The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Please Stay Tuned

I'm at Corinth in Contrast in Austin, Texas today.  I'll post an update this afternoon.  Meanwhile, please stay tuned.  If there is good internet access, I'll drop some Tweets on y'all (http://twitter.com/billcaraher) with the hashtag #CIC.

2010 Cyprus Research Fund Lecture: Setting the Stage for St. Paul's Corinth

This year's Cyprus Research Fund Lecture will feature Prof. David K. Pettegrew of Messiah College.  David is not only a long time collaborator with my in both Greece and Cyprus, but also regarded as one of the foremost scholars on Late Roman Corinth.  His talk will focus on over a decade of archaeological and historical research on the Isthmus of Corinth.  We hope he'll let us podcast his talk so that anyone, anywhere can listen to him!

Here's a description of his talk:

Corinth has come down in history as the quintessential maritime city that became powerful and wealthy by capitalizing on the movement of commercial goods and peoples across a narrow isthmus at the center of Greece.  The connecting isthmus also allegedly made Corinth politically unstable, corrupt in morals, and exceptionally depraved.  As St. Paul’s letters show, Corinth was a Christian community with problems.

Why was Corinth so consistently associated with travel, trade, and wealth in ancient thought?  And how did a land bridge facilitate commerce and traffic and contribute to the city’s development in the Roman era?

In this lecture, David Pettegrew considers what the ancient texts and material evidence suggest about travel and commerce across the Isthmus and its effects on the maritime character of the city in the first and second centuries AD.

The talk is Thursday, October 21st in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library.  There'll be a small reception after the talk.

Ambivalent Landscapes of the 6th century at Corinth in Contrast

As readers of this blog know (here and here), I've been working on a conference paper for the Corinth in Contrast Conference at the end of this week.  This paper is, in effect, an archaeological and architectural argument for the impact of Justinian on the Corinthian Isthmus.  (These ideas developed, more or less, from my analysis of a pair of texts that reference Justinian from the Isthmus).

You've read the drafts, so here's the paper:

Caraher Ambivalent Landscape 2010

Digital Workflow and Microhistory

As you might imagine, I am pretty excited that Steven Ellis's team's use of the iPad as their primary,field data recording device is getting some attention lately.  I imagined this kind of digital workflow when I began working with Scott Moore to design the digital recording components of our project in Cyprus.  Scott and I, from what I recall, always assumed a paper stage.  This is what that stage looks like now:

I think that we fell back on the old archaeological wisdom that a paper stage somehow serves as a more dependable back up that digital copies. This led us to copying the entire archive each year and carrying it home (and still managing sometimes to lose copies of the original or not have them where we needed them). With a fully digital workflow, it is, of course, much easier to make copies of every stage of the documentation process and store them multiple places, and, provided that a good version control system is in place, manage these copies.

I know that I also subscribed to the idea that paper copies preserve more fully the archaeological thought process.  We insisted that our trench supervisors not keep separate, personal, notebooks (they did anyway) and write directly onto our recording sheets as they excavate.  The hope was that the image of the stratigraphic unit form provided the best record of the process of excavation. In fact, as much as was possible, we have sought to associate digital images of these sheets (and the trench plans of each stratigraphic unit) with the digital copies of this data.  This remains a time consuming process of keying the data from each sheet and digitizing each days trench plans. Having supervised the keying of most of our field data, I can attest to the hours of time and concentration that went into producing our digital versions.  It's mostly done now, but it was a onerous process and we haven't quite produced data with the kind of immediate transparency that we had hoped for (although it is all still possible).  Using the iPad to record directly into digital form the basic data from the trench would pay immediate dividends by streamlining the data collection process.

On the other hand, I do wonder whether some of the data associated with the archaeological process might be lost. I was thinking about the faint evidence for revision that appears on our paper recording sheets - typically under various forms of erasure (usually a strikethrough) - that preserves irregular fragments of the archaeological through processes.  If Wikipedia has taught us anything, digital recording makes it possible to record this same data by recording each change to the data set and each earlier version.  In effect, the digital data collection could preserve a kind of digital palimpsest of each key stroke, deletion, adjustment, mistaken measurement.

I am fascinated by this kind of micro-history and its potential to reveal patterns of behavior across an entire project and capture a more intimate look at how the archaeological method is performed.

Just for fun, I used The Archivist to capture some of the buzz about the Apple story on Ellis's use of the iPad. The Archivist lets you download all the Tweets associated with any search criteria.  For my little experiment, I captured all the Tweets that used the word "Pompeii" and "iPad".  As of 6 am this morning when I staggered into my office, I captured 520+ Tweets.  I then plotted them by hour over the last few days.  Here's the chart.

They have averaged about 5 tweets an hour over the last 100 hours or so.  The peek was 95 tweets per hour between 12:20 pm and 12:20 pm on September 23rd.  Thus surge continued over the next hour where they had over 80 tweets and subsided to under 40 tweets later by 3:30 or so. The great thing about The Archivist is that it lets you download your Tweets so that you can data mine them using an application like RapidMiner.  I didn't do that, but I did do some simple mining.  For example, Ellis's name is mentioned in 131 of the tweets (or about 25% of the time) and about 16% of the Tweets are obvious "RT-style" re-tweets. In Tweets with both Pompeii and iPad in them Ellis's university, University of Cincinnati, was never once mentioned nor was his project's name, the Porta Stabia project (even in two Tweets that appear to come from "official" University of Cincinnati channels!).  In the hyper economical world of Twitter, there are good reasons not to include long word like Cincinnati or relatively obscure project names.  In contrast, the most common phrases is "Discovering ancient Pompeii with iPad" which was the title of the Apple article and it appeared in 62% of the Tweets (suggesting the far larger number of retweets happen than had the traditional "RT" designation).  For the record, my Tweet, which occurred very early in the Tweet cycle led to only three retweets. 

This is the kind of micro-historical analysis that could be possible by mining the minutia preserved in a fully digital workflow.

By the way, it's a double blog day! I thought that I needed to do something to mark my 800th post and in the tradition of the National Register of Historic Places, I thought I'd just put up a marker (with a few links, it is a blog after all).

This is my 800th post

This is my 800th post.  Here's what I said at my:

700th post
ca. 600th post
500th post
400th post was my favorite and the most delicious
ca. 300th post
I missed my 200th
100th post.

Thanks for reading!!

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some quick hits for a cool and raining and busy Fall Friday:

• The most exciting thing this week is Steven Ellis' Pompeii project being featured on the Apple website for its creative use of iPads.  I had a chance to work with many of these people at Isthmia and I can attest that their use of the iPad at Pompeii was more than just a gadget exercise.  The technologies actually made excavation more efficient and appears to have made it easier to document their trenches more thoroughly.
• A new and really useful Teaching Thursday this week featuring 25  some starter tips for online course design and teaching.
• I'm beginning to like covers of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" better than the original.  Check this out. (inspired by Chuck Jones who posted a link to this)
• Big announcements from Zotero.  My Zotero use had declined since I started using Chrome more often.  The recent announcement that Zotero was going to be cross platform and even create a free-standing version is great to hear.  And this post from ProfHacker sets out some of the most exciting aspects of these developments.
• These videos of Peregrine Falcon and Goshawk with cameras on them are crazy.  I wonder how the cameras effect the birds aerodynamics?
• The Atlantic put together a canon of major works on technology.  There are some omissions but over all, it's pretty good.
• I need to finish up my paper for the Corinth in Contrast conference next week.
• I received a vote for tenure from my department this week.  Thank for all the encouragement and support!
• What I'm listening to: Crocodiles, Sleep Forever and this free EP from the fantastic Fat Possum.

Some Notes on RBHS Analysis of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Survey Data

No RBHS is not a local high-school to whom I've outsourced PKAP data analysis, nor is it a new type of digital hi-def television.  Those letters stand for Rim, base, handle, sherd and represent the basic parts of a ceramic vessel.  Since most of the vessels one finds in survey and even excavation are not whole or are broken and mangled, documenting the rim, base, handle, and sherds from each vessel is an important way to understand how we as archaeologists are able to identify an particular object and assign it to a date, function, and even, sometimes, place of manufacture. It is also helpful in secure, stratigraphic contexts (that not in an unstratified survey context) for identifying the minimum number of possible vessels of a particular type because we know that some kinds of vessels on have, say, one-handle, then a four handles would represent at least four vessels of this type.

David Pettegrew's research has really set the stage for applying this kind of analysis to the PKAP survey data. He has argued that certainly highly diagnostic artifact types (for example Late Roman 1 amphora handles or Late Roman "combed ware" body sherds) can distort the chronological distribution of material at a site.  Periods characterized by less diagnostic artifact types tend to be less easily associated with a narrow chronology or function and under represented in relation to period defined by more easily identified vessels types.  So isolating the way in which particular periods become visible using our Rim/Base/Handle/Sherd analysis becomes an important to critique our survey data.

Fortunately, the basic system that we use to document our ceramics, the chronotype system, took into account rbhs. The chronotype system required the ceramicist to separate and document as a group, called a batch, according the extant part of each type of vessel present . In other words, we counted in one batch all of the rims from, say, a Roman Amphora and in another batch all the handles from the same kind of amphora. This has allowed us to parse quite finely the character of our assemblages and its relationship to our ability to identify particular types of artifacts based on their individual parts.

So here are some basic observations:

• Of the 19 periods with more than 20 sherds collected using our standard survey procedure, 13 counted the majority of artifacts as body sherds. In other words, for most periods, body sherds represent both the most common and the most chronologically diagnostic type of material.
• Only for the Archaic period were the majority of artifacts identified by one part of a vessel, and these almost all came from one type of vessel, so-called Archaic basket handled storage jars.
• Of the 258 chronotype (that is discrete types of artifacts) that produced extant parts (some chronotypes, like shells or wall plaster fragments, do not produce extant parts that we can easily record), 138 of 55% of these chronotypes were identifiable based on only one extant part. 76% are recognized by only two extant parts and 90% by three. 99% by four extant parts (mainly RBHS).  In other words, most artifacts are only recognizable by one part of the vessel.
• It is interesting to note that the number of chronotypes associated with a particular period has almost no influence on the average number of extant parts by which a vessel is identified. Large number of chronotypes identifiable by a large number of extant parts (4+) come from Roman (40), Late Bronze Age-Hellenistic (18), Ancient Historic (39), Hellenistic-Early Roman (24) vessels. At the same time 4 or more extant parts also appeared for periods with fewer chronotypes, like Classical-Roman (6), Late-Cypriot II-Late Cypriot III (4), and Post-Prehistoric (4).  This means that while the majority of sherds from each period are body sherds, they nevertheless have vessels that are identifiable based on other parts of the artifact.  In other words, our ability to date artifacts to a particular period is independent from the number of vessels with identifiable extent parts. Some periods have three or four chronotypes with lots of identifiable fragments; others have 25 different chronotypes with a mix more and less easily identifiable artifact types.  There does not seem to be a pattern.
• Far more central to the number of parts of the vessel that we can identify is the kind of vessel and their function. Kitchen/Cooking ware produce the most possible extant parts (4+) followed by coarse ware and amphora chronotypes (3.8). Medium coarse ware produced 3.5, while pithos, semi-fine, and fine all produced 2.4 or fewer extant parts per chronotype. This likely has more to do with the shapes of the vessel than the size of the vessel.

This kind of analysis may seem tedious and complicated, but it is important to understand how bias in our ability to identify a particular type of artifact can influence the kinds of chronological and functional landscapes that we create from survey data.  In examining our data in this way, we can really see the point of contact between what our ceramicist does in placing artifacts in particular classes and our historical reconstructions of the landscape.  The entire world of Pyla-Koutsopetria is literally born from the data gleaned from individual artifacts.

More on Open Learning

A couple of weeks ago I sketched out a proposal for an "institute of open learning" at the University of North Dakota.  I pitched it to some of the "power-that-be", and I think that I have some basic start up funds to make it happen.

Now the proposal has to make its way through the administrative hierarchy here on campus.  In the meantime, I'll make a draft of the proposal available here.  Everything included in the proposal is tentative right now including prospects for funding and collaborative relationships on campus, and I expect this might all change if and when we get down to brass tacks (e.g. cost of implementation, et c.).

But for now, here it is:

Proposal for the Development of Open Learning Courses

Plotting Cut Blocks Across Pyla-Koutsopetria

Between 2005 and 2006, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project documented over 500 features from the Koutsopetria plain.  Most of these features were cut blocks of various sizes, material and descriptions as well as a handful of features associated with ancient agricultural installations (bit of an olive press, some andesite mill fragments, et c.).  Over the past couple of days, I finally got to analyzing this data beyond simply observing that we have lots of cut blocks.  The field team in 2005 and 2006 recorded detailed information regarding the location, size, and in many cases generally descriptions of each block and keyed them into a database that we could integrate with our GIS.

Most of the architectural fragments including cut limestone and gypsum blocks, are concentrated in the immediate Koutsopetria plain where farmers have moved them to stone piles on the edges of the fields. Check out our newest additions (partially edited) to our Omeka Collection: Pyla-Koutsopetria from the Air to get an idea of what these stone piles look like.

 

The most common type of cut block is made of local limestone and probably quarried on site. The majority of the blocks fall between 0.3 and 0.7 m in length and 0.3 and 0.5 in width. For the blocks where all three dimensions are visible, their volume falls between 0.06 and 0.03 cubic meters. This produced blocks of between 75 kg and 140 kg which would be relatively easily moved for construction. Some blocks, of course, could be much larger exceeding 1 m in length and weighing close to 500 kg. With blocks of this size, there is almost no doubt that some large scale, monumental architecture once stood in the immediate area.  Here's a distribution map.  The grey grid in the background is our survey grid and the color of the dots relates to the volume of the stone.

We also documented a significant quantity of cut gypsum block.  Since marble did not naturally occur on the island, Cypriots often used gypsum as a substitute in more elaborate buildings.  These blocks are generally similar in size to the cut limestone blocks with lengths of around a half a meter and widths of 0.3 meters. The average volume of blocks was similar to that of the cut blocks with only a few blocks exceeding 0.1 cubic meters. There were slightly more smaller blocks owing most likely to the more friable character of gypsum. Most blocks fell between 0.01 and 0.06 cubic meters. Gypsum has a lower density than limestone and the blocks had correspondingly lower weight usually between 25 kg and 140 kg. Many, much smaller fragments of gypsum were scattered across the fields and several very large blocks appeared clustered together. Here's a map:

 

Finally, we also discovered a small quantity of marble from across the site.  Most of these came from the central area of the Koutsopetria plain embedded in rock piles at the edges of cultivated tracks of land. The marble fragments are small < .30 m in maximum length and relatively thin <.04 m suggesting that all but one marble fragment was revetment or floor slabs. The wide distribution of material perhaps indicates that there were several marble clad buildings on the plain of Koutsopetria even though so little marble survives.  Here's a map:

The next step in analyzing this material is considering its relationship to the re-used blocks found in the excavations at Koutsopetria and the construction techniques used in the fortification wall surrounding Vigla.  It certainly seems possible that the majority of cut stone blocks scattered around the Koutsopetria plain came from the easily quarried fortifications at Vigla and perhaps also the extensive walls surrounding the Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos.  Gypsum blocks had fairly limited uses architecturally owing to their lack of strength and value as prestige materials.  The gypsum fragments from around the site probably served in specific places in buildings and comparing their sizes to in situ blocks from elsewhere on the island might give us some idea of how they were used.

 

Romanization and Christianization

Over the last few weeks, I've been reading some basic, recent works on Romanization or the expansion of "Roman culture" across the area of either direct Roman political control or strong Roman influence.  Most of these works dealt with Western Europe and considered the relationship between the archaeological remains clearly identified as being Roman with those typically seen as "pre-Roman" or local.  Most works consider cultural change as a process and see the interaction between Roman and non-Roman representing both resistance and accommodation.  Moreover, most of these works see the term "Romanization" as problematic.  In particular, the notion of Romanization as a cohesive phenomenon functioning in similar ways across the entire area of Roman influence has done more harm than good and papered over variation in the process of cultural exchange rooted in social status, economic organization, traditions of elite display, and even Roman policies across the Empire.

The basic critique of Romanization (for lack, at present, of a better or more compact term), has clear and obvious parallels with critiques of Christianization over the past 20+ years.  In fact, the conversations about the two concepts are so parallel that it is a wonder that more obvious (than I have seen) cross-pollination between these two scholarly approaches to cultural exchange have not appeared.  I've come away from studying this material with the following little gaggle of observations:

1. The Viewer. Since John Clarke and Jas Elsner introduced me to the Roman viewer, I have become convinced that the act of viewing is central to the understanding the process of cultural engagement.  While it is almost old-hat now to observe that content producers (to use a nice, new media term) do not have exclusive control over how endusers view their content, actualizing this understanding in scholarship is a difficult task, especially if the enduser represents a group that has not left behind the kind of cultural material that scholars are apt to interpret (e.g. texts, monumental buildings, ceramics, sculpture, et c.).

2. Hybrids. Post-colonial critiques have seemingly cast long shadow over the process of Roman political and cultural expansion. A hybridized elite worked to bridge the gap between the political core and periphery and hybrid cultural places created space for that could accommodate both local and non-local interests.  Within the study of Christianization, the notion of the hybrid has not seen the same interest from scholars, although it seems clear that the spread of Christianity can be at least partly associated with the religious, ritual, and political interest of the political center.  The rarity of any discussion of hybridity within the discourse Christianization is, in part, a matter of terminology. Certainly scholars have understood the emergence of Christianity as a process that produced myriad hybrids through, for example, processes like syncretism.  Our relative lack of interest in the notion of hybridity may stem from a reluctance to see the process of religious change as one of imperialism or colonization.

3. Resistance. Hybrids form just one point on an increasingly nuanced ranged of potential cultural interaction in the ancient world.  The extremes, of course, are typically of greater interest to the scholar, if for no other reason than they are more likely to leave evidence.  The more pressing question, to my mind at least, ishow do we recalibrate our analytical lens to see more subtle forms of resistance to aggressive or openly hostile projects to promote social, political, or religious change. The process of Christianization took place over long spans of time and through the independent actions of multiple groups and agents; finding resistance in this context is far more than documenting the obvious occasions when Christian buildings were torched by hostile non-Christian groups.

4. Plurality. Just as being Roman accommodates many different, sometimes incompatible, forms of cultural expression, being Christian can hardly be reduced to a fixed set of characteristics. The plurality of Roman culture and Christianity both require that we expand our understanding of how these two phenomena manifest themselves in a social, political, and cultural context.  In some cases, this might involve simply qualifying what we mean when we say Roman or Christian: for example, direct Roman political control or imperial or ecclesiastical Christianity.  In other cases, we might have to reconsider the relationship between hybrid identities and forms of Roman-ness and Christianity and the way in which such identities appeared to various groups of viewers.

5. Erasure and Process. The creation of a Roman space or a Christian space in the ancient world was part of a process that involved, in part, the overwriting of earlier forms of cultural, economic, political, and social relationships.  In short, the process of Romanizing and Christianizing not only involves present forms of cultural expression, but projects these back into the past making it much more difficult for the historian and archaeologist to discover the traces of the process itself.