Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan: both are futurologists who theorized about the impact of information exchange on societies. In the late 1960s, Toffler came up with the concept of future shock, while McLuhan “invented” the global village. I dared combining these two concepts into a sort of “theory of everything” to explain political process…[Read more]

The Tannaitic Laws of Battery: Scripture and Halakhah
Amit Gvaryahu
Four laws in the Pentateuch discuss fights between people. The arrangement of these laws and their relationship to one another were debated in the Tannaitic academies. The school of Rabbi Ishmael read these laws as a single entity, each law “coming to teach things omitted” in…[Read more]

Failing Gloriously and Other Essays documents Shawn Graham’s odyssey through the digital humanities and digital archaeology against the backdrop of the 21st-century university. At turns hilarious, depressing, and inspiring, Graham’s book presents a contemporary take on the academic memoir, but rather than celebrating the victories, he reflects on…[Read more]

Forthcoming in Wells, J. (ed) Archaeological Informatics Ethics in Practice. Springer.

A meditation on the ethics of archaeology within videogames.

A review of Katell Berthelot, Jonathan Price (ed.), In the Crucible of Empire: The Impact of Roman Citizenship upon Greeks, Jews and Christians. Interdisciplinary studies in ancient culture and religion, 21.

abstract A foundational text in the study of Tannaitic Midrash and Halakhah, Sifre Deuteronomy 122 is a list of places where Halakhah ʿ qpt scripture. This word, ʿ qpt, has long been understood to mean ‘circumvent’, ‘bypass’ or ‘belie’, and the pericope has been read as a list of places where ‘Halakhah circumvents scripture’, and thus a testament…[Read more]

Public health in twenty-first century Ghana is mired with several issues ranging from the inadequacy of
public health facilities, improper settlement planning, insanitary conditions, and the inadequacy of laws
and their implementation. This situation compared to the colonial era is a direct contradiction.
Development in the pre-colonial era to…[Read more]

Book review of Archives, Ancestors, Practices: Archaeology in the Light of Its History, edited by Nathan Schlanger and Jan Nordbladh

Ideally it would be fantastic to reconstitute the life history of a visual artefact, such as a pictograph site in the hope that it may help in es-
tablishing the meanings of these images, their role in the mental and physical landscape as well as the likely sensory and soundscape. This
is because human beings rely on their senses to understand…[Read more]

The act of classification has the widest implications for scholarship. Whatever the format, it involves the totality of our being. The use of our eyes indicates that decisions about whatever it is that we observe have already been made. Yet the interaction between the mechanical act of seeing and the mind or memory has rarely been registered. An…[Read more]

The boreal forest is a vast region. Therefore, the archaeological record, like anywhere else in the globe, is subject to revision as additional evidence is gathered. By conducting research in the same location over a long period of time, Hyslop was able to alter the methodological approach that he utilized while surveying the shorelines of Lac…[Read more]

Published in Sächsische Leute und Länder Benennung und Lokalisierung von Gruppenidentitäten im ersten Jahrtausend, and a considerably expanded version of a paper delivered at the Internationales Sachsensymposion in Leipzig, 2015.

The article considers the literary representation of Saxons in the works of the late antique authors Sidonius Ap…[Read more]

Published in Sächsische Leute und Länder Benennung und Lokalisierung von Gruppenidentitäten im ersten Jahrtausend, and a considerably expanded version of a paper delivered at the Internationales Sachsensymposion in Leipzig, 2015.

The article considers the literary representation of Saxons in the works of the late antique authors Sidonius Ap…[Read more]

Book review. Kate Langdon & Vladimir Tismaneanu “Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy: Ideology, Myth, and Violence in the Twenty-First Century”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Illustration of various features in the arrangement of Linear B tablets in the photo plates of Scripta Minoa II, and a proposed rationale in terms of underlying art.

During the third millennium B.C.E., Tell Mozan, ancient Urkesh, expanded to include an extensive outer city. A variety of investigations in the outer city reveal a complex urban environment: a mix of planned and unplanned activity with the environment and large municipal works acting as constraining factors on more localized activity.

This volume comprises the conference proceedings of the international and interdisciplinary meeting held in Leipzig from November 9 to 11, 2015. Scholars from different research areas present masks from Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Greece, mainly from the third to the first millennium BCE. The masks are…[Read more]

The paper describes an archaeological experiment which was conducted during the course “Experimental Archaeology” held at the Department of Prehistory and Historical Archeology at the University of Vienna from June 30th to July 2nd 2017. The aim of the experiment was to provide new insights on handling cooking pits which formed an integral part of…[Read more]

The paper describes an archaeological experiment which was conducted during the course “Experimental Archaeology” held at the Department of Prehistory and Historical Archeology at the University of Vienna from June 30th to July 2nd 2017. The aim of the experiment was to provide new insights on handling cooking pits which formed an integral part of…[Read more]

This is an enhanced compilation of relevant entries from Clavis Patrum Graecorum which was compiled by me (GS) for the “Patristic Literature in Arabic Translations” volume up to Nov. 2015. It is an embryonic version of what was later substantially enlarged and published as “A Bibliographical Guide to Arabic Patristic Translations and Related T…[Read more]