The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Teaching in the Sun: Revisiting the Study Tour

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday

Last month we were lucky enough to have the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Honors College World Tour 2009 visit us for 10 days in Cyprus.  Contrasting the approach used by this group to the approach used by the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project to a study tour/field school was quite useful.  In fact, it led to several productive conversations with IUP Economics Professor Nick Karatjes who asked whether there existed a body of discipline-specific scholarship on study tours and field schools.  I confessed that I did not know whether any existed, and this got me to thinking about what a scholarship of study tours or field schools would look like.  What would be the key issues to a discussion of study tours in the context of Mediterranean archaeology or of humanities based study tours more generally?

Thinking on the fly, I propose 3 issues that would be good starting points to a conversation about teaching in the sun:

1) Assessment. As with all things in the academy today, any conversation on teaching in the sun must begin and end with assessment.  How do we assess student learning in immersive environments? Unlike assessment in a classroom environment where many rubrics focus on what goes on within the limited confines of the classroom itself, assessing the success or failure of a field school or study tour must take into account all of the components under the direct control of the project supervisors.  Thus, any mode of assessment must take into consideration everything from the basic logistical details (food, accommodation, travel) to the more typical pedagogical components of the education experience.  The pedagogical experience expands from the laboratory like environment of the classroom to encompass the full range of student experiences. 

2) The Limits of Student Engagement.  As so much of the value of the study tour or field school is the potential for immersion in a unfamiliar place or engaging in the regular practical application of skills acquired either in the field or in the classroom.  Both the need to survive in a foreign country and the need to consistently perform tasks or demonstrate skills in a "real world" environment requires a degree of student engagement in excess of the typical course in the humanities.  The stakes can be higher too.  The failure of a student to perform a task correctly over the course of a field school could produce results that either undermine the goal of the team or invalidate research results.  The inability to deal with a foreign environment can cause a degree of mental discomfort that may exceed the discomfort produced in all but the most rigorous courses.  The key in aspect then in a scholarly engagement with study tours or field schools will be how to successfully engage the students in their skill building exercises and foreign environment both the maximize their experiences and to avoid difficult results.  At the same time, it is necessary to understand the background and potential of a group of students to determine the degree to which they are capable of engaging their surroundings.  Pushing a group of students to go beyond their comfort zone can be good, but going a step to far could have unfortunate results.

3) Structure and Chaos.  One of the key components of any study tour or field school is balancing organized or structured learning opportunities against unstructured opportunities for students to explore their surrounding and engage the local culture on their own terms.  On the one hand, living and working in a foreign country is a great opportunities for students to engage critically with everyday life in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, to simulate within more familiar surroundings (only abroad can going to the post office be an opportunity for cross-cultural critique).  Unstructured opportunities for engagement put greater pressure on the individual student to create a meaningful space for themselves within a foreign culture.  On the other hand, unstructured time requires the faculty to allow students to find their comfort zone even if that is not the exact type of engagement that faculty might wish for the students.  The more organized and structured the engagement with the foreign culture is, however, the more that the experience of living and working abroad is partitioned off into a specific place and orchestrated set of experiences.  Less structured time, however, runs the risk of allowing students to chose not to engage with the host community and, say, hide in their rooms or only engage aspects of the local culture that seem familiar.

I wrote the body of this blog post when in Cyprus and reflecting on it now, I think that the three issues broached here apply to some extent to teaching and assessing learning in a classroom environment as well -- except that when running a study tour or field school, these issues are pushed to the foreground as the instructor has far more control over the day-to-day life of the students than an instructor in a more traditional classroom setting.

Swingline Stapler

Just because it's a nice day out, it looked cool, and I am working on revising an article:

Swingline Stapler

The Body and the Liturgy

The summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies is a tribute to the work of Patricia Cox Miller.  Her book on dreams in Late Antiquity has been particularly useful to my work on dreams in an archaeological context.  The volume is dedicated to a series of articles focusing on the body in Late Antiquity and represents the wide range of topics that draw upon the study of the body as a key paradigm.

The article in the recent volume of the JECS that caught my attention is Derek Krueger's "The Unbounded Body in the Age of Liturgical Reproduction".  In it, he explores the idea that in Late Antiquity there were very few checks on the proliferation of the liturgy and its power to reproduce the body of God.  As evidence, he explores passages in John Moschos' Pratum Spirituale.  In particular, he examines the well-known story of the children who play-act the liturgy and, when they utter the words of consecration accidentally consecrate the host.  Thus unordained and untrained children were able conjure the body of God through the words of the liturgy alone.  Krueger then goes on to site some other passages that, in a general way, reinforce his observations.

Several years ago, in a thoroughly unsuccessful and consequently unpublished article, I argued that the the same proliferation of the liturgy explained the appearance of liturgical phrases in inscriptions across the Eastern Mediterranean.  These texts appeared not just in the context of the church building, but also in domestic space and in public space (particularly fortifications).  While these texts rarely contained the entire text of the anaphora (central to the act of consecration), I argue that they frequently invoke the liturgy specifically and establish a pars pro toto relationship.  The implication here is that (1) literate folks were familiar enough with the words of the liturgy to recognize a liturgical phrase in an inscription.  Krueger's work substantiates this assumption.  And (2) the liturgy itself was not the exclusive domain of the clergy, but could be appropriated by ordinary folks for their homes (especially in Syria) or by the elite in monumental fortifications.  Thus, there exists some tension between clergy's position as the "ritual experts" in relation to the liturgy and the proliferation of the liturgy among members of the laity. 

These arguments are persuasive and important, especially for any scholar (like myself) who see the ritual formality of the liturgy as crucial to its role in establishing a clearly defined relationship between the laity, the clergy, and the divine.  I can't get around the idea that clergy's authority in Late Antique society was in some way linked to their role in the liturgy.  After all, the most visible mark of the liturgy and clerical presence in a community was the monumentalized expression of liturgical space -- the church building.

The Varieties of Archaeological Experience

One of the recurring themes in this blog is an emphasis on the varieties of archaeological experience in a Mediterranean context (e.g.). Despite my insistence (primarily to myself) that different approaches to archaeological knowledge can exist concurrently and possess a kind of validity rooted in a particular cultural discourse, it is nevertheless difficult to put this kind of approach to archaeology into practice. It’s one thing to accept that different modern archaeological methods – say, intensive pedestrian survey, stratigraphic excavation, and remote sensing – can produce different results, but another thing to try to understand (and risk validating!) the cultural context for, say, metal detector looting.

This being said, by the end of our field season on Cyprus, we witnessed at least four different archaeological methods each with its own goals and contexts…

1) Stratigraphic Excavation.  This method of excavation has become the standard for academic excavations the world over.  Its basic premise lies in excavating according to depositional contexts typically evident by changes in soil type.  The goal is to associate the depositional process with the cultural material preserved in each stratigraphic layer.  This process melds the processes that create the archaeological environment with chronological and functional indicators of past human activities. This method for archaeological investigation is widely accepted that it can produce a kind arrogance in its practitioners that verges on colonial conceit. 

2) Non-Stratigraphic Excavation. The issue with stratigraphic excavation is that it can be very slow – especially with student excavators in complex environments. The complexity and slow pace of our excavation made it clear that we were not going to be able to answer some of our research questions. In particular, we were not going to be able to excavate deep enough to expose any of the Classical/Hellenistic phase to our settlement at Koutsopetria. At one point our collaborator within the Department of Antiquities suggested that we as “academic” archaeologist excavate too slowly and that we should make a deep, non-stratigraphic sounding to answer a specific research question. This evoked a rather strong negative reaction from many of the senior project staff and conjured up images of Schliemann’s Great Trench at Troy. On the other hand, the suggestion revealed an important distinction between the goals and methods of the state archaeological apparatus and an academic research project. The state, in its capacity as arbiter of official cultural values and “owner” of all archaeological material and sites had a particular right to approach excavation in a way that was inappropriate (at best) for a foreign archaeological mission whose right to excavate depended in part on their commitment to produce detailed documentation from the inherently destructive practice of archaeology.

3) Looting with Metal Detectors. This year, more than any other year in the past, the metal detector crowd was out in force across our entire research area. While we did not actually catch them in action, the divots left from their destructive shovel tests were evident across the entire site. Local informants and the Sovereign Base Area police told us that the metal detecting was organized and systematic at our site. The metal detecting team had a powerful metal detector that could find metal objects well below the plow zone. Apparently this more powerful type of metal detector is illegal (and it was illegal in any event to use it so close to a registered archaeological site), but the folks using it stationed look outs to keep them from being caught. At one point, a man who claimed to be a good kind of metal detector guy, talked with us about the bad kind of metal detector guys who were giving his hobby a bad name.

4) The Mist of the Past. We were also visited by a developer who grew up in the area. He was very keen to demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the local archaeological landscape and talked in some detail about the various local discoveries. He made a point of explaining how local people could detect archaeological sites by observing the way that the morning fog moved across the ground. The coastal position of our site ensures a consistent morning fog making it well suited this kind of remote sensing technique.  Moreover, the expertise necessary to detect the slight changes in the way that fog moved across the landscape required a training rooted in the social organization of the local community.  According our informant, this archaeological method passed down through families and carried with it a kind of distinct (and potentially secret) knowledge of the history of the area.

The four kinds of archaeological methods that we encountered this year on Cyprus reveal different methods for appropriating and making meaningful the archaeological landscape.  The overlapping techniques present in the reading of a single landscape (and revealed over the course of a single 4 week field season) was a great antidote to the exclusive, modernist perspectives offered by stratigraphic archaeology.  This is not to say that we'll unleash a cadre of metal detector wielding undergraduates across the site next summer, but rather to remind ourselves that our methods and the meaning that they project onto the research area represents only a small fraction of the archaeological "carrying capacity" of a particular place.

The Houses of Lakka Skoutara

As I settle back into my American routine, I'll try to bring my readers up to date on my summer adventures.  I just returned from 10 days (or so) of fieldwork in the Corinthia at a site called Lakka Skoutara.  As I've reported here earlier, David Pettegrew and I spent much of that time recording a collection of rural houses in various states of abandonment.  To do this, we (mostly David) described the condition of the house in minute detail, measured the houses, photographed them, and this year we produced small sketch plans of a few typical houses in the area. 

So, I've included here three sketch plans and a photographs (with apologies to architects everywhere -- particularly Kostis Kourelis!).  It will be clear that these houses are rather typical Balkan type "long houses".  House 10 preserved the traditional divider that separated the area for agricultural work or animals from the area reserved for domestic activities.  House 4 is said to be the oldest house in the area and our sketch plan must represent multiple phases or significant repairs. House 10 was by far the best preserved and it is clear that it is still maintained for seasonal use, probably associated with the cultivation of olives. 

The large basin's for resin which were commonly associated with several of these houses show that resin collection was an important activity for residents of the Lakka.  In addition to basins for resin collecting, most the houses had a cistern or well near by, as well as an aloni (or threshing floor) and a oven.  Despite being identified as the oldest house, the aloni associated with House 4 must be earlier than the house as at least part of the house sits atop the aloni and it would have been impractical for the aloni to be that close to a domestic area.  Threshing grain is dusty work.  Several of the houses preserved a small area for a walled garden (see House 3 and probably House 4).  The wall probably served to keep animals out or chickens in.

House 3

House 4

House 10

Loutro Oraias Elenis in the Rain, a Church, and Thoughts of Going Home

Yesterday afternoon, there was an American-style summer thunderstorm here in Loutro Elenis.  Complete with hail, lightening ground strikes, torrential downpours, and thunder, the storm represents (to my mind) another example of American cultural imperialism.  The Corinthia, typically, gets very little rain in the summer and thunder storms are relatively rare.

The nice thing about this storm is that it seemed to tell me that I should be going home.  And I am.  Tonight.

It also brought to mind a nice reminder of summer field seasons in the past.  In 2001, I was doing an extensive survey with the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  This involved hiking by myself through the mountains of the southeastern Corinthia and noting what I saw.  One late June afternoon, I came across the barely nucleated settlement that we now call Lakka Skoutara.  Just as I had finished doing a little walking tour of a few of the abandoned houses -- the very abandoned houses that we prepared for publication this summer -- a late June thunder storm rolled through the mountains.  I panicked and tried to find the biggest (but shortest) olive tree for some shelter when I caught the slightest glimpse of a tiny, whitewashed dome.  My keen, Byzantinist-trained mind immediately realized that there is only one kind of white-washed, domed building in the Greek countryside.  A church! 

It turned out to be a small, rural chapel dedicated to St. Katherine who is not particularly known for protecting wanderers, extensive surveyers, or travelers, but she obliged my immediate needs nonetheless and provided me shelter from the storm.

As I look forward to going home and returning to my more normal routine, I couldn't help but think that the rain yesterday put a nice bookend on our work here in the Corinthia.  First, it evoked my first experience of the Lakka Skoutara basin, where David Pettegrew and I concluded almost a decade of observation and documentation this year.  It also foreshadowed my return to the US with a quintessentially American weather.

So, thank for the patience with my somewhat erratic blogging schedule.  Once I get back to the US and settled in, I'll return to my normal blogging routine and post updates on my summer fieldwork, plans for the fall, and various other topics. 

Collapse

Over the past week, David Pettegrew and I have been able to observe the various processes which caused a series of rural houses to collapse.  One key issue is with their tile roofs. 

A number of houses seem to have had their roofs systematically stripped of tile.

In some cases, the tiles slide off the roof as parts of the roof gives way over time.  As the tiles slide off the roof, they frequently form halos around the house...

In other instances, the tile roof stays more or less in tact, but the walls of the house begin to splay.

In some cases, the home owner tried to buttress the wall with another wall, but this did not seem to work entirely in this case.

When the walls collapsed, the tile roof caved in on the interior of the house.

If the interior of the house doesn't get squashed by the collapsing roof, then the various interior partition walls (which were often just plaster and mud) collapse as well.

 

Provisional Discard

David Pettegrew and I have been visiting a photographing a settlement in the Corinthian countryside.  Today we observed a few commonplace examples of what archaeologists call provisional discard.  That means discard that occurs in an orderly fashion after an object is no longer needed for its primary use. 

Provisional discard is part of the numerous processes through which artifacts become part of the archaeological record from their place in more everyday life.

Construction in the Corinthia

Four construction styles appear in one building in the southeastern Corinthia.  A Cinder block pediment rests atop a fieldstone wall with tile chinking.  Meanwhile a twisted piece of metal holds the now collapsed roof beam in place.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Blog Statistics

As we get ready to leave the island and shut down our empire of the new media for the season (although some new v-logs will appear on the PKAP YouTube channel), we thought we might report on some of the statistics for the blog.  This is largely in response to the most asked question: "do people actually read your postings?".  The answer is emphatically yes.  Here are the page views for the past month:

Archaeology of the Mediterranean World: 2061
Pyla-Koutsopetria Season Staff Blog: 1239
Pyla-Koutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives: 1551
Pyla-Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives: 1192

Total: 6043 page views

Thanks for reading!