A couple of weeks ago I watched the 1977 Doctor Who story Image of the Fendahl. It’s not the best example of the series, not by a long shot, but it’s lingered in my mind. Because despite the things that don’t work – the wonky pacing, the stilted performances, the fact that the monster doesn’t really do anything – there’s so much there that does. It’s bubbling with great ideas. The atmosphere is wonderfully spooky, the monsters look great when they’re not moving, even if they have nothing to do, there are some sparkling lines of dialogue. There’s an anthropologists’ dog called Leakey. I keep thinking about how you might rejig the story to really work.
What really appeals about Image of the Fendahl is its use of palaeoanthropology. Many of the non-regulars are anthropologists, bringing novel scientific techniques to bear on extremely early human remains (or are they…) The idea of a human skull from too old a stratum that reveals a pentagram in the bone sutures when X-rayed is genuinely creepy, as is its concern with the deep time of human existence – all those long aeons before we organised ourselves into settled urban communities and started writing history. Anything could lurk in that vast span of years. What if there was something fundamentally off with humanity’s whole evolutionary process?
Thinking about these ideas led me to wondering about ‘anthropological horror’ as a subgenre, and whether it’s really a thing. Whether it could be. Google doesn’t turn up much. I should say now, I’m not the world’s biggest expert on horror fiction, and nor am I an anthropologist, except in the sense that any archaeologist has to dabble in the discipline to some extent. I do know Doctor Who, though, so that seems like a good place to begin looking for other examples of anthropological horror and to start to define what it is. Continue reading
Just before Christmas I attended the annual Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Chester. To be honest, I mostly steered clear of the hardcore theory – while I do quite like it, I liked it on my own terms and when my brain is feeling fresh and focused: the week before Christmas, at the end of a long and tiring year, not so much. But there was a lot else going on at the conference and I attended several inspiring panels about outreach, engagement and how archaeology relates to other fields. I’ve written about the conference in general over on the 
The ancient world is full of rebellion. In my patch, the Bronze Age Near East, the world was one of dominant ‘great kings’ with imperial aspirations. In the southern Mediterranean was Egypt, ancient and arrogant; in the east, Babylon and later Assyria; in the north, the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni, which was later supplanted by the Hittite Empire. Most histories of the Bronze Age tell political and military tales of the waxing and waning of these great empires and the great campaigns of their rulers – people like Ramesses II or Šuppiluliuma I.
Often rebellion is associated with youth: we take it for granted that young people are by nature rebellious and questioning of the values and authority of their elders. Even those who seek to shut down such dissent often implicitly accept that this is part of the normal behaviour of the young. But youth – especially being teenage – is a highly culturally-constructed category. Arguably, these assumptions tell us more about our own culture than they do about human nature.
Ancient Worlds 