Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some quicker quick hits:

• Two Talk Thursday.  The more I think about it, the more I think that the afternoon talks are the most valuable component to the program here at the American School.  Some people have complained that there are too many talks and when you have two, back-to-back in one afternoon there is a certain point to that.  On the other hand, the talks do allow you to engage with some of the newest and most exciting research in the archaeology of Greece.  I'd say that if you attended every Tea Talk, you'd walk away from the year with a fairly accurate image of the future of the discipline.  The graduate student paper in particular present a nice overview of the kind of material being studied, but (more importantly) the methods, theoretical models, and style that will come to influence the discipline in the near future.
  • Jamie Donati presented a thought provoking Tea Talk called: "Towards a (New) Agora: A Case Study of Three Peloponnesian Cities (Argos, Elis, and Corinth)."  We made a digital recording of it and hope to post it as a podcast over the weekend.  So stay tuned...
  • I survived my talk yesterday graciously hosted by the Gennadius Library in their Work-in-progress Seminar.  My paper was entitled "Some New Readings of Early Christian Architecture".  It was well attended and seemingly well received.
• The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project continues to plan their upcoming season.  We were pleased to receive permission from the company that manages the British Bases on Cyprus to conduct soundings on Vigal and Kokkinokremos this summer.  That was the last formal hurdle in our receiving permission to do fieldwork has been cleared.  We are now deeply involved in the discussion of where exactly to excavate on both sites.  Our survey and geophysical data have provided us with a rough idea of where to excavate, but the determining exactly where we should locate our modest soundings to achieve the best results is another matter entirely.  Our primary research concern it to test the results of our geophysical work and survey.  The garbled stratigraphy on Vigla -- where a surface assemblage biased very strongly toward the Hellenistic period overlies what appears to be a Christian basilica style church -- makes our trenches there particularly interesting both in terms of understanding the formation processes at play in the creation of the surface assemblage, and for refining our chronology for the whole range of past activity there.
• I have spent part of the last two summer normalizing the Isthmia context pottery data so that someday we can compare it with the data from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  Recently, Tim Gregory has posted many of the recent season reports from the Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia on line here: http://isthmia.osu.edu/reports.html. 
• If you are interested in the history of the archaeology of Cyprus you should definitely check out David Gill's History of the British School at Athens blog.  It includes some interesting bits of info on the BSA's role in the archaeology of the island.
• Two interesting pieces from Archaeolog:
• On the role of blogging in a regional archaeological project: Presentation of the creative, relativist and multicultural blog of the Neixón hillforts archaeological project (Galicia, Spain)
• Related to our Punk Archaeology Project (part 1, part 2, part 3): History on the Line, Davis Square
• Finally if you are a North Dakota reader you will certainly be interested in this talk:

  The University of North Dakota chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will host Dr. Roger Bagnall, Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University;4 p.m., Monday April 21, at the North Dakota Museum of Art. Bagnall is part of the visiting scholar program which invites distinguished scholars to visit 100 colleges and universities with chapters of Phi Beta Kappa.

  The topic for his discussion is "Excavating a Town in an Egyptian Oasis." Dr. Bagnall will describe recent discoveries at Amheida, a site in Dakhla Oasis in the western desert of Egypt with a history stretching from the third millennium BC to the late Roman period. He will describe the interplay of Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures in artifacts as humble as food remains or as artistic as mythological wall paintings for the late Roman period.