Raising Horizons project from TrowelBlazers ! We're in the middle of our first fundraising phase, so talking to all the media about all of the TrowelBlazing, including this article in the Guardian . There is still time to get in the amazing perks, raffle prizes, and POTENTIAL STICKERS that come with supporting our effort to reset imaginations and inspire future TrowelBlazers! Check out our IndieGoGo campaign , and help some future scientist See It, Be It. RAISING HORIZONS from Wire Frame Media UK on Vimeo .

So, after an INTENSELY LONG HIATUS due to work constraints, I thought I'd put a quick piece up on the Pokemon Go phenomenon, mostly because any widescale human trend is super interesting, but also because I have a residual interest in Augmented Reality that is probably Neal Stephenson's fault . This is largely brought on by a terrific article in Forbes featuring Andrew Reinhard of #archaeogaming fame posted in the Women's Digital Archaeology Network  by Lorna Richardson. (here is a video of people in New York freaking out over a rare Pokemon) The article mostly lays out past attempts at engaging people with heritage, a lot of which was pretty groundbreaking considering Pokemon Go is just about the first popular AR game and it's taken 10+ years to even get that far. Particular shout outs to Stu Eve and his projects over at Dead Men's Eyes are necessary -- if you can smell the Pokemon in the next release, you'll have innovators like Stu to thank. Or not. I...

There has been considerable interest recently in the very large number of burials unearthed in the excavation of the CrossRail project near Liverpool Street Station. The CrossRail work is not the first (and may not even be the last) archaeological excavation of the increasingly inaccurately named New Churchyard*, so I thought it only fitting that I post a segment out of my by now probably quite dated PhD, which goes into some detail about the origin and composition of the burial ground. Mostly, I thought I ought to put this up as a tribute to the late Bill White, who was a font of knowledge on all manner of Londoners long since gone to ground. What I’ve recorded here as ‘pers. Comm’ can now be found in the published monograph (cite), but I like to remember it coming straight from Bill himself; his funny, fascinating I insights that I would slowly absorb along with the heat from the mobile radiator set against the arctic cold of the infamous Rotunda. Excerpt below from my phd (...

Here follows a repost from the excellent MSU Capblog - check them out here ! Hello MSU! And hello followers of this blog. Since I fall into the former category, it's very cool to be asked to share a little bit about what has become a fairly all-consuming obsession  project: TrowelBlazers . If you don't know us, please come be our friend . Or not, you know, it's cool. The TrowelBlazers project is a born-on-twitter idea that took off from a handful of early career academics (post docs all) who joined in the general academic-internet wide horror at the type of 'inspirational' material produced by major research funders to encourage women to participate in science. If for some reason you missed the utterly patronising travesty that was the European Commision produced 'Science: It's a Girl Thing', please do feel free to watch it now. I'll wait. Squirm inducing, right? I think what as a group we shared was the feeling that there was something...