You may have seen that the origin of the Curious Travellers project name, as shown on the website’s front page, is a quote from Horace Walpole Earl of Orford, in a letter to Sir Horace Mann (1774)…
“At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra”.
At times from looking at the website it may seem as though the project team is separated from you, the curious travellers community, wherever you are in the world with you travelling to amazing places and us staying in the office collating your images, stories and information. This really is not the case. Each member of the project team has their own biography within the world of archaeological heritage, our own curiously travelled past as it were (perhaps some more strange and curious than others), which has led each of us to our place in the project. We work both in archaeology or the heritage sector while also undertaking our own personal travels. You may have seen that several of the pictures on the ‘name that archaeological site’ game (on Twitter and Facebook @curioustravell2) are from the Curious Travellers team members’ own holiday snaps rather than just being images recorded during fieldwork. We are just as curious and interested in travelling and experiencing the past as you are.
Many of the Curious Travellers team have been lucky enough to have worked on some amazing, world famous sites in the past. One especially interesting project that several of the team worked on was the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project. There is an interesting article written about this by Dr Chris Gaffney, published in the Conversation ‘How technology, not spades, revealed what lies beneath Stonehenge’
This Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project has recently been nominated for the Current Archaeology Awards 2017 in the category for ‘Archaeological Innovation of the Last 50 Years’. We would be grateful to receive your vote and to help promote the work of the Curious Travellers team members. You can vote via this link
As always we appreciate the images you keep sending us, and we will be reporting on our preliminary results soon: get involved