passim in passing

Ok, yes, there was a long hiatus. This has a lot to do with the number of countries I have seen fit to wander through in 2016 (special shout out to the elderly Peugeot convertible for making it around the UK, France, Belgium, Luxembourg--finally!--Germany, Austria, Spain, and Italy this summer). This also has to do with the fact that I have been writing a lot -- there was a book, which I may have unobtrusively mentioned , but also some very fun pieces while wearing my other hat as part of Team TrowelBlazers.  I am very fond of this piece in February's History Today , so if you have a chance take a look. There are jokes about how awful the poetry in 'Girl's Own' magazines of the Victorian era is; if you want to see how I managed to shoehorn that into a story about heroines of the digging sciences, you'll have to read the damn thing ;) As we ramped up to the Raising Horizons launch (more on which over at TrowelBlazers) we've had a great run of pieces celebra...

So, I spent this week doing a lot of things. One of my favorites was freaking about my photoshopped proximity to lifetime hero author Neil Gaiman and actual cool writer E lif  Şafak. For information: generally, archaeological book reviews are TERRIFYING. People with PhDs in very obscure and nuanced aspects of the past read something you've written, agree with 90% of it, but spend three pages telling you off for misunderstanding the fundamental holistic interconnectedness of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Or something-- the ruthlessness is all part of the fun. So imagine my surprise when I got my first book review in Reader's Digest ... and it was nice . Obviously, feel free to buy my book and disagree rabidly with whatever per cent of it makes you happiest.