passim in passing

Ok, yes, there was a long hiatus. This has a lot to do with the number of countries I have seen fit to wander through in 2016 (special shout out to the elderly Peugeot convertible for making it around the UK, France, Belgium, Luxembourg--finally!--Germany, Austria, Spain, and Italy this summer). This also has to do with the fact that I have been writing a lot -- there was a book, which I may have unobtrusively mentioned , but also some very fun pieces while wearing my other hat as part of Team TrowelBlazers.  I am very fond of this piece in February's History Today , so if you have a chance take a look. There are jokes about how awful the poetry in 'Girl's Own' magazines of the Victorian era is; if you want to see how I managed to shoehorn that into a story about heroines of the digging sciences, you'll have to read the damn thing ;) As we ramped up to the Raising Horizons launch (more on which over at TrowelBlazers) we've had a great run of pieces celebra...

So, I spent this week doing a lot of things. One of my favorites was freaking about my photoshopped proximity to lifetime hero author Neil Gaiman and actual cool writer E lif  Şafak. For information: generally, archaeological book reviews are TERRIFYING. People with PhDs in very obscure and nuanced aspects of the past read something you've written, agree with 90% of it, but spend three pages telling you off for misunderstanding the fundamental holistic interconnectedness of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Or something-- the ruthlessness is all part of the fun. So imagine my surprise when I got my first book review in Reader's Digest ... and it was nice . Obviously, feel free to buy my book and disagree rabidly with whatever per cent of it makes you happiest.

Slowly, slowly, this blog is creaking back to life; mostly so I have a forum to explain myself when the book eventually comes out (Feb 23, UK / May 7 USA). But there are some amazing things going on in the world of the past that don't involve me digging up skeletons: the Raising Horizons project from TrowelBlazers ! We're in the middle of our first fundraising phase, so talking to all the media about all of the TrowelBlazing, including this article in the Guardian . There is still time to get in the amazing perks, raffle prizes, and POTENTIAL STICKERS that come with supporting our effort to reset imaginations and inspire future TrowelBlazers! Check out our IndieGoGo campaign , and help some future scientist See It, Be It. RAISING HORIZONS from Wire Frame Media UK on Vimeo .

So, after an INTENSELY LONG HIATUS due to work constraints, I thought I'd put a quick piece up on the Pokemon Go phenomenon, mostly because any widescale human trend is super interesting, but also because I have a residual interest in Augmented Reality that is probably Neal Stephenson's fault . This is largely brought on by a terrific article in Forbes featuring Andrew Reinhard of #archaeogaming fame posted in the Women's Digital Archaeology Network  by Lorna Richardson. (here is a video of people in New York freaking out over a rare Pokemon) The article mostly lays out past attempts at engaging people with heritage, a lot of which was pretty groundbreaking considering Pokemon Go is just about the first popular AR game and it's taken 10+ years to even get that far. Particular shout outs to Stu Eve and his projects over at Dead Men's Eyes are necessary -- if you can smell the Pokemon in the next release, you'll have innovators like Stu to thank. Or not. I...

There has been considerable interest recently in the very large number of burials unearthed in the excavation of the CrossRail project near Liverpool Street Station. The CrossRail work is not the first (and may not even be the last) archaeological excavation of the increasingly inaccurately named New Churchyard*, so I thought it only fitting that I post a segment out of my by now probably quite dated PhD, which goes into some detail about the origin and composition of the burial ground. Mostly, I thought I ought to put this up as a tribute to the late Bill White, who was a font of knowledge on all manner of Londoners long since gone to ground. What I’ve recorded here as ‘pers. Comm’ can now be found in the published monograph (cite), but I like to remember it coming straight from Bill himself; his funny, fascinating I insights that I would slowly absorb along with the heat from the mobile radiator set against the arctic cold of the infamous Rotunda. Excerpt below from my phd (...

Here follows a repost from the excellent MSU Capblog - check them out here ! Hello MSU! And hello followers of this blog. Since I fall into the former category, it's very cool to be asked to share a little bit about what has become a fairly all-consuming obsession  project: TrowelBlazers . If you don't know us, please come be our friend . Or not, you know, it's cool. The TrowelBlazers project is a born-on-twitter idea that took off from a handful of early career academics (post docs all) who joined in the general academic-internet wide horror at the type of 'inspirational' material produced by major research funders to encourage women to participate in science. If for some reason you missed the utterly patronising travesty that was the European Commision produced 'Science: It's a Girl Thing', please do feel free to watch it now. I'll wait. Squirm inducing, right? I think what as a group we shared was the feeling that there was something...

Ok! Got distracted by other academic commitments, so fell off the #blogarch wagon for a bit, but back on for March and Doug's final question :   where are you/we going with blogging or would you it like to go?  "Where do we go from here? Is it down to the lake I fear.   Ay ay ay ay ay ay..."   - Haircut 100, sometime in the 80s.   Or, as several of my colleagues would put it, why am I wasting my time writing non-peer reviewed anything? Why would I share anything about my work when people could find out and use it themselves, without giving me credit? I've encountered time and again the repetitive mantra that blogging is at best a waste of time, and at worst an ego-stroking, publicity-seeking exercise carried out by those who just can't hack 'real' academic research. Owwww. This does rather beg the question - why bother? Well, one answer is, I increasingly don't. My personal blog languishes as research projects that really ca...