August 9, 2025 - On this full "sturgeon" moon, Tom Muir of the Orkney Islands talks with dear friend and internationally-known archaeologist, Professor Colin Richards.

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Tonight we have a moonlit blether about these things and more ...

• How early educational prejudice and discouragement ("You'll never amount to anything, Richards.") led to Colin's early career as ... a television repairman
• Putting the lie to the misaprehension that only "really clever people" can get a degree
• Indiana Jones as archaeological inspiration
• Balanced judgements of voices writing from the past
• When Tom met Colin, summer of 1985, Broch of Howe, Orkney
• How Colin (and partly due to his friend Miranda) discovered the Neolithic village of Barnhouse, and other Neolithic settlements
• Descriptions of how an archaeological site is excavated
• Stories from Colin's many archaeological digs in Orkney
• Ongoing discoveries: re-evaluating and changing assumptions in Orkney Islands archaeology
• Barnhouse, Skara Brae, Maeshowe, Ring of Brodgar, Stones of Stenness, Ness of Brodgar, Knap o' Hower, Stonehall ...
• Why were these settlements abandoned? What were they up to?
• What happened when Colin Richards spent the night inside Maeshowe?
• Guardian spirits in the mounds!
• What will Tom never forgive Colin Richards for? (Hint: It involves archaeology.)
• The Spirit of the Corn
• "We're all Jock Thomson's bairns" - people are the same, through space and time

Podcast theme music courtesy of Fionn McArthur.

"Ower wi' the moon" artwork created by Jenny Steer.

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