Professor Simon Holdaway and Kasey Allely’s presentation was a definite highlight of my past week. While being swamped by assignments and the utter terror of exams looming it was nice to sit back and watch a pretty decently animated Pokémon parody of fighting/researching middens.

That said the actual content of the lecture was quite intriguing. The projects Prof. Holdaway undertook lasted many years with a sound method applicable in many different environments with only slight tweaks. Overall, their research was curious and displayed the benefits of a versatile research method. One that some of us may be looking to emulate with the beginning of our own research assignments next year, though I hope not too many fifteen year projects come out of this.

More importantly, their research showed us that the world is not static. The projects used markers to map the concentration of artefacts and also possible landscape changes over time to help us understand the past just that little bit better. That said, Prof. Holdaway and Kasey certainly drummed it home that we can’t really be sure about how things were. We’d do just as well trying to pin down Mew in Weipa or find out how and why exactly the live-action Sonic movie was greenlit.

As the author L.P Hartley said, the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.