In about 5 days, I return home from my first summer field season in the last three years. It was productive and honestly exhausting even if I never did any real field work and spent most of my time looking at material excavated years ago. Most of our progress, then, hasn’t been revealing or creating… Read More →
This summer’s work at Polis in Cyprus has been a study season. This means that we spend our days in storerooms and at our laptops rather than in trenches or survey units.That said, over the past couple weeks, I got to thinking about our study season and the challenges and opportunities that come from traveling… Read More →
This summer, I’ll be once again in the field meaning that my regularly scheduled blogging might become a bit more intermittent. I’m not doing field work, but it’s a study season which will focus primarily on the site of Polis on Cyprus (with a brief side trip to Isthmia in Greece). As readers of this… Read More →
Yesterday, I learned that Diana Gilliland Wright had died earlier this month. I didn’t know her very well and, in fact, I can’t exactly remember if I had ever met her. I knew her mostly via email, comments on my blog, and her own voluminous blogging output. Over the last decade, as my research interest… Read More →
My stack of articles “to read” is pretty scary these days, but I was really glad to find time to read Michael Given’s 2020 article, “Attending to Place and Time: Seasonality in Early Modern Scotland and Cyprus” from the European Journal of Archaeology 23(3). This article is another in Given’s recent work to apply the concept… Read More →
Thanksgiving break is always an opportunity to slow down and be thankful for all the little things that make my life better. Historically, I dedicate Thanksgiving day to catching up on grading and taking a swing at the pile of books and articles that I’ve set aside to read “sometime.” Both of these tasks are… Read More →
Ok, so Watery Wednesday might be a stretch, but I’m slowly working my way through the massive list of Early Christian baptisteries on Cyprus (there are 7, but only 5 are preserved to any real extent and there are a couple that might be baptisteries, but don’t really have much in the way of evidence;… Read More →
My blog is a bit late this morning because I was finishing an almost final draft of my paper on the Chrysochou Valley. It comes in just under the 6000 word limit (with the abstract and citations). I’m pretty happy with it. Here’s the abstract: Abstract This contributionconsiders the long Late Antiquity in the areas… Read More →
I have been working on a contribution to an edited volume this week with a late-July deadline. The article is a revision of a paper that I gave in March at the Cyprus in long late antiquity conference (here’s a PDF). The paper that I gave considers the late 7th and 8th centuries at Polis (ancient… Read More →
This month, I’m working on revising a paper that I gave in March on the Chrysochous Valley on Cyprus during the “long late antiquity” (here’s a PDF). To do this, I’m going to look both later and earlier at two areas at the city of Polis. To tighten the paper a bit, I’m going to cut most… Read More →
Yesterday, I started to put some words on the page for a guide book to the excavations at Polis on Cyprus that Joanna Smith is spearheading. I focused on the site EF1 on Tuesday and today, I thought I would take a swing at the somewhat more formidable task of describing the neighborhood of the South… Read More →
One of this summer’s projects is to write up a few sections that contribute to a new guidebook for the site of Polis Chrysochous on Cyprus. The site is currently undergoing adaptation to accommodate visitors in a more structured and informed way and the site guide will be part of this larger undertaking. Fortunately, we have a… Read More →
This weekend I read Catherine Kearns’s and Anna Georgiadou’s recent article in the Journal of Field Archaeology (2021): “Rural Complexities: Comparative Investigations at Small Iron Age Sites in South-Central Cyprus.” The article is good for a number of reasons and should be added to any reading list on rural Mediterranean landscapes. If you have time (and are into that… Read More →
This week is Holy Week for many Orthodox Christians, but like last year, the COVID pandemic has changed some of the basic rituals of Orthodox life. Giorgos Papantoniou and Thanasis Vionis in a very recent article in the journal Ethnoarchaeology titled “Popular Religion and Material Responses to Pandemic: The Christian Cult of the Epitaphios during the COVID-19 Crisis in Greece… Read More →