This weekend I read Catherine Kearns’s and Anna Georgiadou’s recent article in the Journal of Field Archaeology (2021): “Rural Complexities: Comparative Investigations at Small Iron Age Sites in South-Central Cyprus.” The article is good for a number of reasons and should be added to any reading list on rural Mediterranean landscapes. If you have time (and are into that… Read More →
As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working with my wife, Susan Caraher, on a report from a windshield survey of post-war housing in Grand Forks, ND. We have a mostly, almost, pretty much complete draft of our report, and you can read it here. There are a few caveats: First, I’m not entirely pleased with… Read More →
Like many people, I’ve started to get a bit antsy about what I’ve accomplished and how I’ve prioritized my time during the pandemic. Not only am I feeling a good bit of survivor’s guilt surrounding any productivity that I did manage during the pandemic, but I also feel bad about prioritizing some of my own… Read More →
This weekend, I read Nicholas Zorzin’s article “Is archaeology conceivable within the degrowth movement?” in Archaeological Dialogues 28 (2021). The article is a follow up, in many ways, to James Flexner’s article in Archaeological Dialogues 27 (2020) “Degrowth and a sustainable future for archaeology” which I blogged about it here. Both articles are full of food for thought and… Read More →
This weekend I read an article in the most recent issue of Antiquity titled “Agricultural terraces in the Mediterranean: medieval intensification revealed by OSL profiling and dating” by (takes a deep breath) Sam Turner, Tim Kinnaird, Günder Varinlioğlu, Tevfik Emre Şerifoğlu, Elif Koparal, Volkan Demirciler, Dimitris Athanasoulis, Knut Ødegård, Jim Crow, Mark Jackson, Jordi Bolòs,… Read More →
This weekend, I spent a bit of time reading Anthony Reed’s provocative and challenging Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke 2021). The book is complex and I’m not sure that I have the chops to give it even a superficial summary. It considers the relationship between race, free jazz (broadly construed), and poetry particularly over… Read More →
Thing the First Last week, I read a rather well executed article by Alvise Matessi titled “The ways of an empire: Continuity and change of route landscapes across the Taurus during the Hittite Period (ca. 1650–1200 BCE)” in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 62 (2021). The article does exactly what it says in the title: it… Read More →
It’s a Thursday at the end of the semester and I’m thinking about a new book that is neck deep in production, another book that is getting some good attention, some teaching situations that are amusing me, and … Thing the First This weekend, I’m wrapping up final edits on a new book from The Digital… Read More →
This week has been hectic, but I managed to find some time the read James Flexner’s recent article in Archaeological Dialogues 27 (2020) titled “Degrowth and a sustainable future for archaeology.” I have to admit when I first skimmed it, I was pretty skeptical that the degrowth movement had much to offer archaeology as a discipline.… Read More →
Yesterday I submitted an abstract for the 2021 ASOR annual meeting. It felt like a little expression of hope that things might have returned to a certain kind of normal by next fall. I proposed my paper for the third year in a workshop dedicated to “Best Practices for Digital Scholarship” organized by Sarah Kansa and Chuck… Read More →
Next week is spring break and this means that the semester has only six weeks or so left. It also means that spring deadlines are barreling at me with alarming speed. This is both invigorating and challenging, of course, but I suppose the on-rush of deadlines, overlapping obligations, and complicated priorities is part of what… Read More →
I read with great excitement Fotini Kondyli and Sarah Craft’s article in the most recent Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology. It’s titled “The Making of a Byzantine Monastic Landscape: A Case Study from the Mazi Plain in Northwest Attica, Greece,” and in an honest-to-goodness article on the archaeology of Byzantine landscapes in Greece. This is exciting for any… Read More →
This weekend, I read Allison Mickel’s wonderful new book, Why Those Who Shovel are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor (University Press of Colorado 2021). It’s pretty great and if the title appeals to you at all, then you’re best served by just going and buying a copy and reading it rather than mucking… Read More →
A couple of weeks ago, I started to write some of a short introduction to the baptisteries of Greece that I’m working on with David Pettegew. I’m assuming writing about the Early Christian architecture of Greece is a bit like riding a bike… That said, right now, it’s a bit of a hodgepodge of random… Read More →
This weekend I spent some time exploring the city-state of Ravicka, which is the center-piece and setting for Renee Gladman’s Ravicka series of books. These books are really remarkable and as close to reading a dream as anything that I’ve ever read. The settings and characters shimmer in the yellow light of the city-state and flicker in… Read More →
Over the next five weeks or so I have to go back to some research that I was doing in around 2008 to write a short piece and catalogue of Early Christian baptisteries in Greece. (For some reason this makes me use my Allen Iverson voice: We’re talking about Baptisteries. Not a basilica. Baptisteries). Anyway, the… Read More →
Yesterday, prompted by some well meaning colleagues and social media, I read Kim Bowes’s very recent article “When Kuznets Went to Rome: Roman Economic Well-Being and the Reframing of Roman History” in Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 2.1 (2021): 7-40. It’s good, thought provoking, and, while it might appear to deal narrowly with the Roman economy has significance for… Read More →
I’ve been pretty intrigued by the two new-ish journals for the study of Late Antiquity: John Hopkins Press’s Journal of Late Antiquity and the University of California’s Studies in Late Antiquity. Both have published some interesting articles over the last few years and both have made some of their content available for free (JLA here and SLA… Read More →
