During fieldwork in the Amazonian jungle in Peru, some of my teammates soon started giving nicknames to each other. It didn’t take long until I got mine, Pachamama. Pachamama is known to the indigenous people of the Andes as the mother of earth or time. According to Inca mythology, Pachamama reigns as a fertility goddess…
What’s inside
I recently established the tradition that whenever I travel to the Middle-East, I would spend a few days in Greece on the way back home. After travelling through Egypt for two hot weeks in spring last year, I met up with my PhD-buddy M. in Athens. Together we would travel to Thessaly and the cinematically…
Pachamama I: How to placate evil spirits
During fieldwork in the Amazonian jungle, a local expert, Rómulo, who has been part of the team on the same site in Posic already, joined us for another season. He didn’t speak much, but he also didn’t need to. He could communicate in other ways. Rómulo was mostly responsible for machete-ing everything down that was…
Serbia Tour 2016
In September I guided an archaeological tour through Serbia for 11 days and I eventually have a little bit of time to uplaod a selection of my 4000 pictures from that trip. Even though the tour was quite exhausting, it was great to finally see some of the archaeological sites I heard of in my very first…
Daytrip to Varna
Last Friday, the Leiden Prehistory Department went on an excursion to Dordrecht to visit the exhibition about the famous Varna burials: Het Oudste Goud van der Wereld. Schatten uit Varna. It was intriguing to see how the burials of the Bulgarian Copper Age were organized, and how some deceased were treated in a specific way. In the necropolis of the…
Lenin and depositions: A communistic approach?
In April 2016, a new exhibition with the title “Enthüllt, Berlin und seine Denkmäler” opened in Berlin. German newspapers report about this event with a provocative image on top of the articles, Lenin’s granite head, which during a point in Germany’s shaken history, was erected on a square in Eastern Berlin in April 1970 and is now being risen from the earth.
Creative Destruction
I started my PhD one year ago and during that year many things happened and a lot of things changed (e.g. my research region expanded quite a bit). There will be many posts about important and interesting events which happened in the last year, but I want to (quite unusual for an archaeologist) start in the…
alchemy of the past 