PKAP 2012 First Day Challenges

Part of the fun of archaeology is that it compels scholars who tend to work in fairly controlled environments to encounter the uncontrollable, the physical, and the real. For example, my lovely GIS maps which seem so secure, accurate, and clear when produced for publications seem incomplete and barely legible when carried out into the “real space” of the field. A datum that appears so clearly on the map disappears into the tall, dry grain on the height of Vigla. The edges of backfilled trenches are no longer even hints in the baked, buff earth. Features so visible in our geophysical prospecting remain carefully buried beneath half a meter of earth.

What could this possibly mean in real space?

The invisibility of our cartographic landscape has become apparent this year as we are moving from using a very fancy Trimble R8 GPS unit to using a total station. So we need to ground our virtual landscape in a series of visible features to locate our total station in real space. The ideal way to do this is to place it on a known point and back-sight to other known points to check for the accuracy of our placement. Even as I type this, a legion of eager students are combing through the grain stubble looking for a 1 inch pipe that has served as our datum since 2008.

This is all in advance of laying out trenches on the height of Vigla for our 2012 excavation season. These trenches will continue the work we’ve done in 2008 and 2009 to document the history of the fortified Hellenistic site and to establish a clear chronology for the fortification walls there. The additional challenge of working at this site comes from its position on a British military firing range. As a consequence of this location, we will have only very limited time to excavate. In fact, we’ll lose most of our first week of the season to British military exercises. This will necessitate some long days digging when we are allowed to be on the site. Let’s hope our students (and the senior staff!) are up for the challenge of  a series of 10 hours excavation days punctuated by days when we can’t go into the field at all.

Compounding the uncertainty of our schedule and the need to reconstruct our geo-spatial orientation is that I’m sick. I caught some crazy cold after spending 15 hours breathing other people’s air while on my flight to Cyprus. So, I have been left back at the hotel while the students and staff have gone out to the site for orientation. While I enjoy the challenges that GIS and databases can provide, I do miss it when I don’t have a chance to go out into the field. I’ll begrudgingly admit that staying out of the sun this morning is probably for the best. The quicker I recover from my cold, the easier the challenges of fieldwork will become.

Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Prospects for the Summer of 2012

Last week, I wrote a bit on my plans for work at the site of Polis-Chrysochous for the summer of 2012. Before I even get to Polis, however, I will have worked for a little of three weeks at my long term research site of Pyla-Koutsopetria. This summer a team of Messiah College volunteers will team up with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project to conduct excavations at the site of Pyla-Vigla.

The site is the prominent height that towers above the narrow coastal plain of Pyla-Koutsopetria and our work since 2008 has documented the presence of a substantial fortification dating to the Hellenistic period. A preliminary publication of our work at the site should appear in the next volume of the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus A pre-print is available here and a summary conference paper here. 

We excavated at that site in 2009 and 2010, but left several unanswered questions that our work this season will look to resolve. Like the preceding two campaigns at the site our work will be focused and limited. At present we anticipate three small trenches (<10 sq m each) positioned to clarify three distinct questions:

1. Function. The last two campaigns at the site have produced some good evidence for settlement on the top of the Vigla plateau and inside the fortification walls. We have found traces of storage and cooking practices, the manufacture of military equipment (particularly lead sling pellets), the re-use of material from earlier structures including a possible religious sanctuary, and at least two episodes of destruction. We feel relatively confident, then, assigning this settlement to soldiers stationed at the site. At the same time, the extent of the settlement remains unclear and geophysical work conducted in 2008 and 2009 seems to indicate that some sub-surface anomalies extend toward the northern half of the plateau where we have done no excavation. One goal this summer, then, is to locate at least one sounding on the northern part of the plateau to determine whether the settlement extends over the entire area or whether the sub-surface anomalies represent non-domestic architecture or even the remains of earlier or even later activities at the site. 

2. Chronology. While we have a relatively secure chronology for the settlement within the fortification walls, the fortification walls themselves have so far escaped our efforts to assign secure dates. In 2009 we conducted a sounding along the eastern part of the fortification and in 2010 along the western. Despite substantial amounts of soil and, at least for the eastern sounding, some complex stratigraphy, we were unable to establish a secure date for the wall. In 2012, we plan to place a trench along the northern side of the wall close to where looters exposed a substantial section of the wall in the winter of 2009/10. The looter trench suggested that there is a good chance for undisturbed stratigraphy in this area and that the walls remains standing to a substantial height (>1 m). We hope that a trench in this area will turn up the so-far elusive foundation deposit. Unfortunately, even this might not produce an easy answer as far as the date of the entire wall is concerned. We have fairly good evidence that the wall saw several phases of construction.

3. The Southwest Corner. The southwestern corner of Vigla has also seen some looting in the past few winters. The steep slope of the southern side has also seen some substantial local erosion that has enlarged the looter trenches. The most dramatic exposure appears to have been the remains of a tomb perhaps of Hellenistic date. Recent erosion and possible looting has also exposed the remains of a wall that appears very similar to the fortification wall found further upslope. The extent and function of this wall along the southeastern corner and its relationship to burials in the area remain rather unclear. It could be that the wall is a retaining wall for a road that originally made its way from the coastal plain along the western side of the fortification. Or it may have been an outrigger wall that prevented an enemy force from establishing a position below the southern wall of the fortified plateau. If the wall served to fortify the southwestern approach to the height, it would presumably look similar to the fortification wall along the southern side of the plateau. If it was a retaining wall, we might expect it not to be a less substantial construction. Finally, it is possible that the wall has something to do with the burials in this area or even the quarrying activity further to the south. We hope that a small trench in this area can at least tell us whether the wall had two faces and guide our interpretation either toward or away from its function as a fortification.

To investigate these issues, we are fortunate to have a great team of trench supervisors this summer: Brandon Olson for Boston University, Dallas Deforest from Ohio State, and Aaron Barth from the joint Ph.D. program in History at University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University. As we have for the last five years, we will document our work via social media and as things going, I’ll provide details here!

So, stay tuned!

Performing Power in the Late Bronze Age

The most recent fascicle of Hesperia has been particular distracting over the last few weeks. The quality of articles and strong presence by relatively junior scholars reminds me of the continued vitality in the study of ancient Greece (and is a good tonic to seemingly unending litany of negative stories about the state of Classics).

It was particularly fun to read Dimitri Nakassis’s article on evidence for feasting in the Mycenaean Linear B tables.  Over the several decades, scholars of Mycenaean Greece have focused significant attention on feasts and feasting as a key element in the construction of authority in that society. These feasts were often large and elaborate events, and, according to Nakassis’ review of scholarship (this is far from my area of specialization!), these social and religious events existed across different contexts in Mycenaean society providing a degree of horizontal and vertical ritual integration. The best known feasts centered on the impressive palaces like at Pylos, but we have good evidence that they also occurred in the provinces and among individuals. As Nakassis summarizes, there is significant evidence for these various types of feasts, the contributors, and their contributions in the Linear B tablets from Pylos and elsewhere. While I am sure that it’s more complex than what I can understand, it appears that these feasts made manifest (and reinforced) through their ritualized character the social, economic, and potentially political organization of Mycenaean society. The baked hard Linear B tablets preserve a record of donors, donations, and relationships that structured these important ritual events.

While a significant chunk of the article unpacks several complex issues surrounding the provisioning of the feast, the more interesting argument to me comes as Nakassis argues that the same individual appears as both king and a private person in the Linear B tables. A single individual then, donated both in his person as king and in his person as a private individual. Nakssis has argued that this seems to indicate a differentiation between there personae of political authority and his identity as a private individual. Apparently both personae had access to independent sources of wealth and could deploy this wealth in a feasting environment to manipulate the social and political outcomes.  This, of course, finds nice parallels with differentiation between personal wealth and the imperial fisc in Roman times. Personal wealth became an avenue for patronage outside the administrative functions of the state suggesting that even Roman imperial authority has roots in the personal as much as the political.

The contributions of various other members of the elite to these feasts demonstrates a degree of aristocratic competition that the Mycenaean king participates in as a private individual (as well as in his official capacity). If the feast remains a place where both institutional authority of the Mycenaean king and the elite authority of private individuals become manifest, these events have interesting parallels with the construction of Christian authority in Late Antiquity. As I have blogged about numerous times, Christian ritual and architecture promoted the institutional authority of the clergy. At the same time, patronage of the church often came from non-ecclesiastical sources. In other words, elites from outside the expanding ecclesiastical hierarchy vied for positions to promote the authority of the new institution. As Nakassis observed: “Participants in the feast were not passive recipients of elite propaganda… but instead actively contributed to the processes in various ways… Even mere participation in a feast by individuals in the lower orders is an active choice that is subject to subtle manipulation, as James Scott’s study of peasant resistance vividly illustrates.” (p. 24).

The Chlamydatus of Corinth

In the most recent Hesperia, Amelia Brown has offered an intriguing article on a significant group of Late Roman portrait statues (“Last Men Standing: Chlamydatus Protraits and Public Life in Late Antique Corinth,” Hesperia 81 (2012), 141-176). Chlamydatus statues of Corinth depict men wearing the “distinctive long cloak or chlamys” and this dress typically associates these individuals with imperial office. Brown has assembled a group of 7 largely fragmentary, life-sized statues of this kind from around Corinth with 6 of them appearing in the forum area. These status date to the 4th and 5th centuries and represent both a change in Late Roman portrait style as well as the growing political influence of the imperial center at Constantinople of aristocratic representation at Corinth. According to Brown, these statues appear to be associated with imperial rather than local elite. Corinth’s position as the seat of the governor of Achaea probably accounts for the number of imperial elite present, but also made it both an appealing location for the display of honorific statues dedicated to men who had contributed to the safety, urban environments, religious life, and culture of the province.

As per usual, I’ll let Dr. Brown’s work stand on its own merits and recommend it to anyone interested in understand the development and archaeology of Late Roman statuary. Instead, I’ll focus on two interrelated but admittedly peripheral aspects of Brown’s work.

First, Brown does a nice job of arguing that the Lechaion road was the main area for the display of chlamydatus statues. In her reconstruction of this space of display the chlamys clad statues stood along the sides of the main road into forum area of Corinth. A visitor to the forum area would have passed under the impassive gaze of these statues as they walked along the main artery of the Late Antique city. The Lechaion Road provided access to basic civic amenities like latrines and shops as well as places of display like the Peirene fountain which likely served as an important source of water for the city as well as an area for informal recreation, gathering, and meeting. Thus Corinthians and visitors to the city lived their daily life in and among reminders of the city’s imperial patrons.

The Lechaion Road also likely served as the main route of official processions into the city of Corinth.  Important visitors from the west would have enjoyed their official adventus (or ritual of arrival) into the city along the wide, colonnaded, grandiose Lechaion Road. The chlamydatus would have watched the passage of fellow elites and their retinues accompanied by city fathers, fellow imperial aristocrats, and by the 5th century perhaps local representatives of the Christian communities. The position of the statues along the road left the main route into the city open, but also provided a permanent audience for ritual processions. The most important men in the city and perhaps province would always be there, standing to honor their fellow elites.

The statue that I was most intrigued by was the so-called Kraneion chlamydatus. This statue was found cut down and reused as a threshold at the Kraneion basilica which dates to the 6th century and stood immediately outside of the eastern Kraneion Gate to the city. The location of the statue near the eastern gate of the city suggests that this might have been an area for display during the Late Antiquity with chlamys clad statues greeting visitors from the east.

Hesperia 81 (2012), p. 145

The reuse of the Kraneion chlamydatus in the Kraneion basilica interesting is that it was cut down for use as a threshold block.  It would be easy to recognize in this use of spolia practical concerns; torso of the chlamydatus provided a substantial block of marble suitable for the requirements of a threshold.

I do wonder whether there might be some symbolic considerations as well. The cutting down of the statue would have made it difficult for a visitor to the church to recognize the former function of the block. On the other hand, the process of selecting and cutting down the block must have involved a series of ideological decisions. The chlamys clad man had to be recognized as no longer relevant or important and therefore suitable for reuse. The placement of the block as a threshold offers a nice parallel to the original location of the statue near the gate to the city (or the placement of the other chlamydatus along the processional route of the monumentalized Lechaion Road).  In other words, the location of the reused chlamydatus at the threshold to the church finds a nice parallel with their original location in liminal spaces like the gate to the city or a processional way.

One could even go a step further and suggest that the relocation of the chlamydatus statue at the threshold of the church marked out the boundary between the civic world and the works of the church. The shift is more marked when you consider that within the church the congregation stood in the aisles and watched the ranked procession of the clergy. The congregation may have been accompanied by a passive processions of saints standing in the place of the onlooking chlamydatus along the Lechaion Road while the clergy’s liturgical procession echoed the ritualized adventus of Late Roman aristocrats into the city.

The physical subordination of the Kraneion chlamydatus at the threshold of the church echoed the gradual suppression of monumental civic space throughout the empire and their replacement with churches tied to the ecclesiastical rather than civic or imperial elite.

Crossposted to Corinthian Matters.

The Martyria of Salona

This month, Ann Marie Yasin published an important reconsideration of the martyria of Salona in the Journal of Early Christian Studies (20 (2012), 59-112; pdf here?). Martyria are buildings thought to be dedicated to particular Early Christian martyrs and the veneration of their remains. Scholars have long associated the centrally planned martyrium with some of the earliest forms of Early Christian monumental architecture. In fact, they have in some cases seen martyria as the key intermediate step between the veneration of Early Christian ancestors and saints in the catacombs and the explosive spread of basilica style churches in the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries. As with so much in the study of Early Christian architecture, the material remains for the “evolution”, as Yasin puts it, from burial to monumental martyrium have not been subjected to particularly rigorous scrutiny, and the archaeology of the type site of Salona which featured three “early” martyr shrines that are central to how we have understood the development of this kind of building is particularly problematic.

Yasin’s article, then, subjects the archaeology of Salona to rigorous critique and suggests that the first step to unpacking the complex history of Early Christian architecture is to determine the viability of longstanding arguments for its development at key type sites like Salona. Yasin casts well-justified doubts over the traditional narrative of Christian architectural development and calls for scholars to focus on three particularly problematic areas:

1. The Regional and the Universal. I am working on a paper on monumental Early Christian architecture of Greece. Following the same lines as my dissertation, I am taking Early Christian architecture in Greece as a more or less unified corpus. To my mind, the most remarkable aspect of Early Christian building is the basic uniformity of Christian architecture. This uniformity reflected the institutional structure of church, reinforced the rising status of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and promoted the universal character of the Christian liturgy.

As Yasin points out in her article, this tendency to generalize has caused issues in the past. Scholars have overlooked the particulars of regional development or, more problematic still, the developments of particular sites or buildings. Yasin’s work at Salona, of course, also shows some problems with this approach as the archaeological records for many Early Christian buildings – not to mention the attention to detail in the excavation itself – are not conducive to the detailed study of phases. Moreover, in many cases the excavations followed the architecture and was more concerned with demonstrating the validity of longstanding arguments than carefully detailing the remains.

Yasin’s restudy of the archaeological reports and publications from Solona suggest considerable ambiguity in the traditional phasing of the buildings casting doubt on the neat narrative that assumed the pre-existence of important tombs which received progressive architectural elaboration.

2. The Trouble with Texts. Yasin points out that part of the difficulty in reading the Early Christian architecture is the tendency to see these buildings in terms of the various martyriological and hagiographical traditions. Yasin has suggested that, first, these textual sources are not only problematic in terms of chronology (and this is compounded by chronological ambiguities in the excavated buildings), but they often owe as much to literary conventions and tropes as local conditions. As a result, these texts do not serve as a reliable guide to the history of the buildings and may, in fact, reflect an imagined past that explains the nature of a standing structure. In short, past communities had as much invested in explaining the nature of the architecture as modern archaeologists, and both have created stories designed to make a useful sacred past.

3. Ambivalence and Ambiguity. A key point seen throughout Yasin’s article is that Christian buildings may not have conformed to the clear evolutionary or ritual outlines supposed by modern scholars. In fact, the ambiguity that characterized the archaeological remains of the martyria in Salona might well reflect the ambiguity and tensions present in the buildings as they stood for their ancient audiences. Buildings could and likely did sustain multiple meanings to their audiences. As a result, inscriptions, floor mosaics, and even hagiographic texts provide little to locate these churches within explicit narratives of development. One is tempted to expand this ambiguity to the architecture itself and note that Early Christian (and later) builders were not above mimicking earlier styles, combining features to create visually discordant and confusing montages, or even fabricating historical inscriptions. The willingness of ancient builders to play with architecture and to engage the viewer in a way that multiple potential narratives become possible and the architecture of the building would actively work to confuse simply interpretations.

The tension between the easy readability of Early Christian architecture in general and the complex features, architectural relationships, and narratives associated with specific sites communicated the tension between the general (perhaps universal) and the local in Christian history. The historical nature of the Incarnation, so central to Christian theology, and the universal power of the Christian God found clear parallels with the general power of the institutional church and the local traditions of the sacred.

Consumer Culture and Identity: A Case Study from Grand Forks, ND

Since reading Paul Mullin’s The Archaeology of Consumer Culture (2011), I’ve been thinking a good bit more about the objects that make up our everyday life. While I’ve occasionally played with the archaeology of my everyday life, it dawned on me that Elwyn Robinson‘s memoirs provides a rich sources of information on middle class consumer goods during the mid-20th century. During a football game a few months ago, I started to comb his memoirs for references to objects and costs. I posted in January on the salary figures gleaned form this text, and I offer now some observations on the material culture of a middle class family in Grand Forks, ND in the mid-20th century.

He appears to have mentioned larger or special purchases (rather than everyday objects) and omitted mundane objects (table ware, everyday clothing, et c.). As a result the perspective here is on objects that somehow contributed to Robinson’s identity as a full-fledged member of the local middle class.

1938
Argus AF Camera – $15.00
Enlarger -$12.50
Singer Sewing Machine – $48.10

1939
Eureka Vacuum – $6.93
Silver – $1.50 (per spoon)
Crib – $13.95

1940
Travel trunks – $13.00
Mattress – $11.17
Tweed coat – $24.75
Courier and Ives Prints – $1.49
Antique desk and dresser – $10.00
Coaster wagon – $2.44
Rope – $0.98

1941
Table with leaves – $5.00
Washing machine – $15.00
Chair and stool – $12.50
Refrigerator – $60.00
Kitchen chairs – $3.50
Large rug – $4.00
Small rug – $1.00
Chest – $8.00
Radio table (used) – $2.75
Lamp – $1.00
Bed – $7.95
Bedsprings -$8.95
Lamp – $3.85
Buffet (used) – $8.00
Curtains – $5.93
Chair (unpainted) – $2.50
Gardening book – $1.49
Suit w/ 2 pairs of pants – $32.50
Plastic chess set – $1.49
War Bonds – $37.50
War Bonds – $75.00
Tricycle – $7.20

1942
Parke David Vitamins – $7.00
Chair – $12.95
Wool blanket – $11.59
Iron bed folding – $4.00

1943
Winter coat – $49.50

1944
Davenport recovered – $85.00
Wing back chair – $109.00
Men’s suit – $32.50

1945
Piano (used) – $255.00

1946
Britannica (used) – $25.00
Mouton Lamb fur coat – $135.00
Brown suit (women’s) – $25.00
Porcelain sink – $97.75
Linoleum on kitchen floor – $61.00
Linoleum on table and cupboard – $18.00

1947
Leica 111b Camera with four filters (used) – $175.00
Sled – $2.50

1948
Rug (9 x 20) – $188.00
Play School Toys – $15.00
Occassional table (used) – $5.00
New Piano (Conover Mahogany Console) – $875.00

1949
suit (men’s) – $38.25
Washing Machine – $155.00
Car (Studabaker Champion)- $2,082.37
Piano (Chickering Console) – $1,055.00

1950
Guinea pigs – $4.97
Gasses – $32.00
Jacket for Kids – $9.75
Jacket for Kids – $5.95
Phonograph – $182.00
Attic Insulation – $45.00

1951
Curtains -$17.54

A Review of Lolos, Land of Sikyon.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve been working on a review of Y. Lolos, Land of Sikyon. Hesperia Supplement 39 (2011). I’ve posted more specific discussions of the book’s various sections here and here.

Here is a working version of the final review:

View this document on Scribd

 

Crossposted to Corinthian Matters.

Method and Material from a Survey on Antikythera

One of my first opportunities to shape the research directions of a project came when David Pettegrew and I were allowed to help design the survey methods and goals of Australian Paleochora Kythera Archaeological Survey. I am pretty sure we didn’t do anything marvelous there, but I did meet my wife on that project. So, any work done on Kythera or in its general vicinity has continued to pique my interest over the years. The survey conducted by Andrew Bevan and his team on the island of Antikythera – a mere speck in the Mediterranean on the main sailing route between Kythera and Crete – has attracted my attention of late not only because he conducted it on a Mediterranean island, but also because Bevan (and co.) are among the most sophisticated survey archaeologist in the business right now.

In an article slated to appear in Archaeometry, Bevan and a group of collaborators proposed some new ways of measuring chronological uncertainty in intensive survey (here’s a preprint (pdf)). This is a long standing and vexing issue for survey archaeologists where artifacts datable only to broad or multiple periods are common. The absence of stratigraphy makes it impossible to propose narrower dates for these objects, so a number of strategies have developed to document the uncertainly associated with these objects. The Chronotype system, that we have employed at both the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) and, in Cyprus at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) has provided one method for documenting artifacts of uncertain date. The Chronotype systems has a wide range of roughly hierarchical chronological categories into which we can group objects. For example, an artifact could be “Late Roman” or “Roman” or “Roman-Medieval” or even “Post-Prehistoric”.  When we assign an artifact to one of these categories we are assuming that the artifact could appear with equal probability in any year (decade or century) in that chronological span. Of course, in practice, we know that artifact are unlikely to appear with equal probability in each decade or century, but this does provide a way to smooth chronological data and, when mapped across the landscape, it can help identify areas where handfuls of specifically dated artifacts appear alongside larger quantities of artifacts only datable to broad periods. Additional problems with this system, however, arise when artifacts can appear, for example, in one of two non-continuous periods (Hellenistic OR Late Roman).

Bevan and his colleagues have suggested a system where the ceramicist assigns a probability to each period in which an artifact might appear. An artifact datable in the Chronotype system to a broad period like Roman might appear in Bevan’s system as: 10% Early Roman, 30% Middle Roman, 60% Late Roman. This more subtle way of documenting the probability of an artifact appearing in any given period not only more accurately represents the way ceramicists analyze pottery, but also allows for artifacts appearing in nonconsecutive periods. For example, they noted that certain kinds of chunky prehistoric pottery could date with a fairly good probability to the Bronze Age, but might also date to the Medieval period. Moreover, this method allows for particular classes of artifacts to be identified by their distinct statistical relationships between periods and artifacts identified through these statistical measures could then by plotted spatially. The resulting maps would indicate where similar kinds of localized (un)certainties would appear.

Bevan notes that this system also allows for multiple readings of the same group of artifacts by different ceramicists who could assign different levels of chronological uncertainty to each batch of artifacts. This is particularly useful for types of artifacts that could date to discontinuous periods like our prehistoric or Medieval coarse wares.

(As an aside, its funny to note that Tim Gregory long had a category of “certainty” on his recording sheets. I think I made fun of it and claimed that the category was redundant within the “rules” of the Chronotype system. Now I wonder whether Prof. Gregory continued to keep that category … )

This past year the Antikythera team published the Roman period material from their survey in the Annual of the British School at Athens (106 (2011), 47-98): here’s a preprint (pdf) and here it is published form (pdf). While there is little evidence for the sophisticated system of probabilistic dating the assemblage of Late Roman material on the island is interesting to compare to our Late Roman material from Cyprus. The significant quantities of Phocaean fine ware from Antikythera find clear parallels with our assemblage at Pyla-Koutsopetria. It may reflect, as they Antikythera team has noted, the relatively late date for our Late Roman assemblage which was formed after the supply of the ubiquitous African Red Slip became attenuated.

It is also interesting to note the ratios of Late Roman 2 to Late Roman 1 amphora on Antikythera are almost reversed from ours on Cyprus. This is unsurprising, of course, since LR2 production sites are most likely in Greece or the Aegean and LR1 sites are in southern Asia Minor or Cyprus. The folks at Antikythera noted that LR1 amphora are commonly thought to transport wine, but they – like the LR2 amphoras – might have also served alternate household purposes like storing water or grain that led to their wide distribution across the island.

Finally, they suggest that the absence of material from the post-Late Antique period could indicate that the island was abandoned for a time prior to a Byzantine re-occupation. This fits well within the prevailing ancient (and modern narratives) for the chronology of settlement in the Aegean.

Monumentality in Early Christian Architecture

In May, I am going to a conference on the topic of monumentality in archaeology. When invited, I fired off a rather superficial abstract that talked about how Early Christian church architecture in Greece both used existing, earlier forms of urban and domestic architecture to communicate the new status of the Christian religious elite, but also subverted these forms by establishing new relationship between donor, visitors, and the social structures that informed traditional elite architecture.

This week, I’ve slowly turned my attention to this paper after completing a revised draft of the historical conclusion to the PKAP Survey Volume.

To begin, I re-read Kafka’s short story “The Great Wall of China”. The fictional narrator of the (obviously fictional) story considers the construction of the Great Wall of China and tells of how it was built piecemeal across China to preserve the moral of the workers. According to the narrator, the very enormity of the task ran the risk alienating the labor of the individual worker by reducing it to something inconsequential by comparison. To combat this, the workers built a single section of the wall – often in a remote location – and returned home for a time of recovery before heading out again like departing heroes to build another section. Thus the wall came to represent the entire community of China – and the narrator himself who hailed from the south, not the north where the wall stood – could take tremendous pride in its construction even though the purpose and extent remained as obscure and paradoxical as the body of the Emperor himself who called for the Wall’s construction. In Kafka’s story (hardly the only one in his oeuvre that featured architecture), the Wall represented the enormity of the Empire, the incomprehensibility of the Emperor, and the tension between the fragile individual and abyss of time, space, and power that surrounds human existence. (And I have to assume that the story means many other more significant, literary, and existential things!). Monumentality formed the delicate link between the individual and things much larger, more abstract, and more remote.

This story contributed to my larger meditation of monumentality in the discourse of Late Antiquity (or the Early Christian period). Shifting attitudes toward monumental architecture has represented a key indicator in social, religious, political, economic, and cultural change in the ancient world. Indeed, scholars often argue that the end of the ancient world came with the neglect and sometimes destruction of the pagan temple and the construction of Early Christian basilica style churches in their place. The widespread abandonment of basilica style churches, in turn, marks the end of the transitional period between ancient and “Medieval” or “Byzantine” forms of architecture, and scholars have neatly synced the transformation of architectural styles with political, economic, and social changes.

The link between architecture and social change often comes through the study of patronage practices. If we understand the social practices that led to the construction of Early Christian architecture to be largely identical to those that produced earlier forms of monumental architecture, then we can argue that these shift in building types is largely stylistic or a matter of taste or practice.  In other words, we can see monumental architecture as evidence for continuity between the ancient world and Late Antiquity. If we see different social mechanisms producing the Early Christian monumental building boom, then it becomes easier to claim that the shift in large scale building practices represents a shift in the organization of society on a more profound level. Along these lines, scholars have seen Early Christian architecture as evidence for discontinuity between antiquity and the Middle Ages. The issue is, of course, that we still do not understand the mechanisms that produced the boom in Early Christian architecture and how these intersect with, say, changing attitudes toward the poor among the same group of people (and the study of Late Antique attitudes toward poverty is a particularly fertile ground for recent study).

The flip side of this concern with patronage, of course, is how these buildings were understood by their audiences across the Late Antique world. Not only are did these building represent a point of contact between massive and abstract institutions like the church and the bodies of individuals living throughout the Early Christian world, but they also represent a place of critique around which community responses to new forms of religious or social organization could cohere.

As Kafka articulated in a fictional context, monumental architecture had the potential for alienating the individuals responsible for their construction as the tension between their massively concrete appearance comes all too close to the abstract entities, institutions, and ideologies which they represent. This alienation provides fertile ground of critique inscribed on the monuments themselves, on the bodies of the laborers who produced them, and in the attitudes toward the buildings in broader social discourse.

The Religious Landscape of Post-Antique Pyla-Kousopetria, Cyprus

I’ve spent the last few weeks working on revising the historical conclusion to the survey volume from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. This conclusions looks at our results from the survey in four different ways:

1. In terms of wider regional trends for each period.
2. In terms of the relationship between the local political and economic center, Kition/Larnaka, and our site.
3. In terms of the relationship between our site an island wide, regional, and trans-Mediterranean communication and trade networks.
4. In terms of the changing religious landscape of our area.

As readers of this blog know, our site preserved evidence for both an Iron Age and Hellenistic period sanctuary (here and here) as well as a Late Roman basilica style church. After the abandonment of the church in the 7th century and its eventual destruction sometime later, there is little evidence for settlement or religious activity at our site. This does not, however, mean that the site was not part of a religious landscape in the area.

In my effort to imagine the changing religious landscape of our study area, I offer the following from a fairly early draft of our conclusion:

The wider regions of eastern Larnaka bay preserves considerable evidence for a thriving Christian communities in the Medieval period. There is evidence that the basilica at Pyla-Koutsopetria underwent some late modifications, but these appear likely to have occurred prior to the abandonment of the site. The removal of Cyprus floor slabs and marble revetment from the floors and walls of the excavated annex room suggests that the religious status of the building did not preclude it from being quarried. It also indicates that the building likely stood for some time after its final abandonment. The various graffiti present in the annex room may date to a period after the building’s abandonment suggesting that some religious activity persisted in the area even after its abandonment. Morever, the quarrying of prestigious material from the church may have served to adorn another religious structure elsewhere in the region as occurred at the Episcopal church at Kourion. 

In later time, the religious landscape of the region was likely closely tied to the economic landscape. There were extensive holding of the Orthodox Church and various Moslem religious institutions in the vicinity of Pyla village. While there is no evidence that the coastal lands fell under the control of either institution, they almost certainly influenced local land values, labor markets, and agricultural prices. As Given and Hadjianastasis have recently noted that rhythm of agricultural life would have been shaped by the church bells or the tsimandro or the call of the muezzin.

Finally, the early 20th century base maps for the cadastral survey of Cyprus note that the ruin of Ayia Panayia stood on the route of the coastal road in our study area. There is no evidence that this building was a church, and it is almost certain that this is the Venetian or Ottoman fortification described by Cesnola and remains overgrown and visible to this day. It is notable, however, that this building was identified at some point as a religious structure suggesting that in the local imagination – or perhaps merely that of the surveyor – this presence of almost any ruin in the countryside evoked the past religious life of the community.