Among the most famous sculptures in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is the portrait statue of Demosthenes (inv. 2782; Arachne entry with some further bibliography). The statue is reported to have been found in Campania, where it was once part of the collection of a palazzo in central Naples. In 1770, it then made its way […]
Category archives: Archaeology
Being Karian: On “Classical” Heritage in Bodrum
Gönül Bozoglu, Vinnie Nørskov and I have a new paper on “The Phantom Mausoleum: Contemporary Local Heritages of a Wonder of the Ancient World in Bodrum, Turkey” out in the Journal of Social Archaeology. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bodrum that we’ve done over a number of years and especially a series […]
Robin Osborne on Phaleron and Rewriting Early Athenian History
Following up from yesterday’s post on the extraordinary finds from Phaleron, here’s an online lecture from Robin Osborne placing the mass graves (containing c.3% of the contemporary male population in Athens!) into the much larger context of archaic Greek political history and interpreting them as an expression of Athenian state power: “Archaeology and the Rewriting […]
Violence and the Archaeology of Internal War
A recurring theme in my work on ancient iconoclasm is the social meaning of violence and especially “mirror effects” in the treatment of stone and flesh-and-blood bodies, a topic that I am once again pursuing as part of the DFG network on internal war. For this reason, I was very much intrigued by the discovery […]
The Death of Spolia? Roman Re-Use Cultures
Scholarship on reuse in the Roman (and late antique) world is growing at great speed. I have recently reviewed this large volume on “La sculpture et sesames reemplois”, edited by Vassiliki Gaggadis-Robin and Nicholas de Larquier (forthcoming in Latomus, 79.4): The volume compiles plenty of interesting new material, especially from the western Mediterranean, both in […]
Megali Oikia, Dystos
Some photos of the “Megali Oikia” (Large House), a very interesting example of fourth-century Greek domestic architecture at Dystos on Evia, taken in October 2020. For more on Dystos, see this useful volume by Athina Chatzidimitriou, and specifically on the Megali Oikia, this paper by J.V. Luce.
Earthquakes, Sculpture and the Archaeological Record
Archaeoseismological research typically focuses on urban landscapes (see, for example, Andrew Wilson’s recent piece on Aphrodisias, or my own humble contribution on the Lykos Valley). Late antique assemblages of earthquake rubble at sites, such as Scythopolis (above), indeed show very nicely how earthquakes could affect urban life in devastating ways. What is much less systematically […]
Graphs, Statues and Social History
I first became aware of this graph of the chronological distribution of confederate monuments last year when Jen Trimble gave a virtual paper for our sculpture seminar. Not all of these monuments are statues, but many are…..The graph has since then appeared in Alexander Bauer’s JSA paper, “Itineraries, iconoclasm, and the pragmatics of heritage“. It […]
Safeguarding Statues in WWII
With colleagues, I am doing work on a group of sculptures now in the small archaeological museum in Agrinio. The sculptures were excavated in the 1920s, long way before the current Agrinio museum opened, and for fifty years or so they were housed in Athens. While looking into their history of display (and restoration), I […]
Cross-Marked Ancient Sculpture: A New Case from Patras
Very long ago, I published a paper based on data from my dissertation, a small corpus of ancient sculpture on which one or more crosses had been carved or incised somewhere on their body. I have recently posted an update to this corpus on my Academia page, including the above naiskos in the very nice […]