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Showing posts from October, 2014

Trouble ahead, Trouble behind | The fall and fall of commercial archaeology in Northern Ireland

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[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the secure button at the right. If you think it is interesting or useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. To help keep the site in operation, please use the amazon search portal at the right - each purchase earns a small amount of advertising revenue **] < Appendix Regular readers of this blog may remember that last February I posted a piece about the financial statuses of the four main archaeological consultancies in Northern Ireland , based on their Annual Returns to Companies House in Belfast. At that time the 2013 returns for only one company had been posted. In the intervening period, the 2013 accounts summaries for two further companies have been added, so I felt that it was an appropriate moment to reexamine the current state of commercial archaeology in Northern Ireland. As before, I will go through the companies from the oldest (by date of incorporation) to the y

People and Their Worlds | UCD Archaeological Research Seminar | Part I

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[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the secure button at the right. If you think it is interesting or useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. To help keep the site in operation, please use the amazon search portal at the right - each purchase earns a small amount of advertising revenue **] Part II | Part III > It all started innocently enough. I received an ostensibly ordinary email from Conor McDermott at UCD to let me know that their Archaeological Research Seminar People and Their Worlds would be happening on May 1st. The brochure was certainly promising: This year's UCD School of Archaeology Research Seminar will include a range of presentations from staff, researchers and PhD students, showcasing ongoing and new research being carried out at University College Dublin. Topics will include reconstructing health patterns in the early medieval Irish community; Palaeolithic occupation and ancient g

3D images (anaglyphs) on this blog

[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the secure button at the right. If you think it is interesting or useful, please re-share via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. To help keep the site in operation, please use the amazon search portal at the right - each purchase earns a small amount of advertising revenue **] I appear to have developed a taste for old fashioned 3D (anaglyph) images and have been experimenting with various approaches and software packages. To be able to enjoy these for yourself, all you need is a pair of red/blue (cyan) classes. It is reasonably cheap to purchase a basic set of glasses (or even a deluxe set ), or simply make your own . For connoisseurs of these images, I’ve put together a consolidated list to save unnecessary trawling through the blog: First Presbyterian Church , Rosemary Street, Belfast May St Presbyterian Church , Belfast Belmont Tower , Belfast Harland & Wolff Drawing Rooms , B

Archaeogenetics: future potential and challenges

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I am delighted to introduce the first entrant to the  The 2014 Bob Chapple Archaeological Essay Prize in association with Wordwell Books. Stephen Domican's paper Archaeogenetics: future potential and challenges  describes his current research and will shortly be appearing in Trowel magazine (Domican, S. (2014) 'Archaeogenetics: future potential and challenges', Trowel , 15, pp. TBC.). If you would like to enter, please check out the criteria at the end of the post: here . Robert M Chapple *           *           * Archaeogenetics: future potential and challenges Stephen Domican Recent developments in the field of genetics, especially next generation sequencing technologies, has set the stage for archaeogenetic research - that is the study of the ancient past using genetic data (Renfrew, 2001) - to become as revolutionary a methodology in archaeological research as the development of radiocarbon dating was in the 1950’s (Taylor, 1995). In 2003, th