Friday Quick Hits and Varia

It’s a snowy and cool morning here at New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Headquarters in its top secret North Dakotaland compound. And we’re supposed to get more over the weekend. We have snowblower, but I’ve never used it. This weekend might be the time to do it.

A tiny gaggle of quick hits and varia to keep you busy, educated, and entertained until then:

• A couple good posts on using Twitter in the classroom (and outside of it) here and here.
• John Fea – one of David Pettegrew’s colleagues at Messiah College and a brilliant blogger – felt the wrath of the internets this week. Presumably this is the offending column (it is odd that Fea did not link to it in his post on his blog) and here is the article from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.
• Kostis Kourelis’ Objects-Buildings-Situations is blowing up these days with found objects collected on his time spend in the area around the Lancaster train station. Richard Rothaus pointed us toward this, similar, project.
• Richard also has a nice little post on using Evernote in the archives. My Droid Incredible has slowly died over the past 4 months, and the application that I miss the most is Evernote. Finally, my long suffering wife, gave into my whinging and let me get an iPhone. Provided snowpocalype does not stay “these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”, I should be back in the Evernote by the end of the weekend.
• How to make a proper Old Fashioned.
• The open access battled and recent battles of The Research Work Act (H.R. 3699) has brought in the heavies: a letter from 11 of the most powerful university provosts in the country.
• This is pretty funny video. And so is this. (One, of course, is real and the other a fairly subtle parody. Credit to Dell, however, for responding to it gracefully.)
• I’d like to read Susan Heuck Allen’s book, Classical Spies (Michigan 2011).
• On Tuesday, I posted on both Corinthian Matters and this blog a response to a series of blogs written by Chris Cloke on Corinthian Matters (here, here, and here). Over that time, Corinthian Matters has seen 421 page views with 25 of them being direct views of my post. This blog, however, has seen on 266 page views with only 5 being direct views of that post. As of 7 am CST today, my post is the most recent on Corinthian Matters which as 178 posts most of which date to 2011-2012; over that same time my blog has 302 posts. Corinthian Matters has 27,777 views; my blog has 29,384. It’s only a matter of time before Corinthian Matters has more all time page views than my blog, and the recent daily averages put my blog to shame. Nice work, Dr. Pettegrew!!
• What I’m listening to: The Twilight Sad, No One Can Ever Know; Frankie Rose, Interstellar.
• What I’m reading: Y. Lolos, The Land of Sikyon (ASCSA 2011).

Three Teaching Thoughts on Lectures and Textbooks

A few things over the past few weeks have inspired me to think a bit more about teaching particularly in my larger survey style classes which I have taught online for the past three years.

1. Lectures return? Recently several articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education have hinted that the traditional lecture format might not be as useless as people have generally thought. In fact, a short article about Michael Wesch, long the poster-child for Teaching 2.0, has spent some quality time with a faculty mentor, Christopher Sorenson, who is “decidedly old-school in his approach”. Wesch apparently had become concerned that some of his high-tech teaching tactics were not as universally applicable as he hoped and decided to try to understand better why some things work for his students and his classes, but not elsewhere. He comes to the conclusion that empathy between teacher and student is far more important than even the most robust set of teaching practices.

I reached similar conclusions over the past several years, but articulated empathy as trust (see here and here). Students have to trust the teacher to lead them. I am working toward an idea that one of the key steps to building trust is for teachers to recognize student resistance (in all forms) as an authentic, legitimate response. By recognizing and legitimizing student resistance, we can begin to address its root causes, undermine its consequences, and generate space for a productive metadialogue concerning the value of learning.

2. Flipping? In another recent article, the Chronicle discusses the practice of “flipping” the lecture classroom. This seems to involve breaking large classes into groups and letting the students in these groups work out problems, analyze texts, and even articulate interpretations.

I did this for years in my large (100+) Western Civilization class that met in a traditional lecture bowl. I taught the class for 2 1/2 hours at night and regularly broke the students into groups so that they could wrestle with a text. Then I circulated with my graduate teaching assistant and engaged the groups of students as they tangled with the text and worked to address (or create!) a research question.

I really liked the chaotic atmosphere that this kind of classroom environment created. The better students embraced the opportunity to chat with the professor, and I had a chance to get the attention of some marginally engaged students and pull them into the class.

Other students, however, resented the chaotic environment, resisted group work by sitting sullenly in silence or ignored the assignments, or just stopped coming to class (or, better still, left class when the students re-arranged themselves into groups). At first, this bothered me, but as I grew to expect it, I began to (begrudgingly) accept this behavior and see it as an honest critique of my methods.

In partial response to this, I began to make it possible for students to engage material more fully without having to spend time in the flipped lecture. To do this I created a set of podcasts which allowed students to listen to my lectures on their own time, I cut back on the amount of flipped time in the classroom, and focused a bit more specifically on the methods of writing and interpreting historical documents.  It was at that point that I moved the entire class online, so I was not able to get a clear idea of whether this shift would produce better results, but it did help me reflect on how creating a modular, flexible body of easily recombined course material could provide the foundation for a more dynamic and responsive class.

3. The modular textbook.  Recently I was asked to review an almost completed manuscript for a new textbook. As part of this review, I was asked what new trends I saw emerging in teaching survey classes and the survey textbook market. I suggested that the textbook of the future will be a radically modular affair with short sections (1000 words max) linked together by interrelated themes and arguments and complemented with interactive maps (I prefer Google Earth kml files), primary sources (preferably openly available), timelines, and images.

The era of the long textbook – expensive, daunting, and too rigid for the dynamic and diverse methods in the history classroom – is nearing its end. I am working on a Western Civilization textbook right now built from my Western Civilization podcasts and customized for my course.  I have to find ways to make it modular and dynamic.

It’ll be free.

On-site and off-site at Pyla-Koustopetria: A Response to Chris Cloke’s Interpreting Ceramic Assemblages

Last week Chris Cloke generously shared some of his work with the pottery from the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project over at Corinthian Matters in a three part post. In a nutshell, he argued that there was evidence for manuring during Late Antiquity.

It’s a busy week, but I wanted to follow up on his suggestion that PKAP present some of its data to see whether we could detect similar trends. Our work at Pyla-Koustopetria, of course, is rather different in scope than the work of the NVAP. We focused on one, mid-sized, site rather than an entire region. Moreover, by Late Antiquity the built up area of our study area appears to have been rather large in relation to our overall study area.

Nevertheless, there is reason to think that the northern reaches of our study amount to an off-site zone. The distribution of tiles, for example, suggests that only the coastal zone of our study area had tiled buildings. (The tiny numbers in each unit represent the total number of Late Roman artifacts from each unit.)

Moreover, the distribution of fine and kitchen wares, most frequently associated with domestic activities appear to be concentrated in similar area.

In contrast, the distribution of coarse and utility wares, like amphora, extends of a much larger percentage of the study area.

Judging by these maps, it would appear that the northern part of our study area which comprised the coastal plateaus of Mavrospilos/Kazamas and Kokkinokremos saw a functionally different kind of activity than the coastal area. Cloke has suggested that the prevalence of less diagnostic sherds – and coarse and utility wares are almost be definition less diagnostic than fine and kitchen wares – might represent material scattered through manuring.

Cloke argue, however, that this is a product of smaller sherd size rather than a specific functional difference, and compares the percentages of diagnostic pottery from both on-site and off-site transects to demonstrate that similar proportions of diagnostic ceramics appear in both ceramics. Clearly, this pattern does not appear in the PKAP data.

Moreover, it does not appear that the average weight of the sherds varied in a consistent way across the PKAP study area.

The map above shows the average weight of Late Roman sherds (excluding tiles) across the study area. It is possible to imagine a slightly higher average sherd weight for the coastal units immediately below the height of Vigla in the left-center of the map, and a slightly lower average sherd weight for the material scattered to the north on the Mavrospilos/Kazamas plateau.

While this is slightly suggestive, I wonder, vaguely, whether this has something to do with the greater soil depth on coastal plain that “protects” sherds more. The plateau units tend to have thin soils with patches of exposed bedrock. This seems like a far more hostile environment for sherds and may have accounted for why they are more poorly preserved. In other words, the condition of the sherds has much more to do with post-depositional processes than how they were deposited.

I expect that David Pettegrew – the expert on survey site formation processes – might have some observations.

Crossposted to Corinthian Matters.

New Idea: Grand Forks Community History Project

As readers of this blog know, I’ve gradually been moving into community and local history. It began when I wrote a history of our department for the University’s 125th-a-versary. Then last fall, I became involved in writing the history of the last wood-framed church building in Grand Forks when it was slated for demolition. As a result of this second project, I have been courting the Grand Forks Community Land Trust and seeing if there is the potential for a collaborative project between the Department of History and the Community Land Trust to produce local histories in association with properties that it acquires in the Grand Forks area.

Over the weekend, I put together a brief proposal and sent it over the Grand Forks Community Land Trust people to see if they might be willing to take our relationship a bit further. The initial response has been quite positive, but I still haven’t heard from all the players.

On the University of North Dakota side there is still a good bit of negotiating to do, but I am hopeful that there will be some good will toward this opportunity.

So, here’s the proposal:

Grand Forks Community History Project

Introduction

The Grand Forks Community History Project is a collaboration between the Department of History at the University of North Dakota and the Grand Forks Community Land Trust (CLT). The goal of the collaboration is to produce a series of community histories for neighborhoods with properties redeveloped by the non-profit CLT. The histories will combine professional scholarly rigor with an accessible language and format. Each relatively short work (10,000 – 15,000 words) will form a part of a larger series of histories that aspires to a block-by-block history of Grand Forks and brings to life to the stories, dynamism, and architecture of the community.

The CLT and the Department of History recognize the power of the past to shape the present. The CLT’s work to create strong communities by making affordable housing available in Grand Forks finds common cause with work of local and public historians who strive to tell the story of the entire community.  The Department of History and the CLT will present the books to new residents of CLT homes, circulate them to the associated neighborhoods, provide them at no or low cost to civic institutions, libraries, churches, et c., and sell them at cost through local bookstores. The goal from both the CLT and the Department of History perspective is to use these volumes to strengthen the local community.

The alliance between the CLT and the Department of History will also work to reinforce the ties between the University, the Department of History and the community through partnering with a local organization. The main authors of the volumes will be doctoral level students or exceptional M.A. students under the guidance of Prof. Cynthia Prescott, Prof. William Caraher, and Prof. Bret Weber.  The books will be part of the Department of History’s developing program in Public History and serve as a powerful regional showcase for the best work from our department.

The Program

In the Fall of 2011 the first volume of the series was commissioned by Prof. Caraher and the CLT. The volume, authored by, Chris Price, D.A. student in the Department of History documents the history and architecture of the church on 3rd and Walnut St. in Grand Forks, which is a CLT property and slated for destruction this spring.  This church is among the oldest standing churches in town and the last remaining wood framed church in Grand Forks city limits. In spring of 2012, the CLT will build a single family house on the lot and we will present the volume on the history of the church along with an architectural drawing of the building to the residence of the home, the local community, and state and local archives and libraries. This volume will be the lasting record of the church.

In 2012 we plan to expand this program to include properties acquired by the CLT throughout Grand Forks. For a larger implementation of this program, we will run a seminar for the students on community history and begin to develop the skills and research time needed for producing additional volumes. The resources available at the Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections will support the writing of these local histories and serve as one of a number of outlets for making our work available for the community.

To manage the overhead of producing a series of books, we were serve as the publisher coordinating peer review, contacting authors, and distributing the books locally. We will produce the books in very small print runs and provide additional copies through a print-on-demand service like Lulu. We will also make the manuscripts available in digital formats as either ebook or pdf. This will be done in collaboration with the Working Group in Digital and New Media.

Funding

The collaboration with the CLT provided necessary start up money for the initial phase of the project. They subsidized the publication of the first volume in collaboration with private donors through the Cyprus Research Fund.

 

The next phase of the project will require additional support. At present, we envision a series of 15 to 20 volumes each written by an advanced graduate student. Each volume would cost approximate $1000 to produce and distribute. Because the volumes will be tied to particular properties, the full funding will not be necessary from the start. Ideally, a collaboration with the CLT will open doors to community development money not typically accessible to history projects.

Next Steps

There are three steps necessary to advance this project:

1. There needs to be a liaison between the CLT and the Department of History who will decide which properties will receive the first round of histories.

2. A representative in the Department of History who will work with a representative the CLT to write grants and consider funding options and priorities.

3. A representative to supervise the production of the next round of volumes.

Obviously, these three positions can be occupied by a single individual, but this will involve a significant amount of time and energy. Initiating a community development project is not native to the academic programs of most historians. The value of this project, however is significant, and it will reinforce the innovative character of the CLT as well as the growing interest in public history in the Department of History. The opportunity for graduate students to get first hand experience shepherding a project from research to publication is invaluable for their professional development. More importantly, projects like this have the opportunity to make our community stronger.

 

A Working Paper on Lakka Skoutara in the Corinthia

With the recent preliminary publication of the work by the SHARP team at the site of Kalamianos in the southeastern Corinthia, it seemed like a good opportunity for David Pettegrew, Tim Gregory, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory and I to dust off a long-in-progress manuscript dealing with the site of Lakka Skoutara.

This paper is still very much in-progress, but we have drawn upon it for a paper at the 2010 Modern Greek Studies Association Meeting and at the 2012 Archaeological Institute of America meeting. We have also made available our photographic archive from our work at this site.

With the growing interest in this particular section of the Corinthia, we thought it would be a good idea to get throw our ideas into the mix and get the history of this “small world” into the conversation.

We’ll undoubtedly revise this draft over the next year or so and keep an updated draft available. Over the past couple of weeks, David Pettegrew (the editor of Corinthian Matters) and I have talked about making Corinthian Matters a destination for working papers on … Corinthian Matters. The idea of working papers has strong roots in the hard and social sciences where researchers regularly circulate papers prior to publication. It also provides a way to make research available that escapes from pay-walls and other ways that corporations looks to profit from faculty research.  If you have a working paper that you want people to see, drop David or me an email.

View this document on Scribd

Cross-posted to Corinthian Matters.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s a bracing Friday morning in North Dakotaland. It’s been a long week, but I still have enough energy for a few quick hits and varia…

• There is so much being written about Greece lately that it’s hard to filter or even process it all. The New York Times Magazine article seems decent. This seems like a reasonable cautionary tale. The museum at Olympia was robbed last night (one wonders whether there is a political message to this). Apparently there was an earthquake just east of the Isthmian canal yesterday. Finally, this short “punk economics” video gives a nice overview to the current Greek financial crisis.
• Tom Tartaron lectured on the Ötzi iceman (via Richard Rothaus)
• If you haven’t checked out Chris Cloke’s three part post on the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project (NVAP) survey data and manuring over at Corinthian Matters. Do it now. It’s the best possible use of archaeological blogging.
• Zotero 3.0 is out of beta and ZotPad is now available to let you run Zotero on your iPad.
• Some more writing tips, this time from Henry Miller.
• Some good PR for the Working Group in Digital and New Media via UND’s College of Arts and Sciences Cornerstone magazine. One thing that I hate is when official media from UND insist on calling me William “Bill” Caraher. Who does that in the normal press? Page 12 has a nice little article on Kostis Kourelis visit to UND in the fall. In general, Working Group members dominated the February Cornerstone. You just have to check out the Maya language cartoons that my buddies Paul Worley and Joel Jonientz have put together. They are amazing.
• Some abandonment porn Soviet Afghanistan style.
• Awesome digital reconstructions of the temple at Mons Repos, Corfu by Phil Saperstein.
• It would be fun – in a profoundly depressing way – to run a similar analysis on the funding on campus here for libraries.
• Man, I really like Piezo for recording streamed music tracks to mp3. Cheap, fun, and simple. Plus it works.
• A public (history) Ph.D.
• The Kills cover of VU’s Pale Blue Eyes.
• This is pretty funny (especially to my Australian friends) (via Susie).
• North Dakota bees and California almonds (via Whit).
• Andrew “Roy” Symonds is retiring from all forms of cricket. While he did plenty of amazing things with a cricket bat (and was an amazing fielder), I’ll always remember fondly when he took out the streaker in a ODI at his home pitch.
• This is a very thoughtful blog post on whether digital humanities and digital history are “game changers”.
• Why it’s sometimes good to lecture. And even the highest tech faculty can learn something from great old school lecturers.
• It so happens that work/life balance may be bad for you (especially if you really like your job and are kind of ambivalent about most parts of life). On the same topic, a short article on burn out (or as we call it on PKAP, blow out).
• What I’m reading: Y. Lolos, The Land of Sikyon (ASCSA 2011). It’s really long!
• What I’m listening to: Crime, San Francisco’s Still Doomed; The Jazz Crusaders, Live at the Lighthouse ’66.

Isn’t it cool that we have local businesses here in North Dakotaland called Odin’s (and it’s not a place to get all your neo-pagan supplies or comic books! It’s a service station.)

 

The Annual Letter from the Cyprus Research Fund

Each year I try to produce a newsletter for the various donors and “stakeholders” in the Cyprus Research Fund. The letter tells them a bit about the past year’s work, looks to the future, and thanks them for their support.

Since all readers of the blog are – in some tiny way – stakeholders, I offer the 2012 newsletter below.

Thanks for all the support and encouragement over the past year! (And for reading my blog!).

View this document on Scribd

 

Three Abstracts for the 2012-2013 Archaeological Institute of America Lecture Program

I was invited next year to contribute to the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual lecture program. To help local chapter of the AIA decide whether my lectures would fit their needs, drawn an audience, and interest their members, I was asked to offer a few abstract on talks that I could give.

So I looked through my “works-out-of-progress” folders and concocted three abstracts from the various projects that continue to float about in my scholarly consciousness. They range from the accessible and popular to the technical and obscure and unresolved.

Here they are:

Ten Years at an Ancient Harbor in Cyprus

This lecture would consider the history and archaeology of the coastal site of Pyla-Koutsopetria on the south coast of Cyprus where a now in-filled ancient harbor served a community that prospered for over 1000 years.  While travelers and scholars had periodically visited the site and documented stray finds, including the infamous Luigi Palma di Cesnola, systematic work at the site did not begin until 2003 when the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project began a campaign of intensive survey, remote sensing, and excavation that documented an extensive area of habitation along the coast.  With a Iron Age sanctuary, a Hellenistic fortification, a Roman period olive press and town, and an Early Christian basilica, the coastal zone of Pyla village contains a startling assemblage of features common across the island of Cyprus during the historic period.  The high-density scatter of ceramic artifacts demonstrates the diversity of activities at the site and the wide range connections between the site and the wider Mediterranean world.

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

Between 2001 and 2009, a small team of archaeologists investigated a number of  geographically well-defined and fertile upland basins or poljes located between the villages of Sophiko and Korphos in the southeastern Korinthia. We conducted intensive pedestrian survey in the largest of these valleys, known as Lakka Skoutara, as part of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS). The results of this survey show that despite its seeming isolation, the valley supported human activities throughout antiquity. The most fascinating aspect of the valley, however, appears in more recent times when it supported a cluster of farmsteads and agricultural and pastoral activities. These small houses are now largely abandoned, but can nevertheless tell us a tremendous amount about the “small places” in the Greek countryside that played a vital role in the 20th century in the subsistence of its local population. The team documented the modern landscape of the valley through a series of regular visits, and these allowed up to observe the continued dynamism of changing land use patterns on a very small scale. In particular, we worked to document formation processes and life cycles of use, reuse, and abandonment connected with the modern structures in the valley. 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.

Dream Archaeology

For over 1000 years excavators have relied upon dreams to guide them to hidden treasures, sacred buildings, and lost relics.  St. Helena’s excavations of fragments of the true cross and other stories of inventio inspired later Christian archaeologists to follow the inspiration of dream to find sacred relics. The practice was consistent and widespread enough to qualify as a form of Byzantine indigenous archaeology. In more recent times, excavators as revered as Anastasios Orlandos and Manolis Andronikos have recognized the influence of dreams on their own excavations. As Y. Hamilakis and C. Stewart have shown in their recent work that archaeological dreams played a key role in the developing Greek national consciousness. They do not, however, link these modern archaeological dreams explicitly to Byzantine and Early Christian practices.  This paper will not necessarily establish an irrefutable connection between modern and Byzantine dreams or argue for the presence of some unconscious continuity. Instead, I will sketch the outlines of an indigenous archaeology in Byzantine times and consider how such pre-modern practices can influence our ideas of archaeological knowledge in more recent times.

Which would you pick?

 

A Rough Sketch of Work in the North Dakota Work Camps

As readers of this blog know, I’m slowing articulating a small archaeological fieldwork project that will focus on the material culture, architecture, and landscape associated with work camps in western North Dakota.

This project is part of a larger collaborative initiative recently funded by our Vice President of Research that has brought together scholars from Social Work, Indian Studies, and Anthropology to investigate social change in the oil producing Bakken Counties of North Dakota. As part of coordinating our disparate efforts, we all decided to write up a proposal, in informal language, that would describe our goals.

We have also begun to collect bibliography using Zotero. We have a growing bibliography on the social impact of oil booms and the archaeology of work camps and other sites of natural resource extraction. We are also collecting media reports, newspaper article, blog posts and the like that refer to boomtowns particularly in the western part of North Dakota. Follow the links above to check them out. If you’ve been putting off using Zotero to collect citation, now is the time to start! They have just released Zotero 3.0 which is a lovely and powerful stand alone piece of citation management software which integrates seamlessly with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It’s a pleasure to use and free and open source!

Here’s my informal proposal:

A Proposal for The Archaeology of Work Camps in Western North Dakota

Introduction

The last 40 years has seen a “boom” in the study of industrial archaeology. Work camps and community have formed central features in the conversation among archaeologist of both the recent and distant past.  Work camps and the communities that they housed played a key role in the extraction of natural resources on a global scale and, locally, in the settlement of the American west. Archaeological study of these communities has demonstrated how they both reinforced social divisions based on race, wealth, education, and job, but also allowed for remarkable opportunities for social and economic mobility and transgressive behavior. Most archaeologists have recognized in the material left behind from these camps evidence for resistance to existing social norms at the economic and, indeed, geographic margins of American society.  As messy, gritty, discordant Foucualdian heterotopias, work camps – like the frontier itself in Turner’s naive imagination – provided a model for an American future.

Architectural historians, likewise, have begun to develop a sustained interest in short-term housing and settlement prompted in large part by the use of temporary housing in the aftermath of Katrina and the well-publicized use of camps during the global refugee crises that have dominated the last 60s years. Coincidentally, the recent interest in temporary housing and the structure of highly contingent communities has returned to the American west in the study of dynamic communities in places like Slab City, California and Quartzite, Arizona where two very different groups have availed themselves to the margins of settlement to create dynamic, contingent communities. As some pundits and scholars have noted, the dynamic nature of the communities among refugees, at Slab City and in the Bakken counties find parallels with the flexibility preached in the post-industrial economy, in cutting edge models of American higher education, and in the playful workspaces of high-tech start ups. If the 19th century mining camp represented one possible future for American society, then perhaps the post-Katrina refugee camp, the Bakken Man Camp, and the conventicle of RVers gathering in Quartzite suggest another potential future.

In the humanities more generally, this interest in short-term or temporary habitation strategies and community echoes the so-called “spatial turn” or “material turn” in the humanities which recognizes the fundamentally spatial and material character of human relations. By documenting the material signature, physical organization, and the complex places that work camps occupy in the landscape of western North Dakota, this project seeks to represent these contingent communities in a spatial way.

Methods and Questions

From the perspective of methodology, the study of existing work camps has the potential to shed light on the complexities of the formation processes that produce archaeological sites. While contemporary practices and material present significantly different challenges for archaeologists, documenting basic discard patterns associated with short term settlement practices could provide useful archaeological analogues for understanding past site formation. Moreover, it serves as important documentation for future archaeological work in the region which will inevitably have to deal with the remains of temporary and short-term settlement associated with the oils boom.

By documenting discard practices, site organization, and settlement patterns, an archaeologist can record the material environment that both shapes and is shaped by social interactions. Archaeologists have long harbored the conceit that objects can tell us things that oral and textual sources cannot. Careful and systematic documentation of work camps provides a way to produce the material signature of social, economic, and political relationships. Ideally this work will include both the sanctioned work camps as well as the myriad alternative settlement practices ranging from “hotcotting”  to unsanctioned camps that have appeared in private and public space and various forms of quasi-legal and illegal squatting among individuals and communities working in the Bakken oil fields.

Finally, while archaeological documentation has typically focused at the scale of the trench or the site, recent work in the field has sought to step back from the individual site to consider the landscape as a scale of human society.  The landscape of western North Dakota has entered a period of particularly dynamic change. These changes are set against a landscape that already wears the marks of human exploitation. Photography of the western landscape – in both its “pristine glory” and as the tamed mistress of American economic exceptionalism – has played a key roll in how we imagine the normative landscapes. By placing man-camps and other installations in their relationship to older images of rural space, we not only problematize the aesthetics of exploitation, but also document the character of rapid change.

Any study of the impact and form of economic phenomenon risks being interpreted as subversive or manipulated in such a way as to discredit the authenticity and honesty of the findings. Recognizing that this risk is particular acute in environments where economically powerful interest already feel embattled. To attempt to guard against these pressures, the project will include aspects of “guerrilla archaeology” where low-impact fieldwork that attempts to document a range of different habitation sites with a minimum of collaboration or collusion with sources of local authority.

Procedures

My research plan calls for 2 short trips to the Bakken Counties. The first trip will focus on issues of identification and access to proposed study sites.  This trip will be guided both by data collected from western sources and through the careful study of recent satellite photographs of the areas around New Town and Williston.  Reasonable estimates of distances and some basic procedures for documenting visible material culture will help to determine the equipment and number of people required to document the work camps successfully.

A second trip will occur in the summer months (July or August) and be a maximum of 7 days. This trip will involve primary data collection from a specific group of sites using GPS, photography, forms, and notebooks.  I hope to document I would also like to collaborate, if possible, with a photographer and, if possible, with some local archaeologists familiar with the challenges and opportunities of working in the Bakken counties.

From the Corinthia to Sicyon

This weekend I spent some quality time with Y. Lolos newly published tome, Land of Sikyon. Hesperia Supplement 39 (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2011). It runs to close to 650 pages and provides a nearly comprehensive view on (as his subtitle states) the archaeology and history of a Greek City-State.  With a book of this size and level of detail, I feel a bit like a cat attacking a sofa. The best I’ll be able to do is attack various parts of it and then race off. That being said, over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting my observations on the book as I work my way through it. Scholars interested in the history, archaeology, and topography of the Corinthia and the northwest Peloponnesus have eagerly awaited this book (so eagerly, in fact, that it’s listed in World Cat as having been published in 2006, 2009, and 2011).

This weekend I took particular interest in Lolos detailed description of the history and land routes through the region. My very first article looked at a series of fortifications on the far eastern end of Mt. Oneion. In this article I discuss briefly the idea that an army could cross the eastern end of Mt. Oneion in order to enter the Peloponnesus while avoiding the fortifications around the city of Corinth.

From that article:

In addition, once an army crossed the mountain’s eastern end and moved south, it had bypassed the defenses of Acrocorinth and gained ac cess to a complex network of roads leading toward the population centers of the southwest Corinthia, such as Tenea, Kleonai, and Phlius, as well as the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea. Thereafter, an army could link up with routes into the Argolid or move toward the west through the uplands of the northeastern Peloponnese to descend into Sikyonia, Arkadia, and Achaia.

When I wrote this, however, I had only the faintest idea how a force could descend into Sikonia.  Historically, I knew it was possible, as Xenophon tells us (Hell. 7.1.18-19) that the Theban general Epaminondas did just that during his second invasion of the Peloponnesus in 386, despite efforts by the Athenians, Spartans, and Pellenians to hold the eastern side of the mountain.

Lolos’s book provides some crucial clarification on the route of this invasion. It seems likely that the Thebans must have marched to Phlious before moving south to Sikyon along the route of the Asopos river or alternately veering slightly further west and passing the sanctuary of Titane on a decent to the Sikyonian plateau.  Lolos’ book provides significant evidence for these routes through his thorough compilation of evidence for wheel ruts and road cuttings that suggest the presence of cart roads. Of course, the army of Epaminondas probably had very few carts as they had entered the Peloponnesus through a rather tricky march over the eastern part of Mt. Oneion.

While Lolos has worked out the routes west and south in Sikyonia and R. Bynum Jeanie Marchand, and Mike Dixon (all under the watchful eye of Prof. Ron Stroud) have pieced together the road networks of the southern and western Corinthia, as far as I know, no one has worked out the roads running south of Mt. Oneion from the area of Solygeia (and the modern village of Loutro Elenis) to the Xeropotamos River valley. This is a relatively small area, but one where one might expect to find areas of exposed bedrock that would preserve wheel ruts. Moreover, it’s tempting to imaging that the hills further south had watch towers to monitoring traffic obscured by the mass of Oneion.

As a side note, it feels strange to blog on ancient Greece at a time when the modern Greece is in such turmoil. I wonder whether reading, thinking, and writing about ancient Greece provides me with a safe way to keep that place in my head without incurring the emotional cost of reflecting on its current troubles.