The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Big Week at the Gennadius

Quick Saturday blog post just because there is so much activity at the Gennadius Library this week.  If you can't find something here that interests you, you just aren't interested in Greece!

On Monday, May 5, Sinan Kuneralp will lecture on "From Baghdad to Berlin: the itinerary of Yanko Bey Aristarchi, a 19th - century Ottoman diplomat of Greek origin". The lecture will be held at 7:00 pm in Cotsen Hall. The lecture will be in English - a summary in Greek will be available.

On Tuesday, May 6, Professor Cyril Mango will deliver the 27th annual Walton lecture at 7:00pm in Cotsen Hall. The topic of his lecture is "Imagining
Constantinople" (in English).

On Wednesday, May 7, has been scheduled a symposium in honor of Prof. Mango's 80th birthday. Here's the program.

On Thursday, May 8: "Cavafy's Memory. 75 years from his death" events:  Tour of the Cavafy exhibition (Gennadius Library, 7:00 pm)

Book presentation of "C. P. CAVAFY - THE COLLECTED POEMS", a translation by Evangelos Sachperoglou under the aegis of the British School at Athens; followed by recitation of Cavafy's poems in English and Greek by British actress Claire Bloom and Greek actor Kostas Kastanas (Cotsen Hall, 8:00 pm).

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

A rather short and whimsical Friday Varia and Quick hits today:

• Tucked away in a further recess of the World Wide Net Web is John Wortley's A Repertoire of Byzantine "Beneficial Tales".  It's a massive compilation of summaries of the short beneficial tales that we so popular in Late Antique and Byzantine times.  It has various indices, bibliography, and a nice introduction to the genre.  It's all text file so that the summaries can be searched through your browser.
• Scott Moore at Ancient History Ramblings has posted a link to a Reuters story about the severe draught on Cyprus.  Water rationing is never good. 
• I received a flyer the other day about Midwest Medieval History Conference which will be held at Dennison University on October 3 and 4.  Of particular note: "Graduate students are encouraged to submit proposals, and those presenting will receive a $100 honorarium."  What a nice encouragement for graduate student participation!  If you need more encouragement, Dennison will be absolutely lovely that time of year.  Watching a Division III football game at Deeds Field-Piper Stadium is one of life simple pleasures.  In October the lowset stadium would just begin to be surrounded by fall colors.  Unfortunately the Big Red is away that weekend so you'd have to content yourself with the conference.  Alas.
• Rumor has it that there will be a little symposium on Byzantine Athens here at the American School next Wednesday, perhaps at the Gennadius Library, in honor of Cyril Mango's lecture, Imagining Constantinople, the day before.  Oddly there is no mention of it on the School's fancy-pants web page, so it might be a secret.
• Mary Beard has posted on 10 Excellent Blogs. 
• PhDiva is back.  It's a great blog.  Here's a simply brilliant post (among many): The Rules of The Blog; it includes one of my favorite rules:

"Feel free to email me – you’ll generally get a reply. But please do not confuse friendliness with romance or anything else – a few too many people have recently. I also have a habit of blocking addresses if men are either too rude or amorous."

Needless to say, I have decided to implement the exact same policy.  Since I've started this blog, I have become irresistible.  I've recently had to block my wife's email address. 

All teasing aside, it is a very good blog even if you don't know what a Givenchy dress is.

A Special Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Today is an important Friday for two reasons.  It's Good Friday in the Orthodox Church and it's Anzac Day in Australia, New Zealand, and a few other South Pacific countries.  I'll write about Holy Week tomorrow and Anzac Day at the end of the blog.

First some quick hits:

• I've linked to Archaeolog before, but another interesting post: The Other Acropolis Project by Yannis Hamilakis.  It introduces his newest web project: The Other Acropolis, a photoblog which aims "to produce a range of alternative media interventions which will take the iconic site of the Athenian Acropolis as their centre, their point of departure, or their target (in all senses of the word)."  It's run by The Other Acropolis Collective which includes, among others, Fotis Ifantidis who runs the super-hip (in a William Gibson way) Visualizing Neolithic blog.
• Over the Classics Journal Online Forum there is a noteworthy article: Daniel N. Erickson, “Practical Ways of Saving a Classics Program: A Report From the Front”, 103.3 (2008) 301–6.  Dan Erickson is my erstwhile colleague in the Language Department at UND and has given his passion to developing the Classics program there.  This short article sketches out the main outlines of the history of his work and gives us room for optimism!
• Brandon Olson, Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project veteran and UND History alumnus, gives a short summary of his recent paper at the CAMWS Annual Meeting on the inscribed sling pellets from Vigla. 
• Amanda Flaata gave an interesting Tea Talk on Meter (the Mother of the Gods) in Phrygia and Greece.  Among other things she mentioned how sanctuaries of Meter in Greece often included references to her sacred topography in Asia Minor.  In particular the cult in Greece sometime employed the names of mountains near sacred sites elsewhere to create a kind of imaginary topography.
• A couple of interesting links to scholars bridging the gap between the academy and "the real world".
  • Ohio State's Origins eHistory Project with an interesting article and podcast "(Fore)Closing on the American Dream" by Lawrence Bowdish
  • The North Dakota Humanities Council's blog Prairie Polis features a cool essay "What Are Free Markets For? Or, what should we think about before we think about voting?" by UND Philosophy Professor, Jack Russell Weinstein.

Anzac Day commemorates the role of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in the difficult and bloody Gallipoli Campaign of 1915.  The Australian War Memorial site has a nice web site explaining the ceremonies and commemorative aspects of the observance.  Cities and towns in Australia often hold ceremonies commemorating the exact moment of the Gallipoli landing (in Brisbane this was 04:28 (AEST); for photographs). Among the more interesting things is that the Gallipoli campaign forged a special relationship between Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey.  As early as 1934, Ataturk reassured Australians and New Zealanders with words now inscribed on the several monuments both at Gallipoli and elsewhere:

"Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well."

Another important part of Anzac day are Anzac Biscuits.  According to the story, Anzac Biscuits use Golden Syrup rather than eggs as a bonding agent so that the sweet treats would survive the long journey from Australia to Europe.  My wife and mother-in-law sent me a tin and in a faint way, re-performed the actions of families during World War I who sent biscuits to their loved ones serving in Europe.  A very tasty way to be made to feel part of an Australian family!

Tea Talk Podcast: Toward a (New) Agora

As a proof-of-concept, Jamie Donati, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and I worked together to podcast his American School Tea Talk: Toward a (New) Agora: A Case Study of Three Peloponnesian Cities (Argos, Elis, and Corinth).  Tea Talks somewhat less formal 30-40 minute papers that typically focus on a work-in-progress. 

The talk is divided into three case studies which form the individual tracts to the album.

Here's an abstract:

The Greek agora was a complex social and physical entity within an ancient city. It was inherently heterogeneous, and evolved under different circumstances. In this paper, I explore the structure of the Archaic and Classical agora at three different cities in the Peloponnese (Argos, Elis, and Corinth). I point out some of the unique features at each of these sites, and, in doing so, highlight some common misconceptions about the Greek agora. Since the Peloponnese is an area of the Ancient Mediterranean that is generally neglected in studies on Greek urbanism, agoras in these centers often present diverse patterns of development. Failure to understand the agora within its context risks a misguided interpretation of its spatial setting, best exemplified in trying to understand the agora through the prism of an Athenocentric model.

Here's the URL: http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Toward%20a%20New%20Agora.html

Enjoy!

Susan Sutton at the American School

Susan Sutton gave a fascinating talk at the Trustees Lecture here at the American School on Tuesday.  She reviewed her long career as an archaeologist and anthropologist who studies the modern Greek landscape.  She worked on several of the most influential intensive survey projects in Greece including the Southern Argolid Survey, the Kea Survey, and the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project and made it almost a requirement for every subsequent project to have someone who uses ethnography, archival research, and archaeology to study the modern landscape. 

Her talk like much of her research emphasized the "liquidity" of the Modern Greek landscape.  She stressed how older models rooted in a kind of Orientalism romanticized the Greek peasant and imagined them to be unchanged over countless centuries.  In place of this patronizing and colonial image, Sutton showed how the Greek countryside, particularly the village, was a dynamic and fluid place shaped by engagements with international markets, a long tradition of flexible agricultural and settlement strategies, and nationalism. 

For the second part of her talk she explored the relationship between her carefully wrought view of the Greek village and countryside and that understood and promoted (in some ways) by Classical archaeology.  In particular she discussed the relationship between the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea and the village of Iraklio where she had conducted so much of her fieldwork during the Nemea Valley Archaeology Project.  She noted how the site of the temple of Zeus with its three standing columns had long been abstracted from the landscape.  This was first done by the early travelers who drew the remains and often consciously removed any signs of the modern settlement nearby in their illustrations.  It has been continued by the archaeological treatment of the site which is now a 40 acre archaeological park, set off from the village by a high fence, and further decontextualized through its austere "excavated" appearance and strict rules governing a visitors engagement with the place.  The results of this, she argued, is that visitors to the Temple of Zeus rarely recognize the modern village in which it stands (much like the ancient travelers), although she makes allowances for recent efforts by the excavators there to make the site more accessible and more integrated in its surroundings. 

Her ethnographic work among the villagers in Iraklio allowed her to introduce their perspective into her reading of the archaeological landscape.  She noted how they had a much stronger attachment to the "Lion's Cave" where Herakles was said to have killed the Nemean Lion. Unlike the Temple of Zeus the Lion's Cave was not fenced off, largely unstudied by archaeologists, and well-integrated in the local landscape.  Moreover, she argued that the story of the Nemean Lion had special significance to the local population who had moved down from mountain villages into the plain in the 19th century and worked hard to tame the wild and uncultivated environment. 

Sutton's talk resonates well with some of the themes in this blog (in particular see: Four Views of the Corinthian Landscape); in fact, it was largely through her work that I first endeavored to understand the modern Greek landscape.  Her talk resonated well with Tim Gregory's talk last Tuesday, A New History of Byzantine Greece: An Archaeological Perspective (click the title for a podcast of the talk; for some comments see: An Archaeological Perspective on the History of Byzantine Greece) which began by placing the Byzantine archaeological landscape in the historical context of 20th century Greek scholarship and its views of this period.  Unfortunately no podcast on her talk, but we do have a podcast on her talk from the AIA in Chicago earlier this year where she explored some of the same ideas.

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.

An Archaeological Perspective on the History of Byzantine Greece

Timothy Gregory delivered a lecture entitled, A New History of Byzantine Greece: An Archaeological Perspective, on Tuesday night at Cotsen Hall at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.  The lecture was apparently the first to be cross-listed in both the Directors Lecture Series (typically archaeological and focusing more on ancient and prehistoric Greece) and the Lloyd Cotsen Lecture Series hosted by the Gennadius Library (which brings in lecturers on topics important to the study of post-Classical Greece more generally).  An abstract of the talk and a full podcast of Gregory's lecture is available here (graciously hosted on the Squinch web page).  In the interest of full disclosure, I'll say that Tim was my adviser at Ohio State, so I am somewhat partial to his perspective on things, but that never stops me from having opinions (of course), and with the podcast available you can always check my remarks against the original!

Tim's main argument was that an archaeological approach had much to contribute to the history of the Byzantine period in Greece.  From the start, he sought to differentiate archaeological approach to Byzantine material culture from approaches more typically associated with art history .  He emphasized that this was not to suggest that one approach was better than the other, but rather to argue that the study of the Byzantine period in Greece remains relatively untapped by scholars using both the archaeological methods and evidence, whereas there art historical approaches (stylistic, typological, and increasingly theoretical) have continuously made meaningful contribution to our understanding of this period.  While one could quibble that making disciplinary divisions between art history and archaeology are not particularly productive in the discipline (as the best scholars in either discipline draw on largely a common body of methods, research questions, and theories), there is certainly a feeling in the field that there is a clear divide between how scholars read material culture and those committed to archaeological approaches receive less attention than they deserve (for similar sentiment see: "Priest Houses": Sacred or Profane?, Embodied Bodies in the Coffin of Medieval Art History).

The talk began with a general introduction to the study of Byzantine history in Greece starting with Gibbon and proceeding through to scholars of the last generation with particular attention to Greek scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries.  He then presented three case studies showing how archaeology has made a contribution to the Byzantine History of Greece: Christians and Pagans in the 4th and 5th centuries, the Byzantine "Dark Ages", and the Frangokratia.  Each case study blended material familiar to me -- particular from Corinth and Athens -- with material from sites that may be less familiar such as Messene, Ay. Vasilios (in the Corinthia), and Tim's own work on deserted islands in the Corinthian and the Saronic Gulfs.  For example, he included a nice summary of the important work being done in Messene which holds forth promise to expand how we think about both Pagan-Christian conflict and Greek during the 7th century.  At the same time, his talk paid appropriate tribute to the importance of the work of Charles William whose excavations at Corinth revealed so much about Frankish settlement there.  (He also said nice things about the contribution of the "new generation" of survey archaeologists like David Pettegrew and Dimitri Nakassis both of whom work at the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and with us at Pyla-Koutsopetria!)

The talk was good and brought together a whole number of significant issues.  Nevertheless, Gregory's approach reproduced some of the persistent parochialism of Greek archaeology.  The issues that Tim chose to highlight Christian/Pagan clashes, the "Dark Ages", and the Frangokratia were couched in explicitly Greek context without much mention to the study of these phenomenon in the wider context Eastern Mediterranean.  To be fair, some of this reflected the need to have a narrow and manageable topic for his paper, i.e. "Byzantine Greece" as well as an awareness of the audience for his remarks. Nevertheless, the archaeology of Byzantium extends far beyond the borders of the modern nation-state of Greece and the problems and methods of interest to scholars elsewhere in the Mediterranean received only passing reference in Gregory's remarks.  For example, Late Antique urbanism, the Medieval Mediterranean economy, changes in the structure of authority and society, and the dynamics of cultural interaction all represent topics of longstanding and significant interest among scholars of Byzantine archaeology in regions outside of Greece (and within Greece as well).  In fact, art historical approaches to Byzantine Greece, particularly those that focus on changes in the style of wall painting or architecture, often take a more cosmopolitan approach to the problems of this period than is currently offered by archaeological investigation.  This is not meant to criticize or undermine the value of developing regional or even site specific questions as a key component of focused archaeological research: on the one hand, in the pre-modern world almost all society was local society, and, on the other hand, national archaeological policies exert a strong influence over the nature of research within their borders.  The cultural, social, economic, religious, and political structures that characterize what we recognize as "Byzantine", however, stretched far beyond the borders of Greece and the affairs of the wider empire inevitably influenced the development of what in the 19th and 20th century has become seen as a phase of "Greek (National) History".  Archaeologists studying "transnational" phenomena like pre-modern Empires have the opportunity to critique often divisive nationalist histories by recontextualizing local phenomena within a larger regional context.  Of course, regional approaches are neither new nor immune from their own problems and risks (after all Orientalism was a regional approach!).  Nevertheless, it is not hard to imagine that the next major stride in understanding the history and archaeology of Byzantine Greece won't have some roots in the vast amount of high quality work being done at present elsewhere in the post-Classical Mediterranean.

Enjoy the podcast!

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Four diverse quick hits!  Something for everyone!

• Kostis Kourelis (see: New Books: Peripatetic History) encouraged me to read R. Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost.  It's a brilliant little book combining the spirit of Simone Weil with the lyrics of the Clash.  Her chapter entitled Abandon is particularly compelling.  She weaves together themes of personal loss, the image of the abandoned city (and an abandoned hospital), and the unconscious mind: "The city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture.  Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life." (p. 89)  This certainly brings into focus the importance of dreams in archaeology; the excavation is part of the process of bringing the unconscious to the fore, reifying it, and coming to terms with the details that lead to its disappearance from our conscious mind.
• My blog has apparently created a buzz.  The word in the halls of the American School is that someone did not like this blog post: Inside Looking In: A Wondering about the American School of Classical Studies.  I don't know who or exactly why, except the floors whispered that it was perhaps related to this line: "It seems hard to imagine that the social experiences of each cohort here at the school, which in their intensity can approach a kind of hazing (hearing a talk about an Archaic temple in a steady rain!!), would have no impact on how the various interrelated disciplines (archaeology, philology, history, art history) developed."  In any event, I have been quite open in my critique of the American School (you can find these posts here), but in general, I have am positive in my overall assessment of the institution and its programs.  So, the buzz is good, and I am glad folks are reading my blog and discussing the points that I bring up, but I'd like to learn more.  It's exciting to see such a venerable institution that supports and encourages a robust and critical culture.
• I've just finished reading Maria Iacovou's article in the November 2007 volume of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR) entitled "Site Size Estimates and the Diversity Factor in Late Cypriot Settlement Histories," 1-23.  In it she critiques some of the methods commonly employed to determine the size of Late Cypriot (LC) sites and the implications of these estimates in how we understand the settlement hierarchy in the LC period.  She rightly stresses that function is a crucial variable in determining the relationship between site size and the relationships between settlements on the island. She notes for example that the site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos where we have conducted fieldwork:

"The site commands a superb view of the sea and the fertile plain but, geographically speaking, there is no possibility that it had wells.  Its founders, then, did not choose it to set up a long-loved and prosperous urban center.  They obviously had another, specific objective in mind.  In fact, the houses -- estimated as at least 200 units -- were built along the edges of the plateau, forming a continuous outer wall which has been described as "the fortification wall"  The space within could have been, for all we know, completely free of house structures.

The 27 ha of the plateau should not, then, be interpreted as 27 ha of built-up space; nor should they be compared naively to the "small" size of the urban fabric of Enkomi or Ay. Demetrios.  Far from being similar, they are very different types of settlement." (p. 11)

He observations are interesting and touch upon some of the basic research questions that we hope to test this summer (see Another Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Update).  As for site size, Dave Pettegrew and I have been working on a very similar project, albeit for a later period.  In particular, we have focused on how intensive pedestrian survey defines "large sites" and determining how these methods have influenced our understanding of places in the archaeological landscape.  In fact, we submitted and had rejected an article that dealt with a very similar topic.  Here's the abstract:

"The study of large sites has been vital to Mediterranean archaeological survey for some thirty years. In regional environments where palace complexes, urban centers, and sizable primary and secondary settlements are ubiquitous, large-site survey has emerged as a key component of research design. Despite a scholarship recognizing large-site survey as a distinct facet of landscape archaeology, there has been relatively little scholarship addressing the relationship between intensive method, data production, analysis, and archaeological interpretation. This article provides a synthetic overview of major problems and issues in surveying and interpreting large sites in the Eastern Mediterranean and offers two case studies from Corinth, Greece, and Larnaca, Cyprus, that offer new directions in understanding extensive surface scatters at the archaeological and historical level. The paper advocates large-site survey as a fundamental vehicle for exploring the concept “site”—constructed in the encounter between archaeological fieldwork, the artifactual landscape, and the desire to produce discursively meaningful interpretations of the Mediterranean past."

• I received an email just this morning from Dr. Stephen Robinson, the son of Elwyn B. Robinson who was a longtime professor in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota and the author of The History of North Dakota.  He introduced himself and was kind enough to send along a copy of a touching memoir that his father Elwyn Robinson composed on the death of his wife Eva in 1984, Remembrances of Eva Foster Robinson (1903-1984) and photograph.

 
Stephen Robinson in the window of Merrifield Hall where the Department of History is located on the campus of UND.
Photo by Elwyn Robinson

March 25 Parade in Athens

I looked over my blog for the past month and realized that there were almost no pictures.  March 25th seemed like a good day to fix that.  I took part of the morning off (only part!) and checked out the military parade through downtown Athens.  We weren't in an ideal place for photographs, but I did click off a few that are more or less presentable.

 
Evzones in their fustanellas

Some kind of fighting trucks

Trucks with Large Guns

Proper Tanks

 
Everyone gets into the act...

Drinking planes for firefighting

Firetrucks

Parades are great.  I love trucks although the ones with the big guns were a bit scary.  The biggest applause was for the Evzones and especially the firefighters who worked so hard this past summer.

If the pictures aren't your style, I did do a proper blog post for the day here.

Quick Hits and Varia

This has been a crazy week!

• Monday was "Clean Monday" (Καθαρά Δευτέρα).  It's the first day of Orthodox Lent (and the day after the end of Carnival).  It is traditionally celebrated by eating seafood (particularly shellfish) and flying kites.  It is a significant holiday.
• Tuesday and Thursday saw lectures, and so will today, Friday. 
  • Tuesday was Oleg Grabar who talked about the "object in and object of Islamic Art".  He explored the history of the study of Islamic art and sought to consider its future directions as only a scholar who had close to 5 decades in the field could. 
  • Thursday was Theo Kopestonsky's Tea Talk which continued to develop her research on the the sanctuary of the nymphs at Kokkinovrysi.  She elegantly placed her shrine \within a highly romanticized version of the Corinthian landscape.  
  • Later that evening Bogdan Maleon presented the a working paper on the political theory behind mutilation in the Byzantine state.
  • Tonight is the Open Meeting of the American School.  Jack Davis will review the work of American School projects.  Guy Sanders will present recent work of the Corinth Excavations with Ioulia Tzonou-Herbst and Sarah James.
• Linda Jones Hall was in town.
• Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is getting busy:
  • We installed Omeka on a server at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
  • We are beginning to use a private wiki (an easily updated web page) to help us organize our upcoming field season (http://pkap.wikidot.com/).  We can collaborate in producing lists of supplies, dates of student arrivals, et c.  Scott Moore, David Pettegrew, and I are experimenting with it now.  We'll open it up to the rest of the senior staff once we work out the kinks.
  • The University of North Dakota's Office of University Relations prepared a nice press release for Emerging Cypriot.  Now that we have six of the shorts posted online, we want to begin to lure in more of the non-blog-reading public!The Office of University Relations does a great job at keeping PKAP in the public eye in North Dakota.
  • Our second annual report has appeared in the 2007 volume of the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus.  This volume is dedicated to the memory of Danielle Parks.  Congratulations to the RDAC staff for producing a substantial volume in a prompt way!
  • The the two volumes of the L. W. Sorensen and K. W. Jacobsen's Panayia Ematousa: A Rural Site in South-eastern Cyprus (Athens 2006) hold significant import for the study of Pyla-Koutsopetria.  Panayia Ematousa is only about 12 km inland from Pyla-Koutsopetria and provides a well documented assemblage of pottery to compare to the finds from Pyla-Koutsopetria.
• Byzantium at large:
  • In a March 2, 2008 review of his book Lush Life in the New York Times, Richard Price was quoted as saying:
    "About the Lower East Side today, Mr. Price said, “This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today.” He added that he sometimes thinks of the neighborhood as a very busy ghost town, where many of the ghosts milling around still speak Yiddish."
  • In a New York Review of Books review of John Broughton's book, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, Nicholson Baker compared Wikipedia's use of the public-domain 1911 Britannica to the Medieval use of spolia: "The fragments from original sources persist like those stony bits of classical buildings incorporated in a medieval wall." 
  • I can't say that Julia Kristeva's Murder in Byzantium is a quick read.
• Blogs:
  • I really groove on Brandon Olson's blog: Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean.  For any student contemplating graduate school, read Olson's blog to see how to do it right.
  • The "Vidi" feature on Alun Salt's blog, Archaeoastronomy, is becoming required reading.
  • Not much buzz (not any in fact) around my recent contribution to the Ancient World Bloggers Group blog: PD(Q) 1.1: Form, Translation, Text: Blogging on Paper.  That may not bode well for PD(Q) ... with some much already to read and do, is there room for another journal?
  • There is a new post over at Prairie Polis: Why Is Religion Violent? 
• An odds or an ends: A recent call went out from my department head, Kimberly Porter, that the Art Department at UND was looking to get rid of a collection of glass type slides "of the old type"... "many of which are photos of this persons' journeys around the world."  I claimed them.