Two for Tuesday: Archaeological Thinking

Over the past week or so, I’ve been trying to get back into some kind of reading routine. It’s a struggle as I try to keep as many balls in the air as possible. This past week, I read with some interest Jocelyn Burney’s article in the recent issue of Hesperia: “The Agora Metroon in Late Roman Athens: A Reexamination of Its Use as a Synagogue.” David Pettegrew and I chat regularly, and he’s been thinking deeply about the character of archaeological reasoning. Burney’s article digs into that (heh) by dissecting the evidence for the a synagogue in the Metroon in the Late Roman Agora. The main piece of evidence is a marble fragment inscribed with a menorah and the construction of a building with a western apse in the Metroon. Homer Thompson connected the marble fragment to the western apsidal structure built into the Metroon in the 5th century (or a bit later) and argued that this was likely a synagogue based on parallels with apsidal synagogues from elsewhere in the Eastern…