The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Fauna from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Survey

Over the course of the intensive pedestrian survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria we collected a sample of the faunal material present on the surface of the ground (that is to say the animal bones visible in each unit).  Over the past month, David Reese, one of the leading specialists in faunal remains in an archaeological context examined the material from both our survey and excavation.

While I won't present all Dr. Reese's finds here on the blog (that will have to wait for the full, final report), I will give a brief preview of his finds.  The majority of the material from the site was Ovis/Capra (sheep/goat).  My understanding is that the bones of the two animals are basically indistinguishable (in fact, if one could distinguish the two, I am sure Dr. Reese would have!).  The goat and sheep bones likely reflect the more recent past activity at the site which almost certainly involved grazing.  At present the site is under cultivation with cereals - mostly for feed - but this might be the result of the region's appropriation by the British after independence in the 1950s.  At present our site has relatively restricted access because of the activities at various live-fire ranges in the area.  It is also possible that some grazing continues in the early spring, fall, or winter months when we are not present on the site.  A few of the bones show signs of being butchered and cooked, but it is difficult to know whether this occurred on site - in a possible domestic context - or if these bones represent lunches taken in the fields, rubbish thrown from passing travelers, or even bits of household trash carried out into the fields at some earlier time as composted fertilizer.  The presence of a few worn chicken bones from the fields almost certainly represents meals taken in the field or domestic rubbish.

More evidence for grazing comes from the presence of numerous bones from dogs (canis familiaris).  While we regularly see packs of hunting dogs training across the coastal ridges in the evening hours, the link between dogs and herds of sheep or goats is too close to ignore.

Aside from the dog and sheep/goat bones, there are two objects that really stood out.  First, Dr. Reese identified an eroded part of a bos taurus (cow!) bone on the site.  Since cattle have somewhat different grazing patterns than goats and sheep, this bone suggests that at some point our site may have seen grazing cattle and possible pasture land.

Finally (and most exciting!), Dr. Reese identified a fragment of human skull from one of survey units near the western most extent of our site.  As readers of this blog know, we've been struggling to identify the location of a cemetery that served the inhabitants of our diachronic settlements at Vigla and Pyla-Koutsopetria. Cesnola spent some time in the general vicinity of a site that could be ours (relating his description of the place to our side has proven to be almost impossible; for the description of Cesnola see the link below), as he passed back and forth to his summer home at Ormidhia.  His description of a place called Palaeocastro (which is one of the names for our site) included graves which he appears to have excavated.  The fragment of skull identified from our survey was not particularly close to the area that Cesnola appears to be describing.  So, the mystery of the Pyla-Koutsopetria burials continues with any tiny fragment of evidence suggesting that graves or even tombs are present near our site, but lie undiscovered.

 

Doors of History

My wife has recently stripped the doors in our house and has begun to repaint them.  Like most turn of the century homes in the area, they have wooden doors.  These doors are substantial, hang poorly (in most cases) and preserve the history of the house in through the marks in the door.

The archaeology of the house is preserved in the house itself.

This door shows at least four different lock and works on the door preserved under multiple coats of paint.

The evidence for an earlier latch:

In this detail you can see the outline of the earlier doorplate, cylinder, and lock.

An upstairs door show another set of interesting marks preserving tiny bits of the houses history. The elegant doorplate and crystal doorknob probably date to the earliest years of the house. While the floors upstairs in our house are fir as opposed to the floors downstairs which are a more luxurious maple, the doorknob and plate show certain concessions to display in the more private quarters of the house.  Of course, a nice doorknob and plate is an easy addition to a house at some later date, but the floors on the second floor are more or less permanent.

Evidence for the use of a simple latch on the inside of the door.  The door must have been pushed open a few times because it's clear that someone forced the door open, striping the simply threaded latch, and causing someone to drive the latch back into the door again in a slightly different place.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some quick hits on a windy, but sunny Friday morning:

• Some really cool imaginings of what a new American currency could look like here.
• Tim Caromody is both really smart and increasingly ubiquitous.  Here are his thoughts on reading revolutions and here are his thoughts on the so-called Philadelphia blogging tax.
• This is a perfect page to look at while listening to the punk rock.  Great photos.
• Some thoughtful and careful research on why academics blog.
• 4Chan is pretty wild.
• Go and check out Teaching Thursday this week to find what OID will be to next year.  And while you're at it follow us on Twitter.
• What I am listening to: X, Los Angeles.
• What I am reading: Michael Azarrad, Our Band Could be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground.

Teaching Thursday: The First Week of Class

It's the first week of class and I already feel like I am behind! Since some of my students have discovered this blog (it's inevitable, right?), I thought I was post up my five tips for success in my classes.  I think that these things are generalizable:

1. Come to class.  I seem to inspire students to skip class.  This used to frustrate me, but now I view this as a kind of formal resistance, which I admire enough to take on the role of "the man".  I've blogged on this before here and here.

2. Take notes.  I have had students tell me that they don't need to take notes because they can remember everything.  This is impossible and a cover for laziness.  Note taking is the first step in learning because it forces us to interpret and condense what we are hearing in class.

3. Do the readings. My classes depend on the careful reading of primary sources.  These form the basis for in-class discussions, writing assignments, and exams.  If you don't do the reading, you won't get it.

4. Work with your fellow students.  If you can't figure out how to work together in the classroom, the library, or the quad, then do it online; social media applications provide a great platform for collaboration between students.  For all its faults, Blackboard has baked in an increasingly robust set of collaborative tools that I am more than willing to deploy to allow the students to work together.

5. Talk to me.  If you are struggling or if you feel like you are beginning to struggle, talk to me.  Despite recent reviews which rank University of North Dakota faculty among the least accessible in the country, my door is almost always open.  So come and talk about how you can do better in class.

I leave off this list obvious things like doing assignments, turning them on time, and taking test seriously, because most of our students understand this kind of thing. It's the more mundane and unstructured expectations (attendance, note taking, reading) that students struggle to prioritize.

Good luck in the new semester!

Peer Review and the New Media

A bunch of people have sent me Monday's New York Times article: "Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review".  This article describes a recent trial at Shakespeare Quarterly where they eschewed traditional peer review and instead opened the review process to a panel of experts and others on the web.  The process garnered over 350 comments from 41 people which the editors evaluated.  Ultimately they selected the four articles for publication in a special edition of the journal on Shakespeare and the new media.

Whenever a journal attempts a project like this it attracts attention and almost inevitably provoked headlines heralding the impending end of the traditional practice of academic peer review.  Most articles envision traditional peer review to involve a journal circulating an article to an anonymous pair of experts who evaluate the article's suitability for publication in the particular journal and, in most cases, offer comments. This description of the peer review process is, of course, idealized.  In reality, journals - particularly in Europe - have widely varying standards and practices for peer review with widely varying degrees of transparency. So the introduction of a new method of peer review which takes advantage of the increasing degree of connectivity on the web does not so much represent radical novelty amidst stodgy, ossified, practices of peer review, but another point along a continuum of practice.

Despite this reality, I know that any modifications to the traditional peer review practices are likely to create waves. I generally consider my colleagues across the disciplines to be fairly liberal minded folks, but it never ceases to amaze me how limited our perspectives become on matters like scholarly publishing.  In fact, it befuddles me why academia struggles so mightily with the idea that "in the future" we could acknowledge the value of academic and intellectual work produced through a wide range of publishing paradigms ranging from the un-edited and un-reviewed blog to the highly polished peer reviewed journals.  Of course, I can anticipate one response: with the explosion of new publications and formats, the "average scholar" struggles to keep abreast of developments in his or her field.  Moreover, introducing a new layer of less rigorously reviewed material to the mix contributes to the massive quantity of material that scholars are expect to understand.

On the other hand, the rise of highly integrated and sophisticated social networking applications is making it easier to filter scholarship through a layer a kind of secondary review by colleagues.  My friends and colleagues serve, in effect, as another layer of peer review ensuring the we as a group have access to "important" scholarly contributions even from obscure journals.  While there is no guarantee that good scholarship will find its way through our social network, the economies of numerous eyes scanning the growing body of scholarly literature gives us a better chance of seeing things important to our common research interests.

The other traditional complaint against adjusting the peer review process is that it will ultimately undermine the quality of scholarship produced.  It is as if the practice of circulating working papers, archaeological reports, pre-pubication drafts, informal reviews, has not existed for as long a peer-reviewed publications.  For centuries scholars circulated manuscripts to colleagues and friends without the benefit of anonymous, exterior reviews. The major shift now is that we can democratize the process of circulating working papers by using the web rather than informal and private avenues of scholarly communication.  In fact, the newly democratized practice of pre-publication circulation offers the potential to uphold the highest standards of peer review.  The pressure will be on the peer review process to demonstrate the superiority of its product in relation to non-peer reviewed work.  Such competition should make any benefit inherent to the traditional method of peer reviewed scholarship all the more visible.

Archaeology and Sound

During my recent travels I was able to read over the series of articles published in the most recent World Archaeology.  These articles were dedicated to exploring the place of archaeology in the world today. They considered the place of archaeology in the production of compelling narratives, campus life, the new media, and in pressing problems like homelessness, environmental sustainability, and even transparency in government.  The articles blended methodological sophistication with practical real life applications to show how the tools and approaches that archaeologists have developed over the history of the discipline can contribute to documenting and analyzing problems in the recent past.  If anything, these articles, to generalize, were too practical in their approaches to problems perhaps assuming that for something to be relevant in todays culture, it had to have a direct practical application rather than a more long term theoretical or methodological benefit.  On the other hand, these articles did reflect the increasingly permeable disciplinary boundaries of archaeological research as they drew upon techniques, methods, and approaches developed by disciplinary neighbors like sociology, anthropology, communications, and philology and literature.

One striking omission from this wide ranging group of articles was anything on the archaeology of sound. There have been some intriguing recent work on the sounds of archaeology and they key role that hearing materiality plays in our ability to identify objects, spaces, and materials.  In fact, heavily damped spaces create a kind of sensory deprivation that obscures the materiality and social "reality" of a space.  (At the same time, noise pollution and the saturation of our environment with a range of mechanical sounds is generally recognized as a problem to be dealt with in a architectural - in other words material - way.)  It is worth noting that I am not the first to think about this kind of thing. The sound of archaeology has contributed to the idea of archaeology as performance and sensory as well as contributed to our idea of how past monuments sounded.

Over the past year, I've been thinking about music as a place where archaeological methods could be deployed productively through an exploration of punk rock music.  Punk rock, in particular, sought to celebrate a highly materialized kind of music, through their preference for live recordings in particular places (particularly iconic venues like CBGBs or Max's Kansas City) and their conscious efforts to emphasize the low-fi, diy character of their recording spaces.  (One of my favorite moments in a punk rock recording is when you can hear a bottle fall and hit the ground (and seemingly not break) during a Replacement's song).  The term garage band made clear the link between music, a particular sound, and a space.  This all stands in contrast to the increasingly over-produced character of modern pop music which goes to great lengths to create spatially and materially impossible sound which could never be produced in a way that someone could witness and experience. (For a remarkable critique of this check out this article on Pompamoose, a band that tries to make every sound on their remakes of pop songs visible in some way.

Lechaion after the Basilica

Readers of my blog know about my near obsession with the Mighty Lechaion Basilica.  I return to it as often as I can on my increasingly infrequent and short visits to Greece and every visit to the great church reveals another interesting aspect of its history.

This last visit got my thinking about the later history of the church.  At some point in the 7th century or later, the building collapsed. At some point, a small chapel appears in the baptistery of the church and this seems to have required the movement of the baptismal font from the center of the octagonal space to the southeastern wall. It may be that this space served the community who continued to venerate at the site in the immediate aftermath of the damage to the main church.

Once the main church had collapsed, much of the rubble of the superstructure was stripped away and at least some of the marble sculpture likely vanished at this point.  In the apse of the church, the community constructed a small chapel.  At present we don't know enough about the chronology of the building - and its attendant ceramics - to assign a date to this small building.  The position of the foundations of the later church below the level of the earlier basilica's floor indicates that the builders had removed the majority of the collapse from the main basilica prior to its construction.  

Considering the massive size of the collapsed masonry from the churches half-domed apse, this must have been a massive job.  The absence of large quantities of collapse around the site, however, suggests that the quarrying activity at the church after its collapse may have been systematic.  There is similar evidence for such systematic quarrying activities across the Mediterranean (I've even blogged about it before!) and the quantity of prestige materials used in the building must have made it an appealing source for building material.

In fact, the builders of the later church used spolia heavily (and predictably) in the foundations of the little church including parts of Proconnesian marble columns, various bits of architectural sculpture, and what appears to be "verde antico" engaged columns.  In fact, the buildings seem to have tried to use the verde antico columns symmetrically in the foundations suggesting that the use of spolia, even in structural parts of this building, was not random or completely opportunistic, but systematic.

Reused bricks appear in the foundation courses of the mostly destroyed semi-circular eastern apse and the buildings used large, ashlar blocks - probably spolia originally used in the basilica itself and now in tertiary use in the smaller late church - at the architecturally sensitive join between the apse and the nave.  In short, this building while modest in size, has indications of careful construction.

From what I can tell, there is no plan of this building and very limited discussion of it in the preliminary reports on the Lechaion church.  Moreover, this building does not appear on the plans of the basilica even though it clearly represents an important, late chapter to the life of this important site on the Gulf of Corinth.

Lechaion Basilica and Lechaion Fountain House

One of my side projects this summer was to check out the architectural sculpture from the Lechaion basilica and a nearby fountain house.  In particular, I wanted to compare the ionic impost capitals present at both sites.  The capitals are in fancy Proconnesian marble and look like they were produced by masons with ties across the Mediterranean.  I've blogged about this before. 

These are from the basilica:

These are from the fountain house:

The impost capitals from the fountain house are particularly significant because it is one of the few occasions where this kind of architectural sculpture appears in a building other than a church. And the relationship to the column capitals from Lechaion should be pretty clear.

Hard at Work at the Isthmia Excavation House

 

Telling Stories with Archaeology

One of the great things that I've learned from working with Steven Ellis's team at Isthmia the Corinthia is the idea of archaeological research as the basis for story telling.  Steven used this metaphor a number of times over the first week of our work here as a way to frame the goals of our research.  It was absolutely enlightened and almost completely opposite from my growing obsession with archaeological data collecting.  Recently, when I have approached archaeological problems, I become consumed by the need to document and gather.  This primary stems from an abiding faith that, somehow, data will produce knowledge.

I don't want to suggest that Steven and his team are not interested in data.  In fact, they have collected and collated a remarkable amount of detailed information on the East Field Area and organized it carefully in sophisticated databases designed to facilitate their daily analysis.  What was striking how little they talk about data as the product of their field work.  In contrast, I am ALWAYS thinking about data as the product of archaeological analysis.  Data then becomes - at some uncertain time in the future - the basis for interpretation.  This is completely and unabashedly positivist.

Steven's team has talked about the stories from the very first day. This reminded me that the archaeological process was about narrating events as much a collecting data.  Beginning with the idea that a narrative should be the product of archaeological analysis ensured that data collection worked toward the goal of explicating the site and its history rather than squandering resources on producing data without clear objectives in mind.

Some of this coincides with a recent article by C. Holtorf in World Archaeology, where he discusses the "meta-stories" that so often organize the presentation, analysis, and interpretation of archaeological information.  These narratives serve not only to make bits of information understandable, but also provide the basis for comparing various similar narratives across time.  These stories inform one another by providing structures which help humanity to approach large scale, complex, and pressing questions about the fundamental nature of society.  Holtorf draws in part on the work of Hayden White who looked at the narrative structures present in the work of 19th century scholars like Marx, Burkardt, von Ranke, and Michelet.  Holtorf seems to suggest that archaeological story telling might follow 19th century models: "By stories (or narratives) I mean an account of one or more characters acting out plots in a sequence of events that contain a distinctive beginning, middle and end." (383). 

While stories of the 19th century, novelistic type are clearly recognizable to a broad audience, they hardly represent the scope of potential story types familiar to even popular audiences.  Television shows like Lost, and popular feature films have become increasingly comfortable twisting time, inverting the standard order of narration, and leaving the audience with ambiguous endings.  Story telling in the 21st century is open to a much wider range of potential organizations, resolutions, and plots than its 19th century predecessors.

I can even imagine that some of these narrative types will find ways to "narrate" the structure of data rich descriptions and explorations of the archaeological landscape.