The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Kilns at the University of North Dakota

The University of North Dakota has had a long tradition of producing ceramics.  This grew initially out of the University's interest in exploring the potential of natural resources in the state.  In 1910, the Department of Ceramics (originally in the College of Engineering) hired Margaret Cable, a noted potter, to direct a program dedicated to the use of North Dakota clay.  Today, "Cable Pottery" produced by Margaret Cable or her students at UND, is a sought after collectors item and many would argue that it marked the high-point of the North Dakota ceramics industry.

This past weekend, the modern descendents of Margaret Cable, Wes Smith, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, invited me and my wife over the check out their firing of a wood kiln on UND's campus.  Since I spend lots of time looking at pottery on the ground, on my computer screen, and converted into pixels in various funky-colored GIS maps, I figured it was a good opportunity to do some ethnoarchaeology and attempt to understand the process of pottery production.

The first thing that struck me was how small and simple the kiln was.  It was built of dry bricks (no mortar) with a simple vaulted roof which was constructed initially in a wood form.

 

One side of the kiln has the chimney and the other a brick wall that is constructed after the pots have been put in the kiln.  The kiln has several sets of "passive dampers" which were basically loose bricks that the operator could slide in and out to control the amount of oxygen entering the kiln space. 

 

When some of the dampers near the chimney were closed causing the kiln to draw more violently from one end, the resulting flame was impressive.

Students were in charge of stoking the kiln with wood and it fired to over 2000 degrees!!  It ran all day on less than a chord of wood. 

I was struck by the relatively simple construction of the kiln and its efficiency.  Wes built the kiln in less than a weekend.  Certainly these kinds of kilns must have dotted the ancient landscape producing much of the everyday utility wares. 

Being a Tourist in the Eastern Mediterranean

I just finished reading Philip Duke's short book, The Tourists Gaze, the Cretans Glance: Archaeology and Tourism on a Greek Island. (Walnut Creek, CA 2007).  Aside from the cool title, the book provides a succinct overview of the relationship between archaeology on Crete and tourism with a main emphasis on Bronze Age, Minoan sites.  There is a nice review of the book over at Archaeolog.

What interested me the most was Duke's effort to problematize the relationship between archaeologists, the tourist industry (ranging from efforts of the Greek state to present archaeological sites to small, local businesses), and the foreign tourist.  The boundaries between these groups, of course, are fairly artificial: even Duke in his role of tourist ethnographer become in some contexts a tourist himself.  This same feeling comes to anyone who spends part of every year in a foreign country working as an archaeologist; the feeling of shifting from coddled tourist to specialist interlocutor occurs quite regularly as one passes from one environment to the next.  The complex interplay between being a tourist and an archaeologist is particularly pronounced when leading undergraduate and even graduate students around Greece and Cyprus in the summer months.

For example, as a group, we've been flummoxed when an archaeological site is poorly marked, lacking on-site (or even published!) documentation, overgrown, or simply confusing.  In some cases, of course,  the challenge of working out the relationships between the evidence preserved on-site is invigorating and rewarding.  In many more cases, however, it is just confounding as the myriad of complex site-formation processes conspire to obscure the process of excavation, the relationships between the visible remains and features, and the overall significance of the site itself.  At these moments, there is a natural desire to be led through a site and a willingness to accept the hegemonic presentation provided by signs, labels, paths, and pamphlets (whether produced by an archaeologist or a member of the tourist industry or whomever). 

In other cases, especially at popular destinations which tend to be thoroughly presented, the presentation itself becomes the basis for a critique.  Even a beginning archaeology student can often see through overly nationalistic or tremendously simplified presentations of sites. In fact, at some sites in Greece and Cyprus, I've come to anticipate the relatively simple presentations and use them as the basis for discussion the visible archaeology in much the same way that thoughtful tourists would respond to Evans' reconstruction of the Minoan palaces at Knossos. 

Finally, putting together itineraries for students forces one to consider explicitly the basic tourist infrastructure that contextualizes site visits.  For example, a stretch of lovely (if touristy) taverna restaurants will often make a site a more appealing destination.  The requirements for a tour bus or even good access by road conditions the narrative of site visits even for even a group of experienced archaeologist.  In fact, the accessibility of a site regularly features in the larger archaeological narrative.  Sites that are more difficult to access or presented in confusing ways encourages a sense of remoteness, exoticism, and intellectual privilege derived largely from the contrast to the well-marked sites visited by the "average tourist".  So, even the most intellectual visitor, tourist, or archaeologist often draws upon expectations promoted by the "hegemonic" narrative produced by the tourist industry in all its manifestations.

Of course, the hybrid state of the typical archaeologist/tourist is precisely the position that allowed Duke to critique the "tourists' gaze" so well.  The real charm of his slim volume is that it seems like a nice addition to the reading list for our own study tour/field school next summer. 

More Small Town Archaeology...

The archaeological landscape of Grand Forks, North Dakota continues to amaze me.  In August we noted the substantial piles of earth and bricks excavated from the foundation of a new house being built on a lot abandoned since the flood of 1997 (more here).

Last week this earth has been graded into the beginnings of a proper yard around the now half finished home.  Grading the earth has distributed the bricks and other cultural material in a neat halo around the house.

Next door another new foundation has been excavated.  Doing our best imitation of Infiltration we checked out the big hole in the ground and snooped around the piles of dirt taken from the hole.  The foundations of the earlier house are clearly visible in the scarp of the new foundation.

It is also possible to see in the scarp the dark earth presumably deposited by the flood and later dumped into the basement of the house in a neat lens. 

In the excavated soil, we found a nice little assemblage of material including a threaded glass stopper, a square bottle, and plates with blue and white glaze.  The square bottle, stopper and perhaps blue glazed plate date to earlier than the middle of the 20th century and so they should not be associated with the final phase of habitation at the site.

Scrapping away the top soil nearby exposed a more haunting reminder of the final days of the house: a plastic sand bag and sand perhaps positioned to protect the house from the rising waters of the Red River.

We've been fixing up our turn of the century home this last month.  These repairs and modifications left us with a neat example of provisional discard. 

The bricks will work well in our garden, but the old aluminum shutters will probably find their way into a modern midden.

Grand Forks is a formation process laboratory!

Spolia in the Garden

This summer I got a chance to hang out a bit with Jon Frey at the site of Isthmia.  For the past several years, he's been working on understanding the use of spolia -- that is bits and pieces of older monuments -- that were built into the Hexamilion wall in Late Antiquity.  His interests derive from his excellent dissertation on the topic: Speaking through spolia : the language of architectural reuse in the fortifications of late Roman Greece.  In Late Antiquity, the use of spolia became a regular practice in monumental architecture.  Scholars from the "bad old days" understood this Late Antique practice as evidence for the decline in skills among Late Antique craftsmen and the weakness of the Late Roman economy.  For this earlier generation of scholars, the use of spolia reflected the decline of ancient culture.  Now most scholar recognize the use of spolia as an intentional choice on the part of Late Antique architects, and the combination of old blocks, columns, and even inscriptions gave Late Antique buildings the desired variatio (variation) that was central to the aesthetic of the day.  Scholars who study spolia have used it to explore issues of Late Antique and Byzantine attitudes toward earlier buildings and how they sought to incorporate, appropriate and even commemorate these earlier structures in their own monumental environment.

As I mentioned in my brief note on the Kourion basilica on Cyprus, the desire for spolia among Late Antique and Byzantine builders presumably influenced the archaeological processes at play during the abandonment of Late Antique and earlier buildings.  At Kourion, for example, a there is evidence for a group of workers who systematically dismantled parts of the episcopal precinct in preparation for the transfer of parts of that building to another site.  Similar systematic quarrying of site appears elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean.  The energy exerted to obtain high quality spolia does not appear to have been much less intensive than the initial quarrying of stones.

In my own community, Grand Forks, North Dakota, recent construction projects have uncovered the remains of earlier buildings destroyed a decade ago in a catastrophic flood.  The scatter of bricks, concrete, pipes, and even everyday objects form a halo around a new home.  Eventually, I would guess, these fragments of the past will be removed or turned under a well manicured lawn.

As my wife and I begin to do some rather significant restoration work on our own 100 year old house, we've had opportunities to produce spolia of our own.  Being archaeologically inclined we could not simply discard these fragments of earlier construction!  I was admiring my wife's herb garden the other day and noticed that she had lined the space with bricks that had been quarried from a wall in our house.  These bricks had surrounded a hole in an interior wall of our house through which the chimney for a coal or wood stove passed.  Judging by the color and fabric of the bricks, they were probably made from Red River clays -- most likely at the local Red River Valley Brick Company.  They are soft, buff to red in color and tend to have a fair amount of lime in them.  Similar bricks can be seen in our now crumbling foundations.

Funding Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota

As the readers of this blog certainly know, this year has been a banner year for Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota.  The success of field programs in both Greece and in Cyprus has been made possible by the support from a whole number of institutions – from private foundations like the Institute for Aegean Prehistory to the various universities that work together to make our research program possible, like Ohio State, UND, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Messiah College.  The generosity of these institutions, however, only provided part of the support than an active research and education program in the Mediterranean requires.

Site Tour at Kokkinokremos on Cyprus

We are fortunate to have a small, but dedicated group of private donors who have supported our work.  Thanks to these donors we have collected over $15,000 for the study of the material culture of the Mediterranean world at UND.  Over the next two years, however, we hope to add another $15,000 to take the next step in developing our efforts to bring the Mediterranean world to the University and to develop a long-term presence for the University in Greece and Cyprus.
We have three clear goals that contributions made over the next year will benefit:

1)    We’d like to become a member institution at the American School of Classical Studies.  The American School is the official representative of all American archaeological research in Greece.  Supporting this institution ensures that faculty and students at the University have an academic home in Greece for their research and teaching.  Membership for a University like UND is approximately $500 a year.

2)    Mediterranean Archaeology at UND is committed to graduate education both in Grand Forks, but more importantly in the Mediterranean.  Over the past 3 years, we’ve had 5 UND students (and more than 10 students from other graduate institutions) work with us in Cyprus .  This program has not only allowed graduate students at UND to gain hands on experience in archaeology, but also brought them in contact with their peers from around the world.  It costs around $3,000 dollars for a graduate student to come and work in Cyprus.  We’d like to create a $1000 scholarship to defray some of the costs of travel and work on Cyprus.  The best Mediterranean archaeology programs in the US provide funding for their students to do fieldwork in the Mediterranean, and we feel that this a good investment in the continuing development of our program.

Fieldwork on Cyprus

3)    Computers play a more and more central role in Mediterranean archaeology.  They are central to processing the archaeological data in the field, analyzing results of our summer seasons on campus, and disseminating our findings to our classes and the public.  Blogs, video, podcasts, interactive webpages, and eventually an online Museum will provide almost unprecedented access to the whole range of Mediterranean archaeology to students at UND.  To maximize the potential of the “new media”, however, we need to commit to developing “cyber infrastructure.”  This blanket terms includes everything from access to digital storage and space on a maintained servers, to funds to support the development of innovative techniques to deliver both archaeological data (of interest to researchers)  and multimedia experiences that bring the Mediterranean world to our students and the general public.  $5000 over the next two years would go a long way to ensuring that our program of research and education has the high tech tools to complement the opportunities our field work in Cyprus and Greece have provided.

Funds raised from private donors are particular crucial for developing the kind of infrastructure that Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota needs to succeed and grow.  For information on how you can support our work, contact me (Bill Caraher) or Mike Meyer at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Dakota.

 
UND Student David Terry in the field

Visit to Ft. Totten, North Dakota

My parents were in town this weekend and we took a trip to Ft. Totten, North Dakota.  It's a remarkably well preserved "Dakota frontier era" fort.  It functioned initially as a frontier fort with a garrison who guarded railroad construction and communication lines around Devil's Lake, ND.  In 1890 it was turned over to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and began life as an Indian School.  In 1960 it was given to the State of North Dakota who have subsequently opened it as a historic site and worked to restore and maintain its buildings.  Here's a Google Earth KZM file showing its location.

 

The way the fort is presented enables the visitor to understand its past as a military installation and as a school.  This is no easy thing considering that several buildings -- like the armory -- changed functions considerably over that time.  While hardly lavish in presentation, I thought that the simple signs and informational posters wove together the two, very different, stories of this site in a thought provoking and understandable way.

More interestingly still, is that parts of the site have been given over to local historical organizations, a theatre, and a bed-and-breakfast.  These buildings not only take advantage of the extensive facilities available at the site, but also must also help with the maintenance of the site by keeping it in the public eye.  Coming from Greece where so many sites with substantial remains are simply closed to the public, it was striking to see how the State of North Dakota can find ways to keep a site visible in the public eye while still maintaining some aspects of its "historical integrity". 

This photo is gratuitous... Wind power on the prairie.

Small Town Archaeology

Michael Fronda, an old friend at McGill University, sent along some photos of a collapsing building in downtown Montreal.  It is a nice example of archaeological formation process in a modern urban setting. 

On one of my regular walks around Grand Forks, I noticed another interesting example of the archaeological process. After the flood of 1997 which inundated almost the entire town (see here and here) numerous lots were left vacant.  Some of these lots were promptly rebuilt, but others owing either to specific circumstances of the property or to their vulnerable position were not reconstructed.  The entire Lincoln Drive neighborhood, for example, vanished as it fell on the river side of the new flood walls. 

With the flood walls completed this past year, the city is selling several of the properties which had not been redeveloped on the city side of the flood wall. 

The only physical reminders of the past use of these properties are the driveways that lead nowhere or the alleys that abruptly end in open lots. 

In a few cases the brick foundations or concrete pavers of the vanished houses continue to peak through the carefully mowed city lawns.

Now that some of these properties are being redeveloped, the foundations of the new homes have been cut through the remains of the earlier structures.  From an archaeological perspective, the material excavated for these new foundations provides insights into another kind of formation process.  Substantial piles of rubble from concrete basement floors and scatters of brick from foundation walls surround the new foundation holes.  At one site the bricks and earth are being graded around the new foundation.

Amidst this construction debris, there are a few remnants of everyday life: a broken plate and the neck of a blue bottle really stood out.  They combine to make a nice assemblage of building material and household goods some of which will surely fill in the foundation trenches of the new walls and form part of the stratigraphic record of the buildings on this plot of land.

 

From a landscape perspective, the new homes on these plots will not only fill in gaps left by the flood which served as reminders of this difficult hour in the community's past, but also create the top layer of the archaeological palimpsest that urban historians and archaeologists find to be such a useful metaphor.

A PKAP Thesis Defense: Latin- Greek Relations in Frankish Cyprus

David Terry, a Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project alumnus successfully defended his Master's Thesis here in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota yesterday.  His work was entitled "Authority and Cultural Interaction on Frankish Cyprus, 1191-1374."  His defense was good fun as he ably engaged his committee and members of the general public on all topics related to his research.  I learned a tremendous amount from his thesis, and I suspect it will continue to inform my interest in the contours of authority and religion in pre-modern Europe.

At his defense, David graciously claimed to have been inspired to work on the Frankish period in Cyprus by his time on PKAP and his personal visits to numerous Frankish period monuments on Cyprus (you can read his blog postings from his time on Cyprus here).  (I can also detect the influence of an informal seminar that some of his colleagues and I participated in a couple of years ago which focused on Authority and Religion in the Early Christian East!).

His visit to Cyprus was partially funded by the Graduate School at the University of North Dakota as part of Graduate School Summer Professorship.  David will study next year at Western Michigan University in their Ph.D. program in History.  He hopes to continue working in some capacity with PKAP and continue to pursue research in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.  He is also a member of the Medieval and Post Medieval Mediterranean Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Abstract

Many treatments of cultural interaction on Frankish Cyprus depict the Latin and Greek cultural identities as historic, monolithic constructions and the society of Frankish Cyprus as a multicultural society.  However, sources suggest that similarities between Greek and Latin cultural traditions were numerous and that there was a considerable amount of ambiguity between the two groups.  This thesis will examine the cultural practices of the Latin Cypriots and the origins of these practices and argue that Latin Cypriot communal identity was less dependent upon identification with the Roman Church than it was with a pan-Christian view of Cypriot society.  The subsequent chapter will examine the approach that the king and nobility of Cyprus took to protect this developing cultural milieu and argue that, in addition to a need to protect the island, the Latin secular leadership also felt a communal bond with the island's non-Latin majority.  Last, a discussion of intermarriage between Latins and Greeks shows how easily the two groups could cross the confessional line as well as the Latin Church's ability to prevent them from doing so.

Modern Jeremiahs

Since Monday has somehow become my North Dakota day , it seems appropriate to give a short plug for Mark Jendrysik's new book: Modern Jeremiahs: Contemporary Visions of America's Decline.  He's the head of the Political Science Department at UND, a PKAP fan, and a good buddy. 

The book develops further ideas that he introduced in an important 2002 article in the Journal of Popular Culture ("The Modern Jeremiad: Bloom, Bennett, and Bork on American Decline," JPC 36 (2002), 361-383).  In this article, Jendrysik defined the modern character of the longstanding genre of the Jeremiad as manifest in works of William Bennett, Robert Bork, and Allan Bloom.  He draws examples from their popular and influential books dating from the late 1980 to the late 1990s (The Closing of the American Mind, Slouching toward Gomorrah, The De-Valuing of America, and The Death of Outrage).  These books attacked in a rather formulaic way the excesses of American culture and attributed the decline of American society to the expanding influence of relativism, the expanding power of external influences, and the lack of moral and social discipline of the masses.  Rather than critiquing these propositions based on their internal logic, philosophical rigor, or historical accuracy, Jendrysik places these texts in the historical context of the rhetorical Jeremiah who is braced between wanting his audience to "repent!" and needing conditions to get worse to prove the fundamental accuracy of their claims.

You can get it from Amazon, and I have been told that it makes a great Mother's or Father's Day gift!

A Special Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Today is an important Friday for two reasons.  It's Good Friday in the Orthodox Church and it's Anzac Day in Australia, New Zealand, and a few other South Pacific countries.  I'll write about Holy Week tomorrow and Anzac Day at the end of the blog.

First some quick hits:

• I've linked to Archaeolog before, but another interesting post: The Other Acropolis Project by Yannis Hamilakis.  It introduces his newest web project: The Other Acropolis, a photoblog which aims "to produce a range of alternative media interventions which will take the iconic site of the Athenian Acropolis as their centre, their point of departure, or their target (in all senses of the word)."  It's run by The Other Acropolis Collective which includes, among others, Fotis Ifantidis who runs the super-hip (in a William Gibson way) Visualizing Neolithic blog.
• Over the Classics Journal Online Forum there is a noteworthy article: Daniel N. Erickson, “Practical Ways of Saving a Classics Program: A Report From the Front”, 103.3 (2008) 301–6.  Dan Erickson is my erstwhile colleague in the Language Department at UND and has given his passion to developing the Classics program there.  This short article sketches out the main outlines of the history of his work and gives us room for optimism!
• Brandon Olson, Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project veteran and UND History alumnus, gives a short summary of his recent paper at the CAMWS Annual Meeting on the inscribed sling pellets from Vigla. 
• Amanda Flaata gave an interesting Tea Talk on Meter (the Mother of the Gods) in Phrygia and Greece.  Among other things she mentioned how sanctuaries of Meter in Greece often included references to her sacred topography in Asia Minor.  In particular the cult in Greece sometime employed the names of mountains near sacred sites elsewhere to create a kind of imaginary topography.
• A couple of interesting links to scholars bridging the gap between the academy and "the real world".
  • Ohio State's Origins eHistory Project with an interesting article and podcast "(Fore)Closing on the American Dream" by Lawrence Bowdish
  • The North Dakota Humanities Council's blog Prairie Polis features a cool essay "What Are Free Markets For? Or, what should we think about before we think about voting?" by UND Philosophy Professor, Jack Russell Weinstein.

Anzac Day commemorates the role of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in the difficult and bloody Gallipoli Campaign of 1915.  The Australian War Memorial site has a nice web site explaining the ceremonies and commemorative aspects of the observance.  Cities and towns in Australia often hold ceremonies commemorating the exact moment of the Gallipoli landing (in Brisbane this was 04:28 (AEST); for photographs). Among the more interesting things is that the Gallipoli campaign forged a special relationship between Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey.  As early as 1934, Ataturk reassured Australians and New Zealanders with words now inscribed on the several monuments both at Gallipoli and elsewhere:

"Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well."

Another important part of Anzac day are Anzac Biscuits.  According to the story, Anzac Biscuits use Golden Syrup rather than eggs as a bonding agent so that the sweet treats would survive the long journey from Australia to Europe.  My wife and mother-in-law sent me a tin and in a faint way, re-performed the actions of families during World War I who sent biscuits to their loved ones serving in Europe.  A very tasty way to be made to feel part of an Australian family!