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.

Method and Material from a Survey on Antikythera

One of my first opportunities to shape the research directions of a project came when David Pettegrew and I were allowed to help design the survey methods and goals of Australian Paleochora Kythera Archaeological Survey. I am pretty sure we didn’t do anything marvelous there, but I did meet my wife on that project. So, any work done on Kythera or in its general vicinity has continued to pique my interest over the years. The survey conducted by Andrew Bevan and his team on the island of Antikythera – a mere speck in the Mediterranean on the main sailing route between Kythera and Crete – has attracted my attention of late not only because he conducted it on a Mediterranean island, but also because Bevan (and co.) are among the most sophisticated survey archaeologist in the business right now.

In an article slated to appear in Archaeometry, Bevan and a group of collaborators proposed some new ways of measuring chronological uncertainty in intensive survey (here’s a preprint (pdf)). This is a long standing and vexing issue for survey archaeologists where artifacts datable only to broad or multiple periods are common. The absence of stratigraphy makes it impossible to propose narrower dates for these objects, so a number of strategies have developed to document the uncertainly associated with these objects. The Chronotype system, that we have employed at both the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) and, in Cyprus at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) has provided one method for documenting artifacts of uncertain date. The Chronotype systems has a wide range of roughly hierarchical chronological categories into which we can group objects. For example, an artifact could be “Late Roman” or “Roman” or “Roman-Medieval” or even “Post-Prehistoric”.  When we assign an artifact to one of these categories we are assuming that the artifact could appear with equal probability in any year (decade or century) in that chronological span. Of course, in practice, we know that artifact are unlikely to appear with equal probability in each decade or century, but this does provide a way to smooth chronological data and, when mapped across the landscape, it can help identify areas where handfuls of specifically dated artifacts appear alongside larger quantities of artifacts only datable to broad periods. Additional problems with this system, however, arise when artifacts can appear, for example, in one of two non-continuous periods (Hellenistic OR Late Roman).

Bevan and his colleagues have suggested a system where the ceramicist assigns a probability to each period in which an artifact might appear. An artifact datable in the Chronotype system to a broad period like Roman might appear in Bevan’s system as: 10% Early Roman, 30% Middle Roman, 60% Late Roman. This more subtle way of documenting the probability of an artifact appearing in any given period not only more accurately represents the way ceramicists analyze pottery, but also allows for artifacts appearing in nonconsecutive periods. For example, they noted that certain kinds of chunky prehistoric pottery could date with a fairly good probability to the Bronze Age, but might also date to the Medieval period. Moreover, this method allows for particular classes of artifacts to be identified by their distinct statistical relationships between periods and artifacts identified through these statistical measures could then by plotted spatially. The resulting maps would indicate where similar kinds of localized (un)certainties would appear.

Bevan notes that this system also allows for multiple readings of the same group of artifacts by different ceramicists who could assign different levels of chronological uncertainty to each batch of artifacts. This is particularly useful for types of artifacts that could date to discontinuous periods like our prehistoric or Medieval coarse wares.

(As an aside, its funny to note that Tim Gregory long had a category of “certainty” on his recording sheets. I think I made fun of it and claimed that the category was redundant within the “rules” of the Chronotype system. Now I wonder whether Prof. Gregory continued to keep that category … )

This past year the Antikythera team published the Roman period material from their survey in the Annual of the British School at Athens (106 (2011), 47-98): here’s a preprint (pdf) and here it is published form (pdf). While there is little evidence for the sophisticated system of probabilistic dating the assemblage of Late Roman material on the island is interesting to compare to our Late Roman material from Cyprus. The significant quantities of Phocaean fine ware from Antikythera find clear parallels with our assemblage at Pyla-Koutsopetria. It may reflect, as they Antikythera team has noted, the relatively late date for our Late Roman assemblage which was formed after the supply of the ubiquitous African Red Slip became attenuated.

It is also interesting to note the ratios of Late Roman 2 to Late Roman 1 amphora on Antikythera are almost reversed from ours on Cyprus. This is unsurprising, of course, since LR2 production sites are most likely in Greece or the Aegean and LR1 sites are in southern Asia Minor or Cyprus. The folks at Antikythera noted that LR1 amphora are commonly thought to transport wine, but they – like the LR2 amphoras – might have also served alternate household purposes like storing water or grain that led to their wide distribution across the island.

Finally, they suggest that the absence of material from the post-Late Antique period could indicate that the island was abandoned for a time prior to a Byzantine re-occupation. This fits well within the prevailing ancient (and modern narratives) for the chronology of settlement in the Aegean.

On-site and off-site at Pyla-Koustopetria: A Response to Chris Cloke’s Interpreting Ceramic Assemblages

Last week Chris Cloke generously shared some of his work with the pottery from the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project over at Corinthian Matters in a three part post. In a nutshell, he argued that there was evidence for manuring during Late Antiquity.

It’s a busy week, but I wanted to follow up on his suggestion that PKAP present some of its data to see whether we could detect similar trends. Our work at Pyla-Koustopetria, of course, is rather different in scope than the work of the NVAP. We focused on one, mid-sized, site rather than an entire region. Moreover, by Late Antiquity the built up area of our study area appears to have been rather large in relation to our overall study area.

Nevertheless, there is reason to think that the northern reaches of our study amount to an off-site zone. The distribution of tiles, for example, suggests that only the coastal zone of our study area had tiled buildings. (The tiny numbers in each unit represent the total number of Late Roman artifacts from each unit.)

Moreover, the distribution of fine and kitchen wares, most frequently associated with domestic activities appear to be concentrated in similar area.

In contrast, the distribution of coarse and utility wares, like amphora, extends of a much larger percentage of the study area.

Judging by these maps, it would appear that the northern part of our study area which comprised the coastal plateaus of Mavrospilos/Kazamas and Kokkinokremos saw a functionally different kind of activity than the coastal area. Cloke has suggested that the prevalence of less diagnostic sherds – and coarse and utility wares are almost be definition less diagnostic than fine and kitchen wares – might represent material scattered through manuring.

Cloke argue, however, that this is a product of smaller sherd size rather than a specific functional difference, and compares the percentages of diagnostic pottery from both on-site and off-site transects to demonstrate that similar proportions of diagnostic ceramics appear in both ceramics. Clearly, this pattern does not appear in the PKAP data.

Moreover, it does not appear that the average weight of the sherds varied in a consistent way across the PKAP study area.

The map above shows the average weight of Late Roman sherds (excluding tiles) across the study area. It is possible to imagine a slightly higher average sherd weight for the coastal units immediately below the height of Vigla in the left-center of the map, and a slightly lower average sherd weight for the material scattered to the north on the Mavrospilos/Kazamas plateau.

While this is slightly suggestive, I wonder, vaguely, whether this has something to do with the greater soil depth on coastal plain that “protects” sherds more. The plateau units tend to have thin soils with patches of exposed bedrock. This seems like a far more hostile environment for sherds and may have accounted for why they are more poorly preserved. In other words, the condition of the sherds has much more to do with post-depositional processes than how they were deposited.

I expect that David Pettegrew – the expert on survey site formation processes – might have some observations.

Crossposted to Corinthian Matters.

Three Abstracts for the 2012-2013 Archaeological Institute of America Lecture Program

I was invited next year to contribute to the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual lecture program. To help local chapter of the AIA decide whether my lectures would fit their needs, drawn an audience, and interest their members, I was asked to offer a few abstract on talks that I could give.

So I looked through my “works-out-of-progress” folders and concocted three abstracts from the various projects that continue to float about in my scholarly consciousness. They range from the accessible and popular to the technical and obscure and unresolved.

Here they are:

Ten Years at an Ancient Harbor in Cyprus

This lecture would consider the history and archaeology of the coastal site of Pyla-Koutsopetria on the south coast of Cyprus where a now in-filled ancient harbor served a community that prospered for over 1000 years.  While travelers and scholars had periodically visited the site and documented stray finds, including the infamous Luigi Palma di Cesnola, systematic work at the site did not begin until 2003 when the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project began a campaign of intensive survey, remote sensing, and excavation that documented an extensive area of habitation along the coast.  With a Iron Age sanctuary, a Hellenistic fortification, a Roman period olive press and town, and an Early Christian basilica, the coastal zone of Pyla village contains a startling assemblage of features common across the island of Cyprus during the historic period.  The high-density scatter of ceramic artifacts demonstrates the diversity of activities at the site and the wide range connections between the site and the wider Mediterranean world.

Between sea and mountain: the archaeology of a 20th century “small world”in the upland basins of the southeastern Korinthia

Between 2001 and 2009, a small team of archaeologists investigated a number of  geographically well-defined and fertile upland basins or poljes located between the villages of Sophiko and Korphos in the southeastern Korinthia. We conducted intensive pedestrian survey in the largest of these valleys, known as Lakka Skoutara, as part of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS). The results of this survey show that despite its seeming isolation, the valley supported human activities throughout antiquity. The most fascinating aspect of the valley, however, appears in more recent times when it supported a cluster of farmsteads and agricultural and pastoral activities. These small houses are now largely abandoned, but can nevertheless tell us a tremendous amount about the “small places” in the Greek countryside that played a vital role in the 20th century in the subsistence of its local population. The team documented the modern landscape of the valley through a series of regular visits, and these allowed up to observe the continued dynamism of changing land use patterns on a very small scale. In particular, we worked to document formation processes and life cycles of use, reuse, and abandonment connected with the modern structures in the valley. By combining archaeological survey with oral information obtained from local residents, we were able to reconstruct part of the landscape history of this small, low-density rural settlement and its relationship to the wider world.

Dream Archaeology

For over 1000 years excavators have relied upon dreams to guide them to hidden treasures, sacred buildings, and lost relics.  St. Helena’s excavations of fragments of the true cross and other stories of inventio inspired later Christian archaeologists to follow the inspiration of dream to find sacred relics. The practice was consistent and widespread enough to qualify as a form of Byzantine indigenous archaeology. In more recent times, excavators as revered as Anastasios Orlandos and Manolis Andronikos have recognized the influence of dreams on their own excavations. As Y. Hamilakis and C. Stewart have shown in their recent work that archaeological dreams played a key role in the developing Greek national consciousness. They do not, however, link these modern archaeological dreams explicitly to Byzantine and Early Christian practices.  This paper will not necessarily establish an irrefutable connection between modern and Byzantine dreams or argue for the presence of some unconscious continuity. Instead, I will sketch the outlines of an indigenous archaeology in Byzantine times and consider how such pre-modern practices can influence our ideas of archaeological knowledge in more recent times.

Which would you pick?

 

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.

A Mid-sized Site in Sicily

This past week, I was all excited to get my annual copy of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. So far, the most exciting article in this year’s volume is the brief report by K. Bowes, M. Ghisleni, G. Francesco La Torre, and E. Vaccaro on the site of Sofiana/mansio Philosophiana in the hinterland of the Piazza Armerina.  The report describes recent work by a combined American and Italian team on the site of Sofiana. The site is located some 10 km south of the famous 4th century Piazza Armerina, and scholars have generally understood it to be some kind of service village or statio for the larger villa and located on its estate.

Excavation at the site in the 1980s and 1990s produced a domus, a bath, some cemeteries, and a later Christian basilica dating from the 1st to 4th centuries or so. The site extends for around 15 – 25 ha (at least according to the maps provided), and this would place it between the small sites like isolated farms and larger urbanized sites in the Mediterranean basin.  Work at the site, however, identified at least two grid orientations suggesting that the site did have some features – like a planned road system – typically associated with urban sites. The Italian-American team sought, in part, to expand the scale of work at Sofiana to understand the exact nature of places which would appear to share features of both rural and urban settlements and attempt to determine its function in the Sicilian landscape. To do this they used both intensive pedestrian survey and magnetometry to document surface and subsurface remains.

The relatively compact area of the site allowed the team to employ a rather intense form of pedestrian survey. The gridded the site into 10 x 10 squares in their GIS and then surveyed one of every three grid squares for a 30% sample. The teams collected all artifacts from the surveyed units to avoid biases associated with collecting diagnostic sherds (or chronotypes!).  They then plotted period specific artifact densities in their GIS using Kernel Density Estimates (KDE) to smooth their results across the entire site. We followed similar methods of surveying a slightly larger site at Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus; we opted for 20% sample based on 40 x 40 squares and collected chronotype samples from each grid square. Both surveys functioned at a similar resolution but my guess is that the Sofiana project produced far more pottery. The Sofiana project’s use of KDE smoothing produced convincing and easy to understand maps for each period at their site.

For a 2 km range beyond the core site, the Sofiana project conducted a more traditional, regional level intensive pedestrian survey over 280 ha.  Field walkers were spaced 8 m apart except when visibility was particular poor then they spaced their walkers at 5 m spacing.  We gently hinted at this technique in a 2006 article in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology and while they don’t seem to know about our work, it was great to see this method implemented.  They appeared to have sampled artifacts on the basis of “on-site” and “off-site” designations. As this is a preliminary report, they did not provide more information on their more regional survey, but I’d be curious to understand how they sampled for chronology and function.

They complemented their work at Sofiana with a magnetometry survey and some 32 test pits. The magnetometry and test pits demonstrated that some basic grid orientation seemed to exist at the site and some production of building material (particularly kilns for tiles).  They also provide a smoothed chronological profile for the site using Individual Weighted Means method which is a form of aoristic analysis (or vice versa, I’m not entirely sure). There is an obvious peak in activity at the site in the 4th through 6th centuries covering an area of 21 ha.  The site continues substantially even later.

This preliminary report provide only a hint as to what the authors think this site represents in the Late Roman countryside. On the one hand, the site is smaller than most of the small town on Sicily. On the other hand, the orientation and presence of at least some feature expected of urban areas (which tended to have administrative functions in the Roman world) place this site in the realm of the rural vicus, which could have some urban features but lacked clearly defined administrative roles in the Late Roman state. Such vici are good examples of the kind of third spaces recently discussed by Myrto Veikou for Byzantine settlement in Greece.  Large rural “agglomerations” like Sophiana with production, grid planning, and imported ceramics defy our understandings of the rural/urban distinction in the ancient world and interrupt any simple cultural, economic, or social model grounded in the simply in the administrative structure of the Late Roman state.  Categories like statio – or road side settlements – add even more complexity to how we imagine the ancient world. These sites can be rural (in fact, they are typically situated between urban sites), but they also can enjoy urban features.  The importance of Sicily to grain production toward the end of the Late Antiquity (especially after the fall of Egypt) might help us understand the continued prosperity of the site of Sophiana and its continued significance into the 7th century.

While I look forward to the final report on the work at this site, the preliminary report highlights so many of the crucial issues facing our understanding of the Late Roman countryside and settlement more broadly. As intensive survey allows us to document rigorously more and more rural space the old distinction between urban and rural breaks down offering new perspectives on the production of culture and society in the Late Antique world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-posted to Corinthian Matters.

Sampling the Byzantine Landscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corinth’s Byzantine Countryside

The distribution of Byzantine sites in Corinth’s immediate hinterland is poorly known. No Byzantine monuments exist in the Isthmia valley immediately to the east of the City of Corinth in contrast to the numerous Byzantine churches discovered during the early phases of excavation of the city center or the cluster of standing churches around the village of Sophiko to the south. The absence of any standing Byzantine remains might be an accident of preservation. It could also suggest that the immediate hinterland of Corinth had few nucleated settlements like monasteries and villages. It seems possible that Byzantine Corinthians lived in the city of Corinth, the village of Kenchreai, and perhaps a settlement centered on the eastern part of the Hexamilion wall near the long-abandoned Panhellenic sanctuary at Isthmia.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been working on analyzing the distribution of Byzantine pottery discovered during the work of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. In the chronological scheme used by the survey, material from the Byzantine period was divided into two periods: Early Medieval (700-1200) and Late Medieval (1200-1500). In the map below, the red triangles are the Early Medieval artifacts and the green are Late Medieval.

There are four main areas in the fertile plain east of the city of Corinth that show Early and Late Medieval ceramic material. One area may be associated with a now-destroyed church dedicated to Ag. Paraskevi. In a series of fields disturbed by plowing and recent construction, there is a complex and extensive assemblage of Early and Late Medieval material as well as a significant assemblage of Late Roman material. The assemblage included relatively common glazed finewares from the Early and Middle Byzantine period as well as table wares and utility wares. Some 2 km northwest of the Ay. Paraskevi assemblage, appears another cluster of pottery perhaps associated with ecclesiastical architecture. In a 100 square meter amidst architecture fragments suggesting monumental Christian architecture appear another similar scatter of Byzantine material which featured fineware, kitchen wares, utility vessels from both the Early and Late Medieval periods. As similar small assemblage appears on the steep slopes to the northwest of the Late Roman harbor of Kenchreai. In these units, another 200 square meter area produced a small scatter of Medieval material including finewares and utility wares. Finally, a deeply ploughed field at the base of Mt. Oneion measuring about 350 square meters produced an assembalge of Early Medieval and Late Medieval fine and ultility wares as well as a few sherds from the Venentian and Ottoman periods. Like the other scatters, this assemblage shows both Early and Late Medieval pottery with both table ware and utility wares.

The remarkable thing about these four little clusters of Byzantine pottery is how different the distribution was from period of earlier and later periods.  This is the same map showing Late Roman pottery.

This is a textbook example of a continuous carpet of artifacts and is typical of the Late Roman period throughout Greece. (For some critical comments on this see David Pettegrew’s “The Busy Countryside of Late Roman Corinth,” Hesperia 76 (2007), 743-784 for a PDF go here).

What is also remarkable is how different the distribution is from that of later periods.  The distribution of material from the Ottoman/Venetian period (1500-1800) for example does not overlap entirely with material from the Byzantine period.

It is only in the Early Modern period (1800-1960) where later material becomes an important component of the Byzantine sites, but this seems to be associated with a general expansion of activity in the Corinthian countryside. (For a more extensive discussion of this see T. E. Gregory, “Contrasting Impressions of Land Use in Early Modern Greece: The Eastern Corinthia and Kythera,” Hesperia Supplement 40 (2007), 173-198.)

This very preliminary analysis of the Byzantine material from EKAS resonates with recent studies of the Byzantine countryside in the Nemea Valley immediately to the south. (For this see E. Athanassopoulos, “ Landscape Archaeology in the Medieval Countryside: Settlement and Abandonment in the Nemea Region,” IJHA 14 (2010), 255-270.) Athanassopoulos suggested that the 12th and 13th century landscape of the Nemea valley clustered on arable land or on the lower slopes of valley sides (258). Moreover, the sites tended to represent small and medium scale agricultural production (261).

It is also important to realize that my brief analysis here is preliminary. Sanders has established the basic unreliability of most existing typologies and chronologies for pottery of this period as well as difficulties identifying artifacts datable to the Medieval period in general. A the same time, it is nevertheless striking that such pronounced clusters of Byzantine material would appear in the Corinthian landscape. More importantly, these clusters appear largely independent of the continuous carpet of Late Roman finds and the clusters of post-Byzantine material published by Gregory and, earlier, analyzed by Caraher.

Cross-posted to Corinthian Matters.

Pots to People in Late Roman Cyprus

I spent the last week contemplating Kristina Winther-Jacobsen’s new monograph: From Pots to People: A Ceramic Approach to the Archaeological Interpretation of Ploughsoil Assemblages in Late Roman Cyprus. (Peeters 2010).  This slim volume is an important contribution to not only the archaeology of Late Roman Cyprus, but also intensive pedestrian survey archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean.  Her analysis rests on the analysis of pottery from the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project (TAESP) which is a descendant of the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project (SCSP).  My project PKAP, is an ugly cousin of SCSP as well, and we both PKAP and TAESP approached intensive survey in similar ways.  Both projects recognized that intensive data collection was an essential first step in interpreting ploughsoil assemblages, both projects used version of the chonotype system to document the ceramic material from the field, and both projects placed significant emphasis on a transparent approach to our procedures, methods, and conclusions.  The biggest difference, is that TAESP was conducted on a regional scale, whereas PKAP sought to document a large coastal site and its immediate hinterland.

The central argument in her book is that Late Roman sites on Cyprus produce ceramic material in certain predictable ways.  The consistency in the relationship between light and heavy utility wares, table wares, cooking wares, and transport vessels allowed the author to draw conclusions regarding the function of the various sites and their relationship to wider productive landscape. From the TAESP survey area, Winther-Jacobsen identified farmsteads, mining settlements, an agro-church (a church that played a role in agricultural production), a seasonal settlement, and a market village. She reinforces her arguments for the utility of these settlement types through comparison with other projects on the island and in Greece.

As has become my practice, I am not going to offer a full review (although I think that I’ll probably divide my remarks on this important little book into two posts), but instead offer some observations on her methods and conclusions.

1. Formation Processes. The author paid particular attention to the way that formation processes contributed to the production of surface and ploughsoil assemblages and summarizes a good bit of relevant scholarship on these matters.  Here her work parallels some of the important contributions of David Pettegrew who argued that the full-range of discard behaviors, curation techniques, and natural and cultural activities contribute to the assemblage of material in the plough zone.  Framing the discussion of ploughsoil assemblages in the context of formation processes is vital to understanding the meaning and distribution of artifacts in the landscape.  Winther-Jacobsen makes some good observations regarding breakage rates, use, and discard practices of particular types of pottery suggesting that cooking wares, which are particularly common in her various assemblages, endured particularly difficult life-cycles with many opportunities for breakage and discard.  Heavier vessels (with the possible exception of transport amphora)  tended to be handled less frequently in the household, in contrast, would have had longer life-cycles and lower breakage rates making them appear less frequently in the ploughsoil assemblages.
2. Method and Procedure.  Winther-Jacobsen makes clear that the ceramicist and other field archaeologists participates in archaeological formation processes when the define and document an assemblage for analysis and interpretation. To this end, she includes a detailed meditation on her own sorting and analysis practices. While it is commendable that she recognize the archaeologist as another participant in the life-cycle of an object, I would have been keen to understand in a more specifc way how her practices – from sorting, to measuring, to documenting – had an impact on the kinds of analysis and interpretations found in her larger study.  Like many projects that recognize the importance of reflective practices, Winther-Jacobsen seems to stop just short of demonstrating the fundamentally arbitrary nature of “archaeological material”.  In other words, a cooking pot does not exist outside of the unique interaction between the ancient potter, the Late Roman cook, and 21st century archaeologist.
3. Typologies. Observing the arbitrary nature of archaeological knowledge, does not in any way detract from its meaning (except among scholars committed to increasingly tenuous views that privilege the rhetoric of objective).  The author understand that typologies are utilitarian things that facilitate the answering of particular questions. As a result, the team from TAESP modified the typology introduced by SCSP called the chronotype system.  I have blogged on the strengths and weaknesses of this method for documenting pottery endlessly over the past several years (just run a search over at the archive).  Whatever its weaknesses, its strength for our project has rested in two areas: 1. we are forced to identify each sherd that comes from the field and place it in some kind of chronological and roughly functional category; and 2. our dataset is in some way comparable to data collected by SCSP and the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey where the chronotype system was developed.  Winther-Jacobsen is clear that her efforts to refine the chronotype system eroded its comparability between projects.  In particular, her creation of three categories Transport Amphora, Heavy Utility Ware and Light Utility Ware created two types of pottery that incompatible with the implementation of the chronotype system on other projects where we tended to use Medium Coarse Ware and Coarse Ware to identify utility ware sherds.  While Winter-Jacobsen was obviously free sort her pottery however she wanted, it was odd that she didn’t make a greater effort to make her new chronotype categories “backward compatible” with similar categories from earlier chronotype projects.  This was particularly problematic because her argument rested, in part, on comparing her assemblage to projects elsewhere. For this to be meaningful, some allowance must be made to compensate for the different typologies.  The inherent flexibility of the chronotype system, which tends to parse assemblages into very fine categories, would seem to be ideal for this, but the author did not necessarily maximize this comparative potential in the book.
4. On-Site and Off-Site. While TAESP was a “siteless” survey project, Winther-Jacobsen’s dataset derived almost entirely from dense concentrations of material identified as sites.  On the one hand, this makes sense: she was interested in documenting and interpreting assemblages and sites produce sufficiently robust assemblages for interpretation.  On the other hand, the interpretation of sites has never really been a massive problem for survey archaeology projects.  Over the past 20 years, the more substantial issue has focused on how we understand off-site material. In fact, David Pettegrew’s efforts to link formation processes to ploughsoil assemblages had less to do with the interpretation of distinct sites in the landscape and more to do with how we understand the activities that produced off-site scatters.  In short, the “continuous carpet” of low to moderate density artifact scatters in the countryside represent a far more challenging set of formation processes and require a more sophisticated set of interpretative practices than the robust assemblages produced by high-density concentrations of material.
5. Scalability.  This difference between on-site and off-site scatters and their interpretation shines light on issues of scalability in the methods that the author advocates.  Winther-Jacobsen advocates for near total collection of material in order to produce assemblages susceptible to the kind of proportional analyses that she advocates in this book.  Various forms of total collection are common practice for most survey projects when documenting a site. For off-site scatters or massively extensive, high-density scatters like those encountered by PKAP on Cyprus, such time-consuming, storage-straining, analysis-intensive practices are simply not viable. Taking nothing away from the author’s careful typologies of sites, large-scale, “large site” scatters and the ubiquitous and monotonous extensive low and medium density scatters require some form of sampling technique if they are to be documented at all.  Any form of sampling will make problematic the proportional analysis of ceramic types that Winther-Jacobsen demonstrated because sampling will almost necessarily reduce the level of complexity present in the assemblage and create ambiguity in the relationship between the sample and the putative total assemblage present on the ground.

None of these issues should take away from the significance of Winther-Jacobsen’s book. It represents on of the most thorough and systematic treatments of the analysis of Late Roman material from the Eastern Mediterranean and establishes some valuable comparative standards that other projects will want to consider as they make the move from pots to people in their analysis.