My blogging plans for today involved another heroic swing at the slowly developing final chapter of my book manuscript. It has already developed to a series of nips and tucks and hardly anything worth blogging about. Maybe next Monday. Maybe. Fortunately, I’ve also been working on a little essay about Christopher Witmore’s very recent book Old… Read More →
This weekend, I have a pair of short books on my reading list. One is Sheila Liming’s Office, a contribution to the Bloomsbury’s Object Lesson series, and the other is Kevin Garstki’s Digital Innovations in European Archaeology in the Cambridge Elements series. Both books are short, with Liming’s book officially listed at 152 pages and Garstki’s at… Read More →
It’s a Thursday and just after the mid-point of the semester. Most years, the wheels start to come off about now, and I’m certainly feeling a greater sense of general urgency than I usually do. As a gesture to a rather frantic time, it feels right to do a little “Three Things Thursday” to clear the deck… Read More →
I generally enjoy writing book reviews, but for whatever reason, I haven’t been invited to write very many in recent years. As a result, I tend to get pretty excited when I am asked to write a review and almost immediately start to fret about how I can be thoughtful, fair, critical, and constructive. This… Read More →
This weekend, I read Russell K. Skowronek and Kenneth E. Lewis’s ten-year-old Beneath the Ivory Tower: The Archaeology of Academia (2010). It is an edited collection of articles that deal with excavations on American college campuses. The book is very solid and while it does not contribute much to the archaeology of the contemporary American experience,… Read More →
Things are a bit busier than usual these days, so I thought I’d share some of the stuff rattling in my office with a little Three Things Thursday. Thing the First I’m pretty sure that I won’t write it, but someone should really pull together a review essay on recent books about ruins. I’m hoping… Read More →
This weekend, I read Martin Devecka’s short book titled Broken Cities: A Historical Sociology of Ruins (2020). I’m to write an academic review of it in the next few weeks and I usually find it easier to start with some casual observations here on my blog, which I then refine and formalize into a review. So… Read More →
This weekend I read Filipe Rojas’s new book on Roman Anatolia, The Pasts of Roman Anatolia: interpreters, traces, horizons (2019). It’s the kind of book that I’m prone to like because it considers how individuals in the past thought about their own past largely outside the realm of literary texts. The book brought together evidence for… Read More →
It’s the last Thursday before the last weekend before the start of classes. It feels rather momentous as we brace ourselves for the COVID-inflected start to the 2020-2021 academic year. In an effort to preserve a sense of normalcy, I though it appropriate to drop a Three Things Thursday. A little alliteration never goes astray when… Read More →
Last weekend, I read Carolyn White’s new book, The Archaeology of Burning Man (2020). It was published by the University of New Mexico Press which has been doing really nice work lately. The Archaeology of Burning Man appears in their Archaeologies of Landscapes in the Americas series. If I were going to write a book on… Read More →
It’s been a while since we’ve done a three things Thursday and since I’m feeling like I have a bunch of little things starting to back up in my inbox. Thing The First I was pleased to see that the interview that I recorded with Tristan Boyle for his The Modern Myth podcast has appeared. You can listen… Read More →
It should come as no surprise that I’m a big fan of Shawn Graham’s work. After all, my press not only published his previous book, Failing Gloriously and Other Essays, but also collaborates with with him to publish the paper version of the journal Epoiesen. Shawn was also among the first scholars to push back against my ideas… Read More →
At the risk of duplicating Chuck Jones’s incredible efforts at the Ancient World Online site, here are some more ASOR sponsored publications that are available under an Open Access license via the HathiTrust. Last year, I pulled together volumes of the ASOR Annual that were available as open volumes and listed them here. I started… Read More →
