The most recent issue of the Annual of the British School at Athens is a treat! It contains an article on the pottery from the site of Kastri on Kythera and a chemical analysis of the “Middle Byzantine Production” pottery from the sites of Thebes and Chalcis. After the yesterday’s election, it seems appropriate to… Read More →
The quantity and quality of scholarship over the last few years on Late Roman and Early Byzantine Cyprus has been quite remarkable. Just a two weeks ago, I reviewed here another edited volume, Cyprus and the Balance of Empires, bringing together a wide range of voices on Late Antique and Byzantine Cyprus. Before that review… Read More →
At the end of the year, I think we’re supposed to reflect on the past and celebrate avoided mistakes, seized opportunities, and events that shaped our lives. While we do that, I’d also direct you to Felipe Rojas’ and Valeria Sergueenkova’s article in the most recent Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology: “Traces of Tarhuntas: Greek, Roman,… Read More →
I was pretty excited to pick up at the ASOR annual meeting the volume titled Cyprus and the Balance of Empires edited by Tom Davis, Charles Stewart, and Annemarie Weyl Carr. The volumes consists of a series of papers focused on the period from Justinian I to the Coeur de Lion originally presented at Cyprus… Read More →
This past week, Steve Conn penned a column over at the Chronicle of Higher Education site the describes the rise of the “helicopter teacher”. This is a nice phrase, and all, but it sounds cooler if you call them the gyrocopter professor. To Conn this term describes the rise of a group of faculty members… Read More →
Since we’re in excavation mode today after our spring storm yesterday, I’ll offer up a working paper for your inspection. The paper looks at settlement on Cyprus during the 7th and 8th centuries and argues three interrelated things. First, it challenges the idea that scholars should consider Late Roman Cyprus to be normative and late-7th… Read More →
Over the next two months, I’ve been asked to write an essay on settlement in 7th and 8th century Cyprus. My work at Polis-Chrysochous and at the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria puts me in a good position to think broadly of this transitional period with two specific points of reference. The coastal site of Pyla-Koutsopetria appears… Read More →
There is an old Norwegian folk saying that circulates in these parts. This wisdom divides the world into hedgehogs and squirrels. The hedgehog lives in the comfortable world of a relatively temperate hedge protected from the elements, with a steady diet of grubs, and the secure knowledge that it can simply roll up into a… Read More →
Over Thanksgiving I had a chance to do some more fun reading and tucked into Veronica Della Dora’s Imagining Mount Athos (University of Virginia Press 2011). The book examines how outsiders have imagined the Holy Mountain from antiquity until modern times. The Mt. Athos peninsula, as many readers of this blog will know, has been… Read More →
This weekend I attended the Dumbarton Oaks Spring Colloquium on Byzantine Survey Archaeology. The papers were remarkable and focused. The hosts and colloquiarchs, Margaret Mullett, John Haldon, and Sharon Gerstel put together a congenial environment for a wide ranging conversation on survey archaeology in a Byzantine context. While John Haldon did an admirable job weaving… Read More →
This weekend I’ll be at Dumbarton Oaks presenting a paper at their spring colloquium on Byzantine Archaeology. As I have noted earlier this week, the colloquium is on the impact of survey archaeology on Byzantine studies, and I was tasked with writing a paper on looking across chronological barriers. I focused my paper on comparative… Read More →
After getting some nice feedback on my Monday blog post, I put together a working draft of the paper that I’ll deliver at a conference at the Joukowski Institute for Archaeology at Brown next week. No one will mistake the paper as anything other than my particular perspectives on Byzantine Archaeology. It reflects my interests… Read More →
At the end of next week I am heading to the Joukowsky Institute at Brown University to contribute to a symposium on “Big Questions and Next Directions in the Archaeology of Greece“. My paper will look at Byzantine Archaeology. With only 15-20 minutes, there are limits to what I can say. Moreover, I can’t say that… Read More →
