Reading

Three Things Thursday: Reading Edition

Some summers, I find myself reading far more than I expected to read. Others, not so much. It’s been not so much this summer for whatever reason, but I do continue to chip away at books on my summer reading list and tell myself regularly that I should be reading.

This is the context for today’s three things Thursday.

Thing the First

I enjoyed Catherine Frieman Leila H. Araar, Nika Shilobod, Aris Politopoulos, and James L. Flexner’s recent article in the Annual Review of Anthropology, “Anarchist Theory and Inequality in Archaeology” (2026). It is a nice survey of anarchist and anarchist adjacent work and thought in archaeology. In particular, it draws a useful “distinction between anarchy, the lived experience of a social practice without leaders or hierarchy, and anarchism, an ideology that goes against any form of authority, rules, hierarchy, and inequality, and strives for social and human relationships of freedom, equality, and solidarity.” Their article seeks to connect anarchism (as a theory) with anarchist (and broadly mutualist) practices in archaeology. Their main point is rather simple: studying equality (and inequality) in the past forms the basis for a discipline that rejects inequality.

Thing the Second

A colleague alerted me to Paul Kosmin’s latest book, The Ancient Shore (Harvard 2024). Unlike books that focus on the sea—such as Braudel’s The Mediterranean World  or Nicholas Purcell’s and Peregrine Horden’s The Corrupting Sea—Kosmin takes the shore itself, rather than the sea, as his focus. The shore represents that place where terrestrial powers meet the uncontrollable waters where the kinds of authority expressed in borders, citizenship, and control give way. As a result, the foreshore itself represents the kind of liminal zone where diverse communities commingle, traditional rules of society are suspended, and individuals and states negotiate identities and status. I’ve only read the first part of the book so far, but I was particularly interested Kosmin’s discussion of Hoq cave on the island of Socotra which preserved an impressive collection of inscriptions that connected the island to communities across the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. The inscriptions are simple and appear in a bewildering array of languages including Greek, Aramaic, and various Indian languages. It would appear that travelers and merchants inscribed most of the texts as they stopped by the island on their way to ports elsewhere or availed themselves to the island’s status as a entrepôt.

Thing the Third

This weekend, we plan to go to Delphi to see the site and, on the way, stop at Osios Loukas. Like every good aspiring Byzantinist, I planned to read the life of Osios Loukas the day before, but I also wanted to enliven my trip with some Angelos Sikelianos or his wife, Eva Palmer-Sikelianos. Together, they founded the Delphic Festival. Unfortunately, I cannot find a copy of either Eva Palmer-Sikelianos’s autobiography (Upward Panic compiled by John Ashton). Annoyingly, it’s been tricky to find Sikelianos’s selected poems online (beyond the smattering that appear on websites) and Upward Panic will cost $75 for a Kindle version! Fortunately, I have a tired old PDF of Carolyn Connor’s translation of The Life and Miracles of St. Luke of Steiris (1994) and that might have to satisfy my desire to read in place. 

Summer Reading List

Every summer, I put together a reading list that is mostly aspirational. It’s a combination of books I want to read, books I should read, and books that I have to read for my research or just being a good well-rounded person or whatever. 

By mid-summer, the reading list has collapsed and I’m frantically skimming whatever academic articles are necessary to finish whatever project is looming in front of me. What matters is that I want to read more broadly, more deliberately, but life is life and the wheels always fall off at some point.

Here an index of my former efforts: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011.

Here’s hoping that 2026 might be different.

First, I have a stack of fiction. I’ve been working my way through Iain Banks’s Culture series and have three more books to read (of the 9 books available on Kindle): Excession (1996), Hydrogen Sonata (2010) and Surface Detail (2015). I also want to read the new Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife (even though I’ve not entirely loved this series). I also think that I want to read the sequel to Blindsight by Peter Watt: Echopraxia (2015).

I also have Willa Cather’s Praire Trilogy on my Kindle: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. I’ve read the first and third and should re-read them. It’s hard to know whether I will or not. 

I have a handful of books that I should read to stay abreast of my field. For example, I need to read T. Kiely, A. Reeve, and L. Crewe’s edited volume, Empire and Excavation. Critical Perspectives on Archaeology in British-Period Cyprus, 1878–1960 (Leiden: 2025). I want to read Astrid Van Oyen’s The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family (2020). 

I hope that Dan Hicks’s Every Monument Must Fall (2025) can help me think about the tension between ruins, memory, and monumentality in some of my work in Greece. I want to read Nikolas Bakirtzis’s Architecture and Sacred Landscape in Byzantium: Making Prodromos Monastery on Mount Menoikeion (2026).

I also want to read Hamlin Garland’s The Mystery of the Buried Crosses: A Narrative of Psychic Exploration (1939) and The Shadow World (1908). These two books got me thinking about re-reading Kyriacos C. Markides’s The Magus of Strovolos (1985) and Homage to the Sun: The Wisdom of the Magus of Strovolos (1987).

Related in an unrelated way, I also  want to read Matthew Bernico and Dean Dettloff’s Enough Is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology (2026).

Less related is the recent biography of Marquis de Morès by Sergio Luzzatto: The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès (2026).

I grabbed a copy Costas Montis’s 1974 Anthology of Cypriot Poetry and Andonis Decavalles, Bebe Spanos, and Costas Proussis’s 1965 Voices of Cyprus: An Anthology of Cypriot Literature.

I still plan to read Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel (2025).

Three Things Thursday: Wishful Thinking Edition

I’m tired for lots of reasons, but that fatigue has made it hard for me to focus on anything. I’d love to have the bandwidth to read more carefully and thoughtfully what’s coming across my desk right now and I wish I had a chance to process more thoughtfully the experiences that I’m having in the classroom this semester.

In humble recognition of the disconnect between my aspirations and my realities here, a wishful thinking three things Thursday.

Thing the First

I’ve been trying to read Catherine Kearns’ latest article, “Beyond metrics of resilience and survival in Mediterranean landscape archaeologies” in Archaeological Dialogues. Her work has a studied skepticism toward the recent interest in resilience as a metric for discussing the diverse relationships between communities and their environment in antiquity. Moreover, Kearns seems to show a kind of polished annoyance with some of the more simplistic applications of resilience theory in archaeology (and, of course, she’s not alone; adaptive reuse is a low bar for identifying resilience).

More than that, in my cursory, distracted, and tired reading, I got to wonder how resilience as a narrative might intersect with booms and busts and ways of thinking about time organized around different rhythms, patterns, and experiences. How would Byung-Chul Han or Walter Benjamin think of resilience and the narratives that it produces? I hope that I have time to really think about this.

Thing the Second

I also got a bit fascinated by an article by Jessica Varsallona titled: “Freshfield and Byzantine Ephesos: Railway, faith and archaeology” in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Varsallona follows the history of three Early Christian column capitals from Ephesos to Surrey in the 19th century. These capitals came from the church St. John in Ephesos nearly a century before its excavation and formal discovery. Varsallona argued that Edwin Freshfield brought these capitals to England as part of a larger effort to manifest church history in the context of 19th century British colonialism (especially protectionism) through eliding Anglicanism to Byzantine Christianity.

Ideally, I would have the time and energy to read this article carefully and think expansively about how this contributed to the growth of Byzantine studies and the rise of a kind of mystical appreciation of Byzantium in the west. This interest in the 19th and early 20th century inspired the first wave of archaeological interventions at Byzantine sites and the growing interest in Byzantium in Western Europe and the U.S.

Thing the Third  

Today was the last meeting with the students in our Reading The Roman Revolution group. Four students met weekly at 7 am to work their way through Ronald Syme’s monumental classic. The students did the reading each week, picked apart Syme’s arguments, and considered his larger points and context.

By the end of this remarkable book, the students had begun to ask big questions and issues of liberty and freedom. What does it mean to be free and to have liberty within the Roman oligarchy and how do these concepts apply to how we see the world today. There’s something about the distance that the Roman world offers that allows us to see the world more clearly today.

It’s been a good class.  

Reading the Roman Revolution 28: The Succession

This semester, I’ve shifted from reading Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution on my own to reading it with students and colleagues. This has been wonderful in every way and helped me see arguments across the entire book that perhaps I missed.

Chapter 28 deals with the succession. When I first read the book, the placement of this chapter seemed odd. In fact, I wondered vaguely whether Syme intended this to be the final chapter of the book (although I have no evidence for this). This chapter deliberately looks beyond Augustus to the ascension of Tiberius to trace how “the cabinet” introduced in chapter 27 was ephemeral and contingent. As a result, the succession from Augustus to Tiberius was not simply the replacement of a new leader atop an existing political or institutional structure, but an entirely new government filled with individuals loyal to Tiberius and his branch of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Succession then was fraught because there was so little connective infrastructure in the Empire beyond the Princeps. There was no well defined office of Princeps and even the packet of privileges afforded Augustus were relatively modest and impossible to pass on because of their unprecedented character. Instead, Tiberius’s power rested an a densely interlocked group of family connections and loyal members of the lower orders of the Roman state. 

Augustus was aware of this even if he was a reluctant architect of Tiberius’s ascension. The led Syme to describe the exile of Julia as a move to suppress a potential conspiracy. To wit:  

“As a politician, Augustus was ruthless and consequent. To achieve his ambition he would coolly have sacrificed his nearest and dearest; and his ambition was the unhindered succession to the throne of Gaius and Lucius. To this end their mother served merely as an instrument. There may have been a conspiracy. Whether wanton or merely traduced, Julia was not a nonentity but a great political lady.” 

Syme was hardly a women’s historian, but his prosopographic approach required him to recognize the power of women in orienting dynastic causes as well as subverting them. If prosopography was more than mere structuralism, it admitted to the autonomy of the agents in the web. The exile of Julia and the succession was evidence for just such autonomy.

oOo

The short essay is part of my Reading The Roman Revolution at 80 project. It’s so awesome that I have two hashtags: #ReadingRomanRevolution and #ReadingRonaldat80. I explain the project here. You can read the rest of the entries here.

Two Thing Tuesday: Harry’s Wall and Augustine’s Monica

As the semester comes to the final stretch, my attention gets scattered across a number of smaller projects, teaching, family life, and future travel.  

Thing the First

Every now and then a conference paper sticks with you mostly because they really good (or comically bad). I’ve heard lots of conference papers in my 20+ years in academia and the ones that have often impressed me the most were small papers that gave entrée into larger issues. 

Three years ago, in Patras, Greece, I heard one. Iain Davidson presented on a scratched inscription on a 19th century railroad viaduct pier by the pop singer Harry Styles. The viaduct is in one of those eminently British sounding places — Twemlow — in Cheshire near a place called Homes Chapel. The scratched inscription occurred as part of a 2013 documentary on the band One Direction called This Is Us. I’ve not seen it.

On account of this inscription, the piers of the viaduct — which itself is a heritage listed site — have attracted visitors, pilgrims, from around the world who have added their names and messages to the roughly scratched name of Harry Styles. As near as I can tell, the original Styles inscription is lost. 

This past fall, Iain published a nice 15-page article on his work to document the inscriptions on the viaduct titled “Harry’s Wall: Whose Heritage is it Anyway?” In the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. The article offers a series of analytical lenses to consider the graffiti on the viaduct including commentary on the themes in the graffiti (Styles’s sexual politics, a sense of community, inspiration, pilgrimage, and kindness), the history of the monument itself, and even, interestingly the “navvies” who built it. In fact, the construction of the viaduct my “navvies,” itinerate workers who focused on infrastructure projects, offered a way to merge the history of the 19th century structure with the continued engagement by contemporary pilgrims whose work has transformed the heritage listed site into an object of renewed relevance. 

Thing the Second

There are odd coincidences in life that make me happy. As some readers of this blog know, the past two years have been challenging for my family. My father has experienced a rapid decline in health. This weekend, I re-read Augustine’s Confessions. This has become a little tradition for me over the Easter holidays when I’m teaching Roman history. Confessions is the penultimate reading in my undergraduate Roman history class and our discussion of it has tended to fall the week after Easter.

What made this week’s reading of Augustine special is that my father has had a series of significant strokes (from what we can tell). He’s been in hospice for around 15 months and so diagnoses are less important than care. These events infused my reading of Book 9 of Confessions with a new tenderness. For those who don’t know, Book 9, beginning around chapter 23, Augustine tells us about his last days with his mother Monica as they sat at Ostia looking out over the garden in the place they were staying. Monica had encouraged Augustine to convert to Christianity for most of her life and by the time they were in Ostia, Augustine had become a Christian. While they looked out over the garden, they talked about lower and higher things and this culminated in Monica admitting that the wish that kept her alive was seeing her son become a Christian.  

To be clear, my father didn’t have any such theologically laced hopes for us. He was happy that we are happy. He enjoyed our visits and on our last visit we looked out over the parking lot and tidal marsh from the assisted living facility where he stayed. We looked at a nest of bald eagles and the tentative first hops (and hopes) the two small eaglets had moving from branch to branch. We didn’t unpack them as a metaphor, much less some profound Neoplatonic truth, but after reading Augustine, my father’s interest in them made sense to me.

He’s being kept comfortable right now and I think he knows that it won’t be much longer. He already told us that “since I’ll be dead, I don’t care what you do with me. You can put me in a shoebox.” That’s not too far from what Monica said: “Bury this body anywhere you like. Don’t be troubled or perturbed about it. All that I’m asking of you is to remember me at the altar of the Master, wherever you are.” (9.27).

Two for Tuesday: Porto Rafti and Thessaloniki in Late Antiquity

As I’ve gotten older and my bandwidth has become more attenuated, I’ve mostly fallen out of the habit of reading new journals when they appear. There are a few that I keep an eye on, though, and more often than not read some of them: the AJA, Hesperia, and the Historical Archaeology. 

Last week, Hesperia 95.1 (2026) appeared. It had two articles that attracted my attention immediately. First, an article by Sarah Murray, Phil Sapirstein, and Joey Frankl titled “The Colossus of Porto Raphti: New Finds from the Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS) Project,” and then one by Michalis Karambinis on “St. Demetrios, the Gladiatorial Combats, and the Stadium of Thessaloniki.”

Both articles deal with Late Antiquity. 

Article the First

20+ years ago, Tim Gregory and I spent a few hours wandering around the Hellenistic or Late Classical fortified site of Koroni. From the rocky ruins of the peninsula, we looked out over the little harbor of Porto Rafti and the sun literally glinted off the marble monument on Raftis Island. I was unfamiliar with the monument and asked: what is that? Tim replied: “it’s the Rafti! And he’s making our pants!”

Tim had, of course, been to the island and many other near shore islands researching the use of these so-called “islands of refuge” in Late Antiquity. Tim’s work had pushed back against the idea that displaced residents scurried to these islands to avoid Slavic depredations. Instead, he argued that the use of these nearshore islands showed the intensity of Late Roman land use in Greece and reflected a prosperous and densely populated countryside into the 6th and 7th centuries.

Murray, Sapirstein, and Frankl argue that the Rafti monument was likely erected in the Late Roman period. The statue of a seated figure dates to the 2nd century and probably derived from a sanctuary nearby — perhaps Rhamnous or a sanctuary of Isis at nearby Brauron. For reasons unknown to anyone save the Late Romans, it was re-erected on this island. Evidence for a Late Roman date for the installation on Raftis island comes mainly from the scatter of Late Roman pottery both on the island and evidence for significant activities — a church and other seaside installations — in the harbor itself. The authors offer the suggestion that the monument could have served as a navigational aid.

To be clear, a significant part of the article involves a careful discussion of the monument itself and the sculpture including the use of 3D scans to join virtually a marble fragment with the monument. The authors also navigate the very “American School” discussion over whether the statue represents a male figure — perhaps an emperor — or a female deity. This is all carefully argued and reasonable.  

Article the Second

Michalis Karambinis’s article on the connection between St. Demetrios and gladiatorial combat in the stadium in Thessaloniki. Karambinis examines the three versions of St. Demetrios’s martyrdom. For the uninitiated, St. Demetrios’s martyrdom stemmed from his connection with a young man named Nestor who defeated the Emperor Galarius’s favorite gladiator in the stadium. Nestor was a Christian and either received a blessing or prayers from St. Demetrios whom the emperor had recently imprisoned in a nearby bath for being Christian. When the emperor made the connection between Nestor and Demetrios and the death of his favorite gladiator, he ordered Demetrios’s (and Nestor’s) death. Demetrios’s body was then buried near where he was imprisoned and executed, and this is the current location of the church that bears his name.

Karambinis argues that the account of Demetrios’s martyrdom called the Passio prima which has a terminus ante quem of the late 6th or early 7th century contains details of the stadium which would have been obscure to later authors. Indeed later authors, unable to understand, much less reconstruct this detail, simplified or just ignored it. Karambinis, however, mines these details and compares them to archaeological evidence to suggest that they offer a plausible description of the fences erected around stadia to protect the audience from animals or wayward combatants during the games. This, in turn, suggests that author of the Passio prima had access to an account that dates to closer to the early 4th century when such arrangements would have been familiar both to the reader and the audience.

This is significant because it supports Karambinis’s argument that the source for the Passio prima would have also understood the spatial relationship between the stadium, the baths, and the spot of St. Demetrios’s martyrdom (and later church). This then, offers an insight into the topography of Late Roman Thessaloniki by supporting the location of the ancient stadium adjacent to the later church of St. Demetrios rather than further east near the church of Ay. Sophia, the ancient hippodrome, and the so-called “Palace of Galerius.”

Thessaloniki has always enjoyed some scholarly attention as a major Late Roman and Byzantine city, but it has never enjoyed the kind of detailed scrutiny of Rome, Athens, or Constantinople. It’s intriguing to see a piece like this which uses a well-known source in a careful and thoughtful intervention in the urban landscape of Thessaloniki.

Decentralizing Data (and Publishing)

This past week I’ve been thinking more and more about issues of centralization and decentralization in terms of digital infrastructure. My thinking about these things are inchoate. Obviously, some of it stems from conversations about physical nodes in networks such as data centers, anxieties about the corporate organization of our online and interconnected digital world, and the role of institutions in mediating the dissemination of knowledge and information.

Eric and Sarah Kansa’s recent article, “Open Context in a Changing Context: Data Publishing, Interoperability and Governance” in Internet Archaeology, prompted me to think about the relationship between institutions and knowledge making in archaeology. The article is good and worth reading for all sorts of insights into how Open Context works. One point that stood out to me, however, was that unlike many other data archiving and publishing services (and I deliberately conflate the two even as I understand the former requires more substantial infrastructure than the latter), Open Context does not have an affiliation with a pre-existing institution such as a federal agency or a university. The Kansas argue that this reflects the capital intensive requirements of long term data preservation (which, incidentally, parallels the development of libraries), but also represents a vulnerability especially for those repositories the require federal or state funds for maintenance. Open Context, in contrast, relies on a range of different repositories as backstops for its data publishing with an eye toward ensuring that even amid the increasing vagaries of institutional commitments and priorities, the publish data remains persistent. 

(By the way, you should go and read this article on its own merits which go far beyond my slightly incomprehensible rambling here. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Eric and Sarah Kansa on and off for most of the 20-odd years that Open Context has been thing. I’ve also published data with them from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and our two projects at Pyla–Koutsopetria on Cyprus). 

This flexible and recentered approach to data publishing (rather than the tendency toward centralized data archiving) parallels their broader approach to data. Rather than imposing a standardize template on data that Open Context publishes, they publish archaeological data according the schemes that the project itself defines and presents. This means that comparisons across datasets published by different projects is more complicated and requires us to manage fuzzy alignments to produce meaning. This is a slow process in that it mitigates against the efficiencies promoted by standardized schemas. It also divests itself of any authority inherent a centralized schema. 

I’ve been thinking about this stuff against some recent works on digital infrastructure. Britt Paris’s recent book, Radical Infrastructure, which I’ve only read part of, considers the limits and challenges of our digital infrastructure and its shadowy collusion with the interests of the state and capital. Of course, these interests may not align with the interests of the users and, in fact, may run strongly counter to users political, economic, or social commitments.

Paris sites work like David Nemer’s Technology of the Oppressed (2022), which considers the ways that people living in Brazil’s favela communities created networks using improvised methods. I’ve only skimmed this book so far, but it clearly is something that I need to read more carefully.

The point of my post today is to start to think a bit about how institutions mediate the interface between physical infrastructure (such as servers, cables, switches and so on) and intellectual infrastructure (ontologies, data structures, and other tools). Outfits like Open Context are interesting because they demonstrate how standing even slightly outside of these institutions gives them a position where they can offer a distinct perspective (and an implicit critique) on their operations. 

This is meaningful to me, in part, because I’ve been thinking about how publishing can work in this way as well. Presses (cough… like The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota) that operate on the margins of institutions (as I’ve argued before, I like to think of my press as cultivating the undercommons) or completely free from connections may occupy positions of critical importance. In particular, I wonder whether scholarly and learned societies could similarly work to support practices and structures that offer critical resistance to standardization imposed by capital, efficiency, and, state authority. Of course, I understand that we live in a deeply interconnected world and learned societies are not more free from the entanglements of capital, the state, and the demands for efficiency and standards. That said, Open Context offers us a glimpse of how even within systems that are inhospitable to the kind of engaged, critical, and even inefficient way of presenting data and building knowledge, distinct and creative ways forward are possible.

Two for Tuesday: Ginsberg and Cavafy

This week is the annual UND Writers Conference. It should be a good show and is headlined by George Saunders. I hope to be able to make it to a few sessions.

The writers conference week always nudges me to read more fiction, more literature, and more criticism. It is all too easy for me to race around reading stuff that doesn’t matter: academic ephemera, low-stakes assignments, routine emails, box scores. I spend too little time reading writing of thought and of substance.

It’s not that I don’t try.

This week, I’ve been enjoying Allen Ginsberg in two registers. First, I’ve been reading a newly published collection of Ginsberg’s lectures at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics titled AH!MERICA. The lectures were edited Sebastian Clark and published by Isolarii in their remarkable little book series. The lectures center loosely on Ginsberg’s reading of Blake. As someone who is less familiar with Blake than the average Naropa student, much of what he says, I have to take at face value.

More important (and familiar to me) is Ginsberg’s comments on reading poetry. “This is why when I read a page of someone’s poems, I look for minutiae… So I find myself reading vast reams of poetry with my eye running down the page” (36-37). He then goes on to discuss William Carlos Williams’s poetry of the ordinary. Williams’s effort to understand his entire house a poetics of domesticity. Ginsberg notes details in “The Young Housewife” and exclaims “And the imaginary…is all contained in the fish-man!” (46-47).

I’m reading Ginsberg’s The Fall of America (1973). And letting “my eye run down the page.” The poems, among other things, offers vivid and detailed travelogue as Ginsberg drives across the US reading roadside signs, hitch hikers, fragments of the radio, truck stops, warehouses, the Vietnam War, and details…

Monosnap The Fall of America_ Poems of These States, 1965–1971 -- Allen Ginsberg -- The Pocket poets series,, San Francisco, USA, Califo… 2026-03-23 14-19-04.

I’ve been taking my cameras with me on walks. Most of the time I feel silly. I’m looking at the same stuff over and over again thinking that maybe the light will change or I’ll notice a new angle. I take the same photos over and over. Maybe I need to go back to Williams and spend more time with Ginsberg when I worry that I’m seeing the same things and convince myself that beauty is in the minutiae.

Image

Yesterday morning, very early, I read Langdon Hammer’s reflection on biographies of Cavafy in the Yale Review. He seems to be thinking about Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys recent work, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography. The essay took me back to my first Greek class which was taught by Avi Sharon’s who published an award winning translation of Cavafy. I had Modern Greek with Gregory Jusdanis at Ohio State. Reading Sharon’s translation of Cavafy’s “Caesarion” I recognized something:

When I managed to find the date in question,
I’d have put the book aside had a brief mention
of King Caesarion, an insignificant note really,
not suddenly caught my eye…

The insignificant notes, the minutiae, or, in an anecdote from Hammer’s review:

Once, when a protégé grew impatient with his discussion of the fine points of metrical analysis and said, “Certainly, maître, all of these are details,” Cavafy snapped: “What else is art but details?”

Maybe that’s what I’m after somehow with my work in the Bakken, with my preoccupation with fragments, and with my endless photographing of the same things. It’s not art, I concede that very quickly, and it certainly isn’t poetry, but the minutiae matter on their own. 

Postscript: As usual Noah Kaye seems to be ahead of me, sometime yesterday he posted on Takis Kayalis’s recent book Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities: History, Archaeology, Empire (2024) which includes a chapter on Cavafy’s “Caesarion.” I’m reading that chapter this morning with my coffee. 

Two Thing Tuesday: The Archive and Watts’ Blindsight

I’ve continued to think about AI over the last few months and especially the role of generative AI and large language models. Here are two slightly unhinged thoughts about it as a “Two Thing Tuesday”:

Thing the First

Historians are fascinated by archives and they often observe that historical discoveries (e.g. opportunities for knowledge making) occur not because the well-organized structure of the archive, but despite it. Accidental discoveries — like those described by Arlette Farge, Robert Darnton, and Carlo Ginzburg — shape our encounters with archival collections. These discoveries come about not because the careful organization of the archivists anticipate the questions of historians, but because historians can make distinct connections on their own that often belie the structure of the archive itself. 

As we become more and more familiar with the generative AI, we can’t help but notice the sometimes random associations of texts and ideas. At their worst, they manifest as hallucinations where names, ideas, places, and arguments belch forth as hopelessly garbled references or descriptions. Recently certain kinds of scholars have reveled in showing off historically and geographically inaccurate maps on social media demonstrating that they are smarter than generative AI because they know where Bremen is. What’s more interesting, of course, is that these maps represent wildly speculative geographies not generated from whole cloth, but algorithmically assembled from the massive archive underpinning the large language model. In other words, these maps — like hallucinated citations — are wrong because the algorithm has engaged incorrectly with the archive. 

This misengagement with the archive is familiar to most of us as historians (or archaeologists). It’s not uncommon for us to encounter texts or artifacts that lead us to tell a story, but as our assemblage of texts or material expands, we understand that story to be incomplete or even inaccurate. Archaeological notebooks are fully of what we might call hallucinations that dissipate as we read. Our alarm at the propensity of generative AIs to hallucinate is not so much because these are wrong, but because they are uncanny: they look right. Of course, this is always the risk of any engagement with any archive. 

What is more remarkable to me is not that generative AIs can produce bizarre hallucinations (I’ve worked too much with archaeological notebooks to be surprised when something looks right but, in fact, isn’t), but that it can genuinely find connections across the archive that we might not expect. This is largely because the generative AI can constantly adapts the structure of its archive. On the one hand, this is frustrating because it seems to undermine the very idea of an archive as stable and committed to preservation or at least consistency. On the other hand, this is brilliant because we can compel the archival organization to adapt to our inquiries, at least to a certain extent.

Noah Kaye, a friend and frequent commentator on my blog, noted that AIs are at their most spectacular when they find connections that surprise us even in the speculative geography or the hallucinated citations. These products reveal the contingency of the archive itself and the allusive and elusive nature of its shifting organization. 

Thing the Second

I read Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight (2006) this weekend on the recommendation of a colleague. Without spoiling it, it is a first-contact novel where a ship full of modified humans encounter an alien form that calls into question their notions of sentience and even life itself. The crew includes an individual with a partitioned mind that allows for multiple individuals, an individual whose capacities for vision, hearing, and dexterity have been massively expanded through prosthetic forms, a military officer, an observer whose job is to synthesize the experiences and report them back to Earth, and … a vampire. The ship, the Theseus, itself is controlled by an AI who communicates almost exclusively with the reclusive vampire who is the nominal (?) commander of the mission.

Without getting too far into the weeds (and most of the book has a distinctly weedy quality to it), the encounter with alien forms on their ship, the Rorschach, leads the crew of the Theseus to explore how their own forms of sentience shape their ability to apprehend and ultimately engage with the world. Whether the aliens ever qualify as sentient by human standard remains unclear. They certain learn from their environment and by the end of the novel our perform humans at certain things. The critique offered here is not subtle and remains timely. 

Blindsight anticipated the contemporary discussion of sentience and consciousness in relation to various forms of generative and agential AI. More than that, it reminds us that as we try to define what AI is, we invariably also define ourselves. Part of the genius of Blindsight is that the crew all negotiates various situations that in our contemporary we might consider “disabilities” (and here I’m drawing on my conversations with my colleague). Historically these disabilities — from multiple personalities to the reliance on prosthetics to the vampire’s vulnerability to right angles — have defined individuals as “less than” fully human. Peter Watts’s Blindsight suggests alternately that consciousness is what makes us human (and it was not compromised by disabilities) but also that our reliance on consciousness is a rather less efficient way to live. By the end of the novel, it’s become pure metaphor: in the final scenes, the ships AI devises a plan to dispatch the lobotomized narrator to Earth to tell the tragic story. It reduces the intriguing ambiguity of the narrative to a biological metaphor. Our “blindsight” (that is the ability of the unconscious brainstem to process even complex inputs like vision) protects our consciousness. The ship’s AI protects its more fragile, sentimental, and self-destructive occupants. There are shades of Iain Banks here. 

Archaeology of Oil

I was pretty excited to read a recent piece in Levant by Shatha Mubaideen, David Petts, John B. Winterburn, Ali al-Manaser & Tobias Richter and titled “Colonial-industrial heritage in Jordan: the case of the As-Safawi H5 pumping station.” 

I have to admit that I don’t read Levant very regularly but I mostly know it as a journal that focuses on the Ancient and, in a pinch, Medieval periods in the eastern Mediterranean. This article is not that. Instead, it focuses on a British Mandate oil pipeline pumping station Jordan at the site of H5 station near the modern village of As-Safawi in the Harrat Ash-Sham Black desert.

The pumping station was one of a series of similar stations along the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline constructed by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) between 1932 and 1934. This pipeline remained in use until 1948. The pump station was more than just the tanks and equipment necessary to allow the pipeline to function. In fact, the article deals relatively little with that element of the site. Primary to the article was the various buildings built to house engineers, supervisors, and other workers on the pipeline. The site was connected to larger settlements in Jordan and in the larger British Mandate Levant by an airfield (for airmail) and road needed to build and maintain both the station and the pipeline. A pipeline brought water from the Azraq oasis 50 miles to the south.

Mubaideen et al. go on to demonstrate how the H5 pump station is consistent with not only the investment in infrastructure characteristic of the British Mandate Levant (particularly, their growing interest in securing access to petroleum), but also reflects British interests in social, economic, and military control. The organization of the space in the H5 pump compound paralleled the social organization of the operation with senior officials having more spacious and luxurious accommodations, engineers having middle grade accommodations, and various workers necessary for the functioning of the pump-station and pipeline being given more modest rooms in what appear to be dormitories. The Bedouin would camp outside the walls of the compound and serve as security in keeping with the British Mandate’s practice of employing Bedouin as “desert police” who both projected government control into inhospitable terrain and protected Mandate infrastructure. In effect, the remoteness of the pump station made it a man-camp.    

One of the most interesting aspects of the site is that it had a lengthy afterlife as a military base and a research facility. Its location along transportation routes and the presence of an airfield (and water) contributed to the development of a village in the shadow of the pump station-cum-military base. This settlement ebbed and flow with the stability of the region; when the Iraqi border was open in the 1990s, it grew, when the various Gulf Wars closed the border, the settlement contracted.

This project recognized that the experience of the community living beside the pump station was crucial to understanding how this site functioned has modern heritage. Community members recalled inexpensive movie nights at the compound, for example, and the classroom at the camp in the 1970s. The town logo of As-Safawi features an Arab Legion police outpost constructed in conjunction with the pump station. 

This kind of article is more than significant for a journal like Levant. It speaks to the growing awareness that the archaeology of oil is crucial lens through which to study the modern world and the Levant and Near East in particular. This means documenting