Next week, I’m participating in a roundtable at the ASOR annual meeting. This roundtable is titled “Archaeology and Climate Change: New Challenges to Fieldwork in the Middle East” and it is convened by Ömür Harmanşah. I’ve been thinking about ourr paper pretty non-stop this weekend. It’s titled “North Dakota and the Middle East: The Bakken Oil Patch… Read More →
Next week, I’m participating in a roundtable at the ASOR annual meeting. This roundtable is titled “Archaeology and Climate Change: New Challenges to Fieldwork in the Middle East” and it is convened by Ömür Harmanşah. I’ve been thinking about ourr paper pretty non-stop this weekend. It’s titled “North Dakota and the Middle East: The Bakken Oil Patch… Read More →
Next week, I’m participating in a roundtable at the ASOR annual meeting. This roundtable is titled “Archaeology and Climate Change: New Challenges to Fieldwork in the Middle East” and it is convened by Ömür Harmanşah. I’ve been thinking about ourr paper pretty non-stop this weekend. It’s titled “North Dakota and the Middle East: The Bakken Oil Patch… Read More →
Next week, I’m participating in a roundtable at the ASOR annual meeting. This roundtable is titled “Archaeology and Climate Change: New Challenges to Fieldwork in the Middle East” and it is convened by Ömür Harmanşah. I’ve been thinking about ourr paper pretty non-stop this weekend. It’s titled “North Dakota and the Middle East: The Bakken Oil Patch… Read More →
It’s a Thursday and just after the mid-point of the semester. Most years, the wheels start to come off about now, and I’m certainly feeling a greater sense of general urgency than I usually do. As a gesture to a rather frantic time, it feels right to do a little “Three Things Thursday” to clear the deck… Read More →
One of the particularly challenges that we faced on the Western Argolid Regional Project was how to understand a site at a rock shelter known as Daouli. The site featured a series of fortified rock shelters complete with cisterns and what we interpreted as “gun slits” (actually loopholes) that overlooked the Inachos River valley in… Read More →
This weekend, I read the most recent issue of IA: the Journal of Industrial Archaeology (2017 [2020]). This is a journal that has hung out at the fringes of my scholarly awareness for about a decade now, but this is the first time that I actually just hung out with an issue (and it’s PAPER no less!). … Read More →
My current chapter from my halting book project on the archaeology of the contemporary American experience is lurching forward once more. I gots some words, as the kidz say. The chapter is on “Ruins, Industrial Archaeology, and Cities” and my chapter weaves its way through the post-industrial city, race, and protest and will eventually deposit the bewildered… Read More →
An article by Michael Loy has been making the rounds lately, and my colleague Grace Erny brought it to my attention this morning. It so happens that I’ve also been talking a lot of Greek survey (and Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey) with my old friend David Pettegrew lately because he is working on a book… Read More →
I have two chapters left to write in my book project (and a conclusion or epilogue or some such thing). One of the chapters will be a case study on my work in the Bakken oil patch that will be a pendant to the chapter on the Atari excavations which appears as chapter 1. This… Read More →
A few years ago, I casually floated the idea that projects should publish their field manuals. This was in conjunction with the publication of the Corinth Excavations Archaeological Manual (by Guy Sanders, Sarah James and Alicia Carter Johnson) by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. There was a pretty tepid response with a… Read More →
Things are a bit busier than usual these days, so I thought I’d share some of the stuff rattling in my office with a little Three Things Thursday. Thing the First I’m pretty sure that I won’t write it, but someone should really pull together a review essay on recent books about ruins. I’m hoping… Read More →
Last week, I finally got around to reading Michael Given’s recent article in Epoiesen titled “Walking from Dunning to the Common of Dunning.” Over the course of a 5 hour walk loosely following the 18th century cattle route through the Scottish countryside, Given records his walk using a GPS, a GoPro camera mounted on his… Read More →
This weekend I read Filipe Rojas’s new book on Roman Anatolia, The Pasts of Roman Anatolia: interpreters, traces, horizons (2019). It’s the kind of book that I’m prone to like because it considers how individuals in the past thought about their own past largely outside the realm of literary texts. The book brought together evidence for… Read More →
It is hard to believe that my colleagues, David Pettegrew, Dimitri Nakassis, and I published “Siteless Survey and Intensive Data Collection in an Artifact Rich Environment: Case Studies from the Eastern Corinthia, Greece” in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19.1 (2006) almost 15 years ago. This article has become my most widely cited publication and, in many ways, represents a… Read More →
It’s been a while since we’ve done a three things Thursday and since I’m feeling like I have a bunch of little things starting to back up in my inbox. Thing The First I was pleased to see that the interview that I recorded with Tristan Boyle for his The Modern Myth podcast has appeared. You can listen… Read More →
I really like Mary Leighton’s work and have found myself citing her work and referring to it regularly on my blog (e.g. here and here). Last week, I read her most recent piece in American Anthropologist on “performative informality” in academic archaeology and found it particularly compelling. She argues that the performance of informality marks many of the ways in… Read More →
One of the many downsides to the COVID pandemic is that I’ve had too much free time to thing. As a result, I’ve started not only to come up with new projects, but I’ve also come to second guess these same projects. For example, this past week on a couple run and walks, I concocted a… Read More →
