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Archaeology, Page 2

The Navigation of Feeling

“What are Emotions?” is a question asked by William Reddy (2001) in his book The Navigation of  Feeling: A Framework for the History of History of Emotions. The first part of that books looks at the answers, from Cognitive Psychology in the first chapter, and Anthropology in the second. He points out early, however that: Western specialists who study emotion cannot even agree on what the term emotion means. Continue reading →

Smart conservation

Yesterday, to Oxford, to meet with the brilliant Niki Trigoni, who among many other things founded Navenio, a company that provides infrastucture free mobile location analytics. It occurred to me, during our conversation, that there is a case for MLA in heritage sites that may be stronger than the story delivery that I’ve seen concentrating on. Continue reading →

First impressions of Hololens

A couple of weeks back, I had my first experience with Microsoft’s Hololens. The university acquired a number of units to experiment with. My archaeology colleague Pat Tanner has been trying one out and showed me and Learning expert Sarah Fielding progress so far. Pat is a traditional shipwright by trade and PhD student, exploring the archaeological evidence of boat building techniques. Some of the results of his work is available here. Continue reading →

Please take this very short survey

The problem with doing a PhD part-time is that trends change more quickly than my research. It doesn’t mean that my research has been overtaken, but questions I asked three or four years ago might have very different answers. To that end I have a very short survey I’d like to you do two things with. First of all, answer it yourselves, and secondly, share the link with as many people (over 16) as you can. https://www.isurvey.soton.ac. Continue reading →

Analysis of animal teeth suggests Neolithic cattle grazed at home and away

An international team of researchers has shown in unprecedented detail that prehistoric farmers took their animals away from permanent settlements to graze in more fertile areas – probably because of high demand for land locally. Analysis of strontium isotopes in teeth of Neolithic cattle suggests that early Europeans used specialised strategies to manage herding, according to a study by the universities of Basel, Southampton, Bristol and the The Curt-Engelhorn-Centre for Archaeometry. Continue reading →

Building a story in Star Wars Indentities

A Stormtrooper marching band? The exhibition attempts to illustrate different values with illustrations like this. It was Fathers’ day last weekend, as a treat, my family took me to the Star Wars Identities exhibition at the O2 in Greenwich. I was interested for a number of reasons, not the least of which was, being ten in 1977, I was (am) a massive fan of Star Wars. But one of the other reasons was the idea that visitors build their Star Wars identity as they go around the exhibition. Continue reading →

Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics

There you are sitting down to go back and review a piece of work you completed over a year ago – your literature review. You’ve had notes from your supervisor, some of which you addressed at the time, but others required a little more reading,  which you did, or some deeper thinking about, which you are still doing really (does that ever end?). But over all you are ready to take those forty thousand words apart and rearrange them a bit into three chapters instead of one. Continue reading →