It was a great pleasure to read my friends Kostis Kourelis and David Pettegrew’s (with Nikos Poulopoulos, Albert Sarvis, Alexandra Shehigian) article “Washingtonia 1829: an American refugee colony in Greece” in the most recent issue of the Journal of Greek Archaeology. For those of you who don’t know, Washingtonia was the name of an early… Read More →
Last week, I read Beth Munro’s new book, Recycling the Roman Villa: Material Salvage and the Medieval Circular Economy (2024). It is an interesting take on the afterlife of the Roman villa primarily in the west. I read this book to support my growing interest in the afterlife of large scale architecture in the Late… Read More →
Our time at Isthmia this summer was remarkably productive. Not only did we manage to move through 2500 batches of context pottery from both very recent and older excavations, but we also had a chance to study broad range of inventoried artifacts including the large quantity of Early Byzantine material. More importantly, though, we… Read More →
On my flight from Greece to Cyprus, I read the first part of Gastón Gordillo’s book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (2014). To be clear, I’ve not read enough of the book to offer a thoughtful take on it (or the subject), but it was enough to get me thinking about how to apply some… Read More →
This summer I’ve been trying to limit my blogging to a few times a week (excluding my “Foto Phriday” feature. Slowly, but surely, I’ve started to feel pressure to blog more and my discipline and focus have started to falter. My excuse is that is very hot here in the Corinthia and I’m getting excited… Read More →
I was really excited to read Katie Kearns’s recent article in Heritage, “Everyday Climates: Household Archaeologies and the Politics of Scale.” It’s open-access; so you can read it too. Kearns argues for the significance of household scale research especially in the archaeology of climate change. This challenges the idea that global problems (or situations) require… Read More →
On Friday, David Pettegrew and I are giving a paper titled “Convivial Survey and Publication of the Corinthian Countryside: Lessons Learned from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey” in Seville, Spain (via Zoom). This will draw fairly heavily on a paper that we’ve prepared for the Journal of Field Archaeology. My responsibility for the paper is… Read More →
It was great to read the expansive (~80 pages!) preliminary report from the Lechaion Harbor and Settlement Land Project (LHSLP) in Hesperia 93.4 this past week. It presented three seasons of excavation from 2016-2018 and the finds from a number of structures located to the south of the great Lechaion basilica. The buildings seem all… Read More →
One of the chapters in Sarah Maza’s little book, Thinking About History (2017) is titled “Causes or Meanings?” In it, Maza proposes a distinction between the search for causality in history — evoking E.H. Carr’s famous story of the car accident — and the search for meaning. In the post war period, some historians shifted… Read More →
The second part of our piece for the Journal of Field Archaeology’s 50th anniversary issue is a bit scrappier than the first, but I think it says many of the things that we want to say (even if the citations and some elements of emphasis remain unpolished). If you want some background to what this… Read More →
A few weeks ago, I was hard at work on a draft of an article for the Journal of Field Archaeology’s 50th anniversary. You can follow some of the article’s development by tracing the links in this post. The article, “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for a Future of Reuse: Linked Open Data in the Scholar-Driven… Read More →
I’m sure you’ll all be sick of walls by the time I’m done with writing about them. To add just a bit of variation to the ole blog, though, I’m going to pivot to the section on the 2nd century Roman bath at the site of Isthmia. Readers of this blog know that I’m written… Read More →
This was supposed to be an easy post today that I drew from some of the stuff that I’ve been writing this week, but I became fascinated by the idea of “securityscapes” (particularly as discussed in Setha Low and Mark Maguire in the introduction to their edited volume Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance,… Read More →
It feels like a good time to offer a Three Things Thursday post as it’s not the Third Thursday of the Semester. Such alliteration will not occur again until the Thirteenth Thursday and who knows what’ll happen to me by then! Thing the First Here’s a little Writing Wednesday update. I had a good day… Read More →
I’ve been thinking and talking about walls a good bit lately — including an hour long conversation with David Pettegrew about the fortification of the eastern Corinthia. Last week I posted some scrappy notes on the Hexamilion Wall vaguely related to a paper that I’ll give in November at Michigan State. David and I discussed… Read More →
I’m starting to read and think about walls more partly for a paper that I’m giving at Michigan State in the fall and partly because at some point Richard Rothaus and Scott Moore and I will have to publish some of our work at the Roman Bath at Isthmia and we need to find ways… Read More →
Lately, I’ve struggled a bit to find the enjoyment in writing. I’m not exactly sure what the deal is. Perhaps I’ve been writing too much technical stuff and not enough creative stuff. Maybe I’m just feeling a bit like I’m on a treadmill or writing too far ahead of my reading. Whatever the reason, I’m… Read More →
