PKAP2: The Introduction

It’s been a long time in the works, but the second Pyla-Koutsopetria volume is almost done and should get submitted this spring. I realize, of course, that this project had been pushed so far to the back burner that some of you may have lost track of it entirely.

To rectify this and to maintain a tradition of using this blog as a window into my research, reading, and writing process, I will start to post the various chapters of the volume as I finalize them. 

At present, they’re are lacking figures as we’re still compiling and producing them, but they are in substance complete.

Here’s the introduction and stay tuned for more.

Beginnings and Endings

It’s starting to feel a bit like spring around here and that means both that I’m starting to plan for my summer research season and that I’m feeling some pressure to wrap up projects before everything goes on pause while I’m “doing the archaeology.” 

Over the last few days, I’ve started to work in earnest in wrapping up the second volume in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project series. The first volume, as readers of this blog know, dealt with our intensive survey of the coastal zone of Pyla village in southeastern Cyprus and the second volume will focus on three seasons of excavation in 2008, 2009, and 2012. This volume has taken us much longer to finish than we expected. In fact, as I was fussing with citations and figures yesterday, I found myself editing some texts that I had written for this volume in 2013. 

I have to admit that I’m terrible at end games. In chess, when I feel like a situation is hopeless or, in happier cases, resolved, I tend to resign or get so bored that I make silly mistakes (often complicating the course of winning!). In working on my own projects, I tend to get frustrated as the pace of a project slows and more and more energy is needed to complete the fussy parts of book preparation such as illustrations, checking citations, and reviewing final manuscript pages. While I find such work immensely gratifying when the book belongs to someone else, I find it beyond tedious when it is my own work. 

But it needs to be done and so it goes.

At the same time, I find the beginnings of projects fraught with anxiety. On the one hand, I get excited when I set upon a new (to me) ideas and feel the rush of encountering new bodies of scholarship and evidence. On the other hand, I’ve come to learn that a lack of discipline early in a research process can often lead to inefficiencies later. Indeed, some of the tedious work that I’m doing now with the PKAP2 volume is the direct result of my lack of discipline when I started the project.

I’ve been keeping up with some of Tom Isern, a colleague at NDSU’s history department, musings on research process. In a recent post on his blog, he has reaffirmed his commitment to hand writing notes in a notebook. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that my note taking practice is a bit of a “warm mess” which combines proper (albeit digital) notes, with annotations on the book itself (and sometimes on digital versions of the book!), and casual writing (which I often post to my blog). The result is a complicated jumble of information that leaves me constantly scrambling to find a passage or to recall whether this or that book said what about whatever. 

Tom’s commitment (as well as my colleagues Eric Burin, Kostis Kourelis, and Richard Rothaus!) to note taking on paper has made me contemplate a shift in discipline for my new project on pseudoarchaeology. As a rule, I’m preoccupied with process (or as we call it in publishing “workflow”) and maybe shaking up my workflow at this stage of my research will energize my practice a bit and perhaps pay dividends when I have to turn the jumble of words into a proper manuscript! 

Three Things Thursday: Looking Down and Looking Ahead

Spring break is almost over and I’m not sure that I got what I wanted to do done yet, but I’m still going to take a couple of days to recharge my batteries by watching some boxing and F1 while I catch up on some grading, finish a peer review, and maybe read something for “research.”

In the meantime, I thought I would offer a little handful of updates for those of you curious about what I’ve been up to!

Thing the First

First thing, first. This evening my colleagues and I are giving a talk celebrating both 20 years of work at the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria and marking the changing of the guard as we pass the project off to a new generation of archaeologists.

The talk will be over zoom and there’s a small fee ($25 or so) that goes to benefit ASOR. Our talk should embrace the chaotic collaboration that characterized our work from the start. 

You can register for the event here for $13 which goes to help support ASOR.

And you can see what I have to say here.

Thing the Second

My summer research time is starting to take shape. We have our place to stay at Polis and look forward to a three or four week season there focusing primarily on an apparently kiln and lamp deposit in the area of E.F2 near the South Basilica. Here’s our internal final report from last season for anyone who is interest. 

We’re also going to spend a couple of weeks in Larnaka working on some material from the Larnaka Sewage System Excavations in collaboration with the Department of Antiquities. This will involve the study and preparing for publication of some salvage material that should shed some light on Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Roman Kition.

Finally, we’ll be spending a few weeks at Isthmia in Greece working once again on the Slavic material as well as looking at some possible new stretches of the Hexamilion Wall. You can read a bit about some of our evolving research questions here and here.

Thing the Third

Later today, I’m going to start typesetting a collaborative project associated with the city of Grand Forks 150th anniversary. Our plan is to produce a volume that presents 150, 150-word essays related to the history of Grand Forks. The first 40 or so came from a seminar that Nikki Berg-Burin ran for history students. These essays were then edited and polished by students in my Writing, Editing, and Publishing Practicum class and about 10 more little essays were added from elsewhere.

The students offered some suggestions on page design and typesetting and I’m going to do my best to honor these, but some of them are… let’s say… unconventional to the point of being aesthetically jarring (or at least mildly irresponsible). So I need to find a way to embrace their design vision while gently reshaping it to produce a more polished and professional looking final product. I hope to have something to share by the middle of next week! 

Stay tuned!

20 Years at an Ancient Harbor on Cyprus

Today’s post is as much an advertisement as anything else and for that, as always, I apologize.

On Thursday evening, I’m giving a paper to the Friends of ASOR, which is a bit like the AIA lecture series. The paper will celebrate 20 years at the ancient harbor of Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus and officially mark the transition from a project directed by myself, Scott Moore, and David Pettegrew, to one directed by Brandon Olson, Tom Landvatter, and Melanie Godsey. It also publicly marks the project’s transition from a focus on the Late Roman harbor town of Koutsopetria to the Hellenistic fortified site of Vigla. It loosely (cough) coincides with the completion of the second volume in the PKAP series which publishes the results of our excavations in 2008, 2009, and 2012. 

You can register for the event here for $13 which goes to help support ASOR. 

To keep the level of difficulty as high as possible, we’re dividing the talk into four sections: the first two will talk about the history of the site, the survey, and our study of Late Antiquity at the site; the second two will focus on past and ongoing excavations and the Hellenistic phase of the site. In other words, if you find my voice annoying and my ideas hackneyed, just wait a few minutes and someone else will be on your screen!

Here’s my little section of the talk and here’s a link to the powerpointer (as a PDF).

Twenty Years at an Ancient Harbor on Cyprus

 

The Survey, its Goals, and Results 

1. Goals

a. Develop the most representative sample of the ceramic signature Late Roman harbor town.

b. Determine whether some aspect of spatial patterning is discernible.

2. Slide 1: Scope and Method

a. 465 Units covering 99.5 ha

b. Most units on the coastal plain were 40 x 40 m

c. Slide 2: Surveyed at 10 m spacing

3. Slide 3: Artifacts

a. Total Artifacts: 37,883 total artifacts, which included 30,145 pottery sherds (80%), 6,924 tiles (18%), 109 lithic artifacts (.3%), and 705 other artifacts (1.9%): 902,875 kg (a US ton is 907185 g): a literal ton of pottery.

b. Distribution: artifact density of 2,960 artifacts/ha.

4. Slide 4: The vast majority of artifacts derived from the coastal zone and Vigla where artifact densities ranged from around 3,000 artifacts per ha to an insane 15,000 artifacts per ha. To put this in perspective, Sue Alcock once argued that 3000 artifacts per ha defined a site.

5. Much lower densities extending north from the coastal plain and in part of zone 2, which helped us define the likely ancient harbor.

6. Zone 3 extends to the north of the site atop the coastal heights. This area produced more pre-Roman material including an intriguing assemblage of Iron Age ceramics and fragments of figurines that hinted at the possible existence of an Iron Age sanctuary.

7. Slide 5: Vigla is largely Hellenistic-Roman, but there is a Roman signature as well. The site itself is almost entirely Hellenistic (as Brandon and Tom will discuss later).

8. Slide 6: Site of Kokkinokremos with its known Late Bronze Age site wasn’t an explicit focus of our work. While the vast majority of material from the site is contemporary with the known site there, there was a significant Roman signature that constituted 34% of the material including well known forms of ESA, ARS, CRS, LR1 amphora, and cooking wares. NOTE: excavations have not revealed traces of this R-LR assemblage.

9. Excavations, then, only tell part of the story…. what did survey tell us about the site of Koutsopetria.

 

Pre-Late Roman History of the Site

1. About 5% of the pottery from the survey area is post-prehistoric and pre-Late Roman (and most of it dates to the Hellenistic to Roman periods).

2. Slide 7: This suggests that the site began to emerge after the fall of the island’s independent city kingdoms.

3. Slide 8: For right now, we’re going to focus on the original research goals of the project and its focus on the Roman and late Roman.

 

 

The Late Antiquity Settlement

1. Slide 9: Around 40% of the material is Late Roman in date.

2. Slide 10: about 25% of this was Late Roman roof tiles

3. Slide 11/12: another 25% was likely Amphora or other utility ware sherds (and 5% of our total assemblage of Late Roman pottery was one particular type of amphora: Late Roman 1)

4. Slide 12/13: 10% of our pottery was fine or table ware much of it imported.

5. Slide 14: Olive Press fragments, fragments of brick masonry, gypsum thresholds, and abundant roof tiles suggests that the area was built up.

6. Confirmed our initial suspicious of this site a major Late Roman era site.

7. The abundance of LR1 amphoras which number in the thousands and a complex and massive assemblage of 6th and 7th century imported fine wares. This likely reveals our site as a regional emporium where agricultural produce from the area between the Roman cities of Kition and Salamis-Constantia made their way

 

 

A Church

1. Slide 16/17: Of course, we had our suspicions if for no other reason that Maria Hadjicosti and some of her colleagues from the Department of Antiquities has excavated parts of an early Christian basilica at the site over three short campaigns in the 1990s.

2. in 2008, we conducted additional excavations at the church in an effort to clarify its date and its history as well as to connect the building more closely to the surrounding site.

3. Slide 18: While today, the church is not much to look at — fragments of the apse and part of an annex room and hall way — even the small amount of it exposed through excavation tells us a tremendous amount about the site.

4. The fragments of the apse, however, reveal enough to let us know that church was most likely of a type common to the neighborhood of Salamis-Constantia suggesting that its ecclesiastical influence extended to the south coast of the island.

5. We were not able to date the construction of the church, but the design and the surrounding material make it obviously Late Roman in date.

6. Slide 19: Careful study of the architectural fragments from the church allows us to see that the church underwent several phases of refurbishment during its life. Windows were closed in and hallways were reconfigured.

7. Slide 20: We also found that the church remained in use at least until the 7th century when an almost complete ARS 105 plate was left on the floor of the annex.

8. Against the north wall of the annex room were the fragments of a Dhiorios cooking pot that might date as late as the 8th century. Maybe it was left behind by people stripping the church of its gypsum floor tiles.

 

Lessons from our work.

 

Slide 22: Our work is probably just the first word in the study of the Late Roman period at this site, but we like to think it is a substantial first word! It places our site on the map as a dynamic regional emporium that drew on drew agricultural production from region between Kition and Salamis. Once at the coast, the harbor likely served to move these goods to the Aegean region where they may have provisioned the army on the Danube. The existence of harbor facilities and surplus goods likely stimulated a market for imported fine ware ceramics which were found in such abundance at the site. These objects also help us tell the story of the church which likely served the local community and visiting merchants and mariners during what appears to have been an eventful life for the building and the site during Late Antiquity.

Three Things Thursday: An Abstract, a Panel, and Poetry

It’s going to be another day of weirdly crappy weather, but we’re almost a third of the way through the semester and it’s not -20°! Maybe it’s the strange weather, maybe it’s the hectic semester, or maybe it’s a kind of general fatigue, but I’m having a tough time feeling like February will be a productive month.

This probably accounts for this rather anemic Three Things Thursday:

Thing the First

My greatest accomplishment this week was this abstract for a Friends of ASOR Talk. The talk will be on March 7th (I think). More details soon.

For the last two decades, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has explored the coastal region of Pyla village. Located 10 km east of Larnaka and immediately below the famous Late Bronze Age site atop the Kokkinokremos coastal ridge, Koutsopetria featured a now-infilled embayment which likely served as a harbor in antiquity. The location of the site near an ancient harbor and astride the major road running between ancient cities of Kition and Salamis likely led to the fortification of the prominent coastal height of Vigla in the Hellenistic period. This site likely served as strategic outpost for mercenaries during the tumultuous period after Alexander the Great’s death when his successors battled for control over the island and the Mediterranean littoral. The forces occupying the fort appear to have abandoned it within a generation of its construction leaving behind a fascinating window into the tumultuous life of this strategic site.

During the Roman and Late Roman period, a prosperous town developed in the coastal zone. Excavations in the 1990s by the Department of Antiquities revealed parts of an Early Christian basilica and the intensive survey carried out by our team showed that the site had trade connections across the Mediterranean. The rise and decline of the Roman period settlement at Koutsopetria was less abrupt than that of its Hellenistic predecessor on Vigla, but our work at Koutsopetria similarly offers a window into an era of significant change on the island. Our excavations and survey at Koutsopetria have revealed that the church and surrounding settlement likely experienced a gradual abandonment over the course of the 7th and 8th centuries. This suggests that the site did not succumb to a catastrophic end at the hands of Arab raiders, but declined gradually perhaps as a result of the changing economic and political landscape of the region. 

This talk will interweave the story of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project with our understanding of the history of the site during the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Roman periods.

Thing the Second

Kevin McGeough and I are happy to announce that we’ve had a Workshop accepted for the 2024 ASOR Conference in Boston. 

Here’s the abstract:

Contemporary Perspectives on Near Eastern And Mediterranean Pseudoarchaeology (Workshop)

Despite decades of debunking, pseudoarchaeology remains evergreen. A recent documentary series devoted to yet another pseudoarchaeologcial expedition to prove the existence of Atlantis provoked yet another chorus of outrage from archaeologists. Atlantis, in particular, appears to attract perniciously persistent perspectives anchored in Victorian racism and colonialism. At the same time, it is clear that Atlantis continues to fascinate 21st-century audiences not because of their deep attraction to Platonic rhetoric, but because it also offers a way to think about the consequences of catastrophic climate change. In general, pseudoarchaeological sites, artifacts, and explanations continue to resonate with contemporary challenges including race, identity, forced migration, millenarianism, and globalization.

In light of the ongoing relevance of pseudoarchaeology, this workshop seeks to situate specific pseudoarchaeological phenomenon in their intellectual, historical, social, and even archaeological context by considering the following questions:

1. What are the intellectual, social, political, and material contexts for pseudoarchaeology?

2. How have pseudoarchaeologists responded to normative archaeological arguments, methods, epistemologies, and institutions?

3. How have pseudoarchaeological ideas circulated? What genres, media, and institutions create space for pseudoarchaeology?

4. Have disciplinary efforts to debunk or critique pseudoarchaeology benefited or harmed the discipline?

5. How does the growing appreciation of the plurality of archaeologies create new space within the discipline to recognize and learn from pseudoarchaeological traditions?

As a workshop presenters will present a very brief pseudoarchaeological case study and address these five questions directly. These brief presentations will provide the foundation for an open discussion in the remainder of the workshop.

Thing the Third

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been re-reading William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923). I’m particularly appreciating the 2011 reprint produced by New Directions Publishing which preserve in all its glory the original Contact Editions typesetting and (cough) editing. 

There’s something about the poem’s bleak rendering of the interwar American landscape shaped by the memories of the Great War and the failed promise of industrialization that resonated with me more strongly (and urgently?) than T.S. Elliot’s Wasteland (1922), to which it is often compared. Any number of casual and academic observers have noted that Williams 

I don’t read a lot of poetry and most of what I read is confined to my work as the editor of North Dakota Quarterly and to the casual perusing of various little magazines. When I read something like Williams’ Spring and All, though, I am reminded just how powerful poetry can be and how much more poetry I should read.

Pyla-Koutsopetria 2: The Conclusion

Over winter break, I had three things to do. First, I had to finish a paper on the Corinthian Periphery, then I had to make sure that my courses were prepped for the spring semester, and, then, I had to finish a draft of the conclusion to Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, Volume 2 (PKAP2).

This volume focuses on five seasons of excavation at Koutsopetria: two conducted by Maria Hadjicosti in the 1990s and three conducted by PKAP in 2008, 2009, and 2012. The volume has been substantially complete for years, but we needed to put the finishing touches on the various chapters and make tough decisions on what we would include in this volume and what we would leave for the current excavators at the site to publish with their findings. We have most of this sorted and can finally proceed.

The coolest thing about this conclusion is that we’ve connected it explicitly to the conclusion of the first PKAP volume and demonstrated how our excavations contributed to the research questions framed by that volume. You can check out the conclusion to PKAP1 here.

In the PKAP2 conclusion, Brandon Olson and I focused in particular on the Early Hellenistic and Late Roman periods which both saw significant transformations in the political and economic life of the island.  And you can read a working draft of its sequel here. 

Now we’re down to the fiddly business of formatting citations, proofreading, and preparing figures. We probably won’t get it submitted by the end of 2023 (cough), but it’ll be submitted by the end of the winter for sure! 

Winter Break Projects: Corinth, Cyprus, and Courses

Winter break is both a nice respite from my teaching and service routine and also a chance to get some research and course preparations done amid the holiday festivities. I’m moderately excited to bring one project in for a landing and substantially move the needle on another before classes start again on January 8th. Grabbing time over the next couple weeks is all the more important since my spring semester will be (as the kids say) hectic AF.

1. Christian Corinth. Late last summer, I wrote a rough draft of a paper on the Corinthian periphery for a series called “Early Christian Centers” published by Tübingen’s Mohr Siebeck. I’ve enjoyed writing these handbook style essays over the last few years and found them a nice way to refamiliarize myself with the scholarship on the Corinthia in support of my return to doing some work at Isthmia.

Unfortunately, this paper was left in draft when other responsibilities dropped on me at the end of the semester. My plan is to return to this paper next week, finalize the citations, track down any illustrations necessary (probably by pestering my buddy David Pettegrew for photographs!), and do some kind of stylistic edits.

I don’t think I’ve shared my rough draft here on the blog. For those of you interested in how sausage is made, here’s my current draft. 

2. PKAP 2 Conclusion. A slightly bigger and more complicated project is PKAP 2. This is the sequel to PKAP 1 (2014). The bulk of the manuscript is done. We publish the results from three seasons of excavation.

More importantly, for folks interested in the interpretation of material from Koutsopetria, the conclusion of this volume circles back around to some issues noted in the first volume of the PKAP series including the role of the state in the settlement patterns at Koutsopetria and Vigla, the place of the Early Christian basilica at the site in the religious landscape of the island, and the connection between the settlements at Vigla and Koutsopetria and other sites on Cyprus and in the Eastern Mediterranean more broadly. We’re inching closer to it being done and hope to have a draft of the entire manuscript complete by the end of January.

3. Course Prep. The end of one semester almost always brings about a flurry of course preparation. I’m teaching two partially new preps in the spring (Historical Methods and Byzantine History) and need to sort out a Practicum in Editing and Publishing class where the enrollment jumped from 5 the last time I taught it to an even dozen. There’s no link to this class yet because I’ve not even started to put together a syllabus!

Fortunately, there is a slew of entertaining sports over the next two weeks giving me time for some leisurely syllabus building. Stay tuned!  

Pyla-Kokkinokremos

In an effort to catch up on some reading this past week, I spent some time with Joachim Bretschneider, Athanasia Kanta, Jan Driessen, Excavations at Pyla-Kokkinokremos: Report on the 2014-2019 Campaigns. Louvain 2023. This book documents five seasons of field work at the Late Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos which is in the coastal region of Pyla village. It stands on a prominent, heart-shaped hill overlooking the Koutsopetria plain and immediately to the east of the site of Pyla-Vigla which occupies another prominent coastal height. Readers of this blog know that we conducted intensive survey of the region including the Kokkinokremos hill. Bretschneider, Kanta, and Driessen’s excavations at Kokkinokremos is the fourth campaign at the site which was initially excavated by Porphyrios Dikaios in 1934 and then over two seasons by Vassos Karageorghis and his colleagues in the 1980s and from 2010-2012. 

In 2008 and 2009, my little project excavated a series of trenches on the site as well, in a very minor series of excavations designed largely to ground truth a campaign of remote sensing on the site and to assess whether the site’s casemate style of architecture continued around the entire hill. Michael Brown, who directed this part of our project’s work published most of his results in his 2012 dissertation which is available here.

Bretschneider, Kanta, and Driessen’s book is intensely (and intensively) descriptive in a way reserved for archaeological reports. This is fine, but it doesn’t really entice the reader to dive deeply into the text, immerse oneself in a narrative, or reflect on the thousands of small decisions that go into an excavation. This isn’t so much a criticism of the book as a characterization of its approach to reporting on a site. It’s old school and very much in keeping with the kind of book that I’m working on these days describing our nearly contemporary excavations at Vigla and Kokkinokremos. These books have a place in archaeology, I think, but I also acknowledge that they’re a dying breed.

I won’t try to describe or assess the book here, but I’ll offer a few observations that are largely relevant to our work at Vigla.

1. Single Period. One of the most remarkable things about Kokkinokremos is that even after almost a dozen seasons of work at the site, there is no evidence for more than one main period of occupation. Bretschneider, Kanta, and Driessen acknowledge that our survey produced Roman and Late Roman material from the surface, but also claimed that their excavations produced very little similar material. 

More significantly, the excavations did not produce any compelling evidence for multiple phases at the site. In fact, excavations at Kokkinokremos did not appear to even produce evidence for adaptation, discard, or abandonment. This suggests a site that was active for a short period of time — maybe only 50 years — and did not experience a gradual abandonment or decline. 

This is interesting for a number of reasons largely to do with our understanding of the Late Bronze Age on Cyprus and the transition to the Iron Age. For our work, however, this is interesting because the adjacent site of Vigla shows a similar pattern of use during the Early Hellenistic period. While our excavations at Vigla revealed at least some evidence for clean up and adaptation of the site — which distinguishes it from Kokkinokremos — there is little evidence that this activity took place over an appreciable length of time. Fifty years of intensive occupation seems about right for Vigla.

After the period of intensive occupation… nothing. Later activity at both sites is limited to scatter of later ceramics perhaps identified with quarrying stones or agricultural activity at the sites. 

2. Function and Form. The form of Kokkinokremos is especially vexing. The main architectural feature of the site is the massive casemate style wall. The excavators note, however, that the casemate walls are not especially thick, suggesting that they were neither high nor especially formidable. In other words, these walls as well the position of the site on a high coastal plateau appear to be more of a deterrent than an actual fortification against an enemy incursion.

The significant number of pithoi and deep pits around the site suggest that the casemate walls likely served to protect a community who had invested in the storage of food and water. In fact, it is unlikely (and probably impossible) that the site had a natural water supply. This meant that storage of water was almost certainly a priority if one imagines the casemate walls as a form of fortification.

It is also striking that the site seems to have had very few buildings inside the casemate walls. While this awaits further investigation, one wonders whether this area was reserved for fertilized and irrigated gardens. 

3. Connectivity. One of the coolest things about the excavations at Kokkinokremos is that they’ve demonstrated that the residents of the site were connected to expansive networks of exchange. The excavators recovered ceramics from Crete, mainland Greece, Syria, Asia Minor, and — most spectacularly to my mind — Sardinia. While the authors of this report do not offer a definitive understanding of why such a diverse assemblage of material is present at Kokkinokremos, it is clear that its coastal location and the probable existence of an inlet, wetland, or embayment facilitated connections with maritime routes (and the parallels with the contemporary site at Hala Sultan Tekke). That said, the location of a site on the coast doesn’t necessarily produce the range of connections present at Kokkinokremos.

Again, it is interesting that the MUCH later Roman site of Koutsopetria showed a similarly wide range of economic connections across the Mediterranean. One wonders whether the situation of Kokkinokremos and Koutsopetria on the southern coast of Larnaka Bay situated near Hala Sultan Tekke/Kition and on the overland route to Enkomi/Salamis predisposed sites in the region to accumulate regional connections whether in the Bronze Age or in later Roman times.

Finally, and this just a side note, the site produced some absolutely amazing finds. We’re talking plaster spheres with folded gold objects inside, bronze figures of Astarte, and alabaster flask filled with precious objects. As the old saying goes: come for the rigorously documented archaeology, stay for the glorious color photos of cool stuff.

The Church of St. Lazarus in Larnaka

It had been quite a few years since I had the chance to talk to student about the church of Ay. Lazarus in Larnaka on Cyprus. Yesterday, I chatted a bit about the church and its history with students from Reed College and Metro State University – Denver who were participating in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (Version 3).

This church is a pretty amazing building made only more amazing because it is pretty baffling architecturally and historically. That said, it is also prominent enough in the city of Larnaka and accessible enough to even the casual visitor to make it an appealing building with which to think. Since most of the students had only limited interest in the nitty-gritty of Medieval Cypriot architecture, it made sense to me to talk about the building in more big picture historical ways.

To do this, I decided to focus on how this building embodied a whole series of connections that characterized both the history and contemporary academic conversations about Ancient and Medieval Cyprus. The first connection I make is that the story of Lazarus of Bethany works along side the story of Paul and Barnabas to connect Cyprus (and in the case of Lazarus, Larnaka) to the Levant and Holy Land (which reminds us that ancient Kition was, for most of its history, oriented toward the East). 

Then I discuss the idea that St. Lazarus seemed to be particularly significant to Armenians and propose that the building reflects the connections between Cyprus and Cilician Armenia throughout the Middle Ages from long-standing economic connections between the region to the settlement of Armenians on the island under the Emperors Maurice and Heracleius and the reconquest of the island by Nikitas Chalkoutzes in 965.

I then discuss the how this church connects the city and the island to Constantinople. This connection, of course, works on two levels. First, historically there is evidence that the Emperor Leo VI translated the relics of Lazarus from Larnaka to Constantinople in the first decade of the 10th century. The relics suggest, of course, a church on the site, by the early 10th century, but it remains unclear whether it is the existing church. This matters to architectural historians who continue to ponder the character of Early Medieval Cypriot architecture. On the one hand, it may be that this church reflects trends characteristic of Constantinoplitan architecture, especially if one sees it as a series of cross-in-square churches aligned in sequence to form a basilica. This would tend to suggest an 11th or 12th century date for the building. On the other hand, it might reflect innovation in Cypriot architecture, particularly the long-tail of efforts to convert wood-roofed basilicas to barrel vaults or domes. 

Finally, I leverage a bit of Nassos Papalexandrou’s 2008 article in Journal of Modern Greek Studies to situate the relationship between the city of Larnaka and its salt lake. I concluded with the rival stories about the lake’s origins. According to post-Medieval sources, Barnabas cursed a woman who would not offer him water from a well and claimed it was brackish. He turned the well and the water from it brackish in response to her lie and thus the Larnaka salt lake was formed. Lazarus, in contrast, created the salt lakes as a gift to the city so that the community and the island would never be without salt.

I was fortunate yesterday that Tom Landvatter’s tour of other sites in Larnaka picked up on some stands of my rambling and discursive talk, expanded and clarified them, and used them to discuss the contemporary (and ancient) Cypriot (and Larnakan) identities.

OPP II (Other People’s Projects)

As I’m getting older, I find it easier to make time to help out colleagues and friends on their projects. In some ways, my press, my recent field work priorities, editing NDQ, and my sometimes halting effort to do service in my discipline and my institution represents my efforts to give a bit more back to the various institutions that nurtured my development and growth as a scholar. In some ways, this reflects the collaborative and broadly convivial spirit of archaeology in general. It turns out that my field both has and is a good teacher and time spent on Other People’s Projects is a great way to continue professional development and give back.

This summer, I decided to stick around for the first week of the Pyla-Koutopetria Archaeological Project Version 3.0. This version is officially directed by Tom Landvatter (Reed College) and Brandon Olson (Metro State University – Denver) with an assist from his colleague Justin Stevens. Unfortunately, Brandon was delayed arriving in Cyprus and I was on the island, so I offered to step in as a poor substitute for Prof. Olson. 

The bad news is that this meant that I had to get up at 5 am this morning to help on the first day of the project. To make matters worse, I woke up at 3:30 am because I was terrified that I might oversleep (like I did on the first day of WARP). I did not oversleep and managed to get students to the field on time and without incident.

The good news is that I’ve had the chance to watch and even participate in someone else’s project and learn from how they’re taking some of what we did with PKAP V1 (the survey) and PKAP V2 (the excavations) and develop it in new and interesting ways. From really well articulated anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies to new technologies (like EMLID GPS), new work flows, and new personnel. I’ve also had a chance to see different teaching and mentoring styles with students and different project management styles with staff.

There’s nothing that I’ve encountered the last few days that specifically sticks out as something that I must immediately add to my tool kit as a Mediterranean archaeologist, but I like to think that the opportunity to see (and maybe contribute in some small way) to how other people’s projects work is good for my understanding of archaeology.