The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Thesis Defense: The Representation of Salvation in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Paul Ferderer defends his M.A. Thesis today at 1 pm in O'Kelly 221.  He will be my first student to write in my area of research (the previous group includes theses on Frankish Cyprus, Roman military equipment, and Caesar's Gallic Wars).  So this alone is reason to celebrate.  More importantly, Paul is a great guy.  He worked with us last year in Cyprus and has continued to help manage data this fall.  He is a regular visitor to my office and an expert on the NFL, professional wrestling, and public service announcements.  He also is a thoughtful commentator on the state of evangelical Christianity and longstanding member of our Latin Friday Morning group.  It will be sad to see Paul move on, but wherever he lands will get a first class mind and an all around good guy.

Here's the abstract for his thesis:

This thesis examines four prominent works of monastic literature composed during the third through the sixth centuries and contrasts the representations of salvation within them.  The Lives of Constantine and Antony, The Lausiac History and The Sayings of the Desert Fathers discussed conceptions of salvation in some of the earliest forms of monastic literature.  The contention of this thesis is that in relation to the major works of monastic literature composed during the same period, The Sayings, articulated an existential dimension of salvation experienced as deliverance from sin and manifested in restored communion between God and the believer.  Using genre as its primary unit of analysis, this study reveals the unique theology of salvation found in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

While this study focuses on the early monastic community, it has much broader implications in the study of historical theology and Late Antique religion.  This study’s theological focus contributes to the existing discussions on the holy man of Late Antiquity.  At present, such scholarship remains focused on the sociological implications of ancient religion.  This thesis provides a point of departure for studies of theological texts as works that describe the intellectual history of Late Antiquity. 

The present discourse on the history of Christianity places much of its emphasis on Western Christendom.  Saint Augustine and Aquinas remain the exemplars of Christian thought, and the reformation the pinnacle of the church’s impact on the course of history.  This thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship which probes Eastern foundations of Christian spirituality through the monastic movement and its rich intellectual history.   

He wants his defense to be open to the public.  So if you know Paul or this topic interests you, stop in to see the show!

Pagans and Christians in the Journal of Late Antiquity

The newest number of the Journal of Late Antiquity has hit newstands (only if you live in a very dorky community) or, better, the RSS feed. This is only the second year of this ambitious new journal's existence, and as the only major English language journal dedicated to the study of Late Antiquity, I've looked to it with a particularly critical eye. It's clear that the editors have sought papers from both established scholars and "up-and-coming" graduate students and recent Ph.D.s as well as the representing the Eastern and Wester halves of the Roman Empire. This is a good sign. The journal also seems to have a distinctly international character representing well the common ground within the international field of Late Antique Studies.

The current number has two articles that immediately caught my eye. First, L. Foschia offers a short article entitled: "The Preservation, Restoration, and (Re)construction of Pagan Cult Places in Late Antiquity, with Particular Attention to Mainland Greece (Fourth-Fifth Centuries)". Foschia argues that the 4th and 5th century saw continued attention to pagan cult places in Greece and drew upon evidence from Argos, Athens, and Kenchreai, the Port of Corinth. At each site, there was evidence for some significant reconstruction of a pagan cult site. This is unlikely to surprise scholars of Late Roman Greece, but is nevertheless a good reminder that some form of large scale, perhaps even institutional, support for paganism persisted into 5th century. The late (and getting later) date of many Early Christian basilicas in Greece reflects that rather belated shift of resources from the sphere of pagan (and in some of the examples used by Foschia, civic) monumental architecture to Christian architecture. The biggest weakness of this paper (which, unfortunately has many small issues that one might hope not to see in a top tier scholarly journal) is the absence of many examples that show how the practice of paganism in Greece represented a broad continuum of behavior from formal cult practices (at major sites) to informal, highly ambivalent practices, as seen in late cave sanctuaries or places like the Fountain of the Lamps in Corinth (see, in particular, the work of Tim Gregory, Richard Rothaus, and Frank Trombley here) . The evidence from many pagan sites in Greece suggest that the maintenance of more monumental expressions of cult practice may have been the manifestation of something far more "Late Antique" in character than earlier civic or even imperial supported pagan cults. This distinction is important because it understands "late" paganism as part of the same cultural milieu as "early" Christianity and insists that the public expression of religious practice, ritual, and identity is meaningless outside of a view of Greek (or Late Antique) society that does not include all shades of pagans and Christians.

The second article worth reading is (veteran blogger) Troels Myrup Kristensen's, "Embodied Images: Christian Responses and Destruction in Late Antique Egypt". His article looks at the relationship between attacks on pagan images (and sometimes pagans themselves!) and Christian (and more broadly Late Antique) ideas of the body. It's a thought provoking read, and contributes to the discussion of Christianization as a profoundly "embodied" phenomenon which saw its roots in P. Browns, Body and Society. Troels does good job of thinking about how bodies worked in the context of both Egyptian monasticism and, to a less extent, Early Christianity and Late Paganism. The only reservation that I had when reading his article was how he dated some of the episodes of destruction to Late Antiquity. The archaeologist in me (and someone who has periodically pondered the seemingly ritual destruction of statues in Greece) has confronted how difficult it is to date episodes of ritual destruction. This is particularly important, as in Egypt (like Greece) the centuries long presence of a powerful and equally iconoclastic Muslim population expands the potential context for ritual destruction of ancient images up until almost the present day. As I know that Troels sometimes reads this blog, I'd love to understand more fully how he dates his destroyed statues to the impulses of such Late Antique Christians as Shenoute rather than later Christian or Muslim practices.

  

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.

More on the Post-Classical Parthenon

If you want more traffic to your archaeology blog, just post with the words Acropolis, Parthenon, or Athens in the title!  I posted a couple of weeks ago on what I termed the "destructive power" of the Athenian Acropolis and declared it to be one of the most unapologetically modern of all ancient monuments.

This past week, while frantically preparing for classes, I used my down time to read A. Kaldellis new little book on the Christian Parthenon.  As per my usual practice, I am not going to review this book.  And in the interest of full disclosure, he allowed me to read an early draft of his manuscript.  The book is an exciting one.  Kaldellis combs the difficult and dispersed Byzantine sources for the Parthenon and argues (among other things) that the Parthenon was more important as a church than it ever was as an ancient temple.  Dedicated to the Mother of God, the temple was the Cathedral of Athens, an important pilgrimage site, and the location of a persistent miracle involving some kind of mysterious light.

I'll make three short observations about this book and how his thinking about Byzantine views of antiquity is so enriching:

1. He is subtle in his argument, but he suggests that some of the Parthenon's modern fame is rooted in its Byzantine renown. While the lines of transmission can not be precisely defined, the long Frankish occupation of Athens and some continuity of practice between the Frankish and Byzantine period would have exposed the Crusaders to the temple's reputation as a church.  The Western suppression of the Byzantine period at the Parthenon, then, not only physically eliminated and historically vilified the Byzantine contributions to the building itself, but overwrote the Byzantine source for the temple's architectural and historical significance.  After all, how could the "Oriental" Byzantine have appreciated the Classical glory of the Parthenon?  This argument adds sting to Kaldellis observations "the Byzantines had done far less damage to the monument than had Elgin and the Venetians" (p. 4). 

2. He problematizes the Byzantine relationship to the past in a far more complex way than previous scholarship.  In doing so, he offers the suggestion that spread and importance of the cult of the Panagia Atheniotissa represented a sublimated knowledge of the city's glorious Classical past as embodied in the Parthenon which could not be expressed within the rhetorical and intellectual structures of Christian Byzantine rhetoric or, perhaps, even Byzantine society more broadly (p. 175).  This Freudian reading of the deep conflict between the pagan Classical past and the Byzantine present explain the emergence of the Parthenon as an important site by representing it as the manifestation of suppressed desire.  In other words, the Parthenon and the Classical past of Greece continued to function in societies unconscious (especially among the Byzantine intellectual elite).  It's a small leap to understand the historical and archaeological character of Greek dream life in the same way (for more on that see here and here).  The suppressed wish for a glorious Classical past (especially during challenging times faced by bishops like Michael Choniates) finds expression through the exaltation of the Byzantine temple.

3. For a while, I was looking serious at Byzantine saints lives from Greece and I was told, perhaps flippantly, by a senior archaeologist that he thought these texts had little value and were, more or less, all the same. While this did not cause me to give up on them entirely, it probably discouraged me from thinking that there would be much potential in attempting to bring together Byzantine hagiography (or Byzantine texts more broadly) and the systematic archaeology of the Byzantine period.  Kaldellis's work is a great model for any efforts in that directions and suggests that the integration of Byzantine texts and monuments is not only possible for Greece, but can be profitable.

Oh, one last thing in this non-review. Kaldellis prose is great.  He manages to combine analytical precision with an casual and readable diction.  A few of my colleagues can pull this off.  I can't.  I'm jealous.

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.

Lakka Skoutara: The Survey

I've already blogged a bit about my collaboration with Tim Gregory, David Pettegrew, and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory in documenting the abandoned rural settlement of Lakka Skoutara (The Houses of Lakka Skoutara, Collapse, Provisional Discard, Construction in the Corinthia).  We conducted an intensive survey in this upland basin in 2002 and I've just begun to analyze the distribution pattern of material across the landscape there.  Since we only had about a week to do our survey at the site, we decided to sample the various parts of the basin so that we would capture the hillslopes, slope wash, the bottom of the basin and areas across the entire basin for east to west including fields in the immediate vicinity of the abandoned houses that David Pettegrew and I have so carefully documented.  In hindsight, I wish we had surveyed the entire area since the results of our survey were so interesting.

Daniel Pullen and Timothy Gregory read the ceramics from the site and the entire Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey helped out with the fieldwork.  The basin produced material from the Final Neolithic (ca. 3300-2500 B.C.) to the modern period with noticeable concentrations of material in the Roman, Medieval, and Early Modern periods.  In the maps below each dot represents a single artifact. 

The dates assigned to the various maps derive from the Chronotype dates and reflect the specificity with which our ceramicists could identify the individual artifacts.  The modern houses are represented by little dots and the larger black dots are threshing floors (alonia). The coloring of the survey units represents the total density of material present in each unit.

Final Neolithic

 
Final Neolithic to Early Helladic I

 
Early Bronze Age

Early Helladic I

Early Helladic II

Late Bronze Age

 

Archaic Period

Archaic to Classical

 
Archaic to Hellenistic

 
Early Roman

Roman

 
Late Roman

Roman to Medieval

 
Medieval

Late Medieval

Early Modern

Modern

 
Very Recent

It's clear, for example, that the prehistoric material clusters in a very different place than the highest density of ancient material (particularly the Roman material).  In contrast, the "Greek" period material and Roman period material cluster to the northeast of house 4.  Later, the Roman and Medieval material seems to concentrate in some of the same areas, particularly the units to the east of house 9.  These clusters of material suggesting some local continuity in occupation or activity.  For the material to cluster so relatively clearly in a small survey area was welcome and rather unexpected.  It will certainly make my job of writing up the distributional data from the survey easier.

Check back soon (maybe not today, though!) for more on Lakka Skoutara over the coming weeks.

The Body and the Liturgy

The summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies is a tribute to the work of Patricia Cox Miller.  Her book on dreams in Late Antiquity has been particularly useful to my work on dreams in an archaeological context.  The volume is dedicated to a series of articles focusing on the body in Late Antiquity and represents the wide range of topics that draw upon the study of the body as a key paradigm.

The article in the recent volume of the JECS that caught my attention is Derek Krueger's "The Unbounded Body in the Age of Liturgical Reproduction".  In it, he explores the idea that in Late Antiquity there were very few checks on the proliferation of the liturgy and its power to reproduce the body of God.  As evidence, he explores passages in John Moschos' Pratum Spirituale.  In particular, he examines the well-known story of the children who play-act the liturgy and, when they utter the words of consecration accidentally consecrate the host.  Thus unordained and untrained children were able conjure the body of God through the words of the liturgy alone.  Krueger then goes on to site some other passages that, in a general way, reinforce his observations.

Several years ago, in a thoroughly unsuccessful and consequently unpublished article, I argued that the the same proliferation of the liturgy explained the appearance of liturgical phrases in inscriptions across the Eastern Mediterranean.  These texts appeared not just in the context of the church building, but also in domestic space and in public space (particularly fortifications).  While these texts rarely contained the entire text of the anaphora (central to the act of consecration), I argue that they frequently invoke the liturgy specifically and establish a pars pro toto relationship.  The implication here is that (1) literate folks were familiar enough with the words of the liturgy to recognize a liturgical phrase in an inscription.  Krueger's work substantiates this assumption.  And (2) the liturgy itself was not the exclusive domain of the clergy, but could be appropriated by ordinary folks for their homes (especially in Syria) or by the elite in monumental fortifications.  Thus, there exists some tension between clergy's position as the "ritual experts" in relation to the liturgy and the proliferation of the liturgy among members of the laity. 

These arguments are persuasive and important, especially for any scholar (like myself) who see the ritual formality of the liturgy as crucial to its role in establishing a clearly defined relationship between the laity, the clergy, and the divine.  I can't get around the idea that clergy's authority in Late Antique society was in some way linked to their role in the liturgy.  After all, the most visible mark of the liturgy and clerical presence in a community was the monumentalized expression of liturgical space -- the church building.

The Medieval and Post Medieval Mediterranean at the 2010 Archaeological Institute of American Annual Meeting

We got the good news last week that the panel put together by Kostis Kourelis and Sharon Gerstel for the 2010 AIA Annual Meeting in Anaheim has been accepted.  The panel is titled First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites and will feature papers by Jack Davis, Kathleen Quinn, Anne McCabe, Adam Rabinowitz, Guy Sanders, and Tim Gregory and myself.  Here's a link to the abstracts and overview statement.

Tim Gregory and I plan to re-examine the data produced by the decades old Ohio Boeotia Project around the ancient city of Thisvi.  This survey data was initially analyzed in a series of publications in the 1980s.  Since that time, digital analysis tools have become considerably more powerful and there is a growing body of work in the region, particularly associated with the Cambridge Boeotia Project and its various spin-offs, that promises to add significance to any re-examination of the OBE results.  Returning to excavation and survey results -- so called legacy data -- has taken on new importance in recent years as excavation permits have become more difficult to acquire, a vigorous ethical discourse has put pressure on project directors to make unpublished finds available, and the digital archaeology "movement" has improved our ability to make published and unpublished data alike visible and accessible to the professional public.  A recent issue of the leading electronic journal in archaeology, Internet Archaeology, has dedicated an issue to the reanalysis of "legacy data" taking advantage of the intersection of digital distribution, new technologies, and the remarkable potential of the existing pool of archaeological data to inform contemporary research questions.  We hope our paper frames not only some of the methods and procedures at stake in the re-examination of survey data, but also makes the argument that this kind of secondary analysis marks the coming of age of intensive pedestrian survey.  It marks the potential of survey data to go beyond its applicability to narrowly defined research questions and to have the kind of enduring value that excavations have nurtured by long standing methods and carefully cultivated archival practices. 

Proving that survey data is available for re-analysis is absolutely critical for its persistence as an archaeological methodology in the Mediterranean.  And the recent transformation of post-Classical landscapes from spaces seen as stagnant and unchanging to dynamic "contingent" countrysides makes the study of the post-Classical world ideally suited as a test case.

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.

Merrifield Graffiti

One reason that I abandoned my beloved Blackberry for a less-loved Samsung Omnia is that it has a 5 megapixel camera which has encouraged me to document more regularly "archaeological" aspects of my everyday life.

Every day I walk leave Merrifield Hall on the University of North Dakota's campus past one of the oddest and yet most traditional pieces of campus graffiti.  Unlike more urban campuses, UND's campus is remarkably graffiti free.  Even restroom poets, so common to the semipublic space of university campuses, seems to be scarce.  So this one example of campus graffiti really stood out.  Someone had scratched a Chi-Rho on the inside doorframe at the southeast corner of Merrifield Hall.   The Chi-Rho is an important symbol to Christians, representing the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek.  According to most of the major sources for Constantine's reign, the Chi-Rho appeared associated with the battle of Milvian bridge after which Constantine showed a particular dedication to the Christian cause.  It was famously incorporated into Constantine's military standard (called the labarum). By the later 4th and 5th centuries, the Chi-Rho became a symbol of the Christian cause appearing in both formal inscriptions, mosaic decoration, and graffiti.

This immediately reminded me of ancient examples of graffiti -- especially the Christian graffiti found at various points along the Hexamilion wall in Greece.  While none of those graffiti were Chi-Rhos (that I can recall), several cross graffiti were located at doors entering towers or at gates into the fortress. (See: T. Gregory, The Hexamilion and the Fortress. Isthmia 5  (Princeton 1993), p. 126, ill. 23.).  Scholars have often interpreted such graffiti as being apotropaic; that is designed to ward off evil of both the human and spiritual kind.  Thresholds such as the door of a building or a city gate are liminal spaces (quite literally) and are unstable places being neither within the protected area of the building nor safely outside and away from protected space.  The vulnerability of such places often prompted appeals to divine powers to protect the space.

Of course, in some instances, the evil or restless powers have already infiltrated the interior space and the apotropaic marker -- like the graffiti on the Hexamilion -- are reminders that the bad things of the world can't always be kept at bay.