Tomorrow I’m presenting in Prof. Sercan Yandim Aydin and Prof. Luca Zavagno’s Byzantium at Ankara seminar series in a session titled “Famine and Plagues in Byzantium: archaeology, documentary and hagiography in a comparative perspective.” I have to admit to feeling more than a little nervous about the topic which is pretty far from my core area… Read More →
I know that I’m not the first archaeologist to observe that without a field season this summer, we have theoretically more time to spend thinking carefully about our material and sites, tidying data, and preparing publications. This means, at least for me, trying to get some momentum on some lingering projects. Two, in particular, are begging for attention.… Read More →
I finished Christopher Witmore’s Old Lands: a chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese (2020) this weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. As I said last week, it was a great way to kick off my summer reading and a useful tonic for a summer without fieldwork. This is the kind of book that will likely resist any kind of… Read More →
There have been a few articles recently on resilience in the ancient world (e.g. here, here, here, et c.) and considering the looming social disruptions caused by the COVID-19 virus, this work feels particularly timely. Last week, the new volume of Studies in Late Antiquity appeared and it included an article by Tamara Lewitt titled “A Viewpoint on Eastern… Read More →
For whatever reason, I’m having trouble getting myself into gear over spring break and have been jumping from one thing to the next all week. It’s predictable, then, that today blog post will be a dreaded “three things” rather than a more sustained consideration of one issue, topic, question, or publication. What’s the biggest bummer… Read More →
Over the last week or so, I’ve been carrying around Francisco Martínez’s and Patrick Laviolette’s book Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses (Berghahn 2019) in part to keep my fingers in the book that I’m trying to write on the archaeology of contemporary America and, in part, because I thought it might speak to me about the… Read More →
Next week, I was supposed to head to the UK to give a paper at a conference dedicated to the long Late Antiquity on Cyprus. For coronavirus reasons, the conference has been rescheduled for January 2021. You can check out the program(me) here. Whatever I write for that conference will likely be a bit different… Read More →
It feels like I have a ton going on right now (although I’m sure it’s not nearly as much as other people do on a daily basis!). I’m finishing a paper that I’m scheduled to give in a couple of weeks in the UK (coronavirus permitting), I’m working on a chapter for my book, and… Read More →
Over the last 5 years, my colleagues and I have been struggling to bring our work at Pyla-Koutsopetria to a close. We have largely stepped away from work there (which continues under the direction of Brandon Olson and Tom Landvatter), but have struggled to publish the results of our three seasons of excavation at the… Read More →
The sound of snowblowers woke me this morning because despite everything in town being closed someone just had to remove the snow at 6 am. Since I’m up and at my laptop, here are a few quick things for over the new year holiday. First, I’ve finished the paper for the Archaeological Institute of America’s… Read More →
Over the last few weeks, Bret Weber and I have been working to refine our “Bakken Hundreds” piece for a volume called Archaeology Out-of-the-Box. Since our invitation to be part of the volume was pretty vague, we took advantage of the freedom to do something a bit different. We previewed an earlier draft here a couple… Read More →
I’m trying to finish my AIA paper before the end of the week!! So, instead of blogging this morning, I’m going to write my paper and then post it when a draft is done! Here’s the abstract to the paper. I’ve posted ideas (with a little help from my friends) here, here, and here. If you’re… Read More →
This weekend I read and really enjoyed Lynn Meskell’s recent-ish book, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (2018). The book argues, in remarkable detail, that UNESCOs origins in a modern post-war view of the world instilled with an irrepressible faith in progress has created an organization that not only has failed to use… Read More →
I’ve been working this week on adapting some of the paper that I gave at Dumbarton Oaks last month into a section in a short article with Jody Gordon. The article considers globalization as a paradigm for understanding Roman and Late Roman Cyprus. In my short contribution, I’m arguing that, in some ways, Late Antique Cyprus… Read More →
My old pal Andrew Reinhard of the American Numismatic Society and a PhD candidate at the University of York kindly agreed to comment on my post from yesterday. Because he interwove his responses to my original post, I thought it would just be easier to repost yesterday’s post with his comments included. His comments are in italics.… Read More →
After a lazy couple of weeks with books, travel, and the holidays, I’m struggling a bit to get back into the swing of things. One step in that direction is starting to work “for realz” on my paper for the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting in January. (I probably need to start writing lectures… Read More →
This spring, Bret Weber and I were invited to contribute to a volume called Archaeology Out-of-the-Box edited by Hans Barnard. Over the past nine or ten months, we’ve turned some ideas around in our heads in an effort to find something genuinely creative to say about our now mostly concluded field work in the Bakken Oil… Read More →
Next week, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is really excited to publish Shawn Graham’s Failing Gloriously and Other Essays. As a bit of an appetizer, we’re making the introduction to the book available this morning as a download. Failing Gloriously and Other Essays documents Shawn Graham’s odyssey through the digital humanities and… Read More →
