Atlanta and ASOR 2015

I had a great week attending the 2015 American Schools of Oriental Research conference in Atlanta. The panels that I managed to attend were interesting and crowded, the committees to which I was obliged were productive, and impromptu meetings with friends, colleagues, and strangers were fun and useful.

I even learned some things. So in the interest in bringing order to a complicated few days, here’s a little list summarizing my encounter with the 2015 ASOR meeting: 

1. Bathrooms. I don’t, generally, spend much time reflecting on bathroom design, but at a conference fueled by coffee and endless pitchers of water in every room, regular visits to the bathroom punctuated my day at steady intervals. The men’s room that I visited most regularly had a small vestibule (around 3 m in length) between the door to the hallway and the door to the bathroom proper. Through this second door was a doglegged passage of 7-8 m in length featuring a bank of four or five sinks. The standard bathroom fixtures were set further into the bathroom around a partition wall.

This arrangement may sound typical, but it means that a visitor to the facilities moves through about 10 m of passage between entering the space from the external hallway and encountering the most important features of the bathroom. This space was genuinely liminal for the visitor and preyed directly upon our common, human anxieties associated with moving from the public space of the hallway to the gender-defined space of the bathroom. Is this really the men’s room? Am I in the wrong place? 10 meters is a significant distance to travel “betwixt and between,” and made every trip to the facilities involve some design-induced angst.

2. Nice Cars and Traffic. This was my first time in Atlanta outside of an unplanned night in an airport hotel after some botched travel arrangements a few years back. A few friends with Georgia roots tried to explain to me the urban landscape of the city which seemed to me to be an East Coast version of West Coast urban sprawl and truly a fitting anchor for Gibson’s Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. 

The one thing that Atlanta is famous for is traffic (and streets named Peachtree). I was enchanted (see below) by the bustling traffic of Atlanta’s byways and trip to from Buckhead to the Cabbagetown neighborhood for dinner took us on vibrant and traffic-filled highways through Downtown and Midtown.

The spectacular array of exotic and imported cars on the roads of Buckhead and on Atlanta’s highways reminded me that I truly live in “Pontiac and Plymouth Country (TM)” and created a moving montage of social and economic display. While eating lunch at a little burger place, I watched no fewer than three Bentleys roll by and was shocked to realize that Mercedes only sells S-Class cars to Atlanta residents.

3. ASOR and CAARI and The Digital. There were sustained and productive conversations about “The Digital” both on the ASOR committee on publications and at the board of trustees meeting of CAARI (the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute). The former is embracing the need to at least experiment with open-access digital publishing and linked data and the latter is starting to think more critically about its web site as more than just a billboard for the institutes existence. I’m increasingly optimistic that Pyla-Koutsopetria I: Archaeological Survey of an Ancient Coastal Town will appear next year as a digital, fully linked, revised edition and Pyla-Koutsopetria II: Excavations at an Ancient Coastal Town will be born as a linked digital book in 2017. 

As for CAARI, there’s much work to do, but we’ve made some progress. Moving the CAARI site from a hand-coded page to a WordPress template would make updating the site easier and facilitate links with social media. The conversations at the trustees meeting also suggested that people are increasingly interested in using the website for… something. It may be that the website emerges as a place to solicit contributions or to market scholarship opportunities or even to publish old photographs of Cyprus. It’s clear that the board is not quite sure how to align the web with CAARI’s broader mission.

As I sat there listening to the conversation (and the many generational protests), I started to think that CAARI could use the web to disseminate scholarship perhaps in conjunction with the re-opening of the expanded library. A digital occasional paper series modeled on the ISAW Papers series might anchor the CAARI web presence in a familiar medium – scholarly publication, celebrate the benefit of the new library by linking CAARI with academic production, and provide a new outlet for publications on Cyprus now that the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus is on sabbatical.

The key thing, to my mind, is to revamp the website with a strategy (and goals) in mind. We have work to do!

4. Slow Archaeology. I was thrilled to hear the term “slow archaeology” appear in several papers at ASOR and even more thrilled to realize that some of these mentions were not directed at my work but indicative of parallel work with the same ideas. Eric Kansa’s work on “slow data” distinguishes the deliberate and careful work of publishing, linking, and using published archaeological data from the compliance based “data dump” and suggests that a “slow” approach to data publishing will both yield far more important results and require a change in attitudes among archaeologists, institutions, and funding agencies.

Independent of my work, Ömür Harmansah has explored the intersection of archaeology and development, neoliberalism, and the modern academy to suggest that, today, almost all archaeology is salvage archaeology pushed by an array of pressures inherent to late capitalism. As an antidote to this trend, he has proposed approaches that embrace an intentional engagement with complex landscapes including a kind of “slow survey” that attempts to resist practices associated with the commodification of archaeological space, objects, and heritage in the name of documentation.

I’m exited to explore more of his ideas with him and think there is real potential for a clearly-defined slow archaeology to offer substantive critique to the discipline.  

5. Objects and Enchantment. I participated in a panel on object biography where folks used the word “enchantment” more than I’ve ever encountered at an academic meeting. The papers were good and generally well-received, although I detected a consistent skepticism that object biography represents a  productive way forward for understanding of the place of objects within the broader archaeological project.

My paper was met with skepticism including a comment that my approach to archaeology (and digital artifacts) would cause children to go running from the discipline whereas the opportunity to handle an excavated object would lead to enchantment. This may be the case, although I suspect children and students these days have a greater willingness to be enchanted by digital objects than our generation does.

Despite that critique, my time at the ASOR annual meeting was enchanting, exhausting, and though provoking. I’m looking forward to next year and following up some of the conversations that I had over the course of the meeting.  

Lessons from a Sabbatiquoll

Despite my effort to keep a balanced perspective on sabbatiquoll, I slowly but surely lost my mind as the end of the my year of freedom, rest, and recovery approaches.

So, I’ve learned five lessons and these largely echo the lessons that I learned (and tried to avoid) last time I took a year of leave. I guess I’m incapable of learning.

1. Time, time, time. Over the last 80 days, I diligently used Nick Feltron‘s Reporter app on my mobile phone to document what I did with my days. Reporter asked me approximately 4 times a day (a mode of 5) what I was doing. I would then answer a simple survey that would provide data for analysis.

The most simple question it asks is whether I’m working or not. I answered yes 64% of the time. Since I generally was awake at least 14 hours a day (conservatively), I reckon I was working about 8 hours a day, maybe a bit more. That means that I worked around 60 hours per week. 

2. Write, write, write. Of that 60 hours per week, I wrote about 65% of the time. I spent the rest of the time editing, reading, and in meetings which all account for over 5% of my work time. In hindsight, I probably spent too much time writing and not enough time reading (6.6% of my working time) especially as I look at a stack of unread books for the summer field season, but it was a conscious decision to get as much writing done as possible and load up my folders full of written text for the long, dark time between the end of this sabbatical and the next. 

3. Alone, so alone. I was alone 60% of the time this year, and 32% of the time I was with my wife. That leaves 8% of my time with other people. While I’m not particularly bothered by being alone, I did come to find it a bit oppressive. I suspect the main reason that I was alone so often is that I rarely left the house. I spent 80% of my time in my house and 37% of that time in my home office (29% downstairs in our family room and 12% in the kitchen or workout room). This coincides well with my leisure time activities. 34% of my leisure time was spent eating or drinking primarily in the evening in the kitchen and another 30% of my leisure was spent watching television. 16% of my time was spent on walks either in the workout room on the treadmill or with the mighty Milo-dog. I counted time with Milo as being alone.

4. Preloading my next two years. I promised myself that I would get things done over sabbatical, but I did not promise that I’d finish things. I was really hard to move a number of projects along without wrapping any of them up (well, except this one). I think I succeeded in keeping my eyes on my next couple of years when I’ll return to teaching full time (or at least university life full time!), and setting up a slate of projects that I can finish while occupied by other responsibilities. 

a. Learning Layout. I spent a good bit time over sabbatical learning how to layout books using Adobe InDesign. I was able to work on some manuscripts without interruption and learn techniques to streamline the production of books. This will allow me to keep my little press moving forward next year. 

b. Digital and Analogue for PKAP. I made steady progress working on preparing a digital copy of PKAP I and am working on getting support from ASOR. We also made a good start on finishing the work with PKAP II. We will need to do some data normalizing over the next 6 months and some editing and revising on the manuscript, but much of it is complete. 

c. Man Camp Projects. Several significant parts of the North Dakota Man Camp Project have moved forward including an edited volume with Kyle Conway, a book proposal for the Tourist Guide to the Bakken Oil Patch, a roughed out edited version of our interviews (Voices of the Bakken), some outreach, and an almost completed manuscript for submission to Historical Archaeology (or someplace similar). All of these projects will require attention in the fall, but most of them have significant momentum.

d. Polis-Chrysochous. Unfortunately, my work at Polis-Chrysochous became the awkward step-child of my scholarly attention. I did not move it forward as much as I would have liked this year, but I did get some preliminary commitments to publishing both the notebook data and the finds data in digital forms. Plus, we have a manuscript for an article that is in pretty decent shape (I think) and will help us guide our 3-week summer study season and will set up some work for next year.

5. Service. As an academic, I tend to be pretty self-involved. My projects trump almost everything else in terms of setting priorities and absorbing energy. Over sabbatical, however, I allowed myself a bit more mission creep. I committed myself to several new, and hopefully productive, service projects that range from stepping up my commitment to institutions that mean something to my various communities – like the American Schools of Oriental Research and the North Dakota Humanities Council – and taking on some new responsibilities with North Dakota Quarterly and (pending a vote) the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute. A colleague of mine here at the University of North Dakota and I discussed how rewarding it has been to work within our scholarly communities in ways that advanced the work of others as well as our own. I took that conversation to heart and want to continue to seek out opportunities to build communities with shared academic interests and goals.

Beyond the Book

This post will seem pretty ordinary to anyone who has thought critically about the digital humanities or digital archaeology over the past few years, but since I’m up, it’s early, and I’m thinking, I thought I’d post it anyway.

Last fall, my co-editors and I saw our first book appear from our work at the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria. About six months earlier we had published the data from our site on Open Context. Unfortunately, since the book only appeared in paper, there was no way to connect the PKAP I volume and the Pyla-Koutsopetria book. The great thing about being an author, though, is getting page proofs (although the worst thing is having to read through them one. last. time.) Page proofs are usually just .pdfs of the final draft of the book, but they’re also a bit of a blank canvass. They provide the author or authors with all the value of layout and copy-editing (provided by the press) but also flexibility modify the content. 

So, I began to go through the catalogue section of the volume and insert links connecting the various objects in the catalogue to the entries in Open Context. 

For example:

94.29. Rim (fig. 4.10, reproduced at 1:2). Diam.
= uncertain, PH = 0.020, PL = 0.035, Th. (rim)
= 0.006, Th. (body) = 0.005. Medium-grained,
yellowish-red fabric (5YR 4/6) that is poorly fired
with a discolored gray exterior and a discolored
dark gray slip (10YR 4/1 to 7.5YR 4/4) on the ex-
terior. Fabric contains rare, sparkly inclusions.

With one click in Open Context, you can move back to the survey unit where the object originated, Unit 94; and another click allows you to see photos of the artifact here, here, here, here, and here. 

More recent updates to the Open Context database will expand the links throughout the volume. My edition of the book will be much better, more dynamic, and potentially more accurate than the paper original.

Pretty cool, right?

The problem is, how do I circulate this modified version of the book. Technically, I do not own the copy of the book that I’m modifying so I can’t really circulate it. So what I have is a private circulation book that has significantly added value on an “Unofficial Digital Edition.”

So I got to thinking about my press and dynamic books. I know this is old turf for people thinking about the future of the book, but I have a current project at my press that will initially have only a very limited circulation. Bret Weber and I have been working to layout a collection of interview transcription from our work on the North Dakota Man Camp Project, which the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota will publish. The book is tentatively titled: Voices of the Bakken, and some time soon I’ll produce a snazzy cover for it (soon as in, um, today; see below).

There are two issues. First is that we need to sort out the organization of the interviews and decide whether we might obscure the identities of some of our informants (although we don’t have to according to our IRB paperwork) or contextualize certain aspects of our interviews more thoroughly. 

Second, we are in the process of developing online digital content for this project. Since our dataset is relatively large, we’ll likely publish parts of it over time rather than all at once. So the book will continue to accrue online content as we make more available. At present, though the book is in a private alpha which will probably expand to a private beta before being made available as a public beta sometime before the end of the year. The public version will then get a version number 1.0 that will be updated over time. The book then becomes an entity undergoing continuous development, like a piece of software, until it is formally retired. The final publication of the book, then, is the end of its existence as a living document rather than the start.  

I’m not saying that this will be the cover, but I’m also not saying it won’t be the cover. (Note the Gill Sans for the cover. I really, really wanted to use Cooper Black which to me invoked the 1930s and industry, but it was just too heavy to use in this mock-up.)

Narrating Archaeology

This week I started on one of my major sabbatical projects. I began the process of editing and writing the volume dedicated to our excavations at Koutsopetria on Cyprus. This volume will be PKAPII or PKAP2 whichever looks cooler.

The largest part of our volume will be a detailed treatment of our excavations on Vigla, a Hellenistic fortified site on a prominent coastal plateau. We will publish a discussion of our excavation practices, their results, the architecture and fortifications, and, of course, the significant assemblage of Hellenistic material from this site. The volume will also include discussions of the excavations by our team and Maria Hadjicosti at the Early Christian basilica associated from the Late Roman coastal site of Koutsopetria. More on Koutsopetria later because now it’s all Vigla, all the time. 

Over the next few weeks, I plan to spend time revising my colleague’s, David Pettegrew, detailed treatment of the stratigraphy and phasing of our excavations on Vigla. To be fair to David, these treatments represent the hard work of interpreting the various contexts excavated over our three seasons of work, but at present they are presented in outline form with bullet points. His work has made it fairly easy to identify the various contexts that represent the archaeological phases at the site, but tough reading for anyone not committed to wading through copious archaeological details. My job is to simplify his detailed outlines while preserving and bolstering the basic arguments that he made concerning the stratigraphic, architectural, and historical relationships at the site.

Photo by Ryan Stander from Topos/Chora

So far, this has been tricky, but rewarding work and it got me thinking once again about how we narrate archaeological results. In particular, I thought about three things:

1. History and Archaeology. History and archaeology tend to narrate differently. For example, David’s descriptions of our trenches begin with the plowzone and then go through all the earlier phases to bedrock. This is a typical form of archaeological narration that follows the work of the excavator moving through basic levels. Historians, however, rarely work from the present to the past when they narrate events (although good detective stories sometimes do work this way). After mulling and reading a good, I decided to invert David’s narration and start with the earliest phases of activity on Vigla and then argue for the series of changes that took place in our trenches. I think that this makes it easier for me to integrate our archaeological observations with our historical arguments later. 

2. Archaeological Description and Published Data. Traditionally, one of the roles of the archaeological monograph served was to make descriptive data available to as wide an audience as possible. Today, however, it is becoming increasingly common for projects to make all their data available online including their notebooks, their finds, their inventoried objects, photographs, and drawings. In this situation the archaeological monograph goes from being the primary location for the presentation of “raw” archaeological data and its interpretation to serving as a conduit between archaeological interpretation and a body of evidence that might be available elsewhere. Our volume will still include plenty of primary evidence for our arguments like an artifact catalogue, specific references to stratigraphic units, some section and trench drawings, and short descriptions of complete assemblage from each unit. At the same time, I think that we should place greater emphasis on the interpretation of this data – including narration – since the reader will have access to a far more complete dataset online.

3. Narration and Reflexivity. The trend toward increasingly relfexive archaeological practice and publication habits has had a significant influence on how I think about both field work and publication. In fact, this blog and its effort toward a reflexive transparency in my thoughts about archaeology, my academic career, and my teaching is a direct outgrowth of my commitment to demystify academic work and life. So, it concerns me as I’ve started to narrate “life history” of the site of Vigla over time that my efforts to convey to make our work conform to a historical or even broadly biographical pattern runs the risk of obscuring a reflexive narration of the archaeologists work. I’m not so naive to think that a reflexive critique is somehow independent from the perils of the narrative form (after all I’ve read Hayden White). The old objectivist in me still worries I’ll obscure the myriad small steps that produce our understanding of the past when I invert the traditional archaeological narrative and supplant it with a historical one.

In the end, I’ll have to trust the reader to drill down into our data and to celebrate the possibility of upsetting or challenging our narrative by engaging with the raw data that our project produced. And maybe simply acknowledging this fact and recognizing the limits of our narrative structure is enough? 

The Long Dark Tunnel of Sabbatical

I have slowly become aware this holiday season that my sabbatical is half over. I’ve done some of things that I pledged not to do, but avoided other pitfalls, and now I have to try to focus of the next 9 months to ensure that I survive sabbatical with my motivation intact.

I was particularly heartened to read Sara Perry’s recent post about her sabbatical. In it, she said that she focused part of her sabbatical on being quiet. I’m not really sure what that means in her particular context (as readers of this blog probably can surmise, I’m not a super quiet person), but it led me to think about how focused I can be on making a product. Every day, I go through this annoying process of reprioritizing my work based on (largely self-imposed) deadlines, goals, and schedule. For example, some tasks, like basic writing, can be interrupted and done with distractions. Other tasks, like careful editing, can’t be interrupted, but can only be sustained for about 2 or 3 hours at a time. Anyway, this process of prioritization is geared primarily to getting things done, rather than doing things.

This is where Perry’s idea of quiet comes in. When I become so focused on accomplishing particular goals, I find that I lose my ability to enjoy the tasks required to complete those goals. For example, I like to read, but when I read to glean bits of information from a book or an article, I find that I’m not very engaged with the reading process and more determined to find the answer to some question. This urgency to complete tasks, of course, probably isn’t a bad thing until it becomes all consuming like I fear it will become over the last 9 months of my leave. So, I’m going to focus less of my time on making noise (well, unless that means playing my stereo at socially unacceptable volumes), and more of my energy on just doing work.

My experience with this approach is that doing work, for me at least, is less gratifying than the tremendous rush that comes from completing a project, but also involves less of a let down. The famous burn-out/blow-out comes only from the exhausted, self-congratulatory let down when a task is completed. Making the hamster wheel turn, on the other hand, can feel endless and pointless, but that very feeling encourages me to focus on finding the pleasure in the little things rather than the almost incomprehensible big picture. So, if I seem a bit quieter (that is less productive in a big picture way) over the next 6 to 9 months, it’s not because I’m hopelessly behind, frantically working to meet some deadline, or flailing about in a endless reprioritization loop. It’s because I’m trying to find quiet again and enjoying the work that I do.

That being said, my tasks over the next 9 months will focus around 3 major projects (leavened by the usually gaggle of ankle-bitting obligations!):

1. PKAP II. My colleagues and I managed to get PKAP I through the publication process this fall and while it’s tempting to being “operation shutdown,” I know that I really need to keep focused and get the second book which documents five seasons of excavation at the site into proper order.

This involves making sure that we have good data from our last excavation season in 2012 at the site of Pyla-Vigla. We are pretty confident that our work in 2012 confirms and strengthens the chronology revealed in our previous two seasons excavating at the site. We have a working draft of a manuscript that documents this excavation, and now I need to collate that with our more recent work.

I’ll also need to return to my work on the Late Roman room associated with the Early Christian basilica at the site of Koutsopetria. This was excavated in the 1990s and will be published with our one season of excavation at the site in 2008. We managed to refine the chronology of the building on slightly and to document a bit more thoroughly the events associated with the room’s decline and abandonment. Beyond that, our work mostly consists of putting the architecture of the room and its wall painting in the context of church architecture on Cyprus.

2. Polis Preparation. With any luck, I’ll have a three week season at the site of Polis-Chrysochous this summer that hopefully involves putting the finishing touches on a major publication of the Late Antique phases of the South Basilica there. To be able to maximize my time in Polis, we need to work out the stratigraphy for the last few trenches of EF2 and the trenches associated with Roman period site of EF1.

More important than that, we need to make sure that our work over the last four years is ready for publication. To do that, we have to complete the manuscript that we drafted about 6 months ago and figure out where we need to fill in gaps during the field season. With a little luck, that manuscript might be submitted by the spring with the understanding that for it to be publishable, a few loose ends need cleaning up.

3. Man Camp Writing. With crashing oil prices and budget cuts among the major companies active in the Bakken, I have the creeping fear that the boom will be over before any of our major publications on our work appears. That’s probably unfounded, but it does encourage me to stay focused on tasks associated with my three major Bakken Boom writing projects:

a. Article. Our major scholarly product, representing the first 2.5 years of field work, is currently under revision. I’ve made some pretty major cuts, reorganized and hopefully strengthened the argument, and, most located our work more fully in the conversation about settlement, domesticity, and masculinity in the U.S. With any luck and with the approval of my coauthors, we’ll be able to resubmit this article in the next few weeks. 

b. The Tourist Guide to the Bakken Oil Patch. After a few weeks of cajoling, my co-author, Bret Weber, convinced me that we needed to add another loop to our itinerary. This look will run from Watford City south to Belfield, east to Dickinson, and then north on ND Route 22 through Killdeer and Mandaree on the Ft. Berthold Reservation. In fact, he’s scouted this route over the winter break and I’ll hopefully be able to do a follow up run through the area in late January. With this last leg of the itinerary being complete, we’ll work on producing a final copy and figuring out where to send the product before I head to the Mediterranean this summer.

c. The Bakken Boom Book. This massive tome which includes papers by nearly 20 contributors is out in peer review right now and it’ll need attention as soon as it returns to my desk in the late winter. I’m very pleased with how the book is shaping up and excited for it keep moving along without delays.

Other projects:

1. Publishing. As readers of this blog surely know, I have started a small press called the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. I’m probably too excited about it, but our first book, Punk Archaeology, currently ranks #1,191,400 on Amazon’s sellers list, right behind (sort of) Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C. This month, our second book will appear, called Visions of Substance: 3D Imaging in Mediterranean Archaeology edited by myself and Brandon Olson, and our third book will appear in April! 

2. Book Reviewing. I’m embarrassed to say that I have not yet finished my review of Michael Dixon’s Late Classical and Early Hellenistic Corinth, 338-196 B.C., but it’s almost done, which is good because there’s another book in the way! I’ll, as per usual, post my completed, pre-publication draft here.

3. Paper Giving. Next week, my colleagues on the Western Argolid Regional Project are giving a paper at the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting in New Orleans. I can’t take much credit for that fine paper, but the project directors are accomplished writers and the paper is entertaining! I would love to say that we’ll post it online, but with increasing restrictions on the dissemination of archaeological information on the internet, I don’t think the project directors will feel confident posting the paper. So, if you’re at the Archaeological Institute of America meeting, go and check it out. Nakassis, James, and Gallimore is better live anyway.

I’ll be giving a paper in Boston in February at the Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future workshop though, which will be a major update to my paper given last spring at the University of Massachusetts and revised as “Slow Archaeology” for North Dakota Quarterly.

4. Serving. One of aspects to my sabbatical is that I insisted on continuing to fulfill some service obligations both on campus and in the community. I get the impression that this is quite unorthodox. That being said, our campus is currently oppressed by the tyranny of a faction, and it would seem irresponsible to leave the situation wholly unopposed, for many of the boldest spirits have left the university, quit academia, or worse, while the remaining faculty, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion. (Ok, that was overly dramatic, but that was called love for the workers in song, probably still is for those of them left.) So, I’m on some committees and doing that thing on campus.

I’m also serving on the North Dakota Humanities Council and the State Historic Preservation Board. Fun work that would be a shame to abandon to the selfish delights of sabbatical.

5. Reading. One of my colleagues (of a rather Sallustian comportment when it comes to campus politics) remarked at a holiday party that he was working to get back to the basics and do things like… read. I’ve been haunted by these words since then and plan to redouble my commitment to reading and listening to what books have to say, rather than mining them for my own, largely inconsequential purposes.

6. Running. I need to write a blog post on this, but I’ve started running. Not far, not fast, and not with any great purpose, but my goal is to run a 5k in late September. Right now I’m nursing an aggravated adductor in my left leg, but once that calms down, I’ll be back in my shoes making steady progress.

Memory of Hittite Monuments in Asia Minor

At the end of the year, I think we’re supposed to reflect on the past and celebrate avoided mistakes, seized opportunities, and events that shaped our lives. While we do that, I’d also direct you to Felipe Rojas’ and Valeria Sergueenkova’s article in the most recent Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology: “Traces of Tarhuntas: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Interaction with Hittite Monuments.” The article reminds us that the study of memory in Mediterranean archaeology was not just a passing moment at the start of the 21st century (I was aboard the memory wagon with “Constructing Memories: Hagiography, Church Architecture, and the Religious Landscape of Byzantine Greece: The Case of St. Theodore of Kythera”… I need to get this article manuscript posted somewhere) can rest assured that meaningful scholarship on memory continues to appear.

Rojas’ and Sergueenkova’s article looks at the memory of Hittite monuments in Asia Minor throughout Greek, Roman, and into Byzantine antiquity. They give these Bronze Age and Iron Age realia  particular significance in the construction of changing community identities through time. For example, the massive, monolithic, and abandoned Fasillar statue of the Hittite storm god found abandoned near its quarry appears to have become the center of various Roman activities from commemorative shrine to a young man who died unmarried to Roman games probably associated with a small settlement. Elsewhere reliefs inscribed in rock outcrops became focal points of both Hellenistic and Byzantine religious attention and evidence for ritual activity. Rojas and Sergueenkova do a nice job avoiding simplistic arguments for religious syncretism or for something intrinsically significant in the monumental landscape, but rather argue that these monuments contributed to a periodic discourse faintly evident in preserved texts. The textual conversations surrounding the Bronze and Iron Age monuments tended to focus on the relationship between these sites and the origins of existing communities and as such they were absorbed into the remarkably persistent tradition of Classical learning. Of course, the evidence for interactions that occurred beyond the rather restricted purview of ancient texts  – as evidenced, for example, in the small Roman shrine at Fasillar – suggest that the textual evidence is part of wider tradition. 

It’s hard to do archaeological fieldwork without wondering about memory and Sue Alcock’s work on this topic has cast a long and productive shadow over how we think about ancient pasts. For example, this summer we visited one of the numerous Late Classical block houses in the Argolid including the famous Pyramid at Hellinkon which was noted by Pausanias and re-used for various purposes well into Late Antiquity. The Pyrgouthi Tower in the Berate valley must have been a prominent local landmark from its construction in the Hellenistic period through its use as a Late Antique house some eight centuries later. 

At my site on Cyprus of Pyla-Koutsopetria, it was impossible not to feel the tension between the Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos and the later site of Vigla and Koutsopetria. Kokkinokremos was interesting to us because the site has traditionally been regarded as having a single period occupation during the Late Bronze Age. Later activity in the larger area concentrated several hundred meters to the west. Intensive survey, however, revealed that there was activity at the site as early as the Iron Age and continuing into the Late Roman period. While it would be easy to dismiss this material as evidence for quarrying stones from the substantial walls around this prominent coastal height, it is at least as intriguing to consider why the site was not reoccupied in the Iron Age and preference shown for the hill of Vigla nearby. Perhaps memory of the Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos functioned more like pagan sanctuaries in Greece rather than Hittite monuments in Asia Minor. The presence of the past at Kokkinokremos discouraged resettlement and repelled activity rather than attracting it.

Unfortunately, there is too much college footballing on today to give this any further thought today. Have a happy new year celebration. I hope all my dedicated readers have a chance to cherish good memories and find strength and hope in the bad ones. 

On Books and Blogs

This is the 1000th post on the New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. About 950 of them, I’ve authored and the other 50 or so were penned by my remarkable colleagues and contributors.

My average post length is about 300 words, which puts the entire endeavor at around 280,000 words or so. That’s a lot of words. These words have had about 145,000 page views and average around 1000 views per week. I think this is a sustainable clip for me as the author, and, I hope, for you as readers.  

I’ve posted a number of times on how blogging fits into my daily workflow and its benefit to me as a writer and scholar. It ensures that I write every day and smooths the transition from the jumbled nest of ideas in my head to (what I try to pass off as) linear arguments. As readers of this blog know, my posts tend to be messy and unedited and filled with inconsistencies, but I trust my readers to filter out what makes sense and what doesn’t and to cull the good from the posts here and discard the crazy. I hope, on the measure, that my posts produced more wheat than chaff.

If the threshing process is too time consuming, you can, of course, go right to the main coarse of bread. Yesterday afternoon we got the cover image for the book that I wrote with David Pettegrew, Scott Moore and a few other remarkable colleagues.

I love the cover image because it humanizes our work as archaeologist and stands in contrast to recent covers in the series which tend to focus on objects or buildings. It fits our volume because we spend many pages talking about the interaction between the human work of archaeology and analysis that this work produces. The invisibility of antiquity on the cover reminds the reader that archaeological knowledge is not out there waiting to be discovered, but is generated through the relationship between humans and the landscape. The presence of modern artifacts – electrical wires, metal signs and other features – highlights the diachronic nature of our survey work on Cyprus. All this is to say that the cover of our book shows that knowledge production is a messy process and this has fine parallels with the blobs of words that my dedicated readers frequently encounter here. I think this cover really makes our work stand out!

We’re optimistic that the book will available for Christmastime shopping (and everyone’s life is better with a bit of Koutsopetria!), and if it’s not available yet, you can always make it a Very Punk Archaeology Christmas!

I have a few experiments in mind for my online word-making projects in the next couple of weeks, so please stay tuned. And, while it goes without saying, thanks for reading! 

Connectivity in Cyprus and Corinth

Over the last few weeks, David Pettegrew and I have been working on an article that compares finds data from the Corinthia and from our site of Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus. We were particularly interested in understanding how the types of ceramics that we can identify in survey assemblages shapes the types of economic relationships we can recognize in the Eastern Mediterranean. As one might expect, our focus has been on the Late Roman world, and we have been particularly interested in the difference between the kind of economic relationships manifest in assemblages comprised of highly visible amphoras and those manifest in highly diagnostic Late Roman red slip wares. The entire project is framed by Horden and Purcell’s notion of connectivity and that’s the unifying theme of the volume to which this paper will contribute.

The paper is exciting because it represents a step beyond the work that David has been doing on his book on the Isthmus of Corinth. I’ve read a draft of the book and it’ll be exciting. It also represents the next step for our work with the Pyla-Koutsopetria data. It is significant that all of our survey data upon which this paper is based, is available on Open Context. Our book should be available in time for the holidays. 

The draft below is 95% of the way there with only a few niggling citations to clean up. Enjoy and, as always, any comments or critiques would be much appreciated!

View this document on Scribd

The Final Figure for Pyla-Koutsopetria Survey Volume

Lately I’ve been talking with friends and colleagues about the feeling that I’m wasting my sabbatical. Despite all sorts of reassurances, I feel the days slipping away. Recently, I’ve spent entire days writing grants, editing page proofs, making travel plans, having meetings, filling out Doodle polls to schedule meetings, organizing speakers, writing emails, deciding whether to italicize words in a title, conjuring press releases, and, most recently, finishing up figures for the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project 1 manuscript.

These are not creative tasks. 

In fact, these small tasks can completely suck the energy out of a work day, a work week, or, if I’m not careful, an entire sabbatical. 

That being said, I did finish the final figure for the PKAP manuscript (now that it’s up in Amazon and all). This is important stuff. I need always to color between the lines.

Before:

After:

The more I try to roll on shabbos, the more I realize that gravity always wins.

Book Blurbs: Pyla-Koutsopetria and Punk Archaeology

As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, I’m not much of a book writing person. Most of my ideas can be most profitably explored at about 10,000 words. Every now and then, I figure out some idea or concept or gimmick that deserves more words, and over the next month or so, two of those ideas will appear in book forms. Of course, none of this would be even remotely possible without the collaboration of coauthors, editors, and colleagues. 

One of the most fun parts about getting a book together (you know, more fun than page proofs or sorting out that one last figure that requires attention!) is writing and receiving little blurbs that are used for marketing new books. 

My coauthors and I wrote the little blurb for Pyla-Koutsopetria I: Archaeological Survey of an Ancient Coastal Town. American Schools of Oriental Research Archaeological Report Series Number 21:

Pyla-Koutsopetria I presents the results of an intensive pedestrian survey documenting the diachronic history of a 100 ha microregion along the southern coast of Cyprus. Located around 10 km from the ancient city of Kition, the ancient coastal settlements of the Koutsopetria mircoregion featured an Iron Age sanctuary, a Classical settlement, a Hellenistic fortification, a Late Roman town, and a Venetian-Ottoman coastal battery situated adjacent to a now infilled, natural harbor on Larnaka Bay. This publication integrates a comprehensive treatment of methods with a discussion of artifact distribution, a thorough catalogue of finds, and a diachronic history to shed light on one of the few undeveloped stretches of the Cypriot coast.

I’m also on the verge of releasing my first book as publisher: Punk Archaeology.  

The process has been a bit slower than expected, but I invited some sympathetic voices to provide some short perspectives on the book.

The first is from Brett Ommen, hobo academic:

The <Punk> of Punk Archeology exists as acipher, an empty signifier. The value of this volume lies in its commitment to variously loading <punk> with meaning based on the epistemic uncertainties that mark human civilization and its study. This volume traverses the supposed rules of theory and praxis, of art and science, of conservation and change, of information and meaning by way of the unruly <punk>. <punk> helps these authors locate their work and our world, not because it functions as a particular concept but instead because it refuses any particular mode of divination. As such, Punk Archaeology offers all academic fields a lesson for utilizing the anarchy of the cipher to negotiate the perils of disciplinary rigidity.

The second is from photographer, geek, and author Kyle Cassidy:

Archaeologists are at home in the dirt. They start the season respectably enough, in khaki’s and sensible shoes, but after four weeks of living in a tent and sifting rocks for bits of bone all day they’ve stopped shaving (if they ever did to begin with), possibly eschewed grooming altogether and no longer resemble anything you’d expect to see in the front of a classroom. When an archaeologist needs to get a wheelbarrow of backfill across a trench, they build a bridge out of whatever’s lying around; they do it this way because they’re in the middle of nowhere and they know the swiftest way between point A and point B is to do it yourself; because the coyotes aren’t going to do it for you and the board of trustees isn’t going to do it for you. This DIY attitude is how they manage to transport & house two faculty members and five grad students in Syria for three months for less than one lab in the med school’s spent on glassware during the same time period.

Archaeologists rely on themselves because they have to. They are the cassette tapes of academics; played through one speaker, loudly, and full of passion, blasting a song that so many people can’t understand the words to, but are moved by experiencing. Punk Archaeology is filled with this music: In Richard Rothaus’ “Punk Archaeoseismology”, scientists try to understand the destruction of a town 1,600 years ago by racing to  Güllük, Turkey the day that it sinks into the sea, killing every single inhabitant, during a terrible earthquake. It is as personal and visceral as any Xeroxed Zine because it is ultimately about science poured from the crucible of very personal chaos. Colleen Morgan’s account of continually explaining her tattoos to workers is an explanation for everyone in the sacrifices we all make to identify our tribe. Kostis Kourelis’ singling out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s unheralded place in the creation of Punk and New Wave reminds us of Philadelphia, Turkey and it’s likewise mostly forgotten place in Byzantine history — archaeologists know better than most anyone else that kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall and the small things that are meaningful to us now won’t even be footnotes in eighteen hundred years unless someone tracks them down.

This book is about archaeology, and more than that, it’s about music, but when you peel back all the power chords, the distorted guitars, the sweat, the frenetic drums, Ramone’s stickers and the cheap beer, most of all, this book is about trying to fit broken pieces together to make sense of a world in which you are constantly reminded that everybody dies in the end, because you’re looking at veritable mountains made up of their triumphs, their failures, and their very bones.