passim in passing

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 discipline

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

So... as much storify as I can put together of an afternoon :) [ View the story "the strange saga of #spaceape" on Storify ]

oh HAI. Did you get here from the internet? Did you perhaps see the phrase 'aquatic ape' in one of the many fine news sources that cover advances in science and other randomly cool stuff--maybe this piece in the guardian? Did you, by some strange conjunction of arcane google-fu and a lifelong interest in mermaids, learn about the aquatic ape theory through this fascinating piece in the daily mail? Really, it is fascinating; you get to look at this picture if you read it: No? I guess that means that I get to be the one to tell you about the Aquatic Ape Theory. For which I apologise in advance, but not very sincerely. Not long ago, let's say, in 1960, a very interesting man called Sir Alister Hardy addressed the conference of the British SubAqua Club at Brighton on the theme ' Aquatic Man: Past, Present and Future .'  Hardy was a marine biologist with a strong interest in the evolution of man, and seems to have been frequently preoccupied by religion; his

So, in advance of a more in-depth reflection on my participation in the 7th Quadrennial World Archaeological Congress at the Dead Sea, Jordan , I've pulled together a little storify and bits and pieces of things and projects that seemed pretty fun but were perhaps not obviously related to teeth, the neolithic, or my immediate interests... Starting, of course, with an awesome trip to Petra which is pretty much all over my instagram account  but highlights are: bored donkey tout dude checking his texts while waiting for tourists;  and this, the first view you get of the famous Treasury building coming down the Siq approach. Conference wise, my favourite quote has to be from the rather vigorous keynote given by Prince El Hassan bin Talal, in his thundering Harrow accent, where he referred to the people of the middle east as 'hell's firewood'. Harsh. And of course, no conference is complete without a ridiculous Indy reference, here's mine (spotted by @lornaricha

We had a strange request come through our internal email a few months back. The poster wanted to know if any museum staff were willing to spend 21 days filming 4 second clips of their lives, and the lives of the museum. Given my long standing dedication to dadaism in the workplace and ever-so-slightly worrying attachment to my iPhone, you can probably accurately predict my response. Yup. Hand up in the air, stepping forward to volunteer, any excuse at all to take more footage of things with the phone... The project is the brainchild of the artist Tony Harris ( tonyharris.org ) for the Campsite event hosted during half-term. If you didn't catch the Campsite at Natural History Museum, it was actually pretty amusing (more here ). Arctic explorer tents, people in outlandish field kit wandering around the museum... and of course, our little video installation (screened in a tent, no less!). For 21 days friends, colleagues, volunteers, and anonymous members of the public were subjec

Ok, so I might have taken some time to catch my breath after the massive annual outreach event that is Science Uncovered , the Natural History Museum London's contribution to the EU-wide Researcher's Night event. About 6,000 people wandered around the museum on a Friday night, enjoying (I think that's the word I want) the bars, virtual autopsy tables, live animals, satellite links to antarctica, and our researchers dragged up from their basements and behind-the-scenes labs to talk Science (and redeem our free drink tokens). The Human Origins Group decided to go pretty big -- we had several volunteers as well as the usual suspects manning the tables. There was a lot of discussion about human evolution by C. Stringer, M. Skinner, L. Buck and L. Humphrey. Heck, I even acted out Taung child being carried off by an eagle a few times (with sound effects, natch). L. Humphrey and L. Buck here demonstrate human evolution for the crowd... But it wasn't all fossils