I was pretty excited to read S.T. Stewart, P.M.N. Hitchings, P. Bikoulis and E.B. Banning, “Novel survey methods shed light on prehistoric exploration in Cyprus,” in Antiquity 91 (2017) over lunch yesterday. First off, it had the words method, survey, and Cyprus in its title, which always hit me in the “feels.” Secondly, it deals… Read More →
These are busy days here in North Dakotaland. I’m working on the massive introduction that David Pettegrew drafted for the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology, putting the finishing touches on the paper version of Eric Burin’s Picking the President, maintaining some momentum on Codex, and trying to keep an eye on the news, navigate… Read More →
Over the past week or so I’ve been working my way through the recent special section on “Archaeology and Assemblages” in the most recent volume of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27 (2017). The section includes contributions from many of the same folks whose work featured in my recent review article in the American Journal of… Read More →
Last week, I asked for an extension on a blog post on the ceramics from the site of Pyla-Koutsopetri on Cyprus. My generous readers granted my the extension and, believe, I hope that you’ll find that you’ve been rewarded for your wait. This is the final section in the first effort to prepare a draft… Read More →
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading about in the recent work on the climate history, climate change, and the Anthropocene. I’ve been sucked into John Brooke’s massive work, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge 2014) and spent altogether too much time surfing the footnotes. To simplify a very… Read More →
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on getting a preliminary draft completed for our publication of the excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus. This work involved two campaigns in the 1990s by Maria Hadjicosti and her team and a single season of targeted excavation by a team from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. While the… Read More →
I spent a little time over the holidays continuing my trek through Philip K. Dick’s substantial oeuvre looking for insights into the archaeologists’ craft. I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing this, but as I explain in earlier posts, I was inspired (for lack of a better word) by Bill Brown’s recent book Other Things and… Read More →
It’s the time of year when I frantically try to finish reading various articles with 2016 (or 2015) publication dates so I can feel vaguely up to date in my diminishing awareness of my field and my discipline. It’s a sham, of course, as readers of this blog know, but a largely pious sham. As… Read More →
Over the holiday break, I read David Sax’s Revenge of the Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (Public Affairs 2016). It’s a popular book and Sax is a journalist who write on culture and technologies for a range of periodicals. His book is was intriguing to me not because he has an answer to… Read More →
As I read Tim Cresswell’s 2006 book on mobility: Tim Cresswell’s On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (Routledge 2006), I couldn’t help but think of Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future, the most recent book published by the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. The idea conveyed by the title, Mobilizing… Read More →
Nothing like an unexpected snow day to give me some time to catch up on reading (and grading). This week, I finally finished Reece Jones’s Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (Verso 2016). Richard Rothaus brought the book to my attention largely in connection to a recent, short paper that we wrote that considered… Read More →
Needless to say, L. Lavan and M. Mulryan eds. Field Methods and Post-Excavation Techniques in Late Antique Archaeology (Brill 2015) has attracted my attention. First, it has to do with methods (see my post last week), but it also has to do with whether we think of about archaeology in terms of period specific methods. This winter, for… Read More →
This week I’ve started work on a rather more technical publication project for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. (It’s TOP SECRET). I’m working to publish an archaeological field manual for a significant and long-standing excavation. The manual posses some interesting (but hardly unique) challenges. First, such documents with a few exceptions… Read More →
My friend Dimitri Nakassis directed me toward a recent article in American Anthropologist 118 (2016) by Mary Leighton titled “Indigenous Archaeological Field Technicians at Tiwanaku, Bolivia: A Hybrid Form of Scientific Labor.” I’ve blogged about Leighton’s work here a few months ago particularly her effort to dissect the organization and realities of field work as… Read More →
Just because my paper is done – you can read it here if you want – doesn’t mean that my fascination with Philip K Dick’s novels has ended. On the flight and various layovers to San Antonio for the American Schools of Oriental Research annual meeting, I read Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).… Read More →
