The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Teaching Thursday: Cheating and Byzantium

Just a short post today because I want to leave my loyal readers plenty of time to digest Mick Beltz interesting and important arguments about cheating over on the Teaching Thursday blog. That being said, I can't resist commenting on a recent article in the Weekly Standard (forwarded to me by Kostis Kourelis). This short article summarizes the arguments of E. Luttwak in his new book, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, and casts them in the light of U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy. Luttwak himself summarized many of the arguments in an article in Foreign Policy entitled "Take me Back to Constantinople: How Byzantium, not Rome, can help preserve the Pax Americana".

In the article, he suggests that the often-embattled position of the Byzantine Empire is a good parallel for the US in the 21st century. Like Byzantium, the US is surrounded by a variety of enemies using a wide range of tactics, with a wide range of political, military, and, ideological goals. Moreover, the economic foundation of the Byzantine state, like the US today, was often variable making long term strategic decisions difficult to implement (if not to contemplate). Luttwak's observations regarding the Byzantium represent another example of recent intellectual efforts to see Byzantium as a useful lens through which to view a post-Modern 21st century. (My favorite being J. Kristeva's Murder in Byzantium).

To get back to cheating, Luttwak argues that we can learn from the Byzantine's is that "subversion is the cheapest past to victory. So cheap, in fact, as compared with the costs and risks of battle, that it must always be attempted, even with the most seemingly irreconcilable enemies." Subversion is often seen as means to gain an "unfair" or at best, unseemly victory. It undermines the ethical nature of battle and threatens on fundamental grounds some of the most widely held arguments for just wars. The morally ambivalent (to our 21st century eyes) Byzantines (read: Oriental Byzantines) could get away which such practices, whereas the U.S. as practitioners of the "Western Way of War" must play by a more restrictive set of rules or run the risk of undermining the very values that justified military actions from the start. In other words, cheating in warfare is wrong.

Twittering to Byzantium

Tim Gregory sent me a link to this curious Twitter feed Cry for Byzantium.  The feed reports sequentially on events in Byzantine history as if they were being twittered by the Byzantine Emperor (currently Anastasius I).  The entire scheme is explained in the feed's companion blog.  To create the feed, the author of the Twitter feed draws upon the work of Julius Norwich and Warren Treadgold to create his first person narrative.  According to the blog, it is basically a labor of love.

This is not the first instance of Byzantium in the new media.  The most famous example was Lars Brownworth's 12 Byzantine Rulers series of podcasts.  The popularity of these podcasts resulted in an article in the New York Times and eventually a book deal (he also maintains a blog). 

Cry for Byzantium and other new media experiments in Byzantine history got me thinking about the relationship between scholarship and the new media.  At the same time, my graduate historiography seminar is reading Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra this week.  While these two scholars have not said anything in particular about history and the new media per se, they have both written about the largely uncritical acceptance of traditional forms of historical writing.  They have singled out the uncritical assumptions that undergird most historian's adherence to traditional forms of narrative pointing out that the basic structure of most historical narratives remains rooted in early 19th century forms which drew heavily on the conventions of "realist" fiction.  Since that time, of course, attitudes toward the fictional narrative have changed, but history has not.  Our approach to narrating a "realistic" past continues to look to a 19th century style for validation.

As styles and practices of narration have changed to accommodate and capture the dynamism of a changing world more successfully, the book as the medium to communicate, narrate, and critique has come under increasing criticism (e.g. for a very recent one).  No one would deny that recent efforts to create a paperless book (or eBook) are not at least a little absurd.  New forms of writing, technics of constructing narrative, and communicating information such as those most obviously visible in the internet (and new media) run the risk of making historian's long standing commitment to the book as quaint as the 19th century narrative practices that White and LaCapra have critiqued.  While historians are trying to embrace the new media and the potential of a "bookless future", it still seems that practicing, academic historians are a step behind the interested public in our willingness to experiment. 

On my walk home last night, I thought about what it would mean to use Twitter to write an article, for example.  I regularly serialize my research here on my blog (in most cases writing blog posts as I am doing the scholarship as sort of proto-working papers).  Blog posts are much shorter than the finished articles, but nevertheless contain at least some basic scholarly apparatus (hyperlinks rather than footnotes in many cases) and often help me formulate an idea before having to compose it in its full academic form.  A tweeted article could look the same way except limited to 140 character expressions.  Cry for Byzantium approaches this by narrating an "emperor's eye" view of Byzantine history in such short passages, but the author admits to composing his tweets before hand and preloading them into an application that posts them regularly.  Tweeting an article, as I imagine it, would require the author to be more spontaneous and actually compose the article in twitter over the course of a stretch of time (perhaps a month?).  The intervals between tweets, like the moves in a game of correspondence chess, would allow an author to think carefully about his next move.  At the same time, the audience for the article could respond and critique, or not, to the various ideas and arguments that emerge before their eyes.  (One downside of Cry for Byzantium is that it does not do much with the social media aspects of Twitter.  For example, neither the Ostrogothic King Theodoric nor Pope Symmachus respond to Anastasius tweets.)  This would put some pressure on the author to articulate arguments concisely and clearly.  This focus on language is a good thing for any writer and the limit of 140 characters is not much more arbitrary than word limits imposed on various other forms of academic writing (or works of literature in general, particularly poetry).

While it's unlike that I will run out and start Twittering an academic article, the thought of it and the potential of such new media experiments as Cry for Byzantium is intriguing.  It serves us well to keep an eye on these kinds of things (and that means following the Cry for Byzantium Twitter feed!) and consider the potential of these experiments as real critiques of our tradition-bound scholarship.

Modernity and Knossos

On the recommendation of Phyllis Graham (archaeological librarian/archaeologist extraordinary), I picked up Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.  It was officially the last book of my summer reading season, and it left me with much food for thought.

In particular, the book brought into focus the influence of modernism on archaeological practice outside of the context of the archaeology of nationalism where the most pronounced tendencies of modernist paradigms tend to appear.  This was useful to me in three ways.  First, it helped me understand what I meant when I quipped that the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis might be one of the most modern archaeological sites in the Mediterranean.  In saying this, I didn't simply mean that the temple set atop the "sacred rock" lacked obvious ties to the past (they had been stripped away gradually over the course of numerous intellectual, archaeological, and architectural reconstructions), but that it forms the center point of a whole range of irrational feelings ranging from expressions of passionate nationalism to transferred affections of poets and thinkers ranging from Henry Miller to Freud.  Gere makes a compelling case for the place of Arthur Evans' Knossos in the modernist imagination by going well beyond the excavator's fantastic reconstructions to the sometimes dizzying thought-world that the palace and its Minoan inhabitants evoked across Europe. 

Second, the book pushed me again to return to my rather unformed work on Dream Archaeology.  In particular, Gere's arguments has encouraged me to return to some of my  episodes of Dream Archaeology in the 20th century and consider their relationship to the modernist moment in archaeology (for more on Dream Archaeology see here and here).  This will likely go back to Freud and also to the modernist movement in Greece, since some of my Dream Archaeologists are Greek.  (As an aside, it is interesting to note that Gere's book deals very little with modernism in a Greek context -- outside the almost requisite reference to Kazantzakis -- and it would have been interesting to see how Greek intellectuals engaged Evans' work on Knossos.)  I will certainly have to press Kostis Kourelis to read Gere's book and chat with him at the Modern Greek Studies Association meeting this fall about how Angellos Tanagras fits into a broader modernist movement which sought to bridge the gap between the rational and irrational and, in the process, validate the experience of a distinctly Greek past in the language of an pan-European intellectual movement.  Tanagras work to understand the power of seemingly "supernatural" Greek folk practices, like the evil eye or malevolent dreams, within a psychoanalytical perspective represents a kind of Greek counterpoint to Evans' mystical engagement with the site of Knossos.

Finally, Gere's work is going to take me back to Kourelis' "Byzantium and the Avant-Garde: Excavations at Corinth 1920s-1930s" to explore again how the broader modernist movement made room for the emergence of Byzantine and Early Christian archaeology within Greece.  Modernisms rejection of the overly-rationalistic Christianity of Western Protestantism must have led some to seek spiritual satisfaction in the familiar, yet challenging experiences of mystical Byzantine and Early Christian thought just as Evans took refuge in the world of the ancient Minoans.

In the context of Gere's work, A. Orlandos, perhaps the most important archaeologist of the Athenian Acropolis and a scholar who reported without comment on an episode of Dream archaeology, makes a little more sense.

The Destructive Power of the Athenian Acropolis

The Athenian Acropolis preserves an amazing collection monuments.  Perhaps because of the prominence of these monuments, it never fails to attract attention and controversy.  In fact, as much as the Acropolis and its crown jewel the Parthenon has inspired, the idea of the Acropolis has also shown an amazing power to disrupt, destroy, and disorient.  The most recent example of this (via Kostis Kourelis) is the short film directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras designed to be shown at the new Acropolis museum.  Apparently, the church became upset by a scene that showed priests destroying part of the sculpture of the Parthenon frieze.  According to AP:

The animated segment showed figures clad in black climbing up ladders and destroying part of the Parthenon frieze; the scene referred to well-documented episodes of destruction that took place in the early Byzantine period (5th-8th centuries A.D.), when Christians often demolished monuments and temples belonging to the old pagan era. Many parts from those temples were used to build churches. The Parthenon itself suffered some damage but was spared a worse fate by being converted into a church.

"The priests used to destroy ancient temples. Now they want to remove scenes from a film," Costa-Gavras told Greece's Mega TV channel. "This is the kind (of censorship) that used to happen in the former Soviet Union."

This entire episode is fascinating and another testimony to the power of the Acropolis and the Parthenon to destroy.  History first.  The "well-documented episodes of the destruction that took place in the early Byzantine period" is wrong.  There are almost no well-documented incidents of anything during the Early Byzantine period.  In fact, the closing of the Parthenon as a temple and its consecration as a church remain a hotly debated issue with no particular chance of any resolution any time soon.  Alison Frantz in her still seminal and elegant article from 1965 puts it best (A. Frantz, "From Paganism to Christianity in the Temples of Athens," DOP 19 (1965), 185-205):

"The zeal with which the classically-oriented archaeologists of the nineteenth century stripped away from Athenian temples all possible reminders of their post-classical history has rendered unduly complicated the task of dating their conversion. The nature of the required alterations made it impossible to eradicate completely all traces and these, supplemented by descriptions and drawings by the early travelers, have sometimes made it possible to reconstruct the general appearance of both exterior and interior. But the systematic removal, without recording, of wall masonry and, in many cases, even of foundations, destroyed at the same time almost all chronological evidence..." (p. 201)

In fact, the lack of good chronology for the conversion of the temples of Athens to church means that there is no way of knowing who and when the Parthenon marbles were damaged. 

The issue with the film and the marbles and the Parthenon and the Acropolis is not just about some quibbling over the date of its conversion and the changes wrought by its conversion to a Christian church.  (There have been some good, recent work on the Parthenon during the Byzantine Period).  The real issue that I want to focus some attention on here is how amazingly destructive the idea of the Parthenon has become.  The prominent rock that is the Acropolis has long stood as a place where the various rulers of Athens sought to project their identity onto the city and, more recently, the modern nation.  At the same time that the rock with its temples has represented the commanding voice in Athens, it has also worked to negate competing visions of the city and the nation.  The Conta-Gavras film is a typical example of this.  His work, like many intellectuals of modern Europe, has always contained an anti-clerical strain, so it is unsurprising that he would project his left-leaning ideals onto the Parthenon.  At the same time, the Parthenon is a place where identity is tightly controlled by the Greek state which, particularly when governed by a center-right party, closely tied (if not properly inseparable) from the Greek Church. 

From the 19th century on, efforts have been made to purify the history of the Parthenon through the systematic destruction of its post-Classical phases (see the work of Y. Hamilakis); more recently, the construction of the new Acropolis museum in one of the most archaeological sensitive areas of Athens has caused its own kind of destruction without mentioning the high-profile controversy surrounding the need to destroy a nearby art-deco style building to ensure the museum's view of the "sacred rock".  It is a testimony to the power of the Acropolis that the recent episodes have captured the modernist roots of archaeology and broadcast them so globally.  A the Parthenon, perhaps more than anywhere else, destroying the past and collapsing it into an permanent present has become the key method for transcending it.

The most recent controversy over images of destruction in the Costa-Gavras film and the subsequent destruction of his artistic vision falls in line with the politics of nation building and identity formation that have swirled around the monument for its entire history.  It's also a nice reminder of how an inspirational monument can empower destruction as well as creation.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Some fun quick hits on a cloudy Friday.

• Two interesting articles on First Monday.  A nice article on the relationship between using facebook and grades among college and graduate students and another on a genre based typology of blogs.
• An interesting back and forth (and back) between two veteran bloggers. 
• I can't remember whether I've linked to the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities blog.  This series on Digital Humanities in 2008 (I, II, III) is really good.
• Only Hesperia (with their flashy new address on the web: www.hesperia.org) can pull off a 58 page article on the road linking Corinth and the Argolid.  That's well over a page a kilometer.  Amazing.  But it's a good article with lots of interesting topographic tidbits including another tower that I think is probably a farmstead.
• Lots of exciting reports on the Dumbarton Oaks Spring Symposium: Morea: The Land and Its People in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.
• This is a lovely little church and it's "restoration" is sad and complicated.  I simply love the 13th-14th century undomed (is that a word?) cross-in-square churches from the Argolid and Corinthia.
• Movies with Greek and Roman themes this summer from the Languages Department.

That's all for today and have a good weekend!

Revisioning Relics: Lost, Found, and Lost Again

One of the most amazing inventio narratives, complete with multiple dreams and visions, and multiple excavations, appears in the 6th century Chronicle of the Marcellinus and involves one of the most well traveled relics, the Head of John the Baptist.  (In fact, the Head was sufficiently well-traveled to deserve a monograph as early as the 17th century:   C. Du Frense Du Cange, Traité historique du chef de S. Jean Baptiste... (Paris 1665); for a brief modern treatment see: J. Wortley, "The Relics of  'the Friends of Jesus' at Constantinople," in J. Durand and B. Flusin eds, Byzance et les Reliques du Christ. Centre de Recherche d'Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance 17. (Paris 2004), 143-157).  Ultimately, one part of the complex history of the rediscovery of John the Baptist's head is commemorated in the Synaxarion of Constantinople of May 25th. 

"John, the herald of the Lord and his baptizer, revealed his head which , at an unspeakable horrible demand, Herodias had once accepted after it had been cut from his shoulders and placed on a dish, and buried far from his headless bod; he revealed his head to two eastern monks entering Jerusalem to celebrate the resurrection of the Christ the Lord, so that when they reached the place where the former king Herod lived they were advised to search around and dig the ground up faithfully.  So while they were journeying back to their own places, carrying in their rough saddle-bag the head they had discovered by faith, a certain potter from the city of Emesa fleeing from the poverty which threatened him daily, showed himself to them as a companion.  While, in ignorance, he was carrying the sack entrusted to him with the sacred head, he was admonished in the night by him whose head he was carrying, and fleeing both his companions he made off.  He entered the city of Emesa immediately with his holy and light burden, and as long as he lived there he venerated the head of Christ's herald.  At his death, he handed it over in a jar to his sister, who was ignorant of the matter.  Next a certain Eustochius, who was secretly a priest of the Arian faith, unworthily obtained this great treasure and dispensed to the rabble, as if it were purely his own, the grace which Christ the Lord bestows on his inconstant people through John the Baptist. When his wickedness was detected he was driven out the city of Emesa.  Afterwards this cave, in which the head of the most blessed John was set in an urn and reburied underground, became the abode of certain monks.  Finally, while the priest and head of the monastery, Marcellus, was living a faultless life in that cave, the blessed John, herald of Christ, revealed himself and his head to Marcellus and showed that it was buried here, conspicuous by its many miracles.  It is agreed therefore that this venerable head was found by the foresaid priest Marcellus whil Uranius was bishop of the city mentioned.  This was on the twenty-fourth day of February in the consulship of Vincomalus and Opilio, in the middle week of Lent, and the ruling emperors were in fact Valentinian and Marcian."

Chronicle of Marcellinus. trans. B. Croke. (Sydney 1995), pp. 19-22

This is an extraordinarily complex and dense story capturing almost the entire realm of Late Antique experiences from heretical priests to traveling monks to visions, relics, and the realia every day life (potters, rough saddle-bags, jars, et c.).

The story is one of a significant number of episodes when a holy relic is lost multiple times.  For example, the the bodies of the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste reappear once in the time of the Empress Pulcharia in the early 5th century (Sozomen HE 9.2) and then later in Justinian's reign (Procop. Aed. 1.7.2-10).  Numerous icons appear and vanish from the tumultuous history of far flung monasteries representing the irrepressible sanctity of religious objects.  From a historical perspective, I have always thought that there is something incongruous about sacred objects being misplaced or lost, but then again, we hear of important documents and artifacts sometimes going missing in museums even today, especially during chaotic and unstable times. 

From the perspective of narratives on dream archaeology, these stories show how densely packed stories associated with relics could be and how multiple individuals, places, and events could partake of the sacred penumbra of a single relic.  Once the head of John the Baptist appeared in Constantinople (at the church of St. John Studios or the Pharos ("Lighthouse") Church), it not only validated its power as a sacred object through the various places and people involved in its inventio, but also imparted those people, places, and invents with a share of its sanctity.  The re-inventio of a relic not only reinforced it sacred status, but also produced an expanded network that mapped together people and places from across a sacred history and landscape. 

So multiple dreams, multiple excavations, and various translations (travels) held out an extraordinary potential for creating a sacred topography (often extending far beyond the final resting place of the relic), a sacred history typically revealing the irrepressible persistence of the sacred object, and, in some cases, multiple individuals credited and blessed with the discovery of the object.  When the story is set in such mundane and ordinary surroundings as the one recounted above, the sacred object imbues even the mundane realia of everyday life like pots and saddlebags with a sacred glow.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

A busy Friday, but some fun and serious links:

• Another North Dakotan who's made it big.
• Flavor Flav in a NASCAR jacket with Public Enemy and the Roots.  Note also the updated fatigues.
• Local saints.
• Heritage Bytes.
• Keep checking back.
• Stupid Grammar.

A Few Thoughts on Formation Processes and Sacred Space

I spent little bits of time this weekend meandering through the most recent volume in the Late Antique Archaeology series from Brill: L. Lavan, E. Swift, and T. Putzey eds., Objects in Context, Objects in Use Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity.  Leiden 2007.  Aside from the sort of silly notion of material spatiality, which seems to imply that there could be spatial relationships that are somehow not material, this imposing tome has a bunch of interesting "stuff" in it.  Byrn Mawr Classical Review has offered a complete early review here.

The volume contained, among other things, a series of articles on object in Early Christian space.  The articles by B. Caseau, V. Michel, and Z. Fiema, employed various textual and archaeological methods to survey the range of objects associated with religious space in an Early Christian context.  Of particular note was Z. Fiema's discussion of documents in the storeroom of the Petra Church.  The careful excavation revealed a fairly substantial archive originally arranged on shelves and in cabinets. The two articles by B. Caseau examined textual sources for the various objects that they associate with Late Antique churches.  Her work reminds us how few of the objects recorded in Late Antique church inventories or in more literary sources are regularly found in excavated churches.  Her discussion of the objects associated in texts with healing shrines reminds us how how most of things present in the everyday life of even the most imposing churches were perishable.  Brooms, wooden buckets, leather, metal and papyrus only survive in very particular archaeological and cultural environments and consequently remain invisible to excavators.

These articles reminded me of a short paper that I wrote, probably 8 years ago, with Tim Gregory and David Pettegrew, ("Archaeological 'Signatures' of Byzantine Churches: Survey Archaeology and the Creation of a Byzantine Landscape," Byzantine Studies Conference Abstracts of Papers 27 (2001), p. 38.).  We did very intensive archaeological survey in the immediate vicinity of Byzantine Churches on the island of Kythera hoping to discover some kind of material signature for Byzantine churches.  We were not particularly successful.  The tendency to keep church yards clean, the position of churches on the tops of hills or ridges, and the generally overgrown condition of the island made it difficult for us to find much material that was distinct to the religious function or chronological range of these buildings.

This all led me to think a bit about the distinct set of formation processes that create the archaeological evidence for religious space.  The tendency for the community to regard some religious spaces as sacred and consequently to continue to function on some level after catastrophic events like earthquakes and fires.  Later burials in the remains of Early Christian basilicas is one example of post-destruction re-use.  The functioning of informal and sometimes open air shrines at collapsed churches is another.  The religious significance of various objects associated with churches might prompt more significant kinds of intervention in prior to total abandonment.  Easily recognizable architectural forms (particularly the apse) made churches particularly visible even centuries after their initial abandonment and led to patterns of episodic reuse separated by centuries.

The studies pertaining to religious space presented in Objects in Context, Objects in Use, focused almost exclusively on the link between the location of objects in an archaeological context and their primary use within space.  In general, the archaeological studies avoided over reliance on the so-called Pompeii Premise, which assumed that objects found in an archaeological context revealed the function of those spaces in antiquity.   While carefully wrought observations regarding the location of objects and the function of space remain significant for unpacking the difficult matters surrounding the function of space in an Early Christian context, it provides less help understanding the dynamic processes that form the archaeological record and reveal persistent attitudes toward space in antiquity and in subsequent centuries.

Revising Dream Archaeology

I've set as a goal to send out my now over-hyped Dream Archaeology paper by the beginning of May -- that is before the start of my field season with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. I presented the paper in the early winter at North Dakota State University and got a good bit of helpful feedback.  I've also had some useful conversations with Kostis Kourelis (see his discussion of Tanagras) and read a good bit more, particularly on modernism and nationalism in a Greek context.  G. Jusdanis Belated Modernity and J. Fabion's Modern Greek Lessons proved particularly helpful as did a relatively recent volume of MODERNISM/modernity (11 (2004)) which featured a relatively extensive discussion of the relationship between archaeology and modernity.  While I felt fairly confident about my ability to analyze ancient and even Byzantine (particularly hagiographic) sources, my grasp of the modern 

As is so often the case, the final substantial revisions has far more to do with repositioning the paper that I already have than some massive re-write.  In fact, I began the process of repositioning by adding one paragraph:

The wide range of material available from Late Antiquity, the Byzantine period, and contemporary Greek history has emphasized the importance of dreams and visions in creating an understandable historical and archaeological landscape.  These stories suggest that Dream Archaeology stands at the intersection of a number of crucial strands in the development of the Greek landscape.  The following discussion will seek to explore four distinct connections between the world of dreams and archaeological practice.  First, this paper will expand Y. Hamilakis recent discussion of the role of dreams in creating a sacred context for archaeological practice by placing it in a more developed historical context.  To do this, I will focus on both the historical and the performative elements of dream archaeology especially as they provide a link between the role of archaeology as a sacred commission and its production or discovery of  sacred objects.  The liturgical roots of the hagiographic tradition in which Dream Archaeology and inventio play such an important role, connects the obligation of the archaeologist to excavate to religious rites that mediate between the secular present and a divine.  In the modern era, the role of Dream Archaeology in bridging the gap between the eternal sacred and the present and local parallels the role of modern inventio stories that tied local experiences to key events in the emergence of a nationalist narrative.  Nationalism in Greece, as elsewhere, sought to capture and propagate common experiences across geographical extent of the modern nation state and use these narratives as a foundation for a distinct Greek identity.  The power of Dream Archaeology, and the final focus of this discussion, is that it not only promoted the autochthonous character of the Greek identity and experience, but it recognized it within dreams which rank among the most personal experiences of an individual.  Thus, Dream Archaeology creates a set of conditions in which the nation can transcend the chronological experiences and spatial limits of a local communities and pervades the unconscious world of the individuals. 

Stay tuned for another "working" draft in the next couple of weeks.

More on Dreams...

The regular readers of this blog know that I have an emerging interest in dreams with a focus on the relationship between religion (particularly the phenomenon of inventio) and archaeology in Greece.  Even more specifically, I've thought a bit about the different (but related) roles that predictive dreams played in disciplines influenced by the early 20th century modernist discourse.   For example, religiously inspired dreams appear occasionally in otherwise highly "scientific" archaeological reports and seem to have led the discovery of specific artifacts (relics!), buildings, or features.  This intersection of religious dream and scientific archaeology allowed the scientific discourse of archaeology to bridge the gap, if just momentarily, and create a space where it was possible to reconcile long standing religious phenomenon and "empirical" arguments.  This space, in turn, played a part in the creation of nationalist discourses which typically accommodated by mystical and scientific bases for national identities.

I've also suggested that the role of predictive dreams in anthropological discourse (as well as the scientific discipline of laography (or folklore studies)) was similar, although these dreams tended to be stripped of religious power and transformed into artifacts of continuity between Greek folk and their ancient and Byzantine predecessors.

Finally, I have noted that dreams have a significant place in the field of psychoanalysis and in Freud's works, most notably his Interpretation of Dreams.  Freudian thought was, of course, characteristic of modernism and sought to place the unconscious mind of firmer "scientific" footing.  It appears that Freudian ideas first circulated in Greece during the third decade of the 20th century and among the first generation of Greeks to explore Freud's ideas was Angelos Tanagras (P. Hartocolis, "A Letter from Greece," Journal of American Pschoanalytic Association 48 (2000), 675). 

I spent yesterday afternoon reading through A. Tanagras, Psychophysical Elements in Parapsychological Traditions (New York 1967) on the recommendation of a colleague.  Originally published as La Destin et la Change in 1930, this book sought to integrate Freudian psychological analysis and research into the parapsychological phenomenon ranging from telekinetics to telepathy and clairvoyance.  Dreams feature prominently in his book -- including dreams that lead to the discovery of lost objects.  Tanagras, following much early 20th century parapsychological research, attempts to argue that the mind can control the material world through not only the power of suggestion but also the manipulation of subatomic particles.  His arguments are based upon numerous interviews and sworn testimony of members of the Greek bourgeoisie (doctors, lawyers, newspaper editors, bankers and the like) and interlaced with a strongly Freudian understanding of mind.  In fact, it appears that the unconscious was every bit as powerful -- if not more so -- as the conscious mind in its ability to manipulate and influence the material world.  It is worth noting that Tanagras makes an effort to apply the principles of parapsychology to "evil eye" -- the practice of cursing an individual through a jealous gaze and a common phenomenon in Greek and Eastern Mediterranean folk traditions. 

While Tanagras does not deal with archaeological dreams specifically, his research follows a now well-trod path of attempting to explain and accommodate "supernatural" or even religious phenomena within the emerging (and expanding) scientific discourse.  Efforts to validate scientifically the "folk" traditions in a Greek context -- whether by categorizing them as persistent remnants of ancient practices or through juxtaposing religiously inspired dreams and empirical discoveries or establishing a scientific basis for supernatural phenomenon -- worked to create the foundation for a modern society which stood close to the center of the emerging discourse of nationalism in a Greek context (for a more subtle reading of this complex process see : J. Faubion, Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism.  (Princeton 1993).)

Update:
For more on Tanagras, check out Kostis Kourelis excellent post!

Update 2:
Kostis has contributed more to the link between Tanagras and archaeology including the relationship between the renowned archaeologist A. Philadelpheus and Tanagras.  Philadelpheus apparently dedicated his Monuments of Athens to Tanagras.  Even more interesting is that Tanagras has an autobiography with a copy at the Elliot Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Library.

Update 3:
More brilliant blogging by Kostis Kourelis on Tanagras, parapsychology, and archaeology.