A Blog Reborn...

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.