Ok, it’s quite an obscure source for archaeological news of Europe – NEWS.com.au – but they are running a headline at the moment about the discovery of two large sarcophagi in ancient Corinth. The story is that they are so big that ancient Greeks in 900BCE can’t have done it using only human power but…
Classics
archaeology, Classics and contemporary art – the connections
The interest in the decision to cancel a Stanford acquisition of Dennis Oppenheim’s sculpture “Device to root out evil” is growing.[Link] [Link] Yesterday and today the New York Times has been pressing for interviews and comment – Is this censorship? What does the decision say about Stanford’s commitment to the arts? How does the art…
Cleveland Art Museum – another case of dodgy dealing in the art market?
Another major museum may well be supporting the illicit trade in dodgy (stolen, looted, even fake) works of art. (See my comment in February on the Metropolitan in New York and some major collections of Graeco-Roman art – [Link]) CLEVELAND (AP) – Some archeologists say the Cleveland Museum of Art may encourage smuggling and the…
the archaeological imagination
Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter,…
the mission of contemporary Classics
– some thoughts on reading Sue Alcock … The past is manipulated by people who come after. Memories and re-collections – traces of the past – help make us what we are. The importance of the past is so clear in the spate of books and articles about the ancient Olympics and their relation to…
Greek Olympics?
An intelligent comment today in the NYT on the mismatch between modern and ancient Olympics [Link – “The Way We Live Now: What Olympic Ideal?” – Daniel Mendelsohn (Princeton)] (Thanks to Jody Maxmin for putting me on to this.) Main point – the Greeks were very different to how most people imagine them to be….