Do Serious Archaeologists do all the assigned reading?

I went to Israel in the summer of 2009 with the purpose of aiding my partner at the time, B-, in fulfilling his dying grandmother's last wish of publishing her late husband's poetry. This was a man who wrote multiple poems each day, every day, for years. He wrote them in a muddle of language that sashayed from English to Hebrew depending on...his mood? One presumes. He wrote them stream-of-consciousness style, in neat stanzas, as extended stories. He wrote them on sheaves and sheaves of thin paper on his typewriter, which ended up in fat folders on the shelf above the grandmother's computer. Each spine was branded with a year past in thick black.

Memories of my journey

Coursework:

Archaeology before the bible
Precolumbian histories of America
Food writing
Languages of the Americas

In Archaeology before the bible (from now on ABB) Prof. B- went through slides of sites in the levant (Israel and Jordan, for the most part) that could have been from my own camera. He flipped through places I had forgotten with names that used to come as quickly as my few words of Hebrew but that are now buried deeper than I had realized, if not gone from me entirely. For the next few months, absent as I'll be from any archaeological fieldwork, instead of taking a moment each day to record the doings of serious archaeologists, I'm going to take a moment to record memories of my travels in the levant. This may not be of any interest to anyone else; I'm using this blog now as a journal of sorts for myself. I want to set aside some of my memories of Israel, whether they be main events or just the way unripe carob beans taste from the tree. All are, in their own way, precious to me.

I just realized that over the course of this blog I posted "Serious Archaeologists drink coffee" three times. Guess where my priorities are (and what apparently I need more of).

Serious Archaeologists are off their nut.

Serious Archaeologists write term papers.

Past titles include


Living Outside the World:

Kubrick’s Bloody Black Box and the Humanity of Constructed Realities

Past fieldwork includes:

T's M, NM
The Dixon Archaeology Project, NM

Next up: 

More Dixon archaeology, December 2011! I only even try to contain my excitement when I'm in public.