passim in passing

So, a little while back I had a terrific time writing t his piece for History Today . I was given pretty free reign to charge around talking my second favourite subject (after teeth) -- TrowelBlazers . We had our big Raising Horizons launch coming up and we were all scrabbling away to bring the sheer awesomeness of Women Who Dig to a wider audience. However, in the excitement of telling the story about Hilda Petrie and her climb up Khufu and the time Margaret Murray won WWI (she put a hex on the Kaiser, you know), I got a bit distracted. Margaret Murray TrowelToon by Gabe Moshenska As a very kind reader of History Today pointed out, I'd gotten the details of the redoubtable Amelia Edwards's companion on her historic, and life-changing, trip down the Nile wrong. Amelia was the force behind Egyptology in the UK, cheerleading dashing youngsters like Flinders Petrie (just try imagining him without the beard. No, right?) and more critically, setting up the Egypt Exploration S...

As part of the long process of thinking about the book (especially now that people are reading it, and asking awkward questions like 'wait how do the genetics of pig domestication work again?') I've been doing some additional writing. This was a longer piece for Guardian Cities that I really enjoyed thinking about; I've now decided Annie Besant is one of my personal heroes. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/feb/22/tale-four-skulls-what-can-bones-teach-about-cities She's been arrested* for everything you ought to be arrested for as a Victorian lady - feminism, reproductive rights, atheism, and anti-colonialism.  Besant was a rather prolific writer who turned her talent into a crusaders' sword -- she wrote passionately about injustice, and had a special feeling for those women who felt the hand of opprobrious society most heavily. In 1888, she wrote about a kind of 'white slavery' in London's East End , starting off a torrent of accusatio...

Properly pleased to see such a stellar review in that rather august instrument, The Times (register for free access), for Built on Bones! Tom Whipple has masterfully identified key draws of the book, primarily chattiness and Alan Rickman references. 

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...