It has been a busy few weeks. As usual, I have more topics than time. At this point, I'm going to just accept that my blog sometimes functions as an open access journal. Here is the bullet point version of what I've been up to. We'll do art first, then archaeology.

The Jasper Artist of the Year Is . . . Not Me

As I wrote in December, I was one of three finalists nominated for Jasper Artist of the Year (in the visual arts category). The awards ceremony was last Friday. I did not win the award: that honor went to Trahern Cook. I met some new people, drank some wine, and had a good time (the picture above was taken there). Congratulations to all the winners!

New Pieces Over the Holidays

In addition to "Desire," I completed several other smallish pieces over the holiday break. 

I'm still working to finish up editing the student videos from my Forbidden Archaeology class last semester. I finished one on Atlantis last week and one on pyramids today. You can find them on my YouTube channel, along with videos about my archaeological fieldwork and my art.

New Grant For Collections Work

I'm happy to announce that I have received grant monies from the Archaeological Research Trust to continue inventorying and preliminary analysis of chipped stone projectile points from the Larry Strong Collection. You may remember me writing about working with the Early Archaic materials a while ago. I'm still working with those (more on that later), but now I'm going to move on in time and process the Middle and Late Archaic stuff. Part of the rationale is that I'll be dealing with those time periods in the materials we've been excavated at the field school.

South Carolina Archaeology Class: We're Making a Movie

I'm teaching South Carolina Archaeology (ANTH 321) this semester. The class is bigger than in years past. That's good from an enrollment standpoint, but a challenge from a teaching standpoint. In the spirit of experimentation, I decided to build in a class video project. We'll be making a video attempting to showcase the archaeology of this state. I've divided the students up into groups and given them topics (mostly organized chronologically) that they're responsible for. They're going to research their topics and develop proposals about what issues, artifacts, sites, and people should be included the video. Then we'll take it from there.

Go Deep!

Today I submitted  a grant proposal for systematic exploratory work on the deep deposits at 38FA608 (the field school site). We know now several things about the sediments below the Middle Archaic zones: (1) they're deep; (2) they're Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene in age; and (3) they contain artifacts. I don't believe I've mentioned it publicly, but I submitted a sample for OSL data from the deepest stratum we've documented so far (about 5m below the original surface) and it returned a result around the Last Glacial Maximum.  Also, we've found an Early Archaic Kirk point in a disturbed part of the site. What all that means is that the landform did indeed exist at the end of the last Ice Age and (minimally) Early Archaic peoples were using it. In other words, there's a really good potential for some very high integrity buried archaeology there. Fingers crossed. 

Other News

In other news . . . our 2003 4Runner finally suffered a terminal injury. And I'm tearing out our rotted deck. And I've started working a rabbit sculpture that's big enough to sit on. It will have a tractor seat. And a gear shift. And a dashboard.

And now you are up to date.

Flavia Lovatelli and I have several things in common: (1) we both live in Columbia; (2) we both do art using discarded junk; and (3) we're both finalists for the Jasper Artist of the Year award. We also both ran "summer selfie" contests last that were largely ignored by the public. The result is that we won each other's contests, which means we're making each other art.

We decided that we'd make each other the "same" thing. Flavia picked the subject: crows. I picked the title "Desire." I don't know when they'll be done, but I do know we've both started. I settled on an idea and started putting pieces together earlier in the week. I know that Flavia's got a least a couple of coats of paint down. That's about all I can say at this point. Maybe we can exchange the pieces at the awards ceremony.

In other news: the domestication of the dog continues unabated. Have a nice weekend!

One of the most gratifying personal aspects of moving to Columbia has been having the time, space, and resources to do art. I've got a notebook, some tools, a supportive family, a half of a garage, plenty of ideas, and a bunch of neighbors who give me their junk. In the last couple of years those ingredients have let me go places I never thought I'd be able to go. I've won things, sold things, met some great people, and had a lot of fun in the process. 

When I started messing around with sculpture about ten years ago (in the capacity that I could at the time), memory and sentimentality were core components of what I was interested in. Those remained central thoughts as I ramped up here in Columbia, and were the organizing theme of the "Afterburner" show I had at Tapp's in the spring of 2017.  Over the last couple of years I have continued chasing those feelings while trying to lean forward, pushing my vision, improving my technical skills, and expanding the range of materials I work with.

The end of this semester was a busy one for our family, and I found myself working more in the evenings than on the weekends. After I finished "Passenger" in November I worked mostly on two pieces I had started earlier during the summer: "Painted Swan" and a dancing fox I'm calling "Kiss Goodbye." It was while working on the fox over the course of several rainy evenings listening to the radio that I realized that I'm at a pivot point in my art: the Afterburner series is over. Fifty is a nice round number.

I based the posture of the fox on a line drawing I found online. I wanted the animal to be light, dynamic, and playful. And I wanted the base to be the opposite. The fox is springing off a dead weight (an engine block), saying goodbye to a heavy, broken mass that won't ever move again.

As an archaeologist, I take it as axiomatic that you can't understand the present without knowing something about the past. The past provides context, texture, richness, and direction. Memories of the past are important. But they can also be toxic. They can be limiting when they become an obligation. Sometimes it's best to let them be what they are and move on -- take the power but leave behind the handcuffs.

Over the last few years I have developed my own style, created a cast of characters, and scratched out -- though both creation and discovery -- a vague grammar of symbols, shapes, and colors. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of energy, and I feel like I'll be able to both harness and unleash a lot more of both if I let myself out of the memory box. And so I'm out. The memories are there, but I'm going to attempt to defang them. Let's see what happens next.

Here is a video:

I wanted to pass on the online version of this article ("The Fine Scale of Time" by Megan Sexton) that ran in the USC Times earlier this fall. It's a short piece about my work at 38FA608.  The photo is me examining some of the conjoining lithic debris from the Guilford-age deposit at the site. Enjoy!

I'm happy to announce that "Passenger," my 10'-story-bear-with-butterfly-wings, has been accepted into the 2019 ArtFields competition. It's an honor to be included, and somewhat of a validation of the amount of time and energy I put into the piece. The idea percolated for months (years?) before I began bringing it into reality last May. I sweated over it all summer and we went through several love/hate cycles together. I'm glad it's in.

Since I finished the piece in November it has been gathering leaves in the driveway behind my house. I walk by it almost every day and barely notice it. It's a strange feeling to go from thinking about and struggling with something almost every day to forgetting it's there. Especially when it's a 10' bear with butterfly wings. 

If you like art and you live in the region, I hope you'll visit ArtFields in Lake City this spring -- it's a really cool event and you'll see a lot of fantastic artwork. I hope "Passenger" ends up somewhere in town where you couldn't miss it if you tried.

​A final plug: voting is still open for Jasper Project Artist of the Year. I've been nominated in the Visual Arts category. If you like my artwork, please take a moment and vote for me!

Three years ago today, I was cleaning the kitchen floor in anticipation of the arrival of relatives for the holidays. Through Facebook I became aware of J. Hutton Pulitzer's ludicrous claim that a ""100% confirmed" Roman sword had been recovered from a shipwreck off of Oak Island. The debacle that followed remains, in my opinion, a great example of how facts, logic, and reality can triumph over lies, nonsense, and fantasy in real time. Swordgate remains the most fun I've ever had dealing with pseudoarchaeology online. I can't imagine it will ever be repeated, which is why it's worth remembering and celebrating.

​The final chapter on Swordgate remains to be written. There are still a few swords that we're aware of that we don't have many details about, and we're still missing the real "smoking gun" to nail down exactly when and where these Fake Hercules Swords were first produced. Without a doubt, however, they are all modern creations. There is and never was a "Naples Museum sword." The sword purportedly found on Oak Island didn't come from a shipwreck, was not covered in gold, did not have magical navigational powers, and it is not made using Roman-era metallurgical methods. The sword will never appear in history books. There will never be a "White Paper," and you will probably never get an admission from the principal proponent of the sword that the whole thing was a big pile of baloney.  C'est la vie.​

I'm happy to announce that I'm one of three nominees for the Jasper Project's 2018 Visual Artist of the Year. It's an honor to be nominated, and a thrill to be among such good company. If you like my art, I invite you to click on the link above and vote for me. If you don't like my art, please click on the link and vote for someone else! 

​And now here's a picture of me with one of my recent pieces, just so an image will show up with the link to this post:

If you'd like to see more of my work, visit the gallery page on my art website.

​I'll have more art news in the near future, including whether or not my piece "Passenger" got into ArtFields 2019, an announcement of a major sale (hopefully), and some reflections on what I've done over the last couple of years and what I hope to do in the future. Stay tuned, and thanks for voting!

The Curse of Oak Island has started another season with a few episodes of the obligatory 1/3 recap of the previous episode, 1/3 recap of the recap, 1/6 new material, and 1/6 recap of the new material, per episode. The show airs Tuesday nights in the United States and Sunday night in Canada. To avoid any spoiler issues, this blog is being done on a Monday after the Canadian crowd has had a chance to catch up on the most recent episode.

Welcome to Pilumgate. Don't worry, it won't last long. You might be able to hold your breath until it's over.   
 
You have to wonder if Kevin Burns (Executive Producer & Writer, Prometheus Entertainment) is watching the reactions to his Oak Island cash cow as they happen after each show and season. You have to then wonder if he literally does everything for a reaction. Throw out the red herrings and the scraps of . . . well, scrap, basically . . . as it gets pulled from yet another borehole, or caisson grab, or backhoe pit, or this beach, or that piece of forest, or a full swamp, or a drained swamp . . . you get the idea. As the show keeps trying to be about something, it keeps delivering essentially nothing. Scraps of minor finds are inevitable with the amount of digging and metal detecting going on. Give any historic location in Nova Scotia the same level of effort and you wouldn’t find much of anything different. It’s all stuff from the last couple centuries, but on Oak Island there is also stuff from all the past dead end searches.

Ignoring all these scraps from the last few years, and since this blog is about fake Roman stuff, we leapfrog forward from Fake Roman Swords to the most recent fake Roman find. Kevin Burns has thrown a pilum at us.
 
First let’s build up the context. The supposed non-actors who don’t star in a scripted show have become actors portraying non-actors who do star in a scripted show. They know what they are expected to say, when to say it, and thus they know what exactly has the best chance of making the final edit back in the Los Angeles studio. As a result, when swinging a metal detector turns up a pointed piece of iron, it’s best to start with a conclusion and worry about details later. Fist pumping yelps of TEMPLAR are now mandatory. The obligatory cell phone speaker call to bring over the always conveniently close by fellowship members has to happen next. The bros then high five all around and Prometheus immediately cuts to a leap of faith confirmation fantasy historical re-enactment scene, with universally condemned narration from the “Could it be?” guy. In other words they found this iron spike thing and immediately gave it a bromance declaration as a Templar crossbow bolt.

The second student project video from this year's Forbidden Archaeology class is now posted on YouTube. In this video, three students discuss some of the evidence that's bandied about for the extra-terrestrial origin of the Anunnaki. They've already gotten their first thumbs down. Enjoy!

Tomorrow I'll be posting one on the Nephilim, but I won't write a blog post about it. Check my YouTube channel tomorrow morning if you're interested. [Update: here it is.]

As I mentioned earlier, we're making videos in this year's iteration of my Forbidden Archaeology course. The twenty students in the class split up into seven groups and have been working on developing their topics, doing their research, and preparing their scripts.

Last Monday, we taped the speaking parts for the first video and I edited it together over the break. The videos briefly explores the history of ideas/claims that the earth is hollow, and then discusses reasons why that can't be true. Here it is:

I had several goals in mind when I designed this video project. First, it was one opportunity (among several in the course) for students to go through the process of understanding the history/context of a claim and evaluating it based on evidence. Second, I wanted them to think about how to present a message in the format I gave them and all the constraints that come with it. Third, I wanted to produce what I call "persistent resources" that can live independently online and be found by curious people looking for information. I chose the video format because my sense is that we can reach a different audience than would be possible using writing.

Like many of the things I've done so far in my brief teaching career, this is an experimental project. I hope these videos turn out well, I hope the students get something out of it, and I hope they prove to be useful resources for others as well.