Step back from the turmoil of daily life and stay for awhile. On your tour of this place gaze beyond the horizon of the moment and comb the beach for the curious bits and pieces of past, present, and future lives that wash up on the Shores of Time.

So, what are the Shores of Time?

When I first created this site, its title served as a metonymy for the shores of the Caribbean Sea, which have borne witness to peoples and events of major historical impact that shape the world of today, as well as a metaphor for an archaeological way of looking at the world and its past. Many people think that what defines an archaeologist is that he or she excavates, to dig for artifacts that will be displayed in a museum. Although this is what archaeologists do some of the time — and many archaeologists think excavation is the best part of their job — what defines archaeologists is the perspective that they have on human history.

Archaeologists study for a long time and in fact will never stop learning throughout their lifetime. Sometimes we accidentally wander into terrain where all of a sudden they find they are not called archaeologists anymore. That is, more or less, what happens to me: I no longer dig the soil to discover bits of the past and therefore am rarely addressed as an archaeologist. This has nothing to do with my interests or frame of mind, but is an artefact of boundaries drawn by the sort of people that function best when contained by them — I am not one of them.

So, now I teach and study digital media and computational tools, which places me in the hazily defined, trans-disciplinary, and absolutely fascinating realm of the Digital Humanities. While,  therefore this supposedly make me a “digital humanist” (spoiler: no one calls anyone that), the Shores of Time remain free of such academic identity politics. Instead they still serve as the place to collect my eclectic thoughts about the past.

Thanks once again for taking the time to visit and please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions, opinions, comments, stories or artefacts to share.

Best regards,

Angus