Members of the Class of 2011-12 had much to say about the rewards and benefits of their year at the School. Here, several Associate Members discuss their research topics and talk about progress made on their dissertation research.
William Nolan Bruce
University of Wisconsin
Kress Art and Architecture in Antiquity Fellow
Industry, community, and the sacred: Life outside the city walls at Sardis
In my dissertation I am studying the material remains from a sector excavated at Sardis, the capital of Lydia, during the 1960s. This sector, called Pactolus North, is an important site in the history of metallurgy and coinage at Sardis.
The Lydians are credited in the ancient sources with producing the first coinage in the world, made of an alloy of gold and silver called electrum. Electrum can occur naturally or can be manufactured artificially. It has been assumed that the first coins were made of electrum because the Pactolus River contained electrum. No ancient source, however, claims that the Pactolus contained anything other than pure gold.
At Pactolus North we have the first evidence of a process known as cementation, which separates electrum into gold and silver. It has been assumed that this process was developed for the purpose of separating natural electrum from the Pactolus River into pure gold and silver once electrum coinage went out of use. Recent geological studies, however, have shown that electrum was likely never present in the Pactolus or the surrounding Tmolus Mountains. I have been reevaluating this original published hypothesis to corroborate with the new evidence.
When electrum coinage first began to be minted, the Lydian empire was expanding rapidly and tribute and war booty were flooding the king’s coffers. Precious objects and unrefined metals were likely part of this tribute, if we compare Herodotus’ accounts of later Persian tribute, which include huge quantities of gold dust. Another passage in Herodotus makes it clear that much of Croesus’ wealth was in the form of gold dust, which would have been unrefined and of varying degrees of purity. The use of electrum in the earliest coins seems to have been a way for the Lydian king to give a standard value for a metal, the purity of which was difficult to determine.
The authority of the king to set the value for electrum would have extended only as far as the borders of the Lydian empire, and early electrum coins did not seem to have circulated abroad. The king’s motivation was not to facilitate trade for merchants, as has been suggested, nor to pay mercenaries, another commonly accepted theory, as the coins did not circulate outside the areas of Lydian control. I suggest that the king was paying his own people with these early coins for the extensive building programs begun during that period in Sardis.
I have also been reexamining the religious history of this area of Sardis, as there is an altar to the goddess Cybele built within the industrial complex, believed to have been a thank offering for the technology of separating gold and silver. This altar was augmented and enlarged in the middle of the sixth century. It has previously been suggested that this alteration indicated a change in cult practice. This hypothesis has generated much discussion about the Persian domination of Sardis after 547 B.C. and the imposition of Persian religion on the Lydian people. My research has led me to dispute this hypothesis. Persian rule meant a change in loyalty and to whom one paid his taxes, but Lydian religion, as far as we know, was allowed to continue. The altar at Sardis is one of the very few insights we have into Lydian religion, and my dissertation will be the first full examination of it in the context of the domestic/industrial setting.
I am extremely grateful to the Kress Foundation, and I hope to repay their generous grant with a useful contribution to our understanding of the Lydian empire and its most lasting legacy, the invention of coinage. I also hope to clarify the nature of Persian rule in such an important area of the empire, the terminus of the Royal Road connecting East and West.
David Matthew Buell
SUNY–Buffalo
Doreen C. Spitzer Fellow
Urbanism and settlement archaeology in the Bronze Age Mediterranean: A comparative approach
My dissertation is concerned with the development and functions of prehistoric cities in the Mediterranean and their relationship (i.e., sociopolitical, economic, and ideological) with their hinterlands. This is a comparative study that examines five areas of the prehistoric Aegean, including Alalakh in southern Turkey/northern Syria, Pylos on the Greek mainland, Galatas in north-central Crete, and Maroni/Kalavassos A.D. in the southeastern part of Cyprus. These sites were specifically chosen for their geographic distribution, chronological variation, and high level of previous exploration, including both excavation and survey. The physical data for my dissertation includes the architecture of the major settlements within each one of the above-listed polities, especially as they pertain to planning initiatives that promote the ruler’s or, more generally, the city’s position within society. The second source of data is derived from information collected through surveys of each one of these areas. This data serves to elucidate the nature of the interactions between city and hinterlands. And finally, textual information from both Alalakh and Pylos supplements inferences derived from the above two sources of data.
Given my research questions and the large amount of available data, I spent much of the first semester in Athens working in the Blegen Library in an effort to finish synthesizing previously published information for each one of my major settlements and any additional excavated settlements within the territory of each one these polities. During the second semester and well into the summer I made a number of visits to each of the primary sites (with the exception of Alalakh) that my dissertation is concerned with in order to acquire further architectural data. I also visited a number of sites situated within the hinterlands of each of these major centers in order to check preexisting data and develop an understanding of the spatial relationships between these sites and those of the center. During intermittent periods in Athens and later on Crete, I spent considerable time updating my databases for each of these regions, inputting pertinent information into a GIS, and, perhaps most importantly, completing several chapters of my dissertation, including the chapters for my case studies of Alalakh and Galatas.
Sara Jane Franck
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
John L. Caskey Fellow
Bucolic architecture: Hellenistic pastoral temples in the Peloponnese
My dissertation explores the architectural program of pastoral Hellenistic temples in the Peloponnese and their relationship to functions of the city as well as the significance of their role in the rural landscape.
I made significant progress on several chapters of my dissertation, including one in which I show how Hellenistic temples have been viewed and studied to date, with an overview of modern architectural history. The existing history tends to include only evolutionary assumptions, focusing on a succession of architectural achievements over time reaching their pinnacle in the Classical period, followed by a decline. I explore what the often-used problematic terms “decline” and “decadence” are perceived to mean to antiquity, including the way these terms are used in modern scholarly literature. I illustrate how these two terms limit and downplay consideration of the complexity and innovation of Hellenistic architecture, as well as the Hellenistic period, rich in political, economic, and cultural circumstances.
Another dissertation chapter addresses the widespread phenomenon of religious centers dislocated from city centers in the Peloponnese during the Hellenistic period. This has not been thoroughly explored in current literature and raises many questions of funding and logistics. I discuss patrons and architects, as well as materials used and cost of transport and labor. Using the database I developed as part of my research, I have begun a GIS study to address the significance of this issue and to decipher the extent to which sanctuary construction was determined by proximity to respective cities and role in extra-urban boundaries. An analysis will be run to ascertain the amount of time, energy, and resources required to access and construct these sanctuaries, as well as the visible interrelations between the sanctuaries and the surrounding area.
My research also examines pastoral temples in the Peloponnese with regard to their use, as well as widespread similarity of construction and architecture. More specifically, I focus on significance of setting, topography, vista, and context. These temples were clearly multi-functional and represent an architectural program specific to the Peloponnese during the Hellenistic period.
Thanks to the assistance of the Seventh Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, I was able to visit excavations taking place at the Perivolia temple in Arcadia. This temple is included as a case study in my dissertation, but had not yet been fully excavated. I was able to see the foundations and plan of the structure, as well as the finds being pulled out of the ground to secure the dating. The ephorate graciously provided drawings of blocks, temple plans, and photographs to use for my research.
Aaron Greener
Bar-Ilan University
Jacob Hirsch Fellow
Late Bronze Age imported pottery in the land of Israel: Between economy, society and symbolism
I arrived in Greece with the goal of strengthening my knowledge and familiarity of the Late Helladic (and Minoan) pottery vessels, and of the population that produced and consumed them. This expertise of the typology and chronology of these vessels is extremely important to my doctoral work as I attempt to define the social significance and value of these (as well as Cypriot) vessels among the Southern Levantine population during the Late Bronze Age. I am doing this by studying the distribution patterns of the imported vessels on a regional level as well as within the sites.
The imported vessels represented high-quality products; they were hard fired, often elaborately painted, and they came in a wide range of shapes. It is likely that these physical properties of the vessels played a role in their attractiveness to local consumers. Moreover, imported vessels allowed their owners to be part of the world from which the artifacts derived and emphasized their capacity to extract the objects from that world. The factors that dictated the distribution patterns are interpreted as part of a comprehensive socioeconomic analysis of the Late Bronze Age society, taking into account both the Mediterranean trade networks and local distribution systems.
The collections of Mycenaean pottery vessels are quite small in Israel, and so I set off to handle and study samples of these vessels while in Greece. The most obvious and accessible places were at the Corinth Museum (which holds items from Kurakou and Zygories, as well as from Corinth itself), and the Agora in Athens. Using Penelope Mountjoy’s various publications, I was able to locate, study, and photograph specific items. The ASCSA has a useful study collection, as well; and the Knossos museum collection offered the prospect of browsing through the LHIIIA-B pottery from Tiryns. My year in Greece definitely contributed to enhancing my doctoral research and my knowledge of the vessels, and I am sure this will contribute towards a deeper and more meaningful dissertation.
Ioanna Moutafi
University of Sheffield
Ione Mylonas Shear Fellow
Bioarchaeological analysis of the LHIII cemetery of Voudeni, Archaea: Towards a holistic understanding of burial practices and their relationship to social structure
I was granted the Ione Mylonas Shear Fellowship in support of my doctoral research, whose goal is to investigate the complex relationship between burial practices and social structure through a holistic bioarchaeological approach to the mortuary data from Voudeni, a large Late Helladic III (1400-1100 B.C.) cemetery in Achaea, Greece. The Voudeni cemetery, consisting of more than 70 chamber tombs with multiple burials, was excavated systematically in the 1990s by Dr Lazaros Kolonas and provides a uniquely large and well-documented body of archaeological and skeletal material, spanning the entire Late Helladic III period. My research focuses on the detailed study of around 20 tombs that contain well-documented skeletal material, and for which the archaeological analysis has been concluded by the excavator, and examines burial practices as indicators of the human actions that reflect how people perceive and create social structure. The ultimate goal is to advance Aegean mortuary research by developing a bioarchaeological methodology for linking mortuary assemblage analyses to social inferences.
In Athens, I was able to conclude successfully the analysis of the osteological material that was transferred to the Wiener Laboratory. In addition, during three different trips to Voudeni, I was able to collect additional data from the excavation archives, which complemented the data of Kolonas’ monograph and helped me to resolve specific questions in relation to the bone distribution within the tombs.
The variety of preservation conditions in the Voudeni material offers valuable information in terms of the reconstruction of the taphonomic history of the interments. Furthermore, the osteological analysis has already revealed unprecedented details of the burial practices, as well as clues that could have never been detected during excavation. The demography of the tombs is variable: each tomb contains 5 to 30 individuals, of both sexes and of various age-at-death categories. Questions related to the differential mortuary presence or visibility of different groups are now informed by unexpected evidence: for example, non-adult individuals are manifested much more often than previously thought, while the presence of totally unexpected age categories (e.g., neonates) is also attested. Similarly, differential treatment between groups of different horizontal status (sex, age) is also manifested, but it is not the norm.
Specific types of burial practices that have been suggested in recent Aegean mortuary studies (e.g., secondary acts) are confirmed and illuminated by the basic results of the completed data collection. Analysis of the observed bone frequencies can reveal the type of secondary act (e.g., extended vs. selective bone removal). Great variation is noticed in the case of Voudeni. It is clear that some of the tombs have been much more extensively used than is suggested by the number of the final interments, indicating that a significant quantity of previous burials was not re-deposited within the tomb but completely removed out of it. Different treatment of different body parts, after skeletonization, is also manifested.
Finally, some trends in palaeopathology and occupational activity markers are already noticed: differences are mostly observed between different tombs and not between different groups within the same tomb. It is certain that the final palaeopathological analysis will offer some interesting observations around these patterns.
Robert Joseph Nichols
Indiana University
Edward Capps Fellow and Harry Bikakis Fellow
The Rhetoric of Timōria in Athenian Forensic Oratory
My dissertation seeks to illuminate Athenian social values through a comprehensive study of the Greek value term timōria used by litigants in the courts of classical Athens (508-322 B.C.E.). The subject of vengeance in Athenian legal, social, and philosophic discourse has received considerable treatment over the past two decades; scholars, however, have not fully appreciated how and why litigants invoke the concept of timōria, commonly translated as “vengeance” or “punishment.” Not only do litigants cite the desire for personal vengeance as a legitimate motivation for litigation, they also recommend that jurors, as agents of the community, join them in seeking vengeance on wrongdoers to punish them for legal and moral transgressions. The frequency of these claims suggests that Athenian audiences were receptive to them, yet scholars have not addressed the fact that litigants actively sought to reconcile their personal interests in taking vengeance with those of the city. By analyzing how litigants present timōria (and related lexica) in several key speeches, I argue that they, and the logographers who provided them with their speeches, employed a “rhetoric of timōria” that sought to blur the difference between personal vengeance and collective vengeance/punishment.
My first chapter investigates attitudes towards interpersonal violence in Lysias’ On the Murder of Eratosthenes (Lys. 1) and Demosthenes’ Against Meidias (Dem. 21). While both speeches address the issue of retaliation for personal slights, Lysias and Demosthenes present competing arguments based on the exigencies of their cases. Lysias’ client, Euphiletus, killed Eratosthenes after he found him in bed with his wife. On trial for murder, Euphiletus defends his choice to exact immediate physical vengeance by fashioning himself as the embodiment of the city’s collective retribution, demonstrating that the law supports the prerogatives of dishonored husbands who pursue timōria as he did. Demosthenes, by contrast, defends his choice to pursue legal, rather than physical, timōria against Meidias when the latter struck him publicly at the City Dionysia. By prosecuting Meidias instead of returning the blow, Demosthenes faced suspicions that the attack was not severe or that he was vindictively escalating a private quarrel. But Demosthenes capitalizes on his restraint by stressing the public nature of his personal timōria, since his prosecution of Meidias allows the jurors to exact their own long-awaited vengeance from Meidias. Casting the city’s collective interests in personal terms analogous to his own, Demosthenes gives his jurors personal and public grounds to convict Meidias on the spot as a threat to the entire community.
My second chapter investigates how the prosecutors in Lycurgus’ Against Leocrates (Lyc. 1) and Dinarchus’ Against Demosthenes (Din. 1) present timōria. The rhetoric of these speeches deviates from what we typically see in public prosecutions, since these prosecutors deny personal enmity and timōria as motivations for litigation, styling themselves as solely public-spirited. Nevertheless, when these litigants encourage their jurors to convict the defendants, they appeal to them as individuals and not simply as representatives of the community. Thus Lycurgus argues that the jurors should regard public crimes as personal slights and those who commit them as personal enemies. Invoking timōria more times than any other orator, he calls on his jurors as men to demonstrate their courage by taking angry vengeance on the unmanly coward and deserter Leocrates, charged with treason for leaving Athens before the Battle of Chaeronea. In this way, Lycurgus transforms the courtroom into a battlefield performance of masculine virtues and may have helped the Athenians negotiate the shame of military defeat.
My third chapter examines how legal discourse negotiated the problem of timōria after the restoration of the democracy in 403, specifically the Amnesty’s injunction “not to remember past wrongs” committed under the Thirty. As recent scholarship has shown, the Amnesty did not preclude the possibility of litigation for past wrongs, and in fact the civil war became a talking point that required litigants to reconcile their conduct during and after the civil war with values promoted by reconciliation. Defendants in dokimasiai (scrutiny before taking public office) were especially vulnerable to charges that they profited under the Thirty, and they often declare that they did not use the opportunity for lawlessness to exact timōria from their enemies. Following a discussion of these examples, I analyze the presentation of timōria in Lysias’ Against Eratosthenes and Against Agoratus (Lys. 12-13), two vigorous attempts to avenge the death of a kinsman murdered by the Thirty. In the case of Against Agoratus, the speaker casts the murder of his cousin Dionysodorus as one example of the personal and public wrongs committed by Agoratus as a tool of the Thirty. He merges his obligation to avenge his kinsman’s death with the jurors’ obligation to avenge the death of citizens loyal to the democracy and appeals to the jurors as philoi of the dead, duty-bound to honor their memories and avenge them by convicting Agoratus.
My analysis of these cases demonstrates that while certain details circumscribed how litigants packaged timōria, they did not prevent the exploitation of the term and its corresponding mental attitudes. In fact, jurors were highly attracted to the ethic of vengeance so long as it was reconciled with collective values. Furthermore, litigants may have used the ambiguity of the term as a discursive tool for navigating tensions between private vengeance and public punishment in Athenian law and society: while litigants use and abuse the concept of timōria to achieve their narrow personal ends, the discourse of timōria in which they engage may serve a broader social role. The rhetoric of timōria may have helped the popular audiences serving on juries to come to terms with inherently problematic features of their shared legal and social experience. If we can understand how litigants made persuasive arguments using timōria, we can better appreciate Athenians’ complex attitudes towards vengeance and the transformation of them through legal discourse.
Emilia Oddo
University of Cincinnati
Homer A. and Dorothy B. Thompson Fellow
From pots to politics? Analysis of the neopalatial pottery from the north slope dump at Myrtos Pyrgos, Crete
The subject of my dissertation focuses on the study of a Neopalatial ceramic assemblage of circa 1,500 sherds retrieved in the area and within a large cistern in the North Slope of Myrtos Pyrgos.
My goal for the year was to produce the two core chapters of my dissertation, one relative to the description and discussion of the assemblage itself and the other discussing the history of Myrtos Pyrgos from an archaeological point of view. In order to successfully achieve my goal, I had to work on two different fronts. On one side, I needed to complete the examination and study of the pottery, kept at the Stratigraphical Museum of Knossos (Crete). On the other side, I needed to have access to the original notebooks, plans, and sections of the excavation of Myrtos Pyrgos, all of which are kept in the house of its excavator, Mr. Gerald Cadogan, in England.
The choice of working on these particular two chapters while at the School was therefore far from accidental: both of them required continuous traveling to Crete and a long trip to England. Thanks to my fellowship, I was able to travel to Knossos on several occasions. The repeated exposure to the pottery assemblage at different times of the year was fundamental not only to complete my work on it, but also to consult the material at different stages of my research and therefore with always renewed interest, aiming each time at answering specific questions. This held especially true after November, when I took my trip to England to meet Mr. Cadogan. The information retrieved in that work session and carefully reassessed upon my return to Greece enabled me to write the chapter on the history of Myrtos Pyrgos. This was quite an enterprise in itself, as nothing extensive and detailed has ever been published on the archaeological history of the site and its excavation.
The product of this work was a new understanding of the site and its history and, with it, a better-articulated outline of my dissertation. Besides the writing process, however, what I consider the most important fruit of my cross-study of the excavation notebooks and the pottery is a more detailed and precise understanding of the stratigraphy of the Cistern and the position of my assemblage within it. This is an interesting angle I had not anticipated that is now offering me the opportunity to investigate issues related to the formation processes of the deposit.