Tuesday, 8 March 2016

Making Archaeology "Relevant"? More PAS Dumbdown Gatekeeping


The PAS gatekeepers really cannot let a "day" pass without finding a "relevant" find to show off their powers of correlation. Now, what could be for International Women's Day? Oh of course a coin with a picture of a woman. How incredibly original:

The Essex FLO could not come up either with anything more original than.... a coin with a picture of a woman on it....
The British Museum also found a coin with a picture on it of another ruler (Cleopatra VII). No context there either.

Here, for comparison is the Puerile Geologists Scheme's version, a woman holding a stone that "looks like a face".

Rhiannon holds a stone

I think the value of both for public outreach on the importance of "context" is about the same don't you? So, will it be in the next decade that PAS learns to use social media for proper  outreach do you reckon? Or will they be stuck in artefact-centric dumbdown show-and-tell mode until the bitter end?

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