Archaeology

In the spirit of my “Sumertime Fragments,” I’ve been working on a little piece on the relationship between the church at E.F2 at Polis, which we call the South Basilica, and various communities. Unlike most of my sober and frankly archaeological (and architectural) approaches to this building and space, I tried to offer something that’s… Read More →

In January, I am contributing to a panel at the annual Archaeological Institute of America meeting on legacy data. I’ve already blogged a bit on this last week. One of the unanticipated aspects of this work is that I’ve had to think about what constitutes “data” in an archaeological setting. For example, we’re studying a… Read More →

As I haiku-ed this morning on the Twitters, I am working on an abstract for a paper that I’ll give at the 2019 Dumbarton Oaks colloquium “The Insular World of Byzantium” in November. Here’s the haiku: Writing an abstractDuring the summer seasonevokes autumn cold Here’s the abstract: An Island Archaeology of Early Byzantine Cyprus Over the… Read More →

One of my tasks this summer is to think more seriously about islands, and being on Cyprus and reading some of the recent scholarly work on islands in Byzantium seems to have stimulated this some. Go figure. (To be clear, I have to write an abstract for a conference on islands by May 30th. In other… Read More →

This weekend I read Colleen Morgan’s newest piece on cyborgs archaeology in the European Journal of Archaeology. At just about the same time, I finished the first two novels of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series (Dawn and Adulthood Rites). There’s a kind of unintentional symmetry between these two pieces. Morgan’s article explores the relationship between archaeologists, their methods,… Read More →

With the semester winding down, I’m beginning to organize myself for a three week summer study season at Polis in the Chrysochou Valley in western Cyprus. For the last ten years (almost!), Scott Moore and I have been working with the Princeton Cyprus Expedition team to to document and publish the rather remarkable assemblage of material from the… Read More →

As this semester is winding down, I’m drifting toward a kind of “read everything” mode that is as fun as it is rather unproductive and unfocused. First on the list was Athanasios Vionis, “Understanding Settlement in Byzantine Greece: New Data and Approaches for Boeotia, Sixth to Thirteenth Century,” DOP 71 (2017), 127-173. It’s massive and insightful… Read More →

Last week I worked my way through John Haldon, Hugh Elton, James Newhard, Archaeology and Urban Settlement in Late Roman and Byzantine Anatolia: Euchaïta-Avkat-Beyözü and its Environment (Cambridge 2018) in preparation for my annual trek to the Eastern Mediterranean for field work. As the major field seasons for the survey phase of the Western Argolid Regional Project have concluded, we have… Read More →

This weekend, during a useful conversation about slow data and slow archaeology, Shawn Graham tweeted that he felt that slow data still evoked privilege and that “to be slow depends on a whole bunch of people hustling as fast as they can.” Shawn’s a smart and thoughtful guy, and this conversation about speed in archaeology… Read More →

I’m in friendly, if grey, Buffalo, New York this morning at the 12th annual IEMA conference, “Critical Archaeology in the Digital Age.” On Thursday, I posted a draft of my paper, “Collaborative Digital Publishing in Archaeology,” and since then I’ve received some really useful feedback on it. So I’m going to add a coda to my paper. Here’s that… Read More →

One of the great things about the long, slow slide into the summer is the alternation between frantically working on projects that must be finished before field season starts and the aimlessness of the final month of the spring semester when there are too many distraction to start a major project and too much time to… Read More →

This weekend I read a couple of cool recent articles on Roman Greece: Anna Kouremenos “Ρωμαιοκρατια ≠ Roman Occupation: (Mis)perceptions of the Roman Period in Greece” in Greece and Rome 66.1 (2019) and Sarah James’s “The South Stoa at Corinth: New Evidence and Interpretations” in Hesperia 88.1 (2019). Kouremenos’s article looks at how museums, in particular, depict the Romaiokratia or the Roman… Read More →

Today I need to put the final revising touches the article that I submitted a couple of months ago to the European Journal of Archaeology as part of a section on digital archaeology. You can read the original here. One of the critiques of my paper is that the conclusion is a bit weak sauce… Read More →

This weekend I watched Arthur Penn’s neo-noir Night Moves (1975) which starred Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, and Susan Clark and a very young Melanie Griffith and James Woods. This post involves some spoilers, so if this movie is on your short list, maybe come back to this post after you’ve seen it. The basic plot of the movie… Read More →

This weekend, I received the reviewer reports for an article that I toiled on for over 6 months. They were generous and thought provoking reports, which is basically what you want from your peer reviewers and pushed me to make some of the operating assumptions behind my call for both a slow archaeology and an… Read More →