The art historian Julius Lange (1838-96) is likely to be among the first Danes to have seen the sculptures from the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos. The sculptures, most famously the two colossal portraits usually identified as Maussollos and Artemisia II, had been recovered by the British vice-consul Charles T. Newton in 1857 and then transported by […]
Category archives: Archaeology
The One That Got Away: The Via Labicana Augustus
Frederik Poulsen wasn’t always successful in getting the pieces he wanted for the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. In the second volume of his memoirs, I det gæstfrie Europa (1947), he discusses some of his experiences working under the direction of Carl Jacobsen as well as his occasional failures in acquiring a number of different sculptures, including […]
Bodrum in “Who is Europe”
As part of the broader work of the CoHERE project that our recent paper on the Maussolleion in Bodrum was one small part of, documentary filmmaker Ian McDonald produced a film, “Who is Europe? A Film in Six Acts” that has been shown at a several film festivals across the world. Act 4 is Bodrum […]
“Possibly the world’s finest Greek portrait”: Demosthenes – from Knole to Copenhagen
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 […]
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 […]