The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Indigenous Archaeology Georgian Style

One of the most exciting afternoon from this year in Cyprus involved a trip to the ruined monastery at Yialia in the mountains about Polis on the Western side of Cyprus.  According to textual sources, Georgian monks founded the monastery on the island in the 10th century and it was occupied until the 14th century.  The church is currently under study by a group of archaeologists from the Republic of Georgia with support, apparently, from the Archbishop of Cyprus.

The monastic church itself is a traditional Athonite plan with its characteristic triconch arrangement. Massive cisterns, storeroom, and living quarters for the monks (apparently) extend from the church's southern side. The monastic church underwent several significant modifications in plan including an extension to the narthex, rather significant adjustments to the eastern end of the church, a chapel annex on the northern side, and a very strange tetrapylon type structure abutting the southern apse of the Athonite triconch.  The ruins preserve some wall painting on the upper, more sheltered parts of the collapsed vaults, as well as some better preserved frescoes which were built around during the buildings numerous modifications.

The most interesting thing about this very curious building is how it is used today.  The ruins of the church are currently used for the celebration of liturgy.  A portable altar and prothesis stand at the eastern end of the church despite the ruinous condition of the sanctuary space.

Incense burners and evidence for the burning of candles dot the various ledges and niches of the ruined walls.  The practice of re-using excavated, yet nevertheless consecrated sacred space is not entirely rare.  I observed a similar phenomenon at the church of St. Tychon near Amathous, for example.  It does, however, shed some valuable light on the intersection of long-standing forms of religious archaeology (dream archaeology being just one example) and modern "scientific" archaeological practice.  This kind of provision use of a ruined church may also reflect some of the practices common to ancient and Byzantine Christianity where churches damaged by earthquakes or neglect continue to be places of intermittent devotional practices.

Making this point all the more clear, a casket occupies of the center of the nave.  Apparently the excavations revealed a number of burials around the church and the monastic complex.  A few of these burials appear to be marked by small, Georgian style crosses.

It seems reasonable to assume that the remains from these excavated grave sites are placed in the conspicuous casket.  Apparently, the Georgian church plans to build a new monastery nearby and perhaps the bones of these now excavated monks will be brought to rest there.

The architecture, decoration, inscriptions (some in Georgian), and artifacts from this church will surely contribute to our understanding of the multi-ethnic character of Medieval Cyprus.  More than that, however, the combination of "scientific" archaeology and Christian devotional practices shows the potential for a kind of indigenous archaeological practice to exist alongside largely "western" (by some definition) archaeological practices, methods, and presumably epistemology.

More on Polis

One of the great conversations that I had this past week at Polis Chysochous centered on how one goes about publishing a complex site or sites.  Starting this fall, (as I discussed yesterday) a dynamic and diverse team of Late Antique, Byzantine, and Medieval scholars (Amy Papalexandrou, Kyle Killian, Sarah Lepinski, R. Scott Moore, Nora Laos, and myself) are planning to publish two multi-phase Christian churches excavated over the last 20 years in the village of Polis.  The sites are relatively complex architecturally with numerous overlapping and interrelated phases; they have also produced robust assemblages of Late Antique to Medieval ceramics, highly fragmentary wall painting, glass, and mortuary remains.

In a traditional publication each of these materials would have its own discrete section (or perhaps even volume) produced after a period of careful study by a specialist.  For example, Amy, Nora, and I would study the architecture and publish it complete with a description, comparanda, and comments on the significance of this architecture for existing typologies.  Kyle and Scott would perform a similar study of the ceramics; Sarah would study and publish the wall painting.  These practices have their roots in the history of discipline of archaeology (and the humanities more broadly).  In the first half of the 20th century (outside brief pockets of critique), the humanities emphasized the mastery of (highly!) specialized bodies of material which collectively would contribute to the expanding pool of knowledge on a give topic.  This empirical mode of research favored intensive, specialized, and discrete studies which would build a enduring body of factual knowledge.

Over the last 40 years (and perhaps more recently in the proudly anachronistic world of Mediterranean archaeology), scholarship have moved to more highly integrative approaches to research. These approaches have implicitly (or more recently explicitly) recognized that discrete bodies of knowledge exist only in relation to complex interpretative processes.  These interpretative processes inform both the hypotheses that guide our research as well as the techniques that we use to collect data to evaluate these hypotheses.  In other words, a body of factual knowledge does not exist outside interpretation.  The goal of producing an enduring body of empirically sound knowledge is simply not attainable.

As a result of this trend, scholars have worked to produce more richly integrated, interpretative publications across the humanities.  While vestiges of earlier practices persist in catalogue of finds and narrow specialist studies of distinct artifact types, these practices are increasingly arranged in relation to large archaeological and historical problems.  Our efforts at Polis will, I hope, look to how the assemblage of ceramic material informs how we understand the architecture and decoration of these buildings; at the same time, I hope that the architecture informs our interpretation of the decorative material and the ceramics present at the site.  The interplay between these various bodies of material create the interpretative space which we hope will produce a richer, more clearly historically relevant publication of the site.  In short, our study will regard the material culture (architecture, ceramics, plaster, et c.) of the past as both the product and the producer of historical interpretation.

This approach is not novel, and on Cyprus we have some great models (particularly Marcus Rautman's publication of the churches at Kopetra), but it is not universally applied.  What could make our approach interesting, however, is that we will attempt to implement it as a team of specialists (rather than as a single visionary scholar who can command a vast body of material).  Wish us luck!

 

From Pyla-Koustopetria to Polis Chrysochous

I am back from Cyprus after a little over 5 weeks. Over the next week or so, I'll bring everyone up to date on the triumphs and tragedies of our study and field season.  

I have spent the past week at the site of Polis Chrysochous on the western side of the island. A team from Princeton University under the direction of William Childs have been documenting the site of Polis since 1983 and excavating at the site since 1984. The site itself lies amidst the modern tourist town of Polis and as a result, the excavated areas are sometimes separated from one another by some distance as the map below indicates. The material from these various excavations indicate activity on the site from as early as the Chalcolithic period, and there is archaeological evidence that the area prospered as late as the 16th century and the Lusignan era.

I was invited to visit the site by Amy Papalexandrou who was working to study and publish the Late Antique and Medieval material from the site. This included two basilica style churches both with Early Christian and later phases (one is clearly visible to the right in this photograph, the other is barely visible to the far left in this photograph ). While both churches have appeared occasionally in the literature on the architecture of Christian Cyprus, neither has been published thoroughly. I hope to contribute to their publication and learn more about the architecture and use of these buildings as well as the political, social, economic, and religious history of the island in the shadowy period of the late 7th to 10th century.

The later phases of the Early Christian basilicas on Cyprus have attracted some scholarly attention. Of particular interest is the practice of transforming wood-roofed basilicas to barrel-vaulted structures sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries. The phenomenon was initially studied by A.H.S. Megaw in the 1940s. Numerous other scholars have considered the date, cause, and significance of this phenomenon, including most recently, Charles Stewart in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69 (2010), 162-189. Unfortunately, few scholars have appealed to excavated remains to make their arguments for the chronology of this change, nor have they consistently appealed to archaeology to consider attendant changes in decoration, function, or even social significance of the churches transformed after the end of antiquity.

The churches of Polis both show signs of modification after their original construction. Moreover, both churches were systematically and relatively carefully excavated revealing evidence for chronologically important ceramics, . As a result, these buildings represent an important opportunity to document the later life of Early Christian architecture on the island and in the process consider more fully life on Cyprus during the tumultuous years of condominium when Arabs and Byzantine jointly ruled the island.

In other words, the story of the buildings at Polis allows us to continue the story begun with at the Late Antique coastal settlement at Pyla-Koutsopetria, which appears to have fallen been in steep decline by the end of the 7th century and shows little activity in later eras. Unlike Polis, the vulnerable coastal position of the Pyla-Koutsopetria and its clear dependence on the trading networks sustained by the trans-Mediterranean Roman Empire probably doomed the settlement to abandonment.

Last Days in Larnaka

The museum team from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project finished packing up the museum on Friday and is heading off to Polis on the western part of the island to check out the work of the Princeton Polis Expedition.  They have not only substantial quantities of Late Antique pottery for Scott, but a pair of Early Christian basilicas (for me) and some Roman and Byzantine wall painting (for Sarah). 

Packing up at the end of the season provides a useful perspective on the quantity of material that we have processed and analyzed during the year, and need to synthesize in the off season.  The stacked creates filled with artifacts represent order from the chaos of real fieldwork and provide the basis for both the chronological and functional analysis of both our survey area and our various soundings.

In general, this was a successful season, although the various small projects, student volunteers, site visits, issues with the British base, and bizarre archaeo-political controversies conspired to give it a bit of a disjointed feeling. 

And the real success of the season will only be evident this off season as the various members of the team continue to work to write up the results of our 7+ seasons of fieldwork.

 

There might be a bit of radio silence from the blog over the next week, as we might not have the same degree of internet connective in Polis.  But I'll be back blogging by the end of the week.  Don't you worry.

Top Five Mistakes on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

As another field season comes to a close, it is useful to reflect back on some of our mistakes over the past few years.  I am pleased to say that no mistakes were so significant that archaeological information was lost.  On the other hand, most of these mistakes brought a certain amount of inconvenience to our seasons and set us back in time, energy, and sometimes other resources.

1. Not applying for a single, big grant. Over the past eight seasons, PKAP has been fortunate to be funded by a series of small to mid-sized grants.  The support of numerous organizations not only made our initial fieldwork possible, but also made it possible for us to take advantage of opportunities (like excavation and more robust remote sensing campaigns) that were not present at the project's onset, bring in collaborators from around the world, and to introduce over 50 students to field archaeology and the island of Cyprus. The downside of relying on small to mid-sized grants is that each fall became a frantic scramble for resources to fund the next season. Each spring, as we waited on the grants, became an exercise in speculative accounting as we produce multiple budgets and plans based on the possible level of funding provided by our outstanding grant applications.  Fortunately, we always received enough support to pursue our most optimistic plans, but the wait (particularly over the last few years as "changes" in the global economy made it difficult to predict funding levels) was excruciating.  Next time we conduct a multi-year archaeological project in the Mediterranean, we will make it contingent upon receiving a multi-year grant.

2. Messing with the Cypriot Bronze Age. While I am not a liberty to go into details about this mistake, I have learned that the Cypriot Bronze Age is not fun nor is it necessarily an open field for inquiry.  It seems best for specialists in Late Antiquity working on a largely historical site, to steer very clear of the Late Bronze Age and other messy pre-historic periods in Cyprus.

3. Identifying an Early Christian basilica on Vigla from resistivity results.  After conducting a substantial campaign of electrical resistivity survey in 2007, we concluded that an Early Christian basilica stood atop the coastal height of Vigla. In fact, our scrutiny of the architecture directed the location of our trenches in 2008.  It only took a few days of excavating to discover that the remains on Vigla were not associated with an Early Christian church, and moreover, were not monumental.  Now it appears that we have a Classical to Hellenistic fortified settlement on the height.  (For more on this, see here and here)

4. Flying PKAP Airship One on a windy day.

5. Conducting a study season without a registrar. At one point this year, I looked over the numerous scholars and students working on PKAP material and could see no order to the chaos.  In past years, our registrar has brought order to chaos and allowed for the smooth movement of material through processing and study.  This year, we proceeded without a registrar - a feat only attempted once before - and the results were terrifying.  Well-labeled (fortunately) artifacts everywhere, forms everywhere, well-labeled (phew!) pottery bags everywhere, scholars and specialists everywhere, and me frantically trying to keep up with various questions and requests on my lap top while attempting to analyze the data.  Fortunately, a long, hot, day in the museum last

There are some honorable mentions to this list: working on Cyprus in late July and August for one year, working on a site in the British Sovereign Area (paperwork on top of paperwork!), waiting for five years before discovering how useful a camp manager was to the project, and leaving too little time each season to wrap up all the odds and ends in a calm and collected way. 

Despite these mistakes, we are pleased with the results of our 8 years of relatively intensive field work and study.  We don't lose artifacts, we haven't lost a student (and have had remarkably few "problem" students), and we are well on our way to produce a monograph length study of our work. So, if I am lucky enough to embark on another project like PKAP, I can only hope that it turns out as well.

The Teaching Blogosphere

Just a quick repost from over on Teaching Thursday:

If you read this blog, chances are that you read other blogs like it.  So I thought it would be a useful exercise to crowd-source some of the more useful teaching related blogs on the web.

The three blogs that I check most regularly are:

Tomorrow's Professor Blog aggregates a great selection of online teaching articles each day.  It's a great daily review of what's new across the web.

Prof Hacker has recently moved to the Chronicle of Higher Education's webpage.  It deals with much more than just the "hacking" or technology aspects of teaching to include professional advice, productivity tips, and even recipes! 

Not to be left out, Inside Higher Ed, offers the daily Technology and Learning Blog which covers ground similar to Prof Hacker with maybe a slightly greater emphasis on technology.

Finally, I'd be remiss not to mention Mark Grabe's Learning Aloud blog which provides a nice array of personal technology tips with an eye toward their use in the classroom.

This is just a small sample of the vast teaching related blogosphere.  What blogs do you read to keep up with recent developments in teaching?  Let's work to create a list of teaching blogs that you find useful as a resource.

Post your favorite blogs in the comments section over at Teaching Thursday!

Near Disaster on PKAP Airship One

The chaotic second flight of PKAP Airship One has become an instant legend around these parts.

Contrary to what the manual says, we now know that the PKAP Airship One is capable of a 4g negative dive.  Scott Moore has documented it.  He'd tell you where it occurred, but it's classified and he'd have to kill you.  (If you don't know what I'm talking about ask somebody my age or Google "4g negative dive").

From blimp to page

An afternoon with the newest tool in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project arsenal, PKAP Airship One, produced a series of spectacular aerial photographs (the adventure of the airship was documented by Dallas Deforest here).

I did some quick, post-processing of the low-altitude aerial photographs, which I document below.  My main interest was transforming the aerial photographs into quick plan views.  I first georeferenced the image (and orthorectified them to compensate for any distortion) using a series of points acquired by GPS. 

I then sketched in the most visible features in the photograph in ArcGIS.  The final image is a drawing, base on the photo, prepared for ground-truthing this afternoon in the field.

 

Documenting the Damage

Over the last four or five years, we've witnessed first hand the work of looters on our site in Cyprus.  Their work with metal detectors has left pockmarked fields in their wake, and this past year they left a 2 m deep hole at the site of Vigla. 

The hole was probably not worth the looters efforts as all it did was expose a 2 m high stretch of fortification wall which I diligently worked with Dimitri Nakassis to document yesterday evening.

This sectional of wall is the best preserved stretch of the wall surrounding the height of Vigla.  Even more useful, it is the only stretch visible (for the moment at least) on the northern side of the height and confirmed our suspicions regarding the course of the wall in this area.  Unfortunately, its excavation by looters prevented us from retrieving any significant chronological data from the hole despite a few pieces of coarse ware scattered about inside the hole.

Cleaning Time

We finally have received permission from the British base to work out at our site. Since the students leave this coming weekend, this means re-prioritizing and frantic days of fieldwork.  One of the top priorities has been to clean up the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria so that we can complete the documentation of both our excavations and the architecture exposed by previous work on the site.

Cleaning a site involves removing invasive weeds, "winter wash" (that is dirt that has come into the site over the winter months), and trimming up the inevitable slumping of our once carefully cut scarps.  It's pretty tedious work, but since we've spent the previous two-and-a-half weeks in the museum, the students (and staff) attacked these jobs with extra energy.

 

 

We also lost the services of our hardworking cook today; Chester Beltowski left early this morning to return to Grand Forks.  This leaves us with a different cleaning situation...