On my flight home from Greece, I read Fotini Kondyli’s recent(-ish) article in the The Annual of the British School at Athens 112 (2017), titled “Lords at the End of the Empire: Negotiating Power in the Late Byzantine Frontiers (14th-15th Centuries).” It’s a nice article that explores the complex relationship between semi-autonomous rulers of the Byzantine frontiers and the… Read More →
I was invited to give a paper at a conference in March at the The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies at Oxford titled “Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity.” My current plan is to present the results of some of our recent work at Polis Chrysochous which involves not only the careful unpacking of… Read More →
While on Cyprus this summer, I re-read Joy Williams’ The Changeling (1978). Most of the book is set on a mysterious island off, perhaps off the coast of Georgia (but it doesn’t really matter), where Pearl is drawn first by a mysterious man. When he dies a tragic death after they have a son together, she lives out her life… Read More →
In the spirit of my “Sumertime Fragments,” I’ve been working on a little piece on the relationship between the church at E.F2 at Polis, which we call the South Basilica, and various communities. Unlike most of my sober and frankly archaeological (and architectural) approaches to this building and space, I tried to offer something that’s… Read More →
As I haiku-ed this morning on the Twitters, I am working on an abstract for a paper that I’ll give at the 2019 Dumbarton Oaks colloquium “The Insular World of Byzantium” in November. Here’s the haiku: Writing an abstractDuring the summer seasonevokes autumn cold Here’s the abstract: An Island Archaeology of Early Byzantine Cyprus Over the… Read More →
One of my tasks this summer is to think more seriously about islands, and being on Cyprus and reading some of the recent scholarly work on islands in Byzantium seems to have stimulated this some. Go figure. (To be clear, I have to write an abstract for a conference on islands by May 30th. In other… Read More →
With the semester winding down, I’m beginning to organize myself for a three week summer study season at Polis in the Chrysochou Valley in western Cyprus. For the last ten years (almost!), Scott Moore and I have been working with the Princeton Cyprus Expedition team to to document and publish the rather remarkable assemblage of material from the… Read More →
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks hanging out with Catherine Kearns’s and Sturt Manning’s new edited volume, New Directions in Cypriot Archaeology (2019). It’s a pretty interesting read and was a good way to start thinking in a more sustained way about the archaeology of Cyprus in the run up to a summer study season at… Read More →
Over the weekend, I read Giorgos Papantoniou’s and Niki Kyriakou’s article in the most recent AJA, “Sacred Landscapes and the Territoriality of Iron Age Cypriot Polities: The Applicability of GIS.” Not only was it great to read something on Cyprus in the AJA, but it was cool to read something on the neighborhood of Kition where we worked… Read More →
I was pretty excited to read Marietta Horster, Doria Nicolaou, Sabine Rogge’s edited volume, Church Building in Cyprus (4th – 7th century): A Mirror of Intercultural Contacts in the Eastern Mediterranean (Waxmann 2018). I’ve been working on Early Christian Cyprus for about 10 years now and have been struck by the lack of book-length “standard… Read More →
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to pull into shape a conclusion for the second volume from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. I posted part of that conclusion a couple of weeks back, here’s some more (with a bit of overlap!): Recent work on Cyprus has looked to recontextualizing the archaeology of the island in… Read More →
