Blogging archaeology

Today I saw it, I got quite excited and decided to take part in what I deem as a great initiative- a blogging carnival for archaeologists, where each and every month the participants will answer a question. The first question is:

“Why blogging? – Why did you, or if it was a group- the group, start a blog?”.

For starters, I am not sure if others would qualify my blog as archaeological, but I would definitely do. After all, being interested in theoretical archaeology I can always pretend that anything goes, in line with the postmodernist paradigm 🙂

As I have already written in detail about my reasons for starting blogging, for the purpose of this project I will be brief. I blog because:

1. I love archaeology and I consider it important and relevant for the contemporary society.

2. I care for people, in this case for the people of the past.

3. I believe that an archaeologist should be a public intellectual (to pick up on Sarah Tarlow’s question) and express his/her point of view on several public matters of concern (the fate of the Humanities, heritage, education, public policies etc.). In the same time, I support Public Archaeology and opening to the wider public our research and questions.

4. I support a reflective approach in Archaeology, reason for which I propose an inter-disciplinary take on the discipline, one which borrows from Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology etc.

The first 2 points are the ones which explain why I am an archaeologist, the third one is my explanation of why I started a blog (the quickest and cheapest way of raising awareness and making your ideas public and open), while the last point explains why the blog looks as it does- my take on what an archaeological research might look like. Therefore, this is not a traditional Archaeology blog, as I have far more competent colleagues who are already talking admiringly about field research, Osteoarchaeology, public archaeology projects etc. I just started this blog to add something new, to highlight the relevance of our discipline by discussing topics and questions which might seem unrelated, through the eyes of an archaeologist. It’s a work in progress and each day I learn something new about how I can make this better.

PS: This is a Doug’s Archaeology initiative and one can read more about the purpose of the project and how it works on its website: http://dougsarchaeology.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/blogging-archaeology/