This blog – The thoughts and musings of an Albanian archaeologist as she navigates her way through graduate school, life, and excavation units. There will be typos.

Me specifically – I am an archaeologist who works in the Balkans, specifically Albania and Kosova. I am interested broadly in questions of movement, mobility, migration, settlement & colonization. Simply put, I am interested in understanding why people lived where they did and why this changed over time. I use Geographic information Systems (GIS) to make maps and analyze my data. I make killer maps, if I do say so myself.

My friends jokingly call me the queen of hillforts – this is because I am specifically interested in understanding the role of hillforts in the prehistoric landscape. This means I often have to trek up mountains to visit these sites.

As you may find while reading through my posts, my interests in the part of the world are not limited to prehistory and I often reflect on current matters – and my life as I navigate acadamia (sometimes unhappily). I often write about acadmia, geopolitics, regular polics, human rights and ethics. I try to do so in an anthropological lens, by applying the theory and methods I have learned in school to modern day situations. By doing this I hope to show that archaeology is not a discipline that can be divorced from the present, in fact, anthropology and archaeology can sometimes provide some much needed perspective that might help us understand better understand the present.