Some Notes on the 2024 ASOR Annual Meeting

Each year, the ASOR Annual meeting seems to get a little longer as my social obligations, professional obligations, and academic commitments pile up. That said, it is almost always pleasant, educational, and productive.

Papers

This years meeting gave me a chance to catch up with some colleagues who I only see at either the ASOR meeting or on Cyprus. We were able to discuss our plans for the 2025 field seasons, some unpublished Late Roman sites, and see the work of our colleagues. I was particular impressed by the presentation by Kate Grossman on the Makounta-Voules Archaeological Project. Not only do they have Chalcolithic round houses, but their site is has intriguing evidence for the Chalcolithic to Bronze Age transition. I also enjoyed Melanie Godsey’s fine presentation of the recent work at Pyla-Vigla. Readers of this blog know that Pyla-Vigla the descendent and continuation of the Pyla-Koutopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) and focuses on the site of Vigla which stands on the coastal plateau overlooking the Koutsopetria plain. Over the last several field seasons, the PKAP team has revealed impressive Early Hellenistic remains with tantalizing hints at earlier Iron Age activity. This not only quite suggestive (the coastal height is sufficiently imposing that it feels like an appropriate place for activity throughout antiquity), but also confirms subtle signs of earlier activity in our excavations at the height.

You can read my paper from the Cyprus panel here.

Books

This year’s ASOR was about BOOKS more than anything. First, I was very excited to see a copy of Sarah Costello’s and Sarah Lepinski’s Ethics in Archaeological Practice (Annual of ASOR volume 78). This volume has been marinating for a long time and I’m very excited to see it appear in the coming weeks! You can preorder it here.

I also had the pleasure to chat about books with my colleagues and collaborators. Scott Moore and I talked about our long-overdue PKAP2 volume which is perilously close to being submitted for publication. Nancy Serwint, Scott, and I talked about the imminent Polis I volume which is very nearly ready as well. These books won’t necessary transform our discipline or be the “next big thing,” but they contribute to what we understand about Cyprus and the Late Roman world.

I also have enjoyed tremendously the conversations with Andrea Berlin and my fellow collaborators on LCP book series. The work we’re doing to conceptualize and produce books based on the LCP that embrace both the best of traditional media (i.e. paper academic books) and the best of the more dynamic digital possibilities. This is all happening under the rather traditional umbrella of ASOR publications. 

Finally, I had the pleasure of talking with a publisher about a COVID book project that continues to simmer gently on the back burner. It has to do with the North Dakota Man Camp Project, our photographs, and some final words on that project that reflect over a decade of thinking — sometimes explicitly and sometime just peripherally — about what we were trying to do as we documented housing and the landscape of western North Dakota during the Bakken boom. When this publisher first nudged me toward writing a final statement, I resisted feeling like I had written enough, but after chewing on it for about a year, I wonder whether I might have a more expansive essay in me. Stay tuned.

Panels

I was absolutely stunned to see how many people came out to see the panel that I organized with Kevin McGeough on pseudoarchaeology. The presenters were fantastic and their examples ranged far beyond “the usual suspects” of the pseudoarchaeology trade. That said, there was still a strong spirit of debunking throughout most of the papers. Pseudoarchaeology in this context continued to represent a problem that archaeology could solve rather than an opportunity to see the world through a different lens.

Part of the reason for this is the discipline’s continued focus on grifters like Graham Hancock, but there was less focus on Hancock’s audience. In other words, we could largely agree that Hancock was a grifter, but it felt like there is still more to understand about the kind of people who find Hancock compelling. My suspicion is that Hancock is simply the tip of a very complex iceberg that isn’t just right winger conspiracy bros, but also folks who represent views of the past that don’t map easily onto contemporary politics. Many of these individuals understand archaeology and their own past outside of academic definitions of the discipline not out of some subversive desire to attack academic knowledge or the authority of experts, but as a genuine effort to embrace a meaningful past.

You can read my paper from this panel here.