Buildings

Two Article Tuesday: On Cyprus

Cyprus has long hung out “betwixt and between” the Aegean Greek world and the Near East. As a result, scholarship on Cyprus can sometimes be marginalized neither being “Greek” enough to appear in the places where scholars publish on the Greek world or Near Eastern enough to appear in appear in typical Near Eastern venues. The tendency for Cyprus to fall between these two academic spheres becomes particularly noteworthy when it comes to the publication of post-prehistoric sites and material.

It is happy coincidence then that the American Journal of Archaeology and Near Eastern Archaeology both feature articles on post-prehistoric Cyprus. 

Article the First

Michalis Karambinis’s article “The Gladiatorial Spectacles in Cyprus and the Enigma of the Amphitheater at Salamis,” in the most recent AJA 129.2 (2025) offers an intriguing survey of Cypriot amphitheaters with particular attention on the amphitheater at Salamis. Karambinis traces the emergence of gladiatorial combat in Cyprus and associates it, at least partly, with modifications to theaters in Paphos, Kourion, and Salamis. These modifications, which were well-known from elsewhere in the Roman world, involved transforming the stage area with a post-and-net barrier so that wild animal shows were possible and the spectators would be safe.

The paper goes on to argue that Paphos was the first city to receive a proper amphitheater with curved sides. At the same time, the appearance of an inscription suggests that Salamis received an amphitheater as well. Excavations before the 1974 invasion produced an amphitheater, but Karambinis showed that this was not, in fact, the amphitheater mentioned in the inscription, but a 4th or 5th century structure built atop the earlier amphitheater. It may be that this building dates to the massive urban renovations associated with the naming of Salamis the capital of the island in the 4th century. This is rather conjectural, but the dating of this amphitheater to Late Antiquity adds it to the growing list of monumental structures from the 4th-7th century on the island.

Article the Second

Jolanta Młynarczyk’s “Ritual Banqueting at a Hellenistic Sacred Area on the top of Fabrika Hill, Nea Paphos” appeared in the latest issue of Near Eastern Archaeology 88.1 (2025). In it, Młynarczyk details the discovery of three new ritual dining spaces on the Fabrica Hill in Paphos dating, it would appear, to the Hellenistic period. These seem to be broadly associated with a sanctuary to Paphian Aphrodite constructed atop a rock cut platform. Because the area saw both contemporary and later quarrying and these structures were erected upon bedrock, stratigraphy was largely non-existent. Młynarczyk and the Cypriot, Polish, and French excavators, however, were able to reconstruct some sense of phasing on the basis of bed rock cuts and in a few cases the contents of pits containing the discard from ritual dinners.

The most intriguing thing to me was that these ritual dining rooms were outside and quite small. This suggested to Młynarczyk that members of the religious and presumably social and political elite would recline in these areas. Their being carved into the bedrock of Fabrica Hill would literally anchor the participants in the landscape where they’d be partly below the level of the ground. Considering that Nea Paphos was a new foundation during the Hellenistic period, one wonders if the construction of dining rooms carved into the bedrock served to conjure a more ancient and even autochthonous origins for the city, it’s deities, and even its elite. To be clear, this isn’t an argument that Młynarczyk advanced and such rock cut ritual dining rooms aren’t that uncommon elsewhere in the Mediterranean (in fact, we surveyed around one at the site of Cromna in the Corinthia). It may be that the soft limestone of the Fabrica Hill and the level surfaces created by quarrying for the new city created spaces suitable for periodic ritual dining.

While neither of these articles are going to make me rethink everything I know about Cypriot archaeology, it was exciting to see two article from the historic period appearing in two major journals at the same time. Let’s hope this marks the beginning of a new wave of publications on post-prehistoric Cyprus!

Three Things Thursday: Writing, Reading, and More Writing

It feels like a good time to offer a Three Things Thursday post as it’s not the Third Thursday of the Semester. Such alliteration will not occur again until the Thirteenth Thursday and who knows what’ll happen to me by then!

Thing the First

Here’s a little Writing Wednesday update. I had a good day writing yesterday on the heals of my first writing group meeting. I’m crediting that writing group. I won’t regale you with the whole thing, but it continues my recent thinking about walls (and the Hexamilion Wall in particular):

We are living in a time of walls. From the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to Trump’s much scrutinized promise to build a wall along the US border, the appearance and disappearance of walls has punctuated the turn of the century world and triggered an outpouring of popular and scholarly work on walls. Ancient walls have featured prominently in these conversations with Hadrians Wall (as well as the Great Wall of China) taking pride of place. In popular and even scholarly literature, these walls have emerged as archetypal border walls despite the considerable ambiguity around their actual function in the past. In fact, the reputation of ancient walls allowed Randall Maguire to claim in a recent article that “architects designed the old walls to drive off and annihilate the invaders” (Maguire 2023). Putting aside the naive character of Maguire’s statement — which I suspect was meant more as a glib dismissal of the utility of ancient walls to inform contemporary border policies than a piece of historical interpretation — ancient walls and borders continue to fascinate modern commentators. 

For the last several years, with the generous support of Jon Frey and the Michigan State Excavations at Isthmia, my colleagues Scott Moore, Richard Rothaus, David Pettegrew, and I have been studying the fifth-century Hexamilion Wall at Isthmia. This 7.5 mile rampart formed a barrier across the Isthmus of Corinth linking the Corinthian to the Saronic Gulf. It featured numerous towers and in the 6th century saw the addition of two fortresses: one on the west end and one at the site of the former sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia. Historians and archaeologists generally attribute to Justinian. The wall and its fortresses seemingly served as a barrier preventing the passage of an armed force from the north to the south. 

This summer David Pettegrew and I seem to have identified the previously overlooked eastern end of the wall, but I won’t talk much about that today. Instead, it is this work that we’ve done in collaboration with Prof. Frey that I’d like to focus on today. In particular, my paper will focus on the study of a second-century AD Roman Bath which the builders of the fifth-century Hexamilion Wall incorporate into its structure. Our interest is in the relationship between the bath and the wall between the fifth and eighth centuries. My hope is that this will contribute to not only how we understand the Hexmilion Wall in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine landscape of Greece, but also how we understand walls more broadly. To this end, I’m going to try to demonstrate how a better appreciation of the history of the Hexamilion Wall can contribute to how we understand contemporary border strategies and move beyond Randall Maguire’s ham-fisted assessment of ancient fortifications in productive ways.

Thing the Second

Here’s something in the spirit of Teaching Thursday! What to do when no one reads? This week in my undergraduate methods class about 2/3rd of the student didn’t do the reading. This happens sometimes, but rarely this early in the semester and rarely do so many students simply decide not to read.

What made it amusing for me is that it has happened to me so rarely in recent memory that I really struggled to figure out what to do. This group of students seem likely to be a challenge and I need to develop some strategies for how to move class forward on days that students don’t read.

Thing the Third

What is the writing for the public? Finally, I really enjoyed our first writing group meeting of the semester. We had a nice conversation about the virtues of public writing and there seems to be a lot of support for it in the group.

The one question that I came away with though is whether public writing has to mean writing for a mass audience. It seems increasingly to mean that and I’m not sure that it’s good thing especially as the desire for eyeballs seems have resulted not in a more accessible media, but a media that is rushing to the lowest common denominator in a desperate race to capture clicks and views.

That said, no one think that something is good just because a lot of people read it, and there is no reason to think that something is bad just because only a few people know it. There are more than a few influential and important pieces of public writing that were never especially popular in their time and some incredibly popular pieces that proved as ephemeral as yesterday’s news cycle.

More on Walls

I’ve been thinking and talking about walls a good bit lately — including an hour long conversation with David Pettegrew about the fortification of the eastern Corinthia. Last week I posted some scrappy notes on the Hexamilion Wall vaguely related to a paper that I’ll give in November at Michigan State. 

David and I discussed three key things relevant to understanding the Hexamilion Wall.

First, we acknowledged that considering how (and whether) the wall functioned as a fortification is important to trying to unpack the motivation for the wall. Gregory argued in the Isthmia dedicated to the wall that is served to protect the Peloponnesus for the kind of large overland invasion witnessed in the later 4th century. The destructive impact of Alaric’s Visigoths might have been at the forefront of the Imperial administration’s mind. The wall would have prevented a large land based army from moving easily into the Peloponnesus. 

Of course, a large land based army invading the Peloponnesus would have been quite an unusual thing historically with only a handful of examples. More than that, there’s little reason to imagine that the Peloponnesus in the 5th century was particularly valuable territory for the Roman state. This isn’t to say that it was not valuable, but an army invading the Peloponnesus would have effectively entered a cul-de-sac and not a particularly profitable place to invade. Moreover, the absence of a wall would have not made the passage south into the Peloponnesus particularly easy. The Venetians, for example, appear to have managed passage south in the Morea through a series of smaller fortifications along the northern side of Mt. Oneion which runs immediately to the south of the Hexamilion Wall. Hellenistic fortifications along the top of Mt. Oneion may represent another method of preventing an army from moving south through various passes into the Peloponnesus. The city of Corinth often served as a sufficient deterrent (or a “fetter”) for armies moving through the region as well. A Hellenistic barrier wall served to block passages into the Peloponnesus, but it was erected by an alliance of largely Peloponnesian cities rather than an entity outside the Peloponnesus (similar to the Venetian walls which we’ve connected to the Second Venetokratia).

In short, the Hexamilion Wall is a bit strange when considered in light of earlier efforts to fortify the Isthmus and when considered in the larger context of Late Roman strategy. It may be then that residents of the Peloponnesus lobbied for the construction of the Hexamilion. Or that it served a strategy dictated by defense in depth which created “speed bumps” designed to slow the movement of any invading army and manifested itself in city walls, rural fortifications, garrisons, and even barrier walls like the Hexamilion. Later sources, such as Procopius, point in this direction. 

This brings us to the second point: perhaps the wall’s value both in the 5th century and later was largely symbolic. There is no doubt that Late Antiquity was an era of monumentalized architecture. The construction of city walls, massive basilica style churches, monumental villas, and dramatic urban features characterized a theatrical-turn in Late Antique architecture. The vivid use of walls to symbolize cities (and regions) in mosaic pavements, for example, stresses their prominence in the representation of the city in Late Antiquity and corresponds to ambitious urban fortification campaigns around the Empire. 

If the Hexamilion is as much symbolic as strategic, its location at both a point of north-south transit and east-west movement across the Isthmus makes sense. It would represent both an expression of imperial power, but also — as David noted to me — an expression of local power and wealth. Travelers through the region would have either passed through the wall to points south or walked in its shadows as they moved east-west to either Kenchreai or Lechaion. In later centuries, the construction of monumental Christian basilicas similarly marked the presence of Christian, ecclesiastical, regional, and even imperial authority. Later inscriptions — such as those crediting Justinian and Viktorinus from Isthmia and Corinth — reflect the deep entanglement of sacred power, imperial power, and fortification which by the 6th century appears to be standard in many places around the empire. In this case, the wall might represent the power of the empire (and its increasingly entanglement with sacred power) to protect its communities. In this context, the strategic needs of the wall would have been secondary to its symbolic power. This is also in keeping with a history of symbolic gestures by emperors at the Isthmus.

We might complain that such a gesture seems dramatic and inefficient, and that would certainly be true, but it is hard to imagine that Nero’s doomed effort to dig a canal across the Isthmus was any less of an inefficient and dramatic gesture. After all, Roman engineers were no fools and they must have understood that the topography and geology doomed the project from the start.

Finally, the research of myself and my colleagues at Isthmia has largely focused on the afterlife of the wall and the buildings adjacent to it on the Isthmus. These communities might have been ignorant of the wall’s strategic or symbolic function when they used its abandoned fortress as a place of burial or occupied the collapsing ruins of a Roman bath building into its ramparts.

On the other hand, these people likely contributed to place making in much the same way as the builders, architects, funders, and defenders of the wall did. As I noted last week, but Jon Frey and myself have noted that despite the monumentalized character of imperial investment in the Isthmus, there are signs of resistance throughout Late Antiquity. While we should not expect these signs to operate on the same monumental level as churches, fortresses, and walls, the presence of fish and boats inscribed in the still-wet mortar of the fortress and wall, the presence of liturgical variation in nearly contemporary church buildings, and the reuse of the wall and fortress at Isthmia as the backdrop for domestic activities and agriculture suggest that Corinthian lives continued the shadow of imperial investment. The walling of the gate to the fortress may suggest, on the one hand, that there was no longer a monumentalized way through the wall after the later 6th century. On the other hand, it hints that there were likely any number of less monumental ways over, under, or through the wall by that time.  

The existence of handmade pottery in contexts adjacent to and inside the fortification may even indicate that the wall did not disrupt the movement of technologies, cultures, and groups through and along the wall in the Late Antique and Early Byzantine period. In fact, the presence of these so-called “Slavic Pots” in contexts along the wall speak to the wall’s irrelevance or even fundamental inadequacy as a barrier. History seems to indicate that the wall never served its strategic function either and was probably always too long to serve as anything more than a proteichisma before the mass of Mt. Oneion or the strategic location of the city of Corinth astride major east-west and north-south routes. Perhaps, in the end, that was all that it was meant to be. 

Walls

I’m starting to read and think about walls more partly for a paper that I’m giving at Michigan State in the fall and partly because at some point Richard Rothaus and Scott Moore and I will have to publish some of our work at the Roman Bath at Isthmia and we need to find ways to think and talk about it that make it relevant to people who do more than just study Late Roman and Early Byzantine Northeastern Peloponnesus (as fine as many of those people are).

As a bit of a challenge, I want to try to blend together my book, the Archaeology of Contemporary America, with our work at Isthmia. This isn’t a very clear plan, but work like Jon Frey’s piece “Boats, Burials, and Beehives: Seeking the Subaltern in the Fortifications at Isthmia, Greece” and the recent debate article in Antiquity which compared Hadrian’s Wall with US-Mexico border wall offer points of departure.

The key for my work is going to be, first, to offer an understanding of the Hexamilion Wall in the landscape of the Corinthia. As any number of scholars have argued — Pettegrew, Frey, Kardulias, Gregory and so on — the Hexamilion would have been a visible and imposing feature in the Corinthian landscape for a millennium. It would have shaped settlement, movement patterns, and at times economic activity during its long life. That said, it is NOT a border wall in a conventional sense. The Roman Empire constructed the wall and for most of the Empire’s existence effectively governed the land to the north and to the south of the wall. It seems likely that for most of the wall’s history, the same ethnicity lived on both sides of the wall, speaking the same language, and sharing a material, religious, and political culture. In other words, this wall didn’t wall someone out and despite it’s massive size and length did not (in the unfortunate language of Randal Maguire) appear to be the case that “[a]rchitects designed the old walls to drive off and annihilate the invaders.”

In fact, the Hexamilion Wall appears to have functioned very similarly to contemporary American border security. Since the US borders are so massive that only the most deranged could imagine a wall running their entire length, the US Border Patrol follows a strategy that recognizes that travel corridors are the most effective places to intercept migrants. These corridors extend for many miles from the borders and this is the justification for the rather generous jurisdiction of the Border Patrol which extends 100 miles from the nearest border (which may be a stretch of coastal line). This means that nearly 200 million American live in areas where the Border Patrol operates. In a post-Homeland Security, 9/11 world this equal parts reassuring and terrifying. If I were honest, it is mostly the latter. At the same time, we can accept that — following Paul Virilio here — that speed has made borders qua territorial borders effectively obsolete if we imagine them as wall, but less obsolete if we imagine them as zones where the authority of the state especially as manifest in fortified and militarized architecture, tactics, and symbolism remains visible and common. In other words, the Berlin Wall was simply one expression of the East German police state which penetrated all aspects of East German (and broader Soviet Block life). In the same way, the presence of militarized law enforcement, expanded jurisdictions of Border Patrol, nuclear missile silos, Strategic Air Command bases, the growing reach of dronoscopy, and national security rhetoric suffuses the American experience. We all live at the borders now.   

The Hexamilion Wall — as wall as a series of smaller fortifications throughout the Balkans — operated along a similar strategy. They represented defense in depth (at best) and (at worst) made manifest the reach of the Imperial authority. What makes the Hexamilion (and other walls in the Roman world) interesting, though, is that despite its status as an imperial monument, they clearly served multiple functions over their history.

[As an aside, it is interesting to note that the Isthmus of Corinth was not just a north-south border as the east-west running Hexamilion Wall would suggest, but also an east-west border between the western and eastern basins of the Mediterranean Sea. As early as late-4th century, Greece came to represent a jurisdictional, linguistic, and even religious border land. Investments by Justinian, for example, including the fortress at Isthmia and the massive Lechaion basilica were part of systematic efforts to fortify spiritually, religious, and militarily, the empire’s borders through a strategy of defense in depth.]

Our research at Isthmia, for example, has primarily functioned to highlight the the later uses of the wall and in this way our work is consistent with some of Frey’s arguments surrounding the later modifications to the fortress which saw burials, walled up gates, and the possible return of the area to agricultural uses. He suggested that some of these elements might hint at resistance to the function of the wall or the exceeding short term character of its use.

In other words, both ancient and modern border policies appear to investments in persistent infrastructure. At the same time, the permanence of the Hexamilion Wall as a border (or the material manifestation of a border policy) evidently provided illusory at least as far as representing persistent investment by the state. In fact, it appears to have continued to function as an anchor for groups moving through the region whether the garrison at the fortress at Isthmia or residents of what appears to be a short term Early Byzantine settlement in the Roman bath. 

Writing Wednesday: Projects for the Fall

Lately, I’ve struggled a bit to find the enjoyment in writing. I’m not exactly sure what the deal is. Perhaps I’ve been writing too much technical stuff and not enough creative stuff. Maybe I’m just feeling a bit like I’m on a treadmill or writing too far ahead of my reading.

Whatever the reason, I’m struggling to get motivated to do something that I fear will be a drudgery. To help my precarious state of mind, I’ve signed up for a writing group with the idea that maybe the social aspect of writing will help me get motivated again. It should be timely too boot. I have five writing projects this fall. If the prospect of writing for pleasure fails to motivate me, deadlines will have to suffice.

Here are my writing project (and by extension what you’ll be reading on this blog over the next couple of months):

1. Polis I. I’ve written most of my section of the first Polis volume which is due to the publisher by the first of the year, but I’ve still offered to write the conclusion. In some ways, I’m in a holding pattern until I see the various parts of the book, but it is on the schedule.

2. Grants. I have two grant proposals: one for Polis and one for our work in Greece. These are nice things to write because they get me working toward next summer’s fieldwork and thinking through how to articulate our historical and archaeological questions. More than that, neither of these are particularly long grant applications (I think they’re both about 1000 words).

3. Walls as Place Paper for Michigan State. I’ve been reading about walls lately and thinking about ways to talk about the Hexamilion Wall. Right now, I want to do something that emphasizes how the Hexamilion is not a border wall (in a traditional sense of, say, Hadrian’s wall or the Anastasian Walls in Thrace). Perhaps it served to protect both the Peloponnesus as well as a corridor between the mass of Mt. Oneion and the Isthmus through which traffic could move to Corinth and to the city’s western ports.

More than that, over its life, the wall became a landmark and a material asset for communities in the region. The Roman bath at Isthmia which forms part of the southern face of the wall appears to have undergone adaptation that suggests the continued use of the structure for centuries after the bath itself went out of use. While the reuse of monumental buildings in the countryside is not particularly unusual in Greece, it does suggest that the afterlife of the bath and the ongoing presence of the wall created new opportunities for settlement.

This is not particularly profound, but it is work in progress!     

4. City of Work Paper for ASOR. Scott Moore, Nancy Serwint, and I are giving a paper at ASOR in November and I will write the first draft. The goal of the paper is to dig into some of the evidence for industrial activities at the area of E.F2 at Polis with particular attention to the lamp deposit. In particular, I want to toy around with the argument for the construction of industrial terraces on either side of the drainage that runs through the area and connect one of these terracing activities with a unique deposit of lamps. These terraces not only created flat surfaces for buildings, but also produced odd opportunities for the reuse of earlier industrial remains for new (if hard to understand) functions. 

5. Pseudoarchaeology Paper for ASOR. Finally, I’m giving a very short paper on pseudoarchaeology for a workshop session at ASOR. This will be a nice opportunity to present some of my ideas and get some feedback. I also should be fun.

What Would You Say That You Do: Isthmia Final Report

One of the most consistent assumptions about my summers is that I’m digging. I used to try to tell people that I don’t really dig (much less LIKE to dig), but I’ve more or less given up on that. This is partly because it invariably prompts the response: if you don’t dig, what would you say… you do there?

This summer in Greece, my colleagues, Richard Rothaus and R. Scott Moore, and I worked on the Late Roman and Early Byzantine phases of the 2nd-century Roman bath at Isthmia. We were particularly interested in evaluating the conclusions of Tim Gregory in his 1995 preliminary report and Birgitta Wohl in her 1981 article on a deposit of lamps from the bath. 

The main outcome of this year’s season is a 9,800 word preliminary report on our research. This has focused on the abandonment levels. Our goal was to evaluate the evidence for the dating of the abandonment of the bath (and the building of the Hexamilion wall),  to contextualize later material present at the bath, and to inform how we understand the re-use of this monumental structure. Be aware that these are all provisional and at time tentative conclusions.

Here’s a labeled plan of the bath which will help make the report linked at the end of this blog post make sense. 

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Final report from “Slavic Team” at Isthmia.

More than a Church

One of the challenges of a summer reading list is staying to true to it enough to get through at least some of it while also being flexible enough to read unexpected books that come my way. Catherine Keane’s More than a Church: Late Antique Ecclesiastical Complexes in Cyprus (2024) is just such a book. I had read her 2021 dissertation, but I didn’t expect it to be converted so quickly and effectively into a book. But is was and here we are: the first unexpected detour in my summer reading list.

It is a good book and does important work. By my reckoning, it is the first monograph dedicated exclusively to the architecture of Early Christian churches on Cyprus (excluding some solid dissertations and some exceptional site specific studies). More than that, Keane’s emphasis on abandonment (and post-abandonment) processes is timely as it will help inform my work at the Roman bath at Isthmia where we focus on post-abandonment phases. Her work will also inform our work at the site of E.F1 at Polis which shares the depositional and architectural dynamism of many of the churches that Keane describes in her work. 

Here are five thoughts about this important new book.   

1. Early Christian archaeology from an archaeological perspective. A few years ago, David Pettegrew and I edited the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology. In the project, we observed that despite over a century of work on the archaeology of Early Christian sites, monuments, and artifacts, the field remained dominated by approaches informed by art and architectural history. These fields have tended to privilege stylistic analysis and typology in their discussion of architecture. A more formally archaeological approach to buildings focused attention on architectural phasing, depositional processes (especially stratigraphy), and chronology. Of course, this isn’t to suggest that typological discussions don’t consider phasing or chronologies, they do, but archaeological discussions ground these conversations in the relationship between architecture and depositional processes. This allows for more robust analysis of use of the buildings over time and even in abandonment.     

2. Churches as more than just ritual spaces. The biggest benefit that a shift from studies rooted in architectural typologies and styles is that encourages ways of thinking about churches that go beyond their roles as spaces of ritual. Traditionally (and I include my dissertation in this tradition), we have thought about churches primarily as spaces where the Christian liturgy took place. As a result, we have tended to privilege the ritual significance of the clergy at the expense of their growing role in the political, economic, and social life of the communities. Keane’s book, which looks at production sites associated with Early Christian buildings shifts our view of the clergy from ritual practitioners to coordinators of production. Her emphasis on evidence for agricultural processing, ceramic production, bread making, and the place of churches in metallurgical landscapes shifts the conversation about churches from their place as ritual centers (with all the attendant symbolic and religious significance implied) to their place within the Late Roman economic landscape.

3. Churches as dynamic buildings. The challenge Keane faces in understanding the non-liturgical roles of churches is piecing together the dynamic history of these buildings. In many cases the role of churches in production appears later than their original liturgical function. This means that these buildings adapted over time and were perhaps even designed with such adaptability in mind. This not only required Keane to unpack the phasing and chronology of these buildings very carefully and to negotiate, at times, the vagaries of less than ideal excavation practices, but also think about these buildings as places in the landscape that persisted long after their liturgical functions were over.  

4. Late Antiquity as a dynamic period. Keane recognized that church building were not simply icons of Late Antiquity, but dynamic parts of a period which showed change over time. In this way, she contributes to the growing trend toward a “long late antiquity” on Cyprus and throughout the Eastern Mediterranean which recognizes the period as more than simply the persistence of forms associated with “Christianization,” “changes in imperial iconography,” or “decline” and includes an expectation of dynamic trends. Keane’s focus on the 7th and 8th century and the post-abandonment phases of these church buildings shows how the Late Antique economic landscape remained dynamic, resilient, and even prosperous well beyond the traditional “end of antiquity” marked by the Arab raids. She takes particular pains to challenge arguments for the presence of squatters or groups associated with quarrying material from the sometimes damaged churches. Instead she proposes that many churches witness longer term and more systematic use. These buildings themselves represented investments by the communities that paid dividends even after they no longer functioned in their primary liturgical role.   

5. Cyprus as periphery. Finally, there’s something about Keane’s work that continues to support a view of Cyprus as peripheral to imperial affairs. Her interest in the productive aspects of churches is consistent with a view of Cyprus as an economic hinterland in the Late Roman world. Agricultural, metallurgical, and even ceramic production for export fundamentally shaped the Cypriot landscape and contributed to the refashioning of Early Christian architecture. In exchange for these products, Cyprus absorbed imported ceramic, glass, and metal objects that communicated larger imperial and regional values and standards. In this ways, she echoes longstanding models for understanding Cyprus as a source of raw materials and markets for imported goods in the larger Late Roman world in ways that parallels 19th-century models of empire. 

This isn’t to say that she’s wrong or that these ideas don’t meaningfully describe the character of the island in Late Antiquity. At the same time, it is hard to avoid the specter of 19th century models of empire which had such a lasting influence on both traditional interpretations of the island in antiquity and its contemporary history. 

Carceral Corinth

One of the luxuries that I sacrifice when I’m abroad is keeping up with recent publications in my field. My reading tends to become decidedly less professional when I’m overseas. This is mostly because during the day I’m focused on the material culture and archival material in front of me, and in the evenings, I prefer to read to unwind from a busy day.

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That said, I did take a bit of time to read a recent Hesperia article on carceral Corinth: Matthew D. C. Larsen’s “A Prison in Late Antique Corinth,” Hesperia 93.2 (2024), 337-379. The largest part of the article deals with a series of inscriptions found in the northwest shops of the city that indicate that this area was used as a prison in the Late Antiquity. The inscriptions, which were made in paving slabs presumably inside the prison cells, show that prisoners prayed not only for deliverance from their fate, but also that those who put them in prison suffer. I suspect that this is a sentiment as old as prisons themselves. 

The article draws on evidence from the turn of the 20th century excavation notebooks to show that the slabs derived from the pavement of the prison building and the material under these slabs confirms a broadly Late Roman date for this phase of the building. This is moderately interesting, although I would have enjoyed a more detailed description of the modifications of this building to accommodate this particular function. That said, I did enjoy the observation that officials would have moved prisoners through public spaces after they received their sentences in the city’s courts. It would seem that the “perp walk” has an ancient precedent.

I also wondered a good bit about the place of the prison in the city itself. It would appear that the prison occupied a prominent place along the north side of the ancient forum. While I admit to know understanding the condition and function of the Roman forum at the time that the prison functioned, the argument that the location of the prison in Late Antiquity may have invoked the memory of the location of the so-called captives facade in Corinth is appealing. In this construction, prisoners of the state would have become human embodiments of the power of the Roman Empire (or its local surrogate in the city officials in Corinth) to bring order to the unruly. Another intriguing observation is that the prison stood outside, but near to the city wall which Sanders argued ran along the eastern side of the forum. Thus that prison would have been outside of the public space of the Late Roman city, but it might have been in some kind of dialogue with the wall of the city. In an explicitly contemporary reading: the wall and the prison both represent tools for ordering space and society and often coincide.

The most interesting aspect of this article is nestled in the footnotes. The author is evidently working on a monograph titled Early Christians and Incarceration: A Cultural History. Larsen notes that the prison at Corinth is converted to a chapter in a later phase. The role that religious spaces play in bringing order to society has parallels with the role of prisons. The imposition of order through routine and clearly delineated spaces reinforced their moralistic character (at least of contemporary penitentiaries) to reform individuals. At the same time, it is interesting to observe that prisons produced confessors and martyrs whose defiance of authority led to their sanctification. 

The Music of Merrifield Hall

I was tied up in a meeting last night and was not able to attend the premier of some pieces that my buddy Mike Wittgraf prepared from recordings that we made in Merrifield Hall a few years ago before it underwent renovation.

We did this as part of a larger project to commemorate Merrifield Hall prior to it undergoing a massive renovation. To mark this transformation of a key building on campus, we published a book edited  by Shilo Viginia Previti, Grant McMillan, and Samuel Amendolar called Campus Building which you can download here.

Mike added video effects to the audio recordings which capture in his inimitable way the acoustic character of the building and use it as a foundation for a deeper exploration of campus change.

These videos are in some way a sequel to Mike’s earlier work “Hearing Corwin Hall,” which we published with some exegesis at Epoiesen in 2021. They represent and manifest the complex changing taking place on campus and the tensions between looking forward toward the future and recognizing the importance of continuity, history, and tradition in the past. They also communicate the anxieties inherent in these transitions.

New Book Day: Campus Building

It’s NEW BOOK DAY at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. 

I am very excited to announce the publication of Campus Building, a reflective celebration on Merrifield Hall on the campus of the University of North Dakota edited by Shilo Virginia Previti, Grant McMillan, and Samuel Amendolar.

This book brings together archival research, creative writing, interviews, and stunning photographs to tell the story of Merrifield Hall from the perspectives of students and faculty who spent so many hours learning, teaching, and experiencing the building over the years. These reflections and research are timely as Merrifield Hall is currently undergoing a massive overhaul which is forever change the character of its space. 

This book is fantastic. For folks who have followed The Digital Press for years, you’ll see that this book marks a return to the press’s origins in “punk archaeology”. From it’s eclectic formatting to its square page size, diverse perspectives, and (sometimes) raucous tone, this book feels like the best way to remember, reflect upon, and celebrate one of the great old buildings on UND’s campus. 

Even if you’ve never been to UND, don’t think much about campus buildings, and don’t know or care what a Merrifield is, it’s worth downloading a free copy of this book and giving it a look. And if you like, it consider grabbing a paper copy to help support future publications from The Digital Press.

Grab a free copy here or splurge on a paper copy. 

Press release is below the fold.

Campus Building

For Immediate Release

Campus Building

A New Book Celebrating Merrifield Hall on the
Campus of the University of North Dakota

 

Campus Building, from the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, celebrates the experience of teaching and learning in the historic Merrifield Hall. For almost a century, Merrifield Hall has played a formative role both in “campus building” and in the education of thousands of students. This book offers a reflection on is history, its space, and its people as it embodies the dual role of Merrifield Hall both in campus building and as a campus building.

 

This publication is the product of an English graduate seminar on “things” in which Doctoral and Masters’ students explored how we experienced Merrifield Hall as “a thing.” The course included both creative writers and students of literature, and their exploration of the building became an exercise in thinking about Merrifield Hall from a range of theoretic perspectives, traditions, methods, and practices.

 

The book itself came about in the building that it both describes and celebrates. As Shilo Previti who edited the volume remarked: “On a typical day in Merrifield Hall, my work was habitually interrupted by a pastiche of the building’s past, present, and immortal future: beautiful wooden bannisters and amazing long oak tables; clanging pipes screaming through a lecture; a colleague of advanced experience chortling a wacky and somewhat confounding story; trick locks rendering some doors a lost cause while others open and close on their own; hours lost staring down at a strangely beautiful floor or other hidden artwork, including a particular sculpture on my ceiling; a cockroach big enough to (as our office manager says) “steal your lunch money”—Merrifield Hall had it all.”

 

Further informing the book’s character was the imminent overhaul of Merrifield Hall. The reconstruction of this campus building will fundamentally change its shape and historic character. As a result, the contributors to this volume recognized that it was both the end of one era and the beginning of something new. Writing from moment of change offered new perspectives on the building:

 

Grant McMillan one of the book’s editors noted that building’s future shaped his experience: “I’d like to spend a day inside every building about to be torn down; there’s an uncanny freedom to be found in these spaces. On the precipice of being remade, their formalities and policies and protocols briefly relax, and the whole structure exhales.”

 

Samuel Amendolar, who has spent nearly his entire academic career in Merrifield Hall, offers this view: “Campus Building provides a unique interrogation of Merrifield Hall, UND’s architectural gem, not only as a space of higher education, but also an object which has facilitated inquisitive minds across the northern plains for nearly a century. The ongoing renovation of Merrifield Hall, while exciting and refreshing, has inadvertently highlighted the structure’s transient nature; if Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias tells us anything, while the structure may eventually succumb to natural forces, the permanence facilitated by the words of our contributors succeeds in preserving Merrifield Hall throughout this renovation process and beyond.”

 

Bill Caraher, who published the book, concludes: “This project is a great example of how our experiences in a place shape how we think, not only about the place, but also about our world. As UND’s campus undergoes exciting changes, it’s important both to remember how campus buildings once were, and to imagine how new buildings will contribute to life on campus in the future.”

 

The book is available now as a free digital download and as a high-quality color paperback: https://thedigitalpress.org/campusbuilding/.