Three Things Thursday: Data, Books, Teaching

This semester feels very odd to me. Not only did I start the semester a bit more tired than I expected to be, but I also didn’t have a clear set of goals and deadline ahead of me. After I submitted my revised book manuscript at the end of August, my fall semester seemed oddly under scheduled. It’s taken me a while to recognize that this is probably a good thing and more of a feature than a bug at this point in my career. 

This sense of being under-committed this fall has given me the space to work on a number of other projects in a less frantic way than I have in the past and today’s Three Things Thursday is about that.

Thing the First

Earlier this week, I posted about my work with the Isthmia data and my effort to corral and clean up various datasets produced by the Isthmia excavations over the past 50 odd years. My primary goal has been to work on Roman and Post-Roman material from the excavation and to focus particularly on Byzantine and Roman pottery. Earlier in the week I finished recoding the inventoried Roman and the Byzantine pottery so that it can be integrated with the stratigraphic data and context material from the site.

Then I moved on the the lamps from the site, figuring that most of the lamps found in the Ohio State and Michigan State excavations at Isthmia were Roman and later. Fortunately, Birgitta Wohl has just published a volume analyzing the lamps from these excavations, but her substantial catalogue identifies the lamps according to the inventory number and the area where they were found, but not their stratigraphic context or even trench. This is annoying, but perhaps not too unusual. 

More vexing is that I don’t have a table that includes all the lamps in Wohl’s catalogue. Instead, I have a partial table that I excavated from an Access database whose creator and purpose is unknown and I’ve spent about four or five hours now transforming Birgitta’s catalogue into data. This, of course, is both absurd and a completely normal part of archaeology as early-20th century practices and late-20th century digital tools continue to find opportunities for incompatibility. 

Thing the Second

This summer, I spent a good bit of time fretting about the number of projects I had wending their way through The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. In particular, I was worried about a collaboration that I had hatched with our sister project, North Dakota Quarterly. This project involved the publication of a translation of Jurij Koch’s novella, The Cherry Tree, which would be the second book in our emerging NDQ supplement series.

Our current plan is to release this title on October 11th. In fact, we don’t even have a landin page for the book yet, but the translator convinced us to accelerate the timeline so he could take some copies with him to Croatia next week. Because my fall is under scheduled, we were able to make this happen and while the book has not officially dropped yet, you can, if you know where to look, find a copy from a major online retailer. 

Thing the Third

Finally, I continue to think about whether being under scheduled is a privilege or something that university faculty should aspire to, and this has started to impact how I teach. In some ways, the current “syllabus as contract” driven environment creates an expectation that the schedule on the syllabus represents an accurate summary of student work during a semester. Because faculty (and students) recognize that under representing the quantity of material creates problems with student expectations, we tend to over represent the amount of material (or at least represent the maximum amount of material) that we hope to cover in a semester. This tends to compound a sense among students (and even among faculty) of being over extended or scheduled “to the max.” 

This doesn’t feel very healthy to me.

Isthmia Data

This past summer, I started a small pilot project at the first site where I ever worked: the Panhellenic Sanctuary at Isthmia in the Corinthia. The project brings together some colleagues from my work on Cyprus – including Scott Moore – with some colleagues from the Bakken days – Richard Rothaus and Kostis Kourelis – and my friend David Pettegew, who is an old Corinthia hand. 

Our main interest for this pilot project is some kind of publication of the Slavic pottery from Isthmia. This is material that my advisor Tim Gregory has been studying before his health had started to decline and a class of pottery of significance to folks looking to understand the 7th and 8th century in Greece. As readers of this blog know, the “long late antiquity” is a particular interest of mine both on Cyprus and in the northeastern Peloponnesus. Gregory published a preliminary study of the assemblage of Slavic pottery from Isthmia many years ago and more recently, John Hayes and Kathleen Slane has published Slavic pottery associated with some parts of the sanctuary at Isthmia in a new Isthmia volume. Our work on the Slavic pottery from the rest of the sanctuary aims to both complement and expand this existing work.

First thing, however, is always first and right after the pottery comes the data. Isthmia is a project that has material dating to 1950s excavations and they have long worked to make this data available in digital form. The ARCS project at Michigan State now provides a fairly complete digital collection of digital artifacts associated with Isthmia and this includes inventory cards for inventoried finds and scanned notebooks. Over a few seasons, the most recent being 2022, we also worked to excavate various datasets located at Isthmia and to produce various reports that sought to describe and understand these datasets and how they served to describe the material at Isthmia. This fall, I started to work on recoding, when necessary, and connecting these datasets in ways that will allow us to place various classes of pottery in their archaeological context.

The main challenge here is extracting context data from the inventory cards which will allow us to connect various inventoried artifacts to particular archaeological contexts (ideally, but not always, stratigraphic contexts). This will also allow us to connect the inventoried pottery to the “context pottery” from Isthmia which the ceramicist generally assigned to a particular stratigraphic or, at very least, excavated context. This, in turn, will allow us to produce more robust and comprehensive assemblages of material.

Historically, research at Isthmia proceeded from the notebooks where inventoried finds appeared in relation to particular archaeological contexts. A reader of a notebook could see the inventoried coins, pottery, lamps, architectural material and so on associated with a level and cross reference these with inventory cards organized by year and inventory number. This approach made it unnecessary to record inventoried material on the basis of “lot,” “basket,” or “box” (which are just Isthmia terms for stratigraphic or excavation context) because it was assumed that someone starting with the notebook would know the context for the object.

Being a survey archaeologist and in artifact level analysis, this approach to understanding the Isthmia ceramic assemblage was insufficient. In other words, I needed to recode the inventoried pottery so that I could more easily link it to context pottery and build assemblages from the artifact up (rather from the notebook down, if that metaphor makes sense). To be clear, this doesn’t mean that we will ignore the information contained the notebooks, but it allows us to work both from the artifact side to the notebooks and from the notebooks to the artifact side with greater ease.

First, it’ll allow us to identify similar classes of material across the entire site and then work back to their respective contexts. Ideally, we can then query the notebooks to determine the character of the contexts where the artifacts appears. This would allow us to determine, for example, whether the material came from use, sealed, or secondary contexts. These context could, in turn, be situated in stratigraphic relationships to other levels and situations across the site.   

It will also allow us to locate inventoried artifacts in particular trenches (and even potentially levels) on the GIS maps that Jon Frey, Isthmia Director, is preparing.

This kind of fussy data work will also allow us to develop an assemblage that we can, in turn, compare to assemblages from Corinth and, more importantly, from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) as well as other published assemblages of material from the northeastern Peloponnesus.

Finally, it moves us a step closer to being able to publish the Isthmia material and notebooks online in a more formal and stable way, which will allow more scholars to access and interpret this important site and its artifacts, architecture, and history.

Three Things Thursday: Early Christian Greece, Mineral Rites, and Jimmy Carter

I’m taking a real, honest to goodness vacation over the weekend. In fact, I’m going to vacation so hard that I’m not even taking a laptop! I reckon the last time that I vacationed without a laptop was in 2000 or 2001 when I was living in Athens.

To celebrate this unlikely situation, I’m going to offer a very short Three Things Thursday:

Thing the First

It’s pretty rare that I get genuinely excited about a new archaeological discovery and even less frequently that I get really excited about a discovery in the Late Antique Peloponnesus, but I was genuinely thrilled after reading Nikos Tsivikis’s recent article in the Journal of Epigraphical Studies 4 (2022), 175-197, titled “Christian inscriptions from a third and fourth-century house church at Messene (Peloponnese).” You can download it here.

This article provides some pretty solid evidence for a late-third century house church that continued in use into the fourth century. Tsiviki’s argument is grounded in both epigraphy and excavation evidence although the levels are primarily dated on the basis of numismatic evidence. The building is a modified urban villa in the city of Messenia and the inscriptions record the presence of a reader and then a bishop who provided a mosaic for the modified room.

Of course, textual evidence tells us that there were Christian communities in Greece from the first century AD, but archaeological evidence for pre-Constantinean Christianity in Greece has been pretty thin on the ground and comprised mostly of wishful thinking. In fact, there’s precious little indisputable material evidence for fourth century Christianity in Greece. This building will change that and provide the first archaeologically secure (at least to my knowledge) evidence for third (perhaps optimistically) or early fourth century (almost certainly) Christianity in southern Greece. This is exciting.

Thing the Second

I’ve been enjoying Bob Johnson’s Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy (Baltimore 2019). I’m not finished the book, but I appreciate his efforts to trace the significance of the fossil economy from the oil fields to the hot yoga studio. His efforts to demonstrate the deep entanglement of fossil fuels and our modern world is perhaps not entirely unexpected, but Johnson offers very readable and highly “textured” (to use a word from the book’s blurb) descriptions of how fossil fuels shape our daily lives. Johnson weaves fossil fuels into the story of the Titanic, various efforts to understand the human equivalency of fossil fuel energy, and a brilliant comparative chapter that considers the difference between Lewis and Clark’s journey and our modern road system. I’m still working my way through his study of the reality TV series Coal and the modern novel.    

Years ago, my buddy and collaborator Bret Weber suggested that we write a paper or an essay that tracked a drop of oil from the well to the atmosphere. Because I’m kind of a jerk, I rolled my eyes and said something jerk-ish about that idea. Years later and after giving it more and more thought, I think it’s really brilliant. In fact, I think Johnson’s book provides an appealing model for how the life of that “drop” of oil could be traced through our system and how much “life” it provides.

Thing the Third

There are a couple cool things from North Dakota Quarterly this week. First, I’ve posted over on the NDQ a poem by David Starkey which will appear in a forthcoming collection from the author. It’s a pretty nice little poem that features a cigarette as a prop. As I say in my post, I like poems that feature things.

There’s also this blog post about the time that NDQ published some of Jimmy Carter’s poetry. For some reason the pages of this issue were scanned or processed out of order so you have to scroll back from the first page, but do check out Lane Chasek’s post here and follow his link to NDQ 60.1 where we feature four of Carter’s poems. Then scroll backward from the first poem to read the three others.

Three Things Thursday: Pollen, Climate, and Grass

Today will be a hectic day toward the end of a hectic week. As we enter the “frog days” of summer, I think I’m feeling the start of the fall semester looming. 

As a result, all I have this morning is a very short three things Thursday, but maybe there’s a bit of thematic unity that extends across my posts this week!

Thing the First

My long time collaborator and friend, Dimitri Nakassis, sent some of his WARP colleagues a link to “Mid-late Holocene vegetation history of the Argive Plain (Peloponnese, Greece) as inferred from a pollen record from ancient Lake Lerna” by Cristiano Vignola, Martina Hättestrand, Anton Bonnier, Martin Finné, Adam Izdebski, Christos Katrantsiotis, Katerina Kouli, Georgios C. Liakopoulos, Elin Norström, Maria Papadaki, Nichola A. Strandberg, Erika Weiberg, and Alessia Masi in PLOS One.

As the title suggests, this article reports on the analysis of pollen in cores taken from bed of the now-drained Lerna Lake. It’s pretty technical, but offers a very readable “Interpretation and Discussion” section which offers some perspectives that while not entirely unsurprising are nevertheless useful: 

“During the Early Byzantine period from ca. 1480 to 1120 BP (470–830 CE) the increasing percentage and influx values of Pinus and Quercus robur type evidence the expansion of both pinewoods and oakwoods in the Lerna pollen catchment area. The Olea curve displays a severe drop and PI significantly increases, together with Artemisia, Cichorieae and Plantago undiff…pollen and archaeological data point out a reduced human pressure in the uplands and a more local food production in the plain, where olive groves contracted and pasturelands expanded following the collapse of the Eastern Roman control on the Balkans.”  

Thing the Second

It’s pretty rare that I’ll link to a book published by Springer on this blog, but I’ll make an (open access) exception today. I’m very much looking forward to reading Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises: What the Future Needs from History edited by Adam Izdebski, John Haldon, and Piotr Filipkowski.

The book, as its title suggests, look directly toward the relationship between environmental policy and history. More importantly, this book uses quite a few examples from Greece and the Medieval period, and includes chapters relating to how we narrate and tell stories about environmental history. I’m looking forward to checking this out over the next few days.

Thing the Third

As promised, this is a short post today, and the final thing for this “three thing Thursday” is a link to an essay by Judith Fetterley called “In Praise of Grass” which appeared last year in NDQ.  

It’s a brilliant little reminder that our lawns are both living things and vibrant ecosystems even if they’re very much cultivated by humans. 

From Corinthian Twilight to the Busy Countryside: Remaking the Landscapes, Monuments, and Religion of the Late Antique Corinthia

One of my summer projects was collaborating with my good friend and colleague, David Pettegrew on an article that surveys the Corinthian landscape in Late Antiquity. It’s for an edited volume published in Germany and directed primarily toward a European audience. 

This paper doesn’t so much propose any radically new analysis or interpretations, but offers a solid step toward a new synthesis of what we know and how we understand the Corinth and the Corinthian countryside.  

Since we have no real idea when this will come out, we thought we should share a complete working draft should anyone be interested. 

You can download it here.

This years should be a banner year for those interested in the Roman Corinthia. First, in May, Paul  Scotton, Catherine de Grazia Vanderpool, and Carolynn Roncaglia have published The Julian Basilica: Architecture, Sculpture, Epigraphy, which is Corinth XXII for those of you who still keep a scorecard. Here’s the announcement.

Earlier this month, John W. Hayes and Kathleen Warner Slane published Late Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman Pottery, which is Isthmia XI on your scorecard. Here’s the announcement.

Finally, I remain optimistic that we’ll see Eleni Korka and Joe Rife’s On the Edge of a Roman Port: Excavations at Koutsongila, Kenchreai, 2007–2014 which will appear as a Hesperia Supplement. Here is the announcement page for this volume.

Considering the Corinthia

This summer, I’ve enjoyed working with David Pettegrew on an article surveying the archaeology of the Late Antique Corinthia for some or another edited volume. The piece is getting pretty close to being done and I plant to work on it for a four or five hours this morning. I’m particularly happy with the introduction, which to be fair, was largely written by David Pettegrew (and I generally like how he writes and thinks about Late Antiquity). 

Here’s the current draft of it: 

Around the middle of the last century, American classicist and archaeologist Oscar Broneer sat down to describe the dire archaeological situation of the later history of the Roman city of Corinth. The excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens had exposed extensive portions of the city in intermittent excavations over the previous half century. Time and again the work of clearing the city revealed evidence for destruction events dating to the final quarter of the fourth century. Summing up a city in decline, Broneer minced no words. The city fell into a state of “overwhelming disaster and material decay, reflecting a general exhaustion and deterioration of the creative ability of the people…The invading Goths under Alaric delivered the coup de grace to this unhappy period of twilight of Classical Corinth…In the Early Christian period and during the first centuries of the Byzantine Empire, many of the classical buildings continued to be used, but the ruins of that era bear the marks of material dilapidation, artistic decline and civic helplessness.”

Paradoxically, it was exactly at that moment when Dimitrios Pallas, one of Greece’s foremost archaeologists of the Early Christian period, first began exposing and publishing a series of large and lavish monumental churches in Corinthian territory. He proposed that the churches dated to the fifth and sixth centuries—the age of “material dilapidation” and “civic helplessness”—but suggested enormous (even imperial) investments of resources and capital. The behemoth Lechaion Basilica, for example, was about as long as Old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the monuments incorporated elements of specialized imported marble. Moreover, at that moment, Oscar Broneer himself was beginning to undertake excavations ten kilometers east of Corinth at the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia, the site of biennial athletic contests in the Greek and Roman period. Those explorations would bring to light the same demolition phases of the late fourth century but also expose a massive imperial late antique project to fortify the Isthmus in the early fifth century.

Scholars today rarely describe the late antique Corinthia as a period of dilapidation, decline, and twilight (pace Brown 2018). A wealth of archaeological study in recent decades has introduced new perspectives that point to a flourishing and vibrant population even to the late sixth or seventh century, and scholars underscore the continuing relevance of the region within broader geopolitical and religious spheres. It is now apparent that private citizens expended great resources on private and public buildings. That they did so while many of the primary monuments of old Corinth fell down points to a complex local situation. One cannot deny the evidence of investment any more than one can deny the tremendous transformations of religious, settlements, and built environments that redefined fundamental aspects of Corinthian landscapes. Our aim in this paper is to reconsider the discrepant histories of the Late Antique Corinthia in light of recent archaeological and historical study of its landscapes.

Three Things Thursday: Late Antique Corinth, Travel, and End Games

In about 5 days, I return home from my first summer field season in the last three years. It was productive and honestly exhausting even if I never did any real field work and spent most of my time looking at material excavated years ago. Most of our progress, then, hasn’t been revealing or creating new knowledge, but marshalling what already existed into more easily digested forms.

Thing the First

Some of the most useful moments in a field season come from casual conversations over coffee, a meal, or a beer. Last week, my long-time buddy and collaborator, David Pettegrew and I talked about a article that we are writing that surveys research on Late Antique Corinth. The article starts predictably with Oscar Broneer’s famous description of Late Antique Corinth as an “unhappy period of twilight” in his 1954 article on the south stoa.

Within ten years, Dimitrios Pallas unearths the Lechaion basilica, which was among the largest churches in the world in the 6th century. The building was not only architecturally imposing and sophisticated in design, but it was also lavishly adorned with imported marble from imperial quarries. Whatever one thinks of the aesthetics of Early Christian Greece, this building does little to suggest that the city or the region has entered a period of “unhappy twilight.” In fact, the Lechaion church represents just one example of elaborate monumental architecture in the region revealed over the course of the middle decades of the 20th century outside the city of Corinth (and largely, although not exclusively conducted by Greek archaeologists). In this way, interest in the Late Antique city mapped onto the different political and academic agendas pursued by archaeologists with the Americans at Corinth continuing to research the Greek (and Roman) city and the archaeologists in the countryside often working to understand the substantial remains of Late and Post Roman within a different discourse. Archaeologists such as Dimitrios Pallas, for example, sought to locate Early Christian architecture within a continuous tradition of Greek Christianity and, in this context, it less about a twilight of some putative Classical past and more about the emergence of new forms of political, religious, social, and cultural expression both anchored in Classical antiquity and anticipating Medieval and even modern forms of identity. This tension is, of course, bound up in a wide range of commitments that range from the national (or very least broadly political) to the institutional.

Thing the Second

Man, traveling sucks. I spent about four hours in the Athens airport standing in line, sitting in waiting areas, and shuffling amid various crowds of travelers. I was surprised to see the number of American groups in the Athens airport. Most of the groups seemed to be students and there was a palpable excitement surrounding them.

I know it’s not nice to be annoyed by another people’s excitement, but it’s going to take me a while to acclimate to the experience of navigating the traveling public and both ignoring and (whenever possible) avoiding the outward manifestations of other people’s encounters with a new and different world.

On a more positive note, our global COVID sabbatical has certainly made some things more obvious and I wonder whether this will not only require us to re-establish our tolerance for others and consider whether this tolerance is a good thing.

Thing the Third

Now, that I’m back in Cyprus, we have to wrap up the 2022 Polis study season. This involves not only checking the various finds that we’ve catalogued, illustrated, described, and analyzed, as well as going through the massive document that we’ve produced over the last four weeks and figuring out whether all the moving parts work together and make sense.

This is, as you might guess, a pretty miserable task because the best case scenario is that we’re wasting time checking things that don’t need to be checked and worst case scenario triggers frantic work of revision and reassessment. So far, things have been balanced enough not to trigger panic, but also to feel productive. I’m looking forward to sharing some of our work with you next week!

The Late Byzantine Landscape

Last week I finally finished Foteini Kondyli’s recent book, Rural Communities in Late Byzantium: Resilience and Vulnerability in the Northern Aegean (2022). It’s really quite brilliant and offers a model for the kind of intensive regional study that is possible as the result of slow, deliberate, careful research across archaeological survey, texts, architectural study, and digital techniques.

The book considers the strategies rural communities on Lemnos and Thasos used to survive during the tumultuous 14th and 15th centuries. Kondyli anchored her argument in an extensive survey of the islands where she used surface ceramics to help date surviving churches, the remains of settlements, and the various towers and other sites that have left traces in the landscape. She supplements these with data from the Athonite monastic archive which provide insights to land tenure practices and the structure of settlement across the island. In this context, Kondyli is able to outline some of the strategies families used especially in the aftermath of the demographic changes visited on these islands during these convulsive centuries. These ranged from marriage strategies and other forms of bonds between families, settlements insulated from the presence of pirates in the surrounding seas, cooperation in the construction of military fortification such as towers and spiritual fortifications such as churches and monasteries, and forms of cooperation with the Byzantine state (and even Ottoman) state.

As per usual, I’m not going to really review the book, but highlight a few things that I stuck out to me.

First, I thought Kondyli’s emphasis on resilience is in keeping with contemporary conversations about continuity and change in the ancient and Medieval worlds. Of course, resilience has emerged as a key way to think about Late Antiquity and the degree to which a community could survive, rebuild, and persist amid economic, military, and political disruptions is crucial for understanding how deep structures which are not always readily visible in textual or archaeological sources held societies together at challenging times. Kondyli’s emphasis on resilience and social strategies is appropriate for the Late Byzantine period as well which endured its share of disasters.

Our attention to resilience, I think, shifts how we think about matters of continuity and change in the past. In this context, continuity and change represent strategies rather than evidence for a kind of absent minded persistence of existing social structures and institutions and change becomes a way to understand how communities adapt to circumstances that may well be beyond their control rather than the arrival of new circumstances themselves. As a result, and as Kondyli so cleverly shows, focusing on resilience foregrounds everyday life at the level of the community and how they respond economic, political, and military events.      

Second, for most of my career, I’ve been a bit of an evangelist for intensive, pedestrian, siteless survey. And I still think it’s the best way to do to field survey in the Mediterranean. 

That said, I’m becoming a bit more willing to see the value in intensive survey. Perhaps I should credit my new found appreciation of modern extensive survey to Yannis Lolos’s extensive survey of Sikyonia. I can add Kondyli’s book to the list of influences that are expanding my perspective on the value of modern extensive survey projects. In particular, I admire her willingness to identify the function of specific sites. One of the challenges facing intensive survey work is our tendency to produce vast carpets of artifacts that blur functional (and chronological) borders of sites until they are essentially disappear. To be clear, this is a rather uncharitable reading of siteless survey, but I suspect there is a kernel of truth to it. Kondyli’s willingness to build arguments on the chronological and functional identification of sites – with a certain amount of caution and perspective – opens the landscape of Aegean islandscapes to the kind of historical interpretations that our siteless survey sometimes resists. 

Third, Kondyli balanced her awareness of how islands function as islands (she avoid the term  “islandscapes” but the concept suffuses some of her arguments) with a strong sensitivity for local landscapes. I’ve participated peripherally in several recent conversations about islands and island archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean and this got me thinking a good bit about whether models for understanding islands in historical periods add much to our understanding of the Mediterranean, in general. For example, the mountainous landscape of Thasos exerted a far more obvious impact on settlement patterns than its situation as an island. This isn’t to say that its insularity didn’t play a role in the organization of settlement on islands, but that it might not be the dominant, determining role. 

This understanding feels consistent with the growing interest in microecologies or microregions which often function at level far below that of an island. If we regard the Mediterranean as a patchwork of microregions, then certain larger regional characterization of spaces—from islandscapes to administrative districts—might contribute less to how we understand resilience of communities than we might expect.

As readers of this blog likely know, my excitement for the archaeology of Greece ebbs and flows with my commitments to field work and my (declining!) ability to formulate research questions that keep me engaged. Kondyli’s book when set alongside other recent-ish books such as  Effie Athanassopoulos’s Nemea Valley Archaeological Project II: Landscape Archaeology and the Medieval Countryside (2016, blogged about here) and John Haldon, Hugh Elton, James Newhard, Archaeology and Urban Settlement in Late Roman and Byzantine Anatolia: Euchaïta-Avkat-Beyözü and its Environment (Cambridge 2018, blogged about here) has got me once again thinking a bit about how we understand the Late Roman and Byzantine countryside in the Eastern Mediterranean. I’m looking forward to getting back to the Mediterranean this summer and thinking in more in situ ways about issues introduced in these works.

A Memorial for a Digital Friend: Diana Gilliland Wright

Yesterday, I learned that Diana Gilliland Wright had died earlier this month. I didn’t know her very well and, in fact, I can’t exactly remember if I had ever met her. I knew her mostly via email, comments on my blog, and her own voluminous blogging output.

Over the last decade, as my research interest shifted toward the Argolid, she and I corresponded a bit more regularly as she offered us the occasional insight based on her years of work on the city of Nafplion and its environs. From what I can gather she wrote her dissertation on a 15th century Venetian administrator at Nafplion, Bartolomeo Minio. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never read it. Nor have I read any of her formal scholarship. What I did read, quite regularly, were her blogs.

Year ago, when blogging was still fresh and exciting and filled bloggers with hope, we envisioned a world where bloggers read each others’ work and reached out to one another and commented and shared each others’ work through hyperlinks and blogrolls and ultimately forged relationships across networks of blogs. Diana Wright did all that and was a regularly commenter on my blog from its earliest days (on Typepad!). And even as the promise of blogs as a corresponding medium faded a bit, she continued to reach out via email to offer comments and ask for publications. I remember sending her a few copies of North Dakota Quarterly at some point as well and hoping that she found the poetry and fiction in those pages interesting.

From what I can piece together she ran two blogs. The blog that I knew best was called “Surprised by Time” and it largely focused on the Medieval Morea (or Peloponnesus). Her interests were wide ranging and did much to make transparent murky waters separating the Medieval and Early Modern worlds. The scions of Byzantine elite families rubbed shoulders with Venetian administrators, on assignment, Ottoman officials, and Mediterranean diplomats, literati, and ne’er-do-wells. Palaiologoi cross paths with Italian merchants and Ottoman travelers, Pashas, and poets. Each of the over 200 entries, offered a startling glimpse into a world often overlooked by scholars preoccupied by tidier narratives of rise and decline of empire and neglectful of the messier interface of daily life among those most effected by political and cultural change. To Dr. Wright’s particular credit, the blog exists under a CC-By-SA license meaning that anyone can share her work as long as they credit her and make their work available under an open license. The blog appears to be fairly well archived by the internet archive, but I would be keen to entertain ways to preserve it more formally. 

For many years, she also maintained a landing page of sorts called “Nauplion.net” where she offered an index of her work and the work of her partner Pierre MacKay which featured regularly on her blog. It also featured links to many scans of hard to find primary sources some of which were translated on Surprised by Time. This site is no longer working and hadn’t been updated in many years, but it is preserved on the Internet Archive.

[By coincidence, I’m teaching Evliya Çelebi this week and using Pierre MacKay’s translation of Evliya’s visit to Corinth in my class. Diana Wright posted bits and pieces of Pierre’s translation and the story of his discovery of Evliya’s manuscript on her blog.]

Her other blog, Firesteel is an anthology of poetry gleaned from ancient and modern sources and from Greek, Ottoman, Arab, Italian, French and English language poets. I don’t know whether the poetry posted here and her more academic content crossed paths in some kind of formal way, but it really is an amazing collection of work (which I suspect violates all sort of copyrights, but I get the sense that Diana Wright just didn’t really care). 

~

As a small, digital memorial to Diana Gilliland Wright’s passing, I would encourage you spend a moment looking at her online legacy and recognizing it as a gesture of a kind of digital kinship that could connect individuals who had never met. For whatever reason, her profile included a link to John Coltrane’s 1957 recording of “While My Lady Sleeps.” It feels like an appropriate soundtrack for a visit to her digital world. 

. . . a little wine for remembrance . . . a little water for the dust.  

Ancient and Modern Argos

This weekend, on a lark, I read Jonathan Hall’s relatively recent book Reclaiming the Past: Argos and Its Archaeological Heritage in the Modern Era (2021). It was good and a must-read for anyone who plans to spend any time in Argos or the Argolid. The book does what it says on the cover: it explores the reception of archaeological remains from antiquity (narrowly construed) in the modern period (roughly the 18th century to the present). It does this with a minimum of theoretical bluster and the absence of much conceptual overburden. He acknowledges, for example, the long-standing debates concerning formation of modern Greek identity as both descendants of the ancient Greeks (Hellenes) and Christian Romans, but his nuanced narrative ensures that these longstanding models don’t over simplify complex processes and attitudes. In fact, Hall’s interest in digging into Argive attitudes toward antiquity produces a richly detailed narrative that draws from sources ranging from the Early travelers and Greek revolutionaries to archaeological publications, notebooks, and 19th and 20th century newspapers and media accounts. 

Here are three thoughts on the book:

First, this book defies academic convention by including so much description and narrative. While this is generally laced with analysis and interpretation, it is nevertheless clear that one of Hall’s main objectives was to recover Argive sources for the academic record and compile them. This isn’t to suggest that he wasn’t selective or careful, but instead to highlight his willingness to excavate material from a wide range of contexts in his search for Greek attitudes for the archaeological past of Argos. Our of necessity, this involved culling details from correspondence, newspapers, and local publications as a way to counterbalance the often stereotypical descriptions of Argos and its residents from contemporary travelers. 

Second, I know I will sound like a broken record here, but it bothers me a bit that the book spends so little time with the Early Christian, Byzantine, and Frankish periods in Argos. On the one hand, I get that these fall outside the antiquity-modernity binary and therefore are peripheral to the goals of this book. I also understand that assuming continuity across the centuries even for a city as well-known as Argos risks ignoring the sometimes catastrophic events that displaced its population and triggered cycles of demographic change and renewal. One the other hand, by downplaying the significance of sites such as the church of the Dormition as part of Argive strategies for reconciling Greek antiquity and identity with its Christian history, Hall perhaps removes key evidence for how residents of Argos may have formed their attitudes about the city’s archaeological heritage. I understand, of course, that Hall’s focus was far more directed toward monuments discovered in situ and of interest to foreign archaeologists (e.g. inscriptions, sculpture, and the like). That said, it struck me as a bit odd that despite his interest in how Argives viewed their archaeological past, he overlooked examples of spolia in Medieval and Ottoman buildings which seem to parallel in the more mundane practices using ancient blocks elsewhere. It seems to me that the focus on texts and archaeological heritage as the two interpretative poles of this book would complicate Hall’s efforts to understand local reception and understanding of antiquity because it is predicated on two analytical categories elite texts and the archaeology that these texts recognize and define that exclude a fair number of Argos’s inhabitants and their daily encounter with ancient things.   

Finally, I couldn’t help but compare this book to Chris Witmore’s Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnesus (2020). Witmore shares Hall’s interest in rich and nuanced description and the interplay between antiquity and the modern in the Greek landscape. He and Witmore also have the kind of deep understanding of their physical, archaeological, and historical landscapes that allow both books to situate ancient monuments in a diachronic perspective (albeit informed by different theoretical perspectives and approaches). Someone really should do a comparative review of these two books. 

As I’m teaching Greek history this semester, I couldn’t help but imagine that Witmore’s and Hall’s books could serve both as a way to decenter the often “Athenocentric” narrative of Greek history (past and present) and as a way to escape from viewing the past without taking into consideration the ways that modern attitudes have shaped what we encounter and value. Plus, they both return me to two of my “happy places” the northeastern Peloponnesus and the tangled byways of Argos and the Argolid!