Routledge published his co-edited Archaeology in the Making in 2013 (paperback 2017, with W. He is co-author of Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (2012, with B. Christopher Witmore is professor of archaeology and classics at Texas Tech University. Those interested in the long-term changes in society, technology, and culture in this region will find this book captivating. Old Lands will be of interest to historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and scholars of the Eastern Peloponnese.
Carefully composed with those objects encountered along its varied paths, this book offers an original and wonderous account of a region in twenty-seven segments, and fulfills a longstanding ambition within archaeology to generate a polychronic narrative that stands as a complement and alternative to diachronic history. Turning on pressing concerns that arise out of object-oriented encounters, Old Lands ponders the disappearance of an agrarian world rooted in the Neolithic, the transition to urban styles of living, and changes in communication, move ment, and metabolism, while opening fresh perspectives on long-term inhabit ation, changing mobilities, and appropriation through pollution. Following waters in search of rest through the lens of Lucretian poetics, Christopher Witmore reconstitutes an untimely mode of ambulatory writing, chorography, mindful of the challenges we all face in these precarious times. Old Lands takes readers on an epic journey through the legion spaces and times of the Eastern Peloponnese, trailing in the footsteps of a Roman periegete, an Ottoman traveler, antiquarians, and anonymous agrarians. Looking southwest, to what has become of an ancient oikos Paleolithic to Bronze Age amid Venetian: a museumĢ3. The road to Epidaurus: Frazer and Pausaniasġ7. Argos to Anapli on the hoof, with a stop at Tirynsġ6. Modern spectacle through an ancient theatreġ4. Argos, a democratic polis, and Plutarch’s Pyrrhus, a synkrisis (comparison)ġ3. About Mycenae, history and archaeologyġ2. Ancient Corinth: descent into memory, ascent into oblivionĩ.
Lines in stone: roads, canals, walls, faults, and marine terracesĢ.