Big Thank You!

I have been working extra hard lately to really make something of myself and this blog, and I would like to thank all of you who have been so supportive and have shared it with others! It has been a really exciting week and I am so grateful for all the warm welcomes I've received. I particularly want to thank all my new Twitter followers, especially Dr. Steven Lubar, Dr. David Gill, the Peabody Museum, and Cultural Heritage Parners, LLC. I am also truly grateful to Prof. Archer St. Clair Harvey and Prof. Tod Marder at Rutgers' CHAPS, and Sasha Renninger at Penn CHC for all of their support in sharing the blog with their students and faculty, as well as their very nice invitations to drop by their offices if I'm ever in the area.

When I began this blog in January, I had no concrete ideas about what purpose I wanted it to serve or how I wanted it to grow. Trial and error over the last seven months has pushed me towards filling a gap and entertaining a market that is both wide and critical in solving these cultural heritage issues: college students. To my knowledge, no other blog or website seeks to directly address college students in order to inform them on cultural heritage issues (particularly the illicit antiquities trade) and give them the tools they need to do something about it themselves. Even if that tool is simply having the right book for their research. I find this perplexing, considering how, you know, students are the future. College students have been my primary target audience since the beginning, but over the next few months, I will be focusing on them and this gap in the market more earnestly. My goal is to make this blog not just a commentary, but a resource for all the young angry people who love all the world's old things and past peoples, who value what we learn about our selves and humankind through artifacts and bones, and who are dedicated to saving the culture and bodies of the past from the selfish, destructive hands of a market that values only the aesthetic worth of artifacts. I am hoping to make Things You Can't Take Back a much more dynamic and informative space, so over the next few weeks, I'll be adding a few new features that I hope everyone will find entertaining and educational. In the meantime, I hope you'll keep reading and sharing!