Uncategorized | Archive for the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Metadata Monday

January 26, 2009 Bill Caraher Leave a comment

I haven’t done a Metadata Monday for a while, so perhaps it is time for a quick metadata update for this blog.

As I have argued before, metadata is less interesting for the volume of visitors than for the type of visitors. If we accept the idea that web-reading habits play a role in forming virtual communities on the web, then it worth making the structure of these communities a bit more obvious.

The most common referring blogs to my site are:

1) Buildings, Objects, Situations (Kostis Kourelis)
2) Rogue Classicism
3) Grand Forks Life (I had to beg him to keep a link to my blog on his blog roll! So click through for me to give him some traffic!)
4) Archaeoastronomy (Alun Salt)
5) Thoughts from West Melrose
6) Electric Archaeologist (Shawn Graham)
7) Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean (Brandon Olson)
8) Ancient World Bloggers Group
9) Antiquated Vagaries
10) History of the British School at Athens (David Gill)

Since the inception of this blog about a year and a half ago, I’ve had just over 40,000 page views. In the last year, I’ve had just under 20,000 visits (almost 30,000 page views). The average time on the site over the last year has been 1:13.

The top 10 countries with readers of my blog:

1) US
2) Greece
3) UK
4) Canada
5) Italy
6) Australia
7) Germany
8) Cyprus
9) France
10) Turkey

The top 10 states:

1) California
2) Pennsylvania
3) Minnesota
4) New York
5) North Dakota
6) Ohio
7) Illinois
8) Florida
9) Texas
10) New Jersey

And for Sam Fee and my wife , the top browser by just over 1% is Firefox:

1) Firefox (43.67%)
2) Explorer (42.66%)
3) Safari (8.10%)
4) Opera (2.93%)
5) Chrome (1.38%)

The top OS:

1) Windows (80.60%)
2) Mac (18.08%)
3) Linux (0.98%)
4) iPhone (0.08%)
5) iPod (0.05%)

I have no idea what this means in a cosmic sense, except that it provides an interesting overview of my readers.

Thanks for reading!

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Teaching Thursday: Revised Classes for Spring

January 15, 2009 Bill Caraher Leave a comment

I apologize for missing a post yesterday. I seem to have acquired a catastrophic stomach bug. But I am back in the office today equipped with saltines and weak tea.

I have (perhaps foolishly) revised both of my classes for this spring. For Western Civilization, this has involved moving some of my weekly lecture material to podcasts. Each podcast is around an hour and presents the basic historical narrative for the class. Since my class emphasizes the nature of pre-industrial states and societies, most of these lectures focus on the basic political history for each period. It’s been a challenge to compress, say, all of Archaic and Classical Greece down to an hour, but has encouraged my to prioritize the structured, narrative information that I provide each week. The goal behind these podcasts is to allow allow me to spend more time in class dealing with primary source texts and writing skills. Last semester I experimented with a more lecture based format (entirely appropriate, I think, for a class of 100+ students). I was unsatisfied with the results overall but nevertheless regarded the format as well-suited for the dissemination of basic historical information. Here’s the syllabus, and I will post some of the podcasts soon!

As for my History 240: The Historians Craft… Traditionally I have run this class as an open seminar allowing students to conduct research on any historical topic while providing basic structure to guide them through the writing and research on their chosen subject matter. This worked relatively well, judging from my basically solid reviews and the fairly decent final products. The only down side was that the class was hardly a seminar. There was little in the way of conversation among the students as their topics were often as divergent as “Ninjas” and “Women in the Revolutionary War”. To remedy this, I have created a more focused seminar on the history of the University of North Dakota. This is meant to key on both the recent 125th-i-versary celebrations here at UND as well as get the students into the University Archives. There is no substitute for exposing the students to real archival material (raw and unedited!). The biggest challenge will likely be encouraging the students to think beyond the boundaries of UND and engage the broader historiographic context for their research. If I can do this, however, there will be a significant upside: the students will be forced to consider how their own experiences here on UND’s campus fit into broader trends. Here’s the syllabus, and I will report back on our progress soon!

For more Teaching Thursday:

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Friday Varia and Quick Hits

December 19, 2008 Bill Caraher Leave a comment

Some random quick hits at the end of a long semester:

An Aaron Barth note. Aaron got his M.A. in history at the University of North Dakota in 2006 (I think). He has remained active in history. Here’s a link to a video on Ft. Lincoln to which he contributed. As Barth would say: Everyman His Own Historian.
Another Aaron Barth note. He has internalized the lessons learned at UND. A gratuitous reference to Elwyn B. Robinson in a “man on the street” interview:

“Historian Elwyn B. Robinson wrote history of North Dakota, he said the cold weather challenges us and makes us more industrious… but when it gets this cold and you’re out in it, you’re like hey maybe we don’t need it this extreme.”

An interesting and “edgy” piece over at Tenured Radical called “So you want to be a blogger: a few thoughts on what a blog is not“. Nothing motivates folks to engage a new medium than a blunt statement of what they won’t be able to do. I think it is related to the Matt Foley school of motivational speaking: “Well, I’m here to tell you that you’re probably gonna find out, as you go out there, that you’re not gonna amount to Jack Squat!!” You’re gonna end up eating a steady diet of government cheese, and living in a van down by the river!” Ambition is always fueled by a studied detachment from reality.
Finally, don’t make plans for tonight. Settle into your favorite chair and watch my RICHMOND SPIDERS play for the National Championship in ESPN2. They’ll need all the help they can get, but they’ve made it this far. Let’s go SPIDERS!

Have a good weekend!

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Teaching Thursday: Rethinking Lectures, Content, and the Classroom Vibe

December 18, 2008 Bill Caraher Leave a comment

This past week I’ve begun to experiment with podcast lectures. I teach our Western Civilization survey one day a week, at night, for two and a half hours. The class enrolls between 80 and 150 students and meetings in an “lecture bowl” type room. Traditionally, I lecture for part of the class (say an hour and a half) and then found something else to do over the remaining hour. This sometimes involved breaking into groups, this sometimes involved focusing on a particular skill — say, paper writing — and this sometimes involved a more Socratic style “discussion” focusing on a book or a primary source. Despite my efforts to liven up the class, the most consistent complaint from the students is that the class is too long. On the one hand, the class doesn’t go any longer than the schedule dictates. On the other hand, it is a long class particular for freshmen and at the 100 level.

Long or not, I am still required to teach a certain amount of content and a certain number of skills, techniques, and methods. So, next semester I am going to try to shake things up some. I am in the process of recording all of my lectures as podcasts. This will move the longest and most tedious part of the class online for the students to engage at their leisure. In fact, I find that I can trim about a half an hour from each lecture by doing it as a single uninterrupted podcast. I have worked to eliminate many of my “pregnant pauses”, grand rhetorical gestures, questions (“… in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, passed the… Anyone? Anyone? The tariff Bill?…”), and digressions. The lectures are somewhat less entertaining (at least to me!), but nevertheless reflect the core concepts and narrative in the class. It is worth noting that this is incredibly time consuming. It takes me about 3 hours to record a 1 hour lecture. (Ok, on some level that’s not too bad, but with 14 lectures, I reckon it will take about 40 hours). On interesting side effect of doing all my lectures over a few weeks is that it has led to them being far more cohesive and coherent. It is easier for me move back and forth across the lectures because, quite simply, it is easier to remember what I emphasized earlier in the week than to remember what I emphasized weeks or even months earlier.

With my lectures (and much of the formal course content; that is those things that make this course Western Civilization rather than, say, the History of Portugal) posted online, it frees up time in class to do other things. My hope is to spend more time on the the primary and secondary source readings, in-class writing, basic composition skills, and the historical method. More importantly, it gives me a considerable amount of freedom in the classroom and allows me to break the routine of lecture, stilted discussion, and Socratic questioning. My impression is that this routine contributes to the sense that the class is so long as much as the actual length of the class. My goal is, in effect, to change the classroom vibe.

Of course, this “new approach” depends on the students actually listening to the podcasts. This is especially significant since my lectures (and subsequently the podcasts) basically replace the course textbook which I made optional because the students never read it. With the textbook already optional (I replaced it with a more thematic introduction to pre-industrial society), I reckon that podcasts will fit more easily into the rhythms and habits of student life.

So, this is the fourth “technological, new media, computer” kind of post this week. For my dedicated archaeological readers, do not despair! I have a few interesting archaeological posts dreamed up for next week and a draft of my paper for the Archaeological Institute of America’s Annual meeting should appear soon (as I write it!).

More Teaching Thursdays:

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A Snowy Visit to Montreal and McGill

December 12, 2008 Bill Caraher Leave a comment

I cannot express enough appreciation to my gracious hosts Mike Fronda and Hans Beck during my snowy visit to Montreal and McGill. The colloquium was thought provoking and collegial, Prof. Andreas Mehl’s paper was well-considered, and the University and the city (particularly the food!) lived up to its billing.

I was able to visit the Oratory of St. Joseph. It is a spectacular church, but more importantly, the Oratory ranks as one of the most popular healing shrines in North America. In particular, the church is associated with the Blessed Brother Andre. His simple piety earned him veneration as a holy man during his lifetime. In particular the intercession of Brother Andre was known to heal the sick. His efforts to promote the cult of St. Joseph resulted initially in the construction of a small chapel dedicated to the saint and then the much larger oratory. He was beatified by John Paul II and the Oratory remains an important pilgrimage site. The tomb of Brother Andre is surrounded by candles, images an statues of St. Joseph, and numerous crutches testifying to the healing power of the holy man’s intercession.

The Original Oratory

The “new” Oratory

We also visited the cathedral of Montreal dedicated to Notre Dame. It was a spectacular example of 19th century Gothic architecture. The massive amount of exposed and painted wood gave it a palpably Canadian feel.

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Teaching Thursday: Teaching by Templates

December 4, 2008 Bill Caraher Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a good bit about templates for assignments this semester. Some of this was prompted by a series of discussions organized by our Office of Instructional Development around the Gerald Graff book They Say/I Say. As I have noted earlier, this book offers some basic templates to help students organize the relationship between the scholarly discourse (“they say”) and their own contributions (“I say”). I tend to follow such templates myself, in fact, beginning (at least the first draft) of many papers with the phrase “Many scholars have argued…” in order to set up my own (presumably) different perspective on a particular historical problem. Graff’s templates for this rhetorical “move” are far more complex and sophisticated offering students such useful phrases like “Although X does not say so directly, she apparently assumes _______” (23) or “X is right that _______, but she seems on more dubious ground when she claims ______” (60). Such templates certainly introduce students the kind of techniques and templates that are common in academic writing. This is particular important in lower level courses because we cannot expect students here to have had much, if any, contact with academic writing (and textbooks commonly work to downplay authorial voice in favor of implied consensus).

While we can complain that books like Graff allow students to work around the arduous task of deciphering academic prose and discerning the stylistic ticks that make formal writing work, the book does provide a way to get students thinking more carefully about language, arguments, and presentation. Teaching by templates certainly leads to more aesthetically appealing final products. I teach our introduction to historical methods class (The Historians Craft) and I require students to give a professional style conference paper on their research at the end of the course. I encourage them to follow a fairly strict template for these papers.

1.    Present your topic clearly.
2.    State your thesis.
3.    Place it within the historiography of your field.
4.    Discuss your sources and method.
5.    Demonstrate your argument’s validity.
6.    Conclude with reference to this thesis’s broader implications.

The results of this rather formal structure are papers that are similar in form and vary in content. On the one hand, this structures and limits the students’ creative impulses. On the other hand, it produces papers that are easy to understand and evaluate.

The final paper for my graduate historiography class is a thesis prospectus. Such papers typically follow a fairly restricted number of templates. Nevertheless, I’ve been reluctant to provide a template for this assignment, and this has caused some consternation among my students in this class. Some of my reasons are selfish: I dread reading 20 cookie cutter papers. On the other hand, I also want to encourage students at the graduate level (particularly in a graduate level historiography class) to recognize the vitality and variability in our field. Part of the process of discovering one’s own academic voice and understanding the discipline at the graduate level is recognizing the huge diversity of template available for any aspect of the academic process. This causes the class some consternation, but I’d like to see that as a product of academic and perhaps even intellectual growth.

More Teaching Thursdays:

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The Cypriot Landscape, Pyla-Koutsopetria, and Rome

December 2, 2008 Bill Caraher Leave a comment

As I mentioned yesterday, my paper in Montreal will focus on the archaeological aspects of the Roman presence on Cyprus in an effort to complement a paper that emphasizes the administrative aspects of Roman rule. I spent most of the day yesterday thinking about how Cyprus position in the Roman empire influenced Cypriot landscape. Susan Alcock’s Graecia Capta was at the forefront of my thought as was Marcus Rautman’s work on the “busy countryside” of Late Antique Cyprus.

So, the question that I tried to answer is how was Cyprus’ place in the Roman empire visible at our site of Pyla-Koustopetria. In some ways, our site is typical of other non-urban Roman-Late Roman sites on the island. For example, it lacks a strong signature of material from the 2nd-3rd century and has a tremendous increase of material in the later 5th, 6th, and early 7th centuries. The absence of 2nd and 3rd century material might be an artifact of our understanding of Roman ceramics; after all out site produced a good amount of pottery that can be generically dated to the Roman period. Thus, we can probably argue that our site had continuous activity throughout the Roman era. This would distinguish it, in part, from trends in both Greece and Cyprus which seem to suggest that economic and political turmoil of the later high empire saw a contraction of rural settlement.

On the other hand, our site is not simply a Roman period settlement. We have activity at Koutsopetria continuously from the Archaic period including what appears to be a fortified settlement perhaps dating to the Classical-Hellenistic time. The arrival of Roman material on the site, then, could be read as the changing material culture of the long-standing settlement. While this would qualify as a kind of Romanization (especially as some of the material may suggest a deeper involvement in markets made available by Roman rule over the entire Eastern Mediterranean), it hardly represents the creation of a distinct Roman landscape of the kind recognized by Alcock in Greece and typified by large scale agricultural exploitation of the countryside, centuriation, and wholesale founding of cities.

It is interesting, however, to compare the position of Koutsopetria in pre-Roman Cyprus to its position in the administratively unified island under Roman rule. In pre-Roman times, Koutsopetria sat at the periphery of the city of Kition’s chora (or territory). In fact, one possible interpretation of the fortification at the site is that they are a coastal border fort near the eastern limits of Kition’s territory. With the arrival of Roman administrative organization on Cyprus, inter-city rivalries on the island presumably continued, but political and economic boundaries between these cities (for example Kition and its eastern neighbor Salamis) would have become increasingly irrelevant. It seems worth considering that the rise in prosperity at Koutsopetria over the course of the Roman period, was stimulated in part by a new degree of economic coherence present on the island under Roman rule. Koutsopetria may have gone from being a peripheral settlement to Kition to its own kind of central place occupying the gap between the political and economic centers at Kition and Salamis.

Perhaps it was the political unification of the island during the Roman period which set the stage for the rapid expansion and increase in prosperity of the site during Late Antiquity. The full array of Late Roman finewares and transport vessels at the site shows a deep engagement with Mediterranean markets. Moreover, the material at Koutsopetria appears somewhat different from the material found at other sites in the immediate vicinity suggesting a degree of economic autonomy. What happened during the Late Roman period to encourage this kind of economic expansion? In a general sense, Rautman and others have suggested that the stability of the Late Roman Mediterranean and the general prosperity of Mediterranean markets stimulated the exchange of highly visible (in an archaeological sense) products. So in this sense, Koutsopetria represents one of any number of Roman period sites that cashed in on the general prosperity of the Eastern Mediterranean.

When cast against the backdrop of Roman rule on the island of Cyprus, the site history of Pyla-Koutsopetria appears distinct in that activity at the site is not a pure artifact of Roman administrative priorities, economic resturcturing, or political intervention. On the other hand, its expansion during this period and into Late Antiquity suggests that Roman rule did influence the development of the site. Its location on the coast and at the junction of several Roman roads surely provided opportunities for the residents to engage more fully the local trade on the island as well as the larger external markets made accessible through Roman control of the Mediterranean basin. This assessment, of course, says nothing about the cultural, religious, or even social influences of Roman rule which surely conditioned the archaeological signature of the site in the landscape as well. More on this… I hope… later in the week.

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Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments

October 30, 2008 Bill Caraher 1 comment

This week my graduate seminar has read Hayden White’s The Content of the Form and Dominick LaCapra’s History and Criticism. For most students in the class, these books are unfamiliar territory and their critiques of narrative form pose potent challenges to the way that most of our graduate students think about history as a craft. The one thing that I try to communicate through these books (if everything else these scholars offer is lost) is that history to be renewed, relevant, and significant needs to embrace experiment. The “Ironic perspective” held by most historians who continue to occupy their superior position with regard to the actors, events, and structure of the past encourages the kind of self-aware historical practice that could allow scholars to surpass the limitations imposed by our discipline’s commitment to Irony.

This is undoubtedly heady stuff for a room full of M.A. students. Moreover, many of the students enjoy history in part because of the comfortable familiarity with the narrative structure. So not only does White and LaCapra ask them to critique the very core of the historical practice that they have just recently committed to pursuing at the graduate level, but these scholars also challenge us all to reconsider many of the basic assumptions of historical expression (and by extension historical practice).

The question is how do you get a seminar room full of M.A. students to experiment, to test the limits of historical expression, and feel at ease with history as a creative process that could have far closer bonds to fiction, “creative writing”, or even poetry? I’ll be the first to admit that I am not some kind of wildly experimental historian although my willingness to blog (for example) and play with video in non-linear ways represents some of my willingness to at least consider avenues for historical expression that make more transparent the historical process. Of course, the standard answer to this question is that we need to expose students to experimental kinds of writing both in the discipline of history and across the humanities, and this is almost certainly the case. But I am not entirely convinced that we succeed in encouraging experimentation by using the classroom imprimatur to show how experimental historical writing is not unconventional.

It’s at moments like this when I realize how conservative history is as a discipline (which despite our current political climate is not meant to be an attack), and how hard it is to create room, both mentally and within the disciplinary confines, to experiment.

More Teaching Thursday:

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Teaching Thursday: Making the Test

October 16, 2008 Bill Caraher Leave a comment

Making a midterm exam is always a tricky thing especially in an introductory level class. For my introductory history class there is the challenge in determining what I am trying to test. In its classic formulation this is deciding between testing for content and testing for technique (or method). For a history course, a test that emphasizes content mainly (if falsely) evaluates the ability to recall names, dates, places, events. In contrast, testing for method, technique, or understanding centers on the student’s ability to discern or make arguments for causality in historical event using some version of the historical method. The former is frequently, although not always, associated with “factual” multiple-choice exams. The latter with the dreaded essay.

My introductory level class requires writing. I have weekly writing assignments, a paper, and require the students to write at least one in-class essay. Many of my students do not like writing. They dread writing in-class essays, they grouse about the paper, and they frequently fall behind in their weekly writing assignments. In the past, I would have a midterm essay exam and the dread in the class would be palpable for weeks in advance. As the same time that discontent with the midterm essay was reaching its peak, I was asked to take the Praxis II subject test in History. The Praxis II is the standard test required for certification to teach history in North Dakota. The test was, predictably, multiple choice and focused on, in part, crucial, but ultimately assorted names, dates, and events.

We require students who want to teach social studies or history in North Dakota to take our complete sequence of introductory history classes. So two years ago, I made a concession. I gave the students an option on the exam. They can select one of three types of tests: all multiple choice, half multiple choice and half essay, or all essay. I modeled my multiple choice questions after the kinds of questions found on the Praxis II; they include not only names and dates, but more complex analytical answers which, ideally, show that the students understand the main themes of my class as well as the basic narrative. The essays are a more standard variety. For the all essay exam, I include a “quote identification” question which requires the student to identify a passage from a primary source and discuss how it fits into or represents a major theme in the course. The second essay is the opposite. It requires the student to produce an argument (related to one of the central themes of the class) from the primary sources and historical “facts” that they have assembled from their reading and my lectures over the course of the semester.

Generally, the all multiple choice exam is the most popular with the students and the grades on this test represent the full range of possible student performance (not exactly a bell-curve, but some students perform at every grade level from the catastrophic to the perfect). The grades on the essay exams tend to produce a slightly higher average as there is a slightly larger margin for error; I am willing to accept a wider range of possible responses to the questions. Moreover (and perhaps more significantly) the essay exam attracts students who have more interest in history and are more experienced writing essay test (typically upper classmen). So student grades cluster slightly higher and the average grade is typically much higher since there are fewer “catastrophic” exams. I can usually find a way to give even a hopeless essay a few points, but on multiple choice the answer “B” is never even close when the right answer is “A”.

I am not really sure whether the students appreciate the choice between different kinds of exams. I also wonder about the fundamental fairness of the practice. I have not yet begun to fathom the implications of different kinds of tests for different kinds of learning in the sticky matter of assessment. Once we open a class to a wider range of potential, student-directed, outcomes, it becomes far more difficult to assess performance and success.

More Teaching Thursday:

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Underwater Archaeology in Eastern Cyprus

September 10, 2007 Bill Caraher Leave a comment

Scott Moore brought this little Reuter’s story to my attention. The story is a bit odd especially the strange juxtaposition of trade, 1st century Roman ships, and Hellenistic naval battles, but the project seems interesting nonetheless.

Cyprus to seek ancient shipwrecks

By Michele Kambas
NICOSIA (Reuters) – Cyprus is to launch sea surveys in an area where dozens of vessels led by warring successors to Alexander the Great are believed to have sunk in battle for control over the island in 306 BC.
Encouraged by the discovery of one wreck from a later Roman era, the survey slated for the summer of 2008 will extend into deep waters from the south-east tip of the island, known as Cape Greco, the island’s Antiquities Department said.
“Cyprus is a crossroads and is very rich in ancient shipwrecks,” said Pavlos Flourentzos, director of Cyprus’s Department of Antiquities.
Historical accounts suggest that the Cape Greco region — a rocky outcrop between the now popular tourist resorts of Agia Napa and Protaras, saw one of the biggest naval battles of the ancient world.
According to the ancient Greek historian, Diodorus of Sicily, in 306 BC Demetrios the Poliorketes (Besieger) triumphed over Ptolemy I of Egypt in a naval engagement off Cyprus, with dozens of vessels sunk as the result of combat.
“It is well known that there was a naval engagement in the region in 306 BC, so there is a potential of finding wrecks, or parts of wrecks, in deeper waters,” Flourentzos told Reuters on Thursday.
Ptolemy I, one of the generals of Alexander the Great, lost control of Cyprus for a period of 10 years after his defeat at the hands of Demetrios Poliorketes. Demetrios was son of Antigonus, a Macedonian nobleman who later ruled Asia Minor.
The Cypriot Antiquities Department announced on Thursday that an ancient Roman shipwreck, dated the 1st century AD, had been found in the same area.
Continued…

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Archive for the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Archive

Metadata Monday

Teaching Thursday: Revised Classes for Spring

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Teaching Thursday: Rethinking Lectures, Content, and the Classroom Vibe

A Snowy Visit to Montreal and McGill

Teaching Thursday: Teaching by Templates

The Cypriot Landscape, Pyla-Koutsopetria, and Rome

Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments

Teaching Thursday: Making the Test

Underwater Archaeology in Eastern Cyprus

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