Some More Thoughts on Student Writing

Last December, I wrote up some of my observations on undergraduate writing tendencies based on a stack of student papers from the fall 2011 semester. Having just graded over 150, 3 page introductory level student papers, I figured that I should update the list to reflect some of my new observations and to reinforce the validity of some of my older comments.

1. Capitalization. This remains among the most baffling trend in undergraduate writing. Over the past three or four years, I’ve seen a sustained decline in the use of proper punctuation. Students regularly forget to capitalize people’s names, proper places, and (perhaps less surprisingly) institutions. Some have suggested that this is the rise of “text message English” (or text message english) in which almost no words are capitalized. The argument against that, however, is the concomitant rise of random capitalization. In the most recent group of papers, I’ve seen the word History, Economy, and Politics capitalized. It’s baffling.

2. Fonts. Recently, I’ve started to notice that many papers turned into my feature different fonts in the same text. Sometimes it’s as inconspicuous as a different font in the footnotes or in a clearly “cut and paste” block quote. In other cases, the font will change mid sentence or paragraph. As our word processors become capable of doing more and more formatting and layout-oriented work, they increasingly burden the simple task of presenting text with distracting options that ironically produce a less appealing final product especially for inexperienced users. 

3. The Semicolon. Semicolons continue to be the bane of this generations’ writing. I have banned them in both my introductory and mid-level course, but they continue to make unwelcome appearances in both places. Students not only use them incorrectly (usually to link a complete sentence with a sentence fragment), but even when they do use them correctly they typically produce monstrous, wordily, and complex sentences that obscure meaning.

4. Contractions. I have banned the use of contractions in formal writing in all my classes. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Students are inexorably drawn to contracted words. I even explained that one could set one’s word processor to automatically change contractions into their non-contracted words, but they still appear throughout papers. 

5. In regards. This phrase is a new one to me, but it has appeared in numerous undergraduate papers this semester. It might be related to the tendency to use strangely anachronistic words and British-isms like amongst, whilst, and towards.  In 120 some papers, I counted “in regards” used 43 times in 28 papers.

I realize that language and styles of typography are ever changing, but sometimes I wish they’d change just a little more slowly and systematically in my students’ work.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It was another red morning and it was amusing to watch all the sailors take warning on their morning strolls. Let’s hope that it was all just precautionary and the grey skies give way to clear blue ones.

So as I watch the grey morning sky burn off to blue, I’ll offer a little gaggle of quick hits and varia:

• A nice comment over at Paperless Archaeology on our developing efforts to integrate iPad based data collection into our field procedures this summer. 
• My Bryn Mawr Classical Review of Yannis Lolos, Land of Sikyon: Archaeology and History of a Greek City-State.
• More on the AIA’s strange stance toward Open Access and the AIA president’s strange-ish response (h/t Dimitri Nakassis).
• The most famous ancient dump.
• Some fantastic first year reflections over at Teaching Thursday.
• Pretty cool insights into how the New York Times makes their cool charts.
• I spent time this spring developing a typology of man-camps for the Bakken Oil Patch in North Dakota. Hybrid types of man-camps have begun to materialize already. Check out this recent story on an indoor RV park (a hybrid of my Type 1 and Type 2 camp).
• Along similar lines, check out Prairie Pubic Television’s “Faces of the Oil Patch”.
• Were Depression Era Hoovervilles types of man-camps? Check them out here and here.
• Teaching very, very large classes.
• And a digital boot camp for humanities graduate students.
• Some fun advice for graduating seniors.
• What I’m reading: 10,000 History 101 Papers.
• What I’m listening to: Chimes of Freedom, The Songs of Bob Dylan.

Because you can never have enough GRANITOID.

 

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

The Story of Churchville

With the first volume of my new Grand Forks Community Land Trust Neighborhood History Series almost off the presses, Bret Weber and I have begun work on Volume 2. This volume will detail the history of the neighborhood called “Churchville” in Grand Forks. It is part of the Near Southside Historic District and ranks as among the first residential subdivisions of the city.

The Community Land Trust has received several properties in the area bounded on the east by Belmont Road, on the west by Cherry St, on the south by 4th Ave., and on the north by 1st Avenue. It is home to several of the cities most prominent buildings including United Lutheran Church, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, and the old Christian Science Church. A number of other churches – including one that served the Greek Orthodox community and the city’s original synagogue – has been destroyed or their congregations have moved elsewhere.

While these buildings are certainly interesting, we will encourage our author to put them in the context of the local community and the developing urban and architectural traditions of the day. We know, for example, that throughout the first part of the 20th century, tucked amidst the churches and homes were small grocery stores and businesses that have all but vanished. The area has also preserved some of the few fragments of the city’s old wood streets and extensive stretches of granitoid pavement. Moreover, there are some great examples of the well-preserved early 20th century streetscapes that we seek to document.

We’ll have more announcements about this project during the summer months. And over the next year, look for the second volume of our little neighborhood history series to appear sometime in the winter.

Digital Archaeology and the New Media in 2012

It was about 5 years ago that I started this very blog to “keep our friends, families, donors, and colleagues up to date on our work both in the field and back in the office.” Here’s a link to that first post tucked away deep in the bowels of the Archive for the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. Our hope was that we could provide a window into the daily work, social relationships, and experiences of archaeological work to provide a context for the sometimes de-humanized empirical data produced from our time in the field.   

Since that time, most archaeological projects have developed some social or new media aspect to their work (or have chosen not to for reasons grounded in the discourse of social and new media rather than just naiveté or petty resistance).  With near ubiquitous mobile phone coverage it is now possible to use microblogging platforms like Twitter from almost every corner of the world. Twitter and its rather more reckless cousin Facebook have provided important places for the circulation of up-to-the-minute updates on projects and for the development of community among the researchers, volunteers, staff, supporters, and interested observers around the world. Projects have worked to produce guidelines to help folks new to blogging and social media negotiate the world of archaeological blogging. Conferences and conference panels, both virtual and real, have occurred discussing the virtues and potential pitfalls of blogging and archaeology. In general, projects have found new ways to use the internet to engage a longstanding fascination with archaeological work among a wide range of people and to feed the almost insatiable hunger among professional archaeologists for news from the trowels edge.

Our field staff and volunteers have become more tech savvy. For example, this year, our three trench supervisors – Brandon Olson, Dallas Deforest, and Aaron Barth – all have blogs. My two co-directors, David Pettegrew and Scott Moore, are experienced bloggers as well. I expect that we’ll continue to provide a platform for our students to blog on their experiences. This may be rather more foreign to them, but our Twitter hashtag for the season (#PKAP12) and our volunteers’ Facebook or Twitter accounts will provide them with their own communities and audiences for their reflections on their work. We (well, Scott Moore has) a YouTube channel. 

This summer, we’ll extend our social and new media reach into the field. Messiah College – one of our three co-sponsoring institutions – will provide the project with iPads for the students to use in the field, the museum, and the hotel. They should be able to publish photographs, video, and reflections directly from the field. Prof. Sam Fee from Washington and Jefferson College, has developed an application for us that we will test this summer to collect data from our trenches. We are very close to being able to publish our raw archaeological data from the side of our trenches in realtime. In an era where “transparency” is becoming a watchword for academic, political, and institutional integrity, we are very close to achieving complete transparency in archaeological data collection and analysis. Every step of the process could be made visible to an outside observer.

There are reasons, of course, to limit some of our transparency and these have little to do with issues of integrity and much more to do with issues of security around a site that has already suffered significant degradation at the hands of looters. Moreover, we have done little to provide tools for a wider audience to interrogate raw archaeological data “from the trowel’s edge”. The data rich immediacy of the trowel’s edge perspective rarely serves even an experience archaeologist as any more than a starting point for their own understanding of a trench. It is only in aggregation and comparison of stratigraphy, features, objects, and relationships that real archaeological knowledge emerges. 

So over five years, we’ve moved from the rush of providing a window into life and work of an archaeological project to the prospects of almost immediate data transparency.

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!

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It is glowing red morning here in North Dakotaland (but fortunately we have very few sailors, so the warning seemed unnecessary). Perhaps the red sky in the morning is to remind our students that there is only one week left of the semester. Or perhaps it was to remind faculty that this week was the calm before the storm.

In any event, it is a great day for some quick hits and varia

• How to be succinct.
• Some interesting push back to the AIA’s statement regarding Open Access in Archaeology Magazine. Here’s Chuck Jones and Sebastian Heath. And here from the Open Access Archaeology folks.
• In related news, Harvard spends $3.75 per year on online periodical subscriptions.
• More archaeology of archaeology: some cool thoughts on an archaeological field kit. 
• A conversation with Chuck Klosterman.
• More criticisms of the lecture as a teaching tool.
• Does anyone use iffttt? It seems cool.
• Some Sonic Archaeology from the Punk Archaeology section. And even more.
• Pierre MacKay on SS. Mary and Dominic (Ay. Parakevi) in Chalkis. I visited this church with Pierre when I was a graduate students and we pondered it (and it’s supposed Early Christian foundation). So, this little article brings back some great memories. 
• For deeply personal reasons I hate Helvetica (and it’s sister Haas Grostesk), but I like this story.
• I recently submitted a book review to the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. I got back some revisions this week with, hands down, the funniest editor comments I’ve ever received. I usually dread reading revisions of my writing, but these made me laugh out loud (in a good way). I like their style!
• Check out the next reflection of first year faculty at Teaching Thursday.
• Online teaching to paper books… a cool campus partnership. I keep forgetting why the University of North Dakota can’t do stuff like this.
• 100 Walks.
• The best used car ad ever.
• Revised MLA guidelines for evaluating work in digital humanities and new media.
• What I’m reading: Marcus Banks, Jay Ruby, Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology (Chicago 2011). (via Kostis Kourelis)
• What I’m listening to: Spiritualize, Sweet Heart, Sweet Light.

Reflections on 100 Walks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polis Prospects for the Summer of 2012

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

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

1. The West

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

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

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

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

2. The East

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

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

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

3. The Sherds

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

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

 

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

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.