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...!
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