recent writing

Thinking with Prehistory

An article for Epoch Issue 3, summer 2024. Click on image to read or download.

'Across contemporary Europe there is a renewed interest in engaging with the ancient earthworks and megalithic artefacts of the prehistoric landscape. Enlivened by an aesthetics of permanence and continuity, new generations find meaning in activities that human beings have been doing for tens of thousands of years. The practice of foraging for wild foods, of traveling by foot, or the revival of labour-intensive and slowly-acquired crafts like pottery, weaving, and woodworking are no longer marked by drudgery and subsistence but have become bearers of fulfilment and social distinction.'

Stone Circles and their Meanings to Come

400 words for The Stone Club: 'Neolithic henges and stone circles were created not for purposes lost to the mists of time, but for a moment that is yet to take place. Their meanings depend not on what they once were, but on what they will become. They were created in order to be redeemed by a distant future that is now just beginning to come into view.'

Decolonization, Indigeneity, and the Cultural Politics of Race

This short discussion for the Norwegian Archaeological Review is a response to Ben Ellott and Graeme Warren's article 'Colonialism and the European Mesolithic'. Their subsequent reply can be accessed here.

The Popular Culture of Extinction and the Racialisation of Survival

This article for a special issue of New Formations on 'living with extinction' explores the theme of species extinction in contemporary popular culture, from the environmental activism of Extinction Rebellion to the runaway success of Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens to the genre of 'survival' TV shows.

As Western culture imagines the terms of its own survival, racial and Indigenous others serve to model alternative visions of humanity pushed forwards and backwards in time, representing a forgotten but intrinsic premodern and prehistoric core, or the antecedents of a post-apocalyptic future.

You can read a version here.

What Social Scientists need to know about Prehistory

A piece for the BSA on social scientists' implicit attachments to the prehistoric:

'For as much as social scientists are invested in problematizing the distinction between nature and nurture, we will nevertheless often hold onto the notion that at some point in time the causalities of socialisation do give way to interior qualities that are inherent to us as a species.'

Race, Nationalism and Landscape Belonging: Stonehenge on the Summer Solstice

This book chapter thinks about the experience of neolithic culture in Brexit Britain. You can read a version here.

Wiltshire Before Christ

I wrote a short article about Jeremy Deller and prehistory for The Quietus

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