Tag: Archaeology
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Mattie Lubchansky’s ‘Simplicity’ and Weaponising the Museum of the Future
The following blog post will contain spoilers for Mattie Lubchansky’s recent book Simplicity, which is out now and I highly recommend folks – especially those of you who work in the museum and anthropology fields – read it first! Simplicity (Lubchanksy, 2025) is not about museums. I mean, it kinda is – but it’s more
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Who Gets to Feel Good in Archaeology?
Over the past decade, there has been a lot of attention drawn to the benefits of archaeological fieldwork on the mental health of participants (e.g., Finnegan 2016, Rathouse 2019, Everill et al. 2020, Dobat et al. 2022). And while it is wonderful to see people have such a positive experience with archaeology, I have to
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Is Two Point Museum the Most Accurate Video Game Depiction of Museum Work?
Kinda! Okay, so real life museum work doesn’t usually involve collecting poltergeists and we don’t often have groups of clowns regularly visit (at least, not in my experience). Two Point Museum (Two Point Studios, 2025) is obviously full of charming bits of nonsense that have been found throughout the simulation video game franchise. And yet,
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Finding Hope in Archaeology at the End of the World
At the time of writing this, it is 10am in the United Kingdom on the 6th November 2024. As an American migrant over here, I’ve unsurprisingly been watching with dread as the results begin to trickle in and despite my deep criticisms of electoral politics, its hard not to feel very depressed and worried about
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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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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
Animal Archaeology 