Recording Archaeology talks and lectures - our guide to the best online
Submitted by Andy B on Friday, 27 October 2017 Page Views: 2738
Resources
Last year Mike Parker Pearson the lead archaeologist from the Stonehenge Riverside Project gave a talk on the Stonehenge landscape as the Council for British Archaeology's annual lecture. It's a very wide ranging talk on the history of Stonehenge research, the five stages of Stonehenge, henges, timber circles, what studies into pigs and cattle can tell us, then on to Mike's favourite subject of the possible sources of the Stonehenge Bluestones. Very much worth watching.
Ian Hodder, now at Stanford University was Mike's PhD supervisor and one of the leading lights of postprocessual archaeology - he is now Director of the Çatalhöyük Archaeological Project. Since 1993, Hodder and an international team of archaeologists have carried out research and excavations at the 9,000-year-old Neolithic site in central Anatolia (modern Turkey).
Here he discusses the ritual origins of settled life in the Middle East, looking at Göbekli Tepe as well as Çatalhöyük. Recent archaeological discoveries have upturned theories about the origins of agriculture and settled life. While climate change and economic adaptation have long been seen as prime causes, recent work has shown that social gatherings at ritual centres played a key role. Çatalhöyük is now understood to be a fully fledged town in which carvings of wild bulls, leopards and the severed heads of ancestors were important social foci.
There are lots of high tech graphics and gadgets on show in this talk from Matt Ritchie, who looks at new approaches to archaeology and visualisation in Scotland's national forests - which amazingly comprise 9% of the whole of Scotland and include around 12000 archaeological features!
My next recommendation is to watch Fabio Silva's talk: The Stars and the Stones: An Introduction to Archaeoastronomy. This was given to the Radical Anthropology Group in London in 2014. Fabio Silva is a Post-Doc researcher at University College London, an editor of the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology and one of today's foremost archaeoastronomical researchers
There is more in our forum, including details another talk by Fabio on the 31st October.
What We Don’t Know About The Heysham Hogback with Howard M R Williams, was recorded in the actual church where the hogback 'lives'! Howard knows more than he's letting on of course, and explains the ongoing debate surrounding hogbacks and early medieval stone sculpture.
There is more, including the location and a link to a 3D model of the hogback on our page here.
Of course if you are a student, lectures are a way of life, and not usually as interesting as those above. However the good news is that some universities, such as the University of Manchester now aim to record all lectures for their students as a matter of course.
The University of Leicester has done research into the many benefits of recording lectures for students, which is summarised here.
In the UK there is no specific regulation on individuals' making audio recordings as long as it is purely for your own use, is done discreetly and you do not share or post recordings online, but it is always a good idea to ask permission first.
Once you have your recording, you may want to make a written transcript for your own use. This can be very time consuming to do yourself so it's a very good idea to look at using professional transcribing services, because you will no doubt have a lot of audio material to go through.
There is more help on recording lectures at WikiHow.
With thanks to Doug Rocks McQueen and the team at Recording Archaeology, and Megalithomania, both of whom have hundreds more videos of talks, lectures and tours that they have recorded over the years.
Cerrig has selected some of the best videos from Megalithomania here, and these are some of my prehistory picks from various recent conferences.
TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) 2016 Videos:
Visualising Skyscapes - Material Forms of Cultural Engagement with the Heavens
Reassessing ‘henge’ monuments and other prehistoric typology
Iberian Bronze Age stelae, Atlantic rock art, Manx slate plaques etc
This article was prepared with the kind support of gotranscript.com
Oh and who's the person in the top photo - well it's me. I wouldn't put myself in the same league as those above - it's just a nice photo of someone giving a talk from our collection - but if you must watch mine about the Megalithic Portal then it's online here.
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