About

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantle ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried. — Jerome K. Jerome, Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog), pp. 79-80.

I’m an archaeologist, working mostly on the Middle Islamic period (1000-1400 AD) in Jordan. You can read more about my work here. On this blog, I tend to write about archaeology and history more generally, dictated mainly by whatever has caught my interest recently. Updates are rather sporadic these days, but they do happen.