passim in passing

As just about the entire world must now be aware, popular revolt has swept Egypt. I'm not on the ground there, and haven't been for a few years now, but there is something to be said for watching the places you know and lived as they turn topsy turvy. It's a little like watching the world from underwater... you can kinda recognize the landscape, but it's all out of whack. So, I'm not going to try to keep pace with events--I'll leave that to Al-Jazeera  (English) and the twitterverse, especially the tireless and well informed @bencnn .  I do want to highlight the very Egyptian nature of the response to the instability in terms of protecting heritage.  You can listen to Dr Zahi hawass explain it here: But I think the most amazing thing of all is  this footage  (external link, sorry) , showing scores of ordinary Egyptians linking arms to protect the National Museum from looters. That's a level of dedication you don't see very many places. In the ...

I've just come across this  wonderful little video from the ever-optic-enabled Mr. Quinlan .  It brought back a whole host of memories from the couple seasons I spent on the Giza Plateau Mapping Project . Morning Commute from JasonQ on Vimeo .  The journey up to the  finds store on the Giza plateau itself has to rank as one of the most iconic morning commutes. Ibrahim, the homicidal taxi driver, used to pick us up in the strange little neighbourhood across the concrete river of death that is al Matar road and take us up the hill to the plateau every day around 6 am. The big construction pit you see in the first minute was a smaller construction pit in my day, but not much has changed. Men in galabeyahs still attempt ritual suicide by crossing the road, the guards at the gate still wave imperiously, and the pyramids, of course, are still there.

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...

 So it looks like our good friends at the Thames Discovery Programme have wowed yet another award-giving body-- they're up for Research Project of the Year from Current Archaeology ! They really go above and beyond in terms of bringing archaeology to the public, particularly to the london public, so why not click through and support them!

  I've just read the new piece over at Middle Savegery  on the trouble academics face trying to use collections with stern copyright restrictions. MS flags the inherent contradictions between two opposing forces in research, particularly arch and anth where much of the material is human-centred and just about guaranteed to evoke an emotional response in someone, somewhere. On the one hand, there are archives, collections, museums, and private individuals who are firmly invested in the sole proprietorship of the material they  hold: intellectual property is monetarized to fund its holder. These organizations are also frequently acting to protect individual anonymity by limiting access or reproduction rights. However (and this is the point where we all get a little agitated) all of these limitations seem to fly in the face of our missive to make our work accessible. Humanities don't get funded, grants don't get given, and your own relevanc...

This past weekend brought a really exciting outreach opportunity through a host of collaborating institutions down at LAARC (the London archaeological archive research centre. or something along those lines). The Thames Discovery Project hosted a one-day seminar on the archaeology of human remains from the Thames foreshore, in conjunction with just about everyone involved with bones in the whole of London: Museum of London provided materials and their expert personnel from both the commercial Museum of London Archaeology (MoLa) and the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology , English Heritage staff, stalwarts from Birkbeck and local digs, and of course myself, as a bit of a UCL / Birkbeck twofer. You can check out the TDP's take on the day here , but I can safely say it seemed like a pretty good day. Lots of participation, lots of hands-on experience for the attendees, and a ton of questions for the experts--at least no one seemed bored! We heard about bodies on the foreshore, t...

Well, here we go... This little narrative journey comes after  quite a bit of thinking about blogs, archaeology, and the professional repercussions (and benefits!) of diving headlong into new media.  The first question I had, of course is 'why'-- why throw yourself out there? What should you talk about?  And does anyone even listen?  Slowly, I've seen a couple different answers emerge. A lot of my time is spent flicking through other people's interweb offerings -- colleagues, friends, and even organizations are now all  multimedia presences in my life. I've been looking at the excellent Middle Savegery  for a while, as well as more targeted single-project blogs and websites like L-P Archaeology's Prescott Street dig site and the Thames Discovery site .  For me personally, the 'blog' format offers a chance for unfinished ideas to live a little,  and a chance for the little projects that crop up from time to get their time in the s...