Bib

I have research I'm reading for the London book. Not sure how much I'll actually consult them, but in any case I have in physical form:

Canterbury Tales
London for Less
Londinium
The London Map Guide
Lonely Planet London
Ben Johnson's London
Stage Fights
London under London
The Practical Archaeologist
A Strong Land and a Sturdy
The London Underground
Archaeology Theories, Methods, and Practice
Shakespeare the Globe and the World

I have a few more in electronic form, although only the ones indicated in bold go beyond the first few (free sample) chapters at present (I will be buying more of them):

London was Ours
Blitz Diary
How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On
The War on Our Doorstep
Thames the Biography
A Beginner's Guide to Pantomime
Underground London
The Last Ditch
Pantomime Christmas
A History of Pantomime
London Under
Cheap London
London Travel
Down and Out in Paris and London
Directing Pantomime
When Violence is the Answer
The Gift of Fear
London Underground at War
London Underground's Strangest Tales
London Lore
Haunted London
Writing Fight Scenes
Violence, a Writer's Guide
Body Trauma
Archaeology, a Very Brief Introduction
Archaeology in Practice
Neoreaction a Basilisk
Indiana Jones in History
Antiquities, What Everyone Needs to Know
Archaeology Essentials
Not All Dead White Men
Three Stones Makes a Wall
Who Owns Antiquity
Fighting Nazi Occupation
Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage

And I haven't even looked into Roman Britain, Norman Britain (or whatever the first Field School is)...but most of the stuff about Urban Archaeology and Urban Spelunking, Train-spotting, London dialects, The Tower, Highgate Cemetery, The British Museum, living arrangements, street food, coin collecting, metal detectorists and the law, HEMA, and...I don't even know what else...are mostly going to be online resources.

***

Plans for the next couple books are Japan, particularly Kyoto, and some San Francisco, and the American Southwest. And in the "woah, even more research here" Israel/Turkey, Paris and Berlin.

The first two are...bonkers. The Southwest idea is to dip a toe in to American CRM, NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), Bears Ears, but also Trinity, Uranium Mining, and retro-tech, archaeo-gaming, the No Man's Sky survey project and the great Atari dig.

My new solution to the problem of the Japan one is to prevent her and the narrative from ever achieving a real deep dive on the culture or even much of the language, reduced to a tourist overview battered between the pop-culture of anime otaku and weabos and the pop-culture of samurai and geisha. Dealing with the archaeology of a self-inventing and endlessly refreshing culture whose artifacts range from the Ship of Theseus of ancient Shinto shrines to the can't-even-be-verified of the Imperial Regalia. And similar questions of identity, particularly through the lens of the Takurazuka Dance Troupe.

I'm trying to trim down the London book. The Romans may have to skip this one. At its heart it is the conflict between a Lara Croft sort of universe of what I  call "Tomb Crawls" -- dangerous solo expeditions through massive underground caverns -- and the realities of Shovel Bum work, where a graduate degree buys you as little as $12 bucks an hour starting salary. This book largely takes the glamour off both of them, and leaves an uneasy choice.

So as much as there are going to be dead parrots and bangers and mash and all that, it wants to be a fairly limited and straight-forward tale of digging in the dirt, shooting the shit with other people in the field, and trying to make a go of it under the added burden of a shrinking budget and lousy weather.

And a certain amount of white-knuckle climbing and desperate sword fighting. Because otherwise why even call it an "Athena Fox" story?