passim in passing

Regular readers of this blog (hi mom!) will be aware that generally, I talk about teeth. I post videos of teeth, I wonder what teeth might be telling us about Neolithic children, and otherwise tend towards the dental. Recently however, I was asked to do something a bit out of the ordinary -- the lovely organisers of the BONE exhibit at the Florence Nightingale Museum  ( @florencemuseum )asked me to come and be a 'live respondent' in their installation. How much fun, right? Art! But me, a scientist? However could it work??? It's like oil and water, right? Cats and dogs, chalk and cheese, Ikea furniture that requires an allen wrench and Ikea furniture shipped with an allen wrench. Which is to say, things that don't always come together. But Simon and Rhiannon, the organisers, were determined to bring a 'scientist' ( moi ) in to their thoughtful display. So how did that work? Actually, pretty well. The exhibit focuses on 'bone', but by focus, I mean...

Occasionally, people wonder what it is a dental anthropologist does. Not often, mind. And if they do make the mistake of asking, generally eyes glaze over before you can say 'hydroxyapatite'. So as you can imagine, I get a bit overexcited when people seem to actually want to know how one goes about the business of being the Tooth Fairy.  I've just come back from Turkey, where I've been studying human remains from the beautiful early Neolithic site of Asıklı Höyük , home to the first farmers and earliest settlement of the Anatolian plateau. My mission was to take casts of the teeth, to address questions about childhood health and growth. One of the first queries I got from my fellow archaeologists however, was what, exactly, I actually do -- so I made this little instructional video for the benefit of the lab, and hopefully future students in the biological anthropology program at Hacateppe University. Dental Impressions from Brenna Hassett on Vimeo . ...

#update! day of archaeology site is having some problems, so the links have been temporarily removed... originally posted by   Brennawalks     on   JUNE 29, 2012   as part of the  This is reposted from here at Day of Archaeology 2012 - bigger and badder than last year! #dayofarch So, now you know. The Tooth Fairy is an archaeologist. Archaeologists get everywhere. Like sand. This also applies to  jobs, so it’s not totally impossible that someone who specialises in the minute structures of teeth (see my  previous post from DayofArch 2011 ) would end up in the overwhelmingly awesome  Human Origins Research Group  at the  Natural History Museum, London . For starters, this is an awesome place to work. Yesterday I found out that during WWII, the collections were evacuated to stately homes across the country to escape the Blitz… complete with associated researchers. And there’s a basement here that’s really a bomb shel...

#update! day of archaeology site is having some problems, so the links have been temporarily removed... So, as some of you might have guessed, I sort of ran out of time to keep up with the blogging and whatnot. There's been a series of cross-continent moves (nothin' but love, Aix. nothin' but love) followed by a new position with rather dense stipulations on social media use. So while I negotiate the social media policy document, obtaining creative commons licences for pictures of replica dinosaurs, and the other trials and tribulations of working for what has to be the most awesome museum in the whole of London (unless there is one about cheese I don't know about...?)--well, suffice to say, I won't be saying much.  Hope to be with you in time for Day of Archaeology 2012 though! Until then... enjoy...the sound of silence...

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 .