Where is the centre of the ancient world? This is not only a question for globalisation, network or core-periphery debates in archaeology and ancient history, but is also relevant to the study of ancient conceptions of sacred geography. Specifically, the idea of Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi as the “centre of the ancient world” is a […]
Category archives: Archaeology
Jen Trimble on Iconoclasm and the Modern Materialities of Ancient Sculpture
Back in June last year, in the aftermath of the fall of Colston and US debates about confederate statues, we had Jen Trimble (Stanford) talking to us via Zoom about “Carving, Recarving, Deforming, Destroying: Modern Materialities of Ancient Sculpture.” The recording of her lecture is available here:
Julius Lange: A (Classical) Art Historian in a Small Country
In the little volume, Classical Heritage and European Identities: The Imagined Geographies of Danish Classicism (2019), we presented a brief history of Danish classical archaeology. Our main focus was fieldwork and especially the excavations at Bodrum (ancient Halikarnassos), so much was obviously left out. An important figure that we didn’t cover was Julius Lange (1838-96), […]
Monumenta and Monuments for the 21st Century
This blog has been dormant for a long time (eleven years!). It is unlikely to become a lively platform with frequent posts, but a global pandemic at least makes (re)launching a blog seem like a relatively sensible thing to do. Over the last couple of years, I have become involved in the editorial side of […]
CFP: The Afterlife of Roman Sculpture II
THE AFTERLIFE OF ROMAN SCULPTURE II LATE ANTIQUE RESPONSE AND RECEPTION CALL FOR PAPERS International Seminar Department of Classical Archaeology, Aarhus University Friday 25 March 2011
When on Google Earth 87
I managed to identify Elephantine for When on Google Earth 86 over at AWBG. So without further ado, here’s the 87th edition of WOGE: Here are the rules: Q: What is When on Google Earth? A: It’s a game for archaeologists, or anybody else willing to have a go! Q: How do you play it? […]
The City Walls of Tarragona
City walls of Tarragona. Photo: TMK, December 2009. Some shots of the city walls of Tarragona, including some of the “cyclopean” bits. More below the fold. City walls of Tarragona: Masons’ marks. Photo: TMK, December 2009. City walls of Tarragona. Photo: TMK, December 2009.
Aleppo Citadel
Main gate of the Aleppo citadel. Photo: TMK, October 2008. Here’s a good little free guide to the Aleppo citadel, courtesy of the Aga Khan Trust (via AWOL). It has excellent illustrations to help visitors make sense of the multi-period monuments on the citadel. The Aga Khan Trust has similar guides to the Castle of […]
Bathing Culture in the Near East
Hypocaust in the late 4th-early 5th century Western Bathhouse at Scythopolis (Baysan / Beit She’an), Israel. Photo: TMK, June 2009. Here’s a pretty cool French blog on Near Eastern bathing culture from antiquity to today: Balneorient, run by a research project with the same title. Its latest post reports on the discovery of a 5th […]
The Archaeology of the Hajj
The holy mosque at Mecca with high-rise pilgrim hotels and other construction massively re-shaping the cityscape. Photo copyright Khaled Desouki. One of my future projects is to take a closer archaeological look at pilgrimage in a cross-cultural perspective. So it was fascinating to see this photo essay in the Danish newspaper Information on the Hajj […]