Autore: Stefano Costa
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La fine dell’archeologia in Italia
L’archeologia italiana è finita. C’è chi dice che non è vero e c’è chi non se n’è ancora accorto, ma molti elementi puntano in questa direzione e si stanno verificando tutti in un tempo brevissimo. Provo a farvi una panoramica, se mi riesce. 1. La riforma del MiBACT Per chi non lo sapesse ancora, con…
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L’etimologia di Genova
Perché Genova si chiama così? Dipende dall’epoca in cui fate questa domanda. Oggi il calendario segna 2015 quindi lasciamo perdere la (interessante ma ben nota) paretimologia medievale di Ianua e quella molto meno interessante che rimanda al termine greco xenos. Parliamo dell’etimologia “vera” di Genua, attestata per la prima volta in un cippo miliario dell’anno…
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Pottery and archaeology on the Web
Today marks five years since Tiziano Mannoni passed away. There’s one thing that always characterised his work in publications and lectures: a need to visualise anything from research processes to production processes and complex human-environment systems in a schematic, understandable way. The most famous of such diagrams is perhaps the “material culture triangle” in which…
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What’s the correlation between the exposure time of your photographs and the time of the day?
My digital photo archive spans 15 years and holds about 12,600 pictures (not so many, after all). I’m curious to see if there is a correlation between the exposure time of my photographs and the time of the day they were taken. A rather simplistic observation, perhaps. In short: there’s nothing spectacular about this correlation,…
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The life of Andrew of Crete
Andrew of Crete was a (famous) archbishop of Crete during the early 8th century. He is a venerated as a saint by both the Orthodox and the Catholic church, and even today he is particularly appreciated as a hymnographer. Andrew was born in Damascus, spent his early years in Jerusalem (and that’s why he’s also…
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Interlude pages for my PhD thesis (with sketch drawings!)
Who said PhD theses have to be boring texts with horrible typography? Even if my thesis is far from being ready for discussion, I can’t help some diversion from the actual writing. Today I put together this experiment for an interlude page: imagine you’re skimming through dozens of pages and suddenly your eyes catch something…
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William Gibson, archaeologist
Earlier this year, in cold January morning commutes, I finally read William Gibson’s masterpiece trilogy. If you know me personally, this may sound ironic, because I dig geek culture quite a bit. Still, I’m a slow reader and I never had a chance to read the three books before. Which was good, actually, because I…
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Being a journal editor is hard
I’ve been serving as co-editor of the Journal of Open Archaeology Data (JOAD) for more than one year now, when I joined Victoria Yorke-Edwards in the role. It has been my first time in an editorial role for a journal. I am learning a lot, and the first thing I learned is that being a…
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Political leaders are not human beings
The problem with satire and much political commentary is that politicians, and leaders particularly, are treated like human beings, with their own spoken language and experience and ideas, whereas a less naive view could acknowledge they are more a condensation of economic and lobby agendas, brought forward on a mid-term scale with fixed objectives. At…
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