Teaching Thursday: Contexts of Classical Sculpture

One of the fun things I’m doing this semester is teaching a new graduate seminar for our graduate students in classical archaeology on “Contexts of Classical Sculpture.” With them previously having been schooled in the basics of chronology and style, the seminar dives straight into current discussions about the meanings and uses of “context” in […]

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 […]

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 […]