One, Two, Three Things Thursday

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 Byzantine epic-ish poem that goes by the name Digenes Akretes (or in somewhat stilted English “The Two-Blood Borderer”). It’s one of my favorite sources for the Byzantine world largely because it shifts our attention from the claustrophobic confines of Constantinople and into the hazy landscape of the Middle Byzantine “Middle Ground” between the Byzantine and Muslim worlds. Plus, it’s a good read, of manageable length, and filled with a wide range of material to support a critical discussion of the politics, economy, and social world of the Byzantine borderland.

The “one” thing is that while surfing the web last night, I came across this fine little article on Digenes Akrites by Nathan Leidholm of Bilkent University in Ankara. Nathan is not only a University of North Dakota (BA) alumnus, but also took Byzantine History with me in 2007. How cool is that?

Two Things the Second

I’ve been reading with considerable enthusiasm the articles on “Back Dirt” in the recent issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology. The two articles that have intrigued me the most have focused on the political character of back dirt. For folks who don’t know, back dirt is the soil removed from excavation. Recently it has received renewed attention particularly in the Near Eastern archaeology as a number of “sifting” projects have emerged, particularly in Israel, where archaeologists combing through back dirt from earlier excavations have made spectacular (and at times controversial discoveries). As Chemi Shiff makes clear in her contribution to this special section, back dirt is professional dirt that archaeologists have produced and is therefore the domain of archaeology as a profession and a discipline. The professionalization of archaeology, Shiff argues, has problematically allowed for it to claim to be apolitical and to bring impartial knowledge to contested situations. Practically, of course, this is not the case; just as back dirt is archaeologically ambiguous material capable of being used in a range of political and professional arguments, so is the discipline of archaeology itself where a generation of scholars have sought to both professionalize and acknowledge the political complicity inherent in disciplinary knowledge making.

I also quite enjoyed Krystiana L. Krupa, Jayne-Leigh Thomas, Rebecca Hawkins, Julie Olds and Scott Willard’s piece on the relationship between back dirt and burials in a NAGPRA context. They offer a short, but complex argument that back dirt from Native American sites has a range of relationships with NAGPRA. In the simplest of these relationship, back dirt from burial sites might contain fragments of human remains or have been changed through contact with the burial and should therefore be treated in accordance with cultural protocols of whichever Native American group is associated with the burial site. In more complex ways, however, there is abundant evidence that most “dirt” is not culturally neutral “nature,” but the product of any number of cultural, social, and even political processes. These processes range from the deliberate deposition of certain kinds of earth at certain kinds of sites (a global phenomenon well attested to in Native American contexts) to the remains of “artifacts” and “ecofacts” in the soil strata itself. Since NAGPRA governs objects associated with burials in direct way (i.e. “grave goods”) as well as in less direct ways (e.g. associated with, say, burial rituals), then back dirt might too be governed by NAGPRA guidelines.

There are more of these articles on back dirt coming on line over the next couple of months and I look forward to reading them!

Three Things the Third

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota now has THREE books officially in PRODUCTION. This is about the most I can handle at any one time and to be fair, one of the books is in copy editing and the other one is about to enter final proofs (and to be completely honest, there is another book just entering production this week, but that would mess up the “one, two, three” thing).

The first of the three and the most imminent in appearance is Çiğdem Pale Mull’s translation of Ismail Gaspirali’s 19th century utopian tale: The Muslims of Darürrahat which Sharon Carson edited and situated historically and philosophically (you can read a bit about it here). The last of the three books is Christopher Price’s Big Pandemic on the Prairie: The Spanish Flu in North Dakota which is in copy editing now and is scheduled for a fall publication date. Chris will always have a special place in the history of The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota in that I publishing his little book The Old Church on Walnut Street: A Story of Immigrants and Evangelicals before The Digital Press was even a thing! We have, of course, re-released it and it is an absolute gem of careful, local history.

Finally, to make this “three things the third,” I just received the second proofs to David Pettegrew’s epic Corinthian Countryside book. I’ve blogged about this book recently (you can read a bit about it here), but there are updates. Because of the complex archaeological politics associated with working in Greece, it seems more than likely that this book will be a joint publication with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The reasons for this are bound up in the way in which permitting works in Greece and the tradition of the ASCSA requiring right of first refusal on the final reports from projects receiving a permit under their auspices. The ASCSA deemed David’s book the “final report” and therefore subjected to this policy. This is really a situation where the ASCSA has all the cards and deeming this or that work a final report is “well, yeah, that’s just like your opinion, man.”