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Why Do We Love (Plastic, Inaccurate) Skeletons So Much? A Halloween Investigation
This blog post is part of the first ever Real Archaeology festival! Myself, along with several other archaeology-focused content creators, have come together to celebrate real, factual (not pseudoscience!) archaeology over the next few days, with new content coming out on a variety of themes. To see the full schedule and learn more about the…
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The Call is Coming From Inside the Discipline! The Inability to Recognise Racism within Archaeology
Over the past few months, I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with some of the rhetoric I’ve heard from white colleagues in the archaeology sector with regards to racism. Mainly, there seems to be this sense that racism is either something that occurs outside of the field – in that there are bad faith…
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Dreaming of the Past: Using Narrative & Fiction to Understand Archaeology in “I Am Dead”
Please note that this blog post contains spoilers for the game “I Am Dead”. I’ve already written at length about how much I loved I Am Dead (Hollow Ponds, 2020) as an archaeologist and as a museum worker. However, I want to discuss another element of the game a bit further – more specifically, the…
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Does Zooarchaeology Matter? A Case for Actionable Animal Archaeologies
The following is a transcript of my keynote talk from the Zooarchaeology Saves the World conference held in May 2022. Introduction Does zooarchaeology matter? Perhaps this is an intentionally provocative question to ask zooarchaeologists but given the status of the world today – the intensification of climate change, the rise of fascism across the globe,…
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Stuck in the Past: Silence & Complicity in Archaeology’s Current Harms
I have been meaning to write a proper blog post about my frustrations regarding some of the discourse within archaeology around making amends for the discipline’s contributions to oppression and violence – in fact, this post has probably been sat unfinished in my drafts for a few years now. But these frustrations have certainly reached…
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On Getting There: The (Im)patience of Archaeology and Heaven’s Vault
Please note that this blog post contains spoilers for the game “Heaven’s Vault”. As I wrote in a post almost a year (!!!) ago, I finished my second playthrough of Heaven’s Vault (Inkle Studios, 2021). And perhaps one of the things that struck me most on this replay was just how long the travel sequences…
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Moving Towards Decolonisation – Proposing a Framework for Action in Universities
The following transcript is from a conference paper I presented in 2022 as part of the Making Diversity Interventions Count Annual Conference at the University of Braford. It is also an expansion of a previous paper I presented on decolonising zooarchaeology, and proposes a more institutional-wide approach to moving towards decolonisation. Introduction Since the 2020…
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Digging While Depressed and Disabled: Mental Health and Accessibility in Archaeological Practice
This is the transcript from a talk I gave in April 2022 for the Enabled Archaeology session of the CIfA2022 Conference. It is an extension of my original blog post on Digging While Depressed, which you can read here. Digging While Depressed (Fitzpatrick 2018, 2019) was the result of my experiences after being injured on-site…
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Stories and Histories: The Importance of the Written (and Spoken) Word in ‘Pentiment’
Please note that this blog post has major spoilers for the video game Pentiment, which I highly recommend you play before reading further as its a fantastic game! There’s lots you can talk about with Pentiment, a point-and-click historical mystery game set in 16th century Bavaria (and I’m sure I’ll talk about this game a…
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Promoting Progress: Using Social Media to Diversify Archaeology
This is a transcript from a talk I gave in April 2022 as part of the ARCHON workshop “Digging Archaeology through Social Media”. Introduction Archaeology still has a diversity problem. It is difficult to find up-to-date demographic information regarding the archaeological workforce across the world, but the information that is available does not present a…
Animal Archaeology
All things archaeology…but mostly dead animals.