Dear Readers, Over the years, some of us (the past and present members of the collective that runs this blog) have been fortunate enough to meet some of you. We say fortunate, because such encounters have always been positive. Many of you have a background in anthropology, having studied it in college, or even a graduate degree, but — as is the case with most people who study anthropology — few of you end up as professional anthropologists. Yet you love the discipline and want to stay connected to it in some way, and so you found your way here. It makes a lot of sense to us that you discovere ..read more

I’m sitting in a semi-dark room, the electricity has just cut out, and there’s a slight chill in the air. I love being in MohenjoDaro (Sindh, Pakistan) in December. It’s cold at night and it’s hot during the day, unlike the summer, where there is nowhere to hide from the heat. The winter is more playful with the weather. However, living on the site isn’t play. Without being romantic about it, there’s little electricity, hardly any internet, no consistent mobile service, often no gas to cook with, and limited water. And yet, I find myself looking forward to my time there. I have spent many year ..read more

This is not an academic text. Wow. It has been several months since I last posted something here in AD. It’s kinda weird trying to survive a pandemic amid a coup d’état attempt here in Brazil. For that and for my lack of productivity, I apologize. But I have to say that I feel no guilt for trying to find a new way to cope with academic life since the 2020 pandemic. For me, that represented less stress around writing stuff I did not want to write, and less stress on making myself participate in events/obligations I thought were not a priority at that moment. As the year of 2023 closes, I find m ..read more

As promised, here’s a list of the anthropology and archaeology blogs that are still active from Jason Antrosio’s archive from 2017. I found one site that’s actually not active, so that brings us down to 76 blogs that are still running. But Lorena Gibson just posted a new piece on Anthropod, so that brings us right back up to our total of 77! Yay! In the first section of this post I’ll list all the sites from Jason’s list that are still active. Then at the bottom I’ll add some new sites, other sites, and places where people are writing/posting now. If you have or know about other sites/blogs t ..read more

Pushmi-Pullyu, by Kerim Friedman 2021 The blog may be shutting down, but I’m not! I started blogging in 2001 and my personal blog, Keywords, is still going strong. Check out this recent post about the movie Killers of the Flower Moon. I’ve also started a newsletter, Triptych. I wanted to recreate the joy and excitement I used to feel in the early days of the internet. The content is a smorgasbord, including everything from youtube clips, to long form journalism, to weird websites that are fun to explore. The newsletter is based on the philosophy that “less is more”: there are just three posts ..read more

Well, by now most of you have heard the news that this blog is closing down. That whole conversation was happening in the last couple of months, but really something that we’d been talking about for the past few years. Back in 2021 we all agreed to try to revive this blog, but things just didn’t take off. There was just so much going on at the time. This site, like many others, was a casualty of the mass exodus to Twitter, the decline of blogging, people moving on to other things in their careers, others getting slammed with kids and careers (that was me), and the global pandemic…among other ..read more

As many of us already know, in the last decade or so we’ve seen some big changes with anthropology & archaeology online, particularly in relation to blogs. In short, there aren’t too many these days. This is due to what we can perhaps call the “Great Fragmentation,” when so many former bloggers left their home sites and migrated…mostly to Twitter. We all know what happened next. So what does the anthro blog landscape look like these days? What’s left? Who is still around? Is it all totally gone?! Lately I have been assuming that it’s all gone, but that’s not really very scientific of me, i ..read more

When I first heard about chatGPT, the main thing I was concerned about, like many others, was that students would use it instead of writing their own work. I tried to take an open approach with it all to try to head off any potential problems. Rather than trying to ban GPT, I talked about it with my class pretty extensively. I adopted a modified version of Kerim’s statement about using chatGPT and other LLMs in the classroom, which I think helped a lot (especially the part about clearly documenting use of such tools). Overall, while there were some issues, things went fairly well. But there w ..read more

The AABA, along with several other organizations, has just released a statement in support of trans lives. Here’s an excerpt: The American Association of Biological Anthropologists, the American Association of Anthropological Genetics, the Dental Anthropology Association, the Paleopathology Association, The PaleoAnthropology Society, the Biological Anthropology Section of the American Anthropological Association, and the Human Biology Association stand together against the escalating legislation and governance in the United States and across the globe that attacks the existence of transg ..read more

Esoteric caption: The power of old things in new hands. Practical caption: This is one image I have on hand while I’m here at the airport that I can work into this post somewhat reasonably. Real caption: Central California coast, 2017. I’m sitting here at Toronto Pearson International Airport after this year’s AAA meetings. The first time I went to the AAA’s was back in 2008, in San Francisco. I was a grad student back then, all worried and nervous about presenting at a professional conference. My first shock was just basic economics. The room at the conference hotel was $250, and it wasn’t pa ..read more