Polis Prospects for the Summer of 2012

I’ve finally begun to slowly shift my attention from my academic year tasks to my summer goals. I’m just starting to think a tiny bit about our work at Pyla-Koutsopetria this summer (more on that next week), but I’m slowly getting more and more excited about the plan for Polis. Scott Moore and I head to Polis after we wrap up excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria. Right now we have three plans for the Polis season all involve the continued study of excavated material and architecture from the site of EF2.

Last season, we focused primarily on the architecture and stratigraphy of the Early Christian basilica style church at the site. In 2012, we will continue our work to document that building and expand our study to include other contemporary (or potentially contemporary) structures in the larger EF2 area.   

1. The West

The western part of EF2 is perhaps the most complex and interesting part of the site. It has two main features that are directly significant for our work at the EF2 basilica. The first is a Roman period quadraporticus that stands at the intersection of two roads through this section of the city (it is not visible on the plan above). We do not have a clear sense of the chronology of this structure and one of the key questions is whether it continued to stand into Late Antiquity. If it did continue to stand, then it would have formed an architectural complement to the western part of the basilica . We have this lovely vision that narthex of the basilica echoed the arched form of the quadraporticus which was the other monumental building in the area.

We are also interested in the small water feature situated immediately adjacent to the southwest corner of the basilica narthex. It is visible on the plan above as a small apsidal structure. We have reason to suspect that this feature was contemporary with the basilica but we have no idea when it was built and when or whether it underwent changes. It seems to have been a spring house and we know that such features would have been important landmarks in the urban fabric.

Further west from these features are a number of smaller buildings, perhaps work shops, and what appear to be domestic structures of uncertain date. By starting to unpack the western part of EF we hope to be able to contextualize the neighborhood of the church here and determine how it fit into the social and architectural fabric of the town.

We also hope to understand the relationship between Roman structures in the area and the massive leveling effort upon which basilica stood. The material in this leveling course seems to date to the 2nd to 3rd century – that is two centuries earlier than the date of the basilica – and it would be valuable to understand whether this dates to the time of the basilicas contraction or an earlier re-organization of this neighborhood. 

2. The East

Last year, we mistakenly felt like we had the eastern side of the basilica fairly well problematized. The main issues surrounded the portico that ran along the south side of the church and the architectural and chronological relationship between the apse and the walls of the aisles and nave. While we have not necessarily come to absolute conclusions on these issues, we at least thought that we knew where to focus our attention.

This winter, however, two new structures appeared which might be contemporary with the church. The two rooms immediately to the southeast of the southeastern corner of the south portico may well be contemporary with the church. Their positions suggests that they form the eastern limit to a possible southern atrium to the church which ran between the southern portico and the nicely paved road visible along the bottom of the plan above. This would be more or less consistent with other basilicas on the island which often featured atria surrounded by buildings. In fact, the room that we have worked to study at Pyla-Koutsopetria is probably exactly such a structure for the south facing atrium of that church.

It is also interesting that the ubiquitous graves respect the walls of these rooms in some cases and cut the walls in other cases suggesting that they may have been standing for part of the life of the church and then fallen out of use later. Sorting the relationship between these rooms and the eastern part of the church will be a significant priority for this summer. 

3. The Sherds

All of our work about relies on getting the ceramics rights. While we can most likely sort the relative chronology of the strata in each trench, we have not had too much luck linking the various level across trenches. As a result, the date of the ceramics present in each strata become vital for attempting to coordinate building sequences across a site excavated over 20 years.

As we identify particularly secure strata (that is to say single context strata or strata that represent single depositional events) and particularly diagnostic artifacts in the myriad artifact trays neatly arranged in the Polis storerooms, we also need to illustrate key artifacts and determine whether we can make any arguments from the chronological or typological distribution of artifacts across the entire site.

 

Of course all these more focused research questions depend upon our continued routine work. This involves reading tray after tray of pottery that has not been studied since it was excavated. It also involves digitizing Polis plans, keying notebooks, and building Harris Matrices for each trench. All this is routine work and pretty tedious, but as you can see, the research questions and potential outcomes will shed new, valuable light on the fabric and society of a Late Antique neighborhood on Cyprus.

Polis-Chrysochous: City of Gold in Late Antique and Medieval Times

Busy week! But I do have something new for my dedicated readers to peruse. This is a working draft of an essay that will appear in the exhibit volume associated with an upcoming show at the Princeton University Museum called City of Gold: The Archeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus.

The essay is a nice summary of the Late Antique and Medieval remains at the city and a short synthetic section that places the site of Polis (called Arsinoe in our period) into the context of the island and the Mediterranean.

It’s rough around the edges still, but I actually had a blast working with Amy Papalexandrou and finding an accessible way to describe the site.

Check it out here:

View this document on Scribd

 

 

A Byzantine Body

I’ve been working in a stop/start way on developing our GIS for the Polis project. My main goal this winter is to prepare a basic GIS plan for the entire EF2 area and to add various burials to this plan. In general, this is a tedious task that involves many hours of tracing stones and georeferencing poorly prepared field drawings.

Every now and then, however, there is a little discovery that provides some motivation.  For example, over the course of preparing an essay for the upcoming City of Gold: The Archaeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus exhibition, I checked the location of a burial that I georeferenced this summer. The burial was excavated at a fairly high elevation in 1984.  In fact, it appears to be the highest burial in the large cemetery to the south of the church at the site of EF2. 

The notebook description of this burial’s excavation was predictably short:

Burial 10 was removed and burial 11 uncovered. With burial 11 was found Find #4, a green stone crucifix (see drawing p. 42). Glass fragments were also unearthed around burial 11.

More interesting, however, is its location. The head of the body appears to intersect with the east wall of the south portico. In the original publication of this site, the excavators and architects assumed that the south portico was a rather late edition. We have since suggested that it was added rather early in the history of the church perhaps at the same time as the similarly articulated western narthex.

With the discovery (so to speak) of this burial, we can add to the history of this portico by suggesting that its destruction perhaps predated the complete abandonment of the church.  Since the head of Burial 11 crossed the line of the foundation of the east wall of the south portico, it is difficult to imagine that this wall was still standing to an substantial height.  In other words, the body in Burial 11 was probably interred after the east wall of the south portico had collapsed.  Our current assumptions regarding the collapse of the south part of the church (and this is exceedingly tentative) is that the southwestern part of the narthex collapsed by the 11th century AD.  This collapse almost certainly compromised the western wall of the south portico and it might have marked the collapse of the south wall of the south aisle (although this is not clear). So it might be that Burial 11 dates to after the 11th c. AD.

Making this burial even more interesting was the presence of Find #4, a small pectoral cross, illustrated and described in the notebook. This cross – I think – is going to appear in the City of Gold exhibition.

There were not enough other finds from Burial 11 (or we haven’t analyzed them yet) to draw any firm conclusions in the date of the burial, but it does hint at the continued use of the site for burial perhaps even after the south portico was structurally compromised and perhaps after the church itself went out of use.  These little discoveries keep me motivated to continue the tedious work of digitizing plans.

Fragments of an Introduction

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with Amy Papalexandrou to write up a short essay for the an exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum titled: City of Gold: The Archaeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus.

Amy and I have been negotiating the introduction to our essay.  For some reason, we have latched onto the idea of introducing our short essay with two inscriptions: one from the 3rd century BC and one from the 5th century (?) AD.  We juxtapose these texts to open a conversation about continuity and change in civic identity over 7 centuries. In a poetic flourish (that may not make the final cut of the essay), I proposed  adding a third text from a Greek ecclesiastical court of the (let’s say) 12th or 13th century.  This text also captures some of the civic organization of the city. The bishop of Arsinoe, the president of the village, and a representative of Paphos (presumably the bishop there) all have representation in the ecclesiastical court that adjudicates on marriages.

The symmetry of three texts separated by 7 centuries each appealed to me, but it might not quite work on context.

In any event, here’s our draft intro:

The few, fragmentary texts that do survive provide only scant context for the once vibrant community in the Chrysochous valley, but they do offer us a place to begin our story.

A 3rd century BC statue base celebrated a gift from ‘The City of the Arsinoeans,’ and it is possible to hear the echoes of this text some seven centuries later in very different terms. Found at Polis tis Chrysochou in 1960 and displayed today in the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia, this modest limestone block captures an important moment in the history of the Late Antique city (fig. 1). Dated to the mid-fifth century CE, it records the presence, whether real and literal or spiritual and implied (or both), of two high officials who co-sponsored the construction of an important building at Arsinoe:

Ἒν ἔτι (sic) Λς τῆς ἀρχιε 
ρωσύνης Σαβίνου
ἐπί Φωτηνοῦ ἐπισκό(που) +
διά τῶν +

“In the 36th year when Sabinos was Archbishop, when Photinos was Bishop (this was erected) at their own expense.”

Some seven centuries later still, the bishop continues to represent the community in a legal document associated with the ecclesiastical court at Arsinoe. This is only surviving example of the records from a Greek ecclesiastical court in Cyprus. The main focus of the text is on the tangle of complex laws surrounding marriage and engagement. Periodically throughout the text a simple formula appears which establishes the “all loving and God-honored Bishop of Arsinoe, the president of the city, and the enorias of Paphos” as the presiding officials of the court.

These modest texts resonate with the more impressive material remains of the city itself.  The texts confirm the central place of the Bishop among the leaders of the community, the persistent civic identity of Arsinoe, the influence of the church in almost all aspects of daily life, and the close ties of the city to other regional centers.  These are themes that frame the impressive material remains of the Late Antique and Medieval city of Arsinoe and underscore the continued importance of this dynamic, monumental, Christian center in southwestern Cyprus.

Archaeology as Remix

This past week, I romped through Mark Amerika’s newest book Remixthebook (Minneapolis 2011). As with his previous non-fiction-ish offerings, this book defied categorizing and description. I was mostly a meditation on his creative process taking as a point of departure his creative work as a performance VJ, as an author, and as a critic. He focused primarily on the links between creativity and the work of remixing our lived worlds. His argument, laced through a complex, poetic text, is that to be alive, creative, and conscious is to exist in a constant flow of spontaneous, post-production remixing. As his definition of creativity expands and his understanding of remixing grows more ragged, the lived, creative, and performative become a blur and increasingly stand in for reality.

As archaeologists, we are in a constant state of remixing. Even the most basic archaeological arguments require us to move between times (the present and the past, relative and absolute dates, stratigraphy and periodization), move between media (ceramics, architecture, lithics, texts, digital data, images, maps, plans), move between voices (the art historian, the historian, the scientist, the critic, and the skeptic), and move between genres (narrative, analysis, catalogue, data). Our work flow is punctuated by the constant shifting between software, media (of different shapes, sizes, genre, forms), and our own creative output.  Archaeological work is a process of constantly performing and remixing bits (both in the traditional sense and increasingly the digital sense) into new objects that present themselves for remixing.

1. This next week, Amy Papalexandrou has asked me to help her produce a 20 page synthetic, interpretative text for an exhibit catalog for an upcoming exhibit at the Princeton Art Museum -City of Gold: The Archaeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus. Our short paper will look at the Late Antique to Medieval city and remix over 30 years of archaeological work, the physical objects present at Princeton, and our most recent research at the site (which is itself the remixing of finds, notebooks, architecture, past-texts, and archaeological method to perform new arguments and new syntheses). In our somewhat-harried correspondence, we took as points of departure an inscription, a short-video I narrated on site, and our most recent research. It goes without saying that the previous scholarship on the site forms a persistent backing track for our remix.

More importantly, we are writing a text that is designed for an informed and interest public, rather than a professional group of scholars, students, or researchers. So while our source material will – more or less – be the same as any other production of our site, our audience will be a bit different. The remix has context and responds to its environment.

2. I’ve been working with a small group of students to produce a public, digital history exhibit on the 50th Anniversary of the Chester Fritz Library (which is the main library on campus here). The students are busy pulling together photographs, texts, documents, and other objects from the university archives. They are also working on how to integrate these objects across a range of digital media – a blog, a Twitter feed, an Omeka.net page, and a Flickr account – and to narrate using these objects across these various spaces.  While the source base for our remix is not so different from that confronting any scholar looking to produce historical analysis, the output of our work is quite different. We are intentionally distributing our remix across multiple media and thinking actively how our remixes (as a team and as individuals) will be unique to our audience.

In the context of our work with the library, we’re following Amerika’s lead by using the context of remix to join the work of the “authors” with the work of the audience.  By preserving (re-producing?) some of the fragmented state of the original media (individual texts, documents, objects), we attempt to entice people to remix our material in new ways. We’ve performed the initial act of selection and become partners in the conversation.

3. In an effort to think more radically about the notion of remixing, I’ve begun a conversation with Tim Pasch – a computer guru type in Communications at the University of North Dakota. We both have an interest in sound and he records his own, highly-textured digital music. In the course of these conversations, he mentioned software that could translate digital images to sounds. This makes sense, of course, a digital image is a just a gaggle of digital data that could be read by any interface to produce output.  The data behind a digital image could be rendered as text, images, sound or almost any medium imaginable via suitable software.

As we chatted about this, I offered to send him raster images from my project in Cyprus and invited him to use images which show the distribution of pottery, the survey grid, or topography and to render them as sounds. We’ve even discusses the potential for capturing sonic landscapes using both microphones, but more radically – capturing images with an explicit eye toward transforming them into sounds. Remixing the landscape would, then, extend beyond simply filtering digital data collected from the landscape and incorporate using the software filters as a lens for primary data collection.

A new semester and a new year…

The new semester begins tonight at 5 pm (or something). This is my first semester with tenure which I officially received on August 15.  It felt a lot like my team winning the World Series (which I have experienced) or the Super Bowl.  I woke up the next day expecting things to be or feel different and then was disappointed when they were the same. My coffee tasted the same, the sky looked the same, my office did not become larger or smaller.

And my teaching and research loads did not change either. So here’s my fall semester:

1. Two old classes. I’m teaching two classes that I’ve taught every semester for the past four years. I love the routine, the opportunity to tweak the classes minutely and judge the results the next semester, the battle with boredom of going through the same material each semester (which I liken to acedia, a kind of monastic boredom), and the chance to compare students in very similar situations. And I often think of it as a kind of cricket match (as I watch Sachin Tendulkar in what is likely his last at bat in England). The patience to do the same thing over and over, but also the flexibility to adjust to variables and changes. The two classes are: History 101: Western Civilization I (online) and History 240: The Historians Craft, which is the required course for our majors.

2. A new class. I am also teaching a new class of sorts. I am teaching a digital and public history practicum. This course will focus on developing a boutique-y collection of digital artifacts to celebrate the Chester Fritz Library’s 50th Anniversary (The Fritz @ 50: 1961 to 2011).  I have a class of four diligent but inexperienced graduate students, some good allies in the Department of Special Collections, a Gigapan, a brilliant tech advisor, and a bunch of good will.  Like my effort in the Spring, our goal is to produce a small, well-curated digital exhibit, for the library using off the shelf components as much as possible.

3. Got Papers? I have somehow committed to four (?) conference papers this fall and winter. I have no idea how this happened. I’ve posted a rough draft of the first one here already. I’ll be giving “Liminal Time and Liminal Space in the Middle Byzantine Hagiography of Greece and the Aegean” at the International Anchoritic Society Conference here in Grand Forks. At the American Schools of Oriental Research Conference, I’ll be (co-)authoring a paper on our ongoing work at the site of Pyla-Vigla on Cyprus. (I might also be involved in a paper on my work on Polis at this conference, although this is not at all clear). Finally, in January I’ll be giving a paper with David Pettegrew at the Archaeological Institute of America’s Annual Meeting titled “Producing Peasants in the Corinthian Countryside“. This paper will draw on our decade old survey data from around the Corinthia.  (To make my life easier, I’ve decided not to actually attend ASOR or the AIA.)

4. Publication Projects. I also have four ongoing publication projects. The first and most pressing one is to shape my paper, “The Ambivalent Landscape of Christian Corinth” from the Corinth in Contrast Conference into publication shape. I’ve received really good feedback from the editors of a volume that will come from this conference, and now I need to take it all in. I also need to push into final form my short encyclopedia article on Early Christian Baptisteries. I’ve also (more or less) committed to writing up a piece on post-colonialism in Byzantine Archaeology.  This will develop from a paper I wrote years ago, with every intent of publishing, and gave at a working seminar at the Gennadius Library in Greece. The last publication project involves the results of our survey on Cyprus. We have finally decided to publish the results of the survey aspects of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Survey separate from the results of our excavations at the site. We have a completed draft of this manuscript more or less prepared and have submitted a book proposal to the American Schools of Oriental Research Archaeological Reports Series.

5. And the other stuff:

• Did I mention that we’re moving?
• I continue to tilt at windmills in an effort to document an early 20th century church here in Grand Forks. We have a verbal agreement with an architect to illustrate the building.
• I’ve been working with some people looking to revitalize the College of Arts and Sciences webpage (ssshhhh… this is the top secret not ready for primetime development page.)
• Teaching Thursday!
• At least one book review.
• Following Formula 1, NASCAR, Cricket, Baseball, the NFL, and College Football.

So it should be a fun semester!!!

The East end of EF2

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working with a team to publish the Early Christian basilica at the site of Polis EF2.  One of the most perplexing things about this building is the relationship between the east end – specifically that three eastern apses – and the foundations of the nave and aisle walls.

The eastern apses do not bond with main walls of the nave or the aisle foundation walls. The widening of the aisle foundations at the point in which they join with the main nave would suggest that the main and flanking naves are later than the aisle foundation walls. In other words, it would make the best sense if we imagined the widening of the aisle foundations wall as a response to an apse being built with thicker walls. The apse is a more structurally complex and demanding component of the church and it would make sense that the aisle foundation wall received additional thickened to support more effectively a reconstructed eastern end.

The archaeology might well add some support to this sequence of building in the eastern part of the church. Efforts to find evidence for a foundation trench for the thickened eastern buttresses of the church were not successful. In other words, it seems like the fill below the floor of the eastern part of the church post-dates the thickening of the aisle foundation wall.  This would be consistent with a major rebuilding of the eastern end of the church.

It is notable that the eastern wall of a portico that ran along the south side of the church building rested against (but did not bond with) the south side of the south aisle apse. This has allowed us to sequence the construction of the portico after the construction of the eastern apses and the modification of the eastern end of the church.

So the phasing of the church must go, aisle foundation walls, nave, and portico.

The ceramics from the fill associated with the construction of the apse are 7th century.

Final Church Sketch of the E.F2 Basilica

A few weeks ago, I started to prepare a georeferenced sketch of the E.F2 Basilica (for more on that click here).  I finished that this week. Sketching a plan is a great way to be productive especially when subjected to constant interruptions or distractions (heat, thesis defenses, job talks, et c.).

Here is the original.

Here’s my sketch added to the original:

And here’s the final sketch without the original plan:

Another View of the E.F2 Basilica at Polis

Those of you not particularly interested in Early Christian Polis are probably suffering right now and for that I apologize. I’ve been on the road, so I can only think about one thing at a time, so I continue to think about the E.F2 Basilica at Polis.

So here’s another view of the basilica. This time, we used the Gigapan to take a panorama of the church.

A Tour of the E.F2 Basilica at Polis

Before I left Polis for the Northern Plains, Scott Moore and I prepared a short tour of the E.F2 Basilica there.  We’ve been working on the basilica for the previous month and used the short video tour as a way to summarize some of our results.

For the academic purists, I can assure you that we’ve also written up a rather lengthy document that set out our preliminary conclusions!!