Staying Through Another Hurricane Season

I'll be teaching here at Tulane for another semester. I had made it as a finalist at a Mid-Atlantic school, but lost out to the competition. However, I do have enough of a job here teaching that with perhaps a little supplementary work, I'll be ok for the rest of the year. I've been working a bit of contract archaeology, and it has been better than the Calcasieu Parish work I talked about in a previous post.

My dissertation work has been on hold somewhat for a couple of weeks, due to the preparation, travelling, and aftermath of the job interview, as well as working for a living. But tomorrow will be my last day doing contract for a while, as I bang out the final parts of the dissertation, and prepare to teach this fall.

I have also had to revise some of my previous work. Not change the analysis or results, but rather modify some of my classification to bring it in line with more traditional and accepted classification schemes. Most of the changes, which I hammered out with my advisor, will make the classification easier to understand and possibly more useful.

It will be nice to be teaching again. The last few years, I've either been just writing, or running the Center for Archaeology. Now at least I can tell people "I teach at Tulane" and that will make a lot more sense than "I'm writing a book" or "I part-time run an archaeology lab." It's a job that people intuitively understand. The class will be a cultural anthropology course, for which I got some of the best reviews I've gotten teaching. I've revamped my syllabus, added a new ethnography on American street culture and illicit trade.