Three Things Thursday: Medieval Pottery, Weird Reviews, and a New Book

It’s the last Thursday of the semester and I feel like I’m at the point where I’m almost done, but there’s also so much left to do! This is exhausting and exhilarating in turn and also vaguely distracting as I try to balance between starting something new and wrapping up the odds and ends from the semester. New things always sound more fun, but there’s nothing more satisfying than checking something off my to-do list.

All this is to say that today is a three things Thursday:

Thing the First

If you have time this weekend, do read “Thebes at the Time of the Catalans: A Deposit between the Ismenion Hill and the Elektra Gate” by Fotini Kondyli and colleagues in the latest issue of Hesperia (89.4 (2020) for those of you with a score card!). It’s a fantastic study of 13th and 14th century (AD!) pottery for Thebes. 

Thebes is one of those places that folks interested in Medieval Greece think about more than we know about. It was clearly a major center in the Middle Byzantine and Frankish period and we understand its place in the political and to the economic history of the region (via the earlier Cadaster of Thebes, various Medieval towers, as well as other sources). At the same time, it seems like we knew a good bit less about the everyday material culture of the city especially when compared to Corinth or Athens.

Kondyli’s article is a good step toward rectifying this. Her study (with her colleagues) focused on a stratified deposit of pottery from a bothros that appears to represent daily life in the city. As such, the published material featured more than just the usually “fancy wares” (i.e. glazed fine table wares) and included a substantial selection of cooking pots and other household coarse wares (jugs, table amphora et c.). 

The meticulous typological study of the ceramics complements a more preliminary study of their fabrics based on petrography. This allowed the authors to begin to sort local wares produced around Thebes from imports from outside the region. Among the more interesting revelations is that despite the political tensions between Catalan Thebes and its Venetian rival on Euboea (Negroponte), goods continued to move between those regions as well as between Thebes and Athens which were both under Catalan control for most of the 14th century.

Needless to say, this kind of detailed and careful work has significant implications for our understanding of the Medieval economy of Greece more broadly. It has particular significance for intensive pedestrian survey where Medieval coarse ware often goes unrecognized even by experienced ceramicists. Consequently, absence of carefully dated Medieval coarse ware typologies has led to the Medieval landscape of Greece being comparatively under represented in survey analysis, and this has tended to support a view that post-Classical Greece, particularly during the Frankish period, endured a period of economic, political, and cultural decline. Efforts to revise this perception begin, in some ways, with our ability to recognize the material culture of this period and to document its distribution more carefully. This article is a start.

Thing the Second

There’s been quite a kerfuffle over a review that was posted yesterday in the BMCR. The BMCR is free site for academic reviews of books related to Classics, ancient history, and Mediterranean archaeology. Typically the reviews, at best, useful and, at worst, boring (with the very worst being almost unreadably dull). Occasionally, they publish reviews that are exceedingly critical, misunderstands or misrepresents a book, or, like this week, are very weird. 

As someone who appreciates weirdness for weirdness sake, I mostly find opportunities for even inoffensive weirdness a welcome distraction from the incredibly banal character of academic life and provocative weirdness — even when it gets it wrong — usually makes me smile. 

At the same time, I do understand and appreciate that there is a time and place for weirdness. Judging by the outcry on the interwebs, this review was maybe out of place or at the wrong time. The issue then becomes, what should BMCR or the scholarly community do about it?

Some have suggested that BMCR apologize to the authors of the book (which by all accounts is a very fine book) for allowing this review to appear. This has the benefit, I suppose, of protecting the author of the review — who provided that they reviewed the book in good faith — prepared the review, had it accepted and published, while also taking the blame for allowing such a review to appear.

It’s interesting to think about the social contract between book authors, publishers, journal editors, reviewers, and readers. It seems to me that book authors and publishers hope that their work to be reviewed fairly, but once it is released to the public, they lose any right to expect that. Readers and journal editors, however, have the right to expect that reviews were done in good faith. It seems to me that an authors hope for a book and the editors and readers expectations for a review need not align perfectly. For example, an unfair review that comes about because of a misunderstanding of the book may well be done in good faith and lead to fruitful discussion of the book and its merits. 

What rights, then, do reviewers have? For most of us, writing a book review is a service to the discipline. It is uncompensated and only rarely counts for anything at our home institutions. We hope that our review encourages academic discussion of the book under review and adds value to the venue where it is published. It would be a difficult pill to swallow if a good faith review appropriately vetted by the editors of a journal led to an apology by the journal to the author of the book. 

Thing the Third   

With any luck, I’ll start on book production today (or maybe tomorrow, but certainly by the weekend) on the first book that the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota will publish in 2021. It’s a volumed edited by Rebecca M. Seifried and Deborah Brown Stewart titled Deserted Villages: Perspectives from the Eastern Mediterranean.

Stay tuned for more on this book over the next few weeks!!

More on Chris Witmore’s Old Lands (Part 2)

I’m tired these days. It’s the end of the semester. There’s a pandemic. And I feel vaguely overextended and haven’t been very good about keeping up with my ominous to do list. I’m not saying this to complain really. I know that a lot of people are feeling much worse than me these days. I’m just acknowledging it.

I’m slogging through finishing the last chapter of my slowly developing book. I’m looking at a stack of grading landing on my desk later this week and I’m fussing around with letters of recommendation, end of the semester service work, a stack of books and articles that I want to read and digest, and a couple of manuscripts that I’m editing, publishing, or reviewing that need attention.  

I’m also slogging through a review essay that I agreed to write on Christopher Witmore’s Old Lands. The book, as I’ve noted several times on this blog, is quite remarkable, and this alone has made it challenging to review. I posted the first part of my review essay yesterday. Here’s the second part: 

The dual emphasis on antiquity and the early modern and modern periods reinforces the link between chorography and 19th-century encounters with Classical Greece and the modern Greeks. While he distinguishes chorography from these older traditions, he acknowledges that the structure of the book cleaves closely to the routes of early travelers and nineteenth century archaeologists which the contemporary decedents continue to cite and mimic. The work of these scholars and their approaches clings to the objects that constitute Witmore’s chorography. Witmore’s efforts to construct a landscape that “adds nuance” to centuries-old practices of diachronic study of objects, strata, buildings, routes and regions, encounters significant resistance from the scholarly residues that cling things themselves. In many ways, Witmore’s book encounters the same problems as ”Carpenter’s Folly“ at Corinth. Standing perched above the Peirene Spring, Rhys Carpenter built a two-story structure on and around the remains of a 2-story house that dated to the 10th or 11th century. Carpenter’s building, which he meant to house Byzantine objects from the site, was a confused and ambiguous combination of modern, Byzantine, and ancient material some of which archaeologists brought to the site and immured in the building. It was never finished, partly dismantled during World War II and continued to house Byzantine sculpture into the 1950s. At this point, archaeologists at Corinth start to identify the building as a folly. As Kostis Kourelis observed in the most thorough published treatment of this building (Kourelis 2007), this term evoked both 18th century Romantic associations with aristocratic garden culture and the ultimate failure of the building to its intentions successful. Carpenter’s drew as heavily on an utterly foreign early-20th century fascination with Byzantium and resisted mid-century attitudes toward the reconstruction of historical buildings which framed the Stoa of Attalus in the Athenian Agora, the Cloisters in New York, and Colonial Williamburg. Witmore’s text, like this building, dislodged objects from their original context to create new relationships, while never quite severing them from their diachronic past. Like Carpenter’s folly, Witmore does not mean his folly to provide the only stories from the old lands, but to reflect the kinds of stories that things encourage us to tell.

Recent years have seen increasingly desperate calls to reimagine Classics and Classical (or Mediterranean) archaeology. Old Lands clearly hopes to contribute to this ongoing and crucial conversation. In particular, chorography challenges the growing pressure toward fragmentation and specialization that characterize contemporary archaeological (and, indeed, scholarly) practices (##). Increasing chronological and regional knowledge, expertise in ever narrower classes of objects, and competence in specialized tools, scientific methods and techniques, all frame a century long shift in our discipline toward professionalization. Following the logic of the assembly line, academics honed their expertise in the name of industrial knowledge making and eschewed the messy and inconsistent process of craft. Such an approach to scholarship also reinforced efforts to construe academia as a meritocracy where advancement came through demonstrations of professional competence better measured through the incremental advancement of specialized knowledge than in works aspiring to distinctive modes of engagement or broad synthesis. As Michael Given has recently noted, changes in the discipline of archaeology have called for a more convivial practice (2018). Evoking Ivan Illich’s anti-modern notion of conviviality, Given shares Witmore’s desire for an archaeology that engages with the material presence and resists the trap of ontological dead ends. It may be that conviviality offers a way forward that is more consistent with the character of contemporary academic knowledge.

This critique, however, speaks more to my theoretical predilections than the character of the book. There is no doubt that there will be sympathetic readers in archaeology, Classics, Ancient history, and anthropology. Many of them will find in Witmore’s work echoes of their time traveling with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, working on excavations and survey projects in the Corinthia and the Argolid, or visiting important sites with detours to the beach at Tolo, the gelaterias in Nafplio, and wineries around Nemea. For all that these readers might find familiar, they might think strange that his periegesis overlooks the politics of archaeology in the region. Long standing projects carved their own routes into the landscape with well-known walks from Ancient Corinth to Nemea or from Ay. Vasilios to Mycenae pass down from one generation to the next. Stories of a particular archaeologist’s pants abandoned on a rugged crag on Mt. Oneion ensured that any visits to this mountain included a question: “Did you find Richard’s pants?” A scatter of sherds, tiles, and revetment fragments became the “Villa of the Pig Dog” because archaeologists on the Eastern Korinthian Archaeological Survey encountered a dog that some thought resembled a pig. This has now entered academic literature (Pettegrew 2015, no. 38). Elsewhere, we can talk of a road that crosses a ravine in the Western Argolid because of its proximity to a flea infested mandra. Our interaction with these landscapes preserve their convivial origins in formal and informal archaeological practices.

The landscape of the northeast Peloponnesus also preserves the marks of intense and often bitter academic rivalries. For an outsider, these rivalries may only appear in negative and contested reviews in leading journals, pointed questions at academic panels, and palpable frostiness between significant contributors to the field. For someone who worked in the region for decades, however, these tensions are constituent of the landscape itself. As a graduate student working on the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, the forbidding walls of the American School’s Hill House in Ancient Corinth did more than suggest the institution’s colonial past but defined a project with different goals, practices, and academic attitudes. Sites such as Isthmia and Mycenae that have multiple ongoing projects often have competing agendas and interpretations that spill over into tense interpersonal and professional relations which the various foreign schools attempt to mediated awkwardly. Various Greek projects and the relationship between foreign excavators and the Greek archaeological authorities produce fault lines for relations and shape how archaeologists and visitors to the region view both objects and landscapes. The shear number of projects in the Northeastern Peloponnesus fosters competition for excavation and survey permits, specialized staff, and even accommodations. This, in turn, fortifies a vibrant rumor mill where whispered critique of competence in the field, professional comportment, personal relationships, wealth, and character continue to shape archaeological knowledge. It is not unreasonable that Witmore’s book avoids these kinds of messy political entanglements. Indeed, discussion of these matters remains as rare in archaeological literature as they are influential.

Old ways of thinking about the past cling to the old lands. It may be that the future of our field will emerge from the interplay of old and modern just as Witmore traces the old lands through his chorography and readers find echoes of their own experiences in the text. I suspect, though, that the burden of the old ways that weighs so heavily the old lands will continue to spur archaeologists to excavate alway those residues of the past than to embrace them for new ways forward.

More on Chris Witmore’s Old Lands

My blogging plans for today involved another heroic swing at the slowly developing final chapter of my book manuscript. It has already developed to a series of nips and tucks and hardly anything worth blogging about. Maybe next Monday. Maybe.

Fortunately, I’ve also been working on a little essay about Christopher Witmore’s very recent book Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese (2020) for a forum type review in an archaeology journal. I posted about it a six months ago in a pair of blog posts here and here. Since then, I’ve re-read the book, thought a good bit more about it over the course of some long walks, and started to put together a rather flailing essay.

Here’s the first part of it (warts and all). I’ll post the second part tomorrow:

Christopher Witmore’s Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese (2020) is rather difficult book to review. It a personal journey through the landscape of the northeastern Peloponnesus, and, as such, it is sui generis, at least in the field of contemporary Greek archaeology. Witmore’s periegesis through the Corinthia and the Argolid, which he calls a chorography, follows the well-trod routes established by Pausanias, early travelers, and 20th century excavators and survey archaeologist. He treats these landscapes, however, with a distinctive eye that follows the ancient and modern things that he encounters into tangles of conversations, secondary literature, archaeological reports, and ancient sources. In this regard, his book inverts the conventional narrative technique in archaeology that so often starts with the ancient testimonia, early travelers, and modern scholarship and presents these works as context necessary for things to have meaning. Witmore’s approach, in contrast, locates the authors within in the landscape, rather than behind dusty tomes of past scholars and returns objects to their place within our lived experiences. Needless to say, Old Lands is particularly welcome at a time when many of us have been unable to travel to the Mediterranean because of the ongoing pandemic.

Witmore’s narratives are earnest and devoid of irony. In fact, its earnestness evokes the image of the “heroic archaeologist” who reassembles the past from their personal encounters with sites, objects, and contexts. To be clear, this is not meant to imply that Witmore seeks to play the role as a savior of a particularly worthy past, the discipline, or the contemporary communities which described (e.g. Cleland 2001, 2; González-Ruibal 2009, xx). Instead, Witmore looks back to traditions in archaeology that started with the learned traveler and continued with the the individual archaeologist as the revealer of the past and the producer of knowledge. The epithets associated with an excavator’s notebook — Blegen’s notebook, for example — center the individual agent in knowledge making, often at the expense of workers and colleagues. Witmore puckishly recognizes as much by noting the “here unmentioned” retinue of Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi (##). This is not to suggest that Witmore’s colleagues go unmentioned. Indeed, he is dutiful in naming his companions, but these individuals always play bit roles to Witmore’s enthusiastic inquisitiveness. They are nearly as marginal as his footnotes which nevertheless demonstrate a nearly encyclopedic understanding of the vast scholarship on the northeast Peloponnesus. They function to advance the story, and their presence never lingers or distracts.

Witmore’s presence in the landscape also shapes his encounter with the diverse chronology of the northeastern Peloponnesus. This approach to the landscape locates the past not as hidden, buried, or requiring extraction and but as contemporary with the archaeologist. The past is superficial and requires selection, assembling, and sampling rather than discovery. In this regard, he parallels Rodney Harrison’s proposed “archaeology-as-surface-survey” (Harrison 2011) and draws inspiration from Laurent Olivier’s The Dark Abyss of Time (2011). As with intensive survey practices, it is impossible for the archaeologist to identify every object, artifact, sherd, or plant. Instead, the survey archaeologist stresses the relationships between the objects to create a surface that produces archaeological knowledge “in and of the present.” Witmore and most survey archaeologists are familiar with the abrupt disjunctions that occur when we document a sherd of Final Neolithic pottery next to a Late Roman amphora fragment amid fragments of modern plastic. The ghostly figures that appear alongside the survey team in the first page of Given and Knapp’s volume on the Sydney Cyprus Survey (2003) and the brief first person digressions that situate the modern reader in the landscapes produced in Pettegrew’s The Isthmus of Corinth (2018, ##-##) anticipate the diachronic, contemporary landscapes of Witmore’s book, albeit in less developed ways. Like the surface assemblages studied by Given, Knapp, and Pettegrew, Witmore’s book does more to reveal what we could know about the landscape than what we do know. As such, it presents a future archaeology rather than one anchored in a recovered past.

It is, of course, easy enough to critique survey archaeology and books like this for what it has left out or remains hidden. There is a certain glee with which scholars discuss the excavations at Pyrgouthi tower in the Berbati Valley, for example, because standing Classical remains and Classical and Hellenistic sherds obscured a later, Late Roman phase that only became visible with excavation (Hjohlman et al. 2005; Sanders 2004, 165-166; Pettegrew 2010, 221-224). Similarly, it would be easy enough (and even vaguely gratifying) to critique Witmore for overlooking the Byzantine and Frankish periods in his perambulations. The twin poles of antiquity and the modern (and contemporary) create a landscape of light and shadow that makes the temporal discontinuities more abrupt and the ambiguities all the more salient. Witmore used this to good effect in his description of the First National Assembly of Greece which met in Hellenistic theater of Argos. This setting reinforced the view of the northern European Philhellenes that “the lot of contemporary Greeks was rarely illuminated outside the long shadows of Classical antiquity.” (##). A different narrative was possible. Prior to this meeting, the assembly had met in the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin which stands a half a kilometer south of the theater. There they received a blessing from Orthodox clergy (Witmore, Rt 13). The walls of church which appears to date to the Middle Byzantine period contain numerous ancient blocks (Hadji-Minaglou 1980). Like the nearby church at Merbaka, the spolia grounded the church in antiquity (cf. Sanders 2015; Palalexandrou 2003) just as the church and the Hellenistic theater grounded the assembly in the Byzantine tradition of the Orthodox faith and the modern, archaeological Neohellenism. At the church of the Dormition, the ancient blocks themselves carry the weight of not only vaults from which the central doom springs, but also the connection to antiquity. In the place of the disjunctive friction between the ancient and modern worlds, this Byzantine monument offered a narrative where the Philhellenic shadows turn to grey.

Three Things Thursday: Fiction, Archaeology, and Reading

It’s a Thursday and just after the mid-point of the semester. Most years, the wheels start to come off about now, and I’m certainly feeling a greater sense of general urgency than I usually do. 

As a gesture to a rather frantic time, it feels right to do a little “Three Things Thursday” to clear the deck of wandering blog material that is bound to get caught up in the machinery of daily life and bring everything to a stop.

Thing The First

Last weekend, I read Don DeLillo’s new novel, The Silence. It’s short and like so much “Late DeLillo” atmospheric. It describes a world when all digital technology simply stops working and five people are forced to encounter life in a fundamentally different way. 

For archaeologists interested in issues of ontology, the book is short enough to be a “must read.”  As the five individuals lose their digital tools (and the digital tools that make the contemporary world possible), they lose part of themselves. The loss of their digital prosthetics leave them with phantom memories that bubble up through their consciousness suggesting that the disruption of digital technology is not enough to entirely divest ourselves of the imprint of our digital tools.

The book also engages with time in interesting ways (and here it seems to pick up where Point Omega, his 2010 novel leaves off. In Point Omega time alternately slows down and speeds up as the characters encounter existence through various modalities including the vastness of the desert, a slowed-down version of the film Psycho, and the structure of a haiku (which apparently give the novel its structure). In The Silence, time appears to stutter, lurch, and double back on itself. One character begins to recite Einstein, the other the fractured commentary on the Super Bowl, while another attempts to understand how they arrived in New York after crossing the Atlantic on a flight when all technology stopped. The staccato stratigraphy presented through DeLillo’s dialogue will be immediately recognizable to the archaeologist who is asked to make sense of the sequence of events (which are so often non-linear) as well as the definition of each object.

Thing the Second

I also enjoyed Anton Bonnier and Martin Finné’s recent article in Antiquity, “Climate variability and landscape dynamics in the Late Hellenistic and Roman north-eastern Peloponnese.” As readers of this blog know, I’ve become increasingly interested in historical climate change and they way in which changes in climate shaped past societies and their archaeological remains. Bonnier and Finné’s article consider climate proxies from three caves in the Peloponnesus and attempt to correlate this data with evidence from intensive pedestrian surveys in the Argolid and the Corinthia. Needless to say this is a messy project, but the results are suggestive.

They propose that a shift is visible away from land on hill slopes during the Late Hellenistic and Roman periods. They then suggest that there exist the political and economic explanations for this: the shift away from diversified agricultural strategies associated with the “family farm” toward less diverse practices associated with the supplying of urban centers with grain. They add to this explanation the possibility that the Late Hellenistic and Roman period was also notably drier than the Classical and Hellenistic era. As a result, more marginal fields on hill slopes with thinner soils that were less likely to retain moisture, for example, were abandoned for better and more erosionally stable fields on the valley bottoms. They make clear that climate change was not the primary driver of this putative shift, but could have been a contributing factor.   

Thing The Third

I’ve been thinking a bit about how we read in the 21st century. In my introductory level World History class, I’ve asked the students to engage in non-linear reading of the class’s open access history textbook. Instead of moving chapter to chapter, region to region, I’ve suggested that student use the search function and read across certain themes, ideas, phenomena, and situations. Searching for topics such as “joy,” “love,” and “anger” connects Confucius’s quip on the joys of a contemplative life, the joy of Buddhist nirvana, and the joy of a Classical Greek religious festival. Love brings together Chinese and ancient Egyptian love poetry. Anger connects the fate of kings, the wrath of deities, and daily life in the Levant. For me, this kind of reading is exciting and disorienting, but for my students, it’s frustrating. Without the coherence and context of narrative (preferably supported by a strong sense of progress!), history becomes a cacophony of unrelated events.

I spend far more time working as an editor and publisher these days than I do as a conventional researcher and writer. As a result, I often find my day defined by oddly juxtaposed texts. Snippets of emails, poetry, typeset text, and academic prose jostle with each other more attention. On some days, it’s deeply fatiguing mostly because like my students, I want to encounter some kind of pattern. I want to find that rhythm of meaning that comes from sustained reading of a single or related texts. In its place, I find jostling voices and snippets of conversation overheard at a crowded bar. On my best days, this feels more real than a tidy narrative or a scholarly argument. The orderly style, tone, and forensic detachment feel inadequate to represent the chaotic realities of everyday life. 

Unfolding a Mountain

One of the particularly challenges that we faced on the Western Argolid Regional Project was how to understand a site at a rock shelter known as Daouli. The site featured a series of fortified rock shelters complete with cisterns and what we interpreted as “gun slits” (actually loopholes) that overlooked the Inachos River valley in the neighborhood of the village of Lyrkeia in the Argolid. The fields around these fortifications produced some Late Roman and Final Neolithic pottery as well as modern material. The fortifications themselves proved difficult to date; they are likely 19th century, but graffiti in the plaster of at least one cistern included dates from the 1940s.

Last weekend, I finally finished Niels Henrik Andreasen, Nota Pantzou, Dimitris Papadopoulos, and Andreas Darlas’s Unfolding a Mountain: A historical archaeology of modern and contemporary cave use on Mount Pelion. (2017). A used copy is available now for $21 on Biblio.

The book is really great. 

It describes a two year survey of caves on Mt. Pelion and considered the range of recent and contemporary uses of the caves through a variety of lenses ranging from archaeological survey, ethnography, epigraphy, and regional history. Mt. Pelion is the rugged and beautiful stretch of mountain that extends roughly southeast of Volos. There are a number of villages on the island, a narrow gauge railroad, orchards, overgrown terraces, stone mansions, and caves. 

The book does a few things that were really helpful. 

First, they demonstrate the wide range of ways that caves have been used in the modern and contemporary period. These range from a field hospital during the Greek Civil War to occasional shelters for shepherds, temperature stable storerooms, hermitages, and even periodically for housing new arrivals on the peninsula. The varieties of use reflect the cave’s location, their shape and size, and the changing political, economic, and social situation on the peninsula over the course of the 19th and 20th century. 

Second, they document the caves, related material culture, and graffiti carefully. Historical archaeology in Greece remains in its infancy, and while many projects recognize the significant of modern and contemporary material culture, most continue to document it in a rather less systematic and intensive way that ancient or medieval material. In Unfolding the Mountain, modern graffiti and stacked stone walls are documented with almost the same care that an ancient inscription would receive. Joanita Vroom’s study of the modern and contemporary ceramics emphasized that we still do not have the same chronological resolution for modern pottery as we do for certain periods in antiquity or, more accurately, other sources of evidence for the recent past offers more precision than we can extract from the long-lived ceramic forms.  

Graffiti on the other hand, often included specific dates or, at very least, years, which provided the authors with a more precise, if not entirely consistent, proxy for cave use during the 19th and 20th centuries. While they did acknowledge that the epigraphic habit changed over time, with certain decades less well represented than others, graffiti nevertheless offered insights into the broad patterns of cave use on Mt. Pelion.

The ebb and flow of resources, migrants, and challenges (including Italians, Nazis, Allies and the combatants in the Greek Civil War) shaped the use of the mountain over time. The agricultural practices and the construction of the railway drew Albanian migrants to the mountain and these workers left their marks on caves where they sometimes resided during their short-term stays in the region. Resistance fighters during the German Occupation and the Civil War used the caves to hide weapons, command posts, and hospitals. Miners and shepherds modified caves in various ways when there were markets for goats (and their cheese) and Pelion stone. 

What’s more striking, in their account is how today many of the caves have slipped into obscurity. Their informants described the mountain as “closed” and even denied the existence of caves in its rugged heights. The absence of grazing goals and cultivated fields outside the immediate vicinity of the villages has allowed the caves to disappear into tangled webs of vegetation. Pave roads, the end of transhumant practices, and fewer large flocks have also resulted in access to the caves being impossible. The authors readily acknowledged that their sample of caves only represented a fraction of what likely existed but was lost to knowledge or now too difficult to access.

As someone who has spent a good bit of time at the margins of the cultivated area in the Argolid and Corinthia, I’ve found it impossible to miss the signs – terraces, buildings, cisterns, wells, paths, et c. – that early modern agriculture and habitation was once far more extensive than it is in the 21st century. As a result, our intensive survey methods, wedded as they are to the flatter, more open, and often still cultivated fields of the valley bottoms and lower slopes around modern villages, can produce a pretty distorted view of the earlier land use. In fact, our tendency to conclude that modern and pre-modern land use and settlement were similar often owes itself, at least in part, to the part of the landscape that we can easily sample. 

The Pelion team does a nice job connecting this sampling bias to larger regional trends and demonstrating how the mountain, its villages, caves, and fields responded to larger regional and transregional trends, which, in turn, defined how archaeologists can understand the mountain today. 

Genealogy of Mediterranean Survey Archaeology

An article by Michael Loy has been making the rounds lately, and my colleague Grace Erny brought it to my attention this morning. It so happens that I’ve also been talking a lot of Greek survey (and Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey) with my old friend David Pettegrew lately because he is working on a book that brings together the analysis of survey area with the publication of EKAS data. We’ve also been working on preparing a preliminary report for the Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP) and working to locate it relation to earlier work in the field.

Loy’s article makes an effort to trace the development of Mediterranean intensive pedestrian survey primarily in Greece and the Aegean over the past 50 years. The method is largely anecdotal and focused on the relationship between project directors starting with the three early systematic survey projects: the Minnesota Messenia Expedition (1961-1968), the Cambridge-Bradford Boeotia Survey (1978-1991), and the Southern Argolid Exploration Project (1972-1982). From these projects, Loy identifies the “Cherry-Davis Network” from which sprung any number of significant intensive surveys in Greece with primacy given, perhaps, to the Namea Valley Archaeological Project and the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project. He also notes several other genealogies existed “outside” this network including the “Chronotype” family of projects associated with Sidney Cyprus Survey Project, the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project, EKAS, the Australian Palaiochora-Kythera Survey Project, the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project and Western Argolid Regional Project. Sadly, my little survey on Cyprus – the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project – slipped through the cracks here!

There are many ways to critique this article. On the one hand, the article reflects the relationships between project directors and gives some sense for how professional collaborations create genealogical relationships in disciplines defined as much by field-developed craft as the formal publication of methods, procedures, and practices. In fact, one thing that is striking about the development of intensive pedestrian survey as how quickly it intensified between the earliest project — like the MME and the Southern Argolid survey — and their siteless survey successors from the later 1980s (NVAP and PRAP being key examples).

On the other hand, this kind of network analysis overlooks the bottom-up influences that often influenced the development and transmission of survey methods. Individuals like Tim Gregory, who was my advisor, were often overlooked as significant participants in the functioning of these networks. Tim’s career intersected with both the Southern Argolid Exploration Project and the Cambridge Bradford Boeotia Project though his work at Thisvi in Boeotia. His surveys of islands in the Saronic Gulf and the Gulf of Corinth where he worked with P. Nick Kardulias (who studied with William Dancey, a key player in the development of siteless survey, in the anthropology program at Ohio State) grew from his work in Boeotia and the Southern Argolid respectively. Kardulias’s and Gregory’s work also intersected in their collaborations to survey and excavate the Byzantine fortress at Isthmia and to survey any number of small sites in the Eastern Corinthia. Tim’s and Nick’s work also intersected on Cyprus where Tim briefly worked on the later pottery from Athienou Archaeological Project’s Mallora Valley Survey Project directed by Nick and Ohio State anthropology professor Rick Yerkes.   

When the Eastern Korinthia Survey began, it also drew upon participants in the Southern Argolid project and NVAP such as the ceramicist Daniel Pullen who became co-director of EKAS when Fritz Hemans’s stepped down. These influences combined with those of sometime Corinthian archaeologist James Wiseman through Tom Tartaron and Carol Stein, respectively, who had worked with Wiseman on the Nikopolis Survey and who served as the field director and as a team leader respectively. Tom had also worked on the Berbati-Limnes Archaeological Survey. Neither the Nikopolis Survey nor Berbati-Limnes appear in Loy’s networks. 

Long, undoubtedly annoying, conversations with Tom Tartaron helped me, David Pettegrew, and Dimitri Nakassis develop our ideas about intensive pedestrian survey. As did conversations with Rob Schon who had worked on EKAS and both PRAP and SCSP and directed an experimental team on EKAS also informed my views on intensive pedestrian survey. More directly, my project with David Pettegrew on Cyprus was co-directed by R. Scott Moore who was a fellow Tim Gregory student with me and David, and worked with Tim at Isthmia and with the SCSP. We used the Chronotype system, in part, because we were all familiar with it from EKAS and SCSP where the data structure and sampling processes were refined and critiqued. Here the behind the scenes work of Richard Rothaus, another Tim Gregory student, who designed the survey database and at the same time was working with Nick Rauh on the Rough Cilicia Survey Project in Turkey. Versions of Richard’s database were used on PKAP, APKAS, and WARP and structured how we thought about survey units, walker transects, and descriptions collected via text fields, pulldowns, and check boxes. 

WARP brought together two directors who had experience on EKAS – Dimitri Nakassis and Sarah James both of whom also had worked with Michael Cosmopolos on the Iklaina survey project as well (if I’m not mistaken). Scott Gallimore, the third director, cut his teeth on the Gallatas Survey under Vance Watrous on Crete. Sarah James also worked closely with Guy Sanders at Corinth and, on WARP, often mediated between the siteless approaches embraced my Dimitri (and myself) and Guy Sander’s more critical position regarding survey methods in general. Scott Gallimore’s work on the rather different Gallatas survey provided an additional perspective that shaped our work.

Update: As Dimitri reminded me in this little Twitter thread, he also was a student of John Cherry and Sue Alcock at Michigan  and worked with Jim Wright in Nemea connecting WARP with the “Cherry-Davis-Wright” network as much as the SCSP/EKAS lineage.

It’s telling and significant that graduate students who worked with us on WARP have now worked on other survey projects in the Aegean basin and have undoubtedly transmitted certain ideas as well as contributed their own critiques to the development of field practices.

None of this is meant to necessarily contradict Loy’s top down view, but to complicate the implicit assumption that survey directors define the discipline in such an explicit way. A more subtle reading of survey project (which would involve more complex genealogies that extended well below the level of project director) would reveal a more dynamic space for the foment and transmission of ideas. Instead of the dendritic networks presented in the article a more rhizomic understanding of how ideas and practices shaped intensive survey. 

Indeed, one of the things that always attracted me to intensive survey is its relative simplicity in practice and its largely non-destructive nature encouraged a more egalitarian attitude among its practitioners. Moreover the granularity of survey data and its digital format allowed projects to open up the process of analysis to more participants than many traditional excavations. As a result, it would seem that the character of intensive survey in the Mediterranean would reward the development of genealogies that looked beyond the hierarchy of project directors and first authors. This is not meant to take anything away from Loy’s work, but to suggest that he has just scratched the surface of the networks and relationships that have shaped contemporary survey practices in Greece and the Aegean.

Eleutherai

Over the weekend, I read Sylvian Fachard, Sarah C. Murray, Alex R. Knodell and Kalliopi Papangeli’s article on the late Classical fortress at Eleutherai in the latest issue of Hesperia.

The fort is not only spectacular, but it also brings back one of my fondest memories of my time as the “Melonaki” at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. For whatever reason, I was asked the lead the day trip for the Regular Program to Panakton, Aigosthena, and Eleutherai. I suspect it was because of the important Early Christian basilicas, including the remarkable and oft-overlooked double-basilica at Eleutherai. (That’s an ASCSA joke there). Anyway, the weather was beautiful and sunny at Aigosthena, but by the time we were set to go to Eleutherai, it was raining and grey. There’s something about the wet cold of winter in Greece that is every bit as brutal as the sub-zero days here in North Dakotaland. We stopped the bus near the base of the fort where there was a bakery and most of the students got coffee and were clearly intent on hunkering down for the rest of the day. Ever mindful of my duty, I gently insisted that we ascend the track to Eleutherai and discuss on site the long-standing debate on whether the fort was Athenian or Boeotian, hunt for the handful of low polygonal walls, and discuss the role of rural forts in the Attic countryside. The students politely ignored me and made it clear that they’d prefer to stay on the warm and dry bus with their coffee. I then begged a bit more insistently that they join me on the walk to the fort and they as insistently declined. Finally, I just went with maybe one or two students who felt bad for me. I suspect that the rest of the students eventually felt sorry for me as I wandered up the track in the steady drizzle to examine a fort as grey as the winter sky. Most of them eventually made it up to the fort and enjoyed some dramatic scenes of the fort in the low clouds. To this day, the attempted ASCSA mutiny reminds me of my limits as a teacher and that maybe not every fort in Attica is interesting in the rain. 

This has nothing to do with the Fachard et al. article which is just as interesting on a rainy Sunday afternoon as it would be in the bring sun of an Attic summer. Not only do the authors produce a new stone-by-stone plan of the fort, but they also resolve some long-standing issues with its chronology and construction technique and its role on the Athenian-Boeotian border. They also contribute some useful observations regarding rural fortification in general which will help the WARP team make some progress on its stalled article on the fortifications of the Western Argolid. 

I won’t try to summarize the article’s 75+ pages; after all, I think that you can download the article for free from JSTOR. Instead here are a few highlights.

First, the authors not only prepared a plan of the fort, but they also conducted an intensive pedestrian survey. This survey which was part of the larger Mazi Archaeological Project documented the distribution and chronology of artifacts present around the fort. While artifact densities were predictably high, the percentage of diagnostic pottery was rather low (<15%). This was presumably in keeping with the utilitarian function of the fort and its rural setting over time. They did count almost 10,000 fragments of tile which was unsurprising. The team also collected grab samples from around various features. 

Overall, the rather small assemblage of diagnostic pottery confirmed their argument that the fort saw the most intensive activity during the Classical and Hellenistic period with limited evidence for Late Bronze Age activity on the hill, a gap in the Archaic period, and some indication of Late Roman and later reuse of the fort based as much on architectural evidence as ceramic finds. Their analysis here was more or less compelling, but I am curious about the 85% of the material that was not collected and whether it might fill in some of the chronological gaps at the site.  

Second, they do a masterful job identifying an earlier phase of fortifications at the site and tracking the various fragments of polygonal masonry and earlier lines of walls to demonstrate that the fort likely had an earlier Classical form that was replaced during the same period with the impressive coursed trapezoidal-rectangular masonry that is now visible.

Along similar lines, they also note evidence for later activity at the site including signs of Late Roman rebuilding perhaps as part of the larger effort to fortify the Greek countryside in the 6th century. Eleutherai would have been an ideal site of refuge for the nearby Late Roman settlement during times of instability. I would have loved to understand a bit more specifically the distribution of evidence for modern activity at the site particularly during World War II and the Greek Civil War when the fort guarded the road through the Kaza pass and saw military action.  

Third, the authors do an amazing job demonstrating that despite the size and substantial character of the fort, it would have likely cost relatively little to construct (at least compared to other forms of military investment in the Classical period such as manning and maintaining a fleet of triremes). In fact, the authors argue that the rural garrison needed to man the fort was a much greater expense than the resources required for the fort’s construction. To be more specific, the authors estimate the cost of the building the fort was roughly equal to the expense of maintaining a garrison of 200 soldiers at the fort for a single year. They go on to propose that “It was therefore pointless to build a fortification in the chora without the means to garrison it over the long term, and indeed an unmanned fortification represented a risk if another polity took control of it” (p. 526).

I’ll have to mull this over a bit. While Eleutherai is an impressive fort, the Greek countryside is dotted with less imposing, but undoubtedly similarly functional fortifications that one could hardly imagine being garrisoned regularly. The argument that forts where relatively inexpensive to construct, then, might account for their regular appearance at strategic points. It might also suggest a high tolerance for the risk that an opposing force could gain control of a fort to gain a strategic advantage. The mitigating factor would be that the expense of maintaining a garrison at a strategic location (and general limits on ancient manpower) which might eventually lead a state to cede tactical superiority in the name of economy.

Finally, for many the question of which side constructed and controlled Eleutherai is a matter of some academic interest (although perhaps not enough to warrant walking up to the fort in the rain of a Greek winter). The authors argue persuasively (at least for me, who doesn’t really care one way or another) that the fort is Boeotian. I now regard this matter as settled.

I do hope that they lavished similar attention on the double basilica of Early Christian date to the southeast of the fort! It’s a remarkably unusual building for southern Greece and suggests that something odd was going on in the area in Late Antiquity. 

~

As per usual, Hesperia did an amazing job producing a text largely free of errors and sharp and clear illustrations. More significantly, they published an article that ran to nearly 80 pages (without an artifact catalogue!). There are fewer and fewer places for scholars to publish an article at this length. For archaeology, though, such long articles vitally important to our field in that they allow us to present often complex evidence in a thorough way and present the kind of analysis and interpretation that is key for the creation of new knowledge. 

Siteless Survey and Intensive Data Collection in an Artifact Rich Environment (15 Years Later)

It is hard to believe that my colleagues, David Pettegrew, Dimitri Nakassis, and I published “Siteless Survey and Intensive Data Collection in an Artifact Rich Environment: Case Studies from the Eastern Corinthia, Greece” in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19.1 (2006) almost 15 years ago. This article has become my most widely cited publication and, in many ways, represents a touchstone for my thinking about intensive pedestrian survey until this day.

In fact, this past week, we’ve been working on a pair of articles from the Western Argolid Regional Project. One will be a fairly conventional preliminary report with a brief methodology section. We plan to submit it to Hesperia next month. The other will be a more methodological piece that we hope to submit to the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology before the end of the year. Both pieces are a bit challenging because they involve multiple authors and an effort to balance our desire to describe our work against an interest in providing some kind of larger analysis of our methods. Plus, there’s a pandemic which seems uniquely designed to unsettle even well thought out plans. 

The article that I’d like to see us prepare for the JMA would take our 2006 JMA article as a point of departure. It’s tempting to title our new piece ““Siteless Survey and Intensive Data Collection in an Artifact Poor Environment: Case Studies from the Western Argolid, Greece.” 

The main point of our new JMA piece could be that we’ve taken some of the lessons from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) that we outlined in the 2006 JMA article and applied them at scale to a rather different landscape in the Western Argolid. In particular, our survey in the Western Argolid demonstrated that applying intensive collection practices to low and moderate density scatters can unpack the complexities of artifact distribution across a landscape. This approach, while it might seem intuitive, runs counter to the traditions of site-based collection which approached the highest density places in the landscape through higher intensity collection strategies such as gridded or total collection. In this context, low density artifact scatters were often relegated to “off site” status and subjected both to less intensive collection regimes and generally mapped at a lower level of spatial resolution. 

In our 2006 JMA article, we argue that these practices tend to overlook evidence for short-term, season, or low-intensity activities in the countryside. We also argued that this approach obscures the fact that many high density consist of overlapping material from various periods which might extend in far lower densities into “off site” areas. Like a Venn diagram, then, the main area of artifact densities speaks less to the range and distribution of material at a single site either over time or from any particular period and more to the visible densities that their overlap creates. 

The main critique of the kind of rigorous, siteless approach employed by EKAS is that the intensity of this approach limited the area that we could survey. Our article recognized that the intensity of Mediterranean survey could be seen as leading to a kind of “Mediterranean Myopia” that treated surface assemblages like those produced by careful stratigraphic excavation where every sherd could be the type fossil that provides a terminus post quem for the level. While this attention is warranted in excavations, it limited the ability of survey to speak to regional issues because the scale of intensive survey projects remained limited.

WARP recognized these concerns and while many of the high-intensity siteless predecessors to WARP – namely the EKAS and PKAP, a large site survey on Cyprus – remained limited in spatial extent, WARP surveyed the majority of the 30 square kilometer area allowed by the Greek Ministry of Culture. While this is not nearly as expansive as the largest Near Eastern or North and Central American survey projects which could encompass hundreds of square kilometers, a survey that covered the majority of the territory allowed by the Greek state represented a much larger survey than the territory covered by EKAS or PKAP. Moreover, in the rugged landscape of the Western Argolid, the territory surveyed by WARP represented a topographically and historically plausible micro-region. In effect, we can propose that WARP managed to implement a highly intensive survey model in a way that responded to the historical geography of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Peloponnesus.

The article, as we now have it, includes two case studies. One examines the Roman period from the end of the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity and shows how low density scatters shed light on the activities in the Roman landscape of the survey area. At the same time, it argues that certain periods, such as the Middle Roman period, produce less diagnostic pottery that only becomes visible under more intensive collection regimes that go beyond the typical focus on diagnostic artifacts. While the chronotype system was originally designed as both a standardized method for recording ceramics and a sampling strategy for artifact rich environments. On EKAS and PKAP, field walkers only collected one of every unique kind of artifact according to fabric, decoration, vessel type, and part of vessel (i.e. rim, base, handle, body sherd). This helped the projects manage the potential processing and storage burden associated with the collection of massive numbers of duplicate artifacts. Various experiment conducted on PKAP (and reported here) demonstrated that chronotype sampling did, in fact, preserve the functional and chronological range of artifacts in high density units, but under represented the diversity of chronotypes present. For a periods like the Middle Roman with less diagnostic artifact types susceptible to being overlooked in collection and recording, a more intensive collection regime increases the potential that we would recognize this material.

The second case study evokes the analysis of Kromna in the 2006 JMA article by examining the multiperiod scatter that constitutes the high density “site” of Panayia-Trelo in the Western Argolid. Like Kromna in the Corinthia, this site represents a series of overlapping scatters. The focus of the case study will be on the Archaic to Hellenistic period during which time the region’s relationship with Argos underwent significant change. The goal of the case study is to show that regional level analysis is not only possible from projects that prioritize higher intensity collection and spatial resolution over extent, but also requires the higher level of intensity to produce nuanced historical analysis.

Today’s blog post is just a the gentlest of sketch of what this piece needs to do to be compelling and significant. The most daunting task will be to review the scholarship published between 2006 and today to see how Mediterranean survey projects have adapted their methods to accommodate varying artifact densities. Needless to say, there’s a ton of scholarship to navigate. Stay tuned. 

Kephalari Blockhouse

I know that I’m not the first archaeologist to observe that without a field season this summer, we have theoretically more time to spend thinking carefully about our material and sites, tidying data, and preparing publications. This means, at least for me, trying to get some momentum on some lingering projects.

Two, in particular, are begging for attention. First, we have an almost complete draft of the publication of the area EF1 at Polis complete. In fact, I think we could have it ready for submission in two weeks.

More pressing at the moment, though, is a little article on the Late Roman finds from the Kephalari blockhouse in the Western Argolid. These finds were discovered in Corinth storerooms a few years ago and a group of us agreed to publish them. Of course, since that time lots of things have happened including WARP seasons, Polis stuff, a PKAP volume that’s not yet done, and The COVIDs. But this spring, the article received the ultimate motivating push: my colleague Scott Gallimore wrote up the catalogue and analysis of the finds.

So now it’s time that I do my part, which is writing up the “Discussion” section of the article. My goal is to offer a concise synthesis of 7th century settlement and rural insecurity in the northeastern Peloponnesus. It’s obviously a work in progress!

 

The assemblage from the Kephalari block house adds another small body of evidence to the increasingly complex mosaic of material from the later 6th, 7th, and early 8th century in the northeastern Peloponnesus. While the presence of material from the region’s significant urban centers, particularly Argos and Corinth, is well-known, archaeologists have only just begun to unpack and understand the situation in the countryside during these decades. The small number of excavated and well-published rural sites even in the well-studied northeastern Peloponnesus creates a particularly challenge for situating the reuse of the Kephalari blockhouse in its regional context. The growing number of stratified sequences, especially from Corinth, however, has made it increasingly possible to analyze the growing body of intensive survey data from this region from the end of antiquity. This, in turn, has offered new perspectives on a number of long-standing academic debates including changes in rural settlement patterns and urbanism, the character of the so-called “Slavic Invasions” of the late-6th century, and the presence of rural refuges such as the Andritsa cave.

Scholars have recognized that the reoccupation of rural sites, such as Pyrgouthi and the Kephalari block house appear to indicate significant investment in the adaptation of existing rural sites for reuse in the late 6th and 7th centuries. The appearance of window glass at Kephalari, for example, and the large-scale reconfiguration of the Pyrgouthi tower into a farmhouse with a courtyard suggests efforts to reoccupy these sites on a permanent basis. The evidence is less extensive from the other blockhouses and pyramids of the Argolid, but it appears that these sites were cleaned up with much of the material from earlier periods removed and the interior organization of the spaces modified with new walls and additions (Pettegrew 2006; Lord 1938; Scranton 1938).

Intensive survey has produced scatters of ceramics in the countryside that not only suggest that other Classical and Hellenistic sites experienced reoccupation in the Later Roman period, but that these sites were part of a larger reoccupation of the countryside. The site of Kastraki, for example, in the Inachos Valley, while unexcavated, may well be a similar site to Pyrgouthi or Kephalari in that it was a Classical or Hellenistic tower set atop a low rise in the valley bottom surrounded by a scatter of Late Roman material. The site of Any Vayia in the southeastern Corinthia likewise produced a low-density scatter suggesting a possible short-term reoccupation (Caraher et al. 2010) which found parallels elsewhere including on Euboea (Seifried and Parkinson 2014) and at the Vari House in Attica (Pettegrew 2006, p. 33).

Other smaller sites with material dating to the late-6th and 7th centuries exist throughout the Western Argolid survey area in the Inachos Valley and generally follow a pattern of settlement present in the 5th and 6th centuries. Athanasios Vionis and John Bintliff have argued for Late Antique Boeotia, urban and rural sites represent opposite sides of the same coin (Vionis 2017; Bintliff 2013). The persistence of sites in the countryside and even the expansion of activities into places like near coastal islands reflects the expansive use of diverse rural landscapes for agricultural purposes as well as nodes in regions and Mediterranean wide trade networks (Gregory 1984; 1995).

Urban sites continued to provide markets for rural agriculture, points of contact with larger imperial command economy, centers for manufacturing, and ecclesiastical and a certain amount of political authority. While the Finleyan concept of the “consumer city” should be laid to rest, work at Corinth (Sanders; Rothaus; Brown), Athens (Hayes), and Argos (Oikonomou-Laniado 2003) and in Boeotia (Bintliff, Vionis) have demonstrated that urban areas in Late Antiquity continued to serve as key places in Greece into the 7th century with continued investment in monumental architecture, urban amenities, and public spaces fortified in part by the growing spiritual, political, and economic role of urban bishops and the persistent reach of the imperial government.

This is not to suggest that the 7th century was not a period of significant disruption in southern Greece. Urban areas clearly experienced contraction and settlement in rural areas and this is visible in the larger WARP survey area as well as in urban surveys in Boeotia. The changes in rural settlement, including the emergence of fortified settlements in the countryside, seem to accompany continued economic activity in rural areas. While the evidence for such sites in the Argolid remains limited — the site of Kastro near the village of Tsiristra being a possible exception — the reoccupation of places like the Kephalari block house may well represent the need for both additional security and as well as continued economic viability in the countryside (Vionis 155-157). The reoccupation of fortifiable, if not necessarily fortified, sites in the Argolid may also shed light on the status of sites like the Andritsa Cave. If continued occupation of the countryside indicated the continued viability of markets and networks open to agricultural production and the fortified sites not only in Greece but across the wider Eastern Mediterranean reflects larger insecurity in the region, then places like the Andritsa Cave may well reflect the local realities of both rural wealth and instability. The so-called isles of refuge first recognized by Sinclair Hood and critiqued by Tim Gregory in the 1980s and 1990s, may also reflect the same effort to reconcile economic potential with the need for added security during unstable times.

Greek Villages

Over the weekend, I read the special section in the most recent Journal of Modern Greek Studies dedicated to the Greek village. It consisted of five articles with an introduction drawn from a conference on the Greek Village convened by Sharon Gerstel at UCLA last year. 

The article were good and offered views of the Greek village that drew upon perspectives developed in art history, archaeology, anthropology, and history. In the background, as Gerstel points out in her introduction, is the changing meaning of the Greek village in light of the recent economic crisis in Greece which has pushed people to return to villages for a range of economic and social reasons.

It is also hard not to read these articles against Greece’s extraordinary response to the COVID-19 crisis as well. To paraphrase Michael Herzfeld’s title, did the ability of Greeks to “see like a village” shape their response to the coronavirus? Of course, as Gerstel, Foxhall, Herzfeld, Kourelis, and others make clear, the concept of the village (and of the villager) is not a neatly localized phenomena.

Villagers in antiquity drew upon a range of strategies which included dispersed landholdings to diversify their economic opportunities and to insulate themselves from environmental vagaries present in the Mediterranean basin. Foxhall’s work to extend the village from the nucleated settlement to its surrounding countryside echoes the strategies articulated by Thom Gallant, Horden and Purcell, and similar work on rural life in ancient Italy. 

Sharon Gerstell, in some ways, inverts this paradigm by focusing on how contemporary villagers read, understand, and contribute to the inscribed record of a Byzantine church in the Mani. The ability of a community to connect their material past to their own situation ensured that monuments like the Byzantine church in the village of Vamvaka in the Mani develop a significance that goes beyond their place in the history of Byzantine architecture and settlement. Instead, the regular interaction with this monument and its inscriptions connects current residents with their predecessors on a personal (and, in the case of inscriptions naming clergy ecclesiastical) past.

Michael Herzfeld’s “Seeing like a Village” offers a perspective on the tensions between village and national political and social culture in Greece. By returning to the site of his long-time ethnographic interest, the village of Zoniana on Crete, he explores the ways in which the less formal structures of village life instruct how villagers engage with the more rigid bureaucracy of the modern Greek state. The functioning of patronage, violence, and strong kinship ties at the village level refract in different and generative ways when they interact with the state. Herzeld’s piece was perhaps the most thought provoking when it comes to understanding Greece’s success in dealing with the COVID pandemic. How did village political and social culture with its intergenerational ties, strong kin relations, and distinct forms of authority complement and reinforce the restrictions promoted by the Greek state. This would seem to echo Herzfeld’s assertions that seeing like a village did not necessarily imply a kind of parochialism or narrowness, but could produce responses to government policies through networks of relations otherwise inaccessible to institutions that could only “see like a state.”

Konstantinos Kalantzis considered the way in which villages are mediated in popular culture, for tourists, and in architectural conventions through a case study of a highland Greek village in Crete. By considering such everyday tourist objects like postcards, Kalantzis explores how the depictions of village life shape the expectations of visitors and villagers alike. The more dispersed settlement style of Cretan highland villages, for example, often disappoints tourists expecting the denser arrangement of lowland villages. The reproduction of village public spaces in highland villages likewise served to conformant to the expectation of visitors and as a backdrop to Cretan hospitality. The way in which architecture, space, and media shape experiences and expectations provides an insight into how Greek national and regional identities are performed on the most local level.

Finally, Kostis Kourelis, offers a view of the Greek village through the lens of three women named Eleni. These women provide a perspective onto the transnational experience of Greek immigrants. Kourelis’s stories offer a contemporary take on Foxhall’s observation that villages are far more than their nucleated cores, and often extend into the countryside. Kourelis demonstrates that villages in the modern period often represent communities that exist on a global scale.