Summer Work

I’ve started to call my summer “research leave” to help my focus on doing what I need to do and to avoid getting complacent. This summer will he hectic, in a fun way, with a few different projects rubbing shoulders with one another and it help me develop a bit of stamina for what will likely be a busy fall and winter semesters.

For those of you who wonder how the average academic spends their research leave. Here’s what I’ll be up to.

1. “Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis”: This paper is due August 1, but I have a substantially complete draft of the text. I think I’ll send a draft of it to a couple buddies who have endured campus budget crises in their day and see what I can do to make it stronger and more useful. I don’t have a ton of time to work on this either this summer or when I get home. I’m hoping that I can be efficient.

2. “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication”: This is a coauthored paper with David Pettegrew for the Journal of Field Archaeology. I think we’ll work a bit on it when we’re together this summer in Greece, but most of the work on this will have to wait until September. A manuscript for review will be due September 26th, I think. So we have some time!

3. Polis I: We’ve recently learned that we need to submit the first volume of our work at Polis on Cyprus to press by the end of December (so let’s say, December 1) or risk losing funding. This is adding a much needed injection of stress to our summer work on Cyprus, but it is what it is, and fortunately, we’re close to having our part of this volume complete. In fact, most of what we need to do is the fun stuff: re-read what we’ve written and give it a bit more polish and refinement. First thing is first, though, and that’s producing a proposal for the first two volume and getting them accepted.

4. PKAP II: ARRGGGHHH… this is our long simmering second PKAP volume which is 96% done. Seriously. 96%. It is so close to being done that we could reasonably send it out for review before the end of the summer, but it has gone from being the wolf closest to the sled to just another wolf in the forest. This is less than ideal from my perspective, since I invested a good bit of energy in this volume this fall and spring, but the risk of long simmering projects is that while they might produce the richest sauce in the end, they also risk being forgotten.

5. Larnaka Sewage System pottery: This is one of those OPP (Other People’s Pottery) projects that has a spring deadline for publication. We started the work this past summer and spent some time during the “non-research leave season” collecting bibliography and strategizing how to publish this salvage material in a meaningful and efficient way. We have two weeks in Larnaka to finish our work on this material and put together some kind of very rough draft of an article to submit in the spring. 

6. Slavic Pottery from Isthmia: Last summer, we started a project to study and contextualize the Slavic pottery from Isthmia. I think our first season was moderately productive. We not only studied the material from the Roman Bath (and framed some small additional research questions), but we also came to understand both the potential and challenges of working with Isthmia data and ceramics. This summer we plan to look beyond the Roman Bath, particularly to contexts associated with the Justinianic Fortress and use these to check our contexts and typologies developed from the material from the Roman Bath. My feeling is that we’re yet another season away from producing a significant publication of this material, but we should know more or less what we want to say by the end of this summer. 

7. Hexamilion Wall Exploration Project. This is a made up name for the work that David Pettegrew and I plan to do to document what might well be some new sections of the Hexamilion Wall. We received a permit to clear some vegetation and to do some documentation and we’ll just have to see what we find. I’m optimistic. What could be very interesting is if we can connect this work with the work we’re doing with the ceramics and stratigraphy at Isthmia.

8. Publishing Work: This summer is a summer of FIVE books, I think. The Corinthian Countryside, Wild Drawing: Street Art in Perspective, The Muslims of Darürrahat, Big Pandemic on the Prairie: The Spanish Flu in North Dakota, and Clell Gannon’s Songs of the Bunchgrass Acres. I’ve never had this many irons in the fire, but I’m very excited about this bumper crop of titles scheduled to appear this fall. I’m already beginning to think of ways to market this! 

9. The Slow Cooker. This fall, I’ve agreed to give a paper on my “slow cooker” idea of “Black Pseudoarchaeology.” Fortunately it is only a 10 minute paper as part of a larger workshop on Pseudoarchaeology at the ASOR annual meeting. Hopefully this gets me back to work on my next book project which will be a short book on pseudoarchaeological ideas and Black culture with particular focus on Black spiritual traditions, music, and literature. It’ll offer an alternate view to the whitewashing of the pseudoarchaeological discourse and hopefully encourage archaeologists to tread a bit more lightly when they encounter pseudo-science and pseudoarchaeological ideas in the wild. 

10. The Deep Freeze. Finally, I have a few ideas that have been shunted into the deep freeze for now. These are mostly digital projects especially related to our work at Polis. I would love, for example, to build out a digital framework and standards for publishing the archaeological data from Polis. We got a start on it may years ago so this wouldn’t be de novo.