Why two presentations?

Given the choice I’d rather do the ancient history presentation, but the ancient history staff are slightly overworked in the department at the moment. If the room is going to be devoid of classicists but have plenty of industrial archaeologists then it would feel like a bit of a missed opportunity if I had something relevant on the hard-drive that I didn’t talk about.

Even though it’s not an important presentation I’d still like it to be a good one, so I think it’s best to bite the bullet and drop one. The time spent preparing two mediocre presentations could be better spent make one slightly less mediocre presentation. It’s not like the Industrial archaeologists are inflexible and unable to cope with anything outside their period, so I’m going with the Ancient History talk because it’s more useful to me. I feel less confident with the content matter than for the archaeology presentation, but I think it’s closer to my PhD and more useful in the long term. Particularly if I have a look at myth in connection with religion and the supernatural.

The reason the two talks have the same title is that I was asked for a title, not a topic and was told ‘tba’ was not a suitable title. Hopefully there’ll be a series of increasingly less ill-informed posts on the topic of meaning as the presentation date looms. I’ve had it confirmed today as March 2.

There should also be another presentation to follow. I plan to give my “Archaeologists and Astronomers Miscommunicating” talk at the National Astronomy Meeting if it’s accepted. It makes sense to add notes and stick them up here when that happens around April 6.