Dr Pamela Armstrong

Senior Reseach Fellow in Byzantine Cultural History and Dean of Degrees

pamela.armstrong@campion.ox.ac.uk

About

Pamela Armstrong was awarded a BA (Hons.) in Greek (classical & medieval) from the Queen’s University, Belfast. On gaining a Greek Government scholarship at graduation she studied Byzantine hagiography in Athens for two years, where she developed an interest in Byzantine archaeology. She has an MA in Greek and Latin and a PhD in Byzantine and Ottoman Archaeology. She lived in Athens for another ten years, taking part in archaeological field work in Cyprus and Turkey, as well as in Greece. She also taught archaeology at College Year in Athens and organized a seminar series for five years at the French Centre Byzantin for the international scholarly community. In Oxford she is a member of the Sub-faculty of Archaeology and set up the Oxford Byzantine Ceramics Project.

Research Interests

Her specialization is challenging texts with material evidence, particularly to do with ecclesiastical and monastic history. She has been involved with publication of the excavations of the cathedral of the city of Xanthos in SW Turkey and of an underwater excavation of a possibly monastic trading ship in the Sea of Marmara. Having built up an expertise in both textual analysis and archaeology she is engaged in applying them to a series of overlapping researches about early monasticism in Egypt, Syria, Bithynia, the Aegean islands, and Insular Britain.

She is currently juggling work on a volume entitled Sanctity and Monasticism in Middle Byzantine Greece, to be published by Brill, with study of the pottery from the monastery of Satyros in Constantinople.

Selected Publications

Material Culture as History in the north Aegean and Thraco-Macedonian Region is in press and will appear in 2022

‘Greece in the Eleventh Century’, in J. Howard-Johnston (ed.), Social Change in Town and Country in Eleventh-Century Byzantium, Oxford, 133–56.

‘Zeuxippus Ware and the Archaeology of Trade in Twelfth-and Thirteen-Century Chersonesos’, in III международная научная конференция Севастополь. Материалы конференции 1, Moscow, 8–13.

‘Ethnicity and Inclusiveness in the Development of Religious Cults: Saint Christopher the Dog-Headed and Saint George’ in Identity and the Other in Byzantium, Istanbul, 71-82

‘The earliest glazed ceramics in Constantinople: A regional or international phenomenon?’ in Journal of Archaeological Science, 2020

Continuity and Change in a Greek Rural Landscape: The Laconia Survey, vols. I & II (1996 & 2002)

The Balboura Survey and settlement in highland southwest Anatolia from the Prehistoric period to the Turkish Republic (2012)

`Nomadic Seljuks in "Byzantine" Lycia: New Evidence' in Η Βυζαντινή Μικρά Ασία, Athens, 321-38

‘Some Iconographic Observations of Figural Representation on Zeuxippus Ware’ in Ritual and Art. Byzantine Essays for Christopher Walter, Farnham, 75-93

‘A Byzantine soldier from the Crusading era’ Questiones Medii Aevi Novae 11, 11-21 (with N. V. Sekunda)

‘Monasteries Old and New: The Nature of the Evidence’ in Founders and Refounders of Byzantine Monasteries ,Belfast, 315-43

‘The monasteries of Saint Nikon: The Amyklaion, Sparta and Lakonia’ in Dioskouroi. Studies presented to W. G. Cavanagh and C. B. Mee, Oxford, 352-69

‘Trade in the East Mediterranean in the 8th century’ in Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th Centuries, Farnham, 157-78

‘Merchants of Venice at Sparta in the twelfth century’ in The 1st International Symposium of Lakonian Studies. Sparta and Lakonia from Prehistory to Pre-modern, London, 313-22