Reflections on 100 Walks

Today, if I don’t come down with the horrible flu that has attacked my wife, I will walk home for the 100th time this academic year. It’s not a very long walk – somewhere between 2.5 and 3 miles depending on my route – but it can feel longer or shorter depending on the weather and my energy levels!

So to celebrate my 100th walk of the year, I thought I might reflect a tiny bit on what I’ve learned walking home.

1. I should not wear headphones while I walk. Sometime last fall – right around the time when I installed Spotify on my phone – I started to listen to music a few days a week on my walks home. I had been working harder than usual at the office and had cut back on music listening during the day; so, I started to pop in my headphones and listen to music on my walk. While this certainly made my walks go faster, I found that I lost a tremendous amount of awareness about my environment. The aural landscape – from the sound of cars passing on the street to the grind of the rail yard, the sound of the wind between houses, or the barking of dogs created a much heightened awareness of space.

2. Neighborhoods. One of the most interesting thing about walking home is that each neighborhood prompted a different (and remarkably consistent) feeling in me as I walk through it. The neighborhood closest to campus invariably made me feel old. College age students were always out and about and younger families too with small kids and smaller dogs. When I reached Washington St., the feeling of my walk changed. Here I became very much aware of the social distinction between a walker and someone whizzing by in a car. Other pedestrians in this area tended to be individuals who appeared to be walking not because they wanted to, but because they had to. I felt conspicuous both among these people and my colleagues as they passed by in their cars (and on their mobile phones!). Finally, when I ducked back down into the neighborhoods closer to my own home in the Near South Side, I encountered children and other walkers who clearly were outside because they wanted to be outside. I felt like I was another suburbanite talking an evening stroll and far less conspicuous than I was walking beside the rushing traffic of Washington Street.

3. The Wind and Weather. The expansive skies of the Red River Valley are truly amazing, but they come at a price. The howling winds that can cut through even the most weather-proofed jackets can make even a my casual strolls exercises in resistance training. Mostly, however, they don’t. I’ve come to love the close packed houses of campus neighborhoods and the Near South Side. Many of my colleagues who rarely walk in inclement weather remained skeptical when I tell them that once my walking route gets me into a neighborhood (rather than campus or sports fields or other open spaces that punctuate my route), I can hear the wind, but I generally don’t feel it. 

4. Fatigue. I live a pretty sedentary existence. Generally, I sit at my desk for around 10 hours a day. Walking is tiring. I am consistently surprised by how tired I feel after walking home. As a historian of the pre-industrial world, I have always recognized that walking was the most common way to get around through most of human history (and maybe the case even today). Walking home has made me all the more aware of how much walking can limit the scope and extent of one’s world. Simple detours that I might make in the car – stopping at the grocery store or to grab milk at the Quik-E-Mart – seem to be immense inconveniences on my walk even when the additional distance is less than a mile. So while walking brings me closer to my environment, it also makes everything seem much further away.

5. Paths and Hidden Landscapes. My walks have made me much more aware of the paths inscribed in my local landscape. These range from random staircases that allow a pedestrian to move from a sidewalk to a more elevated, perpendicular side street to the paths through grassy areas between commercial and residential districts. The remains of the streets that were abandoned with the installation of the rail yard and resulting changes in the road network are still clearly visible. Strange little houses converted from garages when such things were still possible under building and zoning codes, abandoned storefronts on now-neglected side streets, and repurposed buildings which clearly straddle the line between commercial and residential. So many of the subtle signs of how communities respond to change remain hidden as I blast around in my little Honda Civic, but become visible when I wander home (without headphones).

Finally, there is one additional benefit to walking. I feel better when I get home (albeit more tired) than I do when I leave my office. Less cranky, more relaxed, and usually just slightly (in a pleasant Sunday afternoon kind of way) bored.    

… My feet is my only carriage. So I’ve got to push on through … 

UPDATE: This is a total coincidence, but a happy one. Check out Tom Vanderbilts’s “Crisis in American Walking” on Slate a couple weeks ago. (via kottke.com yesterday)

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.

More on Sicyonia, fortifications, and Late Antiquity

I’ve continued to work my way through Y. Lolos’s massive tome, Land of Sicyon. Hesperia Supplement 39 (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies, 2011) this weekend while waiting for the rain delayed Daytona 500.  I posted the first part of my review a couple of weeks ago and, so, I suppose this is part two.

There are three areas, in particular, which attracted my interest:

1. Rural Fortifications. As I noted two weeks ago, there remains significant work to be done on the rural fortifications of the Peloponnesus, and Lolos’s book does its part by documenting a significant number of undocumented or poorly documented fortified sites in the countryside. Of particular interest to me were the irregular fortifications at Kokkinovrachos (pp. 234-240)and the round towers at Profetes Elias hill (p. 231) and at Tsakouthi (pp.  240-244) which my colleagues and I reference in a 2010 Hesperia article. While the Kokkinovrachos fortification is much larger than our fortification overlooking Vayia in the southwestern Corinthia, they share the same irregular masonry and both combine a fortification with a free standing tower. Lolos argues that this fortification occupied a height with good views of the crucial intersection between Stymphalos, Phlious, Acrocorinth, and the Sikyonian sites of Titane and Thyamia. Maintaining a substantial stronghold on this hill allowed Sikyonian forces to command several significant routes into the city.

The round tower at Tsakouthi resembled closely the round tower at Lychnari in the Corinthia. Lolos suggested that the upper course of the tower at Tsakouthi were likely mud brick, and this construction, in fact, combined with the towers round shape would have made the tower less vulnerable to artillery blows from forces passing on the nearby road. Our tower at Lychnari may have also had a mud brick superstructure, although there is a sufficient stone in the area to allow for a stone tower of significant height. The smaller and poorly preserved round tower at Profetes Elias may be a good parallel for the smaller tower at the site of Ano Vayia.

The explanations for building a round tower as opposed to a square or orthogonal tower has never entirely satisfied me. It seems to me that a round tower would entail a significant increase in technical difficulty as each block had to be cut or at least trimmed to match either the interior or exterior diameter of the tower. (Blocks in square towers could fit in numerous different positions.)  While it seems likely the round towers were less susceptible to damage by artillery which would only ever inflict a glancing blow, the towers at Lychnari and Ano Vayia (and at Lolos’s Profetes Elias) do not seem close enough to major roads to make the additional work necessary. Moreover, there are numerous towers very close to major roads which are square or rectangular in plan.

Finally, Lolos contributes little the on going discussions of rural fortifications and land use. In fact, Lolos seems to be content suggesting that the fortification of Sikyonia primary served to allow the city to communicate with and deploy forces to across its hinterland. This may be the case, but for fortifications like the round tower at Tsakouthi, it seems like we should at least entertain the possibility that the tower was part of a agricultural complex serving the valley its overlooks.

2. The Late Roman Boom. Like most region in the Eastern Mediterranean, Lolos’s Sikyonia saw a boom in settlement and sits during the Late Roman times. The number of new sites is truly remarkable with over 60 site with Late Roman material and only 23 having material from immediately earlier periods.  While the extensive nature of Lolos’s survey which did not sample his study area in a systematic way, makes it difficult to determine whether this pattern he identified would survive a more rigorous sampling regimen, it is nevertheless consistent with findings published from the Eastern Corinthia, for example, which documented the Late Roman period as time of particular prosperity.

Of particular note is Lolos’s documenting of several previous overlooked or under documented Early Christian churches including a “Early Byzantine Church” at the site of Litharia you Rakka of Poulitsa. The rather small number of Early Byzantine churches in the Peloponnesus alone makes this structure worth additional consideration. The presence of rural church apparently situated apart from significant settlements appears increasingly to be a feature of Late Roman Greece. Lolos’s argument that the site of Klisi-Boukoura of Stylia might be a monastic foundation based on its size of over 3,000 sq. m. This would be rather unprecedented in the Peloponnesus in Late Antiquity, but does show how many significant interpretative gaps exist in our knowledge of the Early Christian landscape. Recent work in the Eastern Corinthia has shown that even in the hinterland of a major city, rural churches remain undocumented.

3. Diachronic Survey. Finally, one of the most interesting parts of Lolos’s book is his commitment to treating the history of Sikyonia in a diachronic fashion. He not only includes discussions of the Venetian period census record, but also of Medieval, Ottoman, and Early Modern period sites. This includes a brief comment on zevgolateio which are groups of kalyvia, or modest, seasonal dwellings, that form a small hamlet (p. 365). From his short remarks, it would seem that the settlement at Lakka Skoutara in the Corinthia which my colleagues and I are now bringing to publication, represents a zevgolateio. The illustrations that he provides of the interior of a season dwelling coincide closely with those found in Lakka Skoutara, which is unsurprising, of course, considering the geographic proximity and similar ethnic make up of the populations.

I have a bit more to read and process from this rich, closely edited, and significant work, and I expect that I’ll provide some final words on the book in the coming weeks.

Crossposted to Corinthian Matters.

A New Mycenaean Center in the Corinthia

I just finished reading the T. Tartaron, D. Pullen, R. Dunn, L. Tzortsoulou-Gregory, A. Dill, and J. Boyce, “The Saronic Harbors Research Project (SHARP): Investigations at Mycenaean Kalamianos, 2007-2009,” Hesperia 80 (2011), 559-634. I rarely get excited about the Bronze Age, but it’s hard not to get excited about a major new site. Extending for over 7 ha and including over 50 buildings, the site of Kalamianos represented a major harbor on the Saronic coast. Constructed primarily of the grey Corinthian limestone, the outlines of the site remained visible on the surface allowing the SHARP team to outline the site and its buildings without excavating. Using the techniques of intensive pedestrian survey they produced a significant ceramic assemblage of material from the site which they feel grounds the site chronologically in the Late Bronze Age. A larger regional survey of the region north and west of the coastal village of Korphos has indicated that the area also had significant activity in the Early Bronze Age and rather little activity thereafter. Extensive survey of the hills and valleys surrounding Korphos has produced additional evidence for a vital Bronze Age landscape suggesting that the region was a particularly prosperous and well-developed corner of the busy Saronic world.

On a personal level, the documentation of activities in this area is interesting because the site of Lakka Skoutara where David Pettegrew and I have worked for close to a decade is just a few kilometers (as the crow flies) from their study area. The publication of the ancient, medieval, and modern landscape of Kalamianos and surrounding regions will form a key anchor to our analysis of Lakka Skoutara.

The most interesting thing to me is the methods used to document the site and the extraordinary transparency of the authors in describing their procedures. The integration of architectural, extensive, and intensive survey in a methodologically consistent treatment of a single area.  The use of kite and balloon photography to assist in documenting the visible architecture produced some rather striking images that were effective in conveying both the methods and the character of the preserved architecture.

Over the course of intensive survey, the SHARP collected ceramic material using the chronotype system from both specific rooms within clearly defined buildings and across survey style transects. Using a gridded system for the most part, their work follows a similar approach our large site in Cyprus, and this is unsurprising since both David Pettegrew and myself learned the craft of survey from Tom Tartaron, Daniel Pullen, and Tim Gregory over the course of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  When the final results are published, the survey work at Korphos will represent another good example of the “4th Wave” intensive survey in Greece which tends to focus intensively on single sites or microregions of a few square kilometers rather than the large areas typical of “Third Wave” regional survey in Greece.

Figure 40. Satellite image of the Korphos region with the locations of small elliptical stone enclosures indicated by open white ovals, and two larger Mycenaean enclosures indicated by filled ovals.

I was gratified to see that their systematic extensive survey produced a preliminary map (above) of the strange round enclosures found on numerous height in the area. In his preliminary study of these enclosures, M. Dixon argued that they were Classical or Hellenistic in date and represented a series of ad hoc fortifications designed defend a vulnerable landscape from the historically documented threat of the Athenian fleet (in the Classical Age) and the more persistent threat of local raiding during the unstable Hellenistic centuries. The SHARP team found little to support a Classical or Hellenistic date for these enclosures and, noting the absence of any substantial quantity of ceramic material, preferred an Early Bronze Age date on the basis of a few sherds found wedged in the walls.

I had the opportunity to look at some of these strange little “fortifications” first hand about a decade ago while documenting the site of Lakka Skoutara. The absence of ceramic material from these sites is, indeed, vexing. And a few Early Bronze Age sherds do little more, at present, than provide a terminus post quem for these rough enclosures.

There were any number of interesting tidbits from their preliminary publication, but a few really stood out to me:

First, I was pretty interested to see that they used the absence of later pottery collected by the survey to argue for the absence of later activity at the site. To my mind, this is an important step for the field of survey archaeology. We are often relatively confident in arguing from the presence of activity based on the presence of ceramics, but we rarely have taken the next step. The vagaries of site formation and the differential visibility of various periods in the surface record have usually led us to stop short of making arguments ex silentio.  But, I suppose the extraordinary geomorphological stability of the landscape around Korphos provided them with the confidence to make this claim.

Next, it is remarkable, however, that there is very little discussion of Byzantine material. The site of Stiri features a significant Middle Byzantine church dedicated to the Panayia. It was the katholikon of a monastery that may have been visited by Os. Loukas and is attested in census records as late as the 18th century.  It probably functioned in some capacity into the 19th century. Remarkably, the area around the church which is strewn with important Early Bronze Age remains seems to have produced almost no Medieval pottery (according to their admittedly preliminary report). This may be the result of local geomorphological activity – the church site in a polje filled with sediment that may have covered the Byzantine surface – or perhaps a preference of non-cermaic material at the site during the Byzantine period (although this seems a bit unlikely).

Finally, it is a bit troubling, however, to imagine a Byzantine church leaving almost no trace in the local ceramic assemblage and, then, using that same assemblage to date walls visible on the surface. I have no reason to doubt their confidence in assigning Late Bronze Age or Early Bronze Age dates to features in the landscape, but I anxiously await a more systematic treatment of their results to understand the complexities of site formation in this area.

In my informal visits to the area over the years, I’ve seen significant evidence for Late Antique activity in the area including some Early Christian mullions at the church of Ay. Pantes in the village of Korphos itself. It was interesting to note that the SHARP team found a Late Roman kiln site amidst the ruins. Their suggestion that the center of habitation in the region moved to the location of Korphos town during antiquity seems plausible.

One last thing: the color photographs and illustrations in the article are fantastic!

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.

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.

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.

Some Musings on Hellenistic Fortification

This past week I’ve been enjoying Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology. The book takes a reflective, photographic journey along the coastal defenses erected by Hitler’s army to defend his Fortress Europa from an Atlantic invasion. The photographs and essays are haunting. The massive, modern, brutally functional fortifications, watchtowers, batteries, and bunkers served to protect Hitler’s vision of a unified, German Europe, on a resistant population.

It got me to think a bit more about the fortification on our site of Pyla-Koutsopetria. Like Hitlers Atlantic Wall, the fort at the site of Vigla was likely built by the Hellenistic rulers of Cyprus sometime in the late 4th or early 3rd century. It is situated at the edge of the territory of Kition astride a major land route to the city of Salamis and overlooking a now infilled harbor. This location is interesting because the fortification would have stood watch over the eastern flank of the city of Kition had the city remained independent. Ironically, fighting between rival claimants to Alexander’s empire infiltrated the rivalries between the Cypriot cities and led the Ptolemies to put the last king of Kition to death in 312.

The fortification at Vigla, then, continued to stand at a strategically sensitive point in the territory of Kition. Only it did not serve to protect the city as an independent polity but rather to protect the interest of Hellenistic conquerers would positioned the fortification to forestall an invasion over land (as had occurred in the Classical period) or along the coastal plain. The most cynical reading of the fortress could even see as a way to occupy a strategic point to prevent local forces from holding it.

At the same time as this fortification stood watch, the southeastern corner of the island witnessed an rapid increase in settlement. Like the Akamas peninsula in the west, numerous settlements appear east of the Pyla littoral. Presumably the expansion of settlement in this area benefited from the end of the rivalry between the independent cities of Kition and Salamis and occupied what was previously a liminal zone on the island.  New settlements may have benefited from access to markets on the southern coast of the island and the end to political and military rivalries among the island’s city kingdoms might have opened up territory to capital from new sources. On the coastal plain at Pyla-Koutsopetria, we clearly see an expansion of activities including evidence for the production of olive oil.

In this context, the fortification at Vigla stands less as site to project domination and more as a site that offers protection to the new and vulnerable communities on the coast. Ptolemy the Geographer in the 2nd century AD notes a site called Dades along the coast of Cyprus and some (including us!) have plausibly assigned this name to our site at Vigla. Both Dades and the modern name Vigla are words that could refer to a watchtower (Dades means torch and Vigla is related to English words like vigilant). It may be that our site could communicate through torches to other posts along the south coast of the island. Such torch relays could alert defenders to the appearance of hostile ships or armies.

The shift in the political organization on the island also changed the meaning of fortifications in the landscape. The line between projecting power, imposing control, and providing protection is blurry during times of dynamic political change.

Camps Ancient and Modern

I just finished Charlie Hailey’s book called Camps. It’s an architectural study of camps and consists of examples of camps from around the world and through history.  The study divides camps into three types: camps of autonomy, camps of control, and camps of necessity.  Camps of autonomy are camps that are characterized by the goal of autonomy and independence (as the name might suggest!), whereas camps of control and necessity are opposite sides of the same coin. The former rely on the form of the camp to control its occupants or to project control into a potentially dangerous situation; the latter are camps that emerge as responses to circumstances beyond the occupants control (refugee situations, survival camps, et c.). The line between these two types of camp tends to blur.

I began to think about camps largely in the context of man or work camps in the western part of North Dakota. The camps typically consist of temporary trailers arranged very close to work sites (if not on the sites themselves). These temporary housing units were often brought from other places of temporary settlement like the Olympic village in Vancouver or in camps used to house people displaced from Hurricane Katrina. The trailers are a response to both the limited infrastructure existing in a peripheral area as well as the unwillingness to invest in substantial investment in an area by the companies that arrive looking to extract oil. These camps also reflect the global system not only for resource extraction, but also for managing temporary populations whether they are athletes, refugees from natural disasters, or groups looking to work in remote locations. The camps, their residents, and the natural resources that they work to extract combine to produce a low-investment, temporary pattern of settlement across the landscape.

These camps cross the various categories proposed by Hailey and represent spaces of control (particularly when they are provided by local employers), spaces of autonomy as they function on the fringes of local utilities (water cisterns are sometimes visible in aerial photographs), infrastructure, and community, and spaces of necessity as the work population in the Western part of the state settled in camps owing to the lack of existing infrastructure in the area. The autonomy and necessity of the camps overlap when they provide housing for groups of individuals who live and work on the periphery of infrastructure, social bonds, and the economic systems.

I also got to thinking about a camp that I published in the Corinthia. I argued that a fieldstone fortification on the height of Mt. Oneion along the south boundary of the Isthmus as a “fortified camp” that served the needs of military forces who sought to secure access to the Peloponnesus in the Hellenistic era. Like the work camps in North Dakota that fortified camp on Mt. Oneion was not designed for any enduring way – the roughly built field stone walls provided protection for structures that housed the forces encamped there – and these camps were also dependent on wide ranging geopolitical systems and events that were not necessarily under the control of the local population. Moreover, the location of the camps on Mt. Oneion is peripheral to settlement, cultivated ground, and political space.

Our site in Cyprus – Pyla-Vigla – is likewise a peripheral settlement and the habitation appears to have been quite short lived. We have suggested that the site was a base for local mercenaries. Like the fortified camp on Mt. Oneion, the fortification wall appears to have been the most substantial investment on the site. The domestic structures on the interior of the site show only modest architectural investment. Simple stone sockles would have supported mudbrick walls and the absence of rooftile suggests thatched roofs. The floors were packed earth. In one trench we observed the rapid reconstruction or modification of the building perhaps over the course of a decade or two. Like. Mt. Oneion, the site it removed from the centers of political power, situated at a natural border (on the sea and at the periphery of the territory of Kition), and immediate surroundings of the site offer little in the way of economic incentives.

Of course, our archaeological work on the site embraces some of the practices of camp. Our base of operations on site involve almost no investment in the site (plastic furniture, shade provided by vehicles, et c.). One of my favorite practices is that at the end of the season we backfill the trenches. We cover the collapsed walls with a blue tarpaulin (which we always call trapampoline) which echoes the ubiquitous “blue tarp” associated with provisional camps around the world. By backfilling the trenches we follow a different set of camping practices by “leaving no trace’.  It not only preserves the archaeological remains, but also returns the space to the condition it was prior to our arrival. Hailey has some great descriptions of the methods used to restore the desert site of Burning Man festival at the conclusions of the event. They organizers walk transects across the site looking for trash. They also use gridded collection areas to sample other areas to ensure that the dried lake bed is spotless on their departure. The archaeological scrutiny employed by this group to preserve the natural beauty of the Burning Man site, provides a nice contrast to efforts by archaeologist to document the traces of human life in the landscape. Both practices represent efforts to view the landscape as radically separate from present human activities. This notion of people being alienated from the landscape is central to the mystic and allure the camp.

More Archaeology of Man Camps: Some methodological and historical perspectives

In my occasional free time, I’ve continued to do research on the archaeology of work camps and other temporary settlements associated with construction, resource extraction, or manufacturing. In particular, I’ve drawn heavily on the contributions to a special issue of Historical Archaeology titled Communities Defined by Work: Life in Western Work Camps (36 (2002)).

These articles have helped me to focus my ideas and approaches for my own project.  As I have mentioned here before, I am interested in doing an archaeological survey of so-called man camps associated with the Bakken Oil Fields in Western North Dakota. Unlike the projects presented in the Historical Archaeology volume, which tended to date to turn of the 20th century, the camps that I plan to study are still very much in use.  While the ephemeral nature of historical work camps has often made their study difficult, an approach that documents archaeologically the ongoing use of work camps will provide a useful corrective to this difficulty. Moreover, my work will be done in collaboration with a team of anthropologists, social workers, and “traditional” archaeologists allowing our research both to draw upon a range of methodologies (oral history, collaboration with social service providers, survey archaeology) and to provide analysis for a range of contemporary (and pressing) social, anthropological, and historical concerns.

There are several key themes in the recent study of the archaeology of historical work camps that can easily be ported over to the study of contemporary camps.

1. Margins. The location of work camps in marginal landscapes is a consistent feature in their development. When camps appeared in areas with established settlement, they tended to be set apart from traditional, long-term housing. More frequently, however, camps tended to be established to support work in areas with few centers of settlement. The capital needed to establish the camps and to fund the work undertaken, tended to come from established and often distant economic, political, and demographic centers. As a result, camps tended to be marginalized economically, socially, and politically and can be profitably studied using core-periphery models for how established centers projected authority, capital, and power into the periphery. Work camps in Western North Dakota, traditionally a economically and politically marginal area, clearly fit the model for how the core seeks to exploit resources located in marginal territories.

2. Structured life. As a part of the projection of core interests to the periphery, camps tended attempted (in some cases) to reproduce the social structures characteristic of the center.  The architecture and organization of camps often distinguished clearly between groups who controlled production and labor. Managers and specialists had better housing that often came close to what they might expect in the center and laborers tended to have more modest dwellings that were less rigidly organized and physically substantial. In some cases, squatters camps or other even more temporary settlements would appear on the periphery of camps where individuals with fluid or poorly defined relationships to the work at the camps would live. A colleague of mine who did professional cultural resource management work on the Bakken ranges described sleeping in his truck on the work site because housing was both expensive and scarce.

3. Resistance. As much as the core attempts to project certain relationships into the periphery, there remains ample space to resist. Resistance practices in historical work camps ranged from consuming alcohol in supposedly dry camps to refusing to live in the designated camps.  The most dramatic forms of resistance, of course, involve outright revolts, strikes, and other forms of physical “unrest”, but there were a range of less conspicuous forms of resistance to the structures imposed from the center (and imposed by capital). Interestingly, some forms of resistance – binge drinking, absenteeism, work slow-downs – follow closely the methods used by early and pre-modern workers confronting the reality of capital driven labor for the first time.

4. Reuse. One of the most interesting aspects of the man camps in Western North Dakota is the reuse of housing in new ways. Apparently parts of the Olympic village from Vancouver and trailers used for Katrina refugees have found there way to the Bakken range to house workers in the oils fields. Historical period camps likewise saw the reuse of housing, structural and architectural components, and other discarded materials to expand upon the limited resources available to camp residents.

These four points, for now, provide a departure for hypothesis building and method making for my field work out in the Western part of North Dakota. We are in the grant writing stage and one of the most exciting possible outcomes is that “my” team will be able to rent an RV to conduct our research out west. In other words, we’ll be living in our own academic work camp, in temporary housing, and experiencing some of the same challenges as the communities that we are studying while we are studying them. Stay tuned for more on this project in the next few months.

Received wisdom has that these houses set diagonal across their blocks just south of the Corinth canal were built to house the managers of the canal construction project in the 1880s.  We’d walk buy these houses nearly every day on our way from Isthmia to the beach near the canal’s mouth in the Saronic Gulf. Does anyone know anything more about these houses?