Over the weekend I wrapped up one of my books on the summer reading list: Kevin McGeough’s Readers of the Lost Ark (Oxford 2025). The book considers the various treatments that the Ark of the Covenant receives in Ancient, Medieval and Modern texts from Hebrew Scriptures to Raiders of the Lost Ark and in the… Read More →
I spent some time between classes reading a couple articles that felt relevant to my current research (and interests). It seemed reasonable to combine them into a Two Article Thursday. Article the First I read with great interest Gabe Eckhouse’s and Ewan Gibbs’s, “Two Late Imperial Oil Booms: A comparison of the constrained national energy… Read More →
Last week, I read Beth Munro’s new book, Recycling the Roman Villa: Material Salvage and the Medieval Circular Economy (2024). It is an interesting take on the afterlife of the Roman villa primarily in the west. I read this book to support my growing interest in the afterlife of large scale architecture in the Late… Read More →
I’ve been struggling over the last couple weeks to get back into a writing groove which isn’t great because I typically like to start my semester with a certain amount of momentum (it’s a bit like trying to get up to speed before having to climb a steep hill on your bike). I have, however,… Read More →
We were excited to read the recent article by Christiana Kelepeshi and Jelena Živković in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences titled “Reassembling the pieces, reassessing the picture: an analytical study of medieval pottery (mid. twelfth–sixteenth c.) from Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus.” The article is a study of 50 sherds sampled from the area of E.G0 at Cyprus… Read More →
Yesterday’s conference filled my head with thoughts about landfills, and this was exciting indeed. The range of papers from the Neolithic and the Roman to the 20th century provided a complex range of ways to see discard in the past and present. Here are some of my thoughts: 1. Landfils as Lens. One of the… Read More →
Today, I’m presenting my paper on the Alamogordo landfill that I shared last week. As a warm up to that, we were invited to do an interview with a local “influencer.” Here are his questions and my responses: What’s something you find yourself throwing away most often these days? Packaging. Boxes, bags, wrappers, containers, and… Read More →
As readers of this blog know, I head to South Korea to give a talk next week. I don’t think that I’ve shared the complete text of the talk and the images, but just in case next week is more hectic than I anticipate, I want to provide a link today: You can download the… Read More →
My summer reading list is an ever evolving grab bag and the sense of long, lazy summer days often encourages me to read without a strong sense of priorities (even if that means occasionally procrastinating on a book that I have for review or a manuscript that I’m peer-reviewing). This past week, I read and… Read More →
Our time at Isthmia this summer was remarkably productive. Not only did we manage to move through 2500 batches of context pottery from both very recent and older excavations, but we also had a chance to study broad range of inventoried artifacts including the large quantity of Early Byzantine material. More importantly, though, we… Read More →
On my long flight home, I read Andrea Villani’s “Vanishing Villages: Exploring Habitation and Abandonment in the Dhiarizos Valley, Cyprus, and Surrounding Areas,” in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology (2025). The article studies the abandoned villages in the Dhiarizos Valley in the Paphos districted. Villani does this through field work, of course, but also… Read More →
On my flight from Greece to Cyprus, I read the first part of Gastón Gordillo’s book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (2014). To be clear, I’ve not read enough of the book to offer a thoughtful take on it (or the subject), but it was enough to get me thinking about how to apply some… Read More →
This summer I’ve been trying to limit my blogging to a few times a week (excluding my “Foto Phriday” feature. Slowly, but surely, I’ve started to feel pressure to blog more and my discipline and focus have started to falter. My excuse is that is very hot here in the Corinthia and I’m getting excited… Read More →
I was really excited to read Katie Kearns’s recent article in Heritage, “Everyday Climates: Household Archaeologies and the Politics of Scale.” It’s open-access; so you can read it too. Kearns argues for the significance of household scale research especially in the archaeology of climate change. This challenges the idea that global problems (or situations) require… Read More →
As my time working at Isthmia hits the two week mark, our routine of ceramic analysis is giving me the bandwidth to start to think more broadly about the situation at Isthmia. For those who don’t read the blog regularly, I’ve been working with my colleagues Richard Rothaus and Scott Moore to analyze the after… Read More →
As readers of my blog know, my current research in Greece examines the latest phases of ancient activity at the Roman Bath at Isthmia. This involves a “Dark Age settlement” visible in both some scrappy architecture features built into the carcass of the 2nd century AD bath and a significant assemblage of hand-made “Slavic” pottery.… Read More →
It was really exciting to read the latest Sara Perry article (with Simandiraki-Grimshaw, Colleen Morgan, James S. Taylor, Aida Fadioui, Lise Foket, Piraye Hacıgüzeller, Despoina V. Sampatakou, Paola Derudas, Holly Wright & Alice Clough) titled “Towards New Futures for Archaeological Data Production: Challenging Archaeonormativity through Storytelling” in the Journal of Field Archaeology. Not only is… Read More →
If I was at home this summer and had unlimited time to think and write, I might be working a bit on my little pseudoarchaeology book. One of the things that has struck me lately is how much science fiction is vaguely dependent on diffusionist views of the future. Difussionism, loosely, is the largely discredited… Read More →