Costas Papadopoulos
Biographic Data
| ID | 4071878 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Costas Papadopoulos |
| GIVEN NAMES | Costas |
| FAMILY NAME | Papadopoulos |
| SIGNATURE | PAPADOPOULOS C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Maastricht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1072-5198 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 36 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
And Now What? Three-Dimensional Scholarship and Infrastructures in the Post-Sketchfab Era
The transition of Sketchfab, a widely used platform for hosting and sharing 3D cultural heritage content, to Epic Games’ Fab marketplace has raised concerns within the cultural heritage community about the potential loss of years of work and thousands of 3D models, highlighting the risks of relying on commercial solutions for preservation and dissemination. This shift, together with the unprecedented investments by the European Commission on infr…
Open Educational Resources as the Third Pillar in Project-Based Learning During Covid-19
Teaching in higher education in the Netherlands was affected, as in most other parts of the world, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper reflects on how two courses were taught and experienced by students during the 2020–21 academic year in the MA Media Studies: Digital Cultures at Maastricht University. It particularly focuses on how the integration of open educational resources into the course design, what we call a third pedagogic pillar, c…
In Visible Presence
This chapter explores the uses and perception of light in religious architecture. Often characterized as an ambiguous materiality—neither concrete and tangible nor distinctly immaterial—light seems to offer itself readily as both matter and metaphor for the divine. We argue in this chapter that this is precisely what happens in contemporary Danish churches, yet not without conflicts between the ideal of immaterial divinity and the need for tangib…
Reconstructing Artificial Light in Ancient Greece
This chapter presents an overview of artificial lighting means and their efficiency in the performance of domestic nocturnal activities (except cult practices) in ancient Greece. Through experiments conducted in the Lighting Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens, the optical properties of exact copies of ancient light sources are investigated. The experimental data are used to assess the sufficiency of light produced by the li…
Light and Shadow Effects in Megalithic Monuments in the Iberian Peninsula
Atlantic Europe and the Mediterranean, especially the Iberian Peninsula, contain thousands of Megalithic monuments, such as dolmens and passage graves, built at the end of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. These are funereal monuments normally built with large bolders that define a space usually kept in darkness except for a period of time when light may enter the inner parts. These light and shadow displays were used in all likelihood to highlight d…
Illuminating Sensory Archaeologies
Light has a fundamental role to play in our perception of the world. It meditates the relationship between people and things within space, and is crucial to our understanding of the material culture of past societies. This chapter introduces light as the core focus of the volume; its qualities and affordances in different contexts and (im)material environments; its design and manipulation; and its elusive properties. The introduction also outline…
Lighting and Museum Exhibits
Museums exist to display and preserve valuable artefacts. Display lighting helps fulfil one of the main tenets of a museum, but excessive light causes irreparable damage to sensitive exhibits. Getting the balance between good display lighting and good conservation conditions is often difficult, but not impossible. Good exhibit lighting is not accidental. A considered process of design ideation and refinement is required to render exhibits to best…
Visibility, Privacy, and Missing Windows
This chapter examines the means by which light was admitted to Mesopotamian domestic space, arguing that doorways were the primary light source for most rooms. The consequences of this are then discussed, including the accessibility of lighting to archaeological study through recovered floor plans, and the impact which a reliance on doorway lighting may have had on the development of ancient Mesopotamian architecture. The interrelationship of lig…
The Light of the Flame
This chapter presents a study of light, in particular light produced by flame, by investigating the most representative lighting devices used in preindustrial Greece. The symbolism of lighting devices in traditional Greek society, used either out of necessity or in ritual ceremonies and customs as well as in representations in art and in social discourse, is examined to reveal aspects of culture, common beliefs, and social structure. The oral lit…
The Eleusinian Projector
The Mysteries of Eleusis in ancient Greece were the foremost sect of the mystery religions that dominated the eastern Mediterranean sphere for almost 2,000 years. The staying power of the Eleusinian rite stemmed from its convincing presentation of an otherworldly drama about the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Initiates endured a harrowing experience in darkness that somehow evoked death, before seeing beatific visions, the climax of which was …
Light and its Interaction with Antiquities and Works of Art
This chapter addresses issues related to light–object interaction along with its resulting phenomena, taking into consideration materiality issues. It presents light and its role in artefacts studies, either as a tool for finds analysis or as a corrosion agent. It attempts a balanced investigation into past and contemporary approaches towards light from the conservator’s perspective. It discusses traditional raking and oblique light examination, …
Darkness and the Imagination
Darkness has profound effects on human behaviour and the ability to perform everyday activities. It can influence our ability to function, our moods, emotions, and cognition. Here we examine the relationship between darkness and supernatural beliefs. This work is informed by cross-cultural cave research, which suggests that cave dark zones are used as the settings for rituals from the advent of modern humans to the present. How can this phenomeno…
Rediscovering the Winter Solstice Alignment at Newgrange, Ireland
Newgrange was the first prehistoric site in Ireland to have its astronomical alignment widely accepted, and since its discovery in 1967 has remained the best-known astronomically oriented archaeological monument on this island. This chapter investigates the discovery of the winter solstice orientation at this key light-centred site. It proposes a possible new explanation for the astronomically oriented ‘roof-box’: that its origins can be found in…
Modalities of Meaning
Images do many things: they capture data, they analyse and explain it in very particular ways; they are used as evidence to give weight to arguments; they stand in for the original; they contain and convey information to specialists and the public alike and they do this by transforming vastly complex material into usable and visible form. But they are not neutral. All images are sign systems that are more or less effective for the uses they have …
Materializing Light, Making Worlds
The distinctive architecture of Neolithic passage tombs reproduces the fundamental format of a camera obscura. Could Neolithic people have projected animated images of the outside world into the chambers of these monuments? Fieldwork in Wales and Scotland reveals that the methods required to generate optical projections inside passage tombs are straightforward and do not require a lens. At those sites that feature a solar alignment it is possible…
Lighting the Good Life
During late antiquity, the aristocratic house worked as an architectural social filtering system. Many structures of the private residence were used and combined to create, or to strengthen, an impression of social superiority. Ancient sources and archaeological evidence show clearly that light played a key role as an aesthetic element within this aristocratic housing scheme. The function of many key architectural and ornamental features were dep…
The Chacoan World
In the southwest United States, high altitudes, open vistas, and cloudless skies create a visual atmosphere where the light is legendary. I focus on the role of light for the people of Chaco Canyon—a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage centre in the San Juan Basin of northwest New Mexico. Here, worldviews and cosmologies involved the dualistic juxtaposition of light and dark, visible and invisible, sun and moon. The movements of celestial bodies in a clear…
The Role of Darkness in Ancient Greek Religion and Religious Practice
Aiming at a better understanding of ways through which the ancient Greek religious experience was shaped, this chapter investigates the role and use of darkness in religious belief and practice. The orientation and certain architectural features of Greek temples, Dionysiac and Mystery cults, divination, rites of passage, magic, and other nocturnal rituals are examined here in an investigation of the interplay between light, darkness, and shadow a…
Encountering Photoamulets and the Use of Apotropaic Light in Late Antiquity
In antiquity, natural and artificial light was not only manipulated to illuminate dark spaces but could also serve an amuletic function. This chapter explores several unique and in some instances forgotten archaeological small finds that hint at the use of symbolic light in tombs, sanctuaries, and building foundations. These ‘photoamulets’ were linked to symbolic and metaphoric light in word, image, and form. They were used for protection against…
Çatalhöyük
This photo essay outlines the experimental work undertaken in summer 2007 in Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, Turkey, while the author was the artist in residence. The work done in this Neolithic settlement led to the discovery of a sun clock, i.e. a beam of light present in each dwelling entering from the roof and drifting like a sun dial to different areas of the house. The parallelogram of light produced by the beam created a pattern of light and shado…
The Handling of Light
This chapter explores the handling of natural light in the classical Greek temple and the Byzantine church. It discusses concepts of orientation as related to their respective functions and aims and the planning of lighting. It addresses light’s influence on the shaping of formal components in the Greek temple, such as the peristyle, fluting, and echinus of the Doric column. It attempts to establish relationships between the temple and the church…
Industrializing Light
The evolution of the factory in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one of the most significant components of the process of industrialization, the impact of which is still being felt today. Early factories played a vital part in the development of artificial lighting, particularly in the use of gas lights. This role was not confined to the pioneering of the technology; also, perhaps more significantly, it altered public attitudes to…
Phenomenology of Light
Focusing on the glitter of gold in a fourteenth-century Byzantine cross—today inserted in the famous reliquary of Cardinal Bessarion, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia—this chapter uncovers the important role phenomenology plays in the study of the spiritual operations of medieval art. The analysis draws on the inscriptions written on the cross in order to explore how gold’s sparkle functions as a vision of Paradise nourished by the Byzantine litur…
Afterword
Is light an energetic ray, a beam, the illumination of surfaces, an atmosphere? Is it the shining of the sun, the moon and the stars? Is it a flickering flame, a lamp or torch, the glowing embers of a fire? Is it whiteness, or a spectrum of colour? Is it a release from darkness, an enlivening of the spirit, divine presence, the power of reason? In this commentary I show that light can be all of these things but only because, as we pass from one t…
Illuminating Time
Using the astronomical animation software of Stellarium, this chapter will demonstrate how time was ‘staged’ by prehistoric people at particular periods during the solar and lunar years. It will show how they ‘choreographed’ night- and day-lighting and landscape shadowing effects, along with the appearance and travels of other celestial phenomena in relation to the monuments and their horizons. It was this staging of natural lighting through illu…
Digital Sensoriality
The image-based discourse on clay figurines that treated them as merely artistic representations, the meaning of which needs to be deciphered through various iconological methods, has been severely critiqued and challenged in the past decade. This discourse, however, has largely shaped the way that figurines are depicted in archaeological iterations and publications, and it is this corpus of images that has in turn shaped further thinking and dis…
Heritage Artefacts in the Covid-19 Era
Museums have been increasingly investing in their digital presence. This became more pressing during the COVID-19 pandemic since heritage institutions had, on the one hand, to temporarily close their doors to visitors while, on the other, find ways to communicate their collections to the public. Virtual tours, revamped websites, and 3D models of cultural artefacts were only a few of the means that museums devised to create alternative ways of dig…
Light in a Neolithic dwelling
And Now What? Three-Dimensional Scholarship and Infrastructures in the Post-Sketchfab Era
The transition of Sketchfab, a widely used platform for hosting and sharing 3D cultural heritage content, to Epic Games’ Fab marketplace has raised concerns within the cultural heritage community about the potential loss of years of work and thousands of 3D models, highlighting the risks of relying on commercial solutions for preservation and dissemination. This shift, together with the unprecedented investments by the European Commission on infr…
Illuminating Triangulations
The moon and its moonlight mediated human and non-human relationships in ways that a relational theory of bundling helps us to understand. Similar to assemblage, bundling better captures the ways that human perceptions involve triangulations and transfers. Pre-Columbian human experience in the Mississippi River valley was intimately aligned to the nightly, monthly, and generational cycles of the moon as these converged with the earth and other mo…
Light, Human Evolution, and the Palaeolithic
Human light-producing technology (i.e. the controlled use of fire) evolved during the Palaeolithic. Among its more obvious advantages to survival (heat, cooking, protection), fire-provided light in the form of hearths and lamps probably had considerable evolutionary significance. As human symbolic systems spread with the late Middle Palaeolithic and Upper Palaeolithic in Eurasia, it became a constituent component of European cave art. After revie…
An Evaluation of Human Intervention in Abandonment and Postabandonment Formation Processes in a Deserted Cretan Village
A deserted Cretan village provided the grounds to look beyond the ruins and study the abandonment and post-abandonment formation processes that transform settlements into archaeological sites. The long abandonment period, as well as the continuous human presence and ntervention in the post-abandonment period of individual buildings and larger parts of the site, resulted in an evidence-rich environment, ideal for tracing the formation processes in…
Archaeology in the Digital Era
Light in a Neolithic dwelling
Illuminating Triangulations
The moon and its moonlight mediated human and non-human relationships in ways that a relational theory of bundling helps us to understand. Similar to assemblage, bundling better captures the ways that human perceptions involve triangulations and transfers. Pre-Columbian human experience in the Mississippi River valley was intimately aligned to the nightly, monthly, and generational cycles of the moon as these converged with the earth and other mo…
Light, Human Evolution, and the Palaeolithic
Human light-producing technology (i.e. the controlled use of fire) evolved during the Palaeolithic. Among its more obvious advantages to survival (heat, cooking, protection), fire-provided light in the form of hearths and lamps probably had considerable evolutionary significance. As human symbolic systems spread with the late Middle Palaeolithic and Upper Palaeolithic in Eurasia, it became a constituent component of European cave art. After revie…
Digital Sensoriality
The image-based discourse on clay figurines that treated them as merely artistic representations, the meaning of which needs to be deciphered through various iconological methods, has been severely critiqued and challenged in the past decade. This discourse, however, has largely shaped the way that figurines are depicted in archaeological iterations and publications, and it is this corpus of images that has in turn shaped further thinking and dis…
In Visible Presence
This chapter explores the uses and perception of light in religious architecture. Often characterized as an ambiguous materiality—neither concrete and tangible nor distinctly immaterial—light seems to offer itself readily as both matter and metaphor for the divine. We argue in this chapter that this is precisely what happens in contemporary Danish churches, yet not without conflicts between the ideal of immaterial divinity and the need for tangib…
Reconstructing Artificial Light in Ancient Greece
This chapter presents an overview of artificial lighting means and their efficiency in the performance of domestic nocturnal activities (except cult practices) in ancient Greece. Through experiments conducted in the Lighting Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens, the optical properties of exact copies of ancient light sources are investigated. The experimental data are used to assess the sufficiency of light produced by the li…
Light and Shadow Effects in Megalithic Monuments in the Iberian Peninsula
Atlantic Europe and the Mediterranean, especially the Iberian Peninsula, contain thousands of Megalithic monuments, such as dolmens and passage graves, built at the end of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. These are funereal monuments normally built with large bolders that define a space usually kept in darkness except for a period of time when light may enter the inner parts. These light and shadow displays were used in all likelihood to highlight d…
Illuminating Sensory Archaeologies
Light has a fundamental role to play in our perception of the world. It meditates the relationship between people and things within space, and is crucial to our understanding of the material culture of past societies. This chapter introduces light as the core focus of the volume; its qualities and affordances in different contexts and (im)material environments; its design and manipulation; and its elusive properties. The introduction also outline…
Lighting and Museum Exhibits
Museums exist to display and preserve valuable artefacts. Display lighting helps fulfil one of the main tenets of a museum, but excessive light causes irreparable damage to sensitive exhibits. Getting the balance between good display lighting and good conservation conditions is often difficult, but not impossible. Good exhibit lighting is not accidental. A considered process of design ideation and refinement is required to render exhibits to best…
Visibility, Privacy, and Missing Windows
This chapter examines the means by which light was admitted to Mesopotamian domestic space, arguing that doorways were the primary light source for most rooms. The consequences of this are then discussed, including the accessibility of lighting to archaeological study through recovered floor plans, and the impact which a reliance on doorway lighting may have had on the development of ancient Mesopotamian architecture. The interrelationship of lig…
The Light of the Flame
This chapter presents a study of light, in particular light produced by flame, by investigating the most representative lighting devices used in preindustrial Greece. The symbolism of lighting devices in traditional Greek society, used either out of necessity or in ritual ceremonies and customs as well as in representations in art and in social discourse, is examined to reveal aspects of culture, common beliefs, and social structure. The oral lit…
The Eleusinian Projector
The Mysteries of Eleusis in ancient Greece were the foremost sect of the mystery religions that dominated the eastern Mediterranean sphere for almost 2,000 years. The staying power of the Eleusinian rite stemmed from its convincing presentation of an otherworldly drama about the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Initiates endured a harrowing experience in darkness that somehow evoked death, before seeing beatific visions, the climax of which was …
Light and its Interaction with Antiquities and Works of Art
This chapter addresses issues related to light–object interaction along with its resulting phenomena, taking into consideration materiality issues. It presents light and its role in artefacts studies, either as a tool for finds analysis or as a corrosion agent. It attempts a balanced investigation into past and contemporary approaches towards light from the conservator’s perspective. It discusses traditional raking and oblique light examination, …
Darkness and the Imagination
Darkness has profound effects on human behaviour and the ability to perform everyday activities. It can influence our ability to function, our moods, emotions, and cognition. Here we examine the relationship between darkness and supernatural beliefs. This work is informed by cross-cultural cave research, which suggests that cave dark zones are used as the settings for rituals from the advent of modern humans to the present. How can this phenomeno…
Rediscovering the Winter Solstice Alignment at Newgrange, Ireland
Newgrange was the first prehistoric site in Ireland to have its astronomical alignment widely accepted, and since its discovery in 1967 has remained the best-known astronomically oriented archaeological monument on this island. This chapter investigates the discovery of the winter solstice orientation at this key light-centred site. It proposes a possible new explanation for the astronomically oriented ‘roof-box’: that its origins can be found in…
Modalities of Meaning
Images do many things: they capture data, they analyse and explain it in very particular ways; they are used as evidence to give weight to arguments; they stand in for the original; they contain and convey information to specialists and the public alike and they do this by transforming vastly complex material into usable and visible form. But they are not neutral. All images are sign systems that are more or less effective for the uses they have …
Materializing Light, Making Worlds
The distinctive architecture of Neolithic passage tombs reproduces the fundamental format of a camera obscura. Could Neolithic people have projected animated images of the outside world into the chambers of these monuments? Fieldwork in Wales and Scotland reveals that the methods required to generate optical projections inside passage tombs are straightforward and do not require a lens. At those sites that feature a solar alignment it is possible…
Lighting the Good Life
During late antiquity, the aristocratic house worked as an architectural social filtering system. Many structures of the private residence were used and combined to create, or to strengthen, an impression of social superiority. Ancient sources and archaeological evidence show clearly that light played a key role as an aesthetic element within this aristocratic housing scheme. The function of many key architectural and ornamental features were dep…
The Chacoan World
In the southwest United States, high altitudes, open vistas, and cloudless skies create a visual atmosphere where the light is legendary. I focus on the role of light for the people of Chaco Canyon—a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage centre in the San Juan Basin of northwest New Mexico. Here, worldviews and cosmologies involved the dualistic juxtaposition of light and dark, visible and invisible, sun and moon. The movements of celestial bodies in a clear…
The Role of Darkness in Ancient Greek Religion and Religious Practice
Aiming at a better understanding of ways through which the ancient Greek religious experience was shaped, this chapter investigates the role and use of darkness in religious belief and practice. The orientation and certain architectural features of Greek temples, Dionysiac and Mystery cults, divination, rites of passage, magic, and other nocturnal rituals are examined here in an investigation of the interplay between light, darkness, and shadow a…
Encountering Photoamulets and the Use of Apotropaic Light in Late Antiquity
In antiquity, natural and artificial light was not only manipulated to illuminate dark spaces but could also serve an amuletic function. This chapter explores several unique and in some instances forgotten archaeological small finds that hint at the use of symbolic light in tombs, sanctuaries, and building foundations. These ‘photoamulets’ were linked to symbolic and metaphoric light in word, image, and form. They were used for protection against…
Çatalhöyük
This photo essay outlines the experimental work undertaken in summer 2007 in Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, Turkey, while the author was the artist in residence. The work done in this Neolithic settlement led to the discovery of a sun clock, i.e. a beam of light present in each dwelling entering from the roof and drifting like a sun dial to different areas of the house. The parallelogram of light produced by the beam created a pattern of light and shado…
The Handling of Light
This chapter explores the handling of natural light in the classical Greek temple and the Byzantine church. It discusses concepts of orientation as related to their respective functions and aims and the planning of lighting. It addresses light’s influence on the shaping of formal components in the Greek temple, such as the peristyle, fluting, and echinus of the Doric column. It attempts to establish relationships between the temple and the church…
Art (29 works) · History (28 works) · Archaeology (27 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Geography (21 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Visual arts (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Historical and Architectural Studies (13 works) · Psychology (13 works)