I'm so sorry that I've been away for so long. I've been working on a chapter of my thesis and promised myself I wouldn't post on my blog again until it was done; partly as an incentive to finish and partly because I felt guilty writing about 'trivial' things when I had so much 'serious' writing to do!
I thought I'd be back in a couple of weeks, but this chapter has turned into a monster and consumed my life... It's about the theories from archaeology and other related disciplines I will be using to analyse my cemetery data; use of space, rituals, monuments and social identity. It's a huge area, and until I started I didn't realise how poor my knowledge was, so the chapter ended up being a 'everything I learned about this from reading 20 books' kind of affair and it's now 14,000 words long... So you can see why it's taken me a while!I've still got some more work to do on it, and then edit the whole thing down, but I've broken the back of the work now, so I'm back.
I've also been on a 3 day Human Osteology course, so I could learn about human bone analysis on archaeological remains. It was fascinating! I am sorely tempted to do a maser's in it now (Will I ever finish my education?!). The course was in Bournemouth, which is a really pretty seaside town, with a lovely cemetery. So as an apology for my long absence, here are some photos I took whilst wandering the paths and standing in the shade of the majestic monkey puzzle trees of Wimbourne Road Cemetery, which is located on a road island called 'Cemetery Junction'. Asking for a bus ticket to Cemetery Junction made me so happy!
I am sad to have missed so many cool monthly themes like Hidden Bat Week, so I may be doing a some very late entries! I will also try to return to a normal posting schedule as soon as possible.
All in all, I'm so glad to be back! I'll try not to disappear again!
I'm so glad you didn't all desert me (and welcome to my new followers!). So in order to show my gratitude I'll be hosting another give-away when I get to 100 followers.
