I benefited greatly from the 104th Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South personally and academically. Let me discuss the personal first. My parents, who live in Denver, Colorado, met me in Tucson for the conference. Since my patents last saw their granddaughter at Christmas, I decided to bring her along. The only troublesome aspect to our travels was taking a 20 month old on a 6 hour flight with, on the outbound flight, two connections. I cannot complain too much because Alexis, my daughter, travels very well, see the picture below. Once we arrived at Tucson, my parents spent as much time with Alexis as possible. On Saturday we decided to drive to Tombstone, Arizona for a little sight seeing. My dad really enjoys the history of the Wild West and there is much to see in Tombstone: historic downtown, the OK Corral, various signs describing what event happened where, and of course no old west town is not complete without the cemetery. All of us had a great time together.
As far as my academic experiences, there were many. I presented my latest version of my sling-bullet paper. I listed my basic arguments below.
1. Through a syntactical analysis of the Greek inscriptions on the Cypriot sling-bullets and a study of David Robinson, Excavations at Olynthus X: Metal and Minor Miscellaneous Finds (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1941) an interpretative model emerges where personal names in the nominative case represent a manufacturer while personal names in the genitive case represent an authority figure ordering the assault or issuing the bullets.
2. Of the 32 identifiable inscribed sling-bullets from Cyprus there are 7 different names (3 Nominative and 4 Genitive comprising 30 bullets) and 2 symbols (comprising 2 bullets). Robinson's Olynthian assemblage has 64 inscribed bullets with 4 personal names in the genitive (comprising 51 bullets). Robinson attributes the bullets inscribed with personal names to Philip II's siege of Olynthus in 348 BC. The Cypriot sling-bullet bullets, with the diversity of names and cases, allude to prolonged multifarious modes of deposition, not a single event. This suggests that there was a lot of activity on Vigla, the area of the site where the sling-bullets came from, during the Classical and Hellenistic periods.
3. There are six categories of inscriptions types on sling-bullets: commands and exclamations, group names, personal names, names of deities, and symbols and signs.
4. From a careful examination of the inscriptions scholars can investigate specific issues such as ethnic identity and mobility, magical uses of language, literacy, and psychological warfare. Moreover, inscribed sling-bullets also contributed to general issues such as ancient warfare, social history, and military history.
After I presented my paper I received good questions and feedback. CAMWS was the fourth professional conference I present my sling-bullet research. Each conference offered great feedback, interesting questions, and suggestions for bettering and/or furthering my research. Indeed having presented this work to several people, both specialists in the field and the general public, I feel I am now at the point where I can complete a final draft for publication in the upcoming PKAP monograph.