Just back in Rome after a series of engagements with the bog people, those extraordinary faces and bodies of 2000 years ago whose preservation has inspired poets, artists and writers. I have been writing about them for more than a decade (see, for example Past Poetic: archaeology and the poetry of WB Yeats and Seamus Heaney (Duckworth, 2004) http://www.brad.ac.uk/corpcomms/pressreleases/2004/poetic.php, which Michael Shanks has kindly flagged up in the past.

I first encountered them as images in PV Glob's book, "The Bog People", while studying the Iron Age as a first year undergraduate. That began a line of research which became a doctorate, and has continued in conversations with artists, film-makers, writers, and performers, all likewise enthused by the potential of these people lying, apparently, twixt sleep and death. I have just made a BBC Radio 3 feature on the girls who inspired "The Bog People", which will be broadcast on April 22. I'll write more on this nearer the time.

At Bradford last year, I curated an exhibition, "Strange Powers: bog lands and bog bodies" which included a short DVD film I made as an installation piece featuring Larsen's images, Heaney's poetry, and contemporary works by Stephen Vaughan, who grew up near the British bog of Lindow Man fame. I have since shown the film to dozens of international audiences - archaeologists and general public - providing even more material about the ways the bog people are received by those working outside archaeology.

Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry http://www.msim.org.uk currently hosts an excellent exhibition from Canada called "The Mysterious Bog People". Last month, I was invited to hold family poetry workshops in the gallery space, and to show and discuss "Strange Powers".

And the DVD had a different audience again when I travelled to London to set it up as an installtion at an art exhibition - "Memoire Collective" - a show evoking memory and the tangible remainders of memorialisation. http://www.geocities.com/memoirecollective. It was held at a fascinating site, the Crypt of St.Pancras Church in the Euston Road. "... St Pancras Church, the best known work of William Inwood, who lies in the family vault beneath the building. It is said to be the first and only church in England in the strict Greek style, and possibly did more than anything else to hasten the revival of Gothic. It is very imposing, built in 1820 with porticoes modelled on the Erechtheum, the famous little temple on the Acropolis at Athens. Athenian, too, is the wedding cake tower (165 feet high) supported by pillars, for it is modelled on the Temple of the Winds set up by Pericles, in whose Golden Age the Greeks rebuilt the Acropolis and set up its temples." ( From Arthur Mee's 1937 "London", thanks to Jean Harker for this.) It is certainly an appropriate venue for work on memorialisation, if cold and dank to invigilate in early March. To pile on the atmosphere, I am told there was a Roman cemetery beneath, or near, the later Crypt...

Here are some images from the show: a classic Larsen image of the Tollund Man from "Stage Powers", which I am showing in a small ante-room, on a small, book-shaped screen, to encourage close inspection. It is the non-narrative version, better suited to the space.

Richard Ducker's "Burden of Dreams" and "Al Fresco" in the main corridor of the Crypt.

Frederique Lacombe's "Concorde Forever"

Guillaume Constantin's "Headless"