Byzantine Studies
Fellows
Victor Alexandrov (Budapest, Hungary, Fall), “Byzantine Dimension of the Canon Law Corpus of the Orthodox Slavs and Romanians”
The primary aim of my work in Dumbarton Oaks has been research into the Byzantine background of the canon law corpus available to the Orthodox Slavs and Romanians in the Middle Ages and early Modern period (up to the late-seventeenth century). On the one hand, I have been reading general literature on Byzantine and Slavic canon law, trying to obtain greater knowledge in this field. On the other hand, I have been concentrating on those two aspects of Byzantine and Slavic legal history with regard to which my research is at an advanced stage. These two aspects are, first, the history of the Slavic canon law sources translated from Greek and, second, the ecclesiastico-political conflicts in the late Medieval and early Modern Balkans.
I am particularly interested in the data on the five Byzantine nomocanones—extensive codes comprising both canon and civil law—that were translated into Church Slavonic: the Synagoge of John Scholastikos, the Syntagma of Fourteen Titles, the Pandectae of Nikon of the Black Mountain, the Synopsis of Stephen of Ephesos with the commentary of Aristenos, and the Alphabetical Syntagma of Matthew Blastares. The editions and secondary literature on these collections are difficult to find in one location, and I have taken advantage of the Dumbarton Oaks Library to study these otherwise poorly accessible materials. The data I have collected during my stay here constitute the basis for writing a historical introduction to the Slavic translations of these Byzantine codes. Such a publication will contribute to the study of Byzantine legal influence upon the Orthodox countries situated north of Byzantium (and subsequently post-Byzantine Greece).
Regarding the ecclesiastico-political controversies in the Balkans, I have been researching the period from the early thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. Studying the relations between the Churches of the Balkans, one encounters a long chain of conflicts in which several issues recur constantly. The driving force of these conflicts was the struggle of the local Balkan Churches (namely those of Ohrid, Bulgaria, Serbia, Epiros, and Trebizond) to emancipate themselves from the Patriarchate of Constantinople after the dismemberment of the Byzantine Empire, that is, after the Fourth Crusade. I have attempted to follow the recurrent issues of the separate controversies and to study the canon law background of the struggle. Again, the library of Dumbarton Oaks has proved indispensable for orientation in sources and literature related to this chain of conflicts. I expect that this research will also result in an important publication (or several minor ones) clarifying the ecclesiastical and political relations in the Balkans in the period indicated above.
Zhiqiang Chen (Nankai University, Spring), “The Byzantines in Chinese Eyes: Translation and Commentary of Relevant Ancient and Medieval Chinese Texts”
Taking advantage of my investigation in recent years of Chinese texts about the Byzantines, I have concentrated my efforts during the period of my Dumbarton Oaks fellowship on the translation of Chinese texts into English and research for the commentary. Part I of my project consists of the translation of more than one thousand Chinese historical texts into English, resulting in 500 pages. The final result of the project will be a book in English with the original Chinese texts attached, entitled Chinese Texts on Byzantium. After meticulous editorial care in textual criticism, I translated them into English with notes to help readers identify the special terms in the texts. From the translation, readers can learn abundant information on Chinese records of the Byzantine political system, material life, economic activities, customs, geographical situation, local products, religious regulations, architectural style, native plants and animals, monks (one of them retreated to a cave in southern China), technique of damask and glass, precious stones, etc. Some of the descriptions of diplomatic events and commercial relations between the Byzantines and Chinese are also interesting,
The second part of my project was comparative research and writing of a commentary on these texts with the help of the valuable rare books in the Dumbarton Oaks Library, the Georgetown University library, and the Library of Congress. The manuscript tradition of 329 books, from which the Chinese texts are cited, needs to be analyzed, and more than 100 place names, about 200 names of plants and animals as well as local products, about 50 names of drugs, and over 100 names of persons and peoples mentioned by the texts need to be identified. Also many events described by Chinese writers need to be corroborated by other historical sources, both literary and archaeological.
My investigation and translation of Chinese texts about the Byzantines represents the first collection of historical sources since 1885, when F. Hirth published China and the Roman Orient: Researches into their ancient and medieval relations as represented in old Chinese records (Leipzig-Munich, Shanghai-Hongkong, 1885), with his translation of seventeen texts from Chinese chronicles. The achievements of the scholars of the earlier generations have established a sound basis for more recent research on the topic, but have shortcomings. First of all, their collection of the sources is incomplete due to the lack of extensive research, and their reading of the sources was imperfect due to insufficient understanding of the ancient Chinese language and writing. Hirth’s translation of seventeen passages of the Chinese texts about the Roman East, quoted often by western scholars, is marred by misunderstandings of key Chinese words and sentences. Furthermore, his book does not contain all the passages which we know on the subject, even though the collection of these passages claimed a considerable part of his time. The seventeen selected passages in his book come mostly from the official dynastic chronicles, whereas there are more than one thousand passages, not only from the Chinese dynastic histories, but also from government documents, folk literature, scientific books, etc. Until now, few Chinese scholars have made an investigation about the texts relevant to Byzantium and can give a reasonable interpretation of them. Some of them, such as Zhang Xinglang, mention fewer than one hundred and fifty texts, with some useful notes and identifications. His collection was not translated into any western language, however, but appeared only in Chinese. My English translation of over one thousand Chinese texts with commentary should have academic significance for Byzantine studies, as well as for medieval European studies.
Peter John Heather (University of Oxford, Fall), “Migration and Development in First Millennium Europe”
During the period of my fellowship, I have essentially solved the two remaining major intellectual problems in my book project. The first was how, exactly, to combine the themes of migration and state formation. The breakthrough here came when, finally, I realized that state formation is a code name for development in general. Major political change never occurs in isolation from equally profound social, economic, and cultural transformation. And in the modern world, patterns of migration are always strongly dictated by patterns of unequal development; migrants from less developed zones are always sucked into the more developed unless prevented from doing so by state structures at their points of destination. When I fed this insight back into my research on the first millennium, the linkages between migration and development fell quickly into place.
The second problem was more specific. I have drawn much inspiration from comparative migration studies, since the kind of migration unit often reported in first millennium sources (large numbers of men, women, and children in a compact, organized mass) has never been observed in modern contexts. Again, I think, the explanation is linked to development. Most of the migrants derived from populations whose level of agricultural expertise did not root them solidly to one particular locality. Unable to maintain fertility over the long-term, they were prone to periodic movement. These kinds of agricultural regimes also produced only a small surplus, so that warrior specialists could also be supported in small numbers (200 seem to have been standard for the retinue of a Germanic king of the late Roman period). But since much first-millennium migration involved moving into the territory of an imperial state, migrating groups required much larger military forces. Germanic society did have other sources of military manpower, but these men were also landholders, many of them with wives and children, and recruiting them naturally involved their families as well. In a quite different way, therefore, migration and development emerge as intimately interlocked on the level of the migration unit as well as of the broader patterns of movement.
Marilyn E. Heldman (University of Missouri, St. Louis, Fall), “Early Byzantine Miniatures Revealed”
A group of twenty-three full-page miniatures, the subject of my fellowship research, is bound in disarray within two Ethiopic Gospel books, treasured manuscripts at the monastery of Abba Garima in northern Ethiopia. The miniatures—evangelist portraits and two sets of decorated canon table frames—were first published in the 1960s, but were neither properly identified nor correctly dated. Recently published results of radiocarbon tests of the miniatures’ parchment confirm my stylistic analysis and my conclusion that these early Byzantine miniatures are datable to the late sixth century.
These stylistically homogeneous miniatures, produced in a workshop at a major center in the eastern Mediterranean, were brought to Ethiopia, probably before AD 630, as separate quires to be integrated into two Ethiopic manuscripts of the four Gospels. Each set of evangelist portraits came with a set of canon tables, composed of sets of numbers—ten different concordance tables—that indicate parallel passages of the four Gospels. They are typical of luxury editions of the Gospels which were provided with the beautifully embellished architectural frames within which the concordance tables were copied. The architectural frames of the Abba Garima canon tables arrived in Ethiopia devoid of numbers as well as the standard directions concerning the use of the canon tables. The requisite numbers and Ethiopic texts were added to the empty architectural frames by Ethiopian scribes.
Five evangelist portraits, the surviving miniatures from the two sets, represent a significant addition to the presently recognized number of extant late antique evangelist portraits: St. Luke in the late sixth-century Latin Gospels of St. Augustine and the portraits of the four evangelists incorporated into the canon table frames of the Syriac Rabbula Gospels (AD 586). In figure style, the evangelist portraits at the Abba Garima monastery are stylistically closer to late sixth- and seventh-century Byzantine mosaics and murals.
Few decorated canon tables datable to before AD 600 are extant, either as fragmentary or complete sets. Hence the importance of the Abba Garima miniatures with richly illuminated Early Byzantine canon tables, the architectural frames of which, embellished with grasses, fruits, flowers and birds, suggest doorways to the path of salvation. One set of canon tables concludes with full-page miniature of a circular temple whose roof is upheld by four columns, an architectural device symbolizing the unbroken unity or harmony of the Four Gospels, the purpose of the canon tables themselves. The “finispiece” of the second set of canon tables takes the form of a rectangular structure with steep stairway and is unique to our present knowledge of late antique canon table decoration, although architectural motifs play an important role in the iconography of extant floor mosaics of early Byzantine churches in the eastern Mediterranean. I argue that within the context of the Gospel book decoration, this unique composition suggests the symbolic temple of Christ’s body. My fellowship research will result in a publication that establishes the strategic importance of these miniatures for the history of Bible illumination.
Sergey Ivanov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Spring), “Things and Places Speaking of Themselves: From Rome to Byzantium”
A characteristic feature of a label is that without the actual object it makes no sense. The line “This is Zeus” or simply “Zeus” has only one clear reference—this text refers to an object. The majority of ancient pieces of art (with the exception of ancient Greek vases before the fourth century BCE) had no explanatory inscriptions whatsoever. Nearly all frescoes, statues, mosaics, and reliefs lack explanations. Why? Because viewers must have immediately recognized a likeness, not from a label but from their background knowledge. It was assumed that anyone who might be considered as a possible audience must also know what Homer looks like, and those who don’t do not matter. True, depictions in Antiquity are often accompanied by benedictions or maledictions, with signatures of painters and sculptors, with poetical commentaries and ekphraseis. All the above-mentioned kinds of texts are not labels, however, because they can be easily detached from the actual works of art that they accompany and also because they are fully meaningful when read separately. Thousands of epigrams on different works of art have come down to us, but only in the smallest minority of cases can we ascertain that these particular lines were written (for explanation) on the base of an actual statue or on the edge of a relief. Streets of Roman cities abounded with inscriptions of different kinds. Yet, even in Rome there were no street signs or written signboards (with the understandable exception of the words “taberna” and “hospitium”). The reason was the same: a lot of things were taken for granted.
At some unspecified moment, perhaps in the second half of the first century BCE, there began to appear pictures with explications. The earliest occurrence is in Palestrina Nilotic mosaics. A little later, in various regions of the Roman Empire, mosaics emerge with the names of dogs, horses, and circus animals, such as tigers, as well as names of gladiators, charioteers, and athletes; that is, transient and accidental appellations. There is also a new development in mosaics with classical subject matter. In the second and third centuries, captioned images of great poets and philosophers of Antiquity begin to appear; in addition to real people, we can observe names of the months accompanied by their allegorical images, as well as captioned personifications of abstract concepts such as “creation,” “generosity,” etc. Moreover, captions were attached to personified images of rivers, mainly rivers of heaven, as well as elements such as winds, the ocean, etc. Thus, labels were appreciated not only by those with low-level artistic preferences, but also by cultured adherents of pagan philosophical systems. Paradoxically, what the identifying labels all shared was the sense of a certain deficiency of artistic expression and the need for a “verbal explanation.”
In the early Byzantine period, we witness both “silence” and “loquaciousness” with respect to identifying labels. If we look at the few remaining monuments of Constantinople, we see quite close to each other the mosaics of the imperial palace, which do not have a single inscription, and the hippodrome statues of Porphyrios the charioteer on which literally all surface areas are covered with inscriptions; besides poems and good wishes the name of every horse is depicted on the reliefs. The imperial portraits (ivory plaques, mosaics, statues) or the Byzantine emperors’ sarcophagi remain “silent” and anonymous, whereas Byzantine icons become more and more “talkative.”
During my stay at Dumbarton Oaks, I assembled evidence of the developing urge in Byzantium to explain and to “label.” Among my examples are labels such as “this stone is from the Calvary” or signboards such as “distillery of the holy monastery of Ataous,” or a street sign “phoros Theodosianos” from Ephesos. The vita of St. John the Almsgiver gives us an interesting example of house-labeling. The most striking example is the inscription found recently on the Constantinopolitan city wall: “The Gates of St. Romanos.” Does this mean that not only Byzantine icons and miniatures, but also Byzantine streets and squares were systematically “captioned” and “labeled”? If substantial evidence thereof will be found, it will provide a clearer picture of a huge shift in world outlook, of which the triumph of Christianity was but a small fragment.
Apostolos Karpozilos (University of Ioannina), “Suicide in Byzantium”
Of the material I have gathered on suicide incidents during the Byzantine millennium, the historical sources have proved by far more instructive and informative, although the recorded instances are not as numerous as one might have expected. To be sure, the sources of the earlier period, that is from the fourth to the sixth century, have yielded more material than the later centuries. Most of the incidents involve individuals in high political or military positions, who committed suicide in anticipation of death and/or in the fear of cruel torture at the hands of their captors. The question that arises is whether suicide was more widespread in the earlier than in the later centuries and whether the cases under consideration suggest a pattern; or differently said, whether inflicting death upon oneself was more socially acceptable during the period of transition from paganism to Christianity. In Late Antiquity, self-inflicted death seems to have been part of a code of honor or a moral duty in case of defeat and disgrace. The recording of attempted and successful suicides by well-known persons, defeated or otherwise disgraced, was considered “normal,” whereas in later periods such incidents were perhaps considered taboo and may have been suppressed. The same seems to be the case with collective suicides either among heretics or among the oppressed populace: the phenomenon is confined to Late Antiquity up to the eighth century. The suicides recorded in historical sources by and large resulted from extreme situations, in the face of defeat and in fear of confinement and torture.
The cases mentioned in the hagiographic texts, on the other hand, are of a different kind. The individual is described as struggling against daemonic powers and invisible forces that drive him to self-destruction, but in the end he is rescued by the timely intervention of divine agency. These kinds of stories, unreal as they may be, nevertheless indicate the way suicide was perceived and understood by a large segment of the society. A more sophisticated approach was inclined to interpret it, of course, as the product of a primitive mind, overburdened with passions, as Manuel Palaiologos theorized.
We also encountered instances of attempted suicides by women either in love or in distress. Judicial records attest to the fact that suicidal incidents of women under extreme stress were not uncommon. As for suicides among the lower classes, like soldiers and slaves, only general statements about them are found in the sources—the anonymous poor driven to suicide out of desperation, whereas in legal texts contain only a few inferences regarding soldiers and slaves. The impact of a suicidal act within a community is described in some detail only in one instance, which makes it clear that the act was socially condemned and severely affected the relatives of the deceased. Yet, instances of indignities inflicted upon the body of a victim of suicide or arbitrary confiscation of his property—practices attested in western documents—are not witnessed in the Greek sources.
Dirk Krausmüller (Queen’s University Belfast), “The Constantinopolitan Monastery of Panagiou in its Eleventh-Century Context”
During the last nine months, I have prepared a monograph about the Constantinopolitan monastery of Panagiou and its literary legacy: a typikon, a Life of Athanasios the Athonite, and a metaphrasis of this Life, the so-called Vita A, all of them written before 1025. These texts are of crucial importance for the understanding of the coenobitic movement of the eleventh century: the Panagiou typikon is the earliest surviving extended rule and the Lives are the earliest examples for the influence of typika on the hagiographical genre.
I first give a historical overview and reconstruct the lost texts. Comparison between the Bachkovo typikon and the Vitae A and B of Athanasios proves the existence of the Panagiou typikon and the first Life, and study of the metaphrastic techniques employed by the author of Vita A permits the conclusion that Vita B represents this first Life with only minor changes. Then I discuss the rivalries between Panagiou and other monastic settings. I show that the author of the first Life claimed that Panagiou and not Lavra followed the Athanasian monastic tradition. I further argue that he inserted into the text a much extended version of the short rules of Athanasius in order to match the claim of the Studites that their extended version of the original Studite Hypotyposis was based on the teachings of Theodore.
Next, I study the texts as indicators for a transformation of the two literary genres to which they belong. I argue that the transition from shorter to extended rules reflects growing emphasis on communal rituals, which had previously been of little significance. I further show that the integration of typikon material into the Lives and the presentation of Athanasios as interacting with his community marks a new development when Lives are no longer exclusively written to prove the sanctity of the protagonist but also function as models for monastic life, or in other words, as typika in action. Lastly, I study invectives against extreme and ostentatious asceticism and against private almsgiving. I demonstrate that these activities were widely accepted and that they were an intrinsic part of the traditional ideal of sainthood. I then show that the authors of the Lives of Athanasios engaged in a complex reinterpretation of traditional topoi in order to present Athanasios as a “traditional” saint and at the same time to make sure that his behavior would not be emulated.
Yoram Tsafrir (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), “The History and Archaeology of Bet Shean (Scythopolis) from the Hellenistic to the Medieval Periods: Introductory Volume (Series of Final Reports)”
The Hebrew University excavation at Bet Shean (directed by Gideon Foerster and myself) took place between the years 1986–2000. It was the largest archaeological project carried out in Israel in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Biblical Bet Shean was refounded as Scythopolis in the Hellenistic period. At the end of the fourth century, it became the capital city of the province of Second Palestine. In the early sixth century, it reached its peak in size (some 160 hectares) and demography (probably 30–40,000 inhabitants). Around 635 CE, it was conquered by the Muslims who called it Baysan. A process of decline, which had begun already in the late Roman period, accelerated. The town was destroyed by an enormous earthquake in the year 749 CE.
The publication program comprises five large volumes (written by members of the research team) that deal with major complexes that cover the entire area: 1. The Street of the Monuments; 2. The Valley Street, the Roman Basilica and the Byzantine Agora; 3. Silvanus Street, the Eastern Bathhouse, and Hisham’s Bazaar; 4. Palladius Street and the Caesarea Street; 5. The Amphitheater and the Neighboring Byzantine Quarter. Several volumes of smaller scale on selected topics (for example, on oil lamps and on early Islamic glass, which have already appeared) will complete the publication. Such a large-scale program calls for an introductory monograph which will supply general orientation and enable the readers of the detailed reports to insert each individual complex into a comprehensive historical and archaeological frame. I have dedicated my work at Dumbarton Oaks to the writing of this monograph
My research has been concerned with general problems such as urbanization and municipal organization, city economy, urban planning, the role of plagues and earthquakes, ruralization of the city in late Roman and Islamic periods, etc. There is also an analysis of individual monuments: the streets, temples, basilica, forum and the Byzantine agora, bathhouses, residential buildings, mass entertainment structures, statues, etc. Each of these topics will be inserted into the monograph according to the chronological order. I believe that, when completed, the monograph will present more than a profile of an individual city, but will also shed light on urbanism and culture in the entire region of Palestine and Arabia.
Tomasz Waliszewski (Warsaw University, Fall), “Growth or Decline? Agriculture and Village Life in the Late Antique Near East (Third–Eighth Centuries)”
The present state of research on the rural communities of late antique Syria-Palestine can be described, on the one hand, by the growing number of regional studies focused on settlement history, on architecture of the rural dwellings and the installations used in agricultural production, and, on the other hand, on a paleoenvironmental approach revealing the potential of such disciplines as climatology, pedology, or paleobotany for the comprehension of the natural processes taking place in parallel with and in close relation to the impact of the human activity revealed by archaeology. Scholars look also for the possible and probably multiple reasons for the slow abandonment of the villages in the early Islamic Near East.
Agriculture and village life, a basic expression of economic life at that time, is understandably a vast subject. Due to the limited time of my fellowship, I decided to narrow the scope of my research to a general review of sources covering the territory of modern Jordan and southern Syria which correspond largely to the late antique provinces of Arabia and Palaestina Tertia. The focus on one of the regions gives an opportunity to choose the most promising areas that could serve as reliable case studies. Data from the numerous prospections and excavations conducted in such regions as Hauran or Moab reveal an interesting network of settlements, still active during the early Islamic period, much later than was accepted until recently in the scholarly literature. The detailed examination of the landscape and the soils helps also to determine the agricultural regions inside the mentioned areas, when a careful study of the implements, installations and the buildings sheltering them provides the firm basis for a regional differentiation of the main agricultural activities.
Regionalism in local production is a widely debated element of the discussion. My research reveals that the region between Wadi Mujib and Amman as well as the Hauran in southern Syria share the same predilection for wine production documented by dozens of rock-cut installations. In contrast, the hills and mountains surrounding the Greco-Roman cities like Jerash, Philadelphia, or Abila are well furnished with olive oil presses. Interestingly, closer investigation of the presses reveals also another phenomenon that can be explained by different treatment of the fruits. Installations for pressing the grapes are almost exclusively located near the fields, whereas the olive oil presses are known mainly from the settlements—villages but also, in a few cases, from the cities.
I was also able to trace the technological parallelism between Palestine and Transjordan. Screw and cross presses found in the Ajlun and Jerash area find their closest parallels in Byzantine Judea. Predominance of lever and weights presses in Jordan again links the country technologically to Judea and Galilee.
The project is a contribution to our comprehension of the local trade, village economy, subsistence resources of the peasants and the history of ancient farming techniques. The results of my research, extended over the next year, will be published in the form of a book.
Ann Marie Yasin (University of Southern California, Spring), “Memorials Transformed: Funerary Monuments, Church Space, and Saints’ Cults in Late Antiquity”
Early Christian writers frequently denied the possibility of containing God within physical structures. By contrast, the construction of monumental churches, relic veneration, and pilgrimage journeys, all of which begin in earnest only in the fourth century, appear to be manifestations of a drastically new notion of sacred space. These observations have led many scholars to associate the “invention” of early Christian sacred space with the explosion of saint veneration in the post-Constantinian era.
My book project, Saints and Church Spaces: The Sacred and the Community in Late Antiquity, posits that such arguments risk misinterpreting the archaeological record by limiting the definition of holy space to a narrow point, or locus, for the meeting of heaven and earth—a model generated largely through study of literary sources. This project investigates the impact of saints’ cults on ecclesiastical space as a whole, looking not only at evidence of saints’ tombs and relics proper, but also at that of funerary monuments, liturgical installations, votive and dedicatory inscriptions, and visual imagery. I contend that the impact of saints’ cults on the sacred geography of early Christian churches is more pervasive and diverse, but perhaps less novel, than has been previously supposed. Specifically, I see manipulations of saints’ cults as powerful means of shaping corporate identity and reinforcing social hierarchies within local Christian communities.
During my semester at Dumbarton Oaks, I wrote the book’s first chapter, “Churches before Architecture: Approaches to Sacred Space in the Early Christian World.” Through an anthropologically informed reading of patristic sources, I suggested that the places in which Christians gathered to worship had become symbolically loaded sacred spaces well before the era of monumental churches. I also conducted research on church sites in the early Byzantine Near East (especially modern Israel, Jordan, and Syria). These form more important counterpoints to my earlier work on monuments in Italy and North Africa than I had previously recognized. My regional comparison of saint veneration at “alternate focal points” (i.e., not the church’s primary altar), as well as the location and rhetoric of inscriptions invoking saints has productively changed the shape of the book’s remaining chapters, which I am currently in the process of writing.
Junior Fellows
Paroma Chatterjee (University of Chicago), “The Politics of Narrative: The Byzantine and Italian Narrative Icons”
My research deals with the emergence of narrative icons in Byzantium and Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The most influential study by Nancy P. Ševčenko suggests that the very mode of the narrative icon originated in the monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai, and was expressly intended to cater to a multicultural audience of the sort that the monastery attracted during the Crusader period. My study uses Ševčenko’s valuable observations but places the narrative icons within both a physical and visual context in order to determine their specific value for the cultures in which they functioned.
Using the resources of Dumbarton Oaks, I was able to construct a physical sacred space in which the narrative icons may have been displayed, and also to gauge their specific position within the broader visual and cultural history of images in Byzantium. In my chapter on the Byzantine icons, I conclude that the narrative panels were considered to be cult images of saints analogous to cult images of the Theotokos, such as the Hodegetria, Blachernitissa, and others. The narrative icons of saints managed to juxtapose a static image of a saint with narrative images in a manner that recall the moving images in miracles associated with the Theotokos. The most famous example of the latter is the Blachernai miracle witnessed by Byzantine and Latin audiences. Furthermore, I argue that the narrative icons take their cues from templon beams which adorned the iconostasis—a structure that developed in the same period as the icons. On the basis of these observations, I challenge Ševčenko’s proposition by showing how the Byzantine narrative icons functioned in extremely specific ways in resonance with the concerns of Byzantine visual culture. They were not, therefore, intended as multicultural vehicles for a homogenous audience.
In the next chapter, I explore the narrative icons of saints in Italy, particularly Francis, and the fresco cycle of Francis painted in the narrative format on the walls of the Kalenderhane Camii (Kyriotissa Monastery) in Constantinople. I conclude that the narrative icons followed at least two trajectories in Italy: one in the south which closely imitated Byzantine examples, and one in a specifically Franciscan milieu which departed consciously from Byzantine icons as a means of asserting Franciscan identity. I argue that the Franciscan fresco in Constantinople continues this trend by affirming ethnic and religious differences between the Orthodox and the Catholics via the Franciscan use of the narrative format.
Jon Kyle Harper (Harvard University), “Slavery in Late Antiquity”
During my fellowship, I succeeded in completing the research phase of my dissertation on slavery. When I started the term, I had written four chapters on the history of law and slavery—the first half of my dissertation. The second half of my dissertation analyzes the social role of slavery. From a research perspective, it is a much more ambitious and laborious undertaking. Dumbarton Oaks has allowed me to pursue a broad research strategy that would hardly be possible in any other environment.
I set myself the task of using the electronic databanks of ancient texts to search for slaves in late antiquity. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Library of Latin Texts technology allowed me to create instantly indices that gave me virtually every reference to slavery from the period of my research. I have gone through over one hundred thousand references to slavery in late antique texts. John Chrysostom, for example, used some form of the word “slave” eight thousand times in his extant corpus. Because of Dumbarton Oaks and the electronic resources, I have been able to collect an amount of useful raw data that I hope can illuminate the importance and nature of slavery in the Late Roman Empire.
The next phase will be to turn this store of data into readable chapters. The late antique witnesses have shown me that slavery was a vital institution, woven into the fabric of late antiquity’s most important social institutions, above all the family. I plan to write three chapters on the place of slavery in the late antique family. One will address the relation between sexuality and slavery. I believe that the transition from a society whose sexual ethics were moored in the workings of status to a society that preached a Christian, spiritualized notion of sexuality was a slow, if fundamental, part of the transformation of the ancient world. My other chapters on the family will focus on discipline and labor, that is, how master-slave relations worked and how slaves were used in Late Antiquity.
Maureen Anne O’Brien (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Art and Text in the Vienna Genesis”
I spent the 2005–2006 academic year researching and writing my dissertation on the Vienna Genesis. One of the world’s most famous codices, the Vienna Genesis comprises the Greek text of the Book of Genesis on the upper part of each page accompanied without exception by painted miniatures to the text on the lower half. Although a large volume of scholarship exists on the manuscript, research over the past sixty years has focused almost exclusively on finding evidence within the Vienna Genesis for lost models of illustrated manuscripts that might prove theories about the origins of Jewish and early Christian book illustration.
My dissertation takes a different approach and investigates the afterlife of the object rather than its origins. It returns to fundamental questions about the codicology and paleography of this purple-dyed manuscript and presents evidence that the Vienna Genesis is most likely a composite codex made up of a sixth-century manuscript and a fourth-century manuscript. I furthermore argue that this composite codex was extensively repainted in Renaissance Italy before it entered the Austrian imperial library in Vienna in the seventeenth century. The dissertation also examines the interesting relationship between the Vienna Genesis’ Greek text and its repainted images as well as considering its original function and possible place of production versus its possible use during the Renaissance. A final chapter discusses the contributions of Franz Wickhoff, who wrote the original facsimile commentary of the Vienna Genesis in 1895, to art historiography and to the field of narratology and considers how narratological analysis can be applied to the codex today. In the end, I am arguing that the Vienna Genesis is a miscellany, a composite group of fragments, a repainted pastiche, and a testament to the complex afterlife and reception history of early Christian codices rather than a means to understand the origins of manuscript illustration.
Vessela Valiavitcharska-Marcum (University of Texas at Austin, Spring), “Rhetoric and Poetry in Byzantine Homiletics”
Despite the broad title, the research area of my dissertation is prose rhythm in Byzantine and Old Slavonic homilies. My goals are, first, to examine thoroughly the theoretical principles of prose rhythm outlined in Byzantine rhetorical treatises and commentaries, second, to test those in practice by applying them to homiletic texts of the fourth through tenth century, third, to determine whether there is any connection between prose rhythm and accentual poetry, and fourth, to see whether any of the Byzantine Greek principles of rhythm applied to the early (that is, tenth-century) translations of Slavonic homilies. I began my research with the idea that our understanding of prose rhythm has been confined mostly to the accentual cadence that defines the end of a sentence or clause, quite in contrast with how prose rhythm is described in the Hermogenic corpus, which the Byzantines studied extensively. Hermogenes and the authors of the Hermogenic corpus speak of prose rhythm as composed of word composition and end-of-clause cadence, which means that in order to fully understand Byzantine rhythm, we need to look at the entire clause or sentence.
My findings, based on Byzantine commentaries on the Hermogenic corpus and scholia on classical texts, are that the Byzantines did not think of prose rhythm as comprised solely of the clausular cadence, but as distributed in various ways throughout the sentence and the paragraph. Although they did use regular accentual patterns (as in accentual poetry), they saw the individual word, rather than a certain type of cadence or accentual foot, as the basic rhythmical unit of prose. Byzantine prose rhythm is somewhat similar to the rhythm of Byzantine accentual poetry in clause construction and ending cadence, but the rhythm of prose is much more varied and is perceived differently. There is, indeed, a similarity between Greek homiletic rhythm and the rhythm of the Slavonic translations of Greek homilies as shown by preliminary statistical data; this part of my research, however, is still under way.
My research took a surprising turn at Dumbarton Oaks when I discovered that Byzantine literary instruction included instruction in prose rhythm based on accentual patterns found in classical texts. The Byzantine teachers, in other words, sought out patterns of accentual responsion or other kinds of accentual regularity, whether deliberate or incidental, in classical texts and pointed them out to their students. The implications are that first, Byzantine prose rhythm includes accentual responsion, in a way similar to the rhythms of liturgical poetry, and second, that perhaps there are many more instances of accentual regularity in classical texts than we usually assume—a question involving intimate knowledge of the musical patterns of speech and barely studied by classicists.
Garden and Landscape Studies
Fellows
Richard Coulton (Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom), “Discourses of Horticulture in England, 1660–1760”
My research project focuses on discourses of horticulture in England between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. It situates practices of gardening within their historical contexts, concentrating on a period when a burgeoning, elite taste for fashionable gardens coincided with the growing intellectual curiosity about the natural world that was displayed by members of the gentry and middling sorts alike. These developments were not unrelated: rather, the garden's capacity to facilitate work in both experimental and systematic botany was coupled with the utility of the new science for improving gardens as sites of aesthetic beauty, scholarly enquiry, and social exchange. Horticultural discourse-in the form of printed texts, manuscript correspondence, and metropolitan clubs (for example)-conveniently located the interface between divergent practical and theoretical approaches to gardening; yet its emergence and codification was not a straightforward process, informed (and at times directed) as it was by contemporary concerns with political economy and the land, commerce and consumption, sociability and status, nationhood and empire.
The research I had completed prior to this year examined the social and literary worlds of professional horticulturists (especially trading nurserymen) in England around the turn of the eighteenth century. At Dumbarton Oaks I have broadened the scope of this work, most importantly by interrogating the social milieus and textual productions of genteel gardeners, with particular reference to the pursuit of horticultural knowledge within the Royal Society, and to the generic conventions and cultural currency of georgic as a polite category of writing about husbandry. However, the most crucial outcome this year has been a methodological shift within my project as a whole. In attempting to integrate histories of elite, aristocratic gardens with those of the manual labour and technical skill of bourgeois horticultural practitioners (two domains of garden studies that hitherto arguably have failed to establish adequate dialogue), I had exploited the idea of the garden as social space, one variously productive of cultural, commercial, and intellectual interactions between people of unequal status and background. Yet this approach was in some ways counter-productive: after all, gardens during this period were deployed far more regularly to preserve and reinscribe dominant social relations than they were appropriated as sites of transgression. Instead it is in the construction, revision, and dissemination of contemporary horticultural expertise that such dynamic exchanges between gentleman, professional, and labourer can readily be observed and explored. I have therefore altered my project's focus from representations of garden space towards discourses of horticultural practice, and anticipate that this will produce a more astute account of the complex interplay between knowledge and sociability, taste and property, work and wealth, within which the nascent science of gardening was produced and conditioned.
M. Elen Deming (College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, Spring), “Wish-Landscapes and Garden Cities”
From Garden City to New Urbanism, the history of the twentieth-century Anglo-American utopian project turns on the assumption that gardens are essential components of the ideal city. At first glance this seems an innocent, benevolent idea, almost as old as urban history itself. Yet, many agendas are hidden within the discourses surrounding the modern reform garden. In urban reform campaigns, garden images may often veil a critique of the modern industrial metropolis, especially the negative impact of the city on the psyche and the body of its citizens. Simultaneously ideological and social, spatial and sensual, the garden-as-critique is particularly vivid in the rise of the British Garden Cities movement, at the end of the nineteenth century. Rather than the Garden Cities per se, my work at Dumbarton Oaks has focused on the discursive history of the working-class garden. In particular, I am interested in the way images, ideals, and social functions of the domestic landscape entered the political and social discourse surrounding this urban reform movement—and then how these ideals have performed at multiple scales and metaphorical levels over time.
In the context of the history of Garden Cities, a close examination of promotional images, discursive patterns in primary texts, political alliances, and social engineering, offers a deeper understanding of how Anglo-American attitudes towards domestic landscape, labor, class, and the city have (and continue to be) constructed. By focusing on uses of the garden as a powerful spatial symbol and social mechanism in urban design and social reform campaigns, we see that the character of the domestic landscape has been fundamental to the creation of social connections—and spatial separations—that define modern cities and their suburbs. In particular, my project shows how modernist cultivation of popular landscape desires and expectations has set in motion a trajectory of attitudes toward landscape, urbanism, family eugenics and the working body that still shapes the socio-spatial politics of contemporary cities.
While at Dumbarton Oaks, therefore, my principal project has been to reframe a monograph based on my doctoral dissertation (Wish Landscapes and Garden Cities, Harvard 2001), and to expand the literature base for my manuscript. Working with Michel Conan, Director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, has given me deeper insight into the social logic and somatic dimensions of gardens in urban reform. Access to primary literature on housing reform, as well as rare French and Scandinavian titles, has aided in developing my new understanding of environmental and planning history. I have begun to recognize the impact of emotions on the patterns of the built environment, and to map the power of wishful thinking, guilt, fear, anxiety, abjection, and nostalgia on the shape of modern cities. This helps explain why, at the turn of the last century, small domestic gardens were so frequently invoked in support of apparently contradictory reform agendas mounted by conservatives, liberals, socialists, eugenicists, utopians, artists, architects, family planners, youth organizers, and other advocates of urban reform.
Maryrica Ortiz Lottman (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), “Myriad Gardens: Landscapes of the Baroque Spanish Stage”
My book manuscript examines the symbolic use of gardens and landscapes in seventeenth-century Spanish theater. The project initially focused on gender and on the work of Tirso de Molina. But my experience at Dumbarton Oaks has broadened and thoroughly reshaped the project. Two chapters now discuss Tirso's best known Old Testament plays, The Revenge of Tamar (La venganza de Tamar) and The Woman Who Rules the Home (La mujer que manda en casa), but the remaining chapters are devoted to Lope de Vega, The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus (El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón); Calderón de la Barca, The Physician of His Honor (El médico de su honra); and Miguel de Cervantes, The Prisons of Algiers (Los baños de Argel). Thus my book examines several types of gardens located on three different continents.
The project also contributes to the current scholarly debate on the meaning and interpretations of gardens. On the Baroque Spanish stage a single garden could have multiple meanings, depending on the point of view of the character perceiving it. For example, in Calderón's The Physician of His Honor, four different characters see the same garden as an emblem of freedom, but their conflicting perceptions draw on four distinctly different garden traditions. The original audiences of this play, like the audiences of other masterpieces of Spanish classical theater, were expected to be so familiar with a variety of real and literary gardens and with gardens portrayed in the visual arts and on stage that they could readily identify the warring perceptions of individual characters as they explored these settings. Part of the enjoyment of participating in the performance as an active viewer must have been the effort to simultaneously apprehend the conflicting conceptions of the garden as the action was under way.
The project also explores the staging of gardens and landscapes, the use of costumes and stage props, and the probable postures of the actors in order to discover important visual allusions that have heretofore been neglected in critical discussions of these dramas. Spanish playwrights manipulated audience response by positioning characters against an often unnamed but always carefully selected backdrop of figures; these figures are drawn from the landscapes of biblical iconography, classical myths, popular legends and folk beliefs.
Junior Fellow
Igor Demchenko (State Institute of Art Research, Moscow, Russia),
“The Visual Representation of Heavens and Paradise in Medieval Islamic Culture”
The dream of heavens and paradise was an important motivating factor for believers in the medieval Islamic world. In the Western tradition of Islamic studies, scholars traditionally paid more attention to the texts describing the future life of the righteous. In my project at Dumbarton Oaks, I explored the visual image of paradise in pre-modern Islamic culture. Under the term visual image I understand a generalized image of a material object, or a number of objects, that appears in the mind of a person (in my case in the mind of a medieval Muslim believer) in response to a certain idea.
The question that allowed me to shed new light on the problem of reconstructing the visual idea of Islamic paradise was whether all Muslims had the same idea of the material aspects of paradise. When I analyzed medieval eschatological texts, I took into account social differences between military or landed aristocracy and the mass of city-dwellers; and this approach brought interesting results. In general, I can say that the idea of paradise itself was produced (and reproduced) by and for city-dwellers; and it deeply correlated with the socioeconomic needs of this group. Gradually it was accepted by other layers of society including the military and landed nobility.
Evidence from medieval panegyric poetry shows that gardens were constantly compared with paradise, and so the image of real gardens could influence the visual idea of paradise in the consciousness of the nobility. At the same time, I found that there was a substantial difference between depictions of luxurious gardens and representations of paradise in medieval Islamic miniatures that were created by artists who obviously came from the lower layers of society. Muslim painters used special combinations of visual elements to depict large-scale formal gardens. The most important of such elements was a regular basin together with straight channels. The idea of a garden could also be transmitted by painting enclosure walls or a garden pavilion. Paradise was usually visualized not as a large-scale regular garden but as a piece of abundant nature. Comparative study of depictions of real gardens and abodes of paradise leads me to the conclusion that the traditional regular gardens of the nobility played a minor role in the formation of the visual image of paradise in the consciousness of city-dwellers.
The research conducted at Dumbarton Oaks allowed me to take the next step in clarifying the causes of the appeal of Islam to proselytes and relations between art and religion in the medieval Islamic world.
Pre-Columbian Studies
Visiting Scholars
Elizabeth H. Boone (Tulane University, Fall),
“Painted Books and Indigenous Expression in Pre-Conquest and Early Colonial Mexico”
My research this fall was divided into two principal areas. One concerned the painted books of Aztec Mexico as examples of the graphic organization and communication of knowledge. The other looked into the early colonial period in Mexico to examine how indigenous art forms and ways of graphic expression continued within New Spain.
My work with the pictorial codices of Mexico focused on the divinatory and religious manuscripts, which record the invisible world of the sacred calendar as well as the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhere to time. Building on an earlier oral presentation, I finished writing the essay, When Art Is Writing and Writing, Art, for the volume Dialogues in Art History (forthcoming from the National Gallery of Art). This essay addresses the manner in which the calendrical and prophetic information was structured graphically. In so doing, I looked comparatively at the presentational strategies of other forms of graphic communication, such as diagrams and lists used by peoples in the Western world today.
I then turned my attention to my next major project, which is to analyze the ways indigenous ways of thinking and creating continued during the colonial period in central Mexico. As this will be a multi-year venture, I only made a start. I wrote a short essay, Colonial Foundations: Points of Contact and Compatibility, for the exhibition of colonial Latin American art organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in which I argue that colonial culture was shaped largely by the points at which indigenous and Spanish culture seemed to overlap the most. I also continued to develop the bibliographic base for my study of early colonial Mexico.
Dean Snow (Pennsylvania State University, Fall),
“The Other World: Archaeology of Ancient America”
The focus of my stay as senior scholar at Dumbarton Oaks has been the preparation of chapters having Mesoamerican content for my new book tentatively titled The Other World: Archaeology of Ancient America. The book is designed to cover the entire continent of North America, including nearby islands. This is a departure from tradition in the United States, where books claiming to treat the archaeology of North America invariably stop at the Mexican border and give scant attention to any sources written in languages other than English.
Most previous books have been written as culture histories, descriptive volumes that have tended to let the facts speak for themselves. The facts of North American archaeology are now so voluminous that this approach is both stultifying and unacceptably confusing. My solution has been to adopt evolutionary ecology as an explanatory framework, and to make minimum use of the now hopelessly complex time-space frameworks that archaeologists have traditionally used to organize knowledge. There are too many archaeological phases, pottery types, projectile point types, and regional sequences for the older approach to remain viable (if it ever was).
The book is traditional in its overall structure, consisting of fifteen chapters that begin with Eurasian origins and the spread of Paleoindians. Thereafter the book turns to a general coverage of the new adaptations brought on by the end of the Pleistocene and the emergence of modern climatic conditions. These changes contained the seeds of plant domestication, which ultimately fueled the rise of chiefdoms, states, and empires. The last two developed only in Mesoamerica, but their influences extended to the United States Southwest and the Eastern Woodlands. Plant domesticates spread northward, and physical remains such as ceramics, architecture, and luxury goods all show evidence that ideas spread with them.
I have been moving toward writing this book for four decades. Dumbarton Oaks has given me the time and resources to complete six (of fifteen) chapters and make significant progress on several more. This was particularly the case for all sections having anything to do with Mesoamerica, where the library collection at Dumbarton Oaks is unequalled. I have been able to discover and describe clear evidence of linkages between Highland Mexico and both the southwestern and southeastern regions of what is now the United States. It is also the case that fellows in residence provided me with many excellent ideas and helpful suggestions. I am very grateful to Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks for this opportunity.
John W. Verano (Tulane University, Fall),
“The Lady of El Brujo: Unwrapping the Mummy of a High Status Moche Female”
My two principal research projects during my stay at Dumbarton Oaks were the study of a recently-discovered Moche mummy from the site of El Brujo in northern coastal Peru, and the preparation of an article on trophy head-taking and human sacrifice. The article is an attempt to synthesize recent work on this subject, incorporating new archaeological discoveries and laboratory analyses, and evaluating them within the context of previous scholarship.
My project on the El Brujo mummy entailed both library research and a short trip to Peru to continue with data collection and analysis that I had begun during the summer of 2005. I presented an informal talk on this research at Dumbarton Oaks on November 17, as well as at the National Geographic Society on December 14. In November, I submitted a grant proposal to the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration for further funding of this work, and was successful in receiving funding (NGS CRE Grant #7961–05: Anthropological study of the El Brujo mummies). I plan to return to Peru in July of 2006 to continue this research.
On December 1, I gave an invited talk at the University of Utah, entitled: Identities of the Dead: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Human Sacrificial Victims in Ancient Peru. While there, I met with faculty and graduate students and worked on a grant proposal to be submitted to the National Science Foundation on ancient DNA analysis of sacrificial victims from Punta Lobos, Peru. This is a collaborative project I am conducting in conjunction with research laboratories in the United States and Canada.
Fellows
Scott Hutson (University of Kentucky),
“Personhood, Dwelling, and Identity: A Relational Approach”
My project of developing a relational model of identity in ancient Mesoamerica was advanced in several ways at Dumbarton Oaks. I wrote three chapters of a book on this subject, each chapter extending the model beyond the original grounds from which I launched the project: household archaeology at the ancient Maya site of Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico. The first chapter, presented as my Dumbarton Oaks research report on November 15, 2005, uses the context of the production of graffiti at the site of Tikal to highlight the social and interactive aspects of learning and the development of personhood. This chapter also contributes to a topic that has received little attention in the New World: the social experience of childhood. The second chapter explored the culturally peculiar logics of power relations as revealed by forms of sacrifice (in Peru, central Mexico, and Yucatan) that manifest extremely dialectical forms of relatedness: human sacrifices in which a lord subsumes and consumes the subjectivity of the victim and in which retainers of a lord are killed upon the death of the lord. The final chapter is an ethnographic analysis of how contemporary indigenous Yucatecans construct their identity through their daily relations to and action in a landscape filled with ancient Maya ruins.
In addition to my work on the book, I also advanced my project in other ways. For example, I prepared two manuscripts for submission to peer-reviewed journals. The first manuscript concerns the discard of garbage in ancient households. Discard is often seen as a behavior dominated by practicality and expedience. My data show, however, that communally-held and historically-transmitted structures of meaning govern, in part, what is considered practical. The second paper concerns results of phosphate analysis of ancient soils in domestic contexts. Since phosphate analyses help identify activity areas, they add much to an understanding daily life. Consequently, understanding daily life promotes a relational perspective insofar as identity is built from everyday relations to people, places and things. Finally, I used my time at Dumbarton Oaks to perpetuate my field research on this topic by writing the field report from the previous summer's investigations at Chunchucmil and the permit proposal for research in the upcoming summer. Such reports and proposals enable my colleagues and I to continue doing archaeology in Mexico and to continue to contribute new information and new questions to the field of Pre-Columbian Studies.
Leonardo López Luján (Museo del Templo Mayor, INAH, Fall),
“Awakening the Stones: The Beginnings of Pre-Columbian Archaeological Studies in Central Mexico”
At the end of Mexico's colonial period, a newfound interest in Pre-Columbian civilizations emerged due to the spread of Enlightenment ideas among the native-born population (criollos), feeding the spirit of independence and promoting a reevaluation of the past for academic, as well as political, purposes. This interest was also a result of Charles Ⅲ and Charles Ⅳ's support for archaeology and to the sciences in general. These monarchs, well-known for promoting the first explorations in Herculaneum and Pompeii, were responsible for a number of scientific expeditions and the establishment of institutes, academies, botanical gardens, and museums in the colonies overseas.
It is precisely in this context that the study of Pre-Columbian remains flourished in the last three decades of the eighteenth century. It is then we see the first systematic recording of virtually forgotten archaeological sites from Central Mexico, such as Xochicalco and Teotihuacan, as well as the publication of reports on more distant ruins such as those of El Tajín and Palenque. This is also the era of the formation of the first public and private collections of Pre-Columbian art in Mexico City. Unfortunately, with a few noteworthy exceptions, modern surveys on the history of archaeology in the Americas devote only a few lines at most to an analysis of this period.
The main goal of the present research project is to produce a historiographic study to understand better the origins of Pre-Columbian archaeology in Central Mexico, particularly in Mexico City. My intention is to delve into the biographies of the major figures in this story in order to shed light on what were the relationships between these individuals, and to assess the value of their scientific contributions to the body of knowledge, as well as their influence on current interpretations.
At Dumbarton Oaks, I have had the opportunity to analyze and compare numerous unpublished manuscripts and drawings recently discovered at the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, the Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The study of these important documents has revealed, among other unsuspected conclusions, that the most illustrious intellectuals and artists of the Mexican Enlightenment as well as the growing number of aficionados and dilettanti who lived in Mexico City, recorded dozens of Aztec sculptural monuments that were emerging in those years through urban renewal projects. The Aztec monuments—most of them still at the Museo Nacional de Antropología—generated curiosity, debates, publications, and the desire to preserve them for posterity. This research has also shown that these scholars, once thought to be working independently, were engaged in a lively intellectual circle around the university and the Academia de San Carlos.
Saburo Sugiyama (Aichi Prefectural University, Japan),
“Monuments and Dedicatory Burials at the Moon Pyramid of Teotihuacan: The Rise of Power and State Religion”
During my fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, my long-term research on the dedication burials, monuments, and city-layout of Teotihuacan progressed substantially, due to the library's myriad of comparative texts in Mesoamerican and Andean archaeology, ethnohistory, and art history. In particular, my spatial analyses of major monuments and the dedication burials found within them, resulted in an exciting outcome that seemingly links the data of sacrificial graves to the monumental constructions and general city planning at Teotihuacan meaningfully. The data analyses and interpretations I developed during my Dumbarton Oaks fellowship term were positively received by an experts' workshop organized at Colgate University in April.
As the project director of the Moon Pyramid Project at the site of Teotihuacan, I coordinated a series of publication projects and developed materials studies procedures. Despite the fact that extensive excavations and research on material remains and data have been conducted, these studies, published in Spanish, are still preliminary reports. The preparation of an extensive catalogue describing the significant and unique offerings as well as various material analyses carried out by my colleagues, require thorough and systematic completion. Therefore, I began structuring the contents of future publications and made contacts with publishers in order to disseminate the results of the project, including my own studies developed while in residence at Dumbarton Oaks. As a result of these efforts, descriptive volumes and a book in English will be published by INAH and the University of New Mexico Press respectively, and a permanent data bank with extensive web pages will be created at the Arizona State University.
During the spring term, I coordinated the exhibition Sacrificios de Consagración en la Pirámide de la Luna to be held April – July 2006 at the Templo Mayor Museum, co-edited an exhibition catalogue with Leonardo López Luján, for which I wrote two papers highlighting new information and interpretations I have recently developed, and participated in the opening ceremony in Mexico. I also collaborated with the journal Ancient Mesoamerica in preparing a special section on the Moon Pyramid Project, for which I wrote two papers including substantial data I organized while at Dumbarton Oaks. My additional studies and writing activities undertaken while at Dumbarton Oaks included one paper for the Shimada and Fitzsimmons' edited volume, one article for Encyclopedia of Archaeology from Academic Press, one article for Archaeology Now: Great Discoveries of Our Time, from Thames and Hudson, as well as many others, and all reflect my continuing study of ancient cities, monuments, and sacrificial burials at Teotihuacan.
Junior Fellows
Laura Filloy Nadal (Museo Nacional de Antropología, INAH, Spring),
“Finery and Insignia of a Maya King of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico”
The city of Palenque is located at the northern end of the highlands of the state of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico. Palenque reached its maximum splendor in the Late Classic (600–900 AD) when it became one of the Maya centers of greatest importance. The early accounts of the city speak mainly of wars, defeats, and dynastic turbulence that did not come to a halt until the reign of one of the most prominent kings of the Maya area: K´inich Janaab´ Pakal—also known as Pakal the Great or Pakal II (603–683 AD).
During the reign of Pakal II, the city of Palenque flourished and underwent significant modifications. This sovereign ordered the construction of a number of major structures, including the Temple of the Inscriptions, which served as his sepulcher and commemorative monument. Mexican archeologist Alberto Ruz excavated this mausoleum in 1952, and discovered the remains of the renowned king dressed with fine effects carved in jade.
The central goal of my doctoral research is an in-depth analysis of the garments, insignia, and symbols of power present in Pakal's funerary complex. At Dumbarton Oaks, I had the opportunity to consult the magnificent bibliographic collection on Mesoamerican archaeology that allowed me to work with abundant references that facilitated the comparison of objects, clothing, and symbols of power associated with Maya royalty at different Classic period centers, and those worn by Pakal II for his last rites.
Since the 1960s, an interesting debate has arisen over the existence of portraiture in Mesoamerican visual representation. One group of specialists has maintained that, from the Western perspective, the notion of portraits has been confused with naturalistic or conventional art characteristic of certain Mesoamerican cultures. On the other hand, another group of specialists suggests purely conventional art may coexist with the art of portraiture. The accessibility of major sources on the world's history of art at Dumbarton Oaks let me track the debate over the existence of portraiture in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, and early Christian art. The main purpose was to find out whether or not the Palenque depictions are true portraits or if they are idealized, emblematic, or ethnic representations of the king and the royal family. My preliminary observations lead me to presume that at least during the reign of Pakal II, true portraits were produced in Palenque.
Jeffrey C. Splitstoser,
“Weaving the Structure of the Cosmos: Cloth and Agency at Cerrillos, a Paracas Site in the Ica Valley, Peru”
While at the Dumbarton Oaks, the majority of my time was spent writing an outline and a draft of my dissertation. In doing so, I made an interesting discovery regarding the unique role of fabric selvages—in particular the weft selvages—as potential harbingers of ancient world view. The find promises to have a positive impact on the field of textile studies.
I am studying a collection of more than one thousand textile fragments from the site of Cerrillos, a Paracas ceremonial complex in use ca. 850–200 BCE on the south coast of Peru. The textiles were found in stratified architectural fill that was excavated between 1999 and 2003 by Dwight Wallace and Mercedes Delgado. The remarkable preservation of the textiles (more than 2,200 years old) is due to the extreme aridity of the south coast of Peru, one of the driest places on earth.
My thesis is that textile structures, as the material products of human practice, are embedded with information, including worldview. This assertion is premised on the belief that all technology, including textile technology, is culturally informed. Thus, textile structures can help us understand aspects of ancient societies that were hitherto considered unknowable without writing.
One aspect of the project involved looking at patterns of symmetry in weave structures in order to learn about concepts of dualism. When looking at warp and weft selvage structures (i.e., the edges of textiles), I immediately noticed that weavers were almost always using either pairs of yarns or groups of four yarns that were interconnected at the selvages, creating unexpectedly complex structures—some so complicated as to defy practical explanations. The structures varied through time, indicating that they were not accidental.
I believe these structures might reflect principles of dualism, because weft selvages—as the edges of textiles—embody the moment when two opposite actions met during the weaving process (that is, the pivot point when the yarn changed direction and turned back). In essence, selvages are the material manifestation of opposite actions, and this fact most likely would not have gone unnoticed by ancient Andean weavers. We know, for example, that ancient Andean people were keenly interested in the meeting of opposites. They even had a term for it: tinquy. Hence, weft selvages, as the loci of tinquy, deserve special attention during textile analysis.
This finding could potentially revolutionize textile analysis by changing the focus from the study of design to the interpretation of structure, thereby expanding our knowledge of ancient Andean worldview in heretofore unexplored, but meaningful ways.