Excavations and surveys at Butrint, Albania: Butrint 5 & 6i,ii, iii
The popular view of archaeology is that it is done and dusted on the ground, in the trench. Nothing is further from the truth. Analysing the results, then publishing these is the real labour – often as not a labour of love to entice those who enjoyed a summer in an exotic location to knuckle down and write.
Well, the Butrint Foundation had a bumper year in 2019. Four heavyweight volumes were published about our excavations between 1994-2007. A decade or more’s work is now ready to be consumed by our peers. More to the point these volumes are the cornerstone of writing new narratives about the past.
Butrint, barely known to the scientific world before the 1990s, is now by virtue of the field research and publications one of the great Graeco-Roman-Byzantine places in the Mediterranean.
So, my congratulations to William Bowden, who edited Butrint 5, on the finds from the Triconch Palace excavations (published in Butrint 3), and to Simon Greenslade who edited three volumes of Butrint 6 dedicated to the Vrina Plain excavations – truly a herculean as well as a noble task.
The Butrint series is published by Oxbow Books at Oxford:
Herein a link to the first review of Butrint 6, flattering and respectful: http://www.bmcreview.org/2020/01/20200122.html
Butrint 5 & 6
