Commentary: Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology of Greece

Recent work by archaeologists emphasized the contributions of archaeological fieldwork to the study of post-classical Greece. This marks a significant departure from traditional approaches to the archaeology of Byzantium that tended to focus on art historical methods and architectural history. Despite these changes in the study of post-classical Greece, the issues of abandonment, continuity and change continue to play an important role both in ongoing debates and will undoubtedly influence future research priorities. Only collaboration among scholars who study historical archaeology in Greece and elsewhere will ensure the continued relevance of this field even as these long-standing debates wane in relevance.     

Light tries the expert eye: the introduction of photography in nineteenth-century macroscopic neuroanatomy

It is often argued that photography's scientific inauguration meaningfully coincided with a shift towards the ideal of mechanical objectivity. Values of disinterestedness and precision were readily attributed to photography and were cherished by the emerging field of neurology as well. However, after the publication of the first neuroanatomical atlas to contain photographs, Jules Bernard Luys' Iconographie Photographique des Centres Nerveux (1873), the use of photography in macroscopic neuroanatomy remained rare. The present article sketches this largely overlooked terrain of investigation and will expand on why in macroscopical neuroanatomy photography failed to offer a satisfactory alternative to drawing or engraving.     

Documentary Evidence and the Medieval Pottery Industry

EARLY in my study of the medieval pottery industry it became clear to me that, contrary to general belief, a reasonable body of documentary evidence bearing on the industry had survived, but that it would take some years to assemble and interpret. There is no corpus of documents from which to begin, for surviving evidence is not only scattered in a very wide variety of documents, but is also dispersed geographically in a number of local record repositories. It might seem sensible to delay publication until a larger proportion of this evidence has been studied, or at least to avoid analysis and generalization at this stage; but pottery and potters are of interest to archaeologists here and now, and there is nothing written on the industry save assemblages of unrelated facts, often strung together from widely different periods. An effort has, therefore, been made to assemble the material so far available into a coherent pattern. Since this is the first time that this has been done, the result will probably require drastic modification in a few years' time. If the interim report here presented stimulates others to prove it wrong, this paper will have achieved at least one of its purposes.¹