Wool and Rubble Walls: Domestic Archaeology in the Medieval Peloponnese

Back in March 26, 2015, I participated in a conference on Byzantine textiles at Dumbarton Oaks, "Liminal Fabrics: Furnishing Textiles in Byzantium and Early Islam." I made the argument that piles of rubble walls and ceramics from archaeological survey tell a much better story about medieval textiles (through production) than the few surviving pieces in museum collections (through artistic analysis). 

I have just finished writing up the essay and submitted it for review in the conference publication, edited by Gudrun Bühl, director of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum. I celebrate International Open Access Week by posting my draft.

Wool and Rubble Walls: Domestic Archaeology in the Medieval Peloponnese by Kostis Kourelis on Scribd

This is the first paper that I have written entirely on iCloud's Pages, integrating laptop, tablet, and smart phone in one process. The paper was never printed out in hard copy or read as a Word document.

Ruskin's Greek Shadow

Time has come to get serious about a paper that I will be delivering on September 6 at King's College, London. This is a conference I have been most eagerly anticipating on the Byzantine Influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Much gratitude to Amalia Kakissis at BSA (conference organizer) and to Franklin & Marshall College for funding my airfare. It will be an honor to share the podium with Gavin Stamp, J.B. Bullen, and Robin Cormack and to catch up with some old friends. See conference details here. Here is what I have just sent for the program.

Ruskin’s Greek Shadow
The British School in Athens and the Byzantine House

ABSTRACT
The creation of the Modern Greek nation-state was posited on the virtual manifestation of Athens’ g
olden age, which European architects and archaeologists fully endorsed. In practice, this resulted into the suppression of Greece’s complex post-classical heritage and the demolition of medieval houses impeding on the purity of white temples. John Ruskin’s layered sense of historical accumulation, the Arts and Crafts ethos, and the preservation principles of the Anti-Scrape Society had no place in Greece. Ruskin's Venice and Neoclassical Athens incorporated two diametrically opposed epistemologies. The Arts and Crafts' movement staged an early assault on the purist construct of Greece through the archaeology of houses. The paper focuses on Walter S. George’s unpublished studies of three houses at Mystras. They present a radical departure from contemporary practices by French (Gabriel Millet) and Greek (Anastasios Orlandos) scholars. George’s stratigraphic approach, also evident in his excavations in Sudan, offered a critical voice in the development of medieval archaeology. Related work by George’s colleague Ramsay Traquair lead to the foundation of Canadian vernacular architectural studies. The activities of Rhys Carpenter on the houses of medieval Corinth suggest an additional trajectory of influence. Ruskin was not translated into Greek until 1935. His shadow, however, seems to have been already cast on Greek soil through the prominence that Anglo-American architects placed on the house.

BIOGRAPHY
Kostis Kourelis teaches architectural history at Franklin & Marshall College. He is an archaeologist with a specialty on medieval settlements and extensive field experience in Greece, Italy, Tunisia, and Ukraine. He has co-authored Houses of the Morea: Vernacular Architecture in the Northwestern Peloponnese (1205-1955) (Melissa 2003) and edited The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture (New Griffon 10, 2008), and The Abandoned Countryside: (Re)Settlement in the Archaeological Narrative of Post-Classical Greece (International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14, 2010). While excavating archives rather than medieval houses, Kourelis has discovered a forgotten collaboration between domestic archaeology and the artistic avant-garde. He has investigated the American aesthetes of Corinth, in “Byzantium and the Avant-Garde: Excavations at Corinth, 1920s-1930s” (Hesperia 76, 2007), and the Greek modernists of Mystras, in “Byzantine Houses and Modern Fictions: Domesticating Mystras in 1930s Greece,” (Dumbarton Oaks Papers 65-66, 2011–2012). The Ruskinian origins of Anglo-American aestheticism have brought him to the archives of the British School in Athens.

Image: Courtesy of the Byzantine Research Fund, Archives of the British School in Athens

Polis Pectoral

Congratulations to Amy Papalexandrou and Bill Caraher for their essay on the Byzantine phases of  Polis, the Princeton excavation in Cyprus, just hot off the press. My favorite objects in the catalog are the three pectoral crosses found in the proximity of the chest of three buried individuals. Amazingly enough, they are not made of metal or ivory but are carved stone (ca. 2-3 cm in size). What I love about them is their formal inventiveness that take the objects away from a singular reading. Yes, they are crosses, but they are also a whole lot of other shapes, too. That multiplicity demotes the singularity of the symbol and opens associations with other realms. I suspect that some of the grooves may have had some intricate interaction with the leather or cloth chain that would have wrapped them and held them around the neck.

Amy Papalexandrou and William Caraher, "Arsinoe in Late Antiquity end the Middle Ages," in City of Gold: The Archaeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus, ed. William A. P. Childs, Joanna S. Smith, and J. Michael Podgett (New Haven, 2012), pp. 267-282.

Two of the crosses have been already published by Amy in the Curcic Festshrift, see:
Amy Papalexandrou, "Polis/Arsinoe: A Cypriot Town and Its Sacred Sites," in Approaches to Byzantine Architecture and Its Decoration: Studies in Honor of Slobodan Curcic, ed. Mark J. Johnson, Robert Ousterhout, and Amy Papalexandrou (Farnham, 2012), pp. 27-41.

Ruskin: Global Ecology

John Ruskin's conception of architectural agency is wonderfully global and, thus, just as relevant for the 21st as for the 19th century. In order to eradicate "the pestilence of the Renaissance" and the monopoly of "Classicalism" in western culture, Ruskin develops a global ecology of influence. Architecture becomes the total synthesis of multi-regional influences that are both cultural and environmental. When Ruskin published The Stones of Venice, scholars knew almost nothing about the chronology of medieval buildings. As a result, many of Ruskin's premises have been discounted by 20th-century scholarship. When positivist art history (Panofsky, Wittkower, Krautheimer, etc.) migrated from Germany to America after World War II, it managed to fully banish the Ruskinian world-view that had dominated for a century, since Charles Eliot Norton's establishment of a Ruskinian art program at Harvard. The Germanic tradition (via Panofskian iconology) reduced art history into social history. It is interesting to note that, within his lifetime, Ruskin resisted this development in his encounters of early positivists rampaging through Europe's archives. For Ruskin, the positivists spent too much time studying social documents and less time studying the works of art. To a certain extent, I am trying to reconstruct the Ruskinian world-view if only to reconstruct a lost century in American cultural history. So, I would like to focus on Ruskin's globalist paradigm.

For Ruskin, classical and Renaissance architecture should be abolished for being developmentally static, formulaic and easily reproducible by technological media. As a style of grand perfection, the classical vocabularly disguises the process of manufacture. If Ruskin were to use a contemporary situation, he would criticize a mass-produced classical molding from Home Depot because it disguises the oppressed Chinese factory worker that manufactured it, as well as the Hispanic day-laborer who will install it in a suburban home. A global view of architecture allows both China and Mexico to participate in the production of architectural meaning (although Ruskin felt that Chinese and Mesoamerican architecture were as static as modern European classicism, and he preferred Islamic and medieval paradigms).

Ruskin makes a pretty interesting argument in "The Quarry," ch. 1 of The Stones of Venice. Modern architecture begins with the Roman inheritance that gets transformed by the influences of two climatic and cultural extremes from the north and the south. A "glacier stream" from the north (Lombard, Norman) hardens it, while and a "lava stream" from the south (Arab, Byzantine) heats it. Ruskin chooses Venice as his ideal because it illustrates the process of cooling and thawing as it meets between the geographic extremes. In Venice, three global cultures come together to produce a processual synthesis. The classical inheritance of Rome, the frigid barbarian north and the luscious global south all come together in Venetian Gothic to produce the single most important lesson for the architectural future.

Ruskin's subjective theory of architecture is globally compelling, although problematic from a variety of view points. For instance, Postcolonial discourse has criticized Ruskin for asserting Venice as a colonialist prototype. Ruskin's Venice is compelling because it resembles the processes of hybridization that the British Empire must execute in India and Africa, in order to dominate. See, for instance, Daryl Ogden "The Architecture of Empire: 'Oriental' Gothic and the Problem of British Identity in Ruskin's Venice," Victorian Literature and Culture 25 (1997), pp. 109-120. Ruskin's architectural chronologies and real geographies are difficult to sustain. For instance, he sees Byzantine and Romanesque architecture as part of a unity, which informed both Byzantine and Romanesque Revival movements in the 19th century. It is difficult to distinguish Byzantine and Romanesque elements in the style of H. H. Richardson, for example. Even if it's not possible to adhere to all the details of Ruskin's schema, we must admit that we still use his concepts of influence and cultural hybridization.

Ruskin: Beautiful but not Pretty

I begin a series of postings that one might call "Ruskin in Greece," although Ruskin (like Goethe) never crossed the Adriatic. Had he traveled to Greece, the prevalent Neoclassicism of the nascent nation-state would have crushed him. Greece's aspirations were so diametrically opposed to Ruskin's philosophy of art that any cross-fertilization between Ruskin and Greece seems ridiculous, Hence the names Ruskin and Hellas have never been put next to each other in scholarship. Nevertheless, I would argue that Ruskin cast a long shadow over Greece. It's the contours of this shadow that I will be tracing.

The earliest manifestation of Ruskin's theory of culture were articulated on a work devoted to domestic architecture. Ruskin wrote "The Poetry of Architecture" under the pseudonym Kata Phuysin ("According to Nature"), humorously tackling the classicist status quo. Mr. According to Nature studies the interplay between "national scenery and national character" in Europe's vernacular architecture. The book was serialized in 1837-38 and is the first book in Ruskin's 39-volume Collected Works (ed. E. T. Cook, London, 1912)

Had Ruskin visited Greece, he would have included a chapter on its mountain villages. His observations here would have been similar to his observations on the highlands of England and Wales, the mountain cottages of Westmoreland and Cumberland. I sketch Ruskin's illustrations of a window and his eloquent language of description. "It may be observed of the whole of the cottage," he concludes, "that, though all is beautiful, nothing is pretty." Thus, in 1837, sets up a new aesthetic discourse on vernacular architecture.

I tackle "The Poetry of Architecture"while researching an episode of Byzantine archaeology in Greece, when Ruskin's own students brought Ruskinian notions to Greece while documenting Byzantine monuments. Ruskin had placed Byzantium in a paradigmatic position for western culture, but Venice was the closest he got to it. It is natural that his students would take his mission further east through the Byzantine Research Fund at the British School at Athens. The group of Ruskin students in Greece include W. S. George, Robert Schultz, Sidney Barnsley and Ramsay Traquair. I had the great pleasure to study the drawing collection of these architects this summer. Many thanks to BSA archivist Amalia Kakissis for all her help. Moreover, the British School is organizing a conference on Byzantium and the Arts and Crafts movement in London, where I hope to present "Ruskin's Greek Shadow: The British School in Athens and the Byzantine House." The project hopes to untangle W. S. George's unpublished house drawings of Mystras, a topic related to my forthcoming essay on the houses of Mystras

The Quest

Saint Andrews University excavated subterranean passages leading to Chamber V that contained 12 chests. What became The Great Palace Excavations, a landmark of Byzantine archaeology, began as "The Quest," a psychic search to connect with Emperor Justinian via his chambers. Read more here.

Mystical Interference

SUBJECTIVE DEVIATIONS IN BYZANTINE ARCHAEOLOGY. Part II

(Part I, here)

Byzantium’s role in the development of the Christian tradition has apportioned to the study of its material culture a magical aura. The pilgrimage to the East has always held a magical, or in the case of Protestantism, a crypto-magical dimension. Under the cloak of archaeological science, Byzantine Studies has served a variety of spiritual agendas. Consider, for instance, one of America’s earliest expedition into Byzantium sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum (1906-36), or more specifically the Episcopalian J. P. Morgan who could bypass the problems of Catholicism (i.e. his low-class Italian and Irish laborers) via Early Christianity. Similarly, expeditions to the East by Francis Kelsey (University of Michigan) were were conditioned by a need to collect magical works of Protestant sensibility (and do some missionary work on the side, particularly in regards to the oppressed Armenians). The Protestant tradition has always incorporated an ethos of missionary activity. In the 1930s, the religious fervor was translated into the secular religion of art.

As is evident from the extensive genre of travel literature to Greece, western travelers saw contemporary Greece as a mystical, oriental, primitive other. Travelers would recount Orthodox religious beliefs as exotic evidence of the population’s contemporary inferiority. The traveling observers who became the first archaeologists, however, were incapable of articulating their own subjectivities and magical assumptions. Protestant travelers, for example, took for granted their missionary engagement and the doctrine of good work. The conversion of Muslims was illegal by Islamic law, a political fact that directed Protestant missionary activities towards the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The Orthodox populations targeted by missionary work were de facto the living traditions that mitigated between two groups of Christians estranged from each other both by religious traditions and imperialist geopolitics. Early travelers, antiquarians and archaeologists were no less mystical than the post-Byzantine subjects that filtered Byzantine material culture. The Protestant work ethic, for instance, was applied onto the post-Byzantine world and flavored the activities of early archaeological engagement. Some of the earliest scholars and scholarly institutions were unapologetically missionary in character. Through Roberts College in Istanbul to Misses Hill’s School in the Athenian Agora, British and American scholars engaged Byzantine material culture in order to reach personal salvation through doing good works. Protestantism’s theology of salvation through archaeological work was utterly incomprehensible to post-Byzantine subjects.[1] The philergetism of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens was a selfless gift to the Greek other, but also a dress rehearsal for capitalist domination in the spirit that Max Weber had outlined in his treatise on the work ethic.[2] Jack Davis, Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, Betsey Robinson and Niki Sakka and others have begun to enumerate the specifics of the American work ethic in an upcoming volume Hellenism, Philanthropy, or Political Convenience? American Archaeology in Greece [3] Burt Hodge Hill’s obsession with watering the Corinthians, Rodney Young’s hand loss driving an ambulance through he war fronts of Albania, or the archaeological connections with the Red Cross reveal a hidden spiritual agenda. Unlike the overly-performative liturgical magic of the post-Byzantines, however, the spiritual ethos of Protestantism took the form of work. Foreign archaeologists in Greece occasionally criticized the local populations as deficient in work ethic. British and American archaeologists, in particular, embraced the scientific labor of rigorous archaeology with a religious fervor. Keeping immaculate excavation notebooks, recording a multitude of facts, excavating as vigorously as possible and outshining other institutions in scholarly productivity have produced the foundations of an objective science. At the same time, and less obviously articulated, such endeavors fulfilled an irrational metaphysical agenda of personal salvation.

Protestant notions of salvation through work, however, are not the only magical paradigms applied onto the Byzantine archaeological field. The positivist developments in archaeological methods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were coupled by a growth in spiritualism. A non-sectarian form of spiritualism grew in a variety of fronts, whether from universalist deist movements, like theosophism, or directly from the sciences. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity that posited the transformation of matter into energy, Carl Jung’s spiritual psychology and other mainstream academicians precipitated a methodology towards material culture that involved the supernatural. The Excavations of the Great Palace in Istanbul serve the best example. The 1920s are a critical decade in the development of scientific method developed by Mortimer Wheeler and espoused by Cambridge archaeologists. It is important to note that Wheeler perfected his stratigraphic method in Segontium (1921-1922), a Roman fort that included Byzantine-period phases.[4] In 1927, the same year that Wheeler publicized his principles in a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts, his colleagues applied stratigraphic methods on the first Byzantine site, the Hippodrome in Istanbul.[5] The project produced the first discussion of “strata,” as well as the first systematic serialization of Byzantine pottery and was followed by an equally objective project the Great Palace Excavations carried out between 1935 and 1938.[6]

Looking at the final publication of the Great Palace excavations, one only sees the positivist discourse. But what lies behind the rational discourse are the invisible metaphysical practices of the project. The Great Palace excavations were executed by the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland and led by three individuals, the manufacturer David Russell who provided financial support, James Houston Baxter who was professor of church history and Tudor Pole who belonged to a merchant family and served at the Middle East in the First World War. What all three had in common was an association with spiritualism. Pole considered himself a psychic and while visiting Istanbul in 1908 had an intense sensation that Justinian’s house was in the vicinity. Soon thereafter, he became engaged in a great “Quest” to discover the precise location of the palace and ultimately excavate it. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, a number of Russian refugees migrated to Scotland. Russell took refugees under his financial control, including Russian monks that had first hand experience with Constantinopolitan manuscripts in Russian monasteries. Among the refugees under Pole’s patronage was Prince Oleg of Saxe-Altenburg whose psychic powers were more intense than his own. In a 1933 letter to Baxter, Pole notes that Prince Oleg and three other refugees will assist them in psychic methods towards a more precise find-spot of the sensations from 1908. Those mystical communications, in effect, identified the subterranean chambers that included twelve chests full of treasures including the sword Emperor Arcadius used as scepter in his coronation and a sapphire described as “The Eye of God.” David Russell had met Pole through spiritualist circles, as president of the Leven Lodge of the Theosophical Society (founded in New York in 1875). In 1906 Pole’s psychic visions had assisted the discovery of a sapphire bowl in Glastonbury and Russell visited Bristol to visit him for the first time. James Baxter, the third partner in the Great Palace excavations joined “the Quest” in 1931. As an expert on ancient Christian texts, he was a popular academic among theosophists. In 1928, Baxter wrote the introduction to a visionary text, The Scripts of Cleophas, derived by Ceraldine Cummins a famous medium.[7]

Byzantium’s proximity to the origins of Christianity brought about an intersection between psychic preoccupations and material manifestations. Constructed in a Northern European Post-Reformation environment, theosophism and psychic spiritualism congealed well in Orthodox soil. Western archaeologists began a committed engagement with spiritually charged material culture at the same time that Greek folklorists began the scientific documentation of vernacular beliefs. Nikolaos Polites, a pioneer in folklore studies, compiled a corpus of popular beliefs assembled from scientific field work. Among the themes that he recorded was the super-natural power of archaeological culture that he cataloged in 1904. Among the specimen, for example, he includes a report documented in the newspaper Astei on August 2, 1893. “On the north wall of the old church of the Virgin, there is a statue that nobody dares to remove. It’s been a few years now since some little Mason tried to remove the sculpture from the wall at night. The next morning he was found dead right below the statue.”[8] Polites the folklorist, thus, provided the scientific evidence for non-scientific behaviors and beliefs and accounted for the survival of magical archaeology evident in the Byzantine tradition.

Another Greek scientist collecting data of the Greek vernacular was Angelos Tanagras, a founder of the Paraphysical Society of Greece. Tanagras went throughout Greece documenting paranormal phenomenon. Scientific method. Collaboration with archaeologists.

Housing the origins of the Christian tradition and located so far in time that it avoids sectarian strife, Byzantine archaeology remains dependent on the patronage of Christians. This is most evident in the financial patronage of fundamentalist Christians in the archaeology of Israel, as well as the tourist dollars on Biblical journeys.

The secularization of the West, many of the supernatural powers that held sway over Christian theology were aestheticized into the realm of art. What Walter Benjamin describes as the aura of the work of art vigorously interjected in the study of Byzantine art. Modern art’s abandonment of figurative representation and realism in the 1910s, lead to the discovery of Byzantium’s abstract visual tradition. Although Romantic theorists had already discovered the creative potential of Byzantium in the nineteenth century (Ruskin, etc.), Byzantine art entered canonical appreciation by a highly reified conception of artistic experience learned at the studios of Henry Matisse, Diego Rivera, Duncan Grant, Gustav Klimt or Konstantin Malevich. The theoretical tracts of Modernism made the visual of Byzantine art central. From Roger Fry’s art theory, to Willhelm Worringer's Empathy, Kandinsky’s Spiritual in Art.

The archaeology of Byzantium in the twentieth century was highly dominated with an aesthetic agenda. Whittemore; the Louvre and Princeton University, Mosaics. Michigan and Mount Sinai exhibition. Finally Getty Sinai and Metropolitan.

[1] See Heather Sharkey's work.

[2] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; English trans. New York, 1930). 1920s and economic imperialism exercised in Greece. Much different than the aggressive imperialism that the U.S. exercised after World War II and during the Cold War, or even the economic imperialism of the late twentieth century.

[3] Philhelenism conference, American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2010), see here; Bob Ousterhout and Renata Holod, Achaeologists and Missionaries in Ottoman Lands, conference in Philadelphia (2011), see here.

[4] R. E. M. Wheeler, “The Segontium Excavations 1922,” Archaeologia Cambrensis 77 (1922): 258-326. Segontium’s Period III was contemporary with the reign of Valens; Segontium’s Period IV was medieval (early ninth century).

[5] British Academy et al., Preliminary Report upon The Excavations Carried out in the Hippodrome of Constantinople in 1927 (London and Oxford, 1928); W. Müller-Wiener, Bildlexikon zur Topographie Istanbuls (Tubingen, 1977), 64-71.

[6] D. Talbot Rice, Byzantine Glazed Pottery (Oxford, 1930).

[7] Mark Whitby, “The Great Palace Dig: The Scottish Perspective,” in Through the Looking Glass. Byzantium through British Eyes. Papers from the Twenty-ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, London, March 1995, ed. Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys, (Aldershot, 1995), 45-5; Lorn Macintyre, Sir David Russell: A Biography (Edinburgh 1994), 6.

[8] Nikolaos Polites, Παραδόσεις. Μελέται περί του βίου και της γλώσσης του Ελληνικού λαού (Athens, 1904; reprinted 1965) vol. 1, 73, no 138.

Subjective Deviations

SUBJECTIVE DEVIATIONS IN BYZANTINE ARCHAEOLOGY. Part I

Postprocessualism remarks that what we consider as modern archaeology is only one epistemological variety of correlating material culture with meaning. Byzantium was a highly archaeological civilization that relished complex processes of relating past material culture with contemporary stories. So intensive was the exploitation of old buildings, for instance, that the imperial administration needed to legislate against spoliation as early as the 320s. [1] From the age of Constantine, whose own triumphal arch appropriated the monuments of Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, Byzantium developed a systematic identity of archaeological meaning ranging from the archaisms of its academic culture to the cyclical theological time where graves, relics, spaces, and objects contained multiple stratigraphic meanings. Sacred loci involved a process of historical discovery that often took the form of excavation. The archaeological practices of the Byzantines share neither the positivist nor the empiricist principles of modern archaeology, but they were systematic, centralized and shared socially.

“Go excavate in the garden, measure two cubits from the fence along the road that leads to Betherebin, and you will find two coffins, a wooden one enclosed in a lead one. Next to the coffins, you will find a glass vessel full of water, and two medium-size serpents that are tame and perfectly harmless.”[2] Texts containing such archaeological specificity were common in chronicles, saint’s lives and ecclesiastical histories. Recounted in the fourth-century ecclesiastical history of Sozomen, this archaeological text appeared in the dream of the farmer Kalemeros, who was instructed in discovering the relics of the Biblical prophet Zechariah near Eleutheropolis in Palestine. The tenth-century Life of Saint Elias the Cave Dweller describes a methodical survey of an abandoned tower that the wandering saint inhabits. [3] Eleias goal is to exorcise this ancient monument from the pagan spirits of its age. Despite the irrational character of exorcism, the monk follows a systematic process, going around the monument and surveying each one of its four corners.

As William Caraher has shown, Byzantium’s methods of magical archaeology constitute a tradition that continued to be practiced by “scientific” archaeologists in the twentieth century through séances, parapsychology and the surviving cosmologies of Orthodoxy. Although publicly embracing positivist methodologies, modern practitioners continued to employ indigenous archaeology side-by-side modern materialist methods. [4] Rather than dismissing such “premodern” or “indigenous” archaeologies” as ridiculous manifestations of superstitious peasantry, Yannis Hamilakis has made a convincing case that such modes of narrative offer an epistemology of resistance against the colonialist archaeology of the Enlightenment. [5] Most postprocessual theorists of archaeology have based their analyses on the archaeological canon of classical or pre-classical Mediterranean societies rather than the marginal field of Byzantine archaeology.

Christianity’s theology of commemoration guaranteed the continuous usage of many sacred buildings. Unlike the archaeology of antiquity, where the original inhabitants and religious systems have disappeared, the archaeology of Christian periods confronts an interesting dimension of heritage. Sites of sacred significance, from the Holy Sepulchre in Palestine to remote cave chapels in the Balkans, have passed on their meaning through continuous inhabitation and the codification of historical memory. Continuous occupation, however, introduces a reverse problem. In contrast to the maintenance of meaning, the maintenance of place requires the constant manipulation of the archaeological fabric. Even the slightest of renovation, restoration or renewal requires limited destruction. What Romantic historians like John Ruskin relished as an organic accumulation of history, involved topical archaeological practices. Even the simplest of building additions required excavation and the revelation of previously unknown strata. Thus, the afterlife of Byzantine sites engaged in an archaeological process of digging into previous layers and re-presenting them in conspicuous fashion. The prevalence of such situational archaeology in Byzantine monuments has produced some of the most stratified masonries in the history of architecture and has, consequently, given birth to a radical archaeological tradition of intense fragmentation.

The emergence of scientific methods in modern archaeology have encouraged the removal of the viewer’s subjectivity into the process of data collection. Since the eighteenth century, archaeologists have developed objective methods by which the viewer could remove himself or herself from observation and minimize interpretive contamination. Scientific methods of physical analysis, the spatial and temporal objectivity of stratigraphy and the processualist models of social science have certainly produced a scientific discipline of Byzantine archaeology. At the same time, however, more subjective methods of interpretation have been applied on the material record. Byzantium’s eminent visuality, as well as the vibrancy of its living tradition in contemporary subjects have led modern archaeologists into avenues of experimentation. The marginality of Byzantine studies as a discipline, moreover, has encouraged interdisciplinary experimentation and a laxity of rigor that have benefited premodern or postmodern epistemologies. One could thematize at least three modes of interference from positivist objectivity that have been particularly persistent in the methods of Byzantine archaeology a mystical interference.

NOTES

[1] J. D. Alchermes, "Spolia in Roman Cities of the Late Empire: Legislative Rationales and Architectural Reuse," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994) , pp. 167-178.
[2] Life of Elias Spelaiotes 20 (Acta Sanctorum, September 3, pp. 843-888), Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database. Washington, D.C.
[3] Sozomen, Historia ecclesiastica 9.17.2.
[4] W. Caraher, “Dream Archaeology,” University of North Dakota Faculty Lecture Series (Grand Forks, 2010), 
[5] Y. Hamilakis, “Decolonizing Greek Archaeology: Indigenous Archaeologies, Modernist Archaeology and the Post-Colonial Critique,” in A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece, ed. D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos (Athens, 2008): 273-284

Concrete Byzantium

In 1908, Henry C. Mercer wrote an essay “Where Concrete Stands for Concrete,” in Cement Age 6 (1908) pp. 9-20. Published in an engineering journal, the essay has been forgotten by scholarship. I would argue that it must be included in the anthologies of modern architectural theory. The essay tackles the perennial conflict between modern material (concrete) and medieval crafts (ceramic tiles). Rather than covering up the concrete with plaster or paneling, Mercer argues that the concrete should remain exposed. To hide concrete’s imperfections behind a false layer of false perfection was not only dishonest, but a lost aesthetic opportunity. By theorizing the aesthetic qualities of concrete, Mercer becomes a forefather of Brutalism, which blossomed half a century later. Rather than hiding the concrete, Mercer thought that it could be elevated into a nobler material if decorated by the similarly earthy medium of ceramic tiles. He recommended covering no more than 10% of the surface area with colored tiles. The essay is illustrated with an application of this strategy in a Philadelphia club house. Mercer’s idea was soon fulfilled in his Fonthill construction.

Equally important in Mercer’s solution to concrete is the choice of historical tiles that would complement the new form, namely Byzantine decorative patterns. These abstract Byzantine borders are placed on the critical edges of the interior space, such as capitals for the concrete piers, fireplaces, and are complemented by Gothic borders. My sketch is based on Fig. III “Column of Byzantine pattern in original plastered concrete supporting heavy ceiling.” I love the casualness by which an iron skillet is hung on the pier. Mercer replicated this arrangement in the Saloon of his house, whose electrical illumination I discussed in the earlier posting "Illuminating Byzantium". Here, too, an electrical light bulb adorns the exterior and tightens the conceptual depth of the installation.

In addition to its pioneering significance on the theories of form and function, Mercer emerges as an interesting spokesman for a Byzantinism radically different from the Byzantium that figures in Louis Comfort Tiffany work. This other and more famous figure of the American Arts-and-Crafts also experimented with the visual qualities of Byzantine surface and the optical effects of glass and mosaic. For Tiffany, however, Byzantium was not a 10% application, but a complete cover-up of every visible surface. If Mercer's Byzantium is about conflict and dialectic, Tiffany's Byzantium is about surface and illusion. If Mercer's Byzantium is haptic and embodied, Tiffany's Byzantium is optic and disembodied.

Tiffany's concrete column (ca. 1905) is exactly contemporary to Mercer's. Rather than exposing the cement, Tiffany covered it up with favrile-glass mosaic and topped it with a plaster capital. The column now resides at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but it used to stand in the Tiffany Studios showroom at Madison Avenue and 47th Street.

Hence another distinction between Mercer and Tiffany is one of exposure, or between Bucks County, Pennsylvania and Madison Avenue, New York. Mercer never reached the commercial success and visibility of Tiffany's.

Illuminating Byzantium

Henry C. Mercer is a central figure in the development of the American Arts & Crafts movement. He is doubly important as an archaeologist. He excavated native American sites, directed the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, and began a field of vernacular tool studies. His life highlights the intimate connection between the epistemologies of archaeology and the arts as they were defined by Charles Norton, whose arts curriculum informed Mercer's rebellion.

Mercer is best known for his revival of Pennsylvania German pottery traditions at the Moravian Tile Works in Doylestown. What is less known are his researches in Byzantine pottery. In the tradition of John Ruskin (via Norton), Byzantium was instrumental in the conception of the new aesthetics of handicraft, labor ethics, and the attention to process over product.

Last week, F&M art history majors, minors, and faculty visited Mercer’s architectural masterpiece, his concrete house Fonthill (1908-12). One of the many things that struck my attention during this visit is the incorporation of electrical illumination within the architecture. This is particularly evident in the Saloon room. The octagonal concrete piers are hollow. Electrical wiring travels through the cavity and then folds out at the height of the capital. The wiring then drips down the exterior of the column. Fastened to the concrete, the wiring concludes with a bare light bulb that illuminates the room about 7 ft above ground level. My sketch above tries to illustrate the arrangement.

The tiles, which are more Byzantine than Pennsylvania German in effect, are thus illuminated by modernity’s amenities. The simplicity of the electrical wiring that travels through the interior cavity and emerges out of the pier capitals is profound. As the piers are concrete masonry, the bare light bulb rests directly on the pier. It is easy to miss this architectural detail. For me, it exemplifies modernity’s illuminated Byzantium, where the rich aesthetic surfaces of glazed pottery reflects the shimmer of bare incandescent light bulbs. The nakedness of the light and the bareness of the concrete are surreal in their simplicity and their tactile emanations.

Acrocorinth 1920s

The Peschke show has forced me to revisit some canonical images of Greek landscapes and I have revisited one of the most important photographic publications on Greece, the Wasmuth volume on Greece, Hans Holdt and Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, Griechenland: Baukunst, Landschaft, Volksleben (Berlin, 1923). This volume constitutes a landmark in the history of visualizing Greece within the German tradition. The subtitle tickled me a bit because it corresponds closely to the thematic divisions that I have given to Peschke's ouevre in the show: Buildings, Landscapes, Folk Life.

Thrilled to find a copy of Griechenland in F&M's library, I sought out photographic analogs for Peschke's placement in the landscape. We know that Peschke used photography in his archaeological and artistic work, and must have been cognizant of the German photographic tradition of a decade earlier. I discovered, for instance, that Acrocorinth (1932) was painted at the same location as Griechenland, pl. 68. In designing the exhibit at F&M, I had placed this photo in proximity to the painting. Holdt's photo and Peschke's paintings, moreover, have proven to be invaluable documents in the on-going archaeological survey of Acrocorinth. I was thrilled that a bunch of archaeologists that were attending Masons at Work: Architecture and Construction in the Premodern World last weekend made it to the show at Bryn Mawr and will be able to use Peschke's paintings to reconstruct missing walls. Stay tuned for more on this topic.

Icon Workshop

My class on Medieval Art and Architecture congregated at the Phillips Museum yesterday afternoon for a workshop on icon painting by Dorothy Thayne, F&M artist in residence. The drawing, or "writing" of icons involves a fascinating process of "layering veils." Using her own work, Dorry demonstrated the spiritual process of making icons.

Teaching medieval art, one encounters the topic of devotional practices that modern students do not always comprehend. Seeing an icon painter perform the process best illustrates the technical dimensions of pigment layering, as well as, the symbology. It was a priceless experience.

The workshop took place in the Dana Gallery of the Phillips Museum, where we are currently having our faculty show. Dorry's two icons are part of the exhibition.

The demonstration brought devotional art to life. We learned how the wood is like the tomb, and the fabric on top of the wood is the shroud. We learned about the different spiritual lights that are layered on the icon. We learned about light and shadow, pigments and their hierarchy of coarseness. We learned about tempering the material. We also learned about typology (the Theotokos Eleousa, etc.) and the reasons why an icon-painter chooses the types that she works with.

(Photos by Maureen Lane)

Liquid Altar

The Drinker block discussed earlier was discovered at the ancient Asclepeion on the South slopes of the Acropolis in Athens. Excavated by the Greek Archaeological Society in 1877, the few surviving Byzantine walls were removed soon after excavation ("ταύτην μελετώμεν να διαλύσωμεν"). Recognizing the ethics of archaeological documentation, however, the Archaeological Society left a small record of the architecture, hiring M. Mitsakis to produce a site plan ("Η Εταιρία έχει το καθήκον όταν προσεχώς συντελέση την ανασκαφήν, να δημοσιεύση και σχεδιογράφημα του κτίσματος ακριβές."). Above, I have extracted some of the crucial elements to visualize the architectural dialectics of caves and water.

The ancient cave (marked "A") from which water sprang, was converted into a Christian altar. The excavators discovered frescoes along the lining of the cave, but could not make up the subject matter. An upright stone placed on the altar ledge (left) marked the religious character of the cave. The pseudo-Kufic decoration on the upper border helps us date the installation to the Middle-Late Byzantine period. Other sculptural fragments published by Xyngopoulos testify to the occupation of the site. Adjacent to the sacred water cave was an ancient stoa. In the Byzantine period, the ruined foundations of the stoa were used to create a new building (marked in dark lines above) that included a square room ("D") on the east end. Most intriguing in Mitsakis' drawing are the three semi-circular lines signifying the existence of a church with three consecutive phases of alteration.

Completing the water narrative of the site, note the channel ("C") that carried the water from the cave under the church floors into a cistern ("F"). Remembering the drinker graffiti representing the thirst-quenching experience of water, we may extend the vessel cavity into the water cave. The cave-altar becomes a cavity to be inhabited. The water would then exit the cavity through piping (the neck) and be recollected below the body of the church into the cistern.

The sacral metaphors of water are well known in the Byzantine scholarship and found numerous architectural expressions. The waters in the crypt of Saint Demetrius in Thessaloniki or in the crypt of Saint Andrew in Patras are two of the first examples that come to mind. The Byzantine installations on the South Slopes of the Acropolis should be remembered as additional evidence for the spatial articulation of the phenomenology of liquids.

The sketch plan above is based on M. Mitsakis drawing appearing in Praktika (1878). The altar stone is based on a drawing by Josef Strzygowski published by Andreas Xyngopoulos in "Χριστιανικόν Ασκληπείον" Archaiologike Ephemeris (1915), p. 62, fig. 14. It measures 0.95 x 0.34 m.

For those interested in the fine details of the cave, here is the eye-witness report given by Ioannis Phillipos in his Jan. 9, 1877, report: "Ολίγον δε κατωτέρω η πέτρα είναι ορθίως τετμημένη επί μέτρα 25 περίπου προς δυσμάς και υπ'αυτήν κατωτάτω εφανερώθη εν σπήλαιον κωνικού σχήματος τα έσω, με είσοδον κτιστήν, τους τοίχους του δ'εσώθεν έχον επίχριστους και εζωγραφημένους με εικόνας χριστιανικάς, δυσδιαγνώστους διά την εκ του χρόνου φθοράν. Εν αυτώ κατά τον κάτω γύρον αποστάζει εκ της πέτρας και ύδωρ, το οποίον κύκλω περιλαμβάνεται εκ μαρμαρίνω ευρίπω και διοχετεύεται ύστερον έξω διά τας μετ' ολίγον μνημονευθησομένας εκκλησίας μέχρις ου καταπίπτει εις εν φρεατοειδές κτιστόν όρυγμα." Praktika (1877) pp. 17-17.

My rough translation: "A little below, the rock is cut for about 25 meters to the West. Under the rock, we found a cave with a conical interior shape. Its entrance was built with masonry. In the interior, the wall were plastered and were painted with Christian scenes, but it was difficult to discern the subject due to deterioration. Under the lower circle, water drips from the rock. The water is collected by a circular marble feature and is then routed outside of the cave through pipes. The pipes continue under the ancient stoa and under the churches (to be discussed below) depositing the water in a built cistern."

The Drinker

Architectural block (0.84 x 0.38 x 0.07 m), Byzantine, South Slopes, Acropolis, Athens. Kourelis sketch, based on photo (Xyngopoulos, 1924)

Scratched roughly on a piece of masonry, a figure drinks with one hand while fanning with the other. The block was excavated in 1877 at the Sanctuary of Asclepius on the South Slopes of the Acropolis in Athens. It was published in 1924 as a personification of August. The Byzantine remains of the Asclepeion have been forgotten by scholarship. The site contained no less than three consecutive churches, a cave altar dripping with water, frescoes, burials, and lots of sculptural fragments from the Middle and Late Byzantine periods. I will discuss the architecture in the next posting.

The block of the drinking figure is striking in its graphic convention of depicting the interior of the vessel with a sectional diagram. The drawing, thus, communicates what is invisible, the interior container of the liquid as it is depleted through the mouth of the drinker. It helps us clarify the spatial experience of drinking. The neck of the vessel and our mouths are two extended thresholds that transfer water from one invisible interior (the vessel) to another (our belly). The figure raises a vessel to his mouth. He will soon swallow its contents capturing that moment of satisfaction offered by the exchange in a hot summer month. Drawing the vessel in section, thus, clarifies the spatial nature of thirst. It doesn't simply represent what drinking looks like, but it tries to encapsulates the essence of drinking as a spatial experience. The cavity that holds water before it enters the body is terminated by a kind of lip in the interior of the vessel. The hand clasps the diaphragm of the vessel and commands its release. The diagramatic depiction of the vessel may also lead the viewer into other bodily associations of the womb and female genitalia.

The carver scratched a phenomenological experience through a complicated system of graphic abstraction. Liquid transfers through interiorities. If we look at the architectural setting of the Byzantine Asclepeion (in the next posting), we will see that the transfer of water takes over the entire spatial expression of the complex. In other words, this small depiction is a moment in a larger phenomenological experience originating from the origins of water in the dripping cave.

Briefly, I summarize the paper trail from this excavation. The Asclepeion was excavated by the Greek Archaeological Society in 1877. The Byzantine remains were discussed by Philippos Ioannou, in Praktika (1877), 17-20. M. Mitsakis, an architectural intern at the Polytechneion, surveyed the Byzantine walls before they were demolished, publishing his plan in Praktika (1878). A quarter century later, Andreas Xyngopoulos published the Byzantine sculpture from the site, "Χριστιανικόν Ασκληπείον," Archaiologike Ephemeris (1915), pp. 52-71, but did not include the drinker. Andreas Xyngopoulos devoted a separate article on the drinker in the debut issue of the journal of the Society of Byzantine Studies, "Βυζαντινή παράστασις μηνός," Epeteris Etaireias Vyzantinon Spoudon 1 (1924), pp. 180-188. In this essay, Xyngopoulos argues that the image above belongs to a tradition of month personifications, specifically August. Accordingly, the seated August quenches his thirst with wine and cools himself with a fan. In addition to iconographic comparanda, Xyngopoulos quotes a relevant passage from the 15th-century novel Lyvistros and Rodamni.

"Είδα τον Αύγουστον απ'αυτόν, τέτοιον και κείνον φίλε, να ένε από κάυματα έμψυχος εις την όψιν. να στέκεη τάλα εις λουτρόν λουσμένος, κτενισμένος. να ένε εκ τα κάυμα έδιψος. και εις το έναν τον χέριν κούπαν εκράτει με κρασί και έπινεν δια την θέρμην και εις το άλλον του εβάσταζεν χαρτί μετά γραμμάτων και το έγραφεν. φίλε μου, άκουσε να το μάθης τους κάψει η θέρμη του λουτρού, τους φλέξει και διψήσουν, κατάψυχον ας πίνουσι οίνον, μην τ' αθετούσιν."

The novel was translated into English by Gavin G. Bates, Three Modern Greek Romances (New York, 1995). I will get the English translation next time I visit the Penn library.

Architecture of World Religions

The first third of my History of World Architecture focused on antiquity (prehistoric to late Roman). During the second third of the class, we turn our attention to the architecture of the major global religions from monotheism (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) to the religions of India (Buddhism, Hinduism, Janism), the philosophical traditions of China (Confucianism, Daoism) and Japan (Shinto, Zen). My students are now studying for their second exam and I have prepared the following graphic lists to organize their studying. The last third of the class will be devoted to the western Middle Ages (Carolingian, Romanesque, Gothic). Stay tuned.

Lechaion Basilica Graffiti

William Caraher has posted his working draft of "The Ambivalent Landscape of Christian Corinth: The Archaeology of Place, Theology, and Politics in a Late Antique City," a fascinating paper that seeks to pull together direct and circumstantial evidence about a power struggle between local and imperial identity in mid-6th-century Corinth. The paper combines new survey data on rural villas (potentially domus-ecclesiae) with the better-known excavated mega-churches, such as the basilica at Mount Lechaion.

In one section of the paper, Caraher seeks the voices of local craftsmen employed by the imperial building boom left behind on the fabric of the building (p. 17). He cites Sanders wonderful discovery of fish graffiti in the mortar bedding of the Panayia Bath, Lechaion basilica and other monuments in Corinth. To this list, I would like to add a couple of additional evidence, based on some notes and slides that I took in a 2000 visit.

1. "Save Me"Few of the marble blocks of the Lechaion basilica contain evidence for a numbering system related to the process of production, transportation and erection. One such block, an Ionic column base dividing the nave and the aisles contains number 1 (Greek letter "A"). The block, however, also contains an inscription of Christian content Σώσων, referring to salvation. Like the numeric Alpha, this inscription would have been disguised by the next column drum. It offers a fascinating example of the mason's temporarily visible/permanently immured apotropaic prayer. Unfortunately, I didn't transcribe or trace the inscription in detail. This slide from 2000 is all I have, but enough of it is visible. The photo also illustrates the evidence for attached parapets that would have divided nave from aisles.

2. Kappa for Korinthos?

In addition to the fish scratching on the plaster, I also noticed the pattern above, vertical lines flanked by two angled lines that make up two Kappas, one Chi, or even some vestige of Chi Rho. I have the vague memory that this slide was taken from the exterior surface of the apse (but it's 11 years ago). As in the case of the fish, these lines were scratched on the plaster to create an adhesive surface for the decorated layer. They were never intended to be seen. Yet, one cannot help but speculate whether these scratches have any linguistic significance. The Long Building that Sanders excavated in the Panayia Field also had such lines (if I remember correctly). In the Middle-Byzantine period the letter "K" or "X" was used for intentional decorative purposes in exterior walls. In Corinth, one can see it at the lower courses of the Tower Building that still survives in the Forum area. The letter "K" is rather common for such Middle and Late-Byzantine walls throughout Greece. Its appearance in the exterior of churches in Kastoria has been used as evidence for urban insignia. The examples from Corinth warrant further thought. Was this just a standard way to prepare a wall surface? or did it have special significance? I let Bill Caraher sort this one out.

From Idea to Building: Ancient and Medieval Architectural Process

The 65th Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians will be convening at Detroit, Michigan, on on April 18-22, 2012. Vasilis Marinis and I have put together a panel focusing on the media used to tranform ideas into built form before the Renaissance. We received a great number of submissions (to our great surprise) and have put together a panel that covers methodological depth and chronological breadth (ancient Greece, Rome, Islam, Middle Ages). Limited to five papers, we regretfully rejected a number of great abstracts. Here is our program.

From Idea to Building: Ancient and Medieval Architectural Process. Kostis Kourelis (Franklin & Marshall College) & Vasileios Marinis (Yale University), Chairs

The transformation of ideas into buildings has puzzled architectural historians of the premodern world. Design is a Renaissance notion of organizing spatial ideas via drawings and models. The limited evidence for such documents before the fifteenth century suggests that they were not commonly used. Their absence makes ancient and medieval design opaque, leaving masonry as the only reliable evidence for reconstructing building histories. As finished products, buildings do not readily offer clues about the transformative process from conception to execution. Attention to previously unseen carvings, markings, signatures, numbering systems, masonry bonds, stratigraphy, and destruction layers reveals otherwise undocumented design actions. By reading between the masonry lines, historians have reconstructed lost intentionalities and plausible scenarios. The picture is fragmentary and encourages a way of looking that privileges detail over general concept. The evidence for architectural process includes line drawings carved on buildings, numerical systems for provisioning material, other markings left by masons, as well as a very small set of surviving drawings. Textual sources and visual illustrations also shed some light on the materialization of ideas, on design alterations, even on the odd dismantling of a structure. Many questions remain open. How did ancient and medieval builders use intermediary documents? How were executive decisions made on the construction site? And more importantly, how did the designer innovate, copy, or appropriate? Shedding new light on such old questions introduces complexities in modern architectural historiography. However conceived, the tectonic process of ancient and medieval buildings has featured centrally in arguments of architectural theory from Viollet-le-Duc to Kenneth Frampton. Such traditions of modern theorizing weigh on the stones and mortar of premodern processes. The session hopes to investigate details of construction along with the repercussions these details may bear in larger modern (or postmodern) theoretical narratives.

PAPERS
Recognizing Innovative Design in the Nereid Monument at Xanthos
Elisha Dumser (Ursuline College, OH)

Around 400 BCE a local dynast in Xanthos erected an extraordinary tomb in the form of a small Ionic temple. The white marble monument marks the first ‘Greek’ style building in Lycia, and it sports several intriguing features including intercolumnar statues of Nereids, distinctive Ionic capitals copied from the Erechtheion in Athens, and innovative (perhaps even the first) corner capitals with volute sides on all four faces. The Ionic capitals designed for the Nereid monument form the starting point of an instructive case study of late fifth-century BCE architectural practices, especially the designer’s role when appropriating and innovating within the Greek orders. This paper details how the designer of the Nereid Monument selectively quoted distinctive elements associated with major Greek architects – namely, Mnesikles at Athens and Iktinos at Bassae (who in the preceding decades had designed a variety of Ionic capital with volutes on all sides) – as a means to highlight his own innovative design work at Xanthos. Yet how would a designer working in Lycia have acquired detailed knowledge of monuments located in Greece? Technical evidence suggests that Attic builders were employed on the Nereid Monument. If workmen were imported to southern Anatolia from the mainland, it is not implausible to propose that a well-traveled master builder also designed the monument. But what of the patron and the building’s audience(s)? Without extensive travel themselves, how would they learn to recognize the meaningful narrative of quotations from master architects, each surpassed within the Nereid Monument’s own design? Here, one must propose the existence of portable architectural drawings, and moreover, the circulation of such visual materials outside of a limited professional circle, so that an interested connoisseur could gain the detailed knowledge necessary to appreciate the skill and novelty of the Nereid Monument’s design.

Designing and Building the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias
Felipe Rojas (Brown University)

The Sebasteion in Aphrodisias is a lavish architectural complex dedicated in the first century CE to Aphrodite and the divinized Julio-Claudian emperors. The complex is composed of four different buildings: a temple, two multi-storied portico-like buildings fitted with sculptural reliefs, and a monumental propylon, or gate—all made almost entirely of marble. The Sebasteion’s architecture and sculptures together with its building and restoration inscriptions offer an ideal opportunity for the architectural historian to study how such a complex was designed, erected, and repaired in antiquity. As we know from inscriptions, one prominent family sponsored the construction of the temple and the south building, while a different family donated funds to build the north building and the propylon. My paper focuses on the coming together of the two different teams of masons at the juncture between the propylon and the south building. By analyzing the problems faced here as well as the solutions devised, I illuminate ancient design and building, treating issues such as the probable use of models and drawings, as well as by considering which marble blocks were prefabricated off-site and which were manufactured in situ. I concentrate on “mistakes”, such as the lack of alignment of moldings and profiles as well as the failure to foresee that some of the elaborate propylon decoration would have to be destroyed to accommodate the south building. In addition, I examine blocks that suggest that while the makers of the complicated column-bases at the juncture were aware of the oblique angle between the propylon and the long buildings, those who built the columns were not. This lack of coordination resulted in columns that do not fit neatly on the bases. I also consider the benefits of anastylosis (restoration using primarily original blocks) for our comprehension of ancient architectural process.

The Alchemical Harmony of the Musical Firmament and the Muqarnas
Agnieszka Szymanska (Temple University)

Islamic architecture enhances our understanding of the architectonic materialization of ideas in the pre-modern world, specifically with regard to intersections of theoretical and practical geometry. I employ Renata Holod’s and Alpay Özdural’s concept of the transmission of architectural knowledge to probe some meanings of the tarh (plan or drawing) of the muqarnas. As Holod and Özdural have demonstrated, mathematicians transformed geometric principles into designs through the vehicle of the tarh, which architects utilized in the building process. The epistemological shift from theoretical to practical geometry depended on the apprentices’ increased reliance on the senses. While the mathematicians conceived of properties such as length as abstractions, the artisans perceived them as part of the material world. The tarh functioned as an intermediary between the mathematicians’ geometric figures and the builders’ tangible understanding of the construction process. An examination of the transmission from theoretical to practical geometry elucidates the design and significance of the muqarnas, specifically within a memorial context. The conceptual creators, or mathematicians, of the muqarnas drawings surviving in the fifteenth-century Topkapı scroll based their work on Greek scientific treatises, including Euclid’s Elements. Drawing on the concept of visuality, I postulate that the eye in Euclidean theoretical propositions corresponds to the placement of the beholder in the Topkapı plans, and to the location of the viewer of the actual muqarnas, materialized by the practical designers, or artisans. Examples include the shrine of Imam Dur (1085-90) and the mausoleum of Ahmad Yasavi (1397). Using the writings of Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039) and the eleventh-century epistles of the Ikhwan al-Safa’, I conclude that the designers of the muqarnas intended it to be perceived as the heavenly firmament, and to transfix the beholder in an otherworldly experience. Mathematicians and artisans created the muqarnas by means of the language of geometry, visualized through the tarh.

The Origins of Gothic Design Process
Sarah Thompson (Rochester Institute of Technology)

Architectural historians have a framework for exploring the process of construction in western Europe from the mid-thirteenth century forward: by this period, specific figures are named as architects, specialized job titles appear in records, and the earliest surviving architectural drawings can be analyzed to reveal methods of design. This era coincides with the spread of the style known as Gothic, but while it seems logical to conclude that the advent of Gothic may have coincided with a more hierarchical system of designing a building and managing a construction site, architectural historians focusing on the mid-twelfth century—the era during which Gothic emerged—face absent or altered buildings, a dearth of textual documentation, and no evidence of drawings, templates, or other means of advance planning other than what can be extrapolated from the buildings themselves. An association between the creation of a new style with new building practices has thus been notoriously difficult to prove. In fact, a study of sites typically considered early Gothic indicates a much less tidy picture. At the church of Notre-Dame d’Étampes, a significant twelfth-century project within the French royal domain, an analysis of the surviving architectural fabric indicates a building constructed in a series of short campaigns by a small, flexible group of workers; comparative analysis with buildings such as La Madeleine du Châteaudun, La Ferté-Alais, and Saint-Denis supports this theory that the hierarchy and fixed roles of the building site documented in the thirteenth century had yet to be established at early Gothic sites. This analysis of mid-twelfth century sites suggests that the changes in building practices and design process may not have been associated with a new style, but instead may have been engendered by the increasingly large scale or structural complexity of projects dating from the later twelfth or early thirteenth centuries.

Drawing and Stonecutting: Investigating Late Gothic Stereotomy
Dominic Boulerice (York University, Canada)

The design process of late Mediaeval buildings is relatively well documented. Gothic builders of the Holy Roman Empire have left behind a few hundred architectural drawings of large-scale tower and façade elevations, detailed ground plans, multilayered horizontal cross-sections, profiles and templates, tracery designs, figured vault patterns, geometrical constructions and so on. Although very instructive, these drawings do not inform us explicitly about building procedures. For example, the figured vault patterns with rib elevations, the so-called Bogenaustragungen, show how the vaults were extracted from their ground-plans to give them volume but do not provide instructions as to how the vaults were to be erected. How were the keystones and voussoirs carved? Suffice it to say, Mediaeval building procedures are practically not supported by documentary evidence. In the collection of architectural drawings of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien), I found a few drawings and sketches that directly address stonecutting. These stereotomic sketches, sometimes difficult to comprehend, were didactic drawings used for the training of masons and stonecutters. More than mere plans or blueprints, they illustrate stonecutting procedures. In this paper I investigate and discuss the Vienna stereotomic drawings and relate them to late Gothic building practices.

Frankish Roof Tiles: Morea

Medieval roof tiles tend to be thrown away in excavations because they are both plentiful and undiagnostic. In contrast to beautifully shaped stone or clay tiles from antiquity, medieval tiles seem vernacular, produced locally with less regulation or form-work. Luckily, the discipline of medieval tiles in the Peloponnese is witnessing a renaissance. My experience with medieval roof tiles began in 1991 at the Morea Project. One of the few things that makes a medieval settlement recognizable on the landscape is the scatter of roof tiles. If tiles is all you got, then you start taking them seriously. While surveying countless medieval settlements in the Peloponnese and looking at thousands of tile fragments, the eye began to recognize certain patterns. A few analytical drawings and reconstructions produced a distinctive tile system that Fred Cooper articulated most succinctly in our project monograph, Houses of the Morea (Athens, 2002), pp. 23-35. I will quote Fred's analysis:"The distinctive Frankish roof tile system has a different shape altogether for the pan and the cover. The pans are somewhat wider than the Byzantine (ca. 0.25-0.30 m.) and the flanks turn upwards sharply to for an edge for insertion underneath the closing edge of the incumbent cover tile. The cover is quite broad (0.20-0.30 m.) in comparison to older and later examples. In section, the arch forms one ogive or, at least, the arch tightly curves at the peak. Cover and pan are relatively thick, ca. 0.025 m. (figure 1).

Another distinctive feature of the Frankish variety is the interlocking system of covers above pans. Adjoining pans are separated by the span of the cover, rather than the reverse that is typical of other types of roof tile systems, in which the lower or pan tile has flank sides abutting, while a narrower cover tile spans a width no more than necessary to close the joint. In the Byzantine system, bothpans and covers abut.

Still another characteristic of the Frankish type is the fabric: course and mottled black to red by uneven firing. The underside or unexposed surfaces are quite crumbly, often having straw embedded, a result of nested stacking. Exposed surfaces are more evenly fired and usually bear finger impressed loops on both covers and sometimes on pans.

In an exploratory trip to Burgundy, France, I found the same type of tile system in use on extant Romanesque church roofs, such as Vezeley, as that used for the churches of Glarenza and Andravida and at our kastro sites. This is to say, the technology, but probably not the tiles themselves, came directly from the Frankish homeland of the Morea occupiers. The topic of Frankish roof tiles is one of several which I will pursue further. In any event, the presence of Frankish tile fragments on the ground at sites is taken as evidence for a medieval date."

Fred Cooper has, indeed, done a lot more fieldwork in Burgundy since this publication, but he has not published his conclusions. One more thing I'd like to add. Right around the time that the Morea Project began, Charles Williams had been excavating a Frankish complex in Corinth. In his early explorations, he thought that he might have identified a distinctively Frankish (versus Byzantine) roof tile. But in the course of the excavations, he seems to have grown more and more uncertain about the diagnostic potential of the tiles.

Cooper had encountered the Frankish tiles in two additional projects, in the Minnesota excavations of the Frankish Cathedral in Andravida and in his excavation of Karl Blegen's dump in Pylos. Yes, you read correctly. Nestor's Palace in Pylos contained Frankish material. Blegen excavated Pylos in 1939 and the 1950s. As was common, he tossed all the medieval roof tiles in his excavation dump. Cooper talks about finding newspapers that provided termini for the layered dump that he re-excavated in the 1980s.

Cooper's Frankish tile thesis needs obvious refinements and has been a topic of intense debate among the Morea Project staff. Even at its preliminary articulation, the roof tiles of the Morea Project thesis presents invaluable evidence in roof tile scholarship. It should also be noted that the Morea Project was an architectural survey and not a pedestrian surface survey. We were, thus, forbidden from collecting any archaeological material from the ground. We simply noted it, sketched, and photographed it. This means that we, unfortunately, do not have a sample study collection. Luckily, there is no shortage of these roof tiles on the ground. Here is an example from Kastro tes Orias (pp. 116-118), photographed in 1994.

Brick Stories

In Vasari's hierarchy of art, it doesn't get much lower than bricks. Byzantine archaeology tends to disagree. Back in 1954, Alison Frantz excavated the Church of the Holy Apostles in the Athenian Agora and directed its restoration. The works were published in, Frantz, Agora XX: The Church of the Holy Apostles (Princeton, 1971).

Today, I'd like to showcase a rare working drawings from the annals of Byzantine wall decoration. Paying attention to tossed bricks pays off. The exterior walls of Holy Apostles make extensive use of pseudo-Kufic ceramic decoration. Byzantine architectural historians know that these decorations pretend to look like Arabic script but were executed by artists who did not know the language. Byzantine pseudo-Kufic is an early form of Orientalism, if you will. To read more about this interesting topic, see George Miles, DOP 18, 1964 and Laskarina Bouras' study of Hosios Loukas.

During the Holy Apostles conservation, Frantz found a broken half brick in the rubble core of the south wall of the south apse. The rough side of the brick contains a drawing in black that looks like an architectural sketch working out a pseudo-Kufic pattern. As Frantz notes, the sketch does not match any of the designs precisely, but it best resembles one of the 37 recorded designs (Fig. 2, no. 6). I've sketched the sketch above (based on photo, pl. 5b) and the executed design below. Isn't that amazing? I'm telling you, there's much wisdom in bricks and tiles.

The design sketch is one of the few examples of Byzantine process drawings that survive. Obviously, it served its ephemeral purpose. The artist sorted out what he wanted to sort out and then dumped it. As the brick was already broken, it was of no architectural use. It was scrap. Vasilis Marinis and I have organized a session, "From Idea to Building: Ancient and Medieval Architectural Process" for the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians (April 18-22, 2012, Detroit), which will address such issues of drawings as process.

Frantz's Holy Apostles restoration was completed in 1956 just in time for the dedication ceremonies of the Stoa of Attalos on Sept. 3, 1956. Whereas the Stoa of Attalos has dominated the brunt of criticism against American imperialism, few speak of the Holy Apostles in the same vein. I am not sure of the politics, but it seems that Frantz saved the monument single-handedly and guaranteed funding from the Kress Foundation for its restoration. I have heard apocryphal stories about the anti-Byzantine attitudes of 1950s Agora, but I haven't verified them. But I digress.

Three Fingers of Clay

I have begun working on the Byzantine house publications of Chersonesos for Adam Rabinowitz's upcoming monograph, Excavations in the South Region of Chersonesos, 2001-2006: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Adam Rabinowitz, Larissa Sedikova and Paul Arthur.

One aspect of the study will reconstruct the roof system based on fragments unearthed in the complex's debris. The scholarship on house roofs is practically non-existent, since most medieval houses of the period hardly survive above a few courses.

I will start with a wonderful ancient building inscription that records the restoration of a covered walkway in Athens' city walls in 306 BCE. It's a valuable document because it discusses the juncture between the roof tiles and the wooden beam support: “And after laying upon the sheathing moistened rushes [κάλαμον], and under these (i.e. between the planks) beanstalks [λοβόν] or rushes he shall cover the whole with a layer of clay mixed with straw [δορώσι] three dactyls in thickness.” Although the text is 1,000 years before the houses at Chersonesos, it gives some insights on a vernacular building method with a long afterlife. It gives a precise measurement of three fingers (1 1/2 inches) for a layer of clay mixed with straw as the binding agent.

My explanatory sketch above is based on L. D. Caskey, “The Roofed Gallery on the Walls of Athens,” American Journal of Archaeology (1910) 14, pl. V.