Desert Island Archaeologies

[lorna]

If any Forum members would like to be a castaway on Desert Island Archaeologies, I would love to get more contributions. You don't need to have 10 books, just as long as you explain why the books are important to you. Please take a look at the recent posts here to get an idea of the type of thing people are writing about. It's certainly extended my range of reading (and I believe BAJR himself features soon too): http://desertislandarchaeologies.wordpress.com/ Any questions, please get in touch!

[kevin wooldridge]

1) The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart.... When I first started in archaeology, this was what people were reading in the site hut. This book explains in very simple terms why we make decisions and how we rationalise life. Explains why you are an archaeologist....

2) Hamlet - William Shakespeare. How to organise and manage an archaeological project/unit....

[Steven]

Hi
Catch 22 (Joseph Heller) for the philosophy of Dunbar.
Count Belisarius (Robert Graves) just fantastic!
Excession (Ian M. Banks RIP)
and
The Social Foundations of Prehistoric Britain (Richard Bradley) I know I'm sad but it's good stuff.

[P Prentice]

carl sagan: pale blue dot
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

hermann hesse: the glass bead game
"There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught"

albert camus: the outsider
"Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said"

william faulkner - the sound and the fury
"...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

virginia woolf: orlando
"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that"

jean m auel: clan of the cave bear
because of Ayla one otherwise boring christmas!

simone de beauvoir: the mandarins
for gutting intellectual elitism


robert musil: the man without qualities
for teaching me patience

aldous huxley: island
“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are over-consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”

gabriel garcia marquez: one hundred years of solitude

a joy from start to finish

[kevin wooldridge]

william faulkner - the sound and the fury
"...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

YES....I too would have chosen The Sound and Fury - marvelous book!!

[Marc Berger]

To help with the not wanting to get rescued or ever seeing blighty again:

"The setting of Heritage assets": " Setting is separate from the concepts of curtilage, character and context:"

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publi...assets.pdf

Impossible to get passed the first sentence or so before you would thank your luck stars that you were castaway. You could read it as a who done it in the full knowledge that you would never find out who wrote it and also because you would never read it to the end. You could also use it as tripe.

[beamo]

'You could read it as a who done it in the full knowledge that you would never find out who wrote it'

Wouldn't work for me as I do know who wrote it.


Beamo

[barkingdigger]

Surely you'd only need one book - EOP 98? It was often said that a clever archaeologist looking to justify a grant could ALWAYS find something useful between its covers!

[Hamish]

I'm not sure I'd want to be reading until the end of my days on a desert island books that I have already read.

The world's largest book/atlas costs a $100,000 I don't own one, but at 6ft x 4.5ft when I'm bored with looking at it or the weather changes for the worse, I could open it up ram the covers in the sand and use it as a tent.
http://www.millenniumhouse.com.au/title-earth-plat.html

I got a bargain book (£3.20+post) on Ebay a while back - Old England - A Pictorial Museum of Regal, Ecclesiastical, Baronial, Municipal and Popular Antiquities. Published: London: Charles Knight 1845,. two volumes bound as one about 780 pages, thousands of engravings, lots of text. I keep finding myself just looking at the pictures, A bit of desert island time and I'd read it all too - the odd bits I've looked at are quite readable.
You can see it on the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/oldenglandpictor01knig

[Boxoffrogs]

Anything by Terry Pratchett ....just to keep a sense of ridiculous in the back of the mind would have to be a must...