This week, I’ve been making the final edits and read through of the distributional analysis chapter of the monograph I am preparing with David Pettegrew and Scott Moore for the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project’s survey conducted between 2004-2010. I’ve blogged a good bit about our ceramic distribution in a series of post two years ago.
As I edited the chapter and chatted with David over the past few days, we made some few little observations. So, the first one today:
In our Zone 4 which is the top of the coastal height called Kazamas, there are a series of cultivated fields which give way to more rugged terrain where a thin layer of soil atop sits atop a hard horizon of bedrock. Recently this layer of bedrock has been scrapped and broken to allow for some modern efforts to cultivate these fields. What is interesting is that there is an almost continuous low density scatter of pottery across these rocky fields. (For maps and the like, check out this post from The Archive.) In fact, the low density material forms “halo” around the higher density fields to the south. Based on artifact densities, one could imagine this low density scatter as a classic example of a manuring halo. This is the halo of fields close to the main settlement which received manure in antiquity. The rocky fields on the Kazamas ridge, however, seem hardly suited to intensive manuring.
Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 