The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Teaching in the Sun: Revisiting the Study Tour

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday

Last month we were lucky enough to have the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Honors College World Tour 2009 visit us for 10 days in Cyprus.  Contrasting the approach used by this group to the approach used by the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project to a study tour/field school was quite useful.  In fact, it led to several productive conversations with IUP Economics Professor Nick Karatjes who asked whether there existed a body of discipline-specific scholarship on study tours and field schools.  I confessed that I did not know whether any existed, and this got me to thinking about what a scholarship of study tours or field schools would look like.  What would be the key issues to a discussion of study tours in the context of Mediterranean archaeology or of humanities based study tours more generally?

Thinking on the fly, I propose 3 issues that would be good starting points to a conversation about teaching in the sun:

1) Assessment. As with all things in the academy today, any conversation on teaching in the sun must begin and end with assessment.  How do we assess student learning in immersive environments? Unlike assessment in a classroom environment where many rubrics focus on what goes on within the limited confines of the classroom itself, assessing the success or failure of a field school or study tour must take into account all of the components under the direct control of the project supervisors.  Thus, any mode of assessment must take into consideration everything from the basic logistical details (food, accommodation, travel) to the more typical pedagogical components of the education experience.  The pedagogical experience expands from the laboratory like environment of the classroom to encompass the full range of student experiences. 

2) The Limits of Student Engagement.  As so much of the value of the study tour or field school is the potential for immersion in a unfamiliar place or engaging in the regular practical application of skills acquired either in the field or in the classroom.  Both the need to survive in a foreign country and the need to consistently perform tasks or demonstrate skills in a "real world" environment requires a degree of student engagement in excess of the typical course in the humanities.  The stakes can be higher too.  The failure of a student to perform a task correctly over the course of a field school could produce results that either undermine the goal of the team or invalidate research results.  The inability to deal with a foreign environment can cause a degree of mental discomfort that may exceed the discomfort produced in all but the most rigorous courses.  The key in aspect then in a scholarly engagement with study tours or field schools will be how to successfully engage the students in their skill building exercises and foreign environment both the maximize their experiences and to avoid difficult results.  At the same time, it is necessary to understand the background and potential of a group of students to determine the degree to which they are capable of engaging their surroundings.  Pushing a group of students to go beyond their comfort zone can be good, but going a step to far could have unfortunate results.

3) Structure and Chaos.  One of the key components of any study tour or field school is balancing organized or structured learning opportunities against unstructured opportunities for students to explore their surrounding and engage the local culture on their own terms.  On the one hand, living and working in a foreign country is a great opportunities for students to engage critically with everyday life in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, to simulate within more familiar surroundings (only abroad can going to the post office be an opportunity for cross-cultural critique).  Unstructured opportunities for engagement put greater pressure on the individual student to create a meaningful space for themselves within a foreign culture.  On the other hand, unstructured time requires the faculty to allow students to find their comfort zone even if that is not the exact type of engagement that faculty might wish for the students.  The more organized and structured the engagement with the foreign culture is, however, the more that the experience of living and working abroad is partitioned off into a specific place and orchestrated set of experiences.  Less structured time, however, runs the risk of allowing students to chose not to engage with the host community and, say, hide in their rooms or only engage aspects of the local culture that seem familiar.

I wrote the body of this blog post when in Cyprus and reflecting on it now, I think that the three issues broached here apply to some extent to teaching and assessing learning in a classroom environment as well -- except that when running a study tour or field school, these issues are pushed to the foreground as the instructor has far more control over the day-to-day life of the students than an instructor in a more traditional classroom setting.

The Varieties of Archaeological Experience

One of the recurring themes in this blog is an emphasis on the varieties of archaeological experience in a Mediterranean context (e.g.). Despite my insistence (primarily to myself) that different approaches to archaeological knowledge can exist concurrently and possess a kind of validity rooted in a particular cultural discourse, it is nevertheless difficult to put this kind of approach to archaeology into practice. It’s one thing to accept that different modern archaeological methods – say, intensive pedestrian survey, stratigraphic excavation, and remote sensing – can produce different results, but another thing to try to understand (and risk validating!) the cultural context for, say, metal detector looting.

This being said, by the end of our field season on Cyprus, we witnessed at least four different archaeological methods each with its own goals and contexts…

1) Stratigraphic Excavation.  This method of excavation has become the standard for academic excavations the world over.  Its basic premise lies in excavating according to depositional contexts typically evident by changes in soil type.  The goal is to associate the depositional process with the cultural material preserved in each stratigraphic layer.  This process melds the processes that create the archaeological environment with chronological and functional indicators of past human activities. This method for archaeological investigation is widely accepted that it can produce a kind arrogance in its practitioners that verges on colonial conceit. 

2) Non-Stratigraphic Excavation. The issue with stratigraphic excavation is that it can be very slow – especially with student excavators in complex environments. The complexity and slow pace of our excavation made it clear that we were not going to be able to answer some of our research questions. In particular, we were not going to be able to excavate deep enough to expose any of the Classical/Hellenistic phase to our settlement at Koutsopetria. At one point our collaborator within the Department of Antiquities suggested that we as “academic” archaeologist excavate too slowly and that we should make a deep, non-stratigraphic sounding to answer a specific research question. This evoked a rather strong negative reaction from many of the senior project staff and conjured up images of Schliemann’s Great Trench at Troy. On the other hand, the suggestion revealed an important distinction between the goals and methods of the state archaeological apparatus and an academic research project. The state, in its capacity as arbiter of official cultural values and “owner” of all archaeological material and sites had a particular right to approach excavation in a way that was inappropriate (at best) for a foreign archaeological mission whose right to excavate depended in part on their commitment to produce detailed documentation from the inherently destructive practice of archaeology.

3) Looting with Metal Detectors. This year, more than any other year in the past, the metal detector crowd was out in force across our entire research area. While we did not actually catch them in action, the divots left from their destructive shovel tests were evident across the entire site. Local informants and the Sovereign Base Area police told us that the metal detecting was organized and systematic at our site. The metal detecting team had a powerful metal detector that could find metal objects well below the plow zone. Apparently this more powerful type of metal detector is illegal (and it was illegal in any event to use it so close to a registered archaeological site), but the folks using it stationed look outs to keep them from being caught. At one point, a man who claimed to be a good kind of metal detector guy, talked with us about the bad kind of metal detector guys who were giving his hobby a bad name.

4) The Mist of the Past. We were also visited by a developer who grew up in the area. He was very keen to demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the local archaeological landscape and talked in some detail about the various local discoveries. He made a point of explaining how local people could detect archaeological sites by observing the way that the morning fog moved across the ground. The coastal position of our site ensures a consistent morning fog making it well suited this kind of remote sensing technique.  Moreover, the expertise necessary to detect the slight changes in the way that fog moved across the landscape required a training rooted in the social organization of the local community.  According our informant, this archaeological method passed down through families and carried with it a kind of distinct (and potentially secret) knowledge of the history of the area.

The four kinds of archaeological methods that we encountered this year on Cyprus reveal different methods for appropriating and making meaningful the archaeological landscape.  The overlapping techniques present in the reading of a single landscape (and revealed over the course of a single 4 week field season) was a great antidote to the exclusive, modernist perspectives offered by stratigraphic archaeology.  This is not to say that we'll unleash a cadre of metal detector wielding undergraduates across the site next summer, but rather to remind ourselves that our methods and the meaning that they project onto the research area represents only a small fraction of the archaeological "carrying capacity" of a particular place.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Blog Statistics

As we get ready to leave the island and shut down our empire of the new media for the season (although some new v-logs will appear on the PKAP YouTube channel), we thought we might report on some of the statistics for the blog.  This is largely in response to the most asked question: "do people actually read your postings?".  The answer is emphatically yes.  Here are the page views for the past month:

Archaeology of the Mediterranean World: 2061
Pyla-Koutsopetria Season Staff Blog: 1239
Pyla-Koutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives: 1551
Pyla-Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives: 1192

Total: 6043 page views

Thanks for reading!

Narrating Pyla-Koutsopetria

One of the simple pleasures of the end of fieldwork are the various papers that we write and the opportunity to present in narrative form the history of the site.  There is nothing particularly binding about the following narrative, nor is it even a working hypothesis, but a collection of potential interpretations in narrative form.  It sure beats the dry-as-bones digitalizing and number crunching that will be at the core of our more formal analysis!

By the later stages of the Late Bronze Age the various settlements in the area consolidated their population on the height of Pyla-Kokkinokremos.  Taking advantage of the imposing positions afforded by the coastal height of Kokkinokremos and the now-infilled harbor, this settlement must have controlled an impressive stretch of the coastline with views incorporating around the curving aspect of Larnaka bay.  This community comes to an abrupt end sometime around the year 1200 after existing for less than a century.  There is no real evidence of continuity between this community and later settlement in the area.  So, during the Archaic-Classical period it was probably a new population who established the small, fortified settlement on the height of Vigla surrounded by not insignificant shrines both inland and on the coastal zone.  By the Hellenistic period (4th-2nd century BC), it is possible that the small settlement on Vigla received a garrison perhaps of mercenaries funded by the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt who sought to hold fast to Cyprus and awarded the governors of the province the status of strategoi (or general) reflecting the military significance of their post.  The Roman conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean brought to an end the almost constant wars between the various successors of Alexander the Great and regional powers. This is likely revealed at our site by the gradual occupation of the coastal plain of Koutsopetria.  During Late Antiquity, or the Late Roman period, the coastal site of Koutsopetria reached its heyday. The substantial Early Christian basilica formed the western border of a prosperous coastal town. To the east of the church there appears to have been domestic space, but there are suggestions of another monumental building based on stray architectural fragments found during the survey. There is also evidence for what may have been modest harbor-side facilities.  Only recently have we discovered some faint traces of post-ancient occupation on the site. Our excavation has revealed a substantial post-ancient fill that preserved some pottery that we can tentatively date to the 10th-13th century. The fill was associated with a wall that seems to be a substantial, late refurbishment of the area near the basilica.  Later still, In the post-Medieval period there are only traces of activity across the site. There’s a rough wall that flanks the modern coastal road and the faint remains of a possible 19th century road running along a barely visible coastal ridge.

More PKAP Video on YouTube

Here are some more PKAP Video from our YouTube channel.  Check out the interview with our filmmaker Ian Ragsdale here.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Filmmaker Ian Ragsdale

Things are getting hectic here as PKAP heads into its final phases, so I'll let our resident documentary filmmaker provide some content.  Below is a short email interview with Ian Ragsdale.  I've asked him the same questions that I asked to Joe Patrow, our last documentary filmmaker, two years ago.  For that interview click here. 

What were your goals in shooting a documentary with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project?

As an aspiring archaeologist as well as a professional videographer, I arrived in Cyprus with a variety of goals.  My most basic goals are to provide PKAP with videos to increase the exposure of the project, its mission, and its directors.  It is my hope that these videos will assist PKAP to educate students as well as retain and attract new sources of funding.  Before I arrived, I honestly did not have clear concepts about what form such videos would take, but my goal now is to create short video posts covering the personal and archaeological experiences of members of the field team (already available online) and additionally make a 30 to 60 minute documentary about the archaeology of the project.  On a professional and academic level, this video project is a great way for me to show a diversity of filmmaking skills in a new environment and gain real archaeology field work experience.    This experience should also prove critical in my applications to graduate school.  On a personal level, the trip to Cyprus has been a refreshing break from a strenuous and chaotic freelance videography career.  I haven't been to Europe to shoot movies since 2003 and 2004, and it's been a wonderful and challenging opportunity.  As expecting parents, my wife, who is also here in Cyprus, and I are also happy that we've already taken our child on an international trip.  It sets a good precedent for the future!

How is your work different from PKAP’s earlier documentary work, namely Joe Patrow’s award-winning Survey on Cyprus and Emerging Cypriot, his series of shorts?
My work is different from Joe's in a few ways.  Most fundamentally, Joe worked with PKAP before the project undertook any excavations, so the work going on at the PKAP site has been incredibly different from what he captured on camera.  While artifact collection and processing has been similar, the simple fact that PKAP is now digging into the ground has given me a whole new category of field methods to cover. I've been able to build on Joe's work by covering a variety of field methods and other scenes non-existent at the PKAP site when Joe was last here.  As an aspiring archaeologist, I also have a different perspective on the work that PKAP is doing.  Although I am working on videos for the general public, I'm also trying to specifically reach the aspiring-archaeologist undergrad set with interviews and videos that address the questions and interests of someone curious about archaeology as a profession.  Since I am in that same place in my life, it's a great perspective for me to try and give others watching my videos.

Can you describe your relationship to the Project?

Although I have been brought to PKAP as a professional videographer, I feel like much more than a hired hand sent out to capture video of Mediterranean archaeology.  I'm living, eating, and riding bumper cars with field team members and sweating in the trenches excavating whenever I get the chance.  I've unearthed artifacts, measured ancient walls, and earned my blisters just like everyone else.  About the only thing that is different is every evening I go into my room and edit video, and occasionally I appear randomly with a camera and demand an interview.  Because I have four weeks here - three weeks of excavations and one week for interviews - I have been able to get all the footage I need while also getting some experience digging.  I must also say that the closeness that I feel to PKAP is not only because of my interest in the work going on here, but truly because of the warm reception I have received from the staff and the field team.  I can only hope that the PKAP directors don't mind me being chummy...

Did anything surprise you about working closely and being a member of the PKAP team?

It's a fairly stock response, but I didn't have too many preconceptions.  I've been on many group trips with close quarters, shared meals, and long hours, so I experienced no hardship in that sense.  One thing that has been interesting is that, as a filmmaker, I have been afforded the opportunity to constantly step back and "people-watch" at the PKAP site.  There are a great many wonderful individuals on the trip here, and together they have formed many strange and unique alliances and small-group cultures without developing cliques.  Moving from trench to trench across the site, I have been able to interact with all the workgroups and see their quirks and listen to their conversations.  I have been surprised and pleased at how much fun folks can have in 105 degree heat, no wind, engulfed in dust, and with no relief in site but a handful of pizza-flavored bagel chips at 5:00.

Do you feel that your presence and work on the project contributed to the project's overall goals?

It's been great to see the openness, on the part of the project's directors, to so-called "new media" interacting with archaeology. Only since the invention of YouTube is free bandwidth for video available to anyone to present their videos to the world, and PKAP is all about taking advantage of such tools.  I think that the final word about my impact on the project's goals will come several years down the road, as funding and other attention is directed towards the project via the videos.

What did you have to teach the archaeologists in order to make your work there successful?
I'm an extremely flexible filmmaker and I like to shoot with minimal impact on my subjects, so I didn't really have to fight anyone to conform to some Kubrick-esque demands in order to get a critical interview about a trowel.  I think the most important thing that a filmmaker can do is to instill confidence in his or her subjects so that they can feel comfortable letting the filmmaker, for instance, crawl over their newly-discovered antiquities trying to pull off a neat shot.  My work in the trenches really showed that I was serious about archaeology and would present both the work and the people faithfully.\

How much footage have you accumulated during your three weeks of shooting?
So far I've shot twelve hours, but I anticipate on shooting 18-20 hours total once I've completed the formal interviews next week.

How was the footage shot -- can you give us some technical specifications without being too technical?
I'm shooting with a Panasonic DVX100 miniDV camera, editing with Final Cut Pro, producing special effects using Motion, and creating original background music for the YouTube clips using Garage Band.  I always shoot with a polarizing filter on my camera, which is a filter that reduces glare from the sky, sea and other reflecting surfaces so that I can get nice shots of the blue sky over Cyprus.  This filter also protects my lens from dust and grit, which is a reality on an archaeological dig.  Whenever practical, I shoot with the camera on a tripod.  Shooting handheld makes it must faster to switch from shot to shot, and it is sometimes easier to pull off pans with just the hands, but having the camera on a tripod is extra insurance that my shot will be steady enough to use in the final product.

What will happen to the footage? Does it have archival value?
PKAP has already purchased an external hard drive that will hold this year's footage in a totally digital, versatile form, and which PKAP will keep for future use.  I believe that the interviews may hold some archival value, as they capture, in a nutshell, the perspectives of PKAP staff in 2009.  If the PKAP site ever undergoes full-scale excavation or even conversion to a tourist attraction, then the interviews could be an interesting feature of a visitor's center or excavation archives.

What are your future goals with the project?
As I begin graduate education in anthropology and archaeology, it would be wonderful to continue my association with the project as both a member of the field team and a filmmaker.  Right now though I'm really living in the moment, still trying to figure out what I'm going to shoot in the fifteen minutes following completion of this questionnaire.

What other projects are you working on now and how can we follow them?
In the past year I've shot documentaries on slow food, family farms, and Olympic gymnasts and have traveled to Tuscon, Philadelphia, and all over Texas for my work.  I'm based in Houston and my production company, Big Ape Productions has a website: www.bigapefilms.com.  The site is new, but we are updating it with content as fast as we can.

More Pyla-Koutsopetria on YouTube

Our resident filmmaker, Ian Ragsdale, has produced three more video log (vlog) shorts on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.  As the students prepare to return to the US leaving the trench supervisors and senior staff a hectic week of processing finds and rapping up final documentation, it seems fitting to begin with a video dedicated to the hard work and fun that our volunteers contributed to the project over the last month.

 

Dallas Deforest provides a nice insight into the background of a trench supervisor... we'll head out this morning to continue work on his trench which is now over 2 m below the surface!

Another perspective on life in a trench...

More to come soon!

The Last Week of PKAP Fieldwork in 2009

The entire Pyla Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is looking down the home stretch of the 2009 field season.  I find myself repeating in my head each morning: "if I can only make it through Friday, we'll be fine...".  Our enthusiastic group of student volunteers begin to leave on Sunday morning and the senior staff will shift their focus from the dirty work of excavation to the tidier work of producing final reports.  As part of the end-game process, the senior staff has met regularly to parse out our top priorities for the next 10 days on the island.  What absolutely has to get done before we leave?  We must process some of our finds -- especially those from secure or sensitive contexts, we must draw and photographs trenches before they are backfilled, and we must produce comprehensive reports on each area excavated. 

A few of our trenches still need considerable work to bring them to a successful conclusion.  One of the cruel realities of excavation is that the most sensitive contexts tend to appear at the end of the season.  At least three of our trenches -- one on Vigla, one in Koutsopetria, and one on Kokkinokremos -- are finishing up over the next few days with the most delicate kind of excavation.  Teams in each trench scrape down floors, carefully remove floor packing, or excavate foundation trenches related to significant walls in order to extract the chronologically significant ceramics to ensure the we do not contaminate the material in these contexts with material from other less secure layers.

I've both spent time in the trenches and digitizing trench plans to make sure that a digital plan exists for each excavated stratigraphic unit.  We've also begun to enter the ceramic data produced by Scott Moore in the museum into our finds database.  Entering data while in the field ensures that we can analyze results on the fly and produce a final report for the Department of Antiquities quickly and efficiently at the end of season.

So the blogging may slow down as we are faced with the frantic dash to the finish of the PKAP season, but fear not, we'll keep you in the loop.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the New Media

The short weekend has given us a chance to upload some of the most recent new media treatments of our work here in Cyprus. 

Our filmmaker, Ian Ragsdale, has released two short pieces chronicling life on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  The first two clips can be viewed on PKAP's new YouTube channel.  Ian's work has focused on the students so far and gives a great insight into how students and trench supervisors engage the work of archaeology.

 

We also have the second installment of our popular PKAP podcast series:

Week Two Podcasts:

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

Be sure to check out the Week 1 Series:

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

If you haven't checked out our photographer (and Artist-in-Residence) Ryan Stander's work, you are missing some great photographs.  Check them out both on his personal blog, Axis of Access, and on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives Blog.

And we haven't forgotten about the archaeology...

This week will be our most hectic so far.  Our goal is to bring at least 5 of our 6 trenches to completion before our hard-working group of student volunteers leave the field on Saturday.  We also have planned a half-day trip to Nicosia, our Bronze Age ceramicist, Mara Horowitz, will be arriving Wednesday, and we plan to push a last few trays of pottery collected in 2008 through preliminary analysis over the course of the next week.  We're all tired, but excited to bring our short and exceedingly intense field season to a close.  Keep reading our blog here and elsewhere.  To read about the latest goings-on keep visiting the PKAP blog aggregator.

And just in case you are not convinced that PKAP is awesome, check this out.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Podcasts

Here is one more installment of PKAP Podcasts:

Koutsopetria East Week 1 (Featuring P-Ferd)
Koutsopetria West Week 1

A more substantial blog post will come soon!  We are in full on working mode.

Do check out the work of our photographer Ryan Stander.  He's posting photographs on his excellent blog Axis of Access.