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Yannis Hamilakis

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Archaeo-Politics in Macedonia

On Friday I wrote a post on the London Review of Books blog about Alexandromania. It begins as follows: "On Monday, six days before the general election, the Greek Ministry of Culture published a preliminary report by the osteo-archaeological team studying the skeletal remains found in the mound of Amphipolis in northern Greece. The bones were found in November, since when there had been a lot of speculation about who they might have belonged to. Continue reading →

A Centre for Anthropology at the University of Southampton

The field of anthropology is currently thriving internationally, and there is an increasing interest in it amongst prospective students and the wider public. Anthropologists often intervene in the contemporary debates on the major issues of the day, from the current financial crisis and the associated notions of debt and informal economies, to global migration, and to environmental matters. Continue reading →

The Anthropocene in Berlin

I am writing this from Berlin, where I am for a long weekend of talks and performances on the idea of the Anthropocene: the notion that we no longer live in the Holocene but in a new geological era which is defined by the immense impact of one species (humans) upon earth. The concept was not meant to promote the exceptionalism of Homo sapiens, not to glorify humans at the expense of all other species and of the earth in general. It rather wishes to do the opposite. Continue reading →

Spartan Myths

  Spartan Myths In the early hours of Thursday 17 January, 26-year-old Shehzad Luqman rode his bicycle from the Peristeri suburb of Athens to the farmers’ market (or bakery, according to other reports) in Petralona, not far from the Acropolis, where he’d been working for several months. He was paid 20 euros a day, most of which he sent back to his family in Pakistan. [...] http://www.lrb.co. Continue reading →