Pyramiden was a Soviet mining town in the high Arctic that was completely abandoned in 1998. We were lucky enough to have Bjørnar Olsen, an archaeologist from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Tromsø in Norway come speak to us about his recent documentation of the archaeological-site-in-the-making. Pyramiden is a fascinating town all [...]
Whew–life has been a whirlwind lately. I turned in my dissertation prospectus yesterday and much of the other surrounding paperwork, but I still have a lot to catch up on while I study for my orals. I also had a wonderful time with a certain visiting archaeologist who brought me my very own MoLAS manual–a [...]
A folding metric ruler, of course. Thanks to my mom for the early birthday present!
I’m curious to see how this one holds up next to the wooden engineer’s rulers with the metal joints.
I need a few good images for Critical Archaeology — a journal that is currently being formed and that I am an editor for. These would be used on the website and you would be credited for them, and possibly featured later on in our section on media in archaeology.
I’m looking for unreduced, creative commons [...]
For your secret (or not-so-secret) inner processualist:
You too can own an expression of your extra-somatic means of adaptation! Y’know, that’s really the biggest problem with post-processualists–poor font choice.
I was able to nearly complete the Neolithic house by Cal Day, which was nearly a miracle. I would still like to add more pottery, obsidian, bucrania, and the like. I would also like to add embedded links to images of excavated materials like baskets and murals to show what the reconstructions are based on.
I [...]
I was pretty chuffed to receive an Outstanding GSI (read - Teaching Assistant) award for teaching Introduction to Archaeology last year. There isn’t a prize awarded initially, but you can enter a one-page essay describing a teaching problem you have encountered and what you did about it to get an additional prize. Sorry about the [...]
-or-
The Porno Baskets of Çatalhöyük
For Cal Day I’m furnishing the inside of one of the reconstructed Neolithic houses so we can change up our tour a little bit from our open house. In a lot of ways it has been a great mental exercise–having to figure out if I thought the ceiling was plastered, move [...]
Each year we try to have an outreach program for Cal Day with offerings for children and adults. I’m actually double-booked–I’m supposed to help out with the Cheney House excavations AND with the Second Life demonstration. Oh well.
Here is the schedule, if you happen to be in the Bay Area on Saturday. It’s pretty star-studded, [...]
Change, what keeps all of it the same,
the Teacher says, no new thing
under the sun. What we make, let’s make old
instead, older than the first tool,
what smelled much like the body–
the first blacksmith must have thought–
not quite like displaced blood, but blood at home
in its place among other parts in their places,
and that must be [...]
