Here are 100 books that Dug to Death fans have personally recommended if you like
Dug to Death.
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When I applied to college, I thought I’d study science and pursue my passions for art and justice separately. Then, I went to Kenya for my first excavation and found that archaeology combined my love for storytelling, data analysis, and making the world a better, safer, more inclusive place. As much as I love movies like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, I never saw myself in them. They just don’t capture what I love about archaeology! Now, my research—like this list—is dedicated to really understanding what makes archaeology so compelling, so rewarding, and most capable of telling nuanced stories that make us think differently about our past.
This book is one of my absolute favorites for expressing how archaeology really works on a macro level. As a student, I learned that archaeology has often been co-opted to serve political and nationalist purposes.
But the hows and whys of that process weren’t clear until I started doing archaeology. I love how Nadia Abu El Haj makes extremely clear why archaeology as a science lends itself so well to solidifying claims about identity, history, and land. I really admire how Abu El Haj captures what happens between the direct, tangible encounter of a person with an artifact and the abstract, national level of narrative construction and policymaking.
Archaeology in Israel is truly a national obsession, a practice through which national identity-and national rights-have long been asserted. But how and why did archaeology emerge as such a pervasive force there? How can the practices of archaeology help answer those questions? In this stirring book, Nadia Abu El-Haj addresses these questions and specifies for the first time the relationship between national ideology, colonial settlement, and the production of historical knowledge. She analyzes particular instances of history, artifacts, and landscapes in the making to show how archaeology helped not only to legitimize cultural and political visions but, far more powerfully,…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
When I applied to college, I thought I’d study science and pursue my passions for art and justice separately. Then, I went to Kenya for my first excavation and found that archaeology combined my love for storytelling, data analysis, and making the world a better, safer, more inclusive place. As much as I love movies like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, I never saw myself in them. They just don’t capture what I love about archaeology! Now, my research—like this list—is dedicated to really understanding what makes archaeology so compelling, so rewarding, and most capable of telling nuanced stories that make us think differently about our past.
This was one of the first archaeology books I was assigned when I started studying archaeology, and I only appreciate it more and more with time. I don’t think there is any book the captures so well the fact that real archaeologists actually learn much more from everyday, mundane objects—rather than from the monuments and treasures that archaeology in the movies is all about.
I still remember, too, the moment this book made it ‘click’ for me that archaeology often reveals secrets that contradict the written record. A plantation owner might say, for instance, that they designed and built their house, but they can’t hide the existence of the front porch and other traces of African architectural and construction techniques.
My copy of this book is riddled with nearly 20-year-old post-it notes, each one representing an epiphany for a budding archaeologist just ahead of her first summer of excavation.
A fascinating study of American life and an explanation of how American life is studied through the everyday details of ordinary living, colorfully depicting a world hundreds of years in the past.
History is recorded in many ways. According to author James Deetz, the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten. Objects such as doorways, gravestones, musical instruments, and even shards of pottery fill in the cracks between large historical events and depict the intricacies of daily life. In his completely revised and expanded edition of In Small Things Forgotten, Deetz has added…
When I applied to college, I thought I’d study science and pursue my passions for art and justice separately. Then, I went to Kenya for my first excavation and found that archaeology combined my love for storytelling, data analysis, and making the world a better, safer, more inclusive place. As much as I love movies like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, I never saw myself in them. They just don’t capture what I love about archaeology! Now, my research—like this list—is dedicated to really understanding what makes archaeology so compelling, so rewarding, and most capable of telling nuanced stories that make us think differently about our past.
This book, for me, is something of a guiding star. It is profound, scientific, powerful, and directly applicable to contemporary debates about policy, governance, and justice. Archaeology isn’t just about collecting objects; instead, most archaeologists I know are deeply invested in how archaeology can help inform the decisions we make in the present. MacArthur “genius” award winner Jason de Leon shows the full potential of this in this book, where he combines archaeological, ethnographic, and forensic methods to reveal the impact of immigration policy on real human bodies and families.
Maybe it’s cheating to include this book on this list; it isn’t just how archaeology works—it has set a new standard for archaeologists to make contributions that are relevant and resonant enough to make a change in the world.
In his gripping and provocative debut, anthropologist Jason De Leon sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time-the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De Leon uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of "Prevention through Deterrence," the federal border enforcement policy that…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
When I applied to college, I thought I’d study science and pursue my passions for art and justice separately. Then, I went to Kenya for my first excavation and found that archaeology combined my love for storytelling, data analysis, and making the world a better, safer, more inclusive place. As much as I love movies like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, I never saw myself in them. They just don’t capture what I love about archaeology! Now, my research—like this list—is dedicated to really understanding what makes archaeology so compelling, so rewarding, and most capable of telling nuanced stories that make us think differently about our past.
I read this book at a time when I was feeling dissatisfied with archaeological writing’s ability to capture the feeling of being at an archaeological site—all of the sensory experiences and historical enigma.
I loved that much of this book was written as a series of dialogues that actually took place while walking around Stonehenge. I also love that this text looks directly at different people’s thoughts and experience of the site, and allowed those contestations and disagreements to remain unresolved.
To me, this book felt like the uncertain social experience of finding so much, and yet never enough, through the archaeological process.
This book is an imaginative exploration of a place that has fascinated, intrigued and perplexed visitors for centuries. Instead of seeing Stonehenge as an isolated site, the author sets the stones within a wider landscape and explores how use and meaning have changed from prehistoric times right through to the present. Throughout the millennia, the Stonehenge landscape has been used and re-used, invested with new meanings, and has given rise to myths and stories. The author creatively explores how the landscape has been appropriated and contested, and invokes the debates and experiences of people who have very different and often…
I study culture. Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by what people think, feel, believe, have, and do. I’ve always wondered why people need things to be meaningful. Why do people need an explanation for why things happen that puts the meaning outside their own minds? I wanted to get beyond the need for things to be meaningful by themselves, so I began looking into meaning-making as a thing we do. Once I realized the process was infinitely more interesting and valuable, I read books like those on my list. I hope they spark you as much as they have me.
I love that Ingold uses the concept of design to explore how people make meaning and things meaningful. By bringing me through lenses such as architecture, archaeology, and art, he shows me that design is not a process of doing but of making.
When we design, we do so by constructing meaning and knowledge. The artifacts that come from my design thinking are secondary effects of the thinking and meaning-making. I love being brought into a larger point of view on the everyday activities of my own life.
Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making, and all are dedicated to exploring the conditions and potentials of human life. In this exciting book, Tim Ingold ties the four disciplines together in a way that has never been attempted before. In a radical departure from conventional studies that treat art and architecture as compendia of objects for analysis, Ingold proposes an anthropology and archaeology not of but with art and architecture. He advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to,…
Tim Murray has been a leading exponent of the history and philosophy of archaeology for the past thirty years. He has used the history of the discipline to explore the nature of archaeological theory and the many complex intersections between archaeology and society. Of his many publications flowing from this general project, the award-winning global scale five-volume Encyclopedia of Archaeology,the single volume global history of Archaeology Milestones in Archaeology. Murray is a global leader in applying studies in the history of archaeology to the reform of archaeological theory. This is evidenced by the publication of a collection of his essays, From Antiquarian to Archaeologist, and his numerous academic papers on the subject.
Wylie’s philosophical journey over the past 22 years has mirrored (and in some senses helped to create) the landscape of contemporary archaeological philosophy.
Certainly Wylie’s commitment to developing an ethical and inclusive archaeology, where discussions of research agendas such as feminism should not be ruled out by the application of empiricism, has done a great deal to support the work of archaeologists also committed to those agendas.
In this long-awaited compendium of new and newly revised essays, Alison Wylie explores how archaeologists know what they know. Examining the history and methodology of Anglo-American archaeology, Wylie puts the tumultuous debates of the last thirty years in historical and philosophical perspective.
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
My passion for ancient history and archaeology began in secondary school when I started learning Latin and we were taken on a field trip to Fishbourne Roman Palace. By the time I started my MA at Bristol, my obsession with ancient Roman housing was well and truly established, and it quickly became clear to me that this was the area that I wanted to study for my PhD. Now as an Associate Professor in Ancient History and Archaeology at Royal Holloway, University of London, I have been very lucky to study and teach a range of areas in ancient history and archaeology, including my beloved area of the Roman domestic realm.
Hamilakis’s Archaeology and the Senses was one of the first books I read when starting to explore multisensory history, and it totally altered my view of how we study the past.
Focusing on Bronze-Age Crete, Hamilakis examines how archaeology has engaged with the bodily senses thus far and critiques its emphasis on sight and the traditional hierarchy of the five senses in the west.
Moreover, he proposes an innovative and exciting means by which archaeology can move beyond its focus on visual experiences of artefacts, environments, and materials to bring in lost and neglected, yet just as important, bodily senses such as sound, smell, taste, and touch.
Through this approach to archaeology he seeks to evoke a deeper, richer insight into the breadth of human experience in past societies.
This book is an exciting new look at how archaeology has dealt with the bodily senses and offers an argument for how the discipline can offer a richer glimpse into the human sensory experience. Yannis Hamilakis shows how, despite its intensely physical engagement with the material traces of the past, archaeology has mostly neglected multi-sensory experience, instead prioritising isolated vision and relying on the Western hierarchy of the five senses. In place of this limited view of experience, Hamilakis proposes a sensorial archaeology that can unearth the lost, suppressed, and forgotten sensory and affective modalities of humans. Using Bronze Age…
Kees van der Pijl was lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex in the UK. He retired in 2012. At Sussex he was head of department and director of the Centre for Global Political Economy. Besides democracy and anti-war activism he continues to write on transnational classes and policy networks, including the role of “deep politics”.
As the attack on democracy in the West has come to include the grip of Big Pharma on public health programmes and on bodies like the World Health Organization, the covert dimensions of how this influence is being exercised have also come under scrutiny.
With a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. highlighting the fate of successive critics of medical misconduct, one of the most vocal of these critics and her co-author offer a shocking account of the repression they faced.
Passionate, personal, and highly revealing about the risks one takes by speaking out on the basis of facts.
#1 on Amazon Charts, New York Times Bestseller, USA Today Bestseller-Over 100,000 Copies in Print!
"Kent Heckenlively and Judy Mikovits are the new dynamic duo fighting corruption in science." -Ben Garrison, America's #1 political satirist
Dr. Judy Mikovits is a modern-day Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant researcher shaking up the old boys' club of science with her groundbreaking discoveries. And like many women who have trespassed into the world of men, she uncovered decades-old secrets that many would prefer to stay buried.
From her doctoral thesis, which changed the treatment of HIV-AIDS, saving the lives of millions, including basketball great Magic…
After finishing my secondary education in Athens I got a degree in business administration at the University of Genova. The idea was to return to Greece to work in my father’s business. But I soon realized that I was neither interested in business theory nor going back to Greece to work in my father's organization. I decided to continue my studies in England focusing on the social sciences – first at Leicester University and then at the London School of Economics. After retiring I continued to write books and articles in Greek, English, and French. I have passion for reading and writing. It helps me psychologically as well to survive in a postmodern chaotic world.
I know Antony Giddens from the time we were young lecturers at the University of Leicester.
He is one of the well known living sociologists globally. In this text he shows the importance or interpretative sociology for understanding social reality. I personally recommend it to those who want to know how our social world is constructed.
This is a new and revised edition of a book which has established itself as a basic text in social theory. The first section of the work provides a concise critical analysis of some leading schools of thought in social philosophy, giving particular attention to phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and Wittgensteinian thought. Giddens concentrates primarily upon the implications of these various perspectives for an account of human action and its intelligibility. An 'action approach' on its own, however, will not do; in human social life, action and structure presuppose one another. The author therefore moves on to provide a series of concepts…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
I taught philosophy (in particular critical reasoning!) for the colleges of Oxford University between 1987 and 2021. But, aged 15, I was thrown out of school (for truancy and disruption). Between the ages of 18 and 23 I travelled the world, hitch-hiking through Asia, living in Australasia, then travelling back through Africa. By the time I got home, starved of intellectual stimulation, I started an Open University Course and discovered logic. It was the hardest thing I had ever done. But also the most enjoyable. I loved getting to grips with difficult distinctions and concepts and having to use them precisely. Getting the answers right felt like an achievement. Getting them wrong, a challenge. I’ve loved logic ever since!
As with any other academic discipline, philosophy has its own language. This is not jargon (or it shouldn’t be!). It is a technical terminology. To look at something very closely, as any academic discipline does, is to record distinctions that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Immediately two names are needed where only one was needed before. This book will talk you through the most important of these distinctions. The book also looks at the methodology of philosophy, the most important of which, of course, is logic.
A new edition of the bestselling guide to the study of philosophy: the ideal intellectual 'toolkit' for sharpening analytical skills and building philosophical acuity
Whether used as a guide to basic principles or a resource for key concepts and methods, The Philosopher's Toolkit equips readers with all the intellectual 'tools' necessary for engaging closely with philosophical argument and developing fluency in the methods and language of philosophical inquiry. Featuring accessible explanations, practical examples, and expert guidance, this text empowers readers to understand traditional philosophical thinking and to engage with new ideas.
Focuses on the practical methods and concepts necessary…
