Over the weekend, I read Justin Leidwanger’s new book, Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (2020). It’s a pretty good book that brings ship wreck data to bear on long-standing questions of regional and inter-regional trade in the Eastern Mediterranean. Leidwanger’s focus on the Cilician coast and Cyprus make the book particularly… Read More →
One of the many downsides to the COVID pandemic is that I’ve had too much free time to thing. As a result, I’ve started not only to come up with new projects, but I’ve also come to second guess these same projects. For example, this past week on a couple run and walks, I concocted a… Read More →
This weekend, I read Michael Roller’s An Archaeology of Structural Violence: Life in a 20th Century Coal Town (2018). It’s a pretty compelling book that considers the history and archaeology of Lattimer No. 2 (later Pardeesville), Pennsylvania from its origins as a company town for a local coal baron to its late 20th and 21st century… Read More →
This weekend, I read Laura MacAtackney and Randall Maguire’s new edited volume Walling In and Walling Out: Why Are We Building New Barriers to Divide Us? (2020). The contributions offer a diverse range of studies on walls and borders that draw upon the perspectives informed by archaeology, sociology, and anthropology as well as public policy. For readers broadly familiar with recent conversations around walls and… Read More →
This week, I read Todd Hanson’s little volume titled The Archaeology of the Cold War (2016). It’s a survey of Cold War sites primarily in the US followed by a discussion of some issues related to preservation and access. Perhaps its most distinctive feature is that it brings together a good bit of “grey literature”… Read More →
I listen to a ton of music, mostly in various digital format — CDs, downloads, and streams — but I do so through a occasionally painfully anachronistic system that involves vacuum tube amplification and single-driver, paper-cone speakers and enough cables to stress my wife (and my dad, a former old-school IT guy) out. And, yes, I’m one of… Read More →
Over the weekend, I read Alice Gorman’s delightful monograph Dr Space Junk vs The Universe (MIT 2019). It’s a rare book that is both an easy read and full of interesting, useful, and provocative ideas. As someone knee-deep in the archaeology of the contemporary world, Gorman’s book (as well as her more formal research articles) offers a well-drawn… Read More →
My grades were submitted on Monday, and I made the mistake of thinking that summer would begin now. Alas, the world had other plans with zoom meetings, deadlines, and an endless stream of emails from various administrative accounts across my university. The good news is that despite the noise, there are plenty of fun things to keep my… Read More →
Each summer, I try to put together a summer reading list. Usually this is in response to my summer travels and is a good way to make sure that the books I want to read in Cyprus and Greece are on my iPad, Kindle, or laptop. I usually anticipate some time — especially in the evenings — to read… Read More →
I finished Christopher Witmore’s Old Lands: a chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese (2020) this weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. As I said last week, it was a great way to kick off my summer reading and a useful tonic for a summer without fieldwork. This is the kind of book that will likely resist any kind of… Read More →
This weekend, I started to read Chris Witmore’s Old Lands: a chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese (2020). Witmore is perhaps best known among archaeologists as a theory guy whose work on thingness, symmetrical archaeology, and agency has contributed to the larger “thing turn” or “material turn” in the field. This book certainly draws upon his formidably grasp… Read More →
It took me a while to figure it out, but now that I’ve (finally) finished reading Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, my understanding of John Sayles’s novel Yellow Earth is much better. For folks who lack the Wikipedias, Oil! was published in 1926-1927 and today is perhaps more famous for controversy surrounding a rather chaste sex scene which got the book… Read More →
I feel like my comfortable and predictable teaching-writing-reading has been quite upset lately. First, there was spring break, now there’s this move to online teaching, and finally, there’s the uncertainty of what will come next. It’s almost certain that my early summer field plans are cancelled, my later summer plans are in limbo, and various other local fieldwork… Read More →
Over the last week or so, I’ve been carrying around Francisco Martínez’s and Patrick Laviolette’s book Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses (Berghahn 2019) in part to keep my fingers in the book that I’m trying to write on the archaeology of contemporary America and, in part, because I thought it might speak to me about the… Read More →
It’s been one of those weeks where nothing seems to get traction. From Monday at the keyboard to Tuesday in the classroom, Wednesday amidst articles and books, and now it’s Thursday and I have so very little to show for it. As a result, I’m back to doing another Three Things Thursday, which I suppose… Read More →
My body is gallantly fighting off a cold the week, so I don’t quite have the energy for a long involved post. So, instead, I’ll offer a little “Three Thing Thursday” as I try to keep the balls in the area down the stretch run of the week. First Thing. A colleague shared this article… Read More →
