Dumbarton Oaks: Archaeology Conversation First Impressions

Dumbarton Oaks (DO) hosted a conversation this weekend addressing the achievements and future challenges of Byzantine archaeology. “Byzantine Archaeology in North America” was in many ways a momentous events, highlighting Dumbarton Oaks’ institutional ability to muster up a huge intellectual community that has limited venues for conversation (the Byzantine Studies Association of North America annual meeting being the other, and by design the more democratic one). The last time such a conversation happened at DO was 1978, marking the moment when DO turned its back to “big digs” and, according to some, turned its back to archaeology more generally. The prime mover behind the recent attitudinal shift within DO is its new director, Margaret Mullet, and all credit must go to her and the organizers, Michael McCormick and John Haldon.

Although it was a gathering of incredible intellectual caliber, I must confess, that I left Washington a little depressed, partially because the issues that I think of prime importance were never addressed. My 15-minute contribution “Archaeology as Critical Practice” failed to generate discussion and I feel this is largely my fault for missing the target. I overviewed four moments of critical engagement with Byzantine material culture, I. aestheticism, 1850s-1920s, II. stratigraphic positivism, 1920s-1960s, III. processualism, 1960s-1980s, and IV. post-processualism (1980s-now). I argued that half of DO checked out in Period II (Antioch vs. Corinth) and all of DO checked out in Phase III (after the 1978 collapse). Despite the archaeological topic, the majority of the audience did not seem engaged with archaeology’s internal discourse (methods, ideology, theory). But this is OK. More important than what was said or not said at the conference is what will unfold in future conversations. In order to start this conversation, I begin with self-reflecting. I pose a series of comments as first and most immediate thoughts. I organize them into two related headings, Archaeological Reality and Institutional Honesty.

1. Archaeological Reality

One question that surfaced the whole weekend was whether Byzantine (or medieval, or whatever we call it) archaeology is in any way special. What much of the conversation revealed is a fundamental shift in archaeological definition. Up until the 1960s, archaeology was defined culturally rather than methodologically; it was defined by cultural typologies. So, we had classical archaeologist focusing on classical civilization, or Christian archaeology focusing on Christian civilization. The methods of cultural formation were supplanted in the 1960s with a concern for critical, self-reflective practices. Practicing archaeology broke from cultural, ethnic, or geographical definitions. An autonomous discipline was formed, whose theory and methods could be successfully applied across the cultural and geographic board. This also meant that one could not privilege one historical layer over another when excavating or surveying a site, producing not only a discussion of archaeological ethics but also the foundations of diachronic projects.

When I train my archaeology students, I anticipate that most of them will not excavate Byzantine sites. Many will dig other periods and other places, and many will become contract archaeologists in the U.S. (in America, archaeology is not a federal discipline, it is officiated by the state government and executed by private companies). Historians find this difficult to understand because their cultural definitions rely so much on the knowledge of the culture’s languages (to read the primary texts) and textual histories. The modern archaeology student learns a different language that springs from the natural and social sciences. A Byzantine archaeologist has no disciplinary niche, and must hence become a little bit of a historian, linguist and art historian (based on the unique model of Classical Studies).

As a result of method-driven archaeology, you have two kinds of people. Those trained as historians/art historians who pick up archaeology in the field, and those trained as archaeologists that pick up Byzantium in the field. The former were represented at the DO conversation but not the latter (with the exception of Sue Alcock). It became a little depressing for the trained archaeologist to hear so many speakers begin with “I am not an archaeologist.” What was missing from the table were the majority of scholars who are not self-defined as Byzantinists but who have actually made the greatest contributions to our field.

This concern over “Byzantium” and the need to define a cultural-type, whether we call it Byzantine, Post-Byzantine, late-antique, medieval, Islamic became a central question. My counter-argument was that the need for cultural-types is the historian’s anxiety not the archaeologist’s. The archaeologist should make distinctions arising from the material record and not the other way around. The transition from terra sigilata to glazed pottery or from mega-basilicas to mini-cross-in-square churches needs no label. From the ceramics point of view, Joanita Vroom has published a typology of 48 pottery types from 500 to 1900. The cultural label has been a primary target of archaeological discourse precisely because it recycles imperial or national agendas.

2. Institutional Honesty

Although we academics spend entire careers analyzing and deconstructing historical institutions, we have a hesitancy to articulate power-structures, modes, traditions, oppressive structures, exclusivities, propaganda, ideologies of our own traditions. I urged everyone in the conference to read Louis Menand’s new book, The Marketplace of Ideas. The book is rather normative, analyzing the origins of the humanities in the United States and the extra-academic motivations that shaped them. Anyone studying American academic history will find nothing new or original in the book, but it is a wonderful and succinct summary. From my perspective, it answers half of the questions raised at DO. Ultimately, any crisis of Byzantine Studies is situated in a larger context. Menand’s book is a MUST because it articulates the crisis of today, particularly from the perspective of redesigning general education at Harvard. So, first, we need to raise the bar by contextualizing our Byzantine problems more broadly in North American institutions (and sadly what Frankfurt has to say become less important). DO is a product of a different era (the Cold War) and it must now address the era of capitalism. It must deal with the drop of undergraduate majoring in the humanities. DO is a product of the baby-boomers and the Cold War. The director of DO alluded to the perception of DO as a “cash cow.” Well, that is a reality that must be reckoned with. Harvard is capitalistically powerful despite its endowment reduction, but what does that mean for Byzantine practices?

Clearly, DO has functioned as a gate-keeper thanks to its financial patronage. We need to examine this historically. Robert Nelson, Helen Evans, Glenn Pierce and others have began a historiographical critique of Byzantium as a constructed art-historical discipline. DO lacks institutional self-reflection. Consider the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, which is most admirably confronting its colonial heritage and its Byzantine archaeology. Its very director, Jack Davis, has been publishing profusely not only on his scholarly expertise (Bronze Age, surveys, etc.) but on the history of his institution. This kind of soul-searching has motivated my own research, but I owe the inspiration to others. Despite all the cutting-edge Marxism in Byzantine history, there is little socio-economic critique of the academy. How does super-structure relate to base in Byzantine Studies? DO's earlier debates about the city were in many ways about the Soviet Union (Ostrogorsky, Kazhdan, etc.) What is the role of ideology in Byzantine block-buster exhibitions today? What happens when corporate sponsors outside the U.S. finance exhibitions in New York? What happens when Greek tobacco pays the bill for Glory of Byzantium? Why is Serbia not Byzantine all of a sudden? What does it mean to sell Byzantium to a consumer? What does it mean to have the Greek media magnate manage the EU funds devoted to scanning American excavation notebooks?

DO must also confront what Bob Ousterhout called “the elephant in the living room,” antiquities that have entered DO’s museum in suspicious ways and are challenged by the host countries (Turkey, Peru). Such conversations should not be forced by political pressure, they should evolve from intellectual inquiry. The Archaeological Institute of America has defined an ethical code that its members must adhere to. My archaeological ethical code is much stricter than the one of my museum colleagues and I cannot be evasive when I represent American archaeological ethics to the international community. The museum curator and art historian has greater liberties on that front.

DO must also confront its own archaeological lineage. The 1978 collapse started the conversation, but nobody dared to comment on it. The 1978 DO meeting was not as civil as the one 32 years later. Blood was spilled. I know this because my own mentor was caught in the carnage. His relationship to DO has been forever damaged. But his stories are now my stories. My mentor’s narratives inform my own narratives, although I had nothing to do with DO for my entire academic career, a fact which undoubtedly reflects that situation.

Jim Russell’s “Last Time Around” did not reveal the conversation that ensued in 1978. And I am sure that, at some level, revisiting 1978 (and the Angeliki Laiou years that followed) is still traumatic for many of the key players. But these are stories that formed me indirectly and are consciously or unconsciously trickling down to my own students. I want to know the full story. I know that DO is conducting an oral history project but I want those narratives to influence the debate today. With enough historical distance, what happened behind the fortress of DO’s leadership and its Senior Fellows will be ultimately part of our story. There diaries, secret histories and excavation notes the future historian will be able to consult. But I would rather have those issues addressed now, when they can be used for making critical decisions. It can be done in a constructive way (see how Brown University dealt with the discovery of its slave past). The American School is doing it extremely well, so that we are learning precisely how Alison Frantz and other archaeologists engaged with the Cold War. It’s time for DO to turn its attention to its rich history. I wish I had passed through the institution to be able to do it. My focus is the American School. I would also very much like to hear from the younger scholars who had to deal with the pieces after 1978. Robert Ousterhout and Sharon Gerstel, who presented the achievements of Turkey and Greece, had to deal with the collapse. Each on his/her own way, managed to create semi-archaeological identities that reflect post-1978 DO. Their tactical engagement with archaeology is a success story of the 1978 collapse, but also a reflection of its limitations. Just as much as I would like to hear more about the Striker-Mango conversation, I would like to hear what it must have been like for Bob and Sharon to work as junior scholars within that environment.

Transnational issues must also be confronted. DO’s international engagement calls for a few observations. During the last quarter of the 20th century, American institutions turned their back to Byzantine archaeology (for an entire host of great reasons; DO is perhaps a big part of the story). The deficit was filled masterfully by Great Britain, which pioneered both archaeological methods and theory (the two always go hand-in-hand). Looking at the archaeological landscape at DO this weekend, I could not help to notice the celebration of this British tradition. Jim Crow reported on the view from Edinburgh, but it would be myopic to pretend that Byzantine archaeology in the U.S. today is not partially a transplantation. The fact that the new director of DO is British speaks volumes of national sensitivities pro/con material culture. Let’s be institutionally honest. Christopher Lightfoot brought a British project to the U.S. and welcomed the new financial support (he told the story very well this weekend). John Haldon brought the lessons of one of the most successful archaeological curricula from Birmingham to Princeton. Richard Hodges brought the British experience in the Balkans to the University of Pennsylvania. Guy Sanders, the director of American excavations of Corinth, is not only the greatest living Byzantin archaeologist but also British. This is fascinating. To me, this illustrates an American deficit. It is a direct reflection of DO’s rejection of archaeology. The issue was not just “the big dig," everyone dealt with that. A good question for our day may also be the following. What happens when institutions with lots of money but weak archaeological traditions invest their resources on departments with strong historical traditions. In other words, what happens when you throw historians lots of cool toys? What kind of trickle down effect can we expect?

My request for institutional self-reflection and transparency is not just my own style of asking questions. It emerges from contemporary archaeological practice, occurring under the umbrella of physical and cultural anthropology. The myth of “objective viewer” has been shattered. In every discipline, including the sciences, we have analyzed the modernist project. We have understood how the myth of interpretive autonomy (New Criticism in literature, Processualism in archaeology) is a product of specific socio-political agendas. Post-structuralist theory in literature and Post-processual theory in archaeology are confronting the dichotomies of subject/object, emic/edic, insider/outsider in enriching ways. DO’s resistance to such theory can only be read politically. Does the institution feel a theoretical threat? The conference this weekend avoided all the critical archaeological issues, the topics that I teach in my classes, the topics that all my other colleagues deal with in/out of archaeology: Post-Colonialism and Nationalism, Gender, Globalization, Environmentalism, Neo-Imperialism. What happens to the political discourse at DO? Having members of the diplomatic core attend receptions is interesting, but it cannot substitute for substantive discussion over our American geopolitical reality. To quote Howard Zinn’s memoir, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

Let’s face it, Byzantium was a bubble constructed between the late 19th and 20th centuries. The bubble was created because the empire’s territory fit the geopolitical boundaries of the western world as it was sliced and resliced by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, two World Wars and a cold one . Byzantium was "discovered" only when it mattered. It served both the military radar (Cold War) and the aesthetic radar (exoticism). It formed the limes of modernity. Those boundaries have shifted further east to the Islamic World and China. Sure, Byzantinists should feel anxious that their academic positions are replaced by recent areas of geopolitical heat. The erosion of Byzantine studies, however, reveals the fragility of its construction. Archaeology as a contemporary discipline tackles these very issues. With or without “Byzantine” as a preface, I am thrilled to be an archaeologist in the 21st century. I relish in learning about DOs role as intellectual gate keeper in the second half of the 20th century, but I hope it will engage with archaeology more constructively in the 21st century.

I want to point attention to another thought-piece reflecting on the workshop. See Veronica Kalas' posting on Facebook.

Schwarzmann: Islamic Philadelphia

I'm reading more about the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, specifically on the work of its main architect, Herman Schwarzmann. Specifically, I'm reading the monograph by John Maass, The Glorious Enterprise: The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and H. J. Schwarzmann, Architect-in-Chief (Watkins Glen, N.Y., 1973). The Philadelphia Centennial celebrated 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and was the first official World's Fair in the United States, followed by the Colombia World's Exhibition of Chicago in 1893. It was a momentous event of national redefinition. The equivalent of 20% of the U.S. population visited the exhibition. These numbers are astounding. See earlier postings on Centennial here and here.

I am interested in the Exhibition for many reasons. But as an archaeologist of the medieval Mediterranean, I am especially intrigued by Schwarzmann's Horticultural Hall because it was designed in an Islamic style.

Before discussing Horticultural Hall, let me note that Schwarzmann was an architect from Munich. As a young painter, he learned the art of fresco painting and was employed by the court of Ludwig. Amazingly enough, he executed the frescoes in the Royal Palace in Athens for Ludwig's son, Otto the King of Greece (p. 12). This is an important detail showing that Scharzmann would have come into direct contact with Islamic visual culture, in the remnants of Ottoman Greece. In 1868, Schwarzmann emigrated to the U.S. As would be natural for a German, Schwarzmann settled in Philadelphia and began work on projects associated with Fairmount Park. Schwarzmann was selected as the chief architect for the 1876 exhibition.

Horticultural Hall was one of the Exhibition's five principle building and the largest conservatory built in the world. In Schwarzmann's words "the design is in the Moresque style of architecture of the twelfth century, the principal materials externally being iron and glass" (p. 60). Strange as it may seem to us today, the Orientalist mindset associated exotic plants with Islam. As early as 1843, German conservatories used Islamic prototypes, such as the conservatory in the Wilhelmina at Stuttgart (1843), the Paris Exposition (1867) and the Vienna Exposition (1873). Schwarzmann was, therefore, importing European notions of exoticism into the U.S.

John Maass has traced the specific origins of Schwarzmann's Islamic features to the following sources: "The brick arcade of striped pattern may be derived from the engravings of the 12th Century mosque Barbauk and El Moyed in Architecture Arabe ou Monuments Du Kaire by Pascal Coste (1839). We know Schwarzmann studied the Corquis d'Architecture: the September 1869 issue featured a large drawing of the court of the mosque in Cairo with striped arches; the first issue published after the Franco-German War, in April 1871, carried a drawing Court of Old House, Cairo with striped arches." (p. 65)

Horticultural Hall was not the only structure inspired by Islamic prototypes. A dozen of smaller structures and pavilions carried Islamic references: the Turkish Cafe, Tunisian Cafe, Bethleem Bazaar, Jerusalem Bazaar, Bosphorus Bazaar, Frank Leslie's Pavilion, Moorish Villa, Soda Water Stands and Guano Pavilion (p. 70) (left)

The presence of a dominant eastern flavor in America's antebellum self-representation is intriguing. I am also intrigued in imagining Schwarzmann's direct memories of the Ottoman East while working for King Otto in Athens.

Furness: Centennial Bank

Every morning, on my walk from West Philly to 30th Street Station, I pass a brilliant building designed by Frank Furness in 1876. The Centennial Bank (re-dedicated as Drexel University's Paul Beck Center in 2000) contains one of my favorite architectural details (my sketch left)

This vertical limestone ornament marks the division of bays in the western 1-story bay that extends south from the corner. In typical Furnessian manner, it evokes sentiments of mechanical power and the medieval past (corbel, crockets, etc.), but it also reworks the motif of the entrance way. This console has additional significance in that it created a prototype used throughout Philadelphia's row houses in the 1880s and 1890s.

The Centennial Bank was chartered to finance the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition (see earlier posting on Jerome Hodos' essay of the exhibition here). The building sits diagonally on Market Street today and it would have served as an axial termination to a street that lead to the Exhibition.

The photo below was taken in 1961, for Historic American Buildings Survey; Library of Congress HABS PA,51-PHILA,525-1.

Byzantine Archaeology: An Intercollegiate Proposal

During last Spring's Dumbarton Oaks Symposium, I got a chance to meet Margaret Mullett, the new director of Byzantine Studies. At the end of the conference, a small group gathered for lunch and brainstormed on the future of archaeology at Dumbarton Oaks. The conversation has blossomed into a public workshop this weekend (see here). Over the summer, brainstorming and consultation lead to the idea of an undergraduate field school in Byzantine archaeology. In the Fall, I wrote up those thoughts into an email. Now that the conversation on archaeology is formalized, I thought I might post that email. Some of the ideas were also discussed in the 2010 annual meeting of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America and were warmly received. I thank all the people whose brains I picked last summer.

I should also note that during my paper in last May's symposium, I made a comment about Dumbarton Oaks lack of support in surface surveys. My May 21, 2010 follow-up "Dumbarton Oaks and Surface Survey" addressed some criticism. I think it is no coincidence that I have been paired with Sue Alcock, the queen of reflecting on surface survey, in this weekend's conversation.

Email to Margaret Mullett
Sent September 21, 2009

Dear Margaret

It’s been a while since we last communicated. We met last May during the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. Thank you for inviting me to the lunch meeting where we discussed the future of archaeology at Dumbarton Oaks. I’ve been giving your questions a lot of thought in the last four months and I would like to share some of my thoughts and conversations with other young archaeologists.

Some of our conversations have been directed towards engaging undergraduates as much as graduate students in field archaeology. One idea that we have kicked around is organizing a field school, or a summer program similar to DO’s Byzantine Greek seminar. We are envisioning an intercollegiate program with many collaborators and components. This would be different from DO summer grant program. DO’s sponsorship would be primarily institutional and organizational. The field school would hope to bring both students and faculty. It could serve as the network for exploratory research taking place across the collaborating universities and faculty. So, in addition to a number of people gathering at one excavation in the summer, there could be educational coordination back in the United States, including visiting lectures and workshops.

Given the recent landscape of excavation permits, it seems that Turkey has now become as difficult as Greece. Over the summer, I began a series of conversations with a growing community of researchers and institutions in Cyprus. An intercollegiate program has been operating in Cyprus at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Project Archaeological Project (PKAP). The recent hire of Nikolas Bakirtzis at the Cyprus Institute adds an additional component in the landscape, and CAARI is looking forward to any new collaboration. The local archaeological service is extremely keen in having PKAP extend their survey (which was completed this last season) into an excavation. William Caraher (PKAP co-director) and I have worked closely the last four years in the creation of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group of the AIA. The group meets every year at the AIA meetings and strategizes over future projects, conferences, PR, and advocacy.

An intercollegiate archaeological field school in Cyprus seems like an excellent means to pool resources and create a platform of collaboration. A short excavation season could be supplemented by additional experiences. The team, for example, could be taken to other sites and introduced to other methodologies (archival work, dendrochronology, GIS, etc.) Given the number of collaborators, the project could also extend across countries and continents. After working in Cyprus, for example, I could take the students to Corinth for a week of analyzing the 1930s house excavations, and Ann Marie Yassin could take them to Rome. Although we could set up collaborations between our colleges independently, Dumbarton Oaks would provide the platform for a conversation – maybe even an undergraduate workshop back in the US.

I am not sure if this is an avenue that resonates with your plans for DO. One thing that would be nice to do is organize a workshop in the Spring, where a number of us gather and critically address the future of Byzantine field archaeology. Although it doesn’t have to be a formal conference, we could each present components of our concerns and ideas. Such a brainstorming gathering might lay the foundations for a common project, even if it doesn’t end up in Cyprus.

Thanks for hearing my thoughts. The Medieval and Post-Medieval Group will be meeting at the AIA conference in Anaheim, California, where Sharon and I have organized a panel called “First Out: Late Levels of Early Sites.” The Group also organized a colloquium at the Modern Greek Studies Association Meetings in Vancouver, “City, Village, Monastery: The Archaeology of Modern Greek Landscapes.”

Sincerely

-Kostis Kourelis

Dumbarton Oaks: Byzantine Archaeology in North America

This weekend, Dumbarton Oaks is hosting a conversation on archaeology, "Byzantine Archaeology in North America." The discussion promises to be interesting, and I commend Margaret Mullet for initiating this conversation.

My contribution ("Problems and Opportunities") will focus on a couple of institutional issues that have defined Byzantine archaeology from an American point of view. I will speak on some general issues but will focus on the American School of Classical Studies, which is the legally binding organization through which all American archaeology must occur in Greece. I will also articulate what I perceive to be some ideological problems in Dumbarton Oaks' archaeological patronage.

I was not able to find the conference program on-line, so I quote it below:

BYZANTINE ARCHAEOLOGY IN NORTH AMERICA
CONVERSATIONS ON ARCHAEOLOGY

Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection
1703 32nd Street NW
Washington, DC 2007

April 9-10, 2010

"Byzantine archaeology is a rapidly developing area with profound implications for the future of the subject. But it has very little infrastructure in North America: no established chairs, few graduate programs, little available field training. Even creating opportunities for an exchange of views is difficult, sometimes easier in the host countries in the field than in North America. This has the result that scholars find it hard to cross the political boundaries; few archaeologists work in both Greece and Turkey, for example. Honorable exceptions are panels at the AIA, and MGSA, and blogs set up by individuals, as well as many interdisciplinary initiatives. There is anxiety about finding and training the next generation of archaeologists in such a fragmented practice, particularly in specialist fields like ceramics. And then of course there are problems in placing students once they have qualified. All in all it appears more difficult at present to be a Byzantine archaeologist than any other kind of Byzantinist, while the results can change the field more rapidly and fundamentally than in any other discipline. We propose to hold a series of conversations in April 2010 in Dumbarton Oaks on achievements and challenges and the future. We hope that we can arrive at suggestions which can improve opportunities in the field, and in which Dumbarton Oaks can play some part."

Friday, April 9

I Achievements of North American archaeology

2.30 Margaret Mullett, Introduction
2.45 Achievements in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, led by Sharon Gerstel, Bob Ousterhout, Marcus Rautman
4.15 Tea in the Study
4.45 Achievements in Italy, the Balkans, North Africa and the Levant, led by Richard Hodges, Susan Stevens, Ken Holum
7:00 Drinks on the Bowling Green

Saturday, April 10

II Problems and opportunities

9.00 John Haldon, Introduction
9.15 North American institutional and attitudinal issues, led by Susan Alcock, Kostis Kourelis
10.15 Coffee in the Study
10.45 Problems and possibilities for and in host countries and in American overseas research centers, led by Scott Redford, Chris Lightfoot, Mary-Ellen Lane
12.15 Transforming Byzantine archaeology through science, led by Henry Schwarcz
12.45 Discussion
1.00 Lunch at the Refectory

III The future

2.45 Mike McCormick, Introduction
3.00 Joachim Henning, The future as seen from Frankfurt
3.15 Discussion
3.30 James Crow, The future as seen from Edinburgh
3.45 Discussion
4.00 Tea in the Study
4.30 General Discussion
6:00 Reception for host countries on the Music Room Terrace

Participants:

Susan Alcock, Rina Avner, Betsy Bolman, Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, Susan Boyd, Budrun Bühl, James Crow, Danny Curcic, Florin Curta, Tony Cutler, Örgü Dalgiç, Jennifer Davis, Clive Foss, Sharon Gerstel, Heather Grossman, John Haldon, Joachim Henning, Richard Hodges, Ken Hollum, Veronica Kalas, Kostis Kourelis, Mary-Ellen Lane, Chris Lightfoot, Mike McCormick, Sheila McNally, Eunice Maguire, Vasileios Marinis, Margaret Mullett, Bob Ousterhout, Marcus Rautman, Scott Redford, Jim Russell, Henry Schwarcz, Andrew Smith II, Sharon Gerstel, Carolyn Snively, Heather Grossman, Kathy Sparkes, Susan Stevens, Deb Stewart, Noreen Tuross, Günder Varinlioglu, Jan Ziolkowski, Stephen Zwirn.

Hodos: 1876 Centennial Exhibition

My good friend and occasional contributor to this blog Jenn Ball was visiting Philadelphia this weekend (with her husband and two lovely daughters). She was staying with a friend from her graduate school who now lives in Philadelphia (with her husband and lovely daughter). Within the first few minutes of our visit to Jenn’s friend’s house, it became obvious that we are all interconnected by a web of social relationships and professional affiliations. I don’t want to bore the readers with all the details. Suffice it to say that the city of Philadelphia offers what might be called “social capital” that intersects with our host Richardson Dilworth, a political scientist at Drexel University and husband of Jenn's friend. It was especially amusing to meet Dilworth soon after Franklin & Marshall's president was announced to become Drexel's new president.

Dilworth has edited a collection of papers, Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2006) that contains an essay by an old friend and new colleague at Franklin & Marshall Jerome Hodos. In some kaleidoscopic way, I use this book to understand both my city of inhabitance and my itinerant network of academia/personal life. Dilworth’s book is dedicated to his daughter Nina “because she and the rest of her cohort of toddler Philadelphians are already well on their way to forming their own social network and building anew a collective stock of social capital in the city.” (p. xi) Our meeting this last Saturday was just as much a meeting of children as a meeting of adults and I look forward to seeing more of everyone involved.

I turn now to Hodos’ essay “The 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia: Elite Networks and Political Culture,” Social Capital (pp. 19-39) because it deals with an event of great architectural interest, the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. From an art-historical point of view, the 1876 Centennial was transformative. See, for example, Elizabeth Milroy’s “A Crowning Feature: The Centennial Exhibition and Philadelphia’s Horticultural Hall” in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 26:2 (2006), pp. 132-165. Coincidentally, Milroy was the dean that hired my wife at her previous job. Hodos offers a different point of view on how political capital intersects with social capital. In short, the 1876 Centennial managed to push the city beyond a political gridlock and into modernity. Jerome Hodos, explains that the exhibition solved a political puzzle that plagued the city’s transition into an industrial metropolis. Four particular problems confronted the antebellum city, 1. rapid population growth, 2. intense industrialization, 3. public disorder, and 4. a change of guard in the ruling elites (namely from a mercantile class to an industrial class). The Civil War had divided the city's double allegiances to both the North and the South. Support for the Democratic party comprised of a pro-Southern alliance. Republicanism, which emerged victorious and remained unchallenged for 60 years after the Centennial, coalesced in the 1870s and was assisted by the organization of the exhibition.

The essays in this collection deal with a definition of social capital developed by Robert Putnam in a book with the most memorable title, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000). Hodos argues that social capital developed when political hegemony needed to move outside its economic/political domain and collaborate with culture. The Centennial offered precisely that opportunity. More importantly, the Centennial as a historical case study reveals the inter-penetrability of intellectual realms. I know this relates to a Durkheim vs. Weber conceptual problem, but my social theory is to rusty to tackle here. Thanks to the academic social network, I can simply ask Hodos for details next time I see him on campus.

Much of the pleasure of reading a friend’s work is hearing their voice behind the text but also learning a tremendous amount without having to bother them. Hodos’ essay is full of great nuggets. I had no idea that the Democrat-Republican rivalry in Philadelphia's civic politics reflected Southern allegiances. I am reminded of the Philadelphia enclaves in Charleston from Clemson's Charleston Preservation program. I was also interested to learn that in 1850, Philadelphia was almost 5% African American and 5.6% German born. Over the weekend, I chanced on a mid-19th century building abandoned by its German community (part of the Trainscape exploration). Now I have a context.

Shawcross: Morea Chronicle

David and Irene Romano used to host an annual Corinthian masquerade party. Back in 1994 when I was David's intern in the Corinth Computer Project, I attended the party as the Chronicler of the Morea (photo left). My own interest on this fictional author rose out of the Morea Project, a field project that in the 1990s revealed a whole mess of undocumented medieval settlements. Although the Chronicle of the Morea has been a central source in the history of this region, few have entered the literary mindset of the Chronicle as deeply as historian Teresa Shawcross.

Shawcross's The Chronicle of the Morea: Historiography in Crusader Greece (Oxford, 2009) is by far the most important book on the Frankish Morea in the last decade and tops another Shawcross favorite, "Re-inventing the Homeland in the Historiography of Frankish Greece: The Fourth Crusade and the Legend of the Trojan War," Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 27 (2003), pp. 120-152. I remember reading this article in the Gennadios Library while thinking about mythical Centaurs represented on Byzantine and Frankish sculptural reliefs (such as a sarcophagus now at Vlacherna Monastery)

Shawcross's new book is divided into three major parts, preceded by a 30-page introduction that, to my mind, is the sweetest introduction to the general intellectual issues of the period. Part I, Composition, Transmission, and Reception, does all the philological hard work of establishing manuscript traditions and imagining the lost common source. Part II, Narrative Technique: Orality and Literacy, dissects the Chronicle as a text with its own structure, literary constructs. My favorite part of this analysis is the study of speech acts within the text. Shawcross makes a fundamental discovery here, that the Greek version reveals inspiration from oral performance and reception (hence justifying my own dress-up above). In contrast, the French version lacks this "oral residue" and is driven by textual structures. In Part II, Ideology: Conquerors and Conquered, Shawcross takes all her laborious textual and inter-textural readings and employs them towards a cultural reconstruction. Working strictly within the parameters of her textural analysis, Shawcross is able to prove concepts of identity, "Greek" versus "Latin." Rather than relying on contemporary cultural theories of identity and projecting them clumsily onto the 13th-15th centuries, Shawcross manages to recreate contemporary notions of ethno-religious identities. The results are astounding. There are many conclusions having to do with the creation of a vernacular histories, a Moreote sensibility and even a local resistance movement. Shawcross contextualizes the composition of the Chronicle to the development of those identities. Written in the 1320s, the Chronicle stands at a moment of crisis, a moment of transition within an established Moreot aristocracy. In short, the Principality of the Morea had established a flourishing multicultural society based on local power-centers. Despite their ethnic, religious and sociological differences, Latins and Greeks collaborated into an interesting medieval experiment, which came under threat in the 14th century when the survival of the principality depended on outsiders, the Angevin kings of Naples (on the Frankish side) and the Byzantine emperors of Constantinople (on the Greek side). Shawcross observes, for instance, that not all of the Greek in the Peloponnese supported the Byzantine Despotate of Mistra. Historians have tended to exploit the Chronicle of the Morea as a source in understanding the region's history. Shawcross has shown the flows of such strategy. Rather, we should read the Chronicle of the Morea as a document that directly confronts the 1320s identity crisis.

The lessons and conclusions of Shawcross' book are multiple and complex. She has shown that scrupulous philological and literary analysis can still yield valuable lessons from an old text. Although I am not a philologist or a manuscripts specialist, I am awed by Shawcross's technical analysis without which her conclusions would have been the usual cultural speculation that we all perform when studying this interesting period.

Finally, I thank Shawcross for publishing 12 brilliant plates illustrating manuscripts from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Among other things, the reader can inspect a wonderful variety of letter forms. I will definitely scan these pages, enlarge the opening lines and put them on my wall: "Θέλω να σε αφιγιθώ αφήγησιν μεγάλιν, Και αν θέλεις να με ακροάσης ολπίζω να σ'αρέσει." This should be the motto of all historical enterprise: "I want to tell you a great narrative, and if you want to listen to me, I hope that you like it." Another favorite quote comes from the 12th-century Theogony by John Tzetzes and illustrates the multi-cultural atmosphere of the Byzantine capital during the reign of Emperor Manuel Comnenus (1143-80) and hence before the 4th Crusade (p. 18-19). This quote is so good that I must leave it for a later posting of its own.

Shawcross's work now tops my BEST-OF new scholarship on the Frankish Morea. My list is highly subjective and only includes work that accompanied a personal "aha" moment of intellectual insight. It includes Aneta Ilieva's Frankish Morea (1205-1262): Socio-Cultural Interaction between the Franks and the Local Population (Athens, 1991), Peter Locks' The Franks in the Aegean, 1204-1500 (London, 1995), Charles K. Williams' Frankish excavations in Corinth (published in Hesperia 1992-1998), and Demetris Athanasoulis' excavations in Eleia.

Trainscape: Philadelphia-Lancaster

My daily commute (Philadelphia-Lancaster) involves one of America's most historic train routes, the Main Line built by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company around 1850. See 1855 map of the the railway below from about the time that painter Mary Cassatt's family moved from Pittsburgh to Lancaster and then to Philadelphia. Her brother Alexander became the Pennsylvania Railroad's president.
The Main Line gave its name to Philadelphia's elite suburbs but its primary objective was to link Philadelphia to Pittsburgh via Harrisburg. My commute lasts a little over one hour and covers about 68 miles of linear miles. Recently, I have started to pay close attention to the human geographies my path crosses that can be divided into nine zones: 1. booming corporate cityscape of downtown Philadelphia, 2. glorious residential neighborhoods of the late 19th/early 20th c. now depressed ghetto, 3. the prosperous early suburbs of "the Main Line," 4. a corporate park islands where the peripheral highways intersect, 5. sprawling ex-burbs of subdivisions, 6. forest, 7. small industrial towns, 8. pristine Amish and Mennonite farmland, 9. urban Lancaster. From Pennsylvania Station in Philadelphia (now Amtrak 30th Street Station) to Pennsylvania Station in Lancaster, I observe from my train window a cross-section of American history and urban politics.
As an archaeologist, I ponder ways to document this passage. On March 10, I started simply by writing down facts and thoughts in a stream of consciousness kind of way. Inspired by Bill Caraher's "Walking Home and the Phenomenology of Landscape" (Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, Mach 8, 2010), I post my first notebook entries.

What makes my commute an incredible experience is its visual primacy. The number of buildings, urban installations, signs, objects, people, and landscapes that I cross are powerfully iconic and simply beautiful. So I set myself a drawing exercise, a kind of quick-sketching as the train rushed through the landscape. On March 24, 2010, when I first tried this method, I produced the following visual notes between Lancaster and the beginning of Philadelphia's suburbs.
The next day, March 25, I've decided to regulate my process typologically. Since I am teaching a seminar on religious architecture, I decided to make note of every religious building that I could decipher from my train window. Looking only southward, I noted almost 50 churches and synagogues. One of my new tasks is to find a system to actually document the visual evidence of those buildings that are intentionally visible from the rail line (most buildings built after 1850). A continuous elevation drawing is one of the exercises I have in mind, although it would take years and years to complete. For the time being, I have decided to simply build up the database and identify all the buildings visible from my window. Using Google Maps and Google Earth, I hope to identify the actual location of those visible monuments and inspect them one by one. Sixteen of the churches that one sees immediately out of Philadelphia are actually in my neighborhood, moving into the depths of depressed West Philadelphia. The weather is getting nice and it's time to oil the chain of my bicycle.

If churches is one obvious typology, thanks to the visible steeples and towers, what would be the other interesting category to document? Here is a list of typologies that would yield a fascinating picture and that I would enjoy mapping and thinking about:

1. Churches
2. Ruins
3. Modernist masterpieces
4. Postmodernist anti-masterpieces
5. Signs and texts
6. Factories and warehouses
7. Railroad stations
8. Objects (like visible trash, garden fixtures, etc.)

Archaeologies and Travelers in Ottoman Lands

I just finished attending one of the most fascinating conferences, "Recovering the Past: Archaeologies and Travelers in Ottoman Lands." Organized by Renata Holod and Robert Ousterhout at the University of Pennsylvania, "Recovering the Past" is an 18-month long initiative, involving the conference, graduate seminars and exhibitions. Each of the 18 papers in the conference (and Holod's final comments against Orieantalism and Occidentalism) revealed a whole new discourse of scholarship. Each of the scholars came from a wide array of disciplines, history, art history, archaeology, architectural history, Near-Eastern languages, etc. Their very gathering in one space is a testament to Holod's and Ousterhout's interdisciplinary breadth and vision. I'm sure I'll address many of the papers on this blog in the next few weeks, but I would like to start with one of my favorite papers.

Holly Edwards', "Exiles, Diplomats and Darlings: Afghans Abroad in the Early 20th Century," looked closely at the Afghan royal couple Amanullah and Soraya (top) in their journey through Turkey and England in 1927. Edwards investigated the day-by-day coverage of this diplomatic visit showing the various guises that the royal couple took and how those guises were received and represented in both the Turkish and British presses. The case-study stressed the multiplicity of Easts (at least two) and reminded me of Artemis Leontis' essay, "An American in Paris, a Parsi in Athens," in Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and the Hellenic Identity in the Twentieth Century (Athens, 2008). Here Leontis focused explicitly on the transnational female subject and investigated the complex veiling/unveiling of the Indian Khorshed Naoroji, who met the American Eva Palmer Sikelianos in 1924 and traveled with her through Greece. Both projects illustrate the limits of binary categories (East/West) the moment we contemplate a globalized setting. In an ideal cyberworld, I would love to put Leontis and Edwards in the same room and listen-in to their conversation.

The problematic of dress, posing, modeling, role-playing and cross-dressing became a central theme in the consideration of Osman Hamdi Bey, the Turkish Orientalist painter and archaeologist that was the subject of the conference's session. Panelists Edhem Eldem, Emine Fetvaci and Gulru Cakmak addressed the binary straitjacket of Hamdi Bey's career. Although he cultivated himself as a cosmopolitan French artist (and dressed accordingly), his French audience forced him to pose as an Oriental. What I missed in all the discussions of Hamdi Bey's cross-dressing is a comparison of European cross-dressing. Consider, for example, the Orientalist outfits that people like Louis Charles Tiffany embraced in their eastern journeys. Images of Laurence of Arabia, etc. come to mind. Yet this male cross-dressing is a much easier appropriation to deal with: it's safely theatrical and permissibly carnivalesque. The multiple cross-dressings of the female body, however, is much more challenging. Soraya, Khorshed Naoroji and Eva Palmer Sikelianos are helping us break the East/West binary much more easily than their male counterparts.

Louis Kahn in Corinth

Michael J. Lewis has published a fascinating little article on Louis Kahn's 1932 entry for a Lenin Memorial. The competition is largely unknown from Kahn's corpus because he intentionally expunged it from his resume in order to save himself from future political embarrassment. Although Michael Lewis had studied a verbal description of the monument (donated to the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives), it wasn't until 2006 when a photo of the project appeared at an auction. Lewis' article also intrigued me for its reference to another Soviet competition entry by an American. In 1932, the sculptor William Zorach proposed a statue for Lenin. He built a 3-ft model of the piece and sent it to Leningrad. My interest in Zorach has peaked this last year because the Phillips Museum at Franklin and Marshall is preparing a Zorach exhibition. Michael Lewis article can be found in the most recent Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, see Michael J. Lewis, "Louis I. Kahn and His Lenin Memorial," JSAH 69 (2010) pp. 7-11. This is a great issue of the JSAH, it includes an essay by Diane Favro in reconstructing Roman funerary processions, an essay on Melchior Lorich's famous panorama of Constantinople, an essay on Bruneleschi's dome, and an essay on Walter Gropius' letters to his daughter Manon.

Louis Kahn's Lenin Memorial features two red glass-brick skyscrapers that made me think of the bright red used in his watercolor of the Temple of Apollo in Corinth. The drawing was done in 1951, when Kahn was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Lewis' article reminded me of another European trip that Kahn took as a student in 1929, right before the Lenin competition. I must do some further research on the details of this trip (that included a visit to Le Corbusier's office, where Kahn's childhood friend Norman Rice worked). I wonder, for example, if he made it to Greece in 1929. If he did, I wonder if he intersected with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and architecture fellows like Richard Stillwell.

This morning, I decided to visit William Whitaker, director of the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives that includes the Louis I. Kahn Collection. Whitaker is a fountain of knowledge about Kahn and the architectural culture of Philadelphia in the 1920s. We had a wonderful conversation, and I'm grateful that he let me barge in to his office without preparation. He agreed that, unlike the American Academy in Rome, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens is invisible from the architectural literature despite its Architectural Fellows program. Whitaker showed me some amazing photographs showing Louis Kahn visiting Corinth, standing in front of the Temple of Apollo in 1951. Louis Kahn's visit to Greece must definitely become a chapter in my larger research project of Corinth's relationship to the avant-garde. The best study of Kahn's travel sketches is Eugene Johnson and Michael J. Lewis, Drawn from the Source: The Travel Sketches of Louis I. Kahn (Cambridge, 1996) that accompanied an exhibition at Williams College.

One of my objectives for the summer is to explore the archive of Richard Stillwell, particularly his architectural work in France (restoring Gothic ruins after World War I) and his architectural fellowship at Corinth. Stillwell and Kahn have an indirect connection, which might turn into yet another chapter of research. Robert Venturi (who was Kahn's student and teaching assistant) also studied with Stillwell at Princeton. This summer, I hope to study Stillwell's personal notebooks, especially his 1921 diary from the Architectural Restoration in France project. Stillwell seems to have been one of Georg von Peschke's closest admirer and friend in the 1920s and 30s. Stillwell's son (also Richard) will be a great source of information; in fact, he remembers meeting Peschke as a young kid in Acrocorinth. I hope to interview Richard Stillwell, Jr. this summer and visit his great collection of Peschkes. William Whitaker encouraged me to interview Robert Venturi, as well, stressing that Venturi is extremely generous with scholars.

Ryan Stander: Topos/Chora

Last summer, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus had a novel idea, an artist in residence program. Photographer Ryan Stander spent the season with the archaeologists, (as we would now say) "embedded" in the team. The fruits of this project are now on view at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks, N.D. During preparation for the exhibit, I was invited to contribute an essay reflecting on Stander's work. I picked one photo, a kind of self portrait, and wrote about it. The exhibit is now on-line and you can read my reflections here. I am honored to have been invited on this project, a rare example of interdisciplinary collaboration between art, archaeology and the theory of both.

Thinking about the photographic landscape comes at an opportune time for me, as I get ready to start a mapping project this summer in collaboration with Todd Brenningmeyer at Maryville University. Using a combination of balloons, kites and survey, we hope to document a series of urban forms across Boeotia, Phocis, Eleia and Karpathos in Greece. Our idea is to produce aerial digital images with limited topographic survey (G.P.S.) Using the topographic coordinates as anchors, we will geo-rectify the aerial photos and digitize the wall elements visible within them. As a result, we use the photographs to investigate general landscape issues, but also as the base for new urban maps. Many of the sites we will be surveying are situated in difficult and rocky mountain tops. Traditional survey would be extremely strenuous. This will be an experimental season. If our process works, we might just take the show on the road and create a permanently nomadic field project.

I am receiving immense inspiration from my colleague Scott Wright who teaches painting and photography (and a fantastic art history course on Art and Jazz). If you look at Scott's work, you'll note the interface between aerial photography and landscape painting. Scott is also artist-in-residence at the Wohlsen Center, a new organization at F&M devoted to ecology and sustainability. Ryan Stander (see his blog, Axis of Access) has introduced me to the New Topographics school of photography. Just this last week, Scott and I started an informal reading group to deal precisely with issues of ecology and landscape art.

Stella: Athenian Agora

Last year, I learned that one could watch Greek movies and old televion shows online. And I poured over Το μινόρε της αυγής (The minor key of dawn), the 1983 TV series whose soundtrack I had loved for many years. Then, I moved on to classic b/w movies and came across Stella (1955), directed by Michalis Kakoyannis and staring Melina Merkouri. Filmed in Athens, the urban scenes include powerful references to historical topography and archaeology. I have watched the film a couple of times and made a mental note to do some research on the monuments and urban vistas. I thought I might be the only one paying attention to those subtle details until my copy of the last Journal of Modern Greek Studies arrived in my mail. The October 2009 issue is devoted to the Marshall Plan, but it includes Artemis Leontis's review of Yannis Hamilakis' celebrated Nation and Its Ruins and Argyro Loulaki's Living Ruins, Living Conflicts. Leontis' essay is titled "Archaeology in the Neighborhood: Views of the Ancient Agora and Other Ruins from Outside the Gate" (JMGA 27, 2009, 417-432) and it includes the first scholarly citation of this blog (THANK YOU!!!)

I was thrilled to discover in "Archaeology in the Neighborhood" that I wasn't the only person to have noted Stella's importance as a mid-century text. Leontis points out the contextual role that archaeology plays in the movie. This is simply a brilliant set of observations. For better or for worse, Melina Merkouri was made famous through Never on Sunday (1960). Jules Dassin, director and Merkouri's husband, plays a naive American philhelene "Homer Thrace from Middletown, Connecticut" (where Dassin was born) who tries to reform a prostitute from Piraeus. For the longest time, I have wondered whether Dassin or Merkourci knew of Homer Thompson, who was excavating the Athenian Agora through the 50s and 60s. Dassin's Homer, I suspect, might not only refer to the ancient bard, but also to Homer Thompson. Two years later, Dassin directed another movie with Merkouri, Phaedra (1962), which strikes a clear archaeological chord. Merkouri plays the wife of an Onassis-character who falls in love with her son-in-law (played by Anthony Perkins). Perkins and Mercouris first meet at the British Museum in front of the Elgin marbles. It's a beautiful movie (soundtrack by Mikis Theodorakis) that never reached the popularity of Never on Sunday. But Stella is truly the intellectual forefather of all these films, and it introduces the archaeological motif. As Leontis shows, the American excavations of the Athenian Agora bear witness to the films' plot. For those readers that are either archaeologists or modern Greek specialists, I urge you to see Stella immediately and look out for the ancient monuments (the Theseion), the Byzantine churches (Saint George; Holy Apostles) and the excavations (Agora). You can see the movie here (with subtitles). But before seeing the movie, you must read Leontis' observations:

"Evidence of the Agora excavations' uninviting feeling for Greeks who witnessed them appears unexpectedly in another Greek source: Michael Cacoyannis's classic film Stella, released in 1955. In it, the Agora is the backdrop, and Stella's apartment, the scene of extramarital drama, sits alongside the excavation site on the Plaka's western edge. At the time of the filming, the American School's 'big dig' was at the point of completion, having removed, along with all the extant homes, 250,000 tons of dirt and debris from post-classical remains. The reconstruction of the Stoa of Attalos was in progress, but barely visible, as it had just reached ground level. A vast expanse of mounds and trenches loomed darkly behind Stella's apartment. The site makes several cameo appearances from different angles, the most important of which comes at the film's turning point, about 52 minutes from the opening credits, when Stella's abandoned boyfriend Alekos retraces his steps from his asphyxiating upper-class home home in Kolonaki (Lykavitos's Church of St. George can be discerned behind him as he descends) to the Roman Agora. Passing the Gate of Athena Archegetes, he follows a narrow street, opposite the Church of the Holy Apostles, then turns into Stella's alley and heads up her steps. When Stella does not answer the door, he walks to the other side of the building and calls up to her windows. Stella pushes her lover Miltos away and peeks through the blinds, watching as Alekos steps back blindly into the road, with the excavation site spread out behind him like a vast grave. Both Stella and the excavations become mute witnesses to Aleko's accidental death by a passing car." (p. 420)

Thinking about the Athenian Agora, Nikki Sakka's, "The Excavation of the Ancient Agora of Athens: The Politics of Commissioning and Managing the Project" (in Singular Antiquity) and Craig Mauzy's, Agora Excavations, 1931-2006: A Pictorial History (2003) are great essential prerequisites.

Movies like Stella invite revisiting. On the one hand, they offer fantastic historical evidence of an older more beautiful Athens before its unchecked concrete expansion. On the other hand, they reveal central motifs of self-presentation and domestic anxieties. Overshadowed by Italian neorealism, the golden age of Greek cinema is both lightweight and provocative. In addition to the archaeological subtexts, Stella has an extraordinary sophistication in its set design, directed by painter Yannis Tsarouchis. One day, I would love to read/write a comparative study of the exterior urban scenography and the interior rooms. Tsarouchis uses a technique that is evident in his paintings, aligning the characters with objects of great poetic depth. Watching Stella, note for example the role that interior lights play, how they align with characters. Note the role of doors opening and closing, especially doors that also carry mirrors. One could write an essay about electrification, light projection, Greek domestic space, and the technicalities of film. The film would have originally been projected by a bright light source from the back of a movie theater. Keep that in mind as bare light bulbs illuminate the interior spaces of the nocturnal scenes. This reminds us of the bare lightbulbs of Tsarouchis' interiors. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the Tsarouchis' bare lightbulbs are the technical shame-inducing machines of homosexual desire. With Manos Hadjidakis' soundtrack, and Iakovos Kambanelli's original screen-play, we are in the company of high aesthetics. I would love to know how Tsarouchis, Kakoyannis and Hadjidakis may have interacted with the Agora excavations. Unfortunately, Melina Merkouri, in all her admirable Elgin-marble activist, has left us with a very superficial scenario over the conflicts of foreign archaeology.

My mother, my uncle and aunts grew up in Plaka, all born around the time that the Americans began the Agora excavations. I once asked them how the excavations affected the life of the neighborhood. My uncle pointed out how grateful the neighborhood was for the employment that the excavations offered, especially after World War II when much of Athens starved. My mother, who was a little younger, remembers using the excavations as a playground, literally climbing in and out of pythoi. Having just seen Anne McCabe's paper "A Middle Byzantine Neighborhood in Athens: Recent Excavations in the Agora" (see 2010 AIA annual conference), I suddenly visualized the 1930s excavations as a playground of subterranean wells and storage jars. And suddenly remembered Luigi Pirandello story "The Jar," beautifully dramatized in the Tavianni brothers' Kaos (1984).

All these thoughts and allusions bring us back to Yannis Hamilakis and his discussion of pre-modern archaeology (in Nation and Its Ruins, and in Singular Antiquity), to Gregory Jusdanis' "Farewell to the Classical: Excavations in Modernism," Modernism/Modernity 11:1 (2004), pp. 37-53 and to Hamilakis' response. William Caraher is working on an essay on dream archaeology, namely the use of dreams in predicting site locations (see here). Dimitris Plantzos is also working on non-archaeologists' archaeology (see "Displaying Modernity," and other postings in (pre)texts). Between Hamilakis, Leontis, Jusdanis, Caraher and Plantzos, I sense a thrilling new vibe. I'm staying tuned for the fruits of these insightful observations that are derailing archaeology into meta-positivist directions.

Ruins: Feedback

The last couple of postings on punk archaeology have produced some wonderful comments on Facebook that I cannot resist from sharing. Thanks to my supportive friends. You make blogging a satisfying endeavor (one always wonder if anyone is reading out there).

STEPHENNIE MULDER

"Kostis, hard to put into words the emotions this evoked for me, especially since I spent my teenage years running around with a bunch of kids who (thought they were) punk and hanging out in ruins too. Since I grew up in Salt Lake, they were not these nineteenth-century East Coast Gothic-tinged ruins, but, still. I often wonder if the same deep melancholy I got in those spaces, the heavy and intoxicating sense of past lives, ordinary and mundane, their loves, deaths, celebrations and Thursday night dinners, was somehow related to my interest in archaeology. Ruins have the ability to conjure a certain type of melancholy that is like nothing else in human experience, I think. Did you know mourning over ruins is a major theme in Arabic poetry? One of my favorites:

At the way stations
stay. Grieve over the ruins.
Ask the meadow grounds,
now desolate, this question.

Where are those we loved,
where have their dark-white camels gone?

-Ibn Arabi

Thanks for this, and I spent a long time looking at the photographs you linked to, as well."

Stephennie is a friend from UPenn Art History. She is professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin and specializes in Syria. We've recently reconnected thanks to the power of Facebook.

OMUR HARMANSAH

Pogue Harrison on the sight of ruins:

"One could say that, in its world-forming capacity, architecture transforms geological time into human time, which is another way of saying it turns matter into meaning. That is why the sight of ruins is such a reflexive and in some cases an unsettling experience. Ruins in an advanced state of ruination represent, or better they literally embody, the dissolution of meaning into matter. By revealing what human building ultimately is up against -natural or geological time- ruins have a way of recalling us to the very ground of our human worlds, namely the earth, whose foundations are so solid and so reliable that they presumably will outlast any edifices that we build on them." Robert Pogue Harrison, The dominion of the dead 2003: p. 3.

Omur is an old friend from UPenn. He is a specialist in the architecture of the ancient Near East and professor of archaeology at Brown University. Among his many specializations, Omur is especially active in archaeological theory. See, his Theoretical Archaeology Group here.

RYAN STANDER

"Hey Kostis. Are you familiar with Jeff Brouws work? As a photographer he follows the in the New Topographic lineage looking toward the landscape as cultural product/artifact. http://www.jeffbrouws.com/series/main_discarded.html

Ryan is an MFA student in photography at the University of North Dakota. His work explore the nature of place/space through artistic and liturgical lenses. Ryan discusses his work and process on a great blog, Axis of Access. Last summer, Ryan was the artist-in-residence at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus. His work in Cyprus is currently exhibited in Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project at the Empire Arts Center, Grand Forks. It was an honor to be invited to write an interpretive essay for Ryan's exhibition. I've never met Ryan in person, but the blogosphere has brought us together.

Camden: Whitman, Smith, Vergara

Walt Whitman spent the end of his life in Camden, N.J., not far from where Patti Smith spent her childhood. While growing up at Germantown, Philadelphia and then Deptford, N.J., Smith would visit the Whitman Hotel in Camden and imagine that her poet hero once inhabited the spaces. Whitman's trajectory of American poetry extends to William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, both from Paterson, N.J.; interestingly enough, Williams was Ginsberg's pediatrician and wrote the introduction to "Howl." From Ginsberg, the trajectory continues to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, an inheritance that neither musician undervalue. The celebration of the every-day, even if it smells of sweat and dirt, is central to Whitman's Amerian tradition. This is what architect Louis Sullivan called the "physiology" rather than the "physiognomy" of American life. Sullivan, who coined the "form follows function" equation was himself not a reductivist; his functionalism was "physiological" not technocratic. If American life has been suffering economic ailments, its physiology is evident not in the great skyscrapers of the spirit but in its ruins of its post-industrial cities.

Patti Smith is not alone to bring us back to Whitman's Camden. Camilo José Vergara, the Chilean-New Yorker photographer has devoted his career in documenting America's fallen urban condition. His American Ruins (1999) was a landmark publication, appearing at the same time that a California school of sociologists (Edward Soja and Mike Davis) turned Marxism's attention from the superstructure to the base, from a functionalist view of the city to a consideration of space. Vergara's photographs have appeared in numerous publications and exhibitions since then. But I would like to highlight one particular project, Invincible Cities, where Vergara turns his attention directly onto Camden. Vergara has been producing what he hopes will culminate into "A Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto." Invincible Cities offers Camden as a case study. An interactive database allows the viewer to navigate through Vergara's photographs across space and time.

Vergara has been photographing the American ghetto since the 1970s. His perseverance matches Jacob Riis, while his methodology combines the sociologist's lens with the documentary rigor of Bernd and Hilla Becker. Invincible Cities takes Vergara one step further. I suspect that Patti Smith would find Vergara's lens a little too literal. Walt Whitman might protest the slickness of the digital colors (he would prefer the texture of male sweat). Even if sensibilities differ, Camden needs revisiting and Vergara has let us perform the very kind of scholarly voyeurism that could lead into action if not the transformation of our civic psyche.

Hospital Ruins: Patti Smith

Rebecca Solnit's ruined hospital experience reverberates in Patti Smith's memoir, Just Kids, which, last week climbed to the 7th spot in the New York Times nonfiction best seller list. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were regular visitors to Coney Island at a time when the side shows were still surviving. They saw Snake Princess Wago and a flea circus at Hubert's on 42nd St., which closed in 1965. They also visited a small museum with body parts and human embryos in jars. Robert Mapplethorpe became obsessed by the idea and sought to find some of his own specimen. The search lead them to a ruined hospital. The experience seems straight out of a magic realist novel. Patti Smith writes,

"He [Robert Mapplethorpe] asked around where he might find something of that sort, and a friend told him about the ruins of the Old City Hospital on Welfare (later Roosevelt) Island [picture left]. On a Sunday we traveled there with our friends from Pratt. There were two points on the island that we visited. The first was a sprawling nineteenth-century building that had the aura of a madhouse; it was the Smallpox Hospital, the first place in America to receive victims of contagion. Separated only by barbed wire and broken glass, we imagined dying of leprosy and the plague.

"The other ruins were that left of the Old City Hospital, with its forbidding institutional architecture, finally to be demolished in 1994. When we entered it, we were struck by the silence and an odd medicinal smell. We went from room to room and saw shelves of medical specimens in their glass jars. Many were broken, vandalized by visiting rodents. Robert combed each room until he found what he was looking for, an embryo swimming in formaldehyde within a womb of glass." (p. 68)

On the walk back to their home, "... just as we turned the corner to Hall Street, the glass jar slipped inexplicably from his hands and shattered on the sidewalk, just steps from our door. I saw his face. He was so deflated that neither of us could say anything. The purloined jar had sat on the shelf for decades, undisturbed. It was almost as if he had taken its life. 'Go upstairs,' he said. 'I'll clean it up.' We never mentioned it again. There was something about that jar. The shards of heavy glass seemed to foreshadow the deepening of our days; we didn't speak of it but each of us seemed inflicted with a vague internal restlessness." (p. 69)

Hospital Ruins: Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit helped me articulate some threads of Punk Archaeology in her essay "Abandon," in A Field Guide of Getting Lost (New York, 2005, pp. 87-109). Solnit describes her own discovery of punk at the age of 15, "Punk rock had burst into my life with the force of revelation, though I cannot now call the revelation much more than a tempo and an insurrectionary intensity that matched the explosive pressure in my psyche." Solnit's revelation was more than a musical discovery, it was a shift in incorporating the city within the realms of the natural wilderness. Punk directed Solnit and thousands of other youngsters in the 1980s to connect the surrounding post-industrial decay and the inner self. After all, isn't that one of culture's primarily roles, to negotiate between exterior and interior worlds? In the 1990s, selected neighborhoods went into choreopraphed reinventions. New York got Dinseyfied and hipsters became just marketing demographic. Attention shifted from archaeological realism (a desire to see things as they are and adjust aesthetics accordingly) to historicist melancholy (a desire to relive earlier generations' angst through self-fashioning). Such developments make the 1980s seem like a distinct cultural period, where punk and archaeology united.

Reading through Patti Smith's memoir made me re-read Solnit's essay (read tomorrow's posting). There is one particular detail that unites the two experiences, namely the incorporation of hospital ruins into a search for meaning. Solnit begins her essay with an adventure that, in retrospect, seems like a classic punk pursuit, searching for abandoned buildings and seeking to incorporate them into aesthetic life through photography, music and film.

"The most beautiful thing in the abandoned hospital was the peeling paint. The place had been painted again and again in pastels, and in the years of its abandonment these layers flaked into lozenges and curled scrolls, a different color on each side. The flakes clung to the walls like papery bark and piled up like fallen leaves. I remember walking down one long corridor illuminated only by light from distant doorways. There the paint dangled from ceiling and walls in huge wafers, and my passing stirred the air enough that some came drifting down down in my wake. The movie we made there was was too grainy to show such delicate details, but I remember one passage in it where I was coming down such a corridor and the shafts of light behind me were so strong on either side of my neck that my head seemed at times to detach from my body and hover above it. I had become its haunting wraith.

"That was when I was twenty, half my life ago, and a boy my age made the most politely democratic proposition I ever received: would I like to make a move with him in the ruined hospital near my San Francisco home? I would, we did, and we spent the next six years together in amazing tranquility and stayed close for a few years thereafter... It was the early 1980s, and looking back I can see that it was a sort of golden age of ruins.

"Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear we were living at the end of something--of modernism, of the American dream, of the industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was all around us in the ruins of cities. The Bronx was block after block, mile after mile of ruin, as were even some Manhattan neighborhoods, housing projects across the country were in a state of collapse, many of the shipping piers that had been key to San Francisco's and New York's economies were abandoned, as was San Francisco's big Southern Pacific rail yard and its two most visible breweries. Vacant lots like missing teeth gave a rough grin to the streets we haunted. Ruin was everywhere, for cities had been abandoned by the rich, by politics, by a vision of the future. Urban ruins were the emblematic place for this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic, and like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a worldview with a mandate on how to act, how to live." (pp. 87-88)

The image at the top is a photo by Camilo Jose Vergara, who will be the subject of a post later this week. The photo, "Henry Horner Homes, 2051 W. Lake St., Chicago, 1995" was featured in Vergara's recent Slate article, "American Ruins: Nature is Taking back These Buildings," (Jan. 15, 2010).

Lancaster: Architecture of Faith

Although I am bursting with topics to blog about, I have been quiet on OBS mostly because I have been setting up another blog, a blog for my class "Lancaster: Architecture of Faith" (F&M, ART 271). Inspired by Bill Caraher's Public History Internship Program, I decided to turn my seminar loose in the blogosphere. I set up Lancaster Architecture over the weekend and made my students submit all of their research on the blog. This reaffirms our commitment to public knowledge, but it also lets the students share their work (both text and image) in real time. Knowing that their research is made instantly available to the public, including the communities that they are writing about, will elevate accountability and rigor. You can visit the blog here:

http://lancasterarchitecture.wordpress.com/

So far, the students have only met once. The postings to-date reflect their first assignment. Each student had to visit 5-6 churches/synagogues/mosques and report on history and architectural condition. The numbers at the beginning of each entry comes from A. Hunter Rineer, Jr.'s catalog, Churches and Cemeteries of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster County Historical Society, 1993). Within the first two weeks of the class, the students will have reported on over 100 buildings. Already, this will be the largest record of Lancaster's religious architecture available. After the first two weeks, students will focus on individual case studies and issues.

For more information about the class, see earlier postings. The class syllabus is posted here.