The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Plotting Cut Blocks Across Pyla-Koutsopetria

Between 2005 and 2006, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project documented over 500 features from the Koutsopetria plain.  Most of these features were cut blocks of various sizes, material and descriptions as well as a handful of features associated with ancient agricultural installations (bit of an olive press, some andesite mill fragments, et c.).  Over the past couple of days, I finally got to analyzing this data beyond simply observing that we have lots of cut blocks.  The field team in 2005 and 2006 recorded detailed information regarding the location, size, and in many cases generally descriptions of each block and keyed them into a database that we could integrate with our GIS.

Most of the architectural fragments including cut limestone and gypsum blocks, are concentrated in the immediate Koutsopetria plain where farmers have moved them to stone piles on the edges of the fields. Check out our newest additions (partially edited) to our Omeka Collection: Pyla-Koutsopetria from the Air to get an idea of what these stone piles look like.

 

The most common type of cut block is made of local limestone and probably quarried on site. The majority of the blocks fall between 0.3 and 0.7 m in length and 0.3 and 0.5 in width. For the blocks where all three dimensions are visible, their volume falls between 0.06 and 0.03 cubic meters. This produced blocks of between 75 kg and 140 kg which would be relatively easily moved for construction. Some blocks, of course, could be much larger exceeding 1 m in length and weighing close to 500 kg. With blocks of this size, there is almost no doubt that some large scale, monumental architecture once stood in the immediate area.  Here's a distribution map.  The grey grid in the background is our survey grid and the color of the dots relates to the volume of the stone.

We also documented a significant quantity of cut gypsum block.  Since marble did not naturally occur on the island, Cypriots often used gypsum as a substitute in more elaborate buildings.  These blocks are generally similar in size to the cut limestone blocks with lengths of around a half a meter and widths of 0.3 meters. The average volume of blocks was similar to that of the cut blocks with only a few blocks exceeding 0.1 cubic meters. There were slightly more smaller blocks owing most likely to the more friable character of gypsum. Most blocks fell between 0.01 and 0.06 cubic meters. Gypsum has a lower density than limestone and the blocks had correspondingly lower weight usually between 25 kg and 140 kg. Many, much smaller fragments of gypsum were scattered across the fields and several very large blocks appeared clustered together. Here's a map:

 

Finally, we also discovered a small quantity of marble from across the site.  Most of these came from the central area of the Koutsopetria plain embedded in rock piles at the edges of cultivated tracks of land. The marble fragments are small < .30 m in maximum length and relatively thin <.04 m suggesting that all but one marble fragment was revetment or floor slabs. The wide distribution of material perhaps indicates that there were several marble clad buildings on the plain of Koutsopetria even though so little marble survives.  Here's a map:

The next step in analyzing this material is considering its relationship to the re-used blocks found in the excavations at Koutsopetria and the construction techniques used in the fortification wall surrounding Vigla.  It certainly seems possible that the majority of cut stone blocks scattered around the Koutsopetria plain came from the easily quarried fortifications at Vigla and perhaps also the extensive walls surrounding the Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos.  Gypsum blocks had fairly limited uses architecturally owing to their lack of strength and value as prestige materials.  The gypsum fragments from around the site probably served in specific places in buildings and comparing their sizes to in situ blocks from elsewhere on the island might give us some idea of how they were used.

 

Romanization and Christianization

Over the last few weeks, I've been reading some basic, recent works on Romanization or the expansion of "Roman culture" across the area of either direct Roman political control or strong Roman influence.  Most of these works dealt with Western Europe and considered the relationship between the archaeological remains clearly identified as being Roman with those typically seen as "pre-Roman" or local.  Most works consider cultural change as a process and see the interaction between Roman and non-Roman representing both resistance and accommodation.  Moreover, most of these works see the term "Romanization" as problematic.  In particular, the notion of Romanization as a cohesive phenomenon functioning in similar ways across the entire area of Roman influence has done more harm than good and papered over variation in the process of cultural exchange rooted in social status, economic organization, traditions of elite display, and even Roman policies across the Empire.

The basic critique of Romanization (for lack, at present, of a better or more compact term), has clear and obvious parallels with critiques of Christianization over the past 20+ years.  In fact, the conversations about the two concepts are so parallel that it is a wonder that more obvious (than I have seen) cross-pollination between these two scholarly approaches to cultural exchange have not appeared.  I've come away from studying this material with the following little gaggle of observations:

1. The Viewer. Since John Clarke and Jas Elsner introduced me to the Roman viewer, I have become convinced that the act of viewing is central to the understanding the process of cultural engagement.  While it is almost old-hat now to observe that content producers (to use a nice, new media term) do not have exclusive control over how endusers view their content, actualizing this understanding in scholarship is a difficult task, especially if the enduser represents a group that has not left behind the kind of cultural material that scholars are apt to interpret (e.g. texts, monumental buildings, ceramics, sculpture, et c.).

2. Hybrids. Post-colonial critiques have seemingly cast long shadow over the process of Roman political and cultural expansion. A hybridized elite worked to bridge the gap between the political core and periphery and hybrid cultural places created space for that could accommodate both local and non-local interests.  Within the study of Christianization, the notion of the hybrid has not seen the same interest from scholars, although it seems clear that the spread of Christianity can be at least partly associated with the religious, ritual, and political interest of the political center.  The rarity of any discussion of hybridity within the discourse Christianization is, in part, a matter of terminology. Certainly scholars have understood the emergence of Christianity as a process that produced myriad hybrids through, for example, processes like syncretism.  Our relative lack of interest in the notion of hybridity may stem from a reluctance to see the process of religious change as one of imperialism or colonization.

3. Resistance. Hybrids form just one point on an increasingly nuanced ranged of potential cultural interaction in the ancient world.  The extremes, of course, are typically of greater interest to the scholar, if for no other reason than they are more likely to leave evidence.  The more pressing question, to my mind at least, ishow do we recalibrate our analytical lens to see more subtle forms of resistance to aggressive or openly hostile projects to promote social, political, or religious change. The process of Christianization took place over long spans of time and through the independent actions of multiple groups and agents; finding resistance in this context is far more than documenting the obvious occasions when Christian buildings were torched by hostile non-Christian groups.

4. Plurality. Just as being Roman accommodates many different, sometimes incompatible, forms of cultural expression, being Christian can hardly be reduced to a fixed set of characteristics. The plurality of Roman culture and Christianity both require that we expand our understanding of how these two phenomena manifest themselves in a social, political, and cultural context.  In some cases, this might involve simply qualifying what we mean when we say Roman or Christian: for example, direct Roman political control or imperial or ecclesiastical Christianity.  In other cases, we might have to reconsider the relationship between hybrid identities and forms of Roman-ness and Christianity and the way in which such identities appeared to various groups of viewers.

5. Erasure and Process. The creation of a Roman space or a Christian space in the ancient world was part of a process that involved, in part, the overwriting of earlier forms of cultural, economic, political, and social relationships.  In short, the process of Romanizing and Christianizing not only involves present forms of cultural expression, but projects these back into the past making it much more difficult for the historian and archaeologist to discover the traces of the process itself.

What does Archaeology and the New Media look like?

After a phone chat with an old friend yesterday, I got to wondering what an edited volume on archaeology and the new media would look like.  Here are my random thoughts:

1. Dynamic. If we've learned anything from the New Media moment, it's that static media is old media. The New Media - whatever that really is - is dynamic, adaptive, conversational, and unstable. It is a bit difficult to understand how a traditional edited volume that recognizes the value of the New Media in archaeology would bridge the gap between a static book form (and I would certainly count most ebooks as static, electronic versions of the Old Media) and the dynamic forms of expression that have characterized new media concepts. I could, perhaps, imagine a publication as a application for the iPad or coming wave of Android tablets that would fully embrace the nascent ability of e-readers, like the Kindle, to allow people to read collectively by providing access to other readers annotations.

2. Historical. At the same time, I'd want a volume to reflect and capture a specific historical moment in the development of archaeology as a discipline.  As archaeologists, we know that excavation and documentation are both productive and destructive processes.  The creation of a volume on archaeology and the New Media could embrace this destruction/production dichotomy both by preserving in some way our thinking about the role of web 2.0 technologies in our work and by destroying the web 2.0-ness of these technologies (and ways of thinking) in a static, profoundly archaeological volume.  The archival tendency in archaeology could presumably accept the loss of the New Media experience for the sake of its historical description and preservation in another medium.

What do these first two points mean? An application or web site and an archive (a printed volume)?

3. Sampling Strategy.  The one thing about New Media engagement with archaeological work is that range of applications and goals.  Some projects see New Media as a means of publicizing their work to an established group of "stakeholders" or even working to expand the group of stakeholders by leveraging the webs infinite reach (and this is the point of departure that my project took when first experimenting with blogging).  Other projects developed New Media technologies in their core project goals viewing the text-blogging or photo-blogging or video-blogging or pod-casting or whatever as central to the way archaeological research functions as story telling.  The use of new media also extends from the New World archaeological practices to the deepest bastions of Old World archaeology and from the most highly restricted research oriented projects to field schools.  Sampling a range of project's that have used New Media would be necessary to document New Media in both practice and theory.

4. Definitions. The sampling strategy proposed above would help create a definition for the New Media in an archaeological context that would capture a moment in time and a discrete range of relationships between archaeological methods and media technologies. The production of an archives forms the basis for this kind of disciplinary definition that can serve as a measuring stick of effectiveness, innovation, and mark out more clearly conceptual boundaries.

5. Best Practices.  There are practical concerns for using New Media technologies in archaeology.  Some of them have to do with control over archaeological data and various national policies for the dissemination of sensitive archaeological information.  As New Media technologies are increasingly used to record various aspects of archaeological research, there should be a set of  best practices to ensure that the output of even the most ephemeral outputs are not lost.  While a single set of best practices is unlikely to emerge, principles of curation would certainly provide a framework around which more practical approaches could cohere.

What are your thoughts on the design, scope, and content of a volume on Archaeology and the New Media?

Fauna from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Survey

Over the course of the intensive pedestrian survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria we collected a sample of the faunal material present on the surface of the ground (that is to say the animal bones visible in each unit).  Over the past month, David Reese, one of the leading specialists in faunal remains in an archaeological context examined the material from both our survey and excavation.

While I won't present all Dr. Reese's finds here on the blog (that will have to wait for the full, final report), I will give a brief preview of his finds.  The majority of the material from the site was Ovis/Capra (sheep/goat).  My understanding is that the bones of the two animals are basically indistinguishable (in fact, if one could distinguish the two, I am sure Dr. Reese would have!).  The goat and sheep bones likely reflect the more recent past activity at the site which almost certainly involved grazing.  At present the site is under cultivation with cereals - mostly for feed - but this might be the result of the region's appropriation by the British after independence in the 1950s.  At present our site has relatively restricted access because of the activities at various live-fire ranges in the area.  It is also possible that some grazing continues in the early spring, fall, or winter months when we are not present on the site.  A few of the bones show signs of being butchered and cooked, but it is difficult to know whether this occurred on site - in a possible domestic context - or if these bones represent lunches taken in the fields, rubbish thrown from passing travelers, or even bits of household trash carried out into the fields at some earlier time as composted fertilizer.  The presence of a few worn chicken bones from the fields almost certainly represents meals taken in the field or domestic rubbish.

More evidence for grazing comes from the presence of numerous bones from dogs (canis familiaris).  While we regularly see packs of hunting dogs training across the coastal ridges in the evening hours, the link between dogs and herds of sheep or goats is too close to ignore.

Aside from the dog and sheep/goat bones, there are two objects that really stood out.  First, Dr. Reese identified an eroded part of a bos taurus (cow!) bone on the site.  Since cattle have somewhat different grazing patterns than goats and sheep, this bone suggests that at some point our site may have seen grazing cattle and possible pasture land.

Finally (and most exciting!), Dr. Reese identified a fragment of human skull from one of survey units near the western most extent of our site.  As readers of this blog know, we've been struggling to identify the location of a cemetery that served the inhabitants of our diachronic settlements at Vigla and Pyla-Koutsopetria. Cesnola spent some time in the general vicinity of a site that could be ours (relating his description of the place to our side has proven to be almost impossible; for the description of Cesnola see the link below), as he passed back and forth to his summer home at Ormidhia.  His description of a place called Palaeocastro (which is one of the names for our site) included graves which he appears to have excavated.  The fragment of skull identified from our survey was not particularly close to the area that Cesnola appears to be describing.  So, the mystery of the Pyla-Koutsopetria burials continues with any tiny fragment of evidence suggesting that graves or even tombs are present near our site, but lie undiscovered.

 

Doors of History

My wife has recently stripped the doors in our house and has begun to repaint them.  Like most turn of the century homes in the area, they have wooden doors.  These doors are substantial, hang poorly (in most cases) and preserve the history of the house in through the marks in the door.

The archaeology of the house is preserved in the house itself.

This door shows at least four different lock and works on the door preserved under multiple coats of paint.

The evidence for an earlier latch:

In this detail you can see the outline of the earlier doorplate, cylinder, and lock.

An upstairs door show another set of interesting marks preserving tiny bits of the houses history. The elegant doorplate and crystal doorknob probably date to the earliest years of the house. While the floors upstairs in our house are fir as opposed to the floors downstairs which are a more luxurious maple, the doorknob and plate show certain concessions to display in the more private quarters of the house.  Of course, a nice doorknob and plate is an easy addition to a house at some later date, but the floors on the second floor are more or less permanent.

Evidence for the use of a simple latch on the inside of the door.  The door must have been pushed open a few times because it's clear that someone forced the door open, striping the simply threaded latch, and causing someone to drive the latch back into the door again in a slightly different place.

Archaeology and Sound

During my recent travels I was able to read over the series of articles published in the most recent World Archaeology.  These articles were dedicated to exploring the place of archaeology in the world today. They considered the place of archaeology in the production of compelling narratives, campus life, the new media, and in pressing problems like homelessness, environmental sustainability, and even transparency in government.  The articles blended methodological sophistication with practical real life applications to show how the tools and approaches that archaeologists have developed over the history of the discipline can contribute to documenting and analyzing problems in the recent past.  If anything, these articles, to generalize, were too practical in their approaches to problems perhaps assuming that for something to be relevant in todays culture, it had to have a direct practical application rather than a more long term theoretical or methodological benefit.  On the other hand, these articles did reflect the increasingly permeable disciplinary boundaries of archaeological research as they drew upon techniques, methods, and approaches developed by disciplinary neighbors like sociology, anthropology, communications, and philology and literature.

One striking omission from this wide ranging group of articles was anything on the archaeology of sound. There have been some intriguing recent work on the sounds of archaeology and they key role that hearing materiality plays in our ability to identify objects, spaces, and materials.  In fact, heavily damped spaces create a kind of sensory deprivation that obscures the materiality and social "reality" of a space.  (At the same time, noise pollution and the saturation of our environment with a range of mechanical sounds is generally recognized as a problem to be dealt with in a architectural - in other words material - way.)  It is worth noting that I am not the first to think about this kind of thing. The sound of archaeology has contributed to the idea of archaeology as performance and sensory as well as contributed to our idea of how past monuments sounded.

Over the past year, I've been thinking about music as a place where archaeological methods could be deployed productively through an exploration of punk rock music.  Punk rock, in particular, sought to celebrate a highly materialized kind of music, through their preference for live recordings in particular places (particularly iconic venues like CBGBs or Max's Kansas City) and their conscious efforts to emphasize the low-fi, diy character of their recording spaces.  (One of my favorite moments in a punk rock recording is when you can hear a bottle fall and hit the ground (and seemingly not break) during a Replacement's song).  The term garage band made clear the link between music, a particular sound, and a space.  This all stands in contrast to the increasingly over-produced character of modern pop music which goes to great lengths to create spatially and materially impossible sound which could never be produced in a way that someone could witness and experience. (For a remarkable critique of this check out this article on Pompamoose, a band that tries to make every sound on their remakes of pop songs visible in some way.

Telling Stories with Archaeology

One of the great things that I've learned from working with Steven Ellis's team at Isthmia the Corinthia is the idea of archaeological research as the basis for story telling.  Steven used this metaphor a number of times over the first week of our work here as a way to frame the goals of our research.  It was absolutely enlightened and almost completely opposite from my growing obsession with archaeological data collecting.  Recently, when I have approached archaeological problems, I become consumed by the need to document and gather.  This primary stems from an abiding faith that, somehow, data will produce knowledge.

I don't want to suggest that Steven and his team are not interested in data.  In fact, they have collected and collated a remarkable amount of detailed information on the East Field Area and organized it carefully in sophisticated databases designed to facilitate their daily analysis.  What was striking how little they talk about data as the product of their field work.  In contrast, I am ALWAYS thinking about data as the product of archaeological analysis.  Data then becomes - at some uncertain time in the future - the basis for interpretation.  This is completely and unabashedly positivist.

Steven's team has talked about the stories from the very first day. This reminded me that the archaeological process was about narrating events as much a collecting data.  Beginning with the idea that a narrative should be the product of archaeological analysis ensured that data collection worked toward the goal of explicating the site and its history rather than squandering resources on producing data without clear objectives in mind.

Some of this coincides with a recent article by C. Holtorf in World Archaeology, where he discusses the "meta-stories" that so often organize the presentation, analysis, and interpretation of archaeological information.  These narratives serve not only to make bits of information understandable, but also provide the basis for comparing various similar narratives across time.  These stories inform one another by providing structures which help humanity to approach large scale, complex, and pressing questions about the fundamental nature of society.  Holtorf draws in part on the work of Hayden White who looked at the narrative structures present in the work of 19th century scholars like Marx, Burkardt, von Ranke, and Michelet.  Holtorf seems to suggest that archaeological story telling might follow 19th century models: "By stories (or narratives) I mean an account of one or more characters acting out plots in a sequence of events that contain a distinctive beginning, middle and end." (383). 

While stories of the 19th century, novelistic type are clearly recognizable to a broad audience, they hardly represent the scope of potential story types familiar to even popular audiences.  Television shows like Lost, and popular feature films have become increasingly comfortable twisting time, inverting the standard order of narration, and leaving the audience with ambiguous endings.  Story telling in the 21st century is open to a much wider range of potential organizations, resolutions, and plots than its 19th century predecessors.

I can even imagine that some of these narrative types will find ways to "narrate" the structure of data rich descriptions and explorations of the archaeological landscape.

Even More Experiments in Intensive Pedestrian Survey

Even more guest-posting brilliance from our esteemed guest blogger, David Pettegrew, the co-director the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund speaker.  Be sure to check out his posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and yesterday.

Over the last few days (here and here), we have been discussing the results of an experiment we carried out 2010 in order to assess the relationship between the number of artifacts we see in pedestrian survey and the number actually on the ground.  You can read about the first two phases of these experiments here and here.

Today we consider the kinds of artifacts that we observed during total collection and the sorts of material that made up the surface matrix.  When we set up the experiment, we consciously decided not to collect artifacts via the chronotype sample as we normally do in our pedestrian resurvey.  What crueler thing could one do to the project ceramicist than overwhelm him with 1,000+ surface artifacts? (After all, the logic of sampling is to manage human resources more effectively.) Because we didn’t identify the artifacts from the total collection grid according to chronotype as we did for the survey units, we limited the kinds of comparisons we can make between the pedestrian survey sample and the total collection.

Even still, there were still some things we could do to give us a sense of the kinds of material on the ground, especially their fabric and functional attributes.  How much of the surface assemblage of a high-density unit at Koutsopetria consists of cooking ware, coarse wares, coarse wares with surface treatment like combing, and table wares (slipped or unslipped)?

To address this question in part, we sorted all pottery from each total collection unit into three basic fabric classes: semi-fine and fine ware (whether decorated or not), cooking ware, and medium-coarse and coarse wares (including amphora sherds).  The results below show the count of each of the categories in each of the total collection grid squares and give in parentheses the percentage of that fabric group in terms of the total number of potsherds in the unit.



 

Fine ware constitutes 7.6% to 15.4% of the number of potsherds in each subunit; cooking ware only 1.7% to 5.4% of the total number of potsherds; and coarse wares consistently 80.2-87.2% of the overall assemblage.  Unsurprisingly, for a predominantly Late Roman assemblage, the great majority of the sherds are coarse, a small percentage are fine, and tiny percentage are cooking.  The disparity between coarse wares, on the one hand, and fine and cooking wares on the other would have been even greater had we compared weight instead of count, since most fine and cooking ware sherds are thin-walled and small.

We also counted the “parts” of the vessel according to the standard ceramicist categories of rims, bases, handles, shoulders / necks, and body sherds.  Rims represented 2.9-7% of the total sherd count, bases less than 2.2%, handles from 2.2 to 5.3%, neck and shoulders typically less than a percent. Body sherds typically represent over 90% of the surface assemblage.

Finally, we tabulated the data in a slightly different way, breaking down the surface assemblage for each subunit by both fabric group and part.  The results shown in the table below suggest that this Late Roman assemblage includes for fine wares mainly body sherds (73.8% of fine wares) and rims (19.5%), for cooking ware mainly body sherds (84.5% of cooking wares) and handles (6.9%), and for coarse ware mainly body sherds (92.9% of coarse wares).  

Coarse ware body sherds make up 79.5% (n=1474) of the total number of sherds (n=1,854) counted for all 4 subunits.  By contrast, fine ware rims make up 2.2% of the total pottery assemblage and cooking ware rims form only .11% of the total pottery assemblage!!!  The 71 fragments of slipped and glazed fine ware (i.e., not including fine ware lacking clear glazing or slip) represent only 3.8% of the total number of potsherds counted (n=1854).  These few black glazed Classical-Hellenistic sherds and red slipped Roman-Late Roman sherds are the typical objects used to provide most of the chronological information for dating archaeological sites but they represent less than 4% of our surface assemblage of this unit at Koutsopetria.

Finally, it is worth asking what percentage of coarse body sherds have surface treatments and decorations like grooving, combing, and ridging — the kinds of surface treatments that usually lead to them being collected in most regional surveys.  To address this question, we counted the coarse sherds for two of the subunits (G1 & G15) with spiral grooving, combing, or wheel ridging.  The 66 sherds represent 12.5% of the 526 coarse body sherds from those subunits and 9.8% of 672 total sherds from those units.  These “diagnostic body sherds” then are more visible than glazed and slipped fine ware but still quite unrepresentative of the surface pottery as a whole.

I suppose our next steps with the results of these experiments are to compare them with 1) the chronotype sample from the broader survey, and 2) the data from subsurface excavated deposits.  I think the interesting results of the experiment certainly justified the time it took to totally collect the subunits and will allow us to understand how close our chronotype sample is to the population of ceramic artifacts on the ground.

More Experiments in Intensive Pedestrian Survey

More guest-posting brilliance from our esteemed guest blogger, David Pettegrew, the co-director the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund speaker.  Be sure to check out his posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Last Thursday, we introduced the survey experiment that PKAP conducted in June 2010 to assess the relationship between the number of artifacts that we see when we walk across a survey unit and the number of artifacts actually on the ground.  In other words, we wanted to assess how effective our survey methods are in actually assessing what was on the ground.  On Thursday, we compared the artifact densities detected by the project’s untrained student fieldwalkers to those counted by trained senior staff members.  Today we will discuss the second phase in our 2010 experiment, an assessment of the total population of all artifacts on the surface of select subunits.  This part of the experiment was designed to give us a total count of all surface artifacts that can be compared with the artifact counts reported in yesterday’s discussion.

We began by selecting four 10 x 10 m subunits based on the densities of the 10 x 10 m artifact densities counted by the experienced senior staff members.  As with past experiments (published in the RDAC 2007), we selected our 4 subunits to represent the range of density variation: the lowest density quartile (G15), highest density quartile (G9), and two middle quartiles (G1 and G6).  Each total subunit was 10 x 10 m, representing 1/16 (6.25%) of the 1,600 sq m survey unit.

To vacuum a high-density unit, you really have to spend a lot of time picking individual artifacts off the ground.  For each of our units, students Andrew, Zane, Valerie, and Luke, and I  walked very slowly in adjacent passes across each selected square gathering together in 1 or 2 corners of the unit all the artifacts present.  An initial pass was never enough for we observed how many artifacts we missed initially.  Usually two additional passes were necessary to vacuum the surface completely, and each pass involved either crawling on hands and knees, or bending so that you had a closer view of the ground.  I have to admit that my back and neck got sore after a while of this.

The results of this “total collection”, shown below, are interesting to compare with the “pedestrian survey counts” discussed yesterday.  You have to keep in mind with the comparison that the pedestrian counts represent a 20% sample of each subunit while the total collection counts represent a 100% sample.  You have to multiply the pedestrian count by a factor of 5 to estimate the “total putative count” (i.e., an estimation of what the total count would be for 100% of the unit) for the pedestrian-walked unit.

The first outlined set of grid units below shows the total counts from each of the total collection units.

The second set of grids compares the total collection counts with the pedestrian survey counts in parentheses (multiplied by 5 to create the 100% putative sample).  

The third shows the factor difference between these two types of counts.  

Here is where it gets even more interesting.  We can estimate that the 940 artifacts experienced fieldwalkers counted through pedestrian survey across the entire unit (i.e., the pedestrian counts from 4 walker swaths) would produce a putative pedestrian survey count (factoring for the 20% sample) of 4,700 artifacts.  In other words, had we walked 100% of the unit, we would have counted about 4,700 artifacts.  Now, if total collection (vacuuming) produces on average 2.96 times the number of artifacts as pedestrian survey, we can estimate that there were 13,212 artifacts actually on the surface of the ground.  To provide some perspective, we collected and brought back to the museum 8,788 total artifacts from the 252 grid squares of Koutsopetria and 19,657 total artifacts from our survey of the entire Pyla-Koutsopetria area.  A single survey unit at Koutsopetria totally collected would produce 1.5 times the number of artifacts sampled from all 252 grid squares at Koutsopetria and .67 of the total artifacts sampled across the entire Pyla area.  If we were to apply the same multipliers to all 252 forty x forty meter grid squares, i.e., the main part of the site of Koutsopetria, the total artifact count of 19,182 would produce a putative total count of 95,910.  Our estimated total population of artifacts (based on the 2.96 factor) is at least 284,894 (and in reality, poor visibility in many units often limited our sample to 50% of the ground).  This is *why* sampling is important!

As for TIME, total collection requires a huge commitment.  Although we (for clarification here, "we" means David - Bill) initially considered surveying all 16 subunits, i.e., an entire 40 x 40 m unit, this proved unrealistic given the time it took for 5 individuals to vacuum a single subunit: 1.5 hours each for G1 and G6, 2 hours for G9, and 1 hour for G15.  Using the total time it took to hoover 25% of the grid square (6 hours) as an index for hoovering this unit, we estimate that 5 individuals could hoover a high-density 40 x 40 m unit in about 24 work hours or well over 100 work hours!  If the typical survey work day is 6 hours long (say, 6AM-noon), it would require 4 full days of a team collecting artifacts from the surface.  Truly this would be an incredibly time intensive task!  By contrast, sampling 20% of the unit through pedestrian survey takes about 20-30 minutes.  In this perspective, total collection requires 72 times more time than pedestrian survey collection!

One final comparative result is interesting to note here.  The “other” category increases dramatically through total collection, including numerous pieces of ancient glass (9), lithic stone artifacts (7), shells (24), slabs (13), gypsum (141), ceramic bricks (2), stone vessel (1), marble revetment (3), and a ceramic tessera or gaming piece.  Although total collection was time intensive, this sort of qualitative information is quite useful in filling out our picture of the overall survey unit and indicates something of the functional variability within each survey unit.

Tomorrow, we will conclude our discussion of experiments with an overview of ceramic fabric categories.  Stay tuned!

 

Experiments in Intensive Survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria

Another guest post from our esteemed guest blogger, David Pettegrew, the co-director the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund speaker.  Be sure to check out his posts on Tuesday and Wednesday.

When I announced my plans to conduct a survey experiment where we would “vacuum” an entire 40 x 40 m unit, Dimitri and Bill both laughed and told me that I had to try it simply for its absurdity.  The 40 x 40 m survey unit was our standard size for the 252 units that we laid out across the Koutsopetria plain .  As far as survey units go, 40 x 40 m (or 1,600 square meters) is a relatively small unit compared to that typically employed by those who conduct distributional survey.  At the same time, when on the group, 40 meters is still vast when compared to the dimension of most lived space.  After all, a 40 x 40 meter unit is over 130 square feet on a side and over 17,000 square feet which makes a single survey unit much larger than even the most over-sized suburban McMansions.  The reason that my suggestion was humorous, however, had to do with the method I proposed for collecting artifacts.  In our typical pedestrian survey, we only looked at 20% of the surface of the unit (for a more reasonable and suburban 3,400 square feet) and only collected each unique artifact from what we saw on the surface.  My proposal was more extreme: get down on our hands and knees and completely “vaccum” (or “hoover”) all the artifacts from 100% of the unit to produce an exhaustive (and exhausting!) total collection rather than a quick 20% sample.

Why?  I had the suspicion that the amount of artifacts we see when we walk across the unit is but a fraction of the total number of artifacts actually on the ground.  The suspicion was based on experiments conducted in 2004 & 2006 where we ‘vacuumed’ artifacts from a 5% sample of our 40 x 40 m units, producing on average artifact counts that were 4 times greater than that produced through our 20% sample using pedestrian survey.  We also proved through these experiments that the substantially larger number of artifacts did not really contribute much new chronological or functional information that warranted the additional investments of time and energy.  We published a report on those experiments in an article by the authors in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus 2007.  However, we were aware of the substantial fluctuations of artifacts within 40 x 40 m units and the risk of a 5% sample (80 sq m) being unrepresentative of the unit as a whole (1600 sq m).  The point of our 2010 experiments, then, was to test the results with a much more robust sample.  While I initially wanted to vacuum 100% of the unit, time constraints prohibited me to vacuuming 25% of the unit.  Even still, 25% of the unit is 5 times greater than what we sampled in 2004 and 2006.

Due to the limited time for fieldwork this season (and time constraints were one of the reasons that we sampled the units to begin with!), we could only resurvey a single unit placed in the highest-density area immediately northeast of the excavated apse of the early Christian basilica.  We picked this unit to overlap with our very first Discovery Unit, a grid square of 40 x 40 m surveyed in 2004 northeast of the enclosed excavated part of the site of Koutsopetria.  We divided the 40 x 40 unit into sixteen 10 x 10 m subunits, each representing 6.25% of the overall unit area (1,600 sq m).  The grid squares have been given the prefix of G followed by a number between 1-16, as the following plan shows.

In our interest in comparing artifact counts noted during pedestrian survey—where a surveyor walks across the unit examining a 2 m wide swath and counting all pottery, tile, lithics, and other artifact types—with the total population of artifacts actually on the surface, we implemented two stages to the experiments.  The first stage (pedestrian survey) we will report on today.

We began by having four fieldwalkers walk across the unit, recording all artifacts visible in their swath, giving a 20% sample of every 10 m of space across a 40 m transect.  We collected ‘sub-tract’ artifact counts every 10 meters to produce density figures for each of the subunits (G1-G16) and assess the fluctuating density of pottery, tile, and lithic artifacts within a survey unit.

We collected the data for pedestrian survey three times.  The results of these three separate pedestrian survey exercises are shown in the four figures below.  The numbers represent artifact counts of each type (pottery, tile, other, and total), and the gray shaded columns with orange numbers represent the total artifact count for the swath per fieldwalker.  

The first time (see figure 1.1 below) a group of untrained students walked the units—Andrew, Luke, Valerie, and Zane—who who had only seen artifacts at the museum and not in their "natural" (or better, archaeological) contexts.



A steady light rain the following day provided the chance for these same students to rewalk the unit a second time (see figure 1.2 below) with artifacts slightly more visible as a result of the washing of the dust.

Finally, a group of experienced fieldwalkers—David Pettegrew (DKP), Dimitri Nakassis (DN), and Bill Caraher (WRC) —walked the unit and counted artifacts (see figure 1.3).

Hence, the variables in these three episodes of pedestrian survey were experience, and, to a lesser extent, the amount of dust and dirt obscuring the surface of the pottery.  Otherwise, between episodes environmental factors were constant, as were methodological factors and figure 1.4 shows the average of all the counts produced.

We walked these units on June 9 and 10 and each took between 15 minutes and half an hour.

Comparing simply the total artifact counts (the bottom right grid within each of the outlined figures), it is interesting to note that the rain appears not to have made a difference overall in density counts between units [1.1] and [1.2].  Although one student count went up significantly after the rain (LHM: 118  243), and another student count was slightly greater (AMH: 200  241), VAW’s total counts were essentially unchanged (335 to 334), while ZRB’s total counts actually declined (238).

As far as the other variable (experience) goes, there were some significant disparities between experienced walkers and inexperienced walkers as evident in counts for particular grid squares (compare G1 for [1.1] and [1.3]).  Otherwise, the overall artifact counts were comparable for the units: the lowest-density and highest-density subunits occurred between all three walking episodes.  If we look at total artifact counts for each unit as a whole, students counted 942 artifacts in [1.1] and 1056 artifacts in [1.2] while experienced walkers counted 940 artifacts in [1.3].  That is remarkably close!  

We noticed one major difference, however, in the “other” category, which includes all artifacts besides pottery and tile: marble revetment, gypsum, shell, ancient glass, and ground stone agricultural implements.  The experienced field walkers noted 2-4 times the number of other artifacts in [1.3] than inexperienced fieldwalkers in [1.1] and [1.2].  An experienced walker counted 4 lithic artifacts (chipped stone & ground stone) in G3 and G7 that an inexperienced walker missed.