Seen Elsewhere

I’ve completed my presentation for NAM. In addition I’ve got a Breeze account at Leicester, so pre-recorded narrated version of my PowerPoint presentation will be available after I’ve given it live. It’s being tested by a few people at the moment and I’m told it’s like I’m in the room with them, though opinion is divided as to whether or not this is a good thing.

I haven’t had time to write much on a few topic I wanted to get done. I’d like to contribute something a bit more substantial to the debate at Early Modern Notes on the Carnival of Bad History. There’s also other stuff to write up including notes on online journals. Which connects nicely to this first link.

Troels Myrup has emailed me to let me know the European Journal of Archaeology now has a blog. This looks like it could be a fun place. For instance can you name a German archaeological landmark? I’d love to see the Porta Nigra in Trier, which is hardly an isolated ruin. There’s the fairy tale castles of Ludwig II but I’m not sure they count, being under 250 years old (don’t complain to me, see the post). For sheer aura can you beat the Neander Valley? I don’t know I’ve never been there so it could be an eyesore, but it is one of the few physical places which associated with the huge timescale of human existence.

I’ve had this page in my comments section awaiting approval for a while. It’s the Portraiture of Caligula. It’s going to be deleted now I’ve linked to it, not because I think it’s bad, but because there’s clearly a lot of work gone into it and I think it would be wrong for people to read it on my site. Joe Geranio deserves people to visit his website which has much more depth to it than a comment here would have. His comment reminded me I wanted to write up something on an online journal, but that won’t be happening for a while.

Finally Black Pot Mojo has let me know where my supervisor is this week. He’s in Ghana for a conference on African astronomy. Sheree Renée Thomas isn’t talking about him but one of the co-organisers, Jarita Holbrook instead. I am incredibly jealous of my supervisor. Partly because he gets to see the eclipse, but also because African astronomy is a fascinating area of study. It requires you to leave your preconceptions of what astronomy should be behind and the most interesting work in the field does this. There are some people who bring a Graeco-Roman shopping list of observations and seem to award marks to cultures that get the ‘right’ answers, but African astronomy is most exciting when you approach it as an anthropologist rather than astronomer. I’ll have to write something up on Mursi astronomy which is… hard to describe. My reaction when I first heard about it was “No, that’s not possible! They aren’t allowed to do that are they?” It’s great when you discover how wrong you can be.

Well not always. If the traffic lights have turned red and you think you’ve fixed the brakes properly after they failed in the accident* the previous week, it’s a little unsettling to be proved wrong. But sometimes it’s a nice feeling.

*To be honest I think they failed a few seconds before I had my first accident. I sold my Beetle for scrap after the second time the brakes failed. I know car magazines look down on cars that are boring to drive, but I’d far rather have a boring trip than an eventful one.