Friday, September 19, 2008

Also Ridiculous

D. and N. Soren's 1999 A Roman Villa and a Late Roman Infant Cemetery: Excavation at Poggio Gramignano Lugnano in Teverina [worldcat], which is a useful publication, costs $608.00 at Amazon.com.

If you happen to have access to a library that spent the money to acquire the volume, you can find a useful discussion of the pottery in part 2, with good photographic documentation of amphoras reused as child burials on plates 236 to 250. Black-and-white, but you can still get a sense of North African and other fabrics.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Still Totally Ridiculous...

I recently received the David Brown Book Company's Byzantium and Late Antiquity list via regular mail; the one that is valid through October 31st, 2008. On the inside of the last page, J. Bardill's Brickstamps of Constantinople is offered for $199.98. That's much better than the original list price of $750.00 still given at Amazon.com, and again less than the independent reseller prices also listed there. At the time of writing, these ranged from $692.12 to $297.99.

Even with these reductions, it does nonetheless seem clear that expensive, print-only distribution was a bad way of bringing this information to the world. I say this without meaning to take anything away from the author's scholarly accomplishment.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Pottery Database from the British Institute at Ankara

Tom Elliot noticed that the British Institute at Ankara has put up a website for its collection of artifacts from various sites around Turkey. Pot sherds seem to make up the greatest part of this material.

The map at the top right is nice for exploring what's available. Here's a link to the site of Kavak on the Gallipoli peninsula. Click here for an enlarged photo of some sherds from the site. Note the nice Phocaean Red-Slip Hayes form 3, it's one-up from the lower left corner. It looks like there are some PRS bases in there as well, and the largest ridged amphora sherd should be LRA2. But it's always risky to identify small fragments from photos so take that for what it's worth.

Another nice digital resource, even if the descriptions aren't yet very complete.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Hadashot Arkheologiyot from the IAA

The Hadashot Arkheologiyot website offers useful preliminary discussions of archaeological work in Israel. There is a nice search form with a link to a clickable map.

Many of the articles discuss ceramic and numismatic finds and are accompanied by well-chosen illustrations. Here's a notice of an agricultural "watchman's hut" where African Red-Slip was found. That's certainly an interesting site classification. And see here for salvage work that recorded Cypriot Red-Slip.

There's much to be learned from browsing and searching so I recommend taking the time to try it out.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008