Some Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Byzantine Countryside

Later this week, I head east to the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library to a meeting on the state of Byzantine archaeology. This is second such meeting; the first occurred in 2010 in the spring (and Kostis Kourelis provided a useful chronicle of it here and here.)  I was invited in 2010, but unfortunate was not able to attend.

This year, however, I’ll be able to make it to Washington and the organizers of the meeting have asked me to talk about the archaeology of the Byzantine countryside. I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure about the format of the meeting or the expectations people may have with regard to my contribution. I know that I have only 10 minutes to present some kind of perspectives on the archaeology of the Byzantine countryside in a panel that looks at the archaeology of the rural and the urban. After that, I suppose, we just contribute to the conversation as required.

Here’s my brief contribution. I’ve tried to avoid being too specific in the text with the feeling that with relatively little time, painting with broad brushstrokes would be more useful than a detailed – but inevitably incomplete – historiography.

Any advice on its content and tone would be greatly appreciated.

Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Byzantine Countryside

It is difficult to emphasize how much we do not know about the Byzantine countryside. While recent work has produced an increasingly complex picture of small sections of the rural Byzantine world and textual sources have offered some perspectives on the economic and social relationships that structured rural society, there remains remarkably little data on everyday life outside the urban centers of the Byzantine world.

Archaeologists, however, have some tools at their disposal to redress this.  At this point, I should confess my methodological commitment to low or lower impact kinds of archaeological work which emphasize the study of surface material, remote sensing practices, and the publication or re-study of excavated assemblages to address new scholarly concerns.

From a methodological perspective, low impact archaeology has found particular favor among those interested in documenting the countryside. It has generally allowed archaeologists to sample larger areas at less expense, time, and overhead associated with storage and processing of artifacts. In Greece and Cyprus – they two regions where I am most familiar – work of Tim Gregory, Archie Dunn, Effie Athanasopoulos, Joanita Vroom, Marcus Rautman, Nick Kardulias, and others has begun to slowly populate the countryside with rural sites from all periods including the Byzantine.  This work has begun to investigate critically categories of sites that occur faintly in our textual sources including farmsteads, hamlets, and villages. The hope has been, of course, that by documenting artifacts on the ground, often at a regional scale, we can begin to fill in the blank areas on the map between known sites in Byzantine rural areas (typically churches, monasteries, and fortifications) and urban centers.

There is also hope that we can begin to describe more effectively the kinds of activities that took place in the countryside and the degree to which rural areas were integrated with urban centers or larger economic systems.  In particular, survey archaeologists have begun to explore the complexities of the interstitial spaces which formed the fabric of the Byzantine world. Fortified by concepts like  ”connectivity” and the autonomy of micro-regions, made famous in Horden and Purcell’s monumental work on the Mediterranean, scholar have begun to consider how the economic networks that integrate urban and rural, in fact, produce Byzantine society.

If this undertaking was as simple as declaring the countryside to be the key to new perspectives on the Byzantine society, there would be very little debate surrounding the priorities for Byzantine archaeology.

But, of course, it is not that simple.

There is only the most superficial consensus on the difficult issue of how we define the function of rural sites and calls for genuinely siteless intensive survey methods have largely failed to sidestep the complex issue of relating past activities to specific space.

Issues related to the chronology of surface assemblages have remained every bit as vexing. Even when we can identify, broadly speaking, fine wares with a fairly decent degree of consistency, coarse, cooking, and other utility wares remain difficult to recognize. Local wares, in particular, remain poorly known and coarse wares without obvious fabrics or surface treatments remain challenging to date without comparanda from local, secure stratigraphic context.

Finally, there remains a host of issues related to how we sample the countryside. On a macro scale these issues relate to definitions of the region and sampling strategies that work efficiently and accurately enough to produce substantive generalizations.  On a micro scale, there persist issues related to sampling artifact-rich environments in a way that represents chronology and function while at the same time preserves the advantages in efficiency of intensive survey. The general trend in survey archaeology – and some of this is the product of more restrictive attitudes toward survey from host countries – has been toward smaller areas and more intensive methods. These debates contribute directly to our ability to compare survey data across regions (or, even, in some highly surveyed areas like Boeotia or the Corinthia within the same region) to create a synthetic perspective on a singular Byzantine countryside.

The work in intensive pedestrian survey often contributes explicitly to the growing interest in landscape as a synthetic term for considering the countryside. Landscape perspectives draw inspiration from a range of disciplines and partake of the so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities. From the perspective of the Byzantine countryside the study of landscapes presents a wide, if unfocused, stage for the critical interplay of texts and material culture.

If survey archaeology has reduced the countryside to a set of quantifiable variables, landscape approaches have sought to emphasize the range of experiences crucial to articulating meaning within rural space. For example, elusive media like memory and ritual – preserved in hagiography, architecture, art, and epigraphy – grounded Byzantine spirituality in the real countryside and produced recoverable religious landscapes.  Landscape perspectives tempt scholars to expand discussions of land tenure, taxation, and production to considerations of kinship, administration, resistance, and control.  Economic relationships become roads, paths, and travel through the countryside, and offer human-scaled alternatives to our cartographic perspective of regions, places, and Byzantine rural space. This kind of work has just begun to expand how we see countryside from being largely in economic terms, to being a space where religion, economy, politics, kinship, and connectivity all interact. As one scholar has recently observed, the Byzantine countryside is ripe for reconceptualization as a kind of “third space” that challenges the traditional assumptions about the urban – rural dichotomy, relationships grounded in modern conceptions of production, and cartographic perspectives of the countryside that occlude the complexities of the countryside as lived space.

From my perspective, landscape approaches and the methods associated with intensive pedestrian survey offer tools that will allow us to gently decenter the urban focus of Byzantine culture. At present, however, these techniques for interrogating and documenting the countryside have remained on the margins of Byzantine studies. Recent synthetic and survey works have spent little time considering rural life in Byzantine, in general, and periodicals that focus on the Byzantine period rarely feature articles related to this kind of fieldwork. Moreover, with a few prominent exceptions, Byzantine archaeologists have remained on the sidelines during the theoretical and methodological discussions central to these new methods.  The skills central to survey and landscape approaches – facility in relational databases, Geographic Information Systems, remote sensing technologies – remain comparatively rare among Byzantine archaeologists who tend not to be as fluent in methodologies and debates grounded in world archaeology, archaeological sciences, and a more diachronic approach to Mediterranean fieldwork. The resulting absence of a sustained interest in the methods and results of archaeology in the countryside in synthetic works on Byzantine history and the relative detachment of Byzantine archaeology from larger methodological and theoretical debates has made it more difficult for Byzantine archaeologists to secure resources necessary within our discipline or from outside our discipline to design large scale projects or to gain leadership in regional scale projects.  If these methods and approaches do have something to offer the archaeology of the countryside, Byzantine archaeology remains on the outside looking in.

Byzantium and the Avant Garde Wrap Up

Just a quick post today as I continue my hosting duties for Kostis Kourelis.  I did, however, want to provide a quick report on his talk.

We had a great turn out for the talk yesterday with over 40 people from all across campus in attendance. We also have 15 people logged into the online feed which was pretty exciting. Special thanks go to our Center for Instructional and Learning Technologies who provided the live stream.

For anyone who missed the talk, you can watch a recording of the live feed here.

For those of you who want to read more about Kostis’ work, I encourage you to become a regular visitor to his blog Objects-Buildings-Situations.

If you’d like to check out some of his longer work in pre-publications, Kostis does post occasionally to a Scribd page here.

Finally, thank you to all the Phi Alpha Theta (History honor society) students who helped set up and break down the little reception after the talk. Thanks to the Department of History for providing the lovely reception and to the International Studies Program for helping with publicity.  And, a very special thanks to all of our donors who have helped the Cyprus Research Fund

And we’re hard at work on our next event, hopefully this Spring!

Byzantium and the Avant Garde Streamed LIVE on the Web

As I am sure you all know, today is the 2011 Cyprus Research Fund Lecture. It will be delivered by Prof. Kostis Kourelis of Franklin and Marshall College at 4 pm (CST) on the beautiful University of North Dakota’s campus in the elegant East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz library.  His talk is on Byzantium and the Avant Garde: American Excavations in Corinth, ca. 1930.

But, WAIT, you say you’re not from the Grand Forks Metropolitan Area and can’t make it to the Cyprus Research Fund in person?  We have you covered, of course, with our very own live stream.

To get access to the live stream by clicking here.

A Little More on Some Byzantine Pottery from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey

David Pettegrew and I continue to analyze the Byzantine pottery from the Eastern Corinthia Survey for a short discussion of intensive survey and Byzantine archaeology (see also: Sampling the Byzantine Landscape and Corinth’s Byzantine Countryside). This past week, I did a RBHS (Rim, Base, Handle, Sherd) analysis of the Byzantine sherds from the survey assemblage.  This amounts to looking at the number of rims, handles, bases, and body sherds in the assemblage collected from the survey area. In excavation RBHS analyses often contributes to determine how many complete vessels may have existed in a particular space. In survey, however, the purpose of this kind of analysis is more frequently to detect biases in a project’s sampling strategy. If a project, for example, only collects rims or handles of certain types of vessels, it would suggest that they were not able to identify and collect body sherds effectively in survey units.  The opposite can be true as well: vessels with easy to identify surface treatments are easier to identify as body sherds. Since there tend to be more body sherds than rims, bases, or handles, artifact types with easy to identify body sherds tend to be more visible in the landscape and this can, as Pettegrew has shown (pdf), create problematic perspectives on the function and chronology of human activity in the landscape.

This analysis showed that 53% of the pottery of Byzantine date was body sherds. Rims, bases, and handles, accounted for between 18% and 13%.  The large number of body sherds assigned Byzantine dates led me to look more closely at these artifacts to determine whether we were more effective in identifying particular types of pottery than others.  The vast majority of these body sherds were fine and medium course wares.

This complements the result that the vast majority of sherds were either fine or medium coarse wares. 40% of the finds were medium coarse “utility” wares and 45% of the artifacts were fine wares. Of the fine wares, almost all (88%) preserved some glaze, paint, or slip that would have appeared visually distinct both to field walkers and to our ceramicists.  43% of all the fine ware collected were glazed body sherds.  Guy Sanders has suggested that the fragility of some slips on Byzantine wares, in fact, contributed to their invisibility in the landscape.

The 40% of the Byzantine material identified as medium coarse ware from the survey.  The most common types found were rather generic body sherds in assigned a Byzantine date on the basis of their fabrics (52%) or surface treatment. Half of the medium coarse ware body sherds had grooves, combing, or other distinctive surface treatments. The other medium coarse utility wares identified by the survey stood out because of diagnostic handles from vessels like Late Medieval Smyrna Jar Amphora, smaller water jars and the body and rim sherds of later glazed utility wares.  Semi-fine wares, amphoras, and kitchen/cooking wares were unusual and coarse wares absent entirely. The absence of these types of pottery likely demonstrates the limits of our knowledge of Byzantine local wares rather than evidence for strangely depleted use assemblages in the Corinthian countryside. Coarse local utility and kitchen wares and undiagnostic amphora sherds are particularly difficult to identify without stratigraphy.

What our analysis tells us is that we were successful in identifying fine and medium coarse wares on the basis of their surface treatments and to some extent the fabrics.  This, of course does not tell us much about the artifacts that we did not identify in the landscape, but it indicates we were able to sample at least some artifacts on the basis of fabric alone rather than just as a result of shape, glaze, or surface treatments.  Our ability to recognize diverse types of Byzantine pottery on the surface has created a landscape populated with a diverse assemblage of Byzantine pottery representing a wide range of past activities that took place in the Byzantine countryside.

Cross-posted to Corinthian Matters.

More on Byzantine Settlement

I always get excited to discover a new scholar’s work, but I get really happy when I find scholarship that cuts through my various interests and offers some useful insights.  Over the past few days I’ve been reading three articles by Myrto Veikou on Byzantine settlement in the region of Epirus. One is a working paper titled “Byzantine Histories, Settlement Stories: Kastra, “Isles of Refuge,” and “Unspecified Settlements” as In-between or Third Spaces”. The other two have appeared in print:  ”Urban or Rural? Theoretical Remarks on the Settlement Patterns in Byzantine Epirus (7th-11th centuries)”  BZ 103/1 (2010): 171-193 and “‘Rural Towns’ and ‘In-Between’ or ‘Third’ Spaces. Settlement Patterns in Byzantine Epirus (7th-11th c.) from an interdisciplinary approach.” Archaeologia Medievale 36 (2009) 43-54. These papers are all available on her Academia.edu site.

While it would be difficult to describe her work across three papers in a single post, I think I can point out some of the more useful elements of it (for me).

First, and most importantly, she takes pains to point out the our concept of “rural” and “urban” do little to inform the archaeological evidence present for Byzantine settlement. She suggests that these division whether based on the Moses Finley’s reading of Max Weber or views developed by the “Chicago School” of urban planning have produced developmental models that see cities as the inevitable products of rural settlement and an important landmark in the development of civilization. Thus, long-standing ideas like the re-emergence of cities in the early Middle Byzantine era echo modern realities or ideas that the re-birth of cities ushered Byzantine civilization back onto the track to civilization.  She demonstrates that the various forms of Byzantine settlement (whether the problematic polis, the enigmatic kastron, or the diverse places designated as episcopal sees, villages, towns, or diverse settlements) barely coincide with modern ideas of settlement.

In fact, she makes the persuasive case that many Byzantine settlement “types” (particularly the problematic kastron) occupy hybrid “third spaces” within the landscape. They are not transitional, or a point within a linear development toward a more recognizable space, but rather places that sit outside of our standard typologies of habitation and offer profoundly destabilizing features both in our understanding of the Byzantine landscape and perhaps the Byzantine landscape itself.  The hybrid, third-space of Byzantine settlement represents perplexing combinations (mash-ups?) of places in the continuum between rural and urban. For example, she argues that the seat of the Byzantine Bishop of Acheloos might correspond to a region stretched along the river rather than particular “urbanized” or nucleated space.  This actual cathedral of the bishop would have shifted through time and depending on various contingencies until it eventually became tied to a settlement with a sufficient economic and political investment to maintain the see.

She also points out that so-called “islands of refuge” might also benefit from more open-ended interpretative models. Here her work parallels ideas offered by Tim Gregory when she noted that the function of an island of refuge might not be stable through time. In fact, at some times, these island settlements might have functioned as economic overflow whereas later – perhaps during the Byzantine period – the topography and location of the islands dictated their suitability for certain kinds of settlement practices that had little to do with immediate threats.  She proposed that they represent a maritime response to the kind of topographic choices typical of inland settlements (hill tops, easily defended peninsulas, et c.). These choices emerged as part of new ideas of settlement space in the Byzantine era and were not tied exclusively to immediate dangers of invasions or general insecurity, but had aesthetic, demographic, economic, and even political motivations  For the islands, this combination of explanations could explain the significant economic investment in these places – probably tied to their easy access to maritime routes through the area – as well as the signs of sustained habitation and monumental religious architecture despite the harsh environments and absence of natural resources on these slivers of land.

Elsewhere in her work she notes that part of the difficulty in understanding Byzantine settlement is that in some cases the fabric of Byzantine settlement is not well preserved in the archaeological record. Putting aside persistent difficulties identifying locally produced Byzantine pottery in both excavated and surface conditions, Veikou ponders various other scenarios. In fact, she suggests that some Byzantine settlements might have been largely wooden (and we all know that tile roofs on wooden houses are the first things to be salvaged and could leave almost no trace).  She hypothesized this to explain the presence of Early Christian churches with extensive burials made in the Byzantine period, but without any clear evidence of Byzantine settlement. She suggests that some kinds of Byzantine settlement could be quite ephemeral and leave little for a survey archaeologist to identify on the surface. These buildings then were far from being isolated, but rather stand as the permanent evidence for fleeting local settlements in a shifting and fluid Byzantine landscape.  (I suspect, of course, that Early Christian churches remained as places in the landscape whether surrounded by local settlement or not. In fact, hagiography has shown that these buildings attracted local pilgrimages, hermits, and hunting parties looking for shelter in the “wilderness”.  Their suitability as places for burial may have, in this content, be tied to their permanence in the landscape and Byzantine desire the embed memory of the deceased in a sacred (and relatively unchanging) landscape.)

My disagreements with particular interpretations aside, these three articles (and the apparently forthcoming book) offer some substantial food for thought. While none of her arguments diverge completely from prevailing trends in understanding Byzantine landscapes (and the influence of Archie Dunn’s work is particular visible in some of her arguments and that is a good thing!), she does provide some vital tools for theorizing the Byzantine landscape outside of modern conceptions of settlement patterns and their “development” through time.  And this is a timely and exceedingly useful thing.

A Big Book and the Byzantine Economy

This weekend I began the almost overwhelming task of negotiating L. Brubaker and J. Haldon’s Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era c. 680-850: A History (Cambridge 2011). The runs to just shy of 800 pages of text and with an addition 100 pages of bibliography.  It continues in the trend of Byzantinists writing big books; M. McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy (Cambridge 2002) and C. Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford 2005) come to mind as similar tomes.

Considering the massive size of Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, I could imagine no way of reviewing it or even reading it in over a coherent block of time. (It really deserve the kind of treatment typically reserved for books like James’ Ulysses or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, where readers read the book as an event.).  So, I decided to dip into the book not exactly at random, but to fish out the topics of interest to me, and I’ll offer my thoughts here, from time to time as I work my way through the book hopefully before my interlibrary loan period runs out.

I’ve been thinking a bit about settlement in the Byzantine period, the relationship between Byzantine and earlier Late Roman urban space, and, to a lesser extent the Late Roman and Byzantine economy.  So chapters 6 and 7 which focused on the economy and settlement attracted my attention immediately. As one would expect, these chapters laid out the basic issues facing the Byzantine economy in the 7th to 9th centuries, with a focus on the role of the state and the distribution of coins and ceramic material as evidence for economic activity.  The first part of the chapter focused on coinage and, inevitably with this kind of evidence, the role of the state as the engine for economic activity both in the capital (and its immediate hinterland) and in the provinces.  Coinage entered the market as pay for soldiers and returned to the state as taxes. The further a community was from areas of military activity, the fewer coins appeared.

For ceramics, the authors pulled together the diverse and fragmented body of evidence for ceramic production and distribution to argue that from the 7th to the 9th century, the distribution of ceramics became increasingly region in character and long distance trade declined. Even as the authors accept the gradual lengthening of Late Antique patterns of production and exchange into the 8th century, the evidence for the long-life of certain types of pottery, like Cypriot Red Slip, does little to challenge the overall impression that the transregional character of exchange in the Later Roman Empire was giving way to far more circumscribed economic zones largely dependent on local needs of the state, the military, or an local ecclesiastical or market center.  Thus, both trade and the circulation of coinage took on a regional character during these centuries and contributed to the regional character of the Middle Byzantine provincial elite.

The authors treatment of settlement patterns followed from their understanding of the regionalized economy. As demographic decline, urban contraction, and the decline of interregional trade occurred over the course of the 7th and 8th centuries, settlement patterns within within the Byzantine world took on increasingly regional character. Asia Minor, for example, represented a different development trajectory than the Balkans owing to different levels of state activity, security, economic opportunities, natural resources, and demographic decline. So while general pattern, did emerge – particular for settlements like the fortified kastron that features so prominently in discussion of rural settlement – these were either motivated by state, provincial, or military elite, or certain ubiquitous economic opportunities – like harbors.

One heartening aspect of the chapter dedicated the patterns of settlement, is that the authors begin to take into the account the results of intensive pedestrian survey.  The limited scope of projects employing this method made it difficult for the authors to apply its findings on a scale fitting their own sweeping survey, but they clearly recognized that it had to potential to expand how scholars understand the character of Byzantine settlement and the various influences that shaped it on the local level.

In general, these two chapters – read outside of the context of the book in general – provide a nice survey of the economy and settlement of the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Byzantine period.  My main criticism of these chapters is the absence of any people in the text.  The economy is a completely impersonal and state run affair devoid of individual laborers, their crafts, and the various persistent evidence to their work (other than pottery, of course).  Fortifications, cities, monasteries, and port cities appear in these chapters without much discussion of the labor involved in constructing and maintaining them. Perhaps the sum total of this labor made just a minor dent in the Byzantine economy, or perhaps the evidence for building and the like cannot sustain the weight of sustained analysis. At the same time, the presence of individuals as participants in economic activity would ground the analysis of the economy and settlement in the bodies of actual Byzantine subjects.  Trace evidence for practice could mediate between the systems proposed by the authors and the lived experiences of Byzantine individuals.

Byzantium in Transition at the University of Cyprus

This is a pretty interesting conference being held this weekend at the University of Cyprus.  Apparently, it will be the first in a trilogy of conferences designed “to shed more light on the ‘invisible’ eras or period of major transformations in economy, society, and culture after the end of Late Antiquity by (re)evaluating old and new archaeological data, namely dated to (a) the Byzantine Early Middle Ages, middle 7th-8th centuries, (b) the Middle to Late Byzantine or Early Frankish era, Late 12th – early 13th centuries, and (c) the Late Byzantine/Frankish to Early Ottoman period, middle 14th – late 15th centuries.”

The schedule of speakers looks pretty impressive (although a bit light on people doing active field research in Cyprus) with most of the usual suspects represented.

The poster is snazzy.

It’s always useful to notice the way in which these kinds of conferences organize sessions because they both capture the areas of specialty among the participants and the questions central to research in the field. Sessions on urban and rural space suggest, at least, that tradition ways of viewing ancient settlement with the conceptual divide between town and country continues to persist (although it is possible that the papers could critique the title of the session). The next session on “trade networks and the economy” suggests more fluid and integrated view of economic relationships that might offer a counterpoint to the seeming rigid city/countryside divide. The final session bring the term “material culture” to the conference and opens up the potential to consider how objects both embody and communicate cultural expectations.  It remains to be seen how fully the participant embrace the complex concept of material culture or just use it as a synonym for architecture and small-finds.

The program is as follows:

Byzantium in Transition

Introductory Session: Setting the Scene

Islam and its relations with ByzantiumAlexander Beihammer (University of Cyprus)

Latin Christendom and its relations with Byzantium, c. 700-900 AD
Richard Hodges (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, USA)
keynote speaker (hospitality sponsored by the Cyprus Tourism Organisation)

Approaches to Early Medieval Byzantium
John Haldon (Princeton University, USA)

Session I: Urban and Rural Space

Urban and rural space: surface survey and its problematics
John Bintliff (University of Leiden, The Netherlands)

City and countryside in Greece
Guy Sanders (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece)

Island and coastal landscapes in Greece and Cyprus
Timothy Gregory (Ohio State University, USA)

City and countryside in Asia Minor: Amorium as model or misfit?
Christopher Lightfoot (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA)

City and countryside in the western fringes
Paul Arthur (University of Salento, Italy)

Session II: Trade Networks and Economy

A ceramic koine as evidence for continuity and economy
Athanasios Vionis (University of Cyprus)

Amphorae and trade networks
Stella Demesticha (University of Cyprus)

Pottery in seventh-century Cyprus: ceramic economies in a Sea of change
Marcus Rautman (University of Missouri, USA)

Towards a new definition of Mission Creep: trade with the western peripheries
Pamela Armstrong (University of Oxford, Wolfson College, UK)

Coins, exchanges and the transformation of the Byzantine economy (7th-10th c.)
Cecile Morrisson (CNRS, France)

Session III: Artistic Testimonies and Material Culture

The culture of Iconoclasm
Leslie Brubaker (University of Birmingham, UK)

Church planning and sculpture in Late Antique Cyprus: their connections with the regional environment
Jean-Pierre Sodini (Universite de Paris- I, Sorbonne, France)

Early Christian basilicas: changes or continuities in post-Justinianic Cyprus?
Doria Nicolaou (Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, Italy)

The art of metalwork in Byzantium
Marlia Mango (University of Oxford, St John’s College, UK)

Early Medieval archaeological evidence from central Greece
Olga Karagiorgou (Academy of Athens, Greece)

Cross-posted to Corinthian Matters.

Phonographs and Potsherds

A reference in Daniel Faltesek’s contribution to Dougherty and Nawrotzki’s Writing History in the Digital Age caught my interest. Faltesek discusses the rise of non-linear editing particularly in film, but he refers to an article by Thomas Edison from 1878 which celebrated the potential of the phonograph for both recording and playing back sounds.

In this article, Edison imagines the phonograph function:

“For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family – as of great men – the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph. In the field of multiplication of original matrices, and the indefinite repetition of one and the same thing, the successful electrotyping of the original record is an essential.” (pp. 533-534).

This passage immediately reminded me of the end of St. Theodoros of Kythera’s life. According to his Vitae, Theodoros’ recorded on a pot sherd the following phrase: “I, Theodore, humble deacon, laid down in sickness on April 7th, and I died on the 12th of May, on the day of the Holy Epiphany.”

In a short article on this life, I argue that by knowing the time of his death and inscribing a potsherd to this effect, Os. Theodoros demonstrates his sanctity. The modest, inscribed sherd demonstrates that Theodoros knew his future and had attained access to timeless knowledge of God. The use of a potsherd to inscribe his revelation takes an archaeological twist by the embedding a revelation that warps time on an object that is both modest and likely to endure.

Edison’s phonograph, likewise, sought to disrupt the predictable flow of time by making the last words of individuals remain alive after death. The immediacy of the spoken word and enduring the materiality of phonograph gave it a particular power as medium for last words. Like St. Theodore’s potsherd, the phonograph record became a way to warp time.

Sampling the Byzantine Landscape

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working with David Pettegrew on a short paper that considers the role of intensive pedestrian survey in documenting and creating Byzantine landscapes in the countryside of Corinth.  One of the challenges of this analysis is our scatters of Byzantine pottery tend to be rather small and sometimes amount to only four or five sherds.

The small quantity of Byzantine material present at any one place in the landscape makes it difficult to discuss the function of places in the countryside, to determine the relationship between survey assemblages and more robust samples of material from excavated settings, and to understand the extent, duration and intensity of activities in the landscape. As a result, survey projects have had to consider ways to evaluate periods that manifest in small assemblages of pottery.

A whole series of issues likely contribute to certain periods appearing mainly as small, low-density assemblages. It is almost certain that we have failed to recognize certain types of diagnostic material on the surface or even during pottery study and as a result certain types of pottery are not associated with particular periods. Certain periods also enjoyed problematic natural and cultural site formation processes. For example, sites occupied for a short time or seasonally from particular period could produce less ceramic material.  Later activities could obscure the presence of particular periods in the countryside as well.  Periods where groups settled on the

In a 2006 Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology article, David Pettegrew, Dimitri Nakassis, and I argued that survey units that produced small, but highly diverse assemblages of pottery because of with low surface visibility might actually contain higher density, very diverse assemblages lurking beneath their obscured surfaces. We suggested in these situations that it might be wise to increase our sampling intensity from the typical 2-meter wide swaths through the unit spaced at 10 m intervals to compensate for the effect of the obscured surface on the overall sample size in the unit. In other words, as densities fell because of poor visibility, we just increase our intensity.

In 2005, David Pettegrew and I concocted a series of experiments at our survey site in Cyprus to determine whether increasing the intensity of our collection strategy actually produced more robust assemblages.  In these experiments – documented in an article in the Report of the Department of Antiquity of Cyprus in 2007 – we determined that grubbing around on the ground and collecting all artifacts from a 5% sample of the units surface produced interesting results.

First, our hands-and-knees 5% samples produced far more pottery than our 20% sample (where were walked across the unit counting sherds) predicted.

Second, and more importantly, the assemblages produced by these 5% total collection areas were more diverse than those produced by our effort to sample the artifacts present in our 20% samples of the unit. On the one hand, we discovered that our smaller total collection areas did not produce significantly more chronological information. In other words, we were not seeing periods in our super intensive 5% sample that did not appear in our less intensive 20% sample.  On the other hand, our 5% hands-and-knees collection strategy did produce more diversity than our typical survey and sampling strategy. Our samples of 20% of the surface produced 11.2 chronotypes (or distinct types of pottery recognized by our ceramicist) per unit, whereas our more intensive (if smaller) sample produced 15.6 chronotypes per unit.

Our sample sizes remains extremely small, but they are nevertheless suggestive. I looked at the least diagnostic types of pottery (coarse, medium coarse, and kitchen/cooking wares) in each of our experimental units and compared the total number of chronotypes present in each of these classes with the number of chronotypes present in the larger 20% sample.  I discovered that for coarse ware, there was a 5% increase in the number of chronotypes, for medium coarse a 35% increase, and for kitchen/cooking wares a 33% increase. There was a 50% increase in the diversity of the fine ware assemblages produced by a more rigorous effort to collect pottery from the surface of the ground.

What this all suggests is that small quantities of pottery based on our typical sampling and collection strategies might represent the tip of an iceberg hidden by collection strategies that ill-suited to documenting hidden landscapes. Of course, one upshot of the need to increase the intensity of surface collection is that it makes it difficult to conduct data collection on the regional level from problematic or less visible periods. This contributes to what Blanton has called “Mediterranean Myopia” or a tendency for Mediterranean survey archaeologists to focus on smaller and smaller areas while still attempting to address regional level survey questions.

Cyprus Research Fund Lecture 2011: Kostis Kourelis’ Byzantium and the Avant Garde

This marks the 5th Year Anniversary of the Cyprus Research Fund and the 3rd Anniversary of the Cyprus Research Fund Lecture Series.

So, I am happy to announce that this year’s speaker will be colleague and collaborator Kostis Kourelis. Kostis will speak on “Byzantium and the Avant Garde: American Excavations at Corinth, ca. 1930″. His talk will tell the unlikely story of how the excavation of Byzantine remains at Corinth, Greece influenced avant garde movements in mid-20th century America.

The talk will be in the elegant East Asia Room at the Chester Fritz Library on November 14 at 4 pm. There will be a reception sponsored by the Department of History immediately following the talk.

So if you are in the area, please come to this talk! Kostis is one of the most accomplished and dynamic of a new generation of polymaths who can speak with confidence and expertise on topics from modern art to ancient archaeology. (And a fellow blogger.)