The First Step

Perhaps the first post is always the hardest to write. An introduction to myself, an introduction to my ideas, and an introduction to the content that will inevitably find its way here -all of these are such a mouthful to coherently produce in the very first missive. Then there's writing style, post format and regularity to formulate, and I don't even know exactly who I'm addressing at this stage. Or even how many of you there are! I'm going to attempt it anyway, of course. You know me well enough by now.

First: myself. While I very sincerely doubt I'll attract followers who aren't known to me personally in some way, I find it necessary to properly introduce myself. A young, poor, and persistently anxious person, I am a masters student at a northern English university, studying archaeology but with an interest in history, philosophy, literature, politics, geography (of the human variety) and music. I verb for a noun: I work for a pittance, I volunteer for a conservation charity, I write for pleasure, I study for a variety of reasons. Which leads me to:

Second: my ideas. While I reason that my ideas will naturally surface from time to time in my future posts, some sort of rationale is needed. This is not easy, given the variety of subjects I intend to explore. At a higher level I am a socialist, of a sort of Orwellian bearing. I sympathise with feminist, anarchist, communist, libertarian, internationalist and environmentalist tendencies, although I wouldn't consider any of these to have a hand directly on the rudder. In my work I tend to advocate processualism and shun post-processualism (post-modernism), as well as history-based approaches, purely economic explanations for the past, and purely military explanations for the past. I believe societies are and have always been much more complex than that, and always try to view things in a relativist manner.

Third: the nature of this blog. I intend to use this blog as a sounding-board, or perhaps echo-chamber, for my many various thoughts, and mantelpiece for curiosities and experiences. Thus we come to the rationale behind 'strata' as a name for the blog: it encompasses a plethora of topics while evoking the field of archaeology, which this site is, primarily, a depositary for (I have Rachel to thank for the name). But hopefully ideas for creative writing, world theories and interesting factoids will make an appearance as my thoughts lead me to interesting and strange new landscapes.

Hence the logo, by the way.

James