The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

James Brewer Stewart and Abolitionism at the University of North Dakota

On Friday, we have the distinct pleasure of hearing James Brewer Stewart give a talk entitled, "The Old Slavery and the New: History, Memory, and the Challenges of Human Trafficking".  His talk was one of those all too rare occasions when a historian can bridge the gap between past practices and present policies and offer a compelling case for present action.  He argued that the abolitionist movement of the first half of the 19th century could provide a model for the creation of a movement to abolish slavery in the world today which Stewart regards as a more pressing problem today than ever before.  In particular, he asserted that the moment is right for a movement that would demand the immediate emancipation of all slaves in the world.  His talk was particularly successful in tying events in the 19th century to the current upswing in youth activism, the spread of technology, the vitality of the evangelical movement both at specifically evangelical colleges and in American life in general, and the dire need to eliminate the immoral practice of slavery from the earth.

The talk was one of those great opportunities to discuss and grapple with a wide range of issues from the uses of the past, to the nature of slavery (in the past and today), and the potential and structure of any movement with global goals and ambitions.  The discussions poured over in a local watering hole and Steward graciously hung around talking to faculty and graduate students.

My students, who generally study pre-modern Eastern Mediterranean, we particularly excited about Stewart's talk.  Not only have there been some interesting recent works that look at various aspects of slavery in the Ancient and Medieval East (e.g. Jennifer Glancy's recent survey or M. McCormick's Origins of the European Economy), but our work in Cyprus and in the Muslim east brought to the fore important transnational issues (e.g. what is the impact of evangelical involvement in various social justice issues in countries where Western Christianity is looked upon with concern or even hostility).

The point of this post today is purely advertisement.  Between Friday's Red River Valley History Conference and Stewart's talk, I was impressed and invigorated by the vitality present in our small history department and small graduate program.  Check out the photos on the web page!  And our graduate student members of the history honor society, Phi Alpha Theta, should be commended for their hard work and successful conference.

Phi Alpha Theta Conference and Other Fun Stuff

If you are in the Grand Forks area, stop by the Red River Valley History Conference today at the Memorial Union at the University of North Dakota.  In particular, stop by my panel at 9:30 am in Medora Room 209.

Historical Idealism & Religion
Dr. W. Caraher, Commentator,
Memorial Union Medora Room 209     

"Croce and Collingwood: Continuities in Idealism"
Dalton Little,University of North Dakota

"A Late Antique Saint"
Kathryn A. Hughes Nedegaard
University of North Dakota    

“Standard of Salvation: The Christian’s Use of Greco-Roman Literary Genre”
Paul Ferderer, University of North Dakota

______________________

And stick around for the other panels and our keynote speaker:  Dr. James Stewart: "The Old Slavery and the New: History, Memory and the Challenges of Human Trafficking"

A few other fun quick hits:

• Some interesting discussion over that Teaching Thursday.  Check it out and leave a comment!
• This is interesting and cool.
• This will be fun to follow.

Four Miniposts on a disjointed Tuesday

I usually wake up, become oriented, and think about what I will do and blog about for the day.  This morning, I slipped into some kind of overload.  I could not put together a coherent blog post, plan for the day, or strategy for the week.  This semester has presented me with a whole series of mini-tasks.  None takes more than a day or two and none provides any sense of accomplishment. 

So, in the spirit of the mini-task, I offer four mini-posts:

1. Video and the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  So what would happen if we distributed 5 simple HD cameras to folks on PKAP this summer.  They were told to video anything of interest to them and at the end of each day, we downloaded the video onto a hard drive and marked with the individual's name.  On the return to the US we turned it all over to another group of students, faculty, folks, people, scholars, whoever, and asked them to produce a mash-up, narrative, montage, or whatever.  What would we learn?  What would we see?  Who would be the author? Most importantly, what would this exercise or experiment tell us about the experience of archaeology on Cyprus with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project?

2. Military History in Murfreesboro.  In April, I am going to the Society for Military History's Annual Meeting in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  I was invited to comment on papers offered by a group of graduate students from Penn State on topics related to archaeology and the Battle of Issus where Alexander first defeated the Persian King Darius III.  This is pretty far from my comfort zone, although I did write my M.A. Thesis on Alexander the Great and I have worked on Hellenistic fortifications.  I have to be honest when I say that I am a bit nervous about this, but the idea of the archaeology of ancient battlefields, has begun to intrigue me.  The most recent wave of intensive pedestrian survey archaeology has done little to clarify the topography of battle in the ancient world, and, in this regard, stands in contrast to its predecessor -- extensive survey, which often sought to localize ancient battles within the modern topography.  So, I think that I will be able to say something...

3. Cyberpunk Space and Archaeology.  This is a tiny post for our Punk Archaeology project.  I had a habit of reading William Gibson on flights to conduct archaeological work in Greece and Cyprus.  Gibson was among the founders of the Cyberpunk movement and many of his books are characterized by vivid "post-urban" landscapes.  While all his books work at the intersection of material culture, punk, and identity, his Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties) was the first to draw me in -- if for no other reason than one of the books was titled All Tomorrow's Parties and any book with a title from a Velvet Underground song deserves to be read.  One of the key settings in these works (which I have not read for at least 5 years) is Bay Bridge in San Francisco which after being damaged in an earthquake became an interstitial settlement.  Spolia, the re-use of urban space, cultural and political dystopia, and the shadow of natural disasters evoke themes common to literature on Late Antique archaeology. 

4. An Encyclopedia of Baptisteries.  I've recently returned to thinking about Early Christian baptisteries. Hopefully I will have a few early drafts of encyclopedia type entries done in the next week or so. As I write these relatively short entries, I've had to think about what to include and exclude in each and who my audience will be.  It reminded me of site reports from my time at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.  Do I  include dimensions?  Do I include scholarly debates?  How much bibliography should I include?  Should I interpret as much as I describe?  More?

So, four mini posts for the day.

A Conference Next Door: The Red River Valley History Conference

Next Friday (February 27th), Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society here at the University of North Dakota, will host their annual spring conference called the Red River Valley History Conference. I am chairing a panel on "Historical Idealism & Religion" at 9:30 AM in the Memorial Union Room 209.  My panel will feature papers from three UND M.A. students Dalton Little, Paul Ferderer, and Kathy Nedegaard.  The highlight of the conference this year will be the department's regular Wilkins Lecture offered by Emeritus Prof. James Steward of Macalester College in St. Paul.  The conference has largely been organized by our graduate students here and will feature papers from many of the regional universities, including the University of Minnesota, Minot State, and North Dakota State.  There is no registration fee, so if you are in the area, stop by and catch a panel.  The papers give a great overview of the work being done by M.A. level students at both UND and the other universities in the region.

And, it's a regional conference!  Reflecting back on my travel this winter to the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, I realized that my trip to Philadelphia cost, all told, over $1500.  While the meetings, paper, and fellowship were priceless (as they say), it did drive home how expensive conference travel can be -- as if the myriad articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education haven't made this argument abundantly clear.  Despite the high cost and world wide budget tightening, national and international conferences seemly continue to proliferate.  In fact, this year alone, I avoided attending conferences in Rome, Berlin, and Loutraki, Greece.  (Of course, some of these conferences are, in fact, local or regional for their participants!). 

In any event, regional conferences have often (but not always!) been regarded as decidedly second tier affairs, suitable for graduate students, regional scholars, and local hobbyists. But what would happen if we began to think of regional conferences as a way of fostering a deeper engagement with the local intellectual community?  How would the profession of history (or any field) change if the economy compelled us to rely on local intellectual resources to get our annual conference fix?  Assuming that the conference still functions as an important opportunity for genuine academic and intellectual discourse, I suspect that regional conferences would promote a deeper engagement with the local community, closer ties between faculty in different areas of the discipline, and perhaps even promote a more robust local intellectual life. 

I typically tell our potential job candidates that my closest colleagues are spread around the US, if not around the world, as a way of assuring them that the relative isolation of our campus has not been a major obstacles to my professional goals. I stay in touch with my various collaborators via phone, email, wikis, and even blogs.  But this low level and regular contact is not the same as an academic conference.  The technologies and techniques that we use, however, could replicate, if not improve upon, some of the basic goals of a conference.  Podcasts linked to threaded discussions, for example, would facilitate question and answer sections removed from the constraints of "real time" (I'm sorry, our time is upon now, but I am sure the participants would be happy to continue to discuss their paper's at this evening's social...).  Participants could be encouraged -- or required -- to engage their colleagues' papers and respond to posts from registered users in order to foster the kind of dialogue that makes a conference valuable as an intellectual and academic enterprise (and not just an opportunity for socialization).  Of course, such an approach may not reproduce entirely the opportunities for informal conversation and social networking that makes national conferences so valuable, but in some ways, the online social networking tools have already begun to fill even that niche.  I know more about many of my distant colleagues now than I did five years ago because they update their facebook status, blog regularly, or maintain twitter feeds.  Integrating this kind of social space into an online conference is more a matter of balancing the spontaneous opportunities provided by simultaneity (papers read in real time, for example) against the convenience of non-real time delivery.  Such issues though could surely be resolved and would shed interesting (if not valuable) light on the different modes of academic engagement.

Speculation on the future of academic conversation aside, if you have a chance, do stop by the Red River Valley History Conference next Thursday. 

Two More Springtime Conferences

The Spring conference schedule is jam-packed this year!  Two more interesting events:

Shifting Frontiers VIII is being hosted by Indiana University, April 2-5, 2009.  The focus this year will be on "Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity".  It looks good albeit with predictable panels on the typical Late Antique topics: Letters (II), the body (III), cultural negotiation between religious groups (IV), identity (V), ritual (VI), memory (VII), "material culture" (IX), historiography and cultural representation (X), imperial power (Xb), and the frontier (XI).  All and all, the panels provide a nice survey of the pressing issues in scholarship on Late Antiquity. 

At the same exact time, the Roman Archaeology Conference (RAC) will occur at the University of Michigan including an interesting panel on the "Troubled Adolescence of Late Antique Studies...", Cam Grey's paper in this panel has particular relevance to our work on Cyprus (Stuck in the Middle: Between Grand Theory and the Case Study in the Countrysides of Late Antiquity).  Another interesting panel will focus on comparative approaches to the archaeology of the Roman rural landscape. 

It's perhaps instructive to note where the two conferences overlap even though it is always difficult and dangerous to judge a book by the cover or a panel by the titles and abstracts of the papers.  They both show marked interest in issues of identity, particularly of groups on the periphery, and various forms of representation and reception - particularly as related to urban culture or elite power. Both conferences also consider the relationship between religion and ritual in a Roman context.  Other than that there was not as much overlap as one might hope.  The RAC had relatively little interest in the archaeology of the body or, at least explicitly, in the issue of authority, which has become an important topic of discussion for scholars of the Late Antique world.  Shifting Frontiers, for their part, showed little sustained or systematic interest in the Late Roman economy in the countryside or the city (outside of the panel on "material culture").  Curiously, Shifting Frontiers has almost nothing, explicitly on epigraphy even though inscriptions marked one of the key ways that scholars have observed the conflicting, overlapping, and complementary spheres of influence produced through languages. 

Both conferences look interesting and it is always valuable to see how the lines are drawn in the discipline between archaeologists and historians, Romanists and Late Romanists, scholars of culture and scholars of material culture, et c.

A Conference on Kourion at the University of Pennsylvania Museum

Rather than a typical Friday quick hit and varia post, here's a conference dedicated to The University of Pennsylvania's work at the site of Kourion:

The Ancient Kourion Area: Penn Museum's Legacy and Recent Research in Cyprus: A Conference Commemorating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Museum's Expedition

March 27-29, 2009

Program

 

FRIDAY, MARCH 27

7:00 p.m.          Welcome and opening remarks:

C. Brian Rose, UPMAA Deputy Director and Curator-in-Charge, Mediterranean Section

Ambassador Andreas Kakouris, Republic of Cyprus   

7:15 Keynote: Stuart Swiny, Director, Institute of Cypriot Studies, University at Albany , “The Land of Kuri: How American and Cypriot Archaeologists Revealed the Past of the Island’s Southern Shore”

8:15 – 9:00       Reception

 

SATURDAY, MARCH 28

9:00     Welcome          C.Brian Rose

Session I: Hippos and Humans Settle Prehistoric Kourion

9:10     Alan Simmons, University of Nevada Las Vegas – “So, Who Were the First Cypriots?—Perspectives on When and Why People Initially Came to Cyprus”

9:40     Ellen Herscher, Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum – “Between Two Worlds: Phaneromeni and the Transition to the Late Bronze Age”

10:10   Gisela Walberg, University of Cincinnati – "Excavating a Late Bronze Age Major Coastal Urban Center - UPenn and UC at Episkopi Bamboula"

10:40   coffee break

 

Session II: Late Bronze Age Roots of the Kingdom of Kourion

11:10   Pavlos Flourentzos, Director, Department of Antiquities, Cyprus – “A Contribution to the Topography of Bronze Age Kourion, A New Suggestion”

11:40   Maria Iacovou, University of Cyprus – “Site Location and Status Identification: The Kouris River Valley Regional Authorities in the Late Second and First Millennia B.C.”

12:10   discussion

12:30 – 2:00     lunch break

 

Session III: Research at Kourion, Past and Present

2:00     Thomas Kiely, British Museum – “Ancient Kourion On-line. The British Museum Excavations of 1895 in Cyberspace”

2:30     Tom Davis, Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute – “An Amateur’s Dream: McFadden at Kourion”

3:00     Nathan Harper, University of Nevada Las Vegas – “Ancient Cypriots in the Kouris River Valley: The University Museum’s Contribution to Physical Anthropology”

3:30     coffee break

 

Session IV: From City Kingdom to Roman City

3:50     Sabine Fourrier, CNRS Lyon, France – "The Topography of Cult in the Iron Age Kingdom of Kourion"

4:20     Demos Christou, former director, Department of Antiquities, Cyprus – “Excavations of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities at Kourion, 1975-1998”

4:50     Michael Given, University of Glasgow – “Funerary Landscapes at Kourion's Amathus Gate Cemetery”

5:15 – 5:30       discussion

 

SUNDAY, MARCH 29

Session V: The Christian Era

9:00     Benjamin Costello IV, SUNY Buffalo – “The Earthquake House at Kourion: An Analysis of the Material Culture”

9:30     David Rupp, Canadian Institute in Greece – “To Be, or Not To Be. The Limits of Antiochene and Christian Influence on the Floor Mosaics of the Early Fifth Century AD Eustolios Complex at Kourion, Cyprus”

10:00   John Rosser, Boston College – “The Episcopal Basilica at Kourion”

10:30   coffee break

10:50   Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou, Curator of Antiquities, Department of Antiquities, Cyprus – “The Medieval Sugar-Mills of Episkopi Serayia and Kolossi, and Sugar Production in Medieval Cyprus”

11:20   William Woys Weaver, Drexel University – “The Foods of Kourion through a Medieval Lens: An Ethnographic Analysis”

11:50 – 12:15   discussion and closing remarks

Abstract for the Modern Greek Studies Association Annual Meeting

Over the last week, I've been working with Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, Timothy Gregory, David Pettegrew to prepare an abstract for the Modern Greek Studies Association Annual Meeting next year in Vancouver on a panel coordinated by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology of the Mediterranean Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America.  The paper will focus on our work at the site of Lakka Skoutara and its environs in the southeastern Corinthia.  This is an area originally documented by the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (2000-2008) and then by the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project.

It's always challenging to work on a research paper as a group, but in this case, the potential is remarkable.  David, Tim, Lita, and I all conceive of our research at this site in significantly different ways.  Lita is interested in the larger systems in which the site and the regions functions, Tim is an expert on ceramic evidence and the perspectives it can offer, David's interest focus on archaeological methods and formation processes, and I am interested in embedding the site at the intersection of the archaeological and historical discourse.  Such productive tensions will undoubtedly enrich the work and our own understanding of the sites, the region, and the process of archaeology in Greece.

Here's the abstract:

"Between sea and mountain: the archaeology of a 20th century “small world” in the upland basins of the southeastern Korinthia"  

Between the villages of Sophiko and Korphos in the southeastern Korinthia are a number of geographically well-defined and fertile upland basins or poljes, each one accompanied into modern times by a cluster of farmsteads and used for agriculture and pastoral activities. The heavily forested slopes adjacent to these basins were systematically exploited for resin production, a flourishing industry in the wider region especially after WWII, which is now in serious decline. Although physically isolated from major urban centers, these microecologies played a vital role in the 20th century in the subsistence of its local population, which originated primarily in the nearby mountainous village of Sophiko.  Placing these isolated, yet deeply interconnected places into their regional context provides another key case-study for the contingent character of the Greek countryside in the 19th and 20th century.

Between 2001 and 2009, the authors investigated these basins, with a primary focus on the largest, known locally as Lakka Skoutara, through two archaeological projects: the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (2001-03) and the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (2008-09).  The former studied Lakka Skoutara as part of its emphasis on the archaeology of the modern period (19th-20th centuries), while the latter conducted archaeological investigations in several of these basins as part of a larger regional survey of the Saronic coastline.

Typical of the other basins, Lakka Skoutara presents a remarkably robust assemblage of material, including domestic and religious architecture, agricultural installations, and ceramics scatters.  This material reflects the dynamism of changing land use patterns in the Greek rural landscape as well as the formation processes and life cycles of use, reuse, and abandonment connected to domestic residence.  By combining archaeological survey with oral information obtained from local residents, we were able to reconstruct part of the landscape history of this small, low-density rural settlement and its relationship to the wider world. This micro-level analysis of the site complements the broader perspectives offered by regional level data collection, oral history, and comparative studies from elsewhere in Greece.  Lakka Skoutara and its neighboring poljes offer both snap shots of historical processes affecting the countryside over the last two centuries as well as the dynamic archaeological environments of semi-abandoned settlements recorded over the much narrower horizon of a decade of field work.

The Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting: Four Conversations

The AIA Annual meeting was as exciting and interesting as usual (I'll leave it to my more regular readers to determine whether there is sarcasm intended).  It was good to see old friends and hear about new ideas, projects, and, well, news.  Four conversations stuck out in my head as I traveled back to Grand Forks, and here they are:

1. Jobs.  While most of my graduate school buddies landed tenure-track positions over the last 5 years, I still know enough folks on the job market to hear about the good (2-2 teaching loads, good support for research), bad (4-4 teaching loads, budget cuts), and ugly (fractured departments, battles in interviews, little chance for tenure) jobs available.  The reports from the AHA and the MLA appear to resonate with things at the AIA/ APA (American Philological Association) Joint Meeting.  Almost everyone with whom I talked had some story about a job search being canceled or words of warning about "upcoming cuts" during the interview.  One interesting phenomenon is that several folks told stories about job searches being accelerated to get the hiring done before the position was suspended.  A few people told stories the entire job search -- phone interview, on-campus interview, and job offer -- taking place over a mere two weeks.  Our department is searching right now and we were surprised when one candidate accepted a position before Christmas.  Traditionally job offers are made in the late winter or spring.  It may be that our lost opportunity was the product of an accelerated search.

2. Digital Archaeology. I talked with several people about archaeological field work this summer (see below), and one thing that came up in conversations was the need for IT support.  On the one hand, this is not terribly surprising as most projects have (mostly de facto) an "IT Guy" (or person).  On the other hand, it was interesting to hear projects talk seriously a dedicated IT expert perhaps even with long term responsibilities to the project.  The coming of age of digital archaeology is when archaeologists understand that born-digital data requires the same level of curation as traditional techniques for archaeological recording (inventory cards, artifacts, notebooks, drawings, et c.).  In some ways born-digital artifacts are susceptible to the same risks as an artifact of archaeological fieldwork.  In particular, digital data requires carefully documented context to be meaningful.  Unlike "analog" artifacts -- especially notebooks -- the techniques for preserving and maintaining digital records are not nearly as refined (yet), so archaeological IT experts must remain committed to project data at least until it reaches a stable state.  Even then, projects appear to be aware that a basic level of maintenance is required for "legacy data"; after all, no one produces data with the expectation that it will become unusable or worthless.  Data becomes unusable only through neglect.  In any event, it was heartening to hear so many projects (even small ones) talking about either bringing in a dedicated IT person from the earliest planning stages and hearing more established projects designated IT "coordinator" to curate legacy data and enforce good practices in data creation.  Some projects even talked about data integration beyond the site on a regional level.  The era of the digital archaeologist has arrived.

3. A Fractured Field.  I think that I heard the phrase, "that doesn't really interest me" more times at this meeting than ever before.  I'll admit that I was guilty of this on several occasions (one might have even been documented on a digital recorder!) as I begrudged my prehistorian colleagues the abundance of panels on Aegean prehistory at the AIA!  Some of my begrudging was for show, I have to admit. After all, we have worked for the last few years on the Late Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos on Cyprus and enjoyed the support of colleagues and funding organization in our efforts to contribute to a better understanding of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean.  What was vaguely more disturbing was the willingness of senior (and contemporary) colleagues to express a genuine lack of interest of work even within the more narrow disciplinary confines.  My feigned lack of interest in the Bronze Age could be seen as reasonable since my area of specialty is some 2000 years later in time!  A lack of interest in material produced 400 or 500 years earlier or later than one's specialization (or in a different sub-region of the Mediterranean) reflects the ever narrowing focus of our field and perhaps predicts the eventual demise of such august and long-lived organizations at the AIA.  Already, conferences like the Byzantine Studies Conference, Dumbarton Oaks Symposia, annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting, the Society of American Archaeologists, and regional groups like the Classical Association of the Midwest and South offer smaller and potentially more focused environments for scholarly exchange.  As money for travel to conferences becomes more scarce (not to mention the money to put on such major events), perhaps the lack of interest among scholars who are more devoted to their narrow research fields (rather than larger disciplines) simply marks out a practical, intellectual reality of our changing times.  Stan Katz offered a similar (if more articulate) critique of the American Historical Association Annual Meeting at the Chronicle Review Blog. Despite my posturing, I'd be sad to see the AIA go.  I think that we have far more to learn from our colleagues than we sometimes realize.

4. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Logistics. I spent a good bit of time on Thursday and throughout the meeting talking logistics with my fellow directors of the Pyla-Kousopetria Archaeological Project.  It looks like we will have over 30 people this year on the project ranging from almost completely inexperienced undergraduates to specialists in Bronze Age pottery, Roman wall-painting, and the history of the Medieval Cyprus.  We had designed our project from the start to be "scalable".  We began with 6, 3 students and 3 faculty, and each year expanded our operation.  With over 30 slated to come for at least part of the time, we'll certainly push the limits of scalability.  This blog began as a means to make our planning and field work on Cyprus more transparent.  While it has expanded and wandered over the almost 15 months of its life, it will continue to keep our stakeholders informed of our planning and our day-to-day activities in the field.

Finally, I was approached a number of times this weekend by folks with kind words for this blog.  Apparently it was mentioned in several contexts at the Meetings, and this corresponds with a spike in hits over the weekend.  I do not do much to promote this blog (although it is listed in the various indexed blog-searches and has even appears occasionally in Google Scholar), so it was really encouraging to hear that people appreciate my musings.  Thanks!  And if you are a visitor or a new reader, I hope you find my blog entertaining (at least) or informative or just pathetic in an endearing way.  After all, it's cold out here, and blogging helps keep me warm.  Keep coming back and I'll keep posting.

More Roman Cyprus...

My recent blog entries on Roman Cyprus center on two projects.  One is a article that we have been working on for almost three years now that places the assemblage produced by the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in the context of other similar sites in the Eastern Mediterranean.  It focuses particularly on how the economic relationships between sites in the region led to the creation of a distinct assemblage of pottery at Koutsopetria in Late Antiquity.

The second project is a paper at a small colloquium at McGill University in Montreal.  I was invited to present a response to a paper by Andreas Mehl. Prof. Mehl's paper presents an administrative sketch of the province of Cyprus during the Roman period.  Without giving too much away, his paper's primary emphasis was on the role of the province in the Roman Empire.  As with many papers of this kind, Mehl relies heavily on epigraphical evidence and, by his own admission, takes little stock in the archaeological evidence from the island.  Such administrative and provincial histories were once the foundations for regional histories of the Roman Empire.  Even today, any discussion of Roman Cyprus begins with the epigrapher T.B. Mitfords, "Roman Cyprus," (ANRW II 7.2 (1980): 1285-1384).  The tradition was carried on further, albeit with a slightly broader perspective, in David Potter's article "Roman Cyprus" which appeared originally in Greek translation (2000) but has circulated widely in an English manuscript for years. 

More recent work has concerned itself less with the administrative component of Roman domination on Cyprus and emphasized it its place the economic and cultural components of Roman rule on the island.  To do this, scholars have drawn more and more heavily on archaeological data.  In part, this is because the traditional material for Roman administrative history on Cyprus is lacking.  There are relatively few inscriptions from the Roman period which give insight into the workings of Roman rule there and even fewer inscriptions give any information on Cypriots abroad; without such texts, the traditional narratives of Roman authority that relied upon prosopography and Roman legal history falter. As a result, scholarship on Roman Cyprus has come to emphasize archaeological data and this data has encouraged us to consider different kinds of questions from those traditionally addressed using epigraphical data and considered by scholars interested in the administrative apparatus and individuals central to Roman rule.

Thus, responding to a paper like Prof. Mehl's will be a particular challenge.  On the one hand, the questions and interests of historians who have committed to using archaeological data have diverged considerably from the kind of analysis produced by Mehl.  On the other hand, our work should have points of contact and mutually inform each others' conclusions.  Recent work on Roman Cyprus -- particularly John Leonard's dissertation and the steady stream of publications from recent fieldwork on Roman and Late Roman sites -- should exert an influence over more traditional questions regarding the expression of Roman administrative power on the island.

Our site at Pyla-Koutsopetria for example must be in part an artifact of Roman administrative authority on the island.  It reached its largest extent in the Late Roman period. The material at the site shows that it benefited from well-worn trade routes which linked the length and breadth of the Roman Mediterranean most likely through a now infilled harbor.  This harbor was well-situated to take advantage of the location of the site within the Roman road network on the island.  The main route from Kition to Salamis-Constantina would have departed the coast near our site, and this made Koutsopetria the first place that a traveler from the east would reach the coast.  Despite the site's status as a central place (albeit most likely on a very local level), the "town" does not appear to have acquired any administrative identity.  It presumably fell under the local political control of Kition, but its size alone suggests that it must have enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy.  In fact, the material present on the surface of the site does not find ready parallels with any of other site or region in the hinterland of Kition suggesting that size of the site might also mark out some degree of economic autonomy.  This is to say that the residents of Koutsopetria had their own model for engaging Mediterranean commerce.  Such concentrations of wealth in the countryside have contributed to fundamental economic and administrative changes in the empire over the course of Late Antiquity as the state sought to develop new methods for extracting resources from such a "busy countryside" at the same time as the traditional urban elite progressively lost status.

The Roman administrative system was hardly known for its dynamism or ability to respond to changes.  Moreover, it is likely that economic changes and changes in settlement were tied at least in part to changes in the administrative structure of the empire.  An opportunity to engage someone like Prof. Mehl in a conversation about administration, economic, settlement, and politics, on Roman Cyprus holds forth considerable potential.  More soon...

Late Antiquity in Ottawa

David Pettegrew dropped me a line about Late Antique World Workshop at the University of Ottawa from September 20-21, 2008.  A number of the sessions will focus on various chapters from Stephen Mitchell's recent textbook A History of the Later Roman Empire (2007).  This is a really clever idea for a conference and ensures that participants have a common basis for conversation.  While I have not read Mitchell's textbook, the very need for a formal textbook designed, presumably, for a course in Late Antiquity (beyond Brown's classic survey The World of Late Antiquity or Averil Cameron's more "monographic" offering, The Mediterranean world in late antiquity, AD 395-600) surely reflects the period's recent boom in popularity as well as a recent wave of synthetic studies in the field. 

The conference is put on by the Ottawa Network for the Study of Late Antiquity.  The list of contributors to this network and their research projects reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the study of Late Antiquity at Ottawa. The impulse toward interdisciplinary collaboration (the emergence of centers/centres as opposed to departments and schools) and at the same time a willingness to regard (accessible) synthetic studies as significant contributions to the discipline reflects the deep engagement of Late Antique studies in the language and vision of North American universities.