Atari Excavation

This has been a hectic week, but I did have the chance to get a little bit of reading done. I particularly enjoyed Rebecca Bryant’s recent article in American Ethnologist 41 (2014), 681-697 titled “History’s Remainders: On Time and Objects After Conflict on Cyprus.” The article looks at objects looted, left behind, and sometimes returned… Read More →

This past week, folks from the city of Alamogordo announced that they were going to sell about 100 Atari cartridges from the excavations conducted last spring in a local landfill. If this was a typical excavation, my professional standing as an archaeologist would require me to be outraged that a community would so quickly profit… Read More →

I have really enjoyed getting back into some scholarly habits the past couple weeks. I have even engaged in this primitive activity where I open a bound stack of paper and read the words, in order, written on each. I’ve heard that some scholars call it reading. I was pretty excited to read some of… Read More →

I’ll admit to being somewhat overwhelmed by the media attention surrounding the excavation of Atari games in the New Mexico desert. At the same time, I couldn’t resist contributing to it. First, here is an interview I did yesterday that focused on the punk archaeology movement. In the last segment, we talk about the Atari… Read More →