Apparently, it is the season of digging. Not long ago, I finally played LucasArts’ The Dig, and now a TV comedy with the same name is about to land. On 23 November 2026, Peacock releases Dig, a ten-episode series about an archaeological excavation in Greece. Behind it: Amy Poehler and Mike Schur, the team behind…
Now and then, a book puts words to something I have felt for years. C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game (2026) is one of them. Nguyen is a philosopher at the University of Utah who works on the philosophy of games. In this book, he asks a simple but…
On 20 October, I was in Vienna at the invitation of the Austrian Society for Prehistory and Protohistory (ÖGUF). At the Institute for Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology, I gave a talk on a topic I’ve been working on for many years: archaeogaming. The evening was hybrid, with an audience in the lecture hall and online…
Some games you never get around to. The Dig is one of those for me. LucasArts released it in 1995. It grew out of an idea by Steven Spielberg, and Orson Scott Card contributed to the dialogue. Given that the title literally promises digging, and that one of its three protagonists is an archaeologist, it…
I am writing this on the train back from Munich, laptop on the fold-down table and the conference still buzzing in my head. Today, Marco Weppelmann-Akyildiz and I presented our work on Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) at the colloquium Dokumentieren – Vernetzen – Kontextualisieren. Status quo und Zukunft der Vasenforschung (Documenting – Networking – Contextualising….
I recently moved one of my repositories from GitHub to Codeberg. Just one, for now. This post explains why I did it, how it went, and why I think researchers should care where their code lives. The trigger The move had a clear trigger: news about GitHub. In March, GitHub announced that from 24 April…
Some publications drag on for years. This one went from workshop to finished book in about sixteen months, and I am rather proud of that. Together with Marion Bolder-Boos and Georg Pantelidis, I edited Digitale Kompetenzen in den archäologischen Disziplinen. Perspektiven für die Lehre (Digital Competencies in the Archaeological Disciplines: Perspectives for Teaching). Propylaeum publishes…
CAA is going to Chile. From 17 to 20 May 2027, the University of Chile in Santiago hosts the 54th CAA International Conference – the first time the conference meets in South America (I think!). And once again, there will be an archaeogaming session. I am co-organising it with Aris Politopoulos and Angus Mol from…
A call for papers landed in my inbox recently, and it deserves more visibility than it will get on its own. ConTrA 2027 – Reconstructing Antiquity. Knowledge, Imagination and the Making of the Ancient World takes place on 19 February 2027 at the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne. Here is why I think…
Last week, I attended the 53rd International Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) in Vienna, Austria. The conference took place from 31 March to 4 April at the University of Vienna, right on the famous Ringstraße. It was a packed week – and a very good one. Presenting and organising I…