Believe it or not, Richard Rothaus and I still have things to talk about even after an (almost) complete first season of the Caraheard podcast. So, today, we’re premiering Caraheard: Season 2.

Like Season 1, we’ll continue our conversational style of podcasting, our unofficial (un)sponsors, and our slightly affected irreverence, but we’re both committed to bringing in more “very special guests.” In fact, we’ve recorded the second episode already with a very special guest and despite some little technical issues, it went really well.

On this week’s Caraheard podcast, we start with the idea that we should have a basic structure to our season (or at least a minimum number of episodes). I floated the idea of 12 episodes; Richard was more optimistic, but agreed that 12 episodes was a fine goal.

We then proceeded, as per usual, to banter about trucks. Richard’s truck is bigger, carries more archaeology stuff, and has more miles, but my truck has almost as many miles and a yellow dog. 

We then talked about what we did this summer.

It’s not a Caraheard podcast until someone talks about gravel and gravel pits. Brown gold. 

Richard got to spend some time in The Magin City: Minot, North Dakota. Minot has a deceptively charming downtown and I’ve enjoyed every visit I’ve made to the banks of the Souris, or, as they say in French, Mouse River. Despite what Richard says, it doesn’t really flow south, it flows north too. We both appreciated the Souris River Brewing Company, although I think I’m the only one who has tasted their fine wares.

Richard also continues the French lesson with a brief chat about his work around Mille Lacs in Minnesota. Before talking about his actual vacation which involved projectile vomit and the Vore Buffalo jump. Not to be intimidated by Richard’s smooth banter en francais, I mangled the pronunciation of the word ennui in my discussion of the existential angst experienced by buffalos on the Northern plains. 

We deftly avoid the neat segue between Richard’s summer and my summer in my brief and painfully uninformed pseudo-discussion of kites (neither the birds nor the flying machines) in the Middle East. I also know less about micromorphology than I should, but I was right in claiming they did some interesting work with it at Nemea. 

We then included a few words about our un-sponsors, the North Dakota Humanities Council‘s Game Changer Series. More information can be found here (you can tell that it’s serious because the voice over has an English accent). The event will include the guy who wrote, Men Who Stare at Goats. I will personally buy a beer from the Souris River Brewery to the first person who asks about telekinesis at the Game Changer. While I smart alecked around, Richard sung the praises the NDHC’s magazine On Second Thought which is not available online here.  

I then regale our listeners with my summer’s field work at Polis-Chrysochous on Cyprus and with the Western Argolid Regional Project. Richard asks about field work efficiency and refers to a blog post on efficiency and field team size that I floated at the end of exhausting, but tremendously rewarding WARP season. We also talked a bit about slow archaeology.

We finally talked a bit about our work on the North Dakota Man Camp Project, and we talked about our outreach work with the North Dakota Humanities Council funded, Man Camp Dialogues.