Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

We have moved the development infrastructure of Total Open Station from Sharesource to Berlios. Berlios gives us more control on website and repositories administration, and it offers both Mercurial (which is what we're using now) and git (which is what we will be using in the future) hosting.
Despite the lack of news, Total Open Station's development is going on. An alpha quality 0.1 release is expected soon, and after that the whole program will undergo a major rewrite to better suit what we have learned about total stations during the past 11 months (yes, it's just 11 months ago that I had this crazy idea and I''m still surprised by the fact that it works so well even at this development stage).
If you own a total station and want to feel free of using it anywhere, just contact us and send us some sample raw data from your device.

A tap on the door, as I try to deal with the week’s post, and a neighbour bearing a parcel from Brepols.  Yes, it’s the remaining two fascicles of the Patrologia Orientalis of Agapius.  I wrote to them over the Christmas period, asking for them, and never heard back.  Prompt service indeed!

This brings to an end a week which has snowed books.  I mentioned Zamagni’s edition of Eusebius Gospel Questions yesterday; today it arrived — massively quick service that from Amazon.fr — and looks excellent.  I decided last weekend that I needed to read Catullus and Tibulus, for what they say about the Roman book trade.  On Monday I ordered an out-of-copyright Loeb; a couple of days later it arrived at work.  Together with a mail-order pack of 20 100w lightbulbs (used in every house in Britain but now removed from every shop), no day has gone by without a delivery. 

It’s frankly overwhelming.  I’ve been trying to read N. G. Wilson’s Scholars of Byzantium, and being distracted.  Wilson deals with the survival of Greek classical literature in the Eastern Roman Empire, to 1453 — and does it magnificently.  It’s a truly splendid book.  To read it is a liberal education, and if I could give copies to my friends and know that they would read it, I would.  It’s been brought back into print via a print-on-demand service; go and buy it!

The two fascicles of the PO are interesting to see.  One is a shiny new anastatic reprint of 2003, but very good quality.  The other has uncut edges, and yellowing paper, and looks like an original printing — almost a century old!  Evidently not many people ever wanted to buy Agapius!  In a way, isn’t it a privilege to be able to get them?  Isn’t it a blessing that Brepols keep these in print?  Good for them!

The coming of the railroad to Pontiac County was going to be, in the words of a newspaper of the time, ‘our surest hopes of prosperity’. Sad to say, this didn’t turn out to be the case.

My brother Gord made a study of that railroad for his MA thesis, back in ‘92. For his birthday this past year, I took his thesis and re-formatted it using Lulu, and presented him with a hardcover version, complete with new illustrations and maps. Partly I did this because, being a little brother, I was always in awe of my older brother, and my own progression to grad school was in no small way influenced by his experience. I was also partly motivated to publish his work this way because much of his work on our local history gets plagiarized, and I was sick and tired of seeing people steal it.

The book turned out beautifully, and I persuaded Gord to make it publicly available on the Lulu marketplace. So, if you’re interested in the economic, social, and transportation history of Western Quebec (an area of persistent industrial failure!) why not take a look? It’s a great read (but of course, I would say that).

      

I am reading Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code right now. In his discussion on method naming on pp. 110-111 he said something that seemed well said. I thought I would share it.

"People sometimes ask me what length I look for in a method. To me length is not the issue. The key is the semantic distance between the method name and the method body. If extracting improves clarity, do it, even if the name is longer than the code you have extracted."

People at work have commented several times on the rather lengthy method names that I sometimes produce. If I have a method that does some logic to modify a widget in a particular way then I might have a method called "ModifyTheWidgetInSuchAndSuchAWay();" because, well, that makes the naming of the method clear. Who cares if the name is long. The point, in Fowler's words, is that the meaning of the method name should express the meaning of the method body well. If there is a large difference between the meaning of the two you either a) have a badly named method or b) your method is doing too much.

Recently we’ve blogged about the many ways to read the Bible in a year using tools from Logos Bible Software. Within the application, one can make custom reading plans, or you can join an online community of people reading through the same plan using either Global Bible Reader or Bible.Logos.com.

But all of these solutions currently support a 66 book canon only. If you also want to read the Apocrypha, or Deuterocanonical books, either because your faith tradition includes such books or just to learn more about the Jewish writings that appeared during the time ‘between the testaments’ and were read by the early Church, some additional help is needed.

So I’ve made a little Libronix digital book that contains a list of daily readings to cover the Apocrypha in one year. It functions just like other daily devotionals, with a link at the top to jump directly to the current day’s reading. It can also be loaded into your Libronix Home Page in the devotionals section.

This reading plan covers the Eastern Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican deuterocanonical materials. The ‘additions’ to Esther and Daniel are interspersed within and around the protocanonical portions of those books, and Ezra, Nehemiah and the last chapters of 2 Chronicles are included just before the Esdras writings to provide important context for comparison. So if using this in conjunction with one of the other Bible reading plans, you might end up reading some of the books of the Bible twice, but we think this is a high class problem.

Because of some (temporary) limitations to how the Bible data type functions, this first release of the Apocrypha Reading Plan is hard-coded to the NRSV, so we’ve made it free to any customer that already has the NRSV in their Libronix Digital Library. The NRSV is included in all of our base packages, and is also available à la carte.

The NRSV Apocrypha Reading Plan can be downloaded here. Place the file with your other lbxlls book files—the default location is C:\Program Files\Libronix DLS\Resources. Enjoy!

http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-letter-concerning-...

To: ARCHAEOLOGISTS AND THE CONCERNED COMMUNITY AT LARGE

To whom it may, it should or it would concern,

We the undersigned, academics and graduate students who are engaged with the future of archaeology, are deeply troubled by the recent announcement of the termination of eighteen research specialist positions at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the abolishing of those research positions, and the shutting down of their associated laboratories and centers such as MASCA (the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology)

read more

When I was in Egypt before Christmas, I got bitten to pieces by mosquitos.  On mentioning this, David Miller tells me that “canopy” is derived from the Greek word for mosquito-net.

The word is ”k0n0peion”.   The derivation is via late Lat. ‘canopeum’ – perhaps with a supposed connection to ‘Canopus’ .

k0n0ps  (??”cone-face”??) = mosquito.

Imagine all those hard-bitten Greek mercenaries working for the late Pharaohs in the Nile Delta getting bitten, eh?

OK, so this is a slightly delayed New Year post, partly due to the happy fact that I was without an internet connection for most of Christmas. It’s good to go without sometimes!

My love-affair with Mapfish continues with the news that it’s now possible to integrate the google earth browser plugin into your map. I am really keen to try this out, but there is the problem that there’s no google earth browser plugin for linux yet. So it’s going to be a challenge to build this kind of functionality into a map without it being blatantly obvious that it’s not working for a proportion of the audience. I’ll have to ponder this for a while…

In other news- with luck the UK local chapter of OSGeo will get official approval today.  I’ve been quite quiet on the subject of the chapter here on archaeogeek for a while now, but we have been steadily building support and raising the profile of OSGeo in the UK, mainly through attendance at conferences and seminars. Of course if you don’t know about it already we’re also co-organising the first UK Open Source GIS conference, happening on the 22nd of June this year at the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Sciences.  If you’re interested in either the local chapter or the conference, check out the websites, sign up for the mailing list or otherwise make your presence known- the more the merrier!

Open Letter Concerning the Recent Firing of the University of Pennsylvania Museum Researchers:

To: ARCHAEOLOGISTS AND THE CONCERNED COMMUNITY AT LARGE

To whom it may, it should or it would concern,

We the undersigned, academics and graduate students who are engaged with the future of archaeology, are deeply troubled by the recent announcement of the termination of eighteen research specialist positions at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the abolishing of those research positions, and the shutting down of their associated laboratories and centers such as MASCA (the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology). We understand this gesture as a wholesale dismantling of the research mission of the University Museum, which has been at the forefront of international archaeological studies since the museum's foundation in 1887. We would like to bring to public attention that this is a historic decision in the long-term history of the University Museum, and we reject that this is simply a strategic tightening of the belts at the time of a financial crisis, as it has been widely claimed by the Museum administrators in the popular media.

Our main concern is related to the long-term identity and mission of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. We are confident that University administrators are aware of the University Museum's unique status as a research institution that has carried out many historically significant archaeological projects, most notably in the Middle East, the Mediterranean World, and Mesoamerica. In this way, like the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the University Museum has uniquely characterized itself, as stated on the museum's own website, as a research institution to "advance understanding of the world's cultural heritage" (see the Museum's mission statement). We understand the dismantling of the research infrastructure of the Museum as a drastic surgical gesture, a decisive act that will discontinue the possibility of future archaeological research in the above-mentioned fields. We hope that the Museum administration, the Provost, and the President understand the long term responsibilities and the consequences of this historic decision.

Many of these researchers, such as Patrick McGovern, Kathleen Ryan, David G. Romano, Simon Martin, Barbara J. Hayden, Philip G. Chase, and Naomi Miller are high-profile senior researchers in their respective fields. They have contributed to the intellectual environment of the University and the greater archaeological discipline with their research, their numerous publications, and teaching for many years. We feel that the firing of these researchers in this financially strained environment is unfair since they may not be easily employed elsewhere at this time with their laboratory and facilities needs. Additionally, the administration's financially motivated decision not only violates academic ethics of respect to such scholarly accomplishments and intellectual labor, but also ignores the institutional memory of the University Museum all together. We urge the University of Pennsylvania and the University Museum administrators to reconsider their decision, to find ways to restore and fund the research positions, and to rehire for next year the research specialists who are now to be laid off.

We would like to remind the administrators that universities are not for-profit businesses, rather they are institutions of research and teaching whose component parts need to be supported and protected, especially in tough financial times. While calling for the reinstatement of the researchers, we also recommend the establishment of a Archaeological Research Grant Support Office in the University Museum. This will encourage the units to become more financially self-sustaining while at the same time provide guidance and grant-application support for the research specialists to alleviate some of the burden that comes with the arduous process of preparing grant applications. In addition, one of the criticisms directed at such research positions has been their disconnection from the teaching environment at Penn. We suggest then that it would be helpful to redefine these positions with greater interaction with students, some teaching responsibility, and greater public outreach.

We would like to reiterate that the discontinuation of eighteen research positions at the University Museum and the abolition of research centers and laboratories very well might be an irreversible decision for the future of archaeology both at Penn and in the broader field. Furthermore, this is undeniably a reversal of the original mission of the University Museum, as a research institution that supports both public intellectuals and contributes to the scholarly understanding of human past.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

This is AWESOME:

Digital Urban posted that video just the other day, and as they say, the potential is fantastic. More from them:

All you need to make ARplug-in [for sketchup] work is a personal computer, a webcam and a printed code attached to the software.

For optimal functionality, a Dual-core PC with a standard graphic card for 3D videogames are recommended, see AR-media for full details and download.

A free demo version is available with the full version coming in at 99 euros.

      

UCD Scholarcast has released a podcast series featuring highlights from the Sixth World Archaeological Congress’ theme ‘Archaeologies of Art’. Edited by Ian Russell, the series features contributions from Douglass Bailey (San Francisco State University), Blaze O’Connor (University College Dublin), Andrew Cochrane (Cardiff University) and Kevin O’Dwyer (WAC6 Artist-in-Residence). The series responds broadly to the themes raised by the Abhar agus Meon exhibition series hosted at WAC 6.

The series can be downloaded here: http://www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/series2.html

I wanted to mention (slightly belatedly) some exciting developments related to the award-winning Omeka platform for museums, libraries, and other scholarly content providers. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has generously given the Center for History and New Media two grants to add functionality within and beyond Omeka, functionality that I believe says a lot about where both Kress and CHNM think technology is headed in 2009.

First, as we’ve been saying for the last two years on the Digital Campus podcast, we believe expansion into mobile technology is critical for universities, libraries, and museums. There’s still too great a focus on the (desktop/laptop) web. We’re going to do a thorough survey of the use of cell phones and other mobile devices in art museums, out of which will come a series of recommendations about the best use of mobile technology. Moreover, we’re going to produce a suite of prototypes and proofs of concept based on these recommendations.

The Omeka team is already moving full-speed ahead to enable Omeka installations to take advantage of the latest modes of mobile use. By this spring, any Omeka-based site will look great on iPhones and many other smartphones through built-in Mobile Safari and Opera Mini stylesheets. In addition, we’ll release a barcode plug-in to allow institutions to add cell phone readable barcodes to labels in physical exhibits. When visitors to these exhibit aim their camera phones at these barcodes, they will be taken to an Omeka page with more information on the object. Also on the docket are iPhone and Android applications for the Omeka administrative interface (manage and build Omeka items and collections from your handheld; summer 2009), and geotagging, geolocation, and GPS-related services.

We are obviously strong believers in the idea of plug-in architectures. (Firefox has benefited greatly from this ecology of “add-ons,” as has the Zotero project.) A second Kress grant will enable Omeka to add some helpful plug-ins to the dozen plug-ins that are already available. New plug-ins include a CDWA Lite (Categories for the Description of Works of Art Lite) harvester and implementation; Cooliris 3D visualization; and image annotation for MyOmeka, the plug-in that lets visitors save individual items to a personal collection.

Seeing as how I’m ever short on cash, I thought for a moment the following might buy me some groceries. Question arises - what’s the going rate for ‘professional’ blogging? What kind of quality does $15 buy you?

Anyway, if the site gets off the ground, it could well prove interesting, informative, and high quality. Good luck!

From Nigel Hetherington (on whose blog I find a lulu-published ‘Mithras Reader‘):

Articles and Blog entries needed for Heritage Key website

Past Preservers needs your input to a new business venture-Heritage Key

Here’s what they have to say about Heritage Key

Heritage Key - where the ancient world meets the 3D web

Heritage Key provides immersive 3D experiences to explore the ancient world which we will be releasing at around one per quarter. (First one in Q1, 2009; The Life & Treasures of King Tutankhamun)

To supplement the 3D experiences the website is focussed on ancient world sites; providing the best and most up to date information, guides to sites and/or museums and photos of key ancient world or heritage sites and objects.

Alongside that there is a wealth of interesting and relevant material out there on the web, think Flickr for photos or Digg for relevant information and our webby techy team will be bringing it all together.

Last but by no means least…we want as much user generated content as possible and will encourage users to participate by uploading photos, creating groups, writing blogs or travelogs, etc.

So where can you can get involved, well we need your input relating to the first phase of Heritage Key- The Life & Treasures of King Tutankhamun.

We need your articles and blogs on issues relating to Ancient Egypt in general but in particular surrounding the life and death of Tutankhamun

We have three levels of article:-

A Blog Entry, could be a news item, a discussion of a particular object from the tomb, an insight into your research or views, or a comment on another article
Should be around 500 words, and we will pay $15 for all published pieces

Then we have a short article, around 1200 words, again on all aspects of Tutankhamun and the Amarna period, we will pay $25 for all published pieces

Then for all longer articles, we will pay $35 for all published pieces

The focus should be on new investigations, insights, opinions etc

Any questions please ask

All the best Nigel

nigel@pastpreservers.com

      

Press release (January 7, 2009)

...the first effort to provide scholars, policymakers and the public with a comprehensive picture of the state of the humanities, from primary to higher education to public humanities activities. The collection of empirical data is modeled after the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators and creates reliable benchmarks to guide future analysis of the state of the humanities...

Humanities Indicators Prototype

Happy New year everyone. Things are going to be slow here for the next couple of months - I'm taking some proper leave whilst I am on leave, and now more mobile, so am going to step away from the machine and get out the house more, before returning to work full time in April. Normal service will resume then!

It’s here.  It comes with a little application, and runs up to 2005.  Apparently it contains a lot of stuff not in l’Annee Philologique.  Well done, the Gnomon team!

If you recently purchased one of our Mac base packages or crossgraded from the Windows version and are looking for some help getting setup or simply want to get acquainted with what Logos for Mac can do to help improve your Bible study, be sure to check out the seven new training videos that are now available on our videos page or at MacBibleSoftware.com.

Here’s what you’ll find so far:

• First Time Install (New Logos Users)
• Current Logos User Install
• Using the Exegetical Guide
• Passage Guide Tutorial I
• Passage Guide Tutorial II
• Downloading Books
• Adding Books from a Disk

We hope you find these videos helpful. Be sure to check back later. There are many more training videos to come.

For additional help, see the Logos for Mac FAQs.

I happened to see this post at N.T.Wrong, decrying the introduction of CE etc, with which I entirely agree.  Conspiracies against the public are an evil thing; using them to evict Christianity from our society is pretty hateful.

No-one in the UK outside of these state-funded circles seems to use CE.

Rod Letchford has created a new website dedicated to Cyprian.  It’s http://cyprianproject.info/.

At the moment it’s a collection of links, but no doubt will grow! 

Tomorrow I leave for the AIA (Archaeological Institute of America's Annual Meeting). Just like last year, I did a poster on PKAP. This year, fortunately, I was able to create the poster without much trouble, both in the design phase and in the printing phase. That must mean the poster is not very good. Last year the judges thought I had too much text and so this year I eliminated almost all my text. It will be interesting to see if my feedback this year is that I need to include more text.

RSM

I should be studying for exams but I wanted to quickly post about Ada Lovelace Day. The organiser asks for pledges to "publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire". You can find out more about why at the link above, but the point about why role models are important is worth repeating:

Undoubtedly it’s a complex issue, but recent research may shed some light: Psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones.

Well, that’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

Thus was born Ada Lovelace Day, and this pledge:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

Who would you blog about? I've signed the pledge so I'd better start thinking.

[Edited to add: if you're interested in researching and making information about inspiring female role models accessible, you might be interested in 'modern bluestocking'. Contributions and suggestions are very welcome, especially from a technical perspective. And I will be shamelessly checking out suggestions for Ada Lovelace Day to add to the nascent modernbluestocking topic on Freebase.]

Tony Hirst blogged about a JISC survey on good APIs, so if you're an API producer or consumer with a few minutes to spare then have your say on good APIs:

The aim of this survey is to identify best practice which should be adopted when making use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). The feedback will inform a report for JISC on best practices related to the development of and use of APIs in JISC's development activities and will be made freely available.

You might not be directly affected by JISC's funding decisions, but I think the entire cultural heritage sector could benefit from better information on the best practices for API creation and use. Early last year I heard a speaker say 'APIs are UIs for programmers' and the nicer the UI we get to work with, the easier our jobs are. Apart from anything else, the more good examples out there, the more creating an API for any digitisation project will become the norm.

Update (7 January 2009): added links to abstracts

This Saturday, 10 January 2009, Paul Iversen and I will be co-chairing the following panel at the Joint Annual Meetings of the American Philological Association and the Archaeological Institute of America. The panel, on the topic of digital study and publication of inscriptions, is sponsored by American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy. I hope to see you there!

Saturday, January 10, 8:30-11:00 a.m. in Independence I of the Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia:

1. Publishing Image and Text in Digital Epigraphy
   Neel Smith (College of the Holy Cross)
   [ abstract not available ]
   
2. Topic Maps and the Semantics of Inscriptions
   Marion Lamé (Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Italy and Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille 1, France)
   [ abstract in pdf (courtesy APA) ]
   
3. An Efficient Method for Digitizing Squeezes & Performing Automated Epigraphic Analysis
   Eleni Bozia, Angelos Barmpoutis and Robert S. Wagman (University of Florida)
   [ abstract in msword (courtesy APA) ]
   
4. Opportunities for Epigraphy in the Context of 3-D Digitization
   Gabriel Bodard (King’s College London) and Ryan Baumann (Univ. of Kentucky)
   [ abstract in pdf (courtesy APA) ]
   

The latest issue of the American Journal of Archaeology (113.1, 2009) is out, and it's chock full of good stuff. Three articles pertain to Italian pottery of the 5th through 1st centuries BCE. First and foremost for the purview of Tria Corda is T.H. Carpenter's "Prolegomenon to the Study of Apulian Red-Figure Pottery" (39-56; Abstract), in my opinion a must-read.

Carpenter's analysis offers a fresh alternative to the (art historical) orthodoxy represented by the work of the late A.D. Trendall, and places the vases back into their "native" context—at least as far as possible for an object class that has suffered so much from looting: "To use the term 'Hellenized' for [the Italic] people, who had been trading with the Greeks for several hundred years, is meaningless unless the specific meaning is that they were Hellenized in the same sense that mainland Greeks were orientalized in the seventh century" (p.36). Recent scholarly activity has gone far in overturning colonial ideologies both ancient and modern, e.g. in the work of Edward Herring (for a good introduction to current trends, see his "Daunians, Peucetians and Messapians? Societies and Settlements in South-East Italy," in Bradley, Isayev & Riva, (eds.), Ancient Italy: Regions without Boundaries, Exeter 2007, 268-294); that such a well-known class of artifact had escaped such treatment up to now may be a function of the eminence of Trendall in the field. Carpenter also dissociates Taranto from its traditional role as producer of or major influence on Apulian vases, especially with regard to theatrical scenes, and refutes the notion that some scenes on Apulian vases represent images from "Orphic" religion.

Elsewhere, J. Theodore Peña and Myles McCallum discuss evidence for both the pre-Roman and Roman phases of the city in "The Production and Distribution of Pottery at Pompeii: A Review of the Evidence; Part 1, Production" (57-79; Abstract). Notable is the evidence for a Black Gloss Ware pottery production facility dating before the 2nd half of the 2nd century BCE, in the Vicolo Storto Nuovo.

Roman Roth—whose dissertation, published as Styling Romanisation: Pottery and Society in Central Italy (Cambridge 2007), treated Black Gloss Ware in Volterra and Capena—discusses the social implications of the replication of specific ceramic urn shapes in stone during the 2nd century BCE in "From Clay to Stone: Monumentality and Traditionalism in Volterran Urns" (39-56; Abstract).

Hélène Verreyke and Frank Vermeulen report on some results of the Potenza Valley Survey Project in "Tracing Late Roman Rural Occupation in Adriatic Central Italy" (103-120; Abstract), in a region (Picenum) better known for its Iron Age inhabitants.

Nothing explicitly to do with either pottery or Italy, but Stephen V. Tracy and Constantin Papaodysseus' note on "The Study of Hands on Greek Inscriptions: The Need for a Digital Approach" (99-102; Abstract) is very exciting--it means that we can soon replace epigraphists with computers... but seriously, this technique has a lot of potential. I wonder if it could be used to compare the work of known forgers with doubtful inscriptions?

Tom Elliott has built a set of news feed aggregators for topics relating to Ancient Studies. Each of these keeps track of a variety of websites, blogs, and other entities, and informs you whan any of them is updated or added to. Look at the Atlantides: Feed Aggregators for Ancient Studies page, or choose one of them from the list below:

Maia Atlantis: Ancient World Bloggers
This aggregator brings together content from the blogs of the members of the Ancient World Bloggers Group and the eClassics Community, as well as other blogs touching on ancient studies.

Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity
This aggregator brings together content from "ancient world" blogs that also focus on, or frequently address, issues of digital scholarship and teaching, as well as content from blogs devoted to the new (digital) humanities, digital scholarly publishing and open content/data.

Concordia: News and Views
This aggregator brings together blog posts about the Concordia Project from the project's participants. It does not include the Concordia Trac Timeline (with SVN commits).

EpiDoc: News and Views
This aggregator brings together blog posts about the EpiDoc customization of the Text Encoding Initiative (it does not include the EpiDoc SVN Commits Feed, nor the revision feeds for the EpiDoc Documentation Wiki and the EpiDoc Roadmap Wiki).

Pleiades: News and Views
This aggregator brings together blog posts about the Pleiades Project from the project's participants. It does not include the Pleiades Trac Timeline (with SVN commits).

Merope Atlantis: Ancient Inscriptions
This aggregator brings together images and texts of (mostly) Greek and Roman inscriptions from Flickr and various other sources.

Taygete Atlantis: Excavation Blogs
This aggregator brings together blog posts directly related to specific ancient-world, archaeological excavations and surveys.

Do you use or know of other feed aggregators useful for this community? Let me know!

If you're still in town the day after the Annual Meeting wraps up, or if you're just lucky enough to live in Philadelphia, be sure to check out the following lectures on Monday the 12th of January:

Alba Frascarelli: Lost History Rediscovered? The Campo della Fiera Excavations and Livy's Fanum Voltumnae

The twelve peoples of ancient Etruria were said to meet at the shrine of their most important god, the Fanum Voltumnae outside the city of Volsinii, now recognized as modern Orvieto. Only recently have excavations by the University of Macerata begun to identify this all-important site of so much history. Dr. Frascarelli, one of the excavators, will present the latest findings.

Claudio Bizzarri: American Archaeological Projects in Etruria: The Excavations at Poggio Civitelle and Monterubiaglio.

The co-director of joint US-Italian excavations in Tuscany presents the results of this year's campaigns conducted by Florida State University, the University of Oklahoma and St. Anselm College.

Monday, January 12th

Classroom 2

University of Pennsylvania Museum

6pm

The first, fifth, and sixth of the following titles are available online exclusively via the subscription component of Digizeitschriften.

Göttinger Miszellen , Band. 1 (1972) - 185 (2001)
Hermes : Zeitschr. für klassische Philologie, Band 1 (1866) - 132 (2004). [open access]
Historia, Band 1 (1950) - 52 (2003) [also available at JSTOR]
Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, Band 1 (1959) - 45 (2003) [also available at JSTOR]
Studien zur altägyptischen Kultur, Band 1 (1974) - 29 (2001)
Theologische Rundschau, Band 1 (1898) - 20 (1917); Band N.F. 1 (1929) - 67 (2002)

If you'd like to have access to these and the rest of the Digizeitschriften collection, bring it to the attention of your librarians

Start: 2009-04-27

End: 2009-04-28

Timezone: Europe/Rome

Il quarto Workshop Italiano sull'Open Source in archeologia si svolgerà i giorni 27 e 28 aprile 2009, presso la sede centrale del CNR di Roma e sarà organizzato dall'Istituto per le Tecnologie Applicate ai Beni Culturali (ITABC), in collaborazione con l'Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie Informatiche (ISTI), con il patrocinio del Dipartimento Patrimonio Culturale del CNR.
Il Workshop sarà articolato in 4 sessioni di mezza giornata ciascuna. Il tema dell'Open Source verrà sviluppato in tutti i suoi aspetti, tecnici e metodologici, con una specifica sessione didattica prevista per i neofiti e gli studenti, e tre sessioni dedicate agli interventi di studiosi, selezionati dal comitato scientifico su 4 tematiche generali: Open Data, Open Learning, Open Software e Open Processes.
La novità dell'edizione 2009 sarà l'OpenLab; accanto al tradizionale svolgimento del workshop verrà allestito anche un “laboratorio”: uno spazio dedicato all'incontro diretto con i progetti e gli strumenti open source presentati durante il convegno. Qui i relatori potranno fare delle dimostrazioni informali delle proprie applicazioni, consentendo ai partecipanti di testarle, installarle ed utilizzarle. L'obiettivo è quello di diffondere quanto più possibile gli strumenti aperti nel campo umanistico, superando la barriera “del primo utilizzo”.

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So Stearns Coffee, which I had staked out as a personal replacement for the recently shuttered Aromas but hadn't had a chance to visit prior to the December 1st fire, is now closed for good. The owners just sent the following note to their Facebook followers:

So as many of you have probably guessed or assumed by now, Stearns Coffee will be unable to re-open. After carefully considering all of our options, we’ve found that we just can’t rebound financially from this. With that said, we are truly lucky to have so many customers and friends who have offered their love and support. We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to serve these people; you are what made our shop such a wonderful place to be. We will miss seeing your faces and allowing us to be a part of your lives.

Daniel & Marisa

So, in the monthly email newsletter on healthy living that I receive gratis from my beneficent employer, I read:

Find Yourself in the Stressed Lane?

When you find you need to take a moment to relax and slow down, contact The Relaxation Phone Line at [...]. This line is a recorded relaxation message that provides you with an opportunity to unwind and renew for a few minutes during your day. The Relaxation Phone Line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Huh.

Is there also a Relaxation Blog (with a relax-o-feed)? Or maybe an @relaxifier I can follow on Twitter?

Clearly I need more coffee ...

Statistics: gotta love ‘em. And as someone once said, more or less, ‘if you can’t count it, it doesn’t exist’.

On that theme, in my inbox today: a press release from American Academy of Arts & Sciences concerning the creation of statistical ‘indicators’ concerning the Humanities in the United States. I’m willing to bet you’ll find ammunition here for your next faculty meeting. I haven’t had a chance yet to delve, as everything I’m involved with at the moment seems to have the same due date of January 15th… tempus fugit indeed.

Full press release below:

American Academy of Arts and Sciences Launches
Humanities Indicators Prototype

HumanitiesIndicators.org
Benchmarking Humanities in America

CAMBRIDGE, MA - The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today unveiled
the Humanities Indicators, a prototype set of statistical data about the
humanities in the United States. The new on-line resource is available
at www.HumanitiesIndicators.org.

Organized in collaboration with a consortium of national humanities
organizations, the Humanities Indicators are the first effort to provide
scholars, policymakers and the public with a comprehensive picture of
the state of the humanities, from primary to higher education to public
humanities activities. The collection of empirical data is modeled after
the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators and
creates reliable benchmarks to guide future analysis of the state of the
humanities. Without data, it is impossible to assess the effectiveness,
impact, and needs of the humanities.

The Academy project collected and analyzed data from existing sources to
compile a prototype set of 74 indicators and more than 200 tables and
charts, accompanied by interpretive essays covering five broad subject
areas. The Indicators will be updated as new information becomes
available, including data from a survey administered last year to
approximately 1,500 college and university humanities departments. The
Academy views the Indicators as a prototype for a much-needed national
system of humanities data collection.

“Until now the nation has lacked a broad-based, quantitative analysis of
the status of the humanities in the United States,” said Leslie
Berlowitz, chief executive officer of the American Academy and project
co-director. “We need more reliable empirical data about what is being
taught in the humanities, how they are funded, the size of the
workforce, and public attitudes toward the field. The Humanities
Indicators are an important step in closing that fundamental knowledge
gap. They will help researchers and policymakers, universities,
foundations, museums, libraries, humanities councils and others answer
basic questions about the humanities, track trends, diagnose problems,
and formulate appropriate interventions.”

Among the organizations collaborating with the Academy on the effort are
the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy of
Religion, the American Historical Association, the American Political
Science Association, Association of American Universities, the College
Art Association, the Federation of State Humanities Councils, the
Linguistic Society of America, the Modern Language Association and the
National Humanities Alliance.

Almost a decade ago, Academy Fellows Steven Marcus, Jonathan Cole,
Robert Solow, and Francis Oakley joined Berlowitz in recognizing the
need for improved data on the humanities and spearheaded the Academy’s
efforts to establish a data collection system. Other leading humanists,
including Patricia Meyer Spacks, Denis Donoghue, Norman Bradburn,
Pauline Yu, Arnita Jones, and Rosemary Feal helped guide the project.

The need for and potential value of the Humanities Indicators was
described in the Academy’s 2002 report, Making the Humanities Count: The
Importance of Data (available at:
http://www.amacad.org/projects/humanities.aspx).

“The humanities community has suffered from a protracted case of data
deprivation, especially in comparison with science and engineering,”
said Oakley, co-chair of the Academy’s Initiative for the Humanities and
Culture and President Emeritus of Williams College. “We know that public
support of the humanities depends on accurate data. The Indicators
prototype is the start of an infrastructure that will broadly support
policy research in the humanities.”

The Academy’s Initiative for the Humanities and Culture provides a
framework for examining the significance of the humanities in our
national culture. It is a necessary backbone for developing adequate
resources and informed policies to ensure the continued growth and
health of the humanities. The Academy’s work in this area has received
support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Teagle Foundation,
and the Sara Lee Foundation. For more information on the Initiative, see
http://www.amacad.org/projects/humanities.aspx.

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an
independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary
studies of complex and emerging problems. Beyond its work in humanities
and culture, current Academy research focuses on: science and global
security; social policy; and education. With headquarters in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, the Academy’s work is advanced by its 4,600 elected
members, who are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business
and public affairs from around the world. (www.amacad.org)

      

A while back I wrote a little sample of a web crawler. It was not terribly sophisticated but has been the biggest draw to this blog through search engines for some time. This is likely because it ranks very high (why I am not sure) in Google's rankings. For example, my crawler sample page ranks #1 in Google for "c# web crawl" and #3 for "c# web crawler". Neat.

So the other day I dusted it off and started reworking it. It was such a simple sample and I thought some improvements could be made. Lo and behold, I just got an email about a different web crawler written in c#, which you can find here. I haven't downloaded and looked at the source yet, but I figured I would point it out.

Crystal Alberts (Department of English, UND) and I have submitted a white paper to the President of the University in response to his call for trans- and inter disciplinary working groups at the University of North Dakota.  The plan is apparently to target groups with outstanding potential and to facilitate funding either from campus sources or from elsewhere.  Consequently, our White Paper stressed the potential of our group and its need for funding.  As I noted previously in this blog, the president seems to have assumed that a "center" dedicated to the digital humanities already exists on campus; it does not.  I am not sure whether this will help or hinder our chances!

Here's the white paper:

White Paper for a Digital Humanities Group at the University of North Dakota

Digital technology has come to play an increasingly important role in the humanities (i.e., history and literature), the arts, and archaeology.  Scholars are more and more dependent on digital resources ranging from online publications to text queries, archives of digitized historical sources, collections of photographs, and databases.  Students and faculty have found in the new media a way to travel beyond the classroom, to analyze and explore diverse types of historical evidence and data, and to build learning communities together.  The impact of the digital humanities extends beyond the walls of the university and holds forth the potential not only to bring our research and teaching to a broader audience, but also to forge new local and global communities committed to the intellectual and academic mission of the university.  Institutions committed to interpreting, producing, and teaching the emerging, digital media in the humanities will shape the future of the information or knowledge economy. 

While some work in the digital humanities has already occurred on this campus, a more substantial online presence would allow us to open our doors to the wider public and invite them to engage in research and learning in the field, library, and classroom.  Institutions like the University of Virginia and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have long-standing programs in the digital humanities and archaeology; less august institutions like the University at Buffalo, the University of Nevada-Reno, the University of Vermont, and the University of Kentucky have already followed their lead in creating institutional entities to cultivate the development of digital humanities on their campuses.  Centers, Institutes, and Working Groups focus the intellectual resources and develop the cyber-infrastructure necessary to promote research and teaching projects in the digital humanities, arts, and archaeology.  Most federal funding bodies for the humanities now require such established, institutional commitment to cyber-infrastructure and core digital resources before they will fund research projects.  The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) at the NEH clearly states that preference will be given to projects that include freely available digital components that are maintained by an institution.  In the private sector, our expanding information economy demands graduates with degrees in the humanities who have levels of digital literacy that go beyond simple web-browsing to engage the theoretical and conceptual foundations of digital knowledge management.  The University of North Dakota is poised to expand the teaching and research work of digital humanists (in their many guises), which, in turn, will increase the intellectual possibilities for our students, as well as the intellectual, infrastructural, and financial resources available to individual researchers.

Fortunately, the core for such a center exists among our current faculty in the departments of history, English, philosophy, archaeology, art, music, and aerospace, as well as the staff of the Chester Fritz Library (CFL), because they are currently engaged in digital research and scholarship.  For example, based on his archaeological fieldwork in the Eastern Mediterranean, Dr. William Caraher of the Department of History produces digital data ranging from GIS maps to databases, photographs, and new media productions, including two documentaries. Dr. Crystal Alberts of the Department of English worked with students to digitize the UND Board of Regents Minutes from 1883 to 1893; this full-text collection is currently available through the CFL.  She serves as the technical editor for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded Elizabeth Barrett Browning Project.  Dr. Jack Weinstein of the Department of Philosophy and Religion has also asked her to assist him with the digital archive for the proposed Institute for Philosophy in Public Life, a group formed in partnership with the North Dakota Humanities Council and Prairie Public Radio.  In addition, the CFL already has a number of open-access digital collections available, such as UND Image Collection, W. P. Davis Columns, and the MacDonald Cartoons. The English department has also offered a 400-level course in digital humanities or the past two semesters, each had an enrollment beyond capacity.

To remain competitive with our peer institutions and produce students capable of succeeding in a dynamic and challenging economy, it is necessary to develop the infrastructure to support sustained synergistic, transdisciplinary, research and teaching in the digital humanities. A center or working group in the digital humanities will promote the sharing of knowledge among practitioners of digital humanities on campus, collaborative research, and unique instructional opportunities.  Such intellectual adjacency will both promote and develop faculty and student expertise in new media and emerging technologies. The students’ interest in new media has been demonstrated not only by their enrollment in digital humanities courses, but also by their continued involvement with digital projects on campus.  In addition to integrating intellectual resources, this group will allow for physical adjacency in the centralizing of technology. Finally, the creating of a center or working group will focus important attention on the various collections, datasets, audio-visual materials, and new media productions developed at UND. Bringing these resources together in a single, transdisciplinary portal created by our organization will produce data central to assessing the impact, reach, and success of the group and their projects. Moreover, administrative recognition and commitment to a group dedicated to digital research and scholarship improves the chances that federal grants will be awarded to UND faculty.

At present, we have faculty members who have both the technological skills and interest in forming a group dedicated to the digital humanities, arts, and archaeology on campus.  Our group will have three goals.  First, we will promote and support teaching and research in the digital humanities, arts, and archaeology by creating a transdisciplinary working group.  Second, we will use this working group to create a center on campus recognized by the State Board of Higher Education.  Finally, we will seek to make this center self-sustaining through individual and group grants in the digital humanities.  In support of these goals, we have already been working with the help of and in collaboration with the library to ensure that our projects comply with the established standards and best practices across our disciplinary fields (literature, history, art, archaeology, philosophy).  The library also currently has a subscription to CONTENTdm, digital collection management software (limited to 10,000 objects), which is primarily designed for storage and retrieval of images. In addition, thanks to the fundraising efforts and initiative of Dr. Caraher, we have access to five terabytes (TB) of server space for data storage and online delivery.  Because our projects our research oriented, the server space is connected to the high performance computing cluster and will be supported by ITSS through EPSCoR funding.  The formation of this group is also a high priority in the Arts & Sciences campaign.

Despite these initiatives, we need additional resources to make this group and its work function to maximum potential.  Specifically, we would like physical space allocated on campus that is wired for our technological requirements.  Wilbur Stolt has suggested that the library may have such a space for us in the library.  We believe that this space, with minimal remodeling and expense, would be logistically and symbolically ideal.  It is centrally located, and, perhaps more importantly, would allow faculty immediate access to the institution’s information repository.  We would also like $1000 a year for at least the next three years dedicated to increasing the library’s scholarly resources related to digital scholarship and research.  Because this group is meant to facilitate discussion and the exchange of information, we would like to establish a lecture series that would provide a forum for both on campus and off-campus scholars to present their digital research scholarship.  Because this field is ever changing, we would like to offer workshops to train interested faculty in digital technology, again, tapping the knowledge of on campus faculty, as well as bringing off-campus experts in various related fields to UND.  Finally, while we already have dozens of files stored in Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) compliant XML, the standard for full-text digitization, UND does not currently have the technological capability to make them fully searchable online.  As such, we would like to purchase the middleware that would enable these files to be fully functional. This middleware will move our collections beyond static web pages and make them comparable to ones available at the University of Virginia, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.  Neither the University of Minnesota nor North Dakota State University currently have the capacity for sophisticated text anaylses and queries provided by this software.  This software will serve as an instant catalyst for the text digitization projects taking place on campus and garner national recognition.

The digital humanities, as all humanistic inquiry, is inherently transdiciplinary.  Developing the synergy on campus to tap into existing faculty, staff, student, and technological resources will maximize the university’s commitment to engaging the emerging information and knowledge economy.  This keeps us competitive with the activities of our peer institutions and represents an area of expertise that does not yet exist in the state or the region. It will also make our research freely available to the entire state of North Dakota, the region, and the world.  These criteria alone ensure that the UND would be an attractive center for external funding.  In an environment of increased competition for resources, funding a digital humanities working group provides an opportunity to capitalize on resources already available on campus and to perpetuate the very kind of synergistic adjacency that the College and University has already made great sacrifices to achieve.

There’s no replacement for reading the Bible. But there are some very good supplements.

Last week Ryan talked about how you can read the Bible this year with people all over the world using our Global Bible Reader or the new Bible reading plans at Bible.Logos.com. Both are great ways to read the Bible while learning from and sharing with other believers.

If you just want to read by yourself or want to customize your own reading plan, there is the Bible reading feature in the Windows version of Logos. Rather than repeating what I wrote last year, I’ll let you check it out for yourself if you want to learn some tips for creating a reading plan in Logos for 2009.

Another feature in Logos for Windows that I’d encourage you to consider using this year is the Devotions section on the home page. Books whose content is arranged by day of the year are automatically added to the list of available devotional readings that you can choose from.

Here’s just a sampling of the scores of devotional books we have:

• Amazing Grace—366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions by Kenneth W. Osbeck
• Drawing Near—Daily Readings for a Deeper Faith by John MacArthur
• Everyday Blessings by Max Lucado
• For the Love of God, Volume One by D. A. Carson
• For the Love of God, Volume Two by D. A. Carson
• From This Verse by Robert J. Morgan
• Grace for the Moment by Max Lucado
• Into His Presence by Charles Stanley
• More Light on the Path by David W. Baker and Elaine A. Heath
• Morning and Evening by Charles Haddon Spurgeon
• My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers
• On This Day by Robert J. Morgan
• Truth for Today by John MacArthur
• Tozer on the Almighty God: A 366-Day Devotional by A. W. Tozer

To add a book to your daily devotional reading, simply click “Customize View” on home page, scroll down to the Devotions section, and check the box next to Devotions and any of the books that you’d like to read through over the next year. Every day the next devotional will be waiting for you. Just click it to open the current day’s reading.

Some other devotional books that don’t span an entire year but are worth checking out include John Piper’s A Godward Life, Life As a Vapor, and Pierced by the Word.

We trust that God would encourage your faith this year as your read His Word and meditate on its relevance for your life.

The excellent Claudio Zamagni has now published his edition and translation of the epitome of Eusebius, Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum in the Sources Chrétiennes series as “Questions évangéliques”.  It’s available from Amazon.fr.

Some may remember that I commissioned a translation of the Commentary on the Nicene Creed by al-Majdalus, an Arabic Christian writer of uncertain date and affiliation, but probably a 10th century Melkite.  The text has never been published, but I obtained a microfilm of a manuscript from Sainte-Joseph University in Beirut.

I wanted to make it accessible because he might mention a saying attributed to Zoroaster in it; “whoever does not eat my body and drink my blood, the same does not have salvation.”  This saying is from the collections of sayings attributed to pagan philosophers and predicting the coming of Christ.

It seems that the translator has almost completed the translation (he has also transcribed it), a couple of words aside.  I’m looking forward to reading it!  It does indeed include some sayings from Hermes and Aristotle of this kind, although not Zoroaster as far as I can see.

Every once in a while, I have my doubts about the benefits of blogging. But then, magical things happen that would have never been possible in the pre-blogging age. One such event is the following. Diana Wright, NEH Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, sits in the Gennadius Library and considers an article about a treatise that the library's founder, Gennadius himself,

I direct you to Michael Smith's important and interesting comments at Is Precolumbian America part of “The Ancient World” ?, and to my response.

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Lizzy Ha. To receive more frequent updates, join our email listserv. On Campus Joseph DeLappe- You’ll Never Walk Alone: Protest, Memory and Reenactment 2/9/09 http://atc.berkeley.edu/bio/Joseph_DeLappe/  As part of the UC Berkeley Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium, Joseph DeLappe, a Media Artist and Associate Professor [...]

It is the last week before my semester begins so I am frantically trying to get ready. It is always amazing how quickly time flies over the holidays. Two items that caught my attention in the news:

• On the digital front, there is a Twitter phishing scam circulating through Twitter designed to steal login information. It is evidently working well enough that someone was able to hack into CNN anchor Rick Sanchez's Twitter account and post a false message.
• On the ancient history front there was an article about a 3rd century Roman battlefield discovered near Hanover Germany.

RSM

New, or newly discovered, online journals:

• Abgadiyat: Scientific Refereed Journal by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Calligraphy Center
  
• Gradhiva: revue d’anthropologie et de muséologie
  
• Journal of Greco-Roman Judaism and Christianity (JGRChJ)
  
• London Archaeologist
  
• Open Anthropology Journal
  
• Parrhêsia: Newsletter of the Friends of the Coptic Museum
  
• Revue Archéologique
  
• Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale
  
• Rursus: Poétique, réception et récriture des textes antiques
  
• Tyndale Bulletin
  
• Sudan and Nubia
  

Michael Tilgner has compiled an excellent list: E-Journals and Digitized Paper Periodicals (Egyptology) [currently dated December 19, 2008] at the EEF Archives & Links page.

Searching Abzu for "open access journal" will also provide a useful, if long, list.

Charles’s recent post on his new “The Ancient World Online” uses a definition of “the ancient world” that excludes the Precolumbian cultures of the New World (“from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific”). Those of us who work in the Americas are used to being excluded by historians and antiquarians focused on the Classical world. As something that periodically bugs me, though, here are some remarks on the topic. The benign interpretation of limiting consideration this way is logistical—departments, institutes, journals, blogs, and other professional entities must limit their focus for a variety of professional and intellectual reasons.

But all too often the exclusion of New World cultures is caused by intellectual chauvinism or tunnel vision. As an example, consider textbooks on the history of architecture, many or most of which ignore the New World entirely (e.g., Conway and Roenisch 2005; Roth 2007). This is changing now (e.g., Ching et al. 2007; Moffett et al. 2004), a good sign. If the goal is to understand the western architectural tradition, then omitting Mesoamerica or China makes some kind of sense. But if the goal is more general, to look at architecture as a human achievement across space and time, then the narrow focus should be questioned. In other words, if it is assumed that there is some unity to “ancient” cultures that allows their joint inclusion in a category such as “the ancient world,” then it is hard to identify an intellectual justification for excluding the New World.

Now the present blog (The Ancient World Bloggers Group) seems to take a relaxed attitude. Most of the content focused on the Old World, but New World interlopers such as myself are not excluded. As for Charles’s new project of looking at the “Ancient [Old] World Online”, I see nothing wrong with his focus, since it reflects his interests, his knowledge and his institutional affiliation. I am certainly not accusing any of the participants in these blogs of chauvinism or tunnel vision! I guess my peeve is that “The Ancient World” sounds like a broad and inclusive category, when in fact it is being used as a geographically limited category that excludes phenomena that many people would include in their conceptions of the term “ancient.”

PS – I think that this and other work in digital scholarship reported in these blogs is first-rate, and I am jealous that those of us working in the “ancient” part of the New World are far behind you guys!

Ching, Francis D.K., Mark M. Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash
2007 A Global History of Architecture. John Wiley and Sons, New York.

Conway, Hazel and Rowan Roenisch
2005 Understanding Architecture: An Introduction to Architecture and Architectural History. Routledge, New York.

Moffett, Marian, Michael Fazio, and Lawrence Wodehouse
2004 A World History of Architecture. McGraw-Hill, New York.

Roth, Leland M.
2007 Understanding Architecture: Its Elements, History, and Meaning. 2nd ed. Westview, Cambridge, MA.

For more than thirty years Joe and Maria Shaw and their teams have been working on the site of Kommos in south central Crete. They now provide access to both the major publications and the core field and other records for the Kommos excavation through a collaboration with the University of Toronto's Research Repository:

Since 1976 the University of Toronto, in collaboration with The American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Greek Archaeological Service, has investigated the ancient site of Kommos in south central Crete. In this first large-scale Canadian excavation in Greece was revealed a prehistoric Minoan town with a group of large civic structures, also an unusually well preserved Greek sanctuary built over the Minoan remains and used for a thousand years. Study of the Minoan town has been contributing new evidence about the inhabitants’ domestic economy, architectural talents, ceramic chronology, as well as Late Bronze Age trading interconnections in the Mediterranean. Research in the Greek Sanctuary has enhanced our understanding of Cretan temple architecture, religion and ritual activity including animal sacrifice and banqueting. In addition, the remains revealed important information about Crete’s contacts with other lands during the early period of Phoenician expansion to the West.

Excavation requires massive recording both while digging goes on and later, when the remains are to be studied. Such recording and interpreting are ongoing processes, culminating in publication which can inform but can also serve as a foundation for other students of the past to build upon. Publication allows the larger community to access such knowledge. In this case, T-Space makes available a series of records: not only the publication in the form of thick, richly illustrated volumes, but preliminary levels of recording and interpreting that acted as steps leading to final publication. The preliminary stages in this case consist of excavation daybooks with the day-by-day reports by the trench supervisors of discoveries made. There also are preliminary reports of the results, some only in the excavation archives, but others published separately in periodicals by senior members of the excavation team.

Backing for this Kommos venture was provided by the publicly funded Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, also by The Institute for Aegean Prehistory founded by Malcolm Wiener, The University of Toronto, as well as by individuals, including Lorne Wickerson.

Table of Contents:

Kommos

• Site Area Terminology
  


• General Observations
  


• Collections in this community
  
  
  
  • Books
  
  
  • Concordances and Bibliography
  
  
  • Interviews with Pitsidia Elders 1977, 1978, 1979
  
  
  • Journal articles, conference papers and book chapters
  
  
  • Pottery Tables
  
  
  • Specialist reports 1986, 1991-1997
  
  
  
  Sub-communities within this community
  
  
  
  • Trench Notebooks and Trench Reports
  
  
  
  

Have other archaeological projects made this level of documentation available to the public?

License or copyright restriction are expressed on the item level. Many items are labeled with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license. Items unmarked appear to have copyright in the published version.

Happy new year. Bidding has opened (and closed?—I don't pretend to know anything about how this works) for the construction of a new National Archaeological Museum (not to be confused with the existing Museo Civico) in Canosa di Puglia. The planned complex will incorporate the remains of the Baptistery of S. Giovanni with its attached basilicas of Sta. Maria and S. Salvatore (as seen in the plan). The entire project runs to the tune of 16 million euro.

[From CanosaWeb, and again]

Marco Büchler at the University of Leipzig just