This week, I plan to slide into spring break where I’m going to literally take a break from some of the work that I’ve been grinding on this past few months and focus on projects that will give me a quick hit of satisfaction that’ll fade almost as quickly. But for now, I wanted to share… Read More →
The last couple weeks have been a real struggle for me personally and professionally. I’ve been sort of drifting through my days in a post-COVID fog and have found it incredibly difficult to focus enough to write anything longer than a few sentences. This is particularly intense in the afternoons when I start to fatigue. I… Read More →
It’s been a pretty long week. I managed to teach my two classes via Zoom on Tuesday and made it through my night class face-to-face on Wednesday. Today, I’m bracing for the full slate of teaching and hoping (as much as anything) that the after shocks of my brush with The Omicron remain mild. With… Read More →
I don’t think very often about Pompeii, mostly because I assume that folks like Eric Poehler and Steven Ellis think about enough, but every now and then something happens that makes me aware of how ubiquitous Pompeii is in our popular culture. For example, this week, I’ve been enjoying Cate Le Bon’s latest album titled Pompeii and… Read More →
My stack of articles “to read” is pretty scary these days, but I was really glad to find time to read Michael Given’s 2020 article, “Attending to Place and Time: Seasonality in Early Modern Scotland and Cyprus” from the European Journal of Archaeology 23(3). This article is another in Given’s recent work to apply the concept… Read More →
This week, I’ve been reading and enjoying some of the most recent work on the archaeology of homelessness to update and revise a chapter in my book on the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. Yesterday, I blogged about Courtney Singleton’s very recent dissertation documenting archaeological evidence for homeless activity at Pelham Bay Park in… Read More →
This semester is going to be an adventure. Not only are we having some pretty cold weather, but COVID and teaching four different classes is keeping my on my toes. On top of this, I’m trying to develop a bit more personal discipline and read and write regularly even if it’s not directed toward any… Read More →
As anyone who has read this blog knows, I have grown weary of big books, proposing big ideas, and written by big name scholars. They stimulate debate, in part, because of their ambition and their flaws which is a consequence of their length. Of course, an overly long, complicated, and problematic book often attracts the kinds… Read More →
This past week, I listened with a good bit of enthusiasm to the Koichi Matsukaze Trio feat Ryojiro Furusawa, Live at the Room 427 re-released by BBE as part of their series of Japanese jazz. It’s a great example of Japanese jazz from the 1970s and both reflects the internationalization of this deeply American form of music and… Read More →
I’m just over 60% done with my first week of classes, and I’m settling into my new weekly scramble. As per usual, buy the half way point of the week, we life has started to fragment as I desperately flailed to capture the bits and pieces of the time, ideas, and work that had been so neatly arranged… Read More →
As I race toward the semester finding its footing, I’m still churning away at a few winter break projects including a paper on the archaeology of oil production. I posted the first part of the paper last week and a second part yesterday. Today it’s time for the third part. At this point, the paper… Read More →
It’s the first day of classes and I’m pretty excited to begin my “teaching sabbatical” this semester and focus my attention mostly on teaching. Like most sabbaticals, however, just because I’m shifting my focus, doesn’t mean that my other responsibilities will vanish. In fact, I’m working on wrapping up a paper on “The Archaeology of Oil Production” that’s… Read More →
Readers of this blog know that I have a long simmering interest in extractive landscapes that date to my work in the Bakken patch. As a result, I jumped at the chance to write a chapter on the archaeology of oil production for a volume on the archaeology of plastics. In fact, I’m irrationally excited… Read More →
I read a bit randomly these days in Byzantine archaeology. When something comes across my desk, I tend to read it, and even as my attention has been on revising my book and a couple archaeology of the contemporary world projects, I’ve recognized that things are happening in Byzantine archaeology. A couple of weeks ago, a colleague… Read More →
My holiday reading consisted of wading my way (almost!) through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s massive book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). I like the book and I like their argument and I’m hoping that it spurs a wide ranging discussion of how our views of the past shape how… Read More →
I’m obviously out of sync with my use of alliteration, but I am working my way through my “articles to read pile” albeit rather haphazardly. This week, I read two articles from the most recent Journal of Greek Archaeology 6 (2021), both of which were pretty cool. The first was by Chris Cloke whose relatively recent… Read More →
This week, I read the recently published report on the 2019 excavations at Corinth in Greece by Christopher Pfaff. The report is the second in his tenure as director of Corinth excavations and while this report is less amazing than the report on work at the site in 2018, the 2019 article is thoroughly entertaining… Read More →
This weekend I read Rachael Graff’s Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (2020). This is obviously a book that I should have read about a year ago, but for some odd reason, did not. I really enjoyed the book and admired Graff’s ability to balance between intimate and… Read More →
