Mysteries, mysteries?

I may have not seen the Stonehenge programme the other week, but this week I saw three different archaeological - or archaeologically themed - television programmes. These contained the good things and bad things about the archaeological programming. The one-off Pompeii documentary put me off instantly. Not that I have anything against Margaret Mountford, the egyptologist from the Apprentice. She was really lovely when making a guest appearance in Chris Naughton's The Man who Discovered Egypt that told the story of Flinders Petrie.

Chris Naughton in Egypt

The problem with the Pompeii documentary was that it made a huge mystery of the way the people, who have been immortalised in plaster casts, died. My instant reaction a couple of minutes into the programme was to switch channels, since I just did not want to face the prompt every five minutes requesting the solution to the puzzle. After all, there was a huge volcanic eruption, toxic gases and ashes and stones raining from the sky. How did they die? The volcano erupted. And I was wondering why we did not have a Mary Beard, but an egyptologist.

I read afterwards from a review that the problem they were looking at was the reason for the Herculaneum bodies evaporating and the brains exploding and the Pompeii bodies dropping down, decaying peacefully and leaving us with facial expressions and all. It was apparently all down to the different temperatures. Luckily, I found this out without watching an hour of prompts.

Joann Fletcher in a tomb

The really lovely and interesting programmes were both about egyptology. The Flinders Petrie documentary I already mentioned, but I have to underline how informative it was. I had not realised that Petrie was still active around the time the Tutankhamun's tomb was found. He just had redirected his interest to Palestine, since he could not profit any more in Egypt from exporting the objects from the excavations to Britain to give to the museums and societies that funded him.

The other programme was Joann Fletcher's Ancient Egypt - Life and Death in the Valley of the Kings. It the fascinating story of the builders of the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. She may look flamboyant in her all black attire contrasted with red hair, but the programme told a truly fascinating story and provided proper information and evidence. What we really need is less sensationalism and more truly fascinating details!

Detective work

This year is probably the 20th anniversary of many things, but I spotted that it is 20 years since Ingold’s seminal article on taskscapes, a concept our ‘ceramiscene’ owes more than a reference. As a consequence, we are planning to arrange a TAG session (TAG is the annual Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in UK - the forerunner of the Nordic, Turkish and American TAGs - that incorporates the nationwide Christmas party) on taskscape and its developments, including ceramiscene. We just had one problem. We had not made it to the Liverpool TAG, so we did not know where the next TAG was going to be.

The first port of call in modern times when you have any enquiry is to google. I tried it, my co-session organiser tried it and I tried it again, but with no results. We could find out that the Nordic TAG is definitely still going to happen in Iceland, the American TAG will be in Chicago and that the Turkish TAG was going to be as well. Nevertheless, there was no sign of TAG 2013. I even considered for a fleeting moment, if archaeologists had become superstitious... Then I started e-mailing the usual suspects.

My friend at Liverpool clearly had read my Facebook message, but she apparently did not know, since I received no answer. Cambridge archaeologists, including Pam Smith, whose Personal Histories interview series, to be including this year the films on Martin Carver and Tony Robinson, is a visible presence every year, gave negative answers. Even John Carman from Birmingham, who has attended the meetings regularly, did not go to Liverpool and was not any wiser than anybody else. I asked around in the CAA UK with no result either; the news had not reached London, yet.

Then my co-organiser did what I should have done earlier. He e-mailed Britarch. We got a reply that somebody had an understanding it was going to be Bournemouth – to the amusement to one of our friends who lives in Bournemouth and will not have any excuse this year. Now I only had to get a confirmation, since there was nothing on the university web site. Finally, a friend working at Bournemouth confirmed that Bournemouth will organise the TAG 2013. Their web site is under construction and will go online for the normal start of the session proposals later in the spring. Now their research blog announcing the conference, dated to early February, is fortunately coming up in the search engine. So the search is over and we can start putting the session together.

Embarrassing admissions

This week of my friend specifically asked me to write my blog about the Channel4 programme on the latest finds from Stonehenge. I had noticed that Mike Parker Pearson had been in the papers and Stonehenge was presented as a burial place and as a result of the communal effort of whole Britain. This result had been discovered by studying the animal bones from the Riverside project excavation site, where the builders of the Stonehenge allegedly lived. Those cows had been living before coming to Wiltshire from up and down the country.

Call the Midwife (still by BBC)

Apparently after the TV programme where were some irritated comments, mainly due to the normal reasons of irritating voice over and other TV mannerisms. However, I have not seen the TV programme. No matter how many marvellous iPlayers and 4oD services there are, they do not actually provide you with any more time. In addition, the original reasons why this programme slipped my net are slightly embarrassing to admit.

The main reason was that the programme collided with the Call the Midwife. It was the last episode and I had been following the budding, problematic romance emerging between one of the nuns and the male doctor, who widowed in the series one. I wanted to shed a tear and enjoy my Sunday night entertainment instead of watching re-enactors passing by some stones in the dusk and sweaty men pushing big stones – the programme on Stonehenge may or may not have contained such elements.

After actually visiting Stonehenge for the first time in the late 1980s, I was relatively unimpressed by the stone themselves. Somehow Avebury catches more my awe. Anyway, after my MA at Bristol I appreciated even more all other landscape elements in the plains, including the Romano-British villages/towns. Stonehenge evokes imagination when considered as part of a landscape and when one looks at some elements, such as the dagger carvings and the human burials. A few of the interpretations promoted by the professor have somewhat cold, since they have felt slightly glued on, but I cannot ignore the importance Stonehenge has in the minds of my colleagues and my ‘lay’ friends. It is a prestigious site and everyone wants a piece of it or has an opinion. Nevertheless, I must now wait for a repeat.

Of course, there is the matter of female archaeologists not normally admitting doing such frivolous activities as following Sunday night entertainment. I have never kept it a secret that I do read the gossip and watch lame programmes. After following the Bold and the Beautiful in the 1990s, I have left the soaps alone, though. My male colleagues do many things from fishing, long distance running to Roman re-enactment on their spare time. I am currently so busy with different things that pure enjoyment is a luxury. Thus, on this occasion, I wanted my fluff.

Open Access

Open Access is all in vogue now and I have suddenly acknowledged that I am actually an Editor-in-Chief of an open access series. Not that I have been thinking the Monographs of the Archaeological Society of Finland first and foremost as an open access publication. Actually, web presence is a way to allow producing peer-reviewed publications in a convenient format. The learned society and their umbrella organisation provide the storage space on a server, which is a saving in comparison with a full hard copy publication.

In his keynote speech in CAA UK 2013 Mark Lane discussed the issue of affordability of open access publications. Some do ask the authors to pay a fee instead of asking for libraries and users to pay for subscriptions as the traditional, prestigious publications do. The price of these subscriptions has gone through the roof and many libraries are ‘rationalising’ their orders. Even an institution such as the University of Cambridge has dropped – or at least has tried to drop – overlapping subscriptions from the University Library if these are provided by a departmental or faculty library.

The business plan is in the core. Our business plan is traditional, since all the editors, members of the editorial board and peer reviewers do the volumes in the academic fashion – for free. Or more precisely, all activity is subsidised by their proper job or other income. Nevertheless, this is how different publications work anyway. Very few apart from the most prestigious ones have paid part-time editors or editorial assistants or secretaries. Actually, discussing the publications as open access makes the existing practices transparent. Basically, additional value is created through voluntary work.

CAA UK – a conference to twitter about

My busy week did have its highlight in London last week, where I attended the CAA UK conference. I was presenting the ceramiscene to the computing audience. Our paper ended up being the first after some fiddling with the original programme and this meant I ended up storming through the central London dragging my trolley in order to make it in time to the conference venue in East End.

This conference was unusual, since it was hosted by a commercial unit, namely L-P:Archaeology. It was also held in a bar – in the side building of the former Truman brewery. Suiting fine with these difficult economic times, the wine reception was a pop-up event in an empty shop front. All very NOW. By the screen there was a side screen for all the incoming tweets from the conference attendants and others. This was a concerning news to me and I did not dare to check the tweets when speaking – being videoed was bad enough. Apparently there were no too critical comments during the ceramiscene paper, so I got through it reasonably well, considering I literally ran to the front of the screen to deliver. My lunch bun was waiting for me in the first row.

The interactive nature of a conference with tweets flashing to the screen could be truly scary, but all content was very civilised. Some critical comments or questions were targeted to the key note speaker Mark Lane, who has edited a volume of World Archaeology on open archaeology. The irony of the eventual pay-for-view nature of the traditional publication series and the topic had not escaped other archaeologists and some authors dropped out when they heard about the set up. Lake was very protective about the publishing venue – and he referred to the fact that his University expects him to publish in a series of certain importance and impact – but most open archaeology publication do not have the standing, yet. He was generally critical and I was wondering if he truly is for or against open archaeology, but overhearing his comments to some delegates suggested that he is for it in principle. I did my duty as the Editor-in-Chief of the Monographs of the Archaeological Society of Finland and pointed out that most of the open publications are relative newcomers and we are just building up the reputation and a reliable and classy peer reviewer base.

The conference gave a good snap shot of the present state of computing. Since this year’s CAA International is in Perth, Australia, there were many European papers and delegates from Scandinavia and Baltic states among others. The papers covered cloud computing and cool mobile phone heritage apps. The laser scanning seems to be going slightly out of vogue and photogrammetry was lauded with some applications using historic records from earlier excavations as well. If you were not there, you can visit the papers, since they are to be uploaded onto YouTube. Ours can now be seen on YouTube.

As I said, we were conferencing in a bar. Not only was the venue comfortable with warm brick walls and comfy sofas for some delegates to sit on – a definite improvement from non-descriptive university conference facilities – but the conference had all the tech where its mouth was.

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PS. It was sad that the Brick Lane curry was the worst I probably have ever eaten. While the colleagues around me were complaining about their curries being too hot, my aloo paneer was the mildest thing ever. It was like a Finnish spinach soup with some paneer thrown in. A curry as made by an old Finnish lady... But it was admittedly a Friday night and there were about 60 of us, if not more.

Sour grapes

I did not touch last week the great revelation of the week - suggested though for some time - that is the confirmation of the identity of the man excavated from the car park in Leicester. Nevertheless, I thought the internship issue had to be covered before jumping the Richard III band wagon. I already discussed the matter with some Embrace Arts and WEA students and was explaining how I find the basic research behind the flashy headlines reassuringly robust. Nothing to do with the fact that I have eaten the divine walnut cake baked by the osteologist who cracked slightly Richard’s skull with a mattock to the amusement of the field archaeologists everywhere.

This was in the Pitts blog as well (University of Leicester)

After the TV documentary headed by the secretary of the Scottish arm of the Richard III Society and the Death from the Stupid Deaths of the Horrible Histories the critics raised their heads and sharpened their axes. I could point out that a well-presented press conference can bring the results of a project together like no peer-reviewed publication, that the peer-reviewed article will be provided by the Antiquity (if it passes the peer-review) as soon as possible and that archaeologists have always popularised their results. Part of the funding and the idea came from outside the profession, so the University was answering a demand in the community. This may be an occasion when Leicester is delivering a result to the official expectations of the authorities for research to have a social impact. The critics such as Charlotte Higgins would probably have loved to have this kind of possibility to enhance the reputation of their own university. For academics with a visible and widely acknowledged media profile to suggest that other academics may be slightly misplaced to publicise their results in a press conference comes across as sour grapes. I could go on and on but this all has already done better.

Mike Pitts in his long Digging Deeper post gives well-established opinions and shows that professional archaeologist can give respect to their peers who ‘strike gold’. But he does edit British Archaeology magazine, so he is better informed than most of us. And what regards any discussions on the non-existing screenwriting credits in the IMdb or the re-enactment of ‘Britain’s Most Haunted’, better not to continue further...

Let’s work for free! An internship anyone?

After a trip to a workshop in Groningen, I am back to write about an important contemporary issue that effects not just landscape archaeology but all archaeology. I will return to the themes I have been thinking about even before the workshop, namely computing, later during the month.

There are clear signs that the professional archaeology is stepping back in time – just as apparently the whole education system is taking a leap back to the 1950s. The highly laudable effort that is DigVentures when it is resurrecting the excavations of Flag Fen is now advertising for an intern. Similarly to the political internships this one does not mention any salary nor does it mention any expenses either, even if much of the early meetings will take place in London. The internship requires two months commitment and basically this person will take care of the social networking and web side of the interaction by DigVentures – or should I say advertisement.

Harsh times require new remedies, but making budding archaeologists to work for free without tying the scheme to any of the existing MA/MSc programmes that require periods of practical work embedded in the year of study is problematic. This work experience could have fitted nicely to the computing or media courses there have been in places like Bristol, London and Southampton. Failing to make sure that the unpaid work would 'pay' in this way suggests that the not-so-laudable practices are creeping into archaeology. Naturally, small companies wish to keep themselves afloat and nothing is more economic than a free employee.

The ethical dilemma in this case lies squarely on the fact that this intern will be essential in keeping the company afloat. The interaction and web presence will engage people and get them to part from their money. Bluntly put this person working for free will help the certain number of archaeologists be paid through their payroll in DigVentures. This is OK, if the person 'interned' will get a tangible outcome out of the experience. The work experience may be enough, if the person is a student and the internship will count towards his/hers degree. Perhaps DigVentures will pay this person in the future for his/hers services. In any case they have to make him/her feel valuable and compensate for the fact that that person will help them to get their salaries.

I for one have never been in the position to rely on my relatives for my income; thus, archaeology or something else has to pay. This is the situation with most of the people who have entered archaeology during the eighties, nineties and noughties. Paying for work is the only way to keep people in archaeology and make sure that our interpretations take into account the experiences of the widest possible width of population. Otherwise we are back in the situation where archaeology will become an ivory tower of independently wealthy again.