Jon Tyler Wolford is a Byzantine archaeologist and PhD candidate in the Medieval Studies program at Cornell University. His current dissertation project seeks to understand how and why people came to live in permanent settlements on the mountains of Latros and Mykale in the middle Byzantine period. Usually, increased habitation in mountains is explained by political and military instability. However, the association of flight from war to mountainous habitation obscures a complicated and often contradictory relationship between mountains and war.
During his tenure at ANAMED, Tyler intends to research the relationship between middle Byzantine institutions which thrived in this period, such as newly founded mountain monasteries and the encroaching imperial estates in the valley below, and the settlements in the mountains.