It’s the small things in Athens during April: the touch of my feet on the ground upon embarking the tiny Aegean Airlines plane from Heathrow, the freshness in the air of the Attic countryside that quickly turns to choking gasoline fumes as the X95 barrels toward Syntagma. Of traipsing through the Kerameikos, losing count of the number of tortoises hidden amongst the red poppies and the slight aggravation of listening to tourists who are confused about how an archaeological site can also be a cemetery at the same time.

This final trip I made sure to stop at one of the best ice cream places I know, on Nikis in Syntagma, directly across from the Jewish Museum and down the street from the excellent vegetarian restaurant Avocado. The Greek woman who runs the little παγωτό shop Cremino is a delight - she speaks just a bit of English, so trips to Cremino are always a welcome opportunity to practice my Greek. And Cremino has an ice cream type I’ve not encountered anywhere else: it’s called καϊμάκι. Similar to the Turkish dondurma, it is made from a mastic resin that makes it slightly chewy. In addition, a scoop is just a 1,90 euro. It’s small, but a perfect little post-lunch or dinner treat.

I went in for my usual καϊμάκι, but I noticed another flavour on the board: lemonanthoi. And thus proceeded a lively Greek conversation about the lemon blossoms out on the streets of Athens that percolate and permeate my senses in my wanderings during the Spring and early Summer. Turns out, the lady who runs the shop makes all of her ice cream from scratch (which I already knew), and she opened the fridge to show me a fresh handful of lemon blossoms. I felt that weakness in my knees that only Athens knows how to do so well: that everything in Greece collides in beauty, its roughness, its difficulties, its persistence. Lemon blossoms, orange blossoms: they are abundant in Athens this time of year, usually buzzing with bees and not too far from the jasmine.

And in ice cream form? It’s just lovely. Coupled with the καϊμάκι, it was the very essence of Athens in Spring.

And best of all? Wandering out and back down Nikis toward Syntagma, ice cream cone in hand, I discovered a pile o’cats in a box. Well-cared-for cats are a rarity in Athens, so it warmed my heart to see these snugly boysies.

I've recently returned from a brief visit to Athens. In just a week, I saw a lot of the city that I know and love, but also some new places. One of the great delights of Athens is the ability to stumble upon things that you don't expect. My last day in town before an evening flight back to London was no exception.

I was wandering through the Plaka, on the hunt for some last-minute knickknacks and on my way from the Agora to a new/old cafe I wanted to try (Kimolia Art Cafe, in case you're wondering, and yes, it's lovely) and I saw a sign for the "Oldest House in Athens." I had to check it out - and I discovered the Benizelou Mansion, aka the House of St. Philothei. It's located at 96 Adrianou Street, and I had a dim recollection of seeing the house from the backside on a walking tour of Athens last summer. It apparently underwent years of renovation and has just this February opened to the public.

The house is the oldest surviving house of the Ottoman period in Athens, having belonged to the illustrious Benizelos family. The archontiko (wooden mansion), also referred to as a konaki (urban house) is built atop earlier structures of the 16th century that are said to have been the house of St. Philothei, a family ancestor. A spacious, airy courtyard gives way to rooms for daily life and semi-enlcosed spaces, which could be modified for various purposes.

The "museum" is impressive - open, light, and accessible. There are two floors, and interpretive screens (not all of them working yet) in several rooms provide insights into life in Ottoman Athens. I couldn't see the entire house, since it was almost closing time and they were shutting it down room by room, but what I did see was a great way of experiencing the home of a noble family of the mid-18th century. Most impactful was the inclusion of not only signage in Greek and English, but in Braille as well (see the images in the slideshow).

Best of all, entrance is free, but note the limited hours of the museum: right now, it is only open on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 am to 1 pm and Sundays from 11 am to 4 pm. I couldn't find much info about the Benizelou Mansion online, so hopefully this will serve as a short guide for travelers in Athens wanting to learn more about this fascinating time period of the city, to which the opening of the Benizelou Mansion is a welcome addition.

Some post-AIA thoughts on Session 7I: Researching Ownership Histories for Antiquities in Museum
Collections.

This was a different AIA/SCS for me: usually, I see as many papers as possible, delving into the two programs and tracing intricate paths between sessions and rooms. But this year, I went to just three full panels: the two I co-organized on Friday regarding objects in focus from the Royal Ontario Museum’s collections, and a third on Sunday on object provenances. I’ll need to think more about the ROM objects panels (including my own paper on Sylvia Hahn’s work over four decades as the ROM’s Staff Artist), but that is for another time. Instead, my post today will concentrate on Session 7I: Researching Ownership Histories for Antiquities in Museum Collections, which was held on Sunday, 8 January.

The panel was just one of several at the AIA that dealt with provenance, collecting histories, and issues of best practices for cultural heritage. Others included Session 2J, "Classics, Classical Archaeology, and Cultural Heritage: Toward a Common Understanding of Professional Responsibilities for the Study of 'Exceptional Objects'" on Friday, and Session 6C, "Collecting and Presenting the Etruscans in North America" on Saturday. Moderated by David Saunders of the Getty, the Sunday session’s description, taken from the AIA program, is as follows:

“Building on the success of museum-related panels at recent annual meetings, the AIA Museums and Exhibitions Committee has organized a workshop on current approaches to provenance research. In light of numerous high-profile legal cases and repatriations, together with the policies developed by the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums, there is a growing expectation that museums should make available the ownership histories of their objects in a full and clear manner. Many institutions are actively engaged in online documentation projects for their antiquities, and this workshop will explore some of the methods and results, as well as challenges and pitfalls. Researching ownership histories for ancient objects has not received the investment seen for the World War II era, and institutions often lack the resources to undertake this work in a sustained fashion. Furthermore, information in museum files is often speculative or unconfirmed, and discussions regarding the best ways of presenting such information are much needed. Through a series of case studies addressing Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Egyptian, and ancient Near Eastern artifacts, the participants will explore a broad variety of themes: objects for which ownership information has been “lost” and methods and resources for recovering it; the organization of research projects and the development of common standards; the value of terms such as “said to be”; and how the nuances and ambiguities so often inherent in this subject can be presented meaningfully to scholars, students, school groups, and the general public. More broadly, we hope that this workshop will encourage more open conversation among diverse museum professionals, academics, and field archaeologists with a view to developing guidelines and models for this work that can be shared across the community. A series of short papers will be presented from a variety of museum professionals and academics.”

(Why is this description only available in the pdf program? Why can’t abstracts be put up online in a searchable format? And why do only workshops get descriptive paragraphs in the program, whilst individual abstracts are relegated to a separate publication? - random thoughts from your local digital humanist, disgruntled with the conference app and flipping through multiple books and pages)

I decided to live-tweet the series of lightning talks, mostly in order to get word out regarding the topics at hand, which were unfortunately not published individually in the AIA program (since it was a workshop). I then compiled the series of tweets in a Storify narrative here, including the names of the speakers as well as their presentation titles. How effective is tweeting and Storify? I always feel a bit self-conscious tweeting whilst someone else is speaking (lest anyone think I’m playing on my phone), but my hope was to get the word out about the workshop in real time and with the #aiascs hashtag. With 140 characters or less, however, it was challenging to summarize the thoughts of the speakers on my phone (my laptop was being used for the presentations, so I had to resort to the Twitter app on my phone). Yet Twitter and Storify provided a concise, succinct narrative to the “order of things” and the topics most prominent in the panel. The speakers highlighted issues pertinent to their own collections in various museums throughout the country. A number of themes emerged, such as the continual investment in the improvement of provenance data, the desire to see that information made accessible, and the focus on particular objects or groups of objects within the museum context that have been and often still are in need of sustained study and analysis.

After the series of lightning talks, I stopped tweeting and took freehand notes in order to concentrate on the discussion. I was struck by how many of the people in the room were from museum contexts, and there were less from university/academic settings. How different would the course of the conversation have been if it were more balanced (of course, I could simply be wrong in my knowledge of who was in the room, and a number of attendees had one foot in each world, such as myself)? Nevertheless, it was a stimulating discussion for all present, fruitful with ideas and individual case studies with overarching themes. Here are a few additional bullet point take-aways from the open floor conversation:

• Transparency is key to provenance research. How can object histories be not only a part of online catalogues of objects, but also be brought into the stories we tell in exhibitions and installations? That way, the public can be contributors to the discussion of cultural heritage, and learn that objects have histories beyond their excavation: collection, movement, storage, and display all become part of the object’s narrative life cycle.
• What words do we use to describe provenance and provenience? “Said to be from” is hardly sufficient in giving a secure findspot, but often, not much more can ever be known due to uncontrolled excavation practices that were more common in the past. Along with this, the pressure to shorten labels and limit information in the museum itself makes it difficult to be transparent and all-inclusive. How can curators do a better job at creating onion-like layers of accessible information, through publication, online resources, novel technologies, and the like?
• The legal issues surrounding antiquities collecting by museums were not discussed extensively, perhaps because this was more a panel about legally acquired objects (mostly those acquired before the 1970 UNESCO convention guidelines) that were in need of further study in order to make their ownership histories more clear - yet I was quite taken by how much audience members were interested in legal issues (like the Elgin marbles, issues of looting and illegal activity are always hot topics). There’s immense variation in individual institutional structures within the museum, as well as the laws of various countries, that makes this an even more complicated issue, and legal considerations often must be discussed on a case-by-case basis.
• We also discussed the benefits of collaborating and communicating with World War II and Nazi-era provenance researchers, as there has been extensive work done within this particular time frame (see, for example, the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal; a number of American museums also have their own WWII provenance research pages). The challenges of this underscore the unique tasks of studying antiquities, such as  the lack of systematic assessment in their descriptions in auction and dealer catalogues. Objects from antiquity are invariably described as “a woman’s head” or “a predynastic pot,” for example, making it particularly hard to trace their histories. Nazi-era provenance research, however, is often tied to specific artists, such as known painters or sculptors; antiquities provenance research does not share that luxury.
• What is the role of student involvement in doing provenance research? At the Menil (from which the Collections Analysis Collaborative stems) and at Penn, for example, undergraduate and graduate students regularly undertake provenance research as part of their coursework and are active participants in shaping this line of research; the Boston MFA also has a Mellon fellow working on provenance. What are some models we can use to encourage and support research into ownership histories moving forward?

In sum, this was a rich panel with an intelligent range of speakers from a variety of museums. What was most promising to me, however, was the intense care and concern that curators exhibit for individual objects within their respective collections. This isn’t particularly surprising, but the panel really brought to light the enormous task curators face in dealing with orphaned and undocumented objects, and the exactitude with which their research into these objects is undertaken to learn their stories. With persistence, the trend of examining the life histories of objects from their creation to their acquisition will be one that only augments from here on out.

I'm already tired of hearing about Aristotle's tomb, but in skimming this article in Greek (which seems to be one of the most comprehensive), I think I'm able to decipher the following (native/more fluent Greek speakers, correct me if I'm wrong):

• "...the teacher of Alexander the Great, Aristotle" - first paragraph, and I can already see where this is going
• The monument was discovered over 20 years ago, but couldn't be fully excavated at the time due to lack of funding.
• There have been no osteological finds.
• There have been no identifying inscriptions found.
• The monument's location in the city seems to be the primary indicator of its purpose.
• There's criticism that the "findings" (what are they again?) were presented at a philosophical conference rather than an archaeological one.
• Via the Guardian: "A team of independent archaeologists with no connection to a particular school or department have been working at the site." - how exactly does that work in Greece??

I'm all in favor of news about the Classical world piquing the interest of non-Classicists and the public, and for discoveries to be made open in a timely manner. But it just seems sloppy to create a maelstrom of English-language media sources that say very little, perpetuate rumor, and fuel the fires of nationalism (because really, this, like the Kasta Tomb, is part and parcel of the never-ending discussion of FYROM and what constitutes "Macedonian" and "Greek" identities).

Enough already. Show us the evidence. Publish properly and publish carefully. 

ETA: rogueclassicism has done a nice job of summing up the news sources so far, with similar skepticism. 
ETA, redux: I excavated Sismanidis' abstract from the conference website, and Kristina Killgrove has written a good Forbes article that quotes me - thanks!

Frequently I'm asked for advice on what kind of camera to buy in order to take photographs of artifacts in archaeology and in museums, and/or for use in the field.

The short answer is: it doesn't really matter.

The longer answer is: buy the best you can afford.

Within these two answers are a whole range of possibilities, but it is sufficient to say that in this day and age, most photographic equipment is pretty good, and pretty affordable.

I myself use a Nikon D5000, which I purchased before my Regular Year at the ASCSA in 2010-11. I liked it because it has a tilting screen that, as I discovered with an earlier point and shoot model, comes in handy when photographing objects in museums that are positioned overhead or at awkward angles. Of course, by now the D5000 might be considered "out of date" or an antiquity itself. But it still fulfills my purposes, and the beauty of a good DSLR body is that you can add to it over time: I now have, in addition to the standard 18-55 and 55-200 mm lenses that came with it, added a very good 18-105 mm lens to my repertoire of camera equipment.

So, here are a few short tips for choosing equipment, etc.:

1) In general, I've found that Canon is better for point and shoot cameras, whereas the colour quality of Nikon DSLRs is far superior to that of Canons (nb: I know little about other brands). If colour is important to you, keep this in mind. Ken Rockwell (whose site I highly recommend in general) provides a good comparison of the two brands.

2) I recommend a macro lens for small objects - you can buy one, or even DIY (some tips here).

3) Additionally, a fixed focal length lens is good for all-purpose photography; as opposed to a large zoom range, "prime" lenses are the best-made lenses you can buy. Check out this article for more info.

3) If photographing objects from excavations, you'll want a copy stand or a tripod with a reversible center post. You can even build your own copy stand; I also like this discussion of copy stands for more advice (a separate post is needed for archaeological photography, I think, but this is quite detailed and helpful).

4) When photographing archaeological sites, your best bet is a cloudy day. Too much sun washes out the landscape and destroys the fine features of walls and stratigraphy. Always shoot with your back toward the sun to avoid shadows, and be sure to remove extraneous "stuff" (backpacks, sweaters, etc.) from the area within your photo frame. A measuring stick is always a good idea, but be sure to choose one that's appropriate for the area you are photographing (ie, don't use a foot-long rod in a general area shot).

5) When photographing objects through glass (such as in museums), be careful of reflections! You'll often need to move to an angle in which the reflection is not visible. There's some good chat here about museum photography and here regarding photographing through/with glass.

Clearly, I could write far more on this subject, but this should provide a sufficient beginning for the documentation of sites and artifacts from antiquity. If you have further questions, feel free to drop me a line here!

2015 is coming to a close, and what a year it's been. A finished dissertation, an excellent job, and some wonderful personal events. For now, as we wrap up the term, this is just a note to say that I've updated both the homepage of this website, as well as my CV. In 2016, I plan to update with some new photos and more regular blog posts. Until then, Happiest of Holidays, wherever you may be!

I'm starting to round up weekly news, so here are a few things that caught my attention recently. My aim is to post mainly links having to do with digital humanities, but I may also include other items of interest regarding the humanities, Classical archaeology and art history, and other topics of interest. Disclaimer: they frequently may be Getty-heavy (because I'm slightly biased).

Like Being There: Walking Through an Ancient Roman Town - Digital technologies at work in the small Roman town of Ammaia, Portugal (see also Seeing the Invisible: Visualizing an Ancient Roman Town)

Bloomsday Mapped on Social Media - An event that took place on June 18 that explored Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin and worldwide from a variety of perspectives, including topographical maps, the interweaving of social media and GIS, and travel writing

The Bodies of Pompeii Resurrected with 3D printing - The fascinating plaster molds from Pompeii get a digital uplift thanks to the potential of 3D printing technologies. Casts of casts?

Let There Be Light: A Top Foundation Puts Three Decades of Grants Online - The Getty Foundation launches a searchable database that provides open access information on all of its grants and funding initiatives. As the 2014-15 Graduate Curatorial Intern in the Department of Antiquities, I'm quite proud to have been one of the many recipients of one of these grants.

Corinth Ends 2015 Season - The third session at Corinth wraps up, with some fabulous digital pursuits: my friend Colin is doing photogrammetry of mosaics from the South Stoa, and Cyark is 3D scanning the Peirene Fountain for the first time.

This whirlwind year is best summed up in the past two and a half weeks with a whirlwind tour of Italy, Bulgaria, and Greece. I'm finishing up my last couple of days in Athens before heading back to my other home of Athens. One thing that's been particularly striking to me is the excellent weather I've had - all sun and warmth in Italy, sun with just one glorious thunderstorm in Sofia, and beautiful clouds and light in Athens. Last night, I climbed up Philopappos Hill for some late evening photography:

I'm pretty happy with this one, but there are others just as (and even more!) incredible. I'm always quite pleased when I don't have to do anything to make an image work. The space, light, and place is enough. And now that I foresee some newfound time to work on my own things in the immediate future, more may very well be coming your way.

I'm not one for New Year's Resolutions, but this year I decided to choose one asana per week for focus and incorporate it into my daily practice. Since I practice every morning, I have a long list of variations in the asanas that I work on to keep things from getting stagnant. A weekly focus pose helps keeps things balanced while also giving me a chance to concentrate on refining certain poses. Here's my list so far:

Week 1: Adho Mukha Svanasana (Down Dog) - Another day, another down dog, as my yoga teacher always says. No better way to start than practicing this; like tadasana, it's essential for so many other poses. In this pose, I try particularly hard to work on my arm and elbow strength

Week 2: Virabhadrasana II (Warrior 2) - A good one to work on in preparation for triangle pose. Good for stretching the inner leg.

Week 3: Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) - in the interest of building my shoulder strength and opening the upper back for Sunday morning shoulderstands (which I only do in class), this is a good pose to work on. I have some ongoing issues with my left knee that I have to watch, but otherwise it's okay. It is somehow calming and stimulating at the same time. See here for an even more in-depth article.

Week 4: Utthita Trikonasana (Extended Triangle) - this one gets me every time. I feel like I've been practicing it forever, and yet still can't quite get my legs straight.

Week 5: Viparita Kirani (legs-up-the-wall): "Does this pose even have a name?" I asked myself. Yes, yes it does. And since my back's been cranky with me the past few days, it's high time I gave it some attention. This pose helps my legs and the inversion helps my clear my head (short of going fully upside down, which I only do in class). I'm also moving back to 2x daily practice this week in the hopes of getting this sorted out sooner rather than later.

Week 6: Vrksasana (Tree Pose): A favorite pose, I incorporate it into my practice nearly every day. This week I will concentrate on it a little more than usual and attempt not to slack. It's definitely a really good balancing pose, and it's my goal to work more on balancing on my right (bad) leg.

Weeks 7 & 8: I completely failed to choose a pose for these two weeks - too caught up in other work. But, I kept up my daily practice. This past week's Sunday morning class was especially fun and challenging, although I'm still having issues with my ears.

Week 9: How is it Week 9 already? I'm working on Uttanasana I this week  with a goal to keep it easy. It's usually easier for me to practice this up against a wall to keep my back okay, but lately I've been okay with bending forward as long as I have blocks in front of me.

Week 10 and beyond: I fell behind in choosing a new pose each week as I was scrambling to finish my dissertation, but starting in May I plan to pick up the ball again. Where should I begin?