Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s a cold, but warming day here in North Dakotaland. In fact, it’s a perfect day to stay in bed just a little bit longer and wait for the mercury to pass the 30 degree (F) mark. So, as you lounge in bed at the start of your day, the New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World intergalactic content team is hard at work  producing a lovely little gaggle of quick hits and varia.

• An amazing collection of geographic information and images on the Early Christian basilicas of the Peloponnesus (via Guy Sanders). This probable deserves a blog post in its own right.

• Some cool thoughts on deformative digital archaeology from the Electric Archaeologist, Shawn Graham. (This is a long-running and remarkably high-quality blog that I just don’t link to enough.)

• The first microbrewery ever discovered was discovered on Cyprus. (And this naturally called for some experimental archaeology…)

• Maybe I’ve linked to this in past, but maybe not, so here’s a deconstruction of Richard Scary’s Busytown.

• Speaking of Busytown, check out the new FargoHistoryProject website.

• Why is our Thanksgiving dinner food is named after a country?

• A nice little interview with my uncle, the author.

• Have you started thinking about Punk Archaeology, yet? Stuff is happening. Listen to this.

• The Australians who are digging at the site of Zagora on Andros have done a great job making their excavation visible, accessible, and understandable on the web. Check out this blog post on Digging, Digging (and the entire rest of the blog while you’re at it). 

• How can you not love a tiny house?

• This is pretty funny and ironic. 

• Speaking of housing, congratulations to Bret Weber for receiving a Stone Soup Award for community engagement.

• There have been a gaggle of recent essays and commentaries on the library arts and the university. All of them more or less make similar arguments and none of them are particularly convincing (unless you’re prone to agree with them anyway). Here are some thoughts from the newish chancellor of the North Dakota University System, Hamid Shirvani. And here are the thoughts of William Durden, President of Dickinson College. And here are some thoughts by an adjunct professor in the English Department at Santa Clara University

• Here are all the talks at the super hip and super techie xoxofest.

• Like the dork that I am, I downloaded iTunes 11 as soon as I could. I hate iTunes so I was desperate for something better. I’m not sure iTunes 11 will be the next great thing, but it’ll be better.

• In a similarly technological vein, here is a new social approach to reading Thomas More’s Utopia. And, a really nice article that presents some to the tools, tricks, and trends in digital publishing. And here’s an interesting piece by James Cuno of the Getty Trust on Art History and the web.

• The opposite of high tech: who still uses typewriters?

• What I’m reading: Journal of Roman Archaeology 19 (2012).

• What I’m listening to: We are Augustines, Rise Ye Sunken Ships; Pela, Anytown Graffiti.