Summer Reading List

I don’t want to say that I’m behind in my preparations for this summer, but I will concede that things are not as far along as they usually are.

One thing that I absolutely had to do is build my summer reading list. Each year for the last dozen years, I’ve posted what I planned to read over the summer: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011.)

This summer feels particularly filled with left overs. Books that banged around my summer reading list for years now and I haven’t managed to read them. I had hoped this year to read the final installment in Arkady Martine’s science fiction “Teixcalaan” trilogy, Marlon James “The Dark Star” fantasy trilogy, or even the final book in William Gibson’s “Jackpot” series. Since none of these books have appeared, I feel like this is a good moment to try to get through some long simmering reading projects (with just a few new ones as well).

First, my major reading project is William Gaddis’s J R (1975). This part of this vaguely quixotic effort to read the major works of American post-modern fiction. I’m pretty nervous about taking on a 1000 page novel as it violates most of my rules about Big Books, but it’s been staring at me for a few years now and I feel like I need to at least TRY.

I figured I would leaven the sheer enormity of J R with some shorter books. For example, I’m keen to read more in James Sallis’s Lew Griffin series. I’m also excited to read Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (2023) after reading and enjoying On Beauty (2006). I’m several years behind in my other reading and still haven’t read Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022). That might be my book for my international flight. I also picked up Evelyn Waugh’s Helena (1950) on a lark. I continue to have a Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun trilogy and Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons on my Kindle.

There are some odds and ends that I’m reading. For example, I’m reading Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1962) and Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). This is part of my larger project on Black Pseudoarchaeology.

I’m also eager to read Elizabeth Kryder-Reid and Sarah May’s edited volume, Toxic Heritage: Legacies, Futures, and Environmental Injustice which came out last summer and I still haven’t managed to read.

I’ll probably also throw the most recent issue of the Greensboro Review, Ploughshares, and Conjunctions in my bag to read when I get a chance. Since the most recent issue of Ploughshares was edited by Laila Lalami, I’ve now added to my pile of books her 2014 novel, The Moor’s Account.

In addition to these I have a few manuscripts to read for review. They’ll ride with me on my iPad!

Odds and Ends from the Publisher’s Desk

When I put together my list of tasks for my summer research leave yesterday, I realize that I hadn’t shared quite as much of my current work in publishing as I had hoped. 

The first one is a book of poetry which will appear as a collaboration between NDQ and The Digital Press. Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres is a collection of poems written by Clell Gannon and published in 1924. The goal of republishing this work is to recognize its centennial and to shine some attention on the work of this prairie poet. We also want to bring attention to “Midwestern Modernism” and show how regional voices, like NDQ, contributed to larger cultural currents. We have generous support from the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation to support cover design and copy editing. My Practicum in Editing and Publishing Class was responsible for elements of book design, some editing, and some elements of project management.

We’ve been trying to clean up the 1924 publication of the Gannon book and give it a bit more of a contemporary look without making it feel too current. The class identified a wonderful font to use for the text: LD Genzsch Antiqua. One of the students is cleaning up the line work (and more on that later in the summer) and that is giving us a bit more flexibility in our page design and a chance to to highlight Gannon’s art. You can see a few pages from the original below: 

Another project piece that has not appeared on this blog (as near as I can tell) is the cover for David Pettegrew’s epic Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This, I think, is our final cover design:

Paper Proposal: Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication

As a bit of lark David Pettegrew and I submitted the following abstract to the Journal of Field Archaeology for their 50th anniversary volume. According to the call for proposals, they’re looking for papers that consider “what inspires researchers to do their best work?” The longer I spend in the field of archaeology, the less I’m moved by inspiration and more by professional responsibility and a sense of obligation to the next generation of scholars (this, of course, remains a work in progress!). But I suppose we can call that inspiration even if we sort of side step the issue in this paper. 

Readers of the blog will recognize both the project and our thinking here and David and I will likely write this paper even if it doesn’t land in pages of the JFA.

Title: Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication

Archaeologists conduct fieldwork with the goal of sharing results through final publications and reports. Whether completed to meet core professional expectations, to fulfill requirements of public funding, or simply to build careers, archaeologists do their best work when they have a sharp sense of outcome and purpose. Yet, as reporting has become an object of critical reflection on disciplinary practice (e.g. Hanscam and Witcher JFA 48 [2023] and JFA 11 [1981]), and has changed with new modes of publication and data sharing, archaeologists may question how to mobilize reporting for a richer and more inclusive future.  

Our paper aims to address the seismic changes that archaeologists will face in publishing and reporting on their work. In the next half century, publication must streamline reporting and make the interpretive process more intentionally accessible to wider communities. Archaeologists will need to come to terms with the declining institutional market for traditional book length publications, the changing expectations of funders and professional organizations, and the growing range of digital technologies central to archaeological work and publication. They will also need to make their results more findable, accessible, interoperable, and usable for future interpreters.

We present a case study from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (1997-2003), a diachronic intensive distributional survey project conducted in the periphery of Ancient Corinth, Greece. Our work to publish this project provides a practical perspective on the short-term potential of linked open-access books and datasets. We developed the book, Corinthian Countrysides, with low-cost, persistent, and sustainable practices to both build upon existing digital infrastructure and software and evoke traditional forms of publication. Linked to online datasets at Open Context, the book centers the potential for reuse, ongoing analysis, and interpretation decades beyond fieldwork. The process of publishing the book and datasets required care in the preparation, documentation, and linking of information, and prompted us to reconsider the relationship between fieldwork, study, analysis, interpretation, and final publication. In contrast to recent innovations in archaeological publishing that explore the bleeding edge of technology (e.g. Opitz in JFA 43 [2018]), our book offers a simpler alternative to reflexive archaeological publishing, and it takes a critical view of notions of finality in publication.

Our article will have three main sections: 

The first part will offer an introduction to the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) and The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota which frames our case study of digital publication as part of a conversation about the nature of intensive Mediterranean-style distributional archaeological survey, the presentation of survey data, and the iterative analysis and publication of the results of fieldwork.  

The second part will present the various contexts and processes that David Pettegrew, the author, and William Caraher, the publisher, undertook to prepare the digital publication of the survey data, its metadata, and its analysis and interpretation. Data collection strategies, early efforts in study and presentation, and the changing landscape of digital technology all shaped the publication of the digital book and presentation of data. 

The final section will situate our experience publishing EKAS within the future landscape of archaeological publishing. Instead of isolating digital technology as a kind of solution (or, conversely, a problem), this section will argue that digital-first processes, methods, and approaches offer a compelling trajectory for the future of archaeological publishing by deepening reflexive practices and building a more inclusive purpose of work through collaborative archaeological knowledge making.   

The paper, in short, anticipates a future of archaeological publishing that sees greater integration between archaeologist, publisher, and a community of scholars committed to the ongoing production of archaeological knowledge through both data production and reuse. 

One, Two, Three Things Thursday

We’ve almost over the midgame hump and end game is on the horizon (one way or another). So it seemed like a particularly good time for one, two, three things Thursday that spans teaching, research, and (in the name of symmetry) service.

One Thing the First

Next week, my Medieval History class discusses the Middle Byzantine epic-ish poem that goes by the name Digenes Akretes (or in somewhat stilted English “The Two-Blood Borderer”). It’s one of my favorite sources for the Byzantine world largely because it shifts our attention from the claustrophobic confines of Constantinople and into the hazy landscape of the Middle Byzantine “Middle Ground” between the Byzantine and Muslim worlds. Plus, it’s a good read, of manageable length, and filled with a wide range of material to support a critical discussion of the politics, economy, and social world of the Byzantine borderland.

The “one” thing is that while surfing the web last night, I came across this fine little article on Digenes Akrites by Nathan Leidholm of Bilkent University in Ankara. Nathan is not only a University of North Dakota (BA) alumnus, but also took Byzantine History with me in 2007. How cool is that?

Two Things the Second

I’ve been reading with considerable enthusiasm the articles on “Back Dirt” in the recent issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology. The two articles that have intrigued me the most have focused on the political character of back dirt. For folks who don’t know, back dirt is the soil removed from excavation. Recently it has received renewed attention particularly in the Near Eastern archaeology as a number of “sifting” projects have emerged, particularly in Israel, where archaeologists combing through back dirt from earlier excavations have made spectacular (and at times controversial discoveries). As Chemi Shiff makes clear in her contribution to this special section, back dirt is professional dirt that archaeologists have produced and is therefore the domain of archaeology as a profession and a discipline. The professionalization of archaeology, Shiff argues, has problematically allowed for it to claim to be apolitical and to bring impartial knowledge to contested situations. Practically, of course, this is not the case; just as back dirt is archaeologically ambiguous material capable of being used in a range of political and professional arguments, so is the discipline of archaeology itself where a generation of scholars have sought to both professionalize and acknowledge the political complicity inherent in disciplinary knowledge making.

I also quite enjoyed Krystiana L. Krupa, Jayne-Leigh Thomas, Rebecca Hawkins, Julie Olds and Scott Willard’s piece on the relationship between back dirt and burials in a NAGPRA context. They offer a short, but complex argument that back dirt from Native American sites has a range of relationships with NAGPRA. In the simplest of these relationship, back dirt from burial sites might contain fragments of human remains or have been changed through contact with the burial and should therefore be treated in accordance with cultural protocols of whichever Native American group is associated with the burial site. In more complex ways, however, there is abundant evidence that most “dirt” is not culturally neutral “nature,” but the product of any number of cultural, social, and even political processes. These processes range from the deliberate deposition of certain kinds of earth at certain kinds of sites (a global phenomenon well attested to in Native American contexts) to the remains of “artifacts” and “ecofacts” in the soil strata itself. Since NAGPRA governs objects associated with burials in direct way (i.e. “grave goods”) as well as in less direct ways (e.g. associated with, say, burial rituals), then back dirt might too be governed by NAGPRA guidelines.

There are more of these articles on back dirt coming on line over the next couple of months and I look forward to reading them!

Three Things the Third 

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota now has THREE books officially in PRODUCTION. This is about the most I can handle at any one time and to be fair, one of the books is in copy editing and the other one is about to enter final proofs (and to be completely honest, there is another book just entering production this week, but that would mess up the “one, two, three” thing).

The first of the three and the most imminent in appearance is Çiğdem Pale Mull’s translation of Ismail Gaspirali’s 19th century utopian tale: The Muslims of Darürrahat which Sharon Carson edited and situated historically and philosophically (you can read a bit about it here). The last of the three books is Christopher Price’s Big Pandemic on the Prairie: The Spanish Flu in North Dakota which is in copy editing now and is scheduled for a fall publication date. Chris will always have a special place in the history of The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota in that I publishing his little book The Old Church on Walnut Street: A Story of Immigrants and Evangelicals before The Digital Press was even a thing! We have, of course, re-released it and it is an absolute gem of careful, local history.

Finally, to make this “three things the third,” I just received the second proofs to David Pettegrew’s epic Corinthian Countryside book. I’ve blogged about this book recently (you can read a bit about it here), but there are updates. Because of the complex archaeological politics associated with working in Greece, it seems more than likely that this book will be a joint publication with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The reasons for this are bound up in the way in which permitting works in Greece and the tradition of the ASCSA requiring right of first refusal on the final reports from projects receiving a permit under their auspices. The ASCSA deemed David’s book the “final report” and therefore subjected to this policy. This is really a situation where the ASCSA has all the cards and deeming this or that work a final report is “well, yeah, that’s just like your opinion, man.” 

Two Book Tuesday: Books are Born without Covers

As a kid, I used to sometimes buy books without covers. Mostly these books were not memorable reads, but they were very, very cheap. At some point in my life I came to understand that these books probably re-entered the marketplace illegally after the book seller or distributor removed the cover to prove that they had destroyed the book.

Here’s a secret, though. All books are born without covers. 

There are two books in the pipeline right now at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota and both are really exciting. 

Just this past weekend, I finished typesetting the penultimate proofs of David Pettegrew’s book on the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This book began as a handbook designed to introduce students and scholars to the EKAS dataset at Open Context. In its final form, the book is a 500+ page study of the Corinthian Countryside grounded in the history and the data produced by the EKAS.

More than that, the book is massively hyperlinked not only to Open Context, but also to other stable resources on the web allowing the reader not only to dive down into the EKAS data, but also to reuse this data to produce new arguments. The book is due out either this spring (best case scenario) or in the early fall as a free download and a low cost paperback.

And, nope, we do not have a cover for the book yet.

The second book in production right now is equally amazing (if in a bit of a different register). This is Çiğdem Pale Mull’s translation of Ismail Gaspirali’s 19th century utopian tale: The Muslims of Darürrahat. Sharon Carson edited the volume and situated the text historically and philosophically. 

If you want a preview of this book, check out some excerpts from the book which appeared in North Dakota Quarterly 84.1/2.

I’m pretty excited about the font that I used in typesetting this manuscript. It’s set in Sabon which was designed by none other than Jan Tschichold in 1960s. The font is a bit of a favorite for formal and serious works, such as the Washburn College Bible, and this will help emphasize the importance of this work, which is among a very small number of translated Islamic utopias. At the same time, the font feels contemporary without being too modern.  

This book will appear as the third volume of NDQ’s supplement series as is fitting for a translation that first appeared in NDQ’s pages. With some good luck and good timing, this book will appear later this spring. We still don’t quite have the cover locked down, but I’ve seen some preliminary sketches for it and know its in Lucy Ganje’s good hands!

Once again, stay tuned!

New Book Day: The Archaeology of Contemporary America

I try to refrain from blatant self promotion on blog, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t announce the publication of my new book: The Archaeology of Contemporary America.

(Look! No subtitle!)

More than that, if you’re interested in a discount, you can use this code “AU224” which is valid until the end of February. It’s a $45 discount!

More important than that, this feels like a good opportunity to remind myself (and my readers) that academic books are rarely solo endeavors. This book, in particular, took a village. From its prehistory when folks like David Pettegrew, Nick Kardulias, Lita Diacopolous-Gregory, and Tim Gregory supported my curiosity and my unorthodox field work in Greece to the folks who worked with me in the Bakken (especially Kostis Kourelis, Richard Rothaus, Bret Weber) and at the Atari Excavations in Alamogordo (especially Andrew Reinhard, Rothaus, and Weber) and the series editors (Krysta Ryzewski and Michael S. Nassaney) who likely saved me from the worst of my blunders and did their best to keep my unruly manuscript in check.

I’m particularly appreciative of all the folks who took time to read and offer feedback on various sections and chapters here on the blog. Over the last four years, I’ve circulated virtually the entire book here (including some sections that while they were researched and considered, got cut from the final version of the book). 

Along side my blog readers, my friends and family also listened patiently to my half-baked ideas, supported my effort to write, and offered critical feedback.

Of course, for a book to happen, a press had to accept it, had to get the manuscript edited, had to typeset it, had to get it printed, and had to work to maintain distribution, marketing, and publicity channels. This all reflects a tremendous commitment to the idea that academic publishing remains valuable.

Finally, there’s an old saying among academics, by the time the book comes out, we’re on to the next project. This is partly true for me (although PKAP2 which is NOT the next project in any conventional sense will continue to linger on my desk for another month or so), but I’m beyond eager to get started on my next project. 

Richmond’s Monument Avenue in Context

On a weekend when many Americans reflect on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, I took some time to listen to the music of Max Roach and read Marvin T. Chiles’s book The Struggles for Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond (2023). My colleague Eric Burin recommended it to me, but what inspired me to read it was an early draft of a chapter for my forthcoming book, The Archaeology of Contemporary American Culture, where I try to dig a bit deeper (pun intended) into the removal of the Confederate Statues from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia.

This particular site has personal significance to me. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Richmond (RC ’94) and while there, I worked at the JCC on Monument Avenue. My parents were married at St. John’s UCC on (formerly?) Stuart Circle, my father grew up in Richmond (attending Thomas Jefferson High School), and I still have family there. When I started to write my chapter on the removal of statues, I felt confident that my experiences in Richmond would help me be able to present the context for these events in a more nuanced way. After making a bit of a flailing effort to put what I knew on paper, it turned out that I was wrong and daunted by the extensive, complex, and nuanced corpus of scholarship on race and urban space in Richmond, I gave up. 

If I had been able to read Marvin Chiles’s book, I might have stuck with my original plan to try to say something more substantial. It turns out, my instincts weren’t entirely wrong: Richmond did represent a nearly majority Black city that had long struggled with the burden of its racist past as capital of the Confederacy. Chiles’s book, however, unpacks that more recent context for that burden starting in the 1960s and culminating in the removal of the statues in 2020. More than that, he showed how understand the particular historical context of this national (or even global) response to police violence is vital to appreciating what the removal of Confederate War memorials meant to local communities. 

Chiles’s book, for example, stressed that the removal of the Confederate statues from Monument Avenue was not the manifestation of a community pushed to the breaking point and resorting to violence to make its desperation known. Instead, it was culmination of a half-century of work between poor Black residents of Richmond, the Black elite, and what he calls the “White Establishment.” Each of these groups sincerely sought to shed the burden of Richmond’s racist past and navigate the changing realities facing a city with a majority (or near majority) population. This isn’t to suggest that every member of the White Establishment was committed to anti-racist policies or that every Black Richmonder had the same values and ideas. Moreover, this isn’t some kind of bootstrap narrative that suggests Richmond managed to find its way without outside help or a triumphalist narrative distorted by boosterism. Instead, Chiles’s book demonstrates that by the 21st century, the failures, challenges, and history of often tense collaboration between various economic, racial, and social factions in Richmond produced a city that eagerly sought to move beyond its history as the capital of the Confederacy. 

Chiles, for example, demonstrates how efforts to annex outright (or at least parts of) Henrico and Chesterfield Counties to recapture more affluent populations who moved out of the city of Richmond in the post war period cut across racial lines. The White Establishment sought to annex Richmond’s growing suburbs to secure tax revenues to support a cash strapped and increasingly poor and Black city. Black elites, on the other hand, often resisted these efforts to maintain their electoral majority in the city and to prevent the Black majority from being diluted by an influx of white suburban voters. Poor Blacks, however, recognized that annexation had the potential to increase funding for social services, schools, and other public amenities that would improve their lives. 

The controversy over annexation, which would ultimately involve only the annexation of part of Chesterfield county, played out at the same time Richmond struggled to desegregate its public school system through the use of bussing. These efforts, which met only uneven success, underscored the racial tensions in the city and resistance to bussing relied on stroking tired racist fears of Black student violence and Black students lowering the academic performance and standards in the classroom.

These stories, in turn, were set against both top-down efforts by both the White Establishment and the Black elite to revitalize the city through massive downtown investment projects such as Project One and the Sixth Street Marketplace. While these projects largely failed (as so many efforts to revitalize cities through ambitious retail schemes did nationally), they didn’t fail because elite Blacks and Establishment Whites didn’t care or weren’t working together to address poverty and racism in the city. They failed because they were flawed schemes, because of political bickering among their sponsors, and because white consumers refused to support them. Race shaped these situations to be sure, but race did not necessarily dictate the outcomes. 

The most intriguing part of the book is Chiles exploration of the murky and partial archives related to grassroots activism in Richmond. He shows how religious leaders, academics, and community leaders worked together to try to address racial housing practices, urban poverty, and, most relevant to my interest, the city’s historic landscape deeply inflected by its racist past. These groups did hard, serious, and important work under the White Establishment and Black elite radar. While there weren’t always successful in their efforts — employment schemes ran out of money, various collective organizations fractured along racist lines, and radical rhetoric sometimes proved easier to ignore than to consider — they also moved the needle. The use of walking tours, for example, in the public schools to trace the history of Black Richmond, as a counterweight to visible and oppressive burden of the city’s Confederate past, played an important role in making it possible for Black and White city residents to think about an urban landscape traced by reconciliation rather than antipathy. While the line from a school’s walking tour to the erection of Arthur Ashe’s statue on Monument Avenue and the removal of the Confederate memorial on Monument Avenue is a long and winding one, Chiles shows how this line (along side the struggles of school desegregation, bussing, failed urban revitalization projects, the threat of gentrification, and other challenges) is the story of racial reconciliation in Richmond.

[To be clear, I’ve simplified and streamlined complicated stories and likely misrepresented some essential aspects of Chiles’s argument. Go read this book if you’re interested in American urbanism, race, history, and reconciliation!] 

In other words, the removal of the Confederate monuments was not a desperate and violent gesture of a disenfranchised and alienated Black community, but a widely accepted and understood moment in the long struggle toward racial reconciliation in the city. As we say in the archaeology business, context is everything and Chiles’s book offers a nuanced and approachable context for the removal of the Confederate statues. Like many urban stories, the shadow of future challenges remains, but there is also hope for Richmond, and as our national media and political leaders seek to stoke racism, polarization, and (ideological and physical) violence, perhaps we all need to read some hopeful stories. 

Public Domain Day 2024

Over the past twenty years, New Years Day has become more than simply a celebration of a new beginnings, it is has come to coincide with Public Domain Day! And this year’s Public Domain Day is a particularly notable one because it finally features the arrival of Mickey Mouse (at last as he appears in the film “Steamboat Willie”) into the public domain. Since Disney has exerted an outsize influence on the shape of the public domain, in part to protect their prized property Mickey (and Minnie) Mouse, it is an important landmark indeed.

I won’t try to explain the decades of wrangling associated with the arrival of “Steamboat Willie” in the public domain because Jennifer Jenkins, the Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has done it far better than I could! Read the story here.

For the avid reader public domain day is better than Christmas. It not only marks the release of a new gaggle of works into our eager hands free from any copyright, but also (and more importantly) represents an occasion to remind us of all the wonderful writing that has appeared, but somehow slipped quietly into obscurity.

I won’t offer any heavy-handed recommendations (although you should definitely check out NDQ 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, and 19.1 and volume 9 of the Annual of ASOR), but I’d be remiss not to mention W.E.B. Dubois’s, Dark Princess, Ford Madox Ford’s entire Parade’s End tetralogy (with The Last Post becoming available this year; this could be read profitably alongside Eric Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front), Edith Wharton’s The Children (with a h/t to our essay editor Sheila Liming’s socials for this!), Virginia Wolf’s Orlando, and Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall. For a longer list, go here.

Remember that our literary commons are there for our enjoyment and edification. This isn’t just a quirk of copyright law or a perk of living in a litigious society, but the recognition that great (and even just mediocre) works of literature are part of our common inheritance. 

New Book Day: A Physician’s Journey

A new year and a new book from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. We are very pleased to kick what is likely to be a busy 2024 publishing year with Robert Kyle’s memoir: A Physician’s Journey: The Memoir of Robert A. Kyle, M.D.

Bob Kyle did his undergraduate work at UND before going on to medical school at Northwestern and a distinguished career at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic.

Here’s the back of the book description:

Regrettably, I did not know three of my four grandparents.

So begins A Physician’s Journey, a quintessential modern memoir. Beginning in the tradition of the prairie reverie with snow-filled winters and single room school houses and ending with a litany of late-life accolades, Dr. Robert Kyle details his life from the farm, to smoke jumper school, to the University of North Dakota, to Northwestern Medical School, the US Air Force and eventually a career at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic.

At the Mayo Clinic he met his wife, Charlene, pioneered new treatments for cancer, and started his family. The story as Dr. Kyle tells is unique, but somehow still familiar and endearing. By drawing us into his life and accomplishments, we encounter a narrative suffused with the memories of an American experience that through his work, interests, and travels had a global reach.

~

When I started my press, I was satisfied publishing quirky edited volumes that largely revolved around my interests and my colleagues and friends. After a few of these books, however, I realized that I needed to expand my repertoire both to learn to publish new and different kinds of book with different kinds of authors.

A Physician’s Journey was my first effort at a memoir and the unique character of an editorial and production process that is more personal than usual. Fortunately, I had the support of a wonderful developmental and copy editor and Bob Kyle proved to be a thoughtful and collegial author.

The book is unique in The Digital Press catalogue in that it is the only volume available exclusively in hard cover and the only formal memoir. I hope that readers interested in Bob Kyle’s life, career, and accomplishments find it a worthwhile monument.

Pseudoarchaeology and Fiction

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to think as much about how pseudoarchaeological ideas transmitted as pseudoarchaeological ideas themselves. Over the holiday weekend, I read Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). The book tells the story of the Exodus, but does it in an idiosyncratic ways that supposes Moses was an Egyptian rather than a Israelite.

The book is epic in scale, but also somehow disarming intimate as it traces Moses’s life first as a Egyptian Prince, then as a desert ascetic, and finally as savior of the Israelites who led them through the desert to the border of the promised land. Hurston introduces Moses inner life and his conflicted attitudes toward God’s commands. The book is also subtly laced with allusions to esoteric knowledge and leans deeply into “Moses the Magician” trope.

In this way, the book capitalizes on a number of key pseudoarchaeological themes. For example, it privileges Egyptian culture as crucial to the development of other ancient Mediterranean societies. It does this by interrogating an ancient story and revising its claim. In Hurston’s novel, Miriam claims that Moses was found by the daughter of the Pharaoh, but she actually lies having fallen asleep while watching the baby Moses after his mother hid him among the reeds. It is hardly surprising that efforts to revise the narrative of the Exodus have interested pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological thinkers for years. Rand Flem-Ath’s worked on Moses as well as a theory of Atlantis grounded in Charles Hapgood’s theories of polar inversion. Of course, Hurston’s novel also appeared the same year as Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.

Deirdre Dempsey’s and Julia Zeppenfeld’s recent work offer both summaries of scholarship on this novel and its contemporary implications. Dempsey, for example, notes that most critics believe that Hurston did not know Freud’s work on Moses, as her book was completed by the mid-1930s, but Hurston’s biographers have noted that she appears to have been familiar with Flinders Petrie’s Egyptian Tales (1899). Hurston’s work with Franz Boas at Barnard is also well known as is his support for her ethnographic research in the American south. It seems likely that she also was familiar with the basic outlines of the Kenite Hypothesis and the work of Josephus. Zeppenfeld notes the importance of the Exodus narrative for African Americans as it evoked both their emancipation from slavery and their subsequent efforts to secure political, social, and economic freedom.   

Jon Woodson’s more unconventional work has argued that Hurston’s novel also alludes to George Gurdjieff’s philosophy (perhaps filtered through the influence of A.R. Orage and P. D. Ouspensky). Gurdjieff’s and his follower’s work represents an expansion of Madame Blavatsky’s work which, as John Hoopes has observed, is a well-spring of many strains of pseudoarchaeology. Woodson contends that Hurston’s work includes references to Oragean esotericism that fellow followers would have recognized but the average reader would have simply overlooked. While the specific cypher that Woodson offers is beyond my ability to critique, it is clear that Hurston’s novel includes several unresolved digressions including several passages about a book of Thoth hidden on an island near Koptos which was known to Moses Hebrew servant. Moses eventually visits the site and defeats the immortal serpent that guards the book. Curiously, we’re never told what the book said or even, clearly, why Moses’s pilgrimage to the site was important for the story. A passing description amulets that Hurston modeled on “slave bundles” in the novel connect Black spirituality to Egyptian magic. Moses’s spiritual quests and his efforts to lead the Israelites out of Egypt were both called “the work” in Hurston’s novel. The Work stands as both a reference to Grudjieffean quests for self-knowledge and Black traditions of magic and spiritual power grounded in Caribbean practices such as Voodoo.  

Hurston’s novel, on the one hand, served as an alternate history of the Exodus that would have resonated with Black readers who had begun to leverage both Egyptian and, in some cases, Hebrew or Israelite, identities to negotiate the challenges Jim Crow laws, the displacements of the Great Migration, and the economic trauma of the Great Depression.

On the other hand, Moses, Man of the Mountain, would have worked as a cypher for esoteric knowledge and offers a window into the way in which certain strains of mysticism, the Black religious experience, and pseudoarchaeology go hand-in-hand. Moreover, these currents are not always obvious to uninitiated (or uninformed) readers leaving them with a patch work of pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological narratives that invite further understanding, but serve as a shadowy guide. 

In the end, works like Hurston’s Moses serve as a framework for pseudoarchaeological knowledge to enter mainstream awareness. Hurston’s reputation as an important contributor to be Black literature in the US and to archaeology and anthropology through her commitment to ethnographic recording and publishing of Black folk knowledge makes her an especially compelling figure in fictionalized pseudoarchaeology.

I’m increasingly come to realize that authors like Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Reed (who was likely influenced by Hurston’s work), Sun Ra, and even contemporary authors such as Minister Faust or even, obliquely, Fred Moten help keep pseudoarchaeological ideas alive and circulating in the Black community. Many of these ideas are entangled with other forms of counter-hegemonic knowledge that can, at the worst, support racist, antisemitic, colonialist, and white supremacist arguments, but, at their best, can be decolonizing, identity forming, and revolutionary.

As readers of this blog know, one of my projects is to decolonize pseudoarchaeology and to consider it potential both to complement more established archaeological ways of knowing and to offer ways of understanding the role that archaeology can and does play in the face of contemporary challenges of race, migration, and climate change.