Hey folks! This is Lucas Livingston from the Ancient Art Podcast, serving up hot meals of antiquity since 2006 with a healthy side of smack! Yeah, that's right. 10 years. A good decade now. Going way back to when smartphones were still cool and your friends were telling you all about why you gotta join this Facebook thing.

So I got 2 things I wanna tell ya now:

1. There’s this awesome class coming up at the the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. It’s a 3-part series called "Drinking in Antiquity" and I’m teaching it. It’s on 3 Saturdays in 2016, October 8, Nov 12, and Dec 10. We’ll cover Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mongolia and Central Asia, the Silk Road, and ancient Greece. We’re gonna visit the collections in the Oriental Institute and University of Chicago's Smart Museum, and we’re gonna get "experimental" with multiple ancient-inspired beer tastings. If you’re interested, visit ancientartpodcast.org/drink.

2. So, we're gonna try something different and change up the podcast. In a perfect world I love producing the glitzy hi def video episodes. The reality, though, is that the effort has become rather prohibitive for me at this current point in my life. Don't worry! The Ancient Art Podcast is still here, but I'm going to switch over to publishing a largely audio podcast for a while and see how that goes. I'll continue to produce a simplified video version for YouTube, where video continues to make the sense. And I’m still going to show my love for the arts and material culture, but with this new turn in the road towards audio, we’ll likely stray into the broader realm of narratives about the ancient world. I've got plenty of fodder with the legends of Dionysus and, heck, I could do a whole series on boozing it up in ancient times, combining my passions for antiquity and brewing! But first up, you and I are going to take the little journey down the Silk Road. So strap on them sandals, dust off your camel, and buckle up, because episode 69 of the Ancient Art Podcast is just over that sand dune!

Visit http://ancientartpodcast.org/

Connect at http://facebook.com/ancientartpodcast and http://twitter.com/lucaslivingston.