The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Happy New Year everyone.  Here is a little batch of Friday stuff:

• Brandon Olson's Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean celebrated its one year anniversary this week.  He blames me.  Brandon is a long-standing member of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and a graduate student at Penn State.  He did one of his M.A. degrees with me at the University of North Dakota.  He'll present part of his research at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America next weekend.
• This is an ominous and interesting tease on Digital History Hacks.  For the past three years he has presented his research in a blog based format.  From what I can gather he is moving to a wiki.  I've been tempted to experiment with wiki's more systematically.  In fact, we used a wiki last year to work to organize PKAP and I use wiki's in my History 101 class.  In some ways a wiki is superior for the presentation of ongoing research.  It's easy to update and allows a user to navigate in a more topic oriented manner (familiar to so much scholarly inquiry).  The public face of a wiki erodes however (or at least de-emphasizes) the linear narrative structure that a blog imparts (understanding, of course, that one can view every edit to a wiki and see the very process of construction).
• The 2008 Cliopatria Awards were announced.  Archaeology of the Mediterranean World was once again snubbed.  In fact, I was so snubbed as to not even be nominated.  I feel like Kanye West.  But some great blogs were recognized including one of my regular reads, Tenured Radical, for her post: "What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do? A Few Meditations on Women's History and Women in History." Congrats!!!
• I get enough spam both on my blog's comment pages and in my various email accounts to have a skeptical eye toward all of it.  That being said I did get this link recently and it seems more or less harmless and perhaps even useful. 
• A quick reminder, the Archaeological Institute of America's Medieval and Post Medieval Archaeology Interest Group will meet from 7:00 AM - 8:30 AM  on Sunday January 11th at the AIA Annual Meeting.  See you all there!

Finally, if you were miffed by my Merry Christmas post, rest assured that it was -15 this morning (not the -18 announced on the Weather Channel) and we are expecting 4-6 inches of snow.  I am back in North Dakota and all is right with the world.

Hala Sultan Tekke: Thoughts on an Overlooked Cypriot Site

In the most recent fascicule of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies Nassos Papalexandrou offers a short study on the mosque of Hala Sultan Tekke outside of Larnaka (N. Papalexandrou, " Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus: An Elusive Landscape of Sacredness in a Liminal Context," JMGS 26 (2008) 251–281).  Our team at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project visits the site every year, and I was regularly embarrassed by how little I knew of this impressive, picturesque, and curious site.  Papalexandrou's article includes many interesting observations on the site, particularly from the perspective of early travelers, and I was vaguely heartened to learn how little people actually know.  His article sought to contextualize the monument within the dynamic religious landscape of the Larnaka area in the early modern period.  This is a valuable addition to our understanding of the religious landscape of Larnaka as well as a valuable methodological experiment as Papalexandrou sought to imagine a past for the mosque as a counterpoint to potentially simplistic observations made largely by non-local travelers or visitors with particular ideological or religious perspectives. Papalexandrou captures the ambivalence of sites like Hala Sultan Tekke by placing them within the shifting context of historical change, religious attitudes, and varying perspectives of textual sources.

This article will definitely appear among our regular reading for PKAP, in part because it offers a nice method for reading the dynamic religious landscape of Larnaka today.  To Papalexandrou's thorough reading, I can add five additional observations:

1) Papalexandrou rightly highlighted the various polarities that enveloped the mosque of Hala Sultan Teke.  The main polarity in the context of this mosque was the distinct Christian and Muslim religious places.  But his resistance to polarities could be extended to very notion of well defined sacred and profane places within the landscape.  It may be that the concept of "holiness" works better in a pre-modern world.  It is clear, for example, that Hala Sultan Tekke was a holy spot in a very rich sacred landscape.  The Larnaka Salt Lake itself, for example, formed part of a sacred landscape as it origins were deeply embedded in Christian miracle stories.  The nearby Stavrovouni, "Cross Mountain", amplified the sanctity of the monastery on its peak which held the fragment of the True Cross given by St. Helena.  So, as Papalexandrou demonstrates, the mosque itself is not just a sacred place (in a profane world) but a holy place in a landscape where the profane was not only absent, but unlike to exist at all.

2) Papalexandrou brings out the liminal nature of the mosque.  One of the standard stories told at the mosque today is how Muslim ship captains would fire off their cannons when they came in sight of the mosque as a sign of respect.  Today, the mosque is situated on the main road from the Larnanka airport (the main airport in the Republic of Cyprus) to the city of Larnaka.  Thus the mosque continues to stand in a liminal place as it appears not only on the outskirts of the city of Larnaka but between the city and the airport (a site often reserved in other places for all kinds of transient and marginal activities: storage, traveler's hotels, duty-free zones, maintenance, et c.).  The liminality of the site is further echoed by the nearby Bronze Age site of the same name which has been regarded as an important ancient harbor.  Thus, the more recent mosque is situated within a landscape of liminality that stretches from antiquity to the modern period.

3) Papalexandrou did not mention that behind the mosque and its elaborate grave is a tree bedecked with strips of cloth (these are sometimes called "Wishing Trees").  This traditional Eastern Mediterranean practice dates to antiquity and is exactly the kind of religious practice that transcends simple polarities between Christian and Muslim, sacred and profane, formal ritual and informal practices.  In fact, the same practice occurs at the site of Throni tis Panayia in the Troodos mountains and is sometimes associated with the grave of the Archbishop Makarios (a polarizing figure).

4) In the city of Larnaka, the church of Ay. Lazaros and the nearby mosque of Büyük Cami both have interesting relationships with the kinds of polarities that Papalexandrou sought to explore in the narrative of Hala Sultan Tekke. In the case of Ay. Lazaros, the church functioned as a Catholic monastery during the Frankish rule on the island (another tradition has that it was used by the local Armenian Uniate population) before functioning perhaps only briefly as a mosque and then being returned to Orthodox population.  Even then, the Orthodox and local Catholic population had an agreement to share the building during various times of the month (this phenomenon is recorded by various travelers).  Less than 200 m toward the coast the Büyük Cami mosque preserves a tradition of similar religious ambiguity.  Several guides claim that the building was the former church of the Holy Cross.  While this is possible, there is no obvious evidence of this transformation form the architecture of the building.  A guess would be that this story developed as much from the traditions of religious ambivalence characteristic of holy sites within Larnaka as any real evidence for the building's transformation.  Similar stories occur regularly for the location of Early Christian churches on former pagan holy sites.

5) The final, interesting aspect of the Hala Sultan Tekke site is that its restoration was funded by USAID and UNDP.  The funding of projects like the restoration of the mosque is not without political overtones.  The careful preservation and restoration of a Muslim site in the Republic of Cyprus could easily be read in contrast to the reported looting and destruction of Christian churches in the north.  It serves as a useful reminder that polarities of the type described by Papalexandrou are, indeed, politically constructed.

Papers, Projects, and Perspectives for Next Year...

This fall I was invited to present my research on campus in the spring. The talk will be to a general audience and sponsored by the Graduate School here at the University of North Dakota. There are relatively few opportunities for junior faculty to present their research on campus, so it's an exciting opportunity, but I need to come up with a topic.  The process of thinking about a topic gave me a chance to reflect on my ongoing research and try to find a way to bring together my various interests or at least prioritize my research so that I can have a productive spring.

So, my research agenda in no particular order...

1. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  As any reader of this blog would know, I co-direct the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  I am quickly learning that an archaeological project will expand to fill any time left unoccupied by other research or teaching demands (and it will often try to bully those projects to the sideline as well!).  That being said, the project also provides any number of opportunities for productive and interesting digressions ranging from methodologies, to general considerations of Cyprus in Roman Antiquity to more focused studies on Late Roman trade, ecclesiastical architecture, and the history of ancient Kition.  Moreover, my experiments with video, podcasts, and blogs have formed the basis for emerging ideas about narrative, archaeology, and the new media.  This would certainly be the most entertaining project to present to a general audience in that it could be rooted in narrative and include photos, videos, and even audio clips.

2. Early Christian Architecture in Greece.  I spent a good part of the last two years wrestling with my long moldering dissertation manuscript.  I have presented various fragments of it over the past few years to generally positive results, but as I spin parts off from it, the entire project begins to lose its conceptual cohesion.  Despite its conceptual fragmentation, I am working on a rather lengthy article which explores the role of churches in the process of Christianization in Greece.  I have posted versions of this work on this blog.  My most recent work has emphasized the role of churches as dynamic, hybrid space that served as a place of convergence for the many interests at play within Late Antique Greek society.  This work seeks to undermine the singular, hegemonic church so often portrayed in literary sources of the period and replace it with a more fluid institution which embraced ambiguity in its efforts to translate a universalizing discourse on a local level.

3. Dreams, Inventio, and the Memory of Early Christianity.  This project complements project 2 in looking at the remains of the Early Christian architecture in the archaeological record of Byzantine and post-Byzantine times.  I hold out the hope that I can somehow bring this project and project 2 together in a cohesive book manuscript.  I presented some of this research for the first time this fall at North Dakota State University and received some valuable feedback from colleagues there.  The core of this project is an effort to show that the massive number of basilica style churches built in Early Christian times had a profound impact on religious landscape of Byzantine Greece (and the entire Eastern Mediterranean).  At my most ambitious moments, I sometimes imagine that Early Christian architecture might have served as a vital filter between the remains and memory of Classical antiquity and the needs of Byzantine and even post-Byzantine society.  The frequent appearance of Early Christian spolia in Byzantine churches and their not uncommon appearance in Byzantine texts suggests that Byzantine society recognized the importance of the Early Christian period in the formation of their identity.  This challenges the more pervasive perspective that Byzantines sought primarily to establish ties to Classical antiquity.  In fact, I'd tentatively suggest that scholars' tendency to overlook Early Christian spolia speaks more to the traditional aesthetic values of Byzantine architectural historians than those of the Byzantine architects.

4. The Continuing Corinthia.  I continue to dabble in the fortifications and landscape of the Eastern Corinthia.  Most of this is in collaboration with David Pettegrew and comes from our ongoing work with the data produced over the course of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  Some of this involves our work documenting an Early Modern settlement at a site called Lakka Skoutara.  We have documented this site over the course of almost 10 field seasons with particular attention to archaeological formation processes in the Greek landscape.  David has also helped me continue to document the fortifications of the Eastern Corinthia (Project Fortress Corinthia).  David Pettegrew and I will present some of our recent research in this particular direction next month at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.  I am also working with Tim Gregory to digitize and normalize the context pottery from the Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia.

5. Thivi-Kastorion Archaeological Project.  This is another archaeological reclamation project.  I am working to re-analyze survey data collected by the Ohio Boeotia Project in the vicinity of Thisvi, Boeotia with Tim Gregory.  We are collaborating with Archie Dunn who is conducting an archaeological field survey of Thisve/Kastorion, Greece.  Our hope is to produce new maps of the Thisvi basin that combine the archaeological data collected in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Ohio Boeotia project and Archie Dunn's more recent work at the site.

So, this spring one of these projects (perhaps more) needs to come together in an engaging public lecture (at least) and ought to move forward toward a publication phase (and to be fair some of these projects have some good traction right now!). 

More Dreams, Religion, and Archaeology

One key element to my study of Dream Archaeology is emphasizing its relationship to the discipline of scientific archaeology as it developed in the late 19th and early 20th century.  Episodes of Dream Archaeology predictably found little place in mainstream discussions of archaeological methods, it did, however, attract the attention of ethnographers and students of folklore both in Greece and elsewhere in Europe.  Ethnography (or laography)  in Greece shared a focus with archaeology in that it sought to "excavate" contemporary folk traditions for ancient artifacts that linked contemporary Greeks with their ancient ancestors.  This complemented the work of archaeology by validating the historical basis for the existence of the nation and the fundamental continuity between ancient and modern Greeks. 

Outside of Greece, the nationalistic aims of studying folklore were muted considerably, but scholars such as John Cuthebert Lawson (following in the footsteps of scholars like E.B. Tylor), in his Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge 1910) relied upon the work of Greek laographers/ethnographers particularly Nikolaos Politis (M. Herzfeld, Ours Once More; Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin 1982), 103-104).  Politis carefully documented Greek folklore and deployed it to demonstrate historical continuity among the Greeks.  Among the myriad stories and types recorded by Politism, he notes numerous stories, some quite complex, related to dreams and excavation often of buried treasures. 

Lawson's assessment of such stories, in part drawn from his own experiences doing research in Greece at the end of the 19th century, views tales of Dream Archaeology with a typically modern and skeptical eye:

"One of the pieces of information most frequently imparted to men in dreams is the situation of some buried treasure.  The precautions necessary for unearthing it, namely complete reticence as to the dream, and the sacrifice of a cock, have already been mentioned.  This kind of dream has been utilized by the Greek Church.  There is no article of ecclesiastical property of more value than a venerable icon; to any church or monastery which aspires to become a great religious centre an ancient and reputable icon, competent to work miracles, is indispensable.  Now the most obvious way of obtaining such pictures is, it seems, to dig them up.  A few weeks underground will have give the right tone to the crudest copy of crude Byzantine art, and all that is required, in order to determine the spot for excavation, is a dream on the part of some person privy to the interment.  It was on this system that the miracle-working icon of Tenos can to be unearthed on the very day that the standard of revolt from Turkey was raised, thus making the island the home of patriotism as well as of religion.  And this is no solitary example; the number of icons exhumed in obedience to dreams is immense; wherever the traveler goes in Greece, he is wearied with the same reiterated story, and if the picture in question happens to be of the Panagia, there is often an appendix to the effect that the painter of it was St Luke – an attribution which can only have been based on clerical criticism of the style." (Lawson, 301-302)

Despite the skepticism, the link between these stories and the goals of the modern state is already obvious.  Thus, not only has the modern, scientific discipline of archaeology developed to support the national narrative, but so has at least some traditional "folk" understanding of the archaeological process.  It seems likely that the parallels between longstanding views of archaeology as preserved in hagiography, in particular, and the emerging modern discipline facilitated the transfer of meaning from the local and religious sphere to the national sphere.  The place of Dream Archaeology in the folk tales recorded (no matter how cynically) by Lawson and especially Politis further validate the significance of such stories in the national narrative.

For more on Dream Archaeology see here, here, here, and here .

Some New Publications from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

Two new publications features data and analysis from the Pyla-Kousopetria Archaeological Project.  R. Scott Moore, "A Decade Later: The Chronotype System Revisited," in W. R. Caraher, R. S. Moore, L. J. Hall, Archaeology and History in Roman, Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. (Aldershot 2008), 137-151 used PKAP data to reconsider some key features of the much-discussed Chronotype system of sampling and pottery identification. In brief, the chronotype system was developed over the course of several intensive survey projects in Greece and Cyprus.  It stipulates that each fieldwalker collects one example of every unique type of artifact in their swath or path through the unit.  When this pottery comes back to the lab, the ceramicist then batches the artifacts according to their unique chronotype which is a combination of fabric type and function.  Thus, the chronotype system provides a comprehensive sample of all unique types of artifacts present in a unit as well as some indicator of their frequency across the surface of the unit (that is to say, if a unit produces several objects of the same chronotype, this should indicate that several walkers saw similar material in their swaths).

While Moore's article includes a nice review of recent publications on the chronotype system, it also features some new analysis.  Of particular significance, is Moore's discussion of whether fieldwalkers were able to distinguish individual chronotypes successfully in the field.  Proponents of the chronotype systm have long argued that walkers could quickly be trained to distinguish similarity and different in the field and therefore were able to recognize unique types of artifacts in the field as is required by the chronotype system.  The tendency for survey pottery to be relatively cleaner than excavated pottery makes this process easier for the fieldwalker.  Moreover, most walkers were instructed to collect an artifact if they could not determine whether it was unique or not.  Moore's analysis of PKAP data, however, showed that walkers did not seem regularly to collect duplicate chronotypes as is shown in the strong correlation between overall artifact densities and the number of chronotypes in the unit.  Furthermore, he was able to argue that fieldwalkers were less selective in units with a larger number of sherds.  That is to say that walkers collected a smaller percentage of the sherds from units in which they counted a large number of artifacts.  Of course, this could simply reflect a lack of real diversity in the units from Pyla-Koutsopetria with the greatest number of sherds.  This, however, might simply be a characteristic of the site itself, where the highest density units tend to have almost overwhelming Late Roman component. Moore finds further support for his observations when he compared the number of chronotypes present in several total collection circles to the number of chronotypes found in the same unit sampled with the chronotype system.  In general, there was a much stronger correlation between the number of chronotypes present and the number of sherds in the total collection circles than in typical survey units. It may be that this shows a slight tendency for walkers to under-collect, but it may also simply reveal the difference between carefully scrutinizing the ground in a total collection circle versus walking across a unit using standard survey procedure.  Moore's conclusions offer another significant body of quantitative data for the effectiveness and limitations of the chronotype sampling system.  More significantly some of his conclusions differ from those reached by another chronotype project -- the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey -- where there is good evidence that fieldwalkers over-collected certain chronotypes (an issue discussed by Pettegrew, Hesperia 76 (2007), 743-784).  Despite some variation in quality of data that the chronotype system produces, it is nevertheless produces a body of data that allows us to critique the sampling tendencies of fieldwalkers in a critical way.  More importantly, he demonstrated that PKAP fieldwalkers were "remarkably consistent in their artifact collection" (147), which may not tell us much about the artifact types that they missed, but will at least allow us to draw confident conclusions regarding the distribution of artifact types across a unit and throughout the survey area more broadly.

The work of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is also features in the recent double issue of Near Eastern Archaeology (W. R. Caraher, R. S. Moore, D. K. Pettegew "Surveying Late Antique Cyprus" NEA 71 (2008), 82-89)  This issue is devoted to American work in Cyprus and, in part, celebrates the 30th Anniversary of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) in Nicosia as well as the important contributions of the late Danielle Parks.  CAARI serves as an import source of support for our work on Cyprus so it was particularly gratifying to be represented among the impressive list of American field projects active on the island since the founding of the Institute.  It is also exciting to note how many projects featured in this issue focus on "later" periods.  Alongside the PKAP contribution, M. Rautman's reviewed upon his important work at the Late Roman village of Kalavassos-Kopetra and Cypriot countryside in Late Antiquity, Annemarie Weyl Carr reflects on Dumbarton Oaks efforts to preserve and document the Byzantine History of the island, and Bethany Walker highlights the role of CAARI in supporting work on Ottoman Cyprus.  And, the entire issue is filled with spectacular technicolor photographs! 

Pyla-Koutsopetria in the Press and Other Varia

A bunch of odds and ends at the end of the week:

• The Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project got some press this past week in Cyprus Weekly.  While the article doesn't get everything right, the University of North Dakota got some press from it:

  "The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, as it is called, is jointly under the direction of Professor William Caraher, University of North Dakota, Professor R. Scott Moore, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Professor David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College, and Dr Maria Hadjicosti. Experts from Europe also assisted in the excavations.

  Maria Hadjicosti said that each participant contributed their own expertise and specialty in evaluating the archaeological excavations and survey."

• Edward L. Ayers, the new President at my alma mater, the University of Richmond, continues to contribute to the field of digital history.  His History Engine has gone live and public and is getting some good press.  This is exactly the kind of collaborative enterprise possible in a Web 2.0 environment and the kind project to which Digital History at the University of North Dakota could someday contribute.
• Luke Lavan's and Axel Gering's Berlin-Kent Ostia Excavations Blog is now being updated.  It will be fascinating to watch their project work to uncover the Late Antique city of Ostia.  Archaeological Project blogs is such a booming field that it might warrant more extensive treatment...
• Finally, a little advertisement for myself.  Brandon Olson, over at Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean, deserves a good bit of credit for helping get this book done.  He performed the preliminary edits on nearly all the contributions.  Scott Moore, at Ancient History Ramblings, was a co-editor.  Kostis Kourelis, at Buildings, Objects, Situations, was a contributor as was Sam Fee at Arranged Delirium.  It's the blogosphere in print form!

Kourion and Abandonment

I finally had a chance to make my way through A.H.S. Megaw's Kourion: Excavations in the Episcopal Precinct.  (Washington, D.C. 2007).  I am not going to try to review this imposing book here, but merely to point out one part of the Megaw and Company's interesting analysis.  A few years ago, I gave a paper at a panel at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of American in San Diego.  I argued that the master narratives that influence the excavation, description, and even analysis of Early Christian architecture in Greece have tended to obscure events associated with these buildings' abandonment.  The desire among archaeologists to fit their analysis of remains into the neat periodization schemes that have held sway in our discipline since the Enlightenment (i.e. a site "ends" when the period ends) combined with a long held preference among archaeologists for studying monumental architecture (as opposed to more humble structures) to lead scholars to overlook the often dynamic histories of buildings and sites after their most monumental phase had ended. 

The Kourion volume is not a revolution in this area, but the team of scholars associated with this excavation do bring out -- in various places throughout the text -- some significant observations concerning the abandonment and afterlife of this building.  The most well-known aspect of this building's history is that after its abandonment some of its architectural elements and liturgical furnishings were transferred to the site of Sarayia Chapel in the nearby village of Episcopi.  This use of Early Christian spolia in a slightly later building led the excavators to conclude plausibly that this three-aisle chapel replaced the episcopal basilica at Kourion as the seat for the bishop after the site of Kourion reduced to ruin by a late 7th century earthquake.

The removal of material from the site, however, did not occur in a single episode.  In fact, the excavations revealed that initially, the residents or bishop of Kourion made an effort to repair the church.  For example, even though the top floor of the diakonikon to the west of the main nave had collapsed, the first floor was nevertheless cleared out, perhaps to serve as a temporary chapel while repairs continued on the larger main basilica.  These efforts however proved inadequate and were perhaps stymied by additional seismic activity and the economic and political disruptions resulting from several 7th century raid and the eventual occupation of the island by Umayyad forces. 

According to the excavators, once the bishop or the community made the decision to abandon the church, the systematic quarrying of the precinct commenced.  The small settlement of workers established in the atrium of the church made new provisions for storing water (since the aqueducts for the city must have been damaged) and  left behind various tools for processing food and late types of cooking pots and transport amphoras.  The workers removed debris from the site, collected objects that could be easily salvaged, like roof tiles, and carried off prestige or symbolically significant items like marble furnishings, sections of opus sectile floors, and champleve revetment.  A lead seal from the 8th century Bishop Damianos suggests that the quarrying of the basilica took some time. 

Clearly, then, the church continued to be a "site" well after it ceased to function as a religious center.  The attention that Megaw and his colleagues paid to the "later" life of the buildings at Kourion is certainly not unique (in fact, just this week, I've been catching up on the careful "late" history of the site of Isthmia in the Corinthia), but neither is it as common as it could be in the study of important monuments in the Eastern Mediterranean.

A PKAP Thesis Defense: Latin- Greek Relations in Frankish Cyprus

David Terry, a Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project alumnus successfully defended his Master's Thesis here in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota yesterday.  His work was entitled "Authority and Cultural Interaction on Frankish Cyprus, 1191-1374."  His defense was good fun as he ably engaged his committee and members of the general public on all topics related to his research.  I learned a tremendous amount from his thesis, and I suspect it will continue to inform my interest in the contours of authority and religion in pre-modern Europe.

At his defense, David graciously claimed to have been inspired to work on the Frankish period in Cyprus by his time on PKAP and his personal visits to numerous Frankish period monuments on Cyprus (you can read his blog postings from his time on Cyprus here).  (I can also detect the influence of an informal seminar that some of his colleagues and I participated in a couple of years ago which focused on Authority and Religion in the Early Christian East!).

His visit to Cyprus was partially funded by the Graduate School at the University of North Dakota as part of Graduate School Summer Professorship.  David will study next year at Western Michigan University in their Ph.D. program in History.  He hopes to continue working in some capacity with PKAP and continue to pursue research in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.  He is also a member of the Medieval and Post Medieval Mediterranean Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Abstract

Many treatments of cultural interaction on Frankish Cyprus depict the Latin and Greek cultural identities as historic, monolithic constructions and the society of Frankish Cyprus as a multicultural society.  However, sources suggest that similarities between Greek and Latin cultural traditions were numerous and that there was a considerable amount of ambiguity between the two groups.  This thesis will examine the cultural practices of the Latin Cypriots and the origins of these practices and argue that Latin Cypriot communal identity was less dependent upon identification with the Roman Church than it was with a pan-Christian view of Cypriot society.  The subsequent chapter will examine the approach that the king and nobility of Cyprus took to protect this developing cultural milieu and argue that, in addition to a need to protect the island, the Latin secular leadership also felt a communal bond with the island's non-Latin majority.  Last, a discussion of intermarriage between Latins and Greeks shows how easily the two groups could cross the confessional line as well as the Latin Church's ability to prevent them from doing so.

Byzantine Dreams in Athens

I was just sent the program for a conference  at the end of this month in Athens on "Dreams and Visions in Late Antiquity and Byzantium".  The program looks full of interesting approaches to dreaming ranging from the literary to the psychoanalytical.  The afternoon panel on the first day looks particularly interesting with papers by Steven Obherhelman, Maria Mavroudi, and Charles Stewart, the first and the last of which consider the relationship between Ancient or Byzantine and Modern dream practices.  None of the papers appear explicitly deal with the relationship between archaeology and dreams (as in some of my earlier posts: Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology), judging from the titles, with inventio, so my research might have had something to add to these proceedings.  It's always heartening to open a conference program like this one and not see paper dealing with my current research.

It is all too predictable that a conference with a focus that falls near one of my current research areas would happen less than two weeks after I leave the country!

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some quicker quick hits:

• Cyril Mango's lecture, "Imaging Constantinople", here in Athens was very well-attended.  Cotsen Hall was packed!  He imagined Middle Byzantine Constantinople to be much less monumental than the Constantinople of Justinian's time.  Sounds like discontinuity...
• The symposium celebrating Mango's 80th birthday picked up on some of these themes particularly Anne McCabe's discussion of the Byzantine remains from the Athenian Agora.  Of particular notes was Erkki Sironen's discussion of verse inscriptions from the Late Antique and Early Byzantine period in Athens.  His volume of Inscriptiones Graecae is to appear by the end of this year and will supercede his presently invaluable Helsinki dissertation: The late Roman and early Byzantine inscriptions of Athens and Attica.
• An interesting preview of the new Acropolis Museum done on the BBC.  Word on the street here is that none of the considerable remains of the Christian Parthenon will be displayed inside the new museum including the considerable and important fragments of the church's ambo.  This seems hard to believe as it represents such an important piece in any argument for the continuity of Greek culture from antiquity through Christian times.  It is particularly surprising since there is so much interest at present in Hellenism in Byzantium (e.g. see "A Heretical (Orthodox) History of the Parthenon" as a preview of Kaldellis forthcoming book: The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)., also Writing off the Wall: Transcription as Resistance).
• IV International Cyprological Congress was two weeks ago in Nicosia.  I forgot the blog about it!  I did not attend, but everyone who did has reported that is was both well-organized and intellectually productive.  Here's a link to the program and abstracts.

Two random links:

• I am looking forward to reading newly released The Programming Historian by William J. Turkel & Alan MacEachern.
• And I enjoyed Natalie Zemon Davis's reading of Michel de Certeau in the New York Review of books, "The Quest of Michel de Certeau".