Okay, I'm more than a
bit embarrassed that it's been 5 years since I've posted anything here. But those
years have witnessed a rather profound increase in the global intellectual
interest in the archaeology of the Cold War. And I'd like to think I've had at least a little something to do with it.
I took a bit of an
ethnographic turn in 2009 with the publication of “Exploding the Strangelove Myth – Cold
War Nuclear Weapons Work and the Testing Times of William Ogle” in The Atomic Bomb and American Society – New Perspectives, G. Piehler and R. Mariner
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press). The book chapter was the first step
in a plan to offer new scholarly perspectives on the work of Cold War atomic
testing.
In 2010, I had the
honor and pleasure of contributing the first paper on the archaeology of the
Cold War to the prestigious Archaeological Review from Cambridge issue
on Violence and Conflict in the Material Record (Issue 25.1 April). That
paper, entitled "Uncovering the Arsenals of Armageddon: The Historical
Archaeology of North American Cold War Ballistic Missile Launch Sites,"
explored the archaeological
and material culture aspects of ballistic missile launch sites as potent
artefacts of violence and conflict in 20th Century society. Based on fieldwork
at twelve former Atlas F missile launch sites located near Roswell, New
Mexico, the paper considered the sites as examples of the material manifestations of Cold
War paranoia.
More
recently, I've been working on a publication for the University Press of
Florida's The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective series,
tentatively entitled The Archaeology of the Cold War.
Expected publication is in 2015. I’ll be writing more about that project here in the
months to come.
If you'd
like to learn more of what I've been up to, check out my Academia.edu
web page for copies of the paper and book chapter mentioned above and
more.
