Music Monday: Duke, Fortner, and Grossmann

The first week of classes is always a hectic time and doesn’t always afford much time for good listening.

That said, I did make some time to enjoy Duke Ellington’s concert from 1940 in Fargo’s Crystal ballroom. This is famously the first recording of Ben Webster with Ellington’s band and his breathy, smooth tenor saxophone appears in abundance. While I find some pre-war recordings more interesting as an archival documents than exciting listens (which may say more about my appreciation for jazz than I want to admit). This remarkable live album is an exception. It’s a brilliant artifact. Check it out here:  

I also enjoyed Sullivan Fortner’s new album, Leave That In There (2026). It’s Fortner on piano (and keyboards) with Tyrone Allen II on bass and Kayvon Gordon on drums. The tracks are short and tight and many of them feel not just improvised, but like he’s experimenting. They’re fragmentary and since I’m into fragments these days, it’s a suitable soundtrack.

Finally, I really like the Portuguese reed player Muriel Grossmann and I’ve really enjoyed her latest improvised album with Estonian keyboard play Tõnu Naissoo. They describe the album as spiritual and cosmic jazz which seems fair to me. Parts of it verge on “acid jazz,” but like most of Grossmann’s albums, it is deeply entertaining:

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

The “frog days” of summer are coming to an end and the first hints of fall — changing leaves, cooler nights, and shorter days — are more and more present. That means it’s time to return to my Friday tradition of quick hits and varia, although I suspect I’ll continue to post some “Photo Fridays” as well.

This weekend is “Week 0” for college football, although not many games of note are taking place. The Fighting Hawks won their home opener, though, last night, and the Mighty Spiders start their season against Bucknell. The Spiders are unranked this year, but the Hawks started the season ranked 10th. Judging by their victory last night, they probably deserve it. The Phillies are out west trying to salvage an already bumpy roadtrip (while the Braves swept the Dodgers!). The Eagles and the Buckeyes are tuning up before what should be interesting seasons. The Cup guys are at Daytona for the annual “Summertime Crashfest” summer night race. All of this is just the warm up to the Sixers season.

With all that going on, I’m going to hunker down the weekend and finish a paper due August 31st and make sure my second week of classes is a bit smoother than my first! 

While I contemplate a weekend in my office, please enjoy some quick hits and varia:

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Teaching Thursday: Notebooks, Double Dipping, and Getting Old

I’m more than halfway through the first week of classes and that feels like as good a time as any for a three things, teaching, Thursday:

Thing the First

For my historical methods class, I bit the bullet and bought the entire class Moleskine style black bound notebooks (which can be purchased at bulk for around $2 a notebook). The tipping point was this: In my class of 10 or so, no student had a paper notebook on their desk. This is the first time that I recall no students having a paper notebook. Not a one. The classes at my institution still attract the occasional one-notebook guy and we have more than our share of planner-proud students (especially from the “helping sciences” of nursing, social work, counseling, and so on), but this semester in the historical methods class, I had none of them.

My hope is that getting students a notebook reduces the friction to pen-and-paper note taking and encourages students to write stuff down.

I’m also going to design an AI assignment around it. I’m going to have them scan their notebook around the midway point of the semester and have the AI of their choice transcribe their handwriting into a word document and produce an index to their notebook. I will then ask them to critique the scan and index for accuracy. It should be a good way for them to see the potential for AI for helping organize research, but also its limitations.

Thing the Second

I am teaching two sections of History 101: Western Civilization to 1500 this semester. One is on Tuesdays and Thursday for 75 minutes and the other is a single 150 minute night class. It’s pretty rare that I get to teach the same prep in two different “modalities” (as the kids say). It’s made me think a good bit about how I might leverage this to the benefit of both current students and future ones. One thing that I’m most interested in seeing is whether having shorter class periods allow students to sustain more energy and engagement to produce better work (and presumably more learning) or whether the longer class allows students to work in a more sustained and less frantic pace.

I also wonder whether students might comment on the work of the other class more honestly than work done by their own classmates. Usually I have groups review each other’s work in the same class, but maybe I’ll have the classes evaluate each other’s work. I wonder whether a bit of distance emboldens them to be more critical (in a constructive way).

Thing the Third

I often tell my students that my teaching career has had three phases. When I first started teaching, I was similar enough in age to my students to be able to genuinely empathize with their experiences; hecks, when I first started teaching, I was still a student as well. After ten years of teaching (around the time I got my first tenure track job), I could remember enough of my own undergraduate (and graduate) experience well enough to “get” what students were going through. More than that, I was generally the same “generation” as these students (roughly Gen-X-ish or Gen-X-adjacent). 

A growing sense of disconnect marked my third decade of teaching where each year, I understood the “kids these days” less and less. This was amplified by COVID and the challenges adapting my teaching style to those of the “COVID Kids” whose high school careers were interrupted by the virus.

As I am well and truly in my fourth decade of teaching (!!), I like to think I can now lean into the “old dude with wisdom” vibe. This means, I can speak about universal truths (despite going to college before anyone had email, the internet, or cellphones), I can offer vague and slightly disingenuous reassurances that “this too will pass,” and I no longer have to justify anything I say or do in the classroom beyond this I just how I do things.

That said, I also have to guard against using my experience as a schtick. Students these days crave sincerity, earnestness, and honesty. If they feel like I’m just performing a role — slightly crazed older professor who uses too much profanity and “saw some stuff back in the day” — they’ll tune out whatever wisdom that I feel like I can offer. I probably cross the line into “schtick” this semester a bit. I need to double down on the authenticity in the spring.

Writing Wednesday: More on Fragments

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been revisiting Nora Goldschmidt’s Fragmentary Modernism: The Classical Fragment in Literary and Visual Cultures, c.1896 – c.1936 (2024). It has me thinking about fragments again and how they might be relevant for rethinking how we approach digital practices in archaeology (and this is for the conference, “The Digital, The Archaeological, and the Ethical” at the Center for Hellenic Studies in mid-September).

I’ve decided that I want to introduce my paper by entwining three concepts of fragments. The first, is drawn from folks like Goldschmidt and their reading of modernism more broadly. This will focus on the experience of a fragmented reality. This manifest, say, in Imagist poetry, in the Arcades of Benjamin, in the music of Igor Stravinsky, and the art of Picasso. Cultural critics bold enough to essay an interpretation of fragmentation often see it as a product of accelerating speed, growing alienation, and industrialization. The sense of a fragmented world is never more apparent than when you board an airplane in one city and disembark in another experiencing nothing but a generic tube in between. In a more mundane way, our scheduling apps, calendars, and appointment books with their neat compartments dividing our days, encounters, and activities into tidy intervals is a more mundane encounter with fragmentation. Few things are more alienating from the flow of normal social interaction than when you notice that a conversation must be cut short for another meeting. Despite how jarring and unpleasant it is, it shapes most of our daily lives.

The second form of fragmentation is that which one encounters in archaeology (or at museums that display archaeological artifacts). This form of fragmentation is apparent in the broken ceramics that find in excavation and survey, in maimed sculpture, and in walls, roofs, and even rooms violently displaced from their original context. Archaeologists have long struggled with how to treat these fragments. In some cases, archaeologists take great pains to reconstruct the whole from the fragments by reassembling vessels, adding plaster prosthetics to damaged sculpture, restoring collapsed buildings, and creating digital reconstructions of past worlds. In my corner of the discipline, efforts to make sense of the fragments of ceramics scattered across the landscape initially led archaeologists to populate the Greek countryside with sites. These sites took on functional, demographic, economic, political, and social characters. Artifact level survey challenged the integrity of sites and dove back into the fragment as the smallest interpretable unit for archaeological interpretation. 

This drive back to the fragment in intensive pedestrian survey in the Mediterranean coincided with the growing presence of digital technology in archaeology. While digital tools and excavation (and survey) have a history together dating to well before the predominance of artifact level survey, it is clear that the capacity to handle fragments distributed across geographic space had a significant impact of archaeology as a discipline. The sheer number of books, articles, panels, and conferences on digital practices in archaeology alone testifies the ongoing impact of this technology. Digital technologies, of course, rely on fragmentation to process vast quantities of information. Indeed, we easily speak today in bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and today terabytes and even zettabytes.

The fragmentation in computers, in archaeology, and in our experience of everyday life often serves to support a drive toward efficiency and speed. My paper, will ask how we can subvert this expectation of fragmentation and recognize fragmentation as an opportunity not only for critique (of alienation, the dehumanizing drive toward efficiency, and incomprehensibility of the contemporary experience), but also to appreciate its potential to subvert the inevitability of narrative (a la Benjamin or even Hayden White), to push us toward deeper, more meditative approaches centered on the materiality of archaeology (sensu Byung-Chul Han), and, in the end, potential to sustain a kind of slow practice that resists both the (seemingly) always accelerating present and the inevitability of progress.   

The Monastery on Mt. Menoicheion

Over the last week or so, I’ve read and enjoyed Nikos Bakirtzis’s new book, Architecture and Sacred Landscape in Byzantium: Making Prodromos Monastery on Mount Menoikeion (2026). I don’t read as much in Byzantine history, architecture, or landscape studies as I want to which is always a bummer. As a result, I was very glad to take some time this past week to read this book and enjoy it.

The focus of the book is the Prodromos Monastery on Mt. Menoikeion near Seres in Macedonia (Greece). The monastery had its origins in the 13th century, with an earlier predecessor that the founders of the current monastery, Ioannikios and his nephew Ioakeim, revived. For the next 700 years, the monastery stood as a significant and wealthy institution in the hinterland of Seres attracting wealthy patrons and visitors. In the early 20th century, its status and the community declined as it was caught up in the violence of two world wars. In 1986, however, in an effort to revitalize the abandoned site, the church installed a group of nuns in the venerable monastery. Since that time, the monastery has endured a destructive fire, but also enjoyed considerable investment in its restoration. More than that, Nikos Bakirtzis and the nuns who live there have introduced a generation of students both to Byzantine and post-Byzantine monastic architecture as well as contemporary monasticism.    

Here are four things that I found intriguing in the book:

1. Setting: The setting of the monastery on Mt. Menoikeion located it as part of the long tradition of sacred landscapes in Christianity. Whether mountains served as a form of wilderness or an idyllic retreat from the chaos of the mundane, such settings attracted monks across the Eastern Mediterranean who, in turn, left monastic institutions in their wake. The presence of cave chapels, small churches, and ruined sanctuaries speaks to the persistence of the mountain as sacred space. These sites are entwined and support the history of monastic and religious activity on the mountain.

2. Founding Stories. The various sources describing the foundation of the monastery on Menoikeion stress that the initial foundation was not ex nihilo. In fact, Ioannikios found a ruined church and as part of his ascetic practice, took to rebuilding this. For those of you who have followed this blog for many, many years, you know that I have an enduring fascination with the practice of rebuilding ruins found in deserted landscapes. Not only does this tell us that Mt. Menoikeion had already acquired a sacred landscape before the founding of the current monetary, but that founding it on the ruins of an earlier church was an important way to establish continuity with an already sacred past. In this context, it is perhaps immaterial whether there was a ruined church which Ioannikios rebuilt or whether this is a pious legend or well-worn trope. The significance is that sacred places have continuity in the landscape.   

3. Continuous Adaptation. The continuity with the sacred must have contributed to the continuous investment in the monastery even if the development of the monastery as an institution and the wealth of its patrons deserve most of the credit for its persistence. Nikos does a remarkable job describing the development of the building and the complex. As someone who was perhaps narrowly focused on the Byzantine katholikon and the little chapel dedicated to the Taxiarchs, I was surprised to become completely engrossed in the adaptation and transformation of the monastery in the 19th century. It was particular interesting to read how the buttressed Byzantine tower was transformed into the monastic library in the 19th century. This was done despite explicit instructions from the founder Ioakeim that it serve as a guest house for members of the community. 

4. Rebirth. Finally, the entire volume stands against the backdrop of a revived monastery where a community of nuns welcomes visitors (and archaeologists and architectural historians), continues to tend gardens, and almost certainly provides an additional context for the 21st century renovation and restoration of the monastic compounds. My tendency to study religious buildings that were not only disused but also fallen down sometimes insulates me from remembering that these buildings were the centers of community life. The persistent presence of a new community (well, new-ish) in the monastery on Mt. Menoicheion provides a nice reminder that the continuous adaptation of the monastic buildings was not in the service of some kind of abstract architectural development but as part of the community’s ongoing life.

Music Monday: Tolliver, Booker, and Aldana

I usually have a bit of burnout in the week before the semester starts. The summertime grind of research, reading, and writing runs up against the anticipation of the new academic year. It’s stressful, exhausting, and exciting all at once. 

And, it’s usually a time when I turn to music to help my channel my waning and dispersed energy. The last week was a good music week.

First, Strata-East continues to release its catalogue to streaming services and that includes lots of Charles Tolliver. His most recent album, Charles Tolliver Allstars: Right Now… and Then (1971) is a brilliant album by one of Tolliver’s best bands: Herbie Hancock on Piano, Ron Carter on Bass, Joe Chambers on Drums, and Gary Bartz appears on a couple of tracks playing alto sax. The album is loud, intense, and brash in a brassy, swingin’, 26-year-old-first-time-band-leader-with-an-Allstar-supporting-line-up kind of way. Check it out:

Second, I’ve been listening to Roy Haynes with Booker Ervin’s album Cracklin’ (1963) with Ronnie Matthews on piano and Larry Ridley on bass. Booker Ervin is really good (as always), but the low-key star is Roy Haynes whose drumming is remarkable. “Under Paris Skies” is a great track).

My friend Dimitri Nakassis was once incredulous that I didn’t listen to drumming more (I’m sure it wasn’t the first, only, or last time I made him incredulous). Since then, I’ve listened more carefully to drumming and it’s help me appreciate guys like Roy Haynes much more. And now the rest of my readers can be incredulous that I like music as much as I do, but didn’t regularly pay attention to the rhythm section. (I’m also tempted to check out Larry Ridley’s 1975 album, Sum of the Parts released on Strata-East).

Just to get away from listening to drumming, I’ve been enjoying Linda May Han Oh and Melissa Aldana’s Beneath Lifted Skies (2026). It’s a duet album with May Han Oh on bass and Aldana on tenor.  In particular, I love the big breathy tenor tone of Aldana’s sax on “I’ll Be Seeing You”: 

And the interplay on the Sam Rivers’s tune: “Cyclic Episode”

Finally, this song from the new Mountain Goats album, Days (2026) makes me smile:

Photo Friday: Burn Out Edition

I had this plan to restart my quick hits and varia this week. It was an honest and real plan, and then the long, lazy tendril of late summer burn out happened and instead of doing work for my blog, I spent the last week fiddling with a paper, re-reading a monograph that I read two years ago, and trying to catch up with my email backlog (and two peer reviews). Needless to say, I’m desperate for the structure of the semester.

All this is to say that I have a few more photos for you instead of anything substantive. They’re all with the Nikon D600 with a 24-85 lens. A few show how much I need to get the sensor cleaned (and I am hoping this isn’t oil from the shutter).

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This last one is from 2009.

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Three Things Thursday: Running toward the Fire

I’m pretty excited about the start of the semester. This semester is going to be crazy busy. Not only am I teaching five classes for the first five weeks of the semester, but I have a ton of little (and not so little) projects coming at me from conference papers (and travel), to Digital Press books, to grants, and larger book-length manuscripts.

Here are three things that I’m thinking about as the semester beckons (or is it looms?). 

1. Hectic is Fun. When I was in my 20s, I admired the culture that developed around the first dot-com companies. I was drawn the intensity, the bustle, the shared commitments, and the excitement of working on the razor edge of exhaustion. I got to experience a version of this doing archaeological work where time constraints, limited resources, and the stress of constant decision-making created the same kind of energy.

I suspect that I’ve been chasing that kind of “high” since the 1990s and have worked (sometimes unconsciously) to create situations where I can experience the intensely generative bustle that produces new ideas. It’s exhausting, of course, and part of me dreads the inevitable transition from buzz to grind, but I will not be bored (and with any luck, I’ll have next fall off).  

2. Lots of teaching means staying in the moment. Teaching five classes in the fall is a lot, but it pushes me to stay in the moment in the classroom (and even when doing course prep). It prevents me from creating elaborate (and invariably inefficient) learning objectives, fixating on planning, and micromanaging assignments and classroom interactions.

Instead, I do my best to identify good texts, engage with the students thoroughly in the classroom, and give them space (and support) necessary to figure things out on their own. Teaching more saves me from my worst tendencies: over planning, trying to manipulate outcomes (at the expense of understanding), and micromanaging out of frustration about the uneven pace of learning.

As I’ve spent more time in the classroom over the last three decades, I’ve come to realize that the most important thing a teacher does isn’t bound up in lesson planning or assessment, but being present in the classroom.

3. Take more photographs. I’ve been taking a good many photographs this summer inspired as much by my rediscovery of film as my need to take breaks from whatever it is that I think I should be doing.

This week, while out walking around and shooting photos, I started to think about what I was trying to do with my photography. I probably have clung too fiercely to Gary Winogrand’s famous quip: “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs” as a way to avoid really thinking about what I was doing. Or, I told myself that I was working on the technical aspects of photography, which gave me a pass on thinking about what my photographs were saying.

Over the fall, I want to think more about what I’m trying to do with my photographs and even, if my readers here will indulge me, spell it out. 

Writing Wednesday: NDQ

Over the last week or so, I’ve been slogging through some revisions on my article about the the first 23 volumes of NDQ. While this has involved lots of spinning wheels, some crunching of data, and some new prose (especially after I learned that my article could be 7500 words rather than just 4000).

The best of this new prose, which isn’t saying much to be honest, is in the introduction:

 

From 1910/11 to 1933, The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota (now North Dakota Quarterly) was a regional magazine based at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota (USA). It appeared in 23 annual volumes across four issues each with five or six articles of 4000-5000 words as well as book reviews, poetry, and various editorial and university notes. Each volume, then, amounted to a 125,000 words or so and the total run of the first 23 volumes to a bit under 3 million words. The Quarterly emerged amid a deepening interest in regionalism in the American scene. With roots in the late-19th century, writers, historians, and scholars devoted renewed attention to the emergence of regional identities across the North American continent. The turn of the 20th century witnessed the easing of the tragic regionalism that wracked the country during the American Civil War and the growing embrace late-19th century concepts of cosmopolitanism embodied in the universal aspiration of the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. These trends encouraged the emergence of new publications which celebrated regional literary styles and the growing role of institutions in promoting regional economic, political, and social interests.

So far, critical attention to the Quarterly has slipped through the cracks between long-standing conversations about literary regionalism (and cosmopolitanism: e.g. Lutz, Dorman) and recent work to trace the social, cultural, and historical developments of regionalism on the North American prairies (Rozum 2021). Scholars of literary regionalism, while recognizing novels from such luminaries as Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and Wallace Stegner, also trace the influence of little magazines in introducing a wider audience to work of “regional” authors. More broadly, Molly Rozum’s work to trace the emergence of a regional identity in the Northern Plains places the work of novelists alongside memoirs, histories, cultural networks, and scientific studies of the region’s distinctive arid, tall-grass prairies. Contemporary magazines like the Quarterly operated between these two registers. They embraced the form of little literary magazines but rather than joining the surge of regional voices gaining recognition at the national level, they published scholarly essays on topics of regional and national interest across a wide range of fields from education and history to the natural sciences and public policy. In this regard, they bridged the gap between the little magazines and commercial magazines published in Minneapolis and paralleled magazines published by state and regional historical societies.

As the following contribution will show, the history of the Quarterly Journal reflects the development of regionalism in an American context in three interrelated ways. First, Quarterly Journal has a distinctive history that is inseparable from its situation at the university, the interests of its editors, and the greater political life of the state. The first part of this contribution unpacks this context. The second part of this contribution places the Quarterly Journal alongside the boom in little magazines both nationally and in the region. Finally, the Quarterly Journal represents a process where regional voices, particularly those in the progressive tradition, become institutionalized at universities and colleges. This process both deprived these voices of their sharpest radical edge, while also validating their call for progressive change intellectually and politically in the region. In is in this context that the Quarterly Journal created space to negotiate the tension between regionalism and cosmopolitanism in an American context. Unlike purely literary journals which often left as tacit the tension between a distinctly regional voice and that of the literary establishment, the wide ranging topics in the Quarterly Journal, including interests in institutions, communities, the environment, and the economy, allowed authors to recognize the significance of the regional situation in explicit relation to the national and even global one.

 

Two Things Tuesday: More Anarchism

From where I sit, there’s been a notable uptick in scholarship that appeals to anarchism and anarchist praxis in archaeology over the last decade. Some of this should be attributed to David Graeber and David Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) which for whatever its limitation has inspired scholars to consider how anarchist practices and concepts may help us understand how societies function in the past. 

I suspect that the publication of Charles Orser’s newish book Mutualist Archaeology will continue to breath life into this trend by offering an expansive survey of key texts outside the field of archaeology and some examples for how anarchist ideas can inform archaeological interpretation.

Over the weekend, I read Polina Kapsali’s “Exploring alternative trajectories of social change in European prehistory. Anarchist theory and the Aegean Bronze Age” in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 83 (2026). (H/t to Dimitri Nakassis for sending this along!) 

The article looks at the development of the Aegean Bronze Age in the late EBII to Early EBIII period transition. As Kapsali shows, historically, scholars have understood this period as one of collapse and then reestablishment of social order in Greece. In general, this narrative follows the trajectory informed by social evolutionism which sees societies as a whole organizing around a small number of elites in centralized places (to generalize a complex set of arguments). Kapsali argues, from what I can understand in this dense and careful article, that places like the House of Tiles at Lerna in the Argolid (dating to the late EBII period) often represent evidence for this kind of transition. Kapsali reiterates the “authoritarian” character of large structures like the House of Tiles with their clear evidence for spatial distinction in the buildings and structured access to various rooms. She pays particular attention to ceramics and seals as evidence for dining practices and food collection and storage. 

Where Kapsali introduces something new (at least to me) is that she argues that the decline of these large buildings is not the reflection of the displacement of one group by another or some kind of social collapse, but the reconfiguration of social and spatial organizations around loosely nucleated settlements. If the House of Tiles and other monumental structures represent increasingly centralized nodes of authority, more dispersed settlements, characteristic of the Early EBIII period reflect the dispersion of authority. These decentralized EBIII settlements which overlap in meaningful ways with the more centralized monumental Late EBII buildings represent more egalitarian practices through the flexibility of the buildings to adapt to various functions, more evidence for small scale dining practices, and less controlled access to spaces. 

Kapsali argues that the types of settlement characterized by the decentralized networks of the Early EBIII period reflect a “trajectory” that was independent of the nearly contemporary trajectory that culminated in the centralized buildings at Lerna. It appears, then, that decentralized network was not the result of the collapse of a centralized system, but an independent and possibly competing form of social organization that won out.

In other words, decentralized habitation patterns and more egalitarian social practices was not the collapse of centralized authority, but an equally viable, competing form that survived the EBII to EBIII transition when the more fragile and authoritarian form did not. 

If this little review of the article demonstrates anything, it’s that I don’t really understand the EBII to EBIII transition very well. To be fair, it’s pretty far from my area of study (and while reading the article I frequently vocalized EB as Early Byzantine). That said, the basic idea of two trajectories — one tracing monumental centralization and the other tracing a more dispersed settlement structure — does offer a useful way to think about the tumultuous centuries at the end of antiquity. Rather than seeing the collapse of the centralized state in places like Greece (or perhaps better, it’s retreat to a handful of urban centers) as a mark of decline, the emergence of decentralized and often ephemeral settlements and the adoption of locally manufactured handmade pottery suggests adaptation to new economic and political conditions. This “trajectory” to borrow Kapsali’s terminology has its origins well before the retreat of centralized — imperial — authority to coastal enclaves. 

A few years ago, we playfully argued that handmade pottery from the Early Byzantine period might be the culmination of the ancient ceramic tradition. Stripped of unnecessary decoration and detail, the vessels preserve their simple functional design. They could be manufactured anywhere and by anyone with a modicum of expertise and experience needing neither the wheel nor the industrial kiln. These simple (or better still efficient and functional) vessels could be manufactured by groups on the move seasonally or in collectives without the need for complex and costly overhead (kilns, wheels, levigation facilities, or necessarily designated clay beds). In situations where economic, political, and environmental changes elevate stress levels, the production of handmade pottery is a calculated response to daily needs for cooking and serving food. 

Obviously, this is not entirely satisfying. In contrast to the EBII to EBIII transition (from what I can gather), the transformation of the Late Roman world is set against 1000 years of ancient social organization, material culture, and political life. The notion that handmade wares and dispersed, less centralized political and social organization is simply an adaptation to stresses risks downplaying the extent and character of the change Late Roman Greece. That said, narratives that foreground adaptation in the place of collapse and entropy offer ways to recover meaningful history from so-called “Dark Ages” and even redeem the capacity for societies to adapt to challenges in new ways.