Sacred Cyprus and GIS

Over the weekend, I read Giorgos Papantoniou’s and Niki Kyriakou’s article in the most recent AJA, “Sacred Landscapes and the Territoriality of Iron Age Cypriot Polities: The Applicability of GIS.” Not only was it great to read something on Cyprus in the AJA, but it was cool to read something on the neighborhood of Kition where we worked for the last 15 years. Papantoniou and Kyriakou’s project focused on the western extent of  Kition’s control in the Iron Age whereas our project studied a site, Pyla-Koutsopetria and Pyla-Vigla, to the east of the city.

Papantoniou and Kyriakou studied legacy data from the small Iron Age sanctuary site of Vavla-Kapsalaes which was identified by the Vasilikos Valley Project. They consider whether this site is a border sanctuary between Kition and Amathous further west and whether it marked the edges of Kition’s or Amathous’s territorial, political, and economic control. By drawing upon data produced by a rather robust GIS, they were able both to propose a method for assessing such situations and to propose that Vavla-Kapsalaes (and several other nearby sites) would have likely been under Amathousian control for most of the Iron Age. In this way, the article contributes to the decade old debates concerning the spatial organization of the city-kingdoms of Iron Age Cyprus and serves as a useful reminder that Rupp’s famous application of Thiessen polygons to propose political boundaries between the various polities on the island was provision and suggestive rather than definitive. 

This conclusions, however, only scratches the surface of this complex article. Papantoniou and Kyriakou develop a dynamic model to assess the relationship between the sanctuary at Vavla-Kapsalaes and the Iron Age political and economic centers at Kition, Amathous, and Idalion. The model integrated at a micro-regional and regional level stable resources and features of the landscape from the presence of arable land, copper rich pillow lavas, river valleys, passable routes, and visibility.The authors set these more stable features of the landscape against the artifacts from Vavla-Kapsalaes, the iconography present at the sanctuary, the ebb and flow of Iron Age settlement in the Vasilikos valley, and the history of the larger urban centers nearby. The results is a highly nuanced and complex analysis that remains suggestive and dynamic rather than stable and structural. This kind of analysis, of course, is particular appropriate for borderlands and liminal regions which would have drifted over time between central power centers and also served as a locus for territorialization of these larger polities.

I’ve often wondered whether a more robust analysis of the regional and micro-regional characteristics of the neighborhood of Pyla-Vigla would produce similarly complex and nuanced results. The site of Vigla almost certainly possessed an Iron Age sanctuary which likely stood on a major route between the kingdoms of Salamis and Kition. The late Iron Age fortification of the area, its prominent coastal position, and its rapid expansion in the Hellenistic and Roman period suggests that the micro-region of Pyla-Koutsopetria and Pyla-Vigla transitioned from a zone of religious and military activity in the Iron Age to an area of settlement after the Hellenistic and Roman rulers of the island suppressed the political autonomy (and rivalry) of the city kingdoms. 

What is the most intriguing aspect of Papantoniou’s and Kyriakou’s study is its willingness to consider the limits of a territorial model for understanding Iron Age polities on Cyprus in general. While no one denies that the city kingdoms were territorial states, the margins of their political, economic, religion, and even cultural control need not be articulated in purely territorial terms. In the conclusion they note that human affinities and identities, including spiritual and emotional attachments to particular places and practices, do more to shape the nature of territorial control than neatly defined borders.

This conclusion has a particularly salient modern significance as in the modern era we’ve witnessed rigid political borders defining the rights of individuals in ways that often defy, subvert, or attempt to redefine their cultural, religious, or social connections to the wider world. As the authors show, despite the tendency for GIS to produce rigid and linear marks on maps, the integration of GIS technologies and historical models allow us to trace territorialization as a continuous process in the past. This offer a useful reminder that border have never been impermeable marks on the landscape, but continuously negotiated and dynamic spaces.

Human, Posthuman, Transhuman Digital Archaeologies

I’m jet lagged and a bit crowd addled here in Barcelona, but I wanted to share Colleen Morgan’s blog post on the panel to which I’ll be contributing this week at the European Association of Archaeologists meeting. 

My paper is rough and like everything, always in the process of being revised, but my hope is that between listening to what the other panelists say and reading their papers, I’ll have something worthwhile to contribute (and even if I don’t, I feel pretty confident that I’ll get something out of the meeting.

Go here to check out the panel.

Resurvey

This week on the Western Argolid Regional Project, I’ve been running a few queries that compare the data from our original survey field walking and subsequent efforts to expand the assemblages present in these survey units. We termed these later efforts “resurvey” on WARP and thought they might be useful both to expand our generally small assemblages into something a bit more susceptible to functional analysis and to calibrate our recovery rates (as David Pettegrew and I did on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project). 

The challenge with this kind of analysis is how do we compare two different assemblages. In general, these two assemblages did not produce the same specific types of artifacts on the basis of our narrow typologies (i.e. the odds seem small that we’d find, for instance, two examples of the same African Red Slip form or even two examples of a Classical cooking pot), so that is not a very useful way to compare things. 

To open up the potential for meaningful overlap, I did a quick comparison of our resurvey units and our initial survey units to see if they produced the same period. This involves comparing the exact periods present in the finds from our first walking of the units to those found in either re-walking the units or in total collection circles with 2 m radius. Generally speaking there was some overlap between periods from each collection type. A few units producing over 50% of the material from the same periods, but most resurvey units produced material that had much lower overlaps (10%-20%). In this context, overlapping periods represent specific chronological period overlaps, such as Classical or Early Roman. This does not account for overlaps that are more broadly defined, such as when one assemblage produced Classical pottery and the other produced Classical-Hellenistic.  This is the next step in analysis is to see if resurvey produced chronological (as opposed to simply period) overlaps. This is a more complicated query and not ideal for analysis in the field.

We also compared the artifact densities per hectare from the resurvey units and the original survey units. As we demonstrated on PKAP, looking more carefully at the ground produced significantly higher densities. The highest density resurvey unit – which consisted total collection circles with 4 m diameters – produced densities that were over 100,000 per ha, for a unit that produced a density of only 1,700 artifact per ha through standard field walking practice. (Despite this massive difference in density, the unit produce a period overlap of over 50%!). Other units showed a similarly massive increase in densities with the resurvey units often producing nearly the same amount of pottery as the original survey units which covered much larger areas.

The differences between the two densities likely reflect three trends. First – and most obviously – a team of two or three scouring a 4 m diameter total collection circle for 10 minutes is like to find more pottery than a field walker, standing upright, and scanning 1 meter to either side even at a leisurely pace. Total collection circles were also much more likely to be placed in high density areas. After all, part of the goal of resurvey was to produce more a robust assemblage of material for chronological and functional analysis. Finally, total collection resurvey circles tended to be in areas of the unit with higher surface visibility. For each survey unit we recorded the average visibility for the entire unit. We did the same for the total collection resurvey units and they generally were 20%-40% higher visibility than the original survey units.

In the end, my analysis of these units is just starting. Considering the functional character of the original and resurvey assemblages, the chronological overlap of the two sets of material, and whether they produced new information about the   

Cyprus is Everywhere

Last week, Annemarie Weyl Carr asked if anyone could offer a summary of a recent publication that they might share with the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute’s newsletter.  I thought it would be fun to share my most recent book on the Bakken, which in very real ways had its origins in the Eastern Mediterranean and on Cyprus, in particular.

So here’s my little write-up. It’s another attempt at writing in a more breezy and accessible style.

The Bakken: An Archaeology of an Industrial Landscape
Or Cyprus is Everywhere.

My first season excacating on Cyprus was in 2008. At that time, I had completed four seasons of intensive pedestrian survey at the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria, a coastal site located some 10 km east of Larnaka and just inside the British Base at Dhekelia. I was carrying the controller of a differential GPS unit across slopes of loose soil at the coastal height of Vigla while an unlikely colleague, Bret Weber, dutifully held the rover in place and leveled it as I recorded the point. We did this thousands of times on our way to making a high-resolution DEM of our site. It was boring work but gave us plenty of time for conversation.

Bret Weber was the project’s cook and camp manager, and he’d help out in the field almost every day. He also had a PhD in Western History and had almost completed his Masters in Social Work. He was deeply active in issues surrounding housing both in our home town of Grand Forks, North Dakota and in his scholarship in 20th century urbanism and social welfare. As we took point after point, we discussed the Bakken Oil Boom that had just started to rumble in western North Dakota and the growing rumors of life in the temporary “man camps” that had popped up across “the patch” to accommodate the influx of works. Those who couldn’t find room in a hotel or in a man camp ended up squatting in the Williston Walmart parking lot, and in various make-shift camps across the Bakken counties. At the same time, our work at the site of of Vigla where we clicked off point after point, revealed what we thought was probably a 4th-century mercenary camp, housing soldiers who occupied this prominent fortified height on the Cypriot coast during the tumultuous early Hellenistic era. We wondered about life in an ancient camp and whether the mercenary camp was similar to the encampments and short-term settlements that for millennial served miners in the Troodos mountains. Our field work, the history of settlement and extractive industries on Cyprus, and important work of archaeologists and historians to unpack the relationship between the two, framed our discussion of what was going with settlement and extractive industries in western North Dakota.

When Bret and I returned home we continued to reflect on our fieldwork conversations, we read extensively on the organization of settlement and extractive industries in a global context, we recruited a range of colleagues to our project, many of whom were Mediterranean archaeologists, and, finally, in 2012, we inaugurated the North Dakota Man Camp Project. The Bakken: An Archaeology of an Industrial Landscape (Fargo, ND: North Dakota State University Press 2017) is the first book-length publication from this project.

This book used the genre of the tourist guide to present the bustling and sometimes ephemeral landscape of the Bakken oil patch. The decision to frame our work as a tourist guide once again drew on my experience as a tourist in Greece in the 1990s and then Cyprus in early 21st century which indelibly shaped my view of the landscape. The language of my trusty Rough and Blue Guide for Greece and Cyprus suffused the language of The Bakken, which, like these handy guides, is divided into routes and sites. Our goal was to evoke the modern experience of tourism created, in part, by such iconic guidebooks as Baedeker’s and the Blue Guide which became synecdoches for the informed tourist. More importantly, my summers in Greece and Cyprus as both an informed tourist and an archaeologist reinforced the parallels between these two deeply modern experiences of landscapes. The spaces and places defined and described by both tourism and archaeology are profoundly modern. In short, my time on Cyprus made me aware of my modern way of seeing the world.

In a 1982 essay, the poet Tom McGrath used the phrase, “North Dakota is Everywhere” to reflect on the influence of the prairie state on writers, artists, and readers around the world. In writing The Bakken: An Archaeology of an Industrial Landscape, I hope readers familiar with my other archaeological work will see in its pages that maybe “Cyprus is Everywhere” as well.

More on the Historiography of Late Roman Cyprus or Writing up the Pyla-Koutsopetria Excavations (part 2).

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to pull into shape a conclusion for the second volume from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. I posted part of that conclusion a couple of weeks back, here’s some more (with a bit of overlap!):

Recent work on Cyprus has looked to recontextualizing the archaeology of the island in three basic ways. First, archaeologists have sought to continue the long-standing effort to locate Cyprus within the larger Roman, Late Roman, and Byzantine worlds. G. Hill’s and T. Mitford’s argument that Cyprus was a quiet backwater of the Roman East, based largely on historical sources, has been fundamentally challenges by the work of Dimitri Michaelides (e.g. 1996), John Hayes’s publication of the ceramics from the House of Dionysios at Paphos (1991), and the work of John Lund (2003; 2006; 2015). These scholars and their younger contemporaries (e.g. Leonard 2005, Gordon 2012) have demonstrated that during the first seven centuries AD, Cyprus was deeply embedded in the economic life of the Roman East, traded extensively with their neighbors, reflected wider trends across the empire, and exploited their natural and agricultural resources for both public and private expressions of power and wealth. In the 21st century, recent work on connectivity, globalization, revised ideas of insularity, and hybridized culture have shaped our view of Roman Cyprus as a sphere for distinct forms of cultural and economic interaction that extends far beyond monumental architecture. The quantitative analysis of imported and local ceramics, evidence from shipwrecks and ceramic production sites (Leidwanger 2013; Demesticha 2013; Demesticha and Michaelides 2001), and survey and excavation at small harbors, emporia, villages, and non-monumental buildings have all contributed to a view of Cyprus that is deeply embedded in the Roman and Late Roman world. Moreover, by embracing theoretically rich concepts like globalization, insularity, and hybridity, they local the study of Roman and Late Roman Cyprus within a larger conversation about the island that extends from the Bronze Age (e.g. Knapp 2008) across most of antiquity (e.g. Counts 2008).

The long tradition intensive and extensive survey archaeology on Cyprus has contributed to recent efforts to expand the scope of our understanding of Roman period on the island into the non-urban, ex-urban and suburban settlement. This complements a large trend toward rejecting the Finleyean conception of the ancient “consumer” city that merely drew resources from the countryside. In its place, scholars like Horden and Purcell (2000) have proposed a world of densely connected microregions that include both urban and rural spaces. This upset the tidy binary of producer and consumer spaces, and even in urban and rural (Viekou 2009; 2010) in the Roman countryside and offered new contexts to make sense of rural sites. Cyprus, despite its deserved reputation for dense urbanism, had a bustling or “busy” countryside. Hector Catling directed the Cyprus Survey Project in the 1950s and documented the Kornos cave (Catling 1970) and the Dhiorios settlement and ceramic works on the Kormakiti peninsula (Catling 1972). Both of these sites were rural and offered substantial assemblages of both local and regional Late Antique ceramics including kilns for the production of cooking ware vessels at Dhiorios. Excavations in the 1990s by Charalambos Bakirtzis revealed the massive ex-urban site of Ay. Georgios-Peyias with three basilicas, a bath, warehouses and other structure dating, it would appear, to Late Antiquity (Bakirtzis 1995). The initial excavations at Kousopetria by Maria Hadjicosti, at Kopetra, by Marcus Rautman (2003), at Alassa by Pavlos Florentzos (1996), and at Maroni-Petrera by S. Manning (2002) represented a watershed decade in the archaeology of non-urban Cyprus. The excavations at Kopetra and Maroni Petrera emerged from intensive pedestrian survey projects which likewise expanded our knowledge of Roman and Late Roman countryside. Recent work in the Troodos mountains by the Troodos Areas Environmental Survey Project (Given et al. 2013), for example, has demonstrated that the Troodos mountains continued to be exploited for iron into the Roman period and a number of other survey projects have produced a “busy countryside” of sites ranging from villages to isolated farmsteads (Rautman 2003), production sites, and even monumental Christian architecture (Procopiou 2013). While the excavation of these sites often added to the catalogue of Christian churches, more importantly, they also expanded our knowledge of the fabric of non-urban places and the productive landscape of the island and demonstrated the connections between non-urban spaces and the wider region. The Cyprus that emerged from this research was less a series of dots along the coast of the island, and more a tapestry of interconnected regions that includes places both on the island and in the wider Mediterranean.

Finally, Scholars of Late Roman and Early Byzantine Cyprus, like so much of the Eastern Mediterranean, have increasingly placed the island chronologically within “the long Late Antiquity” which recognizes fundamental continuity between the 5th and 8th or even 9th centuries in the Eastern Mediterranean. For Cyprus, “long Late Antiquity” is complicated and punctuated by at least two Arab raids on the island that disrupted political and social life on the island and left their marks in both the architecture and archaeology. These raids, however, rather than being points of discontinuity in Late Antiquity, marked the start of the famous, if controversial, condominium period on the island that embodied aspects of both continuity and discontinuity in the island’s political arrangement and relationship with neighboring regions. Andreas Dikigoropoulos’s 1962 dissertation defined 7th to 10th century Cyprus in the famous phrase of the 8 th century pilgrim Willabald as “betwixt Greeks and Saracens.” His attention to the architecture of these centuries built upon A.H.M. Megaw’s studies of the vaulted churches of Cyprus (Megaw 1946), and, more recently, C. Stewart (2008, 2010) has continued to study the architecture of this period as a key to the island’s social, economic, religious and political status during these centuries. D. Metcalf (2004, 2009) and L. Zavagno (2011; 2011-12; 2017) have collated evidence from coins and seals to track continued ties between the economic and political ties between Cyprus, the Arab Caliphate to the east and Byzantine state in Anatolia and the Aegean. Important work has also focused on understanding the chronology of Late Roman ceramics both on Cyprus and across the region. P. Reynolds (2014; 2010), J. Vroom (2004; 2005; 2007), A. Vionis (2009), and P. Armstrong (2009), among many others, have pushed some common ceramics types, namely forms of widely traded Late Roman red slips and common transport amphoras, from the 5th and 6th century into the 7th and even 8th centuries. This work, in turn, has challenged the dating of buildings and sites on Cyprus by pushing destruction levels later than the Arab raids and demonstrating the urban areas continued to be economically connected and vital into the later 7th or even 8th centuries.

Writing up the Excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus, Part 1.

A few weeks ago, I boldly complained (in my head) that this is the February of Pyla-Koutsopetria. Since then, my colleagues and I have been working frantically to get the second volume of our work at the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus completed and ready for submission. The second volume documents our three seasons of excavation and a couple of seasons of early excavation at the site by the Department of Antiquities on Cyprus.

I was tasked with wrapping up the conclusion while I have most of the basic summary work done, I’m working this week on the historiographic components of the conclusion that frame my more summary remarks. I’m arguing that contemporary archaeology of Roman, Late Roman, and Byzantine Cyprus is primarily concerned with three things: first, it continues the tradition of placing Cyprus within the economic and political context of the Roman East; second, it has expanded from being a largely urban archaeology (with a few notable exceptions) to an archaeology invested as much in the landscape and countryside as in the monumental urban centers; and finally, work on Cyprus has contributed to the growing interest in the “long Late Antiquity” in the Eastern Mediterranean that argues from continuities between the 5th and 8th or even 9th centuries there.

This is how I started this section today (and please excuse the incomplete and, perhaps, inaccurate citations!):

Historically, urban archaeology has dominated the study of Roman, Late Roman, and Byzantine Cyprus. The impressive urban sites of Paphos, Kourion, Salamis, Soloi, Amathus, and even Polis-Arsinoe have received the majority of archaeological attention. This has largely followed long-standing interests in the Iron Age kingdoms of the island and the island’s reputation as one of the most urban landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean. For Late Antiquity, this attention to urban contexts produced a bumper crop of monumental Early Christian basilicas and excavations at Paphos, Amathus, Kourion, and Salamis revealed multiple examples of elaborate Christian buildings. The emphasis on urban sites and Christian buildings contributed to argument for long-term continuity of settlement on the island from the Iron Age into the Roman and Late Roman periods. Moreover, it provided archaeological evidence for the antiquity of these urban episcopal sees that represented the famously autonomous Cypriot church in antiquity and demonstrated ecclesiastical continuity into the modern period. The archaeological attention received by monumental Christian architecture exerted a formative influence over the trajectory of Late Roman and Byzantine archaeology on the island. Church plans, architectural typologies, and less frequently decorative techniques, particularly mosaic and wall painting, formed the basis for interpreting the place of Cyprus in the both the history of Late Roman and Byzantine architecture, and in the Eastern Mediterranean. From G. A. Soteriou’s ambitious arguments for the central role of Cypriot churches in the development of Byzantine architecture more broadly (1935; see Davis and Stewart 2014) to A.H.M. Megaw’s famous article that asked whether Byzantine architecture on Cyprus was metropolitan or provincial (1974) and Slobadon Curcic’s 2000 reformulation of that question as provincial or regional, architecture, floor plans in particular, provided evidence for the relationship between Cyprus and the rest of the Mediterranean world. Unfortunately, in many cases, these urban churches remain little known beyond their plans (and their impressive remains) with few receiving careful publications and only two, the Episcopal Basilica at Kourion and the South Basilica at Polis, resting on a thorough study of stratigraphy supported by the analysis of small finds and context pottery. As a result, these buildings remain difficult to date archaeologically. Moreover, in many cases, these buildings remain detached from their larger urban contexts as excavators either focused their attention on monumental architecture or chose primarily to publish the results from this work. There are obvious exceptions to this, of course, at Salamis, Paphos, Kourion, and Polis, but the overall unevenness of both publication and excavation has made it difficult to contextualize Cypriot architecture and urbanism within the larger Roman and Late Roman world.

Recent work on Cyprus has looked to recontextualizing the archaeology of in three basic ways. First, archaeologists have sought to continue the long-standing effort to locate Cyprus within the larger Roman, Late Roman, and Byzantine worlds. G. Hill’s and T. Mitford’s argument that Cyprus was a quiet backwater of the Roman East, based largely on historical sources, has been fundamentally challenges by the work of Dimitri Michaelides (e.g. 1996), John Hayes’s publication of the ceramics from the House of Dionysios at Paphos (1991), and the work of John Lund (xxxx). These scholars and their younger contemporaries (Leonard xxxx, Gordon 2012, xxxxxx) have demonstrated that during the first seven centuries AD, that Cyprus was deeply embedded in the economic life of the Roman East, trading extensively with their neighbors, reflecting wider trends across the empire, and exploiting their natural and agricultural resources for both public and private expressions of power and wealth. In the 21st century, recent work on connectivity, globalization, revised ideas of insularity, and hybridized culture have shaped our view of Roman Cyprus as a sphere for distinct forms of cultural and economic interaction that extend far beyond monumental architecture. The quantitative analysis of imported and local ceramics, evidence from shipwrecks and ceramic production sites, and survey and excavation at small harbors, emporia, villages, and non-monumental buildings have all contributed to a view of Cyprus that is deeply embedded in the Roman and Late Roman world.

Some Closure: PKAP Excavations at Pyla-Kokkinokremos

Yesterday I received an offprint of an article from the Palestinian Exploration Quarterly authored by my colleague Michael Brown. Michael Brown worked with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project from 2006-2010 (or thereabout) as a collaboration between our project and his dissertation research. This collaboration culminated with his excavating a number of trenches at the fortified Late Bronze Age sit of Pyla-Kokkinokremos in 2007 and 2008 with teams from our project as well as contributing to our intensive survey of the site, working with us to do electrical resistivity at Pyla-Vigla and Pyla-Koutsopetria, and helping us process the artifacts from our excavations and survey. Working with Michael wasn’t always easy (mostly because we had no idea really how to collaborate and directing our first excavation in 9 trenches, at 3 sites extending over a kilometer apart was stressful), but we learned a tremendous about from him and will always appreciate his patient collegiality. (Plus, he’s a first rate story teller!).

Michael Brown Sifting (photo by Ryan Stander)

As you should be able to tell in this article, the Pyla-Kokkinokremos excavations were remarkably successful for a series of small exposures and they contribute useful, new knowledge about this important Bronze Age site even though it has been subject to two major excavation campaigns subsequent to Michael Brown’s work. The success of his work at the site wasn’t, however, without its challenges and while I am not particularly qualified to discuss the significance of this site in its Late Bronze Age context, the story surrounding this publication was pretty edifying for me and my team.

As I’ve already noted, we had to learn to work with a colleague from a rather different tradition of archaeological work, and that was interesting (and at times frustrating). We also had to navigate a much more complex political landscape than we had anticipated. We had permission to excavate the site, we had a viable research question backed by both intensive survey and geophysical data, and we had an experienced workforce to conduct the excavation and analysis of the find. The excavations, more or less, went off without a hitch, but once we had begun to present the material from the site, things nevertheless got complicated. The most significant past work at the site had been done by a major figure in Cypriot archaeology who had strongly held (at the time), if idiosyncratic views of the history of the site. He argued that Pyla-Kokkinokremos was a settlement of Mycenaean refugees who had fled from the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces in Greece and settled in Cyprus. Whatever the plausibility of this argument and however much our work directly challenged it, the argument rested on a particular reading of the archaeological evidence at Kokkinokremos and Paleokastro-Maa. The result of this discontinuity between our work and previous scholarship led to us being discouraged from continuing our research and a few tense meetings between our project and various figures in the Department of Antiquities and the Cypriot archaeological establishment. It was all pretty stressful and since our main focus had been on the Hellenistic and Late Roman phases of work in the area, I think we were happy enough to put those days behind us. 

Sarah Costello digging on Kokkinokremos (photo by Ryan Stander)

We did learn an important lesson – and one that we had understood from our work in the Corinthia where internecine struggles often rippled out from longstanding beefs at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and across the pages of academic journals and monographs – that archaeology is political and personal. The problems that emerged from our work at Kokkinokremos had less to do with the archaeology itself and more to do with the personalities involved, the place of the site within certain master narrative of Cypriot history, and our own status on the island. In any event, bygones are bygones and it is remarkably gratifying to see this publication and for it to be the inaugural publication of the excavation phase of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.

One drum that I’ll continue to beat is that when we conducted intensive pedestrian survey of the site of Kokkinokremos, it produced a distinct scatter of Roman and Late Roman material. These were not just random finds, but accounted for nearly 35% of all material from this site. Excavations have not produced any identifiable Roman period architecture or features (at least as far as we know), but that doesn’t make the ceramic signature go away. Moreover, Kokkinokremos is a plateau meaning that it is very difficult to imagine the Roman signature appearing at the site on account of erosional processes. Human actions brought Roman material period to Kokkinokremos. 

To my mind, there are a handful of plausible explanations. First, it is possible that at some point in the past – probably in the modern period – farmers brought soil to the site to level it or to provide additional topsoil to a landscape susceptible to erosion. This soil may have contained Roman material that were then spread over the top of Kokkinokremos by the plough. A similar explanation could be the material was brought to the site in antiquity with manure (this is usually known as the “sherds and turds hypothesis”) used to fertilize gardens associated with the bustling Roman settlement on the plain below. Considering the absence of perennial source of water on the hill and the thin and sandy soil, it’s a bit hard to imagine that the Cypriot inhabitants of the Roman period saw it as well-suited for market gardens, but that doesn’t make it impossible.  

The scatter of Roman material may also represent a long history of low intensity activity at the site perhaps associated with quarrying stones from the Late Bronze Age walls or perhaps short-term habitation at the site that left very little in the way of persistent material signatures. The presence of Late Roman cooking ware at Kokkinokremos as well as fine ware in well-known forms makes for a pretty compelling domestic assemblage and make me think that the site more likely saw habitation 

What is intriguing about this scatter, of course, is that it has not been confirmed by excavation. When I’ve queried the current excavators about any post-Bronze Age material from the site, they have always told me that they haven’t come across any. In general, excavation has been seen as a way to confirm survey results and certainly a more reliable method for determining whether the absence of evidence is the evidence for absence. In this case, excavation has demonstrated that the presence of evidence may not be evidence for presence at the site, or, at least, the kind of persistent presence that excavation does well at documenting.  

Cypriot Landscapes

I finally grabbed a few minutes to read Giorgios Papantoniou’s that Thanasis Vionis’s recent article in Land, “Landscape Archaeology and Sacred Space in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Glimpse from Cyprus.” It is a among the first articles to emerge from their “Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus” project which has focused on the area to the west of Larnaka. This article focuses for the most part on the sites around Kofinou in the Xeros River valley in Larnaka District.

This space is interesting to me because it is situated in a very similar location to our site of Pyla-Koutsopetria. Kofinou is approximately 20 km to the west of Larnaka and slightly more inland where as Koutsopetria is 10 km to the east of the Larnaka and a coastal site. They both, however, stand near what many scholars have thought to be the boundaries of the ancient city of Kition and situated along major land routes through the ancient (and modern) countryside (so even if we conceive of ancient borders between states as less lines on the map and more markers along routes of contact, we can understand both Kofinou and Koutsopetria as marking likely edges to the political authority of Kition into the countryside).

The article got me thinking about three major things (and I’m sure a reading of the article by someone less easily distracted by their own archaeological commitments on the island!):

1. Landscapes. The first four pages of the article unpacks the wide range of theoretical perspectives that hang precariously on the concept of landscape in Mediterranean archaeology. For anyone interested in Mediterranean landscapes, this is an almost ideal primer and it broadly frames the work of the Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus project. The complexity of landscapes as spaces defined by economic, political, social, and religious activities recognizable through archaeological methods informs the following analysis of the Kofinou region. The awareness that landscapes are diachronic and diverse incorporating different spaces and places at various times and both informing and being the product of myriad experiences. I only wish that the authors made more apparent how the complexities of recent archaeological approaches to landscape inform their reading of the sacred spaces of Kofinou.

2. Site Size and Population. Among the more intriguing aspects of this project is the authors’ willingness to draw upon methods grounded in processual archaeology. In other words, despite the complexities of recent theoretical reflections on landscape and their dependence of post-processual understanding of lives and experiences spaces and places, Vionis and Papantoniou look toward intensive pedestrian survey to understand the extent of settlement at a site. Their site of Kofinou is approximately 13 ha and could support a population of 250-300 families on the basis of available arable land in the vicinity. This was compared to our estimate of 40 ha at Pyla-Koutsopetria from which they estimated a population of perhaps as many as 1000 families. 

Whatever one thinks of their estimates population and site size, I’m not entirely convinced that the same formula could be scaled to Koutsopetria. Without getting pedantic, I wish they authors had been more explicit in how they arrived at site size estimates (and this probably applies to our estimated site size as well) and how these can be compared across the island. More than that, though, it would be interesting to consider the functional differences between a site like Kofinou and our site at Koutsopetria. If, as the authors suggest, the Kofinou site is a settlement, then the estimates based on arable land and artifact scatters may well speak to population. In contrast, we’ve argued that Koutsopetria is a small emporion and perhaps a transshipment site for agricultural produce (particularly olive oil and perhaps wine) from the region. In other words, much of the build up space of the site would not have been settlement at all, but warehouses, production facilities, and, of course, the ecclesiastical compound associated with the excavated basilica. This isn’t to suggest that people didn’t live at Koutsopetria, but it’s functional purpose would serve to define its extent. The absence of massive quantities of cooking pots at Koutsopetria, for example, tends to suggest that much of the space was not concerned with habitation or settlement, but storage and processing of good for export.

3. Diachronic Landscapes. I was particularly intrigued by their effort to think about the diachronic landscapes of Cyprus and to balance the various aspects of places from geology and topography, to history, memory, and long-term structural organization of Cypriot sacred and settled space.

Border zones like Kofinou and Koutsopetria have seen both historical investment starting as early as the Iron Age with sanctuaries which inscribed the landscapes with persistent places even after the political and economic contingencies of border zones abate. The appearance of a Early Christian basilica at Koutsopetria, for example, might have less to do with successive Iron Age and Hellenistic sanctuaries and more to do with diachronic landscape of the place and accretion of successive rounds of material investment that built upon both the practical realities of a natural embayment, proximity to inland passages, and the presence of easily defensible coastal heights, and the social and cultural realities of marking the landscape with fortifications, sanctuaries, and settlements.

The relationships that form these diachronic landscapes are likewise variable and depend upon the place of the site and island within larger networks. Indeed, their very visibility and definition often relies on the presence of recognizable artifacts imported to the site or monument types familiar based on their presence elsewhere on the island or in the region. In other words, the diachronicity of landscapes is something that includes the archaeologist in the longterm history of sites as well as its location in Cypriot landscape and its place within the relational structures of disciplinary knowledge.

Conversations with David Pettegrew

A week worth of conversations with David Pettegrew is pretty challenging and invigorating stuff. 

Part of the great value of doing field work is the conversations during downtimes. David and I have been immersed in working on the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology for the last two years, but we’ve been chatting about other projects – including our next book project, An Introduction to Early Christian Archaeology.

This summer we chatted about a potential collaboration between his brilliant Digital Harrisburg project and maybe a new tourist guide and The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. This led to a productive conversation about the potential of digital and public humanities. I suggested that the limited time that faculty have to dedicate to public humanities projects may well parallel the limited time that consumers of public humanities projects have to engage them. (In my experience, faculty are not particularly voracious consumers of public humanities projects.) 

We also discussed the strange tension between public humanities as opportunities for student learning, but also as having to compete with myriad distractions of modern life from video games and movies to work, sports, kids, and other media. A significant challenge for the historian or public humanist, who often works constantly between an academic and public audience, is finding ways to present what we know and do in a way that competes with professionally generated media. We’re underfunded amateurs who are often expected to bring students into projects that are intended to compete for attention with highly paid professionals capable of slick production, with access to marketing teams, skilled programers and developers, and massive media markets. 

At the same time, we celebrated the potential of “punk projects” with low costs, modest goals, and do-it-yourself practices. As we contemplate the demise of the National Endowment for the Humanities we began to imagine a world where competition for grants could give way to greater impulse for collaboration and the often large, lavish (but not always even in humanities terms) grants and projects funded by the NEH would be replaced by denser networks of collaboration among humanists. To be clear, I don’t think that more organic and DIY practices could replace the sustained and systematic investment and leadership of the NEH, but I do wonder whether there are positive, alternative ways to think about how the humanities works.

Invariably, David and I also talked about intensive pedestrian survey archaeology. We reflected a bit on the rise and decline of methodology as a central feature of the discourse of intensive pedestrian survey in the Mediterranean. I offered the observation that with the growing acceptance of intensive survey among Mediterranean archaeologist has blunted the apologetic tone so prevalent in survey literature in the immediate aftermath of the Second Wave survey projects. It’s hard to know for certain if this lull is real or just the maturation of the conversation which results in fewer blockbuster methods articles and more incremental change. At the same time, it is clear that the way that we talk about intensive survey practice and methods has become more confident and perhaps less critical and reflexive.

Finally, we’ve talked about our work at Pyla-Koutsopetria. We have a small, but tightly controlled body of data from three(plus) seasons of excavation and five worth of study that now almost ready for publication. The most interesting conversation focused on our careful and exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of the plow zone assemblage from the site of Pyla-Vigla. This assemblage could be compared profitably to the assemblage produced during intensive pedestrian survey to offer a small, but well-controlled case study for the relationship between the surface, plow zone, and subsurface remains.

We usually circle back to our work at the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and various ways to prepare a “final publication” that at least leads researchers to our data (when it’s fully published) if not to a particular set of conclusions or interpretations. 

Most conversations with David conclude with the refrain that we have too many projects and too many top priorities, but I think we both agree that this is better than being bored!

From Little Things

Despite having written and blogged about slow archaeology and the importance of being in the landscape and various expressions of embodied knowledge, I’m nevertheless always surprised by how time with ancient artifacts helps me think through archaeological problems.

The last two weeks in Cyprus have focused on the artifact assemblages from the site of Polis-Chrysochous and Pyla-Koutsopetria. At both sites, we’re working to finish processing artifacts from excavations. Over the past decade, we read most of the ceramics from these sites and documented their type with brief descriptions. A handful of objects, however, receive more detailed descriptions and study. Generally speaking these artifacts represent the most chronologically or functionally diagnostic types from the assemblage. We focused on fine table wares, amphora, and cooking pots at Polis and Koutsopetria and spent a good bit of energy looking carefully at each artifact and preparing a catalogue entry. 

This kind of work has got my thinking about the end of antiquity in Cyprus and the role that various types of artifacts have in understanding the end of the kinds of economic and social pattern that have historically defined antiquity. Individual classes of ceramics from Roman red slip fine wares (particularly African Red Slip, Phocaean Ware, and Cypriot Red Slip (LRD)) not only provide elusive dates for end of ancient patterns of trade connecting production sites and consumers across the Mediterranean but reflect tastes in pottery types (as well as foodways) that persisted for half a millennium. The same can be applied to cooking pots and even humble transport amphora. This intersection of economic patterns and social habits embodied in these tiny, broken sherds fascinated me over the last two weeks and located the world of antiquity in smallest fragment of the past.