This is William Caraher's Typepad Profile.
Join Typepad and start following William Caraher's activity
William Caraher
Recent Activity
Andrew,
Thanks for the note!
Bill
Hesperia, Offprints, and the American School
Yesterday I had one of those little thought-provoking coincidences that make you wonder about how things could be done better. At 11:44 am I got an email from the American School of Classical Studies publication office concerning our soon-to-be-published article on fortification around Ano Vayia...
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
Hesperia, Offprints, and the American School
Yesterday I had one of those little thought-provoking coincidences that make you wonder about how things could be done better. At 11:44 am I got an email from the American School of Classical Studies publication office concerning our soon-to-be-published article on fortification around Ano Vayia...
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.
Telling Stories with Archaeology
One of the great things that I've learned from working with Steven Ellis's team at Isthmia the Corinthia is the idea of archaeological research as the basis for story telling. Steven used this metaphor a number of times over the first week of our work here as a way to frame the goals of our res...
Dimitri,
Thanks, man! I assumed as much. That must account for the goat/sheep bones in the survey.
Bill
Fauna from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Survey
Over the course of the intensive pedestrian survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria we collected a sample of the faunal material present on the surface of the ground (that is to say the animal bones visible in each unit). Over the past month, David Reese, one of the leading specialists in faunal remains in...
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
Punk and Spolia
Over the last week or so, I've been listening again to the Detroit Cobras and thinking about some of our first conversations on Punk Archaeology. The Cobras specialize in what they have called "revved up soul". They make this wonderful noise by covering (mostly) lost classics of the MoTown era...
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.
Ideas of Landscapes
I strongly recommend Matthew Johnson's Ideas of Landscapes to anyone interested in landscape archaeology. It is among the best books on the topic, and it does a nearly brilliant job of putting the concept of landscape archaeology in a historiographic context. Johnson's main focus is on the eme...
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
Teaching Monday: Reflections on the End of a Year
As I work to get my final grades together for the Spring semester, I leafed back through my teaching notebook and began to think a bit about how to change my classes next semester. (I've already blogged at some length about my Twitter experiment this semester). I have to good fortune of teaching...
Dimitri,
Thanks! Mine was really hasty -- I mistranslated timeron. Pretty lame.
Bill
Some more thoughts on Leonidas, Baptism, and Korinth
Thanks to our rock-star quality interlibrary loan staff here at the University of North Dakota, I was able to get my greedy mitts on F. Halkin, "Saint Leonide et ses sept compagnes martyrs a Corinthe," EEBS 23 (1953), 217-223. This little gem of an article will help me complete (or at least fill...
Mark,
They actually look great. It was very comfortable to read on.
Bill
The iPad and My Computer Ecosystem
Enough people have asked that I feel either mocked or obligated to report on my first two days with my Apple iPad. (And for the record, I think that they're mostly mocking me.) As I have said before, I am not necessarily an early adopter, but I also understand that the next generation of any dev...
Absolutely. Except, I didn't have an old device and I never want to have one either. They sound like they are pretty undesirable.
The iPad and My Computer Ecosystem
Enough people have asked that I feel either mocked or obligated to report on my first two days with my Apple iPad. (And for the record, I think that they're mostly mocking me.) As I have said before, I am not necessarily an early adopter, but I also understand that the next generation of any dev...
William Caraher is now following The Typepad Team
Mar 15, 2010
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
Walking Home and the Phenomenology of Landscape
In a recent article, by John Bintliff ("The Implications of a Phenomenology of Landscape," in E. Olshausen and V. Sauer, Die Landschaft und die Religion. (Stuttgart 2009), 27-45) offers (another) harsh critique of Christopher Tilley's efforts toward a phenomenology of ancient landscapes. Bintl...
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
Teaching Thursday: Grading and Resistance
I just finished grading two stacks of midterm essays for lower division courses (in the interest of full disclosure my graduate assistant also graded a third stack). I noticed certain trends that were so pronounced and consistent across almost all of the essays in these stacks that they are wort...
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
Teaching (with Technology) Thursday
Technology is all over the news this week with both Apple's announcement yesterday and the official publication of the 2010 Horizon Report; so I thought it might be a good time to talk a bit about some of the high-tech new and its potential impact on teaching and some of my own efforts to use te...
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
Corinth's Greek Agora
These are boom times for articles on Corinth. I just completed Jamie Donati's interesting new article in the American Journal of Archaeology: "Marks of State Ownership and the Greek Agora at Corinth" AJA 114 (2010), 3-26. In it, Jamie argues that the evidence for state owned objects (drinking ve...
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?
Dipping my Toe in the Public History Pool
Public history is all the rage these days in history programs. To my eye, the interest in public history is an effort within the discipline of history to connect our work with a recognized group of jobs as archivists, public historians, and at museums. On the one hand, this is good in that it ...
Good dissertation topic! I'll certainly pass along my paper. Have you published on the topic? I am scrambling a bit to develop bibliography.
Elwyn Robinson Lecture Thoughts: Digital Archaeology
Just before the holidays, I was invited to give the library’s Elwyn Robinson Lecture. The librarian suggested that I do something that highlights how my research will benefit from the newly established Working Group in Digital and New Media. This would coincide well with Elwyn Robinson’s inter...
Subscribe to William Caraher’s Recent Activity