Some Reflections
I want to jot down a few reflections as I sit in the airport waiting to go home. I have spent the last week with my family. It was the first time in 28 years that I was informed that my family had taken a vacation together that was not golfing in PEI — even that has been a while. The last vacation was a trip to Mexico when I was 16 and contracted a wonder viral infection that nearly killed me. I don’t recommend contracting para-typhoid. Over this current trip, I reflected on a few items — primarily my work in Athens, my dissertation proposal and most importantly, my soon-to-be wife and nine-month-old son. I am ecstatic to get home and see them.
Athens
Athens was a successful season. over a 55 day period, I examined and documented approximately 200 coins that were minted between 1000 - 1350 CE. Each of these coins were excavated in the 1930s from the H’ trench, and as I have noted before, I am reassessing each coin and creating an updated dataset for them. The season brought forward more evidence to preliminarily support my hypothesis about circulation and reuse. A trip to Corinth to discuss these ideas with Guy Sanders, was fruitful and informative. Sorry, but I cannot go into further detail about this at it is unpublished materials from the Agora and I want to go back to continue my research. I will, however, will write a preliminary report and will notify everyone when this is published in the coming year…I hope.
Dissertation Proposal
I can speak more to the proposal, as I have given this process more thought and I am free to divulge my work at pleasure. The dissertation will be broken into 4-5 articles to be published in peer-reviewed journals with diverse themes. The overarching theme of the dissertation is medieval coins as forms of colonial pollution within the Canadian context. The application of methods and theory will be multi/trans-disciplinary and focus on Manuel I Komnenos’ coins, from resource harvesting to their deposition in the Canadian museum. Each article will address 1-2 components in these processes and how we, as scholars, perpetuate colonial/oriental ideologies by critiquing the processes we use when excavating, curating, and exhibiting medieval coins. The objective is to disrupt traditional methods in the so-called fields of ‘Byzantine’ numismatics and archaeology. The goal: to demonstrate how the continued use of the ‘Byzantine’ label in Canada is a continuation of colonial/imperial ideologies which perpetuate the disenfranchisement of Indigenous Land relations and the preservation of Orientalist tropes about medieval Eastern Roman society. The topic is complex and broad while highly specific at the same time. It is a collaboration of disciplinary resources at the intersection of Public History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Numismatics, and Sociology. Though I have been procrastinating in writing the proposal — due to my overthinking — much of the project is conceptualized in my squirrel-ly brain. It will be written over the coming month…I hope.
Rome
Rome was not built in a day, and you cannot experience it in a day. Over the past week, I have been on vacation with my family. My brother had a conference on a cruise ship, where he presented his products, TangTalk and Dracattus, to a group of crypto investors. An extra ticket and his continued business success led him to bring me and my parents on the cruise. We sailed from Ravenna to Santorini, Athens, Mykonos, Kephalonia and back to Ravenna, where we then travelled by train to Rome and spent a day and a half in the city. It was a whirlwind vacation, much needed and productive at the same time. My brother and I will be launching a digital project in the coming months. It will incorporate my expertise in late-Roman and medieval Roman coins and public engagement within the digital resources of NFT and blockchain. Announcements to come in the future…I hope. That said, Rome was magnificent but too short and hectic. We saw the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Spanish Steps, and several more sites. By the end of the day, we were exhausted and full of delicious Italian cuisine.