Travels with an Archaeologist Finding a Sense of Place

by Hodges, Richard

• ISBN13: 9781350012646
• ISBN10: 1350012645
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-04-20
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

'You must be very patient', most everyone asserts admiringly on encountering an archaeologist. Patience in the pursuit of history instantly earns consideration. Patience to sift through the soil to discover treasure, from gold to unidentifiable knick-knacks – an educated beachcomber. But, patience does not come into it so much as the chemistry of experiences from being in the company of others as the five senses are provoked and satisfied by the buried unexpected.

Archaeology is about hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching past textures in our time. With these senses, in the company of friends, new places are created from old ones. Travel with archaeologist and writer Richard Hodges as he explores sites across the globe and ponders the relationship of the individual with the past and the present of the past in its ruins, monuments and traces of distant worlds and civilisations.

Author Biography

Richard Hodges OBE, is President of The American University of Rome, Italy. He is the editor of the Debates in Archaeology series; and his many publications include The Archaeology of Mediterranean Placemaking (Bloomsbury 2016) and Dark Age Economics (Bloomsbury 2012). He has previously been Director of Archaeology for the Butrint Foundation and Director of the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, USA, and writes widely for magazines.

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgements

Introduction: An archaeologist's sense of the past

In the company of place-making people

1. In Charles Newton's shadow, searching for Demeter at Knidos
2. Wim van Es and the discovery of the Dutch 'Troy', Dorestad
3. Johnny Mitchell and San Vincenzo al Volturno's first saint
4. Riccardo and Quinto – place-making at 'lost' Tuscan villages
5. Reviewing Lisa Fentress at Alatri

Feeding the senses

Sounds

6. Boreal Butrint and its golden oriels
7. Sublimity: hidden in the togate's folds
8. Fireworks at Copán

Sight

9. Seeing beyond Sparta, Mistra
10. Cavernous spectacles of colour: S. Michele at Olevano and the Crypt of the Original Sin
11. A Renaissance dream house at Visegrád

Smell

12. The smell of the desert: Doha and Al Zubarah
13. Smelling spices in Sana'a
14. The disturbing scent of gold - Rosia Montana, Transylvania

Taste

15. A taste of Tuscany: S.Pietro d'Asso in the Orcia valley
16. Red mullet and retsina on Aegina
17. The taste of Key lime pie

Touch

18. Touching 'gold' in Gordion
19. In touch with Rome's ex-pat dead: Rome's non-Catholic cemetery
20. Where the blue begins: Lampedusa

Select Bibliography
Index of People and Places