The North Fortification Wall

One of the major research goals for this season of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project was working out the date and arrangement of the fortification wall on the northern side of the height of Vigla. This wall dates to the Hellenistic period and was part of a larger effort to fortify important or vulnerable stretches of the south coast of the island during those politically turbulent days. A trench dug by looters in 2008 indicated that the wall along the northern side of the coastal height might be very well preserved.

Our excavations in the 2011 season suggests that the level of preservation on the northern side of the height was not consistent. On the other hand, it did nicely confirm the orientation of the wall along the northern side of Vigla.

From points collected prior to the backfilling of the looter trench in 2009, we were able to establish the orientation of the wall. This orientation follows exactly the orientation of the wall found in our 2012 trench. The red line on the image below is the orientation of the fortification wall established by the looters trench. It follows closely the north face of the wall excavated this week.

While this is heartening, we still don’t quite understand how a wall at this orientation joined with the east and west walls to produce a fortified enceinte. It seems like the walls on the eastern and western flanks extended further north than the north fortification wall. We know that a rock cut fosse or taphros (basically a dry moat) complemented the wall along the northern flank of the fortification. Perhaps walls extending north from the northern wall on its east and west side served to force the enemy to cross the rock-cut moat by preventing them from circumventing the dry moat and attacking the north wall directly from the relatively level ground between the moat and the wall.

This trench is also producing some interesting finds, but more about that in another post…

Ancient Archaeology

As I thought a bit about the archaeological remains left behind by modern archaeologists, we cleaned a scarp produced by looters to reveal clear evidence for another archaeological event in the same area.

The photo below shows the remains of a pit dug at some point that provided an excavator (of some description with access to the tomb). If you look carefully at the area between the dotted lines in the photograph below, you can see a series of stones and pot sherds oriented in a consistent direction. This indicates that the hole was probably filled in a single or closely related series of taphonomic processes. (In other words, the dirt in this earlier excavated area was probably filled in through something like erosion).

You can probably also see that the fill in the area is a different color than that to its right.

(It was a bit challenging to get a good photo of this because immediately behind me to the west was a 8 m drop into a pricker bush.)

We’re hoping that the careful excavation of this deposit will tell us something about past field work at our site. We know that Luigi Palma Di Cesnola excavated some tombs near or on our site in the 19th century. Perhaps this is the remains of his work.

Tracking the First Days of PKAP12

Even the most hardened post-structure, post-processual, reflexive, archaeologist can succumb (in a moment of epistemological weakness) to the giddiness of discovery. We can talk endlessly about how we create landscapes, imagine pasts, and define significance, but when the trowel meets the earth and a trench produces something COOL, we still gather around to see what the ground will reveal. (One of the best things about being the director of the project is the ability to drop everything and race around our site to the most interesting (and, inevitably, problematic) situations.

The daily routine of archaeology, however, tends to attract less of an audience.

It’s the daily routine of archaeology that leaves its inevitable marks on the landscape. (On Cyprus, it’s tempting to compare the massive spoil heaps produced by the mining industry to the mounds produced by trenches). The paths linking our various trenches are one of the most striking ways that inscribe their routines upon the landscape.

Gearing Up for Excavation at PKAP12

So far the PKAP 2012 season has been a bit start and stop owing to the schedule of the British firing range and problems with our total station. As of tomorrow, however, we feel pretty good that we can begin our first days of intensive excavation. Because of the interrupted schedule we’re all bracing for a fairly intense field season in which long days of excavation alternate with frustrating interruptions.

For now, however, frustrations will take the back seat to excavation, and our intrepid group of trench supervisors have prepared their trenches for excavation. The field atop Vigla has been mowed, the trenches planned, and the teams assigned. All that’s left to do now is actually breaking ground.

PKAP 2012: Left Behind

Everything in Mediterranean Archaeology is better when you’re sick. The only time I get to go into the field is when there was when the team needed someone to do something so boring that no healthy person should be subjected to it.

So this morning, after reporting a metal detectorist to the local police, we worked to set up the total station. The challenge of this was to establish the total station in relation to our existing site plan established by 5 years of intensive GPS survey. After a few false starts, I think we’re close to working this out.

UND M.A. alumni Aaron Barth (left) and Brandon Olson (at the Total Station)

Fortunately, UND alumnus Brandon Olson (and current Boston University Ph.D. candidate) was willing to be patient with the total station and surf through myriad settings to figure out how to get it set up for on the height of Vigla. It is good to have competent and willing team members.

Since I did not venture out into the field after lunch – as I try to manage my cold – I worked to get things set up for our first day in the museum where we are going to spend some quality time reviewing the Hellenistic pottery from the area that we plan to excavate later in the week.

PKAP 2012 First Day Challenges

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

What could this possibly mean in real space?

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

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

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

Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Prospects for the Summer of 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, stay tuned!

Introduction to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Survey Volume: Connectivity and Intensification

Over the last week or so I’ve been working on writing the introduction to the publication of our survey work at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP). I have never written an introduction for a volume like this so David Pettegrew gently nudged me to write on the two issues that have most informed our work: connectivity of sites across the Mediterranean and intensification of survey methods. 

The former derives from Horden and Purcell’s work, The Corrupting Sea (2000). The first five chapters of this book argue for a new way to see the Mediterranean based on a dense network of interconnected microregions. A microregion is an area defined by the interplay between the available environmental resources and human efforts to exploit these resources. For Horden and Purcell these microregions are the key constitutive elements of the Mediterranean world. Their connection to other microregions, however, is what allows them to become the locus for human activities. Small scale trade provided by cabotage and other informal types of communication and travel forms the vital links to other microregions. These links ensure that each microregion has economic outlets, social insurance against local environmental risks, and access to larger social and political institutions. 

The site of Pyla-Koutsopetria corresponds to a microregion as we have been able to recognize a modest set of environmental resources ranging from an small embayment to easily quarried stone, a defensible topography, a location at the periphery of political power on the island, and access to key land routes through the area. These resources provided a context for the responses from the people who made this area home for over 3000 years. These responses – which readers of this blog undoubtedly know – ranged from fortifications to the distinct forms of engagement with trans-Mediterranean markets, hybridized religious sanctuaries, and economic prosperity.

Horden and Purcell do not argue for a specific method for the documenting and studying of microregions. Scholars have argued for quite some time that intensive pedestrian survey provides an ideal tool for documenting the human response to their environment of the regional scale. While the differences between region (as defined by intensive pedestrian survey project) and mircoregions (as defined by Horden and Purcell) remains a bit opaque, we argue that the gradual intensification of pedestrian survey methods in the Mediterranean have made this technique well-suited for the documentation of trends over areas larger than those susceptible to excavation, but smaller than the a region of several hundred square kilometers.

Much of our discussions on the ground in Cyprus have centered on how we should adjust our methods to document a dense scatter of artifacts that extends for over 40 ha set in a study area of close to 200 ha. In the end, we attempted to balance the need to collect a robust and representative sample of the material on the group against the need to avoid the inefficient collection of redundant or meaningless data. We created units that were either 40 x 40 or 80 x 80 meters in size depending on artifact densities. These units became the primary space for sampling the artifact assemblages on the surface of the ground. In effect, each unit became a context for a specific sample that we could then document in detail and in an efficient way. These units were significantly smaller than those typically used my a regional survey project, but at the same time larger than the most intensive “site based” survey methods designed to document a single village, villa, or fortification. 

By adjusting the methods of intensive pedestrian survey to the scale of the microregion we were successful in documenting in a rigorous and systematic way the significant surface assemblage present in the Pyla-Koutsopetria microregion. We also followed recent trends toward increasing the intensity of survey methods to capture intrasite variations, difficult to recognize periods and artifact types, and the furtive traces of short term or low intensity human activities on the ground.

We hope our volume, which is very close to being complete, will demonstrate that at least for our site, intensive survey methods can bring to light the dynamic complexity of Mediterranean microregions. 

The Realities of Archaeological Data from Small Projects

Over the weekend, I devoted some thought to a call for papers for a joint colloquium at next years Archaeological Institute of America/American Philological Association meeting. The colloquium is entitled: “Managing Archaeological Data in the Digital Age: Best Practices and Realities” and it sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology of Greece Interest Group and the Forum for Classics, Libraries, and Scholarly Communications. That’s a mouthful.

David Pettegrew and I were nudged to propose a paper that looks at some of the unique challenges facing small projects like our Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus.  Our project was new in 2003, documented an archaeological assemblage that was largely independent of earlier work at the site or in the region, and lacked substantial institutional support for custom application development or cyber-infrastructure. In these areas, I suspect, that our project was similar to many smaller archaeological projects in the Mediterranean and my hope is that we should be able to generalize from our case study in three key areas.

First, whereas larger projects can create elaborate, bespoke applications and interfaces to collect and disseminate archaeological data, small projects tend to use more off-the-shelf components for data capture, organization, and analysis. As a result, there is the possibility that small project data get tied up more easily in proprietary software formats and require a greater degree of post-processing to produce archival collections. Small projects can often find themselves in situations where they have privileged immediate utility over  commitment to complex, platform agnostic best practices.

Second, large projects have led the way in creating highly-visible, longterm digital archives for their data. Small projects, in contrast, rarely have the resources to invest in longterm data storage and maintenance. Many small and mid-sized universities continue to lack the necessary in-house cyber-infrastructure and the number and diversity of potential external solutions – from both private foundation initiatives and major research centers and universities – present a bewildering array of options. The key concerns for our small project is ease in data transfer, long-term integrity of the archive, and accessibility. The archive has to be a place where other scholars know to seek out archaeological data from small projects as the future value of smaller datasets will often come from its availability for larger comparative or synthetic studies. The more other scholars place smaller project datasets in a broader context, the more significant that results of small-scale intensive fieldwork become. Where small projects should archive their data and how existing institutions can support these practices in ways to make small project data visible and useful remain open issues without simple answers.

Finally, over the past 20 years there are persistent conversations regarding the value of data standards in archaeology. The responses to these conversations are predictable. Some projects value the utility of their own data formats, terminologies, and ontologies arguing that all data serves best to contribute to existing archives and to enjoy compatibility with longstanding, often local, practices. Our small project, in contrast, tended to produce data that answered a particular, limited set of research questions and lacked any obvious and practical obligation to longstanding data conventions. As a result, we employed a vocabulary that was consistent with a larger project on the island – the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project and an established American excavation – Corinth Excavations. Our point is not to recommend that all projects conform to this particular standard, but rather to point out that our project conformed to these two standards in an effort to make our data more accessible for comparison and more immediately comprehensible to scholars not familiar with our particular procedures and methods.

The future will judge the value of the data produced by small project by its persistent utility.

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.