As a bit of lark David Pettegrew and I submitted the following abstract to the Journal of Field Archaeology for their 50th anniversary volume. According to the call for proposals, they’re looking for papers that consider “what inspires researchers to do their best work?” The longer I spend in the field of archaeology, the less… Read More →
We’ve almost over the midgame hump and end game is on the horizon (one way or another). So it seemed like a particularly good time for one, two, three things Thursday that spans teaching, research, and (in the name of symmetry) service. One Thing the First Next week, my Medieval History class discusses the Middle… Read More →
On a weekend when many Americans reflect on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, I took some time to listen to the music of Max Roach and read Marvin T. Chiles’s book The Struggles for Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond (2023). My colleague Eric Burin recommended it… Read More →
Over the past twenty years, New Years Day has become more than simply a celebration of a new beginnings, it is has come to coincide with Public Domain Day! And this year’s Public Domain Day is a particularly notable one because it finally features the arrival of Mickey Mouse (at last as he appears in… Read More →
Over the last year or so, I’ve started to think as much about how pseudoarchaeological ideas transmitted as pseudoarchaeological ideas themselves. Over the holiday weekend, I read Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). The book tells the story of the Exodus, but does it in an idiosyncratic ways that supposes Moses was… Read More →
Like most of America, I’m up and at my keyboard with the Naoya Inoue-Marlon Tapales super undisputed bantam weight bout from Japan, but I’m starting to fret about my spring semester classes. The man class that I’m worried about is the Practicum in Editing and Publishing. I’ve taught this class in the past, but only… Read More →
Apparently today is Cyber Monday which marks the end of the a week of glorious (if glutinous) consumption featuring Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Small Business Saturday. To celebrate this holiday, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is making a veritable gaggle of its books available in a simple, one-click, download. 2023 was… Read More →
I’m finally getting some reading done again and started to slowly churn my way through my “to read” pile. This weekend, I managed to read one book to prep myself for going to the ASOR annual meeting next week and one book for some vague future project that is distracting me. Book the First I… Read More →
For the first time in many years, I’ve found myself struggling to find time to read. This is both “unprofessional” as the kids say these days because part of my job is, in fact, reading, and personally disappointing. That said, I’ve been carrying around three recent-ish issues of literary magazines to tempt me into turning… Read More →
I’ve been mulling over writing a short review of two recent books that feature boxing as a main theme. One is Michael Winkler’s Grimmish (2021) which I wrote about here, and the other is Red Shuttleworth’s Eclipse of the Sun: boxing poems published this year by University of Nevada Press. Boxing, of course, has long… Read More →
As readers of this blog probably know, I’m co-leading a session at the Alexandria Archive Institute’s NEH sponsored program, Networking Archaeological Data and Communities, this weekend. As part of that, I’ve been musing on publishing lately. I posted something yesterday related to publishing and something a couple months ago and something a few weeks before… Read More →
This month I’ve been thinking a bit about editing and publishing. Partly because I’ve been working on a bunch of books that are trickling out from my nano-press, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, and partly because I’m contributing to a NEH funded seminar on Saturday about digital archaeological data and publishing. … Read More →
Last week I read and enjoyed Charles Orser’s slim volume: Living Ceramics, Storied Ground: A History of African American Archaeology (2023). It tells the story of the origins and development of the archaeology of enslaved African Americans prior to the Civil War. Beginning with Charles H. Fairbanks excavations at Kingsley Plantation in Florida and continuing… Read More →
A few months ago, I wrote a post on a book project that is absolutely not what I’m working on right now. It is called “Recent Advances in Pseudoarchaeological Practice.” In my previous post, I outline some of the goals of this little book with I hoped would clock in at around 40,000 words and… Read More →
