The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Teaching Thursday: Teaching in the Sun

Cross-posted to Teaching Thursday and the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Staff Blog.

As the spring semester gradually recedes into memory, the summer beckons.  Many folks at the University of North Dakota, head off campus or switch gears on campus as they begin to focus on new summer research and teaching projects.  These projects, even when it’s just teaching a summer class, inevitably involve a change of pace.  The pace of the summer semester slows down for some; for others who look to the summer as a time of more intensive research and teaching find that the summer brings a new bustle to their routine.

I will be heading to the Mediterranean this summer, as I have for the last 6 years to conduct archaeological research on Greece and Cyprus.  This year, I’ll be joined in Cyprus by about 15 undergraduate and graduate students from across the US.  These students arrive with different expectations, different skills and experiences, and different ways of learning, but all of them expect to leave Cyprus after 4 weeks with a better grasp of the methods, theory, and practice of archaeology.  They’ll attempt to acquire these skills in the most distraction filled environment possible.  Not only will they be inserted into a fully-functioning archaeological research project, but one that is located in a beach side town (Larnaka, Cyprus) in a foreign country!  While it is easy to see how an travel outside the US provides additional opportunities to learn through experience, these same experiences can also provide considerable “background noise” to the more routine and regimented learning processes that we are accustomed to in the classroom.  (As much as we might embrace the chaos of Edu-punk, few of us turn our classroom into a night at CBGBs, but there are days in Cyprus, when the height of our research season meets head on with the annual summer festival in Larnaka (the Kataclysmos) that we’d embrace a daily routine that took on the relatively predictable routine of, say, an Iggy Pop show.)

Teaching in the sun, in Cyprus or anyway away from the standard routines of the classroom involves new strategies that not only allow students to absorb the chaotic realities of experience, but nevertheless ensures that they acquire basic skills essential to the courses (so to speak) that they are taking.  For us, it’s balancing between imparting the rigorous and structured requirements of “scientific” archaeological research and allowing them enough unstructured times to feel comfortable in a dynamic and complex foreign city.  This is particularly challenging for us because we also have research priorities each season.  On the one hand, this ensures that the students feel the genuine (and authentic) experience of professional, archaeological research with all its contingency and excitement.  On the other hand, this creates a place where some members of the project are constantly tempted to sacrifice the unstructured time for the structured and rigorous experiences of primary data gathering.  One season, we famously broke our students.  The senior staff were disappointed that this dedicated cadre of students weren’t taking in the local culture more consistency until we realized that after a grueling day in the field the students were collapsing on their beds and sleeping until dinnertime and then crashing out immediately after dinner clean up.   This was hardly an environment that cultivated students’ access to unstructured time!

Over subsequent seasons we’ve been better balancing work and play, but the balance is always deliberate.  Keep an eye on how well we are maintaining it through our Pyla-Koutsopetria Project Blog page. 

The Medieval and Post Medieval Mediterranean at the 2010 Archaeological Institute of American Annual Meeting

We got the good news last week that the panel put together by Kostis Kourelis and Sharon Gerstel for the 2010 AIA Annual Meeting in Anaheim has been accepted.  The panel is titled First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites and will feature papers by Jack Davis, Kathleen Quinn, Anne McCabe, Adam Rabinowitz, Guy Sanders, and Tim Gregory and myself.  Here's a link to the abstracts and overview statement.

Tim Gregory and I plan to re-examine the data produced by the decades old Ohio Boeotia Project around the ancient city of Thisvi.  This survey data was initially analyzed in a series of publications in the 1980s.  Since that time, digital analysis tools have become considerably more powerful and there is a growing body of work in the region, particularly associated with the Cambridge Boeotia Project and its various spin-offs, that promises to add significance to any re-examination of the OBE results.  Returning to excavation and survey results -- so called legacy data -- has taken on new importance in recent years as excavation permits have become more difficult to acquire, a vigorous ethical discourse has put pressure on project directors to make unpublished finds available, and the digital archaeology "movement" has improved our ability to make published and unpublished data alike visible and accessible to the professional public.  A recent issue of the leading electronic journal in archaeology, Internet Archaeology, has dedicated an issue to the reanalysis of "legacy data" taking advantage of the intersection of digital distribution, new technologies, and the remarkable potential of the existing pool of archaeological data to inform contemporary research questions.  We hope our paper frames not only some of the methods and procedures at stake in the re-examination of survey data, but also makes the argument that this kind of secondary analysis marks the coming of age of intensive pedestrian survey.  It marks the potential of survey data to go beyond its applicability to narrowly defined research questions and to have the kind of enduring value that excavations have nurtured by long standing methods and carefully cultivated archival practices. 

Proving that survey data is available for re-analysis is absolutely critical for its persistence as an archaeological methodology in the Mediterranean.  And the recent transformation of post-Classical landscapes from spaces seen as stagnant and unchanging to dynamic "contingent" countrysides makes the study of the post-Classical world ideally suited as a test case.

Digital Archaeology Meeting in New York

I'm off to New York for a meeting focused on digital archaeology hosted by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.  We've been asked to put together a brief presentation on how we use digital technology in our archaeological research and areas where more sophisticated use of the technology available would improve our ability to collect, analyze, and archive archaeological data.

Here's a brief precis of what I plan to present:

1. On of my main goals for the next few years is to continue to work to streamlining the digital workflow for the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  Right now, we collect numerous different kinds of born data regularly (e.g. excavation data, survey data, photographs, finds records, scanned field notebooks, et c.) but it's not done in an integrated way.  The end result is a whole series of data sets that could be integrated, but are not.

2. The lack of integrated workflow in the field has impaired our ability to bring our digital data to quick publication.  We feel that improving the level of integration will help us produce data efficiently that can sustain rigorous analysis and enables an end user to drill down (and across) from published reports to digital data of various kinds.

3.  I have also been working to create stable, public, digital data sets from legacy and analogue data.  For my work in the area of Thisvi (with data from a survey conducted in the early 1980s called the Ohio Boeotia Expedition), I have worked to migrate analog data to digital formats. This data preserves archaeological information from a landscape currently under threat and susceptible to making it accessible for new analysis in GIS.  Moreover, this work forms a model for migrating legacy data to digital formats for other small scale surveys in the Corinthia that record information about endangered or destroyed landscapes.

4. I've begun to also think about work at the Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia.  Over the last few years, Timothy Gregory and I have created concordances that have allowed us to integrate the context pottery from the OSU-Isthmia Excavations with the survey data from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  In a post last week, I've begun to think about how our work at integrating EKAS and OSU-Isthmia data could extend to the various other teams working at Isthmia to ensure that the data that they produced in various formats is archived and fundamentally compatible. This work would, of course, grow to include collaborating with the efforts of the American School at Corinth and in Athens to make our data available for eventual migration to a stable, long-term, integrated environment encompassing many of the American School projects in Greece.

5. The final issue is the most complex.  For PKAP, in particular, we have gathered a considerable quantity of digital video and audio and we want to begin to make this available alongside our more traditional archaeological data in immersive, multimedia environments.  This ties into the issues under point 2 above, but with the additional layer of multi and new media complexity. 

Modern Greek Studies Association Symposium 2009

We heard this past week that the Modern Greek Studies Association accepted a panel coordinated by Kostis Kourelis and Effie Athanassopoulos under the auspices of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in the Mediterranean Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America. 

The panel is entitled "From Town to Country: The Archaeology of Modern Greek Landscapes" and here's the description:

Since the birth of the nation-state, the identity of Modern Greece has been defined by its relationship to antiquity. The discipline of archaeology has, thus, played a central role in the construction of Greece, but only in so far as it concerns ancient periods (archaia). For Greece, the archaeology of the recent past is an etymological contradiction. Material culture dating to after 1850 is considered non-archaeological; it can be exported and traded freely. Archaeological studies on 19th- and 20th-century Greece are greatly lacking, leaving a huge disciplinary gap with Historical Archaeology, a discipline that flourishes in the United States.

This panel brings together recent work applying archaeological perspectives to the material culture of Modern Greece spanning a spectrum of ecological milieus from the metropolis, to the small town, the village, the monastery and the rural landscape. The theme that connects the individual papers is that of “landscape” approached through the lens of archaeology. Landscape as a concept refers to the external world mediated through subjective human experience. In archaeology, approaches to landscape have changed drastically over time, from economic and ecological perspectives of the 1960s to more recent post-modern views that focus on the social and symbolic construction of landscapes. In Greece, the field of landscape archaeology has grown out of the tradition of archaeological regional surveys, introduced by American scholars during the 1950s.

The individual papers offer diverse perspectives and examine a wide variety of landscapes in the 19th and 20th century. The settings range from the urban space of 19th century Athens to the town of Corinth, to rural space in the upland basins of Corinthia, to monastic space in Mount Menoikeion in northern Greece, and to landscape features such as Mt. Pentadaktylos in Cyprus. Each paper applies a different methodological tactic. Some revisit older historical records, others collect new data or re-conceptualize physical relationships. Collectively, they represent the richness of a growing field. Susan Buck Sutton, who pioneered the study of the Modern Greek countryside and single-handedly developed the discipline of ethno-archaeology, has agreed to serve as the panel’s respondent.

The panel is sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). The Group consists of AIA members with an interest in the archaeology of post-classical Greece, and in promoting its understanding through various programs and publications.

Here are the papers (for full abstracts):

"Athens in the 19th Century: Archaeological Landscapes and Competing Pasts"
Effie Athanassopoulos (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

"Ancient Corinth from the Ottoman Empire to the Archaeologists"
Amelia R. Brown (American School of Classical Studies at Athens)

"Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th-Century “Small World” in he 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)
Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory (Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia)

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

An Early Draft of an AIA Abstract

Lots going on this week!  If you're in Grand Forks -- and have dug yourself out of the snow -- come and check out my research talk at the Lecture Bowl at the Memorial Union at the University of North Dakota today at 12 pm. 

If not, here's part of my chaotic life: an abstract for next January's Archaeological Institute of America's meeting.  The plan is for a panel that looks at post-Classical levels at well-know ancient sites sponsored by our Medieval and Post-Medieval Interest Group of the AIA.  My paper will tweak that a bit by looking at data collected from a handful of small intensive survey projects and re-analyzing them in light of recent work on the post-Classical world and changes in the basic questions survey archaeology has proven adept at addressing.

New Views on Old Data
Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results After 30 Years

Intensive pedestrian surveys across Greece have vastly expanded our understanding of the Greek countryside, particularly for the post-Classical period.   Over the past 25 years, the publications of the so-called second-phase intensive survey projects have contributed to our understanding of a more prosperous Late Roman east and refined our view of the post-Classical settlement structures.  With these successes in mind, this paper will reexamine the results from several small-scale survey projects conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Boeotia and the Corinthia.  Using a series of case studies, this paper argues that there is much to be gained by returning to old survey data with an eye toward addressing recent questions regarding the post-Classical landscape.

The survey projects examined in this paper coincided with many of the early second-phase survey projects, like the Cambridge Boeotia Project and the Argolid Exploration Project, but were published earlier and in a less comprehensive way.   Returning to the material from these projects, in much the same way that archaeologists return to excavation material many years after its recovery and publication, both represents the coming of age of intensive survey and continues the reflexive trends in the study of survey material and data.  Re-examining the data and these projects’ underlying assumptions increases the transparency of these older efforts, enriches the pool of material available for the comparative study of the Greek countryside, and contributes to the way in which current survey projects collect and organize their data.

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.

Papers, Projects, and Perspectives for Next Year...

This fall I was invited to present my research on campus in the spring. The talk will be to a general audience and sponsored by the Graduate School here at the University of North Dakota. There are relatively few opportunities for junior faculty to present their research on campus, so it's an exciting opportunity, but I need to come up with a topic.  The process of thinking about a topic gave me a chance to reflect on my ongoing research and try to find a way to bring together my various interests or at least prioritize my research so that I can have a productive spring.

So, my research agenda in no particular order...

1. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  As any reader of this blog would know, I co-direct the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  I am quickly learning that an archaeological project will expand to fill any time left unoccupied by other research or teaching demands (and it will often try to bully those projects to the sideline as well!).  That being said, the project also provides any number of opportunities for productive and interesting digressions ranging from methodologies, to general considerations of Cyprus in Roman Antiquity to more focused studies on Late Roman trade, ecclesiastical architecture, and the history of ancient Kition.  Moreover, my experiments with video, podcasts, and blogs have formed the basis for emerging ideas about narrative, archaeology, and the new media.  This would certainly be the most entertaining project to present to a general audience in that it could be rooted in narrative and include photos, videos, and even audio clips.

2. Early Christian Architecture in Greece.  I spent a good part of the last two years wrestling with my long moldering dissertation manuscript.  I have presented various fragments of it over the past few years to generally positive results, but as I spin parts off from it, the entire project begins to lose its conceptual cohesion.  Despite its conceptual fragmentation, I am working on a rather lengthy article which explores the role of churches in the process of Christianization in Greece.  I have posted versions of this work on this blog.  My most recent work has emphasized the role of churches as dynamic, hybrid space that served as a place of convergence for the many interests at play within Late Antique Greek society.  This work seeks to undermine the singular, hegemonic church so often portrayed in literary sources of the period and replace it with a more fluid institution which embraced ambiguity in its efforts to translate a universalizing discourse on a local level.

3. Dreams, Inventio, and the Memory of Early Christianity.  This project complements project 2 in looking at the remains of the Early Christian architecture in the archaeological record of Byzantine and post-Byzantine times.  I hold out the hope that I can somehow bring this project and project 2 together in a cohesive book manuscript.  I presented some of this research for the first time this fall at North Dakota State University and received some valuable feedback from colleagues there.  The core of this project is an effort to show that the massive number of basilica style churches built in Early Christian times had a profound impact on religious landscape of Byzantine Greece (and the entire Eastern Mediterranean).  At my most ambitious moments, I sometimes imagine that Early Christian architecture might have served as a vital filter between the remains and memory of Classical antiquity and the needs of Byzantine and even post-Byzantine society.  The frequent appearance of Early Christian spolia in Byzantine churches and their not uncommon appearance in Byzantine texts suggests that Byzantine society recognized the importance of the Early Christian period in the formation of their identity.  This challenges the more pervasive perspective that Byzantines sought primarily to establish ties to Classical antiquity.  In fact, I'd tentatively suggest that scholars' tendency to overlook Early Christian spolia speaks more to the traditional aesthetic values of Byzantine architectural historians than those of the Byzantine architects.

4. The Continuing Corinthia.  I continue to dabble in the fortifications and landscape of the Eastern Corinthia.  Most of this is in collaboration with David Pettegrew and comes from our ongoing work with the data produced over the course of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  Some of this involves our work documenting an Early Modern settlement at a site called Lakka Skoutara.  We have documented this site over the course of almost 10 field seasons with particular attention to archaeological formation processes in the Greek landscape.  David has also helped me continue to document the fortifications of the Eastern Corinthia (Project Fortress Corinthia).  David Pettegrew and I will present some of our recent research in this particular direction next month at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.  I am also working with Tim Gregory to digitize and normalize the context pottery from the Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia.

5. Thivi-Kastorion Archaeological Project.  This is another archaeological reclamation project.  I am working to re-analyze survey data collected by the Ohio Boeotia Project in the vicinity of Thisvi, Boeotia with Tim Gregory.  We are collaborating with Archie Dunn who is conducting an archaeological field survey of Thisve/Kastorion, Greece.  Our hope is to produce new maps of the Thisvi basin that combine the archaeological data collected in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Ohio Boeotia project and Archie Dunn's more recent work at the site.

So, this spring one of these projects (perhaps more) needs to come together in an engaging public lecture (at least) and ought to move forward toward a publication phase (and to be fair some of these projects have some good traction right now!). 

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...

Mapping Roman Pottery at Pyla-Koutsopetria

Over the last two weeks, I've been working to map the distribution of Roman and Late Roman pottery from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  Roman and Late Roman pottery was collected over the course of intensive survey.  The intensive survey mapped the overall density of pottery across the site on the basis of field-walkers spaced at 10 m intervals who counted all visible pottery 1 m to either side of the their swath through the unit.  While it is typically necessary to adjust the sample size (and the estimated densities) on account of surface visibility (e.g. density of vegetation covering the surface), it has nevertheless proven to be a consistent measure of archaeological material on the surface of the ground.  In fact, intensive surveys from across the Mediterranean have used this technique with only minor variation for the last 20 years of intensive survey. 

To sample the variation of pottery within this sample, our project asks each field-walker in a unit to collect one example of each unique artifact type.  We call this the chronotype sampling method and I have talked about it here on my blog.  We consider it an improvement over earlier methods of sampling variation in surface assemblages (that is all the material present on the surface of the ground).  Some techniques which relied upon the unsystematic collection of "diagnostic" pieces (often rims, handles, or sherds with some outstanding features) failed to account for our ability to analyze subtle differences in fabrics that might not appear to be diagnostic to a relatively untrained field-walker.  Other projects have used total collection, but this would not be feasible for a survey area with large, high-density concentrations of material like Pyla-Koutsopetria where artifact densities often exceeded 5,000 artifacts per hectare. 

While we are confident that the chronotype sampling system produces a representative sample of the variety of material present in the unit (and we have done experiments that have supported this assertion), we are less sure how to proceed in mapping the distribution of artifacts across the site.  The chronotype sampling strategy tends to under-represent very common artifact types and, in any case, makes no effort to produce a sample that has any correlation to the actual number of artifacts of a particular period visible on the ground.  In this regard, it is no better than collecting diagnostic material, although we have argued that the variation in the chronotype sample is often representative of more intensive use of a particular area in a particular period.  Even if a greater number of chronotypes (or unique types of artifacts) does correlate in some way with more intensive use of a particular unit, the opposite is probably not true: certain kinds of sites -- for example a warehouse -- might produce a substantial assemblage of relatively homogenous material which would be radically underrepresented by the chronotype sample.  Even total collection from each unit (or even just one swath of each unit) would not necessary produce a sample of chronological distribution of artifacts in the landscape in the same way that field-walking produces a sample of artifacts present on the surface.  As many scholars have pointed out, our ability to identify particular types of artifacts (say, coarse wares) varies widely across the periods possible across the landscape.  The "differential visibility" of particular types of pottery -- particularly less well-known local ware and utility wares -- means that certain types of pottery which are the present of particular economic conditions or functions of the landscape will be systematically underrepresented.  Thus, we are less able to map the distribution of material from periods represented heavily by local wares or by less diagnostic coarse.

Site based surveys often define their sites based on overall artifact densities and then sample for chronology within the limits of this elevated densities.  Thus the site definition and the distribution of material from a particular period across the landscape of individual sites are, in effect, separate functions.  Siteless survey, however, requires that we develop a method for mapping period distributions across the landscape that works more closely with more traditional maps representing the overall distribution of pottery.  Our current methods makes it challenging to identify concentrations of single periods in the landscape and this is a vital task if we seek to embrace the arguments central to siteless survey. 

As a case study for this difficulty, our site at Pyla-Koutsopetria has two well defined zones of elevated, overall artifact density on the coastal plain.  The material collected from these two areas are overwhelmingly Roman and Late Roman in date.  We have been able to argue that these two areas represent functionally different activities during the Late Roman period by comparing the artifacts from each zone.  Last week, I attempted to compare another area of the site to the distribution of Roman and Late Roman pottery in zones 1 and 2.  This third zone represented an area of overall artifact densities that was comparable to those found in zone 2, but the assemblage of material in zone three was far more chronologically diverse than that found in zones 1 or 2.  In particular, the Roman and Late Roman material from zone 3 represented a smaller percentage of the overall assemblage than the Roman and Late Roman material in zone 1 or 2.  So, since our sample of Roman material does not represent the overall density of material in a particular unit, how do I compare in a meaningful way the three areas? My goal here is to evaluate the distribution of Roman and Late Roman material in zone 3.  What is the relationship?

GIS Day and the Digital Humanities at the University of North Dakota

You may not realize this but today is International GIS (Geographic Infromation Systems) Day.  While I don't think that ESRI has "GIS Day" cards yet as the leading producer of GIS software, their fingerprints are all over this international celebration of their product.   (And to be fair, the National Geographic Society and other non-profit groups co-sponsor the celebration!)  In any event, the influence of GIS software on archaeology has been immeasurable.  Landscape and survey archaeologists now depend upon GIS software not only to manage primary data collection in the field, but also to conduct a whole range of analyses from displaying basic artifact densities to estimating the most efficient routes through the landscape. 

GIS software represents one of the core technologies in Digital History, Archaeology, and the Humanities.  The ability to create easily data-rich maps of everything from archaeological finds to real and imagined landscape of works of fiction plays a key role in our increasingly visual culture.  Even such simply GIS interfaces as Google Earth provide a vital classroom tool and provide a kind of flexibility and dynamism that even the best paper maps cannot replicate.

The University of North Dakota appears to be interested in exploring the potential of digital resources across the Humanities.  In fact, in his first "State of the University Address" Robert Kelley (UND's new president) referred specifically to Digital Humanities in his speech. 

I'd like to spend just a few moments at the beginning of this address highlighting some of the outstanding achievements within this institution... I would like to showcase a sample of what faculty, staff, and students of the university have achieved as a reflection of where we are at the moment and why we should be justifiably proud of our university.  First UND has a remarkable faculty and staff.  The University has recruited very well over the years and we will continue to put priority emphasis on allocating resources into faculty and staff compensation and professional development.  The efforts of UND's faculty and staff have resulted in new centers and institutes, new advances in science and technology, creative new performances in music and in the visual and performing arts and the development of innovative new technologies like the Ag Cam that was recently delivered to the international space station by NASA on the Shuttle last Friday.  Faculty have developed centers that focus on such diverse themes as Digital Humanities, sustainable energy, human rights, digital archiving, neuroscience, natural resource law, human behavior, the regulation of the gaming industry, and the list goes on and on."

The interesting (and exciting) thing is that there is no Digital Humanities center on campus.  In fact, the entire "program" at present includes one class in the English Department.  It looks like the president is giving those of us involved in the digital humanities a green light to expand our efforts and make his optimistic (and premature) pronouncement a reality.