le-Bigs

As I monotoned my way through a slew of scanning this morning - pottery drawings for a certain ceramically prolific excavation I work for - suddenly my music genome radio station was all silence.

and a pepper grinder.

and a base line.

and a conga.

Buenvenidos, Senor Santana. A which point I kicked the desk over, tore up the inked transparency paper, and began gyrating in a latin frenzy throughout the museum, knocking over, among others, a copper tablet from Nuzi, a few vintage field photographs (various archaeo-celebrities ho-humming about something on the ground, beyond the picture frame), and an egyptian doorjamb from the temple of Amun at Karnak (which required a particularly vigorous twist which seems to have thrown my hip out of socket again).
Then I decided mondays aren't always so bad.

The library feels empty again

There's nothing like a conversation with a loved one in which you cloak your actual cares and worries under a layer of babble about academic business. There's a rough form of hypocrisy to it that makes me a bit sick to my stomach.
Another cycle in life; as vulnerability and fragility develop, so too the deposits which bury the impulses best suited to resolve them. In this manner a healthy mind is dependent on a constant archaeological labor. Its absence results in the fossilization of these vulnerabilities (attractive to emotional miners of all sorts) or, in the best (albeit painful) instances, in regular seismic activity which forces such strata to the surface.

Doesn't it seem futile, then, to return to a treatise on settlement differentiation? Something about the moment makes me hope that, returning to the pages I left to write this, I will find in them overriding chaos. It seems unlikely, but I would find a strange relief in reading that, as the Capetian dynasty consolidated it's economic hegemony on feudal France, everything suddenly went terribly wrong and the West European countryside was devasted by a godzillic Auroch. Perhaps it could be the unthinkable offspring of a meteoric impact in the Atlas Mountains.

L'automne, quand tombent les coeurs

High gear instantaneously as I got back to Cambridge.

In addition to a full semester of courses I've become the happy co-progenitor of a potential survey in Nor'eastern Jordan, where the roads are few and the smugglers many (that's the hearsay): A happy encounter with a previously un-deciphered rock-carving this summer left a chum in the good graces of some folks over there... Said folks said "come on back next summer," and so he's going back and I guess I'll be in the hand-luggage. The intention is to manufacture some kind of epigraphy/archaeology hybrid. So far things are looking up.
Along with that I've picked up a few lecturing spots at the museum, part of a program for educating our volunteer tour-guides. So experience teaching. And some jitters. And the nagging thought: "why am I doing this as I attempt to learn Ugaritic?" (Ugaritic, by the way, kicks ass)
Usually followed by another thought which is not really an articulated thought, but rather something like this.

Moving out of dormitories and into real-people housing is also a benefit for my general psychological health, and a giant leap in the direction of convincing myself that I am a mildly functional human being. Our landlord was a champ today and changed the shower curtain. Now that I put it into words, though, I'm not sure when changing shower curtains fell into the landlord's purview. Perhaps he takes the name very very seriously and considers petroleum and associated by-products as his responsibility.

I grew my hair out this summer.
I'm pretty pleased about that.
and: Vox DA5. 'nough said. But I'll say more anyways - I'll be ramping that bad boy up with my Squire stratocaster come saturday. (it's only after writing about this that I was inspired to add the hypertext link earlier in the email)(c'est bête mais il fallait y penser)

Mardi 29 Juillet

Bought some pants, a shirt, some empty notebooks down near St Germain after a bit of coffee at the Cafe de la Mairie on St Sulpice. There's been a lovely warm breeze through the city the last few days, which this morning effectively cleared away a sordid mood which had afflicted me since my return, sunday evening, from a good friend's wedding down near Avignon. No doubt, that the wedding was so excellent as to require a bit of physical recuperation may have had its part to play in said mood (the neck part of the physical, in particular, was in need of attention from the body-particles).While I'm just beginning the 'summer' part of my summer (in this we find that the author still relates to seasons from a predominantly juvenile anchor) I've begun thinking towards an amusing task for the fall - exploring what kind of analogy might be drawn between the arrival of the Israelite tribes in Palestine ca 1300-1200 B.C. on one hand, and the Arab conquest of Palestine in 635-637 A.D. on the other. The topic (for a seminar paper) emerged from a conversation with my advisor and it's been floating in Lake semi-conscious since late June. Accordingly, as I got back to Paris I wandered through a few bookstores and poked at texts relating to the events of the 7th century since I'm completely unfamiliar with them. This brought me to some excellent shops (again, near st Sulpice) where I found some old publications of sites like Tello (Ah, vulture Stela, you taunt us once again!). The kind with wax paper over the cover.
as far as my above analogy goes, it looks like it may be a bit of a stretch to get it to fly... The originally intriguing fact was that of tribes emerging from the Saudi peninsula bearing monotheism and rapidly rallying local Levantine peoples to their cause. Of course, the contexts are so radically different...
On verra.

Just finished our first week of excavations here at Ashkelon. We're kicking back here in the hallway at the Gane Dan. That's our hotel, and 'we' is me and a bunch of folks from the dig. I've been making them listen to Led zeppelin for the last half hour, and now we've moved away from that because apparently not everyone can handle excellent music.
The excavations are going smoothly, and I'm getting used to the different modalities of supervisory work (about 4 volunteers work directly beneath me, hierarchically speaking)(If we're excavating a pit, then sometimes they excavate beneath me, spatially speaking)(and if they ever make terrible jokes, then I usually consider those beneath me, qualitatively speaking). Clearly, I have yet to bleed myself completely of the paper on polysemy that I wrote a few weeks ago. (bring more leeches!)
Surprisingly, we had a fantastic discovery in our first two days of digging. As we took down a few balks we discovered a cypro-minoan stamp seal, another indication that this script was used to write the language spoken by the philistines. (since the script has yet to be deciphered, we're not sure what language that was, exactly. probably something like pig latin).
I've been trying to make theoretically responsible decisions during excavation, were precision and rigorous collection sometimes give way to exhaustion and the irritation at having to write up (yet another) MC tag. (Material Culture - anything man-made or man-modified that's not architecture). It's also been a good experience to be confronted with a square under my control, and therefore to face the task of creating, in light of past excavation, research questions to guide my digging over the next few weeks. (although it's not really up to me, since there are broader interests in play...). Right now I'm looking at a large Late Bronze (~1300 bc) outdoor surface, like a courtyard, with evidence of grain processing activities (large pits, work platforms, grindstones). The area is cut by a large Egyptian wall (~1250-1200) and so I'd like to take that thing out to have a clear view of everything beneath it (sampling a tell with squares is restricted enough, it gets a little ridiculous when you limit yourself even further), but I may have to wait on that.
As usual, I'll be heading up to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem sometime in the next few weeks to visit a few friends coming through town (B, G, R, J...maybe M?). If you're in the country and I know you, and you read this, send me a message or something.
Time to go scrub some pottery.

no subject

About to hit NY with the back of my hand. ("back..of the hand.." 2:35-2:44).
I'll be heading out to Israel in just 3 days now. At which point I will also hit tell Ashkelon with the back of my hand. (and a pick).
In the meantime I've settled into that lifestyle which makes up that delightful fraction of a grad student's career: doing nothing. While the reader may be inclined to think and then suggest that I must, in fact, still do something (I mean geez, he's still alive, right?), I am adamant: nothing. Deal with it, reader.

For those more inclined towards the anxious, wide-eyed, intellectual-hopes-and-fears kind of posts, I have no doubt those will find their way back here in due time. It's hard to be existential all the time. It's even harder to be not-existential all the time. I suppose we can only hope that I'll be near a laptop when it strikes.

On the back slope

In just about a week I'll be hopping my annual flight outta here to Israel. It always strikes very suddenly, this summer thing (which I suppose is liable to elicit a few disgruntled ... grunts, from readers who have real jobs). It'll be interesting to get back into the field and see if I'm able to keep thinking when I'm in the heat of the action, so to speak. More heat than action, typically. The skeletons are mostly pretty tame.
That is to say that after a first year in grad school (3 huzzahs) and the ensuing layering of perspectives,* ideas and entirely too much theoretical thought (I don't actually think there can actually be too much), I'm curious to see whether it will really be impossible to make room for critical thought during a dig. As a staff member (10x10 meters for me, this year) the workload is prohibitive, which means that usually any free time is spent staring at walls hoping for a quick death, and not in profound (or affected) consideration of what cultural assumptions I may be expressing by my choice to excavate those pits in a certain way.

"Following this prodigiously verbose and obscure statement, he returned to occupying an otherwise delightfully vacant evening with video games."


*en français, s'il vous plait.

It's been such a long time

If I could be any song, I might be Foreplay/Prelude.
I've just about survived my second bout of gradscholasticus finalius, which is, as are most things, much better appreciated with a bit of retrospection. I can imagine myself whyinmydaysing some poor kids in 20 years, scaring the living daylights out of them, only so they can discover on their own time (as I have) that it's not quite as apocalytpic as it is played up to be (le style s'inspire de G Keillor)(y tambien de Kerouac - esp. lo que sigue). I rushed into the museum this morning in a fustle, thinking my german competency exam would be starting, scampering from room to room trying to find where it was (where the hell was it, anyway??) only to realize, as I retreated to a computer equipped with internet in order to "find it out for myself, damn them" (random students sitting in empty classrooms are of no help whatsoever) that the Deutschefest was scheduled for 10 am, not 9 or 9:30 as had been my proto-diurnal, self-righteous conviction (I still think someone changed the internet behind my back).
And the natural thing to do, when you realize that you have a full hour to review before a required test, is to remain on the internet, check facebook, dilly dally around, and throw some shwag onto the blog.
Das Schwag wird geworfen.*

* en allemand dans le texte

l'œil rougeâtre

Il y avait de ces saisons où, malgré moi:
Succombant sans émotions aux charlataneries
Délicates de la jeunesse (un doux trépas).
J'en reste pétrifié, souvent, sur un portrait.

When I wrote

I sat down last night to begin writing a paper that has been running around in my head for some time now. It's a wonderful experience, to find oneself in the presence of that simulated alterity which springs out with the pen. There's a struggle, because our ability to delude our minds is much greater than our ability to trick a simple piece of paper (or in this case, a computer screen) into believing that our ideas are well-formed. And there is a bit of terror involved because the concept, once it leaves the comfortable womb, is no longer quite yours. It grows on it's own, rambling across the pages, taking sometimes unexpected turns which might better be attributed to muscle spasms than pure intent. The concept may remain friendly, but it often becomes a burdensome companion, which must be walked patiently to its end. Its incompetence is frustrating: it was so crystalline before it emerged!

Or maybe it's a phoenix, and as it burns itself out, it beckons other concepts to existence. Their incubation may be swift - they jump out a few days later and die on a post-it - or it may be long, paced, perhaps the work of decades. The latter bide their time (watching the seasons change) and they feed on the many deaths played out before them. It is never quite clear, with them, that they will care to emerge at all.

A day at the races

Actually, just a day running around downtown Boston, which is surprisingly rare for someone living in Cambridge. I'm a little past feeling like that's too bad. I usually just constate it now.

Fenway park is pretty cool. I was there with A. for this afternoon's game against the Angels. We wandered down into the sun and snagged some seats we had scoped out. It's funny, because it's a relatively normal thing to do, and I'm an adult, but I still felt a bit naughty for it. And therefore, it was better.

The big jolt of the day was realizing that because I turned my VA license into the MA Motor Vehicle Registration to get a local driver's license, I now don't have an ID for the next week and a half. It's like 1932 all over again (this is a clumsy reference to the Prohibition, whose exact dates evade me, the archaeologist)(it's all about culture history)(sort of).

And so I'll listen to Ramble On, because what can be more true to life than departure.
...but now it's time for me to go...

Shwag

While shwag wasn't one of the great alchemistic elements, I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement "Shwag is the center of the universe" (iff shwag can take any conceivable value, including the null).

Surprisingly, no one has ever noted this simple, transparent fact.

I got the munchies

lookin' to make some tracks

So I've sent my CV to a couple archaeologists at the DAI. It's part of my bid to not get to stuck in Israeli or even Near Eastern archaeology. Ultimately I'd like to hit honduras as well (maybe I'll talk some other time about my plans to excavate Port Royal on Roatan).

Floating in the backdrop, naturally, is my conviction that studying archaeology is studying the past is studying people. Which means major interfacing with philosophy, history, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and, while we're at it, Koi fish (which are awesome). The downside (koi fish aside) is that this all means either a lifetime commitment, or ineptitude. I favor the former.

And right now the most difficult, near-impossible, and therefore essential task is to figure out a way to reconcile the fact that the past did occur (just once), with the post-structural défi. I'm not sure my current idea (that we should extend the pragmatic epistemological approximation by which we live our day to day lives to our scholarship) will pan out. Or that it changes anything. The fact that the intellectual world is split by the positivistic/relativistic divide, and that the two sides don't talk to or acknowledge the other, makes any sort of dialectical solution to the problem improbable. It also speaks of the small, fickle, and self-important nature of the academic mind.
So I'll be working on that.

I knew there was a reason I felt conflicted about my leftist tendencies...

Here's why.

Borders

Part of the conversation in Theory tonight is worth mentioning.
In discussing landscape archaeology and issues of space and it's social construction, we fell back into the difficulties inherent in characterizing the political organization of early societies without reverting to language implying Neo-evolutionary views of political development (Band-Tribe-Chiefdom-State). It's a can of worms. Essentially by using terms like "state" you gloss over any individuating characteristics of a given society's organization for the sake of an implicit statement concerning the linearity of human cultural history.
So we were discussing this and came to the topic of borders, as we talked about the fact that it's quite probable that many early polities didn't really concern themselves overmuch with physical borders of 'their land', but rather were preoccupied with control of resources - be they human or material (this could well have been the case with the Inca for instance, territoriality having been imported by Pizarro and his spaniard chums).
Mapped over to the marginal areas of the Southern Levant, this yields that semi-nomadic groups who lived (mostly) from herding or trade would have been predominantly interested in establishing rights not to surface territory or even resource points or nodes, but rather to vectors. That is, routes from one place to another.
The concept of borders has been relatively uncritically applied to the study of ancient Israel (unless I'm mistaken). I wonder how different the borders of, say, the divided monarchies are from our 20-21st century conception.

The world is way too big for this blog to be interesting.

I suppose I'll just have to keep writing, regardless.

Process? What Process?

A little tired and down in the mouth as the week nevertheless toils on.

As usual in these energetic lulls I'm feeling a little frustrated about how to think of my work. I'm a first year grad student in archaeology. And because I've found myself more and more attracted to theoretical questions, I sometimes wonder if I should be doing history of historiography instead. Or epistemology.
It's a mess.
As a novice, should I be concentrating on practical questions, getting my feet wet in the "stuff" of archaeology, keeping my head down and leaving the abstract thinking for 20 years later?
Or should I get a firm grip on theoretical matters, enabling me to approach concrete problems with greater breadth?
How can I do "practical" archaeology if I don't have firm conceptual footing? How can I have firm perceptual footing if I'm unfamiliar with the raw materials of my discipline?

Chickens and eggs.
(I have a friend who claims to have solved that problem, on the ground that there were eggs in the evolutionary tree long before chickens. I laughed.)
For lack of a better alternative, I'm going to play it back and forth between the two. Like a ninja running up a chimney. To glory.

Roman (A. Rimbaud)

I
One is not so serious when one is seventeen.
One fine night, sick of steins and lemonade
Of raucous cafes all that bright and glaring scene
He goes 'neath the green linden of the promenade.

The linden smell good on those good nights of July
At times the air so gentle coaxes close the eye;
The wind laden with noises - the city is nigh -
Bears aroma of the vine, aroma of the stein.

II
Then he catches sight of a tiny little patch
of dark azure, border'd by a little branch,
dotted with a naughty star, which would love to match
as it gently shivers, small and very white.

July Night! Seventeen! - Thus overcome with bliss.
Sap is champagne and it seeps up into your nape...
His thoughts prance; he feels on his lips a kiss
just crouching there, a critter taking shape...

III
Untethered the heart rambles across all novels
- When lo! In the clearing of a pale street light
There passes a damsel with most charming subtle spells
'Neath the shadow of her father's frightful o'ersight.

à suivre (et à revoir un peu, sans doute)...

Incipit

Y. suggested I start a blog, and since today offers nothing but opaque german articles and watery coffee, I thought 'why not.'

I don't know how this will all turn out. Although I suppose it will take on a life of its own, the reason I'm doing this now is to have a place to toss the ideas I usually encase in a post-it, and which then rot on the wall in my room. Strangers don't usually wander around my room, which makes the chance of feedback pretty slim.

Coffee, when drunk, decides to leave after a while. Lesson #1 is that even at the margins, humanity functions under biological imperatives.