Newletter Tuesday: Beyond Icons for the CAARI Newsletter

In the fall, I was asked to write a little note for the CAARI Newsletter about the recent volume that I edited with Kostis Kourelis and Dar Brooks Hedstrom: Beyond Icons: Theories and Methods in Byzantine Archaeology in North America(2024). It’s always a bit tricky writing about your own book (even if it’s an edited one!) without turning it into an advertisement for myself. I don’t know whether I managed it here, but my excuse is that I was invited to write this!

Looking Beyond Icons in the Study of the Byzantine Past

When many people think about the history and archaeology of Byzantium, the spectacular painted churches of Cyprus or cliff hugging monasteries of Meteora come to mind. The flicker of candlelight off gold mosaics and icons evokes the enduring mystery of the Byzantine era and sometimes provides an uncanny metaphor for the obscurity in which Byzantium lingers among many scholars. Archaeologists and Art Historians who study Cyprus are an exception, of course. Not only has the island’s Byzantine legacy enjoyed significant acclaim, but the island has hosted both generations of brilliant and influential scholars of Byzantium and provided an fruitful place for the next generation of scholars to develop.

Beyond Icons: Theories and Methods in Byzantine Archaeology in North America, offers some perspectives on the field of Byzantine archaeology from a dozen scholars deeply invested in the field. Some names will be familiar to archaeologists on Cyprus: Amy Papalexandrou has worked for years at Polis and William Caraher and David Pettegrew surveyed and excavated at Pyla-Koutsopetria in Larnaka District. Nick Kardulias has worked for a generation at Atheinou and the Malloura Valley. Caraher continues to work at Polis where he and Amy have published one of two Early Christian basilicas. The volume itself emerged from a series of conversations nearly 15 years ago at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Dumbarton Oaks, as many readers of this newsletter will know, worked to preserve and to publish Byzantine monuments on Cyprus throughout the 1960s and 1970s and as recently as the early 21st century published Peter Megaw’s volume on the Episcopal basilica at Kourion.

Amy Papalexandrou’s, Ann Marie Yasin’s, and Dar Brooks Hedstrom’s work remind us that there is still much to learn from religious architecture and landscapes. Anyone who has spent time with the over 100 Early Christian church excavated on Cyprus or the dozens of painted churches of the Byzantine and Medieval periods recognizes the value of these buildings not just for the history of religion on the island, but for the history of communities, social life, and economics. Scholarship centered on the experience of life and worship within these spaces, soundscapes, and landscapes shifts our attention from architecture as architecture (or art as art) to religious spaces as places for human activity. Marica Cassis’s work draws upon gender theory to situate women within both Byzantine communities and domestic spaces often outside elite, urban contexts. If Cassis’s article recognizes the potential of gender theory in the Byzantine archaeology, Nick Kardulias’s study of Early Byzantine millstones from Isthmia in Greece continues his efforts to situate the archaeology of Byzantium in the context of global archaeology. Adam Rabinowitz and William Caraher’s work with Kostis Kourelis, consider the past and future of Byzantine archaeology. Dreams, stratigraphy, and digital tools connect the legacy of innovation in Byzantine archaeology to the future of the discipline.

As Margaret Mullet explains in the book’s afterward, during her term as director of Dumbarton Oaks she sought to encourage wide ranging conversations about Byzantine archaeology which had by the early 21st century fallen into a secondary role at the institute. The papers in this volume found inspiration from these conversations and reflect a view of the field of Byzantine archaeology from a group of North America based archaeologists situated between the “Golden Age” of Byzantine Archaeology in the 1960s and 1970s and the generation to come.

The appearance of so many archaeologists with ties to Cyprus in this volume and the presence of so many Cypriot projects in the footnotes reveals the strong connection between Cyprus and the archaeology of the Byzantine era. Indeed, the editor of this newsletter – Annemarie Weyl Carr – set new standards for how archaeology and art history on Cyprus could inform how we understood Byzantine society. The scholars who contributed to this new volume followed her pathbreaking legacy and continue to work to move the study of Byzantium beyond icons and into the varied landscapes not only on Cyprus but elsewhere in the Medieval Mediterranean.