A 10 week whistle-stop tour through the big wide world of archaeology. Look a little closer at human prehistory and the journey from hunter/gatherer cavemen to small scale farmers, city dwellers and modern humans. Find out whether the living a paleo lifestyle was really something you would want! ...... arriving Monday 18th September Week 1 (17/09) - Introduction, plans, reading and timescales Week 2 (24/09) - Paleolithic Week 3 (01/10) - Mesolithic and Neolithic Week 4 (08/10) - Bronze and Iron Age Week 5 (17/10) - Roman Britain Week 6 (29/10) - The `Dark Ages` Week 7 (05/11) - Food, farming and trade Week 8 (12/11) - Art, ritual and religion Week 9 (19/11) - Experimental archaeology Week 10 (26/11) - British sites and ways to study further Useful Links: Reading University Department of Archaeology - local and great! Link is to their outreach page but you may want to investigate the page and perhaps make some contacts. Reading Archaeology outreach UK Archaeology - th
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Writing a 10 week introduction to Archaeology is like trying to write a 10 week introduction to being a human. In planning this series of blogs I've mostly come up with far too many things to talk about and to point you in the direction of. Mostly I want you to think about the questions that archaeologists ask and to question their conclusions. I think the aspect of archaeology that I enjoy the most is that 'unknown-ness' of most of it. To tell the truth any expert is telling stories that, at the very best, are the random snapshots of residues of human life that have miraculously remained intact. Its a world of likelihood, best guess and imagination that is rapidly using a scientific and forensic approach to give more clues and widen the picture of the world throughout time. But mostly it is the hunt for the stories that link us to our ancestors, trying to tell us how we got here and remind us of who we are and what we leave behind. The plan for these blogs is in the pre