Steve Mills is over from Cardiff to work with me on a collaborative project exploring ideas to do with senses of place at Catalhoyuk and how we can use different media to disseminate these ideas. At present we are experimenting with sound and video walks at the site. Our aim is to develop other modes…
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Symmetrical Archaeology at Society for American Archaeology (SAA’s) in Puerto Rico
The second installment of A Symmetrical Archaeology was organized as a full session at the Society for American Archaeology at San Juan, Puerto Rico (April 26-30th). Organized by Timothy Webmoor with Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks, and Christopher Witmore, the session brought together an international and trans-disciplinary group of thinkers to present a Manifesto for Symmetry…
Donna Haraway, Richard Rorty, Isabelle Stengers in conversation on Whitehead and Science and Technology @ Stanford
A panel of eminent scholars came together to discuss Alfred Whitehead’s relevance to current issues in science studies, technoscience and pragmatism. Beginning with Isabelle Stengers’ recent work on “Penser avec Whitehead”, the panel discussed the role of Whithead’s ‘propositions’ for facilitating non-reductive modes of understanding ‘common matters of concern’ in the sciences. Stengers and Haraway…
The Borderland. Ethiopia.
Slavery/Fascism/Colonialism: Landscape in Gubba. In a hill over the border town of Gubba, very close to Sudan, stand the remains of a small palace. Its owner, Hamdan Abu Shok, was an infamous slave trader in the late 19th and early 20th century. The surviving brick arcades are redolent of Islamic architecture elsewhere. The ruins look…
Hannibal in the Alps: Stanford Alpine Archaeology Project 1994-2006
Figs. 1 & 2 Hannibal Crossing the Alps; Stanford Alpine Archaeology Team 2004 (Patrick Hunt – project director- at back center in orange) One of the Stanford Alpine Archaeology Project’s most interesting ongoing research foci is Hannibal in the Alps. Hannibal’s famous passage through the Alps in 218 BCE remains one of the most intrepid…
Ancient symmetries: some notes and reflections
It was while searching for an appropriate symbol or image for the cover of a new book on ethnographies of archaeological practice that I encountered Janus – the Roman god of doors and gates. I was specifically looking for something in ancient material symbolism that encapsulated the idea of looking both inwards and outwards at…