Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Someone once recommended to me that as an academic, you should always have three projects going: one is a project that is almost done (or deep in the writing phase), one is a project that is just getting started, but has a clear outcome in mind and trajectory, and one project that is speculative and emergent without a clear goal, trajectory, or tidy research focus.

This summer at Polis, I’m working on a writing project (and with any luck, I’ll have something to share on Writing Wednesday) that focuses on the draft of the article on the kiln that I worked on over the winter. Most of what this is right now is integrating the catalogue with the arguments that we’re making. As part of this, we need to expand the catalogue by adding the analysis of a few objects that we hadn’t formally described. Of particular interest to us are the handful of pot stands found in contexts associated with the kiln and the later pool. These stands probably supported vessels that were “leather hard” and awaiting firing. They must be local production; it is improbable that there was a trade in pot stands. As a result they represent local fabrics and their size might give us some idea of the kinds of pots being produced at the site. We have argued that there was likely some lamp production in the area. This would not require pot stands nor a levigation pool the size of the one present in the second phase. The pot stands tell us that other kinds of vessels — most likely cooking pots or other utility wares — were produced here.

While we’re doing this, we have our next project on the horizon. My colleague Scott Moore and I have been slowly developing a provisional catalogue of Roman lamps from the site. Since there is a lamp deposit associated with the kiln area that gave us a running start. Comparing the lamps found near the kiln (albeit at a higher level) and those found elsewhere at the site required us to expand some of the preliminary analysis of these objects. The next step is to extend our analysis to all the Roman lamps from Polis. This is a bigger job, but manageable over the next season.

The larger future project is publishing the North Basilica. This is a complicated undertaking, but one that begins with notebooks, stratigraphy, and context pottery. A very tentative plan is to start the process of analyzing the notebooks and do some dives into the context pottery boxes to see what we’re up against. The first step might be to determine whether we should produce a Roman and Late Roman pottery volume and whether the material from E.G0 offers a complement to the material from E.F1 and E.F2. This would obviously be a significant pivot, but we certainly have enough stratified deposits and a diverse enough assemblage of material to produce something significant.

The key thing about all three of these writing projects is that they benefit immeasurably from being here in Polis.

Music is key to my archaeological process especially since so much of the fussy work of archaeology is relentlessly boring. 

Fortunately, there is more than enough good music in the world.

I have been charmed by Alan Braufman’s recent revival. His most recent album, Anthem for Peace (2026) includes Patricia Brennan on vibes, Chad Taylor on drums, and Luke Stewart on bass.

This has drawn me back to Wendell Harrison’s work from the 1970s. His debut album An Evening with the Devil (1972) released on his and Phil Ranelin’s Tribe Records label is a wonderful statement of 1970s spiritual and loft jazz.

It anticipates the iconic and powerful A Message from The Tribe (1972):

I am still pretty jet lagged and waking up at odd hours and not getting very good sleep. 

That said, I did manage to take a walk with my little Ricoh camera yesterday morning in Larnaka and took some decent, if cliche and moderately uninspired photographs. But it’s a start.

I’ve finally reached the end of an exhausting semester and a good and productive year. My teaching has continued to change and I continue to learn things about my students and my own approaches. 

Here are three things that I learned this year.

1. Classroom Contingency. When I first taught Roman history again after nearly 20 years out of the loop, the class went remarkably well. The students read voraciously and discussed things vigorously. The papers were good and the classroom environment was exciting. Last year, when I taught History 101: Western Civilization I in the spring, the class met for 75 minutes starting at 12:30. It was a dumpster fire. The students were uninterested, didn’t engage in the work, and the class basically became triage.

This semester, the same Western Civilization class at the same time was remarkable. The students were engaged and excited and interested and personable. My Roman history class, in contrast, felt flat and disengaged. The students didn’t seem to want to read and they seemed unhappy when they did.

What this reminds me is to be patient with my classes (and myself) and recognize that in classes of less than 100 students, a handful of students have the potential to transform how a class responds. I will refine some things next semester, but I probably won’t make wholesale changes.

2. The Rise of AI. I was feeling pretty cocky that my classes didn’t manifest much in the way of rampant AI usage even as recently as this fall. In the spring semester, this all changed. My students in History 101 had to be reminded weekly that the goal of the class was not to teach them how to use AI to write essays and generally, they got it — reluctantly (after all learning is hard) — and ramped down their AI usage to background levels.

My upper level Roman history class, however, showed a willingness to lean heavily on AI. The results were, at times, impressive and at times, disappointing. In general, language was more polished and refined, papers were better organized, and generally hewed closer to the assignment. On the other hand, of course, it’s harder to know whether the students have invested much of themselves in the work. If the pundits are right and the rise of AI is inevitable, we can either become absolutist and ban it in our classes. Or we can adapt to it and find ways to help students retain their control over the writing within the confines introduced by AI. After all, all college writing has constraints on it: deadlines, paper length, prompts, instructional rubrics, and topics. Word processors, Bluebooks, typewriters, dictionaries, spell-checks, grammar-checkers, encyclopedias (wikipedias), the interwebs, ballpoint pens, and other tools have created affordances that shape the character of student work in the past, and we will certainly encounter new technologies in the future.

The question for me is whether it’s worth a pivot now or just wait until I see how this plays out.

3. Student Tensions. What is more and more interesting (and I think tragic, in some ways) is the growing tension between students being pushed to conform to a compliance based learning model where the goal is to fulfill requirements and students being genuinely interested, excited about learning, and wanting more engaging, deeper, and “authentic” experiences. 

For example, this semester, I offered a 1-credit reading course focused on Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution. Students showed up every Thursday at 7 am to talk about the book. They were interested and excited about it (even when it bored or frustrated them!). At the same time, more and more students have admitted that this or that class doesn’t fit their schedule not because they don’t have time, but because their interest doesn’t align with the growing list of requirements. This saddens me in part because even our best students are being pushed to do things not because they understand them, but because their schedule dictates certain requirements.

Now, I’m not naive and I know students will sometimes allow their worst tendencies to influence their judgment and to maybe find paths of least resistance. On the other hand, many of the students who tell me that they can’t fit this or that into their schedule are the kinds of students who want to dig deeper and challenge themselves. 

Writing acknowledgements is always gratifying if a bit bitter-sweet. For me, at least, it marks the end of a project and I get more joy from the doing than the having. Yesterday morning, I wrote the acknowledgements for my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota and submitted the revised draft to the press.

I was happy to acknowledge to all the people who contributed in various, often subtle ways to this project. 

Acknowledgements

I wrote most of this book as my dad became ill. He got me interested in photography when I was a younger. He took me to buy my first camera, my first digital camera, and mentored me as much as I was willing to listen. At some moment in my life and with the help of my colleagues, I became an adequate technical photographer and the photographs in this volume are a testimony to that adequacy.

As my dad’s health failed I started to take more photographs on my daily walks in a local park and around the house. While the photos in this book are deliberate in a technical sense, they lacked any self-conscious awareness of photography as craft. My recent photographs, in contrast, have sought to capture something more than technical details. Photographer John Holmgren introduced me to the phrase “make photographs” in the Bakken. I now try to “make photographs” even if the photos in this book are merely taken. As I finished this book, I came to realize that my shift to more deliberate photography represents a kind of embodied memorial to my dad. My attention to light, the fussing with camera settings, the framing of objects and scenes, and my posture all served to commemorate my dad through how I move, look at the world, and ”make photographs.”

This book would not have been possible without the collegiality, friendship, and support of the members of the North Dakota Man Camp Project: Bret Weber, Richard Rothaus, and Kostis Kourelis. Photographers Kyle Cassidy, John Holmgren, Richard Rothaus, and Ryan Stander all showed me how they made photographs. Richard Rothaus, in particular, shared his love of cameras with me and helped me think about photography more than he realizes in our walks around the village of Ancient Corinth, with our cameras at the hottest time of the day. Kostis Kourelis brought the technical vocabulary of an architectural historian and the careful eye of an archaeologist to my work and always encouraged me to stick with the evidence while also framing the project more broadly and thoughtfully. Bret Weber talked to people. He conducted the interviews in Appendix I and made sure that our enthusiasm for material culture did not overshadow the human element our work. Aaron Barth, Carenlee Barkdull, Sebastian Braun, Kyle Conway, and Ryan Low shared insights at various points in this project and Ryan allowed me to present my work in his class. My friends and colleagues on the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory (CHAT) standing committee and who presented at CHAT conferences inspired me to write this book. Jacqueline Senior and Dan Etches Jones at BAR encouraged and supported my work and expressed appropriate and productive skepticism. My colleagues in the department of History and American Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota and in our faculty writing group created a conducive and supportive space for writing during some very difficult semesters.

My wife, Susan Caraher, has stood by and watched me work on this strange project with her usual patience and support. I wish I had shared more about it with her as I wrote and I’m sure it would have been better for it. Our dogs, Argie and Milo, have listened to me talk at them and Argie has learned to stop when I am fussing with my camera.

It goes without saying that the problems with this book and its limitations are my own. The book has many of them, but I do hope that it is still useful to some people who are interested in bringing an archaeologist’s eye to the contemporary world.

This book is about photography and as I finished the book, my dad passed away. My dad taught me to be curious and tried to convince me to slow down and look carefully at things. I’m not sure my dad would have enjoyed this book or the photographs. That said, the work of writing this book, thinking about photography, and taking photos while I wrote, however, helped me to connect with my memories of him even as he was slipping away. In that way, this book brought me closer to him and to honor that I dedicate this book to his memory.

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).

I’m on the road this week and that means I’m loading up some music for long days in the airport and longer nights in the air. I have a long tradition of putting albums on my phone and when I decide to listen to some music finding nothing that I like. It’s annoying and predictable.

I want to continue to my dive into the Miles Davis discography with two classic expressions of Miles electric period: Bitches Brew and Live-Evil. I’ve blogged about both recently and found the 1970 Cellar Door sessions particularly exciting once I managed to wrap by head around them.

I’ve enjoying a couple newer albums. Chris Potter’s latest Alive with Ghosts Today is very enjoyable. I’ve never loved Bill Frissell, but who doesn’t love Nate Smith on drums. Rane Moore is fantastic on clarinet and Potter does Potter things on sax. You can listen to a lot of the album here. Here are a few tracks:

I also learned that [Ahmed] released a new album this week: Play Monk. I’ve blogged about them before. This album is a celebration of Monk and if you like [Ahmed] you’ll like this album:

I always was taken by Ben Wendell’s latest album BaRcoDE (2026). What makes this album special is Joel Ross, Patricia Brennan, Simon Moullier and Juan Diego Villalobos on vibes and other percussion do something magical to Wendell’s sax. This feels like travel music to me more than the other stuff. There’s a good chance that I’ll listen to this. 

To end where I started — with Miles Davis — I might listen to Cassandra Wilson’s Traveling Miles (1999) which feels like a nice traveling companion if there’s ever been one.

And maybe I will pair it was Gabrielle Cavassa’s new album Diabola (20260.

It’s finally feeling like spring here in North Dakotaland. The grass is getting greener, the trees are just starting to bud, and neighborhoods smell like mulch. 

The Sixers lurch the inevitable end of their season at the hands of the Knicks while the Phillies continue their resurgence after an epic early season slump. Saturday’s big fight between Daniel Dubois and Fabio Wardley should be interesting even if the winner might not have the aura of recent heavyweight champs like Joshua, Fury, or Usyk. I probably won’t watch the fight though.

Over the last few weeks, my web surfing has been intermittent for lots of reasons, but I have been keeping a little gaggle of links to share. This will likely be my last gaggle of the academic year  and I apologize for my rather desultory list of quick hits and varia:

• Pasts Imperfect.
• Blackwashing the Greek Past
• Brian Eno on burnout.
• A Summer Day in Detroit.
• Kind words from Noodling.
• Would it be too crass to imitated Neville Morley’s Day in the Year?
• What I’m reading: Astrid Van Oyen’s The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family (2020)
• What I’m listening to: Jason Moran, Blankfor.me, Marcus Gilmore, Shards (2026).

I have inherited by dad’s Nikon D600 and I put on it a 50 mm f/1.8 Nikor lens that I spent a few years trying to get him to use (and failed). It’s been fun to shoot with a DSLR again after years using mirrorless cameras. I’ve been looking at Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home (1992) and would have loved to do more with that while both my parents were alive. For now, I’m trying to blend it with Todd Hido’s House Hunting (2001).

Here are a few shots.

It’s the end of a long, hectic semester, and it is time for a University of North Dakota story. Stories like these, that are passed down from generation to generation, are part of what makes our campus a special place:

Many years ago — some say the 1950s others the 1920s or 1930s or even the 1970s or 1980s (or even 1880s!) — there was a man called Ray Pospisil. He worked in the registrar’s office. Toward the end of every semester, he would make the announcement at that final grades could now be submitted and were due at a particular date.

This was usually with some fanfare: the ringing of the campus bells, a “huzzah” from the students and faculty as the news of the announcement would course across campus; some would raise a celebratory glass at the moment. Almost instantly, pre-printed flyers would appear around campus naming the location of student parties and dances. Throughout the day, people would wish one another a “happy Ray Pospisil day!” and the campus would embrace a celebratory mood that belied the stress and anxiety of the finals to come.

When the internet age arrived the administration saw fit to make a gesture to the original Ray Pospisil and the celebrations associated with his end-of-the-semester announcement. Today, the email that makes known that final grade rosters are ready comes from an account named “Ray Pospisil.” And, thus, the administration has preserved the shadow of a campus tradition into the 21st century. Today there are fewer “huzzahs” and the bells are silent, students no long plan parties for the day or wish each other well. But in a few campus buildings where some older faculty work and teach, there is the quiet ripple of applause (and maybe a draught of coffee, water, or whatever one keeps in one’s bottom drawer) to mark this moment.

Campuses are full of little traditions. These don’t get inscribed in glossy alumni magazines or touted on recruitment websites. They trace lines that course through both the public life of campus and extend deep into the undercommons. Ray Pospisil Day is a minor tradition — one that an updated email system or a new provost or some flashy new marketing priority could wipe away — but faculty and staff maintain it quietly without fanfare to show that they remember people who did meaningful work and embed these memories into the annual rhythm of the academic year.

Over the few weeks, I’ve been writing an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. The appendix is a brief summary of our work in the Bakken grounded in our publications for a reader who might not be entirely familiar with our work and who might want a more firmer grounding in a traditional archaeological narrative. Here’s part 1, part 2, part 3, and below is the fourth of four parts.

III.4: Conclusions

The North Dakota Man Camp Project witnessed significant changes over the five years worth of time spent traveling, visiting, and documenting workforce housing in the Bakken. As I have already noted, by then, some of the most visible temporary and improvised Type 3 camps, such as the famous Walmart parking lot camp, had already vanished and the small Type 3 camps like the one described in section 3 had become rare. This reflects the steady growth in the number of beds in the Bakken region in hotels, Type 1 and Type 2 camps, and new housing starts (Caraher et al. 2017, 269; Caraher and Weber 2020, 292; Hodur et al. 2022). By 2014, the demographic boom that had shaped the Bakken region had begun to subside (Conway 2020) and housing pressure released (albeit with persistent complications: Gershenson et al. 2024). As early as 2014, our fieldwork had begun to reveal changes to the material conditions present in workforce housing sites. As a way of concluding this appendix, this section looks to manage the tension between local responses to the boom and the fragmented reality that the region experienced as the specter of a bust came into view.

In 2012, a stay at Capital Lodge near Tioga, a large Type 1 camp, required an involved registration process, payment by wire transfer, and detailed check in. The camp was bustling, the parking lot full of trucks, the dining hall crowded at breakfast and dinner, and the food options plentiful and diverse. In 2015, when we returned, the camp was nearly empty, the dining hall quiet, the registration and check-in process simplified. It ceased operation later that year and after a few failed attempts to get the area rezoned for a hotel, the camp was dismantled leaving only the inflatable quonset hut, broken PVC piping, piles of pressure treated lumber, and the forlorn gatehouse remaining. Elsewhere in the region, the large Type 1 camps that lined US 85 on its route into Williston have similarly vanished leaving only footprints behind. Those within Williston city limits sought to avoid a September 1, 2017 deadline for their removal through a series of lawsuits, but this merely delayed the inevitable. In 2015, the abortive Great American Lodge, financed by a Ponzi-scheme, sat unopened with towels resting on the feet neatly made beds and a well appointed dining hall still awaiting new guests. A year later, workers were removing the units for transportation to new sites elsewhere. Finally, the “stackables” at the eastern border of Mountrail county by 2015 and a visit in 2016 showed signs of squatting. By 2018, the stackables were gone. Today, most of these sites remain unoccupied and those around Tioga, for example, have not returned to agricultural use.

Type 2 camps likewise showed a contraction. Some of the more remote camps, such as the ragtag Type 2 that developed amid the abandoned town of Wheelock disappeared as early as 2013. The dry camp north of Alexander, where we met the fisher, had a few mobile homes installed in 2013 and by 2015, the camp was largely abandoned. Today it is a storage lot for hay and farm equipment. The camp that had taken over the lots around the old school at Ross, North Dakota, between Stanley and Tioga was bustling between 2012-2014 before slowly contracting and disappearing by 2018. A 84-lot camp to the north of the rail line that bisects Ross showed a pattern of decline typical of larger Type 2 camps. The camp opened in 2013 financed by investors from Arizona and operated by a manger from Georgia. By December 2014 showed signs of RVs being pulled out in the dead of winter leaving behind an outline of skirting and exposed PVC sewage pipes. By March 2015, the camp was even more run down with entire mudrooms sitting in lots exposed to the elements where the trailer had been removed (Caraher and Weber 2013, 101). In two short years, the general state of the camp declined with more trash, abandoned lots, and more weathered and damaged units. MC11, documented in the photographs in this book, represents a more gradual decline characteristic of the larger camps closer to larger towns. It opened in 2012 and could accommodate nearly 300 units. Over the next five years, its fortunes ebbed and flowed as the previous section showed. Changes in ownership, in management, and in occupancy rates shaped the character of the camp. In the winter of 2013/2014, the camp suffered when the septic and water system froze leaving residents without water or toilets for over a week. By 2014, s interview with camp employees (see Appendix I) showed, there was less talk about community and more a the trash, vehicles, human waste, and drug paraphernalia left behind. Residents and employees also observed that some of the community oriented activities that occurred in previous years had declined in the camp. There were no more children’s movie nights, craft bees, and fewer casual conversations in the the camp. There were more vacant lots, more RVs with eviction notices on them, and more abandoned cars, RVs, and mudrooms.

The material conditions at the various man camps offers evidence for the Bakken “bust.” The empty lots, eviction notices, and shifting concerns toward abandonment, waste, and post-boom strategies would appear to mark a point in trajectory from boom to bust. At the same time, counter narratives existed. Residents and camp managers, for example, continued to express a sense of optimism that we called “Bakktimism” (Caraher et al. 2020: 300). In this narrative, the bust is illusory or temporary and the situation of the moment whether captured in a photograph, an interview, or a description in a notebook does not provide evidence for a larger trend. The willingness to fragment the present and to contend that it need not fit into a trajectory required by our commitment to a boom/bust cycle demonstrated in practical, everyday terms, the contingent instability of the contemporary.

This past week involved a good bit of travel and this meant that I had some time to read in flights and in airports. I spent a good bit of that times with Caroline Cheung’s recent-ish book on Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome and Empire of Wine (2024).

The book is good. It manages to thread the needle between a dry-as-dust study of dolia as containers and a more sophisticated analysis of the role of these massive vessels in shaping Roman society and economy. In a perfect world, I maybe would offer a thorough review of this book, but I just don’t have the bandwidth to do that so I’m going to focus on a few interesting points.

1. Containerization. There is something unapologetically modern about this term (and anyone who has studied the rise of the shipping container and the pallet as the manifestation of units that shape our everyday lives), but Cheung’s book demonstrates how it likewise applied to the use of dolia in the 1st century BC/AD. Particularly relevant was the clear relationship between the volume of dolia and transport amphora which was sometimes marked on the sides of the vessels. The size of dolia, in turn, shaped the size of wine cellars and storerooms. The most remarkable manifestation of this — one which echoes modern containerization concerns — is the wine tankers built around a series of massive dolia cemented into the hull of a specially constructed ship.

2. Storage Strategies. Cheung does a nice job connecting the rise in the use of dolia with new strategies of production. In particular, she contrasted the strategies in Italy where even larger farms had relatively small numbers of dolia when compared with the farms in Spain and Gaul where wine production occurred at a massive scale. In fact, single estates in Spain and Gaul produced enough wine each year to supply a town. Dolia not only allowed this kind of large scale production of wine by creating reliable and stable storage at production sites while wine fermented, but also at distribution sites near cities. While Cheung never articulates it in this way, the vessel itself has a kind of “agency” (broadly construed) in transforming the economic systems that supplied wine to the Roman Empire to the same degree that amphora did.

3. Conspicuous Displays. One of the more fascinating elements of the book is the use of dolia as signs of prosperity by wealthy elites. The use of dolia in dining areas in the garden district of Pompey would have amplified the luxurious surroundings. The presence of dolia in storerooms and processing areas near the public areas of Roman villas likely connect spaces of display to those of production making clear that dolia do more than serve the practical needs of Roman elite farmers, but also represent visual signs of a well-run and prosperous household. 

4. Repair and Reuse. Chueng’s interest in the material form of the dolia, which were complex to manufacture and prone to breakage, made them both valuable (and expensive) and worth repairing. Studying dozens of repaired dolia allowed her to create a typology of repair strategies that demonstrated different approaches, levels of expertise and situations. Among the most fascinating to me were those repairs that occurred prior to firing as a way to reinforce dolia that have shown signs of vulnerability. The use of lead to mend dolia that either cracked in use revealed that not all menders were equally adept at repairing these massive vessels. More than that, most of the dolia found in secondary contexts were mended suggesting either a prolonged period of use or a failed mend.

5. The End of Dolia. Unlike most things in antiquity that disappear with the end of the ancient world, dolia stop being produced toward the end of the 1st century. This was largely because of the introduction of the barrel which were lighter, easier to make and repair, and more portable especially when disassembled for transport. Barrels introduced a new form of containerization with new affordance and new possibilities. 

I keep working my way through Miles Davis’s studio albums this year and as we get to albums recorded in the later 1960s and 1970s, the time commitment necessary listen to the entire album becomes more daunting with most of his 1970s output approaching or exceeding an hour each.

Then there is 1969’s In a Silent Way. 38 minutes:

For a long time, I accepted that Kind of Blue was Miles Davis’s masterpiece. While I dislike the practice of ranking albums (or books or whatever), it seems reasonable to assert that In a Silent Way is also a masterpiece. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether an artist can have multiple masterpieces. I can’t really add much to what others have written about In a Silent Way: it’s dark, it’s organic, it’s disturbing at times while being palpably brilliant. 

During my travels, I downloaded the newly released Joe Henderson live album, Consonance, from Tidal onto my phone. I planned to listen to it on various flights, but I forgot the adapter that allowed me to connect my little Dragonfly DAC to my phone. When I got home, I intended to listen to it on my home system, but by the time I found some time to listen, the album had disappeared from Tidal. I was able to play a few tracks from the version of the album I had saved to my phone before it too had vanished. I know enough about Resonance releases to feel confident that this album will reappear in a few months. What I heard from the album was good though and I’m interested in hearing the new Ahmad Jamal release is also worth a listen.

Both of these albums appeared as part of the predictable gaggle of “Record Store Day” releases. One of the more intriguing re-releases was Buster William’s 1975 debut album from Muse records: Pinnacle. This album featured Sonny Fortune on sax, Earl Turbinton on woodwinds (particularly bass clarinet), Billy Hart on drums, and Onaje Allan Gumbs on piano and synths. Woody Shaw appears on a couple of tracks as well with his distinctive trumpet moving above the groove. The album is really quite remarkable. It integrates post-bop, fusion, and elements of early 1970s spiritual jazz into a sound that’s not quite unique, but certainly compelling. Unfortunately, the album isn’t available on Tidal, but does appear on YouTube. Check it out here:

Finally, I’ve been enjoying the new Dave Douglas album, Transcend, with Rafiq Bhatia on guitar, James Brandon Lewis on sax, Tomeka Reid on cello, and Ian Chang on drums. I’ve only had a chance to listen to it a few times, but from what I’ve been able to enjoy, it’s fantastic.