A Nod to ResearchBlogging.org and to a Great Archaeology Website

I sometimes post reviews of journal articles here, and when I do, I usually submit them to Research Blogging. Those who follow science blogging probably already know, but Research Blogging aggregates content that reviews and cites articles in the literature across the natural and social sciences (and Philosophy). The bloggers submit the citation and the post and Research Blogging links to it, the idea being that most bloggers (like me) post on a range of topics of varying seriousness and scientific content, but through Research Blogging you can follow a blog or browse by field and get only the more rigorous posts (ideally, anyway). The four posts I’ve sent to them have accounted for well over half of the total visits to Iapetus Beat and my Toba supervolcano post was an Editor’s Selection, so I’m grateful. Also, I’ve had issues using their html with my blogger site and thus I haven’t posted their icon, so this recognition is me giving back.

One of my discoveries from Research Blogging is an archaeology/anthropology site concerned with Chaco Canyon and related southwestern archaeology called Gambler’s House. Blogger teofilo has submitted 15 posts so far to the aggregator site and has many more at Gambler’s House. It’s not really for casual skimming – it’s comprehensive and in-depth, and he reviews evidence from isotopic analysis, geochronology, linguistics, and the like, and unfailingly provides good synthesis and context. On top of that, it’s lucidly written and the photographs are very nice.

Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. Photo from Gambler’s House.

When in grad school, I taught four seasons on two related cross-disciplinary field classes that covered North American geology, archaeology, and ecology/environmental science, in that order of concentration (UGA-IFP and Geojourney). The trips changed a bit year-to-year, but we always spent a lot of time in the Southwest. The major cultural sites we visited were Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Wupatki, and Bandelier. We went pretty deep, considering it was a traveling class for undergrads, and I really enjoyed discussing what is and isn’t known about those sites with the Archaeology Instructors and Professors. Migrations and settlement patterns, Mesoamerican influence, the rise of the Kachina cults… Gambler’s House covers all of that.