Right, just finished #TheDig. I thought it was excellent - the sort of archaeology movie I was hoping for, which is, at it's heart, about individual people with their own histories working collectively to uncover a more distant past people.

Lots of interesting themes to pick up on, but the main one is class & expertise (& therefore credit). Comes through very distinctly early on when Basil Brown describes himself as an excavator, not an archaeologist.

Just imagine if this theme were woven through an archaeology film set in, say, Egypt in the same period? Wouldn't that be a wonderful alternative to the mummy/curse narratives that we usually have.

I also appreciated the fact that museum politics comes into play. Loved the reverence given to recording - notebooks & photograph are the reason this story was able to be told. Obviously not possible now but I really hope more museums make more of dig archives they may hold.

Finally, women. Great to see reference to Edith Pretty's long-standing interest in archaeology (slight quibble that I thought Carey Mulligan, while excellent, was far too young to be EP). Nice that via EP's story the film highlighted women as dig funders. She wasn't the only one!

Obviously a film can only do so much but I sort of wanted a bit of a follow up to Peggy Piggott's story - it would've been nice to see a sentence on her at the end! But, maybe she could have her own film...