Renaming and Reigniting the Blog

Since earning a doctorate many rapid and positive changes have kept me away from this blog. I returned to Peru to start a new research project, I taught at DePaul University for a year, I co-founded a lecture series which I have left in the capable hands of a colleague and friend, my family expanded with the arrival of our first child, we moved to a new city and state, and I've taken the helm - with excellent colleagues - of two archaeological publication projects for which I am very enthused. 

These changes and the new opportunities they bring will give me plenty of material for reflection and sharing that may be useful to others. I'm most interested in sharing my experiences of creative processes; I think specifically about how people roughly in my position might be able to pick up tips on things that I troubleshoot regularly: writing, revising, editing, organizing research, parsing troublesome data, teaching  challenging classes, meshing academic and non-academic activities, making sense of an increasingly complex and sometimes fraught socio-cultural environment.

I make no promises to keep this blog strictly professional or even strictly academic, although those are the two domains in which I am most outwardly active. I'm likely to comment on art and music (avoiding total shameless self-promotion of my projects), rapidly-changing political currents, the challenge of finding, designing, and executing innovating teaching opportunities, and finally on doing intellectually creative work like research and writing. No promises either regarding frequency of posts, though I hope to complete at least one a month. (Pro-tip to myself: make a writing goal, remind yourself of it, complete it, and recognize your accomplishment).

Why 'Into Lost Time?' It's a phrase that has worked its way into my mind and returns regularly. On the one hand, it is a gesture towards my main training as an archaeologists. Archaeologists dig into the earth and scrutinize objects to gain insight into lost time. But I'm also taken with the idea - however mystical - that archaeological and historical curiosity is driven by personal and psychological desires to dig into one's own past in order to understand and liberate one's own psyche or, more plainly put, one's self. Herbert Marcuse saw this social archaeology as having a double-character. It was on the one hand personal and on the other hand broadly social. He felt that if we as a society might look at our own history we would find the kernel of a less oppressive society. This less oppressive society would be the context for less individually repressed people. These ideas appeal to me as an archaeologist (and perhaps slightly radical political thinker) because the implication is that by understanding the past, especially the past that remains unwritten, we find inspiration and reason to believe that other worlds (less oppressive ones) are possible. This liberatory model of archaeology I expressed in 2014 at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in proposing an anarchist attitude towards archaeological heritage. I argued that the exclusivity of state-sanctioned archaeological practice has alienating effects that undermine some of the humanistic goals of anthropological archaeology. I quoted Kropotkin, who used what he believed to be a metaphor to explain that if one digs under the cities and towns one finds evidence of the collective work required to create the civilization we enjoy today; therefore, he argued, no one can claim exclusive rights over the riches of civil life. 

It is in this light that I find the phrase 'Into Lost Time' an appealing textual totem for organizing diverse efforts and reflections.