For the next three weeks I’m helping to teach a class at the Presidio of San Francisco on digital documentation, cultural heritage, and interpretive trails. It’s an intensive course, 8+ hour days for the undergraduates and more like 12-13 hour days for me. For the first day, I had the students create memory maps using [...]
While reading a bit of the New York Times this morning, I was reminded of the violence we encountered in Nuevo Laredo while on a project on the Texas/Mexico border. I posted about this in my old livejournal blog back in 2005:
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I’ve taken dozens of pictures of nothing now. It’s so beautiful out here, but [...]
Cleveland, Ohio
“Explaining the ‘Great Abandonment’ has proven to be a challenge…The evidence for warfare, the widespread abandonments, and the subsequent settling of vacated regions by these nomadic peoples were considered to be compelling evidence. The arguments, however, have not held up to scrutiny.”
Cleveland, Ohio
“The trash deposits in the midden show that the initial abandonment was [...]
For my very last (and, at this point, quite late!) paper of the semester, I am comparing the volcanic tuff architecture of Cappadocia and that of the Southwestern US–Pajarito Plateau, to be exact. I’m particularly interested in cavate architecture–where the tuff is actually carved into for more than a back wall/support structure as you see [...]
I’m not a “spiritual” person and I don’t believe in ghosts or horoscopes (though finding out that my advisor is a metal dragon–mechagodzilla–in the Chinese system was pretty hilarious), but I really can’t resist a good fortune cookie.
I passed my orals!
The one piece of advice that I never got, but that I will now try [...]
I am joining several of my esteemed colleagues (see links to the right) in taking a brief hiatus from blogging at the end of a very busy semester.
For a little background, we have a 6-year PhD program at Berkeley. I am coming up to the end of my 3rd year (half way through!) and, in [...]
A few days ago I came across some images posted by one of the right-wing vigilante border patrol groups of the trash that is left behind by people crossing the US/Mexico border. This is just one of the many perceived affronts by what many people consider an invading force–their own ancestry be damned.
When I was [...]
L-P Archaeology has started a lovely multimedia blog covering their work on Prescot Street.
http://www.lparchaeology.com/prescot/
They have a nice overview of the site, videos, and blogs from the excavators. My friend Anies is doing a great job with the filming there, and he mentions how difficult it is to record while you have several other duties as [...]
The first summer, they lived in a tent while Archie worked on a small cabin. It took him a month of rounding up stray cows for Bunk Peck before he could afford two glass windows. The cabin was snug, built with eight-foot squared-off logs tenoned on the ends and dropped into mortised uprights, a size [...]
As I mentioned in my SAA paper back in 2007, ubiquitous computing has great potential for interpretation and outreach in archaeology. I’m very inspired by Jane McGonigal’s PhD on ubiquitous computing and pervasive play and have decided to test the viability of the format for education. It’s always hard to make educational games fun, but [...]
