Three Things Thursday: Wishful Thinking Edition

I’m tired for lots of reasons, but that fatigue has made it hard for me to focus on anything. I’d love to have the bandwidth to read more carefully and thoughtfully what’s coming across my desk right now and I wish I had a chance to process more thoughtfully the experiences that I’m having in the classroom this semester.

In humble recognition of the disconnect between my aspirations and my realities here, a wishful thinking three things Thursday.

Thing the First

I’ve been trying to read Catherine Kearns’ latest article, “Beyond metrics of resilience and survival in Mediterranean landscape archaeologies” in Archaeological Dialogues. Her work has a studied skepticism toward the recent interest in resilience as a metric for discussing the diverse relationships between communities and their environment in antiquity. Moreover, Kearns seems to show a kind of polished annoyance with some of the more simplistic applications of resilience theory in archaeology (and, of course, she’s not alone; adaptive reuse is a low bar for identifying resilience).

More than that, in my cursory, distracted, and tired reading, I got to wonder how resilience as a narrative might intersect with booms and busts and ways of thinking about time organized around different rhythms, patterns, and experiences. How would Byung-Chul Han or Walter Benjamin think of resilience and the narratives that it produces? I hope that I have time to really think about this.

Thing the Second

I also got a bit fascinated by an article by Jessica Varsallona titled: “Freshfield and Byzantine Ephesos: Railway, faith and archaeology” in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Varsallona follows the history of three Early Christian column capitals from Ephesos to Surrey in the 19th century. These capitals came from the church St. John in Ephesos nearly a century before its excavation and formal discovery. Varsallona argued that Edwin Freshfield brought these capitals to England as part of a larger effort to manifest church history in the context of 19th century British colonialism (especially protectionism) through eliding Anglicanism to Byzantine Christianity.

Ideally, I would have the time and energy to read this article carefully and think expansively about how this contributed to the growth of Byzantine studies and the rise of a kind of mystical appreciation of Byzantium in the west. This interest in the 19th and early 20th century inspired the first wave of archaeological interventions at Byzantine sites and the growing interest in Byzantium in Western Europe and the U.S.

Thing the Third

Today was the last meeting with the students in our Reading The Roman Revolution group. Four students met weekly at 7 am to work their way through Ronald Syme’s monumental classic. The students did the reading each week, picked apart Syme’s arguments, and considered his larger points and context.

By the end of this remarkable book, the students had begun to ask big questions and issues of liberty and freedom. What does it mean to be free and to have liberty within the Roman oligarchy and how do these concepts apply to how we see the world today. There’s something about the distance that the Roman world offers that allows us to see the world more clearly today.

It’s been a good class.