The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Geographic Information Systems and Regional Survey at the American School

Jack Davis and I will present an introduction to Regional Survey and GIS this morning at the American School.  I will talk about using GIS in the context of survey.  My seminar will be pretty basic and focus mainly on the conceptual framework behind such software as ESRI ArcGIS.  My feeling is that grasping the principles of most GIS programs (as well as the basic ideas behind such applications as databases) and understanding potential of GIS application is more valuable for the average archaeologist than developing a technical mastery of the applications.  In the last decade the number of GIS labs has proliferated on US university campuses (UND has two!), many of which are familiar in general with archaeological uses of GIS.  Consequently people with technical expertise are available to develop GIS platforms to a project's exact specifications.  The issue then is knowing exactly what GIS can do and communicating the needs of the project effectively to the technical experts (a kind of modern-day, technological, "ritual experts"). 

To this end, I am going to start with what most of us know -- relational databases -- and then describe GIS software as basically a spatial database.  After a short introduction to what a database is (the tendency among a certain kind of Classical Archaeologist is to conflate databases and spreadsheets), I'll talk about how GIS creates and queries spatial relationships between data sets.  I hope by introducing some of the basic technical vocabulary of GIS (shape file, vector/raster, DEM/DTM, georeferencing, orthorectifying) and, indeed, cartography (geodetic markers, projections, UTM/Coordinate systems) that I can demystify the process of producing GIS data for a site or a region and reading reports that rely heavily on GIS data . 

To this end, I've given them a suggested reading list with some case studies.  The seminar is optional, so I couldn't be too rigorous (but these are all good studies that use GIS data in a productive way). 

Four Case Studies

M. Given, H. Corley and L. Sollars, “Joining the Dots: Continuous Survey, Routine Practice and the Interpretation of a Cypriot Landscape,” Internet Archaeology 20; URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue20/4/1.htm

A. Bevan and J. Conolly, ‘GIS, Archaeological Survey and Landscape Archaeology on the Island of Kythera, Greece’, JFA 29 (2004), 123-138; Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0093-4690%28200221%2F200422%2929%3A1%2F2%3C123%3AGASALA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D

A. Bevan. The Rural Landscape of Neopalatial Kythera: a GIS perspective, JMA 15 (2002), 217-256.

Y. Lolos, B. Gourly, and D.R. Steward, "The Sikyon Survey Project: A Blueprint for Urban Survey," JMA 20 (2007), 267-296

I'll supplement the these case studies with one from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and one from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project which have the added advantage of having light-duty, java-based, GIS interfaces available on line (EKAS GIS, PKAP GIS).

One thing that struck me as I was going back through my mass of GIS data from EKAS, PKAP, and various other projects is how easy it is to forget the processes that produced the data.  Fortunately, I've managed to keep decent metadata over the years and I was able to reconstruct the processes that created my current data sets.  In the past, keeping good metadata has helped me (and my collaborators) to "fix glitches (always with a smile) " and, perhaps more importantly from a conceptual standpoint, to preserve a record of the intermediate analyses that created out seemingly "stable" data sets.  Given et al. (see above) talk about "verbing" the landscape; it is vital for the archaeologists to see their work of creating the data sets as part of this verbing process.  Data doesn't simply exist, it's constantly being created by the process of archaeological analysis itself whether it be in the field or late at night with a laptop. Metadata is the narrative of data creation in our increasingly digital age and has all the fragility and ephemeral qualities of an ancient text.

This sets up the conclusion of my presentation which will deal with the issue of data preservation, archiving, and presentation.  Regional survey projects increasingly rely on GIS to produce both stable images of the landscape and interactive interfaces for analysis.  It is crucial, then, that we as archaeologists communicate our assumptions in creating these images effectively even if it remains explaining such murky concepts as "corrected for visibility" or explaining how the values are assigned to the color increments that show artifact densities (many projects use Jenks/K-Means to show densities, but this, like any form of analysis , creates breaks in the artifactual landscape that are based on statistical formulae).  Finally, the issue of creating stable archives for GIS data -- both for the "final results" of analysis (shape files, raster images, GPS point data), but also the intermediate steps that preserve a paper trail and form the evidence for the interpretative narratives embedded in the digital and archaeological metadata. The potential loss of repositories like the Arts and Humanities Data service in the UK is a reminder of how far we still have to go in creating the kind of long term storage facilities for our digital data as our libraries and archives afford paper notebooks.

Snow in Athens

This is not today's "official blog post"; to read that click here.  I'd be remiss not to show my friends back home in North Dakota that we do get snow in Athens.  Well, at least on the mountains. 

Snow on Hymettos

The Kitchen at the American School

Each morning sometime around 6:30, I wander down the back stairway of the American School's Loring Hall to the kitchen.  The main floor of Loring Hall has a U-shaped "public space" with a service area occupying the center part of the U.  On the ground floor, this includes the professional kitchen and staff offices and storage; on the main floor, however, there is (what I think is) called a staging kitchen.  Each morning the staff of Loring Hall sit in the kitchen preparing breakfast for the students and faculty who arrive at around 7 am.

As I have noted before, Loring Hall is lovely but not a terribly homey place.  Its scale is institutional, it serves too many multiple functions, and its decor is too formal (if a bit threadbare).  Loring feels more like a lounge at an exclusive metropolitan club (just slightly past its day) than a place where people live.  One sleeps in Loring Hall, eats there, has conversations (always with a touch of formality and professionalism), meets people, but one does not live in Loring Hall in a proper sense.  The exception to this is the kitchen in the morning. 

Each day I have two cups of coffee, a bowl of somewhat ordinary mueseli and conversation with the women who staff Loring Hall for breakfast and lunch.  The conversation is in Greek and, properly speaking, I don't know Greek (despite my best efforts), but I do manage to speak it every morning for about 3/4 of an hour.  I learn a few new words a day and try to use them throughout the conversation.  I did this every day when I was an Associate Member at the School and do it every day now.  It's one of the few places in Loring Hall that feels like a place where one could live. Over the years they have welcomed and made to feel at home my friends, my wife, and my family. 

 

The conversation is wide ranging.  We talk about our home towns, the weather, our families, our work, and very often the news of the day.  This morning the talk was about the death of the Metropolitan Bishop of Greece -- Archbishop Christodoulos, who succumbed to liver cancer late last night.  He was the youngest person to ever hold his position and was quite active and outspoken and popular.  He famously engaged in talks with Pope John Paul II and sometimes stirred controversy with his nationalist rhetoric.  It's being picked up by the international press now (BBC, CNN, NYT/AP), but I heard about it in the kitchen.  In fact, I can hear the muted, somber bells from our neighbor,  Moni Petraki, as I write this.

Delphi Mosaics and the Late Roman Hybrid

Late Antiquity (300-700 AD, it is also called the Early Christian period or the Late Roman period) is a perfect period for exploring the notion of hybridity in material culture.  Not only was it a time of unprecedented change in culture and society, but there is also a vast and growing body of Late Roman material that is relatively unencumbered by long generations of study.  For Greece this is particularly the case.  At present I am working on an article arguing that ecclesiastical architecture (particularly in Greece) is quintessential hybrid space.  The intersection of Early Christian liturgical rites with architectural forms and decorative motifs with longstanding currency in Greece allowed the newly empowered ecclesiastical elite to express their social, economic and political authority in a way accessible to the Greek society.  This process was reciprocal, however, in that donors to churches, for example, had some access to the authority articulated by liturgical ritual and found ways to redeploy it in service of their own social goals.  Thus, Early Christian basilicas (churches) constructed by local elites became platforms for self expression while at the same time the clergy's control over the mediation between the divine and the mundane worlds ensured that ecclesiastical elite gradually acquired increased privilege in an Greek society (i.e. Bishops and the clergy in general became more powerful).

A 6th century floor mosaics from a rather typical Early Christian basilica found near the ancient site of Delphi is a great (and under-explored) example of this process.  I will spare you a comprehensive examination of the floor (with comparanda and the like), but present you with a short(ish) teaser.  The western most panel in the main nave (the central room of the church through which all liturgical processions would pass) has a central emblema showing leopard pouncing on a deer. 

This is surrounded by scenes of peacocks and eagles.  In the corners of the mosaic panel are two figures rushing toward the south.  We know from other mosaics in Greece (and elsewhere) that these figures are the personifications of the months.  So we have one pouncing leopard, four majestic birds, and two rushing months (no lords-aleaping, ladies dancing or rings of any kind!).  The months, it turns out are the key to understanding this mosaic.  The rushing months probably represent June (or July) and August.  Again, we know this from mosaics elsewhere on which the months are labeled.  The eastern month is labeled with the Greek letters KA and the western with letters KAI. This means nothing, until we assume that there were two more months with inscriptions reading LOI and ROI that have been destroyed (you can see in the picture above that the southern half of the mosaic has been destroyed).  This would spell KALOI KAIROI or "Good Times" or "Good Seasons".  Thus we can assume that the months of July and perhaps September are missing.  We have then the depictions of the summer months (June, July, August, September) with an inscription that says "Good Times".

This unlocks a possible meaning for the leopard and deer motif in the middle, which hardly seems appropriate for a mosaic in a church.  This scene, I think, is meant to evoke arena combats between animals.  This was a favorite ancient past time: release an exotic animal (like a leopard) and watch it attack another animal.  Moreover, animal combat scenes are sometimes associated with calendar mosaics (C. Kondoleon, "Timing Spectacles: Roman Domestic Art and Performance,"  in The Art of Ancient Spectacle. (Washington 1999), 321-341.).  The reason for this is because arena contests were often parts of seasonal games or festivals.  So the the calendar mosaics served to evoke specific time of year when games and arena combat took place.  Moreover, this kind of mosaic, when put up by a wealthy patron, often served to advertise the generosity of that patron who presumably paid to provide the exotic animals for a particular set of games.  So, in some cases the link between the months and a scene of violence referred to a specific contest. 

One last thing, during the Roman empire festivals to Apollo were very common in the summer months.  These festivals were good opportunities for games and arena shows.  Delphi was a shrine to Apollo and it's games -- the Pythian Games -- were held in the summer (although there is no indication that they involved arena contests).  In fact, the association between Apollo and the summertime was so close that he sometimes appeared as the personification of summer in sculpture and mosaics (see:  George Hanfmann, The Season Sarcophagus in Dumbarton Oaks. Cambridge, MA, 1951, 156). 

A half century ago, a scholar might have said "AH HA! Syncretism between Christianity and paganism!  An invocation of pagan festivals in a Christian church!  I knew it!  The pagan gods did not disappear they merely changed their names."  Now, we approach this differently.  I might suggest, for example, that the link between "Good Times", the summer, and a scene from the arena is not designed to evoke Apollo -- after all the oracle of Apollo at Delphi had not uttered a word since the later 4th century AD -- but rather to evoke general images of wealth, prosperity, and happiness.  It is predictable that these images of wealth, prosperity, and good times would be influenced by images deriving in part from paganism, but in a Christian context the pagan aspects of these motifs (if they still existed in the 6th century) would have been appropriated by the patron of the church (whom we know nothing about except for a fragmentary inscription that suggests he or she paid for the mosaic or the entire church) to show his or her own prosperity and generosity.  In fact, the floors seem to hint, that the building the church was equivalent to providing games in the arena. 

Finally, in the Greek liturgy of this time, the clergy would have walked across this floor on the way to sacred eastern end of the church.  These ritual processions were important opportunities for the clergy to demonstrate their unique position in Christian society as the links between God and the mundane world.  Thus, the ritual of the liturgy appropriated the space of the church for clerical display which, in turn, reinforced the position of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.  The mosaic floor, with its references to prosperity and generosity provided a suitable setting for ecclesiastical ritual which transformed the social and economic meaning of the mosaic and translated it to the religious realm.  The liturgy made clear that prosperity and generosity worked in the service of the church and the clergy.  The patron of the floors certainly recognized this, but also realized that their generosity in the service of the liturgy would gain them greater access to the same divine advantages of the clergy.  After all, providing for a church was a noble calling worthy of rich rewards in the afterlife!

Thus, the hybridity of Early Christian space in Greece.  The ecclesiastical elite and the local patron (assuming in this case that they were separate institutions) appealed to images and rituals which had independent meanings but also informed one another.  In this simplified (and superficial) analysis, the space of the church becomes an active place of reinterpretation where the juxtaposition of ritual, decoration, and social and institutional structures produce new combinations of meaning (hybrids!) which both benefited the varying parties involved in creating the hybrid space, and produce a new iconography which could be deployed later in its own hybrid combinations.

Varia and Quick Hits

Some quick hits and varia for the weekend:

• The blogging archaeology article that I worked on in the fall and serialized here and over at the Ancient World Bloggers Group page has appeared on Archaeology Magazine's online features page (here's a link to the article).  Thanks to everyone who helped with the revisions and Mark Rose at the Archaeological Institute of America who provided some nice editorial touches and his web-design who helped its slick appearance.  I hope to be able to provide an update to the article in 9 or 12 months time and continue to track some of the developments in the blogosphere. 
• Brandon Olson, a PKAP and UND alumnus, has made a foray into the blogosphere with his Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean blog. He not only discusses his own research but also his experiences and classes as a Ph.D. student at the Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Program at Penn State.  So far, it provides a nice perspective on advanced graduate.  With all this new blogging activity, I will have to expand my PKAP blog aggregator.
• Erstwhile, PKAP co-director Scott Moore has begun to blog on his Digital History course at Indiana University of Pennsylvania at his Ancient History Ramblings blog (part -2, part -1, part 0, part 1, part 2).  In an earlier post, I mentioned Sam Fee's mini course on Web 2.0 at Arranged Delirium.  I am thinking about offering a Digital History course at UND next year and will have to consider the experiences of these two colleagues (in addition to the iconic and sophisticated course offered by William J. Turkel at the University of Western Ontario).
• David Gill who already provides us with the excellent Looting Matters, now adds another "research blog", History of the British School at Athens.

[It will be interesting to track the way in which certain genres coalesce in the blogosphere over the next several years.  On the one hand, there are clearly certain relatively well-defined and recognizable types of blogs: research blogs, teaching blogs, news blogs, graduate student blogs et c.).  On the other hand, there does seem to be a willingness to experiment with hybrid blogs that bring together teaching and research and present themselves in a conversational style.]

• I meet with Scott Moore and David Pettegrew tonight in Second Life.  It will be the first time that PKAP attempts to use their presence in Second Life as an actual productive tool -- albeit not in a very creative or unique way (we are not using it as anything more complex than a conference call!)
• Finally... I have managed to settle back in from my holiday travels.  I then survived a week of unmitigated bustle with teaching responsibilities and several thought provoking talks that centered on a recognizable theme. Ben Millis gave a "Tea Talk" (an informal lecture on a work in progress) on the ethnic and linguistic identity of the refounders of Corinth entitled "“The Social and Ethnic Origins of the Colonists of Early Roman Corinth".  He argued that the population of refounded colony of Corinth was a hybrid population who were comfortable in both the eastern "Greek" world and the western Roman world, and therefore well suited for a position astride a major east-west trade route in the Mediterranean.  Maria Georgopoulou, the director of the Gennadius Library, conducted a Gennadius Seminar entitled "Studying Mediterranean Cities at the Gennadius Library" which examined the nature of Cretan/Venetian interaction at the sites of Heraklion and Venice in 400 year period of Venetian control over Crete.  Much of the material derived from her excellent book, Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: architecture and urbanism, but she provided a very thoughtful theoretical introduction which considered the influence of more recent theoretical developments on the models she employed to understand Venetian/Greek interaction.  Finally, Nanako Sawayanagi, a graduate student at NYU, offered some of her research at a Gennadius Library "Work-in-Progress" seminar with a paper entitled, "The Team of the Japanese and the Greek Politics in 1906 - 1908".  Like Georgopoulou and Millis, Nawayanagi considered cultural interaction (whether literally or figuratively) to be a suitable topic for historical study.  While she argued clearly that there was no evidence of real Japanese involvement in Greek politics (the name Team of the Japanese refers to a small but influential party in the Greek Parliament in the early 20th c.), the name itself reflects the influence of a growing global awareness and a willingness to negotiate (a political) identity in transcultural terms.

A Walk through Byzantine Athens

This week has had a Byzantine theme.  I lead the American School Regular Members to some of the Byzantine churches in Athens today.  It was a bit of a challenge because the churches are spread out over a relatively wide area (relative to say, a single ancient site), and I had three hours to do it.  In addition to the basic architectural tour, these three hours also included a short talk on the basic history of Middle Byzantine Athens.

So I had to make some decisions.  I decided to focus almost exclusively on Middle Byzantine (10th-11th c.) Athens and limit the tour to five churches.  I began with Moni Petraki which is next door to the American School.  It's also one of the oldest standing churches in the city (probably the oldest) perhaps dating from as early as the last quarter of the 10th century.  It's rounded apses, arcade type windows, rugged construction, and lateral vaults that protrude beyond the outer wall of the north and south crossing recommend an early date.

Moni Petraki

We then walked down to the Kapnikarea which sits in the middle of a bustling shopping district.  The church is contemporary with another 11th century church in the city, Ay. Theodoroi which can be dated by an inscription to the mid-11th century.  The use of dentelated bands (or dog-toothed friezes) and the grouping of the arcaded windows more closely together reflect its later date as does the appearance of "Kufic" decorations and stone crosses.

 
Kapnikarea

The group will then walk over to the so-called Little Metropolis.  The tour route defies chronology and jumps to this Frankish  period (the period after the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204) monument that most likely dates to the 13th century.

The "Little Metropolis"

Famous for its use of spolia from ancient, Early Christian, and Middle Byzantine buildings, this church is among the best studied Byzantine monuments in the city.  The extensive use of spolia in all Byzantine buildings in Athens makes it challenging to use architectural sculpture as a source of chronological information.  Of particular interest to me is the use of Early Christian and Early Byzantine (say 8th and 9th century) fragments in these buildings.  I've argued elsewhere that this practice reflects an interest in continuity between the Early Christian and later periods, but at the same time suggests an awareness of a some kind of break or discontinuity.  After all, the original building from which the spolia derived was no longer in existence.  An additional level of complexity derives from the possibility that some of the properly "ancient" spolia (particular column capitals) in Middle Byzantine buildings like the Little Metropolis might in fact be in tertiary use, having at some point been employed in an Early Christian context before being used again in a later building.  Thus, the use of spolia become very much like the use literary or documentary evidence by the historian.  On the one hand, the use of primary source evidence reflects an awareness of separation between the historian's time and a previous moment in the past (i.e. discontinuity).  On the other hand, the actual use of particular evidence in a contemporary historical text reflects its continued validity and its potential for translation from one context to another.  Our ability to understand a piece of "primary source" evidence and use (like ancient spolia) it reifies the persistent sense of continuity between the past and the present.

From the little Metropolis we made a chronological jump backward to the Soteira Lykodemou (also called the Russian church).  This is the largest church in the city and Ch. Bouras has recently proposed that it is, in fact, a 3/4 copy of the Katholikon church at Os. Loukas.  It's a crossed-domed octagon which presents a significantly different kind of interior space than the cross-in-square type churches common to Midddle Byzantine Athens.  The church probably dates to between the death of the found of the church in 1044 and the completion of the Katholikon at Os. Loukas in the first decades of the 11th c.

Finally, we walked from Soteria Lykodemou over to the 11th century church of Ay. Aikaterini near the Lysikrates monument which is undergoing some repairs and renovations so that the foundations of the apse are exposed.  The church has been extensively modified with a massive narthex and ambulatory.  The church highlights one of the key issues facing the study of Middle Byzantine buildings in Athens (or any city for that matter).  The churches are living buildings, they remained in use for centuries undergoing modifications to serve their varying congregations. 

 
Ay. Aikaterini with later ambulatory in foreground and detail of its exposed foundations

The Middle Byzantine churches of Athens remain a relatively understudied group with only a handful of detailed studies on specific churches. Few of the churches have received proper archaeological investigation and our dating of them has continued to rely on the stylistic chronology established by Peter Megaw in the 1930s (with some modifications).  The remarkable thing is that over 70 years of archaeological and architectural study of the Byzantine buildings of Athens and the rest of Greece has done very little to modify Megaw's overall chronology (although single buildings have received revised dates).  You can read my hand out for the walk and some additional bibliography here. 

The Byzantine and Christian Museum

I led the Regular Members through the Byzantine and Christian Museum with the help of Associate Member Christina Stancioiu who graciously talked about icons for us.  I've posted my notes here.

George Lampakis: Thrace-Constantinople (1902) (see also here)

George Lampakis (1854-1914) was a key figure in the formation of the Byzantine and Christian Museum collection. He was educated in Athens in theology and in Germany in the developing field of Christian Archaeology. Upon his return to Greece, he participated in the growing willingness to understand Byzantium as a crucial part of Greek identity. He was among the founders of the Christian Archaeological Society and circulated in elevated circles becoming a close associate of Queen Olga (the Russian bride of King George I who claimed descent from the Byzantine Anglos family). He traveled extensively and his photographs, some of which are on display at the Byzantine and Christian Museum, and form an important resource for the study of late 19th and early 20th century Greece. He also worked to document and in some cases collected artifacts important to both Byzantine and the more recent Christian culture of Greece. As such he should be understood as part of a larger movement toward embedding Greek history within the larger narrative of both the Orthodox church and the Byzantine empire. This reinterpretation of the Greek past, of course, contributed to the Great Idea and the irredentist movements that it spawned, but perhaps should not be read as purely a nationalist movement. The conflation of Greece’s Byzantine past and the modern life of the church gave Lampakis’ collection of Byzantine and Christian antiquities an ahistorical quality evocative of liturgical time and distinct from the modern historicist narratives characteristic of the emerging nationalist histories.

Byzantine and Christian Museum 

The Byzantine and Christian Museum developed out the collection of the Christian Archaeological Society which Lampakis curated. The Museum itself was founded in 1914 soon after the capture of Thessaloniki, a city of particular significance to the Byzantine patrimony of the modern Greek state. The first director of a distinct Byzantine and Christian Musem was Adamantios Adamantiou, and he and his successor, George Soteriou, both expanded the collect and shifted its focus. They drew upon the growing prestige of Byzantine material and Byzantine history within Greece, which by the second half of the 19th century had emerged as a counterbalance to Classical philhellenism and its association with Western political and cultural interventionism. This use of Byzantium found parallels elsewhere in Europe where scholars, particularly in Austria and German, increasingly asserted the cultural autonomy of Byzantine and Late Antique material. The artistic, stylistic, and historical autonomy of Late Antique and Byzantine culture (as opposed to reading simply as a decadent or debased form of Classical art) made it particularly suitable for scholars seeking to understand Byzantine Greece as the cultural predecessor of the independent nation-state. By 1930, Soteriou established the collection in its present location – the Villa Ilissia which had been built in the 1840s for the eccentric American Sophie de Marbois who had married into the Napoleonic aristocracy. He arranged it to demonstrate the uninterrupted development of Byzantine art from the Early Christian period to the early 19th century.

 
Villa Ilissia

In keeping with the modernist and scientific underpinnings of both museum and the nation-state, Soteriou organized the religious artifacts collected by Lampakis as well as material from his own excavations in two ways. One group of rooms organized icons, portable objects, and church vestments chronologically and typologically transforming the kinds of religious objects, which continued to be venerated and used in neighborhood churches throughout Greece, into objects susceptible to systematic and scientific investigation. More interestingly, however, Soteriou placed the best examples of sculpture, furnishings, and architectural sculpture into reconstructed examples of churches built in a series of rooms in the Museum. These rooms, designed by Aristotle Zachos, who was also the architect responsible for the reconstruction of St. Demetios in Thessaloniki after the fire of 1912, served to create secular churches which abstracted the material culture of everyday sacred experience in Greece and rendered it suitable for integration within the historicist narrative of the modern nation.

The current museum underwent significant renovations since Soteriou’s time. The shadows of Soteriou’s organization, however, persist in many of the displays. For the Early Byzantine period, the influence of material collected from Soteriou’s excavations at the Ilissos basilica and the churches at Nea Anchialos is evident. The majority of the material in the collection derives from Athens (particularly the Acropolis and various Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches destroyed in during the transformation of the city during the 19th century) and Attica (Mygdaleza, Stamata, Anavyssos, and Damalas (Troizene)). It also includes a significant collection of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine icons of the Cretan and Ionian schools from private collections.

Museum as Secular Church

Bibliography

J. Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Reigel and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History 25 (2002), 258-279.
K. Kourelis, “Byzantium and the Avant-Guard: Excavations at Corinth, 1920s-1930s” Hesperia 76 (2007), 391-441.
S. Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski,” History and Theory 33 (1994), 106-130.
M. Rautman, “Archaeology and Byzantine Studies,” ByzFor 15 (1990), 137-165.
G. Soteriou, Guide du Mussée Byzantin d’Athènes (Athens 1932)
P. Vokotopoulos, “Museums and Collections of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art in Greece,” BalkSt 37, 207-234.

Travel Books

With my travel time today (and tomorrow) approaching 35 hours (including a flight listed on the ticket as 21 hrs), I am traveling with books, but nothing too heavy.

V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival.
C. Bukowski, Hollywood.
C. Bukowski, Women.

Over the holidays, two books for my work on a Postcolonial approach to Early Christian Architecture in Greece:

D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: PostColonial Thought and Historical Difference.
G.C. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.

And two books for my Graduate Historiography course next fall (in which I am adding a week on Freud.  The absence of Freud in the original version of the class rendered our discussions of 20th century historiographic developments somewhat unstable):

P. Gay, Freud for Historians.
J. Neu, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud.

Thanks to all the people who have read and commented on my work on Blogging Archaeology/Archaeology of Blogging (part1, part 2, part 3).  My plan is to send off a version before the end of the holidays, so if you haven't commented yet and want to, you have plenty of time.

Georgios Lampakis, Thrace-Constantinople (1902) at the Byzantine and Christian Museum

I take the Regular Members to Athens' Byzantine and Christian Museum in January when we all return from our holiday travels.  To make the week that I return better, I have begun thinking about how I will present the museum over the past week.  This winter the museum is hosting an exhibit of Georgios Lampakis early 20th century photographs from Thrace.  Lampakis was among the founders of the Christian Archaeological Society and dedicated photographer who used his photos to document Byzantine and Post-Byzantine monuments and objects throughout Greece (his journals and photographs were published in first series of the Deltion of the Christian Archaeological Society which ran from 1892-1911).  He was also instrumental in the establishment of the collection of Early Christian and Byzantine antiquities that would later form the core of the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens.  Trained as theologian in Athens and an archaeologist in Germany, Lampakis blended ideas of European romanticism with Byzantine Orthodox theology to envision a Greek state that was historically and spiritually coterminus with the Church.

In 1902, he traveled through Thrace, which was part of the Ottoman Empire, to Constantinople documenting the Byzantine monuments there and in the capital.  His photos from the towns of Ainos, Didymoteicho, Adrianople, and Constantinople capture not only the significant monuments in those place, some of which are now lost, but also the feeling of these early 20th century Ottoman Balkan towns with their narrow streets and low slung neighborhoods clustered around the tall domes of churches and the minarets mosques.  (His photos of the Eastern Corinthia -- particularly the harbor at Kenchreai -- some of which were displayed at the relatively recent retrospective on the Byzantine and Christian Museums capture moments of a lost landscape.)

What was interesting to me was that Lampakis trip was sponsored in part by the Greek government and in part by the Christian Archaeological Society.  His goal of documenting the Byzantine monuments was very similar to work of the Early Travelers in Greece who sought to document the remains of antiquity.  The efforts of these travelers to inventory the antiquities (and in some cases the modern remains) of Greece were an aspect of the imperialist impulses that ultimately led to the appearance of the Greek state as an outpost of the West on the border of the Orient.  With the establishment of the Greek State, Classical antiquities acquired tremendous importance as the physical validation of Greece's place among the Western nations and symbols of national identity.

By the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, the Byzantine past of Greece was given a seat at the able.  Fueled perhaps in part by the growing cynicism toward the Western European interpretation of Greek history and the growing confidence of Greek intellectuals (particularly Konstantinos Paparregopoulos), Greece's Byzantine past came to the fore.  Their interpretation of the Byzantine heritage of Greece, however, set its eyes not only on Byzantine monuments within the border of the Greek state, but those among the Greek communities of the Ottoman empire and especially in Constantinople.  Lampakis efforts to photograph the monuments of Thrace and Constantinople was, like the early Western travelers to Greece, an effort to secure the place of these monuments in the revised narrative of Greek national history.  This same impulse influenced the development of the Byzantine and Christian Museum, which even today intersperses Byzantine antiquities with images of the churches of Constantinople.

Ultimately the aspirations of some Greek intellectuals and politicians to unite the Greek communities of the Mediterranean in a single state ended in tragic results in 1922.  The place of Byzantium in the Greek state's national identity has by then been secured and was developed brilliantly in the Byzantine Museum's first independent iteration under George A. Soteriou.  While the recent changes at the Museum offers a somewhat different perspective on the Byzantine history of Greece, the photographs of Lampakis should serve as a good introduction to of the complex history of Byzantium in the formation of the Greek state.

 

Bibliography

I. Katsaridou and K. Biliouri, "Representing Byzantium: the Narratives of the Byzantine Past in Greek National Museums," http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/022/016/index.html

D. Ricks and P. Magdalino, eds., Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity. Aldershot: 1998.

Ο Κόσμος Του Βυζαντινού Μουσείου. Αθήνα 2004.

Kommos on Crete

On Saturday, I visited Kommos on Crete.  A Bronze Age habor town with interesting Greek levels as well.  Kommos is regarded as the likely major Minoan port for the Mesara (the fertile plain situated on the south central coast of Crete) serving the important Minoan sites of Phaistos and Ay. Triada.  The excavations by Joseph and Maria Shaw of the University of Toronto revealed monumental architecture of Minoan date at the site (which Bob Bridges patiently pointed out to me) as well as possible storage sheds for Bronze age ships. 

From my perspective, one of the most interesting things about the site was the array of imported material from as far afield as Egypt, the Levant, and Cyprus.  As we are beginning to argue for Pyla-Kokkinokremos, Kommos appears to have been a point of contact between the Mesara and the major trade routes of the Eastern Mediterranean.  This brought site considerable prosperity and may have allowed it to exert some autonomy despite the proximity of Phaistos and Ay. Triada.  The presence of monumental architecture at least suggests that the folks at Kommos invested in some form of large scale building and this may suggest an effort to cultivate a distinct identity.  Like Pyla-Kokkinokremos with its nearby and powerful neighbors of Kition and Hala Sultan Teke (and the looming regional superpower of Enkomi), the settlement structure, economic organization, and political character of Bronze Age Crete may have been far more "multipolar" than some of better-known schematics would allow. 

As an added bonus, Shaw has written a brilliant guide to Kommos which talks not only about the architecture and finds, but also bring alive the back story of running a major excavation.  From expropriating lands to raising money to the relations with local community, the guide places the site not only in archaeological context, but also in the context of the excavation process.  Even if you don't ever visit the site (which is generally kept locked), the guide is an entertaining and informative read.