Human Subjects Review and Digital Archaeology

On Wednesday I’m spending part of the class time giving a lecture on media licensing (heavy on the Creative Commons) and Human Subjects Review/IRB/ethics issues within digital media and archaeology. While the former has been a regular feature of the class, the latter will be a new feature. The University of California, Berkeley is a [...]

Tara – From the Past to the Future

Last year at the World Archaeological Congress in Dublin we witnessed a debate over Tara and a large highway project that may destroy the site. Archaeologists (or Seandálaíochta!) in Ireland are trying to save the famous site, and there are 40 papers being presented about Tara; check it out here:
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Conference Live Web Stream
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The symposium will [...]

Archaeology and E-Scholarship

Dodging between rainstorms and trying to finish up my Visualisation in Archaeology paper, I managed to make it to the “Taking Control of Your Own Publications” E-Scholarship presentation at the department. Sadly, as usual, it was poorly attended–I really wanted to also check out a talk in Near Eastern studies, but at a place like [...]

Writing, Editing, Publishing

Last week I was pushing pretty hard to get a paper and a powerpoint together for the UMAC conference that I mentioned briefly before. The paper was apparently controversial (though well received by the majority of my colleagues) and I had to take the photos and the blog for the Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project down for [...]

Çatalhöyük in Second Life, Fall 2009

Once again Spring has come to Çatalhöyük! We’ve removed all the snow and icicles and the tell is green and grassy. Work has started up again, and we’re lucky enough to have a class dedicated to “Serious Games” working on the site, as well as undergraduate research apprentices through Berkeley’s URAP program.
We have a number [...]

Meta: Blog Linking

In a fit of structured procrastination, I decided to go through my blog links today and add a few blogs links that have been emailed to me or that I’ve noticed and delete a few of the blogs that haven’t been updated for a while. There’s been a huge increase in archaeology blogs lately and [...]

Old Bones, Digital Narratives: Re-investigating the Cornwall Collection in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum

I just realized that while I had posted about this over at the Dilmun (was Bahrain) Bioarchaeology project blog, I hadn’t linked it to my main blog. I wrote this for the UMAC (University Museums and Collections) conference that is being held here at UC Berkeley next week.  The paper itself has four authors, but [...]

Plaster “caps” at Çatalhöyük

As I’d previously mentioned, I was digging a lovely burned building at Çatalhöyük before I left. Happily, several interesting discoveries were made in that short time. We uncovered a seated stone figurine with a beard that was painted (sadly, I don’t have any photos, but I’m sure it will make the official Çatalhöyük press release), [...]

Backlog: Goodbye Dhiban & Hello Catalhoyuk

Cross-posted from the Dhiban Excavation and Development Project Blog:

As the sun sets on Tell Dhiban, the colors become deeper, pink-tinged, and the limestone blocks look stunning against the blue sky. The wadi turns golden and a small wind picks up, cooling off the air. It’s really the best time to work up on the tell, [...]

Dhiban by the Numbers

17: Flea bites on my left hand
5: Workmen
3: Words I learned in Arabic (horribly transliterated: Gumu, Suu-on, Harrrr = “get out” “chert” “hot”)
6: Hours of sleep (a good night!)
103: Iron Age, Roman, and Mamluk pot sherds from my trench
16: Tags I filled out for finds
8: Cups of tea consumed by 13:00
38: Guffaws full of rocks [...]