Van Dyke R.M, Alcock S.E. (ред.) Archaeologies of Memory
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Ancestral Presence, Commemorative Practice 51
the Western cemetery were re-opened and used by an organized group of funerary
workers, called choachytes. These were the libation-pourers of Djeme who were
responsible for maintaining the mortuary cult of those buried in the necropolis of
Djeme.Their role was cultic and performative, bringing the necessary food and water
offerings to the tombs (Vleeming 1995). The tombs in question were not generally
newly constructed mausolea; rather, they were usurped monuments from much earlier
periods such as those at Deir el Medina. In the Ptolemaic period numerous bodies
were deposited in tombs 1126, 1233, 1346, and in later times into 1126, 1140, 1153,
1154, 1155 (Bruyère 1929:39–43). The extensive archives of the choachytes, in
Demotic and Greek, outline their economic activities in some detail and show them
to have been a cohesive, endogamous group closely identified with the West Bank
(Montserrat and Meskell 1997:182). This social group regularly visited tombs which
the owners had entrusted to them, and tombs – particularly older ones without
owners – which they had simply occupied (Pestman 1993:8). Their involvement was
not limited to depositing bodies and to enacting cultic practices; they also stored their
equipment and documents at the site, and used it as a temporary storage facility for
mummies awaiting burial. One text mentions a large tomb in which 17 related
individuals were deposited in 124 bc (Pestman 1993:450). This has tentatively been
identified as TT5 at Deir el Medina (El-Amir 1959:13). Moreover, the choachytes
participated in local religious festivals such as the journey of the cult image of Amun
during the Festival of the Wadi (Montserrat and Meskell 1997:183).
The cemetery landscape of Deir el Medina was still potent, but without the same
concatenation of meanings that it once held in the New Kingdom. This reinforces
the nexus of four salient dimensions of cultural landscape: time, space, meaning,
and communication. Without understanding of this specific historical and cultural
situation, one might conclude that only time had changed, whereas I would posit
that meaning and communication had also been irreversibly changed. Artifacts
and past places “surrender their claim to evoke substantive meanings out of the past”
while the “inner life of those who fashioned culture in the past remains hidden
and inaccessible” (Hutton 1993:21). Perhaps we need to question the notion that
memory is inherently authentic, which is undoubtedly a fiction based on the notion
of total recovery of the past and the erasure of subjectivity and imaginings.
The waning, renewal, and revisioning of memory might prove potentially even more
compelling.
To graphically illustrate this disjuncture, I turn to an elite Roman family burial at
Deir el Medina interred within the cellar of an ordinary village house. A purposeful
and expensive burial, it is unlikely that those responsible for the burial actually rec-
ognized this as a non-sacred context. Given an adjacent cemetery of pyramid-topped
tombs, why would one choose a rather unimpressive household cellar? I have argued
that at post-New Kingdom Deir el Medina, the significance of the burial context
gradually decreased in importance through time (Meskell 1999a). Concern for
the material structure and even the immediate surroundings of the place of burial
vanished. The materiality of death, as well as its attendant material culture, virtually
disappeared, and objectification of the body and bodily treatments took its place.
Other explanations might posit that a domestic context was less obvious and thus
52 Lynn Meskell
more secure or, more plausibly, that the specific character of the structure was simply
unknown. It is the only such post-New Kingdom burial within the village enclosure.
It is axiomatic that the boundaries between mortuary and domestic are selectively
permeable, varying over time, thus allowing people to cross these borders and enter
spatial domains at different times.The people who buried Pebos and his family, some
nine individuals spanning two generations, certainly crossed that boundary.
The exceptionally wealthy burials and elaborate bodily treatments in this case are
striking. From the epigraphy, we know this was a local family of national prominence
who came to live in Alexandria. Their names relate to local Theban cults, suggesting
a close affiliation with the Theban area (Montserrat and Meskell 1997:190). Memory
and locality conjoin in this instance and gather force in the return to a past lived
landscape for a meaningful burial: yet the specific funerary context is disjunctive –
offering two levels of mnemonic association. It must have been vital that the family
members were laid to rest in their local area and, yet, despite their obvious rank and
station in life, they were buried in the cellar of a workman’s house. This was a fact
probably unknown to them, but it stresses that although the landscape was imbued
with a sense of sanctity, the family members had no real knowledge as to why this
was the case. Perhaps the entire region now had a valency irrespective of its histori-
cal specificities, a sort of counter-memory where cultural memories had been re-
worked or irrevocably lost (see Foucault 1977). Hybrid groups like people living in
Roman Egypt certainly had a knowledge and interest in their particular Egyptian
setting, and they developed traditions not seen in native Roman culture. Yet this is
not social memory, this is a conflation of mortuary images like pyramids, which were
extremely familiar, with evocative local settings with powerful, but perhaps lost asso-
ciations. One could argue that there is a fairly rapid change of meanings within a
somewhat static natural and material landscape and, as such, we cannot assume an
implicit continuity on the basis of a similarity of forms.
Influenced by the seminal work of Halbwachs, Hutton (1993:78) has formulated
an eloquent assessment of the contingency of memory which is instructive for
archaeologists, given our preoccupation with both temporal and spatial dimensions of
the past:
In remembering, we locate, or localize, images of the past in specific places. In and of
themselves, the images of memory are always fragmentary and provisional.They have no
whole or coherent meaning until we project them into concrete settings. Such settings
provide us with our places of memory. Remembering, therefore, might be characterized
as a process of imaginative reconstruction, in which we integrate specific images for-
mulated in the present into particular contexts identified with the past.
Deir el Medina, originally a workman’s village, in later times became the site of a
Christian monastery from which the site derived its modern name.This rather modest
site, with its explicitly pagan associations, became another holy place within a new
set of cultural parameters, thus removing meaning still further from its original
context.This prompts us to question the historical status of memory.Would we really
conflate pharaonic religion with Greek, Roman, or Christian ideologies – because
Ancestral Presence, Commemorative Practice 53
the archaeological data might suggest that there was considerable overlap – despite
the fact that from the culturally specific, historical perspective we can construct a very
different picture? The entire West Bank leaves us with a very ambiguous and multi-
valent picture of the landscape and impels us to question the degree to which social
memory can be continuously examined in the long term.Today the West Bank con-
tinues to serve as a vast canvas of memory and imagination. Recent events highlight,
albeit violently, its powerful contemporary presence in national modernity (Meskell
2000). Given the interpretive climate of current scholarship, the Place of Truth must
now be cast as the place of many Truths.
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4
Memory Tattered and Torn: Spolia in
the Heartland of Byzantine Hellenism
Amy Papalexandrou
I wish to thank Susan Alcock and Ruth Van Dyke for including me in the Mediterranean
Memories session in early 2001 and for subsequent advice and constructive criticism regarding
some of the issues discussed here. I am also grateful to Robert Nelson,Walter Kaegi,Matt Canepa
and Galina Tirnanic` for lively discussion and valuable insights at the Late Antique and Byzan-
tine Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago, where an earlier version of this text was
presented in March of 2001. My husband, with his usual erudition, enlightened many aspects of
my approach to the material. All errors, and any lapses of memory, remain my own.
The facades of medieval buildings can tell us much about the thought-worlds of their
contemporary builders, patrons, and viewers. In the region of central Greece, the walls
of many Byzantine (fourth to fifteenth centuries ad) churches are a particularly out-
spoken indicator of a complex attitude toward the past. This is often seen in the pur-
poseful inclusion and, at times, careful arrangement of ancient building material, or
spolia, within the medieval building fabric. It was an activity at once subversive and
constructive; whether or not its perpetrators were conscious of it, the use of spolia
cunningly enabled (then as now) both the suppression and endorsement of past
memories while simultaneously re-ordering them into a fresh “memory network”
(Carruthers 1998) of altered meanings.
Despite its striking potential to shed light on greater issues of communal and in-
dividual memory for the Byzantine East, the phenomenon of spoliated masonry has
not generated the attention it deserves within this specific context.This is due, I think,
on the one hand to the negative press that has often befallen these facades.The overall
visual effect of their appearance has traditionally been deemed rude and rustic, the
product of tasteless pilfering by less sophisticated masons operating within a depleted
economy. Such a dim view cannot help but color modern interpretations and may be
partly responsible for the overwhelming tendency to think of immured spolia in terms
of firmly imbedded “superstitions” (Maguire 1994; Mango 1963) rather than the poten-
tially nuanced “memories” of those who built and regarded these monuments.
On the other hand, the omission of memory from discussions of spolia may be
the result of the tendency to take the notion of commemoration for granted, espe-
Spolia in the Heartland of Byzantine Hellenism 57
cially since it is deeply implicit in nearly every aspect of the society and material
culture that Byzantinists study. We need only think of the overwhelming extent to
which the memory of Attic culture (in the form of mimesis) permeated most schol-
arly, religious, and artistic activity in the Middle Ages, at least among the influential
elite in their conscious imitation of the “high” style of ancient literature and art; or
the monastic enterprise of copying which, it is generally believed, required rote
memorization as the primary tool of its scribes; or the use of certain church plan
types to prompt the recollection of specific holy places, most notably Christ’s tomb
in Jerusalem; or the tremendous attention given, at all times and within all ranks, to
the written or inscribed preservation of a patron’s eternal memory in the face of the
inevitable dangers of time, envy and oblivion. Perhaps it is, indeed, this overwhelm-
ingly constant, if quiet, presence of mneme that has obviated a systematic analysis of
its place in Byzantium. No matter what the reason, The Book of Memory has yet to
be written for the Byzantine Middle Ages as it has for the Latin West (Carruthers
1990). I offer this paper as a brief inquiry into the potential for one aspect of
Byzantine building practice to raise larger questions of meaning, intention, and recep-
tion within a complex web of memory associations, specifically those encountered on
the Greek mainland after the supposed “end” of antiquity (i.e., after the seventh
century ad). Alternative readings of the phenomena of fragmentation and reuse here
take into account shifting notions and attitudes toward the historical and mythological
past, appropriations of the local landscape, the perpetuation of a patron’s self-image,
and the possibility of viewer response to the material “display” of constructed walls,
each set within the many-layered framework of the church as the arena of com-
memoration par excellence in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Spoliated Masonry and Modern Interpretation
The Mediterranean basin is saturated with spoliated monuments (map 4.1).They are
in evidence from the late antique period to the present century, the motley appear-
ance of their walls often the result of a random placement of nondescript materials.
Their abundance defies enumeration; they dot the countryside and line the streets
of villages and cities from Spain to Syria. As common as it is, however, this type of
construction reached a crescendo of expression in a few choice buildings of the
Byzantine period (especially from the ninth to thirteenth centuries ad) in areas with
a surfeit of ancient sites and, by extension, of readily accessible building material. I
feel it necessary to state at the outset – and temporarily to placate those who will
always privilege the notion of utilitarian necessity over that of ideological investment
– that economy was certainly a factor in this activity. Stone was no longer quarried
with abandon, and suitable construction material was naturally sought closer to hand.
The process of despoliation was convenient and cheap, and the medieval mason was
nothing if not practical.
At the same time, however, the buildings examined here suggest a sophistication
of organization that belies purely pragmatic explanations for their form and appear-
ance. The so-called “Little Metropolis” in Athens is the classic example, where more
58 Amy Papalexandrou
than ninety spolia were gathered from various monuments (in this case medieval as
well as ancient) and re-configured within its thirteenth-century walls (plate 4.1).
Unlike those of most Byzantine monuments its masons completely avoided the use
of brick, even for the filling of joints or the construction of arched window open-
ings. Brick stringcourses, a standard device employed to distinguish or isolate features
or sections of wall, were avoided altogether. Instead, every square inch of the facade,
from foundation to cornice, was tightly packed with blocks of dressed stone, pieces
of architectural members, carved sculptures, tombstones (or stelai ), and inscriptions
(Michel and Struck 1906). Perhaps most noticeable is the series of large panels that
form a frieze-like band above the level of the door openings (visible in plate 4.1).
This frieze completely envelops the structure and may be understood to comprise its
visual focus. Whether it holds the key to our understanding of the overall icono-
graphic schema or not (Maguire 1994), the inclusion and accentuation of such an
array of antiquities was clearly of fundamental importance, certainly during con-
struction and probably even from the initial laying out or “design” (whatever this
Map 4.1 Map of sites mentioned in text
Spolia in the Heartland of Byzantine Hellenism 59
means for the Middle Ages) of the building. Only this can explain the consistent
height at which the panels were immured and the care taken to ensure their unbro-
ken flow across all four facades.
From our modern, archaeological point of view, this building is a virtual “museum”
of artifacts, many of which were salvaged from the city’s collection of famous, by
then derelict, ancient monuments.The medieval viewer certainly did not regard it in
the same way. Indeed, the practice of “collecting” per se was not in evidence for
Byzantium after the seventh century ad, at least not in the terms we are accustomed
to recognizing it (Guberti Bassett 2000). Still, one cannot help but notice the dili-
gence with which certain spolia were positioned in highly visible or symbolically
significant locations. A sculpted figure (perhaps Selene) was placed at the pinnacle of
the building’s east gable, arguably the most prominent (and perhaps triumphal) setting
for a figure that commanded a forceful presence over the eastern, most sacred, realm
of the building. Moreover, a section of Doric frieze from the sanctuary of the
Athenian Eleusinion was conspicuously immured above the south doorway, while a
calendar frieze representing the Athenian months was cut to size, re-ordered and
re-positioned above the main, west entrance (seen in plate 4.1).This is not to suggest
that the “find spots” of these sculptures had any relevance to the medieval builders,
but simply that certain pieces were singled out for emphasis. They were highlighted
by the symmetricality of their placement, not to mention their frank presence at
Plate 4.1 The “Little Metropolis,” Athens. General view from northwest (photo by permis-
sion of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut-Athen)
60 Amy Papalexandrou
critical points of convocation and transition from the external, profane world to its
sacred antithesis within. In the case of the calendar frieze, it is even apparent that the
medieval builders took stock of the original content, (re-)arranging the depicted signs
of the zodiac in good order so that the sequence moved from spring, on the left, to
winter on the right (Simon 1983:7). Mention should also be made of the matching
Corinthian capitals that neatly flanked the calendar frieze and demarcated the north
and south corners of the facade; the symmetrical placement around window open-
ings of chancel panels and ancient coffering; and the paired sculptures studiously
placed as pendants to one another on the east facade. One has the impression that
the medieval builders, if not also the beholders, were attentive to how these objects
were immured in the walls before them.
Another important church, this one in the Argolid peninsula of the Peloponnese,
displayed a similar “taste” for the antique (plate 4.2). Constructed probably in the thir-
teenth century ad and known today as the church of the Virgin at Merbaka, its walls
similarly incorporate a substantial amount of spolia in a remarkable way (Coulson
2002; Struck 1909). While conforming to the usual Byzantine tendency to employ
brick in the masonry, most notably in the form of decorative stringcourses, large
blocks of plain dressed stone from ancient monuments were used exclusively at the
corners and in the lower tracts of the walls. The latter were neatly arranged two to
three courses high and were separated from the remaining wall surface by the afore-
mentioned stringcourses. Spolia were also used in the creation of a two-step pedestal
Plate 4.2 Church of the Virgin at Merbaka. Detail of north facade (photo by the author)