The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Another, Better Attempt at Dream Archaeology

For those of you in the Grand Forks Metropolitan Area this evening, I am giving a talk at the North Dakota Museum of Art in the Faculty Lecture Series. The talk starts at 4:30 with a reception from 4:00. Considering my post yesterday, I promise to include only a few illustrative slides using The Powerpointer.

My talk is entitled Dream Archaeology and represents the third version of my efforts to come to terms with this subject. Unlike earlier versions, I think that I problematize my paper somewhat better and add a bit of flair (mostly because I am going to present it to relatively diverse audience). If you doubt my efforts to make my paper better you can (although I don't recommend it) read the first draft here, read the second draft here, and contemplate my third draft below:

Caraher Dream Archaeology 2010   
For more on Dream Archaeology without leaving the comfortable informality of the blog, see below:

Dreams in Ravenna
Dream Archaeology in the Early Christian West
Blindness, Dreams, and Relics
More Dreams, Religion, and Archaeology
More Byzantine Dreams...
Dreams, Pausanias, and Archaeology
Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology
Kozani

Lakka Skoutara: A Partial Archive

Over the last 10 years or so, David Pettegrew, Tim Gregory, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, and I have been working to document a modern rural settlement in the southeastern Corinthia. The site is called Lakka Skoutara and we have presented the preliminary results of our work in a few conference papers over the past few years, I've presented some photographs and general discussions in this blog, and Lita-Tzortzopoulou published a very brief summary of our work in "The Archaeology of Modern Greece" in E. Athanassopoulos and L. Wandsnider eds. Mediterranean Archaeological Landscapes: current issues. (Philadelphia 2004).

Part of the basis for our study is a significant archive of photographs. I've made a significant number of these available using Omeka on a companion site to this blog called Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota. David Pettegrew and I took these photos over a 9 year period from 2001-2009. So far, I've uploaded and begun to annotate with metadata photos taken in 2002, 2004, and 2009.

To find the photos on my Omeka site, click on Browse Collections and then Lakka Skoutara. You can look at the various photos of individual houses by their tags: House 2, House 3, House 4, House 5, House 6, House 7, House 9, House 10, House 11, House 13 , House 14, House 16, House 17. Or you can go to advanced search (in the upper right hand corner) and create more complex searches. The simple search is nearly worthless. Once you find a photo in which you are interested, you can save the citation into your Zotero database.

At present the houses do not have a significant amount of metadata associated with each house, but that is coming soon. Moreover, we do not have many contextualizing documents associated with these houses. But we will have a few plans posted soon and a map of the site as well as some photos taken in 2001 and some more robust descriptions of the houses and the area. In other words, this is a work in progress, but the item numbers for each photograph will remain stable.

Abandonment Again

I keep thinking about abandonment in both modern and ancient contexts and wondering why (and to a lesser extent whether) there seems to be a recent upswing in public interest in abandonment. I've written elsewhere about the work of such photographers as Yves Marchand and Romain Meffree, Camio Jose Vergara (via Kostis Kourelis) and James D. Griffioen (we can now add (thanks to Ryan Stander, Jeff Brouws, and thanks to Aaron Barth, Brian Herbel), and from closer to home the folks at Ghosts of North Dakota and the haunting 2008 Nation Geographic article "The Emptied Prairie"). I've contributed my own fuel to the fire by co-chairing a panel at the 2007 Archaeological Institute of America which focused on abandonment in the archaeological record.

In a forthcoming article (yes, I know...) in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, I argue, among other things, that abandonment, in its many guises, served as a chronological marker for the end of something. Typically, the something was the abandoned building or object or space, and since archaeology tends to plot the rise and fall of civilizations (in its crudest forms) according to the life history of objects, buildings, and spaces, the abandonment of such things typically serve to mark out the end of a particular culture or period of time. Thus, abandonments are central to the way in which we create historical and chronological periods from the events of the past. Abandonment helps us organize time.

There is an inevitability to abandonment which evokes tragedy. Despite the best intentions of humanity, time (as an active agent) inevitably takes its toll on human constructions and brings them down. In these formulations, abandonment brings to the fore both the power of nature and the folly of human ambition. What I am more interested in, however, is whether our current focus on abandonment is meant to bring about and mark out the end of some era. For as long as history has existed, people have declared history to be at an end. Since the Enlightenment, this call has most frequently been triumphant (see, for example, Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man), but in our current fixation on abandonment, it seems to be tragic. The focus of abandonment -- monumental hotels, bustling factories, middle class suburbs, rural towns -- cut across American and Western society and suggests a kind of all encompassing futility.

Of course, the celebration of the futility of human works could point to an interpretation that is not simply apocalyptic. The end of one era of achievement whether inevitable or calculated (was the Roman Republic assassinated?) typically ushers in the dawn of a new age. If we see abandonment as a critique of past folly, and it seems that some works that celebrate the return of nature to abandoned places see abandonment as the first step toward a return to a more environmentally conscious and humane world. A post-American landscape sees the collapse of the densely packed urban world and the sprawling suburbs as marking the beginning of a new time.

In fact, it may be necessary to mark or even promote the end of an era in order to take credit for building something new. It was common for ancient rulers to celebrate renewal or return to past glories. They took particular pride in the Early and Middle Byzantine periods for the reconstruction, rebuilding, or refounding of institutions or buildings long abandoned. In these narratives, abandonment continued to mark the folly of the past, but also placed hope in new beginnings.  

Semester Preview...

After a few weeks vacation, I am ready to get back going this semester. And it will be an exciting semester, I think. So here's something of a preview on the day before my classes start in earnest.

1. Tweaking existing classes. This semester I'll teach History 101: Western Civilization (in the classroom) and History 240: The Historians Craft. I've taught these classes each semester for the past few years. While this can get boring, the one advantage to this continuity is that I can spend time tweaking each class in ways that a more diverse schedule of course preparation just would not allow. For example, check back here to see how I plan to use social media applications in History 101.

2. Public History Interns. As our department tentatively dips its toes in the public history pool, I am going to run a public history internship. Based on the conversations already taking place in Google Wave, it seems like we are off to a good start. The plans include working on an online museum of the Late Antique material from the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria, working with Ryan Stander on the online complement to his gallery show of photographs from this summer's PKAP season, keying and normalizing the survey and excavation data from the last few PKAP field seasons plus some other odds and ends. Part of their responsibilities will be to write a blog to make their work as transparent as possible.

3. Writing. I am looking forward to wrapping up work on a few articles submitted over the past few years. This includes a co-edited volume of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology and a co-written piece for Hesperia. The PKAP team will submit its last preliminary report to the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, and I'll finish a contribution to Cambridge Encyclopedia of World Religious Architecture on Early Christian baptisteries.

4. Lectures. While my conference schedule is pretty clear this spring, I will deliver the Elwyn Robinson Lecture (which I think will be on Digital Archaeology) sometime in February. Even more exciting in our keynote speaker for the annual Phi Alpha Theta History Conference here at UND: Robin Jensen of Vanderbilt University, has agreed to come and talk about some aspect of her work on Early Christian art and ritual in March. More on this soon!!

5. Reading. I am really looking forward to my winter reading list. First, I need to finish Y. Hamilakis and A. Anagnostopoulos edited volume Archaeological Ethnographies for a review for the European Journal of Archaeology. But I am also looking forward to M. Decker's Tilling the Hateful Earth: Agricultural Production and Trade in the Late Antique East (Oxford 2009) and V. Makrides, Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches: A concise history of the religious cultures of Greece from antiquity to the present (New York 2009).

6. Blogging. I am looking forward to getting Teaching Thursday going again. At the end of last semester I began to despair of ideas, contributors, and motivation, but after a brief break, I am recommitted to making it work as a forum for conversations about teaching and pedagogy here at UND. I am excited to get feedback on transmedia teaching, using technology in new ways in the classroom, and exploring the potential of Foucault's panopticon for understanding the experience of teaching online. And more!

7. Administrative. I agreed to write up by-laws for our Working Group in Digital and New Media. Having never written by-laws before (and generally ignoring them when they do exist!), this should be an adventure. I am also working with an interesting group on the redesign of the University's website. Stay tuned for more on the latter.

Lots on tap for this winter and spring. Plus the standard routine of planning for summer fieldwork and writing grants.

So plenty of blog-fodder!

Stay tuned!

City, Village, Monastery Podcasts from the Modern Greek Studies Association Meeting

I've posted podcasts from our panel at the Modern Greek Studies Association Meeting at our Squinch page. Since I haven't blogged about Squinch much lately, it's probably useful to remind my readers that it is the official website of the Archaeology of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Mediterranean Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America. We post our meeting minutes there, maintain (or not) a very out of date membership list, and post other bits of interesting new for interest group members. The most valuable thing about the site, however, is a little section of podcasts.

We could do better with these. In fact, since our interest group was founded, we have organized panels at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America three times (counting this coming year), at the Byzantine Studies Conference (in 2007), and now at the MGSA meeting, but have only prepared podcasts for a few of these events. Moreover, members of the interest group have undoubtedly given numerous lectures around the world and only one, Timothy Gregory's lecture at the Gennadius Library in 2008 appears on the page.

As the acting web master for Squinch and the Medieval and Post-Medieval Interest Group, I'd encourage any member who gives a public talk to consider recording it and sending it along so that we can continue to expand our collection of podcasts. The only equipment that you need is a little hand held recorder (generally costing less than $80). I generally edit the podcasts using Audacity, a free audio editing program that is nearly intuitive to use.

For those of you too busy to follow the link to the podcasts in this blog post, I've made the talks available here:

1. Athens in the 19th Century: Archaeological Landscapes and Competing Pasts
Effie Athanassopoulos, University of Nebrask-Lincoln
Abstract

2. Ancient Corinth from the Ottoman Empire to the Archaeologists
Amelia Brown, Princeton University
Abstract

3. Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th-Century ‘Small World’ in the Upland Basins of the Southeastern Korinthia
William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota, David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College, Timothy E. Gregory, Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia
Abstract

4. The Sacred Grip: Landscape, Art and Architecture in Mount Menoikeion (19th-20th Centuries)
Nikolas Bakirtzis, The Cyprus Institute, Kostis Kourelis Franklin and Marshall College, and Matthew Milliner, Princeton University
Abstract

Next time you give a talk some place, consider recording it and passing it along to me to post at the Squinch website!

Michael Fronda's "Anarchy, Rivalry, and the Beginnings of the Roman Empire"

For all of you who were unable to attend Michael Fronda's lecture on Thursday, I have made a podcast of the lecture available.  Click here to download the Fronda Lecture.

Three things really stand out about Fronda's lecture:

1. Modern Models and Ancient Evidence. The model that he used to understand the expansion of the Early and Middle Roman Republic called for the identification of so-called "enduring rivalries" between states that Rome exploited to enforce her hegemony over the Italian peninsula.  This model derived from international relations theory and had clear roots in the Cold War efforts to not only understand but also the justify the binary world of Soviet - US relations.  Despite the very clear historical context for the model's development, it suited the ancient evidence admirably.  This was a remarkable example of how history draws upon the present to understand the past.  While this may seem like an obvious observation, it will be an excellent point of departure for our undergraduate methods students who often struggle to understand how the present molds the past without slipping into a kind of simplistic presentism.

2. Text and Landscape. Mike's talk on Thursday (as well as his less formal talk on Friday afternoon in the Department of History) emphasized the role of texts in revealing the political landscape of Italy.  While Mike did not explicit use the word "landscape" in his talk and certainly did not employ the various models that scholars of the ancient landscape have recently come to favor, he nevertheless read the political topography of Italy in a way that linked very local relationships to regional (or even global) regimes of power.  He gave several examples of how the Romans became involved in adjudicating very local territorial disputes and highlighted how the looming threat of Roman political and military power could exacerbated or even produced local rivalries. The projection of Roman power on the local level and typically mediated through local concerns is surely a topic which would reward post-colonial theorizing.  More importantly, it showed how local landscapes could be shaped and "distorted" by the regional powers in ways that might not necessarily be apparent on the ground.

3. The crowd!  As I noted on Friday, Mike's lecture attracted over 70 people and it is clear that others turned away at the prospect of standing throughout.  While we did what we could to promote the talk on campus, it was great to see folks in attendance who I would not have thought to be interested in Ancient Rome. 

Enjoy the lecture and thanks to everyone who helped make the talk a success.

Teaching and Lecture Thursday

Two quick posts today rolled into one.

First, a Teaching Thursday must read: Anne Kelsch's thoughtful post on the Cost of a Cheap Education.  Her post is a critical response to a recent article in Washington Monthly which speculated on the disruptions to American systems of college and university education if it became possible to offer "College for $99 a Month".  Anne's post is a call to reconsider the purpose of higher education in the U.S. Join the conversation by posting a comment! Or, if you have a bigger idea, drop me a line about authoring a post on Teaching Thursday.

Second, if you haven't succumbed to media saturation, then you probably know that Michael Fronda of McGill University will be speaking today at 4 pm, in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library.  His talk is entitled "Anarchy, Rivalry, and the Beginnings of the Roman Empire".  A small reception will follow the talk.  My sense is that there will be a good crowd on hand, so, it wouldn't hurt to come early, just in case.  The talk is sponsored by the Department of History, The Department of Political Science and Public Administration, and the title sponsor is the Cyprus Research Fund.  The talk fits into the goals of the Cyprus Research Fund by working to introduce students and faculty to cutting edge research in the study of the Mediterranean World.  Complementing, Prof. Fronda's talk will be a preview exhibition of photographs taken the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project''s Artist-in-Residence, Ryan Stander entitled Topos/Chora.  For information on how to contribute to the fund and support these and other events both in Cyprus and in North Dakota, check out our support page.

See you at the talk!

Michael Fronda Lecture at UND

The big news this week is that Professor Michael Fronda of McGill University has agreed to come and present the inaugural Cyprus Research Fund lecture here at the University of North Dakota.  The talk will be at 4 pm on September 17th in the Chester Fritz Library's East Asia Room.

The title of his talk is "Anarchy, Rivalry and the beginnings of the Roman Empire". 

Here's an abstract for it:

Professor Fronda's paper will examine the growth of Roman power in the ancient world by focusing on how the city of Rome came to dominate the Italian Peninsula.  Through an innovative use of contemporary international relations theory, Prof. Fronda argues that Rome capitalized on the tendency for ancient state relations to be anarchic, on the one hand, but in some way limited by enduring rivalries between particular states, on the other.  Rome’s ability to exploit these fundamental characteristics of ancient, and perhaps all, states led ultimately to the city’s domination of Italy and provided important lessons for the city’s conquest of the Mediterranean world.

The talk is open to the public and a reception will follow.

Mike is my oldest friends in academia and it's great that he's agreed to come and present this talks. It's also exciting that the talk is sponsored by the Cyprus Research Fund and will be the first in a series of annual talks which seek to introduce the Mediterranean world to University of North Dakota community.  Mike is particularly suitable candidate for the inaugural lecture because he has not only spent time working with us on Cyprus, but because he returns each year to the Mediterranean as both a scholar and a teacher. For more information on the Cyprus Research Fund and, in particular, how to give to this fund, click here.

Support for the talk has also been provided by the Department of Political Science and Public Administration.

Treasures from Moving Merrifield

A second post today, but be sure to read today's main post.  I was chatting with our Department Chair, Kim Porter, in her former office and couldn't help but notice this on the back of a bookshelf:

She had asked Gordon Iseminger about it and he suggested that it might have been done by Charles Carter.  His speciality was Near Eastern Languages, with a particular focus on the Hittites, but he worked to identify and translate the fragmentary hieroglyphics inscription held by the University Archives.  It could have also been done by either of the subsequent ancient historians at the University of North Dakota: Linda Ricketts who wrote her dissertation on Ptolemaic Egypt or Walter Ellis, my immediate predecessor, who also worked on the same period.

So what does it say?

Is it a curse on anyone who dares to move the Department of History?

UPDATE:

Chuck Jones of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Near Easternist, and digital librarian extraordinary, identified the drawing as "a sketch of one of the reliefs at Yazilikayathis which depicted Tudhalyia IV in the embrace of his god":

And thought that it was likely to be Charles Carter's work.

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.