I’m sitting in the Best Practices of Digital Scholarship panel at ASOR 2019. Chuck Jones leads things off with a librarian’s perspective on the need for open access for a thriving academic ecosystem with particular attention to the role of libraries. He’s stressing the need to read author contracts carefully and to make sure that… Read More →
With the ASOR annual meeting not even begun, I’m already being gently nudged to think about my paper for the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting in January. Fotini Kondyli and Jon Frey have organized a panel on legacy data in archaeology, and according to the abstract that I wrote a few months ago, my… Read More →
On Friday, I enjoyed a day of thinking about Byzantium. The collegiality of all those involved and the polished setting of Dumbarton Oaks made it all the more pleasant. Luca Zavagno and Nikos Bakirtzis provided supportive and deeply knowledgable leadership and imparted the entire proceedings with a kind of thoughtful informality that encouraged wide ranging conversation.… Read More →
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on my paper from next week’s Dumbarton Oaks colloquium titled The Insular Worlds of Byzantium. My paper is a bit of a rambling affair which seeks to consider whether island archaeology is a useful way to think about the island of Cyprus in the Late Roman and… Read More →
Just a quick blog post this morning! This week, I’ll submit my first timid foray into the scholarship of publishing archaeology. It’s mostly a position paper that frames my work at The Digital Press. This short piece originated as a paper delivered at the 12 annual IEMA conference at the University at Buffalo last year titled… Read More →
Last week, I presented part of a final, albeit working, draft based on a paper that I gave last spring at the annual IEMA conference at Buffalo. It’s due at the end of the month, and right now, I’m starting to feel deadline pressure. Here’s the final 1000 words or so of the paper, where I… Read More →
Yesterday evening, I finished reading Miguel Angel Cau Ontiveros and Catalina Mas Florit’s new edited volume, Change and resilience: the occupation of Mediterranean islands in late antiquity (2019). It’s pretty good and filled with things that I should follow up on as I try to reconstruct a bit of what I used to know about Late Antiquity. As I noted yesterday,… Read More →
Anna Sitz’s recent article in the American Journal of Archaeology is currently my favorite thing (sorry Scott!). It not only takes the archaeology of Late Antiquity seriously, but also considers the complexities of understanding Late Antique practices through the lens of modern scholarly conventions. There’s a ton to think about in this article, but three things stand out to… Read More →
This weekend, I worked on refining and revising my response to Andrew Reinhard’s piece, Assemblage Theory, on Epoiesen. The response is a bit long so I’m breaking it into two pieces. Below is part 2. Check out part 1 here. My response is also a bit complex (and a bit like a cat attacking a sofa), but by… Read More →
This weekend, I worked on refining and revising my response to Andrew Reinhard’s piece, Assemblage Theory, on Epoiesen. The response is a bit long so I’m breaking it into two pieces. It’s also a bit complex, but by playing with these ideas, I’m hoping it’ll help me refine my thinking for an article that is due at… Read More →
This past week, I offered to write a response to a piece by Andrew Reinhard over at the journal Epoiesen. Having the opportunity to write a response there had been a recent bucket list thing for me since I started to work with the journal’s editor Shawn Graham to publish the paper and paginated version of the journal through The… Read More →
This weekend, I read my colleague Scott Gallimore’s recent paper in the American Journal of Archaeology titled “An Island in Crisis? Reconsidering the Formation of Roman Crete.” The article is the model of careful interrogation of various ways of understanding the Roman conquest of Crete “on the ground.” By focusing on the material changes on the… Read More →
This semester, I’m teaching a small graduate seminar that is a combination historical methods, theory, and historiography. The syllabus is uncomplicated and involves only 10 or 11 books, a couple of short paper, and a draft of a prospectus. The third book on the syllabus of Elizabeth Clark’s 2004 classic, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the… Read More →
With the lovely fall weather, I’ve been taking the dogs on some long walks lately. This has not only given me the headspace to solve the world’s problems (if I only had a pen to write down the solutions before I forgot them all) and to work on a few papers that are looming in… Read More →
One of the things I’ve been working on for the last 2 (or 10 or 15) years is how do we understand the distribution of artifacts produced through intensive pedestrian survey. In fact, thinking about the distribution of artifacts and how our methods of survey and analysis shape the kinds of conclusions we can reach… Read More →
This afternoon I’m scheduled to talk to a journalist about nostalgia, the Atari excavation, and punk archaeology. Over the last few years, I’ve thought a good bit about nostalgia, in part, because it seems rampant in a few of my hobbies. For example, among “audiophiles” or folks who enjoy carefully organized stereo systems, there’s been… Read More →
Later today, I’m going to give a little lecture in a political science class. The class is on Political Science 120: Global Perspectives. The instructor, one of my mentors and heroes on campus, asked me to talk about globalization and archaeology. There is no reason to expect the students to know much about archaeology. So the lecture… Read More →
This fall, we received some really helpful reviews on an article that we submitted to the Journal fo Field Archaeology on our work documenting the Modern site of Chelmis in the Western Argolid. Among the comments was the suggestion that we develop the relationship between our work and historical archaeology more fully. Fortunately, I’ve been… Read More →
