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professor of archaeology. Beazley was a fine classical scholar and an excellent teacher, but his major interests were Greek art and Attic vase-painting. Vase-painting, because of its quality and the fact it had survived when all other forms of painting in ancient greece did not, made it particularly important to the history of art. Beazley’s work on vase painting was to revolutionize the disciplines of art history and archaeology.
By the early twentieth century the collections of Greek pottery formed by sir william hamilton and other aristocratic antiquarians during the early nineteenth century had found their way into museums across Europe. German scholars such as Hartwig, Hauser, and Furtwangler had noted that some pots carried short inscriptions, including what appeared to be “signatures” or short texts giving the name of an artist, followed by a verb, as in “made or painted by,” which allowed a typology based on signed works to be created. German scholars applied this typology only to those pots that were signed and were diagnostic of a particular style or technique.
Beazley broadened this method to include the whole corpus of Attic pottery. By identifying the unconscious details of individual artists—such as painted features and elements—he was able to add unsigned pieces to the rest of the corpus of signed ones—and so tens of thousands of Attic red-figure and black-figure pottery could be grouped as the works of individual artists. Beazley’s method has been described as identifying the “hands” of the painters and potters of Athens, and these additional identifications supplemented the names of craftsmen that appeared on the pottery. Thus he was able to transform the hitherto chaotic study of vase-painting into an organized field of study, similar to other documented schools of painting. He went on to successfully apply his method to Etruscan, Corinthian, Eastern Greek, and South Italian pottery.
See also
Britain, Classical Archaeology
Excavated by English archaeologist Diana Kirkbride between 1958 and 1967, Beidha is a significant Natufian and prepottery Neolithic site in southern jordan. Excavation revealed changes in domestic architecture and provided evidence of the early cultivation of barley and emmer wheat (prior to the development of a domesticated morphology for these plants). Beidha also exhibited evidence of long-distance trade in obsidian, the origins of which are at Anatolia in central turkey.
See also
Syro-Palestinian and Biblical Archaeology
The state of Belgium was founded in 1830. Within its small territory (30,513 square kilometers), it comprises two major language groups, which has been an important factor in the country’s recent political history. Since 1980, Belgium has been a federal state divided into three regions, each with substantial autonomy. The Flemish region, which occupies the northern part of the country, consists of sandy lowlands bordering the North Sea and part of the central Belgian loam belt covering a range of low foothills. The linguistic border between the Flemish- and French-speaking populations runs across these hills from east to west. Brussels is a separate bilingual region.
To the south, there are Cretaceous limestone formations dissected by the Sambre and Meuse Rivers. From there, the land rises to the Ardennes uplands with a maximum altitude of just below 700 meters above sea level. Belgium was the first country on the European continent to go through a process of industrialization early in the nineteenth century, and this industrialization entailed major infrastructural and mining activities. The country’s geographical features, political developments, and economic prosperity have all been influential in the development of archaeology in Belgium.
The leading role of Belgian naturalists and geologists in the establishment of prehistory during the later nineteenth century is well known. Earlier, however, historians had been
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