Drowning in data

Currently overdue (of course?) with an article for Paul Devereux, for his new formal journal Time & Mind (‘The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture’). Working with my colleague Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, the aim is to present the same general ideas as in Disciplines of Dowsing, but for a more archaeology-oriented audience, and illustrated with much more of Liz’s work at Belas Knap.

The catch is that although the journal pushes the envelope a lot – with articles, for example, on sensory archaeology, Timothy Darvill’s Landscape & Perception studies at Preseli, and an excellent argument by Robert Henshaw on the need to think in terms of ritual ‘imprecision’ as well as astronomical precision when assessing archaeoastronomy – it’s still a much more mainstream, academic readership than that for which I usually write. Hence the need to do things the academic way. Hence, this morning, drowning in data…

• excavation reports from Belas Knap over the past hundred and fifty years (for example, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society for 1929-1938 – the main restoration of Belas was in 1929-1930, after being thoroughly wrecked in ‘excavations’ in the 1860s)
• all manner of assorted formal references
• rock art, archaeoacoustics, archaeography and deep mapping
• museum searches
• and, of course, all manner of ‘amateur’ sites – all of them interesting if sometimes a bit too much towards the ‘newage’ end of the scale

And that’s all in addition to my own stuff on methodology, and a couple of years’ work at Belas by Liz. And somehow I have to pull all of that together within the next two days, ’cause I’s already well overshot the nominal deadline, and that’s all the time I have left…

Wish me luck!