finding meaning in pop culture archaeology
By Adrián Maldonado Among all the ways that Andor seemed to predict the events of 2025, shining a light on the trade in illicit antiquities was probably not on anyone’s bingo card. In part one of this post, we established how the terror of cultural erasure was one of the most significant themes of the 24 perfect episodes of the series Andor (2022-2025). I showed how antiquities dealer Luthen Rael…
ALT By Adrián Maldonado It is long ago, and we are far away. In the imperial capital of Coruscant, the gallery of Galactic Antiquities and Objects of Interest receives some visitors. One of them admires some antique jewellery. “The blue is lovely”, the visitor observes. Shop attendant Kleya explains it is made with something called Devaron blue. We don’t know why this is important, we just…
ALT By Adrián Maldonado I recently happened upon a brand new videogame museum on a recent holiday to Spain. Like a glint of gold in river gravel, it popped up in the corner of my map app as I searched for the nearest supermarket. It just so happened that it was two blocks away from our piso in central Madrid. Cosmic! Destiny! I went immediately! I have written about videogames in museums, and…
ALT By Adrián Maldonado When I was a teenager reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time, a weird thing started happening. Whenever I had to walk any distance, I began to imagine I was embarking upon a great journey across Middle-earth. I remember when sitting around waiting for the bus one rainy afternoon, I saw a clump of bushes with a trickle of water streaming out to the gutter, and I…
By Adrián Maldonado The gift and the curse of being a medievalist is that watching fantasy fiction adaptations can feel a bit like taking your job home with you. You’re still able to be a fan, but you’re also hyper-aware of the real-world inspirations for settings, props and storylines. You’re at an elevated risk of taking to social media and posting about it. Despite being set in the ancient past…
By Kenny Brophy (the Urban Prehistorian ) If a poll of Conservative members showed a majority of them were druids, Boris would be straight down to Stonehenge to dance naked for the seasons (Mark Steel, Independent , 28 March 2019) Stanton Drew’s stone circles may not vibrate as wildly in the English consciousness as their easterly cousins at Stonehenge, however, they remain seriously impressive…
By Adrián Maldonado In the last blog post , I realized that despite being suffused with ancient artefacts, the wizarding world of Harry Potter didn’t seem to have any archaeologists. Instead, wizards and witches live in a weirdly eternal present with little sense of how things have come to be as they are, and this ultimately caused them no end of trouble. So much of the story hinges on prominent…
By Adrián Maldonado The Harry Potterverse is crawling with ancient artefacts and old magic. That doesn’t make it a story about archaeology as such – there is very little effort from the protagonists to do more than treasure-hunt (and in at least one case, tomb-raid) to collect and then destroy these artefacts. In one sense, the Harry Potter cycle is a parable of Fantastic Antiquities and How to…
By Adrián Maldonado There’s been a lot of commentary over the weekend on the effect of two years of the Trump presidency. One overlooked aspect of this is the surprising amount of archaeology-related activism that has arisen over the same period. From peer-reviewed takedowns of populism to fact-checking Trump’s theory of ‘ wheels and walls ’, archaeology has become one of the most consistent…
By Adrián Maldonado This post is an interim report. I have found that reading about the history of the fantasy genre has taught me something important about the history of archaeology itself. In my last post , I showed that Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was building his Hyborian Age around the same time as JRR Tolkien was conceiving Middle-earth. For all their interest in the…
By Adrián Maldonado I write about medieval barbarians in my legit academic work, and use this blog to explore how they occasionally escape from our powerpoint slides into the public consciousness. I recently realized that for all my degrees, I didn’t know a thing about one of history’s most famous barbarians. It was high time I looked up Conan. Stock image of Dark Age Europe In my 80s childhood,…
By Adrián Maldonado You must have seen the media coverage of the exciting discovery of a new ‘lost’ culture. Lost in plain sight, these were the kids who were born too late to feel part of Generation X, but are too old to identify as millennials. Only recently has the scientific community (which in 2017 just means the Internet) proposed a name for this mysterious civilisation: Xennials . While the…
By Adrián Maldonado I didn’t wake up that morning thinking I’d be playing an original Street Fighter II Championship Edition arcade console in just a few hours. It turned out to be a very good day. So I was on Long Island recently for our annual, far-too-short family visit to America. It was also my daughter’s second birthday but it was raining and we needed an indoor activity. She loves planes,…
By Adrián Maldonado If I seem a bit disoriented, it’s because I just experienced a mad evening of archaeology and cake on the Antonine Wall. As I wrote in the previous post , Dig It! 2017 and EventScotland teamed up this year to mark World Heritage Day in style with Scotland in Six , unique experiences on Scotland’s six UNESCO World Heritage Sites. At Callendar House, Falkirk, a stately home…
By Adrián Maldonado So it’s World Heritage Day next week, and to mark the occasion, Dig It! 2017 and EventScotland are hosting Scotland in Six , unique celebrations on all six Scottish World Heritage Sites. Much to my nerdy glee, one of these will be Pictish themed, on the Antonine Wall at Callendar House, Falkirk . I have kind of an unhealthy fascination with the Picts. I will definitely be…
By Adrián Maldonado Take a drink if you’ve heard this one before , but for me, one of the things which set Rogue One apart from the previous Star Wars films was its archaeological sensibility. While The Force Awakens had plenty of ruins , and featured one iconic artefact from the original trilogy, there was no real sense that history extended beyond the events of Episodes IV-VI. Yet with Rogue One…
By Adrián Maldonado Did you know that the majority of people now get their news through social media ? This means that we can safely assume that Facebook and Twitter are now also the primary outlets for archaeology news. Hope your research lends itself to clickbaity headlines. That’s why when I was invited to submit a Digital Review for the SAA’s Advances in Archaeological Practice , I chose…
By Adrián Maldonado I started this blog in 2014 without a clear idea of what it was for. I just knew there weren’t enough places where I could satisfy my particular nerdisms combining archaeology, Tolkien, Nintendo and space. [i] Many moons later, this is still not that place, but a mission has begun to emerge. While I fully admit I am still chasing the dragon of meaning, I propose this as a first…
By Adrián Maldonado So the Guardian had a whole series recently on millennials (or Generation Y, as no one ever called them). I was bemused to find that I was apparently part of this group, as their definition encompassed anyone born from 1980 to 1994. I chuckled to myself at the thought that anyone would look upon my jaded, grizzly 1982-born visage and call me a millennial. This led me to a…
By Adrián Maldonado Last year in the run-up to the big Celts exhibition at the British Museum, project curator Rosie Weetch blew my mind open with the following discovery: With this foresight we can now protect the Book of Kells during the second invasion from Mars. Thanks Marvel Comics! pic.twitter.com/Dxj5ERzijQ — Rosie Weetch (@rosieweetch) July 22, 2015 This is a page from the Guardians of the…