The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

The Personal Archive

I'll admit that I am currently obsessed with Omeka (and particularly excited about their new foray into cloud hosting).  As any reader of this blog knows, it's a free, open-source web-publishing platform.  And I have begun to use it extensively to publish images from my archaeological work in the Mediterranean.  The software is powerful and relatively easy to use. I've managed to build three archives so far.  The first included the works of Ryan Stander who was the artist in residence at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project this past summer.  The second, which I featured in this blog yesterday, included images taken of the site of Lakka Skoutara over the course of 9 years showing archaeological formation processes playing out in the Greek countryside.  Yesterday, I uploaded a series of maps documenting the distribution of material across our study area in Cyprus.  The maps show the distribution of artifacts by chronotype across the coastal zone of Pyla Village, and these maps will be linked to places within a working draft of a chapter for the upcoming PKAP monograph on the distributional analysis of material at the site. 

Distribution of Hellenistic to Early Roman period artifacts

Distribution of Early Roman period artifacts

Eventually, a working draft of this chapter (part of which have appeared, albeit in very fragmentary forms in this blog in Thinking Out Loud One, Two, Three, Four) will appear on my Scribd page or, better still, in my Omeka archive alongside the other maps and images using their clever Google powered document viewer plug-in.

None of these applications took me more than a few hours to find my comfort zone and I can uses these applications to continue to expand the personal-professional archive that began with the blog.  Each archive is designed to accommodate different types of material, operates with slightly different principles of organization, and has a different aesthetic of display (or user-interface as the kids call it).

The scholarly process becomes more transparent and de-mystified.

Creating Ruins: Formation Process Pictures from Lakka Skoutara

One of the most exciting things about our recent efforts to produce an online archive of images from the rural site of Lakka Skoutara is that it is now possible to track the processes that have created the ruins visible today.  It's remarkable how much the houses have broken down over just a decade of observation.  Click on the images of the houses to get access to the archive itself (powered by Omeka) and selective Dublin Core metadata.

House 3 represents one of the most dramatic changes over 8 years time. Once the roof collapses, the walls fall down fairly quickly.  The fieldstone and mud mortar addition on House 3 below collapses much more quickly than the modern cinder block and concrete.  It's interesting that the end walls on the house remain standing, but I suppose unsurprising since they bear very little of the roof's weight. 

(2001)

(2002)

(2004)

(2009)

The change in house 2 is equally dramatic, but here you'll notice some little editing issues.  For example, in many cases the images scanned from slides are backwards.  Note that between 2001 and 2002, the tiles of the house were removed and as a result the roof gives way quickly. 

(2001)

(2002)

(2004)

(2009)

The plan with this project is not only to create a resource where students and scholars can observe the way that buildings break down over time.  Be sure to check out the growing archive here.  The plan is to add some maps and plans as well as some more pictures over the next few weeks so it is always worth stopping back through the archive.  I'll also likely move the working papers over to my Omeka page soon as well.

For more on this project:

Lakka Skoutara: A Partial Archive
Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th Century "small world" in the upland basin of the southeastern Korinthia
Slopes and Terraces at Lakka Skoutara
Corinthian Infiltration: The Interior of Some Houses at Lakka Skoutara
Lakka Skoutara: The Survey
The Houses of Lakka Skoutara
Collapse
Provisional Discard
Construction in the Corinthia

Three Things From the Writers Conference

This past week's writers conference was a pretty spectacular event.  I managed to attend several of the lunchtime sessions and a few other events.  I wish I could have done more.  Even with that somewhat limited exposure, I came away with innumerable impressions and ideas that I hope can somehow influence my thinking and work over the next year.

1. Writing as Performance.  Saul Williams, whose poetry is as much about performance on stage as it is about language, made the point that he regarded the page itself as a performance space.  I am not sure why I was surprised by this.  In the previous days panel entitled "beyond the screen", a number of the participants described the creative process in performative terms.  One work discussed in this panel was a collective called Collaborative Furtures created a single book over a week period.  The act of writing was as much the final product as the book itself.  It got me thinking about blogging as a kind of performative writing.  The time-based aspect of the blog -- with the date of publication forming the primary organizing principle -- represents writing in a way that centers more on the way that ideas develop through time and careen off one another than any one central theme, argument, plot, or even space.  The time based component of the blog draws inspiration from the practice of writing journals which seek to capture the immediacy of experience.  I think this relates to our somewhat erratic efforts on the Punk Archaeology blog where we have (I think tacitly) abandoned any plan or argument or even rhythm to our posts and introduce ideas as they come to us. In effect, blogging (even my rhythmic, daily, inscription) performs the act of writing by insisting on the temporal dimension of its practice. Like working papers, blog posts are showing the work that final drafts of academic and professional writing obscures behind a find layer of polish.  Blogs represent ideas as events in the process of development.

2. There is no New Media.  One of the themes of the writers conference was the New Media and one of the really obvious outcomes of all the panels that I attended is that the very notion of the New Media has outlived its purpose.  First off, we probably can't call many of the things that are traditionally associated with the New Media "new" any more.  After all, the internet as we know it is 20 years old and computer based media actually predates widespread access to net.  Like any once-new medium for communicating ideas, any effort to produce a common definition is bound to be inadequate to describe the work of artists and writers across such varied platforms as interactive fiction, web-based video, digital music, installation art, and multimedia arguments.  In fact, if there is any complaint that I have about the writers conference is how little common ground there was between the people on the largest and (to my mind) potentially most dynamic panel -- Beyond the Screen -- which featured new media pioneers and masters across mutiple fields: Cecelia Condit (film), Mark Amerika (film and literature), Nick Montfort (literature), Stuart Moulthrop (art and literature), Scott Miller (music).  While we can all accept that a lack of easy definition can suggest the existence of something profound, in the case of the New Media it may indicate, instead, that whatever moment in time the newness sought to capture and define has passed.  The New Media no longer has a center around which ideas are coalescing.  In other words, whatever middle ground once existed which allowed authors and artists to share ideas has now once again dispersed and we must find new paradigms to understand how former "New" media works relate.

3. Anxiety and the Book.  The first panel I attended was provocatively titled: "Are Books Obsolete?".  The title alone suggests the anxiety surrounding the coming of the ebook reader, the speed and fluidity of the web, and the end of the page as a basic unit for measuring writing, reading, and certain basic intellectual accomplishments.  While there were plenty of opportunities to celebrate the "new" opportunities made available through the hypertextual medium of the electronic "page", the underlying anxiety persisted. In this context, all of the sometimes incredible power of books came to the fore: their ability to capture attention, to stimulate pleasure through their weight, forms, and even scent, to structure narrative through conditioning interaction, to create better, more thoughtful readers, and to sustain the creative arts by protecting the intellectual property of the author.  Anyone who has read this blog knows that I appreciate the role that objects play in creating relationships between individuals, but all of the anxiety about the end of the book seems strangely overwrought.  There is no denying there importance of books to the Western intellectual tradition, there is also no denying that most people in history did not read books.  And more than that, even most people who could read did not necessary read books.  I'd even argue that today, most of us spend more time reading newspapers, magazines, loose papers, and letters than books.  It's not that books aren't important (and I suspect that they will continue to be), but that their impact has always been focused on a particular groups and particular circumstances.  Perhaps it's just the historian in me who noticed the lack of historical context for the significance of the book.  This is not to suggest that a dose of "historical reality" will alleviate fears that the end of books as we know it will swiftly bring about the end of Western civilization, but it certainly would make the extent and significance of the book as an object and technology easier to understand.

Any event that causes me to think is a good event (even if the only thing that I think is "who is that guy and why is he doing that?") and, with this broad definition, the Writers Conference qualifies as a good event. It was exciting to hear people talk so freely and to speculate so widely about the life of the mind on a campus and in a community where such talk is not always readily accepted. I'm already looking forward to next year, and if you have a few bucks, give something to help the Writers Conference continue to stimulate the minds of the northern plains.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Just some quick hits on a sunny Friday.

• An interview with UND alumnus Rex Sorgatz.
• Crowd-sourcing Pompeii elevation data.
• Soundscapes in the UK.
• The last day of the Writers Conference features presentations by Frank X. Walker and Saul Williams. Pretty exciting stuff.
• I've added some more photographs to the Lakka Skoutara collection on my Omeka page. Check them out.
• Sneak peek at the newest blog in the Caraher Blog empire: Pendentive. It's the successor to Squinch... check it out.
• Some really positive feedback on the Teaching Thursday: Year in Review.

Be sure to check out Saul Williams at the Chester Fritz Auditorium tonight at 8 pm!

Teaching Thursday: A Year in Review

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Teaching Thursday, for a brief effort to summarize its first year in existence. Teaching Thursday emerged from a conversation between me and Anne Kelsch. The idea of Teaching Thursday began on my blog as an online extension of his regular teaching journal.  The idea was to take time each week to reflect on some issue either in the media or in practice that influences the way in which he taught. As with blogging in general, the reflective writing soon became addictive and this addiction (as they often do) led to changes in behavior.  I found that I became more aware (and, indeed, interested) in how changing approaches to my classroom practice produced different results, created different environments, and reflected changing attitudes toward teaching more broadly.  I thought it would be a great idea to supplement the regular discussions organized by the Office of Instructional Development with a weekly teaching blog where folks across campus (and perhaps even outside of campus) could reflect on the things that they do that influence how they teach.

SInce those first conversations, Teaching Thursday has seen 63 posts and 66 comments.  The most common categories (and we divided the post into many, probably too many categories) and those related to online teaching (5), technology (7), cheating (4), student expectations (6), graduate instruction (6), and the future of teaching (6), and summer teaching (4).  These posts were written by over 20 authors representing 15 departments or divisions on campus and several off-campus bloggers to add some diversity to our perspective here.  The posts featured the full range of faculty (both tenure track and non-tenure track, from full professors to assistant professors), staff, and administrators who are all committed to teaching in some way on the University of North Dakota campus.

Below is a list of the 25 most popular posts from the past year.  One of the great things about blogs is that you can track, to some extent, the number of times your pages were viewed.  Of course, any kind of web statistic must be taken with a grain of salt, but the ability to say something about what your audience found interesting, compelling, or timely.  The list below ranks the most popular posts based on the number of page views per day. The diversity among these popular posts is remarkable to me.  They range from very traditional blog posts which merely point toward an article of interest on the web, to inspirational essays, to thoughtful critiques and practice teaching advice. 

1. 2.4. Howard Zinn and Teaching, R. Kahn
2. 1.80. The Recruiting Paradox: Recruiting and Teaching a New Generation of Graduate Students, E. Nelson
3. 1.75. Online Teaching, the Panopticon, and the unequal gaze, M. Beltz
4. 1.59. On the habit of cheating, M. Beltz
5. 1.39. How to spot a bad professor, W. Caraher
6. 1.38. The Cost of Cheap Education, A. Kelsch
7. 1.28. The English Department and Beyond: the UND Writers Conference, C. Alberts
8. 0.95. Technology and Pedagogy. W. Caraher
9. 0.87. Teaching Thursday: Critiquing the Three Year Solution, J. Hawthorne
10. 0.70. The New Future of Teaching: Graduate Student Mentoring/Deconstructing Framework J. Benoit
11. 0.67. Teaching Thursdays: Boundaries and Manners, C. Prescott
12. 0.63. The New Future of Teaching: Social Networking, Changing Expectations, and the Perils of Access, W. Caraher. B. Weber
13. 0.57. Teaching Thursday: Some Thoughtful Tips , M. Beltz,W. Caraher, T. Prescott, B. Weber
14. 0.57. The Panopticon and Online Teaching, W. Caraher
15. 0.47. Mentoring Graduate Students, C. Prescott
16. 0.42. The Cost of Cheap Education: Another Perspective , M. Beltz
17. 0.41. Three Thursday Thoughts on Teaching: 1. Lexical Analysis , D. Perkins
18. 0.40. Reflecting on Teaching: An All-Campus Colloquium on Teaching and Learning, W. Caraher
19. 0.39. Call me Edupunk, C. Alberts
20. 0.38. Using Models to Teach, C. Barkdull, B. Weber
21. 0.37. Cheating, W. Caraher
22. 0.31. Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium: On Spurring Self-Reflection in Decision Making, D. Sauerwein
23. 0.30. Online Cheating, C. Prescott
24. 0.26. Another View on Teaching Graduate Students, A. Kitzes
25. 0.24. Making the Most of a Month in China: The Role of a Direct Journal, C. Berry

Over the first year, the blog has enjoyed over 7500 page views (and this does not count views via its RSS feed in Google Reader and the like).  The chart below shows that the trend over the past 12 months is clearly a positive one especially when you consider that December and January are typically slow blog months (both in terms of posts and visits) and March still has a week left and is showing exceptional traffic. In short, I am optimistic that the upward trend will continue.

While we do not collect a full set of analytics data, we can say a few things about how people got to our blog.  The biggest referrer is und.edu, followed by und.edu/dept/oid (the home page of the office of instructional development). My personal blog -- The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World provided some traffic as did the Official Blog of the Graduate School , but more important perhaps are various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter which drove a considerable quantity of traffic to the site.  Finally, several other sites picked up our blog and linked to it.  The most exciting link came from the the New York Times, but we also attracted links from India, South America, and several blogs in the US.  The most exciting thing is that every day, every week, and every month we see more and more traffic coming to Teaching Thursday to discover what our faculty and friend have to say about teaching.

Without sounding sappy, I've been very pleased to discover so many people on campus willing to write critical, reflective, and practical posts on aspects of their teaching.  As we look ahead to our 10,000 visit and 100th post, I am excited to continue to work to develop content and participation on the blog. In particular, I'd like to get more participation from across campus, and extend invitations to my colleagues in the College of Engineering, Nursing, the Law School, and Medical School (I'm already working on ways to draw in colleagues in Aerospace!) to contribute what you do that is inspirational, practical, and exciting to the conversation.  With the recent emphasis on the STEM disciplines, I think that this forum can become a useful place for teachers both within and outside of the STEM fields to  exchange ideas that will enrich all of our classroom experiences.

I'd like to thank all the contributors over the past year -- especially those who wrote multiple posts or took the time to write about teaching during busiest parts of the semester -- and thank Anne Kelsch's for all her hard work to keep the blog in the campus eye.

Some thoughts on St. Leonidas and Baptism at Lechaion in Greece

The Lechaion basilica and baptistery are among the most impressive archaeological and architecture remains from the Early Christian period in Greece. As I have blogged on many times, the massive Lechaion basilica stood near the coast at Corinth's Western harbor. It's baptistery is often thought to date earlier than the massive basilica situated to its south largely because they have slightly different orientations. (This post has a companion post here).

Scholars have often associated the basilica with the martyr Leonidas and his several companions who, according to the preserved lives, were drowned in the Gulf of Corinth (AS II, April 16). Since Robin Jensen's visit a few weeks back, I've been thinking about this episode and its relationship to the great church at Lechaion. In several articles, Jensen argues that ad sanctos baptism was a not uncommon practice in Early Christian times (for a nice summary see here). This largely involved traveling to pilgrimage sites or even just local martyr's tombs for the initiation rite of baptism. For Jensen, this evokes the long-standing association between baptism as a kind of spiritual rebirth and the death of martyrs as their birth into spiritual and eternal glory.

   

I began to wonder whether ad sanctos type baptisms might have taken place at Lechaion. After all, the church is conspicuously close to the sea where a martyr shrine to Leonidas would be appropriate. Moreover, the church makes abundant use of water both in some of the imagery present in the yet unpublished architectural sculpture (at least one unpublished fragment of sculpture includes a dolphin which would have had particular significance in the context of baptism and Corinth through the myth of Arion) and in the various water features associated with its massive western atrium. These water features include the installation of a large basin, perhaps for fountains, in the center of its western hemicycle and two large basins along the eastern wall of the atrium. The baptistery itself is quite large with three rooms: two ancillary rooms and the baptistery proper with its central font. In short, the basilica featured water prominently, and if the basilica was to be associated with the martyr Leonidas, then the use of water throughout may well have been evocative of the events surround his and his companions martyrdom.

The use of water around Lechnaion is not enough, however, to link this church to the martyr Leonidas or to make an argument for ad sanctos baptismal practices. Corinth and the Corinthia was known in antiquity for fountains and water; so, the the use of water at Lechaion may have merely evoked or advanced Corinth's longstanding reputation. There is something more however linking Leonidas to baptismal practices. First, it was not uncommon to associate explicitly martyrdom with baptism, especially if the martyr was a catechumen. Leonidas seems to have been a full-fledged Christian. He was, however, martyred on during Easter. Easter was the common time for baptism in the Mediterranean in general and in the Greece specifically according to the historian Socrates (5.22). While there does not appear to be explicit (at least that I've found) references to baptismal imagery, the accounts of St. Leonidas' martrydom are short and the link between their physical and fatal submersion in the sea at Easter when catechumens experienced (at least symbolic) submersion of their own in the baptismal font at Lechaion seems hard to overlook.

To take this admittedly speculative reading a step further, it would be interesting to imagine the relationship between the Lechaion basilica and the nymphaion excavated a short distance to the south of the church (E. Stikas, Ergon (1957), 53-58).

This building shows many remarkable similarities in both architectural decoration and in the use of opus sectile floors to the Lechaion basilica. While the building itself may be earlier, it seems likely that it underwent some modification by the same work crews who were involved in building the Lechaion basilica. The location of the nymphaion at the base of a coastal bluff gave it access to water and a position along a likely coastal road leading to the north coast of the Peloponnesus and, presumably, past the massive Lechaion church. It would be appealing to imagine this building as a symbolic billboard (are there other kinds of billboards?) for the Lechaion basilica taking not only certain decorative cues from the church as well as the reference to water. Water would have brought together the local history of the church, well-known Corinthian water culture, the martyrdom of Leonidas, and the Christian rite of baptism performed in an elaborate building less than 100 m from the foreshore of the Corinthian gulf.

Tweets and Writers Conference on a Digital Day

Today is going to be dominated by digital affairs. First, I plan to attend the University of North Dakota CIO (Chief Information Officers) Core Technology Research Forum. The plan, from what I understand, is to focus on the future of research technology here on campus.

That's probably the least interesting meeting of the day. Immediately after that meeting, I'll scurry off to the first major panel of the UND Writers Conference. The theme of this years conference is "Mind the Gap: Print, New Media, Art" and here's the exciting schedule. At noon in the lecture bowl, the first panel will discuss "Are Books Obsolete?" and feature graphic artist, Art Spiegelman, e-literature author (and Teaching Thursday contributor!) Deena Larsen, filmmaker Cecelia Condit. This is not the first panel to consider this topic in recent years and the slightly negative tone to the question (as opposed to the more optimistic "What is the future of the book"? The fear with a panel focused on a question like this is that the answer could be a simple "no" and that doesn't leave us anywhere really to go.

One of my little pet projects has been to encourage a Twitter back channel for the Writers Conference using the hashtag #UNDWC. Let's just say that North Dakota is not quite ready for Twitter hashtags yet and it's been a bit of an uphill battle. In any event, the Writers Conference does have an official Twitter Feed, which awkwardly has two followers. So, anyone attending, thinking about, or curious about the Writers Conference, follow their feed. Or, better still, contribute to the conversation by using the #UNDWC. Then follow the chat (or just me tweeting merrily away) here.

Then, at 2 pm, I'm off to my History 240 Class to talk about research using the library. As per usual this involves introducing them to digital tools - namely the library catalogue, J-Stor, World Cat, Google Scholar, and Zotero -- as well as old fashioned analog ones. One of the greatest challenges that I have each year is explaining to students exactly what a monograph is or how to distinguish between an academic and popular work. It's always surprising how little the students understand about the relationship between form and authority in publishing. In other words, a book that has all of the basic attributes of an academically authoritative text (footnotes, bibliography, index, acknowledgements, thesis, academic publisher) is more likely to be the basis for further research than a book lacking this attributes. Students simply do not come to University with the skills needed to discern academic authority. The thing that worries me more, is that these basic skills are very difficult to communicate and instill in students. In other words, students will continue to ask me -- sometimes for semesters after the class is over -- whether a book is a monograph or not. I am not trying to suggest that students only read monographs or anything like that, but it strikes me as odd how hard it is for them to distinguish between an academic book and a non-academic book. And, to return to the theme of this post, it worries me that in a digital environment it is even more confusing to them. At least academic publishing adheres to some basic standards whereas the signs of authority on the web are far more obscure.

Finally, on a digital day, I am slightly embarrassed to announce that I (well, actually my wife) ordered my iPad over the weekend. While I have, like any good academic, scurried off to find negative reviews of it (just to keep myself from being disappointed), I am pretty excited to have a flexible, flawed, and nicely designed ebook reader. I expect it to substantially improve my life.

Lakka Skoutara: A Partial Archive

Over the last 10 years or so, David Pettegrew, Tim Gregory, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, and I have been working to document a modern rural settlement in the southeastern Corinthia. The site is called Lakka Skoutara and we have presented the preliminary results of our work in a few conference papers over the past few years, I've presented some photographs and general discussions in this blog, and Lita-Tzortzopoulou published a very brief summary of our work in "The Archaeology of Modern Greece" in E. Athanassopoulos and L. Wandsnider eds. Mediterranean Archaeological Landscapes: current issues. (Philadelphia 2004).

Part of the basis for our study is a significant archive of photographs. I've made a significant number of these available using Omeka on a companion site to this blog called Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota. David Pettegrew and I took these photos over a 9 year period from 2001-2009. So far, I've uploaded and begun to annotate with metadata photos taken in 2002, 2004, and 2009.

To find the photos on my Omeka site, click on Browse Collections and then Lakka Skoutara. You can look at the various photos of individual houses by their tags: House 2, House 3, House 4, House 5, House 6, House 7, House 9, House 10, House 11, House 13 , House 14, House 16, House 17. Or you can go to advanced search (in the upper right hand corner) and create more complex searches. The simple search is nearly worthless. Once you find a photo in which you are interested, you can save the citation into your Zotero database.

At present the houses do not have a significant amount of metadata associated with each house, but that is coming soon. Moreover, we do not have many contextualizing documents associated with these houses. But we will have a few plans posted soon and a map of the site as well as some photos taken in 2001 and some more robust descriptions of the houses and the area. In other words, this is a work in progress, but the item numbers for each photograph will remain stable.

Even more exciting and strangely beautiful flood pictures

I always tell people that the most beautiful thing about Grand Forks is the light. This relatively low-resolution web cam, capture shows just that at about 7:46 am this morning.

The mighty Red River of the North is at 45.99 feet, the 8th highest historic crest.

Here is the river level yesterday, the day before, and the day before

Another Flood Picture

It's 7:25 am on a partly cloudy Saturday. Here's what the river is up to from the Grand Fork Herald's Flood Cam.

Have a good Saturday.