Friday Quick Hits and Varia

For some reason short weeks take the longest, but this has been a good week so I suppose that I shouldn’t complain that it lingers a bit longer than usual. 

First, thank you to all the generous comments on social media about my post yesterday on the archaeology of care during the current refugee crisis. The only critical observation came over at Paul Barford’s blog. I wrote him a fairly lengthy comment with some ideas for how antiquities collectors and museums might also contribute to shifting the focus from objects to people even just for a time. Check out Richard Rothaus’s musing here. 

Second, I want to thank everyone who downloaded or purchased copies of The Digital Press’s most recent publication, Karl Jakob Skarstein’s The War with the Sioux. In the first week the book was available we saw over 150 copies enter circulation as either free downloads or purchases. Needless to say, this is great start since we’ve done no marketing beyond the social media networks of the authors, translators, and friends of the Press. 

Finally, thanks to everyone who took the time to listen to the first Caraheard podcast of the season. Richard and I are already scheming up some ways to keep our always witty banter fresh and engaging.

With my self-congratulatory banter dispensed with, on to some quick hits and varia:

• Sebastian Heath and company on Early Byzantine pottery from Kenchreai, in brilliant, open access. 
• A long feature on Pamela Gaber’s work at Idalion in the Cyprus Mail. It’s odd that the Mail could assert “the most depressing part of Pamela Gaber’s story is perhaps that an American should’ve spent her life uncovering Cypriot treasures to the general indifference of actual Cypriots,” while at the same time overlooking the important Cypriot excavations at Idalion.  
• Digging at Dreamer’s Bay. This site is the closest parallel to the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus.
• The newest issue of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology is also nearly all open access. Groovy. 
• The most recent special issue of the Near Eastern Archaeology on the Cultural Heritage Crisis in the Middle East is not open access.  
• The mighty team of women who spelunked and excavated a new species of human. 
• This site solves “The New Yorker Problem.” And the art of omission and why you hate the new Google logo.
• Overwhelming mediation on the tides of human misery.
• A mash up of Infinite Jest and Ulysses. (No not really).
• Two kinds of people.
• The answering machine messages from the Rockford files.
• Are blue collar shirts still blue collar?
• A man camp gone mobile?
• Breaking Madden 3.
• What I’m reading: Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 (2015).
• What I’m listening to: Empress of, Me; Lou Barlow, Brace the Wave.

If he can’t get over writers’ block,
the great American dog novel will never get finished.