Milestone tagged

The days when staff would arrive at Stonehenge to find someone had painted the stones are gone, but a week ago Tim Daw spotted graffiti on the milestone across the road.This is his photo: I wrote about this stone earlier, and here is an image I Photoshopped to show the whole stone more clearly, with …

Books VIII: worms & weathering

Here’s another of my especially prized offprints. It’s a classic and perceptive paper by Richard Atkinson, about how soils form and what that can tell us about archaeological deposits. He had been excavating at Stonehenge during four years before this was published (in 1950, 1953, 1954 and 1956), and was soon to start on the …

Filming in Dorset (& reprogramming the TV)

I'm giving you my essential guide to retuning your TV soon, but first a bit of archaeology. This is Maumbury rings, a nice earthworky sort of earthwork near the centre of Dorchester. It looks how it does now because of corporate curation, remodelling during the Civil War and before that as a Roman amphitheatre, but …

Stonehenge (noises off)

Sorry, couldn’t resist that one. I wasn't going to write about this latest piece of Stonehenge silliness, but it’s had so much coverage (and regular readers of this blog might have noticed comments from me in quite a few of the press stories), that I thought I should at least acknowledge it, and perhaps see …

Books VII: Neil Gunn

A writer I discovered when I was a student in London.

Night at the Museum 2

A chance to give Hoa a quick dust Last night we finished the job of recording the British Museum's large Easter Island statue (see here for the first post). As with photogrammetry, the really clever stuff with PTM lies mostly in the software and not the kit. The two most important things here were a …

Last night in the Wellcome Gallery

I spent last night all but alone with the British Museum's Easter Island statue, Hoa Hakananai’a. Graeme Earl, James Miles, Hembo Pagi and I began a project to record and analyse the carving in unprecedented detail. It is one of the British Museum’s most popular objects, but well known as it is, it has been …

Books VI: gallery guides

A random selection of those little guides you are given when you visit special exhibitions

Old Sarum in the snow

I had to visit the museums in Devizes and Salisbury yesterday (hence the cathedral photos), in connection with an exciting little exhibition I'm helping with, as a guest of directors David Dawson and Adrian Green respectively (I earlier referred to British Museum curators as heroic: the challenges they face pale beside those of being responsible …

Salisbury Cathedral in the cold