The amazing Lorna-Jane Richardson organised the first Public Archaeology Twitter Conference as part of her work and experimentation in digital public archaeology on 27th and 28th April 2017. It was an amazing day full of brilliant presentations in the format of maximum 12 tweets over a 15 minute period. There were 58 papers, and on 28th April they ran from 9.15am to 11.30pm (BST)!

It was wonderful to see the incredible projects people are doing around the world to engage people in archaeology, particularly by Gavin Mackenzie and Kenneth Brophy with Team Build ‘n’ Burn.

I got fired up about the image problem archaeology has, thanks to a lack of diversity, most brilliantly expressed by Cath Poucher (plus she inspired me to use more gifs).

 

I researched and presented my own paper, and I’ll let the tweets speak for themselves.

This image above is from Stone Age Boy from Satoshi Kitamura, so ‘woman on hide’ is alive and well in children’s picture books being used in schools today.

The books were Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura, The Wild Girl by Chris Wormell, Ug by Raymond Briggs (a book, by way of full disclosure, I absolutely hate btw), The First Drawing by Mordicai Gerstein, Stone Age Bone Age by Brita Granström and Mick Manning, and Cave Baby by Julia Donaldson and Emily Gravett.

This image above is of the central character in The First Drawing by Mordica Gerstein. Is it a boy or a girl? S/he is referred to in second person all the way through to encourage the reader to put themselves in their place whether boy or girl. But everyone I know who has read it (including my daughter of 7) thinks it’s a boy.

It was also great to get some feedback from other tweeps.

 

 

And this couldn’t have been done without Lorna, obviously. I wholly support this tweet.

 

The conference was, quite simply, incredible.