Any discussion of the character and development of Byzantine archaeology needs to recognize the associated disciplines of Byzantine art and architectural history.
All three are concerned with differing aspects of the material world of Byzantium and their study ultimately rests on the physical traces of past structures, artefacts, human landscapes and environments. Although each subject can be informed by historical texts to illuminate and contextualize past perceptions and motives, ultimately they are each rooted in the physical survival of differing categories of remains from the past. A consequence of these symmetries is that the investigation of Byzantine archaeology has often been conducted by scholars with a range of backgrounds, and this has given rise to differing and changing definitions of how the discipline of archaeology is understood. Thus in Britain before the First World War it is possible to identify three distinct approaches. Firstly, one which draws from the experience of a museum curator, O. M. Dalton of the British Museum, who published his Byzantine Art and Archaeology in 1911. This was a handbook of early Christian and Byzantine art and artefacts, covering an impressive range of material from the visual arts of wall-paintings, mosaics, icons, and manuscripts, to the ‘minor decorative arts’, including coins, metalwork, glass and ceramics, and architectural decoration. Apart from wall-paintings and mosaics that still remained in situ, most of what he described was drawn from the collections and catalogues of international museums and included categories of evidence often excluded by Byzantine art historians today. Secondly, the archaeology of buildings and especially churches was represented by the researches and travels of scholars such as Gertrude Bell, whose work with William Ramsay recorded the Binbirkilise (Tool Churches’), one of the major stone-built settlements in central Anatolia (Fig. 1). Above all she was concerned to establish a taxonomy of churches, by recording, documenting, and classifying ancient buildings but with little concern of why they were built or
Fig. 1 Gertrude BelTs workers at the excavations of the Byzantine settlement of Maden §ehir. Binbirkilise. Turkey 1907
(Gertrude Bell Photographic Archive, Historical Studies, Newcastle University)
How they were used (Ramsay and Bell 1909; Kleinbauer 1991). Thirdly, an approach exemplified by a number of scholars associated with the British School of Archaeology at Athens in the decades before the First World War which demonstrated a broader interest in the material culture of the Byzantine world, often set within the context of what would now be termed the ‘long-term history’ of the Hellenic world, reaching from prehistory to recent times (Kleinbauer 1991: xlvi-xlviii). One work which exemplifies this is F. W. Hasluck’s study of Kyzikos (1910), which includes not only a study of the monuments, topography, and epigraphy of the classical city, but also extends to the Byzantine and later Ottoman monuments in its territory. From this can be seen the beginnings of an approach to landscape archaeology and history, no longer confined to specific monuments or objects. The examples cited are drawn from British Byzantinists but similar approaches are replicated by other European scholars at that time such as Josef Strzygowski and Charles Diehl.
World History
