passim in passing

A thoughtful present for the long Bank Holiday weekend from  diggingthedirt ! We are invited to view and vote for the Top 10 funny archaeological videos . Well, it makes a nice break from cats, anyway... A clear favorite emerges in the shape of the inimitable 'Don't Stop' video from the guy behind  Tollan Films . Anies' Hassan's rather unoffical tribute to the lyricality of archaeological site workers combines the glory of excavating a medieval fort in Bahrain with a respectful hommage to what, in the 70s, was considered music to demonstrate the fundamental interconnectedness of things. An ting. Simon Davis: Don't Stop!! from Anies Hassan on Vimeo .

  Well it's been a while, and while nothing particularly fascinating has happened to keep me from posting... well. Nothing particularly fascinating happened for quite some time. However, I am now properly back in the archaeological trenches, merrily mattocking out slots in obscure ditches for a commercial company in London. Well, they've hired me to look at some dead folk, but I managed to get a few good days on site (and a truly awesome farmer tan). In all this excitement, I have vaguely kept in the back of my mind that there are some very cool opportunities for archaeological engagement coming up. I'm pretty excited about #dayofarch , which is coming up as part of the Festival of British Archaeology on July 29th 2011 . A merry crew will be offering snapshot glimpses into the lives of archaeologists via blogs and other social media--highly recommended! I hope to see some folk (digitally) appearing. It should be good, you never know when you'll get a day like last ...

Well, it's been a long strange trip... Middle Savagery is shoehorning the genie back into the bottle and prepping her paper for the SAAs, and all of us Archaeo-Bloggers who crawled out of the woodwork (see her summaries, or check out the list at right) are going to have to find a new way of interacting. Speaking of which, I totally skipped Week 3's question, which asked what we all want in terms of interactivity. I skipped it because I couldn't think of anything to say: I'm recently gloriously redundant, graduated, and without an excavation permit, so the raison d'être for this exercise has morphed into more of a shout in the dark than a focused outreach effort. I will say that this whole carnival has made me a lot more proactive about reading other people's material and has probably broadened my awareness of the archaeo world in a good way; it has definitely thrown up some cool visualisations of how I (and the fellow travelers) have linked together to put on t...

Week 2 of the carnival and it's been a lot of fun trekking through the archaeo-blogs. It made an awesome distraction from the viva (let's never talk about Chapter 9). I honestly didn't realise how many voices there were; nice to meet you Dirt , John Hawks , The Horde from MSU , Dig Girl , Publishing Archaeology , Sara Perry ,  Where in the hell am i? , and  Electric Archaeologist . For a round-up of responses, see the Call to Arms by MS. I have a serious issues with hitting the  tl,dr  wall, so I'll just briefly summarize: we all blog to talk to some sort of public. We're either trying to convince them to buy us (value what we do!) or we're sort of broadcasting an internal monologue to a swift-responding army of peers. It's worth pointing out that a journal I just submitted to has a ONE YEAR electronic preview thing going on, and that's after the 6 month submission process; I might as well blog because by the time anything gets published we'll ll b...

Conference season is coming up, which means that for a lot of people who 'do' archaeology, it's time to take a step back and get some big-picture perspective. Our friend Middle Savagery is definitely a 'do'er and brings this interesting challenge to the upcoming roundtable of Archaeo-Bloggers that will meet at the annual Society for American Archaeology (SAA) Meeting in Sacramento, CA March 30-Apr 3: to answer a question or two in the run up to the meeting about what the heck it means to blog archaeology. At the risk of being so meta- that I entirely cease to exist, I have to admit I'm intrigued by the idea of knowing the whys and wheretofores of digital short-form non peer reviewed archaeological publication. So, here's the question for the week (and somewhere below, my response...): MS asks : The emergence of the short form, or blog entry, is becoming a popular way to transmit a wide range of archaeological knowledge. What is the place of this conver...

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.