Two Things Tuesday: Summers are for Survey Archaeology

This time of year my thoughts almost always turn to archaeology as my preparations for the summer research season begin to take on a sense of urgency and clash with the end of the semester rush.

For many years, this also meant that I started to think about survey archaeology and this meant, at least partly, preparing my body for the rigors of a summer field season. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to ramp down my involvement in active field projects and shift my attention to publishing the results of older excavations. That said, I still feel a bit of nostalgia for early morning departure times from the seaside at Myloi (in the Argolid), walking along the coastal plain at Pyla-Koutsopetria, and the smell of Eastern Corinthia as the heat of the day would start to infiltrate the citrus and olive groves.

This year, this nostalgia is particular acute thanks to two things and these make for a nice, if slightly maudlin, Two Things Tuesday.

Thing the First

I’m very excited to announce that we have a publication date for David Pettegrew’s book on the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Project: Corinthian Countryside: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. The book will drop on September 1, 2024.

The book is an in-depth reading of the data produced from EKAS, an iconic, high intensity survey in the Eastern Corinthia that trained a generation of survey archaeologists in Greece (including myself, David, Dimitri Nakassis, and Sarah James among quite a few others!), spawned a series of successor projects, and forged lasting personal and professional relationships. 

David’s book digs deeply into the digital data, offers some compelling new conclusions, and most importantly presents a template for not only the reuse of EKAS data, but also the publication of data produced from other, similar projects across the Mediterranean. 

I’m serving as publisher on this project, and have read the entire manuscript multiple times. It is really exciting to see the final pieces of this publication project coming together (including it would seem an unlikely partnership with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens who have asked to be involved in the publication of this book). 

The last step in the process is the book cover which is coming together. I have two options right now of which I’m particularly fond:

I’m slightly partial to the front of the first cover and the back of the second one which shows the author standing at the round tower at Lychnari that we published almost 15 years ago, but I’m not sure that I want to disrupt the wrapped cover design on either of them. 

Thing the Second

I was also lucky enough to participate in one of EKAS’s sequel projects: The Western Argolid Regional Project directed by EKAS alumns—Dimitri Nakassis and Sarah James—and Scott Gallimore, a veteran of the active Cretan survey archaeology scene. I served as “Assistant to the Directors” and largely played the role of the grumpy field director.

During my time on the project, I spend countless hours in the fields and paths of the Western Argolid. Project director and my long time colleague, Dimitri Nakassis produced a nice blog post the other day introducing our newly published “results” article “Landscape Histories and Terrestrial Networks in the Peloponnese: Results from the Western Argolid Regional Project” in Hesperia 93.1 (2024). Go check out his blog post now.

Reading his post and our article reminded me of early morning departure from the seaside in Myloi (and I still wince a bit about oversleeping on the first day of the project’s first season and missing our field orientation!)

and evening walks over to the “Directors’ Mansion” for strategy meetings.

Of course, WARP reminds me of the The Bargepole (when he was Taco),

and the glories of the Rite-in-the-Rain notebook inscribed with Zebra pens.

When I think too long about WARP, my knees start to ache remembering the days spent walking across the cobbled strewn, deeply furrowed, and uneven fields of Inachos Valley.

It goes without saying that WARP has shaped my professional and personal life in meaningful ways and introduced me to a new group of colleagues and friends whose energy and smarts will shape the next generation of survey and excavation projects.

Summer will always be for survey archaeology in some sense, even if nowadays it’s mostly in my memories (and my aching joints).

Survey Archaeology and Modern Greece: Close to Done

Those of you who read this blog probably know that I’m giving a paper next week at the 20th annual CHAT conference in Greece. The paper is titled “Survey Archaeology and Modern Greece,” and will be on a panel dedicated to the archaeology of Greece. I’ve posted on this paper here, here, and here.

The paper has received some really incisive feedback from Grace Erny who is my coauthor on it. Dimitri Nakassis pushed me to refine my question more clearly (which I may or may not have done successful).

The paper seeks to present an archaeological counterpoint to a perspective that Michael Herzfeld has recently described as: “Villages appear to represent the first stage in an evolutionist paradigm that fits the Western-inspired vision of the Greek state. In that paradigm, so-called true Greeks originate as members of rural communities. That identity is reinforced even as they urbanize, because electoral laws require them either to register themselves anew in their cities of residence or to accept all the inconvenience of having to travel back to their natal villages every time there is an election—a situation that also furnishes a pretext for family reunions, for the chance to breathe the supposedly pure country air, and, more pragmatically, for a check on their local properties.

I can’t say that this is the FINAL draft, but it’s getting pretty close:

Survey Archaeology and Modern Greece

William Caraher, Grace Erny, Dimitri Nakassis

Paper delivered at the 20th annual CHAT conference.  
November 2023
Patras, Greece

 

Intensive survey projects in the Mediterranean have increasingly revealed a wide range of settlement types, habitations, and activity areas in the countryside. My paper today will consider how intensive survey methods can support a view of rural life in modern Greece that goes beyond the traditional emphasis on the Greek village. To do this, my paper will use examples from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey which was conducted between 1999-2004 and the Western Argolid Regional Project which ran from 2014-2017.

But, first, a bit of context is necessary. For the purposes of this paper, the modern period in Greece extends from the Greek War of Independence in 1821 to the present. Intensive pedestrian survey refers to the Anglo-American tradition of survey in Greece with its focus on rural areas and its aspiration to document the landscape in a diachronic way. Despite these aspirations, intensive survey projects have generally developed sampling methods designed to detect “hidden landscapes” of ancient and Medieval material.

In its earliest days, intensive survey focused on documenting the phases of high-density scatters — that is sites — in the landscape. Since the 1990s, however, the development of siteless survey has shifted attention away from sites to lower density concentrations (sometimes called “off site” scatters). Survey archaeologists have argued that these low-density scatters may represent more ephemeral practices in the landscape, such as seasonal habitation, comparatively short periods of occupation, or even activities such as manuring that extend well beyond the limits of nucleated settlements. In this way, siteless survey has contributed to a view of the Greek countryside as dynamic and fluid in antiquity and has challenged the notion of rural Greece as a stable and enduring entity.

Villages are highly visible and thoroughly studied manifestations of rural continuity. There is general consensus that the village was the most common form of rural Greek settlement from at least the Medieval period. Fotini Kondyli has recently shown that ethnographic studies of Early Modern Greek villages can productively inform how we understand Byzantine villages, suggesting enduring material, social, and economic connections between the medieval and the modern village although many aspects of the modern village system may date to the 18th century. 20th-century Greek villages were centers of religious and political life. They furnished key venues for commemoration in the form of war memorials and in the early 20th century received new, often ancient, names. After World War II, villages served as nodes for domestic and international investment schemes designed to both modernize rural lifeways and bolster “traditional Greek life and values.” Groups who operated outside of the structure of the village (or the town) such nomadic pastoralists, found themselves periodically forced to settle in a village or at least declare residency in one. After the exchange of population in 1923, the state often settled refugees in purpose-built Greek villages, including Nea Kios in the Argolid, which made it easier to provide services and integrate these new communities into the nation. Movement between villages and from villages to cities and towns, promoted Susan Sutton to ask “what is a village in a nation of migrants?” while at the same time recognizing this type of settlement as the practical, historical, and ideological anchor for the modern state in the countryside.

Intensive survey, however, is ill-suited for the archaeological study of modern villages. The abundance of contemporary and recent material near modern villages and the subsequent blurred lines between systemic and archaeological contexts pose a major challenge for intensive survey’s canonical sampling methods, which are designed to capture faint traces of the past rather than document the hyper abundance of the present. Artifact counts near modern villages can easily exceed 10,000 artifacts per hectare and may include thousands of fragments of modern rooftiles, bricks, synthetic building material, metal, and plastics. The Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey quickly abandoned its efforts to document modern material on the busy Isthmus of Corinth after teams started to note “scattered trash” in every survey unit.

Along with these practical concerns, siteless survey, which questions the idea of sites as places of continuity in the landscape, looked at villages with studied skepticism. As a result, survey projects typically abandoned archaeological techniques for documenting the modern period and turned to ethnography, local histories, and documentary data derived from censuses, state economic and agricultural reports, or tax records to document villages.

In contrast to this approach, this paper uses data from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and the Western Argolid Regional Project to consider the modern countryside beyond the village in the southeastern Korinthia and the Western Argolid. Our approach to the modern period on these two projects built upon the work of Nick Kardulias with Claudia Chang and Pricilla Murray in the Southern Argolid and his subsequent efforts on Cyprus, various Saronic islands, and in the Eastern Corinthia. Kardulias and colleagues documented sheepfolds, shrines, threshing floors, lime kilns, storehouses, and farmsteads — virtually any modern feature other than villages. This work revealed a “contingent countryside” (or a liquid landscape) that reflected the ebb and flow of seasonal and situational activities in rural space.

Kardulias’s work contributed directly to a study that I conducted with David Pettegrew in the southeastern Korinthia where we documented the rural site of Lakka Skoutara. This site consisted of over a dozen houses situated in a valley and loosely arranged around a rural crossroad and a church. The houses featured baking ovens, large cisterns, and threshing floors. The fields around the houses included massive stone clearance piles and the slopes saw extensive terracing as well as simple rock windbreaks which preserve evidence for pastoralists who operated in the region. Intensive survey around the remains of the settlement at Lakka Skoutara produced a robust and chronologically diverse assemblage of ceramics. Nineteenth-century table wares from Çanakkale in northwestern Turkey and slip-painted ware from Didymoteicho in Thrace appeared alongside less diagnostic unglazed utility wares, modern glazed yoghurt pots, modern flower pots, glass bottles, and metal tableware. The presence of Koroneiko pitharia indicates a substantial investment in ceramic storage vessels. The character and the quantity of material at Lakka Skoutara suggested periods of intensive occupation despite its physical and social proximity to the village of Sophiko.

We also returned to the site regularly over the course of the next two decades. While we did not conduct another intensive survey, we continued to document the use of the houses over time. In some cases, we were able to watch individual structures collapse as their owners removed their tile roofs and exposed their mud mortar walls to rain. One house disappeared entirely as a result of efforts to widen a modern road that passed through the area. Other observations, however, reflected the ongoing value of these rural structures. Objects left in ruined houses appeared one year and were gone or replaced by other objects the next. In one case, a house saw extensive renovation and remodeling. Other homes saw consistent maintenance. The overall picture here was of a modern landscape that continued to play a role in contemporary life of the residents of the nearby villages, while at the same time remaining outside the official state apparatus: the site of Lakka Skoutara does not appear by name on 20th century maps or, as far as we could determine, on censuses.

More recently, Grace Erny, Dimitri Nakassis, and I documented a similar cluster of houses at the site of Chelmis in the Western Argolid. Like at Lakka Skoutara, we conducted intensive survey around the remains of over a dozen largely abandoned buildings which featured threshing floors, ovens, enclosures for animals, and paths. The settlement was founded by seasonal pastoralists who moved their flocks from around the village of Frosiouna to the site of Chelmis near the village of Schinochori in the winter months. At some point during the early 20th century, they also cultivated grain in the area, as the terraces and threshing floors show. It seems likely that the Frousiouniot pastoralists acquired this relatively marginal land during one of the land redistributions of the late 19th or early 20th century. During efforts to reorganize and modernize the countryside in the mid-20th century, Chelmis appears in the 1951 census with 119 people, but then declines by around 50% each decade until registering no inhabitants in 1991. During our time at the settlement in 2016, Chelmis had no permanent residents. By the 1970s, the settlement had a connection to the village of Schinochori via a road, electricity, and the children of Chelmis walking the several miles to attend school in the village. Today, the site appears largely abandoned but for one large, flea infested goat fold, and a few houses maintained as storerooms and seasonal shelters during the olive harvest.

The artifact assemblage around the houses of Chelmis produced a massive quantity of roof tiles, suggesting at least some of the houses were abandoned with their roofs intact. The appearance of several different kind of tiles — one type local and roughly made and the other mass produced and from a regional tile manufacturer — suggested both ad hoc repairs and the reuse of older tiles as wall chinking, in the construction of ovens, and on shed roofs. It also reflects the residents’ engagement with both regional and highly local economic networks which likely varied over time and perhaps became more wide-ranging in the postwar period when Chelmis became linked to the village of Schinochori by road. The scatter of artifacts at the site was sparse with metal and glass objects more common than ceramics. The few ceramics that were present included a Marousi Ware storage jar from Attica and small vessels made of either porcelain or imitation porcelain. A mug made of aluminum and glass bottles suggests that these materials replaced ceramic vessels for daily use. The general absence of table and utility wares at the site, however, may result from the periodic (perhaps initially seasonal) use of the site, the modest material means of its residents, and its relatively short existence as a settlement in the countryside. The residents of Chelmis likely took most high value objects with them when they stopped living there.

Chelmis was accessed via a series of routes that avoided the agricultural fields around the village of Lyrkeia (previously known as Kato Belesi) in the Inachos valley. Lakka Skoutara was connected to neighboring villages by a rugged routes through the hilly interior of the southeastern Corinthia. Even modern bulldozers have only made the routes partly passable for occasional vehicular traffic. The remote location of Lakka Skoutara made it suitable for residents of the village of Sophiko during the Greek Civil War and German Occupation, suggesting that its status at the margins of the modern state served a valuable purpose for local residents. Chelmis’s role as an extension of the mountain village of Frosiouna, with access to only marginally arable land, but nevertheless proximate to schools, markets, and employment opportunities on the Argive plain. For both Chelmis and Lakka Skoutara, the visibility of activity at the site appears shaped by regional, national, and global markets, employment opportunities, services, and routes. Intensive survey in these areas cast valuable lighton activity in the Greek countryside that existed outside the modern structure of the village. The many functions and affordances of these sites, both in the past and in the present, situates modern villages amid a fluid rural landscape.

 

As a kind of conclusion, I wonder whether greater attention to the traces of modern life in the Greek countryside has the potential to connect the archaeology of modern Greece to Charles Orser’s well-worn “haunts” of historical archaeology: colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, and modernity. The ephemeral traces of life outside the Greek village reminds us that the world of late-modernity and late-capitalism need not necessarily reflect the culmination of the structures developed by the European nation-state with its spatially defined forms of colonialism and capital. Indeed, the history of Greece is laced with fluid populations that existed at the margins of the nation-state and the archaeology of the modern period. Some examples, such as the arrival of the Arvanites in Attica and the northeastern Peloponnesus date to Ottoman times or, in other cases, such as the exchange of populations in 1923 represent the emergence of the modern nation from the ruins of pre-national states. But more recent examples also abound, from the current migrant crisis, to the quiet presence of the Roma and Southeast Asian agricultural workers in today’s Argive plain or the fish farms of the southeastern Corinthia.

Returning to Chelmis, the route from Frosiouna to the settlement may reveal traces of another seasonal “Thousand Year Road,” to use Hal Koster’s term, as it materialized at the intersection with state sponsored land redistribution, electrical networks, and roads. In the Corinthia, the ebb and flow of activity at Lakka Skoutara reflected continued vitality of sites outside the boundaries modern village even amid post-war efforts reified the village as the center of settlement and modern life. Intensive survey’s capacity to document spaces marginal to the influences of the nation, capital, and colonialism reminds us that other narratives, situations, and possibilities exist outside of the site.

A Memorial for a Digital Friend: Diana Gilliland Wright

Yesterday, I learned that Diana Gilliland Wright had died earlier this month. I didn’t know her very well and, in fact, I can’t exactly remember if I had ever met her. I knew her mostly via email, comments on my blog, and her own voluminous blogging output.

Over the last decade, as my research interest shifted toward the Argolid, she and I corresponded a bit more regularly as she offered us the occasional insight based on her years of work on the city of Nafplion and its environs. From what I can gather she wrote her dissertation on a 15th century Venetian administrator at Nafplion, Bartolomeo Minio. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never read it. Nor have I read any of her formal scholarship. What I did read, quite regularly, were her blogs.

Year ago, when blogging was still fresh and exciting and filled bloggers with hope, we envisioned a world where bloggers read each others’ work and reached out to one another and commented and shared each others’ work through hyperlinks and blogrolls and ultimately forged relationships across networks of blogs. Diana Wright did all that and was a regularly commenter on my blog from its earliest days (on Typepad!). And even as the promise of blogs as a corresponding medium faded a bit, she continued to reach out via email to offer comments and ask for publications. I remember sending her a few copies of North Dakota Quarterly at some point as well and hoping that she found the poetry and fiction in those pages interesting.

From what I can piece together she ran two blogs. The blog that I knew best was called “Surprised by Time” and it largely focused on the Medieval Morea (or Peloponnesus). Her interests were wide ranging and did much to make transparent murky waters separating the Medieval and Early Modern worlds. The scions of Byzantine elite families rubbed shoulders with Venetian administrators, on assignment, Ottoman officials, and Mediterranean diplomats, literati, and ne’er-do-wells. Palaiologoi cross paths with Italian merchants and Ottoman travelers, Pashas, and poets. Each of the over 200 entries, offered a startling glimpse into a world often overlooked by scholars preoccupied by tidier narratives of rise and decline of empire and neglectful of the messier interface of daily life among those most effected by political and cultural change. To Dr. Wright’s particular credit, the blog exists under a CC-By-SA license meaning that anyone can share her work as long as they credit her and make their work available under an open license. The blog appears to be fairly well archived by the internet archive, but I would be keen to entertain ways to preserve it more formally. 

For many years, she also maintained a landing page of sorts called “Nauplion.net” where she offered an index of her work and the work of her partner Pierre MacKay which featured regularly on her blog. It also featured links to many scans of hard to find primary sources some of which were translated on Surprised by Time. This site is no longer working and hadn’t been updated in many years, but it is preserved on the Internet Archive.

[By coincidence, I’m teaching Evliya Çelebi this week and using Pierre MacKay’s translation of Evliya’s visit to Corinth in my class. Diana Wright posted bits and pieces of Pierre’s translation and the story of his discovery of Evliya’s manuscript on her blog.]

Her other blog, Firesteel is an anthology of poetry gleaned from ancient and modern sources and from Greek, Ottoman, Arab, Italian, French and English language poets. I don’t know whether the poetry posted here and her more academic content crossed paths in some kind of formal way, but it really is an amazing collection of work (which I suspect violates all sort of copyrights, but I get the sense that Diana Wright just didn’t really care). 

~

As a small, digital memorial to Diana Gilliland Wright’s passing, I would encourage you spend a moment looking at her online legacy and recognizing it as a gesture of a kind of digital kinship that could connect individuals who had never met. For whatever reason, her profile included a link to John Coltrane’s 1957 recording of “While My Lady Sleeps.” It feels like an appropriate soundtrack for a visit to her digital world. 

. . . a little wine for remembrance . . . a little water for the dust.  

Ancient and Modern Argos

This weekend, on a lark, I read Jonathan Hall’s relatively recent book Reclaiming the Past: Argos and Its Archaeological Heritage in the Modern Era (2021). It was good and a must-read for anyone who plans to spend any time in Argos or the Argolid. The book does what it says on the cover: it explores the reception of archaeological remains from antiquity (narrowly construed) in the modern period (roughly the 18th century to the present). It does this with a minimum of theoretical bluster and the absence of much conceptual overburden. He acknowledges, for example, the long-standing debates concerning formation of modern Greek identity as both descendants of the ancient Greeks (Hellenes) and Christian Romans, but his nuanced narrative ensures that these longstanding models don’t over simplify complex processes and attitudes. In fact, Hall’s interest in digging into Argive attitudes toward antiquity produces a richly detailed narrative that draws from sources ranging from the Early travelers and Greek revolutionaries to archaeological publications, notebooks, and 19th and 20th century newspapers and media accounts. 

Here are three thoughts on the book:

First, this book defies academic convention by including so much description and narrative. While this is generally laced with analysis and interpretation, it is nevertheless clear that one of Hall’s main objectives was to recover Argive sources for the academic record and compile them. This isn’t to suggest that he wasn’t selective or careful, but instead to highlight his willingness to excavate material from a wide range of contexts in his search for Greek attitudes for the archaeological past of Argos. Our of necessity, this involved culling details from correspondence, newspapers, and local publications as a way to counterbalance the often stereotypical descriptions of Argos and its residents from contemporary travelers. 

Second, I know I will sound like a broken record here, but it bothers me a bit that the book spends so little time with the Early Christian, Byzantine, and Frankish periods in Argos. On the one hand, I get that these fall outside the antiquity-modernity binary and therefore are peripheral to the goals of this book. I also understand that assuming continuity across the centuries even for a city as well-known as Argos risks ignoring the sometimes catastrophic events that displaced its population and triggered cycles of demographic change and renewal. One the other hand, by downplaying the significance of sites such as the church of the Dormition as part of Argive strategies for reconciling Greek antiquity and identity with its Christian history, Hall perhaps removes key evidence for how residents of Argos may have formed their attitudes about the city’s archaeological heritage. I understand, of course, that Hall’s focus was far more directed toward monuments discovered in situ and of interest to foreign archaeologists (e.g. inscriptions, sculpture, and the like). That said, it struck me as a bit odd that despite his interest in how Argives viewed their archaeological past, he overlooked examples of spolia in Medieval and Ottoman buildings which seem to parallel in the more mundane practices using ancient blocks elsewhere. It seems to me that the focus on texts and archaeological heritage as the two interpretative poles of this book would complicate Hall’s efforts to understand local reception and understanding of antiquity because it is predicated on two analytical categories elite texts and the archaeology that these texts recognize and define that exclude a fair number of Argos’s inhabitants and their daily encounter with ancient things.   

Finally, I couldn’t help but compare this book to Chris Witmore’s Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnesus (2020). Witmore shares Hall’s interest in rich and nuanced description and the interplay between antiquity and the modern in the Greek landscape. He and Witmore also have the kind of deep understanding of their physical, archaeological, and historical landscapes that allow both books to situate ancient monuments in a diachronic perspective (albeit informed by different theoretical perspectives and approaches). Someone really should do a comparative review of these two books. 

As I’m teaching Greek history this semester, I couldn’t help but imagine that Witmore’s and Hall’s books could serve both as a way to decenter the often “Athenocentric” narrative of Greek history (past and present) and as a way to escape from viewing the past without taking into consideration the ways that modern attitudes have shaped what we encounter and value. Plus, they both return me to two of my “happy places” the northeastern Peloponnesus and the tangled byways of Argos and the Argolid!  

A List: The 15 Best Early Christian Baptisteries in Greece

The other day, mostly on a lark, I posted to Twitter a list of the top 15 baptisteries in Greece. It was 60% done as a kind of silly joke designed to spoof the ubiquitous “listicles” that fill our social media feeds and 40% done because David Pettegrew and I needed to cull our list of around 65 baptisteries to 15-20 for a publication. In any event, the list proved more popular than I imagined which has prompted me to post it here to the ole blog. 

It also got me thinking about maybe doing a little weekly list of things which I post to Twitter and then, perhaps, share them on my blog. One of the major trends of the last five years or so is that blogs like mine have declined in regular readership. Some have argued that Twitter threads and other forms of “long form” social media engagement have created new reading habits. The rise of newsletters has also drawn readers away from stand along blogs. Finally, the blogging landscape itself has changed. The slow and steady grind of research blogs stand out less visibly against blogs engaging more fully with debates that have attracted considerable public attention. In other words, it’s no longer enough to just blog and hope for readers. Today, one has to understand the digital media landscape and have a sensitivity to wider concerns both within and outside of the academy.

My effort to produce a fun little listicle is probably not a useful step in any particular direction for this blog, but it was fun so I’ll share it here with my few remaining (but dedicated and committed) blog readers:  

15. Ay. Sophia at Panormos on Crete. It’s a bit weak, but it’s ranked 15 so there’s that. It also has some archaeology to it and some phasing (it seems to have been added in the 5th century). A little architectural adaptation goes a long way in this list.

14. Kenchreai Basilica (Corinthia). I mean the Pauline tie-in makes it a lock for the list (even though the church is much later. Plus, it’s mostly under water now which is cool. And the swimming there is nice. Otherwise, pretty garden variety.

13. Kos-Zepari Kapama. No list of baptisteries is complete without at least one from Kos or Rhodes. These islands consistently produce great content. In fact, the competition is so intense that these baptisteries are often overrated by fans and critics alike. This one has style.

12. Argos – Aspis Church. I have a soft spot for the Argolid and everyone knows that. This baptistery brings the ROUND and offers just a hint of synchronism for all you old school conversion fans out there. It won’t win a prize for style or design, but it’s there all day long.

11. Aigosthena-Attica. This church is just great and the site (ashlar walls, the sea, the mountains) is almost enough to move it into the top 10. For now, it’s the number 2 baptistery in Attica.

A solid building, good font, probably some arches, but it’s all about the setting.

10. Ialysos-Rhodes. You can’t talk baptisteries without Rhodes and Kos and this little gem is more than representative of the baptismal landscape there.

Apsidal room – check.
Cruciform font – check.
Parapet screen – check.
On an ancient acropolis – check.
Top 10 – check.

9. Brauron-Attica. This basilica is great, but the baptistery is show stopper. Curving walls, a circular baptismal chamber, some apses, and some changes in elevation. This place is special and almost anticipates a day when curves matter. It’s not Ronchamp, but it’s 6th c. Style.

8. Philippi-Octagon. Don’t let the church or the Pauline associations distract you! Here it’s all about the FONT. Square room, busy building, but then: BLAM: cross pattée. It is FLASH. Like someone wanted to show that EC architecture wasn’t all geometric forms and columns.

7. Nea Anchialos – Basilica C. This baptistery is a sleeper. Two phases. Subtle. Small, but complex. From a free standing building to an integrated one. It has a story to tell. Maybe from adult baptism to child baptism? Maybe changing styles and liturgy? There’s a lot going on.

6. Dion – Basilica B. Simple can be better. Octagonal font and three room baptistery:  Apodyterion-Font-Chrismarion. Textbook with just enough style to let people know that they planned this thing. Not quite top 5, but you can feel conversion here.

Oh, man. I’ve gotten so excited that I had forgotten to enjoy my pair of post-prandial Twizzlers!! This never happens except when I’m dropping some public science and doing my baptistery thing!!

Top 5. Here we go.

5. Paros Katapoliani Church. This church speaks for itself and the baptistery is part of that conversation. Apses and aisles and cruciform font. Maybe a dome. This is class in a church that makes me pun Theoktiste and want to escape from pirates to live there alone for 35 years.

4. Metropolitan Church at Gortyn on Crete. Is this controversial? Sure. Is it free standing. Without a doubt. There is a lot going on here: lobes, ambulatories, octagons, quatrefoil fonts. Maybe earlier doubters pushed this up the list a bit, but how could it not be top 5?

3. Kraneion-Corinthia. You’d have to be living in a jar not to it in the top 5. This church is all about SUBSTANCE. The baptistery is apsidal, the font is octagonal with steps, there is an ambulatory. Plus enough burials in the church and the area to remind you of life and death.

2. Damokratia Church – Demetrias. I know this will be controversial. It doesn’t bring the architectural bling of some, but the church is flashy and the baptistery is substantial. Damokratia did this church the right way and this baptistery deserves its spot in the list.

1. Lechaion. The Lechaion baptistery shines brighter than (and predates?) the church itself. Multiple geometric forms, visible adaptations, multiple fonts, apses, parapets, opus sectile, revetment. Plus possible martyrs who died by drowning?

There’s nothing more to say here.

 

 

 

More on WARP Data (Part Two)

Yesterday, I wrote about “Densities and Visibility” and “Hidden Landscapes” with regard to the data generated by the Western Argolid Regional Project. Today, I am going to write up four more aspects of our virtual study season in what should be the final installment of WARP related writing this summer. (You can read the rest here, here, here, and here). 

Next week, I return to Cyprus (at least in my writing and reading), but for now, WARP is the place.

Here are the final four observations on the WARP data crunching season.  

3. Land Use. As part of our standard descriptions of each survey unit, we recorded a good bit of land use data. This includes things like dominant vegetation, evidence for recent plowing, and the presence of features such as terrace walls that indicate material investment in the landscape. We initially chose to record this kind of information to provide insights to artifact recovery rates, but we soon discovered that this data also provided a high resolution perspective on contemporary (and recent) land use in the Inachos valley. 

For example, it became clear from our data that three main commercial crops in the Inachos valley were olives, stone fruit (primarily apricots), and citrus. While olives are more or less ubiquitous throughout the survey area, citrus tend to only appear in units under 150 masl in elevation. Apricots appear in units under 200 masl leaving units of 250 masl and higher in elevation to olives. This likely has to do with the susceptibility of these crops to frost damage. The presence of windmill-like air circulators in the citrus fields to the northwest of Argos confirm that this territory receives some manageable frost during the winter months. More durable apricots, a major export crop in our survey area, can endure occasional frosts, but are less rugged than the ubiquitous Greek olive tree. 

Evidence for plowing tends to be most common at fields under 200 masl which have, for our survey area, moderate slopes of less than 13 degrees although fields with compacted soils that show some evidence for plowing in the recent past (which we call “plowed, compacted” soils) extend slightly higher in elevation (and average 215 masl) and with slightly greater slopes of an average of 14 degrees. Higher elevations and greater slopes than these tend not to see regular plowing and are characterized by unplowed field even when the erosion of soils on slopes exceeding 20 degrees creates loose soil conditions. It should come as little surprise that units with plowed and loose soils tend to have the highest artifact densities and the highest visibilities. It is worth noting, however, that units with plowed and compacted soils, which indicate recent, but not ongoing plowing, produced the higher densities than predicted by visibility alone. 

A significant network of terrace walls manage the sloping walls of the Inachos river valley, and we recorded over 850 units with terrace walls. This is over 10% of all survey units. The average elevation of a terraced field is 247 masl with no terraces appearing below 108 masl and the highest over 500 masl. The average slope of a terraced field was 26 degrees. Predictably, most of the higher terraced fields (over 245 masl) were not plowed and these tended to have steeper slopes. There were, however, a number of recently or currently plowed terraced fields at lower elevations and slightly lower slopes suggesting that access rather than elevation and slope alone determined whether terraced fields saw plowing. In fact, these recently or currently plowed terraced fields tended to produce much higher artifact densities than visibility alone would predict whereas unplowed terraced fields tended to perform closer to what one would expect based on their visibility. This almost certainly reflects the high artifact densities from fields surrounding the ancient acropolis of Orneai which is also in the immediate vicinity of the village of Lyrkeia and accessible via a network of paved and field roads.      

4. Describing Chronological Landscapes. Over the last week or so, the project directors have been thinking about how best to describe the distribution of material from various periods across the entire landscape. This is distinct from how we interpret or understand the historical significance of particular patterns in the landscape. Instead, the idea (to my mind) is to describe the distribution of material in a consistent way across the entire survey area that allows for at least basic comparisons.

On the most basic level we can compare the character of assemblages by number of artifacts alone, but this speaks very little to the distribution of artifacts across our survey area. Thus combining the number of artifacts with the area of the units in which they appear helps to give some sense of distribution. David Pettegrew in his recent (unpublished) analysis of the distribution of EKAS data used nearest neighbor analysis (based, I believed on the centroid of units) determine whether the pattern produced by artifacts from various periods is clustered or dispersed. The vagaries of artifact recovery patterns could, I imagine, be managed by comparison with the overall pattern of the survey which would allow us to say whether the overall distribution of artifacts from a particular period is more or less dispersed than the overall distribution of all artifacts from the survey (imagining that the latter reflects recovery rates). 

Obviously one challenge here is the differential visibility or diagnosticity of particular periods on the surface. Certain periods – such as Pettegrew famously argued for the Late Roman period in Greece – are more visible than others complicating a simple reading of distributional analysis as a measure for (say) the character of settlement in the survey area. The other challenge, of course, is the different date ranges for various periods which mean that comparing, say, the Late Roman period (which we date to AD300-AD700) tends to be a good bit longer than, say, the Classical period (450BC-300BC) which means that the Late Roman assemblage has had twice as long to develop in the landscape.

There are various ways to manage for the differential diagnosticity and the different length of various periods to make these assemblages comparable. I tend to be fairly pessimistic about the potential of comparing assemblages from different periods. In other words, I think it is pretty hard to make arguments for the expansion or contraction of settlement by comparing assemblages from two different periods unless one establishes that the material signature of the two periods is fundamentally comparable.

That said, I suspect that the distribution patterns of material from various period between different survey projects is likely to be more comparable than between periods in the same survey project. For example, issues of differential visibility or diagnosticity on the surface tend to be common to most survey projects in a region and in most cases periodization schemes are, if not absolutely the same, at least broadly consistent at a regional level. In other words, being able to describe the various period landscapes across the survey area serves as the basis for later analysis of the periods in question rather than the analysis, necessarily, of the survey area across time (although it should also inform how we understand the survey area diachronically).  

5. Chasing the Data. One thing that crunching data does reveal is the strengths and weakness of any dataset. Our dataset is quite a way from what I would consider big data and as a consequence little problems with our data can create big issues during analysis. (And here I’m assuming that the strength of big data schemes is that small imperfections or outliers in the data set tend be washed out by the scale of the data more generally, for better or worse). As I ran queries and did analyses and produced new datasets on the basis of data that we collected in the field, I discovered little problems. For example, the aoristic analysis that I posted last week was based on a chronology table that had the Archaic period dating from 750BC-AD450 rather than 750BC-450BC. This is meant that pottery dated to the Archaic period was rather significantly underrepresented in the aoristic analysis that I conducted. It is an easy enough fix, fortunately, one that probably would have become clear at some point in the publication process.

At the same time, doing the work of analyzing our material is part of what brings various limitations to our data to the fore. For example, we didn’t ask our field teams to record the presence of terrace walls. So I had to excavate this data from the a more general comment field. This was easy enough to do, of course, but I suspect that the dataset is a bit fuzzier around the edges than one generated by a simple check box. 

In the end, querying the data will both reveal its analytical limits and make it a stronger dataset. This kind of “slow data” work is both humbling, in that it reveals the limits of data collection processes in the field, and energizing in that it only through analysis do we recognize the potential of our data to reveal more about the landscape than we had intended.

6. Solitary Data Crunching. Finally, crunching data by myself has been pretty boring. One of the great things about study seasons is not so much the work of study, but the time to reflect, ask questions, make false starts, share processes, and think out loud (although my colleagues might not entirely agree about that last one!).

Crunching data alone in my home office feels so disconnected from the work of the survey. I’m left to my own devices and my own questions, I often end up spinning my wheels or working my way into a dead end of data which does neither speaks to whatever hypothesis that I have imagined nor leads me to new questions. 

When doing data crunching next to my (often much smarter) colleagues, however, I constantly encounter new ways of seeing the data and imagining how it speaks to the archaeological landscapes that we explored together. In that context, data oriented study seasons often led to trips through the survey area (and surrounding regions), shared memories and reflections on units and field practices, and deeper engagements with both the landscape and our data.

Data-ing alone, on the other hand, has made me feel not only a bit detached from the survey universe, but also mildly confounded by our data. Hopefully before we get to the publication stage, we’ll have time to revisit our data together in a more collaborative and conversational way, but for now, this is what we have and despite it being a bit uncomfortable, I think I’ve made a bit of progress. 

More on WARP Data (Part One)

As readers of this blog know, my colleagues and I on the Western Argolid Regional Project have been working our way through the data that the project produced over its three main field seasons. This (virtual) study season focused on producing some reports that would start to describe the survey area in general ways. These reports will help us in the future as we attempt to unpack the character of more specific artifact scatters and distribution patterns. They’ll also contribute to address some “big picture” questions in survey methods and methodologies. I’ve already blogged a bit on my work over the last few weeks (here, here, and here). This week’s installment will likely be my last and the most general.

Six things that I learned this WARP study season.

1. Densities and Visibility. Like most intensive surveys we counted the total number of sherds and tile fragments in each survey unit. These numbers alone don’t tell us much about the past, but they do provide insights into artifact recovery rates across the entire survey area. For example, we know that surface visibility and the quantity of artifacts in the plow zone are likely independent variables. The question then becomes whether the areas with higher artifact densities represent the quantity of material in the plow zone or simply zones where we have higher visibility (or geomorphological processes took place that revealed past surfaces). As I blogged about a few weeks ago, for our survey area lower visibility tended to mean lower densities in a fairly consistent way. This indicates that across the entire survey zone lower visibility areas are as likely to have significant quantities of artifacts as higher visibility areas (and vice versa). In other words, it suggests that the two variables are independent. We might see a different trend if the two variables were related. For example, if ancient settlements tended to appear more frequently in fields that were currently abandoned and overgrown, we might see unusual spikes in artifact densities at lower surface visibilities and lower densities – either proportionately or in absolute terms – with greater visibility.  

Another measure for this considers the variability of artifact densities at different levels of visibilities. A number of scholars have noted that as visibilities decrease our ability to consistently recover artifacts becomes more random. This may be the case in some environments, but at WARP, the variability present across visibilities (measured by the standard deviation divided by the mean) does not pattern consistently and if anything appears to slightly increase as visibility increases. 

Background disturbance is another factor that archaeologists have recognized as impacting artifact recovery rates (as I’ve blogged about before). Background disturbance describes the amount of distracting material on the surface that complicates artifact recovery. In general, we did not notice background disturbance having a significant impact on artifact recovery rates at WARP in general. That said, when consider variability in artifact densities per visibility split out by background disturbance (which we recorded as light, moderate, and heavy) we can see that variability decreases with higher densities, but the pattern is not a particular strong one. It is telling, however, that variability increases with visibility in units with moderate and light artifact densities.

While the patterns here are not particularly compelling, I think they do hint at how background disturbances shape recovery rates even if the story they tell is not a dramatic one.

2. Hidden Landscapes. Survey archaeologist have long worried about hidden landscapes, a phrase coined by John Bintliff, Phil Howard and Anthony Snodgrass in an influential late 1999s article. While this article introduces a whole range of reasons for landscapes being hidden – from geomorphology to the fragility of ceramics fired at lower temperatures at certain periods – in crunching the WARP data, I concerned myself with just one or two factors. The main factor that I fretted about was the possibility that contemporary land use which shapes not only recovery rates (through factors like surface visibility and plowing; units that remain under cultivation, for example, tend to have better surface visibility and to receive the kind of attention that increases the amount of subsurface contexts visible to field walkers), but as importantly shaped access to fields. Overgrown fields, steep slopes or units inaccessible via field road, walking paths, or undergraduate clambering may well hide landscapes that survey projects could systematically overlook. At this point in our project, there is no chance of us going back to field to survey steep slopes or dense thickets of maquis, but we can look at the data to see if there are hints that certain periods were more common in certain kinds of fields or, better still, whether they appeared somehow out of sync with predominant densities across the survey area. Again, overall artifact densities do not necessarily suggest certain units saw more activity throughout the past than others, but suggest the happy confluence of field conditions and surface material.

To do this analysis, I ranked the units in our survey area by artifact density according to equal intervals. The lowest density unit was 1 and the highest was 5. I think looked at any period of under 1100 years (and these constitute “narrow” periods from WARP) and ordered them according to average density rank. The idea was to determine whether certain periods appeared consistently in fields where artifact recovery rates produced low densities. I recognize that this is not the only method to suss out whether certain periods were more hidden than others, but it offered at least a preliminary way to consider the problem at scale across our survey area.

For Bintliff and co. there was a thought that certain prehistoric periods might be hidden in their landscapes in Boeotia. On WARP, however, it appears that prehistoric periods – even rather narrow ones such as Late Helladic IIIA-B – tend to appear most consistently in units with the highest artifact densities suggesting the confluence of recovery rates and material in the plow zone revealed a significant assemblage of pre-historic material. Of course, this can’t tell us what we didn’t find, but it is suggestive when compared to material from the Medieval period, the Venetian/Ottoman period, and the Early Modern period. This material tended to appear in units with lower average densities and lower average visibilities suggesting that contemporary land use, access, and surface visibility might be working to obscure the Late Medieval and post-Medieval landscape in the survey area. The densely overgrown Medieval site near the village of Sterna which produced Late Medieval through Venetian material despite may be a useful example of an area where our survey might not consistently explore. The site stood above the highest cultivated fields in the Inachos valley and was densely overgrown in vines, trees, and weeds. Artifact densities was spotty owing to the difficult surface visibility and it seems probable that artifact densities if not otherwise compromised would have been significant. That said, the site near Sterna did produce some standing architecture, a series of (you guessed it!) cisterns, and stood at a strategic location where the Inachos river valley narrowed before opening out into the wider Lyrkeia valley. In other words, there are certain characteristics of the site that encouraged us to explore it in greater detail despite the limited visibility and challenging landscape. To my mind, this mitigates to some extent against the idea that the absence of certain landforms and situations have led to the underrepresentation of Late Medieval to Early Modern material, but this hypothesis will, of course, require greater testing.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow!

Preliminary Thoughts on Artifact Recovery Rates from the Western Argolid Regional Project

This past week, I’ve started the intimidating task of crunching the data produced over three field seasons with the Western Argolid Regional Project. While we’ve made a few efforts to make sense of the data over the past five years, our dataset has been varying degrees of provisional and more pressing matters in the field and in the storerooms often attracted our attention. With the field and storeroom over five thousand mile away and our data as clean as any project can reasonably expect, now is the time for number crunching! 

In the past, we have tried to focus on a number of rather well defined publication projects: a preliminary report and various side projects that required some attention. This year, we wanted to shift our attention back to analysis and instead of producing fully formed publishable quality manuscripts, we wanted to produce some reports and moved the project forward without the pressure of polished final publications.

This summer, I elected to look at the variables that shaped artifact recovery in the field with the hope that this might inform how we analyze artifact patterns in the landscape. So far, I’ve just started but I can make a few observations (and these, if I recall correctly, largely follow observations that I made several years ago when analyzing a rougher version of the same data).

First, the most significant variable in artifact recover is surface visibility. Survey archaeologists have know this for years so it comes as no surprise. It appears that sherd density tracks pretty closely with density up to the highest visibility units (100%) where densities drop rather steeply (as does sample size!).

 

 

Tile densities track visibility a bit less regularly and follow a kind dromedary curve with a hump at 40% visibility and another peak at 90%. The reason for this is a bit unclear. It may be that tiles are generally a bit more visible in the plow zone so surface visibility doesn’t impact their recovery quite as dramatically. A good example of this is that many of the highest density units with tile are from the immediate vicinity of collapsing houses at Chelmis and Iliopouleika (6 of the top 10 and 13 of the top 20), and these units tend to have visibility below 50%. In these units, tiles are abundant and often fairly well preserved and this likely contributed to their relatively high recovery rates even from units with lower visibility.

Second, my old buddy David Pettegrew has been running similar analyses on the EKAS data (which is rapidly becoming available at Open Context). Of particular interest to him (and to us!) is the impact of background disturbance on artifact recovery rates. As we say in the WARP field manual: this category represents the degree to which a field walker’s ability to see artifacts on the ground is hindered or obscured. This is a distinct category from visibility since even a field with 100% visibility could still have heavy background disturbance. A useful rule of thumb is that when walkers are spending much of their time picking up rocks they think are pieces of pottery, the background disturbance is heavy.

There are any number of ways to measure background disturbance. For example, units with high background disturbance took about 2 minutes longer to walk than units with moderate or light background disturbance despite having an average visibility of 68.5% as compared to 47.3% and 57.0% for light and moderate background disturbance respectively. Units with high or moderate background disturbance had a tendency to produce more “Stone, Unworked” (which are really just rocks) than those with light or none (2.8 and 2.3 rocks from units with high and moderate background disturbance and 1.9 rocks from those with light and none). 

On EKAS, there was a relationship between background disturbance and artifact recovery rates. In fact, David has proposed a metric that takes into account background disturbance and visibility to understand recovery rates in those units (and he has plans to unpack some of this in a future publication). That said, when we analyze the background disturbance from the Western Argolid, it doesn’t seem to have a particularly strong relationship with recovery rates at least as manifest in artifact densities. 

For units with the heaviest background disturbance (n=672), in fact, artifact densities tracked more or less along with those from similar visibility units with the exception of two spikes at 40% (n=33) and 90% visibility (n=88) where units with heavy background disturbance produced higher densities than might be expected from visibility alone. In contrast, units with moderate and light background disturbances more or less followed the expected trajectory based on visibility alone. This suggests that background disturbance did not exert a predictable influence over artifact recovery.

We obviously recorded more variable than background disturbance and I have began to run quarries on our data that looks at these variable as well. So, if you’re a survey archaeology “method-head” you might want to stay tuned for more “exciting” methodological reflections in the coming week.

In the meantime, I also ran some queries based on artifact recovery and vegetation in our units. We had standardized recording terms for vegetation in each unit which ranged from “weeds,” “maquis,” and “phrygana,” to “citrus,” “olives,” “grain,” and “grain stubble.” It was possible to select multiple vegetation types for each field resulting in 27 combinations which appeared in at least 50 units. Various combinations produce artifact densities that under performed what one might expect from visibility alone.

The lowest visibility were typically flat units lower elevations (< 200 masl) with citrus or stone fruits (and not infrequently weeds). My guess is that these units were as likely to be shaped by their proximity to the Inachos River and its wandering course that deposit sediments carried toward the Argolidic Gulf. In contrast, units with higher slopes and elevations, often populated with olives, weeds, and (mostly volunteer) grains produced artifact densities that exceeded those predicted by visibility alone. This is as likely the result of historical phenomena as artifact recovery variables and shaped by the dense scatters associated with the fields around the acropolis of Orneai.

As you might guess, such hypotheses will have to be tested using our GIS data, but for now, I’m mostly just crunching numbers without too much attention to spatial concerns. Once again, this means more “method-head” goodness is likely to appear in these pages in the near future!   

Three Things Thursday: Roads, Books, and Things

Thing the First

Last week, I read a rather well executed article by Alvise Matessi titled “The ways of an empire: Continuity and change of route landscapes across the Taurus during the Hittite Period (ca. 1650–1200 BCE)” in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 62 (2021).

The article does exactly what it says in the title: it analyzes the routes through the Taurus mountains during the Hittite period. The method is as (relatively) simple as it is compelling. The author generated Least Cost Corridors through the area on the basis 90 m DEMs and compared these corridors to the location of Hittite settlements and landmarks. While I’m not terribly interested in his conclusions per se, this approach struck an intriguing balance between the presence of longer term routes through the region (defined in large part by topography) and short term shifts within these larger patterns. 

My colleague and collaborator Dimitri Nakassis sent this along to me with the intent to get us thinking a bit about how patterns of movement across the Western Argolid reflect a similar tension between longer term routes through the region and more narrowly historically defined variation that might be visible at the scale of our intensive survey. In fact, an article on settlement and the Early Modern road network in the region that we published earlier this year offered a nice, if less sophisticated, example of how two different patterns of movement across the region intersected. The main corridor through our survey area followed the route of the Inachos River, but at various periods other routes including those that crisscross the region perpendicular to the river’s path, were significant and remain visible in organization of settlements in the Western Argolid     

Thing the Second

I’m starting to pull together my annual summer reading list. This list is mainly aspirational (at best) and at worst hangs over my head all summer (an into the fall) as as a reminder of my lack of discipline.

Right now, I’m trying to develop the part of my summer list that will deal with the music and context of Sun Ra. It’s for a post-book project that’s just starting to simmer. This weekend, for example, I started to read Anthony Reed’s Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke 2021) which is a challenging read (and vaguely reminds me of my buddy Paul Worley’s Telling and Being Told (Arizona 2013)  which focuses on orality and performances in Mayan literature), but it evokes many of the artists and musicians that I want to understand better. I’m also eager to tuck into William Site’s new book Sun Ra’s Chicago (Chicago 2020) which I hope will expand my understanding of Ra’s early career and formative influences in that city.

To balance these more recent books, I also plan to read some classic works that unpack the history of jazz (especially the kind of avant-garde creative music with which Sun Ra has been associated). I’m familiar with works like Szwed’s biography of Sun Ra and Paul Youngquist’s A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism (Texas 2016), but I need to familiarize myself with works like Graham Lock’s Blutopia (Duke 1999) which is a bit of a touchstone for later scholars working both Sun Ra and jazz. 

Along similar lines, I need to read a bit more seriously on Afrocentrism, particularly in a mid-century American context. I have Stephen Howe’s book, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (Verson 1999) on my “to read” shelf  as well as Wilson Moses’s Afrotopia: the Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge  1998), Clarence E. Walker’s We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism (Oxford 2001), and Algernon Austin’s Achieving Blackness: Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century (NYU 2006). 

At the risk of a bad pun, I’m jazzed!

Thing the Third

The final thing is about things. This weekend, I aim to retire my long-serving MacBook Pro laptop. There was a time when I upgraded computers every year or so and this prevented me from developing much of a sentimental attachment to chunks of plastic, silicon, glass, and aluminum. This laptop, however, has served me well for almost five years. In fact, it’ll serve out the rest of its day doing light-duty file serving and storage. 

Last year, I traded in my beloved 2004 F150 for a newer truck. It’s a cliche to say this, but it happened so fast. One day, the truck and I were inseparable, and the next, it was sitting in the back lot of a car dealer.

I know its crazy to assume that things have feelings, but I also think a good bit about how our long term attachment to things like cars, laptops, watches, and homes creates an attachment that is both irrational and real.

How should I retire my laptop? Or trade in a beloved truck? Or gently allow a treasured watch to fall out of my weekly rotation? 

Shouldn’t there be some kind of ceremony or moment recognizing the bond and at least allowing for the slimmest possibility that the connection between a thing and myself is mutual?  

Early Christian Baptisteries of Greece

Over the next five weeks or so I have to go back to some research that I was doing in around 2008 to write a short piece and catalogue of Early Christian baptisteries in Greece. (For some reason this makes me use my Allen Iverson voice: We’re talking about Baptisteries. Not a basilica. Baptisteries). 

Anyway, the start of Lent feels like the right time for me to put some words down on paper that get the ball rolling. My little essay will contribute to a larger project spearheaded by Robin Jensen to bring together descriptions and interpretations of baptisteries from around the ancient world. I’m writing this with David Pettegrew who is writing a short survey of Early Christian archaeology that will complement our Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology. 

Here goes a very rough first swing:

The study of Early Christian baptisteries in Greece has developed relatively little since I. Volanakes’s 1976 book, The Early Christian Baptisteries of Greece (in Greek). The book offers a systematic survey of known baptisteries and remarks on their form and chronology. The vast majority of 68 structures catalogued by Sebastian Ristow in 1998 also appear in Volanakes and the exceptions, such as the baptisteries associated with J.-P. Sodini’s basilicas at Aliki on Thasos and the German excavations at Demetrias are fairly well known. There are undoubtedly a handful of unpublished or only superficially documented new discoveries over the past 25 years, but these seem unlikely to upset in a significant way how we understand the Early Christian landscape of Greece.

There are four significant challenges facing any study of the Early Christian baptisteries of Greece. The first, and most significant challenge, is that there are very few stratigraphically excavated Early Christian buildings in the region. In fact, most of the churches and baptisteries known from Greece were excavated before the middle of the 20th century through methods designed with a greater interest in exposing the horizontal architecture of the buildings than revealing the vertical stratigraphy associated with their construction. As a result, archaeologists have dated most churches and baptisteries in Greece on the basis of architectural style or mosaic decoration. This tends to provide only the most general chronology for these buildings and rarely allows us to reconstruct or date the changes that took place at these buildings over time. For example, it is clear that the impressive baptistery associated with the Lechaion basilica in Corinth is earlier than the enormous church which stands to its south, but it is unclear how much earlier and impossible to associate it with earlier structures at the site. The two baptisteries associated with Basilica C at Nea Anchialos (Thessalian Thebes) are only circumstantially associated related phases of the basilica. The excavator supposes that the smaller second baptistery is later and reflects a shift from adult to infant baptism in the 6th century AD. 

One consequence of the less than ideal excavation conditions associated with the both churches and baptisteries in Greece is that it remains very difficult to detect development over time. It is clear, for example, that the Lechaion baptistery underwent modification at some point with a smaller font suitable only for affusion installed in the southeastern conch of the octagonal baptistery. It is unclear however whether this font supplemented or replaced the central font in this room and reflected a wholesale change in baptismal ritual or the convenient addition of an alternative to ongoing practice of the earlier rite. It is likewise difficult to understand the chronological relationship between multiple baptisteries in any single community and whether the construction of some of these baptisteries marked earlier structures becoming obsolete or going out of use or changes in baptismal liturgy or the status of various churches.   In effect, archaeologists and architectural historians should treat the existing corpus of baptisteries for Greece, much like the corpus of Early Christian basilicas, provides a chronologically undifferentiated body of evidence which almost certainly combines regional, liturgical, and likely doctrinal variations present in Late Antique Christian communities in the region.  

Among the more interesting features of the Early Christian architectural landscape of Greece is the number of baptisteries associated with major urban centers. Nikopolis, Nea Anchialos (Thessalian Thebes), Argos, Corinth, and Athens all have multiple churches with baptisteries. Conventionally, the bishop was responsible for baptism and the rites occurred once per year as part of the Easter Vigil. Thus multiple baptisteries, assuming that they contemporary, requires some explanation. Of course, it is possible that the annual baptismal rites occurred on a kind of rotation between churches or even that the bishop performed the rites at multiple sites on the same day. Another explanation is that various congregations following various doctrines each had their own baptisteries in Greek cities attended by their own bishop. We have relatively little understanding of doctrinal diversity in Greece during Late Antiquity, but the evidence that we do have suggests that divisive church politics did not spare Greek see any more than any other part of the empire. Finally, it is tempting to imagine that the presence of baptisteries at some sites maybe have had a connection to pilgrimage and so-called “ad sanctos” baptismal practice in which pilgrims traveled to particular sites to receive baptism. The connection between the basilica at Lechaion, for example, and the martyrdom of Leonidas and his seven companions may provide an explanation for the elaborate character of the baptistery at that site. St. Leonidas and seven women were drowned off the coast of Corinth and, according to a 13th century martyrology, while being drowned celebrated his imminent martyrdom by comparing it to a second baptism. While it seems unlikely that the Lechaion baptistery performed second baptisms, which would be a distinctly heterodox practice at a site likely associated with an effort to promote imperial orthodoxy in a see situated at the eastern edge of western ecclesiastical control, it may suggest that the site was a popular destination for “ad sanctos” rites.

The large number of baptisteries in Greece especially in urban areas have also taken on particularly significant for scholars who seek to use baptisteries as a way to asses the nature or rate of conversion in Greece. Recent scholarship has suggested that large-scale Christianization in Greece occurred rather late and the proliferation of baptisteries in urban areas was a response to the need for mass baptisms during the Easter vigil. Putting aside the role of the bishop in baptism, this is not necessarily an implausible scenario, but the lack of chronological control over the dates of the baptisteries (and their destruction) in Greece makes it hard to align with existing evidence.

~

This is a start. I promised myself to spend time today on my book project and this is all the time that I can allot for this today, but stay