The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Provisional Discard at the Larnaka Museum Apotheke

Due to a bit of a paperwork issue and a series of British holidays, we have not been able to get the students in our field should out to our site.  While there is plenty of work to do at the museum where we are gaining momentum in processing artifacts, we are still working to find ways to get our students to flex their fieldwork brain-muscles.  In other words, we hope to find ways to get the students to think archaeologically on a larger and more complex scale than the individual artifact. 

One of the suggestions that I made was that we could get the students working on the amazing assemblage of material present just outside the museum storerooms.  Unlike the "archaeological" material in the storerooms, the assemblage of stuff in the storage area's courtyard represents a whole range of storage and discard practices.  While documenting and studying the various objects, stored, and discarded used by the local archaeological establishment may seem to some (of my colleagues) as a classic example of busywork, I think that it would be a great exercise in archaeological description.

It also is an interesting opportunity to consider the remains of a wide range of archaeological and conservation practices.  As archaeology comes to play a more and more prominent role in the presentation and performance of the modern state, we have to assume an increasing amount of recovered archaeological material itself re-entering new archaeological contexts.

 

 

Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project gains pace

It's been a bit of a slow start to the summer work at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  Some of this may be because my bag and computer power supply were lost for a bit, but after a roundabout trip to the island, I am back in the blogging business.

But if you miss this PKAP blogosphere, then you ought to check out our staff blog here: http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/

And follow us on Twitter (now that I have my phone and can provide exciting blow-by-blow descriptions of our work) with the hashtag: #pkap

Or at the PKAP Blog Aggregator site.

We've spent the last few days in the museum attempting to set priorities for the study season, introduce the students to the project, and organize the ceramics that need to be processed.  Our biggest challenge right now is that the paper copies of many of our forms have gone missing in our time away from the Larnaka Museum.  On the one hand, this is not surprising since the museum is an active and busy place all year around.  On the other hand, we had hoped that our paper data recording sheets would remain in relatively close proximity to the physical artifacts for the duration of the project.  The missing sheets provide another challenge, the data has not been entered into our database yet and this was one of the goals of the 2010 PKAP season (we have copies back in the US).  One of the main downsides of paper copies is that they can't be multiple places at once, like our digital databases.

While we hope to get copies of our artifact sheets from the US before too long, their absence makes it harder for us to identify and focus on particular artifacts as we prepare our catalog for publication.  We've become totally dependent on our ability to querry data efficiently in order to identify patterns in our finds data that will reward further research.

This weekend, we take the students on trips to Paphos, the monastery of Ay. Neophytos, and the small coastal site of Ay. Georghios-Peyeas and Maa. then, on a special Sunday trip, to the Classicla to Late Roman site of Amathous and then to the seaside town of Zygy which once prospered as a major export port for the islands carobs. We appear to have a good group of students this year, so these trips should be exciting.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project gains pace

It's been a bit of slow start to the summer work at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  Some of this may be because my bag and computer power supply were lost for a bit, but after a roundabout trip to the island, I am back in the blogging business.

But if you miss this PKAP blogosphere, then you ought to check out our staff blog here: http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/

And follow us on Twitter (now that I have my phone and can provide exciting blow-by-blow descriptions of our work) with the hashtag: #pkap

We've spent the last few days in the museum attempting to set priorities for the study season, introduce the students to the project, and organize the ceramics that need to be processed.  Our biggest challenge right now is that the paper copies of many of our forms have gone missing in our time away from the Larnaka Museum.  On the one hand, this is not surprising since the museum is an active and busy place all year around.  On the other hand, we had hoped that our paper data recording sheets would remain in relatively close proximity to the physical artifacts for the duration of the project.  The missing sheets provide another challenge, the data has not been entered into our database yet and this was one of the goals of the 2010 PKAP season (we have copies back in the US).  One of the main downsides of paper copies is that they can't be multiple places at once, like our digital databases.

While we hope to get copies of our artifact sheets from the US before too long, their absence makes it harder for us to identify and focus on particular artifacts as we prepare our catalog for publication.  We've become totally dependent on our ability to querry data efficiently in order to identify patterns in our finds data that will reward further research.

This weekend, we take the students on trips to Paphos, the monastery of Ay. Neophytos, and the small coastal site of Ay. Georghios-Peyeas and Maa. then, on a special Sunday trip, to the Classicla to Late Roman site of Amathous and then to the seaside town of Zygy which once prospered as a major export port for the islands carobs. We appear to have a good group of students this year, so these trips should be exciting.

First days on Pyla-Koutsopetria 2010

I've made it to Cyprus, but my bag has not. Inside this bag is the massive power brick for my computer, so for the time being, I am reduced to using my iPad as my primary computer. As various pundits have observed, the iPad is much better suited for consuming media than its production. In other words, my blog posts will be short. On the positive side, the flight gave me an opportunity to read Michael Given's most recent article on The Ottoman landscape of Cyprus (Given and Hadjianastatsis, BMGS 34 (2010), 38-60. Drawing on textual and archaeological evidence, Given and Hadjianastasis reconstruct segments of the Ottoman period Cypriot landscape looking at history of a series of villages on the northern slope of the Troodos mountains. I also read Charles A. Stewart on the 8th century vaulted churches of Cyprus, particularly those on the Karpas (JSAH 69 (2010), 162-189). These buildings represent an important, albeit local, transitional step between wood-roofed basilicas and more centrally planned, vaulted or even domed structures. Finally, we've begun to introduce the students to our work in the museum, the local topography, and local sites. So far the students and staff are filled with early season energy and enthusiasm. Stay tuned!!

You're not going to dig?

As I put the final touches on my packing for my trip to Cyprus, I want to address a question that I have been asked numerous times over the past few weeks. What do you do over there if you're not digging? And why aren't you doing fieldwork this summer?

As for the first question, my project, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, has never been a traditional excavation. In fact, the project started with no intention of digging at all. Our initial research methods and goals involved conducting an intensive pedestrian survey across the the Pyla coastal zone. Excavation served to ground truth various hypotheses developed by survey and remote sensing. So, we had never intended to excavate large areas or conduct a full-scale excavation of buildings. Instead, the goal was to establish chronology of subsurface remains, to try to determine their function, and to generate a stratified sample of artifacts to which we could compare our survey materials. So, in short, our excavations were limited in scope and, as a result, limited in duration.

Despite the limited nature of our excavations, they, nevertheless, produced a good bit of material that requires careful documentation. We will devote most of the 2010 season to documenting excavated material and preparing detailed catalog entries for important artifacts collected during excavation and survey. As we have begun to prepare our final analysis of the Pyla region for publication, we have identified artifacts, units, and contexts that require more thorough and comprehensive documentation. Over the next four weeks, we'll spend time making sure that the key pieces of archaeological evidence are thoroughly analyzed so that they can support our arguments.

Fieldwork is the most fun part of archaeological work, but as the pioneering underwater archaeologist George Bass recently quipped, "my most exciting discoveries have all come in the library". The same can be applied to the artifacts stored away in museum storerooms which when cleaned from the dirt of the field can often reveal crucial information overlooked during the bustle of excavation or survey. Our ceramicist's careful attention to each artifact is a time consuming and tedious process, but the results of his work (and the entire teams efforts to facilitate his work by cleaning artifacts, dividing them into lots, keeping records, and cataloging) will allow us to reconstruct the history of the site in a way that digging another or even just a bigger hole would not enable us to do.   

So, off to Cyprus today, to spend four weeks or so in the museum storerooms helping our ceramicist go through our collected corpus of artifacts. As with every year, this blog will continue through the summer, although perhaps with a few short interruptions. Also be sure to check out our Undergraduate Perspectives Blog, the PKAP Season Staff Blog, and our long-running, Graduate Student Perspectives blog. Or check out the PKAP Blog aggregator for the most recent posts from all three.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

The countdown to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is official on, so we'll spend today running errands and making final preparations for a Monday departure.  In the meantime, you can enjoy a little bevy of quick hits:

• I love reports and statistics, so I was pretty excited when the 2010 University of North Dakota Sophomore Satisfaction Survey was released by our Office of Institutional Research.
• If you share my worry about the state of graduate education in the U.S., the you certainly need to read the latest report of from the Council of Graduate Schools.  And, for more info on Graduate Education, you should certainly bookmark, the other blog in our household: The UND Graduate School Blog.  It's curious that the Chronicle of Higher Education does not feature a blog on Graduate Education in the US.
• Teaching Thursday begins its summer semi-slumber this next week.  We'll keep posting throughout the summer (perhaps not with the same regularity), but our readers move on to more summer related tasks like mowing the lawn, family vacations, and neglected research projects.  Before you go, be sure to read the last installment in our series of First Year Teaching Reflections.
• Ghosts of North Dakota continue to update their growing catalogue of photographs of abandoned North Dakota towns. Their most recent trip through the "abandoned" landscape of North Dakota produced some pretty brilliant results.
• While the PKAP blogosphere is about to return to bloom, it is now joined by some new Mediterranean fieldwork blogs.  I'm keeping an interested eye on my old buddy Rangar Cline's Under the Umbrian Sun blog which will document their work at the excavations at Vicus ad Martis Tudertium.
• In recent weeks, the Penn State student run blog Onward State has attracted a good bit of media attention.  Being involved in re-imagining the University of North Dakota's web presence, I am not sure that the imperiously named "Web Oversight Council" fully understands the potential power of a site like Onward State and its ability to influence the image of the university on the internets. 

Off to run errands!

Another Thesis: American Scheherazade

Nigar Soubra, one of my M.A. students here at the University of North Dakota will soon defend her thesis. It's entitled "American Scheherazade: Strategic Orientalism and Hybridity in the Ottoman Tales of Demetra Vaka Brown".

Here's the abstract:

In the academic era of Post-Colonial scholarship, the discourse of Orientalism is particularly under close observation and it is a subject for heated debates among many Post-Colonial scholars. Since Edward Said’s Orientalism identified this discourse as a homogeneous historical and political process, the subsequent field of scholarship engaged in the process of understanding and re-defining the term of Orientalism. Post-colonial hybrid personas who were actively engaging and strategically re-addressing the course of Orientalism destabilize Said’s monolithic definition and create a ground for a more complex discussion of this seemingly diverse discourse, which extended beyond Western colonial agendas. A hybrid cultural status of a Greek-American writer and an immigrant from the Ottoman Empire, Demetra Vaka, as well as her first publication, Haremlik, are the focus of this thesis, which implements a “close-reading” of the narrative in order to understand the author’s ambivalent use of Orientalism. It is argued that Vaka Brown’s culturally in-between status granted her a privilege of authorial authority and authenticity in her representations of the East to the West. Vaka Brown ambivalently not only re-addressed the previously constructed Orientalist stereotypes but also engaged in developing Orientalist knowledge through classification and representation of cultural difference. It is argued that Vaka Brown utilized Orientalism strategically in order to establish her authorial authority based on her origins, to map the cultural differences between the East and the West, and to bring an air of commercially desirable exoticism to her narrative. In the era of American material Orientalism, when American popular culture was enchanted by the allure of exotic merchandise and the idea of escapism, Haremlik represented an authentic voice of experience and a story about the “other.” In Haremlik, Orientalism is a tool for mapping of cultural differences and a hallmark for marketing. It is argued that Vaka Brown’s strategy for representing an inherent incompatibility between the East and the West was imbedded in her nostalgic idea about the timeless and unchanging Orient. The idea of westernizing Orient threatened the author expertise on the intimately familiar Orient. Not only did the westernization of the Ottoman Empire destabilize her knowledge about the intimately familiar “other,” but also the idea of the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire’s disintegration and the rise of Turkish nationalism threatened the existence of Greek minorities in Turkey.

Congratulations Nigar!

Byzantine Archaeology and Indigenous Archaeology

Over the last few weeks, I have been re-reading some work on indigenous archaeology and considering its application to the study of Byzantium. The new edition of Matthew Johnson's Archaeological Theory spurred this, in part, as did a more careful reading of Robert McGhee's 2008 critique of indigenous archaeology in American Antiquity 73 (2008), 579-597. The main arguments supporting indigenous archaeology stem from the idea that indigenous peoples (broadly construed) understanding the material past in different ways from that articulated and advanced by "scientific" (broadly construed) archaeology. In its most radical applications, indigenous archaeology sees "traditional" Western archaeological practice as the continuation of centuries of imperialism rooted in the physical appropriation of the past. Advocates of "scientific" archaeology, of course, argue that the miracle of the Western scientific approach to disciplines is that the theories, methods, and conclusions are universal and universalizing. This makes it possible, in their view, for Western archaeologists to contribute to a universal understanding of an indigenous past. Indigenous archaeologists (perhaps more properly the advocates of indigenous archaeology) argue that Western archaeological practice developed from profoundly different understandings of time, the past, and material culture which preclude representing indigenous pasts in ways that do not intentionally undermine indigenous practices at the expense of Western values.

I've maintained (even occasionally on this blog) that the notion of indigenous practice is no limited to groups traditionally represented (by the West) as indigenous, but that we are all indigenous to someplace. As silly as this seems, this simple notion allows us to re-position European practice as not simply Western and imperialist and, frankly, "bad," but as indigenous as well. This has obvious parallels with Chakrabarty's ideas of provincializing Europe and undermines the oppositional character of both the West (to the East or to the "other") and the "indigenous" as categories. In other words, Western practices are indigenous too.

The problem becomes, however, that scholars traditionally understand Western archaeological practices through the lens of historical analysis and in the "context" of specific historical developments. As a result, the methods involved in understanding and writing this history of archaeological practices draw upon the same basic intellectual frameworks and methods that inform Western archaeological practices themselves. From a theoretical and methodological perspective, this creates a kind of circular analogy whereby western archaeology is understood only through the western practice of history. Ironically, perhaps, this circularity is liberating inasmuch as this same circularity besets traditionally identified indigenous practices as well which often find draw upon "indigenous" models for understanding the past to validate and authorize particular archaeological practices.

Where does all this leave Byzantium? This is what I am beginning to attempt to work out:

Byzantium clearly possessed an indigenous archaeology which manifest itself through dream inspired excavations, the use of spolia, the practice of inventio (the rediscovery of lost sacred objects) and translatio (the transfer of sacred objects from one place to the next), and the practice of renovation, refurbishment, and reconstruction. All of these practices represent particular views of the material past that contribute to a broader understanding of Byzantine history and Byzantine culture. (I've documented some of these practices here and here). These practices represent profoundly Byzantine attitudes to the past, to material culture, and to significant (and sacred) places in their world. These practices remain embedded within persistent sacred narratives and continue to produce meaningful landscapes. All of this suggests that these indigenous archaeological practice continue to function and inform social behavior on some level.

Moreover, the persistence of a kind of "Byzantine archaeology" suggests that discrete pre-modern archaeological practices existed in the West and produced meaningful landscapes. In other words, "Western" practice is neither historically unified, exclusively modern, nor even necessarily exclusionary. Western archaeology in all of its modern, disciplinary, manifestations nevertheless circulates in a world of archaeological practices that continuously challenge it exclusive right to produce meaning. Byzantine and other archaeologies that exist at the margins of disciplinary practice present important avenues for the revitalization of archaeology as a discipline. Not only do these practices demonstrate the potential for differing forms of archaeological knowledge of co-exist, but also reinforce the historical, religious, and even irrational influences on the seemingly universalizing methods of modern archaeological research.

Medieval and Post Medieval Archaeology of the Mediterranean - 2011 Archaeological Institute of America Colloquium

I just heard the good news that the Medieval and Post-Medieval Interest Group of the AIA has had a panel accepted at the 2011 AIA.  The proposal is from David Pettegrew (the Interest Group president from 2008-2010) and Amelia Brown (current president 2010-).  I'll post updates on the panel including the abstracts for the papers and hopefully the podcasts of the actual panel over at our Pendentive Blog. 

Here's the abstract for the entire colloquium session and the paper titles.  Looks like a great panel.

"Travel to Greece between Antiquity and the Grand Tour"

Two sets of travel texts have consistently formed the backdrop to archaeological interpretations of ancient Greek sites and landscapes: Pausanias's 2nd-century Description of Greece and early modern accounts of western Europeans, who themselves often wrote with an awareness of Pausanias. Throughout most of the 20th century, archaeologists attempted to relate these texts to the new discoveries of excavation and survey, while in very recent years scholars have sought to understand these accounts, and the landscapes they represent, in terms of their particular social and intellectual contexts. In general, however, there has been very little research on travel to Greece between Pausanias and the start of the Grand Tour, despite the growing recognition that interregional communication continued uninterrupted between the 3rd and 17th centuries, both in Greece and in the Mediterranean more broadly. Indeed, the textual evidence for Late Antique, Byzantine, and Ottoman travel to Greece is greater than is often realized as historians, geographers, imperial functionaries, sailors, merchants, students, Hellenes, Christian pilgrims, monks, ‘barbarian invaders,’ refugees, pirates, Crusaders, knights, and armies, among many others, visited the peninsula and islands of Greece. It is true that most of these travelers did not (or even could not) record their visits to Greek lands in writing, but the extant textual evidence is not insubstantial. Some educated travelers followed ancient writers and prefigured the Grand Tourists by recording their interest in the monuments of classical antiquity while others ignored the classical past and sought places associated with St. Paul and Christian holy men and women, or viewed sites unaware of either Christian or classical pasts.  The textual evidence itself exists in the context of an ever-expanding body of material culture of Late Antique to Ottoman date produced by both urban excavation and regional survey. In this colloquium, we analyze the varied written sources for different kinds of travel into, within, and around Greece between the 3rd and 17th centuries together with the regional archaeological evidence to illuminate landscapes from Late Antiquity to the Ottoman era. Our goal is to combine both kinds of evidence to better understand post-antique travel and the sites and landscapes visited before the Early Modern era.

Papers
"Intellectuals on the Isthmus of Greece,"
David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College

"Christian Pilgrimage to Byzantine Corinth,"
Amelia R. Brown, University of Queensland

"Two Italian Travelers on Karpathos in 1923 and c 1423, and an archaeological explanation for Sorzadori,"
D.J. Ian Begg, Trent University

“'To tell you something very special': Cyriaco of Ancona in Greece,”
Diana Gilliland Wright, Independent Scholar

"Athens through Ottoman Eyes."
Pierre A. MacKay, University of Washington

Teaching Monday: Reflections on the End of a Year

As I work to get my final grades together for the Spring semester, I leafed back through my teaching notebook and began to think a bit about how to change my classes next semester. (I've already blogged at some length about my Twitter experiment this semester). I have to good fortune of teaching the same classes almost every semester, so I have a nicely iterative environment to experiment. This also allows me to chart trends over multiple semesters and make observations about the kind of variation present in my classes.

So for this semester, I have five observations:

1. Three years ago, I started a multiple-guess option for my History 101: Western Civilization class. I allowed the students to opt into a full multiple guess test, a half-multiple guess and half essay, or an all essay exam. At this time, I created a fairly robust test bank and revised my lectures to ensure that I hit on the answer for each question. Eventually, I recorded these lectures and podcasts (more on this later). Each semester, I add a few questions to the test and cycle a few questions out basically at random. Over the past three years, most students answer each question correctly. That is to say, that over 50% of the students answer the questions right and the average grade on the multiple guess sections hovered around 60%. I haven't done more sophisticated statistical analyses on these questions, but it never ceases to amaze me that students' responses do not pattern more clearly.

2. Attendance woes. Students do not come to my classes. I probably average less than 60% attendance in my larger 100 level night class and less than 70% in my midlevel, majors class. I've tried all sorts of tricks to get students to attend. In other words, I've incentivized student attendance, but I need to do it better. This is absurd on some level: I use incentives to make students want to do something that they have paid to do. Generally, these incentives have a pedagogical goal. In my large lecture class we do a series of in-class writing assignments focusing on the use of primary source readings. Some of these are individual writing assignments (which tend to put pressure on individuals to do the reading and come to class prepared), some are small group assignments (which force students to pool their preparation and resources), and some are large group assignments (which encourage students to hash out the best answers from a group of with similar levels of preparation). These in-class writing assignments are facilitated by myself and my teaching assistant, focused on building the skills required in the short paper and on the essay sections in the exam, and contribute to a discussion grade that is worth 30% of their final grade. Despite the grade and pedagogical incentive to come to class students still skip in remarkable numbers. The reasons are similar: the class is too long (it's a 2:20 minute night class), they work, they can listen to versions of the lectures as podcasts, they are busy with other classes, and my class competes with Lost. The defeatist in me sees the reasons for cutting class as being deeply embedded in student culture (here?), but part of me thinks that I can find the right combination of incentives and penalties to break student resistance to attending class.

3. Podcasts are the new textbook. Two years ago, I transitioned from using textbooks to using my own podcasts to provide basic narrative for my class. I did this for three reasons. First, podcasts could serve both my in-class and my online class . Second, textbooks are really expensive and even though most of my 101 students sold their textbooks back at the end of the semester, I was skeptical that the use of the book was worth the money that the students paid. Finally, I had this strange idea that students would find it easier to listen to podcasts than to read a textbook. While there is no disputing that podcasts serve my online teaching well and that they are free, students -- according to my very informal poll -- did not find my podcasts any more appealing than a textbook. In fact, many of the students admitted to not listening to them at all. This surprised me as I had tried to use the podcasts to turn class time in a more dynamic space where I could talk about big, conceptual issues in the history of the West and spend time focusing on class writing. The result, however, seems to have been that many students felt that the podcasts were as good as my lectures and opted to neither attend my lecture nor listen to the podcasts. Yikes.

4. Drafts. I used to be a big advocate of students writing multiple drafts of papers. In fact, I structured an entire class midlevel history class around this practice. In the best case scenarios, students would diligently work to improve a manuscript focusing on various different skills in each version and eventually produce a sophisticated and polished final draft. In the most-case scenario, students would work hard on one draft of the paper - either the first or more often the last - and temporize with the rest making insignificant edits, cosmetic fixes, or (most annoyingly) only those changes that I recommended explicitly. So, this year I did away with multiple drafts and instead assigned multiple, different, unrelated, short papers each of which focused on developing a particular skill set: focused thesis, citation formats, good prose, et c. The final paper of the semester required the students to bring together these skills into a single paper. The result: well, as a group, these papers were no way worse than the results from papers for which I required multiple drafts.

This got me wondering if the formal process of producing drafts - particularly completed, substantial, and relatively polished drafts - was an artifact of older technologies and practices which focused on the production of relatively complete texts which were then subjected to editing. This made sense in a world where handwritten texts had to have a degree of polish to be legible and type-written texts involved a significant commitment of time and energy. As a result, drafting involved the creating of relatively work-intensive texts, which were then only re-produced after receiving substantial editing. Today, producing a text is relatively easy (as this blog undoubtedly shows!). Editing can be performed on the fly, printing is a separate and fairly easy process, and as a result we focus less on creating distinct versions of a paper and more on the malleability of the text-always-in-revision. In this environment submitting a copy of a text for critique marks the end of the editing processes, during which time the text exists on screen or on scrap papers, rather than in a polished format suitable for circulation.

5. Process versus Product. Along similar lines, I have included components of my classes that focus on process. A colleague here uses journaling as a way to capture parts of the intellectual process. I've been using an old-school threaded discussion board where I post weekly discussion questions. The students do not discuss the questions as much as write short reflections on the discussions questions supported with evidence from the primary source readings for that week. Mostly these short reflections are poorly considered, historically problematic, or logically flawed. Despite that, the students nevertheless write around 3000 words a semester and strive over 15 weeks to write using historical sources as evidence. I've defended these short assignment, which I evaluate on a 5 point scale, as ways to get the students write and useful contributions to my goal of having students write 5000 words a semester in an introductory level class. What I need to do now is set up a way to evaluate whether these short assignments are successful in making the students better writers or whether they merely reinforce poor writing practices.

By noon today, I will have submitted my grades and dust will largely have settled from another semester. Hopefully, I'll have some new ideas by the time the fall semester rolls around.