Tag: heritage
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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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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 Benevolence of the Billionaires, or Why are So Many Mansions Museums?
My first real job in the heritage sector was in high school, when I was a volunteer (and then paid) docent at the Vanderbilt Museum on Long Island, NY. As you may be able to gather from the name of the museum, this was originally owned by the Vanderbilt family – descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt,
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Community-Led, Community-Run: The Blathers’ Approach to Museum Curation
In the Animal Crossing video game series, Blathers is the rather stereotypical curator of the local museums; a straight-laced nerd who punctuates his educational rambling with “wot?” and is dutiful in his collecting…even if he has to occasionally handle a bug or two. But what is less stereotypical is his curatorial approach as the head
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The Instagram Museum: Visitor Participation in the Age of the Selfie
Have you ever heard of an “Instagram Museum”? Often temporary, these pop-up exhibitors are often part-art gallery, part-immersive experience, but all about the selfie. Although the Museum of Ice Cream, which first opened up in NYC in 2016, is arguably the most famous of these Instagram Museums, it wasn’t the first – for that, we
Animal Archaeology 