News

• Mitch presented a paper on Social Complexity in Parthian Sistan, Afghanistan, at the American Schools for Oriental Research Conference, November 16, Boston. Copies of the presentation available upon request. 
• Mitch has been made a Research Associate with the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, as a result of the project he is now working on: preparing for publication the results of the Helmand-Sistan Project, Afghanistan. The good folks at the SI have linked me in as part of their support for getting the project  published thirty five years after the end of fieldwork. The Smithsonian partially funded and oversaw the fieldwork in the 1970s and is offering invaluable administrative and financial help with artifacts and plans, both of which are still housed at the Smithsonian. 
• Mitch has just been made a Research Associate at the Archaeological Research Facility (ARF) at UC Berkeley, one of the largest, smartest collection of archaeologists in the world. Very honored to be included in the group. Duties include going to their regular sets of lectures, attending all the wine and cheese parties, and giving an occasional workshop on archaeological publishing.  
• ​​​​​​I just had an article published in the journal, Cultural Studies<—>Critical Methodologies: “Qualitative Publishing in a Neoliberal Universe and University.” It’s behind a Sage firewall at csc.sagepub.com. If you can’t access it and wish to read it, send Mitch an email. The abstract
  
  “Rapid transformation in the ecosystems of academic publication can be attributed not only to changing demands of the neoliberal university but also to factors in the broader economic, cultural, and technological world. The centralization of information of academic publishing into fewer multinational media corporations who provide information to scholars in aggregated and disaggregated forms. Resistance by academics has focused on the availability of open access scholarship, but they have not solved how to make this system financially sustainable. This article reports on trends in this ever-more-unequal ecosystem, the challenges they raise, and options for scholars to solve them.”

• Just published:: a book review of “Disasters in Field Research” to appear in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies. Mitch is the book review editor of this journal. If you can't get past the JSTOR firewall, let me know and I'll send you a copy.