I’ve been working on revising my paper on the Bakken and Babylon and it just so happens that I’ve also read two pretty great things that contribute directly to these efforts. This was not really intentional, but not entirely coincidental either. First, I really enjoyed my colleague Kyle Conway’s piece in the International Journal of… Read More →
This past week Hesperia 91.3 appeared. For those of you just here for the music, Hesperia is a publication of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. I generally get excited for its regular arrival in my inbox in part because I have a long-standing interest in the archaeology of Greece and, in part, because… Read More →
I’m juggling a few projects lately and that always keeps me on my toes and excited to get to work in the morning. Right now, I’m working with Rachael Kiddey to edit the inaugural volume in the CHAT book series. It’s a collection of papers from festivalCHAT which was an online conference held in 2020.… Read More →
My post today is mostly for data nerds (or want-to-be data nerds, in my case). For the last two months, I’ve been messing around with some databases from the Michigan State Excavations at Isthmia in Greece. I have any number of goals with doing this and most of them loosely coalesce around “figuring out how… Read More →
This week has become more hectic than I would have wished, but mostly it’s hectic with good things. I’m looking forward to heading to Fargo tomorrow for the Northern Great Plains History Conference and pleased that some of the work that I put into cleaning up data from the Michigan State Excavations at Isthmia is… Read More →
As readers of this blog know (perhaps too well), I’ve been slowly exploring the topic of pseudoarchaeology over the last couple of years (here and here are links to most recent posts). Recently, I’ve explored the concept of an anti-racist pseudoarchaeology that rejects narratives infused with white supremacy and colonialism and amplifies anti-colonial and Black… Read More →
This past summer, I started a small pilot project at the first site where I ever worked: the Panhellenic Sanctuary at Isthmia in the Corinthia. The project brings together some colleagues from my work on Cyprus – including Scott Moore – with some colleagues from the Bakken days – Richard Rothaus and Kostis Kourelis – and my… Read More →
For those of you tired of reading my take on pseudoarchaeology, you maybe should sit this blog post out. There’s not much new here. Another Flint Dibble twitter thread has prompted this post and I want to stress from the top that Flint is not wrong and his heart and his mind is in the right… Read More →
This week has been a very difficult one for my Native American colleagues and students. The University of North Dakota announced that they had begun the repatriation process on a collection of artifacts and ancestors discovered over the last six months on campus. I’ve been a small part of this process and I’ve been overwhelmed by the experience and especially… Read More →
The early fall is always an awkward time of year because it marks the intersection of summertime work and the more regular routine of the semester’s start (as well as baseball and football season). Over the last couple of week’s I’ve been working to pull together some of our work from the past summer on… Read More →
Over the weekend, I got a chance to read Colleen Morgan’s thoughtful review of digital archaeology published in the Annual Review of Archaeology this past month. The piece surveys recent trends in digital archaeology and, more important, urges the discipline forward toward a more reflective, ethical, and meaningful directions. Unlike many approaches to digital practice in archaeology… Read More →
I’m not great at writing conclusions. More than that, I designed my book on the archaeology of the contemporary American experience without a conclusion. Instead, I planned an afterword that would bring the book “up to the minute” (and you can read that here), but my editors, rightly, noted that the publication process is a long… Read More →
I’m taking a real, honest to goodness vacation over the weekend. In fact, I’m going to vacation so hard that I’m not even taking a laptop! I reckon the last time that I vacationed without a laptop was in 2000 or 2001 when I was living in Athens. To celebrate this unlikely situation, I’m going to offer a… Read More →
Today will be a hectic day toward the end of a hectic week. As we enter the “frog days” of summer, I think I’m feeling the start of the fall semester looming. As a result, all I have this morning is a very short three things Thursday, but maybe there’s a bit of thematic unity that… Read More →
As I’ve hinted for the last week or so, I’ve been reading Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). It’s a fantastically rich book that I neither have the depth of learning to review nor the time to digest even partially (and this appears to be my fate in life). The… Read More →
Like most of the world, I’m anxiously reading about the rise of the latest COVID variant, Ba.5, and worrying about how it will impact my health, the health of people in my community, and our daily life. I’m already hearing about the consequences of this new, highly transmissible variant, on the operations of summer programs,… Read More →
One of my summer projects was collaborating with my good friend and colleague, David Pettegrew on an article that surveys the Corinthian landscape in Late Antiquity. It’s for an edited volume published in Germany and directed primarily toward a European audience. This paper doesn’t so much propose any radically new analysis or interpretations, but offers… Read More →
