History in the Dirt

Where are the Late Romans?

David Pettegrew again.  A report from the Vigla trenches.  To say we've been busy is an understatement.  Our work has been continuous since excavation began two weeks ago.  Last week, in fact, some of us worked morning (7:30-11) and afternoon (2-7) shifts to make progress.  We used the time in between to run errands, eat, and sleep.  The Dhekelia military ranges are in use in the mornings this week which is allowing trench supervisors to catch up on excavation notebooks. 

At Vigla, four different trenches have raised as many new questions as they have answered.  We are quite quite confident at this point that we misread our geophys results.  No early Christian basilica church has surfaced and we are shocked at the near total lack of Roman/LR pottery---despite the vast settlement and millions of potsherds of that date on the plain below.  On the other hand, we have learned more about the Hellenistic period than we ever planned to do.  Four trenches have revealed walls that appear to be Classical or Hellenistic in date (roughly 500 to 100 BC) trench, and, as we begin to close up our trenches for the year, we have a good sense of several occupation phases on the Vigla ridge.  We've found building walls, room floors, plaster, nice fineware pottery, amphora sherds & cooking wares, a few coins, spear points, a sling bullet, slag, and a statuette.  We've reconstructed architectural contexts, found floor fill, defined rubbish pits, and so on. 

If we have discovered a significant amount of Hellenistic material in the last two weeks, we have still to make sense of this material (a settlement? a military fort? a sanctuary?), and figure out whether there are any buildings of Late Roman date on the heights of Vigla.

A few pics of our excavation.

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LEFT.  Dan Richards, Brandon Olson, Chris Gust act as scales showing the depth of their trench (EU 1)

RIGHT.  Jenn Howell in an excavation unit that doesn't end.

 

 

EU 1, on Vigla.  Julie, Jon, Nick, Brandon, David, Kate's shadow, discuss the excavation of the mortar bedding of a Hellenistic floor.  

Surveying Vigla

David Pettegrew here.  Today we were set to start the excavation at Vigla and Kokkinokremos but encountered a small glitch in our gridding plans and decided to wait until tomorrow (Friday) to break ground.  Instead of excavating, we took the team out to the site for a final day of orientation which involved, among other things, explaining our excavation procedures as well as our specific objectives for trial excavations in the 2008 season.  We also conducted a pedestrian (re)survey over the Vigla ridge with the goal of understanding the relationship between the artifact densities on the surface of Vigla and the artifact densities that we will encounter in the plowzone (during excavation).  What exactly is the proportion between artifacts in surface & subsurface deposits at these sites?

I include here a few images from today's work.  The team is now geared up for fieldwork.

 

PKAP Staff walking at 10 m. intervals counting pottery and tile at Vigla. 

 

Bill & Scott managing the R8 Base Station.

PKAP Flurry: Planning for an Archaeological Project

After a brief vacation to Louisville, Columbus, and Chicago, I'm back with some archaeological updates.  As recorded in the blogs of Scott Moore and Bill Caraher, January has been an important month for planning our summer fieldwork at Pyla-Koutsopetria in Cyprus.  The conversation began while standing around our poster at the AIA Meeting in Chicago and has continued through email, telephone calls, and even a meeting in the virtual world of Second Life.  The second life meeting lasted over 4 hours (banter included) and discussed all matters of planning.

Figure: Clockwise from the guy on the right: the avatars of Scott Moore, Bill Caraher, and David Pettegrew discussing PKAP business

 

The amount of preparatory work needed to conduct archaeological investigation in the Mediterranean today is enormous.  Here are some of the topics we have been discussing, the many practical elements involved in implementing a project design:

• Equipment for survey, excavation, museum work
• Excavation Plans: who will direct?
• Budget
• Personnel & senior staff
• Specialists
• Students
• Visitors
• Field School in Archaeology
• Papers, publications, and plans
• Budget (yes, again)
• A cook! 
• Food
• Packing suggestions & Forms
• Newsletters
• Geophysical Survey
• Ceramic catalogue

Each of these is a conversation in and of itself, bearing a load of logistical details heavy enough to could crush any young aspiring archaeologist. 

Leaving the Armchair

One of the joys of teaching a class like "Archaeology and Historical Interpretation" is getting to see students encounter the archaeological process in two very different ways: reading, thinking, and talking about it in a comfortable classroom setting vs. leaving the armchair and experiencing the process in an excavation trench or a corn field in mid-November.  One of the goals of this course, in fact, was to promote these different encounters with archaeology as different modes of knowing a method used to generate history.  The third assigned project for the course was for students to offer their reflections on their field experiences this semester.  Some of my favorite observations, often humorous:

 

Excavation vs. Survey

"I would say that excavation is the better of the two methods... because excavation is more focused than field survey and therefore has the potential for revealing a greater number of artifacts"

"Survey is an excellent, fast method to get an overall picture of what may be below the surface; however it is not very reliable when it comes time to interpret artifacts...Excavation, although more time-consuming, provides accurate contexts from which artifacts can be interpreted."

"In survey we can see a much broader picture, but in excavation, we are limited to a very small space"

"Each method is able to produce results that contribute something significant and unique to one's understanding of the past."

"One is not necessarily any better than the other; rather the information obtained from survey and excavation culminate in a heightened understanding, allowing for a more intricate historical interpretation."

 

On the Tedium of Archaeology:

"Until a person actually participates in field survey, they will never know how tedious it is.  One constantly focuses on the ground in front of them, scanning the ground for artifacts"

"During the survey I became very easily distracted and I think this is one of the reasons why I did not find many artifacts."

"The patient frustration of scraping away dirt with a trowel for hours on end, and finding nothing, cannot be fully understood without hands-on experience."

"I thought I would be able to deal with the tediousness of excavation, but after the first hour I found that very difficult."

"Disappointingly, we were not given guns and whips but instead little triangularly shaped excavating implements called trowels... If I ever felt emasculated at any point in my life it was never more intense than when holding that little trowel in my hand and scraping away at the bottom of a  square-shaped trench."

 

The Effects of Weather:

"Another one of the difficulties faced by the archaeologist that cannot be adequately learned through reading, but must be experienced first-hand are environmental or climate factors.  In our case it was cold.  Very cold."

"Had it not been so cold, I would've been much more thorough in my scouring of the ground"

"We experienced extreme cold, combined with wind and some snow, which served to discourage the expedition."

 

What did we learn?

"As for me, I learned what I subconsciously already knew--archaeology is technical, precise, and nerve-wrecking...For the sake of my nerves and for the sake of the data being collected I think I am much more suited for armchair archaeology and cups of tea."

"There is something embedded in the archaeological process that lends adventure to every bucket of dirt.  The excitement is almost oppressive--even if all we uncover or observe is dirt, that very dirt was once tilled, built upon, and tread over by figures in antiquity."

"It is one thing, in theory, to examine the stratigraphy in a photograph or see pictures of the trenches.  It is completely different when your hand is in the dirt, and you see the differences in the soil right in front of your eyes....Archaeology is often misrepresented and misunderstood.  But if someone actually takes part in it, they begin to understand what it is truly about."

 

"It's not archaeology if you don't get your hands dirty"

"Sometimes you just have to bring the kid in you out and play in the dirt."

"In excavation or survey, we are uncovering history with our own hands."

Archaeology and Ancient History

Last Thursday, I gave a public lecture at Messiah College about the relationship of the fields of archaeology and ancient history.  There was nothing particularly original about the presentation; rather, I tried to communicate to history students some of the challenges of writing ancient history, the importance of archaeology in filling in the gap, and the changing relationship of the subjects of ancient history & archaeology.  I began with some of M.I. Finley's pessimistic observations from Ancient History: Evidence and Models (now some 20 years old) about the enormous gaps in the literary record for most of classical antiquity, suggesting that archaeology provides the best inlets into the local situation.  I then gave an oversimplified survey of the different relationships of text & material culture in ancient history: 1) using the text like a divining rod to find the site (Schliemann) and justifying the textual evidence with material culture (e.g., Athenian Agora, early Biblical Archaeology), 2) using text & artifacts as complementary forms of evidence, not so much speaking to each other but covering different spheres of knowledge (e.g., using regional archaeological approaches to reconstruct social and economic history, since literary testimony are typically weak here), and, finally, 3) attempting to integrate the two bodies of evidence in coherent narratives and analyses. 

The trend in integration is an interesting one but certainly the most difficult.  How does one combine scatters of pottery into the narrative framework of a Thucydides or a Livy?  Easier said than done.  The different authors of the recent work edited by Eberhard Sauer, Archaeology and Ancient History: Breaking Down the Boundaries (2004), for example, suggest very different modes of interaction between ancient historians and archaeologists.  The question is complicated, as it always is, by definitions: does one define "ancient history" by evidence type (text), method (textual analysis), or subject matter (the development of the classical world)?  How does one define the field of archaeology in turn?  The contributors to the Sauer volume, associated mainly with academic institutions in the U.K., take as a point of departure two disciplines, ancient history AND archaeology.  The discussion would look a little different this side of the Atlantic because archaeology has never (with the exception of Boston University) had the status of a discipline and has only ever formed an important subfield of classics, art history, or anthropology, or an interdisciplinary program between these disciplines; the main question in American universities has been how archaeology of these different types interrelate (if at all).  Less frequently, there are ancient historians (like myself!) who use archaeology as a method for studying the past, but our principal disciplinary home lies in history programs.  The only "boundary" to break down is one of praxis: incorporating archaeology as a method in generating history. 

One of the interesting reviews of the Sauer book by Elena Isayev ("Archaeology [Doesn't] = Object as History [Doesn't] = Nudging the Special Relationship into the Post-ironic") suggests that we need certain arenas to integrate text and material culture.  One of these, she suggests, is memory, as for example in Alcock's recent work Archaeologies of the Greek Past, where both text and artifact both speak to how societies remember and commemorate.  Another of these arenas is certainly landscape, the broader physical territory of human existence charged with meaning, memory, and history.  It is in such cultural spheres as these where archaeology and ancient history may find their closest integration. 

Surface Survey in November

Beyond the Musser Farm excavation, my class's second fieldwork activity for the semester was to conduct an archaeological survey of some of the cornfields on Messiah College's campus.  As originally planned, another colleague (Jeff Erikson) and I were going to combine forces and conduct a full survey of some of these fields in order to document both the prehistoric and historic cultural material in the area; my class was to provide the energy and archaeological angle, Jeff's class was to provide GIS expertise and maps.  The months of fall semester rolled by, the day of harvest never came, and we were forced to abandon the plan.  A week before Thanksgiving, however, the farmer did harvest a small plot of corn, which provided a window of opportunity to conduct a brief survey in the field.

 

 

Since the field was narrow, we lined up at 1 meter intervals and walked slowly across the field; this provided essentially 100% coverage of the field but vegetation reduced visual coverage to about 60%.  Our process was to plant an orange flag at every artifact (modern or earlier) encountered and, following the completion of the transect, to discuss how archaeologists pattern sites and cultural material across landscapes and draw interpretations from surface finds.  In many ways, the exercise worked perfectly, with orange flags scattered across the field marking the remains of modern bits of plastic, golf balls, shotgun shells, and occasional modern potsherds.  The question that came to my mind was whether such artifacts were the remains of recognizable human activities or mere surface junk scattered about following the construction of a nearby road and apartment complex.

 

On the other hand, what I failed to consider in planning our hour among the corn stalks was how cold it could be in south-central PA in November.  It was cold enough that it snowed briefly, cold enough that my laser range finder (an instrument for measuring distance) stopped functioning, and cold enough that some fingers grew numb. 

 

 

So much for surface survey in November.  On the positive end, I believe I have effectively challenged the image of archaeology dressed as Indiana Jones--occasionally you need warmer clothing. 

 

The Musser House Excavations

The 19th and 20th centuries in south-central PA are not typically the focal point of the subdiscipline of Classical and Medieval European History (!), yet this time and place formed the context for several exercises in real archaeology in my course, "Archaeology and Historical Interpretation." 

Our fieldwork focused on the excavation of the side yard of a building on Messiah's campus known variously as the Musser House, the Greenhouse, and the Restoration House.  The house dates back to the early 19th century, has multiple phases of refurbishment, was once owned by the third president of the school (Enos Hess), and has twice been the residence of Messiah Students: 1930s, and 1990s-present.

The property will be demolished next summer and so our class conducted an excavation that would constitute both original research and real archaeological experience, while also producing additional historical knowledge about one of Grantham's buildings before its demolition.  My expectation is that we would find rubbish and refuse from nearly two centuries of habitation; I wondered whether we might also find structural remains with associated outbuildings.

 

Ground Breaking at the Musser House property

 

We carried out the excavations over the course of four days over a two week period.  We dug two 2 x 2m trenches, stratigraphically, recording details about soil consistency, color, and composition, and sifting soil through quarter inch (75% of soil) and half inch (25% of soil) sifters. 

 

My class of 24 students took three hour shifts and everyone signed up for at least one session.  We also had visiting sessions with Professor Caroselli's Art History class, Jeff Erikson's GIS class, and an "Archaeology Day" with the kids (3rd-5th graders) sponsored by the Oakes Museum here on campus. 

An interesting find on the second day was this Atari unit time capsule with an associated (and remarkably well-preserved) note from a young Billy Musser--hmmm, something looks not quite right! (Did I mention that there were still Messiah students living in the house?)

More typically, we found in both trenches the kind of discarded junk, provisional refuse, and lost objects one might expect from a 19th and 20th century house: pottery sherds, different types of nails, bullets and bullet casings, buttons, a coin (1934 Liberty Dime), garden soil, metal bits, coal, slag, glass bottle and window pane fragments, etc... 

The artifacts have now been washed and will be catalogued and stored in the Oakes Museum on campus.  Some students will be analyzing the material for a final project and I will also be looking at the material.  More on our results soon!

History in the Dirt

I'm finally boarding the archaeology blogging train, joining some collaborators in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: William Caraher's Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, Scott Moore's Ancient History Ramblings, and a number of graduate students involved with our project in Larnaka, Cyprus. 

My goal in this venture is to post the occasional image or insight about the integration of archaeology and material culture within the framework of ancient and medieval history.