Omphalic Obsessions

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]