The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Provisional Discard

David Pettegrew and I have been visiting a photographing a settlement in the Corinthian countryside.  Today we observed a few commonplace examples of what archaeologists call provisional discard.  That means discard that occurs in an orderly fashion after an object is no longer needed for its primary use. 

Provisional discard is part of the numerous processes through which artifacts become part of the archaeological record from their place in more everyday life.

The Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project Season Countdown begins...

Scott Moore usually posts a pre-season countdown for various PKAP preparations (and has a handy countdown timer on his blog).  As this year's season is shaping up to be more hectic than usual, there is a strange calm-before-the-storm feeling right now.  Despite the lull, there are some interesting and exciting PKAP wrinkles this year:

1. A big group.  This will be our biggest PKAP team ever.  By all counts, it will number over 30 for most of the four week season.  We'll not only have a while gaggle of undergraduate and graduate student volunteers from Messiah College, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Dakota, but also a whole group mid-level staff from Ohio State, Penn State, and various other places.  We'll also have a cook, a great group of area supervisors who will keep an eye on the trench supervisors, and several experts in ceramics, wall-painting, et c.

2. We will be joined this summer by a team from IUP who will conduct some subsurface prospecting using Ground Penetrating Radar.  They'll arrive for about a week worth of work and will likely concentrate their efforts on the Koutsopetria plain.  Over the past three years we've used electrical resistivity to map subsurface features.  And we based our excavation strategy on the results of this technique.  The advantage of resistivity is that it was relatively inexpensive and required relatively little post-processing work to produce results.  GPR is a more expensive technique as the gear is more complex and larger and has to be brought onto the island from the US, but GPR will allow us to cover more area more quickly than resistivity.  We still hope that a larger sample of the subsurface features from Pyla-Koutsopetria will help us understand the organization of space in the Late Roman settlement.  If there was some formal organization -- say a grid pattern -- this would suggest that the coastal community had some form of urban planning and central organization.  If it was less formally organized, it would suggest that we have basically a large, well-developed village.

3. Three excavation areas.  One of the challenges that PKAP faces is that our excavations are designed primarily to ground truth our intensive pedestrian survey.  Consequently, this season, we will have three distinct excavation areas.  These areas are spread out over close to 2 sq kms.  The topography of the site compounds the distance and makes it even more difficult to communicate between the areas being excavated.  Fortunately each area will have an experienced area supervisor to coordinate the efforts of the trench supervisors and ensure that the data collected is consistent, robust, and high quality.

4. With more areas under excavation, more pottery being analyzed, and additional spatial data -- like our GPR results -- coming in from the field, we are going to have to streamline our data collection, storage, and verification methods.  For one more year, I will likely be the only coordinator of digital data collection, and I think that this will be manageable.  But the next step with the project is a more decentralized digital data collection process.  The challenge with this, of course, it bringing all the data together, having multiple copies of (or server based) software applications, and making sure that teams have the training and understanding to enter data consistently and well.

5. An improved field school.  We've always claimed to be a hybrid project -- part research excavation/survey and part field school.  This year this will even be more true.  We'll have our biggest group of students yet, but also our most well defined research goals.  So we've put considerable effort into creating a cohesive student experience for our volunteers so that they'll learn both in the field, but also at the museum and at various sites across the island.

So, stay tuned for more PKAP news and notes here. We'll get the various PKAP blogs up and running in the next few weeks and try to capture some of the growing excitement around the 2009 PKAP season!

Abstract for the Modern Greek Studies Association Annual Meeting

Over the last week, I've been working with Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, Timothy Gregory, David Pettegrew to prepare an abstract for the Modern Greek Studies Association Annual Meeting next year in Vancouver on a panel coordinated by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology of the Mediterranean Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America.  The paper will focus on our work at the site of Lakka Skoutara and its environs in the southeastern Corinthia.  This is an area originally documented by the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (2000-2008) and then by the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project.

It's always challenging to work on a research paper as a group, but in this case, the potential is remarkable.  David, Tim, Lita, and I all conceive of our research at this site in significantly different ways.  Lita is interested in the larger systems in which the site and the regions functions, Tim is an expert on ceramic evidence and the perspectives it can offer, David's interest focus on archaeological methods and formation processes, and I am interested in embedding the site at the intersection of the archaeological and historical discourse.  Such productive tensions will undoubtedly enrich the work and our own understanding of the sites, the region, and the process of archaeology in Greece.

Here's the abstract:

"Between sea and mountain: the archaeology of a 20th century “small world” in the upland basins of the southeastern Korinthia"  

Between the villages of Sophiko and Korphos in the southeastern Korinthia are a number of geographically well-defined and fertile upland basins or poljes, each one accompanied into modern times by a cluster of farmsteads and used for agriculture and pastoral activities. The heavily forested slopes adjacent to these basins were systematically exploited for resin production, a flourishing industry in the wider region especially after WWII, which is now in serious decline. Although physically isolated from major urban centers, these microecologies played a vital role in the 20th century in the subsistence of its local population, which originated primarily in the nearby mountainous village of Sophiko.  Placing these isolated, yet deeply interconnected places into their regional context provides another key case-study for the contingent character of the Greek countryside in the 19th and 20th century.

Between 2001 and 2009, the authors investigated these basins, with a primary focus on the largest, known locally as Lakka Skoutara, through two archaeological projects: the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (2001-03) and the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (2008-09).  The former studied Lakka Skoutara as part of its emphasis on the archaeology of the modern period (19th-20th centuries), while the latter conducted archaeological investigations in several of these basins as part of a larger regional survey of the Saronic coastline.

Typical of the other basins, Lakka Skoutara presents a remarkably robust assemblage of material, including domestic and religious architecture, agricultural installations, and ceramics scatters.  This material reflects the dynamism of changing land use patterns in the Greek rural landscape as well as the formation processes and life cycles of use, reuse, and abandonment connected to domestic residence.  By combining archaeological survey with oral information obtained from local residents, we were able to reconstruct part of the landscape history of this small, low-density rural settlement and its relationship to the wider world. This micro-level analysis of the site complements the broader perspectives offered by regional level data collection, oral history, and comparative studies from elsewhere in Greece.  Lakka Skoutara and its neighboring poljes offer both snap shots of historical processes affecting the countryside over the last two centuries as well as the dynamic archaeological environments of semi-abandoned settlements recorded over the much narrower horizon of a decade of field work.

The Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting: Four Conversations

The AIA Annual meeting was as exciting and interesting as usual (I'll leave it to my more regular readers to determine whether there is sarcasm intended).  It was good to see old friends and hear about new ideas, projects, and, well, news.  Four conversations stuck out in my head as I traveled back to Grand Forks, and here they are:

1. Jobs.  While most of my graduate school buddies landed tenure-track positions over the last 5 years, I still know enough folks on the job market to hear about the good (2-2 teaching loads, good support for research), bad (4-4 teaching loads, budget cuts), and ugly (fractured departments, battles in interviews, little chance for tenure) jobs available.  The reports from the AHA and the MLA appear to resonate with things at the AIA/ APA (American Philological Association) Joint Meeting.  Almost everyone with whom I talked had some story about a job search being canceled or words of warning about "upcoming cuts" during the interview.  One interesting phenomenon is that several folks told stories about job searches being accelerated to get the hiring done before the position was suspended.  A few people told stories the entire job search -- phone interview, on-campus interview, and job offer -- taking place over a mere two weeks.  Our department is searching right now and we were surprised when one candidate accepted a position before Christmas.  Traditionally job offers are made in the late winter or spring.  It may be that our lost opportunity was the product of an accelerated search.

2. Digital Archaeology. I talked with several people about archaeological field work this summer (see below), and one thing that came up in conversations was the need for IT support.  On the one hand, this is not terribly surprising as most projects have (mostly de facto) an "IT Guy" (or person).  On the other hand, it was interesting to hear projects talk seriously a dedicated IT expert perhaps even with long term responsibilities to the project.  The coming of age of digital archaeology is when archaeologists understand that born-digital data requires the same level of curation as traditional techniques for archaeological recording (inventory cards, artifacts, notebooks, drawings, et c.).  In some ways born-digital artifacts are susceptible to the same risks as an artifact of archaeological fieldwork.  In particular, digital data requires carefully documented context to be meaningful.  Unlike "analog" artifacts -- especially notebooks -- the techniques for preserving and maintaining digital records are not nearly as refined (yet), so archaeological IT experts must remain committed to project data at least until it reaches a stable state.  Even then, projects appear to be aware that a basic level of maintenance is required for "legacy data"; after all, no one produces data with the expectation that it will become unusable or worthless.  Data becomes unusable only through neglect.  In any event, it was heartening to hear so many projects (even small ones) talking about either bringing in a dedicated IT person from the earliest planning stages and hearing more established projects designated IT "coordinator" to curate legacy data and enforce good practices in data creation.  Some projects even talked about data integration beyond the site on a regional level.  The era of the digital archaeologist has arrived.

3. A Fractured Field.  I think that I heard the phrase, "that doesn't really interest me" more times at this meeting than ever before.  I'll admit that I was guilty of this on several occasions (one might have even been documented on a digital recorder!) as I begrudged my prehistorian colleagues the abundance of panels on Aegean prehistory at the AIA!  Some of my begrudging was for show, I have to admit. After all, we have worked for the last few years on the Late Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos on Cyprus and enjoyed the support of colleagues and funding organization in our efforts to contribute to a better understanding of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean.  What was vaguely more disturbing was the willingness of senior (and contemporary) colleagues to express a genuine lack of interest of work even within the more narrow disciplinary confines.  My feigned lack of interest in the Bronze Age could be seen as reasonable since my area of specialty is some 2000 years later in time!  A lack of interest in material produced 400 or 500 years earlier or later than one's specialization (or in a different sub-region of the Mediterranean) reflects the ever narrowing focus of our field and perhaps predicts the eventual demise of such august and long-lived organizations at the AIA.  Already, conferences like the Byzantine Studies Conference, Dumbarton Oaks Symposia, annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting, the Society of American Archaeologists, and regional groups like the Classical Association of the Midwest and South offer smaller and potentially more focused environments for scholarly exchange.  As money for travel to conferences becomes more scarce (not to mention the money to put on such major events), perhaps the lack of interest among scholars who are more devoted to their narrow research fields (rather than larger disciplines) simply marks out a practical, intellectual reality of our changing times.  Stan Katz offered a similar (if more articulate) critique of the American Historical Association Annual Meeting at the Chronicle Review Blog. Despite my posturing, I'd be sad to see the AIA go.  I think that we have far more to learn from our colleagues than we sometimes realize.

4. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Logistics. I spent a good bit of time on Thursday and throughout the meeting talking logistics with my fellow directors of the Pyla-Kousopetria Archaeological Project.  It looks like we will have over 30 people this year on the project ranging from almost completely inexperienced undergraduates to specialists in Bronze Age pottery, Roman wall-painting, and the history of the Medieval Cyprus.  We had designed our project from the start to be "scalable".  We began with 6, 3 students and 3 faculty, and each year expanded our operation.  With over 30 slated to come for at least part of the time, we'll certainly push the limits of scalability.  This blog began as a means to make our planning and field work on Cyprus more transparent.  While it has expanded and wandered over the almost 15 months of its life, it will continue to keep our stakeholders informed of our planning and our day-to-day activities in the field.

Finally, I was approached a number of times this weekend by folks with kind words for this blog.  Apparently it was mentioned in several contexts at the Meetings, and this corresponds with a spike in hits over the weekend.  I do not do much to promote this blog (although it is listed in the various indexed blog-searches and has even appears occasionally in Google Scholar), so it was really encouraging to hear that people appreciate my musings.  Thanks!  And if you are a visitor or a new reader, I hope you find my blog entertaining (at least) or informative or just pathetic in an endearing way.  After all, it's cold out here, and blogging helps keep me warm.  Keep coming back and I'll keep posting.

Testing the Hinterland

I managed to work my way through J. Bintliff, P. Howard, and A. Snodgrass, Testing the Hinterland: the work of the Boeotia Survey (1989-1991) in the southern approaches to the city of Thespiai (Cambridge 2007) over the past couple weeks.  A single read-through only began to scratch the surface of this remarkably rich and dense report on the work of the Boeotia survey around the city of Thespiai. It goes without saying that this book should have a significant impact on how scholars present and analyze data produced through intensive pedestrian survey in the future.

Thespiai is the nearest ancient polis to the city of Thisvi where I am working (in fits and starts) with Timothy Gregory, Archie Dunn, and others to re-examine the data gathered over the course of the Ohio Boeotia Expedition.  Gregory and his colleagues produced the data from the Thisvi survey about a decade earlier than the work by the Boeotia Survey around Thespiai and with a much smaller team.  Consequently the data is of a lower resolution and reflects intensive survey practices that have now endured rather significant critiques. Nevertheless, the high quality data set available from Thespiai should help fill in some interpretive and evidentiary gaps from the Thisvi survey and hopefully enable us to make a more substantial contribution to the archaeology of Boeotia (and Greece) through our rehabilitation of this data.

From Testing the Hinterland, five things struck me as particularly significant about this volume:

1. Thespiai as Large Site.  As I have noted several times previously in this blog (Some Thoughts on Future of Survey Archaeology in Greece (and the Eastern Mediterranean) and More Large Site Survey), large sites of over 50 ha but generally smaller than 700 ha are poised to become the basic unit for interpreting the archaeological landscape in Greece.  This first volume from the Boeotia survey analyzed a mere 500 ha.  While the total work of the Boeotia Survey encompassed a much large territory, the resolution at which they surveyed so much of western Boeotia made it practically impossible to produce a single volume of interpretation that did the data justice.  In fact, of the 200 sites that the Boeotia survey documented, they included merely 18 in this volume (171).  It is doubtful that future intensive survey in Greece will even cover as much ground as the entire Boeotia survey project, but the sophisticated and largely independent analysis of a 500 ha in a single volume should be cause for optimism (and a model) for the next generation of small scale intensive survey project in Greece and elsewhere.  The vast quantities of fine resolution data produced by the most recent generation of intensive surveys can be brought to bear on problems of historical significance (settlement patterns, rural land use, et c.) despite arguments for Mediterranean Myopia (see: A Rambling about Survey from a Regional Prespective).

2. GIS and Survey. This volume has achieved the full integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and intensive survey.  Bintliff et al. brought together view-shed analysis, least cost path, and the integration of divergent data sets (soil types, different types of artifact density data, et c.) into a single analytical framework.  While GIS has been a central aspect of Mediterranean survey for the last 25 years, it has often served as a convenient receptacle for data collected in the field, but not played as active a role in the analysis of that data.  The Boeotia survey used both viewshed analysis and a relatively sophisticated least cost path model to understand the density values present in various parts of their survey area; in doing this, they successfully manage the limitations of sample size and the computational capacities available to them to produce plausible analyses.  They were able to define the site of Leondari Southeast 7 (LSE7), for example, by recognizing that the artifact densities for this site far exceeded the off-site density values expected on their basis of their least-cost path model.  LSE7 stood in a zone of "very high 'friction' where access is not easy" (233)

3. Density and Intensity. The Boeotia survey is among the first surveys in the Eastern Mediterranean to recognize and attempt to control for differences in density produced by different methods of artifact collection. More intensive collection techniques produce greater quantities of artifacts.  This leads them to attempt to compensate for the differences between densities produced my more intensive "on site" data collection and less intensive transect field walking or off-site data collection practices. In general they found that on-site data collection methods produced between 2.5 and 3.5 times as many artifacts as transect walking.  Using these figures to adjust their comparison between transect density and the densities produced by on-site collection, they were able to determine whether specific chronological components of a site (say the Late Roman material) actually represented particular Late Roman activity at the site or simply part of the larger, but lower density carpet of Late Roman artifacts recorded by transect field walking.  This is a valuable contribution to survey archaeology and can be compared to our recent experiments at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and published in the 2007 Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus.  

4. Questions of Procedure.  One striking thing about this volume was the lack of sustained discussion of field procedure.  While I recognize that innumerable smaller publications have proceeded this volume and it is likely that their field procedures were discussed at length in these papers, it is nevertheless disconcerting that a project that committed so much sophisticated thought to the analysis of their artifacts densities would not tie this analysis directly and clearly to field procedures.  This is particularly significant when we consider the sample of artifacts gathered from individual survey units that forms the basis for their chronological and functional analysis.  It seems to me that the day where we can simple claim to have collected "diagnostic artifacts" from a unit is over.  The Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project employed chronotype sampling which ensured that we collected at least one example of each type of artifact present in the unit.  As we (me, David Pettegrew, Dimitri Nakassis, Scott Moore) have argued, this does distort our sample, but in relatively predictable ways. Other projects have defaulted to areas of "total collection" to act as controls against less systematic grab samples of diagnostic sherds from survey units. 

5. Manuring the Countryside.  This volume represents the most sophisticated and sustained argument for the manuring hypothesis.  It contends that Boeotian cities transported huge quantities of manure from the urban center to the countryside and with this manure came pottery and other forms of domestic waste that formed a visible halo of artifacts around both the urban center and more substantial sites in the countryside.  I must admit that the simplicity of this argument is appealing (although I do have particular loyalty to David Pettegrew's challenge to it!).  Unfortunately by separating the analysis of the urban fabric from the countryside as they have in this volume, it is difficult to understand the relationship between the material remaining in the urban center of Thespaia and the material found in the associated halo produced by manuring.  The manuring hypothesis will be more persuasive when they can show that the material from the halo and the city center is fundamentally similar.  At PKAP, for example, we discovered that the highest density areas of the site during the Late Roman are surrounded by lower density concentration of Late Roman pottery.  To test for the manuring hypothesis we compared the types of material present in the highest density zone to the material present in the lower density halo.  The material in the halo was different.  For example, we found very little Late Roman African Red Slip in the halo (but plenty of other contemporary, imported and local fine wares) while it is remarkably common in the highest density units.  Unless we assume that something about ARS led to different discard behavior, it is hard to understand how ARS did not appear in the halo if it was present at the center of the site.  While this one type of artifact alone does not completely eliminate the manuring hypothesis as a possible explanation for the low density halo around our highest density units, it nevertheless produces a kind of challenge made possible by integrating the analysis of on-site data with that gathered from off-site distributions.

There is much more to this book than these 5 observations: the detailed documentation and interpretation of individual sites, the clever ternary analysis of site function, and the effort to deal with the post-antique survey data (albeit in a cursory way) among many other fine points.  Needless to say, this work will emerge as a point of departure for many subsequent studies of intensive survey in the Greek countryside.

Late Antiquity in Ottawa

David Pettegrew dropped me a line about Late Antique World Workshop at the University of Ottawa from September 20-21, 2008.  A number of the sessions will focus on various chapters from Stephen Mitchell's recent textbook A History of the Later Roman Empire (2007).  This is a really clever idea for a conference and ensures that participants have a common basis for conversation.  While I have not read Mitchell's textbook, the very need for a formal textbook designed, presumably, for a course in Late Antiquity (beyond Brown's classic survey The World of Late Antiquity or Averil Cameron's more "monographic" offering, The Mediterranean world in late antiquity, AD 395-600) surely reflects the period's recent boom in popularity as well as a recent wave of synthetic studies in the field. 

The conference is put on by the Ottawa Network for the Study of Late Antiquity.  The list of contributors to this network and their research projects reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the study of Late Antiquity at Ottawa. The impulse toward interdisciplinary collaboration (the emergence of centers/centres as opposed to departments and schools) and at the same time a willingness to regard (accessible) synthetic studies as significant contributions to the discipline reflects the deep engagement of Late Antique studies in the language and vision of North American universities.

The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia

I introduced the site of Ano Vayia in several earlier blog posts (The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia, New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion).  It is basically a Late Classical - Hellenistic fortified site in the southeastern Corinthia.  David Pettegrew and I documented the architectural remains and the local topography.  We also managed to conduct a very small intensive survey in the area.  Designed to produce data fundamentally compatible with the data collected over the course of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, we followed the same method.  A team of field walkers spaced 10 meter apart walked a series of units which, in general, were under 2000 sq. m in size.  The walkers looked 1 m to each side of their swath in the unit and collected one example of each unique artifact (following the "chronotype" system).  For more on our method, we have posted a good bit of bibliography on the EKAS Bibliography page.

Our goal was to determine the extent of the ceramic scatter associated with the features atop Ano Vayia Hill and sample the artifacts present on the surface of the ground to provide some chronological and functional definition for the site.  The only difficulty with this was that the hill was densely wood with rather mature fir trees making typical survey work difficult going.  Consequently, we decided to sample the sides of the hill rather than attempt to cover the entire slope.  This we hoped would give us a good idea whether the tower was part of a larger settlement on the hill itself or more of an isolated structure in the countryside while still giving us some sense of the kinds of artifacts present in the immediate vicinity.

As the distribution map above shows, the site appears to be at the center of a rather isolated spread of artifacts.  (We did not systematically record densities or collect from the actual tumble of the building, but rather gathered diagnostic grab samples from the feature.) It is, of course, possible that erosion and vegetation effected our recovery rates from the slopes of the hill.  Moreover, there could well be additional material beyond the extent of our field work; modern development (as well as the limitations of time and man-power) kept us from extending our survey units further afield.  The relatively uniformity of material collected from these survey units -- a high percentage of painted Classical-Hellenistic rooftile and a significant scatter of pithos sherds -- suggests that most of the material in the units on the slopes originally derived from site itself.

While we are still analyzing the material collected from the site, we can make some observation with a fair degree of confidence.  Aside from the large quantities of tile, the largest category of material from the site is storage and transport vessels.  There is no fine ware and very little kitchen ware.   Like most surveys we produced a fairly substantial collection of difficult to date or interpret "medium coarse red body sherds" none of these artifacts explicitly contradict a Late Classical to Hellenistic date.  The only indication of later use for the site are a few piece of Early Modern utility wares, a couple of medium coarse sherds of possible Late Medieval date and a cut stopper, apparently of Late Antique date.  It seems probable that these artifact represent episodic re-occupation of the site during later periods.  The standing remains would have made it an ideal shelter for shepherds or even local sentries watching the coastline.  There was no evidence for earlier material. 

It's rare that intensive survey produces such a chronologically and functionally homogeneous data set, and our very limited survey of the hill should not be the last word on the distribution of material in this area.  Indeed, some 400 m to the northwest, the lower site of Vayia produced a far more chronologically diverse assemblage with material dating from the Early Bronze Age through the Early Modern period.  

New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion

From June 25th to July 16th, David Pettegrew and I returned to the Corinthia and conducted fieldwork in the region of Vayia.  The immediate vicinity of Vayia was investigated by the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) in 2002 and 2003.  This work focused primarily on a substantial and complex Early Bronze Age site which has since been published in Antiquity (Tartaron, T. F., D. J. Pullen, and J. S. Noller. 2006. “Rillenkarren at Vayia: Geomorphology and a New Class of Early Bronze Age Fortied Settlement in Southern Greece,” Antiquity 80, pp. 145–160).

In the same neighborhood or microregion, however, there are several significant later sites including a series of Late Classical to Hellenistic structures.  I found most of these structures over the course of extensive survey in the area in 2002.  We tentatively identified one of them as a possible farm house.  David Pettegrew, a colleague both on PKAP and with EKAS had a fairly serious interest in farmhouses of the Classical to Hellenistic period (see "Chasing the Classical Farmstead: Assessing the Formation and Signature of Rural Settlement in Greek Landscape Archaeology," Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 14.2 (2001), 189-209).  I was interested in the Hellenistic fortifications of the Isthmus (with Timothy Gregory, “Fortifications of Mount Oneion, Corinthia,” Hesperia 75 (2006), 327-356), so we decided to team up to document the various small sites from the Classical to Hellenistic period that dot this microregion.  We also sought to place these sites a bit more firmly within the local topography of the southeastern Corinthia.  While there has been some substantial work on the Western Corinthia which emphasizes routes into the Argolid, Sykionia, and Kleonid (these are the territories of the cities that border on the polis of Corinth), there has been relatively little work done on the eastern Corinthia (with the exception of Mike Dixon's dissertation which focused primarily on the southeastern corner of this territory). 

In a short 2 week season, David and I were not only able to document rather carefully the three main Classical to Hellenistic sites in the Vayia Microregion, but also establish an important, but largely overlooked ancient route running through the eastern Corinthia.  The work proved to be both intellectually and physically tiring as we not only illustrated the archaeological remains and hiked all over the area, but also argued (around and around and around) about the functions of these sites and their relationship to other sites both locally and in the larger context of Greece.

Over the next few weeks, I'll post some of our work on the blog here in an effort to fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of the eastern territory of Corinth.  The end goal of this fieldwork is a short(ish) study of the microregion in the Classical-Hellenistic period which we hope to submit to Hesperia this fall or winter.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Four diverse quick hits!  Something for everyone!

• Kostis Kourelis (see: New Books: Peripatetic History) encouraged me to read R. Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost.  It's a brilliant little book combining the spirit of Simone Weil with the lyrics of the Clash.  Her chapter entitled Abandon is particularly compelling.  She weaves together themes of personal loss, the image of the abandoned city (and an abandoned hospital), and the unconscious mind: "The city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture.  Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life." (p. 89)  This certainly brings into focus the importance of dreams in archaeology; the excavation is part of the process of bringing the unconscious to the fore, reifying it, and coming to terms with the details that lead to its disappearance from our conscious mind.
• My blog has apparently created a buzz.  The word in the halls of the American School is that someone did not like this blog post: Inside Looking In: A Wondering about the American School of Classical Studies.  I don't know who or exactly why, except the floors whispered that it was perhaps related to this line: "It seems hard to imagine that the social experiences of each cohort here at the school, which in their intensity can approach a kind of hazing (hearing a talk about an Archaic temple in a steady rain!!), would have no impact on how the various interrelated disciplines (archaeology, philology, history, art history) developed."  In any event, I have been quite open in my critique of the American School (you can find these posts here), but in general, I have am positive in my overall assessment of the institution and its programs.  So, the buzz is good, and I am glad folks are reading my blog and discussing the points that I bring up, but I'd like to learn more.  It's exciting to see such a venerable institution that supports and encourages a robust and critical culture.
• I've just finished reading Maria Iacovou's article in the November 2007 volume of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR) entitled "Site Size Estimates and the Diversity Factor in Late Cypriot Settlement Histories," 1-23.  In it she critiques some of the methods commonly employed to determine the size of Late Cypriot (LC) sites and the implications of these estimates in how we understand the settlement hierarchy in the LC period.  She rightly stresses that function is a crucial variable in determining the relationship between site size and the relationships between settlements on the island. She notes for example that the site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos where we have conducted fieldwork:

"The site commands a superb view of the sea and the fertile plain but, geographically speaking, there is no possibility that it had wells.  Its founders, then, did not choose it to set up a long-loved and prosperous urban center.  They obviously had another, specific objective in mind.  In fact, the houses -- estimated as at least 200 units -- were built along the edges of the plateau, forming a continuous outer wall which has been described as "the fortification wall"  The space within could have been, for all we know, completely free of house structures.

The 27 ha of the plateau should not, then, be interpreted as 27 ha of built-up space; nor should they be compared naively to the "small" size of the urban fabric of Enkomi or Ay. Demetrios.  Far from being similar, they are very different types of settlement." (p. 11)

He observations are interesting and touch upon some of the basic research questions that we hope to test this summer (see Another Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Update).  As for site size, Dave Pettegrew and I have been working on a very similar project, albeit for a later period.  In particular, we have focused on how intensive pedestrian survey defines "large sites" and determining how these methods have influenced our understanding of places in the archaeological landscape.  In fact, we submitted and had rejected an article that dealt with a very similar topic.  Here's the abstract:

"The study of large sites has been vital to Mediterranean archaeological survey for some thirty years. In regional environments where palace complexes, urban centers, and sizable primary and secondary settlements are ubiquitous, large-site survey has emerged as a key component of research design. Despite a scholarship recognizing large-site survey as a distinct facet of landscape archaeology, there has been relatively little scholarship addressing the relationship between intensive method, data production, analysis, and archaeological interpretation. This article provides a synthetic overview of major problems and issues in surveying and interpreting large sites in the Eastern Mediterranean and offers two case studies from Corinth, Greece, and Larnaca, Cyprus, that offer new directions in understanding extensive surface scatters at the archaeological and historical level. The paper advocates large-site survey as a fundamental vehicle for exploring the concept “site”—constructed in the encounter between archaeological fieldwork, the artifactual landscape, and the desire to produce discursively meaningful interpretations of the Mediterranean past."

• I received an email just this morning from Dr. Stephen Robinson, the son of Elwyn B. Robinson who was a longtime professor in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota and the author of The History of North Dakota.  He introduced himself and was kind enough to send along a copy of a touching memoir that his father Elwyn Robinson composed on the death of his wife Eva in 1984, Remembrances of Eva Foster Robinson (1903-1984) and photograph.

 
Stephen Robinson in the window of Merrifield Hall where the Department of History is located on the campus of UND.
Photo by Elwyn Robinson

Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey on the Web

After a bit of a sabbatical, the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey  (EKAS) has returned to the web (albeit only in beta... for now). 

David Pettegrew and I have put up a very basic EKAS page that includes a very basic interactive map.

Survey projects on the web are tricky things. 

Nemea Valley Archaeological Project
Pylos Regional Archaeological Project
Sydney Cyprus Survey Project
Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project
Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey Project
Kythera Island Project
Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project
Australia Paliochora Kythera Archaeological Survey
Saronic Harbors Exploration Project
Sikyon Survey Project
The Shala Valley Project

As these links suggest, survey project websites are a mixed bag.  (In fact I could not find any presence on the web for some projects like the Nikopolis Survey and the massive, long running, and complex Argolid Exploration Project (aka Southern Argolid Survey)).  It seems to me that since many survey projects tend to be less stable institutional entities with life spans between a few years and a decade and make little investment in semipermanent, physical infrastructure (e.g. dig houses, site guards, fences, et c.), this often translates to instability on the web.  Big digs, in contrast, with their well-developed infrastructures, long term (and sometimes permanent) staff, and persistent financial commitments from home institutions seem to have better chances for producing a stable presence on the Internet.  The preceding links to survey projects show how most (but not all!) have broken links, pictures that fail to appear, or offer little more than static data (nice photos, some maps... in fact, much of this doesn't count as data at all; of course, some surveys, like the the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project, have archived their data officially in places like the Arts and Humanities Data Service ). 

None of these observations are profound, and this is not to suggest that EKAS is better.  In fact, EKAS totally vanished from the web for a time (and because it's previous home http://web.stcloudstate.edu/eleftheria/ blocked robots like the Internet Archive the site is gone from public view in a profound way! One cannot even "excavate" an early version of the site).

This is all to say that EKAS has reemerged, and the only reason that it has come back is because for David Pettegrew's class in Classical Archaeology.  So, enjoy it while you can!