Patronage and Reception in the Monumental Architecture of Early Christian Greece

For the past two weeks I’ve been preparing a working draft of the paper that I’ll deliver at the 2012 Institute of European and Mediterranean Archaeology Conference: Approaching Monumentality in the Archaeological Record next week in Buffalo, New York.

My initial plans had been to bring together the growing interest in monumentality among Mediterranean archaeologists (particularly those who study the Bronze and Iron Age) and the study of Early Christian monuments. Then I decided that as the only archaeologist at the conference working specifically on Late Antique and Early Christian monuments, I should be more general. Then I tried to do both, and I am not sure that this paper succeeded at doing either. 

The paper argues that the monumental space of the nearly-ubiquitous, basilica style churches in Greece provides a place where the clergy and laity negotiated a new form of Christian authority through ritual and architecture limits on access, patronage practices, and the form and fabric of Early Christian architecture. Rather than being a sign of Christianization or a mark of ecclesiastical authority in the landscape, the church building became a locus for the intersection of competing (and ultimately hybridizing) discourses of power.    

I suspect that folks who have read on monumentality in the pre-modern Mediterranean will see the influences of that discourse on my paper. At the same time, I suspect that my observation on Early Christian architecture in general will appear rather uninspiring. Finally, people might notice that this paper could be profitably read with two other papers on Early Christian Greece which share an interest in the process of Christianization, hybridity, ritual, and authority in the architecture (here and here).

As you’ll also notice, the bibliography is not yet attached and some of the citations are incomplete. It is, however, a working paper and largely complete in terms of argument and organization. Feedback is welcome as always:

View this document on Scribd

Stay Tuned!

(It’s spring break and I’m taking the day off.)

2011 in Review from WordPress

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 22,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 8 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Problematizing Peasants in the Corinthian Countryside

As readers of this blog know, David Pettegrew and I are working on a paper on peasants in the Corinthian countryside. We’ll give the paper at the 113th AIA/APA Joint Annual Meeting in early January in Philadelphia (or at least David will!) in a panel organized by Kim Bowes and Cam Grey.  I’ve been mulling ideas for the last few months and posting various bits and pieces here.

Today, I thought I’d post some fragments of an introduction and a case study.  It is important to note that this is a very early draft and that once David makes his contribution it is impossible that the entire paper will look quite different. He gets the final say on content, organization, and problematique, since he is actually delivering the paper.

Introduction:

The term peasant presents a uniquely problematic opportunity for archaeologists.  The concept of a peasant derives from an understandings of the premodern economy which assumes that there must be individuals whose primary role in society is to produce of agricultural surplus to support those who are not involved in food production. In this system, peasants rarely control or owned their own land, produced little capital, and tended to approach agricultural production through a series of highly-localized, risk-adverse, subsistence practices. In this admittedly broad definition, the peasant is a highly local manifestation of an generalized abstract category. They appear throughout the world and are central to Maxian interpretations of pre-modern economic systems.

The existence, then, of peasants as a diachronic, trans-national, ready-made analytical category has exerted an understandable attraction to archaeologists.  The most sophisticated study of the ancient Greek peasant is Thomas Gallant’s book, Risk and Survival in ancient Greece, where he unpacks the  potential for applying the peasant as an analytical category to the material culture of ancient and medieval Mediterranean.

As with any analytical category, however, applying the concept of the peasant to the ancient world involves some widely recognized risks, some of which are particularly problematic in the history of ancient and modern Greece. For example, the temptation to apply diachronic, comparisons between ancient and modern peasants is particularly fraught in Greece because such comparisons have played such an important role in arguments for a persistent Greek national identity. The Greek peasant stood both outside of time as the persistent locus of Greekness, or, in a more condescending view, the persistence of rural peasant in Greece marked it out as a nation unprepared for full integration into the modern global economy. In an effort to resolve the latter view, in particular, recent archaeological work in Greece has identified the peasant –  (ironically) both ancient and modern – as the dynamic creator of a “contingent countryside” and challenged any view of peasants that regarded their economic position as isolated, static, or persistent.

The challenge to understanding the presence of peasants in the Corinthian landscape, then, is as much a question of the value of the peasant as an analytical category (what exactly should a peasant look like?) as a question of understanding the material culture of Greek countryside. In short, we must determine what a peasant is at the same time as we identify the remains of a particular form of economic relationships and agricultural practices in the landscape.

Case Studies:

To make our assumptions clear, we might begin this challenge by looking at a rural settlement called Lakka Skoutara in the southeastern corner of the Corinthia. This settlement consists of over a dozen late 19th to early 20th century Balkan style long-houses scattered about a crossroad set in a mountain hollow some 7 km east of the major village of Sophiko and 5 km west of the small harbor at Korphos. By-passed by the modern roads in the area and filled with swarms of stinging bees and biting flies, this cluster of houses is neither historically significant nor unique in the region. The material signature of the late 19th and early 20th century activities at the site includes roof tiles, some fine wares, various utility and kitchen wares, as well as evidence for the primary production of agriculture such as large built alonia (or threshing floors), numerous cisterns, and terrace walls. The terrace walls and alonia, at least one of which appears to predate the remains of the earliest visible house in the area, indicate that the grain production was the central concern for region. A small, single aisled church stands amidst the fields anchoring the place within the sacred topography of the region.  Today, the valley is filled with olive trees and the rapidly expansion of pine forests has taken over terraced fields and shows the scars of resin production. Today, some of the houses serve as storage during olive harvest, rural getaways for older villagers, or stopping places for shepherds and their diminishing herds of goats; others slowly collapse.  Plastic containers, metal tools and drums, and fragments of ceramics occupy a complex landscape which straddles a practices that range from modern, subsidized cash farming to various levels of engagement with the local, regional, and even global economy.

Interviews with several individuals who lived and worked in Lakka Skoutara reveal the contingent character of the Lakka. During times of difficulty – like World War 2 – the valley saw year around occupation. In other times, residents in the village of Sophiko resided in the valley when they worked the fields but lived most of the year in the village.  The assemblages associated with activities in the village provide offer little to distinguish between seasonal and full time habitation.  The long houses themselves could appear in a village or alone in the countryside. Even today, the sagging wooden roofs and splaying mud mortar walls are protected by assorted roof tiles of various dates, fabrics, places of production, and shapes. In other words, the evidence for peasants in the countryside conflates a series of past practices and reveal little in terms of the economic structures that define the category.

The problematized peasants of the modern landscape can cast a revealing shadow back on the countryside of the central Isthmus. Using similar methods to the survey of Lakka Skoutara, the survey of the central Isthmus revealed a similar cluster of activity around the so-called site of Cromna.  As we have argued elsewhere, this high density scatter of pottery across the central Isthmus represents a series of overlapping clusters of activity ranging in date from the Archaic to the Late Roman period…

********

So that’s where we are at the moment. We have around 1000 more words to think about the ancient peasant using the problematized model that we created for Lakka Skoutara. We’ve been reading our Eric Wolf on peasants (for proof) and reveling in our reading of James C. Scott (especially his brilliant Moral Economy of the Peasant and his The Art of Not Being Governed). How did I miss this stuff in graduate school? It has blown my mind.

The Substance of the Syllabus

I’ve been thinking about how I run a digital history practicum lately and considering how my experiences in this laboratory course can inform how I teach in more traditional courses. Recently I received a comment on a post that I cross-posted with my own blog, regarding my decisions to go without a syllabus in my digital history practicum.  The well-meaning commenter seemed appalled that I did not have a syllabus and went so far to insist that I “owed the students” a syllabus.

This got me thinking.

It’s not that I didn’t think about making a syllabus or couldn’t be bothered to do it for this class. Instead, I decided that the course was not a traditional course and the goals associated with the course divided evenly between learning by practice and a well-defined goal independent of the learning process.  The course had as a client the Chester Fritz Library and the success of the course dependent in part on the success in putting together a digital history collection and various online exhibits for the library. 

So at the start of the class, instead of circulating a syllabus, the class of four graduate students met and discussed the various expectations and deadlines for various parts of our project. As a result of this discussion, the class itself created an informal syllabus. Since then, we have mostly held to the various deadlines, although I am not convinced that we did as well with the various expectations that involved parties had for the class. 

I will admit that this course is a unique case, the students are almost all graduate students and advanced graduate students at that. We met informally and cultivated a flexible, collegial atmosphere rather than one informed by the traditional teacher – student dyad of authority. 

I had lunch last week with my fellow Teaching Thursday editor, Mick Beltz. Over some sandwiches we discussed the tendency toward contractual understandings of syllabi among students and the rise of the “student as customer” mentality.  We speculated about a  slippery slope where the student as customer arrives in our classroom expecting a precise definition of what it is that they will learn, how much better it will make them, and what the eventual value of this knowledge will be on future earnings and happiness. The quantitative and qualitative character of the imparted knowledge is girded about by a contractual syllabus and a series of rigid rubrics and standardized assessment methods that track the students’ progress through a series of environments arranged like a decentralized assembly line designed to produce a perfected person, a qualified employee, and a happy customer. While we all agree that some parts of this model are inevitable or even intrinsic in how higher education has been conceptualized in the US, the reality of this increasingly commodified view of the educational experience is depressing and limits our ability to adapt to a dynamic classroom environment, disrupt the student-teach dyad, and challenge authority.

In fact, as a result of our conversation, I began to wonder whether the syllabus does more to create the contractual and consumerist attitude by students toward their education than almost anything else. It immediately places the faculty member in the position of someone who owes the students something.  I always imagine the syllabus as a document that basically tells the students that I have something distinct and material to impart and sets their expectations of my performance. Like a contract with a local company, the student is put in the position of making sure that I deliver on the goods that my syllabus/contract promised. 

It wasn’t until my conversations with Mick, that I remembered my first experiment with unconventional syllabus writing. In my Latin 202 course last semester, I wrote a one page syllabus with some vague learning goals. (Something along the lines of “Learn Latin gooder” or “to engooden your knowledge of the Latin language.”)  I did this because I was not entirely confident with the level of preparation the students had or my own abilities to “engooden” their Latin.  Over the course of the class, we discussed various possible assignments re-arranged the value of various successful and failed assessment activities, and established together expectations of weekly work.  This was successful (mostly) because it created an environment where we could adapt the class continuously to our performance. I remember being encouraged by discovering that I am not the only one who approached my classes in this way.

For my digital history practicum, I anticipated that advanced graduate students might see the syllabus as redundant and perhaps condescending. The goals of the course came as much from our conversations with our “client” (the library) as from what the students wanted or what I expected them to learn. In other words, the syllabus became redundant in an environment where the students knew that they had to learn to complete a task.

This kind of environment, of course, simulates life. As the students in the class look ahead to writing their dissertations, they will likely discover that this process does not come with a syllabus. Moreover, when they write their first scholarly articles, there are no deadlines, learning goals, assessments, or rubrics that constrain what they do or document what they learn.  Even outside of the comfy confines of the academy, the students will inevitably discover that life does not offer syllabi. Success, happiness, and fulfillment, do not come by fulfilling the obligations set out on a sheet of paper.

Do syllabi do more harm than good?

Cross-posted to Teaching Thursday.

Why no one saved an old church

A team from Bobbi Hepper Olson’s architectural firm begins to illustrate the church at 3rd and Walnut St. today.  She’s been willing to take on this task a discount in the name of historic preservation. I have also reached an agreement with a doctoral student at the University of North Dakota to write a short history of the building and its congregation. We’ll publish the study of the church and the drawings of the building with the support of the Grand Forks Community Land Trust and the Cyprus Research Fund at the University of North Dakota.

Stay tuned for some photographs

While it feels good to do our part in preserving the memory of this building, it has troubled me that the building itself cannot be saved. I have heard the proximate causes for the decision to “mitigate” (in local lingo) the building which range from the lack of parking, to structural problems, the difficulty bringing the building up to code, and the idea that many people “tried hard enough” to save it.  These causes, however, all seem to me to be temporizing, ex post facto justifications for the decision to demolish the building. After all, zoning and code variances exist to allow historic neighborhood to retain their character and structural problems in wood-framed structures rarely pose insurmountable problems (farmers, for example, often re-roof dilapidated barns).

I’d like to offer three observations on why this church is not going to be saved. Most of these have come from conversations with Chris Price, the doctoral student who is working to document the church and its congregation.

1. The church is hidden. The church sits on a one-way street with mature trees that obscure its steeple. The church lacks any substantial setback from the road or sidewalk which makes it difficult to distinguish from the residential buildings surrounding it. Car traffic down these roads can easily pass the church without noticing it. In fact, most people I tell about the building do not even know that it is there and many say that even when looking for it they pass it by at first without noticing. These Google Street View screen shots make the point better than my description.

This picture shows the view from along Walnut Street. The church is the last building on the right.

This picture show the view from along 3rd where you can notice the steeply running parallel to the telephone poll just right of center.

It hasn’t helped, of course, the church has remained empty since 1997 so not only is it occluded from view physically, but also socially. My wife and I walk along Walnut to get to restaurants downtown and for a traveller down Walnut on foot, the church is a distinct landmark.

2. The church shares its basic fabric with the neighborhood. Unlike almost every other church in town, the 3rd and Walnut church shares its basic fabric with its neighborhood.  The church is wood-framed, has a steeply-pitched roof and domestic style windows, and sits on a standard parcel of land. At sometime in the last 50 years, aluminum siding was added covering its original wood siding and further blending it with updated domestic architecture in the area. The church makes only one concession to pretense: its English Steeple.

While local residents have done all they can to preserve the domestic architecture of the Near South Side, there is a clear and common preference for monumentality.  After all, many people see the monumental buildings and more elaborate homes as defining the historic character of neighborhoods. The everyday character of the church and its easy blending with the more modest, turn of the century domestic architecture make it part of the fabric of the community while also paradoxically making the building less unique in terms of its preservation value.

3. The social and economic character of the building and its congregations. For this observation, I credit Chris Price who observed that the wood-framed churches in Grand Forks built around the turn of the century were predominantly immigrant churches. They typically served newly arrived Scandinavian congregations rather than the earlier Anglo settlers of the area.

These congregations tended to have less access to community wealth and to meet in wood-framed structures at the time when many of the more established groups had begun to upgrade their churches to stone or brick (or at least stone or brick facing on wood frames).  The modest parcel of land nestled amidst residential buildings and without much pretense for monumental presentation not only reflected the religious values of the austere, low-church Hauge Synod Lutherans, but also reflected the limited access to resources.

Even today, the church stand amidst modest dwellings many of which are now rental properties and its appearance and location set it apart from the more monumental churches in the community. At the turn of the century, such “neighborhood style” churches served new congregations which eventually abandoned them for more monumental churches as these groups established themselves in the community. In many cases, the old wood-framed churches were turned over to new arrivals or Christian groups just as today. In fact, the oldest standing church in town was originally build to house the (apparently) well-to-do Christian Science congregation in Grand Forks, and today houses a substantial Pentecostal congregation (who, in turn, has out grown the building and will move on to a new building in the near future).

 

Punk Rock, Materiality, and Time

Crossposted to Punk Archaeology

I spent part of the weekend doing three things: learning how to make pasta with my new pasta maker, listening to low-fi punk, and reading Kathleen Davis’s Periodization and Sovereignty (Penn 2008). I am not sure that I learned much applicable to this blog from making pasta (although it was delicious last night at dinner), but low-fi punk, a short Twitter exchange, and Davis’s book did bring together some ideas that I had been meaning for some time to post to our semi-dormant Punk Archaeology blog.

The low-fi sound that has become popular thanks in large part to bands like the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and other purveyors of so-called Punk Blues positions itself as an antidote to the austere, “over-produced” stylings of contemporary pop music.  (Recently, I’ve been hanging out with the album “GB City” by Bass Drum of Death, but I also listened to Soledad Brothers self titles solo album and their more polished 2006 offering The Hardest Rock. My original idea for a post was to compare the low-fi, thoroughly average sound of “GB City” to the produced sound of Arcade Fire’s “Suburbs”, but that seemed too easy). The sound harkens back to garage rock and rough live albums produced in make shift recording studies on 4 and 8 track recording machines.  Low-fi recordings replaced the spaceless character of the recording study with the gritty and flawed presence of the garage, the basement, or the warehouse. Echoing and distorted vocal tracks compete for space against raw guitars and abusive drums. The best low-fi captures something of a hastily-arranged live recording without actually being anywhere in particular. Low-fi comes from anyone’s basement, garage, or abandoned strip mall.  It embodies marginal (maybe even abandoned) spaces (it’s not surprising that Detroit has become a Mecca of low-fi sound) and pushes out music that speaks to haste, temporary accommodations, and immediacy without specificity.

With the advent of digital music, low-fi has projected the materiality of its sound by producing vinyl LPs or even cassette tapes.  The sonic texture of the 8-track recorder in the basement or garage comes packaged in neatly anachronistic forms that insists upon a material presence even more physical than the music itself.  A friend of mine (on Twitter ironically enough!) suggested a track from an Oblivian’s album recently. When I asked whether she could share the track with me, she told me that she only had it on vinyl! So the grounding of low-fi music in a time and place moves from the practice of recording and to its materiality as a recorded product. Digital music, which can exist simultaneously in an infinite number of places resists any effort to impose physicality (and with music moving to “the cloud” in the very near future the location of music recordings will become all the more ambiguous).

The link between the physical sound of the low-fi recording and its circulation in physical media positions low-fi (and punk) to resist (in an ironic way, to be sure) the ephemeral character of so much “cultural” production today. From blogs and ebooks to musings in the indistinct space of social media, the viral distribution of music and video, and claims of a reimagined-ascetic minimalism, the space or even material nature of cultural production is collapsing in on itself.  In the future (bee-boop-boop-boop-beep), the diagnostic rims of Late Roman fine ware vessels will be stray bits of sound, text, or video clinging to the deteriorating disks of disused servers or discarded along with iPods and Kindles in modern middens.  Unlike the vinyl LP or even the (comparatively) primitive cassette tape, there is little on the iPod or Kindle that links it physically to the music or text stored on the device. Moreover, the use of these devices  do not cause the music or text to deteriorate.

So, I sat around this weekend, grading papers, making pasta, reading Kathleen Davis’ book, and listening to the space of low-fi sound spooling off a hard drive and running through my stereo. I could listen to it as much as I wanted and wherever I wanted.

Pompeii in the 21st Century Talk May 4

I am pretty excited to announce that Prof. Eric Poehler will visit campus on May 4th and give a talk entitled: “Pompeii in the 21st Century”.  The talk will be in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library at 6 pm in the evening.

Here’s an abstract for his talk:

How does one ask a novel question about a site that has been studied, nearly continuously for over 250 years? How does one come to new realizations when almost all new excavation is not permitted? This is the challenge for Pompeian scholars in the 21st century, finding what the great minds of the past overlooked without being able to add large sets of new evidence. Paradoxically, a solution has been propelled by the moratorium on excavation into the areas still buried by ash of Vesuvius. Unable to discover new parts of the city, archaeologists turned to examine those parts already uncovered in both greater detail and in a wider context. They have found a goldmine of information about Roman urbanism and municipal administration generally as well as the particular (and peculiar) history of Pompeii’s development from the earliest, scant traces in the Bronze Age to its destruction in AD 79 and even beyond to the city’s rediscovery in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The resurgence in Pompeian studies in the last 20 years has not merely benefited from the birth of the information age, it has embraced it often at a deep methodological level. Pioneering works of the 1990s set the stage for a statistical approach to the vast and untapped urban dataset, driving a new paradigm in historical argument about the site. Since 2000, the explosion of personal computing power – especially in commercial statistical, database, and spatial tools – has expanded the ways we approach these questions from counting and cataloging aspects of the urban fabric to using the space of the city itself to derive new visualizations, new queries and new syntheses. The 2011 season of the Pompeii Quadriporticus Project will wholy replace the trowel, drawing board and tape measure with the iPad, photogrammetry, and Geographical Information Systems software. Within 10 years these tools will also put entire libraries of reference material at our fingertips while inside the ancient city, dissolving the the distinction between fieldwork and library work.

Professor Poehler teaches at the University of Massachusetts but has local roots. He did his undergraduate work at Bemidji State University before heading to the University of Chicago and then University of Virginia for his Ph.D.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with Eric at the site of Isthmia in Greece where he and a team from the University of Cincinnati are working to reconstruct the mysterious and confusing East Field.  He’s one of the up and coming stars in the field of Mediterranean Archaeology.

His visit to campus is sponsored by Department of History, the Cyprus Research Fund, and the Working Group in Digital and New Media.