Byzantium and the Avant-Garde: Excavations at Corinth, 1920s-1930s

by Kostis Kourelis

Hesperia, Volume 76, Issue 2
Page(s): 391-442
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068026
Year: 2007
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ABSTRACT:

In the 1920s and 1930s, members of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens engaged in a dialogue with the avant-garde through the shared discovery of Byzantium. This extraordinary experiment took place in excavations at Corinth, where American archaeologists invented the systematic discipline of medieval archaeology, facilitated an inclusive identity for the American School, and contributed to a bohemian undercurrent that would have a long afterlife. This article situates the birth of Byzantine archaeology in Greece within the general discourse of modernism and explores the mechanisms of interchange across disciplinary and national boundaries, between subjective and objective realms.