Michael E. Smith lays down an interesting challenge at Publishing Archaeology: What are the hard problems in Archaeology? What questions haven’t archaeologists answered and aren’t likely to answer any time soon? A couple of ideas come to mind. I’ll start with the easier problem to express. Is an ancient history or archaeology of religion a [...]

I wasn’t aware of this book till I saw a review appear on the BMCR feed. If you’re tackling anything to do with ancient Greece and Rome then it’s a good idea to keep an eye on BMCR as there’s a constant stream of reviews highlighting interesting books. I’m very glad I saw this as [...]

I’ve been sat on this post for a couple of weeks. One reason for not putting it up is I’ve been busy and this post might annoy a few people. Kicking off a discussion and then ignoring it is impolite, so it has had to wait. Another reason is that it’s another post on whether [...]

Some blog posts are a long time in the writing, but this sets a new record for me. Around May 2000 I was trying to think of a way of ripping off Le Corbusier’s quote A house is a machine for living in with regard to tombs. It’s not a position I’d strongly defend. Tombs [...]

This very briefly introduces the statistical method I used to analyse the Greek temples of Sicily for astronomical alignments. It’ll be the basis for a paper On the Orientations of Greek Temples in Sicily. The whole thesis will be made available later via Open Access some way or another. I would say via the British [...]

This is (what I hope is) the final version of the Delphi presentation. It briefly covers the ground that formed the basis for Knowing when to consult the oracle at Delphi. There’s more unpublished material, but rather than trying to produce Delphi II, I’m going to make it part of the forthcoming Calendrical Calibration paper.

I’ll admit not everyone is interested in the world around them. Here’s a site I like, The Hall of Ma’at. I don’t read it as much as I’d like because my reading tends to be RSS based. Still, it means that when I do remember to visit their forum there’s plenty of interesting stuff. I’ve [...]

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!” “Why shouldn’t I?” he said. I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!” He said, “Like what?” I said, “Well…are you religious or [...]

Does a supermassive blog illuminate or destroy? Photo (cc) Dana Berry. There’s a new flap going through a few Science blogs following the publication Unscientific America. One chapter of the book* argues that New Atheists in general and PZ Myers in particular are damaging science communication by being outspoken atheists. Religious people will flatly reject [...]

I plan on Sunday to put up a post On Theology unless I can think of a better title. It could have gone up last weekend, or any time since January if I’d finished writing it, but I was trying to make it less boring. That may be an impossible task. Anyway the plan was [...]