Podcasts by New Books in Archaeology
Interviews with Archaeologists about their New Books
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Further podcasts by Marshall Poe
Podcast on the topic Gesellschaft und Kultur
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Lost Temples of the Jungle: A History of Mrauk-U with Dr. Bob Hudson from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Deep in the jungles of Myanmar lie the remains of an ancient kingdom, the 15th-century royal city of Mrauk-U. Located in the Bay of Bengal and separated from the rest of the country by the Arakan m...
ListenFrançois-Xavier Fauvelle, "The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the African Middle Ages? A place, certainly, and a time period, evidently. But also a “documentary regime,” argues François-Xavier Fauvelle. How do we reconstruct these centuries of the Af...
ListenDavid Carballo, "Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mexico of five centuries ago was witness to one of the most momentous encounters between human societies, when a group of Spaniards led by Hernando Cortés joined forces with tens of thousands of Me...
ListenKathryn M. De Luna, "Collecting Food, Collecting People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa" (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Collecting Food, Collecting People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa (Yale University Press, 2016), Kathryn M. De Luna documents the evolving meanings borne in the collection of wild fo...
ListenJames C. Scott, "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), ...
ListenBrian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...
ListenLeslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...
ListenMatt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...
ListenAdrian J. Boas, "The Crusader World" (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Crusader World (Routledge, 2015), edited by Adrian J. Boas, is a multidisciplinary survey of the current state of research in the field of crusader studies, an area of study which has become in...
ListenPhillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...
ListenK. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...
ListenAlberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...
ListenKathleen Sheppard, "The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology" (Lexington, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After Napoleon occupied Egypt, Europeans became obsessed with the ancient cultures of the Nile. In Britain, the center of Egyptology research was University College London (UCL). At the heart of th...
ListenKathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...
ListenJ. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...
ListenJohn D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the cha...
ListenC. Burnett, "Studying the New Testament Through Inscriptions: An Introduction" (Hendrickson Publishers, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Studying the New Testament Through Inscriptions (Hendrickson Publishers, 2020)through Inscriptions is an intuitive introduction to inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world. Inscriptions can help con...
ListenAshley Thompson, "Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor" (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Thanks to the international tourism industry most people are familiar with the spectacular ruins of Angkor, the great Cambodian empire that lasted from about the 9th to the early 15th century. We a...
ListenPJ Capelotti, "Adventures in Archaeology: The Wreck of the Orca II and Other Explorations" (U Florida Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anthropologist PJ Capelotti discusses the role of exploration archaeology in understanding the Pacific voyage of Kon-Tiki, the Arctic airship expeditions of Walter Wellman, and the fate of Orca II,...
ListenAdrian Goldsworthy, "Hadrian's Wall" (Basic Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Stretching across the north of England, from coast to coast, are the 73-mile long remnants of a fortification built by the Roman Army during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. It is, as our guest Ad...
ListenGregory Smits, "Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650" (U Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Conventional portrayals of early Ryukyu are based on official histories written between 1650 and 1750. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Gregory Smits makes extensive use of scholarship in arch...
ListenCaitlín Eilís Barrett, "Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Bar...
ListenChip Colwell, "Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Gr...
ListenRichard Hingley, "Londinium: A Biography" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From its humble beginnings as a crossing point over the river Thames Londinium grew into the largest city in Roman Britain. In Londinium: A Biography (Routledge, 2018), Richard Hingley draws upon t...
ListenPaul J. Kosmin, "Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, the Seleucid kings ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia to Anatolia, Armenia to the Persian Gulf. In a radical move to impose uni...
ListenDiscussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...
ListenSeth Bernard, "Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 B...
ListenFred S. Naiden, "Soldier, Priest, and God: A Life of Alexander the Great" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Macedonian king Alexander III is best remembered today for his many martial accomplishments and the empire he built from them. Yet as Fred S. Naiden details in Soldier, Priest, and God: A Life ...
ListenDouglas Hunter, "Beardmore: The Viking Hoax That Rewrote History" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1936, long before the discovery of the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, the Royal Ontario Museum made a sensational acquisition: the contents of a Viking grave that prospector Eddy Dodd ...
ListenElizabeth Macaulay-Lewis. "Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham" (Empire States Editions, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A new book explores how and why New York City became a showcase for the art and architectural styles of ancient Greece and Rome. Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham (Empire St...
ListenWilliam Kelso, "Jamestown: The Truth Revealed" (U Virginia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Jamestown: The Truth Revealed (University of Virginia Press, 2017; paperback, 2018), William Kelso, Emeritus Head Archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, takes us literally to the so...
ListenKathryn Lomas, "The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
By the third century BC, the once-modest settlement of Rome had conquered most of Italy and was poised to build an empire throughout the Mediterranean basin. What transformed a humble city into the...
ListenChristopher Gerrard, "Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar, 1650" (Oxbow Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In November 2013, two mass burials were discovered unexpectedly on a construction site in the city of Durham in northeast England. Over the next two years, a complex jigsaw of evidence was pieced t...
ListenAngelos Chaniotis, "Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), An...
ListenMark Rice, "Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Speaking at a 1913 National Geographic Society gala, Hiram Bingham III, the American explorer celebrated for finding the “lost city” of the Andes two years earlier, suggested that Machu Picchu “is ...
ListenMcKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...
ListenKathleen Hull and John Douglass, "Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California" (U Arizona Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Between 1769 and 1834, an influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists streamed into Alta California seeking new opportunities. Their arrival brought the imposition of foreign beliefs, p...
ListenG. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a pain...
ListenAndrew Frank, “Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami” (UP of Florida, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this interview, we discuss Andrew Frank‘s most recent book, Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami (University Press of Florida, 2017). The book is a concise a...
ListenSam White, “A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sam White’s brand new book A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Harvard University Press, 2017) turns the tales we learned in grade school about early Europ...
ListenJames F. Brooks, “Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre” (W.W. Norton and Co., 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
James F. Brooks, UC Santa Barbara Professor of History and Anthropology and the William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow at Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, offers a s...
ListenPaul Irish, “Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney” (NewSouth Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), historian Paul Irish debunks the myth that local Aboriginal people disappeared from Sydne...
ListenDouglas Hunter, “The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (UNC, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Douglas Hunter examines the history of meanings, affinities, and petrogl...
ListenMarilyn Palmer and Ian West, “Technology and the Country House” (Historic England Publishing/U.Chicago, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For the aristocracy in Britain and Ireland, country house living was dependent upon the labors of men and women who performed innumerable chores involving cooking, cleaning, and the basic operation...
ListenRebe Taylor, “Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search For Human Antiquity” (Melbourne UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search For Human Antiquity (Melbourne University Press, 2017), Rebe Taylor, the Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, explores the ...
ListenDavid Rohl, “Exodus: Myth or History? (Thinking Man Media, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Archaeologists and scholars of the ancient Near East regularly make statements to the effect that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for many events of the Bible, including Israel’s soj...
ListenStephen Dupont, “Piksa Niugini” (Peabody Press/Radius Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Piksa Niugini by Stephen Dupont, with forward by Robert Gardner and essay by Bob Connolly, is published by the Peabody Press and Radius Books, (2013). Volume 1: 144 pages, 80 duotone, 6 color image...
ListenEric H. Cline, “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” (Princeton University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It quickly sold out in hardback, and then, within a matter of days, sold out in paperback. Available again as a 2nd edition hardback, and soon in the 10th edition paperback with a new Afterword by ...
ListenBruce A. Bradley, et al., “Clovis Technology” (International Monographs in Prehistory, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
13,000-years ago, the people of the first identifiable culture in North America were hunting mammoth and mastodon, bison, and anything else they could launch their darts and spears at, and undoubte...
ListenDouglas B. Bamforth et al., “The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska” (U of New Mexico Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode of New Books in Archaeology we talk with Douglas B. Bamforth about his new book The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). B...
ListenAsya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis, “The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling acro...
ListenJ. Laurence Hare, “Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Borderlands” (U of Toronto Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A recent book review I read began with the line “borderlands are back.” It’s certainly true that more and more historians have used borderland regions as the stage for some excellent work on the co...
ListenAgnieszka Helman-Wazny, “The Archaeology of Tibetan Books” (Brill, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill, 2014), Agnieszka Helman-Wazny explores the varieties of artistic expression, materials, and tools that have shaped Tibetan books over the millennia. Digging ...
ListenRowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen, “Ancient Central China” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One of the most exciting approaches in the contemporary study of China is emerging from work that brings together archaeological and historical modes of reading texts and material objects to tell a...
ListenMark Byington, ed., “Early Korea: The Rediscovery of Kaya in History and Archaeology” (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Early Korea is a resource like no other: in an ongoing series of volumes produced by the Early Korea Project at the Korea Institute of Harvard University, the series provides surveys of Korean scho...
ListenRowan K. Flad, "Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China" (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2012-04-27T08:00
Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words...
ListenRowan K. Flad, "Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China" (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2012-04-27T08:00
Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words...
Listen