My Friday afternoon house cleaning was interrupted last week by a knock on my door. A 20-something guy in a sleeveless t-shirt and jeans asked if I was an archaeologist and if I would look at a couple of artifacts that he had purchased. I’m a curious guy, so of course I wanted to see… Read More →
Over the past two weeks David Pettegrew and I have been working through the data from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project’s excavation seasons. This includes two seasons of excavation in the 1990s by Maria Hadjicosti with the Cypriot Department of Antiquities and and three seasons of excavation by a team from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Messiah… Read More →
Just a short post this morning, but I’ve really been enjoying John Haldon’s The Empire That Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640-740 (Harvard 2016). In many ways, Haldon has been responsible for the changing perceptions of the 7th and 8th century among historians and archaeologists with his several, high-influential works on the topic.… Read More →
I know I’ve been promising to share a draft of our introduction to our Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology, but haven’t come through, Today, that changes. Here’s a link to a draft of our introduction to our Oxford Handbook project. The challenge of this introduction stems our effort to do three things. First, we… Read More →
I spent some time this weekend reading Y. Hamilakis’s edited forum in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. Since Bret Weber, Richard Rothaus, and I contributed to the forum, we received an advanced copy and it’s my impression that the forum will be available very soon. The papers consisted of a wide range of reflections on… Read More →
Over the weekend, David Pettegrew and I have been putting the finishing touches on the introduction to our Oxford Handbook to Early Christian Archaeology. We’re not only engaged in our typical struggled between length and content, but I also find myself returning again and again to the definition of Early Christian archaeology. Recently, I’ve been… Read More →
Over the past week or so, I’ve worked my way through Luca Zavagno’s new book, Cyprus between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (AD 600-800): An Island in Transition (Routledge 2017). As the title suggests, the book examines the 7th and 8th centuries on the island and brings together in a single volume arguments that… Read More →
Over the last few weeks, David Pettegrew and I have been slowly working to revise our introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology. The final part to be written was a brief section on the prospect for an archaeology of Early Christianity. While one could identify any number of significant future lines of… Read More →
On my flight home from Greece last week I got to thinking about archaeological field work and what I learned over my 20 years in the field. I think most of what I learned has had more too do with how to be an effective academic (and colleague) and less to do with any particular… Read More →
On the Western Argolid Regional project this summer, we’re slowly shifting from field work to study season and publication mode. I got to thinking about how I might contribute to the volume and, as you might expect, began to reflect about methods and methodology. Of course, my conversations with David Pettegrew have also inspired my… Read More →
As you might have gathered from my post earlier in the week, I’m interested in applying Ivan Illich’s ideas of conviviality to archaeological practices as well. One of the longterm failures in my argument for slow archaeology is that beyond advocating for a more critical engagement with digital tools and practices in the field, I’ve… Read More →
A week worth of conversations with David Pettegrew is pretty challenging and invigorating stuff. Part of the great value of doing field work is the conversations during downtimes. David and I have been immersed in working on the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology for the last two years, but we’ve been chatting about other… Read More →
