New blogs on the block

About ten days ago, I attended a little function here at McGill to honor the teaching skills of my friend Stephen Chrisomalis, now an assistant professor at Wayne State University. The reception was held because Steve was awarded a McGill Arts Undergraduate Society Excellence in Teaching Award at McGill, where he worked until this summer.

And I have to say, it's richly deserved. Beyond being an original thinker whose archaeological research is strongly and profitably rooted in comparative approaches, Steve (who incidentally was my TA in my very first archaeology course when I started out as an impressionable BA student at McGill back in 19coughcough) approaches teaching with more enthusiasm than I've seen in pretty much anyone involved in academia and, with his 'Cartesian' mindset (i.e., non-linear, which I definitely mean as a compliment!), he has the knack of coming up with innovative ways to get archaeological and anthropological matters through to students in ways that are both innovative and grounded in easily relatable topics and forms of material culture. It's a rare ability indeed, and one that I envy quite a bit now that I've started teaching on something resembling a regular basis. Habitual readers of AVRPI may remember that I had mentioned his Dollarware Archaeology website a few months back. Well, not only does he have a couple more such websites (here, here and here) where he compiles information and papers produced by the students in some of his courses, one of these is the topic of a talk he recently presented on the social underpinnings of stop signs in Montreal.

And, for another 'not only', it was my great pleasure to see recently that Steve has started his own blog, Glossographia, since blogging and new media through which to communicate anthropology writ large to a broader audience was a topic which we often discussed last year, as I was starting my postodc at McGill. Now, you'll have to excuse him if he tarnished what is otherwise an outstanding blog by talking about yours truly in one post, but I highly recommend checking it out and commenting on his posts. You won't be sorry!

Now, I've added a link to Glossographia in the links section of this humble blog, so you have no excuse not to check it out. But, I also want to point out two recent additions to the blogroll: Publishing Archaeology, by Mike Smith (a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University - where I got my degree) who champions the causes of open-access publishing in archaeology and of how to disseminate archaeological literature as widely as possible (among other topics); and Middle Savagery, the brainchild of Berkeley PhD student Colleen Morgan, who devotes a lot of time and energy to how digital technologies can serve the needs and further the goals of archaeology and rendering accessible to a wider audience. Check out all three blogs, people! You'll come out of the experience a better person, if maybe one with slightly less free time.

Call for contributions - Four Stone Hearth #38

Back from the meetings in Vancouver, so back to teaching, back to writing, and back to posting. If you haven't already, you should most definitely check out the 37th installment of the Four Stone Hearth (Pulp SciFi Edition!) at Hot Cup of Joe. If this kinda stuff gets your gollies going, you should also most definitely consider submitting one of your own posts to me (julienrs at hotmail dot com), so they can be included in the 38th installment which will be hosted by yours truly here at A Very Remote Period Indeed. I've already gotten a few submissions, but in blogging as in experiencing new foods, more is always better!

Updates and clean-ups

At long last, I've added a few new links to my blogroll, and cleaned up some links that were either defunct or that hadn't been updated in over three months. And if you have an archaeology/ancient stuff-related blog that you'd like to be featured on A Very Remote Period Indeed please feel free to contact me and I'll try to include it in there if it's pertinent. Check out all the blogs I'm now linking to, but if you want to catch a glimpse of the soul of archaeology as a vocation (and some very nice photos related to this endeavor), then by all mean check out Metin Eren's new blog, The Real Eolith (love that name!).

Update (Jan. 31, 22:11): Now with updated links!

Northern nuts

As Martin reports at Aardvarchaeology, it would appear that some Canadian creationists are not satisfied with advocating their nonsense within the bounds of their country alone. Sigh.