Castles and Coprolites

There has been an opinion piece doing the rounds on twitter - The Secret Life of an archaeologist: soil in your sandwiches and sexism.  Having been subject to sexism both privately and professionally, I can sympathize with aspects of this, however there is a lot in this piece which made me frown. Enough so that I decided to do my own blog post about it. When I saw the title I thought it was going to focus on the problems of sexism and harassment in the field, something which has received a lot of attention recently, both in archaeology and in other field-based disciplines. But the thing that irked me was its presentation of what 'real' archaeology is like. There seem to be two extremes in the way archaeology is perceived, it's either Indiana Jones and digging up 'treasure' (i.e. pretty objects, preferably precious metal), or there are the pieces like this, which want to tell everyone how boring and hard work it actually is. This reminded me of an excellent post (go ...

I read on the interwebs recently that the new Ghostbusters are women! I also read that some people thought this was "unrealistic". So I thought I would check out the original characters and see what is so unrealistic about them being played by women. Why am I blogging about this you may ask? Where is the archaeological connection? Well, it so happens that one of the original Ghostbusters did a PhD in Egyptology! Now it's been many years since I watched the films, and I was of an age where I didn't take in the details of people's professions and whatnot, but that's pretty awesome. And ghosts, you know, archaeology, dead people, cursed artefacts etc. There's a connection in there somewhere. Dr Watt, Prof Jackson, Prof Ikram & Prof. Ferlaino The original dudes were parapsychologists. As psychology is a rather large field, I wasn't sure where to start, but I managed to find Dr Caroline Watt, at my own University of Edinburgh , who researches th...

I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking over the past year about women in archaeology. I've become increasingly aware of the concept of privilege and the impacts it has on the structure of academia, and since joining Twitter it is something I reflect on regularly. Twitter really is one of the best sources of information and interaction on this topic, letting you connect directly with so many people and understand different viewpoints. It is through Twitter that I became aware of the Trowel Blazers website, dedicated to promoting the contributions of women in geoscience, palaeontology and archaeology. I did a post for them recently on Florence Bascom , and hope to contribute more in future. It got me thinking about my own career and the people who have influenced it, many of who happen to be women. So here is a list of inspiring Trowel Blazing women who have influenced my career from starting university to the present day, in roughly chronological order of influence! Dr...

October 19th was International Archaeology Day , not to be confused with Day of Archaeology which I have participated in in the past ( 2012 and 2013 ). Whereas Day of Archaeology is a blog based event, where people blog about their day as an archaeologist, International Archaeology Day is more a series of events organised by different groups and institutions. I was a bit late finding out about it so didn't have time to organise any events, but by browsing some of the online activities I discovered Wikipedia edit-a-thons. Specifically I came across Ada Lovelace and Trowelblazers edit-a-thons , which aim to celebrate women in archaeology, palaeontology and geology, by creating and improving Wikipedia articles. What a great idea! Wikipedia often gets bashed for being a poor source of information for academic work, but as a first stopping point to get your head around a subject it's really not that bad. As with any source, the ability to judge the quality of the information on ...

Kenyon excavating at Jericho. Photo from Archaeology International http://www.ai-journal.com/article/view/ai.1321/89 It's International Women's Day ! So I thought it would be appropriate to have a quick muse about one of archaeology's most inspiring female figures (in my opinion at least!). I first became aware of Kathleen Kenyon as the lady after whom my first year undergrad accomodation was named - the delightful Kenyon Building, a 1960s concrete tower block of doom in the middle of the otherwise attractive grounds of St Hugh's Colleg e. She is perhaps most well known for her excavations of early Jericho in the 1950s, and she also played a key role in the formation of the Institute of Archaeology at UCL, was the first female president of the Oxford University Archaeological Society, was honorary director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, became Principle of  St. Hugh's College and in 1973 was named Dame of the Order of the Brit...