The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Top Five Mistakes on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

As another field season comes to a close, it is useful to reflect back on some of our mistakes over the past few years.  I am pleased to say that no mistakes were so significant that archaeological information was lost.  On the other hand, most of these mistakes brought a certain amount of inconvenience to our seasons and set us back in time, energy, and sometimes other resources.

1. Not applying for a single, big grant. Over the past eight seasons, PKAP has been fortunate to be funded by a series of small to mid-sized grants.  The support of numerous organizations not only made our initial fieldwork possible, but also made it possible for us to take advantage of opportunities (like excavation and more robust remote sensing campaigns) that were not present at the project's onset, bring in collaborators from around the world, and to introduce over 50 students to field archaeology and the island of Cyprus. The downside of relying on small to mid-sized grants is that each fall became a frantic scramble for resources to fund the next season. Each spring, as we waited on the grants, became an exercise in speculative accounting as we produce multiple budgets and plans based on the possible level of funding provided by our outstanding grant applications.  Fortunately, we always received enough support to pursue our most optimistic plans, but the wait (particularly over the last few years as "changes" in the global economy made it difficult to predict funding levels) was excruciating.  Next time we conduct a multi-year archaeological project in the Mediterranean, we will make it contingent upon receiving a multi-year grant.

2. Messing with the Cypriot Bronze Age. While I am not a liberty to go into details about this mistake, I have learned that the Cypriot Bronze Age is not fun nor is it necessarily an open field for inquiry.  It seems best for specialists in Late Antiquity working on a largely historical site, to steer very clear of the Late Bronze Age and other messy pre-historic periods in Cyprus.

3. Identifying an Early Christian basilica on Vigla from resistivity results.  After conducting a substantial campaign of electrical resistivity survey in 2007, we concluded that an Early Christian basilica stood atop the coastal height of Vigla. In fact, our scrutiny of the architecture directed the location of our trenches in 2008.  It only took a few days of excavating to discover that the remains on Vigla were not associated with an Early Christian church, and moreover, were not monumental.  Now it appears that we have a Classical to Hellenistic fortified settlement on the height.  (For more on this, see here and here)

4. Flying PKAP Airship One on a windy day.

5. Conducting a study season without a registrar. At one point this year, I looked over the numerous scholars and students working on PKAP material and could see no order to the chaos.  In past years, our registrar has brought order to chaos and allowed for the smooth movement of material through processing and study.  This year, we proceeded without a registrar - a feat only attempted once before - and the results were terrifying.  Well-labeled (fortunately) artifacts everywhere, forms everywhere, well-labeled (phew!) pottery bags everywhere, scholars and specialists everywhere, and me frantically trying to keep up with various questions and requests on my lap top while attempting to analyze the data.  Fortunately, a long, hot, day in the museum last

There are some honorable mentions to this list: working on Cyprus in late July and August for one year, working on a site in the British Sovereign Area (paperwork on top of paperwork!), waiting for five years before discovering how useful a camp manager was to the project, and leaving too little time each season to wrap up all the odds and ends in a calm and collected way. 

Despite these mistakes, we are pleased with the results of our 8 years of relatively intensive field work and study.  We don't lose artifacts, we haven't lost a student (and have had remarkably few "problem" students), and we are well on our way to produce a monograph length study of our work. So, if I am lucky enough to embark on another project like PKAP, I can only hope that it turns out as well.

Near Disaster on PKAP Airship One

The chaotic second flight of PKAP Airship One has become an instant legend around these parts.

Contrary to what the manual says, we now know that the PKAP Airship One is capable of a 4g negative dive.  Scott Moore has documented it.  He'd tell you where it occurred, but it's classified and he'd have to kill you.  (If you don't know what I'm talking about ask somebody my age or Google "4g negative dive").

From blimp to page

An afternoon with the newest tool in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project arsenal, PKAP Airship One, produced a series of spectacular aerial photographs (the adventure of the airship was documented by Dallas Deforest here).

I did some quick, post-processing of the low-altitude aerial photographs, which I document below.  My main interest was transforming the aerial photographs into quick plan views.  I first georeferenced the image (and orthorectified them to compensate for any distortion) using a series of points acquired by GPS. 

I then sketched in the most visible features in the photograph in ArcGIS.  The final image is a drawing, base on the photo, prepared for ground-truthing this afternoon in the field.

 

Documenting the Damage

Over the last four or five years, we've witnessed first hand the work of looters on our site in Cyprus.  Their work with metal detectors has left pockmarked fields in their wake, and this past year they left a 2 m deep hole at the site of Vigla. 

The hole was probably not worth the looters efforts as all it did was expose a 2 m high stretch of fortification wall which I diligently worked with Dimitri Nakassis to document yesterday evening.

This sectional of wall is the best preserved stretch of the wall surrounding the height of Vigla.  Even more useful, it is the only stretch visible (for the moment at least) on the northern side of the height and confirmed our suspicions regarding the course of the wall in this area.  Unfortunately, its excavation by looters prevented us from retrieving any significant chronological data from the hole despite a few pieces of coarse ware scattered about inside the hole.

Cleaning Time

We finally have received permission from the British base to work out at our site. Since the students leave this coming weekend, this means re-prioritizing and frantic days of fieldwork.  One of the top priorities has been to clean up the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria so that we can complete the documentation of both our excavations and the architecture exposed by previous work on the site.

Cleaning a site involves removing invasive weeds, "winter wash" (that is dirt that has come into the site over the winter months), and trimming up the inevitable slumping of our once carefully cut scarps.  It's pretty tedious work, but since we've spent the previous two-and-a-half weeks in the museum, the students (and staff) attacked these jobs with extra energy.

 

 

We also lost the services of our hardworking cook today; Chester Beltowski left early this morning to return to Grand Forks.  This leaves us with a different cleaning situation...

 

Archaeology and the Tragedy of the Commons

One of the more intriguing conversations this summer has been regarding the role that the state, non-state institutions (foreign archaeological schools, national archaeological associations, et c.), and even funding agencies play in shaping the nature, extent, and character of archaeological fieldwork.  The delays in receiving permission to work on the British base (which, to be clear, has nothing to do with archaeological matters), has tried the patience of the team and forced us to adjust our fieldwork plans on an almost daily basis.

The question that I've been considering is what would happen if archaeologists were simply allowed dig or survey wherever they wanted.  If all constraints were removed, would we experience the archaeological equivalent of the tragedy of the commons?  In other words, how deep are our commitments to responsible archaeology outside of the structures of the community?

My experience on archaeological projects, including PKAP, suggests that there is a tendency for every individual and project to view their research as the most important.  This "selfish" tendency drives projects and individuals to prioritize their work over the work of others.  Most scholars understand their approaches, methods, research questions, and conclusions to be of great significance.  One result of this understanding is, in part, to prioritize fieldwork that will contribute to their work.

The tendency to privilege one's own research over others had tended to drive research projects to work up to any limits established by outside authorities.  In the Mediterranean, this generally involves the local state archaeological authorities and any international archaeological institutions involved in managing the work of foreign expeditions. In fact, these institutions largely grew up to control the archaeological work in an area.  On a micocosmic level, we constantly debate at PKAP the priorities of the project and the strategies of these largely friendly interactions involve project staff moving their research interests at the top of the list. 

The tendency to privilege one's own research interests on both the micro level (e.g. within a project) and at the macro level (among other projects) might well create conditions where the overall health of the field and the protection of the archaeological remains for future generations might not be a primary concern.  In a tragedy of the common scenario, the drive of individuals to survive or prosper leads to the destruction of community resources.  There is no reason to imagine that this would not occur in an archaeological context if forces did not exert influence.

Nicosia

I took my first trip to Northern Nicosia on Saturday, and my first stop was the 13th century Selimeye Mosque.  This imposing Gothic building was the cathedral of the Frankish bishop of Cyprus until being converted into a mosque in the 16th century at the time of the Ottoman conquest of the island.

It remains a dramatic example of the fusion of Frankish, Byzantine, and Turkish architecture.

We also managed to catch the Pope's motorcade and a quick glimpse of the holy head as he made his way to a meeting with the Archbishop of Cyprus.  The Pope's white hat stands out against the black garb of the Orthodox clergy in the second photograph.

The Future of Ancient History

The recent Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient History at Nottingham in the UK inspired vigorous and wide-ranging debate among the PKAP staff.  Tim Cornell's and Robin Osborne's perspectives were particularly provocative.

Here's a link to the meeting's site with embedded videos.

It's at least suggested viewing for any graduate students in ancient history.

Open Ended Learning in the Summer

One thing that I sometimes forget is that most of my learning has come not from structured classroom space with structured relationships to material and environment, clear learning outcomes, and rigid forms of assessment. Summer time provides the perfect time of year for such open-ended learning.  The relentless pressures of teaching and learning are relaxed, the weekly grind of meetings of subsides, and for those of us who do research or teach abroad, the scenery changes allowing for those dislocating moments which are so central to the uncanny experience associated with learning.

For students and faculty summer breaks can be akin to recess or playtime that some education critics see as particularly valuable as an opportunity to develop skill well-suited for real world engagement with the unfamiliar.  The challenge for me and our team, is how do we manage the unstructured environment especially when both students and faculty tend to understand learning most frequently within far more formal  conditions.

The greatest challenge to fostering informal and unstructured learning is in encouraging students to take full advantage of the unstructured opportunities, in allowing for the unpredictability and inefficiency of unstructured learning, and in designing assessment programs that can evaluate a wide range of possible outcomes. 

This summer, we've been waiting on a permit to conduct fieldwork and during this time we have had a diverse group of students washing pottery and biding their time with various small projects.  Our lack of fieldwork has removed one of the more easily assessed and focused aspects of the project's educational goals. In its place, I've advocated for a series of open ended learning events, which would force the students to engage with their environment (the city of Larnaka) or a set of archaeological artifacts (plow-zone pottery).

There has been some reluctance to let the students just roam free, however.  Moreover, there is persistent concern that students wouldn't "get" an assignment that was required, but at the same time had no goals beyond engagement. In fact, students are as conditioned to expect assignments with distinct, assessable learning goals.  This, obviously, is the cause of the most common student question in the classroom: "will this be on the test?"

The summer provides a chance for both faculty and students to shift expectations and to recognize the opportunities for productive learning outside the institutional constraints of regularized university life.  These opportunities, like recess or play time in younger children, can cultivate the sense of wonder, observation, and engagement.

Provisional Discard at the Larnaka Museum Apotheke

Due to a bit of a paperwork issue and a series of British holidays, we have not been able to get the students in our field should out to our site.  While there is plenty of work to do at the museum where we are gaining momentum in processing artifacts, we are still working to find ways to get our students to flex their fieldwork brain-muscles.  In other words, we hope to find ways to get the students to think archaeologically on a larger and more complex scale than the individual artifact. 

One of the suggestions that I made was that we could get the students working on the amazing assemblage of material present just outside the museum storerooms.  Unlike the "archaeological" material in the storerooms, the assemblage of stuff in the storage area's courtyard represents a whole range of storage and discard practices.  While documenting and studying the various objects, stored, and discarded used by the local archaeological establishment may seem to some (of my colleagues) as a classic example of busywork, I think that it would be a great exercise in archaeological description.

It also is an interesting opportunity to consider the remains of a wide range of archaeological and conservation practices.  As archaeology comes to play a more and more prominent role in the presentation and performance of the modern state, we have to assume an increasing amount of recovered archaeological material itself re-entering new archaeological contexts.