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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…
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Alex Excavates a Toy Block: A Serious Tutorial in Archaeological Fieldwork
Hello everyone, and welcome to what may be the worst blog post I’ve ever posted on this website. So, last Christmas my wonderful and supportive family decided that what I truly deserved was to get mercilessly dunked on by gifting me the meanest thing you can gift an archaeologist (well, second meanest thing, I think…
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Animals in Audio: Why Do a Zooarchaeology Podcast?
2023 marks the 5th anniversary of ArchaeoAnimals, a podcast I’ve been hosting alongside my friend and fellow archaeologist Simona Falanga on the Archaeology Podcast Network. Back in 2018, I was approached by the Archaeology Podcast Network after a recent guest appearance on the Women in Archaeology Podcast and asked if I would be interested in…
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Did They Finally Make an Archaeology Game? A Very Late (Archaeological) Review of Heaven’s Vault
Yes, okay this game came out in 2019, and I actually played it for the first time in 2021, but I didn’t actually write a review then, so I’m writing one now based on a recent playthrough. So, if you haven’t played it in the past four years since it was released, beware of spoilers…
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No Margins, No Word Counts, No Masters! Experimenting With ‘Zines for Archaeological Outreach
The following text is an expanded version of a Twitter conference paper I presented in 2019 for the Public Archaeology Twitter Conference on ‘zine making as an alternative form of science communication for archaeology. Over the past two decades, archaeology has seen a shift towards “outside-the-box” thinking. From queer theory to archaeogaming, the discipline has…
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The Importance of the Little Town Museum in “I Am Dead”
This blog post will contain some slight spoilers for the game ‘I Am Dead’. As readers may remember, I absolutely loved the video game I Am Dead (Hollow Ponds, 2020) and wrote a previous blog post about how it was actually more of an archaeology game than players may actually realise. Perhaps one of my…
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The World Wide Reference Collection: Zooarchaeological Twitter and the Case for an International Zooarchaeology Database
The following text is an expanded version of a Twitter conference paper I presented back in 2018 (remember the world pre-pandemic?!) for the Computer Applications in Archaeology Twitter Conference. As such, it’s a bit out of date – however, I think some ideas from the paper are still worth considering, particularly as Open Access and…
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Repairing Relations through Research: An Archival Approach to Institutional Accountability
Note: This blog post is adapted from an abandoned journal paper that I originally wrote in 2021. Introduction From the perspective of many people from marginalised backgrounds and historically looted communities, the museum continues to be a symbol of colonialism. Despite renewed calls for decolonisation, repatriation, and restitution, museums are arguably still behind in progressing…
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On Embracing Liminality and Fighting Precarity: Moving Onwards from 2022
It’s been a tough year…for everyone, to be honest! But for me, it’s been a bit of a wake-up call after finding myself somewhat comfortably situated in grad school life since 2015. At the end of 2021, I graduated with my PhD and had secured my first proper research position at a university (albeit in…
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Beyond Domestication and Subsistence: A Call for a Decolonised Zooarchaeology
The following text is a transcript of a talk I gave in 2019 for the Decolonising Science Narratives workshop held at the Science Museum in London, UK. Although I have since changed my mind a bit on the topic (see my follow-up seminar talk I gave here), I feel like its important to have my…
Animal Archaeology
All things archaeology…but mostly dead animals.