Yesterday, I started to digest Michael Roller’s recent article in Historical Archaeology ((2019) 53:3–24), “The Archaeology of Machinic Consumerism: The Logistics of the Factory Floor in Everyday Life” (h/t to Kostis Kourelis!). Roller examines an assemblage from a mining town in Pennsylvania as a way to consider the rise of what he calls “mechinic consumerism.” Mechinic consumerism… Read More →
I’m slowly working through my pile of articles that I need to read, and yesterday read William Carruthers’ “Credibility, civility, and the archaeological dig house in mid-1950’s Egypt” in the Journal of Social Archaeology 19(2) 255–276. The article is really great. Carruthers studied the social and political context for the the construction and outfitting of the dig house built… Read More →
This weekend, I read Kyle Harper’s new-ish book on plague, climate change, and the end of the Roman Empire: The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire (Princeton 2017). I have to admit that I was skeptical before I read the book. The idea that plague contributed to the end of the Roman Empire isn’t… Read More →
For the last week or so, I’ve been trying to get back into the academic groove and thinking about Late Antiquity. I have done some reading and, more importantly, some writing about the 7th century both in Greece and on Cyprus. Mostly, I’m working to get a first draft of a paper documenting and analyzing… Read More →
One of the funny things about expertise is that if you don’t practice being an expert on something, you begin not to be. Over the past few years, my interests have changed and my level of expertise has declined in general. I tend to see this as a good thing. My interest in the world… Read More →
This summer, Dimitri Nakassis, Scott Gallimore, and I along with a some remarkable graduate students continued to work our way through the data from the Western Argolid Regional Project. Yesterday, Dimitri published a little blog post that expressed a good bit of our frustration with interpreting our data. In some ways, his post expresses some… Read More →
This summer, I read Taco Terpstra’s little book on the ancient economy for a short review. I’ve not had the most productive summer, but I did get a draft of this review done. Here it is: Taco Terpstra’s book, Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions, seeks to transform and complicate our… Read More →
I read over the weekend Michael Given’s article titled “The materiality, monumentality and biography of copper slag on Cyprus” in the relatively recently publish festschrift for Anthony Snograss. Given explores the materiality of slag which is ubiquitous on Cyprus. Slag preserves in a tactile way the history of its production with the bubbles and rivulets on its surface reproducing the… Read More →
On my flight home from Greece, I read Fotini Kondyli’s recent(-ish) article in the The Annual of the British School at Athens 112 (2017), titled “Lords at the End of the Empire: Negotiating Power in the Late Byzantine Frontiers (14th-15th Centuries).” It’s a nice article that explores the complex relationship between semi-autonomous rulers of the Byzantine frontiers and the… Read More →
This weekend as I descended into a seasonally appropriate panic about how little I had accomplished, I read the most recent discussion in Archaeological Dialogues on environmental determinism and causality in archaeology. Like most archaeologists, I’ve struggled to understand much less integrate the flood (see what I did there?) of regional and global climate data into… Read More →
I was invited to give a paper at a conference in March at the The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies at Oxford titled “Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity.” My current plan is to present the results of some of our recent work at Polis Chrysochous which involves not only the careful unpacking of… Read More →
One of the nice things about a study season is that there is time to do little studies that can get lost in the bustle of a field season. There’s also time to catch up on some reading that all too easily gets set aside during the academic year. This week, for example, I spent… Read More →
While on Cyprus this summer, I re-read Joy Williams’ The Changeling (1978). Most of the book is set on a mysterious island off, perhaps off the coast of Georgia (but it doesn’t really matter), where Pearl is drawn first by a mysterious man. When he dies a tragic death after they have a son together, she lives out her life… Read More →
