This past week R. Scott Moore and I sent off a draft of a paper on settlement in Cyprus during the Early Byzantine period. This has been a work in progress for the last few months and developed partially from our work on Cyprus at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and at the site of Polis-Chrysochous. … Read More →
I was pretty excited to read Jesse Casana’s very recent article on the Late Roman landscape of the Northern Levant in the most recent Oxford Journal of Archaeology. I’ve been poking, in a tentative way, around this region lately (via articles and books, mind you) in an effort to situate Cyprus more clearly in its… 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 →
Spring break is one of my favorite times in my busy semester because for the last few years, I’ve been able to dedicate this time to a sustained writing project. In a normal semester, my writing has tended to get broken into tiny fragments of time – a morning here or an afternoon there –… Read More →
I plan to dedicate most of this week to putting words on the page for an article on settlement on Cyprus in the 7th and 8th centuries. The article will start with a brief treatment of the difficulties associated understanding settlement in this period. These difficulties which range from problems with the ceramic chronology to… Read More →
This past week I’ve been catching up on some of my reading on 7th and 8th century Cyprus for an article on settlement in the these centuries that I’m preparing for an edited volume. I’ve particularly enjoy three contributions by Luca Zavagno from 2011, 2012, and 2013. Read together, they provide a short-book-like overview of… 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 →
Tomorrow I head off to the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. You can check out the full program here (.pdf). Our panel is at 8:20 AM on Friday morning: 5C City of Gold: Archaeological excavations at Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus Theme: This session details the exhibition, City of Gold: Tomb and Temple… Read More →
Two interesting articles landed on my desk over the last few days. D. Pullen’s report in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology on the site of Kalamianos in the the Korinthia and Justin Leidwanger’s article in Journal of Roman Archaeology documented a 2nd-3rd century shipwreck at the site of Fig Tree Bay on Cyprus. Pullen argues… Read More →
One of the great things about travel is that I got a chance to read a couple of books. I finished up a fairly recent classic of modern anthropology Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines. Situated at the intersection of Clifford Geertz’s “thick description” and Bruno Latour’s work on the agency of machines, Orr’s classic records… Read More →
This is a rare and exotic double post! Anyone who has seen me around campus knows that I’ve been obsessing with a paper that I’m delivering under the Friday night lights (um… sort of) at the University of Texas on Friday. This paper is really just the start of three separate things. One is a… Read More →
The last couple of week, I’ve been working on the paper that I’ll give at the University of Texas next week (egads!). An important component of the paper involves comparing the Late Roman ceramic assemblage from the area around the South Basilica at Polis-Chrysochous with the contemporary assemblage from the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria with a… Read More →
One of the best things that I’ve done over the last four weeks is think about how I would change the survey volume we are on the verge of publishing from our with with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project on Cyprus. Thing of this as a preview of what the book is not. My main inspiration… Read More →
