Mike Anderson uses his Ancient History blog to ask a deceptively contemporary question: what can Greece, Rome, and the broader human past tell us about the choices societies make now? In this interview, he discusses why direct online publishing suited his approach, how short-form historical writing can invite conversation, and why recurring patterns in human behavior make ancient history more than an exercise in looking backward.
Tag Archives: Meet the Blogger
A Voices of the Past interview series profiling heritage bloggers and the emerging online communities around their work.
Kimberly Alderman of the Cultural Property and Archaeology Blog
Kimberly Alderman describes how blogging helped her create an intellectual community around the specialized intersection of archaeology, law, and cultural property. What began partly as a way to educate and position herself as a scholar while geographically isolated became a platform for making complex legal issues accessible, following emerging cases, and connecting with others working across professional and disciplinary boundaries.
Kurt Thomas Hunt on Putting the Sexy Back in Archaeology
Kurt Thomas Hunt built Sexy Archaeology as both a personal voice and a deliberately recognizable digital brand for archaeology. This interview explores how he combined blogging, photography, social media, and a bit of entrepreneurial experimentation to make the field more approachable and energetic. Beneath the playful branding is a serious question about professional communication: how can archaeologists reach wider audiences without draining the discipline of substance?
Lynne Thomas of “Confessions of a Curator”
Rare-books curator Lynne Thomas discusses blogging from inside special collections and the emerging possibilities of “Special Collections 2.0.” Her work connected traditional stewardship with new forms of public access and professional exchange, asking how libraries could use participatory web tools without losing the context and expertise that give collections meaning. The conversation captures a period when curators were actively redefining what access to rare and distinctive materials could mean online.
Electric Archaeology’s Shawn Graham on Simulating Ancient Social Gaming Networks
Archaeologist Shawn Graham describes using agent-based modeling and digital social-network analysis to investigate how people may have interacted in the ancient world. His Electric Archaeology blog grew from dissatisfaction with static models toward experiments with dynamic simulation and digital humanities. The interview shows archaeology beginning to treat computation not merely as a recording tool, but as a way to ask new questions about human behavior and past social systems.
Carla Bruni of “The Green Preservationist”
Carla Bruni created The Green Preservationist to work across a divide she repeatedly encountered between historic-preservation advocates and the green-building movement. Drawing on experience in both worlds, she used blogging, workshops, and practical projects to challenge assumptions on each side. The conversation is ultimately about productive synthesis: how preservation and sustainability can become stronger when practitioners stop treating change and continuity as opposing values.
Sabra Smith of “My Own Time Machine”
Sabra Smith’s My Own Time Machine used personal experience and online writing to explore what it meant to care about heritage during a period of economic uncertainty and rapid media change. Her work placed institutional preservation concerns alongside the perspective of an individual practitioner navigating those shifts, showing how blogging could become both a public voice for preservation and a record of one person’s evolving relationship with the field.
Tony Cagle, Serving Up “Old” News Since 2004
Archaeologist Tony Cagle had already been publishing Archaeoblog for five years when Voices of the Past interviewed him in 2009, making him an early veteran of heritage blogging. He reflects on entering the medium near the beginning of the blogging boom, mixing professional archaeology with a distinctly personal voice, and maintaining an audience over time. His experience offers an early lesson in digital longevity: sustaining a platform requires personality as well as expertise.
Dan Cull on Conservation for the i-Generation
Conservator Dan Cull reflects on how blogging changed both his professional confidence and his understanding of conservation as a cultural practice. His writing became a way to engage with ideas beyond his immediate workplace and to argue for a more collaborative, interdisciplinary model of conservation. The interview captures the social web functioning as professional infrastructure: a place where individual practitioners could test ideas, build networks, and challenge established organizational boundaries.