Archive
Islands in the Corinthian Gulf: Some Archaeological Data
Over the last few days, I’ve taken a break from my normal routine to key in data collected by the Ohio Boeotia Expedition from the island of Kouveli in the Gulf of Domvrena on the northern coast of the Corinthian Gulf near the site of Thisvi. The results of the work by the OBE on the islands in the Gulf of Domvrena have appeared in scattered publications with the most substantial publications appearing in a volume of the DXAE and Byzantine Studies (here and here)
This continues my work to move the data collected over the course of the Ohio Boeotia Expedition to digital form. As with the earlier data, I keyed the data into an Access database that will, hopefully, eventually, feed into the transect data from the survey of the island of Kouveli stored in a GIS. Right now, however, all I have is the finds data.
Despite the lack of a spatial component, I think that I can make some modest observations about the character of the data collected from this survey. In Gregory’s 1986 publication, he reports that he surveyed 138,000 m2 with a sample area of 207 m2. This produced 494 artifacts (and an overall density of 2.39 m2 or an imposing 23,864 artifacts per ha). That is impressive artifact density despite the relatively small sample. Of these 494 articles, we have records from at some 320 of artifacts that were at least read in a preliminary way and the majority of these artifacts (60%) were assigned a chronology — albeit in small handful of cases this chronology was as broad as “Ancient”. As Gregory noted in publication, the vast majority of artifacts date to the Late Roman to Byzantine period. The assemblage was predominantly coarse and utility wares, particularly combed, spirally grooved, and wheel ridged body sherds which likely derived from storage or transport vessels. There was also a significant number of cooking posts and a light scatter of fineware including a piece of (LRC) Phocaean Ware from 10 and other, perhaps regionally produced, red glazed sherds in table ware forms like plates. It’s striking to note that over 54% of the identified sherds were body sherds rather than more traditional feature sherds like rims, handles, and bases.
Also interesting is the quantity of later material on this rather rough and rugged island. The Byzantine period is substantially represented and some of the relatively “late” late Roman artifacts – datable to the 7th century AD for example – suggests evidence for continuity of use between the Late Antiquity and Byzantium. While a closer analysis of the material from the island is necessary to determine function, it would appear that Byzantine finewares are more recognizable in the assemblage,particularly brown and green glazed ware, chaffing dishes and bowls, and at least one piece of Constantinopolitan white slip. (It would be romantic to see this sherd as the ragged fringe of the prosperous ties between Boeotia and the Capital in the Middle Byzantine period).
Even later still, it appear there was some Ottoman period activity on this island as “Turkish” period glazed wares appear in the assemblage. It will be very useful to correlate this material with recent studies of Ottoman period activities on the nearby mainland. The presence of table ware on the island suggests that activity on the island was more than simply episodic exploitation and might suggest more sustained habitation. Even into the modern period small quantities of table ware appear alongside other evidence of modern activities like shell-casings.
Most striking of all, perhaps, is that dearth of clearly identified earlier material especially compared the seemingly vigorous landscapes of the nearby mainland. Unlike the hinterlands of Thisvi or, further east, Thespiae, there is apparently no evidence for Classical and Hellenistic period activity on the island and very little evidence for activities from the Roman period. Even a relatively rugged island, then, seems to show signs of the Late Roman economic and demographic boom in Greece.
AIA Panel 2010: First Out: Late Levels of Early Sites
Once again the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America is sponsoring a panel at the AIA Annual Meeting. While I won’t be at the meeting, I will be giving a paper with Timothy Gregory. If you’re going to be in Anaheim be sure to check out what I’m sure will be a brilliant panel! I hope that we’ll have podcasts of these talks as well!
On Thursday:
SESSION 1C: Colloquium Platinum Ballroom 6
First Out: Late Levels of Early Sites
Sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group
8:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
ORGANIZERS: Sharon E.J. Gerstel, University of California, Los Angeles and
Kostis Kourelis, Franklin & Marshall College
8:30 I Introduction: Sharon E.J. Gerstel, University of California, Los Angeles and Kostis Kourelis, Franklin & Marshall College (10 min.)
8:40 P Prioritizing Prehistory? A Byzantine Deposit from the Palace of Nestor at Englianos
Jack L. Davis, University of Cincinnati and American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and Sharon R. Stocker, University of Cincinnati and American School of Classical Studies at Athens (20 min.)
9:05 D Drowned in the Depths of Obscurity: How Archaeology both Marginalized and Revitalized Our Understanding of Late Byzantine Troy
Kathleen M. Quinn, Northern Kentucky University (20 min.)
9:30 A A Middle Byzantine Neighborhood in Athens: Recent Excavations in the Agora
Anne McCabe, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford (20 min.)
10:05 F First but Not Out: The Byzantine Levels at Chersonesos in Historical and Archaeological Context
Adam Rabinowitz, University of Texas at Austin, and Larissa Sedikova, National Preserve of Tauric Chersonesos, Ukraine (20 min.)
10:30 N New Views on Old Data: Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results after 30 Years
William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota, and Timothy E. Gregory, Ohio State University (20 min.)
10:55 L Late Ottoman and Early Modern Levels from New Excavations in Ancient Corinth
Guy D. R. Sanders, American School of Classical Studies at Athens (20 min.)
Some other notables from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project…
On Friday:
SESSION 6F Grand Ballroom J & K
Archaeological Methodology
4:30 P Painting Practices in Roman Corinth: Contextualizing Analytical Analyses
on Wall Paintings from Panaghia Field and the Area East of the Theater
Sarah Lepinski, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and Hariclia Brecoulaki, Institute of Greek and Roman Antiquity, The National Hellenic Research Foundation (20 min.)
SESSION 6G Platinum Ballroom 7
Archaeology of Ancient Warfare
3:35 T The Inscribed Sling-Bullets of Perusia as a Unique Discourse
Brandon R. Olson, Penn State University (20 min.)
For Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey types:
On Friday:
SESSION 4A Grand Ballroom Salon E
Excavation and Survey in Bronze Age Greece
9:20 T The Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP): The Bronze Age Worlds of Kalamianos
Daniel J. Pullen, The Florida State University, and Thomas F. Tartaron,
The University of Pennsylvania (20 min.)
New Views on Old Data: Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results After 30 Years
For those of you who will miss the 2010 Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting next week, here’s a draft of our paper. Regular readers of my blog will recognize this as the continued development of my analysis of the data from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition.
New Views on Old Data: Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results After 30 Years
William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota
Timothy E. Gregory, Ohio State University
[draft]
It seems natural to include a paper on survey archaeology on a panel entitled “First Out”. After all, the surface assemblage is, by necessity, the first out for any excavation. At the same time, the study of surface assemblages has fit into the definition of “First out” intended by the organizers of this panel by contributing significantly to our understanding of post-Classical periods in Greece over the past four decades. In fact, the ground breaking work of many of the participants on this panel has made clear that the rigorous documentation and analysis of surface finds has expanded our notion of what constitutes an archaeological site to well beyond the built-up centers of ancient poleis and across every century from the end of antiquity to the modern era. Intensive surveys in Boeotia, Laconia, Messenia, and the Corinthia are rewriting both the ancient and post-Classical landscapes of these well-studied regions.
If we can continue to play with the idea of “first out”, it is also clear that this phrase could apply to the first generation of intensive, pedestrian “siteless” surveys in another way. Like the first phase of excavation at major sites across the Mediterranean, the first efforts at intensive survey often relied upon assumptions and methods that were unrefined or unsophisticated in comparison with more recent work. While the methodological concerns associated with revisiting early “second wave” survey data prose problems, these data nevertheless preserve evidence for the ephemeral surface record in Greece. Both ever-expanding development of the Greek countryside and the irregular patterns of surface visibility, agricultural practices, and erosion patterns obscure and threaten the surface record.
This paper will use the data collected from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition between 1979 and 1982 from the (modern village and) Boeotian polis of Thisvi. The results of this survey were published in a series of short articles between 1980 and 1992. While these articles provided for a broad discussion of method and a basic report on the project’s findings, they did not publish finds or quantitative data extensively. Our goal with this paper is to take the first step in re-introducing data from the OBE into the broader conversation about settlement and survey data in both in Boeotia and across Greece more broadly. To do this, we would like first to discuss briefly the process of curating the survey data produced by the OBE and then go on to analyze this data in the context of some recently published survey work from Greece.
The first step in preparing the OBE data for analysis was the keying of records preserved in a series of notebooks and binder pages into a relational database. At the same time as we keyed data from notebooks and binder pages, we also sought to remap the location of the transects using GIS software. It should be noted that in the mid-1980s the artifact counts and location of transects were entered into the Surface II software program and this produced a contour map of the artifact densities across the Thivi basin. This, in itself was a significant attempt to examine the survey evidence across the landscape, and to make use of a siteless survey approach in the context of Mediterranean archaeology at a relatively early time. While versions of these maps were published, the data behind these maps appears to be lost. In part this was the result of the necessity of using mainframe computers and punchcard data-entry techniques, coupled with the difficulty of maintaining this information in the context of funding for humanities projects at that time. We have hopes that some of these data may yet be recovered but, unfortunately, at present the disappearance of this spatial data has made it difficult o place the western-most transects on the ground. The written description of the locations of the western transects relies upon points of reference that are not visible on the Greek Army Mapping Service 1:5000 maps and have been destroyed on the ground as a result of the construction of a massive pipemaking factory. There is hope that we can find the location of these transects from older aerial photographs of the area.
The final step in the production of this data is recording comprehensive metadata for all the information that we entered. Once the keying of the data and metadata is complete we plan to make all this available to the public via the internet. This step is especially important for small projects because the distribution of digital data expands the curation process from the purview of the creator of the data to the community of users who want to make use of the data. By disseminating the data to end users, with the proper metadata, we make it possible for others to use our material and make it far more likely they will be kept compatible with changes in technology.
_____
There have been significant changes in our understanding of the post-Classical countryside since the Ohio Boeotia Expedition published their results in the 1980s. The work of both excavations and survey in Boeotia and elsewhere in Greece alone has produced a foundation for the reinterpretation of our survey data. Recent work by Archie Dunn and a team from the University of Birmingham has begun to document the post-Classical finds at Thisvi itself and Jonita Vroom’s study of the post-Classical ceramics from the Cambridge-Bradford Boeotia Project has shed important light on the relationship between post-ancient ceramics and settlement patterns across Boeotia. Our work on the older material from Thisvi needs to be put into the context of these newer initiatives.
The OBE team produced the current dataset through a number of different methods. The diversity of methods reflected the early stage in the development of field procedures and an avowedly experimental approach to documenting the landscape. The area closest to the city walls, Area A, was surveyed using a series of 11, randomly placed, 30 m radius circular survey areas from which samples were taken. The team surveyed the plain itself using a series of long transects (Areas, C, D, and E) from which they typically took 1 sq meter samples, at regular intervals, for density and diagnostic artifacts. Finally, the teams also collected samples for areas of particularly high density which they designated sites. They surveyed these areas using flexible methods best suited for documenting the extent, chronology, and function of the material on the ground. In addition to these survey areas, the OBE team also conducted intensive survey on two nearby islands in the Gulf of Corinth, Kouveli and Makronisos, which we have not included in the aggregated totals produced in the analysis below. In toto the survey of the mainland counted over 8700 artifacts and documented over 1700 batches of unique artifacts from the four areas investigated.
The artifact density data from the OBE shows that the number of artifacts declined across the central part of the Thisvi basin. This pattern, noted in the original publication of the survey, may be at least in part a product of the geomorphological patterns. In antiquity, an ancient barrage, described by Pausanias, controlled the flow of water and sediment into the basin. The periodic introduction of water-born sediments into the basin, whether controlled by this barrage or not, may have obscured sites of past
activity or discouraged habitation at various times. The density of artifacts, however, clearly increases once again on the gently sloping, stony ground the along the south side of the basin.
Against the backdrop of overall artifact density we can show the distribution of post-Classical material across the survey area. In general, the survey area is dominated by artifacts from the Classical to Hellenistic and Roman periods which accounted for over 2/3rd of the datable ceramics. In contrast, the far more localized concentrations of both Late Roman and Byzantine to Medieval pottery represented only about 10% of the overall assemblage of datable material collected from survey. Modern material and a thin and rather diffused scatter of pre-Classical artifacts accounted for the other 20% or so of material from the survey.
For the post-Classical period, area A encompassed the highest density areas immediately south of the plateau upon which the ancient city and the modern village stand. The post-ancient material from this area was more focused than material from earlier periods with most of post-classical artifacts deriving from three units: A2, A5, and A8. The transects immediately to the south of the urban center of Thisvi, Area D and C, show that post-Classical material declined at a much steeper rate than Classical-Hellensitic material with distance from the presumed center of post-Classical habitation. The most significant variation between Area D and C was the rich assemblage of Late Roman material collected from the habor at Vathy which fell within Area C. The harbor area at Vathy has been completely destroyed by an industrial harbor serving that factory, but a rock-cut road ran between the harbor and the Thisvi plain and that there were significant stone-built harbor facilities along the water’s edge, all of them apparently dating to the post-classical period. Area E to the east of the ancient city tells a similar story to areas C and D except for a significant post-Classical site situated along the southern edge of the basin and designated E1.
Since the most significant quantity of post-ancient pottery from the Thisvi basin can be dated to Late Antiquity, it is perhaps most useful in this short paper to explore how we can reinterpret this distribution of Late Antique material in the countryside in light of the significant new analyses of material from this period in Boeotia and across Greece and with the help of a more easily manipulated dataset. It is significant, on first glance, that the distribution of material around Thisvi is similar to that recently published around the city of Thespiai to the east. The team from the Cambridge-Bradford Boeotia Project argued that the overall population of the city of Thespiai declined during Late Antiquity and, as a result, the residents of the city progressively abandoned the immediate hinterland of the city to intensive cultivation. In particular, this meant that the residents of Thespiai stopped the practice of regular manuring the fields near the city which, Bintliff and others argued, deposited ceramic material in a tell-tale halo around the urban core. In place of manuring, Late Roman farmers adopted less intensive agricultural practices and, at the same time, large tracts of land previously dedicated to feeding a urban population became part extra-urban agglomerations ranging from agricultural villas to self-sufficient hamlets.
The decline in artifact density visible for the Late Roman period in the Thisvi basin would fit well with this hypothesis as Late Roman (and more generally post-Classical) densities declining away from the city itself not simply as evidence for contracted habitation, but as the relationship between contracting populations and changing land-use patterns.
The work of the CBBP also revealed large extramural concentration of Late Roman material like those at the southeastern corner of the of the survey area, E1. This site coincides particularly well with kinds of site interpreted by the Cambridge Boeotia Survey as villas. The assemblage from the site contained storage vessels consistent with some kind of agricultural installation as well as beehive sherds so common at Late Roman agricultural sites around Thespiai. Moreover, the site was outside the densest areas of ceramics around Thisvi even at its Classical-Hellenistic peek, and this too paralleled the findings of the work at Thespiai.
The second major concentration of Late Roman at the harbor at Vathy represents a more complex phenomenon. The material at this site was more diverse than a simple agricultural installation and included some of the few example of Late Roman fineware from the survey area, in addition to a significant complement of transport vessels which would be expected at a coastal site (except probably not in the Bintliff scenario). Vathy resembles more closely the assemblages present on the islands of Kouveli and Makronisos than the material present inland in the Thisvi basin or even neighboring Thespiai, which lacked significant quantities of Late Roman finewares: fewer than 10 sherds of imported finewares were identified on CBBP sites and this amounted to far less than 3% of the total assemblage of potentially Late Roman material. In contrast, at the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey in the immediate hinterland of the important Late Roman city of Corinth, fineware made up almost 10% of the total assemblage of Late Roman artifacts, despite a collection strategy that would tend to under represent the proportion of fine ware to coarse ware.
Our ability to compare the material at Thisvi in quantitative and spatial ways to the results of more recent survey projects makes a return to this material particularly profitable. When first documented and published in the mid-1980s, the presence of Late Roman and post-Classical material in the countryside of Thisvi was worthy of remark in its own right. Now as “the busy countryside” of Late Antique Greece comes into sharper focus, the functional and non-cosmopolitan character of Late Roman pottery from the Thisvi basin gives pause. There is no question that southeastern Boeotian countryside continued to see investment in post-antique period with Late Antique fortifications extant at Thisvi, Thespiai, Khostia and on Mavrovouni. On the other hand, the lack of imported fine ware in the basin itself during the Late Antique period suggests a particular kind of investment in the countryside. The countryside around both Thisvi and Thespiai during Late Antiquity would appear to have received a less substantial investment in the kind of prestige habitation that is often associated with the concomitant decline in the urban core of the ancient world elsewhere. In contrast, the concentration of imported finewares, as well as the transport vessels, at the harbor site of Vathy along with the islands of Kouveli and Makronisos, indicates that finewares were entering the area, but apparently did not find their way into the local rural assemblages. Perhaps the sites in the gulf of Domvrena were transshipment points for goods destined to more economically prosperous elites around the city of Thebes in the Boeotian interior.
The title of today’s panel was “First Out” and we hope that our paper today extended the potential meaning of that phrase to include the post-Classical material from the first generation intensive pedestrian survey. Our paper today represents a point of departure for further study of both the material produced by the OBE across the Thisvi basin and the growing body of “second wave” survey material from Greece. While much second wave survey material has seen initial publication and has contributed to the present body of knowledge regarding the post-Classical landscape, we have shown the potential in returning to this material. For the Late Roman period, in particular, we think that returning to this material will
allow us to move beyond the juxtaposition of rural prosperity to abandonment (a version of the old continuity or change question) and tease out indications of regional difference present in across the Late Roman landscape of Greece. The potential present in returning to the first sherds collected from the Greek landscape in an intensive and systematic way demands that we make the results of these early intensive surveys available in flexible digital formats. A return to these survey projects will not only contribute to the curation of survey data and, in the processes, confirm the continued value of “first out”.
Dipping my Toe in the Public History Pool
Public history is all the rage these days in history programs. To my eye, the interest in public history is an effort within the discipline of history to connect our work with a recognized group of jobs as archivists, public historians, and at museums. On the one hand, this is good in that it recognizes that many of our students want to stay in the field of history, but do not aspire to academic positions. On the other hand, this is part of a larger vocational trend in the humanities that we probably need to monitor. While there is no reason not to embrace programs which hold forth the prospect of employment for our students, history as a discipline would be weaker if preparing future public historians became the dominant goal of history departments.
In any event, since our department is looking to get more serious about its offerings in public history, I thought I’d make an effort to see how my work in Greece and Cyprus could contribute. So in 2010, I am going to offer a small internship program in public history. Below is a very, very rough fact-sheet on this graduate level internship. As you can see, many of the details are to-be-determined, but I think it captures the core of what I’d like my internship to do.
Public History Internship
SP2010
The goal of this internship program is to provide an opportunity to gain experience with a wide range of digital and new media applications that are becoming increasingly central to public history, museum management and outreach, archival work and archaeological curation.
This work will focus on a number of ongoing and completed archaeological and historical projects and tools.
1. Topos/Chora: The Photographs of Ryan Stander. This is a series of photographs and related essays from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. The photographs will appear at the Empire Theater for the month of January and then in an online gallery. They will be accompanied by a series of reflective essays written by the archaeologists who participated in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. The goal here is to have something up on the web by January 15th and the gallery available for viewing by January 30th.
2. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: A Digital Museum. Since 2003, a team under the direction of Scott Moore, David Pettegrew, and me has been working at a site called Pyla-Koutsopetria on the south coast of Cyprus. This project has produced a vast amount of digital data ranging from video to podcast, photographs, text, descriptive data, maps, plans, illustration, quantitative data, et c. The goal of the Digital Museum is to present some subset of this data in a coherent way for the educated public. We have Omeka, online museum software, installed on a university server. This software can provide the base for our online museum.
3. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: Data Curation. One of the most important aspects of any archaeological or museum work is the responsible curation of all forms of data. PKAP has recorded a substantial amount of both digital and paper data over the past 7 years. This data needs to be curated. The paper data must be prepare to be deposited in the university archives and parts of the digital data, to be uploaded to Open Context for digital publication. In many ways this curation project is the flipside of the project 2.
4. Lakka Skoutara: An Early Modern Site in the Eastern Corinthia. Since 2000, David Pettegrew and I have recorded descriptive and photographic data from the early modern site of Lakka Skoutara that documented the changes at this site as a result of a whole range of abandonment practices. These photographs need to be put together with textual descriptions in a way that is useful to scholars. This archive will become the online companion piece to a published article.
5. Ohio Boeotia Project at Thisvi, Boeotia. Over the past two years, I have slowly been digitizing the results of an intensive pedestrian survey project conducted between 1979-1982 around the village of Thisvi in southeastern Boeotia. It would be excellent to report the results of this project in a transparent way or to develop an online environment where this work can be highlighted and made accessible.
Goals and Priorities: To some extent, I will let you imagine a set of priorities for this list of tasks, and I certainly don’t imagine that you’ll get all these done. On the other hand, I expect that early on, we as a team develop some sense of priorities in how we plan to attack these various projects. It is important to emphasize that public history projects are almost always collaborative. That is to say that people work together to accomplish a particular task. We are going to work together as a team to accomplish the goals listed below.
Assignments and Responsibilities: Since this is an internship, I will not have a major writing or reading assignment. You should plan to dedicate 10 hours a week to working this internship. I will insist on weekly 1 hour meetings. These will include status updates and are not optional. In addition, you will be expected to maintain a public blog detailing weekly how the various projects are progressing. The goal of the blog will be both to keep you honest (as a team) and to make the progress of the various projects underway transparent to the various stakeholders both at the university and elsewhere. I will expect each participant in the internship to contribute a single blog post a week. It might be best to blog on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. The first assignment will be to select a blogging service.
Resources:
1. Digital and New Media Laboratory. At present we have a single PC, a Linux powered laptop, and a gaggles of very powerful Macintosh computers. Time in the laboratory should be negotiated with the various other users.
2. Published and unpublished reports from Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, Ohio Boeotia Project, and Lakka Skoutara (which was a part of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS)).
3. People. Consider me, my various colleagues, and folks on campus potential resources. When in doubt, ask questions. Part of a successful public history project is knowing how to get the information that you need.
Some websites:
http://www.pkap.org/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/between-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-the-upland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikastorion_archaeological_project/
New Views on Old Data: First Draft
Find below my first effort at an AIA paper that I will be co-writing with Tim Gregory. It’s rough around the edges, but I think on the right track.
For more on this research:
Reclaiming Thisve Data
Thisve Basin, Archaeological Visualization, and Curating Digital Data
First Out: A First Draft of An Intro for New Views on Old Data
Survey Archaeology Finds as Data
More on Thisvi in Boeotia
Fine ware and Function at Boeotia Thisvi
New Views on Old Data: Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results After 30 Years
William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota
[first draft]
It seems natural to include a paper on survey archaeology on a panel entitled “First Out”. After all, the surface assemblage is, by necessity, the first out for any excavation. At the same time, the study of surface assemblages has fit into the definition of “First out” intended by the organizers of this panel by contributing significantly to our understanding of post-Classical periods in Greece over the past four decades. In fact, the ground breaking work of many of the participants on this panel has made clear that the rigorous documentation and analysis of surface finds has expanded our notion of what constitutes an archaeological site to well beyond the built up centers of ancient polis and across every century from the end of antiquity to the modern era. Intensive surveys in Boeotia, Laconia, Messenia, and the Corinthia are rewriting both the ancient and post-Classical landscapes of these well-studied regions.
If I can continue to play with the idea of “first out”, it is also clear that this phrase could apply to the first generation of intensive, pedestrian “siteless” surveys in another way. Like the first phase of excavation at major sites across the Mediterranean, the first efforts at intensive survey often relied upon assumptions and methods that were unrefined or unsophisticated in comparison with more recent work. In fact, the constant refinement of survey techniques and the ever more robust datasets that they produce often include explicit and implicit critiques of earlier survey methods. This continuous critique has not only weakened the status of survey among a sometimes skeptical archaeological establishment, but also served as a tacit justification for neglecting the results of earlier surveys. Technological barriers, irregular recording practices, and the incomplete publication of data sets have further impaired archaeologists’ ability to redeploy data collected from the first wave of surveys for newly formed hypothesis.
While the methodological concerns associated with revisiting early “second wave” survey data prose problems, this data nevertheless preserves evidence for the ephemeral surface record in Greece. Both ever-expanding development of the Greek countryside and the irregular patterns of surface visibility, agricultural practices, and erosion patterns obscure and threaten the surface record. As Albert Ammerman famously observed based on the results of several seasons of the systematic resurvey in Italy, sites tend to blink on and off in the landscape like traffic lights. What a project documents one season may not be there the next. Consequently, intensive survey data often captures a single distinct and unique view of the landscape which is not susceptible to reproduction even using similar methods.
This paper will use the data collected from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition between 1979 and 1982 from the (modern village and) Boeotian polis of Thisvi. The results of this survey were published in a series of short articles between 1980 and 1992. While these articles provided for a broad discussion of method and a basic report on the project’s finding, they did not publish finds or quantitative data extensively. Our goal with this paper is to take the first step in re-introducing data from the OBE into the broader conversation about settlement and survey data in both in Boeotia and across Greece more broadly. To do this, we would like to first discussion briefly the process of curating the survey data produced by the OBE and then go on to analyze this data in the context of some recently published survey work from Greece.
The first step in preparing the OBE data for analysis was the keying of records preserved in a series of notebooks and binder pages. These records included counts of artifacts from survey units, which were generally 1 meter square total collection circles as well as from more robust collection procedures conducted at a number of sites across the survey area. We also keyed the finds data from both survey units and the sites into an access database. The finds tables were in turn normalized. Here it is interesting and perhaps valuable to recognize that the quality of data recorded over the course of original fieldwork was quite high, but it was hardly normalized and consequently unsuitable for systematic, quantitative analysis. The lack of normalization was perhaps, in part, the result of the novel character of desktop-level tools for quantitative analysis (e.g. SPSS-X and IBM’s iconic SQL-powered DB2 debuted the year after OBE competed its fieldwork – 1983; the Macintosh personal computer was introduced in 1984.). This is not to suggest that quantitative analysis of archaeological data did not occur prior to the early 1980s, but rather to point out that the creation of normalized practices of data-recording and well-defined hierarchies of object identification became a higher priority after desktop database and statistical tools became more common. By normalizing the robust data sets produced by intensive survey, the database became as important as the traditional artifact catalog for analyzing the chronology and function of sites across the landscape.
At the same time as we keyed data from notebooks and binder pages, we also sought to remap the location of the transects using GIS software. At some point in the 1980s [some additional historical clarity here would be helpful], the artifact counts and location of transects was entered into the Surface II software program which produced a contour map of the artifact densities across the Thivi basin. While versions of these maps were published, the data behind these maps appears to be lost. Unfortunately, at present the disappearance of this spatial data has made it difficult at this point to place the western-most transects on the ground. The written description of the locations of the western transects relies upon points of reference that are not visible on the Greek Army Mapping Service 1:5000 maps and have been destroyed on the ground as a result of the construction of a massive pipemaking factory. There is hope that we can find the location of these transects from older aerial photographs of the area.
The final step in the production of this data is recording comprehensive metadata for the all of the data that we entered. Once the keying of the data and metadata is complete we plan to make this data available to the public via the internet. This step is especially important for small projects because it distributes of digital data expands the curation process from the purview of the creator of the data to the community of users who want to make use of the data. Dissemin
ating the data to end users, with the proper metadata, we make it possible for others to use our material and make it far more likely to be kept compatible with changes in technology.
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There have been significant changes in our understanding of post-Classical countryside since the Ohio Boeotia Expedition published their results in the 1980s. The work of both excavations and survey in Boeotia and elsewhere in Greece alone has produced a foundation for the reinterpretation of our survey data. Recent work by Archie Dunn and a team from the University of Birmingham has begun to document the post-Classical finds at Thisvi itself and Jonita Vroom’s study of the post-Classical ceramics from the Cambridge-Bradford Boeotia Project has shed important light on the relationship between post-ancient ceramics and settlement patterns across Boeotia.
The OBE team produced the current dataset through a number of different methods. The diversity of methods reflected the early stage in the development of field procedures and an avowedly experimental approach to documenting the landscape. The area closest to the city walls, Area A, were surveyed using a series of 11, randomly placed, 30 m radius circular survey areas from which samples were taken. The team surveyed the plain itself using a series of long transects (Areas, C, D, and E) from which they typically took 1 sq meter samples for density and diagnostic artifacts. Finally, the teams also collected samples for area of particularly high density which they designated sites. They surveyed these areas using a flexible methods best suited for documenting the extent, chronology, and function of the material on the ground. In addition to these survey areas, the OBE team also conducted intensive survey on two nearby islands in the Gulf of Corinth, Kouveli and Macronisos, which I have not included in the aggregated totals produced in the analysis below.
The survey of the mainland counted over 8700 artifacts and documented over 1700 batches of unique artifacts from the four areas of the survey.
The artifact density data from the OBE shows a decline in the number of artifacts from the units closest to the city across the central part of the Thisvi basin. This pattern, noted in the original publication of the survey, may be at least in part a product of the erosion patterns. In antiquity, an ancient barrage, described by Pausanias, controlled the flow of water and sediment into the basin. In more recent times, the lack of ability to control the flow of water may have either covered some of the sites or, at very least, discouraged habitation there. The density of artifacts, however, clearly increases on the gently sloping, stony ground the along the south side of the basin.
Against the backdrop of overall artifact density we can show the distribution of post-Classical material across the survey area. In general, the survey area is dominated by Classical to Hellenistic and Roman periods which accounted for 2/3 of the datable ceramics. There were, however, several concentrations of both Late Roman and Byzantine to Medieval pottery which represented about 10% of the overall assemblage of datable material collected from survey. Modern material and a thin scatter of pre-Classical material accounted for the other 20% or so of material from the survey.
Area A encompassed the highest density areas immediately south of the plateau upon which the ancient city and the modern village stand. The post-ancient material from this area were very focused with most of the material deriving from three units. Unit A2 contained an abundance of post-Classical material including Middle Byzantine material. It is situated immediately to the west of one of the Hellenistic fortification’s towers which appears to have undergone some modification in the post-Classical period. Units A5 and A8 produced significant quantities of Late Roman – Early Byzantine coarse wares including the ubiquitous combed ware.
The transects immediately to the south of the urban center of Thisvi, Area D, show diminishing quantities of post-Classical material with distance from the Hellenistic walls and the presumed center of post-Classical habitation. Overall only 12% of the material there was post-Classical as compared 77% of the datable material dating to the Classical-Hellenistic period. Area C, which extends south of the city walls to the west of area D, showed a similar distribution of Late Roman and post-Classical material. In fact, the only variation between Area D and C was the rich assemblage of Late Roman material collected from the habor at Vathy which fell within Area C. This collection of pottery pushed the total quantity of post-Classical material from Area C to close to 18%; without this material, the total percentage of Late Roman material was 13% or only slightly higher than found in the neighboring Area D. Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to place the some of the transects from area C. It is clear, however, that significant quantities of material came from the southern edge of the Thisvi plain where a large pipe factor stands today. The harbor area at Vathy has been completely destroyed by an industrial harbor serving that factory.
Area E to the east of the ancient city tells a similar story to areas C and D. It is notable that the overall assemblage produced by these units was smaller than either D or C (as was the overall area surveyed), and that Late Roman material accounted for close to 25% of all the material collected from this area and post-Classical material represented 27%. Much of this material, however, derived from substantial site situated along the southern edge of the basin and designated E1. Like Vathy, this single concentration of material exerted a substantial influence on the overall character of the assemblage from Area E. Without the material from this site, the overall percentage of post-Classical pottery declines to under 10%.
Since the most significant quantity of post-ancient pottery from the Thisvi basin can be dated to the Late Antiquity, it is perhaps most useful in this short paper to explore how we can reinterpret this distribution of Late Antique material in the countryside in light of the significant new analyses of material from this period in Boeotia and across Greece and with the help of more pliant dataset. It is significant, on first glance, that the distribution of material around Thisvi is similar to that recently published around the city of Thespiai to the east. The team from the Cambridge-Bradford Boeotia Project argued that the overall population of the city of Thespiai declined during Late Antiquity and, as a result, the residents of the city progressively abandoned the immediate hinterland of the city to intensive cultivation. In particular, this meant that the residents of Thespiai stopped the practice of regular manuring the fields near the city which, Bintliff and others argued, deposited ceramic material in a tell-tale halo around the urban core. In place of manuring, Late Roman farmers adopted less intensive agricultural practices and, at the same time, large tracts of land previously dedicated to feeding the urban population became part extra-urban agglomerations ranging from agricultural villas to self-sufficient hamlets.
The decline in artifact density visible for the Late Roman period in the Thisvi basin would fit well with this hypothesis as Late Roman (and more generally post-Classical) densities declining away from the city itself not simple as evidence for contracted habitation, but as the relationship between contracting populations and changing land-use patterns.
The work of the CBBP also revealed large extramural concentration of Late Roman material like those at the southeastern corner of the of the survey area, E1, and at the harbor at Vathy. The former coincides particularly well with kinds of developments documented by the Cambridge Boeotia Survey around Thespiai as villas. The assemblage from the site contained storage vessels consistent with some kind of agricultural installation as well as beehive sherds so common at Late Ro
man agricultural sites around Thespiai. Moreover, the site was outside the densest areas of ceramics around Thisvi even at its Classical-Hellenistic peek, and this too paralleled the findings of the work at Thespiai.
The harbor at Vathy was a more complex phenomenon. The material at this site was more diverse than a simple agricultural installation and included some of the few example of Late Roman fineware from the survey area in addition to a significant complement of transport vessels which would be expected at a coastal site. Vathy resembles more closely the assemblages present on the islands of Kouveli and Macronisos than the material present inland in the Thisvi basin or even neighboring Thespiai which likewise lacked significant quantities of Late Roman finewares. In contrast, at the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey in the immediate hinterland of the important Late Roman city of Corinth some xx km to the southeast, fineware made up almost 10% of the total assemblage of Late Roman artifacts, and this is despite a collection strategy that would tend to under represent the proportion of fine ware to coarse ware.
It is the comparative context that allows us to begin to make sense of assemblage presented around Thisvi. When first documented and published in the mid-1980s the presence of Late Roman and post-Classical material in the countryside of Thisvi was worthy of remark. Now as “the busy countryside” of Late Antique Greece comes into sharper focus, the dearth of pottery present in the Boeotia countryside and its decidedly functional and non-cosmopolitan character gives pause. There is no question that southeastern Boeotian countryside continued to see investment in post-antique period with Late Antique fortifications extant at Thisvi, Thespiai, Khostia and on Mavrovouni. On the other hand, the lack of imported fine ware for Late Antiquity suggests a particular kind of investment in the countryside. The countryside around both Thisvi and Thespiai during Late Antiquity would appear to be less substantially invested in the kind of prestige rural habitation that is often associated with the concomitant decline in the urban core of the ancient world.
The title of today’s panel was “First Out” and we hope that our paper today extended the potential meaning of that phrase to include the post-Classical material from the first generation intensive pedestrian survey. Our paper today represents a point of departure for further study of both the material produced by the OBE across the Thisvi basin and the growing body of “second wave” survey material from Greece. While much second wave survey material has seen initial publication and has contributed to the present body of knowledge regarding the post-Classical landscape, we have shown the potential in returning to this material. For the Late Roman period, in particular, with think that returning to this material will allow us to move beyond the juxtaposition of rural prosperity to abandonment (a version of the old continuity or change question) and tease out indications of regional difference present in across the Late Roman landscape of Greece. The potential present in returning to the first sherds collected from the Greek landscape in an intensive and systematic way demands that we make the results of these early intensive surveys available in flexible digital formats. It seems like that a return to these survey projects will put an end to any lingering skepticism regarding the long-term archaeological significance of survey data and, in the processes, confirm the continued value of “first out”.
Fine ware and Function at Boeotia Thisvi
For those who are regular readers here, you know that I’ve been working on re-analyzing the data produced by the Ohio Boeotia Expedition around the site of Thisvi in southwestern Boeotia. My focus has been on the post-antique material and the Late Roman material in particular. This is both because the post-antique material is the focus of the panel for which I am preparing this paper and because there has been so much work done in on understanding the Late Antique landscape of Greece since the completion of the fieldwork component of the OBE in 1984.
One of the most interesting characteristics of the main assemblage produced by the OBE from the Thisvi basin is the dearth of Late Roman fine wares. Both the transect survey and the site based survey of the Thisvi basin proper (this is the area immediately to the south of the city of Thisvi) produced virtually no fine ware. Only at the harbor site of Vathy was any substantial concentration of fine ware found (and this area only produced a few sherds of Phocaean (LRC) Ware and a Late Roman lamp).
The absence of any considerable quantity of Late Roman fine ware is more or less consistent with the finds of the Cambridge Boeotia Project to the east. One of the absolutely fantastic things included in the publication of their survey around Thespiai were a series of data sets. This data included the finds data from the sites discussed in the volume. They easily imported into an Access database and could be queried and quantified. The striking thing is that the villa sites around Thespiai (LSE 7, THS 2, 12, 13, 14 for those with a scorecard) likewise produced almost no imported fine wares. Now it may be that these villas are “industrial” villas focused on agriculture rather than the luxurious rural estates often associated with the new class of Late Roman aristocrats who looked beyond participation in the local, urban unit to sources for provincial or even imperial prestige.
The relative dearth of Late Roman fine wares from the countryside of Thisvi and Thespiai can also be compared to the conditions on the islands in the Gulf of Domvrena. The finds from the islands of Kouveli and Macronisos produced far greater quantities of imported fine ware than the inland sites (for these see T. Gregory, DXAE 12 (1986), 287-304 and T. Gregory, BS/EB 2 (1986), 155-175). This may well be credited to the status of these island sites as emporia or transshipment points for goods either being manufactured locally (presumably at the “industrial villas”) or being imported from abroad. It is curious, however, to see so little evidence of for the fine ware in the local landscape.
Another useful point of contrast is the distribution of fine wares across the Late Roman landscape in the Corinthia. David Pettegrew’s recent analysis of this data (Pettegrew, Hesperia 76 (2007), 743-784) showed that close to 10% of all Late Roman material collected from the intensive survey was fine ware most of which was imported. Likewise, Pettegrew’s summary of work at rural villas in the immediate hinterland of the city of Corinth revealed sites that we luxurious in appointment with private baths, colonnaded courtyards, and mosaic floors. These were the types of buildings likely to produce assemblages including imported fine wares. In fact, the villa at Akra Sophia suveyed by Gregory at essentially the same time as the sites in the Thisvi basin produce both proper Phocaean (LRC) wares as well as local imitations (T. Gregory, Hesperia 54 (1985), 411-428).
Even if we must observe some caution in assigning function to a building based on surface assemblage alone, the dearth of fine ware in both the Thespiai and Thisvi assemblages suggests that the Late Roman landscape of southwestern Boeotia is considerably different from that of the Corinthia. The results of survey and excavation over the last 20 years has not necessary produced a Boeotia countryside that is any less busy (for a nice summary see A. Dunn, in Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilization in Honour of Sir Steven Runciman. (Cambridge 2006), 38-71). Fortifications, possible Early Christian architecture, rural and urban installations of various types, harbor works and the distribution of Late Roman in general across the countryside point to the continued habitation and, broadly speaking, “usefulness” of the region through the 5th and 6th centuries (if not later!). At the same time, the absence of wide spread indication of imported fine wares — a typical and wide spread indicator of not only of prestige installations, but of domestic activities in general — make it hard to imagine that this area is a deeply connected to the bustling world of Late Roman commerce than even the “deserted” islands found immediately offshore in the Gulf of Domvrena, much less the cosmopolitan assemblages found at our coastal site on Cyprus or the villas of the Late Roman Corinthia.
This reading of the Late Roman countryside of southwestern Boeotia is important because it represents a more qualified reading of the prosperity characteristic of the Late Roman world in general. This is not meant to return to the outdated notions of the Late Antiquity as a time of poverty, dissolution, and decline, but rather to demonstrate that the hallmarks of Late Roman prosperity — namely trade, the wide distribution of prestige goods, and the continued investment in the architecture of display in domestic, urban, and ecclesiastical context — may have been distributed unevenly across the landscape of Late Roman Greece.
For more on this research:
Reclaiming Thisve Data
Thisve Basin, Archaeological Visualization, and Curating Digital Data
First Out: A First Draft of An Intro for New Views on Old Data
Survey Archaeology Finds as Data
More on Thisvi in Boeotia
More on Thisvi in Boeotia
The plan is to wrap up a draft of the Thisvi paper by the end of today, and it looks vaguely possible. This weekend, I ran a bunch of queries on the finds data to attempt to determine the relationship between the ancient and post-ancient material on the site. As our Archaeological Institute of America panel is supposed to focus on the post-Classical levels at well known sites, then it seemed better to focus on the post-Classical material from Thisvi (and ignore, mostly, the idea that surface material, no matter what the chronology is always “first out”).
The first step to my chronological analysis was simply to look at the distribution map generated by plotting the artifacts by period across the sites and known transects. I’ve put up versions of these maps before in a slightly modified form. The maps below include data from the more intensively collected sites (these are dots that do not appear in any survey transect) and in the circular collection units surveyed in the first year of fieldwork near the Hellenistic walls of Thisvi. Each dot represents one artifact. Their location within survey transect is arbitrary.
The first map (blue dots) represents Classical-Hellenistic material, the second (red dots) Late Roman material, and the third (gold dots) Byzantine-Medieval material. They clearly show that by the Late Roman period, a significant contraction in the distribution of material occurred around the city of Thisvi. The southern slope of the basin which were quite a busy place in the Classical to Hellenistic period appear to be used far less intensively in subsequent periods. This seems to represent an overall contraction in the intensive activity areas of the city of Thisvi and parallels to a certain extent the results of the survey at Thespiai to the east.
Unfortunately, the maps which appear above are incomplete. I have not yet been able to plot several of the transects from the western most area of the survey (Area C in the map below).
While I think that there is a good chance that I’ll be able to place these survey transects in the future (with the help of aerial photographs), at present the best I could do for the purpose of analysis is to compare the distribution of material in each of these sections to determine whether the distributional maps show a contraction of activity or simply a shift in the main area of activity from one part of the region to another. These charts are based on the almost convincing assumption that the total sample of each area is roughly equivalent and thus the proportions of various types of material is roughly comparable.
A first glance it would appear that Area E and Area C produced substantial more post-ancient material than either Area A or Area D. This is large due to two significant Late Roman sites in each of these areas. In the case of area C, the significant concentration of Late Roman material at the beach at Vathy accounted for close to 7% of the overall percentage of Late Roman material from the area. In Area E, the result was even more dramatic with a single site (E1) producing close to 20% of the Late Roman (and post-Classical material). Eliminating these concentrations, however, produces a fairly even distribution of post-Classical material across the entire survey area ranging from 7% in Area A to just over 13% in Area E. As a result, I feel comfortable stating that the distribution of what an earlier generation of survey archaeologists might call “off-site scatter” is relatively consistent across the entire survey area. This is significant because at the site of Thespiai to the east, the survey team has argued that most of the material in the fields around Thespiai was deposited as the residents of the city spread manure (and broken bits of pottery discarded in trash piles) to fertilize crops. Thus the distribution of “off-site material” could reflect the intensity of agricultural activity in the basin and the density of settlement at the central site of the survey area, Thisvi itself.
For more on this research:
Reclaiming Thisve Data
Thisve Basin, Archaeological Visualization, and Curating Digital Data
First Out: A First Draft of An Intro for New Views on Old Data
Survey Archaeology Finds as Data
Survey Archaeology Finds as Data
One the small arguments that I make in our paper on re-analyzing the survey finds from the Ohio Boeotia Project is that the changes in technology have influenced the way that data were recorded in archaeology. One thing that is particularly noticeable in the data is that little effort was made to normalize the finds data. This is not because the project was not imagining that their data could be analyzed quantitatively. In fact, the density or distributional data was collected on paper forms that were suitable for direct entry into a spreadsheet type program.
OBE Field Recording Sheet
The finds data on the other hand was collected in a way suitable for a text type catalog. Such catalogues have been a standard part of archaeological documentation for a century. They are typically include measurements for the object and then a textual description of the fabric, shape, decoration, and date of the object with some notes on comparanda. Such thorough textual descriptions of objects is useful for establishing the identity of fossil types in an excavation context. In other words, these objects serve to date stratigraphic layers in excavation and describing them accurate is important for establishing the validity of the identification of the object.
With the introduction of “New Archaeology” (or processural archaeology) in the early 1960s, there emerged a greater interest in quantification and quantitative methods for documenting past human activities. The tools to perform these kinds of quantitative analysis, however, were expensive and time consuming (often involving processing punch cards, expensive mainframe computer time, or even tedious and error prone hand calculations). The increasing availability of personal computers in the first years of the 1980s paralleled the development of important software packages for organizing data on desktop computers. IBM’s iconic DB2 came out in 1983 as represented the first SQL driven desktop database. The same year saw the introduction of a powerful new version of the longstanding statistics package SPSS (SPSS-X). Moreover, the portability of both hardware and software made it possible to enter data in the field. This undoubtedly shed light on the practice of data collection in direct contact with data entry (if not on the fly analysis). The desktop computer, SQL driven database software, and new statistics packages put complex statistically driven archaeological research in the hands of even the smallest intensive survey project.
Apple Computer Advertisement from 1985
The Ohio Boeotia Expedition worked on the cusp of these significant changes concluding in 1982. As a result, they collected quantitative data on artifact densities (which could be easily calculated by hand), but did not collect the finds data in rigorously normalized way. This is not to say that the data was not collected systematically. In fact, the systematic and robust collection of finds data has made it possible to normalize significant parts of the finds notebooks. The results can then be projected across the transects that were remapped into our GIS.
Classical Period Finds
Hellenistic Period Finds
Late Roman Period Finds
With time and creativity these data could be translated into chronotype data. The chronotype system is the systematic recording system that we used to document finds from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (as well as several other significant survey projects). We are gradually translating the context pottery from the Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia into this same system. This will create a foundation for some kinds of cross project analysis. At the same time, it will not eliminate the need for careful catalogue entries. The practice of recording careful descriptions of artifacts central to chronological and functional arguments will continue to remain central to archaeological documentation. In fact, the improved ability of desktop database software and “natural language” search engines will make these descriptions increasingly susceptible to the same kind of quantitative analysis as more standardized (and in most cases abbreviated) forms of notation.
First Out: A First Draft of An Intro for New Views on Old Data
To provide some context, this is a first draft of my introduction to a paper that Tim Gregory and I will present at this winter’s Archaeological Institute of America’s Annual Meeting. The paper deals with survey data produced by the Ohio Boeotia Project in the Thisvi Basin in Boeotia. You can read more on our work to re-habilitate and re-analyze this data here. The paper will be in a session called “First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites“.
For our paper, I plan to tweak the meaning of first out a bit. To begin, the surface assemblage, no matter what the chronological range of the pottery present, is always first out. The systematic documentation of surface assemblages provides a means to apprehend the over all site formation process in which the surface of the ground will invariably the most recent events in the history of the site. First out, in terms of survey, data represents the boundary between the work of the archaeologist and the layer formed by “archaeological processes”.
For the survey data gathered over the course of the Ohio Boeotia Project from the Thisvi Basin, first out has another meaning as well. The OBE was among the earliest “siteless” style intensive surveys typically associated with the Second Wave of intensive survey in Greece. These projects sought to document systematically the distribution of ceramics across the landscape rather than simply focusing on individual sites. The focus on the distribution of artifacts both “on site” and “off site” produced more robust and complex datasets that pushed the limits of quantitative and GIS technology of the day. The tools that we have now, on desktop computers, provide us with new ways of analyzing the data from these early siteless projects. More importantly, however, these projects capture a layer of an ephemeral landscape. Survey archaeologists have come to realize that the landscape documented by intensive pedestrian survey represents a distinct moment in the history of the surface of the ground. Changes in erosion patters, surface visibility, and cultivation practices significantly influence recovery rates which, in turn, affect the chronological character of the assemblage produced. In a bigger picture sense, the continued development of the Greek countryside (particularly in areas with easy access to the coast like the Thisvi basin) further endangers surface assemblages. Since the overall distribution of material across an area rarely warrants the status of “site”, there are few protections in place to prevent the destruction of surface scatters which preserve evidence for both subsurface activity as well as more “low intensity” uses of the ancient and modern countryside.
It’s important to recognize that our efforts to re-analyze the survey data from the Thisvi basin is a key step in preserving the results of an effort to document the disappearing landscape. These efforts run counter to the highly-critical stream in the methodological discourse associated with intensive survey which tends to see the results of earlier field work to be methodological unsophisticated, problematic, and potentially misleading. Each new survey purports to make significant contributions both to the survey method and the more general body of archaeological knowledge. The drive to innovate has had produced ever more robust datasets, but has also led to a relative neglect of earlier work. This in turn, has made the task of curating “early” siteless survey data less appealing: despite its potential for capturing disappearing or ephemeral landscapes, it is seen as being too methodologically problematic to reward the efforts of re-analysis.
Finally, we can address first out in the way meant by the organizers of this panel. Perhaps no area has seen greater advances through the work of siteless survey than later periods. The growth of intensive survey coincided, roughly, with John Hayes’ landmark works on the chronology of Late Roman ceramics. At the same time, survey archaeology has become an important tool for documenting less visible periods at traditional sites including the Byzantine, Medieval, and Ottoman periods in Greece. Shifts in settlement pattern and the continued privileging of the antiquity in both the historical and archaeological discourse of Greece has made the work of survey archaeology in documenting post-antique levels particularly valuable.
That’s my first draft of an introduction. Stay tuned for more on this project over this week as I get to writing up the analysis of the survey data…
Thisve Basin, Archaeological Visualization, and Curating Digital Data
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on preparing the data from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition (1979-1982) for re-analysis. This is all working toward presenting an expanded interpretation of the results from this field work at a panel put together by Kostis Kourelis and Sharon Gerstel at the 2010 Archaeological Institute of American Annual Meeting. The panel is called “First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites”. The site of Thisve is primarily known for its relatively well preserved Hellenistic fortification wall and substantial corpus of published Greek inscriptions. My paper will focus on the surface remains from across the broader region with particular attention to Late Roman and later material (although the surface assemblage no matter how you excavate, is the first out.)
As of this weekend, I finished keying all the density data from the survey transects that can be reasonably mapped. There were three or four transects which I’ve not been able to map in accurately in the GIS. Despite this missing data, I think that the mapped transects reveal something about the distribution of ceramics across the plain south of the ancient city of Thisve (and the modern villages of Thisvi and Doubrovna).
One of the interesting things is that this was not the first time that this data was mapped. Three maps of the archaeological “topography” of Thisve appeared in T. Gregory, “Archaeological Explorations in the Thisbe Basin” in the Boeotia Antiqua II: Papers on Recent Work in Boiotian Archaeology and Epigraphy (Amsterdam 1992), pp. 17-34. The OBE team plotted these maps using Surface II software against a digitized map of the Thisve plain. Unfortunately, from what I can gather, this original map of the basin no longer exists. So I’ve had to reconstruct the location of the transects from the notebooks in which the data was originally recorded.
The comparison of these two images and the processes that created them is a nice, small case study both for archaeological visualization and for the curation of digital media. I think that my more recent map of artifact densities and transect presents a more accurate picture of the distribution of ceramics across the landscape. That being said, even my plan has generalized. The samples from most of the individual survey units, mapped as squares in my plan, were taken from a 1 m sq area. I’ve extrapolated them across the entire unit (i.e. the width of the transect x the sampling interval). The lower images, generated by Surface II plotting, have simply extrapolated the density of artifacts across the entire Thisvi plain. I suspect that the linear arrangement of survey units (an early form of the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project‘s “Souvlaki method” of surveying the landscape) exposed the distribution plots to various kinds of “edge effects” as the software was asked to extrapolate artifact densities farther and farther from known or established data points. Moreover, the jagged abstraction of these figures makes it difficult to assign the surface densities to real space on the map (note the lack of scale or even a north arrow on figure 3.6!).
The disappearance of the Surface II data is another important issue. While it is easy to criticize a project for failing to responsibly curate their data, in fact, the field notes books and survey sheets from the project are well-maintained and organized. The maintenance of data produced over the course of secondary analysis is a challenge for a small project like the OBE which worked in the area for only three years and published their analysis and then dispersed. Survey projects, in particular, suffer from rather ephemeral constitutions (as opposed to the usually more permanent relationship between excavators and a particular site). If the relatively low impact of survey archaeology on the landscape tends to attenuate the link between the archaeologist and a particular place, then the combination of paper and high tech applications ranging from relational databases to GIS mapping applications adds a layer of complexity to curating the digital data that these projects produced. In most cases, data was (and I’d argue still is) collected from the field in paper form and then keyed and plotted into digital databases of various descriptions. So the digital data represents the first phase of analysis rather than a primary data collection. Perhaps this is part of the reason for failing to maintain the digital data as carefully as the paper forms and notebooks. In recent years, a more serious approach to the practices involved in curating digital data (and survey data more generally) will undoubtedly change future practices. Hopefully our work with the data from Thisvi will represent an important case study for the curation of digital data in the context of re-analysis.
