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.

Architecture and Social Analysis at Vouni, Cyprus

The past few years have seen an impressive gaggles of books and articles re-evaluating Iron Age Cyprus. To this number we should add Catherine Kearns’ recent contribution to the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology: “Building Social Boundaries at the Hybridizing First-Millenium B.C. Complex of Vouni (Cyprus)” JMA 24 (2011), 147-170.

This article hit upon a few key issues for how the intersection of architecture and archaeology contributes to our understanding of ancient (and particularly Cypriot) society:

1. Monumentality. The Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Romans periods on Cyprus saw a tremendous interest in monumental architecture. The massive and short-lived Cypro-Classical “palace” at Vouni occupies a fortified hill some 10 km west of the city of Soli. The sprawling structure features two major phases and extends for well over 2500 sq m. The size of this building alone marks it out as a significant monument in the Cypriot landscape and echoes the size of Late Bronze age compounds on the island as well as Roman period “villas” at sites like Paphos and Kourion. Its location, set apart from known urban centers on the island and without clear earlier precedents on the site, have often led scholars to associated the structure with the growing influence of the Persian Empire under whose rule the island fell during most of the Cypro-Classical Age. The presence of so much monumental architecture provides a particularly useful backdrop for the kind of social analysis of architecture that Kearns proposed in her study of Vouni. The highly stratified character of the space within these structures makes them suitable for access analysis.

2. Access. Access analysis considers the social function of space by categorizing and mapping rooms based on their connection to other rooms and their accessibility from the exterior of the building.  When I was working on my dissertation, this kind of analysis had just fallen from it 1980s vogue as scholars increasingly questioned the cultural and structural assumptions upon which these kinds of studies were based. Kearns’ careful use of access analysis (and, indeed, many of the better examples of this kind of study) avoids this by attending carefully to the archaeological changes to the building and proposing that shifts in the patterns of access between the two phases were relative rather than absolute. Thus, changes in access represent different functions of the spaces and, perhaps, different ideas about the social organization among the groups with access to the building’s various rooms and spaces.

3. Hybridity. This careful use of access analysis opens the door to a larger discussion of hybridity in the Cypriot landscape. This terms, derived from the colonial encounter and enriched (and co-opted) by post-colonial theorists, has particular resonance among archaeologists working on Cyprus, which is, in so many ways, a post-colonial state. Kearns suggested that the monumental size and architectural form of the “palace” at Vouni represented a combination of local architectural and building traditions with those from elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean (namely the peristyle courtyard). Rather than this form representing an outpost of Persian influence on the island or an indication of Achaemenid authority, Kearns suggested that site marked a space where those responsible for the site used architecture to mediate between various forms of sovereignty and authority. In fact, the instability of the site and its resistance to interpretation may reflect an intentional strategy designed to protect those responsible for the site and allow them to move with equal efficiency in both local and larger trans-Mediterranean conversations.

The growing sophistication with which scholars have come to treat the architecture and archaeology of Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Cyprus is remarkable, and should offer a valuable challenge to those of us who have focused on later periods in Cypriot history. The numerous Early Christian basilicas, for example, have so far escaped from much sophisticated and theoretically-informed study despite their fine levels of preservation and the presence of several well-documented excavated examples (much better documented, it should be said, than the palace at Vouni).

The Ottoman Period around Pyla-Koutsopetria

After reading M. Given and M. Hadjianastasis article on the Ottoman period in area studied by the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project (TAESP), I ordered a copy of Y. Sarınay’s 2000 edition of the 1831 Ottoman census of the Cyprus (Osmanlı idaresinde Kıbrıs : nüfusu-arazi dağılımı ve Türk vakıfları (Istanbul 2000)) published along side a group of related fiscal documents dated to 1833. As Given and Hadjianastasis note, the publication of these records emphasizes the divide between Muslim and non-Muslims, but this may not have been the original intention of the census.

These records identify three main communities in the immediate vicinity of Pyla-Koutsopetria: Pyla village, Dimbu (Xylotymvou), and Ormidia. Pyla was (and remains) a mixed village where Christians and Muslims lived side by side; Dimbu and Ormidia were Christian.

For Pyla, the census records 31 Muslim males and 51 non-Muslim males
For Dimbu, it records: 22 non-Muslim males.
For Ormidia: 36 non-Muslim males.

The fiscal records show that Pyla village had 16 Muslim houses and 20 non-Muslim houses and 1, 121.75 dönüm or about 103 ha (at the rate of 919.3 per dönüm). As demonstrated by Given and Hadjianastasis for the Troodos region, the number of hectare per household was low for Cyprus. For Pyla village it was 2.86 per household and that was higher than for the villages in TAESP study area. The fiscal records show that Pyla village had 12 olive trees, 1 mulberry tree, and 1 fig tree.

For Dimbu, there was 1 Muslim house and 9 non-Muslim houses with fields of 479.5 dönüm (or 44 ha) for a rather more impressive total of 4.4 ha per household. Although the single Muslim household in Dimbu recorded 75 dönüm (6.85 ha) for itself and the 9 Christian households a mere 4.1 ha. The village had 2 mandras which I am assuming are animal pens, and 10 dönüm of garden plots (bağ, bahçe), 8 olive trees, and 15 figs trees and an additional 3 dönüm of fig trees owned by a Muslim (.28 ha). It would seem that Dimbu was a rather more prosperous village than Ormidia suggesting that even in the early 19th century the rich red soils of the Kokkinochoria villages sustained impressive agricultural outputs.

For Ormidia, there was a 1 Muslim house and 10 Christian houses with 635 dönüm of land (58.3 ha) or 5.8 ha per household (there was no property recorded for the Muslim resident of Ormidia). In addition to this land, there was a single mandra or animal pen, a dönüm of market garden (bahçe), 28 olive trees, and a single fig tree.

We know that there were several large estates around Pyla village including a large çiftlik owned by the bishop of Kition/Larnaka. Judging by some recently published records of this estate, some residents of Pyla village probably earned additional income working on these church lands. The records document a wide range of jobs associated with cultivation (particularly of cotton), tending animals, and various maintenance tasks associated with the upkeep of the çiftlik. The presence of large tracks of land available, apparently, for lease in the vicinity is also confirmed by R. Hamilton Lang’s farm of 1000 acres represented about four times the entire land available to the village of Pyla itself.

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.

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.

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?

 

Mining in Cyprus and Work Camps in North Dakota

The coincidence between the archaeology of mining in Cyprus and my new (albeit small) research interest in the archaeology of work camps in western North Dakota is exciting. I spent the weekend reading some relatively recent publications from Bernard Knapp and his team who excavated the site of Politiko-Phorades in the eastern Troodos mountains of Cyprus (see here and here).

The site itself was a Late Bronze Age copper smelting site in impressive state of preservation. Discovered in the course of the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project and that team has worked to associated the site with larger systems established to support the extraction of copper from the Troodos mountains. Knapp argued that the site probably only functioned seasonally and was worked by individuals who also contributed to the local agricultural economy. A nearby settlement with access to arable land, then, provided agricultural support for the resource extraction. The system described by Knapp understands mining as a practice that functions at the physical margins of economic systems and remained dependent on longstanding subsistence practices. The emergence of large Late Bronze Age centers like Kition and Enkomi, however, almost certainly influenced the settlement patters that supported the extraction of mineral resources.

In a 2003 article in the American Journal of Archaeology, Knapp seeks to take this analysis a step further by exploring how these patterns of production have shaped communities. Drawing on evidence and models from world archaeology, Knapp reflected on the impermanence and marginal status of the Politiko-Phorades production site and its productive and ideational relationship to the surrounding landscape. The marginal position of mining communities forged a tension between social and economic isolation and profound dependence on “other places”. No one is from a mining community, but, at the same time, these places must have both generated and depended upon social understandings. Knapp regards the forms of habitus that emerge in these contexts as central to the formation of “imagined communities” necessary to ensure both social cohesion and economic productivity at industrial sites.

The archaeology of mining communities poses another unique set of problems. The disjunction between the social life of a community and the material reality of these sites is particular profound in that the sites are typically occupied for short periods of time and received minimal investments in features that would enable archaeologists to analyze social organization of the community. In fact, the handful of pottery recovered from the site of Politiko-Phorades that could have been associated with domestic activities does not seem to have received anything more than cursory analysis in Knapp’s preliminary publications of the site. In other words, the small amount of fine wares that probably derived from basic domestic activities at the site, primarily speak to “the specialized nature of the site” rather than providing the basis for understanding the efforts of Bronze Age metal workers to preserve ties to “the outside world” of socially constructed relationships.  In the preliminary analysis and in the preserved evidence, then, the economic world of the mining community seems to overwrite the scant evidence for a social life.

Knapp concludes his 2003 article with a series of recommendations for the archaeology of community in an industrial context and suggests that three steps remain necessary:

At least three steps are needed to develop further an archaeology of communities:

1. to engage studies of place in examining the relationship between locality and community.
2. to refine and elaborate the concerted of the “imagined community”
3. to examine more closely and understand more fully the association among people, locality, community, and material culture as the outcome of specific social and historical processes.

In western North Dakota, the massive influx of workers in support of the oil industry has energized new discussions on the nature of communities in these otherwise sleepy (and we can say marginal) regions. The attitudes of longtime residents in these areas have centered on the disruptive effects of these new arrivals and this new industry on their communities. There has been less attention, however, on the communities that have formed among the new arrival to western North Dakota.

We know, however, that workers in western North Dakota follow longstanding practices common to mining and industrial communities. The investment in habitation is minimal and reflects an interest in maximizing the economic return on their efforts and the limited expectations for the long term sustainability of their activities. The boom in both sanctioned and unsanctioned work camps and the appearance of well-defined work sites provide a material locus for at least some activities central to social organization. There are complemented by less clearly defined areas such ranging from the bars, strip clubs, and restaurants that have grown up to serve the influx of works to jails, schools, churches, and town centers which have become places for the interaction between pre-existing communities and new arrivals.

The changes in western North Dakota have led both longtime residents and new comers to re-imagine their communities and establish new ways of viewing the local landscape and their own sense of place. While both groups recognized the local landscape as fundamentally productive (whether in terms of its mineral wealth or in terms of its agricultural potential), they nevertheless recognized fundamentally different relationships between lands, economy, and community. The ties between community and productive space which Knapp underscored in his articles have become contested as both sides read the landscape in an effort to legitimize their own practices and policies.

An archaeology of community in the context of western North Dakota will invariably consider the relationship between material objects, settlement, and social organization as set against changing notions of community and the physical and productive landscape.

The Ottoman Landscape and Pyla-Koutsopetria

Over the past month, I’ve been working to draw historical conclusions from the artifact distributions produced through the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. For antiquity this did not prove particularly challenging in that our site conformed in many ways to general patterns of expansion and contraction across the island. By the post-Classical period, however, my job have become a bit more complicated as the quantity of artifacts present at our site is depressingly small and the patterns of settlement across the island are less clearly established. Fortunately, our colleagues at the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project and the Troodos Archaeological and Environment Survey Project (TAESP) have begun to shape their relatively modest finds into some interesting analytical models that may help make some sense of our material. M. Given and M. Hadjianastasis published an article titled “Landholding and landscape in Ottoman Cyprus” last year in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 34 (2010), 38-60.

Ottoman material from Pyla-Koutsopetria microregion

In this article, the authors use Ottoman census records to reconstruct the population and arable land available to several villages in the TAESP survey area.  Given and Hadjianastasis were able to reconstruct the local pattern of interdependence between villages that produced grain and other crops according to the suitability of the land. Better watered land of the plains tended to feature larger villages with more land per person suggesting grain cultivation. Villages situated in the dryer foothills of the Troodos tended to be not only small, but have less land per person suggesting that residents of these communities had to have land holdings on the plain which they cultivated seasonally and that they were likely more involved in cash cropping in the immediate vicinity of their own villages. The interdependence of these villages reflects that access to larger Ottoman economy as well as the likely demands of larger Ottoman landholders who sought to exploit cash crops in place of subsistence. A similar pattern has appeared in Greece where it is clear that by the Ottoman period an increasingly globalized economy rendered traditional definitions of subsistence inadequate for explaining the organization of Greek agriculture.

The relatively arid lands of the coastal plain and the thin soils of the coastal plateau at Pyla-Koutsopetria were probably best suited in antiquity as today for grain cultivation. We do know, however, that the marshy lands of the foreshore saw market gardens as recently as mid-20th century suggesting that some local freshwater was available to the area. Moreover, the rugged slopes of the coastal plateaus produced herbs which while never a substantial part of the local economy, do reflect patterns of land use that sought to exploit a wide range of environmental resources. The sparse scatter of Ottoman period material most likely indicates that no major settlement existed in the area. The small scatter of Ottoman period glazed wares on the northern edge of the Mavrospilos/Kazamas coastal plateau might represent a small seasonal settlement or even an isolated farmstead. The fields were probably cultivated by residents of Pyla village some 1.5 km to the north. By the early 19th century, it is clear that some local lands were owned by absentee landowners or stood as part of the endowments of religious officials. It seems likely, then, that the individuals who cultivated the land at Pyla-Koutsopetria were tenant farmers. The presence of a small fortification of Venetian (?) date near the foreshore perhaps suggests that the low-lying lands in the eastern part of the Pyla-Koutsopetria plain continued to serve as a small embayment as late as the Ottoman period. The very slight traces of a road that ran along the earlier coastal ridge hint that the coastline had a more pronounced curve in the 19th century than it does now perhaps providing some protection for coasting ships traveling along the littoral.

The most interesting part of Given and Hadjianastasis article was not the careful, if general, interpretation of ceramic evidence, village populations, and land use, but the discussion of the experiences associated with living in the diverse villages present in the Ottoman landscape. The call of the muezzin and the sound of church bells (or the more common wooden or metal tsimandro) served as aural limits to the religious landscape. The limited intervisibility of Ottoman period settlements provided another means of defining the extent of a village’s land and communicating a sense of community among individuals working the fields (even if these fields were owned by landlords).

The village of Pyla is not visible from our site of Pyla-Koutsopetria obscured by the imposing coastal plateau. It seems likely that the settlement at Pyla which dated at least since the geometric period became the center of habitation in the area as much because it was not visible from the coast as because it stood astride a major route north to the Mesaoria and east-west between Kition/Larnaka and Salamis. When coastal settlements became vulnerable to raiding after the decline of Roman hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean in the mid-7th century, the settlement on the Pyla littoral declined rapidly. It is difficult to imagine that the relatively level lands of the coastal remained neglected long.  The only evidence for habitation was a small scatter of material on the northern edge of the Mavrospilos/Kazamas plateau.  It is worth noting that the southern limits of Pyla village would have been just barely visible from a seasonal shelter in this area and perhaps the fieldworkers could have heard the call to prayer or the church bells (or tsimandro) to orient their daily routines while in the fields.

View to northeast from the Mavrospilos/Kazamas Ridge

As a brief epilogue, it is remarkable that we have almost no photographs looking north from our site. We must have 1000+ photos of the Pyla-Koutsopetria landscape and 80% of these photographs take their orientation from the sea. This probably speaks as much to our preoccupation with the sea as our disinclination to look toward the politically troubled buffer zone between the British Sovereign Base Area, the U.N. Buffer Zone in which Pyla Village sits, and the Republic of Cyprus.

More Indigenous Archaeology on Cyprus

Over the past few years I’ve played around with the idea of an indigenous archaeology in the Greek speaking Mediterranean. In doing so, I have identified certain practices as drawing on traditions found in hagiographic literature (saints’ lives). The most obvious example is the practice of inventio when a pious individual excavates a sacred object, usually an icon. I have written extensively on this blog about inventio and dreams (go here and scroll to the bottom of the post for a little gaggle of links; here’s an example of this from Cyprus).

There are also practices preserved in hagiography through which local communities mark out ruined buildings as special sites or sacred space. Saints’ lives frequently preserves stories that feature commemorative practices associated with long abandoned or ruined buildings. Often these practices are as simple as pilgrimages to ruined churches for prayers. In other cases, saints or pious communities rebuild ruined churches.

In Cyprus, we have seen how acts of piety have influenced the archaeology of Christian buildings (for example here and here). Recently I was re-reading part of P. Flourentzos, Excavations in the Kouris Valley II: The Basilica of Alassa. (Nicosia 1996), and re-discovered this passage (p. 3):

During my first visit to the area of Ay;a Mavri to conduct the rescue excavation, I noticedthat two stones in the form of an angle was visible it the north-western side of the area. Moreovera great concentration of loose stones had accumulated on the surface round a modern quadrangular structure with two holes at the front and a little iron door (PI. II: 2).

Inside the structure was an icon of Ayia Mavri (Saint Mavri), where the villagers often placed lighted candles as offerings. On the surface a small part of the apse of the Holy-of-Holies was also visible.

All those features attracted my interest and I decided to open the first trench at that particularpart of the area. This first trench, which I call Trench I, measured 2 X II m. and contained alarge part of the structure of the Holy-of-Holies and its eastern end yielded a small tomb.

So I was then sure that this was an area of a church probably of basilica type with a related cemetery.

This short passage presents a kind of indigenous archaeology of the sacred and shows how it intersects with modern archaeological practices.