Encounters, Excavations and Argosies: Essays for Richard Hodges

Richard Hodges is one of Europe’s preeminent archaeologists. He has transformed the way we understand the early Middle Ages, and has put the past to work for the present, through a sequence of paradigmatic excavations in England, Italy and Albania. Encounters, Excavations and Argosies pays tribute to him with a series of reflections on some of the themes and issues which have been central to his work over the last forty years. The contributors are colleagues, many his students, above all friends of the man whose ideas, example, trust, and loyalty have touched and inspired us all.

Table of Contents:
Introduction (John Mitchell and John Moreland); Richard Hodges (Mother Miriam Benedict); Richard a San Vincenzo al Volturno, il 23 settembre 1985* (Franco Valente); An ode to New Light on Early Medieval Monasticism (Neil Christie); Looking beyond the local: Richard Hodges’ extraordinary journey from Box to Butrint (Jim Symonds); Cutting history in slices. Periodization and the Middle Ages: an archaeological perspective (Andrea Augenti); Stone Age Economics: a new audit (Graeme Barker); Richard Hodges and Tuscany: from the pioneering excavations of the 80s to the ERC-Advanced nEU-Med Project (Giovanna Bianchi); From villa to minster at Southwell (Will Bowden); Islamization and trade in the Arabian Gulf in the age of Mohammad and Charlemagne (Jose C. Carvajal López); Remembering the early Christian baptistery, the Venetian castle and Art-Deco Saranda: a personal view of the future of heritage and development in Saranda and Butrint (Prue Chiles); The popes and their town in the time of Charlemagne (Paolo Delogu); The rebirth of towns in the Beneventan principality (8th-9th centuries) (Alessandro Di Muro); The monastery of Anselm and Peter. The origins of Nonantola between Lombards and Carolingians (Sauro Gelichi); Farfa revisited: the early medieval monastery church (Sheila Gibson, Oliver J. Gilkes and John Mitchell); Butrint’s death and resurrection: the medieval lime-kiln in the Roman forum (David Hernandez); ʿAnjar: An Umayyad image of urbanism and its afterlife (Bea Leal); Lively columns and living stones - the origins of the Constantinian church basilica (John Mitchell); The survival and revival of urban settlements in the southern Adriatic: Aulon and Kanina in the early to late Middle Ages (Nevila Molla); Powerful matter – agency and materiality in the early Middle Ages (John Moreland); We do it indoors and sitting down, but still call it archaeology – unravelling and recording blocklifted hoards (Pippa Pearce); Albanian Archaeology in the New Millennium and The British Contribution (Luan Përzhita); ‘Moi Auguste’ – Les images de l’empereur Auguste dans les collections des musées albanais (Iris Pojani); Butrint in the late 6th to 7th centuries: contexts, sequences and ceramics (Paul Reynolds); Athens, Charlemagne and Small Change (Alessia Rovelli); From villa to village. Late Roman to early medieval settlement networks in the ager Rusellanus (Alessandro Sebastiani); Scandinavian monetisation in the first millennium AD – practices and institutions (Dagfinn Skre); Philosophiana in central Sicily in the late Roman and Byzantine periods: settlement and economy (Emanuele Vaccaro); Appunti, grezzi, per un’agenda di Archeologia Pubblica in Italia (Marco Valenti); Leiderdorp: a Frisian settlement in the shadow of Dorestad (Arno A. A. Verhoeven and Menno F. P. Dijkstra); Saranda in the waves of time: some early medieval pottery finds from a port in the Byzantine Empire (Joanita Vroom); Richard Hodges and the British School at Rome (BSR) (Christopher Smith); Richard Hodges: an intellectual appreciation (Chris Wickham)