The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

A beautiful, but cold Friday morning for some quick hits and varia.

• Be sure to come down to the Empire Arts Center tonight around 6:30 pm to check out Ryan Stander's gallery show and get a sneak peek of Ian Ragsdale's new documentary.
• Richard Kahn and ecopedagogy. How cool is that?
• I am not sure what to do with Daytum, but I now have a Daytum page.
• Some great discussion about the limitations and problems with the iPad here, here, here and here. (via bavatuesdays) For the real scoop, check out Sam Fee. Some more interesting perspectives on the iPad over at Exploring Our Martix with lots more links.
• Keep checking back to the public history blogging project; I'll turn my public history interns into bloggers yet.
• Ok, I lied a bit about the exciting Teaching Thursday post... but it's still coming. We have a bit of a reluctant blogger issue there. Look for it later today.
• Who is Ryan Harris?  He took 5 more wickets this week.

Maybe some updates throughout today.

Teaching (with Technology) Thursday

Technology is all over the news this week with both Apple's announcement yesterday and the official publication of the 2010 Horizon Report; so I thought it might be a good time to talk a bit about some of the high-tech new and its potential impact on teaching and some of my own efforts to use technology in the classroom. This will also set up today's contribution to the Teaching Thursday blog. It might be a bit later than usual, but it will certainly be worth it!

1. Apple iPad. Every other blogger is talking about so, I would feel left out. As much as I love my MacBook Pro, I am deeply skeptical about claims that the iPad will have a significant impact in the classroom. Having said this, at least one school, Abiliene Christian, is already talking about the possibility of requiring the iPad for all of its students and Steve Jobs' consistently linked the iPad with Apple's goal to position itself at the "intersection of technology and the liberal arts". So, it seems clear that Apple conceives of the iPad as being at home in a university environment and at places like Abiliene Christian, where a significant relationship with Apple already exists -- they require their students to have either iPhones or the iPod Touch -- the iPad will certainly provide an appealing upgrade to the hardware that they are already using. Moreover, the prospect of students being able to bring their digital textbooks (or most online content) to class with them will be hugely appealing.

From the perspective of someone who teaches at a school that occupies the trailing edge of tech trends in higher education, I think that the iPad will struggle at places without a consistent equipment to Apple products. First, there will be interoperability issues with the existing technology infrastructure. Basically, the iPad which is built around Apples iPhone OS, will require students and tech folks to accommodate a new operating system. At a place like UND, there is only minimal support for OS X and very little support for Linux, so I can't imagine their being sufficient technical support for integrating the iPad into the day-to-day classroom environment. This isn't to suggest that the iPad would not function splendidly in those environments or that I can't imagine it's potential, but like a slow moving ship, large, underfunded, university's change courses slowly and if the iPad can not function within the existing technological infrastructure which, for better or for worse, is focused around Microsoft and Windows (XP!), there will be real barriers to its systematic adoption.

Next, I suspect that it's inability to handle Adobe Flash applications and its inability to run multiple programs simultaneously will be series drawbacks. On a phone or smaller and more simple mobile device, the lack of Flash is an acceptable annoyance -- after all you're surfing the web on a tiny screen that fits in your pocket; it's not whether the horse can ride the motorcycle well, it's that it can ride it at all. But on a full screen table, the inability to run flash will be a significant draw back. As an example, the iPad will not be able to run the BBC's spectacular History of the World website or the proper web version of the UND homepage. Since Flash remains an economical way for universities, museums, and the media to produce content rich web experiences, the incompatibility with Flash on the iPad will limit some of its popularity among a group who relies heavily on Flash to make their web go. The inability to run multiple applications simultaneously will make it hard to ask the students to jump back and forth from a digital textbook, to an online interface, to a Twitter application and these are the kinds of expectations that we already have with analog media in the classroom. We expect students to be able to "run multiple applications simultaneously" (take notes, annotate a text, and participate in a classroom discussion) and we need to expect our teaching technology to follow suite.

Finally, I have to agree with Jim Groom -- the noted and notorious semi-underground higher ed tech guru -- who told the Chronicle's Wired Blog that Apple control over the application approval process may be jarring to those in higher education who want to develop specific applications for the iPad. On the one hand, there are universities like Stanford, who have embraced the iPhone apps as a development challenge and teach courses in app development; many more schools, I suspect, will be wary of having to partner with Apple to navigate what most developers claim to be an mysterious and opaque process.

Update: Groom (and others via links) really nails some key concerns in this post.

The reason for this wariness, of course, is that the iPad will not be the only player in the high-end tablet market for vary long. Google's Android operating system should soon be powering alternatives to the iPad which will likely suffer many of the same problems with interoperability, but at least represent a more open source alternative to the iPad restricted development model. At the same time, Windows has long powered tablets and these tablet have not caught on the classroom. This probably reflects hardware issues as much as anything, but its hard to imagine that Windows based developers will not soon offer similar products to the iPad with the advantage of being more clearly interoperable with the existing technological infrastructure on a university campus.

2. Twitter and the Wave in the Classroom. Over the last four weeks, I've be experimenting with both Twitter and Google Wave in a classroom setting. Here are some quick updates:

Twitter. I use Twitter in a large, lower division, night class that meets once a week. So far, it has not produced much in the way of immediate results. Students are still unsure how to use Twitter in the classroom. Most of the in-class Tweets are silly comments about the Viking's loss this past weekend (the football Vikings, not the Scandinavian kind) or remarks about how cool they think Sparta is or was. They seem to have forgotten that I know who they are on Twitter because they have provided me with a concordance that connects their Twitter alias with their real names. Outside the classroom, that is during the week between classes, Twitter seems to have at least made the students somewhat more engaged in the material. I ask questions related to the course material in the form of trivia (everything seems more fun if it's called trivia) and get regular responses. I've also had some nice responses to reflection questions: e.g. Would you rather live the Athens of Perikles or Sparta of the Classical Age? (More preferred Sparta, um, largely because the movie made it seem real cool.) At present probably 15%-20% of those in class who have signed up for Twitter have used it in some way. For more on my Twitter experiment see here.

Google Wave. I've been using Google's latest and greatest web-based collaborative platform in a small graduate class this semester. So far, it works brilliantly. Even my most technologically challenged graduate student has embraced (reluctantly at first) the wave and has contributed to a wide range of spontaneous, threaded discussions. We have not been as successful using Google Wave to actually collaborate on a specific document, but this aspect of its operability is less refined. More on this as the semester progresses, but I already feel confident in saying that Google Wave has real potential in a graduate level class.

3. As I said in my little introduction, we are excited to have a guest blogger over at Teaching Thursday. The blog post will be a bit later than usual, but it drop a Tweet when it is posted

Topos/Chora and Archaeological Photography

If you're in the Grand Forks area (or even if you're not!), I encourage you come and enjoy the opening night of Ryan Stander's photographic exhibit entitled Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. The gallery opens at 6:30 and short gallery talks begin at 7 pm on Friday night. We also hope to give a sneak peek of a film by documentary filmmaker Ian Ragsdale who worked with us this past summer as well.

The exhibit of photographs is an exciting example of an almost ritualized inversion of roles. In the past, archaeologists have used photographs or art to illustrate the results of their work or even their procedures. The recent turn toward post-processural, reflexive archaeological practice has emphasized documenting the processes and experiences the produce archaeological knowledge. While scholars who have used video, still photography, audio, and reflexive writing in these contexts have problematized the techniques and tools used to gather this information, few have sought to invert the process entirely and free the camera's gaze from the control of the archaeologist. Our collaboration with Ryan Stander, does just that. I turns the camera toward the archaeologists and removes it from their physical and intellectual command.

In these photographs (which will come the web soon, I promise), the photographer's autonomy allowed for a perspective of the archaeologists' work that is outside the archaeologists' gaze and control. While I would be naive to claim that these photographs are a fully independent perspective, after all the photographer lived with the project and interacted daily with us, they nevertheless capture something approaching an outsider (or objective, at least from the archaeologists' perspective) view of archaeological practice.

For more on Ryan's work, check out his blog Axis of Access.

So, come down to the Empire Arts Center in beautiful downtown Grand Forks, North Dakota to check out Ryan's work, hear about the project, and see some moving pictures! 7 pm for the gallery talks on Friday night. Some light refreshments will be served.

And stay tuned for the online companion to the exhibit!

Blogging Archaeology: 2 Years Later

The other day, for vanity's sake, I was looking at my Blogging Archaeology article over at the Archaeology Magazine webpage. I noticed that it was formally published on January 18, 2008, two years ago. I began to think about how much archaeology's engagement with the web has changed over the past two years. It's not that blogs were revolutionary back in '08, but they still were things that required, at least in an academic and archaeological context, some kind of explanation. While I don't think that blogs are self-explanatory today nor do I think they've reached a point of widespread acceptance as a useful contribution to the academic discourse, they are at least held in less contempt, which may be enough.

The most remarkable thing about the article is how many of the blogs and their links remain live. A few have been dormant over the holiday season with their most recent posts in November ( Adventures with Yo and Mo, Thoughts on Antiquity) and few have changed urls (Alun Salt's Clioaudio is defunct, but I am sure that he is blogging somewhere), but the vast majority of the blogs listed in 2008 are still active to some extent. This reveals some impressive stability in the archaeological blogosphere. There have also been some great additions to the blogging world like the informative Blogging Pompeii and the wonderfully dramatic Kent-Berlin Ostia Excavations' blog and more than a handful of blogs that I missed in my original article (especially worthy of note is Colleen Morgan's remarkably diverse Middle Savagery, Diana Wright's elegant Surprised by Time, Katie Rask's playful and smart Antiquate Vagaries, and the useful Research News in Late Antiquity).

More interesting, however, is the development of alternatives to blogging within the archaeological community. A number of veteran bloggers have moved seamlessly into Tweeting: Alun Salt, the longstanding dean of ancient world bloggers, the Rogue Classicist, Adrian Murdoch of Bread and Circuses, and Chuck Jones, the Librarian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, who edits and contributes to so many blogs, I can't keep track.  There are some new players as well like Archaeology News. Research News in Late Antiquity provides timely Tweets complementing many of this blog's posts. The Twitter feed from Archaeology Magazine provides a nice way to keep track of content on their site. Several projects, including mine, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, Twittered from the field allowing a global audience of interested observers to follow the day-to-day or hour-to-hour working of their project.

A simple search of Twitter for the word archaeology produces hundreds of tweets a day dedicated to a whole range of archaeological topics. At the same time, there are a wide range of lists that draw together like-minded tweeters from across the web. These lists begin to bring together the real power of the Twitter as a social-media platform. Like the blog rolls of old, the creators of these lists compile Twitter feeds which interest them. When a particular feed is included on a list, however, it is marked as being "listed". This allows a user not only to follow a particular feed, but also, to track down and find other similar feeds brought together by Twitter users. Here are the various lists that include the feed for Research News in Late Antiquity and these lists feature the Archaeology Magazine Twitter feed. My Twitter feed only appears on four, lonely, little lists. Despite this obvious snub, these lists remain a great way to track down Twitter feeds that feature content of interest to students of archaeology or the ancient world.

Facebook and other social-media applications have likewise emerged to complement more fully the dynamic "archaeological" blogoshpere. Moreover, it is clear that archaeology will increasingly embrace new media spaces on the web like YouTube (here is PKAP's YouTube channel) or sites that host podcasts (although these are far less technologically challenging to make available through one's own website or blog) Perhaps even more important will be the influence of the next generation of communication applications like Google Wave. Already archaeologists have descended upon Google Wav, even though it remains in alpha (not even beta) testing status, to take advantage of its ability to create threaded discussions, realtime chat, and (eventually) integrate a wide range of media.

In any event, this was my superficial effort to bring together some of the applications and spaces that I rely on every day to stay connected to the archaeological world. I will come back and update this page from time to time over the next few weeks. Maybe I'll even consider writing up a formal article that captures archaeology on the web in 2010.

The Hateful Earth and the Late Roman Economy

On a snowy weekend, I managed to plow through the rest of M. Decker's Tilling the Hateful Earth (Oxford 2009). (Get it, plow (or for my readers in the UK, plough, through... you know, like a farm plow...). Anyway. Decker's work is the most recent installment in the recent vogue for ancient economic history over the last decade (see, for example, Horden and Purcell's, The Corrupting Sea, M. McCormick's Origins of the European Economy, Christopher Wickham's, Framing the Early Middle Ages, J. Banaji's Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity as four significant works that immediately come to mind). Decker's book stands out in that it is neither theoretically ambitious or immensely long. This isn't meant to be a criticism. In fact, Decker does what he does quite well. He describes and analyzes in some detail the agrarian landscape of the Diocese of Oriens.

As per my usual practice, I'll eschew giving anything like a comprehensive review and, instead, make a series of observations:

1. The strength of this book is the detailed analysis of agricultural practices rather than a comprehensive view of the agricultural economy in the East. The information presented on various settlement types, rural structures, crops and agricultural practices will provide a nice foundation for any kind of comprehensive archaeological and historical study of this region in the future.

2. If any weakness in the detailed study of the agricultural practices did exist, it was in the area of Cyprus. Decker does not seem to have as full a command over the impressive body of material from Cyprus. In particular, he does not take into full account M. Rautman's important studies of the village at Kopetra or any less comprehensive, but nonetheless valuable studies of Late Antique settlement elsewhere in Cyprus. This is unfortunate because the Cypriot countryside is rapidly becoming one of the best documented regions in the Late Roman East and it falls within the geographic boundaries of the Diocese of Oriens. It was particular disappointing in that Late Antique Cyprus has recently produced an impressive body of quantified Late Roman ceramic evidence which would have contributed to the author's main argument.

3. While the detailed nature of Decker's study was a welcome repast from the sweeping or expansive analyses common these day in the study of the ancient economy, his work did leave me wondering why such economic and agricultural prosperity occurred in the East. In places, he argued relatively persuasively against the "minimalist" perspectives on the ancient economy offered by M. Finley and A. H. M. Jones (pp. 228-229). In other words, he did not see the prosperity of the east on a macro level as being tied to administrative practices (namely taxation and other such administrative trade) and their impact of economic and social decisions on the micro level. This, of course, begs the question why he chose the Diocese of Oriens -- an administrative unit -- as the basic unit for his analysis. If trade really functioned according to markets, as he argues, wouldn't it have been more effective to make an argument based on, say, market catchments for agricultural produce or even commercial networks where one could hope to detect the kind of competitive, collaborative, and responsive practices that would characterize market economies in the ancient world? This isn't to suggest that Decker did not analyze specific market reasons, but his decision to organize his book around an administrative unit sometimes made it hard to detect the main impetus of market forces in the Mediterranean basin more generally.

4. From the perspective of my field project, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, Decker's effort to define or at least describe settlement types is helpful. While one can argue that site size definitions are not the most useful (and comparable) kinds of data for the understanding of settlement structure, his description of the features in various kinds of sites does form a useful point of departure for a more comparative approach to settlement during Late Antiquity. For example, he notes the proliferation of settlement which lacked a proper, or at least formally defined, elite, but nevertheless saw the development of some kinds of public buildings and services, churches, and even traditional practices of euergetism. This indicates that by Late Antiquity euergetism had become severed from self-promotion within the traditional avenues of civic or even imperial service. This enabled wealthy folks to give money to their communities outside both the physical and institutional confines of civic or imperial centers. While Decker does not explain why people would have done this (collective security? economic benefit? hopes of civic or imperial promotion? Christianity?), it reveals a shift in how most scholars have understood at least one component of the Late Roman gift economy. Moreover, it explains sites that did not have formal administrative or civic standing could receive both Christian and practical monumental architecture through the generosity of the local elite.

It's a good book! Focused chapters, copious bibliography (befitting a revised dissertation), and nice maps make it a useful contribution to anyone's library.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

As we brace for another bout of winter weather, some quick hits and varia to keep you warm this weekend:

• Check out our Public History Interns as they figure out how to promote their work using a blog. Go here.
• This is a neat way to look at the devastating earthquake in Haiti. (via Richard Rothaus)
• The Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Pubic Affairs presents a huge number of amazing recording including this one of LBJ ordering a pair of Haggar pants. (via James Wells)
• My article on archaeology and blogging is now over 2 years old. I am really thinking about updating it.
• Follow the snow on UND's Regional Weather Information Center webcam.
• And if you need more warmth, read James Henry Breasted's letters from his trip to the Middle East in 1919/1920 on the Oriental Institute's blog. (via Chuck Jones)
• Some cool cricket news. First, the IPL is really interested in the U.S. market. Next the IPL will be broadcast live on YouTube except in the US. Booo.

Have a good weekend!

Teaching Thursday: The Panopticon and Online Teaching

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday

In a blog post a few months back dedicated to the topic of online teaching, I mentioned an observation by Mick Beltz, a regular contributor to Teaching Thursday. He suggested that teaching online captured some of the essential characteristics of M. Foucault's panopticon as outlined in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this metaphor, Foucault used Jeremy Bentham's vision of the panopticon to describe modern society. The panopticon is an architectural form, most famously used for prisons, where an observer stationed at a central point can see into a series of cells. The people in these cells can always see the observation post (although they do not know whether they are being observed), but cannot see into any of the other cells. In this way they are together, yet isolated from one another In practical application, this means that a warden can observe the behavior of all the inmates almost simultaneously while the inmate cannot observe each other's behavior.

For Foucault, the pressure of constant observations implied specifically in the panoticon, but functioning elsewhere formed the ideal environment for maintaining the kind of discipline introduced in the prison, the factory, and even the modern school. For Foucault, this kind of internalized discipline produced by the fear of being constantly observed, ensured that society maintained a degree of conformity sufficient to keep the engines of capitalism moving. The panopticon and its culture of observation were part of Foucault's analysis of discipline in modern times and part of a greater goal of the modern state to produce "docile" bodies .

The parallel between the panopticon as a physical building and the experience of teaching (and presumably taking) an online course are quite striking. First the observer, in this case the faculty member, can observe student behavior through a comprehensive array of statistics as well as submitted work. The individual student, on the other hand, has almost no view of the faculty member, except for when their work is evaluated. At the same time, they have only limited abilities to observe the work of other students and rarely would know when another student is being particular successful in the class or struggling. In a classroom setting, of course, students can interact freely with one another both before and after class and encode their behavior in ways that make it difficult for a faculty member to observe, much less understand. Even during class, verbal and non-verbal cues from the blatant -- like laughter at a particularly innane comment by a fellow student -- or subtle, like glances at one another or eye-rolling or even the frustrated figiting that occurs when a class runs over, provide clear modes of communication between students. Moreover, students can use these techniques to force a dialog with even a reluctant faculty member. The classroom dynamic presents a formidable and almost irresistible check on unfettered faculty authority.

The removal of this opportunity for spontaneous, collective action certainly removes a key aspect of the faculty-student dialog from the classroom setting. Moreover, the realization that one is being constantly observed initiates and conditions the student for a world where companies like Google see everything from your mundane search patterns to your house to your financial, personal, and religious identities. The conditioning of students to be observed in an online environment prepares them for a world where companies and governments constantly gather information and construct identities for individuals which are so subtle, varied, and complex that they exceed the individual's ability to understand or realize them.

The impact of this environment on teaching as a profession is significant. While the "teacherly" gaze has always been one of any number of treasured weapon in the teacher's arsenal (able, when deployed successfully, to bring to order even the most disruptive student), it now has the potential to become the single most powerful tool for conditioning behavior. We can observe when a student comes online, how long they stay for, what they look at, as well as the what they produce. With only a little exaggeration, we can say that the student study habits, reading behavior, and analytical practices are de-mystified and can be placed in direct correlation to student performance on evaluated work. In effect, the barrier that has long separated the mystical process of learning from the work of evaluation has come down.

The advantage, then, of online education is that it conditions students to become the docile bodies in our information age and to accept our individuality as a commodity in the information economy. The documented life is the commodified life.

Public History: An Introduction to an Experiment

So, we're two weeks into my public history internship program and we are slowing putting together the public face of our project. This past week, we set up the project's blog here. The following post explaining the role the blog will play in the project is as follows:

Welcome to an experiment blog for an experimental class! This blog will detail the adventures of an intrepid group of public history interns as they work on several online and real life public history projects in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota. The goal of this blog is to make our efforts to create an online museum, manage an online complement to a gallery show, digitize analog data, prepare analog data for formal archiving, and create an online companion to a paper article. I have no idea how many of these projects this team will succeed in completing this semester or what realizations and limitations the team will encounter. The primary method of instruction, which this blog will reflect, is hands-on learning and like the best kind of hands on learning experiments, the results are not predetermined, but will depend on the success, energy, and abilities of the participants.

The hope is that this blog will make the process of learning and creating a range of public history experiments transparent to anyone who is interested and attract some positive (and maybe even critical!) attention to our high quality graduate students and their creativity. Above all,however, the idea is to make the process of public history as visible as the products of public history itself. In other words, I want to make sure that the process of producing public history (of all descriptions) is as important to how we think about the past as the product is.

So, stop back to the blog, three times a week to follow the trials and accomplishments of the public history team! And feel free to contribute in the comments line.

It has been interesting to participate in the discussions surrounding the public face of the various projects that we plan to undertake and get a clearer understanding of how different people view the potential of the internet as well as how the technology gaps between someone like me, who spends much of their day online in some way, and students who consume online information, but have little experience producing online content. So the learning curve will be steep at times, but I expect that the results will show how much is possible in a short time.

Temples and Churches

This past weekend, I read V.N. Makrides' Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches: A Concise History of the Religious Cultures of Greece from Antiquity to the Present (New York 2009), and I did it graduate school style, cover-to-cover in a couple of days.  The book was pointed out to me by a colleague and I immediately saw how the diachronic scope of the work might resonate with my own diachronic study of dreams as a religious phenomenon.  The first part of the book is a pretty superficial survey of the interaction between Hellenic ideas and Christian ideas across the broad span of Greek history.  I wasn't overly impressed with this survey which said little that was new, but it would be a nice complement to a Greek history class in that it touches on many of the key points of conflict.  In fact, class many years ago, when I taught my Greek history, which considered Greek history from the Neolithic to the Modern period, I was looking for exactly this kind of book to help me integrate and problematize the legacy of the ancient world within the modern, Christian nation.  The appearance of a book like this, in English, from an American press, suggests that there might be a growing market for not only the study of modern Greece, but also the an approach to the entire span of Greek history that views understanding the modern nation-state as an indispensable part of any study of the ancient world.

The real value in this book comes from the second part where Makrides addresses some of the same that I am dealing with in my dream project.  He had to find a way to explain clear parallels in religious expression overtime without falling back on tired arguments for the continuity of Greek culture.  To do this, he argues that Greeks over time consciously engaged in an intertextual reading of their religious past, selecting certain modes of expression (whether Hellenic or Christian) to suit particular strategic goals.  He presents these various strategies in a series of chapters which focus on the various strategies at play: Antithesis, Thesis, Conflict; Selection, Transformation, Synthesis; Symbiosis, Mixture, Fusion; Individuality, Distinctiveness, Idiosyncrasy.  This chapters demonstrate an impressive ability to understand a wide range of area of religious conflict ranging from clashes between Christians and Pagans in Late Antiquity to the politics of the Orthodox church under Ottoman rule to the church's role in modern conflicts with secularizing forces within the Greek state and society.  The only thing that I really wished for was for Makrides to make more clear the link between a particular strategy and a particular situation.  In other words, were there patterns in how and when Greeks (broadly construed) deployed various religious strategies through time?  G. Jusdanis, Belated Modernity (Minneapolis 1991), for example, has made clear that modern Greece's engagement with the modern was not random, but selective and strategic. 

The other curious weakness in the book is the lack of any sustained conversation about archaeology.  Archaeology in Greece has long played on both nationalist, but also religious impulses within Greek society.  Moreover, archaeologists often express the vocation of archaeology in religious terms.  Makrides acknowledges this with a quote from Yiannis Sakellarakis who considered his "higher calling " to be "a hunter of the mystical continuity of place." (229)  Y. Hamilakis recent work The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece (Oxford 2007) dealt with some of these matters specifically. 

Preserving and producing the archaeology of the Hellenic past not infrequently involved overwriting the history of Byzantine and Christian Greece.  Foreign archaeologists destroyed numerous churches in search of inscriptions or Classical buildings. Major, recurring restoration projects like those on the Parthnon on the Athenian Acropolis have likewise eliminated traces of Christian antiquity in an effort to preserve an more authentic expression of a Classical ideal.  As a rule, Byzantine , Ottoman, and Early Modern (19th c.) monuments, many of which remain deeply embedded within the physical and ritual fabrics of communities have far less protection from the Greek state.  The physical manifestations of the conflict between Hellenic and Christian ideals within the Greek state is particularly crucial in an archaeological context because ancient, Hellenic monuments represent the most visible face of the nation to foreign visitors and in tourist, popular, and academic publications.  Historically Greece has catered to the interest of foreign visitors in this regard and suppressed or overlooked aspects of Greece's Christian identity which nevertheless played a key role in its national development. 

Despite this missed opportunity, Makrides book is well worth reading! In particular, his emphasis on the persistent religious plurality in Greek society serves as a useful reminder to all states that romanticized and idealized images of a religious and culturally homogeneous past are almost always false.  Greece like so many Mediterranean countries has a long history of diverse forms of religious expression both within their Christian community, but also outside of it.  Thus, in his final analysis, part of the Christian and Hellenic legacy of Greece is the ability to respond to religious diversity through a variety of strategies and this is as good a thing for scholars of the past as it is for modern society.

The Trinity, Poreč, and a strange little inscription from Tegea

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed know that I spent the end of last week reading H. Maguire's and Anne Bennett Terry's Dynamic splendor : the wall mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreč. (University Park 2007). It's a pretty fantastic book that delves deeply both into the techniques that produced a set of amazing 6th century mosaics, but also how they were "restored" at various times an what they likely meant to their audience. Like many scholars of Late Antique iconography and iconography, Maguire and Bennett regard these mosaics as being both dynamic in a diachronic sense (that is, restored and meaning different things to different people over time), but also dynamic in the sense of being multivalent with many of the images capable of sustaining multiple interpretations at the time of their production.

I was struck by one particular interpretation. The cathedral had several images that evoked the Trinity. Maguire and Terry relate these images to the ecclesiastical controversies that rocked the end of Justinian's reign and, in particular, the Three Chapters Controversy which arose over the course of the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) and led to a number of bishops from the province of Illyricum to break communion with the church in Constantinople and side, initially with the Pope regarding the doctrines promulgated by this council. In short, western bishops felt that by declaring anathema the works of Theodore of Mopsuetia, Theodoret of Cyrus and Ibas of Edessa, the Emperor rejected the orthodoxy established by Chalcedon. This was a traditional rallying cry for bishops in the west (and including the province of Illyricum) who saw Justinian's efforts to promote a compromise position between miaphysites/monophysites in the East and the strict Chalcedonianism of the West (led generally by the Pope) to be heretical. The definition of the Trinity was a central statement at the Council of Chalcedon and so the Trinity became an important symbol for both schismatic Western bishops and Eastern Emperors as they sought to demonstrate their adherence to the spirit of Chalcedon and Orthodoxy.

This interested me largely because, while writing my dissertation, I had struggled with a strange inscription from a church in southern Greece. At the three-aisled basilica of Thyrsos at Tegea (also studied by H. Maguire in his Earth and Ocean: The Terrestrial World in Early Byzantine Art (University Park 1987)), best known for its dramatic early 6th c. (?) calendar mosaic in its central nave, there is a small "chapel" attached to the northern wall of the nave (others have suggested that this chapel is, in fact, a fifth aisle). The church itself is poorly published as a building and the exact chronological and architectural relationship between the chapel and the main body of the church is unclear. The humble style of the floor mosaic in the chapel, especially when compared with the floors in the main nave, suggest that this annex space is later or at least the decoration of this space is later in date than the fancy mosaics in the central nave.

The mosaic floor from this chapel includes a strange and poorly preserved inscription. The text, as far as I know, does not exist in proper edition. I include my catalog entry from my dissertation here:

This text derives from Orlandos 1973 which includes a small, grainy photograph which is no help at all in determining the actual text of the inscription. The text begins with a strange version of the sanctus that includes four "holies". As far as I know this version of the sanctus has no liturgical parallels and is likely a mistake in transcription or a mistake in the creation of the mosaic. The text does not, however, continue with the words of the sanctus (or at least any known sanctus), but provides a small bit of exegesis. The next line would appear to read Lord God with the Son and the Holy Spirit. This draws in a phrase from the Trisagion (Lord God) and mashes it up (as the kids would say) with trinitarian language. Again, this exact way of representing the Trinity does not appear, as far as I know, in any liturgical text. I read it here to mean: Holy, Holy, Holy (ignoring the fourth Holy) = Lord God with the Son and the Holy Spirit.

This is a pretty speculative interpretation, but it could resonate with the increased interest in Trinitarian doctrine in the later 6th century. This would fit the buildings terminus post quem, if we accept that this more modest inscription likely dated to some time after the completion of the much more elaborate calendar mosaic in the main nave. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, there is some evidence that Greece was an area in which the emperor had particular interest concerning doctrinal matters. This was probably because the province of Achaia (and all of Illyricum Orientalis) fell under the direct rule of the emperor, but under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the papacy. This divergent jurisdiction had led to problems throughout the 5th and 6th centuries as the churches of Achaia, Epirus, and elsewhere in the Balkans maneuvered politically to align themselves with powers that provided them with the most benefit and accommodated their theological perspectives. So, the appearance of a Trinitarian inscription in Tegea might well resonate with the Trinitarian mosaics analyzed by Maguire and Terry in Istria at Poreč as another effort by a Greek congregation to articulate their theological and political position in the complex world of 6th century ecclesiastical politics.