The Alt-Antiquarian is a series of articles written by the editor, John Billingsley. ‘Alt’, of course, stands for’alternative’. The views expressed often suggest perspectives which run counter to what have become standard (and sometimes mistaken) neo-antiquarian assumptions and tropes.
Continuing our editorial musings on modern antiquarian implications Last time, our alt-antiquarian found themself side by side with a psychogeographer, contemplating the landscape and its variant pasts, real and spectral. And, our psychogeographer will point out, some of those pasts we imagine today are well-managed, staged dramas for a populace weaned on screened stories. There […]
#4: The Ancient Spectacle Updated Read More »
Places predate monuments; monuments imply a concrete materialisation of narratives that over time becomes more codified – the narratives become myths, become scriptures etched on to place. Journeys between places infused with narratives become less nomadic, more pilgrimages. Dominant cultures are taking shape, and represented on a landscape; alt-antiquarians need to note that the objects
#3: The Society of the Spectre Read More »
Cognitive maps and other inherited understandings can illuminate historical landscapes with a phenomenological focus The presence of memory accretes to locations – not for nothing do we describe places as ‘our familiar haunts’, for at any one time a place is composed of layers of itself. It haunts itself… from what we see now,
#2: Thinking in the style of our pasts Read More »
Moving earth mysteries along Over the 27 years that I have edited Northern Earth, and the 47 years since I wrote my first article on the subject area, I have become increasingly aware that the topical implications of the field still occasionally known as earth mysteries stretch very much beyond even the broad inquisitorial sweep
#1: Subjectivity in an objective frame Read More »