It might have come to your attention that this blog has been ever so slightly comatose of late. This has been going on for far too long and will not do any longer.

I graduated from Durham last summer, and life has largely been boring since then, in the little speck of Surrey I call my home. (Nothing is very exciting here, unless chain coffee-shops and Americans in 4-wheel drives excite you.) Luckily, I’m starting my MA at UCL this autumn. It looks like an amazing programme — I can’t wait!

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that I really rather miss Archaeology. Reading about it, taling about it, and writing about it. And so I’ve decided to dust off this little blog and give it a Grand Revival and Relaunch. New name, new look, less faffing around, more cool Archaeology! That’s the plan, anyway. I’m hoping to write at least once a week about some cool archaeological thing that will, hopefully, be of interest to somebody.

I heard a few minutes of an episode from BBC 4’s A History of the World in 100 Objects series a few days ago, so I went onto iPlayer to listen to all the episodes so far. It’s a series of short radio epsiodes in which the Director of the British Museum retells human history through artefacts in the Museum.

(Through the infinite wisdow of the BBC, it’s also available as a podcast, so those outside the UK can listen to it, too.)

My favourite episode so far is the one about the 10 000 BC Swimming Reindeer. It’s a crazy beautiful piece, for one thing. I love the realism in it, and that they mention in the programme itself that prehistoric art has all manner of styles. There’s a sort of narrative that you get taught where the Ancient Egyptians didn’t know how to draw children, and then the Greeks invented perspective, and then we went through realism and came out the other end with impressionism and surrelaism &c &c. And I think it’s very silly. It’s that same old hangup people seem to have about prehistory. Either the ancients were wise and had all sorts of deep spiritual knowledge that we’ve lost, or they were stupid monkey-men and couldn’t do anything.

There’s some talk about religion and art, too. I’ve never studied that connection in depth, but I think it may be a bit simplistic to say art was always connected to religion to begin with, and now is completely separate.

In any case, the series is quite interesting and nicely presented, and I’m looking forward to it moving on to other time-periods and objects I’ve not heard about before. (Also, I’ve just listened to the last part in this section, and the next section is going to focus on “food and sex”. How can I not look forward to that?)

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Tags:Archaeology; Art; Blog; Media; prehistory; radio