Brandon Olson, a specialist in Hellenistic and Early Roman pottery and military equipment explains the significance of the military finds from the Hellenistic military site of Vigla. We surveyed and excavated this site as part of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeoligical Project and Bradon who worked on the site and received his M.A. in History from the… Read More →
There is a particular kind of reflection that comes from reading a notebook description about the excavation of a benchmark set by a previous years’ excavators or architects. In the area around benchmark 6″ soil is dark brown and moist. Digging reveal the large fragments of an earlier benchmark – L6 or 6′ – immediately… Read More →
Our adventures with basket handles continued over the last few days at Pyla-Koutsopetria and Scott Moore and I recorded another “clever” video showing how we used spatial data from survey and excavation to develop a typology of our vexing basket handled amphora. We should be able to argue that traditional vertical stratigraphy – that is… Read More →
Scott and I tell the story of one little sherd’s abrupt rise to glory and fame and its just as sudden crash. It’s like VH-1’s Behind the Music, except it’s about a potsherd. Going through the finds collected over 9 years of work at the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria has reminded us of so many stories… Read More →
I have finally finished by relatively uninspired review of C. Schabel’s brilliant new edition of the Bullarium Cyprium. Regular readers of this blog have already read this post and this post on this book. I’ll continue my practice of posting the final(ish) version of my review here so that you can see how my ideas… Read More →
I was really excited to see a paper on the Early Byzantine site of Kaukana in Sicily in the most recent volume of the American Journal of Archaeology: R. J. A. Wilson, “Funerary Feasting in Early Byzantine Sicility: New Evidence from Kaukana,” AJA 115 (2011), 263-302. The article describes a bizarre (and creepy) house burial… Read More →
I hope to get a complete draft of my review of Bullarium Cyprium up by the beginning of next week so that I can move on to other projects. I blogged some of my initial perspectives on this two volume collection of Papal letters concerning Cyprus last week. Today, I’ll offer a handful of additional… Read More →
Over the last 15 years Christopher Schabel’s name has become synonymous with the history of Medieval Cyprus. (How’s that for the first line of a book review?) Last year, was a banner year for Schabel, in particular, in that it saw the publication of the Bullarium Cyprium, a massive two volume edition of Papal letters… Read More →
It’s pretty hard to blog this morning with Australia v. India going on in the quarter-finals of the World Cup (and this moment Australia is 165/4 and not looking quite as sharp as they did a few overs ago). I did, however, come across my efforts to produce a comprehensive catalogue of Cypriot churches. It’s… Read More →
Over the past few weeks I have been working to digitize a series of notebooks from the Polis excavations on Cyprus. The notebooks document the excavation of a Late Antique (to Medieval) basilica style church, surrounding burials, and a some earlier structures. The excavators basically dug in a stratigraphic way and recorded information for not… Read More →