What do Archaeologists Do On Their Days Off...?

...They swim with barracuda!

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Making Waves in Seattle!

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Smiths Island field school students may not appreciate it, but they are the intellectual grand-children of Marley R. Brown III, long-time Director of Archaeological Research at Colonial Williamsburg and an important mentor to me as a graduate student at William and Mary in the 1990s. I recently returned from an all-day symposium reflecting on Marley's contributions to the field at this year's Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in Seattle. It was great to catch up with old friends and digging buddies from Williamsburg, Jamestown, Martin's Hundred, and Bermuda as we reflected on a career spent in service of advancing theory and field methods in archaeology. The fact that so many of us are tenured professors and established scholars speaks volumes to the rigorous training and tremendous opportunities that Marley crazily bestowed upon young untried (and in my case, somewhat undisciplined) grad students. The symposium made me reflect on how the Good Dr. Brown has sh...
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2018 Field School and a video from the vault

Hard to believe, but we are just five months from the start of the 2018 field school! If you are interested in participating, click on the new Field School tab above for information and how to apply. I will be spending the spring at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, working on making an interactive GIS map of Richard Norwood's 1663 survey of Bermuda, and if all goes well, a walkable 3D version of the island in 1663 in Unity. In doing housekeeping among my many old hard drives, I came upon a video we shot on the last day of the 2010 reconnaissance, showing the very first unit we excavated, and our three-person field crew!  "From small acorns mighty oaks grow..." (Benjamin Franklin)
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The Quiet Year

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In a normal year, the Smiths Island Archaeology field school would be halfway finished at this moment. The students would be finishing up their collective work (standardized training, really) at Oven Site and dispersing into smaller teams at the other sites - Cave, Smallpox, perhaps the dock/wharf complex at Pitcher's Point. This year, however, we have suspended operations in order to catch up on database and paperwork and also for me to further develop some of my other research projects - particularly Virtual St. George's, which will feature 3D historicized reconstructions of Bermuda's first capital at various moments in the town's four-hundred-year history, developed using a videogame engine. Indeed, during a flying research visit in February, I shot more than 19,000 photographs to use in this digital reconstruction, and I supervised several students creating ArcGIS layer maps for St. George's in 1750, 1775 and 1815.  Seaward facing side of Elmina, Portuguese from...
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