The Anastasian Wall Project 
The Anastasian Wall Project (Crow, Bardill and Bayliss) is the most developed part of this project. This aims to advance our understanding of urbanism in Constantinople throughout its history by investigating the provisions for the urban defences and water supply. This is being achieved through the integrated application of advanced data capture techniques, multi-disciplinary analysis and historical research. Started in 1994, the project began as a detailed survey and study of the city’s outermost defence line. Throughout it has been characterized by the innovative use of computer-generated modelling techniques and since 1998 it has incorporated the investigation of the Byzantine water supply line from the sources in Thrace to the delivery points within the city. The project begins its final three-year phase supported by a major institutional award from the Leverhulme Research Trust. The publication of the first monograph concerned with the Anastasian Wall will be complete by 2001 and the study of the water supply will follow in 2004.

For more information, see http://longwalls.ncl.ac.uk/

Constantinople described (Belfast) A team will collect and publish in BBTT the most important texts in a literary counterpart to allow scholars and students to share each other’s concerns and learn each other’s techniques (including the applications of GIS, rhetoric). The most important texts planned are Oliver Nicholson’s facing text and translation of Dionysios of Byzantium’s Anaplus Bospori, Liz James and Ruth Webb’s facing text and translation of Constantine the Rhodian’s poem on the church of the Holy Apostles, Albrecht Berger’s facing text and translation of the Patria, and Michael McGann and Estelle Haan’s text and translation of Ubertino Pusculo’s four-volume poem on the Fall of Constantinople. A day-school on the 550th anniversary on 29 May 2003 will celebrate the city as well as the fall and provide a forum for the consideration of these texts within the physical environment and material culture of the city.

Sacral Landscape of Constantinople (PDRF) This new strand aims to make advances into the understanding of the urban fabric of Constantinople by situating the textual sources for triumphs and religious processions within the topography of the city. This will draw together and capitalize on the work being conducted by the Anastasian Wall and Constantinople described teams. The project manager will compile an inventory of literary, visual and archaeological sources for processional activity within the city. Textual elements for the study will be supplied by colleagues working on Constantinople described but we will take advantage of the advances already made into the topography of the city as part of the Anastasian Wall Project to provide the spatial context in which to situate the venues for sacred activities. By situating the textual and visual evidence within its wider archaeological and topographical context this reflexive approach will enable specialists from different fields, aware of the strengths and limitations of their own sources, to work together at annual day schools and seminars on new interpretations into the sacred and ceremonial activities of the city.