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...

repost of my favorite ever #trowelblazer post! Gearing up to go into the field, so it's all about Turkey at the mo... Halet Çambel, third from left, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Image: Murat Akman Archive.  Professor Halet Çambel is one of the most fascinating #trowelblazing women you never heard of. From a family of staunch friends of Atatürk himself, she was encouraged to participate in sport and represented Turkey in fencing at the 1936 Olympics--becoming the first-ever Muslim woman to compete in the Olympic games. Her stance there was unflinching; offered an opportunity to meet the Fürher himself she steadfastly refused . She studied archaeology at the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Turkey and building her career as an archaeologist, her poet and architect husband following her out into the field. She excavated the Hittite fortress of Karatepe , where she uncovered a sort of Hittite 'Rosetta Stone' with both Hittite and Phoenician scripts and still mana...

a repost from over at Trowelblazers HQ from last month.... Snippet reproduced from Kober's 1949 letter to J. Sundwall from the Johannes Sunderwall archive of the Library Åbo Akademi , reproduced by kind permission of the University of Texas Digital Repository from the Alice E. Kober archive created by Professor T. Palaima &  D. Tosa Alice Kober (b. 1906, d. 1950) has been recommended for a #trowelblazers post since just about the inception of the site, and now that this once forgotten figure has hit the news again ( bbc ! and this wonderful new york times piece by Margalit Fox, author of a recent book on cracking Linear B) we thought we'd quickly introduce you to the lady. By all accounts a self contained woman, whose meticulous cataloguing of the signs of the Linear B script uncovered at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans was instrumental to its decipherment just a few years after her untimely death, it is wonderful to see the archive created by the meticulous resea...

Reposted! original, with photo here .  Maeve Leakey. Photo: Bob Cambell, Turkana Basin Institute, all rights reserved. Dr. Maeve Leakey (b.1942 - ) Many, many years ago -- about 150, actually-- a group of men with rather fantastic facial hair founded what would become the cornerstone of the American scientific establishment, the National Academy of Sciences.   Signed into existence by President Abraham Lincoln , the Academy served to further scientific research, addressing the pressing issues of the day, like how to make compasses work on your fancy new Ironclad steamboats. On the 150th anniversery of the foundation of the NAS, President Barack Obama arrived to  reiterate the importance  of the body, and science.  The very next day, on April 30th, 2013, the Academy announced its newly elected members, one of the highest accolades possible and limited to American citizens. However, the Academy does recognise exceptional contributions to science f...

Repost from http:/trowelblazers.tumblr.com Kathleen Kenyon. Image from: Reynolds, A. 2011. From the Archives.  Archaeology International  13:112-118, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/ai.1321 The legend of Kathleen Kenyon looms large over archaeology; she is remembered not only as an influential woman trowel-wielder but as pioneer in her field. As a figure of legend, the cut of her vowels (glass!) and coats (mink!) build a towering image of a certain kind of mid-century woman: entitled, empowered, and as sturdy as the famous stepped towers she discovered underlying the foundations of biblical Jericho. Kathleen Kenyon is a woman who left a permanent mark on the discipline (not to mention poor old Jericho), and that cannot all be attributed to her birth in the Director's house of the British Museum. Her accomplishments are legion: first female president of the Oxford Archaeological Society, excavator of Jericho and Jerusalem, creator of the Wheeler-Kenyon archaeological m...

Good morning. Possibly, good afternoon. This post is actually not so much a me-post as it is a meme-post; I'd like to introduce you to the collective amazingness that is the new  trowelblazers.tumblr.com/  . What's that? A midlands plastering company? No! It's ladies. Ladies with trowels. Or, possibly, ladies directing workmen with trowels. source: Illustration by John Kenney, from L. du Garde Peach (1961).  Stone Age Man In Britain. A Ladybird Book.  Wills & Hepworth Ltd., Loughborough. Reproduced from website. It's a celebration, brief, chipper and ever-so-slightly irreverent, of some of the pioneering women in the trowel-wielding fields: palaeontology, geology, and of course, archaeology. This is a labour of love by a dedicated team ( you'll know them as @toriherridge @lemoustier and @suzie_birch  - me you had better have figured out already) who are compiling a fantastic tumblr of some of the forgotten female heroes of our respective d...

Heads up to @matthewpope , who wrote this post on the recent #druiddebate launched by the BBC in response to a letter from King Arthur Uther Pendragon insisting that the display of human remains at the Alexander Keiler Museum in Avebury is unethical. I personally think his point that there is some seriously slippery slope between identifying 'indigenous' heritage and nationalist narratives is pretty critical, but of course there is a whole wealth of thought on that subject (go google 'Nationalism in Archaeology' and get back to me in a few years). Anyhow, this got me thinking about the why this story has popped back up after the furore of  the reburial requests circa 2006-8, and why archaeologists seem to not have quite squeezed the last lessons out of the original English Heritage consultation on the reburial request, despite the existence of thoughtful reflections like Mike Pitt's open access  PIA article . I don't claim to know quite what those lessons...