By Slanted Light

Oh, I'm sure they are hyping it up the other way (I want to see the actual research too, including the reasons for defining her as female), but it's just so annoying that it's never hyped in the opposite direction - here's a man who was very delicately-boned and is buried with a set of kitchen utensils... you just know he'd've been the first masterchef on record if they'd found that!

The whole balance thing is one reason I found it really interesting to do my MA in the USA - there's a very different archaeological approach there to the UK, and I actually sit rather in the middle of them. Arch students in the US are taught to be so "processual" that they can't see beyond the end of their rulers, and you get papers that are nothing more than a catalogue of numbers with just as boring conclusions drawn - and yet also sticking to the old paradigms without questioning them. Then I came home to the excesses of some of the telly-archaeology over here, and eeep!(Generalising on both sides, obviously!)

It's that po-faced conservatism you talk about that annoys me most though, because it's generally linked to all the bad-old-things that I keep hoping were impacted just a little bit by the movements of the 70s/80s etc... but we just seem to have slid back into the hole... Gabriella Cilimi on Never Mind the Buzzcocks with Germaine Greer just about made me want to cry...

Exaggeration's one crime, but at least it admits that things exist - closing your mind from them completely... gargh!