Varia, Quick Hits, and Friday Notes

Some fun quick hits today.

• Kostis Kourelis at Buildings, Objects, Situations has a blog entry posing some good questions on the potential relations between the Archbishop of Corinth (and later famously of Athens) Damaskinos and American archaeologists during the 1920s and 1930s.  There is work to do in understanding the relationship between the American School and the Greek Church. 
• Kourelis work on the institutional and cultural history of the American School finds a happy counterpart in David Gill's History of the British School at Athens.  Both of these blogs show, I think, the real intellectual vitality possible in the genre of short academic notes.  While this kind of writing has seemed to die out in journals, the existence of good quality, small-scale academic writing in blogs suggests that the potential in this kind of work still exists.
• Some interesting photographs of the Archibishop's funeral from AP.
• Montana Archaeology is an new blog by Lance Foster focusing on North American archaeology in general and archaeology of Montana specifically.  It provides material for his Introduction to Archaeology class at the University of Montana. I've added it and a few others to my del.icio.us page.
• More North Dakotiana: An interesting article in the New York Times on campaigning in North Dakota.  The quotes from Mark Jendrysik (political theorist extraordinaire) on the second page really brings the piece and the place into focus. 
• And finally, a metadata update.  The Blogging Archaeology article has led to a relatively substantial uptick in both my number of visits and page views in the two weeks that the article has been online.  Interestingly, however, only about 137 visits (about 175 views) or 16.8 % of my total visits for the two week period) came directly from the Archaeological.org domain.  The hits from Archaeological.org, however, tend to be a more dedicated lot -- reading on average 2 pages for almost 3 minutes worth of total time on site.  Over the last two weeks, I've had about an 75% increase in views per week than over the preceding two months.  This is far in excess of the number of visitors from the Archaeological.org domain suggesting that some of the increase in volume to my blog is what I call "systemic" -- that is to say people finding my blog due via other linked blogs or sites (ideally this means that there is increased traffic in the system).  Whatever the cause, it is good to see that people are interested in what I am writing.