After a frustrating first half to the semester, I've finally had a week of pleasing productivity, especially the last couple of days. I've been reading Maurice Sartre's The Middle East Under Rome (2005), a translation and abridgment of D'Alexandre à Zénobie : Histoire du Levant antique, IVe siècle avant Jésus-Christ - IIIe siècle après Jésus-Christ ( Read more... )

A few links have been building up again:

As if the medicinal qualities of beer were in doubt: Nubian Antibiotic Beer.

A series of maps of Europe illustrating a number of stereotypes: Mapping Stereotypes.

Thinking of a career in academic journalism for a mainstream news source? Here's all you need to know: This is a news website article about a ( Read more... )

This was a day of visiting several interesting archaeological sites in West Norfolk.

Grimes Graves is a field of depressions formed by backfill from prehistoric flint mining. You can go down one of the excavated shafts; it's only nine metres underground, but that's not bad for miners using antlers to extract the best quality flint from the third ( Read more... )

I imagine this is true in all manner of professions, but in academia, conferences are the networking event par excellence. It's certainly not ironic then, that I was presenting paper based to a non-trivial degree on network theory. It did elicit an internal chuckle though ( Read more... )

Has Banksy jumped the shark? It sounds like his fans in the art world have set up the ramp and stocked the swimming pool, at the very least. (And everyone's star has to dim sometimeAs a fellow student of cultural artifacts that are accorded an entirely different set of values in the modern world, the final section of the archaeopop post on the ( Read more... )

This quote caught my eye today:
"Like so many words that are bandied about, the word theory threatens to become meaningless. Because its referents are so diverse - including everything from minor working hypotheses, through comprehensive but vague and unordered speculations, to axiomatic systems of thought - use of the word often obscures rather ( Read more... )

The Crypta Balbi was certainly an interesting museum. For a museum, I guess it is quite a unique concept, but it didn't really blow my mind simply because to my particular Classical background, this kind of thinking is second nature to me. It is however, very interesting to see a non-classist's reaction to the kind of museum it is ( Read more... )