Writing Wednesday: North Dakota Quarterly

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a contribution to the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine that focuses on North Dakota Quarterly. This has turned into a bigger project (in terms of length and work) than I expected, but is also an invigorating one (and, as “gestures wildly about” becomes more and more grim and depressing, this has served as a kind of distraction). 

Today, I’m posting the introduction (which is quite provisional!) and a brief note on method. 

Introduction

In 1909, president Frank McVey of the University of North Dakota allocated $500 for the publication of a university magazine: The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota. He did this in the first year of his term as president of the university and part of a wider trend toward professionalizing both the institution and its faculty. By supporting the creation of a campus magazine, he hoped not only to encourage faculty to publish, but also to provide an outlet for their work that would amplify the contribution of the university to the state and the nation. McVey became president of the University of North Dakota at a key moment in its history. The university was founded in 1883 in Dakota Territory and its first quarter century had been a challenging one. In 1889, Dakota Territory was split and two new states were admitted to the United States: North Dakota and South Dakota. North Dakota had only 190,000 residents and most of them resided in the eastern part of the state within ten or so miles of the Red River of the North. Overall the state had a population density of around 1 person per square kilometer. The arid steppes of the western part of the state supported only fragile agriculture organized around railroad towns which connected these communities to eastern depots, mills, and capital. The Red River “valley” which was technically the bottom of the dry proglacial, Pleistocene Lake Agassiz, offered the more fertile soils of the tall grass prairie, the convenience of the Red River of the North, and the rail connections to the east. This region supported larger “cities” including Grand Forks and Fargo. The University was in Grand Forks, which had a population of about 5000 residents and stood equidistant between Fargo to the south (which was the next large settlement) and the Canadian border to the north. The closest city to Grand Forks was Winnipeg some 150 miles to the north, but the the most important population center was the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul with a population of over a quarter of million people by 1900. Minneapolis-St. Paul was not only the capital of the neighboring state of Minnesota, but the economic, railroad, and cultural hub of the region known variously as the Northwest, the Northern Great Plains, The Northern Plains, the Upper Midwest or the Middle West (Rozum 2021; chapter 8). For convenience, this paper will refer to the region as the Northern Plains when describing the situation in North and South Dakota and Minnsota or the Midwest when describing the larger region which extends from the Appalachian mountains across the Great Plains of the American West.

This brief historical and geographic context helps situate The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota amid the emergence of regional and “little magazines” in the Midwest and Northern Plains and in the United States more broadly. As the following contribution will show, the history of the Quarterly Journal reflects the development of regionalism in an American context in three interrelated ways. First, the Quarterly Journal appeared alongside a boom in little magazines both nationally and in the region and while the Quarterly Journal had a decidedly more academic bent, it shared a concern for the state and the region as a object of attention. Second, the Quarterly Journal represents a process where regional voices, particularly the radical tradition and various strands of modernism, become institutionalized at universities and colleges. This process both deprived these voices of a bit of their radical edge, while also validating their call for progressive change both intellectually and ultimately politically in the region. Finally, the Quarterly Journal created space to negotiate the tension between regionalism and cosmopolitanism in an American context. Unlike purely literary journals which often left as tacit the tension between a distinctly regional voice and that of the literary establishment, the wide ranging topics in the Quarterly Journal, including interests in institutions, communities, the environment, and the economy, allowed authors to recognize the significance of the regional situation in explicit relation to the national and even global one.

A Word on Method

The first 23 volumes of the Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota represents 91 issues. Most issues were around 100 pages in length with a few shorter amounting to just under 9000 pages of text. These 9000 pages amount to around 3 million words. It was obviously impractical to read critically that many pages and words. Instead, I have extracted the author and title of articles using a combination of AI (Google’s Notebook LM) and manual extraction. This produced a table of 530 articles. Because the format of the issues changed over time and often had some inconsistency, this tally almost certain misses some articles and in some cases, articles with multiple authors appear more than one in the table. Whatever the table may lack in being comprehensive, I hope it makes up for in being representative of the kinds of articles published in the Quarterly’s first 23 volumes. Tabulating the articles in the magazine over this time allowed me to assign one or more themes to each article: education, social studies (sociology, political theory, demography, et c.), economics and business, governance and law, physical sciences and engineering, biology and health sciences, literature and the arts, history, and regional articles. Furthermore, this tabulation also allowed me to group issues by editor to observe certain trends and to identify the authors of various articles and mark them as either being affiliated with the university or not. Finally, I attempted to extract the short book reviews published in each volume. This amounted to an additional 620 contributions. This list is almost certainly incomplete and, as a result, I will only use it only sparingly in the following analysis.

Two on Survey Tuesday

Today’s my first day of class in the spring 2026 semester. So it seems like as good as time as any to reflect on some of the reading I did on my winter research leave. 

For whatever reason, there was a gaggle of survey publications that appeared during that time and while I’ve still not managed to process and think about them all, there are two that stand out as worthy of particular note.

First, John Bintliff and colleagues massive and impressive Boeotia Project, Volume III: Hyettos. The Origins, Florescence and Afterlife of a Small Boeotian City (2025). This kind of book will take a long time process and understand, but there are parts that stand out (to me, of course). Last week, I talked a bit about Athanasios K. Vionis, with Chrystalla Loizou’s chapter on “A household archaeology and history of Hyettos and its territory: the Byzantine to Early Modern pottery.” It’s good and useful.

I also found quite impressive John Bintliff’s appendix which surveyed the last 25 years of work related to both his manuring hypothesis and his work on “hidden landscapes.” It has a bit of a polemical edge which I found both entertaining (on a forensic level) and probably unnecessary. It will come as a shock to no one that he remains steadfast in his conviction that settlement halos derived from manuring near fields and the spread of domestic trash (notably ceramics) with the manure near the city. He is equally as unimpressed with efforts to complicate or challenge this theory. (Note: John generously responded to my previous post with a recommendation that I read his article on manuring from the Journal of World Prehistory (2023)). In particular, Bintliff found our hypothesis that the continuous carpet of artifacts in the Eastern Corinthia may represent a wide range of activities including short term habitation, building techniques that use sherds as chinking and temper (in mud bricks, for example), episodes of loss and breakage, as well as manuring, discard from towns, cities, and settlement, and post-depositional processes. He and I will likely have to agree to disagree on this (even if this makes me more of a contrarian than advocate for a productive alternative!) Bintliff’s insistence on a monocausal explanation for this material remains useful mainly as a clear hypothesis against which future projects can measure their ethnographic, material, and archaeological data. In the end, this debate continues (at least in the minds of those who prefer the more complicated explanations often afforded by diachronic assemblages and landscapes) because there isn’t a clear methodological or practical intervention that will resolve it. It remains an important consideration, however, for those who are interested in population size of ancient cities, carrying capacity of ancient landscapes, and the systemic cohesion of ancient agricultural (and social) practices. 

His argument for hidden landscapes offers a far more obvious pathway for methodological innovation. David Pettegrew, Dimitri Nakassis, and I have thought a good bit about this during our time directing and analyzing surveys. On EKAS, we noted that very small assemblages of, say, Ottoman material on the low visibility and steep slopes of Mt. Oneion hint at a more expansive Ottoman landscape than the continuous carpet of artifacts on the plain would suggest. These realizations led us to sample survey units at the Western Argolid Regional Project not simply on the basis of density (with an awareness that low density units in particular require more intensive collection strategies to produce meaningful samples of the surface), but also based on the character of the assemblages. For example, small assemblages of pottery with unusual diversity often recommend returning to those units with increased intensity.

Second, Alex Knodell, who has been on a roll lately, published a lengthy “survey” (pun vaguely intended) of recent work by survey archaeological projects in Greece. If Bintliff’s survey (I really can’t stop) focused on manuring and hidden landscapes, Knodell’s was more general. He offered some useful observations for the character of pedestrian survey both since 2000 and moving forward. 

Here are three of the highlights from his article (and these largely come in the final section since the article is rightly a summary of recent work by various projects).

First, the article really celebrates the diversity of methods which range from one person extensive survey to small intensive surveys to site based gridded collections. There was a time when a certain school of thought held saw and argued that if you weren’t going to do <2000 sq. m. units and 10 m spacing, just don’t bother. This time has passed. As To paraphrase Knodell, method isn’t theory and intensity does not guarantee accuracy.

One thing that does come out of this review of projects is that as survey has expanded it has become rather more estranged from excavation. Many (if not most) early second wave surveys had excavation components (or, more properly, sister projects). This close relationship between survey and excavation offers the potential of refined stratigraphic context for surface finds and the chronological benefits that these afford. Of course not all survey projects have the benefit of nearby excavations (ideally closely tied to the survey) and that isn’t a liability, necessarily, but as survey extends beyond the proximity of excavation, the limits of artifact level survey in terms of chronology and typology become more obvious. 

Finally, it was sobering to recognize how few surveys in the 21st century have produced definitive or “final publications.”  Some of this is understandable: a modern survey project might require as many contributors as an excavation (or even more if it is a diatonic survey) and this alone guarantees that nothing will take place quickly. Another aspect is that most survey projects engage with multiple research questions each with their own historiography and conventions meaning that not only are survey volumes long, but they’re also complex. Finally, we continue to be preoccupied with method and methodology. Whereas an excavation volume can often get by with a quick note that a project excavated stratigraphically, survey projects still work to unpack their methods, situate it within a methodology, and calibrate their results. This is a burdensome and boring kind of writing that rarely motivates authors.

There are some points that I would have liked to understand a bit better from Knodell’s review. While I admired his attention to the use of LiDAR and other remote sensing technologies, I wondered whether he discerned a change in the role the ethnography played in intensive and regional survey projects? Or to put it another way, how has remote sensing changed the relationship between the archaeologist, the landscape, and various communities?  

Music Monday: Big Bands and Shamanism

Today is the last day of my winter research leave and the eve of the first day of the new semester. It makes sense then to look backward (a bit) and forward in a mystical way.

I was pleasantly surprised to see two big band albums kicking around on various “best of 2025” lists and I have enjoyed both of them. 

The first is Tom Smith’s A Year in the Life. I don’t know much about Smith other than he’s a saxophone player, but the band is tight and particularly benefits from Jamie McCredie’s guitar playing. One review notes that at times, the band has a Thad Jones/Mel Lewis sound to it and I agree. But it isn’t just a throwback to the late-1960s big band sound. It has a vibe of its own and leans into contemporary jazz enough to encourage me to listen to it more than once! 

The other big band album that I’ve seen kicking around on lists is Interaction: 3 Cohens & WDR Big Band. The WDR Big Band is a German big band out of Cologne. I’ve listened to them from time to time, but they’re not really in my regular rotation. This album might just change that. The blend of traditional jazz styles (including rags!) and modern sensibilities is really nice. The band isn’t trying to reproduce some kind of vintage sound and plays with polished and contemporary sensibilities. The star of the show for me, though, is Anat Cohen’s clarinet. 

I’ll leave you with a couple more cuts from the album to give you a sense of its range:

Lest you think I’ve totally succumbed to the vigorous complexity of large ensemble jazz, I do still listen to edgier small ensemble improvised music. For example, I was enthralled by Berlin-based, Korean sax player Jung-jae Kim’s Shamanism. As with most improvised music, it is perhaps best to get a sense for it live:

Hearing the album, I recalled Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp, and Joe Morris’s album of the same name (on one of my favorite labels Chad Fowler’s Mahakala Music).

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It isn’t the first Friday of the new year (h/t to Dimitri Nakassis), but it is the first Varia and Quick Hits of 2026. We’re enjoying unseasonably warm weather here in North Dakotaland with highs soaring into the upper 20s (and even kissing the 30s). And I hope that this warmth stays with us (and with all my readers) into the new year.

This is a fun sports weekend with the semifinals of the college football playoffs already underway and the NFL Wildcard season about to kick off. I don’t hold out much hope for my Eagles, but I’ll watch anyway. The Sixers and my Mighty Spiders continue to amble though their seasons losing a few games that should probably win and winning some games that I think they should lose. It’s enough to keep me interested! 

The spring semester starts on Tuesday and my classes — Roman History, Western Civilization I, and the Practicum in Writing, Editing, and Publishing — are almost ready to go. This means that the happy shadow of my winter research leave is receding into blinding light of the oncoming semester.

It seems like a good time for quick hits and varia:

Public Domain Day 2026

One of the most exciting days of the year is Public Domain Day! On January 1 each year, works copyrighted 95 years prior enter the public domain. This means that anything published in the US in 1930 is now in the public domain!

Happy New Year!

For North Dakota Quarterly, this means the volume 20 is now available with no restrictions. You can enjoy the esteemed jurist Sveinbjor Johnson’s article on “The University and the State” Or these two poems dedicated to the memory of Carl Ben Eielson.

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Of course, there are plenty of other things to read from this year. John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, the first of his U.S.A. Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, or for more popular faire Dashiell Hammett’s, The Maltese Falcon or Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison. For those “Hellenically inclined” check out Thornton Wilder’s The Woman of Andros. For those who enjoy the more Gothic side of things, check out Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. 

If you’re into magazines, you probably already know that you can find the entire run of the New Masses (1926–1948) is available online, but now the 1930 volume in the public domain (which features unsurprisingly som John Dos Passos!). Volume 4 of Prairie Schooner from 1930 offers perspectives on a perennial question in Higher Ed, “Should Professors Think?” Or a later issue of The Midland which features these nice winter poems from Frederick ten Hoor in volume 16:

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Writing Wednesday: The Kiln, Come Context, and a Conclusion

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a paper about the kiln and production areas at Polis over my winter research leave. Most of the paper’s narrative and argument are done now and I’m working with my co-author, Scott Moore, on the lamp and ceramic catalogues.

So far, I’ve shared a section on a lamp deposit, a levigation pool, and a kiln. The following sections situate the ceramic production area in its context at the site and offer some tepid (and tentative) conclusions.

 

The Area and Historical Context

The kiln and levigation pool’s position along the east side of the north-south drainage running through the area of E.F2 represents only one feature in what was a bustling industrial district in the Roman period. Fifteen meters to the west stand another cluster of workshops and industrial installations. These workshops featured what appears to have been a furnace or hearth and several deep drains which may have been wells or cisterns. The presence of over 120 fragments of terracotta figurines including a mold suggests that terracotta manufacturing occurred in E.F2. The presence of iron slag in clay lined pits, chunks of lead, fragments of ochre and pigments, and stone bowls and crucibles provides additional evidence for a wide range of manufacturing in the area (Najbjerg 2012). Much like the kiln and later levigation pool, it appears that these installations saw nearly constant adaptation over a relatively short period of time during the Roman period. There are series of superimposed floor surfaces and the walls that indicate constant rebuilding especially along the eastern side of these structures and aligned, as if terrace walls, with the western slope of the drainage. The material from beneath the various superimposed surfaces is chronologically indistinguishable suggesting regular adaptation and reconstruction of the area during the Roman period.

The buildings along the eastern and western sides of the ravine are bounded to the south by an east-west road, the ”south road,” that ran across the contour of the hillslope. The road is paved with large stone slabs and has the remains of at least two drainage systems. One is a plaster lined channel that runs through the center of the road; the other features a series of terracotta pipes that run beneath the northern side of road and flow east to west. At Paphos, the terracotta pipes primarily seem to have served as drainage pipes, and it seems like that the channels and the pipes functioned to control the flow of water down the slope, through the natural drainage, and around the industrial installations in E.F2. Interestingly, the excavators at Paphos date most of the ceramic pipes in primary use to the 2nd century AD (with some 4th century examples in secondary use) (Romaniuk 2021, 371). The east-west road joins two north-south roads with one running to the west the workshops on the western side of the drainage and the other to the east of the levigation pool.

The ”eastern road” also features two sets of drains: one consisting of terracotta pipes cut in half and the other a plaster lined channel. The excavator argues that in this case, the terracotta pipes superseded the plaster lined channel which is cut into a level of rubble that probably served as the bedding for the road. The stratigraphy of the drains in both roads remains ambiguous as both the pipes and the plaster lined channel are both cut in the same rubbly layers beneath the road which appears to date no earlier than the 2nd century AD on the basis of a few ESA sherds beneath the terracotta pipes (T06.1990.L45). The presence of a few sherds of Late Roman pottery beneath the latest surface of the eastern road (T06.1990.L34) suggests that the modified terracotta pipes may date to that period. This would reinforce an interpretation that supposes the central location of the plaster line drain as contemporary with the road and the terracotta pipes a later, perhaps Late Antique addition. At some point, presumably later in the Late Antique period but before the construction of the basilica, a wall is built across the road. This wall sits atop a thin lens of Late Roman soil (T06.1990.L16 and L17).

The road running to the west of the workshops on the western side of the natural drainage, the “western road,” features two channels. It appears that an earlier channel ran along west side of the road. The construction of a monumental quadrifrons arch at the intersection of the western road and the east-west road interrupted this channel and a new stone lined channel was built to the west of the original routing water around the base of the arch.

These roads join at right angles indicating that the city of Arsinoe was organized on an orthogonal grid presumably when Ptolemy II Philadelphos refounded the city in the 3rd century BC. The workshops in this area appear to respect the grid at least until the Late Roman period when a wall interrupts the east road. The superimposed surfaces of “east road,” the installation of terracotta pipes on the “east road” and ”south road”, and the modification of the drains on the ”west road“ reflect their maintenance and adaptation as well as ongoing concerns for drainage. The orthogonal character of the roads in this area suggest that the workshops are well integrated into the organization of the urban center. At the same time, it seems unlikely that they were close to habitation as the smoke and noise from kilns, furnaces, and workshops would have made unpleasant neighbors. Their location along the northern edge of the city, however, would have provided access both the coast and the city as well as routes that availed themselves to the coastal plain. The position of the workshops near the coast and coastal plain would have situated them along coastal routes that transported copper ore through the region and given the workshops easy access to seaborne trade in raw glass. Presumably this would have also allowed the workshops to export their products.

Conclusion

Excavations by the Princeton Cyprus Expedition confirmed the existence of production along the northern edge of the city of Arsinoe. The presence of a ravine or drainage through this area introduced drainage problems and the lack of level ground combined to make it unsuitable for domestic or monumental construction. Instead, the area saw a series of continuously adapted industrial features including a kiln superseded by a levigation pool. While the date of the kiln remains unclear, the levigation pool appears to have been constructed in the 2nd century AD. The presence of a an assemblage of late series Cypriot Sigillata and cooking pots associated with the levigation pool provides a solid indicator of its date. It is tempting to see the date of the levigation pool as contemporary with the modification to the “south road” and the installation of a terracotta tile pipeline along its north edge, but this is speculation.

A more interesting argument involves the assemblage of lamps found mixed with Late Roman material in what we have argued in a leveling fill for the basilica. This group of lamps was distinct compared to lamps found elsewhere at the site and the presence of unlit lamps from the same mould further suggests local production. Moreover, the lamps appeared with 2nd century material that was both contemporary with and similar to that found associated with the levigation pool. This connection alone, of course, is insufficient to assign the lamps to the levigation pool, much less the kiln. That said, it remains an intriguing possibility that exists in the grey area between standards of archaeological proof and the broader domain of interpretation. It is interpretatively plausible to associate these lamps (along with the terracotta figurines) with production in this area of the city of Arsinoe even if the highest levels of evidentiary proof remains elusive.

Boeotia III: Some Unboxing Notes

Over the weekend, I spent about 10 hours with John Bintliff, Emeri Farinetti, and Anthony Snodgrass’s latest publication from their work in Boeotia from 1978-2001: Boeotia Project, Volume III: Hyettos. The Origins, Florescence and Afterlife of a Small Boeotian City (2025). 

It is massive (700+ pages), dense (in two columns!), and it is also open access! In fact, you can download it here. Funny story: I was so excited to get a copy, that when I saw people buzzing about it on social media, I ordered a paper copy before I knew that I could just download it. Do I regret this. No. 

I had the vague idea that I could spend 10 or so hours with this book and that might be enough for a preliminary review. It turns out that I was mistaken. That said, I think that I have enjoyed the volume enough to do the equivalent of an product “unboxing” where I can offer a few preliminary observations.

1. Modify and Adapt. If I were going to write a formal, published review of this book, the first thing I would do is hyperlink the living daylights out of the it. For example, the best description of sites is in “Chapter 4: The analysis of the Hyettos rural landscape (ii): the CN rural sites” where Bintliff and Farinetti describe and interpret each site in some detail. These sites are then discussed throughout the volume in different contexts and by different authors. As the book is downloaded, it is difficult to move between the original description of the site and later analysis. The internal link would solve this beautifully. 

I was tempted (for a moment) to see whether I could easily modify the book to allow a reader to move more easily between sections. Then I noticed that the book was published with a ND license and technically my modifications would violate this license. Of course, I could do it anyway, but I suspect that if the authors publish a book with a restrictive license like this, they are not inclined to entertain modifications.

2. Published Data. As readers of my blog know, I am very interested in how projects publish data. It was exciting to see the Boeotia project published their ceramic data as simple .xlsx downloads here. (They also published their data on architectural fragments here). This data appears to not have any license associated with it which makes it tempting to think of ways to allow the reader to integrate it more tightly with the volume. With the vast number of online data presentation and publication platforms available, it seems pretty easy to create a way to link specifically to particular datasets (say, site data) as well as making the entire dataset available. 

3. Sites. The Boeotia survey pioneered offsite survey not only by collecting data at scale, but offering arguments for why this data matters. Foremost among these arguments it the (in)famous manuring hypothesis which suggests that offsite halos around settlement reflect the scatter of trash associated with the spreading of manure into market gardens around more dense settlements. Alternately, the halo could represent lower density settlement and activity areas surrounding a core settlement. The relatively lower density and shorter term occupation would lead to lower density ceramic scatters that appear archaeologically in very similar ways to manuring especially as they are likely to contain similar assemblages of household ceramics.

The Boeotia project also continued to sample higher density assemblages in the landscape at a higher level. These are areas that exceeded the surrounding density to such an extent that they plausibly represent higher intensity activity areas in the past. By sampling these areas more intensively, the survey teams produced a more robust sample of artifacts and a better relative measure of site densities. This allowed them to discern where densities “fall off” around the borders of the site and return to the level of background scatter and to speak more directly to the function of activities at the site. The functional cohesion of the various period assemblages and the continuity of densities creates a compelling argument for these sites as actually existing as activity areas in the past rather than as the accidental or incidental overlap of lower density scatters. In short, the sites documented by this project are convincing.

4. Early Byzantine Pottery, Assemblages, and Settlement. Finally, I was pretty excited to  read Athanasios K. Vionis, with Chrystalla Loizou’s chapter on “A household archaeology and history of Hyettos and its territory: the Byzantine to Early Modern pottery.” The thing that immediately caught my eye was their discussion of Early Byzantine pottery — particularly handmade and slow-wheel made wares. What’s distinct about their discussion is that they do not simply identify random sherds in offsite scatters, which are a rare, but not unexpected occurrence in areas with long settlement history, but they are able to identify assemblages that include amphora, flat bottomed pitchers (or juglets) and even some burnished brown table wares. While the number of sherds remains small, the diversity in the assemblages is perhaps sufficient to define persistent settlement during these often shadowy centuries.

My interest in this is two fold. First, as readers of this blog know, I’m puttering away on publishing the a more fulsome treatment of the “Slavic” (or better Early Byzantine pottery) from Isthmia and I’ve very recently agreed to write a chapter on the economy of the Early Byzantine countryside (with emphasis, I suspect, on Greece and Cyprus). The traces of evidence for this period are quite scant and the appearance of a cluster of sherds that suggest a domestic assemblage is meaningful indeed.

There is much more to say about this volume and there is a good chance that a longer, more detailed review will appear on this very blog in the near future.

Music Monday: Some New Music in the New Year (and one old album)

I’ve been surfing the various year end lists to find albums that I missed when they came out this year. This year, I did a pretty good job keeping abreast of new releases, but there are always a few that catch me.

First, I think the Guardian list named Michael Wollny’s album Living Ghosts their album of the year in 2025. It is a great album and whether it was the best album to drop this year is less relevant to me than the sheer pleasure I have had listening to it. 

Check it out here. 

I’m also enjoying Jaleel Shaw’s 2025 release, Painter of the Invisible. I think I discovered this on DownBeat‘s year end review.  I’ve known Shaw in some ensembles (including Nduduzo Makhathini, In the Spirit of Nu (2022) which I very much enjoyed), but I haven’t known him as a solo artist (and from what I can gather he’s released relatively few albums as leader). Anyway, the album is very enjoyable and lyrical without necessarily pushing any limits. His alto saxophone feels very much, of the moment where technical flamboyance has given way to lyrical command and tone.   

Along similar alto saxophone lines, but from a very different time and place, check out Hank Crawford’s Help Me Make it Through the Night (1972) on Creed Taylor’s Kudu imprint of his CTI label. “Ham” is a bit of an Allstar outing with Grover Washington Jr. on tenor, Pepper Adams on baritone, Eric Gale in guitar,  Airto Moreira on drums, Idris Muhammad on piano and Ron Carter on bass. The rest of the album featured more common Kudu arrangements and musicians and that means STRINGS.

I’ve been thinking about doing a deep dive into the Kudu label sometime this year, and if you enjoy this album, you’ll know why.

Photo Friday

I bought myself a totally random gift with some Christmas money (which is apparently still a thing in our house). 

I got a Sigma DP2 Quattro mostly because it’s profoundly weird and flawed. It refused to take good photos in low light (below, say, ISO 800 and even at 400 it’s dodgy). Its white balance is bizarre at best. It takes forever to write to its memory card and its autofocus is more a general suggestion than a precise instrument. I get about 50 shots from a battery. On top of that, it looks like a early-1990s mobile phone and is difficult to use without pushing a random button.

On the other hand, the camera has a FOVEON SENSOR (which I’m guessing is related to the Greek word for FEAR). This sensor is low contrast, but incredibly sensitive to color and light. There are those who feel like it is very close to film (which is the audiophile equivalent of saying a DAC sounds like vinyl or a solid-state amplifier sounds like tubes). Others praise the colors it produces and how it captures shading and tone. 

Most admit that taking photos with a Sigma camera forces you to slow down. Since a battery only offers 40 or 50 shots, each shot takes about 20 seconds to write to the memory card, and the camera is bizarrely designed, it requires a bit of thought before using it and despite being digital, it will not offer immediate rewards, especially if you have to process the photos using the primitive Sigma Photo Pro application (which is necessary for Sigma’s proprietary X3F . It is effectively the opposite of my Ricoh GRIII which is the quintessential point and shoot.

As an aside: it turns out that slowing done on a walk in the park when it’s -3° F isn’t as therapeutic as I had envisioned. That said, there will be warmer days and I’m looking forward to my leisurely strolls through the village in Cyprus and Greece. 

I’ve only had the camera for a few days and I’m still trying to figure out how to take good photos with it, but I’m having fun. My plan is to get some monochrome images from the Sigma before my photography habit (cough, discipline) succumbs to the new semester. 

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New Year’s Goals

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but I do think that the end of a calendar year is a good time to reflect on what I can do better, more, or differently. Even if these musings only inspire a moment of reflection, then I think they’ve more or less served their purpose.   

My goals last year were things like play more chess (which I think that I managed to do: I played just under 800 games of chess on chess.com and Lichess in various formats (5 minute blitz games, 10+5 games, 3 Day games, and even some “bullet” games, just for fun). I started writing more in my notebook. I exercised consistently. And I finished my Bakken book. I tried to do more for others, which in hindsight is probably not something that I should designate a resolution.

In 2026, I have two routine goals.

1. Write 100 Notebook Entries.  Last year, I managed about 65 and felt like there were times when I wanted to write and had things to write, but for some reason just didn’t do it. I think that 100 is within easy reach. After all, it’s just two per week right? 

Beyond the nice round number, I feel like 100 entries will be enough for me to figure out whether writing regularly in a notebook will help me become a better writer and thinker. My biggest concern is whether short, thoughtful writing exercises, like a notebook promotes will help me refine my writing in ways that longer, more relaxed, and digitally mediated exercises don’t.

2. Take Photos. I don’t really keep track of how many photos I take, but I know that I sometimes grow lazy and don’t carry my camera with me when I’m out on walks, I’ve struggled to make time to work on some interior photographs (which I have planned for a little photo essay), and I don’t necessarily take photographs with any sense of discipline. As a result, I accumulate random snapshots, poorly composed pictures, and sometimes go days without using a camera. This, of course, isn’t the recipe for becoming a better (or more satisfying) photographer.

There are two specific goals:

3. Finish PKAP II. This manuscript is killing me. This is the second volume documenting my work with David Pettegrew and Scott Moore at the sites of Pyla-Koutsopetria and Pyla-Vigla on Cyprus. At some point around 2014, we had 75% of the volume complete … and then it stalled. It stalled for a many reasons: I started working at Polis and in the Western Argolid; some of our authors enjoy fieldwork more than writing; David and I started editing the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology; Scott became a Distinguished Professor; David and I worked together to publish EKAS, and so on. Over the last two years, we’ve managed to close the gap to about 95%. We’re waiting on ONE contributor who has promised us her chapter “by the end of the month” (which month was not entirely clear, but a promise is a promise). We have the rest of the bits and bobs in place. We have to finish this now.

4. Get North Dakota Quarterly on more sound financial footing. As readers of this blog know, the University of Nebraska Press pulled the carpet out from under NDQ at the end of the summer forcing us to scramble to raise money for a subvention to keep our relationship with that press. This wasn’t a great situation, but things like this happen. Publishing is a proverbial “frog eat frog” business. I’ll post a longer note on this later in the year.

Things are still in flux for the Quarterly, although I feel confident that we have at least two more years of issues ahead of us. My goal is to get NDQ funded through volume 100 and then some time between volume 95 and 98 step aside as editor so that someone else can shape the Quarterly knowing that they have a stable funding situation.   

There are two larger “big picture” goals:

5. More Discipline, Less Habit. Over the last year, I’ve found myself becoming pretty habitual with things. I write my blog, I exercise, I play chess, I read stuff, keep on top of my classes, and try to be a good departmental citizen. My abiding concern is that some of this has become just habit. In other words, I’m doing stuff because it’s the stuff I do.

Most days, routine involves playing a listless game of chess or moving my legs on my indoor bike just to do exercise (rather than with a plan on improvement or even enjoying the moment). It’s here that any sense of discipline lapses and instead routine takes over. I want more days where I do things intentionally and fewer where I just shuffle through my routine. 

6. Community. Our department has been going through a rough spot lately. I think it was prompted by a combination of new blood and the disappointment that comes when expectations elevate ever so slightly. To be clear, new blood and elevated expectations aren’t bad in and of themselves, but sometimes our eagerness for change outpaces the capacity of institutions and colleagues to change. As a result, things get tense and community breaks down.

This year, I’m going to think more about community and how we can create a department, institution, classroom, and society that feels more committed to each other than to some kind of ideal, goal, or outcome. I’m not entirely sure what this will involve in practice, but I am very certain that it will involve listening more than I speak (never an easy thing for a middle-aged dude), not looking for problems to solve (and indulging my savior complex), but for opportunities to celebrate, and keeping my fucking head down. 

Happy New Year, everyone!