Three Things Thursday: Survey, Oil, and Mild Anarchism

Every now and then, life happens in threes and that makes me wonder whether I’m blogging about my life or I’m simply living out a series of blog posts. In some ways, I suppose, it doesn’t matter, but it sure makes three things Thursday a bit easier.

My next few days will be focused (such as I can at all these days) on these three things:

Thing the First

My old survey buddy David Pettegrew has put together an article that offers a preliminary analysis of the Medieval material from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This is a pretty exciting piece for two reasons. First, at some point in the distant past, it was originally intended to be a chapter of his soon to be completed book on the material from EKAS. When it dropped out of that volume, it wandered a bit in the wilderness before he found a home for it. 

Because these are hectic times for all of us, and writing about archaeology in the best of situations often takes a village, I offered to help get this article into final shape. One of the things that I’m working on is adding hyperlinks to the EKAS data in Open Context. This will allow the reader to drill down into the data from the article text, validate David’s arguments, and ask new questions from the raw material. This could mean looking at the data spatially in new ways, aggregating new assemblages based on material fro the same survey unit, or even connecting this data to other publicly available data sets. 

With David’s permission, I’ll share some of the linked assemblages new week.

Thing the Second

Last year, I wrote a short piece on the archaeology of petroleum production. My buddy Kostis Kourelis is pretty sure that the archaeology of oil will be next big thing. Oil is not only the quintessential modern hyper object, but also represents a type fossil for supermodernity. My article mostly just scratched the surface of the potential of an archaeology of oil as a key component of archaeology of the contemporary world as well as the kind of critical archaeology that offers new ways of understanding the modern age.

Part of the reason for this is because the article is destined for some kind of handbook of the archaeology of plastics. In fact, the editors and reviewers patiently pointed out, my article needed to connect oil and petroleum production to plastic more explicitly throughout. This was a fair point and I’ve been nibbling away at their helpful comments. 

In many ways, their urging that I connect petroleum production to plastics was more than just appropriate for the volume, but also useful for reconsidering oil and petroleum production as the definitive phenomenon of the supermodern world. The ubiquity of plastics in our everyday life is just one example of oil’s central place in our contemporary society. That said, plastic manufacturing and petroleum production rely on shared spatial footprints. The profoundly toxic sites of petroleum refineries attract similarly toxic petrochemical manufacturing plants that churn out the stock from which most new plastics are made. These plastic pellets then find their way into the world through some of the same infrastructure as our gasoline, heating oil, and other forms of petroleum that we use as fuel. In other words, plastic and oil share more than chemical DNA, but also leverage the same infrastructure that allows both to be always at hand in the contemporary world. Stay tuned for a plasticized draft.

Thing the Third

The third thing that I’m working on with a mid-February deadline is the revision of an article on a class that I taught as the centerpiece of the Wesley College Documentation Project. The article celebrated (I admit) the prospects of a “mildly anarchist” pedagogy that undermined the increasingly bureaucratized nature of both the modern university and archaeology as an industry. It attempted to embrace many aspects of slow, punk, and anarchist archaeology. Unfortunately, it also appears to have captured some of the more traditional elements of writing about archaeology as well. Namely the congratulatory nature of so many fieldwork publications that elevates the archaeologist from the deeply collaborative space of archaeological knowledge making to the august heights of heroic truth teller. 

This, of course, was the opposite of what my paper was intending to accomplish. I was hoping to celebrate the remarkable creativity that occurred over the course of a spontaneous, place-based, research program freed from much of the administrative oversight that can stifle the simply joy of wandering an abandoned place, thinking about the past, and working together to make sense of a building and its history.

That all said, the reviewers were probably doing me a favor by telling me to temper my congratulatory tone and do what I can to ground my excitement for the project in the dusty and incomplete world of reality. The last thing I want to do is to alienate a reader or conform to some kind of stereotype of ego-driven, tenured, middle aged, truth teller. Stay tuned for an updated and tempered draft. 

Digital Archaeology in Review

Over the weekend, I got a chance to read Colleen Morgan’s thoughtful review of digital archaeology published in the Annual Review of Archaeology this past month. The piece surveys recent trends in digital archaeology and, more important, urges the discipline forward toward a more reflective, ethical, and meaningful directions.

Unlike many approaches to digital practice in archaeology that trace the emergence and advantages associated with particular technologies, Morgan’s article steps back and focuses on how technology and practices produce new forms of knowledge (and new ethical problems and perspectives) for archaeologists to consider. To do this she focuses on four areas: (1) craft and embodiment, (2) materiality, (3) the uncanny, and (4) ethics, politics and accessibility, which she develops sequentially across the article.

The first two areas were pretty relevant to how I think. Her review of recent work that considered craft and embodiment, for example, makes clear how the changing skill sets associated with archaeological practice create new forms of archaeological knowledge. While my work, especially as associated with slow archaeology, has tended to view certain forms of technological change which shape our bodies in new ways and produced new forms of knowledge. On the one hand, this asks us to consider matters of commensurability between knowledge produced today and knowledge produced using older techniques and technologies. Morgan pushes this further to ask how contemporary digital approaches complicate our ability to empathize with people in the past and the present. The former are almost always the object of archaeological inquiry and the latter should be a concern of anyone working in archaeology especially as labor conditions in both academic and commercial archaeology have become a growing concern for the discipline.

I also very much appreciated her consideration of the materiality of digital practice. Not only does this force us as archaeologists to reflect upon the increasingly disposable character of the technologies that we use, but also the human costs of the networks of production and discard that make this technology possible. Here Morgan’s work intersects with both media archaeology and archaeology of the contemporary world. Her call for us to reflect on climate impact of digital archaeology is important. This not only involves the literal climate but also the social conditions necessary to produce the technologies (in their material and immaterial forms) that digital practices require.

The penultimate consideration of the article is perhaps the most provocative. Morgan considers the capacity of digital practices for creating uncanny encounters with the past. These uncanny encounters – manifest in their most simple forms as certain kinds of immersive digital environments and in more complicated ways as “deep fakes” – have the capacity to evoke emotional responses that range from the unsettling to the playful. How digital archaeology develops this heightened capacity for the uncanny will almost certainly exert a powerful influence over the future of the discipline.

Finally, Morgan explores the ethical and political landscape of digital practices. This is a complex matter, of course, that will invariably continue to exert a massively formative influence over discussions of digital archaeology for years to come. The gender make up of the field, our obligations to communities who don’t have access to the same technologies and skills, and the fate of digital data in both archives and online reflect the emergence of a new series of significant political commitments in the field. The capacity for digital archaeology to create “interventions” that allow indigenous communities to communicate their heritage and traditions expands on the potential for digital archaeology to produce politically meaningful knowledge. 

This article is short, but its utility and significance should be long. There is a tendency to see the landscape of digital archaeology to be a changing one and contributions to the field as ephemeral as the next technological leap. While the references in this article will not stand the test of time, I do suspect that Morgan’s framing of the debate will influence future discussions of digital practice for some time to come.

Reflecting on Slow

Last week, I got together with an old buddy for dinner and he asked me to talk a bit more about the idea of slow especially in light of my post “Slow at 50.” Since I’m restarting the archaeological fieldwork aspect of my professional (albeit as a study season), it seemed like a reasonable time to write a little bit about slow more broadly.

When I started thinking about slow in archaeology, I imagined it as a tonic to a growing fixation on archaeological efficiency and its dependence on digital tools. Slow archaeology wasn’t so much a rejection of the benefits technology, but the critical engagement with how our tools shape the knowledge that we produce. As I thought more broadly about the implications of slow for archaeology or academia more broadly, I started to hope that an emphasis on slow might shift our emphasis from doing more to doing better and in this way, we might change the character of academic work.

For me, this would involve critical reflection on academic work and perhaps even an impulse to parse how modern, industrial practices have informed standards of professionalization in academia. I am particularly interested in unpacking the roots of certain academic work patterns in craft. For example, teaching practices associated explicitly with the hands-on learning or grounded in apprenticeship tend to cleave more closely to craft models of knowledge production than those informed by industrial practices. Industrial education, especially at the university level, seems to emphasize the fragmentation of learning into interchangeable chunks which over time produce a well-rounded student.

More broadly, I wonder whether how I started to think about slow some 6 or 8 years ago has now evolved into something wider, but still distinctly rooted no in the literal idea of slowing down, but in the notion of living more deliberately. This involves thinking more carefully about the things I do and making sure that they align with what I value rather than the various expectations foisted on me by colleagues, institutions, and situations.

I understand that this is a kind of privilege afforded to a very small number of tenured faculty who simultaneously find ways to operate at the fringes of the system and reap the benefits of the system, its resources, and its protections. That said, I do hope that reflecting deliberately on the opportunities that my position has allowed me ensures that I do more with what I have than rather than less.

At 50: Slow at 50

I turn 50 this week and I’ve been thinking a lot about what this means. After all, a half-century doing stuff feels like it should mean something, right? So I decided to do some little blog essays mostly to reflect on my professional (and occasional personal) life at 50. Yesterday I blogged about being “Not Full at 50” and today I turn my attention to my always developing thoughts on slow. 

Over the last decade, I’ve been thinking a good bit about ideas relating to the slow movement. I produced an edited volume of a literary journal dedicated to “slow” and published a little gaggle of articles that consider “slow archaeology.” This work, as any reader of this blog probably knows, tends to focus on the idea that slow, focused, and often embodied work, while often inefficient by contemporary standards, produces substantively different outcomes than work that privileges efficiency. These conclusions lean on scholarship that unpacks the distinctive character of certain kinds of slow work from hand drawing to walking the countryside, long form descriptions, and excavating.  

Recently, I’ve been talking with a few graduate students about work load expectations in graduate school and these conversations align neatly with recent debates about faculty work load. There is no doubt that many faculty members and students are feeling overwork and the last two-years of pandemic-inflected work has exacerbated this feeling. A few students have told me that it is hard to find the time to engage in the slow processes that are necessary for their creative work and argued that their workload is making it impossible to find a healthy work/life balance.

I don’t disagree with their assessment and worry a good bit that student workloads at the undergraduate and graduate levels are no longer reasonable in light of changing students responsibilities both in school and outside of school. In one of the more thoughtful critiques of “slow,” Shawn Graham reminded me that working slowly is often a privilege that relies, at worse, on other people scrambling to pick up the slack, or, at best, is a luxury afforded those who have a certain amount of material and professional security. This assessment however tends to see “slow” as less productive or efficient than “fast” work rather than substantively different.

Recently, I’ve started to realize that my work habits are very slow indeed. However, they don’t really involve the kind of deliberate, contemplative practices that we so often associate with slow work. Instead, I tend to work on a number of projects simultaneously. I flit from one project to another over the course of a week and often spend time simultaneously writing, reading, doing email, and surfing the web. I am, of course, familiar with the literature that has argued that these work habits are bad for our brains and our ability to concentrate and focus, and suspect that there is real truth to these claims. At the same time, I rarely find that I prefer to work and particularly write in a distracted way. I find taking a dozen small breaks over the course of an hour consistent with how my brain works. In fact, I find forcing my brain to remain locked onto a single task incredibly exhausting and unpleasant. Sometimes, when proofreading or revising a sustained argument this kind of concentration is necessary, but even then it’s rarely pleasant.

This got me wondering whether the effort to normalize this kind of focused concentration has more to do with expectations of efficiency than more expansive views of how our brain and our lives work. I’ve started to think that my version of slow work, then, reflects my own distracted approach to my work as a scholar and teacher. Instead of focusing on producing predictable outcomes, I’m becoming more and more interested in figuring out sustained and sustaining practices, and for me this involves leaving myself open to distractions and putting aside well-meaning, but often misguided arguments for working and life.

So as I turn 50, I’m trying to embrace my own slow workflows and recognize my unique work habits as sustainable and healthy. Rather than seeking some kind of work/life balance or seeing time (or hours) as a measure of how much work I do. Instead, I’m trying to embrace my own slow habits as an antidote to certain expectations of efficiency. My hope is that these approaches will help me develop more sustainable habits that not only allow me a sense of satisfaction with my daily life, but also keep me productive in my career and as a good collaborator, contributor, and colleague to my various communities.  

A Memorial for a Digital Friend: Diana Gilliland Wright

Yesterday, I learned that Diana Gilliland Wright had died earlier this month. I didn’t know her very well and, in fact, I can’t exactly remember if I had ever met her. I knew her mostly via email, comments on my blog, and her own voluminous blogging output.

Over the last decade, as my research interest shifted toward the Argolid, she and I corresponded a bit more regularly as she offered us the occasional insight based on her years of work on the city of Nafplion and its environs. From what I can gather she wrote her dissertation on a 15th century Venetian administrator at Nafplion, Bartolomeo Minio. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never read it. Nor have I read any of her formal scholarship. What I did read, quite regularly, were her blogs.

Year ago, when blogging was still fresh and exciting and filled bloggers with hope, we envisioned a world where bloggers read each others’ work and reached out to one another and commented and shared each others’ work through hyperlinks and blogrolls and ultimately forged relationships across networks of blogs. Diana Wright did all that and was a regularly commenter on my blog from its earliest days (on Typepad!). And even as the promise of blogs as a corresponding medium faded a bit, she continued to reach out via email to offer comments and ask for publications. I remember sending her a few copies of North Dakota Quarterly at some point as well and hoping that she found the poetry and fiction in those pages interesting.

From what I can piece together she ran two blogs. The blog that I knew best was called “Surprised by Time” and it largely focused on the Medieval Morea (or Peloponnesus). Her interests were wide ranging and did much to make transparent murky waters separating the Medieval and Early Modern worlds. The scions of Byzantine elite families rubbed shoulders with Venetian administrators, on assignment, Ottoman officials, and Mediterranean diplomats, literati, and ne’er-do-wells. Palaiologoi cross paths with Italian merchants and Ottoman travelers, Pashas, and poets. Each of the over 200 entries, offered a startling glimpse into a world often overlooked by scholars preoccupied by tidier narratives of rise and decline of empire and neglectful of the messier interface of daily life among those most effected by political and cultural change. To Dr. Wright’s particular credit, the blog exists under a CC-By-SA license meaning that anyone can share her work as long as they credit her and make their work available under an open license. The blog appears to be fairly well archived by the internet archive, but I would be keen to entertain ways to preserve it more formally. 

For many years, she also maintained a landing page of sorts called “Nauplion.net” where she offered an index of her work and the work of her partner Pierre MacKay which featured regularly on her blog. It also featured links to many scans of hard to find primary sources some of which were translated on Surprised by Time. This site is no longer working and hadn’t been updated in many years, but it is preserved on the Internet Archive.

[By coincidence, I’m teaching Evliya Çelebi this week and using Pierre MacKay’s translation of Evliya’s visit to Corinth in my class. Diana Wright posted bits and pieces of Pierre’s translation and the story of his discovery of Evliya’s manuscript on her blog.]

Her other blog, Firesteel is an anthology of poetry gleaned from ancient and modern sources and from Greek, Ottoman, Arab, Italian, French and English language poets. I don’t know whether the poetry posted here and her more academic content crossed paths in some kind of formal way, but it really is an amazing collection of work (which I suspect violates all sort of copyrights, but I get the sense that Diana Wright just didn’t really care). 

~

As a small, digital memorial to Diana Gilliland Wright’s passing, I would encourage you spend a moment looking at her online legacy and recognizing it as a gesture of a kind of digital kinship that could connect individuals who had never met. For whatever reason, her profile included a link to John Coltrane’s 1957 recording of “While My Lady Sleeps.” It feels like an appropriate soundtrack for a visit to her digital world. 

. . . a little wine for remembrance . . . a little water for the dust.  

Three Things Thursday: Dining, Dancing, and Data

It’s been a pretty long week. I managed to teach my two classes via Zoom on Tuesday and made it through my night class face-to-face on Wednesday. Today, I’m bracing for the full slate of teaching and hoping (as much as anything) that the after shocks of my brush with The Omicron remain mild. 

With this as background, I figure my readers likely understand that a Three Things Thursday represents a path of least resistance as I get back up to speed.

Thing the First

Yesterday, I read Yannis Hamilakis’s recent piece in World Archaeology: “Food as affirmative biopolitics at the border: liminality, eating practices, and migration in the Mediterranean.” He argues that food represents a key element in the political discourse of displacement. Food provided to individuals detained on the island of Lesvos served to define their status within the complex network of cultural and social identities present in the Moria camp. Overcooked rice, for example, made some residents understand their status to be as sick patients. Undercooked rice demonstrated a lack of concern by the state, NGOs, and caterers tasked with preparing food. 

As a result, many camp residents took to preparing their own food. They removed the meat from the pre-packaged meals and combined it with spices and other ingredients. They constructed cooking fires and ovens, used their meager cash allowance to buy cooking supplies and spices, and in some cases planted gardens.

This latter practice gave me pause. We were struck by the construction of gardens at work force housing sites in the Bakken oil patch especially during the height of the boom. Recent work on the role of gardens at Japanese internment camps has shown how they served to produce a sense of community in the austerely functional carceral landscape of the camp itself (see for example Bonnie Clark’s book, Finding Solace in the Soil: An Archaeology of Garden and Gardeners at Amache (2020) or Connie Y. Chiang’s Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of Japanese Incarceration (2018) which I blogged about here.) Ann Elena Stinchfield Danis’s 2020 dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley, “Landscapes of Inequality: Creative Approaches to Engaged Research” notes the gardens built my residents of the Albany Bulb on the San Francisco Bay (more here). 

If I were to wring a bit more from our research in the Bakken, I would write something about the gardens we observed there and the way in which gardens and outdoor cooking spaces contributed to the creation of domesticity, community, and place making at temporary workforce housing sites.

Thing the Second

I’ve been reading Hanif Abdurraqib latest book, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (2021). The book is good and combines Abdurraquib’s poetic grasp of language with chapters that could easily stand by themselves as independent essays. I particularly enjoy passages where phrases spill out on top of each other connected only by the “&” and conveying the immediacy of his experience without introducing urgency. 

One of the best chapters in the book is titled “On the Certain and Uncertain Movement of the Limbs” and it explores the place of dancing or being able to dance on Black identity. Abdurraquib spills the beans when he tells us that Whitney Houston could not dance and then unpacks her rise as a black woman to pop super star status and how that shaped views of her Blackness. I won’t spoil the chapter or the book for anyone who has yet to read it, but this chapter alone makes it worth the purchase. It’s one of the best things that I’ve read over the past year. 

Thing the Third

 There’s been a good bit of buzz surrounding Piraye Hacıgüzeller, James Stuart Taylor and Sara Perry’s recent article in Open Archaeology: “On the Emerging Supremacy of Structured Digital Data in Archaeology: A Preliminary Assessment of Information, Knowledge and Wisdom Left Behind.” In the article, the authors take some of the narrative notes from the Çatalhöyük Research Project and convert them into structured data using the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. 

The fit is predictably awkward and demonstrates for anyone who remains unconvinced that various structured data schemes always leave some information and even “wisdom” behind. I really like this article because it takes something that’s on the verge of being common sensical – i.e. narrative descriptions contain nuance that most ontologies and data capture models can’t reproduce – and makes it plainly visible. It also fits into a larger critique of “big data” or of just “data” driven analyses both in archaeology, narrowly, and also in contemporary society. I wonder, a bit, whether the COVID pandemic and the constant drone of data driven guidelines lurks in the back of these author’s thinking. There’s something about the limits of data as the basis for the analysis of COVID fatalities, spread, and efforts to mitigate COVID. 

An article like this serves as an interesting reminder that data driven analysis (and decision making) depends on methods of inclusion and exclusion and these decisions prefigured the kind of interpretation possible. Of course, this is known situation and hardly profound, but this article sets it out in the context of archaeology in a particularly elegant way.

Live Blogging Music, Reading, and Cooking on Thanksgiving

I’m going to try a bit live-blogging this morning to document my Thanksgiving day adventures. There’s nothing particularly exciting about my morning, but there is something vaguely archaeological about the intersection of reading, cooking, and listening to music. Hopefully this live blog will bring some of that out. 

6 am

The turkey is in the smoker and sitting at about 210°. 

I’m hunkered down by the fire reading Krysta Ryzewski’s Detroit Remains and listening to Lee Morgan introduce the band for the Friday, July 10th 1970 performance at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California.

I’m reading with significant interest Ryzewski’s account of how her work at the Ransom Gillis house in Detroit involved negotiating with an HGTV program for access and collaboration. While I’ve just started reading this chapter, it’s struck me as not entirely dissimilar to the negotiations conducted by Andrew Reinhard to get us access to the Atari excavations at Alamogordo. 

I’m aware that Lee Morgan does not have any particular connections to the Detroit jazz scene, but the 7.5 hours of music (starting with pianist Harold Mabern’s “The Beehive” which features a scorching “post-Coltranesque solo by Bennie Maupin, one of the underrated voices of late-1960s saxophone. Morgan’s solo is so slick and smooth.)

6:15 am

As Morgan introduces the band members and heads into the Bennie Maupin number “Something Like This,” a quick check on the smoker shows that the temperature has dropped to about 160°, so I reopened some vents. It’s about 2° F outside so keeping the heat up today might be a challenge!

It seems fitting that I’m fussing with the grill temperatures as reading about Pewabic pottery manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century in the stable behind the Ransom Gillis house in Detroit!

6:30 am

A quick update shows the temperatures have settled to about 210° F and another Bennie Maupin composition “Yunjana” is on the stereo. It’s quieter and a bit more settled which makes it an appropriate complement to the stabilizing temperatures on the grill.

7 am

I’m cutting out on Bennie Maupin’s lovely flute solo on the first track of the second set from July 10th, “I Remember Brit” to check the heat and maybe start some more coals. It’s now 1° outside!

It looks like no new coals are needed and while I missed most of Lee Morgan’s lyrical solo, I’m thoroughly enjoying Harold Mabern’s piano work on “I Remember Brit.” The long tail of bebop makes a great backdrop to Ryzewski’s chapter on the Blue Bird Inn in Detroit where bebop found a home in Detroit’s musical landscape in the late 1940s.

7:20 am

The temperature is still a steady 210° and there’s been a car accident outside our house. The cops are on hand and they have a dog working to try to find the driver of the car, which was apparently stolen. It’s a bit dramatic, but the cops seem very intent on getting it sorted.

Jymie Merritt’s bass solo at around the 15 minute mark in his “Absolutions” is pretty great. 

I’m enjoying reading about Paradise Valley in Detroit and its vibrant music scene and thinking about it also as the place of origins for the Nation of Islam which would developed in the decade before the bebop heyday of the Blue Bird Inn, but which would go on the exert an influence over music (and especially jazz) in its own way especially when it relocated to Chicago in the early 1930s.

Now, I get to fret about when to start a fresh batch of coals. There’s no need to add them if the temperature hangs at 200°-ish.   

Wrapping up the second set of July 10th with another rollicking version of Lee Morgan’s “Speedball” before the 3rd session of the night begins with Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet on his “416 East 10th Street.”

8:00 am

I had some breakfast and started a new chimney full of coals. The temperatures are dropping from 210° to 200°. hit the turkey with the first round of smoke. I’m going with cherry wood and a just a bit of hickory. 

I’m listening to Lee Morgan’s classic “Sidewinder” from the 3rd set of July 10th. It’s scorching and the absolutely outer fringes of hard bop just as it should have been in the 1970!

Back to reading about the Blue Bird Inn and the state of both Black owned entertainment venues, recording, and music in late 1940s Detroit.

8:30 am

Lee Morgan’s “Speedball” from Set 4 on Friday, July 10th feels even a bit more “out” than the version at the end of Set 2. It was hard to drag myself away from it to check on the bird in the smoker. Temperatures are still around 210° with the addition of wood chips adding just about 5° to the heat. I probably started the additional coals prematurely, but better to be prepared, I guess.

The work of various stake holders on the Blue Bird Inn is fascinating. I appreciated the performance of music in the venue once again by some members of the Wayne State music program and would have loved to hear a recording of their set. I wonder how it would compare to live recordings made in the venue in the 1950s (with Phil Hill’s band apparently). My work in the Wesley College buildings on UND’s campus included working with Michael Wittgraf to record in the Corwin Hall recital space and to think of these recordings as a way to preserve not only the original use of the space, but its changes over time. It was a small offering to the debates 

I’m now onto Set 1 from July 11th with begins with Mabern’s “Aon” which is very much hard bop and feels just right to get the audience ready from the more adventurous offerings to follow.

9:00 am

I finally had to add some coals to the fire to keep the heat closer to 210° than to 180°. Temperatures outside were about 2° so this seems reasonable. 

Fortunately, it’s warm by the fire inside and Bennie Maupin’s lyricism is on full display during his opening solo on his “Yunjana” from the first set on July 11th. Lee Morgan’s reflective solo complements Maupin’s perfectly and keeps the mood going.

The slow, but not sluggish lyricism of these songs is a lovely backdrop to Ryzewski’s work of “slow archaeology” at Gordon Park in Detroit where she and students conducted repeated pedestrian surveys to chart how the park established to mark the start of the 1967 uprising in the city changed over time and endured episodes of neglect and revitalization.

9:30 am

There’s a point my operating the smoker where I can’t quite figure out if the best way to keep the heat up is adding more coals or adding more air by opening the vents. I opted to add a bit more coals and restrict air flow right now with the hope I can open the vents and stretch the coals until close to noon where I’ll take the first temperature of the turkey. 

The second set of July 11th opens with Mabern’s “I Remember Brit” and it’s lovely round based on “Brother John” (or Frère Jacques) that eventually gives way to steady dose of a hard bop melody. You can similarly hear the musicians trying to manage the heat of their sets. You need to keep it warm enough to pull in the listener, but too much fire and the entire show begins to combust too soon and too hot. “I Remember Brit” does just that and it’s a suitable backdrop to the start of coal management work in my smoker. Of course, things get hotter after that with Mabern’s “busy” track “The Beehive.”   

10:00 am

Temperatures are cruising along at around 210° and Lee Morgan’s quintet is finishing Set 2 on July 11, 1970 with “Speedball,” before starting Set 3 with Maupin’s bass clarinet on his “Neophilia.”

I’m just getting into Ryzewski’s chapter on the Grande Ballroom in Detroit which witnessed a wide range of remarkable shows. She’s focusing on its history as a rock music venue and its subsequent history of neglect, abandonment, and deterioration. I’m just getting into the chapter and was pleasantly surprised to see the reference to “punk archaeology”! I’m looking forward to reading about the kinds of archaeological documentation deployed in working to understand and interpret this significant building.

The first temperature check on the bird will happen at around noon, and until then, we’ll be in coals management mode!

10:30 am

The heat is too high!! So I closed some vents and opened the ones on the lid to bleed some heat, but this is a good sign for the rest of the morning because I can conserve coals and cut the heat down to low and slow.

Bassist Jymie Merritt’s “Nomo” appears in Set 3 of the July 11th performance of Lee Morgan’s crew. It has a loose, but deep groove and Morgan really shines on his solo midway through the track. It’s clear that funk, soul jazz, and the spirit of late hard bop come together in this track. 

The chapter on the Grande Ballroom in Detroit is really remarkable. Not only did the work from Ryzewski’s crew show how survey methods can be adapted to document standing buildings in ways that reveal their transformation over time, as well as their main phases of use. Interweaving the discoveries from the building and its history helped me appreciate the role of John and Leni Sinclair in the musical history of Detroit. I’ve appreciated Leni Sinclair’s photography of jazz musicians and her work for Strate Corporation on their cover art and now I can connect her and her husband to the rock and proto-punk scene fueled by the MC5 (who John Sinclair managed) and bands like the Stooges who performed regularly at the Grande Ballroom.

11:00 am

The heat has settled back into the acceptable range, and I’ve added a bit of cherry wood to add some smoke. I’ve also recalled a certain yellow dog from his turkey guard duty as the temperatures outside hang around in the single digits.

Lee Morgan’s guys are into Set 4 on Saturday night and playing Bennie Maupin’s “Peyote” with a kind of comfortable intensity that feels like it should naturally lead into Jymie Merrit’s “Absolutions” as the final number of the night.

I’m also onto the final chapter of Detroit Remains which involves documenting a 19th century log cabin which was quietly preserved in the frame of a 20th century house in a Detroit neighborhood.  

11:30 am

The smoker is just chilling at 200° and my hope is that we’re well on out way to a smoked turkey. Stay tuned for a temperature check in about 30 minutes.

Set 1 from Sunday, July 12, 1970 begins with Bennie Maupin’s “Something Like This.” While this set’s performance may lack the fireworks of those recorded on the 10th and 11th, it certainly has a copious amount of feeling and soul. It was worth the wait.

The final chapter of Detroit Remains, likewise offer a healthy dose of feeling as it deals with the demolition of the log house discovered in Hamtramck by the Detroit Land Bank despite efforts made to preserve and move the building. As someone who has seen any number of significant historical buildings demolished in my community, I can empathize with the disappointment expressed by the authors and stakeholders.     

12 pm

The first temperature check and, miracles of miracles, the bird is done: 165° on the dot.

Happily, my reading of Detroit Remains is done for the day too. Ryzewski’s reflections on Section 106 reviews in the aftermath of the Hamtramck log house demolition resonated with my own experiences on the State Historical Review Board and our local Historic Preservation Commission. While locally we continue to see innumerable 106 reviews, we also recognize how much these remain dependent upon the collective good will of the city, contractors, developers, and the community. Raising awareness of historical preservation issues always involves threading the needle between being outspoke about the value of the past in general and navigating the complicated interests that establish the value of specific pasts to specific communities and stakeholders. 

Finally, “I Remember Brit” from Set 2 on Sunday, July 12 is playing in the background and I sort of feel like pressing pause on this track and listening to the final performance during dinner in an hour or so. And this probably means pressing pause on this bizarre experiment in live blogging.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Learning to Go Slow

This is a cross-post with my other project, the weekly blog at North Dakota Quarterly.

In 2013, I co-edited an issue of North Dakota Quarterly with Rebecca Rozelle-Stone. The issue considered the “slow” movement which had started to expand from the rather limited perspective on cooking and foodways, primarily associated with the “slow food” movement, to a wider consideration about the seemingly relentless pace of life in the 21st century. By 2010, there were thoughts about “slow science,” “slow teaching,” and I had proposed the potential for “slow archaeology.” Our publication wrangled a bunch of these ideas into what we called “A Study in Slow.” (Unfortunately, we don’t have this issue available online yet, but it is a priority. If you want to see what I wrote for that issue, you can go here). 

To be honest, I’ve never been very good at slow. In fact, most of what I do is so hurried that it almost always has the potential to be shoddy. In fact, recently I’ve confronted the need to slow down and be more thoughtful and careful in my life as an academic researcher and writer, and I have to admit that working in this register is frustrating. I did, however, find a bit of solace in Mary Lindemann’s 2021 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association published in the American Historical Review. Titled “Slow History,” it is a reminder that the process of archival work and thoughtful writing is usually slow, and there is real value in its slowness. You can read it here. 

There are two things in my life that have started (slowly, as it were) to teach me how to slow down. The first is listening to music. No matter how quickly one wants to get through an album or a song, there really isn’t any way to speed it up. Music happens on its own pace and (if you can excuse the little pun), rhythm. If you like music, you can read about what I’m enjoying recently on my music Monday postings.

I’ve also found that poetry simply can’t be enjoyed quickly and have found that the ritual of reading and thinking about poetry in my capacity as editor of NDQ has forced me to slow down. I often wonder whether the every increasing pace of academic life and academic writing both requires and contributes to increasingly pace of academic reading. And as we learn to read more quickly, it becomes harder to slow down and, I might suggest, all the more important that we do.

So, maybe this weekend, despite the mid-semester bustle and the piles of untended leaves in my yard, I’ll take a couple of hours and slow down by reading poetry. If you’re looking for some new (and undoubtedly familiar) check out some poetry from NDQ here.

Time and COVID (again)

Last Thursday, I posted a short “two things Thursday” where I mentioned that I had been thinking about time “in the time of COVID.” This is an extension of my interest in slow archaeology, in particular, and the role of both digital and modern (or better industrial)  processes in shaping our experiences of time and space in archaeological practices.

It occurs to me that the COVID pandemic has produced a prolonged meditation on time in contemporary society (whatever other tragic impacts it has had on us personally and our worlds). As an archaeologist, I have a professional interest in time and its materiality and if I had time (heh, heh) and the kind of sophisticated necessary to negotiate its theoretical and conceptual situation, I would write an article on time and COVID. Since that seems just too hard these days, I’ll write a blog post.

Time, Place, and Work 

In my daily life, I’m one of the annoying early risers who is often on my way to my on campus office by around 6 am. Today, I’m sitting in my home office and writing these words at 5:54 am. It’s early, but I have coffee that I made in the kitchen and have had a light breakfast which I pulled from a box in our pantry. I feel like my work day has started and I’m writing this blog. 

As an academic, it’s not too unusual for me to work from home. During my sabbatical year, for example, my routine was almost identical to what I do these days. But most of the time, I spend more than half my work week in my on campus offices. My day is punctuated by my short commute, where I listen to music, organize my thoughts, and either compress for work or decompress on my way home. I rarely work at home in the evenings.

Under COVID, I do go onto campus, but only to teach on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I don’t spend time in my campus offices which are largely reduced to storerooms for research material. I prep my courses at home, grade at home, do what passes as research and service at home, and write at home.

The slow archaeologist in me recognizes that this is not just a spatial shift, but also a temporal one. By working from home, my day is not punctuated by the industrial/post-industrial habit of going to work and its accompanying commute. As a result, work is just a bit closer to life, both physically and temporally. In this way, the COVIDs have shaken the division between work and private life that became such a benchmark for participants in the industrialized economies. I’ve found that it has also encouraged me to reflect on what parts of my work world bring joy to my personal life and draw me back to doing work that might otherwise be defined by a separate spatial and temporal rhythm.

To be clear, I recognize that this is a particularly male (and privileged) way of understanding the work/life divide and that many of my colleagues have long blurred the line between work time and private time as they juggled personal responsibilities and their jobs. I have the luxury of an office on campus, a relatively uncomplicated private life (without children or elder care and with a supportive partner), and a job that lends itself to fairly conventional rhythms (I only teach one night per week, for example). At the same time, I do think that my privileged position is both representative of a particular set of social expectations (judging mostly from the portrayal of working routines in the media) and not that uncommon among my colleagues.

The elimination of the buffer between work and private life is both spatial and temporal.    

Time and Travel

This week, I’m to attend a conference in the U.K. Of course, I won’t be traveling there in person and like most of the participants, will attend via zoom from my home office. The conference will start early in the morning and on the first day will begin before 6 am in my local CST. This minor inconvenience, however, pales in comparison to the disruptions that would have occurred had I need to travel to UK to present my paper. The trip alone would have been at least 12 hours through airports and on flights and then an additional 2 or 3 in the UK via trains, shuttles, and taxis. It would be possible, of course, for me to work on the flight, but since most flights to Europe from my part of the world are overnight, it’s not particularly likely that I would get anything substantive accomplished.  More than that, jet lag would have caused me to lose hours on my return to the US (not to mention my impaired performance at the conference itself). The three day conference would have effectively disrupted a week of teaching and research time. 

By attending via Zoom, I will certainly “lose” a few mornings this week to attend the conference, but this is a comparatively minor disruption (and undoubtedly a productive one as I’m sure that I’ll gain more than I lose from attending the conference!). 

On the one hand, it is tempting to imagine that the Zoom conference could be the way of the future for academic meetings. Saving in time (not to mention money) would open these meetings to individuals whose responsibilities make it impossible to take a week off to attend a meeting. They also offer a simple and more public way to make more visible the workings academic knowledge making.  

The Zoom format would also temper the social and professional anxieties associated with face-to-face conference and the tedium of stilted small talk, but also mitigate the dead time between papers, before and after sessions, between the hotel and venue, and necessary to find a restroom on an unfamiliar campus, to secure a meal in an unfamiliar city, and to demonstrate socially appropriate interest in a new or different place. While this dead time can be part of the fun of academic meeting, it is also part of the temporal disruption that marks professional travel. Even the most efficient traveler encounters this dead time that feels to me to be particularly resistant to being reclaimed for a professional or personal purpose.

Part of me has speculated that the temporal disruptions and dead time associated with academic meetings and professional travel is the way in which space pushed back against the relentless pressure of time to compress its dimensions. You can travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours now, but you can’t avoid the delays with finding a bathroom in an unfamiliar place or the disruptions associated with ordering coffee in a foreign language, locating the appropriate adapter for an electrical outlet, or entertaining the questions from a well meaning host about the weather “in Dakota.”

Time and the Site

As an archaeologist who works regularly in Greece and Cyprus, I have produced a nice set of well-trod paths that allow me to reduce a certain amount of the dead time associated with travel. More than that, over the last two decades, I have collected a massive quantity of “raw” data from the field much of which still requires analysis and interpretation. As a result, I have the luxury (and the privilege) to stay home and do archaeological work without actually visiting the sites themselves. More than that, I don’t anticipate getting back into the field until the summer of 2022, at soonest.

This luxury is the product of our increasingly digital world, of course, where field work involves recording our encounters with artifacts, our experiences in the trench or survey unit, and our impressions of the landscape and place in digital media that are easily transported and accessed from nearly anywhere in the world with a power supply and internet connection. 

In this situation, our distance from our sites may not necessarily disrupt our ability to produce new knowledge, but I do wonder whether the character of the knowledge that we produce changes when our work is displaced from our sites and landscapes for a prolonged period of time. Does our data expire not because it is no longer readable or understandable, but because it becomes less meaningful with time outside of its local context.

I also wonder whether the speed of our analysis will compromise our experience of the landscape, the trench, the site, or the artifact. How much does our memory of how a piece of data came to exist shape what it means? How much of our data is less a surrogate and more of a mnemonic for an experience or encounter that will fade with time?

Two Things Thursdays: COVID Time and Cyprus in Long Late Antiquity

There’s a lot going on the world right now. Between COVID, the events in Washington, the annual AIA/SCS meeting, and another pandemic inflected semester, there are plenty of things that are causing me some worry.

I also wonder, though, whether these things might also influence some new ways of thinking.  I guess that is one theme behind todays “Two Thing Thursday”:

Thing the First

I’ve been thinking a bit about COVID time. What follows here are some fragments of ideas.

Initially, I wondered whether the COVID pandemic has caused time to slow down for some of us. My own schedule has become no less dense with projects and activities, but as the COVID pandemic has drawn on, I feel far less urgency to complete tasks by externally or self imposed deadlines.

It’s curious how the lack of travel during the COVIDs (and the impossibility of planning for future travel) has encouraged me to live much more locally. There’s something about how my constricted horizons of home, local park, neighborhood, and office have created a new sense of routine that blurs temporal markers that depend on the unfamiliar or exceptional to create a sense for time’s passing.  

I’ve also found that Zoom time feels much slower than face-to-face time. Perhaps there are fewer opportunities for distracting pleasantries or that it is easier to become distracted while Zooming and this causes any sense of urgency to dissipate. But Zoom time is also far more immediate than visiting a friend in their home or walking to another building for a meeting, much less traveling to another city or country for an academic conference. 

I was also struck by the sense of futurity that the COVID pandemic has created. The lag between events – the Sturgis motorcycle rally, the arrival of college students in town for the start of a new semester, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, individual COVID exposure – and the report of the virus’s spread or a positive test seems to create this kind of temporal lag or this sense of borrowed time full of dreadful anticipation.   

It also feels similar to the gap between President-Elect Biden’s victory in November and his inauguration on January 20th. There’s a sense that we’re living in this strange buffer time between the moment where we understand what the future will hold and our experience of the future. Maybe it’s a bit like purchasing something online and receiving it in our mailbox?

At the same time, I’ve been struck by the sense of urgent frustration that contemporary society has created for itself. Maybe the gap between knowing and experiencing is the cause for this. The timelines for receiving the COVID vaccinations, for example, seem to be almost unrealistic. Not only were the vaccines developed at an unprecedented pace, but there is realistic hope that a meaningful percentage of the world – the entire world – could have access to this vaccine in the space of a few years. This seems amazing to me, but for many people, even this accomplishment is not enough. Any delay in getting the vaccine is marked as a failure that prolongs the state of uncertainty between any potential contact with an infected person and the results of a test. (This all being said, I do get that there is a difference between friction inherent in our system and poorly executed plans, incompetence, and colonial priorities.)

Anyway, COVID time seems palpably different from pre-COVID time. Maybe the exaggerated and uncertain experience of the gap between the present and the future requires us all to feel like we’re late and that this sense of lateness is heightened by the tension between a scientific sense of inevitability (e.g. the second wave, the surge, super spreader events) and the unsettled temporal rhythms of the present.  

Thing the Second

This is related, somehow, I think. Next week, I’m participating in a conference on Cyprus in Long Late Antiquity. It’s being hosted (via Zoom) by Oxford University and the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and the Cyprus High Commission in London.

You can check out the line up here. And you can read my paper here.

I wonder if the sense of a long late antiquity will resonate with our sense of an unstable present in some way. It evokes for me the kind of pregnant time that resists slipping entirely into the future. While I realize that projecting our experience of time into the past is fraught, I can’t help feeling that we’re living in long-2020 these days rather than in 2021.