Andrew, Thanks for the note! Bill

Chuck, I love the idea! I remember an old program on an airline (which probably went under) where you could donate your free upgrade to someone who was critically ill and needed to travel. Same kind of thing. Bill

Thanks for the comment. I suspect that this is the inspiration, in part, for folks like Christopher Tilley who show that story-telling is not incompatible with more austere and non-narrative descriptions of archaeological data.

Dimitri, Thanks, man! I assumed as much. That must account for the goat/sheep bones in the survey. Bill

Constantina, Yep. I am collaborating with Kostis Kourelis on a long-ish term, album length, project that seeks to bring together a bunch of singles like this into something of a collection. Thanks for the comment and will keep you informed! For more see here: http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/ Bill

Shawn, I'd be keen to hear your take on that exact matter. I assumed that British landscape archaeology contributed (as much as New Archaeology and other, new-world, developments) to the earliest efforts at landscape archaeology in Greece where there was a clear parallel to the Romantic, pedestrian, solitary wanderer-archaeologist (e.g. Cattling's Cyprus Survey or Hope Simpson's survey of prehistoric sites). But I am not as familiar with developments in Italy.

Amalia, Actually, I think that academic writing and fiction writing are very similar in terms of process. And I think that the changes that are taking place now in how the process works (and is taught) are relevant in both spheres! Bill

Dimitri, Thanks! Mine was really hasty -- I mistranslated timeron. Pretty lame. Bill

Mark, They actually look great. It was very comfortable to read on. Bill

Absolutely. Except, I didn't have an old device and I never want to have one either. They sound like they are pretty undesirable.

John, I probably painted with broad brush strokes; you're right there. And I like the idea that we acquired the desire to walk for pleasure from our hunter-gatherer ancestors! I do wonder how much our integrated perspective on the landscape derives from folks like Hesiod and how much comes from reading Hesiod with heads full of Enlightenment values. I suppose the difference is between an integrative holistic landscape -- which clearly appears in Hesiod -- and a total landscape (in the spirit of total history) -- which is perhaps how I misread your short article. On the other hand, once the categories of "productive", "symbolic", "practical", et c. have come into existence in relation to the landscape, I am not sure it is possible to think them away and return to premodern conceptions of the space. Perhaps I'm wrong though! Thanks for the comment! Bill

Shawn, I'd posit a difference between inadvertent violence to the English language (I heard a sportscaster go on and on about the "dearth" of talent in this year's Formula 1 field with 8 former race winners and four former champions. It made me cringe!) and things like contractions where the students could correct the mistake without much additional effort. The former involves a life time of careful reading and writing; the latter involves simple attention to detail. I suspect that willful inattention is a kind of resistance to structures of authority that extend from my position as faculty to the rules that produce disciplinary knowledge. Bill

Jim, Good to hear from you. I have found Google Wave to be a great space for student collaboration. It is easy enough to set up and use, is designed to allow for flexible access (i.e. there can be four "waves" (or threads) each with different groups of students participating), and allows for real time collaboration. This being said, I am looking forward to it becoming more functional and to allow for a more diverse range of content and media. And, I use it with graduate students in a small practicum -- rather than with undergraduates in a formal class. Finally, I don't want to make it seem like Google Wave does something that, say, a nice wiki or threaded discussion board can't do. What I can say is that Google Wave does provide a nice environment for collaborative work. Bill

Guy, Thanks for the lengthy response and some intriguing alternative both to Donati's perspective and the traditional views. I like his idea that the agora need not be a monumentalized area, but this makes it difficult to identify in any case -- even if one could excavate all the proposed locations. Bill

Shawn, All I meant by that sentence is that history departments are probably still obligated to teach the core disciplinary methods for historical analysis rather than the application of those methods to communicate historical knowledge to a broader public. In other words, teaching history broadly construed (as a means to teach various "transferable skills and discipline specific methods) rather than simply focusing on preparing public historians. Narrowing our focus to study on particular group of methods would run the risk of limiting the applicability of a history degree and moving it from among core courses of the humanities to a more marginal, and frankly vocational, position. After all, there are a limited number of public historians in the US at any given time. History majors who receive a broader exposure to historical methods have the basic skills to go one to study law, enter business, become public servants, or even go on to study history at the graduate level as well as work as public historians. Is that more clear?

Good dissertation topic! I'll certainly pass along my paper. Have you published on the topic? I am scrambling a bit to develop bibliography.