This weekend I read the latest in a spate of edited volumes on the history and archaeology of Cyprus: From Roman to Early Christian Cyprus: Studies in Religion and Archaeology edited by Laura Nasrallah, AnneMarie Luijendijk, and Charalambos Bakirtzis. The book continues in a tradition begun by the late Helmut Koester by bringing together historians, art historians, and archaeologists… Read More →
Last week, I attended a virtual conference on Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity convened by Ine Jacobs and Panayiotis Panayides at nominally hosted by Oxford University. The conference was a wonderful cross section of recent research on Late Antique Cyprus and brought together specialists on both a wide range of material culture and texts from… Read More →
This morning, rather early my time, I’ve started to attend a conference on Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity where I’m giving a paper later this morning. The line up is impressive and I’m looking forward to getting up to date on a range of people’s work on Late Antique Cyprus. My paper seeks to… Read More →
An article by Michael Loy has been making the rounds lately, and my colleague Grace Erny brought it to my attention this morning. It so happens that I’ve also been talking a lot of Greek survey (and Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey) with my old friend David Pettegrew lately because he is working on a book… Read More →
Back-to-back weeks with Three Things Thursday! How crazy can it be here at the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World? With the semester looming and outstanding project piling up, I wanted to write some shorter things over the next few week, but when I sat down to Thing The First Here’s a little piece that I wrote… Read More →
Over the weekend, I read Justin Leidwanger’s new book, Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (2020). It’s a pretty good book that brings ship wreck data to bear on long-standing questions of regional and inter-regional trade in the Eastern Mediterranean. Leidwanger’s focus on the Cilician coast and Cyprus make the book particularly… Read More →
There have been a few articles recently on resilience in the ancient world (e.g. here, here, here, et c.) and considering the looming social disruptions caused by the COVID-19 virus, this work feels particularly timely. Last week, the new volume of Studies in Late Antiquity appeared and it included an article by Tamara Lewitt titled “A Viewpoint on Eastern… Read More →
Next week, I was supposed to head to the UK to give a paper at a conference dedicated to the long Late Antiquity on Cyprus. For coronavirus reasons, the conference has been rescheduled for January 2021. You can check out the program(me) here. Whatever I write for that conference will likely be a bit different… Read More →
Over the last 5 years, my colleagues and I have been struggling to bring our work at Pyla-Koutsopetria to a close. We have largely stepped away from work there (which continues under the direction of Brandon Olson and Tom Landvatter), but have struggled to publish the results of our three seasons of excavation at the… Read More →
This week I’m shifting gears from working on archaeology of contemporary America and returning to Late Antique Cyprus to prepare a paper for a conference in March on Cyprus and the Long Late Antiquity. The abstract for my paper is here. As with so many conferences, I wrote my abstract in June 2019 for a paper… Read More →
Whether Three Thing Thursday is becoming a tradition or a routine depends, I guess, on your point of view. But once again, my week has become hectic and strangely the end of the week is more busy than the start. As a result, my world is pretty fragmentary and all that I have left are snippets… Read More →
My body is gallantly fighting off a cold the week, so I don’t quite have the energy for a long involved post. So, instead, I’ll offer a little “Three Thing Thursday” as I try to keep the balls in the area down the stretch run of the week. First Thing. A colleague shared this article… Read More →
I’ve been working this week on adapting some of the paper that I gave at Dumbarton Oaks last month into a section in a short article with Jody Gordon. The article considers globalization as a paradigm for understanding Roman and Late Roman Cyprus. In my short contribution, I’m arguing that, in some ways, Late Antique Cyprus… Read More →
Over the last couple of weeks, I continue to think about the role of legacy data in archaeology. This is for a paper that I’ll give next month at the annual Archaeological Institute of America. I’ve started to work through my ideas here and here. At first, I imagined that I’d give a fairly routine… Read More →
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on my paper from next week’s Dumbarton Oaks colloquium titled The Insular Worlds of Byzantium. My paper is a bit of a rambling affair which seeks to consider whether island archaeology is a useful way to think about the island of Cyprus in the Late Roman and… Read More →
With the lovely fall weather, I’ve been taking the dogs on some long walks lately. This has not only given me the headspace to solve the world’s problems (if I only had a pen to write down the solutions before I forgot them all) and to work on a few papers that are looming in… Read More →
One of the funny things about expertise is that if you don’t practice being an expert on something, you begin not to be. Over the past few years, my interests have changed and my level of expertise has declined in general. I tend to see this as a good thing. My interest in the world… Read More →
I read over the weekend Michael Given’s article titled “The materiality, monumentality and biography of copper slag on Cyprus” in the relatively recently publish festschrift for Anthony Snograss. Given explores the materiality of slag which is ubiquitous on Cyprus. Slag preserves in a tactile way the history of its production with the bubbles and rivulets on its surface reproducing the… Read More →
