The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Blog Carnival

As many of my regular readers know, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has experimented with using the "New Media" to expand the accessibility of our fieldwork on Cyprus.  In particular we've used video and blogs to introduce our project, its participants, and our site to the wider community both on Cyprus and around the world.

This year we are planning the most ambitious project yet.  In terms of archaeology, we are planning to both survey and excavate as well as continuing our geophysical work, creating high-resolution maps of the entire site, and completing the documentation of the material collected during last year's fieldwork.  The team will be larger than ever before and at most times this season we will average more than twenty people ranging from faculty with extensive fieldwork experiments to the least experienced undergraduate volunteers. 

The experiences of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Team will appear on the internet with an unprecedented degree of transparency.  PKAP is planning an almost continuous blog carnival documenting the various perspectives on the the project.  To do this we have set up three new blogs where we hope to be almost continuous activity. 

The Pyla-Koutsopetria Season Staff Blog will document the reflections of the PKAP staff including the project's directors, Scott Moore and David Pettegrew, the field director Dimitri Nakassis, our prehistoric specialist, Michael Brown, our registrars, Susie Caraher and Katie Pettegrew, and our camp manager Brett Weber. 

The Pyla-Koutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives Blog began last year and this year will continue to provide a venue for the reflections of our graduate students: Brandon Olson, from Penn State, Chris Gust, from the University of North Dakota, Dallas DeForest, from Ohio State, and Mat Dalton, our illustrator and leader of the survey team.  This group has already begun to blog on their experiences as they prepare for our field season!

The Pyla-Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives Blog is a new feature for this year.  It will feature undergraduates from Messiah College and Indiana University of Pennsylvania blogging on all aspects of the project. 

So follow one or all of these blogs over the next six weeks and share with us the excitement, tedium, frustration, and comradery of an archaeological project.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some quicker quick hits:

• Cyril Mango's lecture, "Imaging Constantinople", here in Athens was very well-attended.  Cotsen Hall was packed!  He imagined Middle Byzantine Constantinople to be much less monumental than the Constantinople of Justinian's time.  Sounds like discontinuity...
• The symposium celebrating Mango's 80th birthday picked up on some of these themes particularly Anne McCabe's discussion of the Byzantine remains from the Athenian Agora.  Of particular notes was Erkki Sironen's discussion of verse inscriptions from the Late Antique and Early Byzantine period in Athens.  His volume of Inscriptiones Graecae is to appear by the end of this year and will supercede his presently invaluable Helsinki dissertation: The late Roman and early Byzantine inscriptions of Athens and Attica.
• An interesting preview of the new Acropolis Museum done on the BBC.  Word on the street here is that none of the considerable remains of the Christian Parthenon will be displayed inside the new museum including the considerable and important fragments of the church's ambo.  This seems hard to believe as it represents such an important piece in any argument for the continuity of Greek culture from antiquity through Christian times.  It is particularly surprising since there is so much interest at present in Hellenism in Byzantium (e.g. see "A Heretical (Orthodox) History of the Parthenon" as a preview of Kaldellis forthcoming book: The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)., also Writing off the Wall: Transcription as Resistance).
• IV International Cyprological Congress was two weeks ago in Nicosia.  I forgot the blog about it!  I did not attend, but everyone who did has reported that is was both well-organized and intellectually productive.  Here's a link to the program and abstracts.

Two random links:

• I am looking forward to reading newly released The Programming Historian by William J. Turkel & Alan MacEachern.
• And I enjoyed Natalie Zemon Davis's reading of Michel de Certeau in the New York Review of books, "The Quest of Michel de Certeau".

PKAP Site Visits

One week before I leave for Cyprus and I am beginning to prepare for the upcoming season in earnest now.  In particular, I've been preparing material for our site visits with students.

Site visits are an integral part of our season at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  Visiting a while range of archaeological sites -- from prehistoric to modern -- helps familiarize the students with the impressive array of archaeological material present on the island and often begins the process of creating a body of comparanda (objects of comparison) for helping us to understand our site.  We also work with the students on how to "read" an archaeological site and encourage them to formulate and address questions that put the site into a historical, archaeological, and environmental context.  This can be a bit tricky, of course, as the student volunteers on PKAP range from relatively experienced archaeologists to almost totally inexperienced undergraduates.  So, we attempt to frame our site visits in a way that will appeal to the entire range of students.  (You can see more about our site visits in the Emerging Cypriot short entitled "Sightseeing")

This year in order to focus our discussion of the various sites that we will visit, we're including three "site visit questions" on our handouts.  I've been working on them this week and include a sampling here (type-os and all!):

Paphos Site Visit Questions

1) Mosaic floors are an important, if complex, source for the cultural history of the Eastern Mediterranean. What do these floors tell us about the people who lived and visited these fancy buildings?

2) Scholars have long sought to understand the use of rooms in houses as a key to understanding social organization. In Paphos, you can see several relatively well-preserved examples of Roman and Late Roman domestic space. What conclusions can you draw regarding the function of houses in the Roman and Late Roman period? What arguments can you make regarding the function of particular rooms in these houses?

3) The site of Paphos was an important place on the island of Cyprus for over 1000 years. What made this site so important? What advantages did it have compared to other sites on the island? In what ways was it similar to other Hellenistic and Roman sites on Cyprus?

Ay. Neophytos Site Visit Questions:

1) Examine the various phases of wall painting in the Enkleistra. What are the basic differences between earlier and later wall painting?

2) What are the major themes in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine wall painting? What is the significance of these themes in their architectural context? Can you recognize any pattern? What is the goal of Byzantine wall painting?

2) The Enkleistra represents an extreme in the practices of Byzantine monasticism. What does such an extreme say about the values of this strain of Byzantine Christianity? Ay. Neophytos became a popular figure even during his lifetime. What does it say about the values 12th and 13th century society in Cyprus society more broadly?

Ay. Georgios Site Visit Questions

1) The excavated churches at Ay. Georgios are the most impressive remains from the site. What can these buildings tell us about the other, unexcavated, components of the settlement at this site?

2) Unlike many larger sites where the urban centers have been excavated, only a small part of the remains have been excavated at Ay. Georgios. Looking at the remains present around the large Basilica A, what are the potential functions of these spaces? How do they relate both spatially and functionally to the Basilica?

3) Compare the topography and remains at Ay. Georgios to the site at Pyla-Koutsopetria. How are these sites similar? How are they different?

Kourion Site Visit Questions

1) At Kourion you can get a clear sense of the urban area of a Roman site and at least some idea of how it developed over time. What kinds of buildings clustered around the main forum? What do these buildings have in common and what does it say about the site through antiquity?

2) As a coastal site it has certain similarities to other coastal sites that we have (and will) visit including (albeit distantly) Pyla-Koutsopetria. What the similarities and differences between the site of Kourion and others that we know? How does this make it unique? Can we generalize about coastal sites on Cyprus?

3) The House of the Gladiators and the House of Eustolios represent another pair of Roman houses on Cyprus. Like at Paphos, these houses can tell us some thing about both their owners and what Roman Cypriots regarded as important. Produce an informal list of the things common to these houses. How are they different from the way modern Americans decorate their homes?

Amathus Site Visit Questions

1) Like Kourion, Amathus features a well-preserved paved forum/agora area surrounded by public structures. Judging from the preserved remains at the site, what features are the most commonly encountered in the public space of the city?

2) The sanctuary on the acropolis is one of the rare sites on Cyprus where the pagan and Christian sanctuaries are directly superimposed upon one another. How did the Early Christian basilica incorporate or erase the earlier sanctuary? What does this tell us about Cypriot Christianity at Amathus and specifically on the acropolis there?

3) The site of Amathus was situated to take advantage of several natural features. How did the residents of the site shape their environment to take the best advantage of the natural landscape and resources?

Angeloktiste Site Visit Questions

1) Walking around the outside of this church, how can you tell the different phases of construction? How many phases can you recognize? Can you assign them dates relative to one another – earliest to most recent?

2) The apse mosaic is particularly important in the history of Byzantine art. How is it similar to other mosaics that we have seen from a slightly earlier period (e.g. Paphos or Kourion)? How is it different?

3) The church at Kiti stands amidst a modern village. What does its existence say about this area in antiquity and after?

Zygi Site Visit Questions

1) The site of Zygi appears along an otherwise unexceptional stretch of Cypriot coastline. What environmental advantages does the site of Zygi have? Why would there be a coastal site here?

2) The nature of Zygi-Petrini as a “self-excavating sites” provides an profile view of an abandoned site and a window into the site’s stratigraphy. What can we say about the processes that created the site? Are their specific events that appear in the archaeological remains that are invisible in thoroughly excavated and cleaned sites?

3) The modern village of Zygi provides an intriguing point of comparison for the nearby ancient site. How does one go about comparing ancient and modern sites on Cyprus? What historical events must a scholar recognize in order to make valid or useful comparisons?

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

A rather short and whimsical Friday Varia and Quick hits today:

• Tucked away in a further recess of the World Wide Net Web is John Wortley's A Repertoire of Byzantine "Beneficial Tales".  It's a massive compilation of summaries of the short beneficial tales that we so popular in Late Antique and Byzantine times.  It has various indices, bibliography, and a nice introduction to the genre.  It's all text file so that the summaries can be searched through your browser.
• Scott Moore at Ancient History Ramblings has posted a link to a Reuters story about the severe draught on Cyprus.  Water rationing is never good. 
• I received a flyer the other day about Midwest Medieval History Conference which will be held at Dennison University on October 3 and 4.  Of particular note: "Graduate students are encouraged to submit proposals, and those presenting will receive a $100 honorarium."  What a nice encouragement for graduate student participation!  If you need more encouragement, Dennison will be absolutely lovely that time of year.  Watching a Division III football game at Deeds Field-Piper Stadium is one of life simple pleasures.  In October the lowset stadium would just begin to be surrounded by fall colors.  Unfortunately the Big Red is away that weekend so you'd have to content yourself with the conference.  Alas.
• Rumor has it that there will be a little symposium on Byzantine Athens here at the American School next Wednesday, perhaps at the Gennadius Library, in honor of Cyril Mango's lecture, Imagining Constantinople, the day before.  Oddly there is no mention of it on the School's fancy-pants web page, so it might be a secret.
• Mary Beard has posted on 10 Excellent Blogs. 
• PhDiva is back.  It's a great blog.  Here's a simply brilliant post (among many): The Rules of The Blog; it includes one of my favorite rules:

"Feel free to email me – you’ll generally get a reply. But please do not confuse friendliness with romance or anything else – a few too many people have recently. I also have a habit of blocking addresses if men are either too rude or amorous."

Needless to say, I have decided to implement the exact same policy.  Since I've started this blog, I have become irresistible.  I've recently had to block my wife's email address. 

All teasing aside, it is a very good blog even if you don't know what a Givenchy dress is.

The Final Episode: A Note About Survey

The final installment of Emerging Cypriot is now available.  This episodes is a particularly fitting way to conclude the documentary as it shows off the one aspect of archaeological fieldwork that sometimes gets lost in our sober assessments of the process.  Archaeology is fun. 

So, as the 2008 field season for the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project bears down on us with all of its attendant stresses, it is really nice for us to remember (and share!) how fun and entertaining and wacky most archaeological projects and experiences are.  The discipline brings together a range of folks with different interests and personalities. From the fastidious an detail oriented ceramicists, to the procedural and methodological rigor of the field director, the big picture sensibilities of the project directors, and the various types of personalities present among the fieldwalkers, field projects depend on the sense of humor of everyone involved to keep from descending into interpersonal chaos.

The music for this final section comes compliments of Brice Pearce (for more of his music see his band Drake's Folly on Myspace) who is a Graduate Student in History at the University of New Hampshire and dutifully walked fields for us as a graduate student volunteer in 2007. 

Thanks to all the folks who cooperated to make this film happen, particularly the good spirited PKAP volunteers and staff.  Special mention goes to University of North Dakota's Office of University Relations, and Indiana University of Pennsylvania who provided funding and support.  Joe Patrow is the director.  Scott Moore, PatrowVisual, and I produced the film.  Fieldwork on Cyprus was done with the permission of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities with the cooperation and support of the British Ministry of Defense and the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum.  The PKAP/UND Mediterranean Archaeology t-shirts were provided by College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Dakota. 

A few technical notes
The video is all in QuickTime which you will need to download to watch it.  If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.  When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.  We'll add a short a week.  I borrowed the idea for this format from a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  The center square in the last row is a link to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.

We have posted a particularly frank interview with the director of Emerging Cypriot and Survey on Cyprus, and you can read the commentaries on the first twelve shorts (with links to those shorts) below.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Reader for 2008

Each season we put together a short(ish) reader for the participants on Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  We include our publications on the site with some of the earlier work (generally in English because this reader is designed primarily for our undergraduate volunteers -- the best overview of work on our site prior to Maria Hadjicosti's excavations (reported in BCH 1994 and BCH 2000) is O. Masson, “Kypriaka II: Recherches sur les antiquités de la région de Pyla”, BCH 90 (1966), 1-21.).

The reports from the Director of Antiquities (entries 1 and 2) provide short summaries of fieldwork at Pyla-Koutsopetria and are basically English versions of what appears in the BCH. Entries 3-5 represent our contributions to the study of our area (a similar sample of material can be found on the project's webpage).  Entry 6, Rautman's "Busy Countryside" is the best single source overview of non-urban sites on Cyprus during the Late Roman Period. The phrase, "Busy Countryside" has become a bit of a rallying cry among scholars (for "scholars" read: David Pettegrew) interested in the complex phenomena taking place in the Late Antique countryside across the Eastern Mediterranean (see, for example, D. Pettegrew, "The Busy Countryside of Late Roman Corinth: Interpreting Ceramic Data Produced by Regional Archaeological Survey," Hesperia 76: 743-84). Entries 7-9 contextualize the prehistoric work at Pyla-Kokkinokremos.  (And more on the prehistoric components of the project soon, I promise!)

In addition to the selection listed at the end of this post we include a Further Readings bibliography (which I have linked here) and recommend that our students pick up Tim Boatswain, A Traveller's History of Cyprus (Northampton, Mass 2005), which is not a perfect book, but does provide the most accessible (price wise and availability wise) short history of the island.

2008 Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Reader

1. D. Christou, “Excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria,” ARDA (1993).

2. P. Flourentzos, “Excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria,” ARDA (1999)

3. W. Caraher, R.S. Moore, D.K. Pettegrew, “Koutsopetria: Surveying a Harbor Town,” NEA. Forthcoming.

4. W. Caraher, R. S. Moore, J.S. Noller, D. K. Pettegrew, “The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: First Preliminary Report (2003-2004 Seasons),” RDAC (2005).

5. W. Caraher, R. S. Moore, J.S. Noller, D. K. Pettegrew, “The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: Second Preliminary Report (2005-2006 Seasons),” RDAC (2007).

6. M. Rautman, “The busy countryside of late Roman Cyprus,” RDAC (2000)

7. V. Karageorghis and M. Demas, Pyla-Kokkinokremos : a late 13th-century B.C. fortified settlement in Cyprus. (Nicosia 1984), excerpts.

8. M. Yon, & A.P. Childs, “Kition in the Tenth to Fourth  Centuries B.C.” BASOR 308 (1997).

9. S. Sherratt, “Sea Peoples and the Economic Structure of the   Late Second Millennium in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Seymour Gitin,  Amihai Mazar, and Ephraim Stern, eds. Mediterranean Peoples in Transition: Thirteenth to Early Tenth Centuries BCE. In Honor of  Professor Trude Dothan. (Jerusalem 1998).  

10. Further Reading

A Special Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Today is an important Friday for two reasons.  It's Good Friday in the Orthodox Church and it's Anzac Day in Australia, New Zealand, and a few other South Pacific countries.  I'll write about Holy Week tomorrow and Anzac Day at the end of the blog.

First some quick hits:

• I've linked to Archaeolog before, but another interesting post: The Other Acropolis Project by Yannis Hamilakis.  It introduces his newest web project: The Other Acropolis, a photoblog which aims "to produce a range of alternative media interventions which will take the iconic site of the Athenian Acropolis as their centre, their point of departure, or their target (in all senses of the word)."  It's run by The Other Acropolis Collective which includes, among others, Fotis Ifantidis who runs the super-hip (in a William Gibson way) Visualizing Neolithic blog.
• Over the Classics Journal Online Forum there is a noteworthy article: Daniel N. Erickson, “Practical Ways of Saving a Classics Program: A Report From the Front”, 103.3 (2008) 301–6.  Dan Erickson is my erstwhile colleague in the Language Department at UND and has given his passion to developing the Classics program there.  This short article sketches out the main outlines of the history of his work and gives us room for optimism!
• Brandon Olson, Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project veteran and UND History alumnus, gives a short summary of his recent paper at the CAMWS Annual Meeting on the inscribed sling pellets from Vigla. 
• Amanda Flaata gave an interesting Tea Talk on Meter (the Mother of the Gods) in Phrygia and Greece.  Among other things she mentioned how sanctuaries of Meter in Greece often included references to her sacred topography in Asia Minor.  In particular the cult in Greece sometime employed the names of mountains near sacred sites elsewhere to create a kind of imaginary topography.
• A couple of interesting links to scholars bridging the gap between the academy and "the real world".
  • Ohio State's Origins eHistory Project with an interesting article and podcast "(Fore)Closing on the American Dream" by Lawrence Bowdish
  • The North Dakota Humanities Council's blog Prairie Polis features a cool essay "What Are Free Markets For? Or, what should we think about before we think about voting?" by UND Philosophy Professor, Jack Russell Weinstein.

Anzac Day commemorates the role of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in the difficult and bloody Gallipoli Campaign of 1915.  The Australian War Memorial site has a nice web site explaining the ceremonies and commemorative aspects of the observance.  Cities and towns in Australia often hold ceremonies commemorating the exact moment of the Gallipoli landing (in Brisbane this was 04:28 (AEST); for photographs). Among the more interesting things is that the Gallipoli campaign forged a special relationship between Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey.  As early as 1934, Ataturk reassured Australians and New Zealanders with words now inscribed on the several monuments both at Gallipoli and elsewhere:

"Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well."

Another important part of Anzac day are Anzac Biscuits.  According to the story, Anzac Biscuits use Golden Syrup rather than eggs as a bonding agent so that the sweet treats would survive the long journey from Australia to Europe.  My wife and mother-in-law sent me a tin and in a faint way, re-performed the actions of families during World War I who sent biscuits to their loved ones serving in Europe.  A very tasty way to be made to feel part of an Australian family!

PKAP News: Where to Excavate in 2008

The big conversation over the last month among the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project staff is where exactly do we plan to excavate this summer. We've received generous permission from both the Cyprus Department of Antiquities and the British on whose base we will be digging, and we know in a general sense that we plan to place two trenches on the ridge of Vigla and two on the ridge of Kokkinokremos.  Beyond that, we have established three criteria that have influenced our decision making.  My interest is primarily centered on the trenches on Vigla, so I will focus on that part of the site.

1. Our primary goals for excavating on the ridge of Vigla are to ground truth our geophysical and intensive survey work conducted there in 2007.  This includes determining whether the structure revealed by our electrical resistivity is, in fact, an Early Christian basilica and to attempt to understand why the vast majority of pottery on the surface of the ridge is Hellenistic or slightly earlier rather than, say, contemporary with the possible basilica there and what appear to be Late Roman fortification walls. 

2. We have only asked to conduct limited soundings rather than a full scale excavation.  There are a few reasons for this.  First, it was clear that the Department of Antiquities would not approve our request to excavate unless it was within the parameters of the survey work that we have already conducted there (i.e. Point 1.).  We plan 2008 to be the end of the first phase of field work at Pyla-Koutsopetria and will work next year to move our results toward publication.  Finally, our project has generally been committed to low-impact archaeology and using non-invasive (and destructive) techniques to the extent that it is possible.  Limited soundings offer the best opportunity for gaining archaeological knowledge within the context defined by survey and geophysical work while preserving as much of the subsurface archaeological record as possible.  Consequently our plan is only to set in two trenches on Vigla (and two on the neighboring ridge of Kokkinokremos), and back fill at the conclusion of the field season.

3. From an architectural standpoint we would like to be able to estimate the overall size of the possible Early Christian basilica.  The eastern end of the building is secure as the apse appears clearly on our resistivity.  The south wall possibly north wall of the church is also relatively secure.  The only place that we have not been able to determine with absolute confidence is the wall of the narthex or western end.  So we would like to position our trenches to best be able to capture this part of the building with would allow us to estimate an overall length.

 

 
The Apse is the semicircular feature just right of center. 

An additional issue makes the matter of actually, physically placing the trenches a bit more of a challenge.  As you can see by the photo of the top of the Vigla ridge (below) there is nothing in the topography to help guide us.  Moreover, last year we did not have high resolution GPS units so the location of the geophysical transect (seen above) was established by a combination of old fashion surveying (over a rather dramatic change in elevation) and less accurate GPS coordinate (produced by a 2-3 m accuracy Trimble XH handheld GPS units).  If we plan for our soundings to be small -- as close to 2 m x 2 m (or 3 m x 3 m) as possible -- then it will be necessary to make sure that we have good control over the precise location of our geophysical units on the height of Vigla.  A small error in our planning this summer compounded by the 2-3 m margin of error inherent in our mapping techniques from last year could result in our trenches "missing" the apse of the church. 

 

Vigla

The result of all this is that we are going to re-do a single geophysical transect across the top of Vigla in order to secure the location of the eastern apse where we plan to place our first trench.  Since our geophysical transect from last year is accurate relative to itself we should then be able to locate on the ground a reasonable location for the second trench. 

The best case scenario is that our excavations of the apse provides some good chronological and stylistic information on the building there.  We also hope to successfully locate the southeastern corner of the church so that we can estimate the length and width of the building (churches are generally symmetrical east - west).  Finally, we hope that our two soundings hit some earlier stratified deposits that can shed light on the earlier chronology of the ridge and provide some clue as to why the survey discovered so much Hellenistic material on the ridge.

As you can see, planning for the 2008 field season is ramping up quickly.  Check back next week for more...

Episode 12: Sightseeing

Episode 12 of Emerging Cypriot is now posted!  It looks at sightseeing with students on Cyprus over the course of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  This aspect of the project is always a challenge.  We have three goals when we go to visit sites.  First, we try to teach the students how to read an archaeological site just as we would teach students how to read a text (for a longer discussion of this process see here).  This doesn't mean that we show the students the single authoritative meaning of the archaeological text, but rather ask pertinent questions about what they see.  Our goal with this is help them become more careful readers of our site while working in the field.  Our second goal is to give the students exposure to as many periods and places on the island as possible.  Consequently, our visits range from (as the short shows) sites of modern importance -- like the Ledra street wall between north and south Nicosia -- to the aceramic Neolithic site of Khirokitia with a hodgepodge of monasteries, Classical sites, Roman sites, Late Roman sites, and Frankish sites in between (David Terry, PKAP Alumnus, does a nice job introducing this period on the short) .  Finally, the goal is simply to give the students a break from the routine duties of archaeological work.  While site tours are exhausting for the PKAP staff (and the students too, I would guess!), they give the students a chance to use a different part of their brain for a day and talk and think about something just a bit different from daily tasks associated with archaeologcial work.

This year, we re-evaluated our regular site visit schedule.  While in the past we have generally added or dropped one or two sites from our circuit, we generally do it in a fairly impulsive way (hey! let's stop at this monastery!).  This year we went through our list of places visited and considered each one in turn.  So, we now have a list (Included at the end of the post!).  It is always a challenge to eliminate sites from our list and come up with at least some kind of informal criteria to determine which sites we will visit. 

Finally, in this short Joe Patrow captures the dizzying vacillations and juxtapositions on any project that includes students.  One minute you are encouraging the students to follow Christine Kondoleon's lead in understanding the social context for Roman period Cypriot mosaics floors.  The next moment we are looking away as one student removes splinters from another students feet (because she wore sandals to an ancient site!) or dealing with a case of severe sunburn! 

A few technical notes
The video is all in QuickTime which you will need to download to watch it.  If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.  When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.  We'll add a short a week.  I borrowed the idea for this format from a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  The center square in the last row is a link to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.

We have posted a particularly frank interview with the director of Emerging Cypriot and Survey on Cyprus, and you can read the commentaries on the first eleven shorts (with links to those shorts) below.

Here's our current list
Bolded sites are those that we consider indispensable (and initials afterward represent the votes of the directors)

The big 3 [DKP][RSM]
Paphos
Kourion
Amathous

Monasteries and the History of the Cypriot Church
Ay. Neophytos [RSM]
Kykkou
Stavrovouni

Churches of the Troodos
Ayios Ioannis Lambadistou [WRC][RSM]
Angeloktisti [DKP][RSM]
Hala Sultan Tekke [DKP][RSM]
Ay. Lazarus [DKP][RSM]
Pyrga
Ayios Irakleidios Monastery

Comparanda Type Sites:
Ziyi [WRC][RSM]
Panayia Ematousa
Ay. Georgios-Peyia [DKP][RSM]
Eastern Cyprus Coastal Sites [WRC]

Prehistoric Cyprus:
Khirokitia [DKP][RSM]
Kalavassos-Tenta
Lemba
Maa-Palaeokastro

Modern Sites
Famagusta Overlook [DKP]
Kokkinochorio Villages
Pyla Village [DKP]
Lefkara Village
Green Line in Nicosia [DKP][RSM]

Museums
Paphos Museum
Peirides [DKP][RSM]
Larnaka District Archaeological Museum [DKP][RSM]
Nicosia Museum [DKP][RSM]
Byzantine Icon Museum
Kykkos Museum
Limisol Museum
Polis Museum

Other Sites:
Tombs of the Kings [DKP]
Pyla Tomb [DKP][RSM]
Pyla Tower [DKP][RSM]
Kolossi Castle
Polis
Paliopaphos
Athienou
Idalion
Tamassos
Limassol

Episode 11: A Dip in the Sea

 Episode 11 of the Emerging Cypriot is now posted.  While the last few episodes have been technical and archaeological, this one provides a different view of an archaeological field project.  Many archaeological projects are based in the countryside, but the participant in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project live in the middle of the bustling city of Laranka.  Almost every year our project intersects with the week long summer festival called the Kataklysmos which celebrates both the Biblical Flood and Pentecost.  The festival involves everything from music concerts, to parades, to midway rides and games, to booths full of gadgets and toys which break almost before they leave the sellers hand. 

The festivities are a great opportunity to unwind after a long day in the museum and the field and give the students a chance to enjoy themselves.  Sometimes there are bumper car crashes and retaliatory "dips in the sea."  As with many forms of retaliation, there is almost inevitably some collateral damage in the process.  This short shows the lighter side of archaeological work.  Enjoy.

A few technical notes
The video is all in QuickTime which you will need to download to watch it.  If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.  When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.  We'll add a short a week.  I borrowed the idea for this format from a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  The center square in the last row is a link to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.

We have posted a particularly frank interview with the director of Emerging Cypriot and Survey on Cyprus, and you can read the commentaries on the first ten shorts (with links to those shorts) below.

More Large Site Survey

Boeotia is known as the home of Large Site or Urban Survey in Greece.  The work of the Cambridge-Bradford Boeotia Project in the 1970s and 1980s created some of the most significant methodological innovations in intensive survey in Greece by conducting not only some of the first "siteless" artifact level survey but also using intensive survey to document the urban areas of several important Boeotian urban sites. 

The recently published preliminary report of the Plataiai Research Project clearly works in this tradition (A. Konecny, R. T. Marchese, M. Boyd, V. Aravantinos, "Plataiai in Boiotia: A Preliminary Report on Geophysical and Field Surveys Conducted in 2002-2005," Hesperia 77 (2008), 43-71).  The site of Plataiai with its prominent acropolis and well-known circuit wall encompassed an area of over 80 ha in southern Boeotia. 

Their publication is particularly remarkable for its effective use of geophysical survey combining magnetometry and resistivity to produce a vivid map of the polis of Plataiai.  The intensive survey component of the project inspires a bit less confidence as its methods were less fully explained and the data it produced seemed to difficult to reconcile with the field procedures that they described.  They seem to have combined "the zigzag method" of walking across the site with random 1 m squares sampled to determine density and chronology of the various concentrations of artifacts.  As they say: 

"Sherd density was determined by a modified subjective approach since an absolute numeric counting of sherds per area was not possible. Density was determined by surveyors walking in a zigzag pattern across the sampled area. Concentrations of ceramic data and physical features were noted and discussed at the end of each transect.

Random 1 m squares were also selected in which to determine the density of sherds and other artifacts such as brick fragments, roof tiles, worked stone, and metal. Artifact concentrations were assigned to rough numerical categories ranging from 0 to 6, with 0 indicating a lack of artifactual material, 1 with 2–3 artifacts per m2, and 6 indicating more than 100 fragments of material per m2. (p. 44)"

It appears that this technique allowed them to make some quantitative assessments of the distribution of artifacts across the site, but it is perhaps not as comprehensive or intensive as most contemporary large site/urban surveys.  Nevertheless, this project managed to make some interesting arguments including that the site of Plataiai contracted during Late Roman times and continued to be occupied throughout the Medieval period.  The decrease in size of the nucleated settlement during Late Antiquity seems to be consistent with urban sites across Greece and may well represent a the adoption of a more dispersed settlement pattern that corresponds with increase in activity in the countryside.

This project marks one more example of the major increase in Large Site/Urban Survey in the Eastern Mediterranean and in Greece in particular.  I have discussed some of this before on this blog (Some Thoughts on Future of Survey Archaeology in Greece (and the Eastern Mediterranean).  In particular, I noted the recent publication of the Sikyon Survey Project (check out their impressive web page) another urban survey project (for discussion see: Recent Work on Survey Northeast Peloponnesus).  Recent publications and ongoing field work seems to suggest that we are entering an era of small-scale intensive survey in Greece, succumbing in Richard Blanton's words to "Mediterranean Myopia" (Blanton, "Mediterranean Myopia," Antiquity 75 (2001), 627-629).

In an oft-sited 1993 article by Stephen Dyson ("From New to New Age Archaeology: Archaeological Theory and Classical Archaeology-A 1990s Perspective," AJA 97 (1993), 195-206) he predicted the demise of large scale excavations in the Mediterranean:

"The center of the fieldwork tradition, based on the "big dig," is dying, the victim of the economic rise of Europe and the Mediterranean and the decline of the United States as an economic, political, social, and educational power. A few of the dinosaurs survive, sustained by national archaeological politics, private patronage, and archaeological nostalgia. This era of the Classical archaeological Cretaceous, however, is drawing to an end. We will probably see few, if any, new Sardis, Cosa, or Athenian Agora projects in the mega-dig tradition. (p.204)"

One wonders if the recent rise in small-scale intensive survey projects reflects the death of large scale regional survey for some of the same reasons.  Small scale intensive surveys can not only avoid the political, economic, and logistical problems associated with large regional projects (which are in many ways every bit as challenging as the "mega-digs"), but also avoid the interpretative difficulties that continue to bedevil the results of large scale regional projects.  As Robin Osborne noted in his survey of recent work in Greek Archaeology ("Greek Archaeology: A Survey of Recent Work," AJA 108 (2004), 87-102) for many large-scale regional survey projects the quantity of data collected has so far exceeded our ability to produce significant interpretations from it. 

In contrast, smaller scale large-site, like the work at Plataiai, Sikyon, and our work at Pyla-Koutsopetria in Cyprus have produced data sets that allow for a more comprehensive control over both archaeological and interpretative variables.  At the same time, the limited size of these projects coincides with more focused research questions and typically depend more heavily on earlier work to provide context for their results.  This requires a priori that the material from small-scale intensive surveys contribute to pre-existing debates and share common ground that it shares with other intensive surveys and excavations.

While large scale regional surveys will continue to produce valuable data and interpretation (as will "mega-digs"), in some ways their significance will continue to be judged against the both the time and resources invested and the optimism of the early days of survey archaeology.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some quicker quick hits:

• Two Talk Thursday.  The more I think about it, the more I think that the afternoon talks are the most valuable component to the program here at the American School.  Some people have complained that there are too many talks and when you have two, back-to-back in one afternoon there is a certain point to that.  On the other hand, the talks do allow you to engage with some of the newest and most exciting research in the archaeology of Greece.  I'd say that if you attended every Tea Talk, you'd walk away from the year with a fairly accurate image of the future of the discipline.  The graduate student paper in particular present a nice overview of the kind of material being studied, but (more importantly) the methods, theoretical models, and style that will come to influence the discipline in the near future.
  • Jamie Donati presented a thought provoking Tea Talk called: "Towards a (New) Agora: A Case Study of Three Peloponnesian Cities (Argos, Elis, and Corinth)."  We made a digital recording of it and hope to post it as a podcast over the weekend.  So stay tuned...
  • I survived my talk yesterday graciously hosted by the Gennadius Library in their Work-in-progress Seminar.  My paper was entitled "Some New Readings of Early Christian Architecture".  It was well attended and seemingly well received.
• The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project continues to plan their upcoming season.  We were pleased to receive permission from the company that manages the British Bases on Cyprus to conduct soundings on Vigal and Kokkinokremos this summer.  That was the last formal hurdle in our receiving permission to do fieldwork has been cleared.  We are now deeply involved in the discussion of where exactly to excavate on both sites.  Our survey and geophysical data have provided us with a rough idea of where to excavate, but the determining exactly where we should locate our modest soundings to achieve the best results is another matter entirely.  Our primary research concern it to test the results of our geophysical work and survey.  The garbled stratigraphy on Vigla -- where a surface assemblage biased very strongly toward the Hellenistic period overlies what appears to be a Christian basilica style church -- makes our trenches there particularly interesting both in terms of understanding the formation processes at play in the creation of the surface assemblage, and for refining our chronology for the whole range of past activity there.
• I have spent part of the last two summer normalizing the Isthmia context pottery data so that someday we can compare it with the data from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  Recently, Tim Gregory has posted many of the recent season reports from the Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia on line here: http://isthmia.osu.edu/reports.html. 
• If you are interested in the history of the archaeology of Cyprus you should definitely check out David Gill's History of the British School at Athens blog.  It includes some interesting bits of info on the BSA's role in the archaeology of the island.
• Two interesting pieces from Archaeolog:
• On the role of blogging in a regional archaeological project: Presentation of the creative, relativist and multicultural blog of the Neixón hillforts archaeological project (Galicia, Spain)
• Related to our Punk Archaeology Project (part 1, part 2, part 3): History on the Line, Davis Square
• Finally if you are a North Dakota reader you will certainly be interested in this talk:

  The University of North Dakota chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will host Dr. Roger Bagnall, Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University;4 p.m., Monday April 21, at the North Dakota Museum of Art. Bagnall is part of the visiting scholar program which invites distinguished scholars to visit 100 colleges and universities with chapters of Phi Beta Kappa.

  The topic for his discussion is "Excavating a Town in an Egyptian Oasis." Dr. Bagnall will describe recent discoveries at Amheida, a site in Dakhla Oasis in the western desert of Egypt with a history stretching from the third millennium BC to the late Roman period. He will describe the interplay of Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures in artifacts as humble as food remains or as artistic as mythological wall paintings for the late Roman period.

Episode 10: The Hole

Episode 10 of the Emerging Cypriot is now posted!  This Episode deals with one of the more intriguing features confronted by the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  The Hole is just that: a deep hole on the height of Vigla.  It seems almost certainly that this apparently natural feature functioned at least at some point as a cistern for the fortifications on Vigla (See Episode 8: Wall on Vigla).  Moreover, its location to the west of our proposed Early Christian basilica on this prominent coastal height (see the discussion surrounding Episode 9: Geophysical) would be consistent with the relationship between large cisterns and Early Christian basilicas elsewhere on the island (e.g. the basilica on the Acropolis of Amathous and the Extra Muros Basilica at Kourion; for a general discussion see: The Early Christian Ecclesiastical Architecture of Cyprus: First Impressions).  These cisterns were typically pre-existing features that are incorporated into the atrium areas of the church.  The best comparanda for our feature is probably the larger cistern on the Acropolis of Amathous which likely provided water for the sanctuary, fortifications, and later the church on that site.

From a methodological standpoint, exploring The Hole represents another way to gain knowledge of subsurface features!  In fact, it was probably the most exciting day of archaeology on the project last year.  We sent Michael Brown and Mat Dalton down in The Hole to check it out.  When I first told some colleagues that we were producing a documentary on our work in Cyprus, several responded incredulously, "Isn't survey archaeology... boring?"  Of course, I said "no" and pointed out that survey archaeology is often confused with excavation which is, in fact, boring.  (That's a joke. Maybe).  This short provides a good insight into how exciting survey archaeology can be and shows the point where routine fieldwork can capture just a bit of the spirit of Indiana Jones (for a good discussion of this see the recent blog post by Cornelius Holtorf at Archaeolog: Hero! Real archaeology and ”Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystall Skull).  While we didn't discover the Ark of the Covenant or The Crystal Skull (we also did not unleash a horrible curse on our project), we did contribute to our archaeological knowledge of the area.  

A few technical notes
The video is all in QuickTime which you will need to download to watch it.  If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.  When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.  We'll add a short a week.  I borrowed the idea for this format from a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  The center square in the last row is a link to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.

We have posted a particularly frank interview with the director of Emerging Cypriot and Survey on Cyprus, and you can read the commentaries on the first nine shorts (with links to those shorts) below.

Special Saturday Edition of Varia and Quick Hits

A Special Saturday Edition of Quick Hits and Varia.  There was too much excitement in my life this past week to include all the important stuff.  So I'll share some odds and ends here:

• Brandon Olson, an accomplished blogger, UND M.A., and PKAP veteran, continues to work on inscribed sling pellets from the site of Vigla and from across the Mediterranean more broadly.  His work on these enigmatic objects will contribute to his dissertation which is a larger study of military liturgy.  He presented a nice poster at Penn State's Graduate Exhibition where he is pursuing his Ph.D.
• A buddy sent me a copy of a story in the March Happer's Magazine entitled "Mississippi Drift: River Vagrants in the age of Wal-Mart".  The story talks about a planned trip by a group of modern "hobos" down the Mississippi on a homemade raft.  A bit of incidental detail might interest readers of this blog.  At one point the author mentions the sugar beet harvest in Grand Forks "which has become something of an annual pilgrimage for the punk traveler community.  From three weeks of driving forklifts or sorting beets on a conveyor belt, enough money could be earned to fund months of travel" (p. 56).  The NoDak angle reminded me of the body excavated from near the President's house at UND in the fall.  Former UND President Tom Clifford referred to an area adjacent to campus and the railroad tracks as a kind of "hobo jungle" during the 1930s.  It would appear that lure of seasonal labor continues to draw modern day "hobos" (albeit of the "punk traveler" variety) to Grand Forks.
• The University of North Dakota hosted the third annual Red River History Conference this past weekend. This is a graduate /undergraduate history conference started three years ago by members of the Phi Alpha Theta and the History M.A. Program.  Congratulations on keeping it going.  This year there were papers from UND, NDSU, Minnesota State University - Moorhead, Minot State, and Penn State and featured a keynote address by Claire Strom of NDSU at the North Dakota Museum of Art.  Check out the program here.
• It's rare that Grand Forks has as much excitement as it has had this past week.  First, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were both in Grand Forks last night stumping at the State Democratic-NPL Convention.  Next, the World Curling Championship is being held at the Ralph Engelstad Arena.  UND's hockey team is in the Frozen Four.  It may be too much for my little town to handle...
• Scott Moore offers a nice reminiscence of the "Early Days" of PKAP: PKAP Odds and Ends. 

A Junior Scholar with Data or On Being a Data Squirrel

Vigorous conversations on scholars and data continues:

Charles Watkinson: An Institutional Response to the Challenges of Digital Scholarship in Archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens,

The "drill down" dilemma. Why can't we link archaeological publication to the underlying data?, Only Panthers Share Archaeological Data

Sebastian Heath: Drilling Down (and Up)

Me: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and Its Data

Tom Elliot: Which archaeo-data-animal are you?

Eric Kansa: Archaeological Data Critters

One issue that caught my attention Charles Watkinson's suggestion that Only Panthers Share Archaeological Data.  He argues that senior scholars have the resources and the professional security to share data.  This is further supported by Eric Kansa who, while noting exceptions, suggests that junior scholars tend to be more risk adverse and therefore less willing to share data. 

Several other thoughts occurred to me as I slipped into idle speculation on why the squirrels, baby armadillos and raccoons (i.e. junior scholars like myself) have not en masse embraced digital data sharing.  On a very simple and obvious level, junior scholars tend not to have unfettered access to archaeological data.  We tend to collaborate with Panther-types who have varied attitudes toward sharing data.  The more people who have a vested interest in a particular set of data, the more difficult it tends to be to get them all to agree on anything regarding publication in electronic or even print form. 

That being said, I am not sure that we squirrels see data sharing per se as a risky proposition.  I seems that most junior scholar have come of age in an era where proprietary attitudes toward archaeological material are being challenged openly and widely.  In fact, from my perspective here in Greece, the dominant attitude among juniors scholars is frustration that archaeological data is not available.  One can only hope that this frustration will be a powerful impetus toward making archaeological material accessible to the scholarly community quickly and openly.

More significantly, I am not sure what the perceived risk about making one data available, say, online would be.  I suppose a publisher could reject a manuscript if the material was readily available online, but, then again, publishers are hardly banging down the door to publish raw archaeological data these days.  I suppose a scholar could use someone's data to challenge his or her conclusions.  In some ways, however, this is why you make data available in the first place and it hardly seems a likely occurrence at present.  From what I have seen scholars have barely started to use the available data that is now freely available and have not necessarily done it without the collaboration of the individuals who produced the data.  Even the most data-centric archaeologist recognizes that only certain kinds of archaeological knowledge can be made available, and it is generally that kind of material that can be tabulated, organized, and reproduced.  The valuable cognitive and phenomenological patterns, for example, that comprise an archaeological "sense of place" would form a kind of metadata that does not translate easily into print or digital media.

From my perspective, it remains the technical matters that prevents data being made regularly available.  These matters range from such issues as stable long-term electronic storage, to questions of format (which must be kept up to date), to creating a interface that would satisfy a potential end user.  The emergence of projects like Open Context and the work of the team at the American School will likely ameliorate some of the technical challenges related to sharing data electronically, but even then, the first wave of archaeological data going online must be an exercise in informed speculation in an effort to anticipate exactly what the scholarly community will find useful.  Making data available in a format that requires either a high degree of technical knowledge to study or in a way that does not reflect how a potential user thinks about the material is only a theoretical improvement on the current situation of data parochialism, not a practical one. 

Perhaps the greatest risk confronting the current generation of data-squirrels is the investment of time and energy into preparing data for digital publication without a complete understanding of our audience, the technological complexities, and the long-term implications.  The work of the Grey Panthers and their collaborators will certainly resolve many of these issues in the near future, but for now with all the other pressures of data collection (i.e. archaeological fieldwork), writing, and teaching, we can only do so much toward making our data publicly available electronically.  As someone committed to the concept, however, it is my hope that in the near future greater technical and financial resources will make it easier to do the right thing.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and Its Data

Charles Watkinson (An Institutional Response to the Challenges of Digital Scholarship in Archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, The "drill down" dilemma. Why can't we link archaeological publication to the underlying data?, Only Panthers Share Archaeological Data) and Sebastian Heath (Drilling Down (and Up)) have been engaged in an entertaining discussion regarding the future of digital repositories for archaeological data.  The discussion was vigorous and interesting for me and my collaborators at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) as we are beginning to look toward making our data available online.  In this spirit we have posted papers, our annual reports, video (Emerging Cypriot, Survey on Cyprus), maps backed by real data, and even some of our poster presentations.  We are even beginning to fool about with