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Associate Professor
Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Bronze
and Iron Age art and archaeology
Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, 1994
On leave 2008-2009 as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow in Historical Studies)
My work focuses on artistic interconnections in the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean world, particularly among the Aegean, Cyprus, Anatolia, and the Levant. In studying ancient visual communication, not only are creation and viewing important, but also recycling and reuse form bases for the transfer of ideas and aesthetics. Textiles, ceramics, architecture, and architectural sculpture form topics of ongoing research. On this subject, during 2008-2009 I am working on a book entitled Artistic Exchange in the Mediterranean Bronze Age World.
Part of my research concerns the craft and visual appearance of texts as well as the relationship between writing and the art and technology of seals. On this topic, Script and Se al Use on Cyprus in the Bronze and Iron Ages (Archaeological Institute of America Colloquia and Conference Papers 4, 2002), investigates the connections among Cypriot, Aegean, and Near Eastern ways of writing and recording by considering both the content of the images and documents and their functional contexts. In Art and Society in Cyprus from the Bronze into the Iron Age (Cambridge University Press, 2009), I examine the nature of human to human as well as human to deity communication through tools for administrative recording and divination. The study focuses on the harbor city of Kition, a crucial place for understanding the ancient world and the modern history of excavations that have sought to reveal its material remains.
Places of interconnection and processes of exchange play into all aspects of my research, teaching, and fieldwork. The sites of Melissa and Vounari in Phlamoudhi village on Cyprus, excavated in the 1970s by the late Professor Edith Porada, are parts of a Late Bronze Age settlement area with links north, south, east, and west. They were reoccupied in the Archaic and Classical periods. Survey of the area also provides evidence for Roman and Medieval period life in the region. Since 2000, the aim of the Phlamoudhi Archaeological Project has been to study, display, and publish finds from these sites. In 2005, an exhibition in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia simulated visits to the sites in the Phlamoudhi village area. The Guide to Phlamoudhi (Wallach Art Gallery, New York, 2005) accompanied the show. Views from Phlamoudhi, Cyprus (Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 63, 2008) contains papers from a conference held together with this exhibition. On May 15, 2009, the exhibit, retitled, Views from Phlamoudhi, Cyprus, will reopen in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia and will run through August 15, 2009 (http://www.learn.columbia.edu/phlamoudhi). ASOR will also publish the final excavation reports.
E-mail: jss245@columbia.edu
Phlamoudhi-Melissa: http://www.learn.columbia.edu/phlamoudhi
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