There is much written on petromodernity that it hardly seems writing more about it even if it is for a book that deals with the intersection of oil and photography. That said, I can’t ignore it, so I decided to put together some words here on modernity and oil. This is from my evolving, fragmentary,… Read More →
I’ve been reading around in my “articles to read pile” this week as I try to finish a very rough first draft of my “micrograph.” My “articles to read” pile has no particular order. I neither read from the top nor the bottom, but add to it and take from it almost at random. The… Read More →
The last four or five days has been a kind of blur to me as I struggle to shake off a mid-winter cold. Fortunately, with all the gross stuff going around these days, whatever I have has turned out to be just a cold (albeit a man cold, which as you know is much… Read More →
I was under the weather all weekend, so instead of writing, I spent some time with a couple book and trying to rest and stave off the beginnings of a cold before a hectic week begins. The two books that I read are odd bedfellows: Nora Goldschmidt’s Fragmentary Modernism: The Classical Fragment in Literary and… Read More →
It feels like as good a time as any for a Three Things Thursday: Thing the First I’ve been thinking a good bit about fragments lately and also about writing, and I’ve become more and more worried about my own fragmentary writing habits. This semester, in particular, I’ve started to take 45 minutes here, 30… Read More →
I’ve been working on writing whenever I can which doesn’t always create the most pleasant writing experiences (hecks, this is why they call it work, right?), but it is producing words on the page, which during a busy teaching semester is probably the best I can ask for. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been… Read More →
Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of Sean Rafferty’s latest book on pseudoarchaeology: Mythologizing the Past: Archaeology, History, and Ideology (2025). It was a fun romp through some of the more egregious and nefarious examples of pseudoarchaeology and the kind of book that will sit next to Garrett Fagan’s Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents… Read More →
Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of Sean Rafferty’s latest book on pseudoarchaeology: Mythologizing the Past: Archaeology, History, and Ideology (2025). It was a fun romp through some of the more egregious and nefarious examples of pseudoarchaeology and the kind of book that will sit next to Garrett Fagan’s Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents… Read More →
One of the things that is increasingly discussed in archaeological literature and scholarship is the work necessary to turn field or legacy data into publishable data. Publishable data is not only documented with sufficient detail to be reused and evaluated, but also organized in such a way that it can serve as evidence for archaeological… Read More →
As readers of this blog know, I’m both struggling with my writing habits and working on a book project. This creates a world of highs and lows. This week, for example, I’ve managed both the handwrite in my journal and grind out a few words on my book project. (I also got a couple of… Read More →
In one of those bizarre consequences, I read a social media post from an esteemed senior colleague who announced (with just a bit of pride) on the top of his syllabus: “The pledge: nothing in this syllabus, or in the course it describes, is, or ever will be, generated by artificial intelligence. Real teaching, real… Read More →
David Pettegrew and I are working to finish some revisions on our paper for the Journal of Field Archaeology’s 50th anniversary issue. Our paper (which you can sample here and here) benefited immensely (from our perspective) from the feedback of the three peer reviewers. In particular, they nudged us to tighten up our use of… Read More →
A long cold weekend was a nice chance to get caught up on some reading. I enjoyed two articles on Byzantine archaeology that continued a trend toward considering how recent currents in the field have changed the questions, interests, and of Byzantine archaeology. As Kostis Kourelis, Dar Brooks, and I once quipped, the field has… Read More →
In the famous scene in The Graduate, Mr. McGuire, a family friend, earnestly takes Dustin Hoffman’s character Ben aside and offers him one word of advice “plastics.” Oddly enough, this scene is not mentioned in sweeping recent article by Estelle Praet, John Schofield, and Raveena M. Tamoria, on the archaeology of plastics in Cambridge Prisms:… Read More →
It was great to read the expansive (~80 pages!) preliminary report from the Lechaion Harbor and Settlement Land Project (LHSLP) in Hesperia 93.4 this past week. It presented three seasons of excavation from 2016-2018 and the finds from a number of structures located to the south of the great Lechaion basilica. The buildings seem all… Read More →
As I dig deeper and more broadly into the past and future of pseudoarchaeology, I’ve been really enjoying following various threads that contribute that inform the pseudoarchaeological project. One particular thread that I’m finding particularly fruitful is the relationship between pseudoarchaeology and science and speculative fiction. My buddy Dimitri Nakassis let me know about Benjamin… Read More →
I’m just about done with the fall semester and very much looking forward to some sustained writing, reading, and research time over what I’m calling “winter research leave.” The first project on my slate is to write the introduction to the first volume in the Polis excavation series (technically called the Princeton Cyprus Expedition Series,… Read More →
I’ve had some time of the last couple weeks to slowly start to catch up on my reading. This means randomly flailing about and reading articles, books for next semester, parts of Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, and short stories from the latest Conjunctions. So here goes my most recent reads: Article the First Theodoros… Read More →
Last week, I spend a two days in transit to the ASOR annual meeting. It was a great time to catch up on some reading and I read two through provoking books that will continue to inform my thinking and research for the foreseeable future. Book the First I should have read Scott Trafton’s book… Read More →
