The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

PKAP Season in Review

As promised yesterday, this week will features (gasp!) a guest blogger, Dr. David Pettegrew.  David is the co-director of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and over the next three days he will report on the various work conducted by the project this season.  David will be visiting us here in Grand Forks in October as the annual Cyprus Research Fund Lecture Speaker.

Perhaps the greatest misimpression about archaeology today is that it mainly consists in digging holes in the ground.  Excavation is the perhaps the most glorious and maybe even the most exciting, component of archaeological work (although some people find the analysis of the results of survey and excavation the most exciting. - Bill), but it’s still only a tiny part of the pie.  As you may have gathered from this blog, our own work rarely involves traditional excavation.  In the field, we’ve devoted lots of time to pedestrian survey, geophysical prospection, aerial photography, illustrating, and recording notes—and lots of time to processing all those artifacts, i.e., washing, analyzing, cataloguing, photographing.  Beyond the field season, we spend most of our time processing data, reading, writing, and publishing their finds, and preparing for the next field season.  Students who join us every summer in Cyprus for 3-4 weeks may forget that most of our work goes on for months after Cyprus.  And the work is harder, not easier.

This morning we mailed a copy of our 2010 final report to the Cyprus Department of Antiquities.  If the press release posted yesterday represents a kind of quick and dirty abstract of our work in the Pyla area, the annual final report provides in excruciating detail a full outline of our work.  Anyone who does archaeological work has got to produce these things, and they’re not fun to write.  This year’s report with contributions by Scott, Bill, David, and Sarah Lepinski, was about typical in numbering 77 single-spaced pages.  They have been longer (100 pages) but they’re rarely shorter.  Why so long?  What we do is complicated and has to be explained in enough detail that it makes sense to anyone reading the report in the future.  We tend to provide more detail in our reports than we need for our articles which does make it easier at a later point to create papers about our work.

As we’ve discussed here and here, the point of our 2010 field season was completing the analysis of artifacts from our 2008-2009 excavations of the sites of Koutsopetria and Vigla.  We also anticipated being able to conduct additional fieldwork at these sites.  As it turned out, for reasons we’ve explained elsewhere, we were unable to excavate and we received permission only at the 11th hour for our other fieldwork activities.

Even still, as we outlined in our final report, we’re not disappointed and did manage to accomplish the following tasks:

1. We finished a preliminary “read” of all the artifacts collected during intensive survey (2003-2007) and excavation (2008-2009), cataloguing in greater detail about 300 finds from survey and excavation.

2. We finished documenting and illustrating the area excavated by Maria Hadjicosti. We have posted about that here and here.

3. We took low-altitude blimp photographs of the excavated area and the landscape. We have already posted the results of that—including the disastrous flight of …. — here and here.

4. We continued documenting subsurface remains using ground penetrating radar.

5. We conducted limited resurvey of ridges to the west of Koutsopetria.

6. We conducted experiments designed to calibrate the results of the intensive survey in the study area.

Such activities lack the dazzle of opening another excavation unit (as exciting as that can be) but, we would argue, prove more important in the long run for our understanding of the site and create a solid foundation for the final publication of our fieldwork now in preparation.

In the next few days we will be providing some behind-the-scenes glimpses of the kinds of post-processing work that we have been doing in the month since our field season ended.  Since we have already written about #s 2-3 elsewhere, we will focus our comments on #s 1, and 4-6.  Enjoy.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Press Release

At the send of each season, the PKAP team prepares a press release that accompanies the final report submitted to the Department of Antiquities.  The press release also gets sent out (in slightly modified form) by the various collaborating universities.

 

Here it is:

From May 20th to June 21st the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project conducted a study and field season in the coastal zone of Pyla Village on the south coast of Cyprus.  An international team of scholars under the direction of William R. Caraher (University of North Dakota), R. Scott Moore (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), and David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College), have worked in this area since 2003 documenting a sprawling Archaic to Late Roman settlement at the site.  This year, the PKAP team took low altitude blimp photographs of the entire site, sampled the subsurface remains using ground-penetrating radar, and conducted several experiments to calibrate the results of earlier fieldwork.  This work will allow the PKAP team to correlate more accurately the relationship between material on the surface of the grond and material still safely buried.  Another part of the PKAP team worked in the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum to document the nearly 13,000 finds collected since 2003.  The ceramic, architectural, and stone artifacts have revealed a vibrant community through most of antiquity with trading ties spanning the Mediterranean basin.  The study of these finds has revealed that a site on the coastal height of Vigla was a fortified settlement from Archaic to Hellenistic times complete with a fortification wall and significant quantity of domestic ceramics.  This is an unusual type of settlement on Cyprus and may have served as the base for a garrison protecting the eastern flank of Kition and the Larnaka bay.  In Late Roman and Early Byzantine times, the town of Pyla-Koutsopetria stretched across the coastal plain below Vigla. This settlement appears to have been a bustling, cosmopolitan town during at the end of antiquity and may have met its demise after a series of earthquakes.  The ceramic evidence demonstrate economic and cultural ties to Asia Minor, North Africa, Egypt, and Aegean.  Preparations for publication are now under way.

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In more exciting news, stay tuned to Archaeology of the Mediterranean World for a special guest blogging experience!  David Pettegrew and I are going to collaborate to produce a series of posts reporting on some archaeological experiments conducted this past summer on the Koutsopetria plain.  Curious? Stay tuned!

Ideas of Landscapes

I strongly recommend Matthew Johnson's Ideas of Landscapes to anyone interested in landscape archaeology.  It is among the best books on the topic, and it does a nearly brilliant job of putting the concept of landscape archaeology in a historiographic context.  Johnson's main focus is on the emergence of landscape archaeology as a discipline in Great Britain.  He begins with the Romantic approaches to the study of landscape with particular attention to Wordsworth's famous rambles from his home in Grasmere and argues that the Romantic tradition inspired a particular kind of empiricism which privileged experience as the quintessential character of the landscape. This Romantic empiricism continues to influence landscape studies even today through the decidedly more post-modern efforts of archaeologists to present landscapes in a phenomenological terms (see for example, the approaches critiqued by John Bintliff).

Johnson goes on to point out that some of the aversion to theory among local historians derives from this same Romantic empiricism, and this has limited the ability of scholars to take conclusions formed on the basis of detailed local studies and expand them into more far reaching arguments.  As I noted yesterday, the use of maps, aerial photographs, and detailed topographic plans fortified the empirical nature of landscape studies by melding to modern technologies and techniques.  The result was a discipline with an increasingly fine-grained capacity for microhistory, but no more robust theoretical foundation to understand the implications of this kind of methodology.  (Here he brilliantly invokes E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class and Poverty of Theory by paralleling Thompson's attention to detail and, in the latter, attack on theory to the detailed studies of local landscapes produced by contemporary archaeologists.)

In his conclusion he places landscape archaeology at the intersection of two longstanding, divergent strands in archaeology: one, the urge to document in a detailed way the intricate features visible in the landscape and the tacit empiricism implicit in that method, and, two, the need to generalize and theorize about larger problems in the develop of human society and the epistemological critiques that are central to any effort to synthesize myriad more focused studies.  The former derives from archaeology's longstanding ties to a Romantic view of landscapes, and the latter from fields like anthropology (and more recently history) which insist upon critiquing the particular. The contrast appears in the accusations that New Archaeology produces dry-as-dust, quantified, landscapes that while generalized and generalizable, lack any real sense of place.

My brief, rambling impressions do not do the book justice.  So I'll offer just a few more:

1. Johnson ties Romantic empiricism to map making to colonialism in a way that stands as an important caveat to Mediterranean archaeologists who often root their claims to local knowledge and authority in deeply impressionistic views of the landscape.  At the same time, we deploy the tools of New Archaeology and produce quantified landscapes.  The intersection of older impressionistic practices with the rigor of New Archaeology have allowed us to appropriate for research large areas of the Mediterranean basin, but at the same time have moved to the foreground the colonial tendency inherent in so many archaeological practices.

2. Johnson presents a particularly interesting critique of the palimpsest metaphor in landscape archaeology.  While I am more familiar with this metaphor in the study of cities, Johnson discusses the role of the palimpsest in the larger metaphor of landscape as text.  He suggests that the metaphor has become "too strong" and reinforced a view of the landscape as static rather than engaging with more dynamic models for textuality common elsewhere in the humanities.  I've railed against the use of the palimpsest metaphor for years largely because the two levels of the palimpsest have no clear relation to one another.  For example, a text of Plautus could be erased and the skin used for a sermon of St. Ambrose.  These two texts are unrelated whereas historical landscapes are places where interaction between past and present is continuous and the memory of overwritten or erased landscapes often persist preserving the past "under erasure" for political and social goals.

3. Finally, the link between British landscape archaeology and Mediterranean landscape archaeology is a direct one and the history of the latter cannot be fully understood without understanding the history of the former.  I sometimes wonder if separating Mediterranean landscape studies from its British (and to a less extent North American roots) has allowed certain sections of Mediterranean archaeology to persist with just the kind of Romantic empiricism that Johnson critiques.  In fact, I find myself celebrating the more isolated and remote parts of Greece (the southeastern Corinthia and the island of Kythera, for example) for many of the same Romantic reasons that Wordsworth championed his local landscape.  The isolation from the bustle of the everyday (in other words social, political, economic reality), the feeling of antiquity, and the untrammeled natural beauty.  Johnson's work will certainly give me pause.

Picturing Landscapes

I just finished reading Matthew Johnson's Ideas of Landscape(Blackwell 2006).  In it, he argued that maps, air photos, and archaeological hachured plans formed the foundation of landscape archaeology in Great Britain (and, I'd contend, elsewhere).  Landscape archaeology in the Mediterranean has certainly benefited from maps and air (and increasingly satellite) photos which represent the first step, typically, in data gathering for an archaeological project. The first aerial photographs that we acquired in the study of our site of Pyla-Koutsopetria were the 1963 and 1993 series produced by the Cypriot Department of Maps and Surveys.

 

Since then, we were lucky enough to have a series of oblique, relatively low altitude air photos taken from an RAF helicopter in 2007.  These photos provide more detail, but the oblique angles make them more difficult to use for producing accurate maps. 

This past summer, we took even more low altitude and far more oblique air photographs using the infamous helikite (half helium blimp and half kite).  We only had enough helium for a limited number of flights and this tempted us to take the airship up in, let's say, unfavorable conditions.  The results were blurry, but we were able to salvage some good quality aerial photographs from the set.  The camera was rocking furiously beneath the wind-buffeted helikite so the photos lack a good representation of the horizontal.  More disappointing is that the strong breeze from the sea made it difficult to photograph the fields closest to the busy Larnaka-Dhekelia road.  The 1963 and 1993 aerial photographs showed some feature near the intersection of the main road and the northeast running road that now leads to the water treatment facility.  While the feature does not stand out in the 2007 RAF photographs, they were taken after a particularly wet early summer which caused green wheat to be left in the field.  The nicely ploughed fields of summer 2010 may have provided a different image.

 

One of my jobs for this summer is labeling these photographs and moving them to Omeka.  For now, enjoy a different perspective on the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria.

Drawing Archaeology

A week or so ago I was asked why archaeologists spend so much time preparing line drawing illustrators of things when photography is quick, cheap, and "more accurate".  The answer is pretty easy, in fact.  Some things are impossible to photograph.  For example, Dimitri Nakassis and I spent an afternoon illustrating a wall uncovered by looters on our site. The only way we could reproduce the wall was to go down into a relatively narrow hole and produce a stone-by-stone illustration of the what we saw.

 

Likewise, as I have documented elsewhere, our illustration of the architecture at Pyla-Koutsopetria.  Here a line drawing enables us to combine features that are not all visible at the same time in a photograph.  In the drawing below, we were able to combine the results from excavation (at the far the southeastern and southwestern corners of the plan) with a stone-by-stone architectural drawing of the room and the plans produced by the architect at the time that the room was first excavated.

The images is, in effect, a historical composite of three different archaeological moments.

Indigenous Archaeology Georgian Style

One of the most exciting afternoon from this year in Cyprus involved a trip to the ruined monastery at Yialia in the mountains about Polis on the Western side of Cyprus.  According to textual sources, Georgian monks founded the monastery on the island in the 10th century and it was occupied until the 14th century.  The church is currently under study by a group of archaeologists from the Republic of Georgia with support, apparently, from the Archbishop of Cyprus.

The monastic church itself is a traditional Athonite plan with its characteristic triconch arrangement. Massive cisterns, storeroom, and living quarters for the monks (apparently) extend from the church's southern side. The monastic church underwent several significant modifications in plan including an extension to the narthex, rather significant adjustments to the eastern end of the church, a chapel annex on the northern side, and a very strange tetrapylon type structure abutting the southern apse of the Athonite triconch.  The ruins preserve some wall painting on the upper, more sheltered parts of the collapsed vaults, as well as some better preserved frescoes which were built around during the buildings numerous modifications.

The most interesting thing about this very curious building is how it is used today.  The ruins of the church are currently used for the celebration of liturgy.  A portable altar and prothesis stand at the eastern end of the church despite the ruinous condition of the sanctuary space.

Incense burners and evidence for the burning of candles dot the various ledges and niches of the ruined walls.  The practice of re-using excavated, yet nevertheless consecrated sacred space is not entirely rare.  I observed a similar phenomenon at the church of St. Tychon near Amathous, for example.  It does, however, shed some valuable light on the intersection of long-standing forms of religious archaeology (dream archaeology being just one example) and modern "scientific" archaeological practice.  This kind of provision use of a ruined church may also reflect some of the practices common to ancient and Byzantine Christianity where churches damaged by earthquakes or neglect continue to be places of intermittent devotional practices.

Making this point all the more clear, a casket occupies of the center of the nave.  Apparently the excavations revealed a number of burials around the church and the monastic complex.  A few of these burials appear to be marked by small, Georgian style crosses.

It seems reasonable to assume that the remains from these excavated grave sites are placed in the conspicuous casket.  Apparently, the Georgian church plans to build a new monastery nearby and perhaps the bones of these now excavated monks will be brought to rest there.

The architecture, decoration, inscriptions (some in Georgian), and artifacts from this church will surely contribute to our understanding of the multi-ethnic character of Medieval Cyprus.  More than that, however, the combination of "scientific" archaeology and Christian devotional practices shows the potential for a kind of indigenous archaeological practice to exist alongside largely "western" (by some definition) archaeological practices, methods, and presumably epistemology.

More on Polis

One of the great conversations that I had this past week at Polis Chysochous centered on how one goes about publishing a complex site or sites.  Starting this fall, (as I discussed yesterday) a dynamic and diverse team of Late Antique, Byzantine, and Medieval scholars (Amy Papalexandrou, Kyle Killian, Sarah Lepinski, R. Scott Moore, Nora Laos, and myself) are planning to publish two multi-phase Christian churches excavated over the last 20 years in the village of Polis.  The sites are relatively complex architecturally with numerous overlapping and interrelated phases; they have also produced robust assemblages of Late Antique to Medieval ceramics, highly fragmentary wall painting, glass, and mortuary remains.

In a traditional publication each of these materials would have its own discrete section (or perhaps even volume) produced after a period of careful study by a specialist.  For example, Amy, Nora, and I would study the architecture and publish it complete with a description, comparanda, and comments on the significance of this architecture for existing typologies.  Kyle and Scott would perform a similar study of the ceramics; Sarah would study and publish the wall painting.  These practices have their roots in the history of discipline of archaeology (and the humanities more broadly).  In the first half of the 20th century (outside brief pockets of critique), the humanities emphasized the mastery of (highly!) specialized bodies of material which collectively would contribute to the expanding pool of knowledge on a give topic.  This empirical mode of research favored intensive, specialized, and discrete studies which would build a enduring body of factual knowledge.

Over the last 40 years (and perhaps more recently in the proudly anachronistic world of Mediterranean archaeology), scholarship have moved to more highly integrative approaches to research. These approaches have implicitly (or more recently explicitly) recognized that discrete bodies of knowledge exist only in relation to complex interpretative processes.  These interpretative processes inform both the hypotheses that guide our research as well as the techniques that we use to collect data to evaluate these hypotheses.  In other words, a body of factual knowledge does not exist outside interpretation.  The goal of producing an enduring body of empirically sound knowledge is simply not attainable.

As a result of this trend, scholars have worked to produce more richly integrated, interpretative publications across the humanities.  While vestiges of earlier practices persist in catalogue of finds and narrow specialist studies of distinct artifact types, these practices are increasingly arranged in relation to large archaeological and historical problems.  Our efforts at Polis will, I hope, look to how the assemblage of ceramic material informs how we understand the architecture and decoration of these buildings; at the same time, I hope that the architecture informs our interpretation of the decorative material and the ceramics present at the site.  The interplay between these various bodies of material create the interpretative space which we hope will produce a richer, more clearly historically relevant publication of the site.  In short, our study will regard the material culture (architecture, ceramics, plaster, et c.) of the past as both the product and the producer of historical interpretation.

This approach is not novel, and on Cyprus we have some great models (particularly Marcus Rautman's publication of the churches at Kopetra), but it is not universally applied.  What could make our approach interesting, however, is that we will attempt to implement it as a team of specialists (rather than as a single visionary scholar who can command a vast body of material).  Wish us luck!

 

Last Days in Larnaka

The museum team from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project finished packing up the museum on Friday and is heading off to Polis on the western part of the island to check out the work of the Princeton Polis Expedition.  They have not only substantial quantities of Late Antique pottery for Scott, but a pair of Early Christian basilicas (for me) and some Roman and Byzantine wall painting (for Sarah). 

Packing up at the end of the season provides a useful perspective on the quantity of material that we have processed and analyzed during the year, and need to synthesize in the off season.  The stacked creates filled with artifacts represent order from the chaos of real fieldwork and provide the basis for both the chronological and functional analysis of both our survey area and our various soundings.

In general, this was a successful season, although the various small projects, student volunteers, site visits, issues with the British base, and bizarre archaeo-political controversies conspired to give it a bit of a disjointed feeling. 

And the real success of the season will only be evident this off season as the various members of the team continue to work to write up the results of our 7+ seasons of fieldwork.

 

There might be a bit of radio silence from the blog over the next week, as we might not have the same degree of internet connective in Polis.  But I'll be back blogging by the end of the week.  Don't you worry.

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").