The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Thisve Basin, Archaeological Visualization, and Curating Digital Data

For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on preparing the data from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition (1979-1982) for re-analysis.  This is all working toward presenting an expanded interpretation of the results from this field work at a panel put together by Kostis Kourelis and Sharon Gerstel at the 2010 Archaeological Institute of American Annual Meeting.  The panel is called "First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites".  The site of Thisve is primarily known for its relatively well preserved Hellenistic fortification wall and substantial corpus of published Greek inscriptions.  My paper will focus on the surface remains from across the broader region with particular attention to Late Roman and later material (although the surface assemblage no matter how you excavate, is the first out.)

As of this weekend, I finished keying all the density data from the survey transects that can be reasonably mapped.  There were three or four transects which I've not been able to map in accurately in the GIS.  Despite this missing data, I think that the mapped transects reveal something about the distribution of ceramics across the plain south of the ancient city of Thisve (and the modern villages of Thisvi and Doubrovna). 

One of the interesting things is that this was not the first time that this data was mapped.  Three maps of the archaeological "topography" of Thisve appeared in T. Gregory, "Archaeological Explorations in the Thisbe Basin" in the Boeotia Antiqua II: Papers on Recent Work in Boiotian Archaeology and Epigraphy (Amsterdam 1992), pp. 17-34.  The OBE team plotted these maps using Surface II software against a digitized map of the Thisve plain.  Unfortunately, from what I can gather, this original map of the basin no longer exists.  So I've had to reconstruct the location of the transects from the notebooks in which the data was originally recorded. 

The comparison of these two images and the processes that created them is a nice, small case study both for archaeological visualization and for the curation of digital media.  I think that my more recent map of artifact densities and transect presents a more accurate picture of the distribution of ceramics across the landscape.  That being said, even my plan has generalized.  The samples from most of the individual survey units, mapped as squares in my plan, were taken from a 1 m sq area.  I've extrapolated them across the entire unit (i.e. the width of the transect x the sampling interval).  The lower images, generated by Surface II plotting, have simply extrapolated the density of artifacts across the entire Thisvi plain.  I suspect that the linear arrangement of survey units (an early form of the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project's "Souvlaki method" of surveying the landscape) exposed the distribution plots to various kinds of "edge effects" as the software was asked to extrapolate artifact densities farther and farther from known or established data points.  Moreover, the jagged abstraction of these figures makes it difficult to assign the surface densities to real space on the map (note the lack of scale or even a north arrow on figure 3.6!).

The disappearance of the Surface II data is another important issue.  While it is easy to criticize a project for failing to responsibly curate their data, in fact, the field notes books and survey sheets from the project are well-maintained and organized.  The maintenance of data produced over the course of secondary analysis is a challenge for a small project like the OBE which worked in the area for only three years and published their analysis and then dispersed.  Survey projects, in particular, suffer from rather ephemeral constitutions (as opposed to the usually more permanent relationship between excavators and a particular site).  If the relatively low impact of survey archaeology on the landscape tends to attenuate the link between the archaeologist and a particular place, then the combination of paper and high tech applications ranging from relational databases to GIS mapping applications adds a layer of complexity to curating the digital data that these projects produced.  In most cases, data was (and I'd argue still is) collected from the field in paper form and then keyed and plotted into digital databases of various descriptions.  So the digital data represents the first phase of analysis rather than a primary data collection.  Perhaps this is part of the reason for failing to maintain the digital data as carefully as the paper forms and notebooks.  In recent years, a more serious approach to the practices involved in curating digital data (and survey data more generally) will undoubtedly change future practices.  Hopefully our work with the data from Thisvi will represent an important case study for the curation of digital data in the context of re-analysis.

Reclaiming Thisve Data

Long time readers of this blog will remember that some very long time ago, I was working on digitizing and ultimately publishing the data from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition.  This was a very early "second generation" intensive, siteless pedestrian survey conducted around the ancient city of Thisve in Boeotia directed by Tim Gregory.  Recently Archie Dunn at the University of Birmingham began a new project there designed to document the Late Roman and Byzantine remains from the town.  He invited us to re-examine the survey data in the context of his new work with the hope of producing a more thorough publication of the O.B.E.'s work as well as to complement the more recent work both at Thisve and throughout Boeotia.

The Thisve basin

I started work on this project about two years ago in Athens, but quickly moved it to the back burner when I was confronted by very difficult mapping and digitization issues.  In short, I had a terrible time mapping into my GIS the transects that the O.B.E. walked in the landscape.  This was primarily because I was deferring to some published maps of the project's work.  I simply could not get my maps (based on some newly collected GPS data, the Greek Army Mapping Service 1:5000s, and augmented by Google Earth images) to coincide in any recognizable way with the published drawings of the survey area and the location of the sites.  As I returned to the data this fall -- in preparation for a paper at the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting -- I decided to scrap the published maps and attempt to build my own new map.  That was a much easier approach and quickly demonstrated that the published maps were, for lack of a better word, wrong. 

The other decision that I had to make was to accept that I would not be able to map some of the transects.  The recorded data was simply too flawed (and the equally, but differently flawed published maps did not help) to allow me to reconstruct all the transects that the O.B.E. surveyed.  This was disappointing, but also liberating as many of the project's transects digitize quite easily.

I also began to key the finds data from the project.  The density data, as shown in the image above, produces some recognizable trends.  Artifact densities appear to be higher in the immediately vicinity of local (and presumably ancient and Byzantine) villages, decline across the open agricultural plain, and pick up again along the southern boundary of the plain.  The reasons for this might be geomorphological.  There is evidence, in fact, for an ancient water management system in the plain which Pausanias described:

Paus. 9.32.3. Nothing would prevent the plain between the mountains becoming a lake owing to the volume of the water, had they not made a strong dyke right through it. So every other year they divert the water to the farther side of the dyke, and farm the other side. Thisbe, they say, was a nymph of the country, from whom the city has received its name.

So, it may be that the sediment from the flow of water through the plain was covered ceramic evidence there (although there is some evidence for ancient material in the Thisve plain).  It could also mean that this was largely agricultural ground and did not see the kinds of activities that deposited large quantities of ceramics.  The only problem with this is that the Cambridge/Bradford Boeotia Project which along with its various spin-offs has surveyed numerous cities in ancient Boeotia, has argued that fields around Boeotian cities were often filled with ancient ceramics deposited through the process of distributing manure in the fields nearest to the town.  A more sophisticated and careful comparison of the distribution of material outside of Thisve and outside of the neighboring city of Thespiae may shed some light on this practice.

More importantly, the quality of the finds data is actually quite good.  I am confident that digitizing the finds collected and analyzed by the O.B.E. will produce a nice corpus for comparison with other survey projects both in Boeotia and in the "suburbs" of other cities in Greece.  Over the next few weeks, I'll update my progress and analysis of this data more or less regularly.

The Medieval and Post Medieval Mediterranean at the 2010 Archaeological Institute of American Annual Meeting

We got the good news last week that the panel put together by Kostis Kourelis and Sharon Gerstel for the 2010 AIA Annual Meeting in Anaheim has been accepted.  The panel is titled First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites and will feature papers by Jack Davis, Kathleen Quinn, Anne McCabe, Adam Rabinowitz, Guy Sanders, and Tim Gregory and myself.  Here's a link to the abstracts and overview statement.

Tim Gregory and I plan to re-examine the data produced by the decades old Ohio Boeotia Project around the ancient city of Thisvi.  This survey data was initially analyzed in a series of publications in the 1980s.  Since that time, digital analysis tools have become considerably more powerful and there is a growing body of work in the region, particularly associated with the Cambridge Boeotia Project and its various spin-offs, that promises to add significance to any re-examination of the OBE results.  Returning to excavation and survey results -- so called legacy data -- has taken on new importance in recent years as excavation permits have become more difficult to acquire, a vigorous ethical discourse has put pressure on project directors to make unpublished finds available, and the digital archaeology "movement" has improved our ability to make published and unpublished data alike visible and accessible to the professional public.  A recent issue of the leading electronic journal in archaeology, Internet Archaeology, has dedicated an issue to the reanalysis of "legacy data" taking advantage of the intersection of digital distribution, new technologies, and the remarkable potential of the existing pool of archaeological data to inform contemporary research questions.  We hope our paper frames not only some of the methods and procedures at stake in the re-examination of survey data, but also makes the argument that this kind of secondary analysis marks the coming of age of intensive pedestrian survey.  It marks the potential of survey data to go beyond its applicability to narrowly defined research questions and to have the kind of enduring value that excavations have nurtured by long standing methods and carefully cultivated archival practices. 

Proving that survey data is available for re-analysis is absolutely critical for its persistence as an archaeological methodology in the Mediterranean.  And the recent transformation of post-Classical landscapes from spaces seen as stagnant and unchanging to dynamic "contingent" countrysides makes the study of the post-Classical world ideally suited as a test case.

Papers, Projects, and Perspectives for Next Year...

This fall I was invited to present my research on campus in the spring. The talk will be to a general audience and sponsored by the Graduate School here at the University of North Dakota. There are relatively few opportunities for junior faculty to present their research on campus, so it's an exciting opportunity, but I need to come up with a topic.  The process of thinking about a topic gave me a chance to reflect on my ongoing research and try to find a way to bring together my various interests or at least prioritize my research so that I can have a productive spring.

So, my research agenda in no particular order...

1. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  As any reader of this blog would know, I co-direct the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  I am quickly learning that an archaeological project will expand to fill any time left unoccupied by other research or teaching demands (and it will often try to bully those projects to the sideline as well!).  That being said, the project also provides any number of opportunities for productive and interesting digressions ranging from methodologies, to general considerations of Cyprus in Roman Antiquity to more focused studies on Late Roman trade, ecclesiastical architecture, and the history of ancient Kition.  Moreover, my experiments with video, podcasts, and blogs have formed the basis for emerging ideas about narrative, archaeology, and the new media.  This would certainly be the most entertaining project to present to a general audience in that it could be rooted in narrative and include photos, videos, and even audio clips.

2. Early Christian Architecture in Greece.  I spent a good part of the last two years wrestling with my long moldering dissertation manuscript.  I have presented various fragments of it over the past few years to generally positive results, but as I spin parts off from it, the entire project begins to lose its conceptual cohesion.  Despite its conceptual fragmentation, I am working on a rather lengthy article which explores the role of churches in the process of Christianization in Greece.  I have posted versions of this work on this blog.  My most recent work has emphasized the role of churches as dynamic, hybrid space that served as a place of convergence for the many interests at play within Late Antique Greek society.  This work seeks to undermine the singular, hegemonic church so often portrayed in literary sources of the period and replace it with a more fluid institution which embraced ambiguity in its efforts to translate a universalizing discourse on a local level.

3. Dreams, Inventio, and the Memory of Early Christianity.  This project complements project 2 in looking at the remains of the Early Christian architecture in the archaeological record of Byzantine and post-Byzantine times.  I hold out the hope that I can somehow bring this project and project 2 together in a cohesive book manuscript.  I presented some of this research for the first time this fall at North Dakota State University and received some valuable feedback from colleagues there.  The core of this project is an effort to show that the massive number of basilica style churches built in Early Christian times had a profound impact on religious landscape of Byzantine Greece (and the entire Eastern Mediterranean).  At my most ambitious moments, I sometimes imagine that Early Christian architecture might have served as a vital filter between the remains and memory of Classical antiquity and the needs of Byzantine and even post-Byzantine society.  The frequent appearance of Early Christian spolia in Byzantine churches and their not uncommon appearance in Byzantine texts suggests that Byzantine society recognized the importance of the Early Christian period in the formation of their identity.  This challenges the more pervasive perspective that Byzantines sought primarily to establish ties to Classical antiquity.  In fact, I'd tentatively suggest that scholars' tendency to overlook Early Christian spolia speaks more to the traditional aesthetic values of Byzantine architectural historians than those of the Byzantine architects.

4. The Continuing Corinthia.  I continue to dabble in the fortifications and landscape of the Eastern Corinthia.  Most of this is in collaboration with David Pettegrew and comes from our ongoing work with the data produced over the course of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  Some of this involves our work documenting an Early Modern settlement at a site called Lakka Skoutara.  We have documented this site over the course of almost 10 field seasons with particular attention to archaeological formation processes in the Greek landscape.  David has also helped me continue to document the fortifications of the Eastern Corinthia (Project Fortress Corinthia).  David Pettegrew and I will present some of our recent research in this particular direction next month at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.  I am also working with Tim Gregory to digitize and normalize the context pottery from the Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia.

5. Thivi-Kastorion Archaeological Project.  This is another archaeological reclamation project.  I am working to re-analyze survey data collected by the Ohio Boeotia Project in the vicinity of Thisvi, Boeotia with Tim Gregory.  We are collaborating with Archie Dunn who is conducting an archaeological field survey of Thisve/Kastorion, Greece.  Our hope is to produce new maps of the Thisvi basin that combine the archaeological data collected in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Ohio Boeotia project and Archie Dunn's more recent work at the site.

So, this spring one of these projects (perhaps more) needs to come together in an engaging public lecture (at least) and ought to move forward toward a publication phase (and to be fair some of these projects have some good traction right now!). 

Testing the Hinterland

I managed to work my way through J. Bintliff, P. Howard, and A. Snodgrass, Testing the Hinterland: the work of the Boeotia Survey (1989-1991) in the southern approaches to the city of Thespiai (Cambridge 2007) over the past couple weeks.  A single read-through only began to scratch the surface of this remarkably rich and dense report on the work of the Boeotia survey around the city of Thespiai. It goes without saying that this book should have a significant impact on how scholars present and analyze data produced through intensive pedestrian survey in the future.

Thespiai is the nearest ancient polis to the city of Thisvi where I am working (in fits and starts) with Timothy Gregory, Archie Dunn, and others to re-examine the data gathered over the course of the Ohio Boeotia Expedition.  Gregory and his colleagues produced the data from the Thisvi survey about a decade earlier than the work by the Boeotia Survey around Thespiai and with a much smaller team.  Consequently the data is of a lower resolution and reflects intensive survey practices that have now endured rather significant critiques. Nevertheless, the high quality data set available from Thespiai should help fill in some interpretive and evidentiary gaps from the Thisvi survey and hopefully enable us to make a more substantial contribution to the archaeology of Boeotia (and Greece) through our rehabilitation of this data.

From Testing the Hinterland, five things struck me as particularly significant about this volume:

1. Thespiai as Large Site.  As I have noted several times previously in this blog (Some Thoughts on Future of Survey Archaeology in Greece (and the Eastern Mediterranean) and More Large Site Survey), large sites of over 50 ha but generally smaller than 700 ha are poised to become the basic unit for interpreting the archaeological landscape in Greece.  This first volume from the Boeotia survey analyzed a mere 500 ha.  While the total work of the Boeotia Survey encompassed a much large territory, the resolution at which they surveyed so much of western Boeotia made it practically impossible to produce a single volume of interpretation that did the data justice.  In fact, of the 200 sites that the Boeotia survey documented, they included merely 18 in this volume (171).  It is doubtful that future intensive survey in Greece will even cover as much ground as the entire Boeotia survey project, but the sophisticated and largely independent analysis of a 500 ha in a single volume should be cause for optimism (and a model) for the next generation of small scale intensive survey project in Greece and elsewhere.  The vast quantities of fine resolution data produced by the most recent generation of intensive surveys can be brought to bear on problems of historical significance (settlement patterns, rural land use, et c.) despite arguments for Mediterranean Myopia (see: A Rambling about Survey from a Regional Prespective).

2. GIS and Survey. This volume has achieved the full integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and intensive survey.  Bintliff et al. brought together view-shed analysis, least cost path, and the integration of divergent data sets (soil types, different types of artifact density data, et c.) into a single analytical framework.  While GIS has been a central aspect of Mediterranean survey for the last 25 years, it has often served as a convenient receptacle for data collected in the field, but not played as active a role in the analysis of that data.  The Boeotia survey used both viewshed analysis and a relatively sophisticated least cost path model to understand the density values present in various parts of their survey area; in doing this, they successfully manage the limitations of sample size and the computational capacities available to them to produce plausible analyses.  They were able to define the site of Leondari Southeast 7 (LSE7), for example, by recognizing that the artifact densities for this site far exceeded the off-site density values expected on their basis of their least-cost path model.  LSE7 stood in a zone of "very high 'friction' where access is not easy" (233)

3. Density and Intensity. The Boeotia survey is among the first surveys in the Eastern Mediterranean to recognize and attempt to control for differences in density produced by different methods of artifact collection. More intensive collection techniques produce greater quantities of artifacts.  This leads them to attempt to compensate for the differences between densities produced my more intensive "on site" data collection and less intensive transect field walking or off-site data collection practices. In general they found that on-site data collection methods produced between 2.5 and 3.5 times as many artifacts as transect walking.  Using these figures to adjust their comparison between transect density and the densities produced by on-site collection, they were able to determine whether specific chronological components of a site (say the Late Roman material) actually represented particular Late Roman activity at the site or simply part of the larger, but lower density carpet of Late Roman artifacts recorded by transect field walking.  This is a valuable contribution to survey archaeology and can be compared to our recent experiments at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and published in the 2007 Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus.  

4. Questions of Procedure.  One striking thing about this volume was the lack of sustained discussion of field procedure.  While I recognize that innumerable smaller publications have proceeded this volume and it is likely that their field procedures were discussed at length in these papers, it is nevertheless disconcerting that a project that committed so much sophisticated thought to the analysis of their artifacts densities would not tie this analysis directly and clearly to field procedures.  This is particularly significant when we consider the sample of artifacts gathered from individual survey units that forms the basis for their chronological and functional analysis.  It seems to me that the day where we can simple claim to have collected "diagnostic artifacts" from a unit is over.  The Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project employed chronotype sampling which ensured that we collected at least one example of each type of artifact present in the unit.  As we (me, David Pettegrew, Dimitri Nakassis, Scott Moore) have argued, this does distort our sample, but in relatively predictable ways. Other projects have defaulted to areas of "total collection" to act as controls against less systematic grab samples of diagnostic sherds from survey units. 

5. Manuring the Countryside.  This volume represents the most sophisticated and sustained argument for the manuring hypothesis.  It contends that Boeotian cities transported huge quantities of manure from the urban center to the countryside and with this manure came pottery and other forms of domestic waste that formed a visible halo of artifacts around both the urban center and more substantial sites in the countryside.  I must admit that the simplicity of this argument is appealing (although I do have particular loyalty to David Pettegrew's challenge to it!).  Unfortunately by separating the analysis of the urban fabric from the countryside as they have in this volume, it is difficult to understand the relationship between the material remaining in the urban center of Thespaia and the material found in the associated halo produced by manuring.  The manuring hypothesis will be more persuasive when they can show that the material from the halo and the city center is fundamentally similar.  At PKAP, for example, we discovered that the highest density areas of the site during the Late Roman are surrounded by lower density concentration of Late Roman pottery.  To test for the manuring hypothesis we compared the types of material present in the highest density zone to the material present in the lower density halo.  The material in the halo was different.  For example, we found very little Late Roman African Red Slip in the halo (but plenty of other contemporary, imported and local fine wares) while it is remarkably common in the highest density units.  Unless we assume that something about ARS led to different discard behavior, it is hard to understand how ARS did not appear in the halo if it was present at the center of the site.  While this one type of artifact alone does not completely eliminate the manuring hypothesis as a possible explanation for the low density halo around our highest density units, it nevertheless produces a kind of challenge made possible by integrating the analysis of on-site data with that gathered from off-site distributions.

There is much more to this book than these 5 observations: the detailed documentation and interpretation of individual sites, the clever ternary analysis of site function, and the effort to deal with the post-antique survey data (albeit in a cursory way) among many other fine points.  Needless to say, this work will emerge as a point of departure for many subsequent studies of intensive survey in the Greek countryside.

Thisvi Pottery at Thespies

On Tuesday Tim Gregory and I traveled to Thespies (Ancient Thesipeai) in Boeotia to look at the pottery from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition (OBE).  The OBE was a intensive pedestrian survey project conducted by Gregory from 1979-1982.  While it have been published in a general way, the ceramics from the project do not have a proper, published catalogue.  Moreover, we think that it will be possible to discuss the results of the project in a more sophisticated way by converting the maps and data recorded in the OBE notebooks into database and GIS.  Or at least this is what we hope.  As I have mentioned before, the impetus for revisiting the OBE pottery and data is the work of Archie Dunn and colleagues on the Acropolis and City Center of Ancient Thisvi.  The hope is that we can bring the survey data in some sort of conversation with the findings of his work.

The pottery that we found (cleverly labeled with the Greek letters OXAIO -- Ohio) derived from the several survey transects across the Thisvi plain and from work on the island of Kouveli in the Corinthian Gulf.  Much of the pottery appears to date to Late Antiquity, but we did see some earlier material.  It was heartening that we could actually find some (perhaps all) of the pottery from that project in the Thespies storerooms after over 20 years!  It was sufficiently well labeled that it appears that we can understand the provenience of the artifacts.  We now need to go back to the notebooks and see if we can correlate the material that we found with descriptions of transects and sites from the survey.  It looks like this will be feasible. 

One of the interesting exercises in this kind of undertaking is that it forces me to think about larger issues in the storage, labeling, and even sampling of pottery.  In fact, I was having a conversation just the other evening with some of the Regular Members about how excavations and surveys sample pottery that they record with formal catalogue entries and enter into long term storage.  Most museums in the Eastern Mediterranean struggle to maintain the vast collections of pottery in ways that ensures their long term availability for scholars to restudy (and this is particularly true of context and survey pottery).  At the same time, our methodologies call for ever more robust samples from both the surface and from excavated contexts, ensuring that we will continue to push the reasonable (and perhaps absolute) limits of storage space.  Even projects who build their own storerooms rarely find the resources to maintain them indefinitely (like the massive storerooms maintained by, say, the Athenian Agora or the Excavations at Corinth).  There is no real solution for the storage problems here -- we will continue to sample the landscape in accordance with current definitions of methodological rigor -- but it does reinforce the importance of labeling, documenting, and preparing the material for storage so that the maximum amount of data is preserved for future scholars.  It goes without saying that the material from the OBE would be useless without the notebooks, and these notebooks were not kept with the pottery at the museum.  It's fair to say that Tim Gregory (and myself) were the only people capable of tying these artifacts to their place in the landscape.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

This was a pretty full week, so I have lots of quick hits:

• More hybridity:
  • Cristina Stancioiu, the M. Alison Frantz Fellow, gave a Tea Talk on "Made in Italy?  Italian Fashion in Late Medieval Crete" that considered whether the evidence for clothing in the wall paintings of Venetian Crete shows signs of the development of a Venetian/Cretan hybrid culture.  Her work is in its early days, but the approach and material are fascinating.
  • Sir John Boardman gave the major lecture at the Open Meeting of the British School at Athens (more on this below) and looked at Greeks going East.  His main focus was the material culture of the Greek kingdoms in Bactria from the 2nd century BC to the first century AD.  While some of his ideas were decidedly "old school", his discussion of these far eastern Greeks embodied a kind of romantic British intellectualism and captured the flavor of an earlier era.  His interest in Greek - Eastern interaction conjured up the incredible creative potential that emerged both from cultural contact in south-central Asia and from the dying embers of British Empire.
• The British School at Athens held their Open Meeting last night. It was great to hear about all the sponsored projects.  Four jumped out at me:
  • There is interesting work going at the Theatre of Sparta some of which looks likely to reveal information on the Byzantine settlement at the site.
  • The massive (20+ ha), multiyear resistivity campaign at the site of Plataia undertaken by Michael Boyd and Andreas Konecny has revealed huge amounts of information on the Greek city as well as a few more Early Christian basilicas there. (Konecny, A., Boyd, M. J., Marchese, R. & Aravantinos, V.,  "Plataiai in Boiotia: A Preliminary Report on Geophysical and Field Surveys Conducted in 2002 – 2005", Hesperia (forcoming... March?))
  • The Knossos Urban Landscape Project is another "large site/urban" intensive survey project centered on the ancient city of Knossos in Crete.  According to the summary provided at the Open Meeting, they have collected over 400,000 sherds from the surface. 
  • Archie Dunn's brilliant Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project looked good in good company.  I heard recently from Dr. Dunn, and it sounds like things are well in hand for the 2008 study season. 
• The conversation regarding PD(Q) continues particularly in the comments of a post by Michael E. Smith at the Ancient World Bloggers Group: Is PDQ a good idea? An academic perspective.  (Shawn Graham's response and some more discussion appears on his Electric Archaeologist blog).  At the same time we learned that Dr Jim West's blog disappeared one day, and then miraculously came back!  This has spurred, on the one hand, renewed interest in the permanence and stability of the blogosphere (and the internet more generally: see S. Heath's monthly "Ceramics Reference Stability Reports") and provided a timely reminder for us to back up our blogs.  On the other hand, it does beg the question whether permanence and stability in the blogosphere is a good thing.  Many bloggers tend to think that it is; I've suggested that it's not (PD(Q) from Comments to a Post: What are we blogging for?) and want to explore this more. 
• UND is gearing up for its 125th-iversary (I refuse to call it the Quasquicentennial or the "Q"-- the former is not a real word and the latter sounds like (1) an alien from Star Trek or (2) the nickname for an undersized, small forward at a mid-major university who got drafted in the second round, doesn't stick with the team (despite some monstrous "slam-dunk shots" in the NBA Summer League), and ends up having a productive playing career in Spain or Israel -- neither of which capture the spirit or history of the University of North Dakota).  Despite the name, such occasions are a great time to look back on the history of the University and think toward the future.  My wife has captured some of that spirit in her new advertisement for Graduate Study in the Humanities at the Graduate School at the University of North Dakota.  Notice the Adelphi Fountain in the background of the movie still blow (click on the still to watch the short ad).  I blogged on the restoration of that fountain and its iconography. 

 

• The American School has a fancy-pants new website with a news feed and blog. 
• Finally, another advertisement for myself, my Blogging Archaeology and the Archaeology of Blogging appeared on the front page of the Archaeological Institute of America's website.

A Day in Boeotian Thisvi

I am sure that my gentle readers are literally waiting on the edge of their seats to hear of my week of travels through Boeotia and Western Macedonia.

The week started with a visit to Archie Dunn’s Thisvi-Kastorion Project (the project does not have an official name or at least a consistently applied one, so this is what I will call it). It is a collaboration between Dunn and the 23rd Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities.  I gave this project a modest sketch in a previous post, but I can tell you more now!

The goal of the project is to rectify a bias in traditional survey projects by studying settlements of the Early and Middle Byzantine period that do not conform to the standard model of Classical period settlement (i.e. a nucleated polis surrounded by an agricultural hinterland). Dunn reckons that Early and Middle Byzantine period saw the proliferation of settlements that were larger and more complex than villages yet small and less well-developed than urban centers. (He details this argument here: "Continuity and change in the Macedonian countryside, from Gallienus and Justinian", in: W.Bowden & L.Lavan (edd.), Late Antique Archaeology 2. Recent research on the Late Antique countryside (Leiden/Boston, 2004), pp 535-586.). Thisvi, or Byzantine Kastorion, conforms to some of the characteristics of the “mid sized” settlements and this provided the foundations for its establishment as an episcopal center during Middle Byzantine and Frankish times.

His project is conducting a rather intensive urban survey of surviving monuments in Thisvi village (many of which are preserved on account of the stunted development of Thisvi in modern times). For this project he is using some very new-fangled techniques including 3D Laser Scanning of architecture.  While I am not at liberty to divulge any details, his finds are significant and important and will cast new light on both the Western part of Boeotia but also the settlement landscape of the southern Balkans in general. (He provides a sketch of what he’s found here: "Byzantine Thisbe: Kastorian, episcopal kastron and centre of silk manufacture", Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilisation. In honour of sir Steven Runcimen. E. Jeffreys (ed), Cambridge University Press 2006).

My part of the project is to integrate data from a survey of the Thisvi basin in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Tim Gregory and Ohio State. This material is preserved in notebook form and I am in the process of bringing it into GIS whence it can be combined with Archie’s material from the urban survey.

While it is commonplace for excavation data to be revisited to shed light on new issues, it is far less common for survey data to be re-examined in the service of a new research questions. I am optimistic that this work will not only improve our understanding of settlement in the area, but (and perhaps in some ways more importantly) demonstrate the "archival" character of survey material -- that is to say prove that survey data, like excavation data, can be revisited in the service of different research questions many years later.  This will be especially important for a site like Thisvi where a humongous pipe factory and a whole set of new roads has obliterated much of the landscape that Gregory investigated years earlier.

 
The pipe factory is visible at the top left

The goals of this project obvious resonate with our work in Cyprus and its another project affiliated with Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota...!