Archaeology

For some reason baptistery projects take a long time to come out. This week, two baptistery related projects of mine somehow reached milestones. It’s a Christmas miracle. The first is the MASSIVE Cambridge Guide to the Architecture of Christianity edited by Richard A. Etlin. I had only a tiny contribution to this gigantic and long… Read More →

I have to admit that today’s blog post is a bit of a hot take on the very recently published volume: On the Edge of a Roman Port: Excavations at Koutsongila, Kenchreai, 2007-2014 edited by Elena Korka and Joe Rife. I’m not going to come out and say that this is the perfect holiday read, but runs… Read More →

At the end of the semester, I tend to experience a bit of priority creep as the number of “do right now” projects (grading, end of semester deadlines, and so on) begins to encroach on the “do sometime soon” or “wouldn’t it be cool to do?” projects. That kind of ontological ambiguity which is only… Read More →

Every now and then I go back to reading something on Late Antique and Early Christian archaeology. It feels a bit like checking in with a favorite musician to see what they’re up to these days or watching the latest installment of a long running music franchise. You rarely expect something better or even different, but… Read More →

I’ve very much enjoyed the recent and ongoing conversation about pseudoarchaeology across various social media platforms. I’ve been writing some stuff here on my blog (which you can check out here, if you want). There are largely meant as notes for some kind of future project, but hopefully they continue to add to the ongoing… Read More →

My day has almost gotten away from me before the shock realization that I had not posted a link to my talk at the University of Cyprus’s Archaeological Research Unit yesterday! Here’s the link: Enjoy!

This past weekend, I attended the annual meeting of ASOR, which is the annual meeting of Near Eastern archaeologists, and pseudoarchaeology was in the air. Of course, most of this is because of the recent Netflix series featuring Graham Hancock. For more of my writing about the significance of pseudoarchaeology, see here. That series has led to… Read More →

While I’m hanging out at the annual ASOR meeting, you could be checking out the newest book on Sun Ra’s music from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota (or my review essay on recent work on Sun Ra from North Dakota Quarterly). If you’re at the ASOR meeting, check out Rita Lucarelli’s paper on… Read More →

For the first time in many years, I’ll be going to the ASOR annual meeting and not present a paper! It’ll also be my first time at a major in person conference since the pandemic put a stop to them. So, if you’re in Boston at the meetings this week, please do stop by and… Read More →

Anyone who has spent any time in the village of Ancient Corinth has noticed the Perachora peninsula. It is almost always visible across the Corinthian Gulf from the terrace on which the city of Corinth stands. Most famously, the peninsula is home to a Sanctuary of Hera situated around a tiny inlet near the western tip… Read More →

One of the things that I’m trying to do as I find myself well and truly a “mid career” scholar is to focus on small things. Maybe it has to do with my interest in craft and even slow practices. Maybe it has to do with my distaste for senior (generally male) scholars producing BIG BOOKS about… Read More →

Over the past decade there has been an outpouring of scholarship on Byzantine Dreams (as well as dreaming in the Arab and Ottoman world). Much of this was likely prompted by the publication of three books: first, Steven Oberhelman’s translation of six oneirocritica in 2008 (although this was based on his earlier and widely used 1981… Read More →

As readers of this blog likely know, I have an growing interest in pseudoarchaeology and alternative archaeology. As any number of scholars have pointed out, these two forms of archaeological practice and knowledge making are largely political in character. Pseudoarchaeology, in its purist form, represents archaeological practices that seek deliberately to subvert conventional archaeological arguments either… Read More →

I really enjoyed Kevin Dicus’s recent article in AJA 126.4: “Refuse and the Roman City: Determining the Formation Processes of Refuse Assemblages Using Statistical Measures of Heterogeneity.” This article pushed me to read Guido Furlan’s 2017 article in EJA 20.2: “When Absence Means Things Are Going Well: Waste Disposal in Roman Towns and its Impact on… Read More →

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a more casual paper for a special section in an issue of Near Eastern Archaeology on the relationship between the Bakken oil patch in North Dakota and Babylon in Mesopotamia. I now have a completed draft of this paper. At the risk of jinxing everything,… Read More →

Lately, I’ve been delving a bit into Vine Deloria’s imposing and impressive corpus in an effort to understand Native American religion in a more thoughtful way. A number of folks nudged me to start with Deloria’s God is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973; Rev. Ed. 1992, 2003). It’s a fantastic book (so far!)… Read More →

This past week, I was doing some light research at UND Chester Fritz Library’s Department of Special Collections and for various, almost random reasons, was scrolling through the finding aid for John Barger’s papers. In those papers, I noticed an entry for Box 1, Folder 31: “Greek Inscriptions Deciphered” by Thomas Barger. I knew Thomas Barger, John’s brother, from… Read More →

For a long time, I resisted the idea that Thursdays were the new Fridays. After all, I still got up and went to work on Fridays so Thursdays just seemed like Thursdays to me. In fact, Fridays and Wednesdays also often seemed like Thursdays too. Thursdays are weird that way. Recently, however, I’ve started to feel… Read More →