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...

#update! the day of arch website has been identified as potentially infested with malware by google, so I've removed the links to the site... yeesh! Hope you're following along! Here's my post, recreated from the main Day of Archaeology Blog Hiya. My name is Brenna, and I'm an archaeologist. You can normally find me on the twitter at  @brennawalks  or in tl;dr format on my blog passim in passing  . So, what gives today? So many shiny things! Turns out archaeology really suits people with rather wide and varied interests; on any given day you might find yourself with a synchrotron smashing particles or a mattock smashing soil. In my case, I had planned to go in and look at some of my research material in the scanning electron microscope over at UCL. In my 'real' academic life, I study teeth, and I study them very, very close up. You could call what I do 'bioarchaeology' or 'dental anthropology' ... I'm not fussy. But I study the dev...

The Guardian has published the obituary for the inimitable Bill White today. Bill played a major role in my own education and interaction with the bioarchaeology of London, so it was a bit strange to see the life of a man I knew as an institution of the Museum of London laid out with a bit more perspective. While I knew him as the man who rolled his eyes (discreetly, of course) at some of the nonsense that gets put about as science in the world of bioarchaeology, I certainly never knew that he'd gone to school with the Who. I definitely remember his advice about wrapping up in the arctic cold of the (now, off-limits) MoL bone store, but what I never knew, and really wish I had, was that Bill was the product of the UK's now-dying further education system. Bill had been a successful chemist before he decided to follow his passion into osteoarchaeology. He changed careers and the course of UK bioarchaeology by following the same certificate type programme that my institution is...