This talk explores the potential of critical heritage studies to question ownership and the relationship between identity and material culture in the premodern Mediterranean as well as alternative ways of conceiving of heritage linked to place and geography. Displays of reused spolia on the facades of buildings were potent expressions of the continuity of the past in the medieval present. While the visually older spolia were perceived as deriving from the past, they were also understood as belonging to the present, not as divided from it.

Such spolia displays were produced in large quantities in Southern Italy, Venice, and the Byzantine and Muslim-ruled regions of the Eastern Mediterranean between the 12th and 14th centuries. Through breaks, awkward juxtapositions, and forms of fragmentation they signal their age. However, to understand them as visual evocations of a line connecting the past with the present would risk making them conform to modern standards and norms of historical temporality. Vanita Seth and other scholars have encouraged us to explore epistemological alterity instead of finding mirror images of ourselves and our modern ideas in the medieval past. Armin Bergmeier argues that premodern temporality was entirely different from modern temporal consciousness. And that epistemological alterity presents a unique methodological tool that changes our approaches to the study of material culture.