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Christopher Witmore |Changes [Oct 07, 2008]
Curriculum VitaeI am a founding member and former Assistant Director of the Metamedia Laboratory at Stanford. In 2005 I co-founded archaeolog.org, a weblog for all archaeologists, and archaeography.com, a photoblog dealing in all things archaeological.
Within archaeology, my research concentrates on landscape, material culture studies (I prefer things), emergent media in archaeology and the history of archaeology. These interests have three primary facets in my current postdoctoral research. First, my work articulates human and companion animal relations with the landscapes of Greece in general, and the Argolid in particular, over the very long term. From the development of agricultural practices in the Neolithic to pastoral economies and the dynamics of the Greek polis to contemporary land-use my work develops historical geographies of the Greek countryside. Second, my work explores the relationships of people and things, specifically in the context of ‘media’ (whether 2nd-century BCE inscriptions, 1st-century CE coins, or 18th-century maps) as developing modes of circulating actions and ideas. Third, my interests in archaeological practice have served as a springboard to revisiting core questions related to field methodologies in both excavation and survey. How do we produce an accurate portrayal of the material past? What constitutes a satisfactory interpretation? Such questions are the heart of my work in comparative histories of archaeology — with the Classical Topographer, William Martin Leake or the multi-disciplinary French Expédition Scientifique de Morée — and, perhaps not surprisingly, they have led me to address issues related to the reception of the Greco-Roman past in late 18th and early 19th century Europe whether in Greece or Sicily, London or Paris.
My current book projects include:
