I had a nice time at the 2025 ASOR annual meeting. It was a good chance to catch up with friends, scheme some schemes, and hear some papers. In hindsights, I’d have liked to spend more time in sessions and less time in meetings, but at least the meetings that I had were broadly productive. … Read More →
A couple weeks ago, I made the rookie mistake of reading a pair of intriguing articles on the Roman and Late Roman economy and then setting them aside before I took notes on them. I think I had planned on blogging about both pieces but then travel, mid-semester deadlines, and life got in the way.… Read More →
I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. I’ve been too focused on writing and keeping ahead of a seemingly endless array of (possibly pointless) administrative tasks that I’ve struggled to slow down and just read. In fact, I’m excited about my impending travel not because I like travel (I hate it), but because… Read More →
One of my not-so-secret habits is that I write three days a week in a little notebook. The notebook isn’t where I write my most personal thoughts (I learned a long time ago that deeply personal thoughts are more or less a waste of my scant supply of cognition), but rather a secret blog where… Read More →
On Tuesday, we received the sad new that Tom Davis passed away. Tom was the director of Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI), a vastly experienced archaeologist, and he co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology with me and David Pettegrew. He had a big personality, opinions, and energy. And he played an important… Read More →
I spent some time between classes reading a couple articles that felt relevant to my current research (and interests). It seemed reasonable to combine them into a Two Article Thursday. Article the First I read with great interest Gabe Eckhouse’s and Ewan Gibbs’s, “Two Late Imperial Oil Booms: A comparison of the constrained national energy… Read More →
We were excited to read the recent article by Christiana Kelepeshi and Jelena Živković in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences titled “Reassembling the pieces, reassessing the picture: an analytical study of medieval pottery (mid. twelfth–sixteenth c.) from Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus.” The article is a study of 50 sherds sampled from the area of E.G0 at Cyprus… Read More →
My summer reading list is an ever evolving grab bag and the sense of long, lazy summer days often encourages me to read without a strong sense of priorities (even if that means occasionally procrastinating on a book that I have for review or a manuscript that I’m peer-reviewing). This past week, I read and… Read More →
On my long flight home, I read Andrea Villani’s “Vanishing Villages: Exploring Habitation and Abandonment in the Dhiarizos Valley, Cyprus, and Surrounding Areas,” in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology (2025). The article studies the abandoned villages in the Dhiarizos Valley in the Paphos districted. Villani does this through field work, of course, but also… Read More →
My dislike of traveling has only grown more intense as I’ve gotten older. The bustle of airports, the cost, and the constant specter of logistical complications (of various forms and causes) usually exhausts me at least as much as the actual travel. To attempt to approach the start of my summer with a more positive… Read More →
By the time you’re reading this, I’m winging my way to Cyprus via Minneapolis, New York, and Athens to the start of my summer research season. Like every year, when the dust of the semester settles, I start to see a bit more clearly the tasks that ahead of me. Cyprus comes first. We’ll spend… Read More →
Cyprus has long hung out “betwixt and between” the Aegean Greek world and the Near East. As a result, scholarship on Cyprus can sometimes be marginalized neither being “Greek” enough to appear in the places where scholars publish on the Greek world or Near Eastern enough to appear in appear in typical Near Eastern venues.… Read More →
In the fall, I was asked to write a little note for the CAARI Newsletter about the recent volume that I edited with Kostis Kourelis and Dar Brooks Hedstrom: Beyond Icons: Theories and Methods in Byzantine Archaeology in North America (2024). It’s always a bit tricky writing about your own book (even if it’s an… Read More →
One of the things that is increasingly discussed in archaeological literature and scholarship is the work necessary to turn field or legacy data into publishable data. Publishable data is not only documented with sufficient detail to be reused and evaluated, but also organized in such a way that it can serve as evidence for archaeological… Read More →
I’m just about done with the fall semester and very much looking forward to some sustained writing, reading, and research time over what I’m calling “winter research leave.” The first project on my slate is to write the introduction to the first volume in the Polis excavation series (technically called the Princeton Cyprus Expedition Series,… Read More →