The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

New Additions to the Lakka Skoutara Archives

We have added another series of photographs to our Omeka archive of archaeological and landscape photographs from Lakka Skoutara in the southeastern Korinthia. Tim Gregory and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory took these photographs in the summer of 2009 and they were prepared for the archive by Kathy Nedergaard, an intern at our Working Group in Digital and New Media. The archive is now over 650 images each with some amount of meta data (including the name of the photographer, date of the photo, short description of the feature, and some rudimentary tagging).

These photographs feature alonia (threshing floors) and cisterns from the site. Both aloni and cisterns are common features in the Greek countryside. The substantial construction of both cisterns and aloni makes them enduring features of the Greek countryside and relatively easy to identify markers of intensive agricultural practices. Alonia were crucial to the production of wheat and cisterns, particular in the arid lands near the coast of the Saronic Gulf, were important for watering animals involved in threshing and their human companions.

We have full descriptions of the threshing floors and cisterns and before this archive is complete we'll add the dimensions and even locations of these features to the images. But for now, enjoy the images.

Alonia (Threshing floors)

Aloni 2:

Aloni 3:

Aloni 4:

Aloni 6

Cisterns and Wells:

Cistern 1:

Cistern 3:

Cistern 5:

Cistern 6:

Cistern 8:

Cistern 9:

Well 1:

Well 2:

For more on this project:

Creating Ruins: Formation Process Pictures from Lakka Skoutara
Lakka Skoutara: A Partial Archive
Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th Century "small world" in the upland basin of the southeastern Korinthia
Slopes and Terraces at Lakka Skoutara
Corinthian Infiltration: The Interior of Some Houses at Lakka Skoutara
Lakka Skoutara: The Survey
The Houses of Lakka Skoutara
Collapse
Provisional Discard
Construction in the Corinthia

Some more thoughts on Leonidas, Baptism, and Korinth

Thanks to our rock-star quality interlibrary loan staff here at the University of North Dakota, I was able to get my greedy mitts on F. Halkin, "Saint Leonide et ses sept compagnes martyrs a Corinthe," EEBS 23 (1953), 217-223. This little gem of an article will help me complete (or at least fill out) some thoughts I offered a couple of weeks ago in this blog post (and in a related post here). Just in case you can't be bothered to click through to either of those links, I suggest that the prominent baptistery on the coast at Lechaion may have particular significance to the site. In short, if this is a church dedicated to St. Leonidas and his companions, then a baptistery (and references to water) would have particular significance since the saint and his friends were martyred by drowning off the coast.

The Late Byzantine (or later, at least, post early-13th century) life of St. Leonidas published by Halkin in the 1930s includes a couple references that would appear to support my argument. I'll include paragraph 8 below (p. 223):

While I won't translate the entire passage, I'll offer a quick translation of two sections (note that my translations were tweaked in the comments!). First, beginning at line 5:

UPDATED: Dimitri Nakassis provided this nicer translation:

"So with much time having passed and with the public executioners having started sending Leonidēs down into the Gulf first, he [Leonidēs], having raised his face to heaven, said, “Behold! And with this second baptism today have I been baptized, which makes the man within us more clean.”"

Also then at line 12:

UPDATED: He also offered this:  "Pious men, dragging the bodies of the saints lying on the beach, having attended to them in honor they buried them, having built a church on the spot, where [the bodies], both augustly worshiped and extolled everlastingly, to those who approach faithfully they make to gush out healings each time."

According to Halkin (and I have no reason to doubt it) this is the only reference to a church built to honor Leonidas and his martyrs in the accounts of his martyrdom (p. 219). The text that Halkin presents here is almost certainly post-13th century in data and pulls information from a range of known synaxaria and a few other lost sources. One of this unknown sources preserved -- it would seem -- some memory of the great church on the Lechaion coast. Moreover, the clear and explicit link between drowning, baptism, and the massive baptistery at Lechaion might even hint that the building preserved in the memory of this text is not the church, but the baptistery. The baptistery may well have stood longer than the church to its south and considering the relatively shallow depth of the excavations at the site, it seems plausible to assume that significant parts of the buildings on the coast were long visible.

The goal of all this speculation, of course, was to understand the link between the Lechaion basilica and the elaborate nymphaion located less than a kilometer to the south of the basilica along the coastal bluff. This structure shares many decorative cues with the Lechaion basilica and I have proposed (very tentatively) that the shared emphasis on water brings together the Corinthian wide theme of the well-watered city and the specific circumstances of Leonidas and his companions' martyrdom. This is just another, albeit very small scale study, of how religious authority projected into the Corinthian landscape.

Creating Ruins: Formation Process Pictures from Lakka Skoutara

One of the most exciting things about our recent efforts to produce an online archive of images from the rural site of Lakka Skoutara is that it is now possible to track the processes that have created the ruins visible today.  It's remarkable how much the houses have broken down over just a decade of observation.  Click on the images of the houses to get access to the archive itself (powered by Omeka) and selective Dublin Core metadata.

House 3 represents one of the most dramatic changes over 8 years time. Once the roof collapses, the walls fall down fairly quickly.  The fieldstone and mud mortar addition on House 3 below collapses much more quickly than the modern cinder block and concrete.  It's interesting that the end walls on the house remain standing, but I suppose unsurprising since they bear very little of the roof's weight. 

(2001)

(2002)

(2004)

(2009)

The change in house 2 is equally dramatic, but here you'll notice some little editing issues.  For example, in many cases the images scanned from slides are backwards.  Note that between 2001 and 2002, the tiles of the house were removed and as a result the roof gives way quickly. 

(2001)

(2002)

(2004)

(2009)

The plan with this project is not only to create a resource where students and scholars can observe the way that buildings break down over time.  Be sure to check out the growing archive here.  The plan is to add some maps and plans as well as some more pictures over the next few weeks so it is always worth stopping back through the archive.  I'll also likely move the working papers over to my Omeka page soon as well.

For more on this project:

Lakka Skoutara: A Partial Archive
Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th Century "small world" in the upland basin of the southeastern Korinthia
Slopes and Terraces at Lakka Skoutara
Corinthian Infiltration: The Interior of Some Houses at Lakka Skoutara
Lakka Skoutara: The Survey
The Houses of Lakka Skoutara
Collapse
Provisional Discard
Construction in the Corinthia

Some thoughts on St. Leonidas and Baptism at Lechaion in Greece

The Lechaion basilica and baptistery are among the most impressive archaeological and architecture remains from the Early Christian period in Greece. As I have blogged on many times, the massive Lechaion basilica stood near the coast at Corinth's Western harbor. It's baptistery is often thought to date earlier than the massive basilica situated to its south largely because they have slightly different orientations. (This post has a companion post here).

Scholars have often associated the basilica with the martyr Leonidas and his several companions who, according to the preserved lives, were drowned in the Gulf of Corinth (AS II, April 16). Since Robin Jensen's visit a few weeks back, I've been thinking about this episode and its relationship to the great church at Lechaion. In several articles, Jensen argues that ad sanctos baptism was a not uncommon practice in Early Christian times (for a nice summary see here). This largely involved traveling to pilgrimage sites or even just local martyr's tombs for the initiation rite of baptism. For Jensen, this evokes the long-standing association between baptism as a kind of spiritual rebirth and the death of martyrs as their birth into spiritual and eternal glory.

   

I began to wonder whether ad sanctos type baptisms might have taken place at Lechaion. After all, the church is conspicuously close to the sea where a martyr shrine to Leonidas would be appropriate. Moreover, the church makes abundant use of water both in some of the imagery present in the yet unpublished architectural sculpture (at least one unpublished fragment of sculpture includes a dolphin which would have had particular significance in the context of baptism and Corinth through the myth of Arion) and in the various water features associated with its massive western atrium. These water features include the installation of a large basin, perhaps for fountains, in the center of its western hemicycle and two large basins along the eastern wall of the atrium. The baptistery itself is quite large with three rooms: two ancillary rooms and the baptistery proper with its central font. In short, the basilica featured water prominently, and if the basilica was to be associated with the martyr Leonidas, then the use of water throughout may well have been evocative of the events surround his and his companions martyrdom.

The use of water around Lechnaion is not enough, however, to link this church to the martyr Leonidas or to make an argument for ad sanctos baptismal practices. Corinth and the Corinthia was known in antiquity for fountains and water; so, the the use of water at Lechaion may have merely evoked or advanced Corinth's longstanding reputation. There is something more however linking Leonidas to baptismal practices. First, it was not uncommon to associate explicitly martyrdom with baptism, especially if the martyr was a catechumen. Leonidas seems to have been a full-fledged Christian. He was, however, martyred on during Easter. Easter was the common time for baptism in the Mediterranean in general and in the Greece specifically according to the historian Socrates (5.22). While there does not appear to be explicit (at least that I've found) references to baptismal imagery, the accounts of St. Leonidas' martrydom are short and the link between their physical and fatal submersion in the sea at Easter when catechumens experienced (at least symbolic) submersion of their own in the baptismal font at Lechaion seems hard to overlook.

To take this admittedly speculative reading a step further, it would be interesting to imagine the relationship between the Lechaion basilica and the nymphaion excavated a short distance to the south of the church (E. Stikas, Ergon (1957), 53-58).

This building shows many remarkable similarities in both architectural decoration and in the use of opus sectile floors to the Lechaion basilica. While the building itself may be earlier, it seems likely that it underwent some modification by the same work crews who were involved in building the Lechaion basilica. The location of the nymphaion at the base of a coastal bluff gave it access to water and a position along a likely coastal road leading to the north coast of the Peloponnesus and, presumably, past the massive Lechaion church. It would be appealing to imagine this building as a symbolic billboard (are there other kinds of billboards?) for the Lechaion basilica taking not only certain decorative cues from the church as well as the reference to water. Water would have brought together the local history of the church, well-known Corinthian water culture, the martyrdom of Leonidas, and the Christian rite of baptism performed in an elaborate building less than 100 m from the foreshore of the Corinthian gulf.

Lakka Skoutara: A Partial Archive

Over the last 10 years or so, David Pettegrew, Tim Gregory, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, and I have been working to document a modern rural settlement in the southeastern Corinthia. The site is called Lakka Skoutara and we have presented the preliminary results of our work in a few conference papers over the past few years, I've presented some photographs and general discussions in this blog, and Lita-Tzortzopoulou published a very brief summary of our work in "The Archaeology of Modern Greece" in E. Athanassopoulos and L. Wandsnider eds. Mediterranean Archaeological Landscapes: current issues. (Philadelphia 2004).

Part of the basis for our study is a significant archive of photographs. I've made a significant number of these available using Omeka on a companion site to this blog called Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota. David Pettegrew and I took these photos over a 9 year period from 2001-2009. So far, I've uploaded and begun to annotate with metadata photos taken in 2002, 2004, and 2009.

To find the photos on my Omeka site, click on Browse Collections and then Lakka Skoutara. You can look at the various photos of individual houses by their tags: House 2, House 3, House 4, House 5, House 6, House 7, House 9, House 10, House 11, House 13 , House 14, House 16, House 17. Or you can go to advanced search (in the upper right hand corner) and create more complex searches. The simple search is nearly worthless. Once you find a photo in which you are interested, you can save the citation into your Zotero database.

At present the houses do not have a significant amount of metadata associated with each house, but that is coming soon. Moreover, we do not have many contextualizing documents associated with these houses. But we will have a few plans posted soon and a map of the site as well as some photos taken in 2001 and some more robust descriptions of the houses and the area. In other words, this is a work in progress, but the item numbers for each photograph will remain stable.

Death in Corinth

Another banner month for Corinth related articles! This past week saw the publication of A.H. Rohn's, E. Barnes's, and G.D.R. Sander's "An Early Ottoman Cemetery at Ancient Corinth," Hesperia 78 (2009), 501-615. It's fantastic that Hesperia is so flexible to publish what is, in effect, a short archaeological monograph! The highly-detailed article documents with great care the 17th century Ottoman cemetery excavated in Panayia Field in Ancient Corinth. The 133 individuals excavated from 81 graves represented both the Christian and Muslim community at Corinth. The excavators suggest that the presence of both groups in the same cemetery and the common appearance of "boot-heel reinforcement cleats" may associate the cemetery with the Ottoman garrison in the town.

If the cemetery is indeed associated with the garrison the ratio of 11 Muslim-style graves to 55 Christian-style graves based, in large part, on the arrangement of the bodies in the graves (p. 516), suggests that the Ottoman garrison may have been relatively well integrated with the local population. This is further indicated by the cross-section of the local demographic represented in the graves with adult men (54), adult women (23) and children of all ages (54) present (pp. 527-528). The analysis of the skull types seem to indicate that many of the women were local while most of the men were from elsewhere (pp.530-531). This would reinforce the notion that this cemetery served the local garrison. The graves also showed some wealth in the community with numerous examples of jewelry (although mostly featuring non-precious metal and stones) and the regular occurrence of the bodies being interned wearing boots suggesting at least some disposable wealth. At the same time, only a few of the graves preserved indications of wooden coffins with nails preserved in a neat halo around the body in at least one grave (p. 512)

It seems that whenever someone excavates a cemetery, there is at least on creepy grave (this is not a technical term), the description of which is worth quoting in full:

Grave 20 contained the body of a young 20–21-year-old male lying extended with his head pointing westward, but face down (Figs. 24, 25). A thick iron rod projecting out of the left side of his neck turned out to be an iron hook that had been inserted into his left shoulder beneath his left clavicle (collarbone). Apparently, he had been suspended from this hook until he died, because both legs and feet extended fully and parallel to one another as they would have while he hung and rigor mortis set in. His right hand had balled up into a fist that clutched the spot where the hook had been inserted into his shoulder. His left arm dangled behind his back. Presumably, once he had died, his punishers had taken down his rigid body and placed it face down (a position of disgrace?) into his final resting place, leaving the hook still embedded. We suspect this represents a death sentence for an individual who defied the order of the local governing body. Ottoman rule at Ancient Corinth during the early 17th century apparently tolerated Christian religious practice, but only as long as the Christians obeyed their rulers and did not cause trouble for them. (p. 521)

The cemetery appears to have fallen out of use during the Second Venetian period at Corinth (1687-1715) and perhaps forgotten by the 18th century. I can't help wonder how quickly the cemetery fell out of use as place of burial or even commemoration for while the men in the group may have represented Ottoman power, the women would have tied at least some members of that group to the local community. Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory has noted that in the Modern period, Greek graves can fall into neglect very quickly if there are no long any close relatives in the community to maintain them. By the Early Modern period (19th century in Greece) the area had been built over with houses. It is remarkable (and a useful reminder) that there was little evidence of the cemetery in the plow-zone. Thus, the function of this area would have been virtually invisible to intensive survey techniques.

With the recent publications of Lita Tzortzopolou-Gregory on the modern period, the work of Joe Rife on the Late Roman and Roman period, it should now be possible to present an almost comprehensive survey of mortuary practices in the Corinthia from Roman times to the present.

Corinth's Greek Agora

These are boom times for articles on Corinth. I just completed Jamie Donati's interesting new article in the American Journal of Archaeology: "Marks of State Ownership and the Greek Agora at Corinth" AJA 114 (2010), 3-26. In it, Jamie argues that the evidence for state owned objects (drinking vessels, weights, counting tables, et c.) suggests that the Archaic to Classical agora in Corinth most likely stood below the Hellenistic agora and Roman forum. This runs counter to the prevailing wisdom at Corinth which typically places the earlier agora either north of the city or under the plataea of the modern village.

While I won't go through the detail of Jamie's argument, he suggests that part of the reason why scholars have not seen the evidence for the Greek agora under the Hellenistic and Roman levels is because they assumed that the Archaic and Classical agora of Corinth would be in some way similar to the Classical agora of Athens which was uncovered at approximately the same time as major excavations at Corinth continued. The rivalry between these two major American excavations in Greece, in effect, shaped scholarly assumptions. Jamie argued that Corinth, with rather different civic institutions and forms of government, would not have required the same kinds of buildings at Athens. He then points out that the government of Elis met in rather modest structures which, in fact, stood outside of the proper agora of that city.

Even more interesting (at least to me) is how Jamie's argument for the location of the Greek agora influence how we imagine the motives for the monumental elaboration of the city in the Hellenistic (and later, Roman, periods). In one of my favorite dissertations on Corinth, Betsy Robinson argues that the three famous fountains of the Corinth -- Peirene, Glauke, and the Sacred Spring -- were important "places of memory" for the city during the Roman period and served to link the rebuilt Roman agora with the earlier history of the Corinth as a city of water. If we accept Jamie's identification of pre-Hellenistic agora under the Hellenistic and Roman agora, then this might contribute additional perspective to the way that place informed monumental and civic continuity in the ancient city. Sue Alcock has argued that the Athenian agora became, during the Roman period, a kind of memory theater where monuments of various aspects of the glorious Athenian past jostled for attention in a space largely devoid of any practical function. While the Corinth's Greek agora (accepting for a moment Jamie's argument) may have lacked monumental reminders of the city's past, could the place itself, the topography, the views, or even more modest reminders have served to evoke urban continuity (or even a highly localized mytho-history, in Robinson's terms) that largely functioned well below the level of monumental commemoration.

Such an approach reminds me of work on the mnemonics of landscapes where physically invisible markers could nevertheless evoke memories for individuals and groups historically invested in a place. While we tend to conceive of urbanism as replacing these relatively obscure places of memory with monumental expressions, there is no reason to assume that more subtle mnemonic places could not provide a framework for continuity within an urban environment. This observation, however, goes well beyond what Jamie argued. It will be interesting to see what folks do with this article and whether (or how) it shapes the study of urban Corinth.

Semester Preview...

After a few weeks vacation, I am ready to get back going this semester. And it will be an exciting semester, I think. So here's something of a preview on the day before my classes start in earnest.

1. Tweaking existing classes. This semester I'll teach History 101: Western Civilization (in the classroom) and History 240: The Historians Craft. I've taught these classes each semester for the past few years. While this can get boring, the one advantage to this continuity is that I can spend time tweaking each class in ways that a more diverse schedule of course preparation just would not allow. For example, check back here to see how I plan to use social media applications in History 101.

2. Public History Interns. As our department tentatively dips its toes in the public history pool, I am going to run a public history internship. Based on the conversations already taking place in Google Wave, it seems like we are off to a good start. The plans include working on an online museum of the Late Antique material from the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria, working with Ryan Stander on the online complement to his gallery show of photographs from this summer's PKAP season, keying and normalizing the survey and excavation data from the last few PKAP field seasons plus some other odds and ends. Part of their responsibilities will be to write a blog to make their work as transparent as possible.

3. Writing. I am looking forward to wrapping up work on a few articles submitted over the past few years. This includes a co-edited volume of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology and a co-written piece for Hesperia. The PKAP team will submit its last preliminary report to the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, and I'll finish a contribution to Cambridge Encyclopedia of World Religious Architecture on Early Christian baptisteries.

4. Lectures. While my conference schedule is pretty clear this spring, I will deliver the Elwyn Robinson Lecture (which I think will be on Digital Archaeology) sometime in February. Even more exciting in our keynote speaker for the annual Phi Alpha Theta History Conference here at UND: Robin Jensen of Vanderbilt University, has agreed to come and talk about some aspect of her work on Early Christian art and ritual in March. More on this soon!!

5. Reading. I am really looking forward to my winter reading list. First, I need to finish Y. Hamilakis and A. Anagnostopoulos edited volume Archaeological Ethnographies for a review for the European Journal of Archaeology. But I am also looking forward to M. Decker's Tilling the Hateful Earth: Agricultural Production and Trade in the Late Antique East (Oxford 2009) and V. Makrides, Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches: A concise history of the religious cultures of Greece from antiquity to the present (New York 2009).

6. Blogging. I am looking forward to getting Teaching Thursday going again. At the end of last semester I began to despair of ideas, contributors, and motivation, but after a brief break, I am recommitted to making it work as a forum for conversations about teaching and pedagogy here at UND. I am excited to get feedback on transmedia teaching, using technology in new ways in the classroom, and exploring the potential of Foucault's panopticon for understanding the experience of teaching online. And more!

7. Administrative. I agreed to write up by-laws for our Working Group in Digital and New Media. Having never written by-laws before (and generally ignoring them when they do exist!), this should be an adventure. I am also working with an interesting group on the redesign of the University's website. Stay tuned for more on the latter.

Lots on tap for this winter and spring. Plus the standard routine of planning for summer fieldwork and writing grants.

So plenty of blog-fodder!

Stay tuned!

AIA Panel 2010: First Out: Late Levels of Early Sites

Once again the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America is sponsoring a panel at the AIA Annual Meeting.  While I won't be at the meeting, I will be giving a paper with Timothy Gregory.  If you're going to be in Anaheim be sure to check out what I'm sure will be a brilliant panel!  I hope that we'll have podcasts of these talks as well!

On Thursday:

SESSION 1C: Colloquium Platinum Ballroom 6

First Out: Late Levels of Early Sites

Sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group

8:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
ORGANIZERS: Sharon E.J. Gerstel, University of California, Los Angeles and
Kostis Kourelis, Franklin & Marshall College

8:30 I Introduction: Sharon E.J. Gerstel, University of California, Los Angeles and Kostis Kourelis, Franklin & Marshall College (10 min.)

8:40 P Prioritizing Prehistory? A Byzantine Deposit from the Palace of Nestor at Englianos
Jack L. Davis, University of Cincinnati and American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and Sharon R. Stocker, University of Cincinnati and American School of Classical Studies at Athens (20 min.)

9:05 D Drowned in the Depths of Obscurity: How Archaeology both Marginalized and Revitalized Our Understanding of Late Byzantine Troy
Kathleen M. Quinn, Northern Kentucky University (20 min.)

9:30 A A Middle Byzantine Neighborhood in Athens: Recent Excavations in the Agora
Anne McCabe, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford (20 min.)

10:05 F First but Not Out: The Byzantine Levels at Chersonesos in Historical and Archaeological Context
Adam Rabinowitz, University of Texas at Austin, and Larissa Sedikova, National Preserve of Tauric Chersonesos, Ukraine (20 min.)

10:30 N New Views on Old Data: Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results after 30 Years
William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota, and Timothy E. Gregory, Ohio State University (20 min.)

10:55 L Late Ottoman and Early Modern Levels from New Excavations in Ancient Corinth
Guy D. R. Sanders, American School of Classical Studies at Athens (20 min.)

Some other notables from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project...

On Friday:

SESSION 6F Grand Ballroom J & K
Archaeological Methodology
4:30 P Painting Practices in Roman Corinth: Contextualizing Analytical Analyses
on Wall Paintings from Panaghia Field and the Area East of the Theater
Sarah Lepinski, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and Hariclia Brecoulaki, Institute of Greek and Roman Antiquity, The National Hellenic Research Foundation (20 min.)

SESSION 6G Platinum Ballroom 7
Archaeology of Ancient Warfare
3:35 T The Inscribed Sling-Bullets of Perusia as a Unique Discourse
Brandon R. Olson, Penn State University (20 min.)

For Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey types:

On Friday:

SESSION 4A Grand Ballroom Salon E
Excavation and Survey in Bronze Age Greece
9:20 T The Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP): The Bronze Age Worlds of Kalamianos
Daniel J. Pullen, The Florida State University, and Thomas F. Tartaron,
The University of Pennsylvania (20 min.)

Dipping my Toe in the Public History Pool

Public history is all the rage these days in history programs.  To my eye, the interest in public history is an effort within the discipline of history to connect our work with a recognized group of jobs as archivists, public historians, and at museums.  On the one hand, this is good in that it recognizes that many of our students want to stay in the field of history, but do not aspire to academic positions.  On the other hand, this is part of a larger vocational trend in the humanities that we probably need to monitor.  While there is no reason not to embrace programs which hold forth the prospect of employment for our students, history as a discipline would be weaker if preparing future public historians became the dominant goal of history departments. 

In any event, since our department is looking to get more serious about its offerings in public history, I thought I'd make an effort to see how my work in Greece and Cyprus could contribute.  So in 2010, I am going to offer a small internship program in public history.  Below is a very, very rough fact-sheet on this graduate level internship.  As you can see, many of the details are to-be-determined, but I think it captures the core of what I'd like my internship to do. 

Public History Internship
SP2010

The goal of this internship program is to provide an opportunity to gain experience with a wide range of digital and new media applications that are becoming increasingly central to public history, museum management and outreach, archival work and archaeological curation.

This work will focus on a number of ongoing and completed archaeological and historical projects and tools.

1. Topos/Chora: The Photographs of Ryan Stander. This is a series of photographs and related essays from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. The photographs will appear at the Empire Theater for the month of January and then in an online gallery. They will be accompanied by a series of reflective essays written by the archaeologists who participated in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. The goal here is to have something up on the web by January 15th and the gallery available for viewing by January 30th.

2. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: A Digital Museum. Since 2003, a team under the direction of Scott Moore, David Pettegrew, and me has been working at a site called Pyla-Koutsopetria on the south coast of Cyprus. This project has produced a vast amount of digital data ranging from video to podcast, photographs, text, descriptive data, maps, plans, illustration, quantitative data, et c. The goal of the Digital Museum is to present some subset of this data in a coherent way for the educated public. We have Omeka, online museum software, installed on a university server. This software can provide the base for our online museum.

3. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: Data Curation. One of the most important aspects of any archaeological or museum work is the responsible curation of all forms of data. PKAP has recorded a substantial amount of both digital and paper data over the past 7 years. This data needs to be curated. The paper data must be prepare to be deposited in the university archives and parts of the digital data, to be uploaded to Open Context for digital publication. In many ways this curation project is the flipside of the project 2.

4. Lakka Skoutara: An Early Modern Site in the Eastern Corinthia. Since 2000, David Pettegrew and I have recorded descriptive and photographic data from the early modern site of Lakka Skoutara that documented the changes at this site as a result of a whole range of abandonment practices. These photographs need to be put together with textual descriptions in a way that is useful to scholars. This archive will become the online companion piece to a published article.

5. Ohio Boeotia Project at Thisvi, Boeotia. Over the past two years, I have slowly been digitizing the results of an intensive pedestrian survey project conducted between 1979-1982 around the village of Thisvi in southeastern Boeotia. It would be excellent to report the results of this project in a transparent way or to develop an online environment where this work can be highlighted and made accessible.

Goals and Priorities: To some extent, I will let you imagine a set of priorities for this list of tasks, and I certainly don’t imagine that you’ll get all these done. On the other hand, I expect that early on, we as a team develop some sense of priorities in how we plan to attack these various projects. It is important to emphasize that public history projects are almost always collaborative. That is to say that people work together to accomplish a particular task. We are going to work together as a team to accomplish the goals listed below.

Assignments and Responsibilities: Since this is an internship, I will not have a major writing or reading assignment. You should plan to dedicate 10 hours a week to working this internship. I will insist on weekly 1 hour meetings. These will include status updates and are not optional. In addition, you will be expected to maintain a public blog detailing weekly how the various projects are progressing. The goal of the blog will be both to keep you honest (as a team) and to make the progress of the various projects underway transparent to the various stakeholders both at the university and elsewhere. I will expect each participant in the internship to contribute a single blog post a week. It might be best to blog on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. The first assignment will be to select a blogging service.

Resources:

1. Digital and New Media Laboratory. At present we have a single PC, a Linux powered laptop, and a gaggles of very powerful Macintosh computers. Time in the laboratory should be negotiated with the various other users.

2. Published and unpublished reports from Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, Ohio Boeotia Project, and Lakka Skoutara (which was a part of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS)).

3. People. Consider me, my various colleagues, and folks on campus potential resources. When in doubt, ask questions. Part of a successful public history project is knowing how to get the information that you need.

Some websites:

http://omeka.org/

http://www.pkap.org/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/

http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/between-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-the-upland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikastorion_archaeological_project/