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.