Today’s blog post is a bit later than usual because it contains the final draft of a chapter for my book on the Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience.
These are very, very rough drafts. The citations are not entirely complete and they’re about 1000 words shorter than they’ll be when they’re folded together to make a coherent(-ish) book. This also includes working on transitions between the chapters and filling out the references.
You can read a very rough outline of my book proposal here. The book is about 60% survey and 40% a cultural and methodological study of the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. As a result, a significant part of the book will tend toward the descriptive. My hope is that the 40% of the book where I try to do some cultural history isn’t so far off the mark (or so mundane) to be uninteresting or, worse still, produce an archaeology that is merely illustrating well-known history from texts.
Here are the first drafts of all ten chapters with the latest in bold:
Chapter 1: The Alamogordo Atari Excavation
Chapter 2: The Archaeology of Garbage
Chapter 3: Things, Materiality, and Agency
Chapter 4: Media Archaeology, Archaeogaming, and Digital Archaeology
Chapter 5: Borders, Migrants, and the Homeless
Chapter 6: Camps, Campus, and Control
Chapter 7: Industrial Ruins and the City
Chapter 8: Extractive Industry, Housing, and Climate Change in the Bakken
Afterword: COVID, George Floyd Protests, and the Capitol Riots
As always, if you have observations, constructive criticism, or just unmitigated hatred of everything that I’m doing here, please do let me know!
Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 
Excellent. I will happily read that afterword for a third time in print. There’s this undercurrent that surfaces when all the pieces are stitched together.
Thanks, Erik! I know that I’ve been slowly churning on these ideas for a while and appreciate your kind words and patience with this.