Just because a book might be fiction doesn't mean that the archaeology and history you read in them is, too. Listen to archaeologists and authors talk about the real history behind your favorite books.
Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff is a book set in the transition from Bronze to Iron Age, but that's the least interesting thing about it. I talk to Dr. Helen Chittock of the University of Oxford and Dr. Julia Farley of the British Museum about the history of archaeological theory as demonstrated by this book written in 1958.
Julia Farley @julia_farley; Helen Chittock @DrChittock
Host: Kim Biddulph @kimbiddulph
Take a few archaeologists who think they're film buffs and what have you got? A prehistoric film special! From fur bikinis to inter-species rape, we look at the best that we could find of a very small film genre with a sometimes critical and sometimes fond eye.
Kim Biddulph and friends spent the night in an Iron Age Hillfort sharing food, exchanging stories, and discussion ideas. It was an amazing night full of fun and excitement. The audio is a bit challenging at times, as you would expect it to be in this situation, but we've cleaned it up a bit and most should be OK.
Jane Brayne has written and illustrated a comic strip style picture book on the journey of the Amesbury Archer, and kindly appears as a guest on the podcast to talk about it. The original excavator of the early Bronze Age burial the book is inspired by, Andrew Fitzpatrick, also talks about the background evidence for the book.
Mezolith is a graphic novel set loosely in the Mesolithic period (with shades of the Palaeolithic) somewhere in northern Europe. Written by Ben Haggarty, a storyteller steeped in legends of many cultures, which all come through in the book, and drawn by Adam Brockbank, an artist who has worked on X-Men and the Harry Potter films, it packs a punch stylistically but does the content match? Guests helping us decide this are Matt Ritchie from the Forestry Commission Scotland, John Swogger, archaeological comic artist and Erin Kavanagh, geomythologist and poet.
Show host Kim Biddulph talks to three archaeological comic writers and artists, John Swogger, Hannah Sackett and Katy Whitaker about their work and the current and potential uses of comics in archaeology. Comics are obviously a great way to engage children in archaeology, but can they be used beyond that?
Kim Biddulph
Twitter (@kimbiddulph, @schprehistory)
Prehistories Blog
Hannah Sackett
Twitter (@DrHcomics)
The "Other" Prehistories Blog
Katy Whitaker
Twitter (@artefactual_kw)
Artefactual Blog
Two children's picturebooks are the subject of episode 16 of Prehi/stories. Picturebooks may be the first contact children have with prehistory, so we're looking at how two of the best, The First Drawing by Mordicai Gerstein and Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura, represent the remote past. In this episode my guests are Ghislaine Howard, a painter of powerful and expressive means whose works chart and interpret shared human experience. Her drawing Pregnant Self Portrait 1987 was part of the British Museum's exhibition Ice Age Art: arrival of the modern mind in 2013. I also talk to Andrew Needham, Associate Lecturer in Palaeolithic Archaeology and Post-Doctoral researcher on the Templeton funded 'Hidden Depths: The Ancestry of our Most Human Emotions' project at the University of York.
A short film, Ice Age Art: The Female Gaze, featuring Ghislaine Howard can be found at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2hv2ssmB_MU
Ghislaine Howard: The Human Touch, Paintings Drawings and Prints 1980-2016, published by Manchester School of Art in association with Martin Heaps on March 16th 2017. For further information contact raffi@collectart.co.uk or visit www.ghislainehoward.com
Some of the following may be behind a paywall, but some are open access.
Women and Children in art
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-015-9265-8
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/div-classtitleevidence-for-cave-marking-by-palaeolithic-childrendiv/091A61EF12E5E703412D3CE9A49568DA
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43184971?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ojoa.12052/abstract
Pal Art beyond Europe
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313000757
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027737911630508X
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/full/nature13422.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248409000207
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6053/219
Early Pal domestication of the dog
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879981716301127
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440311003499
Neanderthal art
http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-made-some-of-europe-s-oldest-art-1.15805
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/37/13301.full
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/1023.full
@kimbiddulph @schprehistory
Andrew Needham @andyneedhamarch
https://www.york.ac.uk/archaeology/research/research-students/needham/
http://york.academia.edu/AndyNeedham
Ghislaine Howard @ghislainehoward @ghislainehowar4
http://ghislainehoward.com/
Matthew Pope of UCL and Beccy Scott of the British Museum shed light on the extraordinary tale of the Neanderthal Lok and his extended family written by William Golding. Given the topic of Golding's more famous work, Lord of the Flies, it's not surprising that things get a bit vicious in this book too when some other kind of humans turn up. But were our ancestors really that vile?
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