It has been hard to find time to do any writing over the last few weeks and the next month looks even worse. As a result, I’ve turned my hand to revising the chapters that I have already completed for my book project on oil, photography, archaeology, and the Bakken. I’ve been revising part 2… Read More →
As readers of this blog know, I’ve been slowly putting words on the page for a new book project focused on oil, mobility, and modernity. I have a vague (and fleeting) hope that it might be done by the end of the calendar year (it won’t be). Last week, between many other obligations, I managed… Read More →
Those of you who come to this blog regularly know that I’m using any free time that I have to work on a short book project focused on photographs from one particular man camp in the Bakken oil patch. The book is, broadly speaking, looking at the relationship between oil, modernity, photography, and archaeology. The… Read More →
Today, I’m presenting my paper on the Alamogordo landfill that I shared last week. As a warm up to that, we were invited to do an interview with a local “influencer.” Here are his questions and my responses: What’s something you find yourself throwing away most often these days? Packaging. Boxes, bags, wrappers, containers, and… Read More →
My summer reading list is an ever evolving grab bag and the sense of long, lazy summer days often encourages me to read without a strong sense of priorities (even if that means occasionally procrastinating on a book that I have for review or a manuscript that I’m peer-reviewing). This past week, I read and… Read More →
If I was at home this summer and had unlimited time to think and write, I might be working a bit on my little pseudoarchaeology book. One of the things that has struck me lately is how much science fiction is vaguely dependent on diffusionist views of the future. Difussionism, loosely, is the largely discredited… Read More →
After a week of travel, it’s a bit hard to get back into the swing of things, but I managed a little time to write on Monday and even on Tuesday amid a bunch of grading. My main focus has been on re-reading my manuscript and trying to give it a more coherence. As readers… Read More →
The last four or five days has been a kind of blur to me as I struggle to shake off a mid-winter cold. Fortunately, with all the gross stuff going around these days, whatever I have has turned out to be just a cold (albeit a man cold, which as you know is much… Read More →
I was under the weather all weekend, so instead of writing, I spent some time with a couple book and trying to rest and stave off the beginnings of a cold before a hectic week begins. The two books that I read are odd bedfellows: Nora Goldschmidt’s Fragmentary Modernism: The Classical Fragment in Literary and… Read More →
I’ve been working on writing whenever I can which doesn’t always create the most pleasant writing experiences (hecks, this is why they call it work, right?), but it is producing words on the page, which during a busy teaching semester is probably the best I can ask for. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been… Read More →
On Tuesday, I was supposed to devote a couple hours reading the totally unreasonably amount of Thucydides that I assigned my Greek History class. Instead, I got sucked into Daniel Immerwahr’s brilliant article in Past & Present titled: “All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” I blame… Read More →
As I dig deeper and more broadly into the past and future of pseudoarchaeology, I’ve been really enjoying following various threads that contribute that inform the pseudoarchaeological project. One particular thread that I’m finding particularly fruitful is the relationship between pseudoarchaeology and science and speculative fiction. My buddy Dimitri Nakassis let me know about Benjamin… Read More →
Just a quick post today because I’m on my way out to door headed to annual ASOR meeting in Chicago this week. I’ve been enjoying the special section in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology on waste landscapes. The contributions range from Matthew Edgeworth’s “mega-scale” interrogation of landfills built from the former clay mining pits to… Read More →
A few months ago, I wrote a post on a book project that is absolutely not what I’m working on right now. It is called “Recent Advances in Pseudoarchaeological Practice.” In my previous post, I outline some of the goals of this little book with I hoped would clock in at around 40,000 words and… Read More →
As many of you know, I’ve been puttering around on an integrity survey of the 1958 Levee and Flood Wall in Grand Forks, North Dakota. It’s been a fun, little project that combines my recreational walking route and some of my interest in riparian history both in Grand Forks and in the American West. The… Read More →
I really liked this recent piece by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Tim Flohr Sørensen in Archaeological Dialogues (2023) titled “Archaeological encounters: Ethics and aesthetics under the mark of the Anthropocene.” I have plenty of friends who will likely find this kind of article unconvincing or, at very least, not compelling, despite its genuine efforts to address concerns raised… Read More →
I’m just about done the book project that I’ve been toiling on since before the pandemic, and I’m recovering from a mild case of burn out. I’ve started to get the itch to think not about not the next book, but the book after that. (The next book has to be finishing the publication of… Read More →
Two book Tuesdays are kind of a rare thing largely because I’m hard pressed to find time to read ONE book much less two. The combination of the last week of winter break and two short books made this rare event possible! Book the First I’m scratching around in American environmental history largely because I… Read More →
