In the 21st century, digital practices are transforming both archaeological practices in the field and the concept publication. The fragmentation of archaeological knowledge as digital data produces portable, sharable, remixable, and transformable publications that are less stable and less definitive than their predecessors in print. As a result,…[Read more]

An interpretation of the rock art appearing in The Shaft at Lascaux and a discussion of Aurignacian Rites of Passage

An interpretation of the Red Mammoth Panel in Chauvet linking Chauvet to Lascaux in a single ritual landscape

Studies of Egyptian Late Period statuary often assume that the extant corpus is a representative sample of the artistic output of the Twenty-Sixth to Thirty-First Dynasties (c. 664–332 BCE). This assumption ignores the various human processes that affect the survival of statues after their initial dedication. In particular, the Roman practice of c…[Read more]

As the 2017-18 academic job cycle came to an end I found myself, for the first time in five years, in the enviable position of not having to resume my search for employment again in the fall, thanks to a two-year position at a very eminent institution. This good fortune has prompted me to compile my reflections on the classical archaeology job…[Read more]

This Chapter provides simple but valuable insights to Upper Paleo abstract values such as Time, Life After Death, Social Roles, etc. Introduction to ‘Soft Cultural Institutions’. Understanding how abstract valuations become embedded into social structure is especially important in terms of understanding nonverbal language and symbolic sets.

The Index of Deities and Demons is the heart of One Godz. This Index presents almost all Deities and Demons represented on the cave walls of Chauvet and Lascaux along with their defining Basis Points drawn from Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns. This chapter demonstrates the actual process of attaching meaning to symbolism while mediating subjectivity.

This is an Accepted Manuscript, for an article forthcoming in Antiquity (2019), and remains subject to pre-publication type-editing and proofing. Please cite as James M. Harland, ‘Memories of Migration? So-called “Anglo-Saxon” Burial Costume of the 5th Century AD,’ Antiquity 93 (2019). A link to the final publication at Cambridge University Press…[Read more]

The specific outlook and reach of administration in Prepalatial Crete is the topic of heated debate. The materials most frequently implicated in this debate are clay sealings, usually taken as a clear demonstration of administrative concerns. However, although early sealings might have been used for this purpose, this view tends to be influenced…[Read more]

This is the paper I gave at the Public Archaeology Twitter Conference 3 (2019). The conference theme was storytelling in archaeology.

The paper is an archaeological comic. Each panel of the comic was one tweet. The whole comic was composed by threading the tweets. The comic tells the story of the discovery and excavation (2014-15) of a site in…[Read more]

At the end of the Pleistocene (25,000-15,000 BP), there is a shift to more arid conditions in the Negev and the Sinai corresponding to the Last Glacial Maximum. For the Nile Valley and the Levant, the lowering of the Mediterranean sea level, the expansion of the Sahara and the desiccation of some major eastern African lakes had important…[Read more]

During the Nubia Salvage Campaign and the subsequent expeditions from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, numerous sites attributed to the Late Palaeolithic (~25–15 ka) were found in the Nile Valley, particularly in Nubia and Upper Egypt. This region is one of the few to have allowed human occupations during the dry Marine Isotope Stage 2 and is there…[Read more]

During the 2001 excavation season at Göbekli Tepe, a fragment of a small miniature mask depiction was found in Enclosure D. The fragmentarily preserved object was originally ovaloid in form, the back is concave. It features a very prominent nose and large, nearly open-worked eyes. An indention supposedly depicting the mouth is rather small, on…[Read more]

This is the abstract for my paper presented on 31 January 2019 in the third Public Archaeology Twitter Conference. The theme of this year’s conference is STORYTELLING. My paper is a re-telling of an archaeological excavation, inspired by John Swogger’s re-imagining of a peer-reviewed archaeological journal article in comic format. Read the…[Read more]

Die agrarische Wirtschaftsweise ist eines der definierenden Elemente des Neolithikums in Schleswig-Holstein. Doch ist es plausibel, dass diese Form der Ökonomie in gleicher Weise über mehr als 2000 Jahre betrieben wurde? Lassen sich einzelne Landnutzungsphasen identifizieren? Welches waren die bevorzugten Siedlungsräume der neolithischen Be…[Read more]

This A3 poster shows the difference between the structures of academic and journalistic pieces of writing. I call these the ‘Academic Triangle’ and the ‘Journalistic Triangle’. There’s lots of great advice online to help you write one way or the other. But this poster contrasts the two styles side-by-side, using an important archaeological paper…[Read more]

In accordance with current perceptions, the Neolithic landscape of Southern Scandinavia appears to be dominated by two innovations that are connected to the transition to the Neolithic in this region: agriculture and monuments such as megalithic tombs or Single Grave burial mounds. So it seems natural to assume that these aspects also dominated…[Read more]

The Neolithic and Bronze Age burial ground of Flintbek provides a well-documented case study of a monumental landscape, whose shaping and development through ritual practices of monument building can be studied over the course of centuries. The minute excavation and data analyses (Mischka 2011a) enable a discussion of the interrelations between…[Read more]

Over the course of the twentieth century a number of experimental studies have
investigated the construction of megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge
(Atkinson, 1956; Osenton, 2001; Parry, 2000; Pavel, 1992; Ravilious, 2010;
Richards & Whitby, 1997). These studies have typically highlighted the challenges
posed — or benefits offered — by one…[Read more]

This is the presentation of a conference paper at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference 2018 (Chester). The conveners of the conference session ‘Practising Creativity: Experimentation, Mistakes and Successes in Art-Archaeology’, James Dixon and Seren Griffiths, ask participants to discuss experimentation in art-archaeology. Artists have…[Read more]