My classes and my professors

I just got out of "Byzantine History." Karavas, the professor, has a great sense of humor, but it's a very dry sense of humor; he rarely smiles, but you can tell he's laughing on the inside. He's Greek, but speaks very good English. He's an archaeologist and Roman historian, and sometimes he refers to something he's found on one of his digs. For example, the other day, we were discussing economics. He was telling us about inflation in the Roman empire, and to prove his point he pulled from his pocket a third-century A.D. silver coin that he'd found on a dig in northern Italy. It weighed about half as much as a dime, which illustrated his point: that currency was pretty much worthless at the time of the accession of emperor Diocletian, which is partly why he instigated a huge economic reform in the late third century. We've been talking about the emperor Constantine for 2 days, and it's almost Kugler-ish how Karavas leads the class around in circles, asking us questions and making us talk about the material.

Our "Art and Archaeology" professor Nikola, on the other hand, is almost the complete opposite. She uses PowerPoint in her lectures, but whenever we stop her to ask her questions, it's almost like we're getting in the way of her lecture. She always has to answer them and then go back to the PowerPoint, and by then we've lost the thread of the presentation. I think she's used to giving lectures to rooms of 500 people, and not used to all the weird questions my classmates and I have. On the other hand, what she has to teach us is quite interesting, and she takes us to lots of museums to see what she shows us in the PowerPoints, first-hand. Today, for example, she showed us lots of images of frescoes from Thera (aka Santorini) where a volcano exploded around 1650 BC, some of them famous images I've seen in school before. And then we took the tram over to the National Museum of Archeology and saw the ACTUAL frescoes themselves, UP CLOSE. (Like this one on the left, called "Boxing Children.") We saw many frescoes, along with dozens of vases and jars which she's shown us already too, so we can see if they're big or small, cracked, smooth, etc. It's very, very cool. The only thing I'm struggling with about Nikola is that she sees religion as a very black-and-white thing; either an artifact was used "religiously," or it was not. She's a very open-minded archaeologist and so she doesn't claim to always know the answers to everything, but to her, "religious" just means something where people are worshipping or communing with a deity, with little or no practical function in the user's daily life. Personally I think it's more complex, that a religious act can serve a practical function as well, and that many everyday activities have a religious function. So I struggle when she insists that any given item was probably not used "religiously." It's a little too vague for me, and for many of my classmates, and we wish she would elaborate more than she does when we question her. Archeology, we are finding, is pretty controversial stuff. Nikola always refers us back to the old joke: How many archeologists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: 100. One to screw in a lightbulb, and 99 to tell him he did it wrong.