Old Smyrna Excavations


Book Description

"Excavations at the early Greek city of Old Smyrna were carried out jointly by British and Turkish teams. This volume presents a detailed account of the temples themselves, as cleared by the British team. The most important was that under construction c. 610-600 BC, though this was never completed; most of its superstructure apparently ended up in emergency walling, evidently constructed during the siege and sack of the city by Alyattes of Lydia in c. 600 BC. Nevertheless it was already a monumental Aeolic stone temple of superb quality, and it is of the greatest importance for our understanding of the emergence of East Greek architecture. The evidence for its increasingly ambitious predecessors and, mostly more modest, successors is also presented."--Jacket.




Two Oxen Ahead


Book Description

TWO OXEN AHEAD This revealing study of farming practices in societies around the Mediterranean draws out the valuable contribution that knowledge of recent practices can make to our understanding of husbandry in prehistoric and Greco-Roman times. It reflects increased academic interest in the formative influence of farming regimes on the societies they were designed to feed. The author’s intensive research took him to farming communities around the Mediterranean, where he recorded observational and interview data on differing farming strategies and practices, many of which can be traced back to classical antiquity or earlier. The book documents these variables, through the annual chaîne opératoire (from ploughing and sowing to harvesting and threshing), interannual schemes of crop rotation and husbandry, and the generational cycle of household development. It traces the interdependence of these successive stages and explores how cultural tradition, ecological conditions, and access to resources shape variability in husbandry practice. Each chapter identifies ways in which heuristic use of data on recent farming can shed light on ancient practices and societies.




The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy


Book Description

Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of Andrea Odoni is one of the most famous paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Son of an immigrant and a member of the non-noble citizen class, Odoni understood how the power of art could make a name for himself and his family in his adopted homeland. Far from emulating Venetian patricians, however, he set himself apart through the works he collected and the way he displayed them. In this book, Monika Schmitter imaginatively reconstructs Odoni's house – essentially a 'portrait' of Odoni through his surroundings and possessions. Schmitter's detailed analysis of Odoni's life and portrait reveals how sixteenth-century individuals drew on contemporary ideas about spirituality, history, and science to forge their own theories about the power of things and the agency of object. She shows how Lotto's painting served as a meta-commentary on the practice of collecting and on the ability of material things to transform the self.







Archaeology and the Senses


Book Description

This book is an exciting new look at how archaeology has dealt with the bodily senses and offers an argument for how the discipline can offer a richer glimpse into the human sensory experience. Yannis Hamilakis shows how, despite its intensely physical engagement with the material traces of the past, archaeology has mostly neglected multi-sensory experience, instead prioritising isolated vision and relying on the Western hierarchy of the five senses. In place of this limited view of experience, Hamilakis proposes a sensorial archaeology that can unearth the lost, suppressed, and forgotten sensory and affective modalities of humans. Using Bronze Age Crete as a case study, Hamilakis shows how sensorial memory can help us rethink questions ranging from the production of ancestral heritage to large-scale social change, and the cultural significance of monuments. Hamilakis points the way to reconstituting archaeology as a sensorial and affective multi-temporal practice.




John Craxton


Book Description

Uplifting and engaging, this story recounts the life and career of a rebellious 20th-century British artist Born into a large, musical, and bohemian family in London, the British artist John Craxton (1922–2009) has been described as a Neo-Romantic, but he called himself a “kind of Arcadian”. His early art was influenced by Blake, Palmer, Miró, and Picasso. After achieving a dream of moving to Greece, his work evolved as a personal response to Byzantine mosaics, El Greco, and the art of Greek life. This book tells his adventurous story for the first time. At turns exciting, funny, and poignant, the saga is enlivened by Craxton’s ebullient pictures. Ian Collins expands our understanding of the artist greatly—including an in-depth exploration of the storied, complicated friendship between Craxton and Lucian Freud, drawing on letters and memories that Craxton wanted to remain private until after his death.




Tense-Switching in Classical Greek


Book Description

Explores the relationship between the present tense and the conceptualisation of 'presence' in Greek from a cognitive perspective.




Karphi Revisited


Book Description

The site of Karphi, situated in the Lasithi mountains of eastern Crete and occupied from c. 1200-1000 bc, provides a rare example of a large-scale creative response to the economic and political crisis that swept the Mediterranean c. 1200 bc. Other settlements established in this period indicate community fragmentation, relocation and defensive planning; but most excavated examples are small, while deposits at larger sites are masked by later remains. Excavations at Karphi in the 1930s undertaken by John Pendlebury for the British School at Athens uncovered roughly one-fifth of the settlement. The present volume publishes in full the data from excavation and survey work carried out at Karphi and in its surrounding area from 2008 to 2012, helping to confirm the complexity and coherence of this large crisis-period community. Key features include a new public building (differing from the Temple explored by Pendlebury); a hitherto unknown district or sub-settlement on Megali Koprana to the south (with evidence for selective re-use later in the Iron Age); and a fortification system (documented and explored for the first time). The project revealed that the site ended in a burnt destruction, suggesting that conflict accompanied territorial expansion as political conditions changed during the formation of Cretan polis-type states from c. 1000 bc. The first scientific studies, including soil and historic land-use surveys, reconstruct the landscape around this new community, together with its subsistence and exchange practices. Understanding of the Middle Bronze Age use of the Karphi peak as a sanctuary is also enhanced by the discovery of associated material, likely from an auxiliary area, under crisis-period buildings




Live Alone and Like It


Book Description

In this witty, engaging guide, a renowned Vogue editor takes readers through the fundamentals of living alone by showing them how to create a welcoming environment and cultivate home-friendly hobbies, "for no woman can accept an invitation every night without coming to grief." "Whether you view your one-woman ménage as Doom or Adventure, you need a plan, if you are going to make the best of it." Thus begins Marjorie Hillis' archly funny, gently prescriptive manifesto for single women. Though it was 1936 when the Vogue editor first shared her wisdom with her fellow singletons, the tome has been passed lovingly through the generations, and is even more apt today than when it was first published. Hillis, a true bon vivant, was sick and tired of hearing single women carping about their living arrangements and lonely lives; this book is her invaluable wake-up call for single women to take control and enjoy their circumstances. With engaging chapter titles like "A Lady and Her Liquor" and "The Pleasures of a Single Bed," along with a new preface by author Laurie Graff (You Have to Kiss A Lot of Frogs), Live Alone and Like It is sure to appeal to live-aloners—and those considering taking the plunge.