The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Richard Patterson and "Archaeological Dig"

I was privileged to hang out with Richard Patterson last week when he visited the University of North Dakota. Rich is a UND alumnus, but prior to his time here in Grand Forks, he was one of the leading lights in the New York City graffiti underworld where he went by Rich2, Provide133, and others. It was fantastic to watch him work and talk at length about the process of creating graffiti in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s.

One of the most striking aspects of our conversations was the process of graffiti production in New York. Far from being a spontaneous work of creativity (or a crime of opportunistic vandalism), graffiti art was carefully planned and choreographed. The process of planning the art was as much, if not more important, than its actual execution. Major works were always done in teams of painters who regularly worked together and sought to exert influence over particular train lines or sections of town.

A key element in painting was the acquisition of paint. The various types of high quality paints that were preferred by graffiti painters were often hard to find in their own neighborhoods. Consequently, they had to go to New Jersey or more affluent areas to get these paints. This could involve trips to multiple locations in search of particular brands and colors needed to make their work distinct. The distinct colors in the art work, then, represented the time, energy, and inventiveness of a particular group of painters.

Another fascinating element of graffiti art that Rich and I discussed was its gradual emergence in mainstream consciousness. He talked about preparing canvasses for the likes of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring and, in retrospect, how they felt exploited by these figures in the art world. Today, of course, graffiti artists have become increasingly clever at promoting and selling their own art, but in the 1970s and 1980s, Rich talked about how their art represented a call for recognition and access to opportunities. Rich and many of the early artists who contributed so much to establishing the artistic cannon for graffiti art were never able to reap any long term benefits of their work.

Despite these disappointments, Rich found other ways to make opportunities for himself. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia, he returned to school here at the University of North Dakota where he earned both a B.A. and an M.Ed. He currently teaches in North Carolina and paints only occasionally spending most of his time talking to kids about how to get their lives on track through hard work and discipline.

I was lucky enough to catch him at a moment of weakness and he produce this canvas for my new office. Called "Archaeological Dig", it's done in hand style and captures (only a tiny bit) of the vitality and dynamism that Rich Patterson brings to his art.

For more examples of Rich's amazing work, check out Ryan Stander's Axis of Access. For more on his contributions in particular, check out these two interviews, here and here.

Woodstock, Landscape, and Archaeology

Crosposted to Punk Archaeology.

A few weeks ago Kostis mentioned that he thought that archaeology was "a post hippie" discipline.  A certain tendency to emphasize rural places, the integrated, almost spiritual, character of landscapes, community engagement, and political activism would seem to evoke many of the central ideals of the hippie movement, albeit within a far more structured environment.  (It's an open issue whether punk shared the celebrated spontaneity of the hippie movement or parodied it).

This weekend, the New York Times offered a shortish article: "Woodstock: A Moment of Muddy Grace".  Aside from well-worn ironic observation that the memory of Woodstock became a commodity almost as soon as the festival was over, there was a short paragraph that included one interesting line:

With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock looming — so soon? — the commemorative machinery is clanking into place, and the nostalgia is strong. There’s a Woodstock Festival museum now at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and a recently built concert hall at what was the concert site, Max Yasgur’s farm (though the original Woodstock hillside has been left undeveloped).

The notion that the original hillside would be preserved is an interesting example of how the absence of development could nevertheless represent the commidification of a particular landscape.  Paralleling the desire to preserve battlefields, archaeological landscapes, and other places of cultural significance, the archaeology of absence evokes both the notion of a sacred precinct as well as haunting ideas of ritual abandonment.  In the hyper-commodified world of Woodstock nostalgia, the protected hillside stands out both as an ironic and highly structured place of commemoration.

Perhaps this is another characteristic that separates Punk Archaeology from its post-hippie variants.  The hippie movement, for all its energy, has long been overrun by a kind of crude commercialism so even an archaeologically motivated decision like preserving the famous Woodstock hillside cannot stand outside the discourse of capitalism and gain.

Has Punk remained more authentic?  Certainly the battle to save Punk landmarks like CBGBs has been less successful.  The urban foundation of Punk perhaps created landmarks in an environment which had a more ephemeral character.  Change was anticipated and expected in urban landscapes.  The countryside was idealized as unchanging and efforts to commemorate the countryside typically involve limiting the impact of human activities or even marking it off entirely.  Archaeology, however, relies upon the traces of change through time to document human culture.  The urbanism of Punk contributes to its resistance to commodification (and makes its appeals to nostalgia more ironic still) and preserves it for a different method of documentation later.  Punk Archaeology.

Punk Archaeology: Trench Sounds

The long awaited final Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project podcast has arrived.  Titled "Trench Sounds", it is a 10 minute extract of over 3 hours of taping in Dallas DeForest's trench at Pyla-Koutsopetria.  (For more typical discussions of this trench you can down load these two podcasts: Koutsopetria East Week 1 and Koutsopetria East Week 2).  The goal was to capture the sounds of a trench in all of their mundane glory.

The inspiration was Punk Archaeology.  Kostis has posted on Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and its seminal influence on the New York "No Wave" movement.  This album, which is almost impossible to listen to, is composed almost entirely of various ephemeral sounds of the musical production process particularly looped tracks of guitar feedback much of which was created intentionally by placing guitars facing their amplifiers.  This dissonant noise was then remixed and edited to produce tracks including an unusual locked groove track at the end of side "D" (of a two record set) which would play the final 1.8 seconds continuously (an effect lost on 21st century listeners who are more likely to spend the 4$ to download the album in MP3 than the $20+ to purchase the album on vinyl!).

Our final "Voices of Archaeology" track is hardly as intentionally dissonant as Metal Machine Music (nor will it likely be as iconic).  It does, however, capture and attempt to present some of the ephemeral sounds of archaeology -- the gentle thumping of the pick, the scraping of the dust pan, the cascades of dirt into buckets, the interrupted and fractured conversations.  It attempts to capture sonically, what we as archaeologist are attempting to capture physically: the various bits of pieces of the past.  At one point on the track, Paul Ferderer asks whether a tiny fragment of ceramic material is a piece of tile or a piece of pottery.  The tiny fragment was at once almost completely inconsequential (and the question of whether the fragment was pottery or tile was even less consequential as all ceramic material was analyzed by our ceramicist) and at the same time the bit of ceramics is representative of the archaeological process.  The artifact must be contextualized in some way to generate meaning.  It goes without saying (almost) that fragments of the past have no inherent meaning.  They are displaced objects that the archaeologist envelop in contexts ranging from the place of origin, the original "primary" use, and, of course, the chronology of the other objects at the site.  The tension between the decontextualized object at the moment of discovery (the most tenuous and fleeting contextualizing moment) and various "big picture" narrative and analyses that ultimately come to make a specific site meaningful finds its place in the immediacy of punk rock as experience. 

I recently listened again to the MC5's first album Kick Out the Jams, a live album, and admired their effort to capture the live sound and mark the band as a live phenomenon while evoking punk rock's debts to the blues (a genre of music almost always recorded live) and the ephemeral connections manifest in garage bands across the country.  The contextualizing narrative of modern American music has, of course, placed the MC5 in a proper analytical and interpretive category (often placing them alongside Iggy Pop's Stooges whose first album came out the same year and captured a very different kind of sound through the exacting production of John Cale) and striped the first album of much of its shock value (although it still can capture some of the excitement typical of live performances).

Our short track of trench sounds hopes to capture the same thing -- at once it is inconsequential (and frankly hard to listen to!) alone just like Paul's fragment of pottery -- but at the same time, it captures a moment that begs a larger, more dynamic context.  The moment of discovery is the point of departure for archaeological analysis.  Trench Sounds pushes the incidental noise of archaeological research into the center,  like the feedback pushed to the center of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.  By recontextualizing the sonic elements of archaeological fieldwork I hope to have shed light on the analytical process itself which brings otherwise discarded and inconsequential artifacts to the center while pushing the archaeological experience to the edges... 

Enjoy: Trench Sounds

Update: For an overly generous response click here.

Be sure to check out our other podcasts:

PKAP 20009 Introduction
Koutsopetria East Week 1 (Featuring P-Ferd)
Koutsopetria West Week 1
Vigla East Week 1
Vigla West Week 1
Kokkinokremos East Week 1
Kokkinokremos West Week 1

Koutsopetria East Week 2
Koutsopetria West Week 2
Vigla East Week 2
Vigla West Week 2
Kokkinokremos East Week 2
Kokkinokremos West Week 2
Ground Penetrating Radar Team

Toward a Definition of Punk Archaeology

Cross-posted to Punk Archaeology.

I was asked recently what exactly Punk Archaeology is... and aside from pointing to our blog of that name, I struggled to come up with a clever answer or really any answer.  The best that I could offer was that Punk Archaeology was an empty vessel, a conceptual universe opening to being filled by the careening intersection of punk rock music and archaeology (in almost all of its forms and meanings).  So far the vessel is filled with bits of methodology, some history, some archaeology (in a Foucaldian sense) and even some proper archaeological investigations.  This description, however, does not necessarily explain what Punk Archaeology is.

So, here goes a first effort toward a definition of Punk Archaeology:

1) Punk Archaeology is a reflective mode of organizing archaeological experiences.  Punk Archaeology began as conversations between Kostis Kourelis and other archaeologists who admitted to listening to punk rock music or appreciating the punk aesthetic while studying archaeology.  The result was a collaboration between me and Kostis as we made an effort to probe the intersection between these two choices.  Why would we be drawn to punk rock -- or any particular music -- and how does this musical choice explain or organize or condition our approaches to archaeological research.  Both of us came around to the question of whether there is a totalizing discourse in our intellectual lives.  Is there some strand that makes sense of our varied interests?

2) Punk Archaeology follows certain elements of the punk aesthetic through the discipline of archaeology.  It celebrates, in particular, the things that can be grouped under the blanket heading of DIY practices: various low-fi podcasts, infield improvised devices, and serendipitous inventions that allow archaeologists to document space, place, and the past.

3) Punk Archaeology reveals a deep commitment to place.  Punk with its tied to garage band sound has always manifest itself spatially. The tensions between urban and suburban (e.g. Little London Boys), east and west coast, and the persistent association of certain sounds and styles with cities or even places (some of which are intended to disorient: Max's Kansas City).  As archaeology is, in so many ways, a "science" of place, its affinity to a musical genre that self-consciously laced the experience of music with the experience of place would seem appropriate.

4) Punk Archaeology embraces destruction as a creative process.  Archaeologists destroy the very object that they seek to study.  Digging through strata removes artifacts from their physical context and places them in the disciplinary context of the archaeologist notebook, database, plan, map, article, or monographg.  Destruction as a creative process echoes in some ways the process of punk which sought to deconstruct musically the foundation of Anglo-American pop music and build in its place a subversive recontextualized narrative of safe and comfortable bourgeois life.  I am not sure that archaeology is always subversive and I don't even know whether punk rock forms the best parallel for the recontextualizing process of excavation, but there is a certain symmetry between the two.

5) Punk Archaeology is spontaneous.  The one thing that the Punk Archaeology blog is seeking to capture is the spontaneity of the connection between punk and archaeology.  The performance of punk archaeology through the medium of blogging allows for our definition to remain flexible and fluid.  We can reshape our argument and our juxtapositions and even challenge and contradict ourselves.  In short, we can create distortion, noise, and a kind off creative chaos.  That might, like Punk, have value. 

Or not. 

We'll see.

Archaeology, Technology, and Who is the Punk Archaeologist Now?

Every years, we encounter the same problem.  Some vital piece of equipment does not work the way that it should.  This year (as it most often is), it was our expensive and elaborate differential GPS unit.  We spent Sunday reinstalling the Trimble software on the survey controller.  Fortunately, this solved the problem, but it also highlighted the fact that as archaeology develops into the 21st century, the technological demands on the average excavator or survey archaeologist will continue to increase.  The knowledge necessary to fix whatever problem has infiltrated our GPS unit was completely arcane.  The various menus controlling the device's settings did not cascade in a predictable way nor did they make their purpose know through anything approach common or self-evident terms.  The demand for technical expertise continues through the various Geographic Information Systems software as well.  Trimble's Geomatics Office and ESRI's ArcGIS are quite dissimilar, yet are both crucial to mapping our site accurately.

While many projects bring in a separate team to conduct mapping or survey activities, PKAP has a more DIY or hands-on approach.  Aside from geophysical work -- resistivity and this year ground penetrating radar, our project has found itself (primarily for funding reasons) in a position to take on ever increasing responsibilities for tasks that exist at the borders of specilization.  What is interesting, of course, is that some members of the project -- particularly those trained in more tradition archaeology programs -- almost resist the use of technology.  Skeptical of its grandiose promises (sub-centimeter accuracy!), elaborate language (EGG Geoid Models!), and temperamental disposition ("Initialization has been lost"!), several members of the project would gladly reject it and return to old style ways of mapping, organizing data, and conducting fieldwork.  In fact, we can often detect a bit of passive resistance to the growing significance of technology among several old school project members who subtly resist the various requirements imposed by technology (particularly the inflexible demands of consistency imposed by our databases) and seem to revel in declaring their particular fieldwork as having distinctive, irresolvable autonomy from any larger, technological system. 

So this brings me to the question in my subject line. While our project has embraced a fairly wide ranging diy approach (note the various posts at PKAP Graduate Student Perspective Blog and this author has insisted that we do not purchase the ready-made picks and shovels, but the kind where the head is separate (or at least loosely attached) the shaft), there is a lingering reluctance among some members of the project to include technology in their performance of the diy aesthetic.  This perhaps parallels one of the grander splits in the punk rock movement: on the one hand, there were punks like Brian Eno who showed an increasing willingness to embrace of technology and electronic music and, on the other, those influences by the folk tradition who recognized the simple implements of rock 'n' roll music (guitar, drums, base, keyboard) as sufficient to communicate their revolution.  (It seems obvious that Metal Machine Music is ironic, but what exactly does it critique?). 

So PKAP continues.  Each day offers the potential for another skirmish between the earnest and self-sufficient archaeologist with the tape, compass, and notebook, and the technologically savvy director burdened with his Mad Max like tangle of databases, GPS units, video cameras, data collectors and "softwares".

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

A busy Friday, but some fun and serious links:

• Another North Dakotan who's made it big.
• Flavor Flav in a NASCAR jacket with Public Enemy and the Roots.  Note also the updated fatigues.
• Local saints.
• Heritage Bytes.
• Keep checking back.
• Stupid Grammar.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

A few quick and fun things:

• Our EduPunk show has officially blown up.  Watch the Educause sponsored debate here, and see our responses here and here.
• Electric Archaeologist at 50,000 page views.  Congratulations, Shawn!
• Our very own Liz Saunders won the 2009 Distinguished Thesis Award from The Graduate School for her thesis: "Pine Ridge Reservation's Early Economic Initiatives and Intercultural Reactions" under Jim Mochoruk.
• Word on the street is that a version of our White Paper which combined a New Media center with a healthy does of Digital History and Digital Humanities received some 6 digit funding.

Thanks to everyone who braved the elements to show up at my talk on Wednesday! I appreciated the support and interest that our diverse campus brought to my presentation.  I've been dragging a bit this semester and it was just what I needed to carry me through the late winter.

Have a good weekend and enjoy the hoops.

Teaching Thursday: Considering the Punk in EduPunk

Have you watched the series of video debates centering on Jim Groom's term EduPunk?  We've (that the royal we) posted them over on our Teaching Thursday blog.  The critique of the term and its usefulness and applicability is well underway (and was nearly instantaneous); nevertheless it seems to have hung around for more than 15 minutes -- almost a year.  While it originated in the context of instructional technology and a rage against the Blackboard machine, it surely has implications that go beyond the world of the web to capture a growing spirit or willingness to bring .  So perhaps it might be useful to tug at the term and its implications some more and to see how it might fit into a broader cultural context.

I have a passing interest in the place of punk in a broader cultural and academic discourse.  A colleague and I have explored the place of a punk "mentality" or even "methodology" in archaeology.  In the context of EduPunk, the conversation centered on the DIY movement as a form of resistance to the increasing commodification of educational technology (read: Blackboard).  In my little writings, I've emphasized punk as a contextual movement with deep (and ironic) nostalgic strains.

Through an explicit sense of place, punk sought to bridge the growing gap between suburban culture (the garage of the garage band) and the spirit of alienation eating away at the urban center.  The reverse migration of punk rockers from the suburbs or at least the periphery of the city inward toward the urban core (and its values good and bad) sought to reverse the flow of the middle class from the city.  At the same time, punk played with place on the small scale -- the Velvet Underground's famed early show at the New York State Psychiatry convention or the Cramps show at the California State Mental Hospital or the ironic name of CBGBs.  The idea of EduPunk immediately brought to mind the classroom as the place for education and the idea of bringing a punk attitude toward the classroom environment: pushing students to confront the arbitrary nature of so many classroom practices, their power relationships, and the tradition bound conventions (little desks all in a row).  Of course, the students would replace them with their own (equally if not more arbitrary) relationships, but by doing so they'd get it.  They'd understand that these rules are (in many if not all cases) meaningless.

Punk is also nostalgic.  Punk music conspicuously included fragments of the past.  While they would distort these fragments and maybe even ridicule the sensibilities that produced them, but they would preserve and transmit these fragments of the past to ensure (almost dialectically) that their music is in a conspicuous dialogue with popular sensibilities.  The challenge of punk rock is explicit and direct.

So how do these ideas fit into an approach to education that goes beyond being frustrated by the hype-capitalism (and intellectual imperialism) of Blackboard or other for-profit learning management systems?  The grounds for the challenge shifts from a system like Blackboard which can clearly be identified as the enemy to the much more ambiguous, widely respected, and (frankly) powerful, institutions of (higher) learning.  Punk never succeeded in tearing down society or any particular institution or even shattering the assumptions of rock music (although Mike Caufield's claim that punk had "surprising little social impact" is perhaps overstated or at very least requires some qualification; after all, punk has been commodified (an unlikely scenario if it had no value within the capitalist system) and made into a pseudo-ideology that works as a tonic to the predictable angst of adolescence (or or the chronically alienated).).   Punk represented a persistent challenge that consistently attacked the received wisdom through performative, theatrical gesture as it ignored best practice and defying aesthetic logic.

EduPunk could also mean: leading a seminar in an auditorium room of 150, lecturing to a class of 4, grading the class as a group and ignoring the individual, beginning in the middle, changing expectations mid course, and in the words of Andy Warhol (one of the great promoters of punk) "Always leave them wanting less".

For another view on Edupunk see Crystal Alberts post over at Teaching Thursday!

EduPunk Preview

Edupunk, a term coined by Jim Groom of Mary Washington University, in an important blog post last May has once again hit the internets.  A recent debate sponsored by Gerry Bayne, one of the big wigs at Educause, has centered on the merits of this term for how we think about the changing landscape of university education.  Since its introduction last spring, the notion of Edupunk has swept through the blogosphere and print media while cleverly avoiding definition, complete disclosure, or sustained interrogation.  Of course, when EduPunk hit the scene, some of us had already been tempted into the punk metaphor.  Kostis Kourelis posted his now famous Punk Archaeology blog post in mid-February of last year and our ongoing efforts have touched upon some of the intersections -- both intellectual and spontaneous -- between punk rock and archaeology. 

I am still mulling over Edupunk, but I've posted the five part YouTube video debate over at our Teaching Thursday blog.  Check back there on Thursday to see the musings of Crystal Alberts on the video debate and EduPunk as a "movement" (or "project") more broadly. 

Four Miniposts on a disjointed Tuesday

I usually wake up, become oriented, and think about what I will do and blog about for the day.  This morning, I slipped into some kind of overload.  I could not put together a coherent blog post, plan for the day, or strategy for the week.  This semester has presented me with a whole series of mini-tasks.  None takes more than a day or two and none provides any sense of accomplishment. 

So, in the spirit of the mini-task, I offer four mini-posts:

1. Video and the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  So what would happen if we distributed 5 simple HD cameras to folks on PKAP this summer.  They were told to video anything of interest to them and at the end of each day, we downloaded the video onto a hard drive and marked with the individual's name.  On the return to the US we turned it all over to another group of students, faculty, folks, people, scholars, whoever, and asked them to produce a mash-up, narrative, montage, or whatever.  What would we learn?  What would we see?  Who would be the author? Most importantly, what would this exercise or experiment tell us about the experience of archaeology on Cyprus with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project?

2. Military History in Murfreesboro.  In April, I am going to the Society for Military History's Annual Meeting in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  I was invited to comment on papers offered by a group of graduate students from Penn State on topics related to archaeology and the Battle of Issus where Alexander first defeated the Persian King Darius III.  This is pretty far from my comfort zone, although I did write my M.A. Thesis on Alexander the Great and I have worked on Hellenistic fortifications.  I have to be honest when I say that I am a bit nervous about this, but the idea of the archaeology of ancient battlefields, has begun to intrigue me.  The most recent wave of intensive pedestrian survey archaeology has done little to clarify the topography of battle in the ancient world, and, in this regard, stands in contrast to its predecessor -- extensive survey, which often sought to localize ancient battles within the modern topography.  So, I think that I will be able to say something...

3. Cyberpunk Space and Archaeology.  This is a tiny post for our Punk Archaeology project.  I had a habit of reading William Gibson on flights to conduct archaeological work in Greece and Cyprus.  Gibson was among the founders of the Cyberpunk movement and many of his books are characterized by vivid "post-urban" landscapes.  While all his books work at the intersection of material culture, punk, and identity, his Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties) was the first to draw me in -- if for no other reason than one of the books was titled All Tomorrow's Parties and any book with a title from a Velvet Underground song deserves to be read.  One of the key settings in these works (which I have not read for at least 5 years) is Bay Bridge in San Francisco which after being damaged in an earthquake became an interstitial settlement.  Spolia, the re-use of urban space, cultural and political dystopia, and the shadow of natural disasters evoke themes common to literature on Late Antique archaeology. 

4. An Encyclopedia of Baptisteries.  I've recently returned to thinking about Early Christian baptisteries. Hopefully I will have a few early drafts of encyclopedia type entries done in the next week or so. As I write these relatively short entries, I've had to think about what to include and exclude in each and who my audience will be.  It reminded me of site reports from my time at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.  Do I  include dimensions?  Do I include scholarly debates?  How much bibliography should I include?  Should I interpret as much as I describe?  More?

So, four mini posts for the day.