Archaeology

Over the last few days, I’m grinding out a bit of text based on an assemblage of frneware from Polis on Cyprus. This is in the service of a larger project that I’ve been describing over the last few weeks. It’s been slow going and quite frustrating, but words on the page count especially when… Read More →

I feel like I’m starting to find my groove here this summer and our manuscript is getting tighter and more polished. This gives week two of my summer research leave a bit momentum. There are a couple things going on these days that probably deserve a bit of text. Thing the First We had a… Read More →

Someone once recommended to me that as an academic, you should always have three projects going: one is a project that is almost done (or deep in the writing phase), one is a project that is just getting started, but has a clear outcome in mind and trajectory, and one project that is speculative and… Read More →

This past week involved a good bit of travel and this meant that I had some time to read in flights and in airports. I spent a good bit of that times with Caroline Cheung’s recent-ish book on Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome and Empire of Wine (2024). The book is good. It manages… Read More →

Over the few weeks, I’ve been writing an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. The appendix is a brief summary of our work in the Bakken grounded in our publications for a reader who might not be entirely familiar with our work and who… Read More →

I’m tired for lots of reasons, but that fatigue has made it hard for me to focus on anything. I’d love to have the bandwidth to read more carefully and thoughtfully what’s coming across my desk right now and I wish I had a chance to process more thoughtfully the experiences that I’m having in… Read More →

Over the last week, I’ve been writing an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. The appendix is a brief summary of our work in the Bakken grounded in our publications for a reader who might not be entirely familiar with our work and who… Read More →

It’s a long way out and I really need to stay focused on the month left in the semester, but that said, I’m thinking about the summer and I’m really happy to have two very cool projects to work on in the Mediterranean this year. Thing the First First and foremost is our work at… Read More →

Over the last week, I’ve chipped away at an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology that provides a concise survey to our work in the Bakken grounded primarily in the published results of our work. This was at the request of peer reviewers who wanted to understand the project more fully and… Read More →

As the semester comes to the final stretch, my attention gets scattered across a number of smaller projects, teaching, family life, and future travel. Thing the First Every now and then a conference paper sticks with you mostly because they really good (or comically bad). I’ve heard lots of conference papers in my 20+… Read More →

I’ve been revising my book manuscript over the last few weeks and a colleague offhandedly suggested that I might come and talk about it in his class. I took this as the kind of gesture that one makes to a colleague, but not a genuine invitation. That said, it did get me thinking about how… Read More →

I’m neck deep in revising my book manuscript on oil, photography, archaeology, and The Bakken. I wrote a bit about what I was planning to do last week, and I am more or less on schedule despite struggling to find the time and the space to write consistently. Here is part of my revised introduction… Read More →

As I’ve gotten older and my bandwidth has become more attenuated, I’ve mostly fallen out of the habit of reading new journals when they appear. There are a few that I keep an eye on, though, and more often than not read some of them: the AJA, Hesperia, and the Historical Archaeology. Last week, Hesperia… Read More →

This past week I’ve been thinking more and more about issues of centralization and decentralization in terms of digital infrastructure. My thinking about these things are inchoate. Obviously, some of it stems from conversations about physical nodes in networks such as data centers, anxieties about the corporate organization of our online and interconnected digital world,… Read More →

I submitted my latest book manuscript on oil, photography, archaeology, and The Bakken when I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing. In part, I was hoping some reviews would help me focus a bit (or cut away the cruft from my key points making the book more on point) and tighten up my work. … Read More →