passim in passing

Well, I thought I would expand a bit on my AR post, mostly because people seem a lot more interested in awesome hovering 3d images than in the metric qualification of surface expressions of ameloblast disruption (yeah... I know, go figure, right?). So here's an easy, totally free, step by step guide to making your own awesome bit of archaeology float around: You'll need: A webcam. Google Sketchup . This is a fantastic little offering from google which makes it ridiculously easy to create accurate 3d models. You can create any shape you like, though I find recreating structures is the easiest place to start (die, CAD, die). There's a startup guide here , but you can get fairly complicated if you'd like. You can also import stuff in; using freeware like Blender  you can easily convert 3d objects produced in other formats into something Google can read. For this example, I made a simple box, which I then painted with pictures of my (internet) face: Cool, no...

#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...

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...