The first thing I noticed when getting off the plan in Austin: humidity. It’s been a long time since I felt the warm, moist embrace of the Earth’s atmosphere. Living in Tucson, the air feels like a blast furnace that’s just warming up in April. Here in Austin, it feels […]
In the course of my random discussions about working in cultural resource management archaeology and historic preservation, I seem to have come across the same conversation time and time again. It all revolves around some “hell project”— a project that went so FUBAR that the company ended up losing money. […]
This is a question I ask myself a lot. Am I supposed to be an archaeologist? Is this the best career for me? How can I know that? I’ve recently started listening to The New Man podcast hosted by Tripp Lanier. (FYI: It’s not just for men. My wife is […]
Last week, Doug Rocks-MacQueen posted an article on his blog Doug’s Archaeology titled “Top Organizations Receiving NSF Archaeology Funds.” I was surprised to see my current grad school at the top of the list by a long shot. The University of Arizona dominated the list of National Science Foundation (NSF) […]
Imagine this scenario. You’re a lady grabbing some drinks at the local bar after a long day of work at your new employer— Down n’ Dirty Cultural Resource Management Archaeology. Everything is copacetic until you catch the gaze of a young guy at the end of the bar. He looks […]
Do we cultural resource management archaeologists do the same things? Are historic preservationists just following the Secretary of the Interior’s Guidelines for the Treatment of Historic Properties? After decades of historic preservation and cultural resource management guidelines, are we all just going through the motions—just checking the boxes for our […]
Last weekend, I took my bi-annual CPR/AED refresher certification through the University of Arizona Recreation Center. I have long been obsessed with learning as much as I can about health and safety in order to help improve the abysmal condition of safety training and awareness in the cultural resource management […]
“The arrival of the catalog became a major social event…In the early days, people wrote letters about their lives when mailing orders to the company…One of the authors of this book…can remember the special excitement among children when, twice a year, the Sears catalog arrived in the mail” (Leiss, William […]
“The more common sense denies that all action is motivated solely by the attempt to use the structure of the social field to increase symbolic capital, the more the scientist sees evidence of the necessity of preserving the illusio in order for the system to work.” (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1999, […]
My last few posts have been getting some serious discussion amongst the archaeologists I know and from hundreds of archaeos I don’t know. Most of the feedback I’ve been getting has been either positive or at least benign. But I’ve also heard that my posts have pissed off a few […]
