Books

This weekend, read Laurent Olivier’s The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (2011). It’s good. Despite my best efforts, I’ve been slowly drawn back to the topic of time and archaeology and history over the the last year. Some of this come from my recent, largely stalled, efforts to sort out what it means to… Read More →

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of reading casually just a bit in two books. First, I’ve read most of Michael Z. Newman’s Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America (MIT 2017), and at the same time, I discovered Christine A. Finn’s Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley (MIT… Read More →

This weekend, I read Averil Cameron’s new little book titled Byzantine Christianity (2017). At about 120, modest-sized pages, it’s a concise and easy read, intended, it would seem for a wide audience unfamiliar with Byzantine history and anything more than the basic outlines of Orthodoxy. Cameron divides the book into two parts. The first part deals with the… Read More →

Over the last week or so, I’ve been pecking away at a review of Shannon Lee Dawdy’s Patina: A Profane Archaeology (2016) for the American Journal of Archaeology. Writing a review has served as a useful way to become reacquainted with the book as well as to nudge me to think a bit more clearly about… Read More →

A few months ago, I started to try to write a book proposal for a book on the archaeology of contemporary American culture for the University Press of Florida’s series The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective. It stalled a bit (ironically) because I started to work on documenting the historical and contemporary material culture associated… Read More →

I had four more or less random thoughts on my drive onto campus this morning. 1. Famae Volent. There has been a good bit of buzz around the Classics job-hunter site Famae Volent this month. Most of it stems from the increasingly toxic, relatively un-moderated, and thoroughly angst-fill comments section. The tone lately has been hostile with… Read More →

I haven’t written a Teaching Thursday for a while, and this semester, my teaching has been particularly invigorating (aside from having to fix a million broken links in an online class!). Teaching the Controversy: The UND Budget First, my class on the University of North Dakota’s budget cuts has been a joy to teach. (Here… Read More →

Over the weekend, I squeezed in a couple of hours to finish reading Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia. As readers of this blog know, I have a soft spot for Latour and have used various (mis)readings of his ideas in several articles and papers of the last few years. Facing Gaia demonstrates Latour’s willingness to creatively complicate the… Read More →

About six weeks ago, a colleague out of the blue asked whether I’d be interested in writing a book on the archaeology of contemporary American life. Because I almost never say “no” to anything, I responded: “Of course, DUH?! I mean, who wouldn’t? Why wouldn’t I?” I then went on a long walk or two,… Read More →

I grew up in a house on Wheatfield Drive in a northern suburb of Wilmington, Delaware. I lived there until I was 18 and then on-and-off during the next few summers while I attended college. Growing up, I never moved. My experience growing up on a suburban street named after the rural vision of the Wheatfield… Read More →

For reasons that remain a bit hard to understand entirely, I’m heading to Boston this afternoon to spend a day at whatever is left of the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting. I’ll get to see some old friends, have a couple business meetings, and be in a place where its safe to for exposed… Read More →