Feb 4- Happily, Doug’s Archaeology is back online. I don’t know why it was taken down, nor why it was restored, but I am happy for Doug that it’s still a going concern. The letter below was probably unnecessary, from the point of view of influencing whatever was going on at WordPress; but it’s sometimes good to say in public that what someone else is doing here in the blogosphere is important, that it matters, and that we value it. And so, I’ll leave this note up.

Dear WordPress.com

Doug Rocks-MacQueen is an archaeologist who performs a vital service to our community. I write as an academic archaeologist,  and I find that ‘Doug’s Archaeology’ https://dougsarchaeology.wordpress.com/ is an important vector for connecting academic archaeologists with professional archaeologists, students, and the public, and vice-versa.

Recently, Doug organized a blog carnival on the theme of ‘the grand challenges for archaeology’, which riffs on a journal article of the same title. That article missed the mark in many ways, and so Doug’s blog carnival highlighted the many other ‘archaeologies’ that main stream archaeological practice misses.

I am writing to ask you to reinstate Doug’s blog. Though his roundup was filled with many links, which presumably caused the automatic suspension of his site, it is a testament to his readership and his ability to bring disparate communities together that so many people participated in the carnival – which WordPress as a platform facilitates.  I invite you to also read the previous outcome of Doug’s exemplary blogging, ‘Blogging Archaeology’, an edited volume with Chris Webster, which similarly arose from a previous blogging carnival. /http://www.digtech-llc.com/blogarch-ebook/ .

In which case, given that he is using the medium of blogging in a constructive, dynamic way, and that he chooses to use WordPress to do so, I ask you to reinstate ‘Doug’s Archaeology’ as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Shawn Graham
Associate Professor of Digital Humanities,
Carleton University
Ottawa Canada

(to contact wordpress.com to voice your support for Doug, see https://en.support.wordpress.com/suspended-blogs/)