Tim Penn
I am an accidental archaeologist — a love of languages led me to go on a dig for language practice and I’ve been addicted to studying the past through material culture ever since. My research interests encompass the Roman and late antique worlds from Britain to the Caucasus; I like learning, talking, and writing about death and burial landscape and settlements, and portable material culture (particularly glass and board games), because these are all fascinating gateways to try to find ordinary people in the past. I’ve worked at Oxford, Leicester, and Edinburgh and I’ve also contributed to fieldwork projects in Italy, the UK, Germany, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and Iran, primarily working as a small finds specialist. I am currently the Lecturer in Roman and Late Antique Material Culture at the University of Reading and Deputy Director of the Manar al-Athar Digital Archive at the University of Oxford.
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The digital archive is in continuous development. Current strengths include Late Antiquity (250–750 AD), the period of transition from paganism to Christianity, and then to Islam, especially religious buildings (temples, churches, synagogues, mosques) and monumental art (including floor mosaics), early Islamic art (paintings, mosaics, relief sculpture), as well as Roman and early Islamic (Umayyad) architecture, and evidence of iconoclasm.
The digital archive aims to: provide freely-downloadable images at high resolution for research and publication, as well as at low resolution for powerpoint slides for teaching; make images freely available for publication simply by acknowledging the source; have simple and accurate labels easy to search and organize, with bilingual text in Arabic and English to facilitate the use of the images for both teaching and research in the Arab world, where many of the monuments are located.