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BONUS - 5 Year Message From Kim Biddulph of Prehistories
90 Plays4 years ago
To celebrate the APN turning 5, we have asked some of our hosts what the network means to them. Kim Biddulph of the Prehistories podcast talks about her experiences of the APN, her show and why podcasts are important part of outreach.
You can find more info about Kim on Schools Prehistory website and her own website
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Transcript
Anniversary Celebration and Support
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Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the five-year anniversary bonus content for the Archaeology Podcast Network. We're a member-supported network, and we thank all of our members who contribute to us to help us make archaeological education free and available to all. Of course, as a member, you do get access to bonus content and lots of extra little goodies. We want to, over the next five years, get even bigger with more shows and more content.
00:00:34
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but we need your help. Wherever you're listening to this, wherever you listen to any of our shows, share it, like it, comment, tell somebody about it, tell anybody about it.
Growing the Network and Audience
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That is what makes our lives so much easier and it helps exponentially when it comes to being an acquired online world. There are so many amazing independent creators as well as the ones here on the Archaeology Podcast Network who do absolutely fantastic things.
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And it's a crime that not more people know about podcasts in general and what they can offer. So shout it from the rooftops, shout it from the mountains.
Kim Bedelfand's Podcast Journey
00:01:27
Speaker
So the Archaeology Podcast Network is going to be five years old.
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That's amazing. My name is Kim Bedelfand. I hosted the Prehistories podcast for about two and a half years between 2015 and the beginning of 2018.
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And I was first introduced to the Archaeology Podcast Network when Tristan Boyle of Unarchaeologist fame contacted me and asked me to be a guest on his show at the beginning of 2015. And that was really cool. It was so much fun to talk to archaeologists from around the world on his show and on my show as well about topics that were close to our hearts
Broadening Archaeological Understanding
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and explore some of the ideas of expanding the knowledge base through archaeology, expanding the idea of what archaeology was, trying to pick apart some of the interesting, quirky and downright problematic bits about archaeological process and narrative and the structure of the profession. It was fantastic.
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being part of the archaeology podcast network was a really fun experience. Tristan and Chris Webster were really supportive to help me to set up the Prehistories podcast and were always there with suggestions when I needed them of guests and obviously did my editing for me which was brilliant and
00:03:11
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They particularly have been really nice and supportive during the last two years when I've had some personal things to go through, which has stopped me from actually making the podcast. There was always a great team, always trying to make the network bigger, have new podcasts, new ideas.
Challenges of Unpaid Content Production
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reach out to different groups of people, try and find ways to keep the podcast, the network going financially as well because everyone was producing this content for free. So it was all, I'm doing all the editing for free and all this stuff and it was always really super difficult. And the dedication of the guys, you know, Chris and Tristan in particular is really amazing.
Inception of Prehistories Podcast
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My podcast, the Prehistories podcast, was born out of my interest in historical fiction and I realised that even though I was a prehistorian I hadn't really read a lot of prehistorical fiction
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apart from the the g-name all books um you know clan of the cave bear and that kind of thing and uh i i wasn't really aware that there was that kind of
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sub-genre out there but I thought that as I became more involved in working with children on the topic of prehistory I realised that actually they get quite a lot of their information from fiction rather than from factual books and from films and TV shows and I wanted to explore
00:04:58
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what people outside the profession were writing about the topics that we were researching and looking at what ideas they come up with to fill in some of the gaps that we've got in the archaeological record.
Community Building Around Prehistory
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It also gave me a chance to talk to guests who had expertise in loads of different areas like in fossil animals, ice age animals, in Neanderthal
00:05:36
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kind of life and thinking and technology, to excavators of Iron Age hill forts, also geomythologists as well, that was really cool to talk to Erin Kavanagh. And I started to build a little community who were all really interested in prehistory and fiction, so that was really good fun.
Reaching Beyond the Profession
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I think the future of podcasting and archaeology is to reach out to outside the profession. I think that quite a lot of our listeners are inside the profession. That's great to talk to people. But podcasting is so huge that obviously there's a burgeoning audience of people who
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interested in archaeology or interested in the past in some way or just interested in the world and they're looking out for fun easy podcasts to listen to and that's the kind of thing that
00:06:49
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the network is creating so many different types of things on different topics so that you can kind of hook in loads of different people who have got different special interests like textile stuff and things like that and I think maybe if we have more focused podcasts on particular areas of archaeological research that would be awesome
00:07:18
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so light clothing textiles that would get me and has them which is really cool and but you know things like experimental archaeology and making things out of metal making things out of clay making things out of bone I don't know those kinds of crafty things are really
00:07:44
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exciting right now I think. I really feel like there may be a small market for little podcasts or radio shows or little bits of audio for schools as well if we can clean it up and make it safe for children to listen to.
Archaeology as Human Ingenuity
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I think that people should listen to the Archaeology Podcast Network if they want to hear from archaeologists who are working in the field in all sorts of different ways, whether as public archaeologists or digging archaeologists, university archaeologists, researchers in all sorts of different topics. And because archaeology, I feel,
00:08:34
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is more than just digging stuff up to find out about the past. Archaeology to me is a way of thinking about the past to reveal what life was like for people and how they solved problems that they came up against. Every time they
00:08:54
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It's about the ingeniousness of humans over time. It really gives you more of a positive, hopeful look at humanity by studying the archaeology.
00:09:11
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So I think that archaeology at the moment is misunderstood and getting the podcasts and listening to the podcasts and trying to get out there and connect with people is a really great way to change the majority view of archaeology so that it becomes something akin to philosophy. It's a study of the human condition.
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This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.