The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It's a rainy Friday before a (hopefully) sunny weekend, so we have some fun varia and quick hits to get your day going right.

• A nice response to my short review of T. Huston's Teaching What You Don't Know.  There is nothing more humbling than advising graduate or undergraduate research. Student research consistently reminds me how much I don't know even in my own field and energizes me with new and refreshing approaches to familiar topics. Most importantly, however, student research reinforces the importance of process in my own work.  It makes me want to be more systematic, more organized, more exhaustive.
• Punk Archaeology is back.  I have a couple of most posts brewing in my brain. But the blog might not last for much longer, so if you haven't checked it out, it's probably best to do it now.  And fear not, something else is in the works.
• I started using HootSuite this week (instead of Tweetdeck).  While I appreciate the aesthetic of Tweetdeck and actually like the Adobe Air built interface, it may be the Hootsuite is more useful as I look to juggle several Twitter accounts this fall.  So it's Hootsuite on my laptop, Seesmic on my Android Phone, and Tweetdeck on my iPad.  But to read my social media on my iPad nothing beats Flipboard.  For a cool little review of it, check out this post on ProfHacker.
• I also purchased a copy of MarsEdit this week. I've been looking for blogging software for my Mac that would rival the simplicity and ease of Window's Life Writer.  I tried Ecto for a year and found it just a bit too quirky for my taste. (Actually, I was annoyed that I could not change the font size of the text I was writing without changing the size of the font in the blog).  I like MarsEdit better.
• As an historian with a serious professional interest in archaeology housed in a history department, I am increasingly aware of how the professional credentials amassed in my strange interdisciplinary space do not neatly align with those of my colleagues.  For example, I do not get any explicit credit for running my own archaeological project and my collaborative publications (often with 3 or more authors) - standard practice among archaeologists - does not look like the more solitary scholarly efforts of my colleagues.  In any event, I was interested to see how closely my work fits into the new set of best practices for Public History recently approved by the AHA, OAH, et c.  Check out the details and commentary at Found History.
• This is a cool article on how to use Kickstarter to fund a publishing project.  It gets me thinking about Phase Two of Punk Archaeology.
• Marcos Ambrose is leaving JTG Daugherty Racing at the end of this year.  I hope he manages to upgrade his ride.  Rumor has it that he might move over to fill one of the two vacated seats at Petty Racing.
• England v. Pakistan will show whether Pakistan is really that good or Australia is really that bad.  So far, England appears committed to keeping things interesting.
• What I'm Reading: R. Price, trans, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553 : with related texts on the Three Chapters Controversy. (Liverpool 2009); Hesperia 79.2; M.T. Fournier, The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime. (New York 2009)
• What I'm listening to: The Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime.

Punk and Spolia

Over the last week or so, I've been listening again to the Detroit Cobras and thinking about some of our first conversations on Punk Archaeology.  The Cobras specialize in what they have called "revved up soul".  They make this wonderful noise by covering (mostly) lost classics of the MoTown era over the  driving rhythms of punk and the fuzzy, distorted lo-fi sound of the punk blues movement.  Rachel Nagy's voice succeeds at being both smooth and abrasive at the same time.  Some critics have called their sound "Garage Soul".

Their first album, Mink, Rat or Rabbit covered songs by 1950s and early 1960s bands like The Marvelettes, The Shirelles, Irma Thomas, The "5" Royales, and The Shangri-Las.  Later albums continue this tradition.  (They're first two albums - Mink, Rat or Rabbit and Life, Love and Learning - are, to my ear, their best.  (Notice the absence of the "Oxford comma" in both titles.)

The point of mentioning this somewhat obscure band is to consider the relationship between punk and spolia.  Spolia is a technical archaeological term for the re-use older fragments of architecture in new construction. It is typically associated with Late Antiquity and was initially regarded by critics steeped in the Classical Tradition as indicative of the lose of technical skills and economic impoverished conditions at the end of Antiquity.  Other saw the use of spolia as a conscious decision on the part of Late Antique builders and, at worst, reflective of a taste for a discordant, disorganized, and, ultimately, decadent aesthetic.

Of course hip-hop music withstood similar criticisms as they cut up and sampled R&B classics to form  rhythmic backdrop for their poetry.  Such reuse of earlier material was unoriginal and indicative of a kind of creative bankruptcy among "today's generation".  Punk took their lead from pop music which they sped up and made more up-tempo, raucous and chaotic.  The Cobras occupy a third space recently developed by bands like the White Stripes and the Black Keys where punk, R&B, and blues infused with the DIY, lo-fy sound of the garage (which represents a more austere and suburban version of the venerable lo-fy Juke Joint).

The epicenter of this music has been Detroit (or the Rust Belt more broadly) where the punk of the MC Five and the blues Son House and John L. Hooker intersect.  The music here has tremendous symbolic significance, as Detroit has become emblematic of the decline of "traditional America" and images of the ruinous conditions of the factories have become images of the decline of America's fortunes as a manufacturing power.  The photographs are archaeological in their attention to detail and the need to accommodate history.

The music of the Detroit Cobras provide a counterpoint to the haunting, archaeological photographs of abandoned Detroit.  Fragments of the city's earlier days come through in their music, but rather than critique the declining fortunes of America's industrial heartland, the music calls forth the continued vitality of those days in much the same way that spolia maintained a conscious connection with earlier architecture.

The archaeological impulse in of punk rock of the Detroit Cobras reveals a kind of native archaeology of the American city which draws backwards on its unique history to produce critical memory.  Such work is the work of archaeologists both of the past and the present who sought to communicate something meaningful from the fragments of the past that remained visible in their present.  The spolia preserved in the music of the Detroit Cobras presents a musical museum in much the same way that the fragments of the past in produce meaning in the context of a physical museum today or in the context of monumental architecture in Late Antiquity.

Some Thought on Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus

I downloaded onto my iPad - via the Kindle application - a copy of Clay Shirky's Congnitive Surplus (New York 2010).  This book has receive a good bit of attention on the interwebs, in large part because Shirky is unapologetic about the potential of the internet and particularly the potential of the internet for good.  In an era where one's status as a pundit almost depends upon a certain cynical view of the world, this book is refreshing and positive.

In short, Shirky argues that the internet provides an outlet for surplus energy that the prosperity of the second half of the 20th century has made available to us.  The rise in prosperity has allowed residents of the West, in particular, to enjoy increasing amounts of free-time and leisure.  Shirky contends that the number one use of this leisure time over the last 60 years has been watching television.  Watching television is solitary, somewhat anti-social, and, most importantly, passive.

The rise of the internet has begun to slowly encroach on the dominance of television.  Unlike TV the internet is social, provides a platform for both passive consumption and active production of media, and encourages the formation of communities with shared interests.  The dynamic character of the web as a social platform functions to channel energies previously locked away in in the passive relationship between the individual and the television.  The web has already begun to channel the "cognitive surplus" unleashed by the West's recent prosperity, but hitherto squandered through passive and more or less solitary leisure-time activities.  Shirky's best example of this is Wikipedia which appeared out of the many moments of leisure enjoyed by tens of thousands of individual contributors.  The result is a testimony to the aggregate knowledge of global community of individuals which prior to the internet would have found a singular, intellectually substantial expression.

While this is cool thesis, it also caused me to think about a few things:

1. I am not convinced that the "cognitive" activity that Shirky associates with the internet comes directly from surplus time spent in front of the television.  It's a great idea, but a relatively unsophisticated argument.  First, people always used some of their free time in productive, social ways.  Whether it is membership in a community organization, work with a church or other religious group, or serving as an elected official or a volunteer, the cognitive surplus created by economic prosperity poured innumerable areas of social and community life.  As the internet allows for communities to extend beyond the institutional and social confines of traditional, place-based communities, surely some of Shirky's apparent "cognitive surplus" comes at the expense of these other, more traditional forms of community and social organization.  At the same time, there are those who suggest that the rather diffuse creativity on display on the internet comes at the expense of more economically productive pursuits.  The individuals who produce LOLCats for example might otherwise be watching television, but also might be reading a book, working, learning or refining a skill.  I am all for these profoundly democratic expressions of creativity, but I'd be reluctant to argue that television and the internet form a kind of zero-sum dyad.  The arguments for the evils of the internet, in fact, tend not to be arguments for the watching of television, but rather arguments that the internet undermines more rigorous, local, focused, and ultimately socially responsible uses of time and talent.  Shirky does little to undermine these critiques.

2. The notion of channeling surplus is always appealing, but what really matters is how that surplus (cognitive or otherwise) is channelled.  The downside of the unfettered and limitless nature of the internet is that it can minimize the impact of a small contribution while still giving the individual the sense of contributing to something larger.  (And I say this a blogger who regularly devotes 4 or 5 hours a week launching my two-cents into the void, and with the understanding that these 4 or 5 hours could be spent polishing up a lecture, reading another, important, argument, reading a graduate student's paper just that much more carefully, or any number of professionally and socially responsible (impactful) activities).  The radically democratized space of the internet is the most efficient venue for all forms of surplus.  The "eat local" movement provides a nice model here.  Just eating locally produced foods is not a sure-fire solution to ecological, economic, and ethical problems facing large scale food production in a globalized economy. In the same way, the shear scale of the internet presents significant problems for the efficient use of specialized surplus.

3. Finally, this is the first book that I've read cover-to-cover (so to speak) on my iPad.  The most interesting aspect of this experience (aside from the fact that the iPad is a very nice tool for reading a book) is that I could where other people highlighted passages in Shirky's book.  Slight, dashed underlines showed me commonly annotated passages and clicking on the passages indicated how many people underlined that particular text.  Here is a great example of Shirky's of how the internet takes the solitary act of reading and annotating a text and turns it into a global activity with numerous participants creating a running commentary.  While at present (as far as I can tell) the Kindle application only allows readers to share underlining, it would be remarkable in the future for readers to share margin notes, comments, and even links to other passages in other books.  The aggregate of these activities would instantly turn any book into a critical edition.

 

Even More Experiments in Intensive Pedestrian Survey

Even more guest-posting brilliance from our esteemed guest blogger, David Pettegrew, the co-director the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund speaker.  Be sure to check out his posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and yesterday.

Over the last few days (here and here), we have been discussing the results of an experiment we carried out 2010 in order to assess the relationship between the number of artifacts we see in pedestrian survey and the number actually on the ground.  You can read about the first two phases of these experiments here and here.

Today we consider the kinds of artifacts that we observed during total collection and the sorts of material that made up the surface matrix.  When we set up the experiment, we consciously decided not to collect artifacts via the chronotype sample as we normally do in our pedestrian resurvey.  What crueler thing could one do to the project ceramicist than overwhelm him with 1,000+ surface artifacts? (After all, the logic of sampling is to manage human resources more effectively.) Because we didn’t identify the artifacts from the total collection grid according to chronotype as we did for the survey units, we limited the kinds of comparisons we can make between the pedestrian survey sample and the total collection.

Even still, there were still some things we could do to give us a sense of the kinds of material on the ground, especially their fabric and functional attributes.  How much of the surface assemblage of a high-density unit at Koutsopetria consists of cooking ware, coarse wares, coarse wares with surface treatment like combing, and table wares (slipped or unslipped)?

To address this question in part, we sorted all pottery from each total collection unit into three basic fabric classes: semi-fine and fine ware (whether decorated or not), cooking ware, and medium-coarse and coarse wares (including amphora sherds).  The results below show the count of each of the categories in each of the total collection grid squares and give in parentheses the percentage of that fabric group in terms of the total number of potsherds in the unit.



 

Fine ware constitutes 7.6% to 15.4% of the number of potsherds in each subunit; cooking ware only 1.7% to 5.4% of the total number of potsherds; and coarse wares consistently 80.2-87.2% of the overall assemblage.  Unsurprisingly, for a predominantly Late Roman assemblage, the great majority of the sherds are coarse, a small percentage are fine, and tiny percentage are cooking.  The disparity between coarse wares, on the one hand, and fine and cooking wares on the other would have been even greater had we compared weight instead of count, since most fine and cooking ware sherds are thin-walled and small.

We also counted the “parts” of the vessel according to the standard ceramicist categories of rims, bases, handles, shoulders / necks, and body sherds.  Rims represented 2.9-7% of the total sherd count, bases less than 2.2%, handles from 2.2 to 5.3%, neck and shoulders typically less than a percent. Body sherds typically represent over 90% of the surface assemblage.

Finally, we tabulated the data in a slightly different way, breaking down the surface assemblage for each subunit by both fabric group and part.  The results shown in the table below suggest that this Late Roman assemblage includes for fine wares mainly body sherds (73.8% of fine wares) and rims (19.5%), for cooking ware mainly body sherds (84.5% of cooking wares) and handles (6.9%), and for coarse ware mainly body sherds (92.9% of coarse wares).  

Coarse ware body sherds make up 79.5% (n=1474) of the total number of sherds (n=1,854) counted for all 4 subunits.  By contrast, fine ware rims make up 2.2% of the total pottery assemblage and cooking ware rims form only .11% of the total pottery assemblage!!!  The 71 fragments of slipped and glazed fine ware (i.e., not including fine ware lacking clear glazing or slip) represent only 3.8% of the total number of potsherds counted (n=1854).  These few black glazed Classical-Hellenistic sherds and red slipped Roman-Late Roman sherds are the typical objects used to provide most of the chronological information for dating archaeological sites but they represent less than 4% of our surface assemblage of this unit at Koutsopetria.

Finally, it is worth asking what percentage of coarse body sherds have surface treatments and decorations like grooving, combing, and ridging — the kinds of surface treatments that usually lead to them being collected in most regional surveys.  To address this question, we counted the coarse sherds for two of the subunits (G1 & G15) with spiral grooving, combing, or wheel ridging.  The 66 sherds represent 12.5% of the 526 coarse body sherds from those subunits and 9.8% of 672 total sherds from those units.  These “diagnostic body sherds” then are more visible than glazed and slipped fine ware but still quite unrepresentative of the surface pottery as a whole.

I suppose our next steps with the results of these experiments are to compare them with 1) the chronotype sample from the broader survey, and 2) the data from subsurface excavated deposits.  I think the interesting results of the experiment certainly justified the time it took to totally collect the subunits and will allow us to understand how close our chronotype sample is to the population of ceramic artifacts on the ground.

More Experiments in Intensive Pedestrian Survey

More guest-posting brilliance from our esteemed guest blogger, David Pettegrew, the co-director the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund speaker.  Be sure to check out his posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Last Thursday, we introduced the survey experiment that PKAP conducted in June 2010 to assess the relationship between the number of artifacts that we see when we walk across a survey unit and the number of artifacts actually on the ground.  In other words, we wanted to assess how effective our survey methods are in actually assessing what was on the ground.  On Thursday, we compared the artifact densities detected by the project’s untrained student fieldwalkers to those counted by trained senior staff members.  Today we will discuss the second phase in our 2010 experiment, an assessment of the total population of all artifacts on the surface of select subunits.  This part of the experiment was designed to give us a total count of all surface artifacts that can be compared with the artifact counts reported in yesterday’s discussion.

We began by selecting four 10 x 10 m subunits based on the densities of the 10 x 10 m artifact densities counted by the experienced senior staff members.  As with past experiments (published in the RDAC 2007), we selected our 4 subunits to represent the range of density variation: the lowest density quartile (G15), highest density quartile (G9), and two middle quartiles (G1 and G6).  Each total subunit was 10 x 10 m, representing 1/16 (6.25%) of the 1,600 sq m survey unit.

To vacuum a high-density unit, you really have to spend a lot of time picking individual artifacts off the ground.  For each of our units, students Andrew, Zane, Valerie, and Luke, and I  walked very slowly in adjacent passes across each selected square gathering together in 1 or 2 corners of the unit all the artifacts present.  An initial pass was never enough for we observed how many artifacts we missed initially.  Usually two additional passes were necessary to vacuum the surface completely, and each pass involved either crawling on hands and knees, or bending so that you had a closer view of the ground.  I have to admit that my back and neck got sore after a while of this.

The results of this “total collection”, shown below, are interesting to compare with the “pedestrian survey counts” discussed yesterday.  You have to keep in mind with the comparison that the pedestrian counts represent a 20% sample of each subunit while the total collection counts represent a 100% sample.  You have to multiply the pedestrian count by a factor of 5 to estimate the “total putative count” (i.e., an estimation of what the total count would be for 100% of the unit) for the pedestrian-walked unit.

The first outlined set of grid units below shows the total counts from each of the total collection units.

The second set of grids compares the total collection counts with the pedestrian survey counts in parentheses (multiplied by 5 to create the 100% putative sample).  

The third shows the factor difference between these two types of counts.  

Here is where it gets even more interesting.  We can estimate that the 940 artifacts experienced fieldwalkers counted through pedestrian survey across the entire unit (i.e., the pedestrian counts from 4 walker swaths) would produce a putative pedestrian survey count (factoring for the 20% sample) of 4,700 artifacts.  In other words, had we walked 100% of the unit, we would have counted about 4,700 artifacts.  Now, if total collection (vacuuming) produces on average 2.96 times the number of artifacts as pedestrian survey, we can estimate that there were 13,212 artifacts actually on the surface of the ground.  To provide some perspective, we collected and brought back to the museum 8,788 total artifacts from the 252 grid squares of Koutsopetria and 19,657 total artifacts from our survey of the entire Pyla-Koutsopetria area.  A single survey unit at Koutsopetria totally collected would produce 1.5 times the number of artifacts sampled from all 252 grid squares at Koutsopetria and .67 of the total artifacts sampled across the entire Pyla area.  If we were to apply the same multipliers to all 252 forty x forty meter grid squares, i.e., the main part of the site of Koutsopetria, the total artifact count of 19,182 would produce a putative total count of 95,910.  Our estimated total population of artifacts (based on the 2.96 factor) is at least 284,894 (and in reality, poor visibility in many units often limited our sample to 50% of the ground).  This is *why* sampling is important!

As for TIME, total collection requires a huge commitment.  Although we (for clarification here, "we" means David - Bill) initially considered surveying all 16 subunits, i.e., an entire 40 x 40 m unit, this proved unrealistic given the time it took for 5 individuals to vacuum a single subunit: 1.5 hours each for G1 and G6, 2 hours for G9, and 1 hour for G15.  Using the total time it took to hoover 25% of the grid square (6 hours) as an index for hoovering this unit, we estimate that 5 individuals could hoover a high-density 40 x 40 m unit in about 24 work hours or well over 100 work hours!  If the typical survey work day is 6 hours long (say, 6AM-noon), it would require 4 full days of a team collecting artifacts from the surface.  Truly this would be an incredibly time intensive task!  By contrast, sampling 20% of the unit through pedestrian survey takes about 20-30 minutes.  In this perspective, total collection requires 72 times more time than pedestrian survey collection!

One final comparative result is interesting to note here.  The “other” category increases dramatically through total collection, including numerous pieces of ancient glass (9), lithic stone artifacts (7), shells (24), slabs (13), gypsum (141), ceramic bricks (2), stone vessel (1), marble revetment (3), and a ceramic tessera or gaming piece.  Although total collection was time intensive, this sort of qualitative information is quite useful in filling out our picture of the overall survey unit and indicates something of the functional variability within each survey unit.

Tomorrow, we will conclude our discussion of experiments with an overview of ceramic fabric categories.  Stay tuned!

 

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

This week has been an exciting one at the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.  We hosted our first guest blogger, David Pettegrew, who gave us an overview of the work this summer at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  David's review of the season will continue on Monday, in the meantime check out the first three posts:

PKAP Season in Review
Processing Pyla-Koutsopetria Pottery
Experiments in Intensive Survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria

So other odds and ends:

• Imagine! Using blogs, photos, and other "new media" techniques to get students to engage with their experiences while studying abroad.
• I love the idea of using QR codes .... somehow.  I can imagine a world where the barcode on a book in the library serves as a QR code and opens to the student various user-generated data attached to that specific books. It could be anything from book notes, to citations for a good review, another book that challenges the author's thesis, tips on getting the most from the book, advice on reading time.  At the University of North Dakota, at least, these bar codes are unique to our library and not particularly stable (e.g. when a book loses its bar code a new one is simply added and a attached to a book's record).
• In more important news, my favorite cheap beer (I am not hip enough to drink PBR) is undergoing a facelift.  Miller High Life has a new(ish) look. Don't worry, the lovely High Life lady continues to feature in the new design (after all, she is the oldest icon in American brewing).  Check out the critique here.  My favorite aspect of the High Life is the shape of the bottle which was designed to evoke a Champagne bottle and its moniker: the Champagne of Beers.
• I am not sure exactly how I would use this software, but I have to admit Notational Velocity is pretty slick. It allows you to take notes quickly on your computer and, more importantly, find those notes in a super efficient way.  The program follows many of the basic guidelines of hipster software: it lacks most bells and whistles, is open source, and does what it does really, really, well.
• Planned Obsolescence and a flurry in the Twittersphere reminded me that it has been five years since Ivan Tribble's famous and critical Chronicle article on blogging.  This article and the responses probably motivated me to start my blog more than any other (even though it took me another two years to overcome my worry about the technical aspects of blogging).  It made me think that I was going to be doing some transgressive, that I would be upsetting people like Tribble, and that I was defying convention and somehow making my life and career more notable.  (I suspect this is the same reason why I took a year off after I finished my Ph.D. and before I went on the job market.  By taking the year off I flagrantly ignored people who told me it was career suicide and made me feel, if just for a minute, that  convention did not apply to me.)
• Alun Salt is messing around with a nice new blog design.  He does a nice job integrating social media and more formal blogs as he describes here.
• Australia is keeping things interesting in their second test against Pakistan.  All out for 88 and as of this writing 218/5 and 48 ahead of Pakistan??? Things don't look good for them.
• I am reading: K. Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity.  (Cambridge 2008) and David Fischer's, Historians Falacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. (New York 1970).
• I am listening to: Detroit Cobras, Mink, Rat, or Rabbit; Amanda Palmer, Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele, and  Alphaville, Forever Young.

 

Experiments in Intensive Survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria

Another guest post from our esteemed guest blogger, David Pettegrew, the co-director the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund speaker.  Be sure to check out his posts on Tuesday and Wednesday.

When I announced my plans to conduct a survey experiment where we would “vacuum” an entire 40 x 40 m unit, Dimitri and Bill both laughed and told me that I had to try it simply for its absurdity.  The 40 x 40 m survey unit was our standard size for the 252 units that we laid out across the Koutsopetria plain .  As far as survey units go, 40 x 40 m (or 1,600 square meters) is a relatively small unit compared to that typically employed by those who conduct distributional survey.  At the same time, when on the group, 40 meters is still vast when compared to the dimension of most lived space.  After all, a 40 x 40 meter unit is over 130 square feet on a side and over 17,000 square feet which makes a single survey unit much larger than even the most over-sized suburban McMansions.  The reason that my suggestion was humorous, however, had to do with the method I proposed for collecting artifacts.  In our typical pedestrian survey, we only looked at 20% of the surface of the unit (for a more reasonable and suburban 3,400 square feet) and only collected each unique artifact from what we saw on the surface.  My proposal was more extreme: get down on our hands and knees and completely “vaccum” (or “hoover”) all the artifacts from 100% of the unit to produce an exhaustive (and exhausting!) total collection rather than a quick 20% sample.

Why?  I had the suspicion that the amount of artifacts we see when we walk across the unit is but a fraction of the total number of artifacts actually on the ground.  The suspicion was based on experiments conducted in 2004 & 2006 where we ‘vacuumed’ artifacts from a 5% sample of our 40 x 40 m units, producing on average artifact counts that were 4 times greater than that produced through our 20% sample using pedestrian survey.  We also proved through these experiments that the substantially larger number of artifacts did not really contribute much new chronological or functional information that warranted the additional investments of time and energy.  We published a report on those experiments in an article by the authors in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus 2007.  However, we were aware of the substantial fluctuations of artifacts within 40 x 40 m units and the risk of a 5% sample (80 sq m) being unrepresentative of the unit as a whole (1600 sq m).  The point of our 2010 experiments, then, was to test the results with a much more robust sample.  While I initially wanted to vacuum 100% of the unit, time constraints prohibited me to vacuuming 25% of the unit.  Even still, 25% of the unit is 5 times greater than what we sampled in 2004 and 2006.

Due to the limited time for fieldwork this season (and time constraints were one of the reasons that we sampled the units to begin with!), we could only resurvey a single unit placed in the highest-density area immediately northeast of the excavated apse of the early Christian basilica.  We picked this unit to overlap with our very first Discovery Unit, a grid square of 40 x 40 m surveyed in 2004 northeast of the enclosed excavated part of the site of Koutsopetria.  We divided the 40 x 40 unit into sixteen 10 x 10 m subunits, each representing 6.25% of the overall unit area (1,600 sq m).  The grid squares have been given the prefix of G followed by a number between 1-16, as the following plan shows.

In our interest in comparing artifact counts noted during pedestrian survey—where a surveyor walks across the unit examining a 2 m wide swath and counting all pottery, tile, lithics, and other artifact types—with the total population of artifacts actually on the surface, we implemented two stages to the experiments.  The first stage (pedestrian survey) we will report on today.

We began by having four fieldwalkers walk across the unit, recording all artifacts visible in their swath, giving a 20% sample of every 10 m of space across a 40 m transect.  We collected ‘sub-tract’ artifact counts every 10 meters to produce density figures for each of the subunits (G1-G16) and assess the fluctuating density of pottery, tile, and lithic artifacts within a survey unit.

We collected the data for pedestrian survey three times.  The results of these three separate pedestrian survey exercises are shown in the four figures below.  The numbers represent artifact counts of each type (pottery, tile, other, and total), and the gray shaded columns with orange numbers represent the total artifact count for the swath per fieldwalker.  

The first time (see figure 1.1 below) a group of untrained students walked the units—Andrew, Luke, Valerie, and Zane—who who had only seen artifacts at the museum and not in their "natural" (or better, archaeological) contexts.



A steady light rain the following day provided the chance for these same students to rewalk the unit a second time (see figure 1.2 below) with artifacts slightly more visible as a result of the washing of the dust.

Finally, a group of experienced fieldwalkers—David Pettegrew (DKP), Dimitri Nakassis (DN), and Bill Caraher (WRC) —walked the unit and counted artifacts (see figure 1.3).

Hence, the variables in these three episodes of pedestrian survey were experience, and, to a lesser extent, the amount of dust and dirt obscuring the surface of the pottery.  Otherwise, between episodes environmental factors were constant, as were methodological factors and figure 1.4 shows the average of all the counts produced.

We walked these units on June 9 and 10 and each took between 15 minutes and half an hour.

Comparing simply the total artifact counts (the bottom right grid within each of the outlined figures), it is interesting to note that the rain appears not to have made a difference overall in density counts between units [1.1] and [1.2].  Although one student count went up significantly after the rain (LHM: 118  243), and another student count was slightly greater (AMH: 200  241), VAW’s total counts were essentially unchanged (335 to 334), while ZRB’s total counts actually declined (238).

As far as the other variable (experience) goes, there were some significant disparities between experienced walkers and inexperienced walkers as evident in counts for particular grid squares (compare G1 for [1.1] and [1.3]).  Otherwise, the overall artifact counts were comparable for the units: the lowest-density and highest-density subunits occurred between all three walking episodes.  If we look at total artifact counts for each unit as a whole, students counted 942 artifacts in [1.1] and 1056 artifacts in [1.2] while experienced walkers counted 940 artifacts in [1.3].  That is remarkably close!  

We noticed one major difference, however, in the “other” category, which includes all artifacts besides pottery and tile: marble revetment, gypsum, shell, ancient glass, and ground stone agricultural implements.  The experienced field walkers noted 2-4 times the number of other artifacts in [1.3] than inexperienced fieldwalkers in [1.1] and [1.2].  An experienced walker counted 4 lithic artifacts (chipped stone & ground stone) in G3 and G7 that an inexperienced walker missed.

Processing Pyla-Koutsopetria Pottery

Another post with help from our guest blogger and 2010 Cyprus Research Fund lecturer, David Pettegrew. Check out the first in our series of posts here.

In 2010 the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project was above all the year of the potsherd.  Excavations generate a lot of material.  Our thirteen Excavation Units in 2008 and 2009 generated pottery at rates faster than our poor ceramicist, Scott Moore, could read and pottery began to pile up at the museum while we were finishing our work.  We promised Scott that 2010 would be different and we were fully committed to getting the material read.  In fact to our surprise, some bureaucratic snafus getting our permits to do fieldwork prevented the collection of additional materials, and allowed us to devote more time to processing the material collected in past seasons.  So rather than venturing out into the field, we spent each mornings out at the museum processing hundreds of bags of ceramic artifacts and our afternoons processing digital data from previous years.  The result of all this is that we caught up.

Now to the untrained eye, ceramic processing looks like a bunch of people doing just one or two different tasks.  If you had come to Larnaka and peeked into our work space, you might only discern a couple of obviously different activities say, washing vs. analysis.  But the team was conducting a wide range of different tasks related to the finds.  The most obvious and important preliminary activity involved washing artifacts.  There were a slew of them to wash, 147 bags to be exact, each bag containing dozens, sometimes hundreds of artifacts.  Student enthusiasm for washing artifacts declined over a period of a week and a half but that is to be expected.

Dallas Deforest photographed every catalogued artifact at a resolution high enough to be published.  In 2010, Dallas took over 1,200 digital photos of our catalogued artifacts to join the 3,100 artifacts taken in previous years.  Two of our PKAP veterans from 2009, Becky Savaria and Melissa Hogan, began the process of labeling these photos.  In late June, David spent about 10 additional hours getting all the photos in order.  Now we have an archive of 4,300 digital photos of the 700+ catalogued artifacts and uncatalogued artifacts.

Building 13 was the central hub of ceramic analysis.  Our co-director and golden child, Scott Moore, spent 3 weeks analyzing the ceramics from excavations including those occurring in the 1990s at the site of Koutsopetria and our more recent ones at Koutsopetria and Vigla.  Scott analyzed the pottery in two different ways.  First, he “scanned” less significant contexts from stratigraphically unimportant matrices like the plowzone, the kinds of contexts where reading pottery in great detail is not all that beneficial.  “Scanning” involves 1) sorting pottery into broad categories based on fabric groups (e.g., fine ware, cooking / kitchen ware, and coarse ware); 2) setting aside the most distinct and diagnostic artifacts; 3) making basic observations about the context as a whole on a scanned unit form; and 4) analyzing in greater detail the most diagnostic pottery.  Indeed, scanning is common in Mediterranean urban excavations where excavations might easily produce hundreds of thousands of artifacts (or millions).  The more important contexts Scott read more thoroughly by identifying every artifact with a specific chronotype.  A chronotype is simply a specific, limited identifier for known groups of pottery that combines date, potential functions, shape, and appearance.  The point is that Scott read (and this is an estimate) 200 contexts while in Cyprus this year.

The other activities going on in Building 13 were data management (Bill), illustration (Becky Savaria, Melissa Hogan) and artifact cataloguing.  David, Dimitri, and several students wrote more detailed catalog entries for particularly significant finds from the survey and excavation.  In 2007, we completed a formal catalogue of the most significant artifacts from our archaeological survey.  This year, we completed the catalogue of artifacts recovered in the two years of excavated soundings.  The combined total of catalogued artifacts now exceeds 700.  While it is unlikely that we'll be able to publish a catalogue of 700 different artifacts, we plan to eventually release this complete catalog in a digital form and publish on paper a smaller number of "greatest hits".

We recorded the following information for each artifact in our catalogue.

Artifact Number:

Dimensions:

Munsell:

Description Fabric:

Description Shape:

Description Decoration:

_______________________________

Besides this work, we did a variety of more specialized work.  Sarah Lepinski and Bill completed the documentation of the architectural and painted plaster from the excavated area at Koutsopetria producing a complete catalogue of material for publication.  Sarah's pain-staking examination of the plaster from the excavated area has revealed not only several phases of reconstruction and redecoration that remained obscure in the stratigraphic record, but also import clues about the architecture and even construction techniques used in the building.  Nearby, several students completed a special project analyzing artifacts from the plowzone which we plan to report on later in the week.

In sum, at the end of the 2010 season, we can offer this summary of the quantity of artifacts processed by team PKAP between 2003 and 2010:

Total number of units processed (from both the survey and the excavation): 711.  Each unit represents a discrete archaeological context either in terms of stratigraphy, method, or horizontal space in the survey area.

PKAP Pottery Processing by the Numbers

Batches of artifacts processed: 12,900.  Scott divides the pottery from each unit into batches of similar types of artifacts based on the artifact's fabric, the part of the vessel represented, and the chronotype.  Over the past 8 years Scott has processed slightly fewer 13,000 batches.

Total number of artifacts processed: 37, 141.  Each batch has an average of 2.9 artifacts.

Total weight of artifacts processed: 1,482.1 kg or 3,208.7 lbs or over 1.5 tons of pottery.

Artifact Photos Taken: 5,500

Artifacts Catalogued: 727

 

PKAP Season in Review

As promised yesterday, this week will features (gasp!) a guest blogger, Dr. David Pettegrew.  David is the co-director of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and over the next three days he will report on the various work conducted by the project this season.  David will be visiting us here in Grand Forks in October as the annual Cyprus Research Fund Lecture Speaker.

Perhaps the greatest misimpression about archaeology today is that it mainly consists in digging holes in the ground.  Excavation is the perhaps the most glorious and maybe even the most exciting, component of archaeological work (although some people find the analysis of the results of survey and excavation the most exciting. - Bill), but it’s still only a tiny part of the pie.  As you may have gathered from this blog, our own work rarely involves traditional excavation.  In the field, we’ve devoted lots of time to pedestrian survey, geophysical prospection, aerial photography, illustrating, and recording notes—and lots of time to processing all those artifacts, i.e., washing, analyzing, cataloguing, photographing.  Beyond the field season, we spend most of our time processing data, reading, writing, and publishing their finds, and preparing for the next field season.  Students who join us every summer in Cyprus for 3-4 weeks may forget that most of our work goes on for months after Cyprus.  And the work is harder, not easier.

This morning we mailed a copy of our 2010 final report to the Cyprus Department of Antiquities.  If the press release posted yesterday represents a kind of quick and dirty abstract of our work in the Pyla area, the annual final report provides in excruciating detail a full outline of our work.  Anyone who does archaeological work has got to produce these things, and they’re not fun to write.  This year’s report with contributions by Scott, Bill, David, and Sarah Lepinski, was about typical in numbering 77 single-spaced pages.  They have been longer (100 pages) but they’re rarely shorter.  Why so long?  What we do is complicated and has to be explained in enough detail that it makes sense to anyone reading the report in the future.  We tend to provide more detail in our reports than we need for our articles which does make it easier at a later point to create papers about our work.

As we’ve discussed here and here, the point of our 2010 field season was completing the analysis of artifacts from our 2008-2009 excavations of the sites of Koutsopetria and Vigla.  We also anticipated being able to conduct additional fieldwork at these sites.  As it turned out, for reasons we’ve explained elsewhere, we were unable to excavate and we received permission only at the 11th hour for our other fieldwork activities.

Even still, as we outlined in our final report, we’re not disappointed and did manage to accomplish the following tasks:

1. We finished a preliminary “read” of all the artifacts collected during intensive survey (2003-2007) and excavation (2008-2009), cataloguing in greater detail about 300 finds from survey and excavation.

2. We finished documenting and illustrating the area excavated by Maria Hadjicosti. We have posted about that here and here.

3. We took low-altitude blimp photographs of the excavated area and the landscape. We have already posted the results of that—including the disastrous flight of …. — here and here.

4. We continued documenting subsurface remains using ground penetrating radar.

5. We conducted limited resurvey of ridges to the west of Koutsopetria.

6. We conducted experiments designed to calibrate the results of the intensive survey in the study area.

Such activities lack the dazzle of opening another excavation unit (as exciting as that can be) but, we would argue, prove more important in the long run for our understanding of the site and create a solid foundation for the final publication of our fieldwork now in preparation.

In the next few days we will be providing some behind-the-scenes glimpses of the kinds of post-processing work that we have been doing in the month since our field season ended.  Since we have already written about #s 2-3 elsewhere, we will focus our comments on #s 1, and 4-6.  Enjoy.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Press Release

At the send of each season, the PKAP team prepares a press release that accompanies the final report submitted to the Department of Antiquities.  The press release also gets sent out (in slightly modified form) by the various collaborating universities.

 

Here it is:

From May 20th to June 21st the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project conducted a study and field season in the coastal zone of Pyla Village on the south coast of Cyprus.  An international team of scholars under the direction of William R. Caraher (University of North Dakota), R. Scott Moore (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), and David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College), have worked in this area since 2003 documenting a sprawling Archaic to Late Roman settlement at the site.  This year, the PKAP team took low altitude blimp photographs of the entire site, sampled the subsurface remains using ground-penetrating radar, and conducted several experiments to calibrate the results of earlier fieldwork.  This work will allow the PKAP team to correlate more accurately the relationship between material on the surface of the grond and material still safely buried.  Another part of the PKAP team worked in the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum to document the nearly 13,000 finds collected since 2003.  The ceramic, architectural, and stone artifacts have revealed a vibrant community through most of antiquity with trading ties spanning the Mediterranean basin.  The study of these finds has revealed that a site on the coastal height of Vigla was a fortified settlement from Archaic to Hellenistic times complete with a fortification wall and significant quantity of domestic ceramics.  This is an unusual type of settlement on Cyprus and may have served as the base for a garrison protecting the eastern flank of Kition and the Larnaka bay.  In Late Roman and Early Byzantine times, the town of Pyla-Koutsopetria stretched across the coastal plain below Vigla. This settlement appears to have been a bustling, cosmopolitan town during at the end of antiquity and may have met its demise after a series of earthquakes.  The ceramic evidence demonstrate economic and cultural ties to Asia Minor, North Africa, Egypt, and Aegean.  Preparations for publication are now under way.

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In more exciting news, stay tuned to Archaeology of the Mediterranean World for a special guest blogging experience!  David Pettegrew and I are going to collaborate to produce a series of posts reporting on some archaeological experiments conducted this past summer on the Koutsopetria plain.  Curious? Stay tuned!