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This is The Archive for the blog Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. It is volume 1 and includes post composed between 2007-2010.

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The Archive
for Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Volume 1 (2007-2010)

William R. Caraher University of North Dakota

The Archive This document represents an archive of the posts prepared for the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Blog. There are no images and links to other sites and embedded content no longer functions. This is a static archive. The original context for these posts was the web which is a dynamic space. As a result, I have made no effort to reproduce or capture the network that these blog posts relied upon for significance or meaning. The links preserved in the posts, however, may provide a kind of breadcrumbs from a future researcher. The Internet Archive captured three images of my blog in 2007 (October 16, November 12, December 24). There are no images in the archive of the blog. The blog began in the spring of 2007 and continued until the end of 2010. It consists of 857 posts and 455 comments. During its time live at typepad.com, it received well over 110,000 views and had an average of over 80 page views a day. These are miniscule numbers in the broader world of the internet, but they do show that the blog had a consistent audience and grew steadily over its life. As of this writing, an online version of this archive exists (http://mediterraneanworldarchive.wordpress.com/) but I am not active curating this web site. There are broken links that will remain broken and links to media that the current hosting service will not support.

Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 12/17/2010 06:22:26 AM ----BODY: <p>Here are some varia and quick hits on a cold Friday morning (with just a threat of flurries)!</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Generations2010/Overview/Findings.aspx">More interesting internet observations from Pew</a>.  Apparently no one blogs reads blog anymore (and no one told me?).  As always Pew gives us some food for thought on generational differences in web usage. </li> <li>As I think about ways to re-imagine this blog, I keep coming across the idea of "mindcasting".  <a href="http://jayrosen.tumblr.com/post/110043432/mindcasting-defining-the-formspreading-the-meme">Here is a very useful definition</a>.  Typically, the term describes how academics or professionals use Twitter, but I think that it adapts well to a blog use.</li> <li>Some Corinthian-American friends have set up a company to sell Corinthian Olive Oil in the US.  <a href="http://www.agrosoliveoil.net/">Check it out</a>! </li> <li>I haven't read <a href="http://mediactive.com/introduction/">Mediactive yet</a>, but it is on my genuinely overwhelming Christmas break reading list.</li> <li><a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/scan-it-yourself-andother-thoughts-about-the-google-digitizing-settlement/">More DIY Book Scanning</a>, Dan Reetz, former(?) NDSU student and renegade book scanner, has garnered more press coverage this past week.  He's a real bright guy with a firm grasp on common sense.  It's good to see people talking about his ideas.  <a href="http://www.danreetz.com/blog/2010/12/06/the-why-in-diy-book-scanningin-nyls-review/">More here too</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/The-Pleasure-of-Seeingthe/125381">This tongue-in-cheek post at the</a><em><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/The-Pleasure-of-Seeing-the/125381"> Chronicle</a></em> about celebrating student failure has caused a bit of a fuss.  <a href="http://castingoutnines.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/student-failure-andstudent-humanity/">And it lead to this response</a>. </li> <li><a href="http://nowviskie.org/2010/digital-humanities-down-under-state-ofplay-why-you-care/">Some thoughts on Digital Humanities in Australia and New Zealand</a> with a shoutout to the University of Sydney's Archaeological Computing Lab.  I worked with some exceedingly competent folks from the lab on the island of Kythera (where I met my lovely wife)!</li> <li><a href="http://www.personal.psu.edu/bxb11/blogs/brett_bixler_eportfolio/2010/12/the-gamification-of-america.html">Some interesting thoughts on the gamification of learning</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://mashupbreakdown.com/">The actual mashups are just ok, but the visualizations are really amazing</a> (via Crystal Alberts).</li>

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

<li><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40664462/ns/business-going_green/">When you don't make your sales figures, you get sent to Fargo</a>.  This is postironic.</li> <li><a href="http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer?hp">This is a fantastic way to visualize the census</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">If you haven't stopped by Teaching Thursday, you should</a>! We're celebrating out 100th post!</li> <li>What I'm reading: P. Sarris, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/economy-and-society-in-the-age-ofjustinian/oclc/72519630">Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian</a></em>. (Cambridge 2006). R. H. McGuire and R. Paynter, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/archaeology-of-inequality/oclc/22347782">The Archaeology of Inequality</a></em>. (Blackwell 1991).</li> <li>What I'm listening to: Alvin Youngbood Hart, <em>Big Mama's Door</em>.</li> </ul> <p>One more thing!  If you are going to be any where in South Florida in January, you owe it yourself to head up to Ft. Myers and check out the 3rd Annual Surf &amp; Sound Festival.  It's going to be huge and it's produced by Fritz Caraher!</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20147e0ca0569970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="450" height="578" /></p> <ul> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: More on Student Resistance STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-more-on-student-resistance CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 12/16/2010 07:20:27 AM ----BODY: <p>I continue to think a bit about new models for understanding student engagement with the learning environment.  Over the last few weeks, I have been reading more on everyday forms of resistance, and this has added a different perspective to my notes on resistance and teaching as articulated <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/te aching-thursday-grading-and-resistance.html">here </a>and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/05/gr

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

ading-detroit-and-student-resistence.html">here</a>. These forms of resistance typically lack articulated political or social goals, often rely upon anonymity, deception or ambiguity, and tend to be deeply embedded in everyday life.  At the same time, they are the products of power differences and mark out clear efforts on the part of less powerful to establish a identity and agency in relation to the dominant group. Classic examples of this kind of behavior are slow work, gossip, poor communication, and other actions that tread the fine line between outright defiance and actions easily confused with laziness.</p> <p>Anyone who has taught recognizes some resistance in students.  My previous musings on using historical and anthropological definitions of resistance to understand student behavior tended to see student behavior in a far more systematic way. Models of resistance that suggest behavior rooted in practice may have a better applicability for describing, predicting, and (gasp!) maybe even validating student behavior.</p> <p>These models may also point to some root causes of resistance.  Many of the scholars who study resistance in everyday life tend to see resistance as a key component to class struggle. While it is difficult to understand the studentteacher relationship in terms of traditional definitions of class, it would be profoundly naive to deny the role that class plays in the structure of the American university.  With the post-war boom in enrollments the student body has become more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and, indeed, class. The traditional humanities had strong ties to traditions of elite education and values that have not entirely translated to a more diverse student body with more diverse goals and expectations.</p> <p>Resistance in the classroom, particularly the subtle forms, may well represent the long conflict between democratized higher education and the core elite values that continues to guide many aspects of the humanities.</p> <p>My post today is intentionally short to encourage you to head over to<a href="http://teachingthursday.org/"> Teaching Thursday</a> and celebrate with us our 100th post at that blog!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More in Inequality in Justinian's Corinth STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-in-inequality-in-justinians-corinth CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 12/15/2010 06:58:23 AM ----BODY:

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

<p>I&#39;ve begun work on revising <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/am bivalent-landscapes-of-the-6th-century-at-corinth-in-contrast.html">my Corinth in Contrast paper</a> which I delivered in Austin in the fall at a conference of the same name (for a nice overview of the conference check out David Pettegrew&#39;s Corinthian Matters blog posts <a href="http://corinthianmatters.com/2010/10/04/inequalities-in-corinth/">here </a>and&#0160;<a href="http://corinthianmatters.com/2010/10/07/more-corinth-incontrast/">here</a> and <a href="http://corinthianmatters.com/2010/10/13/paulscorinthians-in-contrast-and-context/">here</a>). &#0160;The conference focused on inequality among the Corinthians, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/am bivalent-landscapes-of-the-6th-century-at-corinth-in-contrast.html">my paper</a> emphasized the role that political and ecclesiastical tensions may have played in creating regimes of power in the region. &#0160;To do so, I focused on various methods of asserting political and ecclesiastical power in the landscape and then sought to establish spaces of resistances within these methods. &#0160;In particular, I focused on the differences between subtle, nonmonumental, and &quot;marginal&quot; activities, and dominant forms of political and religious power. &#0160;I tried to emphasize that various less structured forms of expression many not have conformed to a narrow view of &quot;resistance&quot; typified by violence and concerted political actions, but rather to a kind of resistance rooted in the concept of practice. In other words, I am looking for archaeological evidence that represents far more subtle forms of agency than traditional definitions of resistance. &#0160;Good examples of forms of resistance rooted in practice are graffiti, systematic tax evasion, feigned ignorance, gossip, and other techniques that are difficult to punish, protected by a degree of anonymity, and accessible to almost any group within society.</p>! <p>While most of these practices are unlikely to leave an archaeological trace (although an archaeology of gossip is interesting!), it is notable that the 6th century Corinthia witnessed a systematic and monumental campaign to impose imperial authority across the region. &#0160;The goals of this effort are difficult to imagine outside of a pattern of resistance. &#0160;The ecclesiastical tensions between the Emperor and various bishops of the province of Achaia who may have resisted imperial authority by remaining loyal to the papacy in Rome, provides a potential geopolitical justification of resistance. &#0160;Moreover, we know that such political and theological conflicts could manifest themselves in popular resistance. &#0160;Most famously:</p>! <blockquote>! <p>&quot;If you ask for your change, someone philosophizes to you in the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you ask for the price of bread, you are told, &quot;The Father is greater and the Son inferior.&quot; If you ask, &quot;Is the bath ready?&quot; someone answers, &quot;The Sone was created from nothing.&quot;</p>! <p>Gregory of Nyssa, <em>De Deitate Filii et Spiritus Sancti </em>(trans. T.E. Gregory, <em><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=jJU40HJKeDoC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;ots=0B94xLkT OA&amp;dq=Gregory%20Vox%20Populi&amp;pg=PA3#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">Vox Populi</a></em> (Columbus 1979), 3.<span style="line-height: 0px;">Ôªø</span></p>! </blockquote>! <p>While the popular violence associated with theological disputes is well known, it suggests that seeming technicalities in theological language could evoke deep passions among everyday denizens of the Late Roman world. Such

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

passion could, of course, manifest itself in more subtle ways as well as the better documented episodes of riotous violence.&#0160; Some of the everyday practices of resistance during the era of iconoclasm are suggestive.</p>! <p>This is a long introduction to some rather more mundane observations!</p>! <p>One of the least satisfactory sections of my paper had to deal with the role of imperial power on the bodies of Corinthians. &#0160; In the first draft of this paper, I imagined the impact of the imperial building policies on the Corinthian labor force. Workers from the local area would have undoubtedly contributed to the construction of the Lechaion Basilica (as well as the other 6th century churches in the area), the repairs to the Hexamilion wall and city wall of Corinth, and various other construction projects datable to the 6th century. &#0160;I suggested that some sense of identity for these workers derives from the presence of informally inscribed fish in the exterior wall plaster of many of these buildings. &#0160;It may be that this sign marked out the work of a local guild or as smaller work team and allowed the laborers to locate themselves amidst the monumental space of the 6th century Corinthia.</p>! <p>Over the past few weeks, I have the distinct pleasure of re-reading parts of Michael Given&#39;s 2004, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/archaeology-of-thecolonized/oclc/53846484">The Archaeology of the Colonized</a></em> (Routledge). Chapter six of this book is entitled &quot;The Dominated Body&quot; and Given makes several interesting observations about the place of the body is broadly construed &quot;colonial regimes&quot;. &#0160;In particular, Given draws a case study from Roman Egypt where a &quot;highly elaborate tax system&quot; contributed to practices designed to dominate the body of Egyptian famers. &#0160;The center piece of his argument is a vivid fictional narrative of a visit by a family to local granary where their tax in kind was measured and certified.</p>! <p>This narrative reminded me of the famous(ish) passage in Procopius&#39;s <em>Buildings</em> 4.2.14 which describes the building of granaries throughout Greece. These granaries served to provision the soldiers that the emperor stationed there. This passages finds a complement in the <em>Secret Histories</em> 26.31-33 where Procopius tells us that the Emperor Justinian required the cities of Greece to fund the newly stationed soldiers in Greece, and this contingency deprived even Athens of public buildings and entertainments. &#0160;There is no reason to take these passages at face value, but, on the other hand, it is clear that Justinian had an active interest in reorganizing the logistical infrastructure of the empire with an eye toward providing supplies for his soldiers. &#0160;The presence of granaries in Greece would have visibly linked imperial policy with the collection of agricultural taxes from the local residents. &#0160;Some residents, then, would have to experience the act of delivering their crops into the imperial hands; in short, individual labor became imperial policy.</p>! <p>Another observation that Given offered regarding the impact of imperial policy on the body was the effect of walls on movement throughout the Egyptian countryside. He argued that many of the walls were not formal fortifications necessary, but sand fences (at best) or, in other cases, just informal markers. Both Procopius&#39; text and archaeological evidence from the Corinthia have noted Justinian&#39;s interest in wall construction and repair. &#0160;Specifically, Justinian appears to have repaired the massive Hexamilion wall and probably the wall of the city of Corinth itself. &#0160;These two walls would have dominated passage across the Isthmus. &#0160;The individual would have had to pass through spaced marked out and defined by the non-local presence of the Emperor.</p>!

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

<p>Making this all the more conspicuous is Justinian&#39;s used inscriptions tinged with ritually-charged utterances at gates to make political or theological statements. &#0160;So as Corinthian (and other) bodies passed through spaces marked out by imperial power, the walls themselves literally shouted out politically charged religious sentiments. &#0160;We know from other sites in the Mediterranean that roads, walls, and gates were common places for inscribed acclamations; in other words, places where bodies regularly passed were excellent places to commemorate other kinds of ritualized activities. &#0160;Ritual acclamations whether spontaneous or staged, then, further imbued these spaces with embodied knowledge.</p>! <p>As I work to revise my initially clumsy study of power differences across the Corinthian landscape, I am focusing more attention on the way in which imperial power sought to project authority into the landscape. &#0160;By critiquing the methods of projecting power, I think I am getting closer to understanding the conditions with create the kind of power differences that produce various kinds of inequality.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Academic Organizations and the Web: 10 Suggestions STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: academic-organizations-and-the-web-10-suggestions CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 12/14/2010 06:35:15 AM ----BODY: <p>This past week, I offered to prepare a short advisory document to an academic organization that was planning to increase its web presence.  I think that academic organizations do well to model their sites and the people who are asked to maintain them along the lines of established academic institutions and develop "officers", missions statements, and policies.  I think that we should also follow the basic academic method of being collaborative and deliberate, results will be better as well.  Even a single author blog is in some way collaborative as it relies on colleagues and collaborators to link to or to twitter posts.  Being deliberate is deeply ingrained in the most conservative traditions of academic life.</p> <p>With some slight modifications to protect the innocent, here it is:</p> <p>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Audience. The most important thing about any website it to have a clear idea of an audience.  For example, my Archaeological of the Mediterranean World site appeals generally to academics interested in Mediterranean archaeology, ancient and Byzantine history, and

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

technology. So while most of the content (see below) on my site counts as a kind of “<a href="http://jayrosen.tumblr.com/post/110043432/mindcasting-definingthe-form-spreading-the-meme">mindcasting</a>”, I do try to mindcast on things of interest to a notional audience.</p> <p>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> "</span>Content is King". For a website to “work” people have to work it into their everyday life. To do this, the site needs to be updated regularly (at least weekly)  with new content so people want to come back and check it out. The best way to keep a site updated regularly is to develop a group of dedicated contributors.  The era of the static website full of "resources" is over.</p> <p>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Contributors. If the website is going to thrive it has to have some regularly updated content. This does not have to be daily, but it needs in some way to be regular. To maintain a regular flow of content, you need to have multiple contributors.  A good editor can drum up contributors and provide content when needed, but it is essential to have a core group of people willing to work to produce significant web content.  (I think that there is a small, but rather a committed community already producing good quality content for the web, and we should be able to leverage this community).  My general feeling is that no section of the website will remain up-to-date and interesting without at least a few contributors.  Moreover, having a few contributors will prevent a section of the site from becoming a single editors soapbox.</p> <p>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>An Editor.  The best websites have an editor or a group of designated editors who are responsible for content in particular areas of the site. The editors responsibilities might include soliciting new content, maintaining basic information on their section of the site, and establishing policies.  Also naming some an “editor” confers a certain amount of academic and intellectual prestige to these positions (and makes it easier for a mid-career faculty member to claim this work as  part of “national service” or whatever.).   We might also consider bringing in, say, one or two other editors (a “Blog Editor,” perhaps, or even a “Features Editor”).  The advantage of giving these individuals real editorial control over their sections is that they can be gatekeepers for the content coming onto the web, ensure its quality, maintain the content, publicize the content, et c.  Moreover, multiple contributors are also more likely to invoke some positive discussion.</p> <p>5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Mission statement.  Since this will be something of an official site, we should probably come up with some kind of simple, broad mission statement that will help us create policies for the kind of material that we include on our site. For example, do we intend the site to be a scholarly resource or do we want to try to cater to a academic interests?  Or do we want to do both. In any event, a mission statement will help us think about our audience and the types of things that we value.</p> <p>6.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Policies. I know that this will seem overwrought, but as someone with a public web presence, I have been overwhelmed by a range of strange propositions that I get to feature material on my little blog.  Having a policy of what kinds of material you will or won’t allow will make the editors’ jobs much easier.  For example, will you let people post advertisements for their book on the site?  Will we let people submit job ads?  Will we advertise summer programs?  You can imagine.</p> <p>7.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Design. The nicest website sites have some common design elements.  If the plan is to use an institutional server (rather than a commercial service) to host the site as the central hub for a web site that would then would push traffic to various externally hosted

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

pages, then it would be great to have some kind of common design for these external pages (and include cues on the Princeton page).</p> <p>8.<span style="white-space: pre;"> Software</span>. Blogs are great.  This is not just because I am a blogger, but the ease of updating a blog makes them great for regularly updated content.  Moreover, many of the good blog services (e.g. wordpress.com hosts Wordpress software on their servers) or software (e.g. Wordpress is free to download and relatively easy to set up on an institution's servers) allow you to create static pages as well as blog pages.  They are also equipped with an RSS feed et c. making them really easy to update and edit by people with almost no technical knowledge.</p> <p>9.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Social Media. If we are serious about developing a web presence for our organization we need to consider having an integrated social media component.  Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook work well to connect potential readers to the web site and serve as a key method for pushing content to a wider audience. In general, social media services are fairly easy to maintain and manage.  That being said, like the website itself, content drives traffic.  If we don’t maintain social media, then we won’t reap its benefits.</p> <p>10.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Take our time. One thing I’ve seen other places do is to rush out a web presence before they have developed content, policies, or even a kind of editorial or institutional support. The results have been pretty dodgy and have not held up well.  Taking time to develop how a website will work and who will be responsible for what parts of the site will produce the best quality results.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some New Thoughts on the Roman Economy STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-new-thoughts-on-the-roman-economy CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Books DATE: 12/13/2010 07:35:29 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the weekend, I finally found a few hours to sit down with the relatively recent edited volume <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/quantifying-theroman-economy-methods-and-problems/oclc/316430292">Quantifying the Roman Economy: Methods and Problems</a></em> edited by A. Bowman and A. Wilson (Oxford 2009).  The book brings together a number of different perspectives on the Roman economy in a broad response to later chapters of the Scheidel, Morris, and Saller edited <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/cambridge-economic-

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

history-of-the-greco-roman-world/oclc/144219734">Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World</a></em> (Cambridge 2007).  In my reading, the books stands in contrast to a recent work edited by M. Mundell Mango on Byzantine Trade (which<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/12/mo re-byzantine-archaeology-byzantine-trade.html"> I discuss here</a>).  Whereas Mundell Mango theorizes that it is possible to understand trade in the Byzantine world without necessarily appealing to wider considerations of the ancient economy, the authors in <em>Quantifying the Roman Economy </em>take the opposite approach and embed trade of all kinds within a theoretical and material critique of the Roman economy.</p> <p>While I won't review the entire book, I did want to point out some of its highlight to my loyal readers.</p> <p>1. Bowman and Wilson's introduction is among the best short summaries of the state of research in the Roman economy.  Their considerations range from discussions of economic integration to survey of the potential of ancient economic growth and decline. They conclude their survey by focusing attention on four vital areas for analysis: demography and settlement, the agrarian economy, production and trade, and mining and metals. They argue that at present there exists sufficient evidence to support sustained analysis of these issues and that these issues can form the basis for an integrated view of the Roman economy.</p> <p>2. Field Survey and Demography. Intensive pedestrian survey represents an important approach for establishing Roman settlement patterns, and these settlement patterns play a vital role in the organization of the Roman economy. In particular, the relationship between rural producers and urban dwellers structures the relationship between the primary production of food and centralized administrative, political, and population centers across the Roman Empire.  As Jongman, Fentress, Mattingly, and Lo Cascio point out, the percentage of people living in both cities and in the countryside remains hotly contested.  As a result, it is difficult to evaluate even the minimum and maximum productivity of the countryside required to sustain an urban population who is not engaged in primary agricultural production.</p> <p>3. Peopling the Countryside. Elizabeth Fentress and David Mattingly provide valuable defenses of survey archaeology and its ability to shed light not only the structure of ancient settlement but ancient demography. Fentress argues on the basis of her intensive survey work on the island of Jerba and in the Albenga Valley that careful sampling of the landscape can provide a rough estimate of both the kinds and the distribution of sites in the countryside during the Roman period. The types of sites, ranging from urban areas to small villages and isolated farms, could then form the basis for basic demography. To summarize complex and nuanced study, Fentress argues that far fewer people lived in the countryside on Jerba than we might expect considering the potential density of urban settlement: 11% in single farms, 20% in villages, 20% in villas, and an impressive 49% in towns.  She was then able to argue that the urban centers on Jerba (which is not a particularly fertile place) relied on imported grain.</p> <p>In his response to the Fentress article, David Mattingly rightly offers a bit of caution by cleverly invoking Donald Rumsfeld's category of "unknown unknowns" in intensive survey.  For Mattingly, the unknown unknowns are those sites that do not manifest themselves in survey but may have a significant impact on how we understand ancient demography and settlement structure.  Of course, Jerba with its light soils and relative geomorphological stability was less likely to produce the kinds of unknown unknowns than the more dynamic landscape of, say, the Rhone valley, but nevertheless, Mattingly is correct in reminding us that survey is better at demonstrating presence than absence.</p>

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<p>4. Trade. Andrew Wilson's summary of pressing issues with regard to Roman trade is another very useful contribution to any discussion of trade in the Mediterranean. He offers valuable critiques of evidence for trade ranging from shipwrecks to amphora and marble.  In his study of shipwrecks, he uses <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/mo re-lakka-skoutara.html">aoristic analysis</a> to create a more nuanced reading of Parker's classic summary of shipwrecks by century.  He shows that by plotting the possible date of "long-dated" Roman period (150 BC - AD 400) shipwreck by decade rather than by midpoint, it becomes possible to argue for a later peak in maritime commerce than Parker had estimated.  In short, distributing the possible dates for long-dated shipwrecks helps to mitigate against a chronological pattern of trade biased by certain standard dating conventions.</p> <p>Later in the same article, Wilson provides another useful model for understanding Roman period trade when he compares the production of certain classes of pottery (e.g. African Red Slip) to its frequency elsewhere in the Mediterranean. While such analysis is not particularly novel or innovative, he establishes quite clearly how the relationship between production and distribution is not fixed.  Pottery supply represents only one aspect of the distribution of ceramics in the Mediterranean, and the quantitative gap between patterns of supply and distribution provide a useful basis for considerations of trading patterns as well as the vagaries of taste across the Mediterranean basin.</p> <p>William Harris and Michael Fulford offer responses to Wilson's contribution that expand the variables under consideration in his article to include the relationship between settlements in the Roman world and how the differences between overland and maritime trade and urban and ex-urban settlement types can significantly influence the distribution of material.</p> <p>_______</p> <p>As my brief summary of this books probably makes clear, I liked this book and think it is the best single volume summary of the pressing issues and potential for using quantitative data to understand the Roman economy.  As the availability of quantitative data from survey projects, excavations, and summary publications increases, scholars will need more robust models and approaches for producing synthetic analyses of trade, settlement structure, demography, and economic growth or decline.  Despite the typical caveats surrounding the use of any quantitative data from antiquity, this volume has continued the optimistic trend begun with the <em>Cambridge Economic History.</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0

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BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 12/10/2010 09:11:34 AM ----BODY: <p>It's a cold and clear winter day for some quick hits and varia.</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2010/">This is a pretty cool way to see how the world used Google</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Twitter-Update2010.aspx">This looks to be a pretty interesting report on who uses Twitter</a>.</li> <li>Along similar lines, <a href="http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgatheringstorytelling/writing-tools/109176/why-no-dumping-is-a-good-motto-for-writing-onsocial-networks/">this is an interesting little blog post on how to write on Twitter</a>.</li> <li>And <a href="http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/314 9/2718">here is a</a><em><a href="http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/314 9/2718"> First Monday</a></em><a href="http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/314 9/2718"> article on learning and social media technologie</a>s, and here is a <em><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/New-Social-Software-Triesto/125542/">Chronicle</a></em><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/New-SocialSoftware-Tries-to/125542/"> article in another company trying to integrate social media software and teaching</a>.</li> <li>At <a href="http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/314 9/2718"><em>Teaching Thursday</em>, we had a not tech related blog post on the ethics of test making and cheating</a>.</li> <li>Tuesday was December 7th.  Pearl Harbor Day.  And <a href="http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5166/">here is FDR's famous speech</a>.</li> <li>What I am listening to: Jay-Z, <em>The Black Album</em>.</li> <li>What I am reading: James C. Scott, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/weapons-of-the-weak-everyday-forms-ofpeasant-resistance/oclc/13557344">Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance</a></em>. (Yale 1985).</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Test Writing and Cheating STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-test-writing-and-cheating CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 12/09/2010 06:18:03 AM ----BODY: <p>I could try to put together some kind of blog for today (and rest assured, good reader, that a blog post is brewing), but <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/12/09/test-banks-cheating-and-the-moralresponsibility-of-instructors/">Mick Beltz has already put together a far more interesting blog post </a>than I could muster.  He responds to recent discussions of cheating at the University of Central Florida, and without getting into detail, sets out three basic lessons to keep in mind while preparing your end of the semester exams:</p> <blockquote> <p>1. There is an optimal level of cheating on every assignment (and it isn't zero).</p> <p>2. Grades and assignments have only instrumental value, not inherent value.</p> <p>3. Cheating is not (just) a student problem, it is also an instructor problem.</p> </blockquote> <p>The post is really smart, thoughtful, and thought provoking.  In fact, it's so good, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/12/09/test-banks-cheatingand-the-moral-responsibility-of-instructors/">I'm going to link to it again</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Indigenous Archaeology and Cyprus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-indigenous-archaeology-and-cyprus CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Cyprus DATE: 12/08/2010 07:11:35 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the past few years, I've been musing about the relationship between indigenous archaeological practices and nationalism in the Greece.  Recently,

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however, I have begun to think a bit more seriously about these practices in Cyprus.  This past weekend, I read over parts of the <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/hagiographicacypria/oclc/185472022">Laudatio Barnabae </a></em>inspired in part by Paul Dilly's recent article in the <em>Journal of Roman Archaeology</em> (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/11/ic ons-and-space-and-dreams-in-late-antiquity.html">which I discuss here</a>).</p> <p>The great thing about this short, apparently 6th century text, is that it explicitly located the discovery of St. Barnabas' body (Barnabas was the companion of St. Paul) with the tensions between Cyprus and the episcopal see of Antioch in the time between the Church of Cyprus received independence at the Council of Ephesus and the rule of Peter the Fuller at Antioch.  Peter the Fuller was markedly anti-Chalcedonian and have friends in imperial places.  According to the <em>Laudatio</em> he also coveted regaining control over Cyprus. St. Barnabas intervened to avert this by appearing to the Bishop Anthemius in several visions the last of which directed the Bishop to the Saint's body, in a cave near Salamis holding an autograph of the Gospel of Matthew.  The authority of this discovery and the gift of the Gospel book to the Emperor Zeno ensured the continued independence of the Church of Cyprus. We know that Zeno also elevated the bishop of the island to Metropolitan status.</p> <p>The role of <em>inventio</em>, or the discovery of a lost sacred object, in this text is important.  The tie between a discovered object and sanctity would have echoed with stories surrounding the foundation of the monastery on Stavrovouni which overlooks the city of Larnaka.  By the 15th century, this monastery was associated with a fragment of the True Cross delivered by Contanstine's mother, St. Helen, on her return to Constantinople from the Holy Land where she had excavated (quite literally) the remains of Christ's cross.</p> <p>In <a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/1259503">a famous article (for some!)</a>, David Reese describes how Cypriots and some early travelers saw the bones of the extinct pygmy hippopotami and other mega fauna as the bones of saints (or even dragons!).  The discovery of large animal bones in caves seems to have led to their association with saints presumably on the basis of various <em>inventio</em> accounts like the <em>Laudatio Barnabae</em>. This phenomena was recorded (with varying degrees of condescension) throughout the late 19th and<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.14697998.1902.tb08223.x/abstract"> early 20th centuries</a>.</p> <p>In more recent times, as I have noted on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/mo re-archaeolog.html">this blog a few years back</a>, both Peter Megaw and Vassos Karageorghis have encountered similar kinds of archaeological practices.  According to <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/626538">Megaw (</a><em><a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/626538">JHS</a></em><a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/626538"> 66 (1946), 52)</a>, local farmers praying for rain excavated parts of the ruined Panayia Skyra church to appease the Virgin. Karageorghis, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/153885421">in his autobiography</a>, recounts a story of a priest who approached him while director of the Department of Antiquties and asked for help locating the tomb of St. Auxibius.</p> <p>The practice of looking for origins in an archaeological context and using these origins to define the community is not particularly remarkable and almost to be expected in a place like Cyprus where in the modern era nationalism has had such tragic consequences. What is notable, to me at least, is the possible roots of these practices in the 6th century where the archaeological practices

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of the Bishop Anthemius played a role in a prominent narrative of the island's autonomy.  In recent times, objects associated with the arrival of the Greeks (mostly during the Late Bronze Age) have taken on the same kind of sacred status as the objects discovered by their earlier predecessors.  The discovery of these objects is grounded, of course, in a faith in scientific archaeology rather than divine revelation, but it is hard to imagine that the basic impulse driving these practices and the narratives that they produce is different.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Hellenistic Fortifications on Vayia: A Working Paper STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: hellenistic-fortifications-on-vayia-a-working-paper CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 12/07/2010 06:12:04 AM ----BODY: <p>I have long advocated for an increase use of working papers in the field of Mediterranean archaeology.  Circulating pre-publication drafts of articles is already a common practice and the presentation of sites and finds in an efficient and prompt way has long stood as an ethical obligation for archaeologists.</p> <p>In that spirit, I am presenting as a working paper my preliminary analysis of the fortifications from the site of Vigla on Cyprus.  This is a working draft so the research, analysis, and interpretation should be regarded as provisional.  The basic description of the fortification on the hill of Vigla is accurate and should not undergo significant modification.</p> <p>The analysis presented below is the work of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-</a><em><a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Koutsopetria</a></em><a href="http://www.pkap.org/"> Archaeological Project</a>, but at present, all issues are the product of my analysis of their hard work.</p> <p><a style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sansserif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; display: block; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Vigla Description and Analysis December Working 2010 on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/44826683/Vigla-Description-and-AnalysisDecember-Working-2010">Vigla Description and Analysis December Working 2010</a>

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<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" width="100%" height="600"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /> <param name="wmode" value="opaque" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=44826683&amp;access_key=keykvu8hdreotlts70cc6w&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" /> <embed id="doc_146824793926072" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%" height="600" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=44826683&amp;access _key=key-kvu8hdreotlts70cc6w&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" name="doc_146824793926072" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#ffffff"></embed> </object> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Clothes make the Professional: Archaeological Boots STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: clothes-make-the-professional-archaeological-boots CATEGORY: Academia CATEGORY: Archaeology DATE: 12/06/2010 06:47:47 AM ----BODY: <p>This past week, I've been preparing to teach P. Novick's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/that-noble-dream-the-objectivity-questionand-the-american-historical-profession/oclc/17441827">That Noble Dream</a></em> (Cambridge 1988) and P. Menand's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/marketplace-of-ideas/oclc/286488147">The Marketplace of Ideas</a></em> (New York 2010).  Both these books foreground the process of professionalization in a university context.  In a recent spat over the character of academic offices, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/ma king-the-professional-office.html">I argued that </a>we ought to model our offices on the creative space of highly flexible technology start up companies rather than the antiseptic space of anonymous, highly bureaucratized companies (some of which are now faltering).  This idea did not meet with much acceptance

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especially as the link between university culture and corporate culture is wellknown.</p> <p>This brings me to what academics should wear. Over my time as  teacher I've found myself increasingly adopting a more and more professional dress code especially on the days that I teach in the classroom.  When I am writing in my office, I tend to dress more casually and comfortably.  In this way, I publicly divide creative time (writing) from corporate time (teaching).  (This is not to suggest that these two do not overlap).</p> <p>I also have another professional persona and that is as a field archaeologist.  In the media, at least, archaeologists are known for distinctive clothing, but even Indiana Jones dressed in a more professional "corporate" way when in the classroom (bow tie and the requisite tweed).  C. Holtorf has written on this very topic in some interesting ways <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=J7PXgXuVXOgC&amp;lpg=PA7&amp;ots=X9ZASdiT _w&amp;dq=David%20Webb%20archaeologist&amp;pg=PA69#v=onepage&amp;q=David%20Webb% 20archaeologist&amp;f=false">here </a>and <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/populararchaeology/49">here</a>.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20148c67461be970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="182" height="277" /></p> <p>I prefer to "rock the neck beard" in the field to mark out my departure from "corporate" world of classroom. I typically imagine my rather unkempt appearance as an reference to the archaeologist as artisan.  The neck beard represents the both a layer of additional protection against the sun, the unpleasant nature of shaving and then sweating, and distracted air of someone deeply engaged in their work.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Neckbeard.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20148c67461cc970c -pi" border="0" alt="Neckbeard.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></p> <p>The boundaries between my various professional identities or avatars (casual creative writer, stuffy company man teacher, and archaeologist as artisan) can be fairly rigid. I will occasionally wear a NASCAR hat while walking across campus in my teaching attire, but never in the classroom.  I will also sometimes wear my teaching clothes on days when I have a series of "important" committee meetings or other responsibilities.  The one thing that I almost always wear (at least from October to April) are my boots.</p> <p>Boots are the most vital component of an archaeologist wardrobe.  Without a rugged pair of boots, an archaeologist is, at best, another weekend warrior whose engagement with the realities of the out-of-doors stops at the wellgroomed trail or the end of a manicured lawn.  Boots make the archaeology.</p> <p>My wife introduced my to Blundstone boots almost 10 years ago and since then, I have never been without a pair.  I wear them on campus, in teaching clothes, in my creative clothes, while walking home and while doing anything outdoors.  (Ironically, I don't always wear them while doing actual archaeology. I prefer low-top boots and nylon to the traditional Blundstone, hightop, leather.)  I have found that my boots last about 3 years, but I don't care for them properly.  The walks home through the freezing snow and the super dry environment in campus buildings tend to make the leather dry out.  I shuffle my feet and walk incautiously scuffing the tips on obstacles.  I have a pronation in one of my feet and that stretches the leather in an unnatural way usually resulting in it pulling a bit away from the sole.  A few times a year, after considerable harassment, I will polish the boots and put some leather treatment on them.  If I pass through the Minneapolis airport, I'll stop at the shoe shine place, but

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that's mostly to banter about the Timberwolves and, as they say, to pass the time. ¬†(The men at the shoeshine stand can always identify the Blundstone's and usually chide me for not taking better care of them!).</p> <p>This past week, I got my new pair of Blundstone's! ¬†They replace my old pair as the link between my professional avatar as a teacher and my professional avatar as an archaeologist. ¬†The old boots get retired into more rugged duty and less high profile tasks (shoveling snow, mowing the lawn, et c.) and the new boots make their debut this morning on a casual writing day. ¬†The old boots are inscribed with three years of activities from long walks with the wife through our small town to cold winter mornings spent shoveling out the car. ¬†They also preserve the marks of innumerable professional lectures, classroom successes and failures, and afternoons in the library, archives, or hunched over my lap top. Coats of water, snow, polish, and conditioner have changed their color. ¬†My idiosyncratic stride has etched deep wrinkles across the soft leather.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="RetiringBoots.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20147e06b0b3f970b -pi" border="0" alt="RetiringBoots.jpg" width="450" height="301" /></p> <p>The new boots are stiff and unforgiving at present undoubtedly aware of the fate of their predecessors and hoping to hold off the inevitable.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amalia EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 75.42.158.81 URL: http://blog.amaliadillin.com DATE: 12/06/2010 11:49:12 AM Ha! This was a great post, Bill! I am wishing your boots all the best in their struggle against time and wear. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Susan Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.205.189 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/susancaraher DATE: 12/06/2010 03:34:51 PM These boots are made for walkin', and teachin', and committee meetings, and a little archaeology, and mowing and .... well you get the idea. They're Blunnies! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 98.111.177.94

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URL: DATE: 12/06/2010 07:21:19 PM Oh man. I'm now totally worries: are we doubles? Although we never discussed this, I'm a Blundstone guy, in fact, so committed I might have to tell some stories on my blog. Question: Do your Blundstones ever start making a creaking sound? usually one of the two? And I've been thinking of Fred Astaire's tap dancing shoes, having intense conversations with a colleague about Zizek and pyschoanalysis!!! I must also send you this amazing chapter by Fredrick Jameson about modernism to postmodernism based on the analysis of shoes, from Heidegger and van Gogh to Andy Warhol. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: R. H. Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 209.30.230.206 URL: DATE: 12/07/2010 03:24:03 PM Interesting topics. On professional and corporate attire in academia, I would add that there are a number of subtle differences between what is acceptable formal wear for academics, and what is acceptable as formal wear in the world of finance, say. Take the image of Indiana Jones' suit, for example. The earth tones, striped shirt, and subdued tie distinguish him from the G-men who wear more "corporate" looking suits early in the film. The film reflects some of the distinctions that continue to exist in academic formal wear. For example, few academics teach in blue suits (although they often wear them for interviews), whereas the blue suit is a standard uniform in the world of banking and finance. Academic formal(for men, at least) often consists of non-matching pants and blazer, or suits in gray or earth-tones. Or, any of the above mixed with denim (just to show that you are not too corporate). In other words, academic formal wear takes elements of the corporate wardrobe in order to communicate professionalism but presents them in a way that is intended to look uncorporate. I think the origins of this aesthetic may be rooted in the class biases of the past, when professors did not wish to be associated with those who had to earn their money (i.e. the corporate world) but rather those who had the leisure to pursue their careers because of family wealth. And, I think, even today crossing the line into what could be taken for actual corporate attire can be a faux-pas in some academic settings -- revealing that one is not authentically academic, or something. For instance, I apparently crossed this line one day and was told (with a sneer) by a colleague in the natural sciences that I looked like a banker. Ouch! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 12/03/2010 06:32:44 AM ----BODY:

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<p>As we wait for the snow to arrive, a little gaggle of quick hits and varia to keep you entertained for the weekend:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/from-dream-diary/">My friend and colleague Elizabeth Harris's translation of part of her friend and colleague Marco Candida's </a><em><a href="http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/fromdream-diary/">Dream Diary</a></em>.  Allusions to dreams and excavations.</li> <li>A great new post on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://mercury6.spacelog.org/page/-00:00:00:20/">A play by ply of the Mercury 6 mission</a>.</li> <li>Two great blog posts from Duke University's HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) website: <a href="http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/why-doesnt-anyone-payattention-anymore">Why Doesn't Anyone Pay Attention Anymore?</a> and <a href="http://www.hastac.org/blogs/ernesto-priego/your-brain-computers-somenotes-twitter-open-research-community">Your Brain on Computers: Some Notes on Twitter as an Open Research Community</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.complex.com/CELEBRITIES/Cover-Story/kanye-west-projectrunaway">Kanye West's creative process</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/tcooa.htm">The text of Alfie Kohn's "The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement"</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.handmaps.org/connect.php">The Hand Drawn Map Association</a> (via Kostis Kourelis).  This group must be an affiliate of the <em>Village Green Preservation Society</em>.</li> <li><a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/wired-to-read/27928">Did learning to read really mess us up</a>?</li> <li>A "conversation" between <a href="http://phdiva.blogspot.com/2010/11/blogsand-cultural-property-propaganda.html">Dorothy King </a>and <a href="http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/2010/11/rss-subscriptions-and-culturalproperty.html">David Gill</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-job-market-is-lotlike-pbs-newshour.html">Your graduate students should learn to Skype</a>.</li> <li>Two more blogs from Kostis: Dry Light (and this post on <a href="http://stathatos.blogspot.com/2010/11/washing-clothes-in-kastalianspring.html">Washing Clothes in the Kastalian Spring</a> at Delphi) and <a href="http://fieldnotesphilly.wordpress.com/">Field Notes from the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://publishingperspectives.com/2010/11/neal-stephensonsmongoliad-revolutionizing-storytelling/">This is a pretty interesting idea for story telling</a>.  I wonder how it would translate to an academic work?</li> <li>How important is the name of your Twitter feed?  <a href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/digital-life/digital-lifenews/australiabound-ashes-twitter-mixup-sees-babysitter-hit-for-six-2010112918dkf.html">Just ask TheAshes</a>!</li> <li>Two nice arguments for liberal arts eduction: <a href="http://collegenews.org/x10611.xml">One here</a> (which might be expected) and <a href="http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138">one here</a> (which might not be).</li> <li>Transcripts from the <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/WCVirtual_Library.html">UND Writers Conference Virtual Reading Room</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm">Mass of material chart</a>.</li>

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<li>What I am reading: G. Hall, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/digitize-this-book-the-politics-of-newmedia-or-why-we-need-open-access-now/oclc/222249169">Digitize This Book!</a></em> (Minneapolis 2008) and A. Bowman and A. Wilson, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/quantifying-the-roman-economy-methods-andproblems/oclc/316430292">Quantifying the Roman Economy</a></em>. (Oxford 2009).</li> <li>What I am listening to: Kanye West, <em>My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy </em>and The Go Team, <em>Thunder, Lightening, Strike</em>.</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Propositions for the Study of History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-propositions-for-the-study-of-history CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 12/02/2010 07:07:24 AM ----BODY: <p>A series of Parisian park-bench, NoDak hipster, propositions for the study of history.  These were prepared for an introduction to my Graduate Historiography class next semester.  They are meant to be points of departure for broader discussions into the links between historical epistemology, social responsibility, method, and practice.</p> <p>Propositions for the Study of History</p> <p>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>History is a form of social activism.</p> <p>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Reading, writing, presenting, and teaching history requires thought.</p> <p>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Historical thinking is both the product of the texts (of various kinds) and how we read texts (of various kinds).</p> <p>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Texts (sources) are socially constructed.</p> <p>5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The historian uses various tools to interpret sources.</p> <p>6.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>These tools are socially constructed.  Some would say that they have a kind of agency.  Most would say that tools exert an influence on the work that they do.</p> <p>7.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>One of the historians’ tools is method (which we sometimes call theory).</p>

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<p>8.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Theory is not a single thing: it is a blanket term for method, methodology, epistemology, historiography, ideology, and even procedure that makes historical thinking possible.</p> <p>9.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Many theoretical positions require a historian to make clear how they approach a text or a historical problem.</p> <p>10.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>By making obvious the relationship between texts and the act of “doing history” we make our work as historians visible and open to critique.</p> <p>11.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To many people, the more that history is critiqued (as a method), the more it appears to be either common sense or wrong headed.</p> <p>12.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Skepticism of the historical methods undermines the basic disciplinary structure of the field.</p> <p>13.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Most people in the world do not value the work of historians even though they should.  This is our fault.</p> <p>14.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Skepticism toward the historical method may lead to the end of history as a discipline.</p> <p>15.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>People will continue to study the past.</p> <p>For the real<a href="http://teachingthursday.org/"> Teaching Thursday post, go here</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Byzantine Archaeology: Byzantine Trade STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-byzantine-archaeology-byzantine-trade CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Byzantium DATE: 12/01/2010 07:09:59 AM ----BODY: <p>As the end of the semester approaches, I forced myself to find time to peruse the new (2009) volume entitled <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/byzantine-trade-4th-12th-centuries-thearchaeology-of-local-regional-and-international-exchange-papers-of-the-thirtyeighth-spring-symposium-of-byzantine-studies-st-johns-college-university-ofoxford-march-2004/oclc/244293201">Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th centuries </a></em>edited by M. Mundell Mango.  It is a pretty neat and diverse collection of papers that touch on trade from the beginning of Late Antiquity to 4th Crusade.  The papers range from discussions of amphoras, shipwrecks, and pottery to studies on the location and organization of manufacturing.  I'll

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admit upfront that I did not read all the papers in the volume so I hardly feel qualified to give a comprehensive review, but the articles that I did read were good.</p> <p>Perhaps the most interesting part of the volume is the editors effort to locate the papers in relation to other recent scholarly works on trade and the economy in the Late Antique and Byzantine Mediterranean.  She takes particular aim at the recent A. Laiou edited<em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/economic-history-of-byzantium-from-theseventh-through-the-fifteenth-century/oclc/47050456"> Economic History of Byzantium</a></em> which Mundell Mango points out continued problematic periodization schemes by beginning its analysis at the 7th century and thereby "failing to analyze at the same level the preceding period of formation that links Byzantium to the ancient world." (4).</p> <p>More importantly, perhaps, she noted that this volume sought to separate trade from discussions of the economy.  When I first read this, it blew my mind, but as I thought more carefully about it, I began to understand her point.  On some level, our theorizing about the ancient economy has dictated the kinds of questions that we have asked from our material and the kinds of analyses that we have conducted.  For example, most rural survey projects take as a point of departure M. Finley's ideas of the relationship between the (consumer) city and the (producer) countryside.  Our work at Pyla-Koutsopetria, for example, is explicitly informed by the ideas advanced in Horden and Purcell's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/corrupting-sea-a-study-of-mediterraneanhistory/oclc/42692026">Corrupting Sea </a></em>and their idea that the ancient Mediterranean economy was dominated by semi-autonomous micro-regions. By separating trade from larger economic theorizing, there is a chance that we can produce a far less structured body of data that has the potential to reveal new patterns or organization that do more than challenge or confirm the growing body of economic theorizing.  In fact, Sean Kingsley's unstructured datasets (that is to say, a data set made of individual records without any methodological relationship to one another) of Late Antique and Byzantine shipwrecks could present just the kind of evidence necessary to create new models of how trade actually occurred in the ancient and Medieval Mediterranean (31-36).  Of course, this kind of optimistic empiricism is difficult to come by in practice (and even more difficult to fund!), although one can imagine a time soon when the results of the various survey projects in the Eastern Mediterranean could offer a similar kind of unstructured data for analysis. It is interesting to observe, however, that most of the papers in this volume fall quickly back on longstanding</p> <p>P. Armstrong's article, "Trade in the east Mediterranean in the 8th century", for example, continues the work of pushing the date of Cypriot Red Slip pottery later demonstrating that trade in this common Eastern Mediterranean table ware continued into the 8th century (157-178).  (Moreover, she reminds us that despite its name, CRS (or perhaps better Late Roman D Ware) may not all originate on the island of Cyprus!).  Armstrong's article complements a shorter piece by I. Dimopoulos which looks at the trade in Byzantine red wares in the 11th and 13th century.  Both of these articles provide (as well as O. Karagiorgou's  short offering on "Mapping trade by the amphora" (37-58)) continue the discussion of the relationship between the Late Roman and Byzantine economy on archaeological grounds. To my mind, these discussions are rooted in certain basic expectations regarding the economy, specifically, the notion that the Late Roman economy faltered over the course of the 7th-9th century. This basic assumption suggests that the economy is tied to administrative structures and practices like the <em>annona</em> trade and the political control of the Mediterranean basin.  Demonstrating the certain kinds of trade continued even

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as the political power of the Roman state abated does little to separate the idea of trade from larger questions of economic integration or administrative and political control.</p> <p>I was drawn to this book while thinking about <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2010/06/theory-and-method-inbyzantine.html">my own venture into the study of Byzantine archaeology</a> and it struck me that the approach advocated here is explicitly anti-theoretical (if one understands the economy as a more intensively theorized version of the practice of trade).  The results are interesting and useful, but it barely scratches the surface of what Byzantine archaeologists are currently doing in the field.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: What to do with a blog, when you're done using it STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: what-to-do-with-a-blog-when-youre-done-using-it CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/30/2010 06:56:51 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the past month or so, I've decided to shutter this blog. I don't think that I'll stop blogging, but I'll probably move to another platform or try to find better way to integrate social media into my daily observations.  My reasons for shuttering this blog are not entirely clear to me, but I guess they reflect a combination of things:</p> <p>1. Now that my tenure portfolio is in the pipeline, I've lost the visceral feeling of risk that comes with blogging while an untenured, assistant professor.</p> <p>2. This blog is unattractive and I do not have the energy to redesign it.</p> <p>3. I have this vague feeling that a blog should have a life span.  I feel like blogs should come to an end at some point or to have some form of organization dictated by time.  After all, a blog is a time driven genre or medium.  Posts are organized chronologically like its early predecessor "the log".  One of my favorite blogs on the web, <a href="http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/">Digital History Hacks sits on the web in archive form</a>.</p> <p>4. I want a new challenge.  I think my readership on this blog has pretty much leveled off at a bit more than 100 page views a day.  I run close to 1000 page views a week.  This far exceeded my original goals for my blog and now that I have reached these goals, I just have this feeling that I should change up what I'm doing, go somewhere new.</p>

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<p>5. My other blogs run on Wordpress.  As dedicated readers of this blog know, I have a few other online projects that generally run on Wordpress (<a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>, <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology</a>) and I have come to like the Wordpress interface.  So maybe I'll start up this blog again in some fashion on Wordpress.</p> <p>This is not to say that I'm going to stop blogging today or that this is some kind of dramatic farewell post.  I'll keep blogging here until the end of the year.</p> <p>The bigger issue is what to do with the content here.  This blog runs on Typepad.  I chose this years ago without much critical thought. It's a paid blogging service and the service and uptime has been great.  The downside is that, when I stop paying, they stop hosting.  I am not sure that it's viable to pull everything on this blog down (images, links, text) and even if I did do this, I am sure that there are dead links throughout that would do very little good.  Moreover, I was pretty careless with regard to organizing where supporting files live scattering them over a range of locations on the web with different lifespans and maintenance parameters.</p> <p>Another alternative is just to grab all the text and put it into a single text file.  Typepad does this more or less automatically.  With all the mark up, this file runs to about 900 pages of text with full mark up. While this text based archive would obviously lose the actual hyperlinks  between posts and to the wider web, it would preserve the mark up for these links making it possible for someone to reconstruct parts of the blog.  We have an excellent <a href="http://library.und.edu/Collections/UA/home.php">University Archive </a>here on campus.  I think I'll offer them the text of my blog for their collection.  The <a href="http://www.archive.org/">Internet Archive </a>has captured several snap shots of my blog (<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080113225544/http://mediterraneanworld.typepa d.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/">January 13, 2008</a>; <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20071212174707/http://mediterraneanworld.typepa d.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/">December 12, 2007</a>; <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20071110183326/http://mediterraneanworld.typepa d.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/">November 10, 2007</a>; <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20071028120043/http://mediterraneanworld.typepa d.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/">October 28, 2007</a>).  It's pretty cool to know that some of my work is in the Internet Archive.  Just to be clear, it's not that I think that my blog is so revolutionary or brilliant that it deserves a place in the history of the internet, but I am enough of a historian to realize that preservation of historical artifacts of all kinds is a voluntary process.</p> <p>I guess I could also make an effort to import relevant posts to Wordpress or whatever service I plan to use in the future, but this seems like a time consuming and painful process.</p> <p>So, I have a month to figure out what to do.  As per usual, any tips, insights, advice, suggestions, and insults are welcome in the comments.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Susan Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.205.189 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/susancaraher DATE: 11/30/2010 09:56:21 AM I'd hate to see it disappear. There is too much work, too many ideas and lots of great feedback from readers. While I understand all the points you make, I feel rather nostalgic about it. And besides, the design is now old skool. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.205.185 URL: http://civilwarhistory.wordpress.com DATE: 11/30/2010 01:05:39 PM With Wordpress, you should be able to import your posts into a new blog that could serve as an "archive" of this blog. I would suggest that route, though I do wish you luck in your decision, which actually gives me some thoughts. Have you given any thought to setting up a group blog on our department? That could give you the new direction you are looking for, as well as introduce more of us to blogging and the world to what we do as a department. Just a thought. Hope to see you around the next couple days. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.99.56.171 URL: DATE: 11/30/2010 02:29:40 PM Oh man!!! Since you got me started on blogging, now I'm terrified. Looking forward to see where you go (so that I might follow...) -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Local Knowledge and Universal Goals STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: local-knowledge-and-universal-goals CATEGORY: Academia DATE: 11/29/2010 06:51:13 AM ----BODY: <p>My wife works in marketing and external relations at <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/">The Graduate School</a> here at the University of North Dakota, and we regularly discuss the ways that universities sell themselves both to a local and global community. &#0160;This happens to coincide with some of my own research interests which explore the tension

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between institutions with universalizing aspirations (the emperor or, better still, the church) and local practices and traditions. A local saint for example represents a hyper local manifestation of the power of the universal church. &#0160;For a university, a local class or tradition is the manifestation of global expectations of what a &quot;university&quot; education means. &#0160;Schools have always sought to maintain an identity that made them both access to longstanding &quot;stakeholders&quot; and, at the same time, appealing to people who will only acquire familiarity with the place and its traditions when they arrive there.</p>! <p>With the expansion of online and distance teaching the relationship between local (and spatial) sense of community and the wider world becomes even more attenuated. &#0160;<a href="http://www.phoenix.edu/about_us/uopx-ontelevision.html">A recent group of University of Phoenix commercials</a>, for example, students show students in the most generic of locations (non-spaces, in fact) airports, on trains, at home, or in commuter traffic rather than surrounded by iconic buildings (the intensely local and ubiquitous &quot;old main&quot;), the stadium or other campus scenes.</p>! <p>All this is a long introduction of a billboard that I walk by almost every day on my way home:</p>! <p><img alt="PARKULocalKnowledge.jpg" border="0" height="269" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013489987615970c -pi" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="PARKULocalKnowledge.jpg" width="450" /></p>! <p>The billboard advertises <a href="http://www.park.edu/">Park University</a>, which has a &quot;campus&quot; at the Grand Forks Air Force Base. &#0160;From what I can gather Park has an agreement with the Air Force to provide college courses on base which they also open to the wider community. &#0160;Other than Park being competition for local tuition dollars, I don&#39;t know of anything wrong with them and they certainly do not have the reputation of a for-profit university like the University of Phoenix. In fact, I am pretty sure that Park is non-profit university.</p>! <p>Back to local knowledge, Park clearly endeavored to show its &quot;local&quot; nature by featuring in a prominent way what would appear to be a local phone number on its billboard. &#0160;The number looks local because it does not have an area code or the dreaded 1-800 in front of it (which every American knows to be the area code for &quot;outsourced to India&quot;). &#0160;Unfortunately, local numbers here in the Grand Cities (like other major metropolitan areas (e.g. New York City)) always feature an area code. &#0160;Since we are on the North Dakota - Minnesota border local numbers typically are typically proceeded by a 701 or 218 area code. &#0160;A &quot;local&quot; will almost always starts their number with their area code.</p>! <p>Non-local universities are not a particularly jarring feature of the American higher education landscape these days, they only become jarring when they try to be local and fail.</p>! <p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> By the way, I corresponded a bit with the Park University folks and one of them kindly pointed out that John Gillette of our Gillette Hall (and widely regarded as one of the founders of rural sociology) was a Park University graduate in 1895.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: BrianB EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.245 URL: DATE: 11/29/2010 11:32:38 AM What a coincidence. I just noticed that billboard for the first time this morning, and also took a moment afterward to consider the marketing involved. I got caught up contemplating the temporal question of how a woman is visualized in a given time period and whether this particular image was meant to represent the modern, education-seeking female. Building on your own observations, is this a good sign for Grand Forks' vitality that outside enterprises see us as a market valuable enough to invest? Is it resultant of North Dakota's status as a state that has weathered the economic storm? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 98.111.177.94 URL: DATE: 11/29/2010 10:50:52 PM Fabulous ruminations and documentation of ephemera. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology of Thanksgiving Dinner STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: archaeology-of-thanksgiving-dinner CATEGORY: Archaeology DATE: 11/26/2010 07:09:25 AM ----BODY: <p>Two green ceramic baking dishes.<br />One white ceramic backing dish with handles.<br />Two metal "baking pans". <br />Ceramic leaf-shaped serving dish with ceramic, acorn-shaped, bowl with lid. <br />One silver salad bowl.<br />One pie pan.<br />One small, ceramic bowl with lid.</p> <p>3 stainless steel and 2 silver serving spoons. ¬†Two brass candle stick holders. 1 bottle glass Prosecco bottle.</p> <p>Two ceramic plates. 4 forks, 2 knives, 2 spoons. 2 inexpensive glass champagne flutes. 2 glass drinking "glasses".</p> <p>Four chairs and table (probably pine). ¬†White fabric table cloth.</p> <p><img style="float: left;" title="Thanksgiving.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348987ad15970c -pi" border="0" alt="Thanksgiving.jpg" width="401" height="600" /></p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: George Walsh and the Founding of UND STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: george-walsh-and-the-founding-of-und CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 11/24/2010 06:56:09 AM ----BODY: <p>Despite the inclement weather the University of North Dakota is scheduled to unveil a strange kind of monument today: a bust of George Walsh (<a href="http://www2.und.nodak.edu/our/news/story.php?id=3296">here's the genuinely bizarre press release</a>).  Walsh is one of the "founding fathers" of eastern North Dakota and was responsible for the siting of the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.  His interest in the locating of the University was largely economic, and he used his political power (and audacity) in the provincial legislature to beat out Jamestown and other competing sites for the location of the school. Walsh was a relative of Captian Alexander Griggs who ran the local steamboat line and himself owned the local paper, the <em>Plainsdealer</em>, and served as the president of the town council when Grand Forks was founded in 1878.  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walsh_County,_North_Dakota">Walsh county </a>is named in his honor.</p> <p>Once the university was founded, Walsh ensured that the school continued to receive appropriations from the state legislature throughout the late 19th century.  Moreover, he served as the first secretary of the board of regents for UND. (It is fun to imagine that he recorded the minutes of the first meetings <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/BoardofRegents/Images/Volume1/p3.jp g">in his elegant hand</a>). More importantly, perhaps, he penned the first history of the founding of the University which President Webster Merrifield incorporated into the first "Founder's Day" celebration at the University's 21st birthday in 1904 (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/university-of-thenorthern-plains-a-history-of-the-university-of-north-dakota-18831958/oclc/1107281">Geiger</a>, 178).</p> <p>From a historical standpoint, then, Walsh followed the tradition of writing himself into the history of the university at the moment where the young school was most intent on creating new "invented traditions".  This is not to discredit Walsh's contribution to the founding of the university, but to place the creating myth of the school within its proper context.</p>

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<p>Here is <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/university-of-the-northernplains-a-history-of-the-university-of-north-dakota-1883-1958/oclc/1107281">Louis Geiger's definitive description</a> (followed in <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/184384/">this recent oped in the </a><em><a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/184384/">Grand Forks Herald</a></em> (the rival newspaper to George Walsh's long defunct <em>Plaindealer</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>"... Walsh was deeply involved in the complicated intrigues and politics of the crucial legislative session of 1883 at Yankton where so much of the present educational and institutional pattern of both Dakotas was set.  Ordway had fired the opening gun in his annual message, in which he recommended the establishment of territorial institutions in the north. The next step, which had been prearranged, was to split the southern dedication, which was in overwhelming majoring in both houses - ten to three in the Council. With the approval of Ordway and the northern crowd, J.O.B. Scobey of Brookings was quickly elected president of the Council.  The South Dakota break was further exploited when Walsh after some talk of removing the capital to an entirely new town site on the open prairie, introduced a bill to move it from Yankton to Huron, also in the south.</p> <p>In late January, while Walsh was held up by a blizzard in St. Paul, where he had gone on a short business trip, the South Dakota group attempted to re-form their lines by making overturns to S. G. Roberts and Jonston Nickeus, the representative from Fargo and Jamestown, who were not satisfied with the plans for the north.  They introduced their own set of bills appropriating a half a million dollars for institutions, most of them in the south.  Walsh hastily returned and pulled together his wavering northern colleagues, apparently by accepting a proposal that they draw lots for the university, agricultural college, and the insane asylum and penitentiary. (He wrote years later: "I took the University, Jamestown the insane asylum and Fargo took the agricultural college.  The penitentiary went to Bismarck.").  He then counterattacked by promising the north's support for establishment of an agricultural college at Brookings, Scobey's town, and for appropriations to launch the Dakota University established at Vermillion in 1862 and the normals established by the 1881 Assembly at Spearfish and Madison.</p> <p>With his lines partially re-formed, Walsh managed to bury the South Dakota institutional bills in the appropriations committee, of which he was chairman.  Fearing that his still restive northern colleagues might yet walk off with the prize, he hastily introduced into the legislative hopper some blank sheets of paper inscribed "a bill for an Act Locating the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks, N.D., and Providing Government thereto."  In the two days required for first and second readings, which were by title only, Walsh prepared the bill modeled on the University of Wisconsin act and substituted it for the dummy when it was routinely referred to his appropriations committee. As he put it: "No one would be any wiser, and no harm would be done by anyone, and I would get my bill ahead of Fargo or Jamestown, which I succeeded in doing. The Jamestown member was very much disappointed."</p> <p><a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/184384/">Geiger</a>, 1819.</p> </blockquote> <p>What is interesting to me is that Walsh's bust - situated outside of the administrative building - will be one of the few monuments to a specific individual on campus here (aside from names on buildings).  On historical

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grounds, it is curious that he'd be chosen. While there is no doubt that his energies helped the university survive its formative years, one could easily argue that personalities like President's Webster Merrifield or Frank McVey or even John C. West had a more transformative influence on the institution as a place of higher learning.</p> <p>In contrast, Walsh's unique contribution seems to have been acts of arguably rather self-serving political cunning, and the opportunity to write himself into the history of a university at the moment when it was looking to establish a set of traditions around which to forge an identity.  It is perhaps not coincidental that Walsh's lonely bust is being dedicated at a time when the University continues to seek an identity and forge distinct traditions in the competitive world of higher education.  In fact, it's hard not to think that the decision to commemorate this little known founder of the University suggests a gentle touch of irony from that least ironic of institutions: the University administration.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Tuesday: More Teaching with Twitter STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-tuesday-more-teaching-with-twitter CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/23/2010 07:48:07 AM ----BODY: <p>Readers of this blog know that I've been experimenting with Twitter in the classroom both online and as live backchannel while I am lecturing live.  <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.13652729.2010.00387.x/abstract">The </a><em><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.13652729.2010.00387.x/abstract">Journal of Computer Assisted Learning</a></em><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.13652729.2010.00387.x/abstract"> has recently published one of the first academic articles on using Twitter in the classroom: R. Junco, G. Heiberger, and E. Loken "The effect of Twitter on college engagement and grades"</a>.   The article argues basically, that Twitter improves student engagement (following the definition for engagement developed by the National Survey of Student Engagement) and, in turn, improves grades.  Their data comes from a large (125 student) group of students enrolled in seven sections of a introductory level seminar for a pre-health professional program.  The class met one day a week for an hour, focused in part on T. Kidder's <em>Mountains beyond Mountains</em>,

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and centered, apparently, on discussion. They also established a control group who did not use Twitter but the customizable social network service Ning to communicate.  Twitter used in a number of ways including prompting students to consider discussion questions before class, organizing study groups, and engaging a panel of upperclassmen, public health majors. It appears that the faculty leaders prompted all uses of Twitter, although they do say that subsequent use of Twitter occurred without prompting.</p> <p>They gird their argument with relatively careful controls and statistics. They also record qualitative data including several sample conversations between the faculty moderator of the Twitter feed and the students. These examples demonstrated how the faculty member prompted participation in Twitter discussion.  The article shows that students not only were significantly (from a statistical viewpoint) more engaged (and there were no pre-existing variations in engagement between the groups).  They also showed that the semester GPA for students who used Twitter was significantly higher (.5!!) than among those in the control group.  Even accounting for the relatively small size of the sample, these differences are remarkable.</p> <p>While the experiments did attempt to control for basic variables and appear to have a sufficient degree of internal rigor, one variable did not appear in their discussion.  Nowhere do they discuss <em>how </em>the students access Twitter. In my (completely unscientific) experience, students require a significant level of technological engagement in their everyday life (smart phones, laptops, active engagement in existing social media and online communities) to grasp the potential benefits of a service like Twitter.  While the authors do cite a recent report that 94% of students use social networking site and, at one school, as many as 85% use Facebook, they offer little in the way of explanation for how students use these services.  My expectation would be that students do not see all social media in the same way (and this tends to be backed up by the work of social media researchers like <a href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/">danah boyd</a>), and have markedly different patterns of engagement with a service like Twitter when compared to Facebook, email, or the informal networks produced through sms messages.</p> <p>While I do not have quantitative (or even systematic qualitative) data to back my point, I can offer some informal observations derived from experiences.  I made an effort to use Twitter in a class that met one a week similar to the class studied in the survey.  My class was a lecture class with 140+ students rather than the more intimate discussion sections, but I actually think this would be a more fertile environment for a social media service like Twitter to produce functioning sub-communities within the larger and relatively impersonal lecture.  I reckoned that this class would require students to check their Twitter account and participate in various activities at least twice a week.  To do this, since Twitter is a stand alone site, it would require the student to log into Twitter as a separate place from Facebook, Blackboard, or other course management software.  This is something that many of us do as part of our daily routine at our desks, on our laptops, or on our smart phones, but for many of my students, the deep and regular engagement with technology is not really part of their world.  Moreover, there was a significant investment in becoming comfortable with the technical language of Twitter, which, while not difficult, is unfamiliar and intimidating to students who only follow well-trod paths on the internet (from Facebook to email to Blackboard and to content driven sites like ESPN, CNN, or (for most students) Wikipedia).  In other words, Twitter is unfamiliar in part because most of the web is unfamiliar to students whose use of the internet is largely passive or limited.  As a result, many students simply lurked on Twitter; those who participated regularly only engaged when explicitly prompted with points (and then only in a very

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superficial way).  In short, students struggled to understand the advantages to Twitter for keeping them in touch with their classmates and faculty when not in class.</p> <p>The notion of students are digital natives and that Twitter provides a familiar way to extend the classroom into the space occupied by students in their everyday lives rests upon problematic assumptions.  Students' engagement with the internet and with technology tends to occur in a much more limited or particular way than many of these studies imagine.  The assumption that "social media" represents a cohesive body of technology and applications for most students appears to me to be problematic.  Twitter for an undergraduate is foreign while Facebook is familiar.</p> <p>Despite these difficulties, this study provides a good foundation for future study on how to leverage common technology to improve student engagement.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology and Byzantium STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: archaeology-and-byzantium CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Byzantium DATE: 11/22/2010 07:18:35 AM ----BODY: <p>This weekend I spent a little time with the Liz James edited <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/companion-to-byzantium/oclc/226356116">A Companion to Byzantium</a></em>. (Blackwell 2010).  The scope of the book and the quality of articles (and contributors) is pretty impressive.  The focus on the range of Byzantine literature is both gratifying since so much of the discussion of Byzantine literature has tended to occur in languages other than English and timely since there seems to be growing interest in Byzantine texts other than hagiography.  The bibliography runs to over 70 pages and this alone warrants the perusing of this volume.</p> <p>The section on Byzantine archaeology, however, is disappointing.  First, it is less than 10 pages and one page is half-blank and other other features a photograph of a conserved amphora. So, in all Byzantine archaeology received 8 pages of text in a 400+ page volume. The discussion focuses briefly on villages, towns, fortifications, and churches with short discussions of nationalism and a superficial presentation of different "archaeological approaches."  For their length, the sections are decent, but the decisions to focus on this little handful of areas is difficult to understand.  For example, the chapter left out any sustained discussion of ceramic typologies and chronologies (a favorite of

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many of Byzantine archaeologist colleagues), scientific approaches (e.g. dendrochronology, physical anthropology, et c.) which have made such a significant impact on the field, intensive pedestrian survey on the regional level (which in Greece has begun to produce significant changes in how we understand Byzantine settlement), the archaeology of ethnicity (which is obviously central to discussions of ethnic change, modern nation building, and historical perceptions of Byzantium in the West), and the relationship of Byzantine archaeology to careful work on the Medieval, typically Crusader, eastern Mediterranean.  Some of these oversights can be attributed to the "late" date for the start of Byzantium; the author chose to begin the Byzantine period in archaeology in the second half of the 6th century.  While this dating falls within the conventional periodization for the start of the Byzantine period, it is not explained in terms of archaeological evidence.  In fact, it is increasingly clear that many of the trends that characterize Byzantine material culture (for example, ceramic types, construction styles, and settlement) tend in many parts of the Eastern Mediterranean to persist from the 4th to even the early 7th century (depending on local economic, religious, and political contingencies).</p> <p>To be fair, the chapter on Byzantine archaeology is complemented by a nice chapter by Peter Sarris on "Economics, Trade, and 'Feudalism'" which pays particular attention to the circulation of currency and the practical significance of identifying Byzantine coins in archaeological contexts.  Despite this contribution, the neglect of archaeology in this volume is remarkable.  Of course, it is always easy to say that no volume can even contain everything that every scholar deems central to the study of a particular period. But, on the other hand, the argument for including a robust discussion of Byzantine archaeology in a volume of this scope is hardly a reach.</p> <p>Few areas of Byzantine studies have seen the vitality of Byzantine archaeology over the past several decades especially when it is considered under the wider banner of Medieval and Post-Medieval archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean.  As a little advertisement for myself (this is my blog!), it just so happens that Kostis Kourelis and I are working on<a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2010/06/theory-and-method-in-byzantine.html"> an edited volume right now </a>that will bring together some of the most recent contributions to the archaeological study of Byzantium, and we hope that it will contribute to the archaeology of Byzantium taking a more prominent place in the future of Byzantine studies.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: First Snow Winter 2010 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: first-snow-winter-2010

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CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 11/21/2010 11:58:19 AM ----BODY: <p>In keeping with an irregularly held Archaeology of the Mediterranean World tradition, here are pictures from the first significant snow of the year.  The pictures are courtesy of my lovely wife:</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Snow1.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348968808d970c -pi" border="0" alt="Snow1.JPG" width="450" height="301" /></p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Snow2.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348968809c970c -pi" border="0" alt="Snow2.JPG" width="450" height="301" /></p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Snow3.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134896880a3970c -pi" border="0" alt="Snow3.JPG" width="450" height="301" /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 11/19/2010 09:24:04 AM ----BODY: <p>It's not the cold, it's the wind.  Some quick hits and varia on a windy Friday:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html?_r=2&amp;hpw">The New York Times on digital humanities</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/education/16clickers.html?_r=3&amp;src=m e&amp;ref=general">The New York Times on clickers and other digital tools in the traditional classroom</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj6ho1-G6tw">Danny MacAskill's newest video is incredible</a>. First, it approaches Scotland from a vaguely

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historical perspective and, then, the riding and stunts and skills are amazing.</li> <li>The video of abandoned and soon to be demolished Six Flags Amusement park outside of New Orleans is pretty much viral. ¬†<a href="http://savageminds.org/2010/11/15/collage-for-nola-ruin/">A blog post over at Savage Minds puts in an a provocative context</a>. </li> <li><a href="http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/10/05/urban-explorers-videoarticle/">The Place Hacking blog has an interesting video and article on the culture of urban explorers</a>. ¬†It's brilliant that Geography Compass allows video articles.</li> <li><a href="http://bloggingpompeii.blogspot.com/2010/11/dealing-with-decay2.html">Eric Poehler responded to these thoughts from an ancient perspective on the Blogging Pompeii blog</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://aal.au.dk/en/klasark/studies/summerschool2011">Late Antique Summer School in Constantinople</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.samothrace.emory.edu/">Emory University's Samothrace project </a>website is nice. </li> <li><a href="http://www.fubiz.net/2010/11/15/apple-destroyed-products/">Smashed Apple products</a>.</li> <li>What I'm reading: R. Bagnall, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/administration-of-the-ptolemaic-possessionsoutside-egypt/oclc/2663313">The Administration of the Ptolemaic Possessions Outside Egypt</a></em>. (Leiden 1976). ¬†M. M. Mango ed., <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/byzantine-trade-4th-12th-centuries-thearchaeology-of-local-regional-and-international-exchange-papers-of-the-thirtyeighth-spring-symposium-of-byzantine-studies-st-johns-college-university-ofoxford-march-2004/oclc/244293201">Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th Centuries</a></em>. (Burlington 2009).</li> <li>What I'm listening to: Scott H. Biram, <em>Graveyard Shift </em>and John Legend and the Roots, <em>Wake Up!</em> </li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.194.177 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 11/19/2010 10:45:00 AM Hi, Bill -- check the Eric Poehler link. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Icons and Space (and Dreams) in Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0

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ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: icons-and-space-and-dreams-in-late-antiquity CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 11/18/2010 07:10:05 AM ----BODY: <p>This week I received my annual copy of the <em>Journal of Roman Archaeology</em>.  It always arrives in the mid-fall when the weather has just begun to turn, and it gives me a good excuse to curl up in a comfortable chair and review the archaeology of the Roman world.  This year's volume included a nice article by Paul Dilley entitled "Christian icon practice in apocryphal literature: the consecration and the conversion of synagogues into churches" JRA 23 (2010), 285-302 (notice no hyperlink!).</p> <p>The article focuses less on the conversion of synagogues to churches and more on the role of icons in creating sacred space. Dilley draws his evidence from the oft-neglected body of apocyphal literature from Late Antiquity. These texts are typically ascribed to a Biblical figure or major bishop, but tend to be later, and generally speaking popular texts that often sought to give a contemporary tradition an august pedigree.  So when the use of icons to sanctify places begins to appear in these texts, there is real reason to think that this represents a shift in practice in the era in which they were written.  A classic example of the role of these apocryphal texts in legitimizing practices is the 6th century <em>Laudatio Barnabae </em>from Cyprus.  This text describes the discovery of Paul's companion, Barnabas's body, on Cyprus about a century earlier.  The story features the Bishop Anthemius of Salamais who has a series of dreams that lead him to the place where Barnabas was buried.  When he exhumes the body, he finds it clutching a copy of the Gospel of Matthew.  Ultimately this text comes to explain the construction of the church dedicated to St. Barnabas in Salamis, as well as explain the special privileges that the church of Cyprus held which emerged over the course of the later 5th century. Barnabas's apostolic pedigree, the timely appearance of his body, and the presence of an autograph of the Gospel of Matthew, all helped to legitimize the church of Cyprus as an autonomous apostolic foundation.</p> <p>Dilley highlights a series of similar stories which place relics or icons at the center of the founding of churches.  He also stresses that these foundation stories often include important liturgical elements which suggests that the stories do more than simply legitimize the founding of the church as a building, but link the founding of a church to annual rites celebrated to commemorate the event.  So the stories of the <em>inventio </em>(the discovery) of a relic, icon, or the body of a saint, has key liturgical elements that are reinforced through the rituals of commemoration in which the text plays a key role.  Processions, acclamations (<em>kyrie eleison</em>!), and the key role of the clergy all mark these texts as liturgical as well as simply devotional or "historical" texts.</p> <p>The role of liturgy in the discovery of icons or relics is something that scholars have not necessarily fully realized.  In fact, some scholars have followed <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CBcQFjAA&a mp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fdis.fatih.edu.tr%2Fstore%2Fdocs%2F741256Fxb9ksyF.pdf&amp;rct =j&amp;q=Dark%20Age%20Controversy%20Brown&amp;ei=cCLlTLrjIJHtngeoczEDQ&amp;usg=AFQjCNHSEJCFQU6ObwIHUbzpOQ29J_Cl6Q&amp;sig2=I5TWxixTV9IfPzGC03Rsjg ">Peter Brown's lead (.pdf)</a> and seen icons as almost anti-clerical in that they allow for access to holiness outside of the control of the institutional

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church and the clergy.  In other words, there are ways that the veneration of icons and relics represent paths to holiness that end-run the clergy.  Dilley, however, has argued that stories in seemingly popular apocryphal literature not only commemorate the key role of icons and relics in creating sacred, liturgical space, but also embed this tradition within liturgical practices that tie the deeply personal holiness of the icon to the institutional holiness of the church.</p> <p>As for the conversion of synagogues, I'll admit to being less compelled by the final pages of Dilley's article where he offers a very basic typology for the archaeological evidence relating to the conversion of synagogues to churches, but does not really bring it back to his far more provocative and exciting arguments about icons, liturgy, and the creation of Christian sacred space.  That being said, he makes a good point that the presence of icons in buildings newly converted to Churches - like the synagogue at Cagliara on Sardinia, the synagogue at Lydda, and the Pantheon in Rome - seems to be a key aspect in their consecration for Christian use by the 7th century.  This reminds me of a Coptic church I visited for Easter Vigil in Columbus, Ohio. The church had been converted from a Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall to a Coptic church. While the unabashedly Protestant architecture of the building remained, the presence of Coptic icons on almost every flat surface marked out the repurposing of the space.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Peer Review, Scholarship, and Blogs STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: peer-review-scholarship-and-blogs CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/17/2010 07:33:26 AM ----BODY: <p>The conversation continues on the relationship between blogging and published scholarship. Increasingly, the central issue tends to be peer review.  Blogs are not peer reviewed; academic publications are. This dichotomy is important and represents the core generic difference between working papers and the final publications of result.  Unfortunately, these ideas have been twisted somehow (and I fear that scholars in the humanities have been responsible for this) to mean that only peer reviewed works have value and blogs and other informal types of "correspondence" (in the broadest sense) are not valuable, a waste of precious academic time and creativity, and, at very worst, a contribution of the glut of uncritical opinion that clutters the internet and threatens to crowd out

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careful, reasoned, thought.  (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/10/mo re-on-academic-blogging.html">For more on these perspectives see here</a>.)</p> <p>Just this week, Michael O'Malley wrote a provocative blog post on the value of peer review entitled <a href="http://theaporetic.com/?p=896">Googling Peer Review, Part Two</a> on his <a href="http://theaporetic.com/">Aporetic Blog</a>.  He suggests that good or unorthodox work does not necessarily benefit from peer review and, in some case, might be good and unorthodox <em>despite </em>the peer review process.</p> <p>I am not sufficiently brilliant to write good and unorthodox works.  At the same time, I am not completely sold in the universal value of peer review. While I'll be the first to admit that peer review has significantly helped several of my published articles, I'll also concede that most of the central ideas in my articles were unaffected by peer review (well, except those ideas that died in the peer review process, never to be heard from again!).  Most of the critiques offered by various peer reviewers focused on the clarity of our argument, provided references that we had overlooked, or identified different implications for our conclusions.  These were all helpful and meaningful contributions to our work, but ultimately none of these reviews changed the basic content of our contributions.</p> <p>I'll admit that the argument that I am making here comes on the heels of a particularly pleasant and uncontroversial peer review process for an article that, at its core, is little more than a glorified archaeological site report.  But it may be that this kind of article is the least deserving of peer review.  The formal publication of the article slowed down the circulation of information to colleagues and added little significant academic value to the basic results of our field work.  In fact, peer review strengthened our interpretative conclusions, but hardly made them unassailable.</p> <p>So at least some of the issue is not peer review per se, but the nature of genre in academic writing.  As O'Malley's post points out many of the most significant works of scholarship in the last 70 years were not peer reviewed in a traditional sense (and the same could also be said of  many of the least significant works as well).  The works identified by O'Malley tend to occupy unconventional academic genres which are least likely to benefit from traditional peer review; even today works like M. Foucault's <em>Discipline and Punish </em>upset traditional disciplinary critiques, and E. P. Thompson's <em>Making of the English Working Class</em> stands apart from nearly any work of history writing up until that time (or since).  In a more modest way, data driven archaeological reports fit into this category as well.  There is little that a peer review can provide a scholar aside from reminders of archaeological conventions and advanced copy editing.</p> <p>To prove my point, I can offer as a case study a recent publication of mine.  Over the past two years, I blogged most of the content that appeared ultimately in our peer reviewed publication that appeared this past week.  I've appended a copy of our final article at end of this blogpost.  Of course, some of the final product reflects the hard work of the <em>Hesperia</em> editorial team who in many ways serve as another level of peer review because nearly all of them are practicing archaeologists with advanced graduate training the field. So, I am fudging a bit with this example.</p> <p>Here are links to my various blog posts, conference papers, and working papers that led up to the final publication our work.  These received no formal peer review:</p> <p>July 20, 2008: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a> <br

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/>July 23, 2008: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion<br /></a>August 5, 2008: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia</a><br />August 12, 2008: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Lychnari Tower</a><br />August 19, 2008: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-2.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Passes of the Eastern Corinthia</a><br />August 25, 2008: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-3.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Classical Vayia</a><br />September 1, 2008: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: History and Archaeology</a><br />September 8, 2008: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Some More Contemporary Thoughts</a><br />January 12, 2009: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/th ree-new-sites-in-the-eastern-corinthia.html">Three New Sites in the Eastern Corinthia</a> (W. Caraher and D. Pettegrew)<br />July 27, 2009: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/vi ewsheds-in-the-eastern-corinthia.html">Viewsheds in the Eastern Corinthia</a><br />August 10, 2009: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WorkingPapers/Caraher_Pettegrew _Towers_Fortifications_Working.pdf">Working Paper: Towers and Foritfication at Vayia in the Southeast Corinthia (Caraher, Pettegrew, S. James)</a></p> <p>The final publication:</p> <p><a title="View Caraher Pettegrew James VayiaOffprint 2010 on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/42994192/Caraher-Pettegrew-James-VayiaOffprint2010" style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sansserif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -xsystem-font: none; display: block; text-decoration: underline;">Caraher Pettegrew James VayiaOffprint 2010</a> <object id="doc_936682604688997" name="doc_936682604688997" height="450" width="100%" type="application/xshockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" style="outline:none;" > <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf"> <param name="wmode" value="opaque"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"> <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=42994192&access_key=key2wh8n3ocguqb9va13k&page=1&viewMode=list"> <embed id="doc_936682604688997" name="doc_936682604688997" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=42994192&access_key =key-2wh8n3ocguqb9va13k&page=1&viewMode=list" type="application/x-shockwaveflash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="600" width="100%" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#ffffff"></embed> </object></p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Historical Figures in Social Media STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: historical-figures-in-social-media CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/16/2010 07:20:06 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last year I have become more and more committed to various social media applications, and over the last six months, I am completely obsessed with Twitter. (Facebook, not so much, but not for any ideological or practical reasons; I just prefer Twitter run through Hootsuite).  Recently I have been enamored with the spate of historical figures on Twitter.  The first that I recognized was the brilliant <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/CryForByzantium">Cry for Byzantium </a>which sent out creative Tweets in the name of various Byzantine Emperors who have particular interests in politics, military campaigns, diplomacy, and palace intrigue.  The blog is run by the author Sean Munger who explains the set up for <a href="http://cryforbyzantium.blog.com/">Cry for Byzantium on his blog</a>. At present he has over 550 followers and has sent out over 2000 Tweets!</p> <p>Since then I've also begun to follow <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/iTweetus">iTweetus</a>, who is a Roman soldier on campaign in England during the winter of 72/73 AD.  His feed is curated by <a href="http://www.tulliehouse.co.uk/roman-frontier-gallery">the Roman Frontier Gallery at Tullie House in Carlisle</a>.  Tweetus is poetic and has a keen eye for the rugged landscape and the worsening weather.  I hope he survives the winter. At present iTweetus has made 53 tweets (he's on campaign for heaven sake and who knows what the Roman mobile phone coverage is like at the borders of empire!) and has 495 followers.</p> <p>Finally, <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/iherodotus">iHerodotus</a> has begun to push out tweets from his great work on the Persian Wars.  He has 172 followers and has pushed out 95 tweets.  <a href="http://bestlatin.blogspot.com/2009/06/twitter-ivlivscaesar.html">Laura Gibbs has been tweeting </a><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/IVLIVSCAESAR">Plutarch's </a><em><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/IVLIVSCAESAR">Life of Julius Caesar</a></em> since the summer. She has over 100 followers and has made over 1000 tweets. Various authors whose works are being tweet are aggregated into several lists like <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/MarkKohut/classic-writers-words">Classic Writer's Words</a>.</p> <p>The idea that these real or fictional ancient figures are part of my "social network" certainly stretches the notion of a social network and its virtual

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existence to a new place.  To be sure, Herodotus or even the Byzantine Emperor's do not respond to my Tweets as a colleague might, but at the same time their stories and personalities emerge over the course of their twitter feeds.  Like college classmates or rarely seen acquaintances, the names of historical figures and the text of classic literature roll out across my twitter feed sharing space with various automated tweets from tech-bloggers, various companies, CNN, athletic teams, et c.</p> <p>My social media space, then, extends the notions of the social to include a wide range of products, services, individuals, and texts. Or, to see it another way, my social media space represents the commodification of personal relationships as much as the personalization of products and services. I am not sure how historical figures fit into a network of commodified social relations, except by observing that historical figures have always contributed to the production of social capital.  If Twitter, Facebook, and other social media services provide new ways to visualize and deploy the diverse range of social capital, then there is no reason why historical figures, texts, and other works of so-called "high culture" should not appear.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Christians in Roman Space STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: christians-in-roman-space CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Religion DATE: 11/15/2010 07:22:31 AM ----BODY: <p>On the strength of a <em><a href="http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-1065.html">BMCR</a></em><a href="http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-10-65.html"> review</a>, I spent the last few days reading Laura Salah Nasrallah's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/christian-responses-to-roman-art-andarchitecture-the-second-century-church-amid-the-spaces-ofempire/oclc/417444878"><em>Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture</em></a>. (Cambridge 2010).  The book juxtaposes the works of several 2nd c. Christian "apologists" (Tatian, Justin, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria) and the space of the Roman empire.  To do this, she parallels the texts with specific places within the Roman world (e.g. the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias or the Trajans forum) or specific works of art (e.g. statues of Commodus as Herakles or the Aphrodite of Knidos).  Both the texts, the space,

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and the works of art themselves fall significantly outside my area of expertise.  The approach, on the other hand, which assumes that texts are no more or nor less products of the same culture that produced understandable spaces and statues within the Roman world represents a significant interest to me.</p> <p>In particular, I was intrigued by how Nasrallah used these texts as evidence for Christian response to the built environment of the Roman world.  Of course, this response was, to a certain extent, constructed by the author's decision to juxtapose particular texts with particular environments (see the BMCR review for this observation), but, at the same time, the move to compare texts and monuments in a way that shed light on critical readings of built space was, to me at least, novel.  The alienated (or at least conflicted) posture of figures like Tatian when positioned opposite the imperial rhetoric of the Sebasteion is particular striking and reminds me of John Clarke's more speculative approach to the reading of Trajan's column in his <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/art-in-the-lives-of-ordinary-romans-visualrepresentation-and-non-elite-viewers-in-italy-100-bc-ad-315/oclc/51172352">Art in the lives of Ordinary Romans</a></em> (Berkeley 2003) or some of the essays in J. Elsner's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/roman-eyes-visualitysubjectivity-in-art-text/oclc/71266643">Roman Eyes</a></em> (Princeton 2007).</p> <p>My impression is that Nasrallah's use of texts was a convenient concession to traditional practices in art and architectural history and archaeology of the Classical World that continues to imagine texts as the point of departure for rigorous analysis of meaning and space.  When pushed a step further to deal exclusively with built environments in places uninformed by robust textual sources, the assumption that spaces can accommodate a wide range of viewers (including those bent on resisting, subverting, or even co-opting "intended messages") becomes decidedly more foggy.  As the <a href="http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-10-65.html"><em>BMCR</em> review</a> noted, even Nasrallah moves cautiously in many cases when she enters into relationship between the act of reading a text and the act of reading a space or monument; the author is more willing to leave the texts juxtaposed than to bring out opportunities for mutual critique.</p> <p>In <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/am bivalent-landscapes-of-the-6th-century-at-corinth-in-contrast.html">my recent work on the monumental spaces of Justinianic Corinth</a> (it is, on my blog, all about me, of course), I've had to confront a similar tension not between texts, but between monuments.  I shared Nasrallah's assumption that it is possible to recover the resistance and critique of the built environment through juxtaposing different types of texts; for Corinth, however, these texts are not the literary (or even really epigraphical kind), but other roughly contemporary monuments.  Like Nasrallah and her authors, I have done what I can to understand the act of building as a response to particular (and maybe recoverable) activities within the physical environment. But this reading of the relationship between buildings captures only one response within a monumentalized discourse in the landscape. The ongoing dialog between experiences across the landscape continuously reinscribed monumental places with meanings and presented opportunities for resistance. The decision whether to resist, to critique, or to accept the meanings produced through the productive juxtaposition of places in the landscape returns agency to the viewer and undermines the power traditionally located in imperialist policies.</p> <p>Nasrallah's book provides a model for discerning the act of viewing within the Roman empire by expanding the notion of place to include texts which she demonstrates function according to a similar logic as monuments in the

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landscape.  By resisting the urge to offer definitive or rigid relationships between various more or less contemporary spaces within the ancient world, she resists the temptation to extend a valuable analysis of ways of viewing to specific acts of viewing.  In doing so, she both unpacks the act of viewing (and responding to) ancient art and architecture, and allows it to persist as an essentially ambiguous phenomenon resistant to even our most deeply positivist desire to essentialize.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 11/12/2010 09:20:42 AM ----BODY: <p>It's cold today, but sunny.  In other words, it's a perfect fall day for quick hits and varia:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/i-am-a-bloggerno-longer/66223/">Marc Ambinder on why he no longer blogs</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/iHerodotus">Herodotus is now tweeting here</a>. <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/itweetus">A Roman soldier invading Britain tweets here</a>.</li> <li>Yale published its 900+ page<em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/anthology-of-rap/oclc/601348010"> Anthology of Rap</a></em> this week.  <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2272926/">Check out the Slate review</a> and <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2010/11/04/131063935/listening-to-theanthology-of-rap">what NPR has to say</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Audio-Tech-TherapyWired/125229/">Universities and technologies according Kevin Kelly of </a><em><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Audio-Tech-Therapy-Wired/125229/">Wired </a></em><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Audio-Tech-TherapyWired/125229/">fame</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://app.mobilehistorycleveland.org/">Cleveland Historical now has a App complements</a> of <a href="http://csudigitalhumanities.org/">The Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University</a>.  How cool is that?</li> <li><a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/courses/mamsc">University College, London now has a one year MA/MSc in Digital Humanities</a>.</li>

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<li><a href="http://jobs.uiowa.edu/faculty/view/58610">Classics, Religion, and Digital Humanities job at Iowa</a>.</li> <li>I used <a href="http://www.zamzar.com/">Zamzar </a>to convert a paper that a student submitted as a .wps file to something that a computer made in the 21st century could read.  It worked just as advertised.</li> <li><a href="http://www.life.com/image/ugc1142761/in-gallery/51881/jfkunpublished-never-seen-photos">Some unpublished photos of JFK, now published</a>.</li> <li>I was on the front page of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies</a> webpage this past week thanks to my friends at <em><a href="http://www.atypon-link.com/ASCS/loi/hesp">Hesperia</a></em>.</li> </ul> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="ASCSAHomePage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5cb44f7970b -pi" border="0" alt="ASCSAHomePage.jpg" width="400" height="235" /></p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/11/the-times-paywall-andnewsletter-economics/">Clay Shirky's rather unfavorable assessment of the Times of London's pay wall experiment</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.formula1.com/">The last Formula 1 race of the year is this weekend. Let's see if Mark Weber can pull it off</a>.</li> <li>What I'm listening to: Scott H. Biram, Lo-Fi Mojo.</li> <li>What I'm reading: David Harvey,<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/spaces-of-hope/oclc/43755292"> Spaces of Hope</a>. (Berkeley 2000).</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology and QR Codes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: archaeology-and-qr-codes CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/11/2010 07:42:32 AM ----BODY: <p>My wife recently attended a conference on marketing and higher education hosted in part by Google. There as a low buzz about QR codes at the conference. For those who don't know, QR codes are funny-looking, square bar codes, and QR stands for "quick read". They are designed to be read by little applications on a mobile phone that use the phone's camera like a bar code reader.  QR codes

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are most frequently used to display a URL (a web address), but they can contain a number, a v-card, or even instruction to send a tweet to a twitter account.  Over the past year, QR codes have moved into mainstream marketing, appeared in popular culture (e.g. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frv6FOt1BNI">a Kyle Minogue video</a>!), and have even attracted <a href="http://www.rcet.org/geohistorian/">the interest of academics</a>.</p> <p>I've been thinking about QR codes for<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/fr iday-varia-and-quick-hits-2.html"> six months now</a>. Yesterday, I had a great chat yesterday with a colleague from our Working Group in Digital and New Media, and we began bandying about ways to use QR codes on campus to install art, historical information, subversive (in a polite North Dakota way) messages, and challenges to the barrier between the internet and real space on campus.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: 0px initial initial;" title="QR_Code.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5c3027e970b -pi" border="0" alt="QR_Code.jpg" width="450" height="450" /></p> <p>After the conversation, I struggled a bit to understand what made using QR codes unique or interesting.  On the one hand, I understood that they are a gimmick and fad, but that didn't bother me.  I like gimmicks and fads. (After all, I love the interwebs!). Finally, after I mulled over this discussion ever more, I realized that I like QR codes because they are archaeological.  Here's how I am thinking about them:</p> <p>1. They are mysterious and demand action.  Like an archaeological artifact (imagine a sherd of pottery), QR codes beg to be understood or contextualized.  They demand action on the part of the viewer or, at least, the viewer who recognizes a QR code as something to be deciphered.  Just as an archaeologist is almost compelled to figure out the context for an artifact (and anyone who has ever walked across an archaeological site or any complex landscape with an archaeologist knows how powerful disciplinary training can be!), people "in the know" feel compelled to scan and understand a QR code.  In fact, if you don't read the code, the QR code is meaningless.</p> <p>2. Codes are objects. The form of a QR code communicates meaning. Like most archaeological objects, a QR code does not communicate in an explicitly textual way (except in the sense that all objects can be read as types of texts).  Within the discourse of archaeology and, presumably, QR code-ology, the form of the object prompts the action required to understand it. Archaeologists are obsessed with the materiality of objects - shape, texture, size, weight -  and recognize that to produce meaning, it is necessary to compare one object to another to create a context for archaeological material and, ultimately, to create meaning. QR codes have the same material character. Codes are things which must be understood in a non-textual way and placed within a particular context to produce meaning.  Only people familiar with the code and who recognize the action required will understand the message.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="ArchObject.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5c3028b970b -pi" border="0" alt="ArchObject.jpg" width="450" height="300" /></p> <p>3. The are mobile.  Like many artifacts in an archaeological context, a QR code is mobile meaning that there is tension between its present physical context and its the meaning embedded (by the code's creator) in its form.  In archaeology we like to think about formation processes; these are the processes that led to an object being discovered by an archaeologist in a particular place or condition.  Formation processes recognize our environment as constantly changing and almost infinitely mutable. A QR code printed on a sheet of paper,

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or a sticker, or t-shirt can travel from one place to the next while still retaining a formal link to another context. ¬†Even if a QR code is designed for a particular place and time, because they are material and mobile, they will travel and endure.</p> <p>4. Codes provide a link between the real and the virtual. ¬†As a historian I spend much of my time in a "virtual" environment girded about by the rules of my discipline and embedded deep within my imagination. The past is something that obeys particular rules and, in a particular sense, does not exist except within my imagination. ¬†At the same time, as an archaeologist, I am constantly challenged to recognize the past as real by the physical nature of archaeological artifacts. ¬†QR¬†Codes can bridge this same gap between the virtual world of the internet and the physical world of the code itself. ¬†The real world context of the code creates a physical point of departure into the virtual world of the internet. ¬†In short, the code locates the internet in physical space.</p> <p>QR codes are easy to generate through any number of sites on the internet. (<a href="http://2d-code.co.uk/qr-code-generators/">Here's a basic list</a>.) ¬†And most mobile phones have QR code reader applications available for them. ¬†Phones with better browsers, of course, provide access to far more robust content.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.117.115.102 URL: http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 11/11/2010 12:10:32 PM Hi Bill, They are quite cool, aren't they? They are like a portal point between worlds your point 4. They could link between material culture and the virtual reality created by archaeologists and historians as they 'create' the past... I'm introducing them to my digital history students in the next few weeks... a few years ago, I tried imagining how I might use them in teaching practice; so an opportunity to put into practice! <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/the-past-presentaugmented-historical-reality-a-lesson-plansketch/">http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/the-past-presentaugmented-historical-reality-a-lesson-plan-sketch/</a> ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Vincent EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 118.210.229.150

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URL: http://www.talkingpyramids.com DATE: 11/11/2010 03:25:04 PM What ever happened to Sema codes? It seems there's been a battle between Sema and QR codes over the past couple of years, much like in the old days of Betacord vs VHS. Many companies were using Sema codes a few years ago and it seems they were going to be huge. Then along came QR codes and as they gained in popularity Sema codes seem to have fallen by the wayside. Are Sema codes the betacord of our day? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Vigla at Pyla-Koutsopetria STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: vigla-at-pyla-koutsopetria CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 11/10/2010 07:33:20 AM ----BODY: <p>This past week, I've started to write up a formal description and analysis of the fortification on Vigla at the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus.  While we were not able to date the walls precisely, despite excavating several sections, it seems most likely that fortifications date to the Hellenistic period.  The settlement at the site appears to date earlier with Iron Age and Classical material present.  Moreover, excavations in 2008 revealed that the fortification wall cut through an earlier building at the site.</p> <p>The site itself does not appear in any textual sources for the island, and it clearly lacked any documented civic status.  As a result, Vigla represents another example of a rural fortified site that stands outside the main narrative of the island's history.  From the start, we have speculated that the site at Vigla could be a mercenary garrison camp, built quickly for a particular group of Ptolemeic mercenaries stationed on the island during the 3rd or 4th century BC.  The site could also represent a refuge for a local population whose position so near the coast would have exposed them to possible attach during the unsettled Hellenistic period. Scholars have offered similar explanations for similar rural fortifications from Greece.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488dbc1da970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="450" height="326" /></p> <p>The body of rural fortifications in Cyprus is far smaller.  Claire Balandier in her dissertation (and a series of articles in the <em>RDAC</em> in 2000, 2002, and 2003 and <a href="http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/dha_07557256_2002_num_28_1_2501">elsewhere</a>) has collected evidence for just a handful of rural fortification on the same scale of the fortifications at Vigla.  The most notable among these rural fortified sites is Paleocastro on the Kormakiti peninsula in Kyrenia district (in the North).  The Italians documented the site over several campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s as

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part of a project focusing on the landscape of the Kormakiti peninsula near Ayia Irini (the fortification at Paleocastro might be associated with the ancient anchorage of <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0006:ent ry=melabron&amp;highlight=melabron">Melabron</a>).  Work was interrupted by the invasion of 1974, but preliminary results were published, including a good plan, is <em>RIASA</em> 19/20 (1972/73), 7-120.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Paleocastro.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5bbbcaf970b -pi" border="0" alt="Paleocastro.jpg" width="450" height="366" /></p> <p style="text-align: left;">The site is  larger than the fortified area of Vigla, but situated in a similar way.  The fortified settlement stands on a slight rise over the coast and has a gate on its inland side protected by towers.  Vigla stands on a more prominent height (<a href="http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/59224/">check out Vigla in gigapan</a>), overlooks a likely ancient harbor, and is accessed through its more highly fortified inland side.  The settlement at Paleocastro shows signs of Archaic or Classical origins and then disappears by the 2nd century AD.  The fortification wall appear to be Hellenistic.</p> <p style="text-align: left;">Stay tuned for more work to document, contextualize, and understand Vigla.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Byzantine Pottery from Sagalassos STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: byzantine-pottery-from-sagalassos CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 11/09/2010 07:31:08 AM ----BODY: <p>I was pretty surprise to see an article entitled "<a href="http://www.atyponlink.com/ASCS/doi/abs/10.2972/hesp.79.3.423">Middle-Late Byzantine Pottery from Sagalassos: Typo-Chronology and Sociocultural Interpretation</a>" in the very recent <em>Hesperia</em> (A.K. Vionis, J. Poblome, B. De Cupere, M. Waelkens, <em>Hesperia </em>79 (2010), 423-464).  It's not so much that the subject matter is late, but that the site of Sagalassos is a Belgian project in Turkey rather than an American project in Greece.  As some of my more observant friends pointed out, Hesperia has published the results of project from Albania,

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so maybe this should not have caught be so off guard.  But it did and it indicates to me that<em> Hesperia</em> is continuing to expand its purview to include the wider world of Mediterranean archaeology. Hooray!</p> <p>The article on the Middle-Late Byzantine material from Sagalassos is pretty cool as well.  The main focus of the article is on a series of 12th-13th century layers from the Alexander Hill at the site of Sagalassos.  Over three seasons of excavation, the excavators uncovered the remains of a "heavily burned" destruction layer containing the remains of a short-lived occupation containing a significant and robust quantity of 12th-13th century Byzantine pottery.  This layer appears to represent the final phase of activity on this dramatic hill overlooking the ancient site of Sagalassos.  Early occupation on the hill included a 5th-6th century basilica that was almost completely removed and a later "refuge" of some description with a fortification wall and a substantial cistern.  Apparently the church was almost completely dismantled for the construction of the later refuge. The final destruction layer, which seems to represent the final layer of occupation, may represent an effort to dismantle the refuge to prevent it from being used again.</p> <p>While the site history of the Alexander Hill is pretty interesting (particularly the dismantling of the church), the real meat of the article is in the analysis of the ceramic assemblage from the final layer.  While I would like to have understood the sampling method the produced the assemblage, the authors nevertheless conduct a rigorous and thorough examination of the material and take into account both "common ware" (which we would call medium coarse, coarse, and kitchen/cooking ware in chronotype terminology) and glazed table wares (fine and and semi-fine wares in our terminology).  Some of the glazed wares were repaired indicating that the objects had significant value to their owners.  The presence of repaired pots in an assemblage associated with the destruction of the site, however, suggests (to me at least) that these vessels were either discarded by the last occupants of the refuge or brought to the site by work crews commissioned to destroy or salvage the remains of the site. I wish the article had made considered more thoroughly the formation processes at play in the creation of the assemblage from the burned layer including the possible nature of activities at the final occupation phase of the site.  If these materials were left by work crews (like the material associated with the final phase of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/ko urion-and-aba.html">activity at Kourion</a>), then the diet, ceramics used, and social standing of the individuals could suggest a different assemblage from that left behind by a family.</p> <p>Despite the origin of the pottery in a layer associated with the site's destruction and short term occupation, they regard the material as sufficient diverse to qualify as a use assemblage and, therefore, suitable for making larger arguments for the nature of Byzantine cooking practices, diet, and the circulation of Byzantine glazed pottery and utility ware forms.  This was all supported by residue analysis of individual vessels and the quantitative analysis of the entire assemblage.  Apparently the individuals at Sagalassos ate more beef and game than their Late Roman predecessors (who preferred lamb and goat).  Pretty neat stuff.</p> <p>The article places the material from the assemblage at Sagalassos in the context of the Byzantine Eastern Mediterranean and it will be really useful as we look to document a site with a similar history at Polis in Cyprus.  The material present at Sagalassos has comparanda both on Cyprus and, unsurprisingly, at Corinth in Greece where the study of Byzantine pottery has long held pride of place.  The careful publication of an assemblage from a site like Sagalassos expands the base of evidence for the further study of Byzantine

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pottery.  The appearance of an article like this in <em>Hesperia </em>should show scholars that there are high-quality journals prepared and willing to publish similar papers.</p> <p>P.S. Lest you think that I'm just a blogger, you'll notice that David Pettegrew, Sarah James, and I also have an article in this volume: "<a href="http://www.atypon-link.com/ASCS/doi/abs/10.2972/hesp.79.3.385">Towers and Fortifications at Vayia in the Southeast Corinthia</a>," <em>Hesperia</em> 79 (2010), 385-415.<em> </em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Artifact Level Analysis and Places of History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: artifact-level-analysis-and-places-of-history CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 11/08/2010 07:40:58 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last few weeks, I've been working with <a href="http://corinthianmatters.com/">David Pettegrew</a> to finish writing the analysis of the survey data from the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> (PKAP).  Followers of this blog know that this work is a long a term project and involves challenges both on the level of analysis but also organization and description.  In other words, we've been working to figure out both how to interpret our survey results, but also how do we organize and describe this data in way that is useful to scholars who are likely to ask different questions from the one's that our survey set out to consider.</p> <p>The biggest challenge is moving from the highly granular, artifact level analysis of individual groups of pot sherds to the level of historical time and space.  After all, very few important things happened in the space of a pot sherd or in a time framed absolutely by the life-span or production cycle of an individual vessel.  It is essential to aggregate sherds, space, and time in order to produce historical arguments.  The chronological ranges for artifacts through time depend, in particular, on our understanding of ceramic typologies based on the fabric, shape, and in some cases decoration.  These the chronology assigned to these various typologies are not necessarily meaningful in a historical sense and can be quite individualize to particular objects.</p>

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<p>In other words, artifact level analysis is separate from the process of interpreting artifacts across the survey area as chronologically and historically meaningful groups.  Part of the interpretive process involves grouping artifacts together into more or less contemporary groups of object.  This process involves judgement on our part and cannot be applied in the same way across the entire assemblage.</p> <p>As an example, our analysis of material representing activity across our site from the Classical to Hellenistic (BC 475 to BC 100) periods involves artifacts dated to at least 8 different, overlapping chronological ranges: ArchaicClassical, Archaic-Hellenistic, Classical, Classical-Hellenistic, ClassicalRoman, Hellenistic, Hellenistic-Early Roman, and Protogeometric-Hellenistic.  In contrast, our analysis of activities on our site from the Roman period involves artifacts dated to three chronological ranges: Roman, Early Roman, and Late Roman.  Our ceramicist established the date ranges for individual artifacts largely based upon dates established through stratigraphic excavation and completely independent from our interpretation of the site as a whole.  It is common for individual classes of artifacts to receive have different chronological ranges. A sherd from a cooking ware pot might represent a vessel-type produced over a 500 year periods (say, any time during the Classical-Hellenistic period), whereas a fragment of fine ware might derive from a vessel produced during a 4 or 5 decade span of time (say, the early 4th century).  Each of the objects receives a different date and chronological range when documented in the survey area. As a very general rule, utility wares tend to be produced over longer spans of time than fine and table wares, but this has no necessary impact on how and when they were used.</p> <p>The process of interpreting the artifacts documented by our ceramicist involves us aggregating these objects into chronologically, functionally, and spatially meaningful groups.  Past human activities took place in particular spaces and made use of object produced at different times and for different functions. To produce a picture of what happened in the past at our site that has meaning within these human terms, it is necessary to group together material with different date ranges into assemblages that have meaning in human terms.</p> <p>For example, here are various maps showing some of the periods aggregated to produce our analysis of the Classical to Hellenistic period at our site:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488cdb24f970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="400" height="400" />Archaic-Classical Period</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488cdb25d970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="400" height="400" />Classical Period</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5ad9dbb970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="400" height="400" />ClassicalHellenistic Period</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5ad9ddc970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="400" height="400" />Classical-Roman Period</p>

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<p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488cdb27f970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="400" height="400" />Hellenistic Period</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5ad9df1970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="400" height="400" />Hellenistic-Early Roman Period</p> <p style="text-align: left;">To understand trends at our site from Classical to Hellenistic period, the data contained in each of these maps must be analyzed together.  Occupants at our site may have used coarse ware datable only to the Classical-Roman period alongside table wares dated more narrowly to the Classical period.  The Classical period table ware may have represented a households investment in public display, the same household may have stored their agricultural wealth in a series of amphoras that have forms and fabrics used for over 500 years.  To establish the potential spatial relationship between these two activities in an archaeological setting, it is necessary to plot artifacts assigned to different chronological ranges across our site in order to produce assemblages that reflect historical activities.</p> <p style="text-align: left;">This task is central to the analysis of artifact level survey data and is the key interpretive move in mediating between the results of archaeological work and historical events in the past.  Our goal as we work to prepare this kind of analysis for publication is to keep this interpretative move as transparent as possible.  Transparency, while sometimes tedious for the reader, opens our analysis for critique on both evidentiary and methodological grounds and reinforced the idea that archaeologists <em>produce</em> the landscape that they interpret.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 11/05/2010 09:24:02 AM ----BODY: <p>A lovely fall day here in Grand Forks, so here are a little gaggle of quick hits and varia:</p> <ul>

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<li>This is <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Advising-theStruggling/125198/">a pretty nice little piece about advising graduate students</a>.</li> <li>This is <a href="http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/outmywindow/">a great interactive video project on life in the Global Highrise</a>.</li> <li>The <a href="http://nsse.iub.edu/html/annual_results.cfm">2010 National Survey of Student Engagement is out</a>.</li> <li>A <a href="http://projectinfolit.org/">nice report on how students evaluate research information</a>.</li> <li>The <a href="http://case.typepad.com/case_social_media/2010/10/northdakota.html">Univer sity of North Dakota and social media: A Soft Yes</a>.</li> <li>More<a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/social_media_a nd_the_department"> social media at the departmental level</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume45/Str eamsofContentLimitedAttenti/213923">Even more on social media</a>.</li> <li>This is <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/australia-v-sri-lanka2010/engine/current/match/446958.html">pretty depressing cricket</a> (at least from an Australian standpoint).</li> <li>What I'm reading: Laura Salah Nasrallah, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/christian-responses-to-roman-art-andarchitecture-the-second-century-church-amid-the-spaces-ofempire/oclc/417444878"><em>Christian Responses to Roman Art and Culture</em></a>. Cambridge 2010 (via Dimitri Nakassis)</li> <li>What I'm listening to: Clinic, <em>Bubblegum</em> (via Kostis Kourelis)</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: The (Teaching) Revolution will not be Blogged STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: the-teaching-revolution-will-not-be-blogged CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/04/2010 07:29:11 AM ----BODY: <p><em>X-posted to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.</em></p>

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<p><em>This blog post is an effort to understand the fairly lackadaisical interest in participating in the Teaching Thursday blog among my colleagues at the University of North Dakota.  It got me thinking about the nature of teaching conversations and whether they are suitable to a blog.</em></p> <p>Anyone who follows the happenings on the internets is probably familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's recent article in the October 4 <em>New Yorker</em>: "<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?curre ntPage=1">Small Changer: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted</a>".  In this article, he argued that the connections produced by such social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are "weak ties" which are unlikely to hold up to the kind of social pressures that real revolutionary action will both require and endure.  He begins his article with the students who participated in the revolutionary Greenboro sit-in of 1960 and noted that the four participants had deep social connections as roommates at North Carolina A &amp; T or as friends from highschool. These social connections, characterized by regular physical proximity to one another and a significant body of shared experiences, enabled these four brave students to have the confidence to imagine radical ideas and to maintain their resolve in the face of adversity.</p> <p>Other pundits, like Clay Shirky, have challenged the idea that such dedication is necessary to generate revolutionary change.  Shirky, particularly in his most recent book <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/cognitivesurplus-creativity-and-generosity-in-a-connected-age/oclc/466335766">Cognitive Surplus</a></em>, has argued that the internet and social media sites become conduits funneling myriad rivulets of surplus energies together making the great deluge of internet knowledge possible (manifest in sites like Wikipedia and The YouTubes).</p> <p>These two positions intersect with the mission of this blog.  The idea for this blog was to capture the hundreds of short (and long!), thoughtful, creative, conversations about teaching that go on weekly across campus into a central place.  The hope was that the blog could become an alternative source for stimulation for busy colleagues who missed <a href="http://webapp.und.edu/dept/oid/programsEvents/onTeachingLunchSeminars.php" >a great program offered by our Office of Instructional Development</a> or were not in the hallway at the second two colleagues were unpacking a tricky issue or did not have a moment to read the newest book that presents a new solution to the latest problem. Over the last three months, I extended this effort to Twitter once again trying to funnel energy and ideas from across campus into a single conduit.</p> <p>Follow us on Twitter at <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/OIDatUND">OIDatUND</a>!</p> <p>So far, the blog has had its moments, but they have been few and far between.  Over the last three months, I've been promised many, many blog posts, but always "in the spring semester" when, of course, the songbirds return, the snow melts, and other obligations drift away on the first warm, scented breeze.  I expect that some of these posts will come to enliven our blog, but even these contributions (which I know will be excellent), do not really represent even a fraction of the exciting conversations I have had about teaching.  Of course, we are all busy, all of the time, and finding time to write is a challenge.</p> <p>Having read Gladwell's article, I began to wonder whether the experiences of teaching actually resist blogging as a medium for communication. Perhaps this is because so much teaching on campus represents spontaneous responses to spontaneous issues.  Could it be that our day-to-day teaching activities - a troubled student, a particularly bad classroom experience, or a brilliantly successful assignment - all exist within such a complex matrix of variables that communicating how something succeeded or failed in writing would be either a

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monumental task unsuited to the limited medium of blogging or somehow impossible to articulate in a useful, generalized way?</p> <p>In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that understanding how to become a better teacher is impossible through public reflection -- obviously the research conducted by various academic departments in teaching and learning have both real practical value and a robust disciplinary tradition -- but to wonder whether many of us on campus do not think about teaching in a way that lends itself to even the modest structure of a blog post.  Teaching is an emotional experience full of frustration and excitement as we join the struggle to achieve goals that, in most case, are very difficult to articulate.  Of course, we can all enumerate formal learning objectives, classroom goals, content expectations, and the like, but I wonder whether these are the things that really motivate us as teachers.  For me, teaching is about realizing goals that extend far beyond the classroom.  These goals are resistant to clear quantitative or even qualitative evaluation and they often exist at the fringes of my ability of articulate them in a rational way at all.</p> <p>In short, maybe this blogging experiment reveals the limitations of media dependent on the kinds of "weak ties" that Gladwell assigns to Facebook friends and Twitter colleagues.  Face-to-face meetings, intimate seminars, conversations over strong beverages, and hallway insights depend upon the strong ties of shared experience to have value.  Extracted from that context, everything seems mundane and hardly stuff that matters.  The teaching revolution will not be blogged.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Book Reviews and the Blog: A Case Study STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: book-reviews-and-the-blog-a-case-study CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/03/2010 06:31:10 AM ----BODY: <p>About 10 months ago, I blogged about Ann Marie Yasin's new(ish) book, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/saints-and-church-spaces-in-the-lateantique-mediterranean-architecture-cult-andcommunity/oclc/422764940&amp;referer=brief_results">Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean</a></em>.  I offered a quick review of it, mostly centered on a series of hastily composed observations.</p>!

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<p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/sa ints-and-church-spaces.html">Here's a link to that quick review</a>.</p>! <p>This summer, I was asked to review the book for real, in a print journal, one that appears in paper, and goes to libraries. ¬†This is the first time that I was asked to review for real something I had already reviewed in the old blog.</p>! <p>Here's that review:</p>! <p><a style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sansserif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; display: block; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Yasin Review Oct2010 on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/40841124/Yasin-Review-Oct2010">Yasin Review Oct2010</a> ! <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" width="100%" height="600">! <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" />! <param name="wmode" value="opaque" />! <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />! <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />! <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" />! <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=40841124&amp;access_key=key217qla75xbrm3huuol9r&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" /> <embed id="doc_588026590882095" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%" height="600" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=40841124&amp;access _key=key-217qla75xbrm3huuol9r&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" name="doc_588026590882095" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#ffffff"></embed>! </object>! </p>! <p>For people who struggle to wrap their minds around the difference between a blog and a formal print publication, perhaps these two reviews will shine some light on the issue. ¬†I think that there are subtle changes in style, content, and tone. ¬†As I was writing my blog post, I considered my audience to be someone who might read the book one day. ¬†When I wrote the print review, my audience became someone who was unlikely to read the book ever.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 153.42.40.246 URL: DATE: 11/04/2010 09:50:58 AM I was curious about your concluding comment here: "As I was writing my blog post, I considered my audience to be someone who might read the book one day.

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When I wrote the print review, my audience became someone who was unlikely to read the book ever." Why do you think your printed blog would not encourage anyone to read the book? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/04/2010 01:50:13 PM Somehow, I totally agree with the last statement. The printed book review genre has, in many ways, become the cheat sheet. I do this all the time. Blogging, on the other, hand has a different optimism. There is always an imagined next click. As a personal choice, blogging a book review gives it emotional credence. The print review, on the other hand, enters a different cultural medium. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill Caraher EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.192.180 URL: http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/ DATE: 11/04/2010 03:27:53 PM David,! ! I think what I mean is that if I bother to write about a book on my blog, I am implying that the book has interested or excited me in some way. A review for a journal is part of a larger scholarly project. I review books for academic journals with the assumption that my interest and excitement is personal and does not represent a universal attitude toward a work of scholarship.! ! Bill! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Curt Emanuel EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 75.205.132.11 URL: http://medievalhistorygeek.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/06/2010 09:39:27 PM Academic reviews are pretty important to me when I'm considering whether to buy a book or not. In the case of Yasin, your blog comments interested me enough to recently seriously consider buying it (as you are an Academic in the field I felt this qualified as sufficient endorsement from someone qualified to make it). I have a pretty detailed method of determining what to buy - there are always more than I have reading time or money for. Academic reviews are an essential piece of that. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Comparison Between a Survey Assemblage and an Excavation Assemblage STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-comparison-between-a-survey-assemblage-and-an-excavation-assemblage

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CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 11/02/2010 07:14:04 AM ----BODY: <p></p> <p>For the past few months, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/ev en-more-experiments-in-intensive-pedestrian-survey.html">David Pettegrew and I have been "publishing" the preliminary results of some experimental analysis conducted over the past year</a> at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project on Cyprus</a>.&nbsp; As part of the experimental component to our project we were interested in documenting the relationship between the surface assemblage and the assemblage of material produced by excxavation <p>The archaeological fieldwork conducted on the elevated height of Vigla provided us with an opportunity to compare assemblages produced by intensive pedestrian survey and the excavation of a trench in the survey area. <p>Longstanding critiques of survey have suggested that the relationship between the surface assemblage and the subsurface material is too problematic for survey to be a technique used to produce a comprehensive view of the landscape. While it is true that there are more variables in the formation processes that impact the creation of a surface assemblage, we should be aware of the potential for a false dichotomy. Excavated assemblages are every bit as much a product of formation processes as those on the surface and as a result, we always have to temper our interpretation of past events with the understanding of the archaeological record as the product of a whole range of physical and cultural transformations. The goal of this comparison then is not to test the surface assemblage against the subsurface material, but rather to suggest that their correspondence indicates that the area may have endured similar archaeological processes. <p>As with all of our experimental units, the comparison is influenced by significant differences in the spatial comparison between the two sample areas. The surface area of our trench EU 8 represented only 6 sq meters; The two survey units 500 and 500.1 combined to covere over 6000 sq m. Any comparison of area, however, is problematic; the trench had volume and the relatively two-dimensional surface of the survey area did not. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488a6ae55970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="SurveyAndExcavation" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488a6ae5b970c -pi" width="420" height="462"></a>&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>The excavation unit produced significantly more ceramic material. The excavation unit produced over 4000 artifacts. By comparison, we counted anywhere from 366 to close to 1000 artifacts from our survey of various areas on the top of Vigla (depending on surface conditions and the number of walkers available), and these samples allowed us to estimate an overall artifact density of between 15,000 – 11,000 artifacts per ha. These are astronomical densities by any reckoning. <p>While we counted every artifact visible in our 20% sample of the surface, we collected artifacts using the chronotype sampling strategy which required us only to collect each unique type of sherd from each swath.&nbsp; Using this technique in two campaigns of field walking on Vigla, we collected 963 artifacts with a weight of 27.6 kg.&nbsp; In contrast, we collected and analyzed every artifact from the excavation area and this resulted in over 4000 artifacts, but this assemblage weighed less than 10 kgs more (37.0 kg) than the assemblage collected

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from survey. <p>The nature of the chronotype sampling method used in the survey makes it difficult to find a metric to compare the quantity of material collected from the survey against the quantity of material collected from excavated contexts. The key point for evaluating the correspondence between the two assemblages is not necessarily the quantities of material but rather the presence or absence of material indicating particular activity, periods, or material types present in the area. <p>Comparing the period date between the two collection strategies reveals that the survey collection produced more chronotype period categories (16 compared to 14) and nine of the periods represented in the survey assemblage were also represented in the excavation assemblage. In general, the survey material represented a longer chronological range with material from later periods present on the surface including material from the Late Roman, Medieval-Modern, and Modern periods. The excavated area, in contrast, produced more material from narrower periods and at least one object from a period earlier than those represented in the survey, a sherd potentially dating to the Bronze Age (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/10/br oad-period-artifacts-and-survey-analysis-quantifying-what-you-dontknow.html">for more on broad and narrow periods, see here</a>). This artifact appears to pre-date the earliest phases of architecture present in our trenches and may not represent a past activity on the site. In general, the material from both the survey and the excavation overlap, but the excavation material offered slightly more chronological resolution than the material from the survey. <p>The diversity of chronological periods in the survey material would appear to extend to the chronotypes represented in each unit. The excavation produced 54 chronotypes, while the survey unit produced 57. There are 30 overlapping chronotypes between the two collection methods. While the different sampling techniques make it difficult to compare the assemblages in a meaningful way, the quantity of material from each area nevertheless provides a very basic matrix for comparing the relative quantity of various types of material from each unit. The survey and excavation both produce a significant number of artifacts from the three rather general chronotypes: 'Coarse ware, ancient historic', 'medium coarse ware ancient historic', 'kitchen ware ancient historic'.&nbsp; The excavation also produced a significant proportion of material from two additional chronotype that were poorly represented in the surface assemblage: 'animal bone' and 'fineware, Hellenistic-Roman, Early' which made up 6.6% and 5.5% of the excavated material respectively, but less than 1% of the material from the survey. The absence of animal bone on the surface of the ground could be an issue with visibility (white and tan bones do not stand out as well against the buff colored soil) and certainly preservation.&nbsp; <p>It is notably harder to compare the potential range of activities present in the area. The chronotype method of collection privileges larger, better preserved sherds (walkers will often discard small or poorly preserved sherds if they find larger examples of the same chronotype). It also tends to under represent very common chronotypes in proportion to the total assemblage. In other words, there are fewer examples of chronotypes such as “medium coarse body sherd, ancient historic” in the survey sample in part because field walkers were instructed not collect multiple examples of this very common type of artifact. In the excavation, excavators collected every example of a “medium coarse body sherd ancient-historic” causing sherds of this type to make up a larger proportion of the total assemblage. <p>This tendency can be seen in the relative size of artifacts collected from the survey and excavation. From the survey, the collected artifacts were much larger and this probably reflects both our field walkers’ tendency to select larger sherds more frequently than smaller sherds for collection and the difficulty seeing the smallest sherds on the ground from

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a standing posture. These two tendencies combined to produce an average survey artifact weight almost 30 g as compared to the average size of an excavation sherd that was under 9 g. <p>The fabric groups present show some significant differences in the assemblage that we can largely trace to different sampling strategies. The survey unit preserved more coarse ware (47%) whereas the majority of material from the excavated unit was medium coarse ware. The weight of the two fabric groups as a percent of the total assemblage sheds more light on the situation. Medium Coarse wares from the excavation represented 53% by volume, but only 22% of the assemblage by weight. In fact, the average weight of a medium coarse ware sherd is less than 4 grams. In other words, many of the medium coarse fragments of pottery from the excavation are quite small, and these sherds are the most likely to be overlooked during survey. Cooking/kitchen ware, coarse ware, and amphora represented the other significant parts of the excavation assemblage. As the chart below indicates the percentage of weight is significantly different from the proportions determined by counts. In weight amphora and coarse wares combine to make up the majority of material. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488a6ae6b970 c-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5865739970b -pi" width="400" height="180"></a> </p> <p>The material from survey shows different proportion, but these proportions are significantly biased by our sampling technique that suppressed the collection of redundant artifacts. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5865748970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5865757970b -pi" width="400" height="170"></a> </p> <p>Coarse ware is the most common fabric group by quantity and makes up the majority of material by weight. Amphora sherds, which tended to be handles or very large body sherds, represent a massive quantity by weight, but significantly lower percentage by quantity. The opposite is true of medium coarse ware and kitchen/cooking ware. <p>Similar tendencies are visible from rim-base-handle-sherd analysis (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/so me-notes-on-rbhs-analysis-of-the-pyla-koutsopetria-survey-data.html">for more on R-B-H-S Analysis, see here</a>).&nbsp; <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488a6ae87970 c-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488a6ae95970c -pi" width="400" height="265"></a> </p> <p align="left">The results of this comparison suggest that for the height of Vigla the most major differences between the assemblage produced by survey and that produced by excavation are tied to the different sampling strategies used in these different contexts. At the same time, the basic patterns present in the survey assemblage were also present in the assemblage from the excavation.&nbsp; The presence of material from the Classical and Hellenistic period, the presence of fine ware, kitchen/cooking ware, and utility wares, and the almost complete absence of earlier material allows us to argue that the site was first occupied in the Archaic to Classical period, saw domestic activities, and then was used less intensively in later periods.&nbsp; This close correlation of survey and excavation assemblages reflects, in part, the stability of the soils on Vigla and the relative lack of erosion, on the one hand, and the lack of intensive

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activity during later periods, on the other.&nbsp; In other words, the surface assemblage and excavation assemblage enjoyed similar sets of formation processes which produced similar assemblages.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Brief Review of CLIR and Tufts: Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classics STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: brief-review-of-clir-and-tufts-rome-wasnt-digitized-in-a-day-buildinga-cyberinfrastructure-for-digital-classics CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 11/01/2010 07:32:07 AM ----BODY: <p>This weekend, I finally made it through t<a href="http://www.clir.org/activities/details/infrastructure.html">he most recent report on cyberinfrastructure and digital Classics</a>.  As the title of this post indicates, it was produced by the Council on Library and Information Resources and Tufts University, a longtime leader in the field of digital Classics.  The report is massive, running to over 250 pages, and gives a feeling of exhaustiveness.  The bulk of the report consists of a series of case-studies organized into the various allied- and sub-disiplines of Classics (Philology, Archaeology, Papyrology, Epigraphy, Prosopography, et c.).  For most case-studies there is abundant technical detail as well as some information on the guiding principals of the project, intended end-users, funding sources, and institutional affiliation. There is a pronounced emphasis on the core area of Classics and the analysis of texts of various kinds (inscribed, on papyrus, in edition, et c.), and with this emphasis on texts comes a corresponding emphasis on mark-up technology, collaborative editing, and various image-to-text initiatives like Greek and Latin OCR.  The report's scope, detail, organization and bibliography make it a must read for anyone interested in the work of digital humanities, digital Classics, or the future of the discipline Classics.  It is the type of report that any graduate student going on the job market should at least skim to become familiar with the basic terms, programs, and projects in the field of digital Classics.</p> <p>While I am hardly qualified to comment on the content of the report, a few things struck me as worth pointing out:</p> <p>1. New models of collaboration for new kinds of texts.  The most exciting thing about this report are the new perspectives on scholarly collaboration. At the center of these new perspectives are a set of new tools and collaborative

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environments which are designed to produce new kinds of texts.  In general, these texts are dynamic, multilayered, and designed to take into account both the work of numerous contributors. The next generation of scholarly editions, for example, will be increasingly transparent allow the end user to understand the processes that produced certain editorial decisions and, if necessary, filter the various editorial decisions to produce new versions of a text in keeping with new analytical, interpretative, or methodological positions. The same collaborative environment extends to epigraphy, papyrology, and even archaeology (in some way) where scholars have developed ways to work together to pool resources from around the world and to create new groups of texts. These new collections of texts are born digital, making specialized bodies of material (like epigraphical and papyrological corpora) more widely available, and more susceptible to re-analysis and re-interpretation.  The scalability of digital technology allows multiple scholars, a wide-range range of end-users, and diverse digital objects (texts, images, and interpretative methods) to all exist in the same place at the same time. These are new, transparent, and productive scholarly environments.</p> <p>2. Human infrastructure.  There is no doubt that the projects described in this report are exciting, but I felt that the report took the notion of cyberinfrastructure a bit too literally at times.  In places the projects described by the CRIL and Tufts teams stood strangely disembodied from larger social, institutional, and professional pressures and incentives. While the report made an obligatory mention of studies of scholarly collaboration, professional pressures, and potential end-users, I was not as easily able to grasp the creative environments from which these innovative programs sprung.  In particular, I struggled to identify the research questions or, more broadly, the scholarly discourse that inspired these new approaches to age old problems.  I recognize, of course, that large-scale digital initiatives often take into account a wide range of initiatives, research questions, and stake holders, but at the same time, scholarly collaborative while sometimes altruistic, rarely exists without some common research objectives. Moreover, these research objectives must exist in an environment where administrators, technical staff, and colleagues have the interests and the resources to promote and encourage innovation. The human infrastructure necessary to support cyber-infrastructure projects, to my mind, is far more crucial to their long-term health than the relatively ephemeral character of technical detail.  And this human infrastructure extends to how we teach students and the nature of academic and scholarly expectations. With more dynamic and robust tool available, it is curious that the willingness to avail oneself to these tools remains, to some extent, optional within the academic discourse. In other words, the eventual success of a digital infrastructure project will depend on the willingness of an editor, a peer reviewer, or a conference panel to expect a scholar to use a particular corpus of material.  The human infrastructure, then, represents a dense and complex web of knowledge, traditional practices, and support infrastructure that, to my mind, is far more important than the tools and vision at the root of a cyberinfrastructure project.</p> <p>3. The Social and New Media.  Another slight oversight in this comprehensive report is the absence of any real discussion of the role of the public backchannel in Classics cyberinfrastructure.  By digital backchannel I mean both blogs and the growing role of social media in stimulating discussion among scholars of the ancient world on topics both digital and traditional.  I am not one of those people who think that blogs are the new academic journals or who even press for new media spaces to carry substantial weight in tenure, promotion, or professional development decisions. On the other hand, I have argued that blogs occupy a novel and useful place in the expanding digital

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information ecosystem of Classics.  And bloggers and their blogs, like many other larger, more integrative digital infrastructure projects, have not come to terms with the tricky task of curating and preserving the huge quantity of analysis, discussion, and even knowledge produced through these new media.  With the growth of Twitter, Facebook, and other even more ephemeral social media portals the issue of curation has become even more tricky. If we imagine social and new media applications as playing a role in our digital future as scholars, then these outlets have to become part of the conversation of the digital future of the discipline.</p> <p>4. Mobile Futures.  Finally, I was surprised that mobil computing did not occupy a more significant place in this report.  If I understand the global trends in computing, the future is in mobile devices and applications. In fact, I read the report on my iPad. I do realize, of course, that some of the mobile computing "revolution" will involve us just doing on a mobile device what we've always done on a laptop or a desktop, but there is also a trend toward reimagining how we work and how we disseminate data over mobile devices.  As we look ahead, it seems clear to me that mobile devices, the cloud, and even greater degrees of integration and communication will produce new challenges for curation and new opportunities of realtime collaboration.</p> <p>As I said at the top, this report is a roadmap for anyone interested in the state-of-the-art in digital Classics and presents a brilliant case study for the impact of humanities computing in one field.  Any gaps or oversights, are incidental and tied more to the goals of the project than any shortcomings of the authors.</p> <p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 10/29/2010 09:17:54 AM ----BODY: <p>It finally feels like fall here.  Cold.  So some various varia and quick hits for a cool and cloudy Friday:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/archaeology/gigapan/niaux/?s ource=link_fb20101026caveart">A cool GigaPan of the Cave Art of Niaux</a>.  While you're GigaPaning, be sure to check out Scott "The GigaPanda" Moore's <a

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href="http://www.pkap.org/gigapan.html">GigaPans from the PylaKoutsopetria</a>.</li> <li>The good folks at the <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/">Center for History and the New Media</a> rolled out <a href="http://omeka.org/blog/2010/10/28/omekanet-beta-launches/">the beta test of Omeka.net yesterday</a>.  <a href="http://omeka.net/">Here's the page</a>.  <a href="http://sebastianheath.omeka.net/items">Sebastian Heath already has a page</a>.  We await his review!</li> <li>From the November 2010 issue of the American Historical Association's <em>Perspectives on History</em>: <a href="http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2010/1011/1011pro2.cfm">How is New Media Reshaping the Work of Historians?</a>.  And more on a similar theme with <a href="http://www.dancohen.org/2010/10/25/digital-history-at-the2011-aha-meeting/">the list of Digital History panels at the AHA Meeting in 2012</a>.</li> <li>Some pretty clever posts on a brand new blog called <a href="http://theaporetic.com/">The Aporetic</a>: <a href="http://theaporetic.com/?p=446">Googling Peer Review</a> and <a href="http://theaporetic.com/?p=701">Peer Review and the Public Sphere</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.rcet.org/geohistorian/">The Geohistorian</a> is a really cool place based history project.  Their really straight forward presentation "Using QR codes and mobile phones for learning" is the best of its kind that I've seen (<a href="http://www.rcet.org/research/presentations/eTech_2010_mcneal_qr.ppt">here' s a link to their powerpointer (.ppt)</a>)</li> <li><a href="http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7451115/?ref=nf">This little video has gone viral (in certain circles)</a>.  It's not my favorite thing ever, but its a pretty clever take on the challenges facing anyone interested in getting a PhD in the humanities (although the people who seem to find it funniest, mostly have jobs).</li> <li><a href="http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/TELSTRA_CONNECT.html">This is a pretty cool little article-like thing on early telecommunications in Australia</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304741404575564092478617462. html">Jay-Z in the </a><em><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304741404575564092478617462. html">Wall Street Journal</a></em>: the very fine line between "blowing up" and selling out. </li> <li><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/business/media/25carr.html?_r=4&amp;adxn nl=1&amp;adxnnlx=1288177551-c0e4+bbluT15BLIbqGpWrA">The Awl in the </a><em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/business/media/25carr.html?_r=4&amp;adxn nl=1&amp;adxnnlx=1288177551-c0e4+bbluT15BLIbqGpWrA">New York Times</a></em>.  See previous bullet point.</li> <li><a href="http://blog.xplana.com/2010/10/recognize-the-inevitable-studenttechnology-use-e-books-and-apps/">More and more on student's use of eBooks and Apps</a>. </li> <li>This is pretty cool: <a href="http://bygdebok.library.und.edu/">Arne G. Breke Bygdebok Collection</a> (if you don't know what that means, it's not for you!)</li> <li>The American School of Classical Studies is <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/news/newsDetails/videocast-graphicgreeks/">(1) videocasting their lecture series this year and (2) inviting cartoonists to speak</a>.  When I recorded a couple of presentations at the

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School for podcasting, there was interest, but some skepticism. ¬†Now they have embraced the technology. ¬†Imagine how much better a world we'll live in if scholars can't just give the same lecture over and over again, because they'll know it will be recorded and available for the public. </li> <li>What I'm listening to: The Clinic, <em>Internal Wrangler</em> and, in memory of Ari Up, The Slits, <em>Cut</em>. (both via my music consultant, Kostis Kourelis)</li> <li>What I'm reading: David Forgacs ed., <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/gramsci-reader-selected-writings-19161935/oclc/42953050">The Antonio Gramsci Reader</a></em>. (New York 2000).</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Assignments EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 116.71.47.196 URL: http://www.mastersdissertation.co.uk/assignments_writing.htm DATE: 11/10/2010 04:10:33 AM I liked this post very much as it has helped me a lot in my research and is quite interesting as well. Thank you for sharing this information with us. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Defense of Asynchronous Teaching STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: a-defense-of-asynchronous-teaching CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/28/2010 06:29:38 AM ----BODY: <p>x-posted to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.</p> <p>Recently, I've been talking a good deal with one of my favorite interlocutors on teaching matters, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/bretweber/">Bret Weber</a>. ¬†He and I approach online teaching in different ways. ¬†While I hesitate to speak for him, it seems to me that his online teaching emphasizes more cohort building, realtime interaction, and incremental assignments with set due dates. ¬†This approach has suited his students, his teaching goals, and his program (<a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/socialwo/index.html">Social Work</a>) well.</p> <p>My approach to online teaching is almost the complete opposite. ¬†When I first developed my idea for online teaching I wanted it be as experientially

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different from the classroom as possible.  I was probably overly strident in my efforts to establish this difference and romanced by change for the sake of change. Whatever the cause, I developed a radically asynchronous model for teaching my History 101: Western Civilization class.</p> <p>The class has 2 deadlines, and one of those deadlines is optional.  All work must be done by a date toward the end of the class so that I have some some time left to grade the inevitable onslaught of papers and assignments.  All the course material is available from the start of the class.  The only optional deadline is an optional midterm paper that, if the student decides to write it, is due at the mid point of the semester.  If a student opts out of this midterm paper, he or she must write a final exam paper that brings together all the content of the class.</p> <p>The lessons in the class are organized into 15 folders numbered for each week.  So students are guided to engage a body of material and assignments each week.  Each weekly folder includes readings, a quiz, a discussion board post, and, in many cases, one or two potential paper topics.  Along with the cumulative paper, students must write two other 3-5 page papers analyzing historical documents from the class. All the work from the all the weeks is due at the end of the semester.  In general, I grade two or three weeks at a time as assignments come in.  Assignments that come much later than two or three weeks behind the weekly folder inevitably get less attention, but the students know that I grade on schedule and give greater attention to work submitted in a regular and consistent way.  I use a Twitter feed and announcements to remind the students to keep up with the course and to let them know where I am in terms of grading material.</p> <p>This system has certain risks.  For example, I regularly write off the last two weeks of the semester to grade the papers from all the students who leave the work in the class to the last minute. These assignments tend to be, generally, of a lower quality, but the average grades for all assignments are not significantly lower than in my classroom classes where I tend to have more regimented deadlines.  It appears to be the case that this system probably leads some students to do more poorly on their papers which they leave to the last minute. On the other hand, it also appears that some some students do better than they would in a traditional synchronous course, and the students with better outcomes tend of offset the students who perform less consistently.</p> <p>Aside from the assessed results of the class, his system does offers some additional benefits as well:</p> <p>1. Flexibility for Students.  Teachers have always bemoaned the absence of face-to-face contact with students in an online environment.  My online classes have attracted students from around the world and across the country.  Face-toface time would be impossible with these students even leveraging all the technology available to maximize realtime communication in an online environment.  Moreover, many of my online students have lives that make regular schedules difficult.  Online teaching gives a student who works on oil pipelines and needs to be far from civilization for weeks on end, a way to begin a university education. To me this is a good thing, and an asynchronous course, particularly at the introductory level cultivates diversity in our classes and expands the democratizing aspects so close to the heart of higher-education.</p> <p>2. Flexible Engagement. One of the most challenging parts of creating a class schedule is attempting to address how different students will engage course material over the course of the semester.  For every assignment that some students master easily, other students, particularly in an introductory level course, will find challenging.  An asynchronous course allows students to engage material at their own pace and, moreover, allows different paces to exist

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in the class at the same time. It is interesting to see the natural divisions among students as small cohorts of students form and engage course materials at similar paces over the course of the semester. In a course of 70, about 10 students stay precisely on the weekly schedule, another 10 or so may fall the occasional week behind, and a third cohort of 10-15 students are never more than 2 weeks behind over the course of the semester.</p> <p>2. Flexible Assessment. One of the best things from a faculty standpoint of asynchronous teaching is that it restricts the bulk grading experience to one occasion at the end of the semester.  During the semester there is a constant trickle of two or three assignments a day.  I tend to assess assignments on a weekly basis and contribute to the online discussion board slightly more often. I find that grading the slow trickle of assignments over the course of the semester gives me far more time to make substantial comments on student work.  Moreover, it gives an advantage to students who can make reasonably consistent progress through the course.  I've found that even students with the most complex schedules rarely fall more than a couple weeks behind if they attend to the course in a serious way.  The half of the class that maintains a good schedule of engagement over the course of the semester tends to get the kind of substantial comments that allow their work to improve over the course of the semester.  Students who turn in all their work at the end of the semester do not get the same benefits as students who approach the course in a regular way.  They not only tend to get less sustained comments on their work, but also have less time to develop skills and improve on the skills introduced over the course of class.</p> <p>Asynchronous teaching is not a perfect system for all classes.  I might suggest that that it works best in larger, introductory level courses. It does little to accommodate  unmotivated or undisciplined student who can easily leave their work to the end of the semester or to set deadlines. My experiences has been, however, that these students tend to struggle in any learning environment and  the asynchronous system only exacerbates these issues.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Working Group in Digital and New Media Annual Report and Open House STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: working-group-in-digital-and-new-media-annual-report-and-open-house CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 10/27/2010 06:35:03 AM ----BODY:

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<p>On Thursday, the <a href="http://digitalgateway.und.edu/">Working Group in Digital and New Media</a> at the University of North Dakota will host its first open house and release to its various stake holders its first Annual Report.  The open house will run from 12-1 pm in the Working Group Lab 203 O'Kelly Hall. The open house and report seek to highlight the activities of the Working Group over their first year.  There is still a bunch of work to maximize the potential of this group, but there is momentum and opportunities for collaboration abound!</p> <p>Since readers of this blog participated in some way in the development of the Working Group (loyal readers probably remember these posts: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/th e-potential-and-role-of-digital-humanities-at-the-university-of-northdakota.html">Potential for Digital Humanities at UND</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/di gital-humanities-white-paper-at-the-university-of-north-dakota.html">A Digital Humanities White Paper</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/se lling-the-working-group-in-digital-and-new-media.html">Selling the Working Group in Digital and New Media</a>), I thought it was fair to leak a version of our Annual Report on my blog.  The various members of the Working Group contributed to the Annual Report, I edited it, and <a href="http://joeljonientz.com/">Joel Jonientz</a> designed it.</p> <p>Here's the executive summary from the Annual Report:</p> <blockquote> <p>The Working Group in Digital and New Media emerged as the result of funding awarded from the President’s call for collaborative and transdisciplinary white papers in his New Initiative funding program. The Working Group is dedicated to the support and development of digital and new media projects across the disciplines on campus. Beginning in the spring of 2009, the Working Group has created a laboratory space uniquely suited to collaborative digital and new projects developed across campus. To date these projects have brought together contributors from the departments of Art and Design, Music, History, English, and Computer Science, as well as the Chester Fritz Library and the ITSS High Performance Computing Cluster. Faculty and students have produced a dynamic and diverse group of projects ranging from video shorts, musical compositions, to online and gallery museum exhibitions and collections, and blogs. Statistically, the Working Group projects accounted for over 2500 person/hours of work, over 15 faculty and student collaborators, and close to 20 major creative and research projects. The Working Group created the intellectual and technological infrastructure necessary for over $35,000 of internal and external grants in its first year alone. In the hyper-competitive realm of non-STEM funding, the collaborative infrastructure Working Group in Digital and New Media gives faculty in the arts and humanities a significant edge. The transdisciplinary research, creative activities, and teaching of the Working Group’s members will continue to leverage the common space of the Working Group Laboratory to expand collaborative research and creative activities on campus.</p> </blockquote> <p>And here is the Annual Report:</p> <p><a style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sansserif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; display: block; text-decoration: underline;" title="View WGDNM Annual Report on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/40227454/WGDNM-Annual-Report">WGDNM Annual Report</a>

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<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" width="100%" height="600"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /> <param name="wmode" value="opaque" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=40227454&amp;access_key=key2lixczx02gfz8g1mqdlz&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" /> <embed id="doc_217106899147268" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%" height="600" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=40227454&amp;access _key=key-2lixczx02gfz8g1mqdlz&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" name="doc_217106899147268" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#ffffff"></embed> </object> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Hesperia, Offprints, and the American School STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: hesperia-offprints-and-the-american-school CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 10/26/2010 07:07:07 AM ----BODY: <p>Yesterday I had one of those little thought-provoking coincidences that make you wonder about how things could be done better.</p> <p>At 11:44 am I got an email from the American School of Classical Studies publication office concerning our soon-to-be-published article on fortification around Ano Vayia.  Our article will appear in the next issue of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/publications/hesperia">American School's journal, </a><em><a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/publications/hesperia">Hesperia</a>. </em>The email asked us where we would like our 50 complimentary offprints sent and whether we wanted to purchase 50 more for $150. Hesperia offprints are really lovely things. They are stapled, on high quality paper, impeccably edited, stylish in design, and include a nice, glossy cover.  In short, the $150 price for 50 does not seem unreasonable.</p>

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<p>At 1:45 pm that same day I received a form-email from Jack Davis, the Director of the<a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/"> American School of Classical Studies</a>. It was their annual fund-raising email.  The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is one of my favorite things in the world.  The institution played a key role in anything that is good about my professional development and no matter how long I am away, still has the feeling of a homeaway-from-home. I have benefited three times over from their generous fellowships and these fellowships have led to my dissertation and numerous publications. I have come to appreciation the American School for its awkward and paradoxical blend of things traditional and things contemporary and "modern". By not shying away from some of the most traditional aspects of a classical education (e.g. the flavor of the Grand Tour that pervades the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/programs/academic">Regular Program</a>), the School encourages students to reflect on the practices and institutions that have created the disciplines of Classics, Classical Archaeology, Ancient History, et c.  Because of these things, I am in the habit of giving money to the American School.  I can't give much as an Assistant Professor at a state school in North Dakota, but I give my proverbial widow's mite.</p> <p>Back to the coincidence: In the same day, within hours, the same institution that was asking for money also offered me that very day something for free.  This got me to think: what if we as contributors to <em>Hesperia</em> just turned down our offprints?  Now, I recognize that the circulation of offprints continues to play a small role in the "academic gift economy".  But, as I began to try to make a mental list of people to whom I'd like to send offprints, I was counting far fewer than 50 individuals.  Moreover, many of the people on that list would probably just as soon have a digital offprint (a handsomely formatted .pdf file) suitably disgraced with some personal note of thanks. The digital offprints of Hesperia are every bit as high quality as the print offprints with good resolution on photographs and searchable text.  Moreover, of the handful of people to whom I'd send offprints, almost all of them have access to <em>Hesperia</em>.  Less than a month ago I had a conversation with a resolutely "olde skool" American School type and offered to send him an offprint of my forthcoming article. He smiled, thanked me, and said, that he subscribes to <em>Hesperia</em>. (I knew this, of course, but apparently even among the "olde skool" the ritual component of offprint exchange had fallen into disuse.)</p> <p>All the same, I can anticipate some people saying that some individuals still keep paper offprint files and some of our European colleagues take the circulation of paper offprints quite seriously and some offprints serve as valuable contributions to small, highly specialized and underfunded libraries (say at the local office of the archaeological service).  The high quality of a <em>Hesperia</em> offprint makes them almost something of intrinsic value.</p> <p>On the other hand, I am pretty sure (although I won't admit to doing this) that we can still print out a copy of a <em>Hesperia</em> article, scrawl some heartfelt note of thanks of the first page, and present it to a colleague as a token of thanks.  Maybe this violates copyright?  I'm really not sure, but I can hardly imagine this to be the kind of practice that the International Copyright Police would enforce, and it would guess that it would be possible for <em>Hesperia</em> to give authors permission to reproduce a certain number of copies of their own articles. (Although it would be awesome to be approached by a neatly dressed Nigerian man outside the Agora in Athens with a stack of slightly blurry photocopied <em>Hesperia</em> offprints...).</p> <p>One more thing, <em>Hesperia</em> offers to let us purchase another 50 offprints for $150. Since <em>Hesperia</em> articles tend toward the long side, I assume that this price represents the average cost of printing 50 offprints,

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perhaps with some small compensation of watering down the copyright (in other words, perhaps they factor in that some people will receive an offprint and will decide not to purchase the journal, but I can't imagine that this represents a very large group). ¬†Last year, Hesperia published 17 articles and if $150 is the average cost of a run of offprints, then they spent about $2550 on offprints.</p> <p>If every contributor over a year just said, politely, no thank you to offprints from <em>Hesperia</em>, we could, in effect, give the American School Publication Office a gift of $2500. I suspect that each of us would have to turn down all of our offprints because printing enjoys really significant economies of scale, and it seems fair to assume that these economies are realized at 50 copies of each article. I know some contributors will still want to "kick it olde skool" and will want to have their shinny <em>Hesperia</em> offprints, but I also suspect that, if given the option explicitly, a percentage of hipper, new skool contributors would turn ours down. ¬†And I'd like to think that¬†<em>Hesperia </em>and the American School¬†would appreciate this little gift.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.122.167.92 URL: http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com DATE: 10/26/2010 08:41:48 AM Hmmm. Take it one step further Bill. What if each author was offered the opportunity to donate the $150 per offprint batch to a fund to subsidize the distribution of subscriptions (or e-access) to/in underfunded libraries (say at the local office of the archaeological service) - that would be 51 more copies of complete issues in the hands of people who need and use the journal on a continuing basis. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.180 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 10/26/2010 08:54:06 AM Chuck, I love the idea! I remember an old program on an airline (which probably went under) where you could donate your free upgrade to someone who was critically ill and needed to travel. Same kind of thing. Bill ----COMMENT:

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AUTHOR: Andrew Reinhard EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.168.218.10 URL: DATE: 10/26/2010 11:09:49 AM Hi, Bill, Thanks for a great post today. I am circulating it around the Publications office here in Princeton for comment. Chuck, that's also a good idea. Let me talk to Jack and to PubComm about this. Keep those ideas coming! I appreciate them. Andrew Reinhard ASCSA Director of Publications ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.180 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 10/26/2010 11:11:30 AM Andrew, Thanks for the note! Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tracey Cullen EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.168.218.10 URL: DATE: 10/26/2010 03:34:56 PM Bill (and Chuck), Thanks very much for these good ideas (and Bill especially for saying such nice things about the journal). I've always been a big believer in printed offprints-for advertising not only the author's work, but ours as well--hoping to attract more submissions this way. But saving (or donating) money, and sending out PDF offprints only--both good ideas. I just talked to our press, and they report that offprint orders overall have declined over the past year--and I have noticed that many fewer authors want the extra 50 Hesperia offprints (but no one--other than Bill!--has yet declined the free 50). The printed offprint with the shiny cover is still probably nice to give to "the authorities" when working overseas--but otherwise, a PDF would surely suffice. And save some trees as well. Anyway, thank you both. Tracey ----COMMENT:

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AUTHOR: David EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 74.99.148.10 URL: DATE: 10/26/2010 08:19:58 PM Excellent post, Bill. Tracey and Andrew, what about a box asking authors how many offprints they would like? Our department uses offprints for the display cases and the 'author day' at the end of the year. But I don't often send them out to people anymore when I have PDFs available. If I had the option of 5 offprints, that would probably be enough for my purposes. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tracey EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.168.218.10 URL: DATE: 10/27/2010 03:38:05 PM This is a good idea, and easily enough done. The offprints are created by the press overrunning the print run -- so if you wanted 5, David, and others in the issue wanted 50, the press would still run 50 extra copies, chop off the spines, and throw out the ones not requested. So this approach wouldn't save many trees. But it would definitely save us the cost of labor in assembling and stapling offprints. Jane Carter just wrote to say she thought nice glossy offprints with covers like we produce have become akin to white gloves in church. Maybe not the cutting-edge image we want! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: David Pettegrew's Setting Stage for St. Paul's Corinth Available as Podcast or Streaming Video STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: david-pettegrews-setting-stage-for-st-pauls-corinth-available-aspodcast-or-streaming-video CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 10/25/2010 07:02:42 AM

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----BODY: <p>For those of you who could not make it to the David Pettegrew's 2nd Annual Cyprus Research Fund Lecture, fear not! ¬†We have made David's lecture available as both a downloadable podcast and as a streaming video.</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/CyprusResearchFund/Pettegrew Setting the Stage.mp3">Here's the podcast</a>.</p> <p><a href="http://conted.breeze.und.nodak.edu/p11229350/">Here's the video</a>.</p> <p>David's two days on campus were really exciting. ¬†Not only did he speak to over 50 faculty,undergraduates, graduate students, and members of the community on the Thursday afternoon talk, but he also contributed to the history department's "brown bag" lecture series on Friday. ¬†At his Friday talk, he presented a great primer to intensive survey archaeology and discussed the ideas of "source criticism" as applied to ancient material culture. ¬†Finally, David took a couple of hours and read Latin with some of our graduate students and undergraduates at our weekly "Latin Friday Morning" reading group.</p> <p>It is always gratifying to see how much interest there is in the Ancient Mediterranean at the University of North Dakota. ¬†So, if you enjoyed the lecture with here at UND, thanks for coming out! And if you enjoy the lecture via the streaming video or podcast, thanks for listening! ¬†I also should thank Chad Bushy and Caleb Holthusen from UND's <a href="http://cilt.und.edu/index.html">Center for Instructional and Learning Technologies </a>office for not only preparing the video and podcasts, but trouble shooting during the live webcast.</p> <p>And, finally, thanks to David Pettegrew for agreeing to spend his fall break with us at the University of North Dakota. For more on his research and the Roman and Late Roman Corinthia, check out his blog <a href="http://corinthianmatters.com/">Corinthian Matters</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Archaeology Excavations EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 122.164.139.213 URL: http://archaeologyexcavations.blogspot.com DATE: 10/26/2010 02:45:45 AM Respected Bill Caraher, I found your great archaeology resource <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com">http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.c om</a> Great Work excellent presentations. I like very much very much. I have more interesting in archaeology. i have two archaeology resource site.

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Please Welcome Our archaeology site 1) <a href="http://www.greatarchaeology.com">http://www.greatarchaeology.com</a> 2) <a href="http://archaeologyexcavations.blogspot.com">http://archaeologyexcavations. blogspot.com</a> If you link our site please enter your comments and please provide our site url from your great archaeology site resource. Thank You, Regards, archaeology excavations -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Local Wildlife STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: local-wildlife CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 10/24/2010 12:21:56 PM ----BODY: <p>A cute little woodpecker feasting on whatever he was finding in the trees in our windbreak.  My wife took the photos.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Woodpeckler1.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f54f63de970b -pi" border="0" alt="Woodpeckler1.jpg" width="600" height="600" /></p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Woodpeckler2.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f54f63f6970b -pi" border="0" alt="Woodpeckler2.jpg" width="600" height="600" /></p> <p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

Caraher

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TITLE: Some Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 10/22/2010 09:55:13 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a quick gaggle of quick hits and varia on a sunny Friday morning:</p> <ul> <li>Yesterday's Cyprus Research Fund talk was well attended.  Over 50 interested students, colleagues, and members of the community showed up for David Pettegrew's talk: Setting the Stage for St. Paul's Corinth: How an Isthmus determined the maritime character of an ancient landscape.  If you missed it, <a href="http://conted.breeze.und.nodak.edu/p11229350/">you can watch the presentation here</a>.  And before too long we'll have the lecture up as an mp3 podcast.</li> <li>David directed to me his colleague, <a href="http://www.philipvickersfithian.com/">John Fea's blog: The Way of Improvement Leads Home</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.functionalfate.org/archives/2010/08/18/reasonableviolence/">Dimitri Nakassis got some blog-press</a> a while back venting his wrath while modifying the function of a plastic chair.</li> <li>I know this poem has made the rounds for years, but <a href="http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/013.html">it's worth linking to again</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://nowviskie.org/2010/eternal-september-of-the-digitalhumanities/">Some interesting thoughts on Digital Humanities</a>.</li> <li>The Council on Library and Information Resources and Tufts has produced an impressive report on the state of Digital classics:  <a href="http://networkedblogs.com/9srkS">Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists</a>.  I haven't processed it, but it looks like an amazing compendium of digital humanities projects and initiatives.  <a href="http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2010/10/requestfor-comment-rome-wasnt.html">They are looking for comments apparently</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/4-Very-Different-FuturesAre/125011/">Some different views </a>of the research library of the future.</li> <li>And<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-medium-t.html"> some more thoughts on E-readers</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.paphostheatre.com/paphos-theatre-educationblog.html">Another interesting archaeology blog from the University of Sydney's Excavations at the Paphos Theatre, Cyprus</a>. </li> <li>There is something profound about the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4o-TeMHys0">Rent is Too Damn High Party</a>.</li> <li>What I'm reading: George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. (New York 1970).</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: David Pettegrew on Corinth! Live on the Interwebs! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: david-pettegrew-on-corinth-live-on-the-interwebs CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 10/21/2010 08:09:46 AM ----BODY: <p>Join us today for the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund Lecture: David Pettegrew's "Setting the Stage for St. Paul's Corinth: How the Isthmus Determined the Character of a Roman City."  The talk is at 4 pm today in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f53d0586970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="463" height="600" /></p> <p>If you're not from Grand Forks, FEAR NOT!  We'll also stream David's talk for free on the interwebs!  <a href="http://conted.breeze.und.nodak.edu/cyprus/">Here's the link</a>.  Just log in a guest.  If you're watching remotely and have a question for David, just Tweet it to me.  <a href="http://twitter.com/billcaraher">Here's my Twitter account</a> (@billcaraher) and use the hashtag: #CRF2010 at the end of your post.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: North Dakota's Joseph Kennedy and Psychical Research STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: north-dakotas-joseph-kennedy-and-psychical-research CATEGORY: North Dakotiana

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DATE: 10/20/2010 07:12:24 AM ----BODY: <p>Yesterday my History 240 class spent the afternoon at the <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/">Elywn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections</a>.  This is always a good time for me because not only do I get to enjoy the University Archivist, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/09/09/a-note-from-the-archives-planningan-archival-field-trip/">Curt Hanson's, sense of humor</a>, but I also get to root around in special collections.  Yesterday, I decided to read <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/dept/library/Collections/og1289.html">a Merrifield Award Winning Essay</a> by a former Department of History Doctor of the Arts student, <a href="http://www.trinitybiblecollege.edu/directory/faculty/smith/ken">Ken Smith</a> who now teaches at <a href="http://www.trinitybiblecollege.edu/">Trinity Bible College</a> in Ellendale, ND.  I had a chance to meet Ken at the Northern Great Plains History Conference last week, and our brief chat reminded me to check out his essay.</p> <p>The essay is entitled: "UND's Joseph Kennedy and the Allure of Psychical Research", and it provides a fascinating (and creepy!) insight into the early 20th century interest in psychic and paranormal research. <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og28.html">Kennedy</a> was a member of the "second Merrifield Faculty" who was hired during Webster Merrifield's term as university president in 1892. He followed Horace B. Woodworth as the main faculty member responsible for teaching philosophy and education and in 1901 he became the Dean of the Normal College. He remained in this position until his retirement in 1928.  While his primary area of expertise was education - particularly secondary and rural education, he was influenced heavily by the psychological and philosophical works of William James.</p> <p>According to Smith's work, Kennedy's interest in James paved the way for his critical interest in psychical research.  This interest culminated with a visit to Dr. James H. Hyslop in Boston.  Hyslop was the director of the American Society of Psychical Research which was a group founded by Richard Hodgson who was a colleague and correspondent of William James.  During Kennedy's visit to Boston, Hyslop arranged for him to meet with a medium named "Mrs. Chenowith" who apparently sought to contact Kennedy's family and friends who had passed to the other side. Unlike many mediums of her day, Mrs. Chenowith wrote out the messages that she received from the other side.</p> <p>Apparently the messages that Mrs. Chenowith communicated to Kennedy exist in the UND archives, although I have not yet had a chance to find them.  Kennedy struggled to understand and interpret the messages and initiated an almost two decade correspondence with Hyslop in the process.  As Smith points out, the correspondence, while always cordial, were not without tension.  Kennedy found the work of the medium unconvincing and Hyslop was not necessary amendable to that interpretation.</p> <p>Kennedy remained critically agnostic about the possibilities of parapsychological and spiritual phenomena his entire life.  He was open to the ideas enough to conduct his own research, but critical enough to probe ideas and occurrences quite deeply. Smith, for example, recounts an episode when Raymond Hitchcock, a professor of Mathematics, sought Kennedy out to analyze a lucid dream.  In the dream, Hitchcock saw a home that he then encountered in real life some time later. Kennedy resisted the temptation to attribute the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/10/st -augustine-and-dreams.html">dream</a> to psychical phenomena attributing it

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instead to the power of the unconscious mind (although he stopped short of seeing the dream as an expression of an unfulfilled wish in a Freudian sense).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: St. Augustine and Dreams STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: st-augustine-and-dreams CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 10/19/2010 06:56:15 AM ----BODY: <p>Long-time readers of this blog know that I have an interest in dreams and their role in archaeology, although that interest might not be very evident lately.  So after spending the better part of two weeks pouring over survey data from the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>, I took about an hour to follow up on a citation that I culled from Ann Marie Yasin's recent book to St. Augustine's <em>De cura pro mortuis gerenda</em> (On the Care of the Dead).  The text is a letter that St. Augustine wrote to St. Paulinus of Nola about whether there was any benefit to be buried near the body or memorial of a saint.  Augustine takes this opportunity to articulate a criticism of ad sanctus burials (burials near the graves of holy people, particularly martyrs) which he then expands to a general critique of claims that the dead influence the world of the living.</p> <p>This is where dreams come in.  Augustine shows some concern for the stories in which dead people appear to the living particularly when their bodies are not buried properly.  Augustine, of course, knows that by challenging the authority of these kinds of visions, he runs the risk of criticizing widely held beliefs promulgated in the "writings of certain faithful men" (12).  Augustine makes clear later in the text that, among many possible episodes in Early Christian writing, he is referring here to St. Ambrose's claim (<em>Epist</em>. 20.1-2) that visions (or dreams) prompted him to discover the bodies of Sts. Gervasius and Protasius in Milan (21).</p> <p>The crux of St. Augustine's argument is not whether saints or the dead appear to people, but whether they are aware that they are appearing to people or appear to people in their sleep voluntarily. He argues that the dead do not have any knowledge of this in the same way that the living are unaware when they appear in someone's dream.  Augustine further proves his point by arguing that pious men sometimes appear in dreams and do bad things.  At the same time, pious people, like his own late mother, would certainly appear to the living

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when they were troubled or upset, if they could, indeed, influence the world of the living.</p> <p>It seems that this text dates to the early 420s and continues a North African inclination against the authority of visions and dreams directing the faithful to the locations of buried saints. ¬†As early as the Council of Carthage in 401 the church rejected the practice of <em>inventio per somnia</em> (<em>discovery through sleep</em>).</p> <p>For more on this text, see:</p> <p>A. M. Yasin, <em>Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean</em>. (Cambridge 2009), 212-222.<br />D. Trout, <em>Paulinus of Nola</em>. (Berkeley 1999), 244-247.<br />H. Kotila, <em>Memoria Mortuorum: Commemoration of the Departed in Augustine</em>. (Rome 1992).<br />Y. Duval,¬†ÔªøÔªø<em>Aupr√®s des saints corps et √¢me. L'inhumation ¬´ ad sanctos ¬ª dans la chr√©tient√© d'Orient et d'Occident du IIIe si√®cle au VIIe si√®cle</em>. (Paris 1988).</p> <p> <p>For more on Dream Archaeology without leaving the comfortable informality of the blog, see below:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/an other-better-attempt-at-dream-archaeology.html">Another, Better Attempt at Dream Archaeology</a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/dr eams-in-ravenna.htm"><br />Dreams in Ravenna<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr eam-archaeology-in-the-early-christian-west.html">Dream Archaeology in the Early Christian West<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-dreams-rel.html">Blindness, Dreams, and Relics<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-dreams-rel.html">More Dreams, Religion, and Archaeology<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-byzantine.html">More Byzantine Dreams...<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/dr eams-pausania.html">Dreams, Pausanias, and Archaeology<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">Kozani</a></p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David Pettegrew EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 153.42.40.246 URL:

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DATE: 12/06/2010 01:48:55 PM Fun post, Bill. Doesn't Augustine distinguish in this essay the role of saints vs. the role of the ordinary Christian dead? (I may be misremembering). He discusses some very interesting cases involving dreams. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Broad Period Artifacts and Survey Analysis: Quantifying what you don't know STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: broad-period-artifacts-and-survey-analysis-quantifying-what-you-dontknow CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 10/18/2010 07:14:23 AM ----BODY: <p>By far the most vexing issues facing most survey projects is the analysis of artifacts datable only to very broad periods of time (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/10/st ones-that-speak-and-some-other-data-from-the-pyla-koutsopetria-archaeologicalproject.html">a point I brought up in my blog post from last week</a>).&nbsp; In the work of the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project, these artifacts are the equivalent to objects of "unknown date" from other survey projects.&nbsp; The chronotype identification system required our ceramicist to date each artifact even if these dates are exceedingly broad.&nbsp; As a result, we have significant quantities of artifacts dated to periods that exceed 1000 years in length. These broad periods tend to represent two types of artifacts.&nbsp; </p> <ol> <li>Artifacts that do not fit into any known typology such as body sherds without particularly characteristic marks, fabrics, or shapes.</li> <li>Artifact types that remained in use for long periods of time.&nbsp; This is most often the case with various kinds of coarse and medium coarse utilities wares probably produced from local fabrics.</li></ol> <p>In some cases, the fabrics or shapes can tell use enough to allow us to group the artifact into a relatively welldefined, yet still exceedingly broad, date range.&nbsp; For example, the most common period for an artifact dated to a broad period is "Ancient Historic".&nbsp; This is a date range that extends across the entire period of historical antiquity on the island of Cyprus: 750 BC - AD 750.&nbsp; Almost all of these sherds (89%) are body sherds. The artifacts datable to this period appear over 77% of the total area of our survey and in 84% of the units where artifacts occur.&nbsp; Statistically, the distribution of "Ancient Historic" artifacts correlates more closely to the overall artifact densities across the entire study area than any other period, broad or narrow (the correlation is .674).&nbsp; This is particularly significant because artifact counts and the number of artifacts assigned to a particular period are independent variables: our artifact counts are based on the total number of artifacts visible on the ground according to clicker counts and the number artifacts dated to a particular period is a subset of the number of artifacts sampled from the units.&nbsp; Finally, the fabric types present in Ancient-Historic period more

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or less parallel the fabric groups present in narrower, better-known, or at least more clearly defined periods (e.g. Classical or Classical-Hellenistic). For the Koutsopetria plain, for example, "Ancient Historic" material appears as coarse ware, medium coarse ware, and kitchen/cooking ware which finds rough parallels with the groups of material present from other periods and the general functional character of the area (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-outloud-3.html">for those of you keeping track at home, we call the Koutsopetria plain Zone 1</a>)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f5288654970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Ancient_Historic_Material" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f528865e970b -pi" width="454" height="502"></a> </p> <p>Other broad periods from our site represent small quantities of obscure material that stands outside traditional typologies.&nbsp; For example, there are only two sherds assigned to two chronotypes dated to the Ceramic Age (a Red Micaceous Pithos and coarse ware). Only four sherds assigned to four chronotypes received the generic Ancient date (Ancient Lekane, fineware, kitchen ware, medium coarse ware). Only one chronotype, amphoras, receive the designation Post-Prehistoric.</p> <p>In old days of survey, sherds dated to broad periods tended to be neglected either at the analysis phase, or more commonly at the sampling and collection phase.&nbsp; The vast majority of broad period sherds are body sherds (85%) and most of these would not appear to be diagnostic. As a result many traditional collection strategies that privileged diagnostic sherds (feature sherds with distinct marks, rims, handles, bases) would have overlooked broad period material. More recent work has at least assigned the designation of "unknown date" to these broad period artifacts, but rarely do they appear documented in the survey publication.</p> <p>This material is difficult to correlate with past human activities. At best, it reinforces the notion that certain types of productive practices may have endured for long periods of time without much in the way of visible changing.&nbsp; It suggests that certain vessel shapes, fabrics, and pottery categories may have continued to serve basic functions within the community, the household, and the economy for long periods of time as well. In Braudelian terms, the apparently long, slow, and relatively unchanging character of such a large part of our ceramic assemblage represents the slow swells of the sea.&nbsp; The more closely dated and rapidly changing character of fine wares or even the more diagnostic parts of the vessel , for example, which tend to allow us to produce our narrow period assemblages, show the more fickle and rapidly changing nature of ancient ceramic habits. </p> <p>The value then of our effort to understand the distribution and character of artifacts datable to broad periods from PKAP is that they give us a real measure of how much we do not know about material from our survey area.&nbsp; And at the same time, reveal that much of the most basic practices typical of the ancient world likewise continues to elude our grasp.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 10/15/2010 06:47:57 AM ----BODY: <p>It right around freezing this morning, so fall must really have arrived after positively balmy temperatures earlier in the week. &#0160;So, some quick hits and varia on a crisp Friday morning:</p>! <ul>! <li>If you have some time today be sure to check out the <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/greatplains/">Northern Great Plains History Conference</a> taking place here in Grand Forks and hosted the University of North Dakota.</li>! <li>And next week, if you&#39;re in the community here, I urge you to come and hear the incomparable David Pettegrew speak on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/20 10-cyprus-research-fund-lecture-setting-the-stage-for-st-paulscorinth.html">Setting the Stage for St. Paul&#39;s Corinth: How an Isthmus Determined the Character of a Roman City</a>. &#0160;David will be the 2nd Annual Cyprus Research Fund lecturer.</li>! <li>Two new blogs: First, <a href="http://mybyzantine.wordpress.com/">a new popular blog on Byzantium</a> subtitled: &quot;making Byzantium alive for people today&quot; continues the remarkable new trend in pop-Byzantine history. It&#39;s a great blog that is far more informative and careful than sensational. &#0160;The same author also has <a href="http://patrickleighfermor.wordpress.com/">a nice blog on life, work, and friends of Patrick Leigh Fermor</a> whom the author asserts as the &quot;Greatest Living Englishman&quot;. &#0160;For those who don&#39;t know, Fermor is an influential 20th century travel writer, observer, and in many ways participant in Greek history.</li>! <li>The Oxford Centre for Late Antquity will have a colloquium next month on &quot;<a href="http://researchnewsinla.blogspot.com/2010/10/carnival-and-cultfrom-caesar-to.html">Carnival and Cult from Caesar to Chrysostom</a>&quot;. &#0160;When I was working on my dissertation, I was dismayed to find how little there was on festivals associated with Early Christian holy days, sacred spots, and architecture. &#0160;So it&#39;s great to a see a colloquium taking up this topic.</li>! <li>Does anyone use<a href="http://mailplaneapp.com/"> Mailplane</a>? &#0160;Is it worth the $25? </li>! <li>On Monday, I offered a response to a post by Edward Blum:&#0160;Ôªø&quot;<a href="http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2010/09/academic-blogging-somereservations-and.html">Academic Blogging: Some Reservations and Lessons</a>&quot;. &#0160;I wasn&#39;t the only one. &#0160;<a href="http://mcconeghy.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/should-i-blog/">Here&#39;s a nice response</a> by David McConeghy at his blog, A Lively Experiment. &#0160;He makes the great observation that with many graduate students today this

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isn&#39;t the case of academics becoming bloggers, it is sometimes the case of bloggers becoming academics. </li>! <li>More Liberal Arts 2.0 stuff (which is a phrase coined Jason Kottke&#39;s iconic blog&#0160;<a href="http://www.kottke.org/"> kottke.org</a>) &#0160;Wired has put together a short piece called &quot;<a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/09/ff_wiredu/all/1">7 Essential Skills You Didn&#39;t Learn in College</a>&quot; and grouped them around a Liberal Arts 2.0 theme. I loved the little book called <em><a href="http://www.snarkmarket.com/nla/">New Liberal Arts</a> </em>which grew out of a series of<a href="http://snarkmarket.com/"> Snarkmarket</a> posts a couple years back and this post carries along the same theme.</li>! <li>There is a great project called: <em><a href="http://writinghistory.wp.trincoll.edu/">Writing History: How Historians Research, Write, and Publish in the Digital Age</a></em>. &#0160;From what I can understand, it is going to be crowd-sourced book on on Digital History which will also be collectively edited and reviewed. &#0160;I&#39;m excited to see how it will develop, and I wonder whether this might be a cool model for an archaeology and the new media volume and <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/">Sam Fee</a> and I have bandied about over the last few weeks: Archaeology 2.0</li>! <li>What I&#39;m listening to: Harlem, <em>Hippies</em> (2010)</li>! <li>What I&#39;m (re)reading: Ann Marie Yasin, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/saints-and-church-spaces-in-the-lateantique-mediterranean-architecture-cult-and-community/oclc/422764940">Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean</a> <span style="font-style: normal;">(2009);</span> </em>A. D&#39;Ambrosio, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/let-fury-have-the-hour-the-punk-rockpolitics-of-joe-strummer/oclc/56988650">Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer</a></em>. (2004) - I was drawn to this mostly because of <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=UKMBtint9LwC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;dq=Let%20the %20Fury%20Have%20the%20Hour&amp;pg=PR19#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">Chuck D&#39;s brief comments on Strummer</a> and the Clash.</li>! </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: What is the Future of the Textbook? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: what-is-the-future-of-the-textbook CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media

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DATE: 10/14/2010 07:39:52 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Crossposted to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a></em>.</p> <p>A recent short notice in the<em> Chronicle of Higher Education</em> asked the question: "<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/As-Textbooks-Go-DigitalWill/124881/">As Textbooks Go Digital, Will Professors Build Their Own Books?</a>".  The short article goes on the discuss the various a la carte options offered by traditional textbook publishes that allow a faculty member to create unique combinations of material in an online textbook.  Such a modular approach to textbook content is not new, of course.  In fact, I wrote a module on the "Historical Jesus" for a modular textbook and source reader called <a href="http://custom.cengage.com/etep/"><em>Exploring the European Past</em></a> coordinated by Ohio State and published by Thompson almost 10 years ago.</p> <p>The more interesting idea from the short Chronicle note is the idea that textbook publishers could become distributors of a wide range of content for increasingly customizable course packets.  In short, textbook publishers could become more like iTunes which produces almost no content, but provides an easy interface to access content produced by others.</p> <p>With the growing amount of content available on the web, a central hub for certain kinds of content would certainly make the creating of custom textbooks easier, but, many of us, I expect, have already taken the plunge into both aggregating content from across the web for our textbook, as well as creating on own content.  In other words, the model has probably begun to shift aware from the usefulness of the textbook as a single, authoritative entity and toward a far more fragmented, user-generated, and maybe less profit driven "marketplace" for course content.</p> <p>For example, instead of a formal textbook, my rather low-tech History 101: Western Civilization I class combines podcast lectures with a short, inexpensive monograph, and a gaggle of historical documents available in the public domain. For maps, I created a bunch of "places" that students can view in Google Earth.  For basic reference material, I provide comprehensive indexes with links to useful website or to Wikipedia.  In the end, I have created a custom textbook for free.</p> <p>Other contributors here to Teaching Thursday have taken some of these basic techniques even further by integrating <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/08/04/teaching-with-interviews/">custom made interviews</a>, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/05/06/first-yearreflections-my-classroom-my-goals/">student generated content</a>, and other techniques to produce sophisticated and dynamic bodies of content.  With more and more content becoming available online, it is not difficult at all to imagine a custom textbook that draws exclusively from free material without sacrificing content, scope, or authority.  Perhaps this is more the case in a discipline like history where a blurry line has always existed between highquality, professional, specialized content and content generated for a popular audience, but I could imagine it being the case for other disciplines as well.</p> <p>What makes this scenario so compelling is that textbooks are becoming increasingly expensive.  Moreover, most textbooks are pretty mediocre in terms of content coverage, readability, and even accuracy.  One of my longstanding justifications for using Wikipedia entries in place of a traditional textbook is that they are no less accurate than collectively produced textbooks where little errors tend to creep in between editors and authors and unlike Wikipedia they can't be easily fixed, on the fly, by a critical reader.  At the same time, the

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pervasive (if somewhat shallow) criticism of Wikipedia creates an environment where students are prone to read entries critically and recognize the contested nature of even basic "facts".  And the increasingly robust online teaching tools make it easy to incorporate into the classroom a dynamic and growing body of good quality online video, audio, and massive quantity of public domain documents, works of literature, and data.</p> <p>All this being said, there is a convenience factor with textbooks that may for the short-term outweigh its flaws.  But what do you think? Are the days of textbooks numbered?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Horace B. Woodworth at the Northern Great Plains History Conference STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: horace-b-woodworth-at-the-northern-great-plains-history-conference CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 10/13/2010 08:34:55 AM ----BODY: <p>Horace B. Woodworth will make an appearance at tomorrow's <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/greatplains/">Northern Great Plains History Conference</a> in a panel called History of and History at the University of North Dakota. &nbsp;He'll be joined by Orin G. Libby (via Gordon Iseminger) and a historical cast from the Department of Social Work (via Bret Weber). &nbsp;They'll all gather at the Ramada here in Grand Forks at 9 am tomorrow (Thursday, October 14, 2010).</p>! <p>Bret's paper and mine come from our efforts to document the history of the University for the 125th-aversary last year. Gordon Iseminger's paper will come from his book project on the life and times of Orin G. Libby.</p>! <p>It's nice to have papers representing the history of the University because the Northern Great Plains conference was founded by members of the Department at UND. &nbsp;Here's the text from my<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DHChapter_Intro.html"> history of the department</a> (it doesn't add much):</p>! <blockquote>! <p><span style="font-size: 8pt; line-height: 130%;">There are several other development of note during the 1960s that demonstrate the position of the department both at the university and in the greater intellectual community.<span> </span>First, in 1966 the Department developed the Northern Great Plains History Conference.<span> </span>This conference, initially a cooperative venture with the University of Manitoba, sought to provide a venue

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for scholars based in the Northern Plains to present their work as it was often prohibitively expensive to attend national meetings.<span> </span>The initial conference in 1966 was held in the Memorial Union and attracted over 150 scholars. In subsequent years attendance grew further.<span> </span>While many of the papers focused on the history of the Northern Plains, it included panels on other topics as well.<span> </span>This conference also improved the department’s visibility in a regional context as the conference frequently attracted scholars from more prominent universities like Wisconsin and Minnesota. Over the next decade, the responsibilities for the conference were shared between the faculty of the department and other schools in the area.<span> </span>The conference continues to be a viable academic conference to this day.</span></p>! </blockquote>! <p>And here's my paper:</p>! <p><a style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sansserif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; display: block; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Caraher History Before Libby on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/39250250/Caraher-HistoryBefore-Libby">Caraher History Before Libby</a> ! <object id="doc_629552822599770" width="100%" height="600" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" type="application/xshockwave-flash">! <param name="data" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" />! <param name="wmode" value="opaque" />! <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />! <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />! <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" />! <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=39250250&amp;access_key=key1k8v9gtq82uhzbozfx0j&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" />! <param name="src" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" />! <param name="name" value="doc_629552822599770" />! <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />! </object>! </p>! <p>Here's <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/greatplains/documents/programfinal.pdf">a link (.pdf) to the full program of the conference</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Stones that Speak and some other data from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: stones-that-speak-and-some-other-data-from-the-pyla-koutsopetriaarchaeological-project CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 10/12/2010 07:09:42 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last few weeks I've been running what will hopefully be the final set of unique queries on the data from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project's survey of the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria and its environs.&nbsp; These queries are mostly following little hunches or the comments that my co-director David Pettegrew made in the margins.&nbsp; It is re-assuring in some ways to find that I have not overlooked much (and I hope to circulate a working paper of my distributional analysis by the end of this calendar year), and its always fun to find little patterns.&nbsp; So here are two small PKAP patterns.</p> <p>For some reason on the edges of comprehension our ceramicist, Scott Moore, documented unworked stones collected in the bags of ceramics collected by our field teams.&nbsp; Unworked stones collected from the fields are not traditionally regarded as archaeological material (except that their presence in a bag of ceramics has associated them with the archaeological method).&nbsp; But Scott's unworked stones do show a pattern. In the last few years, archaeologists have suggested that "background disturbance" or the presence of stones or other materials that look like ceramic objects has a clear correlation with our ability to recover artifacts from the field (the best discussion of this is in Knapp and Given, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/sydney-cyprussurvey-project-social-approaches-to-regional-archaeologicalsurvey/oclc/51460580">Sydney Cyprus Survey Project</a> </em>volume).&nbsp; Presumably our field walker's tendency to collect stones from the field might reflect a similar pattern. The map below shows the distribution of unworked stones.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f501b467970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Unworked_Stone" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134882170f8970c -pi" width="470" height="518"></a> </p> <p>And as you can see, a pattern does emerge. Most of our unworked stone comes from units with high or modern background disturbance and this suggests two things.&nbsp; First, it confirms that the unworked stones are most likely unworked (in some cases Scott documented unworked stone because he was not entirely sure that they were unworked and wanted Nick Kardulias our lithics expert to check them out).&nbsp; Next, it suggests that background disturbance does influence our field walkers ability to recognize artifacts. It is encouraging to note, albeit in a tentative way, that our field walkers collected objects that they thought <em>might be </em>ceramics and this might give us enough confidence to at least suggest that they did not overlook objects that <em>might be </em>stones.</p> <p>The second little analysis I ran was on the distribution of faunal remains across the site.&nbsp; David Reese examined the faunal remains from our excavations in 2008 and 2009 and at the same time looked over a small quantity of faunal remains collected from the survey.&nbsp; I've added to the map the major roads in the area (rather inelegantly displayed unfortunately).&nbsp; Most of the faunal remains are near the major roads suggesting that at least some of them particularly the chicken bones - were discarded by passing traffic.&nbsp; The

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remains of sheep or goat bones appear cluster in the lowest lying area of the Pyla-Koutsopetria plain.&nbsp; This area is pretty marshy despite efforts to keep it drained and as a result not generally under cultivation.&nbsp; This kind of marginal land seems likely to have served as pasture for local flocks. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f501b46e970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Faunal_Remans" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f501b484970b -pi" width="470" height="518"></a> </p> <p>The final analysis run over the last few days was on some very broad chronological periods into which we grouped material from the survey.&nbsp; Among the broadest is the "Ancient Historic" period which stretches from around 750 BC to the end of antiquity in AD 749. The transparent dots on the map below show the distribution of artifacts datable only to this long period in the past. Their distribution more or less follows over all artifact densities (with the exception of Kokkinokremos where the ceramicist who read our Iron Age to Bronze Age material used a slightly different designation).&nbsp; This suggests that artifacts grouped into this broad period are not likely to represent a single class of difficult to identify material, but rather a whole group of artifacts from multiple periods that remains outside of traditional ceramic typologies and chronologies. It is never heartening to see how much material from a survey goes unidentified (or identified in only the broadest possible way), but it is encouraging to see that it does not cluster in suggestive ways.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013488217134970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Ancient_Historic_Sherds" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f501b4d3970b -pi" width="470" height="518"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dimitri Nakassis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.232.120.148 URL: DATE: 10/12/2010 07:44:02 AM It's also interesting that only one unworked stone was found at Kokkinokremos, when we had a team of experienced fieldwalkers doing the survey. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Academic Blogging STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0

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BASENAME: more-on-academic-blogging CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 10/11/2010 07:09:34 AM ----BODY: <p>There is still a slow simmer of resistance to the idea of academic blogging.  Most of it represents a kind of knee-jerk conservatism from individuals who refuse to accept blogging as anything more than a medium for middle-class "kids" to vocalize middle-class angst.  This most common form of this argument is the well-known: "why should I care about what you ate for breakfast?"</p>! <p>Every now and then, a scholar offers a more substantial response to the idea and while I typically find these responses every bit as wrongheaded, I do think that they deserve some careful consideration.  Recently Edward Blum published a short post (on his blog <a href="http://usreligion.blogspot.com/">Religion in American History</a>) entitled "<a href="http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2010/09/academic-blogging-somereservations-and.html">Academic Blogging: Some Reservations and Lessons</a>".  The post is clear and coherent and should be considered carefully.  It stems from his conversations with a group of recent Ph.D.s and graduate students who are excited about blogging as a medium as well as the author's personal experience as a blogger.</p>! <p>He established six main points:</p>! <blockquote>! <p>1. "Why would you give away for free the primary commodity you create?"</p>! </blockquote>! <p>I suppose that I must respond to this in the name of being systematic. First, being a blogger doesn't mean that you have to publish every idea on your blog indiscriminately!  Even today scholars can be reluctant to give a paper or commit to an article a brilliant book-worthy idea.  The bigger issue, however, is one already faced by the recording industry. Some circulation of free music that is the primary commodity produced by the recording industry - actually benefits record sales. Most band have MySpace pages, websites, blogs with free downloads, or even "leak" new music to fans.  If they're smart, they do not leak the entire album, but a few select singles.  In some sections of the recording industry mix-tapes and bootlegs are a primary means for unsigned artists to be discovered. Again, if all that musician has to offer is on a 36 minute mix tape, then there are likely to be problems down the line, but if a musician is smart and good, the mix tape works as a teaser that draws attention to their work.</p>! <p>(And it goes without saying that in a business where our rewards for scholarly production are modest, it may be that some day soon, blogging an idea and allowing to enjoy widespread, attributed circulation, could have as much currency as publishing in a very expensive book with limited access.)</p>! <blockquote>! <p>2. "Peer review matters. Academic disciplines will lose all credibility without peer review; it is essential to what we do – as protection for the author and publisher, and as a way to get the best out of your work."</p>! </blockquote>! <p>Of course peer review matters!  But let's not reduce all academic production to a kind of zero sum game.  A blog does not preclude writing for peer review and taking the peer review process seriously. After all, any scholars would be naive to think that all academic production receives the same level and kind of peer review.  Giving a paper at an academic conference, for example, is a different level of peer review than submitting an article to major academic

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journal.  Blogs fit into the academic ecosystem by allowing ideas to circulate in early forms. Scholars outside the humanities have already embraced the idea of "working papers" that circulate widely prior to formal peer review and publication, but as part of a parallel and less formal (but no less important) peer review process.   While most academic blogs do not reached the level of a "working paper" they nevertheless offer a medium ideal for scholarly conversation and critique.  If scholars are too busy or disengaged to participate in this discussion, then their perspectives will be ignored in the development of new knowledge.</p>! <blockquote>! <p>3. "Post-publication review matters. Blog posts don’t get reviewed in the <em>Journal of American History</em> or the <em>Journal of Southern History</em> – books do."</p>! </blockquote>! <p>Again, writing is not a zero sum game. Articles do not (usually) get reviewed in the <em>JAH</em> or <em>JSH</em>, nor do conference papers, but these contributions to the academic, scholarly conversation are nevertheless represent an important place for academic correspondences.  Blog fit into the existing academic ecosystem and expand it. Ironically, blogs are beginning to represent an important venue for post-publication review. A blogger can publish a quick review of a book at a much faster than a traditional journal.  In fact, some venues, like the Bryn Mawr Classical Review have taken on an increasingly bloglike interface and represent the first word on many academic publications in the field of Classics and Ancient history.</p>! <blockquote>! <p>4. "Blog posts could hurt your reputation just as much (if not more) than help it. Fascinating blog posts probably won’t get you an interview or a job, although they may make your name noteworthy enough so the committee looks at your application (although I doubt this for most positions). Articles will, solid dissertations will, fantastic conference papers will."</p>! </blockquote>! <p>Again, academic writing is not a zero sum game. Writing a blog post does not preclude writing an article, giving a conference paper, writing a book. Circulating ideas on a blog, however, gets them to a wider public. Of course, a hastily composed blog post could hurt an individual's career, but the same could be said of a hastily composed conference paper or a poorly-considered book review. There is nothing intrinsic to the blog medium that causes an individual to say outlandish things or attack other authors.  Of course, the ease with which a blog post can be circulated (via, for example, social media) and the wide audience that a blog post can have, should encourage bloggers to be sensitive to their academic reputation and the feelings of other scholars.  But I'd suggest that these are good things!  Blogs can accelerate certain aspects of professional development by allowing a junior scholar access to an academic conversation with certain rules of behavior and expectations.</p>! <p>(And I should say that I personally know some scholars whose careers have been helped by their blogs. It showed them to be far more dynamic and engaged than their slow to appear scholarly publications would suggest.)</p>! <blockquote>! <p>5. "Blogs often function like the current American media: extreme, partisan, and amnesiac."</p>! </blockquote>! <p>None of these things are intrinsic to the medium of blogging except, perhaps, the seemingly ephemeral nature of most forms of digital communication.  I actually like the ephemeral nature of my blog and have little inclination to make it an enduring venue for scholarly communication.</p>!

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<blockquote>! <p>6. "ÔªøFinally, and this is most apropos for our blog ‚Äì this is a blog about religion and religions, the most powerful ideas, rituals, concepts, and communities that exist. As I understand the spiritual, it is the deepest core of people, ideas, organizations, and communities. Writing about it flippantly or without review or without consideration can be extremely damaging."</p>! </blockquote>! <p>This point is a good one, but I think my argument throughout this post should now be clear. Blogs have a context that dictates to some extent the rules in which the blog operates. This context is set at the intersection of a broad and ill-defined public conversation about the topic on the blog and long-standing professional and social traditions of academy. This puts the blogger in a powerful position to communicate academic ideas to an audience that is often unfamiliar with the terms of the debate and the languages and customs of the academic discourse. This position is also fraught with certain risks.</p>! <p>Professor Blum's post highlights many of the risks associated with blogging (and overlooks, for rhetorical purposes I am sure) many of its benefits. It is useful to have these reminders periodically, if for no other reason than it forces those of us committed to the medium of blogging to articulate the place of the blog and blogger in the academic community.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mcconeghy.wordpress.com EMAIL: IP: 174.47.231.87 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/mcconeghywordpresscom DATE: 10/11/2010 10:44:22 PM Well said! I had a similar set of responses when I first saw Blum's post. I was particularly concerned about his resistance to expanding the areas open to different kinds of scholarly products. <a href="http://mcconeghy.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/should-iblog/">http://mcconeghy.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/should-i-blog/</a> ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jan Husdal EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 158.38.156.54 URL: http://www.husdal.com DATE: 11/04/2010 09:40:52 AM Thank you for a great post. I just read the post you are referring to, and I am glad someone else did too, and feels the way I do. As an academic blogger myself, mostly literature reviewer, going on for 3 years now, it has taken me a while to find my own style and reasons for blogging. The by far biggest reason is the interaction with other scholars.

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Why would I give away for free the primary commodity I create? Why not? Agreed, it is my intellectual property, but knowledge kept to myself isn't going to help anybody, not even me. That said, I'm quite selective as to what is published on my blog. Peer review matters. Yes, it does. And frankly, in line with what I just said, very little of what hasn't been peer-reviewed yet ever makes it to my blog. But most of what has made it through, will. Besides, leaking a few bits and pieces may attract the attention of other scholars interested in the same topic, and maybe willing to cooperate in a fruitful exchange of ideas. Not everybody is just out to steal my work. Conference papers don't get reviewed. Don't they? I see them appear often enough in the reference list of journal articles. Conference papers sometimes contain a lot more valuable information than the actual paper that it later turns into, and conference papers are the hardest papers to find, even with the help of my good friend Google. That's why I want my conference papers known. Blog posts could hurt your reputation. Possibly, but I always try to strike a balance between the good, the bad and the ugly in my reviews...and it has to be really bad for me to say something bad. It's all about constructive criticism. The biggest big upside to academic blogging is that I get publicly known to a worldwide audience, to the point that I am on occasion contacted “as an expert in the field” (which I'm not, not always) by other true experts in the field (who I consider to be way more expert than I am). In my opinion that is the biggest compliment an academic blogger can get. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 10/08/2010 10:37:56 AM ----BODY: <p>It's supposed to touch 80 degrees today here in beautiful and tropical Grand Forks.  So a few quick hit and varia on a sunny Friday:</p> <ul> <li>Another <a href="http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2010/10/blogging-inacademy.html">blog post on blogging in the academy</a>.  Good grief.</li> <li><a href="http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/establishments/68506/">New York Magazine profile of Nick Denton of Gawker</a>.</li> <li>Sam Fee has some good thoughts on<a href="http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/establishments/68506/"> Archaeology and the New Media over at Arranged Delirium</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://corinthianmatters.com/2010/10/07/more-corinth-incontrast/">David Pettegrew's Corinthian Matters reports more on the Corinth in Contrast conference</a>.</li>

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<li>Make plans now to come to the <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/greatplains/">Northern Great Plains History Conference</a>.  My paper is at 9 am on Thursday.</li> <li>Remember David Pettegrew will present the 2nd Annual Cyprus Research Fund Lecture at 4 pm on October 21 in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library.  <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/20 10-cyprus-research-fund-lecture-setting-the-stage-for-st-paulscorinth.html">Here's an abstract of his talk</a>. </li> <li>The second test of India vs. Australia<a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/india-v-australia-2010/engine/match/464525.html"> cannot be more exciting than the first</a>.</li> <li>Big news today, apparently, from the University of North Dakota.  I have no idea what it is, but I hope they use the word "game changer".</li> <li>What I'm listening to: Lee "Scratch" Perry, <em>Roast Fish, Collie Weed, and Corn Bread </em>and with the Upsetters, <em>Super Ape</em>.</li> <li>What I'm reading:  <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/howprofessors-think-inside-the-curious-world-of-academicjudgment/oclc/237048345">Michèle Lamont, How Professors think: inside the curious world of academic judgement</a>. (Cambridge, MA 2009).</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Showcase for Online Teaching Technology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: 316 CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 10/07/2010 06:59:56 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Crossposted to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a></em></p> <p>This week the Senate Continuing Education Committee hosted its regular Online Teaching Showcase.  Each semester the showcase brings together faculty who teach online and asks them to share some the techniques and technologies that they use to make their online classes more successful.  In some ways, this regular gathering of online teaching faculty is a great way to get a sense for future directions in online teaching.</p> <p>Many of the most common (and intriguing) applications that faculty used to reach their online and distant students sought to facilitate realtime

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interaction between faculty and student.  The old stalwarts, <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/">Adobe Connect </a>and the various <a href="http://www.wimba.com/">Wimba Applications</a> (which are conveniently bundled into Blackboard), made an appearance.  Their reliable and familiar interfaces allow faculty to stream a lecture to a group of students in real time, record the lecture for an archive, and share screens with students.  <a href="http://www.tegrity.com/home">Tegrity Lecture Capture</a> joined these two applications as another option for faculty who are interested recording lectures live. Tegrity is a server (or as they say now "cloud") based application that allows students to view lectures either in real time or recorded without downloading software to their computer.  To watch a recorded lecture, the student downloads a relatively small executable file which they then run on their computer. Based on the demonstration that I saw at the Showcase, Tegrity allows for the faculty member to track students who stream the lectures from the cloud.  Faculty could not only see how long a student viewed a recorded lecture, but also isolate parts of the lecture that a student rewatched in order to identify problem concepts or explanations.</p> <p>I also saw a demonstration of <a href="http://www.tidebreak.com/">Tidebreak</a> which is an application that creates a dynamic, shared environment where students and faculty can share screens, swap files, and even take control of a central, shared workstation to demonstrate a procedure or execute a task.  I could imagine that software like Tidebreak could be used alongside Adobe Connect or Wemba to create a far more interactive online classroom, but with this advance comes greater complexity.</p> <p>Cloud based computing also was on display with products like Citrix.  Citrix allows students to access applications run "in the cloud".  The applications range from Adobe products like Photoshop to the standard suite of Microsoft offerings (Excel, Word, Access) and even more specialized applications like the statistics application SPSS.  From what I can tell, the goal of this kind of service is allow students access to software without the expense and complications individual licensing. It will eventually allow a faculty member to create an online computer lab where they could work with a group of students using virtualized software (again, from the cloud) without making them each buy the applications or worrying about the hardware that remote students are running.</p> <p>The applicability of these new applications and services is immediately apparent to the part of me that wants to create a richer, more dynamic online classroom.  Another part of me observes that the complexity of these applications will certainly increase the learning curve for a student engaging in online learning (even while services like Tegrity and Citrix could lower the point of entry from the stand point of hardware and software).  Much of the collaborative technology on display also privileged a live teaching environment.  Most of my online teaching, however, and I imagine this is true for many faculty members, is done asynchronously.  That is to say, we are not interacting with students live; instead students are viewing course material at their own pace and interacting with the instructor or their fellow students at far less regular interval than they would in a classroom environment.  While I am sure the users of each of these technologies would stress that they could also work asynchronously, it still seemed clear to me that the goal was to reproduce the classroom experience in a virtual or online way, rather than to imagine the online classroom as something fundamentally different.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Working on a New Departmental Website STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: working-on-a-new-departmental-website CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 10/06/2010 08:49:39 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last 6 months, the University of North Dakota has been working to release an updated and upgraded website.  As part of this process, every department has been asked to reconsider its web site.  The <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History's website</a> is, frankly, horrible, but, at the same time, it is clear that the website functioned successfully as the main point of contact for prospective graduate students. In some sense, the site is horribly broken, but it still gets the job done.</p> <p>The challenge now is to re-design the content and the organization of the department's website without undermining its basic functionality.</p> <p>First, we've been experimenting with some new text for the home page.  This is where we are at present (nothing is finer than a text created by a committee!):</p> <blockquote> <p> <p>From the earliest days of the University of North Dakota, history faculty have played an important part in preparing students to be engaged citizens of their communities, the state, and the world.  Today the department remains committed to teaching the past and developing in our students the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills necessary to take their place in an increasingly global world. Each faculty member is an active researcher in their respective fields, and brings fresh perspectives on different cultures and ideas into the classes they teach.</p> <p>The department offers the B.A., M.A., Ph.D. as well as a D.A. program.  These programs are supported by a diverse faculty whose active research interests span every period in American history as well as in West Africa, the Atlantic world, Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern European history.  Faculty approach these periods with from diverse perspectives ranging from biography to the study of military, diplomatic, social and intellectual history and an emphasis on race, gender, and women as categories of historical analysis.  Faculty and student research draw upon textual analysis, the study of material culture, quantitative and data driven methods, and oral history to bring the past alive.</p>

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<p>The department supports both undergraduate and graduate student engagement in the discipline through a strong regional archive with collections of national significance, the largest library between Minneapolis and Seattle, the history honor society Phi Alpha Theta, several annual lectures, and editorship of the Oral History Review.</p> </p> </blockquote> <p> <p>We also hope to include pages devoted the faculty bios and a page with plain text descriptions of our undergraduate and graduate programs.</p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: What Horace B. Woodworth tells us about the Academia today STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: what-horace-b-woodworth-tells-us-about-the-academia-today CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND DATE: 10/05/2010 07:11:49 AM ----BODY: <p>Next week is the 45th Annual <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/greatplains/">Northern Great Plains History Conference</a>.  Since the mid-1960s when a group of faculty at the University of North Dakota founded the conference, it has roamed universities across Northern Plains and assembled scholars from across the region.  My paper for this years conference will look at the career of Horace B. Woodworth.  He featured prominently in the first chapter of my history of the Department of History here at UND and is the topic of an article that I submitted to North Dakota History (but have strangely heard nothing about for the past two years; I am confident that this means that publication is imminent.)</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ho race-b-woodwo.html">I've blogged on Mr. Woodworth before</a>, but today, I want to suggest that his career might have something to offer the academy today.  Over the past few years there has been a flurry of books suggesting that the organization of the modern American University is somehow broken.  Louis Menand's recent book, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/marketplace-ofideas/oclc/286488147">The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University</a></em> (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/th

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oughts-on-the-end-of-disciplines.html">blogged here</a>) and Mark Taylor's, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/crisis-on-campus-a-bold-plan-forreforming-our-colleges-and-universities/oclc/501320939">Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities</a> </em>have both rooted the current (and typically ill-defined) problems with the university in growth of professionalization of the disciplines and the self-serving and exclusionary rhetoric that come to ossify the departmental/disciplinary mode of university organization.  Both book (and numerous others) also saw fundamental changes in the American university as tied to changes in the organization of institutions; the traditional link between departments and disciplines must be weakened and replaced with a more integrated structure that better represents the dynamic realities of the modern workplace. In fact, as recently as last week, <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&amp;storyco de=413700&amp;c=1">the president of the University of Chicago offered a similar argument</a> noting the tensions between the need for individuals to fill highly specialized entry level positions and the need to produce people who can thrive in the higher reaches of the modern economy through their ability to manipulate and integrate abstract ideas.</p> <p>What can Horace B. Woodworth teach us about these critiques?  When he came to the University of North Dakota in 1885, he had degrees from Dartmouth and Hartford Theological Seminary and had worked as a teacher, headmaster of private schools, a preacher and a farmer.  His first post was as Professor of Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy.   By 1888, Woodworth was the Chair of Didactics, Mental and Moral Sciences, and the Principal of the Normal Department. In 1890, he left the Normal Department and assumed the title Professor of Mental and Moral Science and History. By the time he retired from the University in 1904, his title was simply Professor of History.</p> <p>Such a dynamic career would be impossible today, of course, as the barriers between disciplines (particularly the sciences and the humanities) are virtually insurmountable.  At the same time, Woodworth's career path reflects a response to pressures produced both within and outside of the institution.  The emergence of professional disciplines with more clearly defined professional standards guided Woodworth to a great specialization in teaching and in his research.  This ultimately culminated in the publication of his book, <em><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=aVM6AAAAMAAJ&amp;ots=TaXoVzFMQ&amp;dq=The%20Government%20of%20the%20People%20of%20the%20State%20of%20North% 20Dakota&amp;pg=PP2#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">The Government of the People of the State of North Dakota</a> </em>in 1895.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="http://books.google.com/books?id=aVM6AAAAMAAJ&amp;ots=TaXoVzFMQ&amp;dq=The%20Government%20of%20the%20People%20of%20the%20State%20of%20North% 20Dakota&amp;pg=PP1&amp;output=embed" style="border: 0px;" width="450" height="700" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe></p> <p>While I understand that today universities are far more complex institutions than they were in the time of Woodworth and the pressures of tenure, increasingly narrow disciplinary training, and bureaucratic ossification constrain career paths for most academics, it is nevertheless true that our 19th century predecessors were capable of dynamic changes over the course of their academic careers.  As another example was someone like William F. Allen at the University of Wisconsin where he served as the Professor of Latin and Roman History; Allen was another New Englander trained as a Classicist at Harvard, Berlin, and Göttingen, but his most important contribution to academic life was his work editing<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=LHktAAAAMAAJ&amp;dq=slave%20songs%20of%20

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the%20united%20states&amp;client=safari&amp;pg=PP7#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"> Slave Songs in the United States</a>.</p> <p>The careers of individuals like Allen and Woodworth do not provide a template for a modern scholar to follow, but certainly demonstrate that the disciplinary organization in which we now reside (quite comfortably) is not immutable.  In fact, the response of these early faculty to tensions from outside and within their institutions offers a dynamic model for university faculty today.  University faculty should be engaged in their environment and our training offers us unique opportunities to act in dynamic ways that not only can improve the educational life of our institution, but also carve out and form the basis for new disciplines, fields of study, and knowledge.  Change is not only possible, but good.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Corinth in Contrast: Some Reflective Notes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: corinth-in-contrast-some-reflective-notes CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 10/04/2010 07:27:29 AM ----BODY: <p>I was fortunate enough to spend the last four days in Austin, Texas at the <a href="https://webspace.utexas.edu/sjf365/CC3/Intro.html">Corinth in Contrast conference</a>.  The conference sought to bring together archaeologists working in Corinth and scholars interested in New Testament studies, particularly the work of Paul and his correspondents in Corinth.  The hope was to produce more informed scholars on both sides of the discussion: archaeologists, on the one hand, who have a better idea of the impact of their work on the field of New Testament studies, and, on the other hand, New Testament scholars who have a more solid grasp significant, ongoing work at Corinth.  As I've blogged here in the run up to the conference, the theme was "studies in inequality" and generally speaking the papers presented showed a real willingness to attempt to understand inequality in Hellenistic and Roman Corinth.</p> <p>So, here are a few of my notes on what was a pretty illuminating four days:</p> <p>1. While it comes as no surprise, the folks who studied the New Testament were generally more engaged with archaeology than the archaeologists were with New Testament texts. In fact, many of the New Testament scholars had significant experience doing field work or were directing their own projects.  This almost certainly followed the age old precedent of  Biblical archaeology, which one

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could argue dates to Late Antiquity and the excavations of St. Helena.  I couldn't help think that archaeologists will probably benefit by the sustained interested in their field by New Testament scholars especially as resources to Classical studies continue to decline.</p> <p>2. Mechanisms of inequality.  The scholars working in New Testament studies had much clearer ideas about how individuals or groups in Corinth produced inequality.  Steve Friesen and James Walters, for example, both argued that ritual forms of interaction served to reinforce and challenge (at different times) unequal relationships in the Pauline community.  Among the archaeologists, Guy Sanders identified share-cropping as a method for maintaining economic inequality and a cycle of dependency; Sarah James saw the political arrangements following the sack of Corinth in 146 as crucial context for a hitherto overlooked group of Corinthians who probably struggled for an economic and political place within Greek society as much as they have within the dominant historical narrative of the city.  Pettegrew suggested that inequality may have been a product of Corinth's place as an emporium in the ancient world and seemed to suggest that market forced created a kind of inequality in a way that our image of a state sponsored diolkos would not. (The diolkos was the supposed road across the Isthmus of Corinth ostensibly designed to facilitate dragging ships between the Corinthian and Saronic gulf).</p> <p>3. Inequality and Marx.  One thing that really struck me as a historian was the almost complete absence of Marx from the conference. Marx, to my mind, was the foremost theorist of inequality in the academic world today.  In fact, it would be fair to suggest that Marx's critique of social inequality was central to our imagining of a future where social, economic, and political inequality did not exist.  While it is always easy to say that Marx lurked in the background of many of these papers (and to be fair Guy Sanders did mention Marx and James Walters referenced Althusser), it really amazed me that Marx's interest in the material conditions of inequality and his later use by so many literary theorists did not form a central axis around which New Testament scholars and archaeologists could find common methodological ground.</p> <p>4. Religion and Inequality.  It's hardly surprising, of course, that a conference that combines New Testament scholars and archaeologists would understand religion to be a major mechanism for producing (and challenging) inequality in the ancient world, but at the same time, it was remarkable to see the difficulty archaeology has in penetrating the dense intersection of cult, economy, and society.  Ron Stroud's paper on Corinthian Magic and Ritual did the best at this by looking at the archaeological evidence for the activities surrounding the use of curse tablets at the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Corinth during the Roman period.  He was successful in suggesting that the rituals surrounding the use of curse tablets represented the activities of a group who were alienated from access to more highly structured and regulated types of religious power.  In the case of the curse tablets from Demeter and Kore at Corinth, these individuals appeared to be women who sought recourse to both personal and social grievances by appeals to black magic.</p> <p>5. Historical Inequality. One thing that wanted to hear more about at the conference is the historiography (if you will) of inequality.  In other words, I wanted to understand a bit more about how our expectations and understanding of (in)equality have shaped our reading of the ancient world. Steve Fiesen's opening remarks prompted me to consider the crucial link between teaching about inequality in the past and producing a better future.  Michael White's closing remarks returned to some of these point by pointing out how different expectations of equality were in the ancient world and how the elaborately dendridic systems of patronage the created social cohesion, in fact, relied upon certain expectations of inequality to function. If nothing else the relationship

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between the patron and client (in its simplest form) implied a difference in power between the two parts of the dyad. A couple of papers suggested that the inequality of the ancient world depended, at least in part, on our approach to the past, how we have organized our evidence from the past, and what we think it means.  Sarah Lepinski for example, pointed out that the lack of interest in Roman wall painting and the social and cultural networks involved in its production stemmed in part from the way tendency in the modern nation of Greece to overlook a "colonial" period in its own history.  By overlooking the Roman period we have consigned Roman Greeks to an unequal status both to the dominant Roman power and to earlier "free" Greeks of the Classical period.</p> <p>The opportunity to contemplate these ideas was the product of a brilliantly organized conference with plenty of time for informal discussions, engaging plenary sessions, and fantastic logistical coordination. The conference experience easily ranks among the best that I've encountered.  Thanks to everyone involved from the organizers, Steve Friesen, Daniel Schowalkter, and Sarah James to the graduate assistant Ann Morgan!</p> <p>One more thing, David Pettegrew has promised some comments of his own on the conference over at his new <a href="http://corinthianmatters.com/">Corinthian Matters blog</a>.  They aren't posted yet, but keep your eyes peeled!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Please Stay Tuned STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: please-stay-tuned CATEGORY: Conferences DATE: 09/30/2010 06:45:41 AM ----BODY: <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013487dc5c29970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="500" height="375" /></p> <p>I'm at <a href="https://webspace.utexas.edu/sjf365/CC3/Intro.html">Corinth in Contrast</a> in Austin, Texas today.  I'll post an update this afternoon.  Meanwhile, please stay tuned.  If there is good internet access, I'll drop some Tweets on y'all (http://twitter.com/billcaraher) with the hashtag #CIC.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: 2010 Cyprus Research Fund Lecture: Setting the Stage for St. Paul's Corinth STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: 2010-cyprus-research-fund-lecture-setting-the-stage-for-st-paulscorinth CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Conferences DATE: 09/29/2010 06:44:16 AM ----BODY: <p>This year's Cyprus Research Fund Lecture will feature Prof. David K. Pettegrew of Messiah College.  David is not only a long time collaborator with my in both Greece and Cyprus, but also regarded as one of the foremost scholars on Late Roman Corinth.  His talk will focus on over a decade of archaeological and historical research on the Isthmus of Corinth.  We hope he'll let us podcast his talk so that anyone, anywhere can listen to him!</p> <p>Here's a description of his talk:</p> <blockquote> <p> <p>Corinth has come down in history as the quintessential maritime city that became powerful and wealthy by capitalizing on the movement of commercial goods and peoples across a narrow isthmus at the center of Greece.  The connecting isthmus also allegedly made Corinth politically unstable, corrupt in morals, and exceptionally depraved.  As St. Paul’s letters show, Corinth was a Christian community with problems.</p> <p>Why was Corinth so consistently associated with travel, trade, and wealth in ancient thought?  And how did a land bridge facilitate commerce and traffic and contribute to the city’s development in the Roman era?</p> <p>In this lecture, David Pettegrew considers what the ancient texts and material evidence suggest about travel and commerce across the Isthmus and its effects on the maritime character of the city in the first and second centuries AD.</p> </p> </blockquote> <p>The talk is Thursday, October 21st in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library.  There'll be a small reception after the talk.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Pettegrew.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f4b2ade3970b -pi" border="0" alt="Pettegrew.jpg" width="463" height="600" /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Ambivalent Landscapes of the 6th century at Corinth in Contrast STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: ambivalent-landscapes-of-the-6th-century-at-corinth-in-contrast CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 09/28/2010 07:04:04 AM ----BODY: <p>As readers of this blog know (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/mo re-contrasting-corinth.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/ev en-more-contrasting-corinth.html">here</a>), I've been working on a conference paper for the Corinth in Contrast Conference at the end of this week.  This paper is, in effect, an archaeological and architectural argument for the impact of Justinian on the Corinthian Isthmus.  (These ideas developed, more or less, from <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/ep igraphy-litur.html">my analysis of a pair of texts that reference Justinian from the Isthmus</a>).</p> <p>You've read the drafts, so here's the paper:</p> <p><a style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sansserif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; display: block; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Caraher Ambivalent Landscape 2010 on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/38304843/CaraherAmbivalent-Landscape-2010">Caraher Ambivalent Landscape 2010</a> <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" width="100%" height="600"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /> <param name="wmode" value="opaque" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=38304843&amp;access_key=key29s5z4gyidaj9o4ldpu0&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" /> <embed id="doc_683454948842895" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%" height="600" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=38304843&amp;access _key=key-29s5z4gyidaj9o4ldpu0&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list"

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name="doc_683454948842895" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#ffffff"></embed> </object> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Digital Workflow and Microhistory STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: digital-workflow-and-microhistory CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 09/27/2010 08:27:11 AM ----BODY: <p>As you might imagine, I am pretty excited that <a href="http://www.uc.edu/pompeii/">Steven Ellis's team's</a> <a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/pompeii/">use of the iPad as their primary,field data recording device</a> is getting some attention lately.&nbsp; I imagined this kind of digital workflow when I began working with Scott Moore to design the digital recording components of our project in Cyprus.&nbsp; Scott and I, from what I recall, always assumed a paper stage.&nbsp; This is what that stage looks like now:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f49f8a57970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="PKAPPaperStage" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013487c00a95970c -pi" width="404" height="242"></a> </p> <p>I think that we fell back on the old archaeological wisdom that a paper stage somehow serves as a more dependable back up that digital copies. This led us to copying the entire archive each year and carrying it home (and still managing sometimes to lose copies of the original or not have them where we needed them). With a fully digital workflow, it is, of course, much easier to make copies of every stage of the documentation process and store them multiple places, and, provided that a good version control system is in place, manage these copies. </p> <p>I know that I also subscribed to the idea that paper copies preserve more fully the archaeological thought process.&nbsp; We insisted that our trench supervisors not keep separate, personal, notebooks (they did anyway) and write directly onto our recording sheets as they excavate.&nbsp; The hope was that the image of the stratigraphic unit form provided the best record of the process of excavation. In fact, as much as was possible, we have sought to associate digital images of

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these sheets (and the trench plans of each stratigraphic unit) with the digital copies of this data.&nbsp; This remains a time consuming process of keying the data from each sheet and digitizing each days trench plans. Having supervised the keying of most of our field data, I can attest to the hours of time and concentration that went into producing our digital versions.&nbsp; It's mostly done now, but it was a onerous process and we haven't quite produced data with the kind of immediate transparency that we had hoped for (although it is all still possible).&nbsp; Using the iPad to record directly into digital form the basic data from the trench would pay immediate dividends by streamlining the data collection process.</p> <p>On the other hand, I do wonder whether some of the data associated with the archaeological process might be lost. I was thinking about the faint evidence for revision that appears on our paper recording sheets - typically under various forms of erasure (usually a <s>strikethrough</s>) - that preserves irregular fragments of the archaeological through processes.&nbsp; If Wikipedia has taught us anything, digital recording makes it possible to record this same data by recording each change to the data set and each earlier version.&nbsp; In effect, the digital data collection could preserve a kind of digital palimpsest of each key stroke, deletion, adjustment, mistaken measurement.</p> <p>I am fascinated by this kind of micro-history and its potential to reveal patterns of behavior across an entire project and capture a more intimate look at how the archaeological method is performed.</p> <p>Just for fun, I used The Archivist to capture some of the buzz about the Apple story on Ellis's use of the iPad. <a href="http://visitmix.com/labs/archivist-desktop/">The Archivist</a> lets you download all the Tweets associated with any search criteria.&nbsp; For my little experiment, I captured all the Tweets that used the word "Pompeii" and "iPad".&nbsp; As of 6 am this morning when I staggered into my office, I captured 520+ Tweets.&nbsp; I then plotted them by hour over the last few days.&nbsp; Here's the chart.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013487c00aa7970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f49f8a80970b -pi" width="400" height="252"></a> </p> <p>They have averaged about 5 tweets an hour over the last 100 hours or so.&nbsp; The peek was 95 tweets per hour between 12:20 pm and 12:20 pm on September 23rd.&nbsp; Thus surge continued over the next hour where they had over 80 tweets and subsided to under 40 tweets later by 3:30 or so. The great thing about The Archivist is that it lets you download your Tweets so that you can data mine them using an application like <a href="http://rapid-i.com/">RapidMiner</a>.&nbsp; I didn't do that, but I did do some simple mining.&nbsp; For example, Ellis's name is mentioned in 131 of the tweets (or about 25% of the time) and about 16% of the Tweets are obvious "RTstyle" re-tweets. In Tweets with both Pompeii and iPad in them Ellis's university, University of Cincinnati, was never once mentioned nor was his project's name, the Porta Stabia project (even in two Tweets that appear to come from "official" University of Cincinnati channels!).&nbsp; In the hyper economical world of Twitter, there are good reasons not to include long word like Cincinnati or relatively obscure project names.&nbsp; In contrast, the most common phrases is "Discovering ancient Pompeii with iPad" which was the title of the Apple article and it appeared in 62% of the Tweets (suggesting the far larger number of retweets happen than had the traditional "RT" designation).&nbsp; For the record, my Tweet, which occurred very early in the Tweet cycle led to only three retweets.&nbsp; </p> <p>This is the kind of microhistorical analysis that could be possible by mining the minutia preserved in a fully digital workflow.</p> <p><em>By the way, it's a double blog day! I thought

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that I needed to do something to mark my 800th post and in the tradition of the National Register of Historic Places, I thought I'd just put up <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/th is-is-my-800th-post.html">a marker</a> (with a few links, it is a blog after all).</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Fee EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 209.131.80.228 URL: http://www.samfee.net/ DATE: 10/01/2010 10:49:37 AM I agree, and I'm struck by how valuable tracking that change in archaeological thought over time might be. There are a whole host of ways we could do it electronically. I'd suggest we could chronicle much more of that thought process by digital means than through a paper trail. Of course, it still comes down to the user actually recording those changing interpretations in the field. So any tool that gets implemented needs to be so easy to use that it isn't inconvenient for keeping track of our changing ideas. Otherwise, those changes will fall between the cracks. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: This is my 800th post STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: this-is-my-800th-post CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/27/2010 07:21:25 AM ----BODY: <p>This is my 800th post.&#0160; Here&#39;s what I said at my: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/me tadata-monday-700-posts.html"><br /></a></p><p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/me tadata-monday-700-posts.html">700th post</a> <br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/bl ogging-at-70000.html">ca. 600th post</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/re flecting-on-academic-blogging-at-500-posts.html">500th post</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/ha ppy-400th-post-from-history-240.html">400th post was my favorite and the most

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delicious</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/me tadata-monday.html">ca. 300th post</a> <br />I missed my 200th<br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/10 0-posts.html">100th post</a>.</p> <p>Thanks for reading!!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/24/2010 09:59:24 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits for a cool and raining and busy Fall Friday:</p>! <ul>! <li>The most exciting thing this week is <a href="http://www.uc.edu/pompeii/">Steven Ellis&#39; Pompeii project</a> being featured on <a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/pompeii/">the Apple website </a>for its creative use of iPads. &#0160;I had a chance to work with many of these people at Isthmia and I can attest that their use of the iPad at Pompeii was more than just a gadget exercise. &#0160;The technologies actually made excavation more efficient and appears to have made it easier to document their trenches more thoroughly.</li>! <li>A new and really useful <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/09/23/what-i-wish-i-had-know-beforeteaching-my-first-online-course/">Teaching Thursday this week</a> featuring 25&#0160; some starter tips for online course design and teaching.</li>! <li>I&#39;m beginning to like covers of &quot;Smells Like Teen Spirit&quot; better than the original. &#0160;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KZjnFZvCNc">Check this out</a>. (inspired by Chuck Jones who<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFoS9bho2Ww"> posted a link to this</a>)</li>! <li>Big announcements from <a href="http://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a>. &#0160;My Zotero use had declined since I started using Chrome more often. &#0160;The recent announcement that Zotero was going to be cross platform and even create a free-standing version is great to hear. &#0160;And <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Zotero-Everywhere-How-Will-it/27037/">this post from ProfHacker</a> sets out some of the most exciting aspects of these developments. </li>!

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<li><a href="http://mediacaffeine.com/perspectives/environmental/put-cameras-ona-peregrine-falcon-and-a-goshawk-prepare-to-be-amazed/">These videos of Peregrine Falcon and Goshawk with cameras</a> on them are crazy. &#0160;I wonder how the cameras effect the birds aerodynamics?</li>! <li><em>The Atlantic </em>put together <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/the-atlantic-techcanon-1-10/62818/">a canon of major works on technology</a>. &#0160;There are some omissions but over all, it&#39;s pretty good.</li>! <li>I need to finish up my paper for the <a href="https://webspace.utexas.edu/sjf365/CC3/Intro.html">Corinth in Contrast</a> conference next week.</li>! <li>I received a vote for tenure from my department this week. &#0160;Thank for all the encouragement and support!</li>! <li>What I&#39;m listening to: Crocodiles, Sleep Forever and <a href="http://www.fatpossum.com/news/83">this free EP from the fantastic Fat Possum</a>.</li>! </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Notes on RBHS Analysis of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Survey Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: some-notes-on-rbhs-analysis-of-the-pyla-koutsopetria-survey-data CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 09/23/2010 07:45:55 AM ----BODY: <p>No RBHS is not a local high-school to whom I've outsourced PKAP data analysis, nor is it a new type of digital hi-def television.&nbsp; Those letters stand for Rim, base, handle, sherd and represent the basic parts of a ceramic vessel.&nbsp; Since most of the vessels one finds in survey and even excavation are not whole or are broken and mangled, documenting the rim, base, handle, and sherds from each vessel is an important way to understand how we as archaeologists are able to identify an particular object and assign it to a date, function, and even, sometimes, place of manufacture. It is also helpful in secure, stratigraphic contexts (that not in an unstratified survey context) for identifying the minimum number of possible vessels of a particular type because we know that some kinds of vessels on have, say, one-handle, then a four handles

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would represent at least four vessels of this type.</p> <p><a href="http://www.atypon-link.com/ASCS/doi/abs/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743">David Pettegrew's research</a> has really set the stage for applying this kind of analysis to the PKAP survey data. He has argued that certainly highly diagnostic artifact types (for example Late Roman 1 amphora handles or Late Roman "combed ware" body sherds) can distort the chronological distribution of material at a site.&nbsp; Periods characterized by less diagnostic artifact types tend to be less easily associated with a narrow chronology or function and under represented in relation to period defined by more easily identified vessels types.&nbsp; So isolating the way in which particular periods become visible using our Rim/Base/Handle/Sherd analysis becomes an important to critique our survey data. <p>Fortunately, the basic system that we use to document our ceramics, the chronotype system, took into account rbhs. The chronotype system required the ceramicist to separate and document as a group, called a batch, according the extant part of each type of vessel present . In other words, we counted in one batch all of the rims from, say, a Roman Amphora and in another batch all the handles from the same kind of amphora. This has allowed us to parse quite finely the character of our assemblages and its relationship to our ability to identify particular types of artifacts based on their individual parts. <p>So here are some basic observations: <ul> <li>Of the 19 periods with more than 20 sherds collected using our standard survey procedure, 13 counted the majority of artifacts as body sherds. In other words, for most periods, body sherds represent both the most common and the most chronologically diagnostic type of material.</li> <li>Only for the Archaic period were the majority of artifacts identified by one part of a vessel, and these almost all came from one type of vessel, so-called Archaic basket handled storage jars.</li> <li>Of the 258 chronotype (that is discrete types of artifacts) that produced extant parts (some chronotypes, like shells or wall plaster fragments, do not produce extant parts that we can easily record), 138 of 55% of these chronotypes were identifiable based on only one extant part. 76% are recognized by only two extant parts and 90% by three. 99% by four extant parts (mainly RBHS).&nbsp; In other words, most artifacts are only recognizable by one part of the vessel.</li> <li>It is interesting to note that the number of chronotypes associated with a particular period has almost no influence on the average number of extant parts by which a vessel is identified. Large number of chronotypes identifiable by a large number of extant parts (4+) come from Roman (40), Late Bronze Age-Hellenistic (18), Ancient Historic (39), Hellenistic-Early Roman (24) vessels. At the same time 4 or more extant parts also appeared for periods with fewer chronotypes, like Classical-Roman (6), Late-Cypriot II-Late Cypriot III (4), and Post-Prehistoric (4).&nbsp; This means that while the majority of sherds from each period are body sherds, they nevertheless have vessels that are identifiable based on other parts of the artifact.&nbsp; In other words, our ability to date artifacts to a particular period is independent from the number of vessels with identifiable extent parts. Some periods have three or four chronotypes with lots of identifiable fragments; others have 25 different chronotypes with a mix more and less easily identifiable artifact types.&nbsp; There does not seem to be a pattern.</li> <li>Far more central to the number of parts of the vessel that we can identify is the kind of vessel and their function. Kitchen/Cooking ware produce the most possible extant parts (4+) followed by coarse ware and amphora chronotypes (3.8). Medium coarse ware produced 3.5, while pithos, semi-fine, and fine all produced 2.4 or fewer extant parts per chronotype. This likely has more to do with the shapes of the vessel than the size of the vessel.</li></ul> <p>This kind of analysis may seem tedious and complicated, but it is important to understand how bias in our ability to identify a particular type of artifact can influence the kinds of chronological

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and functional landscapes that we create from survey data.&nbsp; In examining our data in this way, we can really see the point of contact between what our ceramicist does in placing artifacts in particular classes and our historical reconstructions of the landscape.&nbsp; The entire world of Pyla-Koutsopetria is literally born from the data gleaned from individual artifacts.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Open Learning STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-on-open-learning CATEGORY: Academia CATEGORY: Public History DATE: 09/22/2010 06:37:08 AM ----BODY: <p>A couple of weeks ago I sketched out a proposal for an "institute of open learning" at the University of North Dakota.  I pitched it to some of the "power-that-be", and I think that I have some basic start up funds to make it happen.</p> <p>Now the proposal has to make its way through the administrative hierarchy here on campus.  In the meantime, I'll make a draft of the proposal available here.  Everything included in the proposal is tentative right now including prospects for funding and collaborative relationships on campus, and I expect this might all change if and when we get down to brass tacks (e.g. cost of implementation, et c.).</p> <p>But for now, here it is:</p> <p><a style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sansserif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; display: block; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Proposal for the Development of Open Learning Courses on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/37922545/Proposal-for-the-Development-of-OpenLearning-Courses">Proposal for the Development of Open Learning Courses</a> <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" width="100%" height="600"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /> <param name="wmode" value="opaque" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" />

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<param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=37922545&amp;access_key=keyvp8vo3vzdp4m6o12n4f&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" /> <embed id="doc_89885483313925" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%" height="600" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=37922545&amp;access _key=key-vp8vo3vzdp4m6o12n4f&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" name="doc_89885483313925" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#ffffff"></embed> </object> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Plotting Cut Blocks Across Pyla-Koutsopetria STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: plotting-cut-blocks-across-pyla-koutsopetria CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 09/21/2010 07:12:19 AM ----BODY: <p>Between 2005 and 2006, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project documented over 500 features from the Koutsopetria plain.&nbsp; Most of these features were cut blocks of various sizes, material and descriptions as well as a handful of features associated with ancient agricultural installations (bit of an olive press, some andesite mill fragments, et c.).&nbsp; Over the past couple of days, I finally got to analyzing this data beyond simply observing that we have lots of cut blocks.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.pkap.org/staff.html">The field team</a> in 2005 and 2006 recorded detailed information regarding the location, size, and in many cases generally descriptions of each block and keyed them into a database that we could integrate with our GIS.</p> <p>Most of the architectural fragments including cut limestone and gypsum blocks, are concentrated in the immediate Koutsopetria plain where farmers have moved them to stone piles on the edges of the fields. Check out our newest additions (partially edited) to our Omeka Collection: <em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse?collection=9">PylaKoutsopetria from the Air</a> </em>to get an idea of what these stone piles look like.</p> <p align="center"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/koutsopetria_north_2007_ 4944fb9f0e.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/koutsopetria_north_2007_

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4944fb9f0e.jpg" width="450" height="300"></p> <p align="center"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/koutsopetriawest9_2010_7 156214481.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/koutsopetriawest9_2010_7 156214481.jpg" width="450" height="338">&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">The most common type of cut block is made of local limestone and probably quarried on site. The majority of the blocks fall between 0.3 and 0.7 m in length and 0.3 and 0.5 in width. For the blocks where all three dimensions are visible, their volume falls between 0.06 and 0.03 cubic meters. This produced blocks of between 75 kg and 140 kg which would be relatively easily moved for construction. Some blocks, of course, could be much larger exceeding 1 m in length and weighing close to 500 kg. With blocks of this size, there is almost no doubt that some large scale, monumental architecture once stood in the immediate area.&nbsp; Here's a distribution map.&nbsp; The grey grid in the background is our survey grid and the color of the dots relates to the volume of the stone.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134878c0755970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="CutBlocks" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f46c6330970b -pi" width="454" height="338"></a> </p> <p align="left">We also documented a significant quantity of cut gypsum block.&nbsp; Since marble did not naturally occur on the island, Cypriots often used gypsum as a substitute in more elaborate buildings.&nbsp; These blocks are generally similar in size to the cut limestone blocks with lengths of around a half a meter and widths of 0.3 meters. The average volume of blocks was similar to that of the cut blocks with only a few blocks exceeding 0.1 cubic meters. There were slightly more smaller blocks owing most likely to the more friable character of gypsum. Most blocks fell between 0.01 and 0.06 cubic meters. Gypsum has a lower density than limestone and the blocks had correspondingly lower weight usually between 25 kg and 140 kg. Many, much smaller fragments of gypsum were scattered across the fields and several very large blocks appeared clustered together. Here's a map:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134878c0769970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="GypsumBlocks" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134878c076f970c -pi" width="454" height="338"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">Finally, we also discovered a small quantity of marble from across the site.&nbsp; Most of these came from the central area of the Koutsopetria plain embedded in rock piles at the edges of cultivated tracks of land. The marble fragments are small &lt; .30 m in maximum length and relatively thin &lt;.04 m suggesting that all but one marble fragment was revetment or floor slabs. The wide distribution of material perhaps indicates that there were several marble clad buildings on the plain of Koutsopetria even though so little marble survives.&nbsp; Here's a map:</p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134878c0755970 c-pi"></a> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f46c6347970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="MarbleBlocks" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f46c634d970b -pi" width="454" height="338"></a></p> <p align="left">The next step in analyzing this material is considering its relationship to the re-used blocks found in the excavations at Koutsopetria and the construction techniques used in the fortification wall surrounding Vigla.&nbsp; It certainly seems possible that

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the majority of cut stone blocks scattered around the Koutsopetria plain came from the easily quarried fortifications at Vigla and perhaps also the extensive walls surrounding the Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; Gypsum blocks had fairly limited uses architecturally owing to their lack of strength and value as prestige materials.&nbsp; The gypsum fragments from around the site probably served in specific places in buildings and comparing their sizes to in situ blocks from elsewhere on the island might give us some idea of how they were used.</p> <p align="left">&nbsp;</p></a> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Romanization and Christianization STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: romanization-and-christianization CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 09/20/2010 08:02:38 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last few weeks, I've been reading some basic, recent works on Romanization or the expansion of "Roman culture" across the area of either direct Roman political control or strong Roman influence.  Most of these works dealt with Western Europe and considered the relationship between the archaeological remains clearly identified as being Roman with those typically seen as "pre-Roman" or local.  Most works consider cultural change as a process and see the interaction between Roman and non-Roman representing both resistance and accommodation.  Moreover, most of these works see the term "Romanization" as problematic.  In particular, the notion of Romanization as a cohesive phenomenon functioning in similar ways across the entire area of Roman influence has done more harm than good and papered over variation in the process of cultural exchange rooted in social status, economic organization, traditions of elite display, and even Roman policies across the Empire.</p> <p>The basic critique of Romanization (for lack, at present, of a better or more compact term), has clear and obvious parallels with critiques of Christianization over the past 20+ years.  In fact, the conversations about the two concepts are so parallel that it is a wonder that more obvious (than I have seen) cross-pollination between these two scholarly approaches to cultural exchange have not appeared.  I've come away from studying this material with the following little gaggle of observations:</p> <p>1. The Viewer. Since John Clarke and Jas Elsner introduced me to the Roman viewer, I have become convinced that the act of viewing is central to the understanding the process of cultural engagement.  While it is almost old-hat

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now to observe that content producers (to use a nice, new media term) do not have exclusive control over how endusers view their content, actualizing this understanding in scholarship is a difficult task, especially if the enduser represents a group that has not left behind the kind of cultural material that scholars are apt to interpret (e.g. texts, monumental buildings, ceramics, sculpture, et c.).</p> <p>2. Hybrids. Post-colonial critiques have seemingly cast long shadow over the process of Roman political and cultural expansion. A hybridized elite worked to bridge the gap between the political core and periphery and hybrid cultural places created space for that could accommodate both local and non-local interests.  Within the study of Christianization, the notion of the hybrid has not seen the same interest from scholars, although it seems clear that the spread of Christianity can be at least partly associated with the religious, ritual, and political interest of the political center.  The rarity of any discussion of hybridity within the discourse Christianization is, in part, a matter of terminology. Certainly scholars have understood the emergence of Christianity as a process that produced myriad hybrids through, for example, processes like syncretism.  Our relative lack of interest in the notion of hybridity may stem from a reluctance to see the process of religious change as one of imperialism or colonization.</p> <p>3. Resistance. Hybrids form just one point on an increasingly nuanced ranged of potential cultural interaction in the ancient world.  The extremes, of course, are typically of greater interest to the scholar, if for no other reason than they are more likely to leave evidence.  The more pressing question, to my mind at least, ishow do we recalibrate our analytical lens to see more subtle forms of resistance to aggressive or openly hostile projects to promote social, political, or religious change. The process of Christianization took place over long spans of time and through the independent actions of multiple groups and agents; finding resistance in this context is far more than documenting the obvious occasions when Christian buildings were torched by hostile non-Christian groups.</p> <p>4. Plurality. Just as being Roman accommodates many different, sometimes incompatible, forms of cultural expression, being Christian can hardly be reduced to a fixed set of characteristics. The plurality of Roman culture and Christianity both require that we expand our understanding of how these two phenomena manifest themselves in a social, political, and cultural context.  In some cases, this might involve simply qualifying what we mean when we say Roman or Christian: for example, direct Roman political control or imperial or ecclesiastical Christianity.  In other cases, we might have to reconsider the relationship between hybrid identities and forms of Roman-ness and Christianity and the way in which such identities appeared to various groups of viewers.</p> <p>5. Erasure and Process. The creation of a Roman space or a Christian space in the ancient world was part of a process that involved, in part, the overwriting of earlier forms of cultural, economic, political, and social relationships.  In short, the process of Romanizing and Christianizing not only involves present forms of cultural expression, but projects these back into the past making it much more difficult for the historian and archaeologist to discover the traces of the process itself.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/17/2010 10:09:49 AM ----BODY: <p>It's a beautiful but chilly fall morning, ideal for a little gaggle of quick hits:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-bearingbonds-201010">There is an interesting article in </a><em><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds201010">Vanity Fair</a></em> that looks at the role of Athonite monks in Greek financial crisis.  The economic power of monastic communities in both Greece and Cyprus evokes the role of monasteries in Byzantium.</li> <li><a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/september/morris-west-rules091410.html">An Ian Morris interview </a>offers a few gems: "The past sucked" and "The ancient distinctions between East and West will be irrelevant to robots". (via <a href="http://classics.chass.utoronto.ca/index.php/faculty/facultylist/42">Dimitri Nakassis</a>)</li> <li><a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/09/twitter-queen-susan-orlean-on-themini-medium-the-interactive-narrative-and-the-writing-persona/">Twitter as narrative and as mind-streaming</a>.</li> <li>A new <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday yesterday</a> reminds me of some of the challenges from teaching my first class as a grad student years ago. (And if you don't, follow us at <a href="http://twitter.com/OIDatUND">OIDatUND on Twitter</a>)</li> <li>It's great to see Kostis Kourelis blogging again and his post on the<a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2010/09/masons-of-morea.html"> Masons of the Morea</a> is great piece of mini-scholarship (also inspired by <a href="http://classics.chass.utoronto.ca/index.php/faculty/facultylist/42">Dimitri Nakassis</a>). </li> <li>What I'm reading: R. Hingley, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/globalizing-roman-culture-unity-diversityand-empire/oclc/56051095">Globalizing Roman Culture: unity, diversity and empire</a></em>. Routledge 2005.</li> <li>What I'm listening to: Saccharine Trust, <em>We Became Snakes</em>; Busta Rhymes, <em>When Disaster Strikes;</em> The Walkmen, <em>Lisbon</em>.</li> </ul> <p>Have a great fall weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: What does Archaeology and the New Media look like? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: what-does-archaeology-and-the-new-media-look-like CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/16/2010 09:13:35 AM ----BODY: <p>After a phone chat with an old friend yesterday, I got to wondering what an edited volume on archaeology and the new media would look like.  Here are my random thoughts:</p> <p>1. Dynamic. If we've learned anything from the New Media moment, it's that static media is old media. The New Media - whatever that really is - is dynamic, adaptive, conversational, and unstable. It is a bit difficult to understand how a traditional edited volume that recognizes the value of the New Media in archaeology would bridge the gap between a static book form (and I would certainly count most ebooks as static, electronic versions of the Old Media) and the dynamic forms of expression that have characterized new media concepts. I could, perhaps, imagine a publication as a application for the iPad or coming wave of Android tablets that would fully embrace the nascent ability of ereaders, like the Kindle, to allow people to read collectively by providing access to other readers annotations.</p> <p>2. Historical. At the same time, I'd want a volume to reflect and capture a specific historical moment in the development of archaeology as a discipline.  As archaeologists, we know that excavation and documentation are both productive and destructive processes.  The creation of a volume on archaeology and the New Media could embrace this destruction/production dichotomy both by preserving in some way our thinking about the role of web 2.0 technologies in our work and by destroying the web 2.0-ness of these technologies (and ways of thinking) in a static, profoundly archaeological volume.  The archival tendency in archaeology could presumably accept the loss of the New Media experience for the sake of its historical description and preservation in another medium.</p> <p>What do these first two points mean? An application or web site and an archive (a printed volume)?</p> <p>3. Sampling Strategy.  The one thing about New Media engagement with archaeological work is that range of applications and goals.  Some projects see New Media as a means of publicizing their work to an established group of "stakeholders" or even working to expand the group of stakeholders by leveraging the webs infinite reach (and this is the point of departure that my project took when first experimenting with blogging).  Other projects developed New Media technologies in their core project goals viewing the text-blogging or photoblogging or video-blogging or pod-casting or whatever as central to the way archaeological research functions as story telling.  The use of new media also

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extends from the New World archaeological practices to the deepest bastions of Old World archaeology and from the most highly restricted research oriented projects to field schools. ¬†Sampling a range of project's that have used New Media would be necessary to document New Media in both practice and theory.</p> <p>4. Definitions. The sampling strategy proposed above would help create a definition for the New Media in an archaeological context that would capture a moment in time and a discrete range of relationships between archaeological methods and media technologies. The production of an archives forms the basis for this kind of disciplinary definition that can serve as a measuring stick of effectiveness, innovation, and mark out more clearly conceptual boundaries.</p> <p>5. Best Practices. ¬†There are practical concerns for using New Media technologies in archaeology. ¬†Some of them have to do with control over archaeological data and various national policies for the dissemination of sensitive archaeological information. ¬†As New Media technologies are increasingly used to record various aspects of archaeological research, there should be a set of ¬†best practices to ensure that the output of even the most ephemeral outputs are not lost. ¬†While a single set of best practices is unlikely to emerge, principles of curation would certainly provide a framework around which more practical approaches could cohere.</p> <p>What are your thoughts on the design, scope, and content of a volume on Archaeology and the New Media?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Fee EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 209.131.80.228 URL: http://www.samfee.net/ DATE: 10/01/2010 11:05:49 AM For the first two points, I think it is indeed both an archive and a web app. (A web app will run both online and natively - once compiled - for both iOS and Android). This would let us hit the broadest audience: users of text, the web, and mobile devices. It could also help form a community around the work. What I continue to struggle with though is how to collect and organize the ideas we have for content. I think you've got some good ideas here - the best practices section could essentially be a collection of case studies for the use of new media in archaeological research and education. I think the definitions ideas works as well, although I might broaden it... I guess I better get to work! I'll write up my ideas and post to my blog. We'll have a prospectus in no time : ) -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Metadata Wednesday STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: metadata-wednesday CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/15/2010 09:25:38 AM ----BODY: <p>Every once and a while, I get in the mood to post some metadata about my blog.  I last did this at the end of April <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/me tadata-monday-700-posts.html">when I hit my 700th post</a>.  I was thinking about waiting until 800 to do it again, but here I am at 792 and I got just a bit impatient.</p> <p>So, here's some new metadata.</p> <p>First, the summer is always a slow time for the blog.  Over the last 150 days, I received 7008  visits or about 47 hits a day according to Google Analytics.  These unique visits accounted for 10,047 page views or about 67 page views per day (or 1.43 views per visit).  The analytics provided by TypePad claim about 1,800 more page views (11, 903), so as per usual, web analytics is a precise, but rather in exact science.  The numbers reflect the summer lull, for the previous 5 months, I recorded 9,139 unique visitors and 14,559 views.  Overall, I am still hanging just under 80 page views a day.</p> <p>Here's the traditional map of Archaeology of the Mediterranean World visitors:</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="MetaDataSept10.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013487604051970c -pi" border="0" alt="MetaDataSept10.jpg" width="450" height="174" /></p> <p>The top 10 countries: US, Greece, UK, Canada, Italy, Australia, France, Germany, India, and Cyprus.  In the US, the top 10 states were North Dakota, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Florida, Texas, Washington, Illinois, and Michigan.</p> <p>More interesting, perhaps, to my readers interested in technology is the browser data:</p> <p>Firefox: 46%<br />Internet Explorer: 28%<br />Chrome: 11%<br />Safari: 10%<br />Opera: 3%</p> <p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/02/chrome-firefox-techcrunc/">As a number of observers have noted</a>, Chrome is digging into Firefox's share.  Last time I ran numbers (from October 2009 - April 2010), Firefox accounted for 53% of the browser share and Chrome was 6%.  It's interesting that since that time Internet Explorer and Safari has more or less held steady and Opera has more than doubled it share.</p> <p>Over the same span of time, the different operating systems of the computers accessing my blog have not shifted much:</p> <p>Windows: 72%<br />Mac: 23%<br />Linux: 2.5%</p> <p>iPhone: 0.8%<br />iPad: 0.7%<br />iPod: 0.2%<br />Android: 0.2%<br />Blackberry: 0.1%</p> <p>Linux has grown, and there have been notable shifts in the number of people accessing my blog from mobile devices with iPhone, iPod, and iPad showing marked increases as well as Android (but the overall number of views on these devices has remained small).</p> <p>So that's where my blog is in the metadata university.  It's a far cry from the first few times I reported on metadata at <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/10 0-posts.html">100 posts</a> and<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/tr affic-report.html"> at 2500 (!!) hits</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Even More Contrasting Corinth STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: even-more-contrasting-corinth CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 09/14/2010 08:00:37 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/mo re-contrasting-corinth.html">Yesterday I promised more inequality, resistance, and contrast in the Corinthia</a>, and here at the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, I mostly deliver on what I promise.</p> <p>Over the last few days I've been thinking about these small texts:</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="LechGraffiti.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f432ee67970b -pi" border="0" alt="LechGraffiti.jpg" width="450" height="168" /></p> <p>This is the text of two graffiti discovered on a wall fragment from the octagonal baptistery at Lechaion.  Both texts are rather fragmentary.  The first text seems to ask for someone to remember a woman named Eudokia, and the second text is a plea to help the deacon Loukianos, his wife (?), and children.  Both texts conform to the long standing practice of inscribed prayers.  The texts were scratched into what appears to be the mortar of the wall.  The photograph is poorly reproduced in my photocopy of the publication and Pallas' description of the location of the text is unclear.</p> <p>These texts represent a very personal plea for aid set up in a sacred place.  This practice was a long-standing Christian tradition and similar calls for help appear in mosaic floors and inscribed on columns, liturgical silver, and ceramics from across the Mediterranean basin.  At the same time, their rather humble mode of execution contrasts dramatically with the lavish decoration present in the Lechaion basilica.  These texts were not carved into marble and positioned where an audience could experience the proximity of the individuals to the sources of ecclesiastical, ritual, and religious power.  These modest letters were scratched into a wall of the baptistery which is an unusual place

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for such imprecations.  The most obvious explanation for the disjunction between these texts and their surroundings may be that these texts date from the time that the octagonal baptistery appears to have functioned as a church, perhaps after the collapse of the enormous basilica to its south.  Like the graffiti documented by Orlandos on the columns of the Parthenon, the modest character of these texts represents more an eagerness to locate one's prayers in the existing physical fabric of the building rather than a lack of resources or access to official sanction.  After all, Loukianos was a deacon who presumably could have arranged for a more official venue for his call for help.</p> <p>At the same time these texts present a vivid contrast to another, betterknown inscribed prayer from the Corinthia: the request for protection found at Isthmia. Unlike the modest texts incribed on the wall of the Lechaion baptistery, this text which asks God to protect Justinian, Victorinus, and everyone living according to God in Greece</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f432ee72970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="450" height="338" /></p> <p>As readers of this blog are probably tired of hearing, this text should probably be associated with the refortification of the Hexamilion wall by the emperor Justinian, and I have argued (as have others) that the Lechaion basilica is probably another example of imperial activities in the region.</p> <p>I am not sure that I'd argue too forcefully that contrasting character of these two texts represent some kind of inequality or resistance in the Corinthian landscape, but on the other hand, the graffiti text from Lechaion is far more likely to represent an authentic local voice.  And this local voice surely did not share the same access to resources as the emperor, and this local voice may not have had the same ability to endure the the challenging years of the Early Byzantine period in Greece.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Contrasting Corinth STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-contrasting-corinth CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 09/13/2010 07:14:42 AM ----BODY: <p>As some of you may know, I am toiling away on a paper that I will give at the Corinth in Contrast conference in Austin at the end of the month.  I've been

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looking at the way in which the 6th century, likely Justinianic, building boom in the Corinthia represented a monumentalized discourse of authority (both local and imperial, political, military, and religious) in the region.  This is a version of a paper I gave some years ago at a conference celebrating <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/ep igraphy-litur.html">50 years of field work at Isthmia</a>.  In that paper, I focused on two Justinianic inscriptions; in my paper for Corinth in Contrast, I planned to focus on archaeology and architecture.</p> <p>I produced a decent draft of my paper entitled "The Ambivalent Landscape of Christian Corinth: The Archaeology of Place, Theology, and Politics in a Late Antique City", but realized that the paper had very little to do with the theme of the conference:</p> <blockquote> <p><span style="line-height: 21px;">This conference explores the stratified nature of social, political, economic, and religious spheres at Corinth, and how the resulting inequalities are reflected in literary texts and material remains.  The analysis focuses on a specific population center (the Corinthia) over a given period of time (Hellenistic to Late Antique).</span></p> </blockquote> <p>In particular, my paper had almost nothing to do with "inequality".  This bothered me.</p> <p>Over the weekend, I read Louise Revell's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/roman-imperialism-and-localidentities/oclc/476883783">Roman Imperialism and Local Identity</a></em> (Cambridge 2009) with the idea models of Romanization might give me some way to access the relationship between a monumentalized discourse and social, economic, and even political inequality in Corinth.  Revell's introduction does a nice job at summarizing recent problemizations of Romanization, and emphasizes the performative aspects of Romanization as central to way in which imperialism manifests on the local level and local practices manifest as resistance, accommodation, and ambivalence.</p> <p>Despite my initial interest in performance in the way that I originally interpreted the Justinianic inscriptions, I had abandoned using this approach for a reason that I now forget (it might have to do with a particularly summary rejection of an article, but it might have just been time to move on).  After reading Revell, I began to see contrasts across the Corinthian countryside that hint at just the kind of inequality - whether manufactured as an ideological position or "real" - that would make my paper fit better to the theme of the conference and give it a more potent theoretical edge.</p> <p>First, and most generally, the act of producing monumental architecture is a kind of performance.  I argue that the Lechaion basilica (and related buildings) and the renovated Hexamillion wall are buildings with projected imperial power onto the Corinthian landscape.  Corinthians themselves not only saw these buildings as intrusions of 6th century imperial theology into local ecclesiastical affairs (<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/28019578/EpigraphyLiturgy-Justinianic-Isthmus-Caraher">for more on this read over this still unpublished paper</a>), but also contributed to the various ways that these buildings produced meaning.  Local Corinthians, irrespective of theological (or, frankly, religious predilections) surely contributed to the physical construction of the great church and the repairs to the various monumental walls Procopius reports Justinian to have funded in the Corinthia.  Building made their bodies physically complicit in the production of imperial ideology on the Isthmus.  Moreover, individuals involved in manual labor would have surrendered their bodies - if, in fact, working on imperial projects had an ideological or

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theological aspect - more readily than elites who could have held their bodies apart from the actual performance of imperial power.</p> <p>The bodies of the work crews who labored physically to construct imperial authority on the Isthmus do leave traces. Sanders has reported that similar graffiti in the wet mortar of both the Lechaion basilica and the Panayia bath in the city of Corinth proper (and perhaps the Hexamillion wall as well) suggest that the same work crews or the same organization provided labor for both buildings.  The simple inscribed fish in the mortar of both buildings would have been probably been covered with a layer of finer stucco when the building was completed and not visible.  At the same time, the symbol of the fish seems likely to have had religious significance.  The fish had been one of the earliest symbols associated with Christianity.  While we have no idea whether these symbols were set to mark out these buildings as "Christian" (as if this was necessary for the Lechaion basilica church!) or to mark the work of a particular crew of laborers or some kind of apotropaic function that suggested either resistance or accommodation, it is clear that the laborers had agency in the act of constructing these monumental buildings and hence were capable of seeing their labor as a ideological action.</p> <p>At the opposite end of the spectrum, the second largest basilica in the Corinthia is the Kraneion basilica.  Roughly contemporary with Lechaion basilica, it has clear similarities in form. Both churches have numerous annex rooms, a nartex and atria (albeit Kraneion appears to have a second atria extending to the south), water features in the western atria, and a baptistery arranged to the northwest of the church.  The most striking difference between these buildings is that the naves are separated from the aisles at Kraneion by means of a series of narrow piers supporting arches.  Lechaion follows a more traditional pattern by separating the nave from the aisles by a series of columns supporting arches that spring from ornate ionic impost capitals.  At least some of the columns in this nave colonnade were imperially controlled Proconnesian marble and the ionic impost capitals are sufficiently regular in design to suggest an imperial work crew.  The absence, then, of a marble colonnade at Kraneion would have made this church stand out.  If we assume that the nave colonnade at Lechaion worked to communicate the building's imperial funded status, then the absence of such a colonnade at Kraneion may have positioned this church as a conspicuously non-imperial foundation.  While it is impossible to do more than suggest this argument, it is striking that Kraneion is one of the few churches in the Late Roman province of Achaia that used piers in the place of the colonnade. This becomes more significant, if we assume (as <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/church-society-and-the-sacred-in-earlychristian-greece/oclc/59019454">I have argued elsewhere</a>) that the colonnade in Late Roman Greece served to frame the perspective of the congregation as they watched the liturgical proceedings performed by the clergy in an otherwise empty nave.  The contrasting arrangement between these two buildings would hardly be lost on even the most casual observer especially as the Lechaion basilica demonstrates that the colonnade is a feature suited to display of wealth and control over lavish resources.  Like the fish in the mortar, the absence of a nave colonnade could represent a local response, perhaps even resistance, to the wealth and authority vested in display.</p> <p>Neither of these examples explicitly suggest inequality in a modern sense fueled by a post-Enlightenment understanding of the rights of human agents as individuals.  On the other hand, these two examples (and the careful reader will observe that I do have one more, but it'll have to wait until I get into my office this morning to check a citation), demonstrate that despite different the differing economic and social position of the actors within Corinthian society,

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there was nevertheless ample opportunity to participate in both acts of resistance and accommodation.</p> <p>Stay tuned for more...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 74.99.148.10 URL: DATE: 09/13/2010 09:01:38 PM Look forward to reading it. I too need to retune my paper (almost finished) according to angle of inequality. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/10/2010 10:41:17 AM ----BODY: <p>It's a rainy and dreary Friday. ¬†So just a modest list of quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>I put in my tenure application yesterday. ¬†<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/artsci/facultystaff/forms/_docs/T&amp;P_Checklist_2010.pdf">This is the first page of it</a> to give you an idea of the number forms, and forms about forms, and forms summarizing the work summarized on other forms. I found it too difficult to include my blog in the official paperwork for tenure, but I think it will lurk in the background to some extent.</li> <li><a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/the-future-of-reading2/">The future of reading</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://mith.umd.edu/vintage-computers/">This is a pretty fantastic site that considers computers as historical objects</a>.</li> <li>A little press for my <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/175010/">Fall of the Roman Empire class</a>.</li> <li>There will be some announcement regarding <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/09/aproposal.html">this post in the next few weeks</a>. </li>

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<li>There are two people who I follow on Facebook whose posts are so amazing to me that I want to collect them and create a Tumblr of them.  They're models of what not to say as an academic in a new job or searching for a job.  But they're also a kind of poetry of frustration and professional unawareness that make them somehow more wholesome and honest.</li> <li>This is a great weekend for sports: Formula One, NASCAR at Richmond, great college football, first weekend of the NFL, and some great baseball pennant races.</li> <li>What I'm reading: L. Revell, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/roman-imperialism-and-localidentities/oclc/476883783">Roman Imperialisms and Local Identities</a></em>. (Cambridge 2009)</li> <li>What I'm listening to: The Urinals, <em>Negative Capability... Check it Out!, </em>The Minutemen, <em><a href="http://www.corndogs.org/">Acoustic Blowout</a></em>.</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: My Career in Paper STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: my-career-in-paper CATEGORY: Academia DATE: 09/09/2010 07:39:27 AM ----BODY: <p>So, my tenure application is almost done.  And this is more or less what it looks like.  In other words, my career in its most radically material form.</p>! <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="MyLifeinPaper.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f406b210970b -pi" border="0" alt="MyLifeinPaper.jpg" width="450" height="450" /></p>! <p>It hardly looks impressive. I've seen some tenure files spill over three large binders.  But this is what it is.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Evan Nelson EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.203.235 URL: http://www.gradschool.und.edu DATE: 09/09/2010 10:30:11 AM I do see a bit of sag in the desk, which is impressive. Also, it never hurts to include an 8x10 glossy head shot. With a subtle spray of cologne. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Susan Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.205.189 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/susancaraher DATE: 09/10/2010 07:25:48 AM I happen to know there is a lot more to it. You should have put the big diesel in the photo too. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Proposal STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: a-proposal CATEGORY: Academia CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/08/2010 07:33:07 AM ----BODY: <p>As readers of this blog know, I get pretty excited about various projects that seek to open up research and teaching to the general public. ¬†I have a naive faith that the public is interested in what we as scholars do and a commitment to trying to meet them half-way in explaining my research, interests, and discipline. ¬†I am not always sure that I succeed in making my research accessible, but, as I hope this blog testifies, I certainly try.</p> <p>As part of this commitment, I've been mulling over a way to offer my classes to the public for free. ¬†It's easy enough to make content available; I post my podcasts and usually syllabi here, list the books and topics of my classes, and even report on my pedagogical successes and failures. These efforts, however, are a one way window into my courses. ¬†With the exception of the occasional blog post from loyal readers or past students, I don't get much feedback from students because the media that I have used to communicate my course material is not designed to foster the kind of dynamic interaction that a full-featured online course, for example, or a classroom discussion requires.</p> <p>A recent notice in the <em><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/OpenTeaching-When-the/124170/?sid=at&amp;utm_source=at&amp;utm_medium=en">Chronicle

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of Higher Education</a></em> and a quick read of Mark Taylor's new book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Campus-Reforming-CollegesUniversities/dp/0307593290">Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities</a></em> (New York 2010), once again rekindled my interest in imagining a different way to teach. In a moment of excitement, I sent an email to one of the "powers-that-be" on campus and pitched an idea that the University of North Dakota offer some free classes on-line, open to anyone who signs up (for no credit) as well as paying students (for credit). I pitched the idea to some of my trusted interlocutors here and got some good responses, and now have a meeting set up with some folks on the technical side of developing this idea as well as folks on the administrative side.</p> <p>I even have imagined a name for this venture: The Institute for Open Learning at the University of North Dakota.</p> <p>The programs would look for intellectual and technical support from folks with existing expertise on campus and seek to build alliances that encourage the development of contemporary, sophisticated, and varied course material for large scale online teaching opportunities on the web.  As I have argued in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Campus-Reforming-CollegesUniversities/dp/0307593290">an earlier blog post</a>, teaching an open online class with for-credit students enrolled will offer unique opportunities for students to simultaneously experience life within and outside the university classroom.  As Taylor and others have suggested, bridging the gap between the life within the academy and life outside the academy is a vital way to keep what we do here relevant and, at the same time, communicate and reinforce core academic values to a broader audience.  I remain optimistic that if more people saw what goes on in a university classroom, they would be more able to understand the value in a university education.</p> <p>And, unlike most of flights of fancy, I even have something of a funding model: At present the university splits funds collected from an online instruction fee with the college who then usually passes some of these funds onto individual departments.  In effect, departments have a financial incentive to teach online classes.  What I'd want to do is to capture a sliver of the funding that the University collects from these online classes and use that to offer incentives to faculty to develop and teach open classes.</p> <p>Ok. That's not a great plan, but there's more.  My idea of an Institute for Open Learning is mostly altruistic, but part of it imagines that these open classes can serve as marketing vehicles for both various programs as well as the university's efforts at online teaching in general.  In fact, I'd go so far to say that these classes could come to represent the University's commitment to the local and global community as well as showcase the truly exceptional teachers on campus.  In order to make the link between the universities outreach and marketing goals and the course content clear, the courses would be available for advertising.  These advertisement would have to adhere to certain standards of taste and would have to come from approved sources (mostly, I suspect in house, but it could extend to various approved groups like the local art museum or the local visitor bureau).  For example, each page might have a banner type advertisement for the Graduate School or for The College of Business and Public Administration.  In addition, there could be simple introductions to each podcast or video lecture which feature a brief advertisement much in the same way that NPR introduces segments of its programing with a plug for the title sponsor.  These advertisement could be relatively inexpensive since our overhead would be relatively low.  And a significant percentage of the revenue could go toward course development, faculty recruitment, and advertising for the Institute.</p>

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<p>Over time, I could imagine offering 4-6 class a year over the spring, fall, and summer semesters. ¬†If the Institute is successful, these course could develop a following and a significant group of engaged and interested learners. ¬†This group of learners could also be an audience for various other programs at the university - some of them, like local and visiting lectures, conferences and colloquia (like the Writers Conference), and events would be free - while others like new certificate programs or distance programs in allied fields would be for credit and involve a fee.</p> <p>I have a meeting tomorrow the begin the process of pitching this idea. Like most of my great ideas (ahem), I suspect that my excitement has led me to overlook some kind of fatal flaw in my plan, but until then I am going to just enjoy the excitement of a new idea.</p> <p>¬†</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.117.115.238 URL: http://www.electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 09/08/2010 10:24:00 AM I think it's a great idea! The phrase 'long-tale education' keeps popping into my mind as I read your proposal... have you seen what the Open University offers by way of 'free' using their Moodle platform? In my former life in the for-profit edu world, I floated the idea of free courses in order to habituate potential students to our platform, and as a marketing tool, but I didn't have the high-level contacts to get very far. The idea of 'giving away' learning was a bit of a lead balloon there, strangely enough (and I think of that Simpson's episode where the class visits Fort Springfield and are chased away 'cuz they're lernin' fer free!'). I will follow this project with interest! Good luck! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.117.115.238 URL: http://www.electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 09/08/2010 10:25:00 AM ...er, make that 'tail'. Long-tail. Darned homonyms. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Places in History

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-places-in-history CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/07/2010 07:41:10 AM ----BODY: <p>I know that it's not Thursday yet, but I want to talk about teaching anyway.  I was perhaps one of the last people on earth to use overhead projectors.  I loved the packets of maps that textbook publishers used to circulate with their "instructor issues".  I put them carefully into three-ring binders and carried them around with me for years after I stopped using the textbooks. I finally stopped using them when our local teaching technology folks removed (mercifully) the last of the clunk overhead projectors from our classroom and replaced them with ELMO document camera projectors.  The shiny, plastic overheads did not appear very effectively on the ELMO's camera and I had to find alternatives.</p> <p>In class, I usually call up Google Maps, and there is usually the embarrassing moment where I search for the location of some well-known historical site.  For example, I can never find the Rubicon river quickly.  I end up fumbling around and pointing to the Po or some other eastern Italian river until figuring out my mistake.</p> <p>In any event, to help manage my geographic lapses, I started to put together .kmz files of the sites that I am going to refer to in each lecture.  When I open this file in Google Earth, bring yellow pushpins appear at the site that I plan to talk about in lecture.  This is not a revolution.</p> <p>As I moved my class online, I preferred to use Wikipedia for basic geographic information and provided the students with indexes of major names, events, and places and, generally, link them to Wikipedia entries, which I have found are as good anyplace (and generally as good as any textbook).  For some reason I didn't include my little .kmz files.</p> <p>But now I have, and here are the first three; I'll add more as I find them and tweak them to fit the newest iterations of my lectures.  All these files should open in Google Earth.</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/GEPlaces/Ancient Greece.kmz">Ancient Greece</a><br /><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/GEPlaces/Hellenistic World.kmz">The Hellenistic World</a><br /><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/GEPlaces/Rome 1.kmz">Rome 1</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A new class to new students: The Fall of the Roman Empire

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: a-new-class-to-new-students-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 09/06/2010 07:46:37 AM ----BODY: <p>Tomorrow I begin to teach 6 week class on the Fall of the Roman Empire to the local, <a href="http://olli.und.edu/">University of North Dakota, branch of the Osher Life Long Learning Institute</a>. &#0160;This Institute focuses mainly on teaching community members - primarily &quot;seasoned adults&quot; and &quot;life long learners&quot; - and does not offer courses for credit. &#0160;The expense is minimal and the goals of my class will be to entertain as much as educate. &#0160;I&#39;ll have to balance my tendency to go into great detail about minute events of the Late Antique world (although it is hard to understand how anyone could not care deeply about the machinations leading up the Three Chapters Controversy!). &#0160;On the other hand, I am pretty excited to offer a class to the greater community. &#0160;My grandmother took classes at a similar institution at the University of Delaware after my grandfather had died, and she seemed to really enjoy them. It will feel good to share some of my knowledge, see how my approach plays to an audience not worried about getting a good grade, and to hear what my &quot;students&quot; think about the end of the ancient world.</p>! <p>That all being said, this is the first time that I&#39;ll teach a course in my particular area of specialty on campus at UND. &#0160;It seems hard to believe that I&#39;ve been here for 8 years and have yet to teach a course on the Late Antique world. &#0160;Another reason to be excited.</p>! <p><img alt="NewImage.jpg" border="0" height="366" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f3ddc05a970b -pi" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" width="300" /></p>! <p>I have conceived of the class in 6, more or less autonomous units:</p>! <p>1. Introduction to the Fall of Rome<br />2. Politics, Popes, Emperors, and Invaders<br />3. Christians and Pagans<br />4. Cities, Buildings, and the End of the Empire<br />5. Archaeology and the End of the Empire<br />6. Rome After Rome: The Long Shadow of Late Antiquity</p>! <p>The course is a blatant bait-and-switch. &#0160;My focus will be less on the &quot;Fall of Rome&quot; as discrete political event and much more on the period of Late Antiquity. &#0160;My goal will be to convince the class that the legacy of Rome refracted through political, religious, social, and economic changes of the 4th to 8th centuries is far more important than the sacking of a city or the death of an Emperor (well, except, I suppose to the folks who lived in Rome or the family of the Emperor). &#0160;In fact, I want them all to understand that the most of the basic tensions that define modern political and religious discourse have roots in Late Antiquity. &#0160;So the Fall of Rome is less about the death of some romanticized (I couldn&#39;t resist!) ancient world and much more about the birth of a society that has strangely familiar echoes.</p>! <p>Wish me luck!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amalia T EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 75.15.28.82 URL: http://amaliadillin.blogspot.com DATE: 09/06/2010 10:00:30 AM Good luck! It sounds like a great course! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.197.147 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 09/06/2010 10:56:05 AM Bait and switch. Fun course. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.115.6 URL: http://doctoralbliss.wordpress.com DATE: 09/06/2010 01:36:39 PM Darn, if it didn't conflict with my class with Dr. Reese, I would love to sit in on it. I may have to look into this, as I would love to teach a class on the Civil War. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/03/2010 09:20:34 AM ----BODY: <p>Lots of little things on a sunny but windy Friday before a holiday weekend.</p> <ul> <li>An interesting, if a bit peculiar article, on the <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">Landscape of Digital Humanities</a> (via <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2010/08/numbered-paragraphs-indigital.html">Sebastian Heath who offers some technical notes</a>)</li>

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<li>An interesting and FREE book about <a href="http://digital.designingobama.com/">the design aspects of Obama's Presidential campaign in 2008</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/">This is a supercool customizing video based on a good Arcade Fire song</a>.  The power of the intertubes!</li> <li>Have you checked out this week's <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> (an advertisement for myself!)?  <a href="http://twitter.com/OIDatUND">You absolutely MUST follow us on Twitter</a>.  Do it!</li> <li>My wife's awesome new content-driven marketing site "<a href="http://gradstories.omeka.net/">Grad Stories</a>" is now up. </li> <li>The tech blog <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/02/chrome-firefoxtechcrunc/">Techcrunch claims that 31% of its traffic yesterday </a>was from people using Google's Chrome browser.  For the past month at this blog, Chrome only represents 10% of my traffic.  Firefox produces 37%, IE runs 35% of my visitors, and Safari runs about 12%, Chrome comes in at 4th, with Opera holding strong at just under 4%.  I might need to do a meta data Monday to contextualize these result. </li> <li>The blog for the <a href="http://lateantiqueostia.wordpress.com/">KentBerlin Ostia Excavations </a>is one of my favorites.  Their recent post on using <a href="http://lateantiqueostia.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/thunderbirdsare-go/">remote controlled helicopters to photograph the site from the air</a> should have <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/">Scott Moore</a> reaching for the nearest tech grant application especially in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2010/06/th e-voyage-of-pkap-airship-1.html">light of our less than successful Kite-o-blimp experiment this summer</a>. </li> <li>This <em>Esquire</em> article from 1971 on the "<a href="http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/lbb.html">Secrets of the Little Blue Box</a>" is really great (via <a href="http://kottke.org/10/09/phone-phreaking1971">kottke.org</a>).  The language of using blue boxes to hack the phone system reminds me of William Gibson's descriptions of the "jacking in" to his imagined internet. </li> <li>If you're a reader in South Florida, you should be excited for the <a href="http://www.surfandsongfestival.com/">3rd Annual Surf and Song Festival in Fort Myers</a>.  <a href="http://twitter.com/SurfandSongFest">You can even follow them on Twitter</a>.</li> <li>I'm totally bummed that Mohammed Amir, the great young Pakistani bowler, has been caught up in the recent spot fixing scandal and <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/pakistan/content/current/story/475695.html">now struck from the ICC awards list</a>.  This is a cat from Taliban controlled areas of Pakistan who was a thing of beauty to watch bowl (even as he was dismantling Australia and being cocky about it!).  I hope that his career and reputation survive. </li> <li>What I'm reading: Mark Taylor, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/crisis-on-campus-a-bold-plan-for-reformingour-colleges-and-universities/oclc/501320939">Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming out Colleges and Universities</a></em> (Knopf 2010).</li> <li>What I'm listening to: Dinosaur Jr., <em>You're Living All Over Me </em>and <em>Dinosaur</em>. </li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching the World for Free STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-the-world-for-free CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/02/2010 08:33:27 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Crossposted to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.</em></p> <p>This week the <em><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Open-Teaching-Whenthe/124170/?sid=at&amp;utm_source=at&amp;utm_medium=en">Chronicle of Higher Education</a></em><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Open-Teaching-Whenthe/124170/?sid=at&amp;utm_source=at&amp;utm_medium=en">'s technology blog featured</a> a short article on two faculty members who offered a course to the public for free and attracted over 2,000 non-credit earning students.  The article argues that, for some classes, opening the course to the public created a more diverse and dynamic classroom environment only really possible through online teaching.  In Profs. Downes' and Siemen's class, non-credit students and paying, for-credit students mingled in discussion forums, witnesses the same lectures, and engaged the same readings, but unlike efforts pioneered by places like MIT where the lectures and syllabi are made public, these non-credit students were invited to participate fully in the educational process as well by engaging with their fellow students and, presumably, the faculty member.  In short, their class emphasizes the interactive potential of online teaching over and above the internet's well-known ability to disseminate prepared content.</p> <p>I couldn't help but also see this as an opportunity to democratize the university experience in a fairly radical way.  Not only would students have to consider how a particular class or material or problem solving exercise helps them to navigate the unpredictable shoals of a distant, abstract "real world", but they will be forced to confront the "real world", right there, in the classroom.  In other words, such a public course might help students overcome the separation between what happens in the classroom where students sometimes regard skills, methods, and knowledge as simply "course objectives" or tools to get an "A", and what happens in the real world where these skills, methods, and knowledge function in a far more ambiguous way and the rules followed to get an "A" rarely apply neatly.  Expanding the conversation by bringing the real world into the foyer of the Ivory Tower could have a revolutionary effect on how students understand the application of classroom skills.</p> <p>I've just begun to discuss the possibility of running some classes like this at the University of North Dakota.  As part of my sounding out processes, I talked to my good buddy, online teacher extraordinaire, and frequent Teaching Thursday contributor, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/michael-

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beltz/">Mick Beltz</a>, and he and I came up with some issues that will have to be considered before developing and deploying a class to the general public.  Both of us bring the perspective of teachers in the humanities with some online teaching experience.</p> <p>So, five observations.</p> <p>1. Technology. The first thing I thought of is how do we run a course like this.  It seems that the classes described in the Chronicle article ran through <a href="http://moodle.org/">Moodle </a>which is open source and, presumably, more flexible (or at least developable) than Blackboard in some ways.  The course will also have to be able to function with almost no live technical support.  I can't imagine any university who would want to commit large scale technical support to a class full of non-credit, non-paying students. So every aspect of online delivery would have to be iron-clad to work and very straight forward to access.</p> <p>2. Scaleable content and exercises. Once one had assurances of a solid platform, then the content would have to be scaled in some way. For example, a course that relied on a $400 textbook would not be a very appealing class to open to the public because few public, non-credit students will be interested (it seems to me) in purchasing a $400 textbook.  Open source content and public domain texts would work better.  Multiple-guess type questions are more easily scaleable than essay tests and papers.  Currently I teach my online History 101 class as asynchronous - meaning all the content is available from the first day.  This may not scale well for a massive online course where a less-engaged public might not be inclined to complete weekly assignments in order and prefer to skip around defeating any pedagogical goals dependent upon the sequential engagement with content.</p> <p>3. Access and Control. One key to managing the relationship between paying, for-credit students, and non-credit students is creating levels of access that, for example, prevent open discussion boards from turning into the worst kind of comment sections on a blog.  I initially thought that limiting the length of time a discussion board was accessible would limit the opportunities for crazy comments or spam.  Mick offered a better solution.  He suggested that discussion boards be controlled through "adaptive release" exercises.  In other words, to get access to a discussion, you have to score above a particular grade on a quiz based on the readings.  Of course, a clever instructor could develop a whole series of adaptive release access points; with achievement would come ever more intimate levels of access much in the same way that video games release bonus features at certain levels.  This adaptive release model would not only limit access to people with malicious intent (to some extent), but also create incentives to non-credit students to engage the material in the class.</p> <p>4. Goals and Objectives. A public course - like any course - will need a clear sets of goals and objectives. There is no escaping that any course like this would have to be experimental at first.  And like any experiment, we would have to establish certain metrics to determine whether the class was successful or not.  The simple statistics, like number of students and length of time onsite (as a metric for engagement) would be useful, but we would also want to see if we could gather data on student engagement more broadly.  The goal, to my mind, would be to draw people into the subject matter.  Following the model of many video game creators, we'd want our course to create an immersive space, and we would have to monitor certain clear criteria to determine whether this was successful.  We might also borrow from are colleagues in marketing to understand better the various metrics used to determine the success or failure of a website or a viral or web-based marketing campaign.</p>

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<p>5. Resources. ¬†The biggest hurdle to implementing a class like this would be to determine whether the benefits of the course are worth the commitment of resources. ¬†A public access course has the potential to break down barriers between "the academy" and the public, engage types of learners who might not be inclined to enroll for credit at a university, and expose students to ways of thinking, priorities, and experiences rare or impossible in the classroom. ¬†On the other hand, how many hours per week does managing a potentially massive online class take, how robust of a cyber-infrastructure, and, even, what is necessarily to publicize the course and actually get non-credit students to "enroll". ¬†As much as we'd like to say that we're teaching the world "for free" there is always some cost in time and resources.</p> <p>Those are just my preliminary thoughts on the potential issues and rewards of teaching the world for free.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sean McMullin EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 144.92.40.77 URL: DATE: 09/02/2010 10:48:45 AM Great post. I like the clarity of the five hurdles you've set out here. #5 is a huge issue unless you manage public expectations well, and set up some pretty strong barriers to personnel access. You may wish to check out David Wiley's work (davidwiley.org) He's a professor who's been practicing with and researching open educational content for several years, and has some interesting insights & examples. One of his ideas relating to your #3 (Access and Control)... He set up one of his courses like a role-playing game. Students could "level up" by completing assignments and doing well on assessments. Those with greater levels could then "multi-class" and gain broader access to resources. It worked because the course was 1) asynchronous and 2) taught to 18-25 yr olds for whom the role-playing mechanics were well-known. Not sure if it would generalise very well to an internet-wide audience. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Archaeology of Moving STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: the-archaeology-of-moving

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CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 09/01/2010 07:45:39 AM ----BODY: <p>Almost a year ago this month, the Great Move occurred as the administration rooted the Department of History from its long-standing and exceedinglycomfortable space in Merrifield hall and moved us across the quad to O'Kelly.  We are now settled into what I think most of us regard as equivalent, if not superior space, at least in the case of my office.</p> <p>As I was reflecting on the events surrounding our move, I stumbled on a very recent article by John Schofield (whose work I am really coming to appreciate and notice) in the journal <em>Archaeologies</em> called "<a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/c734302760t35647/">Office Cultures and Corporate Memory: Some Archaeological Perspectives</a>".  He describes the archaeology of office culture and corporate memory through a study a move made by English Heritage in 2006.  The English Heritage office moved from a prestigious Savile Row address in London to a new "more modern" office space further from the city center.</p> <p>The paper itself is a vivid - but not exceedingly detailed - account of the things left behind in the office of the English Heritage as well was the spaces, behaviors, and memories embedded for him the spaces so recently occupied by coworkers.  At the end of his article, he comments on the feelings associated with abandoned and empty places:</p> <blockquote> <p>As an archaeologist I am fascinated by empty buildings and by the material culture of abandonment. One of my earliest lessons in archaeology concerned Skara Brae, a story of hurried desertion with precious objects left where they fell.  More recently I have studied and inspected military buildings forsaken at the end of the Cold War... In Malta I have studies former bars that closed abruptly with the Navy's withdrawal in the mid to late 1960s, bars that have remained firmly locked ever since. I like these empty places and do sometimes feel something as I wander about.</p> </blockquote> <p>As I look back <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-merrifield-move.html">on some of my blog posts</a> from the days of the move, I think the final line of the quote captures the experience of wandering through the abandoned offices in Merrifield.  I felt something even though I did not have a particularly long history history associated with Merrifield Hall, nor did I enjoy a particular luxurious or historically rich accommodation there.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Fauna from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Survey

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: fauna-from-the-pyla-koutsopetria-survey CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 08/31/2010 07:56:23 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the course of the intensive pedestrian survey at <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria</a> we collected a sample of the faunal material present on the surface of the ground (that is to say the animal bones visible in each unit).  Over the past month, David Reese, one of the leading specialists in faunal remains in an archaeological context examined the material from both our survey and excavation.</p> <p>While I won't present all Dr. Reese's finds here on the blog (that will have to wait for the full, final report), I will give a brief preview of his finds.  The majority of the material from the site was <em>Ovis/Capra</em> (sheep/goat).  My understanding is that the bones of the two animals are basically indistinguishable (in fact, if one could distinguish the two, I am sure Dr. Reese would have!).  The goat and sheep bones likely reflect the more recent past activity at the site which almost certainly involved grazing.  At present the site is under cultivation with cereals - mostly for feed - but this might be the result of the region's appropriation by the British after independence in the 1950s.  At present our site has relatively restricted access because of the activities at various live-fire ranges in the area.  It is also possible that some grazing continues in the early spring, fall, or winter months when we are not present on the site.  A few of the bones show signs of being butchered and cooked, but it is difficult to know whether this occurred on site - in a possible domestic context - or if these bones represent lunches taken in the fields, rubbish thrown from passing travelers, or even bits of household trash carried out into the fields at some earlier time as composted fertilizer.  The presence of a few worn chicken bones from the fields almost certainly represents meals taken in the field or domestic rubbish.</p> <p>More evidence for grazing comes from the presence of numerous bones from dogs (<em>canis familiaris</em>).  While we regularly see packs of hunting dogs training across the coastal ridges in the evening hours, the link between dogs and herds of sheep or goats is too close to ignore.</p> <p>Aside from the dog and sheep/goat bones, there are two objects that really stood out.  First, Dr. Reese identified an eroded part of a <em>bos taurus</em> (cow!) bone on the site.  Since cattle have somewhat different grazing patterns than goats and sheep, this bone suggests that at some point our site may have seen grazing cattle and possible pasture land.</p> <p>Finally (and most exciting!), Dr. Reese identified a fragment of human skull from one of survey units near the western most extent of our site.  As readers of this blog know, we've been <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-outloud-4.html">struggling to identify the location of a cemetery that served the inhabitants of our diachronic settlements at Vigla and Pyla-Koutsopetria</a>. Cesnola spent some time in the general vicinity of a site that could be ours (relating his description of the place to our side has proven to be almost impossible; for the description of Cesnola see the link below), as he passed

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back and forth to his summer home at Ormidhia. ¬†<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Um_PAAAAMAAJ&amp;dq=Cesnola%20Cyprus%20It s%20ancient%20cities&amp;pg=PA178#v=onepage&amp;q=Ormidia&amp;f=false">His description of a place called Palaeocastro (which is one of the names for our site) included graves which he appears to have excavated</a>. ¬†The fragment of skull identified from our survey was not particularly close to the area that Cesnola appears to be describing. ¬†So, the mystery of the Pyla-Koutsopetria burials continues with any tiny fragment of evidence suggesting that graves or even tombs are present near our site, but lie undiscovered.</p> <p>¬†</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dimitri Nakassis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.232.120.148 URL: DATE: 08/31/2010 08:54:25 AM Bill, when Michael and I went to the Pyla Œ∫Œ±œÜŒµŒΩŒµŒØŒø an old guy told us that they used to take flocks out to the coastal ridges before the British base appropriated the land. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.180 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 08/31/2010 09:27:21 AM Dimitri, Thanks, man! I assumed as much. That must account for the goat/sheep bones in the survey. Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Doors of History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: doors-of-history CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana

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DATE: 08/29/2010 04:50:09 PM ----BODY: <p>My wife has recently stripped the doors in our house and has begun to repaint them.  Like most turn of the century homes in the area, they have wooden doors.  These doors are substantial, hang poorly (in most cases) and preserve the history of the house in through the marks in the door.</p> <p>The archaeology of the house is preserved in the house itself.</p> <p>This door shows at least four different lock and works on the door preserved under multiple coats of paint.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Door1.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134868b0e27970c -pi" border="0" alt="Door1.jpg" width="420" height="281" /></p> <p>The evidence for an earlier latch:<br /><img style="display: block; marginleft: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Door2.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134868b0e32970c -pi" border="0" alt="Door2.jpg" width="281" height="420" /></p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Door3.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f366e542970b -pi" border="0" alt="Door3.jpg" width="420" height="281" /></p> <p>In this detail you can see the outline of the earlier doorplate, cylinder, and lock.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Door3_Detail.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f366e54b970b -pi" border="0" alt="Door3_Detail.jpg" width="420" height="420" /></p> <p>An upstairs door show another set of interesting marks preserving tiny bits of the houses history. The elegant doorplate and crystal doorknob probably date to the earliest years of the house. While the floors upstairs in our house are fir as opposed to the floors downstairs which are a more luxurious maple, the doorknob and plate show certain concessions to display in the more private quarters of the house.  Of course, a nice doorknob and plate is an easy addition to a house at some later date, but the floors on the second floor are more or less permanent.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Door4.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f366e555970b -pi" border="0" alt="Door4.jpg" width="420" height="420" /></p> <p>Evidence for the use of a simple latch on the inside of the door.  The door must have been pushed open a few times because it's clear that someone forced the door open, striping the simply threaded latch, and causing someone to drive the latch back into the door again in a slightly different place.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Door5.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f366e56a970b -pi" border="0" alt="Door5.jpg" width="420" height="420" /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 09/01/2010 08:54:45 AM Here's what I find interesting in the transition of locks. 1) The separation of the lock and handle, held in one piece into two different mechanisms and locations, 2) The shift from the presumably ornate composite to the "security" aesthetics of the newer bolt. Most likely what happened is that the original mechanism was too complicated to service and it had to be replaced, but no composites were available. The technology of the new pieces is 1950s. The 1950s/60s in-situ locks I've seen tend to have the color of the actual material, brushed aluminum. The fact that these have been faux-plated to look like bronze makes me think that the switch occurred after the 1980s, probably 1990s. Now if you're really crazy, you can start hunting for the original 19th c. fixture. There are some crazy antique stores in Pennyslvania where you walk in and see literally thousands of locks. But I wouldn't go there. KOSTIS -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/27/2010 10:31:37 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits on a windy, but sunny Friday morning:</p> <ul> <li>Some really cool imaginings of what a new American currency could look like <a href="http://richardsmith.posterous.com/tag/dollarredeign">here</a>.</li> <li>Tim Caromody is both really smart and increasingly ubiquitous. ¬†<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/10-reading-revolutionsbefore-e-books/62004/">Here are his thoughts on reading revolutions</a> and here are his thoughts on the <a href="http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/fivemyths-about-philadelphias-blogging-tax/all/1">so-called Philadelphia blogging tax</a>.</li> <li>This is <a href="http://24flinching.com/word/headline/subway-lifeblood/">a perfect page </a>to look at while listening to the punk rock. ¬†Great photos.</li> <li><a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2962/25 80">Some thoughtful and careful research</a> on why academics blog.</li> <li><a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25997/">4Chan is pretty wild</a>.</li>

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<li>Go and check out<a href="http://teachingthursday.org/"> Teaching Thursday</a> this week to find what OID will be to next year. ¬†And while you're at it <a href="http://twitter.com/OIDatUND">follow us on Twitter.</a></li> <li>What I am listening to: X, Los Angeles.</li> <li>What I am reading:¬†ÔªøMichael Azarrad, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/our-band-could-be-your-life-scenes-from-theamerican-rock-underground-1981-1991/oclc/45804603&amp;referer=brief_results">Our Band Could be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground</a></em>.</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.197.147 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 08/31/2010 10:13:33 AM Love this. When my DC 1905 apartment was repainted in 2004, my daughter photographed four layers of wallpaper under several more layers of paint. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: The First Week of Class STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-the-first-week-of-class CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 08/26/2010 07:46:31 AM ----BODY: <p>It's the first week of class and I already feel like I am behind! Since some of my students have discovered this blog (it's inevitable, right?), I thought I was post up my five tips for success in my classes. ¬†I think that these things are generalizable:</p> <p>1. Come to class. ¬†I seem to inspire students to skip class. ¬†This used to frustrate me, but now I view this as a kind of formal resistance, which I admire enough to take on the role of "the man". ¬†I've blogged on this before <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/te aching-thursday-grading-and-resistance.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/05/gr ading-detroit-and-student-resistence.html">here</a>.</p> <p>2. Take notes. ¬†I have had students tell me that they don't need to take notes because they can remember everything. ¬†This is impossible and a cover for

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laziness.  Note taking is the first step in learning because it forces us to interpret and condense what we are hearing in class.</p> <p>3. Do the readings. My classes depend on the careful reading of primary sources.  These form the basis for in-class discussions, writing assignments, and exams.  If you don't do the reading, you won't get it.</p> <p>4. Work with your fellow students.  If you can't figure out how to work together in the classroom, the library, or the quad, then do it online; social media applications provide a great platform for collaboration between students.  For all its faults, Blackboard has baked in an increasingly robust set of collaborative tools that I am more than willing to deploy to allow the students to work together.</p> <p>5. Talk to me.  If you are struggling or if you feel like you are beginning to struggle, talk to me.  Despite recent reviews which rank University of North Dakota faculty among the least accessible in the country, my door is almost always open.  So come and talk about how you can do better in class.</p> <p>I leave off this list obvious things like doing assignments, turning them on time, and taking test seriously, because most of our students understand this kind of thing. It's the more mundane and unstructured expectations (attendance, note taking, reading) that students struggle to prioritize.</p> <p>Good luck in the new semester!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Peer Review and the New Media STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: peer-review-and-the-new-media CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/25/2010 08:33:08 AM ----BODY: <p>A bunch of people have sent me Monday's <em>New York Times</em> article: "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html?_r=2&amp;scp=3&amp;sq=s hakespeare&amp;st=cse">Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review</a>".  This article describes a recent trial at Shakespeare Quarterly where they eschewed traditional peer review and instead opened the review process to a panel of experts and others on the web.  The process garnered over 350 comments from 41 people which the editors evaluated.  Ultimately they selected the four articles for publication in a special edition of the journal on Shakespeare and the new media.</p> <p>Whenever a journal attempts a project like this it attracts attention and almost inevitably provoked headlines heralding the impending end of the traditional practice of academic peer review.  Most articles envision

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traditional peer review to involve a journal circulating an article to an anonymous pair of experts who evaluate the article's suitability for publication in the particular journal and, in most cases, offer comments. This description of the peer review process is, of course, idealized.  In reality, journals particularly in Europe - have widely varying standards and practices for peer review with widely varying degrees of transparency. So the introduction of a new method of peer review which takes advantage of the increasing degree of connectivity on the web does not so much represent radical novelty amidst stodgy, ossified, practices of peer review, but another point along a continuum of practice.</p> <p>Despite this reality, I know that any modifications to the traditional peer review practices are likely to create waves. I generally consider my colleagues across the disciplines to be fairly liberal minded folks, but it never ceases to amaze me how limited our perspectives become on matters like scholarly publishing.  In fact, it befuddles me why academia struggles so mightily with the idea that "in the future" we could acknowledge the value of academic and intellectual work produced through a wide range of publishing paradigms ranging from the un-edited and un-reviewed blog to the highly polished peer reviewed journals.  Of course, I can anticipate one response: with the explosion of new publications and formats, the "average scholar" struggles to keep abreast of developments in his or her field.  Moreover, introducing a new layer of less rigorously reviewed material to the mix contributes to the massive quantity of material that scholars are expect to understand.</p> <p>On the other hand, the rise of highly integrated and sophisticated social networking applications is making it easier to filter scholarship through a layer a kind of secondary review by colleagues.  My friends and colleagues serve, in effect, as another layer of peer review ensuring the we as a group have access to "important" scholarly contributions even from obscure journals.  While there is no guarantee that good scholarship will find its way through our social network, the economies of numerous eyes scanning the growing body of scholarly literature gives us a better chance of seeing things important to our common research interests.</p> <p>The other traditional complaint against adjusting the peer review process is that it will ultimately undermine the quality of scholarship produced.  It is as if the practice of circulating working papers, archaeological reports, prepubication drafts, informal reviews, has not existed for as long a peer-reviewed publications.  For centuries scholars circulated manuscripts to colleagues and friends without the benefit of anonymous, exterior reviews. The major shift now is that we can democratize the process of circulating working papers by using the web rather than informal and private avenues of scholarly communication.  In fact, the newly democratized practice of pre-publication circulation offers the potential to uphold the highest standards of peer review.  The pressure will be on the peer review process to demonstrate the superiority of its product in relation to non-peer reviewed work.  Such competition should make any benefit inherent to the traditional method of peer reviewed scholarship all the more visible.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology and Sound STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: archaeology-and-sound CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 08/24/2010 09:10:21 AM ----BODY: <p>During my recent travels I was able to read over the series of articles published in the most recent <em><a href="http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g925690055">World Archaeology</a></em>.  These articles were dedicated to exploring the place of archaeology in the world today. They considered the place of archaeology in the production of compelling narratives, campus life, the new media, and in pressing problems like homelessness, environmental sustainability, and even transparency in government.  The articles blended methodological sophistication with practical real life applications to show how the tools and approaches that archaeologists have developed over the history of the discipline can contribute to documenting and analyzing problems in the recent past.  If anything, these articles, to generalize, were too practical in their approaches to problems perhaps assuming that for something to be relevant in todays culture, it had to have a direct<em> practical application </em>rather than a more long term theoretical or methodological benefit.  On the other hand, these articles did reflect the increasingly permeable disciplinary boundaries of archaeological research as they drew upon techniques, methods, and approaches developed by disciplinary neighbors like sociology, anthropology, communications, and philology and literature.</p> <p>One striking omission from this wide ranging group of articles was anything on the archaeology of sound. There have been some intriguing recent work on the sounds of archaeology and they key role that hearing materiality plays in our ability to identify objects, spaces, and materials.  In fact, heavily damped spaces create a kind of sensory deprivation that obscures the materiality and social "reality" of a space.  (At the same time, noise pollution and the saturation of our environment with a range of mechanical sounds is generally recognized as a problem to be dealt with in a architectural - in other words material - way.)  It is worth noting that I am not the first to think about this kind of thing. The sound of archaeology has contributed to the idea of archaeology as performance and sensory as well as contributed to our idea of how past monuments sounded.</p> <p>Over the past year, I've been thinking about music as a place where archaeological methods could be deployed productively through an exploration of punk rock music.  Punk rock, in particular, sought to celebrate a highly materialized kind of music, through their preference for live recordings in particular places (particularly iconic venues like CBGBs or Max's Kansas City) and their conscious efforts to emphasize the low-fi, diy character of their recording spaces.  (One of my favorite moments in a punk rock recording is when you can hear a bottle fall and hit the ground (and seemingly not break) during a Replacement's song).  The term garage band made clear the link between music, a

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particular sound, and a space. ¬†This all stands in contrast to the increasingly over-produced character of modern pop music which goes to great lengths to create spatially and materially impossible sound which could never be produced in a way that someone could witness and experience. (For a remarkable critique of this check out <a href="http://snarkmarket.com/2009/3683">this article on Pompamoose</a>, a band that tries to make every sound on their remakes of pop songs visible in some way.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.197.147 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 08/24/2010 09:43:43 AM A bit of study was done on this at Chartres 20+ years ago. You should see the recent book by Deborah Howard & Laura Moretti: Sound Space in Renaissance Venice with sound tracks at <a href="http://www.stjohnscollegecambridge.co.uk/soundandspace/">http://www.stjohn scollegecambridge.co.uk/soundandspace/</a> ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Richard Patterson EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 65.191.38.214 URL: DATE: 12/04/2010 12:57:11 AM Hey! I hope all is well with you! I was just browsing and saw the interview! It was a privilege to hang out with you and to be able to produce the canvas for your office. I am a better man for having met you. I am doing well. I am currently in my second year of teaching in the North Carolina Public School System. I am looking for ways to earn my doctorate in Early childhood education and be able to influence those who come from similar backgrounds as myself. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Lechaion after the Basilica STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: lechaion-after-the-basilica CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/23/2010 07:55:45 AM -----

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BODY: <p>Readers of my blog know about my near obsession with the Mighty Lechaion Basilica.  I return to it as often as I can on my increasingly infrequent and short visits to Greece and every visit to the great church reveals another interesting aspect of its history.</p> <p>This last visit got my thinking about the later history of the church.  At some point in the 7th century or later, the building collapsed. At some point, a small chapel appears in the baptistery of the church and this seems to have required the movement of the baptismal font from the center of the octagonal space to the southeastern wall. It may be that this space served the community who continued to venerate at the site in the immediate aftermath of the damage to the main church.</p> <p>Once the main church had collapsed, much of the rubble of the superstructure was stripped away and at least some of the marble sculpture likely vanished at this point.  In the apse of the church, the community constructed a small chapel.  At present we don't know enough about the chronology of the building and its attendant ceramics - to assign a date to this small building.  The position of the foundations of the later church below the level of the earlier basilica's floor indicates that the builders had removed the majority of the collapse from the main basilica prior to its construction.  </p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: 0px initial initial;" title="LechLate3.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348667a671970c -pi" border="0" alt="LechLate3.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p> <p>Considering the massive size of the collapsed masonry from the churches halfdomed apse, this must have been a massive job.  The absence of large quantities of collapse around the site, however, suggests that the quarrying activity at the church after its collapse may have been systematic.  There is similar evidence for such systematic quarrying activities across the Mediterranean (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/ko urion-and-aba.html">I've even blogged about it before!</a>) and the quantity of prestige materials used in the building must have made it an appealing source for building material.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="LechLate1.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f3435bf5970b -pi" border="0" alt="LechLate1.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="LechLate2.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348667a664970c -pi" border="0" alt="LechLate2.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p> <p>In fact, the builders of the later church used spolia heavily (and predictably) in the foundations of the little church including parts of Proconnesian marble columns, various bits of architectural sculpture, and what appears to be "<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.14680092.2008.00313.x/full">verde antico</a>" engaged columns.  In fact, the buildings seem to have tried to use the verde antico columns symmetrically in the foundations suggesting that the use of spolia, even in structural parts of this building, was not random or completely opportunistic, but systematic.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="LechLate6.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348667a655970c -pi" border="0" alt="LechLate6.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p> <p>Reused bricks appear in the foundation courses of the mostly destroyed semicircular eastern apse and the buildings used large, ashlar blocks - probably

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spolia originally used in the basilica itself and now in tertiary use in the smaller late church - at the architecturally sensitive join between the apse and the nave.  In short, this building while modest in size, has indications of careful construction.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="LechLate5.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348667a66b970c -pi" border="0" alt="LechLate5.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p> <p>From what I can tell, there is no plan of this building and very limited discussion of it in the preliminary reports on the Lechaion church.  Moreover, this building does not appear on the plans of the basilica even though it clearly represents an important, late chapter to the life of this important site on the Gulf of Corinth.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Lechaion Basilica and Lechaion Fountain House STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: lechaion-basilica-and-lechaion-fountain-house CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/20/2010 10:14:50 AM ----BODY: <p>One of my side projects this summer was to check out the architectural sculpture from the Lechaion basilica and a nearby fountain house.&nbsp; In particular, I wanted to compare the ionic impost capitals present at both sites.&nbsp; The capitals are in fancy Proconnesian marble and look like they were produced by masons with ties across the Mediterranean.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/so me-thoughts-on-st-leonidas-and-baptism-at-lechaion-in-greece.html">I've blogged about this before</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p>These are from the basilica:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013486559840970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013486559857970c -pi" width="124" height="94"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013486559930970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f3320a0c970b -pi" width="124" height="94"></a> <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f3320ad6970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f3320add970b -pi" width="124" height="94"></a> </p> <p>These are from the fountain house:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f3320b7b970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013486559a9f970c -pi" width="124" height="94"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013486559b71970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013486559b82970c -pi" width="124" height="94"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f3320cfa970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f3320d26970b -pi" width="124" height="94"></a> </p> <p>The impost capitals from the fountain house are particularly significant because it is one of the few occasions where this kind of architectural sculpture appears in a building other than a church. And the relationship to the column capitals from Lechaion should be pretty clear.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 98.111.157.223 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 08/20/2010 04:16:59 PM If I remember correctly, some of these blocks have masonry numbers and even dedicatory inscriptions? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Hard at Work at the Isthmia Excavation House STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: hard-at-work-at-the-isthmia-excavation-house CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/19/2010 07:32:00 AM

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----BODY: <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134864e8c3b970 c-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134864e8c69970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134864e8c8a970 c-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134864e8cba970c -pi" width="304" height="404"></a></p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f32b1a5c970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f32b1a87970b -pi" width="304" height="404"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Telling Stories with Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: telling-stories-with-archaeology CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/17/2010 12:45:53 PM ----BODY: <p>One of the great things that I've learned from working with <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/index.php/research/40-isthmia">Steven Ellis's team at Isthmia the Corinthia</a> is the idea of archaeological research as the basis for story telling.&nbsp; Steven used this metaphor a number of times over the first week of our work here as a way to frame the goals of our research.&nbsp; It was absolutely enlightened and almost completely opposite from my growing obsession with archaeological data collecting.&nbsp; Recently, when I have approached archaeological problems, I become consumed by the need to document and gather.&nbsp; This primary stems from an abiding faith that, somehow, data will produce knowledge. </p> <p>I don't want to suggest that Steven and his team are not interested in data.&nbsp; In fact, they have collected and collated a remarkable amount of detailed information on the East Field Area and organized it carefully in sophisticated databases designed to facilitate their daily

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analysis.&nbsp; What was striking how little they talk about data as the product of their field work.&nbsp; In contrast, I am ALWAYS thinking about data as the product of archaeological analysis.&nbsp; Data then becomes - at some uncertain time in the future - the basis for interpretation.&nbsp; This is completely and unabashedly positivist.</p> <p>Steven's team has talked about the stories from the very first day. This reminded me that the archaeological process was about narrating events as much a collecting data.&nbsp; Beginning with the idea that a narrative should be the product of archaeological analysis ensured that data collection worked toward the goal of explicating the site and its history rather than squandering resources on producing data without clear objectives in mind.</p> <p>Some of this coincides with a recent article by <a href="http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/112018903257400975/gotoissue~db=all~dest=latest~cur=g924451445~tab=toc~order=page">C. Holtorf in <em>World Archaeology</em></a>, where he discusses the "meta-stories" that so often organize the presentation, analysis, and interpretation of archaeological information.&nbsp; These narratives serve not only to make bits of information understandable, but also provide the basis for comparing various similar narratives across time.&nbsp; These stories inform one another by providing structures which help humanity to approach large scale, complex, and pressing questions about the fundamental nature of society.&nbsp; Holtorf draws in part on <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/metahistory-the-historicalimagination-in-nineteenth-century-europe/oclc/700666">the work of Hayden White</a> who looked at the narrative structures present in the work of 19th century scholars like Marx, Burkardt, von Ranke, and Michelet.&nbsp; Holtorf seems to suggest that archaeological story telling might follow 19th century models: "By stories (or narratives) I mean an account of one or more characters acting out plots in a sequence of events that contain a distinctive beginning, middle and end." (383).&nbsp; </p> <p>While stories of the 19th century, novelistic type are clearly recognizable to a broad audience, they hardly represent the scope of potential story types familiar to even popular audiences.&nbsp; Television shows like <em>Lost</em>, and popular feature films have become increasingly comfortable twisting time, inverting the standard order of narration, and leaving the audience with ambiguous endings.&nbsp; Story telling in the 21st century is open to a much wider range of potential organizations, resolutions, and plots than its 19th century predecessors.</p> <p>I can even imagine that some of these narrative types will find ways to "narrate" the structure of data rich descriptions and explorations of the archaeological landscape.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Cornelius Holtorf EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 90.227.170.172 URL: http://web.comhem.se/cornelius/ DATE: 09/02/2010 01:26:41 PM

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I think I agree with you. There is a difference between the definition of a story and how you may be telling that story. If you think of the movie Pulp Fiction, for example, then this is relatively conventional story told in a very interesting, twisted way. Archaeological stories and meta-stories can be told like this, too, I suspect. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.180 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 09/02/2010 01:30:25 PM Thanks for the comment. I suspect that this is the inspiration, in part, for folks like Christopher Tilley who show that story-telling is not incompatible with more austere and non-narrative descriptions of archaeological data. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: owlfarmer EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 66.226.212.190 URL: http://owlfarmer.blogspot.com DATE: 11/02/2010 04:09:30 PM This was an especially helpful post for someone (a lapsed archaeologist) who teaches about archaeology in an intro to humanities class as part of a "humanities toolkit" that helps us understand the stories of cultures. As an aside, I also live in a part of Texas near Corinth--which is pronounced by non-natives of the town as "CorINTH" because of St. Paul's letters to the CorINTHians. Needless to say, they're not among the New Testament scholars you mention in a more recent post. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Sprawl STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: sprawl CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 08/16/2010 12:55:00 AM ----BODY: <p>On Kostis&#39; urging, I have been listening to the new Arcade Fire album, the <em>Suburbs</em>. The album itself is a meditation of urban planning and its social impact, but I&#39;ll leave this larger issue to Kostis.&#0160; What I want to focus on in particular is the notion of sprawl that comes through in the last couple of songs in the album.&#0160; <a href="http://www.spin.com/reviews/arcade-fire-suburbs-merge">As critics have noted</a>, the idea of sprawl (as in, but not exclusively, urban sprawl) derives some of its meaning in punk circles from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson">William Gibson&#39;s</a> fictitious topography of the post-apocalyptic east coast.&#0160; Gibson described an massive east coast settlement stretching from Boston to Atlanta

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partially housed in a series of dilapidated geodesic domes.&#0160; This forms a suitably bleak environment for his high-tech dystopian novels.&#0160; Arcade Fire&#39;s understanding of the sprawl clearly has roots in their critique of urbanism in its many 20th and 21st century guises.&#0160; The sprawl consists of a bleak assortment of architectural (&quot;dead shopping malls&quot;, bright lights), social,(dead end jobs, threatening police), and perhaps environmental images (the black river).&#0160; All these images resonate with Gibson&#39;s dystopian and apocalyptic vision of the near future world.</p> <p>The kind of dystopian social critiques of the future are almost always rooted in a kind of utopian view of the past (and has obvious links with genres like the jeremiad).&#0160; In fact, they rely on a recognizable past remaining hidden in plain sight to make it clear to the reader that their own present has become just another layer of detritus.&#0160; Gibson - like Sonic Youth and to some extent Arcade Fire - liken the Sprawl to the failings of capitalism to produce a sustainable, responsible prosperity. The chorus from the Sonic Youth anthem chants: &quot;Come on down to the store, you can buy some more and more and more.&quot;&#0160; The verses paint the same kind of dystopia as Arcade Fire&#39;s with cheap clothing, depressing shotgun houses, and rusted machines along a river.&#0160; </p> <p>Scenes of polluted nature, urbanism, and faded modernity, is pretty standard fair for both science fiction and music, and the same ideas inform our archaeological imagination as well.&#0160; <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/more-punk-andnostalgia/">As I&#39;ve mentioned earlier</a>, romantic views of the natural landscape appeal to me even though I know that these views are as profoundly unhistorical as utopians imaginings of a primordial, edenic nature.&#0160; Human activities have had a fundamental influence on almost every aspect of the Eastern Mediterranean places where I work.&#0160; As an archaeologist, I already understand that there is no escaping from the sprawl and our own present is, in fact, a past dystopian future. </p> <p>Like the works of Gibson and the music of Sonic Youth and Arcade Fire the crass consumerism of late capitalism is held up to be at least tacitly responsible for decline.&#0160; The focus falls (predictably and particularly) on the relationship between individuals (and their behavior) and objects.&#0160; In fact, the physical character of objects take on an archaeological character as they become vehicles for both present identities and history.&#0160; This is archaeological thought: while punk&#39;s characters take in the sprawling ruins of shopping malls and rusted machines that stretch outward from centers of human settlement, archaeologists lovingly document the tell-tale haloes of ceramic material encircle ancient sites.&#0160; In fact, many scholars argue that the practice of spreading manure created these ceramic haloes. Within the settlement, residents discarded bits of broken pottery on piles of household (both human and animal)waste.&#0160; The practice of studying the remains of human activity in the countryside by documenting these worn fragments of discarded goods reminds us of a profoundly dystopian image: communities literally consuming their own waste. </p> <p>So, as both archaeology and our punk friends scrutinize materiality as an indicators of culture.&#0160; They invite us to contemplate the remains of the past as both a cautionary tale for the ephemeral nature of the material accomplishments that we hold dear, while at the same time validate our ability to understand the past (and the present) through bits of meaning embedded in those same good and practices.&#0160; The failures of culture manifest themselves in the discarded objects, buildings, and goods scattered about, and these same practices construct a body of material that we can study and reproduce the past.&#0160; </p> <p>The presence of nature amidst these man-made ruins and the parallel between the ruins of capitalism (dead shopping malls) and natural features (rise like mountains beyond mountains) reminds us that all of our surroundings are

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cultural, and, at that point, dystopian landscapes become familiar.&#0160; We not only live in the sprawl, but we have always lived in the sprawl.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Few Quick Hits at the End of a Busy Week STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-few-quick-hits-at-the-end-of-a-busy-week CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/13/2010 08:50:09 AM ----BODY: <p>Not much in the way of time to explore the interwebs lately, but a few heres and theres:</p> <ul> <li>I've been thinking about Sprawl especially as I listen to Arcade Fire's new album.&nbsp; I re-read William Gibson's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/count-zero/oclc/248547973">Count Zero</a></em> this past summer (on the flight to Cyprus, in fact) and it is among Gibson's "Sprawl Trilogy" along with <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/neuromancer/oclc/24379880">Neuromancer</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/mona-lisaoverdrive/oclc/17876008">Mona-Lisa Overdrive</a></em>.&nbsp; These books inspired <em>Sonic Youth</em>'s track Sprawl (from Daydream Nation) and this track may or may not have come to inspire the penultimate song on Arcade Fire's album the recent album Suburbs (for what appears to be a reference to this, check out <em><a href="http://www.spin.com/reviews/arcade-fire-suburbsmerge">this otherwise ordinary review in Spin</a></em>).&nbsp; <li><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/~carmody/Home.html">Tim Carmody</a> one of my favorite New Media Academic Hipsters is blogging this week at <a href="http://www.kottke.org/">kottke.org</a>. If you don't already check out his usual blog, <a href="http://snarkmarket.com/">Snarkmarket</a>, on a regular basis, you should.&nbsp; He edited one of the more clever (and probably fleeting) little collections of reflections on the New Media entitled the <a href="http://snarkmarket.com/nla/"><em>New Liberal Arts</em></a>.&nbsp; UND almuni and New Media Design Hipster, <a href="http://www.fimoculous.com/">Rex Sorgatz</a>, contributed. <li><em><a href="http://www.informaworld.com.ezproxy.library.und.edu/smpp/title~db=all~cont ent=g925690055~tab=toc~order=page">World Archaeology</a> </em>has a nice collection of assorted article on 'archaeology and contemporary society'.&nbsp; It has a cool introduction by John Schofield, who I think is pretty bright.&nbsp; I haven't read much of it yet, but did notice that there were no articles on archaeology and music (via <a href="http://individual.utoronto.ca/nakassis/">Dimitri Nakassis</a>).&nbsp; Punk

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Archaeology remains untapped. <li>And more teaching news, <a href="http://twitter.com/OIDDirector">Anne Kelsch</a>, the Director of University of North Dakota's <a href="http://www.oid.und.edu/">Office of Instructional Development</a> (and the patron of <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>) is now on Twitter complementing the Office of Instructional Development's own Twitter feed OIDatUND.&nbsp; So you can see the leading edge of our new social media presence.&nbsp; Which brings me to... <li>Checked out <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/08/12/leaving-the-classroom-behindteaching-the-public-humanities/">the most recent Teaching Thursday</a>?&nbsp; It's fantastic!</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Go to Teaching Thursday! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: go-to-teaching-thursday CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 08/12/2010 08:48:59 AM ----BODY: <p>Missing out on your Archaeology of the Mediterranean World?&nbsp; Well, I defer to a far more articulate commentator than I am today.&nbsp; Check out <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/philrel/weinstein.html">Jack Russell Weinstein</a> (from the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/philrel/">Department of Philosophy and Religion</a> at University of North Dakota) as he blogs on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/08/12/leaving-the-classroom-behindteaching-the-public-humanities/">Leaving the Classroom Behind:Teaching and the Public Humanities</a>.&nbsp; He captures many of my own sentiments on the role that the public humanities should play in our society.</p> <p>And while you're at it, sign on to follow the new Twitter feed for the Office of Instructional Development: <a title="http://twitter.com/OIDatUND" href="http://twitter.com/OIDatUND">http://twitter.com/OIDatUND</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Best Inventoried Find from the East Field STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-best-inventoried-find-from-the-east-field CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/11/2010 08:12:19 AM ----BODY: <p>One great thing about photographing all the inventoried cards is you discover remarkable finds, many of which are unfortunately unpublished.&nbsp; <p align="left">Amidst ordinary inventory cards was the following:</p> <p align="center"><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348621cc3b970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2fe41c5970b -pi" width="404" height="271"></a> </p> <p align="left">It is a tragedy that the camera was "broken" than day.&nbsp; </p></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.115.6 URL: http://doctoralbliss.wordpress.com DATE: 08/12/2010 12:04:55 AM Unsure of how to react to the image, as I would guess you were doing a dig on Pandora ;). -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Photos of Photos on Inventory Cards STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: photos-of-photos-on-inventory-cards CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/10/2010 09:49:38 AM

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----BODY: <p align="left">I spent today taking photographs of the inventoried artifact cards at the Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia dig house.&nbsp; First off, this was incredibly boring work.&nbsp; It involved taking pictures of roughly 5&nbsp; 7 inch inventory cards for about 6 hours straight.&nbsp; I managed to photograph about 1500 of them.&nbsp; It reminded me that most of academic life is, in fact, tedious and archaeology - despite its somewhat exotic image (and genuinely exotic locales) - mostly involves a level of unparalleled tedium.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134861bb2dd970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN4894" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134861bb328970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a> </p> <p>Second, it did give me a chance to muse over the nature of media in archaeology.&nbsp; The cards were hand written (mostly) and included a photograph of the inventoried object, pasted, generally onto the card itself.&nbsp; I was translating these images into a digital image, which would eventually form the basis for a textual image of the object in a relational database.&nbsp; The transition from one media to the next always constitutes unique challenges in any discipline and it is particularly challenging to translate physical objects like cards - which are as much artifacts as documents of the artifacts collected - from one form to the next.&nbsp; The most obvious loss is the physical appearance of emendations, additions, and corrections (inscribed in each instance in different hands, colors, pen types, and styles) and the attendant humanizing of the interpretative process over generations.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134861bb41d970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN5295" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2f83994970b -pi" width="404" height="304"></a> </p> <p>The cold reality of text based databases is that even if earlier notation are not overwritten (either in a graphically visible sense or in a digital sense), the human aspect of inscribing physical objects ends.&nbsp; And this is particularly significant for archaeology which is first and foremost, the study of material objects.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 98.111.157.223 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 08/10/2010 12:18:36 PM I have a reference for you from a German article on the history of photography that discusses this card system, basically invented by Lucy Talcott in the Agora in the 30s.

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Four Impressions of Greece STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: four-impressions-of-greece CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/09/2010 12:06:00 AM ----BODY: <p>I&#39;ve traveled to and from Greece often enough over the last few years that I should not be surprised or put off by anything, but each time, no matter how collected I try to act, something strikes me as particularly bizarre, makes me uncomfortable, and reinforces my feeling that I do not travel well.</p> <p>1. Inexact Time.&#0160; To get to Ancient Corinth you can take the train from the airport.&#0160; This isn&#39;t difficult. You just take the regional rail from the airport station to the end of the line and then literally walk across the platform to the train to Corinth.&#0160; There is one ticket, all the trains leaving the airport go the same place, the platforms are well labeled.&#0160; But still, I managed to get confused.&#0160; I am going to blame the person who sold me the ticket, but because it makes me feel better about myself and not because it was her fault.&#0160; When she handed me the ticket she told me that the right train would leave in 30 minutes.&#0160; On the board in the wellmarked train station there were numerous trains arriving (all going the same place, it would seem), but none that arrived in 30 minutes.&#0160; In fact, there were two trains that arrived almost exactly 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the 30 minutes the nice woman had told me to wait.&#0160; So, as any season traveller seeing the possibility of 2 well-marked trains going to the exact same place, I panicked and randomly picked one.&#0160; It worked out fine and by the time I arrived in Corinth, I had recovered.</p> <p>2. Blank Billboards. As the train sped through the Attic countryside along the route of the modern Attic Highway around Athens, I couldn&#39;t help but notice the number of blank billboards.&#0160; The billboards looked new and presumably they were set up for to capitalize on the flood of Olympics tourists, but now in an era of economic uncertainty in Greece, the billboards are a bleak sign.&#0160; It can&#39;t be a good sign when companies can&#39;t afford or be bothered to advertise their wares in the summer months - high tourist season - on the main route from the airport to downtown Athens. The Greek countryside is filled with abandonment both ancient and modern and the empty billboards with their exposed and blank plywood pallets just contributed another aspect to the Greek scene.</p> <p>3. Producing a landscape.&#0160; Once I lost interest in staring at blank billboards (and abandoned a crazy plan to count them) and transferred onto the high-speed train south to Corinth, I began to look forward to my first glimpses of the Isthmus of Corinth.&#0160; While I am not usually associated with work on the Isthmus - David Pettegrew is probably the next in line to be the new Mr. Isthmus (Dr. Isthmus?), I still do get a thrill to see the familiar landscape of development, olive groves, market gardens, citrus orchards, archaeological landmarks, and, for lack of better term, human detritus. The idea of finding such a historically important (at least for what I study) place to be familiar is a remarkable feeling.&#0160; Moreover, my little archaeologist&#39;s ego is further stoked when I see the ridge of Mt. Oneion and its imagine that I

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can make out the faintest traces of its less well-known site.&#0160; See, the thing is, I documented that site.&#0160; In fact, I &quot;discovered&quot; it and documented it (with the help of numerous other people) and published it (with my co-author, Tim Gregory).&#0160; It was cool to see Mt. Oneion and imagine its fortification.&#0160; It gave me an instant feeling of familiarity and of accomplishment. I know it&#39;s dorky, but... </p> <p>4. Always an outsider.&#0160; I still feel like an outsider in Greece and doubly so when I settle into my oftentimes home-away-from-home at the American School in Athens.&#0160; This summer, my short field season, will have me living at their famous compound in the village of Ancient Corinth.&#0160; I had visited it numerous times, enjoyed the hospitality of its community of scholars and directors, and frequently marveled at the collected, historical expertise of the Corinth folks.&#0160; At the same time, I&#39;ve always felt like an outsider there.&#0160; Now, part of this is because I was an outsider!&#0160; I have never dug at Corinth and most of my research on the region focuses on the margins (both in terms of interest and in terms of geography).&#0160; Moreover, I am not renowned for my academic confidence or my ease in fitting into different kinds of professional and personal situations (as I said, I don&#39;t travel well).&#0160; That being said, I had hoped one day to feel more comfortable at the Hill House and the American School more generally.&#0160; It hasn&#39;t happened yet, but maybe this year it will begin. </p> <p>More from the field as I capture the time to blog.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: maddy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.91.201.89 URL: DATE: 09/05/2010 03:05:49 PM Bill, I still remember you picking me up from the airport and driving me to Ancient Corinth all those years ago. The fact that you can drive in Greece is pretty impressive. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/06/2010 06:53:15 AM ----BODY:

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<p>It's still pretty dark here in North Dakota so it's a bit hard to predict what the day will be like, but it nevertheless seems like a fine time for a short quick hits and varia.</p> <ul> <li>There's some activity over at <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology</a>.</li> <li>And there is some really good activity at <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>. And my collaboration with the <a href="http://www.oid.und.edu/">Office for Instructional Development</a> at the University of North Dakota has extended to include a <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/australia/content/current/story/471156.html">Twitt er account (OIDatUND)</a>.  Follow us!</li> <li><a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/2010/07/hands-off.html">This is a pretty neat blog post</a> on an archaeologist's relationship with their tools.</li> <li>Kurt Vonnegut on semi-colons: "Don't use semicolons. They stand for absolutely nothing. They are transvestite hermaphrodites. They are just a way of showing off. To show that you have been to college." (via <a href="http://kottke.org/10/08/kurt-vonneguts-advice-to-youngwriters">Kottke.com</a>). </li> <li><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-googlewave.html">Google Kills Google Wave</a>.  Google announced that they would no longer develop Google Wave, which to me is sort of a tragedy.  I quite liked Wave and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/01/te aching-with-technology-thursday.html">saw it's potential in the classroom</a>. In fact, I used Wave to coordinate an practicum on public history that I ran with a small group of graduate students, and it worked really well to integrate "real time" communication (particular walking a student through an operation on a piece of software) with "more traditional" types of "bloggy" or discussion board type written communication.  Anyway, I wonder if the very deliberate and gradual roll-out strategy made it difficult to gain the kind of critical mass of adopters necessary to make Wave a useful tool. </li> <li>An interesting <em>NYTimes </em>article "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/arts/design/04maker.html">Wringing out Art of the Rubble in Detroit</a>" that complements my recent little essay on Detroit as a context for punk and spolia, and <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128935865">a great radio interview with Queen's Brian May on NPR</a>. (both via Kostis Kourelis)</li> <li>It's curious that <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/australia/content/current/story/471156.html">Marcu s North has such a strong hold</a> on a spot on the Australian Test side.</li> <li>What I am reading: Chuck Klosterman's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/fargo-rock-city-a-heavy-metal-odyssey-inrural-north-dakota/oclc/45202097"><em>Fargo Rock City</em></a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/sex-drugs-and-cocoa-puffs-a-low-culturemanifesto/oclc/52121417"><em>Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs : a Low Culture Manifesto</em></a>. Jennifer Egan's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/visit-from-the-goon-squad/oclc/449844391">A Visit from the Goon Squad</a></em>.</li> <li>What I am listening to: Arcade Fire, <em>The Suburbs</em>.</li> </ul> <p>I'm off to Greece so the blog might be a bit quiet for the next couple of weeks or not.</p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Bronze Age Kommos STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-on-bronze-age-kommos CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 08/05/2010 07:37:42 AM ----BODY: <p>Kommos is one of my favorite sites in the Mediterranean. Not only is it beautifully situated, but it has a great guide and the results of the excavations there contribute (in a way that I can understand as a non-Bronze Ageologist) to broader discussions of Mediterranean connectivity and economic organization.  In fact, I like Kommos so much that <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/ko mmos-on-crete.html">I blogged about the site almost three years ago</a>.  (Have I really been blogging that long? Don't I have better things to do with my mornings by now?)</p> <p>As I noted in my first blog post on Kommos, the most interesting thing about the site is the evidence for how deeply interconnected it was with other regions across the Mediterranean.  An article in the most recent volume of <em>Hesperia</em> makes a further contribution to what scholars already know about the economic networks in which Kommos participated.  In "Mycenaean and Cypriot Late Bronze Age Ceramic Imports to Kommos" (Hesperia 79 (2010), 191231), Jonathan Tomlinson, Jeremy Rutter, and Sandra Hoffman confirm using neutron activation analysis that Kommos featured numerous imports from both the Mycenaean world and, more interesting to me, from Cyprus.  From what I can gather, the assemblage at Kommos produced a significant quantity of Late Minoan III vessels and White Slip II milk bowls and Base Ring II cups in particular.  Apparently these types of vessels were shipped around the Aegean stacked in pithoi (Dimitri Nakassis clarified this for me).</p> <p>Neutron activation analysis demonstrated that the material from Cyprus could be identified with certain discrete production sites on the island.  It is hard to completely understand what this could mean (especially for a time period outside my specialty).  On the one hand, it may be that Late Bronze Age Cyprus had certain sites and production facilities dedicated to an export economy in ceramics (like scholars have argued for copper production).  On the other hand, it also could indicate that certain classes of high-value Late Bronze Age ceramics were only produced at certain sites.  Or, finally, on the third hand (!!!), it could mean that Kommos only had particular political and economic

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relationships with particular sites on Cyprus and imported material from those places to the exclusion of similar material derived from other sites.  All three possibilities reflect how well-organized the commercial economy of Cyprus was in the Late Bronze Age (something that we had already suspected based on the evidence found in the Uluburun shipwreck).  It is interesting to think how patterns of exchange that link discrete consumption and production sites would influence the more decentralized patterns of pre-modern commerce conjured up by <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/corrupting-sea-a-study-of-mediterraneanhistory/oclc/42692026">Horden and Purcell</a>.  For Horden and Purcell, trade seems to flow through flexible and largely decentralized networks of microregions which depended, to some extent, on dynamic, highly-flexible networks of both supply and demand that functioned across a local, regional, and interregional scale. Would the presence of discrete and seemingly long-standing relationships between sites of consumption, like Kommos, and production centers challenge the more decentralized model advanced in <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/corrupting-sea-a-study-of-mediterraneanhistory/oclc/42692026">The Corrupting Sea</a></em>?</p> <p>It is even more interesting to see how neutron activation analysis has allowed Tomlinson, Rutter, and Hoffman to identify the regional production sites that simple visual inspection of ceramics would not have detected.  The downside of this technology, of course, is the expense and the expertise required to analyze and interpret the results.  If we can imagine an archaeological world where neutron activation analysis (and other sophisticated methods for identifying and describing ceramics) become more common, we can see a world where the oftentimes black art of ceramics analysis has simultaneous become blacker and become more transparent.  The individual abilities of ceramicists to identify artifact types consistently can now be verified through a more consistently replicable process, but, at the same time, a process that requires a level of scientific expertise that most Mediterranean archaeologists lack.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Next Project... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: the-next-project CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/04/2010 07:28:54 AM ----BODY: <p>By the end of this week, I'll be back in Greece continuing a long-standing project and initiating a new collaboration.  Next week, I'll be working at the

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Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia with Steve Ellis's <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/index.php/research/40-isthmia">East Isthmia Archaeology Project</a>.  The project focuses on the mysterious East Field at Isthmia.  The East Field is a tangles mass of walls of various dates and has puzzled archaeologists from its initial excavation in the 1970s.</p> <p>Over the past 5 years, Ellis' team has replanned the East Field and established a new relative chronology of the walls.  At the same time, I've been working on (re)digitizing the context data from the Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia and integrating it with the various inventoried finds from the various parts of the site.  Our hope for  this summer is that we'll be able to bring together Ellis' relative chronology of the walls with some parts of my  digitized finds database to determine whether the ceramic data can contribute a more precise chronology to stratigraphic dating of the walls.</p> <p>I also hope that my time at Isthmia will help me come to terms with what I'd need to do to digitize all of the inventoried finds.  From my understanding, the finds inventory is primarily stored on index cards at the Isthmia excavation house.  These cards contain the basic chronology, typological, and stratigraphic context for artifacts ranging from inscriptions, to lamps, pottery, architectural fragments, and various metal objects.  My feeling is that it would be inefficient to attempt to key the data from these cards at Isthmia.  My plan right now is to figure out a way to very efficiently create images of each card so that the data can be keyed back in the US.  I am hoping to discover a way to photograph batches of the cards quickly.</p> <p>My work with the finds data is part of larger and quite diffuse effort to digitize most of the archaeological records from Isthmia.  Jon Frey has been working to digitize the notebooks and produce a new site plan, and my hope is that my finds data will integrate smoothly into his efforts.</p> <p>During my time in Greece, I'll be staying at the Corinth Excavations in Ancient Corinth.  Despite working in the Corinthia for almost 15 years, this will be the first time that I've ever stayed at the Corinth Excavation hostel.  I am almost giddy.</p> <p>More from the field as my adventures develop!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Thoughts on Kim Bowes' Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-thoughts-on-kim-bowes-private-worship-public-values-andreligious-change-in-late-antiquity CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Late Antiquity

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DATE: 08/03/2010 08:30:22 AM ----BODY: <p><img style="float: right;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2d1b4f2970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="139" height="206" /></p> <p>I just finished reading Kim Bowes' <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/private-worship-public-values-and-religiouschange-in-late-antiquity/oclc/183179509">Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity</a> </em>(Cambridge 2008).  The first lines of her introduction recounted one of my favorite stories from Late Antiquity: Pulcheria's dream inspired excavation of the remains of 40 martyrs from Sozomen (<em>Hist. Eccl.</em> 9.2). Any book that begins with a example of dream archaeology is o.k. to me.</p> <p>But, I'll admit that this incident was not why I  read this book. Instead, I wanted to gather recent insights into the relatively late date for monumental architecture in Greece.  Bowes does not talk about Greece directly in her book, but argues for the prevalence and importance of churches associated with elite domestic contexts throughout better documented regions of the Mediterranean.</p> <p>These buildings are important because they represent an architectural counterpoint to the bishop's church which stood as a product of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the centralized authority traditionally associated with that institution.  Acknowledging the widespread existence of church buildings funded by the Late Roman elite and prominently associated with both rural and urban elite domestic contexts reminds us that the spread of Christianity was not the simple, linear growth of the institutional church, but a process riven with disputes.  In fact, the victory of institutional Christianity overwrote evidence for many of the disputes in the process of producing a single triumphant narrative for the victor of the church.</p> <p>Bowes' book also continues to enrich our understanding of space by reminding us of the fluidity between public and private spaces in the discourse of power in Late Antiquity.  Issues of display, patronage, and both public and spiritual mediation played out over a monumental landscape produced as much by private funds and initiatives as institutional authority of the church.  As a result, efforts in the law codes to suppress privately funded church buildings were as much political moves as economic ones as the institutional church sought to suppress rival spaces of power in the Early Christian landscape.</p> <p>The book also contributes to our understanding of the later 5th and early 6th century boom in ecclesiastical architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean.  While Bowes does not discuss these periods explicitly - her book concludes in the middle decades of the 5th century - it may be that the boom in church building occurred as the institutional church made the final push for an exclusive claim to monumental architecture.  The story the church of St. Polyeuctos in Constantinople and the rivalry between Anicia Juliana's private church and the imperial church of Justinian is suggestive of just this kind of rivalry.</p> <p>In the Corinthia, and in Greece more generally, it is exceedingly difficult to differentiate between churches associated with the local, non-ecclesiastical elite, and those constructed by bishops or under the auspices of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.  Evidence from epigraphy does suggest that non-church officials did build churches, but this tells us little about who controlled the church, its clergy, and the rites that took place there.  There is  some suggestive evidence, however:  for example, groups of smaller, rural churches dot the Greek countryside - like those that throughout southeastern Attica - and many are not clearly associated with known settlements suggesting

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the kind of elite-controlled rural churches that Bowes has linked to villas in the West. ¬†Moreover, we know that there existed a villa-culture in Greece and that some civic power likely moved from the urban core to suburban and even exurban villas of the elite. ¬†It would be natural then for these buildings which already served some "public" functions to include religious space as well, although as far as I know we have no specific evidence for this function among the handful of Late Roman villas thoroughly excavated in Greece. ¬†The evidence for 6th century church building in better excavated and documented urban areas like the group of contemporary churches located in the Corinthia - could, then, represent an institutional response to largely undocumented elite, private, rural practices.</p> <p>While this all remains tremendously speculative, but it does allow us to explain how Christianity grew in Greece without evidence for monumental ecclesiastical architecture. ¬†The needs for Christian communities was largely met by church buildings associated with the traditional and increasingly rural elite rather than the new-fangled authority of the emergent, but not yet locally-powerful ecclesiastical hierarchy.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.197.147 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 08/03/2010 12:59:33 PM Your book recommendations are quite reliable. I immediately contact ILL. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Punk and Nostalgia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-punk-and-nostalgia CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 08/02/2010 09:39:59 AM ----BODY: <p>Kostis Kourelis brought to my attention a recent <em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/arts/design/24may.html">New York Times</a></em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/arts/design/24may.html"> article</a> on an exhibit of Victorian era stereoscopic photographs called "A Village Lost and Found". ¬†What made this exhibit interesting to punk archaeology fans, was that former Queen guitarist Brian May curated the exhibit and co-wrote the

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accompanying book.  The New York Times review of the exhibition both feigns surprise that a rock 'n' roller like May would be interested in such quaint, esoteric artifacts as hand-colored stereoscopic images and, at the same time, acknowledged the deep nostalgic vein in British society (and its music).  In doing so, the NYT's author makes reference to one of my favorite albums which lurks around the margins of punk rock, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.</p> <p>The double album, released in 1968, consists of series of tracks celebrating traditional village life in England.  Topics range from the Village green to picture books, trains, farms, and typical village characters (Johnny Thunder and the deviously rocking Wicked Annabella).  The nostalgic element captured, however ironically, in the Kink's album continues in punk music.  As I have noted before, punk always had an affection for the pop music of the earlier generation, even though punk rockers from the Germs to the Ramones and the Heartbreakers typically sped up the hooks and contorted the lyrics that gave pop music its wide-spread appeal.  One of my personal favorites is the Germ's cover of Chuck Berry's "Round and Round".  At the same time punk rockers like Jonathan Richman (especially in his early Modern Lovers tracks like Old World, which is bracketed later in the first Modern Lovers' album with the track Modern World) produced music with the same whimsical nostalgia as the Kink's Village Green:</p> <p>I see the '50's apartment house<br />It's bleak in the 1970's sun<br />But I still love the '50's<br />And I still love the old world<br />I wanna keep my place in this old world<br />Keep my place in the arcane knowledge<br />And I still love the '50's and I still love the old world</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/pu nk-rock-nostalgia-and-the-archaeology-of-musical-utopia.html">As I have argued before </a>the archaeological character of these songs is not in their perfect reproduction of the past, but in the preservation of the past through critique.  For example, the Kink's celebration of the Village Green evokes the nostalgia for the earlier times that shot through modernizing British society. In fact, as <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/id eas-of-landscapes.html">Matthew Johnson has described in his <em>Ideas of Landscape</em></a>, such nostalgia for an earlier period influenced how archaeologist have studied the landscape and regarded material and buildings from the modern period.  Romantic notions of the earlier, rural world, celebrated its simplicity, inherent virtues (especially of Britishness and, as we have witnessed recently the "real" America of the small town), and purity, and expected some degree of continuity to be visible in the society and culture of contemporary denizens of the countryside and the small town.</p> <p>Punk tried to make a mess of these idyllic critiques by taking the staid nostalgia and melding it with what to many appeared to be the most fleeting, contemporary, and critical musical genres. In some ways, this finds a parallel between those of us committed to sophisticated and critical approaches to archaeology of the countryside, but still enamored with the illusory, antimodern character of the rural scene.  I can admit to loving to explore the lonely hilltops in Greece, to document isolated ruins, and to embracing the contrast between the bustle of the village or city and the peaceful "isolation" of rural Greece.  I often will pause and listen just to the wind and revel in the absence of the motorbikes or trucks while at the same time scrutinizing the read-out on a state-of-the-art GPS unit or looking at a map showing an aerial photograph analyzed via sophisticated computer software.  Moreover, as much as my analyses call into question the notion that the Greek countryside was

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isolated, I still use a view of olive covered hills in my publications and presentations to evoke the exotic, traditional character of an archaeological past. ¬†The contrast between my reliance on modern technology to document the past and the romantic image of the rural Greece produces a productive conflict. ¬†My appreciation of the beauty and isolation of the Greek countryside drew inspiration from traditional romantic views of rural life while, at the same time, my approach to field work and conclusions challenges those very same views. ¬†A Punk Archaeology approach embraces these same ironies drawing heavily on traditional of thought while at the same time challenging them.</p> <p><a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">For more musings on Punk Archaeology be sure to check out our blog here</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 98.111.149.120 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 08/02/2010 05:25:01 PM Brilliant!!! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-3 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 07/30/2010 07:59:29 AM ----BODY: <p>It's a rainy Friday before a (hopefully) sunny weekend, so we have some fun varia and quick hits to get your day going right.</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/07/29/teaching-what-youdon%e2%80%99t-know-student-research/">A nice response</a> to my short review of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/teaching-what-you-dontknow/oclc/316037957">T. Huston's <em>Teaching What You Don't Know</em></a>. ¬†There is nothing more humbling than advising graduate or undergraduate research. Student research consistently reminds me how much I don't know even in my own field and energizes me with new and refreshing approaches to familiar topics. Most importantly, however, student research reinforces the importance of process in my own work. ¬†It makes me want to be more systematic, more organized, more exhaustive.</li>

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<li><a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology </a>is back.  I have a couple of most posts brewing in my brain. But the blog might not last for much longer, so if you haven't checked it out, it's probably best to do it now.  And fear not, something else is in the works.</li> <li>I started using <a href="http://hootsuite.com/">HootSuite</a> this week (instead of<a href="http://www.tweetdeck.com/"> Tweetdeck</a>).  While I appreciate the aesthetic of Tweetdeck and actually like the Adobe Air built interface, it may be the Hootsuite is more useful as I look to juggle several <a href="http://twitter.com/billcaraher/">Twitter</a> accounts this fall.  So it's Hootsuite on my laptop, <a href="http://seesmic.com/">Seesmic </a>on my Android Phone, and Tweetdeck on my iPad.  But to read my social media on my iPad nothing beats <a href="http://ax.itunes.apple.com/us/app/flipboard/id358801284?mt=8">Flipboard</a >.  For a cool little review of it, check out this post on<a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Making-Social-Media-More/25858/"> ProfHacker</a>.</li> <li>I also purchased a copy of <a href="http://www.redsweater.com/marsedit/">MarsEdit</a> this week. I've been looking for blogging software for my Mac that would rival the simplicity and ease of Window's Life Writer.  I tried <a href="http://illuminex.com/ecto/">Ecto </a>for a year and found it just a bit too quirky for my taste. (Actually, I was annoyed that I could not change the font size of the text I was writing without changing the size of the font in the blog).  I like MarsEdit better.</li> <li>As an historian with a serious professional interest in archaeology housed in a history department, I am increasingly aware of how the professional credentials amassed in my strange interdisciplinary space do not neatly align with those of my colleagues.  For example, I do not get any explicit credit for running my own archaeological project and my collaborative publications (often with 3 or more authors) - standard practice among archaeologists - does not look like the more solitary scholarly efforts of my colleagues.  In any event, I was interested to see how closely my work fits into the new set of best practices for Public History recently approved by the AHA, OAH, et c.  <a href="http://www.foundhistory.org/2010/06/16/oah-aha-ncph-approverecommendations-on-evaluating-public-history-for-tenure-and-promotion/">Check out the details and commentary at Found History</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://craigmod.com/journal/kickstartup/">This is a cool article </a>on how to use<a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/"> Kickstarter</a> to fund a publishing project.  It gets me thinking about Phase Two of Punk Archaeology.</li> <li>Marcos Ambrose is leaving <a href="http://jtgdaughertyracing.com/">JTG Daugherty Racing </a>at the end of this year.  I hope he manages to upgrade his ride.  Rumor has it that he might move over to fill one of the two vacated seats at Petty Racing.</li> <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/england-v-pakistan2010/engine/current/match/426413.html">England v. Pakistan</a> will show whether Pakistan is really that good or Australia is really that bad.  So far, England appears committed to keeping things interesting.</li> <li>What I'm Reading: R. Price, trans, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/acts-of-the-council-of-constantinople-of553-with-related-texts-on-the-three-chapterscontroversy/oclc/427610844&amp;referer=brief_results"><em>The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553 : with related texts on the Three Chapters Controversy</em></a>. (Liverpool 2009); <a href="http://www.hesperiaonline.org/"><em>Hesperia </em>79.2</a>; M.T. Fournier, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/minutemens-double-nickels-on-the-

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dime/oclc/81453237"><em>The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime</em></a>. (New York 2009)</li> <li>What I'm listening to: The Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime.</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Punk and Spolia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: punk-and-spolia CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 07/29/2010 10:48:20 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last week or so, I've been listening again to the<a href="http://www.detroitcobras.org/index.html"> Detroit Cobras</a> and thinking about some of our first conversations on Punk Archaeology.  The Cobras specialize in what they have called "revved up soul".  They make this wonderful noise by covering (mostly) lost classics of the MoTown era over the  driving rhythms of punk and the fuzzy, distorted lo-fi sound of the punk blues movement.  Rachel Nagy's voice succeeds at being both smooth and abrasive at the same time.  Some critics have called their sound "Garage Soul".</p> <p>Their first album, Mink, Rat or Rabbit covered songs by 1950s and early 1960s bands like The Marvelettes, The Shirelles, Irma Thomas, The "5" Royales, and The Shangri-Las.  Later albums continue this tradition.  (They're first two albums - Mink, Rat or Rabbit and Life, Love and Learning - are, to my ear, their best.  (Notice the absence of the "Oxford comma" in both titles.)</p> <p>The point of mentioning this somewhat obscure band is to consider the relationship between punk and spolia.  Spolia is a technical archaeological term for the re-use older fragments of architecture in new construction. It is typically associated with Late Antiquity and was initially regarded by critics steeped in the Classical Tradition as indicative of the lose of technical skills and economic impoverished conditions at the end of Antiquity.  Other saw the use of spolia as a conscious decision on the part of Late Antique builders and, at worst, reflective of a taste for a discordant, disorganized, and, ultimately, decadent aesthetic.</p> <p>Of course hip-hop music withstood similar criticisms as they cut up and sampled R&amp;B classics to form  rhythmic backdrop for their poetry.  Such reuse of earlier material was unoriginal and indicative of a kind of creative bankruptcy among "today's generation".  Punk took their lead from pop music which they sped up and made more up-tempo, raucous and chaotic.  The Cobras occupy a third space recently developed by bands like the White Stripes and the

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Black Keys where punk, R&amp;B, and blues infused with the DIY, lo-fy sound of the garage (which represents a more austere and suburban version of the venerable lo-fy Juke Joint).</p> <p>The epicenter of this music has been Detroit (or the Rust Belt more broadly) where the punk of the MC Five and the blues Son House and John L. Hooker intersect. ¬†The music here has tremendous symbolic significance, as Detroit has become emblematic of the decline of "traditional America" and images of the ruinous conditions of the factories have become images of the decline of America's fortunes as a manufacturing power. ¬†The photographs are archaeological in their attention to detail and the need to accommodate history.</p> <p>The music of the Detroit Cobras provide a counterpoint to the haunting, archaeological photographs of abandoned Detroit. ¬†Fragments of the city's earlier days come through in their music, but rather than critique the declining fortunes of America's industrial heartland, the music calls forth the continued vitality of those days in much the same way that spolia maintained a conscious connection with earlier architecture.</p> <p>The archaeological impulse in of punk rock of the Detroit Cobras reveals a kind of native archaeology of the American city which draws backwards on its unique history to produce critical memory. ¬†Such work is the work of archaeologists both of the past and the present who sought to communicate something meaningful from the fragments of the past that remained visible in their present. ¬†The spolia preserved in the music of the Detroit Cobras presents a musical museum in much the same way that the fragments of the past in produce meaning in the context of a physical museum today or in the context of monumental architecture in Late Antiquity.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Constantina Katsari EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 86.182.44.10 URL: http://constantinakatsari.wordpress.com DATE: 07/31/2010 11:50:46 AM Not in a million years would I have made a connection between spolia and punk, until I saw your article. This is a valid point that could be pursued further. Are you thinking of publishing it in the near future? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 08/02/2010 05:29:24 PM Constantina,

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Yep. I am collaborating with Kostis Kourelis on a long-ish term, album length, project that seeks to bring together a bunch of singles like this into something of a collection. Thanks for the comment and will keep you informed! For more see here: <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.co m/</a> Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Thought on Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-thought-on-clay-shirks-cognitive-surplus CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 07/28/2010 09:09:16 AM ----BODY: <p><img style="float: right;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485c652cf970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="140" height="212" /></p> <p>I downloaded onto my iPad - via the Kindle application - a copy of Clay Shirky's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/cognitive-surpluscreativity-and-generosity-in-a-connected-age/oclc/466335766">Congnitive Surplus</a> </em>(New York 2010).  This book has receive a good bit of attention on the interwebs, in large part because Shirky is unapologetic about the potential of the internet and particularly the potential of the internet for good.  In an era where one's status as a pundit almost depends upon a certain cynical view of the world, this book is refreshing and positive.</p> <p>In short, Shirky argues that the internet provides an outlet for surplus energy that the prosperity of the second half of the 20th century has made available to us.  The rise in prosperity has allowed residents of the West, in particular, to enjoy increasing amounts of free-time and leisure.  Shirky contends that the number one use of this leisure time over the last 60 years has been watching television.  Watching television is solitary, somewhat antisocial, and, most importantly, passive.</p> <p>The rise of the internet has begun to slowly encroach on the dominance of television.  Unlike TV the internet is social, provides a platform for both passive consumption and active production of media, and encourages the formation of communities with shared interests.  The dynamic character of the web as a social platform functions to channel energies previously locked away in in the passive relationship between the individual and the television.  The web has already begun to channel the "cognitive surplus" unleashed by the West's recent prosperity, but hitherto squandered through passive and more or less solitary leisure-time activities.  Shirky's best example of this is Wikipedia which

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appeared out of the many moments of leisure enjoyed by tens of thousands of individual contributors.  The result is a testimony to the aggregate knowledge of global community of individuals which prior to the internet would have found a singular, intellectually substantial expression.</p> <p>While this is cool thesis, it also caused me to think about a few things:</p> <p>1. I am not convinced that the "cognitive" activity that Shirky associates with the internet comes directly from surplus time spent in front of the television.  It's a great idea, but a relatively unsophisticated argument.  First, people always used some of their free time in productive, social ways.  Whether it is membership in a community organization, work with a church or other religious group, or serving as an elected official or a volunteer, the cognitive surplus created by economic prosperity poured innumerable areas of social and community life.  As the internet allows for communities to extend beyond the institutional and social confines of traditional, place-based communities, surely some of Shirky's apparent "cognitive surplus" comes at the expense of these other, more traditional forms of community and social organization.  At the same time, there are those who suggest that the rather diffuse creativity on display on the internet comes at the expense of more <em>economically </em>productive pursuits.  The individuals who produce <a href="http://icanhascheezburger.com/">LOLCats</a> for example <em>might </em>otherwise be watching television, but also might be reading a book, working, learning or refining a skill.  I am all for these profoundly democratic expressions of creativity, but I'd be reluctant to argue that television and the internet form a kind of zero-sum dyad.  The arguments for the evils of the internet, in fact, tend not to be arguments for the watching of television, but rather arguments that the internet undermines more rigorous, local, focused, and ultimately socially responsible uses of time and talent.  Shirky does little to undermine these critiques.</p> <p>2. The notion of channeling surplus is always appealing, but what really matters is how that surplus (cognitive or otherwise) is channelled.  The downside of the unfettered and limitless nature of the internet is that it can minimize the impact of a small contribution while still giving the individual the sense of contributing to something larger.  (And I say this a blogger who regularly devotes 4 or 5 hours a week launching my two-cents into the void, and with the understanding that these 4 or 5 hours could be spent polishing up a lecture, reading another, important, argument, reading a graduate student's paper just that much more carefully, or any number of professionally and socially responsible (impactful) activities).  The radically democratized space of the internet is the most efficient venue for all forms of surplus.  The "eat local" movement provides a nice model here.  Just eating locally produced foods is not a sure-fire solution to ecological, economic, and ethical problems facing large scale food production in a globalized economy. In the same way, the shear scale of the internet presents significant problems for the efficient use of specialized surplus.</p> <p>3. Finally, this is the first book that I've read cover-to-cover (so to speak) on my iPad.  The most interesting aspect of this experience (aside from the fact that the iPad is a very nice tool for reading a book) is that I could where other people highlighted passages in Shirky's book.  Slight, dashed underlines showed me commonly annotated passages and clicking on the passages indicated how many people underlined that particular text.  Here is a great example of Shirky's of how the internet takes the solitary act of reading and annotating a text and turns it into a global activity with numerous participants creating a running commentary.  While at present (as far as I can tell) the Kindle application only allows readers to share underlining, it would be remarkable in the future for readers to share margin notes, comments, and even

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links to other passages in other books. ¬†The aggregate of these activities would instantly turn any book into a critical edition.Ôªø</p> <p>¬†</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sue Boudreau EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.7.84.235 URL: http://trythis1thing.wordpress.com DATE: 07/30/2010 11:30:00 PM Enjoyed your summary - seems right on to me. I also love the bright side to the inexorable tech tide and the antidote to hand-wringing about kids today. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Even More Experiments in Intensive Pedestrian Survey STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: even-more-experiments-in-intensive-pedestrian-survey CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/27/2010 07:39:33 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Even more guest-posting brilliance from our esteemed guest blogger, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/%7Edpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, the codirector the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> and the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund speaker. ¬†Be sure to check out his posts on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/pk ap-season-in-review.html">Tuesday</a>,¬†<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/pr ocession-pyla-koutsopetria-pottery.html">Wednesday</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/ex periments-in-intensive-survey-at-pyla-koutsopetria.html">Thursday</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/mo re-experiments-in-intensive-pedestriansurvey.html">yesterday</a></em>.ÔªøÔªø</p> <p>Over the last few days (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/ex periments-in-intensive-survey-at-pyla-koutsopetria.html">here</a> and <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/mo re-experiments-in-intensive-pedestrian-survey.html">here</a>), we have been discussing the results of an experiment we carried out 2010 in order to assess the relationship between the number of artifacts we see in pedestrian survey and the number actually on the ground.  You can read about the first two phases of these experiments here and here.</p> <p>Today we consider the kinds of artifacts that we observed during total collection and the sorts of material that made up the surface matrix.  When we set up the experiment, we consciously decided not to collect artifacts via the chronotype sample as we normally do in our pedestrian resurvey.  What crueler thing could one do to the project ceramicist than overwhelm him with 1,000+ surface artifacts? (After all, the logic of sampling is to manage human resources more effectively.) Because we didn’t identify the artifacts from the total collection grid according to chronotype as we did for the survey units, we limited the kinds of comparisons we can make between the pedestrian survey sample and the total collection.</p> <p>Even still, there were still some things we could do to give us a sense of the kinds of material on the ground, especially their fabric and functional attributes.  How much of the surface assemblage of a high-density unit at Koutsopetria consists of cooking ware, coarse wares, coarse wares with surface treatment like combing, and table wares (slipped or unslipped)?</p> <p>To address this question in part, we sorted all pottery from each total collection unit into three basic fabric classes: semi-fine and fine ware (whether decorated or not), cooking ware, and medium-coarse and coarse wares (including amphora sherds).  The results below show the count of each of the categories in each of the total collection grid squares and give in parentheses the percentage of that fabric group in terms of the total number of potsherds in the unit.</p> <div></div> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2977b19970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="508" /></p> <p> </p> <p>Fine ware constitutes 7.6% to 15.4% of the number of potsherds in each subunit; cooking ware only 1.7% to 5.4% of the total number of potsherds; and coarse wares consistently 80.2-87.2% of the overall assemblage.  Unsurprisingly, for a predominantly Late Roman assemblage, the great majority of the sherds are coarse, a small percentage are fine, and tiny percentage are cooking.  The disparity between coarse wares, on the one hand, and fine and cooking wares on the other would have been even greater had we compared weight instead of count, since most fine and cooking ware sherds are thin-walled and small.</p> <p>We also counted the “parts” of the vessel according to the standard ceramicist categories of rims, bases, handles, shoulders / necks, and body sherds.  Rims represented 2.9-7% of the total sherd count, bases less than 2.2%, handles from 2.2 to 5.3%, neck and shoulders typically less than a percent. Body sherds typically represent over 90% of the surface assemblage.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2977b7e970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="220" /></p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2977b85970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="220" /></p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2977b8c970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="220" /></p> <div>Finally, we tabulated the data in a slightly different way, breaking down the surface assemblage for each subunit by both fabric group and part.  The results shown in the table below suggest that this Late Roman assemblage includes for fine wares mainly body sherds (73.8% of fine wares) and rims (19.5%), for cooking ware mainly body sherds (84.5% of cooking wares) and handles (6.9%), and for coarse ware mainly body sherds (92.9% of coarse wares).  </div> <div></div> <div><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2977b96970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="255" /></div> <div><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2977ba2970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="255" /></div> <div><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2977bb7970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="255" /></div> <div> <div>Coarse ware body sherds make up 79.5% (n=1474) of the total number of sherds (n=1,854) counted for all 4 subunits.  By contrast, fine ware rims make up 2.2% of the total pottery assemblage and cooking ware rims form only .11% of the total pottery assemblage!!!  The 71 fragments of slipped and glazed fine ware (i.e., not including fine ware lacking clear glazing or slip) represent only 3.8% of the total number of potsherds counted (n=1854).  These few black glazed Classical-Hellenistic sherds and red slipped Roman-Late Roman sherds are the typical objects used to provide most of the chronological information for dating archaeological sites but they represent less than 4% of our surface assemblage of this unit at Koutsopetria.</div> <div></div> <div>Finally, it is worth asking what percentage of coarse body sherds have surface treatments and decorations like grooving, combing, and ridging — the kinds of surface treatments that usually lead to them being collected in most regional surveys.  To address this question, we counted the coarse sherds for two of the subunits (G1 &amp; G15) with spiral grooving, combing, or wheel ridging.  The 66 sherds represent 12.5% of the 526 coarse body sherds from those subunits and 9.8% of 672 total sherds from those units.  These “diagnostic body sherds” then are more visible than glazed and slipped fine ware but still quite unrepresentative of the surface pottery as a whole.</div> <div></div> <div>I suppose our next steps with the results of these experiments are to compare them with 1) the chronotype sample from the broader survey, and 2) the data from subsurface excavated deposits.  I think the interesting results of the experiment certainly justified the time it took to totally collect the subunits and will allow us to understand how close our chronotype sample is to the population of ceramic artifacts on the ground.</div> </div>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Experiments in Intensive Pedestrian Survey STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-experiments-in-intensive-pedestrian-survey CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 07/26/2010 06:54:24 AM ----BODY: <p><em>More guest-posting brilliance from our esteemed guest blogger, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/%7Edpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, the codirector the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> and the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund speaker.  Be sure to check out his posts on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/pk ap-season-in-review.html">Tuesday</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/pr ocession-pyla-koutsopetria-pottery.html">Wednesday</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/ex periments-in-intensive-survey-at-pylakoutsopetria.html">Thursday</a></em>.</p> <p>Last Thursday, we introduced the survey experiment that PKAP conducted in June 2010 to assess the relationship between the number of artifacts that we see when we walk across a survey unit and the number of artifacts actually on the ground.  In other words, we wanted to assess how effective our survey methods are in actually assessing what was on the ground.  On Thursday, we compared the artifact densities detected by the project’s untrained student fieldwalkers to those counted by trained senior staff members.  Today we will discuss the second phase in our 2010 experiment, an assessment of the total population of all artifacts on the surface of select subunits.  This part of the experiment was designed to give us a total count of all surface artifacts that can be compared with the artifact counts reported in yesterday’s discussion.</p> <p>We began by selecting four 10 x 10 m subunits based on the densities of the 10 x 10 m artifact densities counted by the experienced senior staff members.  As with past experiments (published in the <em>RDAC </em>2007), we selected our 4 subunits to represent the range of density variation: the lowest density quartile (G15), highest density quartile (G9), and two middle quartiles (G1 and

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G6).  Each total subunit was 10 x 10 m, representing 1/16 (6.25%) of the 1,600 sq m survey unit.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="144.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485b373af970c -pi" border="0" alt="144.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p> <p>To vacuum a high-density unit, you really have to spend a lot of time picking individual artifacts off the ground.  For each of our units, students Andrew, Zane, Valerie, and Luke, and I  walked very slowly in adjacent passes across each selected square gathering together in 1 or 2 corners of the unit all the artifacts present.  An initial pass was never enough for we observed how many artifacts we missed initially.  Usually two additional passes were necessary to vacuum the surface completely, and each pass involved either crawling on hands and knees, or bending so that you had a closer view of the ground.  I have to admit that my back and neck got sore after a while of this.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="143.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485b373bd970c -pi" border="0" alt="143.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p> <p>The results of this “total collection”, shown below, are interesting to compare with the “pedestrian survey counts” discussed yesterday.  You have to keep in mind with the comparison that the pedestrian counts represent a 20% sample of each subunit while the total collection counts represent a 100% sample.  You have to multiply the pedestrian count by a factor of 5 to estimate the “total putative count” (i.e., an estimation of what the total count would be for 100% of the unit) for the pedestrian-walked unit.</p> <p>The first outlined set of grid units below shows the total counts from each of the total collection units.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485b37193970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="535" /></p> <p>The second set of grids compares the total collection counts with the pedestrian survey counts in parentheses (multiplied by 5 to create the 100% putative sample).  </p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485b371a6970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="521" /></p> <p>The third shows the factor difference between these two types of counts.  </p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f28f543a970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="521" /></p> <p>Here is where it gets even more interesting.  We can estimate that the 940 artifacts experienced fieldwalkers counted through pedestrian survey across the entire unit (i.e., the pedestrian counts from 4 walker swaths) would produce a putative pedestrian survey count (factoring for the 20% sample) of 4,700 artifacts.  In other words, had we walked 100% of the unit, we would have counted about 4,700 artifacts.  Now, if total collection (vacuuming) produces on average 2.96 times the number of artifacts as pedestrian survey, we can estimate that there were 13,212 artifacts actually on the surface of the ground.  To provide some perspective, we collected and brought back to the museum 8,788 total artifacts from the 252 grid squares of Koutsopetria and 19,657 total

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artifacts from our survey of the entire Pyla-Koutsopetria area.  A single survey unit at Koutsopetria totally collected would produce 1.5 times the number of artifacts sampled from all 252 grid squares at Koutsopetria and .67 of the total artifacts sampled across the entire Pyla area.  If we were to apply the same multipliers to all 252 forty x forty meter grid squares, i.e., the main part of the site of Koutsopetria, the total artifact count of 19,182 would produce a putative total count of 95,910.  Our estimated total population of artifacts (based on the 2.96 factor) is at least 284,894 (and in reality, poor visibility in many units often limited our sample to 50% of the ground).  This is *why* sampling is important!</p> <p>As for TIME, total collection requires a huge commitment.  Although we (<em>for clarification here, "we" means David - Bill</em>) initially considered surveying all 16 subunits, i.e., an entire 40 x 40 m unit, this proved unrealistic given the time it took for 5 individuals to vacuum a single subunit: 1.5 hours each for G1 and G6, 2 hours for G9, and 1 hour for G15.  Using the total time it took to hoover 25% of the grid square (6 hours) as an index for hoovering this unit, we estimate that 5 individuals could hoover a high-density 40 x 40 m unit in about 24 work hours or well over 100 work hours!  If the typical survey work day is 6 hours long (say, 6AM-noon), it would require 4 full days of a team collecting artifacts from the surface.  Truly this would be an incredibly time intensive task!  By contrast, sampling 20% of the unit through pedestrian survey takes about 20-30 minutes.  In this perspective, total collection requires 72 times more time than pedestrian survey collection!</p> <p>One final comparative result is interesting to note here.  The “other” category increases dramatically through total collection, including numerous pieces of ancient glass (9), lithic stone artifacts (7), shells (24), slabs (13), gypsum (141), ceramic bricks (2), stone vessel (1), marble revetment (3), and a ceramic tessera or gaming piece.  Although total collection was time intensive, this sort of qualitative information is quite useful in filling out our picture of the overall survey unit and indicates something of the functional variability within each survey unit.</p> <p>Tomorrow, we will conclude our discussion of experiments with an overview of ceramic fabric categories.  Stay tuned!</p> <p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-2 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 07/23/2010 07:30:05 AM

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----BODY: <p>This week has been an exciting one at the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.  We hosted our first guest blogger, David Pettegrew, who gave us an overview of the work this summer at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  David's review of the season will continue on Monday, in the meantime check out the first three posts:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/pk ap-season-in-review.html">PKAP Season in Review</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/pr ocession-pyla-koutsopetria-pottery.html">Processing Pyla-Koutsopetria Pottery</a> <br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/ex periments-in-intensive-survey-at-pyla-koutsopetria.html">Experiments in Intensive Survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria</a></p> <p>So other odds and ends:</p> <ul> <li>Imagine! <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Help-Studentsto/123653/">Using blogs, photos, and other "new media" techniques</a> to get students to engage with their experiences while studying abroad. </li> <li><a href="http://mashable.com/2010/07/20/qr-codes-mainstream/">I love the idea of using QR codes</a> .... somehow.  I can imagine a world where the barcode on a book in the library serves as a QR code and opens to the student various user-generated data attached to that specific books. It could be anything from book notes, to citations for a good review, another book that challenges the author's thesis, tips on getting the most from the book, advice on reading time.  At the University of North Dakota, at least, these bar codes are unique to our library and not particularly stable (e.g. when a book loses its bar code a new one is simply added and a attached to a book's record).</li> <li>In more important news, my favorite cheap beer (I am not hip enough to drink PBR) is undergoing a facelift.  <a href="http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/miller_high_life_overh aul.php">Miller High Life has a new(ish) look</a>. Don't worry, the lovely High Life lady continues to feature in the new design (after all, she is the oldest icon in American brewing).  Check out the critique here.  My favorite aspect of the High Life is the shape of the bottle which was designed to evoke a Champagne bottle and its moniker: the Champagne of Beers. </li> <li>I am not sure exactly how I would use this software, but I have to admit <a href="http://notational.net/">Notational Velocity</a> is pretty slick. It allows you to take notes quickly on your computer and, more importantly, find those notes in a super efficient way.  The program follows many of the basic guidelines of hipster software: it lacks most bells and whistles, is open source, and does what it does really, really, well.</li> <li> <a href="http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/five-years-posttribble/">Planned Obsolescence</a> and a flurry in the Twittersphere reminded me that it has been five years since <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Bloggers-Need-Not-Apply/45022/">Ivan Tribble's famous and critical Chronicle article on blogging</a>.  This article and the responses probably motivated me to start my blog more than any other (even though it took me another two years to overcome my worry about the technical aspects of blogging).  It made me think that I was going to be doing some transgressive, that I would be upsetting people like Tribble, and that I was defying convention and somehow making my life and career more notable.  (I suspect this is the same reason why I took a year off after I finished my Ph.D.

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and before I went on the job market.  By taking the year off I flagrantly ignored people who told me it was career suicide and made me feel, if just for a minute, that  convention did not apply to me.)</li> <li>Alun Salt is messing around with a <a href="http://alunsalt.com/">nice new blog design</a>.  He does a nice job integrating social media and more formal blogs as <a href="http://alunsalt.com/2010/07/20/and-now-the-blog-re-design-inenglish/">he describes here</a>. </li> <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/pakistan-v-australia2010/engine/current/match/426395.html">Australia is keeping things interesting in their second test against Pakistan</a>.  All out for 88 and as of this writing 218/5 and 48 ahead of Pakistan??? Things don't look good for them. </li> <li>I am reading: K. Bowes, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/privateworship-public-values-and-religious-change-in-lateantiquity/oclc/183179509"><em>Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity</em></a>.  (Cambridge 2008) and David Fischer's, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/historians-fallacies-toward-a-logicof-historical-thought/oclc/60580">Historians Falacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought</a></em>. (New York 1970).</li> <li>I am listening to: <a href="http://www.detroitcobras.org/index.html">Detroit Cobras, </a><em><a href="http://www.detroitcobras.org/index.html">Mink, Rat, or Rabbit</a></em>; <a href="http://www.amandapalmer.net/afp/">Amanda Palmer, </a><em><a href="http://www.amandapalmer.net/afp/">Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele</a></em>, and  Alphaville, <em>Forever Young</em>.</li> </ul> <p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Experiments in Intensive Survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: experiments-in-intensive-survey-at-pyla-koutsopetria CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 07/22/2010 07:47:46 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Another guest post from our esteemed guest blogger, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, the co-director

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the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> and the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund speaker.  Be sure to check out his posts on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/pk ap-season-in-review.html">Tuesday</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/pr ocession-pyla-koutsopetria-pottery.html">Wednesday</a></em>.</p> <p>When I announced my plans to conduct a survey experiment where we would “vacuum” an entire 40 x 40 m unit, <a href="http://individual.utoronto.ca/nakassis/index.html">Dimitri</a> and Bill both laughed and told me that I had to try it simply for its absurdity.  The 40 x 40 m survey unit was our standard size for the 252 units that we laid out across the Koutsopetria plain .  As far as survey units go, 40 x 40 m (or 1,600 square meters) is a relatively small unit compared to that typically employed by those who conduct distributional survey.  At the same time, when on the group, 40 meters is still vast when compared to the dimension of most lived space.  After all, a 40 x 40 meter unit is over 130 square feet on a side and over 17,000 square feet which makes a single survey unit much larger than even the most over-sized suburban McMansions.  The reason that my suggestion was humorous, however, had to do with the method I proposed for collecting artifacts.  In our typical pedestrian survey, we only looked at 20% of the surface of the unit (for a more reasonable and suburban 3,400 square feet) and only collected each unique artifact from what we saw on the surface.  My proposal was more extreme: get down on our hands and knees and completely “vaccum” (or “hoover”) all the artifacts from 100% of the unit to produce an exhaustive (and exhausting!) total collection rather than a quick 20% sample.</p> <p>Why?  I had the suspicion that the amount of artifacts we see when we walk across the unit is but a fraction of the total number of artifacts actually on the ground.  The suspicion was based on experiments conducted in 2004 &amp; 2006 where we ‘vacuumed’ artifacts from a 5% sample of our 40 x 40 m units, producing on average artifact counts that were 4 times greater than that produced through our 20% sample using pedestrian survey.  We also proved through these experiments that the substantially larger number of artifacts did not really contribute much new chronological or functional information that warranted the additional investments of time and energy.  We published a report on those experiments in an article by the authors in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus 2007.  However, we were aware of the substantial fluctuations of artifacts within 40 x 40 m units and the risk of a 5% sample (80 sq m) being unrepresentative of the unit as a whole (1600 sq m).  The point of our 2010 experiments, then, was to test the results with a much more robust sample.  While I initially wanted to vacuum 100% of the unit, time constraints prohibited me to vacuuming 25% of the unit.  Even still, 25% of the unit is 5 times greater than what we sampled in 2004 and 2006.</p> <p>Due to the limited time for fieldwork this season (and time constraints were one of the reasons that we sampled the units to begin with!), we could only resurvey a single unit placed in the highest-density area immediately northeast of the excavated apse of the early Christian basilica.  We picked this unit to overlap with our very first Discovery Unit, a grid square of 40 x 40 m surveyed in 2004 northeast of the enclosed excavated part of the site of Koutsopetria.  We divided the 40 x 40 unit into sixteen 10 x 10 m subunits, each representing 6.25% of the overall unit area (1,600 sq m).  The grid squares have been given the prefix of G followed by a number between 1-16, as the following plan shows.</p>

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<p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f2777ade970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="324" />In our interest in comparing artifact counts noted during pedestrian survey—where a surveyor walks across the unit examining a 2 m wide swath and counting all pottery, tile, lithics, and other artifact types—with the total population of artifacts actually on the surface, we implemented two stages to the experiments.  The first stage (pedestrian survey) we will report on today.</p> <p>We began by having four fieldwalkers walk across the unit, recording all artifacts visible in their swath, giving a 20% sample of every 10 m of space across a 40 m transect.  We collected ‘sub-tract’ artifact counts every 10 meters to produce density figures for each of the subunits (G1-G16) and assess the fluctuating density of pottery, tile, and lithic artifacts within a survey unit.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f277c125970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="486" height="324" /></p> <p>We collected the data for pedestrian survey three times.  The results of these three separate pedestrian survey exercises are shown in the four figures below.  The numbers represent artifact counts of each type (pottery, tile, other, and total), and the gray shaded columns with orange numbers represent the total artifact count for the swath per fieldwalker.  </p> <p>The first time (see figure 1.1 below) a group of untrained students walked the units—Andrew, Luke, Valerie, and Zane—who who had only seen artifacts at the museum and not in their "natural" (or better, archaeological) contexts.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f277c12f970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="334" /></p> <p>A steady light rain the following day provided the chance for these same students to rewalk the unit a second time (see figure 1.2 below) with artifacts slightly more visible as a result of the washing of the dust.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134859ca897970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="334" /></p> <p>Finally, a group of experienced fieldwalkers—David Pettegrew (DKP), Dimitri Nakassis (DN), and Bill Caraher (WRC) —walked the unit and counted artifacts (see figure 1.3).</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f277c134970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="344" /></p> <p>Hence, the variables in these three episodes of pedestrian survey were experience, and, to a lesser extent, the amount of dust and dirt obscuring the surface of the pottery.  Otherwise, between episodes environmental factors were constant, as were methodological factors and figure 1.4 shows the average of all the counts produced.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f277c139970b -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="480" height="332" /></p>

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<p>We walked these units on June 9 and 10 and each took between 15 minutes and half an hour.</p> <p>Comparing simply the total artifact counts (the bottom right grid within each of the outlined figures), it is interesting to note that the rain appears not to have made a difference overall in density counts between units [1.1] and [1.2].  Although one student count went up significantly after the rain (LHM: 118  243), and another student count was slightly greater (AMH: 200  241), VAW’s total counts were essentially unchanged (335 to 334), while ZRB’s total counts actually declined (238).</p> <p>As far as the other variable (experience) goes, there were some significant disparities between experienced walkers and inexperienced walkers as evident in counts for particular grid squares (compare G1 for [1.1] and [1.3]).  Otherwise, the overall artifact counts were comparable for the units: the lowest-density and highest-density subunits occurred between all three walking episodes.  If we look at total artifact counts for each unit as a whole, students counted 942 artifacts in [1.1] and 1056 artifacts in [1.2] while experienced walkers counted 940 artifacts in [1.3].  That is remarkably close!  <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p> <p>We noticed one major difference, however, in the “other” category, which includes all artifacts besides pottery and tile: marble revetment, gypsum, shell, ancient glass, and ground stone agricultural implements.  The experienced field walkers noted 2-4 times the number of other artifacts in [1.3] than inexperienced fieldwalkers in [1.1] and [1.2].  An experienced walker counted 4 lithic artifacts (chipped stone &amp; ground stone) in G3 and G7 that an inexperienced walker missed.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Processing Pyla-Koutsopetria Pottery STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: procession-pyla-koutsopetria-pottery CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/21/2010 08:24:25 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Another post with help from our guest blogger and 2010 Cyprus Research Fund lecturer, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>. Check out the first in our series of posts <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/pk ap-season-in-review.html">here</a>.</em></p>!

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<p>In 2010 the<a href="http://www.pkap.org/"> Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> was above all the year of the potsherd.  Excavations generate a lot of material.  Our thirteen Excavation Units in 2008 and 2009 generated pottery at rates faster than our poor ceramicist, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/scott_moor e/">Scott Moore</a>, could read and pottery began to pile up at the museum while we were finishing our work.  We promised Scott that 2010 would be different and we were fully committed to getting the material read.  In fact to our surprise, some bureaucratic snafus getting our permits to do fieldwork prevented the collection of additional materials, and allowed us to devote more time to processing the material collected in past seasons.  So rather than venturing out into the field, we spent each mornings out at the museum processing hundreds of bags of ceramic artifacts and our afternoons processing digital data from previous years.  The result of all this is that we caught up.</p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Workspace.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134859688ba970c -pi" border="0" alt="Workspace.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p>! <p>Now to the untrained eye, ceramic processing looks like a bunch of people doing just one or two different tasks.  If you had come to Larnaka and peeked into our work space, you might only discern a couple of obviously different activities say, washing vs. analysis.  But the team was conducting a wide range of different tasks related to the finds.  The most obvious and important preliminary activity involved washing artifacts.  There were a slew of them to wash, 147 bags to be exact, each bag containing dozens, sometimes hundreds of artifacts.  Student enthusiasm for washing artifacts declined over a period of a week and a half but that is to be expected.</p>! <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/dallas_def orest/">Dallas Deforest</a> photographed every catalogued artifact at a resolution high enough to be published.  In 2010, Dallas took over 1,200 digital photos of our catalogued artifacts to join the 3,100 artifacts taken in previous years.  Two of our PKAP veterans from 2009, Becky Savaria and Melissa Hogan, began the process of labeling these photos.  In late June, David spent about 10 additional hours getting all the photos in order.  Now we have an archive of 4,300 digital photos of the 700+ catalogued artifacts and uncatalogued artifacts.</p>! <p>Building 13 was the central hub of ceramic analysis.  Our co-director and golden child, Scott Moore, spent 3 weeks analyzing the ceramics from excavations including those occurring in the 1990s at the site of Koutsopetria and our more recent ones at Koutsopetria and Vigla.  Scott analyzed the pottery in two different ways.  First, he “scanned” less significant contexts from stratigraphically unimportant matrices like the plowzone, the kinds of contexts where reading pottery in great detail is not all that beneficial.  “Scanning” involves 1) sorting pottery into broad categories based on fabric groups (e.g., fine ware, cooking / kitchen ware, and coarse ware); 2) setting aside the most distinct and diagnostic artifacts; 3) making basic observations about the context as a whole on a scanned unit form; and 4) analyzing in greater detail the most diagnostic pottery.  Indeed, scanning is common in Mediterranean urban excavations where excavations might easily produce hundreds of thousands of artifacts (or millions).  The more important contexts Scott read more thoroughly by identifying every artifact with a specific chronotype.  A chronotype is simply a specific, limited identifier for known groups of pottery that combines date, potential functions, shape, and

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appearance.  The point is that Scott read (and this is an estimate) 200 contexts while in Cyprus this year.</p>! <p>The other activities going on in Building 13 were data management (Bill), illustration (Becky Savaria, Melissa Hogan) and artifact cataloguing.  David, Dimitri, and several students wrote more detailed catalog entries for particularly significant finds from the survey and excavation.  In 2007, we completed a formal catalogue of the most significant artifacts from our archaeological survey.  This year, we completed the catalogue of artifacts recovered in the two years of excavated soundings.  The combined total of catalogued artifacts now exceeds 700.  While it is unlikely that we'll be able to publish a catalogue of 700 different artifacts, we plan to eventually release this complete catalog in a digital form and publish on paper a smaller number of "greatest hits".</p>! <p>We recorded the following information for each artifact in our catalogue.</p>! <p>Artifact Number:</p>! <p>Dimensions:</p>! <p>Munsell:</p>! <p>Description Fabric:</p>! <p>Description Shape:</p>! <p>Description Decoration:</p>! <p>_______________________________</p>! <p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Besides this work, we did a variety of more specialized work.  Sarah Lepinski and Bill completed the documentation of the architectural and painted plaster from the excavated area at Koutsopetria producing a complete catalogue of material for publication.  Sarah's painstaking examination of the plaster from the excavated area has revealed not only several phases of reconstruction and redecoration that remained obscure in the stratigraphic record, but also import clues about the architecture and even construction techniques used in the building.  Nearby, several students completed a special project analyzing artifacts from the plowzone which we plan to report on later in the week.</p>! <p>In sum, at the end of the 2010 season, we can offer this summary of the quantity of artifacts processed by team PKAP between 2003 and 2010:</p>! <p>Total number of units processed (from both the survey and the excavation): 711.  Each unit represents a discrete archaeological context either in terms of stratigraphy, method, or horizontal space in the survey area.</p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="ProcessedPots1.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134859688f6970c -pi" border="0" alt="ProcessedPots1.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="ProcessedPots2.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485968910970c -pi" border="0" alt="ProcessedPots2.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p>! <p><em>PKAP Pottery Processing by the Numbers</em></p>! <p>Batches of artifacts processed: 12,900.  Scott divides the pottery from each unit into batches of similar types of artifacts based on the artifact's fabric, the part of the vessel represented, and the chronotype.  Over the past 8 years Scott has processed slightly fewer 13,000 batches.</p>! <p>Total number of artifacts processed: 37, 141.  Each batch has an average of 2.9 artifacts.</p>! <p>Total weight of artifacts processed: 1,482.1 kg or 3,208.7 lbs or over 1.5 <strong>tons </strong>of pottery.</p>! <p>Artifact Photos Taken: 5,500</p>!

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<p>Artifacts Catalogued: 727</p>! <p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP Season in Review STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: pkap-season-in-review CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/20/2010 07:20:28 AM ----BODY: <p><em>As promised yesterday, this week will features (gasp!) a guest blogger, Dr. David Pettegrew.  David is the co-director of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and over the next three days he will report on the various work conducted by the project this season.  David will be visiting us here in Grand Forks in October as the annual Cyprus Research Fund Lecture Speaker. </em></p> <p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Perhaps the greatest misimpression about archaeology today is that it mainly consists in digging holes in the ground.  Excavation is the perhaps the most glorious and maybe even the most exciting, component of archaeological work (<em>although some people find the analysis of the results of survey and excavation the most exciting. Bill</em>), but it’s still only a tiny part of the pie.  As you may have gathered from this blog, our own work rarely involves traditional excavation.  In the field, we’ve devoted lots of time to pedestrian survey, geophysical prospection, aerial photography, illustrating, and recording notes—and lots of time to processing all those artifacts, i.e., washing, analyzing, cataloguing, photographing.  Beyond the field season, we spend most of our time processing data, reading, writing, and publishing their finds, and preparing for the next field season.  Students who join us every summer in Cyprus for 3-4 weeks may forget that most of our work goes on for months after Cyprus.  And the work is harder, not easier.</p> <p>This morning we mailed a copy of our 2010 final report to the Cyprus Department of Antiquities.  If the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/07/py la-koutsopetria-press-release.html">press release posted yesterday</a> represents a kind of quick and dirty abstract of our work in the Pyla area, the annual final report provides in excruciating detail a full outline of our work.

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 Anyone who does archaeological work has got to produce these things, and they’re not fun to write.  This year’s report with contributions by <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/scott_moor e/">Scott</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/">Bill</a>, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David</a>, and Sarah Lepinski, was about typical in numbering 77 single-spaced pages.  They have been longer (100 pages) but they’re rarely shorter.  Why so long?  What we do is complicated and has to be explained in enough detail that it makes sense to anyone reading the report in the future.  We tend to provide more detail in our reports than we need for our articles which does make it easier at a later point to create papers about our work.</p> <p>As we’ve discussed here and here, the point of our 2010 field season was completing the analysis of artifacts from our 2008-2009 excavations of the sites of Koutsopetria and Vigla.  We also anticipated being able to conduct additional fieldwork at these sites.  As it turned out, for reasons we’ve explained elsewhere, we were unable to excavate and we received permission only at the 11th hour for our other fieldwork activities.</p> <p>Even still, as we outlined in our final report, we’re not disappointed and did manage to accomplish the following tasks:</p> <p>1. We finished a preliminary “read” of all the artifacts collected during intensive survey (2003-2007) and excavation (2008-2009), cataloguing in greater detail about 300 finds from survey and excavation.</p> <p>2. We finished documenting and illustrating the area excavated by Maria Hadjicosti. We have posted about that <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/06/fr om-blimp-to-page.html">here </a>and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/06/cl eaning-time.html">here</a>.</p> <p>3. We took low-altitude blimp photographs of the excavated area and the landscape. We have already posted the results of that—including the disastrous flight of …. — <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2010/06/th e-voyage-of-pkap-airship-1.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2010/06/pk ap-airship-1-takes-to-the-skies.html">here</a>.</p> <p>4. We continued documenting subsurface remains using ground penetrating radar.</p> <p>5. We conducted limited resurvey of ridges to the west of Koutsopetria.</p> <p>6. We conducted experiments designed to calibrate the results of the intensive survey in the study area.</p> <p>Such activities lack the dazzle of opening another excavation unit (as exciting as that can be) but, we would argue, prove more important in the long run for our understanding of the site and create a solid foundation for the final publication of our fieldwork now in preparation.</p> <p>In the next few days we will be providing some behind-the-scenes glimpses of the kinds of post-processing work that we have been doing in the month since our field season ended.  Since we have already written about #s 2-3 elsewhere, we will focus our comments on #s 1, and 4-6.  Enjoy.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Press Release STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-press-release CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/19/2010 07:24:10 AM ----BODY: <p> <p>At the send of each season, the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PKAP</a> team prepares a press release that accompanies the final report submitted to the Department of Antiquities.  The press release also gets sent out (in slightly modified form) by the various collaborating universities.</p> <p> </p> <p>Here it is:</p> <p>From May 20th to June 21st the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project conducted a study and field season in the coastal zone of Pyla Village on the south coast of Cyprus.  An international team of scholars under the direction of William R. Caraher (University of North Dakota), R. Scott Moore (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), and David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College), have worked in this area since 2003 documenting a sprawling Archaic to Late Roman settlement at the site.  This year, the PKAP team took low altitude blimp photographs of the entire site, sampled the subsurface remains using groundpenetrating radar, and conducted several experiments to calibrate the results of earlier fieldwork.  This work will allow the PKAP team to correlate more accurately the relationship between material on the surface of the grond and material still safely buried.  Another part of the PKAP team worked in the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum to document the nearly 13,000 finds collected since 2003.  The ceramic, architectural, and stone artifacts have revealed a vibrant community through most of antiquity with trading ties spanning the Mediterranean basin.  The study of these finds has revealed that a site on the coastal height of Vigla was a fortified settlement from Archaic to Hellenistic times complete with a fortification wall and significant quantity of domestic ceramics.  This is an unusual type of settlement on Cyprus and may have served as the base for a garrison protecting the eastern flank of Kition and the Larnaka bay.  In Late Roman and Early Byzantine times, the town of Pyla-Koutsopetria stretched across the coastal plain below Vigla. This settlement appears to have been a bustling, cosmopolitan town during at the end of antiquity and may have met its demise after a series of earthquakes.  The ceramic evidence demonstrate economic and cultural ties to Asia Minor, North Africa, Egypt, and Aegean.  Preparations for publication are now under way.</p> <p>_______</p> <p>In more exciting news, stay tuned to Archaeology of the Mediterranean World for a special guest blogging experience!  <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I are going

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to collaborate to produce a series of posts reporting on some archaeological experiments conducted this past summer on the Koutsopetria plain.  Curious? Stay tuned!</p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 DATE: 07/16/2010 07:16:19 AM ----BODY: <p>It's another beautiful Friday morning in the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Blogcast area.  So it seems like a good time for another exuberant gaggle of quick hits and varia:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2010/07/dh2010-plenary-presentnot-voting.html">Melissa Terras' Digitial Humanities 2010 Plenary talk</a> (Present, Not Voting: Digital History in the Panopticon) is among the best, recent "state-of-the-field" talks about Digital Humanities.  It is equal parts optimism and critique and any digital humanities project could take something away from it.</li> <li>Harvard's Center of Geographic Analysis, <a href="http://africamap.harvard.edu/">AfricaMap</a> is a nice combination of of GIS, online distribution, gobs of data, and a user-friendly interface. It's not overly flashy and has all the feel of something that almost anyone with a modest budget, time, and data could do (in other words, accessible), and at the same time is built on a robust, and "lightly" customized Open Source foundation.  The spelling mistakes on the "About" page actually add charm.</li> <li>Apparently the colon, the punctuation mark not that body part, has come under some <a href="http://www.themillions.com/2010/07/colonoscopy-it%E2%80%99stime-to-check-your-colons.html">intense scrutiny lately</a>.  The changing role of punctuation in the media has an almost immediate "trickle down" influence into how students use punctuation.  The new evil: the rise of the jumper colon.</li> <li>I missed some things being out of the country.  Here is Yannis Hamilakis' most recent thoughts on post-colonialism and archaeology: "<a href="http://proteus.brown.edu/tag2010/7821">Are we Postcolonial Yet? Tales from the Battlefield</a>". It was delivered at the Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting in May.</li>

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<li>I've follow enough cricket to know that <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/pakistan-v-australia2010/engine/current/match/426394.html">this match</a> won't get more interesting, but I am still naive enough to think that Pakistan could put together some kind of rally and do something spectacular.  As of lunch on day 4, Pakistan is chasing 439 (!!) and are now 224 back with a second innings of 216/4.  I know, it'll never happen, but it's a beautiful Friday and there is no harm keeping an eye on the score, right? </li> <li>I am listening to three somewhat interesting freebies from World Around Records lable: Naturetone's <em><a href="http://www.worldaroundrecords.com/albums/nihon/">Nihon</a></em>, Louis Mackey's <em><a href="http://www.worldaroundrecords.com/blog/2010/jul/7/louismackey-destroyer-of-all-things/">Destroyer of All Things</a></em> (if for no other reason than it's awesome, throwback, album cover), and J. Dante's EP<em><a href="http://www.worldaroundrecords.com/blog/2010/jul/2/new-music-j-dantedestiny-ep/"> Destiny</a></em>.  All are worth a download, listen, and chill.</li> <li>I am reading: S. Friesen, D. Schowalter, J. Walters, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/corinth-in-context-comparative-studies-onreligion-and-society/oclc/496282300">Corinth in Context: comparative studies on religion and society</a></em>. (Brill 2010); C. Nadia Seremetakis, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/last-word-women-death-and-divination-ininner-mani/oclc/21950994">The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani</a></em>. (Chicago 1991); and M. Trachtenberg, The <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/craft-of-international-history-a-guide-tomethod/oclc/60972182">Craft of International History: A Guide to Method</a></em>. (Princeton 2006).</li> <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ArIj236UHs">This is pretty funny</a>.  The Old Spice Guy (and concept) has received a good bit of buzz lately.  <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/tim_tuttle/07/07/tony.stewar t/">Too bad for Tony Stewart</a>. </li> </ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Teaching What You Don't Know STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-teaching-what-you-dont-know CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 07/15/2010 08:15:11 AM

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----BODY: <p><img style="float: right;" title="NewImage.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134857309f9970c -pi" border="0" alt="NewImage.jpg" width="140" height="212" /></p> <p>This past week, I read <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/teaching-whatyou-dont-know/oclc/316037957">T. Huston's </a><em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/teaching-what-you-dontknow/oclc/316037957">Teaching What You Don't Know</a></em>, largely on the recommendation of <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/05/28/some-summerreading-from-teaching-thursday/">Anne Kelsch and her fantastic summer reading list</a>.  I spend a good bit of my career teaching courses that are at the absolute fringes of what I know.  In fact, I am far more drawn to class that touches on at least some material outside my main field of study.  It may sound perverse, but I spend plenty of time pondering the wonders of the ancient world; so I never feel particularly slighted if I don't have to talk about antiquity in each and every class that I teach.  In an ordinary semester, I teach Western Civilization I, which begins and ends beyond the chronological limitation of my knowledge, The Historians Craft, which is part historical method and part historiography neither of which constitute a particular specialty of mine, and once a year I teach Graduate Historiography, which only touches briefly on any scholar who I have studied intensively.  In short, most of my time is spent teaching what I don't know, if content is the main criteria by which teaching knowledge is evaluated.</p> <p>As Huston points out, most of us end up teaching outside our area of specialty sometime during our academic careers.  This is as much a reflection of the narrow scope of most graduate expertise as the nature of undergraduate curricula that tends to be equal parts conservative in the division of knowledge and cutting edge in the move to cross/trans/inter disciplinary research.  For example, my Western Civilization class is a very traditional way of introducing students to European history which probably fits awkwardly with the methods, approaches, and concentrations most new history faculty experience in Graduate School.  At the same time, the expanding influence of digital methods in history and the influence of social science and other disciplines with the humanities ensures a constantly revised body of post-structural/modern/colonial critique.</p> <p>In some ways, we are always teaching what we don't know and, as a result, this book provides numerous helpful observations to manage the experience of teaching at the edge of understanding.  While many of these are almost selfevident (e.g. read what you have assigned before the class begins... does this really count as advice?), some deal with how to manage student expectations.  In history, it is always amazing to meet a student who is under the impression that we have taken the liberty of memorizing all of the primary sources.  Managing student expectations is central to moving from the solid ground of content mastery (after all, I can list all the Roman Emperor and their dates of rule, can you?) to the far more marshy ground of teaching method or encouraging students to explore new approaches, analyze new texts, and imagine new problems.</p> <p>It's hard to overstate the importance of these techniques in a field like history where teaching content is giving way to teaching method, the ability to teach what you don't know is all the more important.  After all the real test of understanding comes only when a student confronts a foreign body of information and deploys successfully the techniques, methods, and approaches necessary to master it.  While it remains easy enough to create "laboratory" type experiments for students where the instructor knows the possible outcomes

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and the students do not, these kind of teaching models almost always fall short of the risks inherent in real world research.  As I tell my undergraduate historical methods class, when you pick a research topic in the real world, you are, to a very real extent, on your own to make sense of the material at your disposal.  As an instructor, I can bring whatever knowledge of method and content to bear on the topic and material at hand, but there is no guarantee that I know the best way to approach a historical problem.  As the infamous "banking" system of teaching where students master a set body of content gives way toward approaches that emphasize learning by doing (or other active learning type approaches) the possibility for teaching what you don't know increases massively.  In fact, one could even argue that if you're not teaching what you don't know, then you're not doing it right.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Ideas of Landscapes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: ideas-of-landscapes CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Books DATE: 07/14/2010 08:03:07 AM ----BODY: <p>I strongly recommend Matthew Johnson's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/ideas-of-landscape/oclc/62728643">Ideas of Landscapes</a></em> to anyone interested in landscape archaeology.  It is among the best books on the topic, and it does a nearly brilliant job of putting the concept of landscape archaeology in a historiographic context.  Johnson's main focus is on the emergence of landscape archaeology as a discipline in Great Britain.  He begins with the Romantic approaches to the study of landscape with particular attention to Wordsworth's famous rambles from his home in Grasmere and argues that the Romantic tradition inspired a particular kind of empiricism which privileged experience as the quintessential character of the landscape. This Romantic empiricism continues to influence landscape studies even today through the decidedly more post-modern efforts of archaeologists to present landscapes in a phenomenological terms (see for example, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/wa lking-home-and-the-phenomenology-of-landscape.html">the approaches critiqued by John Bintliff</a>).</p> <p>Johnson goes on to point out that some of the aversion to theory among local historians derives from this same Romantic empiricism, and this has limited the ability of scholars to take conclusions formed on the basis of detailed local

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studies and expand them into more far reaching arguments.  As I noted yesterday, the use of maps, aerial photographs, and detailed topographic plans fortified the empirical nature of landscape studies by melding to modern technologies and techniques.  The result was a discipline with an increasingly fine-grained capacity for microhistory, but no more robust theoretical foundation to understand the implications of this kind of methodology.  (Here he brilliantly invokes E.P. Thompson's<em> <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/making-of-the-english-workingclass/oclc/178185">Making of the English Working Class</a></em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/making-of-the-english-workingclass/oclc/178185"> </a>and <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/povertyof-theory-other-essays/oclc/4515967">Poverty of Theory</a></em> by paralleling Thompson's attention to detail and, in the latter, attack on theory to the detailed studies of local landscapes produced by contemporary archaeologists.)</p> <p>In his conclusion he places landscape archaeology at the intersection of two longstanding, divergent strands in archaeology: one, the urge to document in a detailed way the intricate features visible in the landscape and the tacit empiricism implicit in that method, and, two, the need to generalize and theorize about larger problems in the develop of human society and the epistemological critiques that are central to any effort to synthesize myriad more focused studies.  The former derives from archaeology's longstanding ties to a Romantic view of landscapes, and the latter from fields like anthropology (and more recently history) which insist upon critiquing the particular. The contrast appears in the accusations that New Archaeology produces dry-as-dust, quantified, landscapes that while generalized and generalizable, lack any real sense of place.</p> <p>My brief, rambling impressions do not do the book justice.  So I'll offer just a few more:</p> <p>1. Johnson ties Romantic empiricism to map making to colonialism in a way that stands as an important caveat to Mediterranean archaeologists who often root their claims to local knowledge and authority in deeply impressionistic views of the landscape.  At the same time, we deploy the tools of New Archaeology and produce quantified landscapes.  The intersection of older impressionistic practices with the rigor of New Archaeology have allowed us to appropriate for research large areas of the Mediterranean basin, but at the same time have moved to the foreground the colonial tendency inherent in so many archaeological practices.</p> <p>2. Johnson presents a particularly interesting critique of the palimpsest metaphor in landscape archaeology.  While I am more familiar with this metaphor in the study of cities, Johnson discusses the role of the palimpsest in the larger metaphor of landscape as text.  He suggests that the metaphor has become "too strong" and reinforced a view of the landscape as static rather than engaging with more dynamic models for textuality common elsewhere in the humanities.  I've railed against the use of the palimpsest metaphor for years largely because the two levels of the palimpsest have no clear relation to one another.  For example, a text of Plautus could be erased and the skin used for a sermon of St. Ambrose.  These two texts are unrelated whereas historical landscapes are places where interaction between past and present is continuous and the memory of overwritten or erased landscapes often persist preserving the past "under erasure" for political and social goals.</p> <p>3. Finally, the link between British landscape archaeology and Mediterranean landscape archaeology is a direct one and the history of the latter cannot be fully understood without understanding the history of the former.  I sometimes wonder if separating Mediterranean landscape studies from its British (and to a

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less extent North American roots) has allowed certain sections of Mediterranean archaeology to persist with just the kind of Romantic empiricism that Johnson critiques. ¬†In fact, I find myself celebrating the more isolated and remote parts of Greece (the southeastern Corinthia and the island of Kythera, for example) for many of the same Romantic reasons that Wordsworth championed his local landscape. ¬†The isolation from the bustle of the everyday (in other words social, political, economic reality), the feeling of antiquity, and the untrammeled natural beauty. ¬†Johnson's work will certainly give me pause.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.117.115.134 URL: http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 07/26/2010 11:29:17 AM I'm reading Johnson's book at the moment too, and it is brilliant! I'm only a few chapters in though... the connection with Hoskin's work is well laid out, but I wonder to what extent Hoskin's work influenced British work in say Italy, where the tradition is from Ashby and Ward-Perkins? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 07/26/2010 11:49:23 AM Shawn, I'd be keen to hear your take on that exact matter. I assumed that British landscape archaeology contributed (as much as New Archaeology and other, newworld, developments) to the earliest efforts at landscape archaeology in Greece where there was a clear parallel to the Romantic, pedestrian, solitary wandererarchaeologist (e.g. Cattling's Cyprus Survey or Hope Simpson's survey of prehistoric sites). But I am not as familiar with developments in Italy. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Picturing Landscapes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: picturing-landscapes CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 07/13/2010 08:45:29 AM ----BODY: <p>I just finished reading <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/ideas-oflandscape/oclc/62728643">Matthew Johnson's <em>Ideas of Landscape</em>(Blackwell 2006)</a>.&nbsp; In it, he argued that maps, air photos, and archaeological hachured plans formed the foundation of landscape archaeology in Great Britain (and, I'd contend, elsewhere).&nbsp; Landscape archaeology in the Mediterranean has certainly benefited from maps and air (and increasingly satellite) photos which represent the first step, typically, in data gathering for an archaeological project. The first aerial photographs that we acquired in the study of our site of <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria</a> were the 1963 and 1993 series produced by the Cypriot Department of Maps and Surveys.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f240f675970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="a63149KoutsopetriaCropped" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485668e7a970c -pi" width="424" height="382"></a> </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f240f695970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="A93256KoutsopetriaCropped" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485668e9f970c -pi" width="424" height="462"></a> </p> <p>Since then, we were lucky enough to have a series of oblique, relatively low altitude air photos taken from an RAF helicopter in 2007.&nbsp; These photos provide more detail, but the oblique angles make them more difficult to use for producing accurate maps.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485668eae970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Picture 044" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f240f6d0970b -pi" width="424" height="284"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485668ec5970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Picture 047" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f240f6e8970b -pi" width="424" height="284"></a> </p> <p>This past summer, we took even more low altitude and far more oblique air photographs using the infamous helikite (half helium blimp and half kite).&nbsp; We only had enough helium for a limited number of flights and this tempted us to take the airship up in, let's say, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2010/06/th e-voyage-of-pkap-airship-1.html">unfavorable conditions</a>.&nbsp; The results were blurry, but we were able to salvage some good quality aerial photographs from the set.&nbsp; The camera was rocking furiously beneath the wind-buffeted helikite so the photos lack a good representation of the horizontal.&nbsp; More disappointing is that the strong breeze from the sea made it difficult to photograph the fields closest to the busy Larnaka-Dhekelia road.&nbsp; The 1963 and 1993 aerial photographs showed some feature near the intersection of the main road and the northeast running road that now leads to the water treatment facility.&nbsp; While the feature does not stand out in the 2007 RAF photographs, they were taken after a particularly wet early summer which caused green wheat to be left in the field.&nbsp; The nicely ploughed fields of summer

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2010 may have provided a different image.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f240f702970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f240f70b970b -pi" width="424" height="319"></a></p> <p align="center">&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f240f715970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013485668ef6970c -pi" width="424" height="319"></a> </p> <p>One of my jobs for this summer is labeling these photographs and moving them to Omeka.&nbsp; For now, enjoy a different perspective on the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Drawing Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: drawing-archaeology CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/12/2010 06:43:06 AM ----BODY: <p>A week or so ago I was asked why archaeologists spend so much time preparing line drawing illustrators of things when photography is quick, cheap, and "more accurate".  The answer is pretty easy, in fact.  Some things are impossible to photograph.  For example, Dimitri Nakassis and I spent an afternoon illustrating a wall uncovered by looters on our site. The only way we could reproduce the wall was to go down into a relatively narrow hole and produce a stone-by-stone illustration of the what we saw.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="VigWall1.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134855fea3f970c -pi" border="0" alt="VigWall1.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="VigWall2.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134855fea56970c -pi" border="0" alt="VigWall2.JPG" width="420" height="315" /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Koutsopetria_Wall_2010.jpg"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134855fea70970c -pi" border="0" alt="Koutsopetria_Wall_2010.jpg" width="420" height="368" /></p> <p> </p> <p>Likewise, as I have documented elsewhere, our illustration of the architecture at Pyla-Koutsopetria.  Here a line drawing enables us to combine features that are not all visible at the same time in a photograph.  In the drawing below, we were able to combine the results from excavation (at the far the southeastern and southwestern corners of the plan) with a stone-by-stone architectural drawing of the room and the plans produced by the architect at the time that the room was first excavated.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="PKbuildingwTrenches.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134855fea86970c -pi" border="0" alt="PKbuildingwTrenches.jpg" width="420" height="356" /></p> <p style="text-align: left;">The images is, in effect, a historical composite of three different archaeological moments.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 07/09/2010 07:34:40 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits and varia on a gorgeous Friday morning in the Grand Cities.</p> <p>Lots of talk about blogging on the intertubes lately.  First, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/29/your.blog.unpopular/index.html?eref =rss_tech&amp;utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A +rss%2Fcnn_tech+%28RSS%3A+Technology%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader">CNN tells us how to keep your blog popular</a>.  The Economist suggests that <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/16432794?story_id=16432794">blogs are becoming more specialized</a>, occupying cybersilos, and becoming the place for longer writing.  In <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/interview-rexsorgatz-infuses-blog-thinking-into-big-media-brands-2010-7#ixzz0tBdC0Kra">a recent interview</a>, UND alumnus and new media star, Rex Sorgatz, credits blog culture for his own rise to cyber stardom, but when collaborating on a new media project said: "Just throw out the blog, I don’t want another blog,' cause I have this antagonism with media companies who come along and think, 'I have something innovative, I am going to do another blog.'"</p>

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<p>I'm listening to: Big Boi, <em>Sir Lucious Left Foot... The Sone of Chico Dusty</em>; Damian Marley and Naz, <em>Distant Relatives</em>; Mulatu Astatke, <em>Ethiopiques, Vol. 4</em>; The National, <em>High Violet</em>.</p> <p>I'm reading (and summer reading is the BEST reading): Matthew Johnson, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/ideas-of-landscape/oclc/62728643">Ideas of Landscape</a></em>; Therese Huston, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/teaching-what-you-dontknow/oclc/316037957">Teaching What You Don't Know</a></em>; Clay Shirky, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/cognitive-surplus-creativity-and-generosityin-a-connected-age/oclc/466335766">Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age</a></em>.</p> <p>Some UND profs get some good press. Jack Russel Weinstein has <a href="http://www.philosophyinpubliclife.org/Instute/presscoverage.html">an article in the NEH Magazine </a><em><a href="http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities.html">Humanities</a> </em>about his call-in Radio show WHY?  Check out <a href="http://www.whyradioshow.org/upcomingepisodes.html">WHY? on Sunday at 5 pm</a> to hear a follow up report from Paul Sum who has returned from a year long Fulbright to Romania to discuss, "Exporting Democracy Revisited: A Report from Romania".  Elsewhere, <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/168079/">chemist Mark Hoffman demystifies his research</a>.</p> <p>If you haven't followed Rangar Cline's work in Umbria, check out his blog <a href="http://undertheumbriansun.blogspot.com/">Under the Umbrian Sun</a>.  Also check out the Archaeological Institute of America's <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/sagalassos/fieldnotes/">Interactive Dig at Sagalassos</a>.</p> <p>Enough for this morning. Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Communicating with Students Online STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-communicating-with-students-online CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 07/08/2010 08:37:39 AM ----BODY: <p>I was invited this morning to check out the work of the Online Teaching with Technology Seminar here at the University of North Dakota. (<a href="http://cilt.und.edu/workshops/twt.html">The seminars have a somewhat underwhelming web site</a>.)  I was asked to say a few words on communicating

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with students using technology.  I probably have some idiosyncratic attitudes toward these practices, so I thought I might work through some of them on my trusty blog here.</p> <p>The first observation that I'll offer is that I use technology most extensively in my online and large lecture format classes.  For my mid-level courses and grad classes, I generally have an open door policy.  One other idiosyncratic aspect of my communication strategy is that I no longer have an office phone.  When we moved buildings a year ago, my phone was never hooked up.  After a few weeks of not having a phone, I found it really liberating and decided just to go with it.  So, the two most basic ways for a student to contact me is to either drop me an email or stop by my office.</p> <p>I find that these one-on-one meetings with students tend toward the inefficient.  I often end up repeating to each student who comes by the same things.  In a small class, the impact of this repetition is relatively small; for a bigger class, however, one could end up repeating the same clarifications, explanations, or helpful insights numerous times.  As a result, I try to find ways to communicate consistently with students as a class.</p> <p>The most obvious technique to do this is to maintain an updated syllabus that attempts to address the most common student issues.  While this generally works, the syllabus is typically a stable medium for communicating with students.  The greater challenge comes when I have to make changes to the course or address spontaneous issues arising during the semester.  In these cases, I've taken to using Twitter to send out messages addressing specific problems as they arise.  This allows me to "talk" to the class as group while still being timely.  The nice thing about Twitter is that it privileges a certain economy of communication and this forces me (and I suspect my students) to be clear and focused.</p> <p>Twitter as a primary means of "classroom" communication has several downsides (as <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/05/te aching-with-twitter-an-interim-report.html">I have documented here</a>).  One is that it functions in real time.  If a students it not paying attention to Twitter when I address a particular issue, they have to sort their their Tweets or my Twitter feed to find the relevant Tweet.  I've attempted to deal with this through two techniques.  First, I've experimented with using <a href="http://www.twaitter.com/">Twaiter</a> to release scheduled Tweets.  This frees me to compose a Tweet on a particular classroom issue whenever I want and then to release it when it will have maximum visibility.  For example, I can schedule a Tweet reminding the students that they have 6 hours to complete an assignment exactly 6 hours before it is due.  I can also schedule Tweets to repeat or post weekly updates on time.</p> <p>Some students, however, find it more difficult to follow a Twitter feed than to monitor the classes Blackboard page.  I've experimented, more or less successfully, with embedding a Twitter feed into the weekly announcements section in Blackboard.  I typically post an aggregated feed of those Tweets marked with that week's hashtag (e.g. #H101Week1, #H101Week2).  A student who might not check his or her Twitter account can nevertheless check out all the action from that week right inside Blackboard. The only downside is that the Twitter feed only remains active for a relatively short length of time (typically less than a semester) and will usually only include a fixed number of Tweets.</p> <p>Another frustration with using Twitter so heavily is that it remains difficult to link to pages within Blackboard.  Perhaps this will change with Blackboard 9.  I am not a huge fan of Blackboard, but each new iteration becomes easier to use and more dynamic and powerful.</p>

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<p>I've also found discussion boards are a great way to make communication and assessment more transparent. Each week students are required to post a response to a question on a class discussion board.  I have long ago abandoned any hope for a real, dynamic discussion on a class discussion board, but I have discovered that students do read each others' posts.  In many cases, the answers to the discussion question become better (if less original) with later posts.  While I continue to grade each student's work separately, the tendency for students to repeat or (better still) base their answers on earlier discussion posts makes it easier for me to address common problems.  Each week, I will make a post to the discussion board highlighting the good and the bad in the week's posts.  The lack of originality in the posts and the tendency for students parrot ideas present in earlier posts makes it easier to use this kind of public, collective comments to address problems and reinforce good behavior.  Moreover, as long as the earliest posters in each discussion board are conscientious (and they are most frequently a self-selecting group of conscientious students), then week-to-week the entire class will follow the early posting students and begin to internalize my comments.  I understand that this kind of "passive learning" is not in vogue, but I will contend that it is a way to condition students to certain practices of argument by creating an environment that successfully leverages both peer pressure and what we can charitably call "a tendency toward lowest effort approaches to learning".</p> <p>Twitter and discussion boards are just two ways that I have used collective communication to replace personalized emails, long, unfocused office visits, and redundant comments on student papers.  For longer assignments, I continue to use personalized comments (supplemented with a "common comments" sheet that I circulate to all students).  And I do not discourage students from contacting me directly over email for personal problems or problems that are not resolved in more public forums.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Questions about Late Antique Prosperity and Christianization in the Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-questions-about-late-antique-prosperity-and-christianization-inthe-corinthia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 07/07/2010 08:29:08 AM ----BODY:

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<p>I am slowly working to prepare a paper for the <a href="https://webspace.utexas.edu/sjf365/CC3/Intro.html">Corinth in Contrast conference</a> scheduled for the end of the September.  (It's my problem that I'm working on the paper this far in advance, not yours.) It is notable that most of the scholarship of the Late Roman period in the Corinthia rooted in archaeological evidence continues to make two major arguments: (1) the Corinthia remained prosperous much longer than an earlier generation of scholars thought and (2) At some point in Late Antiquity, and through a variety of processes, the Corinthia became Christian.</p> <p>The first argument is an economic version of the old "decline of the Roman Empire" debate.  To simplify, this argument demonstrates that Corinth remained economically prosperous far longer than people expected.  This prosperity depended upon its place within the larger economic world of the Roman Eastern Mediterranean (which included numerous other sites that continued to prosper longer than scholars have traditionally thought).  The continued prosperity of Corinth and the Eastern Empire allowed for the city to continue to fulfill many functions traditionally associated with the Classical or Roman city albeit perhaps through different institutions.  In other words, the city was not in decline (at least economic decline), but was undergoing changes in institutional structure.  This proposition typically contributes to an updated version of the "decline of the Roman Empire" debate which centers on more qualitative arguments over continuity or change in the Roman world.  Typically, scholars have continued to see prosperity in the Late Roman Corinthia well into the 6th century A.D.  The evidence for this argument largely comes from revised dating of ceramics.  By assigning ceramics later dates, we can not only show that trade continued later than expected, but also revise the dating of buildings and other civic activities to show that urban life continued later than expected.</p> <p>The second argument is related, but largely independent from debates over prosperity in the Corinthia.  Increasingly, scholars have argued that Corinth Christianized rather later than other cities.  The largely 6th century date for the construction of Early Christian basilicas is the main evidence for the Christianization of Corinth at a late date.  In other words, monumental architecture provides evidence for the presence of the Christian church as an institution in Corinth, and this must have represented a critical mass of Christians among the population and accelerated the conversion of lingering pagans.  Some scholars have even seen the large scale and number of baptisteries around the city of Corinth (at the Lechaion, Kraneion, Skoutelas, and Kenchreai basilicas) as being a functional response to the large number of converts present in the community.</p> <p>In general, there has been only minor efforts to generalize from the larger historical consequences of these two debates.  The questions linked to these two positions are numerous and significant.  For example, if Corinth is so deeply interconnected with the larger Mediterranean, why does it Christianize later than many other major Mediterranean urban areas? Does the relatively late date of Christianization suggest that economic ties did not facilitate cultural or religious change?  Did the continue prosperity of Corinth stand so independent from imperial ties that the construction of monumental Christian architecture by the local elite did not represent a strategy to improve one's status both across the empire and at home?   Did the religious ties to the west (through the position of the Church of Corinth as subordinate to the Papacy in the West) and economic and political relationship between Corinth and centers in the East?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Church and City in Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: church-and-city-in-late-antiquity CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 07/06/2010 08:02:45 AM ----BODY: <p>Nate Andrade had <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v018/18.2.andrade.html">a nice article in the most recent volume of the <em>Journal of Early Christian Studies</em></a>, titled, "The Processions of John Chrysostom and the Contested Spaces of Constantinople".  In it, Andrade considers the role of processions, particularly those led by the controversial Patriarch John Chrysostom, in transforming urban spaces inscribed with "secular" or even pagan significance into spaces of Christian ritual.  He set Chrysostom's actions against the dual backdrops of his longstanding criticism of secular institutions ranging from the baths to the theater and games (many of which date to his days in Antioch) and Chrysostom's battles with members of the Theodosian court in Constantinople.  The use of processions, highlighted by singing psalms, obvious displays of Christian regalia, and perhaps even the Christian scents of incense, combated the secular or even demonic associations that Chrysostom saw in the chaotic, temptation filled, world of the Late Antique city.</p> <p>Andrade's subtle article relies on the unprecedented textual sources for the city of Constantinople in the 5th century and the relatively substantial accounts of Chrysostom's controversial term as bishop of the city.  (A similarly, if now somewhat dated account of the relationship between the city and church appears in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/vox-populi-popularopinion-and-violence-in-the-religious-controversies-of-the-fifth-centuryad/oclc/5171155">Tim Gregory's </a><em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/vox-populi-popular-opinion-and-violence-inthe-religious-controversies-of-the-fifth-century-ad/oclc/5171155">Vox Populi</a></em>).  It's tempting to imagine how Chrysostom's use of processions in Constantinople would translate to cities where our textual evidence is more limited.  For example, do the acclamations inscribed in public spaces in Aphrodisias (and <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/29901">so carefully analyzed by C. Roueché</a>) commemorate a kind of processional practice similar to those employed by Chrysostom?</p> <p>It is particularly valuable to consider how public processions expanded the range of liturgical practice from the space of the church building to the urban space and the community.  As early as the early 4th-century, Licinius considered it a useful strategy of expel Christians from their churches and

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force them to hold their services outdoors or outside the walls of the city (Eusebius, <em>VC,</em> 1.53).   This suggests that Chrysostom was not the first to challenge the secular or pagan nature of the city through Christian assemblies held outside the space of the church.  J. Baldovin argues for a kind processional warfare between various groups of Christians in the city of Constantinople during the 5th century (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/urban-character-of-christian-worship-theorigins-development-and-meaning-of-stational-liturgy/oclc/18426295">Baldovin, </a><em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/urban-character-of-christianworship-the-origins-development-and-meaning-of-stationalliturgy/oclc/18426295">The Urban Character of Christian Worship</a></em>, 183184).  Andrade's article as well as earlier and later evidence suggests that urban space could well accommodate Christian liturgical practices which the clergy viewed as tool to sanctify secular or pagan places.  This turns on its head the idea that Christian sacred space, namely church buildings, represented sacred spaces that were a kind of pre-condition for liturgical practices.  While the presence of relics, iconography, and both functional and mnemonic architecture surely reinforced the suitability of the church for liturgical activities, the Christianized space did not require these features.  In other words, Christian activities made places sacred in Late Antiquity.</p> <p>The mobility and transferability of the Christian sacred within Late Antique society makes using archaeology to reconstruct Christian landscapes particularly challenging. With the exception of the kind of inscribed acclamations mentioned earlier, processional liturgies would leave very little physical evidence.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Varia Friday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: varia-friday CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits CATEGORY: Weblogs DATE: 07/02/2010 07:54:05 AM ----BODY: <p>Ok, I'm being lazy today. <em><a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1999770,00 .html">Time Magazine</a></em><a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1999770,00 .html"> released a list of the best blogs</a>.  While this is sort of like getting advice on the automotive industry from a Saturn manager, it is nevertheless interesting to see what Time regards as the "Best".  Most of the

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blogs listed are the usual suspects (<a href="http://www.theawl.com/">The Awl</a>, <a href="http://boingboing.net/">Boing Boing</a>, <a href="http://www.engadget.com/">Engadget</a>, <a href="http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/">The Sartorialist</a>, <a href="http://kottke.org/">Kottke.org</a>), so it's not a particularly useful list for finding new and exciting things (which is not to say that blogs like Boing Boing do not introduce the new and the exciting).</p> <p>What's ironic, of course, is that Time - the most mainstream of mainstream magazines - list features the most mainstream of mainstream blogs.</p> <p>Perhaps more interesting is how broad the definition of blog has become.  I mean, is <a href="http://pitchfork.com/">Pitchfork</a> really a blog? Wouldn't some other designation, like Webzine be better for it?  It does publish daily and presumably it is powered by a blogging software (like Wordpress or some variant).  It does not adhere to the traditional "most recent first format".  Moreover, the content on a blog like Pitchfork is more enduring that the varia presented daily at one of my favorite blogs, Kottke.org, or a tech blog like Engadget.</p> <p>In any event, the increasing flexibility of what the mass media imagines to be a blog (wait, maybe, Time magazine is just a blog too!) can only be good news for those of us who use the blog format for somewhat more serious (or at least somewhat less random) pursuits...</p> <p>Here are the lists:</p> <p>Best Blogs (the links are to Time's critique of the blogs, not to the blogs themselves): <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999747,00.html">Zenhabits,</a> <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999751,00.html">PostSecret</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999752,00.html">Climate Progress</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999733,00.html">HiLobrow</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999732,00.html">Hipster Runoff</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999734,00.html">Kottke.org</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999735,00.html">Cake Wrecks</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999738,00.html">The Oatmeal</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999737,00.html">S___ My Kids Ruined</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999739,00.html">Deadline Hollywood</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999748,00.html">Everything Everywhere</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999749,00.html">The Sartorialist</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999750,00.html">Information Is Beautiful</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999736,00.html">The Daily Kitten</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999755,00.html">Shorpy</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761

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_1999756,00.html">Apartment Therapy</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999757,00.html">Double X</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999758,00.html">Strobist</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999759,00.html">Roger Ebert's Journal</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999870,00.html">The Awl</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999868,00.html">GeekDad</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999863,00.html">Engadget</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999861,00.html">The Washington Note</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999860,00.html">The Consumerist</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999761 _1999893,00.html">Pitchfork</a></p> <div class="specialsArticle"> <p>Essential Blogs: <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999765 _1999764,00.html">The Daily Wh.at</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999765 _1999864,00.html">TechCrunch</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999765 _1999873,00.html">Gawker</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999765 _1999871,00.html">Politico's Ben Smith</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1999770_1999765 _1999872,00.html">Boing Boing</a></p> </div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Techno-musing Thursday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: techno-musing-thursday CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 07/01/2010 07:17:31 AM ----BODY:

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<p> <p>I am willing to try almost any piece of technology at least once if I think that it has the potential to improve the way that I teach, write, or do research.  The investment in time required to learn a new piece of software or gizmo while often unsatisfactory one an individual level, has so far paid dividends across the whole range of technologies that I use to manage my everyday life.  To put it another way, I was very reluctant to learn to use the so-called e-mail, but the initial investment in learning Eudora (many years ago) has added a level of efficiency to my everyday life that more than makes up for the time wasted trying to learn to use the latest gizmo or application.</p> <p>Over the past six months, I've used and appreciated a whole range of new technologies, ranging from my iPad and my Android powered phone to light duty web-aps that solve an immediate problem (how is it possible to schedule a meeting without <a href="http://www.doodle.com/">Doodle</a>?).  From that little gaggle of software and hardware, three piece of intriguing technology stand out:</p> <p>1. <a href="http://omeka.org/blog/2010/04/29/omeka-net-alphaarrives/">Omeka.net</a>. I am really excited to be an alpha test for Omeka.net.  <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a> is an online collection management software produced by the <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/">Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University</a>and our neighbors at the <a href="http://www.mnhs.org/index.htm">Minnesota State Historical Society</a>.  It allows an individual or organization to organize and present collections of material - from texts and podcasts to images and video.  As someone who views the world as a kind of infinite archive, a program of this kind has obvious appeal.  For the last year, I've had Omeka running on a server at the University of North Dakota and it has become <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/">home for various collections </a>of images including a fine art photography exhibition, a research archive of vernacular architecture in Greece, and a small collection of maps from my survey project in Greece.</p> <p>The only downside to the program was that it took me quite some time (and a bit of money) to get it up and running on a University server.  Omeka.net eliminates the hassle of running and maintaining server based software because they offer both the software and the server side maintenance in the same way that Wordpress.com hosts Wordpress blogs.  This means that soon, even the least technologically inclined could be up and running with Omeka and begin to catalogue their personal or group archives.</p> <p>The potential for teaching is really clear.  Curation is becoming an important watchword in our digital age as people come to realize that the quantity of data produced has come to challenge our ability to manage it. The ability to deploy and teach easily a powerful tool like Omeka for collecting, organizing, and presenting a wide range of digital material (primarily in the humanities, but Omeka is hardly a tool limited to a particular discipline) will introduce information management and literacy skills that are likely to be relevant for our digital age.</p> <p>Right now, Omeka.net is out in invitation only Alpha testing with all the attended caveats, but I asked for an invitation and received it within a few months.</p> <p>2. <a href="http://illuminex.com/ecto/">Ecto</a> vs. <a href="http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/">MarsEdit</a>. This past week, <a href="http://chronicle.com/blog/profhacker/27/">ProfHacker</a> (a must read for tech-curious faculty) discussed briefly the relative merits of two offline, blog composition tools, Ecto and MarsEdit. If you're a blogger (and these days, who isn't), it is almost essential to be able to write a blog post someplace other

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than the online space provided by your blog provider.  In general, the online editors provided by most blogging services (e.g. Typepad, Wordpress, Blogger) are underpowered, a bit fickle, and dependent on your connection to the internet (and stability of your browser) to work.  There is nothing more frustrating than composing a brilliant post online and seeing it vanish with a browser crash or internet interruption.  Offline composers are half light-duty word processors and half light-duty html editors.  The best option is probably Windows Live Writer, but there is no Mac version of this flexible and stable little program. The two best for Mac users are Ecto and MarsEdit.  Both provide a word processor type interface that allows you to compose easily, edit HTML, and to integrate various media content.</p> <p>I used Ecto for over a year and found it pretty satisfactory.  It did a particularly nice job managing links (and a blog is nothing without its links to other blogs and sites on the web) and images.  MarsEdit has a slightly nicer interface for writing, however.  I love that I can change the font that I am writing with in MarsEdit without changing the font that appears on my blog.  In other words, I indulge my idiosyncratic preference to compose in American Typewriter font without having to publish using that font. MarsEdit may be a bit less capable of handling images, however.</p> <p>Either tool makes blog writing less of an adventure and more of a pleasure.  The simple interfaces encourages a focus on the words (not dissimilar from the recent spate of simplified word processors like<a href="http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom">WriteRoom</a>) and the stability and security the software encourages me to write in a longer form than I might do on the web.</p> <p>3. <a href="http://daytum.com/">Daytum</a>.  Daytum is one of the quirkier services on the web.  It provides a subscriber with an interface where they can record and quantify <em>things</em>.  For example, I count the number of words that I write each day (since I started using Daytum, I've written 73,810 words).  I also record whether I get a ride home with my wife or walk; to date, I've walked home 35 times and got a ride home 34 times since January.  I like recording the temperature in my office in the morning, but I'm just like that.  I also like the idea of keeping track of how many pages I read each day, but I've found that more of an inconvenience as I move from reading paper books and articles to reading across a wide range of media, many of which do not use pages at all (e.g. the web, on my iPad, et c.).</p> <p>Daytum is a free indulgence for those obsessed with quantifying their lives.  At the same time, it represents the far fringe of a whole batch of software designed to help one become more efficient or at least more aware of how one spends their time. As academics, it seems like we are always running out of time, stumbling across some new deadline, or having to negotiate some kind of delicate work management solution to balance relationships, teaching, research, or "outside" interests.</p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Indigenous Archaeology Georgian Style STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: indigenous-archaeology-georgian-style CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Cyprus CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 06/30/2010 07:52:55 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the most exciting afternoon from this year in Cyprus involved a trip to the ruined monastery at Yialia in the mountains about Polis on the Western side of Cyprus.  According to textual sources, Georgian monks founded the monastery on the island in the 10th century and it was occupied until the 14th century.  The church is currently under study by a group of archaeologists from the Republic of Georgia with support, apparently, from the Archbishop of Cyprus.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="DSCN4713.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134851c33dc970c -pi" border="0" alt="DSCN4713.JPG" width="450" height="337" /></p> <p>The monastic church itself is a traditional Athonite plan with its characteristic triconch arrangement. Massive cisterns, storeroom, and living quarters for the monks (apparently) extend from the church's southern side. The monastic church underwent several significant modifications in plan including an extension to the narthex, rather significant adjustments to the eastern end of the church, a chapel annex on the northern side, and a very strange tetrapylon type structure abutting the southern apse of the Athonite triconch.  The ruins preserve some wall painting on the upper, more sheltered parts of the collapsed vaults, as well as some better preserved frescoes which were built around during the buildings numerous modifications.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="DSCN4726.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134851c33f2970c -pi" border="0" alt="DSCN4726.JPG" width="337" height="450" /></p> <p>The most interesting thing about this very curious building is how it is used today.  The ruins of the church are currently used for the celebration of liturgy.  A portable altar and prothesis stand at the eastern end of the church despite the ruinous condition of the sanctuary space.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="DSCN4734.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f1f6e2ed970b -pi" border="0" alt="DSCN4734.JPG" width="450" height="337" /></p> <p>Incense burners and evidence for the burning of candles dot the various ledges and niches of the ruined walls.  The practice of re-using excavated, yet nevertheless consecrated sacred space is not entirely rare.  I observed a similar phenomenon at the church of St. Tychon near Amathous, for example.  It does, however, shed some valuable light on the intersection of long-standing forms of religious archaeology (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/an

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other-better-attempt-at-dream-archaeology.html">dream archaeology</a> being just one example) and modern "scientific" archaeological practice. ¬†This kind of provision use of a ruined church may also reflect some of the practices common to ancient and Byzantine Christianity where churches damaged by earthquakes or neglect continue to be places of intermittent devotional practices.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="DSCN4740.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f1f6e2ff970b -pi" border="0" alt="DSCN4740.JPG" width="450" height="337" /></p> <p>Making this point all the more clear, a casket occupies of the center of the nave. ¬†Apparently the excavations revealed a number of burials around the church and the monastic complex. ¬†A few of these burials appear to be marked by small, Georgian style crosses.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="DSCN4720.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134851c3453970c -pi" border="0" alt="DSCN4720.JPG" width="450" height="337" /></p> <p>It seems reasonable to assume that the remains from these excavated grave sites are placed in the conspicuous casket. ¬†Apparently, the Georgian church plans to build a new monastery nearby and perhaps the bones of these now excavated monks will be brought to rest there.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="DSCN4723.JPG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134851c3463970c -pi" border="0" alt="DSCN4723.JPG" width="450" height="337" /></p> <p>The architecture, decoration, inscriptions (some in Georgian), and artifacts from this church will surely contribute to our understanding of the multi-ethnic character of Medieval Cyprus. ¬†More than that, however, the combination of "scientific" archaeology and Christian devotional practices shows the potential for a kind of indigenous archaeological practice to exist alongside largely "western" (by some definition) archaeological practices, methods, and presumably epistemology.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.197.147 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 06/30/2010 11:00:36 AM Splendid post and a fascinating view of how history continues! follow-up on this church over the years. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Polis STATUS: Publish

I hope you will

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-on-polis CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 06/29/2010 08:17:26 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the great conversations that I had this past week at Polis Chysochous centered on how one goes about publishing a complex site or sites.  Starting this fall, (as I discussed yesterday) a dynamic and diverse team of Late Antique, Byzantine, and Medieval scholars (Amy Papalexandrou, Kyle Killian, Sarah Lepinski, R. Scott Moore, Nora Laos, and myself) are planning to publish two multi-phase Christian churches excavated over the last 20 years in the village of Polis.  The sites are relatively complex architecturally with numerous overlapping and interrelated phases; they have also produced robust assemblages of Late Antique to Medieval ceramics, highly fragmentary wall painting, glass, and mortuary remains.</p> <p>In a traditional publication each of these materials would have its own discrete section (or perhaps even volume) produced after a period of careful study by a specialist.  For example, Amy, Nora, and I would study the architecture and publish it complete with a description, comparanda, and comments on the significance of this architecture for existing typologies.  Kyle and Scott would perform a similar study of the ceramics; Sarah would study and publish the wall painting.  These practices have their roots in the history of discipline of archaeology (and the humanities more broadly).  In the first half of the 20th century (outside brief pockets of critique), the humanities emphasized the mastery of (highly!) specialized bodies of material which collectively would contribute to the expanding pool of knowledge on a give topic.  This empirical mode of research favored intensive, specialized, and discrete studies which would build a enduring body of factual knowledge.</p> <p>Over the last 40 years (and perhaps more recently in the proudly anachronistic world of Mediterranean archaeology), scholarship have moved to more highly integrative approaches to research. These approaches have implicitly (or more recently explicitly) recognized that discrete bodies of knowledge exist only in relation to complex interpretative processes.  These interpretative processes inform both the hypotheses that guide our research as well as the techniques that we use to collect data to evaluate these hypotheses.  In other words, a body of factual knowledge does not exist outside interpretation.  The goal of producing an enduring body of empirically sound knowledge is simply not attainable.</p> <p>As a result of this trend, scholars have worked to produce more richly integrated, interpretative publications across the humanities.  While vestiges of earlier practices persist in catalogue of finds and narrow specialist studies of distinct artifact types, these practices are increasingly arranged in relation to large archaeological and historical problems.  Our efforts at Polis will, I hope, look to how the assemblage of ceramic material informs how we understand the architecture and decoration of these buildings; at the same time, I hope that the architecture informs our interpretation of the decorative material and the ceramics present at the site.  The interplay between these various bodies of material create the interpretative space which we hope will

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produce a richer, more clearly historically relevant publication of the site.  In short, our study will regard the material culture (architecture, ceramics, plaster, et c.) of the past as both the product and the producer of historical interpretation.</p> <p>This approach is not novel, and on Cyprus we have some great models (particularly <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/cypriot-village-of-lateantiquity-kalavasos-kopetra-in-the-vasilikos-valley/oclc/249640107">Marcus Rautman's publication of the churches at Kopetra</a>), but it is not universally applied.  What could make our approach interesting, however, is that we will attempt to implement it as a team of specialists (rather than as a single visionary scholar who can command a vast body of material).  Wish us luck!</p> <p> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: From Pyla-Koustopetria to Polis Chrysochous STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: from-pyla-koustopetria-to-polis-chrysochous CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/28/2010 09:22:56 AM ----BODY: <p>I am back from Cyprus after a little over 5 weeks. Over the next week or so, I'll bring everyone up to date on the triumphs and tragedies of our study and field season.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>I have spent the past week at the site of <a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/Archaeology/rp/polisexhibit/intro.html">Pol is Chrysochous</a> on the western side of the island. A team from Princeton University under the direction of William Childs have been documenting the site of Polis since 1983 and excavating at the site since 1984. The site itself lies amidst the modern tourist town of Polis and as a result, the excavated areas are sometimes separated from one another by some distance as the map below indicates. The material from these various excavations indicate activity on the site from as early as the Chalcolithic period, and there is archaeological evidence that the area prospered as late as the 16th century and the Lusignan era.</p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134850cead3970c -pi" width="358" height="480" alt="201006280756.jpg" /><br /> </div>

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<p>I was invited to visit the site by Amy Papalexandrou who was working to study and publish the Late Antique and Medieval material from the site. This included two basilica style churches both with Early Christian and later phases (one is clearly visible <a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/Archaeology/rp/polisexhibit/polis1.html">to the right in this photograph</a>, the other is barely visible <a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/Archaeology/rp/polisexhibit/polis14.html">t o the far left in this photograph</a> ). While both churches have appeared occasionally in the literature on the architecture of Christian Cyprus, neither has been published thoroughly. I hope to contribute to their publication and learn more about the architecture and use of these buildings as well as the political, social, economic, and religious history of the island in the shadowy period of the late 7th to 10th century.</p> <p>The later phases of the Early Christian basilicas on Cyprus have attracted some scholarly attention. Of particular interest is the practice of transforming wood-roofed basilicas to barrel-vaulted structures sometime between the 7th and 10th centuries. The phenomenon was initially studied by A.H.S. Megaw in the 1940s. Numerous other scholars have considered the date, cause, and significance of this phenomenon, including most recently, Charles Stewart in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69 (2010), 162-189. Unfortunately, few scholars have appealed to excavated remains to make their arguments for the chronology of this change, nor have they consistently appealed to archaeology to consider attendant changes in decoration, function, or even social significance of the churches transformed after the end of antiquity.</p> <p>The churches of Polis both show signs of modification after their original construction. Moreover, both churches were systematically and relatively carefully excavated revealing evidence for chronologically important ceramics, . As a result, these buildings represent an important opportunity to document the later life of Early Christian architecture on the island and in the process consider more fully life on Cyprus during the tumultuous years of condominium when Arabs and Byzantine jointly ruled the island.<br /></p> <p>In other words, the story of the buildings at Polis allows us to continue the story begun with at the Late Antique coastal settlement at Pyla-Koutsopetria, which appears to have fallen been in steep decline by the end of the 7th century and shows little activity in later eras. Unlike Polis, the vulnerable coastal position of the Pyla-Koutsopetria and its clear dependence on the trading networks sustained by the trans-Mediterranean Roman Empire probably doomed the settlement to abandonment.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Last Days in Larnaka STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: last-days-in-larnaka CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/19/2010 11:28:38 PM ----BODY: <p align="left">The museum team from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project finished packing up the museum on Friday and is heading off to Polis on the western part of the island to check out the work of the Princeton Polis Expedition.&nbsp; They have not only substantial quantities of Late Antique pottery for Scott, but a pair of Early Christian basilicas (for me) and some Roman and Byzantine wall painting (for Sarah).&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">Packing up at the end of the season provides a useful perspective on the quantity of material that we have processed and analyzed during the year, and need to synthesize in the off season.&nbsp; The stacked creates filled with artifacts represent order from the chaos of real fieldwork and provide the basis for both the chronological and functional analysis of both our survey area and our various soundings.</p> <p align="left">In general, this was a successful season, although the various small projects, student volunteers, site visits, issues with the British base, and bizarre archaeo-political controversies conspired to give it a bit of a disjointed feeling.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">And the real success of the season will only be evident this off season as the various members of the team continue to work to write up the results of our 7+ seasons of fieldwork.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f181d1a4970 b-pi"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f181d166970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN4325" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f181d168970b -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f181d170970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN4326" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f181d17d970b -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f181d18f970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN4328" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013484a9aab8970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f181d1a4970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN4330" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013484a9aacb970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f181d1ae970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN4333" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013484a9aae4970c -pi" width="304" height="404"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">There might be a bit of radio silence from the blog over the next week, as we might not have the

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same degree of internet connective in Polis.&nbsp; But I'll be back blogging by the end of the week.&nbsp; Don't you worry.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Top Five Mistakes on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: top-five-mistakes-on-the-pyla-koutsopetria-archaeological-project CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/17/2010 11:25:16 PM ----BODY: <p>As another field season comes to a close, it is useful to reflect back on some of our mistakes over the past few years.&nbsp; I am pleased to say that no mistakes were so significant that archaeological information was lost.&nbsp; On the other hand, most of these mistakes brought a certain amount of inconvenience to our seasons and set us back in time, energy, and sometimes other resources.</p> <p>1. Not applying for a single, big grant. Over the past eight seasons, PKAP has been fortunate to be funded by a series of small to mid-sized grants.&nbsp; The support of numerous organizations not only made our initial fieldwork possible, but also made it possible for us to take advantage of opportunities (like excavation and more robust remote sensing campaigns) that were not present at the project's onset, bring in collaborators from around the world, and to introduce over 50 students to field archaeology and the island of Cyprus. The downside of relying on small to mid-sized grants is that each fall became a frantic scramble for resources to fund the next season. Each spring, as we waited on the grants, became an exercise in speculative accounting as we produce multiple budgets and plans based on the possible level of funding provided by our outstanding grant applications.&nbsp; Fortunately, we always received enough support to pursue our most optimistic plans, but the wait (particularly over the last few years as "changes" in the global economy made it difficult to predict funding levels) was excruciating.&nbsp; Next time we conduct a multi-year archaeological project in the Mediterranean, we will make it contingent upon receiving a multi-year grant.</p> <p>2. Messing with the Cypriot Bronze Age. While I am not a liberty to go into details about this mistake, I have learned that the Cypriot Bronze Age is not fun nor is it necessarily an open field for inquiry.&nbsp; It seems best for specialists in Late Antiquity working on a largely historical site, to steer very clear of the Late Bronze Age and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/science/22sail.html">other messy prehistoric periods in Cyprus</a>.</p> <p>3. Identifying an Early Christian

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basilica on Vigla from resistivity results.&nbsp; After conducting a substantial campaign of electrical resistivity survey in 2007, we concluded that an Early Christian basilica stood atop the coastal height of Vigla. In fact, our scrutiny of the architecture directed the location of our trenches in 2008.&nbsp; It only took a few days of excavating to discover that the remains on Vigla were not associated with an Early Christian church, and moreover, were not monumental.&nbsp; Now it appears that we have a Classical to Hellenistic fortified settlement on the height.&nbsp; (For more on this, see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/py la-koutsopetr.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/06/th e-vanished-ba.html">here</a>)</p> <p>4. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2010/06/th e-voyage-of-pkap-airship-1.html">Flying PKAP Airship One on a windy day</a>.</p> <p>5. Conducting a study season without a registrar. At one point this year, I looked over the numerous scholars and students working on PKAP material and could see no order to the chaos.&nbsp; In past years, our registrar has brought order to chaos and allowed for the smooth movement of material through processing and study.&nbsp; This year, we proceeded without a registrar - a feat only attempted once before - and the results were terrifying.&nbsp; Well-labeled (fortunately) artifacts everywhere, forms everywhere, well-labeled (phew!) pottery bags everywhere, scholars and specialists everywhere, and me frantically trying to keep up with various questions and requests on my lap top while attempting to analyze the data.&nbsp; Fortunately, a long, hot, day in the museum last </p> <p>There are some honorable mentions to this list: working on Cyprus in late July and August for one year, working on a site in the British Sovereign Area (paperwork on top of paperwork!), waiting for five years before discovering how useful a camp manager was to the project, and leaving too little time each season to wrap up all the odds and ends in a calm and collected way.&nbsp; </p> <p>Despite these mistakes, we are pleased with the results of our 8 years of relatively intensive field work and study.&nbsp; We don't lose artifacts, we haven't lost a student (and have had remarkably few "problem" students), and we are well on our way to produce a monograph length study of our work. So, if I am lucky enough to embark on another project like PKAP, I can only hope that it turns out as well.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Teaching Blogosphere STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-teaching-blogosphere CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media

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DATE: 06/16/2010 11:31:07 PM ----BODY: <p>Just a quick repost from over on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>:</p> <p>If you read this blog, chances are that you read other blogs like it.&nbsp; So I thought it would be a useful exercise to crowd-source some of the more useful teaching related blogs on the web.</p> <p>The three blogs that I check most regularly are:</p> <p><a href="http://tomprofblog.mit.edu/">Tomorrow's Professor Blog</a> aggregates a great selection of online teaching articles each day.&nbsp; It's a great daily review of what's new across the web.</p> <p><a href="http://chronicle.com/blog/profhacker/27/">Prof Hacker</a> has recently moved to the Chronicle of Higher Education's webpage.&nbsp; It deals with much more than just the "hacking" or technology aspects of teaching to include professional advice, productivity tips, and even recipes!&nbsp; </p> <p>Not to be left out, Inside Higher Ed, offers the daily <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning">Technology and Learning Blog</a> which covers ground similar to Prof Hacker with maybe a slightly greater emphasis on technology.</p> <p>Finally, I'd be remiss not to mention Mark Grabe's <a href="http://learningaloud.com/blog/">Learning Aloud blog</a> which provides a nice array of personal technology tips with an eye toward their use in the classroom.</p> <p>This is just a small sample of the vast teaching related blogosphere.&nbsp; What blogs do you read to keep up with recent developments in teaching?&nbsp; Let's work to create a list of teaching blogs that you find useful as a resource.</p> <p>Post your favorite blogs in the comments section over at <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Near Disaster on PKAP Airship One STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: near-disaster-on-pkap-airship-one CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/15/2010 11:34:56 PM ----BODY: <p>The chaotic second flight of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/2010/06/pk ap-airship-one-and-the-end-of-the-season.html">PKAP Airship One</a> has become

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an instant legend around these parts.</p> <p>Contrary to what the manual says, we now know that the PKAP Airship One is capable of a 4g negative dive.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2010/06/th e-voyage-of-pkap-airship-1.html">Scott Moore has documented it</a>.&nbsp; He'd tell you where it occurred, but it's classified and he'd have to kill you.&nbsp; (If you don't know what I'm talking about ask somebody my age or Google "4g negative dive").</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: From blimp to page STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: from-blimp-to-page CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/13/2010 11:05:06 PM ----BODY: <p>An afternoon with the newest tool in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project arsenal, PKAP Airship One, produced a series of spectacular aerial photographs (the adventure of the airship was documented by <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/2010/06/pk ap-airship-one-and-the-end-of-the-season.html">Dallas Deforest here</a>).</p> <p>I did some quick, post-processing of the low-altitude aerial photographs, which I document below.&nbsp; My main interest was transforming the aerial photographs into quick plan views.&nbsp; I first georeferenced the image (and orthorectified them to compensate for any distortion) using a series of points acquired by GPS.&nbsp; </p> <p>I then sketched in the most visible features in the photograph in ArcGIS.&nbsp; The final image is a drawing, base on the photo, prepared for ground-truthing this afternoon in the field.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f0eb4e65970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Building_Photo" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f0eb4e76970b -pi" width="400" height="421"></a> </p> <p align="center"></p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f0eb4e82970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Building_Points" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f0eb4e9a970b -pi" width="400" height="421"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013484159ad1970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Building_Lines" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f0eb4ec5970b -pi" width="400" height="421"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f0eb4edb970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="Building_Drawn" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f0eb4ee8970b -pi" width="400" height="421"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Susan Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/susancaraher DATE: 06/14/2010 11:40:41 AM That's so cool!! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Documenting the Damage STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: documenting-the-damage CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/10/2010 10:34:42 PM ----BODY: <p>Over the last four or five years, we've witnessed first hand the work of looters on our site in Cyprus.&nbsp; Their work with metal detectors has left pockmarked fields in their wake, and this past year they left a 2 m deep hole at the site of Vigla.&nbsp; </p> <p>The hole was probably not worth the looters efforts as all it did was expose a 2 m high stretch of fortification wall which I diligently worked with Dimitri Nakassis to document yesterday evening.</p> <p>This sectional of wall is the best preserved stretch of the wall surrounding the height of Vigla.&nbsp; Even more useful, it is the only stretch visible (for the moment at least) on the northern side of the height and confirmed our suspicions regarding the course of the wall in this area.&nbsp; Unfortunately, its excavation by looters prevented us from retrieving any significant chronological data from the hole despite a few pieces of coarse ware scattered about inside the hole.</p> <p align="center"><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013483f2dc17970 c-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0838" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f0c83c3b970b -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.162.226.29 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 06/11/2010 10:05:00 AM Oh man, I've got to dig up an essay I read sometime ago about the looterarchaeology relationship and how it is fundamental. Both need each other (for prospecting at different levels). I've started reading this 1920s Greek novel and it starts with a couple of looters. I wonder why Postprocessualists don't do more with looters. Now, that would be a fabulous ethnographic project!!! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Cleaning Time STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: cleaning-time CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/09/2010 10:20:46 PM ----BODY: <p></p> <p>We finally have received permission from the British base to work out at our site. Since the students leave this coming weekend, this means reprioritizing and frantic days of fieldwork.&nbsp; One of the top priorities has been to clean up the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria so that we can complete the documentation of both our excavations and the architecture exposed by previous work on the site.</p> <p>Cleaning a site involves removing invasive weeds, "winter wash" (that is dirt that has come into the site over the winter months), and trimming up the inevitable slumping of our once carefully cut scarps.&nbsp; It's pretty tedious work, but since we've spent the previous two-and-a-half weeks in the museum, the students (and staff) attacked these jobs with extra energy.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013483b489c3970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0821"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013483b489db970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013483b48a13970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0817" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013483b48a2f970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f08af83f970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0815" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f08af88d970b -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f08af91d970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0823" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013483b48b81970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f08af91d970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0824" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013483b48bde970c -pi" width="304" height="404"></a> </p> <p>We also lost the services of our hardworking cook today; Chester Beltowski left early this morning to return to Grand Forks.&nbsp; This leaves us with a different cleaning situation...</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013483b48c4c970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0829" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f08af9a7970b -pi" width="304" height="404"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology and the Tragedy of the Commons STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: archaeology-and-the-tragedy-of-the-commons CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/08/2010 06:27:58 AM ----BODY:

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<p>One of the more intriguing conversations this summer has been regarding the role that the state, non-state institutions (foreign archaeological schools, national archaeological associations, et c.), and even funding agencies play in shaping the nature, extent, and character of archaeological fieldwork.&nbsp; The delays in receiving permission to work on the British base (which, to be clear, has nothing to do with archaeological matters), has tried the patience of the team and forced us to adjust our fieldwork plans on an almost daily basis.</p> <p>The question that I've been considering is what would happen if archaeologists were simply allowed dig or survey wherever they wanted.&nbsp; If all constraints were removed, would we experience the archaeological equivalent of the tragedy of the commons?&nbsp; In other words, how deep are our commitments to responsible archaeology outside of the structures of the community?</p> <p>My experience on archaeological projects, including PKAP, suggests that there is a tendency for every individual and project to view their research as the most important.&nbsp; This "selfish" tendency drives projects and individuals to prioritize their work over the work of others.&nbsp; Most scholars understand their approaches, methods, research questions, and conclusions to be of great significance.&nbsp; One result of this understanding is, in part, to prioritize fieldwork that will contribute to their work.</p> <p>The tendency to privilege one's own research over others had tended to drive research projects to work up to any limits established by outside authorities.&nbsp; In the Mediterranean, this generally involves the local state archaeological authorities and any international archaeological institutions involved in managing the work of foreign expeditions. In fact, these institutions largely grew up to control the archaeological work in an area.&nbsp; On a micocosmic level, we constantly debate at PKAP the priorities of the project and the strategies of these largely friendly interactions involve project staff moving their research interests at the top of the list.&nbsp; </p> <p>The tendency to privilege one's own research interests on both the micro level (e.g. within a project) and at the macro level (among other projects) might well create conditions where the overall health of the field and the protection of the archaeological remains for future generations might not be a primary concern.&nbsp; In a tragedy of the common scenario, the drive of individuals to survive or prosper leads to the destruction of community resources.&nbsp; There is no reason to imagine that this would not occur in an archaeological context if forces did not exert influence.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Nicosia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: nicosia CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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DATE: 06/06/2010 10:46:12 PM ----BODY: <p align="left">I took my first trip to Northern Nicosia on Saturday, and my first stop was the 13th century Selimeye Mosque.&nbsp; This imposing Gothic building was the cathedral of the Frankish bishop of Cyprus until being converted into a mosque in the 16th century at the time of the Ottoman conquest of the island.</p> <p align="left">It remains a dramatic example of the fusion of Frankish, Byzantine, and Turkish architecture.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f03cf31e970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0768" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f03cf32a970b -pi" width="304" height="404"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348366c7f1970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0788" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f03cf353970b -pi" width="404" height="304"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348366c807970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0795" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348366c81d970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348366c836970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0796" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348366c853970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a> </p> <p align="left">We also managed to catch the Pope's motorcade and a quick glimpse of the holy head as he made his way to a meeting with the Archbishop of Cyprus.&nbsp; The Pope's white hat stands out against the black garb of the Orthodox clergy in the second photograph.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348366c862970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0746" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f03cf3e9970b -pi" width="404" height="304"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f03cf3ff970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0749" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133f03cf41c970b -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Future of Ancient History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-future-of-ancient-history-1 DATE: 06/04/2010 11:07:22 PM ----BODY: <p>The recent Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient History at Nottingham in the UK inspired vigorous and wide-ranging debate among the PKAP staff.&nbsp; Tim Cornell's and Robin Osborne's perspectives were particularly thought provoking.</p> <p><a href="http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/ampah/2010.aspx">Here's a link to the meeting's site with embedded videos</a>. </p> <p>It's at least suggested viewing for any graduate students in ancient history.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Future of Ancient History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-future-of-ancient-history CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/04/2010 10:38:36 PM ----BODY: <p>The recent Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient History at Nottingham in the UK inspired vigorous and wide-ranging debate among the PKAP staff.&nbsp; Tim Cornell's and Robin Osborne's perspectives were particularly provocative.</p> <p><a href="http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/ampah/2010.aspx">Here's a link to the meeting's site with embedded videos</a>. </p> <p>It's at least suggested viewing for any graduate students in ancient history.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Open Ended Learning in the Summer STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: open-ended-learning-in-the-summer CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/02/2010 11:22:24 PM ----BODY: <p>One thing that I sometimes forget is that most of my learning has come not from structured classroom space with structured relationships to material and environment, clear learning outcomes, and rigid forms of assessment. Summer time provides the perfect time of year for such open-ended learning.&nbsp; The relentless pressures of teaching and learning are relaxed, the weekly grind of meetings of subsides, and for those of us who do research or teach abroad, the scenery changes allowing for those dislocating moments which are so central to the uncanny experience associated with learning. </p> <p>For students and faculty summer breaks can be akin to recess or playtime that some education critics see as particularly valuable as an opportunity to develop skill wellsuited for real world engagement with the unfamiliar.&nbsp; The challenge for me and our team, is how do we manage the unstructured environment especially when both students and faculty tend to understand learning most frequently within far more formal&nbsp; conditions.</p> <p>The greatest challenge to fostering informal and unstructured learning is in encouraging students to take full advantage of the unstructured opportunities, in allowing for the unpredictability and inefficiency of unstructured learning, and in designing assessment programs that can evaluate a wide range of possible outcomes.&nbsp; </p> <p>This summer, we've been waiting on a permit to conduct fieldwork and during this time we have had a diverse group of students washing pottery and biding their time with various small projects.&nbsp; Our lack of fieldwork has removed one of the more easily assessed and focused aspects of the project's educational goals. In its place, I've advocated for a series of open ended learning events, which would force the students to engage with their environment (the city of Larnaka) or a set of archaeological artifacts (plow-zone pottery).</p> <p>There has been some reluctance to let the students just roam free, however.&nbsp; Moreover, there is persistent concern that students wouldn't "get" an assignment that was required, but at the same time had no goals beyond engagement. In fact, students are as conditioned to expect assignments with distinct, assessable learning goals.&nbsp; This, obviously, is the cause of the most common student question in the classroom: "will this be on the test?"</p> <p>The summer provides a chance for both faculty and students to shift expectations and to recognize the opportunities for productive learning outside the institutional constraints of regularized university life.&nbsp; These opportunities, like recess or play time in younger children, can cultivate the sense of wonder, observation, and engagement.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Provisional Discard at the Larnaka Museum Apotheke STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: provisional-discard-at-the-larnaka-museum-apotheke CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/31/2010 06:06:48 AM ----BODY: <p>Due to a bit of a paperwork issue and a series of British holidays, we have not been able to get the students in our field should out to our site.&nbsp; While there is plenty of work to do at the museum where we are gaining momentum in processing artifacts, we are still working to find ways to get our students to flex their fieldwork brain-muscles.&nbsp; In other words, we hope to find ways to get the students to think archaeologically on a larger and more complex scale than the individual artifact.&nbsp; </p> <p>One of the suggestions that I made was that we could get the students working on the amazing assemblage of material present just outside the museum storerooms.&nbsp; Unlike the "archaeological" material in the storerooms, the assemblage of stuff in the storage area's courtyard represents a whole range of storage and discard practices.&nbsp; While documenting and studying the various objects, stored, and discarded used by the local archaeological establishment may seem to some (of my colleagues) as a classic example of busywork, I think that it would be a great exercise in archaeological description.</p> <p>It also is an interesting opportunity to consider the remains of a wide range of archaeological and conservation practices.&nbsp; As archaeology comes to play a more and more prominent role in the presentation and performance of the modern state, we have to assume an increasing amount of recovered archaeological material itself reentering new archaeological contexts.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013482894230970 c-pi"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013482894255970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0726" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013482894264970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></a></p> <p align="center"><img style="borderright-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0728" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013482894284970c -pi" width="404" height="304"></p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134828942a0970 c-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0729" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134828942b8970c

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-pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ef59ee9b970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="DSCN0730" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ef59eeb4970b -pi" width="404" height="304"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project gains pace STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-archaeological-project-gains-pace CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/28/2010 06:54:15 AM ----BODY: <p>It's been a bit of a slow start to the summer work at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; Some of this may be because my bag and computer power supply were lost for a bit, but after a roundabout trip to the island, I am back in the blogging business.</p> <p>But if you miss this PKAP blogosphere, then you ought to check out our staff blog here: <a title="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/" href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/</a></p> <p>And follow us on Twitter (now that I have my phone and can provide exciting blow-by-blow descriptions of our work) with the hashtag: #pkap</p> <p>Or at the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">PKAP Blog Aggregator site</a>.</p> <p>We've spent the last few days in the museum attempting to set priorities for the study season, introduce the students to the project, and organize the ceramics that need to be processed.&nbsp; Our biggest challenge right now is that the paper copies of many of our forms have gone missing in our time away from the Larnaka Museum.&nbsp; On the one hand, this is not surprising since the museum is an active and busy place all year around.&nbsp; On the other hand, we had hoped that our paper data recording sheets would remain in relatively close proximity to the physical artifacts for the duration of the project.&nbsp; The missing sheets provide another challenge, the data has not been entered into our database yet and this was one of the goals of the 2010 PKAP season (we have copies back in the US).&nbsp; One of the main downsides of paper copies is that they can't be multiple places at once, like our digital databases. </p> <p>While we hope to get copies of our artifact sheets from the US before too long, their absence makes it harder for us to

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identify and focus on particular artifacts as we prepare our catalog for publication.&nbsp; We've become totally dependent on our ability to querry data efficiently in order to identify patterns in our finds data that will reward further research.</p> <p>This weekend, we take the students on trips to Paphos, the monastery of Ay. Neophytos, and the small coastal site of Ay. GeorghiosPeyeas and Maa. then, on a special Sunday trip, to the Classicla to Late Roman site of Amathous and then to the seaside town of Zygy which once prospered as a major export port for the islands carobs. We appear to have a good group of students this year, so these trips should be exciting. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project gains pace STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-return-of-the-pyla-koutsopetria-blogosphere CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/28/2010 06:50:24 AM ----BODY: <p>It's been a bit of slow start to the summer work at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; Some of this may be because my bag and computer power supply were lost for a bit, but after a roundabout trip to the island, I am back in the blogging business.</p> <p>But if you miss this PKAP blogosphere, then you ought to check out our staff blog here: <a title="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/" href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/</a></p> <p>And follow us on Twitter (now that I have my phone and can provide exciting blow-by-blow descriptions of our work) with the hashtag: #pkap</p> <p>We've spent the last few days in the museum attempting to set priorities for the study season, introduce the students to the project, and organize the ceramics that need to be processed.&nbsp; Our biggest challenge right now is that the paper copies of many of our forms have gone missing in our time away from the Larnaka Museum.&nbsp; On the one hand, this is not surprising since the museum is an active and busy place all year around.&nbsp; On the other hand, we had hoped that our paper data recording sheets would remain in relatively close proximity to the physical artifacts for the duration of the project.&nbsp; The missing sheets provide another challenge, the data has not been entered into our database yet and this was one of the goals of the 2010 PKAP season (we have copies back in the US).&nbsp; One of the main downsides of paper copies is that they can't be multiple places at once, like our digital databases. </p> <p>While

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we hope to get copies of our artifact sheets from the US before too long, their absence makes it harder for us to identify and focus on particular artifacts as we prepare our catalog for publication.&nbsp; We've become totally dependent on our ability to querry data efficiently in order to identify patterns in our finds data that will reward further research.</p> <p>This weekend, we take the students on trips to Paphos, the monastery of Ay. Neophytos, and the small coastal site of Ay. Georghios-Peyeas and Maa. then, on a special Sunday trip, to the Classicla to Late Roman site of Amathous and then to the seaside town of Zygy which once prospered as a major export port for the islands carobs. We appear to have a good group of students this year, so these trips should be exciting. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: First days on Pyla-Koutsopetria 2010 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: first-days-on-pyla-koutsopetria-2010 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/27/2010 12:26:03 AM ----BODY: I&#39;ve made it to Cyprus, but my bag has not. Inside this bag is the massive power brick for my computer, so for the time being, I am reduced to using my iPad as my primary computer. As various pundits have observed, the iPad is much better suited for consuming media than its production. In other words, my blog posts will be short. On the positive side, the flight gave me an opportunity to read Michael Given&#39;s most recent article on The Ottoman landscape of Cyprus (Given and Hadjianastatsis, BMGS 34 (2010), 38-60. Drawing on textual and archaeological evidence, Given and Hadjianastasis reconstruct segments of the Ottoman period Cypriot landscape looking at history of a series of villages on the northern slope of the Troodos mountains. I also read Charles A. Stewart on the 8th century vaulted churches of Cyprus, particularly those on the Karpas (JSAH 69 (2010), 162-189). These buildings represent an important, albeit local, transitional step between wood-roofed basilicas and more centrally planned, vaulted or even domed structures. Finally, we&#39;ve begun to introduce the students to our work in the museum, the local topography, and local sites. So far the students and staff are filled with early season energy and enthusiasm. Stay tuned!!<br />

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: You're not going to dig? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: youre-not-going-to-dig CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/24/2010 08:20:08 AM ----BODY: <p>As I put the final touches on my packing for my trip to Cyprus, I want to address a question that I have been asked numerous times over the past few weeks. What do you do over there if you're not digging? And why aren't you doing fieldwork this summer?</p> <p>As for the first question, my project, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, has never been a traditional excavation. In fact, the project started with no intention of digging at all. Our initial research methods and goals involved conducting an intensive pedestrian survey across the the Pyla coastal zone. Excavation served to ground truth various hypotheses developed by survey and remote sensing. So, we had never intended to excavate large areas or conduct a full-scale excavation of buildings. Instead, the goal was to establish chronology of subsurface remains, to try to determine their function, and to generate a stratified sample of artifacts to which we could compare our survey materials. So, in short, our excavations were limited in scope and, as a result, limited in duration.</p> <p>Despite the limited nature of our excavations, they, nevertheless, produced a good bit of material that requires careful documentation. We will devote most of the 2010 season to documenting excavated material and preparing detailed catalog entries for important artifacts collected during excavation and survey. As we have begun to prepare our final analysis of the Pyla region for publication, we have identified artifacts, units, and contexts that require more thorough and comprehensive documentation. Over the next four weeks, we'll spend time making sure that the key pieces of archaeological evidence are thoroughly analyzed so that they can support our arguments.</p> <p>Fieldwork is the most fun part of archaeological work, but as the pioneering underwater archaeologist <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/0307/etc/conversations.html">George Bass recently quipped</a>, "my most exciting discoveries have all come in the library". The same can be applied to the artifacts stored away in museum storerooms which when cleaned from the dirt of the field can often reveal crucial information overlooked during the bustle of excavation or survey. Our ceramicist's careful attention to each artifact is a time consuming and tedious

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process, but the results of his work (and the entire teams efforts to facilitate his work by cleaning artifacts, dividing them into lots, keeping records, and cataloging) will allow us to reconstruct the history of the site in a way that digging another or even just a bigger hole would not enable us to do. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>So, off to Cyprus today, to spend four weeks or so in the museum storerooms helping our ceramicist go through our collected corpus of artifacts. As with every year, this blog will continue through the summer, although perhaps with a few short interruptions. Also be sure to check out our <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">Undergra duate Perspectives Blog</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">the PKAP Season Staff Blog</a>, and our long-running, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">Graduate Student Perspectives blog</a>. Or check out the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">PKAP Blog aggregator</a> for the most recent posts from all three.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Nick Karatjas EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 144.80.228.225 URL: DATE: 05/24/2010 09:18:33 AM Have a great and productive trip and time in Cyprus. this year. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits

Sorry I cannot be there

DATE: 05/21/2010 08:27:53 AM ----BODY: <p>The countdown to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is official on, so we'll spend today running errands and making final preparations for a Monday departure.&nbsp; In the meantime, you can enjoy a little bevy of quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>I love reports and statistics, so I was pretty excited when the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/datacol/reports/subFolder/sophomore%202010/sophomo

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re2010.htm">2010 University of North Dakota Sophomore Satisfaction Survey</a> was released by our Office of Institutional Research.</li> <li>If you share my worry about the state of graduate education in the U.S., the you certainly need to read the <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/the-future-ofgraduate-education-in-the-u-s/">latest report of from the Council of Graduate Schools</a>.&nbsp; And, for more info on Graduate Education, you should certainly bookmark, the other blog in our household: <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/">The UND Graduate School Blog</a>.&nbsp; It's curious that the <a href="http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5">Chronicle of Higher Education</a> does not feature a blog on Graduate Education in the US.</li> <li>Teaching Thursday begins its summer semi-slumber this next week.&nbsp; We'll keep posting throughout the summer (perhaps not with the same regularity), but our readers move on to more summer related tasks like mowing the lawn, family vacations, and neglected research projects.&nbsp; Before you go, be sure to read <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/05/20/more-firstyear-teaching-reflections-two-different-experiences/">the last installment</a> in our series of <a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/first-yearreflections/">First Year Teaching Reflections</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://ghostsofnorthdakota.wordpress.com/">Ghosts of North Dakota</a> continue to update their growing catalogue of photographs of abandoned North Dakota towns. Their most recent trip through the "abandoned" landscape of North Dakota produced some pretty brilliant results.</li> <li>While the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">PKAP blogosphere</a> is about to return to bloom, it is now joined by some new Mediterranean fieldwork blogs.&nbsp; I'm keeping an interested eye on my old buddy Rangar Cline's <a href="http://undertheumbriansun.blogspot.com/">Under the Umbrian Sun</a> blog which will document their work at the excavations at Vicus ad Martis Tudertium.</li> <li>In recent weeks, the Penn State student run blog <a href="http://onwardstate.com/">Onward State</a> has attracted a good bit of media attention.&nbsp; Being involved in re-imagining the University of North Dakota's web presence, I am not sure that the imperiously named "Web Oversight Council" fully understands the potential power of a site like Onward State and its ability to influence the image of the university on the internets.&nbsp; </li></ul> <p>Off to run errands!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Another Thesis: American Scheherazade STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: another-thesis-american-scheherazade CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND DATE: 05/20/2010 07:30:52 AM

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----BODY: <p>Nigar Soubra, one of my M.A. students here at the University of North Dakota will soon defend her thesis. It's entitled "American Scheherazade: Strategic Orientalism and Hybridity in the Ottoman Tales of Demetra Vaka Brown".</p> <p>Here's the abstract:</p> <blockquote> <p>In the academic era of Post-Colonial scholarship, the discourse of Orientalism is particularly under close observation and it is a subject for heated debates among many Post-Colonial scholars. Since Edward Said’s Orientalism identified this discourse as a homogeneous historical and political process, the subsequent field of scholarship engaged in the process of understanding and re-defining the term of Orientalism. Post-colonial hybrid personas who were actively engaging and strategically re-addressing the course of Orientalism destabilize Said’s monolithic definition and create a ground for a more complex discussion of this seemingly diverse discourse, which extended beyond Western colonial agendas. A hybrid cultural status of a GreekAmerican writer and an immigrant from the Ottoman Empire, Demetra Vaka, as well as her first publication, Haremlik, are the focus of this thesis, which implements a “close-reading” of the narrative in order to understand the author’s ambivalent use of Orientalism. It is argued that Vaka Brown’s culturally in-between status granted her a privilege of authorial authority and authenticity in her representations of the East to the West. Vaka Brown ambivalently not only re-addressed the previously constructed Orientalist stereotypes but also engaged in developing Orientalist knowledge through classification and representation of cultural difference. It is argued that Vaka Brown utilized Orientalism strategically in order to establish her authorial authority based on her origins, to map the cultural differences between the East and the West, and to bring an air of commercially desirable exoticism to her narrative. In the era of American material Orientalism, when American popular culture was enchanted by the allure of exotic merchandise and the idea of escapism, Haremlik represented an authentic voice of experience and a story about the “other.” In Haremlik, Orientalism is a tool for mapping of cultural differences and a hallmark for marketing. It is argued that Vaka Brown’s strategy for representing an inherent incompatibility between the East and the West was imbedded in her nostalgic idea about the timeless and unchanging Orient. The idea of westernizing Orient threatened the author expertise on the intimately familiar Orient. Not only did the westernization of the Ottoman Empire destabilize her knowledge about the intimately familiar “other,” but also the idea of the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire’s disintegration and the rise of Turkish nationalism threatened the existence of Greek minorities in Turkey.</p> </blockquote>Congratulations Nigar! ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Byzantine Archaeology and Indigenous Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: byzantine-archaeology-and-indigenous-archaeology CATEGORY: Byzantium DATE: 05/19/2010 08:50:53 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last few weeks, I have been re-reading some work on indigenous archaeology and considering its application to the study of Byzantium. The new edition of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/archaeological-theory-anintroduction/">Matthew Johnson's <i>Archaeological Theory</i></a> spurred this, in part, as did a more careful reading of <a href="http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/McGheeAmAnt08.pdf">Robe rt McGhee's 2008 critique</a> of indigenous archaeology in <i>American Antiquity</i> 73 (2008), 579-597. The main arguments supporting indigenous archaeology stem from the idea that indigenous peoples (broadly construed) understanding the material past in different ways from that articulated and advanced by "scientific" (broadly construed) archaeology. In its most radical applications, indigenous archaeology sees "traditional" Western archaeological practice as the continuation of centuries of imperialism rooted in the physical appropriation of the past. Advocates of "scientific" archaeology, of course, argue that the miracle of the Western scientific approach to disciplines is that the theories, methods, and conclusions are universal and universalizing. This makes it possible, in their view, for Western archaeologists to contribute to a universal understanding of an indigenous past. Indigenous archaeologists (perhaps more properly the advocates of indigenous archaeology) argue that Western archaeological practice developed from profoundly different understandings of time, the past, and material culture which preclude representing indigenous pasts in ways that do not intentionally undermine indigenous practices at the expense of Western values.</p> <p>I've maintained (even occasionally on this blog) that the notion of indigenous practice is no limited to groups traditionally represented (by the West) as indigenous, but that we are all indigenous to someplace. As silly as this seems, this simple notion allows us to re-position European practice as not simply Western and imperialist and, frankly, "bad," but as indigenous as well. This has obvious parallels with <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/provincializing-europe-postcolonial-thoughtand-historical-difference/">Chakrabarty's ideas of provincializing Europe</a> and undermines the oppositional character of both the West (to the East or to the "other") and the "indigenous" as categories. In other words, Western practices are indigenous too.</p> <p>The problem becomes, however, that scholars traditionally understand Western archaeological practices through the lens of historical analysis and in the "context" of specific historical developments. As a result, the methods involved in understanding and writing this history of archaeological practices draw upon the same basic intellectual frameworks and methods that inform Western archaeological practices themselves. From a theoretical and methodological perspective, this creates a kind of circular analogy whereby western archaeology is understood only through the western practice of history. Ironically, perhaps, this circularity is liberating inasmuch as this same circularity besets

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traditionally identified indigenous practices as well which often find draw upon "indigenous" models for understanding the past to validate and authorize particular archaeological practices.</p> <p>Where does all this leave Byzantium? This is what I am beginning to attempt to work out:</p> <p>Byzantium clearly possessed an indigenous archaeology which manifest itself through dream inspired excavations, the use of <i>spolia</i>, the practice of <i>inventio</i> (the rediscovery of lost sacred objects) and <i>translatio</i> (the transfer of sacred objects from one place to the next), and the practice of renovation, refurbishment, and reconstruction. All of these practices represent particular views of the material past that contribute to a broader understanding of Byzantine history and Byzantine culture. (I've documented some of these practices <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/30697799/Caraher-Dream-Archaeology2010">here</a> and <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=U2KXRCJ3gq8C&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;dq=Gregory%2 0Caraher%20Medieval%20Post%20Medieval&amp;pg=PA267#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false"> here</a>). These practices represent profoundly Byzantine attitudes to the past, to material culture, and to significant (and sacred) places in their world. These practices remain embedded within persistent sacred narratives and continue to produce meaningful landscapes. All of this suggests that these indigenous archaeological practice continue to function and inform social behavior on some level.</p> <p>Moreover, the persistence of a kind of "Byzantine archaeology" suggests that discrete pre-modern <i>archaeological</i> practices existed in the West and produced meaningful landscapes. In other words, "Western" practice is neither historically unified, exclusively modern, nor even necessarily exclusionary. Western archaeology in all of its modern, disciplinary, manifestations nevertheless circulates in a world of archaeological practices that continuously challenge it exclusive right to produce meaning. Byzantine and other archaeologies that exist at the margins of disciplinary practice present important avenues for the revitalization of archaeology as a discipline. Not only do these practices demonstrate the potential for differing forms of archaeological knowledge of co-exist, but also reinforce the historical, religious, and even irrational influences on the seemingly universalizing methods of modern archaeological research.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Medieval and Post Medieval Archaeology of the Mediterranean - 2011 Archaeological Institute of America Colloquium STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1

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BASENAME: medieval-and-post-medieval-archaeology-of-the-mediterranean---2011archaeological-institute-of-america-colloquium CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 05/18/2010 07:15:05 AM ----BODY: <p>I just heard the good news that the Medieval and Post-Medieval Interest Group of the AIA has had a panel accepted at the 2011 AIA.&nbsp; The proposal is from David Pettegrew (the Interest Group president from 2008-2010) and Amelia Brown (current president 2010-).&nbsp; I'll post updates on the panel including the abstracts for the papers and hopefully the podcasts of the actual panel over at our <a href="http://pendentive.wordpress.com/">Pendentive Blog</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p>Here's the abstract for the entire colloquium session and the paper titles.&nbsp; Looks like a great panel.</p> <p>"Travel to Greece between Antiquity and the Grand Tour"</p> <p>Two sets of travel texts have consistently formed the backdrop to archaeological interpretations of ancient Greek sites and landscapes: Pausanias's 2nd-century Description of Greece and early modern accounts of western Europeans, who themselves often wrote with an awareness of Pausanias. Throughout most of the 20th century, archaeologists attempted to relate these texts to the new discoveries of excavation and survey, while in very recent years scholars have sought to understand these accounts, and the landscapes they represent, in terms of their particular social and intellectual contexts. In general, however, there has been very little research on travel to Greece between Pausanias and the start of the Grand Tour, despite the growing recognition that interregional communication continued uninterrupted between the 3rd and 17th centuries, both in Greece and in the Mediterranean more broadly. Indeed, the textual evidence for Late Antique, Byzantine, and Ottoman travel to Greece is greater than is often realized as historians, geographers, imperial functionaries, sailors, merchants, students, Hellenes, Christian pilgrims, monks, ‘barbarian invaders,’ refugees, pirates, Crusaders, knights, and armies, among many others, visited the peninsula and islands of Greece. It is true that most of these travelers did not (or even could not) record their visits to Greek lands in writing, but the extant textual evidence is not insubstantial. Some educated travelers followed ancient writers and prefigured the Grand Tourists by recording their interest in the monuments of classical antiquity while others ignored the classical past and sought places associated with St. Paul and Christian holy men and women, or viewed sites unaware of either Christian or classical pasts.&nbsp; The textual evidence itself exists in the context of an ever-expanding body of material culture of Late Antique to Ottoman date produced by both urban excavation and regional survey. In this colloquium, we analyze the varied written sources for different kinds of travel into, within, and around Greece between the 3rd and 17th centuries together with the regional archaeological evidence to illuminate landscapes from Late Antiquity to the Ottoman era. Our goal is to combine both kinds of evidence to better understand post-antique travel and the sites and landscapes visited before the Early Modern era.</p> <p><em>Papers</em><br>"Intellectuals on the Isthmus of Greece,"<br>David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College</p> <p>"Christian Pilgrimage to Byzantine Corinth,"<br>Amelia R. Brown, University of Queensland</p> <p>"Two Italian Travelers on Karpathos in 1923 and c 1423, and an archaeological explanation for Sorzadori,"<br>D.J. Ian Begg, Trent

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University</p> <p>“'To tell you something very special': Cyriaco of Ancona in Greece,”<br>Diana Gilliland Wright, Independent Scholar</p> <p>"Athens through Ottoman Eyes."<br>Pierre A. MacKay, University of Washington</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Monday: Reflections on the End of a Year STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-monday-reflections-on-the-end-of-a-year CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 05/17/2010 09:06:13 AM ----BODY: <p>As I work to get my final grades together for the Spring semester, I leafed back through my teaching notebook and began to think a bit about how to change my classes next semester. (I've already blogged at some length about <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/05/te aching-with-twitter-an-interim-report.html">my Twitter experiment this semester</a>). I have to good fortune of teaching the same classes almost every semester, so I have a nicely iterative environment to experiment. This also allows me to chart trends over multiple semesters and make observations about the kind of variation present in my classes.</p> <p>So for this semester, I have five observations:</p> <p>1. Three years ago, I started a multiple-guess option for my History 101: Western Civilization class. I allowed the students to opt into a full multiple guess test, a half-multiple guess and half essay, or an all essay exam. At this time, I created a fairly robust test bank and revised my lectures to ensure that I hit on the answer for each question. Eventually, I recorded these lectures and podcasts (more on this later). Each semester, I add a few questions to the test and cycle a few questions out basically at random. Over the past three years, most students answer each question correctly. That is to say, that over 50% of the students answer the questions right and the average grade on the multiple guess sections hovered around 60%. I haven't done more sophisticated statistical analyses on these questions, but it never ceases to amaze me that students' responses do not pattern more clearly.</p> <p>2. Attendance woes. Students do not come to my classes. I probably average less than 60% attendance in my larger 100 level night class and less than 70% in my midlevel, majors class. I've tried all sorts of tricks to get students to attend. In other words, I've incentivized student attendance, but I need to do it better. This is absurd on some level: I use incentives to make students want to do something that they have paid to do. Generally, these incentives have a pedagogical goal. In my large lecture class we do a series of in-class writing

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assignments focusing on the use of primary source readings. Some of these are individual writing assignments (which tend to put pressure on individuals to do the reading and come to class prepared), some are small group assignments (which force students to pool their preparation and resources), and some are large group assignments (which encourage students to hash out the best answers from a group of with similar levels of preparation). These in-class writing assignments are facilitated by myself and my teaching assistant, focused on building the skills required in the short paper and on the essay sections in the exam, and contribute to a discussion grade that is worth 30% of their final grade. Despite the grade and pedagogical incentive to come to class students still skip in remarkable numbers. The reasons are similar: the class is too long (it's a 2:20 minute night class), they work, they can listen to versions of the lectures as podcasts, they are busy with other classes, and my class competes with <i>Lost</i>. The defeatist in me sees the reasons for cutting class as being deeply embedded in student culture (here?), but part of me thinks that I can find the right combination of incentives and penalties to break student resistance to attending class.</p> <p>3. Podcasts are the new textbook. Two years ago, I transitioned from using textbooks to using my own podcasts to provide basic narrative for my class. I did this for three reasons. First, podcasts could serve both my in-class and my online class . Second, textbooks are really expensive and even though most of my 101 students sold their textbooks back at the end of the semester, I was skeptical that the use of the book was worth the money that the students paid. Finally, I had this strange idea that students would find it easier to listen to podcasts than to read a textbook. While there is no disputing that podcasts serve my online teaching well and that they are free, students -- according to my very informal poll -- did not find my podcasts any more appealing than a textbook. In fact, many of the students admitted to not listening to them at all. This surprised me as I had tried to use the podcasts to turn class time in a more dynamic space where I could talk about big, conceptual issues in the history of the West and spend time focusing on class writing. The result, however, seems to have been that many students felt that the podcasts were as good as my lectures and opted to neither attend my lecture nor listen to the podcasts. Yikes.</p> <p>4. Drafts. I used to be a big advocate of students writing multiple drafts of papers. In fact, I structured an entire class midlevel history class around this practice. In the best case scenarios, students would diligently work to improve a manuscript focusing on various different skills in each version and eventually produce a sophisticated and polished final draft. In the most-case scenario, students would work hard on one draft of the paper - either the first or more often the last - and temporize with the rest making insignificant edits, cosmetic fixes, or (most annoyingly) only those changes that I recommended explicitly. So, this year I did away with multiple drafts and instead assigned multiple, different, unrelated, short papers each of which focused on developing a particular skill set: focused thesis, citation formats, good prose, et c. The final paper of the semester required the students to bring together these skills into a single paper. The result: well, as a group, these papers were no way worse than the results from papers for which I required multiple drafts.</p> <p>This got me wondering if the formal process of producing drafts particularly completed, substantial, and relatively polished drafts - was an artifact of older technologies and practices which focused on the production of relatively complete texts which were then subjected to editing. This made sense in a world where handwritten texts had to have a degree of polish to be legible and type-written texts involved a significant commitment of time and energy. As a result, drafting involved the creating of relatively work-intensive texts,

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which were then only re-produced after receiving substantial editing. Today, producing a text is relatively easy (as this blog undoubtedly shows!). Editing can be performed on the fly, printing is a separate and fairly easy process, and as a result we focus less on creating distinct versions of a paper and more on the malleability of the text-always-in-revision. In this environment submitting a copy of a text for critique marks the end of the editing processes, during which time the text exists on screen or on scrap papers, rather than in a polished format suitable for circulation.</p> <p>5. Process versus Product. Along similar lines, I have included components of my classes that focus on process. A colleague here uses journaling as a way to capture parts of the intellectual process. I've been using an old-school threaded discussion board where I post weekly discussion questions. The students do not discuss the questions as much as write short reflections on the discussions questions supported with evidence from the primary source readings for that week. Mostly these short reflections are poorly considered, historically problematic, or logically flawed. Despite that, the students nevertheless write around 3000 words a semester and strive over 15 weeks to write using historical sources as evidence. I've defended these short assignment, which I evaluate on a 5 point scale, as ways to get the students write and useful contributions to my goal of having students write 5000 words a semester in an introductory level class. What I need to do now is set up a way to evaluate whether these short assignments are successful in making the students better writers or whether they merely reinforce poor writing practices.</p> <p>By noon today, I will have submitted my grades and dust will largely have settled from another semester. Hopefully, I'll have some new ideas by the time the fall semester rolls around.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amalia T EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 75.27.145.208 URL: http://hellia.blogspot.com DATE: 05/17/2010 02:50:04 PM In regard to multiple drafts, I think you might be on to something. Not to say that writing and rewriting are not important (as I know far too well, even if I never believed it in college), but we do much more editing and revision during the writing process now than we could have done before. Recently I went back to handwriting for a novel and I realized just how much I depended on and utilized the delete key during my writing process. At least a third of every page was crossed out as I wrote and edited and changed my thoughts mid sentence. It is so easy to erase and correct, backtrack and rewrite, that even a first draft will have been edited multiple times during the process of putting it together.

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That being said, academic writing and fiction writing aren't the same, and the process of marshaling argument is a little bit more complex than storytelling, but writing is still writing when all is said and done. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.225 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 05/17/2010 03:04:53 PM Amalia, Actually, I think that academic writing and fiction writing are very similar in terms of process. And I think that the changes that are taking place now in how the process works (and is taught) are relevant in both spheres! Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quck Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quck-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 05/14/2010 07:48:47 AM ----BODY: <p>It's the last Friday of finals' week and my stack of grading has reached imaginable proportions. So, there's plenty of time for a Friday varia and quick hits. Plus, it's sunny for the first time in weeks.</p> <ul> <li>I succumbed to peer pressure and have <a href="http://und.academia.edu/WilliamCaraher">an academia.edu page</a>. I'm not sure what it will do for me, but I have it. Two people follow me.</li> <li>I'm pretty amused by all <a href="http://mashable.com/2010/05/12/anotheriphone-4g-found/">these "lost" Apple 4th generation iPhones</a>. I am not sure why it is taking so long for people to figure out that it's a viral marketing campaign. Do you think that they might have learned to appreciate these tactics from the sustained pre-iPad buzz which surely contributed to the significant sales bounce in the first few weeks of its release?</li> <li>Home grown tech 'n' teaching blogger Mark Grabe <a href="http://learningaloud.com/blog/2010/05/14/simple-is-good-posterous-issimple/">writes a bit about</a> and <a href="http://grabe.posterous.com/">on Posterous this week</a>.</li> <li>I received my <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Archaeological-TheoryIntroduction-Matthew-Johnson/dp/140510015X/">Second Edition of Matthew Johnson's Archaeological Theory</a> today. Weekend reading.</li>

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<li>I like messed around a bit with the <a href="http://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-maps-visualize-your-zotero-library-onthe-globe/">new Zotero mapping plug-in</a> (yep, even plug-ins have plug-ins) and I like what <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/zotero-mapsvisualizing-archaeology/">Shawn Graham observes</a> regarding the potential to map things from, say, an <a href="http://opencontext.org/">OpenContext.org</a> or Omeka database.</li> <li>I spent a few hours a day over the last few days playing around with <a href="http://rapid-i.com/content/view/181/190/">RapidMiner</a>. It's pretty cool.</li> <li>If you haven't checked out <a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/firstyear-reflections/">our series of reflection from first year faculty</a> at the University of North Dakota, you need to hop over the <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro?mco=MTM3 NDczMzg">I ordered a new Macbook Pro</a>. I'm going down to 15 inches. With cheap and large monitors these days, I no longer see the need for the 17 inch laptop.</li> <li>Australia v. Pakistan in the World T20 Final Four, and England looms on the horizon, and Monte Carlo. A good weekend for sport.</li> </ul> <p>That's all I can think of off the top of my head this sunny Friday morning. The prospects of finishing grading, cleaning up my office, and taking a week to reflect and prepare for Cyprus are amazingly appealing right now.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.197.147 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 05/14/2010 08:43:02 AM "William added themselves to the department Department of History" So nice to see grammar as an essential part of academic webbing. -----

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COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck JonesEMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.122.167.53 URL: http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/ DATE: 05/14/2010 09:09:02 AM Upload some of your articles to acadermia.edu to see what it can do for you -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Random Art returns to O'Kelly Hall STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: random-art-returns-to-okelly-hall CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 05/13/2010 07:59:45 AM ----BODY: <p>I've documented on this blog the work to renovate the second floor of O'Kelly Hall where the Department of History now resides. Most of this has come from a well-meaning, but misguided efforts to impose corporate order on a creative space. (For more see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/ok elly-graffiti-under-erasure.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/09/fr om-merrifield-to-okelly.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/ma king-the-professional-office.html">here</a>)</p> <p>So, I was ecstatic yesterday morning to see the first reappearing of public art in the newly renovated second floor of O'Kelly. It appeared above the wood "accent line", in a little awkward space below the sloping ceiling of a stair well. It's a modest start. I have no idea who did it. But it is fantastic to see something public and creative in the newly sanitized O'Kelly hall way.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ed89d7cb970b -pi" width="200" height="334" alt="201005130746.jpg" />&nbsp;&nbsp;<img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ed89d7d3970b -pi" width="200" height="334" alt="201005130752.jpg" />&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p style="text-align: left;">I feel myself becoming more creative and less corporate already. Now back to grading.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla Koutsopetria 2010 Newsletter STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-2010-newsletter CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/12/2010 08:41:38 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the casualties of this year's hectic schedule was the PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project Newsletter. Each year, the PKAP directors produced the venerable newsletter and printed it out, in color no less, on paper. But this year, with <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/">Scott Moore</a> being department chair in History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> frantically working on two books with a newborn in the house, and my typical hectic schedule (with seems somewhat lame in comparison), the newsletter did not appear in paper form.</p> <p>But, we'd be remiss if we didn't keep our PKAP Public appraised of our winter work and summer plans.</p> <p><b><i>Summer 2009</i></b></p> <p>The 2009 field season was our most successful to date. Our main focus was our continued work on a series of soundings at Pyla-<i>Vigla</i> and Pyla<i>Kokkinokremos</i>. On Vigla, <b>Prof. Dimitri Nakassis</b> assisted by David Pettegrew and <b>Brandon Olson</b> (Penn State) directed soundings designed to establish the date of the fortification wall discovered in 2007 and to try to learn more about the maze of walls across the interior of the plateau. While we were not able to date the fortifications with any precision despite moving over 2 m of earth, we were able to establish that the structures across the interior of the Vigla plateau were most likely domestic in nature and had an important phase dating to the Hellenistic period. <b>Michael Brown</b> and <b>Dr. Sarah Costello</b> (University of Houston) opened two soundings on Pyla<i>Kokkinokremos</i> in an effort to continued to clarify the function, chronology, and organization of this Late Bronze Age site. Michael directed the research at this site and it will appear in his University of Edinburgh dissertation which should be completed this summer. We also returned to excavations at Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i> which had been begun almost 20 years earlier by <b>Dr. Maria Hadicosti</b>. We sought to determine the phasing and chronology of a collapsed room apparently associated with an Early Christian basilica complex. <b>Dr. Sarah Lepinski</b> and graduate student <b>Dallas Deforest</b> (Ohio State) expanded two earlier trenches and revealed multiple episodes of destruction and repair at the site.</p> <p>We could not have accomplished our work across all three sites without the help of a gaggle of Messiah College undergraduates: <b>Melissa, Becky, Kyle, Nick, Courtney, Rachel, Caitlin, Matt,</b> and the inimitable <b>Alex</b>. This group was joined by <b>Jon Crowley</b>, a three year PKAP veteran from IUP and <b>Paul Ferderer</b> a graduate student from UND.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013480b717a6970c -pi" width="480" height="319" alt="201005120837.jpg" /></p>

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<p>We also had the assistance of <b>Prof. Beverly Chairulli</b> and her remarkable Ground Penetrating Radar rig. While we still await the final results of her work at Vigla and across a series of survey units with high density artifact scatters some 300 m to the north of Vigla, we are optimistic that these will enable not only to discover new activity areas in the Pyla<i>Kousopetria</i> region, but also to show that our modest soundings represent small windows into the extensive and still unexcavated remains. By using GPR (along with earlier seasons of resistivity and intensive survey), we have been able to learn a significant amount of information about the sites in our region, while only excavating small areas.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013480b717b6970c -pi" width="480" height="240" alt="201005120749.jpg" /> <i><br /></i></p> <p style="text-align: left;"><b>Susan Caraher</b> worked not only in the field each day, but also collaborated with Sarah Costello to keep artifacts moving through processing at the museum storerooms in an orderly way. Without the care of our registrars data collected from the field would be lost. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>As anyone who follows this blog knows, we continued our Artist-in-Residence program with <b>Ryan Stander</b>, an M.F.A. student in photography from UND (for more on them see below!) . The video work of <b>Ian Ragsdale</b> complemented Ryan's spectacular photographs and we look forward to the third installment of the PKAP documentary series this coming fall!</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2013480b71792970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="201005120800.jpg" /> <i><br /></i></p> <p>Last, but not least, graduate student <b>Dalton Little</b> (UND) worked with us as camp manager and cook bringing his own unique brand of cranky efficiency to the project. Ian's wife <b>Randi</b> also joined the PKAP team and helped with all manner of archaeological and child care related tasks necessary to keep the project running smoothly.</p> <p><b><i>Winter 2009-2010</i></b></p> <p>This has been a particularly hectic summer for most members of the PKAP team. Not only was Michael Brown frantically working to complete his dissertation, but rest of the PKAP team began the process of writing up the results of our 7 years of field work and study. As a result, we now have first drafts of 3 or 4 substantive chapters completed for the final publication of our work in the Pyla-Koutsopetria micro-region.<br /></p> <p>We also made significant strides in entering and processing the massive quantity of archaeological data recorded in the field over the past 7 seasons. A diligent group of interns keyed and collated data in the Working Group in Digital and New Media laboratory on the UND campus. As a result, we have completely digitized the results of our survey and our excavation notebooks. So, PKAP researchers can now access both images of the paper copies produced in the field and the keyed version of the same data into a relational database. Over next few months we hope to have the remainder of our finds keyed into our ever expan ding finds database, as well as the linked to our massive collection of both site and artifact photographs.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ed83c97c970b -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="201005120825.jpg" style="padding-bottom:0px;" /></p> <p style="text-align: left;">The winter of 2009-2010 also saw the exhibition of Topos/Chora, the work of Ryan Stander our artist-in-residence. Again helped by a team from the Working Group in Digital and New Media, we helped Ryan produce a gallery show at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks, but also created a more

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permanent online gallery of his photographs from Cyprus accompanied by a series of essays, podcast interviews, and a special trailer of Ian Ragsdale's forthcoming documentary. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/exhibits/show/toposchora">Here's the link</a>.<br /></p> <p><i><b>Summer 2010</b></i><br /></p> <p>This summer, we plan to have much smaller team accompanying us to Cyprus. While we will still bring together students from Messiah College, IUP, and UND, and researchers from across the U.S. and Canada, we will focus our energies on completing the documentation of the finds from the various soundings excavated over the past 2 years. Scott who has played more of a supporting role the past few years will take center stage and direct the work at the Museum. Since Susan Caraher won't be joining us this year, this will involve not only setting research priorities, but also making sure that artifacts move through the museum in an orderly way.</p> <p>While this can sound like boring work (compared to the excitement of excavating), the chances of discovering something really exciting is, in fact, every bit as high. A single sherd can change the dating of an entire building and a link our small site on the Cypriot coast to trade networks that span the entire Mediterranean.</p> <p>As per usual, we'll keep the PKAP Public up-to-date with blog posts, tweets, and podcasts from the field. We'll make an announcement here when the our little army of bloggers begin to produce content again! So, stay tuned!&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Greece in Two Conferences STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: greece-in-two-conferences CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 05/11/2010 08:10:51 AM ----BODY: <p>Here are two cool conferences to fire the imagination.</p> <p>First, the Gennadius library will host a conference entitled "Philhellenism, Philanthropy, or Political Convenience? American Archaeology in Greece" next week. The Gennadius web site provides information on <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/philhellenism-workshop-scope-

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and-content">the scope</a>, <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/philhellenism-workshoplist">the speakers</a>, and <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/philhellenism-workshopabstracts">the abstracts</a>. As one might expect the American School Director, Jack Davis, and the School's Archivist, Natalia Bogeikoff-Brogan, have assembled an impressive group to talk about the deeply intertwined phenomena of philanthropy, philhellenism, and archaeology. I suspect that the ongoing events in Greece will provide this conference with an even more urgent backdrop. (Also check out the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/gennadius/eventDetails/mystrasidentities-and-perspectives/">one-day conference on Mistra</a> two days later!)</p> <p>Next fall, the University of Texas will host a conference called "<a href="https://webspace.utexas.edu/sjf365/CC3/Intro.html">Corinth in Contrast</a>". This is the third in a series of conferences focusing on the history and archaeological of Ancient Corinth. The first has appeared a book, called <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/urban-religion-in-romancorinth-interdisciplinary-approaches/">Urban Religion in Roman Corinth</a><span style="font-style: normal;">, and I suspect that the <a href="http://www.utexas.edu/research/pasp/corinth/index.html">second conference</a> is a forthcoming publication</span></i>. I am among those invited to give a paper which I have tentatively entitled, "The Ambivalent Landscape of Christian Corinth: the Archaeology of Place, Theology, and Politics in a Late Antique City". As the conference is centered around:</p> <blockquote> <p>"the polarities that we often use to characterize forms of inequality—urban/rural, male/female, Greek/Roman, rich/poor, pagan/Christian, Jew/Gentile, monotheist/polytheist, slave/free, high/low status, etc. Participants are also encouraged to move beyond these polarities by 1) bringing forward new data; 2) reexamining existing data; 3) showing connections between different forms of inequality; and/or 4) applying new methods or theories. The focus on Corinth should allow us to produce more nuanced appraisals and more complicated categories of analysis. "</p> </blockquote> <p>Since ambivalence is a viable opposite of polarity, I think I should be able to speak to the major themes of the conference.</p> <p>It's also exciting to see that there will be a PKAP contingent including David Pettegrew and Sarah Lepinski as well as Sarah James who is one of the conference's organizers and an honorary PKAP member by marriage. The CorinthKoutsopetria Axis is a intellectual alliance to be reckoned with!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching with Twitter: An Interim Report

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-with-twitter-an-interim-report CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 05/10/2010 09:38:23 AM ----BODY: <p>I've just completed my first large scale experiments with integrating Twitter into my classroom. For those who don't regularly follow this blog, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/te aching-with-twitter-tuesday.html">I used Twitter in my 100 level Western Civilization at the University of North Dakota</a>. The class met once a week, at night, for two hours and twenty minutes. Most of the students are freshmen and sophomores, with a spattering of juniors and seniors typically in the hard sciences or engineering. The two biggest problems in the class are poor attendance (I am competing with Lost and, to be blunt, the class has a vigorous in-class writing component and perhaps not the most interesting lectures) and a tendency among students to disengage sometime over the course of the semester. Because the class meets only once a week and attendance is a struggle, students tend to disengage from the class and vanish into the night until the midterm or final forces them to re-engage, but at that point it is sometimes too late to get back into the swing of things, make up myriad missed assignment, and get a decent grade in what is otherwise a fairly easy class.</p> <p><i><span style="font-style: normal;">Twitter seemed one way to try to engage the students on the days when my one-day-a-week, 100 level class is probably the furthest thing from their minds. So, I created a Twitter page and began to Tweet regularly. Over the course of the semester, this account acquired 111 followers, all students in my class, or over 75% of all the students in the class. Signing up for Twitter was voluntary, although I motivated the students with a vague promise to make it work the 3 minutes necessary to sign up. Over the course of the semester, I posted 152 Tweets (approximately 10 per week) which represent both public tweets and responses to student tweets. I posted several scheduled tweets each week. Generally, I'd post a quick recap to the class on Wednesday, I'd post weekly announcements on Thursday, and on Friday I would post some kind of trivia questions on my world famous "Trivia Friday". 90% of the Tweets were directly concerning the class. The other 10% of the Tweets concerned campus activities or current events (e.g. the death of Guru, et c.) that touched loosely on classroom conversations.</span></i></p> <p>I also experimented with using Twitter to provide a back channel in class. Using weekly hashtags (#H101W3 = History 101 Week 3), I encouraged students in the lecture style class to post questions or comments during class. I then had an active version of <a href="http://www.tweetdeck.com/">Tweetdeck</a> on the classroom computer on which I could check students tweets or project them on the screen during my lecture. Most, if not all, of the students in the class have cell phones and many (perhaps 30%) had laptops in class.</p> <p>While I was not disappointed with the Twitter experiment -- after all it involved only a modest time commitment on my part (in general, a tweet took me less than 2 minutes to write so less than 20 minutes per week on average) -only a tiny fraction of my students embraced it and it did not appear to have any positive (or negative!) impact on the class. Here are some observations:</p>

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<p>1. UND Students are not on Twitter. While I did not sample the entire class, my random sample of 25 students show that only 5 of this group use Twitter in a regular way and I suspect that the number of regular Twitter users in my class is even lower. So, Twitter is not built into these students' information ecosystem. My morning routine involves starting Tweetdeck and scrolling quickly through my Tweets, but this seems unlikely to be the case for our students. As a result, Twitter appeared to the students as "something extra" and, as a result, an inconvenience rather than a helpful supplement to their already existing information network. As I have discussed elsewhere on this blog, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/05/gr ading-detroit-and-student-resistence.html">students resist anything that they see as a work increase</a>, even if we make clear how these additional "burdens" advance learning objectives.</p> <p>2. Shared Commitment. Twitter works best within a community of people with a shared commitment to engaging one another and the topics at hand. In other words, Twitter is not a particularly efficient tool for one-to-one communication between faculty and a student or it is at least no better than email. Twitter facilitates community interaction in which students can respond to one another or interact with each other in a public way. Because my class only met once a week in a lecture hall setting, had an prevalent lecture component, was rather large (100+), and encompassed a wide range of students of different academic years and standings, there was little existing community for Twitter to facilitate. As a result, students did not, in general, respond to each other, but penned tweets generally directed toward me and usually in response to a specific query. A parallel trend appears in my efforts to encourage the use of Blackboard's wiki tool to produce study guides and class notes. A few students work hard to create a nice set of notes, and the rest of the class become passive consumers. Despite the bribe of points, there is no shared commitment to the class that would support the collective effort to create a body of notes. Neither Twitter nor the Wiki is enough to create community.</p> <p>3. Techniques. Despite my efforts to give the students plenty of instruction on how to use Twitter, my students still struggled with things like hashtags (used to mark posts as belonging to a particular week or lecture), and we never used retweets or replies. This contributed to the one-way nature of the Twitter conversations especially as I was the only one responding to anyone in the class.</p> <p>4. Technology. Finally, students compartmentalize technology. Most of the tweets in my class come from "the web" which I assume means through either their desktop or laptop computer as opposed to a mobile device like a phone or smartphone. In other words, despite the recent concerted interest to integrate social media with mobile devices, very few tweets and almost none from first time Twitter users came from phones (either as text message or Android/WinMo based apps -- we do not have iPhones here in North Dakota). This was disappointing because I thought Twitter would be widely accessible from mobile phones and, as a result, sufficient democratized not to leave less technophilic students at a disadvantage. Another technological issue that arose was the slow speed of Twitter searches made it hard to capture Tweets on specific lectures during class time. As a result, students were not able to create a realtime back channel, but only one delayed by 10 to 15 minutes which over the course of a 2 hour class is significant.</p> <p>So, while my first experiments with Twitter in the class did not produce the social media plus education utopia that I had hoped, it did highlight certain weaknesses in the class as I now teach it. I need to work to create more of a community in the large lecture class if I want to tap into this community with tools like Twitter or wikis. These tools do not create the sense of community,

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but only serve to manage it. At the same time, I need to find ways to communicate the technical aspects of Twitter more effectively so that students can maximize the effectiveness of the medium.</p> <p>I am excited about the prospect of integrating Twitter into the online version of my Western Civilization I courses this fall and spring. Since the students already expect to interact with me and their fellow students through an online medium, there might be a greater sense of value assigned to the simple Twitter interface (as compared to the more cumbersome blackboard interface).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 64.134.241.231 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 05/10/2010 01:41:45 PM very interesting ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: sauerkraut EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 98.235.97.184 URL: http://run4chocolate.wordpress.com DATE: 05/20/2010 08:19:04 PM Many people do not use twitter from mobile devices because they believe it involved extra payment for data. At least that's been my experience. And some, ie, me, prefer the simplicity of tweeting from the docking station. There's too much other stuff which needs remembering besides the steps needed to get each app up and running, and working. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostas Arvanitis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 82.6.78.121 URL: http://digitalheritage.wordpress.com DATE: 05/29/2010 06:55:58 AM Thanks for sharing this; very interesting indeed! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits

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CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 05/07/2010 09:13:57 AM ----BODY: <p>It's a rainy and maybe even snowy Friday morning for my Varia.</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://mattgemmell.com/2010/04/26/creative-space-and-ipad">This is a cool review of the iPad</a>, and this makes me feel just <a href="http://mashable.com/2010/05/06/ipad-owner-demographics/">a bit guilt about owning one</a>.</li> <li>ProfHacker always <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/How-to-GradeStudents-Class/23726/">has clever, interesting, and useful stuff</a>. Although I think their <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Open-Thread-Wednesday/23448/">Open Thread Wednesday</a>, should be Open Thread Thursday.</li> <li><a href="http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/athens_greece">The events in Greece this past week</a> (really this past year) are really sad and stressful. I hope that the country finds ways a way out of its difficult time with a minimum of violence and in a way that is equitable for all of Greek society. (And I do realize that this statement is banal and a cop-out)</li> <li>While I write this, I'm listening to Australia v. India, and <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/world-twenty202010/engine/current/match/412691.html">Australia is off to a good start</a>. (Right now, Australia has launched three balls outside of the grounds, but Shane Watson just got out.)</li> <li>I'm tempted to try to figure out <a href="http://prezi.com/">an excuse to use Prezi</a>.</li> <li>I'm pretty happy with my new HTC Incredible, but Android will take some getting used to. I can't quite figure out how to integrate Google Docs with Android yet. Any tips?</li> <li>I keep forgetting to post a link to this good, local blog: <a href="http://philosophyinpubliclife.blogspot.com/">Philosophical Questions Every Day</a>.</li> <li>A nice short post on <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/social-networks-and-highereducation-whos-doing-it/">Social Networks and Higher Ed with a local focus</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://nickname.und.edu/logo/">More on the Logo and Nickname</a> (and this will be endless). The good thing is that there will be more committees.</li> <li><a href="http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/">We can now experiment with embedding tweets in blog posts</a>.</li> <li>If you haven't checked out <a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/firstyear-reflections/">our new series of blog posts on Teaching Thursday</a> featuring the reflections of first year faculty here at UND, you should.</li>

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<li>This is reading and review day!</li> </ul><!-- end of tweet --> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: First Year Reflections at Teaching Thursday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: first-year-reflections-at-teaching-thursday CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 05/06/2010 07:58:42 AM ----BODY: <p>I'm going to shift the attention from my blog to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a> where we will begin a series of posts by first year faculty at the University of North Dakota. These posts capture both the energy of first year faculty, but also (and more importantly) the new perspectives on how to teach on our campus.</p> <p>The last few weeks have been really productive for the Teaching Thursday "team" (which is basically me). We've come up with some great ideas for the blog new year that will see it expand from one day a week to a new goal of 10 posts a month. But for that Teaching Thursday excitement, stay tuned.</p> <p>For now, head over to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a> and check out the first post of our <a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/first-year-reflections/">First Year Reflections</a> series.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Islands in the Corinthian Gulf: Some Archaeological Data

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: islands-in-the-corinthian-gulf-some-archaeological-data CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 05/05/2010 02:48:31 PM ----BODY: <p>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 <em>DXAE </em>and <em>Byzantine Studies </em>(<a href="http://www.zotero.org/billcaraher/items/126637709">here</a> and <a href="http://www.zotero.org/billcaraher/items/126638161">here</a>)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ed475055970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ed4750d5970b -pi" width="400" height="307"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ed475199970 b-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348079b527970c -pi" width="400" height="307"></a> </p> <p align="left">This continues my work to move the data collected over the course of the Ohio Boeotia Expedition to digital form.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Right now, however, all I have is the finds data.</p> <p align="left">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.&nbsp; In Gregory's 1986 publication, he reports that he surveyed 138,000 m2 with a sample area of 207 m2.&nbsp; This produced 494 artifacts (and an overall density of 2.39 m2 or an imposing 23,864 artifacts per ha).&nbsp; That is impressive artifact density despite the relatively small sample.&nbsp; 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".&nbsp; As Gregory noted in publication, the vast majority of artifacts date to the Late Roman to Byzantine period.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p> <p align="left">Also interesting is the quantity of later material on this rather rough and rugged island.&nbsp; The Byzantine period is substantially represented and some of the

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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.&nbsp; 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).</p> <p align="left">Even later still, it appear there was some Ottoman period activity on this island as "Turkish" period glazed wares appear in the assemblage.&nbsp; It will be very useful to correlate this material with recent studies of Ottoman period activities on the nearby mainland.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Even into the modern period small quantities of table ware appear alongside other evidence of modern activities like shell-casings.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">Most striking of all, perhaps, is that dearth of clearly identified earlier material especially compared the seemingly vigorous landscapes of the nearby mainland.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Even a relatively rugged island, then, seems to show signs of the Late Roman economic and demographic boom in Greece.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blogging and Being Local STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: blogging-and-being-local CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 05/04/2010 08:20:58 AM ----BODY: <p>This past week, a public records request went out on campus for all of our syllabi for the Spring and Fall 2010. My first thought was: if they really want my syllabi or to have an idea what I am teaching in my classes they should just go to my blog or web site. Putting aside the inefficiency of doing that for every faculty member across campus, it made me think a bit about how blogging made our work at the university more transparent and how important this could be in a day-in-age when the university, and public education more broadly, is under

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the duel threat of declining resources and elevated (and perhaps unrealistic) expectations.</p> <p>I was asked some months ago by a person in our admissions office here, what is was, exactly, that I did. After recovering briefly from the shock that this person would not be intimately familiar with my brilliant academic career (cough, cough), I tried to explain why it was that I needed to be in my office over the weekend and what it meant when I said that I was swamped by data.</p> <p>More recently, I've encouraged my public history students to write <a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/">a blog, and they have, more or less, here</a>. One of the blog posts considers the difficulty in understanding community in the age of internet and easy travel. We tend to imagine communities that revolve around shared values or even experiences rather than any physical proximity. As a result, it is not only possible, but likely that someone in the admissions office here would not know what people at the university did even though they worked less than 200 m from their offices. On the other hand, it is likely that this individual knows well what folks in the admission offices at other universities around the country or the world do.</p> <p>Finally, there is a recent initiative on campus to engage more fully with the local community. This is partially a response to the flap over the name and logo here, but it may also be a genuine effort to bridge the gap between the "town and gown" and to recognize our common ground and our shared resources</p> <p>These conversations got me thinking about how my blogs function within our spatially local community and whether they serve as a point of contact between people here in Grand Forks, in North Dakota or even just at my home university. <a href="http://lancasterarchitecture.wordpress.com/">A blog</a> authored by a class offered by Kostis Kourelis, for example, has succeeded in helping bridge the gap between his home university (Franklin and Marshall College) and t<a href="http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/252906">he community in Lancaster</a>. My blog -- with its tendency to focus on Mediterranean archaeology -- has not captured the public attention as effectively.</p> <p><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>, on the other hand, was explicitly designed for the University of North Dakota community tends to be read as much by folks elsewhere as by folks here on campus. While this accomplishes the goal of improving the transparency of university level teaching methods, it does not necessarily present what is happening here on campus in a way that is of interest to the local community or in a way that attracts to community's attention.</p> <p>Recent interest in geolocating and enhanced reality as major additions to the social media arsenal will certainly improve our ability to local our blogs spatially. Services like <a href="http://foursquare.com/">Foursquare</a> already leverage the social network of Twitter and GPS receivers built into new mobile phones to establish spatially local connections on the internet. Enhanced reality applications like <a href="http://www.layar.com/">Layar</a> enables an individual to view a very simple "enhanced reality" and a GIS interface updated in real time to view the social media, local businesses, and even tags left by other users embedded in space. In the near future, people will be able to locate our blogs spatially and use space to mark out a relationship to a community. In fact, our ability to localize our blogs will make it easier (it is, of course, possible now) to demonstrate (or even produce) relationships between the specific place where the blog is located (or composed, hosted, or even "anchored") and places discussed by the blogger.</p> <p>The advantage of our ability to embed our blogs within real, lived space is that we will be better able to recognize the place of the new media in relation to our local selves. Our work will continue to be available and of interest to anyone with access to the World Wide Interwebs, but we'll better be able to

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localize ourselves spatially and demonstrate the global links present in to our local, lived, communities.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Grading, Detroit, and Student Resistence STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: grading-detroit-and-student-resistence CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 05/03/2010 08:43:22 AM ----BODY: <p>Last week I juxtaposed reading <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/detroit-i-do-mind-dying/oclc/39157532">D. Georgakas' and M. Surkin's <i>Detroit: I do mind dying</i></a> (New York 1975) and grading a stack of lower division undergraduate papers. This got me thinking back to some posts from a couple months ago where I speculated that students disregard particular sets of instructions as a form of resistance. Georgakas and Surkin's work looks at the organization of resistance particularly among minority (mostly African-American) auto workers in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They explore the rhetorical of the day and demonstrate the pervasive overlap between developing radical ideologies and the institutions and realities which promoted these positions. In their hands, grass-roots resistance to the dangerous, unrewarding, and soul-crushing work on the Detroit assembly line became the foundations for a genuine radical consciousness.</p> <p>I am not going to argue that our students are on a course to a radical consciousness through their resistance to what they perceive to be an oppressive educational regime, but I will suggest that some of the patterns of student behaviors are sufficiently consistent to be regarded - from the perspective of behavior alone - as resistance. I'll admit that my sample is small, but to my mind this has the benefit of capturing the "situatedness" of the acts of resistance. Moreover, I'll contend that the forms of resistance are not merely the gap between teaching and learning that is typical of educational environments.</p> <p>Over the last three weeks, I've encountered three forms of resistance.</p> <p>1. The contraction. I insist that students do not use contractions in their writing. As a result, contractions have proliferated. They are particularly common in the opening paragraphs of papers.</p> <p>2. Capitalization. I have begged students to observe the rules of capitalization and even conceded the "obscure" rules like whether to capitalize proper terms like "the crusades". As a result, students have stopped

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capitalizing proper names, names of cities, and in some cases, even the first person pronoun.</p> <p>3. Attendance. Over the last three weeks, I asked the students in my lower division, major's course, to make it appoint to attend the final month of the semester where we will workshop writing and focus on preparing the final paper. The next class, my attendance dropped by over 60% and the following three weeks attendance was at its lowest point ever. Despite having taught for close to a decade, I can't help feeling that asking students to attend constituted a kind of rookie mistake.</p> <p>All three of these issues are not earthshaking forms of resistance. My students do not (as a rule) plagiarize, are polite and (generally) conscientious, do not complain in class about workload or teaching philosophy, and are as engaged in the learning process as you might expect students to be at the 100 and 200 level. In other words, their reluctance to follow seemingly simple guidelines are not symptomatic of an adversarial relationship between "management" and "labor". Instead, I am regarding these measures as lines in the sand gestures marking off the limits of my authority and the students' willingness to embrace my expectations. I suspect that I could get students to follow these guidelines with draconian measures (by definition out of the proportion to the significance of the rule being enforced), but I suspect that this would just displace student resistance elsewhere (which in the case of class attendance would probably be a good thing).</p> <p>In short, I've come to expect resistance to certain policies, and have noted that they tend to coalesce around more marginal educational goals rather than core concepts of the course. This distinguishes it from the various large-scale union actions documented by Georgakas and Surkin, and places student resistance in another category of resistance in which various kinds of work-slowdowns and almost bureaucratized obstructions establish the limits of engagement in shared goals.</p> <p>Of course identifying places and types of resistance places faculty in the potentially awkward position of seeing themselves as negotiators in the learning process between the content (and expectations of whatever groups manage the measurable learning outcome) and the student who ultimately the the final arbiter in whether any learning expectation is reasonable. While we have seen over the past few months the worse case scenario, when entire faculties (at the secondary level) are let go after failing to negotiate the divergent expectations successfully. At the university level, where students are adults, student resistance must be taken serious and articulated as active behavior with the potential to disrupt both the expectations of management and, ultimately, if not resolved, the functioning of society and the economy.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Assorted Things STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: assorted-things CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 04/30/2010 09:43:50 AM ----BODY: <p>So, if you missed my talk yesterday, you can read it <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/an other-better-attempt-at-dream-archaeology.html">here</a>.</p> <p>And, if you missed a pretty interesting Teaching Thursday, you can read it <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/04/29/interdisciplinary-teaching-as-achimera/">here</a>.</p> <p>I have a pretty good weekend ahead my as I have tiny gap in my schedule which should allow me do to finish up some odds and ends before the end of the semester and the build up to the Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i> Archaeological Project season.</p> <p>In the meantime, I'll write letters of recommendation, read <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=gNdglUBHSUC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Kristeva+Abject&amp;hl=en&amp;ei=jevaS 4bGE4nQM4_g3JMB&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=book_result&amp;ct=result&amp;resnum=1&amp;ved=0 CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">some Kristeva</a>, read some of the essays in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/hellenisms-culture-identityand-ethnicity-from-antiquity-to-modernity/oclc/192048201">K. Zacharia's edited volume,</a> <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/hellenisms-cultureidentity-and-ethnicity-from-antiquity-tomodernity/oclc/192048201">Hellenisms</a><span style="font-style: normal;">, work on a new edited volume project, put the finishing touches on an <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/ea rly-chrsitian-baptisteries-a-short-description.html">encyclopedia article</a>, and finish <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/ar chaeological-ethnography-part-2.html">a book review</a>.</span></i></p> <p>And, of course, listen to some of the World Twenty20 and watch the night race at Richmond.</p> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Another, Better Attempt at Dream Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS:

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ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: another-better-attempt-at-dream-archaeology CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 04/29/2010 08:29:48 AM ----BODY: <p>For those of you in the Grand Forks Metropolitan Area this evening, I am giving a talk at the North Dakota Museum of Art in the Faculty Lecture Series. The talk starts at 4:30 with a reception from 4:00. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/ip ads-powerpoint-and-agency.html">Considering my post yesterday</a>, I promise to include only a few illustrative slides using The Powerpointer.</p> <p>My talk is entitled Dream Archaeology and represents the third version of my efforts to come to terms with this subject. Unlike earlier versions, I think that I problematize my paper somewhat better and add a bit of flair (mostly because I am going to present it to relatively diverse audience). If you doubt my efforts to make my paper better you can (although I don't recommend it) <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WorkingPapers/Dream%20Archaeolo gy_Working_Nov2008.pdf">read the first draft here</a>, <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/29361884/Dream-Archaeology-2009">read the second draft here</a>, and contemplate my third draft below:</p><a title="View Caraher Dream Archaeology 2010 on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/30697799/Caraher-Dream-Archaeology-2010" style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-systemfont: none; display: block; text-decoration: underline;">Caraher Dream Archaeology 2010</a> <object id="doc_487269490776634" name="doc_487269490776634" height="600" width="100%" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" style="outline:none;"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /> <param name="wmode" value="opaque" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=30697799&amp;access_key=key21c1iybbuqhac3sqcieh&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" /> <embed id="doc_487269490776634" name="doc_487269490776634" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=30697799&amp;access _key=key-21c1iybbuqhac3sqcieh&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" type="application/xshockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="600" width="100%" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" /> </object> &nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> For more on Dream Archaeology without leaving the comfortable informality of the blog, see below: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/dr eams-in-ravenna.htm">Dreams in Ravenna</a><br /> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr eam-archaeology-in-the-early-christian-west.html">Dream Archaeology in the Early

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Christian West<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-dreams-rel.html">Blindness, Dreams, and Relics<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-dreams-rel.html">More Dreams, Religion, and Archaeology<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-byzantine.html">More Byzantine Dreams...<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/dr eams-pausania.html">Dreams, Pausanias, and Archaeology<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">Kozani</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: iPads, Powerpoint, and Agency STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: ipads-powerpoint-and-agency CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 04/28/2010 08:31:19 AM ----BODY: <p>There two curious articles published yesterday. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?th&amp;emc=th">O ne was about Powerpoint</a> (or as I call it The Powerpointer) in the <i>New York Times</i> (and picked up by the <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/PowerlessPoint/23518/"><i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i>'s Brainstorm blog</a>). The prevalence of Powerpoint in military briefings has apparently reached epidemic levels and many folks within the military are saying that the reliance on Powerpoint to communicate information not only makes the seemingly endless stream of briefings debilitatingly boring, but also might impair the ability to make good decisions. In fact, one military official argued that Powerpoint is responsible for creating "the illusion of understanding and illusion of control" in the U.S. Military. Let's hope that this is hyperbole. What is clear, however, is that creating, presenting, and enduring Powerpoint shows takes a tremendous amount of time, and a significant part of that time is spent dealing (in both good and bad ways) with Powerpoint rather than dealing with content of the Powerpoint presentation. This would seem to be a perfect example of technology having agency; Powerpoint creates a culture that depends upon the use of Powerpoint for

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its daily work, basic communication patterns, and ultimately its decisions making.</p> <p><a href="http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2010/apple-and-censoringeducation/">The other article appeared at the blog academHacK</a> and questioned the value of the iPad in higher education. David Parry argued that Apple's practice of censoring apps that do not coincide with rather ambiguous and strictly enforced views on propriety offers a serious threat to the utility of the iPad in the context of Higher Education. In large part, Parry's argument was focused on the possibility that Apple would censor textbooks that appear as apps on the device. This might happen, of course, but it seems to me another version of a standard complaint: Apple's device is too limited and limiting to be useful in a university classroom. Whether it is content creation, app censorship, the devices inability to run Flash, or even the inflexible and relatively hack-proof operating system, digital humanists have begun to rally against the iPad as another example of the things wrong with how the computer industry approaches academia. The fear is that the potential of the iPad will ultimately lull us into accepting its limitations and, as a result, limiting the potential for genuinely creative intersection of technology and learning. In other words, the iPad promotes a coarsely transactional approach to teaching and learning and facilitates the highly commodified packets of knowledge move from a relatively inflexible content provider to consumer.</p> <p>Both of these arguments postulate that the object (Powerpoint and the iPad) exert control over the user in particularly unsubtle ways. Powerpoint somehow makes military briefings boring or suspends critical inquiry. iPads create apparently insurmountable barriers between content consumers (students) and content producers. A little Bruno Latour could go a long way in this context. Both the iPad and Powerpoint exist in a particular network of relations that both influence how this technology is used and will be used. To assume that the iPad will be used on University campuses without some kind of compromise regarding its flexibility and issues of censorship marginalizes the power of university faculty to find or create work arounds, to reject poorly designed devices (just like many faculty members reject poorly designed textbooks or poorly conceived website), or to create pedagogical environments where the strengths of the iPad shine and its limitations are accommodated without sacrificing the teaching or learning objectives.</p> <p>The same can be said for the Powerpointer. Compared to the tedious practice of preparing, creating, and maintaining collections of photographic slides, The Powerpointer is revolutionary. Moreover, in a critical environment like the university or the military, it can be controlled. Boring Powerpoint presentations likely reflect boring lectures, unnecessary briefings, and a culture of tedium rather than actually producing them. In fact, it may be that The Powerpointer manifests agency by allowing us to recognize the inefficiency of a particular culture or practice of which it is a part.</p> <p>It is always disappointing to see a piece of technology blamed for its limitations as if technology existed outside the human networks in which it is used. Recognizing the role of technology in establish expectations is a valid form of critique, but a <i>symmetrical</i> approach to understanding technology demands that we give equal consideration to the character of the networks in which the technology will function.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Damnatio Memoriae and The Ralph STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: damnatio-memoriae-and-the-ralph CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 04/27/2010 07:28:48 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the more interesting sub-plots in the ongoing University of North Dakota logo and nickname scandal is the fate of the mighty Ralph Engelstad Area. This monumental structure has hosted UND Ice Hockey games for the past 10 years. As <a href="http://www.theralph.com/asp/default.asp?p=13">its web site</a> puts it (drinking deeply of the ancient art of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis">ekphrasis</a>): "It's impossible to describe the $104+ million Ralph Engelstad Arena in just a words, but it is described by many as the 'finest facility of its kind in the world.'" In short, it is a lovely facility, built by an eccentric donor who built the arena and established it it as a separate entity from the University. A not unbiased description of the most controversial element of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Engelstad">Ralph Engelstad's life appears in wikipedia</a>.</p> <p>In recent years, the defining feature of The Ralph (as it's affectionately known) are the thousands of images of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UNDsiouxlogo.png">Fighting Sioux logo</a> including a massive one in inlaid granite on the floor of the lobby. By all accounts, the almost ubiquitous use of the logo was intentional, and the controversy surrounding the logo threatened to derail the construction of the building.</p> <p>Now with the logo and nickname almost certainly put to rest, the University, the State, and the NCAA are stuck with this monumental building emblazoned with thousands of symbols of the Fighting Sioux. Fortunately, the West has several well-established traditions for dealing with just this kind of controversy. The best known perhaps is <i>damnatio memoriae</i>, or the damnation of the memory of an individual. Practiced by the Romans for centuries, this involves the removing of the name and image of an individual who had fallen afoul of popular or political favor. Typically this occurred after the individual's death. In practical terms this involved erasing the name and often times image of the individual physically from monuments. In fact, this typically occurred among the elite, political, classes and, as a result, almost always had a monumental component. In many cases, the practice of damnatio preserved just enough of the name of the discredited individual to remind a viewer of that individual's fate. So it did not involve eradicating the individual from all public memory as much as preserving some tiny fragment of the individual to remind the public of that individual's fall into dishonor. In the ruthless and competitive world of

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Imperial Roman domestic politics, it was not enough to defeat one's opponent. The memory of that defeat</p> <p>The practice of <i>damnatio memoriae</i> found a subtle variation during the Christian period when groups of Christians sought to suppress the practice of paganism. Like in Roman politics, the Christian goal was not necessarily to defeat the pagans. In fact, most Christians thought that the power of the old gods had suffered defeat at the time of the incarnation (i.e. when Jesus, the son of God, came to earth). Christians in the 4th-6th centuries, then, were merely the mopping up operation. That being said, there are numerous incidents where Christians sought to mark the defeat of the pagan gods through the symbolically charged destruction of their temples and symbols. In one of my favorites from Mark the Deacon's Life of Porphyry of Gaza, architectural fragments from the burned and desecrated temple of Zeus in Gaza (the Marneion) were used to pave the courtyard of the Christian church erected in its place, so that:</p> <blockquote> <p>"When, therefore, the ashes were carried away and all the abominations were destroyed, the rubbish that remained of the marble work of the Marneion, which they said was sacred, and in a place not to be entered, especially by women, this did the holy bishop resolve to lay down for a pavement before the temple outside in the street, that it might be trodden under foot not only of men, but also of women and dogs and swine and beasts. And this grieved the idolaters more than the burning of the temple. Wherefore the more part of them, especially the women, walk not upon the marbles even unto this day." <a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/porphyry.html">Mark the Deacon, <i>Vita Porphyrii</i>, 76</a>.</p> </blockquote> <p>In most cases, it was the desire to monumentalize one's memory (or one's causes) made <i>damnatio memormiae</i> possible. In this context, the problem of removing all the logos from The Ralph evaporates. In fact, keeping some of the logos present and visible (or at least obviously under erasure) will remind visitors of the controversy and, in particular, who lost and who won. (And it will remind all of us that at least part of this controversy has nothing to do with actual Sioux, and almost everything to do with the structure of power between donors, the NCAA, and the University community.)</p> <p>I've offered some more thoughts on the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/04/un d-the-logo-and-the-name.html">logo and nickname controversy here</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: BrianB EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.248 URL: DATE: 04/27/2010 10:46:11 AM

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Excellent entry! I love it when you tie the current world, especially locally, to antiquity. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Metadata Monday: 700 posts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: metadata-monday-700-posts CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Weblogs DATE: 04/26/2010 08:00:30 AM ----BODY: <p>This is my 700th blog post and so it seemed like a good time to aggregate and reflect on some metadata.</p> <p>The blogs received on average 79 page views a day and over its three year life I've had 87,657 page views. Over the past 120 days, however, I've had well over 100 page views a day. I set as a goal (and I am not really sure why I have goals for things like this) to have 100 page views a day; now that I have that, I think I'll aim for 1000 page views a week. I've had 373 comments over the lifetime of the blog. My bounce rate is a respectable 75.8%. The average time on site is 1 minute 13 seconds and visitors look at 1.50 pages.</p> <p>65% of my visitors are first time visitors and this has held pretty steady over the past couple of years. That means that 35% of you like what you read enough to come back! What's pretty cool is that over 20% of my visitors return more than 9 times.</p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecf66e79970b -pi" width="480" height="84" alt="201004260755.jpg" /><br /> </div> <p>Since my first post, I've had visitors from 149 countries with the US, Greece, the UK, Canada, Italy, Australia, France, Germany, Cyprus and Denmark as the top 10.</p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecf66e6a970b -pi" width="480" height="213" alt="201004260715.jpg" /><br /> </div> <p>I also have had visitors from all 50 states with California, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Florida, and New Jersey as the top 10.</p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecf66e59970b -pi" width="480" height="216" alt="201004260716.jpg" /><br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;">

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The top referring blogs are the usual suspects with some new additions: </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 1. <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/" title="Kostis Kourelis">ObjectsBuildings-Situations</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 2. <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/">Archaeology Magazine</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 3. <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 4. <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/">Grand Forks Life</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 5. <a href="http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/">Surprised by Time</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 6. <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 7. <a href="http://researchnewsinla.blogspot.com/">Research News in Late Antiquity</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 8. <a href="http://www.atrium-media.com/rogueclassicism/">Rogue Classicism</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 9. <a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/">Antiquated Vagaries</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> 10. <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Thanks to everyone who links to my blog. I love that this list of blog reflects so many of my research interests. I've also seen a pronounced uptick in referrals from both <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">Twitter</a> and Facebook. It seems that the social network is beginning to exert some influence on who reads my blog. </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> I haven't posted any browser and viewer data <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/me tadata-and-macintosh.html">since October 2009</a>, here's an update on that kind of thing since that post.

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</div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Operating Systems: </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Windows: 74.11% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Macintosh: 23.20% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Linux: 1.78% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> iPhone: 0.46% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> iPod: 0.08% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> iPad: 0.05% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Android: 0.03% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Windows continues to decline among the readers of my blog and Macintosh continues to grow. It's remarkable to think that from 2007-2008 Windows accounted for 82% of my readers and Macintosh only 16.5%! </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Browser: </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Firefox: 52.95% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> IE: 27.97% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Safari: 9.51% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Chrome: 6.14% </div> <div style="text-align: left;">

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Opera: 1.78% </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Firefox continues to be the most popular browser and by increasingly margins over Internet Explorer. It's remarkable that from 2007-2008, Internet Explorer accounted for 45.05% of traffic to my blog; now it accounts for less than 30%. Chrome continues to become more popular and, it would seem, that Opera has steadily become less popular. This is a shame since the newest Opera browser for Mac is a sound alternative to Safari and far better than Chrome for OS X. </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> As I noted last October, I do think that my statistics speak to the particular niche in academic culture that my blog occupies. Computer savvy archaeologists and historians probably gravitate toward Macs and use Firefox. </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Thanks for taking the time to visit this blog. I'm looking forward to the next 700 posts. </div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Evan Nelson EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.168.218 URL: DATE: 04/26/2010 09:11:20 AM Congrats on 700; that's a thing to be proud of, too. I sometimes wonder how much of the internet is blogs with less than ten posts. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Susan Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.203.228 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/susancaraher DATE: 04/26/2010 11:00:36 AM Noice One! That is quite an accomplishment - may there be many more posts!

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 04/23/2010 09:55:48 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a few quick hits on a beautiful Friday afternoon:</p> <p>First, check out this cool series on digital history and public history: <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/sharon/bracket/21st-century-public-history-parti/">Part 1 of 3</a>, <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/staff/sharon/bracket/21stcentury-public-history-part-ii/">Part 2 of 3</a>... And it complements Tom Scheinfeldt's recent post on <a href="http://www.foundhistory.org/2010/04/21/digital-history-and-the-publichistory-curriculum/">Digital History and the Public History Curriculum</a> at Found History.</p> <p>Kathy Nedergaard continues to write <a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/category/kathrynnedegaard/">interesting posts</a> from my Public History/Digital History Internship.</p> <p>We were effected by McAffocalypse this week. <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update--shutting-down-xpmachines/">The recaps is pretty interesting</a>.</p> <p>Are you excited that the <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/wt202010/content/series/412671.html?template=fixtu res">World 20/20 is in our time zone</a>?</p> <p>A good, practical list of advice for <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/04/22/strategies-and-tips-for-scholarlywriting-and-publications/">academic writing</a> on Teaching Thursday. We aspire to be a local versions of <a href="http://chronicle.com/blog/ProfHacker/27/">ProfHacker</a> which just moved over to the Chronicle of Higher Education's webpage.</p> <p>University of North Dakota ranked number 1 on <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/19/college-tuition-risk-public-personalfinance-tuition_2.html">Forbes' "Tuition Risk List"</a>. This meant that we were at least risk of a tuition increase. This may be a good thing for students, or it may not be.</p> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: New Additions to the Lakka Skoutara Archives STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: new-additions-to-the-lakka-skoutara-archives CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 04/22/2010 08:08:01 AM ----BODY: <p>We have added another series of photographs to our Omeka archive of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse?collection=4">archaeologica l and landscape photographs from Lakka Skoutara</a> in the southeastern Korinthia. Tim Gregory and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory took these photographs in the summer of 2009 and they were prepared for the archive by <a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/category/kathryn-nedegaard/">Kathy Nedergaard</a>, an intern at our <a href="http://digitalgateway.und.edu/">Working Group in Digital and New Media</a>. The archive is now over 650 images each with some amount of meta data (including the name of the photographer, date of the photo, short description of the feature, and some rudimentary tagging).</p> <p>These photographs feature alonia (threshing floors) and cisterns from the site. Both aloni and cisterns are common features in the Greek countryside. The substantial construction of both cisterns and aloni makes them enduring features of the Greek countryside and relatively easy to identify markers of intensive agricultural practices. Alonia were crucial to the production of wheat and cisterns, particular in the arid lands near the coast of the Saronic Gulf, were important for watering animals involved in threshing and their human companions.</p> <p>We have full descriptions of the threshing floors and cisterns and before this archive is complete we'll add the dimensions and even locations of these features to the images. But for now, enjoy the images.</p> <p><b><i>Alonia (Threshing floors)</i></b></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/2058">Aloni 2</a>:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/2058"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecdd6d2f970b -pi" width="321" height="480" alt="201004220737.jpg" /></a></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Aloni+3">Aloni 3</a>:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/2043"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134800d651f970c -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220735.jpg" /></a></p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Aloni+4">Aloni 4</a>:<br /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;">

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<br /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1993"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecdd6d45970b -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220732.jpg" /></a><br /> </div> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Aloni+6">Aloni 6</a></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/2055"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134800d6502970c -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220733.jpg" /></a></p> <p><b><i>Cisterns and Wells:</i></b></p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Cistern+1">Cistern 1</a>:<br /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1989"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134800d6519970c -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220749.jpg" /></a><br /> </div> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1989"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Cistern+3">Cistern 3</a>:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecdd6dc9970b -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220750.jpg" /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Cistern+5">Cistern 5</a>:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/2031"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134800d6546970c -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220752.jpg" /></a></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Cistern+6">Cistern 6</a>:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1987"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecdd6d37970b -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220753.jpg" /></a></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Cistern+8">Cistern 8</a>:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1997"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134800d650f970c -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220754.jpg" /></a></p>

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<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Cistern+9">Cistern 9</a>:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1988"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134800d652d970c -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220755.jpg" /></a></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Well+1">Well 1</a>:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecdd6d9e970b -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220757.jpg" /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/Well+2">Well 2</a>:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1963"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20134800d653f970c -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="201004220758.jpg" /></a></p> <p style="text-align: center;">For more on this project:<br /></p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/cr eating-ruins-formation-process-pictures-from-lakka-skoutara.html">Creating Ruins: Formation Process Pictures from Lakka Skoutara</a><br /> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/la kka-skoutara-a-partial-archive.html">Lakka Skoutara: A Partial Archive<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/be tween-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-theupland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html">Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th Century "small world" in the upland basin of the southeastern Korinthia<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/sl opes-and-terraces-at-lakka-skoutara.html">Slopes and Terraces at Lakka Skoutara<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/co rinthian-infiltration-the-interior-of-some-houses-at-lakkaskoutara.html">Corinthian Infiltration: The Interior of Some Houses at Lakka Skoutara<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/la kka-skoutara-the-survey.html">Lakka Skoutara: The Survey<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-houses-of-lakka-skoutara.html">The Houses of Lakka Skoutara<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co llapse.html">Collapse<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/pr ovisional-discard.html">Provisional Discard<br /></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co nstruction-in-the-corinthia.html">Construction in the Corinthia</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: UND, the Logo, and the Name STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: und-the-logo-and-the-name CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 04/21/2010 07:56:08 AM ----BODY: <p>I resisted posting anything on this topic for as long as I could, but the lingering drone of the Fighting Sioux conversation has finally pushed me to write. Before I say anything, I want to confess that I am not an expert on this topic nor am I particularly engaged in the ongoing controversy regarding the Fighting Sioux logo. I don't have an ax to grind and while I am certainly a "liberal faculty member", I don't feel particularly pressed by the requirements of political correctness or any sort of liberal orthodoxy. In fact, I find both political correctness, in all of its awkward and poorly executed forms, and any kinds of orthodox to be pretty boring, onerous, and unproductive.</p> <p>So, that being said, here are four of my views on this entire logo issue (for the official views of the <a href="http://nickname.und.edu/logo/">University go here</a>).</p> <p>1. The Lack of Civility. The biggest issue from my perspective is that the logo debate has brought out the worst in people on both sides. The lack of civility and carefully considered conversations is disappointing. In fact, two colleagues over the past couple of weeks have said that they have banned discussions of the logo issue in their classes. Read the comments on any news article or blog (and I won't link to them from here) to see how rancorous both sides have become. Moreover, the positions are boring: one side blames everyone from the university administration to the NCAA to the Native Americans and the State Board of Higher Education, and the other side pontificates in a painfully condescending way. So, again, it's disappointing to see that a University community can't engage this topic in a more intellectually productive way. At present, the debate makes almost everyone look bad, and it seems to me that we are in a situation where the need for both sides to claim "victory" makes compromise and conversation increasingly impossible.</p> <p>2. Identity is Messy. Anyone who has been on a university campus for more than 20 minutes over the past two decades should know by now that identity is a messy thing. This is important to remember as we try to resurrect some kind of civil discussion about the Fighting Sioux logo and name. There is no doubt that one side sees itself as honoring the Sioux by appropriating (in a respectful and perhaps even consensual way) parts of the Sioux identity. This is not particularly radical from a historical perspective and is not inherently bad. What strikes me as naive is the idea that if the university could get the Sioux to somehow vote to approve this process, then it would be in the clear. I am liberal enough to know that things aren't made right or moral or ethical, just

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because a group votes for something. The entire idea that the Sioux could vote as a body to allow another group to associate (respectfully, I am sure) with some aspect of their identity seems to be so deeply problematic that I can not understand how it is seriously regarded as a way forward. Fortunately, some groups within the Sioux seem to agree with this and have refused to put this matter to referendum. Identity is far too fluid and contested a thing to be defined by a democratic process alone. The idea that somehow this issue would be resolved if the Sioux voted to approve the logo and name is naive.</p> <p>3. The NCAA. The NCAA is a voluntary organization that has the right to set certain rules for its member institutions. This just makes sense. If the member institutions do not like the rules, they can either change them or quit the organization. While I can understand why no one seriously talks about leaving the NCAA, it is a bit surprising that more people don't at least hold it up as a potential course of action. My solution would be to drop out of the NCAA and reform the hockey program as an <a href="http://theahl.com/">AHL franchise</a>. Playing professional hockey at UND would be revolutionary and, perhaps, offer a way forward to other schools who feel that the NCAA does not adequately represent and protect the distinct character of their programs. Moreover, it could be a real threat to the NCAA as an organization. Imagine if the elite football programs created a University Professional Football League (UPFL) which paid their student-athletes a competitive wage based on some kind of profit sharing model? Isn't this a more fun conversation than most surrounding the logo and name?</p> <p>4. Colonialism. Spending time in Australia with my wife's family has led me to think about the place of Native American's in American society in a different way. I do worry that the eliminating the name and logo will serve as another means of hiding or (to be post-modern about it) erasing the awkward legacy of European (i.e. white) - Native American relations in the Northern Plains. By "returning" to the Sioux the complete control over their identity, image, likeness, and name, we run the risk of eliminating a point of contact that represented a shared moment in history which while contentious and certainly ugly would nevertheless provide the basis for an ongoing discussion. By problematizing the name and logo as a highly visible historical artifact, it forces us to consider complex and messy issues of identity, colonialism, authority, and race. These are not the kinds of things that interest the NCAA. In other words, I cannot think that the NCAA's motives are pure. Their interest is in protecting the commercial entity that is the NCAA and to do this, they will make policies that seek to eliminate controversies and create a product that is the most appealing to the broadest possible audience. We can, of course, argue that a popular, pristine, and neat NCAA product is a good way forward for all member institutions in that it will guarantee the greatest possible revenues from various, highly lucrative commercial ventures.</p> <p>So, I've said my piece. I haven't been a member in the community here long enough to understand completely what is at stake or what the consequences of any particular course of action would be. I can, however, complain that the tenor of the current conversation makes thoughtful, creative, and perspective discussion of the situation pretty difficult. I still talk to my students about it, though, because I think it is our job to challenge our students (on both sides of the debate) to try to see things in <a href="http://www.und.edu/branding/">a creative, innovative, and spirited way (oh, we're Future Ready too)</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Study of the City of Ravenna STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: a-study-of-the-city-of-ravenna CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 04/20/2010 08:27:39 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the past decade or so, there has been a new wave of scholarship on the Late Antique city. These works have ranged from <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/decline-and-fall-of-the-romancity/oclc/44720517">W. Liebeschuetz, <i>Decline and Fall of the Roman City</i></a> (Oxford 2001) or <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/refiguringthe-post-classical-city-dura-europos-jerash-jerusalem-andravenna/oclc/31753671">A. Wharton, <i>Refiguring the Post-Classical City</i></a> (Cambridge 1995) to a myriad of specific city studies: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/alexandria-in-late-antiquity-topography-andsocial-conflict/oclc/34663398">Haas on Alexandria</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/roman-berytus-beirut-in-lateantiquity/oclc/52937907">Hall on Beirut</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/corinth-the-first-city-of-greece-an-urbanhistory-of-late-antique-cult-and-religion/oclc/43615467">Rothaus on Corinth</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/pagan-city-and-christian-capital-rome-inthe-fourth-century/oclc/41641325">Curran on Rome</a>, et c. It's clear that the late ancient city has remained a source of fascination for scholars and the increased quantity of archaeological evidence available has allowed even more robust and synthetic works that have significantly revised our view of urban life in Late Antiquity</p> <p><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/ravenna-in-lateantiquity/oclc/316772672">Deborah M. Deliyannis, <i>Ravenna in Late Antiquity</i> (Cambridge 2010)</a> fits into this tradition by focusing on one the best studied cities in the Late Antique world. The monumental efforts of F.W. Deichmann to document the architecture and history of the city of Ravenna formed a solid foundation of Deliyannis' book which, if nothing else, summarized many of the conclusions from Deichmann's numerous German tomes in English. In fact, the strength of this book is the massive amount of summary description of the major monuments in the city. At the same time, Deliyannis' familiarity with the literary sources for the city, particularly, the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/book-of-pontiffs-of-the-church-ofravenna/oclc/52341636"><i>Liber Pontificalis</i> of Agnellus</a> which she has translated, provided a critical textual basis for many of her conclusions.</p>

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<p>.<img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201348000430d970c -pi" width="140" height="206" alt="201004200824.jpg" /><br /></p> <p>In short, Deliyannis argued that Ravenna was uniquely positioned between East and West both politically and culturally. Nowhere is this more clear than in Its status as both a capital and a more marginal city over its long post-antique history. The result of these influences was the blend local and Mediterranean wide trends that produced a unique synthesis of Late Antique culture. The influences of the East in the Adriatic is an area of growing interest especially as we have come to recognize that the aftershocks of the various theological, ecclesiological, and Christological controversies in the East had a significant impact on Imperial authority in regions like the Balkans which fell under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Papacy, but the political influence of the emperor in Constantinople.</p> <p>While Deliyannis' book does a brilliant job bringing to light the architectural history of the city, it is disappointing that she seemed so much less interested in subjecting the people of the city of Ravenna to the same scrutiny. The was no effort in the book to consider substantially everyday life in the city. The absence of any discussion of the economy of Ravenna was particularly striking. Aside from a few comments on the presence of kilns, the vaguely described ebb and flow of imported pottery, and the tendency to re-use bricks in the construction of churches, there is no sense for how Ravenna fit into the trans-Mediterranean economic networks which so many scholars of Late Antiquity have scrutinized.</p> <p>There was also almost no discussion of the local economy. Particularly striking was the absence of any discussion of the hinterland of Ravenna and its port at Classe. To be fair, Deliyannis makes clear that the marshy territories to the west of the city apparently contributed to its defense and apparently the city did not suffer from lack of water. She does not, however, discuss how the city was fed or even (and perhaps more interesting) whether the marshy land around the city provided any economic advantage to the inhabitants. This is disappointing because so much attention in recent times has focused on the relationship between cities and their hinterlands. In fact, recent work has focused almost as much on the hinterlands of Late Roman cities as on their urban cores (see, for example, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/corinth-on-theisthmus-studies-of-the-end-of-an-ancient-landscape/oclc/86115995">David Pettegrew's work</a> on the near-hinterland of Corinth or <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/tilling-the-hateful-earth-agriculturalproduction-and-trade-in-the-late-antique-east/oclc/316430311">Michael Decker's recent book</a> on the Late Antique hinterland of major Levantine cities).</p> <p>Finally, it also stood out that Deliyannis did relatively little to place the city of Ravenna explicitly into the recent conversations on the urban fabric of Late Antiquity. How does the unique urban history of the city of Ravenna compare to other Late Roman cities both in Italy and elsewhere? And how does the city of Ravenna for all its unique characteristics, inform how we understand the regional politics of Italy, the Balkans, or even the Late Antique Mediterranean? This broader perspective would have added considerable significance to this already valuable contribution to the history of a city.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Sketches of Three Baptisteries STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: sketches-of-three-baptisteries CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries DATE: 04/19/2010 08:19:57 AM ----BODY: <p>I spent a little time this weekend working on my absolutely rudimentary illustration skills.&nbsp; I took as my object the three baptisteries that I included in a recent draft of an encyclopedia article.&nbsp; I worked on tracing them from well-known illustrations with an eye toward simplifying the plans to facilitate their reproduction at a smaller scale.</p> <p>Producing new illustrations is almost always a good exercise in that is forces me to reflect critically on the various features included in the various floor plans.&nbsp; I used Illustrator for these illustrations and mostly traced them from existing plans.&nbsp; I did free sketch some of the features, though, and they are more illustrative than accurate.</p> <p>I suspect, for example, that leaving out the thresholds and some of the features associated with the flooring at the Dura Baptistery has had little effect on how most scholars are likely to interpret the basic features of the plan: the baptistery is a room in the northwestern corner of the atrium style house.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201347ff99c87970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="DuraBaptSketch" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecc985d1970b -pi" width="400" height="393"></a> <br>Dura Europas Baptistery (after <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/excavations-at-dura-europos-final-report-82the-christian-building/oclc/186669600">Wells (1967)</a>, plan 5)</p> <p align="left">Likewise, my plan of the Lechaion baptistery illustrates the complexity of the structure and the strange relationships between the two, apparently contemporary, centrally planned rooms and the long apsidal hallway to their west.&nbsp; It boggles the mind that an "architect" (or builder) could so carefully articulate the interior spaces of the various structures, but arrange their relationships to one another in such an awkward way.&nbsp; The narrow passageways linking the northern building to the baptistery proper appear to have been original to the plan, but utterly inelegant. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201347ff99caf970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="LechaionBapt" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201347ff99cb9970c -pi" width="400" height="400"></a> <br>Lechaion (after <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/palaiochristianika-vaptisteria-teshellados/oclc/4737938">Volonakes (1976)</a>, plan 1b)</p> <p align="left">My sketch of the Orthodox Baptistery in Ravenna eliminated some of the later features which commonly appear in plans and sought to capture the relationship

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between its architectural massing and the central baptismal font.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201347ff99cc1970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="RavennaBapt" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20133ecc985ee970b -pi" width="400" height="393"></a> <br>Orthodox Baptistery in Ravenna (after <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/orthodox-baptistery-ofravenna/oclc/237215">Kostof (1965)</a>, fig. 1)</p> <p align="left">I will never be confused for an architect, but the exercise of re-illustrating the plans of well-known buildings can frequently reveal some feature of aspect of the building (or even the plan) that I might have otherwise overlooked.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 04/16/2010 07:48:13 AM ----BODY: <p>A little gaggle of quick hits on a bright and sunny Friday.</p> <p>First, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/bret_weber /">the former cook</a> of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, obviously scarred by his time working for scraps for a group of scrooge-like archaeologists, takes to the streets on tax day to promote a universal living wage. (Bret Weber holds is the tall guy holding the banner sign).</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201347fea7586970c -pi" width="480" height="316" alt="201004160706.jpg" /><br /> (<a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/image/id/31264/headline/Picket/">Pho to Grand Forks Herald</a>)</p> <p style="text-align: left;">There are lots of cool things taking place over the last couple week at the University of North Dakota. The Ceramics Department is celebration the 100th year of ceramics at UND with a a Centennial called 50/50. The name represents the 50 years of ceramics at UND under Margaret Cable's guidance and the 50 (plus 1) years since her retirement in 1949. <a href="http://www.pottery.und.edu/centenial.html">Here's the link</a>. The Theater Department is producing <a

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href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/157882/">Sarah Ruhl's <i>Eurydice</i></a>.</p> <p style="text-align: left;">If you haven't checked out <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/04/15/bridging-the-gap-in-graduateeducation/">Teaching Thursday</a> this week, you should. <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/04/15/bridging-the-gap-in-graduateeducation/">Rebecca Romsdahl's thoughts</a> on graduate education are insightful and productive. In some ways, Rebecca's thoughts complement those offered by <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2010/04/medieval-art-connecting-withstudents.html">Kostis Kourelis on the same day.</a> I need to use more reflective practices in my classes. For more on teaching, check out <a href="http://learningaloud.com/blog/aboutme/">Mark Grabe</a>'s Learning Aloud project with its <a href="http://learningaloud.com/blog/">helpful blog</a>. There has also been a good bit of activity over at UND's <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/" title="Graduate School Blog">Graduate School Blog</a> including a flashy new advertisement:</p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <object style="height: 344px; width: 425px" width="425" height="344"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oCixalWeeqM" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oCixalWeeqM" type="application/xshockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="425" height="344" /> </object> </div> <p style="text-align: left;">And they now have a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/UNDGradSchool">YouTube channel</a>!</p> <p style="text-align: left;">Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Dreams in Ravenna STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: dreams-in-ravenna CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 04/15/2010 07:00:52 AM ----BODY: <p>So, I'm sick and I promised myself that I wouldn't blog today and focus my meager energies on the handful of things that absolutely need to get done.</p>

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<p>But then I thought, wait, don't I need to remark on a dream from Agnellus of Ravenna?</p> <blockquote> <p>41. Meanwhile, when in that time the mother of Valentinian, the Empress Galla Placidia, was building the church of the Holy Cross our Redeemer, her niece, by the name of Singledia, was advised one night by a vision, in which a man in white vestiments stood there, adorned with a grey-haired head and a beautiful beard, and said, "In such and such a place not far from this church of the Holy Cross, which your aunt is having built, as far as a bowshot, build me a monasterium, as you will find it traced out. And where you find the likeness of a cross in the ground, there let an altar be consecrated, and dedicate it in the name of Zacharias, the father of the Precursor.</p> <p>Waking at once, she ran swiftly to the place, where its outline had been shown; she found that a foundation had been dug as if by the hand of man. Running forward at once, she told the empress with great joy and requested workmen from her; and [Galla] gave her thirteen builders. And at once she started to build as she had found it drawn out; and in thirteen days she built in all and brought it to completion. And she consecrated it and endowed it with gold and silver and golden crowns and most precious gems and gold chalices, which come out in procession on the Nativity of the Lord...</p> <p><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/book-of-pontiffs-of-the-church-ofravenna/oclc/52341636">trans. D. M. Deliyannis</a> (who also has fascinating new book called <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/ravenna-in-lateantiquity/oclc/316772672&amp;referer=brief_results"><i>Ravenna in Late Antiquity</i></a>)</p> </blockquote> <p>I know that I feel better now.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Early Chrsitian Baptisteries: A Short Description STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: early-chrsitian-baptisteries-a-short-description CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries DATE: 04/14/2010 07:48:03 AM ----BODY: <p>I finally have a working draft of an encyclopedia entry that was due some time ago. The entry is on Early Christian baptisteries, and I try to provide a

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cursory study of their architecture, ritual, decoration, and function in less than 2500 words. For some reason this kind of writing always takes me far more time than longer writing projects, so I not only underestimate how long it will take me to produce the original text, but also how long it will take me to tweak and fuss with the text once it is produced.</p> <p>In any event, I present an advanced working draft here for your enjoyment.</p><a title="View Early Christian Baptisteries Working on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/29902863/Early-Christian-Baptisteries-Working" style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-systemfont: none; display: block; text-decoration: underline;">Early Christian Baptisteries Working</a> <object id="doc_348006909609960" name="doc_348006909609960" height="600" width="100%" type="application/xshockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" style="outline:none;"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /> <param name="wmode" value="opaque" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=29902863&amp;access_key=keysy6ww5xxo2nb3zmx67d&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" /> <embed id="doc_348006909609960" name="doc_348006909609960" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=29902863&amp;access _key=key-sy6ww5xxo2nb3zmx67d&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" type="application/xshockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="600" width="100%" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" /> </object> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: History of and History in the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: history-of-and-history-in-the-university-of-north-dakota CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 04/13/2010 07:12:50 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Next fall, the University of North Dakota will host the Northern Great Plains History Conference. This regional conference was originally organized by members of the History Department in the late 1960 and has continued almost every year since then being hosted by various school across the Northern Plains.</p> <p>It seems fitting then, that there be at least one panel that focuses on the history of the University of North Dakota and the Department of History. So, I have organized a panel of three papers for the event.</p> <p>Here it is:<br /></p> <p><b>History of and History in the University of North Dakota</b></p> <p>“History before Libby: University before Disciplines”<br /> 
<i>W. Caraher, Department of History, University of North Dakota</i></p> <p>It is commonplace to imagine now that disciplinary divisions are traditional and neatly contemporary with the creation of the American university system in the late 19th and early 20th century. In reality, of course, this was not necessarily the case. Nor was it the case that the development of disciplines, such as history, took place at only an institutional level. This paper will examine the career of Horace B. Woodworth who served the University of North Dakota from 1885-1904. During the same decades when the discipline of history was reaching its professional maturity through the work of H. B. Adams at Johns Hopkins and his students like Frederick Jackson Turn at Wisconsin, Woodworth underwent his own professional development migrating from the Professor of Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy to the Professor of Moral and Mental Science to the University of North Dakota’s first Professor of History. At his retirement in 1904, he was the first University faculty member to earn a Carnegie Pension and from 1910 – 1949 the Education Building on campus bore the name Woodworth Hall in his honor. The lack of a clear disciplinary home, however, has consigned his name to obscurity and overwritten a valuable, transdisciplinary, precedent in the history the university and its faculty.</p> <p>“Dr. Orin G. Libby: Campus Gadfly”<br /> <i>
G. Iseminger, Department of History, University of North Dakota</i></p> <p>The word “gadfly” comes from the words “sting” + “fly” and a dictionary describes the “pest” as “a purposely annoying or provoking person who criticizes others to get them to reform themselves or their institutions.” In the long history of the University of North Dakota, a period of 125 years, many faculty members aspired to be the campus gadfly. Few succeeded as well as Dr. Orin G. Libby whose tenure in the university’s history department spanned the period 1902-1945. Nothing was so insignificant that it escaped his attention nor so important that he dared not criticize it and urge that it be changed or eliminated. He chided the administration for not clearing campus walks of snow, forcing women students to drag their long skirts over the drifts and then sitting all day in class with wet skirts around their ankles. He criticize Dr. William G. Bek, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, for compromising graduation standards be eliminating the foreign language requirement for the Ph.B. degree. He was the unofficial leader of a group that attempted to remove Dr. Thomas F. Kane from his position as university president on the grounds that he was “irresponsible, inefficient, negligent, intellectually weak, morally vacillating, and wholly incompetent.” Although many felt Libby’s “sting,” he was a respected member of the faculty when he retired in 1945 at the age of eighty-one.</p> <p>“History of Social Work at UND: 1983-2009”<br /> <i>
B. Weber, Department of Social Work, University of North Dakota</i><br /></p> <p>In 2008 I took up the task of writing the history of the Social Work Department at the University of North Dakota: my small contribution to a larger project surrounding the school’s 125th anniversary. My work built upon Louis

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Geiger’s University of the Northern Plains and former department chair Professor Ken Dawes’ work covering the department up till 1982. My argument concerning the recent twenty-five years is that department chairs—despite no real managerial authority—shaped the major events.</p> <p>In 1982 UND’s Social Work Department was a modestly sized undergraduate program. By 2007 it also housed the University’s third largest graduate program outside the Medical School and was administering several quasiindependent service units helping both Social Workers and the general population of North Dakota. This growth was due to multiple interdependent factors, but in the final tally the Department Chairs provided the nexus of change. More precisely, five and a half chairs operated in contexts beyond their control, dealt with controversies and dysfunction, lawsuits and investigations, and the troubling combination of academic freedom and the loose knit process of faculty governance. Yet, through example, cajoling, leadership, and luck they deserve the credit for the accumulated changes—good and bad.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Filmmaking and Archaeology: Some Summary Thoughts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: filmmaking-and-archaeology-some-summary-thoughts CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/12/2010 08:22:00 AM ----BODY: <p>I’ve been lucky enough over the past 5 years to work with two fantastic young documentary filmmakers, Joe Patrow and Ian Ragsdale, in shooting documentary films based on our fieldwork at the Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i> Archaeological Project in Cyprus. Recently Ian has been pressing me (in a good way) to think about what we want to get out of his documentary work and to offer some general insights into how I understand what we have done. This has caused me to begin the process of marshaling 5 years of on and off discussions with Ian and Joe regarding issues related to making an archaeological documentary. Over this time, we’ve talked vaguely about co-writing an article that provides some practical tips for producing a “research film” designed to explore, communicate, and promote a research project. I’d like to think that this informal and spontaneous list will be the first step to writing up something more formal.<br /></p> <p>As someone with very little technical knowledge of the filmmaking process, I’ve relied on the project’s independent filmmakers to tell our project’s

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story. Being a part of these activities, however, has convinced me that these films are not only valuable communication (and teaching) tools, but also useful reflective activities in their own right. My comments below are based on three seasons of working with a documentary filmmaker. Joe Patrow worked with us in 2005 and 2007 and produced two films: <i><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a> <span style="font-style: normal;">and</span> <span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><i>Emerg ing Cypriot</i></a>. Ian Ragsdale worked with us in 2009 and is editing his film: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/PKAP2009#p/a/u/0/L271e8lVkQY"><i>Voices from Cyprus</i></a>. Both Ian and Joe provided short interviews <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/py la-koutsopetria-filmmaker-ian-ragsdale.html">here</a>.</span></i></p> <p>As a final note, these comments are not meant to be proscriptive, but rather descriptive of my thinking as we discussed the making a film that communicated our project to a wider audience.</p> <p>1. Consider various audiences. We’ve used our films for such a wide variety of events that we have reaped the benefits of pitching our films to as broad an audience as possible.</p> <p>2. Modular Movies. When Joe Patrow returned to Cyprus to shoot another video in 2007, he quickly realized that to do something creative with similar material, he had to change the way that he would approach editing his work. As a result, he produced a series of shorts titled <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><i>Emerg ing Cypriot</i></a>. These shorts were mostly under 5 minutes in length and captured various aspect of our work. To be fair, this approach clearly emerged from his first film, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html"><i> Survey on Cyprus</i></a>, which told our story in a linear way, but also divided the story into a series of well-defined chapters. The benefit of a modular film is that it allows us to use the film for multiple purposes including embedding it in Powerpoint presentations, disseminating it over the web, and using in a classroom setting in a flexible way. With the advent of YouTube, Ian was able to take this concept even further by uploading a series of interviews edited in the field to a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/PKAP2009#p/u">PKAP YouTube channel</a>.</p> <p>3. Process over product. One thing that we emphasized on our discussions with both Joe and Ian was the importance to show process rather than just product. In part, our emphasis on process was a necessity for an archaeological project that focused on the gradual accumulation of data rather than the search for a spectacular single find. The emphasis on process, however, ensured that whatever happened over the course of the season, we could tell the story of the project as an event in-and-of itself and not be dependent on a spectacular find or even the elusive answer to a research question during the time when the camera was rolling.</p> <p>4. Personalities. One thing that both Joe and Ian have managed to do is capture the unique mix of personalities present on our project each season. From the passionate to the silly, the personalities drive the story of the project forward and captures the human aspect of field research. In other words, Ian and Joe balanced the technical aspects of archaeological research against the individuals involved in the project. The result of this balancing act was a more

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engaging film which captured the human dimension of decision making in the field.</p> <p>5. Embed the filmmaker. Both Ian and Joe were effectively embedded in our project. This was perhaps largely a consequence of there only being just single person rather than a film crew, but it also speaks to the good match between the filmmaker and our team. Ian was trained as an archaeologist and Joe had an M.A. in history; so, both understood our project’s goals and methods and offered independent, critical interpretation of our work.</p> <p>6. Trust. Closely related to our ability to embed the filmmaker was our willingness to trust both Ian and Joe to tell the story of our project in a responsible and accurate way. In other words, we knew that these two guys would not go out of their way to make us look bad or to distort our methods and goals. What we have discovered is that the best results come from letting our filmmakes tell our story in their own voice.</p> <p>7. Time. One thing that we perhaps underestimated when we first started these projects in the time that they would take. Almost every member of the project had to be willing to take time out of their day to engage the camera and talk about what they were doing. When everyone is harried, tired, and busy, this was a significant commitment. And this says nothing of the commitment that both Joe and Ian have made to take our harried and tired comments and cobble them together into a cohesive story. Filmmaking takes time.</p> <p>8. Landscapes and Place. Video captures a different view of landscape than still photography or maps and plans. Both Joe and Ian were very effective in placing the project in its physical and natural environment. In particular video provides a sense of time to travel through the landscape that still photography often struggles to capture.</p> <p>9. Humor. Both Ian and Joe captured the humorous moments that are inevitable in any collaborative research project. Not only has this made their work more watchable (and less preachy), but also more human and more authentic.</p> <p>10. Technology. One of the great things that we’ve witnessed over the past 5 years is how much easier it is to distribute the results of our filmmakers labors. With the advent of YouTube, more robust broadband connections, and more larger and faster online storage it is now possible to distribute high-quality video over the internet with almost no specialized technological infrastructure.</p> <p>While it remains popular to complain about how academics and p<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/ar chaeologists-the-media-and-the-real-story.html">articularly archaeologists are portrayed in the media</a>, it is also increasingly easy to push back by producing professional quality films to depict archaeological work on a way that is both entertaining and academically responsible. Technology makes it simple to distribute the film around the world, high-quality HD video cameras are relatively inexpensive, and it is now possible to edit and add special effects on a desktop computer. So, if you want to shoot a film, team up with a filmmaker and do it.</p><br /> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 04/12/2010 11:58:44 AM I used Survey of Cyprus for teaching, to explain what pedestrian survey is all about to an undergraduate audience. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sean Williams EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 94.194.204.88 URL: http://heritage-key.com/ancient-london/video DATE: 04/13/2010 04:01:58 AM Why can't more archaeologists see that film-making is an essential part of getting the word out today? We've made some videos on the archaeology of London - take a look! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ian Ragsdale EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 168.7.221.176 URL: http://www.bigapefilms.com DATE: 04/14/2010 12:50:36 PM These insights are going to play a huge part in how I structure my upcoming seminar on digital filmmaking at Rice University. A big theme that I am taking away from recent reading, discussions, and contemplation is that videos for projects like PKAP can accomplish many tasks at once. The process of making a movie informs the research process. An instructional video goes live on the Internet and becomes a promotional tool in addition to a teaching tool. Brandon Olson used his featured vlog as a "thank you" to those who funded his participation in PKAP, in the hopes that that would not be forgotten during the next application season. It is gratifying to hear the breadth of benefit of PKAP's use of video. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Quick Hits and Varia on a Sunny Friday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-quick-hits-and-varia-on-a-sunny-friday CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 04/09/2010 10:07:35 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a few, semi-frantic quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>It's been heartening to see the <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/" title="Kostis Kourelis">Objects-Buildings-Situations</a> has sprung back to life lately!</li>

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<li>Check out the <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/rpm/racing/news/story?id=5069688">Corinth Canal on ESPN</a>.</li> <li>Teaching Thursday features <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/04/08/experienced-interdisciplinarity-atund-the-integrated-studies-program/">a really thoughtful history of Integrated Studies at UND</a>.</li> <li>This is a great new <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5511678/apple-ipadreview">iPad review</a> (via <a href="http://www.fimoculous.com/">Fimoculous</a>).</li> <li>Gonjasufi is fantastic, multimedia, and world wide: <a href="http://gonjasufi.tumblr.com/">tumblr</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/gonjasufi">Twitter</a>, <a href="http://www.sufisays.com/">web</a>, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gonja-Sufi/47704155280">Facebook</a>, <a href="http://www.myspace.com/gonjasufi">MySpace</a>.</li> <li>If you haven't been following it, the University of North Dakota retired the Fighting Sioux logo and name this week. Check out the webcast of the <a href="http://nickname.und.edu/logo/?page_id=91">open forum meeting on it here at noon</a>. Here's the <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/157079/">Grand Forks Herald coverage</a>.</li> <li>It seems a shame that <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/australia/content/current/story/455150.html">Natha n Bracken lost his Cricket Australia contract</a>. I think that the Australian selectors are fickle and short sighted.</li> </ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Christian and Pagan Statues STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-on-christian-and-pagan-statues CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity

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DATE: 04/08/2010 08:54:38 AM ----BODY: <p>A few months ago a thought-provoking article on the destruction of pagan statues and sanctuaries in Egypt by <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Troels Myrup Kristensen</a> appeared <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_late_antiquity/v002/2.2 .kristensen.html">in the <i>Journal of Late Antiquity</i></a>. Now, less than a year later, another thoughtful and extensive article on the topic has appeared in the august pages of the <i>American Journal of Archaeology</i>: "<a href="http://www.ajaonline.org/index.php?ptype=content&amp;aid=3639">Production to Destruction? Pagan and Mythological Statuary in Asia Minor</a>" by Ine Jacobs.</p> <p>The article is a sweeping study of the production, re-use, and destruction of pagan statuary in Late Antique Asia Minor. Jacobs brings to light particularly important issues regarding the declining production of statuary over the course of Late Antiquity particularly at traditional production centers in Asia Minor. She also touched in useful ways on issues regarding the context is which a statue was displayed (pp. 288-289) Statues that appear to have come from a cultic context or with close associations with local cult activities (for example, isolated statues of Artemis found at Ephesos) were more likely to be destroyed or damaged than statues in more secular settings or in groups depicting mythological or literary events. This resonates, in particular, with the work of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/hellenism-in-lateantiquity/oclc/20724797">Glen Bowersock</a> (and others) who have shown that emergence of Christianity did not suppress the importance of pagan literary motifs in Late Antique culture. In fact, he, Peter Brown, and others have shown that references to pagan gods in literary texts was inseparable from the demonstration of Late Antique <i>paideia</i>, the elite discourse of both pagans and Christians.</p> <p>At the same time, Jones introduces the idea of statuary as decoration particularly in so-called "secular" contexts. Pagan statues, for example, could stand in baths, fountains, theaters, and even gates without offering a sustained threat to the increasingly Christianity community. The incidents of violence toward statues -- ranging from ritual and systematic destruction to the incising of crosses on the heads of pagan statues -- appears to have been sporadic and, in most cases, random. And this likely reflects the nature of most anti-pagan (and indeed anti-Christian) sentiments in antiquity.</p> <p>The article concludes with a nice catalogue of "Pagan and Mythological Statue Remains in Late Antiquity" which should be a nice guide for anyone looking to do some work on this topic.</p> <p>Whenever I read any article on the destruction of pagan statues in Late Antiquity (or their preservation in increasingly "decorative" contexts), I begin to consider the relationship between Christian attitudes toward pagan statuary and the emergence of the iconoclastic movement at the very end of Late Antiquity. I can't help but think whether the changing attitudes toward statues and images more generally tell us less about the end of antiquity and more about the emergence of Byzantine attitudes towards images. The creation of secular art (following <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/end-of-ancientchristianity/oclc/20825371">R. A. Markus's idea</a> that the discourse of Christianity, in effect, created the secular out of the remaining fragments of the pagan world in Late Antiquity) must have put particular pressure on its opposite, religious, and in the Late Antique world, Christian art. The surplus meaning generated from the secularization of pagan art created a new set of

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expectation for Christian art and these new expectations met their challenge in the iconoclastic controversies at the very end of antiquity.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Troels Myrup EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 87.57.143.104 URL: http://www.iconoclasm.dk DATE: 04/08/2010 10:59:00 AM Bill, good to see you promoting Ine's AJA paper! I think you're quite right about the need to re-think "destruction" (as well as "conservation") as the guiding principle(s) to understand the role of "pagan" statuary in LA. It's important to see these phenomena as part of a change in what may be termed visual practices rather than as a confrontation with a pagan past. As I argue in my dissertation, production and destruction are indeed often complementary processes rather than opposites, when we think more broadly about the impact that these images had on ancient viewers and what they did to and with them. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: An Open Letter on Byzantine Archaeology and Dumbarton Oaks STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: an-open-letter-on-byzantine-archaeology-and-dumbarton-oaks CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 04/07/2010 07:49:23 AM ----BODY: <p>Recently Dumbarton Oaks invited a group of archaeologists with research interests in the Byzantine period to Washington, D.C. to discuss the future of Byzantine Archaeology in North America. <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2010/04/dumbarton-oaks-byzantine-archaeologyin.html">Kostis Kourelis has posted the schedule on his blog</a>. He has also <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2010/04/byzantine-archaeologyintercollegiate.html">re-posted a related letter</a> that he sent to the new director of Dumbarton Oaks, Margaret Mullett last year, and links to a nice post critiquing <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/05/dumbarton-oaks-andsurface-surveys.html">Dumbarton Oaks' attitudes toward intensive pedestrian survey</a>.</p>

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<p>I was invited to this conference, but unfortunately the invitation came too late for me to secure funding to make it. I belly-ached a bit about the somewhat abrupt planning of the conference which made it difficult for those of use in the hinterland to attend. In a big picture kind of way, it is understandable that Dumbarton Oaks would have overlooked the interest of very junior scholars who lived many miles from either coast. As a result, Director Mullett invited me (as I am sure she did to other folks) to send along my thoughts on Byzantine Archaeology in North America.</p> <p>After some thinking, I decided that I might as well post my email here.</p> <blockquote> <p>Dear Director Mullett,</p> <p>Thank you for the invitation to contribute my thoughts to the ongoing reflection on the relationship between Dumbarton Oaks and the discipline of archaeology. So that you know, I consider the work done at DO over the past five decades to be fundamental to the development of Byzantine studies in the US and I tried doggedly for over a decade to get funding for my research from the institution, not so much because I felt like I could contribute to what was going there, but because I felt that being in contact with the environment, people, and resources of DO would make me a better scholar. I learned this respect for the institution from my advisors Jim Morganstern and Timothy Gregory, both of whom benefited from the generosity, collegiality, and resources of DO.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>My take on how DO could return to the forefront of the study of Byzantine archaeology involves reconsidering both the place of Byzantine and Medieval archaeology in the academic world and leveraging the resources that DO has developed to contribute not only to Byzantine studies, but to archaeology more generally. To do this, I can see three things:</p> <p>1. Archaeology has become increasingly method driven over the past 30 years. These methods range from the quantitative approaches of New Archaeology to the more reflective methods of post-processuralism. Medieval archaeology has taken advantage of both of these developments (although more the former than the latter!). A recently published proceedings from a 1998 conference on the archaeology of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/medieval-and-postmedieval-greece-the-corfu-papers/oclc/476763831">Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece</a> shows the discipline’s deep investment in a wide range of methodologically sophisticated discourses. Unfortunately, publications from Dumbarton Oaks were largely absent from the bibliographies in this work and, as result, from the conversation. I know that Kostis Kourelis has shared with you his thoughts on the role of DO in the support of intensive pedestrian survey in the Mediterranean world. (And I recognize that DO has supported innovation in preservation practices as well as in such scientific methods as dendrochronology). Overlooking intensive pedestrian survey, however, is particularly glaring because this method has contributed significantly to how we understand the Byzantine period across so much of the Eastern Mediterranean. Looking at a slightly bigger picture and overlooking my own, practical commitment to this form of archaeology, DO has supported very little in the way of overtly methodological discussion in Byzantine archaeology. In short, if DO wants to influence the future of Byzantine and Medieval archaeology in the Mediterranean, they need to engage in methodology. (Marcus Rautman and Tim Gregory's contributions here are particularly significant.)</p>

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<p>2. At the same time, archaeology – and the humanities in general – have become increasingly theoretical. Most of this theoretical bent comes, as you know, from the so-called challenge of postmodernism. Despite these somewhat discredited (or at least controversial) origins, the themes introduced by postmodern thought have exerted a tremendous influence on archaeology by not only asking difficult questions of the archaeologist as practitioner, but also offering important critiques of the role of archaeology in the emergence of national identities, the understanding of material objects as active agents in social networks, and the place of archaeology in challenging historical and political orthodoxies. Despite the longstanding investment of DO on the study of important objects from the Byzantine Mediterranean, they have exerted very little influence on discussions of how and why objects create meaning. The most striking example of this is that DO has played a key role in supporting the study of Byzantium in Eastern Europe where the intersection of archaeology, Byzantine studies, and national identities is particularly visible and susceptible to important scholarly critique, but offered very few critical reflections on Byzantine archaeology as an a cultural and political phenomenon. (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/making-of-the-slavs-history-andarchaeology-of-the-lower-danube-region-ca-500-700/oclc/45283024-of-the-slavshistory-and-archaeology-of-the-lower-danube-region-ca-500-700/oclc/45283024">The work of Florin Curta</a> is an important representative of this approach) &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>3. Permeability. The final observation regarding DO’s place in the academic ecosystem may be largely self-serving. As impressed as I have been with its scholarly achievements, I have larger felt like an outsider looking in on its resources and activities. I am not naïve and I understand that my academic credentials have not positioned me geographically or professionally to gain access to what DO has to offer on a regular basis. Moreover, I understand that resources (both financial and otherwise) are limited. That being said, I do wonder whether DO can make itself more inviting to scholars from outside its traditional academic catchment area. One can easily imagine programs that range from archaeological field schools for graduate students, pedagogical outreach to ensure the health of Byzantine archaeology as field taught in American universities, and research outreach so that the good work of scholars affiliated with Dumbarton Oaks is visible beyond the traditional bastions of Byzantine studies (the AIA lecture program is a nice parallel here).</p> <p>Issue 3 likely reflects my own professional insecurities and academic limitations, and I hope it does not overshadow the significance of issues 1 and 2. The theoretical and methodological are areas where the archaeology of the Medieval and Byzantine world has exerted an influence beyond those interested in its traditional chronological and geographical limits. I suppose my earlier observation that DO’s position of leadership in the field of Byzantine archaeology has lapsed derives from the observation that they have not played a particularly significant role in developments in archaeology that have extended to other periods and places. My perspective on the potential of Byzantine archaeology may be a bit naïve, but it seems to me that the transdisciplinary nature of Byzantine Studies and the deep and persistent commitment to art, texts, architecture, and objects provides a formidable foundation for a kind of sophisticated, synthetic archaeology. This is a powerful offering for an academic community that looks in an increasingly positive way on the inter- and transdisciplinary organizations whose efforts to forge research questions across disciplinary boundaries in a self-conscious way surely reflects the future of academia.</p>

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<p>Respectfully yours,<br /> Bill Caraher</p> </blockquote> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some more thoughts on Leonidas, Baptism, and Korinth STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-more-thoughts-on-leonidas-baptism-and-korinth CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 04/06/2010 07:50:47 AM ----BODY: <p>Thanks to our rock-star quality interlibrary loan staff here at the University of North Dakota, I was able to get my greedy mitts on F. Halkin, "Saint Leonide et ses sept compagnes martyrs a Corinthe," <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/epeteris-etaireias-buzantinonspoudon/oclc/473756833"><i>EEBS</i></a> 23 (1953), 217-223. This little gem of an article will help me complete (or at least fill out) some thoughts I offered a couple of weeks ago <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/so me-thoughts-on-st-leonidas-and-baptism-at-lechaion-in-greece.html">in this blog post</a> (and in a <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/th e-ambivalent-landscape-of-late-antique-corinth.html">related post here</a>). Just in case you can't be bothered to click through to either of those links, I suggest that the prominent baptistery on the coast at Lechaion may have particular significance to the site. In short, if this is a church dedicated to St. Leonidas and his companions, then a baptistery (and references to water) would have particular significance since the saint and his friends were martyred by drowning off the coast.</p> <p>The Late Byzantine (or later, at least, post early-13th century) life of St. Leonidas published by Halkin in the 1930s includes a couple references that would appear to support my argument. I'll include paragraph 8 below (p. 223):</p> <p><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201347faedf6e970c -pi" width="480" height="343" alt="201004060701.jpg" /></p>

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<p>While I won't translate the entire passage, I'll offer a quick translation of two sections (note that my translations were tweaked in the comments!). First, beginning at line 5:<br /></p> <blockquote> <p><span id="comment-6a00d83451908369e20133ec80d36a970bcontent"><b>UPDATED:</b> <a href="http://individual.utoronto.ca/nakassis/index.html">Dimitri Nakassis</a> provided this nicer translation:</span></p> <p><span id="comment-6a00d83451908369e20133ec80d36a970b-content">"So with much time having passed and with the public executioners having started sending Leonidēs down into the Gulf first, he [Leonidēs], having raised his face to heaven, said, “Behold! And with this second baptism today have I been baptized, which makes the man within us more clean.”"</span><br /></p> </blockquote> <p>Also then at line 12:</p> <blockquote> <p><b>UPDATED</b>: He also offered this:&nbsp;&nbsp;"Pious men, dragging the bodies of the saints lying on the beach, having attended to them in honor they buried them, having built a church on the spot, where [the bodies], both augustly worshiped and extolled everlastingly, to those who approach faithfully they make to gush out healings each time."</p> </blockquote> <p>According to Halkin (and I have no reason to doubt it) this is the only reference to a church built to honor Leonidas and his martyrs in the accounts of his martyrdom (p. 219). The text that Halkin presents here is almost certainly post-13th century in data and pulls information from a range of known synaxaria and a few other lost sources. One of this unknown sources preserved -- it would seem -- some memory of the great church on the Lechaion coast. Moreover, the clear and explicit link between drowning, baptism, and the massive baptistery at Lechaion might even hint that the building preserved in the memory of this text is not the church, but the baptistery. The baptistery may well have stood longer than the church to its south and considering the relatively shallow depth of the excavations at the site, it seems plausible to assume that significant parts of the buildings on the coast were long visible.</p> <p>The goal of all this speculation, of course, was to understand the link between the Lechaion basilica and the elaborate nymphaion located less than a kilometer to the south of the basilica along the coastal bluff. This structure shares many decorative cues with the Lechaion basilica and I have proposed (very tentatively) that the shared emphasis on water brings together the Corinthian wide theme of the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/fountains-and-theculture-of-water-at-roman-corinth/oclc/50497698">well-watered city</a> and the specific circumstances of Leonidas and his companions' martyrdom. This is just another, albeit very small scale study, of how religious authority projected into the Corinthian landscape.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dimitri Nakassis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.232.120.203 URL: DATE: 04/06/2010 02:39:04 PM I would have translated the first passage, "So with much time having passed and with the public executioners having started sending Leonidƒìs down into the Gulf first, he [Leonidƒìs], having raised his face to heaven, said, ‚ÄúBehold! And with this second baptism today have I been baptized, which makes the man within us more clean.‚Äù" ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.225 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 04/06/2010 03:24:07 PM Dimitri, Thanks! Mine was really hasty -- I mistranslated timeron. Pretty lame. Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dimitri Nakassis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.232.120.203 URL: DATE: 04/06/2010 06:21:50 PM Also, I think that I would translate the second passage as follows: "Pious men, dragging the bodies of the saints lying on the beach, having attended to them in honor they buried them, having built a church on the spot, where [the bodies], both augustly worshiped and extolled everlastingly, to those who approach faithfully they make to gush out healings each time." This sentence is weird to my Classically-trained eye. Why is œÉœçœÅŒøŒΩœÑŒµœÇ present? Why is Œ¥ŒøŒºŒ∑œÉŒ¨ŒºŒµŒΩŒøŒπ (itself bizarre) aorist, since surely they built the church AFTER they buried the bodies of the martyrs? Why use this odd verb, ŒµŒ∫Œ≤ŒªœçŒ∂œâ, with ŒπŒ¨œÉŒµŒπœÇ (liquid imagery, perhaps)? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The iPad and My Computer Ecosystem STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: the-ipad-and-my-computer-ecosystem CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 04/05/2010 09:03:52 AM -----

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BODY: <p>Enough people have asked that I feel either mocked or obligated to report on my first two days with my Apple iPad. (And for the record, I think that they're mostly mocking me.)</p> <p>As I have said before, I am not necessarily an early adopter, but I also understand that the next generation of any device will almost always be better than the device that I decide to eventually purchase. Also, despite one of my former student's suggestions, I am not an Apple fanboy or "the high priest of the Apple cult" (although the latter seems sorta cool). I use four computers regularly. I do most of my writing on a MacBook Pro which is now a couple of years old. I do GIS, database, and basic statistical work on the Big Diesel -- a 17-inch Dell XPS laptop -- and I also increasingly use this computer for editing podcasts and various things involved in developing my online classes. At home, we use a Mac Mini as a media server for our stereo and it runs through our TV for movies and the like and surf the web on a three year old Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu. I don't game, but I do have an iPod Touch that I use regularly to do light web-surfing, check emails, and listen to music.</p> <p>So, that's my computer ecosystem right now. The one thing missing was a ebook reader. I travel pretty regularly and I also read all the time. I read books, articles, student papers, drafts of my own writing, blogs, newspapers, and even, more and more rarely, fiction. Most of the academic articles that I read are now disseminated in PDF format and I do at least part of my own editing work in front of a computer. In other words, I wanted a device that allowed my to consume media in a more efficient and comfortable way. I had plenty of computers that enabled me to produce media in a flexible environment.</p> <p>I was romanced by the Kindle and found it charming and functional enough to get one for my mother for Christmas a few years back, but I was worried that its web-surfing abilities seemed pretty limited for a $300 device. I thought maybe the Nook would be the answer or even one of Sony's elegant ebook readers, but the reviews on these devices were never quite enough to push me to order one. In particular, I wanted a device that would let me do a bit more than basic websurfing since online classes had increasingly come to play a part in my teaching load. I wanted to be able to read and critique discussion board posts, for example, in my classes' threaded-discussions. This can be a time consuming process, and I wanted to be able to do it with more physical flexibility than I currently had with my laptops. I also wanted to be able to manage the various blogs that I write or administer. While I write sitting at the computer, I wanted to be able to administer comments, spam, and other basic maintenance aspects of blogging without having to boot up a computer and without being at my desk.</p> <p>With these needs in mind, the iPad is doing fine so far. I spent time on Easter reading a little gaggle of articles that I had downloaded over the course of the previous week. I uploaded them to my <a href="http://www.mediafire.com/">Mediafire</a> account and downloaded them easily onto a PDF reader on my iPad. I suspect that I'll continue to do most of my research on my laps tops since I am completely dependent on Firefox based <a href="http://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a> to keep track of citations, but I could imagine doing some light research on it in a pinch.</p> <p>I read my Sunday <i>New York Times</i> on it and even contemplated spending $80 on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hellenism-in-Byzantiumebook/dp/B0017XZJPA">Anthony Kaldellis's</a> <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hellenism-in-Byzantiumebook/dp/B0017XZJPA">Hellenism in Byzantium</a>,</i> before opting for the free, <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page">Project Gutenburg</a>produced, version of Conrad's <i>Secret Agent</i>. I also read some discussion

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board posts, a couple of blogs, and even watched part of a TV show on it. So, from what I can tell it does everything that it advertised it could do. The only frustration that I've encountered is figuring out how to organize files that I've uploaded to the device. I have the 32 GB version, so I could imagine having quite a bit of articles, photographs, and even scanned books on it, but I would need a more clear way of keeping these various documents organized before I make the device my research companion for trips to museum storerooms and the like.</p> <p>Aside from that, it's aesthetically appealing, fast, stable, and seemingly bug free (although time will surely tell).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dallas DeForest EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 65.60.192.124 URL: DATE: 04/05/2010 12:39:30 PM <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-device-desirable-old-deviceundesirable,2862/">http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-device-desirable-olddevice-undesirable,2862/</a> dallas ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 04/05/2010 12:44:46 PM Absolutely. Except, I didn't have an old device and I never want to have one either. They sound like they are pretty undesirable. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mark Hilverda EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.236.177.154 URL: http://twitter.com/markhilverda DATE: 04/05/2010 07:28:41 PM I've got to ask...how do standard pdf journal articles look on the iPad? Is a full page clear and readable and is zooming still needed? This could be amazing... ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL:

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IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 04/05/2010 07:46:23 PM Mark, They actually look great. It was very comfortable to read on. Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.115.6 URL: http://civilwarhistory.wordpress.com DATE: 04/05/2010 11:26:16 PM Bill, Can't wait to see this new addition to your electronic family. Hope your Easter was a good one. See you tomorrow. Daniel ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Evan Nelson EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.168.159 URL: DATE: 04/06/2010 03:00:12 PM You do know that mocking usually masks abject jealousy, right? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: R Sang EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 64.178.99.226 URL: DATE: 04/28/2010 12:27:05 PM Can you use zotero on the iPad? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Quick Hits and Varia on a Holiday Friday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: quick-hits-and-varia-on-a-holiday-friday CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 04/02/2010 07:30:43 AM ----BODY: <p>A little gaggle of quick hits and varia on a rainy holiday Friday (it seems fitting that Good Friday be rainy and dark):</p> <ul>

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<li>For the first time in a few years Eastern (Greek) Easter and Western Easter coincide. While both groups use the same method to establish the date of Easter, the has to do with the differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the lunar calendars upon which the two churches use to reckon the date of Easter. The holiday will also coincide next year.</li> <li>Some interesting conversation about inter-disciplinarity <a href="http://www.profhacker.com/2010/04/01/building-an-interdisciplinaryidentity-in-a-mostly-non-interdisciplinary-academic-world/">here at ProfHacker</a>, and <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/ethan-watrall-onbranding-and-interdisciplinary-identity-amen-brother/">here at the Electric Archaeologist</a>, and in the comments on this post <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/03/18/reflecting-on-interdisciplinaryteaching/#comments">here in Teaching Thursday</a>. Keep an eye on Teaching Thursday for more discussions on the inter/trans/multi/cross disciplinary moment.</li> <li>At Tomorrow Museum, <a href="http://tomorrowmuseum.com/2010/03/28/theeditor-and-the-curator-or-the-context-analyst-and-the-media-synesthete/">it's all about curating</a>.</li> <li>I am counting the hours until my iPad arrives (and it left Anchorage, Alaska early this morning). The best review is probably <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/31/a-first-look-at-ipad.html">this one on Boing Boing</a>, but I also liked <a href="http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1976935,00.html">the slightly bigger picture perspective offered at (gasp) Time</a>. I had a great (but too short) discussion with a few students about it this past week and I love that the iPad makes people angry. It reminds me of the early 1990s when being serious about a Mac was seen as an insult to the serious and sacred power of the PC. But before I get too excited, I read this and then <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-youshouldnt-either.html">felt a tiny twinge of guilt</a>. There is, however, something slightly disingenuous about Doctorow's critique. The idea that the iPad or any "walled-garden" type product is bad because we can't get inside to manipulate how it works falls apart when pushed too far. The goal with a product like the iPad is to enhance the experience of consuming content. It's the equivalent of getting a nice pair of new speakers or getting a favorite book rebound in a classy new binding. It enhances the pleasure of consuming music and reading. We can complain that no one should own stereos because, after all it deprives the individual from creating music -- like on a piano -- or that we shouldn't spend time reading books or even sanction their distribution because it will slowly crush our desire to write. These are just silly arguments. The time when the only way to enjoy technology was when you built it or customized it yourself is over.</li> <li>So, one of my graduate students in my public history internship continues <a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/">to blog, and she's pretty good at it</a>!</li> <li>The University of North Dakota is slated to begin a major construction project in the heart of campus. It will involve an expansion and renovation to the College of Education Building. I want to start a campus wide drive to call rename it the Woodworth Building (<a

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href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DHChapter_1.html">if you don't know, you better ask somebody</a>)</li> <li>You can also follow <a href="http://webdevelopment.und.edu/">how UND is revising their website here</a>. I served on one of the committees involved in some of the decisions making. It was an education on how the university works.</li> <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/nzvaus2010/content/story/454066.html">This was quite a display by Mitchell Johnson</a>. I just wish he was more consistent.</li> </ul> <p>One last thing, I brought my breakfast to work this morning in this plastic bag photographed below. It was mixed in with our assorted other plastic bags. It must have entered our collection from Cyprus somehow. There isn't a Carrefour (a French supermarket chain) in the US or even in North America. How's that for the movement of plastic around the world:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201347f976abc970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="Photo 6.jpg" /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck JonesEMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.122.167.53 URL: http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/ DATE: 04/02/2010 10:56:37 AM I suppose you noticed that the Time review was written not by a techie but by a (gasp) regular person with a good grasp of the language - Stephen Fry. Well, maybe he's not quite so regular... ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: renaissance costumes EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 125.60.227.198 URL: http://www.renaissancemodel.com/ DATE: 04/05/2010 12:35:47 AM Hmmm.. probably you have now received your iPad. :) enjoy your new gadget and hopefully you can post a review on how the thing is doing.. :) -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: How to introduce the M.A. in History? STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-how-to-introduce-the-ma-in-history CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 04/01/2010 08:26:56 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the past semester, we've re-conceived our M.A. program in History here at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; As part of this process we've added another required M.A. level course.&nbsp; Traditionally, we've required that the students take a graduate historiography course; in our new program we will require our students also to take a an introduction to historical methods course.&nbsp; This course will involve a "refresher" (let's call it that!) on advanced research techniques.&nbsp; This means an introduction to both library and online resources for doing independent historical research as well as basic refresher on note-taking, outline-writing, and thesis-formulating.&nbsp; This work will likely culminate in the student's writing a feasibility study for their proposed M.A. research.&nbsp; In a two year program, it is never too early to start working on research.</p> <p>The second part of the class will be the so-called parade of scholars.&nbsp; This will involve at least part of our graduate faculty presenting their research interests and methods.&nbsp; Our department has a nice range of scholarly approaches; several of use work on material culture (albeit in different ways), we have an oral historians, a quantitative historian, a biographer, a few archival guys, and a clever, philological Medievalist.&nbsp; So, if even half of the graduate faculty in our department come through the seminar, we'll provide a nice introduction to historical approaches present in our department.</p> <p>The only other issue is how does the historical methods course work together with it's trailing course in historiography.&nbsp; The methods, approaches, and techniques of history are closely related to both the history of the discipline (particularly the process of professionalization) and the theoretical and epistemological assumptions that we rely upon to understand the past.&nbsp; While separating methods from theory (or theory from practice) has long been a practical and pedagogical expectation, it also enables student to take unreflective approach to how they understand their own discipline.&nbsp; In short, we preach that understanding the past is vital for understanding the present, but then offer courses that separate the two making it appear that present practice is sustainable without a sophisticated understanding of the history and theory of what we do.&nbsp; It could be hypocritical at best, and at worse, perpetuate the a kind of theoretical complacency that is not uncommon in history department and among graduate students.</p> <p>On the other hand, you can't teach everything at once.&nbsp; And the division between theory and practice does allow for a rather neat pedagogical division.&nbsp; The practical techniques of historical research are best learned through going and doing historical research, whereas the theoretical and historical foundations for the discipline are perhaps better introduced through a directed readings type environment where a group of scholars wrestle with challenging ideas a group.&nbsp; The challenge of rewriting the curriculum is how to accommodate these two different, yet nevertheless fundamental aspects the process of learning how to conduct historical research and analysis.&nbsp; The key issue is whether we should structure our curriculum around pedagogical issues or around the conceptual links that unite theory and technique in the practice of history.</p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Personal Archive STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-personal-archive CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 03/31/2010 07:48:51 AM ----BODY: <p>I'll admit that I am currently obsessed with <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a> (and particularly excited about their new foray into <a href="http://omeka.org/blog/2010/03/09/omeka-net-be-first-inline/">cloud hosting</a>).&nbsp; As any reader of this blog knows, it's a free, open-source web-publishing platform.&nbsp; And I have begun to use it extensively to publish images from my archaeological work in the Mediterranean.&nbsp; The software is powerful and relatively easy to use. I've managed to build three archives so far.&nbsp; The first included <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/collections/show/3">the works of Ryan Stander</a> who was the artist in residence at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project this past summer.&nbsp; The second, which I featured in this blog yesterday, included images taken of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/collections/show/4">the site of Lakka Skoutara</a> over the course of 9 years showing archaeological formation processes playing out in the Greek countryside.&nbsp; Yesterday, I uploaded <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/collections/show/6">a series of maps</a> documenting the distribution of material across our study area in Cyprus.&nbsp; The maps show the distribution of artifacts by chronotype across the coastal zone of Pyla Village, and these maps will be linked to places within a working draft of a chapter for the upcoming PKAP monograph on the distributional analysis of material at the site.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1932"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/hellenisticearlyroman_2f 7a1b0d0a.jpg" width="400" height="400"></a><br>Distribution of Hellenistic to Early Roman period artifacts</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1944"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/romanearly_dfd6bdb181.jp g" width="400" height="400"></a><br>Distribution of Early Roman period artifacts</p> <p align="left">Eventually, a working draft of this chapter (part of which have appeared, albeit in very fragmentary forms in this blog in Thinking Out Loud <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/09/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-out-

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loud.html">One</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/09/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-outloud-2.html">Two</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-outloud-3.html">Three</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-outloud-4.html">Four</a>) will appear on my <a href="http://www.scribd.com/billcaraher/">Scribd page</a> or, better still, in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/">my Omeka archive</a> alongside the other maps and images using their clever Google powered <a href="http://omeka.org/codex/Plugins/DocsViewer">document viewer plugin</a>.</p> <p align="left">None of these applications took me more than a few hours to find my comfort zone and I can uses these applications to continue to expand the personal-professional archive that began with the blog.&nbsp; Each archive is designed to accommodate different types of material, operates with slightly different principles of organization, and has a different aesthetic of display (or user-interface as the kids call it).</p> <p align="left">The scholarly process becomes more transparent and de-mystified.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Creating Ruins: Formation Process Pictures from Lakka Skoutara STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: creating-ruins-formation-process-pictures-from-lakka-skoutara CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 03/30/2010 07:54:22 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the most exciting things about our recent efforts to produce an online archive of images from the rural site of Lakka Skoutara is that it is now possible to track the processes that have created the ruins visible today.&nbsp; It's remarkable how much the houses have broken down over just a decade of observation.&nbsp; Click on the images of the houses to get access to the archive itself (powered by <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a>) and selective Dublin Core metadata.</p> <p> House 3 represents one of the most dramatic changes over 8 years time. Once the roof collapses, the walls fall down fairly quickly.&nbsp; The fieldstone and mud mortar addition on House 3 below collapses much more quickly than the modern cinder block and concrete.&nbsp; It's

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interesting that the end walls on the house remain standing, but I suppose unsurprising since they bear very little of the roof's weight.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1892"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house3_image1_2001_8f2be aa35c.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house3_image1_2001_8f2be aa35c.jpg" width="400" height="270"></a><br>(2001)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1896"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house3_image1_2002_51dd3 cf609.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house3_image1_2002_51dd3 cf609.jpg" width="400" height="270"></a><br>(2002)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1154"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house3_image4_corinth_ju ne12_2004_edb2c7d3e7.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house3_image4_corinth_ju ne12_2004_edb2c7d3e7.jpg" width="400" height="300"></a><br>(2004)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1124"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house3_image57_2009_fd1b 971c59.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house3_image57_2009_fd1b 971c59.jpg" width="400" height="300"></a><br>(2009)</p> <p align="left">The change in house 2 is equally dramatic, but here you'll notice some little editing issues.&nbsp; For example, in many cases the images scanned from slides are backwards.&nbsp; Note that between 2001 and 2002, the tiles of the house were removed and as a result the roof gives way quickly.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1899"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house2_image1_2001_28767 bd627.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house2_image1_2001_28767 bd627.jpg" width="400" height="273"></a><br>(2001)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1900"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house2_image5_2002_09788 40f81.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house2_image5_2002_09788 40f81.jpg" width="400" height="272"></a><br>(2002)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1037"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house2_image1b_corinth_j une12_2004_53ea038174.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house2_image1b_corinth_j une12_2004_53ea038174.jpg" width="400" height="300"></a><br>(2004)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/show/1015"><img alt="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house2_image5_2009_386af cdaf2.jpg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/archive/fullsize/house2_image5_2009_386af cdaf2.jpg" width="400" height="268"></a><br>(2009)</p> <p align="left">The plan with this project is not only to create a resource where students and scholars can observe the way that buildings break down over time.&nbsp; Be sure to check out <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/collections/show/4">the growing archive here</a>.&nbsp; The plan is to add some maps and plans as well as some more pictures over the next few weeks so it is always worth stopping back through the archive.&nbsp; I'll also likely move <a href="http://www.scribd.com/full/28737818?access_key=key1265siotexydjqyoet25">the working papers</a> over to my Omeka page soon as well.</p> <p align="left">For more on this project:</p> <p align="left"><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/la kka-skoutara-a-partial-archive.html">Lakka Skoutara: A Partial Archive</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/be tween-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-theupland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html">Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th Century "small world" in the upland basin of the southeastern Korinthia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/sl opes-and-terraces-at-lakka-skoutara.html">Slopes and Terraces at Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/co rinthian-infiltration-the-interior-of-some-houses-at-lakkaskoutara.html">Corinthian Infiltration: The Interior of Some Houses at Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/la kka-skoutara-the-survey.html">Lakka Skoutara: The Survey</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-houses-of-lakka-skoutara.html">The Houses of Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co llapse.html">Collapse</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/pr ovisional-discard.html">Provisional Discard</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co nstruction-in-the-corinthia.html">Construction in the Corinthia</a></p> <p align="left"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.91.201.94 URL: DATE: 04/25/2010 02:35:54 PM This is very cool. Thanks Bill! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Three Things From the Writers Conference STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: three-things-from-the-writers-conference CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: The New Media

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DATE: 03/29/2010 08:16:51 AM ----BODY: <p>This past week's writers conference was a pretty spectacular event.&nbsp; I managed to attend several of the lunchtime sessions and a few other events.&nbsp; I wish I could have done more.&nbsp; Even with that somewhat limited exposure, I came away with innumerable impressions and ideas that I hope can somehow influence my thinking and work over the next year.</p> <p>1. Writing as Performance.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wcauthors.html#williams">Saul Williams</a>, whose poetry is as much about performance on stage as it is about language, made the point that he regarded the page itself as a performance space.&nbsp; I am not sure why I was surprised by this.&nbsp; In the previous days panel entitled "beyond the screen", a number of the participants described the creative process in performative terms.&nbsp; One work discussed in this panel was a collective called <a href="http://www.booki.cc/collaborativefutures/">Collaborative Furtures</a> created a single book over <a href="http://www.mandiberg.com/2010/01/25/wewrote-the-book-collaborative-futures-transmediale-booksprint/">a week period</a>.&nbsp; The act of writing was as much the final product as the book itself.&nbsp; It got me thinking about blogging as a kind of performative writing.&nbsp; The time-based aspect of the blog -- with the date of publication forming the primary organizing principle -- represents writing in a way that centers more on the way that ideas develop through time and careen off one another than any one central theme, argument, plot, or even space.&nbsp; The time based component of the blog draws inspiration from the practice of writing journals which seek to capture the immediacy of experience.&nbsp; I think this relates to our somewhat erratic efforts on the <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology</a> blog where we have (I think tacitly) abandoned any plan or argument or even rhythm to our posts and introduce ideas as they come to us. In effect, blogging (even my rhythmic, daily, inscription) performs the act of writing by insisting on the temporal dimension of its practice. Like working papers, blog posts are showing the work that final drafts of academic and professional writing obscures behind a find layer of polish.&nbsp; Blogs represent ideas as events in the process of development.</p> <p>2. There is no New Media.&nbsp; One of the themes of the writers conference was the New Media and one of the really obvious outcomes of all the panels that I attended is that the very notion of the New Media has outlived its purpose.&nbsp; First off, we probably can't call many of the things that are traditionally associated with the New Media "new" any more.&nbsp; After all, the internet as we know it is 20 years old and computer based media actually predates widespread access to net.&nbsp; Like any once-new medium for communicating ideas, any effort to produce a common definition is bound to be inadequate to describe the work of artists and writers across such varied platforms as interactive fiction, web-based video, digital music, installation art, and multimedia arguments.&nbsp; In fact, if there is any complaint that I have about the writers conference is how little common ground there was between the people on the largest and (to my mind) potentially most dynamic panel -Beyond the Screen -- which featured new media pioneers and masters across mutiple fields: <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wcauthors.html#condit">Cecelia Condit</a> (film), <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wc-authors.html#amerika">Mark Amerika</a> (film and literature), <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wc-authors.html#montfort">Nick Montfort</a> (literature), <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wcauthors.html#moulthrop">Stuart Moulthrop</a> (art and literature), <a

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href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wc-authors.html#miller">Scott Miller</a> (music).&nbsp; While we can all accept that a lack of easy definition can suggest the existence of something profound, in the case of the New Media it may indicate, instead, that whatever moment in time the newness sought to capture and define has passed.&nbsp; The New Media no longer has a center around which ideas are coalescing.&nbsp; In other words, whatever middle ground once existed which allowed authors and artists to share ideas has now once again dispersed and we must find new paradigms to understand how former "New" media works relate.</p> <p>3. Anxiety and the Book.&nbsp; The first panel I attended was provocatively titled: "Are Books Obsolete?".&nbsp; The title alone suggests the anxiety surrounding the coming of the ebook reader, the speed and fluidity of the web, and the end of the page as a basic unit for measuring writing, reading, and certain basic intellectual accomplishments.&nbsp; While there were plenty of opportunities to celebrate the "new" opportunities made available through the hypertextual medium of the electronic "page", the underlying anxiety persisted. In this context, all of the sometimes incredible power of books came to the fore: their ability to capture attention, to stimulate pleasure through their weight, forms, and even scent, to structure narrative through conditioning interaction, to create better, more thoughtful readers, and to sustain the creative arts by protecting the intellectual property of the author.&nbsp; Anyone who has read this blog knows that I appreciate the role that objects play in creating relationships between individuals, but all of the anxiety about the end of the book seems strangely overwrought.&nbsp; There is no denying there importance of books to the Western intellectual tradition, there is also no denying that most people in history did not read books.&nbsp; And more than that, even most people who could read did not necessary read books.&nbsp; I'd even argue that today, most of us spend more time reading newspapers, magazines, loose papers, and letters than books.&nbsp; It's not that books aren't important (and I suspect that they will continue to be), but that their impact has always been focused on a particular groups and particular circumstances.&nbsp; Perhaps it's just the historian in me who noticed the lack of historical context for the significance of the book.&nbsp; This is not to suggest that a dose of "historical reality" will alleviate fears that the end of books as we know it will swiftly bring about the end of Western civilization, but it certainly would make the extent and significance of the book as an object and technology easier to understand.</p> <p>Any event that causes me to think is a good event (even if the only thing that I think is "who is that guy and why is he doing that?") and, with this broad definition, the Writers Conference qualifies as a good event. It was exciting to hear people talk so freely and to speculate so widely about the life of the mind on a campus and in a community where such talk is not always readily accepted. I'm already looking forward to next year, and if you have a few bucks, <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wc-donation.html">give something</a> to help the Writers Conference continue to stimulate the minds of the northern plains.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT:

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AUTHOR: Evan Nelson EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.168.159 URL: DATE: 03/30/2010 08:58:25 AM Was the fourth thing you learned just how awesome Saul Williams is? I've always come away from the Writers Conference week feeling like my brain was two sizes bigger than my head. Even after hearing of these events second hand, I feel the same way now. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 03/26/2010 10:24:08 AM ----BODY: <p>Just some quick hits on a sunny Friday.</p> <ul> <li>An interview with <a href="http://www.wiredjournalists.com/notes/An_Interview_with_Rex_Sorgatz_aka_Fi moculous">UND alumnus Rex Sorgatz</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://bloggingpompeii.blogspot.com/2010/03/topography-ofpompeii.html">Crowd-sourcing Pompeii elevation data</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://sounds.bl.uk/maps/Soundscapes.html">Soundscapes in the UK</a>.</li> <li>The last day of the Writers Conference features presentations by <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wc-schedule.htm">Frank X. Walker and Saul Williams</a>. Pretty exciting stuff.</li> <li>I've added some more photographs to the Lakka Skoutara collection on my Omeka page. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/collections/show/4">Check them out</a>.</li> <li>Sneak peek at the newest blog in the Caraher Blog empire: <a href="http://pendentive.wordpress.com/">Pendentive</a>. It's the successor to Squinch... check it out.</li> <li>Some really positive feedback on the <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/03/25/teaching-thursday-a-year-inreview/">Teaching Thursday: Year in Review</a>.</li> </ul> <p>Be sure to check out Saul Williams at the Chester Fritz Auditorium tonight at 8 pm!</p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: A Year in Review STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-a-year-in-review CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 03/25/2010 08:02:16 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Crossposted to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a></em> <p>We interrupt your regularly scheduled <em><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>, </em>for a brief effort to summarize its first year in existence. Teaching Thursday emerged from a conversation between me and Anne Kelsch. The idea of Teaching Thursday began on my blog as an online extension of his regular teaching journal.&nbsp; The idea was to take time each week to reflect on some issue either in the media or in practice that influences the way in which he taught. As with blogging in general, the reflective writing soon became addictive and this addiction (as they often do) led to changes in behavior.&nbsp; I found that I became more aware (and, indeed, interested) in how changing approaches to my classroom practice produced different results, created different environments, and reflected changing attitudes toward teaching more broadly.&nbsp; I thought it would be a great idea to supplement the regular discussions organized by the Office of Instructional Development with a weekly teaching blog where folks across campus (and perhaps even outside of campus) could reflect on the things that they do that influence how they teach. <p>SInce those first conversations, Teaching Thursday has seen 63 posts and 66 comments.&nbsp; The most common categories (and we divided the post into many, probably too many categories) and those related to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/onlineteaching/">online teaching</a> (5), <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/technology/">technology</a> (7), <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/cheating/">cheating</a> (4), <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/student-expectations/">student expectations</a> (6), <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/graduateinstruction/">graduate instruction</a> (6), and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/future-teaching/">the future of teaching</a> (6), and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/summerteaching/">summer teaching</a> (4).&nbsp; These posts were written by over 20 authors representing 15 departments or divisions on campus and several offcampus bloggers to add some diversity to our perspective here.&nbsp; The posts

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featured the full range of faculty (both tenure track and non-tenure track, from full professors to assistant professors), staff, and administrators who are all committed to teaching in some way on the University of North Dakota campus. <p>Below is a list of the 25 most popular posts from the past year.&nbsp; One of the great things about blogs is that you can track, to some extent, the number of times your pages were viewed.&nbsp; Of course, any kind of web statistic must be taken with a grain of salt, but the ability to say something about what your audience found interesting, compelling, or timely.&nbsp; The list below ranks the most popular posts based on the number of page views per day. The diversity among these popular posts is remarkable to me.&nbsp; They range from very traditional blog posts which merely point toward an article of interest on the web, to inspirational essays, to thoughtful critiques and practice teaching advice.&nbsp; <p><b>1. </b>2.4. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/howard-zinn-andteaching/"><u>Howard Zinn and Teaching</u></a>, R. Kahn<br><b>2. </b>1.80. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/the-recruiting-paradoxrecruiting-and-teaching-a-new-generation-of-graduate-students/"><u>The Recruiting Paradox: Recruiting and Teaching a New Generation of Graduate Students</u></a>, E. Nelson<br><b>3. </b>1.75. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/online-teaching-thepanopticon-and-the-unequal-gaze/"><u>Online Teaching, the Panopticon, and the unequal gaze</u></a>, M. Beltz<br><b>4. </b>1.59. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/on-the-habit-ofcheating/"><u>On the habit of cheating</u></a>, M. Beltz<br><b>5. </b>1.39. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/how-to-spot-a-badprofessor/"><u>How to spot a bad professor</u></a>, W. Caraher<br><b>6. </b>1.38. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-cost-ofcheap-education/"><u>The Cost of Cheap Education</u></a>, A. Kelsch<br><b>7. </b>1.28. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/the-englishdepartment-and-beyond-the-und-writers-conference/"><u>The English Department and Beyond: the UND Writers Conference</u></a>, C. Alberts<br><b>8. </b>0.95. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/technology-andpedagogy/"><u>Technology and Pedagogy</u></a>. W. Caraher<br><b>9. </b>0.87. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/teaching-thursdaycritiquing-the-three-year-solution/">Teaching Thursday: Critiquing the Three Year Solution</a>, J. Hawthorne<br><b>10. </b>0.70. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/the-new-future-ofteaching-graduate-student-mentoringdeconstructing-framework/"><u>The New Future of Teaching: Graduate Student Mentoring/Deconstructing Framework</u></a> J. Benoit<br><b>11. </b>0.67. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/teaching-thursdaysboundaries-and-manners/"><u>Teaching Thursdays: Boundaries and Manners</u></a>, C. Prescott<br><b>12. </b>0.63. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/the-new-future-ofteaching-social-networks-changing-expectations-and-perils-of-access/"><u>The New Future of Teaching: Social Networking, Changing Expectations, and the Perils of Access</u></a>, W. Caraher. B. Weber<br><b>13. </b>0.57. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/teaching-thursday-somethoughtful-tips-for-online-teaching/"><u>Teaching Thursday: Some Thoughtful Tips </u></a>, M. Beltz,W. Caraher, T. Prescott, B. Weber<br><b>14. </b>0.57. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/the-panopticon-andonline-teaching/"><u>The Panopticon and Online Teaching</u></a>, W. Caraher<br><b>15. </b>0.47. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/mentoring-graduatestudents/"><u>Mentoring Graduate Students</u></a>, C. Prescott<br><b>16.

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</b>0.42. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/the-cost-ofcheap-education-another-perspective/"><u>The Cost of Cheap Education: Another Perspective </u></a>, M. Beltz<br><b>17. </b>0.41. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/three-thursday-thoughtson-teaching-1-lexical-analysis/"><u>Three Thursday Thoughts on Teaching: 1. Lexical Analysis </u></a>, D. Perkins<br><b>18. </b>0.40. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/reflecting-on-teachingan-all-campus-colloqium-on-the-scholarship-of-teaching-andlearning/"><u>Reflecting on Teaching: An All-Campus Colloquium on Teaching and Learning</u></a>, W. Caraher<br><b>19. </b>0.39. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/call-me-edupunk/"><u>Call me Edupunk</u></a>, C. Alberts<br><b>20. </b>0.38. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/using-models-toteach/"><u>Using Models to Teach</u></a>, C. Barkdull, B. Weber<br><b>21. </b>0.37. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/cheating/"><u>Cheating</u ></a>, W. Caraher<br><b>22. </b>0.31. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/on-spurring-selfreflection-in-decision-making/"><u>Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium: On Spurring Self-Reflection in Decision Making,</u></a> D. Sauerwein<br><b>23. </b>0.30. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/onlinecheating/"><u>Online Cheating</u></a>, C. Prescott<br><b>24. </b>0.26. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/another-view-on-teachinggraduate-students/"><u>Another View on Teaching Graduate Students</u></a>, A. Kitzes<br><b>25. </b>0.24. <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/making-the-most-of-amonth-in-china-the-role-of-a-directed-journal/"><u>Making the Most of a Month in China: The Role of a Direct Journal</u></a>, C. Berry <p>Over the first year, the blog has enjoyed over 7500 page views (and this does not count views via its RSS feed in Google Reader and the like).&nbsp; The chart below shows that the trend over the past 12 months is clearly a positive one especially when you consider that December and January are typically slow blog months (both in terms of posts and visits) and March still has a week left and is showing exceptional traffic. In short, I am optimistic that the upward trend will continue. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310fdc2121970 c-pi"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" border="0" alt="TeachingThursdayStats" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310fdc2129970c -pi" width="400" height="168"></a> </p> <p>While we do not collect a full set of analytics data, we can say a few things about how people got to our blog.&nbsp; The biggest referrer is <a href="http://www.und.edu/">und.edu</a>, followed by <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/oid">und.edu/dept/oid</a> (the home page of the office of instructional development). My personal blog -- <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/">The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World</a> provided some traffic as did the <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/">Official Blog of the Graduate School</a> , but more important perhaps are various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter which drove a considerable quantity of traffic to the site.&nbsp; Finally, several other sites picked up our blog and linked to it.&nbsp; The most exciting link came from the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07ihtcurrents.html?_r=3&amp;ref=world">the New York Times</a>, but we also attracted links from India, South America, and several blogs in the US.&nbsp; The most exciting thing is that every day, every week, and every month we see more and

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more traffic coming to <em>Teaching Thursday </em>to discover what our faculty and friend have to say about teaching. <p>Without sounding sappy, I've been very pleased to discover so many people on campus willing to write critical, reflective, and practical posts on aspects of their teaching.&nbsp; As we look ahead to our 10,000 visit and 100th post, I am excited to continue to work to develop content and participation on the blog. In particular, I'd like to get more participation from across campus, and extend invitations to my colleagues in the College of Engineering, Nursing, the Law School, and Medical School (I'm already working on ways to draw in colleagues in Aerospace!) to contribute what you do that is inspirational, practical, and exciting to the conversation.&nbsp; With the recent emphasis on the STEM disciplines, I think that this forum can become a useful place for teachers both within and outside of the STEM fields to&nbsp; exchange ideas that will enrich all of our classroom experiences. <p>I'd like to thank all the contributors over the past year -- especially those who wrote multiple posts or took the time to write about teaching during busiest parts of the semester -- and thank Anne Kelsch's for all her hard work to keep the blog in the campus eye. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some thoughts on St. Leonidas and Baptism at Lechaion in Greece STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-thoughts-on-st-leonidas-and-baptism-at-lechaion-in-greece CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 03/24/2010 07:46:11 AM ----BODY: <p>The Lechaion basilica and baptistery are among the most impressive archaeological and architecture remains from the Early Christian period in Greece. As I have blogged on many times, the massive Lechaion basilica stood near the coast at Corinth's Western harbor. It's baptistery is often thought to date earlier than the massive basilica situated to its south largely because they have slightly different orientations. (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/korinthian _matters/">This post has a companion post here</a>).</p> <p>Scholars have often associated the basilica with the martyr Leonidas and his several companions who, according to the preserved <i>lives</i>, were drowned in the Gulf of Corinth (<i>AS</i> II, April 16). Since Robin Jensen's visit a few weeks back, I've been thinking about this episode and its relationship to the great church at Lechaion. In several articles, Jensen argues that <i>ad sanctos</i> baptism was a not uncommon practice in Early Christian times (<a

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href="http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~james.p.burns/chroma/practices/pilgrimjens.h tml">for a nice summary see here</a>). This largely involved traveling to pilgrimage sites or even just local martyr's tombs for the initiation rite of baptism. For Jensen, this evokes the long-standing association between baptism as a kind of spiritual rebirth and the death of martyrs as their birth into spiritual and eternal glory.</p> <p style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a96f6e94970b -pi" width="480" height="214" alt="201003240733.jpg" /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><br /> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a96f6e8c970b -pi" width="401" height="383" alt="201003240733.jpg" /></p> <p>I began to wonder whether <i>ad sanctos</i> type baptisms might have taken place at Lechaion. After all, the church is conspicuously close to the sea where a martyr shrine to Leonidas would be appropriate. Moreover, the church makes abundant use of water both in some of the imagery present in the yet unpublished architectural sculpture (at least one unpublished fragment of sculpture includes a dolphin which would have had particular significance in the context of baptism and Corinth through the myth of Arion) and in the various water features associated with its massive western atrium. These water features include the installation of a large basin, perhaps for fountains, in the center of its western hemicycle and two large basins along the eastern wall of the atrium. The baptistery itself is quite large with three rooms: two ancillary rooms and the baptistery proper with its central font. In short, the basilica featured water prominently, and if the basilica was to be associated with the martyr Leonidas, then the use of water throughout may well have been evocative of the events surround his and his companions martyrdom.</p> <p>The use of water around Lechnaion is not enough, however, to link this church to the martyr Leonidas or to make an argument for <i>ad sanctos</i> baptismal practices. Corinth and the Corinthia was known in antiquity for <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/fountains-and-the-culture-of-water-at-romancorinth/oclc/50497698">fountains and water</a>; so, the the use of water at Lechaion may have merely evoked or advanced Corinth's longstanding reputation. There is something more however linking Leonidas to baptismal practices. First, it was not uncommon to associate explicitly martyrdom with baptism, especially if the martyr was a catechumen. Leonidas seems to have been a full-fledged Christian. He was, however, martyred on during Easter. Easter was the common time for baptism in the Mediterranean in general and in the Greece specifically according to the historian Socrates (5.22). While there does not appear to be explicit (at least that I've found) references to baptismal imagery, the accounts of St. Leonidas' martrydom are short and the link between their physical and fatal submersion in the sea at Easter when catechumens experienced (at least symbolic) submersion of their own in the baptismal font at Lechaion seems hard to overlook.</p> <p>To take this admittedly speculative reading a step further, it would be interesting to imagine the relationship between the Lechaion basilica and the nymphaion excavated a short distance to the south of the church (E. Stikas, Ergon (1957), 53-58).</p> <p><br /></p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a96f6e98970b -pi" width="480" height="417" alt="201003240743.jpg" /><br /> </div>

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<p>This building shows many remarkable similarities in both architectural decoration and in the use of <i>opus sectile</i> floors to the Lechaion basilica. While the building itself may be earlier, it seems likely that it underwent some modification by the same work crews who were involved in building the Lechaion basilica. The location of the nymphaion at the base of a coastal bluff gave it access to water and a position along a likely coastal road leading to the north coast of the Peloponnesus and, presumably, past the massive Lechaion church. It would be appealing to imagine this building as a symbolic billboard (are there other kinds of billboards?) for the Lechaion basilica taking not only certain decorative cues from the church as well as the reference to water. Water would have brought together the local history of the church, well-known Corinthian water culture, the martyrdom of Leonidas, and the Christian rite of baptism performed in an elaborate building less than 100 m from the foreshore of the Corinthian gulf.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Tweets and Writers Conference on a Digital Day STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: tweets-and-writers-conference-on-a-digital-day CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 03/23/2010 08:08:05 AM ----BODY: <p>Today is going to be dominated by digital affairs. First, I plan to attend the University of North Dakota CIO (Chief Information Officers) Core Technology Research Forum. The plan, from what I understand, is to focus on the future of research technology here on campus.</p> <p>That's probably the least interesting meeting of the day. Immediately after that meeting, I'll scurry off to the first major panel of the UND Writers Conference. The theme of this years conference is "Mind the Gap: Print, New Media, Art" and here's <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wcschedule.htm">the exciting schedule</a>. At noon in the lecture bowl, the first panel will discuss "Are Books Obsolete?" and feature graphic artist, <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wc-authors.html#spiegelmantop">Art Spiegelman</a>, e-literature author (and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/deena-larsen/">Teaching Thursday</a> contributor!) <a href="http://www.deenalarsen.net/">Deena Larsen</a>, filmmaker <a href="http://www.ceceliacondit.com/">Cecelia Condit</a>. This is not the first panel to consider this topic in recent years and the slightly negative

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tone to the question (as opposed to the more optimistic "<a href="http://www.futureofthebook.org/">What is the future of the book</a>"? The fear with a panel focused on a question like this is that the answer could be a simple "no" and that doesn't leave us anywhere really to go.</p> <p>One of my little pet projects has been to encourage a Twitter back channel for the Writers Conference using the hashtag #UNDWC. Let's just say that North Dakota is not quite ready for Twitter hashtags yet and it's been a bit of an uphill battle. In any event, the Writers Conference does have <a href="http://twitter.com/UNDWC">an official Twitter Feed</a>, which awkwardly has two followers. So, anyone attending, thinking about, or curious about the Writers Conference, follow their feed. Or, better still, contribute to the conversation by using the <a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=UNDWC">#UNDWC</a>. <a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=UNDWC">Then follow the chat (or just me tweeting merrily away) here</a>.</p> <p>Then, at 2 pm, I'm off to my History 240 Class to talk about research using the library. As per usual this involves introducing them to digital tools namely <a href="http://odinlibrary.org/F?func=find-b-0&amp;local_base=undal">the library catalogue</a>, J-Stor, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/">World Cat</a>, <a href="http://scholar.google.com/">Google Scholar</a>, and <a href="http://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a> -- as well as old fashioned analog ones. One of the greatest challenges that I have each year is explaining to students exactly what a monograph is or how to distinguish between an academic and popular work. It's always surprising how little the students understand about the relationship between form and authority in publishing. In other words, a book that has all of the basic attributes of an academically authoritative text (footnotes, bibliography, index, acknowledgements, thesis, academic publisher) is more likely to be the basis for further research than a book lacking this attributes. Students simply do not come to University with the skills needed to discern academic authority. The thing that worries me more, is that these basic skills are very difficult to communicate and instill in students. In other words, students will continue to ask me -- sometimes for semesters after the class is over -- whether a book is a monograph or not. I am not trying to suggest that students only read monographs or anything like that, but it strikes me as odd how hard it is for them to distinguish between an academic book and a non-academic book. And, to return to the theme of this post, it worries me that in a digital environment it is even more confusing to them. At least academic publishing adheres to some basic standards whereas the signs of authority on the web are far more obscure.</p> <p>Finally, on a digital day, I am slightly embarrassed to announce that I (well, actually my wife) ordered my iPad over the weekend. While I have, like any good academic, scurried off to find negative reviews of it (just to keep myself from being disappointed), I am pretty excited to have a flexible, flawed, and nicely designed ebook reader. I expect it to substantially improve my life.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 03/24/2010 09:13:00 AM Can't believe you're meeting Art Spiegelman!!! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Lakka Skoutara: A Partial Archive STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: lakka-skoutara-a-partial-archive CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 03/22/2010 08:17:33 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last 10 years or so, David Pettegrew, Tim Gregory, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, and I have been working to document a modern rural settlement in the southeastern Corinthia. The site is called Lakka Skoutara and we have presented the preliminary results of our work in a few <a href="http://www.scribd.com/full/28737818?access_key=key1265siotexydjqyoet25">conference papers</a> over the past few years, I've p<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/be tween-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-theupland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html">resented some photographs and general discussions in this blog</a>, and Lita-Tzortzopoulou published a very brief summary of our work in "<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=n-PYAykft8C&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;dq=Mediterranean%20Archaeological%20Athanassopoulos&amp;pg= PA183#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false">The Archaeology of Modern Greece</a>" in E. Athanassopoulos and L. Wandsnider eds. <i>Mediterranean Archaeological Landscapes: current issues</i>. (Philadelphia 2004).</p> <p>Part of the basis for our study is a significant archive of photographs. I've made a significant number of these available using Omeka on a companion site to this blog called <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/">Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota</a>. David Pettegrew and I took these photos over a 9 year period from 2001-2009. So far, I've uploaded and begun to annotate with metadata photos taken in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse?search=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D %5Belement_id%5D=40&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=contains&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5 Bterms%5D=2002&amp;range=&amp;collection=4&amp;type=&amp;tags=&amp;submit_search =Search">2002</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse?search=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D %5Belement_id%5D=40&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=contains&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5 Bterms%5D=2004&amp;range=&amp;collection=4&amp;type=&amp;tags=&amp;submit_search =Search">2004</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse?search=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D %5Belement_id%5D=40&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=contains&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5

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Bterms%5D=2009&amp;range=&amp;collection=4&amp;type=&amp;tags=&amp;submit_search =Search">2009</a>.</p> <p><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a962fb70970b -pi" width="480" height="406" alt="MedArchUNDOmeka.tiff" /></p> <p>To find the photos on my Omeka site, click on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/collections">Browse Collections</a> and then <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/collections/show/4">Lakka Skoutara</a>. You can look at the various photos of individual houses by their tags: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+2">House 2</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+3">House 3</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+4">House 4</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+5">House 5</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+6">House 6</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+7">House 7</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+9">House 9</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+10">House 10</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+11">House 11</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+13">House 13</a> , <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+14">House 14</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+16">House 16</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/items/browse/tag/House+17">House 17</a>. Or you can go to advanced search (in the upper right hand corner) and create more complex searches. The simple search is nearly worthless. Once you find a photo in which you are interested, you can save the citation into your <a href="http://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a> database.</p> <p>At present the houses do not have a significant amount of metadata associated with each house, but that is coming soon. Moreover, we do not have many contextualizing documents associated with these houses. But we will have a few plans posted soon and a map of the site as well as some photos taken in 2001 and some more robust descriptions of the houses and the area. In other words, this is a work in progress, but the item numbers for each photograph will remain stable.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Even more exciting and strangely beautiful flood pictures STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: even-more-exciting-and-strangely-beautiful-flood-pictures CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/21/2010 07:49:52 AM ----BODY: <p>I always tell people that the most beautiful thing about Grand Forks is the light. This relatively low-resolution web cam, capture shows just that at about 7:46 am this morning.</p> <p>The mighty Red River of the North is at 45.99 feet, the 8th highest historic crest.</p> <p><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a95dcf7d970b -pi" width="480" height="363" alt="FloodCam4.tiff" /></p> <p>Here is the river level <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a959a571970 b-pi">yesterday</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a95487c9970 b-pi">the day before</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310fb59b0b970 c-pi">the day before</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Another Flood Picture STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: another-flood-picture CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/20/2010 07:37:59 AM ----BODY: <p>It's 7:25 am on a partly cloudy Saturday. Here's what the river is up to from the <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/pages/floodcam2010"><i>Grand Fork Herald's</i> Flood Cam</a>.</p> <p><br />

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<img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a959a571970b -pi" width="480" height="366" alt="FloodCam3.tiff" /></p> <p>Have a good Saturday.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 03/19/2010 07:35:21 AM ----BODY: <p>Some cool quick hits on a chilly spring Friday morning:</p>! <ul>! <li>If you haven&#39;t tracked it down yet, check out <a href="http://www.danreetz.com/">Dan Reetz&#39;s home page and blog</a>.</li>! <li>The <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a> is experimenting with <a href="http://vue.tufts.edu/">Vue (Visual Understanding Environment)</a> <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/vue-opencontext-orgquickly-visualizing-relationships-in-data/">here</a> and <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/more-onvue/">here</a>.</li>! <li>The <a href="http://www.iklaina.org/">Iklaina Archaeological Project</a> publishes its final reports online on a fairly nice looking site. &#0160;&#0160;</li>! <li>Here&#39;s <a href="http://bristol.ac.uk/news/2010/6840.html">an update on the project sponsored</a> by the University of Bristol to included homeless people in the excavation of an urban site.</li>! <li>Here&#39;s a link to a somewhat interesting First Monday article on how students use <a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2830/24 76">Wikipedia</a> and an interesting article on how <a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2613/24 79">peer governance works on that site</a>.</li>! <li>My lovely wife has offered to get my an iPad for my birthday. At the same time, I&#39;ve been talking the Scott Moore who recently purchased a Kindle. And now I discover that I can read <a

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href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_mac_mkt_lnd?docId=1000464931 ">Kindle books on my Mac</a> in a real mediocre way.</li>! <li>Did I link to this interesting (and sort of long) talk by J. Zittrain on the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kpur7yJ7EE&amp;feature=youtube_gdata">Hist orical Record in the Digital Age</a>?</li>! <li>Some of Ryan Stander&#39;s work based on his time in Cyprus was <a href="http://bit.ly/9Xs7hX">recently declared indecent</a> by the good folks at the County of Somerset Culture and Heritage Council.</li>! <li>This is a very funny version of <a href="http://bit.ly/cQlzCK">Classics version of Adam Sandler&#39;s Hannukah</a> song produced by students at my old stomping ground, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.</li>! <li><a href="http://joeljonientz.com/">Joel Jonientz</a>, one of our collaborators in the Working Group in Digital and New Media, <a href="http://bit.ly/9gmqJA">interviewed Art Spiegelman</a>.</li>! <li>One of the fun things to do during the NCAA tournament is to check <a href="http://www.google.com/trends">Google Trends</a> to see what universities are getting lots of attention for their teams&#39; success during the NCAA Tournament.</li>! <li>For a tiny bit, it looked like <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/nzvaus2010/engine/current/match/423789.html">New Zealand v. Australia</a> might be interesting, but then folks settled in.</li>! <li>Bristol this week.</li>! <li>And the NCAA Tournament. I broke my own record for how quickly I could lose my NCAA Champion (Georgetown): first day, third session. What was I thinking?</li>! </ul>! <p>As a point of comparison, I captured this photo at 7:22 am today. Compare it to the capture from <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310fb59b0b970 c-pi">24 hours before</a>.</p>! <p><img alt="FloodCam2.tiff" height="365" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a95487c9970b -pi" width="480" /></p><br /> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Spring Thaw and Flood STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: spring-thaw-and-flood CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana

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DATE: 03/18/2010 07:51:40 AM ----BODY: <p>It's that time of year again: flood season. Since so many of you have asked, I've embedded Grand Forks' flood cam in this post:</p><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="400" height="320" id="utv666513"> <param name="flashvars" value="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=3263976" /> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/3263976" /> <embed flashvars="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=3263976" width="400" height="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" id="utv666513" name="utv_n_570002" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/3263976" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> </object> <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; width: 400px; background: #ffffff; display: block; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: underline; text-align: center;" target="_blank">Streaming .TV shows by Ustream</a><br /> To offer some perspective, I've included a screen grab of the flood cam as of 7:30 am today:<br /> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310fb59b0b970c -pi" width="480" height="371" alt="FloodCam.jpg" /><br /> <br /> As you can see the bridge is still open and the Mighty Red River of the North is still largely within its banks. The flood obelisk is just to the right of center immediately to the left of the electrical pole on the right side of the bridge. As you can see it's in the water, but that's not too unusual or scary. The crest is predicted for early next week and to be between 47 and 49 feet. Apparently the long, early thaw combined with a snowy winter and relatively damp March has caused the major problems this year. Current predictions put the crest safely inside the to 10 historic crests:<br /> <br /> <i>Historic Crests</i>1) 54.35 feet - April 22, 1997<br /> 2) 50.20 feet - April 10, 1897<br /> 3) 49.34 feet - April 1, 2009<br /> 4) 48.81 feet - April 26, 1979<br /> 5) 48.00 feet - April 18, 1882<br /> 6) 47.93 feet - April 6, 2006<br /> 7) 47.41 feet - April 16, 2006<br /> 8) 45.93 feet - April 21, 1996<br /> 9) 45.73 feet - April 11, 1978<br /> 10) 45.69 feet - April 16, 1969<br /> <i>Source: National Weather Service via <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/pages/2010floodlinksandinfo">Grand Forks Herald</a></i><br /> <br /> I guess there is some worry about ice jams -- or at least that was the topic of conversation last night at dinner. If you want to know as much as we do out here, check out the <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/pages/2010floodlinksandinfo"><i>Grand Forks Herald's</i> flood page</a>. We'll do all we can to stay dry and hope the best for our friends to the south.<br />

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece and Dumbarton Oaks STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: medieval-and-post-medieval-greece-and-dumbarton-oaks CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 03/17/2010 08:17:25 AM ----BODY: <p>I've just finished reading through John Bintliff and Hanna StoÃàger's, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/medieval-and-post-medieval-greece-the-corfupapers/oclc/476763831"><em>Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece: The Corfu Papers</em></a> (2009).&nbsp; It's an edited volume produced from a conference in Corfu in 1998.&nbsp; The papers, however, have largely been updated and represent a nice cross-section of the kind of work being done in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece.&nbsp; The papers focus on ceramic studies, the results of intensive pedestrian survey, studies on settlement patterns, new directions in the study of domestic and monumental architecture, and, finally, discussions of issues of cultural research management in Greece. I found W. Bowden's short analysis of the Christian archaeology in Greece with an emphasis on church in Mastron, Aetolia, which scholars have traditionally dated to the 7th-8th centuries.&nbsp; Bowden suggests that simple stylistic dating based either on decoration or architecture can be misleading especially considering the prevalence of re-use and conscious anachronism in the Middle and Late Byzantine period in the region.&nbsp; Also worthy of note is Platon Petrides short review of Late Antique Delphi, which doesn't say anything new here, but is still a nice overview of post-ancient period at the site. T.Gregory, F. Lang, J. Vroom offer some useful commentary on the use of intensive survey and the study of ceramics in the study of Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece; Gregory's article, which has been substantially up-dated, has a nice critiquing the impact of "second-wave" intensive survey projects on our understanding of Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece.&nbsp; The final three papers (M. Mouliou, K. Sbonias, and L. Tzortzopoulou-Gregory) deal with issues of cultural resource management in Greece.&nbsp; L. Tzortzopoulou-Gregory's paper provides more useful evidence for the difficult position that foreign (or even just non-local) archaeologists find themselves in when they are placed between the national archaeological bureaucracy, local communities, and non-local/non-national research interests.</p> <p>I received my copy of this volume the same week that I was

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invited (along with many others) to a "conversation" at <a href="http://www.doaks.org/">Dumbarton Oaks</a> on Byzantine Archaeology in North America.&nbsp; While I will not be able to attend, I was invited by the director of Dumbarton Oaks (as I am sure were many of my colleagues) to send along any thoughts I might have about this particular topic.&nbsp; I was struck by how rarely Dumbarton Oaks publications appeared in the bibliographies of the various articles in this volume. The main reason for this absence is because few of the papers showed much concern for the kinds of art historical approaches long favored by Dumbarton Oaks (for this critique see <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/05/dumbarton-oaks-and-surfacesurveys.html">Kostis Kourelis open letter</a>).&nbsp; The approaches favored by Dumbarton Oaks have tended to particularly ill-suited to research in the Greek countryside where textual evidence is relatively scarce, monumental architecture is often in poor condition, representing stylistically "crude" or provincial work, or even "late" by Dumbarton Oaks standards (although DO has contributed significantly to preservation of neglected buildings, the definition of provincial style, and late and post-Byzantine art), and the field techniques and methods require some specialized training to evaluate and critique. Ironically, Dumbarton Oaks' interest in economic history, the history of everyday life (particularly as manifest in <em>realia </em>in saints lives and other Byzantine documents), and the character of "the provincial" in terms of style and influence on the traditional centers of Byzantine society (Constantinople, Thessaloniki, et c.).&nbsp; </p> <p>The Bintliff and StoÃàger volume (along with <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/archaeology-and-history-in-romanmedieval-and-post-medieval-greece-studies-on-method-and-meaning-in-honor-oftimothy-e-gregory/oclc/191758469">another recent volume</a> focusing on the same period and region) have shown that the tools exist to develop more nuanced interpretations of the Byzantine countryside.&nbsp; And that these analyses have much to offer traditional textual approaches to the history of Byzantium.&nbsp; In fact, one fault I might offer among the articles in the Bintliff volume is the relative lack of attention to questions that extend beyond the national or local boundaries of Medieval (or even post-Medieval) Greece.&nbsp; The transnational approaches fostered by institutions like Dumbarton Oaks could work to counteract a tendency toward studies that emphasize the modern region or nation at the expense of more revealing Medieval concepts of political, economic, and cultural organization.&nbsp; Moreover the relative absence of sustained discussion of texts, urban centers, or elite art in the Bintliff volume is not necessarily a strength.&nbsp; The very areas neglected (to some extent, but not ignored) in the Bintliff and StoÃàger volume are areas where Dumbarton Oaks could and perhaps even should show the way by showing the value of traditional methods and approaches to contemporary archaeological research.</p> <p>It seems clear to me that the archaeology of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Mediterranean is at a watershed moment.&nbsp; As Kourelis noted, a generation of pioneers in the field of Byzantine archaeology are approach retirement age.&nbsp; Part of their legacy is there a strong group of ambitious and dedicated young scholars.&nbsp; This informally-defined group seeks not only to push the methods advanced by folks like Tim Gregory, John Bintliff, Jack Davis, and others, in their individual scholarship but to find ways to push institutions like the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School in Athens</a> and Dumbarton Oaks to bring these methods into fold of traditional research on these periods and places.&nbsp; This should not involve rejecting the important traditions of scholarship at these institutions -- after all, hardly a week goes by when I don't consult a publication produced at Dumbarton Oaks and I value the amazing support that I have received from the American School in Athens -- but showing how recent developments in, say, survey

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archaeology, applied post-modern or post-processural theory, or&nbsp; even kinds of reflective, historical criticism of past and present institutional practices, can enrich the disciplines to which we are all committed. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Tuesday: Readings for History 240: The Historians Craft STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-tuesday-readings-for-history-240-the-historians-craft CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 03/16/2010 06:35:48 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the past two semesters, I've been teaching a revised version of our department's required undergraduate methods course -- the historian's craft.&nbsp; I split the course into two parts: the first part is a historiographical survey of the development of the discipline. The class time is divided between a formal lecture and readings of primary sources central to the development of history.&nbsp; Fortunately, most of these primary sources are easily found on the interwebs.&nbsp; In fact, I've been able to teach the class without requiring a textbook or a primary source reader.</p> <p>Here's the basic reading list:</p> <p><a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.1.i.html">Homer, <em>Iliad</em>, Book 1-2</a><br><a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.1.i.html">Herodotus, Book 1</a><br><a href="http://www.utexas.edu/courses/classicalarch/readings/thucydides_book_1.htm l">Thucydides, Book 1</a><br><a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/alexandr.html">Plutarch, <em>Life of Alexander</em>, excerpts</a><br><a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vita-constantine.html">Euseubus, <em>Life of Constantine</em>, excerpts</a><br><a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bede-book1.html">Bede, <em>Ecclesiastical History of England</em>, Book 1, excerpts</a><br><a href="http://omacl.org/Anglo/part2.html"><em>The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle</em>, excerpts</a><br><a href="http://history.hanover.edu/texts/vallapart2.html">L. Valla, <em>Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine</em>, excerpts</a><br><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=BXsfAAAAMAAJ&amp;dq=History%20of%20the%20 Reformation%20Ranke&amp;pg=PR3#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false">L. von Ranke, <em>History of the Reformation</em>, excerpts</a><br>T. Mommsen, "Rectoral Address," University of Berlin (1874).<br><a

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href="http://books.google.com/books?id=3fticLUr2XIC&amp;dq=J.%20Michelet%20The%2 0People&amp;lr=&amp;pg=PA3#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false">J. Michelet, <em>The People </em>(1846), excerpts</a><br><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=QTENAAAAYAAJ&amp;dq=Bury%20History%20of%2 0Science&amp;lr=&amp;pg=PA3#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false">J.B. Bury, "The Science of History" (1903)</a>.<br><a href="http://www.historians.org/projects/cge/Related/Emerton.htm">E. Emerton, "The Requirements for the Historical Doctorate in America," American Historical Association Annual Report 1893</a><br><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=LFQZAAAAYAAJ&amp;dq=Methods%20of%20Teachi ng%20History&amp;pg=PA113#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false">H.B. Adams, "Special Methods for the Study of History," in G. Stanley Hall ed., Methods of Teaching History. 2nd ed. (1902), 113-148</a>.<br><a href="http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1427">C. Beard, "That Noble Dream," AHR 41 (1935), 74-87</a>.<br>F. Braudel, <em>The Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II</em>, excerpts.<br>E. Said, Orientalism, "Introduction" (New York 1978).<br>H. K. Bhabha, <em>The Location of Culture</em>, excerpt.</p> <p>This past semester, however, I detected some fatigue with the sources.&nbsp; Some were too long and the students did not read them carefully.&nbsp; Others were too difficult to digest during a busy semester.&nbsp; One of the key points of emphasis in our recent revisions of this class is to make it easier for students and more like other 200 level classes.&nbsp; Students were enrolling in the class, finding it difficult, and dropping it and this made it difficult to move our majors through this course in a timely and efficient manner.&nbsp; So, while the subject matter is demanding, we have discovered that the course itself cannot be.&nbsp; As an added benefit to this more "realistic" approach to the course, I've discovered the more nonmajors have enrolled and some of these are students who like history, but have been attracted into other majors. In other words, keeping this course accessible has the potential to attract prodigal students who have wandered from their one true love.</p> <p>So, as I look ahead to teaching it next fall and spring, I am wondering whether there are some classics in the European or American historical tradition that are (1) accessible online and (2) easily excerpted into a 10-15 page section appropriate for a lower level history course.&nbsp; The goal of the readings is to spur discussion of principles central to history as a discipline in either the past or present or to show some particular watershed in the development of history as a professional, academic, and intellectual pursuit. Any thoughts?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Preliminary Analysis of Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Data or Thinking Out Loud 4 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: preliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-orthinking-out-loud-4 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 03/15/2010 07:45:54 AM ----BODY: <p>In September, I began <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-outloud-3.html">a series of posts</a> in which I thought out loud about the survey data from the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; The posts mainly focused on overall ceramic densities across the entire study area.&nbsp; Over the last two or three weeks, I've begun working on the final analysis of the period data from the survey.&nbsp; To do this, I take the finds data produced by R. Scott Moore and Mara Horowitz and plot is against the survey maps produced in the field by David Pettegrew and myself.&nbsp; In most cases, this work has confirmed our long held (and argued) perspectives on the distribution of material at our site, but sometimes, bringing finds data together with our survey maps shows patterns that were not entirely apparent on the ground.</p> <p>While we have dedicated much of our attention to activities along the Pyla-Koutsopetria coastal plain or in the area of the known Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos, it may be that some important activity is taking place on the coastal ridge running north of the Koutsopetria plain and the very prominent coast height of Vigla.&nbsp; The main concentration of activity in what we call <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a61fec54970 c-pi">Zone 4</a> sits along its southern edge.&nbsp; The site in this area first appears during the Iron Age.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310fa14d98970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="ArchaictoClassical" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a93a9986970b -pi" width="400" height="552"></a>&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">This image shows the site from the Iron Age to the Hellenistic period.&nbsp; The blue dots are Iron Age material (1050-475 BC).&nbsp; The assemblage in the red circle included everything from Classical era terracota figurines to fine wares and kitchen wares and utility wares (amphoras, medium coarse and coarse wares).&nbsp; The material is highly localized in an area of 25 units or so and does not appear to extend further north. The assemblage from these periods on Vigla (the concentration of material to the southwest of the red circle) is contemporary, but far less robust and diverse.&nbsp; The activity at this area appears to persist into the later Hellenistic and Early Roman period as well.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a93a9993970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="EarlyRomantoRoman" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a93a99a9970b -pi" width="400" height="552"></a> </p> <p align="left">In this map, the triangles are Early Roman material, the pentagons are Hellenistic-Early Roman material and the green dots date to the more generic Roman period.&nbsp; While there is evidence that the activities at the site begin to extend further to the north along the plateau, the main concentration of material is still in the

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southern most units of along our north to south transect.&nbsp; Like for earlier periods, the assemblage is reasonably diverse including fine wares, lamp fragments, and a full range of utility wares.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">The most remarkable thing about the site is that it suddenly, within the limits of our chronological resolutions, stops in the Late Roman period.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310fa14db0970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="LateRoman" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310fa14dc1970c -pi" width="400" height="552"></a> </p> <p align="left">In this map, the different colored dots are all Late Roman material and, as you can see, there is not much Late Roman activity in the area of the earlier site.&nbsp; So, the question is what kind of site of sees consistent activity for close to 1200 years and then is suddenly abandoned.&nbsp; To my mind, there are three options.&nbsp; First, Late Roman activity does not decline over the study area as a whole.&nbsp; In fact, the coastal plain becomes the center of unprecedented activity during this period. It may be that the center of settlement shifted from the more protected top of the coastal plateau to the more convenient coastal plain during the relatively peace epoch of Late Antiquity.&nbsp; Second, the area on the plateau could be a religious sanctuary of some description.&nbsp; The scholar of Late Antique Christianity in me is drawn to the idea that the site is a long-standing pagan sanctuary abandoned with the growing prominence of Christianity on the island.&nbsp; Perhaps the very fabric of the sanctuary was quarried for the building of the excavated Early Christian basilica on the plain below.&nbsp; Finally, it may be that this coastal height served as the local cemetery.&nbsp; While the diversity of the assemblage at the site hints at habitation or even religious uses (which could include the same material signature as domestic activity), it may be that the main settlement was on the fortified height of Vigla (as our excavations at least hints) and they buried their dead outside the city walls to the north.&nbsp; The abandonment of burial in this area occurred in Late Antiquity where (I can't resist) Christian conventions gently resisted burial among pagan ancestors.&nbsp; At the same time, the persistent sanctity of the long-standing burial ground made it impolitic or even impious to use the space for more mundane activities.&nbsp; As a result, the area was largely abandoned even as activity along the northern part of the plateau continued.</p> <p align="left">We do not have any definitive evidence for any of these hypothesis, although ground-penetrating radar transects recorded in 2009 might provide us with some hints once they are analyzed.&nbsp; At the same time, the clear shift in activity away from this site stands out as one of the most definitive changes in the distribution of material across our site.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dallas EMAIL: [email protected]

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IP: 65.60.192.124 URL: DATE: 03/15/2010 05:39:25 PM Interesting. Seems like there is a need for a few more soundings. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Dan Reetz and his fabulous DIY Book Scanner STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: dan-reetz-and-his-fabulous-diy-book-scanner CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 03/12/2010 10:03:07 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://www.psych.ndsu.nodak.edu/index.php?f=7&amp;uid=dreetz">Dan Reetz</a> <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/uletter/astory.php?uletterID=8103&amp;DateID=290"> spoke on campus yesterday</a> and amazed us with not only his <a href="http://www.diybookscanner.org/">DIY Book Scanner</a>, but perhaps more importantly the DIY Book Scanner community. Dan estimated that his $250 scanner could easily produce high-resolution scans of 500 page an hour. And the scanner is portable, and the plans exist online and could be customized.</p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><br />! <img alt="201003121001.jpg" height="320" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a92c9ba3970b -pi" width="480" /></p>! <p>The applications for this kind of thing for small archaeological projects is patently obvious. &#0160;&#0160;A site like <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">Isthmia</a>, for example, which has, at most, 40,000 pages of notebooks (that is 160, 250 page notebooks). Using a scanner like the one Dan designed would allow a project like Isthmia to digitize all of its notebooks over, conservatively, three weeks. And that&#39;s just with one scanner. The relatively low cost of the scanners (of course better cameras could increase the cost of each scanner quickly) could allow us to run two scanners and cut the time on site to less than two weeks.</p>! <p>Post-processing and mark up, of course, is another issue. But I think that the <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a> interface, if tweaked appropriately could provide the foundation for presenting the scanned notebook pages. This would could all be done without radically expanding the current digital and physical infrastructure (i.e. expensive equipment, et c.).</p>! <p>The development of a relatively portable, efficient, and affordable device would be a pretty remarkable breakthrough for the imposing task of digitizing the archives of a small to mid-sized project.</p>! <p>&#0160;&#0160;</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Grading and Resistance STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-grading-and-resistance CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 03/11/2010 07:32:07 AM ----BODY: <p>I just finished grading two stacks of midterm essays for lower division courses (in the interest of full disclosure my graduate assistant also graded a third stack). I noticed certain trends that were so pronounced and consistent across almost all of the essays in these stacks that they are worthy of remark.</p> <p>First, the students will not articulate a specific thesis. They might offer a number of closely related specific and focused arguments over the course of the paper, but they will not tie themselves down with a specific thesis. I ask them to do this. I provide myriad examples in class, and I have critiqued earlier works from these same students pointing out how a vague thesis undermines the overall structure of a paper and argument. All of this is to no avail. And it's not like these are bad students. In fact, they are good students who can write good arguments. The main concern about writing a strong, focused thesis may be that these students feel like they are going to give alway their "good material" too early in the paper. In other words, they may be following a narrative style more common to the "popular" media like television where arguments are revealed slowly, layer-by-layer, over the course of the program.</p> <p>On Wednesday, Richard Kahn gave a fantastic talk entitled "<a href="http://und.academia.edu/RichardKahn/attachment/719229/full/Education-asthe-Avatar-of-Sustainability-">Education as the Avatar of Sustainability</a>". While I'll leave you to suss out the specifics of the talk, one thing that I came away from is the role of education is fomenting resistance. In Kahn's talk education provided a way to resist "Big Coal", but this was clearly meant as a metaphor for any source of oppression or iniquity in the world. After the talk, I pointed out that universities, generally speaking, were in league with Big Coal. Universities oppress as much as they liberate when it comes to the production of knowledge. I've blogged before about the industrial roots of the system of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/th oughts-on-the-end-of-disciplines.html">disciplines that continue to form the foundation of the university system</a>. If at least part of the institutional goal of universities is to create the kind of docile bodies that serve modern, industrialized society, then how do we understand the steadfast refusal of our students to follow certain simple procedures in their work.</p> <p>Here's an example: I tell my students not to use contractions in formal writing. I even tell them that the so-called "word processors" can be set up to automatically convert contractions to proper, complete words. No matter how many times I tell students not to use contractions, they use contractions flagrantly

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throughout their papers. Is it possible to regard this practice as a kind of resistance not only to my expectations, but to the institution that supports such formal diction.</p> <p>I have my doubts about any one episode or manifestation, but when the pattern of resistance appears consistently across so many student behaviors (and we should not fall into the easy route of just condemning students as "lazy". There is no reason to expect students are any more lazy than faculty to enforce rules and procedures in an uncritical way), I find myself wonder whether students have successfully framed me as the oppressor.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 70.52.192.222 URL: http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 03/11/2010 08:52:19 AM Resistance? I don't know about that... in the undergrad papers sitting on my desk, the pattern I think I'm seeing is simply one where the traditional conventions of written English simply haven't been taught, and/or driven home. "Caesar enjoyed a great defeat over his rivals" turns up again and again (and similar violence to the language): a basic lack of understanding how grammar conveys direction and action and certain words are reflective and so on? This reminds me of a talk I was at, about the reuse of spolia in Christian buildings. The speaker outlined the various theories - stuff about victorious Christians defusing pagan power by turning inscriptions this way and that, etc but the speaker, who started life as a brick layer, pointed out that really, an inscription makes an excellent bond for plaster. Nothing deeper need be posited. Occam's razor? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.225 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 03/11/2010 09:01:03 AM Shawn, I'd posit a difference between inadvertent violence to the English language (I heard a sportscaster go on and on about the "dearth" of talent in this year's Formula 1 field with 8 former race winners and four former champions. It made me cringe!) and things like contractions where the students could correct the mistake without much additional effort. The former involves a life time of careful reading and writing; the latter involves simple attention to detail. I suspect that willful inattention is a kind of resistance to structures of

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authority that extend from my position as faculty to the rules that produce disciplinary knowledge. Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 70.52.192.222 URL: http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 03/12/2010 10:04:22 AM It's not that long ago that we were both students... do you recall 'resisting authority'? I'm not being glib - now that I've paused to reflect a bit more, and taken off my grading hat, I actually do remember being passive-aggressive to one prof whose style and approach I absolutely loathed. So perhaps you're right, yes... so what do we do now? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Abandonment Again STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: abandonment-again CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 03/10/2010 08:14:11 AM ----BODY: <p>I keep thinking about <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/pu nk-archaeology-squatting-and-abandonment.html">abandonment in both modern and ancient contexts</a> and wondering why (and to a lesser extent whether) there seems to be a recent upswing in public interest in abandonment. I've written elsewhere about the work of such photographers as <a href="http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089_1850973,00.html">Yve s Marchand and Romain Meffree</a>, <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2241211/">Camio Jose Vergara</a> (via <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/" title="Kostis Kourelis">Kostis Kourelis</a>) and <a href="http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/">James D. Griffioen</a> (we can now add (thanks to <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Ryan Stander</a>, <a href="http://www.jeffbrouws.com/series/main_discarded.html">Jeff Brouws</a>, and thanks to <a href="http://www.bismarcktribune.com/app/blog/?w=theedgeofthevillage">Aaron Barth</a>, <a href="http://www.brianherbelphotography.com/Other/Abandonded/11351771_w5gaE">Bri an Herbe</a>l), and from closer to home the folks at <a href="http://ghostsofnorthdakota.wordpress.com/">Ghosts of North Dakota</a> and the haunting 2008 Nation Geographic article "<a

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href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/emptied-north-dakota/bowdentext.html">The Emptied Prairie</a>"). I've contributed my own fuel to the fire by co-chairing a panel at the 2007 Archaeological Institute of America which focused on <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/SqunichNewsFiles/MPMAG%20Colloquium%20Session.h tm">abandonment in the archaeological record</a>.</p> <p>In a forthcoming article (yes, I know...) in the <i>International Journal of Historical Archaeology</i>, I argue, among other things, that abandonment, in its many guises, served as a chronological marker for the end of something. Typically, the something was the abandoned building or object or space, and since archaeology tends to plot the rise and fall of civilizations (in its crudest forms) according to the life history of objects, buildings, and spaces, the abandonment of such things typically serve to mark out the end of a particular culture or period of time. Thus, abandonments are central to the way in which we create historical and chronological periods from the events of the past. Abandonment helps us organize time.</p> <p>There is an inevitability to abandonment which evokes tragedy. Despite the best intentions of humanity, time (as an active agent) <i>inevitably</i> takes its toll on human constructions and brings them down. In these formulations, abandonment brings to the fore both the power of nature and the folly of human ambition. What I am more interested in, however, is whether our current focus on abandonment is meant to bring about and mark out the end of some era. For as long as history has existed, people have declared history to be at an end. Since the Enlightenment, this call has most frequently been triumphant (see, for example, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">Fukuyama 's <i>End of History and the Last Man</i></a>), but in our current fixation on abandonment, it seems to be tragic. The focus of abandonment -- monumental hotels, bustling factories, middle class suburbs, rural towns -- cut across American and Western society and suggests a kind of all encompassing futility.</p> <p>Of course, the celebration of the futility of human works could point to an interpretation that is not simply apocalyptic. The end of one era of achievement whether inevitable or calculated (<a href="http://histories.cambridge.org/extract?id=chol9780521256032_CHOL9780521256 032A023">was the Roman Republic assassinated</a>?) typically ushers in the dawn of a new age. If we see abandonment as a critique of past folly, and it seems that some works that celebrate <a href="http://www.thehighline.org/galleries/images/joel-sternfeld">the return of nature to abandoned places</a> see abandonment as the first step toward a return to a more environmentally conscious and humane world. <a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/0081594">A post-American landscape</a> sees the collapse of the densely packed urban world and <a href="http://web.me.com/craigstellmacher/craigstellmacher.com/100abandonedhomes_ Links.html">the sprawling suburbs</a> as marking the beginning of a new time.</p> <p>In fact, it may be necessary to mark or even promote the end of an era in order to take credit for building something new. It was common for ancient rulers to celebrate renewal or return to past glories. They took particular pride in the Early and Middle Byzantine periods for the reconstruction, rebuilding, or refounding of institutions or buildings long abandoned. In these narratives, abandonment continued to mark the folly of the past, but also placed hope in new beginnings.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.15.127.168 URL: DATE: 03/10/2010 01:05:49 PM BillGreat topic! I sometimes think that my childhood encounters with abandonment were what got me interested in archaeology many years ago. One of my favorite dramatic narratives of an encounter with abandonment comes from This American Life. I apologize if you have liked to this already. <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/199/House-onLoon-Lake">http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/199/House-onLoon-Lake</a> --R. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Richard Rothaus EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 64.83.200.199 URL: DATE: 03/10/2010 07:49:04 PM Indeed a good topic. I listened to house on Loon Lake and wasn't so impressed. Houses and property are abandoned all the time, and the Loon Lake story is so very, very typical. I rolled my eyes that the adult narrator was so astonished by the mundane nature of the answer. Most of time when you find a house such as he found, the cause is just what he found. He could have just asked an old person. But listen for yourself‚Äîthat I remember the story and my thoughts is an indicator it has strong merits. Of course, my reaction to the story and the abandonment theme are framed by my own stage of life. My parents are gone, their stuff is dispersed, and the places of my youth have been transformed. Perhaps the upswing in the interest in abandonment is not a societal reflection, but rather a generation of scholars reaching a stage of life. As young folks we just assumed what was normal for us was normal and permanent for everyone. When our childhood haunts disappear, our hometowns become unrecognizable, and our relatives and friends die, the impermanence of existence becomes something much more real and interesting.

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Because we write articles, and blog, and post photos, we are visible. But I also have found that some of the old-timers in those small town cafes have already had many of the same thoughts and feelings about the issues that I have. Someone (not me!) should do a spreadsheet of scholars writing on abandonment as societal theme and see if you can find commonalities in age, parents deceased/living, homeownership, tenure, visits to childhood haunts and the like. Then go backwards in time. Maybe the historical pattern is not just about societal views, but also comes from bulges of overly-literate folks committing their musing to posterity. But lest I come across as a total curmudgeon, I also am still fascinated by the abandoned. One of these days I'll post some photos of the reuse of the Terlingua cemetery by the new-agers who are trying to make a go of the old town (but who will also abandon it in a few years). <a href="http://www.historicterlingua.com/historic_terlingua_ghostown_001.htm">http://www.historicterlingua.com/historic_terlingua_ghostown_001.htm</a> Just an idea I have been thinking about--which may mean I have embraced some societal focus. . . . R. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 67.67.14.246 URL: DATE: 03/11/2010 09:30:43 AM RichardI found the ending of the Loon Lake story very unsatisfying the fist time I heard it -- sort of like "what, that's it?" But, that's part of the reason I think it is a good case study for archaeologists. The narrator interprets the material left in the house (clothes, wallet, etc.) as signs of a sudden abandonment that could only be caused by some sort of catastrophe -- the listener then wonders: "what happened? murder, kidnapping!" -- without considering more mundane causes. When the narrator (and the listener) learns that the abandonment was not caused by a catastrophe, the result is anticlimactic. However, the dramatic realization that abandonment can occur outside of sudden violence, death, or tragedy -- that its causes can be banal -is somehow more unsettling, at least for me. But, that is where I think the story is useful for archaeologists thinking about abandonment. Many -- myself included -- have a tendency to search for sudden and catastrophic causes in cases of abandonment. Perhaps this is because the idea of someone just walking off and leaving something is just hard to imagine. However, as you suggest, and some of Bill's and K. Kourelis' recent posts illustrate, it happens all the time. For me, the story is a reminder to talk to the neighbors. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher

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TITLE: A Huge Tuesday and a Huge Week STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: a-huge-tuesday-and-a-huge-week CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 03/09/2010 07:43:27 AM ----BODY: <p>Today and this week are going to be huge, and I mean that in the most generic, non-specific way possible.</p> <p>1. The University of North Dakota's <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/html/2010ScholarlyForumHome.html">Graduate School Scholarly Forum</a> is today and tomorrow. At noon today Richard Kahn (who has <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/02/11/howard-zinn-andteaching/">blogged for us at Teaching Thursday</a>!) will present in the Dean's Lecture Series a talk entitled "<a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/html/RichardKahn.html">Education as the Avatar of Sustainability</a>". He teaches in our department of Educational Foundations and Research and has just released a book called <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/critical-pedagogy-ecoliteracy-planetarycrisis-the-ecopedagogy-movement/oclc/458892666"><i>Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement</i></a> (Peter Lang, 2010).</p> <p>Here are some more interesting sessions and papers:</p> <p>Session 12: Department of History<br /> Memorial Room, Tuesday 9 March, 2:20pm<br /> "Words of Death: A Theology of Death in the Alexandrian Sayings of the Desert Fathers," Paul A. Ferderer (Faculty Sponsor, Dr. William Caraher) Department of History<br /> "Women’s Associations and Employment: Succor and Impediment of Married Women, 1920-1933," Thomas Harlow (Faculty Sponsor, Dr. Kimberley Porter) Department of History<br /> "Independence in Cape Palmas: The Contentious Path For Autonomy in Maryland in Liberia," Matthew Helm (Faculty Sponsor, Dr. Eric Burin) Department of History<br /> "What Are You Afraid Of? How Governments Have Reacted to Real (or unreal) Threats," Mark Herrmann (Faculty Sponsor, Dr. Kimberley Porter) Department of History</p> <p>Session 21: Social Sciences Writing Panel Memorial Room, Wednesday 10 March, 1:00pm<br /> <i>Scholarly Writing Planning and Finding Success in Writing for Publications</i>, Dr. J. Sagini Keengwe, Dr. Travis Heggie and Dr. <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/cynthia-prescott/">Cynthia Prescott</a>.</p> <p>and at the same time:</p> <p>Session 20: Tutorial Badlands Room, Wednesday 10 March, 1:00pm<br /> <i><a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/html/PythonTutorial.html">Python and Scientific Computing in Open-Source, Gökhan Sever, Department of Atmospheric Sciences</a><br /></i></p> <p>Python has become the programing language of choice across the Digital Humanities. Check out William J. Turkel, Adam Crymble and Alan MacEachern, <a

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href="http://niche-canada.org/programming-historian/"><i>The Programing Historian</i></a> for more on Python.</p> <p>2. Be sure to check out a fantastic guest blogger over at <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursda</a>y. <a href="http://www.deenalarsen.net/webshelf.htm">Deena Larsen</a>, on the premier English Language E-Lit writers, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/03/09/link-spot-link-electronicliterature-made-easy/">has offered the second in a series of posts</a> on using Electronic Literature in the classroom called Teaching the Writers Conference. As the title suggests, these posts appear in conjunction with the <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/">41st Annual University of North Dakota's Writers Conference</a>, which this year will focus on digital and new media.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>3. If you still haven't had enough excitement you should be sure to check out Dan Reetz talk on Thursday in the Arts and Sciences Interdisciplinary Speaker Series:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><br /> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a919f30c970b -pi" width="450" height="578" alt="201003090742.jpg" /></p> <p>Reetz hit it big last year when his DIY book scanner went viral in the blogosphere. He was featured in <a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/diy-book-scanner/">a substantial article in the December 2009 <i>Wired</i> Magazine</a>. He's a new kind of hometown, digital folk hero. Be sure to check out his talk.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Walking Home and the Phenomenology of Landscape STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: walking-home-and-the-phenomenology-of-landscape CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 03/08/2010 08:08:07 AM ----BODY: <p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="NotebookBlog.jpg" height="517" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310f7af197970c -pi" width="400" /></p>!

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<p style="text-align: left;">In a recent article, by John Bintliff (&quot;The Implications of a Phenomenology of Landscape,&quot; in E. Olshausen and V. Sauer, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/landschaft-und-diereligion/oclc/488691541&amp;referer=brief_results"><em>Die Landschaft und die Religion</em></a>. (Stuttgart 2009), 27-45) offers (another) harsh critique of Christopher Tilley&#39;s efforts toward a phenomenology of ancient landscapes. Bintliff, in particular, takes issue with Tilley&#39;s efforts to produce an landscape rooted in its &quot;emotional and symbolic significance&quot; to the exclusion of a more holistic view that includes an emphasis on the landscape as economically productive space. He argues that Tilley&#39;s view of the landscape as &quot;really just about feelings, and symbolic behaviors...&quot; represents a distinctly British reaction to historical phenomenon of the last century or two: namely the gradual abandonment of the countryside by a large part of the population who moved to cities and the consequent inability of most of the population to understand the countryside as productive space. Instead, the countryside has become a kind of &quot;enormous themepark for the urban millions&quot;.</p>! <p style="text-align: left;">Reading this and contemplating my own walks home made me question the authenticity of my own experience. After all, I don&#39;t need to walk home or even be outside in the cold. I don&#39;t walk home for environmental reasons - my wife happily drives to and from campus in the relative warmth of our relatively inefficient little Honda. I do not even do it for convenience, bowing to our more than hectic schedules my wife and I indulged in the ultimate symbol of middle class affluence, when we purchases a second car. I always thought that I walked home because the outdoors offered an experience that was common not only to members of my community today, but also to historical members of this community who would braved the brisk walks across the exposed prairie for over a century. In short, I was imitating, in my own hopelessly local way, Tilley&#39;s call for phenomenological approach to the local landscape.</p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="201003080756.jpg" height="394" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310f7af1aa970c -pi" width="480" /></p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="201003080757.jpg" height="392" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310f7af1b3970c -pi" width="480" /></p>! <p style="text-align: left;">At the end of the day, I suppose my walks home did lack the kind of authenticity necessary to allow me to engage with the past in anything but the most superficial way. The cold, bracing, North Dakota evenings existed only in contrast to the forced-air warmth of my home and office. Our knowledge of space and place can only ever be relative to our historical engagement. Bintliff&#39;s holistic view of the past, of course, is just as easily subsumed into this paradigm. His call for a holistic view of the landscape is clearly fed by the modern roots of archaeological practice and the political drive to document exhaustively the natural, cultural, social, political, and economic resources of a place. So, if the critique of Tilley&#39;s methods for understanding the landscape derives exclusively from its unabashedly urban, 20th century, bourgeois position, then Bintliff&#39;s calls for a holistic view of the landscape must certainly have roots in the modern or even colonial dream of documenting the entire world.&#0160;&#0160;</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: John Bintliff EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 132.229.241.60 URL: DATE: 03/12/2010 06:15:27 AM Dear Bill, I think you are putting people into boxes too much. The danger of Tilley's landscape work was the incompleteness of the analysis, not a problem with the aspects he focussed on. My case study example was not the Enlightenment but the farmer poet Hesiod ca 700 BC (but many other voices from the past would have served), and you will find that pre-moderns do not make the Tilleyesque division into the practical world and the symbolic world as he wishes to do. As for walking for pleasure, this turns out to be something inherited from our hunter-gatherer selves, where we got a kick from landscape and physical exercice but also need to to avoid predators and find food. On this see my other rather obscure paper: Bintliff, J. L. (2009). Is the Essence of Innovative Archaeology a Technology for the Unconscious? Metals and Societies: Studies in honour of Barbara S. Ottaway. T. L. Kienlin and B. W. Roberts. Bonn, UPA: 181-190. If anyone wants to download this and other relevant papers send me an e mail for a personal link to my website Best wishes John Bintliff ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.225 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 03/12/2010 09:35:34 AM John, I probably painted with broad brush strokes; you're right there. And I like the idea that we acquired the desire to walk for pleasure from our hunter-gatherer ancestors! I do wonder how much our integrated perspective on the landscape derives from folks like Hesiod and how much comes from reading Hesiod with heads full of Enlightenment values. I suppose the difference is between an integrative holistic landscape -- which clearly appears in Hesiod -- and a total landscape (in the spirit of total history) -- which is perhaps how I misread your short article. On the other hand, once the categories of "productive", "symbolic", "practical", et c. have come into existence in relation to the landscape, I am not sure it is possible to think them away and return to premodern conceptions of the space. Perhaps I'm wrong though! Thanks for the comment!

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Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Red River Valley History Conference STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: red-river-valley-history-conference CATEGORY: Conferences DATE: 03/05/2010 10:33:15 AM ----BODY: <p>Stop reading this blog post and hurry over the <a href="http://www.union.und.edu/">Memorial Union</a> on the beautiful campus of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/" title="University of North Dakota">University of North Dakota</a> to check out the Red River Valley History Conference today.</p> <p>Go <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/03/re d-river-valley-history-conference-friday-march-5-2010.html">here for the program</a> and don't miss Robin Jensen's talk this late afternoon. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/20 10-wilkins-lecture-robin-jensen.html">Here's a link to that talk</a>.</p> <p>Have a great weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Old School Computer Generated Maps STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: old-school-computer-generated-maps CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 03/04/2010 07:48:47 AM ----BODY:

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<p>When tracking down a few footnotes, I stumbled upon an article J. M. Adovasio, G.F. Fry, J.D. Gunn, and R.F. Maslowski, "<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/124101">Prehistoric and historic settlement patterns in western Cyprus (with a discussion of Cypriot Neolithic stone tool technology)</a>," <em>World Archaeology</em> 6 (1975), 339-364. This team conducted an extensive style survey "reconnaissance survey" of the Khrysokhou drainage in Western Cyprus not far from the site of Polis. I was mostly interested in their documentation of a "large settlement of the Cypro-Archaic Age (600-400 BC) and "very large Hellenistic town" (325-50 BC) thinking that I might find some useful parallels between these sites and our site at PylaKoutsopetria.&nbsp; The description of the sites are pretty superficial, although the observation that the settlement are in defensively advantageous positions is vaguely useful.&nbsp; That being said, the effort of the survey team to document sites systematically with an eye toward computer analysis must represent one of the earlier efforts along these lines in the Eastern Mediterranean (the field work was conducted in 1972).&nbsp; They also were explicitly diachronic in their approach and mapped not the location of Ancient material but the location of Medieval/Byzantine material and even modern settlement.</p> <p>What really caught my eye were the fantastic, old school computer generated maps of the area.</p> <p>Here's the map of the CyproGeometric to Hellenistic components of their survey area:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a8f98c7f970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310f6051fa970c -pi" width="400" height="417"></a> </p> <p align="left">Here are maps showing a slightly larger area and including the Roman and Medieval and Byzantine sites.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a8f98cb0970 b-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a8f98cbe970b -pi" width="400" height="353"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310f60523b970 c-pi"><img style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderright: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a8f98cde970b -pi" width="400" height="343"></a> </p> <p>The project used Harvard's SYMAP software (<a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8163799423258336471&amp;hl=en#">ch eck out this cool little movie talking a bit about the history of SYMAP</a>) run on the University of Pittsburgh mainframe to produce these images.&nbsp; The images themselves include both elevation data (zone data) and archaeological data. While I'll concede that these maps are not immediately legible, they do reflect a very early effort on Cyprus to take data from the field, process it by a computer, and present this analyzed data in a relatively transparent way (that is in a way that does not hide the computer produced character of the analyses).&nbsp; At the same time, there is something aesthetically pleasing about these maps which, after all, were basically contemporary with the first generation of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_art">computer generated art</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Suppressing Archaeological Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: suppressing-archaeological-data CATEGORY: Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 03/03/2010 08:12:22 AM ----BODY: <p>This last week, I&#39;ve heard a story from a colleague about an archaeological project in the Eastern Mediterranean who has been denied permission to study unpublished finds from their own excavation and survey. It seems like a strange story, but from the various accounts, it seems to be legitimate. The project apparently violated some political etiquette in host country and, in response to the ensuing political tumult has been asked not to ask for permission to study a group of finds.</p>! <p>When I first heard this, I was pretty outraged. After all, the project and its directors, participants, and resources had gone to some length to produce this material in an archaeologically responsible way, and now, from what I understood, they were being asked to do something that was pretty irresponsible -- namely leave this material unstudied and unpublished. On the other hand, I recognized the right (let&#39;s say) and, more importantly, the responsibility of the home country to manage its archaeological resources in a way that made sense to the host country. And while <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/ar chaeological-ethnography-part-2.html">the recent volume on <em>Archaeological Ethnographies</em></a> tended to portray archaeologists as having a certain advantageous position in respect to the local communities where they do their work, I also recognized that the archaeological establishing (government agencies with their political entanglements) exert a tremendous influence on how both foreign and local archaeologists conduct their work. After all, we&#39;ve read enough of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/nation-and-its-ruinsantiquity-archaeology-and-national-imagination-in-greece/oclc/122424890">Y. Hamilakis other work</a> to understand that many Mediterranean countries see archaeology as a discipline and a practice as having important nationalist goals. So, asking a project to suppress a particular body of archaeological data in order to maintain political peace or to ensure the continued vitality of a particular nationalistic argument is well within the rights of an archaeological bureaucracy in the host country.</p>! <p>After all, archaeological politics and practice <em>always</em> involve, to some extent, the suppression of archaeological data. Any foreign project in the eastern Mediterranean has limitations imposed on their work. No project, for

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example, can ask to survey as much of the landscape as they need until they have satisfied their research questions. Most project have to work in a designated survey area, established before the beginning of archaeological fieldwork, and independent, at least to some extent, from the results of the fieldwork. Excavations this is even more obvious. The politics of acquiring land, the responsibilities and resources for curation, and the limited number of field permits always shape the design of the project. In most cases, then, archaeological data is shaped by practical and political concerns and negotiated between the foreign project and the home country.</p>! <p>At the same time, projects regularly suppress certain results from their fieldwork. I know of several survey projects, for example, that have limited their collection to material from certain chronological periods. The results, from what I understand about survey, is not that no material from the later or earlier periods is collected -- it would be impossible to only collect material from a particular period -- but that artifacts from earlier or later periods are simply not studied. In the context of excavation, the practice of suppressing material from certain periods is even more common. A project will often choose to publish certain layers, deposits, buildings, or features in great detail and not necessary publish other parts of the projects. In &quot;the bad old days,&quot; this accounted for the practice of digging through the Modern, Byzantine, and sometimes even Late Roman levels. Even now, all multi-period projects have to establish priorities as to what they publish.</p>! <p>I suppose my initial, shocked response speaks to how deeply an adherence to a mythical scientific archaeology still runs within me. At the same time, I still think that publishing archaeological material promptly is important. And I&#39;d argue that it is even more important to publish completely when sites are damaged or destroyed as a result of excavation or intensive survey. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the mechanics and politics of archaeological investigation dictate the extent to which it is possible or even desirable to adhere to these ideals in practice. This is even more evident when working in a foreign country with an archaeological establishment who understand the goals, procedures, and responsibilities of archaeological work in a very different light. The intersection of such &quot;indigenous practices&quot; of archaeological work -- manifest in the goals of the nation building, the contingencies of local politics, and realities of curating sites long after foreign projects depart -- and an outsider&#39;s view of archaeological expectations throw into relief how much <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/he roic-archaeology-digital-data-and-disciplinarity-a-draft.html">the discipline of archaeology</a> is really embedded within social practice.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.197.147 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com

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DATE: 03/03/2010 10:45:53 AM Last year, I was asked to consult with archaeologists in the town of X, about a particular find from a previous generation that they wanted to publish in a shiny new book celebrating a new museum. I spent some time studying the find & wrote them a letter saying that it could not have come from X for these assorted reasons, and that it, in fact, came from organized grave-robbing. I had a letter back from them saying, "We have discussed your opinions and are in agreement with you, but you don't understand, we have to have it come from X." ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Katie Rask EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.106.233.94 URL: DATE: 03/06/2010 12:19:23 PM Really interesting post and a topic that ought to be discussed publicly with more frequency. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: luke t EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 121.73.55.120 URL: DATE: 06/06/2010 12:52:17 AM there is a long history of archaeological suppression and it is utterly unacceptable. in our supposedly enlightened era it would seem unthinkable to repeat the mistakes of our past. preconceived notions need to be discarded in the face of irrefutable evidence. archaeological anomalies also make no sense why should they be called anomalies,they are finds not anomalies perhaps the only anomaly is an established tradition that makes them so. thorough research needs to be carried out not ruled out. science owes it to humanity if only to prove that these claims and finds are false or mistaken. another interesting article highlighting the suppression respected archaeologists encounter is pasted below for your perusal. <a href="http://www.suppressedscience.net/archeology.html">http://www.suppressedsci ence.net/archeology.html</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Red River Valley History Conference: Friday, March 5, 2010 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: red-river-valley-history-conference-friday-march-5-2010 CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries DATE: 03/02/2010 07:17:49 AM ----BODY: <p>via <a href="http://doctoralbliss.wordpress.com/">Doctoral Bliss</a><br /></p>

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<p>This Friday, March 5, the Beta-Upsilon Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta will host its 5th Annual Red River Valley History Conference at the Memorial Union on the UND campus. Several student will present papers on a variety of topics. In addition, staff from our Dept. of Special Collections, as well as local archivists will present a panel on careers in public history. Finally, Dr. Robin Jensen will deliver the keynote address as part of the 2010 Robert Wilkins Lecture at 4:00PM entitled “<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/20 10-wilkins-lecture-robin-jensen.html">Living Water: Rituals, Spaces, and Images of Early Christian Baptism</a>”. Below is the schedule of panels:</p> <p>Panel 1: (9:15-10:30)—Memorial Room<br /> <strong>Race and Gender in 19<sup>th</sup> Century America<br /> <span style="font-weight: normal;">Chair: Daniel Sauerwein, UND</span></strong></p> <p>“No Country For End Men: A Re-Evaluation of American Small Ensemble Blackface Minstrelsy From 1843 to 1853.” By Dorothea Nelson, UND<br /> “Independence in Cape Palmas: The Contentious Path for Autonomy in Maryland in Liberia” By Matthew Helm, UND<br /> “Women and the American Civil War” By Chad Holter, UND</p> <p>Panel 2: (9:15-10:30)—President’s Room<br /> <strong>Controversy in American History<br /> <span style="font-weight: normal;">Chair: TBD</span></strong></p> <p>“What Are You Afraid Of? How Governments Have Reacted to Real (or unreal) Threats” By Mark Hermann, UND<br /> “The Lost Environmentalists: The Struggle Between Conservative Christianity and the Environment in the 1970s” By Neall Pogue, NDSU</p> <p>Panel 3 (10:45-12:00)—Alumni Room<br /> <strong>Material Culture, New Media, and How They Shape History<br /> <span style="font-weight: normal;">Chair: TBD</span></strong></p> <p>“Grandma’s Cookie Jar” By Kathryn Nedegaard, UND<br /> “French Heritage Tour 2009 – Directed by Dr. Virgil Benoit with IFMidwest” By Emilie VanDeventer, UND<br /> “William Bligh or Jack Aubrey? Two Alternative Historical Views of Nelson’s Navy” By Jon Eclov, UND</p> <p>Panel 4: (1:00-2:30)—Memorial Room<br /> <strong>“Career Paths for History Majors: Opportunities in Museums and Archives”<br /> <span style="font-weight: normal;">Chair: Daniel Sauerwein, UND</span></strong></p> <p>Leah Byzewski, Director, Grand Forks County Historical Society<br /> Curt Hanson, Head, Department of Special Collections, UND Library<br /> Mark Peihl, Archivist, Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County<br /> Michael Swanson, Assistant Archivist, Department of Special Collections, UND Library<br /> Alison Voss, Head Curator/Director of Education, Bonanzaville</p> <p>Panel 5: (1:00-2:30)—Alumni Room<br /> <strong>Art and Faith in European History<br /> <span style="font-weight: normal;">Chair: Dr. Bill Caraher, UND</span></strong></p> <p>“Caught between the Old Man and the New: Women and the Body of the Soul in High Medieval Ghost Stories” By Christopher Gust, UND<br /> “The Theology of Existential Salvation in the Interrogative <em>Sayings of the Desert Fathers</em>” By Paul A. Ferderer, UND<br /> “A wild boar from the forest:” Martin Luther as a Model of Rebellion, 15201525” By Danielle Skjelver, UND<br />

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“The New Topographics: Emergence and Legacy” By Ryan Stander, UND</p> <p>Panel 6: (1:00-2:30)—President’s Room<br /> <strong>The Power of Persuasion in early 20<sup>th</sup> Century America<br /> <span style="font-weight: normal;">Chair: Dr. Kimberly Porter, UND</span></strong></p> <p>“Father Coughlin: A Historiography of the Radio Priest” By Emilie VanDeventer, UND<br /> “Henry Ford’s Anti-Semitism and Influence on the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party)” By Paul Robinette, UND</p> <p>In addition, conference participants have the option to partake of a lunch and there will be displays for various on and off-campus entities, including the <a href="http://www.smh-hq.org" target="_blank">Society for Military History</a>, <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/spk.html" target="_blank">Elwyn B. Robinson Dept. of Special Collections</a>, Civil War items by Stuart Lawrence, to name a few. I hope you will come out and join us if you are in the area.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Metablogging Monday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: metablogging-monday CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 03/01/2010 08:21:14 AM ----BODY: <p>I usually find it useful to step back every now and then and consider the enterprise of blogging. Most people who&#39;ve read this blog for any significant length of time, know that I make (over and over) certain arguments for how blogging helps me as a scholar to work better. Three things have led me to return to my thoughts on academic blogging this lovely Monday:</p>! <p>1. I was asked recently by a blogging colleague whether I knew of any good literature that would help a new academic blogger. I&#39;ve read some of the recent and &quot;standard&quot; works on blogging: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/blogging/oclc/228275786">Rettberg&#39;s Blogging</a> (Polity 2009), and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/sayeverything-how-blogging-began-what-its-becoming-and-why-itmatters/oclc/264044762">Rosenberg&#39;s <em>Say Everything</em></a> (Crown 2009), some of the old faithfuls on e-literature like <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/hamlet-on-the-holodeck-the-future-ofnarrative-in-cyberspace/oclc/36446940">Murray&#39;s <em>Hamlet on the

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Holodeck</em></a> (MIT 1998) and some works on participatory culture like Henry Jenkins, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/convergence-culture-where-oldand-new-media-collide/oclc/64594290"><em>Convergence Culture</em></a> (NYU 2008) and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/fans-bloggers-and-gamers-exploringparticipatory-culture/oclc/65187292"><em>Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers</em></a> (NYU 2006). All these works tend to locate blogging the realm of popular culture. This is not particularly helpful to an aspiring <em>academic</em> blogger. In fact, academic blogging has been almost complete ignored. In fact, in the 2004 <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/"><em>Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities</em></a> (a nicely expansive and representatively volume) there are no references to blogs or blogging. In general, the popular press tends to ignore academic blogging as well. <a href="http://technorati.com/state-of-the-blogosphere/">Technorati&#39;s annual &quot;State of the Blogosphere&quot;</a> has never (in my knowledge) referred to academic blogging. The academic trade press, namely the <a href="http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5"><em>Chronicle of Higher Education</em></a>, hosts blogs, but, in general, <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/01/kotsko">the attitude toward blogging</a> is cautious with a dose of pessimism. This all being said, the best place to start thinking about blogging is probably <a href="http://www.millinerd.com/2009/11/blogging-c-2010-state-of-art.html">this post at Millinerd.com</a>. In particular, I liked the idea (from <a href="http://ma.tt/about/">Matt Mullenweeg</a> via <a href="http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2009/04/blogs-are-deadlong-live-blogs.html">Andrew Keen</a>) that blogs are aggregation points for the content that defines (in whatever context) one&#39;s identity. As most of us celebrate multiple personalities (appropriate for multiple contexts) academic blogs tend to represent one facet of my identity, namely my research interests. My blog is the home of my book notes, my rough drafts, my academic (and almost intellectual) musings, and, in many cases, my naivete and curiosity. If someone wants to know about me as an academic and my work, read my blog.</p>! <p>2. This past week saw the publication of a <a href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123301409/">review essay on three anthropological blogs</a> in the Public Archaeology section of the <em>American Anthropologist</em> 112 (2010), 140-141 (via the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2010/02/blogs-dont-get-norespect.html">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a>). The review focused on three blogs: a group blog, Savage Minds, a personal blog, Zero Anthopology, and the American Anthropological Associations official blog. The pros and cons of each approach were weighed, in a fairly uninteresting way, the usual caveats appeared -- blogs aren&#39;t peer reviewed, they can be hastily written, and they might include logical fallacies or half-baked ideas (as if the peer-review processes and these problems were mutually exclusive categories) -- and the typical critique of the assessable value of academic blogging:</p>! <blockquote>! <p>&quot;Like any other writing project, the time required for effective blogging can be enormous and with some of the high scholarship shown in detailed and thoughtful postings and exchanges by scholars at blog sites like Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology (formerly Open Anthropology), or Culture Matters, there are reasons to wonder about the unrewarded disciplinary usefulness of establishing and maintaining such valuable public commons. The political economy of academia is not structured to reward individuals building things for a common good outside of the peer-review process. It has long been true that many of the most useful academic resource tools (annotated bibliographies, reference books, and the like) are undervalued or unrecognized by formal academic assessments.

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For now at least, academic blogs seem to be an electronic extension of this troubling phenomenon.&quot;</p>! </blockquote>! <p>It&#39;s good to realize and recognize this. In most cases a blogger blogs on their own time and for personal benefit more than academic recognition (although the value of blogs for the construction and maintenance of the informal networks that play such a key role in nourishing the academic discourse should not be underestimated). The greatest disappointment that I had with this review is that it made almost not comment on the content of these blogs. It did not, as one would expect an academic review to do, comment on the strength of particular arguments, the value of the contributions in the blog, or even the extent to which the posts in a blog represent a useful companion to the more scholarly discourse manifest in its perfected form in peer-reviewed journals. In effect, the review critiqued blogging as phenomenon. From my perspective, this is the equivalent of reviewing a book that appeared in 2002. What would have been of particular value for a reading public, perhaps tentatively recognizing blogs for the first time as a complement to the traditional academic press, would be a month review of blogs for content, argument, scope, and significance. If blogs move at the speed of our keyboards and the internet (which peer reviewed journals move at the more leisurely pace of institutions, publishers, and collegial good will), a quarterly round up of blogs as sources for information would not only be useful, but also recognize the ability of blogs to shape conversations from the academic margins.</p>! <p>3. I&#39;m contemplating going up for tenure next year. I&#39;ve received assurance from the involved parties, compiled good reviews of my scholarly output, teaching, and service, and have the supportive of my colleagues. I feel confident that my traditional scholarly credentials will live up to the expectations of our department, college, and university. Now, what to do about the blog? None of my colleagues are bloggers and few, if any read blogs. And I don&#39;t feel like I need my blog in order to gain promotion and tenure. On the other hand, <a href="http://daytum.com/billcaraher">over the past month</a> I&#39;ve scrawled more the 13,000 words here. That&#39;s almost 50% more than the 9,685 words that I have written for various other research projects, book reviews, public lectures, correspondence, and grant proposals. Surely that output represents something, if only the misguided folly of a junior scholar who values prematurely exposing his half-formed ideas to a reading audience. Again, I am not going to insist that the blog count the same as 13,000 peer reviewed words or that I get special recognition for this effort (which as I note in point 2, is mostly done on my own time for my own academic <em>disciplina</em>), but on the other hand, blogging is not as removed from my academic identity as, say, gardening (which I don&#39;t do) or religiously watching every lap of every NASCAR race on the weekend (no comment). How does blogging fit into a modern academic <em>curriculum vitae</em>?</p><p><strong>UPDATE</strong>: Do check out <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/why-academicblogging-matters/">Shawn Graham&#39;s response to this post</a>.&#0160; He&#39;s an iconic archaeologist blogger whose <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a> has long set the standard for high-quality academic blogging.&#0160; When he chimes in, it does us all good to listen! </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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The pros and cons of each approach were weighed, in a fairly uninteresting way, the usual caveats appeared -- blogs aren't peer reviewed, they can be hastily written, and they might include logical fallacies or half-baked ideas (as if the peer-review processes and these problems were mutually exclusive categories) -and the typical critique of the assessable value of academic blogging: "Like any other writing project, the time required for effective blogging can be enormous and with some of the high scholarship shown in detailed and thoughtful postings and exchanges by scholars at blog sites like Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology (formerly Open Anthropology), or Culture Matters, there are reasons to wonder about the unrewarded disciplinary usefulness of establishing and maintaining such valuable public commons. ... Again, I am not going to insist that the blog count the same as 13,000 peer reviewed words or that I get special recognition for this effort (which as I note in point 2, is mostly done on my own time for my own academic disciplina ), but on the other hand, blogging is not as removed from my academic identity as, say, gardening (which I don't do) or religiously watching every lap of every NASCAR race on the weekend (no comment).! ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amalia T EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 75.25.98.223 URL: http://hellia.blogspot.com DATE: 03/01/2010 11:11:33 AM I think academic blogging like this is a great way to break down doors and disseminate information to people who otherwise wouldn't be reading anything having to do with this kind of research. Sure, a lot of the people reading will already be interested-- but every so often you'll open someone's eyes, get them hooked, make them think. Furthermore, for those of us no longer in Academia, but who still wish we had at-our-fingertips access to all those peer reviewed journals and subscription services (which we can't afford to shell out for), the alternatives are limited, but academic blogs are a great taste of what we are missing. I guess what it comes down to is this: Information and research being shared and read and put out there is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It should be admired and celebrated. I kind of want to compare it to volunteering time for a charity, but that is probably overstating things by a large margin. But I don't think I'm telling you anything you don't already know. Of course, just because I think it does not mean that's how the greater academic world sees things. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Richard Rothaus EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 64.83.200.199 URL: DATE: 03/10/2010 08:18:16 PM Since I'm commenting today, here's a comment. When I was an evil administrator, my problem with crediting blogs (and webpages) as academic activity was an

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inability to judge impact. If no one reads a blog, then the brilliant words might as well have been written on a napkin. In a respected journal or book, I can at least assume someone might have read it. That of course has little to do with reality. I imagine many an article (including mine) languishes unread in "respectable" journals; it's simple math-published articles/year far exceeds the time available to scholars in the discipline to read them. The technology is already there to figure out an impact--page counts, google ranking, number of subscribers, cross-linking. Nobody can fake all of those (and cumulatively they indeed are a form of peer review). But this is where the system fell apart. Too many less-than-google-savvy folks couldn't keep up with how things work, and recognize the different significance of hit count vs cross-linking. On top of that the internet authors whose trite postings should have been reserved for napkins, fought tooth and nail against any such evaluation system. They wanted anything on the web to count, and were desperate as they usually had written nothing else. Since scholars who don't get promotion or tenure sue (or worse), the system goes totally risk-adverse. The curmudgeons (me) refused to consider the electronic media without some form of evaluation (even though I think some web stuff has a greater impact than articles/books). The career politicians embraced all web based media (crappy or otherwise) as wonderful, forward thinking scholarship. Then I went to the private sector (where you can blog on your own time, mister, but until those ads generate your pay, it's not work). This of course will be resolved in time, about 10yrs after blogs have become irrelevant. R. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Few Cool Links STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: a-few-cool-links CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 02/26/2010 10:37:47 AM ----BODY: <p>It's a cloudy and grey Friday here at Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Headquarters.</p> <p>I've been mucking about with the <a href="http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm">VUE (Visual Understanding Environment) application produced at Tufts University</a>. It allows one to create flow charts of complex ideas that integrate a wide range of media (from web pages, to Zotero bibliography, to documents). This method for organizing one's thoughts has not yet perfectly coincided with my processes, but I can see the utility to an application like this.</p> <p>I have found <a href="http://www.zotero.org/">Zotero 2.0</a> really useful and have used to to sync my bibliography between multiple computers. I'll admit

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to having lost some interest in Zotero once I began to split my time between a Mac and PC, but now with 2, it is easy to sync the bibliographies. I also like the public nature of our Zotero databases. While I haven't found many opportunities to surf around for what other folks are reading, it does produce a great environment for work on collective projects.</p> <p><a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm/">This is a really cool story</a> about how Google works. In particular, it does a great job at presenting the complex variable that occur within any search environment and provides some idea of how Google goes about coping with this. I've added this article to my History 240: The Historians Craft syllabus. If students understand how searches work from the back-end, maybe they'll become more clever at searching for things on the front end.</p> <p>I've fielded lots of questions about this <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/233844"><i>Newsweek</i> article on Göbekli Tepe</a> this week. Claiming something is the first, oldest, or only brings out the press. It also makes it very difficult to put something into any meaningful context.</p> <p>Who better to score <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/indvrsa2010/engine/current/match/441828.html">the first double century in ODI Cricket history</a> than the Little Master, Sachin Tendulkar. He is 36 years old (almost 37) and appears to be still getting better. Amazing.</p> <p>The highlight of my weekend will be watching my Richmond Spiders play Xavier on ESPN2. It's the first time in 24 years that the Spiders are ranked in both polls.</p> <p>Have a good weekend!<br /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A New Table STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: a-new-table CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 02/25/2010 07:46:45 AM ----BODY: <p>To be honest, I have nothing today. I've been working on departmental paper work all week, writing letters of recommendation, preparing tests, grading papers, giving a talk, and going to meetings. It's odd that for such a busy week, I have almost nothing to report. Well, almost nothing:</p>

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<p>1. Go and read Evan Nelson's post over at <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>. He does a great job reminding us that teaching often begins before a student ever sets foot on campus. He's a recruitment specialist for <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/">The Graduate School</a> here at the University of North Dakota and reminds us that success as a teacher is often dependent upon a good match between a student, a program, and a faculty member.</p> <p>2. The second thing I'll offer is a photograph of the new table that I found orphaned in a hallway and that I squeezed into my office. It's pretty sweet and seems very happy there.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a8d26e27970b -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="Photo 3.jpg" /></p> <p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: ryan stander EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.203.20 URL: http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com DATE: 02/25/2010 06:25:12 PM good fortune indeed in finding such a fine orphaned specimen. maybe you can adopt some nice matching orphaned wooden chairs to replace that plastic one. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.115.6 URL: http://civilwarhistory.wordpress.com DATE: 03/03/2010 12:55:08 AM Bill, Thought you would like to know that the table was the computer table used by us TA's back in Merrifield 210. Unfortunately, our smaller accommodations prevented us from having one office and continuing to use it as such. May you enjoy it and remember us who sat at it long after we leave. Daniel -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Thoughts on the end of disciplines STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: thoughts-on-the-end-of-disciplines CATEGORY: Academia DATE: 02/24/2010 07:54:05 AM ----BODY: <p>Three things have made me think about disciplines lately. First, some colleagues and I got a substantial amount of money to create a laboratory for a Working Group in Digital and New Media. Next, I&#39;ve been invited to give a talk next week at our library here that would animate in some way the work of the Working Group. And finally, I&#39;ve been reading Louis Menand&#39;s new book of essays called <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/marketplace-ofideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university/oclc/286488147">The Marketplace of Ideas</a></em> , and it has two chapters that deal with various issues facing the disciplines. All of this is topped off by a buzz on campus about synergistic activities.</p>! <p>I have three thoughts on the role of disciplines within the academy:</p>! <p>1. Menand has caused me to think through the origins of disciplines again and their link to the professionalization of the university and academic professions at the turn of the century. He pointed out, quite rightly, that the creation of professional disciplines from fields of study depended in part on an industrialized view of knowledge production. In particular, he tied professionalization and the emergence of disciplines to the division of labor within market economies (as well as toward the university&#39;s role in creating a more democratic society). In this way, Menand has argued little different from P. Novick in his work, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/that-nobledream-the-objectivity-question-and-the-american-historicalprofession/oclc/17441827">That Noble Dream</a></em>. Menand goes on to emphasize how these professionalized disciplines then created complex and exclusionary systems designed to provide credentials for participants in these emerging professional disciplines; the most obvious credential even today is the Ph.D., but there are a whole series of less obvious mechanisms that also exert control over access to academic life.</p>! <p>2. Menand also points out -- and he&#39;s not unique here -- that over the last 40 years activity within the disciplinary themselves have challenged the foundation of disciplinary integrity. Historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities have increasingly come to rely on epistemologies that increasingly reject an industrial view of knowledge production. In its place, scholars like <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/au dit-culture-and-history-as-craft.html">Michael Herzfeld have looked to craft production and the practice of artisans</a> to understand how embodied knowledge is passed down from scholars to students. Such distinctly pre-modern modes of production have traditionally produced highly integrated systems of embodied knowledge that, while every bit as specialized, are far less fragmented and discourage the division of labor. This epistemological disjunction between the methods and goals of the academy and the methods and goals of the individual disciplines has pushed some area of study into a kind of post-disciplinary status where eclectic, post-modern, and extensive systems of knowledge within traditional disciplinary fields challenge of the overarching model of the modern university. &#0160;&#0160;</p>! <p>3. The result of this is a kind of hybrid academy which relies upon both disciplinary and post-disciplinary approaches to function. As so many hybrids,

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this is an especially destabilizing state of affairs. Pressure to be inter/trans/cross disciplinary is, in effect, pressure to undermine the traditional boundaries established to preserve the professional integrity of disciplinary authority. In other words, it asks us to conceive of authority in the academy in a different way. The cynic in me recognizes that undermining disciplinary authority plays into the hands of administrators who increasingly assert the privilege of speaking for the Institution of Higher Learning. As we undermine the foundation of the disciplines within the university, our authority will increasingly come to rest not on professional expertise but on the strength of the institution as the source of authority. This is bad because it puts more power in the hands of local administrators and takes it away from the broader community of professionals. The less cynical side of me, however, sees the break down of traditional disciplinary barriers as a step toward a more democratized form of knowledge. As with all processes of democratization, this will involve ceding authority and this will inevitably involve the sacrificing of some kind of privilege. This is never an easy pill to swallow for any group, and it might even be harder from academics in traditional humanities fields who feel that they have already sacrificed so much and do what they do for so little (money, respect, authority, et c.).</p>! <p>Ok, back to work on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/el ywn-robinson-lecture-digital-archaeology-technology-in-the-trenches.html">my paper for this afternoon</a>!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 02/24/2010 09:13:42 AM A bunch of F&M faculty are starting a Menand reading group in March. I'm looking forward to reading it. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Elywn Robinson Lecture: Digital Archaeology: Technology in the Trenches STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: elywn-robinson-lecture-digital-archaeology-technology-in-the-trenches CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 02/23/2010 07:33:43 AM ----BODY:

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I've finally finished my talk for the Elwyn Robinson Lecture tomorrow (at 3:30 pm!) in the East Asian Room at the Chester Fritz Library on the beautiful campus of the University of North Dakota. The UND Women's Chorus will open the afternoon's proceedings. It will be fantastic!<br /> <br /> <div style="text-align: center;"> <br /> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201310f2f46de970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="DigitalArchaeology.jpg" /> </div><br /> I've also experimented with <a href="http://www.scribd.com/">Scribd</a> as a way to make my working papers available in one place.<br /> <br /> It also cleverly allows you to embed the papers a blog post (see below).<br /> Enjoy the paper, please feel free to provide feedback, and for all my friends in North Dakota: this is not an excuse to avoid my talk!<br /> <br /> <a title="View Digital Archaeology: Technology in the Trenches on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/27328060/Digital-Archaeology-Technology-in-theTrenches" style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sansserif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -xsystem-font: none; display: block; text-decoration: underline;">Digital Archaeology: Technology in the Trenches</a> <object id="doc_753883999903196" name="doc_753883999903196" height="600" width="100%" type="application/xshockwave-flash" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" style="outline:none;"> <param name="movie" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /> <param name="wmode" value="opaque" /> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> <param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=27328060&amp;access_key=key1kr450he9rg0rt0w6jh3&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" /> <embed id="doc_753883999903196" name="doc_753883999903196" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=27328060&amp;access _key=key-1kr450he9rg0rt0w6jh3&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=list" type="application/xshockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="600" width="100%" wmode="opaque" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" /> </object> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Punk Archaeology, Squatting and Abandonment

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: punk-archaeology-squatting-and-abandonment CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 02/22/2010 06:54:19 AM ----BODY: <em>Cross-posted to <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology</a></em><br /><br />I spent part of the weekend exploring <a href="http://flowersandcream.blogspot.com/">Thurston Moore</a>&#39;s and Abby Bank&#39;s evocative book, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/punkhouse/oclc/154309288">Punk House. </a> </em>The book largely features Abby Bank&#39;s photographs of punk houses across the U.S. Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth fame, provides a short introduction where he talks about the punk house phenomenon, the practice of squatting associated with the most radical expression of the punk lifestyle, and the aesthetic of the punk interpretation of the DIY approach to home decoration. All of these practices speak to the radical politics behind punk rock as a movement. The rejection (or total disregard for) private property made squatting an appealing alternative to ownership, and the collective house represented a more domesticated (and less risky) alternative. &#0160;<br /><br /><em>Squatting, Archaeology, and Abandonment</em><br />Squatting is essentially an archaeological phenomenon; archaeologists are squatters who occupy and savor the abandoned corners of a society. While archaeology tends to be a form of high impact squatting which often leads to the destruction, punk squatting represents a whole series of ephemeral practices that can go almost undetected by subsequent visitors to the space. Like archaeology itself, the practice squatting challenge any simple view of abandonment and in turn challenges the notion of ownership, possession, and use that are vital in some way to our understanding of function within an archaeological context. So while archaeologists are squatters, like punks, the practice of squatting undermines basic assumptions that allow archaeology to function. Archaeologists, like squatters, put spaces in the margins of the mainstream world into use. <br /><br />Recent attention to the practice of abandonment both within the archaeological record and in the American cities wracked by the recent economic downturn has tended to view the spaces of abandonment as tragic expressions of the ultimate futility of human efforts to transform the landscape or the false optimism of progress. Abandoned monumental architecture – especially hospitals, prisons, factories, churches, or public works – provided evidence for the cynicism of the punk world view as well as the backdrop for their ability live without these amenities. <br /><br />Archaeological evidence for so-called squatters in the period of history that I study, Late Antiquity, almost beg such ideological questions. Were the Late Antique squatters in the monumental architecture of the earlier, Classical, era proto-punks who recognized and celebrated the futility of their predecessors? Should we view their re-use of abandoned spaces as critique? <br /><br />At the same time the modern archaeologist as squatter likewise searches for fragments of the past – something useful among the neglected corners of society – in a utopian and ideological quest to produce a singular, uninterrupted world. <br /><br /><em>Formation Process and Provisional Discard</em><br />Bank&#39;s photographs capture the layered, weathered, look of group houses that both support the impecunious lifestyles of their punk residents as well as the chaotic, multi-generation application of DIY practices. The rooms that

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Bank&#39;s photographed were filled with objects out of context – junk – deployed to support lifestyles at the margins of capitalism. The houses stand as living testimony to the value quintessential archaeological practice of provisional discard. The pattern of occupation produces a stratigraphic space as each resident adds a layer of interpretation to what went before.<br /><br />These houses take what archaeologists have sometimes seen as an almost subconscious or deeply structured processes of discard into a performative critique of society. Short term habitation practices, in turn, transform a series of practical choices into the chaotic pastiche of lived stratigraphy.<br /><br /><em>Music</em><br />The link between these houses and punk music is clear. As we have observed before, punk music is a nostalgic, utopian, critique that seeks a more profound authority than punks observe from the world around them. The punk houses, the temporary residence of squatters, and the archaeology of a stratified, provisional existence, forms a physical counterpoint to the archaeological overtones in punk music. ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 02/19/2010 09:54:12 AM ----BODY: <p>Just some quick hits on a cloudy but warmish North Dakota morning:</p>! <ul>! <li>If you haven&#39;t checked out <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/02/18/online-teaching-the-panopticon-andthe-unequal-gaze/">Teaching Thursday</a> or <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/exhibits/show/toposchora">Topos/Chor</a> a now is the time to do it. View Topos/Chora with any browser other than Internet Explorer.</li>! <li>It&#39;s a fun and busy time here at UND:! ! <ul>! <li>Wednesday, February 24, 2010: <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/uletternew/?p=788">The Elwyn B. Robinson Lecture</a>: Digital Archaeology: Technology in the Trenches</li>! <li>Thursday, March 5, 2010: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/20

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10-wilkins-lecture-robin-jensen.html">The Robert Wilkins&#39; Lecture</a>: Robin Jensen presenting &quot;Living Water: Rituals, Spaces, and Images of Early Christian Baptism&quot;</li>! <li>Thursday, March 5, 2010: The Red River Valley History Conference (more soon!)</li>! <li>Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - Saturday, March 27, 2010: <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/">41st Annual UND Writers Conference</a>.</li>! </ul>! </li>! <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/ausvwi09/engine/match/406196.html">These seem hardly even fun to watch</a>. At least the test series had drama.</li>! <li><a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/">Some fun chatter among my public history interns</a>.</li>! <li><a href="http://opencontext.org/about/publishing">This is a very nice guide</a> to preparing data for digital publication. Note the emphasis on peerreview. Very cool.</li>! <li>Thurston Moore is definitely a Punk Archaeologist and <a href="http://flowersandcream.blogspot.com/">his new blog proves it</a>.</li>! <li>I&#39;m currently reading about <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/467143303">The Mangle</a> and love its utility in understanding the interplay between objects and humans.</li>! <li>Does anyone use <a href="http://www.scribd.com/">Scribd</a>? Is it a convenient platform for a working papers site?</li>! </ul>! <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Ryan Stander's Topos/Chora: Online Edition STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: ryan-standers-toposchora-online-edition CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 02/18/2010 07:37:05 AM ----BODY: <p>We are very pleased to announce that the Online Edition of Ryan Stander's photography exhibition <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/exhibits/show/toposchora">Topos/Chora: The Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> is now live. The online exhibit includes over 60 photographs most of which are not appearing in Ryan's gallery show at the Empire Arts Center (which continues through the

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end of February). In addition, to the photographs we have included a whole bunch of bonus features:</p> <ul> <li>An interview with the photographer</li> <li>A collection of reflective essays written by participants of the project in response to both Ryan's photographs and the landscape at Pyla<i>Koutsopetria</i>.</li> <li>The trailer for an upcoming documentary directed by Ian Ragsale and based on our field work in Cyprus</li> <li>An experimental, audio experience called Trench Sounds.</li> </ul> <p>We are tremendously excited about Ryan's work and we hope that these photographs spur further reflection both by PKAP team members, but also by people interested in landscape, photography, and archaeology more broadly. We hope to update the site from time to time if new material becomes available.</p> <p>The website was developed using a brilliant application from <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/">George Mason's Center for History and the New Media</a> called <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a>. My public history interns -- Chris, Gust, Sara McIntee, Kathy Nedergaard -- prepared the metadata, layout, and proofing of the photographs and text. Support for their work and for the installation and maintenance of Omeka comes from the <a href="http://digitalgateway.und.edu/About.html">Working Group in Digital and New Media</a>. Ryan's work in Cyprus was supported by the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/html/welcome2.html">Dean of the Graduate School at the University of North Dakota</a> and the whole team at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/" title="Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project">Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i> Archaeological Project</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Feed back is always welcome!</p> <p>The site is best viewed with any browser other than Internet Explore (Opera, Chrome, Firefox, or Safari!).</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.und.edu/exhibits/show/toposchora"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a8b13124970b -pi" width="470" height="480" alt="ToposChoraCapture.tiff" /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: 2010 Wilkins Lecture: Robin Jensen STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0

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BASENAME: CATEGORY: CATEGORY: CATEGORY:

2010-wilkins-lecture-robin-jensen Early Christian Baptisteries Grand Forks Notes North Dakotiana

DATE: 02/17/2010 07:58:46 AM ----BODY: <p>It's exciting to announce that Grand Forks native, Robin Jensen will present the 2010 Robert Wilkins lecture on Friday March 5, 2010 at 4:00 pm in the Lecture Bowl. This semi-annual talk is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Robert Wilkins, a long time member of the Department of History. Prof. Wilkins contributed to the departments development from the early 1960s through the 1980s during which time it was transformed from a small and fractious department to a major contributor to the intellectual life of the university.</p> <p>Professor Jensen's talk is entitled "Living Water: Rituals, Spaces, and Images of Early Christian Baptism" and it will coincide with the Fifth Annual Red River Valley History Conference that same day. The talk and the conference are free and open to the public.</p> <p>Here's the flier.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012877aeb93f970c -pi" width="368" height="480" alt="201002170756.jpg" /><br /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.197.147 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 02/17/2010 12:17:16 PM You will, of course, video this & make the video available on-line? very long way to drive from Seattle. Or from anywhere. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: O'Kelly Graffiti under Erasure STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: okelly-graffiti-under-erasure CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana

ND is a

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DATE: 02/16/2010 10:41:25 AM ----BODY: <p>Late Friday afternoon(always a sneaky time of day in an academic building) people from University of North Dakota facilities painted over the famed Rich2 (aka King Rich) graffiti wall in O&#39;Kelly Hall. UND&#39;s Integrated Studies Program had originally commissioned the work and it graced the entrance hall to the program.</p>! <p>Unfortunately, in an interesting example of attitudes toward control, &quot;the administration&quot; (with all of its pleasant ambiguity) reasserted their ownership over the wall (and their control over buildings) and slated it for renovation sometime last summer. Once it was clear that the wall would be destroyed the Provost commissioned Rich Patterson, a well-known graffiti artist from New York who earned an undergraduate and graduate degree at UND, to prepare a new work on canvass to hang in the place of this work. <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/2009/10/rich-2-visit-to-und.html">Ryan Stander covered these developments in the fall in his blog Axis of Access</a>. They were picked up by bloggers elsewhere.</p>! <p>At the same time that cash-strapped universities all across the US are beginning to liquidate their art collections, UND has thought outside the box by beginning to destroy parts of their collection while commissioning new works. This might account for why visitors to the building have asked whether these projects are being funded &quot;by stimulus money&quot; noting how long the projects are taking to be completed and the dubious value of their contributions to campus life. They aren&#39;t being paid for by stimulus money and I am not sure that stimulus money was designed to pay for make-work projects. The parallel between the stimulus package and various New Deal programs is amusing, though, and suggests that some of our students are using historical knowledge in a critical way. We offered U.S. History 1920-1945 in the fall.</p>! <p>One of the great things about Rich&#39;s work is that, first, simple primer did almost nothing to cover it. I was lucky enough to spend some time with Rich when he was on campus, and he certainly understood the ephemeral quality of graffiti art. In fact, he told me that rarely would his works last a week on the trains of New York. So, in some ways the long life of the O&#39;Kelly wall makes it an exceptional example of the medium.</p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Rich2OKelly.jpg" height="360" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012877a9861a970c -pi" width="480" /></p>! <p style="text-align: left;">His signature seems particularly resistant to erasure.</p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Rich2Signature.jpg" height="480" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012877a98624970c -pi" width="290" /></p>! <p style="text-align: left;">Even when we know that fresh paint will eventually cover the graffiti, it is clear that Rich knew how to make traces of his work last. He clever extended the design to the ceiling marking the acoustic tiles and the aluminum rails that support them.</p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="ISPUnderErasure.jpg" height="360" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012877a98612970c -pi" width="480" /></p>! <p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="PaintedinCorner.jpg" height="360" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a8a6ea47970b -pi" width="480" /></p>! <p style="text-align: left;">Come over and visit the wall at O&#39;Kelly when you have a chance. Its liminal state -- between visibility and erasure --

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captures the ephemeral essence of the medium and evokes the ambivalent reception of the art itself.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some thoughts on Corinth's Digital Notebooks STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: some-thoughts-on-corinths-digital-notebooks CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 02/15/2010 07:21:14 AM ----BODY: <p>I was pretty excited when the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/news/newsDetails/agora-and-corinthpartner-for-online-excavation-databases/">American School announced that they had released so many of Corinth Excavation&#39;s (and Athenian Agora&#39;s) notebooks the past week</a>. First, I am working on a paper that thinks considers how recording archaeological data in notebooks differs from recording archaeological data using digital technology, and I used the famed Corinth notebooks as an example in the paper. Next, i was excited to look at some of Carl Blegen&#39;s notebooks since I knew he was a keen observer of the landscape and often included some details of the contemporary Greek countryside in his published articles (for example, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1522769">his description of the location of Gonia here</a>). I noticed that they included four notebooks from his work at Zygouries. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/7035161">The Bronze Age site Zygouries</a> was near the imposing Frankish castle of Ay. Vasileios where I had spent a couple of grueling days many years ago and I wondered if Blegen had anything to say about the site, the village or the countryside.</p>! <p>So, I eagerly searched for Blegen and Zygouries and was promptly rewarded with four notebooks from the site. <a href="http://ascsa.net/id/corinth/page/0987%20s008">The first notebook</a>, I think, included some of the detail about which I was curious. Moreover, the American School project had meticulously scanned even the outsides of the notebook giving preserving the tactile, physical quality of the notebook. <a href="http://ascsa.net/id/corinth/page/0987%20s001">The well-worn binding</a> surely preserved some of the actual dirt excavated from Zygouries as well as the marks of generations of scholars who had leafed through Blegen&#39;s field notes with critical eyes.</p>! <p>At the same time there were issues. First, Blegen writes in a small, stylish hand and in pencil which is difficult to read at the resolution of scans that

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the American School provides. Now, someone who had read Blegen&#39;s notebooks first hand might have found it easier to decipher. I also found that downloading the page as an image and fussing a bit with it in Photoshop allowed me to improve the contrast and zoom in a more sophisticated way to make it seem easier to read (I am not sure whether I did anything, in fact). What I really wanted, it turned out was a transcription of Blegen&#39;s notebook ( (consider, Jack Davis&#39;s transcription of <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/blegen-red-cross-diary1918">Blegen&#39;s Red Cross notebook here</a>). Now, it&#39;s not the American Schools fault that I could not read Blegen&#39;s writing or that they didn&#39;t provide a transcription (the low resolution of the image is another matter), but as I thought about this I began to imagine a parallel site where scholars could upload their transcriptions of notebook pages. These would be keyed to the stable urls provided by the American School and presented in a wiki which would allow for and track revisions. I am sure that some notebooks are useful enough and commonly investigated enough to warrant this.</p>! <p>As I continued my browsing of Blegen&#39;s notebooks, I came across another strange anomaly. <a href="http://ascsa.net/id/corinth/notebook/988">Notebook 3 from Zygouries</a> is clearly not in Blegen&#39;s hand. In fact, <a href="http://ascsa.net/id/corinth/page/0988%20s005">the first page</a> of the notebook tells us that it is in the hand of J. P. Harland. Harland&#39;s name, however, is not included in <a href="http://ascsa.net/id/corinth/notebook/988/html">the public metadata for this notebook</a>. The metadata for later notebooks clearly indicate the name of the recorder. For example, the metadata for <a href="http://ascsa.net/id/corinth/notebook/974">Notebook 974 clearly</a> stated that the legendary David Pettegrew and Thomas Henderson were its authors. This got me thinking, on the one hand, about the some text from the description of the collection on <a href="http://ascsa.net/research?v=default">the webpage</a>:</p>! <blockquote>! <p>Using day journal diaries, archaeologists began recording finds, monuments and excavation, as well as their daily life in Greece. Often their thoughts and personalities are evident on the pages. More recent notebooks are more ‘objective’ and standardized but offer no less to the interested reader.</p>! </blockquote>! <p>Clearly the recorders of the metadata became more &quot;objective&quot; as well in that they documented the names of the recorders and not just the excavation director (in the case of Notebook 974 it would be Guy Sanders). The failure to do this in the earlier notebook captures a bit of the spirit of an earlier era of &quot;heroic archaeology&quot; where the personality of the excavation director stood in the foreground of knowledge production. (It also seeming has to do with the difference between Blegen&#39;s project at Zygouries and the American School&#39;s project at Corinth).</p>! <p>The absence of Harland&#39;s name from the public notebook metadata also made me return to the idea that this could be the kind of data captured by the public as they use these notebooks. If it was possible, I would not have hesitated to add Harland&#39;s name to the notebook&#39;s metadata or to some publicly tagged version of the metadata. I might have even been inclined to add a link to <a href="http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead/getEad?id=ark:/88435/pr76f3432">Harland&#3 9;s papers at Princeton</a> which Kostis Kourelis pointed out to me especially since he apparently kept a a dairy for over 50 years. One could imagine a researcher at Princeton adding notations from Harland&#39;s diaries to dates in the notebooks which would allow a researcher to &quot;<a

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href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/04/ecosystems.html">drill sideways</a>&quot;.</p>! <p>I know some people who committed tremendous energy to this massive digitization project read this blog from time to time, and I want to stress that my remarks here are not meant to be critical of the tremendous effort that this project took. In fact, my only criticism of the existing interface -- the lack of high resolution images -- I am sure is easily adjusted in the future as more people have access to significant bandwidth necessary to handle large images. At the same time, my observations about the lack of public markup to these incredibly valuable archaeological resources may be more directed at the scholarly community who makes use of this material than the institution that provided it. After all, it would not be particularly difficult to begin such a project (although it would benefit immeasurably from collaboration with the American School). More importantly, the idea of collaborative projects which add real value to the data available on the web shows how thinking about the internet publication has changed quickly over the past five years. The next generation of digitalized archaeological data is likely to expand the concept of the notebook, context, photograph to include a range of dynamic metadata that embeds the digital artifact within an academic and intellectual context that is every bit as robust as the archaeological context provided by the original excavator.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 02/12/2010 10:05:06 AM ----BODY: <p>A flurry-y Friday morning in a toasty warm office offers this quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>The American School of Classical Studies at Athens has announced <a href="http://ascsa.net/research?v=default">their digital library</a>. This is huge news for anyone interested in the archaeology and history of Greece and Athens and Corinth in particular. This is relevant to <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/02/he roic-archaeology-digital-data-and-disciplinarity-a-draft.html">my post (and paper) here</a>. And you can check out both <a href="http://ascsa.net/id/corinth/page/0974%20s005">David Pettegrew's Corinth Notebook</a> and Carl <a

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href="http://ascsa.net/id/corinth/page/0987%20s001">Blegen at Zygourias</a>.</li> <li>Apparently, <a href="http://www.cyprus-mail.com/opinions/our-view-bigcathedrals-don-t-necessarily-have-be-ugly/20100211">huge, modern churches don't have to be ugly in Cyprus!</a> A novel idea!</li> <li><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/02/11/howard-zinn-andteaching/">A huge day (almost 100 hits) and brilliant post on Teaching Thursday yesterday</a>. If you haven't checked it out, now is the time!</li> <li>Begin to get excited about the <a href="http://www.undwritersconference.org/wc-authors.html">University of North Dakota's Writers Conference</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/">More public history type musing here</a>.</li> <li>What do people think about <a href="http://www.google.com/buzz">Google Buzz</a>?</li> <li>More on <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8509244.s tm">the economic crisis in Greece</a> and some on how <a href="http://www.cyprus-mail.com/cyprus/let-greece-be-lesson-us/20100212">this is being viewed in Cyprus</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/ausvwi09/engine/current/match/406194.html">Only rain can slow down Australia</a>!</li> </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Guy Sanders EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 94.66.247.167 URL: http://ascsa.net/research?q=;v=;t=;sort= DATE: 02/17/2010 09:00:13 AM I have been pushing for this for this since 1997 and when the opportunity to apply for EU funds arose, jumped on on it because Bruce Harzler over in the Agora started after us and had managed to get so far ahead with PHI funding. When we got ahead of them, they received funding to digitize their resources systematically which will start very soon. With a password you can access over 700,000 images and records and since the Agora and we are both pretty much born digital, many more records will become available every year. The data is a bit

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dirty but rather than wait we put out ugly rather than wait for years and give a clean product. Others have expressed an interest in mapping their material with ours so that will add reams more. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday Redirect STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-redirect CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 02/11/2010 07:59:50 AM ----BODY: <p>We have a <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2010/02/11/howard-zinn-andteaching/">great blog over at Teaching Thursday today</a>, and I am not in the mood to compete with it. <a href="http://richardkahn.org/">Richard Kahn</a>, explores Howard Zinn's attitudes toward teaching in a provocative blog post that should generate some conversation regarding our responsibilities as university educators.</p> <p>Some of the main points of the argument reflect Zinn and Kahn's commitment to ideologically aware teaching. That is, to teaching from a particular perspective (and being explicit and open about it) rather than attempting to impart a fixed body of knowledge (Kahn refers here to Paulo Freire's idea of "pedagogical banking") to our students. The former involves being honest and open with our students and in an effort to both model and promote the same kind of honest and open discourse that exists at the heart of the humanities and, perhaps, our experiences as individuals. The latter, however, has roots in foundational notions of the university's disciplinary structure where each discipline contributes a fixed quantity of content toward the production of a "well-round" citizen.</p> <p>Both perspectives on teaching have powerful advocates both within and outside of the academy. For example, few faculty members would regard teaching content - whether we identify content as "methodology", "method", or "facts" -- as a value-free position. Nevertheless, this willful deception has strategic advantages; namely, it creates rhetorical space that preserves the disciplinary integrity that many scholars value as an institutional counterweight to the potential abuses of the university. Kahn's (and others') view of the ecology of teaching:</p> <blockquote> For students, like all people, are <em>actively</em> constructing their reality and placing new experience in the contexts of how they have come to understand and identify with their world. Thus, to teach in this way is to deny the human agency that students bring to the pedagogical encounter. Further, the zone of university teaching does not take place in a void, but is the complex ecological space constructed out of the myriad histories of the people inhabiting the campus, the institution’s own policy and disciplinary histories, the regional history in which a college is situated, the political history of the nation, and the social history of the planet (i.e., globalization). Thus, there is no value-free perspective from which to impart objective knowledge, but only the dynamic landscape that is the actively

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evolving history of ideas as articulated by various groups occupying a highly diverse array of social locations. </blockquote> <p>While this can be liberating and, frankly, appealing, admitting it explicitly has consequences.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Saints and Church Spaces STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: saints-and-church-spaces CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 02/10/2010 07:59:59 AM ----BODY: <p>I just finished reading Ann Marie Yasin's new book, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean, and it is the best recent book on Early Christian architecture in the Mediterranean. I can only admire her breadth of knowledge and ability to synthesize trends across the entire Mediterranean basin without getting mired in the chronological, liturgical, or regional quagmires that can doom large scale analyses like hers. I think the effort to focus the book around the role of saints and commemoration in the architecture and decoration of Early Christian churches was really smart.</p> <p>I won't review the book because if you're interested in Early Christian architecture, or Late Antiquity more broadly, you'll want to go and read it for yourself. Instead, I'll offer 7 observations that I had as I read the book.</p> <ol> <li>I thought that the book got stronger as it went along. I did not think that the early chapters on pre-Constantinean churches or on commemorative practices carried through the rest of the text particularly well, and most of her observations in these chapters depended upon the work of earlier scholars. This isn't a bad thing, but they stand in contrast to her really creative interpretative work later in the book.</li> <li>Chapter 3 is really good. In it, she argues that churches functioned as places of commemoration largely replacing earlier practices of civic commemoration, while carrying on many of the basic attitudes of euergetism in the Roman world. In other words, people began to commemorate themselves in churches rather than in the civic fabric. While I generally agree with her argument that donors in Early Christian space sought to position inscriptions

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commemorating their donations in visible places, I am not sure that she adequately explained anonymous donor texts which are not uncommon in early Christian spaces. At the same time, I am not sure that her argument for commemoration accommodated the broader practice of Christian euergetism which could include things like silver objects which contained inscriptions that we too small to be easily read by an audience. In other words, I would have emphasized texts that had seem to be directed at a divine audience (like inscribed prayers) or a more specific lay or clerical audience (depending upon the location of the text and its relation to the liturgy). These texts depended upon the church as sacred space as much a social space for the community. This doesn't necessary contradict her argument, but perhaps offers a somewhat more subtle reading of the Christian commemorative impulse which separated it a bit more from traditional Roman practices and placed it more fully in an Early Christian context.</li> <li>Following on from point 2, I wonder whether the economics of Christian euergetism was fundamentally different from the economics of earlier Roman euergetism. In particular, I still wonder whether it pulled in a more economically and socially diverse cross-section of the population than earlier Roman practices that were bound up in specifically elite forms of expression. Can we see, in dedications to Early Christian architecture examples of the widow's mite?</li> <li>Regional Variation. I kept thinking throughout the book that it would have been great to get a better understanding of regional variation in Early Christian architecture. While I recognize that this could be a can of worms, I found the differences between practices in the East, in say Syria, and in Italy and North Africa fascinating. Are these to be explained by variation in liturgical practices? Or do they represent long standing differences in social practices?</li> <li>Ritual. In my dissertation I was distracted by the siren-song of Early Christian liturgy. I probably still feel its pull to some extent. I'd have liked to understand more about the interaction between architecture and liturgical practices or even just ritual practices in Late Antiquity -- even if it was speculative. The discussion of the positioning of martyr's shrines and the main axis of the church, for example, would have been even stronger if we knew how the clergy and congregation would have moved in these spaces. Now, the reason why the Early Christian liturgy is a siren song is that in most cases, we don't know how the clergy and congregation moved in liturgical space. At the same time, we can likely explain the off-axis location of the ciborium in the church of St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki as the need to keep the main axis of the church open for liturgical processions; amboes also tended to be offset to the left or right of the main axis in Greek churches suggesting that processions up the axis of the church has a particularly important place in local liturgical practice. Moreover, its position next to the north aisle rail may have allowed the congregation easy access t the shrine from the aisles where they may stood while the liturgy took place.</li> <li>I liked how forcefully she makes the point that relics were necessary for the founding of churches tying saints to liturgical space. In general, her treatment of the intersection of the community of saints and the liturgy was interesting and good.</li>

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<li>Churches and Pagans. One thing I was surprised not to see in the book was any discussion of Christian and Pagan interaction particularly over the matter of martyrs tombs and sacred space. The most obvious incident involving this was remains of St. Babylas and the temple of Apollo at Daphne. The bones of the saint apparently disrupted the oracle at the temple causing Julian to remove them.</li> <li>I loved her section on Augustine's <i>De cura pro mortuis gerenda</i> (pp. 213-222). I need to check this text out, particular Augustine's discussion of dreams and visions. I don't know how I missed this! I thought that her dealing with Augustine's text in the context of Paulinus' own building campaign was useful for her argument and our understanding of the subtle differences between Paulinus's and Augustine's understanding of the popular veneration of saints.</li> </ol> <p>So, if you're interested in Late Antique religious history and architecture, this is a must read book!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Heroic Archaeology, Digital Data, and Disciplinarity: A Draft STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: heroic-archaeology-digital-data-and-disciplinarity-a-draft CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 02/09/2010 08:51:46 AM ----BODY: <p>I've been invited to give the Elwyn B. Robinson lecture at the library at the end of the month. This is a fun event where a nice cross-section of the university community shows up to commemorate the life and work of the historian Elwyn Robinson. So, as per usual, I am being overly ambitious in putting together a paper for this event and trying to articulate the historical and practical links between technology, practice and basic assumptions about archaeology as a discipline. In practical terms, I am trying to tout our new Working Group for Digital and New Media by arguing that digital technology (broadly construed) holds particular potential as a medium for cross/trans/postdisciplinary dialogue.</p> <p>To make this argument, I first suggest that a kind of "heroic archaeologist" characterized the earliest days of "modern" archaeology in the Mediterranean. Think Carl Blegen, not Indiana Jones. The vision of these heroic archaeologists

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adhered closely not only to the data that they produced, but also the conclusions they drew from this data. The legacy of these men's work can be seen even today when we refer to certain archaeological field notebooks as "Blegen's Notebooks". The importance of the paper notebook as the locus of the primary data that these men collected from the field (and through which they actualized their vision of a scientific archaeology) led to incredible steps being taken to prevent these notebooks from being lost or damaged. As a result, we have the notebooks today, but access to them, up until very recently, has been limited. I think that this is both institutional and technological. In the case of the former, these notebooks became so closely related to the heros of archaeology's early days that they acquired relic status. The preservation of the notebooks was regarded as an crucial requirement for the preservation of knowledge in part because notebooks were and are fragile. Moreover, publishing raw notes by traditional means was both prohibitively expensive and perhaps even intellectually risky as it exposed the heroic underpinnings of archaeology to the outsiders' gaze. To get access to the notebooks then, the institutional keepers of the data had to approve. This was both a matter of preserving the fragile media and preserving the past's heroic legacy. In the most extreme cases, notebooks become family possessions and completely removed from any academic circulation.</p> <p>For the past decade, this trend has reversed. Digital technology has made it easier and easier to publish archaeological data. Numerous projects are underway both to preserve and make accessible archaeological field data once hidden deep within the bowels of the archive. The increasing use of digital technology in the field has increased the amount of born digital data and streamlined (in most cases) archaeological workflow to the point where it is feasible in some cases to release data directly from the field into circulation. For example, at the end of every season on my project in Cyprus, we can circulate a completed (albeit provisional) data set that encompasses plans of trenches, (some) finds data, study photographs, and preliminary analyses, and we are far from unique in this respect. The born-digital character of this data makes it particularly easy, then, to circulate data sets. Moreover, the act of circulating even relatively "raw" (that is unanalyzed) data serves as a means to curate this data as well. This is the opposite of the old style notebook which is locked away (after perhaps being copied) at the excavation house under the careful eye of the excavation as an institution or the director. The responsibility that the institution or the person of the director feels toward this data contributes to the status of the notebook as the property of the excavation (or, in some cases, the director). There are obviously other issues at play as well, but I'd contend that the tremendously fragile nature of the archaeological notebook is a significant contributor to the idea that archaeological data is property.</p> <p>With the increasingly easy circulation of archaeological field data, however, there is a growing sense that the data collected from intensive surveys and excavations in the Mediterranean should be made freely available. Sebastian Heath is among the biggest advocates of this idea and he has explored some of the intellectual justifications and consequences of this movement <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/04/ecosystems.html">in his blog</a>. He makes, for example, the link between curating archaeological data and sharing it. On the simplest level: when digital data is shared it is inevitably copied. When archaeological data is made available, the community will put forth increasing efforts to make sure that it is preserved. The simple practice of circulating data freely from a server will not only ensure that at least several copies of the data exist as a result of server architecture, but it will be accessible for people to download and copy onto their own computers, backing it up, and then recirculating it. In effect, the curation is left to the

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community because the data becomes their possession. The solitary, heroic, archaeologist gives way to the collective community who replace the person or institution as both archive and interpreter of data.</p> <p>While this all sounds pretty cool, I am not naive, however, and recognize that some provision of long-term archiving must exist. After all, the collective effort to preserve the "most important knowledge" from antiquity has produced a body of texts filled with lacunae and hardly suitable to answer every question of significance for every age. Long-term, "deep" and stable storage of archaeological data should remain a key component of any archaeological enterprise, but the easy proliferation of digital texts will surely complement these efforts by creating an environment where the archiving and circulation of data are not incompatible. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>At the same time that digital technology and intellectual shifts within the discipline of archaeology has made it easier to access and circulate data from projects, scholars like Ian Hodder and Michael Shanks have pushed for a greater reflexivity in archaeological practice and have come to see archaeological knowledge as product of far more sophisticated forces than the singular vision of a project director or the weight of a seemingly enduring historical problem. The heroic archaeologist is under assault not just from the perspective of technological change. As scholars have articulated the profoundly anti-modern aspects of archaeological practice -- some with closer parallels to craft production or <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">even punk rock music</a>, the hard edges of the discipline have begun to erode. For example, the growing recognition of indigenous archaeologies which articulate how traditionally alienated groups understand their material history has shown that archaeological practice in a modernist mode offers only one of any number of perspectives on the past. Even within the traditional boundaries of the discipline itself, the growing number of specialists involved on even a modest sized archaeological project has produced a space of overlapping and often times conflicting discursive, disciplinary, and even interpersonal agendas and practices. The heroically linear flow from the fieldwork to documentation to publication is now a very crowded space filled with voices. In such a context, archaeological knowledge is negotiated.</p> <p>Digital technologies have made it far easier to document and to disseminate the negotiated character of archaeological knowledge. For example, my wife and I were just talking yesterday about our experiences on archaeological project not that long ago that had only one "official" camera. Typically, this was a pretty nice camera -- often the nicest on the project or with the highest quality film. Now it is common for everyone in a trench to have a good quality digital camera. Unlike just 15 years ago, when developing and circulating slides was an expensive and time consuming process, now we can instantly develop and circulate photographs of the archaeological experience. While there might still be a limited number of "official cameras", the official photograph of a trench is now just one of any number of competing photographs of that archaeological space. Moreover, it is possible to capture this diversity of perspectives and even to publish it on the internet at limited cost. The ease in disseminating the numerous perspectives on a project comes through with inexpensively captured digital audio and video. Consider how easy it is for archaeologists to produce their own documentary films that compete in quality and content with the professional productions of just decades ago. Low cost, HD video cameras and YouTube even hold forth the prospect of making everyone on the project a documentary filmmaker. At my project in Cyprus, we've used blogs to publish instantaneously myriad perspectives offered by undergraduate, graduate students, and even within the senior staff.</p>

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<p>As the collaborative environment within archaeology reveals archaeological practice as inherently transdisciplinary. There are too many moving parts to subject archaeology to a singular disciplinary practice. This should be no surprise; the disciplines are a product of a particular moment in the development of the academy. The influence and faith in modernity and in systematic scientific approaches to knowledge about the past allowed archaeology under the watchful gaze of its heroic founding fathers to carve out a lasting place within the academia and the university. The archive of notebooks protected and preserved the modern disciplinary achievements of the archaeological method. Digital data, however, resists the enclosed space of the "finite" archive just as digital technologies make it more and more difficult to maintain a singular voice in archaeological research. Any effort to accommodate the myriad voices produced by any archaeological project challenges the notion of a "project" and an "archaeology". The easy dissemination of both archaeological data (in a proper, modernist sense) and the various "unofficial" voices of archaeology make it impossible to limit the multi-vocal character of archaeological research and reinforce the centuries old disciplinary strictures. Moreover, the inability necessary to distinguish between data produces by "amateurs" and that produced by "professional" (professionalism is the hallmark of a discipline) suggests that the end of the discipline is near.</p> <p>This is not suggest that people will not continue to use archaeological methods for studying the past; after all, the methods of indigenous archaeologists, undergraduate bloggers, fine art photographers, and casual videobloggers will not answer every question that an individual or community might have about the remains of a past community, building, or event.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Death in Corinth STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: death-in-corinth CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 02/08/2010 08:18:05 AM ----BODY: <p>Another banner month for Corinth related articles! This past week saw the publication of <a href="http://www.atyponlink.com/ASCS/doi/abs/10.2972/hesp.78.4.501">A.H. Rohn's, E. Barnes's, and G.D.R. Sander's "An Early Ottoman Cemetery at Ancient Corinth," <i>Hesperia</i> 78 (2009), 501-615</a>. It's fantastic that Hesperia is so flexible to publish

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what is, in effect, a short archaeological monograph! The highly-detailed article documents with great care the 17th century Ottoman cemetery excavated in Panayia Field in Ancient Corinth. The 133 individuals excavated from 81 graves represented both the Christian and Muslim community at Corinth. The excavators suggest that the presence of both groups in the same cemetery and the common appearance of "boot-heel reinforcement cleats" may associate the cemetery with the Ottoman garrison in the town.</p> <p>If the cemetery is indeed associated with the garrison the ratio of 11 Muslim-style graves to 55 Christian-style graves based, in large part, on the arrangement of the bodies in the graves (p. 516), suggests that the Ottoman garrison may have been relatively well integrated with the local population. This is further indicated by the cross-section of the local demographic represented in the graves with adult men (54), adult women (23) and children of all ages (54) present (pp. 527-528). The analysis of the skull types seem to indicate that many of the women were local while most of the men were from elsewhere (pp.530-531). This would reinforce the notion that this cemetery served the local garrison. The graves also showed some wealth in the community with numerous examples of jewelry (although mostly featuring non-precious metal and stones) and the regular occurrence of the bodies being interned wearing boots suggesting at least some disposable wealth. At the same time, only a few of the graves preserved indications of wooden coffins with nails preserved in a neat halo around the body in at least one grave (p. 512)</p> <p>It seems that whenever someone excavates a cemetery, there is at least on creepy grave (this is not a technical term), the description of which is worth quoting in full:</p> <blockquote> <p>Grave 20 contained the body of a young 20–21-year-old male lying extended with his head pointing westward, but face down (Figs. 24, 25). A thick iron rod projecting out of the left side of his neck turned out to be an iron hook that had been inserted into his left shoulder beneath his left clavicle (collarbone). Apparently, he had been suspended from this hook until he died, because both legs and feet extended fully and parallel to one another as they would have while he hung and rigor mortis set in. His right hand had balled up into a fist that clutched the spot where the hook had been inserted into his shoulder. His left arm dangled behind his back. Presumably, once he had died, his punishers had taken down his rigid body and placed it face down (a position of disgrace?) into his final resting place, leaving the hook still embedded. We suspect this represents a death sentence for an individual who defied the order of the local governing body. Ottoman rule at Ancient Corinth during the early 17th century apparently tolerated Christian religious practice, but only as long as the Christians obeyed their rulers and did not cause trouble for them. (p. 521)</p> </blockquote> <p>The cemetery appears to have fallen out of use during the Second Venetian period at Corinth (1687-1715) and perhaps forgotten by the 18th century. I can't help wonder how quickly the cemetery fell out of use as place of burial or even commemoration for while the men in the group may have represented Ottoman power, the women would have tied at least some members of that group to the local community. Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory has noted that in the Modern period, Greek graves can fall into neglect very quickly if there are no long any close relatives in the community to maintain them. By the Early Modern period (19th century in Greece) the area had been built over with houses. It is remarkable (and a useful reminder) that there was little evidence of the cemetery in the plow-zone. Thus, the function of this area would have been virtually invisible to intensive survey techniques.</p>

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<p>With the recent publications of Lita Tzortzopolou-Gregory on the modern period, the work of Joe Rife on the Late Roman and Roman period, it should now be possible to present an almost comprehensive survey of mortuary practices in the Corinthia from Roman times to the present.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 02/05/2010 10:20:27 AM ----BODY: <p>Some odds and ends on a snowy Friday.</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Ryan Stander</a>, who is rapidly becoming the star of this blog, has some photos showing with <a href="http://archaeologistsphotographers.wordpress.com/">this project here</a>.</li> <li>I've been thinking about the recent vogue in photographing abandoned buildings. <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2010/02/hospital-ruins-rebeccasolnit.html">Kostis posted on it this past week</a>, he linked to <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2241211/">an article by Camio Jose Vergara</a>, and I've been mesmerized by <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2241211/">the photographs of James D. Griffioen</a>. I wonder what this all means...</li> <li><a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2010/02/killer_paragraphs_and_other_re.html">A thoughtful review</a> of <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/">PBS's Digital Nation</a> by Henry Jenkins that offers some interesting observations on writing in our digital age.</li> <li>I'm not a huge fan of the 20-20 format in Cricket, but <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/ausvpak09/engine/current/match/406207.html">this</ a> must have been an exciting game, and it's great to see Shaun Tait be successful again.</li>

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<li>My public history intern's blog, <a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/">The Muses' Web</a> is so far pretty successful.</li> <li>Some fun articles came across my desk this week: from <a href="http://www.atypon-link.com/ASCS/doi/abs/10.2972/hesp.78.4.501">Ottoman cemeteries</a> to <a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/k254u1q4tt357918/fulltext.pdf">digital Catalhoyuk</a> (via <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Shawn Graham</a>)</li> <li>For those interested in seeing me in the flesh: February 24, 2010 - I'm giving the Elwyn B. Robinson lecture at the Chester Fritz Library on campus at the University of North Dakota; the talk is "Digital Archaeology: Technology in the Trenches". On April 29, 2010, I am going to give one of the Faculty Lecture Series Lectures, probably at the North Dakota Museum of Art, paper title tbd.</li> <li><a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/losangeles/ncf/news/story?id=4888515">So this kid is going to</a> put Bear, Delaware on the map. Sweet.</li> </ul> <p>I am ready for the weekend! Enjoy the big game and the unofficial start of NASCAR season.<br /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Ryan Stander's Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-on-ryan-standers-toposchora-photographs-of-the-pyla-koutsopetriaarchaeological-project CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/04/2010 07:51:12 AM ----BODY: <p>We are almost ready to release the online version of Ryan Stander&#39;s photo exhibition, Topos/Chora. For the last week, the exhibit has been up at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks, North Dakota where it will stay all February.</p>!

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Here&#39;s the press release (comliments of our most excellent <a href="http://www3.und.edu/dept/our/">Office of University Relations</a>):! ! <blockquote>! <p>The exhibit <em>Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</em> is featured now through the end of the month at the Empire Arts Center. The exhibit features the photographs of UND Master‚Äôs of Fine Art student Ryan Stander. These images were produced during Stander‚Äôs time as the artist-in-residence at Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus.</p>! ! <p>Since 2003, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has conducted archaeological fieldwork in the Republic of Cyprus under the direction of Bill Caraher of the UND Department of History. It is one of very few archaeological projects in the Mediterranean to support an artist-in-residence program, Caraher said.<br />! <br />! Stander&#39;s photos seek to present the relationship between the archaeologist at work in the field and the physical and natural environment. Portraits, landscape views, and dynamic work images capture the intersection of physical energy, personality, and the striking archaeological and natural landscape of the Cypriot coastline.<br />! <br />! Stander‚Äôs photos will be at the Empire Arts Center through the end of the month. The exhibit is free and open to the public and is open during Empire Arts Center events and by appointment. Check the Center‚Äôs Web site for a calender of this month‚Äôs events. An online exhibit supported by the Working Group in Digital and New Media will be released later this week.<br />! <br />! Useful links<br />! William Caraher home page <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/HomePage.html">www.und.nodak.ed u/instruct/wcaraher/HomePage.html</a><br />! Ryan Stander blog Ryan&#39;s blog Axis of Access <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/</a><b r />! Pyla Koutsopetria Archeological Project Web site <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">www.pkap.org/</a><br />! Pyla Koutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/</a><br />! <br />! Contacts:<br />! Bill Caraher, assistant professor<br />! UND Department of History<br />! <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a><br />! <br />! Empire Arts Center<br />! 415 Demers Ave, Grand Forks<br />! 701-746-5500<br />! <a href="http://www.empireartscenter.com">www.empireartscenter.com</a></p>! </blockquote><br />! And here is the first part of a three-part interview prepared by my public history internship program (for a reflectve, behind the scene&#39;s view of their work check out the intern&#39;s office blog: <a

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href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/">The Muse&#39;s Web</a>). The interview was produced by Kathy Nedegaard, Sara McIntee, and Chris Gust, conducted by Chris Gust and edited by Sara McIntee. It was conducted in our almost-finished Working Group in Digital and New Media Laboratory.<br />! <div style="text-align: center;">! Interview, Chris Gust, Ryan Stander, (Part 1: 13:01)<br />! </div>! <div style="text-align: center;">! <br />! </div>! <div style="text-align: center;">! <embed allowscriptaccess="never" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashvars="playerMode=embedded" height="27" quality="best" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audioplayer.swf?audioUrl=http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Stander% 20Interview/Stander%20Interview%201.mp3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" wmode="window" />! </div>! <div style="text-align: center;">! <br />! </div>! <div style="text-align: left;">! Stay tuned for Parts 2 and Part 3 which will appear with the online exhibit!! </div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Audit Culture and History as Craft STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: audit-culture-and-history-as-craft CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 02/03/2010 08:11:44 AM ----BODY: <p>If you read this blog regularly, you know that I am fond of E. P. Thompson and I have found in some of his works <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/te aching-tuesday-syllabus-as-contract.html">useful ways</a> to articulate not only scholarly work, but also the way in which I teach history as a discipline. In particular, I've found his notion of artisanal work useful to explaining how academic work is different from, say, the stereotypical corporate workplace. Artisans work on their own time and produced according the principles of what

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Thompson called the "moral economy" in contrast to the market economy which becomes the dominant force within capitalism. Two weeks ago, I returned to this analysis and c<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/01/te aching-with-technology-thursday.html">onsidered how the panopticon</a> and online teaching served the market economy. In particular, I suggested (almost argued) that the transparency of student behavior to the gaze of the instructor conditioned them to participate in the so-call "information economy" where every aspect of an individual's identity is observed, recorded, and redeployed (typically to encourage consumption or the production of goods).</p> <p>While ruminating on these things, I stumbled upon an article by M. Herzfeld entitled, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=JF1XWEtDFgC&amp;lpg=PT1&amp;dq=Ways%20of%20Knowing%20new%20approaches%20in%20the%20a nthropology%20of%20experience&amp;client=firefoxa&amp;pg=PA91#v=onepage&amp;q=Ways%20of%20Knowing%20new%20approaches%20in%20the% 20anthropology%20of%20experience&amp;f=false">"Deskilling, 'Dumbing Down', and the Auditing of Knowledge in the Practical Mastery of Artisans and Academics: An Ethnographers Response to a Global Problem,</a>" in M. Harris ed, <span style="font-style:italic;">Ways of knowing</span> (Berghahn Books, 2007), 91112. <span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&amp;ctx_ver=Z39.882004&amp;rft_id=urn%3Aisbn%3A1845453646%2C%209781845453640&amp;rft_val_fmt=info% 3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&amp;rft.genre=book&amp;rft.btitle=Ways%20of%20kno wing&amp;rft.publisher=Berghahn%20Books&amp;rft.aufirst=Mark&amp;rft.aulast=Harr is&amp;rft.au=Mark%20Harris&amp;rft.date=2007&amp;rft.isbn=1845453646%2C%2097818 45453640">Characteristic of Herzfeld's work, this article is dense and significant, so I found myself more mesmerized than necessarily comprehending. From what I can distill, he argues (among other things) that academic work is under the same pressures the ultimately undermined artisanal modes of production (p. 91). The emergence of a culture where administrators (if not fellow academics) expect quantifiable results and by doing so anticipate a kind of "replicability" that runs counter to the fundamental intellectual premises of disciplines like anthropology (p. 97). To Herzfeld, the way in which students acquire the kind of knowledge available through anthropology is parallel to way that apprentices learned from master craft men. Of course, artisanal ways of work have ultimately collapsed in the face of the pressures of the market economy which put greater pressure on the consistency of production and less value on the unique abilities of the individual artisan. As a result, in the place of artisans, we now have deskilled and marginalized labor. The need to maintain this pool of deskilled labor depends upon a kind of "prefabricated knowledge design" which ensures that workers have docile bodies and minds, capable of accommodating market forces (p. 93). In other words, the irregular and creative outcomes of artisanal methods of producing knowledge are undesirable in the market economy which looks toward consistency in production. The goal in education then is to produce consistent outcomes at the expense of creativity (and we must assume with Herzfeld that these two potential outcomes are mutually exclusive).</span></p> <p><span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&amp;ctx_ver=Z39.882004&amp;rft_id=urn%3Aisbn%3A1845453646%2C%209781845453640&amp;rft_val_fmt=info% 3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&amp;rft.genre=book&amp;rft.btitle=Ways%20of%20kno wing&amp;rft.publisher=Berghahn%20Books&amp;rft.aufirst=Mark&amp;rft.aulast=Harr is&amp;rft.au=Mark%20Harris&amp;rft.date=2007&amp;rft.isbn=1845453646%2C%2097818 45453640">The discipline of history, like anthropology, often finds itself in a nervous place when faced with this philosophy of education. I'd contend that it is exceedingly difficult to demonstrate that students understand the notoriously ill-defined "historical method" through quantitative means. Thus scientific (or,

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better, scientistic) means of judging the success or failure -- the consistency -- of the educational process are ill-suited to evaluate the discipline of history as it currently stands. It is possible, of course, to make sure that students know some basic historical facts, but few within the discipline would accept this "prefabricated knowledge" to be a particularly significant indication of one's ability to be a historian. We acknowledge the central place of method in the historical discourse by calling the one required class in the historical curriculum here at the University of North Dakota, The Historians Craft. We explicitly situate history within the tradition of craft -- that is artisanal -- production (pp. 98-99). The outcomes in this class, and in historical research more generally, are uneven, unpredictable, almost impossible to quantify and to replicate. The reasons for this are rooted in the varying nature of historical source material as well as variation in students' (and historians') ability to grasp any particular body of historical source material. Experience plays a key role in our abilities as historians and, as the saying goes, you can't teach experience.</span></p> <p>Lest we think that Herzfeld's paralleling artisans and anthropologists predicts the ultimate collapse of academic disciplines that embrace knowledge over skills, he concludes with an optimistic vision. Anthropologists, like historians, trained through experience are quick to realize the flaws in any form of assessment that endeavors to reduce actual learning to numerical or structural models (pp. 106-107). In fact, the sensitivity among historians and anthropologists to the irregularities present in any form of data (and to the power structures that create these data sets) put them in a position to reject assessments that undermine their devotion to knowledge production. I'd add to this that our understanding of the context of audit culture allows us to subvert it goals by forms of passive resistance which range from mimicking successful outcomes through the deft manipulation of scientistic language to intentional misrepresentation of the audit culture's expectations for the discipline. How long these strategies can sustain the discipline speaks as much to the health of the discipline and its continued ability to produce knowledge as it does the strength of the powers that seek to de-skill academic artisans in the name of scholarly production. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 02/03/2010 08:14:05 AM I'm really interested in reading Louis Menand's new book, The Marketplace of Ideas. Check out a review and NPR interview

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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/books/review/Berubet.html?scp=2&sq=louis%20menand&st=cse">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/books/r eview/Berube-t.html?scp=2&sq=louis%20menand&st=cse</a> <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122702647">http://www .npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122702647</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeological Ethnography (Part 2) STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: archaeological-ethnography-part-2 CATEGORY: Books DATE: 02/02/2010 08:07:59 AM ----BODY: <p>This week I've been working on a review for the <a href="http://eja.sagepub.com/"><i>European Journal of Archaeology</i></a> on the Y. Hamilakis and A. Anagnostopoulos' edited volume, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/468828461"><i>Archaeological Ethnographies</i></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;(London 2009). The papers in the volume derive from a workshop on Poros in 2008 and focus on the intersection of archaeology and anthropological ethnography. The papers were almost all cases studies and these alternated between examples from Greece and those from World Archaeology. In general, the papers with foci outside of Greece demonstrated a greater methodological and, perhaps, theoretical sophistication, but there were numerous, clear points of dialogue between all the scholars at the workshop. It would be hard to imagine a similar dialogue between a representative sampling of scholars working within the traditional disciplinary limits of Greek archaeology and those conducting archaeological fieldwork or theory outside the Mediterranean basin. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>The interplay between scholars offering perspectives from World Archaeology and those writing from a Greek perspective is stimulating and, in general, constructive. But this juxtaposition leaves little room to contrast the contexts from which these case-studies emerged. While superficially, it is clear that this alternation of context reveals the different vocabularies, intellectual traditions, and conditions of work across the world. On the other hand, this alternation avoid problematizing evidence that many of the World Archaeologists worked in places, in conditions, and on sites where they encountered radically alienated groups who were largely deprived of intellectual and physical control over the archaeological remains of their past and struggled to deploy them as a means to secure political authority in the present. For example, ColwellChanthaphonh’s study of the term Anasazi among the Native Americans in the southwest revealed that the words for past cultures remain layered with numerous subtexts capable of alienating and disenfranchising in the present.</p> <p>In Greece, the power relationship between archaeologists and local residents is far more subtle and less visibly contested as the overwhelming power of Greece’s national identity saturates archaeological remains with patriotic significance. As Stroulia and Sutton, Forbes, and Deltsou show, the persistent and sometimes overwhelming din of archaeological nationalism belies the local

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conflicts, attitudes, and practices on the local level. Ethnographic practices holds out the potential to capture these dissonant attitudes toward archaeological sites and archaeologists in their communities. Sutton and Stroulia argue, for example, that the site of Nemea despite its presence on the informed tourist’s itinerary has little meaning to the residents of the Nemea Valley today. Forbes reveals that Arvanites farmers on the Methana Peninsula find little in Classical antiquity to celebrate and associate the past mainly with hardships. At the site of Sikyon, Deltsou demonstrates how official archaeological policy differed from local attitudes toward the local site. Near Kozani in Macedonia, looting practices also reveal the tension between, on the one hand, official expectations and the law, and, on the other hand, a wide array of indigenous archaeological practices that have been generally classified as looting and criminalized or subjected to extreme ethical censure. Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos demonstrated from their experiences at the sanctuary of Kalaureia that the lines between archaeologist, local resident, and ethnographer can produce shifting hybrid identities and resist easy recourse to essential categories or positions.</p> <p>The value of these conclusions are less in the specifics – after all it is unremarkable that Greeks or any groups have diverse attitudes toward the practice and product of archaeology – and more in value of ethnography as a tool to cross barriers between social groups, to articulate alternative histories, to undermine lingering colonial or even racist perspectives embedded in the practices of exploring the past, and toproblematize archaeology’s epistemological roots in modernity. Despite these ambitious goals, most of the case studies presented in this volume at least initially situate the archaeologist or ethnographer in a position of power in relation to the local resident, and this is particularly clear in the case studies from World Archaeology. Ethnography then becomes a strategy that bridges the gap between the authority rooted in modern archaeological practice with its claims to universality and localized, indigenous strategies of imparting meaning in past material culture. While few would argue that the anthropological turn in archaeological practice has contributed to a more dynamic, politically aware, and "sensuous" discipline, in Greece the focus of the ethnographic relationship between outsider archaeologist and the alienated local overlook the relationship between the outsider archaeologist and the state's ability to articulate power on the local level, for example, or the archaeologist and the myriad mediating institutions (foreign schools, academic institutions, disciplinary bodies, scholarly discourses) that influence archaeological practice.</p> <p>In other words, there is no doubt that archaeologists may productively employ ethnography reveal and ameliorate asymmetrical power relationships between the outsider-academic and the local. Ethnography can also function more broadly to document and articulate the relationship between the archaeologist and the various mechanisms of power that influence his or her work. See for example <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/137325143">A. Loukaki's</a> <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/137325143">Living Ruins, Value Conflicts</a> <span style="font-style: normal;">and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/09/ju st-a-bit-more-on-post-classical-athens.html">my blog post here</a></span><span style="font-style: normal;">. Archaeologists are never in complete control over their research, how it is communicated, and their relationship with the local community. "Locals" (for lack of a better word) often exploit their relationship with both foreign and Greek archaeologists for their own benefit. The state -through both the Central Archaeological Council and as manifest in its local representatives in ephorias -- answers to its own logic, political concerns, and networks of power. As often as archaeologists appear to be outsiders to

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alienated local residents, they are also alienated themselves from the various networks of relations and strategical concerns of local residents and national (not to mention disciplinary) politics and power structures. Ethnography may enable an archaeologist to be complicit in liberating and informing local knowledge, but it could also function, in practical terms, as a counterweight to the manipulative strategies employed on all levels and to the lack of transparency within archaeology as a discipline. The deeply embedded position of archaeology within all manner of political, intellectual, and institutional networks makes it an appealing subject for ethnographic scrutiny and perhaps archaeology and ethnography will find even more opportunities to speak truth to power in these contexts.</span></em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Colleen EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 136.152.182.21 URL: http://middlesavagery.wordpress.com DATE: 02/03/2010 12:55:54 PM I'll be happy to see the review--the book is $60, so I doubt that me or the UC library system will have it any time soon. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Topos/Chora Opening and Archaeological Ethnography (Part 1) STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: toposchora-opening-and-archaeological-ethnography-part-1 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/01/2010 08:08:58 AM ----BODY: <p>On Friday night we had an amazing turn out for the opening of Ryan Stander's photo <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/2010/01/toposchoraopening.html">exhibition Topos/Chora</a>. Ryan was the artist-in-resident at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/" title="Pyla-Koutsopetria">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> last summer and produced a remarkable series of photographs during his time with us. We also showed a trailer of a new PKAP documentary produced by I<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2009/06/py la-koutsopetria-filmmaker-ian-ragsdale.html">an Ragsdale</a> and his company <a

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href="http://www.bigapefilms.com/">Big Ape Productions</a>. Both the film and photographs garnered their respective creators great reviews.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a83b3ef8970b -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="Pictures.jpg" /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a83b3ee8970b -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="Paul-Bill.jpg" /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128773e8f3e970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="Portraits2.jpg" style="float:left;" /></p> <p style="text-align: left;">At the same time as the opening was being planned and produced, I've been reading Y. Hamilakis and A. Anagnostopoulos's edited volume <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/468828461"><i>Archaeological Ethnographies</i></a> (London 2009). It occurred to me, particularly after reading the final article in the collection which featured a photo-essay by the editors and F. Ifantidis, that Ryan's photographs were a kind of ethnographic documentary of our project. Unlike much of the Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos volume, Ryan's photographs did not capture the interaction between project members and the Cypriot community, but rather captured the interaction between the members of the project. One could argue that Ryan's photographs sought to capture the dynamic between people on a project as they sought to produce archaeological knowledge from the landscape. The gallery opening represented another ethnographic moment as a wide range of visitors both attempted to understand the photographs as expressions of the photographers art as well as used the photographs as prompts to explore the experience and goals of the archaeological processes. PKAP alumni who came to the opening used the photographs as mnemonic triggers to recall the landscape and, more importantly, their experiences at the site. The result of these conversations was a genuinely transdisciplinary experience as conversations moved from the field of photography to archaeology. In this context, the ethnography of archaeology is doubled: once in the photographs and a second time in the engagement with the photographs as prompts to recall or explore the archaeological process.</p> <p style="text-align: left;">We did not document the public's engagement with the photographs at the opening (we should have), and this limited the value of the evening as a genuinely ethnographic experience. The experience was enough, however, to demonstrate the potential of this kind of transdisciplinary space in documenting the way in which a dynamic group of people understand archaeology as a picture, process, and experience.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/

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DATE: 02/01/2010 08:37:15 AM This looks just FANTASTIC -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 01/29/2010 10:37:25 AM ----BODY: <p>A beautiful, but cold Friday morning for some quick hits and varia.</p>! <ul>! <li>Be sure to come down to the Empire Arts Center tonight around 6:30 pm to check out <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/01/to poschora-and-archaeological-photography.html">Ryan Stander&#39;s gallery show</a> and get a sneak peek of Ian Ragsdale&#39;s new documentary.</li>! <li><a href="http://und.academia.edu/RichardKahn">Richard Kahn and ecopedagogy</a>. How cool is that?</li>! <li>I am not sure what to do with Daytum, but I now have a <a href="http://daytum.com/billcaraher">Daytum page</a>.</li>! <li>Some great discussion about the limitations and problems with the iPad <a href="http://bavatuesdays.com/iprop/">here</a>, <a href="http://andheblogs.andyrush.net/ipad-its-a-consumption-device/">here</a>, <a href="http://mikecaulfield.com/2010/01/27/belated-realization-about-theromance-of-mobile-learning/">here</a> and <a href="http://blogs.ubc.ca/brian/2010/01/open-course-wars-redux/">here</a>. (via <a href="http://bavatuesdays.com/">bavatuesdays</a>) For the real scoop, check out <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/index.php/site/comments/apple_tablet_device /">Sam Fee</a>. Some more interesting perspectives on the iPad over at <a href="http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/">Exploring Our Martix</a> with lots more links.</li>! <li>Keep checking back to the <a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/">public history blogging project</a>; I&#39;ll turn my public history interns into bloggers yet.</li>! <li>Ok, I lied a bit about the exciting <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a> post... but it&#39;s still coming. We have a bit of a reluctant blogger issue there. Look for it later today.</li>! <li>Who is Ryan Harris?&#0160; <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/ausvpak09/engine/current/match/406205.html">He took 5 more wickets this week</a>.</li>! </ul>! <p>Maybe some updates throughout today.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching (with Technology) Thursday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-with-technology-thursday CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 01/28/2010 08:21:22 AM ----BODY: <p>Technology is all over the news this week with both <a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/">Apple&#39;s announcement yesterday</a> and the <a href="http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/">official publication of the 2010 Horizon Report</a>; so I thought it might be a good time to talk a bit about some of the high-tech new and its potential impact on teaching and some of my own efforts to use technology in the classroom. This will also set up today&#39;s contribution to the <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a> blog. It might be a bit later than usual, but it will certainly be worth it!</p>! <p>1. Apple iPad. Every other blogger is talking about so, I would feel left out. As much as I love my MacBook Pro, I am deeply skeptical about claims that the iPad will have a significant impact in the classroom. Having said this, <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Diagnosing-the-Tablet-Fever-in/20888/">at least one school</a>, Abiliene Christian, is already talking about the possibility of requiring the iPad for all of its students and Steve Jobs&#39; consistently linked the iPad with Apple&#39;s goal to position itself at the &quot;intersection of technology and the liberal arts&quot;. So, it seems clear that Apple conceives of the iPad as being at home in a university environment and at places like Abiliene Christian, where a significant relationship with Apple already exists -- they require their students to have either iPhones or the iPod Touch -- the iPad will certainly provide an appealing upgrade to the hardware that they are already using. Moreover, the prospect of students being able to bring their digital textbooks (or most online content) to class with them will be hugely appealing.</p>! <p>From the perspective of someone who teaches at a school that occupies the trailing edge of tech trends in higher education, I think that the iPad will struggle at places without a consistent equipment to Apple products. First, there will be interoperability issues with the existing technology infrastructure. Basically, the iPad which is built around Apples iPhone OS, will require students and tech folks to accommodate a new operating system. At a place like UND, there is only minimal support for OS X and very little support for Linux, so I can&#39;t imagine their being sufficient technical support for integrating the iPad into the day-to-day classroom environment. This isn&#39;t to suggest that the iPad would not function splendidly in those environments or

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that I can&#39;t imagine it&#39;s potential, but like a slow moving ship, large, underfunded, university&#39;s change courses slowly and if the iPad can not function within the existing technological infrastructure which, for better or for worse, is focused around Microsoft and Windows (XP!), there will be real barriers to its systematic adoption.</p>! <p>Next, I suspect that it&#39;s inability to handle Adobe Flash applications and its inability to run multiple programs simultaneously will be series drawbacks. On a phone or smaller and more simple mobile device, the lack of Flash is an acceptable annoyance -- after all you&#39;re surfing the web on a tiny screen that fits in your pocket; it&#39;s not whether the horse can ride the motorcycle well, it&#39;s that it can ride it at all. But on a full screen table, the inability to run flash will be a significant draw back. As an example, the iPad will not be able to run the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/explorerflash/#/object_Hvi54RDiQym 6Pgd3_IsRKA">BBC&#39;s spectacular History of the World</a> website or the proper web version of the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/">UND homepage</a>. Since Flash remains an economical way for universities, museums, and the media to produce content rich web experiences, the incompatibility with Flash on the iPad will limit some of its popularity among a group who relies heavily on Flash to make their web go. The inability to run multiple applications simultaneously will make it hard to ask the students to jump back and forth from a digital textbook, to an online interface, to a Twitter application and these are the kinds of expectations that we already have with analog media in the classroom. We expect students to be able to &quot;run multiple applications simultaneously&quot; (take notes, annotate a text, and participate in a classroom discussion) and we need to expect our teaching technology to follow suite.</p>! <p>Finally, I have to agree with <a href="http://bavatuesdays.com/">Jim Groom</a> -- the noted and notorious semi-underground higher ed tech guru -- who told the <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Diagnosing-the-Tablet-Feverin/20888/">Chronicle&#39;s Wired Blog</a> that Apple control over the application approval process may be jarring to those in higher education who want to develop specific applications for the iPad. On the one hand, there are universities like Stanford, who have embraced the iPhone apps as a development challenge and teach courses in app development; many more schools, I suspect, will be wary of having to partner with Apple to navigate what most developers claim to be an mysterious and opaque process.</p><p><strong>Update:</strong> <a href="http://bavatuesdays.com/iprop/">Groom (and others via links) really nails some key concerns in this post.</a></p>! <p>The reason for this wariness, of course, is that the iPad will not be the only player in the high-end tablet market for vary long. Google&#39;s Android operating system should soon be powering alternatives to the iPad which will likely suffer many of the same problems with interoperability, but at least represent a more open source alternative to the iPad restricted development model. At the same time, Windows has long powered tablets and these tablet have not caught on the classroom. This probably reflects hardware issues as much as anything, but its hard to imagine that Windows based developers will not soon offer similar products to the iPad with the advantage of being more clearly interoperable with the existing technological infrastructure on a university campus.</p>! <p>2. Twitter and the Wave in the Classroom. Over the last four weeks, I&#39;ve be experimenting with both Twitter and Google Wave in a classroom setting. Here are some quick updates:</p>! <p>Twitter. I use Twitter in a large, lower division, night class that meets once a week. So far, it has not produced much in the way of immediate results.

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Students are still unsure how to use Twitter in the classroom. Most of the inclass Tweets are silly comments about the Viking&#39;s loss this past weekend (the football Vikings, not the Scandinavian kind) or remarks about how cool they think Sparta is or was. They seem to have forgotten that I know who they are on Twitter because they have provided me with a concordance that connects their Twitter alias with their real names. Outside the classroom, that is during the week between classes, Twitter seems to have at least made the students somewhat more engaged in the material. I ask questions related to the course material in the form of trivia (everything seems more fun if it&#39;s called trivia) and get regular responses. I&#39;ve also had some nice responses to reflection questions: e.g. Would you rather live the Athens of Perikles or Sparta of the Classical Age? (More preferred Sparta, um, largely because the movie made it seem real cool.) At present probably 15%-20% of those in class who have signed up for Twitter have used it in some way. For more on my Twitter experiment <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/01/te aching-tuesday-on-the-first-tuesday-of-the-spring-semester.html">see here</a>.</p>! <p>Google Wave. I&#39;ve been using Google&#39;s latest and greatest web-based collaborative platform in a small graduate class this semester. So far, it works brilliantly. Even my most technologically challenged graduate student has embraced (reluctantly at first) the wave and has contributed to a wide range of spontaneous, threaded discussions. We have not been as successful using Google Wave to actually collaborate on a specific document, but this aspect of its operability is less refined. More on this as the semester progresses, but I already feel confident in saying that Google Wave has real potential in a graduate level class.</p>! <p>3. As I said in my little introduction, we are excited to have a guest blogger over at <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>. The blog post will be a bit later than usual, but it drop a <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">Tweet</a> when it is posted</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jim Groom EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 173.72.165.158 URL: http://bavatuesdays.com DATE: 01/30/2010 12:18:33 AM Bill, It's cool to hear you are having success with Google Wave. Just about everything I've heard so far was rather tepid, and while I've played with it only briefly, I really had no project to conquer in it. I'd love to hear more about how you are using it, and whether students use that as their CMS/LMS space. -----

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COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.225 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 02/01/2010 08:35:09 AM Jim, Good to hear from you. I have found Google Wave to be a great space for student collaboration. It is easy enough to set up and use, is designed to allow for flexible access (i.e. there can be four "waves" (or threads) each with different groups of students participating), and allows for real time collaboration. This being said, I am looking forward to it becoming more functional and to allow for a more diverse range of content and media. And, I use it with graduate students in a small practicum -- rather than with undergraduates in a formal class. Finally, I don't want to make it seem like Google Wave does something that, say, a nice wiki or threaded discussion board can't do. What I can say is that Google Wave does provide a nice environment for collaborative work. Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sound Systems EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 115.252.65.9 URL: http://www.atvvideo.com DATE: 03/03/2010 05:29:09 AM Technology is getting increased day by day we have to change our life according to it or self it will not suit to work on it ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Premium Flash Templates EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 115.252.65.9 URL: http://premiumwpthemes.in DATE: 03/05/2010 01:25:14 AM nowadays, technology improving lot more, like edu com class -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Topos/Chora and Archaeological Photography STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: toposchora-and-archaeological-photography CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/27/2010 08:16:32 AM ----BODY: <p>If you&#39;re in the Grand Forks area (or even if you&#39;re not!), I encourage you come and enjoy the opening night of Ryan Stander&#39;s photographic exhibit entitled <em>Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-

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Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</em>. The gallery opens at 6:30 and short gallery talks begin at 7 pm on Friday night. We also hope to give a sneak peek of a film by documentary filmmaker Ian Ragsdale who worked with us this past summer as well.</p>! <p><img alt="201001270819.jpg" height="480" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128771a671e970c -pi" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px;" width="360" />The exhibit of photographs is an exciting example of an almost ritualized inversion of roles. In the past, archaeologists have used photographs or art to illustrate the results of their work or even their procedures. The recent turn toward postprocessural, reflexive archaeological practice has emphasized documenting the processes and experiences the produce archaeological knowledge. While scholars who have used video, still photography, audio, and reflexive writing in these contexts have problematized the techniques and tools used to gather this information, few have sought to invert the process entirely and free the camera&#39;s gaze from the control of the archaeologist. Our collaboration with Ryan Stander, does just that. I turns the camera toward the archaeologists and removes it from their physical and intellectual command.</p>! <p>In these photographs (which will come the web soon, I promise), the photographer&#39;s autonomy allowed for a perspective of the archaeologists&#39; work that is outside the archaeologists&#39; gaze and control. While I would be naive to claim that these photographs are a fully independent perspective, after all the photographer lived with the project and interacted daily with us, they nevertheless capture something approaching an outsider (or objective, at least from the archaeologists&#39; perspective) view of archaeological practice.</p>! <p>For more on Ryan&#39;s work, check out his blog <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Axis of Access</a>.</p>! <p>So, come down to the <a href="http://www.empireartscenter.com/">Empire Arts Center</a> in beautiful downtown Grand Forks, North Dakota to check out Ryan&#39;s work, hear about the project, and see some moving pictures! 7 pm for the gallery talks on Friday night. Some light refreshments will be served.</p>! <p>And stay tuned for the online companion to the exhibit!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blogging Archaeology: 2 Years Later STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: blogging-archaeology-2-years-later CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 01/26/2010 08:43:03 AM -----

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BODY: <p>The other day, for vanity's sake, I was looking at my <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/index.html">Blogging Archaeology</a> article over at the <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/">Archaeology Magazine</a> webpage. I noticed that it was formally published on January 18, 2008, two years ago. I began to think about how much archaeology's engagement with the web has changed over the past two years. It's not that blogs were revolutionary back in '08, but they still were things that required, at least in an academic and archaeological context, some kind of explanation. While I don't think that blogs are selfexplanatory today nor do I think they've reached a point of widespread acceptance as a useful contribution to the academic discourse, they are at least held in less contempt, which may be enough.</p> <p>The most remarkable thing about the article is how many of the blogs and their links remain live. A few have been dormant over the holiday season with their most recent posts in November ( <a href="http://adventureswithyandm.blogspot.com/" target="new">Adventures with Yo and Mo</a>, <a href="http://neonostalgia.com/weblog/" target="new">Thoughts on Antiquity</a>) and few have changed urls (Alun Salt's Clioaudio is defunct, but I am sure that he is <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;ct=clnk&amp;cd=1&amp;ved =undefined&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2F74.125.95.132%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dcache%3AUbvLbNydFB4 J%3Aalunsalt.com%2F%2BAlun%2BSalt%26cd%3D1%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus%26cli ent%3Dfirefox-a&amp;ei=ye1eS-G8CofSNeHz5eoL&amp;usg=AFQjCNEQKO32UnjrtmhOv9WynQdIKAMTQ&amp;sig2=SayXlu5AFXOoqKXfPvlmdQ">blogging somewhere</a>), but the vast majority of the blogs listed in 2008 are still active to some extent. This reveals some impressive stability in the archaeological blogosphere. There have also been some great additions to the blogging world like the informative <a href="http://bloggingpompeii.blogspot.com/">Blogging Pompei</a>i and the wonderfully dramatic <a href="http://lateantiqueostia.wordpress.com/">KentBerlin Ostia Excavations</a>' blog and more than a handful of blogs that I missed in my original article (especially worthy of note is Colleen Morgan's remarkably diverse <a href="http://middlesavagery.wordpress.com/">Middle Savagery</a>, Diana Wright's elegant <a href="http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/">Surprised by Time</a>, Katie Rask's playful and smart <a href="http://www.antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/">Antiquate Vagaries</a>, and the useful <a href="http://researchnewsinla.blogspot.com/">Research News in Late Antiquity</a>).</p> <p>More interesting, however, is the development of alternatives to blogging within the archaeological community. A number of veteran bloggers have moved seamlessly into Tweeting: <a href="http://twitter.com/alun">Alun Salt</a>, the longstanding dean of ancient world bloggers, the <a href="http://twitter.com/rogueclassicist">Rogue Classicist</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/adrianmurdoch">Adrian Murdoch</a> of <a href="http://adrianmurdoch.typepad.com/my_weblog/">Bread and Circuses</a>, and <a href="http://twitter.com/chuckjones2000">Chuck Jones</a>, the Librarian at the <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/">Institute for the Study of the Ancient World</a>, who edits and contributes to so many blogs, I can't keep track.&nbsp;&nbsp;There are some new players as well like <a href="http://twitter.com/archaeologynews">Archaeology News</a>. <a href="http://twitter.com/researchnewsinl">Research News in Late Antiquity</a> provides timely Tweets complementing many of this blog's posts. The <a href="https://twitter.com/archaeologymag">Twitter feed from <i>Archaeology Magazine</i></a> provides a nice way to keep track of content on their site.

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Several projects, including mine, the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/" title="Pyla-Koutsopetria">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>, Twittered from the field allowing a global audience of interested observers to follow the day-to-day or hour-to-hour working of their project.</p> <p><a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=Archaeology">A simple search of Twitter</a> for the word archaeology produces hundreds of tweets a day dedicated to a whole range of archaeological topics. At the same time, there are a wide range of lists that draw together like-minded tweeters from across the web. These lists begin to bring together the real power of the Twitter as a socialmedia platform. Like the blog rolls of old, the creators of these lists compile Twitter feeds which interest them. When a particular feed is included on a list, however, it is marked as being "listed". This allows a user not only to follow a particular feed, but also, to track down and find other similar feeds brought together by Twitter users. Here are the various lists that include the feed for <a href="http://twitter.com/researchnewsinl/lists/memberships">Research News in Late Antiquity</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/archaeologymag/lists/memberships">these lists feature the Archaeology Magazine</a> Twitter feed. My Twitter feed only appears on four, lonely, <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher/lists/memberships">little lists</a>. Despite this obvious snub, these lists remain a great way to track down Twitter feeds that feature content of interest to students of archaeology or the ancient world.</p> <p>Facebook and other social-media applications have likewise emerged to complement more fully the dynamic "archaeological" blogoshpere. Moreover, it is clear that archaeology will increasingly embrace new media spaces on the web like YouTube (here is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/PKAP2009">PKAP's YouTube channel</a>) or sites that host podcasts (although these are far less technologically challenging to make available through one's own website or blog) Perhaps even more important will be the influence of the next generation of communication applications like <a href="http://wave.google.com/">Google Wave</a>. Already archaeologists have descended upon Google Wav, even though it remains in alpha (not even beta) testing status, to take advantage of its ability to create threaded discussions, realtime chat, and (eventually) integrate a wide range of media.</p> <p>In any event, this was my superficial effort to bring together some of the applications and spaces that I rely on every day to stay connected to the archaeological world. I will come back and update this page from time to time over the next few weeks. Maybe I'll even consider writing up a formal article that captures archaeology on the web in 2010.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Hateful Earth and the Late Roman Economy STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: the-hateful-earth-and-the-late-roman-economy CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 01/25/2010 08:44:04 AM ----BODY: <p><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128770ddedc970c -pi" width="140" height="219" alt="201001250817.jpg" style="float:left; marginright:10px;" /> On a snowy weekend, I managed to plow through the rest of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/316430311">M. Decker's Tilling the Hateful Earth (Oxford 2009)</a>. (Get it, plow (or for my readers in the UK, plough, through... you know, like a farm plow...). Anyway. Decker's work is the most recent installment in the recent vogue for ancient economic history over the last decade (see, for example, Horden and Purcell's, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42692026"><i>The</i> <i>Corrupting Sea</i></a>, M. McCormick's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/44860892"><i>Origins of the European Economy</i></a>, Christopher Wickham's, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/70764463"><i>Framing the Early Middle Ages</i></a>, J. Banaji's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45806466"><i>Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity</i></a> as four significant works that immediately come to mind). Decker's book stands out in that it is neither theoretically ambitious or immensely long. This isn't meant to be a criticism. In fact, Decker does what he does quite well. He describes and analyzes in some detail the agrarian landscape of the Diocese of Oriens.</p> <p>As per my usual practice, I'll eschew giving anything like a comprehensive review and, instead, make a series of observations:</p> <p>1. The strength of this book is the detailed analysis of agricultural practices rather than a comprehensive view of the agricultural economy in the East. The information presented on various settlement types, rural structures, crops and agricultural practices will provide a nice foundation for any kind of comprehensive archaeological and historical study of this region in the future.</p> <p>2. If any weakness in the detailed study of the agricultural practices did exist, it was in the area of Cyprus. Decker does not seem to have as full a command over the impressive body of material from Cyprus. In particular, he does not take into full account M. Rautman's important studies of the village at Kopetra or any less comprehensive, but nonetheless valuable studies of Late Antique settlement elsewhere in Cyprus. This is unfortunate because the Cypriot countryside is rapidly becoming one of the best documented regions in the Late Roman East and it falls within the geographic boundaries of the Diocese of Oriens. It was particular disappointing in that Late Antique Cyprus has recently produced an impressive body of quantified Late Roman ceramic evidence which would have contributed to the author's main argument.</p> <p>3. While the detailed nature of Decker's study was a welcome repast from the sweeping or expansive analyses common these day in the study of the ancient economy, his work did leave me wondering why such economic and agricultural prosperity occurred in the East. In places, he argued relatively persuasively against the "minimalist" perspectives on the ancient economy offered by <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/765341">M. Finley</a> and <a

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href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/69655444">A. H. M. Jones</a> (pp. 228-229). In other words, he did not see the prosperity of the east on a macro level as being tied to administrative practices (namely taxation and other such administrative trade) and their impact of economic and social decisions on the micro level. This, of course, begs the question why he chose the Diocese of Oriens -- an administrative unit -- as the basic unit for his analysis. If trade really functioned according to markets, as he argues, wouldn't it have been more effective to make an argument based on, say, market catchments for agricultural produce or even commercial networks where one could hope to detect the kind of competitive, collaborative, and responsive practices that would characterize market economies in the ancient world? This isn't to suggest that Decker did not analyze specific market reasons, but his decision to organize his book around an administrative unit sometimes made it hard to detect the main impetus of market forces in the Mediterranean basin more generally.</p> <p>4. From the perspective of my field project, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, Decker's effort to define or at least describe settlement types is helpful. While one can argue that site size definitions are not the most useful (and comparable) kinds of data for the understanding of settlement structure, his description of the features in various kinds of sites does form a useful point of departure for a more comparative approach to settlement during Late Antiquity. For example, he notes the proliferation of settlement which lacked a proper, or at least formally defined, elite, but nevertheless saw the development of some kinds of public buildings and services, churches, and even traditional practices of euergetism. This indicates that by Late Antiquity euergetism had become severed from self-promotion within the traditional avenues of civic or even imperial service. This enabled wealthy folks to give money to their communities outside both the physical and institutional confines of civic or imperial centers. While Decker does not explain why people would have done this (collective security? economic benefit? hopes of civic or imperial promotion? Christianity?), it reveals a shift in how most scholars have understood at least one component of the Late Roman gift economy. Moreover, it explains sites that did not have formal administrative or civic standing could receive both Christian and practical monumental architecture through the generosity of the local elite.</p> <p>It's a good book! Focused chapters, copious bibliography (befitting a revised dissertation), and nice maps make it a useful contribution to anyone's library.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0

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BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 01/22/2010 09:53:32 AM ----BODY: <p>As we brace for another bout of winter weather, some quick hits and varia to keep you warm this weekend:</p> <ul> <li>Check out our Public History Interns as they figure out how to promote their work using a blog. <a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/">Go here</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://trefoilcultural.com/haiti2010.htm">This is a neat way</a> to look at the devastating earthquake in Haiti. (via Richard Rothaus)</li> <li>The <a href="http://www.whitehousetapes.net/">Presidential Recordings Program</a> at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Pubic Affairs presents a huge number of amazing recording including this one of LBJ <a href="http://www.whitehousetapes.net/clip/lyndon-johnson-joe-haggar-lbj-orderssome-new-haggar-pants">ordering a pair of Haggar pants</a>. (via <a href="http://twitter.com/JamesBWells">James Wells</a>)</li> <li><a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/">My article on archaeology and blogging</a> is now over 2 years old. I am really thinking about updating it.</li> <li>Follow the snow on <a href="http://www.rwic.und.edu/webcam/">UND's Regional Weather Information Center webcam</a>.</li> <li>And if you need more warmth, read James Henry Breasted's letters from his trip to the Middle East in 1919/1920 on the <a href="https://blogs.uchicago.edu/oi/">Oriental Institute's blog</a>. (via <a href="http://oihistory.blogspot.com/">Chuck Jones</a>)</li> <li>Some cool cricket news. First, the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8470796.stm">IPL is really interested in the U.S. market</a>. Next the IPL will be broadcast live on YouTube except in the US. Booo.</li> </ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: The Panopticon and Online Teaching

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-the-panopticon-and-online-teaching CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 01/21/2010 07:20:21 AM ----BODY: <p><i>Crossposted to</i> <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday"><i>Teaching Thursday</i></a></p> <p>In <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/11/19/teaching-thursday-somethoughtful-tips-for-online-teaching/">a blog post a few months back</a> dedicated to the topic of online teaching, I mentioned an observation by <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/michael-beltz/">Mick Beltz</a>, a regular contributor to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>. He suggested that teaching online captured some of the essential characteristics of M. Foucault's panopticon as outlined in his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/3328401"><i>Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison</i></a>. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this metaphor, Foucault used Jeremy Bentham's vision of <a href="http://cartome.org/panopticon2.htm">the panopticon</a> to describe modern society. The panopticon is an architectural form, most famously used for prisons, where an observer stationed at a central point can see into a series of cells. The people in these cells can always see the observation post (although they do not know whether they are being observed), but cannot see into any of the other cells. In this way they are together, yet isolated from one another In practical application, this means that a warden can observe the behavior of all the inmates almost simultaneously while the inmate cannot observe each other's behavior.</p> <p>For Foucault, the pressure of constant observations implied specifically in the panoticon, but functioning elsewhere formed the ideal environment for maintaining the kind of discipline introduced in the prison, the factory, and even the modern school. For Foucault, this kind of internalized discipline produced by the fear of being constantly observed, ensured that society maintained a degree of conformity sufficient to keep the engines of capitalism moving. The panopticon and its culture of observation were part of Foucault's analysis of discipline in modern times and part of a greater goal of the modern state to produce "docile" bodies .</p> <p>The parallel between the panopticon as a physical building and the experience of teaching (and presumably taking) an online course are quite striking. First the observer, in this case the faculty member, can observe student behavior through a comprehensive array of statistics as well as submitted work. The individual student, on the other hand, has almost no view of the faculty member, except for when their work is evaluated. At the same time, they have only limited abilities to observe the work of other students and rarely would know when another student is being particular successful in the class or struggling. In a classroom setting, of course, students can interact freely with one another both before and after class and encode their behavior in ways that make it difficult for a faculty member to observe, much less understand. Even during class, verbal and non-verbal cues from the blatant -- like laughter at a particularly innane comment by a fellow student -- or subtle, like glances at one another or eye-rolling or even the frustrated figiting that occurs when a class runs over, provide clear modes of communication between students.

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Moreover, students can use these techniques to force a dialog with even a reluctant faculty member. The classroom dynamic presents a formidable and almost irresistible check on unfettered faculty authority.</p> <p>The removal of this opportunity for spontaneous, collective action certainly removes a key aspect of the faculty-student dialog from the classroom setting. Moreover, the realization that one is being constantly observed initiates and conditions the student for a world where companies like Google see everything from your mundane search patterns to your house to your financial, personal, and religious identities. The conditioning of students to be observed in an online environment prepares them for a world where companies and governments constantly gather information and construct identities for individuals which are so subtle, varied, and complex that they exceed the individual's ability to understand or realize them.</p> <p>The impact of this environment on teaching as a profession is significant. While the "teacherly" gaze has always been one of any number of treasured weapon in the teacher's arsenal (able, when deployed successfully, to bring to order even the most disruptive student), it now has the potential to become the single most powerful tool for conditioning behavior. We can observe when a student comes online, how long they stay for, what they look at, as well as the what they produce. With only a little exaggeration, we can say that the student study habits, reading behavior, and analytical practices are de-mystified and can be placed in direct correlation to student performance on evaluated work. In effect, the barrier that has long separated the mystical process of learning from the work of evaluation has come down.</p> <p>The advantage, then, of online education is that it conditions students to become the docile bodies in our information age and to accept our individuality as a commodity in the information economy. The documented life is the commodified life.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Public History: An Introduction to an Experiment STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: public-history-an-introduction-to-an-experiment CATEGORY: Public History CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 01/20/2010 07:48:05 AM ----BODY: <p>So, we&#39;re two weeks into <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/12/di

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pping-my-toe-in-the-public-history-pool.html">my public history internship program</a> and we are slowing putting together the public face of our project. This past week, we set up the project&#39;s <a href="http://webmuseweavers.wordpress.com/">blog here</a>. The following post explaining the role the blog will play in the project is as follows:</p>! <blockquote>! <p>Welcome to an experiment blog for an experimental class! This blog will detail the adventures of an intrepid group of public history interns as they work on several online and real life public history projects in the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a> at the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>. The goal of this blog is to make our efforts to create an online museum, manage an online complement to a gallery show, digitize analog data, prepare analog data for formal archiving, and create an online companion to a paper article. I have no idea how many of these projects this team will succeed in completing this semester or what realizations and limitations the team will encounter. The primary method of instruction, which this blog will reflect, is hands-on learning and like the best kind of hands on learning experiments, the results are not predetermined, but will depend on the success, energy, and abilities of the participants.</p>! ! <p>The hope is that this blog will make the process of learning and creating a range of public history experiments transparent to anyone who is interested and attract some positive (and maybe even critical!) attention to our high quality graduate students and their creativity. Above all,however, the idea is to make the process of public history as visible as the products of public history itself. In other words, I want to make sure that the process of producing public history (of all descriptions) is as important to how we think about the past as the product is.</p>! ! <p>So, stop back to the blog, three times a week to follow the trials and accomplishments of the public history team! And feel free to contribute in the comments line.</p>! </blockquote>! <p>It has been interesting to participate in the discussions surrounding the public face of the various projects that we plan to undertake and get a clearer understanding of how different people view the potential of the internet as well as how the technology gaps between someone like me, who spends much of their day online in some way, and students who consume online information, but have little experience producing online content. So the learning curve will be steep at times, but I expect that the results will show how much is possible in a short time.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Temples and Churches STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: temples-and-churches CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 01/19/2010 08:20:42 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876ef5538970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 5px 10px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="214" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7ec557a970b -pi" width="144" align="right" border="0"></a> This past weekend, I read <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/276816822">V.N. Makrides' <em>Hellenic Temples and Christian Churches: A Concise History of the Religious Cultures of Greece from Antiquity to the Present</em></a> (New York 2009), and I did it graduate school style, cover-to-cover in a couple of days.&nbsp; The book was pointed out to me by a colleague and I immediately saw how the diachronic scope of the work might resonate with my own diachronic study of dreams as a religious phenomenon.&nbsp; The first part of the book is a pretty superficial survey of the interaction between Hellenic ideas and Christian ideas across the broad span of Greek history.&nbsp; I wasn't overly impressed with this survey which said little that was new, but it would be a nice complement to a Greek history class in that it touches on many of the key points of conflict.&nbsp; In fact, class many years ago, when I taught my Greek history, which considered Greek history from the Neolithic to the Modern period, I was looking for exactly this kind of book to help me integrate and problematize the legacy of the ancient world within the modern, Christian nation.&nbsp; The appearance of a book like this, in English, from an American press, suggests that there might be a growing market for not only the study of modern Greece, but also the an approach to the entire span of Greek history that views understanding the modern nation-state as an indispensable part of any study of the ancient world.</p> <p>The real value in this book comes from the second part where Makrides addresses some of the same that I am dealing with in my dream project.&nbsp; He had to find a way to explain clear parallels in religious expression overtime without falling back on tired arguments for the continuity of Greek culture.&nbsp; To do this, he argues that Greeks over time consciously engaged in an intertextual reading of their religious past, selecting certain modes of expression (whether Hellenic or Christian) to suit particular strategic goals.&nbsp; He presents these various strategies in a series of chapters which focus on the various strategies at play: Antithesis, Thesis, Conflict; Selection, Transformation, Synthesis; Symbiosis, Mixture, Fusion; Individuality, Distinctiveness, Idiosyncrasy.&nbsp; This chapters demonstrate an impressive ability to understand a wide range of area of religious conflict ranging from clashes between Christians and Pagans in Late Antiquity to the politics of the Orthodox church under Ottoman rule to the church's role in modern conflicts with secularizing forces within the Greek state and society.&nbsp; The only thing that I really wished for was for Makrides to make more clear the link between a particular strategy and a particular situation.&nbsp; In other words, were there patterns in how and when Greeks (broadly construed) deployed various religious strategies through time?&nbsp; G. Jusdanis, <a

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href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/232497163"><em>Belated Modernity</em></a> (Minneapolis 1991), for example, has made clear that modern Greece's engagement with the modern was not random, but selective and strategic.&nbsp; </p> <p>The other curious weakness in the book is the lack of any sustained conversation about archaeology.&nbsp; Archaeology in Greece has long played on both nationalist, but also religious impulses within Greek society.&nbsp; Moreover, archaeologists often express the vocation of archaeology in religious terms.&nbsp; Makrides acknowledges this with a quote from Yiannis Sakellarakis who considered his "higher calling " to be "a hunter of the mystical continuity of place." (229)&nbsp; Y. Hamilakis recent work <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/122424890"><em>The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece </em>(Oxford 2007)</a> dealt with some of these matters specifically.&nbsp; </p> <p>Preserving and producing the archaeology of the Hellenic past not infrequently involved overwriting the history of Byzantine and Christian Greece.&nbsp; Foreign archaeologists destroyed numerous churches in search of inscriptions or Classical buildings. Major, recurring restoration projects like those on the Parthnon on the Athenian Acropolis have likewise eliminated traces of Christian antiquity in an effort to preserve an more authentic expression of a Classical ideal.&nbsp; As a rule, Byzantine , Ottoman, and Early Modern (19th c.) monuments, many of which remain deeply embedded within the physical and ritual fabrics of communities have far less protection from the Greek state.&nbsp; The physical manifestations of the conflict between Hellenic and Christian ideals within the Greek state is particularly crucial in an archaeological context because ancient, Hellenic monuments represent the most visible face of the nation to foreign visitors and in tourist, popular, and academic publications.&nbsp; Historically Greece has catered to the interest of foreign visitors in this regard and suppressed or overlooked aspects of Greece's Christian identity which nevertheless played a key role in its national development.&nbsp; </p> <p>Despite this missed opportunity, Makrides book is well worth reading! In particular, his emphasis on the persistent religious plurality in Greek society serves as a useful reminder to all states that romanticized and idealized images of a religious and culturally homogeneous past are almost always false.&nbsp; Greece like so many Mediterranean countries has a long history of diverse forms of religious expression both within their Christian community, but also outside of it.&nbsp; Thus, in his final analysis, part of the Christian and Hellenic legacy of Greece is the ability to respond to religious diversity through a variety of strategies and this is as good a thing for scholars of the past as it is for modern society.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.15.127.168 URL: DATE: 01/20/2010 09:11:28 AM

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Bill, I'm not sure if you are still blogging about winter break reading. But, in case you are, my reading included Kimberly Bowes, _Public Worship, Private Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity_, which (I think) provides a useful model for integrating textual sources and archaeological data in its analysis of religious change and authority in the late Roman countryside and urban center. -R -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Trinity, Poreč, and a strange little inscription from Tegea STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: the-trinity-porec-and-a-strange-little-inscription-from-tegea CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 01/18/2010 07:15:07 AM ----BODY: <p>Those of you who follow my Twitter feed know that I spent the end of last week reading <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64390557">H. Maguire's and Anne Bennett Terry's <i>Dynamic splendor : the wall mosaics in the Cathedral of Eufrasius at Poreč</i>. (University Park 2007)</a>. It's a pretty fantastic book that delves deeply both into the techniques that produced a set of amazing 6th century mosaics, but also how they were "restored" at various times an what they likely meant to their audience. Like many scholars of Late Antique iconography and iconography, Maguire and Bennett regard these mosaics as being both dynamic in a diachronic sense (that is, restored and meaning different things to different people over time), but also dynamic in the sense of being multivalent with many of the images capable of sustaining multiple interpretations at the time of their production.</p> <p>I was struck by one particular interpretation. The cathedral had several images that evoked the Trinity. Maguire and Terry relate these images to the ecclesiastical controversies that rocked the end of Justinian's reign and, in particular, the Three Chapters Controversy which arose over the course of the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) and led to a number of bishops from the province of Illyricum to break communion with the church in Constantinople and side, initially with the Pope regarding the doctrines promulgated by this council. In short, western bishops felt that by declaring anathema the works of Theodore of Mopsuetia, Theodoret of Cyrus and Ibas of Edessa, the Emperor rejected the orthodoxy established by Chalcedon. This was a traditional rallying cry for bishops in the west (and including the province of Illyricum) who saw Justinian's efforts to promote a compromise position between miaphysites/monophysites in the East and the strict Chalcedonianism of the West (led generally by the Pope) to be heretical. The definition of the Trinity was a central statement at the Council of Chalcedon and so the Trinity became an important symbol for both schismatic Western bishops and Eastern Emperors as they sought to demonstrate their adherence to the spirit of Chalcedon and Orthodoxy.</p> <p>This interested me largely because, while writing my dissertation, I had struggled with a strange inscription from a church in southern Greece. At the three-aisled basilica of Thyrsos at Tegea (also studied by H. Maguire in his <a

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href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/14187975"><i>Earth and Ocean: The Terrestrial World in Early Byzantine Art</i> (University Park 1987)</a>), best known for its dramatic early 6th c. (?) calendar mosaic in its central nave, there is a small "chapel" attached to the northern wall of the nave (others have suggested that this chapel is, in fact, a fifth aisle). The church itself is poorly published as a building and the exact chronological and architectural relationship between the chapel and the main body of the church is unclear. The humble style of the floor mosaic in the chapel, especially when compared with the floors in the main nave, suggest that this annex space is later or at least the decoration of this space is later in date than the fancy mosaics in the central nave.</p> <p>The mosaic floor from this chapel includes a strange and poorly preserved inscription. The text, as far as I know, does not exist in proper edition. I include my catalog entry from my dissertation here:</p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876e9f834970c -pi" width="480" height="255" alt="201001180652.jpg" /><br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> This text derives from Orlandos 1973 which includes a small, grainy photograph which is no help at all in determining the actual text of the inscription. The text begins with a strange version of the sanctus that includes four "holies". As far as I know this version of the sanctus has no liturgical parallels and is likely a mistake in transcription or a mistake in the creation of the mosaic. The text does not, however, continue with the words of the sanctus (or at least any known sanctus), but provides a small bit of exegesis. The next line would appear to read Lord God with the Son and the Holy Spirit. This draws in a phrase from the Trisagion (Lord God) and mashes it up (as the kids would say) with trinitarian language. Again, this exact way of representing the Trinity does not appear, as far as I know, in any liturgical text. I read it here to mean: Holy, Holy, Holy (ignoring the fourth Holy) = Lord God with the Son and the Holy Spirit. </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> This is a pretty speculative interpretation, but it could resonate with the increased interest in Trinitarian doctrine in the later 6th century. This would fit the buildings terminus post quem, if we accept that this more modest inscription likely dated to some time after the completion of the much more elaborate calendar mosaic in the main nave. Moreover, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/ep igraphy-litur.html">as I have argued elsewhere</a>, there is some evidence that Greece was an area in which the emperor had particular interest concerning doctrinal matters. This was probably because the province of Achaia (and all of Illyricum Orientalis) fell under the direct rule of the emperor, but under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the papacy. This divergent jurisdiction had led to problems throughout the 5th and 6th centuries as the churches of Achaia, Epirus, and elsewhere in the Balkans maneuvered politically to align themselves with powers that provided them with the most benefit and accommodated their theological perspectives. So, the appearance of a Trinitarian inscription in Tegea might well resonate with the Trinitarian mosaics analyzed by Maguire and Terry in Istria at <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64390557">Poreč</a> as

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another effort by a Greek congregation to articulate their theological and political position in the complex world of 6th century ecclesiastical politics. </div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 01/15/2010 10:14:25 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits on a balmy and sunny Friday:</p> <ul> <li>At one point, I had given up on comments on my blog. And then, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/01/co rinths-greek-agora.html#comments">a really interesting discussion broke out here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2010/01/te aching-thursday-how-to-spot-a-bad-professor.html#comments">a nice comment appeared here</a>.</li> <li>If you're curious on how I am using my History 101 Twitter feed, check it out <a href="http://twitter.com/History101SP10">here</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/ausvpak09/engine/current/match/406201.html">This is an impressive innings</a>. I like the idea of dropping North and moving Watson to the 3 slot and giving Hughes a chance to open with Katich.</li> <li>I like that you can put the little Beta tag back on your Gmail page.</li> <li>So far, <a href="http://wave.google.com/">Google Wave</a> has worked pretty well in my public history course.</li> <li><a href="http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/archaeology">This could be interesting</a>.</li> </ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p><br />

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: How to spot a bad professor STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-how-to-spot-a-bad-professor CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 01/14/2010 07:43:49 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Cross posted to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a></em> <p>This past week <a href="http://www.usnews.com/blogs/professors-guide/index.html">one of the blogs hosted by U.S. News and World Report</a> published <a href="http://www.usnews.com/blogs/professors-guide/2010/01/06/10-warning-signsof-a-bad-professor.html">a short list of ways to spot a bad professor</a> (via <a href="http://www.oid.und.edu/">Anne Kelsch</a>).&nbsp; Two former university professors, Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman write for the blog giving some kind of authority.&nbsp; <p>Here's a short summary of <a href="http://www.usnews.com/blogs/professors-guide/2010/01/06/10-warning-signsof-a-bad-professor.html">their list</a>: <p><strong>1. The professor is boring.</strong> <p><a></a> <p><strong>2. The professor is bummed out.</strong> <p><strong>3. The professor doesn't give out a syllabus</strong>—or hands out a one-paragraph syllabus that is just the course description from the Web. <p><strong>4. The professor isn't clear about the requirements and how much they count.</strong> <p><strong>5. The professor assigns an undoable amount of work—or no work at all.</strong> <p><strong>6. The professor has incredibly petty rules. </strong> <p><strong>7. The professor can't fill the whole class period.</strong> <p><strong>8. The professor seems unsure about the material. </strong> <p><strong>9. The professor presents the material in a confused way.</strong> <p><strong>10. The professor never involves the students. </strong> <p>First, it is probably important to realize that this list is designed to attract hits to their blog as much as to advise students.&nbsp; Once we accept that, it is hard not to think that the list has some merit.&nbsp; I think I would flee from a class if a professor showed any number of these traits.&nbsp; More troubling, however, is the assumption that this kind of behavior is widespread on university campuses or at least common enough to make a list.&nbsp; <p>There is also the issue of how to determine whether a professor is boring or whether a particular workload is "undoable".&nbsp; Petty rules and honest insecurity about material are likewise in the eye of the beholder.&nbsp; Big classes often require some rules that would appear petty in a seminar environment.&nbsp; For example, I tell my students that I am not particularly

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offended if their phone rings during class (and most of our students here at UND know that this is rude), but I am offended if the student answers the phone.&nbsp; This kind of explicit statement is hardly necessary in a seminar environment.&nbsp; On the other hand, I've found it productive to admit in a seminar that I struggled with a particular text.&nbsp; This can often put a student at ease when confronting a very challenging text.&nbsp; I am not sure that this strategy would be as effective in, say, a large lecture course. <p>The real question, I suppose, is not whether a list like this is good or not (after all, who would want to be taught by a "bummed out" or confusing professor?), but what are the basic assumptions about good teaching (or being a good professor) in this list.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jeremy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 72.204.31.225 URL: http://www.professorsguide.com DATE: 01/14/2010 06:45:48 PM Thanks very mcuh for reproducing our piece on your site; we're always happy to have colleagues reading our piece. The purpose of our work is not to garner hits, but rather to help students navigate the shoals of college. The introduction to the complete piece expresses the point: "Many students are heading back for the second semester of college this week. How the semester goes will depend heavily on the quality of the courses they've chosen. Many students will consult sites such as rate my professors. com, their college's own evaluation systems (when public), and the general scuttlebutt from their real and virtual friends. But it's always better to size the professor up yourself by attending the first couple of lectures, then dropping the course if you think the professor is bad."! One of the issues raised in your comment is how to determine whether a professor is too boring or the workload undoable. It's true that there's a certain subjectivity here, and of course it's a matter of degree, but we think that, since the student is the one who has to learn, often he or she is in a good position to determine what counts as too boring or an undoable workload. Many professors think that basic class rules are desirable; we agree. But's it's also possible to offer up so many rules that the class atmosphere becomes noxious and the professor unduly combative. (It does seem that it would be unnerving to allow one's phone to ring but to be prohibited from answering. Why not just instruct the students to turn off the ringer?) And certainly in a seminar, or other advanced class, it's fully appropriate to admit one is learning along with the students, that no investigator has all the answers (On the other hand, a bold confesion of this sort in an intro or service course might undermine the students' confidence in the professor, more than anything else). !

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All in all, the most basic "assumption" in this piece is that, since the student is the learn who has to learn, he or she should select professors from whom he or she can learn. We think that much is uncontroversial. ! Thanks for taking the time to comment. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Corinth's Greek Agora STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: corinths-greek-agora CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 01/13/2010 08:05:54 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/so me-new-work-on-historic-corinthian-lithics.html">These are boom times for articles on Corinth</a>. I just completed Jamie Donati's interesting new article in the <i>American Journal of Archaeology</i>: <a href="http://www.ajaonline.org/index.php?ptype=content&amp;aid=3624">"Marks of State Ownership and the Greek Agora at Corinth" <i>AJA</i> 114 (2010), 3-26</a>. In it, Jamie argues that the evidence for state owned objects (drinking vessels, weights, counting tables, et c.) suggests that the Archaic to Classical agora in Corinth most likely stood below the Hellenistic agora and Roman forum. This runs counter to the prevailing wisdom at Corinth which typically places the earlier agora either north of the city or under the plataea of the modern village.</p> <p>While I won't go through the detail of Jamie's argument, he suggests that part of the reason why scholars have not seen the evidence for the Greek agora under the Hellenistic and Roman levels is because they assumed that the Archaic and Classical agora of Corinth would be in some way similar to the Classical agora of Athens which was uncovered at approximately the same time as major excavations at Corinth continued. The rivalry between these two major American excavations in Greece, in effect, shaped scholarly assumptions. Jamie argued that Corinth, with rather different civic institutions and forms of government, would not have required the same kinds of buildings at Athens. He then points out that the government of Elis met in rather modest structures which, in fact, stood outside of the proper agora of that city.</p> <p>Even more interesting (at least to me) is how Jamie's argument for the location of the Greek agora influence how we imagine the motives for the monumental elaboration of the city in the Hellenistic (and later, Roman, periods). In one of my favorite <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/5049769">dissertations on Corinth, Betsy Robinson</a> argues that the three famous fountains of the Corinth -- Peirene, Glauke, and the Sacred Spring -- were important "places of memory" for the city during the Roman period and served to link the rebuilt Roman agora with the earlier history of the Corinth as a city of water. If we accept Jamie's identification of pre-Hellenistic agora under the Hellenistic and Roman agora, then this might contribute additional perspective to the way that place informed monumental and civic continuity in the ancient city. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/49859958">Sue Alcock has argued</a> that the Athenian agora became, during the Roman period, a kind of memory theater where

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monuments of various aspects of the glorious Athenian past jostled for attention in a space largely devoid of any practical function. While the Corinth's Greek agora (accepting for a moment Jamie's argument) may have lacked monumental reminders of the city's past, could the place itself, the topography, the views, or even more modest reminders have served to evoke urban continuity (or even a highly localized mytho-history, in Robinson's terms) that largely functioned well below the level of monumental commemoration.</p> <p>Such an approach reminds me of work on the mnemonics of landscapes where physically invisible markers could nevertheless evoke memories for individuals and groups historically invested in a place. While we tend to conceive of urbanism as replacing these relatively obscure places of memory with monumental expressions, there is no reason to assume that more subtle mnemonic places could not provide a framework for continuity within an urban environment. This observation, however, goes well beyond what Jamie argued. It will be interesting to see what folks do with this article and whether (or how) it shapes the study of urban Corinth.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Guy Sanders EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 94.66.203.140 URL: DATE: 01/14/2010 01:31:05 AM This article is indeed an interesting take on Corinth's agora. The idea that it is elsewhere is partly based on the absence of evidence for "suitable" monumental buildings in and around the Roman forum, the important communal area served by Peirene was presumably downstream from the fountain and that documented roads converged on an area northeast of Temple Hill. There is also inconclusive evidence from the murderous events at the Euklaia one year and that the Temple of Apollo should be close to the agora. This suggested that the agora was not under the forum, but not too far away, perhaps under that part the village northeast of Temple Hill. Donati has lined up evidence for public functions in the area under the forum and puts forward the falsifiable hypothesis that it was the agora. As you say, it will be very interesting to see how people react to this challenge. It makes me wonder if the building which Saul Weinberg "saw" under the Julian Basilica (Corinth I.v pp. 37-9, plan iv) indeed exists. If so, then it may have served some civic function similar to that served by the Roman basilica. Its juxtaposition with the race track is reminiscent of that of the bouleuterion to the track at Argos. The Hellenistic starting line seems to be oriented with the suggested building and they both have very similar north-south dimensions. The early Roman monumental assemblage including the basilica, the Fountain of Poseidon and the Babbius Monument, seems to relate to the track. Sarah James's has identified post-Mummian fine ware pottery manufacture at Corinth and in a forthcoming article she suggests that life at Corinth did not come to a grinding

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halt after the sack. This raises the distinct possibility that some of the Roman monuments in the forum preserve memories of the Hellenistic past. On the other hand, I am beginning to view the area under the forum in the Hellenistic period to be largely agonsitic serving a festival purpose similar to the platanistas / dromos region in Pausanias's Sparta. I have alluded to this possibility in an article on the Sacred Spring forthcoming in the publication of the "Corinth in Context" conference a couple of years ago at Austin Texas. If so, then it suggests the agora may indeed be elsewhere unless the race track is, like the Athenian Agora and unlike the case at Sparta, in the agora. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.74 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 01/14/2010 07:49:36 AM Guy, Thanks for the lengthy response and some intriguing alternative both to Donati's perspective and the traditional views. I like his idea that the agora need not be a monumentalized area, but this makes it difficult to identify in any case -even if one could excavate all the proposed locations. Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jamie Donati EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 94.70.101.34 URL: DATE: 01/15/2010 09:22:56 AM Some great input here. If Saul Weinberg's monumental Greek structure beneath the Julian Basilica did in fact exist, then its presence at the eastern side of what I view as the Corinthian agora would certainly be in line with how the Hellenistic agora became a more strictly defined urban venue in the Greek city. So we would have the South Stoa, Northwest Stoa, and an eastern monumental structure forming a tight architectural ensemble with the racetrack in the center. As for Guy's suggestion that the pre-Roman forum was not the agora, but served only an agonistic function in the Hellenistic period, I would want to see how this theory fits in with the broader urban history of the site from the 7th century B.C.E. onwards. There were many structures along the southern side of the valley prior to the construction of the Hellenistic South Stoa and the reorientation of the racetrack (e.g. Buildings I-IV, the "Centaur Bath", a number of Protocorinthian buildings, etc.). We need to tie in this phase of the city with the Hellenistic period, rather than look at a single period or building in isolation. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Tuesday on the First Tuesday of the Spring Semester STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 0

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BASENAME: teaching-tuesday-on-the-first-tuesday-of-the-spring-semester CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/12/2010 08:24:38 AM ----BODY: <p>As I mentioned yesterday, I am teaching the same classes this semester as I have the last few. To keep things interesting (to me!), I am experimenting. Over the last week, I&#39;ve been setting up my History 101: Western Civilization class to have a complementary Twitter feed. (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/te aching-with-twitter-tuesday.html">I&#39;ve blogged on this idea before</a>) To do this, I&#39;ve been following the efforts of Monica Rankin at the University of Texas at Dallas who used Twitter in a similar setting and reported on <a href="http://www.utdallas.edu/%7Emrankin/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm">the results here</a> and in this clever YouTube video.</p><object height="340" width="560">! <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6WPVWDkF7U8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;" />! <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />! <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />! <embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="340" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6WPVWDkF7U8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="560" />! </object><br />! <br /><p>! My goals are not radically different from Dr. Rankin&#39;s goals. My History 101 class is over 150 students making traditional classroom discussions difficult. To make matters more challenging, I teach the class one day a week, at night, for 2 hours 20 minutes. To avoid turning the class into a series of marathon lectures, I disseminate most of the standard historical narrative through a series of podcast which I beg students to listen to before coming to class. Since I can expect students to know the basic narrative, I can avoid conducting a formal lecture during class time. Instead, I walk the students through primary and secondary sources in an effort to model how a historian analyzes and integrates primary sources or challenges the arguments in a secondary source. Some days, I am quite Socratic, asking the students a series of relatively simple questions about a source in an effort to break down the process of historical reading into simple parts. Other days, I put more pressure on the students to analyze documents on their own (through in class writing assignments) or, more frequently, in groups. My teaching assistant and I then circulate to help with specific questions.</p><p>! Generally, these techniques have proven to be successful in making a large class a more dynamic and interactive environment. One weakness to these techniques, however, is that the class can easily by dominated by a cadre of more confident (and generally better prepared) students who are very comfortable with the material. These students tend to answer many of the Socratic questions and influence (generally for the better) group discussions. Students who are struggling tend to remain quiet and disengaged. My hope is that by using Twitter during class time as a back channel to the classrooms discussions, I can encourage more reserved students to participate more actively in the class. To help with aggregating student Tweets during class, I&#39;ll rely (as per Rankin&#39;s method) on a series of hashtags designated for each class. One concern that I have, however, is that various Twitter search engines tend to be

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laggy, taking sometimes as much as 20 minutes to find register a hashtag in a search. My hope is that this is only an occasional issue or that volume of hashtags serves to make them more visible to search engines, or that I&#39;ll find a better Twitter search engine.</p><p>I have two other goals with using Twitter:</p><p>First, my students here at UND have a tendency to be a bit technophobic (there are still students who claim &quot;not to be good with computers&quot;) so incorporating Twitter in my class should encourage them to become more familiar with what the internet and social media applications can do. Many people here at UND still see the web as a series of more or less stable &quot;web pages&quot; rather than a dynamic, response environment. It is simply imperative for a well-rounded humanities student to have some familiarity with how the 21st century internet works. So, I&#39;ll add Twitter to my use of threaded discussions (admittedly old-school) and my weekly wiki pages where students can collaborate to create a comprehensive (and authoritative) set of class notes. To help my students feel more comfortable with Twitter, I&#39;ve hastily created a very basic, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/History%20101%20How%20to%20use% 20Twitter.htm">How to use Twitter page</a>. I&#39;m sure that I&#39;ll have to tweak it some over the next few days.</p><p>Next, I hope that Twitter helps make a one-day-a-week class a higher priority in a student&#39;s schedule. The tendency is for students to only think about a one-day-a-week class when something is due or during class time itself. The class lacks a certain amount of persistence. I plan to update my class&#39;s Twitter page daily with different kinds of Tweets. Some days, I&#39;ll simply post an interesting link; other days, I&#39;ll post reminders about assignments; and other days, I&#39;ll post &quot;bonus points&quot; questions that will encourage students to check on the History 101 Twitter account regularly.</p><p>Stay tuned to hear how this all works.! </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Semester Preview... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: semester-preview CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 01/11/2010 08:09:23 AM

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----BODY: <p>After a few weeks vacation, I am ready to get back going this semester. And it will be an exciting semester, I think. So here's something of a preview on the day before my classes start in earnest.</p> <p>1. Tweaking existing classes. This semester I'll teach History 101: Western Civilization (in the classroom) and History 240: The Historians Craft. I've taught these classes each semester for the past few years. While this can get boring, the one advantage to this continuity is that I can spend time tweaking each class in ways that a more diverse schedule of course preparation just would not allow. For example, check back here to see how I plan to use social media applications in History 101.</p> <p>2. Public History Interns. As our department tentatively <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/12/di pping-my-toe-in-the-public-history-pool.html">dips its toes in the public history pool</a>, I am going to run a public history internship. Based on the conversations already taking place in Google Wave, it seems like we are off to a good start. The plans include working on an online museum of the Late Antique material from the site of <a href="http://www.pkap.org/" title="PylaKoutsopetria">Pyla-Koutsopetria</a>, working with <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Ryan Stander</a> on the online complement to his gallery show of photographs from this summer's PKAP season, keying and normalizing the survey and excavation data from the last few PKAP field seasons plus some other odds and ends. Part of their responsibilities will be to write a blog to make their work as transparent as possible.</p> <p>3. Writing. I am looking forward to wrapping up work on a few articles submitted over the past few years. This includes a co-edited volume of the <a href="http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/anthropology+and+archaeology/journ al/10761"><i>I</i><i>nternational Journal of Historical Archaeology</i></a> and a co-written piece for <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/publications/hesperia"><i>Hesperia</i></ a>. The PKAP team will submit its last preliminary report to the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, and I'll finish a contribution to <i>Cambridge Encyclopedia of World Religious Architecture</i> on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/12/un derstanding-early-christian-baptisteries.html">Early Christian baptisteries</a>.</p> <p>4. Lectures. While my conference schedule is pretty clear this spring, I will deliver the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/12/el wyn-robinson-lecture-thoughts-digital-archaeology.html">Elwyn Robinson Lecture (which I think will be on Digital Archaeology</a>) sometime in February. Even more exciting in our keynote speaker for the annual Phi Alpha Theta History Conference here at UND: <a href="http://www.vanderbilt.edu/divinity/facultypages/jensen.php">Robin Jensen</a> of Vanderbilt University, has agreed to come and talk about some aspect of her work on Early Christian art and ritual in March. More on this soon!!</p> <p>5. Reading. I am really looking forward to my winter reading list. First, I need to finish Y. Hamilakis and A. Anagnostopoulos edited volume Archaeological Ethnographies for a review for the <i><a href="http://eja.sagepub.com/">European Journal of Archaeology</a></i>. But I am also looking forward to M. Decker's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/316430311"><i>Tilling the Hateful Earth: Agricultural Production and Trade in the Late Antique East</i> (Oxford 2009)</a> and V. Makrides, <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/276816822">Hellenic

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Temples and Christian Churches: A concise history of the religious cultures of Greece from antiquity to the present</a></i> (New York 2009).</p> <p>6. Blogging. I am looking forward to getting <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a> going again. At the end of last semester I began to despair of ideas, contributors, and motivation, but after a brief break, I am recommitted to making it work as a forum for conversations about teaching and pedagogy here at UND. I am excited to get feedback on transmedia teaching, using technology in new ways in the classroom, and exploring the potential of Foucault's panopticon for understanding the experience of teaching online. And more!</p> <p>7. Administrative. I agreed to write up by-laws for our Working Group in Digital and New Media. Having never written by-laws before (and generally ignoring them when they do exist!), this should be an adventure. I am also working with an interesting group on the redesign of the University's website. Stay tuned for more on the latter.</p> <p>Lots on tap for this winter and spring. Plus the standard routine of planning for summer fieldwork and writing grants.</p> <p>So plenty of blog-fodder!</p> <p>Stay tuned!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Airports as Networks STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: airports-as-networks CATEGORY: Travel DATE: 01/09/2010 04:45:02 PM ----BODY: <p>I've been doing a bit of traveling lately and spent some serious time in airports. Last night, we had to go from Gate C5 to Gate A13 at Minneapolis-St. Paul's Lindbergh Terminal. While this map doesn't really do the distance justice, gate C5 is close to the core area of the airport and A12 is perhaps the furtherest gate from the center. In fact, as you walk toward gate A13, the moving walkway ends, the concourse narrows, the little concessions disappear replaced by by open janitorial closets and worn gate furniture.</p> <p><br /></p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876be44b7970c -pi" width="480" height="399" alt="MinneapolisAirportMap.tiff" /><br />

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</div> <p>It was appropriate that gate A13 was on the periphery of the airport as our flight from Minneapolis to Grand Forks represented movement toward the periphery of the nation (if not geographically, at least in most other ways!).</p> <p>In Brisbane, the situation was a bit different. We departed from Gate 75 of the International Terminal. Like gate A13, this was at the far left (east?) end of the International Terminal. Its isolation was largely because flights to the U.S. require additional security measures best managed at a gate that can be isolated from the major flow of traffic through the airport. So, in this case, the isolation of the gate represents another form of isolation both in terms of global security and in the local network</p> <p><br /></p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876be44ac970c -pi" width="480" height="160" alt="201001091613.jpg" /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> The prayer room (see <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/search/label/Airport%20Chapels">Kostis' efforts on his blog to document these strangely post-modern places</a>) is perhaps even more peripheral than our gate 75. It is tucked behind bathrooms and a family changing room. The lack of windows and depressing, institutional furniture make it perhaps the least comforting place in the entire airport. My suspicion is that this space was designed more the hide the act of prayer from prying and nervous eyes than to present a suitable place for contemplating and communicating with the divine. </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876be44be970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="DSCN2273.JPG" /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7bbd09d970b -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="DSCN2279.JPG" />&nbsp;&nbsp; </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876be44c2970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="DSCN2274.JPG" /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <br />

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</div> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Of course, this kind of simple and fun network analysis breaks down a bit when dealing with a massive airport like LAX. Here we flew to Minneapolis from Terminal 5, where Delta/Northwest departs and to Australia from Terminal 3 on V Australia, both peripheral to the central Bradley International Terminal. It's harder, however, to find metaphorical associations between the gates and their destinations. </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876be44ca970c -pi" width="480" height="348" alt="201001091621.jpg" /> </div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: AIA Panel 2010: First Out: Late Levels of Early Sites STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: aia-panel-2010-first-out-late-levels-of-early-sites CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 01/05/2010 04:38:24 PM ----BODY: <p>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.&nbsp; While I won't be at the meeting, I will be giving a paper with Timothy Gregory.&nbsp; If you're going to be in Anaheim be sure to check out what I'm sure will be a brilliant panel!&nbsp; I hope that we'll have podcasts of these talks as well!</p> <p><em>On Thursday:</em></p> <p>SESSION 1C: Colloquium Platinum Ballroom 6</p> <p>First Out: Late Levels of Early Sites</p> <p>Sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group</p> <p>8:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.<br>ORGANIZERS: Sharon E.J. Gerstel,

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University of California, Los Angeles and<br>Kostis Kourelis, Franklin &amp; Marshall College</p> <p>8:30 I Introduction: Sharon E.J. Gerstel, University of California, Los Angeles and Kostis Kourelis, Franklin &amp; Marshall College (10 min.)</p> <p>8:40 P Prioritizing Prehistory? A Byzantine Deposit from the Palace of Nestor at Englianos<br>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.)</p> <p>9:05 D Drowned in the Depths of Obscurity: How Archaeology both Marginalized and Revitalized Our Understanding of Late Byzantine Troy<br>Kathleen M. Quinn, Northern Kentucky University (20 min.)</p> <p>9:30 A A Middle Byzantine Neighborhood in Athens: Recent Excavations in the Agora<br>Anne McCabe, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford (20 min.)</p> <p>10:05 F First but Not Out: The Byzantine Levels at Chersonesos in Historical and Archaeological Context<br>Adam Rabinowitz, University of Texas at Austin, and Larissa Sedikova, National Preserve of Tauric Chersonesos, Ukraine (20 min.)</p> <p>10:30 N New Views on Old Data: Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results after 30 Years<br>William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota, and Timothy E. Gregory, Ohio State University (20 min.)</p> <p>10:55 L Late Ottoman and Early Modern Levels from New Excavations in Ancient Corinth<br>Guy D. R. Sanders, American School of Classical Studies at Athens (20 min.)</p> <p><strong>Some other notables from the </strong><a href="http://www.pkap.org/"><strong>PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</strong></a><strong>...</strong> <p><em>On Friday:</em> <p>SESSION 6F Grand Ballroom J &amp; K<br>Archaeological Methodology<br>4:30 P Painting Practices in Roman Corinth: Contextualizing Analytical Analyses<br>on Wall Paintings from Panaghia Field and the Area East of the Theater<br>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.) <p>SESSION 6G Platinum Ballroom 7<br>Archaeology of Ancient Warfare<br>3:35 T The Inscribed Sling-Bullets of Perusia as a Unique Discourse<br>Brandon R. Olson, Penn State University (20 min.)</p> <p><strong>For </strong><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html"><strong >Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</strong></a><strong> types:</strong></p> <p><em>On Friday:</em></p> <p>SESSION 4A Grand Ballroom Salon E<br>Excavation and Survey in Bronze Age Greece<br>9:20 T The Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP): The Bronze Age Worlds of Kalamianos<br>Daniel J. Pullen, The Florida State University, and Thomas F. Tartaron,<br>The University of Pennsylvania (20 min.)</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: New Views on Old Data: Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results After 30 Years STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: new-views-on-old-data-reinterpreting-intensive-survey-results-after30-years CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 01/04/2010 03:08:52 PM ----BODY: <p>For those of you who will miss the 2010 Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting next week, here's a draft of our paper.&nbsp; Regular readers of my blog will recognize this as the continued development of my analysis of the data from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition. <p align="center">New Views on Old Data: Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results After 30 Years <p align="center">William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota <br>Timothy E. Gregory, Ohio State University <br>[draft]</p> <p>It seems natural to include a paper on survey archaeology on a panel entitled “First Out”.&nbsp; After all, the surface assemblage is, by necessity, the first out for any excavation.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 <i>poleis</i> and across every century from the end of antiquity to the modern era.&nbsp; Intensive surveys in Boeotia, Laconia, Messenia, and the Corinthia are rewriting both the ancient and post-Classical landscapes of these well-studied regions.&nbsp; <p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; <p>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.&nbsp; The results of this survey were published in a series of short articles between 1980 and 1992.&nbsp; 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 reintroducing data from the OBE into the broader conversation about settlement and survey data in both in Boeotia and across Greece more broadly.&nbsp; 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. <p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It should be noted that in

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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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There is hope that we can find the location of these transects from older aerial photographs of the area. <p>The final step in the production of this data is recording comprehensive metadata for all the information that we entered.&nbsp; Once the keying of the data and metadata is complete we plan to make all this available to the public via the internet.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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. <p>_____ <p>There have been significant changes in our understanding of the post-Classical countryside since the Ohio Boeotia Expedition published their results in the 1980s.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Our work on the older material from Thisvi needs to be put into the context of these newer initiatives. <p>The OBE team produced the current dataset through a number of different methods.&nbsp; The diversity of methods reflected the early stage in the development of field procedures and an avowedly experimental approach to documenting the landscape.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Finally, the teams also collected samples for areas of particularly high density which they designated sites.&nbsp; They surveyed these areas using&nbsp; flexible methods best suited for documenting the extent, chronology, and function of the material on the ground.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; <i>In toto</i> the survey of the mainland counted over 8700 artifacts and documented over 1700 batches of unique artifacts from the four areas investigated.&nbsp; <p>The artifact density data from the OBE shows that the number of artifacts declined across the central part of the Thisvi basin.&nbsp; This pattern, noted

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in the original publication of the survey, may be at least in part a product of the geomorphological patterns.&nbsp; In antiquity, an ancient barrage, described by Pausanias, controlled the flow of water and sediment into the basin.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The density of artifacts, however, clearly increases once again on the gently sloping, stony ground the along the south side of the basin.&nbsp; <p>Against the backdrop of overall artifact density we can show the distribution of post-Classical material across the survey area.&nbsp; In general, the survey area is dominated by artifacts from the Classical to Hellenistic and Roman periods which accounted for over 2/3<sup>rd</sup> of the datable ceramics.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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. <p>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.&nbsp; The post-ancient material from this area was more focused than material from earlier periods with most of postclassical artifacts deriving from three units: A2, A5, and A8.&nbsp; The transects&nbsp; 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 postClassical habitation.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 stonebuilt harbor facilities along the water’s edge, all of them apparently dating to the post-classical period.&nbsp; 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. <p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The team from the CambridgeBradford 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; <p>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

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between contracting populations and changing land-use patterns. <p>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.&nbsp; This site coincides particularly well with kinds of site interpreted by the Cambridge Boeotia Survey as villas.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; <p>The second major concentration of Late Roman at the harbor at Vathy represents a more complex phenomenon.&nbsp; 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).&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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. <p>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.&nbsp; When first documented and published in the mid-1980s, the presence of Late Roman and postClassical 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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. <p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; For the Late Roman period, in

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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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 ‚Äúfirst out‚Äù.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.91.201.94 URL: DATE: 01/07/2010 11:24:40 PM Thanks for publishing the paper, Bill. Even though I'm only 25 mile from Anaheim, I can't make it to the conference (work and all). Have fun! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David Pettegrew EMAIL: IP: 71.173.185.136 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/davidpettegrew DATE: 04/16/2010 06:12:55 AM Thanks again for posting this, Bill. Finding it useful. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Elwyn Robinson Lecture Thoughts: Digital Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: elwyn-robinson-lecture-thoughts-digital-archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 12/30/2009 09:49:38 PM ----BODY: <p>Just before the holidays, I was invited to give the library‚Äôs <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/about/robinson.htm">Elwyn Robinson Lecture</a>.&nbsp; The librarian suggested that I do something that highlights

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how my research will benefit from the newly established Working Group in Digital and New Media.&nbsp; This would coincide well with Elwyn Robinson’s interest in the “new media” of his day, namely radio.&nbsp; Robinson’s <em>Heroes of Dakota</em> radio broadcast brought the University of North Dakota, the department of history, and his research on the history of North Dakota to a broad audience far beyond the limits of scholarly publication.&nbsp; His broadcasts were so popular that he circulated paper copies of his broadcasts to listeners across the state and his research for this broadcasts became the basis for his course on the history of region and the state and eventually his magnum opus, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/190890"><em>The History of North Dakota</em></a>.&nbsp; So in some sense, Robinson embraced what some scholars today would call a transmedia approach to scholarship.&nbsp; </p> <p>My approach to using the digital and new media in the service of historical and archaeological research shares two features at least with Robinson’s: it is both practical and, as yet, under-theorized.&nbsp; I am contemplating using the Robinson lecture to try to assign some theoretical or at very least methodological aspect to my use of digital and new media approaches in my own research.&nbsp; In particular, I am thinking about articulating the notion of digital workflow and its implications in my own archaeological research.&nbsp; </p> <p>By digital workflow, I mean the use of digital technologies across the entire range of archaeological procedures from pre-season planning, data collection in the field, and the dissemination of our results across multiple platforms for diverse audiences.&nbsp; I like to imagine that our deep dependence on digital data and applications shaped not only how we approached historical and archaeological problems but also how we understood the results of our research and imagined the process of scholarly critique as well as pedagogical .&nbsp; This is, in part, a response to the view of digital technology as merely a tool that scholars and teachers deploy in the ongoing search for truth rather than an “active” participant in the process of determining what truths are significant, knowable, and even imaginable within a particular academic discourse.&nbsp; </p> <p>This is a pretty ambitious goal for a 30 minute paper and would reach well beyond my intellectual comfort zone.&nbsp; It would require me to link the mundane world of field procedures to the more ethereal world of epistemology.&nbsp; The most obvious point of contact is through an emphasis on documenting archaeology as a performance.&nbsp; If the performance of archaeological procedure and method is central to the production of authentic archaeological knowledge, then archaeological knowledge would certainly benefit from the growing set of tools capable of documenting efficiently the whole range of archaeological experiences (from the daily grind of excavation to evening banter with colleagues and the reflective moments at the end of a chaotic field season).&nbsp; </p> <p>Another, perhaps more practical, example would emphasize how the wide dissemination of applications designed to facilitate collaborative research from Wiki-pages to blogs and the yet unrecognized potential of applications like Google Wave open the door to more democratic approaches to field research as it became easier to distribute decision making and analysis across a more diverse team.&nbsp; These applications allow almost real-time collaboration across the world blurring the century old division between academic periphery and the center.&nbsp; While such de-centered projects have clear limitations – our project is often better at identifying problems than establishing a clear course of action – and rest on assumptions of how knowledge production is organized that precede the existence of particular digital applications, digital collaborative workspaces rest upon the assumption that so-called “collective intelligence” is superior to judgment of a single individual serving as director.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>A similar process of relying upon a digital, collaborative environment appears in

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the way in which the curation of archaeological data will change with the production, storage, and dissemination of archaeological data in digital media.&nbsp; In past, the careful documentation of archaeological information was largely confined to analog storage devices.&nbsp; This included film based photographs, paper notebooks (often archived on microfilm), and carefully archived paper illustrations and plans.&nbsp;&nbsp; Today, most projects have some level of digitization involved in the recording of archaeological information.&nbsp; Forward thinking project store this data on servers which typically include digital back-ups in their basic infrastructure.&nbsp; Once on a server, this digital data, unlike its analog predecessors, is available to groups of researchers around the world.&nbsp; As these scholars use this data, they can typically download some form of the various datasets onto their personal computers, servers, and backup systems, effectively multiplying the copies of the existing archaeological data.&nbsp; As researchers use the data, they invariably move the information from one format to another for analysis or manipulation and, in some case, they produce alternate versions of the original data (hopefully with a full complement of metadata).&nbsp; As a result, they participate in the process of preserving the data by ensuring the proliferation of copies and ensuring that it remains in a useable format.&nbsp; Like the decentered, collaborative model of decision making, the de-center, collaborative model of archaeological data curation relies upon the (relatively) easy movement of digital data from person to person and from format to format. </p> <p>The audience of the Robinson lectures is a mix of academics and non-academics.&nbsp; My talk would largely focus on the part of the audience who still struggle to understand why it is important to develop not only the physical aspects of the digital infrastructure (servers, computers, software), but also the theoretical and practical aspects of the digital infrastructure especially in the humanities (which have remained on many campuses bastions of unapologetically analog thinking).&nbsp; At the same time, the paper will continue my own effort to articulate in more sophisticated terms the effect of the digital technologies on my own research.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Colleen EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.5.196.150 URL: http://middlesavagery.wordpress.com DATE: 01/07/2010 11:22:57 PM Hey look, it's my dissertation research. :) Good luck, I'd like a copy of the paper when you're finished. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher

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DATE: 01/09/2010 11:07:47 AM Good dissertation topic! I'll certainly pass along my paper. Have you published on the topic? I am scrambling a bit to develop bibliography. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Understanding Early Christian Baptisteries STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: understanding-early-christian-baptisteries CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 12/28/2009 03:58:07 PM ----BODY: <p>Over the Christmas holiday, I’ve spent some time thinking and reading on Early Christian baptisteries.&nbsp; This contributes to a relatively long-term collaborative project with Robin Jensen of Vanderbilt University and Dick Rutherford of the University of Portland, but also to a short-term project of writing an encyclopedia entry on Early Christian Baptisteries for a encyclopedia of world religious architecture published by Cambridge University Press.&nbsp; So, I’ve spent the break reviewing some very basic works on Early Christian baptisteries and considering how to approach a 2000 word essay on their architecture.</p> <p>In many ways, the study of baptisteries suffers from many of the same problems that the study of Early Christian architecture faces in general.&nbsp; There are five major problems, as I see it:</p> <p>1. Most Early Christian baptisteries, like churches from the same period, lack a clear date for their construction, use, and modification. Many of the best examples of architecture from the Early Christian period (roughly from the 3rd-7th century) were excavated before the middle years of the 20th century and were not subjected to stratigraphic excavations (or at least not published as such).&nbsp; The absence of stratigraphic information and the archaeological material that allows scholars to assign dates to the relative chronologies produced through careful excavation has made it difficult to determine the degree to which diversity across the entire corpus of Early Christian architecture is the result of chronological changes or simply differences in style, taste, or the needs of a specific community.</p> <p>2. In fact, it is clear that there was considerable diversity in the architectural forms of baptisteries across a region or even across the buildings in a specific city.&nbsp; This diversity may reflect differences in taste or a desire to create a distinct space of initiation for admission into a particular group of Christians.&nbsp; The diverse range of “orthodoxies” among Christian groups present in the Mediterranean basin ensured that any number of different Christian groups could live and build in a particular region.&nbsp; The Arian and Orthodox baptisteries in Ravenna are clear evidence for this and propose a model that might explain the differences of architectural form in other urban centers like Corinth where several baptisteries of different forms existed at the same time.&nbsp; </p> <p>3. Recognizing that different groups may have desired different kinds of buildings is a far cry from understanding why these differences were required. The importance of ritual in the process of Christian initiation suggests that differences in the baptismal liturgy might account for some of the differences.&nbsp; The known rituals across the Mediterranean reveal

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considerable variation even among grounds regarded broadly as Orthodox.&nbsp; It would stand to reason that “non-orthodox” groups would have differed from their Orthodox brethren as well as from one another adding to the considerable variation in ritual structure of Christian initiation.&nbsp; Unfortunately the lack of chronology for many of our buildings and our uneven coverage of known baptismal rituals mean that liturgical texts can only shed light on the function of Early Christian baptisteries in some areas.&nbsp; For Greece, for example, we have no liturgical texts at all.</p> <p>4. Further compounding the uneven distribution of liturgical texts is the diverse range of symbolic and exegetical readings of the baptismal ritual.&nbsp; Even if a liturgical text provided a blue-print of sorts to the rites involved in Christian initiation, the meaning of these rites derived from the ongoing interpretative work of various communities, church leaders, and even, one must assume, the viewers.&nbsp; Moreover, it seems likely to me that the rich symbolism and interpretive skill of Early Christians produced multiple simultaneous or even contested meanings for baptismal ritual.&nbsp; It, therefore, becomes very difficult to assign a single symbolic text to an Early Christian baptistery and then relate this text to a particular Christian community or set of initiatory values.&nbsp; This does not mean, of course, that it is impossible to interpret the symbolism present in Early Christian baptisteries.&nbsp; Some symbols like water, the hart, paradise, the river Jordan, and the dove appear consistently enough to present a consistent array of baptismal imagery.&nbsp; What I mean, rather, is that the diversity of images associated with baptism and baptisteries should discourage us from assigning a single, exclusive meaning to Early Christian space and ritual.&nbsp; </p> <p>5. The diversity of meanings in Early Christian architecture is made clear in the practice of literary ekphrasis.&nbsp; Ekphrasis was a popular genre of Early Christian ritual focused on unpacking and exploring the symbolism present in architecture.&nbsp; The authors of ekphrastic texts clearly took it upon themselves to produce wide ranging symbolic meaning from even relatively mundane objects in a religious building.&nbsp; Such extensive architectural exegesis often departed from structural reality which these authors subordinated entirely to their own creativity.&nbsp; Efforts by modern scholars to reconstruct actual spaces and buildings from ekphrastic texts regularly end in tears.&nbsp; The goal of ekphrasis was the text itself as a literary artifact and not as an even loosely empirical reproduction of an actual building.&nbsp; As a result, some of the most detailed descriptions of Early Christian space are, ironically, the least helpful in construction actual practice or architecture, and, instead, reveal Early Christian architecture as a suitable foundation for multiple symbolic regimes.</p> <p>The challenges associated with our understanding of Early Christian baptisteries and architecture more broadly will likely discourage any scholar committed to understanding these spaces as a manifestation of a single unified ritual or symbolic regime.&nbsp; (And, in all fairness, I am not sure that there are many scholars committed to this particular approach.)&nbsp; Instead, the diversity of architectural forms, symbolic regimes, and the ambiguity of chronology begs for interpretations that embrace the multivocal nature of the evidence itself.&nbsp; Taking the lead from the authors of ekphrasis, scholars might be well-served by exploring the space of Christian initiation as the space susceptible to multiple, overlapping, and perhaps in some cases contested, symbolic, architectural, and ritual significance.&nbsp; In such a case, the study of Early Christian architecture becomes the study of Early Christian architectures in the same way that Early Christianity has given way to the study of Early Christianities.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Christmastime in Brisbane STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: christmastime-in-brisbane CATEGORY: Australiana DATE: 12/23/2009 04:23:05 PM ----BODY: <p style="text-align: left;">Some happy Christmas photos of Brisbane City Hall (with its solar powered Christmas tree) and some architecture from the Fortitude Valley neighborhood of Brisbane. &#0160;Plus a photo of irrigation for fun.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Merry Christmas!!!</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128767a73b8970 c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="CityHall" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20128767a73b8970c " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128767a73b8970c -500pi" title="CityHall" /></a> </p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7778ad1970 b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Hotel1" border="0" class="asset assetimage at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20120a7778ad1970b " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7778ad1970b -500pi" style="margin-top: 1px; margin-right: 1px; margin-bottom: 1px; marginleft: 1px; " title="Hotel1" /></a>&#0160;</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7778c84970 b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="TheValley" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20120a7778c84970b " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7778c84970b -500pi" title="TheValley" /></a>&#0160;</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7778e07970 b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="TheSaints" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20120a7778e07970b " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7778e07970b -500pi" title="TheSaints" /></a>&#0160;</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128767a7a4f970 c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="McWhirtersintheValley" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20128767a7a4f970c " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128767a7a4f970c -500pi" title="McWhirtersintheValley" /></a>&#0160;</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7779115970 b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="TheChurchinTheValley" border="0"

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class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20120a7779115970b " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7779115970b -500pi" title="TheChurchinTheValley" /></a>&#0160;</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128767a7d7f970 c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="ValleyPool" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20128767a7d7f970c " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128767a7d7f970c -500pi" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; marginleft: 0px; " title="ValleyPool" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a77794bd970 b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Irrigation" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20120a77794bd970b " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a77794bd970b -500pi" title="Irrigation" /></a>&#0160;</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128767a82a7970 c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="ChristmasTree" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20128767a82a7970c " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128767a82a7970c -500pi" title="ChristmasTree" /></a>&#0160;</p>&#0160; ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Vincent EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 118.210.9.61 URL: http://www.talkingpyramids.com DATE: 12/23/2009 07:26:15 PM Hey I will be passing through Brisbane in a couple of days time. realise the Christmas tree was solar powered though. Perhaps it should be called the Summer Soltice Tree instead. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Transmedia Teaching STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: transmedia-teaching CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 12/22/2009 12:41:50 AM -----

I didn't

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BODY: <p>The very first series of posts on our <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> blog revolved around the idea of EduPunk which represented a combination of outside-the-box educational thinking, the widespread use of digital technologies, and the DIY attitude associated closely with punk rock (check them out <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/10/edupunk/">here</a> and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/10/edupunk/">here</a>). &#0160;While EduPunk appears to have been a flash in the pan, the ideas at the core of the movement probably possess more staying power. &#0160;In particular, I have noticed a resonance between some of the ideas around EduPunk (whatever they precisely were!) and the notion of transmedia teaching. &#0160;</p><p>Transmedia teaching is a term that describes teaching and pedagogical techniques that work to create an immersive learning environment which extends beyond the limits of the classroom through the use of multiple, typically digital, media. The idea derives most specifically from the work of <a href="http://henryjenkins.org/">Henry Jenkins</a> on fan culture, convergence culture, and transmedia experiences. &#0160;Jenkins has recently summarized his ideas on transmedia culture in a pair of blog posts (<a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/revenge_of_the_origami_unicorn.html">here </a>and <a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html">here< /a>). &#0160;In these posts, he identifies 7 key characteristics of transmedia, or convergence, culture which center on how new and user generated digital media has come to transform the relationship between the original content provider and groups who were once imagined to be consumers of content. &#0160;The emergence of a whole series of new media platforms and technologies (such as YouTube, blogging platforms, audio and video mash-ups, wikis and other collaborative environments of various descriptions, et c.) has encouraged both the “authorized” groups of content producers as well as groups of fans to create, manipulate, modify, and expand original content in ways that extended these franchises across a wide array of narratives and into different media environments. &#0160;For example, action movies often spawn a whole set of related, authorized video games, a range of sequels and “prequels”, books, music videos, toys as well as “unauthorized” fan-fiction, blogs, and even various forms of adaptation in user-generated environments like YouTube. &#0160;The proliferation of related content across platforms represents the core of the transmedia phenomenon as both an aspect of contemporary multimedia marketing strategies, but also as a far more de-centered phenomenon engaging a wide range of fans whose commitment and interest in a storyline, cast of characters, or imaginary world manifest itself in highly dynamic and creative ways. &#0160;The interaction between the “original” content producers and the committed fan community can be either sequential – that is fans responding to a creative franchise after it is imagined as, say, a major motion picture – or simultaneous – as is manifest in reality TV shows like American Idol where the “audience” co-authors the outcome of the narrative by voting or otherwise actively participating in the creation of the story. &#0160;You can read his original postings here. &#0160;</p><p>My goal in this short essay is to consider how Jenkins’ ideas could be applied to a notion of transmedia teaching. &#0160;Our goals as teachers are largely the same as those of content providers in any media franchise. &#0160;We hope that our students become committed to the ideas, stories, methods, and worlds that we create in the classroom. &#0160;We hope that the commitment on the part of our students manifest itself at least in being able to model certain behaviors and methods on their own (in, say, a laboratory assignment or as a paper or test) and ideally

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in our students willingness to internalize the lessons of the classroom (broadly construed) and commit to producing their own content. &#0160;We measure student success in generating content by how closely it relates to the rules that we identified as governing the thought worlds of our discipline or a particular method. &#0160;What a creative franchise might regard as the best examples of “fan fiction”, we as teachers regard as evidence for learning, a familiarity with content, and the ability to internalize certain methods &#0160; These goals, of course, are not exclusive to transmedia teaching, but they do suggest a certain similarity in the best-case scenario outcomes of a transmedia franchise in the sense that Henry Jenkins studies. &#0160;</p><p>What I’d like to suggest here is that Jenkins’ study of transmedia phenomenon can provide teachers with another way of thinking about how we present and articulate content to our students. &#0160;It is worth noting that when I am referring to content here, I mean both formal content (for a historian like myself this would be names, dates, events, places, et c.) as well as methods which are just as often the goal of a classroom environment. &#0160;We often teach methods in such a way that makes them a kind of content which is particularly susceptible to transmedia expression. &#0160;Media, in this analysis, refers to both the context and the physical (or technical) environment in which students deploy various the various skill sets. &#0160;I regularly repeat that the core aspects of the historical method, for example, represent transferable skills; I far less frequently articulate either where I imagine students transferring these skills or, perhaps more significantly, how these skills are to be transferred (much less modeling the process!). &#0160;Transmedia teaching foregrounds the idea that skills are transferable by encouraging from the very start the transfer of skills from one media to the next. &#0160;Digital media are particularly useful in this regard in that they are ubiquitous in our 21st century world and increasingly geared toward the production and dissemination of “user generated content”. &#0160;In other words, digital media provide an almost perfect environment for the easy transfer of skills (or more traditional content) from one medium to the next. &#0160;There are clear analogies between taking the critical analysis skills central to historical interpretation from the realm of “historic” texts to realm of critically reading a piece of popular journalism or the creation of a compelling corporate memo and the creation of a plausible argument using the historical method in the context of a blog, YouTube video, podcast, or Wikipedia entry. &#0160;Transferring a historical argument across differing media requires an understanding of the basic historical method as well as the commitment to the notion of the historical method (or even well established historical coordinates) as an immersive environment replete with a kind of internal coherence and continuity that makes the creation of multiple storylines, perspectives, and even performative expression not just possible, but desirable (most of these terms derive from Jenkins). &#0160;</p><p>The work of transmedia teaching, however, is more than just the use of digital space to encourage students to produce their own interpretation of, say, a historical narrative or method, but rather a method of teaching that prioritizes convincing students to internalize an immersive world with particular rules, tropes, characters, relationships, and even events. &#0160;By taking a transmedia approach to the pedagogical process from the start, we foreground the transferable nature of the content presented within the classroom environment by modeling its spreadability across different platforms, genres, and media readily available to students in their everyday, increasingly digital lives. &#0160;We can also note the attendant benefit of this method is encouraging students to become familiar with the basic digital tools and techniques necessary to manipulate digital media and to imagine these media as sharing common boundaries and limitations of particular worlds of content or method. &#0160;</p><p>At the

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same time (and perhaps more importantly!), transmedia teaching would realize that differing media will react differently to different content (whether this content is specific bits of data, content, or methods). &#0160; Thus, we would explicitly reject any perspective that regarded media as merely vessels or tools for the dissemination of specific content or the execution of methods presented in laboratory environments, but as active participants in the transference of one skill set or body of knowledge to another context. &#0160;In other words, the notion of user generated content at the core of transmedia phenomena requires a knowledge of both the content and the processes whereby the user actually generates content. &#0160;In the end, we encourage our students to see digital technologies (and creative places) less as inert tools and more as active participants who produce knowledge, narrative, and methodology. &#0160;This move toward viewing media as central to the creation of knowledge is long established and coincides well with the methods that scholars in the humanities employ every day. &#0160;We would never read an inscription on an ancient stone block the same way that we would read an ancient text or piece of architecture. &#0160;The same process is, of course, true for disseminating knowledge in a transmedia world: the world created in the classroom takes on different manifestations across different media. &#0160;By foregrounding this process, we’re emphasizing the transferable nature of skills.</p><p>This is all relatively abstract, I realize; so a case-study is perhaps in order. &#0160;Over the past several years, I have worked with a wide range of collaborators to present my archaeological research in Cyprus as a kind of transmedia experiment. &#0160;Our project has employed a wide range of media and techniques to communicate our discoveries, methods, and experiences to a wider audience. &#0160;Our goal has consistently been to create an immersive environment for a wide range of end-users (from students, interested onlookers, fellow scholars, donors et c.) by extending our work across a number of platforms and media. &#0160;Over the past 5 years we have produced documentaries in digital video, released series of podcasts interviews with students and staff, created interactive maps, supported the work of a landscape photographer, “tweeted” our day-to-day life across social media applications, reflected on our work and life together across student and staff generated blogs, written reflective essays, documented the site through a series of regular forms and procedures in the field, and published a constant stream of formal reports and articles in academic journals. &#0160;The result has been a deepening understanding of the performative aspects of site (that is specific geographical and chronological content) and archaeology (that is as a method and set of regular procedures). &#0160;Describing the site to a small digital recorder for a broad “non-expert audience” is different from recording stratigraphic layers in an official field notebook. &#0160;Reflecting on the experience of working at the site on a blog is different from preparing a final budget of expenses. Taking systematic photographs of an object or archaeological context is different from taking photographs of the site in such a way to communicate the sense of place to a broader audience. &#0160;The different techniques and modes of expression required of these significant shifts in how we present our site and method force us to consider how various different media function within a larger cultural context. &#0160;In short, even this rather simple example of the transmedia representation of an archaeological project encouraged participants to model archaeological knowledge as a transferable skill.</p><p></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Random Thoughts on a Travel Tuesday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: some-random-thoughts-on-a-travel-tuesday CATEGORY: Australiana CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: Travel DATE: 12/15/2009 04:13:48 PM ----BODY: <p>I am blogging from LAX today and there’s nothing like travel to give me time to entertain random thoughts.&#160; So here are three random, end of the semester, travel inspired thoughts:</p> <p>1. LAX replicates the city of LA.&#160; The terminals and facilities are dispersed and more or less without a clear center.&#160; Minneapolis Airport in contrast is centered around a gaudy food court and shopping mall with a nice observation deck that lets you look out and watch jets come and go.&#160; LAX (at least the various terminals that I drifted through over this 8 hour layover) makes it pretty hard to watch the plains come and go and almost always involves a trip outside of a particular terminal to find important information like departure times, gate numbers, or even places to eat and chill out on a long layover.&#160; </p> <p>2. Students. I’ve been pretty lucky this semester.&#160; I had a number of students take the time to send along little notes thanking me for the semester. These are so gratifying!&#160; This semester I taught two completely revamped classes and a graduate seminar that threatened to devolve into a kind of pedagogical trench warfare.&#160; Despite the challenging semester, it was energizing to know that students enjoyed their class and learned something!</p> <p>3. What I read when traveling: <em>Harpers, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker</em>.&#160; I’ve traveled enough this past year to have read almost every issue of the two monthlies.&#160; I’ll also read William Gibson’s <em>Spook Country </em>(2007)). When I asked my <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/12/10/holiday-reading/">Teaching Thursday</a> readers what they planned to read over the holidays, I got one response.&#160; This either means that we faculty need to do a better job of modeling our behavior or that the readers of our blog are unlikely (for whatever reason) to read books over break.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: maddy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.91.201.94 URL: DATE: 12/27/2009 10:40:51 PM Don't get me started on LAX. Happy holidays Bill! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Dipping my Toe in the Public History Pool STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: dipping-my-toe-in-the-public-history-pool CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 12/14/2009 07:51:14 AM ----BODY: <p>Public history is all the rage these days in history programs.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; On the other hand, this is part of a larger vocational trend in the humanities that we probably need to monitor.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; <p>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.&nbsp; So in 2010, I am going to offer a small internship program in public history.&nbsp; Below is a very, very rough fact-sheet on this graduate level internship.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; <p>Public History Internship<br>SP2010 <p>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. <p>This work will focus on a number of ongoing and completed archaeological and historical projects and tools. <p>1. Topos/Chora: The Photographs of Ryan Stander. This is a series of photographs and related essays from the Pyla<i>Koutsopetria </i>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-<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project. The

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goal here is to have something up on the web by January 15th and the gallery available for viewing by January 30th. <p>2. Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria </i>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-<i>Koutsopetria</i> 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. <p>3. Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i> 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. <p>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. <p>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. <p>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. <p>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. <p>Resources: <p>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. <p>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)). <p>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. <p>Some

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websites: <p><a href="http://omeka.org/">http://omeka.org/</a> <p><a href="http://www.pkap.org/">http://www.pkap.org/</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/</a> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/">http://mediterraneanworld.typepad. com/</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/be tween-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-theupland-basin-of-the-southeasternkorinthia.html">http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/ 2009/10/between-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-worldin-the-upland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/">http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeo logy_of_the_me/thisvikastorion_archaeological_project/</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.205.189 URL: http://civilwarhistory.wordpress.com DATE: 12/14/2009 05:46:43 PM Bill, While I will be likely unable to take the class (even though it would fit wonderfully into my Public History minor), I would very much like to assist with this in whatever way I can. I am more than happy to serve as a guest speaker during weekly meetings to talk with students about interning at a museum and interaction with the public, if you desire. Let me know how I can be of assistance to you in this course. Have a great break if I do not see you this week. Daniel ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dallas EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 65.60.192.124 URL: DATE: 12/15/2009 08:17:31 AM Bill,

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I did something like this the last two years through the Classical Arch. Museum here. I only had one student in each class, but I let each get a feel for the place and decide what to work on. Mainly it came down to some work on our displays, dissemination of info to the public, some research on our collection, etc. One student this year is working on our CYpriot pottery (unofficially). Anyway, it was a good experience, I think, for the students, me, the Museum and the department. We really got some useful stuff from the work of the students. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 69.168.144.135 URL: http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 01/11/2010 10:03:36 AM Hi Bill, You write, "history as a discipline would be weaker if preparing future public historians became the dominant goal of history departments. " I should think that preparing students to communicate with the public about history would only strengthen the position and standing of history...? Just a thought. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.225 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 01/11/2010 10:47:33 AM Shawn, All I meant by that sentence is that history departments are probably still obligated to teach the core disciplinary methods for historical analysis rather than the application of those methods to communicate historical knowledge to a broader public. In other words, teaching history broadly construed (as a means to teach various "transferable skills and discipline specific methods) rather than simply focusing on preparing public historians. Narrowing our focus to study on particular group of methods would run the risk of limiting the applicability of a history degree and moving it from among core courses of the humanities to a more marginal, and frankly vocational, position. After all, there are a limited number of public historians in the US at any given time. History majors who receive a broader exposure to historical methods have the basic skills to go one to study law, enter business, become public servants, or even go on to study history at the graduate level as well as work as public historians. Is that more clear? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Hubert EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.102.249.90 URL:

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DATE: 08/11/2010 03:51:01 AM For those not taking that class, but would like to start playing with museum and archival standards, creating object data etc. <a href="http://www.collectconcept.de">http://www.collectconcept.de</a> (CollectConcept) is a free online tool which supports a variety of standards and can be used for free.. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 12/11/2009 10:17:31 AM ----BODY: <p>It's cold here! So a frigid Friday Varia:</p> <ul> <li>This is <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10547">Sebastian Heath's account of the CPAC (</a>Cultural Property Advisory Committee) meeting in Washington, D.C. </li> <li>This is an interesting concept: <a href="http://www.twhistory.com/">TwHistory</a>.&nbsp; Check it out. (via <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">R. Scott Moore</a>)</li> <li>This is a cool post on the <a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/2009/12/graves-ofarchaeologists.html">graves of archaeologists</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/mi chael-fronda-lecture-at-und.html">The First Cyprus Research Fund lecturer</a>, <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521516943">Micha el Fronda, has a book cover</a>!</li> <li><a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/On-Brink-ofBankruptcy-Greece-Spreads-Panic-in-European-Union-1848">This can't be good news for Greece</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/12/091211_cyprus_grave_robbed_ nh_sl.shtml?s">This is strange news</a>.&nbsp; Tassos Papadopoulos grave was robbed and his body stolen.&nbsp; </li> <li>But this is undoubtedly good new for Bismark and the rest of us who appreciate <a href="http://www.bismarcktribune.com/app/blog/?w=theedgeofthevillage">Aaron Barth's quirky ruminations</a>.</li> <li>This is good news: <a href="http://lateantiqueostia.wordpress.com/">The Kent-Berlin Ostia Excavations got the funding it needed to continue</a>, <a href="http://lateantiqueostia.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/bankrupt/">after almost having to pack it in</a>.&nbsp; </li> <li><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/12/10/holiday-reading/">Go to Teaching Thursday and tell us what you're reading this holiday break</a>.&nbsp; There is no excuse not to and we know that you are going to be reading something.&nbsp; So, please.</li> <li>Big news about the 2010 Wilkins Lecture in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota... so stay tuned.</li> <li>I've been invited to give the <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/about/robinson.htm">Elwyn B. Robinson at the Chester Fritz Library at UND</a>.&nbsp; Readers of this blog know my interest in

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Elwyn B. Robinson so this a particular honor.&nbsp; More on my subject soon.</li></ul> <p>Ok, I&nbsp; better get back to this stack of grading, but I'll check back and update this quick hits and varia over the course of the day.&nbsp; I am sure there are things that I meant to include, but they just slipped my mind at this hectic time of the semester.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Fun Web Data and Some Light Duty Analysis STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: some-fun-web-data-and-some-light-duty-analysis CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 12/10/2009 12:26:57 PM ----BODY: <p>Some quick notes on Google data for the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> Website.&nbsp; I did this mostly for fun, but the results are sort of interesting... <p><b>Google Trends</b> <p>The goal of this short report is to summarize my very superficial analysis of our site data via the <a href="http://www.google.com/trends">Google Trends interface</a>. I suspect that this report will raise more questions than answers, but some of the patterns in the data are interesting (and perhaps vaguely alarming). As with all things Google, they are relatively opaque concerning what variable go into their analysis, but I suspect that they are more or less stable and the analysis is systematic. <p><i>Analysis of und.edu</i> <p>This first graph shows the number of visitors who visit the website over a 1 day period. This chart compares und.edu (in blue) with ndsu.edu (on red), and as a control grandforksherald.com (in gold). The most curious thing about these graphs is the huge drop in traffic over summer of 2008. This could be a simple matter of the data that Google for analysis, but if it is associated with a particular change in the way that the site was organized, the we should make note that visitors stopped visiting our main domain (i.e. und.edu) rather abruptly and most never returned. <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a73e422e970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="134" alt="clip_image002" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e51970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>Moreover, the general trend, according to page rank, is that our site (as well as ndsu’s site) has become less popular through time. It is interesting to note, however, that the downward trend appears to be the case will any number of university home pages. This chart adds sdstate.edu (gold) and wichita.edu (green) to the chart. The similar slide over

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the summer months of 2008 suggest that the pronounced slide in und.edu has at least something to do with how Google collected data. <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a73e423a970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="134" alt="clip_image004" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e5d970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>To compare the decline in the number of visits to main domains, here is a chart comparing four major big ten universities: osu.edu (blue), psu.edu (red), umich.edu (gold or, better, maize), and umn.edu: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a73e4246970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="134" alt="clip_image006" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e63970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>They all show similar declines with a slide during the summer months of 2008 (although this slide is far less pronounced at osu.edu). <p>The rather steady decline of the und.edu domain also appears in the data prepared for Google Ad Planner. Of course, in this context Google is trying to sell us on advertisements, so they have every interest in showing declining visitors, but it is nevertheless interesting: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e67970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="214" alt="clip_image008" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e6d970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>To this can be added some basic demographic data collected by Google. I take this <i>cum grano salis</i>, but it is interesting to contemplate and there might be so real motive for Google to be accurate here. They make money (actually, almost all their money) from per-click advertisements. So the more people who click on your advertisement, the better they do. Consequently it is in their best interest to provide the user with good data to maximize the visibility and profitability of their advertisements. <p>Gender <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e73970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="67" alt="clip_image010" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e7a970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>Age <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e83970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="166" alt="clip_image012" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e95970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>Education <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a73e426e970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="127" alt="clip_image014" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412e9e970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>While the data from these charts is probably inconclusive, it seems to suggest that visitors to the main domain of university pages are on the decline. This may well reflect the proliferation of servers on campus (and multiple domains), but I suspect that it also reflects changes in how the web is surfed, with visitors less frequently jumping from main page to main page and more frequently entering into domains through numerous other entry points. <p><b>Google Insights for Search (beta) Data</b> <p><a href="http://www.google.com/insights/search/#">This service</a> provides data on “the number of searches for a particular term relative to the total

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number of searches done on Google over time” normalized on a scale of 0-100. To begin, I compared the search terms “University of North Dakota” (light blue) to “North Dakota State University” (red). Since these are specific search terms, it is probably worth noting that NDSU is probably better known was “North Dakota State” than “North Dakota State University”, I included searches for “North Dakota State” (gold). I would guess that the higher “North Dakota State” numbers are bolstered by people searching for things other than the NDSU, like state offices or even general information on the state itself. <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412ea5970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="129" alt="clip_image016" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a73e427d970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>This graph shows the relationship between the overall number of searches in the specific category of colleges (dark blue) and universities to searches for “University of North Dakota” (light blue), “North Dakota State” (gold) and “North Dakota State University” (red); the dark blue line represents the relative growth of the number of specific searches against searches for colleges and universities in general. Apparently “University of North Dakota” performs better as a “global brand” than in the subset of university and college searches. Note the huge spike in searches for North Dakota State and North Dakota State University precipitated by the flooding last spring!</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412eb1970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="136" alt="clip_image018" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412eb8970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p>It is important to note that the downward sloping line does not necessarily mean that the number of searches for “University of North Dakota” is declining, but that the number of searches for this term in relation to the number of searches through Google overall is declining. The line however does decline at a significantly steeper slope than the lines for either “North Dakota State” or “North Dakota State University”. This suggests that the number of searches for our university name have declined more significantly in relation to all searches than searches for our friendly rival to the south. <p>As a check on this, I also compared Google searches for UND versus those for NDSU, recognizing, of course, that <i>und</i> is a very common word where I don’t thing <i>ndsu</i> means anything (it may be a kind of Asian fungus, but even then a rather rare one). To compensate for this I limited our comparison to the U.S. where people use the word und somewhat less frequently than, say, in Germany. I also did a comparison for North Dakota and Minnesota. UND is light blue and NDSU is red. <p>In the US: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a73e4288970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="127" alt="clip_image020" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412ec0970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>In North Dakota (with forecasted data): <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a73e4292970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="136" alt="clip_image022" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a73e4298970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>In Minnesota (with forecasted data): <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412ed0970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-

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width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="134" alt="clip_image024" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412ed9970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>The results here were surprising. Despite the fact that “UND” is a word, it is still being searched for less than “NDSU” in North Dakota and they are very close in Minnesota. <p>As another point of comparison for the analysis of various searches, I produced a chart based on searches for “Penn State” (blue), “Ohio State” (red), “University of Michigan” (maize) and “University of Minnesota” (green). The very dark blue line shows the overall searches for the Colleges and University Category. <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412ee0970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="131" alt="clip_image026" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412ee9970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>It clear that the searches for the name of the university reflect the rhythm of academic life (and presumably recruitment), with peaks in September and October. To see whether I could isolate other, nonacademic influences, I plotted searches for WCHA (red), “Fighting Sioux” (gold) and “University of North Dakota” (blue). To be safe, I checked the WCHA against searches for “Frozen Four” and found them almost completely parallel. I also checked “Fighting Sioux” against “Sioux Hockey” and found that they carved a similar pattern. In any event, it is interesting to note how little the Fighting Sioux’s end of the season battles has on searches for the term “University of North Dakota”. <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412eee970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="129" alt="clip_image028" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876412ef5970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>Like the charts based on visits to various specific pages and domains, these charts (which show specific searches) also show a decline of searches for broad forms of classification. This chart reflects the decline in specific searches for the name of the university (i.e. University of North Dakota) and it more or less coincides with the decline in site visits to und.edu as a specific domain. The best analysis of this correlation is that visitors to our site (which according to our in-house Google Analytics data have remained relatively stable) are entering through venues other than the main und.edu page and they are not searching for the university through general search terms like “University of North Dakota”.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Thesis Defense: The Representation of Salvation in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: thesis-defense-the-representation-of-salvation-in-the-sayings-of-thedesert-fathers CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 12/09/2009 07:33:09 AM ----BODY: <p>Paul Ferderer defends his M.A. Thesis today at 1 pm in O'Kelly 221.&nbsp; He will be my first student to write in my area of research (the previous group includes theses on Frankish Cyprus, Roman military equipment, and Caesar's Gallic Wars).&nbsp; So this alone is reason to celebrate.&nbsp; More importantly, Paul is a great guy.&nbsp; He worked with us last year in Cyprus and has continued to help manage data this fall.&nbsp; He is a regular visitor to my office and an expert on the NFL, professional wrestling, and public service announcements.&nbsp; He also is a thoughtful commentator on the state of evangelical Christianity and longstanding member of our Latin Friday Morning group.&nbsp; It will be sad to see Paul move on, but wherever he lands will get a first class mind and an all around good guy. <p>Here's the abstract for his thesis: <blockquote> <p>This thesis examines four prominent works of monastic literature composed during the third through the sixth centuries and contrasts the representations of salvation within them.&nbsp; The <i>Lives </i>of Constantine and Antony, <i>The Lausiac History</i> and <i>The Sayings of the Desert Fathers</i> discussed conceptions of salvation in some of the earliest forms of monastic literature.&nbsp; The contention of this thesis is that in relation to the major works of monastic literature composed during the same period, <i>The Sayings</i>, articulated an existential dimension of salvation experienced as deliverance from sin and manifested in restored communion between God and the believer.&nbsp; Using genre as its primary unit of analysis, this study reveals the unique theology of salvation found in <i>The Sayings of the Desert Fathers</i>. <p>While this study focuses on the early monastic community, it has much broader implications in the study of historical theology and Late Antique religion.&nbsp; This study’s theological focus contributes to the existing discussions on the holy man of Late Antiquity.&nbsp; At present, such scholarship remains focused on the sociological implications of ancient religion.&nbsp; This thesis provides a point of departure for studies of theological texts as works that describe the intellectual history of Late Antiquity.&nbsp; <p>The present discourse on the history of Christianity places much of its emphasis on Western Christendom.&nbsp; Saint Augustine and Aquinas remain the exemplars of Christian thought, and the reformation the pinnacle of the church’s impact on the course of history.&nbsp; This thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship which probes Eastern foundations of Christian spirituality through the monastic movement and its rich intellectual history.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p></blockquote> <p>He wants his defense to be open to the public.&nbsp; So if you know Paul or this topic interests you, stop in to see the show!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Small Town Archaeology III pt.2 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: small-town-archaeology-iii-pt2 CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 12/08/2009 08:24:38 AM ----BODY: <p>As promised yesterday, here is the second part of our salvaging expedition to Crookston, Minnesota.&nbsp; Our goal was a beautiful, 1898, yellow-brick house which was to be demolished in the levy building projected on the banks of the Red Lake River.&nbsp; The buff bricks immediately tie the house to the building traditions of the Red River Valley.&nbsp; Numerous brick buildings in the region sport these buff colored bricks produced at either the Crookston or Grand Forks brickworks.&nbsp; The house preserved some nice architectural detail.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d87b8970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Crookston House" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d87bd970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d87c3970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ArchDetail" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306a19970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">But also some unmistakable signs of age.&nbsp; The back wall of the house showed significant distress.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d87ca970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="276" alt="Crackedwall" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d87d3970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">It was interesting to see that the builders had arranged a single course of bricks perpendicular to the courses used in the rest of the house (I am sure there is an architectural term for this and I suspect that I knew it once, but now I can't remember it!).&nbsp; It served as an informal cornice immediately above ground level.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306a36970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Brickdetail" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d87dd970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d87e2970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Backwall" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306a4e970c

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-pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>We were not the first salvagers in the house.&nbsp; Early arrivals had removed much of the kitchen cabinets and counters, but had left behind the two working flour bins with hardware.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306a52970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="332" alt="KitchenRemoval" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306a60970c -pi" width="224" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d87f6970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="332" alt="flourbin" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306a68970c -pi" width="224" border="0"></a> </p> <p>They had also removed the carpets from the first floor and exposed in the process the hardwood floors on the lower level.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306a72970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="332" alt="hardwoodfloor" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8800970b -pi" width="224" border="0"></a> </p> <p>They had, somewhat aggressively, removed the wooden railing from the interior stair case.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8809970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="RailingRemoval" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306a92970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Despite the efforts at salvaging, the house itself retained features common to its age including nicely executed wood frames around the doors, wooden doors with attractive hardware, some well-maintained three-pane windows, and early 20th century duct covers.&nbsp; We scoped out the situation quickly and decided to attempt the most serious salvaging projects first.&nbsp; This involved the turn of the century picture window with stained glass insert. The window was held in place by a relatively narrow trim piece that once removed, allowed us to remove the window and pane without any damage. I'd like to think that the stained glass was original to the house.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306a9d970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="205" alt="Window" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8812970b -pi" width="304" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306ab0970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="205" alt="Window2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306aba970c -pi" width="139" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">We then turned out attention to doors (my co-conspirator Bret Weber was in search of 30 inch wooden doors for his roughly contemporary house in Grand Forks) and the duct covers.&nbsp; My house has forced air hear that comes up through the floor.&nbsp; We keep saying that we'd like to have in wall ducts and these early 20th century duct covers would complement our 1900 American four-square's architecture.&nbsp; It was interesting to see that some of the duct covers had lost their ornate little regulators.&nbsp; Bret pointed out how these small hoops (visible in the top picture below) turned a braided piece of metal (not a

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screw!) that pushed or pulled a metal flap that opened or closed the duct.&nbsp; A very elegant solution!</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306ac8970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="289" alt="DuctCover" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d881c970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8820970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="DuctCoveriWall" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306aea970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Examining the doors revealed some nice early 20th century hardware.&nbsp; We expected to see glass door knobs, but the intricate work on the mortise locks, in particular, attracted our attention.&nbsp; I think that I could see some art deco influences on the design, so my feeling is that these date to the second quarter of the 20th century, but then again, they were consistent throughout the house and it is hard to imagine a systematic effort to replace all the door hardware 40 years after the house was completed.&nbsp; It is possible that these are original.&nbsp; The mortise lock and hardware was relatively easy to salvage.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8826970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="256" alt="Mortiselock" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d882a970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8832970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="228" alt="Hardware" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d883a970b -pi" width="307" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8842970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="228" alt="Hardware2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8847970b -pi" width="154" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">From an archaeological perspective, it was interesting (although unsurprising) to see that all the meters were removed from the outside of the house.&nbsp; The house was quite literally "off the grid" in that some of the tools which embedded the house within the community fabric were stripped away.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d884c970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="204" alt="ElectricMeter" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306b5f970c -pi" width="138" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306b6a970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="204" alt="GasMeter" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306b6e970c -pi" width="302" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">On the other hand, there were all sorts of reminders that the house had recently been lived in.&nbsp; The reminders of everyday life were haunting.&nbsp; Christmas lights, an outlet, a marble.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8855970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-

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bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Christmas lights" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8858970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a72d8863970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="284" alt="outlet" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306b7a970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306b83970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="600" alt="Marble" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876306b89970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kay Hegge EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 174.39.242.36 URL: http://prairieskyline.blogspot.com DATE: 12/09/2009 09:36:27 AM Oh, I'm so glad you salvaged these beautiful items! This house was not on our list. Your photographic story gives the house a proper goodbye. Thank you! Kay ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Alexa EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 173.26.215.131 URL: DATE: 12/09/2009 10:16:41 AM As the architectural historian who documented this house in preparation for its demolition, I am very pleased to see that much of the interior elements will be salvaged. I hope plans have been made for salvage of the lovely brick. FYI the door hardware and stained glass are undoubtedly original to the building. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Small Town Archaeology III STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: small-town-archaeology-iii CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana

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DATE: 12/07/2009 08:05:26 AM ----BODY: <p>On Friday afternoon, Bret Weber (a historian and social worker in the Department of Social Work) headed out to Crookston, Minnesota on a tip that there were a handful of houses there available for salvage.&nbsp; The house that interested us the most was 19th century yellow brick home.&nbsp; Readers of this blog know that I have an interest in what I've termed "small town archaeology" (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/mo re-small-town.html">more here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/sm all-town-arch.html">here</a>).&nbsp; This is the archaeological processes visible in everyday life in a small town.&nbsp; On Friday, we were able to examine abandonment patterns visible in a group of houses slated for demolition as part of the new levy building project in Crookston.&nbsp; The Red Lake River curls its way through town so a good many historically significant buildings are likely to be effected by this levy building project.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236d75970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Red Lake River" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236d8b970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The town itself is not inconsequential.&nbsp; It is the county seat of Polk County, Minnesota and the seat of the Catholic Bishop with a population of around 8,000 people.&nbsp; In recent years, however, it has suffered economic decline with several local industries closing down.&nbsp; Fortunately, the local hospital and the University of Minnesota at Crookston provide some economic stability to the town, but it can hardly be considered a thriving place.&nbsp; </p> <p>With this context in mind, it is interesting to see how abandonment and salvage processes proceeded locally.&nbsp; </p> <p>Driving through town, one of the strangest sights is a brick building from which the bricks have been removed from one long stretch exposing the wood superstructure.&nbsp; It seems likely that at some point the brick face of the building became unstable and potentially dangerous and was then removed.&nbsp; It, nevertheless, presents and intriguing example of the kind of small town archaeological visible here, and it, of course, begs the question: where did those bricks go?</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236d9a970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="205" alt="Stripped Bricks" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236da4970c -pi" width="304" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236da7970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="205" alt="Stripped Bricks 2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7210037970b -pi" width="139" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">As we approached our goal, it was clear that the salvaging process was well underway.&nbsp; The local humane society thrift store to whom the city had given salvage rights, had explained to us that the Amish had already been through many of the houses.&nbsp; One house had sections of its roof removed.&nbsp; Perhaps the roof had skylights.&nbsp; It is interesting to note that no one had salvaged the air conditioner from this house or any of the relatively "modern" looking windows.&nbsp; The former might make sense if the salvagers were Amish (who

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might not have had any use for an airconditioner).&nbsp; I am not sure why the windows were left behind.&nbsp; Maybe they were too difficult to remove?</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a721003b970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="House Roof" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7210043970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Doors appeared to be popular objects for salvagers.&nbsp; Next door to the house with holes in its roof was (what appeared to me to be) an early 20th century house which had had doors and windows removed, but then the front door was curiously boarded closed.&nbsp; It's hard to understand this practice considering right next to the boarded up door was the gaping hole left by the removed front window.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a721004c970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Doors and Windows" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236db5970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">Further down the street, a more ambitious salvage project had occurred.&nbsp; This house had its siding removed. The presence of black tar paper under the siding (rather than the typical, modern house wrap) suggests that this siding was not of the very recent vintage.&nbsp; The house next to it seemed to be sided in metal.&nbsp; Bizarre.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236db9970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Stripped Siding" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236dbe970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Interestingly, they did not remove the satellite television dish from the house.&nbsp; If this as the work of the Amish, I guess that makes sense.&nbsp; I can also hear my wife saying something about disposable technology.&nbsp; Since these dishes are typically part of a service, it may not have been worth the effort to remove it.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236dc2970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="271" alt="Stripped Siding w Dish" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7210055970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">We arrived at our destination after this impromptu tour of local abandonment practices.&nbsp; For our contribution to the salvaging of this houses (a kind of experimental archaeology), stay tuned tomorrow.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012876236dcd970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Crookston House" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a7210067970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">For some Crookston on the web, check out <a href="http://www.lakesnwoods.com/CrookstonGallery.htm">this page of olde tyme photos</a>, <a href="http://prairieskyline.blogspot.com/">this interesting blog</a>, <a href="http://www.mycrookston.blogspot.com/">this one too,</a> and the work of the <a href="http://www.prairieskyline.com/">Prairie Skyline Foundation</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.175.115.108 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 12/07/2009 09:45:53 AM Very nice. BTW, I just clipped a photographic essay on abandonment in Detroit(in Harper's) and one of the images highlights a satellite dish on a 19th c home. And you're right. Dish Network installs satellite dishes but only takes back the expensive part, which is a little white plastic thing that gets attached to the dish. Most of the time, people don't even bother with that. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.175.115.108 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 12/07/2009 09:51:52 AM ... and I hope you're listening to "Rag and Bone" by the White Stripes during the project -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 12/04/2009 10:18:40 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a little gaggle of links for a snow Friday:</p> <ul> <li>I just discovered <a href="http://www.google.com/trends">Google Trends</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com/insights/search/#">Google Insights for Search</a>.&nbsp; They provide cool methods for collecting data from websites, comparing their visibility, and the relative frequency of search terms.</li> <li>President the University of North Dakota's President R-Kelley gave his State of the University Address this past week.&nbsp; <a href="http://undpresidentsblog.wordpress.com/">Here's the text</a>.&nbsp; Comments off, though.&nbsp; Booo.</li> <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/ausvwi09/engine/match/406190.html">This could still be an interesting an interesting test</a>.&nbsp; It's nice to see the Windies off to a good start.</li> <li><a href="http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/showcase-85/">Some cool images of abandonment in Dubai</a>.&nbsp; I am off to photograph and salvage a turn of the

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century house that will be bulldozed in Crookston, Minnesota this afternoon.&nbsp; </li> <li><a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/11/the-death-of-uncool/">Brian Eno gets archaeological about culture</a>.</li> <li>Richmond Spiders versus Appalachian State.&nbsp; Epic.</li> <li>A Terrific Trifecta on Teaching Thursday: <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/12/03/three-thursdaythoughts-on-teaching-1-lexical-analysis/">one</a>, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/12/03/three-thursday-thoughts-onteaching-2-more-on-cheating/">two</a>, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/12/03/three-thursday-thoughts-onteaching-3-are-you-running-out-of-time/">three</a>.</li> <li>Some public love from Cyprus Airways' Sunjet in-flight magazine (thanks to <a href="http://millinerd.com/">millinerd</a>!)</li></ul> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128761079ae970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="636" alt="Cyprus Air Magazine" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20128761079b9970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Have a great weekend.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kay Hegge EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 174.39.170.249 URL: http://prairieskyline.blogspot.com DATE: 12/05/2009 08:11:09 PM Bill, I believe you will have found out that the turn of the century home has been salvaged except for the woodwork upstairs. The Prairie Skyline Foundation, a historic preservation group salvaged some, but lack of volunteer help prevented us from getting all the woodwork out in time. Please join us, we need people like you who like to salvage! check out our website and or email me! Hope to hear from you! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Are You Running Out of Time? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-are-you-running-out-of-time CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 12/03/2009 07:47:53 AM ----BODY:

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<p>I often have trouble communicating the notion of time to students.&nbsp; For example, it is hard to convince them how long it will take to, say, write a paper.&nbsp; The notion of a timed test is also a challenge as, without fail, a student will tell me that he or she ran out of time.&nbsp; E. P. Thompson in ‚Äú<a href="http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/%7Esalaff/Thompson.pdf">Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism</a>,‚Äù (<em>Past and Present </em>2 (1967), 56-97) suggested that this is because students are one of the groups who still exist in pre-capitalist modes of production (p. 73).&nbsp; Time and its accompanying ‚Äúwork discipline‚Äù have not extended their grasp to embrace the docile student body.&nbsp; Instead, they proceed with their studies as artisans or crafts-people, taking every opportunity to enjoy life and then frantically working to complete piece-work goals.&nbsp; This is even more challenging for an online class where the relationship between the overseer and the artisan is the most attenuated.&nbsp; The only motivation, in this case, is the distant and somewhat mystical end of the semester.&nbsp; This clearly will not do.&nbsp; As part of our job is to complete the process of transforming our fun-loving artisan class into good capitalist automatons, I have discovered a simple trick to impart a sense of foreign (to them) urgency to my online class: a countdown timer. <p><a href="http://www.oneplusyou.com/bb/countdown">This one doesn‚Äôt let you set the hours</a> so according to this countdown timer, grades are due at midnight on December 22nd.&nbsp; It doesn‚Äôt hurt to get them in early, right? <p align="center"> <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="100" width="313" data="http://www.oneplusyou.com/bb/files/countdown/countdown.swf?co=000000&amp;b gcolor=FFFFFF&amp;date_month=12&amp;date_day=22&amp;date_year=0&amp;un=GRADES ARE DUE&amp;size=big&amp;mo=12&amp;da=22&amp;yr=2009"></object><img style="display: none" height="1" alt="" src="http://www.oneplusyou.com/q/img/bb_badges/countdown.jpg" width="1"> <div align="center">Created by <a href="http://www.oneplusyou.com">OnePlusYou</a></div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: bathmateus EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 113.11.6.117 URL: http://www.bathmateus.com DATE: 12/17/2009 04:32:30 AM it was just happens when you will look my comments. Bathmate -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: New Views on Old Data: First Draft STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: new-views-on-old-data-first-draft CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 12/02/2009 07:11:13 AM ----BODY: <p align="left">Find below my first effort at an AIA paper that I will be cowriting with Tim Gregory.&nbsp; It's rough around the edges, but I think on the right track. <p>For more on this research:<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/re claiming-thisve-data.html">Reclaiming Thisve Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/th isve-basin-archaeological-visualization-and-curating-digital-data.html">Thisve Basin, Archaeological Visualization, and Curating Digital Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/fi rst-out-a-first-draft-of-an-intro-for-new-views-on-old-data.html">First Out: A First Draft of An Intro for New Views on Old Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/su rvey-archaeology-finds-as-data.html">Survey Archaeology Finds as Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/mo re-on-thisvi-in-boeotia.html">More on Thisvi in Boeotia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/fi ne-ware-and-function-at-boeotia-thisvi.html">Fine ware and Function at Boeotia Thisvi</a></p> <p align="center">New Views on Old Data: Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results After 30 Years <p align="center">William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota<br>[first draft]</p> <p>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. <p>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. <p>While the

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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. <p>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. <p>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. <p>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. <p>The final step in the production of this data is recording comprehensive

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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. 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 to be kept compatible with changes in technology. <p>_____ <p>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 postClassical ceramics from the Cambridge-Bradford Boeotia Project has shed important light on the relationship between post-ancient ceramics and settlement patterns across Boeotia. <p>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. <p>The survey of the mainland counted over 8700 artifacts and documented over 1700 batches of unique artifacts from the four areas of the survey. <p>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. <p>Against the backdrop of overall artifact density we can show the distribution of postClassical 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. <p>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

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A5 and A8 produced significant quantities of Late Roman – Early Byzantine coarse wares including the ubiquitous combed ware. <p>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 postClassical 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. <p>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%. <p>Since the most significant quantity of postancient 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. <p>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. <p>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

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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. <p>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. <p>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. <p>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”. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Zahi Hawass in the New Yorker STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: zahi-hawass-in-the-new-yorker CATEGORY: Popular Archaeology DATE: 12/01/2009 07:59:30 AM ----BODY: <p>Two weeks ago there was a longish article on Zahi Hawass, the outspoken secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, in the <em>New Yorker </em>(I. Parker, "The Pharaoh" <em>New Yorker </em>(November 16, 2009), 5263).&nbsp; I had expected it to create more of a buzz in the blogosphere (and maybe I missed it over the holidays and all), if for no other reason that Hawass seems to be a polarizing figure. I neither work in Egypt professionally nor have a professional interest in Egyptology, but I still found this report on Hawass to be interesting because of how it understood archaeology as a discipline.&nbsp; </p> <p>Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the article is how little it talks about Hawass as a practicing archaeologist.&nbsp; While I hardly think that the New Yorker is the place for an in-depth critique of his archaeological procedures and methods almost nothing in article discussed archaeological methodology at all.&nbsp; This struck me as quite odd since within the discipline of archaeology the most regular critique of any scholar typically centers around his or her competence in the field and in almost all cases this involves a comment on their methods and practices.&nbsp; In fact, there are plenty of overbearing, pretentious, outspoken, popularizing, selfpromoting, funny hat wearing archaeologists who are quite good in the field or, on a larger scale, run sophisticated archaeological projects.</p> <p>The critique of Hawass focused mainly on his personal management style and his propensity to promote his own projects.&nbsp; The former is relatively uninteresting to me (and I felt some of the critique tapped delicately into longstanding colonialist (or even Orientalist) attitudes about the role and attitude of civil servants in countries which contain archaeological material of "global" (read: Western) significance).&nbsp; The latter, of course, could be more problematic, except that in a place like Egypt (and across the Mediterranean more generally) there are almost an infinite number of potential project (almost!) and a distinctly finite amount of resources (both intellectual and economic).&nbsp; In such an environment, it is difficult to prioritize any one project about another in an absolute and definitive way.&nbsp; As a clever friend of mine is prone to remind me: there is always more archaeology.&nbsp; While it is frustrating to scholars with professional aspirations that one project is privileged over another, it is so common in archaeology that this is hardly worth comment, particular in a country where there will always be field work that needs to be done, always architecture, objects, and landscapes at risk, and always eager foreign and domestic archaeologists wanting to participate.</p> <p>A few of the seemingly oblique references to how archaeology has been carried out in Egypt did not exclude the possibility that these projects were methodologically sound and capable of producing valid historical

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and archaeological knowledge.&nbsp; Hawass's dig at Taporis Magna, for example, was done in collaboration with an amateur archaeology enthusiast and often featured enormous numbers of excavators.&nbsp; Nothing in this seems inherently problematic to me, which is not to say that something funny or irregular isn't going on.&nbsp; The moving of villages upsets my sensibilities somewhat, but these kinds of practices continue wherever archaeology is practiced (and I know for a fact many archaeologists would move parts of villages in search for important finds if it was practical).&nbsp; In fact, later levels have to be removed to get to earlier periods! And excavation "excavating down to the bedrock" in search of new tombs does not necessarily equate to archaeology being a treasure hunt (as Parker quotes one critic of Harwass as saying on page 63)</p> <p>What I am trying to say here actually has nothing to do with Hawass.&nbsp; I was just struck by how foreign this article was to how archaeologists critique one another.&nbsp; It seems to reflect that archaeological method remains subordinate to the objects discovered.&nbsp; The production of archaeological knowledge is rooted in a well-considered method, consistent field procedures, and careful documentation of every step of the process.&nbsp; The author does not even reference any of this tedious, but essential archaeological nitty-gritty throughout the article.&nbsp; The article seems intent on portraying Hawass as a larger-than-life individual seeking larger-than-life archaeological achievements, and the principle critique seems to be that his achievements do not correspond with his personality.&nbsp; One almost feels that if Hawass made some great discovery all will be forgiven and his personality validated.&nbsp; Among archaeologists, the care with which Hawass achieved even the most modest discovery will likely weigh just as heavily as the magnitude of any discovery in the popular imagination.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Pierre MacKay EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.104.197.147 URL: http://angiolello.net DATE: 12/01/2009 09:50:09 PM One point that is barely mentioned in the New Yorker article is that Z. H. has now achieved total authority over the entire antiquities service. For those of us who love Mediaeval Cairo, this is, at very least, disturbing. It suggests that we can expect the neglect and destruction of Tulunid, Ikhshidid, Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk and even Ottoman Cairo to go on inexorably. In 1965, it was pointed out to me that for any given year of the 1960s, the budget for Pharaonic archaeology and preservation was larger than the entire sum of all annual budgets for mediaeval archaeology and preservation since that service began. The results are obvious to anyone who visits Cairo with the Cresswell map of the city in hand. (Even if this is out of date, it is the only well constructed guide to Cairo.)

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As an example, Cresswell made a start on the recovery of the great bath of Muayyad Sheikh, near Bab Zuweyla in the 20s or 30s, but try and find it now. Visitors to Cairo rarely discover any part of the non-Pharaonic heritage of the city except the dully conventional mosque of Mehmed Ali in the citadel. They need help and guidance for the rest. Does anyone think they will get such help from a service dominated by the crowd-pleasing juggernaut of Pharonic archaeology that Z. H. seems to favor. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blogging at 70,000 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blogging-at-70000 CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/30/2009 07:59:18 AM ----BODY: <p>I should have linked to <a href="http://millinerd.com/2009/11/blogging-c2010-state-of-art.html">Matt Milliner's excellent review of blogging before today</a>, but I guess my mind was too caught up in thinking about my own blog and where it is going.&nbsp; In any event, this past weekend, I passed 70,000 page views and the week before I made my 600th post.&nbsp; I still use both numbers to gage the relevance and vitality of my blog, although I'll conceded Matt's point that page views probably only reflects a portion of my overall visits; some of my visitors may prefer to read my blog on RSS Readers which do not appear as page visits.&nbsp; I suspect my hit count remains a fairly accurate gage of my blog's visibility, if only because the number of page views continues to increase with each passing week.&nbsp; I have about 300 comments so far and they might be a better measure of how my readers engage with my blog. </p> <p>These are some random thoughts that came to my mind thinking about my blog this past weekend after reading Matt's post:</p> <p>One area where I have been struggling is the link between my blog and the wider world of the social media.&nbsp; I Twitter regularly and use Facebook, but I almost never post a link to this blog to those forums.&nbsp; On the other hand, I regularly post links to the Teaching Thursday blog, which I moderate for the Office of Instructional Development at UND.&nbsp; I tweet the weekly posts on this blog (which makes them appear as Facebook status updates) and direct the tweets to a few other serious campus tweeters.&nbsp; Since I've begun this practice, I've had a pretty steady flow of hits from Facebook and Twitter.&nbsp; So, it seems clear that "social network integration" does increase a blog's visibility and attract readers.</p> <p>Matt Milliner, however, rightly points out that there appears to be a real divergence in function between the world of <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">Twitter</a> (<a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">follow me!</a>) and Facebook and the world of blogging.&nbsp; If many of the earliest bloggers used the platform to make public their inner selves, blogging's move to the mainstream has pushed all but the most sophisticated solipsistic bloggers to the margins (a few persist on the <a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/">Technorati Top 100</a>, but fewer and fewer).&nbsp; In their place has emerged the professional blogger who focus beyond themselves onto the world of politics, technology, celebrity gossip, or

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the development of a particular product (e.g. #1 The Huffington Post, #2 TechCrunch, #6 Gawker, #16 The Official Google Blog, et c.).&nbsp; This list, of course, does not even consider the numerous non-bloggish sites that use the same technology as bloggers, Wordpress or Typepad to manage a flow of rapidly updating content.</p> <p>In keeping with these trends, I think that my blog has become less overtly personal and more of a window into my professional world (although to the chagrin of my wife, I refuse to put up firm barriers between my professional self and my essential self. I am what I do.)&nbsp; As Matt points out, "blogging is about writing well or at least learning to write better".&nbsp; Since my career depends in large part on my ability to write, this blog has become increasingly an extension of the professionalized aspects of myself. I am fairly sure that my writing has improved some because of my blogging habit. Even if I don't write better, I certainly write quicker which leaves more time for revision.&nbsp; </p> <p>During my time managing Teaching Thursday, I've found that the most common response from my colleagues to my invitation to blog is that they do not feel confident writing quickly for a public audience.&nbsp; I usually press that this as much like a conversation as an academic paper.&nbsp; It's a lunchtime chat among scholars or the informed discussion of conference participants after the panel has concluded.&nbsp; By&nbsp; attempting to start this kind of conversation, blogging represents an attempt to extend and influence the center.&nbsp; I know that I have a romantic idea of the center as the place where real ideas are exchanged daily because the community of like-minded (or at least similarly minded individuals) has reached a certain critical mass.&nbsp; This exchange of ideas makes the center a place of soft power.&nbsp; The circulation of ideas and network of professional collegial relationships gives the center an undeniable influence over academic disciplines and academia in general.&nbsp; This is not to suggest that the center has a kind of real or hard power influence.&nbsp; I think, all cynicism aside, that the practices of anonymous peer review mitigates any real control over the most obvious manifestations of the academic discourse.&nbsp; It's all about the soft power that the center exerts.&nbsp; To put this in perspective: I am the only trained, historian of the ancient Mediterranean in the state of North Dakota.&nbsp; </p> <p>My goal with this blog is not to necessary infiltrate the center, but to exert a gentle influence, to broaden it gently by attempting to engage it from afar.&nbsp; This hope represents my feeling of geographic isolation out here at the edge of the known world in North Dakota as well as my professional sense of isolation as a teaching professor at a school that hardly ranks among the elite research universities.&nbsp; My blog represents an antidote to my own marginal position in the field, and any modest success allows me to at least imagine that the margins of the field and the profession can exert an influence on the center.&nbsp; Nothing brings we more pleasure than to present my ongoing research and speculative musing. By putting ideas, half-baked or otherwise, out into circulation, I hope that I stimulate other people to think along similar lines or to see productive opportunities that I may have overlooked.&nbsp; </p> <p>Finally, it is the discipline of blogging that I have grown to cherish more than anything.&nbsp; The idea of writing each day -- even for just a half an hour -- in energizing.&nbsp; The requirement of finding enough time to think up something to write pushes me to find at least a moment to think (perhaps carefully) about something each day.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amalia EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 75.22.162.80 URL: http://hellia.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/30/2009 10:08:40 AM "Nothing brings we more pleasure than to present my ongoing research and speculative musing. By putting ideas, half-baked or otherwise, out into circulation, I hope that I stimulate other people to think along similar lines or to see productive opportunities that I may have overlooked." That's exactly the reason that I write and blog as well. And for myself, daily writing has been the key to success and growth as a writer. I definitely agree with you that blogging is about starting a conversation, too. It isn't about being perfect, it's about engaging in a discussion. Great Post. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dr. James Stathis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 72.194.199.127 URL: http://www.celebrategreece.com/media.aspx?ID=109 DATE: 12/03/2009 10:19:45 AM Congrats on hitting 70,000! You look good for your age! Seriously, keep up the good work. On your recent topics of new media, running out of time, etc., CelebrateGreece.com has started to make short videos on ancient Greek historical/archaeological topics. This weekend we're holding the Santa Barbara International Marathon, so we put up a video commemorating the 'original' Marathon: a video 'celebrating' the beginning of the 2500th Anniversary of the Battle of Marathon (490 BC-2010). The video, in one minute, explains to anyone quickly, the importance of the battle of marathon and the saving of Western Civilization. The clip is a snippet of a larger documentary called Greece: Spirits of the Ancients. Thanks. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: millinerd EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 91.184.212.170 URL: http://millinerd.com DATE: 12/03/2009 02:29:19 PM This are some nice insights, especially the "gentle influence" part. In defense of your notoriety, you are the only archaeologist who appeared in the Cyprus Air

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magazine this month. If you haven't seen it let me know and I'll send you a photo of the blurb. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Costa-Gavras's Parthenon STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: costa-gavrass-parthenon CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/27/2009 06:55:36 AM ----BODY: <p>I made a post a few months ago entitled <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/th e-destructive-power-of-the-athenian-acropolis.html">The Destructive Power of the Parthenon</a> (see also <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/mo re-on-the-post-classical-parthenon.html">my brief review of Anthony Kaldellis' book about on the Christian Parthenon</a>).&nbsp; It has become one of my most frequently viewed posts.&nbsp; I was prompted by the controversy over CostaGavras's short film for the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.&nbsp; The controversy stems from the depiction of black glad Christian's defacing the Parthenon sculptures in (apparently) A.D. 438.&nbsp; As I said in my previous post, I have my doubts about the historical and archaeological veracity of this claim - or at least the systematic extent of damage inflicted by iconoclastic Christians - but I'll leave the archaeological arguments to folks like <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Troels Myrup</a> who specialize in the phenomenon. </p> <p>I'll refrain for analyzing the film further (taking a colleague's advice: it's just a cartoon!), except to say that the only depiction of figures in the film are folks being destructive to the building (namely Christian Athenians and Lord Elgin).&nbsp; It seems like a missed opportunity not to have shown early archaeologists to whose vision we owe so much of our current view of the Acropolis and its temple.</p> <div align="center"> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFCDD9C333F4C5D:62e6b425-5b12-488e-8f40-5423e2dbb6d5" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; paddingtop: 0px"><div id="8211113d-70b5-4641-b1a0-6a93150e0afe" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbkgtsHGDJc&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;" target="_new"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875e3208e970c -pi" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('8211113d-70b5-4641-b1a0-6a93150e0afe'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = &quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;object width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;movie\&quot; value=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/DbkgtsHGDJc&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;\&qu ot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;wmode\&quot; value=\&quot;transparent\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;embed src=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/DbkgtsHGDJc&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot ; type=\&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash\&quot;

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wmode=\&quot;transparent\&quot; width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/embed&gt;&lt;\/object&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&quot;;" alt=""></a></div></div></div></div> <p align="center"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.168.83.124 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/27/2009 07:19:50 PM The saddest thing is that Manolis Korres and Charalambos Bouras were scientific advisers. If I were a classicist, I would have objected to not seeing the clutter of dedications that would have surrounded the monument. I agree, one cannot really be serious by such a fundamentally postmodern document (just as one cannot really be serious about the postmodern Acropolis Museum). Seeking for truth or criticism would mean being duped. Oh, and see how the youtube video is linked to a "call for action." <a href="http://media.causes.com/523562?p_id=6346518">http://media.causes.com/52356 2?p_id=6346518</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Happy Thanksgiving! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: happy-thanksgiving DATE: 11/26/2009 10:52:07 AM ----BODY: <p>Happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. readers.&#0160; And thanks to everyone all the same for making my blogging hobby seem worthwhile!</p><p>What you thought I wouldn&#39;t post today for some reason?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Fine ware and Function at Boeotia Thisvi STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: fine-ware-and-function-at-boeotia-thisvi CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 11/25/2009 09:18:51 AM ----BODY: <p>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.&nbsp; My focus has been on the post-antique material and the Late Roman material in particular.&nbsp; 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.</p> <p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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).&nbsp; </p> <p>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.&nbsp; One of the absolutely fantastic things included in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/144525077">the publication of their survey around Thespiai</a> were a series of data sets.&nbsp; This data included the finds data from the sites discussed in the volume.&nbsp; They easily imported into an Access database and could be queried and quantified.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; </p> <p>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.&nbsp; 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, <em>DXAE</em> 12 (1986), 287-304 and T. Gregory, <em>BS/EB </em>2 (1986), 155-175).&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is curious, however, to see so little evidence of for the fine ware in the local landscape.&nbsp; </p> <p>Another useful point of contrast is the distribution of fine wares across the Late Roman landscape in the Corinthia.&nbsp; David Pettegrew's recent analysis of this data (Pettegrew, <a href="http://www.atyponlink.com/ASCS/doi/abs/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743"><em>Hesperia </em>76 (2007), 743784</a>) showed that close to 10% of all Late Roman material collected from the

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intensive survey was fine ware most of which was imported.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; These were the types of buildings likely to produce assemblages including imported fine wares.&nbsp; 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 (<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/147922">T. Gregory, <em>Hesperia </em>54 (1985), 411-428</a>).&nbsp; </p> <p>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.&nbsp; 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 href="http://books.google.com/books?id=q0hMf5vu7kgC&amp;lpg=PA2&amp;dq=Byzantine %20Style%2C%20Religion%2C%20and%20Civilisation&amp;pg=PA38#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp; f=false">A. Dunn, in <em>Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilization in Honour of Sir Steven Runciman</em>. (Cambridge 2006), 38-71</a>).&nbsp; 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!).&nbsp; 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 <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/pylakoutso petria_archaeological_project/">the cosmopolitan assemblages found at our coastal site on Cyprus</a> or the villas of the Late Roman Corinthia.&nbsp; </p> <p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; </p> <p>For more on this research:<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/re claiming-thisve-data.html">Reclaiming Thisve Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/th isve-basin-archaeological-visualization-and-curating-digital-data.html">Thisve Basin, Archaeological Visualization, and Curating Digital Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/fi rst-out-a-first-draft-of-an-intro-for-new-views-on-old-data.html">First Out: A First Draft of An Intro for New Views on Old Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/su rvey-archaeology-finds-as-data.html">Survey Archaeology Finds as Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/mo re-on-thisvi-in-boeotia.html">More on Thisvi in Boeotia</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching (with Twitter) Tuesday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-with-twitter-tuesday CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/24/2009 08:15:09 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-With-Twitter-Notfor/49230/"><em>The Chronicle of Higher Education </em>this weekend ran a story on Teaching with Twitter</a>.&nbsp; Aside from its appealing alliteration, the story presented two case studies of faculty who use Twitter in the classroom. One was from a consumer science class at Purdue and the other <a href="http://www.utdallas.edu/~mrankin/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm">a history class at University of Texas at Dallas</a>.&nbsp; Both used Twitter as an official back channel for their classes providing students with another opportunity to ask questions, interact with one another, and archive these remarks (organized through <a href="http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags">twitter hashtags</a>) so that students could return to them later.&nbsp; The faculty members report more or less positive experiences from setting up these Twitter back channels, although the Chronicle story and the faculty members themselves admitted that there was some risk involved.&nbsp; Students could, for example, use Twitter as a place to snipe at the professor or other students in a semianonymous setting.&nbsp; On the other hand, Twitter could serve as a platform to engage students more fully in the classroom experience -- especially students who are too shy or reserved to speak out.</p> <p>Longtime readers of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">my blog know that I experimented with Twitter in a graduate seminar</a>.&nbsp; In my experiment, I hoped to encourage the students to "read actively" and tweet their impressions of the various books as they read them.&nbsp; These impressions could range from quotes to questions, visceral responses, or even complaints.&nbsp; I had hoped that the Twitter feed would make the exercise of reading -- typically an intensely private, personal, and reflective time, into something that was public, social, and dynamic.&nbsp; The goal was to break down some of the intellectual isolation (first year graduate) students sometimes experience when reading a challenging text and encourage them to formulate ideas while reading to break through the tendency to read a book passively.&nbsp; </p> <p>Using social networking applications to increase student engagement is an interesting example of how technology as technology can engage students in new ways.&nbsp; My History 101: Western Civilization class this fall is relatively large (150 students) and meets once a week, at night, in

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a large theater style room.&nbsp; The basic content driven lectures are available online (here).&nbsp; The classroom time focuses on "primary source" texts (i.e. texts from Antiquity and the Middle Ages), recapping the major points in the content driven lecture, inclass writing assignments, testing various models for understanding the past, and informal question-and-answer sessions that focus, generally, on more difficult concepts.&nbsp; I playfully refer to the classroom time as a live concert environment and the podcast lectures as the studio album.&nbsp; While this can produce an exciting, improvised, and responsive environment, the class tends to become dominated by a relatively small faction (10%-20% (i.e. 20-30) students).&nbsp; </p> <p>Many of the students in the class are freshman from smaller high school who find the large classroom to be a very foreign and maybe intimidating environment. At the same time, <a href="http://www.utdallas.edu/~mrankin/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm">as Monica Rankin points out</a>, many students are comfortable with the social-networking environment native to Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.&nbsp; The plan would be to use the familiar and more intimate environment of the social media to bridge the gap between the student and their classmates (and teacher) in the large lecturestyle classroom.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostas EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 88.218.86.188 URL: http://digitalheritage.wordpress.com DATE: 11/24/2009 03:22:26 PM Hi Bill, very interesting...May I ask, did your experiment with Twitter work after all?! ! Thanks,! ! Kostas. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Thisvi in Boeotia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-on-thisvi-in-boeotia CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 11/23/2009 09:12:48 AM -----

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BODY: <p>The plan is to wrap up a draft of the Thisvi paper by the end of today, and it looks vaguely possible.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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").&nbsp; </p> <p>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.&nbsp; I've put up versions of these maps&nbsp; before in a slightly modified form.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Each dot represents one artifact.&nbsp; Their location within survey transect is arbitrary.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89d0f970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Thisvi2009ClassicalHellArtifacts" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875ca55b0970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875ca55b4970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Thisvi2009LRArtifacts" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875ca55bd970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875ca55c1970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Thisvi2009ByzArtifacts" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89d1f970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">The first map (blue dots) represents Classical-Hellenistic material, the second (red dots) Late Roman material, and the third (gold dots) Byzantine-Medieval material.&nbsp; They clearly show that by the Late Roman period, a significant contraction in the distribution of material occurred around the city of Thisvi.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">Unfortunately, the maps which appear above are incomplete.&nbsp; 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).</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89d2f970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="Thisvi2009SurveyAreas" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89d36970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">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.&nbsp; These charts are based on the almost convincing

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assumption that the total sample of each area is roughly equivalent and thus the proportions of various types of material is roughly comparable.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89e58970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="133" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89e62970b -pi" width="220" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89e68970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="133" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89e6f970b -pi" width="220" border="0"></a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875ca5721970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="133" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89e8d970b -pi" width="220" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875ca5725970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="133" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6c89eb5970b -pi" width="220" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">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.&nbsp; This is large due to two significant Late Roman sites in each of these areas.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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).&nbsp; Eliminating these concentrations, however, produces a fairly even distribution of postClassical material across the entire survey area ranging from 7% in Area A to just over 13% in Area E.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p> <p align="left">For more on this research:</p> <p align="left"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/re claiming-thisve-data.html">Reclaiming Thisve Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/th isve-basin-archaeological-visualization-and-curating-digital-data.html">Thisve Basin, Archaeological Visualization, and Curating Digital Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/fi rst-out-a-first-draft-of-an-intro-for-new-views-on-old-data.html">First Out: A First Draft of An Intro for New Views on Old Data</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/11/su rvey-archaeology-finds-as-data.html">Survey Archaeology Finds as Data</a></p> <p align="left"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Awesomeness STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-awesomeness CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits CATEGORY: Weblogs DATE: 11/20/2009 10:00:14 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick Friday awesomeness for the weekend.</p> <p>First, if you're in Toronto, check out <a href="http://individual.utoronto.ca/nakassis/index.html">Dimitri Nakassis</a>'s talk at the Royal Ontario Museum. Dimitri is a valued member of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/" title="Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> and helps us connect the Aegean Bronze Age with the evidence for the same period on Cyprus.</p> <p><br /></p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6bb443b970b -pi" width="384" height="480" alt="200911200948.jpg" /><br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> A second burst of awesomeness comes from this photo of a poster at Indiana University of Pennsylvania's Stapleton Library. <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/">Scott Moore</a>, PKAP co-director and my co-editor of the volume, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-HistoryMedieval-Post-Medieval-Greece/dp/0754664422"><i>Archaeology and History in Roman, Medieval, and Post-Medieval Greece,</i></a> was a bit miffed that the book had dropped below the 3,000,000 sales rank on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-History-Medieval-Post-MedievalGreece/dp/0754664422">Amazon</a> (3,082,125 to be exact), so he fired up the ole Scott-Moore-IUP-PR machine. Ashgate should be braced for the influx of new orders. I just ordered two more myself. </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6bb4438970b -pi" width="358" height="480" alt="200911200949.jpg" /><br />

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</div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Go read <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>, <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/" title="Graduate School Blog">UND's Graduate School blog</a>, and <a href="http://pretexts.blogspot.com/">(pre)texts</a>. </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Finally, it's Ohio State - Michigan weekend and Richmond - William and Mary weekend. Two great rivalry games and three schools playing good football right now (sorry, Michigan). <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/No-1-Problem-atMirror-Lake/8916">This story about Mirror Lake on OSU's campus is just gross.</a> Go Spiders and Buckeyes! </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> Have a great weekend! </div> </div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brandon Olson EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 98.172.60.23 URL: http://www.personal.psu.edu/bro118 DATE: 11/20/2009 01:19:09 PM HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, I love that picture. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dallas EMAIL: [email protected]

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IP: 65.60.192.124 URL: DATE: 11/20/2009 03:12:15 PM Can you make that the official PKAP logo or something?? it's just hilarious. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Some Practical Thoughts about Online Teaching STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-some-practical-thoughts-about-online-teaching CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 11/19/2009 07:53:26 AM ----BODY: <p><i>Cross-posted to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>.</i></span></font></p> <p>Yesterday at noon, the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/" title="Department of History">Department of History</a> here at the <a href="http://www.und.edu/" title="University of North Dakota">University of North Dakota</a>, held a roundtable discussion on online teaching. We invited a group of experienced online teachers to join the round table from different fields. Mick Beltz (<a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/michaelbeltz/" style="text-decoration: underline; color: #003366;">a regular Teaching Thursday contributor</a>) from Philosophy and Religion, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/bill-caraher/" style="textdecoration: underline; color: #003366;">Bill Caraher</a>, from History, Tim Prescott, from Math, and Bret Weber (<a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/bret-weber/" style="text-decoration: underline; color: #003366;">another Teaching Thursday regular</a>), from the Department of Social Work. The group focused on the differences between online teaching and classroom teaching. Moreover, the discussion was intensely practical. The Department of History, like many departments across campus, is exploring the potential and pitfalls of online teaching. The audience of graduate students and faculty enthusiastically engaged the panelists and the conversation spilled into the hall after the workshop was over.</span></p> <p>I offer the following brief summary of the teaching roundtable and I encourage the conversation to continue in the comments section over on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>.</p> <p>Bret Weber, of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/socialwo/">Department of Social Work</a>, offered a number of points which emphasized that teaching and learning need to be at the core of online classes. It's not just about the technology! And it's not an online class, it's a class online. To go along with this observation he stressed that teaching online must be interactive both between students and between teacher and student. The more the students interact with each other and the instructor the more likely they are to achieve the course's objectives. In fact, recent students have shown that the quantity of discussion posts, for example, correlates more strongly with learning than the quality of the posts. Finally, Bret emphasized that teaching online can be enormously time consuming in the course planning, set up, and the maintenance of

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an online class, but most importantly in terms of the amount of time that needs to be afforded all students especially during the early weeks of the semester.</p> <p>Tim Prescott of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/math/">Department of Math</a> emphasized the need for more steps in weekly assignments to make up for the lack of regular interaction. He said that this extended from actual content based assignments to the logistics of making sure the students set up proctored tests, completed assignments on time, and understood the basic mechanics of a class. Finally, Tim reinforced the difficulty of ascertaining whether a student understood complex material. Teaching online requires that we develop ways to ascertain how well our students are moving through material in the class so that our first indication of a problem is not a high-value assignment.</p> <p>Mick Beltz, who teaches in the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/philrel/" title="Dept of Philosophy and Religion">Department of Philosophy and Religion</a>, talked about how online classes followed a different rhythm from classroom courses. There was more weekly attention necessary to ensure that an online class functioned properly. The work also tends to be greater at the very beginning of the semester because the majority of assignments and activities need to be available to students at the first day of the semester.This different work rhythm sometimes made the workload feel more substantial than a classroom based course, which might experience hectic moments, like grading midterm exams, while requiring less daily attention. Mick also pointed our that online courses need to communicate the instructor's expectations to students clearly and regularly. Unlike classroom taught courses, most students will be unfamiliar with the online learning environment. The irregular schedule of online courses, the different forms of peer interaction, and a perceived distance between instructor and student would sometimes lead students to neglect online courses more than they would classroom taught ones. The result of this was more MIA students who drift away from the class and do not succeed.</p> <p>I added that teaching online retained elements of very tradition instruction with its emphasis on lectures (as a formal means of instruction, information dissemination, and modeling of good practice). I also noted that the online environment is particularly suited to intensive writing because writing becomes the key means for interacting between the student and faculty member. Finally, I urged the group to embrace the panopticon of online teaching (with thanks to Mick Beltz for introducing me to the link between <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/3328401">Foucault's idea of the panopticon</a> and the online teaching environment). The online environment presents to the faculty member these decisively partitioned reports on student achievement on the computer screen. The students, on the other hand, can see far less of their fellow students achievements and, as Mick pointed out, tend to focus their interaction with the instructor far more than in a regular classroom where the physical presence of other students demands some, often non-verbal, form of engagement.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Wednesday: Teaching with PKAP Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-wednesday-teaching-with-pkap-data CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 11/18/2009 07:38:26 AM ----BODY: <p>I've been asked a few times over the last few years about whether I use our archaeological video, data, and analyses in teaching. Since I've been out of the upper-level teaching racket for a few years now, I have to honestly answer "no". Every now and then, however, I hear from a colleague elsewhere who used some of the material that we made available on the web in their classes. This fall, for example, I heard from <a href="http://www.luc.edu/classicalstudies/faculty.shtml#Gawlinski">Laura Gawlinski at Loyola University - Chicago</a> who used our documentary <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html"><i> Survey on Cyprus</i></a> in her introduction to archaeology class and passed along some great questions from her student regarding our methods and fieldwork procedures.</p> <p>This past week, I've been helping <a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/history/faculty/faculty/fronda/">Michael Fronda of McGill University</a> to use PKAP's interactive map and documents from our website in his Ancient History Methods class. He graciously agreed to pass along the assignment and let me post it here:</p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <strong>HIST 450: Ancient History Methods</strong><br /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <b>Fall 2009<br /></b> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <b>Final Project<br /></b> </div> <p><b>Assignment:</b> You will analyze some of the archaeological data from the Archaeological Project (PKAP) and synthesize this with other historical information (from primary sources, inscriptions, coins, etc.) and modern scholarship, to draw historical conclusions about the Cyprus (especially the site of Koutsopetria) during the Roman (especially Late Roman) period. Your report should be 10 pages NOT INCLUDING bibliography, maps, diagrams, etc. It may not longer than 20 pages in total.</p> <p>For this report, you MUST consult and make use of the following:</p> <p>‚òû The 2004 preliminary report from PKAP, especially any maps, charts and diagrams.<br /> ‚òû The PKAP webpage (<a href="http://www.pkap.org/" title="PKAP">http://www.pkap.org</a>), which has general information on the site as well as some photos, giving an idea of the landscape and topography.<br /> ‚òû The PKAP online interactive map (<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html">http://www.und.

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nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html</a>). This is vitally important, since it contains information on the location of walls and other features discovered at the site (such as cut blocks, gypsum blocks, walls, etc.).</p> <p><b>Some Background Information:</b> Pyla-Koutsopetria is located on the southern coast of Cyprus, not far from the important ancient city of Kition (Citium; modern Larnaca). The main site lies along the sea on a narrow coastal strip. To the north are two very steep plateaus: Vigla (directly north of the main surveyed area) and Kokkinokremnos (to the northeast).</p> <p>The project has surveyed much of the coastal strip (see the maps), but also the heights; we will concern ourselves mostly with the lower site. It is worth noting, however, that high densities of artifacts have been found on both plateaus; as well, Kokkinokremnos was the site of a neolithic-Bronza Age settlement.</p> <p>The great majority of ceramic artifacts come from the Late Roman period, with later periods also represented (Medieval, Ottoman, Modern). The site was, however, probably occupied throughout antiquity.</p> <p>A large area was excavated, revealing cut blocks, gypsum (a stone with a marble-like appearance, used decoratively) and a great many fragments of wall paintings. It has tentatively been identified as a church. A significant number of "features" are strewn about the site, including numerous worked stones, architectural features (stone door pieces, pediment fragments, marble revetment, gypsum blocks, etc.).</p> <p><b>Answer these questions:</b> Analyze the available data, focusing on the lower surveyed and excavated area. Look especially at the distribution of artifacts found: consider chronological, topographical, and typographical (ie, what sorts of artifacts) distribution. Consider also the geomorphological information provided. In your report, be sure to answer the following questions:</p> <p>☞ What type of site was Pyla (small town, big city, fortress, resort area, industrial town, cult center, etc)?<br /> ☞ How do you explain the distribution of artifacts? Consider both historical processes and methodological considerations.<br /> ☞ What happened to the site at the end of the Roman period, and why?</p> <p><b>I expect that you will:</b></p> <p>☞ thoroughly utilize the online interactive map.<br /> ☞ consult outside sources, both modern and ancient. L'Année Philologique will be an important tool, no doubt.<br /> ☞ include a proper bibliography.<br /> ☞ try to impress me by utilyzing different research tools and integrating different sorts of evidence.<br /> ☞ write the report as a proper report--do not break it up into separate questions. Thanks.<br /> ☞ draw your own conclusions. I do not want lots of "maybes" and "could bes"-you have the data, use it as an ancient historian and say something about the site.</p> <p><b>_______________________________________________</b></p> <p>And for the record, I do know that Teaching Wednesday is nowhere near as alliterative as <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>. Rest assured though that my inner poet will make a Teaching Thursday available tomorrow.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Survey Archaeology Finds as Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: survey-archaeology-finds-as-data CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 11/17/2009 08:06:26 AM ----BODY: <p>One the small arguments that I make in our paper on re-analyzing the survey finds from the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/">Ohio Boeotia Project</a> 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.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875acb121970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="400" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875acb127970c -pi" width="315" border="0" /></a><br /> <em>OBE Field Recording Sheet</em></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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

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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.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6aac20c970b -pi" width="400" height="618" alt="cherry_apple-ad_cropped.jpg" /><br /> <i>Apple Computer Advertisement from 1985</i></p> <p>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.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875acb130970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="400" alt="Thisvi2009ClassicalTransects" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6aa5f0a970b -pi" width="400" border="0" /></a><br /> <em>Classical Period Finds</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875acb145970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="400" alt="Thisvi2009HellenisticTransects" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875acb14b970c -pi" width="400" border="0" /></a><br /> <em>Hellenistic Period Finds</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2012875acb155970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="400" alt="Thisvi2009LateRomanTransects" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6aa5f1d970b -pi" width="400" border="0" /></a><br /> <em>Late Roman Period Finds</em></p> <p align="left">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 <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a> and in the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> (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

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increasingly susceptible to the same kind of quantitative analysis as more standardized (and in most cases abbreviated) forms of notation.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: First Out: A First Draft of An Intro for New Views on Old Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: first-out-a-first-draft-of-an-intro-for-new-views-on-old-data CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 11/16/2009 08:09:55 AM ----BODY: <p>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. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/">You can read more on our work to re-habilitate and re-analyze this data here</a>. The paper will be in a session called "<a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-out-late-levels-at-earlysites.html">First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites</a>".</p> <p>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".</p> <p>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

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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.</p> <p>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 highlycritical 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia

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CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 11/13/2009 09:38:05 AM ----BODY: <p>Some links on a cloudy Friday morning.</p> <ul> <li>A long time ago, I wrote an online article on <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/">Blogging Archaeology</a>. Now I wonder whether I should write an article on archaeology and the new(er) media. It's exciting that projects are beginning to use Twitter to keep stakeholders and the general public interested in their work. Check out the <a href="http://sitemaker.umich.edu/gabiiproject/home">Gabii Project</a>'s <a href="http://twitter.com/gabiiproject">Twitter feed</a> followed <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">me</a> the other day, and I'm glad they did! They continue a tradition a practice we used during the PKAP season and the <a href="http://twitter.com/OstiaAnticaDig">Ostia Antica excavations</a> used to chronicle their fieldwork. I love my tweets from <a href="http://twitter.com/researchnewsinl">Research News in Late Antiquity</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/chuckjones2000">Chuck Jones' ISAW Tweets</a>. Anyone have any idea who was the first project to Tweet from the field?</li> <li>It would be fantastic to produce an index of good archaeological video on YouTube.</li> <li>The effort to save Michigan State's Classic's Department has moved to <a href="http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Save-Classical-Studies-at-MSU">petition stage</a>. Over 800 signatures so far. I wish I understood the situation there better.</li> <li><a href="http://gracecheow.com/">This is a cool blog design</a>.</li> <li>Really busy day on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a> yesterday. Check it out.</li> <li>Firefox is 5 years old. T<a href="http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/happy-birthday-firefox/">he Wordpress folk noted Firefox has crept up on Internet Explore</a> consistently over the last few years. Now it accounts for 45.7% of visitors to their blog. This is up from 32.8% in 2008 and 30.7% in <a href="http://ma.tt/2008/07/ie6independence/">2008</a> and <a href="http://ma.tt/2007/08/browserstats/">2007</a> respectively. (via <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott Moore</a>)</li> <li><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574524402818418042. html">This is how you teach</a> (via <a href="http://cyreynolds.com/">Chuck Reynolds</a>)</li> <li>It's so cool that <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/">Arranged Delirium</a> is back.</li> </ul> <p>Have a good Friday and weekend.</p><br />

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Three Year College STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-three-year-college CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 11/12/2009 08:06:24 AM ----BODY: <p>Check out Teaching Thursday this week, where Joan Hawthorne, the University of North Dakota's Assistant Provost for Assessment and Achievement, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/11/12/teaching-thursday-critiquing-thethree-year-solution/">considers Lamar Alexander's recent suggestion</a> in <i>Newsweek</i> magazine that we should consider making a three-year B.A. program available for students.</p> <p><a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/218183">Alexander's suggestion that</a> university education could be completed within three years if universities used space and manpower more efficiently is appealing especially if it could be made to save students a 25% of their tuition. I am skeptical of his math however. Many faculty members work 9 or 10 month salaries that more or less coincide with their teaching loads. It would be necessary, most likely, to increase their compensation in a way that is consistent with their current contractual situation. So some savings would be lost on faculty and presumably staff salaries. Since students would be using facilities for approximately the same duration (that is to say for approximately 36 months of use, simply distributed over 3 instead of 4 years), the percentage of tuition that goes toward maintenance would not be cut in any substantial way. There might, of course, be some initial, perhaps even on-time savings as some facilities -- like residence hall or dinning halls -- could be shut down since the student body would be smaller. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>More significantly, however, the university is part of a larger economic system. As we watch unemployment rates push up over 10%, one wonders whether this very moment would be an ideal time to increase the American full-time workforce by releasing a cohort of able bodies, agile minded young go-getters into the economy one year earlier. In fact, a more intensive university experience would effectively withdraw the ability of college students to participate in the less formal, part time, and relatively unskilled economy that characterizes their employment throughout their 4 or 5 year degree programs and thrust them into the adult job market with expectations of full, formal employment.</p>

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<p>Finally, it is interesting to note that Alexander celebrates the unique character of US Higher Education while at the same time arguing that we should be more like other, frankly, less successful models. Globally, the 3 year degree must be almost as common as the American 4 year model. These 3 year degrees tend to focus less on a broad-based humanities-centered education and more on practical, focused training in a given field. While in many ways these programs rely upon more robust secondary eduction systems, they nevertheless reflect a far less serious commitment to the breadth of education common to American universities. I'm all for tweaking or even "rethinking everything" about American higher eduction, but I am skeptical of any plan that involves modeling our university system on systems that we have already determined to be less successful.</p> <p>In any event, don't just read my post, click on through to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>, and as Prof. Hawthorne asks "bring on the conversation"!<br /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.133.203.164 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/13/2009 02:56:12 PM Interesting. In a faculty meeting at F&M about a month ago, this very question was raised receiving intense debate. Basically, some students have already figured out how to do this, and the administration is wondering whether they should make it more official (to attract more economically diverse students). They're thinking of a pilot. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Ambivalent Landscape of Late Antique Corinth STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: the-ambivalent-landscape-of-late-antique-corinth CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 11/11/2009 08:43:00 AM ----BODY: <p>I'm thinking out loud again. I've been invited to contribute a paper to a conference next fall in Austin and this week one of the organizers asked me for a title of my paper. I thought about it for about an hour and offered: "The

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Ambivalent Landscape of Christian Corinth: The Archaeology of Place, Theology, and Politics in a Late Antique City".</p> <p>I'm not entirely convinced that I have the ability to write a paper that coincides with this title, but a title is a start.</p> <p>My initial thought was to write an article that captures some of the vexing ambiguities present in the Corinthian landscape of the 5th-6th centuries A.D. To do this, my paper would begin with two of my favorite examples of ambivalence in the Corinthian landscape:</p> <p>1. I'd start with the ambivalent language of the two Justinianic texts from the Isthmus (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/ep igraphy-litur.html">that many veteran readers of this blog know and love so well</a>).</p> <p>2. Then I'd talk a bit about the unusual and decidedly ambivalent architecture of the massive Lechaion basilica. Its prominent transepts have long been seen to invoke the architecture of the Epirus, particularly the relatively well-documented group of churches in the immediate vicinity of Nikopolis in Epirus. At the same time, the central ambo and abundant use of Proconnesian marble suggests imperial patronage and the liturgical influence of the Eastern capital. (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ea rly-christian.html">Again readers of this blog, know this argument</a>)</p> <p>I'd like to expand these two points with a few other observations:</p> <p>3. I'd like to do something with the Nymphaion near the Lechaion Basilica. This building was excavated by Stikas in the mid 1950s and published in a fairly preliminary form in 1957 (PAE 1957, 89-94). This building is notable because it was modified extensively in the 6th century. These modifications include the use of opus sectile floors and architectural sculpture that have clear parallels in the Lechaion basilica nearby. The nymphaion, however, does not appear to have any clearly defined religious function. The use of decorative elements that tied the building to the Lechaion church suggested that the basilica extended either liturgical, or perhaps simply symbolic, influence into the larger Corinthian countryside. This influence, however, created ambiguous spaces like the modified nymphaion which was neither strictly religious in function, nor entirely disengaged from the Christianization process</p> <p>4. The Fountain of the Lamps and the Ascleipeion also represent ambivalent spaces in the Corinthian landscape. Both sites show clear evidence for both Christian and pagan use over the 4th and 5th (and perhaps even 6th) centuries. While the evidence continues to be murky and problematic, it would seem foolish not to discuss the relationship between Christians and pagan in a paper on the ambivalent quality of the Corinthian landscape.</p> <p>The more pressing issue, of course, is how does identifying ambivalence in the Corinthian landscape contribute to how we understand pressing historical problems. While I have not thought this out entirely at this stage, I'd argue that embracing the ambiguous position of the Corinthia sheds light on it character as contested space in Late Antiquity. Justinian's efforts to skirt contentious Christological issues and to invest in the construction of monumental Christian churches intentionally subverted ecclesiastical authority of Papacy in the west (under whose authority religious matters in the Corinthia resided). The tentative and ambivalent nature of Justinian's efforts, however, hint that the local residents of the Corinthia were not willing simply to buckle under his political authority, but offered a sufficient threat to warrant Justinian's ambivalent approach to expressing political authority. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

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<p>A parallel perhaps appears between the imperial policy in the 6th century and the relationship between Christians and Pagans earlier in Late Antiquity. While few scholars continue to embrace Christianity and paganism as mutually exclusive categories in terms of Late Antique religious practices, the triumphalizing narrative of Christianization which was so prevalent in Late Antiquity, continues to cast a shadow over how we understand Late Antique religion. In fact, one could argue that the our willingness to accept the narratives of Christianization from antiquity lies in part with their neat correspondence to our own practical categories of religious behaviors. Christians and pagans, sacred and secular space, religious power and secular power, east and west, all form defining polarities in our late modern methods of understanding the world.</p> <p>These polarities coincide well with archaeological practice in particular which tends to categorize evidence in exclusive ways. While the formation of hierarchical typologies of, say, ceramics has been an immense benefit to how we understand the function and chronology of ancient objects, the tendency to create such interpretative categories continues even as the categories themselves become more complex. Thus, for generations archaeologists talked about sacred space or Christians in the archaeological record. Such neat distinctions (which are largely rarely received uncritically by scholars today) often overwrote evidence for more complex and ambiguous definitions within the archaeological record. In this complexity, ambiguity, and ambivalence, once can perhaps find evidence for Corinthian resistance to imperial policy, their opaque and highly practical engagement with religious practices and authority, and their willingness to understand the polysemic character of their built environment.</p> <p>Well, it's at least a start.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Cassandra EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 69.127.12.5 URL: http://www.fluwikie.com DATE: 11/24/2009 01:08:31 PM Fluwikie.com is in the progress of choosing some of the top blogs(which have adequate information) to receive recognition from Fluwikie.com as a Featured Blogger. This award is not meant to be anything other than a recognition that your blog gives adequate information about tactics that directly or in directly raise disease awareness and prevent the transmission of Disease. Simply place the award banner code on your site and your blog will be listed as a Featured Blogger on Fluwikie.com. Flu Wikie is a Private Global Health Watch Group, whose goal is to promote healthy living though the spread of FREE information globally. Thank you for your time and dedication to your blog! Please reply me back with the subject line as your URL to avoid spam and to make sure that you only get the award banner.

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If your Believe in our Goal of Global Health Text link to use for your readers. Text Link: FluWikie Url: <a href="http://www.fluwikie.com">http://www.fluwikie.com</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pagans and Christians in the Journal of Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: pagans-and-christians-in-the-journal-of-late-antiquity CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 11/10/2009 08:08:16 AM ----BODY: <p>The newest number of the <a href="http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_late_antiquity/"><i>Journal of Late Antiquity</i></a> has hit newstands (only if you live in a very dorky community) or, better, the RSS feed. This is only the second year of this ambitious new journal's existence, and as the only major English language journal dedicated to the study of Late Antiquity, I've looked to it with a particularly critical eye. It's clear that the editors have sought papers from both established scholars and "up-and-coming" graduate students and recent Ph.D.s as well as the representing the Eastern and Wester halves of the Roman Empire. This is a good sign. The journal also seems to have a distinctly international character representing well the common ground within the international field of Late Antique Studies.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a66e3db0970b -pi" width="120" height="174" alt="200911100804.jpg" style="margin-right:5px;" /><br /></p> <p>The current number has two articles that immediately caught my eye. First, <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_late_antiquity/v002/2.2 .foschia.html">L. Foschia offers a short article</a> entitled: "The Preservation, Restoration, and (Re)construction of Pagan Cult Places in Late Antiquity, with Particular Attention to Mainland Greece (Fourth-Fifth Centuries)". Foschia argues that the 4th and 5th century saw continued attention to pagan cult places in Greece and drew upon evidence from Argos, Athens, and Kenchreai, the Port of Corinth. At each site, there was evidence for some significant reconstruction of a pagan cult site. This is unlikely to surprise scholars of Late Roman Greece, but is nevertheless a good reminder that some form of large scale, perhaps even institutional, support for paganism persisted into 5th century. The late (and getting later) date of many Early Christian basilicas in Greece reflects that rather belated shift of resources from the sphere of pagan (and in some of the examples used by Foschia, civic) monumental architecture to Christian architecture. The biggest weakness of this paper (which, unfortunately has many small issues that one might hope not to see in a top tier scholarly journal) is the absence of many examples that show how the practice of paganism in Greece represented a broad continuum of behavior from

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formal cult practices (at major sites) to informal, highly ambivalent practices, as seen in late cave sanctuaries or places like the Fountain of the Lamps in Corinth (see, in particular, the work of Tim Gregory, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43615467">Richard Rothaus</a>, and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/26396887">Frank Trombley</a> here) . The evidence from many pagan sites in Greece suggest that the maintenance of more monumental expressions of cult practice may have been the manifestation of something far more "Late Antique" in character than earlier civic or even imperial supported pagan cults. This distinction is important because it understands "late" paganism as part of the same cultural milieu as "early" Christianity and insists that the public expression of religious practice, ritual, and identity is meaningless outside of a view of Greek (or Late Antique) society that does not include all shades of pagans and Christians.</p> <p>The second article worth reading is (<a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">veteran blogger) Troels Myrup Kristensen</a>'s, "<a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_late_antiquity/v002/2.2 .kristensen.html">Embodied Images: Christian Responses and Destruction in Late Antique Egypt</a>". His article looks at the relationship between attacks on pagan images (and sometimes pagans themselves!) and Christian (and more broadly Late Antique) ideas of the body. It's a thought provoking read, and contributes to the discussion of Christianization as a profoundly "embodied" phenomenon which saw its roots in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/16981598">P. Browns, <i>Body and Society</i></a>. Troels does good job of thinking about how bodies worked in the context of both Egyptian monasticism and, to a less extent, Early Christianity and Late Paganism. The only reservation that I had when reading his article was how he dated some of the episodes of destruction to Late Antiquity. The archaeologist in me (and someone who has periodically pondered the seemingly ritual destruction of statues in Greece) has confronted how difficult it is to date episodes of ritual destruction. This is particularly important, as in Egypt (like Greece) the centuries long presence of a powerful and equally iconoclastic Muslim population expands the potential context for ritual destruction of ancient images up until almost the present day. As I know that Troels sometimes reads this blog, I'd love to understand more fully how he dates his destroyed statues to the impulses of such Late Antique Christians as Shenoute rather than later Christian or Muslim practices.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Troels Myrup EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 192.38.32.3 URL: http://www.iconoclasm.dk DATE: 11/11/2009 08:25:35 AM Thanks for reading my article, Bill!

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Regarding the issue of dating: I deal with this quite extensively in my dissertation, as it is a question of great complexity. You have to look very carefully at the chronology of use and re-use, something that is often difficult because of poor documentation of the late antique and post antique phases, as you of course know very well. In the case of Kom el-Dikka, however, the Polish excavations have provided stratigraphical evidence to date the deposition of statues, which is very helpful. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Thisve Basin, Archaeological Visualization, and Curating Digital Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: thisve-basin-archaeological-visualization-and-curating-digital-data CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 11/09/2009 08:28:53 AM ----BODY: <p>For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on preparing the data from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition (1979-1982) for re-analysis.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The panel is called <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-out-late-levels-atearly-sites.html">"First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites"</a>.&nbsp; The site of Thisve is primarily known for its relatively well preserved Hellenistic fortification wall and substantial corpus of published Greek inscriptions.&nbsp; 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.)</p> <p>As of this weekend, I finished keying all the density data from the survey transects that can be reasonably mapped.&nbsp; There were three or four transects which I've not been able to map in accurately in the GIS.&nbsp; 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).&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201287566aaac970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="400" alt="Thisvi2009Working" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a665e1b3970b -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>One of the interesting things is that this was not the first time that this data was mapped.&nbsp; Three maps of the archaeological "topography" of Thisve appeared in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/221569704">T. Gregory, "Archaeological Explorations in the Thisbe Basin" in the <em>Boeotia Antiqua II: Papers on Recent Work in Boiotian Archaeology and Epigraphy</em> (Amsterdam 1992), pp. 1734</a>.&nbsp; The OBE team plotted these maps using Surface II software against a digitized map of the Thisve plain.&nbsp; Unfortunately, from what I can gather, this original map of the basin no longer exists.&nbsp; So I've had to

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reconstruct the location of the transects from the notebooks in which the data was originally recorded.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201287566aaba970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="305" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201287566aac1970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a665e1d2970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="230" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a665e1ee970b -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201287566aadd970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="662" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201287566aae3970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That being said, even my plan has generalized.&nbsp; The samples from most of the individual survey units, mapped as squares in my plan, were taken from a 1 m sq area.&nbsp; I've extrapolated them across the entire unit (i.e. the width of the transect x the sampling interval).&nbsp; The lower images, generated by Surface II plotting, have simply extrapolated the density of artifacts across the entire Thisvi plain.&nbsp; I suspect that the linear arrangement of survey units (an early form of the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/51460580">Sydney Cyprus Survey Project</a>'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.&nbsp; 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!).</p> <p align="left">The disappearance of the Surface II data is another important issue.&nbsp; 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 wellmaintained and organized.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Survey projects, in particular, suffer from rather ephemeral constitutions (as opposed to the usually more permanent relationship between excavators and a particular site).&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; So the digital data represents the first phase of analysis rather than a primary data collection.&nbsp; Perhaps this is part of the reason for failing to maintain the digital data as carefully as the paper forms and notebooks.&nbsp; In recent years, a more serious approach to the practices involved in curating digital data (and survey data more generally)

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will undoubtedly change future practices.&nbsp; 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.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 11/06/2009 10:38:55 AM ----BODY: <p>A few random quick hits on a sunny and warm fall midmorning:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.tegea.uib.no/">A real nice excavation website by the Norwegian team working at Tegea in Arcadia.</a> Word is that they will be working around the Thyrsos basilica this next summer.</li> <li>This week the "Big Digs" Go Digital Symposium happened in Athens. It's a symposium co-sponsored by the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI) and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens:</li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>" to explore shared opportunities and challenges for large-scale German and American excavations in the Mediterranean in the digital age. The project is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA). Initially, this website will act as a forum as private collaboration but, as the project progresses, it will also become a tool for publicly disseminating the results in the hope that lessons learned will benefit other institutions investigating collaborative ways to support digital scholarship."</p> <p>It's a cool program and initiative, but I wish they would make the proceedings of their symposium more public. Those of us struggling with the process of digitizing "little digs" and surveys would love to see and understand more clearly how the big boys do it.</p> </blockquote> <ul> <li><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheapeducation/">Anne Kelsch's piece on Teaching Thursday</a> was linked to from an article in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07iht-

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currents.html?_r=1&amp;ref=world">New York Times</a>. Teaching Thursday is now global and world wide.</li> <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/indvaus2009/engine/current/match/416240.html">The Australia v. India one-day international yesterday was pretty exciting</a>.</li> </ul> <p>Now back to preparing the data for the Ohio Boeotia Expedition.</p> <p>Have a great weekend.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.199.91.113 URL: http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/06/2009 03:50:47 PM Ther is a bit, but not much, about the Big Dig event here. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.199.91.113 URL: http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/06/2009 03:52:18 PM here: <a href="http://www.dainst.org/index_07b7ebf4468914ac4482001c3253dc21_en.html">http ://www.dainst.org/index_07b7ebf4468914ac4482001c3253dc21_en.html</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Cheating and Byzantium STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-cheating-and-byzantium CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 11/05/2009 07:43:42 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a short post today because I want to leave my loyal readers plenty of time to digest <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/11/05/on-the-habit-ofcheating/">Mick Beltz interesting and important arguments about cheating over on

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the Teaching Thursday</a> blog. That being said, I can't resist commenting on <a href="http://www.theweeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/131"> a recent article in the <i>Weekly Standard</i></a> (forwarded to me by <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/" title="Kostis Kourelis">Kostis Kourelis</a>). This short article summarizes the arguments of E. Luttwak in his new book, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/317361758"><i>The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire</i></a>, and casts them in the light of U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy. Luttwak himself summarized many of the arguments in an article in Foreign Policy entitled "<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/take_me_back_to_constanti nople">Take me Back to Constantinople: How Byzantium, not Rome, can help preserve the Pax Americana</a>".</p> <p>In the article, he suggests that the often-embattled position of the Byzantine Empire is a good parallel for the US in the 21st century. Like Byzantium, the US is surrounded by a variety of enemies using a wide range of tactics, with a wide range of political, military, and, ideological goals. Moreover, the economic foundation of the Byzantine state, like the US today, was often variable making long term strategic decisions difficult to implement (if not to contemplate). Luttwak's observations regarding the Byzantium represent another example of recent intellectual efforts to see Byzantium as a useful lens through which to view a post-Modern 21st century. (My favorite being <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/61123208">J. Kristeva's <i>Murder in Byzantium</i></a>).</p> <p>To get back to cheating, Luttwak argues that we can learn from the Byzantine's is that "subversion is the cheapest past to victory. So cheap, in fact, as compared with the costs and risks of battle, that it must always be attempted, even with the most seemingly irreconcilable enemies." Subversion is often seen as means to gain an "unfair" or at best, unseemly victory. It undermines the ethical nature of battle and threatens on fundamental grounds some of the most widely held arguments for just wars. The morally ambivalent (to our 21st century eyes) Byzantines (read: Oriental Byzantines) could get away which such practices, whereas the U.S. as practitioners of the "<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/18961316">Western Way of War</a>" must play by a more restrictive set of rules or run the risk of undermining the very values that justified military actions from the start. In other words, cheating in warfare is wrong.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Twittering to Byzantium STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: twittering-to-byzantium

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CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/04/2009 07:57:21 AM ----BODY: <p>Tim Gregory sent me a link to this curious Twitter feed <a href="http://twitter.com/CryForByzantium">Cry for Byzantium</a>.&nbsp; The feed reports sequentially on events in Byzantine history as if they were being twittered by the Byzantine Emperor (currently Anastasius I).&nbsp; The entire scheme is explained in the <a href="http://cryforbyzantium.blog.com/">feed's companion blog</a>.&nbsp; To create the feed, the author of the Twitter feed draws upon the work of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/18164817">Julius Norwich</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/44039354">Warren Treadgold</a> to create his first person narrative.&nbsp; According to the blog, it is basically a labor of love.</p> <p>This is not the first instance of Byzantium in the new media.&nbsp; The most famous example was <a href="http://www.12byzantinerulers.com/">Lars Brownworth's 12 Byzantine Rulers series of podcasts</a>.&nbsp; The popularity of these podcasts resulted in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/education/31education.html">an article in the <em>New York Times</em></a><em> </em>and eventually <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2007/09/the_digital_tipping_point_the_wild_ride _from_podcast_to_book_deal.html">a book deal</a> (he also maintains <a href="http://www.losttothewest.com/">a blog</a>).&nbsp; </p> <p><em>Cry for Byzantium </em>and other new media experiments in Byzantine history got me thinking about the relationship between scholarship and the new media.&nbsp; At the same time, my graduate historiography seminar is reading <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/301314246">Hayden White</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/60966902">Dominick LaCapra</a> this week.&nbsp; While these two scholars have not said anything in particular about history and the new media <em>per se</em>, they have both written about the largely uncritical acceptance of traditional forms of historical writing.&nbsp; They have singled out the uncritical assumptions that undergird most historian's adherence to traditional forms of narrative pointing out that the basic structure of most historical narratives remains rooted in early 19th century forms which drew heavily on the conventions of "realist" fiction.&nbsp; Since that time, of course, attitudes toward the fictional narrative have changed, but history has not.&nbsp; Our approach to narrating a "realistic" past continues to look to a 19th century style for validation.</p> <p>As styles and practices of narration have changed to accommodate and capture the dynamism of a changing world more successfully, the book as the medium to communicate, narrate, and critique has come under increasing criticism (<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/in-other-words/shop-talk-withmichael-turner/article1343483/">e.g. for a very recent one</a>).&nbsp; No one would deny that recent efforts to create a paperless book (or eBook) are not at least a little absurd.&nbsp; New forms of writing, technics of constructing narrative, and communicating information such as those most obviously visible in the internet (and new media) run the risk of making historian's long standing commitment to the book as quaint as the 19th century narrative practices that White and LaCapra have critiqued.&nbsp; While historians are trying to embrace the new media and the potential of a "bookless future", it still seems that practicing, academic historians are a step behind the interested public in our willingness to experiment.&nbsp; </p> <p>On my walk home last night, I thought about what it would mean to use Twitter to write an article, for example.&nbsp; I regularly serialize my research here on my blog (in most cases writing blog

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posts as I am doing the scholarship as sort of proto-working papers).&nbsp; Blog posts are much shorter than the finished articles, but nevertheless contain at least some basic scholarly apparatus (hyperlinks rather than footnotes in many cases) and often help me formulate an idea before having to compose it in its full academic form.&nbsp; A tweeted article could look the same way except limited to 140 character expressions.&nbsp; Cry for Byzantium approaches this by narrating an "emperor's eye" view of Byzantine history in such short passages, but the author admits to composing his tweets before hand and preloading them into an application that posts them regularly.&nbsp; Tweeting an article, as I imagine it, would require the author to be more spontaneous and actually compose the article in twitter over the course of a stretch of time (perhaps a month?).&nbsp; The intervals between tweets, like the moves in a game of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_chess">correspondence chess</a>, would allow an author to think carefully about his next move.&nbsp; At the same time, the audience for the article could respond and critique, or not, to the various ideas and arguments that emerge before their eyes.&nbsp; (One downside of <em>Cry for Byzantium </em>is that it does not do much with the social media aspects of Twitter.&nbsp; For example, neither the Ostrogothic King Theodoric nor Pope Symmachus respond to Anastasius tweets.)&nbsp; This would put some pressure on the author to articulate arguments concisely and clearly.&nbsp; This focus on language is a good thing for any writer and the limit of 140 characters is not much more arbitrary than word limits imposed on various other forms of academic writing (or works of literature in general, particularly poetry).</p> <p>While it's unlike that I will run out and start Twittering an academic article, the thought of it and the potential of such new media experiments as <em>Cry for Byzantium </em>is intriguing.&nbsp; It serves us well to keep an eye on these kinds of things (and that means following the <a href="http://twitter.com/CryForByzantium">Cry for Byzantium Twitter feed</a>!) and consider the potential of these experiments as real critiques of our tradition-bound scholarship.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amalia EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 68.95.199.218 URL: http://hellia.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/04/2009 12:47:05 PM Someone really should take up the mantles of the Popes and King Theodoric and start engaging. I think that would be hilarious and awesome! It might even be enough to tempt me to twitter, just to observe it. I have to say that I think it would be really difficult for me to critique pieces of an article that were composed via twitter. It would be kind of like judging a book by the first sentence, or workshopping one sentence at a time in a novel with no context.

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Or, perhaps I'm just overlooking the obvious--we've been using short coded bursts of information to convey things for years in Newspaper Headlines, and I have no trouble judging an article in the paper as worthy or not based on that text. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: City, Village, Monastery Podcasts from the Modern Greek Studies Association Meeting STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: city-village-monastery-podcasts-from-the-modern-greek-studiesassociation-meeting CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 11/03/2009 08:01:32 AM ----BODY: <p>I've posted <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/PodcastMGSA.html">podcasts from our panel at the Modern Greek Studies Association Meeting</a> at our <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/Homepage.html">Squinch page</a>. Since I haven't blogged about Squinch much lately, it's probably useful to remind my readers that it is the official website of the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10209&amp;ignum=11">Archaeo logy of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Mediterranean Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America</a>. We post our meeting minutes there, maintain (or not) a very out of date membership list, and post other bits of interesting new for interest group members. The most valuable thing about the site, however, is a little section of podcasts.</p> <p>We could do better with these. In fact, since our interest group was founded, we have organized panels at the annual meeting of the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/">Archaeological Institute of America</a> three times (counting this coming year), at the <a href="http://www.bsana.net/conference/">Byzantine Studies Conference</a> (in 2007), and now at the MGSA meeting, but have only prepared podcasts for a few of these events. Moreover, members of the interest group have undoubtedly given numerous lectures around the world and only one, <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/GregoryPodCast.html">Timothy Gregory's lecture at the Gennadius Library</a> in 2008 appears on the page.</p> <p>As the acting web master for Squinch and the Medieval and Post-Medieval Interest Group, I'd encourage any member who gives a public talk to consider recording it and sending it along so that we can continue to expand our collection of podcasts. The only equipment that you need is a little hand held recorder (generally costing less than $80). I generally edit the podcasts using <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>, a free audio editing program that is nearly intuitive to use.</p> <p class="style24">For those of you too busy to follow <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/PodcastMGSA.html">the link to the podcasts</a> in this blog post, I've made the talks available here:</p> <p class="style24"><span class="style24">1. Athens in the 19th Century: Archaeological Landscapes and Competing Pasts<br />

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<strong>Effie Athanassopoulos, University of NebraskLincoln</strong></span><span class="style24"><br /> <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/MGSA2009Talks/Athanassopoulos_Abstract.htm" target="_blank">Abstract</a><br /> <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audioplayer.swf?audioUrl=http://www.squinch.und.edu/MGSA2009Talks/Athanassopoulos.mp3 " width="400" height="27" allowscriptaccess="never" quality="best" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" wmode="window" flashvars="playerMode=embedded" /></span></p> <p class="style24"><span class="style24">2. Ancient Corinth from the Ottoman Empire to the Archaeologists<br /> <strong>Amelia Brown, Princeton University</strong><br /> <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/MGSA2009Talks/Brown_Abstract.htm" target="_blank">Abstract</a><br /> <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audioplayer.swf?audioUrl=http://www.squinch.und.edu/MGSA2009Talks/Brown.mp3" width="400" height="27" allowscriptaccess="never" quality="best" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" wmode="window" flashvars="playerMode=embedded" /></span></p> <p class="style24"><span class="style24">3. Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th-Century ‘Small World’ in the Upland Basins of the Southeastern Korinthia<br /> <strong>William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota, David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College, Timothy E. Gregory, Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia<br /> <span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/MGSA2009Talks/Caraher%20et%20al_Abstract.htm" target="_blank">Abstract<br /></a><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audioplayer.swf?audioUrl=http://www.squinch.und.edu/MGSA2009Talks/Caraher,%20Pettegre w,%20Gregory,%20Tzortzopoulou-Gregory.mp3" width="400" height="27" allowscriptaccess="never" quality="best" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" wmode="window" flashvars="playerMode=embedded" /></span></strong></span></p> <p class="style24"><span class="style24">4. The Sacred Grip: Landscape, Art and Architecture in Mount Menoikeion (19th-20th Centuries)<br /> <strong>Nikolas Bakirtzis, The Cyprus Institute, Kostis Kourelis Franklin and Marshall College, and Matthew Milliner, Princeton University<br /> <span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/MGSA2009Talks/Bakirtzis_Abstract.htm" target="_blank">Abstract</a><br /> <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3247397568-audioplayer.swf?audioUrl=http://www.squinch.und.edu/MGSA2009Talks/Kourelis,%20Bakirtz is,%20Milliner.mp3" width="400" height="27" allowscriptaccess="never" quality="best" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" wmode="window" flashvars="playerMode=embedded" /></span></strong></span></p> <p class="style24">Next time you give a talk some place, consider recording it and passing it along to me to post at the Squinch website!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: millinerd EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 91.184.215.220 URL: http://millinerd.com DATE: 11/08/2009 01:10:03 PM I thought it worth pointing out the fact that these podcasts reveal that Bill's presentation is just 7 seconds over the officially allotted 20 minutes. That's both very rare and quite impressive. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Reclaiming Thisve Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: reclaiming-thisve-data CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 11/02/2009 07:39:41 AM ----BODY: <p>Long time readers of this blog will remember that some very long time ago, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/">I was working on digitizing and ultimately publishing the data from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition</a>.&nbsp; This was a very early "second generation" intensive, siteless pedestrian survey conducted around the ancient city of Thisve in Boeotia directed by <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a>.&nbsp; Recently <a href="http://www.arch-ant.bham.ac.uk/staff/dunn.htm">Archie Dunn at the University of Birmingham</a> began a new project there designed to document the Late Roman and Byzantine remains from the town.&nbsp; He invited us to reexamine the survey data in the context of his new work with the hope of producing a more thorough publication of the O.B.E.'s work as well as to complement the more recent work both at Thisve and throughout Boeotia. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a69fcb2b970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="271" alt="2006-06-02_0041" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a64a46b8970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>The Thisve basin</em></p> <p>I started work on this project about two years ago in Athens, but quickly moved it to the back burner when I was confronted by very difficult mapping and digitization issues.&nbsp; In short, I had a terrible time mapping into my GIS the transects that the O.B.E. walked in the landscape.&nbsp; This was primarily because I was deferring to some published maps of the project's work.&nbsp; I simply could not get my maps (based on some newly collected GPS data, the Greek Army Mapping Service 1:5000s, and augmented by Google Earth images) to coincide in any recognizable way with the published drawings of the survey area and the location

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of the sites.&nbsp; As I returned to the data this fall -- in preparation for a paper at the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting -- I decided to scrap the published maps and attempt to build my own new map.&nbsp; That was a much easier approach and quickly demonstrated that the published maps were, for lack of a better word, wrong.&nbsp; </p> <p>The other decision that I had to make was to accept that I would not be able to map some of the transects.&nbsp; The recorded data was simply too flawed (and the equally, but differently flawed published maps did not help) to allow me to reconstruct all the transects that the O.B.E. surveyed.&nbsp; This was disappointing, but also liberating as many of the project's transects digitize quite easily.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a64a46bd970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Thisvi2009Working" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a64a46c6970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>I also began to key the finds data from the project.&nbsp; The density data, as shown in the image above, produces some recognizable trends.&nbsp; Artifact densities appear to be higher in the immediately vicinity of local (and presumably ancient and Byzantine) villages, decline across the open agricultural plain, and pick up again along the southern boundary of the plain.&nbsp; The reasons for this might be geomorphological.&nbsp; There is evidence, in fact, for an ancient water management system in the plain which Pausanias described:</p> <blockquote> <p>Paus. 9.32.3. Nothing would prevent the plain between the mountains becoming a lake owing to the volume of the water, had they not made a strong dyke right through it. So every other year they divert the water to the farther side of the dyke, and farm the other side. Thisbe, they say, was a nymph of the country, from whom the city has received its name.</p></blockquote> <p>So, it may be that the sediment from the flow of water through the plain was covered ceramic evidence there (although there is some evidence for ancient material in the Thisve plain).&nbsp; It could also mean that this was largely agricultural ground and did not see the kinds of activities that deposited large quantities of ceramics.&nbsp; The only problem with this is that the Cambridge/Bradford Boeotia Project which along with its various spin-offs has surveyed numerous cities in ancient Boeotia, has argued that fields around Boeotian cities were often filled with ancient ceramics deposited through the process of distributing manure in the fields nearest to the town.&nbsp; A more sophisticated and careful comparison of the distribution of material outside of Thisve and outside of the neighboring city of Thespiae may shed some light on this practice.</p> <p>More importantly, the quality of the finds data is actually quite good.&nbsp; I am confident that digitizing the finds collected and analyzed by the O.B.E. will produce a nice corpus for comparison with other survey projects both in Boeotia and in the "suburbs" of other cities in Greece.&nbsp; Over the next few weeks, I'll update my progress and analysis of this data more or less regularly.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

Caraher

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TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 10/30/2009 10:33:34 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits on a cold and blustery Friday morning:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.spatialecology.com/htools/index.php">Hawth's Tools</a> and <a href="http://gaialab.asu.edu/Jordan/Reproject.php">Doc Savage's ReprojectMe!</a> are becoming more and more important tools in my GIS tool kit. Both are great boons to any archaeological GIS work.</li> <li><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a> this week garnered an almost record number of hits. Check it out. And if you're at the University of North Dakota and have something to say... drop me a line!</li> <li>I am beginning work again on digitizing the results of the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/">Ohio Boeotia Project (1979-1982)</a> around the town of Thisbe in Boeotia (oddly enough). I am writing this blog to avoid commencing with data entry.</li> <li>This is a week late, but T<a href="http://technorati.com/blogging/feature/state-of-the-blogosphere2009/">echnorati's State of the Blogosphere 2009</a>, came out. Academic bloggers feature almost not at all. So much for being important.</li> <li><a href="http://www.pkap.org/" title="PKAP">PKAP</a> Alumna makes good. This is <a href="http://www.iup.edu/newsItem.aspx?id=86729&amp;blogid=4991">a nice article about Sara Fortnam's</a> continued involvement in the PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project.</li> <li>This is either super strange or transcendently wonderful: <a href="http://cryforbyzantium.blog.com/">Cry for Byzantium</a>. You can follow the 5th century A.D. via a <a href="http://twitter.com/CryForByzantium">Twitter feed</a>. As of now, it has 172 followers, which is pretty good!</li> <li>This is a follow up. You can now own a piece of history: a <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/139024/">motorized La-ZBoy used by a Minnesota drunk driver</a>.</li> <li>Be sure to cheer on the Phillies tomorrow night.</li> </ul> <p>That's all for today because I have to get onto data entry!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Cheating at Teaching Thursday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: more-on-cheating-at-teaching-thursday CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/29/2009 07:56:28 AM ----BODY: <p>Check out the latest posting over at <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>. We're continuing the conversation about cheating in American universities with a thoughtful post on how changes in American society, particularly online culture have influenced how students value originality. <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/10/29/online-cheating/">Cindy Prescott notes that</a> the tendency for bloggers, in particular, simply to parrot ideas (often without attribution) from other bloggers or more traditional news sources, is but symptomatic of a growing disrespect for original thinking in American society. While I'd quibble with Cindy's characterization of bloggers -after many of the most successful and popular bloggers do offer unique perspectives on the world and often produce original reporting on events far ahead of traditional news venues -- I do wonder how the echo chamber of the internet clouds confuses the uncritical readers.</p> <p>In many cases the lines of attribution and authority become blurred in open challenge to the exclusive practices promoted by a professional creative class. The idea of legally and economically defined rights to ideas (meant to defend the ability of a creative class to earn a living from those ideas) has earned the ire of more radical voices on the web who view the open copying, repackaging, and redistribution of ideas, intellectual products, and creative projects as a means of resisting capitalism's hold over creativity and complementary to radical critiques in the academy which argue for "the death of the author" and see creativity as no more than the fortuitous interplay of texts and meanings. And while it is too soon to say that these more radical voices are winning, it is striking that they have won some crucial battles. The slow death of DRM (digital rights management) protected music and the rise in open source, open content, and the various legal protections offered by the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">creative commons</a> have all sought to establish new lines in the battle to protect creativity.</p> <p>Of course, when pressed, many academics would say that the fight against cheating -- particularly using someone else's work without attribution -- is rooted in fundamental moral and ethical concerns. But it's also worth contemplating how much of our fight to preserve the sanctity of creativity derives from (more base?) economic motivations. These motivations, on the one hand, ensure that creative work in society is recognized (in order to be rewarded and sustained). At the same time, a naive pressure on originality and

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fetishizing practices of attribution and intellectual property runs the risk of paralyzing academic discourse. Proper attribution of ideas is a cherished practice that personalizes the intellectual and academic ecosystem, but it is rarely exhaustive and universal in tracing the roots of ideas and arguments. Scholars regularly make decisions as to how and sometimes whether to attribute fragmentary ideas, idiosyncratic readings of canonical texts, and seemingly well-known "statements of fact".</p> <p>This is a long way from working to prevent the crude, basely pragmatic, and frankly un-ideological, cheating that takes place on most university campuses. But it does speak, to some extent, to the blurry moral and ethic grounds at the core of the discourse of originality in American culture today. I wonder how much these conversations have undermined our efforts to enforce academic honesty by laying bare some of the coarseness present foundations for our arguments.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Elucidarian EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.249 URL: DATE: 10/29/2009 11:46:52 AM Perhaps it would benefit the curriculum to revert to pencil and paper for most work that could easily be copied from an internet source. Even if the student is still plagiarizing, they would have to write out the text and, in the process, become familiar with the material. Such "extra" work would be a service to the student's education, though it would decrease the ease of an instructor to copy and paste to google in search of stolen phrases. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some New Work on Historic Corinthian Lithics STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: some-new-work-on-historic-corinthian-lithics CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 10/28/2009 08:24:36 AM ----BODY: <p>The most recent volume of <em>Hesperia</em> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/to urists-and-photos-in-hesperia.html">also</a> has a nice article by my favorite stone tool expert, <a href="http://www.wooster.edu/en/Academics/Areas-of-

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Study/Sociology-Anthropology/Faculty-and-Staff/P-Nick-Kardulias.aspx">P. Nick Kardulias</a>.&nbsp; Nick is a long-time colleague from <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia</a> (and the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>) and is publishing our lithics from the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp; His article, "<a href="http://www.atyponlink.com/ASCS/doi/abs/10.2972/hesp.78.3.307">Flaked Stone from Isthmia</a>" emphasizes (in particular) flaked stone from post-prehistoric contexts at Isthmia.&nbsp; He also includes a brief discussion of lithics found in the Kromna excavations and associated with some other areas in the Eastern Corinthia surveyed by the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.&nbsp; Nick makes the useful and interesting point that lithic technologies persisted into the historic period (following on his and others important work along similar lines in the Southern Argolid and in the study of doukani (or threshing floor) blades on Cyprus). </p> <p>Nick's arguments for the use of lithics into the historical period is important for survey archaeologists.&nbsp; EKAS found hundreds (if not thousands) of chert and obsidian objects over the course of its intensive survey in the general vicinity of Isthmia.&nbsp; He makes some off hand observations regarding the cautious tendency for survey archaeologists to assign lithic artifacts prehistoric dates (pp. 333-336) especially when they appear in multiperiod sites.&nbsp; The result of this caution is that we may be underestimating the number of lithic artifact datable to the historic period.&nbsp; There is reason to think that the large assemblage of material from EKAS (which I think Nick is studying) may provide some evidence for the use of lithics in historical periods.&nbsp; Of the 222 units which produced obsidian or chert objects, only 95 of them (43%!) produced clearly datable perhistoric pottery.&nbsp; While the problems with recovering and identifying prehistoric pottery in a survey context are well known and my hasty analysis is a simply count of units (rather than a more useful analysis of their spatial distribution across the site (i.e. it may be plausible to argue for the prehistoric date of lithics found in units adjacent to those with prehistoric pottery), it nevertheless suggests that a careful study of the distribution of lithic artifacts across the survey area might lead to some suggestive observations.&nbsp; (I'll try to do a spatial analysis of this data sometime over the weekend...)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a62858fc970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="June 2009 141" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6285905970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Nick Kardulias looking at one big lithic in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/be tween-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-theupland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html">Lakka Skoutara</a></p> <p>One of the more interesting things about the historic use of lithics is that obsidian (and maybe chert) blades could be reused long after their original production.&nbsp; This is interesting because Kardulias argues that the initial energy needed to produce lithic blades and other tools was not excessive nor did it require a particularly high level of expertise.&nbsp; Moreover there were good chert sources throughout the Isthmia plain most notably on Acrocorinth.&nbsp; This is all to ask why would people re-use lithics in the historic period (other than shear convenience or some accident of survival) if they are relatively easy to acquire and manufacture?&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Selling the Working Group in Digital and New Media STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: selling-the-working-group-in-digital-and-new-media CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 10/27/2009 08:17:19 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last month or so a bunch of university development, marketing, and external relation types have asked me to describe what the <a href="http://digitalgateway.und.edu/About.html">Working Group in Digital and New Media</a> is. I go through my usual boilerplate on the importance of digital and new media in our world and how the convergent space carved out by digital technologies is not only making it easier for academic to collaborate, but it is making it absolutely necessary. I usually go into detail about how the new currency is information and access to information provides certain important structures for new community oriented most obviously around social media applications, but implicit in many of the basic interaction that we have in digital space (for a brief and nice meditation on this same idea see <a href="http://gracecheow.com/2009/10/26/unexpected-confluences/">here</a>). In response to my impassioned plea for our new digital utopia, I usually get a response like "so, this is really about building better webpages." This is not a good sign that my university is prepared to embrace its digital future. Or, alternately and perhaps more optimistically, this response reflects my inability to articulate that digital future in a compelling way!</p> <p>So, out of frustration I volunteered to write up for "the public" an overview of the <a href="http://digitalgateway.und.edu/About.html">Digital and New Media Working Group</a>.</p> <p>Here it is:</p> <p><!--StartFragment--></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>The Working Group<br /> in Digital and New Media</b></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">We live in a world saturated with digital media. It forms a medium through which we engage in all sorts of basic interactions. We communicate with friends and family via email, text-messaging, and social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. At the same time, we find common cause with strangers by following blogs, listening to podcasts, and celebrating the bizarre world created by user-generated YouTube video. The digital and new media has arrived and is shaping our world daily and producing new kinds of communities that transcend traditional barriers of space and social identity.

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Web pioneers have become cult heroes and digital entrepreneurs have become a new kind of intellectual and economic elite.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">As recently as 10 years ago, most of would rank as mere consumers of the web content, and the communities organized around content on the web were mainly passive consumers of pre-packaged commodities. Today, however, things have changed. More and more people have become producers of digital and new media by writing their own blogs, uploading YouTube videos, recording podcasts, and producing new works of fiction, music, and art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span> The most ambitious and creative members of so-called Generation X and Y have found ways to “mash-up” or combine date, text, music, and video from different sources to create unique experiences. This ability to create art, literature, music, scholarship, or any other of the myriad of novel and bizarre experiences on the web has enabled a new generation of digital natives to crash through the barriers that traditionally separated the consumers and producers of media content. In the process, this expanding group has created new communities whose identities and space for interaction extends across a whole range of new digital devices that have become common in our everyday life. Over the past decade, digital media has gone from being the basis for a whole range of new information, to the foundation for new forms of community, social and intellectual interaction, and, of course, economic life.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Academia has not been spared from this digital media revolution. The flexibility, dynamism, and ever-changing capabilities of our digital world has made it a potent platform for cross disciplinary collaboration and communication. At the University of North Dakota, the Working Group in Digital and New Media is at the forefront of using digital technologies to break down the traditional barriers that have separated art from science, the humanities from the social sciences, and research from teaching. In this effort, they deploy many of the same tools that the high-tech industry, new media moguls, and internet entrepreneurs use to create new and digital media experiences that regularly influence our everyday experiences. Drawing on the power of cloud and cluster computing, powerful multi-media desktops machines, social networking, a wide range of digital and new media theory, and rapidly developing software infrastructure, the Working Group is committed to the production of innovative digital media which both produces and stands at the core of new forms of community and social space. The media truly becomes the message as the group collaborates and shares technological expertise, digital aesthetics, and high-tech infrastructure on campus. This groups efforts, in turn, hope to produce a space for collaboration for other scholars, students, and colleagues both on campus and around the world.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The overall goal of this Working Group is to capture the entrepreneurial spirit of the dot.com generation and funnel these creative energies to a new integrative, transmedia scholarship. The Working group laboratory is the place where disciplinary walls collapse and digital and new media becomes the space for innovation and collaboration. This is not just the kind of collaborative efforts that results in scholarly articles or learned conference papers, but a kind of public collaboration where the results of faculty and student discussions become visible, almost instantly, in the internet to the entire world.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>Digital Video</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Anyone who has watched a movie in the past five years has noticed the amazing development of digital animation both to enhance live action films as special effects as well as to carry the entire visual experience and plot. When filmmakers first introduced these effects they took hours and hours to produce and render on high-powered mainframe type computers. At the

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intersection of science, technological expertise, and art, Prof. Joel Jonientz, of the Department of Art and Design is using the high power desktop computers in the Digital and New Media lab to create the basic imagery for the next generation of animate films.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">These images are converted into moving images using the computer power of the high performance computing cluster here on campus in a technical alliance with the Digital and New Media lab.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span> The high performance cluster is one of the newest generation of super computers that marshals the power of a series of linked processors working together to execute complex functions at remarkable speed. The alliance between arts, science and technology at the lab allows faculty and students to produce new creative projects and refine the processes that allow these projects to become reality. What was once the realm of multi-million dollar studios is now within reach of students and scholars here at UND.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>Digital Texts</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Whenever we search the web, we are familiar with the all too common experience of bringing up masses of irrelevant information for even the simplest and most straightforward search. Even as search engines become better able to sort the wheat from the chaff, researchers have become increasingly determined to make the text themselves more easy to search not only by standard search engines like Google, but by the next generation of faceted search engines that will allow you to conduct more focused searches directed toward specific bodies of text. Faceted search engines depend upon various kind of mark-up languages, like XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) which are largely invisible to the general public, but organize information behind the scenes. Prof. Crystal Alberts of the English Department, another scholar in the Working Group, is working to encode historical texts with XML mark-up. This time consuming and technical task opens important texts are searchable by researchers and students. For example, Crystal is working with a team who is encoding the both video and transcriptions of the famous University of North Dakota’s Writers Conference. She is also encoding the “Norwegian Transcript Collection” which documents the Nazi occupation of Norway. Alberts is opening the remarkable archival collections here at UND to a wider world of scholars and students and playing an even more important role in a wide rang of global conversations on topics from fascism to literature.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>Digital Archaeology</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">For the past decade Prof. Bill Caraher, a professor in the Department of History, has been collecting digital data from his archaeological work in Greece and Cyprus. This data comes in many forms ranging from databases to digital photos and maps in Geographic Information Systems databases. The Working Group lab has become the place where a team of undergraduate and graduate interns work to publish this wide range of archaeological media both on the web and in print form.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">The real novelty, however, is their efforts to combine the science and art of archaeology by integrating digital descriptions of stratigraphy, artifact typology, and surface densities to an array of video, audio, and fine art photographs collected from his site in Cyprus. This combinations provides creates an archaeological experience that has something to offer empirical scholars, artists, beginning students, and the general public without compromising the rigor of the field research. A web interface introduces students and scholars to the experience of Mediterranean archaeological without specialized knowledge, expensive airfares, and costly stays away from home.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>Digital Music</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Digital Music has become a mainstay in American culture. As digital music has become more sophisticated and complex, it has required

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additional levels of technical expertise and computing power. Composition of music in a digital environment goes far beyond drum machines and keyboards to involve complex software suites and high-powered computers. UND’s Award Winning Composer, Prof. Michael Wittgraf participates in the Working group and uses the laboratories facilities as a base for his research and teaching in music composition. By combining the art of music composition with his background in mathematics and the technologies available at the lab, Wittgraf’s work is the embodiment of the shared space made available by digital media.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>The Future of Digital and New Media</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The Working Group in Digital and New Media leverages digital media to break down barriers and form new communities across campus, across the state, and around the world. A strong commitment to cultivating both the intellectual and technological infrastructure ensures a place for the University of North Dakota to the forefront of ongoing and rapidly expanding digital revolution.</p><!--EndFragment--> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Tourists and Photos in Hesperia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: tourists-and-photos-in-hesperia CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Travel DATE: 10/26/2009 08:17:56 AM ----BODY: <p>Last week, I pulled down a box full of slides that I had taken between 1997 and 2003. I was looking for photographs of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/be tween-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-theupland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html">Lakka Skoutara</a> in 2001 and 2002 (and found them, for all you who doubt my filing system), but I also found my pictures of my first trip to Greece and my two years as an associate member at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. I looked through box after box of them with a combination of nostalgia and amazement as I realized the completely clinical character of my pictures. My photos focused almost totally on ancient and Byzantine monuments with almost no shots of my friends, traveling companions, or the physical surroundings. As I thought about this more, I remembered how expensive slide film and processing was (particularly for a graduate student) and how important I thought it was to produce a teaching

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collection of images (in the days before Google Image), and this helped me relax a bit.</p> <p>It was pleasant surprise to see an article in the most recent volume of <i>Hesperia</i> that looked at the 19th century equivalent of my touristic perambulations and their photographic record. D. Harlan's "<a href="http://www.atypon-link.com/ASCS/doi/abs/10.2972/hesp.78.3.421">Travels, Pictures, and a Victorian Gentleman in Greece</a>" continues <i>Hesperia</i>'s recent interest in articles on early travelers and tourists to the Mediterranean and the role that they played in shaping our archaeological expectations and perceptions of Modern Greece. Harlan's article focused on the slides of T.R.R. Stebbing who traveled to Greece and Turkey at the end of the 19th century. He took a series of glass-plate lantern-slides of famous monuments and well-known scenes, like the harbor at Smyrna. These slides came eventually to reside in the archives of the Institute of Archaeology of Oxford and some of them may have contributed to a published series of educational slides distributed by Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. These slides, then, provide insights into not only the itinerary and values of a late 19th century tourist in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also the development of well-known educational collections that circulated on lantern slides widely in the the UK and the US.</p> <p>The University of North Dakota has a small collection of these slides distributed by The Keystone View Company -- one of the standard American firms distributing such lantern slides. <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/library/Collections/og49.html">Orin G. Libby</a>, the long-time chair of the Department of History lobbied continuously for new and updated Lantern slide projectors. At the same time, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/library/Collections/og146.html">Webster Merrifield</a> the president of the University of North Dakota and, more or less, a contemporary of Stebbing traveled regularly to Europe and the Mediterranean. While there is no record of him taking slides photographs, Merrifield's Classical training would have made it a likely possibility. After all, we know that he returned with a small number of objects purchased from across the Eastern Mediterranean and destined for a small (and now mostly lost) collection of University antiquities.</p> <p>As Harlan argues, these slides served to link the tourist itineraries of the early guide books, like Murray's, Cook's, and Baedeker's, to classroom instruction in the US. There is a direct parallel between these early tourist itineraries and the modern day itinerary of the American School of Classical Studies which, in turn, continues to reproduce and reinforce a standardized view of Greece as captured by the camera's eye. (<a href="http://montgomery.cas.muohio.edu/nimissa/jakegreece/index.html">Check out this collection of images</a> and compare them, broadly speaking, to the Stebbing's pictures) The persistence of such structured engagements with both Ancient and Modern Greece is nothing short of remarkable. The distribution of such "tourist" photos (that is photos linked directly to a tourists itinerary) serve to condition particular engagements with the Greek landscape that, in turn, shape the itineraries of future tourists. One goes to Greece, according to this kind of structured engagement, less to see the country, per se, and more to reproduce images, vistas, and scenes burned into your memory through the wide distribution and use of images. This likely accounts for the slow rate of change in tourist itineraries (and the itinerary of the American School and other study tours to Greece) and the persistent (if slowly dissipating) view of Greece as a place of history rather than a dynamic society with its own character, problems, and potentials.</p> <p>More on this exciting fascicule of <i>Hesperia</i> later in the week!</p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 10/26/2009 03:22:11 PM The Keystone company also made box sets that they tried to sell to schools throughout the US. There's a nice catalog of them (if you're ever in a cataloging mood). I have images of traveling salesmen knocking on the doors of schools. The promotional material had "authoritative" quotations by University professors. They're also pretty cheap on eBay. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: ryan stander EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.203.199 URL: http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com DATE: 10/27/2009 08:30:06 AM your post made me think of the magnum photographer martin parr who has done a fabulous series of photographs of tourists at a variety of sites around the world. his work often deals with ideas of consumption and with this series in particular looks at how tourists search for authentic cultures may end up destroying them in the process. his images are full of wit and humor...one of my favorites. Below are a few examples... <a href="http://www.aperture.org/exposures/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/2008auction-parr-ma2e30991.jpg">http://www.aperture.org/exposures/wpcontent/uploads/2008/10/2008-auction-parr-ma2e30991.jpg</a> <a href="http://thelightofmanydays.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/photograph-bymartinparr.jpg">http://thelightofmanydays.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/photograph-bymartin-parr.jpg</a> <a href="http://www.canadianart.ca/online/seeit/2008/05/01/martin_parr1_1000.jpg">http://www.canadianart.ca/online/seeit/2008/05/01/martin_parr1_1000.jpg</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0

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BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 10/23/2009 09:50:55 AM ----BODY: <p>A sunny, but cold Friday and just a little assortment of odds and ends:</p> <ul> <li>Everyone should follow the <a href="http://twitter.com/NDMOA">North Dakota Museum of Art on Twitte</a>r.</li> <li>I Tweeted this article yesterday, but it deserves to be blogged: <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/138131/">"Minnesotan admits to drinking, then driving motorized La-Z-boy".</a> It's stories like this that cause my wife to ask "where have you taken me to live?" (but there is nevertheless something vaguely Australian about this story).</li> <li>A new blog, by an old friend. Check out <a href="http://gracecheow.com/">Grace Cheow's blog on design and Chicago</a>.</li> <li>Check out the inside workings of the <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/">UND Graduate Schoo</a>l.</li> <li><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/22/burger-king-selling-a-windows7-whopper-in-japan/#continued">This is gross</a> and super strange.</li> <li>The population of Rome from the perspective of a tech-dude. "<a href="http://davidgalbraith.org/trivia/graph-of-the-population-of-rome-throughhistory/2189/">Rome at its nadir was about the size of Google (20k employees)</a>."</li> <li>A very quick note about <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a>. There is no batch delete. So don't upload 900 photos and then decide that you need them to not be there.</li> </ul> <p>Stay tuned for podcasts from our panel at the Modern Greek Studies Association meeting, an effort at describing the future work of the Working Group in Digital and New Media, and some more GISing next week.</p> <p>And Go Phils!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amalia EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 68.95.199.218 URL: http://hellia.blogspot.com/

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DATE: 10/23/2009 10:32:37 AM Is 7 a lucky number in Japan, and they're capitalizing on it at BK? Weird. And kind of gross. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Cheating STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-cheating CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/22/2009 08:17:49 AM ----BODY: <p><i>Cross-posted to</i> <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/"><i>Teaching Thursday</i></a></p> <p>The past few months have produced the typical batch of articles bemoaning cheating in American universities. From blatant acts of plagiarism facilitated by the proliferation of online materials to technologically assisted cheating on math and science tests, the popular press has decided that university life is overwhelmed by a culture of academic dishonesty.</p> <p>I have my doubts, but I nevertheless recognize that academic dishonesty does occur more often than it should and, as a result, I spend more time tweaking writing assignments and changing tests and quizzes in recent years than I did before.</p> <p>One issue that I put before my esteemed readers of <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>, is what are the causes of this academic dishonesty? Is it the break down in civil society as some have suggested. Or is it simply a change in the values associated with higher education? What role do increased economic, social, and even political pressures put on students to complete their degrees successful and quickly? And do these pressures cause students to cheat? At the same time, has the current generation of university educators so fetishized originality that students are actually paralyzed by these expectations and driven to resort to profoundly unoriginal practices in desperation? Or has the culture of academic cynicism, post-everything nihilism, and radical relativism created such a confused moral zone in higher education that students lack the moral compass necessary to avoid cheating?</p> <p>On the other hand, are cheating and plagiarism simply more visible now than they were before because we have better ways of catching students in the act? Search engines like Google (not to mention purpose built anti-cheating services like <a href="http://turnitin.com/static/index.html">Turnitin</a>) have made it easier to catch the most blatant acts of plagiarism and easier to check up on more subtle forms of unattributed "borrowing".</p> <p>What role have recent changes in universities as an institutions and as university teaching and learning as practice played in presenting a different set of challenges to faculty committed to designing classes that thwart efforts at academic dishonesty? Online classes are particularly challenging in this regard even with established proctoring arrangements and the like. The influx of students from outside the U.S. also pose challenges, as the academic standards and practices vary considerably between cultures.</p>

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<p>It is easy enough to write unique paper assignments that short circuit all but the most ambitious strategies, but what cost do we incur when we concoct these assignments. In other words, has cheating brought an end to the classic "Moby Dick" paper?</p> <p>So, for the next few weeks (depending on the enthusiasm of our readers!), I invite contributions to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/" title="Teaching Thursday">Teaching Thursday</a>'s exploration of cheating.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Landscape(s) of Time STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: landscapes-of-time CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 10/21/2009 08:23:26 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the goals of <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WorkingPapers/Caraher_Pettegrew _Gregory_Tzortzopoulou_MSGA2009.pdf">our paper for the Modern Greek Studies Association meeting</a> was to experiment some with the notion of landscape. We juxtapose four different ways of thinking about the place called Lakka Skoutara. By contrasting various methods for documenting Lakka Skoutara -- ranging from intensive pedestrian survey to formation process archaeology and oral history -we sought to problematize the link between method and place in the Greek countryside. In particular, we focused on how different methods and perspectives produced meaning on different chronological scales and appealed in the conclusion to folks like Braudel and his fellow <i>Annalistes</i> who sought to document history with a similar sensitivity to scale.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a60cb461970b -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="200910210821.jpg" /></p> <p>One issue that I am struggling with is whether to consider the notion of landscape as the space that encompasses all possible methods, interpretations, time scales, and meanings. Or, on the other hand, whether methods, interpretations, and time produce different landscapes which can be juxtaposed and compared as discrete entities. If the former, the landscape becomes a place where different regimes of knowledge interact. The physical reality of place becomes the common ground for these different ways of understanding our environment and history. Landscape archaeology represents the study of the

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landscape as a place where different ways of understanding the lived environment interact and overlap.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a60cb45a970b -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="200910210820.jpg" /></p> <p>If it is the latter, we allow for the physical place of archaeological work to dissolve or even collapse into notions of landscape that vary as much physically as methodologically. Thus landscapes have different physical, experiential, and epistemological realities that have little common ground. In this assessment landscape archaeology becomes the work of documenting the various landscapes present (as much as this is possible) and creating the conditions necessary for them to share the space of the archaeological document. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a60cb45e970b -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="200910210819.jpg" /></p> <p>This may just represent a tiny crisis in terminology, but it may also represent something larger. The way that I am thinking about it, the former appraisal of landscape makes it possible for individuals to comprehend and live in a landscape that relies upon various discrete disciplines, methods, regimes, and experiences to create meaning. If the latter, I wonder if the idea of landscape becomes so highly individualized that they can only intersect within the realm of archaeological documents (both in the sense of real, dirty-nails, archaeology as well as the more Foucauldian variety).</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6632f9e970c -pi" width="480" height="321" alt="200910210822.jpg" /></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: One Last Plan and a Final Report STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: one-last-plan-and-a-final-report CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 10/20/2009 07:47:30 AM ----BODY: <p>I digitized the last trench plan for the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/" title="PKAP">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> field season yesterday. In general, we digitize trench plans on the fly in the field directly

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into our GIS. This allowed us to produce publication quality illustrations (or close to it) while still excavating and allow us to make sure that we have the detail in the trench plans correct and identify problems while the trench is still fresh in everyone's mind. This year, however, we experienced some complicated trench plans that simply defied quick digitization. So the digitizing process was put off until now, when I was finally able to digitize the last trench plan. The plan below shows a trench at the southwest corner of an annex building of an Early Christian basilica. The majority of the annex room was excavated over 10 years ago by a team from the Department of Antiquities. We excavated a trench to the southwest of the main excavated area to both clarify some stratigraphic issues and to determine whether there was more architecture to the west of the annex room.</p> <p><br /></p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6580974970c -pi" width="480" height="480" alt="EU12Plan 2.jpg" /><br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> As you can tell, this plan represents a tremendously complex trench with multiple features and a wide array of material still embedded in the soil. From this confusion, however, the excavator, Sarah Lepinski, was able to discern multiple episodes of destruction and several obvious (if somewhat careless) attempts at repair. In addition to this final trench plan, we now have digitized plans of every stratigraphic unit removed from this trench and these will serve to illustrate many of the episodes in this buildings history. </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: left;"> This plan will be inserted into the final reports that we produce at the end of each field season for distribution to the various organizations that fund our project. Our ability to digitize on the fly directly into our GIS program means that our plans are accurate both to themselves and on the face of the earth (i.e. to other plans on the site). The technology and the cooperation of a great group of trench supervisors has allowed us to produce high quality digital images almost (almost!) instantaneously. The fact that the last trench was digitized in November (rather than years later as is not uncommon) is a testimony to our trench supervisor's diligence and the remarkable pace of technology. </div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: MA Dissertation EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 221.132.118.230 URL: http://www.ukdissertation.co.uk/MA_Dissertation.htm DATE: 10/21/2009 01:13:09 AM Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Modern Greek Studies Association in Vancouver STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: modern-greek-studies-association-in-vancouver CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Travel DATE: 10/19/2009 08:14:01 AM ----BODY: <p>I attended the <a href="http://mgsa.org/">Modern Greek Studies Association</a> conference in Vancouver, B.C. over the last few days. It was a great show. Our panel on the archaeology of modern Greece was sparsely attended, but the discussion was vigorous and the feedback good. It was great to reconnect with <a href="http://www.unl.edu/anthro/afaculty/athanassopoulos.shtml">Effie Athanassopoulo</a>s, <a href="http://romangreece.com/">Amelia Brown</a>, and <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Kostis Kourelis</a>. It was also fun to meet Matthew Milliner, blogger at <a href="http://millinerd.com/">millinerd.com</a>. and <a href="http://northamericanchurches.blogspot.com/">northamericanchurches</a> which I have now happily added to my delicious blogroll and will link to regularly. (His Wordless Wednesday feature is the kind of alliterative brilliance that I can truly appreciate).</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WorkingPapers/Caraher_Pettegrew _Gregory_Tzortzopoulou_MSGA2009.pdf">Here's a link to our paper</a>. My understanding is that Kostis Kourelis has recorded the session and I hope to make these links to our papers as MP3s available soon. As a preview, the papers captured the variety of methods employed to come to grips with modern Greece with an archaeologist's tools. These methods ranged from diligent work in paper archives to field work rooted in the best practices of processualism to postprocessual practices that sought to reconcile the varieties of relationships and experiences recoverable within the modern landscape. What was perhaps striking is that none of our <em>methods</em> were particular to the Greek <em>national</em> experience. This is perhaps good in that it avoids reifying age old arguments for Greek exceptionalism (rooted in the archaeological practices derived in large part from the study of ancient Greece), but it was a bit disappointing as well in that the unique history of Greek archaeology and

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its institutions must contribute more than just a particularly well-curated body of knowledge, but also distinctive ways of understanding the landscape, the place, and the people. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Vancouver was a great city. The trip to the <a href="http://www.moa.ubc.ca/">University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology</a> was a particular highlight. Much like our panel and the project of archaeology more generally, this dramatic building sought to wrap the material culture of the first nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest in a modern setting. The interplay between the elaborately carved, yet functional house posts and totem polls and the austere economy of the poured concrete building made obvious the act of translation performed at the museum. The artifacts of the various local tribes found themselves recontextualized within the museum of the colonizer. The relationship between the vertical lines of the museum and the dimensions and functions of the architectural fragments and objects housed within it proved that some cross-cultural understanding is possible, and while it would be neither precise nor value free, it could at least be dramatic and emotionally evocative.</p> <p style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;&nbsp;<img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5f4d9df970b -pi" width="480" height="359" alt="UBCAnthroMuseumInterior.jpg" /></p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a64bf90d970c -pi" width="480" height="359" alt="UBCAnthroMuseumExterior.jpg" /><br /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <br /> </div> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a64bf915970c -pi" width="359" height="480" alt="UBCAnthroMuseumExhibit.jpg" /> </div> <p>The scenery around Vancouver was simply ridiculous. The rain, the coastline, the diversity of the city's neighborhoods, and the company made the entire experience memorable (and how often can we say that about an academic conference?).</p> <div style="text-align: center;"> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a64bf910970c -pi" width="480" height="359" alt="VancouverCoast.jpg" /><br /> </div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Traveling Thursday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: traveling-thursday CATEGORY: Travel DATE: 10/15/2009 06:43:11 AM ----BODY: <p>I'm off to the <a href="http://mgsa.org/">Modern Greek Studies Association</a> meeting in Vancouver, B.C. today.</p> <p>Here's my reading for the flight:</p> <p>A. Mailis, "<a href="http://brepols.metapress.com/content/d71410475102rl03/">The Early Christian Baptisteries of Crete</a>," AnTard 14 (2006), 291-309.</p> <p>Y. Hamilakis and A. Anagostopoulos, "<a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/pua/2009/00000008/F0020002/art 00003">What is Archaeological Ethnography?</a>" Public Archaeology 8 (2009), 6587.</p> <p>M. Sahlins, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/10996810">Islands of History</a>. Chicago 1985.</p> <p>Be sure to check out <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> tomorrow when we live-blog the Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: I'm off to the Modern Greek Studies Association meeting in Vancouver, B.C. today. ... Be sure to check out Teaching Thursday tomorrow when we live-blog the Reflect ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th Century &quot;small world&quot; in the upland basin of the southeastern Korinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: between-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-smallworld-in-the-upland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology

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DATE: 10/14/2009 08:27:42 AM ----BODY: <p>This weekend, David Pettegrew and I are off to Vancouver, BC to give a paper at the Modern Greek Studies Association conference.&nbsp; Our paper will focus on our work with Tim Gregory and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory at the upland basin of Lakka Skoutara in the southeastern Korinthia.&nbsp; While we have been preparing a proper empirical study with lots of mico-historical detail for a formal archaeological report, David and I decided to take a bit more of a methodological approach to the paper at the MGSA meeting.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b7f8d970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e50ac3970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>We focused on four scales of analysis at the site produced by the various methods that we used to document the material evidence present at Lakka Skoutara.&nbsp; We used diachronic intensive pedestrian survey to document long term changes at the settlement. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4ad5a970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="169" alt="LSPrehistoricPottery" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b2267970c -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b2271970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="169" alt="LSRomanPottery" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4ad65970b -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b2281970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="169" alt="LSMedievalPottery" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b228c970c -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b2292970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="169" alt="LSModernPottery" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b229e970c -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> </p> <p>We placed the results of this survey work in a broader regional and national context to demonstrate how this material is the evidence for a dynamic set of interconnected local, regional, and national economic and political processes.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b22a8970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="229" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4ad8a970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>We also returned to the site every other year for a decade and documented the changes to individual buildings at the site.&nbsp; Most of the buildings at Lakka Skoutara are abandoned or only kept up in a very superficial way, so documenting their deterioration or curation allows us to understand the processes that produced the archaeological landscape documented through intensive survey.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b22c0970

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c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="138" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4ad9f970b -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4ada8970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="138" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4adb6970b -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b22d9970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="138" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b22eb970c -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4addc970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="138" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b2306970c -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Finally, our team collected oral history interviews from people who used the Lakka in various ways.&nbsp; These interviews allowed us to put formation processes within a social context.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4adeb970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="138" alt="DSC_1016" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a63b2315970c -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4ae05970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="138" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e4ae10970b -pi" width="204" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The goal of this approach is not to attempt to reconcile the interpretations or analysis produced by various methods, but rather to produce parallel narratives that are linked through their common reference to the landscape.&nbsp; The interplay of these references to the landscape (i.e. signifiers) is not meant to compile a "total history" of the landscape but to capture the dynamic nature of the landscape as a product of experience and methods. </p> <p>The key to this approach is recognizing the modern period as an important lens for viewing the landscape.&nbsp; An older generation of archaeologists often tended to ignore the modern landscape as they sought to reconstruct the ancient one particularly for rural areas.&nbsp; One result of this approach was an understanding of the Greek countryside, both in antiquity and in modern times, as a static place.&nbsp; More recent work on the Greek landscape, however, has emphasized the dynamism of the 19th and 20th century Greek countryside.&nbsp; Using finer resolution documentary sources than are available to scholars of antiquity and observing more carefully the living archaeology of Greek village life, archaeologists of modern Greece have managed to uncover a vitality in the countryside that less critical observers missed.&nbsp; By ascribing this reality as much to a method uniquely applicable to the modern period (that is, interviews, easy examination of a whole range of ongoing formation processes, documentary evidence) as to the dynamic nature of the modern Greek landscape in particular, we argue that the archaeology of modern Greek landscape emerges as a vital interpretative lens for reconsidering ancient landscapes.&nbsp; This isn't to simply turn the traditional method for understanding landscapes on its head (or resort to a clumsy ethnoarchaeology)

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and argue that ancient landscape are similar as the modern landscape but for our ability to document the processes that created them.&nbsp; Instead, incorporating the modern landscape into our analysis of landscape more generally allows us to problematize the methods used to create archaeological landscapes and show that the idea of landscape requires reading methods across periods.&nbsp; Thus the landscape becomes a product of our knowledge as archaeologists and the tools that we have at our disposal to document the material culture present for any period.&nbsp; </p> <p>Hopefully we'll have a draft of the paper posted by the weekend.&nbsp; </p> <p>For more on our work at Lakka Skoutara see these posts: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/sl opes-and-terraces-at-lakka-skoutara.html">Slopes and Terraces at Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/co rinthian-infiltration-the-interior-of-some-houses-at-lakkaskoutara.html">Corinthian Infiltration: The Interior of Some Houses at Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/la kka-skoutara-the-survey.html">Lakka Skoutara: The Survey</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-houses-of-lakka-skoutara.html">The Houses of Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co llapse.html">Collapse</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/pr ovisional-discard.html">Provisional Discard</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co nstruction-in-the-corinthia.html">Construction in the Corinthia</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.18.253.230 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 10/14/2009 12:05:16 PM I am so glad you are doing this kind of work. I was so frustrated on ASCSA trips last fall. I could not get one person interested in looking at how structures deteriorate -- and once we had to walk around three sides of a doozy, or at successive constructions added to the original "old" building. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: buy viagra EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 74.55.186.151 URL: http://www.xlpharmacy.com/ DATE: 03/05/2010 10:30:07 AM

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Hi friends I really enjoyed this post called The Archaeology of a 20th Century, is very good! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Tuesday: Re-imagining the M.A. Thesis STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-tuesday-re-imagining-the-ma-thesis CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/13/2009 07:59:09 AM ----BODY: <p>Our department has begun a discussion about our M.A. degree in history. This has led me to think a bit about the potential of a non-thesis M.A. and the nature of the M.A. thesis itself. It seems to me that the M.A. thesis today is neither fish nor foul. Years ago, the M.A. was enough to teach at some universities and represented the mastery of some content and some of the basic research skills of the Ph.D. (Although it is interesting to note that even in the late 19th century, folks regarded the M.A. as a bit worthless. As <a href="http://www.historians.org/projects/cmd/2005/Report/ch1.cfm">Philip Katz's recent survey of the M.A. degree</a> in history has recounted). Many Ph.D. programs award the M.A. now, in passing, or designated as a kind of honorable discharge for students who do not make the grade for Ph.D. level work. Other places see the M.A. as a specialized, terminal degree for teachers or even public historians. In general, these two options for the M.A. do not require the completion of the traditional Master's Thesis.</p> <p>Places like the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>, however, who specialize in the M.A. in history and regard is as a stepping stone toward admission into a Ph.D. program, continue the practice of encouraging students to write an M.A. thesis. In general these theses are 70-100 pages in length, make an original contribution to the discipline, and demonstrate a basic mastery of historical methods, academic writing, and vaguely defined "historical thinking". It's a pretty standard approach to the thesis.</p> <p>The only thing is that these theses are basically exercises in method. At half to a third of the length of a proper dissertation, they often involve far less original research -- our M.A. program is designed to be completed in 2 years. Consequently, a Ph.D. dissertation can metastasize into a book with just the right amount of low level intellectual radiation, the M.A. thesis can rarely produce more than a decent article. To extract a 8,000-10,000 word article, it is common to discard 70%-80% of the material from the M.A. thesis. This seems to me to be a frustratingly inefficient use of time, paper, and intellectual energy. On the other hand, graduate education in history has never been predicated on efficiency. Students are more artisans than assembly line workers.</p> <p>The real question, however, is not whether that 80% of the thesis that is discarded when a thesis is converted to a scholarly article is a useful component of the process, but whether it is a useful component of the thesis. Most of this material in the M.A. is dedicated to the careful documentation of process. This includes extensive (and frequently over-wrought) historiographic introductions, digressions on method and methodology, and extraneous narrative

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or interpretive chapters designed primarily to pad out length and show additional competence in the historical idiom. In other words, most of the material in the M.A. thesis is dedicated to documenting the research and composition process in a transparent way. For some students, this material validates their ability to work like a historian, even if the final results of the thesis do not necessarily make a substantive contribution. In my experience, however, and for most students, these pages represent additional editing work, citation work, and busy work which often (but not always) detracts from the overall quality of the main argument in the text by channeling time and energy to less significant exercises. If the goal of the M.A. is to demonstrate basic competence as a historian, the canonical length and standards of a publishable article should satisfy these requirements. Moreover, it would ensure that the student would have the time and energy (especially in a two year degree) to focus attention on the arguments that matter rather than the assorted flotsam that M.A. thesis often attract. Finally, history is a massive competitive field. Finding a job and establishing one's academic credentials are becoming more and more difficult with each passing year. An more professionally oriented M.A. thesis could contribute to a student's developing profession credentials (especially when in a thesis-based M.A. program that is complemented by a nonThesis M.A. option. The latter could be geared toward professionals in public history, teachers, and others who regard Master's degree as something other than a stepping stone to advanced graduate work in history). So, a re-imagined M.A. would be 8,000-12,000 words of publishable quality work, focused on an original thesis, and bearing the efficiency of prose that marks the best kind of published articles.</p> <p>Some of the first, M.A.'s produced by <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a> at the University of North Dakota appeared were supervised by <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/dept/library/Collections/og49.html">Orin G. Libby</a> and appeared in the early volumes of the <em>North Dakota Historical Quarterly</em>. So a re-imagined M.A. thesis could even carry the imprimatur of the father of historical research here at the University of North Dakota.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bryaxis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 164.15.135.34 URL: http://www.bryaxis.be DATE: 10/13/2009 09:02:26 AM Here in Brussels (Belgium) and most other universities in Belgium the M.A. thesis is mandatory for all students in all orientations (be it history of journalism, computer sciences or cognitive sciences...). Our masters can have one of three finalities (profesionnalizing, in depth study or didactical for either access to the professional world outside of academia, training for PhD training or teaching in secondary schools) and the thesis may or may not put

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special emphasis on the finality's theme. They can also be the product of a stage in professionnal environnement (in our disciplines it could be archeological field or laboratory work, museum's work, ...). From what I hear it is one of the most prevalent model in Europe and I've not heard any attempt to reform the concept here (at least at ULB) despite the fact we now have 1 year MA which do still require a 75 to 80 pages thesis for about 1/3 of the years' credits ( and about 1/4th of the credits of the 2 years MA) -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Richard Patterson and "Archaeological Dig" STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: richard-patterson-and-archaeological-dig CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 10/12/2009 08:00:06 AM ----BODY: <p>I was privileged to hang out with Richard Patterson last week when he visited the University of North Dakota. Rich is a UND alumnus, but prior to his time here in Grand Forks, he was one of the leading lights in the New York City graffiti underworld where he went by Rich2, Provide133, and others. It was fantastic to watch him work and talk at length about the process of creating graffiti in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><br /> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a632cb71970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="RichStep1.jpg" /></p> <p>One of the most striking aspects of our conversations was the process of graffiti production in New York. Far from being a spontaneous work of creativity (or a crime of opportunistic vandalism), graffiti art was carefully planned and choreographed. The process of planning the art was as much, if not more important, than its actual execution. Major works were always done in teams of painters who regularly worked together and sought to exert influence over particular train lines or sections of town.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a632cb86970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="RichStep2.jpg" /></p> <p>A key element in painting was the acquisition of paint. The various types of high quality paints that were preferred by graffiti painters were often hard to find in their own neighborhoods. Consequently, they had to go to New Jersey or more affluent areas to get these paints. This could involve trips to multiple locations in search of particular brands and colors needed to make their work distinct. The distinct colors in the art work, then, represented the time, energy, and inventiveness of a particular group of painters.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><br /> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a632cb8d970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="RichStep3.jpg" /></p>

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<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5dc2f16970b -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="RichStep4.jpg" /><br /></p> <p>Another fascinating element of graffiti art that Rich and I discussed was its gradual emergence in mainstream consciousness. He talked about preparing canvasses for the likes of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring and, in retrospect, how they felt exploited by these figures in the art world. Today, of course, graffiti artists have become increasingly clever at promoting and selling their own art, but in the 1970s and 1980s, Rich talked about how their art represented a call for recognition and access to opportunities. Rich and many of the early artists who contributed so much to establishing the artistic cannon for graffiti art were never able to reap any long term benefits of their work.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a632cb7c970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="RichStep5.jpg" /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a632cb9d970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="RichStep6.jpg" /><br /></p> <p>Despite these disappointments, Rich found other ways to make opportunities for himself. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia, he returned to school here at the University of North Dakota where he earned both a B.A. and an M.Ed. He currently teaches in North Carolina and paints only occasionally spending most of his time talking to kids about how to get their lives on track through hard work and discipline.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5dc2f39970b -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="RichStep7.jpg" /></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5dc2f40970b -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="RichStep8.jpg" /></p> <p>I was lucky enough to catch him at a moment of weakness and he produce this canvas for my new office. Called "Archaeological Dig", it's done in hand style and captures (only a tiny bit) of the vitality and dynamism that Rich Patterson brings to his art.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><br /> <img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a632cb90970c -pi" width="480" height="360" alt="Rich2ArchaeologicalDig.jpg" /></p> <p style="text-align: left;">For more examples of Rich's amazing work, check out <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/2009/10/rich-2-visit-to-und.html">Ryan Stander's Axis of Access</a>. For more on his contributions in particular, check out these two interviews, <a href="http://www.at149st.com/rich2int.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.subwayoutlaws.com/Interviews/rich2%20rh.htm">here</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.18.253.230 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 10/12/2009 03:43:08 PM Those were great days & some wonderful graffiti. The subway trains looked like dragons, racing past, and you could get tremendous fights going at dinner parties by bringing up the topic of graffiti. There is an amazing artist at work in the University district of Seattle now, -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 10/09/2009 10:00:30 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits on a sunny and cold Friday morning:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/136187/">The famous smiley water tower in Grand Forks met its end this week</a>. The local water tower painted with a smile and wink in 1977 was dismantled despite the controversy surrounding its importance to the local community.</li> <li>I've begun to experiment with <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a> and hope to have some kind of exhibit of material from the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project</a> available by early next year.</li> <li>I've also started blogging with <a href="http://illuminex.com/ecto/">ecto</a>. So far, so good.</li> <li>Finally, Ryan Stander and I received an invitation from <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/">Kickstarter</a> and hope to have something up and ready to go by the end of the month.</li> <li>If you haven't read <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>, you should.</li> <li>Via, <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/10/post-byzantine-art-inathens.html">Objects-Buildings-Situations</a>, the <a href="http://www.byzantinemuseum.gr/">Byzantine and Christian Museum</a> in Athens has opened its reinstalled Post-Byzantine collection.</li>

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<li>It's fantastic to see the new home of the <a href="http://digitalgateway.und.edu/">Digital and New Media Working Group</a> coming together. Photos soon.</li> </ul> <p>More soon, but in the meantime, have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: More on the cost of a cheap education STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-more-on-the-cost-of-a-cheap-education CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/08/2009 07:23:52 AM ----BODY: <p>I'll defer today to a smart post over at our <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> blog. <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/10/08/the-cost-of-cheap-educationanother-perspective/">Michael Beltz of the Philosophy and Religion Department at UND considers</a> the fundamental organization of the university ecology (or economy) and wonders whether our present model of using introductory level classes to support, in effect, upper level teaching and research is fair to students on both a pedagogical and an economic level. Beltz notes that not only does the university put the fewest resources into these lower level courses as an institution but also students in the lower level classes stand to benefit the least from the resources that these classes provide for upper level courses (in that they benefit no more than any other citizen of the world by the research and expertise of the scholars who take and teaching upper level courses at the university). He argues that the fundamental iniquity of the model employed by most universities has led to the emergence of companies like Straighterline which offer lower divisions courses for much cheaper because they are able to eliminate much of the university overhead.</p> <p><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/10/08/the-cost-of-cheap-educationanother-perspective/">So, read his post</a>!</p> <p>While this post is certainly food for thought, I'd point out that most students do benefit from some upper level courses whether or not they are in the field in which they take an introductory level course or not. That is to say, you might take a lower level course in biology and may not directly benefit from an upper level biology class, but you would benefit from an upper level course in, say, political science or history (and these courses are sustained, at least in theory, by faculty research). So the ecosystem, so to speak, is somewhat more

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complex than Beltz's model. But his point still stands. There is a disconnect between the economics and philosophy of teaching at many universities.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Pierre MacKay EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.18.253.230 URL: http://angiolello.net DATE: 10/08/2009 10:03:42 AM Even worse, when there is a department like the Near Eastern Languages department i used to belong to, where the senior faculty are very concerned to spend time teaching lower division courses, the bean-counters beat them around the head and shoulders for using "high-cost resources" on low value effort. There was one year my chairman taught 5 scheduled courses in a quarter, while still taking care of research and of departmental administration, because there were not enough facult otherwise. He was roundly condemned by the bean-counters for doing so. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Preliminary Analysis of Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Data or Thinking Out Loud 3 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: preliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-orthinking-out-loud-3 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 10/07/2009 08:08:29 AM ----BODY: <p>Last week, I looked at surface visibility and artifact densities.&nbsp; This week, I want to look at two issues when considering the analysis of distributional data across the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project's study area.</p> <p>First, the distribution of ceramic material and the topography of our site recommend that we divide our site into zones for analysis.&nbsp; I decided to divide the survey area into zones to attempt to isolate some variables influencing the distribution of material across the site.&nbsp; In particular, these zones capture areas with distinct patterns and levels of artifacts.&nbsp; Zone 1 -- the area around Koutsopetria -- has a ceramic density of over 4000 artifacts per hectare.&nbsp; Zone 2 -- the coastal plain to the east of Koutsopetria -- has an overall artifact density of barely 700 artifacts

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per hectare.&nbsp; Beyond that the areas capture very different environmental conditions.&nbsp; Zone 1 consists largely of grain stubble fields with an average visibility of around 48%; Zone 2 units are usually sandier soils only a few of which are under cultivation.&nbsp; The average density in Zone 2 is over 70%.&nbsp; Zones 3 and 4 are defined as much by topography as by artifact densities.&nbsp; Zone 3 centers on the prehistoric site of Kokkinokremos and featured units shaped to take into account the plowed top and unplowed slopes of this.&nbsp; Zone 4 is the top of the Kazama ridge which extended north from the height of Vigla.&nbsp; I have isolate Vigla from any zone since the densities there were so high and the environmental conditions in that hill were distinct.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a61fec54970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="PKAPZones" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a61fec6b970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Despite the fact that these zones are the creation the archaeologist and archaeological methods, they nevertheless provide a way to limit some of the known variables (significant variations in artifact density, for example, or clear differences in land use or environmental conditions) in order to isolate other variables which may have had locally significant influences on the distribution of artifacts.&nbsp; Of course, this assumes that the characteristics that formed the basis for the zones are not the main factors on our ability to map ceramics across the survey area.</p> <p>To test that I isolated a number of variables that we have seen influencing our ability to document the material on the surface and look at whether they coincided with the zone divisions.</p> <p>First, I mapped the distribution of grain stubble fields across the site.&nbsp; Grain stubble can be the survey archaeologist's worst nightmare as it typically accompanies the remains of cute wheat which can obscure the surface of the ground almost entirely.&nbsp; The darker units had grain stubble.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c94ddb970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="PKAPZonesGS" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a61fec91970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">In units without grain stubble there was frequently some standing vegetation.&nbsp; We recorded the height of standing vegetation across the entire survey area.&nbsp; The darker the color the higher the vegetation.&nbsp; Note that the height of the vegetation doesn't influence visibility in a predictable way.&nbsp; Sometimes waist height vegetation actually makes the surface easier to see.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a61fecaa970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="PKAPZonesVH" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c94dec970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Another factor that plays into the distribution of ceramics is whether the fields show signs of recent plowing.&nbsp; The plow often bring material to the surface from deeper with the plow-zone, but it can introduce background disturbance (see below) and break pottery into small fragments that increase the number of artifacts without increasing the amount of material (say, by weight) in the unit.&nbsp; At the same time, it tends to limit vegetation across the area.&nbsp; The darker areas are plowed fields.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a61fecbf970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-

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bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="PKAPZonesPl" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a61fecd8970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">I also mapped background disturbance across the zones.&nbsp; Background disturbance is a survey archaeology term that describes the amount of non-archaeological material in the surface soil that confuses the eye of the archaeologist.&nbsp; The most common form of background disturbance are fragments of bedrock chipped by the plow and turned into the soil.&nbsp; This material often looks like pottery and makes identifying ceramic material in the soil more difficult.&nbsp; Some analyses of the data from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey has suggested that background disturbance often influenced the ability of fieldwalkers to document material on the ground to a considerable degree.&nbsp; The darker the color the more background disturbance there was recorded.&nbsp; Note the consistent moderate to heavy background disturbance across Zone 4.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a61fecf8970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="PKAPZonesBG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a61fed15970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">These basic environmental characteristics can now be compared to artifact distribution both across the site and in the individual zones.&nbsp; Stay tuned for more!</p> <p align="left">For more Thinking Out Loud see:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/09/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-outloud.html">Preliminary Analysis of Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Data or Thinking Out Loud</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/09/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-outloud-2.html">Preliminary Analysis of Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Data or Thinking Out Loud 2</a> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Tuesday: Syllabus as Contract STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: 0 BASENAME: teaching-tuesday-syllabus-as-contract CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/06/2009 07:58:49 AM ----BODY: <p style="font-size: 13px;">A student confronted me this week with an old chestnut: the syllabus is a contract. I hadn't heard this argument for many

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years and, perhaps naively, thought that it might have fallen out of circulation. The context for this argument is my graduate historiography seminar. In this class, I've revised the syllabus to take into account a slightly different class dynamic than I have experienced in other classes. In some cases, I reduced the length of some readings, swapped in alternate readings elsewhere, and opened a discussion as to whether the assignments as I have drawn them up in the syllabus are suitable for this particular group. Graduate historiography can be a frustrating class, so I'll assume that the "syllabus is contract" response is in part linked to that frustration.</p> <p style="font-size: 13px;">On the other hand, the notion of syllabus as contract is an interesting one. In fact, it ties into some of the discussions that we have been having over on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> (especially <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/thecost-of-cheap-education/">here</a> and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/24/the-cost-of-cheap-educationanother-view/">here</a>). Over the last month, we've been discussing the rise of for-profit online eduction companies which offer courses at amazingly low prices. In general, they offer introductory level courses that have a strong emphasis on content (as opposed to methods or even less tangible goals like "critical thinking skills"). Presumably the relationship between the student and the "content provider" is dictated by some kind of contract. That is to say, if the student successfully completes the course, he or she should expect to have command over the content that the course purports to provide.</p> <p style="font-size: 13px;">In upper level courses, however, or in courses where the goal is more methodological, the neat contractual obligation of the syllabus writer (and the students who accept the syllabus) breaks down. On the one hand, it is more difficult to determine whether the goals of the syllabus have been achieved; mastery of a method, for example, relies on a level of understanding that is notoriously difficult to evaluate. So to some extent successful completion of the course will never be precisely concomitant with the mastery of the material that the course presents. On the other hand, certain aspects of the syllabus should be expected to remain more or less stable over the course of the class. The instructor probably shouldn't change the value of assignments <em>ex post facto</em> (at least to the detriment of the students) or change the frequency of course meetings or topic of the class in a gross way. The syllabus should, in other words, reflect fairly the nature, expectations, and content of the class.</p> <p style="font-size: 13px;">These vague criteria, however, are hardly the stuff of an enforceably contract (although, it goes without saying that there are many different kinds of contracts in the world and I am sure that there is a kind of contract that could satisfy these vague criteria). I suppose faculty should be able to argue that any changes to a syllabus must be changes in form rather than changes in substance. And I suppose the syllabus could be a tool to hold students to certain expectations and in that regard it benefits from some kind of contractual or pseudo-legal force.</p> <p style="font-size: 13px;">What's more disturbing to me is that there should be a contractual mindset between faculty and student at all. Perhaps what bothers me is that this evokes the current rage transforming academia into a vendorcustomer environment. In other words, it marks out the most blatant examples of market capitalism coming rest in the academic world. For this week in our seminar we've read a few articles by the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson. In several places, he distinguishes between the "moral economy" of the pre-industrial period and the market economy of the industrial period. For Thompson the moral economy was based upon a set of expectations that did not necessary coincide with the tenants of capitalism. For example, the moral

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economy stipulated that grain be sold at a fair price by landlords and those dependent on this grain had the right to protest unfair prices (in both violent ways and with the threat of violence). This tacit agreement made it difficult for landowners to pocket significant profits at the expense of the poor and also created a set of expectations which the poor tended to follow to articulate the limits of their tolerance.</p> <p style="font-size: 13px;">The ritualized interaction of the moral economy has long been a staple in the classroom. It has always been the right of students "to vote with their feet" and abandon courses that they regarded as unfair. Our university sanctions this particular power of students through late drop periods and the ability to withdraw from classes without significant consequences. Students also have means of protesting. They can complain in and outside of class. Intentionally do poorly on assignments or refuse to cooperate in classroom discussions. Faculty can, and do, lash out by pushing the syllabus to its limits, but generally this kind of exchange ends poorly. In most cases, there is a resolution or compromise struck between students and faculty and balance is restored.</p> <p style="font-size: 13px;">The need to view a syllabus as a contract, however, suggests perhaps that some of these old methods of the moral economy are breaking down and methods influenced by more formal, market driven understandings of the relationship between faculty and students are replacing them. Thompson alluded to the idea that students represented one of the last remaining bastions of the pre-industrial way of life. Perhaps these days are ending.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Metadata and Macintosh STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: metadata-and-macintosh CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 10/05/2009 07:54:17 AM ----BODY: <p>Last week, a few high-volume blogs made note of the operating systems and browsers that their visitors used.&nbsp; Of particular interest was the significant increase in number of users using Macs over a two year time span.&nbsp; While my blog does not even receive a fraction of the traffic of <a href="http://kottke.org/09/09/kottkeorg-visitor-trends-andstatistics">kottke.org</a> (for example), I thought that I'd run the same analysis on my data.</p> <p><img

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src="https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/pie?p=6671es03900s00e00a00100100 1001&amp;w=340&amp;h=240" align="right"></p> <p>This is the overall distribution of operating systems:</p> <p>1. Windows: 79.99%<br>2. Macintosh: 18.28%<br>3. Linux : 1.17%<br>4. iPhone:&nbsp; 0.24%<br>5. Sony: 0.01%</p> <p>Obviously, Archaeology of the Mediterranean World readers are overwhelmingly PC users.</p> <p>One Year Ago:</p> <p>1. Windows: 82.08%<br>2. Macintosh: 16.50%<br>3. Linx: 1.05%<br>4. iPhone: 0.13%<br>5. FreeBSD: 0.01%</p> <p>This year:</p> <p>1. Windows: 78.06%<br>2. Macintosh: 19.90%<br>3. Linux: 1.28%<br>4. iPhone: 0.46%<br>5. Sony: 0.03% </p> <p>Last three months:</p> <p>1. Windows: 76.83%<br>2. Macintosh: 19.93%<br>3. Lixux: 1.77%<br>4. iPhone: 0.62%<br>5. Sony: 0.10%</p> <p><img src="https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/pie?p=3it3170mo08106y01i01d00b00 9007&amp;w=340&amp;h=240" align="right"></p> <p>As for browsers, this is the overall distribution:</p> <p>1. Firefox: 45.65%<br>2. IE: 39.32%<br>3. Safari: 8.16%<br>4. Opera: 2.89%<br>5. Crome: 2.50%</p> <p>One year ago:</p> <p>1. IE: 45.05%<br>2. Firefox: 42.52%<br>3. Safari: 7.65%<br>4. Opera: 3.08<br>5. Monzilla: 0.66%</p> <p>This year:</p> <p>1. Firefox: 48.60%<br>2. IE: 33.92%<br>3. Safari: 8.65%<br>4. Chrome: 4.47%<br>5. Opera: 7.71%</p> <p>Last three months: </p> <p>1. Firefox: 51.24%<br>2. IE: 31.86%<br>3. Safari: 8.59%<br>4. Chrome: 4.16%<br>5. Opera: 2.14%</p> <p>But what does this all mean?</p> <p>Compared to kottke.org and other high-volume blogs, my blog is behind in visits by Macs.&nbsp; I'll offer a few mundane observations:</p> <p>1. Over 45% of my visitors are not from the U.S.&nbsp; Macintosh may have gained popularity in the US particularly over the last year or so, but overseas, the world is still overwhelmingly PC oriented.&nbsp; So some of the strong Windows showing probably derives from the international visitors to this blog.&nbsp; I suspect that archaeologists slightly prefer PCs (my friends at the University of Cincinnati aside) especially those who run Microsoft Access databases and ESRI GIS programs.</p> <p>2. More Macs than ever.&nbsp; From totally anecdotal evidence, I have seen more Macs on campus this year than ever before.&nbsp; In fact, in my class that is an introduction to the history major (History 240, for those of you who read this blog regularly), I'd guess that 20% of the class are Mac users. So the upsurge in the number of Mac users in the last three months (when people tend to buy their shinny new back-to-school computers) is not completely surprising (nor is the uptick in Safari users).</p> <p>3. Where are the netbooks?&nbsp; I've also seen a huge increase in the number of netbooks on campus.&nbsp; Most of those run Windows, but apparently these folks don't visit my blog. Perhaps enough of these new netbooks run Linux that they account for the increase in number of Lixus OS visitors (and most likely account for some of the increase in number of Firefox users).</p> <p>4.&nbsp; People are using Chrome, apparently at the expense of Internet Explorer (since there is still no Chrome for Mac).&nbsp; It's remarkable to see how precipitously the number of IE users have fallen over the past two years</p> <p>Bloggers seems to love Macs.&nbsp; I admit to using a Mac to post on this blog probably 60% of the time, but for the record, I prefer my Windows computer for blogging.&nbsp; As far as I can tell, there is no Mac rival to Windows Live Writer, which is the best blogging software around.&nbsp; It lets me compose and lay-out my post in a word processor-like interface, decent spell checking, allows me to produce a glossery of links and to drag-and-drop pictures and data produced by other Microsoft programs.&nbsp; I can post to my various blogs by a simple menu making it easy to cross-post (without cutting and pasting) and even saves drafts of my blog posts making it easy for me to update a post.&nbsp; And best of all, it was free! </p> <p>The only inconvenience is that I tend to write on my Mac, so I'd love to find a decent blogging program for that OS... any advice on one?</p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sam Wise EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 192.35.35.34 URL: http://sortingoutscience.net DATE: 10/05/2009 11:33:12 AM If you're looking for Mac blog software, you should definitely check out ecto: <a href="http://illuminex.com/ecto">http://illuminex.com/ecto</a> Works with pretty nearly all blog CMSs, has a 21 day free trial, is pretty stable / reliable, lets you do rich text editing. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hit and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hit-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 10/02/2009 09:45:29 AM ----BODY: <p>A gray and cold Friday for some quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>Some really good posts from <a href="http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/">Tenure Radical</a> lately.</li> <li><a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/70-000views/">70,000 hits at Electric Archaeologist</a>... congrats!&nbsp; And it's nice to see that Archaeology of the Mediterranean World did its part.</li> <li>New York graffiti artist and University of North Dakota alumnus Richard Patterson (of the famed <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/2009/08/contested-spaces-unds-okellyhall-and.html">O'Kelly Graffiti Wall</a>) will be on campus October 5th to do some new work and talk about it in the Anna Mae Hughes Room in the Hughes Fine Arts Building.</li> <li>Congrats to the NL East Winning Phillies.</li> <li>Be sure to check out <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> and the schedule for the Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium on October 16-17 at the Memorial Union on campus.&nbsp; We are looking for someone to live blog parts of the conference.&nbsp; If you're interested drop me a line!</li> <li>Check out <a href="http://kottke.org/09/09/kottkeorg-visitortrends-and-statistics">kottke.org's user stats</a> and follow the links to similar stats from other blogs.&nbsp; I'll put together some for my blog on a Metadata Monday.</li></ul> <p>So, it felt like a slow week in blog world... and maybe it was.</p> <p>Have a good weekend!</p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dallas EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 65.60.192.124 URL: DATE: 10/02/2009 04:32:42 PM ...and their fine closer, Brad Lidge, er, Ryan Madson--or whoever it is today. Best of luck in October to the Phils. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: ryan stander EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.203.199 URL: http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com DATE: 10/05/2009 09:25:23 AM i will have picts from the Rich 2 visit up today or tomorrow over at AoA -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Teaching History in the 19th Century STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-teaching-history-in-the-19th-century CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/01/2009 07:42:02 AM ----BODY: <p>I assigned Herbert B. Adams' "Special Methods of Historical Study" from <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/34908853">G. Stanley Hall ed., <em>Methods of Teaching History</em>. (Boston 1902)</a> this week for my History 240: The Historians Craft class.&nbsp; It's an amazing, disorganized, bundle of observations, ideas, and arguments.&nbsp; He reports on everything from the texts used by freshman as Smith College, where Adams taught in the late 1870s and early 1880s, to the methods employed in his famous seminar at Johns Hopkins.&nbsp; Many of his observations are quite modern and could well appear in a more modern teaching manual.&nbsp; </p> <p>In particular, Adams rails against the use of lecture in teaching history.&nbsp; </p> <blockquote> <p>"[lectures or dictations], though good to a certain extent, become deadening to a class when its members are no longer stimulated to original research, but sink back in passive reliance upon the authority of the lecturer.&nbsp; That method of teaching history which converts bright young pupils into note-taking machines is a bad method. Its the construction of a poor text-book at the

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expense of much valuable time and youthful energy... The simple minded student assents to this counsel, and says, that it is a great comfort to have everything in black and white, so that he can carry it all home.&nbsp; But no scrap-book of facts can give wisdom, any more than a tank of water can form a running spring.&nbsp; It is, perhaps, of as much consequence to teach a young person how to study history as to teach him history itself." (p. 120)</p></blockquote> <p>Adams goes on the sing the praises of the seminar system where students work independently on research projects and meet periodically to share ideas, citations, and criticisms.&nbsp; He notes that the seminar is well-suited for work in local history as considerable local resources exist at hand and can be brought together in a seminar library.&nbsp; Moreover, according to Adams, there was a great need for local history in the U.S. from works of basic analysis of governmental structures to the arduous task of accumulating documents and preparing archives which would ultimately sustain the work of seminar students into the future.</p> <p>What is remarkable, of course, is that much of Adams advice continues to echo the halls of departments today.&nbsp; The relatively recent push for public history (which almost invariably involves a local component) and its emphasis on method updates and complements century-old invectives against content-driven lecture classes.&nbsp; The internet has emerged as a kind of global archive of historical documents and data and producing a kind of universal seminar library accessible to students from their laptops in the classroom.</p> <p>At the same time, many of our students continue to resist the risks and effort involved in original research and prefer lecture driven classes, the clear "black and white" content, and routine of memorization and reproduction to the unpredictable, syncopated rhythms of archival research.</p> <p>It's sort of discouraging when you think too hard about it.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5b0ac8c970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="627" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a6078a4c970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Preliminary Analysis of Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Data or Thinking Out Loud 2 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: preliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-orthinking-out-loud-2 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology

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DATE: 09/30/2009 07:54:59 AM ----BODY: <p>I am continuing to work on analyzing the survey data collected from 4 seasons of intensive survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria in Cyprus.&nbsp; On Monday, I did focused on the relationship between artifact density data and surface visibility.&nbsp; The survey area for PKAP was particularly uniform in ground cover and field conditions.&nbsp; Most of the survey units had been under cultivation with cereals and were covered with grain stubble or were recently fallow.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a603b831970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="400" alt="GrainStubbleFields" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5acdfbe970b -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Average visibility across the entire survey area was around 60%.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a603b83f970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="400" alt="SurfaceVisibility" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5acdfca970b -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Average density of ceramic objects per area walked across the entire site is 2183 ceramic artifacts per hectare. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a603b848970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="400" alt="OverallArtifactDensity" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5acdfcd970b -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>One of the key discussions in the analysis of surface density data is how to compensate for variable visibility.&nbsp; Our survey area consisted of only 471 units -- hardly a robust sample.&nbsp; The highest density areas of the site coincided with units of middling visibility and (to make matters worse) there were a significant number of very high visibility units that produced almost no artifacts (predominantly from an area that was an infilled ancient embayment and a coastal marsh drained in relatively recent times).&nbsp; So, the small sample size and these topographical and archaeological patterns make doing any analysis of artifact density and surface visibility across the entire site difficult.</p> <p>I did, however, run a small analysis on the artifact densities and visibilities from the area of the Koutsopetria plain.&nbsp; We have reason to think that the distribution of ceramics across this area could be relatively uniform as most of these fields overlay buildings from the Late Roman period (if not other periods as well).&nbsp; At the same time, the units had some variation in visibility with the lowest visibility units being 20% and highest visibility units being around 60%. Most units had 30%-50% visibility.&nbsp; While the sample size is disturbingly small, it is interesting that there is a nice linear relationship between artifact densities and the surface visibility in Koutsopetria with an Rsquared of 0.9229.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5acdfd0970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="242" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a603b853970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>This does not hold up across the entire survey area where for the same range of surface visibility there is no evidence of a linear relationship at all and the R-squared is a laughable 0.5475.&nbsp; (Note that since the following graph compares units of different sizes, I

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compared them using density per area walked (per ha).&nbsp; The graph above compares units of identical size, so I can compare raw ceramic counts.)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5acdfdc970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="242" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a603b85e970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">For more installments of Preliminary Analysis of Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Data or Thinking Out Loud:</p> <p align="left"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/09/pr eliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-or-thinking-outloud.html">Preliminary Analysis of Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Data or Thinking Out Loud</a></p> <p align="left">More as I continue to work through the data.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The SBL, Affiliation, and Bibliobloggers STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-sbl-affiliation-and-bibliobloggers CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/29/2009 08:09:07 AM ----BODY: <p>It's been pretty interesting (in a bit of a train-wreck kind of way) to watch the tense fall as a group of bloggers sought to get their blogging group, Bibliobloggers, associated formally with the <a href="http://www.sblsite.org/">Society of Biblical Literature</a> (SBL).&nbsp; The upshot of this was that their group did become affiliated with the SBL, but not before some serious ruffled feathers, tense comments, and at least one blogger quitting blogging entirely.&nbsp; I don't know any of the participants in this dispute and detect a certain amount of personal animosity among them.&nbsp; Putting aside the interpersonal tensions that are likely to be the part of any social network, it is interesting to see some of the standard issues of the blogging discourse emerge once again. I am not going to link to specific posts in my observations here -- out of only laziness and the fact that I read the various perspectives in an unsystematic way (or until I decided that most folks were making arguments that I had heard before in other contexts).&nbsp; For a general recap, check out <a href="http://danielomcclellan.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/sblaffiliation-posts-consolidated/">this post on Daniel O. McClellan's</a> blog (via Chuck Jones at the <a

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href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2009/09/sbl-affiliation-withbibliobloggers.html">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a>), and if you can only read one post be sure to read Chris Heard's "<a href="http://www.heardworld.com/higgaion/?p=1481#more-1481">Blogging, SBL affiliation, and academic respectability</a>", it's hilarious: </p> <p>1. Bloggers like to think of themselves as voices calling out in the desert (or at least mildly subversive).&nbsp; I must admit that much of the initial appeal of blogging to me was to find a medium that allowed me to work around the traditional barriers of the academic world.&nbsp; That is to meld (such as I can) the intellectual with the academic.&nbsp; I can explore my interests here in a public forum, offer up working papers, comment on various academic and intellectual issues, and watch the world go by without the limitations imposed by peer review (and, of course, without the benefits of peer review either).&nbsp; The formal association with a group and then the formal association with a professional academic organization (like the SBL or the AIA or even for that matter a university) would certain undermine any subversive street cred that I imagine myself possessing, not to mention run the risk of imposing some standards or limits external to my blog.&nbsp; While this wouldn't be a bad thing (a copy editor would be great, in fact), it's not why I blog and would hate to have to worry about my ties with a professional body when I begin to compose a post.</p> <p>2. Blogging and professional credit. Of course, there has long been a group of bloggers who have sought to make blogging a more recognized form of academic discourse and it is easy to see how earning an official professional association would not help&nbsp;&nbsp; Invariably this group is attacked by folks who seem to think that tenure credit should only be given for peer reviewed achievements.&nbsp; This is a silly position to hold, of course, since most of us earn tenure credit for a wide range of activities from community and university service to teaching that are not subjected to the standard strictures of peer review.&nbsp; Moreover, we all know that the notion of peer review varies greatly across a wide range of academic publications which, in all but the most research focused departments, earn something toward tenure (e.g. book reviews, encyclopedia articles, invited contributions, et c.).&nbsp; While I can completely understand how professional pressures can lead us to reading academic activity as a zero-sum enterprise (i.e. if I am blogging then I am not working on a peer reviewed article, a monograph, et c.), I also like to think that blogging evokes some of now-extinct forms of scholarly communication such as the learned communication or the academic correspondence (a public statement regarding a particular issue that would be circulated among a group or published in a journal).&nbsp; These forms of communication circulated in intellectual and academic communities and served to inform likeminded individuals and stimulate debate.&nbsp; The benefit to one's professional status, then, doesn't come from the overly bureaucratized tenure process, but from working to enrich the academic discourse more broadly.&nbsp; In other words, you are benefiting the field of which you are a part.&nbsp; (And for the record, I include my blog in my c.v. under the heading "other publications" where I include non-peer reviewed articles, multimedia projects, and the like).</p> <p>3. Blogs and Incomplete Truths.&nbsp; There are still folks out there who worry that blogging is just another way to fill the internet with incomplete ideas, flights of fancy, and just plain rubbish. Typically, these people are concerned that the general public or students will struggle to separate the good, high-quality stuff, from the low quality trash.&nbsp; The interest in getting the SBL or any formal affiliation is that it will mark a blog out as a legitimate contributor to conversation and not just another source of dubious quality internet drivel.&nbsp; While I appreciate the concern that blogs have often become the medium for cranks or conduits for misinformation,

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there is no reason to confuse the medium with the message.&nbsp; I am tiring of folks who do not seems to expect our colleagues, students. and the general public to be able to read critically on the web.&nbsp; </p> <p>4. Are we still talking about blogging? It's funny to think that blogging as a medium is almost 15 years old at this point. Let's shift the conversation the conversation to more dynamic places within the new media-sphere.&nbsp; How does YouTube, Twitter, and other highly social media outlets contribute or subvert the core missions of our professional organizations?</p> <p>Oh, and do we need an <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/">AIA group</a> dedicated to Archaeobloggers?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Flu, The University, and the Department of History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-flu-the-university-and-the-department-of-history CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 09/28/2009 08:01:07 AM ----BODY: <p>We've recently been barraged by university communications regarding prospects of a serious outbreak of the H1N1 Swine Flu.&nbsp; This is not the first time that the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> has had to deal with an outbreak of the flu.&nbsp; In 1918, UND endured a particularly tragic outbreak of flu as the campus transformed itself into a base for the Student Army Training Corps (SATC).&nbsp; Similar to our current situation, the flu crisis was managed by a new university president, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/library/Collections/og41.html">Thomas Kane</a>, who had been inaugurated just a year earlier.&nbsp; Unlike our current leader, <a href="http://undpresidentsblog.wordpress.com/">Robert Kelley</a>, however, Kane had had a controversial first few months in office including the botched handling of a student drinking case, a flip-flopping attitude toward the tense political situation in the state, and an inflammatory inaugural address that rankled the sensitivities of many longtime university faculty members including the irascible Orin G. Libby.</p> <p><em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1107281">Louis Geiger's The University of the Northern Plains</a> </em>provides the best summary of the flu's decent on campus in October of 1918.&nbsp; The university had just re-organized itself to take on the training of over&nbsp; 400 army cadets who greatly outnumbered the small body of regular students on campus.&nbsp; The campus moved to a quarter system,

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<a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/temporary/Davis.html">Davis Hall</a>, <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/html/factbook/b.html#budgeHall">Budge Hall</a>, the dinning hall of the Commons, and the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity house were turned over to military use as barracks and headquarters for the cadets and money was allocated for the construction of <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/html/factbook/a.html#armory">an Armory</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p>Despite what would have appeared to be significant preparations for the arrival of these new students, the university was unprepared for the influenza epidemic when it struck campus in October.&nbsp; By October 9th, the university had suspended classes and placed the entire campus under a quarantine.&nbsp; Training and classes for the SATC abruptly stopped as growing numbers of the corp became ill and parts of Budge Hall and the Phi Delta Theta house were converted to make-shift hospitals to serve the increasing number of sick students.&nbsp; The hospitals, however, lacked proper equipment, toiletries, and bedding making them poorly suited to care for the sick.&nbsp; Moreover, the Grand Forks community, an important support network for the university, suffered at least as grievously as the university campus.&nbsp; By mid-October Grand Forks reported over 3000 cases of the flu and on campus 320 of the 470 cadets were ill.&nbsp; Tragically, 29 of these students would die and Geiger reports that no other university campus had a worse record (p. 298).&nbsp; In contrast, the Agricultural College in Fargo had far fewer cases and deaths despite having a larger number of SATC students; the quick acting Dean of the Medical School, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/library/Collections/og142.html">Harley E. French</a>, took decisive measures to prevent the spread of the flu among campus women (who were organized and housed separately from the SATC).&nbsp; One died, but far fewer were ill.</p> <p>The upshot of the flu tragedy on the University of North Dakota's campus was significant. Orin G. Libby, the noted historian, had served as the chair of the University's War Committee and had worked alongside President Kane to bring to make the arrangements necessary to accommodate the SATC on campus.&nbsp; Libby, whose feathers had been ruffled already by Kane's impolitic speech at his inauguration, placed the blame for the tragic student deaths squarely on Kane's shoulders.&nbsp;&nbsp; In 1920, Libby joined a group of faculty members including John M. Gillette, perhaps the most well-regarded and influential member of the university faculty during the first half of the 20th century, to call for Kane's removal.&nbsp; Kane for his part rallied support from Vernon Squires (who would later write the first history of the university) and, perhaps significantly, Dean French of the Medical School.&nbsp; The precise details of this conflict have been lost, but it attracted sufficient attention from various university stakeholders to compromise in a serious way both Kane's and Libby's ability to serve as campus leaders.&nbsp; Libby and the Department of History, in particular, suffered at the hands of Kane as they clashed repeatedly throughout the early years of the 1920s (for more the Kane-Libby clashes see my three-part series: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and-th.html">Politics and the Presidency at UND: Reflections on the Past at the Dawn of a New Era, part 1</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and--1.html">part 2</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/po litics-and-th.html">part 3</a>)</p> <p>Stay healthy, UND!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: some-friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/25/2009 09:45:05 AM ----BODY: <p>It's been a busy week!</p> <p>But too many fun web discoveries to pass up on a quick hits and varia.</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/">The Staffordshire Hoard</a>.&nbsp; Pretty amazing stuff and with all the recent interest in Late Antique/Early Medieval trade, this hoard is certain to contribute in some way to broader conversations about the earliest European economy.</li> <li><a href="http://makingmaps.net/">Making Map: DIY Cartography</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Kostis Kourelis</a> turned me onto this blog with it's slight edge of punk-ness via the DIY ethos.</li> <li>The <a href="http://radio.soundwalk.com/">Sound of Phillippe Starck</a> as a 24 hour stream.&nbsp; </li> <li>The <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/">Graduate School Blog here at UND</a> has been particular productive lately.&nbsp; They have embraced blogging better than any <a href="http://undpresidentsblog.wordpress.com/">other division</a> on campus.</li> <li>The photographs coming from the Australian dust storm are amazing.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.monstersandcritics.com/science/features/article_1503028.php/InPictures-Australia-Dust-Storm-Satellite-Imagery">As is this satellite image</a>.</li> <li>Be sure to check out <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.</li> <li>Things are coming together for the exhibition of <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Ryan Stander</a> photographs.&nbsp; Keep your eyes on this spot.</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

Caraher

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TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Another View on the Cost of Cheap Education STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-cost-of-cheap-education-another-view CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 09/24/2009 08:30:03 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Crossposted with <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.</em></p> <p>It was really exciting to see <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/">the interaction between John Tagg and Anne Kelsch</a> who are two of the most thoughtful commentators on higher education to grace this humble blog.&#0160; Their discussion revolved around <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_mo nth.php?page=all&amp;print=true">a recent Washington Monthly article entitled &quot;College for $99 a Month&quot;</a> which reviewed the education model offered by companies such as <a href="http://www.straighterline.com/">Straighterline</a>.&#0160; My post today is less of a critique of their posts and more a complement to it.&#0160; I want to offer a slightly different perspective on the same article.</p> <p>First, one aspect of the original article that was not noted by either Tagg or Kelsch was that introductory level classes have evolved over a particular trajectory in part to satisfy the changing needs of university faculty.&#0160; Introductory level classes play a key role in the university ecosystem, according to the Washington Monthly article, by providing income that supports upper level courses, research (particularly in the humanities where external funding opportunities are relatively scarce), and even the physical facilities and services which have become synonymous with university life.&#0160; So, the nature of these lower division courses and, in particular, their size has become an important feature in university fiscal ecology; changing one part of the ecosystem will necessitate changes across the ecosystem.&#0160; This is not say that this is a bad thing,&#0160; but we are all probably aware that the balance between teaching and research is one of the key issues at stake.&#0160; Introductory level courses are frequently taught by non-research faculty (often adjuncts).&#0160; Redesigning introductory level courses, making them smaller, or changing their relationship to the rest of the curriculum are expensive and potentially time consuming tasks that take time away from research, writing, and other faculty tasks.&#0160; The university ecosystem is a delicate thing!&#0160; The advantage that companies like Straighterline have is that they employ individuals who are charged only with teaching.&#0160; They can offer courses so cheaply because they don&#39;t have to manage the complex ecosystem of the modern university.</p> <p>Next, if changes in the way that we teaching lower level classes will be this expensive and disruptive process within the university ecosystem, we have to consider quite seriously who will bear the costs.&#0160; The democratization of higher education represents one of the great myths of the American success story.&#0160; At the same time, higher education likes to cling to its elite roots.&#0160; Many of the expectations surrounding university life redound with ideals from the earliest days of the modern university.&#0160; As Tagg points out when he asks &quot;what is college for?&quot;, there is not a single answer that describes the role of college in

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the development of all students.&#0160; Our calls for a university that develops students in accordance with the age old principles of humanism will not necessarily ring true with our entire student body.&#0160; In many ways, companies like Straighterline which offer bargain basement higher education packages cater to students who have radically different expectations of their college education.&#0160; Universities have long ago absorbed crucial aspects of vocational education which practices across the world have demonstrated can achieve some degree of success without placing emphasis on critical thinking or intellectual development and focusing on the mastery of a set of practices or body of content.&#0160; While we can argue that there are better and worse ways to communicate and teach content, the basic goals of these degrees and experiences are substantially different from the goals of fields like history, English, or math.&#0160; My point here is that universities have pulled together a wide range of disciplines under a single roof.&#0160; At some point in the past, this may have led to economies of scale where facilities and certain core resources could be shared among these divergent disciplines; today, we might argue that this forced marriage of vocational, practical, theoretical, and philosophical education works counter to the basic democratization of higher learning.&#0160; Maybe Straigherline can do as well, if not better, than tradition bound university practices which, and here&#39;s the catch, are expensive, rooted at least partially in lingering elitism, and perhaps maintained as much for their place within the university ecosystem as any genuine concern about producing a sustainable, well-educated society.&#0160; </p> <p>Part of my evidence for this (and it&#39;s a bit circular) is the growing Luddism of many university faculty.&#0160; (This critique does not apply, obviously, to Anne&#39;s and John&#39;s posts; they both demand that we reformulate the very nature of college education which would, in part, undermine the position of companies like Straighterline.)&#0160; When I use the term Luddism, I don&#39;t mean it to describe an irrational response to technological change, but rather in terms of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/300752543">E.P. Thompson&#39;s</a> reading of Luddite radicalism in 18th century England.&#0160; He argued (bear in mind I&#39;m an Ancient Historian) that the Luddites were less concerned with the industrial revolution and the mechanization of the cloth production, per se, and more concerned with the incredibly deleterious effects of these changes on the social fabric of their communities.&#0160; The violent and superficially futile protests were socially calculated acts meant to highlight the plight of communities which were suffering grievously as a result of industrialization.&#0160; Today, I often wonder whether our protests against changes within academia represent a kind of Luddite response to an increasingly dynamic educational environment.&#0160; The coming of the $99 university degree may not be inevitable, but university much face the changes brought about by technology, the increasingly challenging global economy, and a dynamic workforce which struggles to relate to the elitist rhetoric that has come to dominate the discourse of higher education.&#0160; What I am suggesting is that the response to challenges from places like Straighterline tend to be geared more toward shoring up the existing university ecosystem rather than understanding how such challenges (which are basically symptomatic of larger changes in how education and information is understood in the global economy) will inevitably produce a radical restructuring of university life.</p> <p>To return to my first observation: that companies like Straigherline do not simply offer a new model for teaching university level classes, but threaten to disrupt the institutional fabric of university life by separating teaching from research, undermining long held faculty privileges (office space, access to libraries, relatively generous pay, support for humanities research, et c.), and repositioning higher education

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to serve students who view the college degree as a kind of vocational or practical training.&#0160; These seismic changes are equal parts terrifying (hence the Luddism) and exciting (hence the quality of Anne&#39;s and John&#39;s response), but above all demand wide ranging discussions of the kind that our <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> blog seeks to encourage and support.&#0160; So, if you have an opinion, idea, or comment, post it here or drop me or Anne Kelsch a line and we&#39;ll make sure that your post appears on <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.&#0160; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Preliminary Analysis of Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Data or Thinking Out Loud STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: preliminary-analysis-of-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-data-orthinking-out-loud CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 09/23/2009 11:14:21 AM ----BODY: <p> I have a whole day set aside for data analysis and number crunching of PKAP Survey data.&nbsp; This is the first step in writing up the definitive analysis of the distributional data from PKAP for the planned monograph.&nbsp; We have imposed a deadline of January 15th for producing a set of basic chapters focused on the survey data.</p> <p>Today, I am working on getting an overall sense of the chronological and spatial distribution of material at the site.&nbsp; While we understand this in an impressionistic way, we have done very little second phases analysis to challenge or test our impressions.&nbsp; This kind of analysis involves testing our general and largely impressionistic observations against the actual data parsed in different, more systematic and critical ways.</p> <p>So, to begin, a random map.&nbsp; This map shows the toponyms assigned in the field to various areas in the PKAP survey area.&nbsp; I didn't include the names of the toponyms, in part because they don't matter here.&nbsp; What is interesting is when the various toponyms overlap each other in ways that cartographically do not seem to make sense, but sure reflect some reality on the ground as our team leaders (who recorded toponyms in the field) sought to associate spaces in our survey universe with known features in the landscape.&nbsp; Since our survey world was essentially an abstract grid superimposed on the landscape arbitrarily, it was difficult to assign spaces to features -- especially when we found ourselves in the open coastal plain.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e88436970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="400" alt="PKAPToponyms" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a591f84f970b -pi" width="400" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p>My next challenge was to determine whether these toponyms had any correlation with the distribution of material on the ground.&nbsp; The notion is that our in-field observations reflect something and they seem to coincide fairly clearly with topographic differences across the site.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a591f855970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="251" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a591f85f970b -pi" width="400" border="0"></a><br></p> <p align="left">This chart shows the chronological distribution of material across some of the toponyms above.&nbsp; Although I did need to aggregate some of the areas together to produce sufficient samples to form the basis of comparison,&nbsp; the results, nevertheless show that the toponyms do tend reflect different chronological distributions of material.&nbsp; This, in turn, suggests that a unitary view of the site would likely distort some of the less pronounced periods that only become visible when compared to material present in their immediate areas.&nbsp; Of course, the areas compared in this chart could be reconstituted and compared using more sophisticated groupings than simply toponyms.&nbsp; For example, some of the areas are topographically district from others either on the top of ridges or physically distant from other areas.&nbsp; Artifact densities vary across the site as well.&nbsp; Some types of material might be more present in higher or lower density sites -- suggesting that parts of the site saw occupation for only particular periods.</p> <p>We can also plot the chronological distribution of material across the entire site filtering for various kinds of artifacts.&nbsp; In this case, I offer the chronological distribution of ceramics across the entire site and compare it to the chronological distribution of feature sherds (not body sherds) and fineware.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a59202cc970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="287" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5e88e7e970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">More soon!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Tuesday: A non-thesis M.A. degree in history STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1

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BASENAME: teaching-tuesday-a-non-thesis-ma-degree-in-history CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/22/2009 08:16:14 AM ----BODY: <p>I spent part of yesterday afternoon thinking about the prospects for a nonthesis M.A. degree in history here at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; At present, we have a traditional thesis based M.A. in a graduate program where most of our students go elsewhere to continue their graduate education or regard the program as a terminal M.A.&nbsp; Many of the terminal M.A.s plan to teach secondary school in the area, although some reveal a wait-and-see attitude toward graduate education; that is, they complete their degree and plan to wait and see what opportunities arise before deciding whether to continue their degree.</p> <p>Over the past four or five years, we've produced some top rate M.A. degrees.&nbsp; Several of my students have moved from our M.A. program to decent Ph.D. programs and most of these students have produced very fine M.A. theses and completely their M.A. degree within two academic years (around 6 semesters including summer).&nbsp; These theses tend to be between 70 and 100 pages, are filled with the typical scholarly apparatus, and make some unique contributions to the discipline. </p> <p>We have also had a number of students who really struggled to complete their Master's Theses despite performing admirably in the classroom.&nbsp; This is partially a product of our willingness to take risks on marginal or non-traditional students who would not have a chance to pursue graduate education at a traditional, top-tier program.&nbsp; Some of these students have time limits or family obligations that make it difficult for them to complete a good thesis within the time available.&nbsp; Others struggle intellectually to complete a sustained research project or discover at some point during their M.A. program that graduate work simply isn't for them.&nbsp; These students are often good students and are capable of performing well in seminars style classes, but for whatever reason come apart at the seams during the thesis writing process.&nbsp; As faculty, we are then left in the difficult position of deciding how to do with good students who are either stalled in their thesis writing process or in such a rush that they can't produce a good quality thesis for a proper defense.&nbsp; In the past few years this situation has produced some poor quality M.A. theses and has led the the attrition of some good students.&nbsp; Neither of these results reflects accurately the ability and dedication of either the students or the faculty who have worked with them.</p> <p>It took less than an hour to collect a considerable number of examples of non-thesis M.A. programs in history from across the interwebs.&nbsp; Many schools with the non-thesis option are similar to UND.&nbsp; They have small departments with small Ph.D. programs and presumably accept a wider range of students than we might expect at a larger, top-tier graduate program.&nbsp; In some cases, however, even better programs have non-thesis M.A. programs geared toward students who are leaving the graduate programs before achieving a Ph.D. or geared toward local teachers.</p> <p>In any event, these programs tended to have 4 characteristics:</p> <p>1. Many of the non-thesis programs required students to demonstrate research proficiency through seminar papers.&nbsp; It seemed common for students to have to produce two research papers over the course of two seminars.&nbsp; In some cases these papers had to be submitted to the department for review; in other cases, the student was required to defend one of these papers publicly.&nbsp; Since any graduate degree in history requires the student to demonstrate some advanced competence in research, these papers provide a good opportunity to demonstrate

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such abilities.&nbsp; Moreover, they allow a student to "double dip" so to speak and use papers that had been developed over the course of their course work rather than to create a separate research paper for the completion of the M.A.&nbsp; One program required that non-thesis students prepare an "article length" manuscript (10,000).&nbsp; I thought that this was a particularly smart idea as the traditional M.A. thesis -- which can run as long as 50,000 words -is neither sufficiently long (or developed) to stand as an independently publishable manuscript and too long to for publication in a scholarly journal.&nbsp; An article length manuscript for a non-thesis student would give them a chance to demonstrate a level of professional ability that is consistent with the most common form of peer-reviewed scholarship.</p> <p>2. Many nonthesis M.A. programs require additional course work.&nbsp; Like many M.A. programs, we require students to take 6 "thesis credits".&nbsp; These are "empty" courses which allow the students time to do research on their thesis while still remaining a full-time student.&nbsp; If a student isn't writing a thesis, these credits become available for additional coursework.&nbsp; I could imagine a non-thesis program requiring the student to demonstrate an additional level of content mastery.&nbsp; These credits might also become available for new programs, like Public History, which could, perhaps, replace a thesis with an internship or some other form of professional development.&nbsp; Several of the programs that I surveyed actually required students to take more credits for a non-thesis option.&nbsp; While I like the idea of making sure that a nonthesis option had a similar level or rigor to a thesis based program, I worry that adding another layer of course work would be unfair.</p> <p>3. Many nonthesis M.A. programs in history had some form of comprehensive examination.&nbsp; I like the idea of some kind of culminating experience for any non-thesis student and the idea of a comprehensive exam based on a selection of courses is appealing.&nbsp; But I wonder whether thesis kind of exercise will end up being redundant.&nbsp; I would like to assume that the completion of a graduate level course with an acceptable grade is sufficient to demonstrate the mastery of that course material.&nbsp; I suppose a comprehensive exam could include material that was not presented over the course of typical graduate course work, but such an option might come at the expense of additional course work or a revised and refined seminar paper.&nbsp; That is to say, any exam based option would have to take into account workload and any additional requirements in terms of coursework or research.</p> <p>4. Many of the nonthesis M.A. programs had explicit ties to either public history programs or education programs. Since most of our non-thesis students will consider the M.A. degree their terminal degree in the field of history, it only makes sense that they dovetail their degree with training in a more practical direction.&nbsp; Education is the traditional partner for history and public history, archival/library studies are increasing in popularity.&nbsp; One might also want to consider a certificate in Geographic Information Systems or certification in editing.&nbsp; Building partnerships across the curriculum (they call these synergies here at UND) might attract new students to our M.A. program while at the same time expanding the influence of history across the curriculum.&nbsp; One might even see a non-thesis M.A. as a stepping stone into our one-of-a-kind Doctor of the Arts in History program.</p> <p>These are just my preliminary thoughts regarding the non-thesis M.A. and in now way reflect anything official from our department.&nbsp; We are still in the early moments of an exploratory phase.&nbsp; Let me know if you have experiences with these kinds of degrees or in these kinds of programs.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.115.6 URL: http://civilwarhistory.wordpress.com DATE: 09/22/2009 09:43:18 PM I like the idea, but one question that needs to be answered is would a student have to decide at application to the program or sometime during the program which option they want to pursue. Also, would students have the option late in their career to switch to the non-thesis option if they realize a thesis was too much? I think something that is not stressed enough is just how much work goes into a thesis, with many of the students struggling underestimating what they need to commit in terms of time to research and writing. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.74 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 09/23/2009 02:40:20 PM Daniel, This is, of course, something that would have to be worked out. We are still in the exploratory phase. Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kate EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 124.168.165.112 URL: DATE: 09/23/2009 06:18:11 PM I am aware that the American and Australian University systems are quite different. However, I am currently undergoing a Master of Arts in Ancient History by coursework at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. I am required to do 8 subjects to achieve this degree. Some of the subjects are cotaught with undergraduates but have different requirements for the Masters students (e.g. a 5000 word instead of 3000 word essay). I also have the option of writing a thesis as part of this degree. I can take two subjects over two semesters to write a 15,000-20,000 word 'minor research project'. If I want to go on to do a PhD then this research project/thesis is a requirement (and if you don't do it in your Masters you can do it separately as a Postgraduate Certificate in Research Preparation). I find this progam enjoyable, as I like the classroom environment and structured learning. Yet it also allows me the flexibility to do a larger piece of research and possibly progress on to a PhD. I hope this is helpful in some way. I enjoy reading your blog :)

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kim Gasparini EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.161.186 URL: DATE: 09/25/2009 08:26:48 PM I think this is a wonderful idea, especially for those of us who are teachers but wanted a "real" masters degree. That is, we chose not to pursue a generic masters of education and went subject specific instead. I can think of several projects and courses that would benefit my education and the education of my future students much more than a tradition thesis. This is something that needs to be carefully considered if you want to draw more teachers into the program. As it stands now, most of my colleagues thought I was insane to take on this particular program. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sociology Dissertation EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 221.132.118.230 URL: http://www.ukdissertation.co.uk/Sociology_Dissertation.htm DATE: 10/22/2009 12:37:33 AM Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Michael Fronda's &quot;Anarchy, Rivalry, and the Beginnings of the Roman Empire&quot; STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: michael-frondas-anarchy-rivalry-and-the-beginnings-of-the-romanempire-1 CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/21/2009 08:02:11 AM ----BODY: <p>For all of you who were unable to attend Michael Fronda's lecture on Thursday, I have made a podcast of the lecture available.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/CRF/Fronda_Lecture.mp3 ">Click here to download the Fronda Lecture</a>.</p> <p>Three things really stand out about Fronda's lecture:</p> <p>1. Modern Models and Ancient Evidence. The model that he used to understand the expansion of the Early and Middle Roman Republic called for the identification of so-called "enduring rivalries" between states that Rome exploited to enforce her hegemony over the Italian peninsula.&nbsp; This model derived from international relations theory and had clear roots in the Cold War efforts to not only understand but also the justify the binary world of Soviet - US relations.&nbsp; Despite the very clear historical context for the model's development, it suited the ancient evidence

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admirably.&nbsp; This was a remarkable example of how history draws upon the present to understand the past.&nbsp; While this may seem like an obvious observation, it will be an excellent point of departure for our undergraduate methods students who often struggle to understand how the present molds the past without slipping into a kind of simplistic presentism.</p> <p>2. Text and Landscape. Mike's talk on Thursday (as well as his less formal talk on Friday afternoon in the Department of History) emphasized the role of texts in revealing the political landscape of Italy.&nbsp; While Mike did not explicit use the word "landscape" in his talk and certainly did not employ the various models that scholars of the ancient landscape have recently come to favor, he nevertheless read the political topography of Italy in a way that linked very local relationships to regional (or even global) regimes of power.&nbsp; He gave several examples of how the Romans became involved in adjudicating very local territorial disputes and highlighted how the looming threat of Roman political and military power could exacerbated or even produced local rivalries. The projection of Roman power on the local level and typically mediated through local concerns is surely a topic which would reward post-colonial theorizing.&nbsp; More importantly, it showed how local landscapes could be shaped and "distorted" by the regional powers in ways that might not necessarily be apparent on the ground.</p> <p>3. The crowd!&nbsp; As I noted on Friday, Mike's lecture attracted over 70 people and it is clear that others turned away at the prospect of standing throughout.&nbsp; While we did what we could to promote the talk on campus, it was great to see folks in attendance who I would not have thought to be interested in Ancient Rome.&nbsp; </p> <p>Enjoy the lecture and thanks to everyone who helped make the talk a success.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dissertation Abstract EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 221.132.118.230 URL: http://www.ukdissertation.co.uk/dissertation_abstract.htm DATE: 11/02/2009 05:03:49 AM Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Michael Fronda's &quot;Anarchy, Rivalry, and the Beginnings of the Roman Empire&quot; STATUS: Draft ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: michael-frondas-anarchy-rivalry-and-the-beginnings-of-the-roman-empire CATEGORY: Conferences

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CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/21/2009 07:59:58 AM ----BODY: <p>For all of you who were unable to attend Michael Fronda's lecture on Thursday, I have made a podcast of the lecture available.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/CRF/Fronda_Lecture.mp3 ">Click here to download the Fronda Lecture</a>.</p> <p>Three things really stand out about Fronda's lecture:</p> <p>1. Modern Models and Ancient Evidence. The model that he used to understand the expansion of the Early and Middle Roman Republic called for the identification of so-called "enduring rivalries" between states that Rome exploited to enforce her hegemony over the Italian peninsula.&nbsp; This model derived from international relations theory and had clear roots in the Cold War efforts to not only understand but also the justify the binary world of Soviet - US relations.&nbsp; Despite the very clear historical context for the model's development, it suited the ancient evidence admirably.&nbsp; This was a remarkable example of how history draws upon the present to understand the past.&nbsp; While this may seem like an obvious observation, it will be an excellent point of departure for our undergraduate methods students who often struggle to understand how the present molds the past without slipping into a kind of simplistic presentism.</p> <p>2. Text and Landscape. Mike's talk on Thursday (as well as his less formal talk on Friday afternoon in the Department of History) emphasized the role of texts in revealing the political landscape of Italy.&nbsp; While Mike did not explicit use the word "landscape" in his talk and certainly did not employ the various models that scholars of the ancient landscape have recently come to favor, he nevertheless read the political topography of Italy in a way that linked very local relationships to regional (or even global) regimes of power.&nbsp; He gave several examples of how the Romans became involved in adjudicating very local territorial disputes and highlighted how the looming threat of Roman political and military power could exacerbated or even produced local rivalries. The projection of Roman power on the local level and typically mediated through local concerns is surely a topic which would reward post-colonial theorizing.&nbsp; More importantly, it showed how local landscapes could be shaped and "distorted" by the regional powers in ways that might not necessarily be apparent on the ground.</p> <p>3. The crowd!&nbsp; As I noted on Friday, Mike's lecture attracted over 70 people and it is clear that others turned away at the prospect of standing throughout.&nbsp; While we did what we could to promote the talk on campus, it was great to see folks in attendance who I would not have thought to be interested in Ancient Rome.&nbsp; </p> <p>Enjoy the lecture and thanks to everyone who helped make the talk a success.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

Caraher

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TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/18/2009 10:23:27 AM ----BODY: <p>First, thanks to all the folks who showed up yesterday at Michael Fronda's lecture.&nbsp; We had a great crowd (&gt;70 people!), a great talk, and a nice reception afterwards.&nbsp; Special thanks go to the Department of History, and the Department of Political Science and Public Administration and the University of North Dakota Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta who helped with the preparations.&nbsp; I hope to have a podcast of the talk posted soon.</p> <p>Now a handful of quick hits on a beautiful Friday morning:</p> <ul> <li>This is a cool post at <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/some-top-ten-tipsfor-online-instructors/">the Electric Archaeologist on teaching online</a>. <li>The blog revolution continues at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; I just discovered that the <a href="http://undarts.wordpress.com/">College of Arts and Science has a blog</a>. <li>This is a <a href="http://www.scoutingny.com/?p=1026">pretty neat installation</a>. <li><a href="http://www.bronzeboot.com/">Dinner tonight</a>. <li><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/the-cost-of-cheap-education/">This may be the best post</a> on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">this blog</a>. <li><a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/">Arranged Delirium is back</a>. <li>Phyllis Graham passed onto me two nice links related Pikionis and his work around <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/09/ju st-a-bit-more-on-post-classical-athens.html">the Acropolis in Athens</a>.&nbsp; One was a short note on an effort <a href="http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_1_10/02/2007_79957" >to reopen a cafe on the Philopappou hill designed by Pikionis in the 1950s</a>; the other is <a href="http://www.eikastikon.gr/arxitektoniki/pikionis/en_txt_cv_self.html">a brief autobiographical excerpt</a> from his work <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/256027817"><em>A Sentimental Topography</em></a>.</li></ul> <p>Have a great weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching and Lecture Thursday STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-and-lecture-thursday CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 09/17/2009 06:50:08 AM ----BODY: <p>Two quick posts today rolled into one.</p> <p>First, a <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> must read: Anne Kelsch's thoughtful post on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/17/thecost-of-cheap-education/">the Cost of a Cheap Education</a>.&nbsp; Her post is a critical response to a recent article in Washington Monthly which speculated on the disruptions to American systems of college and university education if it became possible to offer "<a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_mo nth.php?page=all&amp;print=true">College for $99 a Month</a>".&nbsp; Anne's post is a call to reconsider the purpose of higher education in the U.S. Join the conversation by posting a comment! Or, if you have a bigger idea, drop me a line about authoring a post on <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.</p> <p>Second, if you haven't succumbed to media saturation, then you probably know that Michael Fronda of McGill University will be speaking today at 4 pm, in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library.&nbsp; His talk is entitled "<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a563f4ee970 b-pi">Anarchy, Rivalry, and the Beginnings of the Roman Empire</a>".&nbsp; A small reception will follow the talk.&nbsp; My sense is that there will be a good crowd on hand, so, it wouldn't hurt to come early, just in case.&nbsp; The talk is sponsored by the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a>, <a href="http://business.und.edu/pols/">The Department of Political Science and Public Administration</a>, and the title sponsor is the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/CyprusResearchFund/Donors.html" >Cyprus Research Fund</a>.&nbsp; The talk fits into the goals of the Cyprus Research Fund by working to introduce students and faculty to cutting edge research in the study of the Mediterranean World.&nbsp; Complementing, Prof. Fronda's talk will be a preview exhibition of photographs taken the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project</a>''s Artist-in-Residence, Ryan Stander entitled <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/2009/08/toposchora-pkap-artiststatement.html">Topos/Chora</a>.&nbsp; For information on how to contribute to the fund and support these and other events both in Cyprus and in North Dakota, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/CyprusResearchFund/Donors.html" >check out our support page</a>.</p> <p>See you at the talk!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Just a bit more on Post-Classical Athens STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: just-a-bit-more-on-post-classical-athens DATE: 09/16/2009 07:40:14 AM ----BODY: <p>I blogged a bit last month about the Post-Classical Acropolis (in the context, first, of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/th e-destructive-power-of-the-athenian-acropolis.html">the controversy surrounding Constantine Costa-Gavras film for the new Acropolis Museum</a> and then about <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/mo re-on-the-post-classical-parthenon.html">A. Kaldellis new book on the PostClassical Parthenon</a>).&#0160; That writing and reading (and the suggestion of Kaldellis) led me to <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/137325143">A. Loukaki&#39;s <em>Living Ruins, Value Conflicts</em></a>.&#0160; It&#39;s a very thoughtful exploration of the complex interplay of issues surrounding the preservation, restoration, and reconstruction (anastylosis) and the various values associated with these processes in a Greek context.&#0160; In particular, Loukaki explores not just the intellectual roots of heritage management decisions, but the political and, to a lesser extent, economic processes as well.&#0160; Her chapter on the Central Archaeological Council (CAC) of Greece is worth reading as a stand alone chapter.&#0160; And his final chapter, a case study of the Athenian Acropolis, is fascinating.</p> <p>I&#39;ve read many, many, books on the Athenian Acropolis and environs over the past 10 years (and not nearly as many as I could have read).&#0160; As an Associate Member and, later, junior faculty at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies at Athens</a>, I&#39;ve visited the &quot;sacred rock&quot; many times as well listening to both student and professional explanations of the architecture, rituals, and efforts to preserve and reconstruct the buildings there. Despite this background (and I am not claiming by any means to be an expert, just an interested observer), I learned more about the Acropolis from Loukaki&#39;s short chapter than from almost any other recent work.&#0160; </p> <p>As per usual, I won&#39;t attempt a formal or comprehensive review (although I will be very interested in seeing how this book is received).&#0160; Instead, I&#39;ll highlight three area where I particular appreciated his discussion of the Acropolis:</p> <p>1) She does a nice job in putting the Plaka in context.&#0160; Any visitor to Athens -- even for professional reasons -- is inevitably drawn at some point the Plaka.&#0160; Clinging to the northern slopes of the Acropolis, this picturesque neighborhood is the center of the Athenian tourist industry.&#0160; I suppose that I&#39;ve always been aware of the various policies that sought alternately to preserve the Plaka as a picture of Old Athens or reclaim it for the study of the ancient ruins that lay beneath the tourist tavernas and souvenir shops.&#0160; Loukaki does a good job laying out the various shifts in policy and places the gentrification of the Plaka over the past 15 years in an administrative context.</p> <p>2) The center of Athens is

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under constant construction.&#0160; Syntagma, Makryanni, Monasteraki Square, Psiri, the vicinity of the Kerameikos, and Gazi are particular hives of recent activity.&#0160; The chaotic nature of downtown Athens, however, has potential to make even a careful observer of the urban form doubt any real plan or comprehensive vision to the bustle (other than the standard sprucing up of Athens most commonly associated with 2004 Olympics).&#0160; Loukaki outlines the plan behind these renovations (p. 280-282) both on a practical level and on an aesthetic and ideological level.&#0160; The goal is to produce a &quot;open museum that unites the most important archaeological sites of the historical centre of the city.&quot;&#0160; I suspect that my failure to perceive such a plan is tied to my practice of make surgical strikes into the city center to look at specific monuments or museums rather than engaging the area as a unified whole.&#0160; In fact, my mental map of the area is so flawed that I regularly resort to maps or Google Earth when I need to describe the physical relationship between, say, the Roman Agora and the Kerameikos or the Library of Hadrian and the Ilissos basilica.&#0160; So, Loukaki&#39;s explanation and critique of the plan to unify the ancient sites in the city center runs counter to my experiences in Athens, but at the same time provides me with new mental map, complete with new boundaries and paths, to superimpose on what has become familiar space.</p> <p>3) <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5caae66970 c-pi"><img align="right" alt="pikionis_acropolisPavement" border="0" height="192" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5caae6b970c -pi" style="border-width: 0px;" width="244" /></a>The landscape of the Acropolis. While my time at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a> taught me about R. Griswold&#39;s plans to landscape the Agora in the 1950s, I was not particularly familiar with the details and shamefully knew nothing of D. Pikionis work to landscape the Acropolis, Philopappos, and Pnix areas.&#0160; The work of the latter, frankly, blew my mind.&#0160; Loukakis&#39; discussion of Pikionis pavements (p. 270-274) which drew upon ancient, Byzantine, and Modern(ist) influences floored me.&#0160; How could I have walked these sites for so long and not noticed the pavement?&#0160; In fact, I had to pilfer the interwebs just to find photographs (and these do not do the pavement justice).&#0160;&#0160; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5742ef9970 b-pi"><img align="right" alt="PikionisPavements2" border="0" height="183" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5caae71970c -pi" style="border-width: 0px;" width="244" /></a></p> <p>More importantly, than just the pavements Loukaki&#39;s articulates Pikionis effort to unify the sites around the Acropolis in a way that accentuated their modern, ancient, and natural settings.&#0160; He sought to lead the visitor to the sites in a way that played on the visual dominance of the Acropolis by presenting it from a variety of perspectives.&#0160; This worked to accentuate the fragmented nature of archaeology (and reality evoking cubist notions of perspective (p. 274)) while at the same time unifying the archaeological and natural to reinforce the sanctity of the Acropolis.&#0160; Loukakis describes Pikionis efforts &quot;yet his landscape seems eternal, as if it were there from time immemorial.&#0160; Still he manages to remain coherent in a modern, not post-modern way, because of his approach to historical time: he respects its flow and continuity, and enhances them wisely, not arbitrarily.&quot;</p> <p>I&#39;ve <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/th e-destructive-power-of-the-athenian-acropolis.html">blogged in the past about the modern character of the Acropolis</a>, and now I wonder how much of that

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perspective on the monumental core of the city of Athens derived in part from my naive engagement with Pikionis&#39; landscape.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: ŒôœÜŒπŒºŒ≠Œ¥ŒµŒπŒ± EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 62.38.116.47 URL: http://www.iphimedea.blogspot.com DATE: 09/16/2009 08:17:00 AM Just a short note to say that Argyro is a "she" not "he". ;) ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 09/16/2009 08:32:59 AM Iphimedeia, Yikes! Thanks! Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 09/16/2009 09:49:03 AM Don't worry about not having known about Pikionis. He's a bit of a national hero (among Greek artists, architects, writers) but the rest of the world discovered him through Kenneth Frampton a leading American architectural historian (teaches at Columbia). In the 1980s, Frampton wrote a MOST influential essay on "Critical Regionalism" (a term that was in fact invented by a couple of Greeks). The essay was added onto the 2nd edition of his standard Modern Architecture textbook. In short he used Pikionis as a prime example of this new influential (and global) paradigm. Pikionis then became extremely popular at the Architectural Association in London that published the first English language book on him. The AA at this time was the haven of experimentation, where people like Rem Koolhaas and others grew out of. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] Transnational gender slippage.

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IP: 24.18.253.230 URL: http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com DATE: 09/16/2009 12:30:15 PM Most weekends last year, when I was in Athens, I would go to a neighborhood and simply walk, follow its organic contours. I have a bad knee so I have to pay a lot of attention to surfaces. So I have now developed a great kinesthetic knowledge of the oldest areas of the city -- Omonio-Keramikos-AcropolisNekrotafion-Stadium, and almost no formal information on column capitals. But the underlying -- logic -- begins to emerge. I can also tell you where there is a Roman courtyard with arches behind the walls of what appears to be the property of a neighborhood schizophrenic. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: buy viagra EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 74.55.186.136 URL: http://www.xlpharmacy.com/ DATE: 05/14/2010 08:15:58 AM So here's the deal. I have a camera with a memory stick and deleted some pictures. After I deleted the pictures, I uploaded the pictures that I left on the camera into the computer. Can I recover the deleted pictures on the computer, or would I have to have my camera plugged in and find the deleted pictures on that? By the way after I put the pictures on the computer I filled up the memory stick with other pictures. Can you even recover deleted pictures with memory sticks? I know you can with SD cards but what about memory sticks? Thanks! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: From Merrifield to O'Kelly STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: from-merrifield-to-okelly CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND DATE: 09/15/2009 08:06:26 AM ----BODY: <p>Late this past summer, the big move finally happened.&nbsp; Decried as an act of fundamental injustice by some and accepted as the irresistible hand of fate by others, the administrators of the College of Arts and Sciences moved the Department of History from its traditional digs in Merrifield Hall across the quad to O'Kelly Hall.&nbsp; The move is still a work in progress with aesthetic and practical matters still outstanding.&nbsp; On the whole, however, I think that whatever our new digs have lost in dignity, they have more than made up for in character.</p> <p>First, if Merrifield Hall was rough around the edges, O'Kelly is positively jagged.&nbsp; For Merrifield Hall's neglected dignity, O'Kelly provides a kind of genuine, authentic, urban-type neglect.&nbsp; The building itself was built in the mid-1950s as the home to the Medical School.&nbsp; It was the first major post-war construction project initiated on campus.&nbsp; Like most of the central campus, the building is in College Gothic style, although it lacks the refinement and attention to detail of Merrifield hall.</p> <p align="center"><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73f85970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73f8f970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a638970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73f9a970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>There are remnants of its past use as a space for laboratories and other medical facilities (although these are fast disappearing).&nbsp; One of my favorite new rooms that the Department of History acquired was clearly a "wet" lab.&nbsp; (I lobbied unsuccessfully to have this as my office primarily so I could call my office my "Laboratory").&nbsp; The brown tile walls pierced by various ducts complement a a battered Formica floors complete with drains and rusted pipes.&nbsp; For the time being, the space is filled with cast-off furniture and, for lack of a better phrase, undifferentiated crap.&nbsp; It is destined to become a lounge of some sort, but for now, it's a place for the imagination.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a645970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a652970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The halls of O'Kelly stand out as well.&nbsp; Cheerful yellow lockers alternate with ratty and disused display cases.&nbsp; I can imagine the lockers serving the needs of medical students with their lab coats and stacks of thick books.&nbsp; The display cases apparently replaced the lockers at some point and they displayed the triumphs of the now defunct school of communication.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a65d970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73fb5970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73fb8970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73fbb970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a678970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73fc3970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The most famous wall-treatment in O'Kelly is the Rich2 painted graffiti wall.&nbsp; A miscalculated plan to paint over this wall created a minor splash across the blogosphere. Apparently calmer heads prevailed and the wall still graces our building.&nbsp; It adds to the more urban, more provisional feeling of O'Kelly especially compared to the traditional and rooted feeling of Merrifield.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73fca970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73fd1970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>My office is just short of palatial.&nbsp; I've imported most of my old Merrifield style furniture rather

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than succumbing to the temptation to upgrade to latest particle-board masterworks like many of my colleagues.&nbsp; I have a solid wall of tables and desks suitable for Rankian ruminations over dusty tomes, stacks of important archaeological documents, and, of course, my happy gaggle of computers.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a68f970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73fe9970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a6a5970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="DSCN1975" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c73ffa970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp; </p> <p>The classroom space is adequate.&nbsp; The seminar room, the heart-and-soul of any Department of History, is still a work in progress.&nbsp; They've made it a "smart classroom" by adding a digital projector and computer, but they've neglected to install a blackboard or white board.&nbsp; We've been promised one, but it's four weeks into the semester and I haven't seen it yet.&nbsp; My favorite aspect of the new seminar room is the obstructed view seat.&nbsp; It's just like an old ballpark!</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a6b0970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c74005970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a6bb970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a570a6c6970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>We've been promised, many, many upgrades over the course of the semester, but I've already come to like the ratty, urban, and disjointed feeling of our new digs.&nbsp; For some reason (perhaps it's the palatial office), I feel relaxed and creative in this space.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Meta-data Monday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: meta-data-monday CATEGORY: The New Media

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DATE: 09/14/2009 07:56:26 AM ----BODY: <p>I haven't run a meta-data Monday for some time now in large part because my blog hasn't hit any notable landmarks.&nbsp; As a blog lives longer, those landmarks became fewer and farther between, I guess.&nbsp; The reason I am posting a meta-data Monday post now, is that I have heard several times over the past weeks someone quip that no one really reads academic blogs or, more agnostically, that there is no way to know whether anyone reads academic blogs or the like.&nbsp; Of course, on some level there is no way to know whether anyone reads anything, but putting aside that relatively extreme position, I thought that making a post that includes some of my blog's data would at least put my mind to rest.</p> <p>My blog has been in existence for about 2 1/2 years and over this time, I've had about 62,000 page views.&nbsp; While this pales in comparison to high volume, professional blogs which might see page view numbers like this for a single day, these numbers nevertheless make it hard to deny that someone reads or at least looks at my blog.&nbsp; The 62,000 + page views are over the blogs 549 posts (I guess I could have waited a day and posted this in celebration of my blog's 550th post!).&nbsp; Lamentably, there are only 265 comments on these 549th posts.&nbsp; </p> <p>Using Google Analytics, I can show that I have had visitors from 141 countries.&nbsp; My blog has received the most hits from:<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a56c16ea970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="178" alt="WorldMap" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a56c16ef970b -pi" width="304" align="right" border="0"></a> </p> <p>1. United States<br>2. Greece<br>3. U.K.<br>4. Canada<br>5. Italy<br>6. Australia<br>7. France<br>8. Germany<br>9. Cyprus<br>10. Turkey</p> <p>I've had visits from every U.S. state with the most popular states being:<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5c2b520970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="194" alt="USMap" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a56c16f4970b -pi" width="304" align="right" border="0"></a> </p> <p>1. California<br>2. North Dakota<br>3. Pennsylvania<br>4. Minnesota<br>5. New York<br>6. Ohio<br>7. Illinois<br>8. Florida<br>9. Texas<br>10. New Jersey</p> <p>Google Analytics allows us to mine all sorts of interesting data.&nbsp; For example, the ever popular browser profile of my readers:</p> <p>1. Firefox (45%)<br>2. I.E. (39.57% with 27.73% on I.E. 6.x for those of you who get upset about that kind of thing!)<br>3. Safari (8.13%)<br>4. Opera (2.93%)<br>5. Chrome (2.47%)<br>6. Camino (&lt;1)<br>7. Monzilla (&lt;1)<br>8. Netscape (&lt;1)<br>9. Konqueror (&lt;1)<br>10. NetFront (&lt;1)</p> <p>Windows users account for 80% of my traffic with Macintosh representing 18% and Linux 1%.</p> <p>The top referring domains (i.e. how do folks find my site):</p> <p>1. Google<br>2. Typepad.com<br>3. und.edu<br>4. pkap.org<br>5. yahoo.com<br>6. Kourelis.blogspot.com (<a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Objects, Buildings, Situations</a>)<br>7. archaeology.org&nbsp; (the web-domain of the Archaeological Institute of America)<br>8. Iconoclasm.dk (<a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Troels Myrup's excellent blog</a>)<br>9. grandforkslife.blogspot.com (the <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/">Grand Forks Guy's local blog</a>)<br>10. twitter.com (largely via <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">my Twitter feed</a>, which you should

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follow, by the way!)</p> <p>To round out this list, here are the top referring blogs:</p> <p>4. <a href="http://westmelrose.blogspot.com/">Thoughts from West Melrose</a><br>5. <a href="http://rogueclassicism.com/">Rogue Classicism</a><br>6. <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a><br>7. <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a><br>8. <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/">Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean</a><br>9. <a href="http://researchnewsinla.blogspot.com/">Research News in Late Antiquity</a><br>10.&nbsp; <a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/">Antiquated Vagaries</a></p> <p>The top ten posts based on page views:</p> <p>1. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ea rly-christian.html">Early Christian Architecture and Hybrid Space</a><br>2. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/re al-snow-in-at.html">Real Snow in Athens</a><br>3. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/awalk-through.html">A Walk through Byzantine Athens</a><br>4. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/th e-byzantine-a.html">The Byzantine and Christian Museum</a><br>5. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-archae.html">Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging: Metablogging the Ancient World</a><br>6. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/th e-early-chris.html">The Early Christian Ecclesiastical Architecture of Cyprus: First Impressions</a><br>7. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/pu nk-archaeolog.html">Punk Archaeology: Some Preliminary Thoughts</a><br>8. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/su burban-archaeology-a-detroit-jewel-in-the-attic.html">Suburban Archaeology A (Detroit) Jewel in the Attic</a><br>9. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/su rvey-archaeol.html">Survey Archaeology, Pottery, and the Chronotype System</a><br>10. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em ergingcyprio.htmlhttp://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/ 02/emerging-cyprio.html">Emerging Cypriot: An Archaeological Documentary</a></p> <p>And just for fun, here's my Wordle Cluster:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a56c16fc970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="287" alt="WordleSept2009" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a56c1702970b -pi" width="450" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">So, thanks to all my readers and referrers! </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/11/2009 09:46:27 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits on a rainy Friday morning:</p> <ul> <li>If there was any doubt that R. Scott Moore is the Gigapanda, then this spectacular photo should dismiss them forever.&nbsp; Check out his <a href="http://share.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=32533">gigapan of the Larnaka Salt Lake</a>. <li>I rushed out and purchased a <a href="http://www.pogoplug.com/">Pogoplug</a> for all my internet based storage and distribution needs.&nbsp; Cute package, seemingly easy set-up, but it might not run on my university's internet.&nbsp; This is a bummer. <li>Both <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/">Archaeol ogy of the Mediterranean World</a> and <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology</a> got shout-outs from <a href="http://middlesavagery.wordpress.com/">Middle Savagery which was nice.</a> <li>The blog at <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/">The Graduate School at UND</a> and from the <a href="http://undpresidentsblog.wordpress.com/">President's Office</a> still seem to be alive.&nbsp; That's a good sign.&nbsp; It's disappointing, however, to see that few folks have taken advantage of the comments section on either blog. <li>Mashable has a short post on "<a href="http://mashable.com/2009/09/10/firefox-extensions-students/">10 Must-have Firefox Extensions for Students</a>".&nbsp; <li>You can follow me <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">on Twitter</a> or <a href="http://lifeanddeeds.tumblr.com/">on Tumblr</a>. <li>Make plans, like now, to attend the inaugural Cyprus Research Fund lecture co-sponsored by the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a> and the Department of <a href="http://business.und.edu/pols/">Political Science and Public Administration</a>.&nbsp; It's next Thursday at 4 pm in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library.&nbsp; It will be delivered by Michael Frond and entitled "Anarchy, Rivalry, and the beginnings of the Roman Empire".&nbsp; Who doesn't like anarchy.&nbsp; Here's the flier:</li></ul> <p align="right"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a563f4ee970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="540" alt="FrondaTalk" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5ba6dbb970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: BrianB EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.249 URL: DATE: 09/16/2009 09:16:34 AM It appears the President doesn't want to hear anyone's opinions on his blog, as each post is noted "Comments off." -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Building Communities STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-building-communities CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/10/2009 07:56:13 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Cross-posted to </em><a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/"><em>Teaching Thursday</em></a></p> <p>As I reflected on the series of posts grouped loosely around the idea of the "new" future of teaching, I was struck by their common focus on defining, building, or structuring community at the University.&nbsp; <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/08/27/the-new-future-of-teaching-socialnetworks-changing-expectations-and-perils-of-access/">Bret Weber and my post on the 24/7 professor</a>, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/01/teaching-thursdays-boundaries-andmanners/">Cindy Prescott's response on boundaries and manner</a>, and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/03/the-new-future-of-teachinggraduate-student-mentoringdeconstructing-framework/">Dean Benoit's post on mentorship</a> all reflect the desire to evaluate and forge productive social relationships at the modern university. Several of the responses share a similar focus: particularly Anne Kelsch's response to Dean Benoit's post, but also a response offered by Mark El-Dweek show that the call for an increased focus on mentorship is neither limited to the faculty-graduate student relationship nor without challenges.&nbsp; Other graduate student responses to Prescott's post on boundaries and manners (which itself originated as a response to our post on the 24/7 professor) likewise showed that both social and professional boundaries required constant negotiation and a keen eye for context.&nbsp; When I proposed the topic for the first series of posts this year, I had half expected a gaggle of posts on new teaching lingo or technological innovations (and, of course, such posts are still welcome).&nbsp; It is interesting to see that most of the concerns that contributing faculty and administration have are with very basic issues of social and community organization on campus.</p> <p>My impression is that a concern for community is a longstanding one both at American universities in general and at the University of North Dakota specifically.&nbsp; A quick perusal of <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1107281">L. Geiger's

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University of the Northern Plains</a> </em>or any subsequent works on the University's history shows that throughout its history the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a> has represented a kaleidoscopic amalgam of different groups ranging from early student organization like the Adelphi Literary Society to factions of faculty like the influential band of "Young Turks" who exerted such a key influence on University affairs throughout the 1960s.&nbsp; In many ways, the history of the University was the history of these groups. The sense of community achieved by these informal or formal groups represented a way that students and faculty warded off the feeling of alienation and dislocation when they moved from tight-knit and sometimes distant communities to the challenging climate and often transient, artificial culture that characterized university life in North Dakota.&nbsp; (The inability of the University to retain faculty throughout its history was legendary to the point that some senior faculty around mid-century would quip that certain young scholars were "only camping" during their short stays on campus.)&nbsp; So, the challenges of alienation, dislocation, and fractured communities are not new in American academia (nor unique to our campus), but perhaps their effects are particular heightened at this time and at our university which represents the best elements of democratized higher-education while at the same time embraces its increasingly globalized character and confronts dynamic changes in many academic professions. </p> <p>Efforts by the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/oid/">Office of Instructional Development</a> to foster community among faculty members through the Alice Clark New Faculty program in recent years complemented the work by Greek and other fraternal organizations on campus to make the trip to the University in Grand Forks less socially disruptive.&nbsp; There is still work to do, it would seem, to structure the kind of complex communities that can function across an increasingly diverse body of students and faculty members in a time when new social challenges, opportunities, and tools make traditional communal bonds increasingly tenuous and, in some cases, obsolete. The need to establish the kind of common expectations that undergird social order and facilitate productive communication remains a central concern for good teaching, while at the same time these concerns extend well-beyond the the four walls (or Blackboard webpage) of the classroom.&nbsp; These posts have shown that teaching at the University involves as much responding to the changing expectations of the professional, student, and administrative communities that form the foundation for the University as influencing these communities by changing student, faculty, and administrative expectations.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Mysterious Theft of a Column Capital from Olympia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1

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BASENAME: the-mysterious-theft-of-a-column-capital-from-olympia DATE: 09/09/2009 08:06:55 AM ----BODY: <p>This weekend, apparently, someone stole a column capital from the Early Christian basilica at the site of Ancient Olympia (in Greece).&nbsp; This alarming theft has led to the suspension of the local ephor (the official in charge of antiquities for the region) and made <a href="http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100012_07/09/2009_1 10478">the national</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ij6owvrVSruKDNENg_0CT8PP JxSgD9AHUEFO2">international press</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/tr ip-2-part-2-o.html">I've visited the site of Olympia</a> and checked out this church many, many times.&nbsp; The press has not made clear which capital was stolen from the building and whether this was an ancient capital used as spolia in the building or an Early Christian capital (<a href="http://www.ana.gr/anaweb/user/showplain?maindoc=7931864&amp;maindocimg=793 1723&amp;service=102">this short article makes it seem like it is a 6th century column capital</a>).&nbsp; I do not recall any particularly dramatic column capitals from the building -- to be perfectly honest -- although the church is known for its abundant architectural sculpture which was presumably carved from the vast quantity of marble available from the ancient site itself.&nbsp; </p> <p>The interesting (and perhaps ironic) thing about this story is that the Early Christian church is built into the so-called Workshop of Phidias.&nbsp; This is an ancient structure (the visible brick superstructure, from what I understand is 3rd century A.D., but it may have been built on earlier foundations) built to the same dimensions of the cella of the Temple of Olympian Zeus.&nbsp; The excavators apparently found in the area molds for terracota antefixes and other evidence for construction so the building is thought to have been where the sculptor Phidias created his famous statue of Olympian Zeus.&nbsp; Because of these ancient associations, its proximity to the most prominent ancient ruins on the site (it is right outside the ancient Altis), and its well-preserved condition, the basilica in the Workshop of Phidias is among the most visible and visited Early Christian churches in the Peloponnesus (note <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/tr ip-2-part-2-o.html">my clever humor in this post</a>).&nbsp; Its visibility alone would make its assemblage of architectural sculpture particularly wellknown, and its presence within the well-maintained and heavily visited tourist site of Olympia makes this church also particularly accessible to the casual tourist.&nbsp; Most Early Christian basilicas in Greece remain off the beaten path, protected by rusty and collapsing fences, overgrown and neglected.&nbsp; Like the Workshop of Phidias basilica, many of these less-visible churches preserve both ancient and Early Christian architectural sculpture.&nbsp; While I obviously do not condone the theft of antiquities, it's difficult to imagine a less suitable Early Christian basilica to loot than the Workshop of Phidias basilica.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5b2569c970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="357" alt="OlympiaCitations" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5b256b1970c -pi" width="304" align="right" border="0"></a>Of course, the presence of the church within the site of Olympia certainly adds prestige to the material within the church whether it was re-used or carved new.&nbsp; Moreover, for a real

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connoisseur the site represents one of the more important sites for the Early Christian period in the Peloponnesus.&nbsp; While much of the Late Antique settlement on the site itself was removed during the 19th century excavation, scholars -- particularly the late Thomas V√∂lling -- have made important strides in cobbling together the fragmentary record of the hastily excavated Late Antique phases and combining with important, relatively recent discoveries like the extensive "Slavic" cemetery excavated during the construction of the new museum at the site in the 1970s.&nbsp;&nbsp; For the 4th-6th century, the church seems to have been at the center of a substantial settlement which included several larger houses and a maze of smaller houses.&nbsp; The church would have been important for the folks who lived at the site of Olympia in the Early Christian period, but it hard to imagine that the looter of the column capital knew that.</p> <p>For more information on Early Christian Olympia, here's a <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Docs/OlympiaCaraher2007.pdf">ha ndout that I created a few years back</a> when asked to talk about the Early Christian phase at the site and in the right sidebar I've included some citations to the church at the Workshop of Phidias for the truly ambitious.</p> <p>It will be interesting to follow this story develop.&nbsp; The suspension of the local archaeological representative suggests that something more has happened here than the press has reported.&nbsp; I'll keep an eye on the press and&nbsp; <a href="http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/">David Gill's blog Looting Matters</a> over the next few weeks to see if more comes out.</p> <p><strong>Update 1: </strong><a href="http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100008_09/09/2009_1 10547">This brief note (Archaeologist's Horde)</a> has transformed the column capital from 6th c. A.D. to 6th c. B.C.&nbsp; That's a big difference!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 09/09/2009 08:27:39 AM I imagined that the news might be referring to an impost capital. I remember one or two were set up on a shaft or others scattered around in usual disregard. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.225 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 09/09/2009 08:36:55 AM Kostis,

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That's what I'd guess as well, but it's odd that none of those impost capitals made into Vemi's catalog so I began to doubt my memory. But still, I can't imagine a worse place to take an impost capital from. Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Susan Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a5b338b2970c DATE: 09/09/2009 11:08:40 AM I still find it incredible that someone could manage to remove something of that size without being noticed....hmmm... I look forward with interest to finding out more. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: ŒôœÜŒπŒºŒ≠Œ¥ŒµŒπŒ± EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 79.167.6.199 URL: http://www.iphimedea.blogspot.com DATE: 09/09/2009 11:08:57 AM "The suspension of the local archaeological representative suggests that something more has happened here than the press has reported."! ! Indeed this can be inferred also by the announcement of the SEA ! ! <a href="http://sylellarxeol.blogspot.com/2009/09/blogpost.html">http://sylellarxeol.blogspot.com/2009/09/blog-post.html</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Tuesday: History 101 Podcasts and Indices STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-tuesday-history-101-podcasts-and-indices CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/08/2009 07:33:07 AM ----BODY: <p>I have this advertising campaign idea to attract attention to the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a>&#39;s online offering.&#0160; It would be called: </p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong><font color="#008000" size="7">UND for Free!</font></strong> </p> <p>So far, it hasn&#39;t gotten much traction here (except, of course, in my own head).&#0160; But, on this blog, an idea only has to have traction in my own head for it to become a reality.</p> <p>So without further ado, here is the basic content of my 101 class for free.&#0160; As I get more time, I&#39;ll hopefully return to this and add links to readings and the like, but for now, you should feel free to check out, mash-up, openly mock, or (for former students) re-experience the energy, excitement, and brilliance that is one of my 101 lectures.&#0160; The point of my lectures are to produce basic

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&quot;textbook&quot; style information (that is my synthesis and analysis).&#0160; And <font color="#ff0000"><strong>for a limited time only</strong></font>, it is complementary.&#0160; (I&#39;ve been told that saying &quot;For a limited time only&quot; makes any product more appealing!)</p> <p>The first link is to a podcast lecture.&#0160; They run around a hour to an hour-and-a-half each.&#0160; The link labeled &quot;Index&quot; is an index to the podcast with links to various pages on the web that either clarifies and expands issues that the podcast did not treat extensively.&#0160; I discuss some of the issues surrounding the building of this class in posts <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/te aching-thursday-the-instability-of-hybrid-learning.html">here (for my initial goals in creating the podcasts)</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/te aching-thursday-wikipedia-the-new-history-textbook.html">here (for my creating of indices)</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/09/te aching-online-a-report-on-history-101-after-one-week.html">here (for my discussion of the class after the first week).</a>&#0160; I omitted the Week 1 lecture because it mainly deals with the mechanics of the class.</p> <p>Week 2: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/2%20Early%20Civ ilization.mp3">Early Civilization</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%202%20Key%2 0Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 3: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/3%20Early%20Gre ece,%20Athens,%20and%20the%20Peloponnesian%20War.mp3">Early Greece, Athens, and the Peloponnesian War</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%203%20Key%2 0Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 4: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/4%20The%20Helle nsitic%20World.mp3">The Hellenistic World</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%204%20Key%2 0Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 5: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/5%20The%20Roman %20Republic.mp3">The Roman Republic</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%205%20Key%2 0Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 6: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/6%20Augustus%20 and%20the%20Roman%20Empire.mp3">Augustus and the Roman Empire</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%206%20Key%2 0Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 7: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/7%20Christians% 20and%20Romans%20Part%201.mp3">Christians and Romans Part 1</a>, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/7%20Christians% 20and%20Romans%20Part%202.mp3">Christians and Romans Part 2</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%207%20Key%2 0Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 8: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/8%20The%20Merov ingian%20and%20Carolingian%20Era.mp3">The Merovingian and Carolingian Era</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%208%20Key%2 0Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 9: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/9%20Feudalism%2 0and%20Manorialism.mp3">Feudalism and Manorialism</a> | <a

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href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%209%20Key%2 0Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 10: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/10%20The%20Inve stiture%20Controversy.mp3">The Investiture Controversy</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%2010%20Key% 20Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 11: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/11%20The%20Crus ades.mp3">The Crusades</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%2011%20Key% 20Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 12: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/12%20The%20Worl d%20of%20the%20Town.mp3">The World of the Town</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%2012%20Key% 20Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 13: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/13%20The%20Impe rial%20Papacy.mp3">The Imperial Papacy</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%2013%20Key% 20Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 14: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/14%20The%20Blac k%20Death.mp3">The Black Death</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%2014%20Key% 20Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>Week 15: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/15%20The%20Hund red%20Years%20War.mp3">The Hundred Years War</a> | <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivIndices/Week%2015%20Key% 20Terms%20and%20Errata.htm">Index</a></p> <p>As for Teaching Tuesday, I wanted to make sure that I wasn&#39;t competing with the wildly successful <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> weblog.&#0160; So, I&#39;ll post my thoughts on teaching on Teaching Tuesday and let my colleagues continue to enlighten and amaze on Thursdays over at <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amalia EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 75.28.150.67 URL: http://hellia.blogspot.com/ DATE: 09/09/2009 10:26:05 AM Hey, Just a heads up-- your week 3 podcast returns a Page Not Found error. The rest of them worked just fine for me though. Thought you'd like to know! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.225

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URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 09/09/2009 10:54:17 AM Amalia, Thanks for the heads-up. It should work now.

Let me know what you think of them! Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amalia EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 75.28.150.67 URL: http://hellia.blogspot.com/ DATE: 09/11/2009 09:53:26 PM Bill, The first one was fairly excellent-- it answered all my questions about two seconds after I thought of them, but mostly I was just excited that I remembered 99% of what you covered in it. I always feel a little bit short-shrifted in regard to Ancient Egypt though. I know it isn't your area of expertise, but I was looking at some information on the Nordic Bronze Age, and I was kind of floored. I wasn't sure what to make of the fact that the region was apparently involved in trade with central Europe that far back. I also read that the climate in the north was so mild they were growing grapes for wine, similar to Spain or France, presently. Did whatever climate shift that hit there (~800 BCE) have an impact on the rest of Europe? (Should I not be asking historical questions when I'm not actually one of your students anymore? Or is occasional discourse permitted under your "UND For Free" limited time only bargain podcast extravaganza?) Amalia -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Performing the Margins: Punk and Place STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: performing-the-margins-punk-and-place DATE: 09/07/2009 08:19:41 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Cross-posted to </em><a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/"><em>Punk Archaeology</em></a></p> <p>Even as Kostis was conjuring his posts on <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/pink-floyd-inpompeii/">Pink Floyd at Pompeii</a> and the <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/scorpions-inmytilene/">Scorpions at Mytilene</a>, another iconic locus of punk rock magic is reaching the end of its life.&#0160; The <a href="http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/music/54639857.html?elr=KArksLckD

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8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUss">Uptown Bar &amp; Cafe in Minneapolis</a> is apparently slated to close sometime this year.&#0160; Its octogenarian owner, Frank Toonen, is looking to sell the bar to secure the financial future for his family (a noble cause, if there ever was one).&#0160; The bar hosted virtually every major punk(ish) rock band to come out of Minneapolis (Soul Asylum, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü) and ranked as a local CBGBs or Max&#39;s Kansas City.&#0160; Ironically, the bar will be torn down for a three story retail space as the Uptown neighborhood continues a process of regentrification (for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown,_Minneapolis">a nice history of the neighborhood</a>).</p> <p>To be honest, I&#39;ve never been to the Uptown Bar &amp; Cafe (nor Uptown, for that matter), but the story of the Uptown Bar &amp; Cafe caught my eye in the context of our ongoing conversation about punk and place.&#0160; Many of the most storied punk establishments established themselves in seemingly marginal urban spaces made available by white flight and the post-war growth of suburbs and now confront the reopening of the urban center to economic development which in many ways challenged both economic opportunities made available by the marginal status of various neighborhoods and urban locales as well as the gritty and explicitly antisuburban ascetic that punk cultivated. The creative risks exploited by punk rockers as they returned to the urban center from the security of suburban &quot;garage&quot; demanded an authenticity of the punk experience that cannot be maintained when surrounded by boutique shopping spots and chain clothing retailers who seemingly revel in the make-believe character of the consumer experience.</p> <p>The authenticity of the urban experience is not just a hallmark of punk music. Today, it is seen most visibly in hip-hop music where credibility is tied a performer&#39;s ability to maintain their ties to economically and socially marginalized segments of urban areas.&#0160; (As hiphop has globalized, it has shown that the performance of authenticity has transferred from marginalized areas within the American city to marginalized areas of the globe.&#0160; Take, for example, the Somali-Canadian rapper K&#39;naan who mocks the urban posturing of North American rappers by contrasting their claims and experiences to his upbringing in Somalia).&#0160; </p> <p>Common&#39;s song &quot;The Corner&quot; is a another great meditation on the space of performance in contemporary hip-hop.&#0160; The song juxtaposes Common&#39;s lyrics about his experiences on &quot;the corner&quot; with nostalgia tinged lyrics of the radical spoken-word poetry collective &quot;The Last Poets&quot; who note: </p> <p>...The corner was our Rock of Gibraltar, our Stonehenge<br />Our Taj Mahal, our monument... </p><p>Of course, in hip-hop the corner invokes more than just an urban space associated with drug dealing, informal social gatherings, and, perhaps more properly, the performance of <em>dozens </em>between rappers that formed the basis for the combative aspects of modern hip-hop music.&#0160; The corner invokes the crossroads which was an iconic symbol in American Blues music.&#0160; Most famously, the crossroads was where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical talent.</p> <p>Crossroads represent both central places where diverse paths cross, but also liminal sites where clearly-defined spheres of control and authority break-down or lapse entirely.&#0160; It is not surprising, for example, that Oedipus met the Sphinx at a crossroads (see: S. I Johnston, &quot;Crossroads,&quot; ZPE 88 (1991)217-24) .</p> <p>To return, then to punk and place, the impending loss of the Uptown Cafe &amp; Bar (and other punk landmarks) stands out as the return of marginal spaces to the control of the center.&#0160; In many cities in the US, this has manifested itself as reclaiming the marginalized zone of an urban core neglected in the post-war migration to the suburbs for the commercial, capitalist, gentrified space of the new suburban centers (i.e. let&#39;s make the cities look like we imagined them

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when we built those surrogate cities: suburban shopping malls).</p> <p>To bring my archaeological interests more fully into the conversation, I&#39;ll just point out that for the last 7 years I&#39;ve been working with the team of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> to study a community situated at a crossroads along the coast of southeastern Cyprus.&#0160; Peripheral to the main centers of power on the island, there is reason to think that the ancient community situated in what is now the coast zone of the village of Pyla (another liminal space!) served as a local crossroads community.&#0160; <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/%7Edpettegrew/">David Pettegrew&#39;s</a> work at a similar site in the Eastern Corinthia commonly referred to as &quot;Cromna&quot; is another example of a crossroads community.&#0160; These liminal spaces situated neither clearly within an urban core or in the romanticized space of the rural periphery defy categorization.&#0160; The complexity and density of the artifact assemblages found in these areas press to the limit methods devised to document more dispersed kinds of activity in the countryside.&#0160; At the same time, the absence of a built up center with known, monumental architecture, makes it challenging to justify large scale, systematic excavation. </p> <p>The marginal status of crossroads places have made them a kind of improvisational space for archaeological fieldwork.&#0160; In this way, they echo the marginal spaces of desiccated, post-war, urban core which became the places of punk performance, or the ill-defined and marginal space of the corner which became a zone dominated by ancient and modern sphinxes.&#0160;&#0160; Punk archaeology revels in the marginal, ambiguous, ambivalent and, in many ways, dangerous spaces that only become central through the ephemeral performance. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 09/07/2009 03:53:29 PM Fantastic. And thanks for the hip-hop cues. One thing that came to mind regarding Minneapolis: a comparison of the spaces associated with Bob Dylan's tenure as a Freshman at U of Minnesota (Dinkytown, the 10 O'clock Scholar cafe) and the spaces associated with Prince (the nightclub Glam Slam that he opened in 1989). Funny thing is that I've never lived in Minneapolis and I have only visited to do work for MARWP (Minnesota Archaeological Researches in the Western Peloponnese) ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.192.225 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher

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DATE: 09/08/2009 07:42:13 AM Kostis, Another Punk Archaeologist, Aaron Barth, directed me to this article about Bob Dylan and his voice. The Voice as it were: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200908u/bobdylan">http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200908u/bob-dylan</a> Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/04/2009 09:47:54 AM ----BODY: <p>A late Friday post on a sunny Friday morning (in my new office):</p> <ul>! <li>I can&#39;t help but wonder how long we&#39;re going to see articles on the role of Facebook (and other social networking sites) in the construction of academic careers.&#0160; <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Facebooking-forthe-Tenure/48218/">Here&#39;s another</a>.</li>! <li>Ok, I know that I am rather late on this, but <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/">Kickstarter</a> is a really cool idea.&#0160; I wonder if it&#39;s worth the effort to try to get an invitation.</li>! <li>Credit where it is due.&#0160; <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/2009/08/contested-spaces-unds-okellyhall-and.html">The ISP wall is still standing in O&#39;Kelly hall in all it&#39;s glory</a>.&#0160; Perhaps the dean has reconsidered?</li>! <li>I am now in my spacious and spectacular new office.&#0160; More on that next week!</li>! <li>Opera 10 is great.&#0160; Recently Firefox 3.5 and Blackboard 8 have not played well together on my Mac.&#0160; So, I&#39;ve adopted <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera 10</a> as my new browser for Blackboard.&#0160; Not only does it speed up our sluggish Blackboard interface, but so far, it has eliminated all the problems that I had on Firefox.</li>! <li>When the Dean of <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/grad/">The Graduate School</a>, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/grad/html/welcome2.html">Joey Benoit</a> blogs, people listen (and read!).&#0160; Yesterday, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/03/the-new-future-of-teachinggraduate-student-mentoringdeconstructing-framework/">Dean Benoit&#39;s post on Teaching Thursday</a> blew up with close to 70 page visits to read our weekly post.&#0160; I hope some of this momentum carries forward and readers come back every Thursday!</li>! <li><a href="http://scores.espn.go.com/ncf/preview?gameId=292482641">University of North Dakota versus Texas Tech</a>.&#0160; Welcome to Division I.&#0160;

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(Let&#39;s put it this way: it won&#39;t even be on TV here in Grand Forks).&#0160; If you want, you can listen to it LIVE <a href="http://www.fightingsioux.com/liveEvents/liveEvents.dbml?&amp;db_oem_id=135 00">on the internet radiophone</a>.</li>! <li>If you haven&#39;t celebrated the 50th Anniversary of Miles Davis&#39; <em>Kind of Blue</em> by listening to it rendered in <a href="http://kindofbloop.com/">8-bit electronic tones as </a><a>Kind of Bloop</a>, then you are really missing something special.</li>! <li>Follow one of our Ph.D. students in History here at UND through his blog <a href="http://doctoralbliss.wordpress.com/">Doctoral Bliss</a>.</li>! <li>If you aren&#39;t following me <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">on Twitter, you really should</a>.</li>! </ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.115.6 URL: http://civilwarhistory.wordpress.com DATE: 09/14/2009 09:08:30 PM Thanks for the plug Bill. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Historiography STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-historiography CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/03/2009 08:01:29 AM ----BODY: <p>I am teaching both a graduate historiography class this semester and our undergraduate methods and historiography class (cleverly named The Historians' Craft).&nbsp; I've modified both classes over the past year.&nbsp; </p> <p>In my graduate historiography class, I've beefed up the "background" section of the course using three books to introduce the students to broader discourse of historiography: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/426258335">R. G. Collingwood,<em> The Idea of History</em></a>; <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/28377649">J. Appleby, L. Hunt, M. Jacob, <em>Telling the Truth about History</em></a>; <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/54826159">E. Clark, <em>History, Theory,

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Text</em></a>.&nbsp; I open with these three books over the first three weeks to give the students a basis for reading a more traditional gaggle of books central to how we conceive of history as a discipline today. <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/History%20502_Syllabus_ AU2009.htm">Here's the syllabus</a>.</p> <p>For my Historians' Craft class, I've decided to move it away from a standard undergraduate style seminar.&nbsp; I outline my thinking about revisions <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/te aching-thursday-revising-the-historians-craft.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/04/te aching-thursday-capstone-classes.html">here</a>. <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/History%20240_3.htm">He re's the syllabus</a>.</p> <p>This being Thursday and all, there is more.&nbsp; It's Teaching Thursday, right?&nbsp; We got the <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/09/03/the-new-future-of-teachinggraduate-student-mentoringdeconstructing-framework/">Dean of The Graduate School over at the Teaching Thursday Blog, Joseph Benoit, talking about graduate mentoring</a>.&nbsp; Check it out. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Three Little Birds: Pyla-Koutsopetria, Photos, and Ubuntu STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: three-little-birds-pyla-koutsopetria-photos-and-ubuntu CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 09/02/2009 08:24:25 AM ----BODY: <p>The second week of classes is upon us and the excitement of the first week has given way to the somewhat uninspiring bustle of the semester's routine.&nbsp; But sometimes there are moments, challenges, and successes that seem to propel the week forward and cut through some of the routine.&nbsp; Here are three such "Little Bird" moments (after the Bob Marley song):</p> <p><em>Rise up this mornin,<br>Smiled with the risin sun,<br>Three little birds<br>Pitch by my doorstep<br>Singin sweet songs<br>Of melodies pure and true,<br>Sayin, (this is my message to you-ou-ou:) </em> <p><em>Singin: dont worry bout a thing,<br>cause every little thing gonna be all right.<br>Singin: dont worry (dont worry) bout a thing,<br>cause every little thing gonna be all right!</em> <p>1. We had our first meeting to plan the 2010 <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeology Project</a> season yesterday.&nbsp; Every year, it starts a week or two earlier.&nbsp; I fully

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expect our 2011 planning meeting to take place in Cyprus or perhaps even before the 2010 season.&nbsp; <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott Moore</a>, and I convened by conference call and in an efficient hour meeting charted a course of action (subject to change, of course, or at least redirection).&nbsp; It was such an efficient and focused meeting that it made me glad to work with such capable folks.&nbsp; In a nutshell here is where we stand.&nbsp; We decided that we would run a hybrid study season/field school/study tour this year drawing undergraduates from Messiah College, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and graduate students from UND and elsewhere.&nbsp; We also set some deadlines for our work to compile a complete inventory of our paper and digital data for the projects.&nbsp; We started this considerable undertaking last spring, but it was interrupted (at least on my end).&nbsp; Now is the time to finish this work.&nbsp; Our data inventory will be the foundation for writing the monograph.&nbsp; To that end, we even set deadlines for monograph sections.&nbsp; We want to have the basic text of our catalog of survey finds, methodological discuss, and our analysis of distributional data from the survey complete by January 15th next year.&nbsp; </p> <p>2. One small crisis is our PKAP photograph collection.&nbsp; We have thousands of field and artifact photos that need to be checked, (re)labeled, and available for study to the directors of the project and their senior collaborators.&nbsp; We have not developed an image database, but, instead, use the photo's filename to identify the object. It's not a particularly powerful identifier, but for artifacts our unique numbering system locates it spatially and keys it to a proper description in our finds database.&nbsp; In most cases, the artifact number (and the file name) are visible physically in the photograph.&nbsp; We feel that the system is pretty ironclad and stable.&nbsp; The only issue is that because the photo itself contains the artifact number (i.e. the file name) we have allowed ourselves to fall behind in labeling the actual files.&nbsp; This isn't the mini-crisis, however.&nbsp; The crisis comes when we have the photos all labeled and checked.&nbsp; How do we make them available to the team?&nbsp; We need to be able to download them individually or in batches (e.g. for a trench or a particular area in the survey).&nbsp; We need our solution to be inexpensive.&nbsp; And if it is server side software, we need to be able to run it on fairly simple and limited equipment.&nbsp; In other words, our server folks while helpful and generous, do not want to have to radically restructure their hardware and software infrastructure to accommodate our needs.&nbsp; Any thoughts on this would be great.</p> <p>3. <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu</a>.&nbsp; This is just one of life's small triumphs.&nbsp; I am now running a Ubuntu powered Dell XPS. Ubuntu has breathed new life into a 4 year old laptop. After I figured out that the ailing optical drive would not function as a port for booting and installing the new OS, I figured out that with a minimum of effort I could boot from a USB drive.&nbsp; 10 minutes later (and one false start, hang, crash, beeping issue), I had Ubuntu running.&nbsp; It boots in less than 25 seconds.&nbsp; Seems stable.&nbsp; Runs <a href="http://www.openoffice.org/">Open Office 3.0</a>, <a href="http://www.gimp.org/">Gimp</a>, and <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/enUS/firefox/personal.html">Firefox</a> (and soon my new favorite toy <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera 10</a>) without a hiccup. When something that everyone tells you actually works and works just like people tell you that it will... well, it's just a nice thing.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: christian louboutin EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 120.33.202.246 URL: http://www.christianlouboutinstores.com/ DATE: 01/20/2010 12:36:40 AM It's so lucky for me to find your blog! So shocking and great! Just one suggestion: It will be better and easier to follow if your blog can offer rrs subscription service. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Online: A Report on History 101 after One Week STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-online-a-report-on-history-101-after-one-week CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/01/2009 08:10:25 AM ----BODY: <p>There have been quite a few reports on online teaching in the last month, <a href="http://www.aplu.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=282">the most significant of which is probably this massive 2 volume study produced by the American Association of Land-grant Universities</a> (here's <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-EmbraceOnline/48235/?sid=at&amp;utm_source=at&amp;utm_medium=en">an article about it in the <em>Chronicle</em></a>).&nbsp; And, no, I haven't read it all, but I thought that I should still chime in on the subject as I am teaching my very first online class this fall and have a week of experience under my belt.&nbsp; (That should provided a different perspective to the extensive and sophisticated study by the AALU).</p> <p>First things, first.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/History101SyllabusONLIN E_RVD.htm">Here's a link to my syllabus</a>.&nbsp; I'd offer you a link to the entire class (and I will make much of the content available as soon as I get the time).</p> <p>Five points:</p> <p>1. The prep time was enormous.&nbsp; I have talked on this blog and over at Teaching Thursday about the time involved in preparing lecture style podcasts.&nbsp; The 17 podcasts that make up the core of my class took at least 70 hours to prepare.&nbsp; The smaller, quick hit, podcasts took about 15-30 minutes each to account for an additional 4 or 5 hours.&nbsp; Lecturing to a notional audience is bizarre and every pregnant pause or misspeak appears more glaring when converted to an MP3.&nbsp; From the lectures, I also compiled a set of 15 indexes.&nbsp; Each index was composed of key terms that the student would encounter during the podcast.&nbsp; These ranged from places (e.g. France or the Levant) to people (e.g. Julius Caesar,

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Hammurabi) and concepts (primogenitor, subinfeudaton).&nbsp; Each index took about 3 hours to produce and link.&nbsp; So that was another 50 hours or so.&nbsp; Then came the quizzes.&nbsp; I include weekly objective (i.e. multiple guess) quizzes designed primarily to keep the students honest.&nbsp; I had prepared a substantial test bank over the previous few years of teaching, but converting them into the proper format to be integrated into Blackboard (our online teaching interface -- more on that below) and adding questions to weeks where I did not have an extensive quiz bank took, on average, about 2 hours a quiz.&nbsp; That's another 30 hours.&nbsp; Various other formatting issues and the like took probably another 10 hours.&nbsp; So at the end of this all I estimate that preparing an online class took around 170 hours.&nbsp; And that's for a class that I had already prepped for lecture.&nbsp; In other words that's a 170 hours ontop of the basic course construction.&nbsp; But I'll admit that I am fussy and to be fair, I was paid extra by my University to prep the class. </p> <p>2. Lecturing to the void.&nbsp; One of the key aspects of my lecture style is constant interaction with the class. This is crucial to how I produce and deliver my lectures.&nbsp; In general, I lecture from an outline rather than a prepared text.&nbsp; I then adjust my presentation in response to the class.&nbsp; I suppose I have a rather approachable style, in that students feel quite comfortable interrupting me and asking questions.&nbsp; So if there are lots of questions, I slow down.&nbsp; If there aren't many questions, I ask: "Does this make sense to everybody?"&nbsp; If there is convincing silence (i.e. no non-verbal cues like looking down or restless fidgeting), then I move on along to my next point or argument.&nbsp; In my online lecture, there are no cues, no questions, no hints as to how much what I am saying is making sense.&nbsp; Sure, at the end of a particular week, I might notice that the class discussion board is filled with queries, but by then, the lecture is over.&nbsp; And, of course, I realize that I can prepare my lectures in ways that allow students to respond in real-time, but these all defeat some of the benefits of online teaching.</p> <p>3. In the real world, I am on time.&nbsp; I don't mind due dates (and, in fact, I often set them for myself and then keep them!).&nbsp; And whatever I lack in creativity or intellect, I desperately attempt to make up for in discipline (e.g. this blog).&nbsp; My students on the other hand, seem to be almost resistant to due dates.&nbsp; Providing a due date almost ensures that grandparents die, best friends get sick, cars break down, computers crash, et c.&nbsp; Considering the economically and emotionally devastating consequences of due dates, I have generally phased them out of my larger classes.&nbsp; Or set up a series of due dates to spread the disaster out (and prevent a run on laptops or the horrendous stories that you read in Thucydides about the Plague in Athens where the bodies of deceased relatives piled up the streets because of a universal due date).&nbsp; In any event, my online class is completely asynchronous; all of the course material is visible and accessible from the first day.&nbsp; There are two due dates.&nbsp; A due date for an optional midterm and a due date for the final.&nbsp; If you take the midterm, you don't need to take the final and vice versa.&nbsp; Students can engage the class at whatever rate they want.&nbsp; It's not only more humane, but I think (kidding aside) better for the students.&nbsp; It gives them a better chance to take the class on its own terms.&nbsp; If you have three exams on one day, it is fair to think that none of the tests reflect accurately how much a student could know about a given body of material.&nbsp; What that kind of environment tests is how well a student can juggle responsibilities.&nbsp; An important skill, to be sure, but not as important as learning the material that I present in my class.</p> <p>4. Less time in the classroom, more time evaluating work.&nbsp; When I teach three classes a semester, I generally research 10 hours a week per class.&nbsp; That typically involves 3 hours in the

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classroom, an hour or so (on email or in person) dealing with students, a couple of hours preparing material, and a couple of hours grading (more when there are major assignments).&nbsp; Teaching online has allowed my to reclaim about 5 of these hours.&nbsp; I don't lecture in real time and I have all my course material prepared and deployed (see point 3).&nbsp; As a result, I have twice as much time to deal with particular student problems (and with an online class there are many) and to evaluate written work.&nbsp; Evaluating written work is the most time consuming part of any class that I teach.&nbsp; Having more time to comment on writing, is a great benefit to me as an instructor.&nbsp; More importantly, I pass that on to my students by spending more time evaluating their work.&nbsp; In effect, I lose some of the classroom teaching experiences, but make up for this through having more time to comment and evaluate written work.</p> <p>5. Finally, (and you knew this was coming), there is Blackboard.&nbsp; On some levels, it's very, very good.&nbsp; The automated grade book and quizzes are wonderful.&nbsp; It's ability to handle almost any kind of material from podcasts, to text, to images, to webpages, and video is great.&nbsp; And, it's seemingly bug free interface (except on a Mac with Firefox 3.5) is remarkable.&nbsp; But it's super ugly.&nbsp; The interface is inflexible from a design stand point.&nbsp; As you can tell by this blog, design might not necessarily be my highest priority, but it is important nevertheless.&nbsp; For example, my class is divided into 15 weeks.&nbsp; Each week is a folder.&nbsp; I wanted to arrange these folders into a nice grid so that they'd all be visible at once on the screen.&nbsp; This is hardly a revolutionary design.&nbsp; But the clunky, frames-based, interface of Blackboard forbade it.&nbsp; Or made is sufficiently difficult that I could not work out how to do it.&nbsp; I would love a Wordpress style "template" collection for Blackboard.&nbsp; </p> <p>A more significant criticism is that Blackboard is so self-contained that it makes it difficult to make even parts of a class publicly accessible.&nbsp; Of course, you can do what I do, which is put large parts of my class on an external server and just link them into Blackboard (and since Blackboard is fugly, you might ask why would I want to make my class visible to the public... yes, not only was the food bad but the portions were so damn tiny!).&nbsp; As the web is becoming more and more concerned with access, mashups, and convergence, Blackboard remains firmly entrenched in its framedriven, un-mash-up-able web 1.0 interface (with a host of Web 2.0-like options that are basically what Velveeta is to cheese).&nbsp; Maybe Blackboard 9 will be better.</p> <p>Ok.&nbsp; I promise that I won't provide weekly updates on my History 101 Online course, but do stay tuned for how it turns out.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Writing the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1

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BASENAME: writing-the-pyla-koutsopetria-archaeological-project CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 08/31/2009 07:55:18 AM ----BODY: <p>As the semester is finally underway and I have returned to a regular routine, my <a href="http://www.pkap.org">PKAP</a> colleagues and I are beginning to think about the least glamorous part of archaeological fieldwork: writing up the results.&nbsp; Writing up the results has two components, to my mind.</p> <p>First, we need to finalize as much of our data as possible.&nbsp; Over the last two seasons of intensive fieldwork, we have let our data -- from paper forms to digital photographs and databases -- get a bit rough around the edges.&nbsp; Last spring we started a massive data inventory and were able to make good strides in pulling it all together.&nbsp; Now, we need to get the missing pieces sorted so that we can be sure that we are all have access to and are analyzing the same set of information.&nbsp; This is tedious, behind the scenes work that larger projects often leave to designated data managers (professionals no less), but we will have to do on our own.&nbsp; The temptation of course, is to declare the data "inventoried enough" and start on analysis, but this almost always ends in tears.</p> <p>Then, we need to start to write.&nbsp; Fortunately, PKAP has a head start on this.&nbsp; Since 2003, PKAP has published 2 report articles in the <em>Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus </em>and a couple of interpretative pieces (in <em>Near Eastern Archaeology </em>and in a <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/191758469">Festschrift for Timothy Gregory</a>).&nbsp; We have also given close to a dozen conference papers of various descriptions.&nbsp; So we have a nice foundation of description and analysis from which to proceed.&nbsp; As a final contribution to our regular preliminary publications, I am writing a final preliminary report for the <em>RDAC </em>right now.&nbsp; This report will documents the results of our excavations in 2008 and 2009 and the results of geophysical work carried out from 2007-2009.&nbsp; It will be superficial, but will ensure that some prompt publication has appeared from our project in the event that our final monograph length publication is delayed.</p> <p>The final preliminary report for the RDAC will present the results of our geophysical work -- particularly the two seasons of electrical resistivity -- and explain how this work along with the 4 previous seasons of intensive survey established the basis for the excavation at the sites of Vigla, Koutsopetria, and Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; The article will then briefly summarize the results of the excavation at these three sites.&nbsp; Unlike the final publication, there will only be a brief treatment of finds and no proper catalogue. </p> <p>The writing process blends description and analysis and will set the stage for at least one study season where we can fill in any gaps that have appeared over the course of writing. When we have a working draft available, I will post a working paper here. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/28/2009 09:00:26 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits on a cloudy Friday morning:</p> <ul>! <li>The first Latin Friday Morning of the year is this morning.&#0160; We need to decide on a text.&#0160; It looks like we&#39;re leaning toward something Late(ish) and Christian. </li>! <li>The <a href="http://mitpress.typepad.com/mitpresslog/2009/08/naked-lunch-at50.html">50th Anniversary of the publication</a> of the William S. Burroughs&#39; <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=MlvMaAKiobgC&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;dq=The%20Nak ed%20Lunch&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;pg=PP1#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false"><em>The Naked Lunch</em></a><em>&#0160;</em>or the the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Lunch">Wikipedia entry here</a>.&#0160; <a href="http://www.librarything.com/work/5852/covers/">Check out all the different covers for this book over the last 50 years</a>.&#0160; Here&#39;s an interview <a href="http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1268">with Burroughs about <em>The Naked Lunch</em></a>.</li>! </ul>! <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5813f06970 c-pi"><img alt="NakedLunchCovers" border="0" height="492" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5813f31970c -pi" style="border-width: 0px;" width="400" /></a></p> <ul>! <li>There was an amazing response to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/08/27/the-new-future-of-teaching-socialnetworks-changing-expectations-and-perils-of-access/">our most recent Teaching Thursday blog post</a>, including some lengthy comments.&#0160; Now, we just have to get those folks to post their comments in the comment section! </li>! <li>The UND&#39;s <a href="http://undpresidentsblog.wordpress.com/">President&#39;s blog</a> seems to have become dormant, but <a href="http://mygradspace.wordpress.com/">The Graduate School blog at UND </a>has sprung triumphantly back to life!&#0160; As the administration at UND tries to determine how best to engage the new and social media opportunities, the Graduate School appears to be at the forefront with a blog, a Twitter feed, and, from what I understand, a new media strategy.&#0160; </li>! <li>It&#39;s <a href="http://store.apple.com/us/product/MAC_OS_X_SNGL?mco=NzgxMDc2NA">Snow Leopard</a> day!</li>! <li>Check out <a href="http://www.undalumni.org/Page.aspx?pid=1063">the UND Day at the [Metro]dome this weekend</a>.</li>! </ul> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Social Networks and Student Expectations STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-social-networks-and-student-expectations CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/27/2009 07:59:41 AM ----BODY: <p>As is becoming my habit (and I promise it won't continue for too long), I'll redirect you to <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> for today's blog post.&nbsp; The number of visits to <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> have consistently increased, so please, take a minute to check it our and show <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">my latest collaborative blog project</a> some love!&nbsp; And, if you are UND faculty think about joining the conversation.</p> <p>Today, <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/socialwo/html/facultystaff.html#Bret">Bret Weber</a> and I bantered back and forth about <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/08/27/the-new-future-of-teaching-socialnetworks-changing-expectations-and-perils-of-access/">the 24/7 professor and the role of social networks in changing student expectations</a> regarding access to information and individuals.&nbsp; I argue that the ubiquity of social networking applications makes constant contact with people and information a reasonable expectation.&nbsp; And it only goes to reason that faculty, who constantly demand greater commitments from students to their academic pursuits, would exist to some extent within the the web of networking applications. </p> <p>Check out our banter.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Modernity and Knossos

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: modernity-and-knossos CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Religion DATE: 08/26/2009 07:54:11 AM ----BODY: <p><img style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px" alt="Knossos &amp; the prophets of modernism" src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/++699479717_140.jpg?SearchOrder=+-+AV,GO" width="152" align="right" border="0">On the recommendation of Phyllis Graham (archaeological librarian/archaeologist extraordinary), I picked up <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/262429441">Cathy Gere's <em>Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism</em></a>.&nbsp; It was officially the last book of my summer reading season, and it left me with much food for thought.</p> <p>In particular, the book brought into focus the influence of modernism on archaeological practice outside of the context of the archaeology of nationalism where the most pronounced tendencies of modernist paradigms tend to appear.&nbsp; This was useful to me in three ways.&nbsp; First, it helped me understand what I meant when I quipped that the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis might be one of the most modern archaeological sites in the Mediterranean.&nbsp; In saying this, I didn't simply mean that the temple set atop the "sacred rock" lacked obvious ties to the past (they had been stripped away gradually over the course of numerous intellectual, archaeological, and architectural reconstructions), but that it forms the center point of a whole range of irrational feelings ranging from expressions of passionate nationalism to transferred affections of poets and thinkers ranging from Henry Miller to Freud.&nbsp; Gere makes a compelling case for the place of Arthur Evans' Knossos in the modernist imagination by going well beyond the excavator's fantastic reconstructions to the sometimes dizzying thought-world that the palace and its Minoan inhabitants evoked across Europe.&nbsp; </p> <p>Second, the book pushed me again to return to my rather unformed work on Dream Archaeology.&nbsp; In particular, Gere's arguments has encouraged me to return to some of my&nbsp; episodes of Dream Archaeology in the 20th century and consider their relationship to the modernist moment in archaeology (for more on Dream Archaeology see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/re vising-dream-archaeology.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr eam-archaeology-working-paper.html">here</a>).&nbsp; This will likely go back to Freud and also to the modernist movement in Greece, since some of my Dream Archaeologists are Greek.&nbsp; (As an aside, it is interesting to note that Gere's book deals very little with modernism in a Greek context -- outside the almost requisite reference to Kazantzakis -- and it would have been interesting to see how Greek intellectuals engaged Evans' work on Knossos.)&nbsp; I will certainly have to press <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Kostis Kourelis</a> to read Gere's book and chat with him at the Modern Greek Studies Association meeting this fall about how <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/01/angelos-tanagras.html">Angellos

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Tanagras</a> fits into a broader modernist movement which sought to bridge the gap between the rational and irrational and, in the process, validate the experience of a distinctly Greek past in the language of an pan-European intellectual movement.&nbsp; Tanagras work to understand the power of seemingly "supernatural" Greek folk practices, like the evil eye or malevolent dreams, within a psychoanalytical perspective represents a kind of Greek counterpoint to Evans' mystical engagement with the site of Knossos.</p> <p>Finally, Gere's work is going to take me back to Kourelis' <a href="http://www.atyponlink.com/ASCS/doi/abs/10.2972/hesp.76.2.391">"Byzantium and the Avant-Garde: Excavations at Corinth 1920s-1930s"</a> to explore again how the broader modernist movement made room for the emergence of Byzantine and Early Christian archaeology within Greece.&nbsp; Modernisms rejection of the overlyrationalistic Christianity of Western Protestantism must have led some to seek spiritual satisfaction in the familiar, yet challenging experiences of mystical Byzantine and Early Christian thought just as Evans took refuge in the world of the ancient Minoans.</p> <p>In the context of Gere's work, <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/04/iraq-sikyon-orlandos.html">A. Orlandos</a>, perhaps the most important archaeologist of the Athenian Acropolis and a scholar who reported without comment <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">on an episode of Dream archaeology</a>, makes a little more sense.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dean EMAIL: IP: 128.135.204.109 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/dblobaum DATE: 08/27/2009 12:35:09 PM The introduction to Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism by Cathy Gere is available on the University of Chicago Press website. <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/289533.html">http://www.press.u chicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/289533.html</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Michael Fronda Lecture at UND STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: michael-fronda-lecture-at-und CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota

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DATE: 08/25/2009 08:01:52 AM ----BODY: <p>The big news this week is that Professor <a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/history/faculty/faculty/fronda/">Michael Fronda of McGill University</a> has agreed to come and present the inaugural <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/CyprusResearchFund/Donors.html" >Cyprus Research Fund</a> lecture here at the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; The talk will be at 4 pm on September 17th in the Chester Fritz Library's East Asia Room.</p> <p>The title of his talk is "Anarchy, Rivalry and the beginnings of the Roman Empire".&nbsp; </p> <p>Here's an abstract for it:</p> <blockquote> <p>Professor Fronda's paper will examine the growth of Roman power in the ancient world by focusing on how the city of Rome came to dominate the Italian Peninsula.&nbsp; Through an innovative use of contemporary international relations theory, Prof. Fronda argues that Rome capitalized on the tendency for ancient state relations to be anarchic, on the one hand, but in some way limited by enduring rivalries between particular states, on the other.&nbsp; Rome’s ability to exploit these fundamental characteristics of ancient, and perhaps all, states led ultimately to the city’s domination of Italy and provided important lessons for the city’s conquest of the Mediterranean world. </p></blockquote> <p>The talk is open to the public and a reception will follow.</p> <p>Mike is my oldest friends in academia and it's great that he's agreed to come and present this talks. It's also exciting that the talk is sponsored by the Cyprus Research Fund and will be the first in a series of annual talks which seek to introduce the Mediterranean world to University of North Dakota community.&nbsp; Mike is particularly suitable candidate for the inaugural lecture because he has not only spent time working with us on Cyprus, but because he returns each year to the Mediterranean as both a scholar and a teacher. <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/CyprusResearchFund/Donors.html" >For more information on the Cyprus Research Fund and, in particular, how to give to this fund, click here</a>.</p> <p>Support for the talk has also been provided by the <a href="http://business.und.edu/dept/pols/">Department of Political Science and Public Administration</a>.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a51b50a9970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="536" alt="FrondaTalk" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a57221e8970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Slopes and Terraces at Lakka Skoutara STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: slopes-and-terraces-at-lakka-skoutara CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/24/2009 07:59:14 AM ----BODY: <p>I usually plan my blog post as I am waking up (or, if I am running late, in the shower), but today, the post almost planned itself when I received 6 email pertaining to our ongoing research at Lakka Skoutara.&nbsp; Our work at Lakka Skoutara in the southeastern Corinthia is a collaborative effort between <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a>, and Lita TzortzopoulouGregory.&nbsp; I've been working from a set of GIS maps created for the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a> (EKAS) and filled in with GPS points from 2001.&nbsp; It's remarkable to see how much our ability to map the landscape has improved over the years.&nbsp; GPS points are more accurate and the tools available to process large or complex datasets like regional level Digital Elevation Models (or DTMs) is remarkable.</p> <p>Here's a cool example.&nbsp; (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/vi ewsheds-in-the-eastern-corinthia.html">Here's another</a>).&nbsp; This past summer, David, Tim, Lita, and I became curious about the terrace walls at Lakka Skoutara.&nbsp; They aren't particularly interesting on their own.&nbsp; In fact, they reflect what we though was typical terracing procedure.&nbsp; The walls creep up the southern face of the hill that marks the northern boundary of the Lakka (a lakka is basically a valley surrounded by relatively steep hills with <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/vi ewsheds-in-the-eastern-corinthia.html">a polje</a> at its bottom).&nbsp; </p> <p>In any event, as we looked at these terraces, we began to wonder at what point the terrace builders decided to build a terrace or, perhaps more importantly, decided that the slope was too steep to build a terrace.&nbsp; Andrew Bevan, one of the most clever practitioners of archaeological GIS, had posed a similar question based on the terraces on the island of Kythera where he noted that terraces become the norm in terms of field management as the hill slopes approached 10 to 15 degrees of slope (<a href="http://www.bu.edu/jfa/Abstracts/B/BevanA_29_1-2.html">see here</a>).</p> <p>We conducted a similar analysis using a far less robust dataset derived from our work around Lakka Skoutara.&nbsp; At our site in the Corinthia, we found that terraces begin to appear when the slope exceeds 8 degrees and stop when the slopes exceed 16-18 degrees.</p> <p>Here's a maps of the slopes and terraces.&nbsp; Note that some of the terraces function as check dams and that accounts for their position at lower elevations and lower slopes.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a56ddce7970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LakkaSkoutara2009SlopesTerraces" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a56ddcee970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>And here's a map of the slopes with the yellow color representing the slope range associated with terraces.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a56ddcf7970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-

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bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LakkaSkoutara2009SlopesTerraces2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a56ddcfc970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>For more on our work at Lakka Skoutara see these posts:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/co rinthian-infiltration-the-interior-of-some-houses-at-lakkaskoutara.html">Corinthian Infiltration: The Interior of Some Houses at Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/la kka-skoutara-the-survey.html">Lakka Skoutara: The Survey</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-houses-of-lakka-skoutara.html">The Houses of Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co llapse.html">Collapse</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/pr ovisional-discard.html">Provisional Discard</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co nstruction-in-the-corinthia.html">Construction in the Corinthia</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-2 CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 08/21/2009 07:38:49 AM ----BODY: <p>A little klatch of quick hits on an overcast Friday morning:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2013.php">Beloit College's Mindset list for the Class of 2013</a> is a great read.&nbsp; And it makes you think carefully about any common ground that you imagine will exist between students and and faculty.</li> <li><a href="http://personas.media.mit.edu/">The Personas Project at MIT</a> is pretty cool.&nbsp; From what I can tell, Bill is much more interesting than William. Here are my results:</li></ul> <p align="right"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a50c1aac970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="73" alt="Persona1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a50c1aae970b

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-pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="right"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="73" alt="Persona2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5631558970c -pi" width="400" border="0"> </p> <p align="right"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a563155d970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="73" alt="Persona3" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a563156a970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="right"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a50c1ac5970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="105" alt="Persona4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a5631570970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <ul> <li> <div align="left"> If you haven't checked out my other new media experiment, you could <a href="http://lifeanddeeds.tumblr.com/">by clicking here</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">You should probably follow me on Twitter</a>.</div></li> <li> <div align="left">This is something to think about, I mean, if you are into that kind of thing:</div></li></ul> <p align="right">&nbsp;</p> <p align="right"> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFC-DD9C333F4C5D:b905f050-f770-4988-be9f3f7a20fae0c3" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px"><div id="275c7688-9753-42b2b763-de319bb544d9" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8&amp;color1=0xb1b1b1&amp;color2= 0xcfcfcf&amp;hl=en&amp;feature=player_embedded&amp;fs=1" target="_new"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a50c1982970b -pi" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('275c7688-9753-42b2-b763-de319bb544d9'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = &quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;object width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;movie\&quot; value=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/sIFYPQjYhv8&amp;color1=0xb1b1b1&amp;color2 =0xcfcfcf&amp;hl=en&amp;feature=player_embedded&amp;fs=1\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&g t;&lt;param name=\&quot;wmode\&quot; value=\&quot;transparent\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;embed src=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/sIFYPQjYhv8&amp;color1=0xb1b1b1&amp;color2=0 xcfcfcf&amp;hl=en&amp;feature=player_embedded&amp;fs=1\&quot; type=\&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash\&quot; wmode=\&quot;transparent\&quot; width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/embed&gt;&lt;\/object&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&quot;;" alt=""></a></div></div></div></p> <ul> <li> Fortunately, our <a href="http://undpresidentsblog.wordpress.com/">University president has a blog</a>, at just about the time when other university presidents have twitter feeds (<a href="https://twitter.com/presidentgee">Gordon Gee (OSU)</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/kstate_pres">Kirk H. Schulz (K-State</a>), <a href="http://twitter.com/johnmaeda">John Maeda (RISD</a>)). Someone might want to point out: if you're in most of the photographs posted on your blog, it sorta undermines the illusion that you are generating the content.&nbsp; Just sayin'.</li> <li>Go read <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> and join the conversation </li> <li>And some love for the only PR Machine at the University more powerful than the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project: The Institute for Philosophy in the Public Life.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.philosophyinpubliclife.org/Instute/filmseries.html">They're showing Casablanca at the Empire Theater on Wednesday</a>.</li> <li>Word is that

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I'll be in my new office sometime next week.&nbsp; That's the first week of classes. Yikes.</li> <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/engvaus2009/engine/current/match/345974.html">Rain at the Oval just as the Australian side got their feet under them</a>.&nbsp; My new opinion is, if you live in a country where it rains all the time, you should not be allowed to host a Test series.</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Go Check out the Teaching Thursday Blog! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-go-check-out-the-teaching-thursday-blog CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 08/20/2009 07:07:27 AM ----BODY: <p>As I am up to my something in prepping my two new classes right now, I am going to simply direct you over to our Teaching Thursday blog where my colleague, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/08/20/the-new-future-ofteaching-active-learning/">Cindy Prescott, has made the first post</a> in our <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/08/13/teaching-thursday-new-academicyear-new-future-for-teaching/">"New Future of Teaching" series</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/08/20/the-new-future-of-teachingactive-learning/">She looks asks some key questions about the academy's new found fascination with active learning</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/08/20/the-new-future-of-teaching-activelearning/">...</a>did they truly come away from that class activity with a greater understanding of the impact of the market revolution on rural and urban women’s lives?&nbsp; Or do they simply remember that it was fun to argue with their classmates, and take a break from taking lecture notes?&nbsp; Does a fun or memorable activity necessarily lead to deeper learning?&nbsp; Are these activities sufficiently superior to more traditional classroom learning styles that it justifies devoting not only class time to completing the activities, but also the preparation time required to develop them?&nbsp; Time that I could be spending on guiding the students’ independent research projects, reading the latest scholarship on the topic, or making progress on those pressing publication deadlines?"</p></blockquote> <p>And she puts these questions not just in the context of educational outcomes, but in the context of our increasingly busy schedules as researchers as well as teachers.&nbsp; And here she makes a particularly important contribution to the conversation.&nbsp; What distinguishes university professors from other professionals committed to teaching is that teaching represents just one facet of our professional

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identities.&nbsp; We are also expected to do original research (not to mention share in the governance of the university) which gives us access to state-ofthe-art knowledge, distinct, original (if not idiosyncratic) perspectives, and a depth of knowledge about a field that is not necessarily expected in other teaching professionals.&nbsp; </p> <p>Check out Cindy's blog at <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>!&nbsp; If you have an idea for a blog post either on the <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/08/13/teaching-thursday-new-academicyear-new-future-for-teaching/"><em>New </em>Future of Teaching</a> (and I am looking at you UND faculty!) or anything else for that matter, drop me a line!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: My New Experiment on the Interweb STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: my-new-experiment-on-the-interweb CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/19/2009 07:23:01 AM ----BODY: <p>I am always keen to try something new.&nbsp; So as the buzz around Tumblr grew over the past year or so, I was curious about whether this might be a fun thing to play around with.&nbsp; I watched and waited (to make sure that it wasn't too new) and then plunged in.</p> <p>So now <a href="http://lifeanddeeds.tumblr.com/">I have a Tumblr page</a>.&nbsp; Two features have captured my attention so far.&nbsp; First, I like Twitter (and <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">you should follow me</a>), but I the historian in me has always been frustrated by the hyper-ephemeral nature of these little tweets.&nbsp; You fire them out into space and they linger on the breeze for a week, and then they are gone.&nbsp; On the one hand, this is good as a recent study determined that <a href="http://www.pearanalytics.com/2009/twitter-study-reveals-interestingresults-about-usage/">40% of tweets are pointless babble</a>.&nbsp; We don't need pointless babble preserved beyond a week.&nbsp; On the other hand, tweets do provide a kind of running commentary on the world and its claim to be a micro-blogging service indicates that some of its intellectual DNA is rooted in the practice of keeping a log (that's the -log part of the word weblog).&nbsp; Logs traditionally have an archival purpose and nature.&nbsp; So I began to think about how I could save and "log" my tweets.&nbsp; I am not suggesting that these tweets have some kind of long-term archival value, but simply that their value could exceed the span of a week.&nbsp; Tumblr lets me capture my tweets

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from an RSS feed and post them to my Tumblr blog.&nbsp; (Tumblr does not yet allow you to export a Tumblr blog into a real archive, which would make it even more useful as an archive for tweets, but, then again, I don't need my tweets forever, just for more than a week!)</p> <p>The other thing that caught my interest is that Tumblr makes it really easy to upload pictures from my mobile phone.&nbsp; The only reason that I have a Samsung Omnia is because it has a decent 5 megapixel camera in it.&nbsp; I am not planning on replacing my DSLR with a camera phone, but I do like the convenience of almost always having a decent camera with me.&nbsp; And I like to take snap shots.&nbsp; And for a while, I was posting these snapshots here to my "proper" blog.&nbsp; But these snapshots seemed a bit informal or odds and ends-y for this blog.&nbsp; So, I have decided to post my informal snapshots to my Tumblr blog.&nbsp; I want to see if I have the energy and discipline to post a picture a day to document some little part of my world.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, my Tumblr will become the repository of my tweets and random photos of my day.&nbsp; (It will also post links to my proper blog via an RSS feed).&nbsp; I plan to tweet my graduate course from a separate twitter account this next fall, and I suspect that I will capture these tweets as well.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Vincent EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 121.45.223.48 URL: http://www.talkingpyramids.com DATE: 08/19/2009 04:52:43 PM Tumblr is excellent, nice and easy to use as you pointed out. Even easier to use is Posterous. Have you seen this one? It's the easiest way to get your stuff out there that I have ever seen. You don't even have to set anything up. Simply email soemthing to [email protected] and that is it. Done. Check it out: <a href="http://www.posterous.com/">http://www.posterous.com/</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on the Post-Classical Parthenon STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-on-the-post-classical-parthenon CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 08/18/2009 07:22:14 AM

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----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a500b481970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="204" alt="ChristianParthenon" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a500b486970b -pi" width="144" align="right" border="0"></a> If you want more traffic to your archaeology blog, just post with the words Acropolis, Parthenon, or Athens in the title!&nbsp; I posted a couple of weeks ago on what I termed <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/08/th e-destructive-power-of-the-athenian-acropolis.html">the "destructive power" of the Athenian Acropolis</a> and declared it to be one of the most unapologetically modern of all ancient monuments.</p> <p>This past week, while frantically preparing for classes, I used my down time to read <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/286433690">A. Kaldellis new little book on the Christian Parthenon</a>.&nbsp; As per my usual practice, I am not going to review this book.&nbsp; And in the interest of full disclosure, he allowed me to read an early draft of his manuscript.&nbsp; The book is an exciting one.&nbsp; Kaldellis combs the difficult and dispersed Byzantine sources for the Parthenon and argues (among other things) that the Parthenon was more important as a church than it ever was as an ancient temple.&nbsp; Dedicated to the Mother of God, the temple was the Cathedral of Athens, an important pilgrimage site, and the location of a persistent miracle involving some kind of mysterious light.</p> <p>I'll make three short observations about this book and how his thinking about Byzantine views of antiquity is so enriching:</p> <p>1. He is subtle in his argument, but he suggests that some of the Parthenon's modern fame is rooted in its Byzantine renown. While the lines of transmission can not be precisely defined, the long Frankish occupation of Athens and some continuity of practice between the Frankish and Byzantine period would have exposed the Crusaders to the temple's reputation as a church.&nbsp; The Western suppression of the Byzantine period at the Parthenon, then, not only physically eliminated and historically vilified the Byzantine contributions to the building itself, but overwrote the Byzantine source for the temple's architectural and historical significance.&nbsp; After all, how could the "Oriental" Byzantine have appreciated the Classical glory of the Parthenon?&nbsp; This argument adds sting to Kaldellis observations "the Byzantines had done far less damage to the monument than had Elgin and the Venetians" (p. 4).&nbsp; </p> <p>2. He problematizes the Byzantine relationship to the past in a far more complex way than previous scholarship.&nbsp; In doing so, he offers the suggestion that spread and importance of the cult of the Panagia Atheniotissa represented a sublimated knowledge of the city's glorious Classical past as embodied in the Parthenon which could not be expressed within the rhetorical and intellectual structures of Christian Byzantine rhetoric or, perhaps, even Byzantine society more broadly (p. 175).&nbsp; This Freudian reading of the deep conflict between the pagan Classical past and the Byzantine present explain the emergence of the Parthenon as an important site by representing it as the manifestation of suppressed desire.&nbsp; In other words, the Parthenon and the Classical past of Greece continued to function in societies unconscious (especially among the Byzantine intellectual elite).&nbsp; It's a small leap to understand the historical and archaeological character of Greek dream life in the same way (for more on that see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/re vising-dream-archaeology.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr

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eam-archaeology-working-paper.html">here</a>).&nbsp; The suppressed wish for a glorious Classical past (especially during challenging times faced by bishops like Michael Choniates) finds expression through the exaltation of the Byzantine temple.</p> <p>3. For a while, I was looking serious at Byzantine saints lives from Greece and I was told, perhaps flippantly, by a senior archaeologist that he thought these texts had little value and were, more or less, all the same. While this did not cause me to give up on them entirely, it probably discouraged me from thinking that there would be much potential in attempting to bring together Byzantine hagiography (or Byzantine texts more broadly) and the systematic archaeology of the Byzantine period.&nbsp; Kaldellis's work is a great model for any efforts in that directions and suggests that the integration of Byzantine texts and monuments is not only possible for Greece, but can be profitable.</p> <p>Oh, one last thing in this non-review. Kaldellis prose is great.&nbsp; He manages to combine analytical precision with an casual and readable diction.&nbsp; A few of my colleagues can pull this off.&nbsp; I can't.&nbsp; I'm jealous.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project by Ryan Stander STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: toposchora-photographs-of-the-pyla-koutsopetria-archaeologicalproject-by-ryan-stander CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/17/2009 07:00:07 AM ----BODY: <p>It's my pleasure to announce a new contribution to the work of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; If you followed <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">our various blogs this summer</a>, you are likely already familiar with <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">the contribution of Ryan Stander, a M.F.A student focusing on photography who served as our Artist-in-Residence this past field season</a>.&nbsp; He has begun processing and printing the photographs that he took this summer and we are discussing how best to disseminate them to a wider audience.&nbsp; </p> <p>As the first step, Ryan created this poster and offered the following description of his work.&nbsp; While the specific details of our presentation of Ryan's work are still being worked out, it will almost certainly involve a gallery show, an

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online show, and some kind of publication. As his artist's statement represents an interplay between his vision as a photographer and the project's archaeological goals, we are planning to include the voice of archaeologists in the final presentations of his photographs.</p> <p>Watch this space for more information on Ryan Stander's <em>Topos/Chora</em>.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a4fd7b70970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="604" alt="topos-chora cover 100" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a4fd7b7d970b -pi" width="454" border="0"></a> </p> <p></p> <p align="center">Ryan Stander</p> <p align="center"><strong><em>Topos and Chora</em></strong> <br><strong><em>Photographs of the Pyla-Kousopetria Archaeological Project</em></strong></p> <p>&nbsp; <blockquote> <p>“The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) has investigated the 2 sq. km coastal zone of Pyla Village in Cyprus since 2003.&nbsp; The project is a transdisciplinary, landscape-oriented investigation that has drawn upon an international team of archaeologists, historians, geologists, illustrators, and other specialists to produce a vivid, diachronic, archaeological history of a significant coastal site.” <p>“Since its inception, photography has played a key role in archaeological research. Tendencies to view the camera's eye uncritically as an objective representation of material reality have gradually given way to more sophisticated understandings of the camera's role in producing the kind of illusive objectivity that formed a compelling foundation for archaeological knowledge.&nbsp; While photographs of artifacts, architecture, and even topography will continue to appear as evidence for archaeological arguments, there has been less attention to work of photographers in creating the same kind of dynamic, discursive landscapes that archaeological knowledge imagines.&nbsp; By incorporating an experienced landscape photographer into a landscape archaeological project, we seek to problematize in an explicit way the role of photography in the creation of archaeological knowledge.” <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp ;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; - From the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Artist-in-Residence Invitation </p></blockquote> <p>Ancient conceptions of place varied widely between Aristotle’s preference for topos and Plato’s emphasis on chora.&nbsp; Aristotle’s topos suggests objective point on a map that exerts no actual influence upon those who enter.&nbsp; Whereas Plato’s preference for chora, which draws upon the etymological root of “choreography,” as the reciprocal dance between humanity and environment. While topographic mapping and Global Positioning Systems are remarkably helpful to research and convenient for day-to-day living, it is through continued presence and interaction in the landscape that allows the intimacy of chora to emerge from the plotted points and coordinates. While archaeological work relies upon topos, it cultivates chora. <p>My work for the PKAP residency functions on several levels: documentary, landscape, and archive of topos and chora. By drawing upon both ancient conceptions of place, I was keenly aware of our contemporary presence in the landscape as researchers. This reflexive stance guided my efforts to document this emerging diachronic perspective of the historical landscape. As human presence transforms topos to chora it becomes archaeological evidence. Similarly, the photographic project provides a document of ongoing human presence and an alternative archive of evidence of the 2009 PKAP field season in this Mediterranean landscape. ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/14/2009 07:22:31 AM ----BODY: <p>A gaggle of links on a balmy Friday afternoon.&#0160; (As my wife would say, this is cricket weather).</p> <ul>! <li>Introducing the work of Daniel Sauerwein, UND M.A. and Ph.D. student and blogger extraordinary: <ul>! <li><a href="%20http://civilwarhistory.wordpress.com/">Civil War History</a>&#0160; </li>! <li><a href="http://frontierbattles.wordpress.com/">Frontier Battles (a colonial history blog</a>)&#0160; </li>! <li><a href="http://militaryhistoryblog.wordpress.com/">Military History Blog</a></li>! </ul>! </li>! <li>For any of my coastal friends out there, if you want to get a feeling for where I live, <a href="http://abesauer.com/">read this guys blog</a>, which has not become <a href="http://www.theawl.com/tag/abram-sauer">syndicated (so to speak) at The Awl</a>. </li>! <li>For another view of my colleagues, go over to the <a href="http://www.philosophyinpubliclife.org/">Institute for Philosophy and Public Life</a>&#0160;<a href="http://www.whyradioshow.org/">Why? Radio Show page</a> and listen to the last three episodes: <ul>! <li><a href="http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/ndpr/.jukebox/media/ndpr/848681/mp3/why/ podcast/17538/848681.mp3">Paul Sum</a>: My faculty mentor during my first year at UND. </li>! <li><a href="http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/ndpr/.jukebox/media/ndpr/843118/mp3/why/ podcast/17538/843118.mp3">Mark Jendrysik</a>: My &quot;go to&quot; guy for all things political theory related. </li>! <li><a href="http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/ndpr/.jukebox/media/ndpr/852883/mp3/why/ podcast/17538/852883.mp3">Crystal Alberts</a>: The center of the <a

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href="http://digitalgateway.und.edu/About.html">Working Group in Digital and New Media</a>.</li>! </ul>! </li>! <li>Another colleague rapidly achieving rock-star status is our Civil War historian, Eric Burin, who will appear in PBS&#39;s History Detectives on Monday night at 8 pm (CST).&#0160; <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/news/story.php?id=2776">Here&#39;s more</a>. </li>! <li>For all my UND Faculty readers out there (and everyone else as well) go check out <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> as you <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/08/13/teaching-thursday-newacademic-year-new-future-for-teaching/">put the finishing touches on your Fall 2009 courses</a>. </li>! <li>If you don&#39;t already, you should <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">follow me on Twitter</a>.</li>! </ul>! <p>Some exciting announcements next week (well, <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4397938">maybe not this exciting</a>, but still).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Steve EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 121.45.23.67 URL: DATE: 08/15/2009 12:39:30 AM Hey Bill, You might like to make it easier for us to follow you on Twitter by giving your username. I tried every variation I could think of but still couldn't find you. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 08/15/2009 09:28:54 AM Steve, Yikes. Thanks! It's now fixed.

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Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: New Academic Year, New Future for Teaching STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-new-academic-year-new-future-for-teaching CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 08/13/2009 08:02:45 AM ----BODY: <p>Crossposted to <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/"><em>Teaching Thursday</em></a>.</p> <p>As we stand on the brink of a new academic year frantically working on syllabi, tweaking readings lists, and refining or rewriting lectures, I am positive that most of us are thinking at least a tiny bit about the challenges and opportunities of teaching in 2009-2010.&nbsp; </p> <p>I've invited a group of colleagues to write about the future of teaching over the next few weeks, when that future and its practical implications are freshest in their mind. </p> <p>Here are a few of my musings:</p> <blockquote> <p>As I work through the development of a new online version of the History 101: Western Civilization class, I wonder how my university's growing support of online teaching will effect the way that we teach in the classroom.&nbsp; </p> <p>I check my twitter feed at least 5 times a day.&nbsp; Last fall, I attempted to use it (in an awkward naive way) in my graduate historiography course.&nbsp; Even as we are told that students don't tweet and that blogs have reached a kind of grizzled maturity, it is clear that social media applications are changing they way that we communicate on the internet.&nbsp; It's clear that the once static world of html driven webpages has given way to spaces of interaction.&nbsp; The content generators are no longer clearly delineated from the content consumers.&nbsp; What are the implications for teaching?</p> <p>Over the past year the seeming invincibility of the American economic system has evaporated rather abruptly.&nbsp; Once blue-chip companies like GM and the New York Times which provided touchstones from transgenerational identities, are in serious trouble (or have even passed the point of serious trouble).&nbsp; I feel like I've missed out on a Caraher family tradition because I cannot buy a brandnew Oldsmobile).&nbsp;&nbsp; How will this economic "adjustment" change the way that we approach our own place in the economic food chain?&nbsp; How do massive political, social, and economic changes influence our attitude toward what is important?</p> <p>Recent political events have manifest a shocking breakdown in civility and, once again, called into question the status of sincere and sustained discussion in the public sphere.&nbsp; As so much of university education is rooted in a kind of sincerity and a willingness to engage debates in a focused and concentrated way, how do the prevalence of outbursts such as those witnessed on an almost daily basis on television influence how we understand the relationship between the processes that we champion in high education and those central to a properly functioning democracy?</p> <p>How will recent calls across higher-education for <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/te aching-thursday-the-rise-of-a-new-luddism.html">a kind of voluntary, technological luddism</a> shade and condition our use of technology in the classroom?</p> <p>How will changes in assessment, university administration, and

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general education priorities change the content and methods of our classes?</p> <p>If I could have a new classroom, what would it look like?</p></blockquote> <p>I am sure that many of us thought about things like this (or other things entirely) based on our experiences over the past year, our engagement with the political, pedagogical, and technological discourse, and, of course, the practical time constraints that we all face when we stare down the reality of the semester. So, I call out to any UND faculty who are thinking ahead toward the new semester to share their views on the future opportunities, changes, and challenges waiting just around the corner in the new academic year.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Making the Professional Office STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: making-the-professional-office CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 08/12/2009 09:11:01 AM ----BODY: <p>There has been quite the stir around here this past few weeks as the Department of History&#39;s new office space in O&#39;Kelly Hall is being prepared, and the last of us in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-merrifield-move.html">Merrifield Hall</a> are anxiously awaiting access to our new digs.&#0160; Much of the buzz about our new space has centered on the idea that it must look &quot;professional&quot;.&#0160; Whenever there is any conversation surrounding professionalism in the discipline of history, I&#39;m interested -- as both my History 240: The Historians Craft and my graduate historiography class have a section on the development of the discipline of history as a profession.&#0160; </p> <p>Like many academic professions, history has always had an awkward relationship with the professionalization process.&#0160; We have the requisite institutional components: the <a href="http://www.historians.org/index.cfm">American Historical Association</a>, the <a href="http://www.historians.org/pubs/ahr.cfm">American Historical Review</a>, et c. which all have esteemed and glorious pedigrees.&#0160; (For example, the AHA was actually founded by an act of congress).&#0160; On the other hand, unlike archaeology (for example) or other professional disciplines (like Law), <a href="http://www.historians.org/pubs/Free/ProfessionalStandards.cfm">history does not have frame the values and standards of the profession precisely in terms of ethics</a>.&#0160; There are, of course, ethical statement surrounding

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matters such as <a href="http://www.historians.org/pubs/Free/ProfessionalStandards.cfm#Plagiarism"> plagiarism</a> and <a href="http://www.historians.org/pubs/Free/ProfessionalStandards.cfm#Employment"> practices of employment</a>, but these are rather universal rules that would be more or less at home in any academic profession.&#0160; What I am trying to say is that history has few professional standards that are distinctive or unique to history as discipline.&#0160; There is no professional obligation to belong to the AHA, there is no professional certification processes, there is no accrediting body for department (although departments do evaluate one another periodically), and there are no formal standards for what constitutes a B.A. or M.A. or even Ph.D. in history (outside of what the universities provide and what is expected for accreditation of the university and graduate program in a very general way).&#0160; Moreover, as <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/17441827">P. Novick has made abundantly clear</a>, debates over issues of methodology and capital &quot;T&quot; truth have produced more conflict than consensus.</p> <p>So, from the perspective of history as a discipline, there is some irony that we are being moved into &quot;more professional&quot; offices.&#0160; The appearance of professionalism and professional substances should not in this case be confused with the real thing in the eyes of the public.&#0160; Even if all of our offices are a lovely blue color and the floors clad in state-of-the-art carpet squares, we will still represent a cross section of the motley &quot;professional&quot; agglomeration that is the discipline of history.</p> <p>Another concern, of course, is that the days of the traditional, homogenized, professional identities are on the wane more generally.&#0160; The University has recently unveiled a series of new &quot;branding&quot; words which include &quot;innovative&quot;, &quot;creative&quot; and &quot;entrepreneurial&quot;.&#0160; In today&#39;s economic and professional climate, these words evoke the opposite of blue walls and carpet tiles.&#0160; In fact, the corporate interpretation of &quot;professionalism&quot; has fallen into deep repute as &quot;perp walks&quot; and congressional hearings increasingly involve individuals decked out in uniforms associated with the professional world.&#0160; The teetering global economy challenges the traditional white-collar standards of professionalism as the traditional professional styles come to be associated with unethical or even illegal behavior, mismanagement, and violations of the public trust. </p> <p>Ironically (perhaps), the saviors of our current crisis and the bastions for innovation, creativity, and the entrepreneurial spirit are the free-wheeling tech start ups with their chaotic, open offices, hipster presentation, and decentralized, bi-coastal, workspaces.&#0160; Carpet squares give way to graffiti art and mismatched furniture.&#0160; The future of American professionalism is not in institutional colors and homogeneity (specifically designed to promote the public trust and to hide the obscure and sneaky whitecolor criminals), but the bright, chaotic, informal spaces of tech start ups whose office space reveals the flexibility, edginess, and dynamism required to stay ahead of the current curve.&#0160; (See for example, <a href="http://www.officesnapshots.com/2007/07/24/twitter-hq-obviouscorp/">Twitter Headquarters</a>, <a href="http://www.officesnapshots.com/2008/02/04/apple-hq-cupertinocampus/">Apple</a>, <a href="http://www.officesnapshots.com/2007/07/24/craigslist-hq/">Craiglist</a>, <a href="http://www.officesnapshots.com/category/friendfeed/">Friendfeed</a> (recently acquired for an undisclosed amount by Facebook), et c.)</p> <p>As universities remain one of this country&#39;s greatest assets, and there is optimism that universities will also contribute significantly to finding

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solutions for future economic, social, and technological problems.&#0160; The intellectual life, opportunities to experiment, and innovation cultivated in American universities represent an important and powerful impetus for global creativity.&#0160; So, it is reasonable to wonder whether the iconic models of professionalism represent the way forward?&#0160; This question is all the more salient for a profession such as history which has always cultivated a dynamic professional foundation </p> <p>To put this question another way, <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/2009/08/contested-spaces-unds-okellyhall-and.html">can we afford to paint over creativity</a>?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Woodstock, Landscape, and Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: woodstock-landscape-and-archaeology-1 CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 08/11/2009 07:59:03 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Crosposted to </em><a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/"><em>Punk Archaeology</em></a>.</p> <p>A few weeks ago Kostis mentioned that he thought that archaeology was "a post hippie" discipline.&nbsp; A certain tendency to emphasize rural places, the integrated, almost spiritual, character of landscapes, community engagement, and political activism would seem to evoke many of the central ideals of the hippie movement, albeit within a far more structured environment.&nbsp; (It's an open issue whether punk shared the celebrated spontaneity of the hippie movement or parodied it).</p> <p>This weekend, the New York Times offered a shortish article: "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/arts/music/09pare.html">Woodstock: A Moment of Muddy Grace</a>".&nbsp; Aside from well-worn ironic observation that the memory of Woodstock became a commodity almost as soon as the festival was over, there was a short paragraph that included one interesting line:</p> <blockquote> <p>With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock looming — so soon? — the commemorative machinery is clanking into place, and the nostalgia is strong. There’s a Woodstock Festival museum now at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and a recently built concert hall at what was the concert site, Max Yasgur’s farm (<em>though the original Woodstock hillside has been left undeveloped</em>).</p></blockquote> <p>The notion that the original hillside would be preserved is an interesting example of how the absence of development could nevertheless represent the commidification of a particular landscape.&nbsp; Paralleling the desire to preserve battlefields, archaeological

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landscapes, and other places of cultural significance, the archaeology of absence evokes both the notion of a sacred precinct as well as haunting ideas of ritual abandonment.&nbsp; In the hyper-commodified world of Woodstock nostalgia, the protected hillside stands out both as an ironic and highly structured place of commemoration.</p> <p>Perhaps this is another characteristic that separates Punk Archaeology from its post-hippie variants.&nbsp; The hippie movement, for all its energy, has long been overrun by a kind of crude commercialism so even an archaeologically motivated decision like preserving the famous Woodstock hillside cannot stand outside the discourse of capitalism and gain.</p> <p>Has Punk remained more authentic?&nbsp; Certainly the battle to save Punk landmarks like CBGBs <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ExCBGB.jpg">has been less successful</a>.&nbsp; The <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/101ers/">urban foundation of Punk perhaps</a> created landmarks in an environment which had a more ephemeral character.&nbsp; Change was anticipated and expected in urban landscapes.&nbsp; The countryside was idealized as unchanging and efforts to commemorate the countryside typically involve limiting the impact of human activities or even marking it off entirely.&nbsp; Archaeology, however, relies upon the traces of change through time to document human culture.&nbsp; The urbanism of Punk contributes to its resistance to commodification (and makes its appeals to <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/punknostalgia-and-the-archaeology-of-musical-utopia/">nostalgia more ironic still</a>) and preserves it for a different method of documentation later.&nbsp; Punk Archaeology.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Working Paper II: Towers and Fortifications at Vayia in the Southeast Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: working-paper-ii-towers-and-fortifications-at-vayia-in-the-southeastcorinthia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/10/2009 07:56:00 AM ----BODY: <p>This summer, David Pettegrew and I have been revising an article that we submitted last winter to Hesperia.&#0160; The article documents three new rural sites in the southeastern Corinthia.&#0160; Our initial approach was to submit a rather bare-bones site report that simply made the world aware of these sites.&#0160; When we submitted such an article to Hesperia, however, we received some good criticism from our reviewers who required that we make some

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not-insignificant changes before it would be considered for publication (this is usually called a revise and re-submit, but for Hesperia it&#39;s called a conditional acceptance (the condition being, it would seem, that we revise it and resubmit it).&#0160; </p> <p>The most substantial revision stems from the skepticism surrounding our interpretation of the sites.&#0160; We argued that our sites were most likely fortifications; our reviewers were not convinced.&#0160; This criticism evokes a long-standing controversy in how we understand rural installations.&#0160; Traditionally, they were all assigned military functions, by the 1970s, these identifications were coming under scrutiny and many fortifications became fortified rural farmsteads.&#0160; Our research began under the assumption that our sites were agricultural installations of some description, and only after we were knee-deep in fieldwork did we revise our thesis to argue more forcefully that the towers at Lychnari and Ano Vayia only make sense as fortifications (or military installations of some description) and, perhaps more importantly, are hardly plausible as farmsteads.&#0160; Along these same lines, we provided a more robust set of regional comparanda for our sites</p> <p>We also beefed up our analysis of the distributional data from the small scale intensive survey conducted at the site of Ano Vayia.&#0160; This includes not only a more detailed treatment of our methods, but also a comparison of our material collected at Ano Vayia to the assemblages present at other sites.&#0160; The expanded discussion of the assemblage provided a nice complement to our function arguments (not a farmstead) as well as provided a traditional basis for our Late Classical to Hellenistic date.</p> <p>Finally, we beefed up the historical discussion.&#0160; One thing that both reviewers wanted to see was a more substantial description of the historical context for fortifying this area in the Corinthia.&#0160; While the sources for the Late Classical and Hellenistic Corinthia remain problematic, we were able to point toward several possible motivations and occasions mostly from the 4th century which was not incompatible with the material present at the site.&#0160; I favor our sites being built by either Corinthian or Athenian forces stationed in the countryside in the volatile 360s (Xen. <em>Hell</em>. 7.4.4-5.).&#0160; The additional walls at Ano Vayia suggest that the site was modified or repaired at some point.&#0160; The small quantity of material present from the site generally and the almost total absence of any significant material from the post-Hellenistic period suggests that the site may have been used intermittently throughout the Hellenistic period in response to the tumultuous politics of the day.</p> <p>I think that you&#39;ll see that the criticism of the peer reviewers and the Hesperia editorial staff has made our paper better and more substantial.&#0160; All the lingering problems are the responsibilities of the stubborn authors.</p> <p>So, in the interest in keeping our public informed, here is the most recent version of our paper: </p> <p><strong>Towers and Fortifications at Vayia in the Southeast Corinthia <br /></strong>William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota<br />David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College<br />© 2009 </p><p>As the paper says, please do not cite without the authors&#39; permission.</p> <p>For the first version that we submitted see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/wo rking-paper-towers-and-fortifications-at-vayia-in-the-southeastcorinthia.html">Working Paper: Towers and Fortifications at Vayia in the Southeast Corinthia</a></p> <p>For more info on our work at these sites see:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th

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e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Lychnari Tower</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-2.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Passes of the Eastern Corinthia</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-3.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Classical Vayia</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: History and Archaeology</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Some More Contemporary Thoughts</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/th ree-new-sites-in-the-eastern-corinthia.html">Three New Sites in the Eastern Corinthia</a> (W. Caraher and D. Pettegrew)<br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/05/su mmer-research-on-the-fortification-of-the-southeastern-corinthia.html">Summer Research on the Fortifications of the Southeastern Corinthia</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/vi ewsheds-in-the-eastern-corinthia.html">Viewsheds in the Eastern Corinthia</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/07/2009 07:20:52 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a gaggle of quick hits for your enjoyment:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.legacy.com/TUCSON/Obituaries.asp?Page=Notice&amp;PersonID=13095 7640">News came this week that John Mering has passed away</a>.&nbsp; Mering

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taught in the Department of History from 1968-1970.&nbsp; He received his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri which had strong ties to UND.&nbsp; A UND History alumnus served as Missouri's president from 1955-1963 and had already produced Louis Geiger, one of the most important faculty members in the Department of History and at the University in the postwar period.&nbsp; Mering taught 19th century U.S. history at UND before moving on to the University of Arizona in 1969.&nbsp; He was replaced by Thomas Howard, an IU graduate who would serve on UND's faculty for many years.</li> <li>Last month the Princeton Review released its various lists.&nbsp; The University of North Dakota appeared on two of the better known; it ranked 18th on the list of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/27/top-party-schools-listpr_n_245601.html">the top party schools</a> and 5th on the list of <a href="http://spotlight.encarta.msn.com/Features/encnet_Departments_College_defau lt_article_TPRStudyLeast2010.html">schools where students study the least</a>.&nbsp; While on the surface, these are not particularly promising areas to receive high marks.&nbsp; But when we look at our peer institutions on this list, it is really quite striking.&nbsp; First, the top 20 party schools list is made up 3 types of institutions: major state universities (Penn State (1), Florida (2), Georgia (4), West Virginia (6), Texas (7), Wisconsin (8)).&nbsp; In any other context many of these schools would be good schools to find as one's peers.&nbsp; These schools have powerful Division 1 sports traditions, stand as the "flagship universities in their respective states, have good academics and graduate programs, have Carnegie Basic Classificiation of Research University/Very High Research (UND, West Virginia (6), Ohio University (5)and UCSB (10) have basic classifications of Research University/High Research)&nbsp; , and have large and vibrant student bodies.&nbsp; In fact, the top 10 party schools are all <em>at least </em>50% larger than UND.&nbsp; The second group of schools are the three liberal arts colleges: Union College (NY), DePauw University (IN), Sewanee: The University of the South (TN).&nbsp; These are all competitive and well-established liberal arts colleges with student bodies under 2,500.&nbsp; Again, if this were any other list, it would be an honor to rank among these school.&nbsp; Some of the same observations can be applied to the <a href="http://spotlight.encarta.msn.com/Features/encnet_Departments_College_defau lt_article_TPRStudyLeast2010.html">list of schools where students study the least</a>.&nbsp; To my mind, the real issue is not whether our students study enough (many clearly study plenty) or whether they party enough, but how did it happen that UND ranked in these categories?&nbsp; Princeton review bases their rankings on a survey conducted through their website by students (as well as information from the university administration).&nbsp; So, it's not just that someone thinks UND is a party school, but someone cared enough to participate in a survey that produced these rankings.&nbsp; The student willingness to participate in a survey must account for something and it seems like this energy could be parsed and analyzes in a positive way.&nbsp; After all, it's not every day that UND ranks among the school on this list <em>in anything</em>.</li> <li>My parents are in town and we visited <a href="http://www.chuckkimmerle.com/">Chuck Kimmerle's</a> fantastic exhibit at the <a href="http://www.ndmoa.com/exhibitions.html">North Dakota Museum of Art</a> called "An Unapologetic Landscape."&nbsp; It was fantastic!&nbsp; Kimmerle, who is also the University photographer, was able to capture both the clear, sharp, and vivid qualities of North Dakota light as well as the subtle and austere character of the North Dakota countryside.&nbsp; It's a must see for anyone interested in landscapes.</li> <li><a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/engvaus2009/engine/current/match/345973.html">The fourth test in the Ashes</a> started this morning and before I got out of bed,

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England was 42/3.&nbsp; By the time I was done this post, England was 72/6 at lunch.&nbsp; A good start for Australia.</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: You are here. STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: you-are-here CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 08/06/2009 01:54:11 PM ----BODY: <div style="text-align: left;"><p>On the doorjam of the North Dakota Museum of Art.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a525dc36970 c-pi"><img alt="You are here." border="0" class="at-xid6a00d83451908369e20120a525dc36970c image-full " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a525dc36970c -800wi" title="You are here." /></a></p></div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.155.204.96 URL: DATE: 08/07/2009 07:40:41 AM I love these geodetic pins. I photograph them wherever I find them -- typically on geodetic columns in Greece. I have spent endless Zen hours holding polls on these monuments for surveying. Geocaching has a whole "bench marks" gallery. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected]

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IP: 99.155.204.96 URL: DATE: 08/07/2009 08:10:59 AM I did a quick search in Geocaching but didn't find it. Maybe you should upload it. <a href="http://www.geocaching.com/mark/">http://www.geocaching.com/mark/</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Wikipedia the New History Textbook STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-wikipedia-the-new-history-textbook CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 08/06/2009 07:09:31 AM ----BODY: <p>I am well on my way of preparing my Western Civilization 101 class for online delivery.&nbsp; As the semester looms, the calls from the bookstore become more strident that I decide on a textbook for my class.&nbsp; I have dragged my feet on picking a textbook for my online class largely because it seems funny to have a paper textbook for a class delivered entirely over the interwebs.&nbsp; Moreover, I spent a huge amount of time (think: <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&amp;sql=10:kcftxzwkldje">Chinese Democracy</a>) preparing 16 hour long podcasts that served as the basic interpretive and "factual" framework for the class.&nbsp; This was, in effect, an audio textbook. </p> <p>The only problem was that it did not have all the features of a textbook.&nbsp; It didn't have an index, nice maps and timelines, pictures, or a way for a student to navigate a topic (say Athenian democracy) without listening to the podcast on Archaic and Classical Greece and mentally noting the various points where the discussion touches on the particular topic.&nbsp; There was, as far as I could figure out, no way to hypertext a podcast.&nbsp; It remains linear and true to its textbook roots, but unlike a textbook it didn't even have an index or comparable way to allow a student to move through it in a non-linear way.</p> <p>On top of that, there was a practical issue that the evaluation in my class is written. The class will require a weekly-ish multiple guess quiz and discussion board, and at least three short (3-5 page) papers.&nbsp; Moving from the oral environment of the podcast to the written environment of quizes, discussion boards, and papers poses a whole set of challenges -- not the least of which is spelling all the funny names that students come across in my podcasts or the more vexing issue of navigating the podcasts to get bits of information (what we historians quaintly refer to as "facts").&nbsp; And I did not want to assign a paper textbook.&nbsp; </p> <p>The solution is <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>.&nbsp; Over the last week, I've produced massive indexes to all my podcasts and have hyperlinked the various terms in the index to corresponding Wikipedia entries.&nbsp; </p> <p>I was tentative at first; after all, I have read the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/te aching-thursday-the-rise-of-a-new-luddism.html">neo-luddite</a> ranting&nbsp; against the evils of Wikipedia, the unreliability of its wiki-based method of gathering knowledge, and its corrupting influence on the research habits of impressionable students.&nbsp; I have also troubled myself over the decline in

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scholarly and expert authority and the rise of a naive homogenized "group-think" of the wiki writing masses.&nbsp; But then it dawned on me.&nbsp; History textbooks -- particularly for entry level history courses -- are crap.&nbsp; </p> <p>Like Wikipedia, they are constantly being updated and modified.&nbsp; Like Wikipedia, they are assembled by a mass of scholars who write and review the text professionally, but bring to bear a wide ranging abilities, intellectual perspectives, and degrees of commitment to the over all goal.&nbsp; The result is a watery broth of interpretation, overcooked (and not infrequently inaccurate facts), and intellectual bubblegum pop.&nbsp; (Even iconic textbooks go through so many revisions and tweaks these days that their core message is substantially diluted).&nbsp; In any event, the quality of the various textbooks that I've used over the last few years is such that I tell my students to treat them with a careful and critical eye.&nbsp; Don't trust the textbook any more than you trust my lecture.&nbsp; Be critical.&nbsp; Question it.</p> <p>All this and textbooks are incredibly expensive!&nbsp; Wikipedia is free.&nbsp; And in a critical environment forms a neat, non-linear foil to the lecture of the podcast.&nbsp; It also lays bare the editorial process in a way that textbooks hide (in fact, the present discourse about Wikipedia explicitly problematizes the means by which knowledge is produced).&nbsp; I put up my master index and the links to the podcasts as soon as they are done.&nbsp; Stay tuned for more.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Corinthian Infiltration: The Interior of Some Houses at Lakka Skoutara STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: corinthian-infiltration-the-interior-of-some-houses-at-lakka-skoutara CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/05/2009 07:16:17 AM ----BODY: <p>Of the dozen or so houses at Lakka Skoutara (for more on that see the index at the end), there is only one that is clearly 19th/early 20th century, roofed, and accessible.&nbsp; It afforded us a glimpse of the interior of these houses.&nbsp; It was not really locked, the padlock merely served as a weight to keep the wire chain pulled through the door handle.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a4c8b957970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="LSNotReallyLocked" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a51ff5a1970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>One of the interesting challenges confronting archaeologists who study buildings is trying to work out the

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interior organization of domestic space.&nbsp; One the key problems is the use of highly perishable materials to mark divisions in the interior of domestic space or add decorative flourish.&nbsp; In our 19th and 20th century houses at Lakka Skoutara, for example, interior walls were made of a very simple mud and lime plaster which also served to shape the contours of the hearth and mantle.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a51ff5a4970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="LSPlasterMantle" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a4c8b967970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a51ff5ac970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="LSPlasterWalls" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a4c8b97c970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>In houses that have stayed in use, the plaster has sometimes been replaced by concrete. For example, the concrete additions are visible in the mantle below:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a4c8b984970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="LSConcreteMantle" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a4c8b98d970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>While plaster floors are typically easier to identify in excavation, wood members of flooring like the wood threshold below are typically more ephemeral:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a4c8b9ad970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="LSWoodThreshold" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a51ff5d7970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">There are, of course, more common interior features that I should include here.&nbsp; For example, our old friend <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/pr ovisional-discard.html">provisional discard</a>:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a51ff5de970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="LSResinTiles" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20120a4c8b9b7970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The concrete basin in the above photo was for collecting resin.</p> <p align="left">For more on Lakka Skoutara:</p> <p align="left"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/la kka-skoutara-the-survey.html">Lakka Skoutara: The Survey</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-houses-of-lakka-skoutara.html">The Houses of Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co llapse.html">Collapse</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/pr ovisional-discard.html">Provisional Discard</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co nstruction-in-the-corinthia.html">Construction in the Corinthia</a><br><br></p> <p align="center"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: reinsen EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 220.136.189.225 URL: http://www.bilderrahmen.net DATE: 11/21/2009 10:55:22 PM Hi, I recently heard that more and more archeologists work on modern or more "present-time-related" heritages. But Iam not sure about the point....when exploring antique stuff, it is not only intersting, it tells us something about our own past, and might even tell us something about us today - ut whats your interest in those more or less rotten houses? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Punk Archaeology: Trench Sounds STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: punk-archaeology-trench-sounds CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 08/04/2009 09:01:24 AM ----BODY: <p>The long awaited final <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> podcast has arrived.&nbsp; Titled "Trench Sounds", it is a 10 minute extract of over 3 hours of taping in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/dallas_def orest/">Dallas DeForest's</a> trench at Pyla-Koutsopetria.&nbsp; (For more typical discussions of this trench you can down load these two podcasts: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria East Week 1</a> and <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_East_Week_2_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria East Week 2</a>).&nbsp; The goal was to capture the sounds of a trench in all of their mundane glory.</p> <p>The inspiration was Punk Archaeology.&nbsp; <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/metal-machinemusic/">Kostis has posted on Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music</a> and its seminal influence on the New York "No Wave" movement.&nbsp; This album, which is almost impossible to listen to, is composed almost entirely of various ephemeral sounds of the musical production process particularly looped tracks of guitar feedback much of which was created intentionally by placing guitars facing their amplifiers.&nbsp; This dissonant noise was then remixed and edited to produce tracks including an unusual locked groove track at the end of side "D" (of a two record set) which would play the final 1.8 seconds continuously (an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Metal-Machine-Music-Lou-

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Reed/dp/B00004VXF2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1249394446&amp;sr=8-1">effect lost on 21st century listeners who are more likely to spend the 4$ to download the album in MP3 than the $20+ to purchase the album on vinyl</a>!). </p> <p>Our final "Voices of Archaeology" track is hardly as intentionally dissonant as<em> Metal Machine Music</em> (nor will it likely be as iconic).&nbsp; It does, however, capture and attempt to present some of the ephemeral sounds of archaeology -- the gentle thumping of the pick, the scraping of the dust pan, the cascades of dirt into buckets, the interrupted and fractured conversations.&nbsp; It attempts to capture sonically, what we as archaeologist are attempting to capture physically: the various bits of pieces of the past.&nbsp; At one point on the track, Paul Ferderer asks whether a tiny fragment of ceramic material is a piece of tile or a piece of pottery.&nbsp; The tiny fragment was at once almost completely inconsequential (and the question of whether the fragment was pottery or tile was even less consequential as all ceramic material was analyzed by our ceramicist) and at the same time the bit of ceramics is representative of the archaeological process.&nbsp; The artifact must be contextualized in some way to generate meaning.&nbsp; It goes without saying (almost) that fragments of the past have no inherent meaning.&nbsp; They are displaced objects that the archaeologist envelop in contexts ranging from the place of origin, the original "primary" use, and, of course, the chronology of the other objects at the site.&nbsp; The tension between the decontextualized object at the moment of discovery (the most tenuous and fleeting contextualizing moment) and various "big picture" narrative and analyses that ultimately come to make a specific site meaningful finds its place in the immediacy of punk rock as experience.&nbsp; </p> <p>I recently listened again to the MC5's first album <em>Kick Out the Jams</em>, a live album, and admired their effort to capture the live sound and mark the band as a live phenomenon while evoking punk rock's debts to the blues (a genre of music almost always recorded live) and the ephemeral connections manifest in garage bands across the country.&nbsp; The contextualizing narrative of modern American music has, of course, placed the MC5 in a proper analytical and interpretive category (often placing them alongside Iggy Pop's Stooges whose first album came out the same year and captured a very different kind of sound through the exacting production of John Cale) and striped the first album of much of its shock value (although it still can capture some of the excitement typical of live performances).</p> <p>Our short track of trench sounds hopes to capture the same thing -- at once it is inconsequential (and frankly hard to listen to!) alone just like Paul's fragment of pottery -- but at the same time, it captures a moment that begs a larger, more dynamic context.&nbsp; The moment of discovery is the point of departure for archaeological analysis.&nbsp; Trench Sounds pushes the incidental noise of archaeological research into the center,&nbsp; like the feedback pushed to the center of Lou Reed's <em>Metal Machine Music</em>.&nbsp; By recontextualizing the sonic elements of archaeological fieldwork I hope to have shed light on the analytical process itself which brings otherwise discarded and inconsequential artifacts to the center while pushing the archaeological experience to the edges...&nbsp; </p> <p>Enjoy: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Trench_Sounds.mp3">Trench Sounds</a></p> <p><strong>Update:</strong> For <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/08/its-only-matter-of-time.html">an overly generous response click here</a>.</p> <p>Be sure to check out our other podcasts:</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ PKAP2009_Intro.mp3">PKAP 20009 Introduction</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ PKAP2009_Intro.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria East Week 1</a> (Featuring PFerd) <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_West_Week_1_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria West Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Vigla East Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_West_Week_1_2009.mp3">Vigla West Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos East Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos West Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a></p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_East_Week_2_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria East Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_West_Week_2_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria West Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_East_Week_2_2009.mp3">Vigla East Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_West_Week_2_2009.mp3">Vigla West Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_2_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos East Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_2_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos West Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Ground_Penetrating_Radar_Team_2009.mp3">Ground Penetrating Radar Team</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.155.204.96 URL: DATE: 08/04/2009 09:03:50 PM FANTASTIC EXPERIMENT. ABSOLUTELY SUBLIME. I had to respond with a blog entry: <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/08/its-only-matter-oftime.html">http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/08/its-only-matter-of-time.html</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Destructive Power of the Athenian Acropolis STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-destructive-power-of-the-athenian-acropolis CATEGORY: Byzantium

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CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 08/03/2009 08:49:28 AM ----BODY: <p>The Athenian Acropolis preserves an amazing collection monuments.&nbsp; Perhaps because of the prominence of these monuments, it never fails to attract attention and controversy.&nbsp; In fact, as much as the Acropolis and its crown jewel the Parthenon has inspired, the idea of the Acropolis has also shown an amazing power to disrupt, destroy, and disorient.&nbsp; The most recent example of this (via <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Kostis Kourelis</a>) is the short film directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras designed to be shown at the new Acropolis museum.&nbsp; Apparently, the church became upset by a scene that showed priests destroying part of the sculpture of the Parthenon frieze.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jVNVZV8UFR6OU5x4iVmD9lNZVogD99LO4684">According to AP</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>The animated segment showed figures clad in black climbing up ladders and destroying part of the Parthenon frieze; the scene referred to well-documented episodes of destruction that took place in the early Byzantine period (5th-8th centuries A.D.), when Christians often demolished monuments and temples belonging to the old pagan era. Many parts from those temples were used to build churches. The Parthenon itself suffered some damage but was spared a worse fate by being converted into a church. </p> <p>"The priests used to destroy ancient temples. Now they want to remove scenes from a film," Costa-Gavras told Greece's Mega TV channel. "This is the kind (of censorship) that used to happen in the former Soviet Union."</p></blockquote> <p>This entire episode is fascinating and another testimony to the power of the Acropolis and the Parthenon to destroy.&nbsp; History first.&nbsp; The "well-documented episodes of the destruction that took place in the early Byzantine period" is wrong.&nbsp; There are almost no well-documented incidents of anything during the Early Byzantine period.&nbsp; In fact, the closing of the Parthenon as a temple and its consecration as a church remain a hotly debated issue with no particular chance of any resolution any time soon.&nbsp; Alison Frantz in her still seminal and elegant article from 1965 puts it best (<a href="http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00707546%281965%2919%3C185%3AFPTCIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V">A. Frantz, "From Paganism to Christianity in the Temples of Athens," DOP 19 (1965), 185-205</a>): </p> <blockquote> <p>"The zeal with which the classically-oriented archaeologists of the nineteenth century stripped away from Athenian temples all possible reminders of their post-classical history has rendered unduly complicated the task of dating their conversion. The nature of the required alterations made it impossible to eradicate completely all traces and these, supplemented by descriptions and drawings by the early travelers, have sometimes made it possible to reconstruct the general appearance of both exterior and interior. But the systematic removal, without recording, of wall masonry and, in many cases, even of foundations, destroyed at the same time almost all chronological evidence..." (p. 201)</p></blockquote> <p>In fact, the lack of good chronology for the conversion of the temples of Athens to church means that there is no way of knowing who and when the Parthenon marbles were damaged.&nbsp; <p>The issue with the film and the marbles and the Parthenon and the Acropolis is not just about some quibbling over the date of its conversion and the changes wrought by its conversion to a Christian church.&nbsp; (There have been some good, recent work on the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/286433690">Parthenon during the Byzantine Period</a>).&nbsp; The real issue that I want to focus some

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attention on here is how amazingly destructive the <em>idea </em>of the Parthenon has become.&nbsp; The prominent rock that is the Acropolis has long stood as a place where the various rulers of Athens sought to project their identity onto the city and, more recently, the modern nation.&nbsp; At the same time that the rock with its temples has represented the commanding voice in Athens, it has also worked to negate competing visions of the city and the nation.&nbsp; The Conta-Gavras film is a typical example of this.&nbsp; His work, like many intellectuals of modern Europe, has always contained an anticlerical strain, so it is unsurprising that he would project his left-leaning ideals onto the Parthenon.&nbsp; At the same time, the Parthenon is a place where identity is tightly controlled by the Greek state which, particularly when governed by a center-right party, closely tied (if not properly inseparable) from the Greek Church.&nbsp; <p>From the 19th century on, efforts have been made to purify the history of the Parthenon through the systematic destruction of its post-Classical phases (see the work of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/122424890">Y. Hamilakis</a>); more recently, the construction of the new Acropolis museum in one of the most archaeological sensitive areas of Athens has caused its own kind of destruction without mentioning <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2008/jun/09/acropolisvartde coathenssd">the high-profile controversy surrounding the need to destroy</a> a nearby art-deco style building to ensure the museum's view of the "sacred rock".&nbsp; It is a testimony to the power of the Acropolis that the recent episodes have captured the modernist roots of archaeology and broadcast them so globally.&nbsp; A the Parthenon, perhaps more than anywhere else, destroying the past and collapsing it into an permanent present has become the key method for transcending it. <p>The most recent controversy over images of destruction in the Costa-Gavras film and the subsequent destruction of his artistic vision falls in line with the politics of nation building and identity formation that have swirled around the monument for its entire history.&nbsp; It's also a nice reminder of how an inspirational monument can empower destruction as well as creation.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Diana Wright EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.18.253.230 URL: http://nauplion.net DATE: 08/03/2009 10:22:04 PM A very useful summary of the issue, and a useful description of circumstances. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Pierre MacKay EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.18.253.230 URL: http://www.angiolello.net

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DATE: 08/03/2009 11:40:13 PM The Costa-Gavras image of blackrobed priests hacking away at the Parthenon is undoubtedly crude and inflammatory, but Alison Frantz (bless her) is no longer a good reference to the fate of the building. For that you need to go to Manolis Korres. At some time, either just before or, more likely,just after the catastrophic fire of the fourth or fifth century, most of the east end of the temple was dismantled. The central figures of the east pediment were taken down to make room for the apse, and almost all of the pronaos was dismantled. (The interior of the cella, and the entire central area of the roof were totally destroyed by the fire.) It is time to admit that immense alterations had been made to the building by the 6th century so that it would have been hardly recognizable to the ancient world or, for that matter, even to us. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 08/04/2009 06:24:55 AM Pierre, Thanks for the comments! Rest assured that I know that Korres is the better reference, but I liked Frantz's prose (and, frankly, liked her article) more. I think that 4th or 5th century changes to the building are really valuable for this discussion. They suggest that there were very late repairs to the building that were not necessarily associated with its Christianization. (I can't imagine Christians converting the Parthenon in the 4th century and I'd be skeptical of the 5th!) So the blackrobed priests hacking at the temple may not have necessarily been Christian and may have, in fact, been pagans. Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 07/31/2009 08:04:20 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a little gaggle of quick hits today:</p> <ul> <li>What's the difference between <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/te aching-thursday-the-rise-of-a-new-luddism.html">a kind of 21st century academic Luddism</a> and <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/03/090803fa_fact_baker">just being cranky</a>?&nbsp; The motivation for being a Luddite is economic and too a less extent social.&nbsp; </li> <li><a

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href="http://www.cricinfo.com/engvaus2009/content/story/416861.html">Twitter and cricket</a>, but I've stopped watching this: <a title="http://www.cricinfo.com/engvaus2009/engine/current/match/345972.html" href="http://www.cricinfo.com/engvaus2009/engine/current/match/345972.html">http ://www.cricinfo.com/engvaus2009/engine/current/match/345972.html</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.pennlive.com/news/patriotnews/west/index.ssf?/base/news/1248985 51637450.xml&amp;coll=1">Some good press for the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> from the<em> Patriot News</em> (Harrisburg, PA) thanks to <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and the good folks at <a href="http://www.messiah.edu/">Messiah College</a>.</li> <li>So, I've been thinking of changing my blog.&nbsp; Two things have occurred to me lately.&nbsp; First, <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">I like to Twitter</a> and I do it a good bit (<a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">follow me here</a>), but I don't like that Tweets are pretty ephemeral little things and there is no way (that I have discovered) to link to them.&nbsp; So once you release a Tweet into the wilds, it will really resist being captured or re-purposed.&nbsp; I am not going to give up Tweeting, but was thinking about creating a new blog, perhaps an anonymous new blog which intersperses slightly longer commentary with captured (re-purposed) Tweets.&nbsp; It would be a sort of personal meta-twitter.&nbsp; I'd then cut back <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/">this blog</a> to, say, three days a week of longer posts.&nbsp;&nbsp; It's still just a concept...</li> <li><a href="http://www.simplifymedia.com/">Simplify</a> works well.</li> <li>I've been listening to: <a href="http://www.sonicyouth.com/">Sonic Youth's</a> Evol (better than Daydream Nation, I think), <a href="http://thegodetroit.com/">The Go</a>'s "Whatcha Doin'?", and <a href="http://www.franzferdinand.co.uk/">Franz Ferdinand</a>'s "Tonight", while "inking" artifact illustrations in Adobe Illustrator.</li></ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115724cf059970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="249" alt="Print" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571589916970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571589920970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="172" alt="Print" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115724cf0a3970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: The Rise of a New Luddism STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-the-rise-of-a-new-luddism CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 07/30/2009 08:07:33 AM ----BODY: <p>I'll admit to being a bit slow on this, but a couple of weeks ago, the <em>Chronicle of Higher Education</em> ran a short piece in their technology session on taking computers <em>out of the classroom</em>.&nbsp; The provocative title of <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-EffortStrips/47398/">the article is "When computers leave the classroom, so does boredom,"</a> and it was centered around an interview with José A. Bowen the Dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU.&nbsp; In his argument, he weds the age old argument against lecture-based classroom experience with an attack on Powerpoint (or, as we call it here, The PowerPointer) and urges faculty to use classroom time for discussion rather than Powerpoint based lectures.&nbsp; </p> <p>There is nothing revolutionary, of course, about asking faculty to create a more dynamic environment in the classroom and abandoning the napinducing nature of the PowerPointer seems hardly a suggestion worth covering in the Chronicle of Higher Education.&nbsp; Moreover, PowerPointer (and other similar ways to organize and project images from the computer onto the big screen) has nearly revolutionized how we teach image based courses like art and architectural history.&nbsp; In fact, projecting images from a wide range of sources to a class is not at all incompatible with a discussion based classroom experience.&nbsp; Slides, of course, work, but the simplicity of the PowerPointer works better.&nbsp; So there must be something else to this.</p> <p>It seems to me that this article represents a growing stream of Luddism in faculty approaches to technology.&nbsp; While university faculty will always have as many early adopters of technology as obdurate dissenters, I wonder if there is an economic (sub?)text to some of the more adamant critiques of technology in the classroom.&nbsp; This is not to suggest that Bowen's critique is particularly adamant, nor that he recommends that we storm classrooms and destroy computers and delete Powerpointer software.&nbsp; What I wonder is whether the recent increase in critiques of technology in the classroom are less critiques of the effectiveness of technology (as Bowen notes, Powerpointer is an improvement (in some ways) to the old chalkboard or overhead projectors), and more a critique of the way that technology in the classroom is changing the economic and social structure of university life.&nbsp; Bowen notes, of course, that many of the best research universities are already making lectures from their top professors freely available online (and <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Berkeley-Gets-Grants-to/7510/">Berkeley is developing software</a> to make this even easier to do!).&nbsp; There are established models for online course development that require faculty to abandon control of their courses making it possible for non-faculty employees or adjuncts to "teach" the course (at lower pay rates!).&nbsp; Of course, some of this conversation has already been played out over "the Wikipedia".&nbsp; There is a certain vested interest among both content creators (faculty, teachers, et c.) and content providers (i.e. textbook and reference book companies) to undermine the credibility of Wikipedia.&nbsp; And even if some of their arguments are accurate and compelling, it does not remove the underlying economic motivation.&nbsp; </p> <p>The emergence of an educational open market where technology makes all aspects of faculty material more freely available

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could well be terrifying to old guard university types whose place in the academy depends on their local monopoly on expertise.&nbsp; Like the followers of Ned Ludd some of them have come awake to the real and potential problems with technology in the classroom and are using these problems to reinforce their own positions.&nbsp; I don't mean necessarily to tar Bowen's with this brush (although he admits some economic motivations for his arguments), but I do think that his article acknowledges one aspect of a Luddite response.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/0394703227">Just as Luddites were not opposed to technology per se</a> but the changes to their society brought about by changes in the modes and means of production, university faculty who oppose technology often do so in ways that defends their own economic and social positions.&nbsp; </p> <p>The scary thing is, of course, that the Luddites failed.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.155.204.96 URL: DATE: 07/30/2009 09:58:06 AM I think I'm a Luddite. I've been banning (as much as I can) computers in the classroom because they are typically used for escaping the classroom (browsing the internet, chatting on-line, updating Facebook). Not sure what to do about it. The smarter our classrooms get, the less necessary is it for the student to be there mentally. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brice Pearce EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.63.13.242 URL: DATE: 07/30/2009 12:20:40 PM Wow...so many statements that I heard all the time when supporting academics using classroom-based technology: "I can't work the touch-panel", "PowerPoint doesn't fit my style", "I have too many things to carry already", etc... I think this is something that is slowly beginning to change as "traditional" faculty members actually find the correct resource(s) to learn about classroom presentation technology, as well as some who are more innovative pushing the envelope. Ultimately, folks need to remember that the technology can't do anything on its own; the instructor has to make the effort to see the benefit. I will agree that students having computers in classrooms is annoying, but many take their notes that way...what would be better is a way to lock-out noninstructor laptops from the wireless...but then again, with smartphones, what's the real difference?

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As someone who hopes to have a job in the academy in the next 7-10 years, it is disturbing watching the trend of corporatization of higher education, and the unwitting support of many to do this with technology...I think this is gonna be a big "self-police" issue, based on the critical thinking skills we learn...and individual institutions ;) Great stuff, Bill! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.184.168 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 07/30/2009 12:27:29 PM Brice, Thanks for the comments and the perspective. I totally agree that it's how technology is used not the technology per se, but then again, technology -- like all tools -- is not value neutral. Technologies can and do condition behavior and create economies. While a Luddite position seems extreme (Kostis excluded), there does seem to be the matter of economic self-preservation here. Technology can't actually teach, but it can make change significantly the role of the teacher. Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: BrianB EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.249 URL: DATE: 08/03/2009 10:20:09 AM I studied with the option to become a secondary ed teacher. I've never been at the classroom helm, but have had enough experience handling groups of young people to recognize the skill necessary to grapple those short attention spans. Sadly, I also recognize that young people can comprise a wide range of years, as we live longer and redefine childhood. Is it just the condescendent snag of being over thirty, or are new college students displaying an increasingly disappointing lack of critical thinking? There's the idea that a college applicant arrives with studious selfdetermination, and a professor need merely be the source of knowledge and wisdom as pertinent to his or her field. But if students are coming in less mature and focused, how is the teacher and university at large to mold responsible adults from each year's green learners? Do the faculty and institution hold a reasonable responsibility to do so? The technology factor only further complicates the issue. As Kostis states, escaping the classroom is the biggest detriment to that window of countless activities. Brice's idea to "lock-out non-instructor laptops from the wireless" can be argued by students using the "the cloud" to create and save their documents. Should the purposefully distracted be allowed to fail? What degree of restriction of freedoms becomes denigrating imposition?

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As I work in the university environment and aid patrons in their research, I come across an inconsistent pattern of technological benefit. Some people are delighted with what it can do for them, while others are strictly unwilling to learn. Some come in with a broad grasp of the resources available, and others make me mentally shudder at their inability to formulate even mildly intelligent queries or use the most basic options. I am always glad to help open doors, but it sometimes feels like I'm being asked to do all the thinking for someone. So, I am concerned. I'm not in a position to affect policies, but I'm glad there places like this blog to instigate and facilitate discussion outside the formal realm. I sincerely wish you teachers the best of luck in the coming school year. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Blogging STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-on-blogging CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 07/29/2009 08:16:41 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572455c06970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="221" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572455c10970b -pi" width="144" align="right" border="0"></a> I try to read the odd book that deals with Web 2.0 stuff or blogging with an eye toward including a couple in a yet-to-be taught digital history class.&nbsp; I am particularly interested in books that look at the history of some digital phenomena.&nbsp; The time span for such a history is amazingly small; even the most optimistic readers of the blogging phenomenon don't trace the development of the medium earlier than the mid-1990s.&nbsp; While interviews, articles in the popular press, and simple human memory go far to provide a foundation for writing "web history", other kinds of primary sources can be amazingly ephemeral and controlled by the vagaries of the roving-robots of the Internet Archive and cached browsers pages.</p> <p>With this brief word of introduction, I'll offer a few modest observations of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/26404476">Scott Rosenberg's <em>Say Everything: how blogging began, what it's become, and why it matters</em>. (New York 2009)</a>.&nbsp; It was a quick read by an accomplished journalist who provided a sound history of blogging from the first autobiographical pages of Jonathan Hall to the recent explosion of political bloggers.&nbsp; The book focuses almost explicitly on the bloggers themselves with particular attention to folks who facilitated the development of the tools that most bloggers depend upon to engage their craft (folks like David Winer (of XML, RSS, et c. fame) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Williams_(blogger)">Evan Williams</a> (of Blogger and now Twitter renown)).&nbsp; Rosenberg manages to capture the

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personalities of these individuals in rather vivid style, which is fun even if some of the characters end up reading a bit like generic tech-hipsters and less like read folks.&nbsp; </p> <p>What was really odd about the book (and what perhaps separates it from <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/426258335">the best kind of history</a> of blogging) is that it deals almost not at all with the folks who actually read the blogs.&nbsp; These are the people who ultimately made blogging a global phenomenon rather than a hobby for late 20th century hamradio types.&nbsp; Of course, blog readers, as a group, are somewhat less interesting.&nbsp; They range from the bored housewife to the insomniac historian to the unemployed denizen of the public library to the technology consultant, and for whatever reason they found that a blogger out there had similar (or diametrically opposed) interests.&nbsp; Moreover, these folk had access to the technology to keep up with a blog and perhaps even comment on it through the proliferation of personal computers in the public and private zone.&nbsp; And these kinds of folks found in blogging a medium capable of producing a compelling message.&nbsp; The slick <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger</a>, <a href="http://www.movabletype.com/">Moveable Type</a>, or <a href="http://wordpress.org/">Wordpress</a>, driven presentation, the reliability of the prose (both grammatically and in terms of its adherence to specific language of expertise), the links to other trusted websites or blogs (i.e. a relationship to a trusted community), or even the the relationship of the blogger to certain known and trusted non-internet based entities whether these be universities, corporations, print publications, or even the government.&nbsp; The authority and influence accessible to bloggers was not simply a development of their own idiosyncratic genius nor was it it simply their ability to tap into or leverage a kind of "surplus authority" floating around the web.&nbsp; The most interesting thing, to my mind, was that bloggers were able to establish a position of authority in this new media and challenge the longstanding and time tested authority of both general and specialized print publications.&nbsp; And this wasn't accomplished simply because blogs were "better" or offered "better", quicker, more up-to-date news, it was because the web provided a medium where new relationships formed between authors and readers and from these new relationships new sources and forms of authority developed.</p> <p>Thus, as romantic an image as Evan Williams cut in Scott Rosenberg's prose, he was only really one side of the equation.&nbsp; The other side of the equations is a readership who were willing to embrace and trust blogging as a medium for conveying information (in some of the same ways that we (or, ahem, our students) are willing to trust Wikipedia as a medium) or&nbsp; engage in a public debate with a certain faith their voices will not only be heard, but in an abstract, intangible way matter.&nbsp; So as much as the authors of the blogs had to feel that they were doing more than shouting into the wind, the readers had to feel the same way.</p> <p>Unpacking the change in American culture that made this possible requires more than just producing romantic character sketches of cyber pioneers, but exploring <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/32892770">the complex intersection of technology, social organization, authority,</a> and the very acts of readership and authorship in the late 20th century.&nbsp; Blogging didn't just come about because people were willing to "say everything" but because people were willing to read everything.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Toward a Definition of Punk Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: toward-a-definition-of-punk-archaeology-1 CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 07/28/2009 08:02:54 AM ----BODY: <p>Cross-posted to <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology</a>.</p> <p>I was asked recently what exactly <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology</a> is... and aside from pointing to our blog of that name, I struggled to come up with a clever answer or really any answer.&nbsp; The best that I could offer was that Punk Archaeology was an empty vessel, a conceptual universe opening to being filled by the careening intersection of punk rock music and archaeology (in almost all of its forms and meanings).&nbsp; So far the vessel is filled with bits of methodology, some history, some archaeology (in a Foucaldian sense) and even some proper archaeological investigations.&nbsp; This description, however, does not necessarily explain what Punk Archaeology is.</p> <p>So, here goes a first effort toward a definition of Punk Archaeology:</p> <p>1) Punk Archaeology is a reflective mode of organizing archaeological experiences.&nbsp; Punk Archaeology began as conversations between Kostis Kourelis and other archaeologists who admitted to listening to punk rock music or appreciating the punk aesthetic while studying archaeology.&nbsp; The result was a collaboration between me and Kostis as we made an effort to probe the intersection between these two choices.&nbsp; Why would we be drawn to punk rock -- or any particular music -- and how does this musical choice explain or organize or condition our approaches to archaeological research.&nbsp; Both of us came around to the question of whether there is a totalizing discourse in our intellectual lives.&nbsp; Is there some strand that makes sense of our varied interests?</p> <p>2) Punk Archaeology follows certain elements of the punk aesthetic through the discipline of archaeology.&nbsp; It celebrates, in particular, the things that can be grouped under the blanket heading of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/05/ar chaeology-technology-and-who-is-the-punk-archaeologist-now.html">DIY practices</a>: various <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/py la-koutsopetria-podcasts.html">low-fi podcasts</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2009/05/mo re-lowtech-sol.html">infield improvised devices</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2009/05/re turn-of-the-sifters.html">serendipitous inventions</a> that allow archaeologists to document space, place, and the past.</p> <p>3) <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/punk-and-place/">Punk Archaeology reveals a deep commitment to place</a>.&nbsp; Punk with its tied to garage band sound has always manifest itself spatially. The tensions between

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urban and suburban (e.g. <a href="http://www.metrolyrics.com/london-boys-lyricsjohnny-thunders.html">Little London Boys</a>), east and west coast, and the persistent association of certain sounds and styles with cities or even places (some of which are intended to disorient: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max%27s_Kansas_City">Max's Kansas City</a>).&nbsp; As archaeology is, in so many ways, a "science" of place, its affinity to a musical genre that self-consciously laced the experience of music with the experience of place would seem appropriate.</p> <p>4) <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/punk-nostalgia-and-thearchaeology-of-musical-utopia/">Punk Archaeology embraces destruction as a creative process</a>.&nbsp; Archaeologists destroy the very object that they seek to study.&nbsp; Digging through strata removes artifacts from their physical context and places them in the disciplinary context of the archaeologist notebook, database, plan, map, article, or monographg.&nbsp; Destruction as a creative process echoes in some ways the process of punk which sought to deconstruct musically the foundation of Anglo-American pop music and build in its place a subversive recontextualized narrative of safe and comfortable bourgeois life.&nbsp; I am not sure that archaeology is always subversive and I don't even know whether punk rock forms the best parallel for the recontextualizing process of excavation, but there is a certain symmetry between the two.</p> <p>5) Punk Archaeology is spontaneous.&nbsp; The one thing that the <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology blog</a> is seeking to capture is the spontaneity of the connection between punk and archaeology.&nbsp; The performance of punk archaeology through the medium of blogging allows for our definition to remain flexible and fluid.&nbsp; We can reshape our argument and our juxtapositions and even challenge and contradict ourselves.&nbsp; In short, we can create distortion, noise, and a kind off creative chaos.&nbsp; That might, like Punk, have value.&nbsp; </p> <p>Or not.&nbsp; </p> <p>We'll see.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brice Pearce EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.63.13.242 URL: DATE: 07/30/2009 12:01:44 PM This is pretty sweet stuff, man! I look forward to following the conversation further! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Viewsheds in the Eastern Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1

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BASENAME: viewsheds-in-the-eastern-corinthia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 07/27/2009 10:07:51 AM ----BODY: <p>David Pettegrew and I continue to make revisions to our article on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/wo rking-paper-towers-and-fortifications-at-vayia-in-the-southeastcorinthia.html">the fortification around the sites of Vayia and Lychnari bay</a>.&nbsp; One of the reviewers suggested that instead of simply describing the views from the fortified heights of Ano Vayia and Lychnari, we could do a viewshed analysis.&nbsp; Viewshed analysis describes any number of methods used to determine the intervisibility of points on a map.&nbsp; Generally they are performed using geographic information system software (GIS) and are based on Digital Elevation Models (DEM or more properly a DTM, Digital Terrain Models). My viewsheds are pretty basic.&nbsp; They derive from a DEM based on the 1:5000 maps of the Eastern Corinthia.&nbsp; I then use ESRI's spatial analyst to produce very simple viewsheds based on the 6 known sites along the eastern Corinthian coast from Mt. Oneion and Stanotopi to Ano Vayia.&nbsp; </p> <p>The circles are the sites and the blue line represents the route south from the town of Kenchreai, which is not labeled on this map but would have been immediately north of Mt. Oneion and Stanotopi, which are the three sites lined up east to west across the rocky spine that projects into the Mediterranean as a small peninsula.&nbsp; The site from which the viewshed derives is labeled in each of the illustration below.&nbsp; The dark black line is the Saronic coast line.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115723c08c2970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="WestOneion" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571478b60970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115723c08dc970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="EastOneion" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571478b74970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115723c08e6970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Stanotopi" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115723c08f8970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571478b88970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Vigla" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115723c0905970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115723c090c970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Lychnari" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115723c0918970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115723c0931970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Ano Vayia"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571478ba9970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>I am not sure that these images tell me anything more than what we already could say based on simple observations from the various points in the countryside.&nbsp; Here is the argument that we offer in our paper:</p> <p>"The towers and buildings at Vayia, however, do make sense as military installations guarding key travel and transportation corridors through the region. The Lychnari tower sits on the far western side of the Lychnari hill and seems to be positioned to overlook the bay and the northern coast of the Corinthia, while the Ano Vayia tower overlooked the pass from Frangolimano as well as the Vayia River valley. Indeed, both towers were clearly intervisible and well-placed to work together to monitor movement in the area of Lychnari and Vayia. The tower at Ano Vayia overlooked movement through the pass leading south to Frangolimano, but the height of the coastal ridge of Kaki Rachi compromised its view of the northern coast of the Corinthia and the Saronic islands. The tower on Lychnari, in contrast, could not see clearly into the pass but had a good view of the northern coast of the Corinthia including most of the Saronic Gulf and islands. Together these two fortifications could have worked to guard against an invading force traveling either westward through the pass or by sea along the coast. To the north Acrocorinth is visible in the distance as are the occupied heights of Vigla,near the village of Almyri, and the fortifications at Stanotopi, Oneion, and even Kenchreai. The sites at Acrocorinth, Oneion, Vigla, and Stanotopi lacked a clear view of the bays located along the southern coast of the Corinthia. In fact, without the towers situated near Lychnari bay, it would have been possible for a substantial force to land at Frangolimano and move east and north toward the Isthmus hidden by the coastal heights and completely out of the view of Corinthian positions immediately south of Oneion or on the Isthmus. Guards stationed at Lychnari or Ano Vayia ensured that this inland route remained in communication with forces positioned closer to the Isthmus and could provide an early warning for the heartland of the Corinthian chora to any danger threatening these more peripheral communities.</p> <p>The kind of network and communication proposed here is well-documented in other regions of the Greek mainland. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12033923">J. Ober</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43476884">M. Munn</a> have shown how rural towers in Attica belonged to networks of routes, towers, and fortified sites that functioned together for local defense in the Late Classical world. Recently, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/05/th e-other-part-of-the-corinthia.html">J. Marchand</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/71285030">Y. Lolos</a> scholars have demonstrated the close link between towers and roads and argued that states situated towers so as to control traffic through the countryside. As we have already noted, Lolos documented a tower at Tsakouthi in the Sikyonia with similar size and construction technique to the round tower on the height of Lychnari; he argued that it overlooked a significant roadway linking the Sikyonian plain to the region around Stymphalos.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4824475">Wiseman</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/04/fo rtifications-between-the-megarid-and-corinthia.html">Smith</a>, and others have likewise associated a network of towers with the road network that passes from the southern Megarid into the Corinthia via either the Kaki Skala or over various passes through Mt. Geraneia.<a href="#_edn5" name="_ednref5">&nbsp;</a>In these contexts, rural towers functioned mainly as signal stations across the countryside that connected military forces, rural communities, and polis centers separated by long distances and rocky terrain.

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The towers at Ano Vayia and Lynchnari would have functioned in a similar way, although the rectangular building at Ano Vayia and the rubble fortification on the Vayia peninsula also suggest brief or occasional occupations by small garrisons perhaps positioned to protect the area against small-scale raiders. The impressive views afforded the Lychnari and Ano Vayia tower must have extended the influence of any force stationed in the rubble fortification on the Vayia peninsula. <p>In sum, the position of the Lychnari and Ano Vayia towers in the landscape, along with the evidence of the artifact assemblage, encourages us to understand the principal function of these structures as militaristic. The ease with which a force could pass north from the Bay at Lychnari or even Frangolimano into the rolling country south of Oneion made the fortification of this stretch of coastline crucial to any Corinthian strategy designed to protect territory peripheral to city’s central chora on the Isthmus. The fortification of Vayia and Lychnari find parallels in Corinthian (and allies’) efforts to guard or block vulnerable passes in the mountainous regions of Corinth. The large and complex fortified site of Ayia Paraskevi near the modern village of Sophiko, for example, overlooks a fertile plain and several major lines of communication and travel through the southeastern Corinthia.While this site could represent a fortified outpost for a village of the Corinthian interior, its position also suggests a military function not dissimilar to the “border forts” along the Attic-Boeotian frontier. Similarly, the impressive array of rubble fortifications along the ridge of Oneion must represent efforts to control passage across the eastern ridge of the mountain and indicate a clear strategic initiative to control passage through the rugged interior of the Corinthia—even if those walls should represent a temporary occupation by a foreign power." <p>The total viewshed of these six sites, however, is interesting: <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115723c094c970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="AllViews" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571478bbf970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Basically, these six sites combine to blanked the Eastern Corinthia with the exception of the small inlet at Katakali and its beach (it's the largest bay that is not red near the center of this map.&nbsp; I would be reasonable to look at the height to the west of this inlet, perhaps, for a tower.&nbsp; A tower built on that hill would not only be visible to other sites in the area, but also be poised to watch over this embayment.&nbsp; Of course, this tower might not serve too obvious a strategic function in that other towers would cover the most visible routes out of the vicinity of the embayment.&nbsp; The lack over coverage over Lychnari bay is an artifact of the DEM and my analysis.&nbsp; The bay is clearly visible from the tower at Lychnari. ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 07/24/2009 07:41:17 AM ----BODY: <p>Some fun little notes today:</p> <ul> <li>First, I experienced the power of social media applications and blogging first hand this week.&nbsp; On Wednesday, I posted <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/tr easures-from-moving-merrifield.html">a photo of a curious Egyptian drawing found on the back of a bookshelf in a colleagues office</a>.&nbsp; I posted a photo of it on my blog and asked if anyone recognized it.&nbsp; At the same time, I tweeted a link to the blog post.&nbsp; Within 20 minutes, I had a response, from Chuck Jones, who not only identified the sketch but also confirmed my suspicion that it was done by the late UND History Professor Charles Carter.&nbsp; By the end of the day I had over 200 hits on the page (up from my summertime average of 70 or 80).&nbsp; How cool is that? <li>If you rock and iPhone or an iPod Touch and have to deal with ancient Greek, you should get Lexiphanes which provides access to the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/13319175">Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon (1924)</a> and the G. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/37786220">Autenrieth, <em>Homeric Dictionary </em>of 1889</a>. Wow. (Thanks to David Meadows at <a href="http://rogueclassicism.com/2009/07/23/classical-iphone-apps/">Rogue Classicism</a>) <li>Breaking News: Paul Ferderer and I were interviewed by our local ABC affiliate (<a href="http://www.wdaz.com/">WDAZ</a>) yesterday about our work this past summer in Cyprus.&nbsp; The story is set to appear on the 10 pm broadcast tonight.&nbsp; <li>More Breaking News: If you're in Southwest Florida, you owe it to yourself to go and check out the Surf and Song Festival, produced by the famous Fritz Caraher.&nbsp; And it's for a good cause.&nbsp; So check out Famous Fritz in the <a href="http://www.newspress.com/article/20090724/ENT/907240334/1054/">Ft. Myers' News Press here</a> or, if you're&nbsp; a more visual person, <a href="http://www.fox4morningblend.com/tabid/3530/story/34557/Default.aspx">on the Morning Blend on Fox 4</a>. <li>Even More Breaking News: I just heard that my new <a href="http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_mini?afid=p202|G OUSE107380695&amp;cid=OAS-US-KWG-CPUMini-US">Mac Mini</a> has shipped.</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend everyone!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Revising the Historians Craft STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-revising-the-historians-craft CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 07/23/2009 08:36:17 AM ----BODY: <p>The summer is when I do most of the behind the scenes work on my courses for both fall and spring semesters.&nbsp; I've never been able to juggle the pressures of actually teaching a course with those of developing it, so I've tended to develop my courses in the summer and put them into practice in the fall.</p> <p>This summer I am redeveloping two courses that are the foundations to my course rotation: History 240: The Historians Craft and History 101: Western Civilization I.&nbsp; The former is our required historiography/methodology class for all history majors and the latter is the standard survey of Western history from the beginnings of time to the Renaissance.&nbsp; </p> <p>For today, I am going to talk a bit about my History 240 course.&nbsp; I am working on transforming it from a small, seminar style course focused on the very deliberate construction of a 10-15 pages term paper to a larger, lecture style course focused on developing a broader understanding of the history of the discipline of history and on specific research and writing skills.&nbsp; The reasons for this change are complex, but have nothing to do with enrollment pressures from the administration or new curriculum requirements.&nbsp; The decision to transform was completely in-house and has far more to do with how I understand the development of the history major on our campus.</p> <p>Traditionally, I think, we have trained history majors to become careful researchers.&nbsp; Reading and writing exercises across the entire curriculum (with the possible exception of 100 level survey courses) have focused on the production of either analytical essays (like on tests), critical book reviews, and proper research papers -- and these three facets of the history degree find clear analogies with the three responsibilities of the practicing academic historian: teaching, writing book reviews, and writing longer articles and books based on original "primary source" research.</p> <p>Yet, while these specific reading, writing, and analysis skills are valuable and transferable, here at the University of North Dakota most of our students will not go onto graduate school in history and fewer still will become practicing academic historians.&nbsp; In this way, the structure and expectations of the major does not clearly align with our student's professional goals.&nbsp; This is not to say that developing the skills of a professional historian and using them in the field of law, politics, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Berman">sports broadcasting</a>, or whatever will not be fulfilling or even rewarding in a practical sense.&nbsp; </p> <p>Instead, I am trying to re-imagine, through revising one course, how to communicate the core values of a history degree without following long-standing practices designed primarily to cultivate the skills required for professional historians.</p> <p>I've decided, more less unilaterally, that our methods course should emphasize three basic ideas:</p> <p>1. Historical Awareness.&nbsp; Students should be aware that history is only one of a whole range of equally valid methods for understanding past events.&nbsp; They should be aware that

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history is a discipline with rules that developed through time in response to social, economic, political, and intellectual stimuli. Thus, history has no monopoly on "the truth" about the past, but offers a widely accepted model for creating a useful past.&nbsp; At its best history is capable of producing a sound foundation for diverse society and at its worse emerges a tool of a tyrannical majority which seeks to suppress rival understandings of the world.</p> <p>2. Organized Research. Research, in any field, requires basic organizational skills.&nbsp; Back in the day, this involved index cards, legal pads, and binders; now, it involves specialized software, search engines, and databases.&nbsp; The key, to my mind, is to show the students how to use modern methods to organize and make more efficient their research.&nbsp; The discipline of history grew up alongside the emergence of archives (both as physical buildings and as a concept of grouped and organized information) and has always been fundamentally a discipline that does research in the archive (rather than in the laboratory or through contemplation or reflection).&nbsp; Thus, history is well-positioned as a discipline to encourage a kind of <em>information literacy </em>that is becoming more and more important as our access to information grows at an almost unfathomable rate.&nbsp; </p> <p>3. Critical Reading.&nbsp; Historians read. I might even go so far to say that we read more than we write (although it doesn't feel that way most of the time!). At the same time, we are moving into a hyper-literate world (tied of course to the rapidly expanding global archive).&nbsp; The foundation of history as a discipline is the practice of peer review in which good, true, history emerges through a complex node individual works validated through scholarly consensus.&nbsp; That is to say, as professional historians, critical reading is the first step toward making arguments and collating and organizing material from the archive.&nbsp; Consequently, it is difficult to imagine a course on historical methodology that doesn't involve the evaluation of historical work.&nbsp; Traditionally, scholars associated the ability to read critically with the ability to produce historical analysis.&nbsp; Thus reading is tied to writing.&nbsp; I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that we can separate the critical evaluation of texts from the ability to produce those texts.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, what is the fundamental motive for repositioning our historical methods course around these three goals?&nbsp; What I have tried to do is begin the process of articulating the historical method in a way that places at the center of a changing world and not just at the center of a university and tradition-bound disciplinary rules.&nbsp; In effect, I am trying to look outside the discipline in my effort to teach historical methodology and articulate more clearly how understanding the historians craft can make one a better member of contemporary society outside of the expectation that one needs to acquire the full-blown skill set at the hands of a practicing historian.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Treasures from Moving Merrifield STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: treasures-from-moving-merrifield CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Religion DATE: 07/22/2009 11:09:33 AM ----BODY: <p>A second post today, but be sure to read <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-merrifield-move.html">today's main post</a>.&nbsp; I was chatting with our Department Chair, Kim Porter, in her former office and couldn't help but notice this on the back of a bookshelf:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712f3bcf970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="537" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157223bb2d970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>She had asked Gordon Iseminger about it and he suggested that it might have been done by <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hi ttites-in-nor.html">Charles Carter</a>.&nbsp; His speciality was Near Eastern Languages, with a particular focus on the Hittites, but he worked to identify and translate the fragmentary hieroglyphics inscription held by the University Archives.&nbsp; It could have also been done by either of the subsequent ancient historians at the University of North Dakota: Linda Ricketts who wrote her <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/20345920">dissertation on Ptolemaic Egypt</a> or Walter Ellis, my immediate predecessor, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27812424">who also worked on the same period</a>.</p> <p>So what does it say?</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157223bb33970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712f3bf1970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Is it a curse on anyone who dares to move the Department of History?</p> <p align="left"><strong>UPDATE:</strong></p> <p align="left">Chuck Jones of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Near Easternist, and digital librarian extraordinary, identified the drawing as "a sketch of one of the reliefs at Yazilikayathis which depicted Tudhalyia IV in the embrace of his god":</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572241114970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="537" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712f92d8970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">And thought that it was likely to be Charles Carter's work.</p> <p align="center"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Charles Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.122.167.53 URL: http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com DATE: 07/22/2009 12:38:05 PM I'll wager it is Charles Carter's. It is a sketch of one of the reliefs at Yazilikaya (<a href="http://z.about.com/d/archaeology/1/0/7/C/hat3.jpg)">http://z.about.com/d/a rchaeology/1/0/7/C/hat3.jpg)</a> depicting Tudhaliya IV in the embrace of his god. I think there is a bibliography of Carter in The Asia Minor Connexion Studies on the Pre-Greek Languages in Memory of Charles Carter Edited by Yoel L. Arbeitman Leuven: Peeters, 2000 Orbis Supplementa, 13 90-429-0798-3 ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bishop Gregory Godsey EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 68.47.84.70 URL: http://www.taac.us DATE: 07/22/2009 12:42:04 PM I am no scholar, but I did find this very interesting. I did a search of the Near East Languages and found this: <a href="http://www.ancientscripts.com/luwian.html">http://www.ancientscripts.com/l uwian.html</a> It is a story about the god Sarruma who was the god of the mountains (the middle lower symbol that looks like a spear passing through a circle). He was a great king or a great king went to the mountain and was imparted some wisdom or died. I know it is vague, but like I said, I am no scholar. This is my elementary take on it. BTW, if you look at images of Sarruma you will see the resemblance to the tall man in the image. Thanks for the puzzle, not sure if it is correct or not, but I enjoyed the adventure! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.174.205 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 07/22/2009 01:06:13 PM

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Chuck, Thanks for the help! I reckoned if any of my blog readers could figure this out, it would be you. Hope you are enjoying your NYC Summer. Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brice Pearce EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.63.13.242 URL: DATE: 07/22/2009 01:34:07 PM Curses, beaten to the punch! Was at Yazilkaya last summer during a visit to Hattusha, and what fantastic carvings are left! More fun, however, were the reconstructions of the mud-brick defensive walls done by the German project: <a href="http://www.hattuscha.de/English/citywall.htm">http://www.hattuscha.de/Engl ish/citywall.htm</a> There's a cool Byzantine Chapel there as well, Bill. Google Earth has awesome satellite imagery of both Hattusha and Yazƒ±lkƒ±aya. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Merrifield Move STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-merrifield-move CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Elwyn Robinson's Autobiography CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 07/22/2009 08:13:00 AM ----BODY: <p>It's finally happening.&nbsp; After all the bluster and delays, the department is finally moving from its long-held place in Merrifield Hall to O'Kelly Hall.&nbsp; As my colleagues are slowly being moved out of their offices, I've been able to sneak in and get some final pictures of the offices before they are lost to us forever (how's that for dramatic?).</p> <p>It will also give me a chance to add some little odds and ends that I had meant to include in other posts about Merrifield, but had not for various reasons.</p> <p>First, this note greeted me on my return from Europe:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115722324c0970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115722324c6970b

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-pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">As the days past the "faculty still in Merrifield" became less and less true as they moved, one by one.</p> <p align="left">One of the great offices on campus has been until recently occupied by Han Broedel our Early Modernist.&nbsp; It has a bathroom, for one thing:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115722324d2970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="229" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115722324d7970b -pi" width="304" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115722324e0970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="229" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712eae2c970c -pi" width="173" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">It is also, almost certainly, Orin G. Libby's former office from the day that Merrifield opened in 1928 until his retirement in 1944.&nbsp; I am basing this idea, Pausanias like, on a passage from Elwyn B. Robinson's autobiography:</p> <blockquote> <p>"Dr. Libby had two rooms for his office, side by side at Merrifield #221 and #223, with a door connecting them. The first was larger than the other with a toilet, important to me [Elywn B. Robinson] because of the frequent, urgent bowel movements [<em>Robinson had serious problems with his digestive track nearly his entire adult life.</em> ed.]. It had Dr. Libby's desk, a worktable, and a lot of bookcases. The other room, #223, had bookshelves to the ceiling and a worktable. Its door to the hallway was not used. From the books on the shelves, I believed it was a workroom connected with Dr. Libby's editorship of the <em>North Dakota Historical Quarterly</em>. That publication of the State Historical Society was suspended for lack of funds in the Thirties, so the room was not much used. A folding army cot was set up there, and I would lie down and rest between classes." </p></blockquote> <p>The door linking the two offices was not used in recent times, but was still there, to the left of the tall bookshelf: <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115722324f5970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712eae3b970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712eae4e970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="537" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712eae54970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Dr. Iseminger, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/fr iday-quick--2.html">the most outspoken opponent of the move from Merrifield,</a> has vacated his office.&nbsp; He had been in his office since the mid1960s.&nbsp; His office was famous for a number of reasons.&nbsp; First, he still pounds out missives on an old manual typewriter, so the office had a particular sound.&nbsp; He also had a massive philodendron plant that crept around the top of the overflowing bookshelves. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572232517970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712eae63970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Finally, the office preserved some of the original flooring in Merrifield Hall. The local rumor is

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that this was the surplus battleship decking installed as cost cutting measure (and perhaps salvaged from the 15 odd battleships scrapped at the end of World War I in accordance with the Washington Treaty including, ironically, the USS North Dakota (which wasn't officially scrapped until 1931)).&nbsp; Whether the floors were actually old battleship decking or not is relatively unimportant.&nbsp; They are funky:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712eae6d970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157223252d970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The move from Merrifield Hall is pretty sad.&nbsp; The building was tied to the Department of History since its inception.&nbsp; Moreover, by moving our department we will be separated from the departments most closely allied with the study of the past: English, Philosophy and Religion, and Languages.&nbsp; But we've been promised a better future in our new digs in O'Kelly Hall including upgraded office space, better classrooms, and easier access to the Memorial Union food court.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712eae8a970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572232531970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572232537970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="DSCN0559" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157223253e970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">It's still hard not to think that this isn't an end of an era.&nbsp; For more of my tribute to Merrifield Hall see: Check out <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/me rrifield-215.html">Room 215</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/un der-libbys-gaze-merrifield-217.html">Room 217</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/un der-libbys-gaze-merrifield-209.html">Room 209</a>,&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/05/un der-libbys-gaze-merrifield-300.html">Room 300</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/un der-libbys-gaze-images-of-the-department-of-history-from-merrifieldhall.html">the hallways of Merrifield</a>, and even <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/04/me rrifield-graffiti.html">Merrifield Graffiti</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

Caraher

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TITLE: More Lakka Skoutara STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-lakka-skoutara DATE: 07/21/2009 07:55:42 AM ----BODY: <p></p> <p>The site of Lakka Skoutara was initially documented in 2001 as part of an extensive survey of the area between the harbor village of Korphos and the village of Sophiko. The goal of this extensive survey was to discover the premodern route between the two settlements and the work determined that it ran through the site of Lakka Skoutara. In addition, the extensive survey identified a significant scatter of ancient and modern ceramics as well as the presence of several houses, agricultural installations, and a 20th century church building associated with the modern route through the rugged interior of the Saronic coastline.&nbsp; (For more on Lakka Skoutara, see the index below) <p>The next year, the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a> conducted a proper intensive survey in the area as a follow up to the extensive survey in 2001. Since there were limited resources and time available for the survey, the team decided to sample three transects across the landscape. These transects would followed basic geomorphological divisions in the basin by capturing some part of the slopes of the Lakka, the alluvial fans that produced rocky soil throughout the northern section of the basin, and the more-stable and less rocky red soils that marked the basin floor. This method was loosely consistent with the geomorphological division of units practiced throughout the EKAS survey area and allowed us to control for the significance and in a coarse way, the chronology of various erosional processes. The units were also positioned to capture areas immediately surrounding six of the houses which represented various states of abandonment. This sampling method produced 92 units in three groups with an average unit size of 2335 sq meters and a total area of 2.1 ha. <p>The EKAS team walked each unit at a 10 meter spacing with each fieldwalker counting every artifact that appeared 1 m to each side of their swath. This procedure sampled 20% of the area of each unit for density. The variation of artifacts present in each unit was sampled according to the chronotype system in which field walkers collected one example of each unique type of artifact. The ceramics team analyzed these artifacts in the field and the results were keyed into an Access database which was linked to a GIS database. <p>The units surveyed at Lakka Skoutara produced an artifact density of around 2200 artifacts per ha (walked), which is considerably higher than density of approximately 1500 sherds per ha produced by the units in the main survey transect on the Isthmus, but still below the 3000 sherds per ha often considered to be the benchmark for site density in the Eastern Mediterranean. There were, however, 25 units in Lakka Skoutara, with a total area of approximately a hectare which exceeded the 3000 artifacts per hectare standard for site density. <p>During the course of the survey, the field team designated one area of the site as a Localized Cultural Anomaly (LOCA) owing to the high quantity of Final Neolithic material concentrated at the conjunction of six moderate-density units with varying qualities of surface visibility. In these areas, the team conducted a more intensive form of artifact collection. The teams selected a 20m x 20 m square in each DU of the LOCA and performed a total ChronoType collection in that square. One example of each type

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of artifact was collected from each of the four squares to produce a complete sample of every type of ceramic present. The squares were located relatively close to one another, since the FN-EH material was not randomly distributed throughout each DU, but rather clustered together. Consequently, the LOCA collection units were concentrated in an effort to capture the area with the highest artifact concentration. GPS coordinates were taken at the SW corner of each LOCA collection square providing a fixed point from which to map the units. <p><i>Artifact Distribution</i> <p>The standard (or Discovery Unit (DU)) and local collection survey produced 926 artifacts in 625 batches. The periods represented in this assemblage of artifacts produced in these survey units represented over 6000 years of human occupation from the Final Neolithic period to the modern day. <p>Examining the assemblage produced by our standard (DU) chronotype survey shows that 33 periods appear in the survey. Since the chronotype system provides both broad and narrow periods, many of these 33 periods are overlapping. For example, a query for Medieval pottery brings up pottery that is certainly Medieval as well as material that our ceramicists could only date to a broad range of time which could include the Medieval period. There are many ways to deal with this kind of data and to represent it.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tandf/tgis/2000/00000014/00000007/ar t00004">Aoristic analysis</a> can take into account the different degrees of precision in our dating of the artifacts and consequently provides one representative way to show the chronological distribution of artifacts across the basin. This kind of representative analysis assumes that an artifact has an equal chance of appearing during any year across its entire span of possible dates and weights the total assemblage of artifacts that might appear in a given time span accordingly. So if an artifact is dated to the Late Roman period with a date from between 400 and 700 A.D., the artifact has a 1/300 chance of appear in each year. While it is important to emphasize that this is simply a model for the chronological distribution of ceramics, it is a useful way to represent the relative quantity of material datable to a particular period of time.&nbsp; Since most artifacts (although certainly not all!) are most accurately datable to the century, that is the scale that I have chosen for the two graphs included here. As chart 1 shows, there is activity at the site for nearly the entire historical period with a sharp increase in activity in the most recent century. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115721ec65d970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="264" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115712a454e970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Chart 1</p> <p align="left">&nbsp;<br>The results of this kind of analysis, then can be compared to the spatial distribution of material across the unit.&nbsp; For a survey of this <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/la kka-skoutara-the-survey.html">read this post</a>.</p> <p>Lakka Skoutara Index:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/la kka-skoutara-the-survey.html">Lakka Skoutara: The Survey</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-houses-of-lakka-skoutara.html">The Houses of Lakka Skoutara</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co llapse.html">Collapse</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/pr ovisional-discard.html">Provisional Discard</a><br><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co nstruction-in-the-corinthia.html">Construction in the Corinthia</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project 2009 Press Release STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-archaeological-project-2009-press-release CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/20/2009 06:49:26 AM ----BODY: <p>The equivalent of the archaeological victory cigar is the project press release.&nbsp; It's penned only once the fieldwork is done (and usually before the real celebration -- the publication of the results) begin.&nbsp; I send a version of this off to my university's Office of University Relations and they perform their tweaktastic magic on it.&nbsp; I'll post a link to their improved (embettered?) version when it appears: <p>17 July 2009 <br><b>Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Press Release <br></b>For Immediate Release <p>The PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project has completed its 7<sup>th</sup> season of archaeological fieldwork in the coastal zone of Pyla Village near Larnaka Cyprus. Since 2003 the PKAP team has worked under the direction of William Caraher (University of North Dakota), R. Scott Moore (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) and David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College) and used intensive survey, remote sensing, and excavation to document this rich archaeological landscape. The 2009 field season was our second season of excavation and the largest and most complex to date with over 30 students and colleagues from the US, Canada, the UK, and Cyprus including 3 graduate students from University of North Dakota. Over a 5 week season, the PKAP team opened 6 trenches at the sites of Vigla, Koutsopetria, and Kokkinokremos. The trenches on the prominent coastal height of Vigla produced significant evidence of a Hellenistic (4<sup>th</sup>3<sup>rd</sup> c. B.C.) settlement.&nbsp; An imposing fortification wall surrounded domestic quarters whose collapsed mudbrick walls sealed valuable ceramic material on the floors. These buildings may have been the houses for mercenary forces positioned to protect a vulnerable stretch of coastline near the cosmopolitan city of Kition, or perhaps the homes of local residents who had settled in fortified villages during politically unstable times. The excavations on the neighboring coastal ridge of Kokkinokremos revealed two sections of complex perimeter wall dating to the Late Bronze Age. This wall suggests that the site itself was not properly fortified but only ringed with a series of interlocking structures. While these structures would have presented an imposing vista to an attacking foe, the presence of doorways leading through the exterior

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wall indicates that residents of the Late Bronze Age settlement regarded practical needs over the need for an impregnable defense. The final area of excavation was the Early Christian basilica at Koutsopetria. Our work near this long-known building sought to unravel the complex history of repair and rebuilding that occurred during the 5<sup>th</sup>, 6<sup>th</sup>, and 7<sup>th</sup> centuries A.D. To gather information on the building’s tumultuous life cycle, the excavations focused on an annex room that suffered several incidents of significant damage before its roof and second storey collapsed under seemingly dramatic circumstances. <p>In conjunction with the excavation work, the PKAP team conducted 10 days of geophysical survey with ground penetrating radar in collaboration with Beverly Chiarulli of Arcaheological Services Laboratory at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. This work revealed several areas of significant subsurface features. <p>Finally, the PKAP team continued its commitment to a trans-media approach to archaeological research. We were joined in the field by an experienced documentary filmmaker, Ian Ragsdale of Big Ape Productions and Ryan Stander, a photographer in the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of North Dakota. Various members of the PKAP team blogged regularly on PKAP sponsored blogs, tweeted from the field on a PKAP Twitter feed, and produced a dozen podcasts. These projects represent an important aspect of reflexive fieldwork, as well as a commitment to public outreach through new media delivered over the web. The newly created Working Group in Digital and New Media at the University of North Dakota will contribute to the production of Ragsdale’s documentary and facilitate a digital exhibit of Stander’s photographs. <p>All field work was completed with the permission and cooperation of Director of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus, Dr. Pavlos Flourentzos. We also enjoyed the generous assistance of the Estate Manager of the British Sovereign Area – Dhekelia Garrison, the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute. The 2009 season΄s fieldwork was funded by grants from the University of North Dakota, Institute of Aegean Prehistory, and generous private donors. ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Check out &quot;Literature in a Digital Age&quot; if You Are in New Rockford, North Dakota Today! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: check-out-literature-in-a-digital-age-if-you-are-in-new-rockfordnorth-dakota-today CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 07/18/2009 11:16:59 AM -----

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BODY: <p>Here are the details: <p><b>‚ÄúLiterature in the Digital Age‚Äù </b><b>with guest Crystal Alberts<br></b><b>Saturday, July 18, at 2:00 p.m. at the Opera House in New Rockford, ND</b> <p>Is a book on the web still a book? Do hyperlinks change the role of narrative? What is an author if anyone can publish anything whenever they want? These questions frame WHY?‚Äôs first episode in front of a live audience. Recorded at the newly renovated opera house in New Rockford, North Dakota, guest Crystal Alberts will crack open ‚Äúphilosophy of literature‚Äù to help us investigate our assumptions about literature, reading, and art. An expert in ‚Äúnew media,‚Äù we will take the opportunity to ask her the kinds of questions that come up all-too-often in today‚Äôs computerized world. What does interactivity do to the experience of reading? How does the urgency of ‚Äúhipness‚Äù compare with the time-tested lessons of the classics? What does the world ‚Äúclassic‚Äù mean anyway? Is the feel of paper on your fingers a necessary component of good reading? <p>Dr. Crystal Alberts holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Washington University in St. Louis and is a visiting professor of English at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; <p>WHY?‚Äôs host Jack Weinstein says, ‚ÄúCrystal is representative of the energy and learning that our newer scholars bring with them out of graduate school. She is more aware of the cutting edge than most people I know, and talking with her will be a challenge to my own assumptions, not just the listeners. This will be a lively, exciting, and interactive episode.‚Äù <p>Have a question you want to ask Crystal during the show but can‚Äôt be in the audience? Ask it in advance by sending it to: <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> <p>If you can't make it, catch the radio broadcast on August 9th on Prairie Public.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.whyradioshow.org/">For more on the Why? Radio Show click here</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 07/17/2009 07:49:06 AM ----BODY: <p>I've blogged a bunch this week, so I'll keep my Friday blog short thoughts:</p> <blockquote> <p>On the Web:</p></blockquote> <ul> <li>I need to update the look of <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/HomePage.html">my personal webpage</a>.&nbsp; It's really bothering me.</li> <li>I contemplated moving my

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blog from <a href="http://www.typepad.com/">TypePad</a> to <a href="WordPress">WordPress</a> and perhaps even hosting on some of my server space.&nbsp; I got a little spooked about this this past week, as my wife's self-hosted (and unpatched) WordPress blog was hacked and there are rumblings about the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> (where my server lives) articulating some better-defined internet policies with particular emphasis on blogs and social media.&nbsp; </li> <li>That being said, I should at least update the look of my blog.&nbsp; It's embarrassing.</li> <li>Remind me again why I ditched my Blackberry for a Samsung Omnia?&nbsp; Each day something new stops working.&nbsp; Wednesday was my Gmail, yesterday it lost its link to the folder where my Media files are located, today it can't seem to find the interwebs either through WiFi or through mobile broadband.&nbsp; I am not sure whether it works as a phone any longer...</li></ul> <blockquote> <p>At home:</p></blockquote> <ul> <li>I'm thinking about building a digital media center based on a <a href="http://www.apple.com/macmini/">Mac Mini</a> and a <a href="http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/set_territory.php?TID=27&amp;Redirect=/summa ry.php?PID=320">Cambridge Audio DacMagic</a> D/A converter.&nbsp; It might be time to leave my CD collection behind and embrace the future.</li> <li>I've worked from home the last week.&nbsp; In the mornings, I've been rewriting my History 240: The Historians Craft class.&nbsp; I've blogged on this challenging class <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/th e-challenge-of-midlevel-courses.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/ha ppy-400th-post-from-history-240.html">here</a>,&nbsp; and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/te aching-thursday-revised-classes-for-spring.html">here</a>.&nbsp; And <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/Syllabus_240_SP2009.htm ">here was the most recent syllabus</a>.</li> <li>I am also working on our final report for the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>, a "conditionally accepted article" (accepted on the condition that we revise it and resubmit it, for what I gather) on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/wo rking-paper-towers-and-fortifications-at-vayia-in-the-southeastcorinthia.html">some fortifications of the southeastern Corinthia</a>, and our work this summer around the modern site of Lakka Skoutara, for which I need to produce a nice blog index.</li></ul> <blockquote> <p>At play:</p></blockquote> <ul> <li>Make plans to go to the Surf and Song Festival next week if you live in Southeastern Florida!&nbsp; (Even if you don't!).&nbsp; It'll be a great time with great weather and great music... all for a great cause.</li></ul> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711d4221970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="589" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711d422a970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Vincent EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 121.45.213.232 URL: http://www.talkingpyramids.com DATE: 07/18/2009 02:22:13 AM My first Mac was a Mac Mini and since upgrading to an iMac recently I've been using the Mini more as an entertainment unit. Load up the mini with Boxee, Plex, or CentreStage, or even just use the built-in FrontRow. The fact the Mac's have a remote control makes this so much more viable than a PC with a wireless mouse which I was using as an entertainment unit for the past seven years. Not only is there all the online content and what ever you have on the hard drive but of course the Mini also has a DVD drive and so I have never needed to buy a DVD player. I say go for it! The MacMini rocks. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Cyprus and China STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-cyprus-and-china CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: Travel DATE: 07/16/2009 07:45:13 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/07/16/making-the-most-of-a-monthin-china-the-role-of-a-directed-journal/">Colleen Berry graciously agreed to offer her thoughts on running a summer study tour to China</a> for our <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> blog&nbsp; Colleen is an experienced study tour leader and tour guide, and her trip to China in collaboration with Victoria Beard is one of the best regarded summer programs on campus.&nbsp; </p> <p>She recommends that directed journals as a key aspect of keeping students engaged in the learning process throughout their time in China.&nbsp; We experimented with less structured journaling exercises through our <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">Graduate Student Perspectives</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">Undergra duate Perspectives</a> blog with the hope that making the students recount their experiences in public (and with some direction, see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/04/ho w-to-write-for-the-pyla-kousopetria-archaeological-project-blog-a-primer-inarchaeological-blogging.html">A Primer in Archaeological Blogging</a>) was

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likely to keep them honest.&nbsp; I particularly admire the probing questions with which Colleen prompts the students.&nbsp; She is not timid in encouraging the students to articulate their experiences in China on a personal level.&nbsp; For example: "How has this trip changed your life? Give some specific ways that your experiences on this trip will make your life and your actions different when you return home." </p> <p>I also like the idea that the journal explicitly served not simply as a means for the student to engage their experiences, but also a method to evaluate the success of the class.&nbsp; In this way, Colleen showed that her goals with the class were not just to familiarize students with Chinese culture (broadly construed), but to convert this familiarity into something that they can take home and make relevant in their everyday lives.&nbsp; That is a potent goal and posses a real challenge to any assessment regiment as it not only asks the student to reflect their own experiences in China, but to anticipate how their time there will change their engagement with American culture.&nbsp; In this regard, her assessment program asks students to anticipate certain changes and this likely goes a long way to making changes in student behavior real.&nbsp; It would be interesting to follow up with this assessment technique in a years time to see whether the student expectations prompted by Colleen's questions came to pass.&nbsp; </p> <p>Another thing that struck me about Colleen's directed journal is that it did not emphasize the development of any particular skills, expertise, or knowledge nor did it engage a particular theoretic perspective (at least overtly) -- except perhaps the question about feeling like a minority.&nbsp; In this way, her program (at least as represented in the directed journal) represents a departure from the current emphasis on teaching specific, well-defined skills (e.g. the ability to do "x") and encouraging students to understand their experiences through a generalized theoretical vocabulary often keyed to potent terms like literacy, diversity, et c. On the one hand, clearly linking assessment goals to the assignments themselves can make evaluation easier as the values that you assess are linked the the student's ability to understand key terms and concepts.&nbsp; On the other hand, these kind of limited outcome assessment practices (e.g. what did you learn about <strong>diversity</strong>?) probably work poorly for the immersive experiences associated with study tours in general.&nbsp; No matter how similar the backgrounds and the preparation, students will engage a foreign culture on their own, very specific terms.</p> <p>As a final note, I wonder why Colleen presented almost nothing in her directed journaling that is specific to China; that is to say the word China could be replaced with the word Cyprus and the journal prompts would be equally valid.&nbsp; Is this good because she approaches her study tour with the hope that students learn fundamental lessons that would resonate with any transcultural experience?&nbsp; Or is this a limitation because it homogenizes the world outside the U.S. as "other than here" or "diversity"?&nbsp; </p> <p>It's great that Colleen agreed to engage some of the issues (and in such a practical direct way!) that I tried to bring up in my various posts on "Teaching in the Sun" (<a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/05/30/teaching-in-the-sun-managingfatigue/">here</a>, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/05/24/teaching-inthe-sun-a-scavenger-hunt-in-cyprus/">here</a>, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/05/14/teaching-thursday-teaching-in-thesun/">here</a>) and I look forward to a continued dialogue.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maria EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 58.27.153.8 URL: http://www.propertycyprussales.com DATE: 07/27/2009 07:50:29 AM This post is fantastic. Wow‚Ķthank¬¥s. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Lakka Skoutara: The Survey STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: lakka-skoutara-the-survey CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 07/15/2009 07:32:53 AM ----BODY: <p>I've already blogged a bit about my collaboration with <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a>, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory in documenting the abandoned rural settlement of Lakka Skoutara (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/07/th e-houses-of-lakka-skoutara.html">The Houses of Lakka Skoutara</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co llapse.html">Collapse</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/pr ovisional-discard.html">Provisional Discard</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co nstruction-in-the-corinthia.html">Construction in the Corinthia</a>).&nbsp; We conducted an intensive survey in this upland basin in 2002 and I've just begun to analyze the distribution pattern of material across the landscape there.&nbsp; Since we only had about a week to do our survey at the site, we decided to sample the various parts of the basin so that we would capture the hillslopes, slope wash, the bottom of the basin and areas across the entire basin for east to west including fields in the immediate vicinity of the abandoned houses that David Pettegrew and I have so carefully documented.&nbsp; In hindsight, I wish we had surveyed the entire area since the results of our survey were so interesting.</p> <p><a href="http://myweb.fsu.edu/dpullen/">Daniel Pullen</a> and Timothy Gregory read the ceramics from the site and the entire <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a> helped out with the fieldwork.&nbsp; The basin produced material from the Final Neolithic (ca. 3300-2500 B.C.) to the

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modern period with noticeable concentrations of material in the Roman, Medieval, and Early Modern periods.&nbsp; In the maps below each dot represents a single artifact.&nbsp; </p> <p>The dates assigned to the various maps derive from the Chronotype dates and reflect the specificity with which our ceramicists could identify the individual artifacts.&nbsp; The modern houses are represented by little dots and the larger black dots are threshing floors (alonia). The coloring of the survey units represents the total density of material present in each unit.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572084238970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSFN" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571139679970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Final Neolithic</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571139683970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSFNEHI" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572084241970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>Final Neolithic to Early Helladic I</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157113968c970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSEBA" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572084261970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>Early Bronze Age</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572084265970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSEHI" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711396a4970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Early Helladic I</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572084278970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSEHII" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157208427f970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Early Helladic II</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711396b5970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSLBA" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157208428b970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Late Bronze Age</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711396bf970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSArchaic" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711396ca970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Archaic Period</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115720842ab970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSArchaic_Classical" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711396dc970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Archaic to Classical </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711396e8970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSArchaicHellenistic"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115720842c2970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>Archaic to Hellenistic</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115720842d0970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSEarlyRoman" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711396f5970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>Early Roman</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711396ff970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSRoman" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115720842e5970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Roman</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157113971c970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSRomanLate" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115720842ff970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>Late Roman</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571139738970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSRomanMedieval" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571139740970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Roman to Medieval</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571139746970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSMedieval" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572084321970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>Medieval</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157113975d970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSMedievalLate" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572084330970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Late Medieval</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571139770970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSModernEarly" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572084377970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Early Modern</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711397c3970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSModern" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011572084381970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Modern</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711397e9970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LSModernPresent" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115711397f2970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>Very Recent</p> <p align="left">It's clear, for example, that the prehistoric material clusters in a very different place than the highest density of ancient material (particularly the Roman material).&nbsp; In contrast, the "Greek" period material and Roman period material cluster to the northeast of house 4.&nbsp; Later, the Roman and Medieval material seems to concentrate in some of the same areas, particularly the units to the east of house 9.&nbsp; These clusters of material suggesting some local continuity in occupation or activity.&nbsp; For the material to

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cluster so relatively clearly in a small survey area was welcome and rather unexpected.&nbsp; It will certainly make my job of writing up the distributional data from the survey easier.</p> <p align="left">Check back soon (maybe not today, though!) for more on Lakka Skoutara over the coming weeks.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koustopetria Final Trench Plans STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koustopetria-final-trench-plans CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/14/2009 07:44:27 AM ----BODY: <p align="left">For those of you who wonder how exactly I contribute to the excavation component of Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (yes, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David</a> and <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/">Scott</a>), I present the fruits of my recent labors.&nbsp; These are the final trench plans from 5 of the 6 trenches.&nbsp; One is still a work in progress, but with any luck, I'll put it up when its done (today?).&nbsp; These plans were produced in ESRI ArcGIS from illustrations produced in the field by the trench teams.&nbsp; We digitize each plan that our trench supervisors produce and ideally this means that we have a graphic representation of each stratigraphic unit that they excavate.&nbsp; It's a time consuming process to digitize each plan, but we now have plans for each trench embedded with dimensions and elevation data and properly placed in relation to one another.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">So while these final plans look simplified (and they are), they actually contain a substantial amount of data in the background.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157202c695970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="396" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157202c69e970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>EU 8</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157202c6a7970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115710e2029970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>EU 9</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157202c6b7970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="397" alt="image"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157202c6c2970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>EU 10</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115710e2040970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="402" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115710e2053970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>EU 11</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115710e2065970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="402" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115710e207e970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>EU 12</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157202c70f970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="406" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157202c721970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>EU 13</p> <p align="left">Oh, and I haven't forgotten about the final PKAP podcast.&nbsp; It's somethin' else.&nbsp; I'll post it soon.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Reflecting on Academic Blogging at 500 Posts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: reflecting-on-academic-blogging-at-500-posts CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 07/13/2009 08:32:23 AM ----BODY: <p>I try to reflect on my own blogging every 100 posts or so.&nbsp; As I made my 500th post last, I decided to think a bit more about academic blogging.&nbsp; This was prompted by two things.&nbsp; First, I missed a little flurry of activity across the Ancient History blogosphere at the end of May (it has been <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-blog-doesblogging-matter.html">usefully aggregated here</a>).&nbsp; While the issue was framed quite broadly as "why blog?", most of the contributors to this conversation really were asking how does blogging matter in an a tenure-track academic career.&nbsp; And some even asked the more specific question: should blogging count toward research, teaching, or service responsibilities that most academic have.&nbsp; (The answer to that, seems a bit obvious -- it depends on the institution -- but the spirit of the question was good).&nbsp; </p> <p>This past weekend, I read the first couple of chapters of <a

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href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/264044762">Scott Rosenberg's <em>Say Everything: How Blogging Began and What It's Becoming and Why It Matters</em>. (New York 2009).</a>&nbsp; The key thing that these chapters reminded me was how radical blogging was in the days of Justin Hall (ahhh, the mid 1990s!).&nbsp; His proto-blog was intimate, compelling, and a real (or at least significantly visible) departure from previous uses of the internet.&nbsp; </p> <p>Academic blogs have tried to keep up a bit of a radical edge. Some bloggers write anonymously.&nbsp; Others write on explicitly radical topics.&nbsp; But few blogs these days embrace the radical potential of the medium.&nbsp; In fact, if anything blogs have become increasingly mainstream.&nbsp; Scholars who write popular books are encouraged to blog about them in order to increase their visibility and promote sales.&nbsp; Academics talk seriously and consistently about the role of blogs in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions.&nbsp; There have even been <a href="http://pdqweb.edublogs.org/">efforts (albeit abortive) to archive and publish</a> noteworthy blog posts in paper form.&nbsp; Needless to say, the present generation of digital publishing both in the commercial and academic setting is built atop blogging software -- particularly Wordpress.&nbsp; In fact, in a recent discussion with a colleague about starting a new academic journal it seemed like commonsense to begin it online (as a kind of peer-reviewed blog) before moving it to a print-on-demand format.&nbsp; Only the most nostalgic of academics can imagine a future where printed, paper, bound journals continue to play a central role in the academic discourse.&nbsp; As we watch the newspaper industry disintegrate around us, it may well be that we are watching the culmination of a process begun by Gutenberg.&nbsp; The era of mass produced text is here.</p> <p>It seems clear to me that we have witnessed the end of even academic blogging's most radical era and are now in midst of its move into the mainstream of academic consciousness either through its lessons being absorbed, its value specifically acknowledged, or the spark of creativity dissipating as the weight of conformity draws even the most ambitious blogger into line.&nbsp; This is not, of course, a particularly novel assertion.&nbsp; </p> <p>The interesting thing now, as I look ahead to my next 500 posts -- if there will be another 500 posts -- where does academic blogging go from here.&nbsp; Are we as academic bloggers to be satisfied that we've shepherded a once marginal medium into (or at least onto the threshold of) the academic mainstream or is there more work yet to do?</p> <p>This is what I value about blogging and what I strive to do as I look ahead (and yes, this is almost a fragmentary manifesto):</p> <p>1) Blogging is Personal.&nbsp; I admire my fellow bloggers who are able to find the intersection between their personal life and professional identity and make it clear in the blog.&nbsp; I hope that my blog can increasingly come to represent this complex intersection and bring more of my personality (and channel more of my inner Justin Hall) to what I write about (after all my blog can be found at: <a title="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/" href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/<strong><em>the_archaeology_of_the_me</em></strong >/</a>).&nbsp; I think <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">my collaborative</a> <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology</a> project reflects in an explicit way some of this direction in my writing.&nbsp; Most importantly, the personal character of academic blogging is a key aspect of how it is different from what we do in other venues.&nbsp; Conference paper, seminar papers, academic articles and books rarely capture explicitly the personality of the writer (except in the cases of senior scholars who are invited to speak in particularly reflexive ways).&nbsp; As scholarship is a reflection of one's own personality, blogging provides a venue to discuss this important context for the more public and traditional manifestations of the

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intellectual life.</p> <p>2) Blogging is Immediate.&nbsp; As an archaeologist, blogging provides an immediate venue for the results of research.&nbsp; This is not to suggest that one's immediate impressions are the definitive interpretation of a site, a dataset, or an archaeological discovery.&nbsp; My blog is full of false-starts, problematic interpretations, and revisions, but these reveal and preserve (to some extent) the archaeological process in a much more transparent way than traditional print journals.</p> <p>3) Blogging is Free.&nbsp; Blogging provides free access to the academic debate.&nbsp; While search engines are more and more likely to journals or even individual articles even in relatively broad searches, much of the content in these volumes cost some money to access.&nbsp; Blogs, for the most part, are free for the reader and every bit as likely (if not more so) to appear early in a search.&nbsp; (From my location, my blog appears on the top of the second page of search results produced by a Google search for "Mediterranean Archaeology" and on the front page for Google searches for "Survey Archaeology").&nbsp; </p> <p>4) Blogging Provides Space for Experimentation.&nbsp; Peer-review is central to the academic process of creating knowledge, but we'd be naive to think that all valuable knowledge emerges as a result of peer-review.&nbsp; The experimental space provided by blogs has allowed me to air ideas that have not yet (and may never) endure the rigors of the peer-review process.&nbsp; As usual, "reader beware", but on the other hand, these ideas, even a negative response to them, could potentially contribute something to ongoing academic or intellectual discussions.&nbsp; I've been pretty disappointed by my own unwillingness to experiment as much as the medium would allow.&nbsp; I hope to do more in this direction and feel stodgy when I read things like <a href="http://snarkmarket.com/blog/">Snarkmarket's</a> recent volume on <a href="http://snarkmarket.com/nla/">The New Liberal Arts</a>.</p> <p>5) Blogging is Interactive.&nbsp; Ideally.&nbsp; While my blog rarely receives more than a few comments per post and has yet to generate any sustained intellectual debate, blogs have this potential.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It goes without saying that blogging has competition for all these things.&nbsp; As journals take more seriously the potential provided through blog-like interfaces (particularly the opportunity for interactive discussions) and other media, like <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">Twitter</a>, offer even more immediate and potentially experimental environments in which to explore one's intellectual life, I think that the arrival of academic blogging does provide a kind of stable, middle ground between the open seminar (or the half-baked conference paper) and the journal article. </p> <p>So, thanks to all my readers and keep reading, please!&nbsp; And hold me to this manifesto and I try to think a bit more explicitly and productively about how the wide range of tools in a digital humanists toolbox can make a difference in the intellectual life of the community.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Susan Caraher EMAIL:

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IP: 134.129.203.245 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/susancaraher DATE: 07/13/2009 09:25:54 AM congratulations on 500! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David Gill EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 88.202.192.29 URL: http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/ DATE: 07/13/2009 11:50:45 AM Bill, many congratulations on reaching 500 posts. A great achievement. I too have reflected on the place of academic blogging: <a href="http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/2009/05/does-bloggingmatter.html">http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/2009/05/does-bloggingmatter.html</a> Best wishes David ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: f_chan EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 94.192.132.37 URL: http://cultureworlds.wordpress.com/ DATE: 08/04/2009 08:21:23 PM This article actually helped me decide whether or not to blog. So, thanks! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ishmael EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 79.64.218.70 URL: http://www.thepequod.org.uk DATE: 08/10/2009 04:48:46 AM Definitely agree that blogging appears to have become less radical. And it's a shame that academia - which should be exploiting blogs to open up controversial debate not accessible in more traditional media such as peer reviewed journals does seem a bit unwilling to make the leap into doing something different. Many academics (like myself) are still afraid to put their name to a blog, because of the fear that employers or other academics might not recognise that a blog post, written quickly as a work in progress, does not necessarily signify a casual approach to the demands of academic writing (incidentally, I wonder whether this is more of a problem in the UK, where I am based, whereas in the US there are fewer suspicions of the technology). As you say, even you have been surprised "by my own unwillingness to experiment as much as the medium would allow." On the other hand, it's easy to forget how new blogging technology is, such that there is still scope for the academic landscape to change beyond recognition 50 years hence. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Grand Forks in July STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: grand-forks-in-july CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 07/10/2009 01:08:51 PM ----BODY: <p style="text-align: center;">A walk down an alley.<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570fa4b8c970 c-pi"><img alt="Grand Forks in July" border="0" class="at-xid6a00d83451908369e2011570fa4b8c970c image-full " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570fa4b8c970c -800wi" title="Grand Forks in July" /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 07/10/2009 07:10:57 AM ----BODY: <p>I've haven't gotten back into a standard routine for blog reading yet (although some blogs I read religiously like <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">this</a> and <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">this</a> and <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">this</a> ).</p> <p>That being said, I've been looking at these from time to time:</p> <p><a href="http://www.fimoculous.com/">Rex Sorgatz's Fimoculous</a> and <a href="http://mediaite.com/">Mediaite</a>.</p> <p><a href="http://theneedleandthegroove.com/">The Needle and the Groove</a> is mostly about music that I don't know.</p> <p><a href="http://www.kottke.org/">kottke.org</a> always teaches me something new.</p> <p>If you haven't listened to <a href="http://beck.com/record_club/">Beck and friend's versions of some classic Velvet Underground tracks</a>, you're missing something unusual.</p> <p>I've also been enjoying <a href="http://www.cricinfo.com/engvaus2009/engine/current/match/345970.html">the first test of the Ashes</a>.&nbsp; And especially enjoying the <a

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href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/5livesportsextra">BBC 5 Radio</a> commentary on it.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching in the Sun: Revisiting the Study Tour STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-in-the-sun-revisiting-the-study-tour CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 07/09/2009 08:07:30 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Crossposted to <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a></em> <p>Last month we were lucky enough to have the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Honors College World Tour 2009 visit us for 10 days in Cyprus.&nbsp; Contrasting the approach used by this group to the approach used by the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project to a study tour/field school was quite useful.&nbsp; In fact, it led to several productive conversations with <a href="http://www.iup.edu/page.aspx?id=19017">IUP Economics Professor Nick Karatjes</a> who asked whether there existed a body of discipline-specific scholarship on study tours and field schools.&nbsp; I confessed that I did not know whether any existed, and this got me to thinking about what a scholarship of study tours or field schools would look like.&nbsp; What would be the key issues to a discussion of study tours in the context of Mediterranean archaeology or of humanities based study tours more generally?</p> <p>Thinking on the fly, I propose 3 issues that would be good starting points to a conversation about teaching in the sun:</p> <p>1) <strong>Assessment</strong>. As with all things in the academy today, any conversation on teaching in the sun must begin and end with assessment.&nbsp; How do we assess student learning in immersive environments? Unlike assessment in a classroom environment where many rubrics focus on what goes on within the limited confines of the classroom itself, assessing the success or failure of a field school or study tour must take into account all of the components under the direct control of the project supervisors.&nbsp; Thus, any mode of assessment must take into consideration everything from the basic logistical details (food, accommodation, travel) to the more typical pedagogical components of the education experience.&nbsp; The pedagogical experience expands from the laboratory like environment of the classroom to encompass the full range of student experiences.&nbsp; </p> <p>2) <strong>The Limits of Student Engagement</strong>.&nbsp; As so much of the value of the study tour or field school is the potential for immersion in a unfamiliar place or engaging in the regular practical application of skills acquired either

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in the field or in the classroom.&nbsp; Both the need to survive in a foreign country and the need to consistently perform tasks or demonstrate skills in a "real world" environment requires a degree of student engagement in excess of the typical course in the humanities.&nbsp; The stakes can be higher too.&nbsp; The failure of a student to perform a task correctly over the course of a field school could produce results that either undermine the goal of the team or invalidate research results.&nbsp; The inability to deal with a foreign environment can cause a degree of mental discomfort that may exceed the discomfort produced in all but the most rigorous courses.&nbsp; The key in aspect then in a scholarly engagement with study tours or field schools will be how to successfully engage the students in their skill building exercises and foreign environment both the maximize their experiences and to avoid difficult results.&nbsp; At the same time, it is necessary to understand the background and potential of a group of students to determine the degree to which they are capable of engaging their surroundings.&nbsp; Pushing a group of students to go beyond their comfort zone can be good, but going a step to far could have unfortunate results.</p> <p>3) <strong>Structure and Chaos</strong>.&nbsp; One of the key components of any study tour or field school is balancing organized or structured learning opportunities against unstructured opportunities for students to explore their surrounding and engage the local culture on their own terms.&nbsp; On the one hand, living and working in a foreign country is a great opportunities for students to engage critically with everyday life in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, to simulate within more familiar surroundings (only abroad can going to the post office be an opportunity for cross-cultural critique).&nbsp; Unstructured opportunities for engagement put greater pressure on the individual student to create a meaningful space for themselves within a foreign culture.&nbsp; On the other hand, unstructured time requires the faculty to allow students to find their comfort zone even if that is not the exact type of engagement that faculty might wish for the students.&nbsp; The more organized and structured the engagement with the foreign culture is, however, the more that the experience of living and working abroad is partitioned off into a specific place and orchestrated set of experiences.&nbsp; Less structured time, however, runs the risk of allowing students to chose not to engage with the host community and, say, hide in their rooms or only engage aspects of the local culture that seem familiar.</p> <p>I wrote the body of this blog post when in Cyprus and reflecting on it now, I think that the three issues broached here apply to some extent to teaching and assessing learning in a classroom environment as well -- except that when running a study tour or field school, these issues are pushed to the foreground as the instructor has far more control over the day-to-day life of the students than an instructor in a more traditional classroom setting.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Nick Karatjas EMAIL: IP: 71.60.62.11

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URL: http://profile.typepad.com/6p011571f50889970b DATE: 07/11/2009 11:44:49 AM Interesting--I have found a few articles which relate from 3 different outlets: College Teaching, World Archaeology, and The Journal of Experiential Education. Once I have read them I will let you if I find anything to add to the above discussion. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Swingline Stapler STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: swingline-stapler CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 07/08/2009 01:09:21 PM ----BODY: <p>Just because it's a nice day out, it looked cool, and I am working on revising an article:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570e7497c970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571dc1f04970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Swingline Stapler</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Body and the Liturgy STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-body-and-the-liturgy CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 07/08/2009 08:30:43 AM ----BODY: <p>The <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_early_christian_studies/toc/earl.1 7.2.html">summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies</a> is a tribute to the work of Patricia Cox Miller.&nbsp; <a

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href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/29428668">Her book on dreams in Late Antiquity</a> has been particularly useful to my work on dreams in an archaeological context.&nbsp; The volume is dedicated to a series of articles focusing on the body in Late Antiquity and represents the wide range of topics that draw upon the study of the body as a key paradigm.</p> <p>The article in the recent volume of the <em>JECS</em> that caught my attention is Derek Krueger's "The Unbounded Body in the Age of Liturgical Reproduction".&nbsp; In it, he explores the idea that in Late Antiquity there were very few checks on the proliferation of the liturgy and its power to reproduce the body of God.&nbsp; As evidence, he explores passages in John Moschos' <em>Pratum Spirituale</em>.&nbsp; In particular, he examines the well-known story of the children who play-act the liturgy and, when they utter the words of consecration accidentally consecrate the host.&nbsp; Thus unordained and untrained children were able conjure the body of God through the words of the liturgy alone.&nbsp; Krueger then goes on to site some other passages that, in a general way, reinforce his observations.</p> <p>Several years ago, in a thoroughly unsuccessful and consequently unpublished article, I argued that the the same proliferation of the liturgy explained the appearance of liturgical phrases in inscriptions across the Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; These texts appeared not just in the context of the church building, but also in domestic space and in public space (particularly fortifications).&nbsp; While these texts rarely contained the entire text of the anaphora (central to the act of consecration), I argue that they frequently invoke the liturgy specifically and establish a pars pro toto relationship.&nbsp; The implication here is that (1) literate folks were familiar enough with the words of the liturgy to recognize a liturgical phrase in an inscription.&nbsp; Krueger's work substantiates this assumption.&nbsp; And (2) the liturgy itself was not the exclusive domain of the clergy, but could be appropriated by ordinary folks for their homes (especially in Syria) or by the elite in monumental fortifications.&nbsp; Thus, there exists some tension between clergy's position as the "ritual experts" in relation to the liturgy and the proliferation of the liturgy among members of the laity.&nbsp; </p> <p>These arguments are persuasive and important, especially for any scholar (like myself) who see the ritual formality of the liturgy as crucial to its role in establishing a clearly defined relationship between the laity, the clergy, and the divine.&nbsp; I can't get around the idea that clergy's authority in Late Antique society was in some way linked to their role in the liturgy.&nbsp; After all, the most visible mark of the liturgy and clerical presence in a community was the monumentalized expression of liturgical space -- the church building.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Varieties of Archaeological Experience STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-varieties-of-archaeological-experience CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/07/2009 07:32:47 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the recurring themes in this blog is an emphasis on the varieties of archaeological experience in a Mediterranean context (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr eam-archaeology-working-paper.html">e.g.</a>). Despite my insistence (primarily to myself) that different approaches to archaeological knowledge can exist concurrently and possess a kind of validity rooted in a particular cultural discourse, it is nevertheless difficult to put this kind of approach to archaeology into practice. It’s one thing to accept that different modern archaeological methods – say, intensive pedestrian survey, stratigraphic excavation, and remote sensing – can produce different results, but another thing to try to understand (and risk validating!) the cultural context for, say, metal detector looting. <p>This being said, by the end of our field season on Cyprus, we witnessed at least four different archaeological methods each with its own goals and contexts… <p>1) Stratigraphic Excavation.&nbsp; This method of excavation has become the standard for academic excavations the world over.&nbsp; Its basic premise lies in excavating according to depositional contexts typically evident by changes in soil type.&nbsp; The goal is to associate the depositional process with the cultural material preserved in each stratigraphic layer.&nbsp; This process melds the processes that create the archaeological environment with chronological and functional indicators of past human activities. This method for archaeological investigation is widely accepted that it can produce a kind arrogance in its practitioners that verges on colonial conceit.&nbsp; <p>2) Non-Stratigraphic Excavation. The issue with stratigraphic excavation is that it can be very slow – especially with student excavators in complex environments. The complexity and slow pace of our excavation made it clear that we were not going to be able to answer some of our research questions. In particular, we were not going to be able to excavate deep enough to expose any of the Classical/Hellenistic phase to our settlement at Koutsopetria. At one point our collaborator within the Department of Antiquities suggested that we as “academic” archaeologist excavate too slowly and that we should make a deep, non-stratigraphic sounding to answer a specific research question. This evoked a rather strong negative reaction from many of the senior project staff and conjured up images of Schliemann’s Great Trench at Troy. On the other hand, the suggestion revealed an important distinction between the goals and methods of the state archaeological apparatus and an academic research project. The state, in its capacity as arbiter of official cultural values and “owner” of all archaeological material and sites had a particular right to approach excavation in a way that was inappropriate (at best) for a foreign archaeological mission whose right to excavate depended in part on their commitment to produce detailed documentation from the inherently destructive practice of archaeology. <p>3) Looting with Metal Detectors. This year, more than any other year in the past, the metal detector crowd was out in force across our entire research area. While we did not actually catch them in action, the divots left from their destructive shovel tests were evident across the entire site. Local informants and the Sovereign Base Area police told us that the metal detecting was organized and systematic at our site. The metal detecting team had a powerful metal detector that could find metal objects well below the plow zone. Apparently this more powerful type of metal detector is

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illegal (and it was illegal in any event to use it so close to a registered archaeological site), but the folks using it stationed look outs to keep them from being caught. At one point, a man who claimed to be a good kind of metal detector guy, talked with us about the bad kind of metal detector guys who were giving his hobby a bad name. <p>4) The Mist of the Past. We were also visited by a developer who grew up in the area. He was very keen to demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the local archaeological landscape and talked in some detail about the various local discoveries. He made a point of explaining how local people could detect archaeological sites by observing the way that the morning fog moved across the ground. The coastal position of our site ensures a consistent morning fog making it well suited this kind of remote sensing technique.&nbsp; Moreover, the expertise necessary to detect the slight changes in the way that fog moved across the landscape required a training rooted in the social organization of the local community.&nbsp; According our informant, this archaeological method passed down through families and carried with it a kind of distinct (and potentially secret) knowledge of the history of the area. <p>The four kinds of archaeological methods that we encountered this year on Cyprus reveal different methods for appropriating and making meaningful the archaeological landscape.&nbsp; The overlapping techniques present in the reading of a single landscape (and revealed over the course of a single 4 week field season) was a great antidote to the exclusive, modernist perspectives offered by stratigraphic archaeology.&nbsp; This is not to say that we'll unleash a cadre of metal detector wielding undergraduates across the site next summer, but rather to remind ourselves that our methods and the meaning that they project onto the research area represents only a small fraction of the archaeological "carrying capacity" of a particular place. ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 70.248.215.239 URL: DATE: 07/07/2009 08:43:40 AM It seems like your fourth category, "mists of the past," could have some connection to the Dream Archaeology you have discussed in previous posts. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.174.205 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 07/07/2009 08:49:20 AM Rangar, Absolutely... except the mists of the past is a conscious archaeological technique which may have some contact with reality (who know?). In contrast,

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dream archaeology is has feet both in the working of the unconscious mind (dreaming) and the conscious interpretative facilities (interpreting the dream). ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.156.70.186 URL: DATE: 07/07/2009 06:26:15 PM This summer, I visited a cousin of mine, who lives in Lamia. He's a civil engineer but very susceptible to populist theories. I haven't seen him in about 10 years, so I was telling him about my archaeological fieldwork. At some point, he said, next time I am investigating a site, I should simply print out an aerial photograph and give it to him because he has a friend who can detect historical layers through ESP. So, he can do a "mental" excavation and tell me whether I'll find anything below. Now, that is as "remote" as remote sensing gets. During this visit, I was translating what my cousin was saying to my brother-in-law, a very rational Swedish economist. I censored my own translation during this passage. I was simply to embarrassed (for my cousin) to translate this to my brother-in-law. There were many other things that I left untranslated, mostly various conspiracy theories with the Economists as tools of the Americans. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: CamArchGrad EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 96.48.68.141 URL: DATE: 07/07/2009 08:07:18 PM I think there always will be a tension between the need for detail and the need to answer research questions. Moreover, I've noticed in the Mediterranean, archaeologists from the region tend to be more cavalier about doing soundings. When in Italy we cleaned out several structures with a backhoe and dumped the medieval layers in a pile to get at the roman strata. Our English archaeologists were horrified. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.174.205 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 07/08/2009 08:35:40 AM Kostis, A very rational colleague of mine has a former student (and PKAP volunteer) who claims to have color synesthesia (there is apparently no known cure or treatment) which allows her to see space in colors. She looked at some of our standard black and white air photos and made notes where things appeared in different colors. My colleague investigated some of these places over the last year or so and remains convinced of the potential of this very unorthodox form of remote sensing. The ESP story is brilliant. That's another great example of how people map the landscape through their unconscious! Tanagras would be proud!

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Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Houses of Lakka Skoutara STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-houses-of-lakka-skoutara CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 07/06/2009 08:01:42 AM ----BODY: <p>As I settle back into my American routine, I'll try to bring my readers up to date on my summer adventures.&nbsp; I just returned from 10 days (or so) of fieldwork in the Corinthia at a site called Lakka Skoutara.&nbsp; As I've reported here earlier, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I spent much of that time recording a collection of rural houses in various states of abandonment.&nbsp; To do this, we (mostly David) described the condition of the house in minute detail, measured the houses, photographed them, and this year we produced small sketch plans of a few typical houses in the area.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, I've included here three sketch plans and a photographs (with apologies to architects everywhere -- particularly <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Kostis Kourelis</a>!).&nbsp; It will be clear that these houses are rather typical Balkan type "long houses".&nbsp; House 10 preserved the traditional divider that separated the area for agricultural work or animals from the area reserved for domestic activities.&nbsp; House 4 is said to be the oldest house in the area and our sketch plan must represent multiple phases or significant repairs. House 10 was by far the best preserved and it is clear that it is still maintained for seasonal use, probably associated with the cultivation of olives.&nbsp; </p> <p>The large basin's for resin which were commonly associated with several of these houses show that resin collection was an important activity for residents of the Lakka.&nbsp; In addition to basins for resin collecting, most the houses had a cistern or well near by, as well as an aloni (or threshing floor) and a oven.&nbsp; Despite being identified as the oldest house, the aloni associated with House 4 must be earlier than the house as at least part of the house sits atop the aloni and it would have been impractical for the aloni to be that close to a domestic area.&nbsp; Threshing grain is dusty work.&nbsp; Several of the houses preserved a small area for a walled garden (see House 3 and probably House 4).&nbsp; The wall probably served to keep animals out or chickens in.</p> <p align="center"><strong>House 3</strong></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570d329ae970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LakkaSkoutara_House3" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571c803b0970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570d329b6970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="LakkaSkoutara_House4_Photo" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571c803b5970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><strong>House 4</strong></p> <p align="center"><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571c803be970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LakkaSkoutara_House4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571c803c3970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570d329c1970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570d329c5970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><strong>House 10</strong></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571c803ce970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LakkaSkoutara_House10" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570d329ca970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571c803d1970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011571c803dd970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.156.70.186 URL: DATE: 07/06/2009 10:15:32 AM Great to have your blog back as part of daily ritual. And the houses are great stuff. I love the carbohydrate axis between aloni and bake oven with everything else just a stage along the process. Interesting about the resin basin; I've never seen this before. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Loutro Oraias Elenis in the Rain, a Church, and Thoughts of Going Home STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: loutro-oraias-elenis-in-the-rain-a-church-and-thoughts-of-going-home CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 06/29/2009 11:58:30 PM ----BODY:

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<p>Yesterday afternoon, there was an American-style summer thunderstorm here in Loutro Elenis.&nbsp; Complete with hail, lightening ground strikes, torrential downpours, and thunder, the storm represents (to my mind) another example of American cultural imperialism.&nbsp; The Corinthia, typically, gets very little rain in the summer and thunder storms are relatively rare.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157098b253970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115718de651970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157098b275970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157098b284970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The nice thing about this storm is that it seemed to tell me that I should be going home.&nbsp; And I am.&nbsp; Tonight.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157098b29f970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="AyKatherineDome" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157098b2ae970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>It also brought to mind a nice reminder of summer field seasons in the past.&nbsp; In 2001, I was doing an extensive survey with the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>.&nbsp; This involved hiking by myself through the mountains of the southeastern Corinthia and noting what I saw.&nbsp; One late June afternoon, I came across the barely nucleated settlement that we now call Lakka Skoutara.&nbsp; Just as I had finished doing a little walking tour of a few of the abandoned houses -- the very abandoned houses that we prepared for publication this summer -- a late June thunder storm rolled through the mountains.&nbsp; I panicked and tried to find the biggest (but shortest) olive tree for some shelter when I caught the slightest glimpse of a tiny, whitewashed dome.&nbsp; My keen, Byzantinist-trained mind immediately realized that there is only one kind of white-washed, domed building in the Greek countryside.&nbsp; A church!&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157098b2c2970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="AyKatherineChurch" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115718de6a7970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>It turned out to be a small, rural chapel dedicated to St. Katherine who is not particularly known for protecting wanderers, extensive surveyers, or travelers, but she obliged my immediate needs nonetheless and provided me shelter from the storm.</p> <p>As I look forward to going home and returning to my more normal routine, I couldn't help but think that the rain yesterday put a nice bookend on our work here in the Corinthia.&nbsp; First, it evoked my first experience of the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co llapse.html">Lakka</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/pr ovisional-discard.html">Skoutara</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/06/co nstruction-in-the-corinthia.html">basin</a>, where <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I concluded

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almost a decade of observation and documentation this year.&nbsp; It also foreshadowed my return to the US with a quintessentially American weather.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157098b2dd970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="LoutroSunnyAM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115718de6ba970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">So, thank for the patience with my somewhat erratic blogging schedule.&nbsp; Once I get back to the US and settled in, I'll return to my normal blogging routine and post updates on my summer fieldwork, plans for the fall, and various other topics.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 06/30/2009 11:05:50 PM I miss the Corinthia. Happy travels! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Missy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 35.13.114.155 URL: DATE: 10/22/2010 01:20:26 PM I think you stayed in the exact hotel and the same room I stayed in when I was in Loutro Elenis. I studied abroad this summer and just randomly did a search on Loutro Elenis, and this site came up. Ha. I took almost the exact same photo (the second and last photo) Just sort of made me laugh -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Collapse STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: collapse CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 06/26/2009 02:46:21 AM ----BODY:

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<p align="left">Over the past week, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I have been able to observe the various processes which caused a series of rural houses to collapse.&nbsp; One key issue is with their tile roofs.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160dd87970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="600" alt="Tiles" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160dda3970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">A number of houses seem to have had their roofs systematically stripped of tile. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115706bb054970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="600" alt="TilelessRoof" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115706bb070970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">In some cases, the tiles slide off the roof as parts of the roof gives way over time.&nbsp; As the tiles slide off the roof, they frequently form halos around the house...</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115706bb0a1970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="TileFall" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160de41970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115706bb100970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="600" alt="TileFall2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160deaf970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">In other instances, the tile roof stays more or less in tact, but the walls of the house begin to splay.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160e068970 b-pi"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115706bb1c4970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="600" alt="WallProblems" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160df8b970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></a></p> <p align="left">In some cases, the home owner tried to buttress the wall with another wall, but this did not seem to work entirely in this case.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115706bb246970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="600" alt="WallProblems2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160e00d970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">When the walls collapsed, the tile roof caved in on the interior of the house.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160e068970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="RoofCollapse1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115706bb346970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160e0fd970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="RoofCollapse2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160e12e970b

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-pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">If the interior of the house doesn't get squashed by the collapsing roof, then the various interior partition walls (which were often just plaster and mud) collapse as well.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115706bb457970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="WallProblemsInt" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157160e1b1970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.248.150.90 URL: DATE: 06/26/2009 09:04:55 AM There's some great comperanda from American vernacular architecture about the communal cycle of roofs. Roofs are a part of the house that has to be repaired at the end of every winter. The repair is done communally and doesn't require a visiting specialist. Robert Blair St. George has argued that you can use roofs to gauge the degree of communal cohesion, self-sufficiency, etc. Roof tiles are inherently interesting because they are by design recycled every year. With abandonment, of course, one sees a different stratification (roof tiles and wood at the bottom of the trench, followed by stone and mortar with a distinctive catenary curve forming around the walls.) GOOD STUFF. I can't wait to see your documentation. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Provisional Discard STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: provisional-discard CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 06/24/2009 07:21:43 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I have been visiting a photographing a settlement in the Corinthian countryside.&nbsp; Today we observed a few commonplace examples of what archaeologists call provisional discard.&nbsp; That means discard that occurs in an orderly fashion

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after an object is no longer needed for its primary use.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115705adec9970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ProvisionalDiscard1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115705adeda970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115715015df970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="600" alt="ProvisionalDiscard2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115705adf07970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Provisional discard is part of the numerous processes through which artifacts become part of the archaeological record from their place in more everyday life.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.248.150.90 URL: DATE: 06/24/2009 09:39:07 AM Oh man. This is so interesting, and I imagine the method of documentation so difficult. What kind of database criteria might one use? Walking through a bunch of different environments this summer (elite Kephisia suburb, industrial Boeotia, Athenian ghetto, Lamia, provincial beach near Stylida) I noticed a consistent aesthetic of disjunction. Much of it was a material disregard for juxtapositions, connections, joints. This ad hoc sensibility--not only in spolia, but also in new constructions--completely disregards any rules of appropriateness (middle class? protestant? western?) A yard accumulation in Appalachian North Carolina, let's say, follows the same principles. So it can't be strictly national or regional. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Construction in the Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: construction-in-the-corinthia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 06/23/2009 09:06:14 AM ----BODY:

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<p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157052aaff970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ContingentConstruction" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157052ab10970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Four construction styles appear in one building in the southeastern Corinthia.&nbsp; A Cinder block pediment rests atop a fieldstone wall with tile chinking.&nbsp; Meanwhile a twisted piece of metal holds the now collapsed roof beam in place.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 67.66.94.180 URL: DATE: 06/23/2009 09:14:14 AM That's great. Is it near anything else of significance in the Corinthia? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 94.66.241.137 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 06/23/2009 09:17:21 AM Rangar, Ummm... no. It's about 5 km east of Sophiko in a place called Lakka Skoutara.

Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Blog Statistics STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-blog-statistics CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Weblogs DATE: 06/20/2009 10:27:04 PM ----BODY:

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<p>As we get ready to leave the island and <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">shut down our empire of the new media</a> for the season (although some new v-logs will appear on the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/PKAP2009">PKAP YouTube channel</a>), we thought we might report on some of the statistics for the blog.&nbsp; This is largely in response to the most asked question: "do people actually read your postings?".&nbsp; The answer is emphatically yes.&nbsp; Here are the page views for the past month:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/">Archaeol ogy of the Mediterranean World</a>: 2061<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>Season Staff Blog</a>: 1239<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em> Graduate Student Perspectives</a>: 1551<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em> Undergraduate Perspectives</a>: 1192</p> <p>Total: 6043 page views</p> <p>Thanks for reading!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Narrating Pyla-Koutsopetria STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: narrating-pyla-koutsopetria CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/20/2009 02:49:29 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the simple pleasures of the end of fieldwork are the various papers that we write and the opportunity to present in narrative form the history of the site.&nbsp; There is nothing particularly binding about the following narrative, nor is it even a working hypothesis, but a collection of potential interpretations in narrative form.&nbsp; It sure beats the dry-as-bones digitalizing and number crunching that will be at the core of our more formal analysis! <p>By the later stages of the Late Bronze Age the various settlements in the area consolidated their population on the height of PylaKokkinokremos.&nbsp; Taking advantage of the imposing positions afforded by the coastal height of Kokkinokremos and the now-infilled harbor, this settlement must have controlled an impressive stretch of the coastline with views incorporating around the curving aspect of Larnaka bay.&nbsp; This community comes to an abrupt end sometime around the year 1200 after existing for less than a century.&nbsp; There is no real evidence of continuity between this community and later settlement in the area.&nbsp; So, during the Archaic-

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Classical period it was probably a new population who established the small, fortified settlement on the height of Vigla surrounded by not insignificant shrines both inland and on the coastal zone.&nbsp; By the Hellenistic period (4th-2nd century BC), it is possible that the small settlement on Vigla received a garrison perhaps of mercenaries funded by the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt who sought to hold fast to Cyprus and awarded the governors of the province the status of strategoi (or general) reflecting the military significance of their post.&nbsp; The Roman conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean brought to an end the almost constant wars between the various successors of Alexander the Great and regional powers. This is likely revealed at our site by the gradual occupation of the coastal plain of Koutsopetria.&nbsp; During Late Antiquity, or the Late Roman period, the coastal site of Koutsopetria reached its heyday. The substantial Early Christian basilica formed the western border of a prosperous coastal town. To the east of the church there appears to have been domestic space, but there are suggestions of another monumental building based on stray architectural fragments found during the survey. There is also evidence for what may have been modest harbor-side facilities.&nbsp; Only recently have we discovered some faint traces of post-ancient occupation on the site. Our excavation has revealed a substantial post-ancient fill that preserved some pottery that we can tentatively date to the 10th-13th century. The fill was associated with a wall that seems to be a substantial, late refurbishment of the area near the basilica.&nbsp; Later still, In the post-Medieval period there are only traces of activity across the site. There‚Äôs a rough wall that flanks the modern coastal road and the faint remains of a possible 19th century road running along a barely visible coastal ridge.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.248.150.90 URL: DATE: 06/20/2009 05:53:42 AM Very impressive. What a few sherds can tell. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More PKAP Video on YouTube STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-pkap-video-on-youtube CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/15/2009 10:40:01 PM

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----BODY: <p align="left">Here are some more <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PKAP</a> Video from our <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/PKAP2009">YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp; Check out the interview with our filmmaker <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2009/06/py la-koutsopetria-filmmaker-ian-ragsdale.html">Ian Ragsdale here</a>.</p> <p align="center"> <div align="center"> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFC-DD9C333F4C5D:840a0567-7081-49d3-9c6daae9cb156a91" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px"><div id="db737b1a-12f9-4abc8ade-6b4259efaba5" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA0jqLV7sOs&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;" target="_new"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157022d05e970c -pi" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('db737b1a-12f9-4abc-8ade-6b4259efaba5'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = &quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;object width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;movie\&quot; value=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/zA0jqLV7sOs&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; &gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;wmode\&quot; value=\&quot;transparent\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;embed src=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/zA0jqLV7sOs&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; type=\&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash\&quot; wmode=\&quot;transparent\&quot; width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/embed&gt;&lt;\/object&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&quot;;" alt=""></a></div></div></div></div> <p align="center"></p> <div align="center"> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFCDD9C333F4C5D:fe0a0761-49ae-492d-ac67-9a811ddd7f58" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; paddingtop: 0px"><div id="17fe4737-859a-4573-9501-ecbd0307890c" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpqZkmbvVcE&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;" target="_new"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157117ec6e970b -pi" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('17fe4737-859a-4573-9501-ecbd0307890c'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = &quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;object width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;movie\&quot; value=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/YpqZkmbvVcE&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; &gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;wmode\&quot; value=\&quot;transparent\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;embed src=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/YpqZkmbvVcE&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; type=\&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash\&quot; wmode=\&quot;transparent\&quot; width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/embed&gt;&lt;\/object&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&quot;;" alt=""></a></div></div></div></div> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Filmmaker Ian Ragsdale STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-filmmaker-ian-ragsdale CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/15/2009 04:29:26 AM ----BODY: <p>Things are getting hectic here as <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PKAP</a> heads into its final phases, so I'll let our resident documentary filmmaker provide some content.&nbsp; Below is a short email interview with Ian Ragsdale.&nbsp; I've asked him the same questions that I asked to Joe Patrow, our last documentary filmmaker, two years ago.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">For that interview click here</a>.&nbsp; <p><strong>What were your goals in shooting a documentary with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project?</strong> <p>As an aspiring archaeologist as well as a professional videographer, I arrived in Cyprus with a variety of goals.&nbsp; My most basic goals are to provide PKAP with videos to increase the exposure of the project, its mission, and its directors.&nbsp; It is my hope that these videos will assist PKAP to educate students as well as retain and attract new sources of funding.&nbsp; Before I arrived, I honestly did not have clear concepts about what form such videos would take, but my goal now is to create short video posts covering the personal and archaeological experiences of members of the field team (already available online) and additionally make a 30 to 60 minute documentary about the archaeology of the project.&nbsp; On a professional and academic level, this video project is a great way for me to show a diversity of filmmaking skills in a new environment and gain real archaeology field work experience.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This experience should also prove critical in my applications to graduate school.&nbsp; On a personal level, the trip to Cyprus has been a refreshing break from a strenuous and chaotic freelance videography career.&nbsp; I haven't been to Europe to shoot movies since 2003 and 2004, and it's been a wonderful and challenging opportunity.&nbsp; As expecting parents, my wife, who is also here in Cyprus, and I are also happy that we've already taken our child on an international trip.&nbsp; It sets a good precedent for the future! <p><strong>How is your work different from PKAP’s earlier documentary work, namely Joe Patrow’s award-winning <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html"><em >Survey on Cyprus</em></a><em> </em>and <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><em>Emer ging Cypriot</em></a>, his series of shorts?</strong><br>My work is different from Joe's in a few ways.&nbsp; Most fundamentally, Joe worked with PKAP before the project undertook any excavations, so the work going on at the PKAP site has been incredibly different from what he captured on camera.&nbsp; While artifact collection and processing has been similar, the simple fact that PKAP is now digging into the ground has given me a whole new category of field methods to cover. I've been able to build on Joe's work by covering a variety of field

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methods and other scenes non-existent at the PKAP site when Joe was last here.&nbsp; As an aspiring archaeologist, I also have a different perspective on the work that PKAP is doing.&nbsp; Although I am working on videos for the general public, I'm also trying to specifically reach the aspiring-archaeologist undergrad set with interviews and videos that address the questions and interests of someone curious about archaeology as a profession.&nbsp; Since I am in that same place in my life, it's a great perspective for me to try and give others watching my videos. <p><strong>Can you describe your relationship to the Project?</strong> <p>Although I have been brought to PKAP as a professional videographer, I feel like much more than a hired hand sent out to capture video of Mediterranean archaeology.&nbsp; I'm living, eating, and riding bumper cars with field team members and sweating in the trenches excavating whenever I get the chance.&nbsp; I've unearthed artifacts, measured ancient walls, and earned my blisters just like everyone else.&nbsp; About the only thing that is different is every evening I go into my room and edit video, and occasionally I appear randomly with a camera and demand an interview.&nbsp; Because I have four weeks here - three weeks of excavations and one week for interviews - I have been able to get all the footage I need while also getting some experience digging.&nbsp; I must also say that the closeness that I feel to PKAP is not only because of my interest in the work going on here, but truly because of the warm reception I have received from the staff and the field team.&nbsp; I can only hope that the PKAP directors don't mind me being chummy... <p><strong>Did anything surprise you about working closely and being a member of the PKAP team?</strong> <p>It's a fairly stock response, but I didn't have too many preconceptions.&nbsp; I've been on many group trips with close quarters, shared meals, and long hours, so I experienced no hardship in that sense.&nbsp; One thing that has been interesting is that, as a filmmaker, I have been afforded the opportunity to constantly step back and "people-watch" at the PKAP site.&nbsp; There are a great many wonderful individuals on the trip here, and together they have formed many strange and unique alliances and small-group cultures without developing cliques.&nbsp; Moving from trench to trench across the site, I have been able to interact with all the workgroups and see their quirks and listen to their conversations.&nbsp; I have been surprised and pleased at how much fun folks can have in 105 degree heat, no wind, engulfed in dust, and with no relief in site but a handful of pizza-flavored bagel chips at 5:00. <p><strong>Do you feel that your presence and work on the project contributed to the project's overall goals?</strong> <p>It's been great to see the openness, on the part of the project's directors, to so-called "new media" interacting with archaeology. Only since the invention of YouTube is free bandwidth for video available to anyone to present their videos to the world, and PKAP is all about taking advantage of such tools.&nbsp; I think that the final word about my impact on the project's goals will come several years down the road, as funding and other attention is directed towards the project via the videos. <p><strong>What did you have to teach the archaeologists in order to make your work there successful?</strong><br>I'm an extremely flexible filmmaker and I like to shoot with minimal impact on my subjects, so I didn't really have to fight anyone to conform to some Kubrick-esque demands in order to get a critical interview about a trowel.&nbsp; I think the most important thing that a filmmaker can do is to instill confidence in his or her subjects so that they can feel comfortable letting the filmmaker, for instance, crawl over their newly-discovered antiquities trying to pull off a neat shot.&nbsp; My work in the trenches really showed that I was serious about archaeology and would present both the work and the people faithfully.<strong>\</strong></p> <p><strong>How much footage have you accumulated during your three weeks of shooting?</strong><br>So far I've shot twelve hours, but I anticipate on

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shooting 18-20 hours total once I've completed the formal interviews next week.</p> <p><strong>How was the footage shot -- can you give us some technical specifications without being too technical?<br></strong>I'm shooting with a Panasonic DVX100 miniDV camera, editing with Final Cut Pro, producing special effects using Motion, and creating original background music for the YouTube clips using Garage Band.&nbsp; I always shoot with a polarizing filter on my camera, which is a filter that reduces glare from the sky, sea and other reflecting surfaces so that I can get nice shots of the blue sky over Cyprus.&nbsp; This filter also protects my lens from dust and grit, which is a reality on an archaeological dig.&nbsp; Whenever practical, I shoot with the camera on a tripod.&nbsp; Shooting handheld makes it must faster to switch from shot to shot, and it is sometimes easier to pull off pans with just the hands, but having the camera on a tripod is extra insurance that my shot will be steady enough to use in the final product.</p> <p><strong>What will happen to the footage? Does it have archival value?<br></strong>PKAP has already purchased an external hard drive that will hold this year's footage in a totally digital, versatile form, and which PKAP will keep for future use.&nbsp; I believe that the interviews may hold some archival value, as they capture, in a nutshell, the perspectives of PKAP staff in 2009.&nbsp; If the PKAP site ever undergoes fullscale excavation or even conversion to a tourist attraction, then the interviews could be an interesting feature of a visitor's center or excavation archives. <p><strong>What are your future goals with the project?<br></strong>As I begin graduate education in anthropology and archaeology, it would be wonderful to continue my association with the project as both a member of the field team and a filmmaker.&nbsp; Right now though I'm really living in the moment, still trying to figure out what I'm going to shoot in the fifteen minutes following completion of this questionnaire. <p><strong>What other projects are you working on now and how can we follow them?<br></strong>In the past year I've shot documentaries on slow food, family farms, and Olympic gymnasts and have traveled to Tuscon, Philadelphia, and all over Texas for my work.&nbsp; I'm based in Houston and my production company, Big Ape Productions has a website: <a href="http://www.bigapefilms.com">www.bigapefilms.com</a>.&nbsp; The site is new, but we are updating it with content as fast as we can.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Pyla-Koutsopetria on YouTube STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-pyla-koutsopetria-on-youtube CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/12/2009 10:59:16 PM

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----BODY: <div align="left">Our resident filmmaker, Ian Ragsdale, has produced three more video log (vlog) shorts on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.&nbsp; As the students prepare to return to the US leaving the trench supervisors and senior staff a hectic week of processing finds and rapping up final documentation, it seems fitting to begin with a video dedicated to the hard work and fun that our volunteers contributed to the project over the last month.</div> <div align="left">&nbsp;</div> <div align="center"> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFC-DD9C333F4C5D:a01c2c60-4c09-4da8-8de68572a3c24958" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px"><div id="2eb6925a-7e17-4de5af16-d4158814d59b" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbIYd5bYKxk&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;" target="_new"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157103b72e970b -pi" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('2eb6925a-7e17-4de5-af16-d4158814d59b'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = &quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;object width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;movie\&quot; value=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/XbIYd5bYKxk&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; &gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;wmode\&quot; value=\&quot;transparent\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;embed src=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/XbIYd5bYKxk&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; type=\&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash\&quot; wmode=\&quot;transparent\&quot; width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/embed&gt;&lt;\/object&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&quot;;" alt=""></a></div></div></div></div> <div align="left">Dallas Deforest provides a nice insight into the background of a trench supervisor... we'll head out this morning to continue work on his trench which is now over 2 m below the surface!</div> <p align="center"> <div align="center"> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFCDD9C333F4C5D:14c6ca39-3912-4a47-9a03-53d7f4ba1e7e" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; paddingtop: 0px"><div id="88d329b5-d07e-4310-b39c-76e5e581dd4a" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdS8J8IuVWs&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;" target="_new"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115700e9c5f970c -pi" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('88d329b5-d07e-4310-b39c-76e5e581dd4a'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = &quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;object width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;movie\&quot; value=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/xdS8J8IuVWs&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; &gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;wmode\&quot; value=\&quot;transparent\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;embed src=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/xdS8J8IuVWs&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; type=\&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash\&quot; wmode=\&quot;transparent\&quot; width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/embed&gt;&lt;\/object&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&quot;;" alt=""></a></div></div></div></div> <p align="center"></p> <p align="left">Another perspective on life in a trench...</p> <p align="center"> <div align="center"> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D4f48-ABFC-DD9C333F4C5D:e81fc802-3dde-4356-81aa-28ccf93ab09c" style="paddingright: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin:

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0px; padding-top: 0px"><div id="7f4c4bb9-9d7a-4182-84fc-bd9e1c0c2da8" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline;"><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnPpZKGyFi4&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;" target="_new"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157103b73f970b -pi" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('7f4c4bb9-9d7a-4182-84fc-bd9e1c0c2da8'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = &quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;object width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;movie\&quot; value=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/pnPpZKGyFi4&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; &gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;wmode\&quot; value=\&quot;transparent\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;embed src=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/pnPpZKGyFi4&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; type=\&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash\&quot; wmode=\&quot;transparent\&quot; width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/embed&gt;&lt;\/object&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&quot;;" alt=""></a></div></div></div></div> <p></p> <p align="left">More to come soon!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Last Week of PKAP Fieldwork in 2009 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-last-week-of-pkap-fieldwork-in-2009 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/10/2009 10:27:47 PM ----BODY: <p>The entire Pyla Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is looking down the home stretch of the 2009 field season.&nbsp; I find myself repeating in my head each morning: "if I can only make it through Friday, we'll be fine...".&nbsp; Our enthusiastic group of student volunteers begin to leave on Sunday morning and the senior staff will shift their focus from the dirty work of excavation to the tidier work of producing final reports.&nbsp; As part of the end-game process, the senior staff has met regularly to parse out our top priorities for the next 10 days on the island.&nbsp; What absolutely has to get done before we leave?&nbsp; We must process some of our finds -- especially those from secure or sensitive contexts, we must draw and photographs trenches before they are backfilled, and we must produce comprehensive reports on each area excavated.&nbsp; </p> <p>A few of our trenches still need considerable work to bring them to a successful conclusion.&nbsp; One of the cruel realities of excavation is that the most sensitive contexts tend to appear at the end of the

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

season.&nbsp; At least three of our trenches -- one on Vigla, one in Koutsopetria, and one on Kokkinokremos -- are finishing up over the next few days with the most delicate kind of excavation.&nbsp; Teams in each trench scrape down floors, carefully remove floor packing, or excavate foundation trenches related to significant walls in order to extract the chronologically significant ceramics to ensure the we do not contaminate the material in these contexts with material from other less secure layers.</p> <p>I've both spent time in the trenches and digitizing trench plans to make sure that a digital plan exists for each excavated stratigraphic unit.&nbsp; We've also begun to enter the ceramic data produced by Scott Moore in the museum into our finds database.&nbsp; Entering data while in the field ensures that we can analyze results on the fly and produce a final report for the Department of Antiquities quickly and efficiently at the end of season.</p> <p>So the blogging may slow down as we are faced with the frantic dash to the finish of the PKAP season, but fear not, we'll keep you in the loop.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the New Media STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-archaeological-project-and-the-new-media CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/07/2009 10:28:41 PM ----BODY: <p>The short weekend has given us a chance to upload some of the most recent new media treatments of our work here in Cyprus.&nbsp; </p> <p>Our filmmaker, Ian Ragsdale, has released two short pieces chronicling life on the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; The first two clips can be viewed on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/PKAP2009">PKAP's new YouTube channel</a>.&nbsp; Ian's work has focused on the students so far and gives a great insight into how students and trench supervisors engage the work of archaeology.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kEVj8CBMPN8&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;" width="425" height="344" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"></p> <div align="center"> <div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFCDD9C333F4C5D:c3fd4816-f28e-4ccf-a485-a75f4ac7b6b5" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; paddingtop: 0px"><div id="e607d6a5-6e71-4de1-84ab-b3b5144d6c11" style="margin: 0px;

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padding: 0px; display: inline;"><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0hvEb7IiU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;" target="_new"><img src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fdeb6e2970c -pi" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('e607d6a5-6e71-4de1-84ab-b3b5144d6c11'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = &quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;object width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;movie\&quot; value=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/Rb0hvEb7IiU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; &gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;wmode\&quot; value=\&quot;transparent\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;embed src=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/Rb0hvEb7IiU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\&quot; type=\&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash\&quot; wmode=\&quot;transparent\&quot; width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/embed&gt;&lt;\/object&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&quot;;" alt=""></a></div></div></div></div></embed> <p>We also have the second installment of our popular PKAP podcast series:</p> <p>Week Two Podcasts:</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_East_Week_2_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria East Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_West_Week_2_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria West Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_East_Week_2_2009.mp3">Vigla East Week 2</a>&nbsp; <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_West_Week_2_2009.mp3">Vigla West Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_2_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos East Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_2_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos West Week 2</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/

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Ground_Penetrating_Radar_Team_2009.mp3">Ground Penetrating Radar Team</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a></p> <p>Be sure to check out the Week 1 Series:</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ PKAP2009_Intro.mp3">PKAP 20009 Introduction</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ PKAP2009_Intro.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria East Week 1</a> (Featuring PFerd) <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_West_Week_1_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria West Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Vigla East Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_West_Week_1_2009.mp3">Vigla West Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos East Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos West Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4fba0970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a></p> <p>If you haven't checked out our photographer (and Artist-in-Residence) Ryan Stander's work, you are missing some great photographs.&nbsp; Check them out both on his personal blog, <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Axis of Access</a>, and on the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PylaKoutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives</a> Blog.</p> <p>And we haven't forgotten about the archaeology...</p> <p>This week will be our most hectic so

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far.&nbsp; Our goal is to bring at least 5 of our 6 trenches to completion before our hard-working group of student volunteers leave the field on Saturday.&nbsp; We also have planned a half-day trip to Nicosia, our Bronze Age ceramicist, Mara Horowitz, will be arriving Wednesday, and we plan to push a last few trays of pottery collected in 2008 through preliminary analysis over the course of the next week.&nbsp; We're all tired, but excited to bring our short and exceedingly intense field season to a close.&nbsp; Keep reading our blog here and elsewhere.&nbsp; To read about the latest goings-on keep visiting the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">PKAP blog aggregator</a>.</p> <p>And just in case you are not convinced that PKAP is awesome, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsIk15oT-ZI">check this out</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Podcasts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-podcasts-1 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/04/2009 11:03:32 PM ----BODY: <p>Here is one more installment of PKAP Podcasts:</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria East Week 1</a> (Featuring PFerd) <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Koutsopetria_West_Week_1_2009.mp3">Koutsopetria West Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a> <p>A more substantial blog post will come soon!&nbsp; We are in full on working mode. <p>Do check out the work of our photographer Ryan Stander.&nbsp; He's posting photographs on his excellent blog <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Axis of Access</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Pyla-Koutsopetria Podcasts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-pyla-koutsopetria-podcasts CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/03/2009 10:30:17 PM ----BODY: <p>Here's the second installment of <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PKAP</a> podcasts from the 2009 Season.</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Vigla East Week 1</a> (Featuring P-Ferd) <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Vigla_West_Week_1_2009.mp3">Vigla West Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a> <p>And here is a link to work by our photographer Ryan Stander.&nbsp; He's posting photographs on his excellent blog <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Axis of Access</a>.</p> <p>Field trips today to Pyla Village, Halla Sultan Tekke, and the chuch(es) of Ay. Phaneromeni.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Podcasts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-podcasts CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/02/2009 11:14:05 PM ----BODY: <p>Continuing our embrace of Punk Archaeology (in all forms), the team of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> has released our second EP of podcasts.&nbsp; Voices of Archaeology 2009 is now ready for listening and to build suspense (and to take full advantage of our limited bandwidth), we'll release the first batch of podcasts over the course of the week.&nbsp; Like many of the most significant punk rock offerings, the sound quality is mediocre, but the content is better.&nbsp; The wind up on the ridge tops combined with a seriously cheap ($11) Radio Shack microphone to give the entire operation a garage band like quality.</p> <p>Disclaimers aside, here are the first three.&nbsp; The first track is a basic introduction to our site and the goals of our fieldwork this summer.</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ PKAP2009_Intro.mp3" target="_blank">PKAP 20009 Introduction</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ PKAP2009_Intro.mp3"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a></p> <p>For the rest of the tracks, we stop by the trenches and talk to the excavators.&nbsp; For these trench interviews, we mainly focused on the student volunteers.&nbsp; The podcasts are all live and without anything but the most cosmetic editing.&nbsp; This technique was part of our strategy to get the students to think and interpret on their feet (and discourage too much mindless digging).&nbsp; In some sense, the podcasts, while artificial, nevertheless captured a moment in the archaeological process.</p> <p>The first couple are from the trenches on Pyla-Kokkinokremos:</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos East Week 1</a> <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_East_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3">Kokkinokremos West Week 1</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/Voices_of_Archaeology/ Kokkinokremos_West_Week_1_2009.mp3"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="16" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fc4f8dc970c -pi" width="61" border="0"></a></p> <p>Enjoy the podcasts and check back tomorrow for the next installment.</p> <p>And remember for the full PKAP blog experience check out the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">PKAP Blog Aggregator</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 207.108.104.226 URL: http://www.metcalfarchaeology.com/ DATE: 06/04/2009 04:59:59 PM This is good. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Field Trips STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: field-trips CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/02/2009 12:07:09 AM ----BODY: <p>As a director of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/" target="_blank">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>, I spend most of my time working on issues central to our basic research goals whether this involves teams logistics, issues of digital workflow, and questions of archaeological methodology.&nbsp; Several times a year, however, I am called upon to contribute to the various field trips that the team makes.&nbsp; Yesterday, for example, I subbed in for my wife, who was feeling a bit under the weather and visited the sites of Paphos, Paliokastro-Maa, Ay. Georgios-Peyias, and the monastery of Ay. Neophytos.&nbsp; Today, I am traveling with a large study tour from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (we affectionately call it the IUP World Tour 2009) to the sites of Amathous, Kourion, and the Medieval manor house at Kolossi.&nbsp; </p> <p>These trips are a nice distraction from the daily work of archaeology and give me a chance to revisit important sites on the island.&nbsp; They are also great testimonies to how effective and efficient our trench and area supervisors are this year.&nbsp; After a week of excavation, there have been no unexpected issues that have prevented the teams from functioning in a regular way.&nbsp; This is a credit exclusively to our archaeological middlemanagers who monitor day-to-day activities in the trenches (literally!) and continuously work with the students to refine their excavation and interpretative techniques.&nbsp; Because the trench and area supervisors are working so effectively, the project directors (David Pettegrew, Scott Moore, and myself) have been able to take on an expanded number of daily tasks.</p> <p>Recently, <a href="http://www.iuparchaeology.iup.edu/staff.html" target="_blank">Beverly Chiarulli</a> has arrived from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a ground penetrating radar rig. We have been able to work with her to initiate an ambitious program of GPR analysis across the site.&nbsp; While the first day in the field produced some ambiguous results, we are optimistic that today we'll be able to produce some good results from Vigla and

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begin to work down on Koutsopetria.&nbsp; Scott Moore and I have led trips to area sites, we've hosted visiting scholars and showed them around our site, and we've made plans to present some of our research to a group of interested soldiers on the British base.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: If you can't get enough Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: if-you-cant-get-enough-pyla-koutsopetria-archaeological-project CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Weblogs DATE: 05/29/2009 11:02:34 PM ----BODY: <p>If you just can't get enough information on PKAP, check out our family of PKAP Blogs:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/" target="_blank">Pyla-Koutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives</a></p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/" target="_blank">Pyla-Koutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/" target="_blank">Pyla-Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</a></p> <p>Or simply visit the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html" target="_blank">PKAP Blog Aggregator</a> where all three blogs appear as well as up to the hour updates from my Twitter feed.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching in the Sun: Managing Fatigue STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-in-the-sun-managing-fatigue CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/29/2009 10:12:17 PM ----BODY: <p>(Crossposted to <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Staff Blog</a> and <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>) </p> <p>One of the key challenges that <a href="http://www.pkap.org/" target="_blank">we</a> face on Cyprus is managing the fatigue of students and staff.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.pkap.org/" target="_blank">Our archaeological project</a> often spends over 8 hours a day in the sun working on our trenches, processing pottery in the museum, or visiting other ancient sites.&nbsp; Most of students (and staff) come from mild climates like central or western Pennsylvania or North Dakota.&nbsp; By the end of the first week of work, the effect of the sun, work, hours, combine with the lingering remains of jet lag to produce a very tired cohort of students.&nbsp; Despite the fatigue, the students and staff have to keep pushing in their rigorous schedule if we hope to accomplish our research and pedagogical goals.&nbsp; In general, the students enjoy the rigor.&nbsp; Our site is beautifully situated on the south coast of Cyprus, the trench supervisors are an exceptional lot, and there comes a feeling of comradery from working together long hours in the field.&nbsp; </p> <p>The downside of this, of course, is that as the students become more tired, they become less susceptible to learning.&nbsp; This goes for staff as well.&nbsp; There is just enough of the macho ethic in archaeology that staff work beyond their maximum fatigue levels and become less effective both as excavator and teachers.</p> <p>It would be easy to simply suggest that we take more time off or ease back on our schedule just a bit, but the students have traveled quite a ways and paid a good bit of money to experience both the culture and history of Cyprus and gain experience as excavators.&nbsp; So, every time that we consider cutting back on the "contact hours", we worry that we are shortchanging the students.&nbsp; As the students become more fatigued, of course, the quality of contact hours decreases.&nbsp; There is some threshold beyond which it is not useful to keep the students in the field working under the argument that we are doing it to provide them with the fullest learning experience!&nbsp; </p> <p>This challenge of balancing work load and actual learning has made me think of how we organize our classes during the regular school year.&nbsp; For example, at my home institution, <a href="http://www.und.edu/" target="_blank">University of North Dakota</a>, it is fairly common for students to take many credits above the typical 15 credit work load.&nbsp; This puts pressure on the students to function at a relatively high level even under significant stress from their increasing workload.&nbsp; While the visible evidence for the fatigue is more striking when students are doing archaeological fieldwork, the fatigue and stress experienced during the academic year is no less real.&nbsp; </p> <p>The issue that arises, of course, is where is the threshold where students can maximize their experiences on a project or in a class, while still functioning at a high enough level to appreciate it.&nbsp; If you push too hard and the students break down, tempers flair, and decision making (a key aspect of archaeological fieldwork and learning) unravels.&nbsp; If you don't push hard enough, you'll leave experiences and work on the table.&nbsp; To make matters

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more complex, some students and staff can go at maximum intensity for weeks on end, while some break down after only a week of the stress of working and managing a complex group of students and scholars.</p> <p>Today is the end of our first week in the field and while we planned on going into the field all afternoon, it is clear that the students (and staff!) need some time off to recover from the first full week of excavating.&nbsp; We're going to work for a half day today and then take most of Sunday morning off.&nbsp; Our GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) team arrives later today...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Digital Workflow in an Analog World STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: digital-workflow-in-an-analog-world CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 05/27/2009 12:22:04 AM ----BODY: <p>One my responsibilities is managing the digital workflow on the project.&nbsp; This includes migrating information collected in the field from an analog format (mostly text written) to digital formats.&nbsp; With the beginning of excavation, I digitized the first trench plan yesterday.&nbsp; Each plan is digitized as it is prepared by the excavator so the following days trench plans can include features excavated the previous day (if these features remain in the trench -- like a wall or a particularly immobile stone).&nbsp; The digitized plans provide the excavator with a tidy model of their previous days sketch. The worry, however, (and there is always a catch) is that they will freeze with the sketch the interpretative process.&nbsp; This is not a huge worry for something like a single stone which is rather less susceptible to changes in interpretation than, say, the top of a complex wall.&nbsp; Once the wall appears on a trench plan as illustrated it can, of course, be changed by the excavator (and we encourage them to change their illustrations as often as needed!), but I wonder how the crossing of the digital/analog divide will influence a trench supervisors understanding of the interpretative processes.</p> <p>As another example, Scott Moore and I celebrated (with a bag of chips and a fruit juice) the reading of the last unit of survey pottery from the intensive survey the we conducted from 2004-2007.&nbsp; Scott dutifully recorded pertinent data on over 8000 batches of artifacts (close to 20,000 artifacts total).&nbsp; He recorded all the information on a prepared form and these were keyed into the project database.&nbsp; The process of digitization

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transforms the objects from physical, three dimensional artifacts to bits of data organized into tables.&nbsp; These data can then be searched and organized according to the analytical needs of the project.&nbsp; Like digitized trench plans the transition from analog (or even "real") artifacts to digital artifacts ossifies or freezes certain analytical functions.&nbsp; Like the authority vested in the written word, digital data resists the kind of reinterpretation that more traditional analog forms of data encourages in an archaeological context.&nbsp; An object or a notebook entry seems inherently more susceptible to recatagorization and change. </p> <p>The trick with digital data and central to the documenting the digital workflow is to annotate somehow the changes to digital datasets that occur as they move from an analog state to a digital state (and any changes that almost inevitably occur within a digital state).&nbsp; In a notebook or on a handwritten form it is easy to strike out an earlier interpretation or statement and replace it with a newer one.&nbsp; The paper copy, then, preserves a record of the changing interpretations, mistakes, and to some extent the archaeological thought process.&nbsp; An important secondary issue is how to preserve this process in digital form -- especially in a way that embeds the process of change in the visible representation of the data (not in hidden metadata, the name of which implies a secondary aspect to the data itself).</p> <p>More scanning and digitization today... and I hope that an answer reveals itself as I continue to modify and refine the workflow from the analog to the digital.</p> <p>Crossposted to the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a>.&nbsp; If you haven't already, check out the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html" target="_blank">PKAP Blog Aggregator</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: James Herbst EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 94.66.210.234 URL: http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/excavationcorinth/ DATE: 05/29/2009 08:37:04 AM I would really like to see what you work out. At present in Corinth, I'm less concerned about changes reinterpreting a single context record for a stone or a wall or deposit, but how to track multiple interpretations for sets or groups of contexts. Currently, we are synthesizing this stuff randomly (every session or three week interval) in summaries but not in more meaningful groupings. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology, Technology, and Who is the Punk Archaeologist Now? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: archaeology-technology-and-who-is-the-punk-archaeologist-now CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 05/24/2009 10:47:14 PM ----BODY: <p>Every years, we encounter the same problem.&nbsp; Some vital piece of equipment does not work the way that it should.&nbsp; This year (as it most often is), it was our expensive and elaborate differential GPS unit.&nbsp; We spent Sunday reinstalling the Trimble software on the survey controller.&nbsp; Fortunately, this solved the problem, but it also highlighted the fact that as archaeology develops into the 21st century, the technological demands on the average excavator or survey archaeologist will continue to increase.&nbsp; The knowledge necessary to fix whatever problem has infiltrated our GPS unit was completely arcane.&nbsp; The various menus controlling the device's settings did not cascade in a predictable way nor did they make their purpose know through anything approach common or self-evident terms.&nbsp; The demand for technical expertise continues through the various Geographic Information Systems software as well.&nbsp; Trimble's Geomatics Office and ESRI's ArcGIS are quite dissimilar, yet are both crucial to mapping our site accurately.</p> <p>While many projects bring in a separate team to conduct mapping or survey activities, PKAP has a more <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIY_ethic">DIY</a> or hands-on approach.&nbsp; Aside from geophysical work -- resistivity and this year ground penetrating radar, our project has found itself (primarily for funding reasons) in a position to take on ever increasing responsibilities for tasks that exist at the borders of specilization.&nbsp; What is interesting, of course, is that some members of the project -- particularly those trained in more tradition archaeology programs -- <em>almost </em>resist the use of technology.&nbsp; Skeptical of its grandiose promises (sub-centimeter accuracy!), elaborate language (EGG Geoid Models!), and temperamental disposition ("Initialization has been lost"!), several members of the project would gladly reject it and return to old style ways of mapping, organizing data, and conducting fieldwork.&nbsp; In fact, we can often detect a bit of passive resistance to the growing significance of technology among several old school project members who subtly resist the various requirements imposed by technology (particularly the inflexible demands of consistency imposed by our databases) and seem to revel in declaring their particular fieldwork as having distinctive, irresolvable autonomy from any larger, technological system.&nbsp; </p> <p>So this brings me to the question in my subject line. While our project has embraced a fairly wide ranging diy approach (note the various posts at <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/2009/05/da ys-3-and-4.html">PKAP Graduate Student Perspective Blog</a> and this author has insisted that we do not purchase the ready-made picks and shovels, but the kind where the head is separate (or at least loosely attached) the shaft), there is a lingering reluctance among some members of the project to include technology in their performance of the diy aesthetic.&nbsp; This perhaps parallels one of the grander splits in the punk rock movement: on the one hand, there were punks like Brian Eno who showed an increasing willingness to embrace of technology and electronic music and, on the other, those influences by the folk tradition who recognized the simple implements of rock 'n' roll music (guitar, drums, base,

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keyboard) as sufficient to communicate their revolution.&nbsp; (It seems obvious that <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/metal-machinemusic/">Metal Machine Music</a> is ironic, but what exactly does it critique?).&nbsp; </p> <p>So PKAP continues.&nbsp; Each day offers the potential for another skirmish between the earnest and self-sufficient archaeologist with the tape, compass, and notebook, and the technologically savvy director burdened with his Mad Max like tangle of databases, GPS units, video cameras, data collectors and "softwares". </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Nathan EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 83.212.248.195 URL: DATE: 05/25/2009 11:17:08 AM Best of luck with the season! I arrive on-island Friday. Surely, a trip will be made from Athienou. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching in the Sun: A Scavenger Hunt in Cyprus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-in-the-sun-a-scavenger-hunt-in-cyprus CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 05/24/2009 12:29:02 AM ----BODY: <p>(Crossposted to <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Staff Blog</a> and <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>) <p>Classroom teaching hardly prepares you for the adventures and eventualities of teaching (in the broadest sense) while on site in a foreign country.&nbsp; My colleagues, <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">R. Scott Moore</a> (IUP) and <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David K. Pettegrew</a> (Messiah College, Pa.), conduct <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">archaeological research each summer in Cyprus</a> and over the past few years have gradually increased the pedagogical and student components to this work.&nbsp; This has forced us to balance our research goals -- extracting good quality archaeological data from a site called Pyla-

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Koutsopetria -- with teaching goals -- giving the students not only an education in the history and culture of Cyprus but also in archaeological method and practice.&nbsp; At the same time, we have to deal with the very real challenges of managing a group of students through the various stages of travel and culture shock.&nbsp; Since many of our students come from <a href="http://www.iup.edu/">Indiana University of Pennsylvania</a> and the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>, schools that tend to produce students who do not have extensive experience outside the country, this can be as big a challenge as actually teaching historical, archaeological, or cultural content.&nbsp; <p>Many of our students have a tendency to be nervous about venturing out into the city of Larnaka where we live.&nbsp; Some of this comes from the somewhat disorienting local street "grid" where everything seems slightly off parallel so streets are ever converging and diverging, and some comes from the words in the Greek alphabet (even though most important signs are translated into English).&nbsp; Scott Moore proposed that we encourage the students to engage their surroundings through a scavenger hunt.&nbsp; The students will take their digital cameras and crisscross the city taking photos of both practical features (like banks, pharmacies, and mailboxes) and various historical monuments and places across the city.&nbsp; The goal of the latter is to form the foundation for discussion of religious and cultural pluralism on the island as well as make the students familiar with significant the local monuments and how history is inscribed in the local landscape. <p>PKAP 2009 Scavenger Hunt <p><strong>Practical</strong><br>1) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find a pharmacy<br>2) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find a ATM machine<br>3) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find a public mail box<br>4) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find a periptero or mini-market<br>5) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 5 points – find an American restaurant<br>6) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 3 points – find a bookstore<br>7) ___ 1 point each, and worth up to 3 points – find a Greek Orthodox church<br>8) ___ 1 point each up to 3 points – find a bakery<br>9) ___ 2 points – find a Swiss restaurant<br>10) ___ 2 points – find an Irish restaurant<br>11) ___ 2 points – find a Chinese restaurant<br>12) ___ 2 points – find a Cypriot restaurant<br>13) ___ 2 points – find a Lebanese restaurant<br>14) ___ 3 points – find the post office<br>15) ___ 3 points – find the police station <p><b>Cultural</b> <br>16) ___ 2 points – find Ayios Lazarus<br>17) ___ 2 points – find a mosque<br>18) ___ 2 points – find the castle/fort<br>19) ___ 2 points – find the statue of Cimon/Kimon<br>20) ___ 2 points – find the image of a chalcolithic figurine<br>21) ___ 2 points – find a coppersmith/metalworking shop<br>22) ___ 2 points – find the municipal market<br>23) ___ 1 point each up to 3 points – find a street without a Cypriot Greek name<br>24) ___ 1 point each up to 3 points – find a non Greek Orthodox church<br>25) ___ 1 point each up to 2 points – find a mudbrick building<br>26) ___ 2 points – find a shark fishing boat<br>27) ___ 2 points – find a large airplane<br>28) ___ 1 point each up to 2 points – find a sign in Russian<br>29) ___ 2 points – find a store selling Lefkara lace<br>30) ___ 2 points – find the Black Turtle restaurant<br>31) ___ 2 points – find a school<br>32) ___ 2 points – find an example of Gothic architecture<br>33) ___ 2 points – find an example of Ottoman architecture<br>34) ___ 2 points – find an example of Byzantine architecture<br>35) ___ 2 points – find an example of British Colonial architecture<br>36) ___ 2 points – find an ancient ship-shed<br>37) ___ 2 points – find a Greek flag<br>38) ___ 2 points – find a Cypriot flag<br>39) ___ 2 points – find an EU flag <p><b>Bonuses</b> <br>40) ___ 5 points – find a Cypriot wedding or procession<br>41) ___ 5 points – find an American car make and model</p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.168.85.15 URL: DATE: 05/24/2009 05:17:41 PM Now that's a brilliant list!!! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Special Kind of Chaos STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: special-kind-of-chaos CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/21/2009 10:31:48 AM ----BODY: <p>The first week or so of the season always involves a very special kind of chaos.&nbsp; First, we make the rounds talking with the various authorities on the island who sanction or support our fieldwork.&nbsp; Over the last week we met with folks at the Department of Antiquities, the Cyprus American Archaeology Research Institute, the British Dhekelia Garrison (both the military and civilian sides), and the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum.&nbsp; Each party has a particular interest in meeting with us.&nbsp; From the Department of Antiquities, who is responsible for all archaeological activity on the island, to the British base at Dhekelia, who are primarily concerned with our safety on their land.&nbsp; </p> <p>Each meeting, of course, brings with it the potential for a new set of challenges.&nbsp; This week, we've moved from our traditional digs at the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum to site of the museums storerooms at a place called Terra Ombra.&nbsp; The special electrical system at the storerooms seems to struggle to handle our rather modest array of computers without blowing the main fuse which requires a walk around the block to reset.&nbsp; At the same time, the folks at the base have expressed concern with the potential for wildfires.&nbsp; The wet winter and the end of cultivation at two of our main areas of fieldwork has let the vegetation to grow to dangerous levels.&nbsp; To limit this very real risk (fires raging across archaeological projects are not unknown on Cyprus), a few of us are going to receive some fire training at the base fire station tomorrow and we have had to cut back swathes of the vegetation to create a safe barrier for our work.&nbsp; Cutting back the vegetation involves contacting and contracting with the local landscape management company to bring their big field mowers out to clear the site (and

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avoid the archaeology).&nbsp; We'll also have the local grounds keepers for the Department of Antiquities trim back the overgrowth from around more delicate areas of the site.</p> <p>We've also brought our differential GPS online, organized our new storerooms (and begun to process pottery from last year including 12 prodigal units of survey pottery that managed to escape analysis last season), and identified several places where new survey will clarify the relationship between surface features and excavated features.&nbsp; Michael Brown, our indefatigable colleague from the University of Edinburgh, Cypriot prehistorian extraordinary, and representative of empires lost, constructed several new sieves, while Scott Moore and myself scoured the city for various archaeological tools including the elusive small hand picks.&nbsp; We found three of the seven that we need and have promised of more to come next week.&nbsp; </p> <p>While trying to manage this, we've also begun to gird ourselves in preparation for ARRIVAL DAY.&nbsp; Over 48 hours the project will go from a sleepy project of 8 made up of senior scholars and University of North Dakota graduate students and alumni to a bustling hub of archaeological chaos with over 25 scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, and support staff of various kinds.&nbsp; Each team shows up at different times or (in some cases) all at once meaning that after noon tomorrow we'll put even the thought of fieldwork on hold for a bit as we marshal the team.&nbsp; </p> <p>Fieldwork is slated to begin on Monday....</p> <p>To get the rest of the story from different perspectives, be sure to click on our <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">PylaKoutsopetria Blog Aggregator here</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p>(Bev, that's a site where you can read all about the project from the perspective of staff, graduate students, and even undergraduate volunteers!&nbsp; Just click on the headlines to go the various blog entries.).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 05/22/2009 08:38:16 PM It actually sounds pretty similar to doing archaeology in California- the biggest hazards this time of the year (besides the sun) are snakes and fires! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Return to Vigla STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-return-to-vigla CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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DATE: 05/19/2009 10:15:49 AM ----BODY: <p>We spent an afternoon in the field today walking across the landscape and deciding where our 2009 trenches might be and what needs to happen before we begin to excavate in earnest.&#160; The area of Vigla has been removed from cultivation now based in part on the results of our fieldwork.&#160; While I am not entirely sure whether plowing was particularly destructive to the architecture below the surface of the hill, the end to the plowing combined with the particularly wet winter has let the local vegetation take over.&#160; The entire ridge is completely overgrown with a dense tangle of prickly weeds. (Compare it now to <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2008/06/wh ere-are-the-l.html">photos from last year</a>)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fa074bf970 c-pi"><img title="Vigla1" style="border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="Vigla1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570961b60970b -pi" width="404" border="0" /></a> </p> <p align="left">Paul Ferderer, a UND graduate student in history, got his first taste of the field.&#160; Brandon Olson a UND M.A. in history alumnus, joined us in the field from Penn State, just hours after having arrived in Cyprus.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fa074d8970 c-pi"><img title="Vigla2" style="border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="Vigla2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fa074e9970c -pi" width="404" border="0" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570961b88970 b-pi"><img title="Vigla3" style="border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="Vigla3" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570961bb6970b -pi" width="404" border="0" /></a> </p> <p align="left">We are going to have to get these weeds taken back before we let our team of undergraduates loose on the hill.&#160; The risk of both snakes and fires sweeping through the dried weeds is too great right now.</p> <p align="left">In the meantime, however, we’ll leave Vigla to under the watchful eye of its natural guardians:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fa0753c970 c-pi"><img title="Stickbug2" style="border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="Stickbug2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fa07551970c -pi" width="404" border="0" /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The 2009 Archaeological Preseason STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: arrivals CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/17/2009 01:59:12 AM ----BODY: <p>The PKAP season is slowly coming to life with the arrival of various team members.&#160; Almost every day from now until the end of next week, we’ll head over to the Larnaka airport to collected travel-weary colleagues from various universities across the U.S. and the world.&#160; The first few days of the season are always more about logistics than archaeology <em>per se</em>.</p> <p>There is always a bit of a shock arriving in the Mediterranean from North Dakota.&#160; The heat, humidity, and noise are striking on first arrival (especially when you arrive on Friday night when our seaside town comes to life).&#160; Last night the constant buzz of motorcycle, car, and scooter engines kept us awake (in combination with jet lag) well into the wee hours of the morning.&#160; </p> <p>Arrival also brings with it the momentary traumas as we face the various things that we forgot in the U.S. or have somehow become inaccessible to us.&#160; It was relief to find that we had remembered all the software and cables for our GPS units, for example.&#160; It was less of a relief to discover, however, that this year the TSA kindly locked the case that contains parts of our GPS unit, the tripod, and other odds and ends.&#160; Unfortunately, we do not have the key to the case.&#160; So, for now, some vital equipment is trapped inside a heavy duty plastic golf bag case. The solutions at present range from trying to find a TSA key to sawing through the somewhat flimsy plastic latch.&#160; I’ll leave it for Scott to recount how we resolve this issue…</p> <p>Tomorrow morning we head up to Nicosia to meet with folks at the department of antiquities and discuss our fieldwork plans.&#160; Once we have that worked out (and various meetings with folks at the British base), we should be able to get to mapping out our trenches for this season.&#160; </p> <p>Stay tuned!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Big Sky STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: big-sky DATE: 05/14/2009 06:19:38 PM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157088ee81970 b-pi"><img alt="Big sky." border="0" class="at-xid6a00d83451908369e201157088ee81970b " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157088ee81970b -800wi" title="Big sky." /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Teaching in the Sun STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-teaching-in-the-sun CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 05/14/2009 07:34:42 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Cross-posted to <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> and the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project Staff Blog</a>.</em></p> <p>As the spring semester gradually recedes into memory, the summer beckons.&#160; Many folks at the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>, head off campus or switch gears on campus as they begin to focus on new summer research and teaching projects.&#160; These projects, even when it’s just teaching a summer class, inevitably involve a change of pace.&#160; The pace of the summer semester slows down for some; for others who look to the summer as a time of more intensive research and teaching find that the summer brings a new bustle to their routine.</p> <p>I will be heading to the Mediterranean this summer, as I have for the last 6 years to conduct archaeological research on Greece and Cyprus.&#160; This year, I’ll be joined in Cyprus by about 15 undergraduate and graduate students from across the US.&#160; These students arrive with different expectations, different skills and experiences, and different ways of learning, but all of them expect to leave Cyprus after 4 weeks with a better

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grasp of the methods, theory, and practice of archaeology.&#160; They’ll attempt to acquire these skills in the most distraction filled environment possible.&#160; Not only will they be inserted into a fully-functioning archaeological research project, but one that is located in a beach side town (Larnaka, Cyprus) in a foreign country!&#160; While it is easy to see how an travel outside the US provides additional opportunities to learn through experience, these same experiences can also provide considerable “background noise” to the more routine and regimented learning processes that we are accustomed to in the classroom.&#160; (As much as we might embrace <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/category/edupunk/">the chaos of Edu-punk</a>, few of us turn our classroom into a night at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBGB">CBGBs</a>, but there are days in Cyprus, when the height of our research season meets head on with the annual summer festival in Larnaka (the <a href="http://www.cyprusevents.net/events/kataklysmos-larnaca2008/">Kataclysmos</a>) that we’d embrace a daily routine that took on the relatively predictable routine of, say, an Iggy Pop show.)</p> <p>Teaching in the sun, in Cyprus or anyway away from the standard routines of the classroom involves new strategies that not only allow students to absorb the chaotic realities of experience, but nevertheless ensures that they acquire basic skills essential to the courses (so to speak) that they are taking.&#160; For us, it’s balancing between imparting the rigorous and structured requirements of “scientific” archaeological research and allowing them enough unstructured times to feel comfortable in a dynamic and complex foreign city.&#160; This is particularly challenging for us because we also have research priorities each season.&#160; On the one hand, this ensures that the students feel the genuine (and authentic) experience of professional, archaeological research with all its contingency and excitement.&#160; On the other hand, this creates a place where some members of the project are constantly tempted to sacrifice the unstructured time for the structured and rigorous experiences of primary data gathering.&#160; One season, we famously broke our students.&#160; The senior staff were disappointed that this dedicated cadre of students weren’t taking in the local culture more consistency until we realized that after a grueling day in the field the students were collapsing on their beds and sleeping until dinnertime and then crashing out immediately after dinner clean up.&#160;&#160; This was hardly an environment that cultivated students’ access to unstructured time!</p> <p>Over subsequent seasons we’ve been better balancing work and play, but the balance is always deliberate.&#160; Keep an eye on how well we are maintaining it through our <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">PylaKoutsopetria Project Blog</a> page.&#160; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Other Part of the Corinthia STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-other-part-of-the-corinthia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 05/13/2009 08:21:09 AM ----BODY: <p>As readers of this blog know, I am particularly interested in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/wo rking-paper-towers-and-fortifications-at-vayia-in-the-southeastcorinthia.html">the topography and fortification</a> of the southeastern Corinthia.&nbsp; My interest in this part of the Corinthia largely stems from my experience with the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>, but it also comes from an awareness that scholars have already done much good topographic work for the southwestern and western part part of the Corinthia (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/34369379">Bynum</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/71285030">Lolos</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/35921568">Pikoulas</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/55115672">Marchand</a>, et al.).&nbsp; </p> <p>As I have already noted <a href="http://www.atyponlink.com/ASCS/doi/pdf/10.2972/hesp.78.1.107">J. Marchand has just published a lengthy and careful article in the most recent volume of <em>Hesperia</em></a> on the route between Corinth and Argos via the ancient city of Kleonai.&nbsp; The articles is a lovely example of how extensive survey, intensive local knowledge, and careful archival work can shed new and valuable light on one of the most well-known stretches of the Corinthian countryside.&nbsp; Marchand argues the the early modern routes through the region of Kleonai preserve the traces of the Ancient road which linked the Corinthia to the Argolid via the Longopotamos river.&nbsp; This is important because unlike some earlier scholars, this route makes Kleonai a central player in the regional geopolitics.&nbsp; The close ties between Kleonoai and Argos, for example, may have led various enemies of Argos to prefer routes into the Peloponnesus that bypasses the Longopotamos river and used, instead, routes through the Sikyonia via Phlious.&nbsp; </p> <p>While this is helpful, indeed, the method that Marchand employed is perhaps more interesting still.&nbsp; Marchand continued in the tradition of topographic research fostered, in particular, at the University of California at Berkeley under Prof. Ron Stroud and the late W. K. Pritchett.&nbsp; These scholars, like many before them, encouraged students to walk through the countryside to gain a first hand knowledge of the topography that their research required.&nbsp; Indeed, Stroud's notes on his walks through the western Corinthia remain a source of inspiration for many American School students who work at the site of Ancient Corinth and have inspired numerous weekend walks and led to the discovery of inscriptions and monuments.&nbsp; Marchand supplements this emphasis on autopsy with a particularly thorough study of early travelers who made their way from Argos to Corinth via Kleonai.&nbsp; Through these texts, she has identified fountains, churches, khans, and bridges by which she could reconstruct the routes taken through the countryside in the 18th and 19th centuries.&nbsp; Finally, she was able to check specific information in the acquired through the early travelers against local knowledge.&nbsp; Local informants were able to bridge the gap between the monuments seen by early travelers and, in some cases, modern piles of ancient

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debris.&nbsp; They were also able to confirm the routes of the rapidly fading network of walking paths (monopati) that linked together various places in the countryside.&nbsp; These paths, according to Marchand's argument, preserve traces of the ancient road networks that cast valuable light on how we understand interstate relations and ancient texts.</p> <p>The only thing that Marchand's article lacked to be a model approach to reconstructing the ancient landscape is the results of intensive archaeological survey.&nbsp; This is not meant as an indictment of Marchand's research; intensive survey is an expensive undertaking, it is difficult to acquire the required permits, and increasingly challenging to conduct intensive survey over large extents of territory.&nbsp; That being said, intensive survey has consistently shed light on the kind of local settlement structures that interstate relations and routes likely influenced.&nbsp; The next generation of topographers and survey archaeologists will seek a finer balance between the two traditions in reconstructing the history of the Greek landscape.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dimitri Nakassis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.100.106.20 URL: DATE: 05/13/2009 02:12:45 PM And most recently, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/180938182&referer=brief_results">http://www.w orldcat.org/oclc/180938182&referer=brief_results</a> -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Medieval and Post Medieval Mediterranean at the 2010 Archaeological Institute of American Annual Meeting STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-medieval-and-post-medieval-mediterranean-at-the-2010archaeological-institute-of-american-annual-meeting CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 05/12/2009 08:43:11 AM ----BODY:

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<p>We got the good news last week that the panel put together by Kostis Kourelis and Sharon Gerstel for the 2010 AIA Annual Meeting in Anaheim has been accepted.&nbsp; The panel is titled First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites and will feature papers by Jack Davis, Kathleen Quinn, Anne McCabe, Adam Rabinowitz, Guy Sanders, and Tim Gregory and myself.&nbsp; <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-out-late-levels-at-earlysites.html">Here's a link to the abstracts and overview statement</a>.</p> <p>Tim Gregory and I plan to re-examine the data produced by the decades old <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/">Ohio Boeotia Project around the ancient city of Thisvi</a>.&nbsp; This survey data was initially analyzed in a series of publications in the 1980s.&nbsp; Since that time, digital analysis tools have become considerably more powerful and there is a growing body of work in the region, particularly associated with the Cambridge Boeotia Project and its various spin-offs, that promises to add significance to any re-examination of the OBE results.&nbsp; Returning to excavation and survey results -- so called legacy data -- has taken on new importance in recent years as excavation permits have become more difficult to acquire, a vigorous ethical discourse has put pressure on project directors to make unpublished finds available, and the digital archaeology "movement" has improved our ability to make published and unpublished data alike visible and accessible to the professional public.&nbsp; A recent issue of the leading electronic journal in archaeology, <em>Internet </em><a href="http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue24/"><em>Archaeology</em>, has dedicated an issue to the reanalysis of "legacy data"</a> taking advantage of the intersection of digital distribution, new technologies, and the remarkable potential of the existing pool of archaeological data to inform contemporary research questions.&nbsp; We hope our paper frames not only some of the methods and procedures at stake in the re-examination of survey data, but also makes the argument that this kind of secondary analysis marks the coming of age of intensive pedestrian survey.&nbsp; It marks the potential of survey data to go beyond its applicability to narrowly defined research questions and to have the kind of enduring value that excavations have nurtured by long standing methods and carefully cultivated archival practices.&nbsp; </p> <p>Proving that survey data is available for re-analysis is absolutely critical for its persistence as an archaeological methodology in the Mediterranean.&nbsp; And the recent transformation of post-Classical landscapes from spaces seen as stagnant and unchanging to dynamic <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42752729">"contingent" countrysides</a> makes the study of the post-Classical world ideally suited as a test case.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Welcome to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Blogosphere STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: welcome-to-the-pyla-koutsopetria-blogosphere CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 05/11/2009 07:44:13 AM ----BODY: <p>As any regular reader of my blog knows, the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> has invested some time and energy into making the project more transparent through encouraging staff and students to blog about their experiences.&nbsp; Most of the project participants have embraced this initiative and contributed their voice to one of the project's three weblogs.&nbsp; These blogs have brought considerable positive attention to the project from both academic colleagues and interested observers alike.&nbsp; We are particular proud of being in the vanguard of the archaeological blogging movement.</p> <p>To make it easier to follow PKAP on the Web, we have generated <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">a blog aggregator</a> that captures the RSS feeds from the three PKAP blogs and puts them together on a single page.&nbsp; All you need to do to follow the 2009 PKAP season it to <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">visit the blog aggregator</a> and click on the various links to get daily updates from our Senior Staff, Graduate Students, and Undergraduate students.&nbsp; </p> <p>As with past seasons, the students and staff are encouraged to write about whatever they want in the blog and in the past, we've captured everything from <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2008/06/mi ni-micro.html">the heroic silliness of the mini-micro</a> and the daring wager of the sieve challenge (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2008/05/th e-first-two-d.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2008/06/si eves-follow-u.html">here</a>) to <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2008/06/th e-first-of-my.html">the thoughtful reflections of our overqualified cook</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">students </a>.&nbsp; So, bookmark the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PKAPBlogAggregator.html">PKAP Blog Aggregator</a> and follow our adventures and discoveries this year!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Spring in Grand Forks

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: spring-in-grand-forks-1 CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 05/10/2009 06:25:09 PM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115707d0c7b970 b-pi"><img class="at-xid-6a00d83451908369e20115707d0c7b970b" alt="Spring in Grand Forks" title="Spring in Grand Forks" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115707d0c7b970b -800wi" border="0" /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 05/08/2009 08:03:21 AM ----BODY: <p>Some fun quick hits on a cloudy Friday.</p> <ul>! <li>Two interesting articles on <a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/index">First Monday</a>.&#0160; A nice article on the relationship <a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2498/21 81">between using facebook and grades among college and graduate students</a> and another <a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2329/21 78">on a genre based typology of blogs</a>.</li>! <li>An interesting <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/04/joggingempowerment-kopanos.html">back</a> and <a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/2009/05/success.html">forth</a>

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(and <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/05/kopanos-blog-challengefurfilled.html">back</a>) between two veteran bloggers.&#0160; </li>! <li>I can&#39;t remember whether I&#39;ve linked to the <a href="http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/">Digital Scholarship in the Humanities blog</a>.&#0160; This series on Digital Humanities in 2008 (<a href="http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/digital-humanities-in2008-part-i/">I</a>, <a href="http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/digital-humanities-in2008-ii-scholarly-communication-open-access/">II</a>, <a href="http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/digital-humanities-in2008-iii-research/">III</a>) is really good.</li>! <li>Only <a href="http://www.hesperiaonline.org/"><em>Hesperia</em></a> (with their flashy new address on the web: <a href="http://www.hesperia.org">www.hesperia.org</a>) can pull off <a href="http://www.atypon-link.com/ASCS/doi/pdf/10.2972/hesp.78.1.107">a 58 page article on the road linking Corinth and the Argolid</a>.&#0160; That&#39;s well over a page a kilometer.&#0160; Amazing.&#0160; But it&#39;s a good article with lots of interesting topographic tidbits including another tower <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/05/su mmer-research-on-the-fortification-of-the-southeastern-corinthia.html">that I think is probably a farmstead</a>.</li>! <li>Lots of exciting reports on the <a href="http://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/doaks_byz_2009_symposium.html">Dum barton Oaks Spring Symposium: Morea: The Land and Its People in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade</a>.</li>! <li><a href="http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/05/ag-thomas-atmidea.html">This is a lovely little church and it&#39;s &quot;restoration&quot; is sad and complicated</a>.&#0160; I simply love the 13th-14th century undomed (is that a word?) cross-in-square churches from the Argolid and Corinthia.</li>! <li><a href="http://getweb.info/movies/?p=3120">Movies with Greek and Roman themes this summer from the Languages Department</a>. </li>! </ul>! <p>That&#39;s all for today and have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Final Exams and Final Grades STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-final-exams-and-final-grades CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 05/07/2009 07:54:10 AM -----

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BODY: <p>My only job today is preparing the final exam for my 100 level history class, and I am dreading it.&nbsp; I have a robust bank of questions, various essays, and clear ideas about how to evaluate the class's grasp of the the basic principles that I have worked to instill over the course of the semester.&nbsp; Moreover, I have some confidence about how my students will perform on the exam, so I am not anxious for them (although, I already know that some students will do as well as they like).&nbsp; What I dread is that with the final exam the pedagogical aspects of testing give way to evaluation.&nbsp; That is to say, the final doesn't serve the same kind of pedagogical purpose that the various other exams and papers over the course of the semester do.&nbsp; Students rarely come and pick up their exams, so writing extensive comments on them serves little purpose.&nbsp; There isn't a chance to go over common problems in class afterwards, since the class will no longer meet.&nbsp; I can't change the emphasis of the class or go back through a particular section that caused problems.&nbsp; Basically the final exam judges whether the students acquired the skills and mastered the content that I consider to be central to the course.</p> <p>The finality of final exams (and final grades) have always bothered me.&nbsp; In large part because the disrupt whatever dynamic that I've created with the students that encourages them to see the class as part of a larger process of continuously refining their skills over not just the trajectory of a single course, but over their entire career at the university or even their entire life.&nbsp; The idealist in my considers learning to learn and process information is a cumulative process.&nbsp; The final stage of the class, with the exam and the final papers and the like, suddenly makes the steady accumulation of skills into a goal oriented exercise.&nbsp; This, in and of itself, is not bad.&nbsp; After all, most students have goals beyond simply training their mind, but most of these goals exist external to the university (material prosperity, a particular kind of job or career, et c.). </p> <p>In any event, I've not discovered a way to create opportunities for the interactive learning from the the final exams and final grades. I suppose they fit better into the larger purpose of the university, where the entire range of courses and experiences condition and encourage behavior in the students.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Under Libby's Gaze: Merrifield 300 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: under-libbys-gaze-merrifield-300 CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 05/06/2009 07:47:49 AM

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----BODY: <p>The big lecture hall in Merrifield Hall at the University of North Dakota is Merrifield 300.&nbsp; It seat right around 150 students and is an almost a living museum of different pedagogical insights and movements.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157072056d970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f7bf937970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p>Theater style seating establishes an immutable relationship between the student and the teacher.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f7bf944970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f7bf949970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f7bf94f970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157072058f970b -pi" width="304" border="0"></a></p> <p>The front of the room is crowded with the latest in visual teaching aids from the last 50 years: chalkboards, televisions, maps (of course), overhead video projector screens, media center, but oddly no podium.&nbsp; It's impossible, for example, to put your lecture notes down on the media island and refer to them in a comfortable way.&nbsp; It's also impossible to use both the chalkboards and the moveable screen.&nbsp; I've never used the televisions, but their "olde skool", tube-tv, appearances do not inspire confidence.&nbsp; The doors open directly into the orchestra so the first part of class is always interrupted as late arrivals seek to slip inconspicuously by the lecturer and situate themselves in the auditorium.&nbsp; It's a wonder that more theaters aren't designed in this way.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157072059b970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f7bf964970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>These complaints aside the room has a certain charm.&nbsp; I realized that last night will likely be my last night teaching my Western Civilization I survey in this classroom.&nbsp; The auditorium in our new building will have its own character, I am sure, but it will almost certainly lack the bizarre, orange-patterned carpet on the walls. Whether this was designed to calm the students, fill them with eagerness to learn, or simply deter them from looking at anything other than the lecturer in front of the room, is anybody's guess.&nbsp; The photo below preserves one of my favorite features of Merrifield 300, the dark right corner.&nbsp; This corner of the room is always packed with students, hoping, I suppose, that the lack of light makes them less visible to their classmates and the instructor.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f7bf96e970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f7bf974970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">This is the final room of

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my Merrifield Hall farewell tour.&nbsp; (Check out <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/me rrifield-215.html">Room 215</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/un der-libbys-gaze-merrifield-217.html">Room 217</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/un der-libbys-gaze-merrifield-209.html">Room 209</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/un der-libbys-gaze-images-of-the-department-of-history-from-merrifieldhall.html">the hallways of Merrifield</a>) Friday afternoon, I begin to pack up my office and hope to have it reasonably squared away before my impending departure for Cyprus. Merrifield Hall has been the home of the Department of History for over 80 years at the University of North Dakota, an admirable tenure for any department in any building.&nbsp; Most of the Department's notable graduates studied in its rooms, the most productive faculty in the Department's history worked in its offices, and the rooms, hallways, and offices bear witness to research practices, student habits, and teaching techniques of the building's long history.&nbsp; Documenting some of the spaces and places in Merrifield hall has revealed the accumulated traces of practice from its long history.&nbsp; By midsummer, we will begin to process of inscribing the new building with the evidence for our activities, habits, and routines.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.137.209.220 URL: DATE: 05/09/2009 06:28:37 PM I love the 1970s pattern. This is important documentation work. The politics of the room (I want to crawl in the dark corner to do my grading) are priceless (and pleasantly familiar). Kostis -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Summer Research on the Fortification of the Southeastern Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: summer-research-on-the-fortification-of-the-southeastern-corinthia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 05/05/2009 08:57:12 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Those of you who follow my <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">Twitter feed</a> know that <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/wo rking-paper-towers-and-fortifications-at-vayia-in-the-southeastcorinthia.html">our article on the fortifications around Lychnari harbor in the Southeastern Corinthia</a> was given "conditional acceptance" by Hesperia this past week.&nbsp; The descriptive elements -- that is the publication of the archaeology -- was fine, but our interpretation appears to have been somewhat lacking.&nbsp; The main objections from the substantial peer reviews focused on our identification of these rural structures as fortifications constructed either by the "central government" at Corinth (such as this existed in the Late Classical and Hellenistic period) or, at very least, by the local residents of the coastal valley to the south of the main Isthmian plain.&nbsp; One reviewer thought that our site was more likely to be a farmstead or even rural storage.&nbsp; The other thought that we needed to make our argument more convincingly irrespective of our interpretation of these sites.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>From the start our goal in publishing the results of our work around Lychnari bay was to make the material public and make it available for future scholars to draw upon in their analyses.&nbsp; We argue that this alone makes these sites worthy of publication because so few examples of rural fortifications, or installations of any kind, have been published from the Corinthia.&nbsp; So, with that being our goal, how do we approach a problem with the interpretation of our site (and recognizing that we could never separate interpretation fully from description)?&nbsp; We bandied about three potential solutions:</p> <p>First, we could simply observe that the debate around the function of rural installations is long-standing and probably intractable and allow for our sites to be read either as fortifications or as sites of rural habitation or both (imagining that a "fortification" in the countryside would be able to sustain at least a small detachment of guards for seasonal guard duty).&nbsp; Opening the door to both interpretations would shed light back on the material evidence itself and (perhaps ironically) the difficulty of interpreting rural sites without continued efforts to document and publish existing, known, rural installation in a systematic and thorough way.</p> <p>Second, we could fortify our analysis (get it, fortify) our current analysis with an expanded treatment of our discussion of topography, history, and architecture present at our trio of sites.&nbsp; Bringing more comparanda to bear is always difficult in instances when the basic function for almost all rural sites is in dispute.&nbsp; That is to say, for every example of a rural site that fits our argument for fortification, it is possible to suggest that these comparanda are not necessarily fortifications, but other kids of rural installations.&nbsp; On the other hand, we have some additional evidence and arguments that can expand our arguments for the topography of the region.&nbsp; In particular, we can show that there is evidence for the fortification of the route from Franglimano to the far southern Corinthia during antiquity and the post-antique period.&nbsp; This suggests that access to the Saronic ports of the eastern Corinthia was regarded as significant route to more settled areas.&nbsp; While it will not be possible to argue for the amount of traffic through the network of valleys in the Eastern Corinthia, we can at least propose that some of these routes warranted an investment in fortification historically to support our interpretation of the potential state sponsored fortifications around Lychnari bay more successfully.&nbsp; This would include more careful discussions of the several episodes of military activity in the area: the Athenian raid of Solygeia during the Peloponnesian War(4.42-44) and the Athenian landing at Spireion (Korphos?) at 8.11-12.&nbsp; We can also make more of the description in Xenophon, <em>Hell.</em> 7.4.4 of Athenians being stationed at "guard stations"

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throughout the Corinthia in the 360s.&nbsp; </p> <p>Finally, we could back off our interpretation in general.&nbsp; The problems associated with interpreting rural installations are well-known.&nbsp; The issues surrounding these types of sites are unlikely to be resolved successfully without systematic excavation of a considerable percentage rural sites (and perhaps not even then).&nbsp; The link between difficult interpretation and archaeological publication is one that I had not considered in the past.&nbsp; If the problem with an article rests in its interpretation, rather than with the documentation of the site, and the problem is significant enough to prevent the description of the site from publication, then what are the implications for other kinds of problematic evidence seeing the light day in print.&nbsp; It would seem that this kind of problem would increase the potential for stable, digital publication of archaeological data to make an important contribution to the dissemination of archaeological knowledge that resists easy interpretation.</p> <p>Hopefully we'll get a chance to return to work on our Corinthia article after our field season with the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; I have about 10 days in Greece in late June and hope to be able to tie up some interpretive loose ends now.&nbsp; And, special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for Hesperia who have helped us focus very clearly on the shortcomings of our work and challenged us both in the specific context of our research and the more general context of Greek archaeology!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Revisioning Relics: Lost, Found, and Lost Again STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: double-dreams CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 05/04/2009 08:15:24 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the most amazing inventio narratives, complete with multiple dreams and visions, and multiple excavations, appears in the 6th century Chronicle of the Marcellinus and involves one of the most well traveled relics, the Head of John the Baptist.&nbsp; (In fact, the Head was sufficiently well-traveled to deserve a monograph as early as the 17th century:&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/83537177">C. Du Frense Du Cange<em>, Traité historique du chef de S. Jean Baptiste...</em></a><em> </em>(Paris 1665); for a brief modern treatment see: J. Wortley, "The Relics of&nbsp; 'the Friends of Jesus' at Constantinople," in J. Durand and B. Flusin eds, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/57165084"><em>Byzance et les Reliques du

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Christ</em></a><em>. Centre de Recherche d'Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance</em> 17. (Paris 2004), 143-157).&nbsp; Ultimately, one part of the complex history of the rediscovery of John the Baptist's head is commemorated in <a href="http://www.rongolini.com/synmay.htm#May%2025">the Synaxarion of Constantinople of May 25th</a>.&nbsp; </p> <blockquote> <p>"John, the herald of the Lord and his baptizer, revealed his head which , at an unspeakable horrible demand, Herodias had once accepted after it had been cut from his shoulders and placed on a dish, and buried far from his headless bod; he revealed his head to two eastern monks entering Jerusalem to celebrate the resurrection of the Christ the Lord, so that when they reached the place where the former king Herod lived they were advised to search around and dig the ground up faithfully.&nbsp; So while they were journeying back to their own places, carrying in their rough saddle-bag the head they had discovered by faith, a certain potter from the city of Emesa fleeing from the poverty which threatened him daily, showed himself to them as a companion.&nbsp; While, in ignorance, he was carrying the sack entrusted to him with the sacred head, he was admonished in the night by him whose head he was carrying, and fleeing both his companions he made off.&nbsp; He entered the city of Emesa immediately with his holy and light burden, and as long as he lived there he venerated the head of Christ's herald.&nbsp; At his death, he handed it over in a jar to his sister, who was ignorant of the matter.&nbsp; Next a certain Eustochius, who was secretly a priest of the Arian faith, unworthily obtained this great treasure and dispensed to the rabble, as if it were purely his own, the grace which Christ the Lord bestows on his inconstant people through John the Baptist. When his wickedness was detected he was driven out the city of Emesa.&nbsp; Afterwards this cave, in which the head of the most blessed John was set in an urn and reburied underground, became the abode of certain monks.&nbsp; Finally, while the priest and head of the monastery, Marcellus, was living a faultless life in that cave, the blessed John, herald of Christ, revealed himself and his head to Marcellus and showed that it was buried here, conspicuous by its many miracles.&nbsp; It is agreed therefore that this venerable head was found by the foresaid priest Marcellus whil Uranius was bishop of the city mentioned.&nbsp; This was on the twentyfourth day of February in the consulship of Vincomalus and Opilio, in the middle week of Lent, and the ruling emperors were in fact Valentinian and Marcian."</p> <p><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/32803276">Chronicle of Marcellinus. trans. B. Croke. (Sydney 1995)</a>, pp. 19-22</p></blockquote> <p>This is an extraordinarily complex and dense story capturing almost the entire realm of Late Antique experiences from heretical priests to traveling monks to visions, relics, and the <em>realia</em> every day life (potters, rough saddle-bags, jars, et c.).</p> <p>The story is one of a significant number of episodes when a holy relic is lost multiple times.&nbsp; For example, the the bodies of the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste reappear once in the time of the Empress Pulcharia in the early 5th century (Sozomen <em>HE</em> 9.2) and then later in Justinian's reign (Procop. <em>Aed</em>. 1.7.2-10).&nbsp; Numerous icons appear and vanish from the tumultuous history of far flung monasteries representing the irrepressible sanctity of religious objects.&nbsp; From a historical perspective, I have always thought that there is something incongruous about sacred objects being misplaced or lost, but then again, we hear of important documents and artifacts sometimes going missing in museums even today, especially during chaotic and unstable times.&nbsp; </p> <p>From the perspective of narratives on dream archaeology, these stories show how densely packed stories associated with relics could be and how multiple individuals, places, and events could partake of the sacred penumbra of a single relic.&nbsp; Once the head of John the Baptist appeared in Constantinople (at the church of St. John Studios or the Pharos ("Lighthouse") Church), it not only validated its power as a sacred

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object through the various places and people involved in its inventio, but also imparted those people, places, and invents with a share of its sanctity.&nbsp; The re-inventio of a relic not only reinforced it sacred status, but also produced an expanded network that mapped together people and places from across a sacred history and landscape.&nbsp; </p> <p>So multiple dreams, multiple excavations, and various translations (travels) held out an extraordinary potential for creating a sacred topography (often extending far beyond the final resting place of the relic), a sacred history typically revealing the irrepressible persistence of the sacred object, and, in some cases, multiple individuals credited and blessed with the discovery of the object.&nbsp; When the story is set in such mundane and ordinary surroundings as the one recounted above, the sacred object imbues even the mundane <em>realia </em>of everyday life like pots and saddlebags with a sacred glow.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Old and New in Grand Forks STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: old-and-new-in-grand-forks CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 05/02/2009 03:47:49 PM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f71635c970 c-pi"><img class="at-xid-6a00d83451908369e201156f71635c970c image-full" alt="Old and New in Grand Forks" title="Old and New in Grand Forks" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f71635c970c -800wi" border="0" /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: To Fargo 2

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: to-fargo-2 CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 05/02/2009 03:34:25 PM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157067736b970 b-pi"><img class="at-xid-6a00d83451908369e201157067736b970b image-full" alt="To Fargo 2" title="To Fargo 2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201157067736b970b -800wi" border="0" /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: To Fargo STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: to-fargo CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 05/02/2009 03:33:45 PM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f715e84970 c-pi"><img class="at-xid-6a00d83451908369e201156f715e84970c image-full" alt="To Fargo" title="To Fargo" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f715e84970c -800wi" border="0" /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 05/01/2009 09:16:59 AM ----BODY: <p>Here are some quick thoughts on a cool NoDak Friday:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://phdiva.blogspot.com/2009/04/friends-romans-why-i-closedblog.html">Some folks live more interesting lives than others</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2009/04/how_sarah_spread_and_what_it_m.html">I really H. Jenkins' idea of "spreadable" media</a>.&nbsp; I need to pencil in time to read <a href="http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html">t he entire 8 part (!) discussion of it on his blog</a>.</li> <li>It will be cool to follow the work at the <a href="http://lateantiqueostia.wordpress.com/">Berlin-Kent Ostia Excavations</a> again this summer.</li> <li><a href="http://pretexts.blogspot.com/2009/04/whoseculture-indeed.html">This is a pretty scathing review</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/olson/courses/wired/projects/hadrianicbaths/">Thi s is pretty cool</a> and <a href="http://undergraduatedean.duke.edu/2009/04/duke-students-digitally-modelroman-baths/">this blog</a> is a nice way to highlight the accomplishments of your students.</li> <li>The <a href="http://digitalgateway.und.edu/">Working Group in Digital and New Media</a> got some good press from the President yesterday in the University Council Meeting.&nbsp; As the press release says: "Two new initiatives may be built into sustainable centers, Kelley said, citing one project that focuses on digital and new media (involving the department of computer science, art, English, history, music and the Chester Fritz Library)..." </li> <li>Chuck Jones continues to produce useful online content.&nbsp; Check out his <a href="http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Online</a> for the latest on open access material for scholars of antiquity.</li></ul> <p>That's all for today... have a good weekend.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Capstone Classes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-capstone-classes CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 04/30/2009 08:33:23 AM ----BODY: <p>History at the University of North Dakota has a capstone class.&nbsp; Called History 440, it requires the students to produce a substantial term paper on a particular topic in history.&nbsp; The students meet together perhaps a dozen times over the course of the semester as a group, but generally work one-on-one with a faculty adviser who shepherds them through the processes of research, writing, and revision.&nbsp; The students are responsible for meeting with their chosen faculty advisers and the level of "student engagement" with this process varies.&nbsp; There is a general hope that the students are familiar with the processes involved in writing a substantial term paper.&nbsp; Befitting a capstone class, many of the basic skills necessary -- from note taking to footnoting -- are developed over the course of the curriculum in the department and in History 240, the preparatory methods class.&nbsp; Ideally, the students have a complete tool kit for writing a substantial and exciting paper.&nbsp; Having listened to a half-dozen of the papers presented by students this year, the results of this process are varied.&nbsp; It's not entirely clear whether we've successfully communicated the basic research principles to our majors.&nbsp; They can, at their best, play the part and present professional sounding papers, but it is a different matter to consider whether they truly understand how to write, think, and do research (and walk) like a historian.&nbsp; I am optimistic and apparently so are some of my colleagues around the US.&nbsp; In the most recent issues of Perspectives there was a series of papers on capstone courses and some discussion in the blogosphere (including <a href="http://edwired.org/?p=489">this nice contribution from edwired</a>)</p> <p>Since I've been teaching History 240, which is the preparatory methods class for 440, I have a front row seat for many of the issues surrounding the capstone course in our department (and I suspect, in departments around the US).&nbsp; Increasingly I've come to the conclusion that a capstone class is not particularly suitable for history majors.&nbsp; Some of this has to do with the idiosyncratic nature of most history departments, some of this has to do with the kinds of students that we attract to the major, and some of this has to do with the nature of the discipline itself.</p> <p>Here are some of my preliminary thoughts:</p> <p>1. Students are drawn to history not because they love to write and do research because the love the stories.&nbsp; Historical fiction, the History Channel, historical fantasies (like the Da Vinci Code or Larry Potter), and even video games are the primary route through which our students are lured to the discipline.&nbsp; The major itself, however, is a very different thing from the narrative driven experience that have attracted students to the field.&nbsp; The shift from narrative to analysis, interpretation, and argument driven writing turns off a significant portion of our majors.&nbsp; Writing a major analytical and argumentative paper is even more difficult in that they are being asked to make the transition from "content consumers" to "content producers".&nbsp; This is difficult and a percentage of our students just check out on the content production part of their education. It's not why they signed up to be history majors.</p> <p>2. The skills communicated in our capstone course do not appear to the student to fit clearly within their post-university goals.&nbsp; Few of our students go on to graduate school in history.&nbsp; Many go on to teach, go to law school, or go into the

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business world.&nbsp; While it is easy enough to convince students that a long term paper will help them develop a particular set of skills that will be useful in their post-university life (e.g. the elusive critical thinking, writing skills, research discipline, et c.), it is another thing to convince them that this is the best way to develop those skills and it is certainly not a method that most of them particularly enjoy (see point 1). </p> <p>3. History is not a cumulative discipline. Capstone courses are best suited to field where faculty disseminate bits of methods, practices, and procedures over the course of a series of classes.&nbsp; History doesn't really work that way.&nbsp; And our department, which is fortunate to have a wide range of methods and theoretical perspectives represented, does not work this way in particular.&nbsp; While I can imagine how skills learned in a course taught in Oral History, Quantitative Methods, Mediterranean Archaeology, Marxist approaches, Gender History, and Early Modern and Medieval History could introduce a diverse and robust historical tool kit for an aspiring student, I can also understand why these diverse approaches do not present an easily integrated group of methods for a single project.&nbsp; The fact that we distribute our students among the various faculty in the department to work on their papers one-on-one reveals that we don't even expect our students to bring together methods developed across their full range of classes.&nbsp; So the idea that the capstone paper is some kind of integrative or cumulative experience is likely false.&nbsp; In reality, our capstone paper follows models of specialization common to graduate programs.&nbsp; In these models students become increasingly focused on a particular and limited skill set (not necessary to the complete exclusion of other skills, but certainly with the goal of becoming a specialist rather than an individual with a diverse set of transferable skills).</p> <p>So, to sum up, students aren't attracted to history by the writing and research, the capstone course does not feed clearly into the post-graduate goals of most students, and at least as our department has established our capstone, the approach runs counter to the most commonly accepted idea of the capstone course as a cumulative experience. </p> <p>For more thoughts on teaching, be sure to check out our <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> blog!&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://edwired.org/?p=489">Edwired offered some interesting, alternative</a>s,&nbsp; but these could simply exchange one set of professional expectations (i.e. professional academic history) for another (public history, community activism, et c.) and the division of history majors into various tracks with different cumulative projects (public, professional, teaching, community work) would eventually undermine not only the integrity of the discipline as having certain common outcomes ideally assessed and evaluated for all majors, but also would continue to focus the students on certain skills held by particular faculty members in the department.&nbsp; So in some ways, changing or even diversifying the focus of the capstone experience simply compounds methodological diversity, theoretical differences, and chronological specialization already present in a department with an additional layer of fragmentation based on faculty ability to advise a student on various kinds of projects.&nbsp; Again, the capstone experience that draws students to understand how the discipline of history functions as a discipline dissolves into the ghettoized compartments of professional specialization. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Another Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Updates STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: another-pyla-koutsopetria-archaeological-project-updates CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/29/2009 08:53:59 AM ----BODY: <p>The season is begins in a little less than two weeks and the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">PKAP</a> team is preparing for the most complex and exciting field season to date.&nbsp; So a quick blog today to keep our various stakeholders and interested onlookers appraised of what we are up to.</p> <p>1. Despite the difficult economic times, we are fully funded this year thanks to the generosity of the <a href="Institute for Aegean Prehistory">Institute for Aegean Prehistory</a>, the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a>, various grants from the <a href="http://www.asor.org/">American Schools of Oriental Research</a>, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/CyprusResearchFund/Donors.html" >private donors</a>, and a group of enthusiastic field school students from <a href="http://www.messiah.edu/">Messiah College</a>, the University of North Dakota, University of Pittsburgh, and <a href="http://www.iup.edu/">Indiana University of Pennsylvania</a>. It's great to realize the confidence that various groups have in our project, our PKAP team, and its goals.</p> <p>2. Preseason Inventories.&nbsp; Over the past few days, the PKAP triumvirate has been conducting a comprehensive inventory of PKAP Digital Resources.&nbsp; This includes digital research materials that we use in the field (scanned books and articles, for example), scanned documentation from past season (forms, notebooks), digital photographs of objects, survey units, excavation units, and various photos of field and museum work and daily life.&nbsp; Finally, I am preparing an inventory of all our "born digital data" from GPS points to GIS maps, resistivity data and survey, finds, and excavation databases.&nbsp; The hope is that this inventory will provide a common set of digital tools for all the PKAP team members and provide a solid, common foundation for both in-field analysis and the final analysis for publication. </p> <p>3. New and Multimedia. This year we'll have four new/multimedia projects underway.&nbsp; We'll run our typical complement of blogs (which I hope to get running by early next week).&nbsp; At the same time, we plan to host both <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/la ndscape-archaeology-and-photography-at-the-pyla-koustopetria-archaeologicalproject.html">a still photographer</a> (who will be our official artist-inresidence) and a documentary filmmaker.&nbsp; The hope is that some of this content will be made available as the season progresses.&nbsp; I will also (hopefully) conduct some in field interviews and post the podcasts online <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-final-pkap.html">like last year</a>.&nbsp; Hopefully this work will not only highlight the performative aspects of fieldwork, but also make our research more

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accessible and transparent.&nbsp; As part of our multi and new media program for this year, we are going to arm some of our field school students with inexpensive digital video cameras and invite them to capture their own experiences on the project.&nbsp; This content will be available for our documentary filmmaker to incorporate into this work and for the project's larger archival purposes.</p> <p>4. In season work.&nbsp; We plan to have as many as six trenches in three different areas open at once this year.&nbsp; We'll excavate on the top of Vigla in an effort to come to terms with the architecture, function, and, most importantly, chronology of this fortified site.&nbsp; Michael Brown will continue his work at the Late Bronze Age site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos in an effort to come to terms with the extent of settlement on the site and the function of the fortification walls.&nbsp; The Late Antique contingent on PKAP also hopes that Brown's trenches will reveal something of the later history of this site, perhaps even some of its function in Late Antiquity.&nbsp; The final area under excavation will be PylaKoutsopetria.&nbsp; This area was originally excavated by Maria Hadjicosti and the Department of Antiquities (see preliminary reports <a href="http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/bch_00074217_1994_num_118_2_6980?_Prescripts_Search_isPortletOuvrage=false">here</a> and <a href="http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/bch_00074217_2000_num_124_2_1621?_Prescripts_Search_isPortletOuvrage=false">here</a>).&n bsp; We hope to get the complex stratigraphy of this area sorted out a bit more clearly and to determine whether the remains of an earlier phase are present at the coastal site.&nbsp; To facilitate this we have increased the number of trench supervisors and created the position of area supervisors who will supervise the work across the various trenches in an area.&nbsp; We will also collaborate with a group from Indiana University of Pennsylvania who will conduct a survey of various areas using ground penetrating radar (GPR).&nbsp; We hope that this technique, which is somewhat faster than resistivity, will produce a more comprehensive picture of the subsurface remains on both Vigla and the Koutsopetria plain.</p> <p>4. Publication and Presentation.&nbsp; Over the last few years we have worked continuously to present our research at conferences, workshops, and in a wide-range of publications.&nbsp; In 2009 we'll begin to look toward the final publication of the survey, remote sensing, and excavation.&nbsp; We have an advanced draft of an article for the Journal of Roman Archaeology almost complete, and there is probably some wisdom to preparing a final "preliminary" report for the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus (RDAC), but beyond these projects our efforts will shift to preparing the final publication for submission in 2011.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Teaching Graduate Students STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-on-teaching-graduate-students CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 04/28/2009 08:37:13 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Cross posted on <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.</em></p> <p><a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> is on the cutting edge with our recent focus on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/04/23/mentoring-graduatestudents/">teaching graduate students</a>!&nbsp; There was a thought provoking <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html">Op-Ed piece in the New York Times Sunday on graduate education</a>.&nbsp; It began with the provocative paragraph: </p> <blockquote> <p>"Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.&nbsp; Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no oe other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well&nbsp; over $100,000 in student loans).</p></blockquote> <p>Taylor goes on to propose 6 solutions:</p> <p>1. Restructure the curriculum along cross-disciplinary lines. <br>2. Abolish permanent departments and replace them with constantly evolving, problem-focused programs.<br>3. Increase collaboration among institutions.<br>4. Transform the traditional dissertation particularly in the humanities by encouraging students to experiment with alternative formats.<br>5. Prepare students to work in a wider range of jobs by considering real life applications of their graduate training.<br>6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure.</p> <p>He concludes with a personal maxim: "Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it."</p> <p>While it is easy to imagine the reasons why these reforms do not take place within the modern university (funding concerns, competition among departments, genuine intellectual and philosophical differences between disciplines, institutional and bureaucratic impediments, et c.), this core sentiments in this short op-ed piece are shared by many in academia.&nbsp; But, as with many professions, students and faculty tend to be risk adverse.&nbsp; Graduate students often see their accomplishments over their graduate school careers as the basis for their professional careers, and graduate faculty (despite their sometimes well-meaning encouragement to students to take risks) often reinforce this idea as a way to push graduate students through the program, encourage them to complete work on time, and perform up to their potential in the classroom.</p> <p>Moreover, encouraging a student to engage in cross-disciplinary research or a particularly innovative (or even revolutionary) research plan is a challenge for any graduate faculty member.&nbsp; After all, cross-disciplinary or non-traditional research most often puts graduate faculty in a weak position to advise because it frequently falls toward the fringes of our academic expertise, our professional training, and our disciplinary loyalties.&nbsp; It also requires that graduate faculty find ways to work around institutional divisions and, in many cases, find collaborators within a number of administrative silos.&nbsp; </p> <p>Finally, and this is something that I have been thinking about a good bit lately, introducing theses and dissertations in "alternative forms" ranging from new media projects to more practical applied research in the humanities or even just slightly less tradition-bound variations on thesis/dissertation format requires that we change certain fundamental

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aspects of our curricula (particular in the humanities).&nbsp; In history, for example, the entire undergraduate curriculum is geared toward preparing students to write a major research paper in formal academic prose and with the complete scholarly apparatus (footnotes, bibliography, et c.).&nbsp; This capstone exercise represents the supposed culmination of these students' work in the field of history.&nbsp; It forms a solid foundation (in its ideal form) for continued work in the field including the M.A. and even the Ph.D.&nbsp; In effect, the capstone paper is a miniature version of M.A. thesis or dissertation.&nbsp; Ancillary to the place of the thesis in the historical profession, it is said to develop research skills, critical thinking (although this is a vague catch-all), and writing abilities.&nbsp; While there is no doubt that research skills, writing ability, and the ambiguous, if crucial, "critical thinking" are crucial to success in many fields, these skills can also be successfully imparted through any number of projects, media, and programs.&nbsp; </p> <p>The point here is, as we move toward more innovative projects, crossdisciplinary programs, and non-traditional career paths, graduate education is only the very tip of the iceberg.&nbsp; In fact, the real fundamental change within academia might have to occur at undergraduate level.&nbsp; Graduate education, with whatever vocational and professional training that it seeks to impart, builds upon a foundation established in undergraduate programs, if not even earlier.&nbsp; Without changing the foundation of graduate education, it's hard to imagine a new beginning for the Detroit of higher learning.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Profoundly Local STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: profoundly-local CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 04/27/2009 08:22:45 AM ----BODY: <p>For the past few years, my wife and I have taken to listening to Philadelphia Phillies' baseball games on the radio.&nbsp; First we did this over XM radio and now we do it over internet(s).&nbsp; The <a href="http://mlb.mlb.com/index.jsp">mlb.com</a> service allows us to almost always listen to the Phillies broadcast team where as XM always carried the home team broadcasts.&nbsp; This year more than ever, I've felt a tremendous nostalgia for the various institutions and businesses advertised during the game.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.wawa.com/WawaWeb/">Wawa dairies</a> (a local convenience store chain), <a href="http://amorosobaking.com/">Amoroso rolls</a>

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(a must for a Philly Cheesesteak), <a href="http://turkeyhill.com/">Turkey Hill</a> ice cream and even local car dealers that, in truth, I've never visited but were a ubiquitous presence on the airwaves in the Philadelphia area.&nbsp; This disjunction between the businesses being advertised on the radio and my current locale (Grand Forks, North Dakota) is jarring.&nbsp; It is also an interesting reminder of how easy it is to invoke the local in an era where the internet allows us to access various local institutions from anywhere in the world.</p> <p>At the same time that I was reveling in advertisements for Amoroso bread and Wawa sandwiches, I took a group of students for a somewhat impromptu "tour" of campus.&nbsp; We talked about the frequent disconnect between institutional places of memory and the networks of meaning that students construct on a university campus.&nbsp; They shared some of the silly nicknames that students assigned to campus monuments and some of the ways in which they map and associate experiences with places.&nbsp; I made the observation that the current practice of listening to your iPod while walking across campus likely has changed the way in which this generation of students has shaped and mapped their campus experiences.&nbsp; Last year, while I was living in Athens, I used to go out to eat on Saturday night with the same little group.&nbsp; On the walk to a local taverna, I'd listen to my iPod.&nbsp; Today when I hear some of the songs that I used to listen to on these Saturday evening walks, I immediately recall the experience of Athens in the winter.&nbsp; These experiences and memories, however, are almost completely personal.&nbsp; Since my playlists were idiosyncratic (to say the least) and piped directly to <a href="http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/parliament/p+funk_20290643.html">my earhole</a>, the experience was perhaps more intensely personal than one conveyed through more public media (say, the noise of the streets).</p> <p>The students talked around about this for a while and added that they often associated different places on campus with different scents.&nbsp; I've never seen any effort to map smells, although there has certainly been some scholarship on the role of scents in religious experience for example.&nbsp; In fact, it is difficult for me to separate Byzantine architecture from the smell of incense. </p> <p>A final observation that contributed to my recent experiences of the local: all weekend we noticed a low flying helicopter twacking its way back and forth across town.&nbsp; My wife and I puzzled about this until Sunday morning when we noticed that a local business was offering helicopter rides.&nbsp; Judging by how often we saw the helicopter in the air, I suspect that these rides were quite popular.&nbsp; Helicopter tours of big cities like New York are not unusual, but a helicopter ride over the small town of Grand Forks, North Dakota?&nbsp; While a helicopter ride in New York are probably designed for tourists who struggle to grasp the enormity of the city, Grand Forks, aside from the constant flow of bargain-conscious Manitobans, is not a tourist destination.&nbsp; So these helicopter rides are meant for local residents who are seeking a new perspective on their own community.&nbsp; </p> <p>Just as our listening to a Phillies broadcast allowed me a nostalgic escape from Grand Forks, ND, so a helicopter ride could introduce a similar feeling of displacement (an uncanny feeling) by presenting the familiar in a novel, exciting, and unfamiliar way.&nbsp; The idea of localness and of place develops through the tension between physical space and surroundings, experiences, sensations, and memory.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.15.101.225 URL: DATE: 04/27/2009 10:17:20 AM On mapping and scent -- I always think of Athens when I smell diesel fumes. This may sound like a slight against Athens. It is not. Rather, the smell of something that some regard as unpleasant (diesel fumes), I find oddly enjoyable because it reminds me a city that I really like. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: ryan stander EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.168.162 URL: http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com DATE: 04/27/2009 11:09:11 AM bill...love this post. the scent memory mapping is def. interesting. i can easily remember the scent of my best friends home while i was growing, my musty flat in Brasil, the exhaust and cigarette smoke in NYC, the scent of the local wood grill restaurant that choked out my runs in sioux falls. what struck me as i was reading this is how place memory forms through both extraordinary events but also over time in an accumulation of experience (active and passive) that allows place to emerge out of space. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.133.190 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 04/27/2009 11:32:27 AM Rangar, My wife has a similar memory of Athens: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/susan_cara hers_view_of_pkap/">http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the _me/susan_carahers_view_of_pkap/</a> Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brian EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.248 URL: http://mazeoffeathers.blogspot.com/ DATE: 04/28/2009 10:15:03 AM

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Great post. Those moments that really stick with us throughout the years, comprising unique collections of sensory data, aren't usually recognized for their significance until after the fact. Could we have seen it for it's value at the time, might we have basked in the moment a little longer, given a little more effort to appreciate the experience? This line of thinking has challenged me in my photography to think forward to what my future self or others would find truly interesting of a particular place and time, much of which might be taken for granted in the present. Thank you for yet another reminder to be aware of my place in history. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Snow!! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: snow CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 04/26/2009 09:34:15 PM ----BODY: <p>A spring snow!</p><p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570550ae1970 b-pi"><img alt="Snow!!" border="0" class="at-xid6a00d83451908369e2011570550ae1970b image-full " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011570550ae1970b -800wi" title="Snow!!" /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia-1 CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 04/24/2009 09:52:30 AM

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----BODY: <p>Some assorted stuff:</p> <ul>! <li>If you don&#39;t know about <a href="http://researchnewsinla.blogspot.com/">this</a>, then you might have missed <a href="http://saintsandblesseds.wordpress.com/">this</a> and <a href="http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/cgibin/somsid.cgi?page=volumes/pba141">this</a>.&#0160; <a href="http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/cgibin/somsid.cgi?page=141p649&amp;session=581648A&amp;type=header">This article</a> is particularly interesting. </li>! <li><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/04/stand-by-me.html">Kostis Kourelis as new media prophet</a>.&#0160; Read his post alongside <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/opinion/22dowd.html">this</a>, and then read the commentary <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2009/04/person-with-twiceweekly-column-feels-no-need-to-provide-instant-updates">here</a> and <a href="http://www.kottke.org/09/04/in-defense-of-twitter">here</a>.&#0160; You can follow <a href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">me here</a>.&#0160; And we probably need to think about <a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2009/04/how_sarah_spread_and_what_it_m.html">this< /a> now as well.</li>! <li><a href="http://classics.uc.edu/troy/coins/">Sebastian Heath leading the way again</a>. </li>! <li><a href="http://teachingthursday.org/">In case you missed it</a>. </li>! <li><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/CyprusResearchFund/Donors.html" >We&#39;re trying to raise money to do great things</a>. </li>! <li>Keep <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/ta lk-on-thursday-socialism-serbofilia-sex-and-suicide.html">4:00 pm next Thursday free for this</a>. </li>! <li><a href="http://digitalgateway.und.edu/">This is cool</a> and now has a link from the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND homepage</a>. </li>! <li><a href="http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0904/0904tea1.cfm">This </a>, <a href="http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0904/0904tea2.cfm">this </a>, and <a href="http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0904/0904tea3.cfm">this </a> are food for thought.</li>! </ul>! <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Construction Season

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: construction-season CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 04/23/2009 07:44:48 AM ----BODY: <p align="left">Despite the flood and the crazy spring weather, it's construction season again.&nbsp; They are building in a few more of the lots left vacant after the 1997 flood.&nbsp; I really like my new phone's camera.&nbsp; It makes it relatively easy to capture photos like this.&nbsp; The brick is the only remnant of the previous house on this lot sitting amidst the markings for the new foundation.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f4f24aa970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="LonelyBrick" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f4f24ac970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Graduate Students STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-graduate-students CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 04/23/2009 07:35:55 AM ----BODY: <p>Today's blog is just a <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">link</a> over to the thoughtful comments offered by my colleague Cynthia Prescott on <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/04/23/mentoring-graduatestudents/">Mentoring Graduate Students</a>.&nbsp; As I spend more and more of my time this semester reading M.A. Theses, I realize more and more how challenging advising graduate students can be.&nbsp; She has worked hard this year to engage the graduate students in critical activities outside the seminar and classroom.&nbsp; These "value added" activities, namely our monthly history workshops, have not only allowed us to model constructive, professional criticism to our students, but also build a sense of community that encourages

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collective learning.</p> <p>Prescott's post also explores the fine line between frank professional advice and nurturing the dreams and aspirations of our sometimes naive graduate students.&nbsp; The job market for historians is not good these days and our students need to understand that reality.&nbsp; On the other hand, we have positions so it is possible to move from graduate school to the professional world.</p> <p>Ok, enough of my summary, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/04/23/mentoring-graduate-students/">go and read it yourself</a>.&nbsp; (And check back, because there is another post on the way!)</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Two Years of Blogging and 50,000 Page Views STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: two-years-of-blogging-and-50000-page-views CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/22/2009 08:28:45 AM ----BODY: <p>I am not obsessed with blogging, but it gives me something to do while I drink my morning coffee, and now I have done it for two years.&nbsp; I think that <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/arestrospectiv.html">the observations that I offered one year ago still stand</a>.&nbsp; I can briefly add five more:</p> <p>1. Audience.&nbsp; A year ago, I still thought a good bit about a blogging voice and an intended audience.&nbsp; Since then, I've just decided to blog on what I want to blog.&nbsp; I will admit that at times, it suddenly occurs to me that I am an archaeologist and an ancient historian - rather than an American historian, an academic technologist, or whatever - but I am less concerned with inconsistencies in my intellectual and academic life.&nbsp; After all, if a reader isn't interested in a particular topic that I am exploring, they do not have to read that post!</p> <p>2. Blogging as Professional and Social Networking.&nbsp; Over the last 15 months, I have begun to realize how useful blogging is in finding like-minded colleagues from around the world.&nbsp; While my blog has never attracted a huge number of comments (less than 200 as of this morning), I frequently receive emails from fellow scholars commenting on various posts or addressing particular issues that I raise in my posts.&nbsp; Moreover, I now am regularly identified as a blogger by people whom I would have never met otherwise.&nbsp; And, it appears to be regarded as a good thing.</p> <p>3. People read blogs.&nbsp; This has led me to the startling conclusion that people really do read blogs.&nbsp; Whether they are taken seriously as academic

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production or seen a merely a pleasant diversion is another matter, but people do visit my blog regularly.&nbsp; Over the last four months, I've averaged close to 100 visitors per day and over the lifetime of the blog almost 70 visitors per day.</p> <p>4. Content and Form.&nbsp; My blog is ugly.&nbsp; I keep thinking that I should change the template and give it a more open, up to date look.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.typepad.com">Typepad</a> and <a href="http://wordpress.org/">Wordpress</a> release new blog templates seemingly daily.&nbsp; They offer new features (like threaded comments), new widgets for gathering and displaying information, and new formats for text to make your content appear in contemporary formats.&nbsp; My blog does not take advantage of any of these new bells and whistles, but still draws a steadily increasing flow of traffic.&nbsp; I suppose I will eventually move the blog to a more flashy Wordpress template.&nbsp; When I have time.</p> <p>5. Always be Composing.&nbsp; When Michael Bérubé <a href="http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/til_we_meet_again/">took a break from his well-known blogging routine</a>, he complained that that the ABC -- Always be composing -- had taken its toll on him after three years of blogging almost daily.&nbsp; This is certainly the case.&nbsp; I spend at least an hour a day planning my weekly posts, thinking of topics, and, of course, writing.&nbsp; My black notebook is a constant companion as I jot notes down and even write out posts longhand.&nbsp; I can imagine a time when I will have to stop whether the press of other responsibilities becomes too great or out of boredom or a kind of exhaustion, but right now, I continue to feel motivated.&nbsp; The motivations comes from two sources.&nbsp; One, I am energized by the idea of producing text that people want to read, and, two, the discipline of blogging has made me a more efficient scholar.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f471e61970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="272" alt="PageViews" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20115703d9911970b -pi" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">So, thanks for reading my blog regularly and contributing to my scholarly discipline.&nbsp; Read blogs. </p> <p align="left">Here is my weekly reading list:</p> <p align="left"><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Objects, Buildings, Situations</a><br><a href="http://www.janchipchase.com/">Future Perfect</a><br><a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings</a><br><a href="http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/">Tenured Radical</a><br><a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a><br><a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a><br><a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/">Archaeolog</a><br><a href="http://pretexts.blogspot.com/">(pre)texts</a><br><a href="http://www.antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/">Antiquate Vagaries</a><br><a href="http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/">Surprised by Time</a><br><a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Axis of Access</a><br><a href="http://www.henryjenkins.org/">Confessions of an Aca/Fan</a><br><a href="http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/">Looting Matters</a><br><a href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/">apophenia</a><br><a href="http://www.atrium-media.com/rogueclassicism/">rogueclassicism</a></p> <p align="left"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jonathan Laden EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 216.156.120.90 URL: http://www.bib-arch.org DATE: 04/23/2009 08:42:54 AM Congratulations on hitting both impressive milestones. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dallas EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 140.254.69.123 URL: DATE: 04/23/2009 12:29:42 PM Any idea why your data is skewed at 2 points? Seems odd. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.133.190 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 04/23/2009 12:55:47 PM Sometimes a particular post will be linked to from a high-traffic site. The first spike is after I posted some pictures of Athens in the snow. The second spike might be from students in Tim Gregory's Byzantine class. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Fortifications between the Megarid and Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: fortifications-between-the-megarid-and-corinthia CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 04/21/2009 07:57:07 AM ----BODY: <p>Having worked in and thought about Corinth and the Corinthia for the past decade, it amazes me how little I've thought about its northern neighbor Megara -- despite the fact that we drive through the Megarid on the way from Athens to Corinth.</p> <p><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/226389459">Philip J. Smith's book, <em>The Archaeology and Epigraphy of Hellenistic and Roman Megaris</em>, <em>Greece</em>.&nbsp; <em>BAR </em>1762. (Oxford 2008),</a> should make the archaeology of this region more accessible.&nbsp; Of particular interest to me are the fortification across the northern border of Mergara

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presumably situated to impede progress through the Isthmus.&nbsp; Since scholars have generally regarded the Megarid as "neutral" through most of its history or at least militarily and politically subordinate to her southern neighbor, the fortifications along the border between the Corinthia and Megarid would seem to fit into a more ambiguous category of internal or regional fortifications designed to accomplish interregional goals or highly local ones rather then simply to protect the boundaries of an established state.</p> <p><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4824475">Wiseman</a> documented the rubble fortifications at Lysi on Geraneia (20-22) which is the best local comparandum to the rubble fortifications across Mt. Oneion on the southern boundary of the Isthmian plain (see <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/103965127">Caraher and Gregory 2006</a>).&nbsp; This rubble fort would seem to have less to do with fortifying the territory of Megara (or the Corinthia) than with blocking traffic across the Isthmus.&nbsp; Smith follows Wiseman in suggesting that Cassander built this fortification in 316 BC when he was most active in the Peloponnesus (Smith, 31).&nbsp; We've argued that our walls on Oneion further south are, in fact, somewhat earlier.&nbsp; Northeast of the site of Lysi, near the site of Paliopyrgos stands the remains of a circular tower which is probably postantique on account of its mortar and rubble construction.&nbsp; It may sit on an older foundation (or not) which blocked the northern approach to the rubble fort and the passage through Geraneia.</p> <p>Some 10 km east of the site of Lysi stands another useful comparandum for <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/wo rking-paper-towers-and-fortifications-at-vayia-in-the-southeastcorinthia.html">our recent work on Corinthian fortifications</a>.&nbsp; At the Kaki Skala there is the remains of a round tower and a rectangular fortification at the northern end of the eastern pass from the Megarid into the Corinthia (Smith, 24-25).&nbsp; Measuring about 10 m in diameter, this is roughly the same size as our <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">tower at Lychnari</a> and the combination of a round tower and fortified enclosure parallels nicely <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">the fortifications at Ano Vayia</a>.&nbsp; Smith and Wiseman regard the site as a fortification designed the block the pass south and part of a regional signaling system which could have alerted the polis center of an enemy moving north through the Kaki Skala pass (Smith, 89-92).&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>Towers or fortifications at the site of Mavrolimini in the northwestern Corinthia complete the fortifications across the southern Megarid and presumably blocked passage through the western side of the the Geraneia ridge.&nbsp; Unfortunately the remains at the site are mostly lost.</p> <p>There is a nice <a href="http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009-04-10.html">review of Smith's book here</a>.&nbsp; The only thing that I could add to this is that it is regrettable that the author did not extend his analysis to at least Late Antiquity.&nbsp; The Late Antique Medgarid is poorly documented consisting of a handful of stray finds, graves, and several early Christian basilicas.&nbsp; It seems increasingly common practice to include the 4th-7th century in such sweeping regional studies.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: How to write for the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Blog: A Primer in Archaeological Blogging STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: how-to-write-for-the-pyla-kousopetria-archaeological-project-blog-aprimer-in-archaeological-blogging CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/20/2009 07:36:28 AM ----BODY: <p>As the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">PKAP</a> season looms, we are beginning to think of all the little details that go into making our time in Cyprus as stress free and productive as possible.&#0160; Over the past two seasons we have run a very successful series of weblogs.&#0160; The various participants submit their blog posts from the field and have captured a whole range of archaeological experiences (see our <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">Senior Staff Blog</a> and our <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">Graduate Student Perspectives Blog</a>).&#0160; This year we plan to encourage our large group of undergraduate volunteers to contribute to a &quot;PKAP Undergraduate Perspectives Blog&quot;.&#0160; While I haven&#39;t set up the space for it yet (but we&#39;ll announce it with great fanfare here when I do!), we thought it a good idea to make clear what archaeological blogging entails before we set loose a gaggle of eager undergraduates into the blogosphere.&#0160; </p> <p>From our perspective (and like any genre) archaeological blogging has certain rules and conventions about it.&#0160; There are topics that are appropriate for a blog and ones that should be regarded as off-limits.&#0160; On the one hand, this seems to hint at a kind of top-down censorship, and there is definitely some truth to that.&#0160; But, on the other hand, part of the goal of the &quot;field school&quot; aspect of the project is to introduce students to the various expectations that condition behavior on archaeological project.&#0160; This includes how to behave in the field (field procedures, methods, and processes) as well as how to talk about the archaeological experience in various venues.&#0160; As an added layer of complexity some of our students this year will hail from a <a href="http://www.messiah.edu/">small, Christian college</a> that has a rather strict <a href="http://www.messiah.edu/about/community_covenant.html">code of conduct</a>.&#0160; I am vaguely worried that an innocent posting on some aspect of archaeological culture will get our students into real trouble when they return home!</p> <p>So, below is my first effort at creating a guide to archaeological blogging for PKAP.&#0160; Since more and more projects are blogging (I am excited to see that the blog for the <a href="http://lateantiqueostia.wordpress.com/">Berlin-Kent Ostia Excavations</a> has come back to life lately!), I thought that some of the guidelines would be helpful in creating a comfortable and useful space for students to document

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their experiences working and living together in our archaeological community.</p> <p>I am sure these guidelines will get tweaked once my codirectors read them and we try to implement them in the field, but they are a start:</p> <p>How to write for the PKAP Blog: </p><p>The various PKAP blogs are among the most unique aspects of our project. Our blogs inform our friends and families, bring the experiences of archaeology back to our colleges and universities, and become the face of our project on the internet.&#0160; Our blogs also encourage us to think carefully about the processes and experiences of archaeological fieldwork as it takes place. At the end of each season the directors the project archive all the blog posts, and they become part of the permanent record of the project. Over the past few years, individual posts have become popular destinations on the web and continue to attract traffic even now.&#0160; In fact, people remember well-written, exciting, and clever posts and bring them up to project members at social and professional events! </p><p>Like last year, there will be three individual blogs that capture various aspects of the project.&#0160; A Season Staff Blog is reserved for the senior staff of the project.&#0160; PKAP Graduate Student Perspectives captures the experiences of graduate students on the project.&#0160; And our Undergraduate Perspectives Blog provides a venue for our undergraduate volunteers.&#0160; On each blog, we group the posts under the&#0160; individual bloggers name allowing visitors to explore the perspective of particular participants. </p><p>It&#39;s important to remember before you begin to blog that not only will a wide range of people read your posts, but they will become part of the permanent record of the project. Archaeological blogging requires a kind of honesty to confront the wide range of experiences that you will have in Cyprus and working together.&#0160; It will also require a kind of discretion in that not all of your experiences doing field work and living and working together are appropriate for public consumption. If you have any question whether a topic, picture, or experience is appropriate for the blog, talk to a senior staff member before you make your post! </p><p>Here are some basic guidelines for blogging the PKAP experience: </p><p>1.&#0160;&#0160;&#0160; Blog about fieldwork.&#0160; Archaeological fieldwork requires constant analysis and is exciting.&#0160; Attempt to capture that in your blog posts.&#0160; But also be discrete.&#0160; It is considered bad form to publish photos of finds or detailed photographs of your trenches.&#0160; Keep photographs and descriptions of objects and features general.&#0160; The proper place for detailed description of artifacts and features is in our formal publication.<br />2.&#0160;&#0160;&#0160; Blog about Cypriot culture. PKAP hopes that you will think carefully about your experience of living in Cyprus, seeing the various archaeological and historical sites, and learning about the diverse culture and politics of the island. These things will be particularly interesting to your audience back home!&#0160; But also be aware that Cypriots can read your blog as well.&#0160; Most Cypriots can read English well and will find your writing through search engines and links.&#0160; So, be respectful to the host country in your post and approach your efforts to describe your experiences on Cyprus with an open mind and a generous attitude.<br />3.&#0160;&#0160;&#0160; Blog about living and working together.&#0160; One of the most exciting aspects of archaeological fieldwork is living, talking, and working together.&#0160; In past years, our blogs have captured some of the conversations, arguments, and discoveries that come from the intense experiences of living and working as a community of scholars. Before you blog on a funny story that your roommate told you or a heated argument with your trench supervisor, it&#39;s always polite to ask these other folks whether you can blog about what you have discussed.&#0160; In general, people don&#39;t mind being blogged about, but sometimes people might want things to remain private.&#0160; Be a courteous blogger.<br

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/>4.&#0160;&#0160;&#0160; Blog with pictures.&#0160; Our blogging service allows us to upload photographs.&#0160; Pictures make your blog more interesting and vivid!&#0160; Be sure to ask people, though, if you can post that silly photograph of them after a hard day at work and refrain from posting photos of finds or features in trenches (photographs of people working in a trench are fine as are general work pictures).&#0160; As a note, large, high resolution photographs will take a long time to upload on our slow internet connection. </p><p>Some more basic blogging tips:<br />1.&#0160;&#0160;&#0160; Remember your audience! Try to write clearly and avoid emoticons and other internet slang.&#0160; Some of our audience won&#39;t be familiar with these things and it will make the blog less accessible to our diverse audience.<br />2.&#0160;&#0160;&#0160; Remember that people will read your posts! While it might be funny to recount a particularly raucous night on the town, you might not want your dear old aunt or zealous university administrator to read about these things. People will read your blog and if you say things that are inappropriate, it will come back to us and you.<br />3.&#0160;&#0160;&#0160; Don&#39;t be intimidated by length.&#0160; The great thing about blogs is that they can be as long or as short as you want them to be. A 50 word blog can be better, more vivid, or more revealing than a rambling 1000 word post.&#0160; At the same time, you can write mini-essays, multi-part stories, or even poetry in a blog post without any problems.&#0160; In fact, the more diverse, reflective, and earnest our blogs are the more people remember and appreciate them.<br />4.&#0160;&#0160;&#0160; Lots of links.&#0160; The very best blog posts have lots of links to other posts or even other blogs!&#0160; Blogging is like social networking the more you reach out to others, the more they want to know what you are doing.<br />5.&#0160;&#0160;&#0160; Tell your story.&#0160; The most common comments that I get about our blogs are about the very earnest and the funny posts!&#0160; So, develop a voice and be earnest.&#0160; People like it.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/17/2009 11:24:59 AM ----BODY:

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<p>A busy Friday, but some fun and serious links:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.fimoculous.com/">Another North Dakotan who's made it big</a>. <li><a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/62827/late-night-with-jimmy-fallonpublic-enemy-with-the-roots">Flavor Flav in a NASCAR jacket</a> with Public Enemy and the Roots.&nbsp; Note also the updated fatigues. <li><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/04/16/mexico.death/index.html?iref= newssearch#cnnSTCVideo">Local saints</a>. <li><a href="http://ux.opencontext.org/blog/">Heritage Bytes</a>. <li><a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Keep checking back</a>. <li><a href="http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i32/32b01501.htm?utm_source=pm&amp;utm_mediu m=en">Stupid Grammar</a>.</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 05/03/2009 12:14:16 PM That's a hilariously crotchety rant on Strunk and White. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Digital Archaeology at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World: What I Learned STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: digital-archaeology-at-the-institute-for-the-study-of-the-ancientworld-what-i-learned CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 04/16/2009 08:38:48 AM ----BODY: <p>Tuesdays Digital Archaeology meeting at <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/">ISAW</a> was fantastic and <a href="http://homepages.nyu.edu/~te20/">Tom Elliott</a> and Roger Bagnall should be commended for their commitment to creating room for open discussion about crucial matters of digital publication in archaeology.&nbsp; One of the key metaphors of the day was "the carrot and stick".&nbsp; This phrase referred to the need to encourage and require projects to release their digital data.&nbsp; And much of discussion consider the various carrot aspects and stick consequences as related to digital publication of archaeological data.&nbsp; To my great relief, the carrots of opportunity far outweighed, the stick of

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necessity!</p> <p>I learned a good bit listening to colleagues who have struggled over crucial issues in digital archaeology for the past decade.&nbsp; Below I offer a some of the key points that made an impact on how I think about digital archaeology (and these points do not reflect necessarily the scope or priorities of the meeting): </p> <p>1. The Digital Future is Now.&nbsp; The number of people deeply committed to digitizing legacy data from across the archaeological world was truly remarkable.&nbsp; More importantly, it is clear that major digitization projects currently underway will have a significant impact on the availability of archaeological data in a digital format in the very near future.&nbsp; Moreover, the group assembled at ISAW this past week seemed to agree in large part concerning the most pressing and significant issues surrounding archaeological data management.&nbsp; The solutions that each project or team provided varied, but the overarching priorities seemed securely established.&nbsp; In short, many of the old objections to the digital distribution of archaeological data are now entirely resolved.&nbsp; Variable security levels can limit access to material under investigation and analysis, customized systems preserve idiosyncratic data integrity and secure backups protect data from loss. </p> <p>2.&nbsp; The Gap between the Coding and NonCoding Archaeologist. The day has arrived when any serious, large-scale archaeological project needs a data plan.&nbsp; This data plan will almost always require a deliberate and sophisticated approach to processing data from its collection in the field to its dissemination among team members to its final (ideally digital) publication.&nbsp; In many cases, the entire process will depend upon a custom build application or interface.&nbsp; The funding levels necessary to make it possible to have the services of coding archaeologist to produce customized interfaces are likely limited to larger projects with substantial institutional support.&nbsp;&nbsp; The number of archaeologists working on serious, custom applications and interfaces to maximize specialized access to their data was remarkable.&nbsp; This leaves smaller projects, which have the same responsibilities to to work toward converting legacy data and to preserve and publish born-digital data, in a potentially exposed position.&nbsp; What makes this all the more pressing is that so much archaeological data of all kinds, is produced or bound up in smaller projects.&nbsp; The days of the "big dig" are nearly over.&nbsp; Small, focused, and relatively efficient field projects have emerged in its place and, importantly, produce data that can benefit significantly from comparison with other small scale projects.&nbsp; The key now will be to encourage small projects to share data in such a way as to multiply the significance of their conclusions.</p> <p>3. Aggregated Data.&nbsp; The potential for comparisons across large-scale aggregated data sets were hardly a priority at this meeting and the reasons seem to be (1) that most data sets are simply too idiosyncratic to compare in a simple or automated way and (2) the drive to aggregate various data sets has to come from specific research questions: for example, kinds of aggregated data can shed light on problems imagined at the regional level or emphasize some aspect of Mediterranean trade.&nbsp; That being said, there seemed to be a broad consensus that that the current wave of digital publications have emphasized the production of data structures that allows the end users a tremendous amount of flexibility in arranging data.&nbsp; So the creation of data to be compared across projects, sites, or even regions, needs not be an exclusive concern for the data producer, but, in fact, depend more heavily on the savvy and tools available to the end user.&nbsp; The data producer merely has to present the data in a way that is accessible to various third party applications (like Google Earth) through which the data can be mined and queried by the end user.</p> <p>4. Institutional Thinking.&nbsp; It's interesting to see how many institutions participate in the impetus behind the creating of digital data.&nbsp; The <a

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href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/digital-library/">American School of Classical Studies at Athens</a>, The <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/">Archaeological Institute of America</a>, <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/">the University of Cincinnati</a>, the <a href="http://www.museum.upenn.edu/index.php">University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania</a>, are all major players in the universe of Mediterranean Archaeology and all were represented at the meeting.&nbsp; It is clear that issues of digital data in archaeology are being conceived on the transinstitutional level.&nbsp; This not only reflects the serious commitment of resources (especially during difficult economic times), but the development of the kind of decentralized infrastructure for digital archaeology that could spur innovation as different groups work toward common goals from different perspectives.&nbsp; </p> <p>There were only a few things at the meeting that I'd have liked to have heard more about.&nbsp; First, is digital workflow in the field.&nbsp; I have this dream where our data can be produced in the field with solid validations rules and disseminated in almost real time to collaborators around the world.&nbsp; This instant digital publication would streamline the final publication of data and save time on the tedious "post-production" work of data managing in the off season.&nbsp; It's clear that some projects are better at this than others, and I just wanted to understand how and why.&nbsp; The other thing that I would have liked to learn more about is how projects are dealing with the potential of the new media.&nbsp; Most of the discussion centered on "old media" -- drawings, plans, photographs, notebooks, and the like -- and tended to deal with new media the same way (i.e. our systems can accommodate video, audio, or whatever).&nbsp; This is a particular concern for our work which brings in more video and audio than many projects, but it would presumably have applicability for <a href="http://www.millsaps.edu/svp/">any project with an ethnographic or reflexive component to their research</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Digital Archaeology Meeting in New York STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: digital-archaeology-meeting-in-new-york CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 04/13/2009 08:30:34 AM ----BODY:

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<p></p> <p>I'm off to New York for a meeting focused on digital archaeology hosted by the <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/">Institute for the Study of the Ancient World</a>.&nbsp; We've been asked to put together a brief presentation on how we use digital technology in our archaeological research and areas where more sophisticated use of the technology available would improve our ability to collect, analyze, and archive archaeological data.</p> <p>Here's a brief precis of what I plan to present:</p> <p>1. On of my main goals for the next few years is to continue to work to streamlining the digital workflow for the <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; Right now, we collect numerous different kinds of born data regularly (e.g. excavation data, survey data, photographs, finds records, scanned field notebooks, et c.) but it's not done in an integrated way.&nbsp; The end result is a whole series of data sets that could be integrated, but are not.</p> <p>2. The lack of integrated workflow in the field has impaired our ability to bring our digital data to quick publication.&nbsp; We feel that improving the level of integration will help us produce data efficiently that can sustain rigorous analysis and enables an end user to drill down (and across) from published reports to digital data of various kinds.</p> <p>3.&nbsp; I have also been working to create stable, public, digital data sets from legacy and analogue data.&nbsp; For my work in the area of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/">Thisvi</a> (with data from a survey conducted in the early 1980s called the Ohio Boeotia Expedition), I have worked to migrate analog data to digital formats. This data preserves archaeological information from a landscape currently under threat and susceptible to making it accessible for new analysis in GIS.&nbsp; Moreover, this work forms a model for migrating legacy data to digital formats for other small scale surveys in the Corinthia that record information about endangered or destroyed landscapes. </p> <p>4. I've begun to also think about work at the <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia</a>.&nbsp; Over the last few years, <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Timothy Gregory</a> and I have created concordances that have allowed us to integrate the context pottery from the OSU-Isthmia Excavations with the survey data from the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/04/de -centering-data.html">In a post last week</a>, I've begun to think about how our work at integrating EKAS and OSU-Isthmia data could extend to the various other teams working at Isthmia to ensure that the data that they produced in various formats is archived and fundamentally compatible. This work would, of course, grow to include collaborating with the efforts of the American School at Corinth and in Athens to make our data available for eventual migration to a stable, long-term, integrated environment encompassing many of the American School projects in Greece.</p> <p>5. The final issue is the most complex.&nbsp; For PKAP, in particular, we have gathered a considerable quantity of digital video and audio and we want to begin to make this available alongside our more traditional archaeological data in immersive, multimedia environments.&nbsp; This ties into the issues under point 2 above, but with the additional layer of multi and new media complexity.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 04/10/2009 08:50:08 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a few assorted varia and quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>I just discovered <a href="http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0903/0903mem2.cfm">this lovely obituary for Joseph Lynch</a>.&nbsp; He was the Medievalist at Ohio State and served on the comprehensive exam committee.&nbsp; I was Professor Lynch's T.A. for his Early Christianity course, took a reading class with him, and regularly attended his Latin reading group -- which I have tried to reproduce here at the University of North Dakota. </li> <li><a href="http://edwired.org/?p=489">This is an interesting post</a> on the need for a new capstone course.&nbsp; It ties in with some thoughts I had a few weeks ago on the challenge of midlevel courses and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/05/the-challenge-of-midlevelcourses/">posted here</a>.&nbsp; I've been talking with my History 240 students about role of the historical method in teaching history majors.&nbsp; On the one hand, an emphasis on historical thinking (through various methods) builds writing, critical thinking and other transferable skills.&nbsp; On the other hand, many students become history majors not because they like the historical method, but because they are drawn toward the narratives or personalities central to the study of history.&nbsp; Students who are drawn to history for "the sake of the past" often find an emphasis on method, historiography, and writing to be distasteful and incompatible with their expectations.&nbsp; So, the question becomes, how do we accommodate the range of expectations of history majors?</li> <li> I am Twittering again: <a title="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher" href="http://twitter.com/BillCaraher">http://twitter.com/BillCaraher</a> .&nbsp; <a href="http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i31/31a01001.htm">Inspired by this</a>.</li></ul> <p>Have a good holiday weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

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TITLE: Some Alternative Scenarios to Charles Watkinson's &quot;Baby, Bathwater...&quot; blog STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: some-alternative-scenarios-to-charles-watkinsons-baby-bathwater-blog CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/09/2009 10:31:29 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/">Charles Watkinson</a> always makes a splash with his occasional foray into the blogosphere.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2009/04/baby-bathwater-what.html">On Saturday he made a good post</a> on the recent report from the Association of Research Libraries.&nbsp; The report, entitled <a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.arl.org/bm%7Edoc/transformationaltimes.pdf">Transformational Times</a>, again tolls the death knell for the longheld gold standard of academic published: the printed monograph.</p> <p>Watkinson offered three scenarios where the monograph still has some value.&nbsp; It just so happens that I have counter examples for two of his scenarios.&nbsp; This is not meant to be a challenge to Watkinson -- a shrewd observer of archaeological publishing and an insider -- but just another anecdotal perspective that perhaps suggests that, indeed, times are achangin'...</p> <p>Watkinson observed that print monographs remain valuable for the archaeologist in the field and evokes "well-thumbed copies of Rotroff, Hayes or other reference bibles."&nbsp; Ironically, our ceramicist uses digital copies of Hayes and various other reference bibles in part because the print monograph is so incredibly expensive (if you can find it at all).&nbsp; In fact, a nicely digitized pdf, complete with bookmarks for commonly referenced forms, on a $300 netbook may cost less than the print version.&nbsp; And that same netbook (as close as we have to a disposable computer) could easily handle dozens, if not hundreds of scanned books, keeping the out of print and nearly priceless print copies safely at one's home institution.&nbsp; </p> <p>His post also talks about the value of books as a kind of academic wampum.&nbsp; This is certainly true.&nbsp; I admit to enjoying the offprint, book, or chapter sent by an academic colleague as a sign of respect or appreciation.&nbsp; This past summer, however, when I received a copy of a volume of the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus while in Cyprus, I appreciated the limitations of the book wampum system.&nbsp; Was I really expected to bring this book back to the US with me?&nbsp; The complementary volume was appreciated, but my willingness to deal with the difficulties of print while traveling changed my perspective.&nbsp; The common experience of my predicament was confirmed when I met with a German scholar this past year at a colloquium in Montreal.&nbsp; Instead of exchanging piles of offprints (that neither of us carried internationally), we exchanged emails and dutifully sent along wonderful pdf files of various recent articles.&nbsp; I was no less appreciative of the gesture and, thus, electronic publications represented the same kind of wampum as a print publication.&nbsp; Now, I do appreciate the fact that some of the places where archaeologists work lack the infrastructure to take full advantage of the various digital media that many archaeologists have come to rely upon to conduct research on a daily basis.&nbsp; Actually, being at a University that neither subscribes to the entire suite of JStor journals nor to all the various other services, I often find myself relying on paper copies of offprints via

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ILL.&nbsp; That being said, one of the best gifts that I have received from a senior scholar was access to a secure collection of digital offprints and monographs -- that scholar's private hoard, a kind of digital wampum.</p> <p>Finally, Watkinson's print monographs for tenure is a good observation.&nbsp; It's clear that we are simply not there yet as far as the perceived quality of digital monographs.&nbsp; I like the idea of print-on-demand though and have noticed an ever increasing number of books in my collection are the print on demand kind.&nbsp; Perhaps this is the hybrid stage between fully digital monographs and the end of print publishing as we know it.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Check out Teaching Thursday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: check-out-teaching-thursday CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 04/09/2009 07:27:38 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last couple of months there have been some really interesting contributions to our <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday blog</a>.&nbsp; This blog is an extension of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/teaching/" >my old Teaching Thursday</a> feature here (and over at <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a>).&nbsp; Each Thursday (and sometimes more often) we offer a short teaching related post from across the University of North Dakota's campus.&nbsp; We've explored the <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/12/call-me-edupunk/">idea of EduPunk</a>, thought about <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/19/timely-reflections-on-asynchronousteaching/">asynchronous teaching</a> and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/04/09/using-models-to-teach/">teaching with models</a>, <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/04/02/technology-andpedagogy/">grappled with technology and pedagogy</a>, and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/26/teaching-business-during-aneconomic-crisis/">reflected on teaching during times of economic crisis.</a>&nbsp;</p> <p>So go and check out <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>, leave comments, and spread the word!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: De-Centering Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: de-centering-data CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 04/08/2009 08:43:28 AM ----BODY: <p>Next week, I've been lucky enough to be invited to a workshop hosted by the <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/">Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU</a>.&nbsp; The workshop will focus on the challenges and opportunities of using digital data in archaeological research and bring together a wide range of scholars who are using digital data in various ways.&nbsp; To get folks onto the same page, we've been asked to complete a fairly simple homework assignment.&nbsp; One of the questions is whether anyone (or a group) owns or manages our data and whether there are any ways that we would like to centralize or better coordinate our digital workflow.</p> <p>This afternoon, we have a meeting with various University of North Dakota folks to discuss our "emerging" Working Group for Digital and New Media.&nbsp; The working group is largely an artificial creation that was brought together in order to apply for money that the University President was offering for innovative, inter and trans disciplinary groups on campus.&nbsp; The Working Group includes faculty from English, History, Music, Scientific Computing, and the head librarian here.&nbsp; It appears that we will receive a substantial infusion of funding to stimulate (in the language of the day) collaboration and innovation.&nbsp; While the details are still being worked out, I think it is likely that some of funds will go toward creating a centralized Digital and New Media Lab.&nbsp; </p> <p>In the lead up to my meeting today and my meeting in New York next week, I've been thinking about how often I still regard data and the digital realm as something that needs to be managed, centralized, and structured.&nbsp; We have been talking about archaeological data management and the creation of a "center" for digital and new media on campus.&nbsp; At the same time it is becoming more and more obvious that our ability to produce and manipulate digital data is becoming increasing de-centered and de-centralized.&nbsp; As our digital data gathering devices (cameras, GPS units, phones, laptops, video, et c.) proliferate and expertise proliferates -- we have multiple people who can manipulate and create databases, spreadsheets, and GIS.&nbsp; Even in these conditions, we can certainly imagine the utility of a single data manager or a system that can integrate digital media from a variety of devices and organize them systematically (after all, analogue data has a tendency to proliferate on archaeological projects as well and it projects have always prioritized the need to archive, organize, and record systematically).&nbsp; The future of data

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management, however, may not be in such centralized and managed collections.&nbsp; These collections may be built around commonly agreed upon standards or best-practices, but even these centrally administered structures might not suit all the potential types of data, organizing questions, or analytical units that creative archaeologists can imagine.&nbsp; We may look to a future where researchers emphasize the production of concordances that relate different kinds of data to one another as the methods, data types, and applications expand.&nbsp; The issue remains, of course, that data to be useful nevertheless needs to be organized and preserved in some way, but it's hard to imagine such a radically decentered kind of data management method.&nbsp; </p> <p>As an example, I've been talking with Timothy Gregory about how to manage digital data produced by the Isthmia Excavations.&nbsp; Like many large scale projects several different groups of people are producing and using data from Isthmia.&nbsp; Each group has its own research questions, data collection tools (ranging from experiment RDF tags to GPS), data management systems (ranging from Autocad to ArcGIS to Microsoft Access and legacy formats), and time frames.&nbsp; There is simply no way to produce a system that integrates this data as it is being produced and some of the data might be inherently resistant to combination.&nbsp; Nevertheless all of this information deserves to be archived and perhaps even maintained.&nbsp; </p> <p>A similar, decentralized future might await the Working Group in the Digital and New Media.&nbsp; While it is easy enough to imagine how various groups on campus might benefit from pooling resources to satisfy specific hardware and software needs (high-end computers, large-scale storage, server space, access to applications and devices), it seems strangely outmoded to talk about a center for something like digital and new media since these technologies have done some much to de-center the production of texts, media objects, and even certain key elements in the public discourse.&nbsp; It seems more forward looking to imagine the creation of various nodes where individuals, groups, hardware and software could combine to solve specific problems and then disperse to ensure that the community as a whole can maximize the investments in capital (i.e. software, hardware, space).&nbsp; I like the model of an art gallery that can be re-arranged for various installations and exhibits quickly and efficiently.&nbsp; While an artist would have to accommodate some basic structures, like the architectural structure of the space, there would exist a fair degree of flexibility with the best galleries being open to a range of different kinds of exhibits.</p> <p>Of course, these ideas are naive.&nbsp; After all, the existence of a center is as vital to archaeological research as campus politics.&nbsp; Resources are tied to professional credit and control backed by notions of intellectual and physical property.&nbsp; Restricted access to archaeological data has long formed a basic structure for academic research.&nbsp; The freedom provided by unfettered control over technological resources allows for the kind of personally, unstructured environment where a scholar is free to experiment, explore, and fail without impacting other members of the community.&nbsp; Finally, the center structures responsibility and accountability -- watchwords in the current economic and political climate.&nbsp; Someone being in charge of the data and in charge of resources ensure that someone can be held accountable for failure as well as successes.&nbsp; The urge to centralize is pragmatic reflection of the will to power.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.199.91.113 URL: http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com DATE: 04/08/2009 05:25:59 PM Interesting to read this along with Jo Guldi's piece (<a href="http://landscape.blogspot.com/2009/04/age-of-digitalcitation.html)">http://landscape.blogspot.com/2009/04/age-of-digitalcitation.html)</a> today. Looking forward to seeing you next week! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Merrifield Graffiti STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: merrifield-graffiti CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 04/07/2009 08:39:47 AM ----BODY: <p>One reason that I abandoned my beloved Blackberry for a less-loved Samsung Omnia is that it has a 5 megapixel camera which has encouraged me to document more regularly "archaeological" aspects of my everyday life.</p> <p>Every day I walk leave Merrifield Hall on the University of North Dakota's campus past one of the oddest and yet most traditional pieces of campus graffiti.&nbsp; Unlike more urban campuses, UND's campus is remarkably graffiti free.&nbsp; Even restroom poets, so common to the semipublic space of university campuses, seems to be scarce.&nbsp; So this one example of campus graffiti really stood out.&nbsp; Someone had scratched a Chi-Rho on the inside doorframe at the southeast corner of Merrifield Hall.&nbsp;&nbsp; The Chi-Rho is an important symbol to Christians, representing the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek.&nbsp; According to most of the major sources for Constantine's reign, the Chi-Rho appeared associated with the battle of Milvian bridge after which Constantine showed a particular dedication to the Christian cause.&nbsp; It was famously incorporated into Constantine's military standard (called the labarum). By the later 4th and 5th centuries, the Chi-Rho became a symbol of the Christian cause appearing in both formal inscriptions, mosaic decoration, and graffiti.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f04e54a970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="389" alt="MerrifieldChiRho"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156ffbd8a8970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f04e57c970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="537" alt="MerrifieldDoors" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f04e59b970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">This immediately reminded me of ancient examples of graffiti -- especially the Christian graffiti found at various points along the Hexamilion wall in Greece.&nbsp; While none of those graffiti were Chi-Rhos (that I can recall), several cross graffiti were located at doors entering towers or at gates into the fortress. (See: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/26158265">T. Gregory, The Hexamilion and the Fortress. Isthmia 5&nbsp; (Princeton 1993)</a>, p. 126, ill. 23.).&nbsp; Scholars have often interpreted such graffiti as being apotropaic; that is designed to ward off evil of both the human and spiritual kind.&nbsp; Thresholds such as the door of a building or a city gate are liminal spaces (quite literally) and are unstable places being neither within the protected area of the building nor safely outside and away from protected space.&nbsp; The vulnerability of such places often prompted appeals to divine powers to protect the space.</p> <p align="left">Of course, <a href="http://media.www.dakotastudent.com/media/storage/paper970/news/2009/04/03/ Opinion/The-Importance.Of.Unds.Ghost.Story-3694722.shtml">in some instances</a>, the evil or <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/237345178">restless</a> powers have already infiltrated the interior space and the apotropaic marker -- like the graffiti on the Hexamilion -- are reminders that the bad things of the world can't always be kept at bay.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.12.240.32 URL: DATE: 04/07/2009 09:54:26 PM Very very interesting. One might wonder on the author's intention. Does he/she feel oppressed by a secular university? Is it a sign of rebellion? May a student had a Constantinian dream. While at Lancaster, I saw this fabulous presentation by Claire Potter (aka Tenured Radical blogger) on chalking at Wesleyan University. Will send or blog further details. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.133.190 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/billcaraher DATE: 04/08/2009 07:20:09 AM Kostis,

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Great questions! I have thought about the authors intent and the intended audience. And context! The door is directly below the Department of Religion and Philosophy and the classroom where I taught Byzantine History some two years earlier. The Chi-Rho as a sign of resistance! I love it. Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Three Lecture Events STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: three-lecture-events CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 04/06/2009 07:42:21 AM ----BODY: <p>This must be the intellectual springtime that comes at the end of a long, cold, snowy winter.</p> <p>First next Tuesday, I'll be at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York to hear <a href="http://sebastianheath.com/">Sebastian Heath</a> and Eric Kansa deliver talks.&nbsp; Heath will speak on "Digital Publication and Linked Data at Troy" and Kansa (the guru behind <a href="http://www.opencontext.org/">Open Context</a>) will speak on "Open Context: Digital Dissemination of Field Research and Museum Collections."&nbsp; For abstracts and more details about these open to the public lectures check out <a href="http://horothesia.blogspot.com/2009/04/publishing-archaeological-data-onweb.html">this post on Tom Elliott's blog, Horothesia</a>.</p> <p>Not to be outdone, Phi Alpha Theta (the History Honor Society) at the University of North Dakota will host <a href="http://www.cord.edu/dept/art/facprfps.html">Peter Schultz</a> of Concordia College.&nbsp; Peter is a rock star archaeologist/ art historian and he will speak on "History, Image, and Anti-Image on the Periklean Acropolis".&nbsp; The talk will be on Thursday, April 16th at 5 pm in the East Asian Room of the Chester Fritz Library.&nbsp; There will be a reception at 4 pm with pastries and coffee and a chance to chat with Peter.</p> <p>One more, we have successfully rescheduled <a href="http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/history/JohnKCox.htm">John Cox's</a> talk.&nbsp; If you recall, it was scheduled during the Fargo flood crisis and we allowed him to prioritize his efforts to save his community!&nbsp; In any event, the talk is entitled "<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/ta lk-on-thursday-socialism-serbofilia-sex-and-suicide.html">Socialism, Serbofilia, Sex, and Suicide: The Mad World of Slovene Literature and Politics around 1900</a>" and will be on Friday, April 30th.&nbsp; The talk will start at 4:00 pm, reception afterwards!&nbsp; What better way to spend a Spring Friday!</p> <p>And, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our ongoing and successful History

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Workshop will meet once again on April 8th to discuss Daniel Sauerwein's biography of Nonpartisan League president A.C. Townley.&nbsp; If you are interested in participating, contact Cynthia Prescott for a copy of the paper and location details.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 04/03/2009 09:53:23 AM ----BODY: <p>Some fun hits to enliven your weekend browsing:</p> <ul> <li>Congratulations to our College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Dakota for <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/artsci/">their flashy new webpage</a>. <li>It's fun to see that the long-standing <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050203040143/http://campusmawrtius.blogspot.c om/">Campvs Martivs</a> site is back as <a href="http://thecampvs.com/">The Campvs</a>. Check it out for witty, classics banter. <li>It has been rewarding to see some nice traffic stats over at our Teaching Thursday site, but not as much discussion as we had hoped.&nbsp; Wordpress supports threaded discussion as well so that discussions can be quite dynamic. <li>This is an <a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/2009/03/sand.html">amazing satellite image of the Sahara Sands</a> crossing the Mediterranean and coating Athens with a fine mist of sand.&nbsp; <li>The water should be receding by now in Grand Forks, having crested at just a touch under 50 ft.&nbsp; if you haven't checked out the <a href="http://www.justin.tv/gfherald">Grand Forks Herald's flood cam</a>, do it now before the water is gone. <li>How about Afghanistan???&nbsp; <a href="http://content.cricinfo.com/iccwcq2009/engine/current/match/390207.html">T his</a> and <a href="http://content.cricinfo.com/iccwcq2009/engine/match/390201.html">this</a> are both pretty cool.&nbsp; And check out <a href="http://blogs.cricinfo.com/btw/">Hameed Hasan's posts here</a>.</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project Season Countdown begins... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-pyla-koustopetria-archaeological-project-season-countdown-begins CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore DATE: 04/02/2009 09:07:51 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott Moore</a> usually posts a pre-season countdown for various <a href="http://www.pkap.org">PKAP</a> preparations (and has a handy countdown timer on his blog).&nbsp; As this year's season is shaping up to be more hectic than usual, there is a strange calm-before-the-storm feeling right now.&nbsp; Despite the lull, there are some interesting and exciting PKAP wrinkles this year:</p> <p>1. A big group.&nbsp; This will be our biggest PKAP team ever.&nbsp; By all counts, it will number over 30 for most of the four week season.&nbsp; We'll not only have a while gaggle of undergraduate and graduate student volunteers from Messiah College, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Dakota, but also a whole group mid-level staff from Ohio State, Penn State, and various other places.&nbsp; We'll also have a cook, a great group of area supervisors who will keep an eye on the trench supervisors, and several experts in ceramics, wall-painting, et c.</p> <p>2. We will be joined this summer by a team from IUP who will conduct some subsurface prospecting using Ground Penetrating Radar.&nbsp; They'll arrive for about a week worth of work and will likely concentrate their efforts on the Koutsopetria plain.&nbsp; Over the past three years we've used electrical resistivity to map subsurface features.&nbsp; And we based our excavation strategy on the results of this technique.&nbsp; The advantage of resistivity is that it was relatively inexpensive and required relatively little post-processing work to produce results.&nbsp; GPR is a more expensive technique as the gear is more complex and larger and has to be brought onto the island from the US, but GPR will allow us to cover more area more quickly than resistivity.&nbsp; We still hope that a larger sample of the subsurface features from Pyla-Koutsopetria will help us understand the organization of space in the Late Roman settlement.&nbsp; If there was some formal organization -- say a grid pattern -- this would suggest that the coastal community had some form of urban planning and central organization.&nbsp; If it was less formally organized, it would suggest that we have basically a large, well-developed village.</p> <p>3. Three excavation areas.&nbsp; One of the challenges that PKAP faces is that our excavations are designed primarily to ground truth our intensive pedestrian survey.&nbsp; Consequently, this season, we will have three distinct excavation areas.&nbsp; These areas are spread out over close to 2 sq kms.&nbsp; The topography of the

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site compounds the distance and makes it even more difficult to communicate between the areas being excavated.&nbsp; Fortunately each area will have an experienced area supervisor to coordinate the efforts of the trench supervisors and ensure that the data collected is consistent, robust, and high quality.</p> <p>4. With more areas under excavation, more pottery being analyzed, and additional spatial data -- like our GPR results -- coming in from the field, we are going to have to streamline our data collection, storage, and verification methods.&nbsp; For one more year, I will likely be the only coordinator of digital data collection, and I think that this will be manageable.&nbsp; But the next step with the project is a more decentralized digital data collection process.&nbsp; The challenge with this, of course, it bringing all the data together, having multiple copies of (or server based) software applications, and making sure that teams have the training and understanding to enter data consistently and well.</p> <p>5. An improved field school.&nbsp; We've always claimed to be a hybrid project -- part research excavation/survey and part field school.&nbsp; This year this will even be more true.&nbsp; We'll have our biggest group of students yet, but also our most well defined research goals.&nbsp; So we've put considerable effort into creating a cohesive student experience for our volunteers so that they'll learn both in the field, but also at the museum and at various sites across the island.</p> <p>So, stay tuned for more PKAP news and notes here. We'll get the various PKAP blogs up and running in the next few weeks and try to capture some of the growing excitement around the 2009 PKAP season!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Check out the University of North Dakota's Writers Conference STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: check-out-the-university-of-north-dakotas-writers-conference CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 04/01/2009 07:29:06 AM ----BODY: <p> If you haven't look at the <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/writers/wcschedule.htm">schedule</a> or <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/writers/wcauthors.html">the participants</a> or <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/writers/wc-history.html">the history</a>, here are the links.&nbsp; This year the theme is Wit and the featured authors include <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a> alumnus Chuck Klosterman.</p> <p>So if you are trapped in the Grand Forks area by weather or

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just happen to live here, go and check out a panel.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156fb06bc2970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="302" alt="09wit" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156eb652cc970c -pi" width="400" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Technology and Pedagogy STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: technology-and-pedagogy CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 03/31/2009 09:14:49 AM ----BODY: <p>Last week Anne Kelsch, the director of our <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/oid/">Office of Instructional Development</a> at the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a>, suggested that we might have a conversation about the relationship between pedagogy and teaching.&nbsp; In her email she reckoned that "people think in terms of technology inherently either enhancing or detracting from student learning and teaching".&nbsp; And she should know, as she regularly deals with the whole range of issue from the simple implementation of technology to the pedagogical and philosophical underpinnings of various innovations.</p> <p>I have tried on various ways of understanding how to use technology in the classroom from various perspectives.the biggest issue at stake with technology and pedagogy is that to use technology successfully in the classroom, you have to understand the recent increase in "technology" as a change in the way in which people think about&nbsp; that you seek to use and how the application, device, or i</p> <p>From my conversations on campus, people tend to see "technology" (broadly construed) in one of three ways:</p> <p>1. A Tool.&nbsp; My initial effort to engage and use technology was as a tool that could optimize some long standing pedagogical practice.&nbsp; For example, I could use a threaded discussion to take a classroom discussion from the confines of the classroom and expand it throughout the week.&nbsp; Thus, technology could help us do what we have always done -- but do it in a more efficient way and extend what we do in the classroom beyond its traditional boundaries.</p> <p>2. A Medium. After a while of thinking about technology in this way, I gradually came to see it as less a tool and more a medium of communication.&nbsp; Unlike a tool, which (in my simple assessment)

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allowed me to perform some established task (typically established within the traditional pedagogical discourse) better, a medium functioned according to its unique set of rules, standards, and processes.&nbsp; Over time, the medium effects the message (or as well all know, becomes the message).&nbsp; Thus, it's even possible to manipulate the medium as an end to itself -- the processes becomes the product.&nbsp; An emphasis on technology as a medium for disseminating information and shaping information encouraged me to experiment more with wikis, podcasts, blogs and the like.&nbsp; Each new medium provided new challenges -- how do I make a podcast that they will listen to? how do I encourage them to use wikis?&nbsp; how do I write for a blog and how does that effect my writing?</p> <p>3. A Network.&nbsp; Most recently, however, influenced by the works of B. Latour, I've begun to think about technology and pedagogy in terms of networks.&nbsp; Unlike tools which, in my initial assessment had distinct boundaries and functions, or media, which remain in some way subordinate to the messages that they carry, networks link together media, tools, users, producers, expectations and assumptions.&nbsp; In a pedagogical context, the complexity of the networks which impart technology with both meaning and function as a teaching tool, make it important to attempt to consider the implementation, student perceptions, extent of use in the institution, legacy (or history) of the various technological components, and our need and ability to assess the success or failure of the overall pedagogical goals.&nbsp; By attempting to understand technology in the classroom (variously defined) from a network perspective, we approach teaching technologies as social and political phenomena that have social and political goals.&nbsp; Thus, technology becomes something as deeply embedded in all aspects of the educational process including content, teaching methods, pedagogy, and, of course, the politics of curriculum development (and it's articulation).&nbsp; For example, in this method of reading technology and pedagogy, using a wiki in the webbased component of a classroom-taught class requires us to understand how students view wikis.&nbsp; In my History 101 class (Western Civilization I), it is clear that students see wikis as a source of authority and are therefore very reluctant to contribute to it -- even though it is behind a password protected interface.&nbsp; Students likely associate my classroom wiki with <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> which they receive passively as a source of "valid" knowledge.&nbsp; Moreover, the idea of collective intelligence and collaborative learning upon which a wiki depends, runs counter to the individualized grading and evaluation that characterizes most higher education.&nbsp; In the discipline of history, there tends to be an assumption that certain valid facts exist within a fairly rigid narrative.&nbsp; While scholars obviously do not believe this, students tend to see history this way at the introductory level.&nbsp; So a wiki which encourages them to view knowledge in a more fluid way challenges basic assumptions&nbsp; that students tend to hold regarding the discipline.&nbsp; This could be good, but also could challenge their ability to engage the material and technology thoughtfully.&nbsp;&nbsp; There is also the learning curve, even the most basic wysiwyg interface will intimidate an inexperienced user and limit their ability to take full advantage of the medium.&nbsp; At the end, even the most simple technology -- a wiki -- is not merely a tool that allows students to work together toward a pedagogical goal, but a node in a series of networks that undergird student assumptions regarding the university experience, the discipline, and the function of technology in a wider context.&nbsp; (And, this does not even delve into the assumptions that faculty have about technology and how they attempt to use them in the classroom -- whether they are simply replacing an earlier "analog" technology or introducing a "new" learning environment with new goals.).</p> <p>We hope to offer some posts on teaching

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with technology over at <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> this week, so check us out!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Few Thoughts on Formation Processes and Sacred Space STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-few-thoughts-on-formation-processes-and-sacred-space CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 03/30/2009 09:23:36 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f93b384970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="191" alt="LavanBook" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f93b38d970b -pi" width="129" align="left" border="0"></a> I spent little bits of time this weekend meandering through the most recent volume in the <em>Late Antique Archaeology</em> series from Brill: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/254928623">L. Lavan, E. Swift, and T. Putzey eds., <em>Objects in Context, Objects in Use Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity.</em>&nbsp; Leiden 2007</a>.&nbsp; Aside from the sort of silly notion of material spatiality, which seems to imply that there could be spatial relationships that are somehow not material, this imposing tome has a bunch of interesting "stuff" in it.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.bmcreview.org/">Byrn Mawr Classical Review</a> has offered a complete early review <a href="http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/03/20090305.html">here</a>.</p> <p>The volume contained, among other things, a series of articles on object in Early Christian space.&nbsp; The articles by B. Caseau, V. Michel, and Z. Fiema, employed various textual and archaeological methods to survey the range of objects associated with religious space in an Early Christian context.&nbsp; Of particular note was Z. Fiema's discussion of documents in the storeroom of the Petra Church.&nbsp; The careful excavation revealed a fairly substantial archive originally arranged on shelves and in cabinets. The two articles by B. Caseau examined textual sources for the various objects that they associate with Late Antique churches.&nbsp; Her work reminds us how few of the objects recorded in Late Antique church inventories or in more literary sources are regularly found in excavated churches.&nbsp; Her discussion of the objects associated in texts with healing shrines reminds us how how most of things present in the everyday

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life of even the most imposing churches were perishable.&nbsp; Brooms, wooden buckets, leather, metal and papyrus only survive in very particular archaeological and cultural environments and consequently remain invisible to excavators.</p> <p>These articles reminded me of a short paper that I wrote, probably 8 years ago, with Tim Gregory and David Pettegrew, ("Archaeological 'Signatures' of Byzantine Churches: Survey Archaeology and the Creation of a Byzantine Landscape," <em>Byzantine Studies Conference Abstracts of Papers </em>27 (2001), p. 38.).&nbsp; We did very intensive archaeological survey in the immediate vicinity of Byzantine Churches on the island of Kythera hoping to discover some kind of material signature for Byzantine churches.&nbsp; We were not particularly successful.&nbsp; The tendency to keep church yards clean, the position of churches on the tops of hills or ridges, and the generally overgrown condition of the island made it difficult for us to find much material that was distinct to the religious function or chronological range of these buildings.</p> <p>This all led me to think a bit about the distinct set of formation processes that create the archaeological evidence for religious space.&nbsp; The tendency for the community to regard some religious spaces as sacred and consequently to continue to function on some level after catastrophic events like earthquakes and fires.&nbsp; Later burials in the remains of Early Christian basilicas is one example of post-destruction re-use.&nbsp; The functioning of informal and sometimes open air shrines at collapsed churches is another.&nbsp; The religious significance of various objects associated with churches might prompt more significant kinds of intervention in prior to total abandonment.&nbsp; Easily recognizable architectural forms (particularly the apse) made churches particularly visible even centuries after their initial abandonment and led to patterns of episodic reuse separated by centuries.</p> <p>The studies pertaining to religious space presented in <em>Objects in Context, Objects in Use</em>, focused almost exclusively on the link between the location of objects in an archaeological context and their primary use within space.&nbsp; In general, the archaeological studies avoided over reliance on the so-called Pompeii Premise, which assumed that objects found in an archaeological context revealed the function of those spaces in antiquity.&nbsp;&nbsp; While carefully wrought observations regarding the location of objects and the function of space remain significant for unpacking the difficult matters surrounding the function of space in an Early Christian context, it provides less help understanding the dynamic processes that form the archaeological record and reveal persistent attitudes toward space in antiquity and in subsequent centuries.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Thoughts... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1

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BASENAME: CATEGORY: CATEGORY: CATEGORY: CATEGORY:

friday-varia-and-quick-thoughts Conferences Korinthian Matters The New Media Web/Tech

DATE: 03/27/2009 08:40:34 AM ----BODY: <p>I've been thinking a good bit about the web site for our proposed Working Group in Digital and New Media.&nbsp; I can remember when it was pretty easy to set up a website -- throw up some links, perhaps frames or a nice stable menu bar, add a photo or a bit of music (if you were flash-y).&nbsp; </p> <p>Now things are different.&nbsp; First, the number of applications, add-on, languages, style sheets, and the like have proliferated.&nbsp; It's hard to figure out exactly how to combine various forms of java, flash, shockwave, php, CSS, et c. to make an appealing and manageable interface.&nbsp; And we have to contend with multiple browsers.&nbsp; </p> <p>It's also hard to figure out what kind of devices the page will appear on.&nbsp; A page will look great on my 17 inch Macbook Pro, but not so good on my 9 inch Dell Mini and damn near illegible on my iPod touch or Samsung Omnia (running Opera Mobile).&nbsp; So, do we create multiple pages for multiple devices?</p> <p>How often do we change our looks?&nbsp; Do we run the page as a blog with that allows up to update easily into a new theme to keep the page fresh.&nbsp; Do we strip the page down and run it as a wiki which could be changed collaboratively, impulsively, and tracked historically?&nbsp; Or do we combine multiple options to capture the dynamism of the web in it's various facets?</p> <p>Some other little hits:</p> <ul> <li>I like <a href="http://creynolds.tumblr.com/">this</a> and impressed with the interface that <a href="http://www.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a> provides.&nbsp; I am going on a little road trip and want to create a small blog to document my travels.&nbsp; Perhaps Tumblr is the solution?</li> <li>Here's another in the growing list of <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.ucla.edu/images/stories/papers/promise%20of%2 0digital%20humanities.pdf">Digital Humanities White Papers</a>.&nbsp; It would be cool to produce an index of these.</li> <li>Keep an eye on the <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/tag/group/Local%20News/tag/2009%20fl oods/">Grand Forks Herald's flood headlines</a> and keep the folks in FargoMoorhead in your thought and prayers.</li> <li>It sure would be fun to hear about the Corinthia Archaeology conference in Loutraki!&nbsp; Can anyone send along a copy of the program?</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend and stay dry.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dallas EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 65.60.192.124 URL:

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DATE: 03/27/2009 11:06:55 AM Info (program, abstracts) here: <a href="http://www.corintharchconf.gr/indexen.html">http://www.corintharchconf.gr/ indexen.html</a> Quite the gathering... ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 167.219.88.140 URL: http://creynolds.tumblr.com DATE: 03/30/2009 12:49:07 PM A thought on using Tumblr, it really is a mid-way point between Twitter and a blog. They infact encourage you to make multiple "tumblogs." The ease of updating sounds, pictures, quotes, links, etc. really is nice and allows you to quickly do it. With a blog you don't want to post just a quote or photo - with tumblr they want you to. Perfect for trips or just a gathering of thoughts not worthy a blog. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Teaching Uncertainty STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-teaching-uncertainty CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 03/26/2009 09:34:25 AM ----BODY: <p>This has been a wild week in the Red River Valley with blizzards and floods.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/te aching-thursday-teaching-and-the-worldwide-financial-crisis.html">Last Thursday, I asked people to share how they were teaching the "worldwide financial crisis"</a> and <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/26/teachingbusiness-during-an-economic-crisis/">we'll post a response</a> by <a href="http://www.business.und.edu/homepages/dflynn/">David Flynn</a>, a professor of economics here at the University of North Dakota over on our <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> blog.&nbsp; One thing his post brings out -- and it is certainly relevant to this particular moment in the region -- is the need to be able to teach uncertainty.</p> <p>Teaching uncertainty is surely among the most difficult things for me to do.&nbsp; Historians, particularly in the classroom, find themselves in a position where they transform complex and confusing networks of events into more easily understood causal relationships.&nbsp; In fact, history is particular adept at demonstrating how individuals in the past did not grasp the complexity or consequences of their own situations.&nbsp; Surely Caesar could not have

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realized how crossing the Rubicon or engaging in a Civil War would have impacted the long term stability of the Roman Republic (although it is hard to imagine that he thought it would help the Republic).&nbsp; Likewise Constantine could not have fully understood the consequences of his decision to support the fledgling Christian church in the 4th century.&nbsp; Unpacking the consequences of these individuals' actions with the benefit of hindsight is certainly one of the key responsibilities of the historian and playing with such omniscience gives us a kind of authority in relation to historical actors.&nbsp; While most historians would readily admit that their command over the past offers very little in the way of command over the present, the public and our students sometimes see it that way.&nbsp; After all, there are still many who look to history for cautionary tales and take quite literally the old proverb about repeating the past if you can't learn from it.&nbsp; </p> <p>During uncertain economic (or environmental!) times, historians (not exclusively, of course) tend to become more visible.&nbsp; The Obama election and economic turmoil of the last six months has led to more historians appearing in the media and speaking with confidence about the present.&nbsp; While this is certainly appealing and empowering to those of us who keep a comparatively lower profile, it certainly exposes us to a different set of expectation than we are likely to experience in more certain times.&nbsp; At the same time, budget crunches at universities and colleges have forced the humanities to defend themselves more vigorously and to demonstrate in ways that the general public can understand the relevance of their academic pursuits.&nbsp; The pressure is on to demonstrate our worth to a society that is undergoing challenges.</p> <p>Uncertainty is a difficult sell in uncertain times.&nbsp; Of course, we all would readily accept that history is full of uncertainty and even the rhetorically omniscient perspective of the professional historian can only present a plausible interpretation of past events on the basis of a small fraction of the real variables present.&nbsp; The study of the past, just like our understanding of the present, is, in fact, plagued by uncertainty.&nbsp; Scholars, paradoxically, have found a certain amount of confidence by accepting the variability of the events that they study and the inability of their own methods, approaches, and tools to produce definitive and unchallengeable explanations of past events.&nbsp; In effect, we frame our entire discipline within the expectation that things will change with how we view the past; this is to say that we brace our own interpretations against an inevitable feeling of uncertainty. </p> <p>So perhaps the current economic and environmental crisis is a good opportunity to present a counterpoint to the confidence projected in the classroom and formed around the internal cohesion of historical narratives.&nbsp; The past like the present is contingent, uncertain, and subject to change.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Weather STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: weather CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 03/25/2009 07:55:10 AM ----BODY: <p>With the weather we&#39;re having it&#39;s hard to think of much beyond our front door right now.&#0160; The best I can do is to point out, in a rather mundane way, how new media applications have helped our community communicate during a difficult time.&#0160; For example, the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a> community is kept up to date via a <a href="http://www.conted.und.edu/flood/">Flood blog</a>. Our automated emergency notification system simultaneously sent our emails and contacted us via our mobile phones to tell us that the university was closed (while I was shoveling our car out!).</p> <p>The <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/tag/group/Local%20News/tag/2009%20fl oods/">Grand Forks Herald&#39;s flood web page</a> is updated regularly allows folks to monitor the rising waters in the local communities.</p> <p style="textalign: left;">And there at least two video feeds which show important communication routes across the Red River.&#0160; The top feed is Grand Forks and the lower one is Fargo.&#0160; The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorlie_Memorial_Bridge">Sorlie Memorial Bridge</a> in the top video should close by 10 am today.</p><p style="textalign: center;"><object bgcolor="#000000" data="http://www.justin.tv/widgets/jtv_player.swf?channel=gfherald" height="320" id="jtv_player_flash" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="movie" value="http://www.justin.tv/widgets/jtv_player.swf" /><param name="flashvars" value="channel=gfherald&amp;auto_play=false&amp;start_volume=25" /></object><a href="http://www.justin.tv/gfherald" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; display: block; width: 345px; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: underline; text-align: center;">Watch live video from Grand Forks Herald on Justin.tv</a><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><p style="text-align: center;"> <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" height="320" id="utv352952" width="400"><param name="_cx" value="10583" /><param name="_cy" value="8467" /><param name="FlashVars" value="" /><param name="Movie" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/589995" /><param name="Src" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/589995" /><param name="WMode" value="Window" /><param name="Play" value="0" /><param name="Loop" value="-1" /><param name="Quality" value="High" /><param name="SAlign" value="LT" /><param name="Menu" value="-1" /><param name="Base" value="" /><param name="AllowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="Scale" value="NoScale" /><param name="DeviceFont" value="0" /><param name="EmbedMovie" value="0" /><param name="BGColor" value="" /><param name="SWRemote" value="" /><param name="MovieData" value="" /><param name="SeamlessTabbing" value="1" /><param name="Profile" value="0" /><param name="ProfileAddress" value="" /><param name="ProfilePort" value="0" /><param name="AllowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="AllowFullScreen" value="true" /> <embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" flashvars="viewcount=true&amp;autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed" height="320"

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id="utv352952" name="utv_n_460080" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/589995" type="application/x-shockwaveflash" width="400" /></object></p><div style="text-align: center;"> </div><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.ustream.tv/" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; background: #ffffff none repeat scroll 0% 0%; display: block; fontweight: normal; font-size: 10px; width: 400px; color: #000000; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -mozbackground-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;" target="_blank">Online TV Shows by Ustream</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tom Elliott EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 75.254.89.165 URL: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~te20/ DATE: 03/25/2009 08:21:23 AM Bill, thinking about you and hoping for the best! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Modern Greek Studies Association Symposium 2009 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: modern-greek-studies-association-symposium-2009 CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 03/24/2009 07:49:29 AM ----BODY: <p>We heard this past week that the <a href="http://mgsa.org/">Modern Greek Studies Association</a> accepted a panel coordinated by <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Kostis Kourelis</a> and <a href="http://www.unl.edu/anthro/afaculty/athanassopoulos.shtml">Effie Athanassopoulos</a> under the auspices of the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in the Mediterranean Interest Group</a> of the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/">Archaeological Institute of America</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p>The panel is entitled "From Town to Country: The Archaeology of Modern Greek Landscapes" and here's the description:</p> <blockquote> <p>Since the birth of the nation-state, the identity of Modern Greece has been defined by its relationship to antiquity. The discipline of

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

archaeology has, thus, played a central role in the construction of Greece, but only in so far as it concerns ancient periods (archaia). For Greece, the archaeology of the recent past is an etymological contradiction. Material culture dating to after 1850 is considered non-archaeological; it can be exported and traded freely. Archaeological studies on 19th- and 20th-century Greece are greatly lacking, leaving a huge disciplinary gap with Historical Archaeology, a discipline that flourishes in the United States. <p>This panel brings together recent work applying archaeological perspectives to the material culture of Modern Greece spanning a spectrum of ecological milieus from the metropolis, to the small town, the village, the monastery and the rural landscape. The theme that connects the individual papers is that of “landscape” approached through the lens of archaeology. Landscape as a concept refers to the external world mediated through subjective human experience. In archaeology, approaches to landscape have changed drastically over time, from economic and ecological perspectives of the 1960s to more recent post-modern views that focus on the social and symbolic construction of landscapes. In Greece, the field of landscape archaeology has grown out of the tradition of archaeological regional surveys, introduced by American scholars during the 1950s. <p>The individual papers offer diverse perspectives and examine a wide variety of landscapes in the 19th and 20th century. The settings range from the urban space of 19th century Athens to the town of Corinth, to rural space in the upland basins of Corinthia, to monastic space in Mount Menoikeion in northern Greece, and to landscape features such as Mt. Pentadaktylos in Cyprus. Each paper applies a different methodological tactic. Some revisit older historical records, others collect new data or reconceptualize physical relationships. Collectively, they represent the richness of a growing field. Susan Buck Sutton, who pioneered the study of the Modern Greek countryside and single-handedly developed the discipline of ethnoarchaeology, has agreed to serve as the panel’s respondent. <p>The panel is sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). The Group consists of AIA members with an interest in the archaeology of post-classical Greece, and in promoting its understanding through various programs and publications.</p></blockquote> <p>Here are the papers (<a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/03/from-town-to-country-archaeologyof.html">for full abstracts</a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>"Athens in the 19th Century: Archaeological Landscapes and Competing Pasts"<br>Effie Athanassopoulos (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) <p>"Ancient Corinth from the Ottoman Empire to the Archaeologists" <br>Amelia R. Brown (American School of Classical Studies at Athens) <p>"<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/ab stract-for-the-modern-greek-studies-association-annual-meeting.html">Between Sea and Mountain: The Archaeology of a 20th-Century “Small World” in he Upland Basins of the Southeastern Korinthia</a>" <br>William R. Caraher (University of North Dakota) <br>David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College) <br>Timothy E. Gregory (Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia) <br>Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory (Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia) </p> <p>"The Sacred Grip: Landscape, Art and Architecture in Mount Menoikeion (19th-20th Centuries)"<br>Nikolas Bakirtzis (The Cyprus Institute) <br>Kostis Kourelis (Connecticut College) <br>Matthew Milliner (Princeton University) </p></blockquote> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Red River Flood 2 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: red-river-flood-2 CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 03/23/2009 08:22:32 PM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f41693e970 b-pi"><img class="at-xid-6a00d83451908369e201156f41693e970b image-full" alt="Red River Flood 2" title="Red River Flood 2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f41693e970b -800wi" border="0" /></a><br /> </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Red River Flood STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: red-river-flood CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 03/23/2009 08:20:01 PM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f41653a970 b-pi"><img class="at-xid-6a00d83451908369e201156f41653a970b image-full" alt="Red River Flood" title="Red River Flood" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f41653a970b -800wi" border="0" /></a><br />

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</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Talk on Thursday: Socialism, Serbofilia, Sex, and Suicide STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: talk-on-thursday-socialism-serbofilia-sex-and-suicide CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/23/2009 07:14:03 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3c55d8970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; margin: 0px 15px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="240" alt="Ivan_Cankar" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156e42b55a970c -pi" width="167" align="left" border="0"></a>If you are in the Grand Forks area, I encourage you come to hear <a href="http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/history/JohnKCox.htm">Prof. John Cox, the chair of the Department of History at North Dakota State</a> speak on Socialism, Serbofilia, Sex, and Suicide: The Mad World of Slovene Literature and Politics around 1900.&nbsp; The talk will be in Gamble Hall 280, March 26, 2009, at 4:00 pm.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3c55d8970 b-pi">&nbsp;</a>His talk will explore the changing landscape of Slovene politics and culture in the twilight years of the Habsburg Empire. In particular, he will focus on the ideas of Ivan Cankar (1876-1918). Cankar was a highly regarded and prolific prose writer whose quests for esthetic authenticity and for Slovene political rights led him to embrace socialist, pro-Balkan political views that complicate today's dominant narrative of the Slovene "national awakening." Cox will also read selected (potentially amusing!) passages from his newly released translation of Cankar's novel <em></em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/MartinKacur-Biography-IvanCankar/dp/9639776416/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1237809939&amp;sr=81">Martin Kacur: Biography of an Idealist (Central European University Press, 2009)</a>, which treats the moral decline and catastrophic fall of a progressive schoolteacher in the Slovene countryside about 1900.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3c55e3970

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b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="240" alt="Cox_Cover" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3c55e8970b -pi" width="240" border="0"></a></p> <p align="center">Gamble Hall 280 ¬∑ March 26, 2009 ¬∑ 4:00 pm</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Khristophoros EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.164.89 URL: DATE: 04/29/2009 09:51:50 PM I'm sorry that I missed it! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Thaw STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: thaw CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/22/2009 08:08:57 AM ----BODY: <p align="left">Things are thawing here in Grand Forks and people are nervous.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3432b8970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="486" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3432be970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3432c8970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="537" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3432d0970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3432d3970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="537" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156e3a5f13970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156e3a5f1a970

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c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="537" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3432e3970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156e3a5f24970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156f3432ec970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156e3a5f34970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201156e3a5f37970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia-1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 03/20/2009 07:48:06 AM ----BODY: <p>There is so much going on in the next few weeks, that I can only offer you some quick hits now:</p> <ul> <li>Two military historians blogging: <a href="http://www.adriangoldsworthy.com/blog.php">Adrian Goldsworthy</a> and <a href="http://www.barrystrauss.com/blog/">Barry Strauss</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/NewHomePage.html">Too punk rock</a>?</li> <li>The Medieval and Post Medieval Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America has submitted a panel for the 2010 Annual Meeting.&nbsp; The panel, put together by the tireless Kostis Kourelis and Sharon Gerstel, is called <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/03/firstout-late-levels-at-early-sites.html">First Out: Late Levels at Early Sites</a>.&nbsp; They were kind enough to invite me and Tim Gregory to contribute a paper that goes beyond excavation and the first out metaphor (and reality) to look at survey data.</li></ul> <p>Good luck to our neighbors down south at the <a href="http://www.ndsu.edu/">Agricultural College</a> as they take on Kansas in the NCAA Basketballing Tournament!!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Teaching and the Worldwide Financial Crisis STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-teaching-and-the-worldwide-financial-crisis CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 03/19/2009 08:08:48 AM ----BODY: <p>There was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15school.html">an article in the New York Times</a> this weekend about how the Worldwide Financial Crisis has influenced the material and ideas taught in business schools.&nbsp; The Chronicle of Higher Education regularly focuses on some innovation or transformation spurred by more difficult economic times.&nbsp; (Today it was <a href="http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3669/dartmouth-professor-createsrecession-inspired-video-game?utm_source=at&amp;utm_medium=en">recession-themed video games</a>!)</p> <p>So, I've been thinking about how the worldwide financial crisis will effect my teaching -- not only in terms of content, but also in terms of how I approach the content.</p> <p>In terms of content, it seems clear that folks are looking at the way in which house foreclosures, "the culture of greed", and governmental policies (or lack there of) have begun to challenge or change our impressions of American values.&nbsp; For my 101 class (Western Civilization I), I've shifted a bit more emphasis onto topics like the decline of empires (Athens, Rome, Charlemagne).&nbsp; I am also thinking about changing the way I teach the rise of towns and the development of a kind of proto-capitalism in Medieval Europe.&nbsp; In general, I've tended to focus on the relationship between the values of urban dwellers and the church as both groups sought to adjust their skills, expectations, and moral outlook to a new set of social expectations.&nbsp; The conversations about values and morality carried out in the "urbanized" world of Late Middle Ages played out over centuries (and may still be playing out in some ways) and the current shock to the American system is not yet a year old.&nbsp; One of the perennial struggles in teaching Western Civilization is translating the matter of scale: do event occur more quickly in our hyper-connected, modern, (post)industrial world or does it just seem that way?</p> <p>Content, of course, is just one part of teaching the financial crisis.&nbsp; The demographics of our student body will almost certainly change -- and perhaps quite quickly as unemployment among 20somethings outpaces other demographic groups.&nbsp; Students might start returning to school from this group to pick up second degrees or retrain.&nbsp; At the same time, the manufacturing slow down could entice folks who skipped college to go directly into the workforce, back into the classroom.&nbsp; It's too early, necessarily, to tell how students with particular, and perhaps unfortunate, experiences with the American economy will influence classroom

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atmosphere and whether they will offer a critique of some of the typical master narratives promoted throughout higher education.&nbsp; As a parallel on a small scale (it's all about scale, isn't it?), I've found that having Gulf War veterans in my classes has often transformed not only discussions of the Middle East but also how students approach topics like cultural exchange, tactics, and war and its social impact.&nbsp; In fact, one or two Gulf War vets can electrify a classroom discussion by speaking with an authority rooted in experience.&nbsp; It will be interesting to see if "victims" of the economic crisis will bring a similar perspective born of experience to the classroom.</p> <p>Finally, I had a few short, but interesting discussions with our <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/grad/html/welcome2.html">Graduate Dean</a>, and he pointed out that the stimulus package could provide funding for undergraduate and graduate research opportunities and certain programs.&nbsp; Just like the Cold War stimulated research in Slavic Studies, Eastern European history, and certain kinds of defense and aerospace initiatives, it will be interesting to see if the current economic crisis will shift teaching priorities at the university.&nbsp; </p> <p>I keep thinking that next week's <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> blog post over at our newly created <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> blog should focus on Teaching the Worldwide Financial Crisis.&nbsp; Any thoughts on this?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Under Libby's Gaze: Merrifield 215 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: merrifield-215 CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/18/2009 08:02:11 AM ----BODY: <p>Merrifield 215 has a kind of old school charm that will be lost when the department migrates to O'Kelly Hall next fall.&nbsp; The traditional arrangement of desks facing the lectern, chalkboard, maps, and (yes) an outmoded TV which apparently produces its moving picture using some kind of tube.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011279747ae628a 4-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111690049eb970c

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-pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111690049ee970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011279747af128a4 -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The maps are torn and tattered.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111690049fc970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011279747afb28a4 -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>And the days of the chalkboard are numbered as chalk dust is incompatible with the technology in today's "smart classrooms".</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011169004a03970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011279747b0428a4 -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">I've never used a whiteboard regularly, but I will miss the chalkboard.&nbsp; I haven't joined in with the power-point revolution and still prefer to write my notes on the board the old fashioned way.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011279747b0928a 4-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011169004a0d970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The best part of 215 is its view toward the library and the quad.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">For more Under Libby's Gaze see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/un der-libbys-gaze-merrifield-217.html">Merrifield 217</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/un der-libbys-gaze-merrifield-209.html">Merrifield 209</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/un der-libbys-gaze-images-of-the-department-of-history-from-merrifieldhall.html">Merrifield Hall</a> in general.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Revising Dream Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: revising-dream-archaeology CATEGORY: Byzantium

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CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 03/17/2009 07:28:52 AM ----BODY: <p>I've set as a goal to send out my now over-hyped <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr eam-archaeology-working-paper.html">Dream Archaeology</a> paper by the beginning of May -- that is before the start of my field season with the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>. I presented the paper in the early winter at North Dakota State University and got a good bit of helpful feedback.&nbsp; I've also had some useful conversations with <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Kostis Kourelis</a> (see <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/search/label/Modern%20Greece">his discussion of Tanagras</a>) and read a good bit more, particularly on modernism and nationalism in a Greek context.&nbsp; G. Jusdanis <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/232497163"><em>Belated Modernity</em></a> and J. Fabion's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27938075"><em>Modern Greek Lessons</em></a><em> </em>proved particularly helpful as did a relatively recent volume of <em><a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/">MODERNISM/modernity</a> </em>(11 (2004)) which featured a relatively extensive discussion of the relationship between archaeology and modernity.&nbsp; While I felt fairly confident about my ability to analyze ancient and even Byzantine (particularly hagiographic) sources, my grasp of the modern&nbsp; </p> <p>As is so often the case, the final substantial revisions has far more to do with repositioning the paper that I already have than some massive re-write.&nbsp; In fact, I began the process of repositioning by adding one paragraph:</p> <blockquote> <p>The wide range of material available from Late Antiquity, the Byzantine period, and contemporary Greek history has emphasized the importance of dreams and visions in creating an understandable historical and archaeological landscape.&nbsp; These stories suggest that Dream Archaeology stands at the intersection of a number of crucial strands in the development of the Greek landscape.&nbsp; The following discussion will seek to explore four distinct connections between the world of dreams and archaeological practice.&nbsp; First, this paper will expand <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/122424890">Y. Hamilakis</a> recent discussion of the role of dreams in creating a sacred context for archaeological practice by placing it in a more developed historical context.&nbsp; To do this, I will focus on both the historical and the performative elements of dream archaeology especially as they provide a link between the role of archaeology as a sacred commission and its production or discovery of&nbsp; sacred objects.&nbsp; The liturgical roots of the hagiographic tradition in which Dream Archaeology and <em>inventio </em>play such an important role, connects the obligation of the archaeologist to excavate to religious rites that mediate between the secular present and a divine.&nbsp; In the modern era, the role of Dream Archaeology in bridging the gap between the eternal sacred and the present and local parallels the role of modern <em>inventio</em> stories that tied local experiences to key events in the emergence of a nationalist narrative.&nbsp; Nationalism in Greece, as elsewhere, sought to capture and propagate common experiences across geographical extent of the modern nation state and use these narratives as a foundation for a distinct Greek identity.&nbsp; The power of Dream Archaeology, and the final focus of this discussion, is that it not only promoted the autochthonous character of the Greek identity and experience, but it recognized it within dreams which rank among the most personal experiences of an individual.&nbsp; Thus, Dream Archaeology creates a set of conditions in which

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the nation can transcend the chronological experiences and spatial limits of a local communities and pervades the unconscious world of the individuals.&nbsp; </p></blockquote> <p>Stay tuned for another "working" draft in the next couple of weeks.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ryan EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.22.95.136 URL: http://dreamstudies.org DATE: 06/13/2009 02:04:28 AM I'm very interested in your line of thought here, connecting dreams and archaeology in antiquity. this is part of cognitive archaeology that has been overlooked for far too long. have you published it yet? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Barbarians at the Gate STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: barbarians-at-the-gate CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/16/2009 06:38:55 AM ----BODY: <p>It's springtime in Grand Forks, at least for the moment.&nbsp; With spring new threats come to our fair community.&nbsp; The piles of snow that dot the landscape slowly become less controlled and begin to transform into different forms.&nbsp; While it's nice to see little patches of brown earth and pavement, the bigger worry is where all this snow will go.</p> <p>To defend us from the nefarious snow, the trucks have begun to roll through Grand Forks with their cargos of clay.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20112796de85c28a 4-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="Truck1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011168fa06dd970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011168fa06e5970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="Truck2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20112796de86528a4 -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">They gather at our

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fortification walls: not far from <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/sm all-town-arch.html">some recent construction</a> which preserved <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/mo re-small-town.html">some clear evidence</a> for what could happen if our fortifications do not hold.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011168fa06eb970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="Survey" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011168fa06ec970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011168fa06ef970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="186" alt="Wall2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20112796de86e28a4 -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20112796de87628a 4-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="Dozer" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20112796de87928a4 -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Fortunately, the folks here in North Dakota have some experience with using the earth to protect habitation centers.&nbsp; Our predecessors to the west, <a href="http://www.nps.gov/archive/jeff/LewisClark2/TheBicentennial/Symposium2001/ Papers/Wood_Raymond.htm">the Mandan</a>, tended to build their villages on high ground and protect <a href="https://www.state.nd.us/hist/doubleditch/doubleditch.htm">them with ditches</a>.</p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/110688">The Grand Forks Herald scooped me on this</a>.&nbsp; I opened my favorite local paper's web page this morning, and there was not only a better discussion of this, but also better photos.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Television CATEGORY: The New Media

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CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 03/13/2009 07:04:25 AM ----BODY: <p>A few quick and fun things:</p> <ul> <li>Our EduPunk show has officially blown up.&nbsp; Watch the Educause sponsored debate <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/10/edupunk/">here</a>, and see our responses <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/12/call-meedupunk/">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/te aching-thursday-considering-the-punk-in-edupunk.html">here</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a> at 50,000 page views.&nbsp; Congratulations, Shawn!</li> <li><a href="http://www.gradspace.und.edu/blog/2009/03/09/2009-scholarly-forumhighlights-excellence-with-distinguished-dissertation-thesis-awards/">Our very own Liz Saunders won the 2009 Distinguished Thesis Award</a> from The <a href="http://www.graduateschool.und.edu/">Graduate School</a> for her thesis: "Pine Ridge Reservation's Early Economic Initiatives and Intercultural Reactions" under Jim Mochoruk.</li> <li>Word on the street is that a version of our <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/di gital-humanities-white-paper-at-the-university-of-north-dakota.html">White Paper</a> which combined a New Media center with a healthy does of Digital History and Digital Humanities received some 6 digit funding.</li></ul> <p>Thanks to everyone who braved the elements to show up <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/03/an -advertisement-for-myself.html">at my talk on Wednesday</a>! I appreciated the support and interest that our diverse campus brought to my presentation.&nbsp; I've been dragging a bit this semester and it was just what I needed to carry me through the late winter.</p> <p>Have a good weekend and enjoy the hoops.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Considering the Punk in EduPunk STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-considering-the-punk-in-edupunk CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 03/12/2009 10:16:57 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Have you watched the series of video debates centering on <a href="http://jimgroom.net/">Jim Groom's</a> term EduPunk?&nbsp; We've (that the royal we) posted them over on our Teaching Thursday blog.&nbsp; The critique of the term and its usefulness and applicability is well underway (and <a href="http://mikecaulfield.com/2008/05/26/edupunk/">was nearly instantaneous</a>); nevertheless it seems to have hung around for more than 15 minutes -- almost a year.&nbsp; While it originated in the context of instructional technology and a rage against the Blackboard machine, it surely has implications that go beyond the world of the web to capture a growing spirit or willingness to bring .&nbsp; So perhaps it might be useful to tug at the term and its implications some more and to see how it might fit into a broader cultural context.</p> <p>I have a <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">passing interest</a> in the place of punk in a broader cultural and academic discourse.&nbsp; A colleague and I have explored the place of a punk "mentality" or even "methodology" in archaeology.&nbsp; In the context of EduPunk, the conversation centered on the DIY movement as a form of resistance to the increasing commodification of educational technology (read: Blackboard).&nbsp; In my little writings, I've emphasized punk as a contextual movement with deep (and ironic) nostalgic strains.</p> <p><a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/punkand-place/">Through an explicit sense of place</a>, punk sought to bridge the growing gap between suburban culture (the garage of the garage band) and the spirit of alienation eating away at the urban center.&nbsp; The reverse migration of punk rockers from the suburbs or at least the periphery of the city inward toward the urban core (and its values good and bad) sought to reverse the flow of the middle class from the city.&nbsp; At the same time, punk played with place on the small scale -- the Velvet Underground's famed early show at the New York State Psychiatry convention or the Cramps show at the California State Mental Hospital or the ironic name of CBGBs.&nbsp; The idea of EduPunk immediately brought to mind the classroom as the place for education and the idea of bringing a punk attitude toward the classroom environment: pushing students to confront the arbitrary nature of so many classroom practices, their power relationships, and the tradition bound conventions (little desks all in a row).&nbsp; Of course, the students would replace them with their own (equally if not more arbitrary) relationships, but by doing so they'd get it.&nbsp; They'd understand that these rules are (in many if not all cases) meaningless.</p> <p><a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/punk-nostalgia-and-thearchaeology-of-musical-utopia/">Punk is also nostalgic</a>.&nbsp; Punk music conspicuously included fragments of the past.&nbsp; While they would distort these fragments and maybe even ridicule the sensibilities that produced them, but they would preserve and transmit these fragments of the past to ensure (almost dialectically) that their music is in a conspicuous dialogue with popular sensibilities.&nbsp; The challenge of punk rock is explicit and direct.</p> <p>So how do these ideas fit into an approach to education that goes beyond being frustrated by the hype-capitalism (and intellectual imperialism) of Blackboard or other for-profit learning management systems?&nbsp; The grounds for the challenge shifts from a system like Blackboard which can clearly be identified as the enemy to the much more ambiguous, widely respected, and (frankly) powerful, institutions of (higher) learning.&nbsp; Punk never succeeded in tearing down society or any particular institution or even shattering the assumptions of rock music (although Mike Caufield's claim that punk had "surprising little social impact" is perhaps overstated or at very least requires some qualification; after all, punk has been commodified (an unlikely scenario if it had no value within the capitalist system) and made into

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a pseudo-ideology that works as a tonic to the predictable angst of adolescence (or or the chronically alienated).).&nbsp;&nbsp; Punk represented a persistent challenge that consistently attacked the received wisdom through performative, theatrical gesture as it ignored best practice and defying aesthetic logic.</p> <p>EduPunk could also mean: leading a seminar in an auditorium room of 150, lecturing to a class of 4, grading the class as a group and ignoring the individual, beginning in the middle, changing expectations mid course, and in the words of Andy Warhol (one of the great promoters of punk) "Always leave them wanting less".</p> <p>For another view on Edupunk see <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/12/call-me-edupunk/">Crystal Alberts post over at Teaching Thursday!</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: An Early Draft of an AIA Abstract STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: an-early-draft-of-an-aia-abstract CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 03/11/2009 08:29:54 AM ----BODY: <p>Lots going on this week!&nbsp; If you're in Grand Forks -- and <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/">have dug yourself out of the snow</a> -come and check out <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/grad/docs/2009ScholaryForum/CaraherPoster.pd f">my research talk</a> at the Lecture Bowl at the Memorial Union at the University of North Dakota today at 12 pm.&nbsp; </p> <p>If not, here's part of my chaotic life: an abstract for next January's <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10096">Archaeological Institute of America</a>'s meeting.&nbsp; The plan is for a panel that looks at post-Classical levels at well-know ancient sites sponsored by our <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">Medieval and Post-Medieval Interest Group of the AIA</a>.&nbsp; My paper will tweak that a bit by looking at data collected from a handful of small intensive survey projects and re-analyzing them in light of recent work on the post-Classical world and changes in the basic questions survey archaeology has proven adept at addressing.</p> <blockquote> <p align="center">New Views on Old Data<br>Reinterpreting Intensive Survey Results After 30 Years</p> <p>Intensive pedestrian surveys across Greece have vastly

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expanded our understanding of the Greek countryside, particularly for the postClassical period.&nbsp;&nbsp; Over the past 25 years, the publications of the so-called second-phase intensive survey projects have contributed to our understanding of a more prosperous Late Roman east and refined our view of the post-Classical settlement structures.&nbsp; With these successes in mind, this paper will reexamine the results from several small-scale survey projects conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Boeotia and the Corinthia.&nbsp; Using a series of case studies, this paper argues that there is much to be gained by returning to old survey data with an eye toward addressing recent questions regarding the post-Classical landscape. </p> <p>The survey projects examined in this paper coincided with many of the early second-phase survey projects, like the Cambridge Boeotia Project and the Argolid Exploration Project, but were published earlier and in a less comprehensive way.&nbsp;&nbsp; Returning to the material from these projects, in much the same way that archaeologists return to excavation material many years after its recovery and publication, both represents the coming of age of intensive survey and continues the reflexive trends in the study of survey material and data.&nbsp; Reexamining the data and these projects’ underlying assumptions increases the transparency of these older efforts, enriches the pool of material available for the comparative study of the Greek countryside, and contributes to the way in which current survey projects collect and organize their data.</p></blockquote> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blizzard Blog STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blizzard-blog CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/10/2009 08:50:29 AM ----BODY: <p>I'm in my office today despite the reports that we going to get pounded by a blizzard.&nbsp; Apparently, blizzard has a name: <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/109942">Coyote</a>.&nbsp; It was named after a dog on the team of a local "musher" racing in the Iditarod in Alaska.&nbsp; Wow.</p> <p>Everything is closed except the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; North Dakota State, Valley City State, Mayville State, Minnesota State-Moorhead, University of Minnesota-Crookston.&nbsp; The word here in UND is that these schools closed because they are WEAK.&nbsp; </p> <p>Plus, there is a 30% chance that nothing at all will happen.&nbsp; I like those odds.</p> <p>You can follow along here: <a

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title="http://www.rwic.und.edu/webcam/" href="http://www.rwic.und.edu/webcam/">http://www.rwic.und.edu/webcam/</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: EduPunk Preview STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: edupunk-preview CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 03/10/2009 08:18:48 AM ----BODY: <p>Edupunk, a term coined by Jim Groom of Mary Washington University, in <a href="http://bavatuesdays.com/the-glass-bees/">an important blog post last May</a> has once again hit the internets.&nbsp; A recent debate sponsored by Gerry Bayne, one of the big wigs at <a href="http://www.educause.edu/">Educause</a>, has centered on the merits of this term for how we think about the changing landscape of university education.&nbsp; Since its introduction last spring, the notion of Edupunk has swept through the blogosphere and print media while cleverly avoiding definition, complete disclosure, or sustained interrogation.&nbsp; Of course, when EduPunk hit the scene, some of us had already been tempted into the punk metaphor.&nbsp; <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Kostis Kourelis</a> posted his now famous <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/punkarchaeology.html">Punk Archaeology</a> blog post in mid-February of last year and <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">our ongoing efforts</a> have touched upon some of the intersections -- both intellectual and spontaneous -between punk rock and archaeology.&nbsp; </p> <p>I am still mulling over Edupunk, but I've <a href="http://teachingthursday.org/2009/03/10/edupunk/">posted the five part YouTube video debate over at our Teaching Thursday blog</a>.&nbsp; Check back there on Thursday to see the musings of <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/calberts/">Crystal Alberts</a> on the video debate and EduPunk as a "movement" (or "project") more broadly.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blizzard STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blizzard CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/09/2009 03:33:18 PM ----BODY: <div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011168cebfac970 c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="SNC00006" border="0" class="at-xid6a00d83451908369e2011168cebfac970c image-full " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011168cebfac970c -800wi" title="SNC00006" /></a></div>! <p>Blizzard.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A few thoughts on Digital History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-few-thoughts-on-digital-history CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 03/09/2009 08:21:32 AM ----BODY: <p>This fall we worked to establish a Center/Centre/Working Group (my favorite) for the Digital Humanities here at the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; A funding opportunity presented itself in the form of submitting a <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/di gital-humanities-white-paper-at-the-university-of-north-dakota.html">White Paper</a> (it's like the <em>White Album</em> but less influential) to the <a href="http://www.und.edu/president/">President of the University</a>.&nbsp;

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Through this process, the powers-that-be suggested that we merge our proposal with two others which predominantly focused on New Media applications in the arts.&nbsp; The result of this process was an almost established Working Group in the Digital and New Media.&nbsp; The practical demands of the application process required this merger -- as opposed to any real, or at least acknowledged, intellectual common ground.&nbsp; </p> <p>This process of creating a "Centre" here on campus, or securing some funding from the administration, was largely a bureaucratic one, but it does point to the ambiguity surrounding definitions of such emerging disciplines as "digital humanities", "digital history" or even "new media studies" at the level of the university administration and almost certainly among the general public.&nbsp; This is not to suggest that there isn't considerable overlap in this developing specialties or even that we should maintain rigid divisions between them.</p> <p>On the other hand, the more inclined we are to forge definitions, the more fragmented the various "digital" fields could become.&nbsp; After all, <a href="http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/digitalhumanities/2008/12/15/digital-humanitiesmanifesto/#27">orthodoxy creates heretics</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://www.robmacdougall.org/index.php/2009/02/digital-history-hacks/">A recent post-mortem</a> on the important digital history blog -- <a href="http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/">Digital History Hacks</a> -points out one key fissure that could eventually develop into a meaningful schism in the field: how much technical, nuts and bolts, knowledge does one need to be a member of the digital history/digital humanities community.&nbsp; I'll admit that my ability to code is almost zero.&nbsp; I struggle with HTML and my well-meaning efforts for learn some basic XML collapsed amidst a chaotic workload.&nbsp; Programmers intimidate me (as did much of Turkel's blog), although I certainly appreciate what they bring to the table.&nbsp; </p> <p>On the other hand, my background -- and any claim to be a digital historian -comes not from any sort of philosophical commitment to digital history as the way of the future or the foundation for some kind of radical democracy, but from the practical applications of pre-existing software to archaeology and history.&nbsp; Most of my experimentation over the past few years (most of which I have documented here) comes through the mixing and matching of simple applications available to anyone on the web or at the local big box store -wikis, blogs, Google applications, podcasts, and low-cost digital recorders.&nbsp; In fact, much of what I preach (on those odd occasions when I have the pulpit) is how easy and accessible the tools for making history a digital activity.&nbsp; This is a far cry of Turkel's supercool, very technical, and cutting edge <a href="http://digitalhistory.wikispot.org/Fabrication_Wiki">Lab for Humanistic Fabrication</a>.</p> <p>Maybe there will be a massive divide sometime between those of us who rely on the pre-packaged applications and those who are creators and innovators in the digital realm.&nbsp; Those of us who rely on pre-packaged applications would slowly return to the core of our disciplines as society (and academia) come to expect ever increasing amounts of competence and engagement with digital technologies of all kinds become expected.&nbsp; Those who code, fabricate, develop, and pioneer, will remain the digital vanguard and appropriate the term "digital humanist" or "digital historian". </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 96.3.118.225 URL: DATE: 03/09/2009 01:27:26 PM A friend familiar with UC-Berkeley's interdisciplinary doctoral studies program recently asked me how historians, in 50+ years, are going to write histories from electronic archives. It's a question worth considering. This particular blog post somewhat smacks of an article published some years ago concerning a piece of Hubble Telescope technology being used to decipher what was otherwise ancient and burnt up papyrus. With the telescope technology (something to do with infrared stuff that I don't even have the time to understand), scientists were able to read what was before unreadable, and found quite a bit of info to fill in certain gaps of, I believe, Archimedes (or one of those Ancient brains). In this case, new technology allowed humanity to see what otherwise couldn't be seen, and the humanist scholars of the Ancient texts could synthesize the new information with what was already known: the sciences and the arts working together (absolutely outstanding when it works this way within university ‚ÄI recall that, in Caraher's words, it was another "seamless" process). ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sterling Fluharty EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 68.35.74.82 URL: http://cliomachine.org DATE: 03/09/2009 10:59:08 PM I am becoming one of the programmers. Right now I feel like more of an outcast from traditional history, but maybe that will change. I am not sure if programmers will remain in the vanguard. They may be the ones who largely set the research agenda in digital history, but their specialization may end up being just another form of historiography/historical methods. The historians who produce earth-shattering scholarship through use of new digital tools, especially in cases where the scholarship would not be otherwise possible, are probably the ones whose work will be seen as most significant. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: An Advertisement for Myself STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: an-advertisement-for-myself CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 03/06/2009 10:19:13 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Just a quick post advertising my talk next week. I'll be giving a <a href="http://www.gradspace.und.edu/blog/2009/03/03/first-of-the-deans-lectureseries-announced/">Graduate School Dean's Lecture</a> on Wednesday, March 11th at 12 pm at the Lecture Bowl of the Memorial Union.&nbsp; The talk is scheduled to coincide with the Graduate School Scholarly Forum.&nbsp; <a href="http://graduateschool.und.edu/docs/2009ScholaryForum/SFScheduleWeb.pdf">Here's the schedule of events for that</a>.</p> <p>The talk is titled: “Five Years at an Ancient Harbor in Cyprus”.</p> <blockquote> <p>The Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project (PKAP) began work in the coastal zone of Pyla in Cyprus in 2003. Our initial exploration of the area revealed a massive coastal site extending for over 1 km along the coastal plain. We quickly recognized that this site was remarkable both on account of its coastal position and its size and complexity. Moreover, we became aware that the previous archaeological work in the area had only reveal small and isolated sections of the diverse array of archaeological remains present. Consequently, beginning in 2004, the PKAP initiated a systematic, multi-tiered investigation of the microregion designed to understand the historical development of the in its political, economic, and cultural context. Using the tools of intensive pedestrian survey, remote sensing of various kinds, and targeted excavation, we produced a robust assemblage of material capable of answering numerous questions about the history, function, and chronology of the site. <p>This fieldwork confirmed that people occupied our corner of Cyprus from at least as early as the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BC) and fortified parts of the site during the Archaic to Hellenistic period (700 BC-BC 300). The site, however, flourished during Late Antiquity (AD400-600) when it reached its greatest extent and included monumental religious architecture, fine imported ceramics, and a significant functional diversity across. At this time, sprawled for over a kilometer along the Cypriot coast producing a scatter of material considerably larger than a villa, hamlet or rural village yet smaller than a urbanized polis or city center. Scholars have generally overlooked such “mid-sized” sites in the Eastern Mediterranean and, consequently, must of our research has focused on the key role that such sites played in both the regional and local economy and within the local settlement structure. <p>Alongside these traditional components of archaeological research, PKAP has sought to document the performative, narrative, and reflexive components of the archaeological experience. By drawing extensively on new media technologies and applications we have worked to record the experience of archaeology and project it beyond the limits of the field. Such programs are more than simply ancillary components to the overall aims of the project, but complement the main lines of research by emphasizing the multiple narratives present within the same body of research. This practice not only remind project members of the dense web of assumptions, methods, and procedures required to produce archaeological knowledge, but also reinforces the ambivalence and ambiguity central to all humanistic inquiry.</p></blockquote> <p>I know, we've been working at Pyla-Koustopetria for six years, but five years had a better ring to it. <p>Have a good weekend.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kreta EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 83.29.227.90 URL: http://www.odlotowewakacje.com DATE: 03/07/2009 09:04:18 AM I know Pyla. Charming small town. I was there last year. The village is in the eastern part of the island, in the United Nations Buffer Zone in Very interesting article. I must to show my wife. Good weekend for you, ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tanie bilety lotnicze EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 62.121.65.240 URL: http://www.ewings.pl DATE: 06/09/2009 04:07:09 AM Ive been to that area but cant see to recall any archsites... ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Wycieczki EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 89.76.78.150 URL: http://www.fostertravel.pl DATE: 07/07/2009 06:13:33 PM I have been in Nicosia in Cyprus, also Cyprus North (turkish) but didnt arceological sites besides Paphos -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: The Challenge of Midlevel Courses STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-challenge-of-midlevel-courses CATEGORY: Teaching

located Cyprus. too.

see

DATE: 03/05/2009 08:11:03 AM ----BODY: <p>There are few places where the transitional or transformative aspect of university life is more visible than in the midlevel courses.&#0160; At the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a>, these courses often receive the 200 or 300 level designation and represent the lowest level course required for the degree.&#0160; Mediating between introductory classes that are often&#0160; pitched to a general undergraduate audience and upper level classes where we work to develop discipline (or major) specific skills, these courses lay the foundation for later coursework while shepherding students into the major and, ideally, the culture of a particular discipline. </p><p>In the Department of History, I teach the midlevel course which is one of only two specific classes required for all majors.&#0160; We call it History 240: The Historians&#39; Craft.&#0160; The course introduces historical methodology and research techniques, the history of the discipline, and the style of historical writing and argument.&#0160; In the best of all worlds, the class prepares students for the experience of upper level courses which, in turn, reinforce and

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expand the skills developed in History 240.&#0160; By History 440, the capstone course in our major, the students should be prepared to write a major term paper with sustained faculty guidance.&#0160; This doesn&#39;t work quite as well as we&#39;d like as a department, and as a consequence our History 240 class is <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/te aching-thursday-revised-classes-for-spring.html">under constant revision</a>.&#0160; In the process of the several revisions that this class has undergone, I&#39;ve tried to think generally about what the class is supposed to do in our department&#39;s curriculum and what these midlevel courses are supposed to in the more general scheme at the university. </p><p>The main challenge of such a course, particularly in a discipline like history, is to position the class in such a way to allow the student to be successful in a wide range of upper level courses which embrace a wide range of general approaches to the field of history.&#0160; Our upper level courses in history represent a diverse assortment of methods and methodologies from fairly traditional narrative based approaches to the past, to those rooted in archaeology, oral history, quantitative analysis, and various theoretical approaches.&#0160; In fact, from my perspective one of the strengths of our department is the diversity of approaches both in terms of scholarship and pedagogy.&#0160; </p><p>So, the midlevel course is designed to prepare students for a very diverse experience in upper level courses and to an environment where disagreements of basic aspects of theory, epistemology, and pedagogy make it hard to imagine any single set of skills being reinforced consistently.&#0160;&#0160; In a world where &quot;one-size-fits-all&quot; solutions in any field (much less academia) have become unfashionable, the midlevel course is asked to provide just that: a foundation upon which any number of discipline based assumptions and expectations can rest.&#0160; On the other hand, if the course become too generic and focus on such neutral (if important) skills as &quot;critical thinking&quot; or &quot;writing&quot; or &quot;reasoning&quot;, we run the risk of eroding the key features of the discipline.&#0160; In a discipline like history which adopts methods from outside the field with consistency, it is dangerous to push too far (explicitly) into the realm of the generic foundations of &quot;humanistic inquiry&quot;.&#0160; It is easy to agree that critical thinking is important for our majors, but if that is all we offer in the discipline of history, then there is little that justifies its existence as an independent discipline -- and this is certainly not the road any self respecting department wishes to pursue.&#0160; Moreover, </p><p>To return to the problem of the midlevel course and add a small twist, we have traditionally taught the midlevel course almost exclusively to majors in a small seminar style environment.&#0160; The class has capped at 15 and is offered in at least three sections of the year. This not only limits our enrolment figures per semester or per year, but also may limit our number of majors as well.&#0160; As we look ahead to declining enrolments in the humanities (a seemingly inevitable consequence of economic instability) and at our university specifically, there must be good reason to create a mid level class limited to so few students over the course of a year.&#0160; While most of us can agree that smaller classes have definite advantages over larger courses, in times of stagnating enrolments these advantages must be clearly articulated.&#0160; As we revisit our midlevel courses this year, we have also revisited the size of these classes and consider whether it is possible to teach the foundations of the discipline to a larger group of students without significantly eroding the quality of the experience or learning.&#0160; </p><p>With this in mind, we can return to the difficult task of structuring a course to feed into a diverse array of expectations, outcomes, and pedagogies at the upper level. As our department considers expanding the number seats

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available in midlevel courses and radically revising the assignments, content, and goals, I&#39;ve become interested in hearing how other people bridge the gap between the expectations and goals of the lowest level courses and the demands and methods of upper level courses.&#0160; If you have any ideas to share either specifically or generally, check out the blog at <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org">www.teachingthursday.org</a> where I&#39;ve cross-posted this post and hope to get some though-provoking responses.&#0160; It&#39;s <a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/about/">a joint venture</a> between Anne Kelsch of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/oid/">Office of Instructional Development</a> and <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/ContactInfo.html">me</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sterling Fluharty EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.24.94.163 URL: http://phdinhistory.org DATE: 03/05/2009 12:26:39 PM I checked IPEDS and saw that UND granted 26 history BAs in 2006 and 22 in 2007. These are small numbers and the trend is downward, as you noted. Maybe one way to continue justifying the course to your dean is to run it as a combination of lecture and discussion sections. The lecture could happen once or twice per week and the discussion sections would meet once or twice per week as well. This would have the advantage of aggregating sections so that the total enrollment of the course stayed at higher levels, which would likely satisfy your administrators. Lastly, I would point out that the national average is that about 2.2 percent of all bachelors degrees awarded are in history. At your institution, only 1.4 percent are in history. So I would say that your undergraduate program probably has some unrealized growth potential, notwithstanding the recession. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Charles Morley, Ohio State, and the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: charles-morley-ohio-state-and-the-university-of-north-dakota CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Elwyn Robinson's Autobiography DATE: 03/04/2009 06:46:17 AM ----BODY:

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<p>When <a href="http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2005/0511/0511mem2.cfm">Char les Morley died in 2005,</a> his status was secure as one of the leading figures in the study of Eastern Europe and Poland.&nbsp; The most recent issue of Making History at the Ohio State University, the newsletter of the <a href="http://history.osu.edu/">Department of History at Ohio State</a>, reported that his widow has donated Prof. Morley's significant collection of books on Eastern Europe to Ohio State.&nbsp; Morley did his undergraduate work at Ohio State before going on to receive his Ph.D. from Wisconsin.</p> <p>Morley is interesting to me on this blog because he taught at the <a href="http://history.osu.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> from around 1939 to, perhaps, 1942.&nbsp; From 1943-1944 he served alongside many well-known scholars in the Office of Strategic Services.</p> <p>At UND, he was part of a group of scholars who taught for a year or so in the department of history in the 1930s including Reginald Lovell, Clarence Matterson, John Pritchett Charles Centner.&nbsp; Matterson would serve as Department Head at Iowa State University, Centner would publish numerous works on <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8992697">European/South American relations</a>, Lovell published an important work <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/599326">on economic imperialism in South Africa</a>.</p> <p>Elwyn B. Robinson provides, in his customary way, a brief description of Morley during his time at UND:</p> <blockquote> <p>"An unmarried young man of Polish origins from Cleveland, Morley was teaching in the European History Department.&nbsp; I do not remember how long he was at the university, but I know he was later on the history faculty of Ohio State University.&nbsp; That was a typical experience.&nbsp; Generally faculty members who stayed only a few years at the University of North Dakota moved on to an institution of greater prestige.&nbsp; North Dakota was a place where young men of good quality gained valuable experience or seasoning.&nbsp; That in a sense was a recommendation for the quality of the faculty of the university.&nbsp; In our early years at the university I was struck by the rapid turnover among the younger members of the faculty and their expectation of not staying long.&nbsp; I used to say to Eva that so-and-so was "only camping," meaning they would soon move on." </p></blockquote> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Western Civilization Podcasts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: western-civilization-podcasts CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media

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DATE: 03/03/2009 07:31:43 AM ----BODY: <p>A few people have asked me to make my podcasts for my Western Civilization class more widely available.&#0160; So here they are.&#0160; They are works in progress!&#0160; The first few podcasts used a really poor microphone, so the sound quality is pretty low.&#0160; All the later ones were produced with a <a href="http://www.bluemic.com/products/snowball">Blue Snowball Microphone</a> and Garage Band on a MacBook Pro. I convert them all to MP3 format.</p> <p>I am sure that there are little factual errors and some interpretative inconsistencies here and there throughout the podcasts.&#0160; My goal from the start was to create podcasts that <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/te aching-thursday-the-instability-of-hybrid-learning.html">supplemented the classroom experience</a> rather than replaced it.</p> <p>Here are the first 9 podcasts:</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/1_Western_Civ_I ntro.mp3">1. Introduction to Western Civilization</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/2_Early_Civiliz ation.mp3">2. Early Civilization</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/3_Classical%20G reece.mp3">3. Classical Greece</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/4_The_Hellenist ic_World.mp3">4. The Hellenistic World</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/5_The_Roman_Rep ublic.mp3">5. The Roman Republic</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/6_The_Roman_Emp ire.mp3">6. The Roman Empire</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/7a_Christianity _and_the_Later_Roman_Empire.mp3">7a. Christianity and the Late Roman Empire</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/7b_Christianity _and_the_Later_Roman_Empire.mp3">7b. Christianity and the Later Roman Empire</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WestCivPodCasts/8a_Late_Antiqui ty_Byzantium_and_the_Early_Medieval_World.mp3">8. Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Middle Ages</a></p> <p>I&#39;ll post the second half of the class toward the end of the semester (I am still working on post-production special effects).&#0160; If you want to follow the class, so to speak, online here&#39;s a <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/Syllabus_101_SP2009.htm ">link to the syllabus</a>.&#0160; </p> <p>I&#39;m making these podcasts available, in part because I said that I would.&#0160; I also have this vague idea that the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> should do more to make (or promote) the content of their classes available to folks in the community (they&#39;ve started to do this with their <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/itunes/index.php">iTunes U</a> or as they call it on their homepage Itunes U.)&#0160; I&#39;ve been trying to talk to people here into a campaign that promotes our community content.&#0160; We could call it &quot;UND for Free&quot;.&#0160; </p> <p>Enjoy the podcasts.&#0160; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: James Brewer Stewart and Abolitionism at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: james-brewer-stewart-and-abolitionism-at-the-university-of-northdakota CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes DATE: 03/02/2009 09:10:36 AM ----BODY: <p>On Friday, we have the distinct pleasure of hearing <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/rrvhc/keynote_speaker.html">James Brewer Stewart give a talk entitled, &quot;The Old Slavery and the New: History, Memory, and the Challenges of Human Trafficking&quot;.</a>&#0160; His talk was one of those all too rare occasions when a historian can bridge the gap between past practices and present policies and offer a compelling case for present action.&#0160; He argued that the abolitionist movement of the first half of the 19th century could provide a model for the creation of a movement to abolish slavery in the world today which Stewart regards as a more pressing problem today than ever before.&#0160; In particular, he asserted that the moment is right for a movement that would demand the immediate emancipation of all slaves in the world.&#0160; His talk was particularly successful in tying events in the 19th century to the current upswing in youth activism, the spread of technology, the vitality of the evangelical movement both at specifically evangelical colleges and in American life in general, and the dire need to eliminate the immoral practice of slavery from the earth.</p> <p>The talk was one of those great opportunities to discuss and grapple with a wide range of issues from the uses of the past, to the nature of slavery (in the past and today), and the potential and structure of any movement with global goals and ambitions.&#0160; The discussions poured over in a local watering hole and Steward graciously hung around talking to faculty and graduate students.</p> <p>My students, who generally study pre-modern Eastern Mediterranean, we particularly excited about Stewart&#39;s talk.&#0160; Not only have there been some interesting recent works that look at various aspects of slavery in the Ancient and Medieval East (e.g. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/67239425">Jennifer Glancy&#39;s recent survey</a> or <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/46694625">M. McCormick&#39;s <em>Origins of the European Economy</em></a>), but our work in Cyprus and in the Muslim east brought to the fore important transnational issues (e.g. what is the impact of evangelical involvement in various social justice issues in countries where Western Christianity is looked upon with concern or even hostility).</p> <p>The point of this post today is purely advertisement.&#0160; Between Friday&#39;s <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/rrvhc/conference_schedule.html">Red River Valley History Conference</a> and Stewart&#39;s talk, I was impressed and invigorated by the vitality present in our small history department and small

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graduate program.&#0160; Check out <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/rrvhc/2009_conference_photographs.html">the photos on the web page</a>!&#0160; And our graduate student members of the history honor society, Phi Alpha Theta, should be commended for their hard work and successful conference.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.184.129.166 URL: DATE: 03/06/2009 09:44:39 AM There has been very little work on Protestant missionary in Greece. There is a history of the American Farm School, Brenda Marder, Stewards of the Land: The American Farm School and Modern Greece (1979) and there is some work on Robert College in Istanbul. Both elite Greek high schools, Athens College and Anatolia (in Thessaloniki) were the descendants of Robert College. I know of one dissertation that looks at the archives of a Mennonite community in Crete. Good stuff. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Phi Alpha Theta Conference and Other Fun Stuff STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: phi-alpha-theta-conference-and-other-fun-stuff CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 02/27/2009 08:38:39 AM ----BODY: <p>If you are in the Grand Forks area, stop by the Red River Valley History Conference today at the Memorial Union at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; In particular, stop by my panel at 9:30 am in Medora Room 209.</p> <p>Historical Idealism &amp; Religion <br>Dr. W. Caraher, Commentator, <br>Memorial Union Medora Room 209&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>"Croce and Collingwood: Continuities in Idealism"<br>Dalton Little,University of North Dakota</p> <p>"A Late Antique Saint"<br>Kathryn A. Hughes Nedegaard<br>University of North Dakota&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>‚ÄúStandard of Salvation: The Christian‚Äôs Use of Greco-Roman Literary Genre‚Äù<br>Paul Ferderer, University

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of North Dakota </p> <p>______________________</p> <p>And stick around for the other panels and <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/rrvhc/keynote_speaker.html">our keynote speaker</a>:&nbsp; Dr. James Stewart: "The Old Slavery and the New: History, Memory and the Challenges of Human Trafficking"</p> <p>A few other fun quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>Some interesting discussion over that <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a>.&nbsp; Check it out and leave a comment! <li>This is <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/02/cistercian-abbey-of-zaraka-inancient.html">interesting</a> and <a href="http://www.thomasav.com/Media/zaraka.html">cool</a>. <li><a href="http://classics.uc.edu/users/lima/">This will be fun to follow</a>.</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Student Expectations in an Age of Anxiety STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: student-expectations-in-an-age-of-anxiety CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 02/26/2009 08:22:05 AM ----BODY: <p>I've had some time to mull over the recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html?_r=2&amp;scp=1& amp;sq=grade%20entitlement&amp;st=cse">NY Times' article</a> on the growing sense of&nbsp; student entitlement at American universities.&nbsp; It has caused some buzz in the blogosphere <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/02/student-entitlement.html">where a colleague captured some of my immediate reactions</a>.&nbsp; My gut response is always to side with the students, and it is virtually impossible to shake that perception in this case.&nbsp; After all the article does not articulate a sense of entitlement without foundation.&nbsp; The students assume that if they do the work, they will get an above average (i.e. B or better) result.&nbsp; While many teachers (myself included) think that we can counter this kind of attitude through the careful manipulation in the utopian space of classroom, the historian in me sees many of these notions to be deeply rooted in American culture. The idea that hard work will produce above average results must derive at least in part from long held ideas of American exceptionalism.&nbsp; The spirit of American exceptionalism translated to a suburban environment where two generations of Americans witnessed how a work-a-day life could produce a steadily rising standard of living and slowly built up the comforting arrogance

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that the grinding routine of a 40+ hour work week could grant one access to a wonderful world of consumables and luxuries.&nbsp; This might all change as the worsening "global economic crisis" threatens not only the economic basis for American optimism, but also calls into question the authenticity of the values on which this optimism rested.&nbsp; Despite these threats, the common paean in the news today is that hard work will bring America back from the brink.&nbsp; <p>When we walk into the classroom and confront a group of students who will likely work hard -- if not in our class specifically, then in their classes in general (and if not "hard" by our standards, "hard" by their standards) -- we aren't confronting simply another example of botched communication between student and teacher, but the realities of over 100 years of American culture.&nbsp; <p>If a sense of student entitlement is rooted in part in American culture, it is compounded by a university system that can be quite confusing on a number of levels.&nbsp; Despite efforts to standardize classes across the curriculum, they still represent a bewildering diversity of demands, requirements, expectations, and work loads.&nbsp; For example, most departments offer courses at different levels (100, 200, 300, 400).&nbsp; The lower numbers represent "lower level courses", but what exactly does this mean?&nbsp; Is it that the higher level requires more background and expertise?&nbsp; Or is the workload in these classes higher?&nbsp; Are they simply "harder" as many students assume?&nbsp; Students often seem to think that lower level courses should require less work and upper level course require more work.&nbsp; But, if upper level course do require different things or are harder or have a greater workload, it's strange that they all count for the same number of credits (generally).&nbsp; And credits are what the student needs to graduate. And to make matters more complex, credits do not correlate precisely to grades.&nbsp; I student can get a C in virtually all of their undergraduate classes and still graduate.&nbsp; And as the NY Times article reports, most faculty assume that a C is the minimum amount of knowledge sufficient to receive credit for the course.&nbsp; On the other hand, the maximum knowledge gleaned from a course does not, at the end of the semester or academic career, equate to more credits -- the basic standard required for graduation.&nbsp; (It's interesting to note that the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>, like many universities, did experiment with tying grades to credits awarded during the 1920s (I think)). <p>Another key aspect of the current system is that the expense of college education grows yearly.&nbsp; Now more students invest more money in their college education than ever before.&nbsp; The effect is predictable.&nbsp; As the stakes get higher with the spiraling cost of tuition the tactics students use to get the most obvious public results for their money become more creative and strident.&nbsp; In part, this is because students feel that they should expect more and more of the university experience, in general, including the faculty.&nbsp; This puts faculty on the spot as the rapid increase in tuition has not, from what I can tell, corresponded to an similar shift in campus culture.&nbsp; In particular, we probably need to develop strategies to confront the reality that all students are not all going to learn successfully the material presented in a class, despite the fact that they will pay -sometimes huge sums of money to learn the material.&nbsp; While its distasteful to consider on the level of an individual class, could it be that we need to put into place some kind of guarantee that student hard work will allow them acquire or achieve something within a system created by the university itself?&nbsp; <p>Of course, much of this debate also reveals the no incredibly contingent nature of so much education in any event.&nbsp; I see this particularly with graduate education in the humanities where the pressure to come up with a thesis topic, do research, write well and creatively, and complete the degree in a reasonable amount of time can be enormous (Go! Be creative! Quickly!).&nbsp; The

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difficult thing, of course, is that it might not be possible to come up with a "good", much less exceptional, thesis topic in set amount of time, and so much good research is at least partially tied to luck.&nbsp; Of course it's hard to sell luck in an environment where costs continue to spiral upward and hard work is touted as the solution.&nbsp; A student can work hard, in some cases, and still not succeed.&nbsp; <p>These observations should not, of course, serve as an excuse not to communicate our expectations to students clearly.&nbsp; Nor should it give us reason to grade capriciously and without any attention to the learning processes that take place when a student works hard and comes up short.&nbsp; What we can learn is that some expectations are not simply the break down in classroom communications or another indication of the decadent or irresponsible student behavior.&nbsp; The issues that are manifesting themselves in changing attitudes toward classroom grades, the purpose of higher education, and the role of faculty in this process are complex and largely rooted outside what we can immediately control in the classroom.&nbsp; What we can do is to engage openly and transparently both the root causes of changing student attitudes and adapt our methods to accommodate and whenever coopt these attitudes more effectively into the structure of the university and our classroom. <p>Cross-posted at the <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday blog</a>!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: History at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: history-at-the-university-of-north-dakota CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Elwyn Robinson's Autobiography DATE: 02/25/2009 07:47:00 AM ----BODY: <p>I have finally produced a "final" copy of my pamphlet <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WorkingPapers/Departmental_Hist ory_Complete_Caraher.pdf">History at the University of North Dakota 18851970</a></em>.&nbsp; Those of you who read this blog regularly have read bits and pieces of this history over the past few year and know that my interest in the history of our department and the university more generally will persist.&nbsp; Various observations on the history of history at the University of North Dakota appear <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/department al_history_at_und/">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/elwyn_robi

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nsons_autobiography/">here</a>.</p> <p>I include here part of the introduction:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <blockquote> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The plan for each department to write a departmental history first emerged in conjunction with the Centennial Celebration at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; The result was a series of departmental histories which ranged widely in quality and length.&nbsp; The Department of History, however, did not produce a formal history at that time.&nbsp; It may have been that the production of a volume celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the University occupied their collective efforts.&nbsp;&nbsp; While work began on such a publication, it never advanced beyond a rather ramshackle document without any author listed and entitled: "A Centennial Newsletter."&nbsp;&nbsp; When President Charles Kupchella requested that departments and divisions bring their histories up to date in the run-up to the 125th Anniversary of the founding of the University, I undertook to write a basic history of the department from the first historian on campus until today.&nbsp; I quickly decided, however, that the task of writing the entire history of the department in a way that would do justice to the methods of our discipline was simply not possible in the time allowed.&nbsp; Moreover, the material for the most recent history continues in regular use by the department’s officers and, consequently, has not been committed to the University Archives.&nbsp; In other cases, the faculty did not preserve documents, which at the time appeared to be inconsequently.&nbsp; Finally, delving into the recent past always runs to risk of re-awakening tensions between members of the department, and it seemed an unwise course for a junior, untenured faculty member.&nbsp; Consequently, I chose to end my history around 1970.&nbsp; The significant changes that took place in the department during the 1960s carried the department through the following decade. </p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This document follows in the tradition of institutional history.&nbsp; This largely derives from the reality that I am not an expert on history of the University, the state, or the developments within academia or the discipline over the course of the 20th century.&nbsp; Numerous names, events, and historical developments sent me scrambling for my copy of Robinson’s,<em> History of North Dakota</em>,&nbsp; L. Veysey’s, <em>The Emergence of the American University</em>,&nbsp; P. Novick’s,&nbsp; <em>That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession</em>,&nbsp; and above all, L. Geiger’s <em>History of the University of the Northern Plains</em>.&nbsp;&nbsp; The shadow of this last work, a fine example of institutional history, looms large behind these three chapters.&nbsp; </p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; All things being equal, I would have liked to capture more of the experience of studying at the University during the first half of the 20th century.&nbsp; At the same time, I have also neglected to follow the example of the best kind of modern history which captures the personalities of the main characters in the narrative; for long stretches this history reads like the worst kind of prosopography, where individuals fade away behind an endless litany of credentials, accomplishments, and dissertation advisors.&nbsp; </p></blockquote> <p>The <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WorkingPapers/Departmental_Hist ory_Complete_Caraher.pdf">complete text can be downloaded here</a>.&nbsp; It text ends around 1970 without a conclusion.&nbsp; I hope that I can pick it up again in a few years and bring it closer to today.&nbsp; My ongoing work on <a href="http://library.und.edu/Collections/Robinson/home.html">Elwyn B. Robinson</a>'s Memoirs (or Autobiography) will undoubtedly add to this work as well.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Happy 400th Post from History 240 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: happy-400th-post-from-history-240 CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/24/2009 02:50:41 PM ----BODY: <p>My history 240 students surprised me with cake (after an <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/fr iday-varia-and-quick-hits-1.html">innocuous comment on my Friday blog</a>).&nbsp; Before we cut it, the cake said 401!&nbsp; It's gratifying to know that some of my students read my blog.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20112790a997a28a 4-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="400Cake" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20112790a997e28a4 -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>And the cake was delicious. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology of the Mediterranean World at 400 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: archaeology-of-the-mediterranean-world-at-400 CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media

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DATE: 02/24/2009 08:55:55 AM ----BODY: <p>Yesterday I posted my 400th post.&nbsp; Now, some of those posts were not the most substantial things, but I pride myself on some degree of regularity (bordering on obsessive consistency), so maintaining this blog for now over 400 posts does give me a degree of satisfaction.</p> <p>I began just this morning to reflect a bit on what I am doing with this blog.&nbsp; In particular, I was thinking about its origins.&nbsp; It began as an effort to document the goings on the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; The goal was primarily to extend what I do to a broader audience and maybe even to impart a modest sense of community among those individuals who shared a common interested in our project on Cyprus, Mediterranean archaeology, and North Dakotiana.&nbsp; It's hard to evaluate how successful I have been at achieving those goals, but I have met many interesting colleagues through my blog and am occasionally (and pleasantly) surprised when I meet a well-respected colleague in my field who knows a something about my work and my interests through my writing here.&nbsp; (I am also pleased that, with one or two rather minor exceptions, I have stayed out of trouble!).</p> <p>As the blog has developed, however, my interests and goals have changed.&nbsp; Beginning with a well-received article on <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/">Blogging Archaeology</a>, I began to think more explicitly about the intersection of archaeology and the "new media".&nbsp; Over the the life of this blog, I have continued my tinkering with <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/emerging_c ypriot/">digital video</a> (in collaboration with Joe Patrow), <a href="http://www.pkap.org/podcasts.html">digital audio</a> (via podcasts), and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">group authored</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">explorat ions of the archaeological experience</a> (though our "sister" blogs).&nbsp; This work has made me more aware of the way in which the accessibility of the new media has started to open the doors to new ways of thinking about not only the past but also those processes that allow us to document and explore the past.</p> <p>Next month I am going to give a talk on the first 6 years of fieldwork at Pyla-Koutsopetria.&nbsp; I've divided the talk into three sections.&nbsp; The first one sets out the the basic historical questions that our work has sought to answer with a particular emphasis on those relating to Late Antiquity.&nbsp; It's a public talk so some of this will need to be simplified, but I start with a critique of the idea that Late Antiquity was a time of decline and settlement contraction, and then go on to place Cyprus in the context of a prosperous Late Roman world.&nbsp; The second part of the talk discusses archaeological method and methodology.&nbsp; I set out our tiered approach to the sit and explain how we used intensive survey, geophysical prospecting, and targeted excavation to address specific research questions.</p> <p>The final section will draw at least part of its inspiration from this blog. I will bring in our efforts to encourage reflexive thought about the archaeological process and to document this reflexive critique in real time.&nbsp; Our earliest efforts at documenting the reflexive habits have been top down in the spirit of traditional media.&nbsp; Project directors, team leaders, senior staff wrote blogs, a video documentary organized and funded by the project directors documented many of the day to day activities of the project, and I orchestrated a series of podcast interviews.&nbsp; These top down approaches presented only a fairly rarified perspective on archaeological

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decision making and hardly captured the spirit of the new media which has emphasized the democratic nature of the discourse (think: wikis, youtube, et c.), the ability to produce mash-ups that juxtapose different perspectives and visions, and the ultimately the instability of any authoritative discourse.&nbsp; So, the paper will conclude with a look toward the future where it will be easier to produce kaleidoscopic and multipolar views of the archaeological experience.&nbsp; </p> <p>Low cost digital video cameras can produce better images than expensive "pro-sumer" models available just 5 years ago.&nbsp; Server space for blogs, photographs, and video and audio is now inexpensive and widely available for the storage and distribution of new media content.&nbsp; The 1+ years and 400 posts on the blog have begun to outline my interest in the opportunities and challenges provided by new media approaches to archaeology.&nbsp; Hopefully the next 400 posts will begin to embrace more fully the potential of new approaches to old stuff.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.155.205.199 URL: DATE: 02/24/2009 11:24:35 AM Happy 400! Bravo. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Geoff Csrter EMAIL: carter.geoff'@btinternet.com IP: 86.172.108.11 URL: http://structuralarchaeology.blogspot.com/ DATE: 02/24/2009 12:50:34 PM Amazing, that is some going, - there is hope for us all, I have done 24 in six months, so it will be September 2016 before I catch up with you! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Miriam EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 64.56.71.48 URL: http://www.craigslistguide.info DATE: 03/06/2009 05:15:24 AM I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often. Miriam <a href="http://www.craigslistguide.info">http://www.craigslistguide.info</a> -----

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-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Description of an Early Christian Baptistery STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-description-of-an-early-christian-baptistery CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 02/23/2009 07:52:03 AM ----BODY: <p>I continue to work with <a href="http://www.vanderbilt.edu/divinity/facultypages/jensen.php">Robin Jensen</a> and <a href="http://college.up.edu/theology/default.aspx?cid=1089&amp;pid=196">Richard Rutherford</a> in an effort to prepare a catalogue of Early Christian baptisteries.&nbsp; The goal of the catalogue is to present this material in a way that makes it more accessible to a broader audience (than Ristow's otherwise satisfactory work) and with a greater emphasis on regional characteristics, indicators of ritual activities, and their place within their immediate spatial context and built environment.&nbsp; I've taken a stab at one of the longer entries in this catalog, but may not have struck the balance between scholarly precision and accessibility. <p>Lechaion <p>The Lechaion Baptistery ranks among the most architecturally elaborate and lavishly decorated baptisteries in the Eastern Mediterranean and yet remains relatively unknown.&nbsp; The baptistery sits less than 200 meters from the Gulf of Corinth at the ancient harbor of Lechaion, the Western harbor of Corinth.&nbsp; The baptistery is situated at the southwestern corner of the Lechaion basilica.&nbsp; This massive three-aisled basilica with a large atrium and double narthex is the largest and most ornate church in Greece and seems almost certainly to be associated with a prominent local saint.&nbsp; Today, nothing of the church exists about the lowest reaches of the walls, but these are sufficiently well-preserved to provide a complete floor plan of this impressive building.</p> <p> The baptistery itself consists of three architecturally distinct compartments.&nbsp; The largest is a 16.20 m x 7.60 hall with apses on its north and south end.&nbsp; This main hall was entered from the south end, presumably from the basilica , through the apse.&nbsp; To the east of this apsidal hall were two additional chambers.&nbsp; The northern chamber has a central core measuring 5.05 m square with apsidal exedra at the cardinal directions.&nbsp; Entered from the west through the western apse, this room was identified by the excavator as the apodyterion.&nbsp; This chamber lacks a font and seemed well positioned for this purpose.&nbsp; Immediately to the south of this chamber was the octagonal photisterion or baptistery proper which measures 3.15 m across.&nbsp; It appears to have communicated with the apodyerion to its north through the triangular space formed by the east wall of the long hall and the west walls of the north and south chambers.&nbsp; The octagonal room featured apses at the corners and square exedra at the cardinal directions.&nbsp; To the west, the photisterion communicated with the long hall.&nbsp; To the east projects an usually shaped apse.&nbsp; Marble revetment decorated the walls of the elaborate buildings and the interior of the font.&nbsp; </p> <p>The photisterion preserved two fonts.&nbsp; The center of the octagonal interior space featured cruciform

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octagonal font set in the floor with stairs on the northern and southern crossarms.&nbsp; It is just under .50 m in depth.&nbsp; Such cruciform fonts are common in the Corinthia and in Late Roman Achaea more broadly.&nbsp; A smaller font sits in the southeast apse.&nbsp; The chronology of the baptistery complex is difficult to ascertain with any certainty.&nbsp; The basilica has a terminus post quem of 425 leading the excavator to argue that the basilica was largely 5th century in date and destroyed during the 6th century earthquakes.&nbsp; Recently, however, scholars have been inclined to date the basilica to the 6th century, perhaps during the reign of Justinian or Anastasius, on the basis of ceramics found in nearby graves and architectural cues.&nbsp; While an archaeological date for the construction of the basilica is unlikely to emerge, it seems probable that the building continued to stand into the second half of the 6th century.&nbsp; Any clarity regarding the dating of the church sheds little light on the date of the baptistery.&nbsp; It is on a slightly different orientation to the main church, however, suggesting an earlier date.&nbsp; The baptistery may have also remained in use later than the main church.&nbsp; One argument for the second font suggests that it came into use to allow the photisterion to serve as the church after the main basilica became damaged or fell out of use.&nbsp; This practice appears to have occurred elsewhere in the Corinthia.</p> <p>The baptistery is striking in that it is close to the main basilica, but they hardly represent an architectural unit.&nbsp; The entrance on the south side of the baptistery allowed for easy access from the narthex of the main church through a door in its north wall.&nbsp; Seemingly later and relatively insubstantial walls created a courtyard between the north wall of the basilica and the baptistery.&nbsp; Ancillary room attached to the northern wall of the basilica may have also functioned in conjunction with the baptistery and provided access to the church’s northern aisle or galleries which are no long preserved.&nbsp; This may have provided an easy way for catechumens to enter and leave the basilica for the baptistery complex.</p> <p>Bolonaki, I. (1976). <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4737938">Ta Palaiochristianika Baptisteria tes Ellados</a>. Athens Archaeological Society, Athens, 65-66.</p> <p>Ristow,S. (1998). <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/39499611">Früchristliche Baptisterien</a>, Aschendorffesche Verlagsbuchhandlung.&nbsp; Munich, pp. 155156, no. 249 <p>Sanders, G. D. R. (1999). A Late Roman Bath at Corinth: Excavations in the Panayia Field, 1995–1996. Hesperia 68: 441–480.<br>Sanders, G. D. R. (2005). "Archaeological Evidence for Early Christianity and the End of Hellenic Religion in Corinth," in D. N. Schowalter and S. J. Friesen, Urban <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/56874310">Religion in Roman Corinth.</a> Harvard Theology Studies, Cambridge, MA., pp.. 419-442. <p>Varales, I. (2001). E epidrase tes theias leitourgias kai ton ieron akolouthion sten ekklesiastike architectonike tou anatolikou Illyrikou (395-573). Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Thessaloniki. ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

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TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 02/20/2009 09:26:55 AM ----BODY: <p>Some fun or at least interesting readings this Friday:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html?_r=1&amp;scp=2& amp;sq=grades&amp;st=cse">An article</a> on grades and student expectations in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/education/18college.html?_r=1&amp;scp=2& amp;sq=grades&amp;st=cse">New York Times</a>.&nbsp; I'll be very interested to see my colleagues have to say about this article.&nbsp; It' just the kind of thing that gets folks excited and can generate some valuable conversation.</li> <li>And, our newest venture in the blogosphere: <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org/">Teaching Thursday</a> would be a great place for the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a> community to engage this topic.</li> <li>And keep an eye out <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">here</a> as well.</li> <li><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/te aching-thursday-teaching-in-the-field.html#comments">Rangar Cline posted a thoughtful comment</a> on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/02/te aching-thursday-teaching-in-the-field.html">my Teaching Thursday post</a> from yesterday.&nbsp; Rangar should blog.</li></ul> <p>Other stuff:</p> <ul> <li>A cool piece on <a href="http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/fendrich/modernmiddens">modern middens</a> which links the recent collision between two satellites and the rise of deadly trash with B. Ward-Perkins, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/253896539"><em>The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization</em></a>. It feels like people are using archaeology more recently to explore our world.&nbsp; The idea of space middens resonates a bit with <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/11/trashed_out_an_archaeolog ical.html">a recent archaeological reading of foreclosures over at Archaeolog</a>.</li> <li>I've received several hits from <a href="http://mashuparchaeology.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/">this site lately</a>.&nbsp; It seems like a useful destination for interested archaeologists and museum types and I like the idea of Mash-ups in all forms.</li> <li>I can't say enough about the content and links that Shawn Graham posts over at <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a>.</li> <li>For those keeping track at home... Monday will be my 400th blog post.&nbsp; Bake a cake!</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend!&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 69.168.144.134 URL: http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 02/21/2009 09:56:47 AM Hi Bill, Thanks for the great reviews! I have to say, I find your Teaching Thursdays series to be incredibly valuable, and as a former resident of Manitoba, I like to hear what's happening further up the Red River Valley! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Teaching in the Field STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-teaching-in-the-field CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 02/19/2009 08:34:43 AM ----BODY: <p>Some of the most valuable experiences that I have had as an archaeologist have come when my advisor, <a href="http://history.osu.edu/people/person.cfm?ID=689">Tim Gregory</a>, or another senior or more experienced colleague (here I am thinking of <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, <a href="http://www.arthistory.upenn.edu/aamw/faculty.html#tartaron">Tom Tartaron</a>, <a href="http://trefoilcultural.com/">Richard Rothaus</a>, Sarah Lepinski, and others) took the time to show me how to do something or study an object in the field.&nbsp; This taught me more about the archaeological process and the techniques and methods of archaeological research than any seminar or book.&nbsp; Over the past year or so, I've been thinking about how to replicate this process in the field of history.&nbsp; While mindful of Mommsen's famous observation:</p> <blockquote> <p>"It is moreover a dangerous and harmful illusion for the professor of history to believe that historians can be trained at the University in the same way as philologists or mathematicians most assuredly can be. One can say with more justification of the historian than of the mathematician or the philologist that he is not trained but born, not educated but self-educated."&nbsp; (From his Rectorial Address at the University of Berlin in 1874). </p></blockquote> <p>I couldn't help but think that my <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/te aching-thursday-revised-classes-for-spring.html">Historian's Craft</a> class relied fairly heavily on teaching the students techniques in the abstract and doing very little to help them implement these techniques is a practice, realworld way.&nbsp; Telling them how to perform a Google search or look up a book review in J-stor is different from actually walking them through the process.&nbsp; The same goes for archival work.&nbsp; Telling them how to get

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boxes and files from the archives is different from being on hand to help them understand how particular sources could work to advance particular arguments.</p> <p>So, I have tried something new this semester: supervised archival work.&nbsp; Instead of just sending the students over the archives to rely on their own devices, I am running four classes this semester in the archives themselves.&nbsp; I leave over an hour for the students to get down to work with their materials and then circulate to trouble shoot specific issues, talk to the students about their successes and struggles in the research process, and make myself available for more broad reaching and spontaneous issues related to working in actual archives.&nbsp; I've been lucky to have to complete support of the university archivist and his staff.&nbsp; They've made our small (&lt;15) class feel at home in the archives and gives them ample space to pull their materials.</p> <p>Talking with the students while they are conducting their research has exposed me to the various frustrations of the students in ways that talking with them in office hours does not make as visible.&nbsp; It also makes visible their successes at the moment of discovery and allows students to share the enthusiasm and energy that more solitary research environments keeps hidden away.&nbsp; And this seems to be particularly an issue here at the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a> where, at least according to what my students tell me, they don't tend to study together or even necessarily see any value in it.&nbsp; (This may be tied to the myth of the solitary, self-sufficient farmer making their own way on the Northern Plains which in some ways has superceded the myth of the progressive, community oriented farmers who band together to succeed in an inhospitable environment.)</p> <p>For a full list of Teaching Thursday post <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/teaching/" >click here</a>.&nbsp; And stay tuned to our newest project: <a href="http://www.teachingthursday.org">www.teachingthursday.org</a>. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 68.89.251.140 URL: DATE: 02/19/2009 09:29:33 AM As someone who has benefited (I hope) from the Gregory and Rothaus (as well as Sanders and Camp) methods of on-site instruction, I've also wondered if historians can be trained through a similar methodology. For undergraduates in Roman history courses, I've tried using documents or inscriptions like Diocletian's Price Edict, or the parts of the Theodosian Code, or photographs of archeological sites and material. Then I ask some version of the question, "what does this tell the historian?" Although students might be acquainted with these sources, often they have not had to examine them very carefully. To ask questions about the sources of our knowledge seems to me to be in the spirit of on-site archaeological instruction as exhibited by the best teachers.

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Also, I'm sure Mommsen would be dismayed, but in class I usually do compare such document and primary source analysis, and student research papers, to the lab/practicum that accompanies many science classes. I hope your students thank you for showing them to the archives! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP News 2009 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-news-2009 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 02/18/2009 08:23:39 AM ----BODY: <p>From the first season of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>, the directors, <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott Moore</a>, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, and myself, committed ourselves to archaeological outreach.&nbsp; Over the years, this has taken various forms ranging from public lectures, to blogs, podcasts, and documentaries.&nbsp; One aspect of outreach that PKAP has produced each year is the PKAP Newsletter.&nbsp; Each year in the late winter, we produce a two page newsletter that communicates what the project accomplished in the previous season and what we plan to do in the coming summer.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/PKAPNewsletter2007.pdf">Here is last years letter</a>.</p> <p>So, introducing the (first draft) of the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PRLetter2009/PKAPNewsletter2009 .pdf">2009 PKAP Newsletter</a>.&nbsp; Click on the image below to download it.&nbsp; Or look for it in the mail soon!</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PRLetter2009/PKAPNewsletter2009 .pdf"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="536" alt="PKLetter" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2011278f966f528a4 -pi" width="420" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">And be sure to check out <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">our website</a> which Scott has spent some time <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2009/02/pkapwebpages-updated.html">updating </a>recently to include the usual array of reports, photographs, and links. We'll hopefully have links to past PKAP Newsletters up soon.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Four Miniposts on a disjointed Tuesday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: four-miniposts-on-a-disjointed-tuesday CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/17/2009 08:15:31 AM ----BODY: <p>I usually wake up, become oriented, and think about what I will do and blog about for the day.&nbsp; This morning, I slipped into some kind of overload.&nbsp; I could not put together a coherent blog post, plan for the day, or strategy for the week.&nbsp; This semester has presented me with a whole series of mini-tasks.&nbsp; None takes more than a day or two and none provides any sense of accomplishment.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, in the spirit of the mini-task, I offer four mini-posts:</p> <p>1. Video and the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; So what would happen if we distributed 5 simple HD cameras to folks on PKAP this summer.&nbsp; They were told to video anything of interest to them and at the end of each day, we downloaded the video onto a hard drive and marked with the individual's name.&nbsp; On the return to the US we turned it all over to another group of students, faculty, folks, people, scholars, whoever, and asked them to produce a mash-up, narrative, montage, or whatever.&nbsp; What would we learn?&nbsp; What would we see?&nbsp; Who would be the author? Most importantly, what would this exercise or experiment tell us about the experience of archaeology on Cyprus with the Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project?</p> <p>2. Military History in Murfreesboro.&nbsp; In April, I am going to the <a href="http://www.smhconference.org/index.php">Society for Military History's Annual Meeting in Murfreesboro, Tennessee</a>.&nbsp; I was invited to comment on papers offered by a group of graduate students from Penn State on topics related to archaeology and the Battle of Issus where Alexander first defeated the Persian King Darius III.&nbsp; This is pretty far from my comfort zone, although I did write my <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/35251389">M.A. Thesis on Alexander the Great</a> and I have worked on Hellenistic fortifications.&nbsp; I have to be honest when I say that I am a bit nervous about this, but the idea of the archaeology of ancient battlefields, has begun to intrigue me.&nbsp; The most recent wave of intensive pedestrian survey archaeology has done little to clarify the topography of battle in the ancient world, and, in this regard, stands in contrast to its predecessor -- extensive survey, which often sought to localize ancient battles within the modern topography.&nbsp; So, I think that I will be able to say something...</p> <p>3. Cyberpunk Space and Archaeology.&nbsp; This is a tiny post for our Punk Archaeology project.&nbsp; I had a habit of reading <a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp">William Gibson</a> on flights to conduct archaeological work in Greece and Cyprus.&nbsp; Gibson was among the founders of the Cyberpunk movement and many of his books are

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characterized by vivid "post-urban" landscapes.&nbsp; While all his books work at the intersection of material culture, punk, and identity, his Bridge Trilogy (<em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27727228">Virtual Light</a></em>, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/34576883">Idoru</a></em>, and <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/41320160">All Tomorrow's Parties</a></em>) was the first to draw me in -- if for no other reason than one of the books was titled <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/41320160">All Tomorrow's Parties</a></em> and any book with a title from a Velvet Underground song deserves to be read.&nbsp; One of the key settings in these works (which I have not read for at least 5 years) is Bay Bridge in San Francisco which after being damaged in an earthquake became an interstitial settlement.&nbsp; Spolia, the re-use of urban space, cultural and political dystopia, and the shadow of natural disasters evoke themes common to literature on Late Antique archaeology.&nbsp; </p> <p>4. An Encyclopedia of Baptisteries.&nbsp; I've recently returned to thinking about <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/early_chri stian_baptisteries/">Early Christian baptisteries</a>. Hopefully I will have a few early drafts of encyclopedia type entries done in the next week or so. As I write these relatively short entries, I've had to think about what to include and exclude in each and who my audience will be.&nbsp; It reminded me of site reports from my time at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.&nbsp; Do I&nbsp; include dimensions?&nbsp; Do I include scholarly debates?&nbsp; How much bibliography should I include?&nbsp; Should I interpret as much as I describe?&nbsp; More?</p> <p>So, four mini posts for the day.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Conference Next Door: The Red River Valley History Conference STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-conference-next-door CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/16/2009 07:16:35 AM ----BODY: <p>Next Friday (February 27th), Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society here at the University of North Dakota, will host their annual spring conference called the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/rrvhc/conference_schedule.html">Red River Valley History Conference</a>. I am chairing a panel on &quot;Historical Idealism &amp; Religion&quot; at 9:30 AM in the Memorial Union Room 209.&#0160; My panel will feature papers from three UND M.A. students Dalton Little, Paul

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Ferderer, and Kathy Nedegaard.&#0160; The highlight of the conference this year will be the department&#39;s regular Wilkins Lecture offered by <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/rrvhc/keynote_speaker.html">Emeritus Prof. James Steward of Macalester College in St. Paul</a>.&#0160; The conference has largely been organized by our graduate students here and will feature papers from many of the regional universities, including the University of Minnesota, Minot State, and North Dakota State.&#0160; There is no registration fee, so if you are in the area, stop by and catch a panel.&#0160; The papers give a great overview of the work being done by M.A. level students at both UND and the other universities in the region.</p> <p>And, it&#39;s a regional conference!&#0160; Reflecting back on my travel this winter to the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, I realized that my trip to Philadelphia cost, all told, over $1500.&#0160; While the meetings, paper, and fellowship were priceless (as they say), it did drive home how expensive conference travel can be -- as if the myriad articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education haven&#39;t made this argument abundantly clear.&#0160; Despite the high cost and world wide budget tightening, national and international conferences seemly continue to proliferate.&#0160; In fact, this year alone, I avoided attending conferences in Rome, Berlin, and Loutraki, Greece.&#0160; (Of course, some of these conferences are, in fact, local or regional for their participants!).&#0160; </p> <p>In any event, regional conferences have often (but not always!) been regarded as decidedly second tier affairs, suitable for graduate students, regional scholars, and local hobbyists. But what would happen if we began to think of regional conferences as a way of fostering a deeper engagement with the local intellectual community?&#0160; How would the profession of history (or any field) change if the economy compelled us to rely on local intellectual resources to get our annual conference fix?&#0160; Assuming that the conference still functions as an important opportunity for genuine academic and intellectual discourse, I suspect that regional conferences would promote a deeper engagement with the local community, closer ties between faculty in different areas of the discipline, and perhaps even promote a more robust local intellectual life.&#0160; </p> <p>I typically tell our potential job candidates that my closest colleagues are spread around the US, if not around the world, as a way of assuring them that the relative isolation of our campus has not been a major obstacles to my professional goals. I stay in touch with my various collaborators via phone, email, wikis, and even blogs.&#0160; But this low level and regular contact is not the same as an academic conference.&#0160; The technologies and techniques that we use, however, could replicate, if not improve upon, some of the basic goals of a conference.&#0160; Podcasts linked to threaded discussions, for example, would facilitate question and answer sections removed from the constraints of &quot;real time&quot; (I&#39;m sorry, our time is upon now, but I am sure the participants would be happy to continue to discuss their paper&#39;s at this evening&#39;s social...).&#0160; Participants could be encouraged -- or required -- to engage their colleagues&#39; papers and respond to posts from registered users in order to foster the kind of dialogue that makes a conference valuable as an intellectual and academic enterprise (and not just an opportunity for socialization).&#0160; Of course, such an approach may not reproduce entirely the opportunities for informal conversation and social networking that makes national conferences so valuable, but in some ways, the online social networking tools have already begun to fill even that niche.&#0160; I know more about many of my distant colleagues now than I did five years ago because they update their facebook status, blog regularly, or maintain twitter feeds.&#0160; Integrating this kind of social space into an online conference is more a matter of balancing the spontaneous opportunities provided by simultaneity (papers read in

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real time, for example) against the convenience of non-real time delivery.&#0160; Such issues though could surely be resolved and would shed interesting (if not valuable) light on the different modes of academic engagement.</p> <p>Speculation on the future of academic conversation aside, if you have a chance, do stop by the Red River Valley History Conference next Thursday.&#0160; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Australiana CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 02/13/2009 10:18:26 AM ----BODY: <p>Some interesting little hits on a Friday morning:</p> <ul> <li>I am not sure what is more amazing, <a href="http://contentusa.cricinfo.com/wiveng2009/engine/match/352661.html">this</a> or <a href="http://contentusa.cricinfo.com/wiveng2009/content/current/story/390647.html">this</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://contentusa.cricinfo.com/ausvnz2008/engine/current/match/351693.html">This</a> is a relief.</li> <li><a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=37017">These images</a> never cease to amaze me.&nbsp; And <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do9AoKyjjQg">this is really touching</a>.</li> <li>These <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/tweetingarchaeology/">two</a> <a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2317/20 63">things</a> are worth considering.</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend and enjoy <a href="http://www.daytona500.com/">THE RACE</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Susan Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.218.18 URL: http://profile.typepad.com/susancaraher DATE: 02/13/2009 10:54:49 AM Nice one. I posted the video, too. I have watched it several times now and still can't believe it. Poor thing must have been in such shock. The nice part is that the media updates on her condition say that she is healing and even has a boyfriend! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: A New Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-a-new-project CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/12/2009 08:35:57 AM ----BODY: <p>This is a sneak preview or some kind of beta release of<em><strong> </strong><a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/"><strong>a new project</strong></a></em>.&nbsp; A couple of weeks ago, I began talking with Anne Kelsch, a historian who also runs our <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/oid/">Office of Instructional Development</a> here at the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a>, about taking my <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/teaching/" >Teaching Thursday concept</a> and opening it up to a wider audience.&nbsp; Of course, <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/search/label/Teaching%20Thursday">I already have colleagues who have found that writing one day a week or so on teaching</a> gives them a change to verbalize ideas, formulate more formal arguments, and share teaching tips with readers from around the interweb.&nbsp; So I pitched to Anne Kelsch the idea of creating a blog dedicated to "Teaching Thursday" and running it as an official project of the Office of Instructional Development.&nbsp; And we're almost there...</p> <p>The issue now is how do we describe Teaching Thursday to potential readers and, more important still, potential contributors.&nbsp; Of course, Teaching Thursday is built as a blog on the popular Wordpress blogging application.&nbsp; But, as this blog as discussed since its inception, blogs are different things in different contexts.&nbsp; A blog could be a personal journal left open for the public to read, or it could be a minute to minute political commentary.&nbsp; I can also be everything in between.&nbsp; Blogs can accommodate pictures, podcasts, video, as well as the typical maze of hypertext leading off in all directions.&nbsp; So, what, exactly, will or can the Teaching Thursday blog look like?&nbsp; It is appealing to imagine it open to almost any kind of expression that lends insight to

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teaching, but on the other hand some kind of guidelines often work to frame a project in a way that we can easily communicate to contributors and readers.</p> <p>I think that we'll begin our project as part of the long-standing, campuswide effort to get people to talk more about teaching.&nbsp; I like the idea of Teaching Thursday being a collection of essays on teaching.&nbsp; Essays capture a whole range of careful writing ranging from the dreaded essay test to thoughtful reflections focused on particular topics.&nbsp; It also doesn't exclude the possibility of video and audio essays or even other creative efforts to designed to expand the discussion about teaching on campus.&nbsp; </p> <p>We also want to use the tradition of interactivity to blogs to position Teaching Thursday posts as points of departure for interactive discussions.&nbsp; While the Office of Instructional Development has regular talks, roundtables, and symposia on campus, they often conflict with our increasingly chaotic lives.&nbsp; Consequently the audience at these gatherings keeps changing and it is sometimes hard to create a sustained dialogue.&nbsp; Since a blog, like Teaching Thursday, can be read at one's leisure, we hope that it will encourage a more sustained dialogue between folks interested in innovative and effective teaching on campus.&nbsp; I could even imagine conversations playing out in the comments and responses by the authors of provocative or controversial posts.&nbsp; Who knows, maybe we'll expand to a Teaching Tuesday as well.&nbsp; Since blogging is relatively free, the sky's the limit.</p> <p>A blog like Teaching Thursday will also work to forge community on campus -- and perhaps eventually beyond.&nbsp; As regular readers become contributors and offer regular comments.&nbsp; I also think that we'll maintain a blog roll for contributors who maintain blogs with overlapping interests.&nbsp; The blogging began as a venue for social networking as bloggers linked to friendly blogs and relied on networks of associates from across the web to keep one another informed on topics of common interest.&nbsp; Proper social networking sites have refined this model considerably over the last decade, but blogrolls remain (often in conjunction with the clever use of social networking sites) a key way to communicate shared interests in the chaotic and unstructured space of the internet.&nbsp; So, I hope that Teaching Thursday becomes more than just required reading for folks interested in teaching here at UND (and elsewhere!), but a jumping off point for access to like-minded individuals and resources across the web.</p> <p>We'll see.&nbsp; Right now, we're still "<a href="http://teachingthursday.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/coming-soon/">coming soon...</a>".&nbsp; But make a note.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.170.154.217 URL: DATE: 02/12/2009 05:34:36 PM

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a lot of amusing first-person teachingexperience reports. This might provide some model for some submission guidelines. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Under Libby's Gaze: Merrifield 217 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: under-libbys-gaze-merrifield-217 CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND DATE: 02/11/2009 08:15:48 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111685ab135970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="244" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105371ff7c8970b -pi" width="68" align="left" border="0"></a> History at the University of North Dakota came to age with the arrival of the seminar.&nbsp; The seminar in history originated in Germany and arrived in the US first at Harvard and then at Johns Hopkins under the direction of Henry Baxter Adams.&nbsp; At UND it arrived via the University of Wisconsin Madison with its collection of Hopkins graduates -namely Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles H. Haskins.&nbsp; Orin G. Libby learned under the seminar at Wisconsin and transplanted it to UND at the turn of the century.&nbsp; He held the first seminars on U.S. History during the 19031904 academic year and two years later he offered his famous seminars on the history of the Northwest focusing on the history of North Dakota and Canada.&nbsp; By 1907-08, he had arranged to get the papers from this seminar published by the State Historical Society in their <em>Collections</em>.&nbsp; The work by this seminar formed the foundation for the history of the state.</p> <p>Along with the seminar came the seminar room.&nbsp; Large tables, maps, reference books, dark wood panels, form the basic components of seminar ambience.&nbsp; The Department of History's seminar room is 217 Merrifield. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105371ff7cc970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111685ab138970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105371ff7d7970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111685ab13d970c -pi" width="304" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Wood panels and the watchful eyes of historians past create the setting for serious, seminar research.&nbsp; It's disappointing that there are no women on the wall yet, but the collection of photos is hardly systematic or representative of the department as a whole.&nbsp; It features Clarence Perkins, Felix Vondracek, Philip Green, Louis Geiger, John Harnsberger, and Robert Wilkins.&nbsp; Vondracek and Perkins were

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department heads in their day.&nbsp; Geiger and Wilkins were leaders in the department and significant scholars.&nbsp; Green and Harnsberger, while accomplished, left little impact on the department: Harnsberger eventually left UND for Witchita State where he became department head.&nbsp; Green left UND for Queen's College in Charlotte, NC.&nbsp; Elwyn Robinson looks on as well.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111685ab141970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111685ab146970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111685ab152970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105371ff7e8970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Like any good seminar rooms, it has maps for reference.&nbsp; Many of these are the same aging Denoyer-Geppert standing maps that appear <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/un der-libbys-gaze-merrifield-209.html">in room 209</a>.&nbsp; The exception in the large, detailed map of Great Britain on the wall.&nbsp; </p> <p>The central walls of Merrifield hall are immense and conspicuously weight bearing.&nbsp; In an effort to keep the classrooms from feeling like bank vaults they have windows not only to the outside, but into the central hallway as well.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105371ff7ec970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105371ff7ee970b -pi" width="304" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20111685ab160970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105371ff7f2970b -pi" width="304" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Punk and Place STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: punk-and-place CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology

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DATE: 02/10/2009 08:26:41 AM ----BODY: <p><em>Cross-posted with </em><a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/"><em>Punk Archaeology</em></a><em>.</em></p> <p>With Lux Interior's death last week, I offered <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/50/">a short post</a> on The Cramps' concert at the California State Mental Hospital on our Punk Archaeology blog.&nbsp; It got me thinking about the close relationship between punk music and place.&nbsp; I haven't thought systematically about it, but in fragments, as I tried to link it to the importance of place within archaeology.</p> <p>Punk as much as any other music played with place.&nbsp; In their efforts to defy social conventions and question the accepted practices of the music industry and bourgeois society, punk rockers challenged expectations with their concerts.&nbsp; The engaged in theatrical, chaotic performances openly rejecting the polished and choreographed sets associated with pop music.&nbsp; By rejecting the systematic in their performances, they embraced the spontaneous and contingent. </p> <p>This is not to say, however, that their shows were accidental or random.&nbsp; There was an aura of intentionality.&nbsp; The Cramps' show at a mental hospital was full of meaningful references ranging from the tradition of performing to shut in of various kinds to (as <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/50/#comments">Kostis noted in his comment</a>) Antonin Artaud's Theater of the Absurd and Marquis de Sade's famous efforts to direct plays while imprisoned at the hospital at Charenton (one could also note M. Foucault's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/676127"><em>Madness and Civilization</em></a>). The former evoked B.B. King's great live album at the Cook Country Jail and Johnny Cash's concerts at Folsom Prison and San Quentin (as well as a series of other well-known performances to inmates).&nbsp; While these performances have been seen as acts of compassion by Cash and King, they also make explicit the link between the dire nature of their music and the dire state of the inmates.&nbsp; In fact, the power of these shows derives, in part, from the authenticity of the performances.&nbsp; The inmates as audience have actually shared the tortured stories of the performers.&nbsp; It speaks of an intimacy that is absent from shows where the audience, the musician, and the music dwell separately from one another.&nbsp; </p> <p>A concert at a mental hospital depends upon the understood link between the audience and the music established by folks like King and Cash, but turns it on its head.&nbsp; The Cramps, with their theatrical stage shows, absurdist lyrics, and chaotic, raucous sound, depend upon the place to define their music.&nbsp; They play the music of the insane. </p> <p>"And we drove 3,000 miles to play for you people... And somebody told me that you people are crazy, but I'm not so sure about that. You seem to be alright to me."</p> <p>The playfulness with place has deep roots in the punk movement.&nbsp; The moniker "garage rock" locates the entire genre of music in the informal and marginal space of the garage. The garage is also a symbol of suburbia and the dislocation of domestic space from the place of work and the urban center .&nbsp; When punk bands played CBGB's or Max's Kansas City (the name itself is another play on place) in New York, the garage band sound made explicit their critique of bourgeois values; when the suburbia came to the city, they presented not the well-ordered, picket-fence houses, but a sonic dystopia. </p> <p><a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/punknostalgia-and-the-archaeology-of-musical-utopia/">As I posted earlier</a>, punk rock played with time by evoking, manipulating, and mocking nostalgic themes in American music.&nbsp; The Cramps dedicated their album <em>A Date with Elvis

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</em>to the late 50s/early 60s rocker Ricky Nelson.&nbsp; They also drew heavily from the informal "low-fi" sound ironically insisting on a kind of musical authenticity to underpin their blatantly silly lyrics and ridiculous stage shows. Their songs show strong influences of both rockabilly and surf rock.&nbsp; The Cramps' sound formed the foundation for later bands like The White Stripes or The Black Keys or Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion who ironically and playfully employed the authenticity of low-fi sound to highly textured, remixed, and produced albums.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>Time and space remain central archaeological concerns.&nbsp; Punk rock willingness to play with nostalgia and authenticity and use place as a form of social and musical critique provides foundations for a far more radical appreciation of archaeological contexts than traditional chronological or functional analyses allow.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Another Abstract for a Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Talk STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: another-abstract-for-a-pyla-koutsopetria-archaeological-project-talk CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 02/09/2009 08:45:03 AM ----BODY: <p>I've been invited to give a talk in the Dean of the Graduate School's Lecture Series.&nbsp; The talk is on March 11th during the The Graduate School Scholarly Forum (an annual conference highlighting the research of UND faculty and students).&nbsp; It's always fun to give a talk to my peers here at the University and a broader non-scholarly audience.&nbsp; <p>I've given quite a few PKAP talks over the last few years, and each time I present, I try to develop my ideas a bit more and show another aspect of our research.&nbsp; For the talk this spring, I am going to juxtapose our efforts to answer particular questions regarding the site's place within the Mediterranean economy and local settlement structure with our efforts to capture the performative aspects of archaeological fieldwork and to produce a reflexive atmosphere of archaeological decision making.&nbsp; The goal is to show not only how these aspects of the project "work together" to produce unified and empirically significant conclusions, but also to show how they challenge one another by providing space for the kind of intellectual dissonance and counter-narratives that makes our work (that is the process of archaeology) vital and self-aware. <p align="center"><strong>Five Years at an Ancient Harbor in Cyprus<br>New Perspectives on an Ancient Landscape </strong></p> <p>The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) began work in the coastal zone of Pyla in Cyprus in 2003.&nbsp; Our initial exploration of the area revealed a massive coastal site extending for over 1 km along the

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coastal plain.&nbsp; We quickly recognized that this site was remarkable both on account of its coastal position and its size and complexity.&nbsp; Moreover, we became aware that the previous archaeological work in the area had only reveal small and isolated sections of the diverse array of archaeological remains present.&nbsp; Consequently, beginning in 2004, the PKAP initiated a systematic, multi-tiered investigation of the microregion designed to understand the historical development of the in its political, economic, and cultural context.&nbsp; Using the tools of intensive pedestrian survey, remote sensing of various kinds, and targeted excavation, we produced a robust assemblage of material capable of answering numerous questions about the history, function, and chronology of the site. <p>This fieldwork confirmed that people occupied our corner of Cyprus from at least as early as the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BC) and fortified parts of the site during the Archaic to Hellenistic period (700 BC-BC 300).&nbsp; The site, however, flourished during Late Antiquity (AD400600) when it reached its greatest extent and included monumental religious architecture, fine imported ceramics, and a significant functional diversity across.&nbsp; At this time, sprawled for over a kilometer along the Cypriot coast producing a scatter of material considerably larger than a villa, hamlet or rural village yet smaller than a urbanized polis or city center.&nbsp; Scholars have generally overlooked such “mid-sized” sites in the Eastern Mediterranean and, consequently, must of our research has focused on the key role that such sites played in both the regional and local economy and within the local settlement structure. <p>Alongside these traditional components of archaeological research, PKAP has sought to document the performative, narrative, and reflexive components of the archaeological experience.&nbsp; By drawing extensively on new media technologies and applications we have worked to record the experience of archaeology and project it beyond the limits of the field.&nbsp; Such programs are more than simply ancillary components to the overall aims of the project, but complement the main lines of research by emphasizing the multiple narratives present within the same body of research.&nbsp; This practice not only remind project members of the dense web of assumptions, methods, and procedures required to produce archaeological knowledge, but also reinforces the ambivalence and ambiguity central to all humanistic inquiry. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Rare Saturday Post for a Good Cause STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-rare-saturday-post-for-a-good-cause CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: The New Media

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DATE: 02/07/2009 09:01:11 AM ----BODY: <p></p> <p>I forgot remind my reading public of the inaugural <a href="http://www.whyradioshow.org/">Why? radio show</a>.&nbsp; It is produced by the <a href="http://www.philosophyinpubliclife.org/">University of North Dakota's Institute of Philosophy and the Public Life (IPPL)</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.whyradioshow.org/aboutwhy.html">The host of the show is Jack Russell Weinstein</a>, a fellow denizen of Merrifield Hall and professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion.&nbsp; His first guest will be Clay Jenkins from <a href="http://www.jeffersonhour.org/">The Thomas Jefferson Hour</a> (not Clay Aiken, as many had hoped).&nbsp; The show is a call-in style radio show that seeks to&nbsp; "create a large-scale conversation between philosophical professionals and the general public".&nbsp; I love the idea of philosophical professionals (as opposed to professionals who do not lived reflective lives).&nbsp; The show will be blogged live at <a href="http://nancydevine.blogspot.com/">Nancy Devine</a> and even has <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/my-widgetippl?wbx.refer=1&amp;wbx.location=http://www.whyradioshow.org/community.html">it s own widget</a>.</p> <p>In any event, the show will be at 5 pm CST on Sunday.&nbsp; Tune in (via any number of old tech and <a href="http://www.whyradioshow.org/community.html">new tech media</a>!) and if you want to send in a question, here's the email: askwhy?[at]und[dot]edu.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Nancy Devine EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.111.46.75 URL: http://nancydevine.blogspot.com DATE: 02/08/2009 11:59:14 AM Thanks for mentioning the live blogging today. I hope it goes well. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits

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DATE: 02/06/2009 10:22:36 AM ----BODY: <p>Lots of interesting and news worthy things this week:</p> <ul>! <li>Sad news about Tom Clifford&#39;s passing.&#0160; He was President of the University of North Dakota from 1971 to 1992.&#0160; <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/25585876">Dan Rice&#39;s book</a> is the best treatment of his term as President.&#0160; The Alumni association has put up a <a href="http://www.und.edu/clifford/html/biography.html">nice biography</a> and <a href="http://www.undalumni.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=982">interactive space</a>.</li>! <li>Congratulations to <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/02/newgriffon-10-archaeology-of-xenitia.html">Kostis Kourelis and all the contributors</a> for the publication of <a href="http://www.oxbowbooks.com/bookinfo.cfm/ID/67581//Location/DBBC"><em>Archae ology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture</em></a>&#0160; in the New Griffon publication series of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/gennadius/">Gennadius Library</a> at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. This books came out of a panel held at the 2007 Archaeological Institute of America meetings under the banner of the Archaeology of the Medieval and Post Medieval Mediterranean Interest Group.</li>! <li><a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2009/02/a_response_to_the_nation_ and_i.html#more">An interesting review and response</a> to Y. Hamilakis&#39; book, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/122424890">The Nation and Its Ruins</a> </em>at <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/">Archaeolog</a>. </li>! <li>Lux Interior of The Cramps died this past week.&#0160; <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5OMuj4FpII">The Cramps concert at the California State Mental Hospital</a> remains one of the landmarks in <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">Punk Archaeology</a>.</li>! <li><a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/2009/02/historicaljesuses_05.html">Some good comments from Ryan Stander</a> over at <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Axis of Access </a>on my Historical Jesus talk.</li>! </ul>! <p>I have the feeling that I had more varia and quick hits, but I can&#39;t remember them.&#0160; So, the list will likely be updated.</p> <p>Have a good weekend.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: The Instability of Hybrid Learning STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-the-instability-of-hybrid-learning CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 02/05/2009 09:09:41 AM ----BODY: <p>If we can summarize the first decade of the 21st century with a single term it would be: hybridity.&#0160; It is impossible to go even a day without hearing about some kind of hybrid invention: hybrid cars, hybrid identities, hybrid foods, hybrid research projects, and hybrid courses.&#0160; In almost every case the notion of hybridity evokes a positive response.&#0160; The 21st century hybrid brings together two objects, ideas, or concepts that are merely satisfactory and creates a superior synthesis that preserves the character of the original components (in some way) but eliminates some of the negative attributes.&#0160; We can all think: less pollution, less fat, less disciplinary isolation.&#0160; And most positively: better efficiency, better nutrition, better collaboration.&#0160; The positive character of the hybrid has even appeared in scholarship in which scholars tout the hybrid identities of groups in the past as presaging the dynamic identities of the modern age and superior to groups that have remained isolated, pure, or simply defined.&#0160; </p>! <p>While there is indeed much to celebrate in terms of the hybrid in today&#39;s culture, it is worth remembering, however, that hybrid identities are also threatening, unstable, and, frankly, confusing.&#0160; In a post-colonial context, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/56319821">Homi Bhabha is clear</a>: hybrid individuals threaten and destablized the clearly defined world with its boundaries between the authority of the colonizer and the identity of the colonized.&#0160; We should not be overly romanced by the power of the hybrid to bring out only the positive aspects of the combination and realize that hybrids are, in many cases, inherently unsettling.&#0160; They are ambivalent, shape shifters that defy easy categorization and disrupt established interpretative regimes and assumptions.</p>! <p>This semester I introduced an overtly hybrid element in my Western Civilization I class.&#0160; I divided the course material into 4 parts some of which happen in class and some of which happen online.&#0160; Lectures are podcasts, primary source readings are online, there is a basic book (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/62263657">P. Crone&#39;s<em> Pre-Industrial Societies</em></a>), and discussions rooted in the podcasts, primary source readings, and the Crone book occur both online and in class. By moving lectures from their tradition space during class to the internet and by spreading discussion between the classroom and online, I intended to create a much more flexible classroom environment where the class could review online lecture material, discuss the basic primary and secondary sources, and spend time explicitly developing certain skills (historical argumentation, academic writing, study management) that are often squeezed or marginalized during a crowded survey class. </p>! <p>As the instructor, I have thoroughly enjoyed the flexibility that this approach has given to the classroom.&#0160; I can target specific problems of understanding, allow discussions to meander through the student&#39;s interests, and, at the same time, be less anxious about &quot;getting through the material&quot; since some of the basic structure of information dissemination is now presented online.&#0160; </p>!

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<p>On the other hand, the students are struggling.&#0160; I have received multiple emails from students who simply &quot;don&#39;t get the class&quot;.&#0160; This is after I stopped and talked with them at least twice about how each component of the class (podcasts, discussion, Crone, primary source reading) fits together.&#0160; I&#39;ve worked to explain how the environment in which content is disseminated is as crucial to learning as the material itself.&#0160; To do this, I have tried to use a series of overlapping metaphors for the relationship between the classroom and online environments.&#0160; The online environment with its wiki and threaded discussion is &quot;student led&quot;, voluntary (in a sense), and not bounded by strict time limits; the classroom environment, that is in the lecture bowl where the class meets once a week, is &quot;instructor led&quot; (no matter how far they stray on a particular discussion or point, I can ultimately gather them up and refocus them), required (inasmuch as they know that I can tell if they don&#39;t come to class), and bounded by the limitations of the space and time.&#0160; Or more playfully: the online podcasts are &quot;recorded in the studio&quot; where as my lectures in the classroom are a &quot;live show&quot;, and just because you have a CD of your favorite band, doesn&#39;t mean that you don&#39;t want to go and hear them live.&#0160; In fact, you&#39;d expect the live experience to be different; you can feed upon the energy from the audience, have a more intimate relationship with the musicians, and .&#0160; While this isn&#39;t a perfect metaphor, it does challenge them to consider the environment where learning takes place and how the same material in different contexts (online or inclass, collaborative (on a wiki) or solitary (on a test)) makes a difference.&#0160; </p>! <p>Despite these efforts to explain the benefits of a hybrid environment, the class remains ill at ease.&#0160; At first, I criticized my own ability to make my pedagogy clear.&#0160; But now, I have begun to realize that the hybridity of the form is partially to blame.&#0160; The course defies student expectations in that the dissemination of material is not predicated on efficiency, specifically tailored to a single tool or environment, and compartmentalized neatly for easy digestion.&#0160; The hybrid nature of the course is clearly part of the issue.&#0160; The expectations that students have for online course (relative anonymity, ability to move at one&#39;s own pace, complete access to material in an online venue) are defied since they know that they need to attend class.&#0160; On the other hand, their expectations of a classroom environment, particularly for a lecture bowl type class that meets once a week, are not being met either: they can&#39;t be passive and are expected to contribute to the direction of the class time and engage the material in a public way.&#0160; Moreover, dissemination of information is not limited by the classroom time or environment.&#0160; There is material that I expect them to know and at least try to use that will not be &quot;covered&quot; in class but emerge exclusively through their engagement with the online environment.</p>! <p>As the Hybrid Decade of the 21st century continues on, I suspect that the unease experienced by my students will manifest itself as we are confronted by increasing numbers of hybrid experiences.&#0160; With the promise of progress through hybrid approaches to pressing problems comes the instability and ambivalence of hybrid experiences. </p>! <p>For more Teaching Thursdays see:</p>! <p><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/01/teaching-thursday-history-ofdomestic.html">Teaching Thursday: History of Domestic Architecture</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/te aching-thursday-teaching-demonstrations.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching Demonstrations</a> (K. Kourelis)<br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/te

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aching-thursday-revised-classes-for-spring.html">Teaching Thursday: Revised Classes for Spring</a><br /><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/01/teaching-thursday-architecture1400.html">Teaching Thursday: Architecture 1400-Present</a> (K. Kourelis)<br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-tuesday-trends-in-grades-in-a-western-civilization-course.html">Teaching Tuesday: Trends in Grades in a Western Civilization Course</a><br /><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/12/teaching-thursdayinterviews.html">Teaching Thursday: Interviews</a> (K. Kourelis)<br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-thursday-rethinking-lectures-content-and-the-classroomvibe.html">Teaching Thursday: Rethinking Lectures, Content, and the Classroom Vibe</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-thursday-teaching-by-templates.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching by Templates</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-historical-perspective-on-teaching-research-methods-with-kateturabian.html">Teaching Thursday: A Historical Perspective on Teaching Research Methods with Kate Turabian</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-teaching-time.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching Time</a><br /><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/11/teaching-thursday-classroommodernism.html">Teaching Thursday: Classroom Modernism (K. Kourelis)</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching the Election</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments.html">Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br /><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball&#39;s Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br /><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br

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/><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br /><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br /><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a>&#0160;</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Historical Jesus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-historical-jesus CATEGORY: Religion DATE: 02/04/2009 08:24:40 AM ----BODY: <p>Every couple of years, I get asked to talk about the historical Jesus.&nbsp; While this falls toward the ragged fringes of my expertise, in most communities where I have lived, there simply aren't very many historians who think about the pre-modern Mediterranean.&nbsp; Consequently, for some folks, the 5th century AD (or so) looks about a good as 1st century BC/AD.&nbsp; Today, I am talking in the <a href="http://www2.und.nodak.edu/our/calendar_new/index.php?eventid=17809&amp;dat e=">Joint Campus Ministry Association's Theology for Lunch series</a>.&nbsp; Apparently, there will a free lunch (soup!!) on offer.</p> <p>I'll have 20 minutes to present something, and after that there will be about 20 minutes for conversation.&nbsp; Since I don't know the group, I am going to try to present a fairly broad perspective on the topic hoping that the discussion will lead to specific areas of interest to the group.&nbsp; The basic argument that I'll make is that the "historical" Jesus has meant different things to different people through time.&nbsp; In fact, the <em>historical</em> Jesus could as easily mean the view of Jesus using any number of <em>historical </em>methods and epistemological perspectives as the view of Jesus as a unified "historical" artifact with well-defined features derived from some kind of "scientific" study.&nbsp; This will lead me to focus, then, on the key role of context -both ancient and modern -- in understanding how various historical (and other interpretive) regimes generated a Jesus who was meaningful to specific groups, situations, and individuals, but nevertheless sufficiently coherent to be enduring and recognizable.&nbsp; </p> <p>To reinforce this somewhat, I'll spend the second 10 minutes of the talk preparing a (very) basic sketch of the cultural, political, and religious life Roman Mediterranean in order to provide

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at least one perspective on the context for the New Testament texts.&nbsp; But I will emphasize that simply placing Jesus in his ancient context does not necessarily produce a more "historically accurate" depiction of Jesus "the man".&nbsp; In fact, placing Jesus in an ancient context runs the risk of impoverishing the great diversity and brilliance of the Christian traditions which created meaningful images of Jesus throughout the ages.&nbsp; Just as the ancient writers created a Jesus that was meaningful in their context, subsequent generations have contributed their own perspectives on the founder of Christianity.</p> <p>If post-modern approaches to the past have taught us anything, it is to celebrate the plurality of meaning in the historical record.&nbsp; In the context of the historical Jesus, this opens the door to finding significance in a aspects of the historical figure of Jesus that might have been obscured by accretions of time, scholarly or popular neglect, or the overwhelming pressure of contemporary approaches and concerns.&nbsp; In fact, Christians often observe that Jesus is a figure who transcends time and context.&nbsp; By looking at Jesus historically -- that is through the eyes of history as a dynamic discipline as well as through time -- we have the chance to recognize Jesus in ways that destabilize our expectations, challenge our assumptions, and renews faith.</p> <p>But I am an amateur.&nbsp; For a professional, check out Phil Harland's awesome blog: <a href="http://www.philipharland.com/Blog/">Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean</a>.&nbsp; It's the Bentley of Ancient Christianity Blogs with a spec-ta-cu-lar series of podcasts on <a href="http://www.philipharland.com/Blog/2009/01/28/historical-jesus-in-contextpodcast-episodes-and-the-strike/">The Historical Jesus in Context</a>. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 136.244.13.82 URL: DATE: 02/04/2009 08:37:51 AM My favorite way to start the Art History survey is to explain BC and AD, versus BCE and CE. One argument I use that keeps me out of deep waters is the scientific realization that the real Jesus was born after the year 0, making the whole numbering system messed up. Under this light, the Jewish, Arabic (even Byzantine) dating system doesn't seem as bad. Another favorite strategy to avoid the discussion of the real Jesus but keeping it historical is to talk about Saint John Prodromos, who was essentially a freedom fighter, which is why he hang out in caves (not unlike some well-known Islamic contemporaries of ours). Historical Jesus had to befriend the militant Jewish faction, causing all kinds of theological problems: how/why does some one NOT divine baptize someone divine? Lots of fun with the Early Christians and the wonderful tensions of religion. ----COMMENT:

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AUTHOR: Paqid Yirmeyahu EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 84.109.122.129 URL: http://www.netzarim.co.il DATE: 02/04/2009 12:30:01 PM You'll find significant documented historical information not published in the Christian world at: www.netzarim.co.il -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Two More Springtime Conferences STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: two-more-springtime-conferences CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 02/03/2009 08:16:12 AM ----BODY: <p>The Spring conference schedule is jam-packed this year!&nbsp; Two more interesting events:</p> <p><a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~sf8/">Shifting Frontiers VIII</a> is being hosted by Indiana University, April 2-5, 2009.&nbsp; The focus this year will be on "Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity".&nbsp; It looks good albeit <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~sf8/Program.php">with predictable panels</a> on the typical Late Antique topics: Letters (II), the body (III), cultural negotiation between religious groups (IV), identity (V), ritual (VI), memory (VII), "material culture" (IX), historiography and cultural representation (X), imperial power (Xb), and the frontier (XI).&nbsp; All and all, the panels provide a nice survey of the pressing issues in scholarship on Late Antiquity.&nbsp; </p> <p>At the same exact time, the <a href="http://sitemaker.umich.edu/rac2009/session_topics__speakers__and_abstracts ">Roman Archaeology Conference</a> (RAC) will occur at the University of Michigan including an interesting panel on the "<a href="http://sitemaker.umich.edu/rac2009/session_topics__speakers__and_abstracts #troubled">Troubled Adolescence of Late Antique Studies...</a>", Cam Grey's paper in this panel has particular relevance to our work on Cyprus (<a href="http://sitemaker.umich.edu/rac2009/session_topics__speakers__and_abstracts #Grey%20-%20Abstract">Stuck in the Middle: Between Grand Theory and the Case Study in the Countrysides of Late Antiquity</a>).&nbsp; <a href="http://sitemaker.umich.edu/rac2009/session_topics__speakers__and_abstracts #comparativeissues">Another interesting panel</a> will focus on comparative approaches to the archaeology of the Roman rural landscape.&nbsp; </p> <p>It's perhaps instructive to note where the two conferences overlap even though it is always difficult and dangerous to judge a book by the cover or a panel by the titles and abstracts of the papers.&nbsp; They both show marked interest in issues of identity, particularly of groups on the periphery, and various forms of representation and reception - particularly as related to urban culture or elite power. Both conferences also consider the relationship between religion and ritual in a Roman context.&nbsp; Other than that there was not as much overlap as one might hope.&nbsp; The RAC had relatively little interest in the

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archaeology of the body or, at least explicitly, in the issue of authority, which has become an important topic of discussion for scholars of the Late Antique world.&nbsp; Shifting Frontiers, for their part, showed little sustained or systematic interest in the Late Roman economy in the countryside or the city (outside of the panel on "material culture").&nbsp; Curiously, Shifting Frontiers has almost nothing, explicitly on epigraphy even though inscriptions marked one of the key ways that scholars have observed the conflicting, overlapping, and complementary spheres of influence produced through languages.&nbsp; </p> <p>Both conferences look interesting and it is always valuable to see how the lines are drawn in the discipline between archaeologists and historians, Romanists and Late Romanists, scholars of culture and scholars of material culture, et c. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Working Paper: Towers and Fortifications at Vayia in the Southeast Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: working-paper-towers-and-fortifications-at-vayia-in-the-southeastcorinthia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 02/02/2009 07:42:28 AM ----BODY: <p>Lest you think that I am all blog and no... publish.&nbsp; David Pettegrew and I have submitted an article to Hesperia focusing on our work in the Vayia Microregion.&nbsp; Faithful readers of this blog have seen this article emerge from roughish field notes (see below), <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/th ree-new-sites-in-the-eastern-corinthia.html">to conference paper</a>, to working article suitable for submission.&nbsp; The goal of the article was to present three new sites in the Corinthia with enough analysis to make them understandable.&nbsp; We intentionally shied away from too many grandiose conclusions or any broad reaching synthesis in large part because there has been so much synthetic and interpretive work done, recently, on fortified rural sites.&nbsp; Our effort here was to produce another set of examples of such sites from a region that was typically overlooked in discussions of fortifications in the countryside.&nbsp; Here's the abstract:</p> <blockquote> <p>Although rural towers have long been central to the discussion of the fortified landscapes of Classical and Hellenistic Greece, the Corinthia has rarely played into the conversation, despite the historical significance of exurban fortifications for the territory.&nbsp; In this paper, we report on the

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recent investigation by the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey of two towers and associated fortifications in the immediate vicinity of Lychnari Bay in the southeast Corinthia.&nbsp; By integrating topographic study, intensive survey, and architectural analysis, we argue that these three sites served to protect and guard both an economically productive stretch of the Corinthian countryside and important passes northward to Corinth.&nbsp; </p></blockquote> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WorkingPapers/Caraher_Pettegrew _Towers_Fortifications_Working.pdf">Here's a link to a working version of the article</a>.</p> <p>It was a pleasure working with David Pettegrew on this project.&nbsp; He is one of the most careful thinkers about the Corinthian countryside (or the ancient countryside more broadly).&nbsp; I hope that he benefited from my interest in ancient fortifications.&nbsp; One of my many, ongoing projects is a synthetic article that brings together the recent work on fortifications in the Korinthian countryside and examines the various interlocking and overlapping strategies at play in the highly visible fortifications present in this area.&nbsp; Finally, it was exciting to write on the results of extensive (rather than intensive survey) and evoke the voice of so many peripatetic scholars whose walks produced informal plans, photographs, and field notes and provided the first links between the ancient and modern Greek landscape.</p> <p>For more on our fieldwork in the Vayia Microregion:<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Lychnari Tower</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-2.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Passes of the Eastern Corinthia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-3.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Classical Vayia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: History and Archaeology</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Some More Contemporary Thoughts</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/th ree-new-sites-in-the-eastern-corinthia.html">Three New Sites in the Eastern Corinthia</a> (W. Caraher and D. Pettegrew)</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Conference on Kourion at the University of Pennsylvania Museum STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-conference-on-kourion-at-the-university-of-pennsylvania-museum CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 01/30/2009 09:02:45 AM ----BODY: <p>Rather than a typical Friday quick hit and varia post, here's a conference dedicated to The University of Pennsylvania's work at the site of Kourion:</p><a href="http://www.museum.upenn.edu/cyprus">The Ancient Kourion Area: Penn Museum's Legacy and Recent Research in Cyprus: A Conference Commemorating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Museum's Expedition</a> <p>March 27-29, 2009 </p> <p>Program <p>&nbsp; <p>FRIDAY, MARCH 27 <p>7:00 p.m.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Welcome and opening remarks: <p>C. Brian Rose, UPMAA Deputy Director and Curator-in-Charge, Mediterranean Section <p>Ambassador Andreas Kakouris, Republic of Cyprus&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <p>7:15 Keynote: Stuart Swiny, Director, Institute of Cypriot Studies, University at Albany , “The Land of Kuri: How American and Cypriot Archaeologists Revealed the Past of the Island’s Southern Shore” <p>8:15 – 9:00&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Reception <p>&nbsp; <p>SATURDAY, MARCH 28 <p>9:00&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Welcome&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; C.Brian Rose <p>Session I: Hippos and Humans Settle Prehistoric Kourion <p>9:10&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Alan Simmons, University of Nevada Las Vegas – “So, Who Were the First Cypriots?—Perspectives on When and Why People Initially Came to Cyprus” <p>9:40&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Ellen Herscher, Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum – “Between Two Worlds: Phaneromeni and the Transition to the Late Bronze Age” <p>10:10&nbsp;&nbsp; Gisela Walberg, University of Cincinnati – "Excavating a Late Bronze Age Major Coastal Urban Center - UPenn and UC at Episkopi Bamboula" <p>10:40&nbsp;&nbsp; coffee break <p>&nbsp; <p>Session II: Late Bronze Age Roots of the Kingdom of Kourion <p>11:10&nbsp;&nbsp; Pavlos Flourentzos, Director, Department of Antiquities, Cyprus – “A Contribution to the Topography of Bronze Age Kourion, A New Suggestion” <p>11:40&nbsp;&nbsp; Maria Iacovou, University of Cyprus – “Site Location and Status Identification: The Kouris River Valley Regional Authorities in the Late Second and First Millennia B.C.” <p>12:10&nbsp;&nbsp; discussion <p>12:30 – 2:00&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; lunch break <p>&nbsp; <p>Session III: Research at Kourion, Past and Present <p>2:00&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Thomas Kiely, British Museum – “Ancient Kourion On-line. The British Museum Excavations of 1895 in Cyberspace” <p>2:30&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Tom Davis, Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute – “An Amateur’s Dream: McFadden at Kourion” <p>3:00&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Nathan Harper, University of Nevada Las Vegas – “Ancient Cypriots in the Kouris River Valley: The University Museum’s Contribution to Physical Anthropology” <p>3:30&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; coffee break <p>&nbsp; <p>Session IV: From City Kingdom to Roman City <p>3:50&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Sabine Fourrier, CNRS Lyon, France – "The Topography of Cult in the Iron Age Kingdom of Kourion"

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<p>4:20&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Demos Christou, former director, Department of Antiquities, Cyprus – “Excavations of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities at Kourion, 1975-1998” <p>4:50&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Michael Given, University of Glasgow – “Funerary Landscapes at Kourion's Amathus Gate Cemetery” <p>5:15 – 5:30&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; discussion <p>&nbsp; <p>SUNDAY, MARCH 29 <p>Session V: The Christian Era <p>9:00&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Benjamin Costello IV, SUNY Buffalo – “The Earthquake House at Kourion: An Analysis of the Material Culture” <p>9:30&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; David Rupp, Canadian Institute in Greece – “To Be, or Not To Be. The Limits of Antiochene and Christian Influence on the Floor Mosaics of the Early Fifth Century AD Eustolios Complex at Kourion, Cyprus” <p>10:00&nbsp;&nbsp; John Rosser, Boston College – “The Episcopal Basilica at Kourion” <p>10:30&nbsp;&nbsp; coffee break <p>10:50&nbsp;&nbsp; Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou, Curator of Antiquities, Department of Antiquities, Cyprus – “The Medieval Sugar-Mills of Episkopi Serayia and Kolossi, and Sugar Production in Medieval Cyprus” <p>11:20&nbsp;&nbsp; William Woys Weaver, Drexel University – “The Foods of Kourion through a Medieval Lens: An Ethnographic Analysis” <p>11:50 – 12:15&nbsp;&nbsp; discussion and closing remarks</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Teaching Demonstrations STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-teaching-demonstrations CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 01/29/2009 08:09:04 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the most bizarre rituals in the interview process is the teaching demonstration.&nbsp; I suppose not every university asks their candidates to do such a thing, but from my experiences as both an interviewer and interviewee, most schools that prioritize teaching do.&nbsp; The Department of History at the University of North Dakota is no different and having seen three groups of candidates over the last four years, I feel like some critique of the process (not the candidates!) is in order.</p> <p>First, anyone who has done a teaching demonstration during an interview knows how bizarre the experience can be.&nbsp; Typically, you are "invited" to give a lecture in a section of a survey class.&nbsp; I've taught the French Revolution, Roman Greece, the Augustan Age, and 19th century Marxism over the course of my relatively modest career as an interviewee.&nbsp; While I consider myself fairly comfortable in a lecture or teaching environment, these guest lectures were almost always awkward.&nbsp; In

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one memorable case, I had to give a mock teaching lecture in an empty lecture bowl as the students were all on summer leave! I still remember the strange acoustics when I spoke and the dead silence whenever I stopped speaking in this cavernous, empty, classroom.</p> <p>Even more realistic venues -- say, with actual students in the seats -- are still hardly ideal environments to showcase one's teaching.&nbsp; Trying to get students to interact with a lecture, quickly develop some kind of rapport, and cover material in a way that is both representative of one's teaching style, but generic enough not to offend folks who might have significantly different ideas of how to teach a class or a topic.&nbsp; I always tried to do something for everyone in my teaching demonstration.&nbsp; I'd lecture for a bit, then show that I could interact with the students in a Socratic style, question and answer, and then show that I could amuse the class and keep their attention with a witty anecdote, and then use a primary source.&nbsp; </p> <p>To this day my colleagues tease me for one desperate effort to engage the students in class.&nbsp; When discussing Augustus' use of visual propaganda (following <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/18069543">Zanker</a>, for example), I noted the significance of gestures in making an imperial figure immediately comprehensible to a broad audience.&nbsp; I could tell that the students did not really understand what a gesture was and how it could communicate identity or even ideology. So, in an act of desperation, I sought a modern parallel and came upon the <a href="http://www.heisman.com/">Heisman Trophy</a> pose (stupid Desmond Howard).&nbsp; The students laughed and maybe got the point.&nbsp; I got the job, so some silliness didn't disqualify myself from employment.&nbsp; </p> <p>Our positions at UND almost always require a substantial commitment to teaching both graduate and undergraduate students, and we expect our candidates to be comfortable in the classroom.&nbsp; There is almost no good way of determining that.&nbsp; One is always uncomfortable in someone else's classroom, particularly if one is discussing a topic that is at the far fringes of one's expertise.&nbsp; Moreover, the teaching demonstration rarely demonstrates whether a candidate can achieve rapport with a students (what works for a fun, guest lecture can confuse students over the course of an entire semester).&nbsp; </p> <p>This isn't one of those posts that gives a candidate advice on how to give a good teaching demonstration nor do I have any alternative except maybe to drop the teaching demonstration entirely.&nbsp; I am not sure that it works except in extreme cases where a candidate is paralyzed in front of a group of students or cannot command their attention or is so instantly connected with the demographic in the room that they create a new standard for rapport and student engagement.&nbsp; In most cases, however, these aspects of a candidates personality will come out in other parts of the interview.&nbsp; The ability to command a room, advance an organized argument, and think on their feet, should come through in a job talk, for example.&nbsp; Ability to engage students would be just as apparent in less formal meetings.&nbsp; </p> <p>For more Teaching Thursdays see:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/te aching-thursday-revised-classes-for-spring.html">Teaching Thursday: Revised Classes for Spring</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/01/teaching-thursday-architecture1400.html">Teaching Thursday: Architecture 1400-Present</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-tuesday-trends-in-grades-in-a-western-civilization-course.html">Teaching Tuesday: Trends in Grades in a Western Civilization Course</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/12/teaching-thursdayinterviews.html">Teaching Thursday: Interviews</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te

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aching-thursday-rethinking-lectures-content-and-the-classroomvibe.html">Teaching Thursday: Rethinking Lectures, Content, and the Classroom Vibe</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-thursday-teaching-by-templates.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching by Templates</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-historical-perspective-on-teaching-research-methods-with-kateturabian.html">Teaching Thursday: A Historical Perspective on Teaching Research Methods with Kate Turabian</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-teaching-time.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching Time</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/11/teaching-thursday-classroommodernism.html">Teaching Thursday: Classroom Modernism (K. Kourelis)</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching the Election</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments.html">Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Under Libby's Gaze: Merrifield 209 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: under-libbys-gaze-merrifield-209 CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 01/28/2009 08:15:00 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536fda768970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="240" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536fda76e970c -pi" width="64" align="left" border="0"></a> As part of my project to document the space of the second floor of Merrifield Hall, with a particular emphasis on the space used by the department of history, I have started with Room 209.&nbsp; (For my first effort <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/un der-libbys-gaze-images-of-the-department-of-history-from-merrifieldhall.html">see here</a>).&nbsp; Structurally, the room is interesting in that a partition wall separates it from my office (209B).&nbsp; The wall is made of sheet rock and thin as a result I hear almost everything that goes on in the adjoining classroom.&nbsp; (And sometimes I do feel like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8A0rhVG91U">Aerosmith in their famous video with Run DMC</a>.)</p> <p>The room seats 55 or so easily and is one of the more spacious classrooms in Merrifield.&nbsp; It has three features that most historians today can not live without: maps, a digital projector, and a closet filled with... stuff.&nbsp; The maps are the Denoyer-Geppert floor standing models -- one set dates to perhaps 1943 (no map is later than 1942) and the other to 1960.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536fda7bd970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536f48bc2970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>The big windows provide great views of the sunrise in the winter.&nbsp; Many mornings it is possible to find Gordon Iseminger diligently inscribing the key terms for his class on the chalkboards.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536fda7c6970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536f48bc8970b

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-pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536fda7d3970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536fda7d7970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The most striking features of the room, however, are two prints produced by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Art_Society">Fine Art Society</a>.&nbsp; The prints show battle scenes -- suitable for a history classroom, it would seem.&nbsp; The more interesting thing is that both prints have a plaque attached to their frames that states: "Presented to the Pioneer Club by E.H. Thursby 1892.&nbsp; E.H. Thursby was among the "founding fathers" of the University.&nbsp; He appears to have been a wealth land owner from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towner,_North_Dakota">Towner, North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; While he was not a member of the original board of regents, he did offer the first full scholarship to the school in 1890 and made it available for any resident of McHenry Country (see the <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/BoardofRegents/BORv3p76_100.htm">Bo ard of Regent's Minutes June 12, 1890</a>).&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536f48bd1970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536f48bda970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536f48be7970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536fda7e4970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The Pioneer Club is almost certainly the Pioneer Reading Club.&nbsp; This organization was <a href="javascript:pop2('citation.php?CISOROOT=/davies&amp;CISOPTR='+citationUrl() ,'400',%20'150')">a women's reading club organized in 1885</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/library/Collections/og113.html">The minute book from 1899-1901</a> shows the names of many of the most prominent women in Grand Forks -- including the wives of faculty members (Josephine Connell Wheeler (presumably the wife of Henry Wheeler, a prominent local doctor) , Lillian Cool Babcock (wife of Earl Babcock, who would server the university in almost every capacity over a long career), Belle G. Estes (wife of Ludovic Estes, the first Ph.D. hired by the university and a physicist), a Mrs. Woodworth (either the wife or daughter of Horace B. Woodworth), Mrs. Kennedy (presumably the wife of Joseph Kennedy, longtime professor of education), Mrs. Brannon(presumably wife of Melvin Brannon, professor of biology).&nbsp; These women met frequently to read and discuss books and issues of current affairs.&nbsp; They also worked to raise money.&nbsp; Perhaps their most significant achievement was working to secure funding for the Grand Forks Public Library.&nbsp; Apparently the group enlisted William "Billy" Budge (whose wife appear to have been active in the reading club) to solicit funds from Andrew Carnegie.</p> <p>In any event, one of this groups interests was art, and at various times they sought to acquire etchings and prints for the library, for the University, and for a private collection that they displayed and discussed in the community and in small towns throughout North Dakota.&nbsp; It's not entirely clear to me how the two prints in Merrifield 209 came into the possession of the University, but the close ties between the Pioneer Reading Club and the University make it not surprising.&nbsp; Not only did the club include many faculty wives, but President Merrifield was known to give the occasional talk to the group and the

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group had given several gifts to the University over its existence.&nbsp; It may even be possible that these prints came from the Lander family who were prominent local real estate developers and Mrs. Lander was active in the Pioneer Reading Club.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536fda7ea970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536fda7f1970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More on Dreams... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-on-dreams CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Religion CATEGORY: Science DATE: 01/27/2009 08:13:12 AM ----BODY: <p>The regular readers of this blog know that I have <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42366325">an emerging interest in dreams with a focus on the relationship between religion (particularly the phenomenon of inventio) and archaeology</a> in Greece.&nbsp; Even more specifically, I've thought a bit about the different (but related) roles that predictive dreams played in disciplines influenced by the early 20th century modernist discourse.&nbsp;&nbsp; For example, religiously inspired dreams appear occasionally in otherwise highly "scientific" archaeological reports and seem to have led the discovery of specific artifacts (relics!), buildings, or features.&nbsp; This intersection of religious dream and scientific archaeology allowed the scientific discourse of archaeology to bridge the gap, if just momentarily, and create a space where it was possible to reconcile long standing religious phenomenon and "empirical" arguments.&nbsp; This space, in turn, played a part in the creation of nationalist discourses which typically accommodated by mystical and scientific bases for national identities.</p> <p>I've also suggested that the role of predictive dreams in anthropological discourse (as well as the scientific discipline of laography (or folklore studies)) was similar, although these dreams tended to be stripped of religious power and transformed into artifacts of continuity between Greek folk and their ancient and Byzantine predecessors.</p> <p>Finally, I have noted that dreams

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have a significant place in the field of psychoanalysis and in Freud's works, most notably his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42366325"><em>Interpretation of Dreams</em></a>.&nbsp; Freudian thought was, of course, characteristic of modernism and sought to place the unconscious mind of firmer "scientific" footing.&nbsp; It appears that Freudian ideas first circulated in Greece during the third decade of the 20th century and among the first generation of Greeks to explore Freud's ideas was Angelos Tanagras (P. Hartocolis, "A Letter from Greece," <em>Journal of American Pschoanalytic Association</em> 48 (2000), 675).&nbsp; </p> <p>I spent yesterday afternoon reading through A. Tanagras,<em> </em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1991839"><em>Psychophysical Elements in Parapsychological Traditions</em> (New York 1967)</a> on the recommendation <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">of a colleague</a>.&nbsp; Originally published as <em>La Destin et la Change </em>in 1930, this book sought to integrate Freudian psychological analysis and research into the parapsychological phenomenon ranging from telekinetics to telepathy and clairvoyance.&nbsp; Dreams feature prominently in his book -- including dreams that lead to the discovery of lost objects.&nbsp; Tanagras, following much early 20th century parapsychological research, attempts to argue that the mind can control the material world through not only the power of suggestion but also the manipulation of subatomic particles.&nbsp; His arguments are based upon numerous interviews and sworn testimony of members of the Greek bourgeoisie (doctors, lawyers, newspaper editors, bankers and the like) and interlaced with a strongly Freudian understanding of mind.&nbsp; In fact, it appears that the unconscious was every bit as powerful -- if not more so -- as the conscious mind in its ability to manipulate and influence the material world.&nbsp; It is worth noting that Tanagras makes an effort to apply the principles of parapsychology to "evil eye" -- the practice of cursing an individual through a jealous gaze and a common phenomenon in Greek and Eastern Mediterranean folk traditions.&nbsp; </p> <p>While Tanagras does not deal with archaeological dreams specifically, his research follows a now well-trod path of attempting to explain and accommodate "supernatural" or even religious phenomena within the emerging (and expanding) scientific discourse.&nbsp; Efforts to validate scientifically the "folk" traditions in a Greek context -- whether by categorizing them as persistent remnants of ancient practices or through juxtaposing religiously inspired dreams and empirical discoveries or establishing a scientific basis for supernatural phenomenon -- worked to create the foundation for a modern society which stood close to the center of the emerging discourse of nationalism in a Greek context (for a more subtle reading of this complex process see : <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27938075">J. Faubion,<em> Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism</em>.&nbsp; (Princeton 1993)</a>.)</p> <p><strong>Update:</strong><br>For more on Tanagras, <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/01/angelos-tanagras.html">check out Kostis Kourelis excellent post</a>!</p> <p><strong>Update 2:<br></strong><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/01/tanagras-and-archaeology.html">Kostis has contributed more to the link between Tanagras and archaeology</a> including the relationship between the renowned archaeologist A. Philadelpheus and Tanagras.&nbsp; Philadelpheus apparently dedicated his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1742372"><em>Monuments of Athens</em></a> to Tanagras.&nbsp; Even more interesting is that Tanagras has an autobiography with a copy at the Elliot Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Library.</p> <p><strong>Update 3:</strong><br>More brilliant blogging by <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2009/01/tanagras-andkourouniotes.html">Kostis Kourelis on Tanagras, parapsychology, and archaeology</a>.&nbsp; </p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Metadata Monday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: metadata-monday DATE: 01/26/2009 08:16:11 AM ----BODY: <p>I haven't done a Metadata Monday for a while, so perhaps it is time for a quick metadata update for this blog.&nbsp; </p> <p>As I have argued before, metadata is less interesting for the volume of visitors than for the type of visitors.&nbsp; 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.</p> <p>The most common referring blogs to my site are:</p> <p>1) <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a> (Kostis Kourelis)<br>2) <a href="http://rogueclassicism.com/">Rogue Classicism</a> <br>3) <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/">Grand Forks Life</a> (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!)<br>4) <a href="http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/">Archaeoastronomy</a> (Alun Salt)<br>5) <a href="http://westmelrose.blogspot.com/">Thoughts from West Melrose</a><br>6) <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a> (Shawn Graham)<br>7) <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/">Histor ical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean</a> (Brandon Olson)<br>8) <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a><br>9) <a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/">Antiquated Vagaries</a><br>10) <a href="http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/">History of the British School at Athens</a> (David Gill)</p> <p>Since the inception of this blog about a year and a half ago, I've had just over 40,000 page views.&nbsp; In the last year, I've had just under 20,000 visits (almost 30,000 page views).&nbsp; The average time on the site over the last year has been 1:13.&nbsp; </p> <p>The top 10 countries with readers of my blog: </p> <p>1) US<br>2) Greece<br>3) UK<br>4) Canada<br>5) Italy<br>6) Australia<br>7) Germany<br>8) Cyprus<br>9) France<br>10) Turkey</p> <p>The top 10 states:</p> <p>1) California<br>2) Pennsylvania<br>3) Minnesota<br>4) New York<br>5) North Dakota<br>6) Ohio<br>7) Illinois<br>8) Florida<br>9) Texas<br>10) New Jersey</p> <p>And for Sam Fee and my wife , the top browser by just over 1% is Firefox:</p> <p>1) Firefox (43.67%)<br>2) Explorer (42.66%)<br>3) Safari (8.10%)<br>4) Opera (2.93%)<br>5) Chrome (1.38%)</p> <p>The top OS:</p> <p>1) Windows (80.60%)<br>2)

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Mac (18.08%)<br>3) Linux (0.98%)<br>4) iPhone (0.08%)<br>5) iPod (0.05%)<br></p> <p>I have no idea what this means in a cosmic sense, except that it provides an interesting overview of my readers.</p> <p>Thanks for reading!&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Happy Australia Day! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: happy-australia-day CATEGORY: Australiana DATE: 01/26/2009 07:44:36 AM ----BODY: <p>My wife (who is Australian) and I (who am not) celebrated Australia Day last night with a meal of lamb and prawns.&nbsp; It was delicious and fun even though it was -10 and dark at the time rather than a more holiday appropriate 85 and sunny.</p> <p>It's the 60th anniversary of Australian citizenship this year.&nbsp; Prior to 1949, Australians were simply British Subjects.&nbsp; </p> <p>We both wish that we could have spent the holiday -- which commemorates the arrival of the "First Fleet" in 1788 (11 ships sent out from England to found a prison colony in Australia)-- with friends and family (and warmth) in Australia.&nbsp; </p> <p>Australia Day is critiqued in Australia in a similar spirit to Columbus Day in the U.S. Perhaps it is fitting that <a href="http://www.australianoftheyear.org.au/pages/index.asp">Australian of the Year</a> this year <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/25/2473920.htm">was Mick Dodson, a noted Indigenous Australian leader</a> and a University administrator and Professor at Australian National University.</p> <p>It would have been nice if the <a href="http://contentusa.cricinfo.com/ausvrsa2008_09/engine/current/match/351687.html">Australian Cricket team would have obliged and won.</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536f76993970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="74" alt="Flag_of_Australia.svg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536edf52a970b -pi" width="143" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536edf530970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="74" alt="Coat_of_arms_of_Australia.svg" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536f7699b970c -pi" width="94" border="0"></a></p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Abstract for the Modern Greek Studies Association Annual Meeting STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: abstract-for-the-modern-greek-studies-association-annual-meeting CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 01/23/2009 02:26:40 PM ----BODY: <p>Over the last week, I've been working with Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Timothy Gregory</a>, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> to prepare an abstract for the Modern Greek Studies Association Annual Meeting next year in Vancouver on a panel coordinated by the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/squinch/">Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology of the Mediterranean Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America</a>.&nbsp; The paper will focus on our work at the site of Lakka Skoutara and its environs in the southeastern Corinthia.&nbsp; This is an area originally documented by the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a> (2000-2008) and then by the <a href="http://mailer.fsu.edu/~dpullen/SHARP/">Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project</a>. <p>It's always challenging to work on a research paper as a group, but in this case, the potential is remarkable.&nbsp; David, Tim, Lita, and I all conceive of our research at this site in significantly different ways.&nbsp; Lita is interested in the larger systems in which the site and the regions functions, Tim is an expert on ceramic evidence and the perspectives it can offer, David's interest focus on archaeological methods and formation processes, and I am interested in embedding the site at the intersection of the archaeological and historical discourse.&nbsp; Such productive tensions will undoubtedly enrich the work and our own understanding of the sites, the region, and the process of archaeology in Greece. <p>Here's the abstract: <p>"Between sea and mountain: the archaeology of a 20th century “small world” in the upland basins of the southeastern Korinthia"&nbsp;&nbsp; <p>Between the villages of Sophiko and Korphos in the southeastern Korinthia are a number of geographically well-defined and fertile upland basins or poljes, each one accompanied into modern times by a cluster of farmsteads and used for

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agriculture and pastoral activities. The heavily forested slopes adjacent to these basins were systematically exploited for resin production, a flourishing industry in the wider region especially after WWII, which is now in serious decline. Although physically isolated from major urban centers, these microecologies played a vital role in the 20th century in the subsistence of its local population, which originated primarily in the nearby mountainous village of Sophiko.&nbsp; Placing these isolated, yet deeply interconnected places into their regional context provides another key case-study for the contingent character of the Greek countryside in the 19th and 20th century. <p>Between 2001 and 2009, the authors investigated these basins, with a primary focus on the largest, known locally as Lakka Skoutara, through two archaeological projects: the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (2001-03) and the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (2008-09).&nbsp; The former studied Lakka Skoutara as part of its emphasis on the archaeology of the modern period (19th-20th centuries), while the latter conducted archaeological investigations in several of these basins as part of a larger regional survey of the Saronic coastline. <p>Typical of the other basins, Lakka Skoutara presents a remarkably robust assemblage of material, including domestic and religious architecture, agricultural installations, and ceramics scatters.&nbsp; This material reflects the dynamism of changing land use patterns in the Greek rural landscape as well as the formation processes and life cycles of use, reuse, and abandonment connected to domestic residence.&nbsp; By combining archaeological survey with oral information obtained from local residents, we were able to reconstruct part of the landscape history of this small, low-density rural settlement and its relationship to the wider world. This micro-level analysis of the site complements the broader perspectives offered by regional level data collection, oral history, and comparative studies from elsewhere in Greece.&nbsp; Lakka Skoutara and its neighboring poljes offer both snap shots of historical processes affecting the countryside over the last two centuries as well as the dynamic archaeological environments of semi-abandoned settlements recorded over the much narrower horizon of a decade of field work. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Under Libby's Gaze: Images of the Department of History from Merrifield Hall STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: under-libbys-gaze-images-of-the-department-of-history-from-merrifieldhall CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 01/22/2009 08:11:11 AM

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----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536e42ac7970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="300" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536ed8ddd970c -pi" width="80" align="left" border="0"></a> <p>While there is no physical evidence for it yet, the Department of History's days in Merrifield Hall are numbered (for more see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/mo ving-from-mer.html">Moving from Merrifield Hall</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/mo re-merrifield.html">More Merrifield Memories</a>&nbsp; It occurred to me, however, that aside from our vocal protests, we haven't done much to commemorate and preserve the record of the Department's time in Merrifield.&nbsp; Recording how the Department inhabited space is not the most straightforward undertaking.&nbsp; It involves documenting all those small performances that make up the elusive "everyday life"&nbsp; Moreover, it has to include the wide array of spaces that we inhabit (where we dwell): offices, classrooms, hallways, thresholds, et c. <br></p> <p>Not to be intimidated by such a complex project, I brought my wife's little Nikon point-and-shoot camera to school this very morning (unfortunately I did not bring her high-quality photographic eye) and began to take photos of my morning routine and the views that gave me a sense of place within Merrifield Hall.&nbsp; Imagine if we could encourage our students, faculty, and others to make an effort to produce an archive of history within Merrifield and to capture the experience of place there.&nbsp; Not only would this represent the archival and archaeological instinct present in most historians, but also serve as a silent, but potent protest to the rather cavalier way in which the University administration uprooted our department from its traditional spaces on campus.&nbsp; </p> <p>Here are my tentative, preliminary offerings:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536ed8de2970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536e42ad3970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>The History Hall</em>.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536ed8de9970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536e42ad8970b -pi" width="304" border="0"></a><br><em>My office door toward the hall</em>. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536ed8dee970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536ed8df0970c -pi" width="304" border="0"></a> <br><em>Hooks for winter coats</em>.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536ed8df3970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536e42ae1970b

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-pi" width="304" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>My Office.</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536ed8df9970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536e42ae7970b -pi" width="304" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536ed8dfe970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536e42af3970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Gordon Iseminger at the Photocopier</em>.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536ed8e0a970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536e42b11970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>The Stairs</em>.</p></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Punk Rock, Nostalgia, and the Archaeology of Musical Utopia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: punk-rock-nostalgia-and-the-archaeology-of-musical-utopia CATEGORY: Punk Archaeology DATE: 01/21/2009 07:38:13 AM ----BODY: <p>Last week, <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Kostis Kourelis</a> initiated <a href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/">a collaborative project</a> designed to explore the concept, experience, and potential of punk archaeology.&nbsp; As we <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/pu nk-archaeolog.html">had bantered</a> about <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/punk-archaeology.html">this very topic over the space of our two blogs</a>, he invited me to contribute.&nbsp; The format is completely experimental and part of a greater goal to find those points of contact between intellectual life and scholarly life. </p> <p>My first contribution to this project is completely in the spirit of punk rock.&nbsp; It's raw, garage-band quality thought and seeks to question the relationship between nostalgia, archaeology, and the punk aesthetic: </p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; One thing the Kostis' post on <a

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href="http://punkarchaeology.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/house-of-the-risingsun/">the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun"</a> reminded me of was the nostalgic tone to so much popular music.&nbsp; This is not exclusive to the 1960s British invasion bands, nor to punk rockers, of course, but it does intersect with a key characteristic of an archaeological preoccupation with the past.&nbsp; Archaeologists are in some ways nostalgic (in the same way that they are often secretly utopian in aspiration).&nbsp; We hope that excavating the past we can reveal the deeper significance or truth in some fragment of the contemporary world.&nbsp; The fragments of the past become recontextualized in within our contemporary sensibilities -- reassembled and redeployed to capture a kind seemingly authentic past full of utopian innocence and beauty.&nbsp; </p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The rediscovery of the American blues, whether by the 1960s British pop music scene or the later 1960s American folk rock scene seems to capture a similar craving for authenticity, a desire both to appropriate a past reality and recreate it in the present as a utopian critique of the plastic, mass-produced, insincere present.&nbsp; The mid-1960s blues revival craved this authenticity, and in this was both genuine and, to a certain extent, naive.&nbsp; (And in some way, this is what made the intersection between these two groups so potent.&nbsp; Here I'd refer a reader to Sonny Boy Williamson's date with the Animals or, more haunting still, Alan Wilson's (of Canned Heat) work with Son House in the mid 1960s).&nbsp; It's possible at times to detect (over the ironic, post-everything din) the quest for a kind of primordial authenticity still echoes in the blues inspire guitar rock of the White Stripes (see their version of "Death Letter "from <em>De Stijl</em>) or the Black Keys.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Punk rock's engagement with the archaeological stratigraphy of music reveals a more post-modern disposition.&nbsp; While on the one hand, the punk movement continued to champion a kind of a kind of musical authenticity.&nbsp; The low-fi, garage band postures and sound spoke to a more basic and visceral kind of musical experience.&nbsp; "Always leave them wanting less."&nbsp; On the other hand, when punk musicians dug through the stratigraphy of past music and excavated classic pop songs from just a generation earlier, they regarded them with a new spirit of ironic detachment.&nbsp; These songs no longer deserved the kind of authentic (re)productions embraced by the blues revival but a new reading that revealed by the potent gaze of the punk rocker.&nbsp; The very name of the iconic early punk band, The Velvet Underground, invokes the seedy underbelly of the domesticated suburban life in the same spirit that the Germs raucous versions of Chuck Berry's "Round and Round" or Johnny Thunders version of The Commodores (and perhaps as significantly the Dave Clark Five) "Do you love me?"</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I am not positive how this relates to archaeology, but in the spirit of garage band ramblings, I offer this:&nbsp; The most recent trends in archaeology have pulled back from romantic dalliances with the idealized symbols of pure "Classical" past (think: alabaster temples and philosopher-filled stoas) and dedicated themselves to uncovering and subverting such idealized symbols through the study of the more mundane objects and spaces.&nbsp; Over the last several decades serious research has recovered the significance of domestic structures, rural installations, and coarse and utilitarian pottery.&nbsp; By appropriating the mantle and methods of Classical archaeology and its associations with utopian visions of the past, a new Mediterranean archaeology recontextualizes the research of a generations of scholars romanced by the illusory notions of authenticity offered by monumental, urban, elite architecture, sculpture, and ceramics.&nbsp; The Punk Archaeologist shifts the attention from such elaborate acts of nostalgic commemoration toward a sustained and subversive effort to appropriate the notion of the Classical in the spirit of social and political

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critique.&nbsp; The goal is less to preserve the Classical world, than to use it as weapon against itself.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Inauguration STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-inauguration CATEGORY: Current Affairs CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/20/2009 07:26:34 AM ----BODY: <p>It's difficult to think about blogging when the world is watching much more significant events unfold in Washington, D.C.&nbsp; So, instead of reading (and writing) this blog, we should all watch the Obama Inauguration (my mother-in-law is getting up at 3 am to watch it on the Sunshine Coast, Australia).&nbsp; Whatever one's political views, this will undoubtedly be a "historical" event.&nbsp; And if Obama's previous speeches are any indications, his address should be one for the ages.&nbsp; Good luck, Barack Obama.</p> <p>(Oh, because I couldn't resist, the CNN.com page that teams up with Facebook, is pretty interesting.) </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Quick Course on Art, Ritual, and Text in Early Christianity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-quick-course-on-art-ritual-and-text-in-early-christianity CATEGORY: Books CATEGORY: Byzantium

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CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 01/19/2009 07:45:51 AM ----BODY: <p>For the last few years, I've offered an informal readings for graduate and advanced level undergraduates in the Spring semester.&nbsp; In the past, I've offered readings on the Age of Augustus, The Archaeology of Late Antiquity, and Authority in the Early Christian World.&nbsp; Generally these quick courses are designed to sample (in an almost random way) some recent and classic books offered on a particular area.&nbsp; This semester's will be Experience, Ritual, and Text is Early Christianity.&nbsp; After a quick primer with some Peter Brown and Robert Taft, we'll proceed through some recent(ish) and important works that emphasize on some ways the experience of religion, religious art, and ritual in Late Antiquity.&nbsp; <p>The most glaring omission (of several) is the lack of any work on ekphrasis -- that is the poetics of description -- which became such an important component of Late Antique literature.&nbsp; I might yet add a 7th week and draw in a work like the recent edited volume by Liz James, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/69331584">Art and Text in Byzantine Culture.</a> (Cambridge:&nbsp; Cambridge University Press, 2007).&nbsp; It's also disappointing to have to leave out such classics as Thomas Mathew's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/230989180"><em>The early churches of Constantinople : architecture and liturgy</em></a>. (University Park, 1971) or <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27936933">The Clash of Gods</a> </em>(Princeton 1993). <p>But for a 6 week, non-credit, informal style readings, I think this is a nice core of material for discussion: <p align="center">Experience, Ritual, Text in Early Christianity<br>An Informal Reading<br>Syllabus </p> <p>Course Goals: <p>This is just an informal reading, but the goals are to explore some classic and recent literature on the intersection of Art, Ritual, and Text in Early Christian (and Byzantium).&nbsp; The readings will have a slight archaeological bent to them, but nevertheless attempts to touch on art historical and liturgiological approaches as well.&nbsp; The books included below are not meant to be a representative sample of recent approach nor even a good sample of Classic texts, but a gaggle of works that intersect the tangled matrix of space, ritual, art, and power in the Early Christian world. <p>Basic Texts: <p>Reading 1<br>P. Brown, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/138222">The World of Late Antiquity</a></em>. New York 1971.<br>K. Bowes, “Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field”<br>(<a href="http://www.arts.cornell.edu/Classics/faculty/KBowes_files/early%20christia n%20archaeology%20religion%20compass.pdf)">http://www.arts.cornell.edu/Classics/ faculty/KBowes_files/early%20christian%20archaeology%20religion%20compass.pdf)</ a> <p>Reading 2<br>R. Taft, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/61687634">Through their own eyes: liturgy as the Byzantine’s saw it</a></em>.&nbsp; Berkeley 2006.<br>R. Taft, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/26547561">The Byzantine Rite: A Short History</a></em>.&nbsp; Minneapolis 1992. <p>Reading 3<br>J. Elsner, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/29910320">Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity</a></em>.&nbsp; Cambridge 1995. <p>Reading 4<br>A. Wharton, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31753671">Refiguring the Post-Classical City: Dura Europas, Jerash, Jerusalem, and Ravenna</a></em>.&nbsp; Cambridge 1995. <p>Reading 5<br>S. A. Harvey, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/60454912">Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination</a></em>.&nbsp; Berkeley 2006.

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<p>Reading 6<br>K. Bowes, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/183179509">Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity</a></em>.&nbsp; Cambridge 2008. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: Current Affairs CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/16/2009 09:02:23 AM ----BODY: <p>A quartet of quick hits today, all of which deserve more lengthy explorations, but for now, just some links in old-school blog style:</p> <ul> <li>The big talk at last week's AIA Annual meeting was the University of Pennsylvania's Museum's decision to lay-off a large part of their research staff.&nbsp; While this has been news for sometime now, activities geared toward reversing this decision seems to be reaching a crescendo.&nbsp; <a href="http://pennmuseumpetition.wordpress.com/">Read about it here and sign the petition</a>. <li><a href="http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/digitalhumanities/2008/12/15/digital-humanitiesmanifesto/">A Digital Humanities Manifesto</a> (thanks to Chuck Jones at the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a>) provides an interesting point of departure and comparison with <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/di gital-humanities-history-and-archaeology-at-the-university-of-north-dakotafirst-steps.html">our own, much more modest, efforts</a>. <li>Over at <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2009/01/cyprus -rain-and-waterpark.html">Ancient History Ramblings</a>, an interesting story which could impact our work at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.cyprusmail.com/news/main.php?id=43520&amp;cat_id=1">It sounds bombastic</a>. <li><a href="http://www.stanford.edu/dept/archaeology/journal/08Papalexandrou.pdf">Anot her valuable contribution</a> by Nassos Papalexandrou to how we read the modern Cypriot landscape.</li></ul> <p>Lots of things to think about over the long weekend... including the Mighty Eagles game on Sunday.&nbsp; Go Eagles.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Revised Classes for Spring STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-revised-classes-for-spring DATE: 01/15/2009 08:20:45 AM ----BODY: <p>I apologize for missing a post yesterday.&nbsp; I seem to have acquired a catastrophic stomach bug.&nbsp; But I am back in the office today equipped with saltines and weak tea.</p> <p>I have (perhaps foolishly) revised both of my classes for this spring.&nbsp; For Western Civilization, this has involved moving some of my weekly lecture material to podcasts.&nbsp; Each podcast is around an hour and presents the basic historical narrative for the class.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The goal behind these podcasts is to allow allow me to spend more time in class dealing with primary source texts and writing skills.&nbsp; Last semester I experimented with a more lecture based format (entirely appropriate, I think, for a class of 100+ students).&nbsp; I was unsatisfied with the results overall but nevertheless regarded the format as well-suited for the dissemination of basic historical information.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/Syllabus_101_SP2009.htm ">Here's the syllabus</a>, and I will post some of the podcasts soon!</p> <p>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.&nbsp; This worked relatively well, judging from my basically solid reviews and the fairly decent final products.&nbsp; The only down side was that the class was hardly a seminar.&nbsp; 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".&nbsp; To remedy this, I have created a more focused seminar on the history of the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; This is meant to key on both the recent <a href="http://125.und.edu/">125th-i-versary celebrations</a> here at UND as well as get the students into the <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/UA/home.html">University Archives</a>.&nbsp; There is no substitute for exposing the students to real archival material (raw and unedited!).&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; If I can do this,

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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.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/Syllabus_240_SP2009.htm ">Here's the syllabus</a>, and I will report back on our progress soon!</p> <p>For more Teaching Thursday:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-tuesday-trends-in-grades-in-a-western-civilization-course.html">Teaching Tuesday: Trends in Grades in a Western Civilization Course</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/12/teaching-thursdayinterviews.html">Teaching Thursday: Interviews</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-thursday-rethinking-lectures-content-and-the-classroomvibe.html">Teaching Thursday: Rethinking Lectures, Content, and the Classroom Vibe</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-thursday-teaching-by-templates.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching by Templates</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-historical-perspective-on-teaching-research-methods-with-kateturabian.html">Teaching Thursday: A Historical Perspective on Teaching Research Methods with Kate Turabian</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-teaching-time.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching Time</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/11/teaching-thursday-classroommodernism.html">Teaching Thursday: Classroom Modernism (K. Kourelis)</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching the Election</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments.html">Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te

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aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting: Four Conversations STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-archaeological-institute-of-america-annual-meeting-fourconversations CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech CATEGORY: Weblogs DATE: 01/13/2009 08:29:09 AM ----BODY: <p>The <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10096">AIA Annual meeting</a> was as exciting and interesting as usual (I'll leave it to my more regular readers to determine whether there is sarcasm intended).&nbsp; It was good to see old friends and hear about new ideas, projects, and, well, news.&nbsp; Four conversations stuck out in my head as I traveled back to Grand Forks, and here they are:</p> <p><strong>1. Jobs.</strong>&nbsp; While most of my <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">graduate</a> <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">school</ a> <a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/history/faculty/faculty/fronda/">buddies</a> landed tenure-track positions over the last 5 years, I still know enough folks on the job market to hear about the good (2-2 teaching loads, good support for research), bad (4-4 teaching loads, budget cuts), and ugly (fractured departments, battles in interviews, little chance for tenure) jobs available.&nbsp; The reports from the AHA and the MLA appear to resonate with things at the AIA/ APA (American Philological Association) Joint Meeting.&nbsp;

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Almost everyone with whom I talked had some story about a job search being canceled or words of warning about "upcoming cuts" during the interview.&nbsp; One interesting phenomenon is that several folks told stories about job searches being accelerated to get the hiring done before the position was suspended.&nbsp; A few people told stories the entire job search -- phone interview, on-campus interview, and job offer -- taking place over a mere two weeks.&nbsp; Our department is searching right now and we were surprised when one candidate accepted a position before Christmas.&nbsp; Traditionally job offers are made in the late winter or spring.&nbsp; It may be that our lost opportunity was the product of an accelerated search.</p> <p><strong>2. Digital Archaeology.</strong> I talked with several people about archaeological field work this summer (see below), and one thing that came up in conversations was the need for IT support.&nbsp; On the one hand, this is not terribly surprising as most projects have (mostly de facto) an "IT Guy" (or person).&nbsp; On the other hand, it was interesting to hear projects talk seriously a dedicated IT expert perhaps even with long term responsibilities to the project.&nbsp; The coming of age of digital archaeology is when archaeologists understand that born-digital data requires the same level of curation as traditional techniques for archaeological recording (inventory cards, artifacts, notebooks, drawings, et c.).&nbsp; In some ways born-digital artifacts are susceptible to the same risks as an artifact of archaeological fieldwork.&nbsp; In particular, digital data requires carefully documented context to be meaningful.&nbsp; Unlike "analog" artifacts -- especially notebooks -- the techniques for preserving and maintaining digital records are not nearly as refined (yet), so archaeological IT experts must remain committed to project data at least until it reaches a stable state.&nbsp; Even then, projects appear to be aware that a basic level of maintenance is required for "legacy data"; after all, no one produces data with the expectation that it will become unusable or worthless.&nbsp; Data becomes unusable only through neglect.&nbsp; In any event, it was heartening to hear so many projects (even small ones) talking about either bringing in a dedicated IT person from the earliest planning stages and hearing more established projects designated IT "coordinator" to curate legacy data and enforce good practices in data creation.&nbsp; Some projects even talked about data integration beyond the site on a regional level.&nbsp; The era of the digital archaeologist has arrived.</p> <p><strong>3. A Fractured Field.</strong>&nbsp; I think that I heard the phrase, "that doesn't really interest me" more times at this meeting than ever before.&nbsp; I'll admit that I was guilty of this on several occasions (one might have even been documented on a digital recorder!) as I begrudged my prehistorian colleagues the abundance of panels on Aegean prehistory at the AIA!&nbsp; Some of my begrudging was for show, I have to admit. After all, we have worked for the last few years on the Late Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos on Cyprus and enjoyed the support of colleagues and funding organization in our efforts to contribute to a better understanding of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; What was vaguely more disturbing was the willingness of senior (and contemporary) colleagues to express a genuine lack of interest of work even within the more narrow disciplinary confines.&nbsp; My feigned lack of interest in the Bronze Age could be seen as reasonable since my area of specialty is some 2000 years later in time!&nbsp; A lack of interest in material produced 400 or 500 years earlier or later than one's specialization (or in a different sub-region of the Mediterranean) reflects the ever narrowing focus of our field and perhaps predicts the eventual demise of such august and long-lived organizations at the AIA.&nbsp; Already, conferences like the Byzantine Studies Conference, Dumbarton Oaks Symposia, annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting, the Society of American Archaeologists, and regional groups like the Classical

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Association of the Midwest and South offer smaller and potentially more focused environments for scholarly exchange.&nbsp; As money for travel to conferences becomes more scarce (not to mention the money to put on such major events), perhaps the lack of interest among scholars who are more devoted to their narrow research fields (rather than larger disciplines) simply marks out a practical, intellectual reality of our changing times.&nbsp; <a href="http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/article/?id=1084&amp;utm_source=at& amp;utm_medium=en">Stan Katz offered a similar (if more articulate) critique of the American Historical Association Annual Meeting at the Chronicle Review Blog</a>. Despite my posturing, I'd be sad to see the AIA go.&nbsp; I think that we have far more to learn from our colleagues than we sometimes realize.</p> <p><strong>4. </strong><a href="http://www.pkap.org"><strong>Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</strong></a><strong> Logistics.</strong> I spent a good bit of time on Thursday and throughout the meeting talking logistics with my fellow directors of the Pyla-Kousopetria Archaeological Project.&nbsp; It looks like we will have over 30 people this year on the project ranging from almost completely inexperienced undergraduates to specialists in Bronze Age pottery, Roman wall-painting, and the history of the Medieval Cyprus.&nbsp; We had designed our project from the start to be "scalable".&nbsp; We began with 6, 3 students and 3 faculty, and each year expanded our operation.&nbsp; With over 30 slated to come for at least part of the time, we'll certainly push the limits of scalability.&nbsp; This blog began as a means to make our planning and field work on Cyprus more transparent.&nbsp; While it has expanded and wandered over the almost 15 months of its life, it will continue to keep our stakeholders informed of our planning and our day-to-day activities in the field.</p> <p>Finally, I was approached a number of times this weekend by folks with kind words for this blog.&nbsp; Apparently it was mentioned in several contexts at the Meetings, and this corresponds with a spike in hits over the weekend.&nbsp; I do not do much to promote this blog (although it is listed in the various indexed blog-searches and has even appears occasionally in Google Scholar), so it was really encouraging to hear that people appreciate my musings.&nbsp; Thanks!&nbsp; And if you are a visitor or a new reader, I hope you find my blog entertaining (at least) or informative or just pathetic in an endearing way.&nbsp; After all, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/01/co ld.html">it's cold out here</a>, and blogging helps keep me warm.&nbsp; Keep coming back and I'll keep posting.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Cold STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: cold

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CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 01/13/2009 07:23:01 AM ----BODY: <p>This is the vision that greeted me this morning.&nbsp; The time, the inside temperature, and two little dashes telling me that it was too cold to register any temperature outside.&nbsp; That's -35 F (although the F doesn't really matter).</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536c2abc3970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="470" alt="cold" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536c2abc8970b -pi" width="200" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Three New Sites in the Eastern Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: three-new-sites-in-the-eastern-corinthia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 01/12/2009 07:38:22 AM ----BODY: <p>Sorry about the brief intermission in blogging.&nbsp; I was attending the 110th Annual Meeting of the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/">Archaeological Institute of America.</a>&nbsp; I'll blog some tomorrow on my discussions there.&nbsp; (And I'll get back to my regular blogging routine as the semester starts today!).</p> <p>For now, here is our paper delivered on Friday (with the SLIDE notes and all).&nbsp; Thanks to all the folks who offered comments, comparanda, and encouragement.&nbsp; It was really heartening to see the room filled for the paper.&nbsp; For more on our research in the Eastern Corinthia see the links <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/ar chaeological-institute-of-america-annual-meeting-the-corinthian-countryside-atthe-aia.html">at the bottom of this post</a>.</p> <p align="center">"Three New Sites in the Eastern Corinthia”<br>William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota<br>David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College </p> <p align="center">Delivered at the 110th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America<br>Philadelphia, PA January 9, 2009 </p> <p><strong><em>Introduction</em></strong><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Over the last

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several decades, regional programs of archaeological research have populated the Greek countryside with Classical and Hellenistic farmsteads, buildings, monuments, and places associated with the ephemeral activities of rural life [SLIDE].&nbsp; Among the most debated type of site are rural towers which have been variously interpreted as storage facilities for farmsteads, communication beacons, local strongholds, and even slave quarters.&nbsp; If little consensus has emerged regarding their function in the Greek countryside, it is because even modest variation in form and context can indicate major differences in the function of these installations.&nbsp; The best way forward in interpreting the function of these buildings&nbsp; [SLIDE] is to make arguments based on a refined understanding of their local historical, archaeological, and topographical contexts.&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Our paper today seeks to place a series of three newly discovered rural installations in the Eastern Korinthia into their local context [SLIDE].&nbsp;&nbsp; The sites are Ano Vayia, Lychnari, and Kato Vayia and were first discovered in 2003 during the course of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.&nbsp; With the continued support of the project's directors and with a study permit provided by the Ephoria of Classical Antiquities, we returned to the sites in 2008 to document the visible architecture and to study the ceramic artifacts collected in previous seasons.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; While our analysis of these towers should contribute to the broader discussion of the significance and function of the rural installations, our principal aim of this paper is to provide specific information on the Late Classical and Hellenistic landscape of the Eastern Corinthia.&nbsp; [SLIDE] Despite two decades of intensive regional survey throughout the Corinthia, the coastal zone of the Eastern Corinthia south of the modern town of Loutro Elenis and north of the harbor of Korphos has been largely overlooked.&nbsp; Recent work in this microregion has produced a dynamic landscape of agriculturally productive land, mountain passes, and small harbors occupied at least as early as the Bronze Age.&nbsp; The presence of ClassicalHellenistic rural buildings in this area suggests that it was a significant component of the Corinthian chora. </p> <p><strong><em>Topography of the Vayia/Lychnari Area</em></strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The importance of this area for the city of Corinth lies in its place within communication and travel networks between the Isthmus and the Epidauria.&nbsp; The rocky spine of Mt. Oneion forms the dramatic southern boundary to the flat plain of the Corinthian Isthmus [SLIDE], stretching from the imposing rock of Acrokorinth to the harbor town of Kenchreai in the east.&nbsp; To move south along the eastern coast of the Korinthia, avoiding both Corinth and the fortifications near Kenchreai, required crossing Mt. Oneion through several passes fortified during the Late Classical period.&nbsp; Once south of the mountain there were several routes through the mountainous country of the southeastern Korinthia.&nbsp; [SLIDE] These routes provided access to cultivatable valleys and unfortified settlements, roads west into the Argolid and south into the Epidauria, and several ancient embayments.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The bay of Lychnari is one of the best natural inlets on the rugged coast of the Eastern Corinthia [SLIDE].&nbsp; While no evidence for ancient harbor works has been found there, its sheltered aspect and relatively flat beach would have been well-suited for ancient ships.&nbsp;&nbsp; The peninsula known as Vayia shields the small bay from the east and the rocky hilltop of Lychnari protects the bay below from the western wind.&nbsp; Lychnari Bay opens inland onto a relatively broad valley bounded to the north by the coastal ridge and to the south by the abrupt mountains of the Corinthian interior. [SLIDE] The valley bottom provides relatively easy passage from the vicinity of Lychnari bay and the nearby village of Katakali northwestward to the low hills south of Oneion, where are today the modern villages of Almyri, Loutro

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Elenis, and Galataki, and in antiquity, the settlement of Solygeia.&nbsp; Further north, passing over the low hill of Stanotopi, is the Isthmus of Corinth and the harbor town of Kenchreai.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Immediately to the east of Lychnari, a small, pebbly beach sits at the mouth of the seasonal Vayia river. [SLIDE].&nbsp; Walking inland from this beach, it is easy to turn west toward Lychnari bay over the low northern end of the Vayia peninsula.&nbsp;&nbsp; An ascent up the steep, but not unmanageable southern bank of the Vayia River affords access to a high pass that runs southward below the coastal height of Kakia Rachi.&nbsp; [SLIDE] This pass leads to the bay of Frangolimano whence a traveler can proceed inland, past the fortified Classical site of Ay. Paraskevi and onward toward the valley of Sophiko and the Epidauria beyond.&nbsp; <p><em><strong>Remains in the Vayia Area&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br></strong>Architectural Remains</em>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The most extensive remains in the region of Lychnari and Vayia stand atop the hill that we have called Ano Vayia to distinguish it from the site of Kato Vayia below [SLIDE].&nbsp; The remains consist of a long, north-south oriented complex constructed of rough polygonal masonry.&nbsp; Its most imposing feature is its western wall which is preserved to a height of over 1 m&nbsp; [SLIDE].&nbsp; In several places along the course of the wall, it is clear that the builders cut back bedrock to form a solid base for the building [SLIDE]. At its midway point, there is a gap in the wall of slightly over 2 m where the bedrock was trimmed back [SLIDE].&nbsp; This gap, which divides our complex into northern and southern structures, presumably represents an entrance to an east-west corridor between the different parts of the building.&nbsp; The corridor runs eastward to the foundation of a round tower [SLIDE].&nbsp; The lowest course of the tower remains in situ and suggests a structure with a diameter of 6.2 m.&nbsp; The carefully-coursed stones preserved roughly-cut, curved profiles on their outer faces.&nbsp; A considerable quantity of similarly curved stones are scattered down the eastern side of the hill.&nbsp; The round tower is clearly a component of the rest of the compound but the exact architectural relationship is unclear. <p><em>Distributional Data</em><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In conjunction with the initial planning of the site, members of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey conducted a small-scale, highly localized, intensive pedestrian survey of the Ano Vayia hill [SLIDE].&nbsp; Unsurprisingly, this survey established that the densest concentration of material occurred around the architecture present on the top of the hill with dramatically declining densities further down the slope.&nbsp; The units immediately adjacent to the collapsed buildings showed artifact densities of nearly 2,000 artifacts per hectare which were comparable to the generally high artifact density that EKAS documented across the busy Corinthian Isthmus.&nbsp; It seems probable that the material in the immediate vicinity of the collapsed buildings represents a distinct and localized phenomenon in the landscape.&nbsp; <br>Ceramic Finds<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Aside from a small number of Late Medieval and Early Modern sherds, the ceramic assemblage at Ano Vayia dates to the Late Classical-Early Hellenistic period.&nbsp; The most common class of artifacts present are slipped Laconian and Corinthian roof tiles [SLIDE]. These tiles were present not only on the surface of the ground around the buildings, but amidst the tumble on the interior of the structures, and indicate that at least part of the structure was roofed.&nbsp; The different kinds of roof tiles, as well as visible repairs to the north wall of the south structure, suggest distinct episodes of construction at the complex.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In addition to the tiles, there are numerous pithos sherds [SLIDE] and, less commonly, Corinthian B and A amphora sherds and Classical-Hellenistic cooking wares. The scatter is almost completely utilitarian nature.&nbsp; The pithos and amphora sherds, in particular, suggest that storage was a priority at the site.&nbsp; The paucity of kitchen ware and

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the absence of fine wares suggest that the occupation of the building atop Ano Vayia was relatively short term or at least not very intensive.&nbsp; Fine wares and kitchen wares are far less common in use assemblages than amphoras and storage wares, and typically appear only after occupations of considerable length or intensity. <br>Lychnari Tower&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The second major site documented by the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey lies on the hill of Lychnari immediately to the north of the bay with the same name [SLIDE].&nbsp; On its eastern side some 20 m to the southeast of the geodetic marker are the remains of another round tower.&nbsp; Like the fortifications at Ano Vayia, the tower is coursed, rough polygonal in construction and includes stones of massive size.&nbsp; The walls are relatively very well-preserved [SLIDE]. The outer face is traceable for two-thirds of its circuit producing a tower of over 8 meters in diameter with walls over 1 m in width.&nbsp; [SLIDE] While today the remains stand only 1.5 m in height, Young’s informal estimate of heights for these towers suggest that their height could be 2 – 2.5 times their diameter.&nbsp;&nbsp; If this is even a rough indicator, the tower may have stood to over 15 meters in height.&nbsp; The tower at Lychnari can be dated to the Classical to Hellenistic period on the basis of pottery imbedded in the tumble of the building and scattered around the general area.&nbsp; The assemblage, which was not documented intensively, included pithoi, amphoras, and painted Corinthian tile fragments. This material is consistent with the rough-polygonal masonry and date the structure within a significant margin of reliability.&nbsp; We observed only one later ceramic fragment, an early Roman lamp fragment dating to the 1st-2nd century AD, found in the vicinity of the tower.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <p><strong><em>The Remains Near Vayia</em></strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The final group of remains likely datable to the Late Classical – Hellenistic period stand on the peninsula of Vayia proper which projects northwestward into the Saronic Gulf and shelters the eastern side of the harbor of Lychnari [SLIDE].&nbsp; The remains on the peninsula are poorly preserved so it is not possible to determine its complete plan.&nbsp; They exist amidst a scatter of ceramic material that is very similar to the utilitarian and coarse material found around Ano Vayia and the tower at Lychnari.&nbsp; Moreover, the rubble construction style is similar to the fortifications documented at both Stanotopi and by this author on the heights of Mt. Oneion.&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The most clearly defined features at Vayia are a series of long rubble walls and extensive piles of tumble [SLIDE].&nbsp; The best preserved wall runs for close to 40 m from southeast to northwest, curving slightly to follow the natural contours of the peninsula and bounding the western side of the level area along the top of the Vayia ridge.&nbsp; This wall is constructed of unworked, local grey limestone stacked in irregular courses to form two faces approximately 1 m apart, with cobble fill between the faces. [SLIDE] There are several square rooms that project into the interior of this rubble enceinte.&nbsp;&nbsp; While it is nearly impossible to offer a definitive interpretation of this complex of walls on the Vayia peninsula, the uniformity of the ceramics associated with the structures and the extensive system of rubble walls recommends a fortification of the Classical – Hellenistic period. The closest analogy in the Corinthia for this kind of informal construction are the walls on Stantopi and Oneion which are similarly constructed of rubble masonry and situated atop strategically significant heights.&nbsp;&nbsp; <p><strong><em>Discussion: Function, Topography, and History</em></strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Recent scholarship has associated isolated rural towers in the countryside with economic purposes such as agricultural storage, fortified farmsteads, and quarters for slaves involved in mining endeavors.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; At present, we see several reasons for concluding that the sites in the vicinity of Lychnari bay functioned chiefly to protect this agriculturally rich and strategically significant stretch of the Corinthian countryside [SLIDE].&nbsp; First, the position of the Lychnari and Ano Vayia towers at the highest points in their landscape encourage us to understand these structures as military installations guarding the travel and transportation corridors through the region. The Lychnari tower sits on the far western side of the Lychnari hill and was positioned to overlook Lychnari Bay and the north coast of the Corinthia rather than the agricultural lands extending to the east below.&nbsp; The Ano Vayia tower overlooked the pass from Frangolimano as well as the Vayia River valley rather than the agricultural land to its south and east.&nbsp; The towers are intervisible and would have provided good views to all major routes by land and sea.&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Second, these towers were also clearly visible both from the land routes through the region and from the Saronic Gulf.&nbsp; If the function of these towers were only for local land owners to protect their human or material property, one can imagine less obvious locations that would provide similar views toward the land and sea but without being so prominent in the landscape.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A third and final piece of evidence is that none of these three sites produces the variety of ceramics that would be consistent with longer-term habitation.&nbsp; Certainly the Lychnari and the Ano Vayia tower may have supported habitation (in addition to military functions),&nbsp; but the dearth of kitchen wares and fine wares at least suggests that occupation of these towers was on the lowinvestment and short-term end of the spectrum.&nbsp; We can contrast the rather bare-bones ceramic assemablage of these three sites with the typical ClassicalHellenistic assemblage observed elsewhere, on the Corinthian Isthmus, where amphora, cooking wares, and fine wares are typically found together and in abundance. The utilitarian character of the Vayia and Lynchnari assemblages, when taken together with the evidence from topography outlined above, are more consistent with what we would expect from a fortified garrison than a family farm.&nbsp; It is, of course, possible that further clearing and excavation would reveal a wider diversity of ceramics that could change this interpretation.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Historical evidence for Corinthian fortification during the Classical to Hellenistic period tend to focus on efforts to block military forces from moving through the Isthmus.&nbsp; In general, the various states that sought to fortify the Isthmus were not concerned with defending Corinthian territory, per se.&nbsp; In contrast to these better-known fortifications, the towers in the vicinity of Lychnari did little to protect the Peloponnesus generally [SLIDE].&nbsp; Armies that bypassed the fortifications along the Isthmus by sea en route to the Peloponnesus avoided the fortifications at Lychnari as well.&nbsp; Consequently, it is logical to read these sites as installations of the either the Corinthian state or even local residents in an effort to fortify its territory.&nbsp; The ease with which an army could pass north from the bay at Lychnari or even Frangolimano into Corinthian chora south of Oneion made the fortification of this stretch of coastline a crucial component of any strategy to protect Corinthian territory.&nbsp; [SLIDE] Unlike the massive trans-isthmian efforts built in response to particular threats, the Corinthians could have built these smaller, regional towers at almost any point over the course of the Classical and Hellenistic period.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Digital Humanities White Paper at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: digital-humanities-white-paper-at-the-university-of-north-dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/07/2009 07:21:50 AM ----BODY: <p>Crystal Alberts (Department of English, UND) and I have submitted a white paper to the President of the University in response to his call for trans- and inter disciplinary working groups at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; The plan is apparently to target groups with outstanding potential and to facilitate funding either from campus sources or from elsewhere.&nbsp; Consequently, our White Paper stressed the potential of our group and its need for funding.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/th e-potential-and-role-of-digital-humanities-at-the-university-of-northdakota.html">As I noted previously in this blog</a>, the president seems to have assumed that a "center" dedicated to the digital humanities already exists on campus; it does not.&nbsp; I am not sure whether this will help or hinder our chances! <p>Here's the white paper: <p align="center"><strong><em>White Paper for a Digital Humanities Group at the University of North Dakota</em></strong> <p>Digital technology has come to play an increasingly important role in the humanities (i.e., history and literature), the arts, and archaeology.&nbsp; Scholars are more and more dependent on digital resources ranging from online publications to text queries, archives of digitized historical sources, collections of photographs, and databases.&nbsp; Students and faculty have found in the new media a way to travel beyond the classroom, to analyze and explore diverse types of historical evidence and data, and to build learning communities together.&nbsp; The impact of the digital humanities extends beyond the walls of the university and holds forth the potential not only to bring our research and teaching to a broader audience, but also to forge new local and global communities committed to the intellectual and academic mission of the university.&nbsp; Institutions committed to interpreting, producing, and teaching the emerging, digital media in the humanities will shape the future of the information or knowledge economy.&nbsp; <p>While some work in the digital humanities has already occurred on this campus, a more substantial online presence would allow us to open our doors to the wider public and invite them to engage in research and learning in the field, library, and classroom.&nbsp; Institutions like the University of Virginia and University of North CarolinaChapel Hill have long-standing programs in the digital humanities and archaeology; less august institutions like the University at Buffalo, the University of Nevada-Reno, the University of Vermont, and the University of Kentucky have already followed their lead in creating institutional entities to

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cultivate the development of digital humanities on their campuses.&nbsp; Centers, Institutes, and Working Groups focus the intellectual resources and develop the cyber-infrastructure necessary to promote research and teaching projects in the digital humanities, arts, and archaeology.&nbsp; Most federal funding bodies for the humanities now require such established, institutional commitment to cyber-infrastructure and core digital resources before they will fund research projects.&nbsp; The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) at the NEH clearly states that preference will be given to projects that include freely available digital components that are maintained by an institution.&nbsp; In the private sector, our expanding information economy demands graduates with degrees in the humanities who have levels of digital literacy that go beyond simple webbrowsing to engage the theoretical and conceptual foundations of digital knowledge management.&nbsp; The University of North Dakota is poised to expand the teaching and research work of digital humanists (in their many guises), which, in turn, will increase the intellectual possibilities for our students, as well as the intellectual, infrastructural, and financial resources available to individual researchers. <p>Fortunately, the core for such a center exists among our current faculty in the departments of history, English, philosophy, archaeology, art, music, and aerospace, as well as the staff of the Chester Fritz Library (CFL), because they are currently engaged in digital research and scholarship.&nbsp; For example, based on his archaeological fieldwork in the Eastern Mediterranean, Dr. William Caraher of the Department of History produces digital data ranging from GIS maps to databases, photographs, and new media productions, including two documentaries. Dr. Crystal Alberts of the Department of English worked with students to digitize the UND Board of Regents Minutes from 1883 to 1893; this full-text collection is currently available through the CFL.&nbsp; She serves as the technical editor for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded Elizabeth Barrett Browning Project.&nbsp; Dr. Jack Weinstein of the Department of Philosophy and Religion has also asked her to assist him with the digital archive for the proposed Institute for Philosophy in Public Life, a group formed in partnership with the North Dakota Humanities Council and Prairie Public Radio.&nbsp; In addition, the CFL already has a number of open-access digital collections available, such as UND Image Collection, W. P. Davis Columns, and the MacDonald Cartoons. The English department has also offered a 400-level course in digital humanities or the past two semesters, each had an enrollment beyond capacity. <p>To remain competitive with our peer institutions and produce students capable of succeeding in a dynamic and challenging economy, it is necessary to develop the infrastructure to support sustained synergistic, transdisciplinary, research and teaching in the digital humanities. A center or working group in the digital humanities will promote the sharing of knowledge among practitioners of digital humanities on campus, collaborative research, and unique instructional opportunities.&nbsp; Such intellectual adjacency will both promote and develop faculty and student expertise in new media and emerging technologies. The students’ interest in new media has been demonstrated not only by their enrollment in digital humanities courses, but also by their continued involvement with digital projects on campus.&nbsp; In addition to integrating intellectual resources, this group will allow for physical adjacency in the centralizing of technology. Finally, the creating of a center or working group will focus important attention on the various collections, datasets, audio-visual materials, and new media productions developed at UND. Bringing these resources together in a single, transdisciplinary portal created by our organization will produce data central to assessing the impact, reach, and success of the group and their projects. Moreover, administrative recognition and commitment to a group dedicated to digital research and scholarship improves the chances that federal

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grants will be awarded to UND faculty. <p>At present, we have faculty members who have both the technological skills and interest in forming a group dedicated to the digital humanities, arts, and archaeology on campus.&nbsp; Our group will have three goals.&nbsp; First, we will promote and support teaching and research in the digital humanities, arts, and archaeology by creating a transdisciplinary working group.&nbsp; Second, we will use this working group to create a center on campus recognized by the State Board of Higher Education.&nbsp; Finally, we will seek to make this center self-sustaining through individual and group grants in the digital humanities.&nbsp; In support of these goals, we have already been working with the help of and in collaboration with the library to ensure that our projects comply with the established standards and best practices across our disciplinary fields (literature, history, art, archaeology, philosophy).&nbsp; The library also currently has a subscription to CONTENTdm, digital collection management software (limited to 10,000 objects), which is primarily designed for storage and retrieval of images. In addition, thanks to the fundraising efforts and initiative of Dr. Caraher, we have access to five terabytes (TB) of server space for data storage and online delivery.&nbsp; Because our projects our research oriented, the server space is connected to the high performance computing cluster and will be supported by ITSS through EPSCoR funding.&nbsp; The formation of this group is also a high priority in the Arts &amp; Sciences campaign. <p>Despite these initiatives, we need additional resources to make this group and its work function to maximum potential.&nbsp; Specifically, we would like physical space allocated on campus that is wired for our technological requirements.&nbsp; Wilbur Stolt has suggested that the library may have such a space for us in the library.&nbsp; We believe that this space, with minimal remodeling and expense, would be logistically and symbolically ideal.&nbsp; It is centrally located, and, perhaps more importantly, would allow faculty immediate access to the institution’s information repository.&nbsp; We would also like $1000 a year for at least the next three years dedicated to increasing the library’s scholarly resources related to digital scholarship and research.&nbsp; Because this group is meant to facilitate discussion and the exchange of information, we would like to establish a lecture series that would provide a forum for both on campus and off-campus scholars to present their digital research scholarship.&nbsp; Because this field is ever changing, we would like to offer workshops to train interested faculty in digital technology, again, tapping the knowledge of on campus faculty, as well as bringing off-campus experts in various related fields to UND.&nbsp; Finally, while we already have dozens of files stored in Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) compliant XML, the standard for full-text digitization, UND does not currently have the technological capability to make them fully searchable online.&nbsp; As such, we would like to purchase the middleware that would enable these files to be fully functional. This middleware will move our collections beyond static web pages and make them comparable to ones available at the University of Virginia, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.&nbsp; Neither the University of Minnesota nor North Dakota State University currently have the capacity for sophisticated text anaylses and queries provided by this software.&nbsp; This software will serve as an instant catalyst for the text digitization projects taking place on campus and garner national recognition. <p>The digital humanities, as all humanistic inquiry, is inherently transdiciplinary.&nbsp; Developing the synergy on campus to tap into existing faculty, staff, student, and technological resources will maximize the university’s commitment to engaging the emerging information and knowledge economy.&nbsp; This keeps us competitive with the activities of our peer institutions and represents an area of expertise that does not yet exist in the

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state or the region. It will also make our research freely available to the entire state of North Dakota, the region, and the world.&nbsp; These criteria alone ensure that the UND would be an attractive center for external funding.&nbsp; In an environment of increased competition for resources, funding a digital humanities working group provides an opportunity to capitalize on resources already available on campus and to perpetuate the very kind of synergistic adjacency that the College and University has already made great sacrifices to achieve.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Considering Early Christian Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: considering-early-christian-archaeology CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Religion DATE: 01/06/2009 08:15:01 AM ----BODY: <p>By chance, I stumbled upon a rather recent article by Kim Bowes in a relatively new journal called <em>Religion Compass</em>: "<a href="http://www.arts.cornell.edu/Classics/faculty/KBowes_files/early%20christia n%20archaeology%20religion%20compass.pdf">Early Christian Archaeology: A State of the Field</a>".&nbsp; It just so happened that I was looking (weakly) for just such an article to frame an informal reading that I plan to conduct this spring on "Space, Ritual, and Text in Late Antiquity" (or some variation).&nbsp; It's a nice survey of the odd beast that is Early Christian Archaeology.&nbsp; Bowes concludes that the field is becoming increasingly attuned to he relationship between text and archaeology (although not attuned enough to delve very deeply or confidently with the standard tools of textual interpretation used by scholars elsewhere in the humanities (p. 578-579)).&nbsp; At the same time she also detects a growing interest in the economies of Early Christian material culture especially the influence of Christian ways of thinking on practices of euergetism in the Mediterranean world.&nbsp; I devoted a substantial part of a chapter to this in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/59019454">my dissertation</a>, so it was nice to see that my ideas fell within general trends in the field.</p> <p>This article has much to recommend it as a broad overview of the discipline.&nbsp; There are, however, several areas where Bowes missed an interesting chance to consider the broader significance of the field of Early Christian

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Archaeology.&nbsp; After all, it is relatively unusual that a field exists that studies a particular type of archaeological material, Christian material, in the context of a master narrative (presumably the development and spread of Christianity) that no longer asserts an exclusively "totalizing" discourse.&nbsp; That is to say, most scholars who study Early Christian material do not necessarily regard the spread of Christianity or its development to be the central narrative to their own research, much less the study of the past more broadly.&nbsp; While one could point out that archaeologist who study the Classical period rarely make explicit claim to the narrative assumptions implicit in the notion of a Classical period (right?), this term has become somewhat (if not problematically) generic in defining a particular date range (say 480-338 BC) of material.&nbsp; </p> <p>The term Early Christian, however, does not stake as strong a claim to particular date range and, in fact, represents just one of any number of overlapping terms to describe the 3rd-8th centuries A.D. (Although it is worth pointing out that in some circles the notion of Early Christianity can extend back to the 1st century AD.&nbsp; This, I think, genuinely reflects differing interpretations of the origins and development of Christianity.&nbsp; As far as I know, no one pushes the Classical period back to 7th century (which is different from saying that developments in the 7th century did not influence institutions of the Classical period).)&nbsp; I tend to tell people that I study Late Antiquity or the Late Roman period, although my dissertation title refers to "Early Christian Greece".&nbsp; In some quarters I might even refer to some Early Christian material as Early Byzantine.&nbsp; There is even the shifty and confusing term "Dark Ages" which refers to the 7th and 8th centuries that could also be Late Antique or (and I am making this up to some degree) Late Early Christian.&nbsp; </p> <p>Silliness aside, each of these terms imply master narratives that exert a lingering influence on the perception, overarching questions, and basic organization of the fields.&nbsp; For example, Early Christian archaeology clearly assumes that the religious development of Christianity can be extracted, to some extent, as an independent variable from its broader historical and archaeological context.&nbsp; While one can hardly dispute the significance of Christianity in the history of the west, one wonders whether the notion of a specific Early Christian archaeology remains a viable approach to understanding the past.&nbsp; </p> <p>These comments should not be regarded as a critique of Bowes fine article.&nbsp; In fact, she demonstrates that the field of Early Christian archaeology is far from isolated or parochial in its approach to the past and, moreover, quite aware of its baggage as a field. What was a bit striking, however, is that she did not really engage much with the sticky question of the archaeology of religion in a general sense.&nbsp; The material culture of ritual activities, iconography, holy places, much less belief itself have a far more contested discourse both within the specific field of Early Christian archaeology (how can you be sure that the people <em>were </em>Christian?) and within the field of archaeology more broadly.&nbsp; One of the key powers of an Early Christian archaeology is its ability to force archaeologists to problematize religion (and its myriad manifestations) as a category of archaeological analysis in general.&nbsp; Bowes touches upon some of these things in her article -- noting the difficulty in identifying monastic establishments (598-602), the archaeological ephemeral nature of of house churches (579-582), and the religious ambiguity of the catacombs (582-586) -but does not really engage the significance of this debate.&nbsp; If Christianity (and religion more generally) ends up being a relatively unimportant (or invisible) component in the material assemblage marking individual identity in Late Antiquity, where does that leave the discipline of Early Christian archaeology?</p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Victoria Silvers EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 68.196.208.224 URL: DATE: 04/15/2010 12:29:39 PM Hi, This is Victoria Silvers, Asst. Editor for Christian.com which is a social network made specifically for Christians, by Christians, to directly fulfill Christian's needs. We embarked on this endeavor to offer the ENTIRE christian community an outlet to join together as one (no matter denomination) and better spread the good word of Christianity. Christian.com has many great features aside from the obvious like christian TV, prayer request or even find a church/receive advice. We have emailed you because we have interest in collaborating with you and your blog to help us spread the good word. I look forward to an email regarding the matter, Thanks! God Bless, Victoria Silvers [email protected] -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Landscape Archaeology and Photography at the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: landscape-archaeology-and-photography-at-the-pyla-koustopetriaarchaeological-project CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 01/05/2009 07:42:58 AM ----BODY: <p>This winter, I've been working to recruit a talented photographer to my project in Cyprus.&nbsp; As part of that processes, it seemed like a good idea to attempt to articulate exactly why a photographer with an interest in sacred landscapes and place would be a good fit for our project.&nbsp; After all, we would not be asking him to take photographs of pottery or trenches or any of the

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other things that traditionally play a role in archaeological <p align="center"><br>Photography and Landscape on a Mediterranean Archaeological Project<br></p> <p><strong><em>Introduction</em></strong>:<br>The <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> (PKAP) has investigated the 2 sq. km coastal zone of Pyla Village in Cyprus since 2003.&nbsp; The project is a transdisciplinary, landscape-oriented&nbsp; investigation that has drawn upon an international team of archaeologists, historians, geologists, illustrators, and other specialists to produce a vivid, diachronic, archaeological history of a significant coastal site.&nbsp; In conjunction with this work, we have maintained a strong interest in engaging the wider public through the innovative use of the new media (interactive websites, blogs, podcasts, et c.) and through an "artist-in-residence" program.&nbsp; In 2005 and 2007 Josiah Patrow, an award winning filmmaker, served as artist-inresidence and produced two well-received documentaries.&nbsp; In 2009, we have invited <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Ryan Stander</a>, a photographer and M.F.A. student at the University of North Dakota, to join the PKAP team.&nbsp; As artist-in-residence, he will have complete artistic freedom to engage the landscape of Cyprus, archaeological fieldwork, and the personalities and individuals of the PKAP team.&nbsp; Ryan's interest in sacred landscapes, the creation of place, and the interplay of human and natural environments coincides well with the project's archaeological interest in landscape approaches to understanding the human past.&nbsp; By subjecting both project and place to the photographer's gaze, we hope to introduce an exciting new context both to our work as archaeologists as well as the landscape in which we work.&nbsp;&nbsp; <br></p> <p><strong><em>Summary</em></strong>:<br>Landscape archaeology, in the broadest sense, is the study of the relationship between the natural and man-made environment over time.&nbsp; Generally speaking, a landscape approach to archaeology looks beyond the relatively narrow confines of a single site in order to apprehend the myriad environmental, cultural, and political relationships that shaped a particular group or community's relationship access to resources.&nbsp; Most landscape archaeological projects, therefore, have emphasized methods that go beyond excavation to include methods for documenting more spatial extensive areas. <br></p> <p>The most recent wave of landscape archaeologists have come increasingly to recognize the role of the archaeologist in the construction of archaeological landscapes.&nbsp; This work has placed the researcher within the landscape and emphasized the archaeological method itself as an artifact of the intersecting influences that recursively define and produce a distinctly modern sense place.&nbsp; In this context archaeological fieldwork emerges as one of any number of processes that create meaningful landscapes, rather than a method for creating a singular, unified landscape that contains an exclusive command of relationship between the past and place.&nbsp; This repositioning of&nbsp; archaeology has opened the door to productive dialogues with other fields that are similarly concerned with the issues of material culture, landscape, and place.&nbsp; This dialogue has encouraged the discipline to think critically about the methods that they use to create landscapes and realize that documenting archaeologists' engagement with the landscape forms a crucial part of contextualizing (and legitimizing) archaeological knowledge.<br><br>Since its inception, photography has played a key role in archaeological research. Tendencies to view the camera's eye uncritically as an objective representation of material reality have gradually given way to more sophisticated understandings of the camera's role in producing the kind of illusive objectivity that formed a compelling foundation for archaeological knowledge.&nbsp; While photographs of artifacts, architecture, and even topography will continue to appear as evidence for archaeological arguments, there has been less attention to work of photographers in creating

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the same kind of dynamic, discursive landscapes that archaeological knowledge imagines.&nbsp; By incorporating an experienced landscape photographer into a landscape archaeological project, we seek to problematize in an explicit way the role of photography in the creation of archaeological knowledge.&nbsp; <br><br>To do this, we have charged a landscape photographer with producing a vivid and independent counterpoint to the landscapes produced through more traditional archaeological techniques and analysis.&nbsp; By maintaining our fieldwork at the center of the photographer's gaze, we seek not only to produce an alternate image of the physical environment, but also to create a perspective on the archaeological landscape in the process of being created.&nbsp; The tension between the photographer's perspective, the natural and man-made environment, and the ongoing fieldwork&nbsp; will serve to contextualize archaeological knowledge as well as the subjective power of the photographer's gaze.&nbsp; <br></p> <p><strong><em>Photography in Context</em></strong>: <br>The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project takes place against four different backdrops.&nbsp; Each environment reveals a different engagement archaeological knowledge and the social dynamics that make such knowledge possible.&nbsp; While Stander will be free to interpret the project however he sees fit, we thought it might prove the viability of the project by establishing a mis-en-scene for the day-to-day activities. <br><br>1) The Project in the Field. Most afternoons and many mornings teams from the project will be active at three sites in the field.&nbsp; During the 2009 fieldseason we will conduct small scale excavations on the prominent coastal heights of Pyla-Kokkinokremos and Pyla-Vigla as well as on the coastal plain at Pyla-Koutsopetria.&nbsp; These three areas are intervisible and stretch over 1.5 km along the coast.&nbsp; The field teams consist typically of groups of 4-6 student excavators and a trench supervisor.&nbsp; The directors of the project, William Caraher, David Pettegrew, and Scott Moore, and generally on hand as well.<br><br>2) The Project at the Museum.&nbsp; Most mornings are occupied with work at the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum.&nbsp; The work here consists of washing pottery excavated the previous day and processing finds from the previous seasons of fieldwork.&nbsp; Generally work at the museum comes under the supervision of the registrar of finds and our ceramicist, Scott Moore.&nbsp; The team at the museum is typically rather smaller than the team in the field usually consisting of 5 or 6 students and various specialists who are assisting with the analysis of finds.<br><br>3) The Project at Base Camp.&nbsp; The evenings are spent at "base camp" which is a series of rooms at the Petrou Brothers' Holiday Apartments in downtown Larnaka.&nbsp; The work at base camp consists of preparing the evening meal, data entry, planning meetings, and informal conversations regarding the functioning of the project.&nbsp; Since the quarters are quite close, work at the base camp appears chaotic.<br><br>4) The Project in the City.&nbsp; Unlike many archaeological projects we live and work in the bustling small city of Larnaka.&nbsp; Like so many Mediterranean cities, the history of the city is deeply inscribed in urban fabric. Byzantine churches, Frankish monasteries, mosques, and modern concrete buildings crowd and jostle each other attention in the densely built up urban center.<br></p> <p><strong><em>Goals:</em></strong><br>The goal of this project is to produce a public exhibition of the photographs in the fall of 2009 and present a selection of these work online as an online gallery with commentary and discussion.&nbsp; The expectation is that the images that Stander provides will complement and challenge the image of the landscape produced through archaeological fieldwork and problematize the notion of a stable photographic and archaeological reality.&nbsp; Along with the work of Joe Patrow during the 2005 and 2007 fieldseasons, Stander's work will continue the project's commitment to a

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reflexive position toward archaeological research and form a vital component to the project's final archive.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/02/2009 08:59:36 AM ----BODY: <p>Happy New Year everyone.&nbsp; Here is a little batch of Friday stuff:</p> <ul> <li>Brandon Olson's <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/">Histor ical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean</a> celebrated <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/2008/12/one-year-of-blogging.html">its one year anniversary this week</a>.&nbsp; He blames me.&nbsp; Brandon is a long-standing member of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> and a graduate student at Penn State.&nbsp; He did one of his M.A. degrees with me at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; He'll present part of his research at <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/2009/01/aia-paper.html">the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America next weekend</a>.</li> <li>This is an ominous and interesting tease on <a href="http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/">Digital History Hacks</a>.&nbsp; For the past three years he has presented his research in a blog based format.&nbsp; From what I can gather he is moving to <a href="http://digitalhistory.wikispot.org/">a wiki</a>.&nbsp; I've been tempted to experiment with wiki's more systematically.&nbsp; In fact, we used a wiki last year to work to organize <a href="http://www.pkap.org">PKAP</a> and I use wiki's in my History 101 class.&nbsp; In some ways a wiki is superior for the presentation of ongoing research.&nbsp; It's easy to update and allows a user to navigate in a more topic oriented manner (familiar to so much scholarly inquiry).&nbsp; The public face of a wiki erodes however (or at least deemphasizes) the linear narrative structure that a blog imparts (understanding, of course, that one can view every edit to a wiki and see the very process of construction).</li> <li><a href="http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/59103.html">The

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2008 Cliopatria Awards were announced</a>.&nbsp; Archaeology of the Mediterranean World was once again snubbed.&nbsp; In fact, I was so snubbed as to not even be nominated.&nbsp; I feel like Kanye West.&nbsp; But some great blogs were recognized including one of my regular reads, <a href="http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2009/01/its-radical-newyear.html">Tenured Radical, for her post: "What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do? A Few Meditations on Women's History and Women in History."</a> Congrats!!!</li> <li>I get enough spam both on my blog's comment pages and in my various email accounts to have a skeptical eye toward all of it.&nbsp; That being said I did get <a href="http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com/blog/2008/top-50-ancienthistory-blogs/">this link recently</a> and it seems more or less harmless and perhaps even useful.&nbsp; </li> <li>A quick reminder, the Archaeological Institute of America's Medieval and Post Medieval Archaeology Interest Group will meet from 7:00 AM - 8:30 AM&nbsp; on Sunday January 11th at the AIA Annual Meeting.&nbsp; See you all there!</li></ul> <p>Finally, if you were miffed by <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/me rry-christmas.html">my Merry Christmas post</a>, rest assured that it was -15 this morning (not the -18 announced on the Weather Channel) and we are expecting 4-6 inches of snow.&nbsp; I am back in North Dakota and all is right with the world.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536abb6e9970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="183" alt="BoatinFlorida" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536abb6ed970c -pi" width="504" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Hala Sultan Tekke: Thoughts on an Overlooked Cypriot Site STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: hala-sultan-tekke-thoughts-on-an-overlooked-cypriot-site CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Religion DATE: 12/31/2008 09:09:54 AM ----BODY: <p>In the most recent fascicule of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies Nassos Papalexandrou offers a short study on the mosque of Hala Sultan Tekke outside of Larnaka (N. Papalexandrou, " Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus: An Elusive Landscape of Sacredness in a Liminal Context," <em>JMGS</em> 26 (2008) 251–281).&nbsp; Our

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team at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> visits the site every year, and I was regularly embarrassed by how little I knew of this impressive, picturesque, and curious site.&nbsp; Papalexandrou's article includes many interesting observations on the site, particularly from the perspective of early travelers, and I was vaguely heartened to learn how little people actually know.&nbsp; His article sought to contextualize the monument within the dynamic religious landscape of the Larnaka area in the early modern period.&nbsp; This is a valuable addition to our understanding of the religious landscape of Larnaka as well as a valuable methodological experiment as Papalexandrou sought to imagine a past for the mosque as a counterpoint to potentially simplistic observations made largely by non-local travelers or visitors with particular ideological or religious perspectives. Papalexandrou captures the ambivalence of sites like Hala Sultan Tekke by placing them within the shifting context of historical change, religious attitudes, and varying perspectives of textual sources.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105369f39c0970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="600" alt="Hala_Sultan_Tekke_1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536a7714f970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>This article will definitely appear among our regular reading for PKAP, in part because it offers a nice method for reading the dynamic religious landscape of Larnaka today.&nbsp; To Papalexandrou's thorough reading, I can add five additional observations:</p> <p>1) Papalexandrou rightly highlighted the various polarities that enveloped the mosque of Hala Sultan Teke.&nbsp; The main polarity in the context of this mosque was the distinct Christian and Muslim religious places.&nbsp; But his resistance to polarities could be extended to very notion of well defined sacred and profane places within the landscape.&nbsp; It may be that the concept of "holiness" works better in a pre-modern world.&nbsp; It is clear, for example, that Hala Sultan Tekke was a holy spot in a very rich sacred landscape.&nbsp; The Larnaka Salt Lake itself, for example, formed part of a sacred landscape as it origins were deeply embedded in Christian miracle stories.&nbsp; The nearby Stavrovouni, "Cross Mountain", amplified the sanctity of the monastery on its peak which held the fragment of the True Cross given by St. Helena.&nbsp; So, as Papalexandrou demonstrates, the mosque itself is not just a sacred place (in a profane world) but a holy place in a landscape where the profane was not only absent, but unlike to exist at all.</p> <p>2) Papalexandrou brings out the liminal nature of the mosque.&nbsp; One of the standard stories told at the mosque today is how Muslim ship captains would fire off their cannons when they came in sight of the mosque as a sign of respect.&nbsp; Today, the mosque is situated on the main road from the Larnanka airport (the main airport in the Republic of Cyprus) to the city of Larnaka.&nbsp; Thus the mosque continues to stand in a liminal place as it appears not only on the outskirts of the city of Larnaka but between the city and the airport (a site often reserved in other places for all kinds of transient and marginal activities: storage, traveler's hotels, duty-free zones, maintenance, et c.).&nbsp; The liminality of the site is further echoed by the nearby Bronze Age site of the same name which has been regarded as an important ancient harbor.&nbsp; Thus, the more recent mosque is situated within a landscape of liminality that stretches from antiquity to the modern period.</p> <p>3) Papalexandrou did not mention that behind the mosque and its elaborate grave is a tree bedecked with strips of cloth (these are sometimes called "Wishing Trees").&nbsp; This traditional Eastern Mediterranean practice dates to antiquity and is exactly the kind of religious practice that transcends simple polarities between Christian and Muslim, sacred and profane,

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formal ritual and informal practices.&nbsp; In fact, the same practice occurs at the site of Throni tis Panayia in the Troodos mountains and is sometimes associated with the grave of the Archbishop Makarios (a polarizing figure). </p> <p>4) In the city of Larnaka, the church of Ay. Lazaros and the nearby mosque of Büyük Cami both have interesting relationships with the kinds of polarities that Papalexandrou sought to explore in the narrative of Hala Sultan Tekke. In the case of Ay. Lazaros, the church functioned as a Catholic monastery during the Frankish rule on the island (another tradition has that it was used by the local Armenian Uniate population) before functioning perhaps only briefly as a mosque and then being returned to Orthodox population.&nbsp; Even then, the Orthodox and local Catholic population had an agreement to share the building during various times of the month (this phenomenon is recorded by various travelers).&nbsp; Less than 200 m toward the coast the Büyük Cami mosque preserves a tradition of similar religious ambiguity.&nbsp; Several guides claim that the building was the former church of the Holy Cross.&nbsp; While this is possible, there is no obvious evidence of this transformation form the architecture of the building.&nbsp; A guess would be that this story developed as much from the traditions of religious ambivalence characteristic of holy sites within Larnaka as any real evidence for the building's transformation.&nbsp; Similar stories occur regularly for the location of Early Christian churches on former pagan holy sites.</p> <p>5) The final, interesting aspect of the Hala Sultan Tekke site is that its restoration was funded by USAID and UNDP.&nbsp; The funding of projects like the restoration of the mosque is not without political overtones.&nbsp; The careful preservation and restoration of a Muslim site in the Republic of Cyprus could easily be read in contrast to the reported looting and destruction of Christian churches in the north.&nbsp; It serves as a useful reminder that polarities of the type described by Papalexandrou are, indeed, politically constructed.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105369f39c2970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA " src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105369f39c5970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Merry Christmas! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: merry-christmas CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 12/25/2008 07:59:35 AM -----

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BODY: <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053693a386970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="671" alt="Christmastree" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053693a389970b -pi" width="504" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center">Merry Christmas from Sunny Climes!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Tuesday: Trends in Grades in a Western Civilization Course STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-tuesday-trends-in-grades-in-a-western-civilization-course CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 12/23/2008 08:56:41 AM ----BODY: <p>While this is in no way a proper or sophisticated analysis of my grades in Western Civilization (and is completely anonymous), I wanted to follow up briefly on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">a post from the middle of the semester</a>.&nbsp; I noted then that I gave my Western Civilization students options on what kind of midterm they wanted take.&nbsp; The students could choose between an all essay test, a part multiple guess and part essay test, and an all multiple guess test.&nbsp; For the final exam, I continued this practice except that I required all the students to write a cumulative essay. </p> <p>There were some interesting trends that I think reflect student engaging in some strategy to maximize their chance at doing well.&nbsp; For example, 7 fewer students took the all multiple guess final exam.&nbsp; This was probably reflective of the lower grades on the all multiple choice midterm (and the realization that they would have to write an essay anyway).&nbsp; Of the group that took that all multiple guess final, however, there were 7 new students who had taken either the half-multiple-choice and half-essay or the all-essay midterm. I can't explain this particular trend except that it suggests that students were unhappy with their performance on another version of the test and wanted to try their chances in a different format.&nbsp; More students took the all-essay final than took the all-essay midterm.</p> <p>In general, the students who took that all essay final performed better in the writing parts of the class.&nbsp; I require a weekly online discussion board post (of around 150 words) as well as a short paper.&nbsp; The all-essay takers also had markedly better final grades as

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well.&nbsp; On the one hand, I'd love to take credit for this group and cultivating good writer and critical thinkers, but in reality, they probably self-selected to their strength.&nbsp; From anecdotal evidence alone, it seems that students have more confidence taking multiple choice exams and this seems particular true among students who believe that they can beat the system.&nbsp; So while the risk is higher on a multiple choice test where it is possible to get a question completely wrong (unlike an essay question where even the most vague and passing familiarity with a concept can count as a partially correct answer), it is still more appealing than the more arduous course of an essay test.</p> <p>One more little test to assess student "engagement" with the course material is comparing the kind of test that the student opted to take against the paper that they chose to write.&nbsp; I have three papers due at various times throughout the semester, and the students are only required to write one out of the three papers.&nbsp; The first and second papers are due at 5 weeks and 10 weeks into the semester respectively while the third paper is due on the day of the final.&nbsp; The papers are similar to the essay questions that I ask on the midterm and final exams so it is possible to write a practice essay, in effect, and get feedback on it before writing either the midterm (in week 7) or the final exam.&nbsp; Moreover, if you write the first or second paper and don't like your mark, you can write a later paper and if the grade is higher, I will replace the grade received on the earlier paper.&nbsp; An engaged student who wrote one of the first two papers, then, could have not only a fairly good idea of how I will grade the midterm and final essays, as well as a chance to improve their grade on the paper which was worth 20% of their grade.&nbsp; So, comparing the paper that the students chose to write against the kind of test that the students chose to take might indicate whether students who take the multiple guess exam are less engaged in the course.&nbsp; I found that 39% of the students who took the all-multiple guess final wrote one of the first two papers.&nbsp; For the two essay based exams, 50% of the students wrote an earlier paper.&nbsp; While that might suggest that the essay writing students are more engaged in the class and more active in working to get the mark that they want, they weren't that much more engaged than their multiple guess taking peers!</p> <p>In any event, someday I compare the data from this semester to the two previous semester in which I allowed students to take different formats of tests.&nbsp; And while I don't think that this kind of data alone tells me everything about how my students engage a 100 level Western Civilization class, I do think that collecting this kind of data might provide a basic road map for student expectations and tendencies.&nbsp; I am not so naive to think that my class can change the ways that students think about a class like History 101, but the more I understand about how they want to engage the material, the better I am able to accommodate or challenge these ways of thinking...</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>More Teaching Thursdays:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-thursday-rethinking-lectures-content-and-the-classroomvibe.html">Teaching Thursday: Rethinking Lectures, Content, and the Classroom Vibe</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-thursday-teaching-by-templates.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching by Templates</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-historical-perspective-on-teaching-research-methods-with-kateturabian.html">Teaching Thursday: A Historical Perspective on Teaching Research Methods with Kate Turabian</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-teaching-time.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching Time</a><br><a

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href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/11/teaching-thursday-classroommodernism.html">Teaching Thursday: Classroom Modernism (K. Kourelis)</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching the Election</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments.html">Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Papers, Projects, and Perspectives for Next Year... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: papers-projects-and-perspectives-for-next-year CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 12/22/2008 08:39:13 AM ----BODY: <p>This fall I was invited to present my research on campus in the spring. The talk will be to a general audience and sponsored by the Graduate School here at the University of North Dakota. There are relatively few opportunities for junior faculty to present their research on campus, so it's an exciting opportunity, but I need to come up with a topic.&nbsp; The process of thinking about a topic gave me a chance to reflect on my ongoing research and try to find a way to bring together my various interests or at least prioritize my research so that I can have a productive spring.</p> <p>So, my research agenda in no particular order...</p> <p>1. <strong>Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.</strong>&nbsp; As any reader of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/pylakoutso petria_archaeological_project/">this blog would know</a>, I co-direct the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; I am quickly learning that an archaeological project will expand to fill any time left unoccupied by other research or teaching demands (and it will often try to bully those projects to the sideline as well!).&nbsp; That being said, the project also provides any number of opportunities for productive and interesting digressions ranging from methodologies, to general considerations of Cyprus in Roman Antiquity to more focused studies on Late Roman trade, ecclesiastical architecture, and the history of ancient Kition.&nbsp; Moreover, my experiments with video, podcasts, and blogs have formed the basis for emerging ideas about narrative, archaeology, and the new media.&nbsp; This would certainly be the most entertaining project to present to a general audience in that it could be rooted in narrative and include photos, videos, and even audio clips.</p> <p>2. <strong>Early Christian Architecture in Greece</strong>.&nbsp; I spent a good part of the last two years wrestling with my long moldering dissertation manuscript.&nbsp; I have presented various fragments of it over the past few years to generally positive results, but as I spin parts off from it, the entire project begins to lose its conceptual cohesion.&nbsp; Despite its conceptual fragmentation, I am working on a rather lengthy article which explores the role of churches in the process of Christianization in Greece.&nbsp; I have posted versions of this work on this blog.&nbsp; My most recent work has emphasized the role of churches as dynamic, hybrid space that served as a place of convergence for the many interests at play within Late Antique Greek society.&nbsp; This work seeks to undermine the singular, hegemonic church so often portrayed in literary sources of the period and replace it with a more fluid institution which embraced ambiguity in its efforts to translate a universalizing discourse on a local level.</p> <p>3. <strong>Dreams, <em>Inventio</em>, and the Memory of Early Christianity</strong>.&nbsp; This project complements project 2 in looking at the remains of the Early Christian architecture in the archaeological record of Byzantine and post-Byzantine times.&nbsp; I hold out the hope that I can somehow bring this project and project 2 together in a cohesive book manuscript.&nbsp; I presented some of this research for the first time <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr eam-archaeology-working-paper.html">this fall at North Dakota State University</a> and received some valuable feedback from colleagues there.&nbsp; The core of this project is an effort to show that the massive number of basilica style churches built in Early Christian times had a profound impact on religious landscape of Byzantine Greece (and the entire Eastern Mediterranean).&nbsp; At my most ambitious moments, I sometimes imagine that Early Christian architecture might have served as a vital filter between the remains and memory of Classical antiquity and the needs of Byzantine and even post-Byzantine society.&nbsp; The frequent appearance of Early Christian spolia in Byzantine churches and their not uncommon appearance in Byzantine texts suggests that Byzantine society recognized the importance of the Early Christian period in the formation of their identity.&nbsp; This challenges the more pervasive perspective that Byzantines sought primarily to establish ties to Classical antiquity.&nbsp; In fact, I'd tentatively suggest that scholars' tendency to overlook Early Christian spolia speaks more to the traditional aesthetic values of Byzantine architectural historians than those of the Byzantine architects.</p> <p>4. <strong>The Continuing Corinthia</strong>.&nbsp; I continue to dabble in the fortifications and landscape of the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/korinthian _matters/">Eastern Corinthia</a>.&nbsp; Most of this is in collaboration with <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and comes from our ongoing work with the data produced over the course of the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>.&nbsp; Some of this involves our work documenting an Early Modern settlement at a site called Lakka Skoutara.&nbsp; We have documented this site over the course of almost 10 field seasons with particular attention to archaeological formation processes in the Greek landscape.&nbsp; David has also helped me continue to document the fortifications of the Eastern Corinthia (Project Fortress Corinthia).&nbsp; David Pettegrew and I will present some of our recent research in this particular direction next month at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.&nbsp; I am also working with <a href="http://history.osu.edu/people/person.cfm?ID=689">Tim Gregory</a> to digitize and normalize the context pottery from the Ohio State Excavations at <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">Isthmia</a>.</p> <p>5. <strong>Thivi-Kastorion Archaeological Project.</strong>&nbsp; This is <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/">another archaeological reclamation project</a>.&nbsp; I am working to re-analyze survey data collected by the Ohio Boeotia Project in the vicinity of Thisvi, Boeotia with Tim Gregory.&nbsp; We are collaborating with Archie Dunn who is conducting an <a href="http://www.archant.bham.ac.uk/bufau/projects/Abroad/Thisve/Thisve%20survey.htm">archaeological field survey of Thisve/Kastorion, Greece</a>.&nbsp; Our hope is to produce new maps of the Thisvi basin that combine the archaeological data collected in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Ohio Boeotia project and Archie Dunn's more recent work at the site.</p> <p>So, this spring one of these projects (perhaps more) needs to come together in an engaging public lecture (at least) and ought to move forward toward a publication phase (and to be fair some of these projects have some good traction right now!).&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: vitor oliveira jorge EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 87.196.129.61 URL: http://trans-ferir.blogspot.com DATE: 12/22/2008 09:50:01 AM Hi Do you know my blog? It is about archaeology and much more... Regards Vitor Oliveira Jorge http://trans-ferir.blogspot.com -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Snowscape STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: snowscape CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 12/21/2008 05:03:18 PM ----BODY: <p align="left">Snow has been blowing lately and creating dramatic snowscapes across our yard.&nbsp; You can see the nicely plowed path filled with blown snow.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105368a3864970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="484" alt="snowscape" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053691950f970c -pi" width="364" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Each gust of wind leaves a fine layer of snow atop the last layer.&nbsp; You can see the tiny contour lines which preserve a record of the formation process across the snowscape.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105368a3879970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="484" alt="snowscape3" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105368a3883970b -pi" width="364" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Snow drifts look like frozen waves poised to crash against the side of the house.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536919519970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="484" alt="snowscape2"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053691951c970c -pi" width="364" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">Hope it's warmer where you are!!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits-1 DATE: 12/19/2008 08:47:26 AM ----BODY: <p>Some random quick hits at the end of a long semester:</p> <ul> <li>An Aaron Barth note.&nbsp; Aaron got his M.A. in history at the University of North Dakota in 2006 (I think).&nbsp; He has remained active in history.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVh6B0OM1w8">Here's a link to a video</a> on Ft. Lincoln to which he contributed.&nbsp; As Barth would say: <a href="http://www.historians.org/info/AHA_history/clbecker.htm">Everyman His Own Historian</a>.</li> <li>Another Aaron Barth note.&nbsp; He has internalized the lessons learned at UND.&nbsp; A gratuitous reference to <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/elwyn_robi nsons_autobiography/">Elwyn B. Robinson</a> <a href="http://www.kxnet.com/video.asp?ArticleId=309355&amp;VideoId=24523">in a "man on the street" interview</a>:</li></ul> <blockquote> <p>"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."</p></blockquote> <ul> <li>An interesting and "edgy" piece over at <a href="http://tenuredradical.blogspot.com/">Tenured Radical</a> called "<a href="http://tenuredradical.blogspot.com/2008/12/so-you-want-to-be-blogger-few-thoughts.html">So you want to be a blogger: a few thoughts on what a blog is not</a>".&nbsp; Nothing motivates folks to engage a new medium than a blunt statement of what they won't be able to do.&nbsp; I think it is related to the <a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/4183/saturday-night-live-down-by-the-river">Matt Foley school of motivational speaking</a>: "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!"&nbsp; Ambition is always fueled by a studied detachment from reality.</li> <li>Finally, don't make plans for tonight.&nbsp; Settle into your favorite chair and watch <a href="http://richmondspiders.cstv.com/">my RICHMOND SPIDERS</a> play for the National Championship in ESPN2.&nbsp; They'll need all the help they can get,

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but they've made it this far.&nbsp; Let's go SPIDERS!</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Rethinking Lectures, Content, and the Classroom Vibe STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-rethinking-lectures-content-and-the-classroom-vibe DATE: 12/18/2008 08:00:40 AM ----BODY: <p>This past week I've begun to experiment with podcast lectures.&nbsp; I teach our Western Civilization survey one day a week, at night, for two and a half hours.&nbsp; The class enrolls between 80 and 150 students and meetings in an "lecture bowl" type room.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Despite my efforts to liven up the class, the most consistent complaint from the students is that the class is too long.&nbsp; On the one hand, the class doesn't go any longer than the schedule dictates.&nbsp; On the other hand, it is a long class particular for freshmen and at the 100 level.&nbsp; </p> <p>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.&nbsp; I am in the process of recording all of my lectures as podcasts.&nbsp; This will move the longest and most tedious part of the class online for the students to engage at their leisure.&nbsp; In fact, I find that I can trim about a half an hour from each lecture by doing it as a single uninterrupted podcast.&nbsp; I have worked to eliminate many of my "pregnant pauses", grand rhetorical gestures, questions (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091042/quotes">"... in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff Bill?..."</a>), and digressions. The lectures are somewhat less entertaining (at least to me!), but nevertheless reflect the core concepts and narrative in the class.&nbsp; It is worth noting that this is incredibly time consuming.&nbsp; It takes me about 3 hours to record a 1 hour lecture.&nbsp; (Ok, on <a href="http://web.gunsnroses.com/index.jsp">some level that's not too bad</a>, but with 14 lectures, I reckon it will take about 40 hours).&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is easier for me move back and forth across the lectures because, quite simply,

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it is easier to remember what I emphasized earlier in the week than to remember what I emphasized weeks or even months earlier.</p> <p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; My goal is, in effect, to change the classroom vibe.</p> <p>Of course, this "new approach" depends on the students actually listening to the podcasts.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, this is the fourth "technological, new media, computer" kind of post this week.&nbsp; For my dedicated archaeological readers, do not despair!&nbsp; 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!).</p> <p>More Teaching Thursdays:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/te aching-thursday-teaching-by-templates.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching by Templates</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-historical-perspective-on-teaching-research-methods-with-kateturabian.html">Teaching Thursday: A Historical Perspective on Teaching Research Methods with Kate Turabian</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-teaching-time.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching Time</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/11/teaching-thursday-classroommodernism.html">Teaching Thursday: Classroom Modernism (K. Kourelis)</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching the Election</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments.html">Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology, Space, and Old School Computer Adventure STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: archaeology-space-and-old-school-computer-adventure CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 12/17/2008 08:39:40 AM ----BODY: <p>Since I've posted on tech like things the past couple of days, I thought I'd continue.&nbsp; During an almost random Google search, I came across this line:</p> <blockquote> <p><font face="System">West of House<br>You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.<br>There is a small mailbox here.</font> </p></blockquote> <p>Anyone who had a computer in the early 1980s should immediately recognize these sentences.&nbsp; They are the first lines of the computer game Zork.&nbsp; Zork was a text based computer game originally released in 1980.&nbsp; I played the game in the early 1980s (after 1982 at any rate) on our CP/M based Kay-Pro II personal computer.</p> <p>Compared to the massive multi-player role-playing games popular today, Zork is amazingly simple.&nbsp; A set of simple text commands open the "Great Underground Empire" to our intrepid adventurer (that is, if you can figure out how to get into the house!).&nbsp; Filled with nostalgia, I quickly found that the first three Zork games are available <a href="http://www.infocomif.org/downloads/downloads.html">for free download</a>, and after playing the

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game for a bit, I began to consider how this game could be used in a classroom setting or as a thinking tool.</p> <p>First, Zork required a kind of persistence that I found confounding at first.&nbsp; Recently I have had several interactions with students that reminded me that persistence is a learned trait.&nbsp; I've spent considerable time telling students to keep doing research, keep searching the library, archives, or internet, and keep trying to refine language in a paper.&nbsp; The simple dead-ends in Zork and profoundly foreign interface (compared to the graphics laden interfaces of today's games) engaged my curiosity but also confounded me quickly as I had almost no assurance that I would be able to discover anything through my series of simple commands.</p> <p>More importantly, however, is the spatial aspect of Zork.&nbsp; While the three-dimensional space of Second Life or other games provides a plausible representation of reality, Zork requires the player to reconstruct space through a series of simple, if vivid, descriptions.&nbsp; Navigation by the cardinal directions adds a layer of realism (and universality) to the interface.&nbsp; Even in Zork land, north is north (most of the time!).&nbsp; Even with several nice maps of the Great Underground Empire available on the web, it would be an interesting exercise to produce a map of the space described by Zork.&nbsp; Making the leap from text to space and back again is a common task for archaeologists who often rely on notebooks and published, textual descriptions as often as carefully wrought plans.&nbsp; </p> <blockquote> <p><font face="System">You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.<br>There is a small mailbox here. </font> <p><font face="System">&gt;go west<br>Forest<br>This is a forest, with trees in all directions. To the east, there appears to<br>be sunlight. </font> <p><font face="System">&gt;go west<br>You would need a machete to go further west. </font> <p><font face="System">&gt;go north<br>Clearing<br>You are in a clearing, with a forest surrounding you on all sides. A path<br>leads south.<br>On the ground is a pile of leaves. </font> <p><font face="System">&gt;kick leaves<br>Kicking the pile of leaves has no effect. </font> <p><font face="System">&gt;move leaves<br>Done.<br>In disturbing the pile of leaves, a grating is revealed. </font></p></blockquote> <p>Finally, the textual interface itself is an archaeological artifact.&nbsp; Exploring the earliest "interactive fiction" type computer games provides a perspective on the earliest efforts to create an immersive world on a computer.&nbsp; The spatial consistency in Zork echoes the spatial metaphors used today to produce understandable places of interaction and communication on in cyberspace.&nbsp; It would be silly to attribute the overarching spatial metaphors of cyber<em>space</em> exclusively to Zork, but it certainly marks an accessible point of entry for students to understand how the historical metaphors of the internet continues to frame our expectations, experiences, and the potential of the medium.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Computers and Convergence for an Academic Archaeologist

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: computers-and-convergence-for-an-academic-archaeologist CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 12/16/2008 08:13:57 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last few years I have worked hard to upgrade my personal cyberinfrastructure.&nbsp; This has involved developing a computer tool-kit tailored to my various interests: archaeology, history, blogging, writing, teaching, et c. While some continue to dream of single devices that bring together all the basic functions necessary for successful living, I have discovered quite the opposite.&nbsp; As my interests have continued to develop, I have found the need to use more and more specialized tool.&nbsp; With each tool, however, comes the demands of upkeep, a learning curve, transition time (moving from one device to the next is no more seamless than moving from one application to the next), and a predictable gaggle of frustrations.&nbsp; </p> <p>Over the past two years I have had the good fortune (and funding!) to purchase four new computers.&nbsp; Since I travel for my research, they are all portable to some degree. Each computer, however, serves a specific function in my little world.&nbsp; My booncompanion is my MacBook Pro.&nbsp; It is my writing computer, my blogging computer, and my image manipulation computer.&nbsp; It is sufficiently powerful to do these things with grace and has a large enough hard-drive to allow me to carry most of my research with me wherever I go.</p> <p>The most recent addition to my mini-computer center has been my 17-inch Dell XPS laptop.&nbsp; It's an absolute monster.&nbsp; It is portable in the same way that my family's Kay-Pro II was portable.&nbsp; It weighs over 10.5 lbs (close to the Kay-Pro's 26 lbs!) is amazingly fast and runs ArcGIS 9.3 without even breaking a sweat.&nbsp; This is my "mobile GIS workstation" since ArcGIS is Windows only (as is Microsoft Access) and most of our archaeological data currently lives in this format.&nbsp; So while I deeply attached to my MacBook, when the processing gets tough, I need to use the brute strength of the massive Dell.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105367050f8970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="240" alt="kayproii" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053677e72e970c -pi" width="480" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105367050fa970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="240" alt="kayproiicase" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053677e733970c -pi" width="219" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">I have also purchases two little net-books.&nbsp; The <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2008/06/mi ni-micro.html">famous mini-micro</a> (which received no end of derision in Cyprus, but ultimately and heroic saved the day!) is a Asus Eee PC.&nbsp; With little chicklet keys, it is hardly suited for anything more than the shortest of emails, but it nevertheless stood us in good stead when we needed an extra laptop to complete final reports on Cyprus.&nbsp; Its Linux Xandros operating

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system booted super fast and handled our basic word processing and web surfing needs.&nbsp; But the little tiny keys were killer.&nbsp; So, with a tiny bit of extra grant money, I ordered a Dell Mini.&nbsp; It's a cute, little Windows based machine (XP Home) with normal sized keys!&nbsp; It will hopefully serve as a supplemental computer on Cyprus and work well-enough for blogging, emails, word processing (Open Office 3.0), and even some basic image manipulations (with <a href="http://www.gimp.org/">Gimp</a>).&nbsp; XP Home is slow and laggy, but at the size (&lt;3.0 lbs and price (around $300), it works just fine.&nbsp; In fact, I posted my <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/anorth-dakota-blizzard.html">Sunday blizzard blog</a> from it.&nbsp; While no one would want to write their dissertation on one of these mini-computers, they work just fine on an archaeological projects where small size and economy are more important than computing power.</p> <p align="left">So despite the promises of all-in-one devices that serve all of our computing needs, even the middle of the road computer user like myself finds utility in specialized machines that handle specialized tasks well.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.184.131.214 URL: DATE: 12/16/2008 08:53:56 PM So jealous. Those Dell Mini's seem appealing. Tempted by the return to Apple (my last one was a Classic box), but the GIS/AutoCAD problem seems insurmountable. Have you seen the Umberto Eco article from a few years ago about PC vs Apple equivalent to Protestantism vs Catholicism? Textual treatment might need its own tool. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeologists, the Media, and the Real Story STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: archaeologists-the-media-and-the-real-story CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: Television CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 12/15/2008 10:07:40 AM ----BODY:

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<p>As an <a href="http://www.asor.org/">ASOR</a> (American Schools of Oriental Research) member, I look forward to getting my glossy copy of <a href="http://www.asor.org/pubs/nea/index.html"><em>Near Eastern Archaeology</em></a>.&nbsp; This past issue (September 2008) had an interesting forum focusing on the relationship between archaeologists and the [traditional] media.&nbsp; </p> <p>The forum was interesting for several reasons.&nbsp; First, several scholars offered the typical plaintiff cry that archaeology is misrepresented in the so-called mass media.&nbsp; Even those producers and directors (in short "Hollywood types") inclined to use real archaeologists as talking heads rarely allow scholars to exert much influence over the direction of the documentaries or programming.&nbsp; The result are documentaries and programs, even on "good" channels, that at best represent only the sensational side of archaeology, and at worse contort the goals, methods, and results of fieldwork into implausible and simply untruthful shapes.&nbsp; The cause for these evils is that the film and documentary industry is driven by the desire for profit over the desire for truth.</p> <p>The funny thing is that the model of the media explored in this forum is hardly as dominant as it once was.&nbsp; Hollywood style archaeological documentaries still occupy a niche market and it is clear that feature films with archaeological themes (mummies, lost arcs, et c.) will remain popular.&nbsp; On the other hand, it is clear that the hegemony exerted by large scale productions is waning.&nbsp; The former mass media has become increasingly fragmented across a whole range of platforms and media ranging from viral videos, to podcasts, to blogs.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, despite the feeling that archaeologists have lost the war with the mass media, there are unprecedented opportunities for archaeologists to take control of the discourse.&nbsp; Some observations:</p> <ol> <li>Producing an archaeological documentary has never been easier (in fact, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">I've produced two</a>!).&nbsp; Broadcast quality video cameras are inexpensive and digital editing tools are available on most campuses.&nbsp; "Hollywood" has always had a surplus of talent -- the stories of the next great film-maker biding time delivering coffee on-set are not far from the truth -- and there are directors who would jump at the chance to work with an archaeological team to produce a documentary that is both entertaining and with scholarly quantities.&nbsp; Even if digital video is beyond the expertise and resources of a project, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-final-pkap.html">podcasts are amazingly popular and have the same potential for viral distribution as you-tube clips</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/05/py la-koutsopetr.html">Even a simple, daily, blog</a> can attract a wider audience to the work of real archaeologists and "counteract" the sensationalizing tendencies of "mass media" documentaries.&nbsp; </li> <li>While re-enactments by casts of thousands still have a particular dramatic effect, it is now possible for only moderately tech-savvy scholars to produce digital reconstructions of buildings, landscapes, stratigraphy, et c. So, it is possible to produce videos with a high degree of graphic and technological sophistication on a desktop computer with basic software.&nbsp; Technology has democratized the "wow" factor.</li> <li>And reality t.v. has made the wow factor less important.&nbsp; Archaeological projects produce fantastic reality t.v.&nbsp; The decision making, personality conflicts, romance (I met my wife on an archaeological project!), and setting all make archaeological projects compelling.&nbsp; More importantly, many of these aspects of archaeological fieldwork have pedagogical value as well.&nbsp; Archaeological decision making, conflict resolution in an academic setting, and the basic logistics of archaeological work are sometime

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hidden from public view (because, perhaps, of our insistence on appearing scientific, objective, empirical), and this impoverishes our students understanding of how archaeological data is produced.</li> <li>Two interrelated intellectual trends - an interest in reflexivity and in performance - form an important scholarly component to archaeological investigation that complements the potential for video, audio, and text that increases transparency of practice and method.&nbsp; These trends in the framing of archaeological research makes it not only more feasible to argue for a video or audio component of the project, but also ensure that the results of this work contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions.&nbsp; The sophistication of the reflexive and performative discourse provides a fine point of departure for archaeological documentaries that take full advantage of the new media.</li></ol> <p>While archaeologists will probably never stop bemoaning their representation in the media, the days when we could argue that we are being victimized by the motivations of for-profit producers and studios are probably nearing an end.&nbsp; The potential for producing competing narratives of archaeological work that have both significance in the popular eye and in the scholarly realm has arrived.&nbsp; Today archaeologists should worry less about being shut out from the mass media and be more concerned about producing competing narrative of their own that take advantage of the fragmented habits of our media culture and inform and influence the status of our discipline (and its practitioners) in the public eye.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron B. EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 96.3.50.77 URL: DATE: 12/15/2008 06:06:26 PM Yes, in the North American high-Plains realm, we're finding fewer and fewer Nazis to fight... kidding aside, this harkens back to Carl Becker re-visiting the phrase <a href="http://www.historians.org/info/AHA_history/clbecker.htm">"Everyman His Own Historian"</a> some years ago (off hand perhaps when he was the AHA president). Media such as YouTube has provided another way in which any historian, no matter how Ivy League or provincial (a loaded term itself), can deliver their scholarly findings to a broader audience. At the international level, YouTube was popularized even more during the last presidential debates. And comics such as Jack Black have brought their <a href="http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/6eff3fba0d/drunk-history-vol-2-featuringjack-black-from-drunk-history-jack-black-derekwaters-and-jeremykonner">boozy interpretations</a> to the fore. If we historians are going to complain, we can only go so far until we turn to media such as YouTube ourselves. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher

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TITLE: A North Dakota Blizzard STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-north-dakota-blizzard CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 12/14/2008 10:02:56 AM ----BODY: <p>I am supposed to be winging my way to New York right now, but instead I am snug at home waiting out a North Dakota style blizzard.&nbsp; It has winds up to 40 mph which make it difficult to know whether snow is falling or just blowing blowing around.&nbsp; It's also -10 F and it has become colder since we got up this morning.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365bcaed970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="537" alt="Blizzard1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365bcaf5970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365bcaf9970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="537" alt="Blizzard2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365bcb08970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365bcb0a970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="537" alt="Blizzard3" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365bcb11970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">A sign that our house is not as insulated as it could be: snow blowing in under the door.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365bcb17970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="537" alt="SnowDoor" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053663e9d9970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Snowy Visit to Montreal and McGill STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-snowy-visit-to-montreal-and-mcgill DATE: 12/12/2008 07:53:27 AM ----BODY: <p>I cannot express enough appreciation to my gracious hosts <a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/history/faculty/faculty/fronda/">Mike Fronda</a> and <a href="http://people.mcgill.ca/hans.beck/">Hans Beck</a> during my snowy <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/py la-koutsopetria-in-the-context-of-roman-cyprus-at-mcgill.html">visit to Montreal and McGill</a>. The colloquium was thought provoking and collegial, <a href="http://ancienthistory.altertum.unihalle.de/3435_97382start/99253_mehl/">Prof. Andreas Mehl's</a> paper was wellconsidered, and the University and the city (particularly the food!) lived up to its billing.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365eb637970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365eb63e970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365663fd970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536566409970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>I was able to visit the <a href="http://www.saint-joseph.org/en_1007_index.asp">Oratory of St. Joseph</a>.&nbsp; It is a spectacular church, but more importantly, the Oratory ranks as one of the most popular healing shrines in North America.&nbsp; In particular, the church is associated with the Blessed Brother Andre.&nbsp; His simple piety earned him veneration as a holy man during his lifetime.&nbsp; In particular the intercession of Brother Andre was known to heal the sick.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He was beatified by John Paul II and the Oratory remains an important pilgrimage site.&nbsp; 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. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536566415970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365eb66b970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>The Original Oratory</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365eb67a970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365eb684970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a><em>&nbsp;<br>The "new" Oratory</em></p> <p>We also visited the cathedral of Montreal dedicated to Notre Dame.&nbsp; It was a spectacular example of 19th century Gothic architecture.&nbsp; The massive amount of exposed and painted wood gave it a palpably Canadian feel.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053656642d970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-

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bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536566436970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105365eb69d970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536566443970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Place, Identity, and Authority in Late Roman Cyprus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: place-identity-and-authority-in-late-roman-cyprus CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 12/10/2008 10:56:02 AM ----BODY: <p align="left">Just a short post today, here is my paper that will be delivered in a few hours at McGill sans citations and illustrations</p> <p align="left">Enjoy:</p> <p align="center">"Place, Identity, and Authority in Late Roman Cyprus: <br>A Response to A. Mehl's 'Cyprus: The Role of a Province in the Roman Empire'".<br>Delivered at McGill University, Montreal, Canada<br>December 10, 2008 </p> <p align="center">William Caraher, University of North Dakota<br></p> <p>Introduction<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Prof. Mehl's excellent paper reconstructs crucial aspects of the history of Roman Cyprus on the basis of administrative sources such as inscriptions, coins, and the brief mentions of the island in literary sources.&nbsp; He noted, as had the generation of commentators prior to him, that the dearth of traditional administrative sources for the island has stymied efforts to understand its place in the Roman empire.&nbsp; In contrast to the absence of material useful for writing an administrative, prosopographical, or military history of the island, the archaeological record holds forth an embarrassment of riches pertinent to understanding how the long engagement with the Roman state transformed the economic, cultural, and authoritative landscape of Cyprus.&nbsp; In my brief, and hopefully complementary response to Prof. Mehl's paper, I will look beyond the better known excavations of major Roman period sites like Paphos, Kourion, Salamis, and Amathous and even many increasingly important smaller sites like the early Roman period sanctuary on the island of Yeronisos and excavations a Marion-Arsinoe.&nbsp; [SLIDE] Instead, I will follow the lead of Susan Alcock turn my attention to the countryside to document the impact of

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Roman authority on the island.&nbsp; Recent work by both survey archaeologists and excavators has shed light on a surprisingly vital Roman and Late Roman countryside extending from a well-developed maritime landscape to the rich material culture of the villas, industrial sites, hamlets, villages, and small towns that formed the suburban, ex-urban, and rural fabric of a Roman province in the East.&nbsp; While it is important to emphasize that identifying specific agency or policies that indicate a link between Roman administrative presence on the island and changes in the urban and rural landscape remains difficult, evidence for the transformation of the island under Roman rule is nevertheless sufficiently robust for scholars to argue for a pervasive and significant Roman influence on Cypriot life.&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; [SLIDE] Our site, of Pyla-Koutsopetria, on the southern coast of Cyprus provides a useful example of how recent fieldwork holds forth potential for re-imagining the relationship between Roman imperial authority and the organization of life on the island of Cyprus.&nbsp; [SLIDE] The site itself is situated on the coast about 8-10 km from the harbor of ancient Kition.&nbsp; Stray finds from the area since the 19th century indicated that it was a center of ancient activities.&nbsp; At the nearby site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos, systematic excavations since the middle years of the 20th century revealed a substantial Bronze Age fortification.&nbsp; [SLIDE] At the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria proper, excavations in the 1990s by the Department of Antitquities revealed a well-appointed Early Christian basilica.&nbsp; [SLIDE] Since 2003, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has worked to place the previous fieldwork in this area in a broader, diachronic archaeological context.&nbsp; [SLIDE] Using intensive pedestrian survey (and beginning last year targeted excavation), our work has produced evidence for continuous activity in the coastal zone of Pyla Village from as early as CyproArchaic period. [SLIDE] There is evidence that the site began to expand considerable during the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman period before reaching its peak during Late Antiquity.&nbsp; In the 6th and early 7th century, the site extended for over a kilometer along the coast and had a densely built up center of close to 40 ha.&nbsp; Less intensive activity contemporary with the coastal site extended several kilometers inland encompassing an area of well over 150 ha.&nbsp; A diverse assemblage of local and imported transport amphora, finewares, and architectural fragments attest not only to the wealth of the site, but also to its well-connected position within both local and regional trade networks.&nbsp; [SLIDE] [SLIDE] A marshy depression drained in recent times by the British Military likely represents the remains of a substantial ancient embayment which would have formed a protected harbor well into Late Antique and Medieval times.&nbsp; The location, size, influence, and wealth of the site marks it as more than a villa site or even the largest village.&nbsp; In fact, it probably represents a "market town" of the kind mentioned by John Moschos as existing on the island.&nbsp; </p> <p>&nbsp; <br>Place and Space in Roman Cyprus<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It was quite remarkable to discover a site as extensive as Pyla-Koutsopetria in the hinterland of the city of Kition.&nbsp; As Mitford noted so many years ago, there is no evidence for any autonomous villages in the chora of Kition, although this does not mean that such settlements did not exist.&nbsp; The absence of a known settlement outside of the city of Kition might hint at the relatively centralized organization of the city's chora during the Iron Age.&nbsp; It would appear that our site of PylaKoutsopetria remained anonymous into Roman times, although some scholars have suggested that the site may be the ancient town of Dadai or Tadai which appeared in Ptolemy (5.15)&nbsp; and John Moschos.&nbsp; Even if we accept that the site was Dadai, it nevertheless fell outside of the 12 or 13 Cypriot cities recognized as the basic administrative units on the island under Hellenistic and Roman rule.&nbsp; The nominal autonomy of these cities, however, appears to have

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had relatively little impact on the Roman perception of province.&nbsp; As Prof. Mehl pointed out, Rome continued the practice of the Hellenistic rulers of island and regarded the island as a single unit administered first from Paphos and later from Salamis-Constantia. <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Governing the island as a single administrative unit redefined the relationship between urban centers and their peripheral settlements. As Prof. Mehl has observed, the Romans constructed a road network that continued the Hellenistic policy of ignoring the boundaries of the Iron Age cities in favor of linking copper producing regions to the coast.&nbsp; A rationalized pattern for extracting copper ore and trees from the Troodos range, however, only represents one aspect of the economic changes associated with the Roman administration of the island.&nbsp; Pliny and Strabo both comment on the agricultural prosperity of the province.&nbsp; Ammianus Marcellinus observed that Cyprus could not only build and outfit her own transport vessels but also fill them with produce.&nbsp; Even as late at the 7th century, the unusual Christian tale called the Vision of Kaioumos featured an aristocrat from Salamis named Philentolos whose wealth came "from land and sea, from businesses, lands, and ships".&nbsp; Lands in this portfolio presumably represent agricultural wealth which we can add to the list of resources extracted from the island alongside copper and trees.&nbsp; The link between ships and agricultural resources might explain the extensive coastal warehouses at sites like Ay. Georgios-Peyias in the west and the Governor's beach site on the Akrotiri peninsula which served to facilitate the large-scale "commercial" exportation of foodstuffs.&nbsp; As I will discuss later, the agricultural productivity of the island may also account for&nbsp; the wide distribution of Late Roman 1 amphoras some of which were undoubtedly produced on the island.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It goes without saying that the exploitation of agricultural produce represents a lower level of administrative commitment and economic intensity than the extraction of copper or trees.&nbsp; The sustained expansion of settlement in the Cypriot countryside nevertheless reveals a vibrant economy which was largely dependent the upon peace and prosperity introduced by the Roman empire.&nbsp; The pattern of prosperity on the island during the Roman period reflects the complex interaction between Roman and pre-existing settlement patterns. In the eastern part of the island, for example, a longstanding network of roads linking the major metropolitan areas, particularly along the coast, continued to function during the Roman period.&nbsp; With the growing irrelevance of the borders between the Iron Age cities, these same roads became corridors which allowed formerly peripheral coastal sites to exploit their immediate hinterland.&nbsp; This is particularly visible at Pyla-Koutsopetria.&nbsp; [SLIDE] In the Cypro-Classical period and earlier, activity appears limited to the fortified coastal height of Vigla.&nbsp; [SLIDE] The Roman period, however, saw the site expand south onto the coastal plain.&nbsp; The growth in both size and complexity ultimately peeked during the Late Roman period where activity stretched for over a kilometer east to west along the coast likely following the course of the ancient road.&nbsp; While it is always dangerous to propose monocausal explanations for the expansion of a site, it seems probable to attribute some of the growth of Koutsopetria to changes in political and economic organization under Roman rule. Koutsopetria marked the junction of several important routes through this area of the island.&nbsp; [SLIDE] [SLIDE] The major east-west road linking Kition with Salamis-Constantina departed from the coast at Koutsopetria, another road continued east toward Cape Greco and the Roman site of Thronoi which was traditionally in the territory of Salamis, and the site probably marked the southern terminus of a road moving south through the Pyla pass from the Mesoria.&nbsp; The protected harbor at the site further enhanced the ability of Pyla-Koutsopetria to engage traffic and trade along these routes.&nbsp;

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[SLIDE] Moreover, by rendering the border between Salamis and Kition irrelevant, Roman, rule transformed Pyla-Koutsopetria from a peripheral settlement in relation to the city of Kition to a modest, yet central place on the southeastern coast of the island.&nbsp; A similar phenomenon occurred that the site of Ay. Georgios-Peyias which stood at Cape Drepanon near the border between Paphos and its western neighbor of Marion.<br></p> <p>Contacts and Connections<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The administrative unification of the island under Hellenistic and the Roman rule and the consequent re-organization of the Cypriot countryside represents just one manifestation of Roman rule on the island.&nbsp; The peace and stability that the Romans brought to the eastern Mediterranean not only expanded the potential markets for Cypriot goods, but also gave Cypriots access to a new range of objects and practices with which to mark their identity.&nbsp; The tremendously diverse assemblage of pottery collected over the course of our fieldwork at Pyla-Koutsopetria provides a robust guide for understanding local engagement with a Romanized Mediterranean economy and brings to the fore the local implications of being a part of the Roman Empire.&nbsp; While the island of Cyprus had long history of participation in Eastern Mediterranean trade from at least the Bronze Age, the assemblage of Roman pottery present at Koutsopetria represents a distinct artifact of Roman rule particularly when cast in light of recent efforts to re-examine the structure of the ancient Mediterranean economy.&nbsp; Holden and Purcell's influential Mediterranean synthesis, The Corrupting Sea, proposed an approach to understanding Mediterranean trade that separated its position in the Mediterranean economy from the its place in the administrative structure of Roman provincial organization.&nbsp; Mid-sized sites like Koutsopetria, which are larger than rural villages and smaller than the major urban centers of the Roman period, may have had relatively autonomous relationships with regional exchange networks.&nbsp; [SLIDE] For example, the assemblage collected from Pyla-Koutsopetria revealed a distinctly higher percentage of imported African Red Slip fine wares than other sites on the island.&nbsp; [SLIDE] While the locally produced Cypriot Red Slip dominated formed a significant part of the assemblage, African Red Slip occurred far more frequently than the regionally prevalent Phocaean Red Slip.&nbsp; (The real significance of this discovery will be easier to assess once the final publication of Late Roman material from Kition appears.)<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The wealth present at the site seems to have been a product of local agricultural production.&nbsp; The site is too far removed from the copper producing regions of the Troodos to have benefited from copper extraction and the tree covered foothills that rise up to the west of Kition had far more plausible outlets than our harbor.&nbsp; So far, we have seen no evidence for any large-scale production of ceramics, quarrying activity seems relatively modest and best assigned for local construction, and there is no clear reason to suppose that our site had any substantial administrative or military function during the Roman period (such as garrison camp).&nbsp; [SLIDE] We do have evidence for agricultural processing at the site including several components of a olive press of likely Roman to Late Roman date.&nbsp; [SLIDE] A more telling piece of evidence comes from the thousands of fragments of Late Roman transport amphora.&nbsp; [SLIDE] [SLIDE] Late Roman 1 amphora dominate this assemblage.&nbsp; These tremendously common amphoras were probably produced on the island as well as at other sites along the coast of Asia Minor.&nbsp; The wide variation in fabric present at our site suggest that Koutsopetria likely received and exported goods in these vessels to regional markets.&nbsp; Scholars have suggested that these amphora mostly contained olive oil and wine and may have served to provision troops on the Danubian frontiers and elsewhere.&nbsp; Late Roman 2 amphoras were also found in some quantities.&nbsp; These vessels derive from the Aegean and while they may be in reuse at Koutsopetria, they

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nevertheless the demonstrate the range of commercial contacts present at the site.&nbsp; Finally, the concentration of these vessels at the eastern extent of the site suggests that their presence here is more than simply the discard from domestic practices.&nbsp; Instead it is reasonable to suppose that this area had a specialized function presumably tied to the export or import of bulk goods.&nbsp; To consider briefly the administrative aspect of this pattern of trade, it is worth noting that under Justinianian Cyprus was linked with the Cyclades, Asia Minor, Scythia, and Moesia Secunda to form a single quaestura under single commander.&nbsp; This not only secured under a single administrative entity the main route from Egypt to Constantinople, but also linked a group of agriculturally productive provinces to a stretch of the frontier with a substantial contingent of troops.<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The presence of a distinct assemblage of Late Roman fine wares and the more typical assemblage of transport amphora reveal a community with access to the commercial life of the Roman Mediterranean.&nbsp; While Bakirtzis has speculated that western port of Ay. Georgios-Peyias was a stop on the Late Roman anona route from Egypt to Constantinople, there is no reason to believe that PylaKoutsopetria served this function.&nbsp; Thus the prosperity of this site is unlikely to be tied to formal administrative trade.&nbsp; Instead the place of this site in the regional economy is a byproduct of Roman political power both on the island and in the Mediterranean more generally.&nbsp; The choice of the residents at the site to prefer African Red Slip to local or even regional alternatives is ultimately conditioned by the options made available to them by the political organization of the Roman empire.&nbsp; [SLIDE] As C. Kondleon showed in her study of the House of Dionysios in Paphos and is likewise apparent in the House of Gladiators in the thoroughly Roman city of Kourion, the place of a province in the Roman empire was not simply an administrative reality, but a cultural reality as well.</p> <p><br>A Topography of Authority in Late Roman Roman Cyprus <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The increasingly Romanized character of the assemblage present at Koutsopetria as well as location of the site suggest a complex interplay between settlement structure, economic organization, and even cultural identity in Roman and Late Roman Cyprus.&nbsp; Despite the Romanization of the province, Prof. Mehl has noted, few Cypriots appear in the Roman administration.&nbsp; By late Antiquity however, this appears to have changed. While a number of Cypriot saints are known from antiquity, the two most famous are bishops, St. Epiphanius of Salamis and St. John the Almsgiver.&nbsp; Epiphanius was a late 4th century bishop of Salamis.&nbsp; He began his ecclesiastical career first as a monk in Egypt and then in Palestine before becoming the bishop on Cyprus.&nbsp; From this post he exerted influence extensively in the region and in the early 5th century even journeyed to Constantinople where he briefly clashed with John Chrysostom.&nbsp; John the Almsgiver was born on Cyprus at Amathous in the mid-6th century to the governor of the island.&nbsp; Under Herakleios, he became the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria.&nbsp; In 614, however, the Persian threat drove him out of See at which point he returned to Cyprus where he died.&nbsp; While it is hardly surprising that members of the ecclesiastical and imperial aristocracy crossed paths in Late Antique Cyprus, it nevertheless reveals that by Late Antiquity, Cypriots had come to occupy significant places within the Empire. <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; [SLIDE] The activities of elite Cypriot churchmen, however, speaks little to how Roman authority became manifest on the island outside of urbanized areas.&nbsp; The spread of Christianity in rural areas on the island may capture a key aspects of the relationship between Cyprus and "Rome" (or more properly the Roman state).&nbsp; While it always dangerous to project Late Antique phenomena back into earlier centuries, an examination of the distribution of ecclesiastical architecture might offer an example for the

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way in which elite, administrative authority manifest itself on the local level.&nbsp; Whereas the most obvious and monumental reminders of Roman authority in the first four centuries of Roman involvement on the island appears largely restricted to urban areas, the building boom of Late Antiquity saw the spread of Christian basilica style churches throughout the island.&nbsp; Thus far, archaeologists have documented well over 100 churches on the island largely dating to the 5th -7th centuries.&nbsp; The 6th century church excavated at Pyla-Kousoptria with its elaborate opus sectile floors, wall painting, and moulded gypsum decorations represents just one of many examples of relatively elaborate church architecture in rural areas. [SLIDE] Our site only has one known church, but the similar site of Ay. Georgios-Peyias has at least five, the smaller and more rural site at Kopetra has three, the coastal site at MaroniPetrera has one, as does the rather remote anchorage on the Akamas peninsula, Ay. Kononas. The similarities between these buildings and their counterparts in urban areas is significant in that they project not only urban architecture into the countryside but also a specific ritual experience.&nbsp; The hierarchical rituals that took place within Christian churches on Cyprus ensconced the clergy in a position of authority which resonated with the architecture and ritual life of the urban centers on the island.&nbsp; The autonomous status of the bishop of Cyprus, granted in first in 431 and then again in 488, reinforced the position of the island as an independent Roman province.&nbsp; This status framed the common ritual experiences of rural and urban life on Cyprus, but also made clear that the autonomous church was only one scale of engagement with structures of authority extending far beyond the boundaries of the province.&nbsp; </p> <p><br>Conclusion<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To conclude: I have strayed rather far from the topic, methodology, and chronological boundaries of Prof. Mehl's paper.&nbsp; Nevertheless, both our works broached central questions to the study of the Roman Empire today.&nbsp; Any conclusions regarding the cohesiveness of the Roman state, the nature of local and imperial identity, and the manifestation of imperial authority require scholars not only to consider a wide range of evidence, but also to test a wide range of theoretical approaches that offer distinct methods for unpacking the complex intersection of Roman authority, imperialism and local identity .&nbsp; Part of this effort, of course, are colloquiums like this where archaeologists and historians with similar interests exchange ideas, approaches, and conclusions.&nbsp; Such dialogues hold forth the potential not only for a more synthetic approach to the Cypriot past, but also for a multivocal history that captures the diversity of experiences present in Roman empire. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kition EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 203.188.230.240 URL: http://www.journeyidea.com/primeval-kition-part-i/ DATE: 09/07/2009 12:39:49 AM

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Kition, former primeval city concealed beneath Larnaca; Cyprus, is city of great historical, archeological, architectural consequence. From wars of Mycenaeans and the Phonicians to native hero, Zeno, from pre-greek era to Significent incidences of life of Jesus to arebic raiders, the city has it all. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blogging and Genre STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blogging-and-genre CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 12/09/2008 07:57:01 AM ----BODY: <p>My blogging comrade, Kostis Kourelis, over at <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a> offered <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/12/baby-and-blog.html">an interesting post</a> on his own blogging habits.</p> <blockquote> <p>"For one, I must stop belaboring over my postings and make them snappier. Blogging should be done quickly, like an open email to a friend. Even if only for a few minutes a day, I feel that frequent postings are mandatory. Otherwise, potential readers cannot themselves establish reading regularity. So I hope to start a different style of posting that is perhaps more in-tune with the spirit of blogging." </p></blockquote> <p>I blog for about an hour a day, usually the first thing in the morning.&nbsp; I get into my office around 7 am and try to get my post done by around 8.&nbsp; Today is a little different as I am blogging from the <a href="http://www.gfkairport.com/">Grand Forks International Airport</a> en route to destinations international (via Minneapolis!).&nbsp; Being in a different (although not unfamiliar environment) has disrupted my blogging mojo in fairly significant ways. </p> <p>First, I am constantly looking at the little battery monitor on my laptop.&nbsp; While it says that I have 2:45 minutes, I don't trust it.&nbsp; (About 10 minutes ago, it said that I had closer to 3:30 minutes).</p> <p>Second, I feel fairly certain that a blog written on the road should have different feeling than a blog written in the comfort of my office.&nbsp; This is to suggest that my physical environment, channeled through the blog, influences the content of my blog.</p> <p>This gets me back to Kostis's post.&nbsp; He declared that blogging "should be done quickly".&nbsp; Quickly, however, is a relative term.&nbsp; In the world of academic publishing, a three month turn around can be considered quickly for a peer-reviewed article.&nbsp; Or, publishing an archaeological report 6 months after the completion of field work (or even 6 weeks) is quickly (see my series on the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/ar chaeological-institute-of-america-annual-meeting-the-corinthian-countryside-atthe-aia.html">Corinthian Countryside</a>).&nbsp; In the world of journalistic blogging (see for example <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/andrewsullivan-why-i-blog">Andrew Sullivan's "Why I Blog" article in the August 2008 Atlantic</a>), hourly blogging is quickly compared to the rhythm of daily newspaper publishing.</p> <p>These different definitions of quickly suggest the obvious point that blogging has a broader context, and this context might go far to developing the idea of genre (or sub-genre) within the still-expanding field of blogging.&nbsp; This disintegration of blogging as a general term for rapid

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dissemination of new links, news, specific information, attitudes, experiences, and impressions into a myriad of sub-genres and specific blog types will demand a more discernment on the part of the reading audience (not to mention the authors) as they encounter blogs whose content needs to be read within even more specific generic contexts.&nbsp; (This may be part of a larger trend in modern literature descending ultimately from the modern construction of the novel.)&nbsp; </p> <p>The ability to take the act of blogging mobile adds another dimension to the reading of blogs that we may not have encountered in our notions of reading honed on the generic complexities of the novel.&nbsp; It goes without saying the reading a blog on a mobile device in different contexts (from a university office, to the comfort of baby and home, to the train on the way to work,) re-contextualizes the text in even more ways.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Cyprus and the Roman Administration: People and Ritual STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: cyprus-and-the-roman-administration-people-and-ritual CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 12/08/2008 07:52:42 AM ----BODY: <p>I was able to (almost) complete <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/py la-koutsopetria-in-the-context-of-roman-cyprus-at-mcgill.html">my paper for Montreal</a> on Wednesday.&nbsp; This paper is a short response <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/mo re-roman-cyprus.html">to a paper by Andreas Mehl</a> entitled "Cyprus: The Role of a Province in the Roman Empire".&nbsp; In the final section of my paper I consider the degree to which Cyprus was engaged in Roman affairs during Late Antiquity.&nbsp; This brief and relatively superficial analysis is designed to consider how deeply Cyprus was engaged in the affairs of the Late Roman Empire.&nbsp; It stands in response to the observation offered by Mitford, Mehl, and others that almost no Cypriots appear in the administration of the High Empire, and this led them to conclude that Cyprus must have been a relatively insignificant province in the Empire or that the province did not participate in many of the typical activities that allowed for individuals to advance into the Roman administration.</p> <p>In Late Antiquity, however, things appear to have changed.&nbsp; On the one hand, there are two particularly prominent bishops with Cypriot ties: the late 4th century St. Epiphanius of Salamis and the early

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7th century St. John the Almsgiver.&nbsp; While Epiphanius was not a Cypriot by birth, he was perhaps the most celebrated Late Antique bishop of Salamis.&nbsp; He began his ecclesiastical career first as a monk in Egypt and then in Palestine before becoming the bishop on Cyprus.&nbsp; From this post he exerted influence extensively in the region and in the early 5th century even journeyed to Constantinople where he briefly clashed with John Chrysostom.&nbsp; John the Almsgiver was the son of the governor of the island.&nbsp; He was born at Cyprus at Amathous in the mid-6th century.&nbsp; Under Herakleios, he became the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria.&nbsp; In 614, however, the Persian threat forced him from his See at which point he returned to Cyprus where he died.&nbsp; While it is hardly surprising that members of the ecclesiastical and imperial aristocracy crossed paths in Late Antique Cyprus, it nevertheless reveals that by Late Antiquity, Cypriots had come to occupy significant places within the Empire.</p> <p>The deeper engagement of the island in empire wide affair may not simply reflect a top down phenomenon.&nbsp; After all, the island <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/th e-early-chris.html">featured well over 100 Late Antique period churches</a>.&nbsp; By the late 5th and 6th century, churches had appeared in communities all across the island ranging from major urban centers to the small villages.&nbsp; Our site at Pyla-Koutsopetria had at least one well appointed basilica.&nbsp; The much smaller village of Kopetra had three basilica style churches.&nbsp; The similarities between these buildings in non-urban or exurban sites and their counterparts in urban areas is significant in that they projected not only urban architecture but also a specific ritual experience into the countryside.&nbsp; The hierarchical rituals that took place within Christian churches on Cyprus ensconced the clergy in a position of authority which resonated with the architecture and ritual life of the urban centers on the island.&nbsp; The autonomous status of the bishop of Cyprus, granted in first in 431 and then again in 488, reinforced the position of the island as an independent Roman province.&nbsp; This status framed the common ritual experiences of rural and urban life on Cyprus, but also made clear that the autonomous church was only one scale of engagement with structures of authority extending far beyond the boundaries of the province.&nbsp; </p> <p>So evidence for elite engagement at the level of bishop suggests that by Late Antiquity Cyprus has emerged as a more significant participant in the ecclesiastical affairs of the Eastern Roman empire.&nbsp; As the affairs of the church became more deeply embedded in the affairs of the state, particularly over the course of the 6th century, the role of Cyprus and Cypriots appears to have increased.&nbsp; The island's ability to assert its ecclesiastical independence from the See of Antioch twice in the 5th century further attests to the prominence of Cypriot churchmen in the eyes of the ecclesiastical and imperial administration.&nbsp; Cyprus' engagement in the life of the church in the Eastern Mediterranean does not appear restricted to merely elite individuals.&nbsp; The proliferation of churches across the island ensured a degree of continuity in ritual life in rural, urban, and suburban contexts.&nbsp; This continuity of experience represented an important aspect of the "liturgification of Late Roman society.&nbsp; The liturgy with its distinct rituals, language, and organization served as a kind of common language for expressing political, social, and even economic identity across the entire Mediterranean basin.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-quick-hits CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 12/05/2008 07:27:09 AM ----BODY: <p>Here some interesting and fun links for a winter Friday:</p> <ul> <li>From the <a href="http://www.archive.org/index.php">Internet Archive</a> via Nathan Harper through Scott Moore: <a href="http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Cyprus%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts"> Some important texts for the study of Cyprus</a>.&nbsp; It includes Cobham's <em>Excerpta&nbsp; Cypria</em>, Cesnola's <em>Cyprus: Its Cities, Tombs, and Temples</em>, and Hogarth's <em>Devia Cypria</em>.</li> <li>I am not usually a big fan of "blog carnivals" but <a href="http://www.crankyprofessor.com/archives/002004.html">Carnivalesque 45</a> is pretty good.</li> <li>It alerted me that Alun Salt had begun blogging again at <a href="http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/">Archaeoastronomy</a>.</li> <li>Ian Straughn has posted a great article called "<a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/11/trashed_out_an_archaeolog ical.html">'Trashed Out': An Archaeology Reading of the Foreclosure Mess</a>" over at <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/">Archaeolog</a>.&nbsp; This resonates with my own interest in a suburban archaeology (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/sm all-town-arch.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/mo re-small-town.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/th e-streets-of.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/th e-streets-of-grand-forks-2-a-small-town-streetscape.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/su burban-archaeology-a-detroit-jewel-in-the-attic.html">here</a>), but in a far more timely manner.</li> <li><a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/">Antiquated Vagaries</a> has a great <a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/2008/11/greece-origin-ofwestern-civilization.html">post (with some great pictures)</a> on Athenian Graffiti and street art.</li> <li>Ryan Stander's <a href="http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/">Axis of Access</a> is a great blog.&nbsp; His photographs are amazing and we hope to recruit him to visit work

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with us in Cyprus this summer.&nbsp; </li> <li>Finally, the 2009 Graduate School Scholarly Forum Call-for-Papers has appeared.&nbsp; If you are a graduate student or faculty at UND, this is a great opportunity to share your research</li> <p>The 2009 Scholarly Forum – Call for Abstracts <p>The Graduate School is now calling for abstracts for the 2009 Scholarly Forum. The two day campus-wide event focuses on graduate student and faculty research and creative scholarship at UND. The Scholarly Forum will be held March 11 &amp; 12 in the Memorial Union, featuring oral presentations, panel sessions and a poster session. The deadline for abstracts is Monday 2 February, 2009. Sessions times are limited so submit your abstract early! All abstracts must be submitted on the electronic form provided on our web site. It is also important to read the submission guidelines. We look forward to receiving your abstracts. The submission form and guidelines can be found here on the web site (<a href="http://www.graduateschool.und.edu/docs/2009ScholaryForum/Forum%20Guideline s.pdf">submission guidelines here</a> and <a href="http://www.graduateschool.und.edu/docs/2009ScholaryForum/SubmissionForm.pd f">submission form here</a>)</p></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Teaching by Templates STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-teaching-by-templates DATE: 12/04/2008 07:48:32 AM ----BODY: <p>I've been thinking a good bit about templates for assignments this semester.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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").&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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).&nbsp; Such templates certainly introduce students the kind of techniques and templates that are common in academic writing.&nbsp; This is particular important in lower level courses because we cannot expect students here to have

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had much, if any, contact with academic writing (and textbooks commonly work to downplay authorial voice in favor of implied consensus).</p> <p>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.&nbsp; Teaching by templates certainly leads to more aesthetically appealing final products.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I encourage them to follow a fairly strict template for these papers. </p> <p>1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Present your topic clearly.<br>2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; State your thesis.<br>3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Place it within the historiography of your field.<br>4.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Discuss your sources and method.<br>5.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Demonstrate your argument’s validity.<br>6.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Conclude with reference to this thesis’s broader implications. <p>The results of this rather formal structure are papers that are similar in form and vary in content.&nbsp; On the one hand, this structures and limits the students' creative impulses.&nbsp; On the other hand, it produces papers that are easy to understand and evaluate. <p>The final paper for my graduate historiography class is a thesis prospectus.&nbsp; Such papers typically follow a fairly restricted number of templates.&nbsp; Nevertheless, I've been reluctant to provide a template for this assignment, and this has caused some consternation among my students in this class.&nbsp;&nbsp; Some of my reasons are selfish: I dread reading 20 cookie cutter papers.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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. <p>More Teaching Thursdays:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-historical-perspective-on-teaching-research-methods-with-kateturabian.html">Teaching Thursday: A Historical Perspective on Teaching Research Methods with Kate Turabian</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-teaching-time.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching Time</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/11/teaching-thursday-classroommodernism.html">Teaching Thursday: Classroom Modernism (K. Kourelis)</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching the Election</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments.html">Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te

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aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Potential for Digital Humanities at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-potential-and-role-of-digital-humanities-at-the-university-ofnorth-dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 12/03/2008 08:08:38 AM ----BODY: <p>As readers of this blog know, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/di gital-humanities-history-and-archaeology-at-the-university-of-north-dakotafirst-steps.html">we are beginning to explore the potential for a digital humanities center here at the University of North Dakota</a>.&#0160; The Department of English already has invested in a digital humanities class and has

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several faculty members with research interest in the field.&#0160; My interest in the Department of History is in the emerging fields of digital history and digital archaeology.&#0160; So far, a small working group has fashioned some basic material that sought to define digital humanities here on campus and outline potential directions for our work.</p> <p>This past week, <a href="http://www.und.edu/president/">UND&#39;s new President</a> circulated an invitation for &quot;White Papers&quot; asking for resources that would help interdisciplinary groups on campus develop new ideas or shift the emphasis of exiting groups.&#0160; We plan to organize some of our existing material into a white paper and request funding that will help develop digital humanities here on campus.&#0160; The trick is to translate our groups goals into a viable request for resources.&#0160; </p> <p>One thing that is striking about our campus is that there are a number of ongoing digital projects in draw upon digital technology and resources already on campus.&#0160; This work ranges from the creation of digital texts to the use of GIS in archaeological and geographical research to innovative use of digital audio, video, and photography.&#0160; The goal of any Center or Working Group here would be to create a center of gravity not only to promote these projects to the administration and wider public but also to encourage the kind interaction between individuals that will likely stimulate collaborative research, crossdisciplinary projects, or new technologies.&#0160; As anyone who has worked in academia knows, the best way to stimulate research is to make lots of money available to collaborative projects.&#0160; This is probably not a viable option at present so we have worked to come up with other ways to focus the intellectual infrastructure already present on campus is a productive way.&#0160; The hope is that this group or center would form a crucial component in helping the campus and scholars in the humanities transition from analogue perspectives on their research to embracing the wide range of digital technologies and methods that will characterize the next generation of research and teaching.</p> <p>The ironic thing about many of our efforts is that they involve distinctly non-digital methods and resources.&#0160; First we all concluded that some kind of space on campus for our Working Group or Center would foster faculty collaboration.&#0160; I work mostly in my office and I am sure that many of my colleagues have their favorite productive spaces, but a central location for informal or formal discussions about digital approaches to the humanities would nevertheless represent an important aspect of the kind legitimacy and visibility necessary to promote our work.&#0160; We also discussed the need for a lecture series.&#0160; My vision would be to run two a year and pair a faculty lecture with an outside speaker.&#0160; We will likely ask for resources to fund two graduate students who would help prepare external grant applications, maintain the web site (a digital projects portal), and support various campus projects in the digital humanities.&#0160; </p> <p>Since the resources would only be available once (as opposed to sustaining support) we decided not to ask for much in the way of hardware or even software (although we will include several <a href="http://www.dlxs.org/index.html">crucial and expensive software packages</a>) which have well-established horizons of obsolescence and little value unless backed by sustainable funding.&#0160; It seems that funds right now would best serve to foster the kind of social and intellectual infrastructure on campus that would be largely self-sustaining in the future.</p> <p>It&#39;s always hard to know how any proposal will be received.&#0160; There is reason, however, for optimism as <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/gi s-day-and-the-digital-humanities-at-the-university-of-north-dakota.html">the President has already assumed that a center for digital humanities</a> exists on campus.&#0160; We hope that we won&#39;t disappoint him too much when we tell

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him that our work is still in early stages and needs support from the administration to reach its fullest potential.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Cypriot Landscape, Pyla-Koutsopetria, and Rome STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-cypriot-landscape-pyla-koutsopetria-and-rome DATE: 12/02/2008 08:03:20 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/12/mo re-roman-cyprus.html">As I mentioned yesterday</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/py la-koutsopetria-in-the-context-of-roman-cyprus-at-mcgill.html">my paper in Montreal</a> 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.&nbsp; I spent most of the day yesterday thinking about how Cyprus position in the Roman empire influenced Cypriot landscape. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/26014005">Susan Alcock's <em>Graecia Capta</em></a><em> </em>was at the forefront of my thought as was <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/186710945">Marcus Rautman's</a> work on the "busy countryside" of Late Antique Cyprus.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, the question that I tried to answer is how was Cyprus' place in the Roman empire visible at our site of <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koustopetria</em></a>.&nbsp; In some ways, our site is typical of other non-urban Roman-Late Roman sites on the island.&nbsp; For example, it lacks a strong signature of material from the 2nd3rd 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.&nbsp; Thus, we can probably argue that our site had continuous activity throughout the Roman era.&nbsp; 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. </p> <p>On the other hand, our site is not simply a Roman period settlement.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The arrival of Roman material on the site, then, could be read as the changing material culture of the long-standing settlement.&nbsp; While this would qualify as a kind of Romanization (especially as some of the material may

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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.&nbsp; </p> <p>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.&nbsp; In pre-Roman times, Koutsopetria sat at the periphery of the city of Kition's chora (or territory).&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; </p> <p>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.&nbsp; The full array of Late Roman finewares and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/py la-koustopetr.html">transport vessels</a> at the site shows a deep engagement with Mediterranean markets.&nbsp; Moreover, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/pr ovisional-pro.html">the material at Koutsopetria appears somewhat different from the material found at other sites in the immediate vicinity</a> suggesting a degree of economic autonomy.&nbsp; What happened during the Late Roman period to encourage this kind of economic expansion?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; </p> <p>When cast against the backdrop of Roman rule on the island of Cyprus, the site history of Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>appears distinct in that activity at the site is not a pure artifact of Roman administrative priorities, economic resturcturing, or political intervention.&nbsp; On the other hand, its expansion during this period and into Late Antiquity suggests that Roman rule did influence the development of the site.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; More on this... I hope... later in the week.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Roman Cyprus... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-roman-cyprus CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 12/01/2008 08:21:15 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/ma pping-roman-pottery-at-pyla-koutsopetria.html">My recent blog entries</a> on Roman Cyprus center on two projects.&nbsp; One is a article that we have been working on for almost three years now that places the assemblage produced by the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> in the context of other similar sites in the Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; It focuses particularly on how the economic relationships between sites in the region led to the creation of a distinct assemblage of pottery at Koutsopetria in Late Antiquity.</p> <p>The second project is <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/py la-koutsopetria-in-the-context-of-roman-cyprus-at-mcgill.html">a paper at a small colloquium at McGill University in Montreal</a>.&nbsp; I was invited to present a response to a paper by Andreas Mehl. Prof. Mehl's paper presents an administrative sketch of the province of Cyprus during the Roman period.&nbsp; Without giving too much away, his paper's primary emphasis was on the role of the province in the Roman Empire.&nbsp; As with many papers of this kind, Mehl relies heavily on epigraphical evidence and, by his own admission, takes little stock in the archaeological evidence from the island.&nbsp; Such administrative and provincial histories were once the foundations for regional histories of the Roman Empire.&nbsp; Even today, any discussion of Roman Cyprus begins with the epigrapher T.B. Mitfords, "Roman Cyprus," (<em>ANRW </em>II 7.2 (1980): 12851384).&nbsp; The tradition was carried on further, albeit with a slightly broader perspective, in David Potter's article "Roman Cyprus" which appeared originally in Greek translation (2000) but has circulated widely in an English manuscript for years.&nbsp; </p> <p>More recent work has concerned itself less with the administrative component of Roman domination on Cyprus and emphasized it its place the economic and cultural components of Roman rule on the island.&nbsp; To do this, scholars have drawn more and more heavily on archaeological data.&nbsp; In part, this is because the traditional material for Roman administrative history on Cyprus is lacking.&nbsp; There are relatively few inscriptions from the Roman period which give insight into the workings of Roman rule there and even fewer inscriptions give any information on Cypriots abroad; without such texts, the traditional narratives of Roman authority that relied upon prosopography and Roman legal history falter. As a result,

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scholarship on Roman Cyprus has come to emphasize archaeological data and this data has encouraged us to consider different kinds of questions from those traditionally addressed using epigraphical data and considered by scholars interested in the administrative apparatus and individuals central to Roman rule.</p> <p>Thus, responding to a paper like Prof. Mehl's will be a particular challenge.&nbsp; On the one hand, the questions and interests of historians who have committed to using archaeological data have diverged considerably from the kind of analysis produced by Mehl.&nbsp; On the other hand, our work should have points of contact and mutually inform each others' conclusions.&nbsp; Recent work on Roman Cyprus -- particularly <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/162144116">John Leonard's dissertation</a> and the steady stream of publications from recent fieldwork on Roman and Late Roman sites -- should exert an influence over more traditional questions regarding the expression of Roman administrative power on the island.</p> <p>Our site at Pyla-Koutsopetria for example must be in part an artifact of Roman administrative authority on the island.&nbsp; It reached its largest extent in the Late Roman period. The material at the site shows that it benefited from well-worn trade routes which linked the length and breadth of the Roman Mediterranean most likely through a now infilled harbor.&nbsp; This harbor was well-situated to take advantage of the location of the site within the Roman road network on the island.&nbsp; The main route from Kition to SalamisConstantina would have departed the coast near our site, and this made Koutsopetria the first place that a traveler from the east would reach the coast.&nbsp; Despite the site's status as a central place (albeit most likely on a very local level), the "town" does not appear to have acquired any administrative identity.&nbsp; It presumably fell under the local political control of Kition, but its size alone suggests that it must have enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy.&nbsp; In fact, the material present on the surface of the site does not find ready parallels with any of other site or region in the hinterland of Kition suggesting that size of the site might also mark out some degree of economic autonomy.&nbsp; This is to say that the residents of Koutsopetria had their own model for engaging Mediterranean commerce.&nbsp; Such concentrations of wealth in the countryside have contributed to fundamental economic and administrative changes in the empire over the course of Late Antiquity as the state sought to develop new methods for extracting resources from such a "busy countryside" at the same time as the traditional urban elite progressively lost status.</p> <p>The Roman administrative system was hardly known for its dynamism or ability to respond to changes.&nbsp; Moreover, it is likely that economic changes and changes in settlement were tied at least in part to changes in the administrative structure of the empire.&nbsp; An opportunity to engage someone like Prof. Mehl in a conversation about administration, economic, settlement, and politics, on Roman Cyprus holds forth considerable potential.&nbsp; More soon...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

Caraher

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TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hits-and-varia CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 11/28/2008 09:09:39 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits for a sleepy Friday after Thanksgiving:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-onsharing.html">Sebastian Heath</a> pointed out a recent article by <em><a href="http://csanet.org/newsletter/fall08/nlf0801.html">Charles Watkinson in the CSA Newsletter</a> </em>that encapsulates many of the recent discussions about digitally publishing archaeological material. <li>A podcast of my "<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr eam-archaeology-working-paper.html">Dream Archaeology</a>" paper is now <a href="http://www.ndsu.edu/instruct/isern/colloquium/">up at North Dakota State University's Department of History web site</a>. So you don't even have to read! <li><a href="http://tarpipe.com/">Here's an interesting new way to manage work flow</a>.&nbsp; It's called Tarpipe, and while it is still in beta, it looks to be way to disseminate information through various media in a much more streamlined way.&nbsp; Even with my limited engagement with the "New Media", I often find it difficult to manage my e-mail correspondence, blog, twitter tweets, course webpages, et c.&nbsp; This could help. <li>Some more interesting links between Punk Rock and Archaeology (with a Michigan focus!) at <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/11/michigan-is-best.html">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a>.</li></ul> <p>Just so that you don't think that I all I do all day is think up things to post on my blog:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105362079cc970 b-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536291e48970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536291e4b970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105362079dd970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Kilns at the University of North Dakota

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: kilns-at-the-university-of-north-dakota CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 11/26/2008 08:06:06 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://ndpcs.org/und.htm">The University of North Dakota has had a long tradition of producing ceramics</a>.&nbsp; This grew initially out of the University's interest in exploring the potential of natural resources in the state.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.pottery.und.edu/index.htm">In 1910, the Department of Ceramics (originally in the College of Engineering) hired Margaret Cable, a noted potter,</a> to direct a program dedicated to the use of North Dakota clay.&nbsp; Today, "Cable Pottery" produced by Margaret Cable or her students at UND, is a sought after collectors item and many would argue that it marked the high-point of the North Dakota ceramics industry.</p> <p>This past weekend, the modern descendents of Margaret Cable, <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/art/html/staff/wesbio.html">Wes Smith, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art</a>, invited me and my wife over the check out their firing of a wood kiln on UND's campus.&nbsp; Since I spend lots of time looking at pottery on the ground, on my computer screen, and converted into pixels in various funky-colored GIS maps, I figured it was a good opportunity to do some ethnoarchaeology and attempt to understand the process of pottery production.</p> <p>The first thing that struck me was how small and simple the kiln was.&nbsp; It was built of dry bricks (no mortar) with a simple vaulted roof which was constructed initially in a wood form. </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361bf009970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536246ae7970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p>One side of the kiln has the chimney and the other a brick wall that is constructed after the pots have been put in the kiln.&nbsp; The kiln has several sets of "passive dampers" which were basically loose bricks that the operator could slide in and out to control the amount of oxygen entering the kiln space.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361bf00b970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361bf00d970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>When some of the dampers near the chimney were closed causing the kiln to draw more violently from one end, the resulting flame was impressive.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536246af0970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536246af2970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Students were in charge of stoking the kiln with wood and it fired to over 2000 degrees!!&nbsp; It ran all day on less than a chord of wood.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536246af9970

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c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010536246b00970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361bf01e970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361bf023970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>I was struck by the relatively simple construction of the kiln and its efficiency.&nbsp; Wes built the kiln in less than a weekend.&nbsp; Certainly these kinds of kilns must have dotted the ancient landscape producing much of the everyday utility wares.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Mapping Roman Pottery at Pyla-Koutsopetria STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: mapping-roman-pottery-at-pyla-koutsopetria CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 11/25/2008 08:45:32 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last two weeks, I've been working to map the distribution of Roman and Late Roman pottery from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.&nbsp; Roman and Late Roman pottery was collected over the course of intensive survey.&nbsp; The intensive survey mapped the overall density of pottery across the site on the basis of field-walkers spaced at 10 m intervals who counted all visible pottery 1 m to either side of the their swath through the unit.&nbsp; While it is typically necessary to adjust the sample size (and the estimated densities) on account of surface visibility (e.g. density of vegetation covering the surface), it has nevertheless proven to be a consistent measure of archaeological material on the surface of the ground.&nbsp; In fact, intensive surveys from across the Mediterranean have used this technique with only minor variation for the last 20 years of intensive survey.&nbsp; </p> <p>To sample the variation of pottery within this sample, our project asks each field-walker in a unit to collect one example of each unique artifact type.&nbsp; We call this the chronotype sampling method and I have talked about it here on my blog.&nbsp; We consider it an improvement over earlier methods of sampling variation in surface assemblages (that is all the material present on the surface of the ground).&nbsp; Some techniques which relied upon the unsystematic collection of "diagnostic" pieces (often rims, handles, or sherds with some outstanding

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features) failed to account for our ability to analyze subtle differences in fabrics that might not appear to be diagnostic to a relatively untrained fieldwalker.&nbsp; Other projects have used total collection, but this would not be feasible for a survey area with large, high-density concentrations of material like Pyla-Koutsopetria where artifact densities often exceeded 5,000 artifacts per hectare.&nbsp; </p> <p>While we are confident that the chronotype sampling system produces a representative sample of the variety of material present in the unit (and we have done experiments that have supported this assertion), we are less sure how to proceed in mapping the distribution of artifacts across the site.&nbsp; The chronotype sampling strategy tends to under-represent very common artifact types and, in any case, makes no effort to produce a sample that has any correlation to the actual number of artifacts of a particular period visible on the ground.&nbsp; In this regard, it is no better than collecting diagnostic material, although we have argued that the variation in the chronotype sample is often representative of more intensive use of a particular area in a particular period.&nbsp; Even if a greater number of chronotypes (or unique types of artifacts) does correlate in some way with more intensive use of a particular unit, the opposite is probably not true: certain kinds of sites -for example a warehouse -- might produce a substantial assemblage of relatively homogenous material which would be radically underrepresented by the chronotype sample.&nbsp; Even total collection from each unit (or even just one swath of each unit) would not necessary produce a sample of chronological distribution of artifacts in the landscape in the same way that field-walking produces a sample of artifacts present on the surface.&nbsp; As many scholars have pointed out, our ability to identify particular types of artifacts (say, coarse wares) varies widely across the periods possible across the landscape.&nbsp; The "differential visibility" of particular types of pottery -- particularly less well-known local ware and utility wares -- means that certain types of pottery which are the present of particular economic conditions or functions of the landscape will be systematically underrepresented.&nbsp; Thus, we are less able to map the distribution of material from periods represented heavily by local wares or by less diagnostic coarse. </p> <p>Site based surveys often define their sites based on overall artifact densities and then sample for chronology within the limits of this elevated densities.&nbsp; Thus the site definition and the distribution of material from a particular period across the landscape of individual sites are, in effect, separate functions.&nbsp; Siteless survey, however, requires that we develop a method for mapping period distributions across the landscape that works more closely with more traditional maps representing the overall distribution of pottery.&nbsp; Our current methods makes it challenging to identify concentrations of single periods in the landscape and this is a vital task if we seek to embrace the arguments central to siteless survey.&nbsp; </p> <p>As a case study for this difficulty, our site at Pyla-Koutsopetria has two well defined zones of elevated, overall artifact density on the coastal plain.&nbsp; The material collected from these two areas are overwhelmingly Roman and Late Roman in date.&nbsp; We have been able to argue that these two areas represent functionally different activities during the Late Roman period by comparing the artifacts from each zone.&nbsp; Last week, I attempted to compare another area of the site to the distribution of Roman and Late Roman pottery in zones 1 and 2.&nbsp; This third zone represented an area of overall artifact densities that was comparable to those found in zone 2, but the assemblage of material in zone three was far more chronologically diverse than that found in zones 1 or 2.&nbsp; In particular, the Roman and Late Roman material from zone 3 represented a smaller percentage of the overall assemblage than the Roman and Late Roman material in zone 1 or 2.&nbsp; So, since our sample of Roman material does not represent the overall density of

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material in a particular unit, how do I compare in a meaningful way the three areas? My goal here is to evaluate the distribution of Roman and Late Roman material in zone 3.&nbsp; What is the relationship? </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Suburban Archaeology: A (Detroit) Jewel in the Attic STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: suburban-archaeology-a-detroit-jewel-in-the-attic CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 11/24/2008 08:10:21 AM ----BODY: <p>When my wife and I bought our house, we discovered a very strange thing.&nbsp; There was an old stove in the attic.&nbsp; This certain defies certain kinds of archaeological logic.&nbsp; Traditionally we think of discard behavior as following the path of least resistance, especially for an object of new obvious symbolic or religious value.&nbsp; Our house does not have a proper basement, only a root-cellar.&nbsp; It may be that whoever put this old stove in the attic sought to protect it from the general dampness of the cellar not to mention the regular floods in the Red River Valley.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361cf388970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="409" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053614e4dd970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>This past week we had a layer of additional insulation added to our attic and the crew who did this offered to remove the heavy stove.&nbsp; By Thursday afternoon we had the stove back in the kitchen where it deserved to be.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053614e4e2970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361cf397970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>On closer inspection, the stove appears to be a late 1920s-1930s Detroit "Jewel" Stove.&nbsp; These stoves were the classic model produced by the Detroit Stove Company which during its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th century was the largest producer of cast iron stoves in the world. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053614e4f2970 b-pi"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361cf3a5970

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c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="147" alt="detroit_400" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361cf3a9970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></a></p> <p align="center"><img style="borderright: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361cf3af970c -pi" width="404" border="0">&nbsp; </p> <p>I am guessing that the stove was made sometime in the late 1920s.&nbsp; By 1926, the Detroit Stove Company had merged with the rival Michigan Stove Company to form the Detroit-Michigan Stove Company.&nbsp; Our stove still only features the Detroit Stove Company name.&nbsp; The stove itself was a gas model, but the elements have been removed and lost.&nbsp; </p> <p>The lovely Detroit Jewel name plate cleaned up well.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053614e503970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361cf3ba970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>It was remarkable to discover how easy (and relatively un-manufactured) the stove was.&nbsp; I managed to disassemble many parts of the stove using only a flat-head screwdriver.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361cf3c7970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="537" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053614e520970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>My wife and I are able to envision almost any piece of archaeology as a bar (baby-grand piano, stove, LR2 amphora, you name it).&nbsp; So we promptly re-used (spolia!) the stove as a bar/cabinet. To do this we used magnets to add some funky lights (no damage to the actual stove itself).&nbsp; Next spring we will give it a new paint job. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e201053614e52e970 b-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361cf3e7970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.168.80.241 URL: DATE: 11/24/2008 02:54:58 PM I absolutely LOVE it. Last Spring, I rescued a 1920s safe from storage in South Carolina to Connecticut. It once belonged to my aunt's husband, Greek immigrant

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from Peloponnese. The safe was used in a candy factory he opened in Columbia, SC in the 1920s. Transporting it became an odyssey, but it's now safe (but uncracked) in our garage. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/30/2008 11:23:00 PM Neat! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: rev barky EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.118.178.53 URL: DATE: 12/12/2008 10:02:02 PM Hi, I had an old A-B that was very much like yours in my basement and wanted so much to restore it but it was so rusty that I ended up selling in pieces to a guy for $5 in a garage sale. i probably should have kept it I guess. Oh well. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Random Notes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-and-random-notes CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 11/21/2008 08:02:14 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a few quick things this cold Friday morning.;</p> <p>First, a new member of the blogosphere: <a href="http://www.gradspace.und.edu/blog/">The Blog at the Graduate School of the University of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; This is my wife's invention and it seeks to be:</p> <blockquote> <p>"a place for information, updates, dialogue and other fun and newsworthy items that relate to graduate education. We hope to engage you in discussions on a variety of topics and to be informative. In addition to topics relating to our own Graduate School at the University of North Dakota, we will post items of national interest in graduate education, events, conferences and more."</p></blockquote> <p>According to my inside sources, the first week up and running has proven the value of this kind of outlet for an organization like UND's Graduate School.&nbsp; They have received a constant flow of traffic and had hits from all over the world.</p> <p>Next, here are two blogs that have recently become part of my weekly reading list:&nbsp; <a href="http://antiquatedvagaries.blogspot.com/">Antiquated Vagaries</a> has continued the tradition of blogging from the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies at Athens</a>.&nbsp; It's been a cool way to look in on the day-to-day (trip-totrip) activities of the Regular Members.&nbsp; Another blog that consistently has interesting things is Diana Wright's <a href="http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/">Surprised by Time</a>.&nbsp; It has

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a nice blend of musing about Greece.</p> <p>Finally, <a href="http://www.wordle.net/">Wordle</a> is a great waste of time.&nbsp; Now I have pictures of my recent posts:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361534db970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="266" alt="WordleAMW" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105360cdd3b970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>And my <a href="http://www.gradspace.und.edu/blog/">The Blog at the Graduate School of the University of North Dakota</a> (in <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/html/webtools.html">UND's officially approved web site colors</a>, of course!) </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361534e1970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="262" alt="WordleGradSchoolBlog" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e20105361534e4970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Have a good weekend and cheer on on those Spiders as they play that evil team from William and Mary for the 118th time (that's the 4th oldest in Division 1 and the 8th longest running rivalry in college football)!.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: A Historical Perspective on Teaching Research Methods with Kate Turabian STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-a-historical-perspective-on-teaching-researchmethods-with-kate-turabian CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 11/20/2008 07:47:39 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://library.und.edu/Collections/Robinson/home.html">Elwyn B. Robinson</a> provides some interesting comments on teaching a research methods class in the 1950s.&nbsp; His careful documentation of the books that he used over his career at the University of North Dakota is one of the most valuable aspect of his autobiography.</p> <p>Of particular interest to me this semester is that he notes his adoption of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/254320584&amp;ht=edition">Kate Turabian's <em>A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations</em></a>, which first appeared in 1955.&nbsp; This has remained the standard guide for advice on footnotes, bibliographies, and other technical aspects of formal

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writing in our department.&nbsp; The book's organization is obscure to today's students and even the best students find the complexity of her citation style almost impossible to replicate.</p> <blockquote> <p>"The diary shows that I was apparently preparing to teach a course on research methods, for a diary entry shows that I was memorizing portions of <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/987875&amp;ht=edition">Sherman Kent, The Writing of History</a></em>, on scholarly style in footnotes.&nbsp; I later used the book, an excellent one, in my course on Introduction to Research in History.&nbsp; Kent was a professor at Yale.&nbsp; His book was, I believed, by far the best on the subject.&nbsp; I learned a good deal from it.&nbsp; I also had the copy of Homer C. Hockett's book that I had used while a graduate student.&nbsp; I believe its title was something like <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2619495">Introduction to Research in History</a> </em>that I chose as the title of the course.&nbsp; Kent's book had much good advice on writing as well as on note-taking and scholarly style.&nbsp; I believe that Hockett's book had more on bibliographical aids and government documents.&nbsp; I believe that some years earlier I had purchased a copy of the <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/51553085">Chicago Manual of Style</a></em>, the most respected and substantial book of the sort.&nbsp; It detailed the practices of the University of Chicago Press and was followed, perhaps with some modifications, by many university presses and by the journals of learned societies such as the Americn Historical Association.&nbsp; I suppose that it was about this time that I bought a copy of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/6465181&amp;ht=edition">Kate Turabian's style manual</a> (I don't recall the title).&nbsp; Miss Turabian worked at the University of Chicago Press, and her small, paperbound book was an adaptation of the <em>Chicago Manual of Style</em> to the practical uses of graduate students.&nbsp; It became the standard and authority for the Graduate School at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; I may have had a hand in that step, for I was then a member of the university graduate committee, elected to that committee by the faculty of the College of Science, Literature and Art.&nbsp; I don't believe that I required members of my course to buy a copy of Turabian's book, but graduate students in history did so.&nbsp; The students in the course were both seniors majoring in history and graduate students in history.&nbsp; I enjoyed teaching the course very much and learned a great deal in doing it both on writing and scholarly style.&nbsp; I gradually became a semi-authority on the contents of Turabian among my faculty associates who noe and then asked a question on some point that puzzled them.&nbsp; I also bought about this time a copy of the pamphlet issued by the Modern Language Association and entitled <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1471928&amp;ht=edition">The MLA Style Sheet</a></em>.&nbsp; Some of the usages described in it differed from those recommended in Turabian.&nbsp; I believe that in 1956,1957, or 1958 I gave Steve a copy of the Turabian book." </p></blockquote> <p>I teach the undergraduate version of this class almost every semester.&nbsp; Alongside Turabian I also assign <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/233547782&amp;ht=edition">Strunk and White's, <em>The Elements of Style</em></a>, which appeared <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/226204968&amp;ht=edition">in its present format almost 50 years ago</a>.&nbsp; I add to these classic works <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64511082">J. Presnell's The Information Literate Historian</a></em> and, next semester, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/227016692">G. Graff's <em>They Say/I Say</em></a>.&nbsp; It's hard to imagine that either of those works will have the staying power of Turabian and Strunk and White.&nbsp; </p> <p>More Teaching Thursdays:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te

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aching-thursday-teaching-time.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching Time</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/11/teaching-thursday-classroommodernism.html">Teaching Thursday: Classroom Modernism (K. Kourelis)</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching the Election</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments.html">Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sterling Fluharty EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.24.46.18 URL: http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com/

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DATE: 11/23/2008 06:18:39 PM I like the range of books you use. I hadn't heard of _They Say/I Say_. I have used Rael's _Reading, Writing, and Researching for History_ instead:! ! http://www.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides/! ! How do you think they compare? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: GIS Day and the Digital Humanities at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: gis-day-and-the-digital-humanities-at-the-university-of-north-dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/19/2008 07:52:06 AM ----BODY: <p>You may not realize this but today is <a href="http://www.gisday.com/">International GIS (Geographic Infromation Systems) Day</a>.&nbsp; While I don't think that ESRI has "GIS Day" cards yet as the leading producer of GIS software, their fingerprints are all over this international celebration of their product.&nbsp;&nbsp; (And to be fair, the National Geographic Society and other non-profit groups co-sponsor the celebration!)&nbsp; In any event, the influence of GIS software on archaeology has been immeasurable.&nbsp; Landscape and survey archaeologists now depend upon GIS software not only to manage primary data collection in the field, but also to conduct a whole range of analyses from displaying basic artifact densities to estimating the most efficient routes through the landscape.&nbsp; </p> <p>GIS software represents one of the core technologies in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/di gital-humanities-history-and-archaeology-at-the-university-of-north-dakotafirst-steps.html">Digital History, Archaeology, and the Humanities</a>.&nbsp; The ability to create easily <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASTimeMap/disk_EKAS.html">dat a-rich maps</a> of everything from archaeological finds to real and imagined landscape of works of fiction plays a key role in our increasingly visual culture.&nbsp; Even such simply GIS interfaces as Google Earth provide a vital classroom tool and provide a kind of flexibility and dynamism that even the best paper maps cannot replicate. </p> <p>The University of North Dakota appears to be interested in exploring the potential of digital resources across the Humanities.&nbsp; In fact, in his first "<a href="http://www.und.edu/State_of_University_2008/">State of the University Address</a>" Robert Kelley (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-inauguratio.html">UND's new president</a>) referred specifically to Digital Humanities in his speech.&nbsp; </p> <blockquote> <p>I'd like to spend just a few moments at the beginning of this address highlighting some of the outstanding achievements within this institution... I would like to showcase a sample of what faculty, staff, and students of the university have achieved as a

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reflection of where we are at the moment and why we should be justifiably proud of our university.&nbsp; First UND has a remarkable faculty and staff.&nbsp; The University has recruited very well over the years and we will continue to put priority emphasis on allocating resources into faculty and staff compensation and professional development.&nbsp; The efforts of UND's faculty and staff have resulted in new centers and institutes, new advances in science and technology, creative new performances in music and in the visual and performing arts and the development of innovative new technologies like the Ag Cam that was recently delivered to the international space station by NASA on the Shuttle last Friday.&nbsp; Faculty have developed centers that focus on such diverse themes as <strong><em>Digital Humanities</em></strong>, sustainable energy, human rights, digital archiving, neuroscience, natural resource law, human behavior, the regulation of the gaming industry, and the list goes on and on."</p></blockquote> <p>The interesting (and exciting) thing is that there is no Digital Humanities center on campus.&nbsp; In fact, the entire "program" at present includes one class in the English Department.&nbsp; It looks like the president is giving those of us involved in the digital humanities a green light to expand our efforts and make his optimistic (and premature) pronouncement a reality.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sterling Fluharty EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.210.226.120 URL: http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/19/2008 06:54:52 PM Congrats on the mention. I hope it works out for the best. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.230.59.134 URL: http://civilwarhistory.wordpress.com DATE: 11/19/2008 11:38:01 PM Bill,! ! Is there any possibility of our department putting together a course, as I think it would be an exciting way to increase the use of blogging by students as outlets for their personal interests in history. While I am one of the few in the department who blogs actively, at least among students and on history, I would be happy to help in any way to encourage the creation of blogs and other websites by students and faculty in the department. One of the things that I always stress with my blogs is that I provide opportunities for people interested in history and new to blogging to write for my sites, as it provides me more voices and content than my own, and it builds networks with other blogs

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and scholars out there. I will do my best to keep the Digital Humanities in mind and hope to work with it in the future.! ! Take care,! ! Daniel ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.133.190 URL: http://profile.typekey.com/billcaraher/ DATE: 11/20/2008 07:56:10 AM Daniel,! ! I've thought about offering a Digital History course. In fact, I had planned on doing that next semester, but other things came up. If other students have an interest, I'd be happy to do something informally next semester.! ! Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Elwyn Robinson in the Grand Forks Herald STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: elwyn-robinson-in-the-grand-forks-herald CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Elwyn Robinson's Autobiography CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 11/18/2008 07:37:43 AM ----BODY: <p>It didn't take much prompting for Mike Jacobs, the editor of the Grand Forks Hearald, <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=93270&amp;section=Op inion">to offer a few words on the 50th Anniversary of Elwyn B. Robinson's "Themes of North Dakota History" speech</a>.&nbsp; In his usual plain-spoken style, Jacobs contrasted the experience of watching the Space Shuttle Endeavor (which may or may not have carried a satellite built by the University of North Dakota into space) blast off and his father's experiences living in the state 100 years ago.&nbsp; This kind of reflection seems common here in North Dakota.&nbsp; In fact, my experience has been that North Dakotans think more about their varied pasts than any place where I have lived.&nbsp; This interest in the past of the state (always tied in some ways to the future) has occasionally been shared by the national media. <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2008-01/emptied-north-dakota/bowdentext.html">National Geographic's</a> article on the abandoned landscape of North Dakota, for example, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/ab andoned-lands.html">received some attention</a>.&nbsp; Closer to home, the recent opposition surrounding <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/mo ving-from-mer.html">the move of the Department of History from Merrifield Hall</a> has been articulated at least in part is an affront to the history of the Department and the University (see <a href="http://media.www.dakotastudent.com/media/storage/paper970/news/2008/11/04/ Opinion/Letter.History.Majors.Dismissed-3521366.shtml">here</a>, <a href="https://secure.forumcomm.com/grandforks/articles/index.cfm?page=purchase&a mp;id=91518&amp;CFID=121102748&amp;CFTOKEN=88674424&amp;jsessionid=88305e11ddeb6 128286b">here</a>, <a href="https://secure.forumcomm.com/grandforks/articles/index.cfm?page=purchase&a mp;id=91959&amp;CFID=121102748&amp;CFTOKEN=88674424&amp;jsessionid=8830bf67e2424 7774242">here</a>, <a href="https://secure.forumcomm.com/grandforks/articles/index.cfm?page=purchase&a mp;id=90489&amp;CFID=121102748&amp;CFTOKEN=88674424&amp;jsessionid=88303a05756d7 467472e">here</a>).&nbsp; Knee-jerk appeals to history can be depressing and pointless.&nbsp; Jacobs avoid this in the final paragraphs of his editorial where he critiques Robinson's six themes going forward: </p> <blockquote> <p>"Here is a vivid challenge to Robinson’s themes. The <em>remoteness</em> that he identified, and that North Dakotans of my generation grew up with, has largely vanished, though <em>distance </em>remains a major challenge. <p>North Dakota is no longer so <em>dependent </em>as it was. The economy is more diverse, and hence more stable. Still, the vagaries of weather and world markets exert an enormous influence. <p>Similarly, the state’s position has shifted away from <em>economic disadvantage</em>, and that has moderated the<em> radicalism</em> that so characterized the political history of the state during most of my father’s life. <p>The remaining themes are paired. North Dakotans built <em>too many of almost everything</em>, and we’ve been paring back ever since. <p><em>Adjustment </em>meant the loss of thousands of farms and businesses and hundreds of towns and villages. These adjustments took thousands of citizens with them. <p>But history has made a turn. The 20th century was a time of constant challenge and frequent failure, as Robinson saw, but the new century has brought unprecedented opportunity. <p>Nothing demonstrates that so clearly, for me, as Friday’s launch. <p>Robinson’s themes help us to understand the past, and they help to define the present. <p>But they don’t determine the future. They are admonitions, not axioms, and it was clear Friday that North Dakota will live with them, and not by them."</p></blockquote> <p>It's nice to see the history of the department invoked in a positive way.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria in the Context of Roman Cyprus at McGill STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-in-the-context-of-roman-cyprus-at-mcgill

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CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 11/17/2008 07:27:40 AM ----BODY: <p>On Friday <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr eam-archaeology-working-paper.html">I presented some of my research</a> for colleagues at North Dakota State University in Fargo.&nbsp; The conversation after my paper was most helpful and will form a key role in my revisions. <p>But for now, I need to focus on my next paper at McGill Unversity in a scant three weeks!&nbsp; It will focus on our work with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and continue our efforts to place our fieldwork in the larger context of the Roman Mediterranean. <p>Here's the notice: <p align="center"><strong>Roman Cyprus: Space and Power in an Island Province </strong> <p>The McGill University Department of History and Classical Studies and the Pyla Koustopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) will host a one-day colloquium on "Roman Cyprus: Space and Power in an Island Province." The colloquium will feature a key note lecture by Prof. Andreas Mehl (Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg) and a formal response by Prof. William Caraher (University of North Dakota), codirector of the PKAP. The presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion. The colloquium will be held on Wednesday, December 10, 2:30-5:30 PM, at McGill University in Thomson House, 3650 McTavish. <p>Colloquium Schedule <p>Presentations (2:30-4:00) <p>Andreas Mehl, "Cyprus: the role of a province in the Roman Empire"<br>William Caraher, "Response: the Archaeological Perspective" <p>Break (4:00-4:15) <p>Roundtable Discussion (4:15-5:30) <p>Hans Beck (McGill University)<br>Michael Fronda (McGill University, PKAP)<br>John Serrati (McGill University) <p>For more information, contact Hans Beck (tel: 514-398-2234).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Dream Archaeology: Working Paper STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: dream-archaeology-working-paper CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 11/14/2008 08:11:53 AM ----BODY:

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<p>I'm off to Fargo to give my talk on Dream Archaeology.&nbsp; It is supposed to be Skype-cast to some remote locations (like Jamestown!) and maybe recorded for a podcast.&nbsp; If we make a podcast, I'll post it here next week.</p> <p>In the meantime, a good, old-fashion paper copy will have to suffice:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WorkingPapers/Dream Archaeology_Working_Nov2008.pdf">Dreams, Excavation, and the Archaeology of Christian Greece</a> <p align="center">William R. Caraher<br>University of North Dakota </p> <p align="center">Delivered November 14, 2008<br>North Dakota State University<br>Fargo, North Dakota </p> <p><em>Introduction </em>&nbsp;&nbsp; <br>Scholars rarely regard dreams as playing a key role in serious archaeological inquiry.&nbsp; This attitude, however, is a particular characteristic of modern, western archaeological practice.&nbsp; From antiquity until recent times dreams have occupied an important place in the archaeological imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; The Christianization of the Mediterranean during Late Antiquity made room for Dreams within the emerging Christian discourse, and Dreams play an important role in archaeological practices common to the Byzantine Empire.&nbsp; This paper will extend a discussion of Dream Archaeology later still into the context of 19th and 20th century Greece where an archaeology of dreaming has contributed to the production of national religious landscapes on the local level... (<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/WorkingPapers/Dream Archaeology_Working_Nov2008.pdf">read more</a>)</p> <p>Since Dream Archaeology will go onto the back-burner for a couple months after this weekend and I don't want anyone to experience withdraw, here's a full index of my work on Dream Archaeology: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/dr eam-archaeology-in-the-early-christian-west.html">Dream Archaeology in the Early Christian West</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-dreams-rel.html">Blindness, Dreams, and Relics</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-dreams-rel.html">More Dreams, Religion, and Archaeology</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-byzantine.html">More Byzantine Dreams...</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/dr eams-pausania.html">Dreams, Pausanias, and Archaeology</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">Kozani</a></p> <p>As always, have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Teaching Time STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-teaching-time CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 11/13/2008 07:55:10 AM ----BODY: <p>Two incidents this week prompt a post that explores the concepts of teaching and time in an undergraduate and graduate environment.&nbsp; First, I received an <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election.html#comments">interesting comment</a> from <a href="http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com/">fellow blogger Sterling Fluharty</a>.&nbsp; He wondered what needed to happen to ensure that students have read prior to attending seminar.&nbsp; The second issues was that the second papers in my graduate historiography seminar are due today.&nbsp; I received the typical barrage of requests for extensions.&nbsp; The thing is, this paper was originally due on October 30th and had already been pushed back twice for various reasons.&nbsp; So, I was not particularly sympathetic toward students who needed extensions, but it did get me thinking about how students manage time and how that fits into the expectations that I can have as an instructor. <p>Responding to Sterling, I can only speculate really.&nbsp; My class is a seminar made up mainly of majors and depends on the students completing daily and weekly reading assignments without many of the standard checks that keep students on the ball (e.g. tests, weekly quizzes et c.).&nbsp; Some weeks the reading rate in this small class is abysmal (2 or 3 out of 10). I think that such low reading rates reveal some fairly complex issues regarding how students manage time.&nbsp; In general, I suspect that students prioritize other work above readings for a seminar style class.&nbsp; This is particular acute among students who take too many credits (17+!).&nbsp; This means that they are always being compelled to prioritize the most pressing obligation.&nbsp; In general, students intelligently prioritize those obligations that involve a clear link between the performance of a task and a grade.&nbsp; So, papers, test-preparation and other problem-based assignments take priority over reading for discussion.&nbsp; This is fair. <p>The second issue is less noble.&nbsp; Students don't study enough.&nbsp; The University of North Dakota is notorious for this.&nbsp; In fact, the <a href="http://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.aspx?uidbadge=">2009 Princeton Review</a> ranking of colleges and universities rated the University of North Dakota #7 on its list of Universities where students study the least.&nbsp; It seems likely that the perception (or maybe even the reality) that students don't need to study much for classes here has probably leads some undergraduates to take too many credits.&nbsp; A class like my seminar consequently suffers since I don't usually build in a consequence for a student not doing the reading (aside from a boring class).&nbsp; <p>So, there are two potential solutions.&nbsp; One is that I could require some kind of assignment with the readings -- say a response paper.&nbsp; I don't do this because one of my goals of the class (and I state this) is to make the students more responsible for their own education.&nbsp; By assigning grades I feel like my evaluation goes too far toward establishing how much the students should learn in a particular environment (i.e. if they earned an "A" then that's all there was to learn.)&nbsp;&nbsp; What I try to do is to convince them that they should want to read and have good discussions in a class that is central to their

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major.&nbsp; It would undermine this goal if I required them through some assignment to do the reading.&nbsp; Another potential solution is to cut back on the amount of reading so that the prospect of a boring class is a greater inconvenience than 30 minute reading assignment. <p>As for time management among our M.A. level graduate students, I think that some of the same decision making processes apply. The top priority is always the most pressing issue rather than say their area of interest or the issue that would benefit them the most in the long run.&nbsp; Again, this is quite reasonable.&nbsp; In most cases, this process ensures that papers arrive on time and in fairly decent shape.&nbsp; In cases where students consistently miss deadlines, however, there is reason to suspect other issues are at play.&nbsp; This week, I have suggested to one good student that he keep more close track of his time by keeping a daily research log.&nbsp; I suspect that some students who are always rushing around trying to fight the most pressing fire, begin to lose track of how long it takes them to perform basic tasks (read a book, write a 5, 10, 20 page paper, prepare for seminar, et c.)&nbsp; My hope is to encourage <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093822/quotes">repeat offenders</a> to develop more thorough and conscious awareness of how long it takes them do perform particular tasks, it will be easier for them to manage their time. So, when I granted a couple of extensions, I made it contingent on <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093822/quotes">the recidivists</a> ("not a pretty name, is it...?") keeping a time diary for the final paper (due on December 10th).&nbsp; </p> <p>More Teaching Thursdays:</p> <p><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/11/teaching-thursday-classroommodernism.html">Teaching Thursday: Classroom Modernism (K. Kourelis)</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/11/te aching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election.html">Teaching Thursday: Teaching the Election</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments.html">Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech

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Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sterling Fluharty EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.123.51.4 URL: http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/13/2008 04:36:02 PM Thanks for the response. I wonder if a content management system would help. It could allow your students to break their assignments into smaller pieces, record their progress online where their classmates can watch, and promote feedback and interaction between students. If you included research papers in your seminar, the students could be required to post their sources, questions, notes, thesis, outline, etc., on the course web site, where some peer pressure from classmates might keep everyone on track and interested in each other's progress. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Dream Archaeology in the Early Christian West STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: dream-archaeology-in-the-early-christian-west CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 11/12/2008 08:32:04 AM ----BODY: <p>It's coming down to the wire for the first "working" draft of my Dream Archaeology paper.&nbsp; I am due to present it to my colleagues at North Dakota State University on Friday at 3:00 pm!&nbsp; I hope to have a working draft posted by the end of the week.</p> <p>One area where the weakness in my research is more than apparent is in the analysis of Dream Archaeology in the Early Christian West.&nbsp; To make a modest start at redressing that, I offer four observations (of no particular significance or order here):</p> <p>1. Ambrose of Milan had a serious interest in Dream Archaeology.&nbsp; His best known vision led to his discovery of the Saints Gervasius and Protasius in Milan (<em>Epist</em>. 20.1-2):</p> <p>(1) "For after I had dedicated the basilica,

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many, as it were, with one mouth began to address me, and said: Consecrate this as you did the Roman basilica. And I answered: "Certainly I will if I find any relics of martyrs." And at once a kind of prophetic ardour seemed to enter my heart.&nbsp; (2) Why should I use many words? God favoured us, for even the clergy were afraid who were bidden to clear away the earth from the spot before the chancel screen of SS. Felix and Nabor. I found the fitting signs, and on bringing in some on whom hands were to be laid, the power of the holy martyrs became so manifest, that even whilst I was still silent, one was seized and thrown prostrate at the holy burial-place. We found two men of marvellous stature, such as those of ancient days..." <p>Ambrose also included the earliest known story of St. Helena and the True Cross in his Funeral Oration of Theodosius (<em>De Ob. Theod</em>. 40-49).&nbsp; In his account, he does not state that a Dream guided St. Helena, but that she was motivated by the Holy Spirit.&nbsp; Ambrose must have been partially motivated by a desire for relics to fill his newly constructed churches in Milan (and to validate his construction of a sacred landscape: cf. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/7740982">R. Krautheimer, <em>Three Christian Capitals: Rome, Constantinople</em>, Milan. (Berkeley 1983</a>)). <p>2. St. Augustine, Ambrose younger contemporary, had a far more circumspect attitude toward Dream Archaeology.&nbsp; It seems like that his ongoing struggles with the Donatists shaped his attitude toward Dreams.&nbsp; Donatists favored dream inspired baptism and it appears that such practices were common even among Augustine's Orthodox congregation.&nbsp; Augustine also seemed concerned that dreams of martyrs would feed the irregular and sometimes subversive practices associated with the cult of the saints.&nbsp; This resulted in his condemning "inventio per somnia" at the Council of Carthage in 401 (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/17621497">J. LeGoff, <em>The Medieval Imagination</em>. trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago 1988)</a>, 223). <p>3. It is interesting to note that Peter Brown devotes relatively little attention to Dream and inventio in his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/318213">work on Augustine</a> or in his short, but seminal <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/6043068">work on the cult of the saints.</a>&nbsp; What makes this particularly curious is that Brown's work (particularly his early studies) show the influence of E.R. Dodds (particularly his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/258437899"><em>Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety</em></a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2746538"><em>The Greeks and the Irrational</em></a>). Brown himself admits as much in remarks made in 1997 to commemorate the 25 anniversary of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/138222"><em>The World of Late Antiquity</em></a> in <em>Symbolae Osloenses </em>72 (1997), 19.&nbsp; Dodds, of course, dedicated an entire chapter of Greeks and the Irrational to the power of dreams. <p>4. I need to read <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/44704794">I. Moreira's Dreams, <em>Visions, and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul</em>. (Ithaca 2000).</a> <p>For more on Dream Archaeology see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/dr eams-pausania.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-byzantine.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-dreams-rel.html">here</a>, and <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/bl indness-dreams-and-relics.html">here</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting: The Corinthian Countryside at the AIA STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: archaeological-institute-of-america-annual-meeting-the-corinthiancountryside-at-the-aia CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 11/11/2008 07:37:45 AM ----BODY: <p>The Archaeological Institute of American released it preliminary schedule of papers yesterday.&nbsp; I haven't had a chance to look carefully at all the panels, but I did discover that our paper was accepted.&nbsp; Here is our abstract:</p> <blockquote> <p align="center"><strong><em>Three New Sites in the Corinthian Countryside</em></strong> <br>William R. Caraher (University of North Dakota) and David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College)</p> <p align="left">The nature and function of rural towers in the Greek countryside has long interested scholars of the Classical and Hellenistic period.&nbsp; Scholarship has particularly focused on the function of towers in Attica, Boeotia, the Argolid, and the islands.&nbsp; Proposed functions for these building range from purely agricultural to exclusively military, as well as combinations of the two.</p> <p align="left">The Corinthia has largely been ignored in this debate.&nbsp; A recent comprehensive article by Morris and Papadopoulos, for example, cites no examples of rural towers from the Corinthia.&nbsp; Recent work in the Eastern Corinthia, however, has produced several new sites that can be read along side a small corpus of known buildings to contribute to how we understand both the countryside of the Corinthia and Greek rural architecture more broadly.</p> <p align="left">This paper will focus on three sites in the immediate vicinity of Lychnari bay in the Eastern Corinthia.&nbsp; In 2003 and 2008, a small team from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey documented two Late Classical to Hellenistic towers and a rubble fortification.&nbsp; In doing so, we integrated careful topographic study, intensive survey and architectural analysis in order to bring these three unpublished sites in the Corinthia into the ongoing discussion of rural sites in the Greek countryside.&nbsp; We argue in this paper that while the position of these sites in the local topography emphasizes their military function, the ceramic material and architecture of these buildings requires a more dynamic reading of the place of these structures in the

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Corinthian landscape.&nbsp; </p></blockquote> <p>Some of the material in this paper will be familiar to regular readers of this blog.&nbsp; The paper will include the results of what was probably the most fun "micro" field season that I have had for years: all of the archaeology (long hikes, good conversation, spectacular views, nice finds, good architecture, interesting landscape, focuses research questions) and none of the hassle (logistics, crazy undergraduates/graduate students, computer problems, bizarre meetings, endless arguments, complicated plans).&nbsp; I&nbsp; recorded a good bit of information regarding our work in a series of posts on the Corinthian Countryside in the late summer and fall:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Lychnari Tower</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-2.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Passes of the Eastern Corinthia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-3.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Classical Vayia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: History and Archaeology</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Some More Contemporary Thoughts</a></p> <p>Here's the time and place of our session.&nbsp; The panel looks fairly cohesive for the notoriously random "open sessions" at the AIA:</p> <blockquote> <p><a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am p;sid=1F">Session: 1F: Archaeological Field Work in Mediterranean</a>&nbsp; <p>Timeslot: Friday, January 9, 8:30 AM - 11:00 AM <p>Session Papers<br>1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Priniatikos Pyrgos and the Classical Period in East Crete<br>Brice Erickson, University of California at Santa Barbara<br>2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Survey of the Bouro--Kastri Peninsula in the Southern Karystia, Euboea, Greece<br>Jere M. Wickens Lawrence University<br>3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Explorations around Karpathos 1923 and 2008<br>D. J. Ian Begg, Trent University and Michael Nelson, Queens College, City University of New York<br><strong><em>4.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Three New Sites in the Corinthian Countryside<br>William R. Caraher, University of North Dakota and David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College</em></strong><br>5.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Albanian Coastal Survey: 2007-8 Campaigns<br>Jeffrey G. Royal, Archaeological Director, RPM Nautical Foundation<br>6.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Archaic Olive Oil Production at Azoria in Eastern Crete<br>Donald C. Haggis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Margaret S. Mook, Iowa State University C. Margaret Scarry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill<br>7.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A Preliminary Study of Two Early Archaic Wrecks at Kekova Adası and Kepçe Burnu, Turkey<br>Elizabeth S. Greene, Brock University and Justin Leidwanger, University of Pennsylvania</p></blockquote> <p>I'd be remiss not to note a another paper that touches on the Eastern Corinthia: <blockquote> <p align="left"><a

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href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am p;sid=3C">Session: 3C: Mycenaean Periphery</a><br>Timeslot: Friday, January 9, 1:30 AM - 4:30 AM </p> <p align="left">3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP): A Second Season at Mycenaean Kalamianos<br>Thomas F. Tartaron, University of Pennsylvania and Daniel J. Pullen, Florida State University</p></blockquote> <p>And a poster from the PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project:</p> <blockquote> <p><a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am p;sid=2I">Session: 2I: Poster Session</a><br>Timeslot: Friday, January 9, 11:15 AM - 3:00 PM</p> <p>11. The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: Documenting the Experience of Archaeology<br>R. Scott Moore, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Brandon Olson, Penn State University, and Michael Brown, University of Edinburgh </p></blockquote> <p>It will take some time to digest the program and make decisions on where to be when.&nbsp; So, stay tuned!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 136.244.13.209 URL: DATE: 11/11/2008 08:16:49 AM I'm psyched!!! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Corinth in Late Antiquity: Corinth in Context? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-corinth-in-late-antiquity-corinth-in-context CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 11/10/2008 08:27:56 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> dropped me a line a few weeks ago that <a href="http://romangreece.com/">Amelia Brown's</a> dissertation, <a href="http://romangreece.com/Brown2008_CorinthDissUS.pdf"><em>The City of Corinth and Urbanism in Late Antique Greece</em></a>, was done and available <a href="http://romangreece.com/Brown2008_CorinthDissUS.pdf">on line</a>.&nbsp; It's great that she is making her important work on Corinth easily available on the internet.&nbsp; Her dissertation takes its place along the growing list of dissertations (and books) that focus on the Corinthia in Late Antiquity.&nbsp;

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</p> <p>Over the past couple of years, I've noted the boom in interest in Late Antiquity.&nbsp; The first issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity, for example, seemed a natural development for this expanding area of specialization and interest.&nbsp; I have also noted, however, that the the field has tended to emphasize a rather limited number of paradigms for analyze "post-classical" antiquity.&nbsp; As a rule, students of Late Antiquity continue to find irresistible tired arguments for "continuity vs. change" under various guises (prosperity vs. decline, centralization vs. dissipation, economic sophistication vs. economic stagnation, paganism vs. Christianity, et c.).&nbsp; Moreover, these arguments almost all depend upon an ironic interpretation of the traditional good/bad (classical antiquity/post-classical antiquity) dichotomy.&nbsp; So far, this paradigm has produced a significant body of new knowledge and may have even started to de-center the traditional areas of emphasis in the field of "Classical Archaeology".</p> <p>Nowhere is the continuity/change (good/bad, classical/post-classical) debate more engaged than in Greece where the field of Classical Archaeology has a kind of prestige that borders on veneration.&nbsp; The city of Ancient Athens with its "Sacred Rock" and sprawling Agora in the middle of the modern metropolis plays a crucial role in making visible and tangible the significance and value of Classical Antiquity.&nbsp; Down the road from Athens stand the ruins of the ancient Corinth.&nbsp; Corinth, with its neighboring sites in the Corinthia (Isthmia and Kenchreai in particular), has begun to stand out as a counter-weight to Classical Athens.&nbsp; Set amidst olive and citrus groves in small villages across the Isthmus, the Corinthia has become a center in Greece for significant work on Late Antiquity over the past two decades.&nbsp; In American academic circles in particular the American excavations in the Roman (and Late Roman) Corinthia represent a counter weight to the American excavations at the Archaic and Classical Athenian Agora.&nbsp; This is not to suggest that these sites cannot make significant contributions to the work on other periods.&nbsp; There has been plenty of interesting work on Roman and Late Roman Athens and pre-Roman Corinth, for example, but Corinth is a Roman city and Athens a Classical one in both the popular and academic imaginations.&nbsp; </p> <p>Whatever the cause of the Corinth/Athens dichotomy, credit for the recent rise in interest in the Late Antique Corinthia falls largely to the efforts of American archaeologists in the region, most significantly Tim Gregory at Isthmia and Charles Williams and Guy Sanders at Ancient Corinth.&nbsp; Williams, Sanders, Gregory, Slane and others have produced a massive bibliography which has not only transformed the Late Roman topography of the Corinthia but revised in substantial ways the chronology of the region.&nbsp; Students associated with these sites and scholars have produced a bumper crop of works which drawn in whole or in part from Corinthian comparanda (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43615467">R. Rothaus</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/86115995">D. Pettegrew</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/46680697">R. S. Moore</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/50497698">B. Robinson</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/197161577">J. Frey</a>) with assurances of more on the way (particularly J. Rife's important Isthmia volume on the Roman period burials there and his recent work at Kenchreai, the proceedings of a conference celebrating 50 years at Isthmia with several articles specifically dealing with the Corinthia in Late Antiquity, a dissertation of the Roman and Late Roman wall painting from Corinth, et c.).&nbsp; </p> <p>It is interesting to consider the effect of this relatively recent boom in work on the Corinthia on how we think about Late Roman Greece more widely.&nbsp; On the one hand, the status of Corinth as the capital of the province of Achaea justifies some of the recent archaeological attention.&nbsp; It was clearly an important city in Greece and stood at an important cross road of Mediterranean trade.&nbsp; Its

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place in Christian scriptures more than makes up for the relative dearth of archaeological evidence for a Christian community in Corinth prior to Late Antiquity.&nbsp; So, the emphasis on the Late Roman period in Corinth fits within long-standing administrative, economic, and religious narratives of the period.&nbsp; </p> <p>On the other hand, Corinth and the Corinthia represents just one important center in the "busy" rural and urban landscape of Late Antique Greece.&nbsp; My work on Late Antique Basilica style churches (with its strong emphasis on the Corinthian buildings), for example, has enumerated the vast number of these buildings throughout Greece.&nbsp; Other centers throughout Greece certainly shared he prosperity, religious dynamism, and administrative centrality of Corinth even if on a smaller scale.&nbsp; Even sites on a comparable scale, like Nikopolis in Epirus, Nea Anchialos in Thessaly, Argos, Patras, and Sparta have received far less attention than Late Roman Corinth.&nbsp; Should this disproportional focus on Corinth and the Corinthia be a matter of some concern for how we understand the development of Late Antiquity in Greece?&nbsp; Even if we understand fully the reasons why Corinth has become so central to our reading of Late Antique Greece (on account of structures within the narrative of American archaeology in Greece, the support of specific American scholars, and the history of careful and relatively open excavations) what are the implications of this emphasis?&nbsp; Do we see Late Antique Corinth pulling scholarly attention and intellectual resources away from other parts of Greece or is our ever expanding knowledge of the Corinthia pushing the study of the 4th-8th centuries elsewhere in the southern Balkans.&nbsp; It is safe to say that both a certain amount of pushing and pulling are in play here.</p> <p>Since I know some of my colleagues who study the Late Antique Corinthia are sometime readers of this blog, I invite them to respond to this!&nbsp; How do we understand both the academic traditions of Corinthian Archaeology and the narrative of the Late Antique city of Corinth "in Context"?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Amelia Brown EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 86.129.217.196 URL: http://www.romangreece.com DATE: 11/11/2008 05:46:01 PM Dear Bill,! Thanks for including me in your thoughtful comments on Late Antique Corinth and its study. In researching my dissertation, I was most struck by how prominent features of the present Greek landscape- the Parthenon and other monuments of the Acropolis in Athens, the Temple of Apollo and Hexamilion wall at Corinthguide archaeologists and casual visitors alike to form certain ideas of the relative importance of certain eras of history at those cities. How difficult it is in the present to balance the visible and invisible pasts! Cheers, Amelia -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher

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TITLE: Friday Varia: Two Quick Notes on Academic and Administrative Blogs STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-two-quick-notes-on-academic-and-administrative-blogs CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 11/07/2008 09:32:26 AM ----BODY: <p>Congratulations to the <a href="http://www.asor.org/">American Schools of Oriental Research</a> on their slick new website.&nbsp; The site includes <a href="http://www.asor.org/blog/index.shtml">a blog</a> that will presumably join Archaeological Institute of America's <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/news/">Archaeology News weblog</a> in my regular reading list. </p> <p>It's becoming regular practice for institutional websites to include a blog where quick notes, timely comments on news stories, or address controversial issues.&nbsp; In fact, quite a few university presidents (e.g. From big public institutions like <a href="http://president.asu.edu/blog">Arizona State</a>, <a href="http://president.msu.edu/index.php">Michigan State</a>, <a href="http://www.wright.edu/admin/president/presidentblog.html">Wright State</a> and <a href="http://www.usm.edu/blogs/president/">Southern Mississippi</a> to small private colleges like <a href="http://rononmiddlebury.wordpress.com/">Middlebury College</a> and <a href="http://roth.blogs.wesleyan.edu/">Wesleyan University</a>)&nbsp; and deans have taken to using blogs as a way of connecting with their stake holders across the University and community.&nbsp; While many of these blogs make pretty tedious reading, occasionally a blog can capture the drama of the moment in the life of a University.&nbsp; I must admit to reading former University of West Virginia President Mike Garrisons's blog (now only available at the Internet Archive with large gaps in its content (<a title="http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mikesnotes.blogs.wvu.edu/" href="http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mikesnotes.blogs.wvu.edu/">http://web. archive.org/web/*/http://mikesnotes.blogs.wvu.edu/</a>)) as he attempted to deal with the various controversies that would ultimately doom his position at that school.&nbsp; His effort to address concerns and criticisms voiced by alumni and students in the comments section of his blog showed gumption and provided a window into the drama that engulfed that University community.</p> <p>I imagine that it is only a matter of time before most publicity conscious officers at Universities begin to write blogs to keep the community informed about their views of the present and future.</p> <p>As always, have a good weekend.&nbsp; They say that we'll have snow here, but so far nothing but rain. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tom Elliott EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 74.239.78.188 URL: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~te20/ DATE: 11/07/2008 10:55:56 AM Hi Bill: ! ! Thanks for the pointer to the ASOR site and blog. ! ! I'm chagrined though to see that a brand new, shiny blog doesn't seem to have web feeds (or they aren't surfacing links to them at least). Frankly, it makes it unlikely I'll be reading the blog regularly as I have such a broad reading list I need to manage it in a feed reader.! ! Your comments on the widening institutional role for blogging are interesting in welcome.! ! Best,! Tom! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.122.167.53 URL: DATE: 11/07/2008 11:10:47 AM Tom beat me to the punch on this problem, though I might use the term "annoyed" rather than "chagrined".! ! -Chuck----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.133.190 URL: http://profile.typekey.com/billcaraher/ DATE: 11/07/2008 11:22:36 AM Tom and Chuck,! ! It's funny. The announcement of their new site in the ASOR Newsletter makes specific mention of RSS feeds being available on the site (http://www.asor.org/pubs/news/58_3.pdf). So, this might just be a developmental thing rather than an overall design issue.! ! Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.168.80.241 URL: DATE: 11/08/2008 09:09:55 PM

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Wesleyan's blog has been very interesting. A few weeks ago, the New York Times magazine had an article about a Wesleyan adjunct who was "mistreated" based on student evaluations. The article was very strange and under-reported. You should have seen the student responses on the Wesleyan blog. Thanks to the blog, we got a fair representation of how bad (after all) this professor actually was.! ! -Kostis -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Themes of North Dakota History: Looking Back Over 50 Years STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: themes-of-north-dakota-history-looking-back-over-50-years CATEGORY: Elwyn Robinson's Autobiography CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 11/06/2008 07:38:09 AM ----BODY: <p>50 years ago today the University of North Dakota celebrated its 75th Anniversary with an elaborate Convocation.&nbsp; The President of the University, George Startcher, invited Elwyn B. Robinson to give the Convocation Address that day.&nbsp; He delivered a paper entitled "Themes of North Dakota History", and this paper was destined to become one of the most influential statement on the history of the state.&nbsp; The Themes that Robinson identified echoed through his major work, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/33266680"><em>The History of North Dakota</em></a>, and continue to appear even today in the way in which the public, the media, and scholars think about the development of the state over time.</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/library/Collections/Robinson/themes.html">A link to a version of this speech is here</a>.&nbsp; I've also included an excerpt from Robinson's Autobiography that places this important text is a more personal context. </p> <p>"In 1957 or early in 1958, I believe, the committee planning the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Convocation to celebrate the university's seventy-fifth birthday, invited me to give an address at the convocation in November 1958.&nbsp; Dr. Christopher Hamre,&nbsp; dean of the Graduate School, and Dr. William Koenher, then chairman of the Department of Economics, were on the committee. They suggested my topic, "The Themes of North Dakota History".&nbsp; Because of the early invitation, I had a long time to think about the topic.&nbsp; The invitation was one of the great good fortunes of my life because it made me think for a long time about the meaning of North Dakota history.&nbsp; As a result I worked out six themes that ran through the state's history.&nbsp; I talked a great deal with Robert P. Wilkins about the themes as I was working on my essay.&nbsp; He may or probably did suggest some of the ideas as we talked as well as confirming my ideas.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I wanted to give names to the six themes.&nbsp; The most happy invention was the name the "Too-Much Mistake" for the persistent tendency to over expand.&nbsp; I read my essay on the evening of November 6 in the Field House to a great concourse of people.&nbsp; Before Robert Wilkins introduced me there was special music, "The Towering Vision", composed for the anniversary.&nbsp; That evening was the first event of the three-day convocation with many leaders in higher education from

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throughout the nation.&nbsp; I believe that there were several university presidents.&nbsp; I remember especially the president of Columbia University.&nbsp; </p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For a month or so before the event, I was concerned that I should not be understood.&nbsp; Very frequently speakers in the Field House were not heard very clearly.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I talked to John Penn of the Speech Department and possibly to Myron Curry, seeking ways of avoiding the common problem.&nbsp; They told me that the problem arose from the fact that the speaker did not keep his mouth close to the microphone, but would sometimes turn away.&nbsp; So as I read my essay I took great pains to keep close to the microphone and to enunciate very clearly.&nbsp; I expect that it took me forty-five minutes to an hour to read my essay. </p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I worked hard on it.&nbsp; On October 2 I wrote to my mother that I was busy with it.&nbsp; On November 14 I wrote her that my lecture had gone extremely well - "a triumph of the first magnitude".&nbsp; The audience had given me prolonged applause, and a great many people came to the platform to congratulate me.&nbsp; Later, some people told me that my address was the best one at the convocation.&nbsp; Dean Theodore Harwood said that it was a "classic".&nbsp; President Starcher sent me "a letter of warm praise".&nbsp; A reporter for the <em>Fargo Forum</em>, Roy Johnson, called it "a great document".&nbsp; The comments at the time I read the essay and later showed that many people believed that my themes were true and significant ones, that I had illuminated the history of the state.&nbsp; My interpretation has become the accepted interpretation of North Dakota history.&nbsp; <em>The Forum&nbsp; </em>for November 16 carried a report on my essay and an editorial that day said that it "should be required for every resident of North Dakota".&nbsp; The editorial continued:</p> <blockquote> <p> "Dr. Robinson's observations about the 'typical' North Dakotan make interesting reading but there is far deeper significance in his 'six great themes' which he says have been the primary influences on the state. <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Of particular import is his conclusion that one of the main influences upon our economy has been what he calls the 'too much mistake' of our pioneers.&nbsp; He outlines these as too many farms, railroads, roads, towns, banks, schools, churches, and governmental institutions, 'a supply that history has shown has been far beyond the ability of the state to maintain' with its sparse population. <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Accepting this premise requires a different approach to the changes that are taking place in North Dakota today.&nbsp; If Dr. Robinson's conclusions are correct, the declining numbers of farmers mean only that steps are being taken to correct an original mistake.&nbsp; <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Likewise, efforts of railroads to abandon uneconomical facilities are only an attempt to adjust to changing times.&nbsp; Extended branch line trackage once was necessary when grain was hauled by team and wagon, when passenger trains were the only fast means of travel, but trucks, passenger cars, and highways have made much of the trackage and other facilities obsolete. <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Dr. Robinson cites many thought-provoking arguments to prove his point, and he offers many startling statistics such as "in 1958 government work on all levels is the second largest class of non-agricultural employment, standing just behind retail." <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Full judgment of Dr. Robinson's research and conclusions must await publication of his book, but even the brief report in today's edition heralds his work as an important contribution to North Dakota history. <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Whether North Dakotans today will profit from the study of the past remains for future historians to record, but at the very least Dr. Robinson should inspire searching thinking in us all." </p></blockquote> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp; On November 30 I wrote to my mother that President Starcher wanted my essay published so that he could send copies to every member of the legislature.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I went to work on revision

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which was mostly a matter of putting in footnotes.&nbsp; I had not had time for them before I read it to the convocation on November 6.&nbsp; I wrote to Russell Reid, superintendent of the State Historical Society and editor of its quarterly <em>North Dakota History </em>about its publication.&nbsp; As I remember his reply, he was critical of my interpretation of North Dakota history and hesitant about publishing it."</p> <p>In the end, North Dakota History did publish a version of the speech appeared in the Winter 1959 volume of the journal.&nbsp; It was republished in the <a href="http://www.nd.gov/hist/digital/NDHAnthology.pdf"><em>Centennial Anthology of the North Dakota History </em>which can be downloaded for free here</a>. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday (a day early): Teaching the Election STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-a-day-early-teaching-the-election CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 11/05/2008 07:47:17 AM ----BODY: <p>While many of my colleagues and students spent last night watching election returns, I spent it in the classroom.&nbsp; I teach Western Civilization I on Tuesday nights.&nbsp; It meets once a week for two-and-a-half hours.&nbsp; About 40% of my students showed up for class, but they were a boisterous and excited group.&nbsp; We took breaks every half hour to watch the election results come in and the students provided all sorts of punditry -- sometimes on a county-bycounty level -- especially as it became clear that North Dakota was going to fall to John McCain.&nbsp; It was a great class. </p> <p>I also had to teach.&nbsp; Medieval history waits for no man (or woman).&nbsp; It just so happened, however, that I was teaching on the reform movement of the 11th and 12th centuries.&nbsp; I explained how the monastery at Cluny elected its own abbots and this helped keep the monastery (with its particular observance) free from external influence and autonomous.&nbsp; This practice ultimately manifest itself in the practice of the Papal Curia electing the Papacy which was introduced by reforming Popes like Leo IX and Nicholas II.&nbsp; The autonomy of the church, supported in part by the elected status of the Papacy became a significant feature in the emergence of the "imperial" Papacies of the 11th-13th centuries.&nbsp; Lecturing of Medieval history on such a significant election night seemed a bit odd and maybe even a bit out-of-touch, but I kept thinking about two things.&nbsp; First, considering the long history of the "West" will help us keep this moment in perspective. While history has the power to liberate the lost voices of the past, it can also swallow up even the greatest moment of

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triumph.&nbsp; Second, listening to my students talk about their home towns and counties and their views on the election challenged the idea that today's college students are apathetic and disengaged.&nbsp; My students had an idea of what was going on and definite hopes for the future.</p> <p>In my afternoon class, The Historians Craft, we talked about the uneasy relationship between historians and the "public realm".&nbsp; I had the class read <a href="http://www.historians.org/info/AHA_History/weleuchtenberg.htm">William E. Leuchtenburg's American Historical Association,&nbsp; Presidential Address entitled "The Historian and the Public Realm</a>".&nbsp; Aside from the fact that only two or three students (of a class of 10) read it, we were nevertheless able to think about how historians should engage as professionals in political activism.&nbsp; The response from the class was unexpected.&nbsp; Despite the persistent rhetoric that academics should maintain a position above the fray, students almost universally felt that historians should take a more public role in decisions being made in the US.&nbsp; Knowing the past, my class argued, was vital to understanding the consequences of policy and the way forward as a society and state.</p> <p>Exciting politics makes it easy to be an exciting teacher, but next week I'll again be left to my own devices.</p> <p>And Teaching Thursday on a Wednesday!&nbsp; Well, tomorrow is an exciting anniversary for the Department of History, the University, and the State of North Dakota.&nbsp; Stay tuned.</p> <p>For more Teaching Thursdays:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments.html">Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sterling Fluharty EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.24.252.40 URL: http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/10/2008 09:59:16 PM Did you see this article? ! ! http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/10/nsse! ! I thought it might provide an interesting comparison on reading rates. What does it take, in your estimation, to increase the number of students who come to seminar having read the material beforehand? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Election Day in North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: election-day-in-north-dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 11/04/2008 07:47:44 AM ----BODY: <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535d7bf69970 c-pi"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="537" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535d14f11970b -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Beautiful fall morning (in the mid 40s!) for <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/pdfs/1102wheretovote08.pdf">voting in Grand Forks, North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; There were lines at 7 am at my polling place, but that might be normal here (this was my first time voting in North Dakota).&nbsp; It was historically interesting to see all the Democrats on the ballot listed as Democrat-NPL.&nbsp; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_Partisan_League">The Non-Partisan League</a>.&nbsp; The only real radical party to ever gain a substantial foothold in the US.&nbsp; And <em>they </em>talk about East Coast radicals and liberals.&nbsp; Real radicals come from <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/th e-streets-of-grand-forks-2-a-small-town-streetscape.html">small towns</a>.</p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brian EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.248 URL: http://picasaweb.google.com/elucidarian/ElectionDay2008# DATE: 11/04/2008 10:20:28 AM I went in the other door, and then I went for free coffee!! ! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Why Blog? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: why-blog CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/03/2008 08:10:58 AM ----BODY: <p>There have been a couple interesting contributions over the last few weeks on why people blog.&#0160; <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/andrewsullivan-why-i-blog">One was offered by Andrew Sullivan</a>, whose political and cultural blog the Daily Dish has made him a celebrity far beyond the blogosphere.&#0160; A group of blogging historians wrote gave papers at Berkshire Conference of Women Historians on their experiences as bloggers (including <a href="http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2008/10/radical-goes-togenteel-academic.html">Tenured Radical</a>, <a href="http://cliobluestockingtales.blogspot.com/2008/10/little-berks-women-andblogging.html#links">Clio Bluestocking Tales</a>, and <a href="http://hmprescott.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/outline-for-little-berkstalk/">Knitting Clio</a>). Last week, several friends and colleagues forwarded to me <a href="http://hughmcguire.net/2008/10/26/why-academics-should-blog/">a link to a post at hughmaguire.net</a> which provided a list of arguments for why academics should blog.&#0160; </p> <p>With these scholars&#39; encouragement, it seemed like a good time to return a bit to thinking about why I blog.&#0160; (And such a reflection is particularly useful on weeks like this when I feel completely overextended and swamped!).</p> <p>1. I like to write and find the discipline of writing valuable.&#0160; Writing my blog helps structure my day around a pleasurable task.&#0160; I compose my blog as I get ready for my day and write it up as soon as I arrive in my office.&#0160; This simple routine ensures that each morning has a predictable structure and a feeling (no matter

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how fleeting) of accomplishment.&#0160; </p> <p>2. A desire to make visible the process of writing, thinking, and revising.&#0160; Every now and then I am reminded of the brilliant line from Ghost Busters: &quot;Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn&#39;t have to produce anything! You&#39;ve never been out of college! You don&#39;t know what it&#39;s like out there! I&#39;ve *worked* in the private sector. They expect <em>results</em>.&quot;&#0160; For better or worse, even the university expects results now!&#0160; Our production as academics is increasingly judged by publications, grants received, students taught, theses completed, and other such quantifiable &quot;results&quot;.&#0160; Writing a daily blog serves to shine a bit of light on the other side of the examined intellectual life: the process of formulating ideas, writing, revising, rethinking, reformulating.&#0160; In short, it exposes all the time that academics spend doing things that don&#39;t necessarily always lead to directly quantifiable results.&#0160; While one can certainly argue that even the most ill-conceived and poorly executed argument does, in some small way, contribute to a larger project as academics we often try to keep these failures of thought hidden.&#0160; In an environment where our performance is increasingly driven by results hiding the failed hypotheses, the dead-end research, and the poorly articulated arguments, is counter productive.&#0160; We have a responsibility to demonstrate the vagaries, failures, and wanderings intrinsic to the creative process.&#0160; By blogging, I try to show anyone who bothers to read, how the production of scholarship actually proceeds and to generate sympathy and understanding of the kind of productive inefficiency that may someday be threatened even in the academy.</p> <p>3. A feeling of social obligation to a wide range of &quot;stake holders&quot;.&#0160; As a employee at a state institution, I feel a certain obligation to make what I do all day (see point 2) visible to the wider public.&#0160; I teach ancient history in North Dakota.&#0160; This is a not a natural fit.&#0160; I hope that I justify my position at the University and in the community in some small way by each post that I write.&#0160; And I hope that by taking the time to engage the larger community, I actually build more support for the important work done at the University.</p> <p>4. Finding community.&#0160; Academics have always worked within communities whether they are the university communities of the department or college or communities of like-minded scholars at professional organizations or conferences.&#0160; My academic posts have introduced me to new communities of scholars, many of whom I would not have been likely to interact with through the tradition circuit of meetings and conferences.&#0160; While I have only been blogging for a year-anda-half some of these new relationships have already produced significant scholarly interaction.&#0160; I will never argue that blogs represent the same kind of product as a scholarly journal, but they can nevertheless encourage high-quality academic interaction.&#0160; This potential suggests that someday (and perhaps soon), blog posts may have a place amidst the recognized genre of academic production alongside seminar papers, conference papers, academic journals, et c.</p> <p>5. The Death of the Note. It was fairly common some twenty or thirty years ago for scholars to publish short academic notes on topics.&#0160; Often running to less 1000 words, these notes typically amounted to little more than well-developed footnotes on a familiar text or a short comment on a new archaeological discovery.&#0160; Notes seem to have been logistically demanding for journal editors as they required some of the same energy as full-length articles, but filled less space in journals.&#0160; So, accepting numerous short notes had the potential to put pressure on editorial correspondence as each note required some of the same attention as longer articles but with less academic significance. Today, few journals accept notes and short comments on discoveries, textual notes, and the like have quietly

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vanished.&#0160; Some of my posts are essentially notes.&#0160; Short observations, comments, critiques of scholarly matters.&#0160; They hardly warrant the time and energy required for proper publication, but nevertheless advance some small part of scholarly discussion.</p> <p>These arguments for academic blogging are deeply interrelated and hardly meant to supercede or challenge the views advanced in the recent contributions to the topic of academic or intellectual blogging.&#0160; I do hope, however, that they shed a slightly different light on the ideas advanced by others, and if nothing else make the content of my blog more understandable.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 99.168.80.241 URL: DATE: 11/03/2008 09:43:16 AM excellent ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kudzu Fire EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 65.33.244.40 URL: http://waitingonthenewmoon.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/angel-sightings/ DATE: 11/04/2008 02:19:15 PM so blogs have replaced academic notes? I guess they have arrived. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: ryan stander EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.168.212 URL: http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com DATE: 11/12/2008 11:57:00 AM A little quip from my favorite canadian show...! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV2Hs2rgto8! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Fall Update STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetria-fall-update CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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DATE: 10/31/2008 08:59:54 AM ----BODY: <p>It seems like the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project begins earlier every year.&nbsp; Fall is grant writing season with three grants, two external and one internal, waiting to go off my desk in the next two weeks.&nbsp; David Pettegrew, Scott Moore, and I met this past week (in Second Life!) and began to discuss matters of staffing, student programs, and logistics.&nbsp; Our research goals for this next season are fairly well-established as we have received considerable encouragement and support from the Department of Antiquities.&nbsp; Maria Hadjicosti, the curator of the Cyprus Museum and our collaborator, urged us to conduct a few more soundings to ground-truth some of the more intriguing results from our intensive pedestrian survey and geophysical survey on Vigla and Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; We will also conduct some soundings at Koutsopetria in order to clarify some stratigraphic and architectural issues in advance of the final publication of Dr. Hadjicosti's earlier excavation at the site in the 1990s.&nbsp; Finally, we are working on an advanced publication of the results from the survey.&nbsp; This paper will be more synthetic and interpretative than our preliminary reports in the <em>Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus</em>.&nbsp; We'll also have a poster once again at the Archaeological Institute of America's Annual Meeting in Philadelphia this January.</p> <p>It's exciting that our project is taking shape this early in the year and bodes well for the 2009 season!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Making Room for Experiments STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursday-making-room-for-experiments DATE: 10/30/2008 07:54:54 AM ----BODY: <p>This week my graduate seminar has read <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/14412413">Hayden White's <em>The Content of the Form</em></a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/35362398">Dominick LaCapra's <em>History and Criticism</em></a>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The "Ironic perspective" held by most historians who continue to occupy their

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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.</p> <p>This is undoubtedly heady stuff for a room full of M.A. students.&nbsp; 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). </p> <p>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?&nbsp; 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 <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">play with video</a> in non-linear ways represents some of my willingness to at least consider avenues for historical expression that make more transparent the historical process.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But I am not entirely convinced that we succeed in encouraging experimentation by using the classroom <em>imprimatur </em>to show how experimental historical writing is not unconventional.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>More Teaching Thursday:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-5.html">Teaching Thursday: More on Writing</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a

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href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sterling Fluharty EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 64.106.24.242 URL: http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com DATE: 10/30/2008 06:46:34 PM Did you see the forum about Digital History in JAH? It had some interesting thoughts about experimenting with non-linear narratives. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blindness, Dreams, and Relics STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blindness-dreams-and-relics CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 10/29/2008 08:18:29 AM ----BODY: <p>The Life of St. Nikon &quot;Metanoeite&quot; contains a small variation on the standard pattern of Dream Archaeology and brings in an interesting new component to this study.&#0160; The saint worked to build churches on the island of Crete after the Byzantine&#39;s had regained control of the island in 961.&#0160; The following story comes from the <em>Life of St. Nikon</em>, 21: Having decided the depart from he island, he traveled from Gortyn and along the way stopped on night to rest at the remains of an older and now ruined church.&#0160; It is worth noting that St. Nikon displayed some archaeological acumen: he was able to determine that the church was old because of the fragments of &quot;cornices&quot; (geison).&#0160; As he slept he had a dream that St. Photeine appeared to him, asked him to rebuild the ruined church, and threatened that he would not leave the island if he did not do so.&#0160; St. Nikon awoke and could not tell whether the vision of the St. Photeine was a &quot;dream (oneiroxanta) or a vision enlightened by grace.&quot;&#0160; He ultimately decided that it was the former and continued on his way.&#0160; But then, suddenly, he lost his sight.&#0160; This showed him that the vision was certainly divine will, and once he decided to return to the site of the ruined church his vision returned.&#0160; Returning to the site and committed to

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following the St. Photeine&#39;s request, St. Nikon lacked the tools for the work -- namely spades and shovels (ptuon -- a winnowing shovel!) -- but God provided him with a column of fire which attracted the attention of the local residents who soon came to help him rebuild (and apparently excavate) the church.</p> <p>The role of St. Photeine in this story is quite interesting.&#0160; St. Photeine is typically associated with the Samaritan woman from John 4:8-26.&#0160; By the 10th century, however, her cult was centered in Constantinople where they celebrated both her martyrdom (March 20th) and the discovery of her relics (August 20th).&#0160; A&#0160; 11th or 12th century life preserves the story of how her relics were discovered.&#0160; A epidemic of blindness has swept through the city of Constantinople and a man called Abraham (Abraamios) was distraught having lost his sight.&#0160; He cried out to:</p> <blockquote> <p>&quot;God not to neglect him who was in mortal danger, but to show him the path whereby he should not be deprived of the light that is sweetest to all men. As he was thus despondent and lamenting his condition, he found respite from his despair in sleep, and while he was asleep he saw a divine vision: the vision was of a woman who was already elderly and aged and quite advanced in years, wearing a garment of linen, with a pleasant and charming face. She seemed to carry a large candle, and touched his eyes and said in a cheerful voice: &quot;Blind men, recover your sight, and those who are in darkness, receive the light; for behold, through me, the perfume-bearing martyr Photeine, Christ will grant light to your darkened eyes and will bring an end to your affliction and relieve your suffering. And this is a sign for you. A thickly wooded and dark cave holds my &lt;remains&gt; in its depths, and if you dig you will find me and light will shine II on you and all your household and everyone who calls on my name through Jesus Christ.&quot; As she spoke these words, she indicated the place with her hand, and he made a mental note of it. Therefore he quickly shook off his drowsiness, and ran to the spot, after sharing word of his vision with others. And after laboring hard for a short time they found concealed beneath an underground chamber the inviolate treasure, the true pearl, the blooming lily, the venerable remains of the great martyr Photeine, which dimly preserved the features &lt;of the saint as revealed&gt; in the man&#39;s vision. Straightaway then the afflicted man embraced, clasped and kissed the &lt;relics&gt;, washed them with his tears, lifted his eyes up to them, and was immediately delivered entirely from his dim sight.&quot; (A. M. Talbot &quot;The Posthumous Miracles of St. Photeine&quot; <em>Analecta Bollandiana </em>112 (1994), 90.)</p></blockquote> <p>There are obvious parallel between the <em>inventio </em>of St. Photiene&#39;s relics and the story in the life of St. Nikon.&#0160; First, the appearance of St. Photeine, a saint associated with healing eye ailments, makes makes it clear why St. Nikon lost his sight after ignoring her appearance to him.&#0160; Moreover, both stories involved pious men losing their sight and regaining it only after the recovery of lost sacred object or place.&#0160; It is also worth noting that another Cretan saint, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/to -crete-with-j.html">our old friend St. John Xenos</a>, lost his sight briefly while resting in a very large, old, Greek building on Crete.&#0160; In this case, he is told by the Virgin to build a church to her nearby and when he agrees his sight is restored. </p><p>The link between divine revelation and vision is as old as Homer and continues into our own times -- surely the blind blues singers of the American south (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sleepy John Estes, et c.) acquired some of their mystique and inspiration from their lack of sight.&#0160; The lack of vision also highlighted the obscured or lost relic or holy place which divine intervention made visible again.&#0160; In the case of St. Nikon, the refusal to accept the vision of St. Photeine, both made him blind

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physically and showed that he was, in fact, blind spiritually to the will of God.&#0160; In this context, the close parallels with the conversion of St. Paul would have been clear to a Byzantine audience. </p><p>For more on Dream Archaeology see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/dr eams-pausania.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-byzantine.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-dreams-rel.html">here</a>.</p><p>UPDATE: Over a year after I posted this I discovered an article that made a similar observations regarding the relationship between St. Nikon and St. Photeine: A.-M. Talbot and A. Kazhdan, &quot;The Byzantine Cult of St. Photeine,&quot; in A. R. Dyck and S. A. Takac, <em>The Presence of Byzantium: Studies Presented to Milton V. Anastos in Honor of His Eighty-Fifth Birthday. Byzantinische Forchungen </em>20 (1994), 103-112. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Digital Humanities, History, and Archaeology at the University of North Dakota: First Steps STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: digital-humanities-history-and-archaeology-at-the-university-of-northdakota-first-steps CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Web/Tech DATE: 10/28/2008 07:31:09 AM ----BODY: <p>We've begun to make the first steps toward institutionalizing the Digital Humanities at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; The statement here is a rough first draft that I drew up with a colleague in the English Department.&nbsp; We intentionally tried to create a statement that was different from the many good examples available at established digital humanities centers across the US in order to force ourselves to define in an accessible way the basic terms and parameters that define the rather expansive concept of the digital humanities.&nbsp; This statement with some modification will be circulated to administrators and potential donors to help us establish

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the intellectual and conceptual foundations for this kind of work on UND's campus. <p align="center"><strong>Digital Humanities · Digital History · Digital Archaeology<br>at the University of North Dakota </strong></p> <p><em>New Approaches to the Humanities. <br></em>Digital Humanities is a term that refers to the use of digital technology to explore the traditional subjects of humanistic inquiry.&nbsp; In doing so, Digital Humanities continues to explore and challenge the core values of academic humanism, while also embracing the emerging digital technologies that enable the study, teaching, and dissemination of texts in innovative ways.&nbsp; Digital Humanities both complements and expands the traditional ways that scholars and students of literature, languages, history, and archaeology interpret, analyze, and influence the world around them.&nbsp; The Digital Humanities cultivate skills that not only shed new light on old texts, but also to inspire different ways of thinking, reading, and viewing our culture. </p> <p><em>New Texts, New Methods, New Goals. <br></em>Digital Humanities seeks new answers to traditional questions in the humanities through a whole range of techniques, methods and approaches. <p>• The Digital Humanities includes converting traditional media (texts, photographs, video) into digital formats that follow recognized guidelines in order to make it available to scholars and students across campus and the world.&nbsp; So far at UND, work by Digital Humanists had made some of the earliest records of the University and other unique<br>collections available to a wider public through the internet. <p>• It includes processing quantitative data collected over the course of archaeological or archival field work.&nbsp; Scholars at UND have long experience in analyzing complex datasets ranging from 19th century ship manifests to archaeological data, using sophisticated computer programs. <p>• It also includes the production of new digital texts, video, and audio that explore and redefine the limits imposed by more traditional media.&nbsp; Already at the University there are weblogs, digital video, podcasts, photographic projects, and interactive texts that seek to redefine how scholars interact with their students, the community, and their peers. <p>• It recognizes the need to preserve traditional texts by migrating them to digital media, as well as archiving various “born digital” texts.&nbsp; By embracing and developing specific protocols and standards for the creation and preservation of digital media, the Digital Humanities ensure a global audience for fragile or geographically limited materials. <p><em>Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century. <br></em>The Digital Humanities recognizes that teaching and learning are ongoing requirements in the rapidly changing world of new media, technology, and digital approaches to texts and culture.&nbsp; Thus, teaching the broad theoretical approaches to understanding the new media and the specific technical skills necessary to produce digital media is at the very core of the Digital Humanities project. <p><em>Cultivating the Future.&nbsp; <br></em>The commitment to the Digital Humanities ensures that the University of North Dakota maximizes the visibility of existing Digital Humanities projects, cultivates the scholarly activity in this vibrant and innovative discipline, and encourages the teaching of skills necessary to compete in a world increasingly dominated by digital technology.&nbsp; A Center for the Digital Humanities would form a focal point for the energies, technologies, expertise, and infrastructure required for the University to embrace the challenges of humanistic inquire in the 21st century. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sterling Fluharty EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 64.106.24.242 URL: http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com DATE: 10/30/2008 06:49:49 PM What role would information professionals in the library play in this proposed program? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Streets of Grand Forks 2: A Small Town Streetscape STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 1 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-streets-of-grand-forks-2-a-small-town-streetscape CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 10/27/2008 07:42:01 AM ----BODY: <p>With all the talk about Small Town America this election season, it sometimes comes as a bit of a surprise to realize that I live in one of those small towns that are invoked so frequently by candidates for higher office.&nbsp; While <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Grand_Forks_ND.kmz">Grand Forks, North Dakota</a> has its share of strip malls, a Super Wal-Mart, and, of course, the state grain mill and elevator, its streets (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/th e-streets-of.html">whether paved with wood or not</a>) capture a kind of authentic simplicity that develops hoped to capture in their subdivisions of foreclosed mcmansion.</p> <p>Being on the prairie, most of the trees in Grand Forks (except for those that grow on the banks of the Red River or the various coulies that inscribe the flat bottom of the Red River Valley) are planted. The elm lined streets filter the raking light of the morning sun in the autumn.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535c2595e970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535c25963970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535c25972970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535c25979970c -pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535c25980970 c-pi"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; borderbottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535c25984970c

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-pi" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">That is, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/th e-first-snow.html">until it snows</a>...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The First Snow STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: wysiwyg ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-first-snow CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 10/26/2008 09:30:03 AM ----BODY: <p>The first snow of Winter 2008/2009 in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Grand_Forks_ND.kmz">Grand Forks, North Dakota</a>.&#0160; The photos are from this morning.</p> <p style="textalign: center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535b96cd7970 b-pi"><img alt="" border="0" height="537" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535b96cfc970b -pi" style="border: 0px none ;" width="404" /></a> </p> <p style="text-align: center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535c04718970 c-pi"><img alt="" border="0" height="537" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451908369e2010535c04729970c -pi" style="border: 0px none ;" width="404" /></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick--2 CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 10/24/2008 07:49:01 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick thoughts for the weekend:</p> <ul> <li>More Merrifield Moving: Gordon Iseminger made his feelings known regarding the Department of History's impending move from Merrifield Hall on the <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=90489&amp;section=ho mepage">front page of the Grand Forks Herald</a>.&nbsp; His rear guard actions captured the significance of the event well and ensured that the campus and the community realized that the Department's departure from its long time home in Merrifield will be a loss.&nbsp; He evoked the spirit of the building and of Robinson and Libby: </li></ul> <blockquote> <p><em>"Designed by famed architect Joseph Bell DeRemer, Merrifield Hall was built in 1929 and immediately elevated the aesthetics of the young campus, where earlier construction had been more utilitarian. Windows have been updated, and hallway ceilings were lowered to accommodate new heating and cooling systems, but there have been no additions to alter its external elegance. <br></em><em><br>It has a worn, familiar feel inside, where the terrazzo floors are original and the staircases curve into those sun-dappled window seats. </em></p></blockquote> <blockquote> <p><em>Down the hall from the core cluster of history faculty offices, one classroom is outfitted with maps and framed portraits of former history department leaders, including Elwyn Robinson, author of the 1966 “History of North Dakota,” and Orin G. Libby, often called “the father of North Dakota history.” </em> <p><em>“It was in this building that Robinson and Libby made their careers,” Iseminger said, and that tradition — that history — should matter to the larger university community."</em> <p>As the Departmental Historian, I was a bit surprised to see Iseminger's assertion that Libby "made his career" in Merrifield.&nbsp; Libby was hired in 1902 and published <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/248317474">his dissertation</a>, by far his most significant piece of scholarship some 5 years earlier.&nbsp; In 1914, Libby arranged to hold the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (the predecessor to the Organization of American Historians) on campus, and this was surely his finest hour.&nbsp; Libby's high profile battles with President Kane in the 1920s had tarnished his reputation on campus and weakened the position of the department as Kane sought to undermine Libby's power on campus by dividing the department into separate departments of European and American History.&nbsp; Despite these battles, he nevertheless had the privilege of new offices in Merrifield Hall where he would work until his retirement in 1945.&nbsp; While he worked hard during his final 15 years on campus to maintain North Dakota Historical Society during the darkest years of the depression, his scholarly output waned and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/or in-g-libby-an.html">even his teaching fell behind the times</a>.&nbsp; Libby's career was made before he came to Merrifield Hall and continued despite the move.&nbsp; This gives our department hope.</p></blockquote> <ul> <li>Read Quickly.&nbsp; The American Council of Learned Societies is making one of their humanities ebooks available to the public for one month only, after which it will only be available to subscribers.&nbsp; <a

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href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/textidx?c=acls;idno=heb90014"><em>Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800.</em> eds. Roger S. Bagnall, Raffaella Cribiore, with contributions by Evie Ahtaridis (Ann Arbor 2008, 2006).</a>&nbsp; Lots of really cool stuff in it.&nbsp; The letters on ostraca are particular striking.</li> <li>Write Quickly.&nbsp; Andrew Sullivan considers <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog">"Why I Blog" in the most recent issue of <em>The Atlantic</em></a>.</li></ul> <p>Cheer on the Phils this weekend.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: More on Writing STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thur-5 CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/23/2008 08:43:59 AM ----BODY: <p>One of my classes this semester, History 240: The Historians Craft, is fairly writing intensive.&nbsp; The goal of the class is to teach a small group of students basic historical method, to introduce them to a smattering on historiography and philosophy, and, finally, to produce&nbsp; a 10-15 page term paper based on independent research (a paper that should be substantially better than a term paper for a typical, "content based" class).&nbsp; The papers are to be rooted in the academic discourse and based upon primary sources.</p> <p>I am encouraging a kind of slow writing in this class.&nbsp; We build through a series of assignments from short book reviews and an annotated bibliography, to a formal prospectus, to an outline, and then a series of at least three critiqued drafts.&nbsp; I work hard to make the student aware of their writing and insist on a formal style across all of the projects that build toward the final product.&nbsp; The greatest frustration, however, is with students who for whatever reason, just don't get it.&nbsp; They either continues to write in an painfully informal or agrammatical (that is not ungrammatical, but seemingly devoid of any awareness of grammatical rules) style.&nbsp; Or more frequently, fail or even refuse to engage the scholarly discourse either in their research or in their writing.</p> <p>Last week, I met with a group of faculty from across campus to discuss Gerald Graff's and Cathy Birkenstein's little book,<em> </em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/63108472"><em>They Say/I Say: Moves That Matter in Academic Writing</em> (New York 2006).</a>&nbsp; The little seminar put on by our Office of Instructional Development and the Writing Center focused on the books techniques for encouraging writers to understand the

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

scholarly discourse.&nbsp; This is the "They Say" part of the books title.&nbsp; Graff and Birkenstein propose teaching students a series templates or formulas which force the writer to engage their fellow scholars.&nbsp; Most of the templates are so familiar to scholars as to be almost second nature.&nbsp; For example, "In their recent work, Y and Z have offered harsh critiques of Dr. X for __________." (Graff and Birkstein 21).&nbsp; For students, however, these "moves that matter" set a paper up from the start as a kind of conversation with the broader world of academic research.&nbsp; While the book has its flaws, such a kind of patronizing tone that might rub struggling student writers the wrong way, its basic approach to writing is compelling.&nbsp; </p> <p>Our students lack of familiarity with these kind of verbal cues that define so much of the rhetoric and substance of academic writing reflects our students lack of basic academic literacy.&nbsp; In large part, I consider it my biggest challenge and responsibility to encourage students to read and write.&nbsp; Even in my 100 level, introductory class, I encourage the students to write weekly.&nbsp; On the of the thing that is remarkable about this is that students who take the weekly writing assignments serious did much better on the midterm exam.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">As I described before,</a> I gave the students options on the exam.&nbsp; They could either do an all multiple guess, a half multiple guess and half essay, or an all essay exam.&nbsp; Students who regularly contributed weekly writing assignments scored statistically better on the exam.&nbsp; They were also more likely to take essay versions of the exam, which had higher grades in general, and average weekly writing score for the students who took the all essay exam was marked better than for those who took the multiple choice exam.&nbsp; What I think this indicates is that students who like to write, feel comfortable writing or at least feel obliged to write.&nbsp; This is hardly surprising (although it is nice to have statistics of a sort to back it up), but it does add another component to my goals as a teacher.&nbsp; Not only do I need to encourage a kind of slow writing, and teaching writing, but it is clear that I need to encourage the students to see writing as something interesting, challenging (in a good way), and even fun.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>More Teaching Thursday:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech

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Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sterling Fluharty EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 64.106.26.50 URL: http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com/ DATE: 10/23/2008 08:38:02 PM Do your students see the big picture? Do they understand why it is important and necessary to write in the way you are asking? You and I take it for granted. But how about them? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.133.190 URL: http://profile.typekey.com/billcaraher/ DATE: 10/24/2008 07:15:32 AM Thanks for the comment. On the one hand, many read my blog so have followed my discussion of teaching and writing. This, of course, is no guarantee that they buy my argument, but at least they realize it exists. More importantly, I justify how I teach in class. On the other hand, this is different from saying that my students buy into the larger project of the academy on any level. Students in a 100 level course or even a 200 level course are sometimes not particularly predisposed to see the value in academic forms of expression. I do teach this, but it can only go so far as these attitudes derive from deeply set social expectations. It is possible to change these attitudes over time, and I do my part, but changing basic values of society is not likely to be accomplished in a single course.! ! Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: More on Writing STATUS: Draft ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thur-3

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DATE: 10/23/2008 08:43:48 AM ----BODY: <p>One of my classes this semester, History 240: The Historians Craft, is fairly writing intensive.&nbsp; The goal of the class is to teach a small group of students basic historical method, to introduce them to a smattering on historiography and philosophy, and, finally, to produce&nbsp; a 10-15 page term paper based on independent research (a paper that should be substantially better than a term paper for a typical, "content based" class).&nbsp; The papers are to be rooted in the academic discourse and based upon primary sources.</p> <p>I am encouraging a kind of slow writing in this class.&nbsp; We build through a series of assignments from short book reviews and an annotated bibliography, to a formal prospectus, to an outline, and then a series of at least three critiqued drafts.&nbsp; I work hard to make the student aware of their writing and insist on a formal style across all of the projects that build toward the final product.&nbsp; The greatest frustration, however, is with students who for whatever reason, just don't get it.&nbsp; They either continues to write in an painfully informal or agrammatical (that is not ungrammatical, but seemingly devoid of any awareness of grammatical rules) style.&nbsp; Or more frequently, fail or even refuse to engage the scholarly discourse either in their research or in their writing.</p> <p>Last week, I met with a group of faculty from across campus to discuss Gerald Graff's and Cathy Birkenstein's little book,<em> </em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/63108472"><em>They Say/I Say: Moves That Matter in Academic Writing</em> (New York 2006).</a>&nbsp; The little seminar put on by our Office of Instructional Development and the Writing Center focused on the books techniques for encouraging writers to understand the scholarly discourse.&nbsp; This is the "They Say" part of the books title.&nbsp; Graff and Birkenstein propose teaching students a series templates or formulas which force the writer to engage their fellow scholars.&nbsp; Most of the templates are so familiar to scholars as to be almost second nature.&nbsp; For example, "In their recent work, Y and Z have offered harsh critiques of Dr. X for __________." (Graff and Birkstein 21).&nbsp; For students, however, these "moves that matter" set a paper up from the start as a kind of conversation with the broader world of academic research.&nbsp; While the book has its flaws, such a kind of patronizing tone that might rub struggling student writers the wrong way, its basic approach to writing is compelling.&nbsp; </p> <p>Our students lack of familiarity with these kind of verbal cues that define so much of the rhetoric and substance of academic writing reflects our students lack of basic academic literacy.&nbsp; In large part, I consider it my biggest challenge and responsibility to encourage students to read and write.&nbsp; Even in my 100 level, introductory class, I encourage the students to write weekly.&nbsp; On the of the thing that is remarkable about this is that students who take the weekly writing assignments serious did much better on the midterm exam.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">As I described before,</a> I gave the students options on the exam.&nbsp; They could either do an all multiple guess, a half multiple guess and half essay, or an all essay exam.&nbsp; Students who regularly contributed weekly writing assignments scored statistically better on the exam.&nbsp; They were also more likely to take essay versions of the exam, which had higher grades in general, and average weekly writing score for the students who took the all essay exam was marked better than for those who took the multiple choice exam.&nbsp; What I think this indicates is that students who like to write, feel comfortable writing or at least feel obliged to write.&nbsp; This is hardly surprising (although it is nice to have statistics of a sort to

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

back it up), but it does add another component to my goals as a teacher.&nbsp; Not only do I need to encourage a kind of slow writing, and teaching writing, but it is clear that I need to encourage the students to see writing as something interesting, challenging (in a good way), and even fun.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>More Teaching Thursday:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: Making the Test</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Dreams, Religion, and Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-dreams-rel CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA

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DATE: 10/22/2008 08:07:39 AM ----BODY: <p>One key element to my study of Dream Archaeology is emphasizing its relationship to the discipline of scientific archaeology as it developed in the late 19th and early 20th century.&nbsp; Episodes of Dream Archaeology predictably found little place in mainstream discussions of archaeological methods, it did, however, attract the attention of ethnographers and students of folklore both in Greece and elsewhere in Europe.&nbsp; Ethnography (or laography)&nbsp; in Greece shared a focus with archaeology in that it sought to "excavate" contemporary folk traditions for ancient artifacts that linked contemporary Greeks with their ancient ancestors.&nbsp; This complemented the work of archaeology by validating the historical basis for the existence of the nation and the fundamental continuity between ancient and modern Greeks.&nbsp; </p> <p>Outside of Greece, the nationalistic aims of studying folklore were muted considerably, but scholars such as John Cuthebert Lawson (following in the footsteps of scholars like E.B. Tylor), in his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/59400811"><em>Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion</em> (Cambridge 1910)</a> relied upon the work of Greek laographers/ethnographers particularly Nikolaos Politis (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/7572384">M. Herzfeld, <em>Ours Once More; Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece</em> (Austin 1982)</a>, 103104).&nbsp; Politis carefully documented Greek folklore and deployed it to demonstrate historical continuity among the Greeks.&nbsp; Among the myriad stories and types recorded by Politism, he notes numerous stories, some quite complex, related to dreams and excavation often of buried treasures.&nbsp; </p> <p>Lawson's assessment of such stories, in part drawn from his own experiences doing research in Greece at the end of the 19th century, views tales of Dream Archaeology with a typically modern and skeptical eye:</p> <blockquote> <p>"One of the pieces of information most frequently imparted to men in dreams is the situation of some buried treasure.&nbsp; The precautions necessary for unearthing it, namely complete reticence as to the dream, and the sacrifice of a cock, have already been mentioned.&nbsp; This kind of dream has been utilized by the Greek Church.&nbsp; There is no article of ecclesiastical property of more value than a venerable icon; to any church or monastery which aspires to become a great religious centre an ancient and reputable icon, competent to work miracles, is indispensable.&nbsp; Now the most obvious way of obtaining such pictures is, it seems, to dig them up.&nbsp; A few weeks underground will have give the right tone to the crudest copy of crude Byzantine art, and all that is required, in order to determine the spot for excavation, is a dream on the part of some person privy to the interment.&nbsp; It was on this system that the miracle-working icon of Tenos can to be unearthed on the very day that the standard of revolt from Turkey was raised, thus making the island the home of patriotism as well as of religion.&nbsp; And this is no solitary example; the number of icons exhumed in obedience to dreams is immense; wherever the traveler goes in Greece, he is wearied with the same reiterated story, and if the picture in question happens to be of the Panagia, there is often an appendix to the effect that the painter of it was St Luke – an attribution which can only have been based on clerical criticism of the style." (Lawson, 301302)</p></blockquote> <p>Despite the skepticism, the link between these stories and the goals of the modern state is already obvious.&nbsp; Thus, not only has the modern, scientific discipline of archaeology developed to support the national narrative, but so has at least some traditional "folk" understanding of the archaeological process.&nbsp; It seems likely that the parallels between

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longstanding views of archaeology as preserved <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-byzantine.html">in hagiography</a>, in particular, and the emerging modern discipline facilitated the transfer of meaning from the local and religious sphere to the national sphere.&nbsp; The place of Dream Archaeology in the folk tales recorded (no matter how cynically) by Lawson and especially Politis further validate the significance of such stories in the national narrative.</p> <p>For more on Dream Archaeology see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/dr eams-pausania.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-byzantine.html">here</a> . </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David Gill EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 88.202.210.107 URL: http://bsahistory.blogspot.com DATE: 10/25/2008 08:15:05 AM For more on Lawson and other students at the BSA working in this area prior to 1914 see:! http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/2008/08/bsa-students-and-folklore.html! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.133.190 URL: http://profile.typekey.com/billcaraher/ DATE: 10/25/2008 10:23:08 AM David,! ! Thanks for the this link. I checked out your blog before I wrote the post and then forgot to make the link. ! ! Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Cyprus, More Hybridity, More Pyla-Koutsopetria in Print STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-cyprus-mor CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 10/21/2008 08:32:04 AM ----BODY: <p>The most recent issue of the <em><a href="http://www.ajaonline.org/">American Journal of Archaeology</a></em> has a pair of forum articles that continue the work of trying to understand the complex events and processes that took place in Cyprus at during the later Bronze Age and early Iron Age.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.ajaonline.org/index.php?ptype=content&amp;aid=347">In "Cultural and Political Configuration in Iron Age Cyprus: The Sequel to a Protohistoric Episode", Maria Iacovou</a> provides a nuanced reading the Bronze Age to Iron Age transition with an emphasis on the emergence of a powerful Greek speaking group on the island by the Geometric period.&nbsp; She emphasizes, in particular, the exceptional character of a Bronze Age migration to Cyprus and undermines efforts to see parallels between what happened in Cyprus and on other islands in the Mediterranean like Sicily.&nbsp; Of particular significance in this article is that she saw the arrival of a distinct group of Mycenaean Greeks to have stimulated the re-organization of the island over the course of the late Bronze and early Iron Age and did so unevenly across the island.&nbsp; In some places, Greek migrants found fertile ground and relatively quickly asserted political influence, in other places the emergence of Greek influence was more gradual and in other places still, it is barely detectable at all.&nbsp; For Iacovou, then, the notion of "hybridity" recently applied by Knapp to Cyprus only obscures the real geopolitical context for the establishment of Greek power on the island.&nbsp; The emergence of Greek cultural hegemony on the island was a product of political and social calculations and was closely associated with the persistence of certain centers on the island and the decline of others.</p> <p>In response to this <a href="http://www.ajaonline.org/index.php?ptype=content&amp;aid=348">Knapp and Voskos ("Cyprus at the End of the Late Bronze Age: Crisis and Colonization or Continuity and Hybridization?")</a> reiterate the arguments recently <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/hy bridity-in-cy.html">offered in Knapp's recent book</a>.&nbsp; They see the emergence of Greek cultural authority on Cyprus to be part of a gradual process taking place over the course of centuries.&nbsp; This gradual period of migration established the basis for a hybridized community which ultimately became the heir to political power on the island over the course of the turbulent Late Bronze Age.&nbsp; Of course, most models for understanding hybridity, at least those deriving from a post-colonial context, recognized that the hybrid, on an individual level, acquired some kind of advantage as a result of their hybrid status.&nbsp; Knapp's model, at least as I understand it, seems weak in explaining why individuals would chose to adopt hybrid identities.&nbsp; On the one hand, if contact between Cyprus and the Aegean was initiated by merchant communities, which crossed cultural boundaries for economic reasons, one could conceivably imagine reasons for hybridizing, although none that are inevitable.&nbsp; On the other hand, hybrid individuals could be dangerous figures capable of upsetting established cultural, social, and political expectations.&nbsp; As such they could appear as threats as they destabilized the assumptions that structured social interactions and relegated to a kind of post-colonial third-space which vacillated between established social norms without a clear rhythm or center.</p> <p>While the interpretation of the

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evidence from the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age is far beyond my ability, we do hope that our work at the Late Bronze Age site of Pyla<em>Kokkinokremos</em>, which did not feature particularly prominently in either article, will contribute to how scholars understand the emergence of Greek culture on Cyprus.&nbsp; In fact, to facilitate our analysis of the site, we have assembled a "hybrid" team comprised of an archaeologist with a focus on Cypriot Pre-History, Michael Brown, and an Aegeanist with a focus on the Mycenaean period, <a href="http://individual.utoronto.ca/nakassis/">Dimitri Nakassis</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Over the past two field season the difference in methods, approaches, and assumptions infused the project with a kind of dynamic tension (which at times verged on being a bit too dynamic) typified by an environment where hybridity was both a potential outcome and feared result.&nbsp; </p> <p>To defuse the sometimes violent tensions possible during the hybridization process, the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutspetria Archaeological Project</a> has now decided only to publish in periodicals with cute animals on the cover.&nbsp; That's a joke.&nbsp; Here's a copy of our recent article in the British Ministry of Defence Conservation Magazine <em>Sanctuary</em>.&nbsp; Our article runs from pages 62-63.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp; <a href="http://www.defenceestates.mod.uk/publications/sanctuary/sanctuary2008.pdf"><img style="borderright: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="517" alt="SanctuaryCover" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SanctuaryCover.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Streets of Grand Forks STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-streets-of CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 10/20/2008 08:05:59 AM ----BODY: <p>Grand Forks was one of the first cities in North Dakota with paved streets.&nbsp; Fueled by high wheat prices and expanded production of the socalled "Second Boom" in North Dakota, communities like Grand Forks had the resources to provide improved amenities for their populations in the first decades of the 20th century.&nbsp; They paved the streets with a material called Granitoid which is apparently a kind of concrete that uses Granite as an aggregate and stamped it with a cobble-stone like pattern.&nbsp; Today there is

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a vigorous campaign to preserve sections of this granitoid pavement.&nbsp; (More on this next week!)</p> <p>Prior to the use of grantitoid, the streets of Grand Forks were paved with wood blocks some of which must have remained in use until the mid-20th century.&nbsp; Very little of this wood paving remains.&nbsp; Apparently during Grand Forks' frequent flood sections of it would simply float away!&nbsp; There is a one good example of it, however, located on the west side of the <a href="http://www.cottonwoodcommunity.org/">Grand Forks Community Church</a> (formerly, I believe the Presbyterian Church). The blocks were placed in a sand bedding vertically (rather than horizontally as in medieval corduroy roads) creating a kind of wood cobble.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Wood%20Paving%201.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Wood%20Paving%201_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Wood%20Paving%202.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Wood%20Paving%202_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Wood%20Paving%204.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Wood%20Paving%204_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Wood%20Paving%203.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Wood%20Paving%203_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>I've created a Google Earth .kmz file so you can see this pavement's location and embedded these photographs in it as well.&nbsp; You can <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Wood_Streets_Grand_Forks_ND.kmz">dow nload it here</a> and view it in Google Earth.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.199.91.113

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URL: DATE: 10/20/2008 09:39:38 AM As recently as the late seventies and eighties I still saw a lot of wooden street pavement in Chicago, especially in alley-way on the south side. Apparently some is still evident http://arcchicago.blogspot.com/2007/06/cedarsof-astor.html ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.133.190 URL: http://profile.typekey.com/billcaraher/ DATE: 10/20/2008 09:43:08 AM Chuck,! ! Thanks!! And thanks for the link to a great blog post!! ! Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: BrianB EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.249 URL: DATE: 10/20/2008 10:28:05 AM Amazing the blocks have held out so long. I've admired the "cobblestone" roads in town. Glad to hear there is initiative to preserve them. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: BrianB EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.249 URL: DATE: 10/20/2008 10:37:04 AM That Chicago link has an extra ")" at the end that should be removed to view the page:! ! http://arcchicago.blogspot.com/2007/06/cedars-of-astor.html ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 10/24/2008 12:32:19 PM That's really interesting- I've never seen that kind of pavement before. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick--1

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CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 10/17/2008 09:58:30 AM ----BODY: <p>Just some quick hits on a Friday morning...</p> <ul> <li>A cool new blog called <a href="http://pretexts.blogspot.com/">(pre)texts</a> by Dimitris Plantzos.</li> <li>A useful post for the novice digital historian called <a href="http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/2008/10/navigating-digitalhistory.html">Navigating Digital History</a> at <a href="http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/">Digital History Hacks</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">The Department of History at the University of North Dakota</a> in conjunction with Mediterranean Archaeology has purchased 6 TB of server space this week.&nbsp; It should be set up by the beginning of the winter semester.&nbsp; It's the cyber-infrastructure foundation for digital history and digital archaeology.</li> <li>After a brief absence, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/">Archaeol ogy of the Mediterranean World</a> is back on the re-designed and improved <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/">Grand Forks Life</a> blogroll!&nbsp; Thanks GrandForksGuy!&nbsp; This is one of the most interesting "local blogs" that I read regularly.&nbsp; It features a few "Open Threads" a month where people can sound off on various issues from Grand Forks Dinning to local politics and administration.&nbsp; In the past, it has a attracted a motley assortment of established bloggers and anonymous commentators.&nbsp; Recently, GrandForksGuy (not his real name) has decided to prevent anonymous posters (those without accounts on Blogger) from posting in these open threads.&nbsp; A controversial choice that could elevate the level of conversation on these rowdy and rugged open threads, but could also make his blog less representative of the community.&nbsp; A bold experiment and time will tell.</li> <li><a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/index.php/site/comments/openoffice_finally_ arrives/">Open Office 3.0</a> runs natively on Mac's OS X.</li></ul> <p>The Phils can rest easily for a few days and watch the Sox try to survive the ALCS.&nbsp; Good start by <a href="http://contentusa.cricinfo.com/indvaus2008/engine/current/match/345670.html">India versus Australia last night in Mohali (311/5)</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.jayski.com/stats/2008/entries/32mar2008entry.htm">Martinsville</a> this weekend.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Making the Test STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thur-2

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DATE: 10/16/2008 08:01:32 AM ----BODY: <p>Making a midterm exam is always a tricky thing especially in an introductory level class.&nbsp; For my introductory history class there is the challenge in determining what I am trying to test.&nbsp; In its classic formulation this is deciding between testing for content and testing for technique (or method).&nbsp; For a history course, a test that emphasizes content mainly (if falsely) evaluates the ability to recall names, dates, places, events.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The former is frequently, although not always, associated with "factual" multiple-choice exams.&nbsp; The latter with the dreaded essay.</p> <p>My introductory level class requires writing.&nbsp; I have weekly writing assignments, a paper, and require the students to write at least one in-class essay.&nbsp; Many of my students do not like writing.&nbsp; They dread writing in-class essays, they grouse about the paper, and they frequently fall behind in their weekly writing assignments.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The Praxis II is the standard test required for certification to teach history in North Dakota.&nbsp; The test was, predictably, multiple choice and focused on, in part, crucial, but ultimately assorted names, dates, and events.</p> <p>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.&nbsp; I gave the students an option on the exam.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The essays are a more standard variety.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The second essay is the opposite.&nbsp; 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.</p> <p>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).&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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).&nbsp; So student grades cluster slightly higher and the average grade is typically much higher since there are fewer "catastrophic" exams.&nbsp; 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".</p> <p>I am not really sure whether the students appreciate the choice between different kinds of exams.&nbsp; I also

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wonder about the fundamental fairness of the practice.&nbsp; I have not yet begun to fathom the implications of different kinds of tests for different kinds of learning in the sticky matter of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">assessment</a>.&nbsp; Once we open a class to a wider range of potential, student-directed, outcomes, it becomes far more difficult to assess performance and success.&nbsp; </p> <p>More Teaching Thursday:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The North Dakota Sky STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-north-dakot CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 10/15/2008 07:32:26 AM

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----BODY: <p>About a year ago, I made a post on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/gr eek-light.html">Greek Light</a>.&nbsp; Here's a North Dakota pendant.&nbsp; The North Dakota sky is amazing.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Dakota_Sky_2.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Dakota_Sky_2_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><em> <br>Campus</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Dakota_Sky_3.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="194" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Dakota_Sky_3_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br><em>Mainstreet</em> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Dakota_Sky_1.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Dakota_Sky_1_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br><em>Highest Point in Town</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Dreams, Pausanias, and Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: dreams-pausania CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 10/14/2008 08:22:36 AM ----BODY: <p>Since <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22092557">Frazer's translation and commentary on Pausanias's <em>Description of Greece</em></a>, scholars have recognized the importance of this work for understanding Greek religion of the Roman period.&nbsp; Pausanias's punctuated his travels around the Greece with descriptions of temples and shrines, rituals, and stories of religious experiences.&nbsp; In fact, Jas Elsner has argued that readers should understand Pausanias's work as the description of a religious pilgrimage to sites of importance to Greek culture and works to ignore (and subvert the visible

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features of Roman rule (J. Elsner, "Pausanias: A Greek Pilgrim in the Roman World," <em>Past and Present </em>135 (1992), 3-29.). <p>Dreams feature prominently in Pausanias's Description, and in a number of places he ties dreams to archaeological activities.&nbsp; The best know example of this comes from Book 4 where he describes the founding of the city of Messene.&nbsp; A dream prompted the Argive general Epiteles who had fought beside the Thebans under Epaminondas to liberate Messene from centuries of&nbsp; Spartans domination,&nbsp; to excavated at a particular spot on Mt. Ithome: " wherever he found yew and myrtle growing on Ithome, to dig between them and recover the old woman, for, shut in her brazen chamber, she was overcome and well-nigh fainting." (Paus. 4.26.7).&nbsp; These excavations revealed a brazen urn which Epiteles took to the Theban general Epaminondas.&nbsp; In the urn was a piece of rolled tin inscribed with the rites of the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/123902099">Sacred Mysteries (of Andania)</a> which would protect the Messenians from future danger.&nbsp; The great Messenan general and hero Aristomenes had buried this "secret thing" on Mt. Ithome some 300 years previous while fighting a desperate war against the Spartans. An oracle, predicting defeat, had prompted him to bury this "secret thing" because if it was lost, the Messenians would likewise "be overwhelmed and lost forever" (4.20.3-4).&nbsp; The discovery of this urn by Epaminondas and Epiteles prompted the (re)founding of the city of Messene on the slopes of Ithome and, according to Pausanias, inspired the mysteries conducted at Andania well into Roman times. <p>This episode of Dream Archaeology has fine parallels with latter examples of this phenomenon (described <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/10/mo re-byzantine.html">here</a> on this blog).&nbsp; In fact, S. Alcock already recognized the significance of this story and Book 4 in general, and treated Pausanias's account of the Messenian past in some detail in her "The Peculiar Book IV and the Problem of the Messenian Past" (in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43365871">S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner, <em>Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece</em>. (Oxford 2001)</a>).&nbsp; She noted that the dream had linked the recently liberated Messenia to their pre-Spartan past, and this link was made tangible through the physical act of excavation and commemorated through the Sacred Mysteries at Andania. <p>The dream archaeology recorded in Pausanias also ties the Messenians to the soil of Mt. Ithome through the excavation of their "secret [and sacred] thing".&nbsp; In this way, they share a kind of autochthonos character common to other Greek groups throughout Pausanias' narrative (Elsner 1992, 16 esp. note 49). Moreover, as Frazier noted, buried talismans like the "secret thing" often served to protect cities or even regions against outside threats thus linking the safety and ultimately the integrity of a community with a kind of archaeological artifact hidden and buried beneath the surface (Frazier 1898 [1913], 4.433-434) <p>Thus Dream Archaeology in the case of Messenia tied the reborn Messene with its past prior to Spartan domination and reinforce the link between the community, the soil, and the sacred protection provided by the "secret thing".&nbsp; The act of dreaming transformed excavation into a sacred act that re-established continuity in an interrupted history.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pottery, Paganism, and Abandonment in Corinth STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pottery-paganis CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 10/13/2008 08:42:06 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> pointed me in the direction of K. Slane's "The End of the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth," <em>Hesperia</em> 77 (2008), 465-496. The main goal of this article was to clarify certain issues with the ceramic chronology at the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on the slopes of Acrocorinth which had been well published by Slane, N. Bookidis, R. Stroud, and C.K. Williams over a series of Corinth volumes.&nbsp; In this particular article, Slane sought to reiterate her late 4th century dating of this sanctuary's abandonment despite some recent evidence that lamps similar to those found at the sanctuary could date as late as the 5th century.&nbsp; Holding ground on the earlier date for this pottery clearly resists the most recent trends in the study of Late Roman ceramics which tends to push pottery later in time.</p> <p>The end of this cult represents one of a number of episodes in the neighborhood of Corinth that roughly marked the end of a kind of monumental paganism characteristic of formal sanctuaries and perhaps their economic, religious, and political institutions.&nbsp; The site seems to have suffered a violent destruction perhaps at the hands of Christians or during one of the late 4th century earthquakes.&nbsp; The end of ancient "monumental" paganism has, of course, represented a major moment in how we understand the emergence of Christian culture in Greece; for the Corinthia specifically attention to this phenomenon has featured in several dissertations, books, and a gaggle of articles over the past several decades. </p> <p>Slane's article also sheds light on this site after its destruction and abandonment <em>as a sanctuary</em>.&nbsp; The earlier date of the ceramic material from the site maintains the gap between the site's abandonment as a sanctuary and its reuse as a cemetery and as a quarry for building material.&nbsp; The ceramics present on the site date to the final part of the 5th century and into the 6th, and the lamps, in particular, are associated with the burials.&nbsp; Slane contends that since only one lamp has a Christian symbol on it, it is unlikely that this cemetery represented a conspicuous Christian effort to "deny" the site's former sanctity (p. 492).&nbsp; The burials on site, however, only represent one aspect of the sanctuary post-abandonment history.&nbsp; There were also a definite quantity of 6th century ceramics associated with the site -including coins of Arcadius, a 6th century African Red Slip plate, a Late Roman C ware saucer, 6th century amphoras, and cooking pots.&nbsp; While this material may be associated with the rituals that took place at tombs in Late Antiquity,

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it may also represent the everyday life of the individuals who worked to strip the site of building material and transport them elsewhere in the city.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/ko urion-and-aba.html">As similar finds at Late Antique Kourion have shown</a>, the work of robbing a site of building material could have involved a rather substantial crew and extended over a significant period of time (weeks? months?).&nbsp; The provisioning for the crew might well involve cooking pots and transport amphora,&nbsp; and the occasional fineware serving dish would be a possible feature of this assemblage as well especially when these types of objects are found well away from the area of later burials.&nbsp; </p> <p>The point of Slane's article was not to clarify the later function of the site, although establishing a definite gap between the end of cult activity at the site and later burials and activity there certainly contributes to how we understand the site's later phases.&nbsp; Nevertheless, the recent attention to the chronology of later material has continued to cast more and more light both on "abandonment" as a complex process and the dynamic history of site's across the entire landscape.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hi CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 10/10/2008 09:24:23 AM ----BODY: <p>Some pretty interesting reading across the blogosphere this week:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/">Tenured Radical</a> has <a href="http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2008/10/radical-goes-to-genteelacademic.html">a nice post describing why she blogs</a>.&nbsp; It was written for the meeting of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.&nbsp; Her post includes links to two other bloggers who contributed a panel at the conference: <a href="http://cliobluestockingtales.blogspot.com/">Clio Buestocking Tales</a> (who describes why she <a href="http://cliobluestockingtales.blogspot.com/2008/10/little-berks-women-andblogging.html#links">blogs here</a>) and <a href="http://hmprescott.wordpress.com/">Knitting Clio</a> (who provides an outline for her <a href="http://hmprescott.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/outline-forlittle-berks-talk/">talk here</a>).&nbsp; I particularly appreciate Tenured Radical's comments on the importance of blogging to her writing.&nbsp; I too have found that blogging has improved my ability to write efficiently and to

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compose ideas. Like TR, my blog has also led to relationships with colleagues across the entire range of my discipline.&nbsp; In many ways, my blog has helped me understand my discipline better as it has exposed me to a group of scholars that I had not met over the regular course of meetings, conferences, and events.</li> <li><a href="http://landscape.blogspot.com/">Unimaginable inscape</a> has simply blown my mind.&nbsp; Landscapes and Digital Humanities.&nbsp; Amazing.</li> <li>People have noticed that my blog roll has become neglected (although most of the links still work!).&nbsp; If you want to see what I am reading, check out <a href="http://delicious.com/WilliamCaraher">my del.icio.us page for a full list of my readings</a>. At last count, I have over 80 archaeology blogs.&nbsp; This makes me think that I might need to update me Blogging Archaeology/Archaeology of Blogging article...</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clio Bluestocking EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 160.253.0.8 URL: http://www.cliobluestockingtales.blogspot.com DATE: 10/10/2008 01:55:14 PM Hey! Thank you for linking! Now I've found another interesting blog. This is what the form does. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Red pens, Reading, and Assessment STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thur-1 CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/09/2008 08:17:51 AM ----BODY: <p>Grading papers always provides a good opportunity to think through the process of writing, reading, and assessing student work.&nbsp; Over the last few weeks, I've graded a stack of undergraduate papers from both a mid-level course for history majors and an introductory-level, survey course.&nbsp; As I worked my way through the stack my mind kept returning to a few points (and, yes, one of those points was &quot;how many papers are left in this stack.).</p> <p>1. When did people stop grading with red pens?&nbsp; I am always excited to rip into my box of new pens, pull out the strangely colored ones, and set them aside for grading.&nbsp; (I can't imagine taking notes at a faculty meeting in a purple pen...).&nbsp; I never grade in red any more.&nbsp; I think somewhere,

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perhaps in graduate school, someone convinced me that it was traumatic to grade a student with a red pen.&nbsp; Red stood for blood, fear, anger, and possibly communism. So I dutifully stopped grading in red and have brought on board every other color in the rainbow.</p> <p>2. Writing and Reading. Reading student papers, even the good ones, frequently gets me wondering about what my students read (outside of my class, of course!).&nbsp; Some of the characteristics of student writing (in a general sense) like the short paragraphs and the tendency to rely heavily on direct quotation suggests the strong influence of journalism.&nbsp; The long, tenuously organized sentences that appear in so many student papers must reflect some other major influence on their writing.&nbsp; Perhaps the wandering, grammatically ambiguous sentence does not have roots in a written context at all, but reflects the influence of everyday speech patterns on writing.&nbsp; The spoken word might even account for the tendency to write almost exclusively in passive voice.&nbsp; Certainly passive voice is used by us far more frequently in speech than in writing. </p> <p>3. Assessment. Like the hula-hoop, Cabbage-Patch Kids, and the so-called &quot;iPod&quot;, the assessment craze is sweeping our country.&nbsp; It seems to me that the goal of assessment is to ascertain more clearly what makes a good teacher or a good course effective.&nbsp; To do this, it is necessary to break down the course into small parts -- grading, lecturing, leading discussion, witty banter, collegiality -- and subject as many of these facets of the classroom experience to assessment as possible.&nbsp; In most cases, the instructor conducts the assessment using some kind of common template.&nbsp; Since it is necessary to aggregate most assessment results for their presentation to assessment committees or panels, most assessment techniques have a quantitative component.&nbsp; </p> <p>As someone who feels fairly comfortable dealing with numbers, samples, and quantitative data, it is almost fun to break down the process of grading, for example, into assessable steps.&nbsp; At present our assessment techniques focus heavily on student learning as a barometer for faculty effectiveness.&nbsp; Consequently, there is less emphasis on what a faculty member does in the classroom and more on whether the student improves over the course of the semester or the degree program.&nbsp; Each students performance on their papers, for example, gets broken down into certain assessable categories (do they have a clear thesis, do they use evidence successfully, do they advance a coherent argument, and is their paper structured rationally).&nbsp; Invariably these categories coincide with the key categories of the more traditional mode of assessment (i.e. grading).&nbsp; I record both the assessment data and the grades to determine exactly how closely our assessment rubric and the student's grade coincide both now at the mid-term point of the semester and at the final papers.&nbsp; Improvement in grades should correlate closely with improvements in the assessable skills, but writing style (and, of course, grading pen color) fall to the more blurry margins of our assessment criteria and could produce some deviation between student grade and assessable performance.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Byzantine Dreams... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-byzantine CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 10/08/2008 08:26:12 AM ----BODY: <p>I've been working on a paper entitled, "Dream Archaeology", that I will deliver at North Dakota State University in November.&nbsp; Over the past few weeks, I've plowed my way through S. M. Oberhelman's 1981 dissertation at the University of Minnesota: <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/10414879">The oneirocritic literature of the late Roman and Byzantine eras of Greece : manuscript studies, translations and commentaries to the dream-books of Greece during the first millennium A.D., with Greek and English catalogues of the dream-symbols and with a discussion of Greek oneiromancyfrom Homer to Manuel the Palaeologian</a></em>.&nbsp; This dissertation includes translations and commentaries of the seven preserved dream-books of the Late Roman and Byzantine period.</p> <p>My research focuses on excavations that were prompted by dreams.&nbsp; In particular, I am looking at the phenomenon of inventio, or the discover of lost religious objects through a dream.&nbsp; By Late Antiquity, this kind of dream is generally considered to be a <em>horama</em> or vision.&nbsp; The kinds of dream that featured in the dream-books studied by Obherlman is called simply an <em>oneiros.&nbsp; </em>To understand an oneiros, the dreamer needs some kind of aid, either an interpreter or a dream-book, which sets out the metaphorical meaning of the images in a dream.&nbsp; The most significant work of the interpretation of oneiroi in the ancient world is Artemidoros' <em>Oneirokritika</em>. This tradition of dream interpretation comes later to influence, at least in part, Freudian methods of dream interpretation.</p> <p>Horama or visions, however, have received less attention, in part because they are relatively straightforward to understand.&nbsp; In general, a religious figure in a dream instructs the dreamer to dig in a certain place in order to find a particular sacred relic, icon or even a lost building.&nbsp; Such dream narratives appear occasionally in Late Roman and Byzantine hagiography, but have roots in the Roman tradition (see, for example, Pausanias 8.37.3).</p> <p>What is particularly interesting is that the analysis of oneiroi presented in the Late Roman and Byzantine dream-books do not seem to overlap at all with the kinds of <em>inventio </em>dreams found in other sources. In fact, when church buildings, for example, appear in dream-books they are often interpreted as a play on words.&nbsp; For example, in the dream book of Astrampsychos, Nikephoros, and Germanos, they offer this punning interpretation: dreams of standing in a church, results in an accusation (the Greek word for church (ekklesia) and accusation (enklesis) are similar).&nbsp; Dreams of icons or the appearance of saints are interpreted (rather simply to my mind) as signs of good fortune or joyous times.</p> <p>While it is redundant to observe that different kinds of dreams are understood in different ways in the Late Roman and Byzantine worlds, it is interesting to note that most scholarly work has emphasized the oneiroi.&nbsp; Orama, particularly those that tie the conscious, waking world to buried fragments of their past, have received less attention (but not none at all see for example the work of C. Stewart) but may

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offer insight into the place of history at the intersection of the conscious ad unconscious mind.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Being a Tourist in the Eastern Mediterranean STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: being-a-tourist CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Travel DATE: 10/07/2008 08:24:09 AM ----BODY: <p>I just finished reading Philip Duke's short book, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/144773102"><em>The Tourists Gaze, the Cretans Glance: Archaeology and Tourism on a Greek Island</em>. (Walnut Creek, CA 2007)</a>.&nbsp; Aside from the cool title, the book provides a succinct overview of the relationship between archaeology on Crete and tourism with a main emphasis on Bronze Age, Minoan sites.&nbsp; <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/08/a_response_to_philip_duke s_the.html#more">There is a nice review of the book</a> over at <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/">Archaeolog</a>.</p> <p>What interested me the most was Duke's effort to problematize the relationship between archaeologists, the tourist industry (ranging from efforts of the Greek state to present archaeological sites to small, local businesses), and the foreign tourist.&nbsp; The boundaries between these groups, of course, are fairly artificial: even Duke in his role of tourist ethnographer become in some contexts a tourist himself.&nbsp; This same feeling comes to anyone who spends part of every year in a foreign country working as an archaeologist; the feeling of shifting from coddled tourist to specialist interlocutor occurs quite regularly as one passes from one environment to the next.&nbsp; The complex interplay between being a tourist and an archaeologist is particularly pronounced when leading undergraduate and even graduate students around Greece and Cyprus in the summer months. </p> <p>For example, as a group, we've been flummoxed when an archaeological site is poorly marked, lacking on-site (or even published!) documentation, overgrown, or simply confusing.&nbsp; In some cases, of course,&nbsp; the challenge of working out the relationships between the evidence preserved on-site is invigorating and rewarding.&nbsp; In many more cases, however, it is just confounding as the myriad of complex site-formation processes conspire to obscure the process of excavation, the relationships between the visible remains and features, and the overall significance of the site itself.&nbsp; At these moments, there is a natural desire to be led through

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a site and a willingness to accept the hegemonic presentation provided by signs, labels, paths, and pamphlets (whether produced by an archaeologist or a member of the tourist industry or whomever).&nbsp; </p> <p>In other cases, especially at popular destinations which tend to be thoroughly presented, the presentation itself becomes the basis for a critique.&nbsp; Even a beginning archaeology student can often see through overly nationalistic or tremendously simplified presentations of sites. In fact, at some sites in Greece and Cyprus, I've come to anticipate the relatively simple presentations and use them as the basis for discussion the visible archaeology in much the same way that thoughtful tourists would respond to Evans' reconstruction of the Minoan palaces at Knossos.&nbsp; </p> <p>Finally, putting together itineraries for students forces one to consider explicitly the basic tourist infrastructure that contextualizes site visits.&nbsp; For example, a stretch of lovely (if touristy) taverna restaurants will often make a site a more appealing destination.&nbsp; The requirements for a tour bus or even good access by road conditions the narrative of site visits even for even a group of experienced archaeologist.&nbsp; In fact, the accessibility of a site regularly features in the larger archaeological narrative.&nbsp; Sites that are more difficult to access or presented in confusing ways encourages a sense of remoteness, exoticism, and intellectual privilege derived largely from the contrast to the well-marked sites visited by the "average tourist".&nbsp; So, even the most intellectual visitor, tourist, or archaeologist often draws upon expectations promoted by the "hegemonic" narrative produced by the tourist industry in all its manifestations.</p> <p>Of course, the hybrid state of the typical archaeologist/tourist is precisely the position that allowed Duke to critique the "tourists' gaze" so well.&nbsp; The real charm of his slim volume is that it seems like a nice addition to the reading list for our own study tour/field school next summer.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Metadata Monday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: metadata-monday CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 10/06/2008 08:03:26 AM ----BODY: <p>I haven't had a "Metadata Monday" feature for some time.&nbsp; Since I made my 300th post this past week and had my 30,000th page view the week before, I thought it was a good time to look over the various statistical indicators associated with my blog.</p> <p>First, I average just under 60 page views a day (58.45 as of this morning!), and, as this chart shows, this figures seems to

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have leveled off over the last few months with just a slight upward trend.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PageViewChart.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="263" alt="PageViewChart" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PageViewChart_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">&nbsp;</p> <p>Since last November, when I began to use Google Analytics, I've averaged just over 1.5 page views per visitor. The average time on site is just over a minute-twenty (which hardly seems like enough!).&nbsp; My bounce rate remains a respectable 73.99%.</p> <p>The visitors hail from 118 countries with the U.S., Greece, the U.K., Canada, Italy, Australia, Cyprus, Germany, France, and Denmark being the best represented.&nbsp; The top-ten states: Pennsylvania, California, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Texas, and New Jersey.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/HitMap10_2008.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="248" alt="HitMap10_2008" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/HitMap10_2008_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>It is interesting to me to consider who reads my blog by looking at the major referring sites.&nbsp; The top five referring domains (excluding large sites like Google Images) are: <a href="http://www.pkap.org">www.pkap.org</a>, <a href="http://www.archaeology.org">www.archaeology.org</a>, <a href="http://www.und.edu">www.und.edu</a>, <a href="http://www.hnn.us">hnn.us</a>, <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr">www.ascsa.edu.gr</a>&nbsp; </p> <p>The top bunch of referring blogs includes: <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm</a>, <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/">Grand Forks Life</a>, <a href="http://www.atrium-media.com/rogueclassicism/">Rogue Classicism</a>, <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeology</a>, <a href="http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/">Archaeoastronomy</a>, <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a>, <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/">Histor ical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean</a>. It is great to see the readers of so many good blogs taking the time to click over to my modest offerings.&nbsp; It is particularly heartening to see hits from Grand Forks Life, a blog focused on local affairs here in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Part of the goal of this blog was to engage the local community in my research and interests and the traffic from this domain name suggests some success in this area!</p> <p>For <a href="http://www.thefee.net/">Sam Fee</a>, here is my browser data: Internet Explorer (45.35%), Firefox (42.29%), Safari (7.64%), Opera (3.07%), Mozilla (0.71%). I've contrasted this with the metadata gathered from some more public web pages that my wife maintains (like <a title="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/" href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/">http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/</a>).&nbsp; Hit on her site are dominated by Internet Explorer. It may be that my more academic audience prefers Firefox.</p> <p>Thanks for reading my blog!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-an CATEGORY: Australiana CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 10/03/2008 09:27:29 AM ----BODY: <p>Just some quick hits and varia on a sunny Friday morning.</p> <ul> <li>Technorati posted their 5th <a href="http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/">"state-ofthe-blogosphere" report</a>.&nbsp; Interesting reading.&nbsp; I am clearly part of a dominant demographic!</li> <li>I wonder what <a href="http://horothesia.blogspot.com/2008/09/reuters-endnote-sues-george-masonover.html">this</a> <a href="http://horothesia.blogspot.com/2008/09/more-onzotero-lawsuit.html">all means</a> for <a href="http://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a>. Like many academics, I am completely dependent on Zotero for my day-to-day research.&nbsp; Good luck to the Zotero folks at George Mason's Center for History and the New Media!</li> <li><a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/news/newsDetails/corinth-launched-onjstor/">Corinth Volumes on J-Stor is great news</a>.&nbsp; Unfortunately the University of North Dakota does not subscribe to the <a href="http://www.jstor.org/action/showJournals?browseType=collectionInfoPage&amp ;selectCollection=ascomp">Arts and Sciences Complement</a>.&nbsp; This is a nice reminder that we should not confuse being on J-stor with universal or open access.&nbsp; It's a good start though.</li> <li><a href="http://somenotesfromthestreet.blogspot.com/">Another curious and smart blog from a high-tech friend</a>.</li> <li>This is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpvuz8gg79Q">fun and reminds us that IndiaAustralia</a> starts next week.</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend.&nbsp; Go Phillies!!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: The Structure of Seminar

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursd CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 10/02/2008 08:06:25 AM ----BODY: <p>This semester I teach the graduate historiography seminar in our Department's M.A. program.&nbsp; The class is a challenge in several ways.&nbsp; First, it's a large seminar with over 20 students in it.&nbsp; The students come from a wide range of backgrounds and levels of preparation -- some are "home grown" talent from our B.A. program, but most of them come from other programs across the country.&nbsp; The students' interests, as is typical for this kind of class, range from 20th century American history to the history of the Roman empire.&nbsp; Finally, their tolerance for abstraction, theorizing, and philosophizing varies as well.&nbsp; Some of the students are clearly prepared to wade into significant theoretical debates; other students prefer the relatively comfort of concrete forms and narrative.</p> <p>The class meets for 3 hours on Thursday afternoon.&nbsp; For the past five weeks, I've tried to allow the class to find its own intellectual and social equilibrium by reserving the first half of class to open discussion about the readings for the week.&nbsp; I begin the class with an intentionally open-ended questions: "So, what's the deal with E.P. Thompson?&nbsp; Why is he significant?"&nbsp; So, far these open ended questions have tended to generate the kind of wide ranging discussions that one would expect from a class with such a diverse group of students.&nbsp; </p> <p>My open-ended approach, however, has had some unintended (although not unexpected) side effects.&nbsp; First, the class has been dominated by a handful of the most vocal students who not only dominate the space of debate, but also, since the first part of the class is essentially open ended, establish the parameters of the discourse relatively quickly.&nbsp; This can be good, when they quickly seize upon particularly significant elements of the book or points of potentially fruitful discussion.&nbsp; On the other hand, this can be bad, when they struggle to find productive avenues of inquiry or stifle (sometimes by volume of words alone!) alternative approaches to the text.&nbsp; </p> <p>The other challenge of this approach is that it puts pressure on me. For the first half of class, I have to allow the students to work through the texts on their own and resist the temptation to redirect discussion toward topics that resonate more closely with my reading of the text.&nbsp; During the second half of class, I try to redirect the discussion during the first half of class toward several salient aspects of the work or toward the relationship between the particular work to larger trends in contemporary historiography.&nbsp; I also ask the class to relate the particular approach under discussion for the day to their own research.&nbsp; </p> <p>The upside of this more open-ended approach is that I have a chance to observe how students create their own social and political space within the first half of the seminar.&nbsp; It helps me to get to know the students better and understand how they (albeit as a group) engage sometimes challenging works.&nbsp; The downside, of course, is that the social space of the seminar is not necessarily "fair"; students with more confidence, more competitive instincts, or more sophisticated perspectives on the works tend to drown out students who are more reserved, less confident, or who struggled with the text.&nbsp; Some part of the class ends up frustrated each week and sometimes it is me when the seminar's discussion goes so strange direction or

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produces unpredictable or unproductive results.&nbsp; But other weeks, it's an education in itself as I get to sit back and watch engaged, passionate, and prepared minds struggle through the intricacies of the text.&nbsp; </p> <p>More Teaching Thursday:</p> <p><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-jenniferballs.html">Teaching Thursday: Jennifer Ball's Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis and J. Ball)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-3.html">Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some New Publications from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: some-new-public CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 10/01/2008 08:10:56 AM ----BODY: <p>Two new publications features data and analysis from the Pyla-Kousopetria Archaeological Project.&nbsp; R. Scott Moore, "A Decade Later: The Chronotype

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System Revisited," in W. R. Caraher, R. S. Moore, L. J. Hall, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/191758469">Archaeology and History in Roman, Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece</a></em>. (Aldershot 2008), 137-151 used PKAP data to reconsider some key features of the much-discussed Chronotype system of sampling and pottery identification. In brief, the chronotype system was developed over the course of several intensive survey projects in Greece and Cyprus.&nbsp; It stipulates that each fieldwalker collects one example of every unique type of artifact in their swath or path through the unit.&nbsp; When this pottery comes back to the lab, the ceramicist then batches the artifacts according to their unique chronotype which is a combination of fabric type and function.&nbsp; Thus, the chronotype system provides a comprehensive sample of all unique types of artifacts present in a unit as well as some indicator of their frequency across the surface of the unit (that is to say, if a unit produces several objects of the same chronotype, this should indicate that several walkers saw similar material in their swaths).</p> <p>While Moore's article includes a nice review of recent publications on the chronotype system, it also features some new analysis.&nbsp; Of particular significance, is Moore's discussion of whether fieldwalkers were able to distinguish individual chronotypes successfully in the field.&nbsp; Proponents of the chronotype systm have long argued that walkers could quickly be trained to distinguish similarity and different in the field and therefore were able to recognize unique types of artifacts in the field as is required by the chronotype system.&nbsp; The tendency for survey pottery to be relatively cleaner than excavated pottery makes this process easier for the fieldwalker.&nbsp; Moreover, most walkers were instructed to collect an artifact if they could not determine whether it was unique or not.&nbsp; Moore's analysis of PKAP data, however, showed that walkers did not seem regularly to collect duplicate chronotypes as is shown in the strong correlation between overall artifact densities and the number of chronotypes in the unit.&nbsp; Furthermore, he was able to argue that fieldwalkers were less selective in units with a larger number of sherds.&nbsp; That is to say that walkers collected a smaller percentage of the sherds from units in which they counted a large number of artifacts.&nbsp; Of course, this could simply reflect a lack of real diversity in the units from PylaKoutsopetria with the greatest number of sherds.&nbsp; This, however, might simply be a characteristic of the site itself, where the highest density units tend to have almost overwhelming Late Roman component. Moore finds further support for his observations when he compared the number of chronotypes present in several total collection circles to the number of chronotypes found in the same unit sampled with the chronotype system.&nbsp; In general, there was a much stronger correlation between the number of chronotypes present and the number of sherds in the total collection circles than in typical survey units. It may be that this shows a slight tendency for walkers to under-collect, but it may also simply reveal the difference between carefully scrutinizing the ground in a total collection circle versus walking across a unit using standard survey procedure.&nbsp; Moore's conclusions offer another significant body of quantitative data for the effectiveness and limitations of the chronotype sampling system.&nbsp; More significantly some of his conclusions differ from those reached by another chronotype project -- the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a> -- where there is good evidence that fieldwalkers over-collected certain chronotypes (an issue discussed by Pettegrew, <em>Hesperia </em>76 (2007), 743-784).&nbsp; Despite some variation in quality of data that the chronotype system produces, it is nevertheless produces a body of data that allows us to critique the sampling tendencies of fieldwalkers in a critical way.&nbsp; More importantly, he demonstrated that

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PKAP fieldwalkers were "remarkably consistent in their artifact collection" (147), which may not tell us much about the artifact types that they missed, but will at least allow us to draw confident conclusions regarding the distribution of artifact types across a unit and throughout the survey area more broadly.</p> <p>The work of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is also features in the recent double issue of<em> Near Eastern Archaeology</em> (W. R. Caraher, R. S. Moore, D. K. Pettegew "Surveying Late Antique Cyprus" <em>NEA </em>71 (2008), 82-89)&nbsp; This issue is devoted to American work in Cyprus and, in part, celebrates the 30th Anniversary of the <a href="http://www.caari.org/">Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute</a> (CAARI) in Nicosia as well as the important contributions of the late Danielle Parks.&nbsp; CAARI serves as an import source of support for our work on Cyprus so it was particularly gratifying to be represented among the impressive list of American field projects active on the island since the founding of the Institute.&nbsp; It is also exciting to note how many projects featured in this issue focus on "later" periods.&nbsp; Alongside the PKAP contribution, M. Rautman's reviewed upon his important work at the Late Roman village of Kalavassos-Kopetra and Cypriot countryside in Late Antiquity, Annemarie Weyl Carr reflects on <a href="http://www.doaks.org/">Dumbarton Oaks</a> efforts to preserve and document the Byzantine History of the island, and Bethany Walker highlights the role of CAARI in supporting work on Ottoman Cyprus.&nbsp; And, the entire issue is filled with spectacular technicolor photographs!&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Merrifield Memories STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-merrifield CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Elwyn Robinson's Autobiography CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 09/30/2008 07:52:51 AM ----BODY: <p>Elwyn B. Robinson carried out much of his life work in Merrifield Hall.&nbsp; In fact, if the Department of History has to move, one of the greatest disappointments will be the separation from the space consecrated by the work of our predecessors in the Department.</p> <p>Robinson's first memories are worth quoting:</p> <blockquote> <p>"While we were getting settled in our apartment, we were also exploring the campus of the university.&nbsp; The lawns, large trees, and shrubbery were attractive in the late summer, and with no classes there were few people about.&nbsp; We gradually came to identify the buildings. My office

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was in the basement of Merrifield Hall, the newest and largest building on the campus.&nbsp; It had been completed in about 1928 [actually it was completed in 1929 ed.] and housed the College of Science, Literature and Arts, headed by Dean William Bek, a professor of German.&nbsp; Just to the south of Merrifield Hall was Old Main, the first building of the university.&nbsp; In it were the administrative offices - the business office, the president, the registrar, the extension division, buildings and grounds, and the stenographic bureau."</p></blockquote> <p>The rooms Robinson and Libby used in Merrifield are more or less the same as we use today: "The American history classes then met in Rooms 217 and 215 of Merrifield Hall.&nbsp; Room 217 had 66 seats and Room 215 had 40.&nbsp; Libby's classes all met in room 215."</p> <p>Robinson experienced sometimes prolonged periods of ill health and the proximity (or as our administrators on campus here say "adjacency") of classes to the Department's offices benefited him greatly:</p> <blockquote> <p>"I missed teaching all of January, the rest of semester, but went back with the start of the second semester in February.&nbsp; I was still very weak, and since my office was in the basement and my classes on the second floor of Merrifield Hall, arrangements were made so that I did not go back to the basement after my first class.&nbsp; Dr. Libby had two rooms for his office, side by side at Merrifield #221 and #223, with a door connecting them... It had Dr. Libby's desk, a worktable, and a lot of bookcases.&nbsp; The other room, #223, had bookshelves to the ceiling and a worktable.&nbsp; Its door to the hallway was not used.&nbsp; From the books on the shelves, I believed it was a workroom connected with Dr. Libby's editorship of the <em>North Dakota Historical Quarterly.</em>&nbsp; That publication of the State Historical Society was suspended for lack of funds in the Thirties, so the room was not much used.&nbsp; A folding army cot was set up there, and I would lie down and rest between classes." </p></blockquote> <p>In fact, the adjacency of the offices of History and those of Sociology, particularly the office of John Gillette, reinforced the strong ties between those two department.&nbsp; Libby and Gillette served on a number of dissertation committees together and produced some of the most successful early Ph.D.s from the University.&nbsp; The most famous of these, George R. Davies, completed <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/6931980">the first Ph.D. from the University</a>, albeit in 1914 -- over a decade before Merrifield Hall was built.</p> <p align="center"><em>&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/RobinsonMerrifield.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="299" alt="RobinsonMerrifield" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/RobinsonMerrifield_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Stephen Robinson in the window of Merrifield Hall where the Department of History is located on the campus of UND.<br>Photo by Elwyn Robinson</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Moving from Merrifield Hall?

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: moving-from-mer CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 09/29/2008 08:27:37 AM ----BODY: <p>On Friday the Department of History received the alarming news that we might be moving from Merrifield Hall.&nbsp; The Department of History has been in Merrifield Hall since its opening in 1929 -- one year shy of 80 years -- so this move will certainly mark a significant break with the past.&nbsp; While it remains difficult to determine whether this plan will actually come to fruition and whether it will be a positive or a negative thing for the Department of History, it does provide a chance to reflect on the history of Merrifield Hall.</p> <p>Merrifield Hall was the last campus building constructed before the Great Depression.&nbsp; It was the last building completed in the great building boom at the University in the 1920s which included the Armory, the Stadium, and the Chemistry Building.&nbsp; These buildings shared the red-brick style of earlier campus buildings and made the College Gothic style, detected in Budge Hall (1899) and Woodworth Hall, more prominent.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/MerrifieldTower.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="259" alt="MerrifieldTower" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/MerrifieldTower_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Photo: UND University Relations</em></p> <p>The name of the building, Merrifield Hall, was transferred from Old Merrifield Hall.&nbsp; This building, constructed in the first years of the University, was the original "Old Main" before being renamed Merrifield Hall by President McVey in 1912 to honor former UND President and Classicist Webster Merrifield.&nbsp; By 1924, Old Merrifield Hall had begun to fall down owing to its poorly constructed foundations (a common occurrence in the soft soils of the Red River Valley).&nbsp; After a few years of lobbying, the legislature approved $225,000 in 1927.&nbsp; This amount, however, was&nbsp; not sufficient to construct the entire building according to the plans drawn up by renowned architect <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/library/Collections/og744.html">Joseph Bell DeRemer</a> and the estimated price of $350,000 provided by the contractors.&nbsp; They began to build, nevertheless, and the final $161,000 necessary for the building's completion was appropriated by the legislature in 1929.&nbsp; (L. Geiger, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1107281">University of the Northern Plains</a></em>. (Grand Forks 1958), 340).&nbsp; The completed building brought together the College Gothic style with the emerging art deco touches which would come to mark DeRemer's later work (e.g. the North Dakota State Capitol (1932) and the United Lutheran Church in Grand Forks). </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/MerrifieldStairs.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Merrifield Hall staircase" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/MerrifieldStairs_thumb.jpg" width="319" border="0"></a> <br><em>Photo:

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UND University Relations</em></p> <p>Geiger credits Vernon Squires, the Professor of English and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts from 1914-1930, as the driving force behind the construction of Merrifield Hall (346).&nbsp; By all accounts Squires was a difficult individual, but he most concur that he was "one of the University's strongest exponents of old-fashioned standards of public decorum and moral integrity and one of its most vigorous guardians of academic standards in the classroom for both faculty and students." (346).&nbsp; In some ways, Merrifield Hall became Squires "memorial on campus" and stood to remind future generations of traditional core values of the institution, alongside his invaluable efforts to narrate and preserve the early history of the University (V. P. Squires, “Early Days at the University,”&nbsp; <em>The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota </em>18.1 (1927), 4-15; --, “The University of North Dakota, 1885-1887,” <em>The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota</em> 18.2 (1928), 105-118; --, “President Sprague’s Administration, 1887-1891,” <em>The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota</em> 18.3 (1928), 201-230; --, “The First Quadrennium Under President Merrifield,” <em>The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota </em>18.4 (1928), 313-344;), . </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick--1 CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/26/2008 07:41:51 AM ----BODY: <p>A little grab bag of odds and ends.</p> <ul> <li>Almost a year ago I discussed the corpse that was found on UND's campus buried in a drainage ditch near the President's house.&nbsp; I discussed the possible explanations for the interred body (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/tr ansitional-sp.html">"Transitional Spaces" in the landscapes of the Mediterranean and North Dakota</a>).&nbsp; This past week, the <a href="http://media.www.dakotastudent.com/media/storage/paper970/news/2008/09/23/ News/Case-Closed.On.Human.Remains-3449530.shtml">Dakota Student reported</a> that the body was not an unfortunate vagrant but rather a medical cadaver.</li> <li><a href="http://www.janchipchase.com/">Future Perfect</a> is a cool (in the <a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/">William Gibson</a> meaning of the word) technology blog written by a researchers at Nokia Design.</li> <li>Some excellent photos of <a href="http://pioneerwomen.blogspot.com/">Pioneer

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Women</a> (which is an altogether different&nbsp; kind of cool).</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: The Changing Meaning of the Large Lecture STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thur-3 CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/25/2008 08:50:36 AM ----BODY: <p>For the first time since I've been at the University of North Dakota, I have decided to devote the majority of my classroom time in History 101: Western Civilization class to prepared lectures.&nbsp; The class is large 80-150 students, is in an auditorium style room with theater seating, and runs from 79:20 pm at night.&nbsp; The course does not have discussion sections or recitations, but I do have a teaching assistant for grading.&nbsp; The majority of students (albeit just) are freshmen.</p> <p>In the past I have used a variety of in-class discussions, group work, and in-class writing to break out of the "sage on the stage" mode of instruction.&nbsp; This year, however, I have transitioned the class to a simplified lecture format that emphasizes the delivery of content and demonstrations of the historical method.&nbsp; As for writing, group work, and opportunities for collective learning, I have moved that almost entirely to the class's Blackboard page where my TA and I run weekly discussion groups geared toward more careful reading of the primary sources and a class wiki designed to produce weekly class notes.</p> <p>Moving away from the unpredictable routine of in-class discussions and the chaotic logistics of group work has opened up time in class to talk in more detail about writing, to respond more fully to questions students might have about the course material.&nbsp; I make every effort to keep my lectures open to interruptions and digressions driven by student questions and comments.&nbsp; The class that I have this semester has shown a remarkable willingness to interrupt my presentations to ask for clarifications and (more promisingly) to ask that I expand on a particular point or idea.&nbsp; </p> <p>The willingness of students in a large class to interrupt my relatively well-crafted lectures was unexpected and very much welcomed.&nbsp; It made me think whether my previous efforts at perhaps overly contrived in-class discussions (, "Socratic" interludes, and sometimes painfully awkward "group work" actually served to mark off the lecture as a particular moment when the instructor is delivering information and therefore specifically not an opportunity for interactivity.&nbsp; With my more purely lecture style this semester, however, the boundaries between "lecture"

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and "discussion" time are not defined by neatly arranged shifts in my pedagogy, but rather student interest in a particular topic and their willingness to engage me (and my willingness to be interrupted!).&nbsp; This is to say, since we don't have much discussion qua discussion in class, they do not realize that lectures could represent the opposite of discussion. </p> <p>This all suggests that the traditional lecture, even in a large classroom, during a long, night class, may, in fact, be a thing of past. Students today simply do not have the experience of sitting passively listening to a "sage on the stage".&nbsp; They expect their classes to be interactive (and rightly so).&nbsp; Lectures only become passive experiences when we introduce moments of "active learning" to the classroom through such tactics as in-class discussions and group work.&nbsp; Unless otherwise informed, students expect all learning to be active.</p> <p>For more Teaching Thursdays see:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-2.html">Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaching-thursday-who-are-mystudents.html">Teaching Thursday: Who Are My Students?</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday: Another View on High Tech Teaching</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thur-1.html">Teaching Thursday: Transmedia Teaching</a><br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (K. Kourelis)<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dallas EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.146.27.171 URL: DATE: 09/26/2008 01:10:48 PM Hi Bill,! ! I found this post pretty interesting. I've dealt with the same problems you outline here (most have)--overly contrived "active" learning vs. the sage lecturer--with the same results. I'll be teaching a solo 111 next quarter, and I've been thinking of ways to format it that use discussion, lecture, group work and an online component. I have to admit, though, I hadn't considered the format here--or its effects. I think I may try it. Let me know how the online primary source discussion goes (I've done this a lot for Tim's classes--bit of a mixed bag) and how it all pans out as the semester goes along.

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Orin G. Libby and Elwyn Robinson STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: orin-g-libby-an CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Elwyn Robinson's Autobiography CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 09/24/2008 07:43:32 AM ----BODY: <p>I have been editing chapter six of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/elwyn_robi nsons_autobiography/index.html">Elwyn Robinon's autobiography</a>.&nbsp; This chapter describes his arrival in Grand Forks and first years at the University of North Dakota. Robinson works hard to bring to life many of the important figures in the history of the University and the Department of History.&nbsp; None of these figures is more important than <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og49.html">Orin G. Libby</a>, the first professional historian at the University. </p> <p>While the tendency has been to eulogized Libby as the unwavering and clear-eyes proponent of all things right, Robinson provides a more balanced picture on Libby's scholarship, teaching, and character.</p> <p>Robinson, of course, brought to fruiting Libby's work on the history of the state.&nbsp; Robinson traced some awareness of this back to his first days in Grand Forks:</p> <blockquote> <p>"On the first Sunday we were in Grand Forks, Dr. and Mrs. Libby had us for dinner at their home on South 6th Street... Soon after joining the faculty of the University of North Dakota in 1902 (at age 38), [Libby] revived the defunct State Historical Society and served as its secretary and editor until October 1944, shortly before retirement.&nbsp; His work with the Society was an invaluable contribution to the people of North Dakota and made him a widely known and respected person in the state.&nbsp; He was a person of very considerable force of character, a strong personality.&nbsp; That day Mrs. Libby told us that he was going to write a history of North Dakota."</p></blockquote> <p>He saw in Libby's sometimes stern demeanor an underlying kindness:</p> <blockquote> <p>"Dr. Libby, of course, played a very important role in my life during my early years at the university.&nbsp; During the school year I saw him almost daily except for the weekends. By the end of the 1938-39 school year, Dr. Libby was seventy-five and still energetic and vigorous, a strong and alert, white-haired individual.&nbsp; A courteous, kindly man, he tended to be formal and not given to any personal confidences.&nbsp; He addressed his close personal friends with their titles, thus the head of the sociology department whose office had been across the hall from Libby's for years was not "John" but "Dr. Gillette."&nbsp; I believe he called me "Mr." or "Dr." and Felix the other young member of his department the same way.&nbsp; He was not in the least given to gossip.&nbsp; And he was a stern, forbidding figure to his students.&nbsp; In later years, a returning alumnae would tell me that she had been afraid of him"</p></blockquote> <p>Robinson's respect for Libby and his standing in the community and university did not, however, extend to his teaching:</p> <blockquote> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Dr. Libby wanted Felix [Vondracek] and me to use a

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question-and-answer method in our survey sections.&nbsp; He believed that if the students had to recite, they would study the text more diligently.&nbsp; Perhaps he was right, but it made for dull, uninteresting classes. <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The text in the survey, Dr. Libby's choice, was a thick book by <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/37267705">John Spencer Basset, <em> A Short History of the United States</em></a>.&nbsp; Bassett, a North Carolinian who had a teaching career at Smith College, had been a distinguished scholar.&nbsp; He had died in 1928, age 61, after writing a fine biography of Andrew Jackson and a volume in the American Nation series and editing many important historical documents for publication.&nbsp; I believe his Short History, originally published about 1913 [actually in 1921 ed.], was for a time the leading college text for American survey course, but in 1935 was hopelessly out of date even though chapters had been added on the history of the years since its original publication....</p> <p>There was more wrong with the survey as it was taught at the University of North Dakota than an out-dated text and a recitation method more suited to high school.&nbsp; There was no reserve reading program to introduce the students to a variety of source and secondary materials.&nbsp; At [Western] Reserve [University] in the survey, students were assigned excerpts in <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/964273">American History As Told by Contemporaries</a> </em>edited by Albert Bushnell Hart, a star of the Harvard history faculty, in <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1475463">American History as Seen by British Travelers</a></em>, edited by the famous Allan Nevins, and in a large volume of secondary accounts of economic developments edited by Felix Flügel and Harold U. Faulkner, the well-known economic historian [<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/993105"><em>Readings in the economic and social history of the United States</em></a><em>&nbsp;</em>- ed.].&nbsp; These were great materials, but they were ignored at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; Moreover, no effort was being made to introduce the students to a rich body of historical biographies and the writings on particular subject.&nbsp; It was a sad state of affairs."</p></blockquote> <p> Such balanced and perspective views are typical of Robinson's autobiography (and many would say his scholarship).&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Butrint Baptistery Mosaics STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-butrint-bap CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity

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DATE: 09/23/2008 08:24:44 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ButrintCover.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="164" alt="ButrintCover" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ButrintCover_thumb.jpg" width="119" align="right" border="0"></a> This weekend I enjoyed John Mitchell's new book, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/185032796">The Butrint Baptistery Mosaics</a></em>, published this year by the <a href="http://www.butrint.org/index.php">Butrint Foundation</a>.&nbsp; The circular baptistery at Butrint is among the most important Early Christian buildings in the Balkans and a fairly well-preserved example of the art of mosaic decoration on the Adriatic coast.&nbsp; (A nice line drawing of the <a href="http://www.butrint.org/explore_9_0.php">mosaic is here</a>). <p>The book brings out several particularly interesting aspects of the baptistery mosaics and their architectural context.&nbsp; First, The two central scenes in the mosaic, peacocks surrounding a kantharos sprouting vines and two stages at a fountain, are clearly tied to Christian iconography of eternal life. Peacocks symbolized eternal life as their flesh was thought not to decompose and the stags evoked the first verse of the Psalm 41 (33-37) in which stags and water were combined lending the text baptismal significance.&nbsp; Aside from these two panels, however, there was very little on this floor that lent itself immediately to exegetical interpretation.&nbsp; <p>The rest of this round building's floor is covered with linked medallions filled with birds, sea creatures, and domestic and exotic animals.&nbsp; Mitchell reads these critters as representing "A New Creating and an Earthly Paradise" (41).&nbsp; This, indeed, seems plausible.&nbsp; It is worth noting, however, that some of the panels appear to represent rural pursuits like the hunt.&nbsp; Three consecutive roundels show a hunting dog, a stage, and a net.&nbsp; Throughout Classical Antiquity, the hunt was identified with aristocratic pursuits.&nbsp; Moreover, the juxtaposition of exotic animals like lions and leopards with more mundane animals like dogs and donkeys could link the life of the countryside where more typical domesticated animals were common with the life of the city with its exotic animals representing shows in the arena.&nbsp; Animal combat scenes and staged hunts, frequently involving exotic animals, would have been a familiar aspect of the more cosmopolitan centers of the empire into the 6th century.&nbsp; The <em>otium </em>of aristocratic life in the countryside is a well-developed theme in Late Antiquity and would have complemented allusions to animal games in the urban center likely sponsored by the elite.&nbsp; Thus, paradise, in part, is framed by themes tinged with aristocratic values the same way that the presiding Bishops homilies would have been enlivened with the aristocratic language of Classical <em>paideia</em>. <p>Slight differences in how we read the mosaic floors do little to challenge Mitchell's careful reading of the floors at Butrint.&nbsp; Of particular value are his suggestions that subtle variations in the floors -- for example, different motifs in the interlinked roundels -- marked out places of ritual importance in the baptistery.&nbsp; Checkerboard patterns in several of the outer most ring of roundels evoke the checkered pattern immediately surrounding the central font.&nbsp; Mitchell suggests that coincidence may have marked the area where the bishop stood during the baptismal ceremony.&nbsp; In effect the checked pattern marks linked the ritual power of the central font to the place where the

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bishop presided. <p>Finally, the baptistery at Burtint has intriguing connections with important buildings elsewhere in the Balkans. The mosaics floors were almost certainly the product of a workshop based in Nikopolis in Epirus (31).&nbsp; The presence of a fountain in the baptistery, roughly on axis with the font and the axial mosaic panels depicting the stags and the peacocks has parallels with the similar fountain from the baptistery at the Lechaion basilica in Corinth.&nbsp; The large, free-standing and centrally planned baptistery finds comparanda from several other sites in the Mediterranean.&nbsp; Relatively recent geophysical work in the eastern part of the city of Corinth has produced an image that looks very much like a large octagonal baptistery there (G. D. R. Sanders, “Archaeological Evidence for Early Christianity and the End of Hellenic Religion in Corinth,” in <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/56874310">Urban Religion in Roman Corinth: Interdisciplinary Approaches</a></em>. D. N. Schowalter and S. J. Friesen eds. (Cambridge 2005), 440). This would form another link between the site of Butrint and Corinth.&nbsp; Scholars have long recognized the connection between the prominent transept basilicas at Corinth and the city of Nikopolis (and elsewhere in the Epirus) (see: D. I. Pallas “Corinth et Nicopolis pendant le haut moyenâge,” FR 18 (1979), 93-142).&nbsp; The Butrint baptisteries through links to both Nikopolis and Corinth reinforce the place of the latter city in the Adriatic world of the West with its close ties to Italy and Rome.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koustopetria and Rome STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koustopetr CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 09/22/2008 07:51:58 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott Moore</a> is in Rome at the <a href="http://www.aiac.org/ing/congresso_2008/home.htm">XVIIth International Congress of Classical Archaeology</a>.&nbsp; The theme of the conference this year is "Meetings Between Two Culture in the Ancient Mediterranean".&nbsp; The <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> is giving paper entitled “Trade and Exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Model from Cyprus”<br>in a session on exchange in the Eastern

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Mediterranean.&nbsp; </p> <p>We'll make the entire paper available on our web site once Scott returns, but for now, I will provide a teaser.&nbsp; The most significant new analysis to appear in this paper is Scott's study of the Late Roman amphoras. <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/html/amphorasr.html">Amphoras</a> are transport vessels commonly used throughout antiquity to store and ship olive oil, wine, and some dry cargos.&nbsp; As the following excerpt will explain, the most common form from Pyla-Koutsopetria (and on Cyprus in general) are classified as Late Roman 1 based on their shape.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>"Amphorae from all periods make up approximately 15% of our total quantity of pottery from <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria</a> with Late Roman amphorae accounting for 62% of all ancient amphorae.&nbsp; LR1 Amphora was the largest category of Late Roman amphora, representing 30% of PKAP’s total amphorae from the Late Roman period and 80% of the identifiable amphora types. Late Roman 1 Amphora was, of course, one of the most widely traded amphorae of the 4th – 7th centuries AD in the eastern Mediterranean and is associated with olive oil and wine production. A number of production sites for this vessel type in the 6th and 7th centuries have been located along the southern coast of Cyprus (Zygi, Paphos and perhaps Amathous) and on the Cilician coast. We have identified 7 subclasses of LR1 Amphora Types based on fabric differences. Such variety in LR1 amphora fabric is not unusual on Cyprus—there were 4 main subclasses at <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/249640107">Kopetra</a>, for example—but does indicate variety in production sites and suggests that trade on the island was not merely a matter of access to materials, but was selective, in fact. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/LR_Amphora_Density.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="312" alt="LR_Amphora_Density" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/LR_Amphora_Density_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Density of Amphoras at Pyla-Koutsopetria</em></p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp; A closer examination of the LR1 amphorae shows that at Koutsopetria, 25% of the LR1 amphora have a fabric type that has been suggested was produced in Cilicia and Syria. The largest number of LR1 amphora at Koutsopetria (58%) have a fabric whose origin is believed to have been south central Cyprus. This LR1 fabric, often identified as Rautman LR1(1), is also the most frequently found LR1 sherd at <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/80747849">Panayia Ematousa</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/52303510">Maroni</a>.&nbsp; Despite the relatively high number of Cypriot produced LR1 amphora at our site, it is interesting to note that none of the brick red LRI amphora produced at <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/72871373">Kourion</a> were found at Koutsopetria. At Kopetra, however, this ratio is reversed with over 42% of the LR1 amphora being from Cilicia and Syria, and approximately 13% being from south central Cyprus.&nbsp; The greater proportion of locally produced LR1 fabrics at Maroni and Koutsopetria might reflect their function as ports for exporting locally produced agricultural produce rather than major hubs for importing wine and olive oil from abroad in foreign made amphoras. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/LR_Amphora_Density_w_LR1.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="312" alt="LR_Amphora_Density_w_LR1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/LR_Amphora_Density_w_LR1_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Distribution of LR1 Amphoras at Pyla-Koutsopetria</em></p>

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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Comparing PKAP’s Late Roman amphora collection with other nearby sites suggests both significant similarities and differences. In terms of similarities, LR1 Amphora sherds represent the dominant class of LR amphoras at the small villages of Maroni and Kopetra, located some 50 km west of Kition. At Maronia, LR1 accounted for 21% of Late Roman amphora by weight, while at Kopetra, LR1 Amphoras made up 2/3 of all amphora sherds.&nbsp; Both sites, however, produce much greater diversity of amphora types than Koutsopetria.&nbsp; Kopetra, for example, produced 13 identifiable amphora types compared to the 5 types identified at Koutsopetria.&nbsp; In fact, Koutsopetria shows greater similarity to the village of Panayia Ematousa, another site in the immediate hinterland of Kition -- some 6.5 km north and inland of the city.&nbsp; Panayia Ematousa, like Koutsopetria, lacks Late Roman 4 amphora, the most common imported amphora at both Maroni and Kopetra. The differences in proportions between Maroni and Kopetra, on the one hand, and Koutsopetria and Panayia Ematousa on the other, reinforces the hypothesis that Koutsopetria was more heavily engaged in exporting than importing.&nbsp; </p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It is clear that Koutsopetria imported LR amphora from only a few locations in the Eastern Mediterranean, primarily Cilicia and Syria and that its importation of amphora from other regions was limited or nonexistent. Only 1 example of a Palestinian bag amphora (Peacock and Williams Class 46) was found at PKAP, and while the numbers are low for other Cypriot sites (Maroni &lt;1% and Kopetra &lt;3%) this is surprising considering the close proximity of the Levantine coast to the southern Cypriot coast. A similar situation holds true for amphorae imported from Africa with only 1 North African amphora with being found at PKAP, and no Egyptian amphorae. Also uncommon are LR2 amphorae produced in the Aegean and Black Sea region. Low numbers were reported at all nearby sites: Kopetra (1.9%), Pyla-Koutsopetria, Panayia Ematousa, and Maroni &lt; 1%. These relatively low percentages of amphora imports, especially LR4 which is common at other sites, suggests that Koutsopetria is participating selectively in the trade along the southern Cypriot coast and that factors other than availability are determining Koutsopetria’s involvement."</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A short bit of Departmental History: Walter Ellis's Prince of Darkness STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-short-bit-of CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 09/19/2008 08:53:10 AM -----

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BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PrinceofDarkness.jpg"><img width="128" height="191" border="0" align="left" alt="PrinceofDarkness" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PrinceofDarkness_thumb.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;" /></a> About a week ago, the <em><a href="http://chronicle.com/review/">Chronicle Review</a> </em>pulled an article from their archives on Miles Davis: <a href="http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i36/36b01701.htm">K. Gabbard, &quot;Miles Passed, Miles Ahead,&quot; Chronicle Review (May 18, 2001)</a>.&nbsp; In this short retrospective on Miles Davis's career, my predecessor, Walter Ellis got mentioned.&nbsp; I never met Ellis whose death made my current position available, but he was both an ancient historian and a novelist.&nbsp; A number of his novels drew on jazz and blues music for inspiration.&nbsp; Davis's music formed the backdrop to his 1998 novel <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/41338342"><em>Prince of Darkness</em></a><em>.&nbsp; </em>Here's the quote from the Chronicle Review article:<em>&nbsp;</em></p> <blockquote> <p>&quot;Along with several biographies and reminiscences, there are now two books of critical essays about Davis, two books devoted entirely to the <em>Kind of Blue </em>LP, and two romans à clef, Herbert Simmons's <em>Man Walking on Eggshells</em> (1962) and Walter Ellis's <em>Prince of Darkness: A Jazz Fiction Inspired by the Music of Miles Davis </em>(X Press, 1998). A female character in Prince of Darkness pursues the kinds of questions so eloquently posed by Pearl Cleage:&nbsp; </p> <p>&quot;It was difficult to reconcile those sweet melodies with this man who seemed so bitter and angry. But then she realized that the beauty and the tenderness were part of him too. Perhaps the best part. What he could not say in words, he blew through his trumpet. And that was his real message to the world.&quot;</p></blockquote> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: The Modern Graduate Student STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thur-2 CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/18/2008 08:04:04 AM ----BODY:

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<p>The most demanding course in my schedule this semester is my seminar in graduate historiography.&nbsp; The class is big (20+), the students are sharp, and the class sessions can be rather intense.&nbsp; The course covers a grab bag of historiography, methodology, and intellectual history with a primary focus on the 19th and 20th centuries.&nbsp; There is a weekly set of readings and a few mid-length critical analysis papers (a comparative book review, a topical review, and a prospectus for a longer research project).&nbsp; </p> <p>As part of course, I encourage the students to critique the syllabus and my choice of readings and topics.&nbsp; After all, a historiography course should be historiographical in nature!&nbsp; This past week, we read <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/20628221">A. Momigliano's<em> Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography</em></a>, the first books of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Livy, and Tacitus, <em>Agricola</em>.&nbsp; At the end of class I asked the students whether I should continue to include a week dedicated to ancient historiography in the course.&nbsp; The class is predominantly students of U.S. History and the 19th and 20th centuries&nbsp; The overwhelming majority of students said "no" (17-4 may have been the final vote).&nbsp; The most commonly advanced argument was that these sources were no longer relevant for students of contemporary history; contemporary historians had "moved beyond" the work of the ancients.&nbsp; </p> <p>First it is clear that Momigliano's work had very little effect on them as a class.&nbsp; Momigliano argued that historical works from antiquity served as a touchstone for historical thinking well into the modern era. What is more interesting is how overwhelmingly modernist the class's perspective on the past was.&nbsp; Their brazen rejecting of the ancient historiographic tradition implied a historical method that not only showed progress through time, but had, in our modern day, somehow stabilized at a superior state that rendered its earlier manifestations irrelevant.&nbsp; This modernist reading produced a historical method that was, at its very core, ahistorical. </p> <p>This approach to the historical method and the development of this discipline is not radically out of step with some of the scholars that the seminar had read.&nbsp; In fact, we have thought a good bit about the the history of historiography. We have read several classics of the historiographic genre: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/392272">R.G. Collingwood</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/397273">E.H. Carr</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/28377649">Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob</a>, and have several more on the syllabus. Over the past few weeks, I have encouraged them to critique the relationship between a scholar's understanding of the development of the field of history (and historical thought) and their view of the historical method. It is remarkable, however, to consider how deeply modernism still holds ground in how even serious students understand the historical method. It must warm the hearts of the opponents of post-modernism and its ambiguity and openness to chaotic, innovative, and recursive views of the past.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

Caraher

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TITLE: Content and Context in Digital History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: content-and-con CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/17/2008 08:17:08 AM ----BODY: <p>This past few weeks have produced an impressive body of debate on the value and character of digital scholarship, digital media, and students in the digital age. The September volume of the <a href="http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.2/interchange.html">Jour nal of American History produced a wide-ranging forum entitled "The Promise of Digital History"</a>.&nbsp; In this exchange a number of leading lights in the field (movement?) of digital history discuss pertinent issues ranging from the definition of the field to the attitudes, qualifications, and resources necessary to do digital history.&nbsp; At the same time <a href="http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/">Mark Bauerlein and Siva Vaidhyanathan are engaged in a fairly dynamic</a> discussion focusing on some of the basic assumptions and expectations rooted in the increased use of technology both in the classroom and by particular groups in American society.</p> <p>The discussions in both venues are too wide ranging to allow a pithy summary, but one thing that stands out to me: as I have become more self-conscious about the role of digital media in my own research and teaching, I am increasingly aware of the challenges that come with teaching with and about digital technology. It goes without saying that we have moved beyond the time when using Powerpoint (or the "powerpointer") in the classroom qualifies one as technologically sophisticated teacher.&nbsp; Using more sophisticated "tools", however, requires a substantial shift in pedagogy and often considerable investment in both preparation and classroom time.&nbsp; I have spent a substantial amount of time this semester explaining, troubleshooting, and managing the relatively simple battery of collaborative tools (wikis, class blogs, or Twitter feeds that I use in my classrooms.&nbsp; Students here do not naturally "get" how these technologies (if they can, indeed, by called that) can make their experience richer, their time outside the classroom more dynamic, or even just the learning process easier.&nbsp; In most cases my students are simply not sufficiently tech savvy and confident to maximize fully the potential of digital media.&nbsp; They seems to confirm the "<a href="http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b00701.htm">Generational Myth</a>" that Siva Vaidhyanathan has recently explored. </p> <p><a href="http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i04/04b01001.htm">Bauerlein's argument that the web makes students hasty, inattentive, and superficial readers</a> reveals another aspect to the difficulty integrating digital media into the classroom.&nbsp; It may well be that for certain people the web promotes a particular kind of reading that is not conducive to the careful thought and attention to detail that most classes in the humanities cultivate.&nbsp; Careful reading online is a skill that has to be taught because in any society there are different kinds of reading. We'd all accept that reading for a graduate seminar in history is, in fact, a different intellectual and social process from reading for a local book club or a baseball box score.&nbsp; In some ways this is a kind of technical expertise that many not, in fact, be radically different from the

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skills that many contributors to the JAH Interchange argued was required to engage more sophisticated digital tools like relational databases, Geographic Information Systems, or even robust text queries.&nbsp; The lack of basic technology or technical skills makes it difficult (at best) for students to create the kind of immersive experience that so many scholars have held up as one goal for research across the digital humanities.&nbsp; And it is not simply students: faculty and administrators must often be educated to understand not simply the potential of digital tools in the classroom and research, but also what these tool require in terms of physical hardware, expertise, and intellectual flexibility to cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries.</p> <p>The point here is that digital history (or more broadly the digital humanities) as a blanket term carries with it a wide range of responsibilities. On the one hand, the need to generate digital content, particularly in history, is paramount.&nbsp; Making documents and data available is a time consuming and sometimes tedious task that nevertheless forms the foundation for the discovery and analysis that is central to the digital humanities.&nbsp; On the other hand, the digital humanities also require that we work to build a set of skills that range from an understanding of good web design to the more technical skills required to use the most sophisticated tools to their potential.&nbsp; It's more than simply tools, however.&nbsp; Digital history, in particular, requires us to reconsider at least some of our broad pedagogical goals to include digital literacy training that will, for example, encourage a student to read a web page more carefully and thoroughly for scholarly content.&nbsp; It also demands that we work with colleagues and administrators to re-educate them as to the requirements, expectations, and (of course) promise of digital history and the humanities.&nbsp; </p> <p>As I ponder the possibilities for a digital history lab and digital history course offering at <a href="http://www.und.edu/">my home institution</a>, the goals of any project would have to integrate both content creation as well as education designed to create a fertile and receptive context for digital media both on campus and beyond.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Small Town Archaeology... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-small-town CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 09/16/2008 07:56:29 AM ----BODY:

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<p>The archaeological landscape of Grand Forks, North Dakota continues to amaze me.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/sm all-town-arch.html">In August we noted</a> the substantial piles of earth and bricks excavated from the foundation of a new house being built on a lot abandoned since the <a href="http://www.draves.com/gf/">flood of 1997</a> (<a href="http://www.geo.mtu.edu/department/classes/ge404/mlbroder/">more here</a>).</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Bricks_1.jpg"><img width="304" height="404" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Bricks_thumb_1.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p>Last week this earth has been graded into the beginnings of a proper yard around the now half finished home.&nbsp; Grading the earth has distributed the bricks and other cultural material <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/te sting-the-hin.html">in a neat halo</a> around the house.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GradedEarth.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GradedEarth_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GradedEarth2.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GradedEarth2_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p>Next door another new foundation has been excavated.&nbsp; Doing our best imitation of <a href="http://www.infiltration.org/index.html">Infiltration</a> we checked out the big hole in the ground and snooped around the piles of dirt taken from the hole.&nbsp; The foundations of the earlier house are clearly visible in the scarp of the new foundation.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Strat2.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Strat2_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Foundation.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Foundation_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p>It is also possible to see in the scarp the dark earth presumably deposited by the flood and later dumped into the basement of the house in a neat lens.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Strat1.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Strat1_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p>In the excavated soil, we found a nice little assemblage of material including a threaded glass stopper, a square bottle, and plates with blue and white glaze.&nbsp; The square bottle, stopper and perhaps blue glazed plate date to earlier than the middle of the 20th century and so they should not be associated with the final phase of habitation at the site.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Assembalge4.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Assembalge4_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Assemblage2.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Assemblage2_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Assemblage3.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Assemblage3_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p>Scrapping away the top soil nearby exposed a more haunting reminder of the final days of the house: a plastic sand bag and sand perhaps positioned to protect the house from the rising waters of the Red River.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Sandbag.jpg"><img width="304" height="404" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Sandbag_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Sandbag2.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Sandbag2_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p>We've been fixing up our turn of the century home this last month.&nbsp; These repairs and modifications left us with a neat example of provisional discard.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ProvisionalDiscard_1.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ProvisionalDiscard_thumb_1.jpg" style="border: 0px none ;" /></a> </p> <p>The bricks will work well in our garden, but the old aluminum shutters will probably find their way into a modern midden.</p> <p>Grand Forks is a formation process laboratory! </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 69.148.139.231 URL: DATE: 09/16/2008 09:02:36 AM That is awesome. Your blog should help you explain what you were doing should your neighbors call the police.! !

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dimitri Nakassis EMAIL: IP: 128.100.106.20 URL: http://profile.typekey.com/1210514844s30570/ DATE: 09/16/2008 10:52:01 AM Great post! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David Pettegrew EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 98.111.96.240 URL: DATE: 10/06/2008 06:16:48 PM I love these posts on formation processes in Grand Forks. Keep them up! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Inauguration of a New President at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-inauguratio CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 09/15/2008 08:03:44 AM ----BODY: <p>I sat through the inauguration of our new university president on Friday.&nbsp; It was a worthwhile experience providing that it only happens 10 or 11 times every 125 years.&nbsp; It was heartening to hear Robert O. Kelley focus on the history of the University.&nbsp; He based the first part of his inaugural address on Louis Geiger's history of the University of North Dakota, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1107281">University of the Northern Plains</a></em>. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/lo uis-geiger-an.html">Geiger was a professor in the Department of History and wrote the book to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the school</a>.&nbsp; Kelley also gave a nod to the <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/Robinson/home.html">Elwyn Robinson Department of Special Collections</a> when he acknowledge it as the location of the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/so urces-for-the.html">university archives</a>.&nbsp; So, in a speech designed to give equal attention to almost every part of the University campus and administration, two mentions to former members of the history faculty will have to count as some kind of success.</p> <p>Kelley went on to discuss two former presidents of the University: <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og116.html">William M. Blackburn</a> and <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og141.html">Frank L. McVey</a>.&nbsp; Blackburn, who was the first president of UND and served from

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1884-1885, struggled to win support of the faculty or staff and was let go.&nbsp; His advocacy of a more practical approach to university education did not sit well with members of the first faculty, particularly Henry Montgomery and Webster Merrifield, both of whom was succeed him as presidents of UND, and they arranged for his ouster.&nbsp; It is worth noting that Blackburn wrote one of the first histories of the region with his <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27275547">Historical Sketch of North and South Dakota</a></em>.&nbsp; </p> <p>McVey was a different kind of leader.&nbsp; He was the first Ph.D. to hold the office of University of President at UND (a degree in economics from Yale) and he was committed to bringing the University out of the 19th and into the 20th century.&nbsp; This feature of McVey's term as president resonated well with Kelley's own goals for the University.&nbsp; This transition included a massive revision of the curriculum, new faculty hires, and the waning influence of the 19th century "Merrifield Faculty" so-called because they had been hired by McVey's predecessor Webster Merrifield. It is also worth noting that McVey wrote history as well.&nbsp; His book <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/5282643"><em>The government of Minnesota, its history and administration</em></a>, was published in 1901 and he later wrote an <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12195378">a study of the populist movement</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1852415">economic history of Great Britain</a> (based on his Yale dissertation), and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/962857">a history of education in Kentucky</a>. McVey, like Blackburn, did not finish his career at UND, but went on to serve as president of the University of Kentucky from 1917-1940.</p> <p>The short terms in office enjoyed by both Blackburn and McVey hold up the risks and benefits of being an innovator at any university.&nbsp; If you are successful, like McVey, better opportunities await.&nbsp; If you fail like Blackburn, the consequences can be dire.&nbsp; Kelley's awareness of his predecessors and the importance of history in understanding the character of an institution is a good sign.&nbsp; </p> <p>Hopefully the full text of Kelley's speech will be available online soon.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: BrianB EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.249 URL: DATE: 09/15/2008 10:45:44 AM I took some photos at the event. Here's the link:! ! http://picasaweb.google.com/elucidarian/PresidentKelleySInauguration# ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 134.129.133.177

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URL: http://profile.typekey.com/billcaraher/ DATE: 09/15/2008 10:51:06 AM Thanks for the photos! They are great. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hi CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 09/12/2008 09:43:49 AM ----BODY: <p>Just some little notes for the day:</p> <ul> <li>The University of North Dakota will inaugurate their 11th president today, Robert Kelley.&nbsp; Traditionally, an inaugurals speech sets the tone for the President's term in office.&nbsp; The famous inaugural address by <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/library/Collections/og41.html">Thomas Kane</a> (1918-1933), for example, set the University on a course for modernization, but <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and-th.html">enraged many of the more traditional faculty</a>.&nbsp; Subsequent presidential addresses have been less incendiary, but no less important for setting the course of the University.</li> <li>This fall the University has a bumper crop of events.&nbsp; Note in particular the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/jfkconference/">John F. Kennedy: History, Memory, Legacy Conference</a>. The Department of Geography will host the <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/gprm/">AAG Great Plains - Rocky Mountain Division/ ASPRS Upper Midwest Chapter 2008 Annual Meeting</a>.&nbsp; And I can't forget <a href="http://www.potatobowl.org/indexOne.htm">the 43rd Annual Potato Bowl</a>.</li> <li>I've plugged it before, but if you haven't visited the <a href="http://lateantiqueostia.wordpress.com/">Berlin-Kent Ostia Excavations</a> blog, you must.&nbsp; It's great.&nbsp; I particularly appreciated the juxtaposition posed between the excitement of the tourists to see their excavations and finds and the frustration of cost overruns and delayed equipment deliveries.&nbsp; Such is the lot of field archaeologists!</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

Caraher

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TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Reading the Digital Palimpsest for Traces of an Analog World STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thur-1 CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/11/2008 08:23:02 AM ----BODY: <p>I have to talk to my History 240: The Historians' Craft class about doing digital research today.&nbsp; As this is a required "sophomore" level class, it will not be particularly in-depth, but will, instead, focus on basic research tools -- from better use of the library's electronic catalogue to Google Scholar and Wikipedia.&nbsp; The funny thing is this, the seminar room where I will teach this material does not have a digital projector.&nbsp; So, I will&nbsp; have to set up our portable digital projector and my laptop.&nbsp; The screen, however, is offset to one side of the room, so there is not an easy way to set the projector up so that it actually faces the screen.&nbsp; On top of this, I'll control the computer so it limits the extent to which the class has the opportunity to interact in a hands-on way with the technology.&nbsp; To be absolutely fair, the room does have a computer and old tube-style, curved-screen television, but for the past 5 years the screen on the old-school has been so bad that we can not show a website on it so that the text is legible.&nbsp; It was set up basically to show movies or videos.</p> <p>The ironic thing is this.&nbsp; I teach my History 101: Western Civilization class in one of our wired classrooms.&nbsp; It's an auditorium style room with a fancy, high-powered digital projector.&nbsp; It is a slick set up with a document projector, video disk player, computer all controlled through a central panel.&nbsp; The problem is, to use the high powered digital projector, you need to have the screen down.&nbsp; When the screen is down, it covers the chalkboards!&nbsp; And I am one of those ridiculous people who use chalkboards in class as well as digital media.&nbsp; In fact, the other night, I was showing the students Athens on Google Maps during my lecture on Classical Greece, but could not entirely work out how to give them the spelling of Cleisthenes without moving the screen up and using the video-mute on the digital projector (which I could not figure out while giving the lecture).&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SeminarRoom.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="184" alt="SeminarRoom" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SeminarRoom_thumb.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a>On the one hand, these are rather petty complaints.&nbsp; We all confront some kinds of logistical challenges during teaching.&nbsp; On the other, these particular challenges reveal a bit about the archaeology of digital teaching at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; First, the seminar room: the back wall of the room is wood paneled and covered with the austere (but kindly) portraits of the Great Men in the Department's History (Clarence Perkins, Felix Vondracek, Philip Green, Louis Geiger, John Harnsberger (!), Robert Wilkins, and Elwyn Robinson).&nbsp; Scattered about on other walls are various trophies and plaques for long discontinued awards and canvass maps of England the US.&nbsp; The south

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wall of the room is given over to the green chalk board with its off-set screen for projection.&nbsp; Several long tables are arranged into a rectangle in the middle of the room so that the students and professor can sit facing one another.&nbsp; Floor to ceiling windows cover one wall of the room.&nbsp; The room feels worn and evokes the comforting weight of the seminar tradition.&nbsp; Designed for the scrutiny of documents and intense discussions, the digital age projects awkwardly onto the make-shift screen on the intrusive light of portable data projector.</p> <p>The place of digital teaching in the auditorium style room where I teach Western Civilization I is more striking.&nbsp; The screen literally covers the chalk boards (and these are the really nice "two storey" chalk boards that slide up and down on rails!).&nbsp; It has forced me (to a certain extent) to make a choice between the new and old media as the students look on from the comfortable, theater style seating.&nbsp; The 1970s orange wall coverings add a dramatic edge to the entire performance. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Testing the Hinterland STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: testing-the-hin CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 09/10/2008 08:48:48 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TestingHinterland.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="191" alt="TestingHinterland" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TestingHinterland_thumb.jpg" width="143" align="right" border="0"></a> I managed to work my way through <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/144525077">J. Bintliff, P. Howard, and A. Snodgrass, <em>Testing the Hinterland: the work of the Boeotia Survey (19891991) in the southern approaches to the city of Thespiai </em>(Cambridge 2007)</a> over the past couple weeks.&nbsp; A single read-through only began to scratch the surface of this remarkably rich and dense report on the work of the Boeotia survey around the city of Thespiai. It goes without saying that this book should have a significant impact on how scholars present and analyze data

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produced through intensive pedestrian survey in the future.</p> <p>Thespiai is the nearest ancient polis to the city of Thisvi where I am working (in fits and starts) with Timothy Gregory, Archie Dunn, and others to re-examine the data gathered over the course of the Ohio Boeotia Expedition.&nbsp; Gregory and his colleagues produced the data from the Thisvi survey about a decade earlier than the work by the Boeotia Survey around Thespiai and with a much smaller team.&nbsp; Consequently the data is of a lower resolution and reflects intensive survey practices that have now endured rather significant critiques. Nevertheless, the high quality data set available from Thespiai should help fill in some interpretive and evidentiary gaps from the Thisvi survey and hopefully enable us to make a more substantial contribution to the archaeology of Boeotia (and Greece) through our rehabilitation of this data.</p> <p>From Testing the Hinterland, five things struck me as particularly significant about this volume:</p> <p>1. <em>Thespiai as Large Site</em>.&nbsp; As I have noted several times previously in this blog (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/so me-thoughts-o.html">Some Thoughts on Future of Survey Archaeology in Greece (and the Eastern Mediterranean)</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/mo re-large-site.html">More Large Site Survey</a>), large sites of over 50 ha but generally smaller than 700 ha are poised to become the basic unit for interpreting the archaeological landscape in Greece.&nbsp; This first volume from the Boeotia survey analyzed a mere 500 ha.&nbsp; While the total work of the Boeotia Survey encompassed a much large territory, the resolution at which they surveyed so much of western Boeotia made it practically impossible to produce a single volume of interpretation that did the data justice.&nbsp; In fact, of the 200 sites that the Boeotia survey documented, they included merely 18 in this volume (171).&nbsp; It is doubtful that future intensive survey in Greece will even cover as much ground as the entire Boeotia survey project, but the sophisticated and largely independent analysis of a 500 ha in a single volume should be cause for optimism (and a model) for the next generation of small scale intensive survey project in Greece and elsewhere.&nbsp; The vast quantities of fine resolution data produced by the most recent generation of intensive surveys can be brought to bear on problems of historical significance (settlement patterns, rural land use, et c.) despite arguments for Mediterranean Myopia (see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/05/arambling-abou.html">A Rambling about Survey from a Regional Prespective</a>).</p> <p>2. <em>GIS and Survey</em>. This volume has achieved the full integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and intensive survey.&nbsp; Bintliff et al. brought together view-shed analysis, least cost path, and the integration of divergent data sets (soil types, different types of artifact density data, et c.) into a single analytical framework.&nbsp; While GIS has been a central aspect of Mediterranean survey for the last 25 years, it has often served as a convenient receptacle for data collected in the field, but not played as active a role in the analysis of that data.&nbsp; The Boeotia survey used both viewshed analysis and a relatively sophisticated least cost path model to understand the density values present in various parts of their survey area; in doing this, they successfully manage the limitations of sample size and the computational capacities available to them to produce plausible analyses.&nbsp; They were able to define the site of Leondari Southeast 7 (LSE7), for example, by recognizing that the artifact densities for this site far exceeded the off-site density values expected on their basis of their leastcost path model.&nbsp; LSE7 stood in a zone of "very high 'friction' where access is not easy" (233)</p> <p>3. <em>Density and Intensity</em>. The Boeotia

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survey is among the first surveys in the Eastern Mediterranean to recognize and attempt to control for differences in density produced by different methods of artifact collection. More intensive collection techniques produce greater quantities of artifacts.&nbsp; This leads them to attempt to compensate for the differences between densities produced my more intensive "on site" data collection and less intensive transect field walking or off-site data collection practices. In general they found that on-site data collection methods produced between 2.5 and 3.5 times as many artifacts as transect walking.&nbsp; Using these figures to adjust their comparison between transect density and the densities produced by on-site collection, they were able to determine whether specific chronological components of a site (say the Late Roman material) actually represented particular Late Roman activity at the site or simply part of the larger, but lower density carpet of Late Roman artifacts recorded by transect field walking.&nbsp; This is a valuable contribution to survey archaeology and can be compared to our recent experiments at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> and published in the 2007 <em>Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus</em>.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>4. <em>Questions of Procedure</em>.&nbsp; One striking thing about this volume was the lack of sustained discussion of field procedure.&nbsp; While I recognize that innumerable smaller publications have proceeded this volume and it is likely that their field procedures were discussed at length in these papers, it is nevertheless disconcerting that a project that committed so much sophisticated thought to the analysis of their artifacts densities would not tie this analysis directly and clearly to field procedures.&nbsp; This is particularly significant when we consider the sample of artifacts gathered from individual survey units that forms the basis for their chronological and functional analysis.&nbsp; It seems to me that the day where we can simple claim to have collected "diagnostic artifacts" from a unit is over.&nbsp; The Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project employed chronotype sampling which ensured that we collected at least one example of each type of artifact present in the unit.&nbsp; As we (me, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, Dimitri Nakassis, <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott Moore</a>) have argued, this does distort our sample, but in relatively predictable ways. Other projects have defaulted to areas of "total collection" to act as controls against less systematic grab samples of diagnostic sherds from survey units.&nbsp; </p> <p>5. <em>Manuring the Countryside</em>.&nbsp; This volume represents the most sophisticated and sustained argument for the manuring hypothesis.&nbsp; It contends that Boeotian cities transported huge quantities of manure from the urban center to the countryside and with this manure came pottery and other forms of domestic waste that formed a visible halo of artifacts around both the urban center and more substantial sites in the countryside.&nbsp; I must admit that the simplicity of this argument is appealing (although I do have particular loyalty to David Pettegrew's challenge to it!).&nbsp; Unfortunately by separating the analysis of the urban fabric from the countryside as they have in this volume, it is difficult to understand the relationship between the material remaining in the urban center of Thespaia and the material found in the associated halo produced by manuring.&nbsp; The manuring hypothesis will be more persuasive when they can show that the material from the halo and the city center is fundamentally similar.&nbsp; At PKAP, for example, we discovered that the highest density areas of the site during the Late Roman are surrounded by lower density concentration of Late Roman pottery.&nbsp; To test for the manuring hypothesis we compared the types of material present in the highest density zone to the material present in the

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lower density halo.&nbsp; The material in the halo was different.&nbsp; For example, we found very little Late Roman African Red Slip in the halo (but plenty of other contemporary, imported and local fine wares) while it is remarkably common in the highest density units.&nbsp; Unless we assume that something about ARS led to different discard behavior, it is hard to understand how ARS did not appear in the halo if it was present at the center of the site.&nbsp; While this one type of artifact alone does not completely eliminate the manuring hypothesis as a possible explanation for the low density halo around our highest density units, it nevertheless produces a kind of challenge made possible by integrating the analysis of on-site data with that gathered from off-site distributions.</p> <p>There is much more to this book than these 5 observations: the detailed documentation and interpretation of individual sites, the clever ternary analysis of site function, and the effort to deal with the post-antique survey data (albeit in a cursory way) among many other fine points.&nbsp; Needless to say, this work will emerge as a point of departure for many subsequent studies of intensive survey in the Greek countryside.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Late Antiquity in Ottawa STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: late-antiquity CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 09/09/2008 07:46:58 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> dropped me a line about <a href="http://lateantiqueworld.weebly.com/index.html">Late Antique World Workshop</a> at the University of Ottawa from September 20-21, 2008.&nbsp; A number of the sessions will focus on various chapters from Stephen Mitchell's recent textbook <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/62732669"><em>A History of the Later Roman Empire</em></a> (2007).&nbsp; This is a really clever idea for a conference and ensures that participants have a common basis for conversation.&nbsp; While I have not read Mitchell's textbook, the very need for a formal textbook designed, presumably, for a course in Late Antiquity (beyond Brown's classic survey <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/138222">The World of Late Antiquity</a></em> or Averil Cameron's more "monographic" offering, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/26851176">The Mediterranean world in late antiquity, AD 395-600</a></em>) surely reflects the period's recent boom in popularity as well as a recent wave of synthetic studies in the

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field.&nbsp; </p> <p>The conference is put on by the <a href="http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/csla/en/">Ottawa Network for the Study of Late Antiquity</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/csla/en/members.html">The list of contributors to this network</a> and their research projects reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the study of Late Antiquity at Ottawa. The impulse toward interdisciplinary collaboration (the emergence of centers/centres as opposed to departments and schools) and at the same time a willingness to regard (accessible) synthetic studies as significant contributions to the discipline reflects the deep engagement of Late Antique studies in the language and vision of North American universities.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Corinthian Countryside: Some More Contemporary Thoughts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-corinthia-1 CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 09/08/2008 08:16:04 AM ----BODY: <p>One advantage of walking through the Greek countryside is that it forces me to confront a world for which my suburban upbringing and relatively formal education did not prepare me.&nbsp; The countryside of the southeastern Corinthia remains largely agricultural and has preserved evidence for centuries of cultivation as well as the abrupt modernization of the Greek state in the middle years of the 20th century.&nbsp; The traces of earlier practices have left their marks on almost every terraced hillside, abandoned seasonal shelter, and isolated valley.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-2.html">Our hike from Lychnari Bay to Frangolimano</a> revealed so many of the common features of the Corinthian countryside, that it seems worthwhile to record some of them here.&nbsp; First, the wall followed the course of a built path.&nbsp; Cut into the steep, inland side of the coastal ridge, the path created an easy decent from the Vayia river valley to the bay at Frangolimano.&nbsp; The path itself was less than 2 meters wide and marked by a slightly raised lip on its down slope side.</p> <p>As it wove its way across the pine covered slopes, evidence for its continued use appear in the numerous trees with long scars in their bark for resin collecting.&nbsp; Many of the trees along the path had relatively recent aluminum resin collectors attached showing that the path, while overgrown in spots, still served a function.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ResinCollectors.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ResinCollectors" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ResinCollectors_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>A cluster of old oil drums stood near the intersection of the path and one of the few roads in the area.&nbsp; These drums served as collection points for the resin collectors.&nbsp; Further along the path and out of the range of wheeled vehicles stood the predecessor to these drums.&nbsp; A roughly made mortar and stone basin build against an exposed section of bedrock served as a temporary collection point for resin collection.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ResinBasin.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ResinBasin" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ResinBasin_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The path opened onto a high valley just to the south of the Vayia River.&nbsp; While today a bulldozed dirt road provides access to the valley, the remains in the valley show that it was cultivated before the arrival of the bulldozer.&nbsp; Today olive trees cover the carefully terraces slopes, but it seems probable that these terraces originally supported cereals as olive trees do not necessarily need such elaborately constructed terraces to prosper.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Terraces.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Terraces" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Terraces_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>At least two seasonal long-houses of the kind documented throughout Greece and the Balkans are in advanced states of collapse in the valley.&nbsp; They were built of stone with mud mortar.&nbsp; Elsewhere in the Corinthia we have studied the historical and archaeological context for these houses.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/CollapsingKalyvi.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="CollapsingKalyvi" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/CollapsingKalyvi_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/CollapsingKalyvi2.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="CollapsingKalyvi2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/CollapsingKalyvi2_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>They probably served as seasonal habitation during the cultivation of the valley -particularly during the harvest and threshing of grain.&nbsp; We did not observe any of the large threshing floors (aloni) in the valley, but they almost certainly existed as in the Corinthia most threshing seemed to take place in the fields.&nbsp; While the houses are collapsing today, it is clear that at some point concrete and cinder blocks were brought to the valley to reinforce the houses or perhaps even replace them.&nbsp; In the process, the farmer removed some of the tiles from the collapsing field house and stacked them neatly in a textbook example of provisional discard.&nbsp; Something seems to have interrupted the process of building a new field house.&nbsp; The bags of concrete brought to the valley had gotten wet and dried into bag-shaped concrete bricks.</p> <p align="center"><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ProvisionalDiscard.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ProvisionalDiscard" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ProvisionalDiscard_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The result is a countryside that is still in use, but in some ways abandoned.&nbsp; The previous patterns of life characterized by seasonal settlements and narrow paths have given way to bulldozed roads and cement farm sheds.&nbsp; The older ways of life, however, continue to leave their mark as any walk through the Corinthian countryside will show.</p> <p>More Corinthian Countryside:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Lychnari Tower</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-2.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Passes of the Eastern Corinthia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-3.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Classical Vayia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/09/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: History and Archaeology</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 09/21/2008 12:34:48 PM This is very cool. I appreciate that you as a classical archaeologist still make a point to thoughtfully consider more recent history, be it in the Corinthia or in North Dakota...My new professional requirements have forced me to focus on more modern patterns of land use and change in California, which is pretty fascinating and a vital part of local history. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria in the Press and Other Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetr CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/05/2008 09:05:28 AM ----BODY: <p>A bunch of odds and ends at the end of the week:</p> <ul> <li>The <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project</a> got some <a href="http://www.cyprusweekly.com.cy/default.aspx?articleID=7857&amp;heading=Fea tures">press this past week in Cyprus Weekly</a>.&nbsp; While the article doesn't get everything right, the University of North Dakota got some press from it: <ul> <p>"The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, as it is called, is jointly under the direction of Professor William Caraher, University of North Dakota, Professor R. Scott Moore, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Professor David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College, and Dr Maria Hadjicosti. Experts from Europe also assisted in the excavations. <p>Maria Hadjicosti said that each participant contributed their own expertise and specialty in evaluating the archaeological excavations and survey." </p></ul> <li>Edward L. Ayers, the new President at my alma mater, the <a href="http://www.richmond.edu/">University of Richmond</a>, continues to contribute to the field of digital history.&nbsp; His <a href="http://www.historyengine.org/">History Engine</a> has gone live and public and is <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/04/engine">getting some good press</a>.&nbsp; This is exactly the kind of collaborative enterprise possible in a Web 2.0 environment and the kind project to which Digital History at the University of North Dakota could someday contribute. <li>Luke Lavan's and Axel Gering's <a href="http://lateantiqueostia.wordpress.com/">Berlin-Kent Ostia Excavations Blog</a> is now being updated.&nbsp; It will be fascinating to watch their project work to uncover the Late Antique city of Ostia.&nbsp; Archaeological Project blogs is such a booming field that it might warrant more extensive treatment... <li>Finally, a little <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/181822">advertisement for myself</a>.&nbsp; Brandon Olson, over at <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/">Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean</a>, deserves a good bit of credit for helping get this book done.&nbsp; He performed the preliminary edits on nearly all the contributions.&nbsp; Scott Moore, at <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings</a>, was a co-editor.&nbsp; Kostis Kourelis, at <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a>, was a contributor as was Sam Fee at <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/">Arranged Delirium</a>.&nbsp; It's the blogosphere in print form!</li></ul> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-History-Medieval-PostMedievalGreece/dp/0754664422/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1220623162&amp;sr=81"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="240" alt="Caraher_HiRes" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Caraher_HiRes.jpg" width="500" border="0"></a></p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday: Another View on High-Tech Teaching STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursd CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 09/04/2008 08:30:21 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Bauerlein.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="187" alt="Bauerlein" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Bauerlein_thumb.jpg" width="128" align="right" border="0"></a> I just finished Mark Bauerlein's new book: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/196305501">The Dumbest Generation (New York 2008</a>).&nbsp; I won't review it here, but it offered an interesting (and perhaps valuable) perspective on the causes and side effects of the growing use of technology in the university classroom.</p> <p>Bauerlein basically argues that students deep involvement in the New Media -- what he calls Screen Time -derives in part from the Youth Movement in the 1960s and its rejection of both adult authority and the intellectual traditions of the previous generations.&nbsp; The ability of the New Media Universe to cater to the individual tastes of the user has merged with the intensely self-centered perspective of most adolescents to shield them from adult culture and to validate their rejection of traditional values.&nbsp; In the end, this has produced a generation of Americans who lack the skills necessary to be successful in American society largely because their immersion in the world of the internet has allowed them to ignore their teachers, adults, and mentors. To support this, Bauerlein marshals an impressive array of studies that show that despite the advantages provided by access to the "information superhighway" this Dumbest Generation performs no better and in many cases worse than their predecessors. He singles out reading levels for particular scrutiny and agues that the myriad of distractions - from social networking sites, to blogs, to YouTube - detracts from the time that an earlier generation of students dedicated to reading books.&nbsp; The result is that students' reading levels (and writing levels) have steadily declined as they become more and more immersed in a world of their own making.</p> <p>Critics counter, of course, that traditional literacy is being replaced with a kind of technological literacy:

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the ability to navigate the information rich spaces on the internet is a skill that has a much greater relevance in a world where books represent obsolete technology.&nbsp; Bauerlein frets over this notion, of course, and considers it particularly detrimental in that it empowers students to dig themselves more deeply into their protected world of adolescent delights, rather than the more challenging environment of produced by mentors, teachers, and adults and the accrued weight of traditional knowledge.</p> <p>Perhaps more troubling is the notion that despite students' rejection of traditional modes of learning (e.g. book reading, standard lecture formats), they have not necessarily developed the kinds of skills necessarily to successfully gather, collate, and process the information that they encounter on the internet.&nbsp; Sam Fee, at <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/">Arranged Delirium</a> posted a link to a well-known 2007 article on InsideHigherEd.com entitled: "<a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/15/infolit">Are College Students Techno Idiots?</a>"&nbsp; This article suggests that most university students use the internet in a superficial way.&nbsp; Following a set of well trod paths, they rarely venture into unknown territories in search of challenges, but frequent a relatively limited set of places and, in turn, practice and develop a rather limited set of skills.&nbsp; </p> <p>For yet another perspective on this, we can consider the debate over whether faculty should use <a href="http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3251&amp;utm_source=wc&amp;u tm_medium=en">social networking sites</a> to improve their ability to deliver content and capture students attention.&nbsp; Some students, of course, are appalled that faculty are willing (and able!) to invade their private domains.&nbsp; Some faculty on the other hand, see this as an important way to challenge and transform the intellectually safe (and sterile in Bauerlein's view) environment of student space on the web.</p> <p>The various critiques of the value of integrating more "New Media" or Web 2.0 content into university level classes have come back to me this week as I have begun to see the initial results from my experiments with Twitter and a class Wiki.&nbsp; On the one hand, I've been impressed with the ability of some students to work together to produce high-quality content, particularly on the class Wiki for a 100 (intro) level history course.&nbsp; On the other hand, the gap between students who are comfortable on the web and those who find basic navigation a challenge is remarkable.&nbsp; More importantly, perhaps, is whether these applications improve the quality of classroom time and encourage the students to become more deeply invested in the course material.&nbsp; It is still too early to tell on either of these points, but the tools and concepts that make us the Web 2.0 world are not essentially incompatible with increased student involvement in intellectual life.&nbsp; The responsibility may fall to faculty in their roles as leaders and mentors to transform student expectations of the internet experience and shepherd them gently toward the places where real learning -with books, ideas, and intellectual challenges - takes place.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Provisional Processed Pottery from Pyla-Koutsopetria STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: provisional-pro CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 09/03/2008 08:19:38 AM ----BODY: <p>While Scott Moore, <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project's</a> ceramicist and co-director, handles most of the pottery processing in the field, when it gets back to the U.S., I generally work with the processed pottery in its digital form.&nbsp; This past few weeks we have generated a provisional database containing almost all the pottery collected from 5 years of intensive survey at Pyla-Koustopetria.&nbsp; This same database will eventually house the pottery from the excavations last year and from earlier excavations conducted at the site in the 1990s.&nbsp; With our ceramic data in digital form we are able to conduct queries, transfer it to our GIS (Geographic Information Systems) interface, and even produce the basic structure for our publishable catalogue.</p> <p>With the inclusion of material collected during the 2007 and 2008 survey season we have produced a sufficiently robust dataset to conduct some basic quantitative analysis.&nbsp; We have over 18,000 artifacts (not a particularly large number from an intensive survey) collected over the course of our standard intensive survey (with another couple thousand generated through various experimental survey procedures).&nbsp; Of this group about 40% date to the Roman or Late Roman period.&nbsp; Particularly prevalent in this assemblage of Late Roman material are finewares which account for over 8% of all Late Roman pottery.&nbsp; Fine wares are useful because they can generally by associated with a particular production center in the Mediterranean and are distinctive enough to have relatively secure chronologies (thanks in large part to the tireless work of John Hayes whose monumental Late Roman Pottery remains the point of departure for almost any analysis of this class of material).&nbsp; </p> <p>One of the advantages of our significant assemblage of Late Roman finewares is that we can compare it sites elsewhere on this island.&nbsp; The locally produced Cypriot Red Slip (CRS) remains the most common type of Late Roman fineware at the site accounting for about 45% of the material on the site and another type of Late Roman fine ware Phocaean Red Slip (PHW) probably produced in Asia Minor, accounted for close to 30% of the assemblage. The most notable feature of the fine ware at our site, however, is that African Red Slip (ARS), a type of Roman fineware imported from North Africa, accounted for close to 20% of the assemblage.&nbsp; (The other common Late Roman fine ware, Egyptian Red Slip barely appeared at all.&nbsp; John Hayes has recently suggested that this type of pottery may represent the final phase in Late Roman pottery imports to the island where Egyptian Red Slips imported in the mid-7th century replaced African Red Slip which had become increasingly difficult to procure do to disruptions in Mediterranean trade at the "end of antiquity". (see Hayes "Pottery," in Megaw, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/72871373"><em>Kourion: Excavations in the Episcopal Precinct</em></a>, 436).&nbsp; It may be, if this is indeed the case,

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that our site simply went out of use prior to the period when Egyptian Red Slips were most prevalent).&nbsp; </p> <p>The recent publication of the finds from the site of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/220316165">Panayia Ematousa</a> provide an interesting point of comparison.&nbsp; Panayia-Ematousa is, like Pyla-Koutsopetria, another "ex-urban" site situated 6.5 kilometers north of Kition and probably less then 15 km from Pyla-Koutsopetria.&nbsp; Unlike our site, Panayia-Ematousa produced very little African Red Slip (only 2% of the Roman Red Slips).&nbsp; In contrast the most common pottery was Phocaean Ware, followed by Cypriot Red Slip.&nbsp; The two sites were basically contemporary and seemingly reached their Late Roman peaks in 6th century.&nbsp; The forms present at both sites (that is the shape of the vessels of the various types) are basically similar.&nbsp; Panayia-Ematousa likewise produced little Egyptian Red Slip.</p> <p>The presence of a significant quantity of Phocaean Ware at Panayia-Ematousa argues against the idea that this site was less connected to Mediterranean trade -- after all, Phocaean Ware was imported to the island as well.&nbsp; In fact, the fine ware from Panayia-Ematousa seems to suggest that, at least for fine table wares, the residents of the site were less interested in the locally produced Cypriot Red Slip which is by far the most common type of Late Roman fine ware on the island. In fact, at other rural and ex-urban sites on the island, Cypriot Red Slip is typically the most common type of Late Roman Pottery.</p> <p>At present the Late Roman pottery from Kition remains unpublished (although we have heard that its publication is imminent), so it is impossible to compare the material from Panayia-Ematousa and Pyla-Koutsopetria to the closest urban center.&nbsp; The differences between the two assemblages, at least based on our provisional analysis of our assemblage at PylaKoutsopetria, is striking.&nbsp; It would appear that these two nearby and nearly contemporary sites had very different relationships with the pottery available in the local market.&nbsp; While matters such as function, wealth, and site size (i.e. size of market) might well influence the kinds of material present, the prevalence of ARS at Pyla-Koutsopetria nevertheless appears to be one of its most striking characteristics.&nbsp; In fact, we might even suggest that the difference in pottery used by residents of Panayia-Ematousa and PylaKoutsopetria reflected differences in how they chose to identify themselves.&nbsp; This is all the more significant considering that Roman fine wares were the kind of elite, imported goods that likely contributed to opportunities for elite display like dining.</p> <p>Scott Moore is working on the material from <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/206991357">a survey conducted around Athienou</a> some 20 km inland from Kition and our site and this material should cast even more light on the patterns of pottery in southeastern Cyprus during Late Antiquity.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Elwyn Robinson and the First Semester STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: elwyn-robinson CATEGORY: Elwyn Robinson's Autobiography CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 09/02/2008 07:47:46 AM ----BODY: <p>As readers of this blog know, I am working on editing Elwyn Robinson's Autobiography, <em>A Professor's Story</em>.&nbsp; So far, I've managed to read and annotate three chapters.&nbsp; These chapters cover Robinson's childhood on his grandparents farm in Ohio, his school age years in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and his college years at <a href="http://www.oberlin.edu/">Oberlin College</a> (1924-1928).&nbsp; Robinson's descriptions of his surroundings are particularly vivid.&nbsp; He has a sure knack for describing equipment, buildings, and places.&nbsp; He then fills these spaces with smartly drawn characters.&nbsp; </p> <p>His sense of place and character provides the backdrop for his own reminiscences.&nbsp; Despite his eventual achievements in the scholarly realm (if you have not read his magisterial <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/190890"><em>History of North Dakota</em></a>, you should), he is nowhere above revealing his own struggles and failings in the academic realm.&nbsp; His transition from small town Ohio education to the demanding (if friendly) expectations at Oberlin was particularly difficult.&nbsp; As freshmen at the <a href="http://www.und.ed">University of North Dakota</a>, where Robinson taught for so many years, work to make this same transition, it is perhaps useful to excerpt a section from his autobiography:</p> <blockquote> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I might have done better scholastically if I had not chosen English as a major.&nbsp; None of the "A's" I made were in my major.&nbsp; I think (I have no transcript to refer to though there is one somewhere <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/library/Collections/Robinson/og198.html">in my papers in the manuscript division of the Chester Fritz Library</a>) that I may have made an "A" in trigonometry, possibly one in one semester in zoology, and perhaps one in Latin American history.&nbsp; On examinations I believe that often I knew all or nearly all the answers, but I could not express them with the sharpness and grasp of their meaning and relevance that the best of the students could.&nbsp; So generally when I tried the hardest I ended up with a B+, not an A.&nbsp; And that was right.&nbsp; In such company I was not at the top.&nbsp; And I might very well have fared better in one of the sciences, mathematics, or history.&nbsp; But I came to Oberlin enamored with literature.&nbsp; And English was the most popular major at Oberlin.&nbsp; The department had a number of attractive professors.&nbsp; And so I selected it as a major without any hesitation or questioning.<br><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I had some difficulty scholastically at the beginning of my freshman year.&nbsp; I was having difficulty, apparently, in freshman composition, so Brit Tenney [a friend of Robinson's from Chagrin Falls] helped me by reading over my compositions and making corrections before I recopied them and turned them in.&nbsp; I don't recall any trouble in French, English literature, or trigonometry, but on the first test in Ancient History (Greece) I received a"D" even though I had studied conscientiously.&nbsp; I was badly shaken by the "D" and went to talk to the instructor, Professor Alexander, a former Rhodes scholar.&nbsp; The problem was that I had not learned how to study in high school.&nbsp; Professor Alexander gave me suggestions on how to prepare the history material, and I rapidly

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improved, earning a "B" for the semester in History of Greece. [N.B. Leigh Alexander was a Princeton-trained Classicist and head of the department for years at Oberlin.&nbsp; His <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64367528">1911 dissertation</a> was on fragments of Nicholas of Damascus on the Lydian Kings and was written under William K. Prentice.]&nbsp; </p></blockquote> <p>Good lessons for anyone struggling in their first semester: have someone read your work before you turn it in, talk to your professors, and accept that studying in college is different from studying in high school.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Corinthian Countryside: History and Archaeology at Classical Vayia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-corinthian CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 09/01/2008 08:36:47 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the confounding aspects of the Classical-Hellenistic Corinthia is the dearth of ancient sources that make any clear reference to the countryside.&nbsp; Most of what we can say about the rural Corinthia in Classical antiquity is either drawn exclusively from archaeological sources or teased out of obscure and difficult references in the literary tradition.&nbsp; For some rural fortifications, such as the rubble walls on Oneion, scholars have been able to offer a series of possible events leading to their construction.&nbsp; Stroud (Hesperia 40 (1971), 139-145) argued that these fortifications on Oneion may have been built by Spartans (or their allies) in an effort to block the passage of the Theban general Epaminondas into the Peloponnesus in the early 4th century.&nbsp; Or they may represent the camp of Athenian mercenaries who the Corinthians invited in to fortify particularly vulnerable stretches of their territory.&nbsp; In general, scholars have seen fortifications on the Isthmus proper as being the work of foreign troops who had an interest in preventing the main route into the Peloponnesus from being occupied or easily passed.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TowardtheIsthmus.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="TowardtheIsthmus" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TowardtheIsthmus_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br><em>Lychnari Bay and the View Toward the Isthmus</em></p> <p>The Corinthia, however, is more than the Isthmus as our rural installations around Lychnari bay show.&nbsp; Moreover, the Corinthians would have had significant motivations to protect

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their own coastline and coastal territory.&nbsp; During the Peloponnesian war, the Athenian raided the unfortified coastal community of Solygeia in the rolling hills immediately south of Mt. Oneion (Thuc. 4. 42-45).&nbsp; Later in Book 8 (10.2-11.2) Thucydides tells how another Athenian fleet landed troops at a the last Saronic harbor before&nbsp; the Epidauria (most recently and plauisibly identified by Dixon (and others) as Korphos). The account (and apparently the battle) between the Athenian fleet and the Peloponnesian forces is a bit confused, but it seems that the Athenian troops on land withdrew owing, perhaps, to Corinthian forces present "in the neighborhood."&nbsp; </p> <p>The events of the 5th century would have undoubtedly reinforced the vulnerability of the Corinthian coastline to attacks.&nbsp; The rubble fort at Vayia may have been a small camp for a detachment of troops positioned to defend the bay at Lychnari.&nbsp; To speculate: these troops might have been the Athenian mercenaries who were defending the Corinthian countryside in the 4th century (Xen. <em>Hell</em>. 7.4.4).&nbsp; </p> <p>While such speculating is fun -- it puts a story to otherwise silent stones -- it is hardly conclusive and in no way makes these humble fortification more important.&nbsp; The key significance of the fortification in the neighborhood of Lychnari bay is to demonstrate that the Corinthian countryside was indeed fortified during the Classical to Hellenistic period and that Lychnari bay was worthy of particular attention as manifest in towers and a rubble "fortified camp".&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>More Corinthian Countryside:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Lychnari Tower</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-2.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Passes of the Eastern Corinthia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-3.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Classical Vayia</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick--1

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CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/29/2008 08:30:32 AM ----BODY: <p>Some fun links this week:</p> <ul> <li>I like blogs produced by institutions because they are generally full of fun ideas and events.&nbsp; Here's Notre Dame's Medieval Institute's blog: <a title="http://www.ndmedinst.blogspot.com/" href="http://www.ndmedinst.blogspot.com/">http://www.ndmedinst.blogspot.com/</a> .&nbsp; Some good, interesting news, observations, and events. <li>I've been pummeled over email by the folks at the <a href="http://mmhc.slu.edu/">Midwest Medieval History Conference</a>.&nbsp; So, I reckon I better post something here about it (again).&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/MMHCProgram.pdf">Here's the program</a> for their meeting this fall at Dennison University. <li>The <a href="http://www.beyondboundaries.info/">7th Annual Beyond Boundaries Conference on Integrating Technology into Teaching</a> and Learning will be held next month at UND.&nbsp; I am sure there will some good papers, although nothing leaps off <a href="http://www.beyondboundaries.info/schedule.php">their program</a> at me right now. <li><a href="http://www.graduateschool.und.edu/web_assets/movies/Humanities.mpg">Here's a fun UND advertisement</a> for the Graduate School with some cool historical photographs and video footage including Old Science Hall and the Adelphi Fountain.&nbsp; You can also <a href="http://www.graduateschool.und.edu/web_assets/movies/Brain%20Research%20Bio chemist.mp4">check out their newest ads which ran during the Olympics</a> in these parts. <li>Sam Fee's clever blog <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/">Arranged Delirium</a> has been redecorated and revived.&nbsp; He's a fun source of knowledge about all things Mac.&nbsp; Maybe he know why there is no good blogging software for Macs so I am forced to run Parallels to use Windows Live Writer!</li></ul> <p>Have a good looooong weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursdays: Transmedia Teaching STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thur-1 CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/28/2008 08:05:38 AM -----

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BODY: <p>I have almost finished Henry Jenkins' <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64594290"><em>Convergence Culture</em></a> and his chapter on transmedia storytelling particularly captured my attention.&nbsp; Jenkins used the <em>Matrix</em> franchise of films, video games, and animated shorts as an example of a transmedia narrative.&nbsp; The story told in the movies represented only one perspective or aspect of the <em>Matrix</em> narrative (or narratives) that were created across a series of platforms by a whole group of authors.&nbsp; Closely related to the phenomenon of fan-fiction, such transmedia narratives often included fan generated components that slowly blurred the line between interactive and participatory relationships across a whole range of generally web-based media.</p> <p>Most of us would admit to being storytellers, of some description, in the classroom.&nbsp; The best courses that I have taught draw the students into the story-telling experience to the point where they come increasingly to contribute to the narrative (or narratives) that I weave in the course.&nbsp; The most common format, in my classes, for student contributions to course narratives is in-class discussion, but I have also experimented with online threaded discussions and, this semester at least, wikis.&nbsp; I've come to realize that both discussion posts and wikis provide a very simple form of participatory experience in the educational narration process and represent one intersection between media and educational theory and practice.</p> <p>My archaeological project, the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>, has attempted to take transmedia narration a step farther with blogs, podcasts, and video.&nbsp; We encouraged the participants on the project to develop their own narratives of the archaeological experience and hoped that the blogs and other interfaces enabled us to juxtapose and interweave these perspectives.</p> <p>One goal of mine over the last few years is to work toward reimagining the classroom experience.&nbsp; Transmedia Teaching with its participatory aspects is an appealing approach to courses like my History 101.&nbsp; History 101 is a large class (80+ students) that meets one day a week at night for two and half hours.&nbsp; The class always attracts a large percentage of freshmen.&nbsp; It is very easy for students to forget about a 100 level course that meets one day a week.&nbsp; Plus, the lecture bowl environment with theater style seating and two and half hour format is hardly conducive to creating a vibrant, interactive, classroom environment.&nbsp; What it is really best suited for is the traditional lecture format, delivered at a leisurely pace with time for questions and some Socratic interludes.&nbsp; I have worked over the last few years to move more interactive components of the class to an online environment.&nbsp; Course discussions, for example, appear online.&nbsp; Students work together in a range of "knowledge communities" to create authoritative sets of class notes from the lectures.&nbsp; Of course, none of this captures the most adventurous imaginings of the transmedia experience in that it does not incorporate podcasts, twitter feeds, or video.&nbsp; User generated content is limited to text and in most cases (with the exception of the wiki) this text is individually authored and relatively static.</p> <p>The greatest hurdle to achieving a genuinely transmedia environment in a course (aside from the much broader issue of student engagement with the class and material!) is getting students to be comfortable with the tools of the New Media.&nbsp; Since the start of class on Tuesday, I've had almost a dozen emails from students who simply cannot figure out how to post on a discussion board (UND uses Blackboard, which while somewhat less than intuitive is hardly cryptic in its interface).&nbsp; Many of my students did not quite understand what a wiki is; so it is possible that the interface itself will discourage some students from engaging their colleagues in the class fully.&nbsp; Baby steps on

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the part of both the students and the teacher.</p> <p>Much of my conceptual experimenting this semester is in preparation for a possible course in Digital History next semester.&nbsp; For that class, my hope is to create a course that not only introduces some of the "tools" of the Digital Historian, but also challenges the students to understand the relationship between the tools, their historical imagination, and the discipline of history and thus to move away from a simplistic, instrumental approach to technology.&nbsp; My current vision for the class involve the course "meeting" across a whole range of media from simple threaded discussions to dynamic immersive environments like Second Life.&nbsp; By building digital media in numerous forms into the class we will be encouraged to experience and articulate from a first hand perspective the implications of a deeper, transmedia, engagement with the past.</p> <p>For more Teaching Thursdays content see:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (on this blog)<br><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/teaching-thursday.html">Teaching Thursday</a> (at Kostis Kourelis's blog)</p> <p>If anyone else decides to post a weekly "Teaching Thursday" column let me know! </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Roman Site of Kokkinokremos on Cyprus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-roman-site CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 08/27/2008 08:38:35 AM ----BODY: <p>This past weekend, I began to process the survey data from the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; The goal was to produce a provisional data set that would serve as the basis for our work this fall.&nbsp; We want need to write our paper for the AIAC in Rome and we are working on an article on the Roman period at Koutsopetria to submit to the Journal of Roman Archaeology.&nbsp; While I won't steal the prehistorian's fire and report on any of their results, I can't resist offering a sneak peak (with complimentary off-the-cuff interpretation) of the Roman period material from the prehistoric site of Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; Kokkinokremos is an important Late Bronze Age fortified site which overlooks the eastern part of our site.&nbsp; In 2007 we conducted intensive survey on the site, ably supervised by Dimitri Nakassis and Michael Brown, and in 2008 Mara Horowitz and

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<a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott Moore</a> read the prehistoric and historic period pottery respectively from our survey. <p>While scholars had long known that some later material existed on the site, no one had taken the opportunity to consider this material carefully.&nbsp; Our survey has been the first project to systematically document the post-prehistoric component of this site.&nbsp; Our survey work on the nearby Koutsopetria plain, the adjacent coastal height of Vigla, and the various flat-topped ridges that run north from the coast in the area allows us to place the post-prehistoric material from Kokkinokremos in a broader context.&nbsp; <p>While this is not the place for a systematic or definitive analysis, I will report that the site has produced a substantial assemblage of material from the Archaic period through Medieval times.&nbsp; There is very little evidence for early Iron Age material so we can't argue for any type of continuity between the Late Bronze Age remains and subsequent periods.&nbsp; On the other hand, the evidence for Cypro-Archaic material and ceramics from every subsequent period indicates that the site of Kokkinokremos was re-occupied at around the same time as the rest of the Koutsopetria coastal region. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KokkinokremosRAF.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="271" alt="KokkinokremosRAF" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KokkinokremosRAF_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><em> <br>Low Altitude Photo of Kokkinokremos</em></p> <p>The most exciting thing is that the site comes alive during the Roman period.&nbsp; Early Roman finewares, particular Eastern Sigillata A, appear more commonly on Kokkinokremos than the Koutsopetria plain.&nbsp; Along side these finewares is a nice scatter of kitchen wares and various medium coarse utility wares suggesting a domestic assemblage.&nbsp; Roman material persists into the Late Roman period, but the finewares almost entirely disappear aside from a few pieces of Cypriot Red Slip, and the coarse wares become more common.&nbsp; The lack of roof tile or other architectural material suggests that any activity on Kokkinokremos would have been at a smaller scale than the massive quantities of Late Roman rooftile produced by the more substantial architecture on the Koutsopetria plain. <p>Michael Brown has pointed out that the Bronze Age remains at the site of Kokkinokremos might have continued to be visible into the historical period.&nbsp; Its hard to imagine that the wealth of building material present in the Bronze Age ruins would not have attracted the local inhabitants.&nbsp; As this stretch of coastline came alive again in the Archaic-Classical period, Kokkinokremos might have been the site of small scale habitation, although our evidence for this is scant.&nbsp; It is also reasonable to suspect that the inhabitants of the fortified site at nearby Vigla would have removed building material from Kokkinokremos for, say, the fortification wall at Vigla.&nbsp; <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DaveDimitriKokkinokremos.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="271" alt="DaveDimitriKokkinokremos" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DaveDimitriKokkinokremos_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>The Roman period may have seen continued looting as well as some more intensive land use.&nbsp; The increase in quantity of material from Rome to Late Roman period suggests an increase in intensity of activities at Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; The finewares, kitchen wares and storage vessels make Roman habitation at the site possible, although other more ephemeral activities cannot be ruled

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out.&nbsp;&nbsp; Surely some of the activities there are tied to bustling settlement of this period on the coastal plain of Koutsopetria. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/RomanKokkinokremos.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="400" alt="RomanKokkinokremos" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/RomanKokkinokremos_thumb.jpg" width="292" border="0"></a> <br><em>Roman Pottery on Kokkinokremos overlaid on overall artifact densities</em></p> <p>In her book, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/49859958"><em>Archaeologies of the Greek Past</em></a><em>,</em> Susan Alcock has considered how the Romans may have looked at the Bronze Age remains on Crete.&nbsp; She not only noted the differences in how the Hellenistic and Roman residents of Crete understood the prehistoric past there and adopted different commemorative practices in constructing their relationships to the ruins in the landscape.&nbsp; We are still at a very preliminary stage of interpreting the post-prehistoric material from Kokkinokremos but the strategies employed by Alcock would certainly have some utility at our site.&nbsp; The political, economic, and even "cultural" character of this region of Cyprus underwent significant changes between the Archaic period and Late Antiquity seeing Phoenician, Greek, and Roman influences.&nbsp; The material at Kokkinokremos could well shed light on how these different regimes engaged the Bronze Age ruins that remains visible in their midst. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Libby, Evolution, and North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: libby-evolution CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 08/26/2008 08:06:22 AM ----BODY: <p>This weekend, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/education/24evolution.html">the New York Times had a front page story on the difficulty of teaching evolution in high schools in Florida</a>.&nbsp; My wife reports that Phil Jackson, (the coach of the Lakers and UND alumnus) <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/?id=85131&amp;section=homepage">w ho was on campus yesterday to receive an honorary degree</a>, mentioned learning about evolution among his memories of his time at the University.&nbsp; </p>

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<p>All this evolution talk reminded me of a series of correspondence in the Orin G. Libby papers (OGL#49) in the eponymous <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/oglmain.html">University of North Dakota's Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection</a> (at the Elywn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections).&nbsp; <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og49.html">Orin G. Libby</a> was perhaps the best known member of the University of North Dakota's Department of History where he taught from 1902-1945.&nbsp; Folks tend to remember Libby as stern and conservative figure, and in many ways this is certainly the case, but Libby was quite progressive in many of his views.&nbsp; Alongside his friend and ally John M. Gillette, Libby participated in the Women's suffrage movement, was active in progressive causes in the tumultuous decade of the 1920s, and was involved in establishing the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p> <p>Among his causes was the opposition to anti-evolution legislation proposed in the North Dakota legislature in 1927 (#OLG 49, Box 1, Folder 3).&nbsp; According to Libby's correspondence, rumors that an anti-evolution bill began to circulate as early as late January of 1927.&nbsp; Such bills were in the air all across the country in the immediate aftermath of the Scopes-Monkey Trial.&nbsp; Libby's papers show that he not only corresponded with <a href="http://web1.stthomas.edu/libraries/special/archives/rs_div/inventories/reu terdahl.html">Arvid Reuterdahl</a>, a leading member of the Minnesota Theistic Society -- a group who offered support to groups who opposed anti-evolution legislation --&nbsp; but also figures like A. W. Jamison, a sociologist at the University of Arkansas who played a role in the fight against ant-evolution legislation in that state (Gillette, himself a sociologist, seems to have put Jamison in contact with Libby).&nbsp; Libby was also in touch with <a href="http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb338nb1j4&amp;doc.view=frames&amp ;chunk.id=div00008&amp;toc.depth=1&amp;toc.id=">Samuel Jackson Holmes</a> the renown geneticist, scholar of evolution, and zoologist at the University of California - Berkeley whose mysterious sounding &quot;Committee M&quot; had prepared a report on evolution designed to be circulated to legislators and interested parties.&nbsp; These individuals and groups circulated pamphlets and encouragement in the fight to oppose a ban on states teaching evolution.</p> <p>When the bill was presented in the North Dakota House Committee on Education in February of that year (by L.S. Richardson), Libby began to correspond regularly with Attorney General George F. Shafer (who would later serve as governor of the State). In a letter dated to February 8, 1927, Shafer assured Libby that &quot;I hardly think the bill will get any where, as there seems to be little interest in it.&nbsp; I will keep you advised as to the situation.” It seems that Libby kept close tabs on the Bill as it languished in committee.&nbsp; His colleagues in the fight against the banning of evolution corresponded words on encouragement and reported on their own victories.&nbsp; Jamison reports on February 11, 1927 that the bill opposing evolution was defeated in Arkansas.&nbsp; On February 22nd, Shafer wrote to Libby telling him:</p> <blockquote> <p>&quot;You probably noticed in the Press the fact that the Anti-evolution bill was indefinitely postponed in the House of Representatives the other day without objection.&nbsp; I understand that there was some sentiment on the Committee favorable to the bill, but there was so much sentiment against it, not only among the members of the Committee on Education, to which it was referred, but was among the members of the Legislature generally, that the proponents did not make an effort to put it across&quot;</p></blockquote> <p>Libby was clearly pleased with the decision, and in a letter three days later to Jamison in Arkansas, he congratulates

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Jaminson on his success &quot;in clearing the atmosphere of this pestilential fog.&quot;</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Corinthian Countryside: Classical Vayia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-corinthia-3 CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/25/2008 08:09:16 AM ----BODY: <p>I have a soft spot for rubble fortifications.&nbsp; As a budding archaeologist working on the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>, the directors of that project encouraged me to publish a series of rubble fortification along Mt. Oneion -- the mountain ridge that forms to the southern border to the Isthmus.&nbsp; While modest in construction style (and perhaps even significance), their informal nature and close relationship with the local topography seemed (at least to my mind) to summarize the close relationship between human energy and the physical environment.&nbsp; Moreover, to discover a rubble fort was a challenge and required luck and diligence.&nbsp; They are typically built of the local stones -- field stones in fact -- so they blend in with their physical environments and in many cases are virtually invisible until you are on top of them.&nbsp; And, declaring a rubble feature to be something ancient required familiarity with the local countryside and the ability to discern the difference between animal pens, field walls, terraces, piles of cleared stones, and the myriad other features constructed of loose stones.&nbsp; Studying a rubble fort makes me feel like an archaeologist as it taxes my abilities to define, map, and interpret a feature in the landscape.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/VayiaRubble.jpg"><em><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="VayiaRubble" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/VayiaRubble_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>David Pettegrew drawing... what exactly?</em></p> <p>So, it was particularly gratifying to spend a few days documenting a rubble fortification on the Vayia peninsula in the Corinthia.&nbsp; Dimitri Nakassis and I originally stumbled upon the feature when exploring Vayia peninsula several years ago.&nbsp; <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I returned

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to this site this summer and tried to piece together the hodge-podge of walls standing some 250 m to the east of the Early Bronze Age structures already documented and published by the EKAS team.&nbsp; The Vayia rubble walls appear to encircle a narrow stretch of level ground on the spine of the Vayia ridge.&nbsp; While the wall has disappeared in places and in other areas is overgrown, it seems to run for about 85 m east to west and 20-25 m north to south (around 2000 sq. m).&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/VayiaWall.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="VayiaWall" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/VayiaWall_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><em> <br>This is a wall</em></p> <p>The walls are very similar to those on Mt. Oneion.&nbsp; They consist of two faces of unworked stones and a cobble fill.&nbsp; In the few areas where both faces are still visible and standing, the walls are slightly over 1 m in width.&nbsp; Unlike the walls on Mt. Oneion which are relatively well preserved, the walls on Vayia often disappear into disorganized tumble, presumably disturbed by the centuries of goats and shepherds who continue even today to bring their flocks to the relatively "marginal" land of the peninsula to graze.&nbsp; The only obvious features associated with this series of rubble walls are a few well-defined, right-angle turns which may represent rooms or even the foundations for towers built against the wall in a casemate fashion.&nbsp; Similar towers occurred along the rubble walls at Koroni above Port Rafte in Attica (this was published by Eugene Vanderpool, James R. McCredie, Arthur Steinberg in Hesperia 31 (1962), 26-61).</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/VayiaWall2.jpg"><em><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="VayiaWall2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/VayiaWall2_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>More wall...</em></p> <p>The greatest challenge with any rubble wall in the countryside is assigning a date to the structure.&nbsp; Excavation, like those conducted by Vanderpool, McCredie, and Steinberg is the surest way to ascertain the date of any wall, but sometimes there is enough evidence visible on the surface to allow an educated guess.&nbsp; On Mt. Oneion, for example, the overwhelming majority of material present on the ridge top was ClassicalHellenistic making it difficult to imagine any other date for the wall there.&nbsp; The same appears to be true at Vayia.&nbsp; The assemblage of material present both on the surface of the ground and amidst the tumble of the rubble walls is almost identical to the material that we documented at Ano Vayia and Lychnari. The only difference appears to be that the assemblage at Vayia includes more highly diagnostic fine wares -- including Late ClassicalHellenistic black-glazed pottery.&nbsp; Painted tile, pithos and amphora sherds, and cooking pots made up the rest of the assemblage.&nbsp; Considering the proximity of the Early Bronze Age settlement, it was a surprising that we did not see any material clearly datable to an earlier period.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/VayiaFor.jpg"><em><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="276" alt="VayiaFor" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/VayiaFor_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>A Plan... not a stone-by-stone</em></p> <p>For more on our work in the Corinthian countryside see: </p> <p><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Lychnari Tower</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-2.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Passes of the Eastern Corinthia</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday and the Quickest of Quickhits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-and-the CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/22/2008 07:28:58 AM ----BODY: <p>The start of the semester is upon me:</p> <p>I am still reading three books (how did this happen: Freud's <em>Interpretation of Dreams</em>, Henry Jenkins', <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64594290"><em>Convergence Culture</em></a>, and R. G. Collingwood's, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/392272"><em>The Idea of History</em></a>.</p> <p>I have at least three articles started but not finished: "Three New Sites in the Corinthian Countryside", "Hybridity, Ritual, and Authority in Early Christian Greece", and "Dream Archaeology and Christian Memory"</p> <p>I have three classes (see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/te aching-thursd.html">yesterday's post</a>).</p> <p>I need to work on the survey data from the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koustopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a>.</p> <p>And I need to update <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/HomePage.html">my web site</a>.</p> <p>Wow.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Teaching Thursday STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: teaching-thursd CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/21/2008 08:02:36 AM ----BODY: <p>The new semester is looming and my classes begin on Tuesday at 12:30.&nbsp; This semester I will teach three courses, and I am thinking about running a "Teaching Thursday" feature on the blog which recounts my adventures in educating the finest undergraduates (and graduate students) on the Northern Plains.&nbsp; This semester I'll teach:</p> <p>History 101: Western Civilization: Beginning of Time to 1400.&nbsp; I am slowly transitioning this class from a "traditional" Western Civilization style class to a World History type course in anticipation of a gradual move toward World History in our department.&nbsp; Since I am dealing entirely with "pre-industrial" societies the transition to a World History type format is somewhat less challenging.&nbsp; Patrician Crone's almost venerable text <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/18984512"><em>Pre-Industrial Societies</em></a> will serve as my guide as I try to put the civilization of the Mediterranean in a broader context.&nbsp; Since I teach the course at night and it meets only 1 day a week, I have worked gradually to develop a more robust online component for the class.&nbsp; It is also a big class (100+) without recitations or discussion sections.&nbsp; To make up for this, I break the class into groups of about 25 and assign them short discussion questions focusing on the analysis of primary source readings.&nbsp; These discussions are conducted online via a threaded discussion.&nbsp; In theory this will give the students a chance to interact with a smaller group of their peers, respond to their classmates interpretation of texts, and encourage a kind of "collective intelligence" in their reading of the primary sources.&nbsp; This is, of course, best case scenario.&nbsp; Since I require one discussion posting from each student and it must be 10 lines long, worse case scenario is that the students are required to write a very short essay each week.&nbsp; Complementing the threaded discussion, I am going to attempt a Weekly Wiki component in the class.&nbsp; I will make available a Weekly Wiki page for each lecture (and perhaps for each primary source reading) where the students will be encouraged to develop weekly class notes, highlight certain themes in the course, and propose test questions.&nbsp; It's another study in collective intelligence which will encourage the students to pool their understanding of the material and produce some kind of synthetic summary.&nbsp; We'll see how this works.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/History_101_AU2008_Syllabus.htm">Her

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e is the syllabus</a>.</p> <p>History 240: The Historians Craft.&nbsp; Named after <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/390753">Marc Bloch's significant little work</a> on the writing and study of history, this course is required for all undergraduate majors.&nbsp; The course has two components.&nbsp; One part is a cursory introduction to historiography and the historical method.&nbsp; Generally speaking students have received some introduction to these topics in their mid and upper level history course already.&nbsp; The second part of the course is a research seminar.&nbsp; I allow the students to pick any topic that they want and provide them with structure for writing a research paper.&nbsp; The goal is for them to develop a more systematic approach to research and writing.&nbsp; This will ideally serve them will when they have to write the capstone paper that all history majors are required to write (History 440).&nbsp; I am using for the first time, Jenny Presnell's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64511082"><em>The information-literate historian : a guide to research for history students</em></a>.&nbsp; This little (and relatively inexpensive book) has some good, practical advice, and is particularly strong with regard to the use of the internet and other digital tools for historical research.&nbsp; My hope is that this will help bridge the gap between the more digitally savvy students and those less comfortable with internet and library searches, research databases, and e-texts of various descriptions.&nbsp; The goal of the class is a 15 page paper and a 15 minute "professional" style presentation.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Syllabus_2.2_AU2008.htm">Here is the syllabus</a>.</p> <p>History 502: Graduate Historiography.&nbsp; This is the required historiography class for all graduate students in history.&nbsp; It's a pretty standard course with the usual units on major historical movements (Annales School, British Marxists, New Cultural History et c.) and related phenomena to the field of history.&nbsp; Since the University of North Dakota's M.A. in History is designed as a two-year program and most students take this class in the first semester of their first year, I usually encourage them to see the big picture readings in this class as a key component in building a historiographic background for their M.A. Thesis.&nbsp; The final assignment in the course is a preliminary prospectus for their M.A. which explores their own specialized research with larger historiographic trends in the discipline.&nbsp; The only nod that I will make toward "innovation" in this class is I will run as an experiment a <a href="http://twitter.com/home">Twitter feed</a>.&nbsp; If enough students are willing to join, it will help keep the class in contact with one another (and this is especially useful in helping the students share books).&nbsp; I also hope to encourage students to post questions to the Twitter feed as they read.&nbsp; These questions will help to introduce the readings at the beginning of our weekly meetings.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/History_502_Syllabus_AU2008.htm">Her e is the syllabus</a>.</p> <p>All the syllabi are in "beta" still, but will need to be finalized by the end of the week.&nbsp; I hope to report on my various experiments in these courses in this very space over the next 16 weeks...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bigfoot EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.137.93 URL: DATE: 12/01/2009 02:01:55 PM Could a plebian's text be venerable, too? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-late-antiq CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 08/20/2008 07:56:40 AM ----BODY: <p>Circulating on various blogs and email lists is the announcement of a new monograph series published by Oxford University Press and edited by Ralph Mathisen (who also is the editor of the new <a href="http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_late_antiquity/">Journal of Late Antiquity</a> (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/jo urnal-of-late.html">for my impressions of its first volume</a>): <blockquote> <p>OXFORD STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY: Late Antiquity has unified what in the past were disparate disciplinary, chronological, and geographical areas of study. In this spirit, Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity will provide a venue for the finest new late antique scholarship, with coverage extending from the late Roman world to the Sassanid, Byzantine, and early Islamic and Carolingian worlds. The series welcomes proposals relating to a wide array of methodological approaches including, but not limited to, history, society, culture, religion, literature, archaeology, art history, papyrology, epigraphy, numismatics, palaeography, demography, prosopography, linguistics, gender studies, family history, and rhetorical and literary theory. Series Editor: Ralph Mathisen is Professor of History, Classics, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and the Editor of the Journal of Late Antiquity.</p></blockquote> <p>The purview of this journal is predictably wide in a geographic, chronological, and disciplinary sense.&nbsp; We can hope that it will join the University of California's Press's <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/TCH.ser.php">Transformation of the Classical Heritage Series</a> (edited by Peter Brown) in shaping the contours of the discipline. <p>Along similar lines, Gillian Clark has a nice, short piece in the Fall 2008 <em>Journal of Early Christian Studies </em>("‚Äú<em>This strangely neglected author</em>‚Äù: Translated Texts for Historians and Late Antiquity" 16 (2008) 131-141) focusing on the origins and development of the Translated Texts for Historians series at Liverpool University Press. Most scholars who study Late Antiquity, east or west, have at some point availed themselves to these handy "candy-colored" (133) texts for their neat translations or handy historical commentaries.&nbsp; This short article is completely in keeping with the recent (last 10 years?) interest in looking back over the development of the

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field of Late Antiquity.&nbsp; <p>From the world of the new media, I've yet to find a "blog of record" for Late Antique history and archaeology.&nbsp; Several blogs do make regular reference to Late Antique matter (e.g. <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm</a>, <a href="http://judithweingarten.blogspot.com/">Zenobia: Empress of the East</a> and even here <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/late_antiq uity/index.html">from time to time</a>) the most consistently informative among them is the regularly updated blog <a href="http://www.heroicage.org">The Heroic Age</a>.&nbsp; Where else would I be likely to stumble across such a cool conference as "<a href="http://home.vicnet.net.au/~medieval/conference2008/conferencehome.html">We lcoming the Stranger in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages</a>" put on by the <a href="http://home.vicnet.net.au/~medieval/welcome.html">Australian Early Medieval Association</a>.&nbsp; <a href="http://home.vicnet.net.au/~medieval/conference2008/programme.html">The program(me) for this conference looks pretty interesting</a>!&nbsp; Plus you get to visit Brisbane... one of my favorite cities! ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Corinthian Countryside: The Passes of the Eastern Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-corinthia-2 CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/19/2008 08:04:02 AM ----BODY: <p>Those of you who are regular readers of this blog know that I have been serializing research that David Pettegrew and I completed this summer in Eastern Corinthia in the vicinity of Lychnari Bay.&nbsp; There are links to the previous blogs in this series at the end of the post so you can catch up with the story!&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">Last week</a> I described a tower overlooking Lychnari Bay that we have cleverly called Lychnari Tower.&nbsp; Standing amidst the ruins of the tower we were able to clearly make out the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">site of Ano Vayia</a> that I described a few weeks earlier.&nbsp; Ano Vayia consists of a circular tower and a north-south oriented building of relatively imposing construction.&nbsp; </p> <p>The site lines linking Ano Vayia and Lychnari Tower made us begin to wonder how these two sites

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interacted with each other in antiquity.&nbsp; The material present at the sites appears to be almost identical and the construction techniques -- namely the rough polygonal style -- suggest that the two sites were at least roughly contemporary.&nbsp; Our curiosity regarding the function of these two sites led us to explore more carefully the local topography.&nbsp; We knew, for example, that both sites overlooked a rolling valley bottom that continues today to be used for agriculture.&nbsp; This valley runs east to west passing by the village of Katakali and immediately inland from the coastal ridge that defines the abrupt Saronic coastline of the Corinthia.&nbsp; So it is possible to walk, for example, from Lychnari Bay to the town of Kenchreai on the Isthmus passing over the eastern part of the Oneion ridge near Stanotopi.&nbsp; The tower at Lychnari is well-situated to observe movement through this valley and to see along the coastline of the Corinthia to the east.&nbsp; So this tower could observe any one coming from the east along the coast and trying to land in the shelter of Lychnari Bay and then walking west through the inland valley.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Lychnari%20to%20Katakali.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="284" alt="Lychnari to Katakali" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Lychnari%20to%20Katakali_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Lychnari is to the right and Katakali to the left</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AnoVayiaViewWest_3.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AnoVayiaViewWest_3.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="AnoVayiaViewWest" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AnoVayiaViewWest_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>View from Ano Vayia West through Valley</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/LychnariViewEast_3.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/LychnariViewEast_3.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="LychnariViewEast" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/LychnariViewEast_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></em></a><em> <br>View from Lychnari East along Coast</em></p> <p>The site of Ano Vayia was not as well situated to observe the coastline or the east-west valley.&nbsp; Instead the site of Ano Vayia overlooks the Vayia River -- a seasonal torrent that descends steeply from the rugged interior of the Corinthia.&nbsp; This river opens into the Saronic Gulf at a pebbly beach that is not as sheltered as Lychnari Bay, but gradual enough to allow ancient ships to come ashore.&nbsp; Here's where things get interesting: from the Vayia river valley it is possible to proceed east.&nbsp; Climbing the eastern side of the river bank, one can ascend into a valley that runs to the north of the coastal ridge.&nbsp; This valley allows one to walk to east toward another Corinthian bay called Frangolimano.&nbsp; This route in an important pass because it means that it is possible to walk from Kenchreai on the Isthmus, to the area around Lychnari Bay, to Frangolimano and then onto the main routes south into the Epidauria further south.&nbsp; And this isn't just topographic speculatin' either!&nbsp; David Pettegrew and I walked this pass and noted the remains of a built path in

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numerous places.&nbsp; So, some time in the pre-automotive (pre-modern) past, this route from Lychnari Bay/Vayia to Frangolimano actually functioned as a transportation route.&nbsp; Moreover, a little library work (particularly <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/24380812">I. Peppas 1990</a>) turned up at least two fortifications situated along this pass: one is rubble fort which is difficult to date.&nbsp; The other is a "Frankish" (or Byzantine?) fortification situated to guard the route from Frangolimano to points southeast near the village of Sophiko.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Lychnari%20to%20Frangolimano.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; bordertop: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="284" alt="Lychnari to Frangolimano" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Lychnari%20to%20Frangolimano_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Lychnari on the left to Frangolimano on the far right</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PassViewWest_3.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PassViewWest_3.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="PassViewWest" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PassViewWest_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></em></a><em> <br>View from Pass east of Ano Vayia to West.&nbsp; The hill in the background is Ano Vayia.</em></p> <p>So our topographic study of this region revealed that this was not just an isolated corner of the Corinthia turned over to fish-farming and ramshackle vacation homes like it is today, but in antiquity, it may have represented a significant transportation corridor served by two harbors (at Lychnari Bay and Frangolimano) and a well-define route linking them to the bustling Isthmus or the southeastern Corinthia and Epidauria beyond.&nbsp; Is it possible that our sites were situated to take advantage of travel along this route? </p> <p>For more on our work in the Corinthian countryside see: </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthia-1.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Lychnari Tower</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray

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EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 08/23/2008 03:18:55 PM This is really interesting. Do you know of any good references on this topic (in English)? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Double Post on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-double-post-o CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/18/2008 07:58:13 AM ----BODY: <p><strong>A New PKAP Web site</strong></p> <p>First, PKAP has unveiled its new web page.&nbsp; Designed by <a href="http://www.thefee.net/">Sam Fee</a> and his students at <a href="http://www.washjeff.edu/">Washington and Jefferson College</a>, this is the third version of the PKAP page.&nbsp; Our original PKAP page, developed by R. Scott Moore, was fairly minimalist and showed its "old school" roots by using frames (<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050306045529/http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">y ou can check it out here via the Internet Archive</a>).&nbsp; Two years ago we redesigned the web page to show off better some of the multimedia aspects of the project.&nbsp; The site incorporated more flash and employed an opening page that was different from the pages inside the site.&nbsp; I am not sure that we were ever satisfied entirely with its appearance or functionality.&nbsp; Our content lives on multiple servers across at least three blogs, various streaming media servers, and three university systems and despite our efforts to maintain the site, we were never able to really integrate all this content.&nbsp; Somewhere along the line we acquired the web address of <a href="http://www.pkap.org">www.pkap.org</a>. </p> <p>The new site, now at <a href="http://www.pkap.org">www.pkap.org</a> is cleaner, leaner, and more "typical" in appearance.&nbsp; We hope that a more minimal approach will allows us more flexibility in the wide range of content.&nbsp; At present, though, we haven't brought everything into the new page (note that there are no links to <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a>, recently released <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-final-pkap.html">"Voices of Archaeology" podcasts</a>, or our interactive map.&nbsp; Nor have we integrated an RSS aggregator (<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/BlogFeedPageGoogle.html">like here on my page</a>), but these are things that will come. </p> <p>So, if you have a chance, please go and check out our new page and give us some feedback here on its general appearance and content!&nbsp; Either post a comment here or <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/ContactInfo.html">contact me</a>!</p> <p><strong>PKAP Sightings in the Big Apple</strong></p> <p><a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">Joe Patrow</a>, our contact with the bright lights of Hollywood, UND and PKAP alumnus, and the director of both <a

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href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> and <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Multimedia.html">Survey on Cyprus</a>, has gone big time, but fortunately he hasn't forgotten his roots.&nbsp; The New York gossip blog <a href="http://justjared.buzznet.com/">Just Jared</a> recently reported <a href="http://justjared.buzznet.com/2008/08/14/kevin-jonas-taylor-swiftcouple/">a sighting of Kevin Jonas and Taylor Swift on the set of their 3D concert video in New York</a> (I have no idea who they are or what it means, but bear with me...).&nbsp; In the back ground of one of the photos you can see <a href="http://justjared.buzznet.com/gallery/photos.php?yr=2008&amp;mon=08&amp;evt =jonas-swift&amp;pic=kevin-jonas-taylor-swift-couple-03.jpg">Joe Patrow wearing a UND Mediterranean Archaeology t-shirt</a>!!&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/kevin-jonas-taylor-swift-couple-03.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="376" alt="kevin-jonas-taylor-swift-couple-03" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/kevin-jonas-taylor-swift-couple-03_thumb.jpg" width="204" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BigTimePatrow.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="376" alt="BigTimePatrow" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BigTimePatrow_thumb.jpg" width="147" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PatrowColors.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="223" alt="PatrowColors" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PatrowColors_thumb.jpg" width="204" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.133.127.101 URL: DATE: 08/19/2008 03:23:57 PM This is hilarious. I've never heard of these celebrities, but Celina had (as well as the celebrity gossip website) ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Common Japanese words EMAIL: [email protected]

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IP: 113.197.131.215 URL: http://ezinearticles.com/?Studying-Common-Japanese-Words-to-GainFluency&id=2083116 DATE: 03/30/2009 09:48:44 PM The new site looks a little bit dry (i think it is the light blue on white), but is much better. Also, glad you decided to get rid of the opening page. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hi CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/15/2008 07:44:35 AM ----BODY: <p>Just some odds and ends for the end of the week:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> in the News:&nbsp; <ul> <li><a href="http://blogs.messiah.edu/news/2008/08/13/archaeological/">Messiah College did a short feature on David Pettegrew</a>'s involvement in PKAP.&nbsp; He's a co-director and brought over 3 students this year to help us with excavation. <li>The Grand Forks Herald also showed PKAP some love in their <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=83908&amp;section=Ne ws&amp;freebie_check&amp;CFID=70568571&amp;CFTOKEN=18014586&amp;jsessionid=8830e eb8eb711116362c">Sunday Higher Education Notebook</a>.&nbsp; The Herald consistently prints the press releases that we circulate and we appreciate their support in helping bring our project to the community!</li></ul> <li><a href="http://geography.unco.edu/GPRM/">American Association of Geographers Rocky Mountain/Great Plains</a> division and the <a href="http://www.asprs.org/">American Society for Photogrammetry &amp; Remote Sensing</a> (Upper Midwest Chapter) will co-sponsor <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/gprm/index.htm">a conference at the University of North Dakota this September</a> hosted by UND's Department of Geography (good friends and supplier of invaluable technical support to PKAP). <li><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/">Bryn Mawr Classical Review</a> has gone all "Web 2.0" on us!!&nbsp; <a href="http://www.bmcreview.org/">They now have a blog and invite responses to their reviews</a>.&nbsp; So far, there have only been a few responses, one of which says only "yeah" -- which is a bit minimalist for my taste, but cool.&nbsp; <li><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, and Situations</a> has come to life over the last month!!&nbsp; This is a great blog. <li>Another good read that keeps appearing whenever I search for material for a Digitial History class that I am developing: <a href="http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/">Digital Scholarship in the Humanities</a>.&nbsp; It will likely join my little cadre of Digital Humanities blogs: If I was a bit smarter and more tech savvy, I would understand and

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appreciate more fully the intelligent posts over at <a href="http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/index.html">Digital History Hacks</a>.&nbsp; I always follow the <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a>.&nbsp; I try to keep up with <a href="http://horothesia.blogspot.com/">horothesia</a>. <li>How cool is Sebastian Heath's <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/html/amphorasr.html">"provisional" online publication of Roman Amphora from Troy</a>? <li>A little Metadata: After my little vacation, my blog readership fell off a bit.&nbsp; It's nice to see it bounce back to Springtime levels thanks to the some good PR from my university and people who did not lose faith in my interest in blogging!</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Hybridity in Cyprus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: hybridity-in-cy CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 08/14/2008 08:21:15 AM ----BODY: <p>I’ve just managed a quick read of Bernard Knapp’s new book, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/167764381">Prehistoric and Protohistoric Cyprus</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp; He employs a whole range of different approaches in an effort to grasp the complexity of the Bronze Age and early Iron Age Cyprus.&nbsp; In particular, he appeals to concepts of insularity and connectivity to frame the development of Bronze age culture on the island.</p> <p>Of particular interest to me was his use of post-colonial theory, particularly the idea of hybridity to reposition discussion of cultural interaction on Cyprus.&nbsp; Rather than relying on older, but still prevalent discussions of invasion, colonization, and acculturation, Knapp reads the complex material record of the Cypriot Bronze Age as the product of a hybrid society where Cypriot identity is continuously renegotiated against the backdrop of a wide range of influences.&nbsp; This approach works well with his overarching emphasis on island archaeology in that Cyprus' insular position, while clearly exposed to outside influences, offers a geographically delimited zone of interaction which has obvious, if only implicitly defined, cultural analogs.&nbsp; More importantly, Knapp does a good job of tying the idea of hybridity to identity.&nbsp; The hybrid confounds preconceived notions of cultural identity (both in the past and in our own academic discourse) in an

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effort to gain advantage, to subvert repressive cultural regimes, or to enable mobility between groups with divergent sets of cultural expectations.&nbsp; (As an aside, it was curious that Knapp did not apply the concept of hybridity to the architecture of particular sites.&nbsp; In his discussion of Pyla<em>Kokkinokremos</em> he continued to appeal to rather functional interpretations of the site's architecture and consequently its place within the Bronze Age settlement hierarchy on the island.&nbsp; A hybrid interpretation might propose that the inhabitants of the Pyla-<em>Kokkinokremos</em> employed aspects of architecture -- like the casemate design of the site's outer wall -in ways that were quite distinct from their function, say, in a Near Eastern or Aegean context.&nbsp; E.g. there are several "Mediterranean style" homes here in Grand Forks, North Dakota, that reflect neither the presence of a Mediterranean community in the town, nor some kind of functional advantage to Mediterranean architecture in the local environment.&nbsp; Is it possible that the curious architectural choices at Pyla-<em>Kokkinokremos </em>are intended to distinguish the site and its inhabitants from other centers on the island?)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Siteviewtowest.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Siteviewtowest" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Siteviewtowest_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Such an approach becomes more difficult in later periods, I think, but still holds remarkable potential.&nbsp; By Late Roman times, for example, the island of Cyprus is part of a vast, multi-cultural empire.&nbsp; Its position as an island astride busy sea lanes provides it with an exceptional level of connectivity (to use <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42692026">Horden and Purcell's</a> term) with surrounding regions.&nbsp; Thus, identifying specifically "Cypriot" practices, becomes an exercise in recognizing explicit links between the communities on Cyprus and sources of power or authority both on the island and elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; In some contexts, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/th e-early-chris.html">like Early Christian architecture</a>, the willingness to combine various features common to buildings in Asia Minor, the Levant, and the Aegean in different ways results in a bewildering array of church forms and types.&nbsp; The diverse forms of Early Christian architecture presumably represent some part of the diversity of liturgical practice on the island and, as I have argued elsewhere, this variation while still incomprehensible to me, most likely provides insights into a whole range of aspects of Early Christian life ranging from the patronage of ecclesiastical architecture, to the existence of immigrant, heretical, or monastic groups, to the rivalry between episcopal sees both on the island and elsewhere in the region.</p> <p>At the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a>, we have considered the productive tension between hybridity and connectivity in the ceramic assemblage produced by our coastal site.&nbsp; The similarities and differences between the material present at our site and on contemporary site's elsewhere in the region could well represent the efforts of individuals at our site to negotiate a distinct cultural identity.&nbsp; The particular assemblage of Late Roman finewares at the site could reflect the effort of the inhabitants at Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em> to distinguish themselves from the inhabitants of surrounding communities.&nbsp; Any similarities between the assemblages can be understood as both their similar place within the larger economic network of the Eastern Mediterranean as well as the need for present identity in a way that was broadly understandable in the region.&nbsp; A hybrid reading of even subtle variations in such things as

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ceramic assemblages and architecture at even "mid sized" sites like Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>and Pyla-<em>Kokkinokremos </em>enables us to understand these places as "<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/28113876">locations of culture</a>" and further undermine the essentialized, urban monopoly on cultural production proposed by earlier generations of scholars. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Spolia in the Garden STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: spolia-in-the-g CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 08/13/2008 08:10:43 AM ----BODY: <p>This summer I got a chance to hang out a bit with Jon Frey at the site of <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">Isthmia</a>.&nbsp; For the past several years, he's been working on understanding the use of spolia -- that is bits and pieces of older monuments -- that were built into the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/26158265">Hexamilion wall</a> in Late Antiquity.&nbsp; His interests derive from his excellent dissertation on the topic: <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/197161577">Speaking through spolia : the language of architectural reuse in the fortifications of late Roman Greece</a></em>.&nbsp; In Late Antiquity, the use of spolia became a regular practice in monumental architecture.&nbsp; Scholars from the "bad old days" understood this Late Antique practice as evidence for the decline in skills among Late Antique craftsmen and the weakness of the Late Roman economy.&nbsp; For this earlier generation of scholars, the use of spolia reflected the decline of ancient culture.&nbsp; Now most scholar recognize the use of spolia as an intentional choice on the part of Late Antique architects, and the combination of old blocks, columns, and even inscriptions gave Late Antique buildings the desired variatio (variation) that was central to the aesthetic of the day.&nbsp; Scholars who study spolia have used it to explore issues of Late Antique and Byzantine attitudes toward earlier buildings and how they sought to incorporate, appropriate and even commemorate these earlier structures in their own monumental environment.</p> <p>As I mentioned in my brief note on the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/ko urion-and-aba.html">Kourion basilica on Cyprus</a>, the desire for spolia among Late Antique and Byzantine builders presumably influenced the archaeological processes at play during the abandonment of Late Antique and earlier buildings.&nbsp; At Kourion, for example, a there is evidence for a group of

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workers who systematically dismantled parts of the episcopal precinct in preparation for the transfer of parts of that building to another site.&nbsp; Similar systematic quarrying of site appears elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; The energy exerted to obtain high quality spolia does not appear to have been much less intensive than the initial quarrying of stones.</p> <p>In my own community, Grand Forks, North Dakota, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/sm all-town-arch.html">recent construction projects have uncovered the remains of earlier buildings destroyed a decade ago in a catastrophic flood</a>.&nbsp; The scatter of bricks, concrete, pipes, and even everyday objects form a halo around a new home.&nbsp; Eventually, I would guess, these fragments of the past will be removed or turned under a well manicured lawn.</p> <p>As my wife and I begin to do some rather significant restoration work on our own 100 year old house, we've had opportunities to produce spolia of our own.&nbsp; Being archaeologically inclined we could not simply discard these fragments of earlier construction!&nbsp; I was admiring my wife's herb garden the other day and noticed that she had lined the space with bricks that had been quarried from a wall in our house.&nbsp; These bricks had surrounded a hole in an interior wall of our house through which the chimney for a coal or wood stove passed.&nbsp; Judging by the color and fabric of the bricks, they were probably made from Red River clays -- most likely at the local Red River Valley Brick Company.&nbsp; They are soft, buff to red in color and tend to have a fair amount of lime in them.&nbsp; Similar bricks can be seen in our now crumbling foundations.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GardenSpolia1.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GardenSpolia1_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GardenSpolia2.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GardenSpolia2_thumb.jpg" width="304" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.185.140.31 URL: DATE: 08/25/2008 09:59:42 AM I couldn't resist presenting some more garden spolia, see http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/08/spolia-in-garden-fernwood-cemetery_25.html ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Corinthian Countryside: Lychnari Tower STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-corinthia-1 CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 08/12/2008 08:04:38 AM ----BODY: <p>This is the fourth in a series of posts on new research in the Corinthian countryside (for links to the previous posts see below).&nbsp; In particular, I am focusing on recent fieldwork conducted by <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and me this past summer in the vicinity of Lychnari Bay. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TowardLychnari.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="TowardLychnari" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TowardLychnari_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Lychnari Bay</em></p> <p>This post will focus on the site of Lychnari Tower.&nbsp; The substantial remains of a round tower stand on the low, but steep hill that forms the western side of Lychnari bay.&nbsp; The tower shares many features with the remains at the site of Ano Vayia.&nbsp; It is built in the rough polygonal style -- meaning that the builders only trimmed blocks to fit with their neighbors rather than shaping them into clearly defined courses as one might see in more formal ashlar construction -- and employs massive stones some over 1.5 m in length.&nbsp; Unlike the tower at Ano Vayia, the inner and outer face is preserved on the 1 m thick wall.&nbsp; The space between the faces is filled with small, cobble sized, rubble.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/LychnariTower.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="LychnariTower" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/LychnariTower_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>There are a few curious aspects to the Lychnari tower.&nbsp; First, when we first encountered the tower, 5 years ago, we initially thought that the tower was stepped.&nbsp; Only on closer inspection did we come to realize that the inner face stood to a greater height than the outer face to create this impression.&nbsp; In several places we soon noticed that the outer face of the wall stood at least as high as the inner face.&nbsp; The another odd feature about this tower was the lack of associated tumble.&nbsp; This was even more troubling when we realized that it was over 8 m in diameter.&nbsp; (J. Young, a mid-century scholar interested in towers in Attica, once proposed that the height of a tower was approximately 2 x its diameter meaning that our tower could have stood to over 15 m in height!).&nbsp; We were able to clarify this issue this past summer when we noticed that the nearby geodetic marker (a point used in preparing maps) stood on a considerable mound which elevated it above the remains of the collapsed tower.&nbsp; This mound consisted of numerous large cut blocks as well as earth and other tumble that seems likely to have come from the collapse of the tower (see below):&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv

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eWriter/GeodeticMarker.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="GeodeticMarker" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GeodeticMarker_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Finally, the top of the collapsed tower has a small depression.&nbsp; This is a common feature in many of the so-called Corinthian Cairns.&nbsp; These are odd piles of stones found scattered throughout the countryside of the eastern Corinthia.&nbsp; Scholars have proposed any number of explanations and dates for these piles of stones: from Hellenistic boundary markers to the remains of Early Bronze Age fortifications.&nbsp; The wide range of functions, contexts, and dates noted for these cairns, many of which feature depressions very similar to that in our collapsed tower, suggest that these odd depression are not related to these monuments' original functions, but rather reflect some kind of post depositional phenomenon like informal excavations of what are clearly archaeological remains or shelters for shepherds' fires.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/LychnariTower2.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LychnariTower2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/LychnariTower2_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The consider scatter of material surrounding the tower all appears to be Late Classical to Hellenistic in date and is almost identical to that found surrounding the structures on Ano Vayia.&nbsp; </p> <p>The most challenging (and entertaining) thing about this site was figuring out how to illustrate it!&nbsp; The tower is round so our traditional technique of laying out a baseline and then measuring from that line would not work (although at one point we discussed creating a round line... we'd been in the sun for a while...).&nbsp; We realized that we had to set up a grid that would allow us to measure the stones from two lines.&nbsp; The challenge was that the tower, as these photos show, formed a mound and couldn't just run our grid lines over the mound without creating a good bit of distortion.&nbsp; After several visits, arguments, and discussions (including: "do you really think that we need to draw this?"), we found a way to set up two baselines on relatively level ground that would allow us to create a virtual grid (without all the grid lines, in effect).&nbsp; This was not an easy way to illustrate, but David was up to the task.&nbsp; This illustration is his handiwork: </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/LychnariPlan.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="LychnariPlan" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/LychnariPlan_thumb.jpg" width="269" border="0"></a> </p> <p>For more on our work in the Corinthian countryside see: </p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia</a> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.133.127.101 URL: DATE: 08/19/2008 04:06:56 PM I'm so glad you took the time to survey the tower, most people don't bother. But you know well that a) god is in the detail, and b) the proof is in the pudding. It's good to have more and more of these suckers properly cataloged. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Funding Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: funding-mediter CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 08/11/2008 08:01:58 AM ----BODY: <p>As the readers of this blog certainly know, this year has been a banner year for Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; The success of field programs in both <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Greece< /a> and in <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Cyprus</a> has been made possible by the support from a whole number of institutions ‚Äì from private foundations like the <a href="http://www.aegeanprehistory.net/index.html">Institute for Aegean Prehistory</a> to the various universities that work together to make our research program possible, like <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">Ohio State</a>, UND, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Messiah College.&nbsp; The generosity of these institutions, however, only provided part of the support than an active research and education program in the Mediterranean requires.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PKAPTeaching.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="PKAPTeaching" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PKAPTeaching_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em> <br>Site Tour at Kokkinokremos on Cyprus</em></p> <p>We are fortunate to have a small, but dedicated group of private donors who have supported our work.&nbsp; Thanks to these donors we have collected over $15,000 for the study of the material culture of the Mediterranean world at UND.&nbsp; Over the next two years, however, we hope to add another $15,000 to take the next step in developing our efforts to bring the Mediterranean world to the University and to develop a long-term presence for the University in Greece and Cyprus.<br>We have three

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clear goals that contributions made over the next year will benefit:</p> <p>1)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We’d like to become a member institution at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies</a>.&nbsp; The American School is the official representative of all American archaeological research in Greece.&nbsp; Supporting this institution ensures that faculty and students at the University have an academic home in Greece for their research and teaching.&nbsp; Membership for a University like UND is approximately $500 a year.</p> <p>2)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Mediterranean Archaeology at UND is committed to graduate education both in Grand Forks, but more importantly in the Mediterranean.&nbsp; Over the past 3 years, we’ve had 5 UND students (and more than 10 students from other graduate institutions) work with us in Cyprus .&nbsp; This program has not only allowed graduate students at UND to gain hands on experience in archaeology, but also brought them in contact with their peers from around the world.&nbsp; It costs around $3,000 dollars for a graduate student to come and work in Cyprus.&nbsp; We’d like to create a $1000 scholarship to defray some of the costs of travel and work on Cyprus.&nbsp; The best Mediterranean archaeology programs in the US provide funding for their students to do fieldwork in the Mediterranean, and we feel that this a good investment in the continuing development of our program.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PKAPWalking.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="PKAPWalking" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PKAPWalking_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em> <br>Fieldwork on Cyprus</em></p> <p>3)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Computers play a more and more central role in Mediterranean archaeology.&nbsp; They are central to processing the archaeological data in the field, analyzing results of our summer seasons on campus, and disseminating our findings to our classes and the public.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/">Blogs</a>, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">video</a >, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-final-pkap.html">podcasts</a>, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html">interactive webpages</a>, and eventually an online Museum will provide almost unprecedented access to the whole range of Mediterranean archaeology to students at UND.&nbsp; To maximize the potential of the “new media”, however, we need to commit to developing “cyber infrastructure.”&nbsp; This blanket terms includes everything from access to digital storage and space on a maintained servers, to funds to support the development of innovative techniques to deliver both archaeological data (of interest to researchers)&nbsp; and multimedia experiences that bring the Mediterranean world to our students and the general public.&nbsp; $5000 over the next two years would go a long way to ensuring that our program of research and education has the high tech tools to complement the opportunities our field work in Cyprus and Greece have provided.</p> <p>Funds raised from private donors are particular crucial for developing the kind of infrastructure that Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota needs to succeed and grow.&nbsp; For information on how you can support our work, contact me (<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/ContactInfo.html">Bill Caraher</a>) or Mike Meyer at the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/artsci/giving_opportunities.html">College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Dakota</a>.</p> <p

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align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PKAPDavidTerry.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="PKAPDavidTerry" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PKAPDavidTerry_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>UND Student David Terry in the field</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia--1 CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/08/2008 08:58:21 AM ----BODY: <p>Varia from my wanderings on the web:</p> <ul> <li>The Olympic opening ceremonies are happening even as I write this.&nbsp; <font color="#000000"><a href="http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/">Ohio State's History Departments eHistory</a></font> publication <font color="#000000"><a href="http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/origins/">Origins</a></font> features an interesting article on political controversies and the Olympic games: "<font color="#000000"><a href="http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/origins/article.cfm?articleid=17">Playing Politics: Olympic Controversies Past and Present</a></font>".&nbsp;&nbsp; Origins provides a podcast as well!</li> <li>For some fantastic and though provoking work on archaeological ethnography, check out the work of Yannis Hamilakis, Aris Anagnostopoulos, and Fotis Ifantidis at <a href="http://kalaureia.org/">The Kalaureia Research Program</a> on Poros.&nbsp; They maintain an interesting photoblog: <a href="http://kalaureiainthepresent.org/">Kalauria in the Present</a>.&nbsp; They also hosted a workshop on <a href="http://porosworkshop.wordpress.com/">Archaeological Ethnographies</a> which featured a <a href="http://porosworkshop.wordpress.com/abstracts/">series of very interesting papers</a>, at least judging by the abstracts.&nbsp; It would be great if some of these papers were made available on the web!&nbsp;

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</li> <li>The ubiquitous and always interesting Troels Myrup Kristensen of the University of Aarhus (and the iconic blog <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm</a>) is co-organizing a panel at the <a href="http://www.tagconference.org/">Theoretical Archaeology Group</a> conference in December on "<a href="http://www.tagconference.org/content/archaeologiesdestruction">Archaeologies of destruction</a>".&nbsp; Quite interesting!</li> <li><a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/08/broklyn-myseumadds-social-component-to.html">Chuck Jones called</a> our attention (but it's worth repeating) that the <a href="http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/collections/">Brooklyn Museum's collection has gone online</a>.&nbsp; The most interesting thing about it is that <a href="http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2008/08/01/ta g-youre-it/">they built "tagging" into their interface</a> allowing visitors to tag images in their collection. They've even created an ingenious game out of it modeled on Google's Image Labeler.&nbsp; This will help them not only to sort and organize their collection in a way that is meaningful to the public, but will also give their collection a social, interactive aspect that, in effect, makes the community a key component in creating meaning from the wide ranging material available online.&nbsp; This ingenious use of "Web 2.0" practices highlights how web communities can work together to structure content and make the internet a more useful and socially engaged environment.</li> <li>More, Chuck Jones: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/08/me tadata-monday.html">He posted an interesting comment on my Monday Metadata post</a> asking whether the tools I use to monitor readers on this blog (primarily TypePad's Statistics page and Google Analytics) record viewers who read the blog via aggregators like Bloglines or Google Reader.&nbsp; I clearly record hits from Bloglines and perhaps from Google Reader, but the person has to click through to my blog's actual URL.&nbsp; The issue here is more than the vain desire for statistically observable traffic.&nbsp; If readers don't click through to the actual blog page and only view it via an aggregator, then it undermines a key feature that bloggers use to create community: namely their blog rolls -- those lists of blogs that most bloggers keep to show their readers what they are reading.&nbsp; These blog rolls -- which date to the earliest days of blogging -- do not come through on the typical RSS feed.&nbsp; Of course, most RSS aggregators do have some social function -- the most sophisticated, for example, show you how many other people subscribe to a particular blog's feed and some can even recommend feeds that are common among other individuals who subscribe to the same feeds as you.&nbsp; This, of course, is another example of the acephalus (or radically democratic) nature of internet communities as the interests of the community replaces the opinion of an individual blogger who offers up his or her carefully tended (ha!!) blog rolls!&nbsp; One can detect similar tension in the post offered on the Brooklyn Museum's blog piece "<a href="http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2008/07/15/co llection-preview-and-re-thinking-tagging/">Collection Preview and Re-thinking Tagging</a>" : At the same time that they use tagging to allow for a kind of community curration, "The curatorial staff felt is was important to only release works with vetted data. While there are all kinds of arguments both for and against this kind of thinking, we felt it was important to honor their wishes. Records will move out more slowly, but it also means the data will be in good shape when it does and that’s a good thing."&nbsp; </li> <li>The <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/">UND Office of University Relations</a> circulated <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/uletter/story.php#4809">a gently

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tweaked (and improved) version of the press release</a> for the 2008 season of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp; </li> <li>Finally, if you are in North Dakota watch the opening ceremonies to see UND's new television advertising.&nbsp; My sources tell me that this is a key step in re-branding the University and making sure that the wider community understands what the flagship university in the state system has to offer!</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: pwork EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 85.72.140.46 URL: http://kalaureiainthepresent.org/ DATE: 09/02/2008 02:38:00 AM Thank you very much for the Kalaureia link! FYI, the workshop papers are going to be published as a special issue of 'Public Archaeology' in 2009.! ! Aris -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Kourion and Abandonment STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: kourion-and-aba CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 08/07/2008 09:07:17 AM ----BODY: <p>I finally had a chance to make my way through A.H.S. Megaw's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/72871373">Kourion: Excavations in the Episcopal Precinct.</a>&nbsp; (Washington, D.C. 2007).&nbsp; I am not going to try to review this imposing book here, but merely to point out one part of the Megaw and Company's interesting analysis.&nbsp; A few years ago, I gave a paper at a panel at the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/SqunichNewsFiles/MPMAG%20Colloquium%20Session.h tm">Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of American in San Diego</a>.&nbsp; I argued that the master narratives that influence the excavation, description, and even analysis of Early Christian architecture in Greece have tended to obscure events associated with these buildings' abandonment.&nbsp; The desire among archaeologists to fit their analysis of remains into the neat periodization schemes that have held sway in our

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discipline since the Enlightenment (i.e. a site "ends" when the period ends) combined with a long held preference among archaeologists for studying monumental architecture (as opposed to more humble structures) to lead scholars to overlook the often dynamic histories of buildings and sites after their most monumental phase had ended.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KourionBasilica.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="KourionBasilica" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KourionBasilica_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The Kourion volume is not a revolution in this area, but the team of scholars associated with this excavation do bring out -- in various places throughout the text -- some significant observations concerning the abandonment and afterlife of this building.&nbsp; The most well-known aspect of this building's history is that after its abandonment some of its architectural elements and liturgical furnishings were transferred to the site of Sarayia Chapel in the nearby village of Episcopi.&nbsp; This use of Early Christian spolia in a slightly later building led the excavators to conclude plausibly that this three-aisle chapel replaced the episcopal basilica at Kourion as the seat for the bishop after the site of Kourion reduced to ruin by a late 7th century earthquake.</p> <p>The removal of material from the site, however, did not occur in a single episode.&nbsp; In fact, the excavations revealed that initially, the residents or bishop of Kourion made an effort to repair the church.&nbsp; For example, even though the top floor of the diakonikon to the west of the main nave had collapsed, the first floor was nevertheless cleared out, perhaps to serve as a temporary chapel while repairs continued on the larger main basilica.&nbsp; These efforts however proved inadequate and were perhaps stymied by additional seismic activity and the economic and political disruptions resulting from several 7th century raid and the eventual occupation of the island by Umayyad forces.&nbsp; </p> <p>According to the excavators, once the bishop or the community made the decision to abandon the church, the systematic quarrying of the precinct commenced.&nbsp; The small settlement of workers established in the atrium of the church made new provisions for storing water (since the aqueducts for the city must have been damaged) and&nbsp; left behind various tools for processing food and late types of cooking pots and transport amphoras.&nbsp; The workers removed debris from the site, collected objects that could be easily salvaged, like roof tiles, and carried off prestige or symbolically significant items like marble furnishings, sections of opus sectile floors, and champleve revetment.&nbsp; A lead seal from the 8th century Bishop Damianos suggests that the quarrying of the basilica took some time.&nbsp; </p> <p>Clearly, then, the church continued to be a "site" well after it ceased to function as a religious center.&nbsp; The attention that Megaw and his colleagues paid to the "later" life of the buildings at Kourion is certainly not unique (in fact, just this week, I've been catching up on the careful "late" history of the site of <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">Isthmia</a> in the Corinthia), but neither is it as common as it could be in the study of important monuments in the Eastern Mediterranean.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Visit to Ft. Totten, North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: visit-to-ft-tot CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Travel DATE: 08/06/2008 07:46:30 AM ----BODY: <p>My parents were in town this weekend and we took a trip to <a href="http://www.nd.gov/hist/totten/totten.htm">Ft. Totten, North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; It's a remarkably well preserved "Dakota frontier era" fort.&nbsp; It functioned initially as a frontier fort with a garrison who guarded railroad construction and communication lines around Devil's Lake, ND.&nbsp; In 1890 it was turned over to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and began life as an Indian School.&nbsp; In 1960 it was given to the State of North Dakota who have subsequently opened it as a historic site and worked to restore and maintain its buildings.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Ft_Totten.kmz">Here's a Google Earth KZM file showing its location</a>.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Ft_Totten_Parade_Ground.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Ft_Totten_Parade_Ground_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The way the fort is presented enables the visitor to understand its past as a military installation and as a school.&nbsp; This is no easy thing considering that several buildings -- like the armory -- changed functions considerably over that time.&nbsp; While hardly lavish in presentation, I thought that the simple signs and informational posters wove together the two, very different, stories of this site in a thought provoking and understandable way.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Ft_Totten_Baracks_Dorm_1.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Ft_Totten_Baracks_Dorm_thumb_1.jpg" width="304" border="0"></a> </p> <p>More interestingly still, is that parts of the site have been given over to local historical organizations, a theatre, and a bed-and-breakfast.&nbsp; These buildings not only take advantage of the extensive facilities available at the site, but also must also help with the maintenance of the site by keeping it in the public eye.&nbsp; Coming from Greece where so many sites with substantial remains are simply closed to the public, it was striking to see how the State of North Dakota can find ways to keep a site visible in the public eye while still maintaining some aspects of its "historical integrity".&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Ft_Totten_Office_Quarters.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Ft_Totten_Office_Quarters_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p align="left">This photo is gratuitous... Wind power on the prairie.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/WindPower.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WindPower_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Corinthian Countryside: Distributional Data from the Site of Ano Vayia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-corinthian CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 08/05/2008 08:16:00 AM ----BODY: <p>I introduced the site of Ano Vayia in several earlier blog posts (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/th e-corinthian.html">The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a>).&nbsp; It is basically a Late Classical - Hellenistic fortified site in the southeastern Corinthia.&nbsp; <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I documented the architectural remains and the local topography.&nbsp; We also managed to conduct a very small intensive survey in the area.&nbsp; Designed to produce data fundamentally compatible with the data collected over the course of the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>, we followed the same method.&nbsp; A team of field walkers spaced 10 meter apart walked a series of units which, in general, were under 2000 sq. m in size.&nbsp; The walkers looked 1 m to each side of their swath in the unit and collected one example of each unique

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artifact (following the "chronotype" system).&nbsp; For more on our method, we have posted a good bit of bibliography on the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASBibliography.html" >EKAS Bibliography</a> page.</p> <p>Our goal was to determine the extent of the ceramic scatter associated with the features atop Ano Vayia Hill and sample the artifacts present on the surface of the ground to provide some chronological and functional definition for the site.&nbsp; The only difficulty with this was that the hill was densely wood with rather mature fir trees making typical survey work difficult going.&nbsp; Consequently, we decided to sample the sides of the hill rather than attempt to cover the entire slope.&nbsp; This we hoped would give us a good idea whether the tower was part of a larger settlement on the hill itself or more of an isolated structure in the countryside while still giving us some sense of the kinds of artifacts present in the immediate vicinity.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AnoVayiaDistribution.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="381" alt="AnoVayiaDistribution" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AnoVayiaDistribution_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>As the distribution map above shows, the site appears to be at the center of a rather isolated spread of artifacts.&nbsp; (We did not systematically record densities or collect from the actual tumble of the building, but rather gathered diagnostic grab samples from the feature.) It is, of course, possible that erosion and vegetation effected our recovery rates from the slopes of the hill.&nbsp; Moreover, there could well be additional material beyond the extent of our field work; modern development (as well as the limitations of time and man-power) kept us from extending our survey units further afield.&nbsp; The relatively uniformity of material collected from these survey units -- a high percentage of painted Classical-Hellenistic rooftile and a significant scatter of pithos sherds -- suggests that most of the material in the units on the slopes originally derived from site itself.</p> <p>While we are still analyzing the material collected from the site, we can make some observation with a fair degree of confidence.&nbsp; Aside from the large quantities of tile, the largest category of material from the site is storage and transport vessels.&nbsp; There is no fine ware and very little kitchen ware.&nbsp;&nbsp; Like most surveys we produced a fairly substantial collection of difficult to date or interpret "medium coarse red body sherds" none of these artifacts explicitly contradict a Late Classical to Hellenistic date.&nbsp; The only indication of later use for the site are a few piece of Early Modern utility wares, a couple of medium coarse sherds of possible Late Medieval date and a cut stopper, apparently of Late Antique date.&nbsp; It seems probable that these artifact represent episodic re-occupation of the site during later periods.&nbsp; The standing remains would have made it an ideal shelter for shepherds or even local sentries watching the coastline.&nbsp; There was no evidence for earlier material.&nbsp; </p> <p>It's rare that intensive survey produces such a chronologically and functionally homogeneous data set, and our very limited survey of the hill should not be the last word on the distribution of material in this area.&nbsp; Indeed, some 400 m to the northwest, the lower site of Vayia produced a far more chronologically diverse assemblage with material dating from the Early Bronze Age through the Early Modern period.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AnoVayiaSurveyArea.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AnoVayiaSurveyArea"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AnoVayiaSurveyArea_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Metadata Monday: Does Anyone Really Read Archaeological Project Blogs? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: metadata-monday CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 08/04/2008 08:25:43 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the really common questions that I get when people learn that we have integrated blogging into our archaeological project is "does anyone read it?".&nbsp; To answer that question, I'll present some of my metadata from the blogs that we ran this summer as part of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; As a bit of background, we began to run PKAP blogs last season.&nbsp; Several directors wrote on this blog here and we made available a separate blog called "<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PylaKoutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives</a>".&nbsp; I required my graduate students to write for the blog as part of the writing and reflection component of a class that our work in Cyprus counted for.&nbsp; The other graduate students wrote -- quite eloquently and prolifically -- on their own volition, except one who refused to write.&nbsp; This year, we created a separate blog for Senior Staff as our staff had grown and my blog had become "crowded" with my own threads and ramblings.&nbsp; The senior staff blog and the graduate student blog featured more or less regular activity from around May 10th to the last week of June.&nbsp; They were all multi-author blogs.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">The PKAP Season Staff Blog</a> was the most frequently updated with over 60 posts, but it had seven authors.&nbsp; This blog received almost 1000 hits (998) and averaged over 12 a day since its inception on May 10th.&nbsp; Several strands developed over the course of its short life -- including the Saga of the Sifters, the astute musings of our introspective camp manager, Scott Moore's traditional Twitteresque short updates, and our inaugural experiment with podcasts.&nbsp; We've had positive feedback, although a relative dearth of comments, on many of these strands.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">The Graduate Student Perspectives</a> blog had three regular contributors and produced correspondingly fewer posts (about 35), but these posts had

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substantially the same volume of readership with 991 hits since mid-May.&nbsp; The posts not only chronicled the work in the field, but also the travels and site visits by the graduate students on the island.</p> <p>We attempted to run an <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">Undergra duate Perspectives blog</a>, but the undergraduates did not really take to it.&nbsp; They managed only 9 posts, but it was nevertheless encouraging to see that they had almost 500 hits (473) or over 8 views a day.&nbsp; On the surface, it would appear that the Undergraduate Perspectives blog would be worth attempting again next year and a little bit of encouragement on the part of the senior staff could perhaps help to produce a blog with a substantial readership.&nbsp; If we are to believe the experts, undergraduates are far more "wired" than their slightly more senior peers and have access to savvy audiences through their online social networks.&nbsp; </p> <p>This blog, which basically mirrored my posts from the Season Staff blog and sought to drive traffic (as much as it was possible) received around 6,000 hits (70 per day) over this same time.&nbsp; </p> <p>To sum up, the short term results for these blogs -inasmuch as hits correlate with a real audience -- were quite encouraging.&nbsp; The interesting thing about the Graduate Student Perspectives blog is that it is in its second year and the posts from the 2007 season continue to be viewed.&nbsp; It attracts a consistent, if low level, flow of traffic.&nbsp; Part of the goal of the PKAP blog enterprise was to create an online archive for the project that prospective volunteers, interested observers, and our students could view in order to get a flavor for life on a small archaeological project.&nbsp; For example, we direct prospective graduate student participants to the Graduate Student Perspective blog to get one view on what to expect once on Cyprus.&nbsp; PKAP Alumi/ae also frequent the Graduate Student Perspectives blog (as well as the other blogs) to keep tabs on what is going on on-site each season.</p> <p>On the other hand, the lack of comments on these blogs suggests that their audience is not fully comfortable with the interactive potential (i.e. Web 2.0) aspects of weblogs.&nbsp; They continue to appear to be rather static delivery of information rather than a dynamic medium that offers the wider community the offer to participate in the archaeological (as well as social, intellectual, and collegial (e.g. witty banter)) discourse.&nbsp; Some of this may be solved by the occasional "send us your questions!" post on the blog or even the tradition "open discussion thread".&nbsp; It may also be that over time our audience will become increasingly comfortable with the dynamic and interactive potential of the internet and the blog medium.</p> <p>So, thanks for readings our PKAP blogs this year and look for them to return to life next spring. In the meantime, check back here and over at Scott Moore's <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings</a> for updates on the PKAP front.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected]

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IP: 128.122.167.53 URL: http://www.etana.org/abzu DATE: 08/07/2008 01:00:25 PM I wonder, Bill, if there is any way to calculate the number of readers you have, like me, via your feeds. I rather suspect that these are a significant portion of your careful readers. I read this blog in bloglines, which claims to have 6 subscribers via the atom feed and another pair via the rss feed, but this is only bloglines. Do you know of anyway to tabulate the feed readership? My general sene is that we put far too much weight on the hit counters in the analysis of our readership. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-an CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 08/01/2008 08:35:19 AM ----BODY: <p>A real grab bag of things (many of them catch-up posts):</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/byzantium/">Byzantium at the Royal Academy of the Arts</a>.&nbsp; The exhibit is being organized by Robin Cormack and is a collaboration between the Benaki Museum in Athens and the Royal Academy.&nbsp; It will&nbsp; feature objects <a href="http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/byzantium/about/">from across the Byzantine world</a> (ranging from the Antioch Chalice to the Rhia Patten to a splendid 12th century icon from the Byzantine Museum at Kastoria), some of which have not traveled much.&nbsp; <li>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/jfkconference/">UND is hosting a conference to commemorate the 45th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's visit to campus in 1963</a>.&nbsp; The conference will be held September 25-28 in Grand Forks.&nbsp; The <a href="http://www.und.edu/instruct/jfkconference/JFKPanels.html">conference program</a> appears interesting bringing together a substantial group of scholars from across campus and the region.&nbsp; The organizers of the conference brought together <a href="http://www.und.edu/instruct/jfkconference/JFKArchive.html">a nice selection of material</a> related to Kennedy's presidency including the text and <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/itunes/index.php">a digital recording of his speech at the University (available through UND's iTunes U page)</a>. <li>I have begun to experiment with <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> (as have many of my colleagues) with an eye toward using it in my classes that meet only once a week.&nbsp; In fall, I'll teach two of these once-a-week classes, History 101 and History 502.&nbsp; They are at opposite sides of the academic scale.&nbsp; 101 is a large lecture class filled largely with Freshmen and Sophomores.&nbsp; 502 is a large (15+) graduate seminar. I was perplexed by how

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a single Twitter feed could serve both of these classes.&nbsp; So, I began to experiment with multiple Twitter feeds which would allow me to Twitter different things to the different classes.&nbsp; Twitter does not seem to be set up with this kind of functionality in mind -- as each feed requires a separate log-in and a separate email.&nbsp; Clever Web types, however, have developed a solution to this problem: <a href="http://www.themattinator.com/">Matt (Multiple Account Twitter Tweeting)</a>.&nbsp; It allows you to send from one page Tweets to various different accounts (or combinations of accounts).&nbsp; Pretty slick, although it doesn't have the full functionality of the Twitter interface.&nbsp; Now that the technological issues are accommodated, I need to figure out the pedagogy of Tweeting, <a href="http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2699/aprofessors-tips-for-using-twitter-in-the-classroom">fortunately others have</a> already <a href="http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-foracademia/">worked in that direction</a>. <li>The 2009 Princeton Review ranking of colleges and universities rated the University of North Dakota #7 on its list of Universities where students study the least.&nbsp; It's funny that I don't get that impression from my students. <li>This looks to be <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-History-Medieval-Post-MedievalGreece/dp/0754664422/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1217597663&amp;sr=81">an interesting new book</a>...</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Journal of Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: journal-of-late CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 07/31/2008 08:28:09 AM ----BODY: <p>I know that I am a bit late on this one, but I am still catching up from my summer fieldwork break.&nbsp; I've spent the last few days reading over the first volume of the <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_late_antiquity/">Journal of Late Antiquity</a>.&nbsp; As I have noted previously in the blog, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/late_antiq uity/index.html">Late Antiquity</a> has gone from being "the next big thing" to a more or less established (sub)discipline in the academic establishment.&nbsp; In fact, over the last decade that the number of <a href="http://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/">Centers</a> (and <a href="http://arts.stage.manchester.ac.uk/cla/">Centres</a>) for <a href="http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/clarc/">Late Antique</a> <a

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href="http://www.lateantiquity.dk/">Studies</a>, conferences and symposia, and monographs have exceeded what even a determined scholar can easily process in a year.&nbsp; This is to say that the field has grown from a determined minority who could nibble around the edges of any number of well-established disciplines (e.g. Patristics, Classics (particular Roman Studies), (Early) Medieval Studies, Roman Archaeology, even Islamic Studies), to a complex transdisciplinary body of scholars capable of enjoying full meals at a specially prepared academic buffets.</p> <p>It is clear, now, that the study of Late Antiquity as not simply a distinct time period -- variously defined from 200-800 or even 1000 AD -- but as a particular academic discourse has emerged.&nbsp; The inaugural issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity seems to encapsulate the borders of this disciplinary discourse rather well.&nbsp; The first four articles in the journal seek to set the stage for the concerns in the discipline at present:</p> <p>A Long Late Antiquity?: Considerations on a Controversial Periodization<br>Arnaldo Marcone<br><br>The Rise and Function of the Concept “Late Antiquity”<br>Edward James <p>Decline, Fall, and Transformation<br>Clifford Ando<br><br>Barbarians, Historians, and the Construction of National Identities<br>Ian Wood</p> <p>What do these four articles tell us about the state of Late Antique studies?&nbsp; (1) We are still bothered by our illfitting place in traditional periodization schemes, (2) this is tied to the interesting and international historiography of the term "Late Antiquity, (3) as well as our lingering preoccupation with concepts of decline, fall, continuity, and change (and their cousin "transformation").&nbsp; (4) The problems and opportunities inherent in these concerns are most eloquently problematized in the claims made, most famously by Peter Brown, but not uniquely his, that the "Late Antique Period" marked a key watershed in the development of our contemporary ideas of political, social, and religious organization and identity.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>None of these things are bad of course, but it leaves no doubt that our field still considers the fight for disciplinary definition (even just chronological and "moral" elbow room) a vital part of any discussion of Late Antiquity even among scholars committed to the study of the period.&nbsp; While the articles presented in this journal are all of good quality and are "interesting reads" it seems a bit odd that such apologetics continue to be necessary especially in a journal designed to serve a (sub)discipline that is on the brink of maturity in the academy.&nbsp; The continued vitality of the field requires that we move beyond metadiscursive turf wars and move beyond continuity, change, and transformation.&nbsp; (<a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I had a good conversation about this riding the train from Athens to Corinth this summer.&nbsp; He rightly pointed out that historians like to periodize...).&nbsp; </p> <p>As another point of departure, the study of Late Antiquity claim (and perhaps position themselves as heirs to) one of the distinct characteristics of Classical Studies (and to a lesser extent Medieval and Byzantine Studies): namely the inherently transdisciplinary character of our field.&nbsp; On a practical level, scholars of Late Antiquity find homes in departments of Classics, history, religion, and art history (and archaeology).&nbsp; Intellectually, the study of Late Antiquity has embraced a wide range of theoretical and conceptual perspectives drawn from intensive contact with discourses nurtured in relative disciplinary isolation.&nbsp; For example, Late Antique scholars have been relatively quicker to embrace intensive pedestrian survey in archaeology, certain aspects of critical theory (e.g. postcolonial theory), and sophisticated models of religious interaction, all of which have been encouraged by the willingness of scholars of Late Antiquity to ignore disciplinary boundaries and their associated theoretical constraints. </p> <p>The goal here is not to criticize what will become an important new

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journal for the study of Late Antiquity, but to point out that the field will soon move beyond disciplinary boundary marking and its attendant apologetics and will begin to articulate its contribution to the study of the past in different ways.&nbsp; The hope of any field, of course, is to develop paradigms of thinking that will influence not just scholars working within the relatively narrow boundaries of a particular discipline, but will extend to influence how scholars (and the public) think more generally.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Corinthian Countryside: The Site of Ano Vayia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-corinthian CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 07/30/2008 08:20:49 AM ----BODY: <p>As noted already on this blog (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/07/ne w-research-on.html">New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion</a>), David Pettegrew and I worked to document a series of Late Classical-Hellenistic monuments in the Vayia Microregion this past July.&nbsp; While our official report on our work will hopefully be complete by the winter, we can preview some of the results of our research here.&nbsp; </p> <p>Our primary goal this summer was to document the architecture from a site that we called "Ano Vayia" (or upper Vayia) so as not to be confused with Vayia proper - a recently documented multi-period site with an important Early Bronze Age component.&nbsp; The site is situated on a low hill immediately to the south of the Vayia peninsula. Today the hill is heavily wooded making an ascent from the coast rugged going.&nbsp; It is possible, however, to walk up to the top of the rise from the southwest where the hill slope is less crowded with trees and brush and gentler in aspect.&nbsp; The eastern side of the hill drops away quite abruptly above a seasonal torrent known as the Vayia River.&nbsp; While the hill is quite steep, the top of the hill does have a small level area, and our site is located on the western side of this level area overlooking the Vayia river.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/VayiaRegionSM_Annotated.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="VayiaRegionSM_Annotated" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/VayiaRegionSM_Annotated_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p>

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<p>The site itself consists of a north-south oriented building filled now with the tumble from its collapse.&nbsp; The best preserved feature of this building is its particularly imposing western wall.&nbsp; This western wall shows the rough-polygonal style masonry that is so common in the Late ClassicalHellenistic Corinthia. The stones, some of which exceed a meter in length, are slightly trimmed to fit with one another.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AnoVayiaScale.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AnoVayiaScale" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AnoVayiaScale_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>This wall faced the small level area on the top of the hill.&nbsp; The rest of the building consisted of less well constructed walls, several of which might represent later phases.&nbsp; The northern part of the north-south building shows the clever use of exposed bedrock outcroppings.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AnoVayiaBedrock.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AnoVayiaBedrock" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AnoVayiaBedrock_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>To take full advantage of the exposed bedrock, the wall runs at an oblique angle to the rest of the building.</p> <p>Perhaps the most interesting feature on the site of Ano Vayia is the remains of a round tower immediately to the east of the northsouth structure.&nbsp; While only the lowest courses of this tower are preserved, there is enough remaining for us to estimate it's diameter at a little over 6 meters.&nbsp; The stones in the outer face of the wall are neatly drafted with the curved profile of the tower's circumference.&nbsp; Initially we were concerned about whether this&nbsp; tower stood to any substantial height since so little of the tower was preserved.&nbsp; A quick look down the steep eastern slope of the hill, however, revealed several cascading piles of tumble made almost entirely of blocks with the familiar curved shape of our tower. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/CurvedTumble.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="CurvedTumble" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/CurvedTumble_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a>&nbsp; </p> <p>We were able to date this little compound of buildings based on ceramic materials scattered around the hill top and embedded in the tumble of the north-south building.&nbsp; This summer we prepared a stone-by-stone illustration of the walls.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DavidDrawing.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="DavidDrawing" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DavidDrawing_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AnoVayiaPlan.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404"

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alt="AnoVayiaPlan" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AnoVayiaPlan_thumb.jpg" width="269" border="0"></a></p> <p>Stay tuned for more archaeology of the Ano Vayia Microregion...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.175.123.224 URL: DATE: 07/30/2008 08:47:46 AM Nice work on Upper Vayia. Intriguing round tower. Any chance it might be postclassical (or even an early modern kalyvi). I'll send you a drawing of an unpublished tower I discovered a few years ago on Movri Mountain in Achaia. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: William Caraher EMAIL: IP: 208.107.230.122 URL: http://profile.typekey.com/billcaraher/ DATE: 07/30/2008 09:03:53 AM Kostis,! ! I don't think that we ever considered it to be post-Classical. We haven't found much in the way of post-Classical material in the area nor did we find any mortar, tile chinking, et c. that we would associate with post-Classical construction techniques. I'd be interested, nevertheless, to consider it. It seems likely that the tower either antedated the north-south structure (perhaps only by a few years) or post-dated that destruction of the north south building (i.e. post classical??). As we've interpreted it, its function would be to guard a pass (that I. Peppas has argued (somewhat persuasively) was fortified in the post-Classical period) and there would be no real need for a round tower if the rectangular buildings were already there. ! ! We have another round tower in the area, so any help with comparanda would be excellent.! ! Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Final PKAP Podcasts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1

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BASENAME: the-final-pkap CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 07/29/2008 11:46:18 AM ----BODY: <p>It is sometimes difficult to tell whether a concept like podcasts from the field works when you are still in the field.&nbsp; I am not sure that it was a total success, but we received enough positive feedback to post the final two podcasts that we prepared this summer (they're numbers 1 and 8 here). <p>The Introduction and Orientation is <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>'s excellent introduction to the project.&nbsp; He outlines the history of our work in the area and talks about some of the larger research questions that we seek to answer.&nbsp; It's a bit on the long side and the audio is far from perfect, but it is a useful post for anyone wanting to get a grasp on our project without reading our reports and publications. <p>From the serious to the silly, the final podcast is a discussion of precisely how much fun pottery washing is and features some of the students from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Messiah College.&nbsp; They were all good sports, as were my colleagues, when I appeared with the little digital tape recorded asking strange questions.&nbsp; <p>If our podcasting experiment will continue next year, I will need to upgrade some of my equipment to include a mic that will cancel out some of the wind noise.&nbsp; We were not able to visit the trenches as much as we would have liked because afternoons on the coastal heights tend to be windy and the wind noise muffled he audio.&nbsp; Despite the challenges, I do hope that these podcasts brought you closer to our work in the field and introduced you to some of our Voices of Archaeology. <p><em>Voices of Archaeology </em>Podcasts <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/01 Introduction and Orientation to P.mp3">1. Introduction and Orientation</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/02%20The%20Mundane%20M atter%20of%20Sustenance.mp3">2. The Mundane Matter of Sustenance</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/03%20Excavations%20on% 20Vigla_%20Week%20One.mp3">3. Excavations on Vigla: Week One</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B4%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[4]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B4%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/04%20Excavations%20on% 20Vigla_%20Week%20Two.mp3">4. Excavations on Vigla: Week Two</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16"

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alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/05 A Saturday Morning at Bronze Ag 1.mp3">5. A Saturday Morning on Bronze Age Kokkinokremos</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a> <br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/06 The Ceramicist at the Museum 1.mp3">6. The Ceramicist at the Museum</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/07 An Afternoon with the Registrar.mp3">7. An Afternoon with the Registrar</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a> <br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/08 How Fun is Pottery Washing.mp3">8. How Fun is Pottery Washing</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Small Town Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: small-town-arch CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 07/28/2008 08:20:43 AM ----BODY: <p>Michael Fronda, an old friend at McGill University, sent along some photos of a collapsing building in downtown Montreal.&nbsp; It is a nice example of archaeological formation process in a modern urban setting.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/CollapseMontreal2.jpg"><img width="204" height="154" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/CollapseMontreal_thumb.jpg" alt="IMG_1450.JPG" style="border-width: 0px;" /> <img width="204" height="154" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/CollapseMontreal2_thumb.jpg" alt="IMG_1448.JPG" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a> </p> <p>On one of my regular walks around Grand Forks, I noticed another interesting example of the archaeological process. After the flood of 1997 which inundated almost the entire town (see <a href="http://www.draves.com/gf/">here</a> and <a href="http://www.geo.mtu.edu/department/classes/ge404/mlbroder/">here</a>) numerous lots were left vacant.&nbsp; Some of these lots were promptly rebuilt, but others owing either to specific circumstances of the property or to their vulnerable position were not reconstructed.&nbsp; The entire Lincoln Drive neighborhood, for example, vanished as it fell on the river side of the new flood walls.&nbsp; </p> <p>With the flood walls completed this past year, the city is selling several of the properties which had not been redeveloped on the city side of the flood wall.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GrandForksProperties.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GrandForksProperties_thumb.jpg" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a> </p> <p>The only physical reminders of the past use of these properties are the driveways that lead nowhere or the alleys that abruptly end in open lots.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Alley.jpg"><img width="304" height="404" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Alley_thumb.jpg" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a> </p> <p>In a few cases the brick foundations or concrete pavers of the vanished houses continue to peak through the carefully mowed city lawns.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BricksandLawns.jpg"><img width="304" height="404" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BricksandLawns_thumb.jpg" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a> </p> <p>Now that some of these properties are being redeveloped, the foundations of the new homes have been cut through the remains of the earlier structures.&nbsp; From an archaeological perspective, the material excavated for these new foundations provides insights into another kind of formation process.&nbsp; Substantial piles of rubble from concrete basement floors and scatters of brick from foundation walls surround the new foundation holes.&nbsp; At one site the bricks and earth are being graded around the new foundation.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/CementFloor.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/CementFloor_thumb.jpg" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BricksandDirt.jpg"><img width="304" height="404" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BricksandDirt_thumb.jpg" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Bricks.jpg"><img width="304" height="404" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Bricks_thumb.jpg" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a> </p> <p align="left">Amidst this construction debris, there are a few remnants of everyday life: a broken plate and the neck of a blue bottle really stood out.&nbsp; They combine to make a nice assemblage of building material and household goods some of which will surely fill in the foundation trenches of the new walls and form part of the stratigraphic record of the buildings on this plot of land.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DinnerPlate.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DinnerPlate_thumb.jpg" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a>&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BottleTop.jpg"><img width="404" height="304" border="0" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BottleTop_thumb.jpg" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a> </p> <p align="left">From a landscape perspective, the new homes on these plots will not only fill in gaps left by the flood which served as reminders of this difficult hour in the community's past, but also create the top layer of the archaeological palimpsest that urban historians and archaeologists find to be such a useful metaphor. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: BrianB EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.248 URL: DATE: 07/29/2008 09:17:05 AM Great perspective on otherwise overlooked present reality. insight. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

Thanks for the

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hi CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 07/25/2008 08:05:47 AM ----BODY: <p>I've been slowly making my way along my blogroll and catching up with some of my favorite reads after a couple months away.&nbsp; As one could predict, there was a bunch of interesting stuff going on over the summer months... Here are some of my favorites:</p> <ul> <li>Project Blogs <ul> <li>Brandon Olson, <a href="http://www.pkap.org">PKAP</a> alumnus, <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/">dedicated blogger</a>, and some of his graduate student colleagues, are <a href="http://realtimearchaeology.blogspot.com/">blogging from the Mopsos Survey Project in Turkey</a>.&nbsp; <li>UCLA recently featured <a href="http://www.magazine.ucla.edu/summerdigs/">a series of posts from the field work of their undergraduate students</a>.&nbsp; It earned mention in <a href="http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3134/point-and-clickarchaeology">Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus</a> blog. <li>The <a href="http://mountlykaion.wordpress.com/">Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project</a> (for more about it <a href="http://corinth.sas.upenn.edu/lykaion/lykaion.html">read here</a>) will begin its 2008 season presently and like the last couple of years will keep a blog. <li>My co-director Scott Moore has continued to post over at his <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings Blog</a>.&nbsp; </li></ul> <li>Shawn Graham, The <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a> himself, has a <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/archaeology-in-andarchaeology-of-second-life/">great little video (now close to a month old) on his work on archaeology in Second Life</a> and has <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/eja-review-piecesecond-lives-online-world-for-archaeological-teaching-and-research/">a short contribution on the same topic</a> to a special section of the <a href="http://eja.sagepub.com/current.dtl">European Journal of Archaeology</a> (<a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/?p=285">edited by Troels Myrup Kristensen</a> of <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm</a>), along with several other significant players in the digital archaeology movement.&nbsp; The only bummer here is that you need a subscription to get access to the articles.&nbsp; One thing that Shawn did not observe (although it has been observed elsewhere) is that Second Life, as a persistent world (that is to say a virtual world where the work of its participant can remain even after that individual leaves), allows for a kind of archaeological investigation of its own history.&nbsp; Cruising around the old "mainland" (before the creation of islands) reveals, for example, how the original creators of SL saw most travel through their virtual world in cars on the ground rather than by flying or teleporting.&nbsp; More interestingly, it is possible to explore numerous "abandoned parcels" created by ambitious designers who have, for whatever, reason left the parcel for new projects.&nbsp; While traditional formation processes do not effect these neglected corners of Second Life, it is, nevertheless, archaeological to consider the original intentions and meanings of their creators and attempt to piece together a typology of parcels, features, and places.&nbsp; Also be sure

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

to check out the <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/05/digital_desires_and_the_f uture.html">Shanks and Webmoor post on Second Life at Archaeolog</a>. <li><a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/">Archaeolog</a>, probably the most intellectually robust and sophisticated archaeological weblogs (not to mention one of the few weblogs that actually make you feel more cool by reading it; it is superhip), <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/05/focal_things_and_digital_ enfra.html#more">celebrated its 100th post</a>.</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.150.9.7 URL: http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 08/15/2008 07:55:32 PM Thanks Bill, for the mention! It was so brutal, trying to make that video, that I forgot in the recorded talk itself to mention just that very thing: the spooky virtual archaeology of the abandoned lands of SL. In my paper for the Brock Virtual Worlds conference last year, I did touch on that, and if you trawl through june-july 07 of my blog, you'll find an audio version of it... sorry I don't have the proper link; am on dialup, everything is painful! Meant to leave this note before my good internet access was cut off... -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A PKAP Thesis Defense: Latin- Greek Relations in Frankish Cyprus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-pkap-thesis-d CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/24/2008 07:49:43 AM ----BODY: <p>David Terry, a <a href="http://www.pkap.org">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> alumnus successfully defended his Master's Thesis here in the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History at the University of North Dakota yesterday</a>.&nbsp; His work was entitled "Authority and Cultural Interaction on Frankish Cyprus, 1191-1374."&nbsp; His defense was good fun as he ably engaged his committee and members of the general public on all topics related to his research.&nbsp; I learned a tremendous amount from his

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

thesis, and I suspect it will continue to inform my interest in the contours of authority and religion in pre-modern Europe.</p> <p>At his defense, David graciously claimed to have been inspired to work on the Frankish period in Cyprus by his time on PKAP and his personal visits to numerous Frankish period monuments on Cyprus (you can read his blog postings from his time on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/david_terr y/">Cyprus here</a>).&nbsp; (I can also detect the influence of an informal seminar that some of his colleagues and I participated in a couple of years ago which focused on Authority and Religion in the Early Christian East!).</p> <p>His visit to Cyprus was partially funded by the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/grad/">Graduate School at the University of North Dakota</a> as part of Graduate School Summer Professorship.&nbsp; David will study next year at Western Michigan University in their Ph.D. program in History.&nbsp; He hopes to continue working in some capacity with PKAP and continue to pursue research in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; He is also a member of the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">Medieval and Post Medieval Mediterranean Interest Group of the Archaeological Institute of America.</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KitiTowerSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="205" alt="KitiTowerSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KitiTowerSM_thumb.jpg" width="139" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DSC_0210sm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="205" alt="DSC_0210sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DSC_0210sm_thumb.jpg" width="304" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Abstract</p> <p>Many treatments of cultural interaction on Frankish Cyprus depict the Latin and Greek cultural identities as historic, monolithic constructions and the society of Frankish Cyprus as a multicultural society.&nbsp; However, sources suggest that similarities between Greek and Latin cultural traditions were numerous and that there was a considerable amount of ambiguity between the two groups.&nbsp; This thesis will examine the cultural practices of the Latin Cypriots and the origins of these practices and argue that Latin Cypriot communal identity was less dependent upon identification with the Roman Church than it was with a pan-Christian view of Cypriot society.&nbsp; The subsequent chapter will examine the approach that the king and nobility of Cyprus took to protect this developing cultural milieu and argue that, in addition to a need to protect the island, the Latin secular leadership also felt a communal bond with the island's non-Latin majority.&nbsp; Last, a discussion of intermarriage between Latins and Greeks shows how easily the two groups could cross the confessional line as well as the Latin Church's ability to prevent them from doing so.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: New Research on the Corinthian Countryside: Vayia Microregion STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: new-research-on CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 07/23/2008 08:00:58 AM ----BODY: <p>From June 25th to July 16th, David Pettegrew and I returned to the Corinthia and conducted fieldwork in the region of Vayia.&nbsp; The immediate vicinity of Vayia was investigated by the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) in 2002 and 2003.&nbsp; This work focused primarily on a substantial and complex Early Bronze Age site which has since been published in Antiquity (Tartaron, T. F., D. J. Pullen, and J. S. Noller. 2006. “Rillenkarren at Vayia: Geomorphology and a New Class of Early Bronze Age Fortied Settlement in Southern Greece,” <em>Antiquity </em>80, pp. 145–160). </p> <p>In the same neighborhood or microregion, however, there are several significant later sites including a series of Late Classical to Hellenistic structures.&nbsp; I found most of these structures over the course of extensive survey in the area in 2002.&nbsp; We tentatively identified one of them as a possible farm house.&nbsp; David Pettegrew, a colleague both on PKAP and with EKAS had a fairly serious interest in farmhouses of the Classical to Hellenistic period (see "Chasing the Classical Farmstead: Assessing the Formation and Signature of Rural Settlement in Greek Landscape Archaeology," <em>Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology </em>14.2 (2001), 189-209).&nbsp; I was interested in the Hellenistic fortifications of the Isthmus (with Timothy Gregory, “Fortifications of Mount Oneion, Corinthia,” <em>Hesperia</em> 75 (2006), 327-356), so we decided to team up to document the various small sites from the Classical to Hellenistic period that dot this microregion.&nbsp; We also sought to place these sites a bit more firmly within the local topography of the southeastern Corinthia.&nbsp; While there has been some substantial work on the Western Corinthia which emphasizes routes into the Argolid, Sykionia, and Kleonid (these are the territories of the cities that border on the polis of Corinth), there has been relatively little work done on the eastern Corinthia (with the exception of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45703753">Mike Dixon's dissertation</a> which focused primarily on the southeastern corner of this territory).&nbsp; </p> <p>In a short 2 week season, David and I were not only able to document rather carefully the three main Classical to Hellenistic sites in the Vayia Microregion, but also establish an important, but largely overlooked ancient route running through the eastern Corinthia.&nbsp; The work proved to be both intellectually and physically tiring as we not only illustrated the archaeological remains and hiked all over the area, but also argued (around and around and around) about the functions of these sites and their relationship to other sites both locally and in the larger context of Greece.</p> <p>Over the next few weeks, I'll post some of our work on the blog here in an effort to fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of the eastern territory of Corinth.&nbsp; The end goal of this fieldwork is a short(ish) study of the microregion in the Classical-Hellenistic period which we

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hope to submit to Hesperia this fall or winter.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/VayiaRegionSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="VayiaRegionSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/VayiaRegionSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 07/30/2008 11:21:03 PM Neat. I'm looking forward to hearing more about this. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project 2008 Press Release STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetr CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/22/2008 08:21:29 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the final tasks of the season, after the final report is completed, is to prepare a press release for the Department of Antiquities and for our home institutions.&nbsp; Each year the press release, along with other documents produced by the PKAP team serve to communicate the goals, methods, and discoveries to our students and local communities.&nbsp; The goal of these little documents is to capture some of the romance of archaeology as well as some of the more systematic (scientific?) flavor of our work.&nbsp; I am never sure that I strike the right balance, but here it is in any case:</p> <blockquote> <p>Press Release <p>The 2008 Season of the Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i> Archaeological Project <p>The Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i> Archaeological Project (PKAP) under the direction of Professor William Caraher (University of North Dakota), Professor R. Scott Moore (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), Professor David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College), and Dr Maria Hadjicosti (Cyprus Department of Antiquities) recently completed its sixth season of fieldwork at the site of Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i> on Cyprus. The project conducted its field season between 15 May and 25 June 2008 with the help of a team of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members from universities in the U.S. and Europe. <p>For the past 5 years, PKAP concerned itself primarily with

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the archaeological remains present on the surface of the ground. The goals of this kind of fieldwork is the collect data without disturbing the archaeological remains protected beneath the surface. The results of this work include the discovery of what may be a previously unknown shrine from the Archaic to Classical periods (600-300 B.C.) and an extensive Roman to Late Roman (100 B.C.700 A.D.) settlement at the site. <p>In 2008, PKAP conducted limited excavations for the first time in large part to confirm and expand the results of the surface survey. A series of small trenches brought to light the remains of a fortified settlement on a prominent coastal ridge called Vigla. This settlement appears to have been occupied from the Cypro-Archaic to the Hellenistic period (600-100 B.C.). The most dramatic feature of this settlement was a fortification wall that ringed the entire plateau. It seems probable the shrine of the same date served this small community. Nearby, the PKAP team excavated three small soundings near the known site of Kokkinokremos. This work expanded the extent of this Late Bronze Age site (ca. 1200 B.C.) We based this conclusion on the discovery of a section of wall datable to the Late Bronze Age that was located considerably outside the area of use proposed by earlier studies. The 6 seasons of fieldwork in the region of Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i> revealed a dynamic and wealthy Mediterranean landscape filled complete with towns, fortifications, and religious centers. The careful documentation of this material is particularly important as more and more of the Cypriot coastline succumbs to development. <p>As in previous seasons, PKAP has sought to document the our work in various digital media allowing for instantaneous distribution via the internet. It was possible to track our progress during the 2008 fieldseason through a series of regularly updated weblogs written by graduate students (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/</a> ), undergraduates (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/</a> ), and senior staff (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">http://m editerraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/</a> ). In addition to texts, photographs, and illustrations, we also included a number of podcasts done from the field. The blogs and podcasts continue the tone of our documentary films from the 2005 and 2007 seasons by capturing both the serious and frivolous side of life on an archaeological project. <p>The project enjoyed the generous assistance of the Estate Manager of the British Sovereign Area - Dhekelia Garrison, the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum, and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute. The 2008 season’s fieldwork was funded by grants from the University of North Dakota, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Messiah College, American Schools of Oriental Research, Institute for Aegean Prehistory, the Brennan Foundation, the Mediterranean Archaeological Trust, and generous private donors. All field work was completed with the permission and cooperation of Director Pavlos Flourentzos of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus. </p></blockquote> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Last Days of PKAP 2008 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-last-days-o CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/21/2008 08:46:47 AM ----BODY: <p>The 2008 PKAP season ended with a flurry of activity.&nbsp; We completed three chaotic, but important challenges faced PKAP as we rushed through our last days on Cyprus.</p> <p>1. We lost the services of our loyal and efficient camp manager Bret Weber.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/bret_weber /">His blog posts</a> at the PKAP Season Staff Blog became quite popular among our readers.&nbsp; More important than his blogging however was his culinary expertise.&nbsp; He planned, coordinated, and in most cases cooked our meals for the three busiest weeks of the season.&nbsp; When he departed, the senior staff had to suddenly find it in them to not only run the project but to cook for our crowd of hungry, hardworking, undergraduate and graduate volunteers!&nbsp; We managed through, but with far more fast food and far less elegance.&nbsp; We hope we can lure Bret back to the project next year!</p> <p>2. Final report writing!&nbsp; We collected a vast quantity of qualitative and quantitative data this season from both the survey and the excavation. Typically the data gets entered daily as we collected it from the field, but since we were working flat out this past season, some of our data was not recorded digitally until the very end of the season.&nbsp; I spent much of the last few days digitizing trench plans.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/2008/06/tr ench-plans.html">We digitized each SU</a> (or stratigraphic unit which was the basic unit of excavation), and we will eventually be able to link data from our ceramic finds (and other finds) as well as elevations digital photos and qualitative information all to a unit in the GIS.&nbsp; This is relatively easy in concept, but a substantial amount of work in practice.&nbsp; At the end of the season, we needed to get enough of the material digitized and processed to allow us to compose our final report to the Department of Antiquities and our various donor agencies.&nbsp; The report will be made public by the end of the summer, but most of the writing took place in the field on Cyprus.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DimitriandBill.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="271" alt="DimitriandBill" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DimitriandBill_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>3. Finally, as I have already alluded, we had to backfill our trenches.&nbsp; Since we excavate on a British Military base, they quite reasonably asked that we backfill our trenches so that someone did fall into it during maneuvers or the like.&nbsp; Unfortunately we could not begin to backfill until the day before we were scheduled to leave the island because Maria Hadjicosti, our collaborator

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and patron at the Department of Antiquities, could not visit our trenches until then.&nbsp; The result of her late visit was that we were backfilling our trenches for almost 5 hours on the day before we were scheduled to leave.&nbsp; At one point we were using the car headlights to illuminate our work!&nbsp; The day we were to leave we returned to the field at 5 am to continue our backfilling.&nbsp; It was a lot of work and we almost got all the trenches filled!&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SusieandBill.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="SusieandBill" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SusieandBill_thumb.jpg" width="271" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Despite the hectic, end-of-the-season pace, PKAP 2008 was a huge success.&nbsp; Our systems for recording data in the field and in the lab were up to the challenge of excavation and the team worked well together.&nbsp; I was especially pleased how the team pulled together over the last week of the season, working hard both in the field and in the office (so to speak) preparing final reports, food, and the trenches.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 96.227.103.52 URL: DATE: 07/21/2008 12:58:30 PM Welcome back. We missed you! Although your Macintosh is putting me into a crisis. Just finished loads of ArcGIS, which is binding me to PC, but I guess all the rest is better on Mac. Have a safe return. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: What I did on my summer vacation... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: what-i-did-on-m CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 07/19/2008 06:37:30 AM ----BODY:

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<p>So, this blog took a month long hiatus, but it is now ready to resume in all of its blogging glory. So to speak.&#160; </p> <p>Over the next week, I will do what I can to account for this month long gap in the otherwise consistent blogging routine.&#160; It partly derives from the reality that the dirt we so eagerly removed from our trenches on Cyprus...</p> <p>&#160;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DirtPilePhoto.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="271" alt="DirtPilePhoto" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DirtPilePhoto_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0" /></a></p> <p>... had to somehow be returned to its proper place in the ground.&#160; While this hardly accounts for a 4 week disappearance, it is the kind of thing that had to happen at the end of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org">PKAP</a> excavation season.&#160; </p> <p>At the end of the very last day of the PKAP season, I left Cyprus for Greece for a two week field season with David Pettegrew.&#160; The goal of this season was to work on moving toward publication some of the more exceptional sites discovered over the course of the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>.&#160; With only two weeks to work and about 2 and half weeks of work to be accomplished, we continued a rather frantic pace.&#160; On top of this, the village where we stay, Ancient Corinth, does not have much in the way of public internet access (although an internet cafe opened the week that David and I left for the US).</p> <p align="center">&#160;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PettegrewAnoVayiaSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="PettegrewAnoVayiaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PettegrewAnoVayiaSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0" /></a></p> <p>The final excuse is that I finally succumbed to the pressure of my more tech savvy colleagues (and my 65+ father!) and made the big migration to Macintosh.&#160; At present I am terrified and at one point, I am fairly certain my super hip MacBook Pro mocked me.&#160; This led me to immediately open Parallels or reboot into Windows XP and cower in the comfortable environment of Windows.&#160; Of course, almost immediately Windows told me that it would have to reboot in 5 minutes and began the ominous countdown numerous times (no matter how often I told it that I wanted to reboot later).&#160; I will eventually get up the courage to use the Mac OS, but it's going to be a slow transition.&#160; In fact, I am writing this blog in Live Writer in a Parallels window...&#160; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/MacBook%20Pro.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="154" alt="MacBook Pro" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/MacBook%20Pro_thumb.jpg" width="250" border="0" /></a> </p> <p>The upside to my month long vacation from blogging is that I filled with ideas for blog posts!&#160; So over the next week or so, I plan to fill in the details from the last four months, show off the results from some of our fieldwork, and talk a little about my return to proper classroom duties after my year of decadence at the American School.&#160; </p> <p>I was gratified to see that all my regular blog traffic had now abandoned me! So, thanks for sticking around over my little break from the blog and stay tuned...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 07/30/2008 11:08:25 PM Ancient Corinth has an internet cafe? What has the world come to?? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP PodCasts from the Museum Team STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-podcasts-f CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/18/2008 10:47:00 PM ----BODY: <p>The busiest time of the season is upon us: the last day in the field is today, we are preparing our final report to the Department of Antiquities and our paper for the annual CAARI conference.&nbsp; And work in the museum is reaching its conclusion ... so a few quick podcasts from the PKAP team at the Larnaka Museum... <p><em>Voices of Archaeology </em>Podcasts <p>1. Introduction to PKAP. <em>coming soon</em><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/02%20The%20Mundane%20M atter%20of%20Sustenance.mp3">2. The Mundane Matter of Sustenance</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/03%20Excavations%20on% 20Vigla_%20Week%20One.mp3">3. Excavations on Vigla: Week One</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B4%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[4]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B4%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/04%20Excavations%20on% 20Vigla_%20Week%20Two.mp3">4. Excavations on Vigla: Week Two</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16"

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alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/05 A Saturday Morning at Bronze Ag 1.mp3">5. A Saturday Morning on Bronze Age Kokkinokremos</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a> <br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/06 The Ceramicist at the Museum 1.mp3">6. The Ceramicist at the Museum</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/07 An Afternoon with the Registrar.mp3">7. An Afternoon with the Registrar</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Trench Plans STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: trench-plans CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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DATE: 06/16/2008 12:21:35 PM ----BODY: <p><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="393" alt="ViglaWestSchematic" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ViglaWestSchematic_thumb.jpg" width="200" align="left" border="0">I am working on preparing conceptual and schematic illustrations of our trenches.&nbsp; This involves digitizing them with elevations in our GIS program so that they can be properly located on our new 1 m topographic maps of Vigla and Kokkinokremos.</p> <p>To the left is Brandon Olson's trench from Vigla divided into the stratigraphic units that have associated top plans.&nbsp; In some ways these graphics are meaningless from an analytical perspectives (it assumes, for example, that all the features in the unit can be "sectioned" to one elevation).&nbsp; It does, however, provide an easy template for understanding the relationship between strata of soil, features, and in some cases the locations of finds (each of which have a designated elevation that could be plotted within the trench schema).&nbsp; </p> <p>Each trench requires this level of documentation which will hopefully assist our efforts to explain our excavation to students and colleagues in the US.&nbsp; Moreover, it may help us to discover correlations between trenches at various places across the site.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Saturday Morning on Bronze Age Kokkinokremos STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-saturday-morn CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/14/2008 11:08:03 AM -----

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BODY: <p>Michael Brown, one of our Bronze Age specialists and a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, has been working hard at the Late Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; His work has successfully expanded the built up area of this important Bronze Age site.&nbsp; Last Saturday he gave us a quick tour of his favorite trench... <p><em>Voices of Archaeology </em>Podcasts <p>1. Introduction to PKAP. <em>coming soon</em><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/02%20The%20Mundane%20M atter%20of%20Sustenance.mp3">2. The Mundane Matter of Sustenance</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/03%20Excavations%20on% 20Vigla_%20Week%20One.mp3">3. Excavations on Vigla: Week One</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B4%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[4]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B4%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/04%20Excavations%20on% 20Vigla_%20Week%20Two.mp3">4. Excavations on Vigla: Week Two</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/05 A Saturday Morning at Bronze Ag 1.mp3">5. A Saturday Morning on Bronze Age Kokkinokremos</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Excavations on Vigla STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-excavation CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/12/2008 10:59:20 PM ----BODY: <p>This past week we've made considerable progress on Vigla... Here is a short description of the trenches by David Pettegrew.</p> <p><em>Voices of Archaeology </em>Podcasts</p> <p><font color="#808080">1. Introduction to PKAP. <em>coming soon</em><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/02 The Mundane Matter of Sustenance.mp3">2. The Mundane Matter of Sustenance</a> </font><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2.gif"><img style="border-right: 0px; bordertop: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/03 Excavations on Vigla_ Week One.mp3">3. Excavations on Vigla: Week One</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B4%5D.gif"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[4]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B4%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/04 Excavations on Vigla_ Week Two.mp3">4. Excavations on Vigla: Week Two</a>&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D.gif"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2[6]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb2%5B6%5D_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em> -----

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: What is it exactly that I do all day? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: what-is-it-exac CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/12/2008 10:58:01 PM ----BODY: <p>My big project this season has had almost nothing to do with excavation, museum work, or any of those things traditionally associated with archaeology.&nbsp; Aside from the basic tasks associated with running a small archaeological project, my day has largely been occupied with producing a new high-resolution topographical map of our site.&nbsp; The impetus behind this came two years ago when one of our Bronze Age experts noted that the 1:5000 topographical map of the height of Kokkinokremos was not terribly accurate.&nbsp; As we began to study our area more close we noted more and more little inaccuracies in our rather large scale maps.&nbsp; As a result this season we decided to remap the most important features in our micro-region (the height of Vigla, Koutsopetria, and Kokkinokremos) with our differential GPS.&nbsp; </p> <p>This is a painstaking process that involves taking thousands of individual points with GPS.&nbsp; Bret Weber (our camp manager!) and I have wandered the micro-region for 4 or 5 hours a day taking points ever 10 m or so across every kind of terrain from coastal plains to almost shear slopes of cliffs.&nbsp; This week we began to process the elevation data in our desktop GIS software and have some of our first enhances topographical maps.&nbsp; We now have maps that have sub-1 m accuracy for much of Vigla and Koutsopetria complete and we are 60% of the way through producing our map of Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; Below is our new map of Vigla and Koutsopetria with 1 meter contours...</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TopoFun.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="232" alt="TopoFun" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TopoFun_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left"><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP Podcast 2: The Substance of Sustenance STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-podcast-2 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/10/2008 06:23:02 AM ----BODY: <p>Archaeological fieldwork is more than simply our time in the field or at the museum.&nbsp; Part of the appeal of archaeological work is the comradery that it produces as a group of scholars and students from different backgrounds, disciplines, and countries come together working toward a (more or less) common goal.&nbsp; </p> <p>Meals, in particular, become an engaging and intellectually productive time, but certain guidelines must be observed!&nbsp; In our second PKAP Podcast Bret Weber, our camp manager, regular contributor to the PKAP Staff blog, and a specialist in US Social Policy History, lays down the basic procedure for keeping "camp" life happy and healthy during our field season. </p> <p><em>Voices of Archaeology </em>Podcasts</p> <p><font color="#808080">1. Introduction to PKAP. <em>coming soon</em><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/02 The Mundane Matter of Sustenance.mp3">2. The Mundane Matter of Sustenance</a> </font><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1.gif"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/03 Excavations on Vigla_ Week One.mp3">3. Excavations on Vigla: Week One</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon_thumb1.gif"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="16" alt="podcasticon_thumb1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb1_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a> </p> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla

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-Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP Theses STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-theses CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/10/2008 06:22:33 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the most invigorating aspects of PKAP this year is that we have three active graduate theses in progress based at least in part on research conducted in our area and during our field seasons.&nbsp; Michael Brown is writing on the Late Bronze Age remains at Pyla-Kokkinokremos at the University of Edinburgh and has co-direct fieldwork at that site with us for the last three years. He will make a major contribution to our final volume dealing with the Bronze Age settlement structure in the area.</p> <p>Brandon Olson, at Penn State University, plans to include in his dissertation a corpus of inscribed sling pellets found on Vigla many years ago.&nbsp; He spends time each season at the Nicosia Museum documenting them.&nbsp; He will contribute an appendix on the inscribed military equipment to our final publication.&nbsp; </p> <p>Finally, I spent the weekend reading the first draft of David Terry's Master's thesis.&nbsp; His thesis came into focus last year when he was a member of the PKAP survey team.&nbsp; He wrote on the relationship between the Latin church, the various Eastern Christian religious traditions present on Cyprus, and the Latin Crusader rulers of the island during the 13th and 14th centuries.&nbsp; He'll complete his M.A. at the University of North Dakota this summer and matriculate at Western Michigan University in the fall for his Ph.D.&nbsp; We hope that he'll rejoin the PKAP field team in the near future!</p> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP Podcast 1: Week One on Vigla STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-podcast--1 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/08/2008 09:13:20 AM ----BODY: <p>Loyal readers of this blog know that PKAP has long been interested in experimenting with multi- and New Media approaches to archaeological experiment.&nbsp; In that spirit we are pleased to introduce the first in a series of PKAP Podcasts.&nbsp;&nbsp; Entitled<em> Voices of Archaeology</em>, these podcasts will introduce you the various work of the PKAP team in the voice of the archaeologists, volunteers, and staff who are doing it.&nbsp; </p> <p>Our series of Podcasts will begin with a brief introduction to our work on Vigla by David Pettegrew and his team excavating there.&nbsp; The Podcasts are all in MP3 format, easy to upload to your portable music play or on your desktop.</p> <p><em>Voices of Archaeology </em>Podcasts</p> <p><font color="#808080">1. Introduction to PKAP. <em>coming soon</em><br>2. The Mundane Matter of Sustenance. <em>coming soon</em></font><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/03 Excavations on Vigla_ Week One.mp3">3. Excavations on Vigla: Week One</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon.gif"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="16" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP Podcast 1: Week One on Vigla STATUS: Draft ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-podcast-1 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 06/08/2008 09:12:13 AM ----BODY: <p>Loyal readers of this blog know that PKAP has long been interested in experimenting with multi- and New Media approaches to archaeological experiment.&nbsp; In that spirit we are pleased to introduce the first in a series of PKAP Podcasts.&nbsp;&nbsp; Entitled<em> Voices of Archaeology</em>, these podcasts will introduce you the various work of the PKAP team in the voice of the archaeologists, volunteers, and staff who are doing it.&nbsp; </p> <p>Our series of Podcasts will begin with a brief introduction to our work on Vigla by David Pettegrew and his team excavating there.&nbsp; The Podcasts are all in MP3 format, easy to upload to your portable music play or on your desktop.</p> <p><em>Voices of Archaeology </em>Podcasts</p> <p><font color="#808080">1. Introduction to PKAP. <em>coming soon</em><br>2. The Mundane Matter of Sustenance. <em>coming soon</em></font><br><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/PodCasts/03 Excavations on Vigla_ Week One.mp3">3. Excavations on Vigla: Week One</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/podcasticon.gif"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="16" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/podcasticon_thumb.gif" width="61" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Vanished Basilica STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-vanished-ba CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/08/2008 07:13:02 AM -----

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BODY: <p>It's taken me almost a whole week excavating to let go of our year long belief that we would find an Early Christian basilica atop the height of Vigla.&nbsp; We simply could not find any evidence of the feature that we had interpreted as an apse on the geophysical work done last year.&nbsp; Moreover, we have turned up almost no Early Christian (Late Roman) pottery in our excavations.&nbsp; </p> <p>Our excavations have reveal, however, monumental architecture.&nbsp; At least one massive wall (close to a meter in width) as well as a very complex trench with several large ashlar blocks.&nbsp; Moreover, the vast majority of pottery appears to be Hellenistic in date.&nbsp; Our new hypothesis, which relies on only a very, very small sample of material, is that there was a sanctuary on the height of Vigla.&nbsp; Hopefully our excavations, designed as they were to determine the length and width of an Early Christian church, will produce enough chronological and functional evidence to allow us to press this point.</p> <p>The fact remains that parts of the fortification wall around the circumference of the height still appear Late Roman in construction style -- in particular the use of a white, gypsum based mortar that is very similar to the mortar used in the clearly the Late Roman buildings on the plain of Koutsopetria.&nbsp; Unfortunately most of the wall does not show any signs of this diagnostic mortar.&nbsp; Our confidence has been sufficiently shaken in our ability to date a monumental phase on Vigla to a Late Roman date that we have decided to dig a small probe to try to date a particularly well preserved stretch of fortification wall.&nbsp; The biggest challenge is that the wall runs along the slope of the steep rise making it difficult to excavate.&nbsp; We have a small section of the wall that is not only characteristic of the chronologically ambiguous sections of the wall in general (i.e. not clearly Late Roman) and situated on a relatively stable slope.&nbsp; We began excavating this wall on Friday and hope to find datable foundation deposits. </p> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Multitasking PKAP STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: multitasking-pk

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CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/04/2008 11:48:42 AM ----BODY: <p>As readers of this blog know, this week we've started running morning and afternoon sessions as the British ranges are not being used in the mornings.&nbsp; So teams head out into the field a little before 7 am for excavating and around 7:30 for mapping.&nbsp; We come back from the field around 12 for lunch and then return to the field with full field teams (around 20 people) in the PM.&nbsp; We've gotten so desperate to work that we've even impressed our camp manager into service!</p> <p>The PKAP directors -- me. David. and Scott -- assisted by Dimitri Nakassis, our field manager, are left to oversee numerous tasks each day.&nbsp; In the mornings, along with one excavation team, a team of 2 continues to map Vigla and Koutsopetria with our now-functioning Trimble differential GPS.&nbsp; Another team of two is doing a scale drawing of Maria Hadjicosti's excavated room at Koutsopetria.&nbsp; At the same time a team of 5 is processing artifacts from the 2007 field season, Maria Hadjicosti's 1993 and 1999 excavations, and the finds coming in from our excavations this year.&nbsp; They are also checking the pottery that we prepared formal, detailed catalogue entries for in 2006 and 2007 (this was pottery collected from the survey in 2004 and 2005).</p> <p>In the afternoon we have two areas of excavation open and two trenches in each area each with a trench supervisor.&nbsp; At the same time we are mapping with the Trimble GPS and running a survey team of 5 which is completing the last few areas that remain unsurveyed after three fields of fieldwork.</p> <p>Almost all of this data is brought together in our GIS and access databases with a bewildering array of location numbers, names, and accession numbers.&nbsp; And it should largely be comparable between areas, survey methods, and different times!</p> <p>It feels chaotic on a day to day basis, but every now and then when things are running smoothly there is a moment of serenity -- a brief gap in the bustle -- that makes me feel like our goals for the 2008 field season, might, in fact, be possible...</p> <p>Now if we can just find the apse for our theorized (and increasingly theoretical) Early Christian basilica on Vigla rather than an alarmingly straight wall, bits of mud brick, and much earlier artifacts.</p> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT:

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AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.185.143.66 URL: DATE: 06/07/2008 12:48:27 PM Don't despair on Vigla basilica. In many ways, a straight wall and mud brick might be much more interesting. Have enjoyed following your day-to-day. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Depositional Processes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: depositional-pr CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/31/2008 11:55:05 AM ----BODY: <p>Archaeologists are particularly interested in the various processes whereby artifacts become deposited in "archaeological" (that is documented by archaeologists) contexts.&nbsp; Our site on Vigla is littered with modern trash that is in the process of becoming physically embedded in the soil matrix and working its way out of sight.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ViglaTrash2.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="ViglaTrash2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ViglaTrash2_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ViglaTrash.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="ViglaTrash" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ViglaTrash_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">Plastic and aluminum are the modern equivalents of the ceramics from antiquity that provide the basic framework for understanding the chronology of ancient sites.&nbsp; Like ceramics, plastic bottles and beer cans are hardy and will not break down easily in the soil and will surely assist the archaeologists of the future in establishing the chronologies of various stratigraphic levels.&nbsp; Moreover, the discard of modern trash is a relatively well-understood practice allowing archaeologists to make the easy link between the material evidence on the ground and the human practices that produced them.</p> <p align="left">Some despositional events, however, defy explanation.&nbsp; For example, we discovered a nice assemblage of Hellenistic pottery in a small and incredibly thorny bush!</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PotBush1_1.jpg"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PotBush2.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="PotBush2"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PotBush2_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PotBush1_1.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="PotBush1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PotBush1_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p align="left">We quickly determined that the result of some bizarre depositional process (perhaps involving looters or a massive collapse of a local cliff face) created a version of ceramicist hell.&nbsp; Our ceramicist, Scott Moore, had to sacrifice flesh to these thorny guardians to get his hands on these well-preserved sherds.&nbsp; At least one sherd remains persistently out of reach leading to our ceramicist to repeatedly thrust his hand into the thicker bush to trying to extricate it!</p> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Sense of Place at Pyla-Koutsopetria STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-sense-of-plac CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/30/2008 12:10:50 AM ----BODY: <p>We were visited by Maria Hadjicosti today and she spent the morning walking our site with us.&nbsp; We are collaborating with her and the Department of Antiquities to publish the results from her excavations at <em><a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria</a> </em>in the 1990s.&nbsp; These excavations were conducted on her family's lands which now fall within the British Sovereign Area on the island. The remains at the site were initially discovered by her cousin during the deep ploughing of the land (see on Pottery and Plowzones).&nbsp; Maria and some colleagues undertook the excavations at the

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site on their own time, digging on weekends and days off uncovering a single room and part of the apse.&nbsp; The room included the collapsed remains of an impressive double vault spanning a space decorated with plaster wall painting, Proconnesian marble revetment, and moulded gypsum decoration.&nbsp; She was very encouraging concerning our work at the area which was important for the success of the project this year.&nbsp; </p> <p>More important than this, however, was that she shared with us some of the recent history of the place of Pyla<u><em>Koutsopetria</em></u>.&nbsp; She told us about her grandfather's gardens along the coastal road which grew watermellons and described her childhood visits to these gardens and the sea.&nbsp; She told us about how the women in the family used to bring meals down from Pyla Village to the laborers in their fields down along the coast during the harvest time.&nbsp; The fields that her family worked were gradually distributed through the various members of her family, many of whom now live in the UK and the US, and some of them became part of the British base at Dhekelia.&nbsp; The long ridgeline of Kokkikokremos and Vigla was Kazama which she called "our mountain" and villagers from Pyla and the other villages in the area would travel to the mountain to collect herbs, horta, flowers during the springtime, and honey.&nbsp; </p> <p>Finally, her visit officially began the excavation season.&nbsp; As per usual with all things PKAP a slight GIS/GPS glitch delayed the ceremonial first trowel-ing of the soil at Vigla and Kokkinokremos, but I am working this morning to un-glitch our data and we'll be ready to go for real this afternoon.&nbsp; Hopefully we'll have photographs of our first day excavation posted by the weekend.</p> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a></em><em>.</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: On Pottery and Plowzones STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: on-pottery-and CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/26/2008 02:02:01 PM ----BODY:

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<p>The plow (or plough as our British colleagues would say) is an inelegant tool for excavating, but nevertheless regularly produces interesting results.&nbsp; The site of <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria </a>remains largely under cultivation (and we enjoy good relations with the farmers who lease their land from the British Ministry of Defense)so every year the plow brings up expected and sometimes exciting results. This past year a farmer put in some beautifully tilled and irrigated fields immediately adjacent to an area excavated in the mid 1990s by Maria Hadjicosti.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Plough1.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="Plough1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Plough1_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><br><em>The hill of Vigla with the tilled fields</em></p> <p>Around the edge of the field the farmer used a tool that looks like a giant hook.&nbsp; He dragged around the base of a raised area that almost certainly represents a buried structure. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Plough2.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="Plough2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Plough2_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em> <br>The work of the hook</em></p> <p>The results were impressive including sizable chunks of architectural gypsum that you can see in the photo below.&nbsp; The white is roof tiles, plaster and mortar that was pulled up by the plow. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Ploughgypsum.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="Ploughgypsum" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Ploughgypsum_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></em></a><br><em>Plows, Pottery, and Gypsum</em></p> <p align="left">Our entire site was tilled this past year pulling up a whole new range of material and the dry soil makes the pottery and plaster brought up over the past year particularly visible.&nbsp; Part of our season goals will be to document some of this material.</p> <p align="left">For more on the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a> see our sister blogs: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PylaKoutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">PylaKoutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David Terry EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.230.58.53 URL: http://profile.typekey.com/david_terry/ DATE: 05/29/2008 09:28:57 PM Very interesting. This sort of goes to support your theory that you can never survey too much, eh? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: New Arrivals (Mo' Peoples, Mo' Problems) STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: new-arrivals-mo CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/25/2008 09:32:31 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the weekend the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a> doubled in size.&nbsp; On Thursday, my wife, Susan Caraher, and Bret Weber, our camp manager arrived.&nbsp; Friday saw the arrival of David Pettegrew, his wife Katie, and three students from Messiah College in Pennsylvania as well as Chris Gust, a UND graduate student in History and three students from Scott Moore's home institution, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.&nbsp; On Saturday Dallas DeForest, a graduate student at Ohio State arrived and the final undergraduate is slated to arrive later this afternoon.</p> <p>The new arrivals add to the excitement and bustle of PKAP, but also add a significant level of complexity.&nbsp; The project needs now to coordinate buying food and cooking for a group of 20, organizing activities and work schedules for a group spread over 4 apartments in the building, and bringing 20 folks of varying archaeological experience up to a basic level of competence quickly.&nbsp; Such complexity begets meetings as the project slid from a comfortable "low grid" collegiality toward the beginnings of a "higher grid" and more bureaucratized level of hierarchical management. </p> <p>Meetings absorbed nearly half of the day on Saturday as various groups of senior folks in PKAP sat down to discuss everything from publication plans to our itinerary for next week.&nbsp; For example, Mara Horowitz our Bronze Age ceramicist leaves on Sunday, so it was vital that we all agree to her role in the project's final publication.&nbsp; Our final publication will have as many as 10 co-authors of various sections so we needed to make sure that, on the one hand, no one felt that their speciality was infringed upon and understood their specific responsibilities in the final product, and, on the other hand, that all of the various authors understood the goals, organization, and tone of the final monograph. The challenge will be, of course, balancing between our desire for multiple narratives and discourses produced by individual authors who will each focus on a specific aspect of the project, and the need to produce a text broadly legible by scholars interested in the diachronic history of the micro region of Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em>.&nbsp; </p> <p>Even as we accept a certain element of multivocality in our approach to the monograph, we were planning an

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orientation for undergraduates and our new graduate student volunteers.&nbsp; This orientation seeks in part to impose a common methodological and procedural basis for the project.&nbsp; We suggest (rather than impose?) a common archaeological and practical map on the city of Larnaka, for example, as well as reinforcing the students' understanding of the basic procedures in the museum and in the field.&nbsp; We strongly emphasize the relationship between the material collected during survey and excavation and the project's databases and Geographic Information Systems interface which form the basis for the quantitative analysis of at least our ceramic evidence.&nbsp; So while allowing for a alternative voices and narratives in our interpretation, our procedures and methods for the student volunteers are, for the time at least, are quite linear and direct.&nbsp; </p> <p>Of course, the perspectives of students and the staff -- like those that will appear in this and the other PKAP blogs -- form another narrative component of our fieldwork and a particularly chaotic and multivocal one at that.&nbsp; The goal is a balance between the procedural consistency of our fieldwork and the swirling contradictions and irregularities in the narratives that make up the experience of archaeology. </p> <p><em>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><em>Pyla -Koutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</em></a><em>, and </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/"><em>Arch aeology of the Mediterranean World</em></a><em>.</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Drudgery of Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-drudgery-of CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/22/2008 11:31:10 AM ----BODY: <p>While Scott Moore and Mara Horowitz, ably assisted by Michael "Bolton" Brown and Brandon Olson, produce more data by reading the artifacts collected during the 2007 field season, I have spent today processing artifacts analyzed during 2006.&nbsp; In particular, I've been relabeling the near 2000 digital photos taken last year.&nbsp; This is merely a prelude before checking them against the data in our data base.&nbsp; With the advent of digital photography,

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photographing huge quantities of artifact is no longer a prohibitive expense.&nbsp; We have produced close to 10,000 digital photographs of the site and of artifacts over the last 5 years almost all of them in high resolution digital formats.&nbsp; They all need to be labeled in a standard way and linked, somehow, to attribute data produced by the field teams and the ceramicist.&nbsp; I also worked on developing our new database for the excavation which will allow us to record systematically our descriptions of stratigraphy (that is the layers of soil that form the context for all cultural material) and the features in the trenches as well as trench photographs, top plans, and sections.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BillData.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="271" alt="BillData" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BillData_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Dimitri Nakassis and I (together we are filling in for my wife, Susan, as registrar at the museum) experienced another aspect of this data drudgery earlier in the day when we visited remote warehouse for the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum looking for five crates of pottery from our site that were stored remotely last year.&nbsp; The Larnaka Museum houses the material from the entire Larnaka district as well as material from various other excavated sites that are now in the occupied northern half of the island.&nbsp; The amount of finds from these sites is as immense as any district in the Mediterranean basin.&nbsp; The remote warehouse reflects this in its vast size.&nbsp; Three or four warehouse buildings flank an industrial yard strewn with all the elements necessary for the proper excavation and maintenance of an archaeological site: chain fence, wood planks, scaffolding, cement footings, roof tiles, et c.&nbsp; The industrial metal doors of the warehouse slid aside to reveal several huge rooms with 12 foot ceilings, lined with glass cases which were filled with trays labeled by site.&nbsp; The rows upon rows of neatly stored and labeled material evoked the shelves of a research library.&nbsp; The finds, broken, mundane, and magnificent, bore the names of the major sites in the area: Kition, Halla Sultan Tekke, the sites of the Kalavassos and Maroni Valleys, along with trays inscribed with legendary words like Enkomi.&nbsp; </p> <p>Archaeology produces data -- intellectual, material, ceramic, paper, and digital -- and this data requires constant maintenance.&nbsp; The work is tedious.&nbsp; The scale, even for a small project, can seem colossal.&nbsp; Good practices, however, are essential to the continued vitality of the field and the ability for future generations of scholars to revisit and restudy the results.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: On Frustration and Patience in Archaeological Field Projects STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: on-frustration CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/20/2008 11:01:02 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the key elements of working on any collaborative project is the ability to mitigate frustration with patience. The goal of archaeology, no matter how systematic and routine, is the moment of discovery.&nbsp; In the case of survey projects like ours at <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em></a>, discovery is rarely the kind of eureka moment sensationalized in the gripping narratives of the opening of a tomb in Egypt or the uncovering of a piece of monumental architecture.&nbsp; The moment of discovery in survey archaeology is extended and derives from painstaking processes: the systematic walking of fields, the reading of collected ceramics, and the plotting of finds across digital maps, and the querying and re-querying of ever expanding data sets in database programs.&nbsp; </p> <p>The protracted moment of discovery in survey archaeology inevitably leads to a persistent feeling of frustration as each process takes seemingly forever.&nbsp; Each delay in working in the field, reading the sherds collected from the field, gathering landscape information from the site, or processing spatial data gnaws at one's psyche.&nbsp; The in evitable frustrations associated with collaborative fieldwork attempts to drain away, little by the little, the euphoria, excitement, and energy almost inherent in the experience of actually handling artifacts whose meaning and significance runs from your own fingertips to an experience and culture immediate only long before.&nbsp; In one sense, the sherds waited far longer to be discovered, analyzed, and promoted to the status of "cultural heritage" than the archaeologist has waited to produce meaningful and significant assemblages from the data collected in the field.&nbsp; (As my colleague David Pettegrew is fond to say when I get particularly impatient "there is always more archaeology").&nbsp; But this does little to make me better when things are not going as quickly or as easily as planned.</p> <p>So, today was frustrating.&nbsp; Our GPS unit is not working exactly as we had anticipated.&nbsp; The software is not doing exactly what we want it to do either.&nbsp; We are working with people in the US to resolve this and this blew up the afternoon.&nbsp; I spent 3 crushing hours attempting to processes the very small quantity of data collected yesterday to no avail.</p> <p>But today had promise too.&nbsp; Scott and our Bronze Age ceramicist began to read pottery collected in 2007.&nbsp; Moreover, Dr. Maria Hadjicosti, our Cypriot collaborator, paid a visit to the museum and not only helped us get space in the museum work room, but also gave us permission to work in the museum on Mondays.&nbsp; Scott will begin to process the context pottery from her excavations next week.&nbsp; After a visit to the site of her excavations in 1993 and 1999, I will begin to analyze the architectural fragments in conjunction with Sarah Lepinki's work on the architectural gypsum and wall painting.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, frustration.&nbsp; No moments of euphoria today.&nbsp; But some signs of patience rewarded.</p> <p>For more on the PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project see our sister blogs: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PylaKoutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></a><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">PylaKoutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Robinson Photographs STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-robinson-p CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 05/18/2008 11:00:02 PM ----BODY: <p>Steven Robinson has provided me with some more photographs from his collection of his father's, <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/Robinson/home.html">Elwyn B. Robinson</a>'s, photographs(see also: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/05/im ages-from-the.html">Images from the History of the University of North Dakota</a>).&nbsp; The first photo shows Robinson while at Oberlin where he received his B.A.&nbsp; He studied at Oberlin from 1924-1928</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ElwynAtOberlin.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="ElwynAtOberlin" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ElwynAtOberlin_thumb.jpg" width="217" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br>Robinson at Oberlin (1924-1928)</p> <p>Two additional photos of note were taken in the early 1940s.&nbsp; Of particular note is the photograph of Clarence Perkins (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/cl arence-perkin.html">Clarence Perkins and History at the University of North Dakota</a>) evidently taken in 1941.&nbsp; These were presumably shot with Robinson's Argus AF camera which he purchased in 1938 and used through 1947 .&nbsp; On the Argus AF camera from his autobiography (Chapter 6):</p> <blockquote> <p>So I bought an Argus AF the summer or fall of 1938, an Americanmade 35mm camera, for $15.00. It was a fine camera with a f 4.5 lens and a shutter with speeds from 1/25 to 1/200 of a second and a bulb setting as well for time exposures. <p>I believe that my father gave me a tripod he was not using. Later I bought a cable release, necessary for time exposures, a table-top tripod with an adjustable top for holding the camera at any desired angle, an Argus enlarger in 1939, and some trays. I believe I got a plastic developing

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tank as a Christmas present. (I still had that tank when I gave all my darkroom equipment to Steve in 1979 or 1980.) <p>The Argus enlarger, $12.50, was a most ingenious design. With the back of the camera removed, it fitted into the enlarger so that the camera lens became the enlarger lens and the diaphragm of the shutter could be used to regulate the light passing through the lens and also the depth of focus. </p></blockquote> <p>&nbsp; The captions on these photos were kindly provided by Steve Robinson.&nbsp; I am not entirely certain who "Brown" is in the first photo, but I suspect he is the land owner.&nbsp; Marie Thormosgaard must be the Dean of the Law School's wife. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/perkins1941.jpg"><strong><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="269" alt="perkins1941" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/perkins1941_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></strong></a><br>Brown, Dr. Perkins, Marie Thormosgard ca. 1941<br></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/EBR-ca1944.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="254" alt="EBRca1944" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/EBR-ca1944_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br>Robinson at 425 Princeton looking North, ca. 1942-4 </p> <p align="center"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project at the International Association for Classical Archaeology Congress, Rome. STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsope-1 CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/17/2008 07:20:53 AM ----BODY: <p>The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project will be presenting a paper at the <a href="http://www.aiac.org/ing/congresso_2008/home.htm">International Association for Classical Archaeology Congress in Rome</a> (22-26 September 2008).&nbsp; It will be in a panel on Exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; The other papers in the panel and our abstract are listed below.&nbsp; </p> <p>For more on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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see our sister blogs: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PylaKoutsopetria Graduate Student Weblog</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">PylaKoutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</a>.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><b>Session Title: Exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean</b></p><b></b> <p><b>Session Coordinator: James Whitley, University of Cardiff</b></p><b></b> <p><b>Discussant: Professor Carla Antonaccio, Duke University </b></p><b></b> <p><b>Session Abstract</b></p><b></b> <p>This session looks at a number of interrelated issues covered by the word exchange (which necessarily covers, but is not limited by, all forms of trade), and the technological and geographical conditions that made such exchange possible (particularly Mediterranean ‚Äòconnectivity‚Äô). First it looks at the exchange of goods, whether primarily social (as gifts or other ‚Äòentangled objects‚Äô) or commercial (as commodities), and the social and economic networks these exchanges create. Second, it looks at how the exchange of goods mediates changes in technology, ideas and culture ‚Äì exchange, that is, as a medium of acculturation. It seeks to relate these wider patterns to the particular, local circumstances of two of the East Mediterranean‚Äôs larger islands, namely Crete and Cyprus, whose respective social and economic development take radically paths in the Early Iron Age and Archaic periods. </p><b></b><b></b> <p><b>PAPERS</b></p><b></b> <p><b>Transport of goods in the Mediterranean region from the Geometric to the Classical </b><b>period</b><b> Images and meanings</b></p> <p>Athina Chatzidimitriou, <i>Hellenic Ministry of Culture</i> </p> <p>This paper presents various aspects of the iconography and sources related to the transport of goods, as attested from the Geometric to the Classical period. The paper focuses on Greek finds, such as the ones from Attica, as well as from Italian, Greek or indigenous Mediterranean centres. A small number of clay models of wheeled animals shown loaded with transport amphorae were deposited as offerings in Greek graves as early as the Geometric period. Later, carts (hamaxa or ap√®n√®) used for transporting people on special occasions such as weddings, funerals and religious festivals, as well as heavy goods, are depicted in the Archaic and Classical Attic and Boeotian vase painting. A number of vases bear representations of two-wheeled carts drawn by mules, loaded especially with amphorae, the main storage vessel for the trading of wine and oil throughout the Mediterranean. The easy carrying of the amphorae and other products over short distances by the use of a pole, usually held by two men is also attested. </p> <p>In the same period, two-wheel wagons, with similar construction and constituent parts to those of the Attic vase painting occur in the art and finds of the region of Etruria and in the colonies of Magna Graecia. In the 5th to the 4th century B.C. a number of figurines of mules and horses, loaded with vases and other goods, are found in the workshops of Greek coroplastic centers as well as in Cyprus. </p> <p>Merchant ships, although the most common means of goods-transportation, are seen to have been rarely represented on vase painting, when compared to war ship images. Clay models and depictions of merchant ships, found in Greece and Cyprus, tend to share construction similarities with depictions of the same on Etruscan vessels. </p> <p>From the study of transport methods, we can therefore trace the development of commercial relations between various Mediterranean centers. These relations underline the primary role of trade and exchange of goods in the development of cultures in the Mediterranean area. </p> <p><b>Trade and Exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Model from Cyprus</b></p> <p>William R Caraher, <i>University of North Dakota </i><a href="mailto:[email protected]"><br></a>R.

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Scott Moore, <i>Indiana</i><i> University of Pennsylvania<br></i>David K. Pettegrew, <i>Messiah</i><i> College</i></p> <p>Traditional work on the Late Roman economy focused on the role of urban areas as large coastal commercial centers. More recently, however, scholars have begun to recognize the important place of mid-sized coastal sites in Late Antique exchange systems. These smaller nodes of exchange supported independent trade routes standing between urban centers and more rural areas of agricultural production and allowed inhabitants of non-coastal and ex-urban areas the opportunity to participate in</p> <p>economic and cultural exchange. This paper provides a case study of a Pyla<i>Koutsopetria</i>, a mid-sized, Late Antique harbor town of between 30 and 50 ha. situated 10 kilometers east of ancient Kition, Cyprus. Five seasons of archaeological fieldwork by the Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria </i>Archaeological Project have produced archaeological evidence for local and interregional exchange on the micro-regional level. The midsized site of Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria </i>suggests a decentralized pattern connectivity which links exurban and rural regions in Cyprus to broader Mediterranean currents. This connectivity not only provided an economic lifeline but also an opportunity for cultural exchange independent from dominant urban areas. This study considers how greater Mediterranean connectivity supported by an increased number of recognized autonomous economic nodes challenges the longstanding view of ancient culture as an urban phenomenon.</p> <p><strong>Social networks and exchange in ancient Greece: the evidence of weight standards (a case study) .</strong></p> <p>Katerina Panagopoulou, <i>University</i><i> of Crete</i> </p> <p>The present paper capitalizes on the key convention in identifying monetary networks in antiquity, that of a weight standard. A weight standard may be defined as a unit of weight, the fractions or multiples of which provided the various denominations of a coin issue. The unit of weight adopted often varied from place to place. It was normal for a state to adopt (and adapt) for its coin issues the weight standard employed in the economic transactions in which it participated. A state (as an issuing authority) might also employ different weight standards for different coin issues, in order to facilitate transactions lying on different monetary conventions. In order to investigate the nature of the market defined through this convention, I will explore the structure of the market in a specific area through the application of the social networks’ theory. I will then examine the processual history of the integration of this given area into more global monetary systems dominated by standards as widely accepted as the Attic in the Hellenistic period. I will then focus on the impact that the integration of this area into the <i>lingua franca</i> of the Classical and Hellenistic period had upon local networks.</p> <p><b>Pottery production in Iron Age Crete viewed in the context of regional and external trade networks: A ceramic petrology perspective</b></p> <p>Marie-Claude Boileau, <i>Fitch Laboratory, British School at Athens, Greece</i> <sup><br></sup>James Whitley, <em>School of History and Archaeology, Cardiff University, UK</em><br>Anna Lucia D’Agata, <i>Istituto di studi sulle civiltà dell’Egeo e del Vicino Oriente, CNR, Rome, Italy</i> </p> <p>This study uses an integrated approach combining ceramic petrology to stylistic and contextual data to investigate how production of coarse utilitarian pottery in Central Crete was influenced by regional and external trade networks from the 12th to the 7th centuries BC. The gap in the textual record makes the Cretan ‘Dark Age’ highly dependent on material evidence to study the social developments which led to the emergence of the polis. Yet, scientific analyses of ceramics from this post-prehistoric period have been very few and deal mainly with fine decorated wares. In this regard, the scientific analysis of stratified pottery from the British excavations of Knossos in NorthCentral Crete and the Greek-Italian excavations of Thronos-Kephala (ancient Sybrita) in Central-Western Crete, two settlements showing uninterrupted Early

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Iron Age occupation with deposits belonging to domestic, funerary and ritual contexts, will significantly contribute to the current understanding of the early Greek period. The comparative study of the two assemblages is expected to provide a better understanding of the long-term changes and impact of external influence on the island’s potting traditions, especially from the 10 c. onwards.</p><b></b> <p><b>The Cypriot Kingdoms in the Archaic Age: a Multicultural Experience in the Eastern Mediterranean.</b></p> <p>Anna Cannavò, <i>Scuola Normale Superiore – Pisa and Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée «Jean Pouilloux» - Lyon</i> </p> <p>The Cypriot kingship in the Archaic Age is an interesting case of interaction between cultural experiences of different origin. Far from being merely a survival of the Mycenaean-type royalty or an imitation of the Phoenician city-kingdoms, it presents some features of both these institutions, modified and adapted to a different, very heterogeneous cultural context. Spurred and conditioned from time to time by greater and more complex realities active at the border of their world – the Neo-Assyrian empire, 26th dynasty Egypt, the Phoenician city-states, the expanding Greek world – the Cypriot kingdoms evolved during the Archaic Age in original and partially recoverable manners. </p> <p>During the analysis the results of the excavations conducted in different sites of the island – Kition, Amathous, Paphos, Salamis - shall be considered. A comparison with the data resulting from the epigraphic and literary evidence shall be proposed: the textual evidence originates largely from the outside of the island, so the documents have to be read with the greatest attention to their context of provenance. At the end a development model, which accounts for the role and the contribution of each culture involved in the process, shall be proposed, thanks also to the comparison with similar realities in the Mediterranean world of the Archaic Age. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/"></p></a> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Byzantine Dreams in Athens STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: byzantine-dream CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 05/15/2008 07:54:24 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv

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eWriter/image_50.png"></a><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="244" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_41.png" width="198" align="left" border="0"></a>I was just sent the program for a conference&nbsp; at the end of this month in Athens on "<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/DreamsAthensMay2008Program.pdf">Drea ms and Visions in Late Antiquity and Byzantium</a>".&nbsp; The program looks full of interesting approaches to dreaming ranging from the literary to the psychoanalytical.&nbsp; The afternoon panel on the first day looks particularly interesting with papers by Steven Obherhelman, Maria Mavroudi, and Charles Stewart, the first and the last of which consider the relationship between Ancient or Byzantine and Modern dream practices.&nbsp; None of the papers appear explicitly deal with the relationship between archaeology and dreams (as in some of my earlier posts: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology</a>), judging from the titles, with inventio, so my research might have had something to add to these proceedings.&nbsp; It's always heartening to open a conference program like this one and <em>not </em>see paper dealing with my current research. <p align="left">It is all too predictable that a conference with a focus that falls near one of my current research areas would happen less than two weeks after I leave the country!</p></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Blog Carnival STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetr CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 05/13/2008 09:29:59 PM ----BODY: <p>As many of my regular readers know, the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> has experimented with using the "New Media" to expand the accessibility of our fieldwork on Cyprus.&nbsp; In particular we've used video and blogs to introduce our project, its participants, and our site to the wider community both on Cyprus and around the world. <p>This year we are planning the most ambitious project yet.&nbsp; In terms of archaeology, we are planning to both survey and excavate as well as

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continuing our geophysical work, creating high-resolution maps of the entire site, and completing the documentation of the material collected during last year's fieldwork.&nbsp; The team will be larger than ever before and at most times this season we will average more than twenty people ranging from faculty with extensive fieldwork experiments to the least experienced undergraduate volunteers.&nbsp; <p>The experiences of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Team will appear on the internet with an unprecedented degree of transparency.&nbsp; PKAP is planning an almost continuous blog carnival documenting the various perspectives on the the project.&nbsp; To do this we have set up three new blogs where we hope to be almost continuous activity.&nbsp; <p>The <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/">PylaKoutsopetria Season Staff Blog</a> will document the reflections of the PKAP staff including the project's directors, Scott Moore and David Pettegrew, the field director Dimitri Nakassis, our prehistoric specialist, Michael Brown, our registrars, Susie Caraher and Katie Pettegrew, and our camp manager Brett Weber.&nbsp; <p>The <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PylaKoutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives</a> Blog began last year and this year will continue to provide a venue for the reflections of our graduate students: Brandon Olson, from Penn State, Chris Gust, from the University of North Dakota, Dallas DeForest, from Ohio State, and Mat Dalton, our illustrator and leader of the survey team.&nbsp; This group has already begun to blog on their experiences as they prepare for our field season! <p>The <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/">PylaKoutsopetria Undergraduate Perspectives</a> Blog is a new feature for this year.&nbsp; It will feature undergraduates from Messiah College and Indiana University of Pennsylvania blogging on all aspects of the project.&nbsp; </p> <p>So follow one or all of these blogs over the next six weeks and share with us the excitement, tedium, frustration, and comradery of an archaeological project.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 05/17/2008 08:16:35 PM blog carnival- sounds fun! I look forward to reading about your field season as it happens. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The End of One Thing and the Beginning of Something Else... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-end-of-one CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 05/13/2008 12:36:18 AM ----BODY: <p>I leave the comfortable confines of the American School early tomorrow morning for the beginning of my field season in Cyprus.&nbsp; It was an exciting year to be at the American School for many reasons.&nbsp; First, I was able to focus heavily on my own research including my work on Cyprus on the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>, on Early Christian epigraphy, architecture, and decoration.&nbsp; I was able to develop a small (but rapidly growing) project on "dream archaeology" and begin to conceptualize more formally how to approach editing the autobiography of a scholar as accomplished as <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/Robinson/home.html">Elwyn B. Robinson</a>.&nbsp; I was also able to form many new professional and personal relationships.&nbsp; I learned more about the Archaic religion in Athens, the Peloponnesian agora, the Great Mother, Greek landscape and survey archaeology, Roman figurines and magical objects from the Athenian Agora, and the official and unofficial history of the American School.&nbsp; </p> <p>I also had frontrow seats for some of the interesting changes taking place at the School.&nbsp; The lecture series at <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/cotsen/">Cotsen Hall</a> was more extensive than I could remember or even imagine.&nbsp; The regular program included a trip to Western Macedonia and lectures on GIS and Survey Archaeology.&nbsp; There was a new website.&nbsp; Women wearing uniforms with the words "Cleaning Team" on the back introduced a new policy where all members of the school community will be required to wear uniforms clearly marking their position in the community ("<a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/admissionmembership/memberships#regular">Regular Members</a> Team", "Academic Team", "Management Team", and the very important "Board of Trustees Team").&nbsp; This will certainly cut down on those awkward moments when you accidentally assume that a member of the Board of Trustees is the person responsible for cleaning your office!</p> <p>The <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/BlegenLibrary//">Blegen</a>, <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/gennadius/g_index.htm">Gennadius</a>, and neighboring British School Libraries continue to amaze me.&nbsp; If you think that you need a book that is not in one of these three excellent libraries, it is probably the first sign of a much deeper problem with your own research model.&nbsp; I might be kidding, but it is hard to say.</p> <p>I also was supported by a good group of colleagues in the new director, Jack Davis, who generously gave me time off to pursue my own research, in the Mellon Professor, John Oakley, who welcomed my onto his flawlessly organized trips and encouraged my regular contributions, and the two Whitehead Professors, Kirk Ormand and Barbara Barletta.&nbsp; Chuck Jones at the Blegen consistently impressed me with just how much he understands about the digital media and Maria Georgopoulou at the Gennadius gave me a venue to pursue and present my research.&nbsp; The staff at Loring Hall made the American School a welcoming place to call home and patiently saw to the slow improvement of my Greek.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/OxiDay2007_1.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="OxiDay2007" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/OxiDay2007_thumb_1.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The other people that I need to thank here are all those back at the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> who allowed me to take advantage of this year away.&nbsp; My colleagues in the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a> kept me in the loop on things.&nbsp; More importantly, however, my wife made my stay here possible with her patient support. </p> <p align="left">I leave for Cyprus tomorrow and the beginning of the PKAP season.&nbsp; This will bring some exciting changes to this blog! So stay tuned even as I end one thing and begin something else...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 194.219.34.195 URL: http://www.etana.org/abzu DATE: 05/13/2008 08:16:58 AM Bon Voyage Bill! It was good to get to know you a little. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 64.252.254.182 URL: DATE: 05/14/2008 03:07:12 PM My daily routine will be much impoverished without Bill's blogging from Athens. I'll stay tuned on PKAP's postings. A huge thanks goes out to Bill from all of us in the US who kept in touch with the ASCSA program through his blog. Have an unbeatable field season. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 83.97.61.253 URL: DATE: 05/22/2008 05:07:57 AM I have really enjoyed reading this blog over the past academic year. Bill points out some very important aspects of spending time the ASCSA. One of them is that the people one meets there are an incredibly valuable resource. A second is that the talks given at the foreign schools in Athens frequently disseminate valuable information from ongoing archaeological projects. This results in an environment where it is possible to learn a great deal about current, often still unpublished, research. This means that those who are studying at the ASCSA (or merely take lunch, tea, and ouzo there) can learn about ongoing research in Greece to an extent that is impossible stateside. That is one reason that I think Bill‚Äôs blog is particularly valuable. He has

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provided those of us teaching in the US, and anywhere else in the world, an ear to the discussions at the ASCSA that I found so valuable during my time there. Cheers! Have fun in Cyprus! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar Cline EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 83.97.61.253 URL: DATE: 05/22/2008 05:09:32 AM I have really enjoyed reading this blog over the past academic year. Bill points out some very important aspects of spending time the ASCSA. One of them is that the people one meets there are an incredibly valuable resource. A second is that the talks given at the foreign schools in Athens frequently disseminate valuable information from ongoing archaeological projects. This results in an environment where it is possible to learn a great deal about current, often still unpublished, research. This means that those who are studying at the ASCSA (or merely take lunch, tea, and ouzo there) can learn about ongoing research in Greece to an extent that is impossible stateside. That is one reason that I think Bill‚Äôs blog is particularly valuable. He has provided those of us teaching in the US, and anywhere else in the world, an ear to the discussions at the ASCSA that I found so valuable during my time there. Cheers! Have fun in Cyprus! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Images from the History of the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: images-from-the CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 05/12/2008 12:58:11 AM ----BODY: <p>Steven Robinson has generously provided me with some photos take by his father <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/Robinson/home.html">Elwyn B. Robinson</a>.&nbsp; Those included here were primarily taken by him in 1947 (with exception of the photograph with Dr. Robinson in it!).&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>Elwyn Robinson was an avid photographer (as was Robert Wilkins), and he came by this honestly as his father owned a professional photography studio in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. In his autobiography you can feel his excitement in his description of purchasing the camera presumably responsible for these photographs in 1947:</p> <blockquote> <p>"On May 8 I had purchased a second-hand <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_III">Leica, a model IIIb</a> manufactured before the war, paying $175.00 for the camera, case, four filters, and a sunshade. I was much excited to have one of the famous German-made cameras with an Elmar f 3.5 lens and a focal plane shutter with speeds from one second to 1/1000 of a second. In June I bought a copy of the <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/625445"><em>Leica Manual</em> by Morgan, Lester, and others</a>, and spent a good deal of time with it. I must have taken a lot of pictures that summer in the enthusiasm of having a fine camera. I can't

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remember what I did with my Argus AF, but looking back I expect that I could have taken as good pictures with that $15.00 camera as I could with the Leica. I soon devised a way I could use the Leica lens with the Argus enlarger. I owned the Leica until the 1970's when I sold the Leica to a collector for almost as much as I had paid for it. I devised a system for saving and filing the films that I took, numbering and dating them. They were finally thrown out in preparation for the move to Tufte Manor."</p></blockquote> <p>His photographs capture life in Grand Forks in the late 1940s and some of the character of the figures that populate Geiger's history of the University and my own meager offering in the history of the department.&nbsp; I particularly like the photograph of Dean Bek who must have died less than a year after this photograph was taken.&nbsp; Bek did much to see the University through the Depression and the Second World War and his famous address to President West and the faculty in 1944 captures the optimism of the post war university: <blockquote> <p>“The University is coming out of the blight and fog of depression. A new day is dawning. The depression did some terrible things to us… Before the university was hamstrung by insufficient funds it had an enviable reputation among sister institutions…” (“Remarks of Dean W.G. Bek at the Faculty Meeting of the University of September 23, 1944,” Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection. William Bek Papers. Collection #120, file 1. Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.)</p></blockquote> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Wheeler.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="404" alt="Wheeler" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Wheeler_thumb.jpg" width="341" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center">George Wheeler longtime head of the Biology Department and Famous Friend of Orin G. Libby.&nbsp; He served with Libby and Gillette on the committee that recommended the appointment of John C. West as University president.&nbsp; He was known to represent the old guard well into the 1960s when he resisted the idea of rotating department chairs introduced by President George Starcher.</p> <p align="center"><strong><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Wilkins.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="267" alt="Wilkins" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Wilkins_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br></strong>Robert Wilkins longtime member of the Department of History</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Lincoln.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="287" alt="Lincoln" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Lincoln_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Arleigh Lincoln (Sociology) and daughter Ann. The Lincolns lived at the SW corner of the intersection of Hamline &amp; 5th Ave N.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Butler.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="384" alt="Butler" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Butler_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Francis Butler (founder of the Butler Construction Co)&nbsp; who lived in the second house to the south of 425 Princeton</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/RobinsonGordon.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px;

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border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="271" alt="RobinsonGordon" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/RobinsonGordon_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><strong><br></strong>Elwyn Robinson with&nbsp; Gordon </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Thormosgaard.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="331" alt="Thormosgaard" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Thormosgaard_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Dean Thormosgaard (Law) </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Bek.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="352" alt="Bek" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Bek_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br>Dean Bek</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hi CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 05/09/2008 01:21:11 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quicker quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>Cyril Mango's lecture, "<a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/news/eventDetails/walton-lecture-bycyril-mango/">Imaging Constantinople</a>", here in Athens was very wellattended.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/cotsen/">Cotsen Hall</a> was packed!&nbsp; He imagined Middle Byzantine Constantinople to be much less monumental than the Constantinople of Justinian's time.&nbsp; Sounds like discontinuity... <li>The <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Mangosymposium.pdf">symposium celebrating Mango's 80th birthday</a> picked up on some of these themes particularly Anne McCabe's discussion of the Byzantine remains from the Athenian Agora.&nbsp; Of particular notes was <a

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href="http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/kla/sironen/sironeneng.html">Erkki Sironen's</a> discussion of verse inscriptions from the Late Antique and Early Byzantine period in Athens.&nbsp; His volume of Inscriptiones Graecae is to appear by the end of this year and will supercede his presently invaluable Helsinki dissertation: <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40388704">The late Roman and early Byzantine inscriptions of Athens and Attica</a></em>. <li>An interesting <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7381738.stm">preview of the new Acropolis Museum done on the BBC</a>.&nbsp; Word on the street here is that none of the considerable remains of the Christian Parthenon will be displayed inside the new museum including the considerable and important fragments of the church's ambo.&nbsp; This seems hard to believe as it represents such an important piece in any argument for the continuity of Greek culture from antiquity through Christian times.&nbsp; It is particularly surprising since there is so much interest at present in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/166357707">Hellenism in Byzantium</a> (e.g. see "<a href="http://www.lsa.umich.edu/UMICH/modgreek/Home/_TOPNAV_WTGC/Lectures%20at%20 U-M/ParthenonKaldellis.pdf">A Heretical (Orthodox) History of the Parthenon</a>" as a preview of Kaldellis forthcoming book: <em>The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens</em> (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)., also <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/writing-offwall-transcription-as.html">Writing off the Wall: Transcription as Resistance</a>). <li>IV International Cyprological Congress was two weeks ago in Nicosia.&nbsp; I forgot the blog about it!&nbsp; I did not attend, but everyone who did has reported that is was both well-organized and intellectually productive.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.cypriotstudies.org/English%20HTMLs/ENkiprProgramme.html">Here's a link to the program and abstracts</a>.</li></ul> <p>Two random links:</p> <ul> <li>I am looking forward to reading newly released <a href="http://niche.uwo.ca/programming-historian/index.php/Main_Page"><em>The Programming Historian</em></a><em> </em>by <a href="http://history.uwo.ca/faculty/turkel/">William J. Turkel</a> &amp; <a href="http://history.uwo.ca/faculty/maceachern/">Alan MacEachern</a>. <li>And I enjoyed Natalie Zemon Davis's reading of Michel de Certeau in the New York Review of books, "<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21375">The Quest of Michel de Certeau</a>".</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Rambling about Survey from a Regional Perspective STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-rambling-abou CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology

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DATE: 05/08/2008 01:29:07 AM ----BODY: <p>A very recent article in the <em>Journal of Archaeological Research </em>(S. A. Kowalewski, "Regional Settlement Pattern Studies," <em>JAR </em>16 (2008), 225-285) offers another in a recent spate of critiques of intensive survey in the Eastern Mediterranean (and in Greece, in particular).&nbsp; Kowalewski's general treatment of regional settlement archaeology is an interesting read and brings together examples around the world demonstrating how settlement archaeology is indeed a global paradigm for understanding human behavior in space.&nbsp; </p> <p>He singles out Mediterranean archaeology for particular criticism, however, pointing out that most Mediterranean projects do not cover sufficient territory to address questions at a regional scale.&nbsp; Drawing on definitions of regions developed in the discipline of geography, Kowalewski suggests that the smallest possible unit of study capable of providing useful conclusions regarding regional settlement is 150-250 sq. km (p. 257).&nbsp; As in his earlier publications (most notably Kowalewski and S. K. Fish eds., <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/19516061"><em>The Archaeology of Regions: The Case for Full Coverage Survey</em>. Clinton Corners, NY 2008 (originally Washington, D.C. 1990)</a>) he recommends full coverage survey rather than employing any kind of regional sampling model.&nbsp; Thus Kowalewski singled out projects like the <a href="http://www.scsp.arts.gla.ac.uk/">Sydney Cyprus Survey Project</a> for particular criticism:</p> <blockquote> <p>"The Sydney Cyprus project spent five field seasons walking fields at hand-holding spacing, in 50 m transects 500 m apart, for 6.5 km sq., only 10% of the target region, which was small anyway.&nbsp; The well-executed color maps still look like the world as seen through prison bars.&nbsp; The data are not adequate for settlement pattern analysis; the surveys are actually something else, perhaps what Bintliff revealing terms "surface artifact survey." (p. 250)</p></blockquote> <p>Blanton offered a similar critique of Mediterranean Survey in his now famous "Mediterranean Myopia" article (R.E. Blanton, <em>Antiquity </em>75 (2001), 627629).&nbsp; Both Blanton and Kowalewski's arguments, however, fail to account for the contributions of Mediterranean survey toward the history of settlement in the region (many of which were summarized in the M. Galaty, "European Regional Studies: A Coming of Age?" <em>JAR </em>13 (2005) 291-363).&nbsp; Indeed, the contributions of any one project might appear meager, the aggregate accomplishments of Mediterranean survey are impressive by any standard.</p> <p>More importantly, the criticism of Blanton and Kowalewski are fundamentally incompatible with the kinds of surveys possible in places like Greece today.&nbsp; Most survey projects find themselves restricted by limitations imposed by host countries (both in terms of time and area covered), the rapidly expanding and widespread rate of development, and the expense of doing fieldwork in Europe.&nbsp; At the same time, the intensity of Mediterranean survey exceeds that of the kinds of regional surveys proposed by Kowalewski in part because regional studies in the Mediterranean (and in Greece in particular) operates in a discourse dominated by longstanding, large-scale excavation.&nbsp; This creates a very particular set of expectations for survey projects by demanding very high degrees of chronological, spatial, and functional precision (i.e. like one finds in an excavation); see for example D. Haggis's review of M. Cosmopoulos, <em>The Rural History of Ancient Greek States: The Oropos Survey Project</em> in the <em>American Journal of Archaeology </em>(<em>AJA </em>107 (2003), 305-307) for an interesting example of the influence of excavation on survey in Greece.&nbsp; These demands for precision fueled a particularly active discussion over the nature, notion, and definition of the site in the

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Mediterranean world.&nbsp; The slippery definition of site in a Mediterranean context and the continuing challenge in assigning a clear functional component to most agglomerations of pottery in the landscape has pushed regional survey projects to engage in somewhat different paradigms than those offered by "regional settlement archaeology".&nbsp; Thus scatters of ceramic material in the Greek landscape are more likely to represent concentrations of particular kinds of resources at a particular place and provide insights into the complex network of economic, social, and even political processes that made such concentrations of material possible.&nbsp; </p> <p>Paradigms that understand regions as networks of interaction (see for example <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42692026">Horden and Purcell's</a> treatment of the Mediterranean) rather than geographically bound places in the landscape tend to privilege robust assemblages of material (namely pottery) derived from the increasingly narrow windows available for the study of the Mediterranean landscapes.&nbsp; Mediterranean survey's deft adjustment to a peculiar set of practical and discursive conditions has pushed increasingly for cooperation and comparability between projects that employ similar degrees of methodological sophistication (see for example, the S. Alcock and J. Cherry, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/52920721">Side-by-side survey : comparative regional studies in the Mediterranean World</a></em>).&nbsp; Survey projects in the Mediterranean emerge as methodologically-defined windows into the material culture of place and appreciated the wide variation of scales at which interaction occurs in the landscape.&nbsp; While recent challenges to the notion of the site has eroded the kind of clear functional assessment of the landscape at a chronological scale suitable for traditional historical analysis, it has privileged approaches that recognize the variation within survey assemblages as an important indicator of the vitality of larger networks of regional interaction.&nbsp; Thus the kinds of regions identified by Kowaleswki (and others), which are external to the methods employed by archaeological survey, have given way to networks of interaction across space that are fundamentally tied to the archaeological methodology.&nbsp; In a larger perspective it seems possible that survey archaeology in the Mediterranean represents a significant example of bridging the kind of mid-range theory that has become a kind of holy grail for processual and post-processual archaeologists alike.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Khristophoros EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.224.223 URL: DATE: 05/21/2008 10:40:46 PM The "holy grail for processual and post-processual archaeologists alike" -- wow, I'm getting goosebumps ... -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher

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TITLE: PKAP Site Visits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-site-visit CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/07/2008 01:01:58 AM ----BODY: <p>One week before I leave for Cyprus and I am beginning to prepare for the upcoming season in earnest now.&nbsp; In particular, I've been preparing material for our site visits with students.</p> <p>Site visits are an integral part of our season at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; Visiting a while range of archaeological sites -- from prehistoric to modern -- helps familiarize the students with the impressive array of archaeological material present on the island and often begins the process of creating a body of <em>comparanda </em>(objects of comparison) for helping us to understand our site.&nbsp; We also work with the students on how to <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/si te-reports-re.html">"read" an archaeological site</a> and encourage them to formulate and address questions that put the site into a historical, archaeological, and environmental context.&nbsp; This can be a bit tricky, of course, as the student volunteers on PKAP range from relatively experienced archaeologists to almost totally inexperienced undergraduates.&nbsp; So, we attempt to frame our site visits in a way that will appeal to the entire range of students.&nbsp; (You can see more about our site visits in the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><em>Emer ging Cypriot</em></a><em> </em>short entitled "<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Movies/Siteseeing.m4v">Sightsee ing</a>")</p> <p>This year in order to focus our discussion of the various sites that we will visit, we're including three "site visit questions" on our handouts.&nbsp; I've been working on them this week and include a sampling here (type-os and all!):</p> <p><strong>Paphos Site Visit Questions</strong></p> <p>1) Mosaic floors are an important, if complex, source for the cultural history of the Eastern Mediterranean. What do these floors tell us about the people who lived and visited these fancy buildings? <p>2) Scholars have long sought to understand the use of rooms in houses as a key to understanding social organization. In Paphos, you can see several relatively well-preserved examples of Roman and Late Roman domestic space. What conclusions can you draw regarding the function of houses in the Roman and Late Roman period? What arguments can you make regarding the function of particular rooms in these houses? <p>3) The site of Paphos was an important place on the island of Cyprus for over 1000 years. What made this site so important? What advantages did it have compared to other sites on the island? In what ways was it similar to other Hellenistic and Roman sites on Cyprus? <p><strong>Ay. Neophytos Site Visit Questions:</strong> <p>1) Examine the various phases of wall painting in the Enkleistra. What are the basic differences between earlier and later wall painting? <p>2) What are the major themes in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine wall painting? What is the significance of these themes in their architectural context? Can you recognize any pattern? What is the goal of Byzantine wall painting? <p>2) The Enkleistra represents an extreme in the practices of Byzantine monasticism. What does such an extreme say about the values of this strain of Byzantine Christianity? Ay.

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Neophytos became a popular figure even during his lifetime. What does it say about the values 12th and 13th century society in Cyprus society more broadly? <p><strong>Ay. Georgios Site Visit Questions</strong> <p>1) The excavated churches at Ay. Georgios are the most impressive remains from the site. What can these buildings tell us about the other, unexcavated, components of the settlement at this site? <p>2) Unlike many larger sites where the urban centers have been excavated, only a small part of the remains have been excavated at Ay. Georgios. Looking at the remains present around the large Basilica A, what are the potential functions of these spaces? How do they relate both spatially and functionally to the Basilica? <p>3) Compare the topography and remains at Ay. Georgios to the site at Pyla-<i>Koutsopetria</i>. How are these sites similar? How are they different? <p><strong>Kourion Site Visit Questions</strong> <p>1) At Kourion you can get a clear sense of the urban area of a Roman site and at least some idea of how it developed over time. What kinds of buildings clustered around the main forum? What do these buildings have in common and what does it say about the site through antiquity? <p>2) As a coastal site it has certain similarities to other coastal sites that we have (and will) visit including (albeit distantly) Pyla-Koutsopetria. What the similarities and differences between the site of Kourion and others that we know? How does this make it unique? Can we generalize about coastal sites on Cyprus? <p>3) The House of the Gladiators and the House of Eustolios represent another pair of Roman houses on Cyprus. Like at Paphos, these houses can tell us some thing about both their owners and what Roman Cypriots regarded as important. Produce an informal list of the things common to these houses. How are they different from the way modern Americans decorate their homes? <p><strong>Amathus Site Visit Questions</strong> <p>1) Like Kourion, Amathus features a well-preserved paved forum/agora area surrounded by public structures. Judging from the preserved remains at the site, what features are the most commonly encountered in the public space of the city? <p>2) The sanctuary on the acropolis is one of the rare sites on Cyprus where the pagan and Christian sanctuaries are directly superimposed upon one another. How did the Early Christian basilica incorporate or erase the earlier sanctuary? What does this tell us about Cypriot Christianity at Amathus and specifically on the acropolis there? <p>3) The site of Amathus was situated to take advantage of several natural features. How did the residents of the site shape their environment to take the best advantage of the natural landscape and resources? <p><strong>Angeloktiste Site Visit Questions</strong> <p>1) Walking around the outside of this church, how can you tell the different phases of construction? How many phases can you recognize? Can you assign them dates relative to one another – earliest to most recent? <p>2) The apse mosaic is particularly important in the history of Byzantine art. How is it similar to other mosaics that we have seen from a slightly earlier period (e.g. Paphos or Kourion)? How is it different? <p>3) The church at Kiti stands amidst a modern village. What does its existence say about this area in antiquity and after? <p><strong>Zygi Site Visit Questions</strong> <p>1) The site of Zygi appears along an otherwise unexceptional stretch of Cypriot coastline. What environmental advantages does the site of Zygi have? Why would there be a coastal site here? <p>2) The nature of Zygi-Petrini as a “self-excavating sites” provides an profile view of an abandoned site and a window into the site’s stratigraphy. What can we say about the processes that created the site? Are their specific events that appear in the archaeological remains that are invisible in thoroughly excavated and cleaned sites? <p>3) The modern village of Zygi provides an intriguing point of comparison for the nearby ancient site. How does one go about comparing ancient and modern sites on Cyprus? What historical events must a scholar recognize in order to make valid or useful comparisons?</p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Khristophoros EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.224.223 URL: DATE: 05/21/2008 10:52:05 PM Looks good, Professor Caraher; I look forward to the tour/discussions. ! ! When I was in Europe, it bugged me that I was nearly always touring by myself without anyone with whom to discuss the sites. The few times that I had a captive audience (e.g. at Carcassonne, Perigueux and Aix-en-Provence) I fear that I talked their ears off. These are some good, discussion-provoking questions, though. I'll start warming up ...! ! ;-j -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Christian Spolia in Medieval Greece STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: christian-spoli CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 05/06/2008 12:46:40 AM ----BODY: <p>The study of spolia in a Medieval context is certainly not new and it has received particular intensive attention in the last few years.&nbsp; Most scholars, however, have focused on the use of Ancient spolia in a Medieval context and focused on monuments like the 9th-century Panayia at Skripou (see in particular A. Papalexandrou, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40099239"><em>The church of the Virgin of Skripou : architecture, sculpture and inscriptions in ninth-century Byzantium</em></a> (Ph.D. Thesis, Princeton University, 1998)) or, here in Athens, the Little Metropolis.&nbsp; One almost wonders whether this emphasis on the use of Classical stones represents a lingering apologia for Medieval period monuments -- an effort to prove that <em>even the Byzantines </em>recognized the importance of Classical Antiquity or reinforces the timeless aesthetic of Classical monuments or an abiding sense of continuity with the Classical past. </p> <p>We know, however, that by far the largest class of spolia reused in

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Byzantine monuments did not date from antiquity, but rather the Early Christian period.&nbsp; Columns, column capitals, marble chancel barriers, inscriptions, even mosaic decoration complemented obvious efforts to mark the place of earlier buildings in the landscape.&nbsp; </p> <p>Two relatively recent works highlight the significance of studying this Christian spolia in a Medieval context. L. Nixon's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/70104789"><em>Making a Landscape Sacred: Outlying Churches and Icon Stands in Sphakia, Southwestern Crete.</em></a> (Oxford 2006) (for more on this book see my: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/sa cred-landscap.html">Sacred Landscapes in Crete and the Corinthia</a>) focuses some attention on the reuse of Early Christian spolia in Venetian era buildings in Crete.&nbsp; She argues:</p> <blockquote> <p>"I suggest that what we have in Venetian Sphakia is the expression of a particular chronology of desire, made material and visible through the incorporation of earlier Christian elements, especially in the case of he churches built over basilicas, but also in the churches which include palaeo-Christian spolia. The desired chronology is one that links local Orthodox Christianity with an earlier authentic and original Christian presence, ruined but not destroyed (according to local tradition) by the Arabs. The placement of new churches over basilica sanctuaries shows a precise awareness of the older structures, and a desire to bind two points in time into one authoritative chronology." (p. 72)</p></blockquote> <p>Oddly, she over looks the work of John Xenos (for more on him see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/to -crete-with-j.html">To Crete with John Xenos</a>) who many centuries earlier on Crete showed a similar sensitivity to reconfirming the Christian landscape of the island.&nbsp; It can perhaps be added to her argument that this was not only building physical continuity with Early Christian remains on the island, but also in practice by re-performing deeds documented in the texts of their Byzantine predecessors.&nbsp; </p> <p>Another recent article shines valuable light on this matter as well.&nbsp; B. Kiilerich, "Making Sense of the Spolia in the Little Metropolis," Arte Medievale 4 (2005), 95-114 not only offers a relatively radical re-dating of this building, but also notes the important role of Christian spolia in a building perhaps better known for its wide array of ancient stones.&nbsp; The basis for redating the building to the 16th century is an inscription built into the church but recorded by Kyriakos of Ancona among stones said to be near the agora.&nbsp; Kyriakos was unlikely to record an inscription built into a church without noting the church and its wide array of other spolia suggesting that the building was, in fact, not built until after his visit to Athens in 1436.&nbsp; Kiilerich argues fairly convincingly for a date in the 1450s after the city had fallen to the Ottomans.</p> <p>More interesting for a discussion of spolia, however, is her idea that the church sought to integrate both pagan and Christian spolia into a monument as a mark of a distinct Byzantine and Greek identity.&nbsp; Her final paragraph summarizes this nicely:</p> <blockquote> <p>"The most prevalent sign on the spoIia is the cross. It is presented more than fifty times on the exterior of the church, and on the northern wall, inscribes itself upon a particular large number of ancient and medieval reliefs. In this context the many crosses - some of which were probably inserted into the ancient images long before the stones were reused in the church - were hardIy due to superstitious minds fearing pagan imagery; rather, they were aimed at the Ottomans as a visual manifestation of religious identity, The Little Metropolis was a monument to Athens and the Orthodox faith in the form of a church that displayed tangible physical evidence of Athens' Byzantine and antique culture. The spolia with the dominant sign of the cross were markers of identity, visual reminders of Christianity, the auctoritas of which was rooted in antiquity." (p. 111)</p></blockquote> <p>Both Nixon and

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Kiilerich demonstrate a willingness to see spolia in a Medieval context as capable of evoking an Early Christian past as much as what scholars would see as an ancient one.&nbsp; Kiilerich in particular is even willing to see pagan spolia in a Medieval context noting that some of the material used in the Little Metropolis may have had crosses already inscribed in it from previous reuse.&nbsp; Thus, some ancient spolia might not necessarily function to evoke a Classical past that at times seems to be of more interest to contemporary archaeologists and historian than to Medieval Greeks who reused the stones.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Modern Jeremiahs STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: modern-jeremiah CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 05/05/2008 01:19:54 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_49.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="204" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_40.png" width="134" align="left" border="0"></a>Since Monday has somehow become my North Dakota day , it seems appropriate to give a short plug for <a href="http://business.und.edu/homepages/mjendrysik/">Mark Jendrysik's</a> new book: <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/185021462">Modern Jeremiahs: Contemporary Visions of America's Decline</a></em>.&nbsp; He's the head of the Political Science Department at UND, a <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PKAP</a> fan, and a good buddy.&nbsp; </p> <p>The book develops further ideas that he introduced in an important 2002 article in the <em>Journal of Popular Culture</em> ("The Modern Jeremiad: Bloom, Bennett, and Bork on American Decline," <em>JPC </em>36 (2002), 361-383).&nbsp; In this article, Jendrysik defined the modern character of the longstanding genre of the Jeremiad as manifest in works of William Bennett, Robert Bork, and Allan Bloom.&nbsp; He draws examples from their popular and influential books dating from the late 1980 to the late 1990s (<em>The Closing of the American Mind</em>, <em>Slouching toward Gomorrah</em>, <em>The De-Valuing of America</em>, and <em>The Death of Outrage</em>).&nbsp;

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These books attacked in a rather formulaic way the excesses of American culture and attributed the decline of American society to the expanding influence of relativism, the expanding power of external influences, and the lack of moral and social discipline of the masses.&nbsp; Rather than critiquing these propositions based on their internal logic, philosophical rigor, or historical accuracy, Jendrysik places these texts in the historical context of the rhetorical Jeremiah who is braced between wanting his audience to "repent!" and needing conditions to get worse to prove the fundamental accuracy of their claims.</p> <p>You can <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Modern-JeremiahsContemporary-VisionsAmerican/dp/0739121928/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1209964033&am p;sr=8-1">get it from Amazon</a>, and I have been told that it makes a great Mother's or Father's Day gift!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Big Week at the Gennadius STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: big-week-at-the CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 05/03/2008 12:11:39 AM ----BODY: <p>Quick Saturday blog post just because there is so much activity at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/gennadius/g_index.htm">Gennadius Library</a> this week.&nbsp; If you can't find something here that interests you, you just aren't interested in Greece! <p>On Monday, May 5, Sinan Kuneralp will lecture on "From Baghdad to Berlin: the itinerary of Yanko Bey Aristarchi, a 19th - century Ottoman diplomat of Greek origin". The lecture will be held at 7:00 pm in Cotsen Hall. The lecture will be in English - a summary in Greek will be available.</p> <p>On Tuesday, May 6, Professor Cyril Mango will deliver the 27th annual Walton lecture at 7:00pm in Cotsen Hall. The topic of his lecture is "Imagining<br>Constantinople" (in English). </p> <p>On Wednesday, May 7, has been scheduled a symposium in honor of Prof. Mango's 80th birthday. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Mangosymposium.pdf">Here's the program</a>.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_48.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-right-width: 0px"

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height="191" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_39.png" width="121" align="right" border="0"></a> On Thursday, May 8: "Cavafy's Memory. 75 years from his death" events:&nbsp; Tour of the Cavafy exhibition (Gennadius Library, 7:00 pm) <br><br>Book presentation of "C. P. CAVAFY - THE COLLECTED POEMS", a translation by Evangelos Sachperoglou under the aegis of the British School at Athens; followed by recitation of Cavafy's poems in English and Greek by British actress Claire Bloom and Greek actor Kostas Kastanas (Cotsen Hall, 8:00 pm).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-varia-an CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 05/02/2008 12:56:53 AM ----BODY: <p>A rather short and whimsical Friday Varia and Quick hits today:</p> <ul> <li>Tucked away in a further recess of the World Wide Net Web is John Wortley's <a href="http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~wortley/index.html">A Repertoire of Byzantine "Beneficial Tales"</a>.&nbsp; It's a massive compilation of summaries of the short beneficial tales that we so popular in Late Antique and Byzantine times.&nbsp; It has <a href="http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~wortley/general.html">various indices</a>, <a href="http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~wortley/bibliography.html">bibliography</a>, and a nice <a href="http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~wortley/intro.html">introduction to the genre</a>.&nbsp; It's all text file so that the summaries can be searched through your browser. <li>Scott Moore at <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings</a> has posted a link to a <a href="http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L21786447.htm">Reuters story</a> about the severe draught on Cyprus.&nbsp; Water rationing is never good.&nbsp; <li>I received a flyer the other day about <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/MMHC_flyer.pdf">Midwest Medieval

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History Conference</a> which will be held at Dennison University on October 3 and 4.&nbsp; Of particular note: "Graduate students are encouraged to submit proposals, and those presenting will receive a $100 honorarium."&nbsp; What a nice encouragement for graduate student participation!&nbsp; If you need more encouragement, Dennison will be absolutely lovely that time of year.&nbsp; Watching a Division III football game at <a href="http://www.denison.edu/athletics/deeds_field_piper_stadium.html">Deeds Field-Piper Stadium</a> is one of life simple pleasures.&nbsp; In October the lowset stadium would just begin to be surrounded by fall colors.&nbsp; Unfortunately the Big Red is away that weekend so you'd have to content yourself with the conference.&nbsp; Alas. <li>Rumor has it that there will be a little symposium on Byzantine Athens here at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a> next Wednesday, perhaps at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/gennadius/g_index.htm">Gennadius Library</a>, in honor of Cyril Mango's lecture, <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/news/eventDetails/walton-lecture-bycyril-mango/">Imagining Constantinople</a>, the day before.&nbsp; Oddly there is no mention of it on the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">School's fancy-pants web page</a>, so it might be a secret. <li>Mary Beard has posted on <a href="http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2008/04/ten-excellent-b.html">10 Excellent Blogs</a>.&nbsp; <li><a href="http://phdiva.blogspot.com/">PhDiva</a> is back.&nbsp; It's a great blog.&nbsp; Here's a simply brilliant post (among many): <a href="http://phdiva.blogspot.com/2008/04/rules-of-blog.html">The Rules of The Blog</a>; it includes one of my favorite rules:</li></ul> <blockquote> <p>"Feel free to email me ‚Äì you‚Äôll generally get a reply. But please do not confuse friendliness with romance or anything else ‚Äì a few too many people have recently. I also have a habit of blocking addresses if men are either too rude or amorous."</p> <p>Needless to say, I have decided to implement the exact same policy.&nbsp; Since I've started this blog, I have become irresistible.&nbsp; I've recently had to block my wife's email address.&nbsp; </p> <p>All teasing aside, it is a very good blog even if you don't know what a <a href="http://phdiva.blogspot.com/2008/04/new-kim-brandstrup-ballet-atroh.html">Givenchy dress is</a>.</p></blockquote> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dorothy King EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 86.143.4.28 URL: http://www.dorothyking.com DATE: 05/02/2008 02:18:19 AM Whoops - have corrected the typo ... many thanks. Not sure if it was just written in a hurry, or was subconsciously hoping to fell a couple of the worse offenders.! Love your blog, by the way, and wish I could come to Athens for the Mango day. ----COMMENT:

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AUTHOR: Dorothy King EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 83.205.250.54 URL: http://www.dorothyking.com DATE: 12/31/2008 12:22:20 AM Givenchy - late great French fashion designer. Dress Audrey Hepburn, notably in Breakfast at Tiffany's ... -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Rebranding of Byzantium STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-rebranding CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 05/01/2008 02:23:00 AM ----BODY: <p>Kostis Kourelis posted a valuable defense of the study of Byzantine Art entitled <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/04/byzantiumnow.html">Byzantium N O W</a> on his <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a> blog.&nbsp; It complements earlier critiques (<a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/03/embodied-bodies-in-coffin-ofmedieval.html">Embodied Bodies in the Coffin of Medieval Art History</a>) of the direction of the study of Byzantine Archaeology, Architecture and Art.&nbsp; He again bemoans the decline in Byzantine Studies in the American Academy.&nbsp; His professional plaint clashes perceptibly with Tim Gregory's optimism for the contribution of the discipline to persistent problems in the field (see his <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/an -archaeologic.html">An Archaeological Perspective on the History of Byzantine Greece</a>), and reminds us that the decline of Byzantine Studies is not because of intellectual impasses within the field.&nbsp; The decline of Byzantine Studies' fortunes also stands out against the growing visibility of Byzantium across various aspects of popular culture and in expanded offering available for undergraduate courses (see, for example, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/mo re-springtime.html">More Springtime for Byzantium</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/sp ringtime-for.html">Springtime for Byzantium</a>).</p> <p>Thus, Byzantine Studies seems to be at a crossroads where the increase in cultural capital and scholarly resources is braced by a decrease in the positions available for Byzantinists within the Academy.&nbsp; I'd argue that this contrast is in some ways reflects of the particular academic history of the study of Byzantium in the US.&nbsp; The growth of Byzantine Studies in the US over the course of the 20th century was largely the product of political events in Europe -- from World War II to the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe -- which drove a concentrated and prestigious body of European Byzantinists to the US.&nbsp; Over time they found a happy home in the American Academy at a time when the American culture (not to mention the US government) had distinctly political interest in encouraging research on the cultures located on the other side of the "Iron Curtain", and as

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Kostis, has pointed out elsewhere, at a time when there was a&nbsp;&nbsp; growing appreciation of the Byzantine ascetic all along the ragged edge of the Modernist movement.&nbsp; The fortuitous coincidence of Modernist interests, the Cold War, and a body of mature, rigorous, and productive immigrant scholars created an American presence in Byzantine Studies that continued through the final decades of the 20th century as the intellectual heirs and students produced by these movement continued their academic appointments.&nbsp; In fact, one could go a step further and imagine the recent flourish of Byzantium in the popular eye as the high-tide of a wave of influence generated by a very peculiar moment in academic history.&nbsp; The declining positions available to Byzantinists within the academy marks the return to a kind of academic and professional equilibrium.&nbsp; </p> <p>But does this simplistic (and admittedly arbitrary) view of Byzantine Studies accurately describe the status of Byzantine studies as a discourse within the American Academy?&nbsp; I'd argue that appearance of Byzantine Studies' decline has been exaggerated by a significant "rebranding" of the field in the last four decades.&nbsp; The emergence of the study of Late Antiquity has made significant inroads into both the chronological span of Byzantium, but also appropriated many of the crucial elements of its discourse.&nbsp; </p> <p>A century ago it was reasonable and common to understand Byzantium as the vast period spanning from the conversion of Constantine in the early 4th century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.&nbsp; By the mid 1960s and the publication of A.H.M. Jones monumental <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/173808192">Later Roman Empire 248604</a></em>, a significant chronological chunk of Byzantium was cut away and appropriated for the new interest in the study of the Late Roman Period.&nbsp; Peter Brown's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/138222"><em>The World of Late Antiquity A.D. 150-750</em></a><em>&nbsp;</em>pushed this even further by conjuring up a Late Antiquity that persisted into the 8th century in some places<em>.</em> This trend has continued in a flurry of scholarship in the last three decades.&nbsp; Garth Fowden's 1993 work, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27034803">Empire to Commonwealth</a><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27034803">: the Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity</a>, located the roots of even the venerable <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/214064">Byzantine Commonwealth</a> (tellingly dated 500-1453) in a quintessentially Late Antique discourse, the rise of monotheism.&nbsp; Chris Wickham's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/58998790"><em>Framing the Early Middle Ages</em></a><em> </em>claims for its dates 400-800 and Michael McCormick's influential book, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/44860892"><em>Origins of the European economy: communications and commerce, A.D. 300-900</em></a>, embraces an even more extensive period finding it productive to study a period from before the reign of Constantine until after the end of Iconoclasm.&nbsp; The growing autonomy of the period from 4th century until the 9th or 10th century appropriated the entire Early Byzantine period (312-843?) and encroached menacingly into "Middle Byzantine" (i.e. 843-1204) heartland of Byzantine Studies. The intellectual categories of the Late Roman, Late Antiquity, and the Early Middle Ages owe far more to Western conceptions of the decline of "antiquity" and the "Middle Ages" than to the chronological divisions most commonly understood among Byzantinists.&nbsp; Thus within the academy certain aspects of the Byzantine narrative have been effectively hijacked by a group of intellectually impressive scholars whose understanding of the history of the Mediterranean is rooted in fundamentally different discursive propositions and assumptions.&nbsp; </p> <p>At the same time, the study of Late Antiquity has proven to be particularly capable of absorbing certain key themes in Byzantine studies.&nbsp; For example, one of the fathers of the discourse of Late

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Antiquity, Peter Brown makes clear in his important 1973 article, "A Dark-Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy" (<em>EHR </em>88 (1973), 1-34) that the veneration of icons is not only best understood within a Late Antique context, but, in fact, so is iconoclasm.&nbsp; Thus, one of the central events in the narrative of Byzantine history is recontextualized or re-branded (as we'd say today) as part of the great tapestry of Late Antiquity that Brown and his students would go on to construct.&nbsp; Recent work on the rise of icons has continued to emphasis its origins earlier in both Neoplatonic ways of thinking and the distinct elements of Late Antique religiosity.&nbsp; Brown's influence on another major element of the Byzantine discourse, the Byzantine Saint and hagiography, is almost too well-known to elaborate here.&nbsp; His "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," was tellingly published in the <em>Journal of Roman Studies </em>(61 (1971), 80-101), and contributed another key component to the raising cult of Late Antiquity.&nbsp; </p> <p>Outside the immediate penumbra of Peter Brown's work, emphasis on economic and settlement history, long mainstays of the Byzantine discourse, have become increasingly prominent features in the study of Late Antiquity.&nbsp; For every new city in the Byzantine period, like Monemvasia, there are cities for which there is increasing evidence for continuity spanning the former discursive rupture between the Ancient and Byzantine World (e.g. Guy Sander's recent work on Corinth which hadn't yet exert its full significance in his <a href="http://www.doaks.org/EconHist/EHB30.pdf">synthetic summary of the Corinthian economy in the <em>Economic History of Byzantium</em></a>.)&nbsp; <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/52930136">Recent research on the Late Antique countryside</a> has sought to recontextualize some of the most prominent changes associated with the rise of a Byzantine economy (rise of a rural elite, emergence of villages as key sites of production, et c.) as at least strongly flavored by phenomena best understood as Late Antique.&nbsp; While the jury remains out on many of these matters, the great synthetic works of McCormick and Wickham cited earlier in this post, have gone far to mark out new discursive parameters for the discussion of what a past generation of scholars might have considered fundamentally a topic for Byzantine historiography.</p> <p>The exact reasons for the rise of Late Antiquity and its absorption of significant strands of the Byzantine discourse, particularly in the Anglophone world, where Byzantium's roots were far shallower, are surely complex.&nbsp; Perhaps Late Antiquity was a way to ground the study of later period in the thriving, safe, and familiar world of Classical Studies (i.e. the "Antiquity" in Late Antiquity) rather than the unfamiliar, mystical, and Oriental confines of Byzantium.&nbsp; Whatever the reason, some of the consequences are clear.&nbsp; Byzantine Studies became increasingly relegated to a smaller and smaller discursive and chronological range.&nbsp; What once majestically spanned 1100 years of European history now occupies a period of sometimes less than half that (from 10001453?).&nbsp; Its religious, economic, and even literary significance has become transformed as a post-script to the imposing and healthy edifice of Late Antiquity with its Janus faced comportment that seeks in equal parts sound roots in the safe confines of antiquity and validation in their Byzantine consequences.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Final Episode: A Note About Survey STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-final-episo CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/30/2008 12:40:23 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SurveyNoteRO.jpg"><em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="164" alt="SurveyNoteRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SurveyNoteRO_1.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a></em></a>The final installment of <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><em>Emer ging Cypriot</em></a> is now available.&nbsp; This episodes is a particularly fitting way to conclude the documentary as it shows off the one aspect of archaeological fieldwork that sometimes gets lost in our sober assessments of the process.&nbsp; Archaeology is fun.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, as the 2008 field season for the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a> bears down on us with all of its attendant stresses, it is really nice for us to remember (and share!) how fun and entertaining and wacky most archaeological projects and experiences are.&nbsp; The discipline brings together a range of folks with different interests and personalities. From the fastidious an detail oriented ceramicists, to the procedural and methodological rigor of the field director, the big picture sensibilities of the project directors, and the various types of personalities present among the fieldwalkers, field projects depend on the sense of humor of everyone involved to keep from descending into interpersonal chaos.</p> <p>The music for this final section comes compliments of Brice Pearce (for more of his music see his band <a href="http://www.myspace.com/drakesfolly">Drake's Folly</a> on Myspace) who is a Graduate Student in History at the University of New Hampshire and dutifully walked fields for us as a graduate student volunteer in 2007.&nbsp; </p> <p>Thanks to all the folks who cooperated to make this film happen, particularly the good spirited <a href="http://www.pkap.org/staff.htm">PKAP volunteers and staff</a>.&nbsp; Special mention goes to University of North Dakota's <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/">Office of University Relations</a>, and <a href="http://www.iup.edu/">Indiana University of Pennsylvania</a> who provided funding and support.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">Joe Patrow</a> is the director.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/">Scott Moore</a>, <a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">PatrowVisual</a>, and I produced the film.&nbsp; Fieldwork on Cyprus was done with the permission of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities with the cooperation and support of the British

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Ministry of Defense and the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum.&nbsp; The PKAP/UND Mediterranean Archaeology t-shirts were provided by <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/artsci/">College of Arts and Sciences</a> at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; </p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first twelve shorts (with links to those shorts) below. <p><em><em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img height="78" alt="Landscape_MontageRO7" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO7%5B5%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img height="78" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO5" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO5.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img height="78" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO4%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"><img height="78" alt="FormerStudentRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO4.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-5-basec.html"><img height="78" alt="BaseCampRO6" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaseCampRO6%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-6-findi.html"><img height="78" alt="FruitCratesRO12" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FruitCratesRO12%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-7-the-w.html"><img height="78" alt="KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb[7]_thumb[1]_thumb[1]_thumb[3]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb7_thumb1_t%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><em></em></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep

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isode-8-the-w.html"><img height="78" alt="WallViglaRO4654" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WallViglaRO4654.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/bcaraher/Application%20Data/Windows% 20Live%20Writer/PostSupportingFiles/06c0a0c5-91ac-40ef-973b0c13fefd6241/GeophysicalRO3.jpg"><em></em></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-9-geoph.html"><img height="78" alt="GeophysicalRO474" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GeophysicalRO474.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-10-the.html"><img height="78" alt="TheHoleRO46" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TheHoleRO46.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-11-a-di.html"><img height="78" alt="DipintheSeaRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DipintheSeaRO4_thumb.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-12-sigh.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_47.png" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em></em></em></em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Sacred Landscapes in Crete and the Corinthia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: sacred-landscap CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 04/29/2008 12:51:24 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_46.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-right-width: 0px" height="191" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/image_thumb_38.png" width="137" align="right" border="0"></a> I have just finished reading L. Nixon's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/70104789"><em>Making a Landscape Sacred: Outlying Churches and Icon Stands in Sphakia, Southwestern Crete.</em></a> (Oxford 2006).&nbsp; She deals precisely with some of the issues that I am exploring with my work on Dream Archaeology (which is now far enough along to deserve capital letters).&nbsp; Her book has numerous interesting observations, many of which articulate observations that most anyone who has spent times looking at the churches in the Greek landscape might have.&nbsp; Her observations regarding the location of churches and their relationships to communities are perhaps overly schematic, but nevertheless helpful (see particularly, pp. 14-31).&nbsp; She notes the churches often represent boundaries of villages, access to resources, liminal locations, earlier important structures, or places of contact with supernatural forces.&nbsp; The final category, of course, draws upon the four previous -- the boundary between humans and the divine tends to be the thinnest at the borders of habitation and, as I have begun to articulate elsewhere, near earlier structures.</p> <p>Reading Nixon's book sent me scrambling back through some of my field notes from a walk around the village of Korphos in the Summer of 2001. (For the most recent work in this area see:&nbsp; <a href="http://mailer.fsu.edu/~dpullen/SHARP/">Saronic Harbors Exploration Project</a>) These notes were recorded "on the fly" or during a short "cookie" break in my perambulations so they are clearly not the final word on this church and its landscape, but nevertheless evokes many of the same themes that appear in Nixon's work.&nbsp; I've added some notes in brackets:</p> <blockquote> <p>"The small and relatively unremarkable church of Ay. Anna serves as a good example for expression of community in the ecclesiastical landscape. According to the lengthy inscription in fresco on the west wall of the church, the impetus for its construction was the appearance of the Theotokos and her mother Anna to a farmer from the village of Sophiko who had come to the vicinity of Korphos to work his fields. The village of Sophiko is some 5 km inland from the site of the church, but is a much more sizable settlement with many things Korphos lacks – such as an abundant supply of water, large stretches of arable land, and relatively easy lines of communications to the Argolid, communities in the western Korinthia and, the fertile plains of the Isthmus. The Panayia appeared two or three more times to the farmer and demanded that he build a church for her mother, Anna. The farmer did this and with a large group of priests from Sophiko, he dedicated the church in 1744. The painter of the walls hailed from the town of Adami in the Argolid. [For the text of this inscription see: T. A. Gritsopoulos, "Χριστιανικά Μνημεία της Περιοχής Σοφικού" Πελοποννησιακα (1975), 161-171] <p>The church sits outside of the village of Korphos, but its founder hailed from the larger settlement of Sophiko. The clergy associated with the church came from Sophiko and the inscription described the entire community of Sophiko as responsible for the churches construction. The painter of the fresco, however, declared his village of origin as Adami in the Argolid, thus associating himself with that community. The church is tied in spatial terms to the villages of Korphos and Sophiko, and in human terms to the villages of Sophiko and Adami. Other communities receive definition and realization here as well. On the exterior wall of the church an inscription offers the church for the salvation of the inhabitants of Sophiko. Also the priest Ioakim Nikoloas is mentioned and defined as the archpriest in the bishopric of Damala (Troezene) near Methana.&nbsp; [This part of the Korinthia was closely tied to the greater Saronic community of which Damala and Adami were part]. <p>The role of the Virgin, interceding on behalf of her mother works to demonstrate the order of heaven and express it in human terms.

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The reference to the Virgin would have also almost certainly invoked an association of the small church of Hag. Anna with the more significant church of the Panayia of Stiri some two km distant on the opposite side of the village of Korphos. This elaborate cross-in-square type 12th century Byzantine church was clearly linked to a large and probably wealthy monastic community. The local villagers even today attest to the relationship between the church of Hag. Anna and the Panayia of Stiri*, and the latter church is further associated with the important monasteries at Chiliomodi and Agnountas in the northern Argolid. A single poorly maintained and unstudied 18th century church might hardly warrant even a passing notice in a traditional study of the ecclesiastical architecture, wall painting, or epigraphy of the region. When placed within the physical, human, and spiritual landscape of the region, however, this church, and others like it, opens an important window into the web of interconnected communities represented by the material culture of the Eastern Korinthia." <p>* [The story in rough outline: There is a story about the bells of Ay. Anna ringing incessantly one day and no one understood why.&nbsp; Eventually they figured out that the bells of Ay. Anna rang when the candles at the Panayia at Stiri went out -- a touching gesture of motherly affection between St. Anne and her daughter.&nbsp; For the Panayia at Stiri see: Orlandos, <em>ABME </em>1 (1935), 1ff., M. Dixon, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45703753">Disputed Territories: Interstate Arbitration in the Northeast Peloponnese, ca. 250-150 B.C</a>., </em>Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Ohio State 2000, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/tw o-new-byzanti.html">Two New Byzantine Churches in the Corinthia?</a>]</p></blockquote> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Two_Korphos_Churches.kmz">Here's a Google Earth kzm file</a> with the location of these the two church mentioned above.&nbsp; Ay. Anna is along a route that ascends the northern side of the rugged valley inland toward Sophiko.&nbsp; This route was probably never the primary route between the two areas (for a long description of the routes in this region see Dixon, Disputed Territories). <p>I have more to say about this book... but I will save it for another post.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: bernard EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 195.93.21.7 URL: DATE: 04/30/2008 04:09:40 AM great site. When more time I shall follow closely.Small chapels on Crete. South west.Anidri. Azoriges. etc etc.! bernard.! And do you know the tiny one at the back of Elos. There were students working there last year. I've got a photo if I can find it of some icons that had gone missing. How can I post them to you?! bernard.!

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How did this site have my name and email ad ? Interesting. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Reader for 2008 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsope-1 CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/28/2008 01:38:39 AM ----BODY: <p>Each season we put together a short(ish) reader for the participants on <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; We include our publications on the site with some of the earlier work (generally in English because this reader is designed primarily for our undergraduate volunteers -- the best overview of work on our site prior to Maria Hadjicosti's excavations (reported in <a href="http://cefael.efa.gr/detail.php?site_id=1&amp;actionID=page&amp;prevpos=15 &amp;serie_id=BCH&amp;volume_number=118&amp;issue_number=2&amp;cefael=eae9aa4e0c 94613b8188738e2a876a86&amp;x=16&amp;y=20&amp;x=11&amp;y=10&amp;sp=413"><em>BCH </em>1994</a> and <a href="http://cefael.efa.gr/detail.php?site_id=1&amp;actionID=page&amp;prevpos=1& amp;serie_id=BCH&amp;volume_number=124&amp;issue_number=2&amp;cefael=eae9aa4e0c9 4613b8188738e2a876a86&amp;x=8&amp;y=9&amp;sp=290"><em>BCH </em>2000</a>) is <a href="http://cefael.efa.gr/detail.php?site_id=1&amp;actionID=page&amp;prevpos=70 &amp;serie_id=BCH&amp;volume_number=90&amp;issue_number=1&amp;cefael=eae9aa4e0c9 4613b8188738e2a876a86&amp;sp=2">O. Masson, “Kypriaka II: Recherches sur les antiquités de la région de Pyla”, <em>BCH</em> 90 (1966), 1-21</a>.). <p>The reports from the Director of Antiquities (entries 1 and 2) provide short summaries of fieldwork at Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>and are basically English versions of what appears in the <em>BCH</em>. Entries 3-5 represent our contributions to the study of our area (<a href="http://www.pkap.org/publications/papers.htm">a similar sample of material</a> can be found on the project's webpage).&nbsp; Entry 6, Rautman's "Busy Countryside" is the best single source overview of non-urban sites on Cyprus during the Late Roman Period. The phrase, "Busy Countryside" has become a bit of a rallying cry among scholars (for "scholars" read: <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>) interested in the complex phenomena taking place in the Late Antique countryside across the Eastern Mediterranean (see, for example, D. Pettegrew, "The Busy Countryside of Late Roman Corinth: Interpreting Ceramic Data Produced by Regional Archaeological Survey," <em>Hesperia </em>76: 743-84). Entries 7-9 contextualize the prehistoric work at Pyla<em>-Kokkinokremos</em>.&nbsp; (And more on the prehistoric components of the project soon, I promise!) <p>In addition to the selection listed at the end of this post we include a Further Readings bibliography (which I have linked here) and recommend that our students pick up Tim Boatswain, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/57170061"><em>A Traveller's History of Cyprus</em></a><em> </em>(Northampton, Mass 2005), which is not a perfect book, but does provide the most accessible (price wise and availability wise) short history of the island. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv

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eWriter/clip_image002_1.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="clip_image002" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/clip_image002_thumb_1.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p><em> <p>2008 Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Reader</p></em> <p>1. D. Christou, “Excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria,” <i>ARDA</i> (1993). <p>2. P. Flourentzos, “Excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria,” <i>ARDA</i> (1999) <p>3. W. Caraher, R.S. Moore, D.K. Pettegrew, “<i>Koutsopetria</i>: Surveying a Harbor Town,” <i>NEA</i>. Forthcoming. <p>4. W. Caraher, R. S. Moore, J.S. Noller, D. K. Pettegrew, “The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: First Preliminary Report (2003-2004 Seasons),” <i>RDAC</i> (2005). <p>5. W. Caraher, R. S. Moore, J.S. Noller, D. K. Pettegrew, “The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: Second Preliminary Report (2005-2006 Seasons),” <i>RDAC</i> (2007). <p>6. M. Rautman, “The busy countryside of late Roman Cyprus,” <i>RDAC</i> (2000) <p>7. V. Karageorghis and M. Demas, <i>PylaKokkinokremos : a late 13th-century B.C. fortified settlement in Cyprus</i>. (Nicosia 1984), excerpts. <p>8. M. Yon, &amp; A.P. Childs, “Kition in the Tenth to Fourth&nbsp; Centuries B.C.” <i>BASOR</i> 308 (1997). <p>9. S. Sherratt, “Sea Peoples and the Economic Structure of the&nbsp;&nbsp; Late Second Millennium in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Seymour Gitin,&nbsp; Amihai Mazar, and Ephraim Stern, eds. <i>Mediterranean Peoples in Transition: Thirteenth to Early Tenth Centuries BCE. In Honor of&nbsp; Professor Trude Dothan</i>. (Jerusalem 1998).&nbsp;&nbsp; <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Further_Reading_PKAP_Reader.pdf">10. Further Reading</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Special Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-special-frida CATEGORY: Australiana CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/25/2008 12:41:30 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Today is an important Friday for two reasons.&nbsp; It's Good Friday in the Orthodox Church and it's Anzac Day in Australia, New Zealand, and a few other South Pacific countries.&nbsp; I'll write about Holy Week tomorrow and Anzac Day at the end of the blog.</p> <p>First some quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>I've linked to <a href="http://archaeolog.org/">Archaeolog</a> before, but another interesting post: <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/04/the_other_acropolis_proje ct.html">The Other Acropolis Project</a> by Yannis Hamilakis.&nbsp; It introduces his newest web project: <a href="http://theotheracropolis.com/">The Other Acropolis</a>, a photoblog which aims "to produce a range of alternative media interventions which will take the iconic site of the Athenian Acropolis as their centre, their point of departure, or their target (in all senses of the word)."&nbsp; It's run by The Other Acropolis Collective which includes, among others, Fotis Ifantidis who runs the super-hip (in a <a href="http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp">William Gibson</a> way) <a href="http://visualizing-neolithic.blogspot.com/">Visualizing Neolithic</a> blog. <li>Over the <a href="http://classicaljournal.org/forum.php">Classics Journal Online Forum</a> there is a noteworthy article: Daniel N. Erickson, <a href="http://classicaljournal.org/Erickson.pdf">“Practical Ways of Saving a Classics Program: A Report From the Front”</a>, 103.3 (2008) 301–6.&nbsp; Dan Erickson is my erstwhile colleague in the Language Department at UND and has given his passion to developing the Classics program there.&nbsp; This short article sketches out the main outlines of the history of his work and gives us room for optimism! <li>Brandon Olson, <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> veteran and UND History alumnus, gives a short summary of his recent paper at the <a href="http://www.camws.org/">CAMWS</a> Annual Meeting on the inscribed sling pellets from Vigla.&nbsp; <li>Amanda Flaata gave an interesting Tea Talk on Meter (the Mother of the Gods) in Phrygia and Greece.&nbsp; Among other things she mentioned how sanctuaries of Meter in Greece often included references to her sacred topography in Asia Minor.&nbsp; In particular the cult in Greece sometime employed the names of mountains near sacred sites elsewhere to create a kind of imaginary topography. <li>A couple of interesting links to scholars bridging the gap between the academy and "the real world". <ul> <li><a href="http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/origins/">Ohio State's <em>Origins</em> eHistory Project</a> with an interesting article and podcast "<a href="http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/origins/article.cfm?articleid=10">(Fore)Closin g on the American Dream</a>" by <a href="http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/members/memberview.cfm?memberid=503">Lawrence Bowdish</a> <li>The North Dakota Humanities Council's blog <a href="http://prairiepolis.blogspot.com/">Prairie Polis</a> features a cool essay "<a href="http://prairiepolis.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-are-free-markets-for-orwhat.html">What Are Free Markets For? Or, what should we think about before we think about voting?</a>" by UND Philosophy Professor, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/weinstei/">Jack Russell Weinstein</a>.</li></ul></li></ul> <p>Anzac Day commemorates the role of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in the difficult and bloody Gallipoli Campaign of 1915.&nbsp; The Australian War Memorial site has <a href="http://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac/anzac_tradition.htm">a nice web site</a> explaining the ceremonies and commemorative aspects of the observance.&nbsp; Cities and towns in Australia often hold ceremonies commemorating the exact moment of the Gallipoli landing (in Brisbane this was 04:28 (AEST); <a href="http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/gallery/0,23816,503120617382,00.html">for photographs</a>). Among the more interesting things is that

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the Gallipoli campaign forged a special relationship between Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey.&nbsp; As early as 1934, Ataturk reassured Australians and New Zealanders with words now inscribed on the several monuments both at Gallipoli and elsewhere:</p> <blockquote> <p>"Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well." </p></blockquote> <p>Another important part of Anzac day are Anzac Biscuits.&nbsp; According to the story, Anzac Biscuits use Golden Syrup rather than eggs as a bonding agent so that the sweet treats would survive the long journey from Australia to Europe.&nbsp; My wife and mother-in-law sent me a tin and in a faint way, re-performed the actions of families during World War I who sent biscuits to their loved ones serving in Europe.&nbsp; A very tasty way to be made to feel part of an Australian family!</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Anzac%20Biscuits.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="212" alt="Anzac Biscuits" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Anzac%20Biscuits_thumb.jpg" width="244" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David Gill EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 88.202.192.168 URL: http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/ DATE: 04/25/2008 03:55:19 AM For members of the British School at Athens at Gallipoli see http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/2008/04/gallipoli-remembering-lives-lost.html -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP News: Where to Excavate in 2008 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-news-where CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 04/24/2008 12:59:59 AM

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----BODY: <p>The big conversation over the last month among the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a> staff is where exactly do we plan to excavate this summer. We've received generous permission from both the Cyprus Department of Antiquities and the British on whose base we will be digging, and we know in a general sense that we plan to place two trenches on the ridge of Vigla and two on the ridge of Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; Beyond that, we have established three criteria that have influenced our decision making.&nbsp; My interest is primarily centered on the trenches on Vigla, so I will focus on that part of the site.</p> <p>1. Our primary goals for excavating on the ridge of Vigla are to ground truth our geophysical and intensive survey work conducted there in 2007.&nbsp; This includes determining whether the structure revealed by our electrical resistivity is, in fact, an Early Christian basilica and to attempt to understand why the vast majority of pottery on the surface of the ridge is Hellenistic or slightly earlier rather than, say, contemporary with the possible basilica there and what appear to be Late Roman fortification walls.&nbsp; </p> <p>2. We have only asked to conduct limited soundings rather than a full scale excavation.&nbsp; There are a few reasons for this.&nbsp; First, it was clear that the Department of Antiquities would not approve our request to excavate unless it was within the parameters of the survey work that we have already conducted there (i.e. Point 1.).&nbsp; We plan 2008 to be the end of the first phase of field work at Pyla-Koutsopetria and will work next year to move our results toward publication.&nbsp; Finally, our project has generally been committed to low-impact archaeology and using non-invasive (and destructive) techniques to the extent that it is possible.&nbsp; Limited soundings offer the best opportunity for gaining archaeological knowledge within the context defined by survey and geophysical work while preserving as much of the subsurface archaeological record as possible.&nbsp; Consequently our plan is only to set in two trenches on Vigla (and two on the neighboring ridge of Kokkinokremos), and back fill at the conclusion of the field season.</p> <p>3. From an architectural standpoint we would like to be able to estimate the overall size of the possible Early Christian basilica.&nbsp; The eastern end of the building is secure as the apse appears clearly on our resistivity.&nbsp; The south wall possibly north wall of the church is also relatively secure.&nbsp; The only place that we have not been able to determine with absolute confidence is the wall of the narthex or western end.&nbsp; So we would like to position our trenches to best be able to capture this part of the building with would allow us to estimate an overall length.</p> <p>&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Viglatrench.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="271" alt="Viglatrench" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Viglatrench_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>The Apse is the semicircular feature just right of center.</em><em>&nbsp;</em></p> <p align="left">An additional issue makes the matter of actually, physically placing the trenches a bit more of a challenge.&nbsp; As you can see by the photo of the top of the Vigla ridge (below) there is nothing in the topography to help guide us.&nbsp; Moreover, last year we did not have high resolution GPS units so the location of the geophysical transect (seen above) was established by a combination of old fashion surveying (over a rather dramatic change in elevation) and less accurate GPS coordinate (produced by a 2-3 m accuracy Trimble XH handheld GPS units).&nbsp; If we plan for our soundings to be small -

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- as close to 2 m x 2 m (or 3 m x 3 m) as possible -- then it will be necessary to make sure that we have good control over the precise location of our geophysical units on the height of Vigla.&nbsp; A small error in our planning this summer compounded by the 2-3 m margin of error inherent in our mapping techniques from last year could result in our trenches "missing" the apse of the church.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Koutsopetria%20006.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="Koutsopetria 006" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Koutsopetria%20006_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br>Vigla</em></p> <p align="left">The result of all this is that we are going to re-do a single geophysical transect across the top of Vigla in order to secure the location of the eastern apse where we plan to place our first trench.&nbsp; Since our geophysical transect from last year is accurate relative to itself we should then be able to locate on the ground a reasonable location for the second trench.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">The best case scenario is that our excavations of the apse provides some good chronological and stylistic information on the building there.&nbsp; We also hope to successfully locate the southeastern corner of the church so that we can estimate the length and width of the building (churches are generally symmetrical east - west).&nbsp; Finally, we hope that our two soundings hit some earlier stratified deposits that can shed light on the earlier chronology of the ridge and provide some clue as to why the survey discovered so much Hellenistic material on the ridge.</p> <p align="left">As you can see, planning for the 2008 field season is ramping up quickly.&nbsp; Check back next week for more...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 12: Sightseeing STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-12-sigh CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/23/2008 01:14:25 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SiteSeeingRO.jpg"><em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><img

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style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="164" alt="SiteSeeingRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SiteSeeingRO_1.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a></em></a>Episode 12 of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>is now<em>&nbsp;</em>posted!&nbsp; It looks at sightseeing with students on Cyprus over the course of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; This aspect of the project is always a challenge.&nbsp; We have three goals when we go to visit sites.&nbsp; First, we try to teach the students how to read an archaeological site just as we would teach students how to read a text (for a longer discussion of this process <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/le ssons-from-th.html">see here</a>).&nbsp; This doesn't mean that we show the students the single authoritative meaning of the archaeological text, but rather ask pertinent questions about what they see.&nbsp; Our goal with this is help them become more careful readers of our site while working in the field.&nbsp; Our second goal is to give the students exposure to as many periods and places on the island as possible.&nbsp; Consequently, our visits range from (as the short shows) sites of modern importance -- like the <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/04/03/europe/EU-GEN-Cyprus-LedraStreet.php">Ledra street</a> wall between north and south Nicosia -- to the aceramic Neolithic site of Khirokitia with a hodgepodge of monasteries, Classical sites, Roman sites, Late Roman sites, and Frankish sites in between (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/david_terr y/index.html">David Terry</a>, PKAP Alumnus, does a nice job introducing this period on the short) .&nbsp; Finally, the goal is simply to give the students a break from the routine duties of archaeological work.&nbsp; While site tours are exhausting for the PKAP staff (and the students too, I would guess!), they give the students a chance to use a different part of their brain for a day and talk and think about something just a bit different from daily tasks associated with archaeologcial work.</p> <p>This year, we re-evaluated our regular site visit schedule.&nbsp; While in the past we have generally added or dropped one or two sites from our circuit, we generally do it in a fairly impulsive way (hey! let's stop at this monastery!).&nbsp; This year we went through our list of places visited and considered each one in turn.&nbsp; So, we now have a list (Included at the end of the post!).&nbsp; It is always a challenge to eliminate sites from our list and come up with at least some kind of informal criteria to determine which sites we will visit.&nbsp; </p> <p>Finally, in this short Joe Patrow captures the dizzying vacillations and juxtapositions on any project that includes students.&nbsp; One minute you are encouraging the students to follow <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31133440">Christine Kondoleon</a>'s lead in understanding the social context for Roman period Cypriot mosaics floors.&nbsp; The next moment we are looking away as one student removes splinters from another students feet (because she wore sandals to an ancient site!) or dealing with a case of severe sunburn!&nbsp; </p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the

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Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first eleven shorts (with links to those shorts) below. <p><em><em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img height="78" alt="Landscape_MontageRO7" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO7%5B5%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img height="78" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO5" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO5.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img height="78" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO4%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"><img height="78" alt="FormerStudentRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO4.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-5-basec.html"><img height="78" alt="BaseCampRO6" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaseCampRO6%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-6-findi.html"><img height="78" alt="FruitCratesRO12" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FruitCratesRO12%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-7-the-w.html"><img height="78" alt="KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb[7]_thumb[1]_thumb[1]_thumb[3]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb7_thumb1_t%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-8-the-w.html"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="78" alt="WallViglaRO4654" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WallViglaRO4654.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/bcaraher/Application%20Data/Windows% 20Live%20Writer/PostSupportingFiles/06c0a0c5-91ac-40ef-973b0c13fefd6241/GeophysicalRO3.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-9-geoph.html"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="78" alt="GeophysicalRO474"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GeophysicalRO474.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-10-the.html"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="78" alt="TheHoleRO46" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TheHoleRO46.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DipintheSeaRO4.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="78" alt="DipintheSeaRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DipintheSeaRO4_thumb.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em></em></em></em></p> <p>Here's our current list <br>Bolded sites are those that we consider indispensable (and initials afterward represent the votes of the directors) </p> <p>The big 3 [DKP][RSM]<br><strong>Paphos<br>Kourion<br>Amathous</strong> <p>Monasteries and the History of the Cypriot Church<br><strong>Ay. Neophytos</strong> [RSM]<br>Kykkou<br>Stavrovouni <p>Churches of the Troodos<br><strong>Ayios Ioannis Lambadistou</strong> [WRC][RSM]<br><strong>Angeloktisti</strong> [DKP][RSM]<br><strong>Hala Sultan Tekke</strong> [DKP][RSM]<br><strong>Ay. Lazarus</strong> [DKP][RSM]<br>Pyrga<br>Ayios Irakleidios Monastery <p>Comparanda Type Sites:<br><strong>Ziyi</strong> [WRC][RSM]<br>Panayia Ematousa<br><strong>Ay. Georgios-Peyia</strong> [DKP][RSM]<br><strong>Eastern Cyprus Coastal Sites</strong> [WRC] <p>Prehistoric Cyprus:<br><strong>Khirokitia</strong> [DKP][RSM]<br>KalavassosTenta<br>Lemba<br>Maa-<em>Palaeokastro</em> <p>Modern Sites<br><strong>Famagusta Overlook</strong> [DKP]<br>Kokkinochorio Villages<br><strong>Pyla Village</strong> [DKP]<br>Lefkara Village<br><strong>Green Line in Nicosia</strong> [DKP][RSM] <p>Museums<br>Paphos Museum<br><strong>Peirides</strong> [DKP][RSM]<br><strong>Larnaka District Archaeological Museum [</strong>DKP][RSM]<br><strong>Nicosia Museum</strong> [DKP][RSM]<br>Byzantine Icon Museum<br>Kykkos Museum<br>Limisol Museum<br>Polis Museum <p>Other Sites:<br><strong>Tombs of the Kings</strong> [DKP]<br><strong>Pyla Tomb</strong> [DKP][RSM]<br><strong>Pyla Tower</strong> [DKP][RSM]<br><strong>Kolossi Castle</strong><br>Polis<br>Paliopaphos<br>Athienou<br>Idalion<br>Tamassos<br>Li massol</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Dream Archaeology and Abandoned Landscapes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1

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BASENAME: more-dream-arch CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 04/22/2008 12:55:29 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_45.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-right-width: 0px" height="191" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_37.png" width="134" align="right" border="0"></a> I have just finished reading H. Forbes, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/76820937"><em>Meaning and Identity in a Greek Landscape</em></a>. (Cambridge 2007).&nbsp; The book is another important contribution to the archaeology and history of the Methana Peninsula <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/14918417">complements Forbes's earlier ethnoarchaeological work there</a> and his 1997 survey volume edited with C. Mee (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/37628298"><em>A Rough and Rocky Place. The landscape and settlement history of the Methana Peninsula</em></a>. (Liverpool 1997).&nbsp; I am tempted to post a more substantial review of Meaning and Identity here perhaps next week, but for now, I will just offer a quick observation.&nbsp; </p> <p>One thing that makes this book fairly remarkable is his attention to the religious landscape of the peninsula.&nbsp; He places the churches so carefully documented by Th. Koukoulis in Mee and Forbes ("Catalogue of Churches," pp. 211-256) in a ethnographic context.&nbsp; He looks at two aspects of the religious landscape that I have appeared in this blog (and in my research).&nbsp; First, he analyses the processes that led to the refurbishment of churches in the countryside.&nbsp; Forbes argues that the population of Methana largely arrived since the Greek War of Independence and that this population found numerous churches on Methana when they arrived.&nbsp; Over the 200 years since their arrival the communities on Methana have restored and rebuilt these churches in many cases multiple times and integrated these buildings into their new understanding of the religious landscape.&nbsp; This is one of the few works that shows the process whereby churches persist in the Greek landscape and defy our simple ideas of abandonment.&nbsp; According to Forbes, churches endure as persistent features in the landscapes not because of a kind of inherent sacredness, but because of consistency in the ideas of religious space among the various groups who inhabited the landscape of Methana. </p> <p>The second interesting aspect of Forbes's discussion of the religious landscape was his brief analysis of an <em>inventio </em>story (360-364).&nbsp; The community on Methana built the church of St. Barbara after one resident had a dream telling them to go and dig at a particular spot.&nbsp; When the villagers dream was reported to the local priest and then circulated in the village, the villagers came out en masse to excavate the site.&nbsp; This divinely inspired excavation led to the discovery of the bones of St. Barbara and St. Juliana, and the subsequent construction of a church on the spot. Apparently this all happened around the beginning of the 20th century perhaps in the context of the worldwide Spanish Influenza epidemic which hit Greece in 1918. Forbes demonstrates that today there are several versions of the story and the chronology of the tale of the church's founding is becoming chronologically unstable.&nbsp; Nevertheless, the story shares features common to other versions of this story from elsewhere in Greece including the tie between a dream and the

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discovery of relics, the cooperation and presence of the entire village during the act of excavation, and the subsequent construction of an important church on the spot.&nbsp; The association with a pressing local need, in this case protection from the influenza, and an ancillary story about the discovery of a pot with gold (or ashes) links the tale on Methana to narratives of divine protection and "hidden treasure" common elsewhere in Greece. Moreover, the site where the excavations took place was likely the site of some ancient tombs.&nbsp; These tombs acquired local significance through the agency of dreams which were a popular medium for understanding both the contemporary landscape and the future.</p> <p>I discuss many of these themes elsewhere: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/mo re-archaeolog.html">More Archaeology of Sacred Spaces</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/fo ur-views-of-t.html">Four Views of the Corinthian Landscape</a>. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Restrospective on One Year of Blogging STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-restrospectiv CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/21/2008 01:04:09 AM ----BODY: <p>In my Friday post,<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/me tadata-milest.html">Metadata Milestones</a>, I promised to offer some of my observations on blogging after one year.&nbsp; On the one hand, blogging for one year is hardly enough time to enjoy real perspective on the genre or the medium.&nbsp; On the other hand, blogging as a phenomenon is so recent, there is little "time depth" available even to the most savvy commentators on the blogosphere.&nbsp; This latter condition is sufficiently liberating for me to offer some observation on my experiences that I think have some bigger implications.</p> <p>1. Blogging is mixed media platform, but my blog is not.&nbsp; It is really quite remarkable how good blogs can integrate and bring together podcasts, videos, photographs, and text into a single space.&nbsp; Academic blogs don't seem to do this quite as effectively.&nbsp; It seems like we are committed (and I am part of the problem here) to make our blogs resemble as much as possible traditional print media.&nbsp; Even as I have attempted to experiment with podcasts and video, I have consistently located this material

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outside the blogging interface.&nbsp; In some cases this is because it fit in better elsewhere on the web, but I think that it mostly reveals a particular view of a blog as a coherent, textual entity.</p> <p>2. A Blogging Voice.&nbsp; I speculate in one of <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/index.html">my first reflections on blogging</a> that bloggers develop distinct voices, and that I was not sure whether I had (at that point) discovered a comfortable blogging voice of my own.&nbsp; This was 5 months ago.&nbsp; I think that I might have it now.&nbsp; In fact, I think that the strength and weakness of my current blog is the diversity of voices in which it speaks.&nbsp; Of course, most of us in real life use different voices.&nbsp; For example, we talk to our colleagues in a different voice from the one we use to talk with our spouses, students, or parents.&nbsp; On my blog, I try to give voice to my various academic interests (these overlap heavily with my personal interests; I don't really have hobbies) each of which requires a slightly different inflection that both reflects my view of my audience as well as the parameters of discourse.&nbsp; I like to think at least that I use a different voice when I blog on Survey and Landscape Archaeology, archaeological projects that work on and think about (especially the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> and the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>), Early Christian architecture and ritual in Greece, Late Antiquity, Archaeology and the New Media, North Dakotiana including both historical and archaeological observations and the institutional history of the Department of History, and, at least for this year, the cultural and programs at the American School (see the categories to the left for links).&nbsp; The inevitable overlaps between these topics (and their respective voices) represent the best areas for my future work.</p> <p>3. Traffic management.&nbsp; I've become increasingly interested in understanding how people find my blog.&nbsp; Some of it comes via the typical search engines -predominantly <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>, but the majority of hits come from referring sites of one kind or another.&nbsp; A strategically placed link on, say, the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School's</a> web page increased my volume over 100% one day as did a mention on the popular blog for Greek expatriots, <a href="http://www.dailyfrappe.com/">The Daily Frappe</a>.&nbsp; Longer term links from Archaeology Magazine web page and my <a href="http://www.und.edu/">home institution's</a> main web page (the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>) also clearly drove some traffic.&nbsp; The heartening thing is that while a strategically placed, short-term link from a high volume site can cause a spike in visits on a particular day, long term links from pages like Archaeology, University pages, and, perhaps most importantly, my fellow bloggers seemingly attract longer term repeat visitors.&nbsp; </p> <p>4. A Blogging Network.&nbsp; The most intellectually productive moments on my blog come from the occasional back and forth with other bloggers -- some of whom I know in the flesh -- but many of whom I only know from the blogosphere.&nbsp; It doesn't happen to often, but these spontaneous carnivals occupy my time for disorganized thinking. </p> <p>5. Episodic readers.&nbsp; Even as heartening as spontaneous blogging carnival can be, there is no doubt that the majority of my readers only read my blog occasionally or episodically.&nbsp; In fact, about 65% of my readers each day are "new readers" (that is come from an IP address that had not previously been recorded). This has come increasingly to condition how I write each post.&nbsp; On the one hand, I want to make sure that my post is as self-contained as possible so that a reader can understand the larger context of the blog post without having read the blog from the beginning.&nbsp; On the other hand, I want

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a potential reader to explore material on my blog (and elsewhere on the web) so I provide as many links as possible to other posts.&nbsp; I am not sure how well this has worked to convert episodic or occasional readers into regular readers, but it does remind me to work hard to keep each post accessible to as wide an audience as possible.</p> <p>6. Few academics take blogging seriously. I did not go into this expecting to have a vast and intensely interested academic audience, but with all the talk about the public humanities over the last decade, I reckoned that blogging would be widely accepted as a valid and commendable way to bring our humanities scholarship to a broader audience.&nbsp; I am genuinely surprised how many of my younger colleagues are simply not interested in the medium as a place to expand the audience for our work.&nbsp; There are of course notable exceptions to this, and you can generally read their blogs from my blogroll on the left of this page or through the links on <a href="http://del.icio.us/WilliamCaraher">my del.icio.us page</a>.&nbsp; In contrast to academics, however, I have had a good bit of positive feedback from non-academics who read my blog.&nbsp; They seems to genuinely be interested in what we are doing and are even willing to work with our somewhat esoteric language to get to it.&nbsp; Is this simply another example of academics being out of touch with what ordinary folks find interesting?</p> <p>7. Blogging Time.&nbsp; When I first mentioned blogging, my wife warned me not to get carried away. I am not sure whether I am carried away yet, but I have not found that blogging interferes much with my regular routine.&nbsp; In fact, writing of an hour or so in the morning, even in a relatively informal way, often serves as a good opportunity for me to gather my thoughts for the day and get settled into the quiet and careful attitude of "work mode".&nbsp; Moreover, my blog has increasingly become a place where I first articulate ideas typically weeks or even months before I am ready to compile them into a proper academic draft.&nbsp; This early writing has often brought to light aspects of my thoughts that need refinement and new directions and prospects for research.</p> <p>8. Future of Blogging.&nbsp; There has been plenty of debate now about the future of the blog and its place within internet culture (Scott Moore pulled together some of this in this short post: <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2008/04/bloggi ng.html">Blogging</a>).&nbsp; The emergence of tools like <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> which allows users to create spontaneous, micro-blogs on their day to day activities, or <a href="http://www.shyftr.com/">Shyftr</a> which aggregates blog posts from across the internet and brings them together in a social-network kind of environment so that your friends can see what you read and comment on it without actually having to go to the blog site itself.&nbsp; Both Twitter and Shyftr show the expansion of the internet as a space for the construction of meaningful social networks.&nbsp; This is not inherently incompatible with the notion of blogging, of course; the earliest group of bloggers was a close nit group and even today blogrolls serve to place a particular blog in a network of like minded sites.&nbsp; These networks have been expanded through services like <a href="http://del.icio.us/">del.icio.us</a> which allows one to create a public list of bookmarks, shows you who else has book marked particular sites, and encourages users to form communities of like minded readers.&nbsp; At the same time, there may be a difference between the blog with its stable and regulated interface (particularly blogs like mine which (see point 1) are fairly conservative in content and style) and "the flow" which has increasingly become metaphor of choice to describe the unstable and fluid environment of the internet of the future.&nbsp; The flow would be characterized by user/reader structured content that interacts and responds seamlessly (and recursively) with similarly structured content across the web.&nbsp; In such environments "mash

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ups" of content, structure, style, and media would become the norm leading, inevitably, to the fragmentation and decontextualization of more formally organized and articulated content.&nbsp; This is both exciting and scary!&nbsp; As scholars we have been trained to respect context, genre, and structure as important aspects of academic communication.&nbsp; The future of the internet might actively work to subvert these stalwart features of the academic discourse.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Tea Talk Podcast: Toward a (New) Agora STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: tea-talk-podcas CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/19/2008 12:24:24 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_44.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-right-width: 0px" height="244" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_36.png" width="80" align="right" border="0"></a> As a proofof-concept, Jamie Donati, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and I worked together to podcast his <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a> Tea Talk: <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Toward%20a%20New%20Agora.html"> Toward a (New) Agora: A Case Study of Three Peloponnesian Cities (Argos, Elis, and Corinth)</a>.&nbsp; Tea Talks somewhat less formal 30-40 minute papers that typically focus on a work-in-progress.&nbsp; </p> <p>The talk is divided into three case studies which form the individual tracts to the album.</p> <p>Here's an abstract:</p> <blockquote> <p>The Greek agora was a complex social and physical entity within an ancient city. It was inherently heterogeneous, and evolved under different circumstances. In this paper, I explore the structure of the Archaic and Classical agora at three different cities in the Peloponnese (Argos, Elis, and Corinth). I point out some of the unique features at each of these sites, and, in doing so, highlight some common misconceptions about the Greek agora. Since the Peloponnese is an area of the Ancient Mediterranean that is generally neglected in studies on Greek urbanism, agoras in these centers

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often present diverse patterns of development. Failure to understand the agora within its context risks a misguided interpretation of its spatial setting, best exemplified in trying to understand the agora through the prism of an Athenocentric model.</p></blockquote> <p>Here's the URL: <a title="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Toward%20a%20New%20Agora.html" href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Toward%20a%20New%20Agora.html"> http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Toward%20a%20New%20Agora.html</a></p> <p>Enjoy!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Metadata Milestones STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: metadata-milest CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/18/2008 12:38:47 AM ----BODY: <p>I have now officially been blogging for a year.&nbsp; Originally I had planned to do this lengthy retrospective on my experiences blogging, the development of a blogging identity, and my plans for the future, but I ran out of time and it sounds like a lazy weekend job rather than something that I do during a hectic week.&nbsp; </p> <p>So for the time being I will put together some interesting metadata.<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_43.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="209" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_35.png" width="304" align="right" border="0"></a></p> <p>Total Posts: 205<br>Total Comments: 106<br>Total Words: (est) 120,000</p> <p>Total Page Views: 18,362<br>Total Blog Views: (est.) 11,300<br>Absolute Unique Visitors: (est.) 5,200<br>Average Views per Day: 50<br>Average Time on Site: 1:40</p> <p>Hits from 100 countries and every state. </p> <p>Top 10 Countries:<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Blog_Hit_Map%20copy.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="192" alt="Blog_Hit_Map copy" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Blog_Hit_Map%20copy_thumb.jpg" width="304" align="right" border="0"></a></p> <p>1. United States<br>2. Greece<br>3. United Kingdom<br>4. Canada<br>5. Italy<br>6. Australia<br>7. Denmark<br>8. Germany<br>9.

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France<br>10. Turkey <p>Top 10 States:</p> <p>1. Pennsylvania<br>2. California<br>3. New York<br>4. Minnesota<br>5. Ohio<br>6. Florida<br>7. North Dakota<br>8. Illinois<br>9. Michigan<br>10. South Carolina</p> <p>Top Referrers:</p> <p>1. <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/">archaeology</a>.org<br>2. und.nodak.edu (the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>'s domain)<br>3. chss.iup.edu&nbsp; (<a href="http://www.iup.edu/">Indiana University of Pennsylvania</a>'s domain)<br>4. <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">iconoclasm</a>.dk <br>5. <a href="http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html">hnn</a>.us <br>6. <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/">grandforkslife</a>.blogspot.com <br>7. <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">pkap</a>.org <br>8. <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">ancientworldbloggers</a>.blogsp ot.com <br>9. <a href="http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/">archaeoastronomy</a>.wordpress.com <br>10. <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">electricarchaeologist</a>.wor dpress.com <br>11. <a href="http://www.atriummedia.com/rogueclassicism/">atrium-media</a>.com <br>12. <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php">ascsa</a>.edu.gr <p>Browser Breakdown (for my wife!):</p> <p>1. Internet Explorer (46%)<br>2. Firefox (41%)<br>3. Safari (9%)<br>4. Opera (2%)<br>5. Mozilla (1%)<br>6. Camino (&lt;1%) - and you know who you are!<br>7. Konqueror (&lt;1%) <p>Most Popular Posts: <p>1. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/re al-snow-in-at.html">Real Snow in Athens</a><br>2. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-archae.html">Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging: Metablogging the Ancient World</a><br>3. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-arch-1.html">Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging: Metablogging the Ancient World Part 2</a><br>4. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">Emerging Cypriot: An Archaeological Documentary</a><br>5. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/awalk-through.html">A Walk through Byzantine Athens</a><br>6. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/th e-byzantine-a.html">The Byzantine and Christian Museum</a><br>7. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/ea stern-korinth.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey on the Web</a><br>8. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/sn ow-in-athens.html">Snow in Athens</a><br>9. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/py la-koutsopetr.html">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Second Life</a><br>10. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-arch-2.html">Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging: Metablogging the Ancient World Part 3</a></p> <p>Thanks for reading this year!&nbsp; And, as always, stay tuned for more...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Susan Sutton at the American School STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: susan-sutton-at CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 04/17/2008 12:45:54 AM ----BODY: <p>Susan Sutton gave a fascinating talk at the Trustees Lecture here at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a> on Tuesday.&nbsp; She reviewed her long career as an archaeologist and anthropologist who studies the modern Greek landscape.&nbsp; She worked on several of the most influential intensive survey projects in Greece including the Southern Argolid Survey, the Kea Survey, and the <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/nvap/">Nemea Valley Archaeological Project</a> and made it almost a requirement for every subsequent project to have someone who uses ethnography, archival research, and archaeology to study the modern landscape.&nbsp; </p> <p>Her talk like much of her research emphasized the "liquidity" of the Modern Greek landscape.&nbsp; She stressed how older models rooted in a kind of Orientalism romanticized the Greek peasant and imagined them to be unchanged over countless centuries.&nbsp; In place of this patronizing and colonial image, Sutton showed how the Greek countryside, particularly the village, was a dynamic and fluid place shaped by engagements with international markets, a long tradition of flexible agricultural and settlement strategies, and nationalism.&nbsp; </p> <p>For the second part of her talk she explored the relationship between her carefully wrought view of the Greek village and countryside and that understood and promoted (in some ways) by Classical archaeology.&nbsp; In particular she discussed the relationship between the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea and the village of Iraklio where she had conducted so much of her fieldwork during the Nemea Valley Archaeology Project.&nbsp; She noted how the site of the temple of Zeus with its three standing columns had long been abstracted from the landscape.&nbsp; This was first done by the early travelers who drew the remains and often consciously removed any signs of the modern settlement nearby in their illustrations.&nbsp; It has been continued by the archaeological treatment of the site which is now a 40 acre archaeological park, set off from the village by a high fence, and further decontextualized through its austere "excavated" appearance and strict rules governing a visitors engagement with the place.&nbsp; The results of this, she argued, is that visitors to the Temple of Zeus rarely recognize the modern village in which it stands (much like the ancient travelers), although she makes allowances for recent efforts by the excavators there to make the site more accessible and more integrated in its surroundings.&nbsp; </p> <p>Her ethnographic work among the villagers in Iraklio allowed her to introduce their perspective into her reading of the archaeological landscape.&nbsp; She noted

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how they had a much stronger attachment to the "Lion's Cave" where Herakles was said to have killed the Nemean Lion. Unlike the Temple of Zeus the Lion's Cave was not fenced off, largely unstudied by archaeologists, and well-integrated in the local landscape.&nbsp; Moreover, she argued that the story of the Nemean Lion had special significance to the local population who had moved down from mountain villages into the plain in the 19th century and worked hard to tame the wild and uncultivated environment.&nbsp; </p> <p>Sutton's talk resonates well with some of the themes in this blog (in particular see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/fo ur-views-of-t.html">Four Views of the Corinthian Landscape</a>); in fact, it was largely through her work that I first endeavored to understand the modern Greek landscape.&nbsp; Her talk resonated well with Tim Gregory's talk last Tuesday, <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/GregoryPodCast.html">A New History of Byzantine Greece: An Archaeological Perspective</a> (click the title for a podcast of the talk; for some comments see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/an -archaeologic.html">An Archaeological Perspective on the History of Byzantine Greece</a>) which began by placing the Byzantine archaeological landscape in the historical context of 20th century Greek scholarship and its views of this period.&nbsp; Unfortunately no podcast on her talk, but we do have a <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/PodCasts.html">podcast on her talk from the AIA in Chicago</a> earlier this year where she explored some of the same ideas.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 11: A Dip in the Sea STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-11-a-di CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/16/2008 12:27:01 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DipintheSeaRO.jpg"><em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="164" alt="DipintheSeaRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DipintheSeaRO_1.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a></em></a><em>&nbsp;</em>Episode 11 of the <em><a

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href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a></em> is now posted.&nbsp; While the last few episodes have been technical and archaeological, this one provides a different view of an archaeological field project.&nbsp; Many archaeological projects are based in the countryside, but the participant in the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> live in the middle of the bustling city of Laranka.&nbsp; Almost every year our project intersects with the week long summer festival called <a href="http://www.visitcyprus.com/wps/portal/!ut/p/c0/04_SB8K8xLLM9MSSzPy8xBz9CP0 os3hXN0fHYE8TIwN_b09TAyNDSyNLE0tXQwNXQ_2CbEdFALwyDyA!/?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/Engli sh__en/CTO+B2C/Tourist+Information/Events/Pentecost_Kataklysmos">the Kataklysmos</a> which celebrates both the Biblical Flood and Pentecost.&nbsp; The festival involves everything from music concerts, to parades, to midway rides and games, to booths full of gadgets and toys which break almost before they leave the sellers hand.&nbsp; </p> <p>The festivities are a great opportunity to unwind after a long day in the museum and the field and give the students a chance to enjoy themselves.&nbsp; Sometimes there are bumper car crashes and retaliatory "dips in the sea."&nbsp; As with many forms of retaliation, there is almost inevitably some collateral damage in the process.&nbsp; This short shows the lighter side of archaeological work.&nbsp; Enjoy.</p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first ten shorts (with links to those shorts) below. <p><em><em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img height="78" alt="Landscape_MontageRO7" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO7%5B5%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img height="78" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO5" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO5.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img height="78" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO4%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"><img height="78" alt="FormerStudentRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO4.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-5-basec.html"><img height="78" alt="BaseCampRO6" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaseCampRO6%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-6-findi.html"><img height="78" alt="FruitCratesRO12" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FruitCratesRO12%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-7-the-w.html"><img height="78" alt="KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb[7]_thumb[1]_thumb[1]_thumb[3]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb7_thumb1_t%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-8-the-w.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="WallViglaRO465" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WallViglaRO465.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/bcaraher/Application%20Data/Windows% 20Live%20Writer/PostSupportingFiles/06c0a0c5-91ac-40ef-973b0c13fefd6241/GeophysicalRO3.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-9-geoph.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="GeophysicalRO47" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GeophysicalRO47.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-10-the.html"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="78" alt="TheHoleRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TheHoleRO4.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em></em></em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brandon EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.58.110.51 URL: http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historical_arc haeology_in/ DATE: 04/16/2008 09:42:51 PM

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Wow I thought Joe left that one on the editing table, oh well it is pretty funny! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Large Site Survey STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-large-site CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 04/15/2008 01:06:21 AM ----BODY: <p>Boeotia is known as the home of Large Site or Urban Survey in Greece.&nbsp; The work of the Cambridge-Bradford Boeotia Project in the 1970s and 1980s created some of the most significant methodological innovations in intensive survey in Greece by conducting not only some of the first "siteless" artifact level survey but also using intensive survey to document the urban areas of several important Boeotian urban sites.&nbsp; </p> <p>The recently published preliminary report of the Plataiai Research Project clearly works in this tradition (A. Konecny, R. T. Marchese, M. Boyd, V. Aravantinos, "Plataiai in Boiotia: A Preliminary Report on Geophysical and Field Surveys Conducted in 2002-2005," <em>Hesperia </em>77 (2008), 43-71).&nbsp; The site of Plataiai with its prominent acropolis and well-known circuit wall encompassed an area of over 80 ha in southern Boeotia.&nbsp; </p> <p>Their publication is particularly remarkable for its effective use of geophysical survey combining magnetometry and resistivity to produce a vivid map of the polis of Plataiai.&nbsp; The intensive survey component of the project inspires a bit less confidence as its methods were less fully explained and the data it produced seemed to difficult to reconcile with the field procedures that they described.&nbsp; They seem to have combined "the zigzag method" of walking across the site with random 1 m squares sampled to determine density and chronology of the various concentrations of artifacts.&nbsp; As they say:&nbsp; </p> <blockquote> <p>"Sherd density was determined by a modified subjective approach since an absolute numeric counting of sherds per area was not possible. Density was determined by surveyors walking in a zigzag pattern across the sampled area. Concentrations of ceramic data and physical features were noted and discussed at the end of each transect. </p> <p>Random 1 m squares were also selected in which to determine the density of sherds and other artifacts such as brick fragments, roof tiles, worked stone, and metal. Artifact concentrations were assigned to rough numerical categories ranging from 0 to 6, with 0 indicating a lack of artifactual material, 1 with 2–3 artifacts per m2, and 6 indicating more than 100 fragments of material per m2. (p. 44)"</p></blockquote> <p>It appears that this technique allowed them to make some quantitative assessments of the distribution of artifacts across the site, but it is perhaps not as comprehensive or intensive as most contemporary large site/urban surveys.&nbsp; Nevertheless, this project managed to make some interesting arguments including that the site of Plataiai contracted during Late Roman times and continued to be occupied throughout the Medieval period.&nbsp; The decrease in size of the nucleated settlement during Late Antiquity seems to be consistent with urban

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sites across Greece and may well represent a the adoption of a more dispersed settlement pattern that corresponds with increase in activity in the countryside.</p> <p>This project marks one more example of the major increase in Large Site/Urban Survey in the Eastern Mediterranean and in Greece in particular.&nbsp; I have discussed some of this before on this blog (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/so me-thoughts-o.html">Some Thoughts on Future of Survey Archaeology in Greece (and the Eastern Mediterranean)</a>.&nbsp; In particular, I noted the recent publication of the <a href="http://extras.ha.uth.gr/sikyon/en/">Sikyon Survey Project</a> (check out their impressive web page) another urban survey project (for discussion see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/re cent-work-on.html">Recent Work on Survey Northeast Peloponnesus</a>).&nbsp; Recent publications and ongoing field work seems to suggest that we are entering an era of small-scale intensive survey in Greece, succumbing in Richard Blanton's words to "Mediterranean Myopia" (Blanton, "Mediterranean Myopia," <em>Antiquity</em> 75 (2001), 627-629). </p> <p>In an oft-sited 1993 article by Stephen Dyson ("From New to New Age Archaeology: Archaeological Theory and Classical Archaeology-A 1990s Perspective," <em>AJA</em> 97 (1993), 195-206) he predicted the demise of large scale excavations in the Mediterranean:</p> <blockquote> <p>"The center of the fieldwork tradition, based on the "big dig," is dying, the victim of the economic rise of Europe and the Mediterranean and the decline of the United States as an economic, political, social, and educational power. A few of the dinosaurs survive, sustained by national archaeological politics, private patronage, and archaeological nostalgia. This era of the Classical archaeological Cretaceous, however, is drawing to an end. We will probably see few, if any, new Sardis, Cosa, or Athenian Agora projects in the mega-dig tradition. (p.204)"</p></blockquote> <p>One wonders if the recent rise in small-scale intensive survey projects reflects the death of large scale regional survey for some of the same reasons.&nbsp; Small scale intensive surveys can not only avoid the political, economic, and logistical problems associated with large regional projects (which are in many ways every bit as challenging as the "mega-digs"), but also avoid the interpretative difficulties that continue to bedevil the results of large scale regional projects.&nbsp; As Robin Osborne noted in his survey of recent work in Greek Archaeology ("Greek Archaeology: A Survey of Recent Work," AJA 108 (2004), 87-102) for many largescale regional survey projects the quantity of data collected has so far exceeded our ability to produce significant interpretations from it.&nbsp; </p> <p>In contrast, smaller scale large-site, like the work at Plataiai, Sikyon, and our work at <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria</a> in Cyprus have produced data sets that allow for a more comprehensive control over both archaeological and interpretative variables.&nbsp; At the same time, the limited size of these projects coincides with more focused research questions and typically depend more heavily on earlier work to provide context for their results.&nbsp; This requires <em>a priori </em>that the material from smallscale intensive surveys contribute to pre-existing debates and share common ground that it shares with other intensive surveys and excavations.</p> <p>While large scale regional surveys will continue to produce valuable data and interpretation (as will "mega-digs"), in some ways their significance will continue to be judged against the both the time and resources invested and the optimism of the early days of survey archaeology. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More History of History at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-history-of CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 04/14/2008 12:25:24 AM ----BODY: <p>I know that I stated that the three part study of the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and-th.html">Libby-Kane Controversy</a> was the final installment of my history of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a> at the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; As so often happens, things change.&nbsp; I have begun working with the sons of Elwyn Robinson to bring together the manuscript of his autobiography which I discussed briefly before in this blog in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/so urces-for-the.html">Sources for the Department of History at the University of North Dakota</a>. <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/RobinsonHeroesofDakota.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; borderright-width: 0px" height="190" alt="RobinsonHeroesofDakota" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/RobinsonHeroesofDakota_thumb.jpg" width="244" align="right" border="0"></a>Elwyn Robinson began his autobiography in January of 1982 and continued working on it until his final illness in January 1985.&nbsp; Much of this manuscript can be found in the <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/oglmain.html">Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection</a> at the <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/spk.html">Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections at the University of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; Recently Steven Robinson, Elwyn's eldest son offered me a copy of Chapter 13, which does not seem to appear in the manuscript and typescript preserved at the University of North Dakota which ends which at Chapter 12 and Robinson submission of the manuscript of the <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/190890">History of North Dakota</a> </em>to the University of Nebraska Press.&nbsp; <p>Also included in the papers that I recently received is a very brief introduction by Robinson.&nbsp; He offered this eminently reasonable prologue to his task at hand: <blockquote> <p>"I believe that my guidelines are essential to the success of the effort. They are: (1) to put down all that I can remember without any concern about whether it will be of any interest to anybody or whether it is presentable (2) to not worry

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about the literary quality or the organization of what I am recording, and (3) not to be in any hurry to accomplish the task and not to work on it too long at a time. I want, however, to spend some time on the job every day."</p></blockquote> <p>Later he offers another piece of wisdom: <blockquote> <p>"Robert Wilkins remembers an aphorism of either Anthony Eden or Harold Nicholson: 'Old men do not remember, they invent.' So what I am writing is more the way I remember it, not necessarily the way it was."</p></blockquote> <p>Here's the table of contents:&nbsp; </p> <blockquote> <p>Chapter I. Childhood on the Russell Farm, 1905-15 </p> <p>Chapter II. Growing up in Chagrin Falls, 1915-24.</p> <p>Chapter III. Oberlin College, 1924-28 </p> <p>Chapter IV. Teaching School, 1928-30 </p> <p>Chapter V. Graduate School, 1931-35 </p> <p>Chapter VI. Early Years at the University of North Dakota, 1935-39</p> <p>Chapter VII. Stevie and the move to Princeton Street, 1939-42 </p> <p>Chapter VIII. Gordon and the War Years, 1942-45 </p> <p>Chapter IX. "Heroes of Dakota" and a Promotion, 1946-49 </p> <p>Chapter X. Three Operations and the Start of History of North Dakota, 1950-53 </p> <p>Chapter XI. Progress on History, 195458 </p> <p>Chapter XII. Completing the History of North Dakota, 1959-64 </p> <p>Chapter XIII. Years of Triumph, 1965-1970</p></blockquote> <p>My goal with this is to find a publisher and gradually begin editing the manuscript filling in details as I go.&nbsp; There is a lot to edit (although Robinson's prose is spare and clean) and many small points that need elaboration.&nbsp; My hope is that this text will provide a distinct insight into the academic career of an individual who while remarkable and important for the history of both the state of North Dakota, is also representative of a particular place in the history of both the university and academic culture in the United States as it crossed the gap between pre-war and post-war worlds.&nbsp; </p> <p>The text also provides myriad interesting insights into the various people and places Robinson experienced during his academic career.&nbsp; At Oberlin College in Ohio, for example, he appreciated the courses offered by Leigh Alexander.&nbsp; Alexander was a Princeton-trained Classicist and head of the department for years at Oberlin.&nbsp; His <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64367528">1911 dissertation</a> was on fragments of Nicholas of Damascus on the Lydian Kings and was written under William K. Prentice.&nbsp; </p> <p>There are numerous other little interesting bits of information that will come out as I re-read this manuscript, and I will from time to time post them here.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hi CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota

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CATEGORY: CATEGORY: CATEGORY: CATEGORY:

Notes From Athens Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project The New Media Varia and Quick Hits

DATE: 04/11/2008 01:29:56 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quicker quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>Two Talk Thursday.&nbsp; The more I think about it, the more I think that the afternoon talks are the most valuable component to the program here at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a>.&nbsp; Some people have complained that there are too many talks and when you have two, back-to-back in one afternoon there is a certain point to that.&nbsp; On the other hand, the talks do allow you to engage with some of the newest and most exciting research in the archaeology of Greece.&nbsp; I'd say that if you attended every Tea Talk, you'd walk away from the year with a fairly accurate image of the future of the discipline.&nbsp; The graduate student paper in particular present a nice overview of the kind of material being studied, but (more importantly) the methods, theoretical models, and style that will come to influence the discipline in the near future. <ul> <li>Jamie Donati presented a thought provoking Tea Talk called: "Towards a (New) Agora: A Case Study of Three Peloponnesian Cities (Argos, Elis, and Corinth)."&nbsp; We made a digital recording of it and hope to post it as a podcast over the weekend.&nbsp; So stay tuned... <li>I survived my talk yesterday graciously hosted by the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/gennadius">Gennadius Library</a> in their Work-in-progress Seminar.&nbsp; My paper was entitled "Some New Readings of Early Christian Architecture".&nbsp; It was well attended and seemingly well received.</li></ul> <li>The <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> continues to plan their upcoming season.&nbsp; We were pleased to receive permission from the company that manages the British Bases on Cyprus to conduct soundings on Vigal and Kokkinokremos this summer.&nbsp; That was the last formal hurdle in our receiving permission to do fieldwork has been cleared.&nbsp; We are now deeply involved in the discussion of where exactly to excavate on both sites.&nbsp; Our survey and geophysical data have provided us with a rough idea of where to excavate, but the determining exactly where we should locate our modest soundings to achieve the best results is another matter entirely.&nbsp; Our primary research concern it to test the results of our geophysical work and survey.&nbsp; The garbled stratigraphy on Vigla -- where a surface assemblage biased very strongly toward the Hellenistic period overlies what appears to be a Christian basilica style church -- makes our trenches there particularly interesting both in terms of understanding the formation processes at play in the creation of the surface assemblage, and for refining our chronology for the whole range of past activity there. <li>I have spent part of the last two summer normalizing the Isthmia context pottery data so that someday we can compare it with the data from the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>.&nbsp; Recently, <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a> has posted many of the recent season reports from the <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia</a> on line here: <a title="http://isthmia.osu.edu/reports.html" href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/reports.html">http://isthmia.osu.edu/reports.html</ a>.&nbsp; <li>If you are interested in the history of the archaeology of Cyprus you should definitely check out David Gill's <a href="http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/">History of the British School at

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Athens</a> blog.&nbsp; It includes some interesting bits of info on the <a href="http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/search/label/cyprus">BSA's role in the archaeology of the island</a>. <li>Two interesting pieces from Archaeolog: </li> <ul> <li>On the role of blogging in a regional archaeological project: <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/04/presentation_of_the_creat ive_r.html">Presentation of the creative, relativist and multicultural blog of the Neixón hillforts archaeological project (Galicia, Spain)</a> <li>Related to our Punk Archaeology Project (<a href="Punk Archaeology: Some Preliminary Thoughts">part 1</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/pu nk-archaeolog.html">part 2</a>, <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/punk-suburbs.html">part 3</a>): <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/04/history_on_the_line_davis _squa.html">History on the Line, Davis Square</a></li></ul> <li>Finally if you are a North Dakota reader you will certainly be interested in this talk: <ul> <p>The University of North Dakota chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will host Dr. Roger Bagnall, Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University;<strong>4 p.m., Monday April 21</strong>, at the North Dakota Museum of Art. Bagnall is part of the visiting scholar program which invites distinguished scholars to visit 100 colleges and universities with chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. <p>The topic for his discussion is "Excavating a Town in an Egyptian Oasis." Dr. Bagnall will describe recent discoveries at Amheida, a site in Dakhla Oasis in the western desert of Egypt with a history stretching from the third millennium BC to the late Roman period. He will describe the interplay of Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures in artifacts as humble as food remains or as artistic as mythological wall paintings for the late Roman period.</p></ul></li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: An Archaeological Perspective on the History of Byzantine Greece STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: an-archaeologic CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/10/2008 01:29:27 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Timothy Gregory delivered a lecture entitled, <em><a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/GregoryPodCast.html">A New History of Byzantine Greece: An Archaeological Perspective</a></em>, on Tuesday night at Cotsen Hall at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.&nbsp; The lecture was apparently the first to be cross-listed in both the Directors Lecture Series (typically archaeological and focusing more on ancient and prehistoric Greece) and the Lloyd Cotsen Lecture Series hosted by the Gennadius Library (which brings in lecturers on topics important to the study of post-Classical Greece more generally).&nbsp; An abstract of the talk and <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/GregoryPodCast.html"><strong>a full podcast of Gregory's lecture is available here</strong></a> (graciously hosted on the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/Homepage.html">Squinch</a> web page).&nbsp; In the interest of full disclosure, I'll say that Tim was my adviser at Ohio State, so I am somewhat partial to his perspective on things, but that never stops me from having opinions (of course), and with the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/GregoryPodCast.html"><strong>podcast available</strong></a> you can always check my remarks against the original!</p> <p>Tim's main argument was that an archaeological approach had much to contribute to the history of the Byzantine period in Greece.&nbsp; From the start, he sought to differentiate archaeological approach to Byzantine material culture from approaches more typically associated with art history .&nbsp; He emphasized that this was not to suggest that one approach was better than the other, but rather to argue that the study of the Byzantine period in Greece remains relatively untapped by scholars using both the archaeological methods and evidence, whereas there art historical approaches (stylistic, typological, and increasingly theoretical) have continuously made meaningful contribution to our understanding of this period.&nbsp; While one could quibble that making disciplinary divisions between art history and archaeology are not particularly productive in the discipline (as the best scholars in either discipline draw on largely a common body of methods, research questions, and theories), there is certainly a feeling in the field that there is a clear divide between how scholars read material culture and those committed to archaeological approaches receive less attention than they deserve (for similar sentiment see: <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/priest-houses-sacred-orprofane.html">"Priest Houses": Sacred or Profane?</a>, <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/03/embodied-bodies-in-coffin-ofmedieval.html">Embodied Bodies in the Coffin of Medieval Art History</a>).</p> <p>The talk began with a general introduction to the study of Byzantine history in Greece starting with Gibbon and proceeding through to scholars of the last generation with particular attention to Greek scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries.&nbsp; He then presented three case studies showing how archaeology has made a contribution to the Byzantine History of Greece: Christians and Pagans in the 4th and 5th centuries, the Byzantine "Dark Ages", and the Frangokratia.&nbsp; Each case study blended material familiar to me -particular from Corinth and Athens -- with material from sites that may be less familiar such as Messene, Ay. Vasilios (in the Corinthia), and Tim's own work on deserted islands in the Corinthian and the Saronic Gulfs.&nbsp; For example, he included a nice summary of the important work being done in Messene which holds forth promise to expand how we think about both Pagan-Christian conflict and Greek during the 7th century.&nbsp; At the same time, his talk paid appropriate tribute to the importance of the work of Charles William whose excavations at Corinth revealed so much about Frankish settlement there.&nbsp; (He also said nice things about the contribution of the "new generation" of survey archaeologists like <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and Dimitri Nakassis both of whom work at the <a

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href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a> and with us at <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em></a>!)</p> <p>The talk was good and brought together a whole number of significant issues.&nbsp; Nevertheless, Gregory's approach reproduced some of the persistent parochialism of Greek archaeology.&nbsp; The issues that Tim chose to highlight Christian/Pagan clashes, the "Dark Ages", and the Frangokratia were couched in explicitly Greek context without much mention to the study of these phenomenon in the wider context Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; To be fair, some of this reflected the need to have a narrow and manageable topic for his paper, i.e. "Byzantine Greece" as well as an awareness of the audience for his remarks. Nevertheless, the archaeology of Byzantium extends far beyond the borders of the modern nation-state of Greece and the problems and methods of interest to scholars elsewhere in the Mediterranean received only passing reference in Gregory's remarks.&nbsp; For example, Late Antique urbanism, the Medieval Mediterranean economy, changes in the structure of authority and society, and the dynamics of cultural interaction all represent topics of longstanding and significant interest among scholars of Byzantine archaeology in regions outside of Greece (and within Greece as well).&nbsp; In fact, art historical approaches to Byzantine Greece, particularly those that focus on changes in the style of wall painting or architecture, often take a more cosmopolitan approach to the problems of this period than is currently offered by archaeological investigation.&nbsp; This is not meant to criticize or undermine the value of developing regional or even site specific questions as a key component of focused archaeological research: on the one hand, in the pre-modern world almost all society was local society, and, on the other hand, national archaeological policies exert a strong influence over the nature of research within their borders.&nbsp; The cultural, social, economic, religious, and political structures that characterize what we recognize as "Byzantine", however, stretched far beyond the borders of Greece and the affairs of the wider empire inevitably influenced the development of what in the 19th and 20th century has become seen as a phase of "Greek (National) History".&nbsp; Archaeologists studying "transnational" phenomena like pre-modern Empires have the opportunity to critique often divisive nationalist histories by recontextualizing local phenomena within a larger regional context.&nbsp; Of course, regional approaches are neither new nor immune from their own problems and risks (after all Orientalism was a regional approach!).&nbsp; Nevertheless, it is not hard to imagine that the next major stride in understanding the history and archaeology of Byzantine Greece won't have some roots in the vast amount of high quality work being done at present elsewhere in the post-Classical Mediterranean.</p> <p>Enjoy the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/GregoryPodCast.html"><strong>podcast!</strong>< /a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William

Caraher

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TITLE: Episode 10: The Hole STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-10-the CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/09/2008 12:10:08 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="164" alt="TheHoleRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TheHoleRO.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Episode 10 of the <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a></em> is now posted!&nbsp; This Episode deals with one of the more intriguing features confronted by the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; The Hole is just that: a deep hole on the height of Vigla.&nbsp; It seems almost certainly that this apparently natural feature functioned at least at some point as a cistern for the fortifications on Vigla (See <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-8-the-w.html">Episode 8: Wall on Vigla</a>).&nbsp; Moreover, its location to the west of our proposed Early Christian basilica on this prominent coastal height (see the discussion surrounding <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-9-geoph.html">Episode 9: Geophysical</a>) would be consistent with the relationship between large cisterns and Early Christian basilicas elsewhere on the island (e.g. the basilica on the Acropolis of Amathous and the Extra Muros Basilica at Kourion; for a general discussion see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/th e-early-chris.html">The Early Christian Ecclesiastical Architecture of Cyprus: First Impressions</a>).&nbsp; These cisterns were typically pre-existing features that are incorporated into the atrium areas of the church.&nbsp; The best comparanda for our feature is probably the larger cistern on the Acropolis of Amathous which likely provided water for the sanctuary, fortifications, and later the church on that site.</p> <p>From a methodological standpoint, exploring The Hole represents another way to gain knowledge of subsurface features!&nbsp; In fact, it was probably the most exciting day of archaeology on the project last year.&nbsp; We sent Michael Brown and Mat Dalton down in The Hole to check it out.&nbsp; When I first told some colleagues that we were producing a documentary on our work in Cyprus, several responded incredulously, "Isn't survey archaeology... boring?"&nbsp; Of course, I said "no" and pointed out that survey archaeology is often confused with excavation which is, in fact, boring.&nbsp; (That's a joke. Maybe).&nbsp; This short provides a good insight into how exciting survey archaeology can be and shows the point where routine fieldwork can capture just a bit of the spirit of Indiana Jones (for a good discussion of this see the recent blog post by Cornelius Holtorf at <a href="http://archaeolog.org/">Archaeolog</a>: <a

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href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/03/hero_real_archaeology_and _indi.html">Hero! Real archaeology and ”Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystall Skull</a>).&nbsp; While we didn't discover the Ark of the Covenant or The Crystal Skull (we also did not unleash a horrible curse on our project), we did contribute to our archaeological knowledge of the area.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first nine shorts (with links to those shorts) below. <p><em><em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img height="78" alt="Landscape_MontageRO7" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO7%5B5%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img height="78" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO5" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO5.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img height="78" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO4%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"><img height="78" alt="FormerStudentRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO4.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-5-basec.html"><img height="78" alt="BaseCampRO6" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaseCampRO6%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-6-findi.html"><img height="78" alt="FruitCratesRO12" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FruitCratesRO12%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-7-the-w.html"><img height="78" alt="KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb[7]_thumb[1]_thumb[1]_thumb[3]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb7_thumb1_t%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep

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isode-3-an-ar.html"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-8-the-w.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="WallViglaRO46" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WallViglaRO46.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GeophysicalRO3.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ep isode-9-geoph.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="GeophysicalRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GeophysicalRO4.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em></em></em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Sharing Matters in Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: sharing-matters CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/08/2008 12:53:03 AM ----BODY: <p>I like Sebastian Heath's final line <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/04/ecosystems.html">in his recent contribution to our ongoing discussion</a> of data sharing in archaeology:</p> <blockquote> <p>"So I am an optimist on the basis of quickly formulated principle, on the basis of current observation, and due to the resulting extrapolation of future trends. But I'm a little grumpy, too. If you don't share, you won't matter. Simple as that."</p></blockquote> <p>This is a great attitude, but it remains difficult to imagine a future in which this will be true.&nbsp; In fact, there is a basic power-knowledge relationship in archaeology which is in some ways predicated on <em>not sharing </em>or at least not sharing as it is recognized by American archaeologists in the first decade of the 21st century.&nbsp; In fact, a school of thought holds that you matter more when people know you that have things that they can't see.&nbsp; The more material that you have, the importance of your site or sites, and the intensity of interest in the archaeological community to get a glimpse of your finds all contribute to the significance of unpublished and unshared material.&nbsp; In this regard, the field continues to be influenced by a kind of archaeological

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panoptics which ensure that most scholars have only a partial view of the entire assemblage of excavated material.&nbsp; In contrast, the "great directors" of the discipline (who are different from <a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/04/only-panthers-sharearchaeological-data.html">Charles Watkinson's Gray Panthers</a>) through complex personal networks, wealth, standing in the broader professional community, and positions of authority and responsibility within the field avail themselves to a unique big picture understanding of the discipline that they are loath to cede.&nbsp; </p> <p>While it is easy to attack these "great directors" for their short sightedness and selfishness, as often as they have used their knowledge to maintain a personal power base within the discipline, in some cases they have used their knowledge to resist encroachments from external, often thinly veiled colonial forces.&nbsp; By not sharing archaeological data they are able to maintain hidden valleys of archaeological knowledge where they can resist trends and expectations in the discipline that are incompatible with their understanding of material culture, archaeological practice, and positions within local power structures.&nbsp; </p> <p>Anglo-American attitudes toward archaeological material has tended (at least over the last 30 years) to see that material (whether published or otherwise) as part of the public domain of knowledge almost as soon as it emerges from the ground.&nbsp; Other more proprietary models of archaeological material persist and intersect with institutional and even national agendas that understand the material culture of a site, region, or country in profoundly different ways.&nbsp; American projects often funded from public money, collaborative in nature, and highly focused in scope regard the publication of the results to be the ultimate goal of the archaeological project.&nbsp; This may not be the case for excavations conducted by a overburdened office of a local archaeological service or a long-term, large-scale excavation.&nbsp; For example, excavation itself may represent the goal as uncovering the past and extracting it from the ground is part of performative action that reifies the right and privilege of a government to engage in the inherently destructive task of removing artifacts from their archaeological context.&nbsp; In other cases public display of material takes precedence over academic or formal publication.&nbsp; The formal "scientific" archaeological context for the material extracted from the ground is not in these cases the primary intellectual context of the archaeological project, but one of a whole spectrum of potential narratives for understanding artifacts.&nbsp; (Consider: my understanding is that Greece considers all images of archaeological sites (that is photographs) to be the property of the Greek state and requires specific permissions for anyone seeking to publish them).&nbsp; </p> <p>Data sharing assumes a highly <em>modern </em>almost utopian view of archaeology.&nbsp; Again, I generally agree with Sebastian and look forward to sharing the data produced by <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a> (once we have it collected, that is!).&nbsp; But I am also just a bit skeptical of a day when all material is made available for any interested and responsible party to study.&nbsp; To painfully mix metaphors, the importance to the discipline of "valleys of resistance", is that they provide a kind of intellectual balk that reminds us of the importance and complexity of context for all archaeological material.&nbsp; Sharing data is part of recontextualizing archaeological data and as commendable as it is, it nevertheless represents just one (and certainly not a mutually exclusive) understanding of the significance of material culture.&nbsp; </p> <p>To contextualize my comments, check out <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/04/ecosystems.html">Sebasti an's summary and links</a>:</p> <ol> <li><a

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href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/03/drill-down-dilemma-why-cant-welink.html">Charles Watkinson wrote about "drilling-down" in archaeology.</a> <li><a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/03/drilling-downand-up.html">Sebastian responded</a> <li><a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/04/only-panthers-sharearchaeological-data.html">Charles replied.</a> <li><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/py la-koutsopetr.html">I joined in </a> <li><a href="http://horothesia.blogspot.com/2008/04/which-archaeo-data-animal-areyou.html">Tom Elliot took us into orbit</a> <li><a href="http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog/?p=104">Eric Kansa took note</a> <li><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/ajunior-schola.html">I re-upped</a> <li><a href="http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/2008/04/classifying-archaeologistsby-their.html">The whole thread hit the Big Time.</a> <li><a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/04/drills-small-and-largeanimals-sharing.html"><a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/04/ecosystems.html">Sebasti an Summarized</a> </a> <li><a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/04/drills-small-and-largeanimals-sharing.html">Chuck Jones expanded our perspective</a> <li><a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/04/archaeology-asecology.html">Charles Watkinson refined our ecosystem</a> <li>I tried to have the last word...</li></ol> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 87.203.89.15 URL: http://www.etana.org/abzu DATE: 04/08/2008 01:51:10 AM Sorry Bill, bump yourself to 12, and insert:! 9: http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/04/drills-small-and-largeanimals-sharing.html! and! 10: http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/04/archaeology-as-ecology.html ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 194.219.34.195 URL: http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/ DATE: 04/08/2008 04:39:05 AM Duly noted! ! !

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Thanks, Chuck! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tom Elliott EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 74.239.78.188 URL: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~te20/ DATE: 04/08/2008 09:51:25 AM There ought to be a better way to track this discussion constellation than maintaining manual lists ... hmmmmmmmm .... ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: CamArchGrad EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.80.232.75 URL: DATE: 04/09/2008 01:10:40 PM Very interesting, as I was sitting with a friend at the SAA's discussing data sharing from a different perspective.! ! What is missing so far is the concept of "Greater risk". As much as keeping certain area's of archaeological knowledge grayed out provides theoretical checks and balances, there is the greater risk that the mortality of the archaeologists who knows those areas will render those area's permanently off limits. ! ! For example the Winchester excavation from the 1950's, where Harris developed his matrix, is still unpublished and there is one lone archaeologist desperately trying to publish it before he passes on.When he does, we lose our last living link and our understanding of the site is permanently compromised. ! ! Of course knowledge loss happens over time regardless of mortality, but death, natural or accidental emphasizes the danger of keeping data out of general circulation. ! ! There is a risk to sharing archaeological data, however when set against the greater risk of permanent data loss, we cannot afford the luxury of ! balkanizing our data sets. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Politics and the Presidency at UND: Reflections on the Past at the Dawn of a New Era - Part 3 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: politics-and-th CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 04/07/2008 12:07:41 AM ----BODY:

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<p><em>This may be the final installment of my weekly feature on the history of the Department of History at UND. It will appear as a three-part case study (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and-th.html">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and--1.html">Part 2</a>, Part 3) examining the clash between Professor Orin G. Libby of the Department of History and President Thomas Kane.&nbsp; Its greater purpose is to shed light on the University of North Dakota at a crucial crossroads in its history.&nbsp; In the early decades of the 20th the University found itself with a new University President, suffering through the leading edge of a significant economic crisis, and facing a time when particularly divisive local and national politics manifest themselves in University life.&nbsp; At the center of the resulting maelstrom stood Professor </em><a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og49.html"><em>Orin G. Libby</em></a><em> of the Department of History.&nbsp; I have not provided a full biography of Libby here, but rather an overview of the important and complex clash between Libby and President Thomas Kane.&nbsp; Hopefully this serves a prompt to reflect on the history of the university at a moment when it is facing an important crossroads.&nbsp; UND is </em><a href="http://www2.und.nodak.edu/our/news/story.php?id=2253"><em>welcoming a new president</em></a><em>, the nation faces a likely economic downturn, the state of North Dakota is deep into a major demographic shift, and many politicians are becoming increasingly sensitive about the politicized nature of university faculty.</em> <p>The final clash between UND President Thomas Kane and Orin G. Libby occurred in 1922. The conflicted and confused discourse evident in both Libby’s and Kane’s ideas of professional propriety was again apparent when Kane attempted to force Libby to retire, as well as two other members of the faculty who in a broad sense tended to side with Libby in the tumultuous university politics of the day. In a letter dated May 4, 1922, Kane outlined his grievances against Libby.&nbsp; In particular, Kane accused Libby of being erratic as a teacher and as an administrator. For Kane this reflected a general “vacillating” attitude that manifest itself in Libby’s shift from being a “patrioteer” during the World War I to a supporter of the NPL (Non-Patisan League) once they had come to power. In fact, Kane’s alleges that Libby’s political leanings led him to be a member of “one of the most radical organizations in the state” which apparently had only nine members (this organization was apparent so radical and secretive no one could find any record of it. It was likely meant as an allusion to the Communist Party). Kane also leveled that Libby frequently interfered with the running of the university including violating the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and-th.html">so-called Hagan Agreement of 1920</a> by contacting George Totten, a member of the Board of Administrators over the course of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and--1.html">the Taylor controversy the previous year</a>. In light of these charges, Kane recommended that Libby retire. Libby having no desire to retire asked that President Kane follow the University Constitution by bringing the matter before a special Committee of the University Council who would then offer their recommendations to the State Board of Administration. Kane agreed to this, but noted that he did not consider the University Constitution a binding document as it had not been approved by the present Board of Administration. <p>For the meeting of the Committee of the University Council Libby prepared a point-by-point response to Kane’s charges in a letter pointing out that many of the charges against him were unfounded, lacked evidence, or preceded the socalled Hagan agreement which stipulated the slate be wiped clean. Despite a

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rhetorically thorough refutation of Kane’s position, the Committee of the University Council submitted the recommendation that Kane and the three faculty members could not work together and that the three faculty members, including Libby should retire. The Board of Administration after considering the report of the committee agreed with its recommendations. It was only a later injunction by the Board of Administrators that saved Libby’s career at the University. <p>The final major clash between Kane and Libby shares many characteristics of the earlier clashes. These controversies show a number of important aspects regarding the growth and development of the university as an institution. First, as much as Libby reflected the new wave of professional academics at the University, his view of the role of faculty in University governance and life developed under President Merrifield who presided over a far more intimate institution in which faculty had come to expect much greater influence. Kane, in contrast, held the clear idea that the university president had the authority to oust an individual or force him to retire. In Kane’s view, the position of the faculty was largely a concern of the administration who would have the final say in hiring as well as firing individual faculty members. Grounds for dismissal need not be gross negligence, but could be tied to being a good citizen – not being part of radical political groups, or being a “patrioteer” or being vacillating and wavering. The deep rifts cut in North Dakota society by the contentious politics of the day had created seemingly accepted political pretenses for dismissing or at least challenging the position of an individual in the University. While Libby’s relationship with Kane over the next decade is difficult to ascertain, there seems to have been a mutual détente which allowed Libby not only to carry on his responsibilities as the head of the Department of American History but to expand its faculty and offerings. <p>Despite the difficulties between Libby and Kane, the University and the Department of History survived and even prospered.&nbsp; Let's hope that the words of William Schaper, prior to his dismissal from the University of Minnesota for political reasons, may still ring true when he advised Libby prior to taking the job at the University of North Dakota: “The University of North Dakota is still young and small. Its future is before it.”</p> <p>Over the last several weeks I have blogged a series of short essays on the history of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a>&nbsp; in honor of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>'s <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125th-iversary</a>.&nbsp; <h6><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/so urces-for-the.html"></a></h6> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/so urces-for-the.html">Sources for the Department of History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/lo uis-geiger-an.html">Louis Geiger and the University of the Northern Plains</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/fe lix-vondracek.html">Felix Vondracek and History and the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/cl arence-perkin.html">Clarence Perkins and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ho race-b-woodwo.html">Horace B. Woodworth and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hi ttites-in-nor.html">Charles Carter and the Hittites in North Dakota</a></p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Special Saturday Edition of Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: special-saturda CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 04/05/2008 12:23:50 AM ----BODY: <p>A Special Saturday Edition of Quick Hits and Varia.&nbsp; There was too much excitement in my life this past week to include all the important stuff.&nbsp; So I'll share some odds and ends here:</p> <ul> <li>Brandon Olson, <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/">an accomplished blogger</a>, UND M.A., and <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">PKAP</a> veteran, continues to work on inscribed sling pellets from the site of Vigla and from across the Mediterranean more broadly.&nbsp; His work on these enigmatic objects will contribute to his dissertation which is a larger study of military liturgy.&nbsp; He presented a <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Olson_Poster_SLingPellets2008.pdf">n ice poster</a> at Penn State's <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/2008/03/graduate-exhi-1.html">Graduate Exhibition</a> where he is pursuing his Ph.D.</li> <li>A buddy sent me a copy of a story in the March Happer's Magazine entitled "<a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/03/0081945">Mississippi Drift: River Vagrants in the age of Wal-Mart</a>".&nbsp; The story talks about a planned trip by a group of modern "hobos" down the Mississippi on a homemade raft.&nbsp; A bit of incidental detail might interest readers of this blog.&nbsp; At one point the author mentions the sugar beet harvest in Grand Forks "which has become something of an annual pilgrimage for the punk traveler community.&nbsp; From three weeks of driving forklifts or sorting beets on a conveyor belt, enough money could be earned to fund months of travel" (p. 56).&nbsp; The NoDak angle reminded me of the body excavated <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/tr ansitional-sp.html">from near the President's house at UND in the

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fall</a>.&nbsp; Former UND President Tom Clifford referred to an area adjacent to campus and the railroad tracks as a kind of "hobo jungle" during the 1930s.&nbsp; It would appear that lure of seasonal labor continues to draw modern day "hobos" (albeit of the "punk traveler" variety) to Grand Forks.</li> <li>The University of North Dakota hosted the third annual Red River History Conference this past weekend. This is a graduate /undergraduate history conference started three years ago by members of the Phi Alpha Theta and the History M.A. Program.&nbsp; Congratulations on keeping it going.&nbsp; This year there were papers from UND, NDSU, Minnesota State University - Moorhead, Minot State, and Penn State and featured a keynote address by Claire Strom of NDSU at the North Dakota Museum of Art.&nbsp; Check out the program <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/RedRiverHistoryConference2008.pdf">h ere</a>.</li> <li>It's rare that Grand Forks has as much excitement as it has had this past week.&nbsp; First, both <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/ap/index.cfm?page=view&amp;id=D8VRFAJ00">B arack Obama and Hillary Clinton were both in Grand Forks</a> last night stumping at the State Democratic-NPL Convention.&nbsp; Next, the <a href="http://www.worldmenscurling2008.com/index.php">World Curling Championship</a> is being held at the Ralph Engelstad Arena.&nbsp; UND's hockey team is in the <a href="http://www.uscho.com/">Frozen Four</a>.&nbsp; It may be too much for my little town to handle...</li> <li>Scott Moore offers a nice reminiscence of the "Early Days" of PKAP: <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2008/04/pkapodds-and-e.html">PKAP Odds and Ends</a>.&nbsp; </li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Junior Scholar with Data or On Being a Data Squirrel STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-junior-schola CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/04/2008 01:09:10 AM ----BODY: <p>Vigorous conversations on scholars and data continues:</p> <p>Charles Watkinson: <a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/03/institutionalresponse-to-challenges-of.html">An Institutional Response to the Challenges of Digital Scholarship in Archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens</a>, </p> <p><a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/03/drilldown-dilemma-why-cant-we-link.html">The "drill down" dilemma. Why can't we link archaeological publication to the underlying data?</a>, <a

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href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/04/only-panthers-sharearchaeological-data.html">Only Panthers Share Archaeological Data</a></p> <p>Sebastian Heath: <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/03/drilling-down-andup.html">Drilling Down (and Up)</a></p> <p>Me: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/py la-koutsopetr.html">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and Its Data</a></p> <p>Tom Elliot: <a href="http://horothesia.blogspot.com/2008/04/which-archaeo-data-animal-areyou.html">Which archaeo-data-animal are you?</a></p> <p>Eric Kansa: <a href="http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog/?p=104">Archaeological Data Critters</a></p> <p>One issue that caught my attention Charles Watkinson's suggestion that <a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/04/only-panthersshare-archaeological-data.html">Only Panthers Share Archaeological Data</a>.&nbsp; He argues that senior scholars have the resources and the professional security to share data.&nbsp; This is further supported by <a href="http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog/">Eric Kansa</a> who, while noting exceptions, suggests that junior scholars tend to be more risk adverse and therefore less willing to share data.&nbsp; </p> <p>Several other thoughts occurred to me as I slipped into idle speculation on why the squirrels, baby armadillos and raccoons (i.e. junior scholars like myself) have not en masse embraced digital data sharing.&nbsp; On a very simple and obvious level, junior scholars tend not to have unfettered access to archaeological data.&nbsp; We tend to collaborate with Panther-types who have varied attitudes toward sharing data.&nbsp; The more people who have a vested interest in a particular set of data, the more difficult it tends to be to get them all to agree on anything regarding publication in electronic or even print form.&nbsp; </p> <p>That being said, I am not sure that we squirrels see data sharing <em>per se </em>as a risky proposition.&nbsp; I seems that most junior scholar have come of age in an era where proprietary attitudes toward archaeological material are being challenged openly and widely.&nbsp; In fact, from my perspective here in Greece, the dominant attitude among juniors scholars is frustration that archaeological data is not available.&nbsp; One can only hope that this frustration will be a powerful impetus toward making archaeological material accessible to the scholarly community quickly and openly.</p> <p>More significantly, I am not sure what the perceived risk about making one data available, say, online would be.&nbsp; I suppose a publisher could reject a manuscript if the material was readily available online, but, then again, publishers are hardly banging down the door to publish raw archaeological data these days.&nbsp; I suppose a scholar could use someone's data to challenge his or her conclusions.&nbsp; In some ways, however, this is why you make data available in the first place and it hardly seems a likely occurrence at present.&nbsp; From what I have seen scholars have barely started to use the available data that is now freely available and have not necessarily done it without the collaboration of the individuals who produced the data.&nbsp; Even the most data-centric archaeologist recognizes that only certain kinds of archaeological knowledge can be made available, and it is generally that kind of material that can be tabulated, organized, and reproduced.&nbsp; The valuable cognitive and phenomenological patterns, for example, that comprise an archaeological "sense of place" would form a kind of metadata that does not translate easily into print or digital media.</p> <p>From my perspective, it remains the technical matters that prevents data being made regularly available.&nbsp; These matters range from such issues as stable long-term electronic storage, to questions of format (which must be kept up to date), to creating a interface that would satisfy a potential end user.&nbsp; The emergence of projects like <a

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href="http://www.opencontext.org/">Open Context</a> and the work of the team at <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/digital-library/">the American School</a> will likely ameliorate some of the technical challenges related to sharing data electronically, but even then, the first wave of archaeological data going online must be an exercise in informed speculation in an effort to anticipate exactly what the scholarly community will find useful.&nbsp; Making data available in a format that requires either a high degree of technical knowledge to study or in a way that does not reflect how a potential user thinks about the material is only a theoretical improvement on the current situation of data parochialism, not a practical one.&nbsp; </p> <p>Perhaps the greatest risk confronting the current generation of data-squirrels is the investment of time and energy into preparing data for digital publication without a complete understanding of our audience, the technological complexities, and the long-term implications.&nbsp; The work of the Grey Panthers and their collaborators will certainly resolve many of these issues in the near future, but for now with all the other pressures of data collection (i.e. archaeological fieldwork), writing, and teaching, we can only do so much toward making our data publicly available electronically.&nbsp; As someone committed to the concept, however, it is my hope that in the near future greater technical and financial resources will make it easier to do the right thing.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and Its Data STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetr CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 04/03/2008 01:07:51 AM ----BODY: <p>Charles Watkinson (<a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/03/institutional-response-tochallenges-of.html">An Institutional Response to the Challenges of Digital Scholarship in Archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens</a>, <a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/03/drill-down-dilemmawhy-cant-we-link.html">The "drill down" dilemma. Why can't we link archaeological publication to the underlying data?</a>, <a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/2008/04/only-panthers-sharearchaeological-data.html">Only Panthers Share Archaeological Data</a>) and Sebastian Heath (<a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/03/drilling-down-and-

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up.html">Drilling Down (and Up)</a>) have been engaged in an entertaining discussion regarding the future of digital repositories for archaeological data.&nbsp; The discussion was vigorous and interesting for me and my collaborators at the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a> (PKAP) as we are beginning to look toward making our data available online.&nbsp; In this spirit we have posted <a href="http://www.pkap.org/publications/papers.htm">papers</a>, our <a href="http://www.pkap.org/reports/reports.htm">annual reports</a>, video (<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><em>Emer ging Cypriot</em></a>, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html"><em >Survey on Cyprus</em></a>), <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html">maps backed by real data</a>, and even some of our <a href="http://www.pkap.org/publications/posters.htm">poster presentations</a>.&nbsp; We are even beginning to fool about with <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a> to develop an online "museum".&nbsp; But none of this, at least to my mind, really counts as "data" in an archaeological sense.&nbsp; </p> <p>While folks like Charles and Sebastian have a firm grasp of many of the technical and theoretical aspects to making data available, most small to mid-sized projects supported by small to mid-sized universities and directed by folks like me with small to mid-sized brains struggle to get their heads around the real practical issues of making data available to colleagues elsewhere on the web.&nbsp; (I would be what Charles Watkinson refers to as a baby armadillo or raccoon (I prefer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Common_Squirrel.jpg">squirrel</a>) as compared to the Grey Panther types, like Jack Davis and Ian Hodder). </p> <p>In particular, I struggle to envision what my end-user will do with out data.&nbsp; This is not rooted in the fear of someone doing something untoward or threatening with our data or an unwillingness to share.&nbsp; Rather I am not sure how to present our data in in a way that would be effective and useful to a outside user within the technical expertise at our disposal.&nbsp; On the one hand, for our project, the metaphor of "drilling down" from the solid surface of interpretation to the data below (if I understand the metaphor) represents a reasonable extension of the sound rhetorical tactic for any archaeological argument.&nbsp; Most well-published sites and surveys include some kind of catalogue of finds that at least allows for some kind of down-drilling from interpretation and analysis to the actual artifacts that provide evidence for a project's conclusions. In this sense, presenting data to allow for drilling down is not a phenomenon that is new to archaeological argument or presentation, but one that would simply be enhanced by exploring electronic forms of data.</p> <p>This, however, is does not necessarily coincide precisely with how we envision our archaeological data being useful.&nbsp; PKAP is a small scale, highly intensive pedestrian survey.&nbsp; Despite the claims of "artifact level survey", a single sherd from a project like ours rarely has much "intrinsic" meaning.&nbsp; Of course, if we say that a particular artifact is African Red Slip 105 and an expert looks at it and says that it is a local Hellenistic cooking pot, then we have a problem.&nbsp; More commonly, however, a single artifact gains meaning from its spatial distribution, frequency, and relationships to other artifacts.&nbsp; Thinking about our data in this way, the metaphor of drilling down from interpretation to a stable artifactual foundation is less helpful (although I can understand how it would be extended to include the context of the artifact).&nbsp; When we at PKAP think about data sharing we primarily think about presenting data in such a way that it can be recontextualized and recombined to form the basis for yet unanticipated

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interpretations.&nbsp; </p> <p>Perhaps this line of discussion is a red herring: while not a technical wiz like Sebastian, I know enough about database structure to know that data "drilling" and regrouping and comparing should all be possible within well-conceived data structure.&nbsp; Nevertheless it remains difficult, for example, to export data from the <a href="http://docs.classics.uc.edu/fmi/xsl/prap/pottery_list.xsl?-findall">PRAP Pottery Database</a> in a tabular form for analysis (although I suspect that this is possible).&nbsp; Other data sets which are available as tables (for example some that are available through the <a href="http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/">Archaeological Data Service</a>) lack the metadata necessary to understand what the tables actually represent or seem too raw and irregular to trust entirely for analysis.&nbsp; </p> <p>When we have thought about publishing our data, we've conceived of it almost exclusively in a raw format which would make it more difficult for an inexperienced user to drill down through, but perhaps more useful to a professional who seeks to do quantitative analysis.&nbsp; Again, I recognize that these models for data distribution are not mutually exclusive (<a href="http://www.opencontext.org/">Open Context</a>, for example, seems to allow queries to be exported in tabular form) but for a project like ours that is approaching its final field season and is looking to share our data in the short term there are some very basic issues that would facilitate our progress toward that goal:</p> <p>(1) On a budget and with present technology how should a project go about making its data available?&nbsp; The ASCSA has invested a major grant in preparing the complex data sets of the Agora and Corinth Excavations.&nbsp; PRAP and other major archaeological project have welldesigned interfaces prepared by highly skilled experts.&nbsp; At the same time, there are services like <a href="http://www.opencontext.org/">Open Context</a>.&nbsp; How do we understand and sort through these options for making data available?&nbsp; What are the salient issues?&nbsp; Is this something that individual projects should do or is the future of data distribution going to ultimately reside with outside services? Will data distribution become as idiosyncratic and fragmented as, say, academic publishing? </p> <p>(2) Is drilling down still the best way to conceptualize the presentation of our data.&nbsp; That is to say, how raw can our data be?&nbsp; Do we need to contextualize our data within interpretative narratives that can then form the "surface" from which "excavation" can take place?&nbsp; Or do we present our "raw" data with appropriate metadata with the hope that it can serve as the raw material for independent comparisons and analysis?</p> <p>(3) An more practical concern is stable storage.&nbsp; As recent discussions of digital infrastructure has made clear, just getting long term, stable server space at a mid-sized university is a struggle and maintaining it is a long-term investment (just as maintaining a apotheke for physical artifacts).&nbsp; What is the relationship between a long term commitment to data storage (on a certain server) and reference stability that is necessary if we want to cite in our academic papers a particular artifact from a particular data set?</p> <p>Is our end user someone who simply wants to download a data set with appropriate meta data and manipulate it via their own software and according to their own whims?&nbsp; Or does our end user want an interactive interface?&nbsp; Or both?&nbsp; </p> <p>Will it increasingly be the obligation of a project to have well-thought-out answers to these collections <em>before </em>we begin to collect data to begin with?&nbsp; I can't shake the feeling that my inability to answer these questions or even properly understand the debate reflects a kind of archaeological irresponsibility on my part!</p> <p>This is confusing business.</p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 9: Geophysical STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-9-geoph CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/02/2008 01:05:14 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GeophysicalRO.jpg"><em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="164" alt="GeophysicalRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GeophysicalRO_1.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a></em></a>Episode 9 of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>is now posted!&nbsp; This episode focuses on the geophysical work that the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a> conducted during the 2007 field season and introduces John Hunt who collects our geophysical data for us.&nbsp; The technique that we used during the 2007 season was electrical resistivity.&nbsp; John described it fully in this week's short.&nbsp; It is the most commonly used technique in the Eastern Mediterranean largely owing to its simplicity and cost effectiveness.&nbsp; As I have noted in other posts our results were all that we hoped for as I have noted elsewhere in this blog (e.g. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/py la-koutsopetr.html">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project Mid-Winter Update</a>).&nbsp; The outline of a possible Early Christian basilica and highly-suggestive bedrock cuts on the ridge of Kokkinokremos will become the targets of excavations during our rapidly-approaching 2008 field season.</p> <p>As excited as we are about the discoveries produced by the geophysical work, we are equally excited about our success in implementing a multi-stage research strategy rooted in survey archaeology. The first phase of fieldwork in 2003, as readers of this blog know, was informal "extensive" type survey that did little more than allow us to gain a broad understanding of the distribution of artifacts across the site.&nbsp; In 2004, 2005, and 2007 we first increased the intensity of our survey employing a gridded collection of the highest density

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areas of the site and then expanded out intensive survey to the surrounding area using larger units.&nbsp; The next stage in our fieldwork saw us conduct geophysical prospecting of the highest density areas and this will continue in 2008.&nbsp; The final stage will be focused excavation of two areas documented by geophysical work.&nbsp; This tiered approach will enable us to analyze not only the varied success of the techniques used to document the site, but also to ensure that any finds from both excavation and survey have reciprocal archaeological context.&nbsp; We can correlate excavated material with the spatially more extensive material from survey and (hopefully) correlate the unstratified material collected by survey with stratified deposits from the excavation.&nbsp; Finally, survey and geophysical work minimizes the area requiring excavation.&nbsp; Excavation is not only costly, labor-intensive, and time consuming, but it is also a far more destructive method for gaining knowledge about past activity than even our relatively intensive survey collection.&nbsp; By implementing a multi-stage approach to the landscape we not only protect the archaeological remains at Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em>, but we are also producing a far more meaningful context for those that we collected (i.e. removed from their depositional or "archaeological" context) than we could using any one technique alone.</p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first eight shorts (with links to those shorts) below. <p><em><em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img height="78" alt="Landscape_MontageRO7" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO7%5B5%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img height="78" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO5" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO5.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img height="78" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO4%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"><img height="78" alt="FormerStudentRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO4.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-5-basec.html"><img height="78" alt="BaseCampRO6"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaseCampRO6%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-6-findi.html"><img height="78" alt="FruitCratesRO12" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FruitCratesRO12%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-7-the-w.html"><img height="78" alt="KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb[7]_thumb[1]_thumb[1]_thumb[3]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb7_thumb1_t%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-8-the-w.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="WallViglaRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WallViglaRO4_1.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a> </a></em></em></em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Archaeology of Sacred Spaces STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-archaeolog CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 04/01/2008 12:31:41 AM ----BODY: <p></p> <p>In <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology</a>, I began to think about the link between dreams, the sacred, and the formal, modernist discipline of archaeology.&nbsp; Since then I've noticed several examples of this phenomenon.</p> <p>In his, "Three Vaulted Basilicas in Cyprus"&nbsp; <em>JHS </em>66 (1946), 48-56, A.H.M. Megaw describes the excavation of the Panayia Skyra on Cyprus as follows:</p> <blockquote> <p>"Further details of the first basilica were disclosed about fifteen years ago, when in a period of drought the

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cultivators of the neighbourhood cleared the debris from the interior, to appease the Panayia, and summoned a priest to pray there for rain. The floor of the reconstructed church was reached and broken through, revealing parts of the original pavement about 30 ccntimetres below it. In the central apse a simple synthronon was laid bare. In the course of the same clearance works fragments of a marble ambon and of chancel panels came to light." (52)</p></blockquote> <p>Elsewhere Vassos Karageorghis in his engaging autobiography, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/153885421">A Lifetime in the Archaeology of Cyprus</a> </em>(Stockholm 2007), describes a regret he still has from his early days as the Director of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus:&nbsp; <blockquote> <p>"one day a priest of the Astromeritis (a village near Morphou Bay), came to my office, bringing on melon and one watermelon.&nbsp; We had never met before.&nbsp; He put them on my table and said that this was a reward in advance, I had to discover the tomb of Ayios Afxivios (a local saint) in the area of his village.&nbsp; I tried to say that I was not sure that I could, but he insisted.&nbsp; He left my office full of hope. I never managed to satisfy his expectations and I have many regrets for having accepted his reward in advance." (77)</p></blockquote> <p>It is worth noting that a French translation of the Life of St. Afxivios (Auxibius) appears as an appendix to J. Des Gagniers and Tran Tam Tinh's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/19881492">Soloi I: dix campagnes de fouilles</a> </em>(1964-1974).&nbsp; (Sainte-Fox 1985)&nbsp; pp. 132-144. <p>Both of these anecdotes look at the relationship between archaeology and the sacred in the Cypriot landscape.&nbsp; The first example viewed a form of excavation as a devotional practice which unintentionally revealed the long standing history of the site as a sacred place.&nbsp; The second example, in contrast, reflects the view of the modern, "scientific" archaeologist as the agent of inventio.&nbsp; In this example, Karageorghis became the individual vested with the responsibility for discovering a sacred place that had been lost and thereby returning the eternal sacred landscape to view.&nbsp;&nbsp; <p>This passage is a good example of a phenomenon recently discussed in Y. Hamilakis, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/122424890"><em>The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece</em>.</a> (Oxford 2007) where he compares the role of the archaeologist in Greek society to the role of the priest.&nbsp; Archaeologists are sometimes said to perform a <em>leitourgima </em>(λειτούργημα): "The modern connotations of the word denote not only an operation but also the religious church ceremony.&nbsp; This last meaning is perhaps closer to the public perception of archaeologists as people who mediate between the world of the past ancestors and the modern world." (39).&nbsp; Archaeologists, in Hamilakis analysis, emerge as priests of a "secular religion".&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Politics and the Presidency at UND: Reflections on the Past at the Dawn of a New Era - Part 2

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: politics-and--1 CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND DATE: 03/30/2008 11:55:12 PM ----BODY: <p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hi ttites-in-nor.html"></a></p><em>This may be the final installment of my weekly feature on the history of the Department of History at UND. It will appear as a three-part case study (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and-th.html">Part 1</a>, Part 2, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/po litics-and-th.html">Part 3</a>) examining the clash between Professor Orin G. Libby of the Department of History and President Thomas Kane.&nbsp; Its greater purpose is to shed light on the University of North Dakota at a crucial crossroads in its history.&nbsp; In the early decades of the 20th the University found itself with a new University President, suffering through the leading edge of a significant economic crisis, and facing a time when particularly divisive local and national politics manifest themselves in University life.&nbsp; At the center of the resulting maelstrom stood Professor </em><a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og49.html"><em>Orin G. Libby</em></a><em> of the Department of History.&nbsp; I have not provided a full biography of Libby here, but rather an overview of the important and complex clash between Libby and President Thomas Kane.&nbsp; Hopefully this serves a prompt to reflect on the history of the university at a moment when it is facing an important crossroads.&nbsp; UND is </em><a href="http://www2.und.nodak.edu/our/news/story.php?id=2253"><em>welcoming a new president</em></a><em>, the nation faces a likely economic downturn, the state of North Dakota is deep into a major demographic shift, and many politicians are becoming increasingly sensitive about the politicized nature of university faculty.</em>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <p>The second clash between Orin G. Libby and President Thomas Kane erupted only a month after the Hagan Agreement came to pass in 1920 (for details see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and-th.html">Part 1</a>).&nbsp; The central point of this second LibbyKane controversy regarded the proper procedure for expanding the history department. From the days of President Frank McVey, Libby had sought to expand the department by either adding faculty which only occasionally exceeded Libby and a part-time instructor like George R. Davies, who was primarily a sociologist and would have an important career at the University of Iowa). Since 1916 Libby’s requests for additional faculty had become all the more urgent, as the University required that all students take a semester of History and this taxed the limited faculty resources in the department. In the Spring 1920 Libby became interested in hiring a certain Robert R. Russell who had been teaching at Ottawa University in Kansas. At the time, Russell only held an M.A. completed at the University of Kansas under Carl Becker and F. H. Hodder, but he was enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois. Libby regarded Russell as having sufficient teaching experience and, being enrolled in a Ph.D. program, he would soon complete the necessary requirements for eventual promotion to full

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professor serving alongside Libby as the Professor of European History. <p>After meeting with Russell in Minneapolis for what appears to have been an impromptu interview, Libby forwarded a letter to Kane recommending that the University hire Russell. Kane responded that he did not see any need to hire Russell at present because the classes were being taught by a man named John W. Taylor. If there was to be a faculty change, Kane would require some justification from Libby to dismiss Taylor and hire someone new. At the same time, Kane contacted Russell and inquired to his qualifications for the job. In response to Kane’s request, Libby provided a detailed argument regarding the need to hire Russell and a careful enumeration of his qualifications. Kane received Libby’s recommendation of Russell, but regarded this as avoiding the larger question of whether Taylor should be dismissed. Moreover, he criticized Libby’s plan to expand the department suggesting that the candidate he favored, Russell, was in fact no more qualified than Taylor who Libby evidently deemed inadequate. Kane, perhaps posturing here, suggested that the department would benefit by hiring a “full fledged man” rather than relying on Taylor or Russell. Moreover, before any change could be made Kane insisted again that Libby provide evidence for Taylor’s incompetence in the classrooms of the Department of History in order to justify dismissing him. Libby steadfastly refused to do this, and this evidently was the sine qua non for any further action from Kane.&nbsp;&nbsp; In fact, for President Kane, Libby’s inability to provide grounds for Taylor’s dismissal invalidated Libby’s recommendation that the university hire Russell. <p>As this dispute gradually escalated, Kane kept Russell informed of the issues at stake with the appointment of Taylor and the behavior of Libby, thereby providing the unsuspecting candidate with quite an insight into the workings of both the department and the administration of the university. Libby, who had become increasingly impatient with what he saw as Kane’s stalling tactics, finally referred the matter to the Board of Administration. The board in this instance sided with Kane who in turn created a separate Department of European History and hired <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/cl arence-perkin.html">Clarence Perkins</a> as a full professor to be the chair of this department. He had been an Associate Professor at Ohio State University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1908. <p>The second round of the Kane-Libby controversy, much like the first, reflected the growing pains of the University as new and old faculty and administrators sought to accommodate their personal ideas of how a university should function with growing body of professional standards. Libby, for his part, arrived at the University with sterling professional credentials, a willingness to be active in University life, and an expectation that the faculty’s views be respected in the running of the University. Moreover, he reinforced this view of faculty’s place on campus through such as activities as founding a Grand Forks branch of the American Association of University Professors.&nbsp; Nevertheless and perhaps ironically, Libby’s behavior often seemed to represent more traditional approaches to academic life. It seems likely that Libby’s preference for an individual like Russell who would have been quite junior in status to Libby, would have ensured his continued control over departmental affairs. Kane’s choice, Perkins’ held qualifications that were certainly more significant than either Taylor or Russell, suggesting that Kane, for all his faults, sought to hire a more substantial scholar than Libby’s choice. In a sense, then, Kane’s view of the development of the department was perhaps more in keeping with later standards, and Libby, or so it would seem, sought to rely on older models of academic practices more dependent on personal acquaintances and a hierarchy based on seniority and professional prestige. Furthermore, Libby’s willingness to move Taylor aside without being willing (or perhaps able) to articulate a

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reason contrasted with Kane’s willingness to support Taylor’s appointment. Kane’s perspective in this matter was consistent with his ideas of faculty promotion articulated in his inaugural address.&nbsp; Kane professed his unwillingness to dismiss a successful member of the faculty without clear reasons. In this sentiment, Kane clearly meant to state his willingness to protect faculty from the arbitrary dismissals that characterized the tumultuous wartime years when some faculty, like Libby’s friend William Schaper at the University of Minnesota had lost their positions due to academic, political, or personal animosities.&nbsp; </p> <p>Over the last several weeks I have blogged a series of short essays on the history of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a>&nbsp; in honor of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>'s <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125th-iversary</a>.&nbsp; <h5><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/so urces-for-the.html"></a></h5> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/so urces-for-the.html">Sources for the Department of History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/lo uis-geiger-an.html">Louis Geiger and the University of the Northern Plains</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/fe lix-vondracek.html">Felix Vondracek and History and the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/cl arence-perkin.html">Clarence Perkins and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ho race-b-woodwo.html">Horace B. Woodworth and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hi ttites-in-nor.html">Charles Carter and the Hittites in North Dakota</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hi CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Notes From Athens

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CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 03/28/2008 02:07:39 AM ----BODY: <p>Four diverse quick hits!&nbsp; Something for everyone!</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_41.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-right-width: 0px" height="191" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_33.png" width="128" align="right" border="0"></a> Kostis Kourelis (see: <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/new-booksperipatetic-history.html">New Books: Peripatetic History</a>) encouraged me to read R. Solnit's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/57316646"><em>A Field Guide to Getting Lost</em></a>.&nbsp; It's a brilliant little book combining the spirit of Simone Weil with the lyrics of the Clash.&nbsp; Her chapter entitled Abandon is particularly compelling.&nbsp; She weaves together themes of personal loss, the image of the abandoned city (and an abandoned hospital), and the unconscious mind: "The city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture.&nbsp; Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life." (p. 89)&nbsp; This certainly brings into focus the importance of dreams in archaeology; the excavation is part of the process of bringing the unconscious to the fore, reifying it, and coming to terms with the details that lead to its disappearance from our conscious mind. <li>My blog has apparently created a buzz.&nbsp; The word in the halls of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a> is that someone did not like this blog post: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/in side-looking.html">Inside Looking In: A Wondering about the American School of Classical Studies</a>.&nbsp; I don't know who or exactly why, except the floors whispered that it was perhaps related to this line: "It seems hard to imagine that the social experiences of each cohort here at the school, which in their intensity can approach a kind of hazing (hearing a talk about an Archaic temple in a steady rain!!), would have no impact on how the various interrelated disciplines (archaeology, philology, history, art history) developed."&nbsp; In any event, I have been quite open in my critique of the American School (you can find these posts <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/notes_from _athens/index.html">here</a>), but in general, I have am positive in my overall assessment of the institution and its programs.&nbsp; So, the buzz is good, and I am glad folks are reading my blog and discussing the points that I bring up, but I'd like to learn more.&nbsp; It's exciting to see such a venerable institution that supports and encourages a robust and critical culture. <li>I've just finished reading Maria Iacovou's article in the November 2007 volume of the <em>Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research </em>(BASOR) entitled "Site Size Estimates and the Diversity Factor in Late Cypriot Settlement Histories," 1-23.&nbsp; In it she critiques some of the methods commonly employed to determine the size of Late Cypriot (LC) sites and the implications of these estimates in how we understand the settlement hierarchy in the LC period.&nbsp; She rightly stresses that function is a crucial variable in determining the relationship between site size and the

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relationships between settlements on the island. She notes for example that the site of Pyla-<em>Kokkinokremos </em>where we have conducted fieldwork: </li></ul> <blockquote> <p>"The site commands a superb view of the sea and the fertile plain but, geographically speaking, there is no possibility that it had wells.&nbsp; Its founders, then, did not choose it to set up a long-loved and prosperous urban center.&nbsp; They obviously had another, specific objective in mind.&nbsp; In fact, the houses -- estimated as at least 200 units -- were built along the edges of the plateau, forming a continuous outer wall which has been described as "the fortification wall"&nbsp; The space within could have been, for all we know, completely free of house structures.</p> <p>The 27 ha of the plateau should not, then, be interpreted as 27 ha of built-up space; nor should they be compared naively to the "small" size of the urban fabric of Enkomi or Ay. Demetrios.&nbsp; Far from being similar, they are very different types of settlement." (p. 11)</p></blockquote> <blockquote> <p>He observations are interesting and touch upon some of the basic research questions that we hope to test this summer (see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/an other-pyla-ko.html">Another Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Update</a>).&nbsp; As for site size, Dave Pettegrew and I have been working on a very similar project, albeit for a later period.&nbsp; In particular, we have focused on how intensive pedestrian survey defines "large sites" and determining how these methods have influenced our understanding of places in the archaeological landscape.&nbsp; In fact, we submitted and had rejected an article that dealt with a very similar topic.&nbsp; Here's the abstract:</p></blockquote> <blockquote> <p>"The study of large sites has been vital to Mediterranean archaeological survey for some thirty years. In regional environments where palace complexes, urban centers, and sizable primary and secondary settlements are ubiquitous, large-site survey has emerged as a key component of research design. Despite a scholarship recognizing large-site survey as a distinct facet of landscape archaeology, there has been relatively little scholarship addressing the relationship between intensive method, data production, analysis, and archaeological interpretation. This article provides a synthetic overview of major problems and issues in surveying and interpreting large sites in the Eastern Mediterranean and offers two case studies from Corinth, Greece, and Larnaca, Cyprus, that offer new directions in understanding extensive surface scatters at the archaeological and historical level. The paper advocates large-site survey as a fundamental vehicle for exploring the concept “site”—constructed in the encounter between archaeological fieldwork, the artifactual landscape, and the desire to produce discursively meaningful interpretations of the Mediterranean past."</p></blockquote> <ul> <li>I received an email just this morning from Dr. Stephen Robinson, the son of Elwyn B. Robinson who was a longtime professor in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota and the author of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/190890">The History of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; He introduced himself and was kind enough to send along a copy of a touching memoir that his father Elwyn Robinson composed on the death of his wife Eva in 1984, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/11380503">Remembrances of Eva Foster Robinson</a> </em>(1903-1984) and photograph. </li></ul> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_42.png"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="299" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_34.png" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>Stephen

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Robinson in the window of Merrifield Hall where the Department of History is located on the campus of UND. <br>Photo by Elwyn Robinson </em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 130.127.64.160 URL: DATE: 03/28/2008 10:27:46 PM I don't know what the vibe might be inside the ASCSA, but for those of us in the US, William Caraher's blog has brought us so much closer to the daily activities of the School. Reportage is obviously subjective and knowing the author adds a human voice. In the 10-years I've been an ASCSA alumnus and the 20-years I've worked in its excavations, I haven't heard the voice (Akoue) of the ASCSA so vividly as in this blog. For me, the postings were a celebration of the ASCSA and its dispersed, complex, multi-national, multi-aged community. I haven't noticed negativity but quite the opposite, the affirmation of critical inquiry and a refreshing honesty. My greatest worry now is what will happen when Bill comes back home. Who will provide my daily ASCSA fix? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Early Christian Ecclesiastical Architecture of Cyprus: First Impressions STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-early-chris CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 03/27/2008 01:57:59 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last two weeks, I have been collecting research on the Early Christian architecture of Cyprus.&nbsp; These are my first impressions. <p>Five quick impressions of the Early Christian basilicas of Cyprus in tacit comparison to those of Greece. <p>1. The churches of Cyprus demonstrate a remarkable diversity in decoration, architecture, and organization. Some of this can be attributed to the multiple influences present on the island. The raised stylobates, western narthex and atrium evoke churches from the Aegean, the widespread use of <i>opus sectile</i> seems to be a distinctly Cypriot element as does the creative and unique use of molded gypsum plaster, and the mosaic floors show the influence not only of the southern coast of Asia Minor, but also

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from the vicinity of Antioch and Beirut in the Levant as well as points further west including the Aegean. From a diachronic perspective, these multiple influences have framed some of the main questions regarding Cypriot culture throughout antiquity and prehistory. Where do the constituent elements in Cypriot culture – including architecture, decoration, and liturgical organization – derive? The diversity of influences reflect in part the wide range of economic contacts between the island and the various regional centers nearby and the degree and nature of external has continued to inform the reading of the design and decoration of Early Christian basilicas in Cyprus (Most famously outlined by A.H.S. Megaw in his "Byzantine Architecture and Decoration in Cyprus: Metropolitan or Provincial?" <i>DOP</i> 28 (1974), 57-88). It is worth noting, however, that the different styles of buildings, sometimes in the same community, also reflect the strategies employed by local populations to mark out their identity. External influence is not simply the passive side effect of economic or political contact between areas that make certain cultural traits inevitable in a particular context, but rather evidence for cultural interact reflects the deliberate and conscious modes of expression in a particular community. <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_40.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="191" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_32.png" width="148" align="right" border="0"></a>2. Megaw early attention to post-classical monuments and levels has been continued in the impressive record well published churches from Cyprus. Whereas in&nbsp; Greece only a handful of Early Christian basilicas have received dedicated monographs (Demetrias, Aliki on Thassos, for example). In Cyprus at least six buildings have complete monographs: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/19881492">Soloi</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40110272">Kampanopetra</a>, the three churches at <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/186710945">Kopetra</a>, the basilica at <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/52303510">Maroni-Petrera</a>, the church at <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/175138459">Alassa</a>, and the very recently published (and long awaited) <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/72871373&amp;referer=brief_results">Kourion: Excavations in the Episcopal Precinct</a></i>. These churches provide welldocumented, if not necessarily well-dated base points, for assessing the lesser known buildings. <p>3. Like in Greece, Early Christian basilicas in Cyprus are places of continuous investment in the landscape: <p>a. Most churches show several phase of construction. When the phases are close chronologically they often reflect large scale repairs and refitting typically owing either to earthquake damage to the original structure or the desire to build a more expansive and elaborate building. Two phases of decoration, at very least, are visible at Ay. Kyriaki in Paphos, the basilica at Soloi, and the Kampanopetra and Ay. Epiphanios at Salamis. <p>b. In other instances, much later buildings stand atop earlier foundations. The more convenient examples of this come from the three barrel vaulted basilicas documented by Megaw in his 1946 JHS (A.H.S. Megaw, "Three Vaulted Basilicas in Cyprus," <i>JHS</i> 66 (1946), 46-56). There are many other instances, however, including the several examples in which the decoration of the early church continues to be visible in the later building. Three such buildings preserved examples of earlier, pre-iconoclastic mosaic work in apses incorporated from earlier buildings: Angeloktiste at Kiti, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4153078">Panayia Kanakaria</a> – Lythrankomi, and Panayia tis Kyras – Livadia. <p>c. Finally, the practice of reutilizing Early Christian spolia occurred in Cyprus. The later basilica of Ay.

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Lazaros in Larnaka includes numerous examples of Early Christian architectural sculpture in its walls. The most interesting example, however, might come from the Episkopi Sarayia which incorporated large amounts of material from the Episcopal Basilica at Kourion into its fabric and decoration. Megaw has argued that this occurred when the Episcopal see was transferred from Kourion to Episopi at some point after the Episcopal Precinct at Kourion was abandoned. (See: A.H.S. Megaw, "The episcopal precinct at Kourion and the evidence for relocation," in A. Bryer and G.S. Georgallides eds. <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31097067">Sweet Land of Cyprus</a> </i>(Nicosia 1993)). <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KourionBasilicaSM.jpg"><em><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="KourionBasilicaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KourionBasilicaSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><br><em>Kourion Episcopal Precinct</em></p> <p>4. Churches in bunches. Thoroughly excavated sites show evidence for multiple churches. The sites of Kopetra, Pyla-Koutsopetria, and Ay. Georgios Peyeias are examples of relatively small (i.e. non polis sized) sites with multiple churches. Large sites like Salamis-Constantina, Kourion, or Paphos have produced multiple large basilicas. This is not necessarily a feature distinct to Cyprus. Indeed, multiple basilicas are common even around smaller communities in Greece and elsewhere. How this phenomenon is to be understood is the more pressing matter. Functional differentiation is one potential explanation for the large number of churches. Even modest settlements might have a designated “cemetery” basilica and perhaps a nearby monastic establishment. Church building was an important aspect of the “sacred economy”. The temporal personal prestige as well as genuine piety associated with building a church might also account some of the large number of churches. Finally, it seems likely that the Christian community had a diversity is that is often overlooked by archaeologists. Various heretical groups – from the relatively harmless rigorist sects like Novatianism to more aggressive Monophysites congregations – would have likely fed the proliferation of ecclesiastical architecture throughout the east. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AmathousBasilicaSM_1.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AmathousBasilicaSM_1.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="271" alt="AmathousBasilicaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AmathousBasilicaSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></em></a><br><em>Amathous "Foot of the Acropolis" Basilica</em></p> <p>5. The Long Late Antiquity. While there is very little evidence for significant Early Christian architecture in Cyprus prior to the end of the fourth century, the Early Christian basilicas on the island continue to be built well into the 7th century. This is about a century later than the dates regularly attributed to Early Christian basilicas in Greece, but in keeping with the later dates for sites in elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. It suggests that despite the disruptions of the Persian Wars and perhaps even the early days of the Arab invasion, sufficient wealth continued to be available to build relatively elaborate buildings. The ceramic evidence seems to show that Cyprus drew at least some its wealth from its deep engagement in Eastern Mediterranean networks of exchange. Thus, the continued prosperity manifest in the commitment to monumental construction suggests (although it does not prove in a proper sense) that the exchange networks continued to function and generate wealth for

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the inhabitants of the island. </p> <p>In 1966 A. Papageorghiou noted that around 60 Early Christian basilicas were known in Cyprus (A. Papageorghiou, "H Παλαιοχριστιανικη και Βυζαντινη αρχαιολογία και Τέχνη εν Κύπρωι κατα το 196768," <em>ΑΒ </em>(1970)) and by 1985 that number had exceeded 80 (A. Papageorghiou, "L'architecture paleochretienne de Chypre," <em>CCARB</em> 32 (1985), 299-324).&nbsp; I include a list here of around 60 major Early Christian basilicas (and a few minor one).&nbsp; The list in not exhaustive, but a start. <p>List of the Major Early Christian basilicas of Cyprus : <p><b></b> <p> Acheiropoiitos - Lambousa<br>Agios Georgios hill (PASYDY) Nicosia<br>Alassa<br>Amathous - Akropolis<br>Amathous - Ay. Tychonas<br>Amathous - Ay. Varvara<br>Amathous - Foot of the Acropolis<br>Amathous - The Great Southeast Basilica<br>Angeloktistos - Kiti<br>Arsinoe - Polis Chrysochous<br>Asomatos-Aphendrica<br>Ay. Barnabas - Salamis<br>Ay. Barnabas and Hilarion<br>Ay. Epiphanios - Salamis<br>Ay. Georgios - Peyias - Basilica I<br>Ay. Georgios - Peyias - Basilica II<br>Ay. Georgios - Peyias - Basilica III<br>Ay. Heracleidios - Politico<br>Ay. Kononas - Akamas<br>Ay. Kyprianos Menico<br>Ay. Kyriaki - Panayia Chrysopolitissa <br>Ay. Mamas - Morphou<br>Ay. Philon - Karpas<br>Ay. Photios - Yialousa<br>Ay. Procopius<br>Ay. Spyridon Tremethoushia<br>Ay. Thekla<br>Ay. Trias - Yialousa<br>Ay. Tychikos<br>Ayia Moni<br>Bedestan - Nicosia<br>Episkopi Saraya<br>Giorkous<br>Hagiasma of Nicodemus<br>Kampanopetra - Salamis<br>Katakymata<br>Katalymata ton Plakoton Akrotiri<br>Kato Katalymata - Akrotiri<br>Kopetra-North Church<br>KopetraSirmata<br>Kopetra-South Church<br>Kourion - Episcopal<br>Kourion - Extra Muros<br>Kourion - Harbor<br>Ktima<br>Lysi<br>Marathovouno<br>MaroniPetrera<br>Panayia Kanakaria - Lythrankomi<br>Panayia Limeniotissa Paphos<br>Panayia Pergamenotissa<br>Panayia Syka - Karpas<br>Panayia tis Kyras Livadia<br>Panayia-Aphendrica - Karpas<br>Paphos - Toumbelos<br><b>PylaKoutsopetria<br></b><b>Pyla-Vigla<br></b>Shyrvallos - Paphos<br>Soloi</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 8: The Wall on Vigla STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-8-the-w CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 03/26/2008 01:40:06 AM ----BODY: <p><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep

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isode-3-an-ar.html"><em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="164" alt="WallViglaRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WallViglaRO.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a> </a></em></em></p> <p>Episode 8 of <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><em>Emer ging Cypriot</em></a><em> </em>is now posted.&nbsp; Similar in theme to <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-7-the-w.html">Episode 7: The Wall on Kokkinokremos</a>, this short documents in the in-field component of the process of archaeological analysis on the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; Specifically, <a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">Joe Patrow</a> captures my initial rumination on the wall on Vigla.&nbsp; </p> <p>The full extent of this wall became evident after the dry winter ended with torrential spring rains.&nbsp; These rains cleared earth and vegetation away from parts of the wall allowing us to follow it for much more of its length than during previous seasons.&nbsp; On the ground, the wall is very difficult to see and almost impossible to video or photograph in a convincing way.&nbsp; From the air, however, its course along the south face of Vigla is clearly visible.&nbsp; On the photo to the left below note the parallel lines just to the right of the cultivated area.&nbsp; The northern approach to Vigla was fortified by another stretch of wall and a dry moat, or taphros which is also more visible from the air than the ground as is clear from the two parallel lines separated by a line of bushes on the right of the the photo to the right.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ViglaWallDetail.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="204" alt="ViglaWallDetail" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ViglaWallDetail_thumb.jpg" width="124" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ViglaTaphros%20copy.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="204" alt="ViglaTaphros copy" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ViglaTaphros%20copy_thumb.jpg" width="304" border="0"></a> </p> <p>This short also captures one of the archaeological problems that we face at Vigla.&nbsp; The material on the plowed surface of the hill is predominantly Late Classical or Hellenistic (i.e. 4th-2nd c. BC).&nbsp; We are fairly convinced that the construction techniques used in the wall and dry moat are Late Roman or Early Byzantine in date (i.e. ca. 600 AD).&nbsp; Moreover, our geophysical work (stay tuned for Episode 9!!) produced an image suggestive of an Late Roman basilica style church.&nbsp; Excavations this summer should shed considerable light on this archaeological mystery.&nbsp; I think some of my confusion about this seeming incongruity (a Classical-Hellenistic overburden?) is evident in this short.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ViglaWalls_1.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="290" alt="ViglaWalls" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ViglaWalls_thumb_1.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p><em>A few

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technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first seven shorts (with links to those shorts) below.</p> <p><em><em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="Landscape_MontageRO7" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO7%5B5%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></em></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO5" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO5.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO4%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="FormerStudentRO4" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO4.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-5-basec.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="BaseCampRO6" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaseCampRO6%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-6-findi.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="FruitCratesRO12" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FruitCratesRO12%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-7-the-w.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb[7]_thumb[1]_thumb[1]_thumb[3]" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KokkinokremosWallRO4_thumb7_thumb1_t%5B3%5D.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: March 25 Parade in Athens STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: march-25-parade CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 03/25/2008 06:50:32 AM ----BODY: <p>I looked over my blog for the past month and realized that there were almost no pictures.&nbsp; March 25th seemed like a good day to fix that.&nbsp; I took part of the morning off (only part!) and checked out the military parade through downtown Athens.&nbsp; We weren't in an ideal place for photographs, but I did click off a few that are more or less presentable.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/EvzonesSM.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="EvzonesSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/EvzonesSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>Evzones in their fustanellas</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ParadeTrucksAthens.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ParadeTrucksAthens_1.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ParadeTrucksAthens" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ParadeTrucksAthens_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </em></a><em> <br>Some kind of fighting trucks</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GunTrucksSM.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GunTrucksSM_1.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px;

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border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="167" alt="GunTrucksSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GunTrucksSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </em></a><em> <br>Trucks with Large Guns</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TanksSM.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="TanksSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TanksSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em> <br>Proper Tanks</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/HelocoptersAthensSm.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="HelocoptersAthensSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/HelocoptersAthensSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>Everyone gets into the act...</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DrinkingPlanes.jpg"><em><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="DrinkingPlanes" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DrinkingPlanes_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em> <br>Drinking planes for firefighting</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Firefighters.jpg"><em><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="247" alt="Firefighters" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Firefighters_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em> <br>Firetrucks</em></p> <p align="left">Parades are great.&nbsp; I love trucks although the ones with the big guns were a bit scary.&nbsp; The biggest applause was for the Evzones and especially the firefighters who worked so hard this past summer.</p> <p align="left">If the pictures aren't your style, I did do a proper blog post for the day <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/pl anning-the-py.html">here</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 03/26/2008 12:01:52 AM

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The great thing about blogs is that you can discuss some highly intellectual topic one day, then show lots of photos and talk about how cool big trucks are the next. Keep up the good work! ! P.S. I'm a little jealous of your extended stay in greece. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Planning the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: planning-the-py CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 03/25/2008 02:10:27 AM ----BODY: <p>March 25th is a National holiday in Greece.&nbsp; There will be parades and ceremonies to commemorate the raising of the Greek flag in revolt from the Turks on this day in 1821.&nbsp; March 25 is also the Feast of the Annunciation as it falls exactly 9 months before Christmas.&nbsp; Finally (and I am the only one "celebrating" this), March 25 is almost exactly 2 months before the beginning of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> field season.&nbsp; </p> <p>The planning stage of the project is going full bore now and the PKAP planning wiki has filled up with all kinds of discussions regarding the field season.&nbsp; The major discussions center on three interrelated issues:</p> <p>1) Daily Schedule.&nbsp; In the past the PKAP team has been small enough that we were able to plan each day as it arrived.&nbsp; This has generally been necessary as the schedule of the British firing ranges varies a good bit, and we can only get access to the site when the British are not firing.&nbsp; They almost never use the ranges in the afternoon so we can generally count on being in the field during that time of day (say, after 2 pm), but sometimes they do not have firing scheduled in the morning allowing us to have a complete day in the field.&nbsp; This year with a bigger team we will lose some of our scheduling flexibility and we will have to be more disciplined.&nbsp; Each morning, we will work in the museum (8-12) and then go into the field in the afternoon (3-7).&nbsp; We still have a good bit of pottery to wash, read, and process from last year's survey so there is museum work to occupy the students each day.&nbsp; Two days a week we will run seminars for the students that will both get them out of the museum for a morning and provide a more structured learning environment.</p> <p>The other issue related to our daily schedule is how many days a week we will work. I am generally in favor of working every day that we are on Cyprus. It seems fair since it costs us money to be there whether we work or not.&nbsp; <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> has suggested a six day a week schedule.&nbsp; He's probably right here.&nbsp; It gives us a chance to recharge, take care of personal business (laundry!), write and enter data, read, and most importantly meet to plan the next week.&nbsp; So, Sundays will likely be days off.&nbsp; </p> <p>The other big change in our daily schedule will be that this year we'll have a camp manager, Bret Weber.&nbsp; This frees up the senior staff from handling the logistics like daily grocery shopping, cooking, and making sure that the students are contributing to the general upkeep of our living arrangements.&nbsp; It should give us more time to focus on museum work -- since we won't have to leave the museum at 12 to go

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shopping and can work straight through to our 1 pm lunch time (the museum closes at 2 and we try to clean up our workspace and leave before then).&nbsp; Moreover, we can work in the field until 7 and not have to worry about rushing home to prepare and then cook dinner.&nbsp; He'll be a great help.&nbsp; The fact that he has a Ph.D. in history, is a gifted teacher, and has a strong interest in environmental history is an added bonus.</p> <p>2) Equipment and Supplies.&nbsp; This will be our first excavation season, and it will require a new set of equipment.&nbsp; On top of that, we are going to bring some new tools for mapping (like a Trimble R8 DGPS) and documenting artifacts.&nbsp; Scott Moore has been talking about learning the new tools over at his <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings</a> blog.&nbsp; The tools that we bring over to Cyprus or purchase there will depend closely upon the field procedures that David, Michael Brown, and Dimitri Nakassis develop for our investigation.&nbsp; Since we are not attempting large-scale open-field excavations, but rather four small soundings, we will require slightly different set of tools than a full scale excavation.&nbsp; We do, however, want to introduce as many of the standard excavating tools to students as possible so we will inevitably bring more equipment that is strictly necessary.&nbsp; Archaeologists are nothing if not inventive and have developed techniques to do almost anything in an accurate and precise way with a minimum of equipment.</p> <p>Once we figure out exactly what we need, we then need to determine what to bring from the US and what we can get in Cyprus.&nbsp; It has always been more economical to bring big-ticket items from the US, but with the Europ being as strong as it now is, it is increasingly viable to bring over even less expensive equipment.&nbsp; In any event, our list of supplies is growing.&nbsp; Once it is close to being finalized, I will post it here as I did last year (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/04/pk ap_season_pre.html">PKAP Season Preparations Continue</a>).</p> <p>3) Teaching.&nbsp; We have also begun to set a schedule for the pedagogical aspects of the program.&nbsp; While I have talked in this blog (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-5-basec.html">Episode 5: Basecamp</a> with links) how learning happens in the field, we will also conduct site visits and run seminars.&nbsp; The site visits in particular are challenging because (1) our students tend not to have much formal training in ancient history and the reading of archaeological sites and (2) their interests will vary from early prehistory (aceramic Neolithic sites like Khirokitia) to the Late Antique (like Kourion) and the Medieval period (like Kolossi Castle). Visiting representative sites from every period is easier in Cyprus than elsewhere, because of its small size, but still requires that we plan our weekend excursions well.&nbsp; We also work to expose the students to sites that are similar in size and organization to Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>like Ay. Georgios-Peyias on the western part of the island with its impressive set of Early Christian churches, tombs, and elite buildings.&nbsp; Once our list of sites to visit is finalized, I will post it here as well.</p> <p>All this requires not only academic coordination, but also logistical coordination (i.e. cars, drivers, and scheduling -- particularly the delicate balance between fieldwork and trips).</p> <p>Two months may seem like plenty of time to get this all planned, and it is, but if we don't start thinking about it and discussing it now, late April and May becomes frantic and we end up cutting corners to get things ready in time.</p> <p>So the planning begins now and over the next 8 weeks, I will post on our progress toward PKAP.&nbsp; Stay tuned!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Politics and the Presidency at UND: Reflections on the Past at the Dawn of a New Era - Part 1 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: politics-and-th CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/24/2008 01:38:22 AM ----BODY: <p><em>This may be the final installment of my weekly feature on the history of the Department of History at UND. It will appear as a three-part case study (Part 1, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/po litics-and--1.html">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/04/po litics-and-th.html">Part 3</a>) examining the clash between Professor Orin G. Libby of the Department of History and President Thomas Kane.&nbsp; Its greater purpose is to shed light on the University of North Dakota at a crucial crossroads in its history.&nbsp; In the early decades of the 20th the University found itself with a new University President, suffering through the leading edge of a significant economic crisis, and facing a time when particularly divisive local and national politics manifest themselves in University life.&nbsp; At the center of the resulting maelstrom stood Professor </em><a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og49.html"><em>Orin G. Libby</em></a><em> of the Department of History.&nbsp; I have not provided a full biography of Libby here, but rather an overview of the important and complex clash between Libby and President Thomas Kane.&nbsp; Hopefully this serves a prompt to reflect on the history of the university at a moment when it is facing an important crossroads.&nbsp; UND is </em><a href="http://www2.und.nodak.edu/our/news/story.php?id=2253"><em>welcoming a new president</em></a><em>, the nation faces a likely economic downturn, the state of North Dakota is deep into a major demographic shift, and many politicians are becoming increasingly sensitive about the politicized nature of university faculty.</em> <p>The tensions and changes during the first several decades of the 20th century coincided with a period of significant political and economic tensions within the state. The so-called Second Boom of the early 20th century had ended and the difficult economic times of the 1920s and the 1930s presented the University with a new set of challenges. The economic problems of the state not only led to serious financial difficulties for the University but also fed the rise of powerful political organizations, such as the NPL, that charged many aspects of public life with a political current. This political current tracing

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just below the surface infused the sometimes tumultuous discourse of university life with a factional and conspiratorial tone. Conservatives, in particular, had attacked economist James Boyle and sociologist John Gillette for the political elements of their research in agricultural economics and sociology of the rural poor respectively. Typical of this moment was the efforts of N.C. Young’s, an avowed conservative and head of the Board of Administration of the University, to oust law school professor Joseph Lewinsohn who was an active supporter of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Bull-Moose Party while on the law school faculty in 1912. Lewinsohn was not attacked simply on the basis of his involvement in controversial local politics, but also on account of his alleged incompetence as a teacher.&nbsp; This blending of political motives with allegations of a genuine academic character led several leading members of faculty, including Orin G. Libby and his more progressive friend and colleague, John Gillette, to form a local branch of the American Association of University Professors. While the A.A.U.P. often remained strangely silent during the turmoil of the late teens and twenties, the great challenges and changes facing both the University and the department frequently played themselves out at the intersection of political, academic, and even pedagogical discourses. <p>Throughout this tumultuous period at the University, the discipline of history underwent its own transformation to acquire a very different appearance by the 1930s. Enrollments steadily increased as did the size of the faculty who tended to possess credentials not dissimilar from those expected of faculty today. This properly credentialed faculty produced an impressive array of publications, a solid reputation in the state and university, and a group of prestigious and influential alumni. It is with only a little exaggeration that the department’s faculty of the mid-century looked back on this period of the department’s history as a “golden age”.&nbsp; The story of the successes and struggles of the university, department, and its faculty during this period have survived to a relatively remarkable degree in the papers of O. G. Libby.&nbsp; <p>While numerous aspects of Libby’s career at the University and in the state in general have become legendary, his clash with the President Thomas Kane has remained somewhat infamous in Libby lore. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/lo uis-geiger-an.html">Louis Geiger in his classic history (The University of the Northern Plains</a>)found the tumultuous early years of the Kane presidency deserving of no less that 13 pages in his general history of the University and assigned Libby pride of place in his description of the clash. Libby’s character, politics, and understanding of the role of faculty in University life made him particularly vulnerable to attacks from the administration who sought faculty who supported their views or remained detached from the governance of the University. <p>The most popular impression of Libby comes through clearly in Iseminger’s portrayal of the man as the “defender of academic standards and university protocol.” This stood in stark contrast to Kane who from his earliest days on campus “consistently took the side of leniency in matters of discipline or academic standards and that he had only casual regard for the university constitution.” (see: G. Iseminger, "Dr. Orin G. Libby: A Centennial Commemoration of the Father of North Dakota History." <i>North Dakota History</i>. 68:4, pp.2-25) While these characterizations are perhaps fair, in the larger context of the time, matters such as university protocol and academic standards for both faculty and students were hardly fixed points. In fact, the university constitution had only been implemented a scant few years before Kane’s arrival on campus as one of the last acts of the McVey Presidency, and few precedents had firmly established the extent of its authority. In this void of <i>de jure</i> policies, men like Libby and Kane with strong personalities held forth expectations that their views would command significant authority.

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<p>Libby’s strong personality gave his independent perspective a particular edge in the politically charged climate of the post-war period. Most scholars consider the appointment of Thomas Kane as President of the University to be a decidedly political. More Progressive minded members of the board, some of whom were strong NPL supporters, saw the selection of Kane to the presidency as a victory. In fact, George Totten, a leading NPL representative on the Board of Administrators famous declared Kane “our man.”&nbsp; This victory, however, proved illusory as Kane quickly shifted from apparently progressive leanings to a more conservative orientation. In some ways, Libby, who never wore his politics on his sleeve even in particularly political times, shared Kane’s tendency to straddle positions in political debates. His involvement with the Campus War Committee, for example, might have suggested conservative leanings. Conservatives generally touted their patriotism and support for the wars as distinct from members of the NPL who were unfairly painted as unpatriotic and at times subversive. Libby's close friendship with J. M. Gillette, however, an active supporter of Progressive causes ranging from Womens’ Suffrage to the NPL's domestic agenda, suggested liberal tendencies.&nbsp; The obscurity of Libby’s political views and seemingly contradictory elements of his behavior limited the support that he received from any one side and left him open to criticism from both. <p>Finally, Libby’s views on University life in some ways reflected older traditions of university administration which preserved an important place for the faculty voice in University affairs.&nbsp; Kane, on the other hand, like his predecessor Frank McVey saw the president as the ultimate arbiter of all university life. In this assessment, shared by Geiger, the clash between Libby and Kane, while unfortunate for both men, emerged as a key test case in the ongoing process of professionalization of the office of professor at the university. This, as most of my predecessors have observed, is another aspect of the significant contributions of the Libby to the development of the Department and the university in general. <p>The initial salvo in the clash between Libby and Kane is typically seen as the president’s mismanagement of the Influenza Epidemic on campus in 1918. In fact, as Iseminger observed, the clash between Libby and Kane might date even earlier to the president’s inaugural address in which Kane, among other things, offered a thinly veiled criticism of Libby’s close friend Gillette’s handling of a disciplinary case against a fraternity. (T. Kane, “The Installation Address of the President of the University of North Dakota,” <i>School and Society</i> 8 (1918), 127.) Such strangely impolitic statements, which nevertheless clearly sought to establish the pre-eminent position of the president on campus as the final arbiter of university affairs, came to characterize Kane’s term as President and predictably clashed with the equally blunt Libby. In the aftermath of the influenza epidemic in which 20 military trainees stationed at the University died, Libby emerged as the spokesman for a group of faculty who blamed Kane for the tragedy. In 1920, Libby along with four others – including Gillette and E. Ladd – composed a 12 page memo entitled “Memoranda of the Unfortunate Happenings at the University of North Dakota.” This document blasted President Kane as unsuitable for the office of president and established the basis for their call later that year that Kane be dismissed by the Board of Regents. As word of the memorandum and Kane’s endangered presidency became known, the controversy escalated drawing in students, the press, and members of the Board of Regents. In fact, the ruckus had a seriously disruptive effect on campus complete with the student body taking the President’s side. Such public demonstrations perhaps motivated all parties to come to the table. Ultimately Libby and his faction negotiated a secret deal with Kane brokered by three members of the Board of Trustees George Totten, R. T. Muir, who were important politicians in the state, NPL members, and apparently more or less in sympathy

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with Libby and his group, and John Hagan. This agreement became known as the “Hagan Agreement.” Its contents like the “Memoranda of the Unfortunate Happenings” are lost.&nbsp; Whatever the specifics in this document, the "Hagan Agreement" appears to have established the basis for a functional, if not to say peaceful, relationship between Libby’s faction and President Kane. Its artificial, "negotiated" nature provided only the thinnest coating of formal niceties to obscure their deep animosity.&nbsp; The peace between the two did not last long. <p>Over the last several weeks I have blogged a series of short essays on the history of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a>&nbsp; in honor of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>'s <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125th-iversary</a>.&nbsp; <h5><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/so urces-for-the.html"></a></h5> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/so urces-for-the.html">Sources for the Department of History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/lo uis-geiger-an.html">Louis Geiger and the University of the Northern Plains</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/fe lix-vondracek.html">Felix Vondracek and History and the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/cl arence-perkin.html">Clarence Perkins and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ho race-b-woodwo.html">Horace B. Woodworth and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hi ttites-in-nor.html">Charles Carter and the Hittites in North Dakota</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DHChapter_2.html#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15_4107"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Why Hybridity Matters for the Study of Early Christian Greece STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: why-hybridity-m CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 03/21/2008 01:21:12 AM -----

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BODY: <p>My talk yesterday was canceled or rather postponed indefinitely due to a conflict with another talk here at the American School.&nbsp; I was a little disappointed, but having a date to complete my first draft of an article was more important (in some ways) than actually giving the talk (although I would have liked to get the feedback!).&nbsp; </p> <p>Over the weekend, I was able to revise my introduction (and a revised introduction is posted here: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/th e-hybrid-arch.html">Intro</a>) and complete a draft of the conclusion.&nbsp; My conclusion attempts not only to wrap up the arguments that I make in the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/th e-hybrid-arch.html">Intro</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep igraphy-and-h.html">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/de lphi-mosaics.html">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ea rly-christian.html">Part 3</a>, but also articulate why this kind of analysis matters for how we understand Late Antiquity and Early Christian Greece in particular.</p> <p>Since it touches upon several of the ideas that I have talked about in the blog (e.g. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/dr eams-inventio.html">Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology</a>) and since I have posted informal versions of each section (see above) and since I have posted 2 versions of my introduction, it only makes sense to post the conclusion here as well.&nbsp; It's a work-in-progress, an almost-working paper, fresh off the presses with all its warts, and now it's available:</p> <p><i>Conclusion</i> <p>The proceeding three case studies suggest that both patrons and viewers recognized the potential for ambiguous and hybrid readings of architecture and decoration in an Early Christian context. Adding to this complexity was the character of churches as ritual space. While donors might pay for the construction and decoration of a church drawing upon both Christian and elite motifs, ultimately the clergy take center stage during the performance of Christian ritual. This ritual not only played an important role in establishing clerical authority as they are shown mediating between the divine and mundane, but also may have also created ambiguity as inscriptions marking lay euergetism, mosaics evoking aristocratic values, and imperial patronage competed for the attention of the Late Antique viewer. One method for coming to terms with how we understand Early Christian space characterized by the polyvalence of signs is accepting the mottled and ambiguous message produced within Early Christian architecture. The postcolonial concept of hybridity offered a paradigm for understanding the interaction of authority and ambiguity. Moreover, the historical situation in Greece during Late Antique finds certain parallels to colonial circumstances at other times and places. In common with other colonial situations, Late Antique Greece manifests the intersection of a powerful source of institutional authority with ties extending beyond the local community, and strongly held and long standing local needs and expectations. A postcolonial reading of the architecture of Early Christian Greece should not disregard the problematic nature of the archaeological and historical evidence for these centuries in Greece. In fact, such a reading accepts the archaeological and interpretative problems by suggesting that we abandon our efforts to find sharp developmental, regional, or exegetical interpretations of Late Antique Greek ecclesiastical architecture and recognize that some of the ambiguity confronting the modern scholar would have been present for the ancient viewer as well. <p>A substantial revision of how we understand Early Christian architecture in the

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context of Late Antique history of Greece has the additional benefit of shedding valuable light on the implications of more traditional interpretative paradigms. Recent work on the historiography of Late Antiquity has revealed the strong, and not entirely unexpected, influence of Orientalist influences in the work of late 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> century pioneers in the discipline like A. Riegl as well as in the long-suspect but no less significant works of J. Strzygowski.<a href="#_ftn1_5893" name="_ftnref1_5893">[1]</a> The willingness to consider the “Eastern” influence on the art of the Late Roman world drew upon contemporary practices of essentializing cultures and tracking cultural traces through the art, architecture, and cultural syntheses that emerged from periods of intimate contact. Flattering or unflattering critiques of the art of Late Antiquity often depended upon assessing how much influence “Oriental cultures” had on the artistic development of that age and thereby reflected the colonial judgments of Western European scholars derived in part from the experiences of contemporary political contacts with the societies of the socalled “Orient”. <p>The desire to understand the character and boundaries of these essentialized cultures intersected with the nationalistic goals for archaeology in places like Greece. From the second decade of the 20<sup>th</sup> century men like George Soteriou and Anastasius Orlandos revealed the presence of numerous Early Christian basilicas throughout the modern boundaries of the Greek state.<a href="#_ftn2_5893" name="_ftnref2_5893">[2]</a> The uniformity of these buildings confirmed in the mind of these scholars the relatively uniformity of a Christian Greek culture within and perhaps even beyond the boundaries of the modern nation-state during 5<sup>th</sup> century AD. Moreover, the emphasis reading architecture in Greece as evidence for the development of the Christian liturgy not only established a historical connection between the Early Christian liturgy in Greece and its Middle Byzantine successor but also placed Greece firmly within the liturgical history of both Constantinople and the broader Orthodox world. Thus, the architecture and liturgy of Greece sought not only to define the ancient roots of Greek Christian culture, but also to tie it to the culture of the Orthodox Eastern Mediterranean at the very moment when Greek territorial ambitions had been stifled after the disastrous Asia Minor campaigns of the early 1920s. The terms of debate established by Soteriou and Orlandos persisted even as the discipline of Early Christian archaeology passed into the hands of scholars with rather different political views like Demetrius Pallas. <p>In contrast to paradigms rooted in the historicism of the national narrative, postcolonial theory provides a sustained critique of the unity and integrity of culture as a constituent component of individual or group identity.<a href="#_ftn3_5893" name="_ftnref3_5893">[3]</a> By critiquing our reading of Early Christian culture in the context of the art and architecture of Greece we offer a clear challenge to the long shadows of Orientalism and nationalism that still fall over Late Antique scholarship.<a href="#_ftn4_5893" name="_ftnref4_5893">[4]</a> Such efforts reinforces the readings of Late Antiquity that view the emergence of something identifiable as the Late Antique or Early Christian world less as the coalescing of a distinct culture, and more the interplay of diverse individuals, groups, and interests across the Eastern Mediterranean. In this intellectual context, Early Christian basilicas no longer stand out as merely static markers of Christian authority in the landscape and instead come to be places where the population of Greece negotiated changing notions of authority, social and religious hierarchy, cosmology, ritual life, and even the role of religious and public architecture in the life of the community. By undermining monolithic claims to cultural unity and authority, which resonate so closely with the modern distortions of totalitarian regimes, we shift our focus from the institutional power of the Early Christian church to the complex interplay of

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the various groups within Late Antique society in the creation of a distinct, if unstable, Christian discourse. <hr align="left" width="33%" size="1"> <p><a href="#_ftnref1_5893" name="_ftn1_5893">[1]</a> S.L. Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski.” <i>History and Theory</i> 33 (1994), 106-130; J. Elsner, "The birth of late antiquty: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901," <i>Art History</i> 25 (2002), 358-79. <p><a href="#_ftnref2_5893" name="_ftn2_5893">[2]</a> W. Bowden, <i>Epirus</i><i> Vetus</i>, 22-24; W. H. C. Frend, <i>The Archaeology of Early Christianity, a History</i>. (London 1997), 204-205, 244-245. <p><a href="#_ftnref3_5893" name="_ftn3_5893">[3]</a> H. Bhabha, “Postmodernism/Postcolonialism” in <i>Critical Terms for Art History</i>. R. Nelson and R. Schiff eds. (Chicago 1996), 302-322. <p><a href="#_ftnref4_5893" name="_ftn4_5893">[4]</a> For a sustained critique of these methods, albeit in a different context see: F. Curta, <i>The Making of the Slavs</i>. (Cambridge 2001), 6-36.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: North Dakota, Athens, and the Southwest Peloponnesus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: north-dakota-at CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 03/20/2008 02:14:22 AM ----BODY: <p>On Monday I helped to perform the annual book inventory at the Blegen Library.&nbsp; The library is a highly specialized, non circulating collection with a focus on&nbsp; archaeology, classics and ancient history.&nbsp; The annual inventory involved scanning the shelves to make sure that all the books catalogued were present and shelved correctly.&nbsp; It was tedious work and took most of the day as teams of two fanned out across the stacks.&nbsp; One person read the call numbers from the catalogue and the other read the spins of the books on the shelves.&nbsp; </p> <p>Two books came to my attention and reflect the far reaching, international character of contemporary scholarship.&nbsp; One of the sections that I read included Walter Ellis's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27812424">Ptolemy of Egypt</a></em>.&nbsp; Ellis was my predecessor in the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a> at the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; Prior to his

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untimely death he built a loyal following of students interested in the ancient world.&nbsp; This group of students formed the core of my early classes on Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, and the Middle Ages and greatly smoothed my transition to full-time teaching.&nbsp; It was nice to see a sliver of home tucked away in the stacks crowded with titles on Hellenistic Egypt.</p> <p>Michael Laughy brought the other book to my attention: Demetrius J. Georgacas, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42436808">A historicolinguistic and synonymic inquiry into some medical and cognate terms: Greek and other terms for 'tapeworm' and 'ravenous hunger'</a>.&nbsp; Georgacas taught for many years at the University of North Dakota, contributed to body of material housed in the Historical Lexicon of the Modern Greek Language (see P. Koukoules, "The Athens Modern Greek Lexicon," <em>JHS </em>53 (1933), 1-8), and generated a vast body of published works (running to over 40 entries in World Cat) related to the toponyms, etymology, and lingusitic roots of the Greek language.&nbsp; Some aspect of his lexographical and linguistic work have appeared in his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/63052335">Modern Greek-English Dictionary</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p>More interesting perhaps to readers of this blog is Georgacas' interest in toponymys.&nbsp; In this capacity he worked with William A. McDonald of the University of Minnesota.&nbsp; McDonald is best known as one of the co-directors of the Minnesota Messinia Expedition.&nbsp; McDonald and George Rapp published the seminal work, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/389723">The Minnesota Messenia expedition: reconstructing a bronze age regional environment</a> (Minneapolis 1972), which formalized many of the ideas and approaches central to the first wave of modern regional survey archaeology in Greece. </p> <p>McDonald used Georgacas' work to compile a register of place names in the Southwest Peloponnesus and together they co-published the results of this research: D. J. Georgacas and William A. McDonald, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/15397">Place Names of the Southwest Peloponnesus</a></em>. (Athens 1967).&nbsp; It's clear that the final product of this collaboration was mainly McDonald's work.&nbsp; The introduction, however, provides some background on McDonald's and Georgacas's work in the area:</p> <blockquote> <p>"Some thirty years ago Mr. Georgacas became interesting in the collection and study of place names in the vicinity of the native town of Siderokastro, which was the seat of the former demos (municipality) of Avlon.&nbsp; In the course of the next ten years he collected material from much of the area and prepared two manuscripts (<em>Τοπωνυμικόν Μεσσηνίας</em> (Athens 1935) and <em>Γλωσσικόν υλικόν Μεσσηνίας καί κυρίως της επαρχίας Πυλίας συλλεγέν τό θέρος του 1937</em>. (Athens 1937)) which are now in the archives of the Athenian Academy's <em>Historical Lexicon of the Greek Language</em>.</p> <p>Mr. McDonald's involvement began in 1853 and derived from his participation in Professor Carl W. Blegen's archaeological work in the vicinity of the Bay of Navarino.&nbsp; At that time the decipherment of the Linear B script by the Late Michael Ventris had made it possible to compile a list of phonetic approximations of the names used ca. 1200 B.C. to designate the towns, villages, and districts which belonged to the kingdom of Pylos.&nbsp; It therefore seemed worthwhile, concurrently with the archaeological surface exploration to make a collection of present-day place names on the chance that at least a few of them might have maintained in continuous use since the late Bronze Age.</p> <p>It soon became apparent that, quite apart from any bearing they might have on the problems of the topography of the Bronze Age, the modern names merited close attention and study, for they represented a stratification in which historical and linguistic vicissitudes are reflected as unmistakably as in the successive destruction layers of archaeological sites.&nbsp; Inhabitants whose language was

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ancient Greek, Koine Greek, Byzantine (Middle) Greek, South Slavic, Franckish (French), Venetian (Italian), Albanian, Turkish, or Neo-Greek have all left discernable traces in the local toponyms." (p. 4)</p></blockquote> <p>The creation of the modern toponymy of any region is as complex a phenomenon as the creation of the archaeological landscape, but the basic act of collecting data remains central to any analysis.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BlegenBookscrpped.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="182" alt="BlegenBookscrpped" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BlegenBookscrpped_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.133.179.92 URL: DATE: 03/20/2008 03:35:52 PM NO kidding. Demetrios Georgakas taught at North Dakota? Had no idea! His work on the toponyms of the NW Peloponnese is truly great. Among other things, he wrote on Slavic toponyms as early as the 1930s. I've always wondered if he might be related to Dan Georgakas, the prominent scholar of Greek-American history at Queens College CUNY. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 194.219.34.195 URL: http://www.etana.org/abzu DATE: 03/21/2008 04:11:01 AM Just a minor correction Bill. The Blegen library has open stacks, that's why you were in them and able to make the serendipitous discoveries you report here. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 194.219.34.195 URL: http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/ DATE: 03/22/2008 01:51:15 AM Thanks, Chuck! I fixed it and reposted. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 7: The Wall on Kokkinokremos STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-7-the-w CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 03/19/2008 02:14:34 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="163" alt="KokkinokremosWallRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KokkinokremosWallRO.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Episode 7 of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>is now available. This episode begins a series which examines our daily fieldwork.&nbsp; Joe Patrow chose to focus his camera on the personalities involved in the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; Thus, for this short you get to meet Michael Brown who works with Dimitri Nakassis to study the Late Bronze Age aspect of the Pyla coastline.&nbsp; In particular, Michael and Dimitri are working to expand what we know about the site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos, a major Late Bronze Age site documented over the course of several excavations in the 1970s and 1950s (for more on the site see: V. Karageorghis and M. Demas, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/14190271"><em>Pyla-Kokkinokremos : a late 13th-century B.C. fortified settlement in Cyprus</em></a>. (Nicosia 1984)).&nbsp; Systematic intensive survey continue to reveal both additional chronological phases at the site, as well as information regarding the extent and nature of the prehistoric settlement there.&nbsp; Notice the stone basin that Mat Dalton, our illustrator, is reassembling in the final clips of the short.&nbsp; </p> <p>Patrow also captures a bit of the journey to the site.&nbsp; On the day this was shot, Michael and Mat took the bus to site since the project cars were occupied elsewhere.&nbsp; There are some shots of the low coastal plains that are being rapidly built over as the city of Larnaka continues to expand to the east.&nbsp; </p> <p>Finally, it has been particular fruitful to discuss with Michael the various ways to understand the construction of a fortified Late Bronze Age site on this stretch of coastline.&nbsp; The parallels with our newly discovered Late Roman fortifications on Vigla are striking.&nbsp; Both sites would have likely taken advantage of the new infilled embayment as a harbor, but this safe harbor would have also left both sites exposed to potentially hostile groups who wanted the wealth concentrated at the site on account of its advantageous location.&nbsp; Our collaboration with Michael and Dimitri who have sought to position the site in relation to both Aegean and Levantine civilizations has encouraged us to consider the links between the coastal area of Pyla and other prosperous networks of exchange in the Late Roman period as well (for our efforts along these lines see <strong><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/mo re-pkap-news.html">here</a></strong>).</p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video,

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it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first six shorts (with links to those shorts) below.</p> <p><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><em></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="Landscape_MontageRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO_2.jpg" width="119" border="0"></a></em></em></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO_2.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></em><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO_2.jpg" width="115" border="0"></a></em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="FormerStudentRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO_3.jpg" width="116" border="0"></a></a><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-5-basec.html "><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="BaseCampRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaseCampRO_1.jpg" width="115" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-6-findi.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="78" alt="FruitCratesRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FruitCratesRO_2.jpg" width="114" border="0"></a></em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: dreams-inventio CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 03/18/2008 02:17:16 AM ----BODY: <p>I have occasionally mentioned examples of <em>inventio </em>here in this blog particularly as they relate to the discovery of Early Christian basilicas in Greece.&nbsp; An <em>inventio </em>is a story in which some long lost, typically religious object is revealed again usually by supernatural means.&nbsp; It is commonly applied to the discovery of Christian relics and icons, but can also apply to the discovery of "sacred places" like caves and abandoned churches in the landscape.</p> <p>Jack Davis recounted this <em>inventio </em>story about the discovery of the basilica on the Evangelistria Hill outside of Ancient Nemea:</p> <blockquote> <p>According the story the church was discovered after an old woman in the village had a dream which told her to go up on top of the hill and dig there.&nbsp; She did what the dream asked and discovered an ancient icon amidst the ruins of an old church.&nbsp; The villagers hearing about this then rushed up the hill and excavated the Early Christian basilica with their farming tools revealing its full plan.&nbsp; The story itself is an <em>inventio </em>tale and tremendously common in the oral tradition of modern Greece.&nbsp; As <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">mentioned earlier in the blog</a>, the story has precedents in Christian literature dating back to at least the 5th century <em>Inventio Crucis </em>(discovery of the true cross). (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/fo ur-views-of-t.html">More...</a>)</p></blockquote> <p>While it would be easy enough to attribute such activities to the "simple piety" of villagers, I came across another example of this genre over the weekend.&nbsp; Anastasios K. Orlandos, the important Greek archaeologist and architect (for more see: <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/writing-off-wall-transcriptionas.html">Writing off the Wall: Transcription as Resistance</a>), introduces his summary of the excavations at the Early Christian basilica at Daphnousia in a report to the Athenian Academy in 1929 (<em>PAA </em>4 (1929), 226-230) :</p> <blockquote> <p>"Around 20 km from Atalantis in the area of the Lamian coast, the villagers of the neighborhood of Arkitsa and Lavanata of the demos of Daphnousia driven by their religious zeal to discover an icon of St. Katherine, revealed according to a dream by one of them, have excavated last year the apse of a large church..." (227)</p></blockquote> <p>The similarities between

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Orlandos's description of the discovery of the church at Daphnousia and the story of the discovery of the church on the Evangelestria Hill make it possible that the latter is a doublet of the earlier story rather than two separate episodes (I need to determine whether there is any published account of the discovery of the Evangelistria church), but stories like this in Early Christian archaeology of Greece are not rare.&nbsp; Elsewhere in this blog, I have mentioned the story surrounding the discovery of church at <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">Kozani</a>.&nbsp; While the villager's dream is not specifically mentioned in the rather austere descriptions of the excavation of this building, the <em>Archaeologikon Deltion </em>(20 (1965), 475) suggestively notes that the church was excavated initially by villagers. </p> <p>In general I had left these stories as examples of the genre of <em>inventio</em> which would have been familiar to most Greeks because if its regular place in both local traditions of holiness and in hagiography.&nbsp; What I missed in these stories was the prominence of dreams in the construction of the Greek landscape and local archaeological knowledge.&nbsp; </p> <p>Since Antiquity dreams have been regarded as revelatory -- something fundamental to Freudian dream analysis as well -- and so it is not surprising that the act of uncovering (revealing) the material remains of the past is closely associated with the interpretation of dreams.&nbsp; Charles Stewart, in a recent article ("Dreams of Treasures: Temporality, Historicization, and the Unconscious," <em>Anthropological Theory </em>3 (2003), 481-500), makes just this point.&nbsp; He argues that the dreams draw upon not only an individual's unconscious in a Freudian sense (i.e. the individual's childhood), but also the larger body of collective historical memories both suppressed actively and "forgotten."&nbsp; </p> <p>Dreams and <em>inventio </em>have a close relationship in the historical understanding of the Greek landscape. Moreover, the importance of dreams within Christianity (in both the New Testament and in hagiography) has contributed to the close link between dreaming and the discovery and understanding of Greece's Byzantine and Early Christian past.&nbsp; The most famous episode in more recent Greek history is the discovery icon of the Panagia on the island of Tinos in the 1820s.&nbsp; A nun was told where to find the icon in a dream and since the discovery of the miraculous icon, it has become the center of a major pilgrimage site (for a discussion of this see. J. Dubisch, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31375161">In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine</a></em> (Princeton 1995)).&nbsp; The story of the icon at Tinos was well-known in Greece and certainly influenced similar dreams and their interpretations.&nbsp; Stewart adds a more recent example to this story from his own anthropological fieldwork on Naxos.&nbsp; In the Korinthia during our work at the site of Lakka Skoutara (for a brief report of our work there see: L. Diakopolos, “The Archaeology of Modern Greece,” in <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/54966412">Mediterranean Archaeological Landscapes</a>: Current Issues</em>. E. F. Athanassopoulos and L. Wandsnider eds.&nbsp; (Philadelphia 2006). 183-197), a local informant understood the building a church in an isolated valley according to a similar story.&nbsp; His grandfather was drawn to the build a church there because of the presence of an earlier building.&nbsp; The stories of <em>inventio </em>collected above add an explicitly archaeological dimension to such dreams.</p> <p>In a another context, the revelatory nature of dreaming and its confirmation by (sometimes unauthorized) archaeological excavation - which could occasionally be reinforced by the recording of such narratives and discoveries in academic proceedings by such archaeologists as Orlandos - contributed to the link between the past and the present in the Greek landscape.&nbsp; The importance of such narratives in the development of a nationalistic Greek archaeology is clear especially in the

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1920s.&nbsp; It is during this period that Early Christian archaeology of Greece sought to affirm the Christian character of the Greek nation as a response both to the frustrated irredentism of that decade and to the exchange of populations with its explicitly religious definition of ethnicity (see: W. Bowden, <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/48679111">Epirus Vetus : the archaeology of a late antique province</a></i>. (London 2003), 24-26; W.H.C. Frend, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/60266629">The archaeology of early Christianity : a history</a>. (London 1996), 205-206, 245-246).&nbsp; The revealed truth of dreams which announced the location of Christian antiquities or sacred objects proved the historical presence of Christian Greeks in the landscape and tied the religious practices and beliefs of the local population to an archaeological past.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.133.179.92 URL: DATE: 03/20/2008 04:04:00 PM Just a quick reference. Maria Mavroudi (earlier at Berkeley, now at Princeton) works on Byzantine dream books. I wonder if there might be some leads there. See, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources (2001) and a collection of essays edited by Mavroudi and Paul Magdalino, The Occult Sciences in Byzantium (2006) -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Sources for the Department of History at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: sources-for-the CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/17/2008 12:58:53 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last several weeks I have blogged a series of short biographies of important figures in the history of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a>&nbsp; in honor of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>'s <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125th-iversary</a>.&nbsp; I have received several emails about these biographical notes , and one of the regular questions about working on the history of the university is where to begin.&nbsp; Since I

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wrote <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/lo uis-geiger-an.html">last week</a> about L. Geiger's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1107281"><em>The University of the Northern Plains</em></a><em>, </em>I won't deal too much that important work here.&nbsp; Instead, I'll bring to the fore some of the primary sources and good secondary works on the history of the University and the history of the Department of History in particular.</p> <p><em>The Early History</em></p> <p>The earliest history of the University is particularly fragmentary.&nbsp; Some of the better fragments derive from the President’s annual reports to the board of trustees and the annual report of the Department of History to the President which either exist as freestanding documents or as embedded within the President’s Report to the Board of Trustees. The minutes of the Board of Trustees’ meeting for the first two decades of the university (1884-1904) contain odd references to <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ho race-b-woodwo.html">Horace B. Woodworth</a> and his activities at the University. Otherwise, Woodworth appears infrequently in the correspondence of President Webster Merrifield, Dean Vernon Squires, Dean Joseph Kennedy, and others. While some of these correspondence preserve information on institutional matters, they contain regrettably little information regarding the man himself, his influences, or the reasoning behind the policies, events, and decisions that affected his role at the university. Some of that information, however, can be gleaned from later reminiscences offered by faculty members, the local press, and the <i>Dakota Student</i>, the University’s student newspaper, which provide some background and color, but little true substance. This general dearth of sources for the University’s early years, plagues the two best studies of the University history – Vernon P. and Duane Squires’s serialized history of the University published in the late 1920s and early 1930s as well as <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/lo uis-geiger-an.html">Louis Geiger’s</a> more expansive later work.</p> <p>V. P. Squires, “Early Days at the University,” <i>The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota</i> 18.1 (1927), 4-15<br>--, “The University of North Dakota, 1885-1887,” <i>The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota</i> 18.2 (1928), 105-118; <br>--, “President Sprague’s Administration, 1887-1891,” <i>The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota</i> 18.3 (1928), 201-230; <br>--, “The First Quadrennium Under President Merrifield,” <i>The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota</i> 18.4 (1928), 313-344; <br>D. Squires, “The University Attains its Majority: 1901-1905” <i>The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota</i> 21.4 (1931), 293-317</p> <p><em>The Early 20th Century</em></p> <p>The story of the successes and struggles of the university, department, and its faculty during the first half of the 20th century have survived to a relatively remarkable degree in the papers of <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og49.html">Orin G. Libby</a> (for Libby see G. Iseminger, "Dr. Orin G. Libby: A Centennial Commemoration of the Father of North Dakota History." <i>North Dakota History</i>. 68:4, pp.2-25; G. F. Shafer, "Dr. Orin G. Libby." <i>North Dakota Historical Quarterly</i>. 12:3, pp.107-110). Libby’s fastidious character ensured that a large quantities of his private papers survived, as did much of his personal and professional correspondence and his annual reports on the Department to the University President. This material has formed the background for Iseminger's modern studies on Libby’s professional and personal character and contributed to Geiger’s general work on the University. Libby’s material on the department found complements in the annual catalogue of courses which were updated

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throughout this period to show not only the courses but also the faculty responsible for them.&nbsp; </p> <p>The side-effect of the Libby's large collection of material is that it tends to skew Departmental history toward his somewhat idiosyncratic view of the University and Departmental affairs.&nbsp; Counterpoints to Libby that focus on the internal working of the department appear occasionally in the papers of the President's of the University during the early 20th century: Franklin McVey and Thomas Kane.&nbsp; The continue albeit somewhat more rarely in the correspondence of President John C. West and Dean William Bek, the longtime Dean of the college of the Arts, Science and Literature. Despite the increasingly bureaucratized nature of the University during the first third of the 20th century, the history of the department remains frustratingly fragmentary.</p> <p><em>The Era of <a href="http://library.und.edu/Collections/Robinson/home.html">Elywn B. Robinson</a></em> <p>The dynamism of the Robinson Era is captured in a rather remarkable array of documents. The most interesting of these documents, perhaps, is Elywn B. Robinson’s unpublished autobiography. Composed apparently in the early 1980s, Robinson details his life from his early years in Ohio to the publication of his magnum opus <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/190890">The History of North Dakota</a></i> in 1966. He drew heavily on his family diary, the material in the Robinson Papers in the Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collect, and the reminiscence of his colleagues, particularly Robert Wilkins, and his sons Steve and Gordon. One of my long term projects is to edit this manuscript and explore the possibility of getting it published. <p>The autobiography is complemented by a series of interviews conducted by John Davenport in the early and mid 1970s. Davenport interviewed Elwyn Robinson and his wife, Eva, members of the Departments of the 1950s and 1960s, and in one extensive interview, Robert Wilkins, who taught in the Department of History from 1945 to 1992. The majority of information in these sources focus on the life of the department in the 1950 and early 1960s. I have supplemented this modestly with interviews with Gordon Iseminger, Playford Thorson, and D. Jerome Tweton, although I have only begun to process much of the content from these interviews. The departmental reports to the Dean from 19551977 came to light in the files of the Department Head and provide basic information on departmental affairs including a enrolment numbers. These reports are far more robust for the 1950s and early 1960s than for later years. This, perhaps, reflects the awareness of this period as one of particular importance in the development of the department. Finally, Robinson provided a long synthetic article on the post-war expansion of the University: “The Starcher Years: The University of North Dakota, 1954-1971,” <i>North Dakota Quarterly</i>, 39 (Spring 1971): 5-44. <p>Unfortunately, as is typical for the history of the department and the university in general, several major voices go unrepresented in the available material. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/fe lix-vondracek.html">Felix Vondracek</a> left almost no papers after his retirement from the department in 1971. Vondracek served as department head from 1945 to 1962. Equally, if not more problematic, is the absence of material from Dean Robert B. Witmer who was the Dean of the College of Science, Literature, and Arts. Witmer served as dean from the death of Bek in 1948 until his retirement in the late 1960s and with the growing complexity of the university, played an increasingly important role in the major departmental affairs. The growing complexity of the university its expanded bureaucracy had made the paper trail larger, more complex, and more dispersed. Consequently, this section will depend more fully, perhaps to a fault, to those limited materials available in the Wilkins and Robinson papers. It is important to note, however, that these substantial and easily accessible collections present only one view of the

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department. <p> <p>Other Short Biographies of major figures in the Department of History at UND: </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/lo uis-geiger-an.html">Louis Geiger and the University of the Northern Plains</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/fe lix-vondracek.html">Felix Vondracek and History and the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/cl arence-perkin.html">Clarence Perkins and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ho race-b-woodwo.html">Horace B. Woodworth and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hi ttites-in-nor.html">Charles Carter and the Hittites in North Dakota</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: quick-hits-and CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 03/14/2008 01:40:05 AM ----BODY: <p>This has been a crazy week!</p> <ul> <li>Monday was "Clean Monday" (Καθαρά Δευτέρα).&nbsp; It's the first day of Orthodox Lent (and the day after the end of Carnival).&nbsp; It is traditionally celebrated by eating seafood (particularly shellfish) and flying kites.&nbsp; It is a significant holiday. <li>Tuesday and Thursday saw lectures, and so will today, Friday.&nbsp; <ul> <li>Tuesday was Oleg Grabar who talked about the "object in and object of Islamic Art".&nbsp; He explored the history of the study of Islamic art and sought to consider its future directions as only a scholar who had close to 5 decades in the field could.&nbsp; <li>Thursday was Theo Kopestonsky's Tea Talk which continued to develop her research on the the sanctuary of the nymphs at Kokkinovrysi.&nbsp; She elegantly placed her shrine \within a highly romanticized version of the Corinthian landscape.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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<li>Later that evening Bogdan Maleon presented the a working paper on the political theory behind mutilation in the Byzantine state. <li>Tonight is the Open Meeting of the American School.&nbsp; Jack Davis will review the work of <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a> projects.&nbsp; Guy Sanders will present recent work of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/corinth/index.html">Corinth Excavations</a> with Ioulia Tzonou-Herbst and Sarah James.</li></ul> <li><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/52937907&amp;tab=editions">Linda Jones Hall</a> was in town. <li><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_38.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-right-width: 0px" height="238" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_30.png" width="175" align="right" border="0"></a><a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> is getting busy: <ul> <li>We installed <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a> on a server at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. <li>We are beginning to use a private wiki (an easily updated web page) to help us organize our upcoming field season (<a title="http://pkap.wikidot.com/" href="http://pkap.wikidot.com/">http://pkap.wikidot.com/</a>).&nbsp; We can collaborate in producing lists of supplies, dates of student arrivals, et c.&nbsp; Scott Moore, David Pettegrew, and I are experimenting with it now.&nbsp; We'll open it up to the rest of the senior staff once we work out the kinks. <li>The University of North Dakota's Office of University Relations prepared a <a href="http://www2.und.nodak.edu/our/news/story.php?id=2283">nice press release</a> for <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a></em>.&nbsp; Now that we have six of the shorts posted online, we want to begin to lure in more of the non-blog-reading public!The <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/">Office of University Relations</a> does a great job at keeping PKAP in the public eye in North Dakota. <li>Our second annual report has appeared in the 2007 volume of the <em>Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus</em>.&nbsp; This volume is dedicated to the memory of Danielle Parks.&nbsp; Congratulations to the RDAC staff for producing a substantial volume in a prompt way! <li>The the two volumes of the L. W. Sorensen and K. W. Jacobsen's <em>Panayia <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/156043236">Ematousa: A Rural Site in Southeastern Cyprus</a> </em>(Athens 2006) hold significant import for the study of Pyla-Koutsopetria.&nbsp; Panayia Ematousa is only about 12 km inland from Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>and provides a well documented assemblage of pottery to compare to the finds from Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em>.</li></ul> <li><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_39.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="191" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_31.png" width="127" align="right" border="0"></a>Byzantium at large: <ul> <li>In a March 2, 2008 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/02mcgr.html">review of his book <em>Lush Life </em>in the New York Times</a>, Richard Price was quoted as saying: <br>"About the Lower East Side today, Mr. Price said, “This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today.” He added that he sometimes thinks of the neighborhood as a very busy ghost town, where many of the ghosts milling around still speak Yiddish." <li>In a <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131">New York Review of Books review of

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John Broughton's book</a>, <em>Wikipedia: The Missing Manual</em>, Nicholson Baker compared <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>'s use of the public-domain 1911 Britannica to the Medieval use of spolia: "The fragments from original sources persist like those stony bits of classical buildings incorporated in a medieval wall."&nbsp; <li>I can't say that Julia Kristeva's <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/61123208">Murder in Byzantium</a> </em>is a quick read. </li></ul> <li>Blogs: <ul> <li>I really groove on Brandon Olson's blog: <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/">Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean</a>.&nbsp; For any student contemplating graduate school, read Olson's blog to see how to do it right. <li>The "Vidi" feature on <a href="http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/">Alun Salt's blog</a>, Archaeoastronomy, is becoming required reading. <li>Not much buzz (not any in fact) around my recent contribution to the Ancient World Bloggers Group blog: <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/03/pdq-11-form-translationtext-blogging.html">PD(Q) 1.1: Form, Translation, Text: Blogging on Paper</a>.&nbsp; That may not bode well for <a href="http://pdqweb.edublogs.org/">PD(Q)</a> ... with some much already to read and do, is there room for another journal? <li>There is a new post over at Prairie Polis: <a href="http://prairiepolis.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-isreligion-violent.html">Why Is Religion Violent?</a>&nbsp; </li></ul> <li>An odds or an ends: A recent call went out from my department head, Kimberly Porter, that the Art Department at UND was looking to get rid of a collection of glass type slides "of the old type"... "many of which are photos of this persons' journeys around the world."&nbsp; I claimed them.&nbsp; </li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Hybrid Architecture of Early Christian Greece STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-hybrid-arch CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 03/13/2008 01:03:05 AM ----BODY: <p>Regular readers of this blog (both of them) recognize that I have been slowly constructing several arguments through a series of posts; one of these arguments draws upon Postcolonial theory to argue for the hybrid nature of Early Christian space in Greece (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep igraphy-and-h.html">Part 1</a>, <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/de lphi-mosaics.html">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ea rly-christian.html">Part 3</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/wh y-hybridity-m.html">Conclusion</a>).&nbsp; It's my current research project and the topic of an article currently under construction.&nbsp; Today's blog is an early draft of the introduction to that article. <p>I was conflicted whether to release an early draft of what is definitely a work-in-progress.&nbsp; Over the weekend, however, I listened to quite a few of the famous Blue Note "blowing session" type Jazz albums; I was listening to Art Blakey's <em>Night in Birdland </em>and Cannon Ball Adderly's <em>Somethin' Else</em>.&nbsp; These albums are largely characterized by their relaxed arrangement and loosely organized style.&nbsp; They were provisional by nature and sought to capture the energy of live Jazz recordings.&nbsp; Consequently, they lacked the polished composition of, say, Miles Davis' great works; in fact, you could often here the voice of producers or the musicians making comments to one another about the melody or time.&nbsp; At the same time, I noticed that Sebastian Heath had released a <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/03/research-note-diningand-numismatic.html">provisional draft</a> of something he had been working on over at his <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/">Mediterranean Ceramics</a> blog. <p>It's in the spirit of these bold and informal offerings that I present very early draft of an introduction to my "Hybridity and Early Christian Architecture" article-in-progress.&nbsp; The citations are not done yet and the prose is rough in places, but it does capture, for better or for worse, the current state of my thinking.&nbsp; <p>(Version 2: 21 March 2008): <p><i>Architecture and the Creation of a Christian Discourse in Greece</i> <p>Since at least the 4<sup>th</sup> century, the church building has been an iconic feature of Christianity and ubiquitous in the archaeological record of the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean. These building proliferated over the 5<sup>th</sup> and 6<sup>th</sup> centuries. In the Late Roman province of Achaia alone there is archaeological evidence for well over 200 buildings, nearly 100 of which have some significant part of their plan preserved. Outside of Greek scholarship, these buildings have received relatively little attention despite the recent interest in the Late Roman period across the Eastern Mediterranean and in Greece in particular.<a href="#_ftn1_6433" name="_ftnref1_6433">[1]</a> Some of this neglect can be attributed to the irregular character of many of the excavations and the generally poor state of preservation of the buildings. Further limiting scholarly interest in these buildings is the prevalent attitude toward Early Christian churches in Greece as relatively unsophisticated pieces of architecture designed primarily to serve the liturgical needs of the local Christian community. Studies of the relationship between architecture and liturgy have tended toward functional analyses of these buildings’ regular features and regarded architecture as evidence for understanding the development of the Middle Byzantine and later liturgies.<a href="#_ftn2_6433" name="_ftnref2_6433">[2]</a> Over the past several decades scholars have increasingly questioned such developmental models,<a href="#_ftn3_6433" name="_ftnref3_6433">[3]</a> but the typological studies associated with this work have produced a solid foundation for this study of Early Christian architecture in Greece. This body of evidence is all the more valuable when we consider the dearth of literary sources for Early Christian Greece as compared to elsewhere in the Late Antique Mediterranean. New archaeological evidence and developments in how scholars interpret ancient art and architecture have made the Early Christian basilicas of Greece more accessible for the study of the cultural, economic, and religious history of the

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region during Late Antiquity.<a href="#_ftn4_6433" name="_ftnref4_6433">[4]</a> These recent methodological developments complement an already solid foundation of past scholarship to make it an appropriate moment to bring the Early Christian basilicas of Greece into closer contact with the ongoing conversations about the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean. <p>This [article] will focus on Early Christian architecture as a source for the emergence of a distinctly Christian cultural, political, and religious discourse in Greece during the Late Antique period. The study of the so-called “totalizing” discourse of Christianity is a central component to understanding the Christianization of the Mediterranean world. Scholars like A. Cameron, R. Markus, and P. Brown have argued convincingly that the increased prevalence of broadly Christian interpretive regimes across all aspects of society marked a significant change in how Late Antique individuals both articulated and understood their world. While scholarly interest in the emergence of Christianity in Greece is longstanding, it has received renewed attention over the past several decades. Despite the well-known evidence from the Pauline epistles, Acts of the Apostles and other first and second century texts, scholars have puzzled at the late appearance of the institutional church in the textual sources and archaeology for Greece prior to the 5<sup>th</sup> and 6<sup>th</sup> centuries. This gap in the historical record likely recommends a late date of the large scale Christianization in Greece and suggests that the powerful institutional church of the 5<sup>th</sup> and 6<sup>th</sup> century drove the expansion of Christianity. One important implication of this conclusion is that the population was largely non-Christian, or pagan for lack of a better term, up until this point.<a href="#_ftn5_6433" name="_ftnref5_6433">[5]</a> This line of reasoning has endowed paganism with the appearance of an indigenous and sometimes more authentic form of religious expression.<a href="#_ftn6_6433" name="_ftnref6_6433">[6]</a> The occasional and shadowy evidence for dramatic and possibly violent clashes between Christians further conjures a romantic image of a persistent paganism as a form of local resistance to institutional church. Ultimately this persistent paganism imparts in the Greek church its distinct character. Thus, Christianity is presented as a cultural system projected on Greece by an outside authority, namely Christianized and increasingly powerful pan-Mediterranean ecclesiastical and imperial hierarchy. In this context, Christian churches become the markers of this authority. While the model that I have presented here for viewing the emergence of Christianity in Greece is rather simplistic, it nevertheless represents one of the most common ways to understand the expansion of Christianity throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. <p>Early Christian architecture represents an essential indicator of the institutional church in this understanding the spread of Christianity in Greece. As elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, Christian churches contributed in important ways to the production of a distinctly Christian urban and rural landscape.<a href="#_ftn7_6433" name="_ftnref7_6433">[7]</a> Moreover, an approach that links Early Christian architecture to the rise of Christian institutional authority in the Late Antique world has brought these buildings into broader discussions of Late Antique religious, political, and urban history. At the same time, however, Early Christian churches have tended to remain relatively static places in the Late Antique landscape and serve primarily to express the unambiguous message of Christian political and religious authority.<a href="#_ftn8_6433" name="_ftnref8_6433">[8]</a> This view of Early Christian architecture as largely representational or symbolic inevitably privileges the intent of the patrons and builders. In this regard, many modern studies of Early Christian architecture borrows the tone from Late Antique literature in which the church building stands as the sign of the triumphant faith and Christian authority.<a href="#_ftn9_6433"

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name="_ftnref9_6433">[9]</a> This reading of Early Christian architecture in the Late Antique landscape largely persists even as recent interest in the genre of ekphrasis has encouraged scholars to recognize the variety possible in the way that Late Antique viewers saw Early Christian architecture and art.<a href="#_ftn10_6433" name="_ftnref10_6433">[10]</a> So while the work on epkphrastic has opened the door to considering the role of the viewer in the creation of Early Christian art, it has done little so far to challenge the primacy of the elite viewer and patron in how architecture and decoration is actually understood in a Late Antique context. <p>This [article] seeks to expand the representational or symbol reading of churches by assuming that <i>the absence </i>of a stable relationship between the viewer and Early Christian architecture played a central role in the construction of Christian authority in Late Antique society.<a href="#_ftn11_6433" name="_ftnref11_6433">[11]</a> This instability is manifest both in the practices of the Late Antique patron and, perhaps more importantly, in the diversity of perspectives available to the Late Antique viewer in Greece. The diversity of Late Antique viewers relies on an understanding that most, although certainly not all, Early Christian architecture was physically accessible to wide range of Late Antique viewers occupying a wide range of places in the social, economic, religious, and political communities of Late Antique society. The potential viewers of Early Christian churches would have included committed Christians, new converts, and perhaps even the openly skeptical. Within many churches the highly literate aristocracy would have mingled with the almost certainly illiterate urban and rural poor.<a href="#_ftn12_6433" name="_ftnref12_6433">[12]</a> In most communities the church would have been an important venue for contact between the clergy and the laity. Each group and, indeed, individual brought to these buildings a diverse range of expectations, religious backgrounds, and interpretive tools.<a href="#_ftn13_6433" name="_ftnref13_6433">[13]</a> Indeed, scholars have recognized the diversity present in the “preacher’s audience” The potential variation among Late Antique viewers provides a strong contrast to the sophisticated iconography and ordered theology of the Early Christian liturgy.<a href="#_ftn14_6433" name="_ftnref14_6433">[14]</a> While Late Antique liturgical texts and pronouncement of Early Christian theologians tended to emphasis ritual, theological, and ecclesiastical <i>taxis</i>, or order, the complex interplay of architectural spaces, decorative motifs, movable objects, and inscribed texts almost certainly resisted a unified interpretation and confronted the Early Christian viewer with an abiding sense of ambiguity. The tension between the regularity of the Early Christian ritual, the diversity of Late Antique congregation, and the potential for an ambiguous reading of the architecture and decoration recommends that we approach Early Christian architecture as a type of <i>hybrid</i> space. As this [article] will argue, the hybrid character of Early Christian space played a key role in the development of a compelling Late Antique discourse and contributed the production of a distinctly, but hardly unified Christian society. <p><i>Reading Hybridity in the Early Christian Architecture of Greece</i> <p>The notion of the <i>hybrid</i> and <i>hybridity</i> has received considerable attention in recent decades by scholars seeking to understand the interaction between cultures in a colonial and postcolonial context. The most famous use of this word in the context of postcolonial theory derives from Home Bhabha.<a href="#_ftn15_6433" name="_ftnref15_6433">[15]</a> Bhabha proposed an image of the colonial hybrid as an individual who occupies and negotiates the middle ground between the colonizer and the colonized. The emergence of a hybrid identity represents, on the one hand, a concession to the influence and power of colonial authority. On the other hand, the colonial hybrid had the ability to understand and to view expressions of colonial power in a way that produced subversive readings of

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colonial authority. In this way, hybrids exploited the inherent ambiguity of the colonial discourse (and perhaps any act of viewing). Nowhere is this clearer than in the emergence of the colonial mimic who simultaneously represents the colonizers’ reluctance to permit full assimilation of the colonized individual and the colonized individual’s potential for negotiating new, highly unstable identities that disrupted the seemingly fixed relationships stipulated by the traditional structures of colonial authority. <p>The concept of hybridity has become a popular interpretative paradigm throughout the humanities and gained influence among scholars of antiquity over the past two decades. The application of postcolonial theory has expanded our understanding both of the interaction between different groups in ancient society and of modern and ancient techniques employed to construct ethnic, religious, and social identities. Archaeological efforts to document the colonial moment have particularly attended to the instability of contact between indigenous populations and colonial powers and have issued important caveats regarding any reading of the ancient world rooted in essentialized notions of cultural identity. Peter van Dommelen’s work on contact between Punic and indigenous populations in Sardinia is particularly important for highlighting the inherent ambiguity present in the material representations of colonial identities in the Sardinian landscape.<a href="#_ftn16_6433" name="_ftnref16_6433">[16]</a> Derek Counts recent work on the “Master of the Lion” motif in Iron Age Cypriot sculpture provides a focused study on how individual objects could reflect the deep ambiguity of the hybrid form.<a href="#_ftn17_6433" name="_ftnref17_6433">[17]</a> These studies are only two examples of the conceptual interdependence of the ambiguity and hybridity in the recent readings of the ancient material culture. <p>Scholars of Early Christianity have also recognized the applicability of postcolonial theory to the Late Antique world. In particular scholars have examined how the totalizing Christian discourse of Late Antiquity has shaped our modern reading of contact between Christians and non-Christians.<a href="#_ftn18_6433" name="_ftnref18_6433">[18]</a> Rebecca Lyman has pointed out that long prevailing notions of a monolithic and coherent orthodoxy have tended to critique diversity within Early Christianity as the failure of a unified Orthodox Christianity to assert complete control over Late Roman society.<a href="#_ftn19_6433" name="_ftnref19_6433">[19]</a> A postcolonial reading of this evidence, however, suggests that arguments for a monolithic Christian identity belie far less stable reality. In fact, the process of creating a rhetorically exclusive Christianity depended in large part on the existence of the threatening and destabilizing hybrid; in other words, non-Christians, heretics, and other dissenting groups helped to define the core values of the Christian community. Consequently, the strident rhetoric of Christian triumphalism, despite its claims to persistence and uniformity, constantly shifted to accommodate the diversity within the Christian community as it sought to span the complex and cosmopolitan world of Late Antiquity. Andrew Jacobs recent work on the representation of the Jews in Early Christian sources illuminates the delicate negotiations necessary within a Christian discourse that both appropriated Jewish knowledge and discredited the Jewish “other” to reify Christianity’s privilege position.<a href="#_ftn20_6433" name="_ftnref20_6433">[20]</a> The result of these recent readings of the socalled totalizing Christian discourse is an Early Christian identity that had an inherent instability deeply tied to its modes expression. Like the rhetoric of the triumphant Early Christian literary traditional and emphasis on ritual <i>taxis</i> in the Christian liturgy, Early Christian architecture projected a wide-spread, easily recognizable, and relatively uniform presence in the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean. This uniformity, however, like the regularity of the rites performed in Early Christian space, belies the deep ambiguity present

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in the arrangement, decoration and even epigraphy of the Christian architecture. Postcolonial theory with its emphasis on the ambiguity and instability in viewing the seemingly unified rhetoric of colonial authority offers useful tools for deconstructing the productive forces at play in the emergence of a Christianizing discourse. Applying this method of analysis to Early Christian ecclesiastical architecture not only challenges the rhetorically potent construct of Early Christian triumphalism and uniformity, but also reifies the place of material culture as a constituent and productive element in the social, cultural, economic, and even political history of Late Antiquity. <p>The increasing awareness of hybridity within the unified Christian discourse offers considerable potential for reinterpreting Early Christian architecture, decoration, and ritual and finds close parallels with the recent trend toward recognizing ambiguity in ancient art, and Late Antique art in particular. Of particular significance for this current project is John Clarke’s work emphasizing the impact of imperial art in Rome on the non-Roman or “ordinary” viewer.<a href="#_ftn21_6433" name="_ftnref21_6433">[21]</a> While he stopped short of proposing subversive readings for monuments like the column of Trajan or the Arch of Constantine, he demonstrated that there was sufficient ambiguity present in these potent monuments to make them meaningful for groups often neglected in the study of the reception of Roman art. Jas Elsner proposed that the ambiguity of the motifs in some art at Dura Europus made it possible to communicate messages of resistance to Roman rule by the “indigenous” inhabitants of this community.<a href="#_ftn22_6433" name="_ftnref22_6433">[22]</a> Elsewhere Elsner and Henry. Maguire have both recognized the potential for ambivalence and ambiguity inherent in the complex symbolism oft utilized in Early Christian contexts and noted that the persistent efforts of the clergy to propose exegetical interpretations.<a href="#_ftn23_6433" name="_ftnref23_6433">[23]</a> The fruitful discussion of ambiguity in the viewing of Early Christian art provides a suitable foundation for considering the hybrid nature of the Christian discourse produced by the engagement with Early Christian space. <p>As Clarke, Elsner, Maguire and others have realized monumental architecture is particularly valuable barometer of social change in antiquity. It not only has a larger potential audience than textual sources, but it also absorbs considerable resources from the community. Consequently, monumental buildings tend to occupy significant places in the symbolic, ritual, and social landscape of a community. Not only do the Early Christian basilicas of Greece reflect the varied motives of their donors, but the motifs, furnishing, and texts employed in these buildings evoked different responses from the diverse groups who witnessed Early Christian space. In this context, the hybrid and ambiguous nature of Early Christian space negotiated and produced an unstable middle ground between the intent of donors who sought to draw upon multiple contexts to create spaces rich in meaning, and equally diverse expectations of Early Christian viewers. <p>The three cases studies features in this article will bring to the fore the hybrid character of Early Christian space in Greece. The first study looks at the intersection of imperial and local influences in the Lechaion basilica outside of Corinth. The distinctive liturgical furnishing of this building created an environment which would have visibly linked the local ecclesiastical hierarchy to imperial power and perhaps the liturgy of the Eastern Capital. This link would have flaunted the formal ecclesiastical ties between Corinth and the bishop of Rome. Neither purely local in its arrangement and features nor obviously Constantinopolitan, the architecture of this church encouraged the viewer to negotiate between the familiar features required for the Greek liturgy and novel insertions heralding imperial influence. The second case study examines a prominent mosaic pavement found in a basilica in Late Antique Delphi. This mosaic inserts motifs

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traditionally associated with the aristocratic display into a liturgical setting. The hybrid combination of aristocratic motifs and liturgical space serves to transfer values deriving from the largely “secular” sphere of the elite to the Christian rituals and perhaps even the clergy who perform them. The hybridity introduced by the mosaic floors from Delphi could easily represent the perspective of a secular, aristocratic donor as the desire of the clergy for association with elite values. Moreover, the overlap of the aristocratic and Christian discourse, whether intentional on the part of the clergy or not, like communicates a particular view of Christian authority to at least some of the Late Antique viewers. The final case study moves away from the imperial or even aristocratic component of Early Christian hybridity to consider the different modes of Early Christian epigraphy. In particular, I will focus on the difference between elite donations to Early Christian basilicas and more modest donations made by the artisan classes. The intersection of these two different, if closely related, donor strategies produced not only a hybrid method of expressing one’s identity as a donor, but may have also reflected the emergence of a particular Christian mode of giving. Each of these case studies highlights a particular aspect of hybridity in Early Christian space. They emphasize hybridity not merely in the juxtaposition of the familiar with the unfamiliar, but also as the creation of unstable interpretative regimes in which the plurality of potential meanings derived subverts plausible modern readings of the intended meaning of the donor, author, or clergy. In this assessment the ambivalence of Early Christian space empowered the congregation to play a key role in the establishment of the hybrid Christian discourse. Hybridity, then, becomes more than simply the static combination of diverse features in an object or the landscape, but a method of reading architecture, ritual, and objects breaks down the unity of essentialized discourses whether they be characteristic of Christian, pre-Christian, imperial, local, elite, or common expression. <hr align="left" width="33%" size="1"> <p><a href="#_ftnref1_6433" name="_ftn1_6433">[1]</a> A. Frantz, <i>Late Antiquity, A.D. 267-700</i>. Athenian Agora 24. (Princeton, N.J 1988), ###-###; W. Bowden, <i>Epirus Vetus: The Archaeology of a Late-antique Province</i>. (London 2003); A. Avramea, <i>Le Péloponnèse Du IVe Au VIIe Siècle: Changements Et Persistances</i>. (Paris 1997); R. M. Rothaus, <i>Corinth</i><i>, the First City of Greece: An Urban History of Late Antique Cult and Religion</i>. (Leiden 2000), <b>###-###. </b>C.<b> </b>Kosso, Cynthia. <i>The Archaeology of Public Policy in Late Roman Greece</i>. (Oxford 2003). Oikonomou-Laniado, A., <i>Argos Paléochrétienne: Contribution À L'étude Du Péloponnèse Byzantin</i>. (Oxford 2003) <b>NON VIDI.</b> <p><a href="#_ftnref2_6433" name="_ftn2_6433">[2]</a> Soteriou “Αἱ παλαιοχριστιανικαὶ βασιλικαὶ τῆς Ἑλλάδος,” <i>AE</i> (1929), 161-254; A. Orlandos <i>Η</i><i> </i><i>Ξυλόστεγος</i><i> </i><i>Παλαιοχριστιανική</i><i> </i><i>Βασιλική</i><i> </i><i>Της</i><i> </i><i>Μεσογειακής</i><i> </i><i>Λεκάνης</i><i>. </i>Athens (1957); <b>Lemerle ;</b> D. I. Pallas “Corinth et Nicopolis pendant le haut moyen-âge,” <i>FR </i>18 (1979), 93142; --, “Monuments et texts: rémarques sur la liturgie dans quelques basiliques paléochrétiens.” <i>EEBS</i> 44 (1979/80), 37-116; --, “"L'édifice culturel chrétien et la liturgie dans l'Illuricum oriental," <i>Studi Antichita Cristiana </i>1 (1984), 544-557 <p><a href="#_ftnref3_6433" name="_ftn3_6433">[3]</a> W. Bowden, “Epirus and Crete: Architectural Interaction in Late Antiquity,” Creta Romana e Protobizantina 3.1 (2000), 787800; A. Poulter, “Churches in Space: the early Byzantine city of Nicopolis,” in <i>Churches Built in Ancient Times</i>. K. Painter ed. (London 1994), xxx-xxx (at 249); C. Mango, <i>Byzantine Architecture</i>. (Milan 1978), 7-8. <p><a

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href="#_ftnref4_6433" name="_ftn4_6433">[4]</a> For a short summary of some recent and historical trends see: C. Mango, “Approaches to Byzantine Architecture.” <i>Muqarnas</i> 8 (1991), 40-44. <p><a href="#_ftnref5_6433" name="_ftn5_6433">[5]</a> Sanders, Gregory, et c. <p><a href="#_ftnref6_6433" name="_ftn6_6433">[6]</a> Gregory, “first order concerns” <p><a href="#_ftnref7_6433" name="_ftn7_6433">[7]</a> O. Von Simson, <i>Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna</i>. (Princeton, N.J 1987). R. Krautheimer, <i>Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics</i>. (Berkeley 1983). R. A. Markus, “How on Earth do Places become Holy?” xxxxxxxx; --, <i>The End of Ancient Christianity</i> (Cambridge?? 1990), xxx-xxx; B. Caseau, “Sacred Landscapes,” in G. Bowersock, P. Brown, and O. Grabar eds. <i>Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World</i>. (Cambridge, Mass. 2001), 40-45; R. Rothaus, <i>Corinth</i><i>, the First City of Greece,</i> <b>###-###.</b> <p><a href="#_ftnref8_6433" name="_ftn8_6433">[8]</a>, but see also Wharton <p><a href="#_ftnref9_6433" name="_ftn9_6433">[9]</a> See also recently J. Elsner, “The Rhetoric of Buildings in the De Aedificiis of Procopius,” in L. James ed . <i>Art and Text in Byzantine Culture</i>. (Cambridge 2007), 33-57. <p><a href="#_ftnref10_6433" name="_ftn10_6433">[10]</a> For Ekphrasis and the growing appreciation of ambiguity in this context: L. James and R. Web, “’To Understand Ultimate Things and Enter Secret Places’: Ekphrasis and Art in Byzantium,” <i>Art History</i> 14 (1991), 1-17; P. C. Miller, “’The Little Blue Flower is Red’: Relics and the Poetizing of the Body,” <i>JECS</i> 2000 (8), 213-236. <p><a href="#_ftnref11_6433" name="_ftn11_6433">[11]</a> For such approaches see especially J. R. Clarke, <i>Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representations and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C. - A.D. 315</i>. (Berkeley 2003), 9-11; Maguire, Elsner. <p><a href="#_ftnref12_6433" name="_ftn12_6433">[12]</a> Note some of the recent work on poverty. Also look at Maxwell’s recent book on John Chrysostom. <p><a href="#_ftnref13_6433" name="_ftn13_6433">[13]</a> There is a particularly well-developed body of work that examines t <p><a href="#_ftnref14_6433" name="_ftn14_6433">[14]</a> H.-J. Schulz, <i>The Byzantine Liturgy: Symbolic Structure and Faith Expression</i>. Trans. Mathew J. O’Connell. (New York 1986); R. F. Taft, <i>The Byzantine Rite: A Short History</i>. (Minneapolis, MN 1992). <p><a href="#_ftnref15_6433" name="_ftn15_6433">[15]</a> H.K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817” in <i>The Location of Culture</i>. (check: London 2004), 145-174. The basic study remains R. Young, <i>Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race</i>. (London 1995) J. Nederveen Pieterse, “Hybridity, So What?: The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition.” <i>Theory, Culture, and Society</i> 18 (2001), 219-245. <p><a href="#_ftnref16_6433" name="_ftn16_6433">[16]</a> P. van Dommelen, "Ambiguous Matters: Colonialism and Local Identities in Punic Sardinia," in K. Papadopoulos and C. Lyons, eds. <i>Archaeology of Colonialism</i> ( Los Angeles 2002), 121-147.; --, "The Orientalizing Phenomenon: Hybridity and Material Culture in the Western Mediterranean," in C. Riva and N. Vella eds. <i>Debating Orientalization: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Change in the Ancient Mediterranean</i>. (London 2006), 135-152. See also the work by C. Antonaccio, “Hybridity and the Cultures within Greek Cultures,” in C. Dougherty and L. Kurke eds. The Cultures Within Ancient Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict, and Collaboration. (Cambridge 2003), 57-74. <p><a href="#_ftnref17_6433" name="_ftn17_6433">[17]</a> D. B. Counts, “Master of the Lion: Representation and Hybridity in Cypriote Sanctuaries.” <i>AJA </i>112 (2008), 3-27. <p><a href="#_ftnref18_6433" name="_ftn18_6433">[18]</a> P. Brown, <i>Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World</i>. (Cambridge 1996). For the term “totalizing discourse “ see:

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A. Cameron, <i>Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse</i>. (Berkeley 1991), <b>xx-xx.</b> <p><a href="#_ftnref19_6433" name="_ftn19_6433">[19]</a> J. R. Lyman, “2002 NAPS Presidential Address: Hellenism and Heresy.” <i>Journal of Early Christian Studies</i> 11 (2003), 209-222. Cf. R. Lim, “Christian Triumph and Controversy,” in in G. Bowersock, P. Brown, and O. Grabar eds. <i>Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World</i>. (Cambridge, Mass. 2001), 196-218. <p><a href="#_ftnref20_6433" name="_ftn20_6433">[20]</a> A. S. Jacobs, <i>Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity</i>. (Stanford, CA 2004). D. Boyarin, and V. Burrus, “Hybridity as Subversion of Orthodoxy? Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity” <i>Social Compass</i> 52 (2005), 431-441. <p><a href="#_ftnref21_6433" name="_ftn21_6433">[21]</a> Clarke, <i>Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans</i>, 42-67. <p><a href="#_ftnref22_6433" name="_ftn22_6433">[22]</a>J. Elsener, “Viewing and Resistance: Art and Religion in Dura Europus,” in <i>Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text</i>. (Princeton 2007), 253-287; A. Wharton, <i>Refiguring the Post Classical City</i>, 23-63. <p><a href="#_ftnref23_6433" name="_ftn23_6433">[23]</a> H. Maguire, <i>Earth and Ocean: The Terrestrial World in Early Byzantine Art</i>. (University Park 1987), 1-19; J. Elsner, <i>Art and the Roman Viewer</i>. (Cambridge 1995), 249-287. ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 6: Finding Fruit Crates STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-6-findi CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 03/12/2008 01:32:06 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="163" alt="FruitCratesRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FruitCratesRO.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Episode 6 of <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><em>Emer ging Cypriot</em></a> is now posted.&nbsp; I have thought just a tiny bit about

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archaeology as bricolage lately.&nbsp; Bricolage is the practice of building or making something in an ad hoc way with whatever material is readily available.&nbsp; Punk rock is often seen as evoking bricolage in it's tremendously provisional production (for more thoughts on that see: <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/punk-archaeology.html">here</a>, <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/101ers.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/pu nk-archaeolog.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/punk-suburbs.html">here</a>) and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/pd q-11-form-tra.html">blogging</a> often demonstrates some aspects of this technique.&nbsp; Archaeological method and field procedures are often, by necessity, ad hoc.&nbsp; The <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> often found itself forced to confront unexpected problems (you threw away all of our kitchen supplies and cooking equipment?), to address lack of a permanent headquarters, to accommodate the provisional status of much of our preliminary data collection, sorting, and and storage, and to fix glitches in our field procedures (as viewers of our first archaeological documentary, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html"><em >Survey on Cyprus</em></a>, learned "fixing the glitch" was a common refrain on our project).&nbsp; </p> <p>We try each year to convey to our students the spirit and practical realities of the "read and react" atmosphere that is probably common on almost all archaeological projects.&nbsp; To introduce them to "archaeological problem solving" we'll typically ask their help to solve little problems.&nbsp; This short chronicles our students efforts to secure two fruit crates for pottery sorting.&nbsp; The stackable, industrial, plastic crates used for shipping fruit are a common feature on archaeological projects.&nbsp; They are easy to acquire, stack neatly for storing pottery, and they are fairly rugged.&nbsp; The only problem is that they tend to proliferate if unsupervised.&nbsp; We began with around 20 of them, but each season, nature takes its course, and 5 or sometimes even 10 more appear.&nbsp; Each crate is diligently labeled "catalogued pottery", "uncatalogued", "needs to be washed pottery", "to be drawn", "drawn", or even the dreaded "problem units".&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>The students did a good job and learned a bit on the fruit crate adventure.&nbsp; Next season we hope to be able to return of the crates to their proper home in the fruit market!</p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Crates_1_1.jpg"></a> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Crates_2_1.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Crates_2_1.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="271" alt="Crates_2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Crates_2_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></em></a><br><em>It begins with just two... well labeled and disciplined<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Crates_1_1.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="271" alt="Crates_1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Crates_1_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br>A fruit crate gathering... at night... unsupervised<br></a></em><a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Crates_3_1.jpg"><em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Crates_3_1.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="271" alt="Crates_3" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Crates_3_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>Order restored, but at what cost?</em></p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first five shorts (with links to those shorts) below.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img height="74" alt="Landscape_MontageRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO_1.jpg" width="112" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img height="74" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO_1.jpg" width="110" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img height="74" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO_1.jpg" width="110" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"><img height="74" alt="FormerStudentRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO_1.jpg" width="110" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/ep isode-5-basec.html"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px" height="74" alt="BaseCampRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaseCampRO.jpg" width="110" border="0"> </a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 130.127.64.160 URL: DATE: 03/12/2008 10:48:27 AM I LOVE FRUITCRATES! That was so awesome: a conceptual performance piece.! Archaeology and politics in a plastic nutshell.! Scholars meets host country in the marketplace.! An essay on the subtle intersections between methodology ! (sorting, rationalizing, collecting, displaying, washing, shriveling in the sun, molding in storage)! and ideology (expectations, language, economic value, personal charisma). ! LOVED IT -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PD(Q) 1.1: Form, Translation, Text: Blogging on Paper STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pdq-11-form-tra CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 03/11/2008 12:23:19 AM ----BODY: <p>This is a first draft of an introduction to a section in the first fascicule <a href="http://pdqweb.edublogs.org/"><em>PD(Q)</em></a><em>. </em>The blog posts included in this sections are: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dont-buy-thisbook.html">http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dont-buy-thisbook.html</a><br><a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/lulucom-andbypassing-thepublishers/">http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/lulucom-andbypassing-the-publishers/</a><br><a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/re-thinking-blogcarnival.html">http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/re-thinkingblog-carnival.html</a><br><a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-carnival-journalproposal-past.html">http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/blogcarnival-journal-proposal-past.html</a> <p>Much of this feels a bit stale and returns to some of my old saws.&nbsp; I cross posted this on <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> blog.&nbsp; In any event, here's my intro:</p> <p><em>Form, Translation, Text: Blogging on Paper</em>&nbsp; <p><i>PD(Q)</i> is an experiment in translation. When it was first introduced on the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers

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Group</a> blog, I eagerly agreed to participate. Since that time I have sought to understand what it is that we are trying to do and to recognize the implications of translating onto paper texts developed in the digital genre and medium of blogging. The mechanics behind the idea seemed quite straightforward, as the following blog posts will reveal. Bloggers would submit their best posts to a group of editors who will edit these posts, offer some form of mild peer review, and then assemble them in a quarterly journal which will be available at Lulu.com as either an electronic publication in PDF or in paper form for a modest price. At the same time, the posts included in each issues would be entered into a digital archive in a format suitable for stable, long-term storage. <p>The benefit of a paper version of the blog posts is to attempt to cross the divide between the kind of people who are comfortable with online, digital media, and people who feel most at home in the world of paper publishing. This happens to be a very current topic, as the discussions surrounding the Indiana University libraries announcement of the electronic <i>Museum</i><i> Anthropology Review</i> over the past several weeks have shown. Some of these debates, however, reveal the persistence of considerable hesitancy to regard online publications as equal to those distributed on paper. <p>In some regard, the decisions of <i>PD(Q)</i> to provide a print venue for web based content reflects a kind of reverse migration from an fluidity and instability of an electronic medium to the staid legitimacy of a the printed page. A movement from an electronic medium to paper may well be simple for those electronic journals which continue to employ the basic format of print publications. The method that we will use to move the blogs from the web to paper reflect just such a simplistic approach. The webblog posts are moved from the web into a word-processor, edited for basic style (i.e. spelling and basic grammar), and then formatted for the dimensions of standard paper. <p>This process, however, brings to the fore a number of potentially valuable questions regarding how blogs or text native to a digital format are understood as a form of writing (I use the term “form of writing” to encompass the medium, genre, and style of a text). The following blog posts reveal some of the issues surrounding the idea and process of translation from one form to another; other issues, however, were explored other post, in emails, and comments on these posts which for various reasons we will not include in the print version of <i>PD(Q)</i>. I will take the liberty of bringing up some of these issues here in a general, if somewhat superficial, consideration of the process of translation from the blogosphere to the world of paper publishing. <p>The first step in the translation process is extracting the blog text from the context provided by the blog itself. Blogs provide a vital context for this form of writing. From their onset, blogs were closely tied to the ephemeral communities and networks that appear on the internet. These communities are visible through the practice of linking to other blogs both through hyperlinks in individual posts and through lists of other blogs, called blogrolls, typically appearing on the side of the webpage. Both hyperlinks to other blogs and blogrolls served to contextualize conversations taking place in the blogosphere by validating the work of colleagues in the community. In many cases bloggers forge relationships through repeated references to the work of other bloggers often over the course of multiple posts spanning week or months. Translating a single post – or even a whole series of posts – from the blogosphere to paper removes some of the markers indicating that a blogger is a member of a particular community (although the <i>PD(Q)</i> community certainly replaces some of that) and strips away some of the meaning from a post that goes beyond what is contained in text and argument. While most of better bloggers might admit that each post can stand like a miniature manifesto, most would also concede that what makes the blogosphere interesting and perhaps even valuable is that links and blogrolls

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make visible the exoskeleton of context and community. <p>These links between bloggers and posts are most often made manifest through the use of hyperlinks which allow a reader to move laterally across texts and pages. We resolved to render hyperlinks as footnotes in our translantion of these texts from digital format to paper. This shifts the reading of a blog post from an exercise in intertextuality to the more traditional practice of continuous reading which marginalized a key indicator of the texts original context. On the web, hyperlinks in the text beg the reader to move laterally “across the text” linking from page to page and promote ways of reading that destabilize the integrity of the text. In the place of sustained argument essentially native to the linear arrangement of printed texts, hypertext encourages experiments with allusion, intertextuality, and at times even bricolage. <p>The different techniques used by bloggers to construct their texts (and anticipated by readers of these texts) highlight the difference in form, content, and reception from the formal printed page of academic publication. In particular, blog posts embrace the more improvisational, allusive, and ephemeral character of the medium bringing to the fore their provisional nature. Unlike the more linear and consequently more definitive statements that appear more commonly in paper journals, the provisional nature and form of blogs allows them a greater range of experimentation and speculation. Their interactive character intersects with their less formal tone and style of expression to evoke conversations or perhaps, in academic circles, the less formally structured experience of professional conferences. <p>As such blogs represent “works in progress” their formal publication in a venue such as <i>PD(Q)</i> with an eye toward increased circulation reflects an critical interest in the process of scholarship which stands apart from the more definitive works common to more formal print journals. The interest in the provisional and in the scholarly process parallels a movement across the humanities fueled by important developments in critical theory. From at least the 1970s, scholars from across disciplines have sought to demonstrate the myriad variables active during the interpretative process. In archaeology, for example, the growing interest in reflexivity has sought to capture the archaeological experience and the interpretive process at the “trowels edge”. The broader implications of this work is a growing appreciation of the contingent and provisional nature of all knowledge. The publication of the blog posts here, despite the recontextualizing exercise of translation from digital media to print, serves an important function to document the interpretative and creative processes that undergird intellectual life. <p>The following excerpts from a rather lengthy and more involved discussion provide modest insights into the processes of creating a print journal from the digital material in the blogosphere. The arguments advanced in these posts contribute to the ongoing discussions into the nature of digital publishes (and blogs in particular), and the role of print media in the future of academic life. <p>Any thoughts, comments, or open mockery would be much appreciated...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Louis Geiger and the University of the Northern Plains STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: louis-geiger-an CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 03/10/2008 12:20:46 AM ----BODY: <p>In honor of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>'s <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125th-iversary</a>, I am continuing my series of short biographies of important figures in the history of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a> at the University of North Dakota. <p>Louis Geiger was one of the last men hired by Clarence Perkins prior to his death in 1946.&nbsp; He had studied at the University of Missouri and came to the University with the recommendation of <a href="http://muarchives.missouri.edu/portrait3.html">Elmer Ellis</a>, a former student of Orin G. Libby's one of the most prestigious alumi of the UND's Department of History.&nbsp; His was trained in American History with a thesis was on <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1850021">Joseph W. Folk</a> (aka Holy Joe), a major reformer in early 20th century Missouri politics.&nbsp; Geiger would serve the university from 1946-1960, and despite his frequent frustration and continuous clashes with Department head, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/fe lix-vondracek.html">Felix Vondracek</a>, he managed significant contributions to the development of the department and the history of the university.&nbsp; Moreover, he was an active scholar with a national reputation receiving a Fullbright Award to the University of Helsinki in Finland in 1953-1954 and, the next year, a Ford Fellowship split between Harvard University and Stanford University.&nbsp; While his not always happy interactions with Vondracek have been set out in an earlier post, this post will look at his two most lasting contributions to the life of the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; <p><em>The Archives</em> <p>Geiger played a central role in perhaps the single most significant achievement of the Department in the 1950s.&nbsp; He and Elwyn Robinson began the difficult task of developing of a <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/spk.html">Department of Special Collections</a> in response to the need for a regional-and university-wide archive.&nbsp; The initial impulse in the department for collecting important historical material from the state came under Orin G. Libby. He and his seminar recognized the importance of collecting material relevant to the state’s history. Both unsystematic and systematic efforts, like the WPA funded Historical Data Project, began the process of collecting, preparing, storing, indexing, and ultimately archiving material relevant to the early history of the state, although much of these efforts focused on the State Historical Society in Bismarck. It was not until the 1950s that a growing awareness of the lack of material form state’s more recent history spurred Geiger, Robinson, and John Parker to envision a manuscript division at the library. They solicited resources from Dean Bonner Witmer, namely a sheet of 100 stamps, and sent out letters to a list of North Dakota notables asking them to consider depositing their papers, or in some cases the papers of their parents, in an archive housed at the University. This brought very few results, but did not diminish their

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enthusiasm for the project.&nbsp; This initial effort was sufficient to encourage President John West to approve the formal creation of the manuscript collect which he named after Orin G. Libby in honor of his contribution to the study of history in the state of the state. At the same time, they appealed to J. Lloyd Stone, the ambitious new director of the Alumni Foundation and an important figure in the development of University resources during the 1950s and 1960s, to run a story on the archives in the Alumni Foundation newsletter. This story appealed to the name recognition afforded by Orin G. Libby and Elwyn Robinsons who had taught many alumni during their long teaching careers at the university. The story also appealed to North Dakotan’s well-developed sense of identity by noting that Robinson was working on the definitive narrative history of the state. <p>They followed up these efforts with personal appeal to both ordinary and important personages and institutions who may have had collections of material worthy of preservation. In 1951, Geiger and Robinson, along with Robert Wilkins traveled to Bismarck to explore the resources of the State Historical Society and State Government, only to realize that there was no systematic effort to collect documents important to the history of the State of North Dakota. Moreover, many state documents were simply stored in the basement of the state capitol building without any order and without an archivist.&nbsp; This prompted Geiger and Robinson, in particular, to begin to collect material from various figures of political importance and in many cases their descendents throughout the state. Initially they sought to gather the paper of Lyn Frazier and approached his widow, apparently while she was herding cows on her farm near Concrete, North Dakota.&nbsp; Unfortunately, she reported that she had none of her husband’s papers thus eliminating one potential collection. This did not, however, dull the enthusiasm or energy of Geiger and Robinson. By the fall of 1951, they met with the widow of William Lemke, the widow of former Governor John Moses, the daughter of former Governor L.B. Hanna, the son of former Governor John Burke, the son of Senator Asle J. Gronna, seeking to gather the papers of these two important politicians for the University manuscript collection. In 1952, they complemented these appeals to famous North Dakotans with a call to ordinary folks to pass along material of historical significance. To do this, Robinson, Geiger, along with George Lemmer made use of the university radio station, KFJM, through a radio broadcast called “Preserving the History of the Northwest” to solicit historically important materials from throughout the state. The radio broadcast and countless hours and miles of personal travel eventually attracted a substantial and important collection of material to the manuscript collection. The highlight of their early efforts was the William Lemke Papers which were deposited into the manuscript collection and today account for over 50 linear feet worth of material. Through the 1950s, they also managed to secure William Langer’s and Milton Young’s papers for the collection. These collections in addition to the significant donations from both famous and ordinary North Dakotans remain the core of the Orin G. Libby Collection today. <blockquote> <p>L. Geiger, “A Reminiscence on the Founding of the Libby Manuscript Collect,” in <i>Guide to the Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection and Related Research Collections at the University of North Dakota</i>. J.B. Davenport ed. (Grand Forks 1975), 3-8.</p></blockquote> <p><em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1107281">The University of the Northern Plains</a></em> <p>Soon after the creation of the University Manuscript Collection and Archives, L. Geiger utilized the resources of this collection in his book <i>The University of the Northern Plains</i> which was written for the 75th Anniversary of the University. Geiger had started researching higher education in general while he was a Ford Fellow at Stanford and Harvard during the 1954-1955 academic year.&nbsp; This led President Starcher to approach him with regard to writing a university history. The main

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body of his text was written in earnest during from 1956 to 1958 when it went to press just in time for the University’s 75th anniversary. The funding for the project came primarily from the Alumni Foundation, in particular, a donation of the New York financier and alumnus John Hancock who on his death in 1957 gave $50,000 gift to the Alumni Association.&nbsp; Geiger received a course reduction, a summer appointment with no teaching, and, perhaps most importantly, assurances that he could write his book with no interference from the President’s office or any obligation to alumni or other distinguished people.&nbsp; This is not to suggest that he composed his history without attention to audience; he states “I have tried to write for several audiences and purposes: to inform faculty, students, and alumni, and to entertain them a little if I could, to provide the historical background which must be a part of any intelligent planning for the future and to make some small contribution to the general history of American life and culture.” (x-xi).&nbsp; Geiger sought contributions to his research from all quarters and his efforts to collect materials for the composition of the history expanded the manuscript collection and filled in some of the numerous gaps in the University archives. In particular, he corresponded regularly with numerous distinguished alumnae, particularly Edna Twamley who would become a major donor to the university as well as Kathrine B. Tiffany, who not only endowed in her own right the East Asian Room and the Kathrine B. Tiffany Graduate Room in the Chester Fritz library, but also encouraged her nephew Chester Fritz to make numerous donations to the University, including funds for the library, the auditorium, and the Chester Fritz Distinguished Professorships. Geiger circulated drafts of his manuscript to both of these individuals, as well as other leading members of the university community, and Tiffany, who taught English for many years and had graduate training, made extensive, in most cases stylistic, comments. These connections are not intended to impugn the veracity or scholarly character of the work, but rather to show that Geiger clearly viewed his work as a link between alumni and the University. Certainly the help provided by J. Lloyd Stone in securing material for the book and the Manuscript Collection and funds to support Geiger's research did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. <p>As the book neared completion Geiger and Starcher sought to find it an academic publisher who would help subsidize the printing cost, provide editorial assistance, and ensure it a broad circulation. In the end, this effort was unsuccessful and the University of North Dakota Press undertook its publication amidst the 75th Anniversary festivities of the University. Despite the lack of a major academic press, the book received a focused and successful circulation. In particular, President Starcher gave numerous copies to “stakeholders” in the University ranging from distinguished alumni to, perhaps as importantly, politicians at both the state and national level. The book also served as a model for university histories elsewhere in the U.S. as Starcher distributed copies of the book to his fellow university presidents. Finally, to complete the circle, the publication of the <i>University of the North Plains</i> ensured Geiger promotion to full professor. Geiger’s work served as a focal point in commemorating the Universities 75th year in existence and served as a vital link between its past and present.</p> <p>Soon after the completion of his book, Geiger left the University to serve as the Department Head at Colorado College.&nbsp; In 1972 he went on to Iowa State University.&nbsp; He remained an active scholar for his entire career publishing numerous books including most prominently&nbsp; <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/175597"><em>Higher Education in a Maturing Democracy</em></a> (1963), and serving on such professional organizations as North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools (publishing in the course of that service: <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/92473"><em>Voluntary accreditation: a history

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of the North Central Association, 1945-1970</em></a> (1971)).</p> <p>Other Short Biographies of major figures in the Department of History at UND: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/fe lix-vondracek.html">Felix Vondracek and History and the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/cl arence-perkin.html">Clarence Perkins and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ho race-b-woodwo.html">Horace B. Woodworth and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hi ttites-in-nor.html">Charles Carter and the Hittites in North Dakota</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Three Late Antique Conferences STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: three-late-anti CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 03/08/2008 12:27:44 AM ----BODY: <p>Since my Varia and Quick Hits feature has gone on sabbatical, here are a few recent conferences on Late Antiquity:</p> <p>1) The Eighth Biennial&nbsp; SHIFTING FRONTIERS IN LATE ANTIQUITY CONFERENCE: "Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity" at Indiana University, April 2-5, 2009.</p> <p>The Society for Late Antiquity announces that the Eighth Biennial Conference on Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity will be held at Indiana University and will explore the theme "Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity" [ca. 200 - 700 AD].&nbsp; The confirmed plenary speakers will be Professors Jas Elsner (Corpus Christi , Oxford ) and Seth Schwartz (Jewish Theological Seminary).</p> <p>Beneath the familiar political and religious narrative of late antiquity lies a cultural history both more complicated and more fascinating.&nbsp; Late antiquity was a time of intense cultural negotiation in which new religious communities and new populations sifted through existing modes of cultural expression, adopting many elements for themselves and turning others aside.&nbsp; This conference seeks to understand how cultural transformation occurred amidst the political and religious disruption that can seem

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characteristic of late antiquity.&nbsp; To this end, we seek contributions that explore three distinct areas of late antique cultural history: 1) the interaction of "high" and "low" culture, 2) the impact of changing and collapsing political centers on their peripheries, and 3) the emergence of hybrid literary, artistic, and religious modes of expression.&nbsp; Possible contributions to these areas may highlight the permeable division between elite and vernacular culture, the ease with which cultural memes were transmitted across geographic and linguistic boundaries, the adaptability of established cultures to new political and social realities, and the degree to which newcomers were integrated into existing cultural communities.&nbsp; As in the past, the conference will provide an interdisciplinary forum for ancient historians, philologists, Orientalists, art historians, archeologists, and specialists in the early Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds to discuss a wide range of European, Middle-Eastern, and African evidence for cultural transformation in late antiquity.&nbsp; Proposals should be clearly related to the conference theme.&nbsp; They should state both the problem being discussed and the nature of the new insights or conclusions<br>that will be presented.</p> <p>Abstracts of not more than 500 words for 20-minute presentations may be submitted via e-mail to Prof. Edward Watts, shifting.frontiers.8 (at) gmail.com (Department of History, Indiana University, Ballantine Hall, Rm. 828, 1020 East Kirkwood Avenue , Bloomington , IN 47405-7103 , USA ). The deadline for submission of abstracts is October 15, 2008.&nbsp; The submission of an abstract carries with it a commitment to attend the conference should the abstract be accepted.</p> <p>2) The Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO) offered a symposium on Archaeology of the Countryside in Medieval Anatolia last weekend at Leiden.&nbsp; You can check out the program here: <a title="http://www.ninoleiden.nl/activities.aspx?id=7" href="http://www.ninoleiden.nl/activities.aspx?id=7">http://www.ninoleiden.nl/activities.aspx?id=7</a></p> <p>3) Next weekend in London there is the annual Late Antique Archaeology (LAA) conference.&nbsp; The program usually appears on their web site (<a href="http://www.lateantiquearchaeology.com">http://www.lateantiquearchaeology.c om</a>), but has not yet.&nbsp; So, I've attached it below:</p> <p>LATE ANTIQUE ARCHAEOLOGY 2008<br>RECENT FIELDWORK IN URBAN ARCHAEOLOGY<br>A one-day conference to be held on Saturday 15th March 2008 at the King’s College, London, jointly held by the University of Kent (Department of Classical and Archaeological Studies) and King’s College London (Centre for Hellenic Studies / Dept of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies).&nbsp; This conference will explore innovative fieldwork in late antique urban archaeology, focusing not only on recent careful excavations, but also on attempts to re-evaluate old excavated sites, to recover the context of epigraphy, and to bring modern survey methods to the study of the late antique city.<br><br>10.30 Welcome by Luke Lavan (Kent) and Tassos Papacostas (KCL)<br><br>*Urban Surface Survey*<br>10.4011.10 Kris Lockyear (UCL) Noviodunum, Romania<br>11.10-11.40 John Bintliff (Leiden) Thespiae and the Boeotia Survey<br><br>*Epigraphic and Archaeological Survey*<br>11.50-12.20 Charlotte Roueché (KCL) Epigraphic survey at Aphrodisias and Ephesus<br>12.20-12.50 Luke Lavan (Kent) Surface archaeology, spolia and epigraphic context at Sagalassos<br><br>*Re-evaluating Old Sites*<br>14.00-14.30 Axel Gering (Humboldt University, Berlin) Ostia<br>14.30-15.00 Vincent Deroche (College de France, Paris) Delphi<br>15.00-15.30 Didier Viviers (ULBruxelles) Apamea<br>15.40-16.10 Tea and Coffee<br><br>*Artefact-rich Deposits*<br>16.1016.40 Mark Houliston (Kent) Canterbury: the Late Roman levels at Whitefriars<br>16.40-17.10 Julian Richard and Marc Waelkens (KULeuven) Sagalassos: the Macellum<br><br>*Recent Developments in Istanbul*<br>17.20-17.50 Ken Dark (Reading) Recent excavations in Istanbul, and the Hagia Sophia

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Project.<br><br>Entry is *FREE* of charge, but to reserve a place please email Luke Lavan (<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a >).<br><br>The meeting will be held in room K2.31 (King's College London, Strand Campus, London WC2R 2LS: Main Building, first floor). Location details: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/about/campuses/strand-det.html. For flights try www.skyscanner.net. Cheap UK train tickets can be obtained in advance from www.thetrainline.com. Direct trains from Canterbury West on Saturday morning leave at 8.35 or 9.06 and arrive 10.00 and 10.36 respectively, at Charing Cross. The best direct train from Oxford leaves at 9.00, and arrives at 10.01 Paddington.<br>This meeting has been made possible thanks to the support of Museum Selection</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Site Reports Revisited STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: site-reports-re CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 03/07/2008 01:20:38 AM ----BODY: <p>Dedicated readers of this blog know that I have already offered some commentary on the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a> practice of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/si te-reports.html">Site Reports</a>.&nbsp; These short(ish) reports by the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/admissionmembership/memberships#regular">Regular Members</a> have formed a central pillar to the regular program from time <em>in memoriam </em>(and should generally be distinguished from the times when the excavators of a site or scholars with some particular expertise present the sites).&nbsp; Regular Member Site Reports are largely performative (as opposed to providing information regarding the site <em>per se</em>): students act out on site their scholarly persona and recite with proper emphasis and deference the main contours of the relevant academic debates.&nbsp; The best reports use the archaeological material visible at the site to to comment on the validity of past scholars' claim; the more mundane reports merely demonstrate an awareness of an academic tradition.&nbsp; Despite these subtle variations, <em>most </em>sight reports are boring.&nbsp; They are not, generally speaking, innovative scholarship and, at their worst, take up a substantial amount of time on site (with the most decadent running for over 40

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minutes) thereby cutting into our time actually spent <em>looking </em>at the archaeology (although as I noted in an earlier and not-entirely-well-received post, spending time actually on site may be overrated: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/03/le ssons-from-th.html">Lessons from the Borders of Attica</a>).&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ASCSASiteReport.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="ASCSASiteReport" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ASCSASiteReport_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>That being said, site reports do provide the impetus to dig deeper into the historiography of a site.&nbsp; After all, it is generally because scholars have written about these places that they appear on the ASCSA itinerary in the first place!&nbsp; It would be disingenuous to ignore the scholarly debate that makes the site, in fact, something worth seeing.&nbsp; Moreover, it would be inhumane to expect the Mellon Professor who leads the trips to prepare a bibliography for every site.&nbsp; The students must be involved in the presentation of the site, if for no other reason than to drive home the point that sites in the Greek landscape are largely products of an academic discourse.&nbsp; </p> <p>The real issue, however, is balancing the need to be aware of the archaeological discourse as emerging professionals in the discipline and the dreadful tedium of site reports, which are inevitably more boring than the archaeology of the site itself.&nbsp; Moreover, having at least one individual at the site who has read over all of the excavation reports does make viewing the site more interesting.&nbsp; The real issue is, then, how do you enforce the historiographical rigor and ensure at least one very well-informed interlocutor on site without crushing boredom of site reports?</p> <p>What I have done is prepare short papers on the site which provides a good bit of descriptive and when applicable historiographic information on each site.&nbsp; As I have noted, this doesn't necessary always succeed in engaging the students in the place, but if these short papers were distributed prior to arrival on the site, they would not only provide an introduction to the place, but also form a handy reference on site.&nbsp; They might be slightly more work for the Regular Members, but they have the advantage of coming together to form the basis for a guide to important Greek sites at the end of the program. </p> <p>The downside of this, of course, is that it does take away the experience of lecturing on site -- an important skill for academics who might want to lead study tours or give site tours in the future.&nbsp; Moreover, the Regular Member who is responsible for the site itself, must still be able to engage the material remains at the site.&nbsp; The best alternative might be a combined system where each student must give one formal (15-25 minute) site report and otherwise provide short papers (2-3 pages) on each site for which they are responsible.&nbsp; When the School visits the site, the students should point out features in their short papers, but cannot go on for more than a few minutes.&nbsp; </p> <p>It's an inelegant solution.&nbsp; I know.&nbsp; I've appended my site report from yesterday to this post and some photos of the Byzantine Church of Holy Apostles below.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Holy_Apostles_From_Areopagus.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="Holy_Apostles_From_Areopagus" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Holy_Apostles_From_Areopagus_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p>

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<p>The Church of the Holy Apostles <p>The earliest remains on the site appear to be a Nymphaeum of the 2nd C. A.D. The church dates to the late 10th or early 11th century and marks it the earliest standing Middle Byzantine buildings in Athens. Earlier churches, however, appear to have all been destroyed (John Mangoutis (9th c.), Prof. Elias sto staropazaro (10th? c.), Taxiarchs sto staropazaro (Early 11th ? c.). The church stood in the Solaki neighborhood probably the name of an important Athenian family who lived nearby. The church evidently remained in continuous use from the time of its construction serving the residents of this area of the Agora. There is evidence for at least 4 major modifications from its original construction until the 16th, 17th,and 19th century including the construction of numerous tombs under the Middle Byzantine floor level. Renovation work carried out in the 1954-1956 removed most of the later additions and restored the church to its Byzantine form. The church was first noted by Lenoir in 1839 and photographed by Lambakis in 1890 <p>The plan of the church is a tetraconch. The western apse, however, had largely been destroyed during modifications which extended the western end of the nave into an elongated narthex. The basic plan of the building, however, evokes typical cross-in-square type architecture with four columns (three of Hymettian marble with spoliated capitals) supporting a Attic-type octagonal dome on pendentives (triangular sections of a sphere). The masonry is cloisonné type with double layers of brick in horizontal courses (cf. Os. Loukas Theotokos church). The vertical joins between the bricks received pseudo-kufic design (cf. Kapnekarea, Ay. Theodoroi, Os. Loukas, Soter Lykodemou). Further defining the exterior the building are a series of 5 dentulated frieze courses. The courses not only frame the windows, but coincide with the major architectural divisions of the building. The topmost course marked the eaves of the apse and the second course marking the springing of the interior vaults. The windows are of the arcadetype. <p>The windows and masonry provide a date for the building based on Megaw’s typology of church architecture. The arcade-type windows (cf. Skripou (9th) and Moni Petraki (10th)) are his earliest type window. The well-wrought Ps.-Kufic masonry design is 10th-11th in date. <p>While the dating of the church makes it contemporary with the major wave of Middle Byzantine church building in Athens, the design of the church is distinct. Despite its cross-insquare core, an octagonal shape is formed by the four major apses which project beyond the core of the building and alternate with four smaller apses at the angles between the cross arms. This octagonal plan has parallels with buildings of the more imposing cross-domed-octagon types (cf. Panayia Lykodemou, the Katholikon Os. Loukas, and Daphni). The cross arms of Ay. Apostoloi extend beyond the northern and southern walls evoking free-cross building like the Koumbelidiki at Kastoria. The most obvious problem that the architect needed to overcome was joining a centralized, tetraconch plan with the western narthex. This architect managed this with some elegance by adding two lateral spaces on either side of the western apse and piercing the northwest and southwest apses with doors. The wall of the western apse guides the visitor toward the doors in its flanking apses thereby unifying the lateral space of the domed narthex with the centralized plan of the church. It does not work perfectly but it is the best solution among the Middle Byzantine churches in Greece. <p>A. Frantz, <i>The Church of the Holy Apostles</i>. <i>Agora</i> XX. Princeton 1971. <p>A. Lenoir, <i>L’architecture monastique</i>. Vol. 1. Paris 1852. <p>H. Megaw, “The Chronology of Some Middle-Byzantine Churches,” <i>BSA</i> 32 (19311932), 90-130. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Holy_Apostles.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="Holy_Apostles"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Holy_Apostles_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.173.184.141 URL: DATE: 03/07/2008 06:02:42 AM It would also help if there were a ten minute cap on site reports, forcing students to define what is most significant about the site. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Thisvi Pottery at Thespies STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: thisvi-pottery CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 03/06/2008 12:04:54 AM ----BODY: <p>On Tuesday <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a> and I traveled to Thespies (Ancient Thesipeai) in Boeotia to look at the pottery from the Ohio Boeotia Expedition (OBE).&nbsp; The OBE was a intensive pedestrian survey project conducted by Gregory from 1979-1982.&nbsp; While it have been published in a general way, the ceramics from the project do not have a proper, published catalogue.&nbsp; Moreover, we think that it will be possible to discuss the results of the project in a more sophisticated way by converting the maps and data recorded in the OBE notebooks into database and GIS.&nbsp; Or at least this is what we hope.&nbsp; As I have mentioned before, the impetus for revisiting the OBE pottery and data is the work of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/index.html">Archie Dunn and colleagues on the Acropolis and City Center of Ancient Thisvi</a>.&nbsp; The hope is that we can bring the survey data in some sort of conversation with the findings of his work.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ThespiesMuseum.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="ThespiesMuseum" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/ThespiesMuseum_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The pottery that we found (cleverly labeled with the Greek letters OXAIO -- Ohio) derived from the several survey transects across the Thisvi plain and from work on the island of Kouveli in the Corinthian Gulf.&nbsp; Much of the pottery appears to date to Late Antiquity, but we did see some earlier material.&nbsp; It was heartening that we could actually find some (perhaps all) of the pottery from that project in the Thespies storerooms after over 20 years!&nbsp; It was sufficiently well labeled that it appears that we can understand the provenience of the artifacts.&nbsp; We now need to go back to the notebooks and see if we can correlate the material that we found with descriptions of transects and sites from the survey.&nbsp; It looks like this will be feasible.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ThisviPottery.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-right-width: 0px" height="244" alt="ThisviPottery" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ThisviPottery_thumb.jpg" width="118" align="right" border="0"></a> One of the interesting exercises in this kind of undertaking is that it forces me to think about larger issues in the storage, labeling, and even sampling of pottery.&nbsp; In fact, I was having a conversation just the other evening with some of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/admissionmembership/memberships#regular">Regular Members</a> about how excavations and surveys sample pottery that they record with formal catalogue entries and enter into long term storage.&nbsp; Most museums in the Eastern Mediterranean struggle to maintain the vast collections of pottery in ways that ensures their long term availability for scholars to restudy (and this is particularly true of context and survey pottery).&nbsp; At the same time, our methodologies call for ever more robust samples from both the surface and from excavated contexts, ensuring that we will continue to push the reasonable (and perhaps absolute) limits of storage space.&nbsp; Even projects who build their own storerooms rarely find the resources to maintain them indefinitely (like the massive storerooms maintained by, say, the <a href="http://www.agathe.gr/">Athenian Agora</a> or the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/excavationcorinth">Excavations at Corinth</a>).&nbsp; There is no real solution for the storage problems here -we will continue to sample the landscape in accordance with current definitions of methodological rigor -- but it does reinforce the importance of labeling, documenting, and preparing the material for storage so that the maximum amount of data is preserved for future scholars.&nbsp; It goes without saying that the material from the OBE would be useless without the notebooks, and these notebooks were not kept with the pottery at the museum.&nbsp; It's fair to say that Tim Gregory (and myself) were the only people capable of tying these artifacts to their place in the landscape.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ThespiesLandscape.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="141" alt="ThespiesLandscape" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ThespiesLandscape_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 5: Basecamp STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-5-basec CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 03/05/2008 12:41:15 AM ----BODY: <h5><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"></a></h5> <p><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px" height="164" alt="BaseCampRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaseCampRO.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"> </a> <p>Episode 5 of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>is now posted.&nbsp; This episode again focuses on the social dynamic of archaeological field work as we started to see in <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html">Episode 4</a>.&nbsp; Unlike Episode 4, however, Episode 5 emphasized living, eating, and working together as a good opportunity for intellectually productive debate and discussion.&nbsp; One of our favorite topics of discussion involves the nature and goals of the <a href="http://www.pkap.org/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; At present we are not a pure field school or training project, but have many elements of that kind of project.&nbsp; For example, we try to introduce our students to many aspects of archaeological work, and this is particularly important because most of our students do not come with a background of archaeology.&nbsp; We also take the students to important sites on the island, talk with them about the history of Cyprus, and even run informal archaeological method seminars.&nbsp; On the other hand, our <em>primary </em>responsibility is our fieldwork at Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria, </em>and this responsibility shapes our goal to document our results in a timely and complete way.&nbsp; So we are (to use my word of the year) a hybrid project.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PetrouBrothers.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="164" alt="PetrouBrothers" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PetrouBrothers_thumb.jpg" width="244" align="right" border="0"></a>Part of the excitement of being a project that is part field school and part field project is that we constantly evaluate and critique our day-to-day activities to&nbsp; determine whether we are fulfilling our obligations both to our

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research and to our students.&nbsp; <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I, as this short will show, have differing opinions on how this balance should be struck.&nbsp; We've had some of the debates, in fact, right here in this blog: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/05/fi eld_school_or.html">Field school or field project?</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/05/ar chaeology_as_.html">Archaeology as Field School, or why Bill Caraher is certainly wrong</a>.&nbsp; Most of our discussions (and arguments), however, play out over meetings, lunches, dinners, and the odd cocktail party at our (dramatically named) "Basecamp", the Petrou Brothers Holiday Apartments in downtown Larnaka.&nbsp; </p> <p>One perspective to this discussion is that all archaeology is in some ways a field school (and I recognize the risk of sounding sappy here).&nbsp; Both the student and the archaeologist are constantly learning and teaching one another through their regular interaction.&nbsp; In fact, I often tell my wife, Susan, who often regrets abandoning her academic study of archaeology, that you learn far more about archaeology from your colleagues and students the field than you can in a classroom.&nbsp; Much of the most intense archaeological debates do not take place in the remote seminar rooms, but in the far more modest and chaotic confines of the basecamp.&nbsp; </p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first four shorts (with links to those shorts) below.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img height="74" alt="Landscape_MontageRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO_1.jpg" width="112" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img height="74" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO_1.jpg" width="110" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img height="74" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO_1.jpg" width="110" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-4-forme.html"><img height="74" alt="FormerStudentRO"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO_1.jpg" width="110" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 130.127.64.160 URL: DATE: 03/05/2008 11:09:01 PM I think BASECAMP is my favorite episode so far because it gives a good raw flavor of the theoretical polarities within each field project. Good job. I may not know the scene too well, but I've personally never seen such documentary honesty before. This is serious stuff. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 194.219.34.195 URL: http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/ DATE: 03/06/2008 05:42:22 AM Kostis,! ! Thanks!! ! Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Felix Vondracek and History and the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: felix-vondracek CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND DATE: 03/03/2008 11:05:29 PM ----BODY: <p>In honor of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>'s <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125th-iversary</a>, I am serializing some short biographies of important members in the history of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p>Felix Vondracek was one the Department of History's most controversial figures and longest serving faculty members.&nbsp; He earned the enmity of several of the important voices in the history of the Department, particularly

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Robert Wilkins and Elwyn Robinson, ensuring that his place in the annals of the Department was generally a negative one.&nbsp; Despite his shortcomings as a colleague, Vondracek did see the department through a time of growth and can receive at least some credited for seeing the Department from the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DHChapter_2.html">Era of Libby and Perkins</a> to the modern day.&nbsp; </p> <p>With the death of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/cl arence-perkin.html">Clarence Perkins</a> in the winter 1946, the department, recently reunited after 20 years of being divided into departments of American and European history, rallied to ensure that his classes were taught in the spring semester. A replacement for his position as department head, although far less onerous post than in the modern, highly-bureaucratized, university, was nevertheless required. Dean Bek designated Felix Vondracek, the senior member of the department, as acting department head. Vondracek was known around campus for his photographic memory and booming voice, which on clear summer days could be heard across the quad. He had recently returned to the department from his wartime service, which comprised primarily of training cadets at the University. Libby had hired him in 1929 in the Department of American History although at the time he was struggling to complete his Ph.D at Columbia with <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2382730">a dissertation on the foreign policy of Czechoslovakia</a>. He led a department composed of Robert Wilkins, Louis Geiger, and Elwyn Robinson.&nbsp; All three held particularly negative views of Vondracek as both a scholar and a leader of the department. In later accounts they were confident that Dean Bek shared those views and resisted officially naming Vondracek Department Head.&nbsp; Despite the reluctance of the previous dean and the reservations of the faculty, the department had no choice. The retirement of Libby and the death of Perkins had left the department at less then full strength with only four faculty members. Robinson’s frail health made him unsuitable and Geiger and Wilkins were newly arrived and lacked the Ph.D. This situation and the death of William Bek in 1948 led Bek’s replacement Bonner Witmer to elevate Vondracek to the position of department head.</p> <p>Almost immediately Robinson, Wilkins, and Geiger had difficulty with Vondracek. Both Wilkins and Robinson saw Vondracek as easily offended, insecure, and absent during most of his term as department head.&nbsp; They criticized his apparent lack of intellectual substance, his failure to provide strong administrative leadership in the department, and his regard for his position as department head as a means to gain a larger salary. As a typical example of Vondracek’s behavior, Wilkins and Robinson both complained that he used his position as department head to monopolize summer teaching in order to supplement his income despite the fact that salaries for junior faculty remained substantially below the national average even amidst post war prosperity.&nbsp; Their criticism of Vondracek for this and other matters eventually required personal visits not only to Dean Witmer but also to President West and his successor Starcher. <p>The consistently vituperative critique of Vondracek by Robinson, Geiger, and others cast a long shadow over Vondracek’s term as department head. There criticisms tended to obscure some key developments in the department during that time which may give credit to Vondracek’s leadership. Perhaps the most damning of the criticisms leveled by Robinson is that Vondracek hindered the department’s growth from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s during which the university itself expanded markedly. While it is difficult to assess the intensity and commitment with which Vondracek acted, the annual reports of the department from the 1950s to the early 1960s nevertheless show that he regularly requested additional resources for the department including better offices, additional library resources, and even provisions for an archivist for the expanding <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/oglmain.html">Orin

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G. Libby Manuscript Collection</a>. The manuscript collection was a pet project of Robinson, Wilkins, and Geiger, none of whom got along well with Vondracek. Moreover, Robinson’s and Wilkins’s critique obscures the key role that Vondracek played in bringing to the university an ambitious, competent, and active group of young faculty members. At the death of Perkins, the department only registered three faculty members, down form the six members of during the days of Libby's and Perkins's split department. Vondracek worked to increase the number of faculty members steadily during his term as chair. Wilkins begrudgingly notes that Vondracek was either good or very lucky in attracting faculty members to the department, and may have been equally as instrumental in driving them out.&nbsp; It should be noted, however, that one of the byproducts of hiring good and ambitious young faculty is that one is apt to lose some of them on account of their greater access to other opportunities. <p>By 1948, Vondracek had hired two Missourians, George Lemmer a fellow graduate student of Geiger’s at the University of Missouri, and Robert Kirkpatrick who held an M.A. from Washington University, bringing the faculty of the Department back to 5 members. Kirkpatrick earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and departed in 1950 to be replaced by John Parker. Parker was the first native North Dakotan to teach in the Department. He was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and met Felix Vondracek purely by chance at a meeting of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association in Madison, Wisconsin. According to Parker, he had introduced himself to Vondracek after seeing the University of North Dakota as his affiliation. Vondracek hired him quickly after that. While Parker’s training was in European History, he primarily taught U.S. Economic history which was a required course for students in the School of Commerce. <p>The faculty of the early 1950s, however, also proved difficult for Vondracek and the turnover in faculty fed a period of instability in the department. While his relationship with Robinson and Wilkins was cool at best, he did not get along at all with Lemmer, Geiger, and Parker. At one point, Vondracek famously told Lemmer and Geiger that President West saw them as “dead-wood".&nbsp; Moreover, he seems to have verbally attacked John Parker for reasons that remain obscure.&nbsp; This increasingly hostile work environment took its tool on the physical health of Parker leading him to resign with an ulcer in 1952. He completed his Ph.D. in library science and served for almost 40 years as the <a href="http://bell.lib.umn.edu/">James Ford Bell Library</a> of rare books at the University of Minnesota. Lemmer soon left as well to take a position as a temporary position as a civilian historian with the Air Force. During this time he wrote a letter to Dean Witmer very critical of Felix Vondracek and this prompted President West to fire Lemmer.&nbsp; Efforts by Robinson, Wilkins, and Dean Witmer to convince Lemmer to write a formal apology and return to the University were unsuccessful. At the same time as Lemmer’s and Parker’s departure, Louis Geiger accepted a position as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland and as a Ford Fellow at Harvard University and Stanford University. These departures, both temporary and permanent marked a period of instability and change at both the University and the Department. John Harnsberger, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, replaced John Parker. Jerry DeWitt, a graduate student at Yale University, replaced Lemmer. Fred Winkler was invited to replace Geiger for his two years of leave. In 1960, Playford Thorson came to the University as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota having earned an M.A. from the University of New Mexico. He would serve for over three decades as the department’s expert in Scandinavian history. The new blood in the department initially calmed the turmoil incited by the conflicts between Lemmer, Parker, and Vondracek. The calm did not persist, however, as soon DeWitt and Harnsberger chaffed under Vondracek’s leadership.&nbsp; The record for the early years of the 1960s and the end of the

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1950s is poor, but it appears to have been a period of growing discontent with the leadership in the department as the early 1960s marked a significant watershed in departmental history. <p>Robinson, Geiger, and others complained to President Starcher, Dean Witmer, and ultimately the newly created Vice President of Academic Affairs (the predecessor to the position of Provost at the University) William Koenker about Vondracek‚Äôs lack of leadership in the department. While initially there was no response, eventually the departure of DeWitt, Harnsberger, Wilkins, and Geiger during the early 1960s drew administration‚Äôs attention to the department. Robinson opined that these departures in the context of the constant complaints regarding Vondracek‚Äôs leadership forced the administrations hand in 1962. President Starcher, however, had been inclining toward a policy of rotating department heads.&nbsp; Several long serving department heads like Libby‚Äôs old friend George Wheeler, had resisted as these men typically held their positions for life, but over time nearly all of the old guard were replaced. The policy of Starcher, while immediately beneficial to an embattled department like history, was part of the gradual expansion of administrative power at the University largely at the expense of the faculty. Ousting long standing department heads and replacing them with rotating faculty limited the ability of faculty groups, like a group of powerful, longstanding, and conservative faculty called "the Wranglers", to develop sustainable power bases and shifted some of the responsibility for continuity of policy to the administrative level. In the Department of History, a petition submitted to Starcher by Thorson, an emerging member of a younger, more liberal minded, and progressive group of faculty members called the ‚ÄúYoung Turks‚Äù, and endorsed by five of the members of the department led to the ouster of Vondracek. The next year, Starcher tried to offer the department head to Thorson, who refused, and Robinson briefly assumed the post until his chronic health issues led him to resign after less than a year.&nbsp; Glenn Smith, a newcomer to the department hired in 1962, followed him but briefly as chair.</p> <p>Vondracek continued to teach in the Department for another decade, finally retiring in 1971 after serving 43 years in the Department of History.</p> <p>Other Short Biographies of major figures in the Department of History at UND:</p> <h5><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/cl arence-perkin.html">Clarence Perkins and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ho race-b-woodwo.html">Horace B. Woodworth and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hi ttites-in-nor.html">Charles Carter and the Hittites in North Dakota</a></h5> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Vincent O'Reilly (1960) EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 74.101.33.167

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URL: DATE: 08/22/2010 05:55:06 PM I studied Medieval History under Dr. Vondracek but until reading this had no idea of the nature of the turmoil that surrounded him... although I knew that there had been turmoil. He was certainly one of the more colorful professors at UND in the 1950s with a taste for mildly off color historical tidbits with which he would entertain us. Both during lectures and in after class discussions he would literally be in your face. Class with Dr. Vondracek was exciting and stimulating though I have always felt that his phenomenal memory for facts interfered with his looking very deeply into the whys of history. Of Dr. Geiger I remember little except an impression of his being all business. There may have been little love between Vondracek and Dr. Wilkins but I enjoyed and benefitted from both their classes, and from Dr. Vondracek developed a lifelong interest in Byzantine studies. Of Dr. Wilkins I would say that he was one of the most kindly and pleasant men I have ever met. If it is not inappropriate to say so of one's mentor, I would call him friend. He would have fit nicely into the Prairie Home Companion show. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Lessons from the Borders of Attica STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: lessons-from-th CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 03/03/2008 12:47:20 AM ----BODY: <p>I spent Friday at the Border Forts of Northwest Attica (which I had scouted some weeks ago: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ph yli-panakton.html">Phyli, Panakton, Eleutherai, Aigosthena in the Rain</a>).&nbsp; The weather started out cold and cloudy, but by mid-afternoon gave way to bright sunshine.&nbsp; I learned two important lessons leading the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/admissionmembership/memberships#regular">Regular Members</a> on a day trip.</p> <p>First, despite the relatively similar background of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/admissionmembership/memberships#regular">Regular Members</a>, they engaged the sites that we visited in very different ways.&nbsp; (Most readers of this blog recognize my interest in ways of viewing the landscape.&nbsp; If not here are some earlier posts: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/fo ur-views-of-t.html">Four Views of the Corinthian Landscape</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/mo re-views-of-t.html">More Views of the Ancient Landscape</a>). Some staggered around in a bit of fog.&nbsp; Others ambled with the stooped gate of an archaeologist, while others still puzzled over buildings or spend time taking photographs.&nbsp; Some didn't appear to look at the site at all, finding a nice seat on some antiquity and smoke and chat or hung out on the beach taking in the dramatic scenery of the harbor at Porto Germano.&nbsp; I tend to think about how

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I would go about documenting the site; that is, I tend to think about the site as an archaeological problem.</p> <p>The penultimate site of the day, for example, Aigosthena is relatively undocumented and produced the widest range of responses from the Regular Members.&nbsp; In an effort to inform their reading of the landscape, I provided the requisite textual description of the site, bibliography, and plan:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/clip_image002.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="274" alt="clip_image002" hspace="12" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/clip_image002_thumb.jpg" width="200" align="left" border="0"></a></p> <p><em>Aigosthena </em> <p>Unlike the nearby Eleutherai, Panakton, or Phylai, Aigosthena was a city under the control of Megara. The site nevertheless had strategic value as it controls the major route running along the north coast of the Corinthian gulf potentially. From Aigosthena a force could either continue south toward the Megarian ports of Pagai and Panormus or turn inland through the Villia Valley toward plain of Mazi/Oinoe and the major passes to the Athenian Saronic coastline. The most prominent feature at the site is the imposing early 4th-early 3rd century polygonal fortification walls. Ober has suggested that the Athenians helped to fortify the site during the 4th century. The polygonal masonry of the walls encompasses a low acropolis and extends south toward the sea in a technique reminiscent of the Athenian long walls. Towers to the south of the site linked Aigosthena to the vicinity of the mountainous region of the Vathychoria and a system of towers that would have communicated with the Mazi plain. Finally, the long walls would have provided Athens with a fortified naval stronghold on the gulf of Corinth. <p>The later history of the site is relatively undocumented. There is evidence for Roman activity near the coast with the remains of a cemetery and perhaps a villa. Orlandos excavated a large 5 aisled early Christian basilica some 100 m from the coast. It had mosaic floors and a cruciform baptistery to the south. The church shows multiple phases, but probably dates largely the late 5th&nbsp; century. Atop the church is a triconch cruciform middle Byzantine church perhaps dating to the 12th c. with many in built inscriptions and spolia. The acropolis was clearly refortified at a “late date”; it is tempting to associate the rubble and mortar walls with the settlement of the Late Roman period. A Frankish date might also be possible and is perhaps more in keeping with the construction style. <p>The Venetian or Ottoman period saw a small group of buildings in the upper acropolis – including an olive press and a church of Ay. Georgios. It seems likely that the buildings on the acropolis which appear to be a monastic structure date from this period as well. <p>Benson, E.F., “Aigosthena,” <i>JHS</i> 15 (1895) 314-24.<br>Giannoulidou, K. “Aigosthena,” <i>Platon</i> 16 (1964) 143172.<br>Sakellariou, M. and N. Pharaklas, <i>Megaris, Aigosthena, Ereneia</i> (Ancient Greek Cities 14; Athens 1972).<br>Orlandos, A. “Anaskaphi tis basilikis ton Aigsothenon,” <i>Praktika</i> 1954, 129-142. <p>Many archaeologists would argue, of course, that sites are a kind of text and that as individuals we engaged texts differently depending upon our own background.&nbsp; The act of reading traditional literary texts, both in antiquity and the modern world, has even generated a considerable corpus of scholarship.&nbsp; In contrast to the ways of reading literary texts, reading an archaeological texts can be a much more visible process.&nbsp; There isn't so much a correct and incorrect way of engaging an archaeological site (any more than there is a "right" way to read a text), although I suppose some have the training, experience, and interest to read a site more carefully and take more away from the experience.&nbsp; <p>I gave the students about 2 hours at the site

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reasoning that it took about a half an hour to walk from the coast, where we had eaten lunch, to the acropolis.&nbsp; So, another hour to look around and an hour of walking time would provide almost everyone with enough time.&nbsp; Some students took the full time, others took only a small fraction of the time allotted.&nbsp; <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AigosthenaSM2.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AigosthenaSM2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AigosthenaSM2_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em> <br>Aigosthena</em></p> <p>I am not sure whether the students who were done more quickly were bored or not, but I suspect that they were.&nbsp; And this boredom (or "site fatigue") perhaps explains the second lesson that I learned: When leading a trip, never leave anything to a vote.&nbsp; We departed Aigosthena at around 3:30 pm, and I reckoned that it would take slightly over an hour and a half to get back to Athens.&nbsp; 5 pm is generally when we return to the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a>, so if we stopped at another site -- namely Eleutherai which was only a short detour on our way back -- it would probably get back later than usual, probably after 6 or even (with traffic) 6:30.&nbsp; So rather than unilaterally decided to return later than usual, I asked the Regular Members what they wanted to do.&nbsp; It was a close vote but it seemed to me that the majority of students wanted to go to one more site and did not mind returning late.&nbsp; So, we went to the site and since the vote was close, I asked that we visit the site quickly as a compromise to those who wanted to get back to Athens sooner.&nbsp; <p>Here's the interesting part.&nbsp; The students who didn't want to go Eleutherai decided not to go.&nbsp; (This is like not paying taxes because "I didn't vote for the guy!").&nbsp; Instead they stayed on the bus (or went to a nearby coffee shop for coffee).&nbsp; My logic for putting the issue to a vote was because I felt that we would get back to Athens later than usual.&nbsp; Sitting on the bus didn't help us get back to Athens any sooner and replaced looking at another (relatively impressive site) with staring idly at the inside of a rather generic tour bus or drinking coffee at an equally generic coffee shop.&nbsp; That was an unanticipated way of viewing a site, indeed. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/EleutheraiSM3.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="133" alt="EleutheraiSM3" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/EleutheraiSM3_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>The opposite of the inside of a tour bus</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected]

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IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 03/04/2008 12:23:10 AM What better way to experience Greece than to tour its many beautiful cafes? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: David EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.173.184.141 URL: DATE: 03/04/2008 06:56:10 AM The American School should virtualize their trips so students don't even have to leave their PC. Right! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Clarence Perkins and History at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: clarence-perkin CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 02/28/2008 10:07:19 PM ----BODY: <p>In honor of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>'s 125th-iversay, I will continue to look back at some of the key players in the Department of History's development within the University.&nbsp; As before, I am not going to dwell right now on the well-known story of <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og49.html">Orin G. Libby</a>, but will shine some light on a less well-known, but no less important figure in our Department's history, Clarence Perkins.</p> <p>Despite his nearly 20 year career at the University, Clarence Perkins remains an ill-defined figure in the history of the discipline at UND. His significance was largely overshadowed by his more cantankerous colleague, Orin G. Libby. Nevertheless, Perkins played a key role in the expansion and development of the discipline at the University. Trained at Harvard, he had taught in the Department of History at Ohio State University from 1909-1920 when he was wooed to the University of North Dakota by President Thomas Kane.&nbsp; Kane and Libby had clashed during late 'teens and particular controversy arose over Libby's seemingly irregular hiring practices.&nbsp; Almost from his first days on campus, Libby had criticized Kane's management style and suitability to lead the university.&nbsp; A particularly violent disagreement over Libby's right to hirer additional faculty in the Department of History had led Kane to split the Department of History into two parts, as a largely punitive measure against Libby.&nbsp; From 1920 until after Libby's retirement in 1945, there would be a Department of American History under Libby's chairmanship and a Department of European History</p> <p>Clearance Perkins was hired by Kane to lead the Department of European History.&nbsp; Affable, jolly, generous, and prone to gossip, there is no evidence that he and the more taciturn Libby got on well.&nbsp; Perkins had studied at an undergraduate at Syracuse University and received his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1908.&nbsp; His thesis was a <em><a

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href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/76995357">The History of the Knights Templar in England</a></em> and he taught medieval and modern English History.&nbsp; Early in his career he produced a series of prominent articles on the Knights Templar in both the <em>American Historical Review </em>(1910) and in the <em>English Historical Review </em>(1909, 1910, 1930) but like scholars of an earlier era he was qualified to teach in almost any European field from Ancient to current affairs. During the 1920s, he demonstrated his wide ranging competence in writing a well-regarded high school textbook, <i></i><i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2641900">The History of European Peoples</a> </i>published by Rand, McNally, and Company in Chicago and stretching to nearly 1000 pages, as well as several study guides for the Ohio State Bookstore in Columbus.&nbsp; Throughout the 1930s he continued to write popular texts like <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/3647452">Man’s Advancing Civilization</a></i> (1934 and 1937) and <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2989847">Ancient History</a></i> (1936). In 1940 he published <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1403922">Development of European Civilization</a></i> with two former colleagues at UND, Clarence Matterson and Reginald Lovell.&nbsp; These and other books provided him with some income, particularly during the dark years of the late 1920s and 1930s when the collapsing grain prices and then the Great Depression wracked the state and gutted the University budget.&nbsp; Throughout his career at UND Perkins was a successful teacher and scholar who had a national reputation and regularly spent time away doing research both in Europe and at major American universities like the University of Texas.</p> <p>Perkins’s who had far less baggage than Libby with the administration and took time to cultivate good relations with the Kane administration. This better relationship enabled him to hire good quality faculty throughout the 1920s like Claudius Johnson (Ph.D. Chicago in 1927) in 1921, Albert Hyma (Ph.D. Michigan 1922) and Fletcher Brown in 1922, and Clyde Ferrel (Ph.D. Wisconsin) in 1923. In the later 1920s, Perkins’ department hired Phillip Green (Ph.D. Chicago) and Donald Nicholson (Ph.D. Wisconsin). Perkins, like Libby, often relied on personal connections with colleagues to find capable professors for their departments. In an interview conducted in the late 1970s, Robert Wilkins, whom Perkins hired in the 1940s, opined that Perkins sought candidates who were likely to be comfortable at the University and over time relied less upon the recommendations of colleagues at more established East Coast institutions. In fact, Perkins had hired Wilkins on the advice of fellow Syracuse alumnus, F. Lee Benns, a noted scholar at Indiana University where Wilkins had received his B.A. and M.A. <p>Despite the relatively good credentials held by many of the faculty members of the 1920s, their appointments in the two Departments did not necessarily coincide with their increasingly specialized training. For example, Felix Vondracek, a specialist in Central European history found himself teaching the Survey of American history in Libby's American History department; Phillip Green, in contrast, a specialist in American history, primarily taught European history in Perkins’ European History Department. Notwithstanding the odd assignments, the faculty of both Departments tended to be productive with Libby and Perkins setting the tone for the more junior faculty.&nbsp; Perkins, in particular, took pains to note the accomplishments of his faculty in his annual reports to the president. <p>Perkins was particularly concerned with the difficulty in retaining qualified faculty, a problem characteristic of the university as a whole and reflected in the Departments of History. L. Geiger, in his book <em></em><em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1107281">University of the Northern Plains: A History of the University of North Dakota 1883-1958</a></em>, considered “the chief cause of the turnover was the uneasy relations between the president and the faculty.” It is perhaps unsurprising, however, that this particular factor

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does not appear prominent in the History Department's annual reports to the President. Perkins stressed in his reports throughout the 1920s that the pay for faculty was too low if the University hoped to compete with Eastern colleges which regularly paid as much as 50% more than UND. In practice, it was not just eastern universities that hired away qualified faculty from UND; one member of the faculty, G.P. Hammond, was hired to teach Latin American History at the University of Arizona. A. Hyma, who became a noted scholar of the Renaissance moved on to teach at the University of Michigan (his major contributions to the Christian Renaissance have been <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/82511474">collected here</a>).&nbsp; An instructor or even Assistant Professor was unlikely to earn over $2000 a year. Salaries from the mid-1930s through the early 1940s stood below the levels of the turn of the century, and while jobs were scarce throughout the U.S. many of the better qualified junior faculty were able to obtain positions elsewhere.&nbsp; Perkins understood this reality, and admitted as much to President West in a letter when he conceded “I believe it is far better to get men good enough to move and have them stay only two or three years here than to land mediocrities who stay indefinitely.” Perkin's continued to replace faculty who left, spending considerable time working to find teachers for the European History department. The struggle, however, to keep a full compliment of faculty was obvious: Nicholson left in 1935, Reginald Lovell the same year for Willamette College in Oregon, Clarence Matterson left in 1939 left for Iowa State University at Ames where he would eventually become department head, Charles Morely left for Ohio State in 1942.&nbsp; <p>These departures distressed Perkins, but they did allow him to hire two men who made massive and enduring contributions to the University: Robert Wilkins replaced Phillip Greene who sought to return to his southern roots by taking a job at Queen’s College in Charlotte, North Carolina. Perkins also hired Louis Geiger, a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, on the advice of former University of North Dakota history alumnus <a href="http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/collections/ellis.htm">Elmer Ellis</a>.&nbsp; With Perkins's sudden death in 1946 (and Libby's retirement the year previously), Geiger, Wilkins and Elwyn Robinson emerged as the most influential members of the Department during the 1950s and 1960s. <p>Other Short Biographies:<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ho race-b-woodwo.html">Horace B. Woodworth and History at the University of North Dakota</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hi ttites-in-nor.html">Charles Carter and the Hittites in North Dakota</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Views of the Ancient Landscape STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-views-of-t CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 02/28/2008 01:30:49 AM ----BODY: <p>I lead a trip to the border forts of Northwest Attica tomorrow (report and photos on Monday!).&nbsp; Preparing for the trip was a good excuse to re-read some of the classic descriptions of Attic topography.&nbsp; This region of Attica has attracted continuous attention from the days of the Early Travelers and the work of Hammond, Edmonson, and Ober did much to establish the archaeological landscape of the region.&nbsp; (This post is in some ways an extension of my post some weeks back <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/fo ur-views-of-t.html">Four Views of the Corinthian Landscape</a>)</p> <p>Much of the work of Hammond and Edmonson was done with rather poor maps, and this clearly influenced their reading of the topography.&nbsp; In particular Hammond's peripatetic method brought together the ancient and modern landscape of the area.&nbsp; His descriptions of the fortifications, roads, and mountain passes depended upon modern features like roads and crops as well as the visible remnants of the pre-modern landscape.&nbsp; A good example: N.G. L. Hammond, "The Main Road from Boeotia to the Peloponnese," <em>BSA </em>49 (1954), 108.</p> <blockquote> <p>"A second path leaves the road from Megara to Pagae at a point before one reaches the watershed.&nbsp; Starting from this point on climbs up through a pass between the two peaks for Mt. Korona, follows the ridge between the two Vathikoria basins and drops down to Tower C.&nbsp; This path is very well marked, and I noticed rut-marks in the rock-bed during the ascent.&nbsp; This also took me one and a half hours of walking.&nbsp; Although steeper than the road past Mikro Vathikhori to Tower C, it is fresher in the summer.&nbsp; Both these paths were evidently practicable for carts in the past, so that there were three carriageable roads leading into the Vathichoria area from the Central Megarid."</p> <p>From Tower C a very steep path, fit only for a man or pack-animal, leads into Attica.&nbsp; I climbed for one hour to a high saddle on Mt. Pateras between points 976 and 1108.&nbsp; From there one descends by an easy route down a long valley to reach Ayios Yeoryios in one hour, and the Paliokhori of Koundoura in a futher one and a half hours, making three and half hours in all from Tower C. From Tower F Buchon took a path 'par un chemin assez facile' to the ridge west of Mr. Karidhi; from there he descended to Aegosthena, a path which he described as follows... A further path begins from Tower F, taking the same line as <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/162634518">Buchon</a>'s path, and then turns around the end of a spur to join the main route over the saddle of Mt. Karidhi.&nbsp; These three paths are, and always were, impracticable for carts; they ascend the very steep slopes in short zig-zags, such as mules make." </p></blockquote> <p>In this simple description he is able to bring together both the topography of the area as well as some of the historiography of the places and routes.&nbsp; Because he spent so much time walking through the landscape, he is able to describe it on a particularly human scale.&nbsp; Simple things like the number of hours that it took to walk between sites in some ways provides a much more meaningful measure of proximity than even the most precise cartographic treatment of the space.&nbsp; Compare Hammond's description, for example, to my marking out of the sites in <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/NWAtticForts.kmz">this Google Earth .kzm file</a> where Tower C, Tower F, and Ay. Yeoryios (Ag. Georgios) are marked and visible on the Google Earth photos.&nbsp; (You'll need to download Google Earth for this to work).</p> <p>As a final note, the <a href="http://www.scsp.arts.gla.ac.uk/">Sydney Cyprus Survey Project</a> introduced <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/51460580">their volume</a> with an an imaginary encounter between their survey team and a farmer from the past.&nbsp; This rather overt effort to link the landscape being created by the modern survey archaeologist to the lived landscape of the past employs in an imagined way many of the same techniques Hammond applied some 50 years before without the fanciful or the theoretical baggage. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 130.127.64.160 URL: DATE: 02/29/2008 11:37:42 AM I hope you got a chance to also visit Hosios Meletios, the late 11th/12t c. monastery that initiated a large monastic revival on Mount Kythairon. Good stuff. If I remember correctly, it's not too far from Phyle. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 4: Former Students Advice STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-4-forme CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 02/27/2008 12:18:34 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FormerStudentRO_2.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="163" alt="FormerStudentRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FormerStudentRO_thumb.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a> Episode 4 of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging

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Cypriot</a> </em>is now posted.&nbsp; This episode best reflects <a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">Joe Patrow</a>'s efforts to bring the student and volunteer voice into the project's narration.&nbsp; He interviewed a bunch of the students who worked on the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a> in the past and asked them to give advice to future participants on the project.&nbsp; The next three shorts will move a bit away from the methodological concerns of a field project to the experience of the project's participants.&nbsp; Their experiences reflect both their own background and our efforts as directors to construct a meaningful experience for the students.&nbsp; The latter is something that we talk about constantly as we think about what we need to do to ensure not only a positive interpersonal atmosphere for the students, but also a rewarding intellectual environment.&nbsp; <p>Without spoiling the movie, one thing that came out clearly in the interviews was the intense experience of living and working together.&nbsp; This has resonated with a conversation that I have had about 20 times over the last two weeks.&nbsp; As the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School's</a> <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Program</a> is coming to an end, the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> seem increasingly tired of the routine, tired of site reports, and perhaps most predictably tired of the bus, the lunch table, the dinner table.&nbsp; The tensions created by living in close quarters are as fundamental to the archaeological experience as the repetitive tasks of field walking, excavating, or artifact analysis.&nbsp; As I have noted before, living in <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/about/facilities.htm">Loring Hall</a> is an intense experience, especially for the students who are sometimes together for over 12 hours a day.&nbsp; While most intense academic discourse carries with it a personal tone as scholars attack one another arguments and assumptions, I continue to wonder how the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/in side-looking.html">Loring Hall Experience</a> has shaped the discipline of Classics and Greek Archaeology by forcing a sub-set of the discipline to have the particularly unusual experience of knowing a large number of the individuals in the field personally.&nbsp;&nbsp; <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts. <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first three shorts (with links to those shorts) below. <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em

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erging-cypr-1.html"><img height="74" alt="Landscape_MontageRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO_1.jpg" width="112" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img height="74" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO_1.jpg" width="110" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-3-an-ar.html"><img height="74" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO_1.jpg" width="110" border="0"> </a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Early Christian Architecture and Hybrid Space STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: early-christian CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 02/26/2008 01:07:47 AM ----BODY: <p>For my regular readers, you know that I have already posted on the topic of Early Christian architecture and the hybrid at least three times, examining <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/de lphi-mosaics.html">mosaics</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep igraphy-and-h.html">inscriptions</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/ep igraphy-litur.html">imperial policy</a>.&nbsp; The last case study in my ongoing research focuses on the Lechaion basilica outside of Corinth and looks at the intersection of architecture and imperial policy a little more closely.&nbsp; The Lechaion basilica was one of the largest basilica churches in the Mediterranean at the time of its construction in the 6th century.&nbsp; Initially excavated by D. Pallas over a series of campaigns in the late 1950s and early 1960s, recent work has strongly suggested a Justinianic date for its completion, placing it among the large number of Justinianic building projects in the Corinth (G.D. R. Sanders and K. Slane, “Corinth: Late Roman Horizons,” <i>Hesperia</i> 74 (2005), 291-292).&nbsp; There is little left of the church today above the foundation level, the size alone makes the building impressive.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv

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eWriter/image_35.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="136" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_27.png" width="204" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_36.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="136" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_28.png" width="204" border="0"></a> <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_37.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="172" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_29.png" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Floor plan and figures from Google Earth<br>(if you have installed Google Earth you can </em><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Lechaion_Basilica.kmz"><em>click here</em></a><em> for coordinates with bibliography)</em></p> <p align="left">Not only did the church extend for over 150 m in length but it was also adorned with spectacular decoration including <em>opus sectile </em>floors (made of pieces of marble and slate cut into geometric patterns) and Proconnesian marble (this is marble from the imperial marble quarries on islands in the sea of Marmara).&nbsp; The presence of these elaborate touches in the Lechaion church make it appear to be an imperial foundation.&nbsp; J.P. Sodini, one of the foremost scholars of Early Christian architecture in Greece, noted that the church reflected an "international style" (J. P. Sodini, “Note sur deux variantes régionales dans la basilique Grèce et des Balkans,” 587).</p> <p align="left">Such an elaborate building would not be surprising, of course, for the reign of Justinian.&nbsp; The emperor was known for founding churches throughout the empire.&nbsp; The furnishing of the Lechaion church probably served alongside its elaborate appointments to mark the church as having special ties to the imperial capital.&nbsp; In particular, the long pathway in the center of nave of the church linking the eastern chapel with a centrally placed pulpit (or ambo).&nbsp; This feature, called a solea, is characteristic of Justinianic architecture in Constantinople and appears very rarely in churches in Greece.&nbsp; The centrally placed pulpit is also rare in Greece; typically Greek ambos stand offset to either the north or the south of the axis of the main nave.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">Other parts of the church, however, fit in well with churches elsewhere in Greece.&nbsp; The colonnade separating the nave from the flanking aisles is set up on raised stylobates (or platforms) and the spaces between the columns are blocked off by low barrier setting the aisles apart from the main nave.&nbsp; The western part of the church has a huge atrium which does not have a central door providing access to the narthex (the western hemicycle in the plan above is elevated above the floor of the atrium).&nbsp; The eastern apse of the church features a synthonon -- a set of seats running around the inside wall of the apse -- designated for the clergy.&nbsp; All these features are characteristic of Greek churches, and their regularity in a Greek context suggests that they fulfilled basic requirements of the particular kind of liturgy practiced in Greece at this time.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Lechaion.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="236" alt="Lechaion" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Lechaion_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>The north aisle of the Lechaion basilica</em></p> <p align="left">The combining of

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features from the capital and features from the provinces presents imperial power in the context of local practice and forms.&nbsp; Thus, Lechaion provides another example of hybridity in Early Christian architecture in Greece.&nbsp; Imperial authority not only stands out in the context of the Lechaion church but, perhaps more importantly, it is translated and coopted by the persistence of characteristically Greek architecture forms.&nbsp; Such intermingling of features evocative of different liturgical observations also occurs in other Justinianic foundations in the west -- most notable San Vitale in Ravenna where the famous mosaics of the Emperor and his wife Theodora almost certainly represent features of the Constantinopolitan liturgy (see O.G. von Simson, “1987. <i>Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna</i>. (Princeton 1947), 30 and T. Mathews, <i>Clash of Gods</i>. rev. ed. (Princeton.2003), 171.).&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">The importance of this hybrid expression of the 6th century liturgy can only be fully understood in the context of the 5th and 6th century ecclesiastical organization.&nbsp; Greece was ecclesiastically part of the West at this time falling within the ecclesiastical province of Illyricum Orientalis which was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome (the Pope).&nbsp; Justinian's efforts to influence ecclesiastical affairs in the West included making regular interference in Papal politics.&nbsp; Moreover, the church at Lechaion (and San Vitale) provide evidence that he sought to influence to some extent liturgical observation as well.&nbsp; This would be consistent with the growing importance of the liturgy in the political life of the 5th and 6th centuries.&nbsp; It was common, for example, to voice opposition to imperial or ecclesiastical policies by excluding the name of the emperor or offending bishops from the lists of officials commemorated in the liturgy.&nbsp; Some emperors even went so far as to insert particular prayers in the liturgy in an effort to impose their theological positions on the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the faithful.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">It is important to note, however, that such bold expressions of imperial authority over religious matters did not go unchallenged.&nbsp; The translation of the imperial politics and authority into a local context often required negotiation some of which took place in the way imperial authority was manifest in Early Christian architecture.&nbsp; Just as <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep igraphy-and-h.html">epigraphy</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/de lphi-mosaics.html">mosaic floors</a> served as places where the Christian community negotiated varying understandings of being Christianity and created a new model of Christian authority, so the architecture of imperial foundations like the Lechaion basilica evoked both local and imperial influences.&nbsp; Through features of the church common in a Greek context, the local ecclesiastical hierarchy asserted its control over the space and the rituals taking place there, while the emperor or his agents challenged that primacy through bold allusions to the liturgy, architecture, and wealth of the imperial capital.&nbsp; In such hybrid spaces neither side "won" this contest.&nbsp; Both sides, rather, expressed their overlapping claims in ways that demanded that the viewer continuously renegotiate their understanding of imperial and ecclesiastical authority.</p> <p align="left"><strong>Update</strong>: Check out Kourelis's response to this post: <a title="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/priest-houses-sacred-orprofane.html" href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/priest-houses-sacredor-profane.html">http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/priest-houses-sacred-orprofane.html</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 02/26/2008 10:17:30 PM Very interesting. Was it unusual for a basilica to be situated so prominently, almost directly on a harbor front? This would have been a striking sight for those arriving at the port. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/ DATE: 02/27/2008 12:45:25 AM Maddy,! ! It's not too terribly unusual for a major church to be located on the water. Consider for example the Kenchreai basilica which would have been visible at the harbor. Our site in Cyprus has at least two visually prominent basilicas on a coast. Procopius describes several churches that the faithful could sail right up to in Constantinople!! ! What would have been particularly striking to a knowledgeable visitor (say a visiting member of the clergy) from the west, however, would be the architectural allusions to the liturgy of Constantinople. While Corinth was under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Pope in Rome, the architecture suggested that other influences were at play as well.! ! Thanks for the comment and thanks for reading!! ! Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 130.127.64.160 URL: DATE: 02/27/2008 05:33:44 PM Inspired me to post:! http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/priest-houses-sacred-or-profane.html ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: marija EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 91.7.41.40

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URL: DATE: 03/11/2009 11:51:53 AM So what would you say that the biggest difference between the early christian basillicas in the west and east (4-6 c.) are. I have noticed that the gallery appears more in the east. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Horace B. Woodworth and History at the University of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: horace-b-woodwo CATEGORY: North Dakotiana DATE: 02/25/2008 12:58:25 AM ----BODY: <p>As the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> begins the celebration of its <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125thiversary</a>, it's a good opportunity to look back at some of the faculty who played important roles in creating the Department of History at UND.&nbsp; Most people familiar with History at UND know of Orin G. Libby.&nbsp; Libby's name graces the <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/oglmain.html">Manuscript and Photograph Collection</a> the Department of Special Collections, and Gordon Iseminger and Robert Wilkins have published on his contributions to both the study of history at UND and the formal study of the history of the State of North Dakota (<a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og49.html">see here for basic biographical notes and bibliography</a>). </p> <p>While most scholars regard Orin G. Libby as the “Father of North Dakota History”, he was neither the first man to teach history nor was he the first individual to hold the position of Professor of History at the University of North Dakota. Horace B. Woodworth held these honors. The former farmer from Southern part of Dakota Territory taught history as well as philosophy, math, and even astronomy at the University of North Dakota from his hiring in 1885, one year after the University was founded, to his retirement in 1904. From 1902-1904 he was Professor of History at the University. In contrast to Libby’s professional credentials, Woodworth held a more fluid and ambiguous position at the university and this reflected important changes at the institutions around the turn of the century. Woodworth’s career parallels in many ways changes taking place at the university and preserves an important perspectives on the early years of higher education in state.</p> <p>Woodworth’s began as the Professor of Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy, became the Professor of Moral and Mental Science, and retired as the first Professor of History at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; His career was parallel with the creation of the professional standards in the discipline of history, and the emergence of organization like the American Historical Association, which sought to establish and protect the integrity of the discipline by developing a coherent set of professional standards.</p> <p>Despite a career path that would look unusual by today's standards, Woodworth’s career path was not terribly odd in his time. Born in 1830, he grew up farming in rural Vermont and graduated from Dartmouth in 1854 at the age of 24. After graduating he continued to farm while serving as the principal of several New England boarding schools during the later 1850s. By

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1861, returned to school and earned a degree from the Hartford Theological Seminary.&nbsp; He then preached at several Congregationalist churches in Connecticut and New Hampshire. His choice of careers, first in teaching and then in the ministry, was not unusual for Dartmouth College students in 1850s, especially the sons of farmers from rural New England.&nbsp;&nbsp; These young men sought the skills to succeed in the changing economic and social conditions of the 19th century, and as might be expected many of them moved west. Woodworth followed this trend and left New England first to serve as the pastor in churches in Charles City and Decorah, Iowa, before moving to Mt. Vernon in what is now South Dakota to farm in the early 1880s. In 1884 he applied for a position at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; He was hired beating out men like Elwood Mead who went on to head the Bureau of Reclamantion and give his name to Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam.&nbsp; His success is perhaps owed to his acquaintance with a member of the University of North Dakota’s Board of Regents, F. R. Fulton, whom he had known in Iowa, he was hired by the University, an institution that was scarcely a year old, as Professor of Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy. </p> <p>By 1888, however, Homer Sprague, the newly appointed president of the University, sought to improve the professional credentials of the UND's faculty.&nbsp; He hired Ludovic Estes to replace Woodworth as the Professor of Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy.&nbsp; Estes was more conventionally trained holding a Ph.D. in Physics from Michigan and worked hard to develop laboratory science at the university which was seen as a key contribution to a useful education. As a result of Estes hiring, Woodworth moved to Chair of Didactics, Mental, and Moral Science and Principal of the Normal Department. By 1890, he would have as part of his responsibilities the requirement to teach history. <p>Woodworth, however, did not like the position as principal of the Normal Department, which was primarily responsible for teaching secondary school teachers in the state.&nbsp; In particular, he felt that it detracted from his lectures in History and Mental and Moral Science. By 1890, Woodworth asserted his hope that “the course in History may be more fully developed in the near future and that it may be giving the prominence which its importance demands.”&nbsp; His hopes were fulfilled later than year when he appeared as the Professor of Mental and Moral Science and History. With his new position, Woodworth began to prepare a more complete and consistent offering of University-level history courses.&nbsp; His first offering were a course to juniors on the constitutional history of England and course on the History of Civilization for students in the Letters Course (a degree course which required less math and had a stronger emphasis on literature). At the same time he continued to teach courses in logic, psychology, and the history of philosophy. Woodworth saw all these course as contibuting to the same goals: “to encourage habit of independent thinking and thorough investigation.”&nbsp; This view of history would not be out of place among many faculty today. <p>Woodworth's earliest offerings at the University in the field of history reflect late 19th century interests in institutional and constitutional history which were epitomized in the work of Henry Baxter Adam’s seminar at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.&nbsp; Adams and his contemporaries viewed the rigorous study and teaching of history as a way to ensure good and conscientious citizenship.&nbsp; Such an interest comes through in Woodworth's relatively modest scholarly effort, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8703929">The Government of the People of the State of North Dakota</a>, </em>which followed contemporary trends in the study of institutional and constitutional history.&nbsp; Eldredge and Brother, a textbook publisher in Philadelphia, published the work both separately as well as bundled with Newton Thorpe’s <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/710313">The Government of the Nation: A

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Course in Civil Government based on the Government of the United States</a></i>. In the preface, Woodworth notes: “the new interest in the study of Civics is a hopeful sign. But the study ought not to be confined the study of the Constitution of the United States. Home government in the township, in the county, and in the State has more to do than the national government, in matters connected with the home, family, and daily life of the citizen.” It begins with a twenty page history of the state before a chapter detailing the basic narrative of the states founding. The bulk of its pages, however, are committed to a detailed analysis of the content, institutional apparatus, and, in some cases, reasoning behind the text of the constitution. Woodworth’s book stands in contrast to the work of the former President of the University, William Blackburn’s history of the state.&nbsp;&nbsp; Blackburn's work written in 1892 and published in 1902, details the history of the territory and early statehood of the Dakotas. Blackburn’s work apparently written during 1892 and published 1902.&nbsp; In general, it is highly fragmentary and anecdotal in nature.(William Blackburn, “A History of Dakota,”<i> South Dakota Historical Collections</i> 1 (1902), 42-162).&nbsp; It shows no inclination toward the rigorous institutional history and lacks any effort to bring in primary source documents.&nbsp; Woodworth’s work in contrast, includes the complete text of the State Constitution.&nbsp; Woodworth's work book is only surpassed in 1910 when James E. Boyle wrote <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4796259">The Government of North Dakota</a></i>.</p> <p>While little is specific detail is known of Woodworth’s private life and finances, there is no reason to assume that he was wealthy. His appointment at the university paid a salary of $2000 which was consistent with other faculty of his rank. He was able to live comfortably in town in a modest house at 815 S. 5th St. in Grand Forks and seems to have enjoyed the benefits of a middle class lifestyle.&nbsp; Moreover, his position as a professor at the University afforded him some social clout, and he was active in various charitable activities in the community.&nbsp; In a statement read by fellow faculty members, Vernon Squires, Joseph Kennedy and M.A. Brannon into the minutes on the occasion of Woodworth’s retirement in 1904, it is noted that he contributed money to the university’s maintenance. <p>Woodworth’s family life was also consistent with a middle class and even shows signs of upwardly mobility. He had two daughters. Alice Woodworth Cooley worked in the administration of the Minneapolis city schools and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/14061238">co-authored a well-regarded English grammar</a>. In 1901 she returned to Grand Forks to teach in the School of Education.&nbsp; She retired in 1905 as an Assistant Professor of Education.&nbsp; With a well-developed professional reputation and access to solidly middle class society, she married C. F. Cooley who would become a local judge. Woodworth’s other daughter, Henrietta (Hattie) Woodworth also taught at the University briefly in music in 1889 (interestingly her her father objected to her appointment!). She married W. A. Gordon a New York City native and Amherst graduate who made his fortune as a real estate developer and insurance broker. He was a prominent citizen in Grand Forks and a supporter of the university.&nbsp; In fact, during a financial crisis in the 1890s he traveled with the president of the University, Webster Merrifield, to Bismarck to lobby on the university’s behalf.&nbsp; The intermarrying of Woodworth’s daughters with members of the local “gentry” is a good indication that the Woodworth family was not limited by the later breach between “town and gown”. Recalling the situation perhaps 15 years later, Orin G. Libby’s eldest son, Charles, noted that university families tended to live near one another and children of the university professors did not necessarily play with the children in town.&nbsp; While the information of Woodworth himself remains modest, his family demonstrated access to middle and upper class society in Grand Forks.

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<p>Despite the appearance that Woodworth circulated among the elite society of Grand Forks, it seems that Woodworth remained dependent upon income from his position at the university. After he retired he received a modest pension from the university of $600 a year and professor emeritus standing. UND's President, Webster Merrifield, however, inquired whether Woodworth would be eligible for a Carnegie Fund Pension.&nbsp; In this letter Merrifield specifically cited his friend’s former salary of $2000 a year. Woodworth did not live to hear that he had been awarded a Carnegie Pension. The letter announcing that he had been awarded a Carnegie Pension of $1000 a year for life arrived two days after his funeral in 1907.&nbsp; </p> <p>After his death, his name graced Woodworth Hall, the longtime home of the College of Education at the University.&nbsp; When it burned down in 1946, Woodworth's name disappeared from campus and became eclipsed by the legend of Orin G. Libby.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_34.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="274" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_26.png" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Woodworth Hall</em></p> <p align="left">For more on Woodworth check out the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DHChapter_1.html">first chapter</a> of my history of the Department of History at the University of North Dakota.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick--1 CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 02/22/2008 12:55:32 AM ----BODY: <p>This was a pretty full week, so I have lots of quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>More hybridity: <ul> <li>Cristina Stancioiu, the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/gennadius/fellowships/">M. Alison Frantz Fellow</a>, gave a Tea Talk on "Made in Italy?&nbsp; Italian Fashion in Late

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Medieval Crete" that considered whether the evidence for clothing in the wall paintings of Venetian Crete shows signs of the development of a Venetian/Cretan hybrid culture.&nbsp; Her work is in its early days, but the approach and material are fascinating. <li>Sir John Boardman gave the major lecture at the Open Meeting of the <a href="http://www.bsa.ac.uk/">British School at Athens</a> (more on this below) and looked at Greeks going East.&nbsp; His main focus was the material culture of the Greek kingdoms in Bactria from the 2nd century BC to the first century AD.&nbsp; While some of his ideas were decidedly "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_school">old school</a>", his discussion of these far eastern Greeks embodied a kind of romantic British intellectualism and captured the flavor of an earlier era.&nbsp; His interest in Greek - Eastern interaction conjured up the incredible creative potential that emerged both from cultural contact in south-central Asia and from the dying embers of British Empire.</li></ul> <li>The <a href="http://www.bsa.ac.uk/">British School at Athens</a> held their Open Meeting last night. It was great to hear about all the sponsored projects.&nbsp; Four jumped out at me: <ul> <li>There is interesting work going at the Theatre of Sparta some of which looks likely to reveal information on the Byzantine settlement at the site. <li>The massive (20+ ha), multiyear resistivity campaign at the site of Plataia undertaken by <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/boyd.html">Michael Boyd</a> and Andreas Konecny has revealed huge amounts of information on the Greek city as well as a few more Early Christian basilicas there. (Konecny, A., Boyd, M. J., Marchese, R. &amp; Aravantinos, V.,&nbsp; "Plataiai in Boiotia: A Preliminary Report on Geophysical and Field Surveys Conducted in 2002 – 2005", <em>Hesperia </em>(forcoming... March?)) <li><a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/project/knossos/index.htm">The Knossos Urban Landscape Project</a> is another "large site/urban" intensive survey project centered on the ancient city of Knossos in Crete.&nbsp; According to the summary provided at the Open Meeting, they have collected over 400,000 sherds from the surface.&nbsp; <li><a href="http://www.archant.bham.ac.uk/research/individuals/dunn/archie3.htm">Archie Dunn</a>'s brilliant <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/index.html">Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project</a> looked good in good company.&nbsp; I heard recently from Dr. Dunn, and it sounds like things are well in hand for the 2008 study season.&nbsp; </li></ul> <li>The conversation regarding <a href="http://pdqweb.edublogs.org/">PD(Q)</a> continues particularly in the comments of a post by <a href="http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/">Michael E. Smith</a> at the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a>: <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/is-pdqgood-idea-academic-perspective.html">Is PDQ a good idea? An academic perspective</a>.&nbsp; (Shawn Graham's response and some more discussion appears on his <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a> blog).&nbsp; At the same time we learned that <a href="http://jwest.wordpress.com/">Dr Jim West's blog</a> disappeared one day, and then miraculously came back!&nbsp; This has spurred, on the one hand, renewed interest in the permanence and stability of the blogosphere (and the internet more generally: see S. Heath's <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/02/mediterranean-ceramicsreference.html">monthly "Ceramics Reference Stability Reports</a>") and provided a timely reminder for us to back up our blogs.&nbsp; On the other hand, it does beg the question whether permanence and stability in the blogosphere is a good thing.&nbsp; Many bloggers tend to think that it is; I've suggested that it's

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not (<a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/pdq-fromcomments-to-post-what-are-we.html">PD(Q) from Comments to a Post: What are we blogging for?</a>) and want to explore this more.&nbsp; <li><a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND</a> is gearing up for its <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125th-iversary</a> (I refuse to call it the Quasquicentennial or the "Q"-- the former is not a real word and the latter sounds like (1) an alien from Star Trek or (2) the nickname for an undersized, small forward at a mid-major university who got drafted in the second round, doesn't stick with the team (despite some monstrous "slam-dunk shots" in the NBA Summer League), and ends up having a productive playing career in Spain or Israel -- neither of which capture the spirit or history of the University of North Dakota).&nbsp; Despite the name, such occasions are a great time to look back on the history of the University and think toward the future.&nbsp; My wife has captured some of that spirit in her new advertisement for Graduate Study in the Humanities at the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/">Graduate School at the University of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; Notice the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/factbook/html/adelphifountain.htm">Adelphi Fountain</a> in the background of the movie still blow (click on the still <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Movies/HumanitiesSM.m4v">to watch the short ad</a>).&nbsp; I blogged on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/07/th e-pythia-in-g.html">the restoration of that fountain and its iconography</a>.&nbsp; </li></ul> <p align="right"><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Movies/HumanitiesSM.m4v"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="180" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_32.png" width="240" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="180" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_33.png" width="161" border="0"></a></p> <ul> <li> <div align="left">The American School has a fancy-pants <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php">new website</a> with a news feed and blog.&nbsp; </div> <li> <div align="left">Finally, another <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/181822">advertisement for myself</a>, my <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/">Blogging Archaeology and the Archaeology of Blogging</a> appeared on the front page of the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/">Archaeological Institute of America</a>'s website.</div></li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some Thoughts on Future of Survey Archaeology in Greece (and the Eastern Mediterranean)

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: some-thoughts-o CATEGORY: Survey Archaeology DATE: 02/21/2008 01:38:24 AM ----BODY: <p>A few months ago, I presented <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/th e-corinthia-a.html">an overview of the survey archaeology</a> to the Regular Members in the Corinthia.&nbsp; <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/faculty_staff/davis_informal.html">Jack Davis</a>, <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a>, and I followed this up with <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/fo ur-views-of-t.html">survey archaeology day in the Corinthia</a> taking in parts of the <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/nvap/">Nemea Valley Archaeological Project</a> and the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>.&nbsp; As a result of "teaching survey" on site, I have begun to think about the future directions of survey as a method for exploring, documenting, and creating the Ancient and Medieval landscape.&nbsp; I have recently thought about writing a short, speculative (if informed) article on the topic while trying to envision what the next generation of survey projects might look like.&nbsp; Today's post is basically a brainstorm written on the fringes of coherence that explores several interrelated themes current in my own work as a survey archaeologist.</p> <p>Scholars have argued in the past that survey archaeology has approached a "threshold of intensity" (which is a version of <a href="http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/075/Ant0750627.htm">Blanton's Mediterranean Myopia</a>) that involves the collection of massive data sets of both "archaeological" data (sherds, sherd densities, features, buildings, roads et c.-- not to mention data generated by various remote sensing techniques), but also environmental data (visibility, land use, high resolution topographical maps, geological and geomorphological data, et c.).&nbsp; This data allows survey archaeologists to possess an unparalleled number of variable to understand the cultural and natural formation processes and tempts us to read these elaborately constructed survey universes as totalizing discourse of the landscape.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/re cent-work-on.html">This increase in intensity</a> (coupled with a tendency for increasingly limited permits particularly in Greece) has tended to produce surveys of much smaller scope than the first generation of survey projects or similar projects in a North or Meso-American context.&nbsp; Rather than covering hundreds of square kilometers which would encompass a large percentage of a economic or politically constituted region in the ancient Mediterranean, surveys have become more focused endeavors emphasizing the micro-region, sometimes as small as a few square kilometers, as the primary unit of analysis.&nbsp; Such micro-regions may or may not be constituted in direct relation to any pre-modern (pre-industrial) system.&nbsp; In fact, modern conditions ranging from development, to agricultural land use, the limits of past archaeological investigation, or even the institutional borders of the archaeological

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bureaucracy of the host country exert strong influences over the shape of the intensive pedestrian survey "universe" (i.e. area of investigation).&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ThisveWorking.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="ThisveWorking" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ThisveWorking_thumb.jpg" width="277" border="0"></a> </p> <p>If survey intends to address regional concerns, then they must find a way to overcome the methodological and practical limits that are likely the shape the future of the discipline.&nbsp; In particular, there is a need to produce results that are compatible and comparable with the results produced by other surveys in order to create the kinds of large scale data sets required for regional analysis.&nbsp; The growing potential for digital publication of relatively "raw" survey data holds forth one important prospect for creating large scale integrated regional and trans-regional data sets.&nbsp; By manipulating the primary data from surveys, scholars will be able to find common ground for analysis between projects and ideally construct data sets suitable to address concerns that exceed the scope any one survey area.&nbsp; This will require, of course, substantial quantities of carefully prepared "metadata" necessary to provide an interpretative context for any single project's data.&nbsp; In some cases, it will involve creating (and maintaining!) normalized data sets in electronic form.&nbsp; The re-analysis, re-processing, and maintenance of the archaeological data from earlier projects is a tedious task, but it will be vital for our ability to analyze systems that function on levels that greatly exceed the scope of any single project.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DokosSurvey.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="227" alt="DokosSurvey" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DokosSurvey_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Revisiting archaeological survey data also encourages us to reconsider the methodological assumptions that shaped the investigation of the countryside.&nbsp; For example, artifact level survey rooted deeply in the tradition of processural archaeology has tended to view the landscape in a way that marginalizes the role of the individual and privileges the analysis of systems, society, or even culture.&nbsp; Recent work on the role of the individual and agency in archaeology (usefully summarized in: A. Bernard Knapp &amp; Peter van Dommelen, "Past Practices: Rethinking Individuals and Agents in Archaeology," <em>Cambridge Archaeological Journal </em>18 (2008), 15–34) has exposed some of the tension between the archaeologist as interlocutor and narrator (for an interesting recent post on this see: <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/02/imagination_to_interpreta tion.html">Christa M. Beranek, "Imagination to Interpretation"</a>) and ancient society.&nbsp; Michael Given et al. ( in <a href="http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue20/4/2_02.htm ">"Joining the Dots: Continuous Survey, Routine Practice and the Interpretation of a Cypriot Landscape (with interactive GIS and integrated data archive)" Internet Archaeology 20</a>) have called for projects to work toward "verbing the landscape" as a way recognizing the archaeological landscape as evidence for past activities.&nbsp; Work such as <a href="http://proteus.brown.edu/witmore/home">Christopher Witmore</a>'s 2005 dissertation at Stanford , <a

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href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/multiplefields/Home">Multiple field approaches in the Mediterranean: Revisiting the Argolid Exploration Project</a>, seek not simply to resturcture the archaeological data, but to reposition the archaeologist's relationship to the processes and the material which constitute archaeological landscapes. </p> <p>So, my post today has mapped two future paths for survey which are closely related (1) the cross-project integration of survey data for trans-regional analysis and (2) negotiating the role of the individual (both in antiquity and in more modern times) in creating the archaeological landscape.&nbsp; Both tasks build upon the methodological self awareness developed by survey archaeology in the last four decades and call upon its practitioners not only to continue to be reflexive concerning methodology and field procedure producing data that anticipates its integration into larger regional interpretations, but also to go beyond this to consider the place of the archaeologist amidst the modern and ancient landscape.<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/RoadPictSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="244" alt="RoadPictSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/RoadPictSM_thumb.jpg" width="218" align="right" border="0"></a></p> <p>Since, I am unlikely to re-catagorize my past postings on survey archaeology, I have included an index of entries on survey archaeology in this blog: </p> <h5><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/su rvey-archaeol.html">Survey Archaeology, Pottery, and the Chronotype System</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/fo ur-views-of-t.html">Four Views of the Corinthian Landscape</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/re cent-work-on.html">Recent Work on Survey Northeast Peloponnesus</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/ge ographic-info.html">Geographic Information Systems and Regional Survey at the American School</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/ea stern-korinth.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey on the Web</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/th e-corinthia-a.html">The Corinthia and Survey Archaeology</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/le arning-about.html">Filmmaking and Archaeology</a><br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ne w-research-in.html">New Research in Late Roman Boeotia</a></h5> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 3: An Artifact's Journey STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-3-an-ar CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 02/20/2008 01:01:50 AM ----BODY: <p>This third episode of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>is up on the web.&nbsp; This is the final short that looks in detail at the field methods used by the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a>'s intensive survey team on Cyprus.&nbsp; This short tracks an artifact as it moves from the field to the artifact catalogue catalogue.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ArtifactsJourneyRO.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-rightwidth: 0px" height="164" alt="ArtifactsJourneyRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ArtifactsJourneyRO_thumb.jpg" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The focus on the artifact is of particular significance for the kind of intensive survey that we practice on PKAP.&nbsp; Artifact level survey (what is sometimes also called siteless survey) shifts the basic unit of interpretation from the site (or a dot on the map) to the artifact.&nbsp; In particular we focus on interpreting the distribution of artifacts on the ground meaning the location, identification, and documentation of each artifact plays a key role in producing our larger understanding of the site. You can see the distribution of artifact on our <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html">interactive GIS map here</a>.</p> <p>The short also shows how <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/staff.htm">many people</a> have to work together to analyze and document a substantial corpus of ceramic evidence. Each artifact passes through multiple hands: the fieldwalker, the washing team, the registrar, the ceramicist, the photographer, the illustrator, and the cataloguers.&nbsp; Each individual has a particular perspective on the artifact and their role on the project, and this, in effect, contributes to their creation of a distinct and familiar archaeological landscape.&nbsp; Among the differences between our first archaeological documentary <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a> </em>and <em>Emerging Cypriot </em>is that the omniscient narrator has given way to participant voices.&nbsp; This has allowed us to present the archaeological landscape as a product of the participants in the project rather than some overarching and anonymous analytical process.</p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image.&nbsp; We'll add a short a week.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/webisodes">a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a

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link to the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>, </em>and you can read the commentaries on the first two shorts (with links to those shorts) below.</p> <p>&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="70" alt="Landscape_MontageRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Landscape_MontageRO.jpg" width="106" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/ep isode-2-emerg.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="70" alt="Learning_FieldwalkingRO" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Learning_FieldwalkingRO.jpg" width="104" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Punk Archaeology: Some Preliminary Thoughts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: punk-archaeolog CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 02/19/2008 01:42:10 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/punk-archaeology.html">Kostis Kourelis recently included me on his list of Punk Archaeologist</a> -- a complete honor! <p>My attraction to punk, I think, comes from the selfconsciously ironic quality of the early punk movement and its easy resonance with the predominant character of much of the academic discourse.&nbsp; This should be no surprise as the punk mentality was crystallizing at the same moment that intellectuals were trying to understand the implications of <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/700666">Hayden White’s <em>Metahistory</em></a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/511209">M.

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Foucault’s <em>Archaeology of Knowledge</em></a>. Both works, but particularly the former recognized the ironic as the dominant force in modern intellectual life. Such spirit of the ironic is captured in the Velvet Underground’s first album cover which showed a realistically rendered banana with the instructions “Peel slowly and see”. Peeling the banana lead the viewer to discover the bright pink (and obviously phallic) unpeeled banana inside. This somewhat alarming discovery behind the ordinary banana encapsulated the ironic spirit of the M. Leigh book <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12894916">The Velvet Underground</a></i> which reported on the sexually “deviant” practices underlying the typical suburban landscape. Peeling the banana and listening the album revealed the hidden tensions existing within even the most mundane elements of society. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_30.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_24.png" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The band, the Velvet Underground, occupies a central place in the emergence of the punk rock movement, first in New York and around the world. The vivid urban scenes narrated by Lou Reed, John Cale and company helped to situate punk in an urban context. Kourelis has brought to the fore this celebration of the urban and linked the punk ascetic with the notion of squatting. <p>The idea of occupying urban space, however, reflects the mixed roots of many of the pioneers of punk rock. While some punk rockers with clearly urban roots (particularly such key players in the New York scene like The Ramones (Queens), David Johansen and Johnny Thunders (Staten Island and Queens respectively), many the genres early heroes were suburban: Lou Reed (Long Island), Richard Hell (Kentucky) and Tom Verlaine (Morristown, NJ – Hell and Verlaine met at a suburban high school in Wilmington, Delaware at around the same time that Bob Marley was living in downtown Wilmington (ca. 1965-1966)), Paul Westerberg (and the Replacements – Minneapolis), Bob Mould (went to Macalester!), Iggy Pop – Muskegon, Michigan. In fact, punk rock was closely associated with (and perhaps developed from) the idea of the “garage band” which only made sense in a suburban, post-war context. While playing in a garage was another aspect of the squatter aesthetic, it also implied the centrality of the car and reflected their membership in (and rejection of) a suburban middle class. <p>In fact, the urban world created by many punk bands brought to life the fears, myths, and contradictions derived from the typically suburban origins of the musicians. The image of the urban painted by these musicians resonated with suburban kids throughout the country (including me when I first heard it). Punks viewed the city from a decidedly suburban perspective. In punk rock, the city was both intimidating and full of chaotic creative power (the ordinary, mundane, working classes who struggled to survive in the <a href="http://www.jstor.org/view/00754358/ap010056/01a00110/0">twilight of American urbanism</a> rarely make an appearance in the early New York punk music). The earliest and perhaps most seminal expressions of the punk rock aesthetic, <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Velvet_Underground_and_Nico">Velvet Underground with Nico</a></i> is a great example of this; songs like “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_My_Man">Waiting for My Man</a>” and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_Run_Run_%28Lou_Reed_song%29">Run, Run, Run</a>” summarize a feeling of urban alienation and danger. Some of this intensity seems to conjure up the earlier fascination with the “urban” best summarized in Norman Mailer’s essay “<a

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href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12315017">The White Negro</a>,” which extolled the virtues of the hipster many of whom, like many members of the punk movement, were second and third generation immigrants who retained some urban ties while at the same time seeking to reposition their identity at vital fringes of American urban culture. <p>The ironic in punk derives largely from the relative bourgeois background of many of the genre’s greatest lights. Punk created an urban experience that was both exotic and predictable. They glamorized the suburban perspective of the urban by filling with exotic characters, like drug-dealers (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:TheVelvetUndergroundI%27mWaitingForTheM an.ogg">Waiting for My Man</a>”, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_Run_Run_%28Lou_Reed_song%29">Run, Run, Run</a>"), violence ("<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_of_Brixton">Guns of Brixton</a>" or Iggy’s "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_and_Destroy_%28song%29">Search and Destroy</a>": “I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm | I’m a runaway son of the nuclear a-bomb”), distorted sexual tension (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wanna_Be_Your_Dog">I Wanna be Your Dog</a>”) and ambiguity (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_Generation_%28album%29">Blank Generation”</a> – totally ironic, a generation “under erasure”; the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Blankgeneration.jpg">album cover</a> shows Richard Hell with an open shirt exposing the words "You Make Me ______" written on his chest.) that found open contrast to the seemingly controlled and superficial suburbia. Thus, punk held up the “declining” urban centers against the boring, mundane, and predictable suburbs while at the same time reifying the growing criticisms of the city offered by its suburban critics. The punk rock stories and life styles recycled a suburban vision of a vital urban energy for suburban (re)consumption. They understood at least to some degree the importance of the “safe media” of records, but that recorded performances had to capture the live feeling and excitement of “excursions” by suburban fans to such iconic venues as Max’s and CBGBs. The raw listening experience of punk album evoked the experience of live shows and made the particularly punk image of the urban mobile. At the same time, the heroes of the punk movement performed their own pilgrimage and gained the requisite authenticity through short residence at the Chelsea or Albert Hotels. Of course so many of the pioneers of punk not only celebrated the chaotic culture of the urban world of the suburban imagination, but also succumbed to the image that they in many ways created, dying violent deaths or struggling with drug addiction. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_31.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="407" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_25.png" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>There is every evidence that many punks understood the irony of their own position. Punk rockers who experimented with narrative in their music, such as Lou Reed, openly embraced the ironic in their lyrics (e.g. The Velvet Underground's “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_%28Velvet_Underground_song%29">The Gift</a>”). Punk bands regularly covered old standards (my favorites are the Germs&nbsp; “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_and_Around">Round and Round</a>” or Johnny Thunders’ live version of “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_You_Love_Me">Do you love me?</a>”, but see also Sid Vicious “<a

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href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Way_%28song%29">My Way</a>‚Äù et c.) or borrowed and distorted melodies from earlier pop standards (echoing of course the practices in Hard Bop and other jazz idioms two decades earlier). Their intentionally cacophonic versions of these tunes not only reified the enduring value of the music from an earlier time, but also sought to distort, disrupt, and appropriate it for subversive purposes.&nbsp; Punks translated the safe features of ‚Äúclassic‚Äù pop music into barely recognizable, distorted, burned out idiom of urban space in a highly-referential and explicitly counter-cultural performance. <p>Punk, in my analysis, foreground the process of translating the sense of place.&nbsp; <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/02/101ers.html">As Kourelis has pointed out</a>, their self conscious use of architectural fragments in their cover art, which was designed to evoke the urban context for their music (but consider the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_It_Be_%28Replacements_album%29">Replaceme nt's <em>Let it Be</em></a> with its more suburban setting), set the stage for their music.&nbsp; This work of translating and transposing the experience of space has featured significantly in almost all archaeological approaches to the past (and the present as well!).&nbsp; Punk rock and archaeology both foreground the necessity to communicate the meaning of place.&nbsp; The act of uncovering, of excavating in an archaeological context ("<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Velvet_Underground_and_Nico">Dig slowly and see</a>") presupposed an ironic tension between the surface of the ground (or the expected view of a landscape) and the "reality" that emerges from excavation (or, in the case of landscape, intensive investigation).&nbsp; On the one hand, it may be fair to argue that irony represents the quintessential narrative mode of late/post modernity (as it coincides so well with the major epistemological positions of the modern world), but on the other hand, punk and archaeology both embrace a spatial aspect of this ironic mode of narration that keys upon the unexpected energy of neglected, hidden, and dangerous places and seeks to translate the energy and knowledge of this space into media appropriate for broader consumption and use.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Laura Gawlinski EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 205.189.30.48 URL: DATE: 02/19/2008 10:44:16 AM You might be interested to know that Iggy Pop is published in a classics journal:! "Caesar Lives," Classics Ireland 2 (1995): 94-96.! http://www.classicsireland.com/! (see the editorial note too) ----COMMENT:

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AUTHOR: Corbouman EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 80.100.145.138 URL: DATE: 04/06/2009 06:44:40 PM James, please listen to this !!

/Users/corbouman/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Herman Brood & His Wild Romance/Cha Cha -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Monday Metadata STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: monday-metadata CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/18/2008 12:56:59 AM ----BODY: <p>I am going to keep with my practice of reporting metadata on this blog whenever I reach interesting milestones (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/10 0-posts.html">after 100 posts</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/tr affic-report.html">after 2,500 page views</a>)or experience interesting changes in volume (see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/va ria-quick-hit.html">the last bullet point for metadata after the Blogging Archaeology article went up</a>).&nbsp; Over the weekend, I received my 10,000th page view.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_29.png"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="277" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_23.png" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>I am not sure exactly how to explain this notable increase in volume, but clearly some of the volume comes from my "<a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/">Blogging Archaeology/Archaeology of Blogging</a>" article on Archaeological.org.&nbsp; Links from that page provide about 6% of my volume since October.&nbsp; Some of the volume also must come from the number of words and phrases in the blog that search engines like Google will find.&nbsp; Visitors from Google search pages are around 30% of my volume.&nbsp; Links from other blogs, particular Troels Myrup Kristensen's <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm</a> (2.5%), the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> (2%), Shawn Graham's <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a>

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(1.5%) and occasional notice on group blogs like <a href="http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html">HNN</a> (3%) account for sizeable number of visits (and page views).&nbsp; <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/">Grand Forks Life</a>, a blog on life and times in my home town of Grand Forks, North Dakota does its part, drive about 2.5% of my traffic; the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a>'s various pages provide another 3.3% of my visits.&nbsp; About 50% of my visitors are new visitors.&nbsp; The average time on site has held fairly steady (although the length of my posts have increased!) at about 1:40 per visit.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/index.php/site/comments/market_share/">My buddy Sam Fee over at Arranged Delirium</a> will be pleased to know that the majority of my hits come from browsers other than Internet Explorer (45%): 41% from Firefox, 9% from Safari, 2.7% from Opera, and the rest from more obscure or unrecognized sources including Camino, Konqueror, and Blazer.&nbsp; </p> <p>Most of my hits come from the U.S. with hits from every state in the U.S. except Alaska and Wyoming; the latter suggests that <a href="http://www.und.edu/kelley">UND's new president</a> was not an avid reader of this blog (that will have to change)!&nbsp; The top 10 states are: Pennsylvania, California, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, North Dakota, Michigan, Illinois, Florida, and Virginia.</p> <p> The top 10 countries are Greece, UK, Canada, Australia, Italy, Denmark, Germany, France, and Cyprus.&nbsp; I've had hits from every inhabited continent now.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BlogMap.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="249" alt="BlogMap" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BlogMap_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">It is genuinely gratifying to see that people are interested in what I write here.&nbsp; Thanks for reading!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Pamela Russell McClellan EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 72.64.9.189 URL: DATE: 02/18/2008 04:12:32 PM Hi, I am Pam Russell, a relatively new reader of your blog, which I am enjoying a lot. I was a member of ASCSA in the early 80s, so it is fun to hear the news, as well as your stimulating essays -- thanks so much. (Reading from icy New Hampshire right now!) ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shelley Ramos EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 216.174.214.78

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URL: DATE: 02/18/2008 06:09:51 PM You may have one more source for hit volume to your blog now that Brenda has linked your blog from her blog. Thanks for the warm review of Brenda's tea. I've known Brenda since highschool and it's great to hear a peer's review of her talk...especially when it is a good review. :) -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Real Snow in Athens STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: real-snow-in-at CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 02/17/2008 02:58:57 AM ----BODY: <p>I've posted some photos of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/sn ow-in-athens.html">snow on Hymmetos</a>, but last night there was real snow in downtown Athens, and we are said to get more today.&nbsp; So, the requisite Athens snow pictures:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Loring_Snow.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Loring_Snow" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Loring_Snow_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Loring Hall in the Snow</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Gennadius_Snow.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Gennadius_Snow" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Gennadius_Snow_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>The Gennadius Library in the Snow</em></p> <p align="left">The snow is pretty, to be sure, but the more amazing thing for Athens is the silence.&nbsp; The roads are almost completely empty of cars.&nbsp; I'll defer to my wife <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/at hens---broken.html">Susie's description of downtown Athens on a normal day</a>, and post the final photo in contrast</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Road_Snow.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Road_Snow" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Road_Snow_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 02/18/2008 12:42:58 PM Very pretty. My first-ever glimpse of Athens was a day after a (relatively) major snowfall like this, although by the time I arrived it had moved beyond the "pretty" stage to the "giant piles of grey/brown slush" stage. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Friday Quick Hits and Varia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: friday-quick-hi CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 02/15/2008 01:58:28 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a handful of quick hits today:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S20/17/36K39/index.xml?section= topstories,featured">Princeton has announced the acquisition of a&nbsp; collection of over 800 Medieval Greek coins minted in the 13th and 14th century</a>.&nbsp; The collection is said to feature many coins from the Villehardouin and Angevin rulers of the Southern and Central Greece.&nbsp; <li><a href="http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/">Alun Salt</a>'s PD(Q) project continues to gain momentum.&nbsp; The conversation over at the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> has been productive, although it may not have added too much clarity to exactly what kind of journal this will be and how it will relate precisely to what we do in our blogs.&nbsp; I tried to frame my position in <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-carnival-journalproposal-past.html">a post</a> (which derived in large part <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/bl ogging-peer-r.html">from an earlier post here</a>) and got a <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/blogging-andpdq.html">good, sharp reply</a>.&nbsp; Then the public planning stopped and it all went underground into a series of emails, which is a shame since I think some of the issues might be of somewhat wider interest.&nbsp; And the conversation might be particularly suitable for a blog which so often focuses as much on process as real product. In any event, the conversations have resulted in a web site.&nbsp; I think that it is still in draft form, but <a href="http://pdqweb.edublogs.org/">here's the link</a>. <li>I didn't feel the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4592418.stm">earthquake off the south coast of Greece yesterday</a>, and so far I haven't heard anything about the damage to the island of Kythera.&nbsp; The island is known for its painted Byzantine churches (<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64446360">M.

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ChatzeÃÑdakeÃÑs and I. Bitha, Corpus of the Byzantine wall-paintings of Greece : the Island of Kythera.&nbsp; David Turner Trans.&nbsp; (Athens 2003)</a>), and some of them there are in pretty fragile shape. <li>I heard a really good Tea Talk this week by <a href="http://www.art.uiowa.edu/directory.php?id=79">Brenda Longfellow</a> of the University of Iowa.&nbsp; Tea Talks are supposedly less formal talks held during tea time (yes, the American School still serves tea in the afternoons).&nbsp; Mostly they are formal talks which run about 40 minutes in length.&nbsp; Anyway, Brenda (Dr. Longfellow) talked about the use of spolia in the Roman period (1st and 2nd c. AD).&nbsp; The use of <em>spolia </em>-that is older material like statues or architectural sculpture built into new buildings usually in a programmatic way -- earlier than Late Antiquity rarely gets serious and systematic attention.&nbsp; One reason for this might be that the use of spolia became a key component in the definition of Late Antiquity as topic worthy of study.&nbsp; In fact, if we follow J. Elsner's argument (in J. Elsner, "The Birth of Late Antiquity: Reigel and Strzygowski in 1901," <em>Art History </em>25 (2002), 358-379) the use of spolia in the Arch of Constantine -particularly the juxtaposition of the 2nd century and 4th century sculpture -was a key impetus in Riegl's description of a distinctive Late Antique style (in his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/74864342"><em>SpaÃàtroÃàmische Kunstindustrie</em></a>).&nbsp; In particular, one of the major lines in his argument for the autonomy and independence of Late Antique art is demonstrating its development from art of the high empire.&nbsp; Without the willful juxtaposition of spoliated members in such monumental works as the arch of Constantine, this influential argument would not have occurred.&nbsp; <li>Finally, I got into work this morning and found that a friend had sent an email with a link to a <em>New York Times</em> article which reassuringly told me: "... in the other America, specifically in small cities like Austin; <strong>Grand Forks, N.D.</strong>; Yakima, Wash.; and Salem, Mass., the available evidence suggests the real estate market is holding up. Prices there never boomed as crazily as they did in the big cities, and now, even though volume is down almost everywhere, prices in many of these towns are firm or rising." (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/business/15homes.html">More...</a>)&nbsp ; This is good news for me because we have begun some renovations this week to our 100 year old American Four-Square.</li></ul> <p>Have a good weekend!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kythera Cultural Association EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 85.72.73.0 URL: DATE: 02/15/2008 08:00:29 AM No damage has so far been reported to any of Kythera's Byzantine Churches (or, indeed, to anything else) as a result of yesterday's two earthquakes. ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Survey Archaeology, Pottery, and the Chronotype System STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: survey-archaeol CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 02/14/2008 12:52:23 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last three months there has been some discussion of the chronotype system of sampling and identifying pottery in the context of regional intensive survey projects.&nbsp; The most recent critiques have appeared in D. Frankel, Review of B. Knapp and M. Given, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/51460580">Sydney Cyprus Survey Project</a></em>. <em>AJA </em>112 (2008), 182-183 and Y. A. Lolos, B. Gourley and D. R. Stewart, "The Sikyon Survey Project: A Blueprint for Urban Survey?" <em>JMA </em>20 (2007), 271 (for more on this article and this exciting project see their spectacular <a href="http://extras.ha.uth.gr/sikyon/en/">Sikyon Survey Project</a> web site and my less spectacular <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/re cent-work-on.html">previous post</a>).</p> <p>Tim Gregory developed the chronotype system for the <a href="http://www.scsp.arts.gla.ac.uk/">Sydney Cyprus Survey Project</a> and it has subsequently been employed by Australian Paliochora-Kythera Survey Project, the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>, the <a href="http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/archaeology/research/projects/taesp/">Tro odos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project</a>, and my own <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> on Cyprus.&nbsp; In very basic terms, the chronotype system involves both a sampling strategy and a somewhat nested terminology for artifact types designed to facilitate the reading and analysis of survey pottery.&nbsp; The sampling strategy (as alluded to in the film short from <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a> </em>released yesterday) involves collecting every unique artifact type from a survey unit to ensure that one of each kind of artifact in the unit is represented in the collected assemblage.&nbsp; It was a response to an older generation of survey projects that tended to collect only "diagnostic artifacts" which often meant rims, handles, bases, and feature sherds.&nbsp; By collecting one of every type of artifact present in the unit, the chronotype system shifted the responsibility for determining whether an artifact was diagnostic from the fieldwalker (who in traditional surveys would have to decide whether a sherd was likely to be significant for establishing the chronology or function of the site) to the ceramicist who would study an assemblage that reflected the material present.&nbsp; All the fieldwalker needed to do was to determine whether a sherd was similar or different from the ones he or she had already collected.</p> <p>The nested terminology for artifact types involved the ceramicist assigning to each sherd a standardized chronotype which was a combination of date range (e.g. "Late Roman", "Early Bronze Age", or "Ancient"), fabric type (e.g. "medium coarse", "fine ware", "cooking ware" et c.) and description (e.g. "combed", "black glazed", "drip painted").&nbsp; Standardizing the way in which artifacts were described facilitated the quantitative and

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qualitative analysis of the survey pottery which demands that artifact types be normalized consistently across the data set.&nbsp; It also provided a fairly well-developed set of artifact identifiers that could be (and was) exported to other survey projects.&nbsp; </p> <p>Frankel expressed concern that the chronotype system, by eschewing "conventional pottery terminology" would make inter-site and inter-project comparability more difficult.&nbsp; This is certainly a concern. Inter-site comparability (e.g. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/52920721">Side-by-Side</a>) is of increasing significance as more and more of the Mediterranean world is covered by intensive survey and, perhaps more importantly, as survey relies upon excavated contexts for establishing the chronology of surface pottery.&nbsp; That being said, I am not as convinced that "conventional pottery terminology" is so stable that introducing a new set of standardized terminology designed for the vagaries of survey pottery will have any inherent incompatibility with more traditional nomenclature.&nbsp; For the periods where my research focuses (which are generally historical), there is sufficient diversity in the conventional terminology to require some translation between projects(consider, for example, the typologies for Late Roman amphora).&nbsp; As survey and excavation data sets make the slow migration <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/th oughts-on-ope.html">to accessible digital archives</a> which will allow for more direct comparison between projects, there will certainly be a need to create concordances of ceramic terminology that take into account not only the variety of terms employed to describe particular sherds, but also changes in identification of certain types of pottery.&nbsp; Frankel has identified an area that will require the attention of archaeologists in the very near future.&nbsp; </p> <p>Lolos et al. critiqued the sampling strategy employed by the chronotype system.&nbsp; They questioned whether a fieldwalker could consistently determine whether a sherd was "different" and therefore worthy of collection.&nbsp;&nbsp; They also wondered if by collecting each unique sherd we would lose the ability to talk about relative frequency of particular artifact types within a unit .&nbsp; Their critiques are, indeed, valid, and we have worked to address them in several recent publications (Caraher et al. "Siteless survey and intensive data collection in an artifact-rich environment: case studies from the eastern Corinthia, Greece. <em>JMA </em>19 (2006),&nbsp; 7-43; T. Tartaron et al. "The Eastern Corinthia archaeological survey: integrated methods for a dynamic landscape," <em>Hesperia </em>75 (2006), 453-523; Caraher et al. "Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project: Second Report 2005-2006" <em>RDAC </em>2007, in press; D. Pettegrew "The Busy Countryside of Late Roman Corinth:Interpreting Ceramic Data Produced by Regional Archaeological Surveys," <em>Hesperia</em> 76 (2007), 743–784; R. S. Moore, "A Decade Later: The Chronotype System Revisited," in <i>Archaeology and History in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece: Studies on Method and Meaning in Honor of Timothy E. Gregory</i>. W. Caraher, R. S. Moore, L. J. Hall, eds. Forthcoming.)&nbsp; The two salient points here are as follows:</p> <p>1) We regularly tell fieldwalkers "when in doubt regarding whether a sherd is unique, collect it."&nbsp; Some recent studies (see Moore (Forthcoming) and Caraher et al 2006) have suggested that fieldwalkers tend, if anything, to over collect; that is to say err on the side of caution and collect too many examples of even relatively undiagnostic sherd.&nbsp; While this cannot anticipate whether the walkers have overlooked certain types of artifacts completely (i.e. artifacts that are <em>so indistinguishable </em>from other sherds that they are disregarded <em>consistently </em>as duplicates), it suggest that they did not.&nbsp; In any case, the chronotype sampling method should ensure a more robust sample of the variety of material present on the surface than techniques which involve only

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collecting highly visible "diagnostic" (e.g. rims, handles, feature sherds, et c.) artifacts.&nbsp; </p> <p>2) The chronotype sampling strategy will not create assemblages that are as robust as so-called "total collection" strategies which involve the collection of all the material from a unit or a walker's swath.&nbsp; We conducted experiments in 2005 and 2006 and determined that, indeed, total collection from a 5% sample of the unit would produce an assemblage that would allow discussions of proportional representation within the unit.&nbsp; This being said, it is not clear exactly what the significance of the varying proportions present in a surface assemblage means.&nbsp; The formation processes that create the surface assemblage are incredibly complex and varied across periods; thus, for example, it is difficult to understand what a proportionately greater quantity of, say, Classical period artifacts in a unit means.&nbsp; Does it mean more Classical activity in a particular spot?&nbsp; More intensive use of that spot?&nbsp; More people? Or does it suggest that the Classical period material was particularly susceptible to certain site formation processes.&nbsp; From my perspective we need to understand the processes that lead to the creation of the surface assemblage much better than we do today to find any significance in the proportion of pottery represented in a unit.&nbsp; Of course, gross differences -- like the incredible, overwhelming presence of Late Roman material at Pyla-Koutsopetria -- will come out in the chronotype system as in almost all cases the more pottery there is from a particular period the more diversity there is present in the assemblage.&nbsp; Thus, the chronotype system, which excels in documenting diversity, will produce a use and valid indicator of particularly prevalent periods.</p> <p>The point of this post is not to attack Frankel and Lolos et al. -- far from it, in fact! --&nbsp; but to expand the dialogue into the blogosphere and, perhaps more importantly, shed some light on an exciting (and surprisingly robust!) little debate in the world of Mediterranean survey archaeology.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Episode 2: Emerging Cypriot: Learning to Fieldwalk STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: episode-2-emerg CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/13/2008 02:21:16 AM ----BODY: <p>Episode Two of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging

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Cypriot</a></em> is up and ready for download or viewing.&nbsp; "Learning to Fieldwalk" is a short introduction to intensive survey field walking.&nbsp; From its first formal field season in 2004, <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a> has been part field project and part field school.&nbsp; Consequently, we put a good bit of energy into teaching basic archaeological skills to a small group of graduate student and undergraduate volunteers.&nbsp; Over a 3-4 week field seasons we work closely with the students emphasizing both the practical and the theoretical (or at least methodological) training in archaeological survey. The short gives you some idea what their first day in the field is like.&nbsp; We run the first day of practice on a very high density unit atop the hill of Vigla where the walkers are likely to encounter almost all of the artifact types that they will see in the survey area (with the odd exception of large, flat, Late Roman roof tiles that are ubiquitous elsewhere!). </p> <p>This film short condenses long hours of work with the student in the field into one blustery afternoon. It does broach the not insignificant matter that most survey (and many surveys) have to confront: how does our training of field walkers, diggers, or even supervisors impact the data that our projects produces.&nbsp; One of the most persistent critiques of survey archaeologist is that inexperienced field walkers produce unreliable results.&nbsp; We examined our walker data for just this kind of irregularity and some of the results are available in a short working paper: "Notes <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/PKAP_Notes_on_Walker_Collection_Figu res.pdf">on the Relationship between Walker Collection Figures and Total Artifact Densities</a>" based exclusively on PKAP data collected between 2004 and 2006.&nbsp; It clearly does not represent the last word on the effect of walker variability on the data produced by surveys, but at least attempts to problematize our data in a coherent way.</p> <p>The first three installments of <em>Emerging Cypriot </em>work together to provide a brief introduction to our field methods and expand the detail provided by the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html"><em >Survey on Cyprus</em></a>.&nbsp; If you are more of a text oriented person you can read about our methods in our two articles in the <em>Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus </em>(2005, 2007).&nbsp; </p> <p>Next week, we'll debut "An Artifact's Journey" which clever web-surfers have already seen as it accidentally appeared on an early version of the <em>Emerging Cypriot </em>interface.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/02/emergingcypriot.html">The good news is that it received decent reviews from discerning eyes</a>.&nbsp; Feel free to make comments here on each of the episodes.&nbsp; </p> <p><em>A few technical notes<br></em>The video is all in <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">QuickTime</a> which you will need to download to watch it.&nbsp; If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch.&nbsp; When a new installment is made, the image will be a rollover.&nbsp; I borrowed the idea for this format from a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.&nbsp; The center square in the last row is a link to the Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.</p> <p>We have <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">posted a particularly frank interview</a> with the director of <em>Emerging Cypriot </em>and <em>Survey on Cyprus, </em>and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cypr-1.html">a short commentary on the first installment</a>.</p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Four Views of the Corinthian Landscape STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: four-views-of-t CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 02/12/2008 01:14:38 AM ----BODY: <p>Yesterday the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> participated in a popular "optional, but mandatory trip" to the Eastern and Southern Corinthia.&nbsp; <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/faculty_staff/davis_informal.html">Jack Davis</a> (the Director of the American School), <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a> (a professor at Ohio State and a NEH Fellow here in Athens), and I introduced the students to they way in which regional archaeological projects, most of whom practice intensive pedestrian survey, read the landscape.&nbsp; In particular, the students saw four different views of the Greek landscape.&nbsp; The different readings of the same "text" reinforced the idea that the landscape was a constructed entity.&nbsp; This is to say that the landscape is not a discrete space with a single significance but a complex mosaic of overlapping meanings which each group assembles for their own benefit in order to create a useful and meaningful knowledge of their environment.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/NemeaVillage.jpg"><em><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="NemeaVillage" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/NemeaVillage_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em>&nbsp;<br>The Village of Old Nemea.&nbsp; Sanctuary of Zeus is the far right.</em></p> <p>1) Jack Davis provided us with a brilliant historical overview of the landscape of the Nemea Valley from his experiences with the <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/nvap/">Nemea Valley Archaeological Project</a>. He pointed out the wide range and diversity of sites extending from the somewhat isolated vicinity of Ancient Nemea with its temple to Zeus to the head of the pass into the Argolid.&nbsp; Atop the Evangelistria hill we were able to look south through the Dervenakia pass into the plain of the Argolid, past Mycenae, Argos, and on to Nauplion.&nbsp; The area is now mostly given to vines -producing the famous Nemean wines -- but was dotted with sites and settlements throughout antiquity.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DevenakiPass.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px;

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border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="DevenakiPass" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DevenakiPass_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>South from the Evangelistria Hill through the Argolid with the Saronic Guld in the distance</em></p> <p>2) On the way through the countryside of Nemea, Jack told a story about the discovery of the Early Christian basilica on the Evangelistria Hill above the village of Old Nemea.&nbsp; According the story the church was discovered after an old woman in the village had a dream which told her to go up on top of the hill and dig there.&nbsp; She did what the dream asked and discovered an ancient icon amidst the ruins of an old church.&nbsp; The villagers hearing about this then rushed up the hill and excavated the Early Christian basilica with their farming tools revealing its full plan.&nbsp; The story itself is an <em>inventio </em>tale and tremendously common in the oral tradition of modern Greece.&nbsp; As <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ko zani.html">mentioned earlier in the blog</a>, the story has precedents in Christian literature dating back to at least the 5th century <em>Inventio Crucis </em>(discovery of the true cross).&nbsp; The stories emphasize the discovery of a lost sacred object typically through divine intervention.&nbsp; They conceive of the landscape as having places of latent sacredness that persist through time even if temporarily obscured from view.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/EvangelistriaHillChurchSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; bordertop: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="EvangelistriaHillChurchSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/EvangelistriaHillChurchSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Early Christian Basilica on the Evangelistria Hill with the modern church in the background.</em></p> <p>3) After a lunch at Ancient Corinth, Tim Gregory and I walked the students through the landscape in a way that would complement Jack Davis's big picture view of the Nemea Valley.&nbsp; We focused on a few fields and encouraged the student to look down and take notice of the artifacts on the ground.&nbsp; By observing field conditions, like visibility, small scale changes in slope and soil type, and the variations in artifact densities students, we gave the students a fieldwalker's eye view of survey archaeology and method.&nbsp; It also urged them to consider how survey archaeology defines site in the landscape based on artifact density, topography, and the various influences on artifact recovery.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TimTalkinginCorinthia.jpg"><em><img style="border-right: 0px; bordertop: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="TimTalkinginCorinthia" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TimTalkinginCorinthia_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em> <br>Tim Gregory talking to the students in the Corinthian countryside</em></p> <p>4) Midway though our fieldwalker's eye view of survey, we were sidetracked by a local farmer who offered to show us the antiquities on his land.&nbsp; We were standing atop a known archaeological site which had been partially documented in the early 20th century.&nbsp; Since then, however, it has been part of seemingly prosperous farm which had imported soil, changed the landscape through bulldozing, and plowed through antiquities to improve the drainage for vines and citrus trees.&nbsp; The farmer, nevertheless, was pleased to walk the Regular Members across the landscape pointing to antiquities throughout his land.&nbsp; He watched with an amused look as the students crashed, slid, and jumped down

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the tall bulldozed terraces, and pointed out various antiquities with the quiet confidence of a man who knew the land better than almost any archaeologist could ever hope.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Phyllis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 169.237.75.170 URL: DATE: 02/12/2008 05:45:53 PM Thank you for those photos of memory-charged countryside. Intrigued by stories of Sister Vasilike and her landmark chapel atop Evangelistria, I trudged up there alone one hot July Sunday in 1981 to make her acquaintance and inspect the Early Christian Basilica. After offering me the customary spoon-sweet and a glass of water in her modest living space, she cheerfully escorted me around the hilltop to see her chapel, the goat and chickens, the ancient basilica, and a sweeping view then undefiled by telephone towers or the 'new road' to Tripolis. I have a vivid recollection of bright eyes peering out from beneath the black scarf. Her face was weathered, but she probably wasn't much older than 40. I think she died only a few years later. The story I had heard in the village involved a vision dreamt by Vasilike herself, prompting her family to build the hilltop chapel and shelter in fulfillment of a vow. With a group of Nemea excavation folks, I climbed an uninhabited Evangelistria again one summer evening in the mid-90s and espied in the weeds a grooved block from one or another of the ancient stadia (it's probably been removed to the museum by now). Before the Tripolis highway--and all those other superfluous roadcuts - sliced through the countryside and disturbed old monopatia, excavation staff often walked over a saddle south of Evangelistria to return home from evening dinner at the Hani Enesti taverna. Those were the days. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Epigraphy and Hybridity in Early Christian Greece STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: epigraphy-and-h CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 02/10/2008 11:07:24 PM ----BODY:

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<p>Regular readers of this blog (both of them) recognize that I have been slowly constructing several arguments through a series of posts; one of these arguments draws upon Postcolonial theory to argue for the hybrid nature of Early Christian space in Greece (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/ep igraphy-litur.html">part 1</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/de lphi-mosaics.html">part 2</a>).&nbsp; It's my current research project and the topic of an article currently under construction.&nbsp; (Plus, it's what the cool kids are into these days; see <a href="http://www.ajaonline.org/index.php?ptype=content&amp;aid=300">Derek Count's article in the most recent AJA</a>).I've been posting on it here, in large part, to force me to consider my research in an accessible way and to make sure that my arguments have an essential simplicity.&nbsp; This, I think, is part of the process of finding my own voice as a blogger and scholar.</p> <p>The second case study exploring the notion of the hybrid in the Early Christian architecture and society in Greece draws upon the epigraphy associated with Early Christian basilicas there. The inscriptions in these churches are overwhelmingly found on mosaic floors.&nbsp; They commemorate the donors of the churches, in some cases, and the donors of the floors in others instances. The language in these texts is diverse and reflects myriad cultural influences that led to the construction of these buildings.&nbsp; </p> <p>Take three texts for example:</p> <p>From the Basilica Alpha at Nikopolis a text:<br>(<a href="http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00707546%281951%296%3C81%3ASOLAAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O">E. Kitzinger, "Studies on Late Antique and Early Byzantine Floor Mosaics: I. Mosaics at Nikopolis," DOP 6 (1951)</a>, 87).</p> <blockquote> <p>Here you see the famous and boundless ocean.<br>Containing in its midst the earth<br>Bearing round about in all the skillful<br>images of art everything that breathes and creeps<br>The foundation of Dometios, the greathearted archpriest.</p></blockquote> <p>From the church at Antikyra in Boeotia:<br>(P. Ασημακοπούλου - Ατζακά, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/7666362">Σύνταγμα Των Παλαιοχριστιανικών Ψηφιδωτών Δαπέδων Της Ελλάδος</a></em>. (Thessaloniki 1987), 150).</p> <blockquote> <p>For her vow, Elizabeth [together with<br>Simian] paved this for a one gold piece.</p></blockquote> <p>From the church at Daphnousia in Locris: <br>(A. Orlandos, “Une basilique paléo-chrétienne en Locride,” <i>Byzantion</i>, 5 (1929/30), 229). <blockquote> <p>Eugeneios, the illustrious, and his wife<br>Dionyseia for a vow of themselves and<br>their children completed the whole building<br>of the holy church of God from the foundations.</p></blockquote> <p>These three texts provide three different perspectives on the act of making donation to Early Christian churches.&nbsp; The first text is from a mosaic floor at Nikopolis that shows an edenic garden scene and the line "everything that breathes and creeps" is a quote from Homer ((<em>Il</em>. 17.447; <em>Od</em>., 18.131).&nbsp; The donor, a Bishop named Dometios, is greathearted and, elsewhere, "greatest of all, a great light to the fatherland."&nbsp; The Homeric quote and the grandiose language draws upon traditions of patronage dating back to the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods. The Bishop Dometios was a local elite and continued the practice of ancient building patronage by constructing a church.&nbsp; He promoted his elite identity through elaborate inscriptions that remind the reader of his learning, piety, and loyalty to the city.</p> <p>The second text reflects a different perspective on giving to the construction of a church.&nbsp; Here the humble Elizabeth and Simian donate a single gold piece for the pavement of a mosaic floor.&nbsp; A gold piece is a small donation, but not a tiny one.&nbsp; A

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skilled artisan perhaps would earn the equivalent of 5 or 6 gold pieces a year, maybe less.&nbsp; A grave plot seems to be the nearest equivalent: they often seem to have cost about a single gold piece and were seemingly purchased by wealthier members of the artisan class for the burial of their close relatives.&nbsp; The reasons for the donation are clear in this text as well.&nbsp; Elizabeth pledged the donation for a vow (hyper euxis, in Greek).&nbsp; Presumably she asked God for something in exchange for a donation to the church.&nbsp; This simple act was then commemorated with this text which both reflected the piety of the donor and the power of the Christian God.&nbsp; There is none of the aristocratic posturing, Homeric quoting, or elaborate decoration in Antikyra.</p> <p>The final text commemorates the generosity of Eugeneios "the illustrious".&nbsp; The word used here in Greek (and it is poor and potentially confusing translation) is <em>lamprotatos</em>, and it is a word that denotes a particular rank in Late Roman society.&nbsp; Originally the emperor awarded this rank to members of the Senatorial aristocracy (<em>vir clarissimi</em>), but by the 6th century it had become a generic honorific that placed an individual in the upper ranks of Late Roman society.&nbsp; Eugeneios may not have been a Senator, per se, but he was clearly from an important family.&nbsp; While so much is obvious by his donation of an entire church "from the foundations," his proud assertion of his rank reflects a longstanding practice of elite presentation.&nbsp; The text itself, however, remains very different from the elite inscription of Dometios.&nbsp; There is no Homeric language and the reasons for the construction reflect the same kind of piety present in the humble text of Elizabeth.&nbsp; The family of Eugeneios, his wife Dionyseia, and his children (a delightfully homey touch) gave the church "hyper euxis" for a vow.</p> <p>The hybrid moment of Christianity emerges from the intersection of diverse identities in the space of the Early Christian basilicas of Greece.&nbsp; The humble Elizabeth and the pompous Dometios represent differing motivations and traditions of representation.&nbsp; In the "illustrious" Eugeneios and his family these identifiers intersect to produce an rich in the Christian piety and aristocratic diction.&nbsp; </p> <p>These texts and others like them provide another good example of the permeability of Early Christian churches.&nbsp; This permeability to various influences from the longstanding traditions of civic munificence to the piety of non-elite donors created a space that did not produce a unified or consistent meaning but rather displayed the ambiguity and ambivalence of continuously negotiated rules and identities.&nbsp; This tension present in the iconography, epigraphy, and architecture of church buildings stands in contrast to the representation of Early Christian space in literary accounts, where it often appears as a space of comfort and spiritual, theological, and ritual coherence (see for example the exciting article by <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.library.und.edu/journals/journal_of_early_chri stian_studies/v015/15.4shepardson.html">C. Shepardson, "Controlling Contested Places: John Chrysostom's Adversus Iudaeos Homilies an the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy," JECS 15 (2007), 483-516</a>).&nbsp; The spread of churches often represented the spread of Christianity, but the fluidity of representation within their walls leaves open what that really means.</p> <p>I'm off to the Nemea Valley today with the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> to hear Jack Davis talk about his <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/nvap/">Nemea Valley Archaeological Project</a>.&nbsp; Then, Tim Gregory and I will present something on the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>.&nbsp; It's cold and maybe rainy, and the Regular Members are getting restless.&nbsp; As I told them in an email -- <a

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href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">The American School of Classical Studies</a>: Always leave them wanting less.&nbsp; Andy Warhol would be proud.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Special Saturday Quick Hits: a New Archbishop, a New University President, and Blogging Archaeology Again STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: special-saturda CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/09/2008 06:17:42 AM ----BODY: <p>Three quick hits in a special Saturday edition:</p> <ul> <li>The new Metropolitan Archbishop of Greece, Ieronymos II formerly Bishop of Thebes, brings to his office some scholarly credentials according to the <a href="http://www.ecclesia.gr/englishnews/default.asp?id=3452">press releases</a>.&nbsp; The official church bulletin said that before entering the clergy he served as a lector or academic assistant under Anastasios Orlandos and pursued an academic which included studying at the <a href="http://www.uoa.gr/">University of Athens</a> and then in Germany and Austria -- <a href="http://www.uni-graz.at/">Graz</a>, <a href="http://www.unimuenchen.de/">Munich</a>, and <a href="http://www.uniregensburg.de/">Regensburg</a>&nbsp; --&nbsp; but Ieronymos left slightly before the time of that Regensburg's most famous professor -- Pope Benedict XVI -taught there from (1969-1977). He also served for a time as the abbot of Os. Loukas.&nbsp; He published two books on Christian archaeology: I. Liapes, <a href=" http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8016644">Μεσαιωνικά Μνημεία Ευβοίας</a> (Medieval Monuments of Evia) (Athens 1971) and in 2005 or 2006 a book on Christian Boeotia which I have not been able to find.&nbsp; I leafed through the former at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/gennadius/g_index.htm">Gennadius Library</a> this morning, and it is a careful and well-done survey of the Medieval Monuments of the island of Evia with a nice collection of plans, drawings, and plates complete with proper academic citations and bibliography.&nbsp; It's interesting that Kostis Kourelis wrote a post entitled "<a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2008/01/bishops-earthquakesimmigration.html">Bishops, Earthquakes, and Diaspora</a>" about the relationship

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between the Orthodox church and American archaeologist just a week or so ago over at his <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a> blog.&nbsp; It will be interesting to see if having an individual with a serious interest in archaeology as Metropolitan leads to closer ties between the church and the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a>.<br></li> <li>On the other side of the pond, my home institution, the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> has a new president, Robert Kelly formerly dean of the College of Health Sciences and professor of medical education and public health at the University of Wyoming.&nbsp; Read the press release <a href="http://www.und.edu/kelley/">here</a>.&nbsp; Let's hope that he supports the humanities at the University... particularly our archaeological fieldwork in Cyprus!<br></li> <li>Finally, Alun Salt and Tom Elliot move at the pace of the blogosphere (or blogging world as Alun puts it).&nbsp; From conversation to concept in a mere few days, <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/re-thinking-blogcarnival.html">a lengthy and thoughtful post by Alun</a> a few days ago, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/bl ogging-peer-r.html">my slightly irreverent response</a>, and <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-carnival-journalproposal-past.html">an intriguing new concept</a> designed to occupy the middle ground between a blog and a journal.</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Lon EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 87.69.37.53 URL: http://mochafuled.wordpress.com/ DATE: 02/10/2008 05:20:27 AM Great blog. Shalom from Israel. I am an American traveling in the Middle East and looking for a dig(s) to volunteer at as time permits. Plus just enjoy reading up on the history when I can. Looks like there is loads of information here and will be back to read more.! ! take care. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 194.219.34.195 URL: http://www.etana.org/abzu DATE: 02/28/2008 04:04:46 AM The other Liapis book is:! ! ŒõŒπŒ¨œÄŒ∑œÇ, ŒôŒµœÅœéŒΩœÖŒºŒøœÇ ŒßœÅŒπœÉœÑŒπŒ±ŒΩŒπŒ∫ŒÆ ŒíŒøŒπœâœÑŒØŒ±: ŒëŒÑ/ ŒúŒ∑œÑœÅŒøœÄŒøŒªŒØœÑŒøœÖ ŒòŒ∑Œ≤œéŒΩ Œ∫Œ±Œπ ŒõŒµŒ≤Œ±Œ¥ŒµŒØŒ±œÇ

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Ιερωνύμου. Λιβαδειά : Κέντρο αρχαιολογικών, ιστορικών και θεολογικών μελετών, 2005.! ! It is still unclassified and incompletely catalogued, but you're welcome to come on down to my office Bill, and have a look.! ! -Chuck-! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blogging, Peer Review, and Scholarly Publication STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blogging-peer-r CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/08/2008 12:58:51 AM ----BODY: <p>Over at the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> there is a <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/re-thinking-blogcarnival.html">good post by Alun Salt</a>, with a nice little swarm of comments, on "re-thinking the blog carnival".&nbsp; Blog Carnivals are coordinated discussions held at various blogs on a set topic.&nbsp; He considered, in particular, the relationship between such uses of the new media and the "traditional media" of scholarly publication.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="289" alt="AWBG" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AWBG.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>There seems to be at least three main issues at stake.&nbsp; First and perhaps most obviously there is the vexing issue of peer review (which is both a scholarly concern (i.e. peer-review validates knowledge as a product of the community) and professional concerns (i.e. can we "get credit" for our output in blogs).&nbsp; The second issue is archiving the production of blogs.&nbsp; On the one hand, this has to do with making sure, in a practical sense, that the time and intellectual energy put into a blog doesn't disappear with some massive server-side conflagration.&nbsp; On the other hand, as the third issue, it means that if we think our scholarly output in a blog is intellectually useful, we need to ensure that scholars can cite a blog in a responsible way to giving the author credit where it is due and in some cases allowing author to defend any copyright he seek to enforce.&nbsp; Some fields, literature and <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-citation-in-lawreviews.html">apparently law</a>, have begun to see the citation of blogs as a reasonable scholarly practice.&nbsp; This only really works if we have a commitment to stable URLs and the like so that these citations are persistent.&nbsp; </p> <p>These are all issues as we consider the place of "the blog" as a medium/genre with a role in the future of the scholarly world.&nbsp; Some bloggers, like Shawn Graham at the <a

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href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a> have experimented with creating a <a href="http://www.lulu.com/content/1951030">"best of the blog" book via Lulu</a>.&nbsp; At the iconic literary blog, <a href="http://www.thevalve.org/">The Valve</a>, they regularly release books pulling together the posts from their "book events" and including comments which give the reader access to a particularly transparent kind of peer review.&nbsp; Others, including <a href="http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/research-blogging-bpr3is-in-open-beta/">Alun Salt</a> and <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/01/bloggers-for-peerreviewed-research.html">Tom Elliott</a>, have explored <a href="http://bpr3.org/">bloggers for peer-reviewed research concept</a> (BP3), which imprints a blog post with a stamp validating the work as having serious scholarly (i.e. peer reviewed) value and allowing it to be aggregated <a href="http://researchblogging.org/">at the BP3 site.</a>&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/">Sebastian Heath</a> has advocated <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons scholarly licensing tools</a> -- both for his blog (as many others have done) and for <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/01/grbpilion-nowcc.html">printed scholarly works</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp; These are all interesting and exciting developments in the scholarly blogosphere!</p> <p>My only concern, and it's a vague one at present, is that as we push blogs toward more recognizable forms of scholarly output -- books, peer reviewed works, even the various forms of copyrighting (and lefting) is that we slowly eat away at the things that make blogs distinct as a medium and a genre.&nbsp; In some ways archiving, peer reviewing, printing, copyrighting all take away from the freedom of the cybersalon.&nbsp; Blogs can replicate in some ways the ephemeral character of conversations and discussions to waft thousands of miles across continents, they remain a realm where it is possible to preserve personal and scholarly anonymity (who was the <a href="http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/">Invisible Adjunct</a> anyway?),&nbsp; and, finally, blogging allows for an unported and unregulated output which encourages liminal, marginal, and obscurely combined ideas -- this is to say, some blogs are worth reading because they are bad or crazy or just so odd.&nbsp; Pulling the "academic" blogosphere away from the cacophonic world of the World Wide Net Web into a discernable relationship with the larger world of scholarly output will almost certainly work to undermine the unstructured quality that contributes to the medium's vitality.&nbsp; (I think this is what the late Mary Douglas meant by social transformations tending to go from lowgrid to high-grid).&nbsp; Of course such a move toward a more regulated and critical blogosphere will undoubtedly win committed, intelligent, bloggers and their ideas improved standing in the academic and professional world; less cynically, it will encourage more conservative colleagues to give a some of those ideas that are rattling around the blogosphere a more serious hearing.</p> <p>This post, I suppose, doesn't propose a solution to the valid and, indeed, important concerns voiced among committed bloggers.&nbsp; And it should certainly not be read as a lack of interest or enthusiasm for <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2008/02/re-thinking-blogcarnival.html">Alun's idea</a> (cf. my comments on his post!), but rather meant to be an alternative critique (or the beginning of an idea or an explanation for why I don't list my blog on my CV or post a Creative Common's license).&nbsp; In the end, I am sufficiently cynical to see my own alternative definition to how blogs fit into the larger world of scholarly production as another push toward giving blogs a higher-grid kind of existence.&nbsp; (It could have been worse, of course: I was thinking last night that the <a

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href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> might want to initiate some kind of blogging awards (kin to the <a href="http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/46208.html">Cliopatria Awards</a> or the <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/01/open_lab_2007_up_for_sale.php">Open Laboratory Best Science Writing on Blogs book</a>) which mark out certain blogs and their posts as exceptional and then produce every year a book of these posts (a kind of Best Blogs of 2008)...this would have all the irony of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame and none of the Rock or the Roll).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Phyli, Panakton, Eleutherai, Aigosthena in the Rain STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: phyli-panakton CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 02/07/2008 12:58:17 AM ----BODY: <p>The sites of Phyli, Panakton, Eleutherai, and Aigosthena are known for fortifying Attica's Northwest border and forming part of the famous <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12033923">Fortress Attica</a> of the Late Classical period.&nbsp; Their imposing walls of ashlar masonry stand out in the winter against the green cover of the Attic mountains.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PhyliSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="PhyliSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PhyliSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Phyli</em></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/EleutheraiSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="EleutheraiSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/EleutheraiSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Eleutherai</em></p> <p>While the ashlar walls of the Classical period are by far the most dramatic aspect of these sites, what is perhaps more interesting from an archaeological perspective is the evidence for their continued use and significance sometimes into the Late Medieval and Early Modern

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periods in Greece.&nbsp; These sites do not simply reflect an interesting example of Classical architecture and strategy, but also represent dynamic places in the landscape.&nbsp; The reasons for this vary.&nbsp; In many cases the abundance of building material make these sites appealing quarries for subsequent settlements.&nbsp; In other instances, the siting of a fortification is well suited for settlement.&nbsp; Panakton, for example, makes use of the blocks from the earlier fortifications there and occupies a naturally advantageous spot about the Skorta plain (for the publication of the later remains at this site see <a href="http://www.atyponlink.com/ASCS/doi/pdf/10.2972/hesp.2003.72.2.147">S. Gerstel, et al., "A Late Medieval Settlement at Panakton," Hesperia 72 (2003), 147-234</a>).</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PanaktonChurch.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="PanaktonChurch" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PanaktonChurch_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Late Medieval Church at Panakton</em></p> <p align="left">The site of Aigosthena likewise shows a rather dynamic history of use.&nbsp; It's position at the head of the bay of Porto Germano gave it both a decent harbor but also access not only to Boeotia but to the passes south in the Megarid and further east in Attica.&nbsp; It appears to have thrived as one of the communities of the Corinthian Gulf which probably benefits as the point of contact between EastWest trade across the northern Isthmus.&nbsp; Plus, the prosperity of Thebes and even perhaps Athens ensured that there were local markets for goods.&nbsp; The long term vitality of certain trading patterns ensured that sites like Aigosthena represented the persistent nodes of wealth from exchange.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AigosthenaSM.jpg"><em><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AigosthenaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AigosthenaSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></em></a><em> <br>Aigosthena with its Middle Byzantine church on the foundations of an Early Christian basilica with its Hellenistic fortifications in the background</em></p> <p align="left"><em></em>I have to lead the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> on the tour of these sites at the end of the month.&nbsp; The challenge will be to bring together the topography, architecture, archaeology, and history of these sites in a way that reinforces the importance of their later history, but does not diminish their specific place in the history of Classical Attica.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Rainbow.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="99" alt="Rainbow" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Rainbow_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Emerging Cypriot is now Live STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: emerging-cypr-1 CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 02/06/2008 12:08:46 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PatrowCamera.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; border-right-width: 0px" height="308" alt="PatrowCamera" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PatrowCamera_thumb.jpg" width="124" align="right" border="0"> PatrowVisual</a>, <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>, <a href="http://www.iup.edu/">Indiana University of Pennsylvania</a>, and the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> are proud to introduce Joe Patrow's newest documentary film project entitled <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a></em>.&nbsp; </p> <p>The first installment called, "Landscape Montage", is the longest (8 min) and only one without dialogue.&nbsp; It focuses on the landscape of the site of Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>which despite its small area represents a wide range of uses and landforms ranging from coastal plains to abrupt cliffs and ravines.&nbsp; Joe Patrow's camera work presents the landscape montage from a human perspective by keeping the activities of the archaeologist at the center of the frame.&nbsp; This montage of scenes featuring field walking, a survey of the ridge line below the Kokkinokremos ridge, geophysical fieldwork and we feel this active montage is superior to the panoramic photos sometimes used to show landscape because our video montage keeps the archaeologists in the picture and uses them to frame the landscape itself.&nbsp; </p> <p>We plan to release a new documentary short just about every week, so stay tuned to emergence of <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Emerging_Cypriot.html">Emerging Cypriot</a></em>.</p> <p>To view the documentary you will need the <a href="www.apple.com/quicktime/download/ ">newest version of Quicktime</a> and it's best viewed from a broadband connect.&nbsp; It is formatted for easy upload to your iPod or iPhone.&nbsp; We should have other formats up soon.</p> <p>For an interview with the director on this project, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/02/em erging-cyprio.html">click here</a>.&nbsp; For Joe Patrow's first documentary check out the <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/itunes/index.php">University of North Dakotas iTunes</a> store for <em>Survey on Cyprus </em>or <a

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href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Multimedia.html">watch it on the web here</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Emerging Cypriot: An Archaeological Documentary STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: emerging-cyprio CATEGORY: Emerging Cypriot CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/05/2008 02:14:10 AM ----BODY: <p><strong><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PatrowPhoto.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px; border-right-width: 0px" height="302" alt="PatrowPhoto" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PatrowPhoto_thumb.jpg" width="204" align="right" border="0"></a></strong></p> <p>Finally, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/le arning-about.html">after so many idle promises</a>, Emerging Cypriot, the long awaited documentary project of <a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">PatrowVisual</a>, <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project</a>, <a href="http://www.iup.edu/">Indiana University of Pennsylvania</a> and the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University of North Dakota</a> is ready for release. </p> <p>Unlike <em>Survey on Cyprus </em>which was a more formal "feature style" documentary, <em>Emerging Cypriot </em>is a series of shorts intended to show the routine, human, mundane, and humorous aspects of a regional survey project. These complement the image drawn by <em>Survey on Cyprus </em>and, in some ways, expand it. The first installment will be ready for download tomorrow, but to whet your appetite today, I'll introduce you to our director, Joe Patrow, and let him introduce his work to you.&nbsp; The interview is very candid and unedited.&nbsp; It shows his frustrations and joys throughout the second phase of the project.&nbsp; If you haven't watched <em></em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Multimedia.html">Survey on Cyprus, it's available in multiple formats here</a>.&nbsp; Check back tomorrow for the internet premiere of <em>Emerging Cypriot</em>!</p> <p><strong>How is

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<em>Emerging Cypriot </em>different from <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Multimedia.html">Survey on Cyprus</a></em>?</strong><br>The shorts that are collectively titled "Emerging Cypriot" are chapter extensions of "Survey on Cyprus;" one might call them extensive bonus features. They highlight aspects of archaeology that were unavailable to shoot in 2005, while simultaneously introducing new faces and situations. </p> <p><strong>Did anything surprise you? <br></strong>I was surprised by my change in attitude toward the documentary project. In 2005, I was a graduate student of history, eager to make a low budget documentary in Cyprus. The hope was that it would help generate a serious budget for a more affective, broadcast worthy documentary on survey archaeology. Two years later, I was working in Hollywood under a variety of hats (cameraman, editor, data capture engineer, etc), and had become more realistic about that goal and the nature of film production. Although I remained positive about returning to Cyprus and chose to ignore my production limitations, I worried that I might end up shooting little new material; and, when that worry was justified, I had to face some hard facts. I knew that there was still potential for creating a unique documentary in post-production, but not without a substantial budget, or very special resources (maybe these will materialize later). I also knew that the archaeologists anticipated my creating a feature despite the limitations. What surprised me was my unwillingness to knock myself out trying to make it when I began running into a wall. Indeed, even though I knew that such a feature could be made, I also knew I couldn't make it without compromising my creative vision; without it coming across as sub-par, as little more than a longer remake of 'Survey on Cyprus.' I was equally surprised when I opted to produce shorts of the fresh material, ignoring the guilt I felt for not meeting the supposed feature expectations of PKAP. Fin ally, I was surprised because the position I took marked a real shift in my earlier "do it yourself for nothing" dogma. It became evident that the film industry had left me with a more realistic approach to filmmaking. Yes, you can do something for nothing, but remember "you always get what you pay for." </p> <p><strong>Can you describe your relationship to the Project?</strong><br>I've seen myself as a friend and supporter of the project. That is, someone who volunteers his time and resources for free to shoot archival footage of the expedition, with the understanding that PKAP will help defer some of the costs and give me special access to the footage. The postproduction end of the business has always been hazy. The archival footage is made accessible to both parties who acknowledge their right to do with it as they please, though it is assumed that some form of mutual cooperation will be observed in creating a final product. In this way everyone can benefit. </p> <p><strong>Do you feel that your presence and work on the project contributed to the project's overall goals?</strong><br>Absolutely. I know that "Survey on Cyprus" helped the archaeologists drum up interest and grant money, which fed directly into their project goals. The footage also played a role in creating a man-on-the-spot look at their work. This was important because the archaeologists are particularly keen in recording their research methodology. And, finally, "Survey on Cyprus" and "Emerging Cypriot" supported their educational goals by making their site accessible to classrooms. </p> <p><strong>What did you have to teach the archaeologists in order to make your work their successful?</strong><br>Between "Survey on Cyprus" and the "Emerging Cypriot" shorts, we've achieved a great deal of success; maybe not a feature yet, but that is the nature of documentary filmmaking. Indeed, what I've needed to explain to the archaeologists is that creating a documentary is not as easy as it may seem, and that a truly successful piece -- that appeals to both parties -- can only come if their is more cooperation and communication in postproduction. After all, one doesn't sit down and crank out a feature in a month;

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it can take years. For example, the chair of my Alma Mater's Cinema Department, Dr. Dave Bussan, shot a documentary about Northern Cyprus at least a decade ago, and he's still working on it. </p> <p><strong>How much footage have you accumulated over your two years of shooting?<br></strong>Over 40 hours. To an editor faced with all that material, it's not unlike facing a massive jigsaw puzzle with millions of possible combinations.<br></p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_27.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 15px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="113" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_22.png" width="244" align="left" border="0"></a> </p> <p><strong>How was the footage shot -- can you give us some technical specifications without being too technical?<br></strong>Knowing that my first priority was to gather archival footage and the second priority was to shoot a documentary, I approached the project in the spirit of Dziga Vertov, an early filmmaker of unstaged realities, the so-called Kino-Pravada. I let my camera follow people, dancing onto a face here, tilting down to an artifact there; always keeping my lens ready to be flooded with story. I wandered across the open fields and through the streets of Larnaka like Preston Sturgis' comic character John L. Sullivan, looking to capture real substance in the world around me (...and returning to Hollywood having learned the same lesson he did). I conducted some interviews and made an occasional inquiry of PKAP's plans, but generally tried to play a fly on the wall. Over time, I would see little stories develop, and then -- and only then -- would I begin looking to shoot things that might help me connect them in post.<br>From a technical aspect, the shoot was bare-bones. I returned to Cyprus in 2007 with almost all of the same equipment I had brought in 2005. including my same old standard definition camera (a Canon XL1s). This technically barred me from creating anything new visually; in other words, my footage of Vigla looked the same in 2007 as it did in 2005; now all I had was more of it. All the footage was recorded on Sony Mini-DV tape. Indiana University of Pennsylvania lent me Sony studio headphones and an Azden wireless microphone system to help with interviews. I also brought a portable flag set and some stands to cut down on harsh lighting. Naturally, as I was the only member of the production crew, I was unable to carry a lot of gear into the field, and only in rare instances would someone have seen me waddling uncomfortably across the countryside with a camera in one hand and flags, stands, and a tripod strapped haphazardly to my backpack.<br><br><strong>What will happen to the footage? Does it have archival value?<br></strong>Academic selections of the 40 hours of footage will likely be digitized and transferred to a hard drive for PKAP -- a laborious project, but useful. In this way they'll be able to edit it, share it, archive it, etc. The original Mini-DV tapes will likely remain in my care and also remain accessible.<br>Most of what was shot has archival value. If anything, it offers a historic record of an archaeological expedition and Cyprus in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It might even be said to maintain a tradition set by earlier cameramen, like those who shot the old silent reels of French archaeologists excavating ruins in Northern Cyprus.<br><br><strong>What are your future goals with the project?<br></strong>This has yet to be determined. At present, it seems wise to backup the footage to hard drive, and discuss options. This might be the end of the road, or it could be a new beginning.<br><br><strong>What other projects are you working on now and how can we follow them?<br></strong>I am currently working on Big Brother, Season 9. You'll be able to catch that show on CBS this Feburary. Earlier this year, I was the 2nd AC on a Super Bowl spot for Reebok, and rumor has it that there'll eventually be a behind-the-scenes movie on their

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website. Beyond trying to write more (both alone and with my writing partner), I've been helping a lot of friends with their short film projects, primarily as an editor. One series called 'Failing Upwards' can be seen here (along with behind-the-scenes featurettes for two short films I DPed last year): <a href="http://www.myspace.com/tomorrowtheworldonline.">http://www.myspace.com/tom orrowtheworldonline.</a> I'll be editing a short comedy called "Booth Girls" next month. I'm also helping design characters for an animated series. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Joe EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 216.79.193.56 URL: DATE: 02/05/2008 10:47:39 AM I thought the writers were on strike... how are some of these things even possible? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Springtime for Byzantium STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-springtime CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 02/04/2008 01:13:36 AM ----BODY: <p>A couple of weeks ago <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/sp ringtime-for.html">I noted the recent flurry of books well-suited for teaching Byzantine History</a>.&nbsp; It was quite a surprise when one of the first "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/education/31education.html?_r=1&amp;oref =slogin">podcast celebrities</a>" turned out to be a high school teaching lecturing on Byzantium.&nbsp; Lars Brownworth's has produced a series of podcasts focused on the Byzantine Emperors which he used to structure his history of Byzantium (a la Psellos).&nbsp; Brownworth is now working on a book for <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6468238.html">Crown Publishing</a> that will cover the all of Byzantine History.&nbsp; <blockquote> <p>Freedman, Samuel G. ‚ÄúHistory Teacher Becomes Podcast Celebrity.‚Äù The New York Times, January 31, 2007. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/education/31education.html?_r=1&amp;oref

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=slogin">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/education/31education.html?_r=1&amp;o ref=slogin</a>. <p>Brownworth, Lars. “12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of The Byzantine Empire - Anders.com.” <a href="http://www.anders.com/lectures/lars_brownworth/12_byzantine_rulers/">http: //www.anders.com/lectures/lars_brownworth/12_byzantine_rulers/</a>. </p></blockquote> <p>I've begun to collect syllabi on Byzantine Studies available on the internet (using <a href="http://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a>, of course!).&nbsp; The list is pretty undisciplined (I included some Late Antiquity syllabi, but did not explicitly search for them) and was created using <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/syllabi/">CHNM Syllabi Finder</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>.&nbsp; Additional syllabi are likely "hidden" behind webct passwords (<a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/classes.htm">like R. Scott Moore's</a>).&nbsp; Some you'll note derive from archives and I can imagine that any of these URLs are particularly stable. <blockquote> <p>Abrahamse, Dorothy. “The Byzantine Empire.” <a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/byzantium/syl318a1.pdf">http://www.fordham. edu/halsall/byzantium/syl318a1.pdf</a>. <p>Alexakis, Alexander. “BYZANTIUM: Alexakis - ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY [Syllabus, Spring 1995].” <a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/byzantium/texts/alexakissyl.html">http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/byzantium/texts/alexakis-syl.html</a>. <p>Angelov, Dimiter. “Byzantine Civilization (History 442).” <a href="http://homepages.wmich.edu/~dangelov/Syllabus442">http://homepages.wmich.e du/~dangelov/Syllabus442</a>. <p>Caraher, William. “Byzantine Civilization.” <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/Byzantine%20Civilizatio n_Syllabus.htm">http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/Byzantine%20C ivilization_Syllabus.htm</a>. <p>Drake, Hal, and Michelle Salzman. “History 222 Syllabus: Late Antiquity.” <a href="http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/lateantique/History%20222%20Syllabus.htm">http: //www.humnet.ucla.edu/lateantique/History%20222%20Syllabus.htm</a>. <p>Gregory, Timothy. “History 505.01: Early Byzantine Empire, A.D. 330-843.” <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/50501/syl_50501.htm">http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg /50501/syl_50501.htm</a>. <p>Gregory, Timothy. “History 505.02: The Later Byzantine Empire.” <a href="http://history.osu.edu/courses/syllabi/hist50502_Gregory4_WI07.doc">http:/ /history.osu.edu/courses/syllabi/hist50502_Gregory4_WI07.doc</a>. <p>Gregory, Timothy. “HISTORY 603: The Later Roman Empire AD 180-476.” <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/hist50303/syl50303.htm">http://isthmia.osu.edu/ teg/hist50303/syl50303.htm</a>. <p>Gregory, Timothy. “History 709: Methods in Ancient History: Late Antiquity and Byzantium.” <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/hist709/syl709.htm">http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/ hist709/syl709.htm</a>. <p>Gregory, Timothy. “The Later Byzantine Empire (Timothy Gregory).” <a href="http://www.aarweb.org/syllabus/syllabi/g/gregory/later_byzantine_empire.ht m">http://www.aarweb.org/syllabus/syllabi/g/gregory/later_byzantine_empire.htm</ a>. (an older version of 505.02) <p>Hall, Linda. “History 383.01: History of the Byzantine Empire.” <a href="http://faculty.smcm.edu/ljhall/HIST383SP07.htm">http://faculty.smcm.edu/lj hall/HIST383SP07.htm</a>. <p>Hall, Linda. “History 435.01: The World of Late Antiqutity: From Constantine to Justinian.” <a href="http://faculty.smcm.edu/ljhall/HIST435SP07.htm">http://faculty.smcm.edu/lj hall/HIST435SP07.htm</a>. <p>Harl , Kenneth. “History/Medieval Studies 303: Early Medieval and Byzantine Civilization.” <a href="http://www.tulane.edu/~august/H303/Byzantine.htm">http://www.tulane.edu/~a

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ugust/H303/Byzantine.htm</a>. <p>Havice, Christine. ‚ÄúSpring 2001 eSyllabusA-H 322 Byzantine Art and Civilization.‚Äù <a href="http://www.uky.edu/Classes/AH/322/esyllsp01.htm">http://www.uky.edu/Classes/A-H/322/esyllsp01.htm</a>. <p>Ivanov, Serguey. ‚ÄúByzantine History.‚Äù <a href="http://home.aubg.bg/faculty/Serguey/Links/Byzantium/Byzantine%20History%20 Syllabus%20Spring%202007.doc">http://home.aubg.bg/faculty/Serguey/Links/Byzantiu m/Byzantine%20History%20Syllabus%20Spring%202007.doc</a>. <p>Ramseyer, Valerie. ‚ÄúHist 305 - Valerie Ramseyer, Wellesley History Department.‚Äù <a href="http://www.wellesley.edu/History/VRamseyer/hist_305.html">http://www.welle sley.edu/History/VRamseyer/hist_305.html</a>. <p>Rapp, Claudia. ‚ÄúVarious Byzantine Syllabi.‚Äù <a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/classes/profbylid.php?lid=837">http://www.sscne t.ucla.edu/classes/profbylid.php?lid=837</a>. <p>Stephenson , Paul. ‚ÄúEarly Medieval Europe, 300-1000: 2004 Syllabus.‚Äù <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/madison/medieval/eme_2004.html">htt p://homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/madison/medieval/eme_2004.html</a>. <p>Stephenson , Paul. ‚ÄúHistory 313 Syllabus 2005.‚Äù <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/madison/byzantium/syllabus2005.html ">http://homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/madison/byzantium/syllabus2005.html</a> . <p>Stevenson, Walt. ‚ÄúHistory 223 Syllabus, Roman Imperial History 2004.‚Äù <a href="http://www.richmond.edu/~wstevens/romanhistory/his223syl_04.html">http://w ww.richmond.edu/~wstevens/romanhistory/his223syl_04.html</a>. <p>Zanemonets, Alexander. ‚ÄúByzantine Literature.‚Äù <a href="http://hcc.haifa.ac.il/Departments/greece/pdf/byzantine-literaturesyllabus.pdf">http://hcc.haifa.ac.il/Departments/greece/pdf/byzantineliterature-syllabus.pdf</a>. <p>--, ‚ÄúEarly Christian and Byzantine Art.‚Äù <a href="http://www.kean.edu/~jtuerk/documents/4_Byzantine/Byzantine_Syl.htm">http: //www.kean.edu/~jtuerk/documents/4_Byzantine/Byzantine_Syl.htm</a>. </p></blockquote> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kathleen M. Quinn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 192.122.237.11 URL: DATE: 03/27/2008 02:32:17 PM Might I suggest a few additions to your most excellent Byzantine syllabi list?! ! http://www3.ashland.edu/academics/arts_sci/history/moser.html (Scroll down to his syllabi which are downloadable as PDFs.)! ! http://www.indiana.edu/%7Edmdhist/c300syllabus.html ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C

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EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 194.219.34.195 URL: http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/ DATE: 03/28/2008 04:55:21 AM Thanks for the updates! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Varia, Quick Hits, and Friday Notes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: varia-quick-hit CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: North Dakotiana CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 02/01/2008 02:07:34 AM ----BODY: <p>Some fun quick hits today.</p> <ul> <li>Kostis Kourelis at <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a> has a blog entry posing some good questions on the potential relations between the Archbishop of Corinth (and later famously of Athens) Damaskinos and American archaeologists during the 1920s and 1930s.&nbsp; There is work to do in understanding the relationship between the American School and the Greek Church.&nbsp; <li>Kourelis work on the institutional and cultural history of the American School finds a happy counterpart in David Gill's <a href="http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/">History of the British School at Athens</a>.&nbsp; Both of these blogs show, I think, the real intellectual vitality possible in the genre of short academic notes.&nbsp; While this kind of writing has seemed to die out in journals, the existence of good quality, smallscale academic writing in blogs suggests that the potential in this kind of work still exists. <li><a href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hwefaK5_31pd1JcH79NIIEA3d0wD8UGSPJO0">Some interesting photographs</a> of the Archibishop's funeral from AP. <li><a href="http://montanaarchaeology.blogspot.com/">Montana Archaeology</a> is an new blog by Lance Foster focusing on North American archaeology in general and archaeology of Montana specifically.&nbsp; It provides material for his Introduction to Archaeology class at the University of Montana. I've added it and a few others to my <a href="http://del.icio.us/WilliamCaraher">del.icio.us page</a>. <li>More North Dakotiana: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31dakota.html">An interesting article in the <em>New York Times</em> on campaigning in North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; The quotes from <a href="http://business.und.edu/homepages/mjendrysik/">Mark Jendrysik</a> (political theorist extraordinaire) on the second page really brings the piece and the place into focus.&nbsp; <li>And finally, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/bl ogging-archae.html">a metadata update</a>.&nbsp; The <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/">Blogging Archaeology

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article</a> has led to a relatively substantial uptick in both my number of visits and page views in the two weeks that the article has been online.&nbsp; Interestingly, however, only about 137 visits (about 175 views) or 16.8 % of my total visits for the two week period) came directly from the Archaeological.org domain.&nbsp; The hits from Archaeological.org, however, tend to be a more dedicated lot -- reading on average 2 pages for almost 3 minutes worth of total time on site.&nbsp; Over the last two weeks, I've had about an 75% increase in views per week than over the preceding two months.&nbsp; This is far in excess of the number of visitors from the Archaeological.org domain suggesting that some of the increase in volume to my blog is what I call "systemic" -- that is to say people finding my blog due via other linked blogs or sites (ideally this means that there is increased traffic in the system).&nbsp; Whatever the cause, it is good to see that people are interested in what I am writing. </li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Material Culture and Greek Identity: Notes from Athens and Podcasts from the AIA STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: material-cultur CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 01/31/2008 12:56:41 AM ----BODY: <p>The link between objects, culture, and identity is never straightforward or simple.&nbsp; At certain moments, however, the relationship between certain objects and a sense of identity and community is more clear.&nbsp; This is especially visible right now in Athens as many of the residents of the city focus their attention on the <a href="http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100009_30/01/2008_9 2735">funeral for Metropolitan Archbishop Christodoulos</a> whose life, office, and now death was punctuated with a wide range of symbolically significant regalia.&nbsp; </p> <p>Immigration is another moment when the link between identity and material culture can crystallize into a recognizable (albeit fluid) assemblage of objects.&nbsp; A panel on this topic organized by Kostis Kourelis (Clemson University) and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory (La Trobe University) at the 2008 <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/">Archaeological Institute of America</a> Annual Meeting is <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/PodCasts.html">now available online as podcasts</a>.&nbsp; The panel, "The Archaeology of <i>Xenitia</i>: Greek

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Immigration and Material Culture,"<strong> </strong>represented the recent work of friends and members of the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology of the Mediterranean Interest Group</a> of the AIA, <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">and the podcasts appear complements of their SQUINCH web page</a> :</p> <blockquote> <p>Between 1900 and 1915, one quarter of the working-age male Greek population immigrated to the United States, Canada and Australia. This profound demographic phenomenon left an indelible mark on Greek society but also created new diasporic communities in the host countries. Greek immigration is a phenomenon of modern trans-nationalism that shares features with other migration stories despite its unique ethnic manifestations. <i>Xenitia</i>, as a historical narrative, has been studied by various disciplines, entering the popular mainstream through movies, comedy, television, academia, museums and culinary institutions. The historical enterprise of Greek immigration in the twentieth century, however, has lacked a significant archaeological voice... (<a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/AIAbstracts/The%20Archaeology%20of%20Xenitia.ht m">more</a>)</p></blockquote> <p>We suspect that this is the first AIA panel to be podcast and hope that these podcasts serve to disseminate these fascinating papers to a wider audience.&nbsp; </p> <p>These podcasts also resonate with a recent post by <a href="http://prairiepolis.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-northdakota-by-michael-lopez.html">Michael Lopez</a> on the new <a href="http://prairiepolis.blogspot.com/">Prairie Polis</a> blog of the <a href="http://www.nd-humanities.org/default.aspx">North Dakota Humanities Council</a> which focuses on the experiences of migration within the US.&nbsp; They also echo one of the ongoing themes in this blog -- the material culture and archaeology of abandonment (which I have commented on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/po dcasts-at-the.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/ab andoned-lands.html">here</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/06/pk ap-korinthiak.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/04/ab andoned_lands.html">here</a>).&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 87.203.84.186 URL: http://blegen.blogspot.com DATE: 01/31/2008 03:26:31 AM Congratulations on the launch of Squinch! tech guy to deploy a feed? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher

Do you think you can convince your

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TITLE: Geographic Information Systems and Regional Survey at the American School STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: geographic-info CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Teaching CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/30/2008 12:27:48 AM ----BODY: <p>Jack Davis and I will present an introduction to Regional Survey and GIS this morning at the American School.&nbsp; I will talk about using GIS in the context of survey.&nbsp; My seminar will be pretty basic and focus mainly on the conceptual framework behind such software as ESRI ArcGIS.&nbsp; My feeling is that grasping the principles of most GIS programs (as well as the basic ideas behind such applications as databases) and understanding potential of GIS application is more valuable for the average archaeologist than developing a technical mastery of the applications.&nbsp; In the last decade the number of GIS labs has proliferated on US university campuses (UND has two!), many of which are familiar in general with archaeological uses of GIS.&nbsp; Consequently people with technical expertise are available to develop GIS platforms to a project's exact specifications.&nbsp; The issue then is knowing exactly what GIS can do and communicating the needs of the project effectively to the technical experts (a kind of modern-day, technological, "ritual experts").&nbsp; </p> <p>To this end, I am going to start with what most of us know -- relational databases -- and then describe GIS software as basically a spatial database.&nbsp; After a short introduction to what a database is (the tendency among a certain kind of Classical Archaeologist is to conflate databases and spreadsheets), I'll talk about how GIS creates and queries spatial relationships between data sets.&nbsp; I hope by introducing some of the basic technical vocabulary of GIS (shape file, vector/raster, DEM/DTM, georeferencing, orthorectifying) and, indeed, cartography (geodetic markers, projections, UTM/Coordinate systems) that I can demystify the process of producing GIS data for a site or a region and reading reports that rely heavily on GIS data .&nbsp; </p> <p>To this end, I've given them a suggested reading list with some case studies.&nbsp; The seminar is optional, so I couldn't be too rigorous (but these are all good studies that use GIS data in a productive way).&nbsp; </p> <p><b>Four Case Studies</b> <p>M. Given, H. Corley and L. Sollars, “Joining the Dots: Continuous Survey, Routine Practice and the Interpretation of a Cypriot Landscape,”<i> Internet Archaeology </i>20; URL: <a href="http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue20/4/1.htm">http://intarch.ac.uk/journal /issue20/4/1.htm</a> <p>A. Bevan and J. Conolly, ‘GIS, Archaeological Survey and Landscape Archaeology on the Island of Kythera, Greece’, <i>JFA </i>29 (2004), 123-138; Stable URL: <a href="http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00934690%28200221%2F200422%2929%3A1%2F2%3C123%3AGASALA%3E2.0.CO%3B2D">http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00934690%28200221%2F200422%2929%3A1%2F2%3C123%3AGASALA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D</a> <p>A. Bevan. The Rural Landscape of Neopalatial Kythera: a GIS perspective, <em>JMA</em> 15 (2002), 217-256. <p>Y. Lolos, B. Gourly, and D.R. Steward, "The Sikyon Survey Project: A Blueprint for Urban Survey," <i>JMA</i> 20 (2007), 267-

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296 <p>I'll supplement the these case studies with one from the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a> and one from the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a> which have the added advantage of having light-duty, java-based, GIS interfaces available on line (<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASTimeMap/disk_EKAS.html">EKA S GIS</a>, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html ">PKAP GIS</a>). <p>One thing that struck me as I was going back through my mass of GIS data from EKAS, PKAP, and various other projects is how easy it is to forget the processes that produced the data.&nbsp; Fortunately, I've managed to keep decent metadata over the years and I was able to reconstruct the processes that created my current data sets.&nbsp; In the past, keeping good metadata has helped me (and my collaborators) to "<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSTheSite.html">fix glitches</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSTheSite.html">(alw ays with a smile)</a> " and, perhaps more importantly from a conceptual standpoint, to preserve a record of the intermediate analyses that created out seemingly "stable" data sets.&nbsp; <a href="http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue20/4/1.htm">Given et al.</a> (see above) talk about "verbing" the landscape; it is vital for the archaeologists to see their work of <em>creating </em>the data sets as part of this verbing process.&nbsp; Data doesn't simply <em>exist</em>, it's constantly <em>being created </em>by the process of archaeological analysis itself whether it be in the field or late at night with a laptop. Metadata is the narrative of data creation in our increasingly digital age and has all the fragility and ephemeral qualities of an ancient text. <p>This sets up the conclusion of my presentation which will deal with the issue of data preservation, archiving, and presentation.&nbsp; Regional survey projects increasingly rely on GIS to produce both stable images of the landscape and interactive interfaces for analysis.&nbsp; It is crucial, then, that we as archaeologists communicate our assumptions in creating these images effectively even if it remains explaining such murky concepts as "corrected for visibility" or explaining how the values are assigned to the color increments that show artifact densities (many projects use Jenks/K-Means to show densities, but this, like any form of analysis , creates breaks in the artifactual landscape that are based on statistical formulae).&nbsp; Finally, the issue of creating stable archives for GIS data -both for the "final results" of analysis (shape files, raster images, GPS point data), but also the intermediate steps that preserve a paper trail and form the evidence for the interpretative narratives embedded in the digital and archaeological metadata. <a href="http://horothesia.blogspot.com/2008/01/is-ukgovernment-out-to-get-me.html">The potential loss of repositories like the Arts and Humanities Data service in the UK</a> is a reminder of how far we still have to go <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/th oughts-on-ope.html">in creating the kind of long term storage facilities for our digital data as our libraries and archives afford paper notebooks</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Snow in Athens STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: snow-in-athens CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 01/29/2008 07:37:24 AM ----BODY: <p align="left">This is not today's "<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/mo re-pkap-news.html">official blog post</a>"; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/mo re-pkap-news.html">to read that click here</a>.&nbsp; I'd be remiss not to show my friends back home in North Dakota that we do get snow in Athens.&nbsp; Well, at least on the mountains.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SnowonHymmetos.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="SnowonHymmetos" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SnowonHymmetos_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Snow on Hymettos</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More PKAP News STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-pkap-news CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 01/29/2008 12:49:40 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Preparation for the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a>'s summer 2008 season is slowly gaining momentum.&nbsp; This time of year we spend considerable energy moving back and forth between the three elements of archaeological fieldwork: logistics, academic publication, and publicity.</p> <p><em>Logistics</em><br><a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott Moore</a> handles most of the logistics.&nbsp; These responsibilities get fairly serious as our team will exceed 20 this year (drawing support from more than a half-dozen universities!) and our field season stretching out over almost 7 weeks.&nbsp; This is coupled with weak dollar and the uncertainty (for us) surrounding the move of Cyprus to the Euro.&nbsp; We have already discovered that our rental car rates will increase around 30% between price increases and the exchange rate.&nbsp; We are also trying to find enough money to bring on board a "camp manager" to help with some of the cooking and shopping duties for the team.&nbsp; We have a good candidate in mind, but we can't commit to anything until we hear on our grants.&nbsp; We are also beginning to think about the kind of orientation material, both practical and academic, that will help a diverse range of students (from Ph.D. candidates in the Ivy League to undergraduates at State Universities!) feel comfortable on the project.</p> <p><em>Academic Publications</em><br>From an academic publication stand point, we have submitted a contribution to a special issue of <em><a href="http://www.asor.org/pubs/nea/">Near Eastern Archaeology</a> </em>which will focus on American fieldwork on Cyprus and the page proofs of our second report to the <em>Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus </em>for 2007.&nbsp; We are also putting the final touches on a paper that seeks to understand the place of the Late Roman site of Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em> in the settlement patterns of the island of Cyprus and the networks of exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; The PKAP team (myself, <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/">Scott Moore</a>, and <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>) is co-authoring the paper with Greg Fisher (Keble College, Oxford) who is contributing his knowledge of the Near Eastern material.&nbsp; Greg has been with PKAP over the last three years handling many of the odd jobs ranging from taking photos of artifacts to serving as a spare fieldwalker.&nbsp; His research focuses on the Late Roman Near East -- particularly borderlands of Roman Syria.&nbsp; The paper is basically an outgrowth of a conference paper that Greg gave at the PostGraduated Conference on Cypriot Archaeology in 2006 and paper David, Scott, and I gave at the ASOR meeting a two years ago.&nbsp; Here's the abstract:</p> <blockquote> <p align="center">"Beyond City and Country: Mid-Sized Coastal Settlements in Late Roman Cyprus" <p>Twenty-five years ago M.I. Finley described the ancient world as one whose populations labored in the countryside but inhabited urban centers. Archaeological surveys, however, have populated territories with small rural settlements, calling into question dichotomies between town and country, especially as some settlements have produced monumental architecture and movable wealth, typical signatures of urban centers. This paper discusses the Late Roman coastal site of <u>Koutsopetria</u> in the hinterland of Kition, Cyprus, as it contributes to this debate. An intensive, large-site type survey in conjunction with earlier excavations has revealed a substantial (&gt;40 ha) settlement at an important, regional crossroads of land and maritime routes. The assemblage produced from excavation and survey compares favorably with other assemblages at large Late Roman sites in Cyprus. Comparison of these sites reveals rural space with many of the same features of traditional urban centers, which garnered cultural independence from their positions in both local and Mediterranean-wide networks of exchange.</p></blockquote> <p>This article picks up on the recent interest in exchange networks in the work of <a

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href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/58998790">Chris Wickham</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42692026">Horden and Purcell</a>, and others who seek to de-centralize both the structure of Late Roman trade and, perhaps only by implication, the origins of (Late) ancient culture.&nbsp; By challenging the town-country dichotomy (with autonomous consumer cities and exploited producer countryside) , we open the possibility that mid-sized sites like Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>could function at least some of time in an autonomous way within the networks of exchange that supported the prosperous material culture of antiquity.&nbsp; Once the residents of a settlement begin to make their own economic choices, the begin to produce the kinds of discrete material assemblages that scholars have traditionally seen as definitive of culture.</p> <p><em>Publicity<br></em>We have completed our annual PKAP Newsletter which will circulate this week to the various PKAP stakeholders.&nbsp; It's a way to keep private donors, institutional support at the three sponsoring universities (UND, IUP, and Messiah College), and PKAP alumni in the loop on our fall and winter work as well as the summer fieldwork plans.&nbsp; It serves the important role of translating our academic research from the world of our relatively narrow academic community to the community at large. In this sense, it complements the work on this blog, <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/podcasts/podcasts.htm">our podcasts</a>, and <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/video/video.htm">the video work</a> of <a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">Joe Patrow</a> (more of which will debut here on this blog soon!) in that it strives to make our research processes more transparent to the interested public and invite them to find ways to participate in the "<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45064746">theatrical</a>" aspects of archaeological fieldwork.&nbsp; <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/NewsLetter2.jpg"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/PKAPNewsletter2007.pdf"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="302" alt="NewsLetter" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/NewsLetter.jpg" width="234" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/PKAPNewsletter2007.pdf"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="302" alt="NewsLetter2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/NewsLetter2_1.jpg" width="234" border="0"></a></a>&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">As always PKAP would not be possible without the generosity of our <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/funding.htm">institutional sponsors</a> and private donors.&nbsp; This support gives a projects like ours the opportunity to develop future plans and create both the practical and intellectual infrastructure for efficient and effective research.&nbsp; Just this year, we were able to secure a significant research grant because we could match their grant with private donor money.&nbsp; If you'd like to contribute to our ongoing research, contact either <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/ContactInfo.html">me</a> or Mike Meyer at the University of North Dakota's <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/artsci/giving_opportunities.html">College of Arts and Sciences</a>.</p> <p align="left">With PKAP planning in full swing, check back here regularly for PKAP updates.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Kitchen at the American School STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-kitchen-at CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 01/28/2008 12:39:56 AM ----BODY: <p>Each morning sometime around 6:30, I wander down the back stairway of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a>'s <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/about/facilities.htm">Loring Hall</a> to the kitchen.&nbsp; The main floor of Loring Hall has a U-shaped "public space" with a service area occupying the center part of the U.&nbsp; On the ground floor, this includes the professional kitchen and staff offices and storage; on the main floor, however, there is (what I think is) called a staging kitchen.&nbsp; Each morning the staff of Loring Hall sit in the kitchen preparing breakfast for the students and faculty who arrive at around 7 am.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FromDinningRoom.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="FromDinningRoom" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FromDinningRoom_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/in side-looking.html">As I have noted before</a>, Loring Hall is lovely but not a terribly homey place.&nbsp; Its scale is institutional, it serves too many multiple functions, and its decor is too formal (if a bit threadbare).&nbsp; Loring feels more like a lounge at an exclusive metropolitan club (just slightly past its day) than a place where people live.&nbsp; One sleeps in Loring Hall, eats there, has conversations (always with a touch of formality and professionalism), meets people, but one does not live in Loring Hall in a proper sense.&nbsp; The exception to this is the kitchen in the morning.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KitchenLoring.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="KitchenLoring" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KitchenLoring_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FromDinningRoom.jpg"></a></p> <p>Each day I have two cups of coffee, a bowl of somewhat ordinary mueseli and conversation with the women who staff Loring Hall for breakfast and lunch.&nbsp; The conversation is in Greek and, properly speaking, I don't know Greek (despite my best efforts), but I do manage

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to speak it every morning for about 3/4 of an hour.&nbsp; I learn a few new words a day and try to use them throughout the conversation.&nbsp; I did this every day when I was an Associate Member at the School and do it every day now.&nbsp; It's one of the few places in Loring Hall that feels like a place where one could live. Over the years they have welcomed and made to feel at home my friends, my wife, and my family.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KitchenLife.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KitchenLife_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p>The conversation is wide ranging.&nbsp; We talk about our home towns, the weather, our families, our work, and very often the news of the day.&nbsp; This morning the talk was about the death of the Metropolitan Bishop of Greece -- Archbishop Christodoulos, who succumbed to liver cancer late last night.&nbsp; He was the youngest person to ever hold his position and was quite active and outspoken and popular.&nbsp; He famously engaged in talks with Pope John Paul II and sometimes stirred controversy with his nationalist rhetoric.&nbsp; It's being picked up by the international press now (<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7212502.stm">BBC</a>, <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/01/28/obit.christodoulos/index.ht ml">CNN</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-ObitChristodoulos.html?_r=1&amp;scp=1&amp;sq=Greece+Christodoulos&amp;st=nyt&amp;ore f=slogin">NYT/AP</a>), but I heard about it in the kitchen.&nbsp; In fact, I can hear the muted, somber bells from our neighbor,&nbsp; Moni Petraki, as I write this.</p> <p align="center"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rangar EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 129.15.101.163 URL: DATE: 01/30/2008 09:49:13 AM Bill -- Great to see the Loring Hall kitchen at breakfast! Voula, Labrini, and Demetra for me. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Varia, Quick Hits, and a Friday Commercial STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: varia-quick-hit CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: The New Media

Say kalimera to

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CATEGORY: Varia and Quick Hits DATE: 01/25/2008 12:23:09 AM ----BODY: <p>I went to be last night thinking that I didn't have anything to blog about this morning and feeling a bit relieved.&nbsp; But there is <em>always </em>something to blog about.&nbsp; So, some quick hits in the tradition of blogs in days gone by when authors would just provide links with just a touch of commentary.</p> <ul> <li>The <a href="http://www.ndhumanities.org/default.aspx">North Dakota Humanities Council</a> has a new enewsletter and blog called <a href="http://prairiepolis.blogspot.com/">Prairie Polis: Mindful contributions to North Dakota's public dialogue on ideas, values, and history</a>.&nbsp; I like the title because it confirms my long held belief that there is some kind of link between life in North Dakota and the Ancient Mediterranean World.&nbsp; (Polis is the Greek word for City, the basic form of political, economic, and cultural organization of the Greek world which encompassed so much of the Eastern Mediterranean).&nbsp; The title reminds me of conversations that I've had with UND alumnus Aaron Barth who wrote an MA thesis on the writings and experiences of the late-19th century trapper and later newspaper editor <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/28410738">Joseph Henry Taylor</a>.&nbsp; Barth and I had talked about Taylor's use of Roman imagery in his experiences in North Dakota particular the image of the Rome's civilizing effect on the frontier. The ancient world is alive and well in the North Dakota imagination.&nbsp; The first post on the Prairie Polis blog "<a href="http://prairiepolis.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-north-dakota-by-michaellopez.html">Why North Dakota?</a>" is a response to the <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2008-01/emptied-north-dakota/bowdentext.html">National Geographic</a> article <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/ab andoned-lands.html">which I posted on a couple of weeks ago</a>.&nbsp; If you haven't read the article it's haunting, perhaps in a good way. <li>I received an email last night announcing the formation of the <a href="http://gssar.wikispaces.com/">Graduate Society for the Study of Ancient Religion</a>.&nbsp; It seems to be based at my graduate alma mater, <a href="http://www.osu.edu/">Ohio State University</a>, and is presumably a kind of graduate student outgrowth of the their interdisciplinary program on <a href="http://greekandlatin.osu.edu/graduatestudies/gis/default.cfm">Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean</a>. <li>The folks at the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/">University of North Dakota's Office of University Relations</a> put a link for my Archaeology Magazine Online Feature article on the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University's front page</a>.&nbsp; Thanks for the link! <li><a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2008/01/minorupdates.html">Scott Moore reports</a> that we have purchased the domain name <a href="http://www.pkap.org">www.pkap.org</a> for <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a>.&nbsp; We haven't done anything with it yet, and old site will continue to work. </li></ul> <p>One more thing, if you're in South Florida this weekend, be sure to check out the <a href="http://www.oceanroadspromotions.com/">Surf and Song Festival</a>, a rock 'n' roll festival featuring both great national and local bands in Ft. Myers.&nbsp; The proceeds benefit <a href="http://www.johnentwistle.org/NEW_HOME/index.html">The John Entwistle Foundation</a> (he was the amazing bassist for the Who; if you don't know listen to "My Generation").&nbsp; By youngest brother is promoting it through his <a

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href="http://www.oceanroadspromotions.com/">Ocean Roads Promotions</a>.&nbsp; Since it's for charity, I don't feel too guilty helping the cause here.&nbsp; The weather is supposed to be beautiful on Sunday and what goes better with sunshine than rock and roll.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.oceanroadspromotions.com/"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_26.png" width="276" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dimitri EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.186.86.241 URL: DATE: 01/28/2008 10:11:31 AM My favorite John Entwistle song is "My Wife" on "Who's Next" (1971) -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Thoughts on Open Context, Omeka and the Digital Revolution in Archaeological Publishing STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: thoughts-on-ope CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/24/2008 12:56:09 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last few days I've been exploring the capabilities of <a href="http://www.opencontext.org/">Open Context</a>, an open access platform for publishing archaeological data online.&nbsp; The goal of a platform like Open Context is to enable archaeological projects to publish their data online, using their own data structures, in an environment accessible to other scholars and even subject to a kind of peer review process.&nbsp; The platform is not limited to simple or highly structured (i.e. tabular) data, but can also accommodate textual data from, say, a field note book and images, drawing, and maps.&nbsp; So, for example, you can display the data from a particular trench and it will automatically draw up the data from all the stratigraphic units (lots, baskets, whatever) in the trench with the trench notebook, the finds, and any features in the trench or the lot. You could also begin with a particular find and search out all the archaeological contexts from a site or evaluate how frequently a

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particular class of object appears with a particular type of feature.&nbsp; The data is queried through Open Context's "faceted" search capability that will not only allow scholars to search any single set of data online, but also to search multiple data sets online -- even if these data sets have significantly different structures.&nbsp; While I won't pretend to understand the technical details behind this (it seems to involve something called ArcheoML or Archaeological Markup Language and other things like PHP and RDF which seem very complex), the goal appears to be to allow users through the process of tagging to create data sets that, in effect, mediate between different data organized and articulated in different structures, and to make these tools available and visible to other scholars who might be seeking to do the same thing.&nbsp; This kind of functionality will make the process of comparing date from different archaeological projects -- a task familiar to any archaeologist and central to archaeological research -- even more transparent.&nbsp; Their <em><a href="http://www.sha.org/publications/technical_briefs/volume02/article01.htm">r elatively recent article in Society for Historical Archaeology’s Technical Briefs in Historical Archaeology</a> </em>online journal provides a great introduction to this project.&nbsp; The potential for scholarly publications to link directly to locations in Open Context data sets offers the prospect for unparalleled transparency in archaeological research.</p> <p>Open Context and other similar platforms (the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies</a> is seemingly working to develop its own platform to accommodate and integrate the data from the Athenian Agora and the Corinth Excavations) find complements in systems like <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a>, the soon to be released online publishing platform developed by the <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/">Center of History and the New Media</a> at George Mason University and the <a href="http://www.mnhs.org/">Minnesota Historical Society</a>.&nbsp; While seemingly not as powerful as Open Context with its ability to integrate complex data sets, Omeka is designed to allow projects to put together in an efficient way online exhibits of images, documents, and other media.&nbsp; </p> <p>At <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> we've talked a good bit about making our data available online and considered what tools a scholar would need to make sense of our data sets.&nbsp; Generally, we have gravitated toward relatively simple (and admittedly low tech) solutions like saving our survey data down to a series of ASCII Comma Separated Value text tables (including descriptive concordances for the codes we've employed to standardize our data).&nbsp; These tables could be read by almost any database or even spreadsheet applications.&nbsp; This would allow the dissemination of our archaeological "raw" data, but would not easily accommodate various other media like images or narrative sources.&nbsp; Perhaps a platform like Open Context integrated with an online museum software like Omeka will eventually produce the kind of online data integration and management that would allow us to make our data accessible to a wide range of end-users.&nbsp; </p> <p>The only slight Luddite twinge that I feel when I read about all these amazing applications being developed (and this is clearly the historian in me speaking) is a slight nostalgia for the rhetorical grace of "early" archaeological publications.&nbsp; Scholars like Carl Blegen (and for my period and material Demetrios Pallas), who lacked all these sophisticated data management tools, nevertheless created elaborate and descriptive pictures in words of the context for their sites, the composition and location of deposits, and the relationships between features.&nbsp; Their skill at description and argument (along with other scholars of his generation) created a genre of archaeological description that for all its weaknesses in technical precision and analytical consistency nevertheless possessed an aesthetic lacking in even the most sophisticated

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computer applications with their elegant and elaborate data structures ("code is poetry" aside).&nbsp; The most fluidly structured archaeological research environments only ever approach the flexibility of language even as they seek to integrate and allow for the ambiguity of narrative.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Delphi Mosaics and the Late Roman Hybrid STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: delphi-mosaics CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 01/23/2008 12:57:11 AM ----BODY: <p>Late Antiquity (300-700 AD, it is also called the Early Christian period or the Late Roman period) is a perfect period for exploring the notion of hybridity in material culture.&nbsp; Not only was it a time of unprecedented change in culture and society, but there is also a vast and growing body of Late Roman material that is relatively unencumbered by long generations of study.&nbsp; For Greece this is particularly the case.&nbsp; At present I am working on an article arguing that ecclesiastical architecture (particularly in Greece) is quintessential hybrid space.&nbsp; The intersection of Early Christian liturgical rites with architectural forms and decorative motifs with longstanding currency in Greece allowed the newly empowered ecclesiastical elite to express their social, economic and political authority in a way accessible to the Greek society.&nbsp; This process was reciprocal, however, in that donors to churches, for example, had some access to the authority articulated by liturgical ritual and found ways to redeploy it in service of their own social goals.&nbsp; Thus, Early Christian basilicas (churches) constructed by local elites became platforms for self expression while at the same time the clergy's control over the mediation between the divine and the mundane worlds ensured that ecclesiastical elite gradually acquired increased privilege in an Greek society (i.e. Bishops and the clergy in general became more powerful). </p> <p>A 6th century floor mosaics from a rather typical Early Christian basilica found near the ancient site of Delphi is a great (and under-explored) example of this process.&nbsp; I will spare you a comprehensive examination of the floor (with comparanda and the like), but present you with a short(ish) teaser.&nbsp; The western most panel in the main nave (the central room of the church through which all liturgical processions would pass) has a central emblema showing leopard pouncing on a deer.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv

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eWriter/DelphiMosaic.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="DelphiMosaic" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DelphiMosaic_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a> </p> <p>This is surrounded by scenes of peacocks and eagles.&nbsp; In the corners of the mosaic panel are two figures rushing toward the south.&nbsp; We know from other mosaics in Greece (and elsewhere) that these figures are the personifications of the months.&nbsp; So we have one pouncing leopard, four majestic birds, and two rushing months (no lords-aleaping, ladies dancing or rings of any kind!).&nbsp; The months, it turns out are the key to understanding this mosaic.&nbsp; The rushing months probably represent June (or July) and August.&nbsp; Again, we know this from mosaics elsewhere on which the months are labeled.&nbsp; The eastern month is labeled with the Greek letters KA and the western with letters KAI. This means nothing, until we assume that there were two more months with inscriptions reading LOI and ROI that have been destroyed (you can see in the picture above that the southern half of the mosaic has been destroyed).&nbsp; This would spell KALOI KAIROI or "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Times">Good Times</a>" or "Good Seasons".&nbsp; Thus we can assume that the months of July and perhaps September are missing.&nbsp; We have then the depictions of the summer months (June, July, August, September) with an inscription that says "Good Times".</p> <p>This unlocks a possible meaning for the leopard and deer motif in the middle, which hardly seems appropriate for a mosaic in a church.&nbsp; This scene, I think, is meant to evoke arena combats between animals.&nbsp; This was a favorite ancient past time: release an exotic animal (like a leopard) and watch it attack another animal.&nbsp; Moreover, animal combat scenes are sometimes associated with calendar mosaics (C. Kondoleon, "Timing Spectacles: Roman Domestic Art and Performance,"&nbsp; in <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43408700">The Art of Ancient Spectacle</a></em>. (Washington 1999), 321-341.).&nbsp; The reason for this is because arena contests were often parts of seasonal games or festivals.&nbsp; So the the calendar mosaics served to evoke specific time of year when games and arena combat took place.&nbsp; Moreover, this kind of mosaic, when put up by a wealthy patron, often served to advertise the generosity of that patron who presumably paid to provide the exotic animals for a particular set of games.&nbsp; So, in some cases the link between the months and a scene of violence referred to a specific contest.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DelphiMosaicDetail.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="DelphiMosaicDetail" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DelphiMosaicDetail_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>One last thing, during the Roman empire festivals to Apollo were very common in the summer months.&nbsp; These festivals were good opportunities for games and arena shows.&nbsp; Delphi was a shrine to Apollo and it's games -- the Pythian Games - were held in the summer (although there is no indication that they involved arena contests).&nbsp; In fact, the association between Apollo and the summertime was so close that he sometimes appeared as the personification of summer in sculpture and mosaics (see:&nbsp; George Hanfmann, <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1150963">The Season Sarcophagus in Dumbarton Oaks</a></em>. Cambridge, MA, 1951, 156).&nbsp; </p> <p>A half century ago, a scholar might have said "AH HA! Syncretism between Christianity and paganism!&nbsp; An invocation of pagan festivals in a Christian church!&nbsp; I

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knew it!&nbsp; The pagan gods did not disappear they merely changed their names."&nbsp; Now, we approach this differently.&nbsp; I might suggest, for example, that the link between "Good Times", <a href="http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/g/georgegershwin8836/summertime299720.html"> the summer</a>, and a scene from the arena is not designed to evoke Apollo -after all the oracle of Apollo at Delphi had not uttered a word since the later 4th century AD -- but rather to evoke general images of wealth, prosperity, and happiness.&nbsp; It is predictable that these images of wealth, prosperity, and good times would be influenced by images deriving in part from paganism, but in a Christian context the pagan aspects of these motifs (if they still existed in the 6th century) would have been appropriated by the patron of the church (whom we know nothing about except for a fragmentary inscription that suggests he or she paid for the mosaic or the entire church) to show his or her own prosperity and generosity.&nbsp; In fact, the floors seem to hint, that the building the church was equivalent to providing games in the arena.&nbsp; </p> <p>Finally, in the Greek liturgy of this time, the clergy would have walked across this floor on the way to sacred eastern end of the church.&nbsp; These ritual processions were important opportunities for the clergy to demonstrate their unique position in Christian society as the links between God and the mundane world.&nbsp; Thus, the ritual of the liturgy appropriated the space of the church for clerical display which, in turn, reinforced the position of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.&nbsp; The mosaic floor, with its references to prosperity and generosity provided a suitable setting for ecclesiastical ritual which transformed the social and economic meaning of the mosaic and translated it to the religious realm.&nbsp; The liturgy made clear that prosperity and generosity worked in the service of the church and the clergy.&nbsp; The patron of the floors certainly recognized this, but also realized that their generosity in the service of the liturgy would gain them greater access to the same divine advantages of the clergy.&nbsp; After all, providing for a church was a noble calling worthy of rich rewards in the afterlife!</p> <p>Thus, the hybridity of Early Christian space in Greece.&nbsp; The ecclesiastical elite and the local patron (assuming in this case that they were separate institutions) appealed to images and rituals which had independent meanings but also informed one another.&nbsp; In this simplified (and superficial) analysis, the space of the church becomes an active place of reinterpretation where the juxtaposition of ritual, decoration, and social and institutional structures produce new combinations of meaning (hybrids!) which both benefited the varying parties involved in creating the hybrid space, and produce a new iconography which could be deployed later in its own hybrid combinations.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Podcasts at the State Historical Society of North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: podcasts-at-the CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 01/22/2008 12:14:21 AM ----BODY: <p>I am bit behind on this one, but the <a href="http://www.nd.gov/hist/index.html">State Historical Society of North Dakota</a> has been releasing <a href="http://www.nd.gov/hist/podcasts/podcasts.html">a series of podcasts focusing on aspects of the archaeology and history of North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; The most recent two look focus on work at the "Scattered Village" site in downtown Mandan and at recent geophysical work in the Heart Valley Region of North Dakota.&nbsp; The later considers the massive geophysical programs being carried out by the <a href="http://www.uark.edu/depts/anthinfo/kvamme.html">Professor Kenneth Kvamme</a> from the <a href="http://www.cast.uark.edu/%7Ekkvamme/ArcheoImage/archeoimage.htm">University of Arkansas's Archeo-Imagine Lab</a> at the sites of <a href="http://www.cast.uark.edu/%7Ekkvamme/geop/menoken.htm">Menoken</a>, <a href="http://www.cast.uark.edu/%7Ekkvamme/geop/huff.htm">Huff</a>, <a href="http://www.cast.uark.edu/%7Ekkvamme/geop/double.htm">Double Ditch</a>, and <a href="http://www.cast.uark.edu/%7Ekkvamme/geop/mittutta.htm">Fort Clark State Historic Site</a>.&nbsp; The podcast, <a href="http://www.nd.gov/hist/podcasts/GeophysicsPodcast.mp3">Geophysics and Archaeology in the Heart River Region of ND</a>, is particularly nice introduction to geophysical techniques in general and their application in North Dakota.&nbsp; At <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> we have used resistivity extensively and have not had access to magnetometry, Kvamme's arguments form using multiple methods on a site, something that is still relatively rare in the Eastern Mediterranean.</p> <p>The predecessor to podcasts, radio broadcasts on historical topics, have a particularly interesting history in North Dakota.&nbsp; In 1947, 1948, and 1949, <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/Robinson/">Elwyn Robinson</a>, a professor of <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">History at the University of North Dakota</a> (<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DHChapter_3.html">for more on Elwyn Robinson's career and the History Department at the University of North Dakota</a>), broadcast a series of 15 minute radio sketches called "Heroes of Dakota" which focused on the history of the state of North Dakota. These radio broadcast were unexpectedly popular and requests poured into the University radio station, KFJM, for copies of transcripts.&nbsp; Robinson quickly began to distribute copies of his talks charging only the cost of printing and binding.&nbsp; This reflected the tremendous interest among North Dakotans in their state's history.&nbsp; The radio was a particularly suitable technique for engaging this interest in that the low population density of the state made traditional techniques for disseminating the history of the state and region -such as museums or public lectures -- less viable.&nbsp; Ultimately the work Robinson put into the radio broadcasts formed the basis for his <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/190890">History of North Dakota</a>, which remains today the authoritative work on the history of the state.</p> <p>PKAP is just beginning to experiment with the potential of podcasts for getting information on our project out in an accessible form.&nbsp; We <a

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href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/podcasts/podcasts.htm">have some nice interviews</a> (or better conversations) conducted in 2005 which lay out the basic premises of both survey archaeology as a method and our research plan at Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em>.&nbsp; </p> <p>Check out the SHSND and PKAP podcasts for new perspectives on archaeological fieldwork and how much the archaeological methods in North Dakota and Mediterranean share.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blogging Archaeology: A MetaReport STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blogging-archae CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/21/2008 02:15:34 AM ----BODY: <p>The response to my article on <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/">Blogging Archaeology</a> has been great.&nbsp; It was my first tentative step in to the vast gray area of academic publishing -- not quite reviewable for tenure, but not entirely insubstantial either -- and I can report that the response to my contribution has been gratifying in large part because the results of my labor were almost instantaneously visible.&nbsp; While I have not queried the folks at <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/">Archaeology</a> for their page view or hit data on my piece, I have tracked the number of readers who were interested enough to click through to my blog.&nbsp; This metric is perhaps, in some ways, a more interesting one as it presumably samples those readers who were sufficiently interested to at least click through to some of the content in the article.&nbsp; (The data gleaned from over the last fours presents a nice smallscale study in the kind of <a href="http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/2008/01/whats-opposite-of-bighistory.html">super-small, micro-history</a> possible and perhaps even necessary in the fast moving and ephemeral space of the internet) In the four days since my article has been live at Archaeology, I have had about 350 hits on my personal blog.&nbsp; My average four day total is about 100 hits; so I am well above average since the article has appeared.&nbsp; According to my Google Analytics report 28% of my traffic comes from Archaeology.org, another 7% comes from <a href="http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/46491.html">History New Network's blog post on the article</a>, and another 5% comes from Chuck Jones kind announcement of the article on the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> blog.&nbsp; The other hits come from either Google searches or direct

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links.&nbsp; The average number of page views is 1.84 and the average length of time on the page is a little over 2 minutes (people who link from Archaeology.org tend to only spend about 1.15 on the site).&nbsp; I have a bounce rate of 67% which I think is pretty good for a blog with lots of links.&nbsp; It would be valuable to know whether other bloggers have experienced an increase in traffic and where their hits come from.&nbsp; In other words, is it simply from people reading the Archaeology article or is a knock-on effect of sorts from more people being in the network of blogs.&nbsp; I suggest that blogs work in some ways like social networking sites: that once people enter the system through a particular blog, they can pass on within the blogging network and read other blogs through blogrolls and links.&nbsp; I have no real idea if this works in practice.</p> <p>Coincidentally, several interesting pieces related to academic blogging have recently appeared.&nbsp; Over at the <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/">Center for History and the New Media</a>, they have released their first episode of a new series of podcasts called <a href="http://thatpodcast.org/episode/4">THAT (The Humanities and Technology)</a>.&nbsp; The first episode was an interview with Matt Mullenweg the founder of <a href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a>.&nbsp; The interview is a bit raw, but interesting nonetheless.&nbsp; One thing that is particularly telling is that Mullenweg had no idea of how academics might use his technology or how academic users might benefit such open source blogging software like Wordpress.&nbsp; </p> <p>The other interesting post that appeared just recently was over at <a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2008/01/my_own_personal_writers_strike.html">Henry Jenkins' <em>Confessions of an Aca-fan </em>in which he announced his return to blogging after a month long hiatus</a>.&nbsp; Jenkins is one of the most prolific academic bloggers around, and his populist style shows a real sense of audience for his own work.&nbsp; In his recent post, he sets out some of the pressures of blogging and gives some good advice for someone starting out.&nbsp; None of it is beyond what a good academic might guess: set a writing goal, anticipate an audience, et c.&nbsp; Jenkins also commented on some of the benefits of academic blogging.&nbsp; In particular he described the effect of his well-known blog on his academic program at MIT.&nbsp; He noted that it not only attracted graduate students to the program, but helped students maintain an attachment to the program after they left.&nbsp; These are both goals that would seemingly warm the administrator's heart -- especially the latter as folks who keep an attachment to a program are more likely to give to it later.&nbsp; One would think that the popularizing aspects of some academic blogging might make it attractive to administrators, and their interest in promoting it would gradually trickle down to departments (as so much in academia these days) as they make decisions on tenure and promotion.&nbsp; If you like Jenkins' style, be sure to follow the link to one of his earlier posts which set out <a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2006/07/how_to_break_out_of_the_academ.html">a manifesto (of sorts) for his kind of academic blogging</a>.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT:

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AUTHOR: William J. Turkel EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.141.41.217 URL: http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com DATE: 01/22/2008 02:16:06 PM We've found that the blogs created by our public history MA students are also a real draw for our program. Almost all of the students each year tell us they chose our program because of our website, and especially because they were able to follow the ideas and progress of earlier student cohorts through their blogging. Not being Henry Jenkins, I'm not sure if my own academic blogging is a draw or a source of trepidation for incoming students ;) -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Varia and Quick Hits STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: varia-and-quick CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/18/2008 01:05:34 AM ----BODY: <p>Some quick hits and varia for the weekend:</p> <ul> <li>The blogging archaeology article that I worked on in the fall and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-arch-2.html">serialized here</a> and over at the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> page has appeared on <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/">Archaeology Magazine</a>'s online features page (here's a link to the <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/blogs/">article</a>).&nbsp; Thanks to everyone who helped with the revisions and Mark Rose at the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/">Archaeological Institute of America</a> who provided some nice editorial touches and his web-design who helped its slick appearance.&nbsp; I hope to be able to provide an update to the article in 9 or 12 months time and continue to track some of the developments in the blogosphere.&nbsp; <li>Brandon Olson, a <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> and <a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND</a> alumnus, has made a foray into the blogosphere with his <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/">Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean</a> blog. He not only discusses his own research but also his experiences and classes as a Ph.D. student at the <a href="http://historicalarchaeologyintheancientmediterranean.typepad.com/historic al_archaeology_in/">Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Program at Penn State</a>.&nbsp; So far, it provides a nice perspective on advanced graduate.&nbsp; With all this new blogging activity, I will have to expand my <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/BlogFeedPageGoogle.html">PKAP blog aggregator</a>. <li>Erstwhile, PKAP co-director Scott Moore has begun to blog on his Digital History course at Indiana University of Pennsylvania at his

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<a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings</a> blog (<a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2008/01/digita l-history.html">part -2</a>, <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2008/01/digita l-histo-1.html">part -1</a>, <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2008/01/digita l-histo-2.html">part 0</a>, <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2008/01/digita l-histo-3.html">part 1</a>, <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2008/01/digita l-histo-4.html">part 2</a>).&nbsp; In an earlier post, I mentioned Sam Fee's mini course on Web 2.0 at <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/">Arranged Delirium</a>.&nbsp; I am thinking about offering a Digital History course at <a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND</a> next year and will have to consider the experiences of these two colleagues (in addition to the <a href="http://digitalhistory.uwo.ca/h513_0708/">iconic and sophisticated course</a> offered by <a href="http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/">William J. Turkel</a> at the <a href="http://www.uwo.ca/">University of Western Ontario</a>). <li>David Gill who already provides us with the excellent <a href="http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/">Looting Matters</a>, now adds another "research blog", <a href="http://bsahistory.blogspot.com/">History of the British School at Athens</a>.</li></ul> <p>[It will be interesting to track the way in which certain genres coalesce in the blogosphere over the next several years.&nbsp; On the one hand, there are clearly certain relatively well-defined and recognizable types of blogs: research blogs, teaching blogs, news blogs, graduate student blogs et c.).&nbsp; On the other hand, there does seem to be a willingness to experiment with hybrid blogs that bring together teaching and research and present themselves in a conversational style.]</p> <ul> <li>I meet with <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/">Scott Moore</a> and <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> tonight in Second Life.&nbsp; It will be the first time that <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> attempts to use their presence in Second Life as an actual productive tool -- albeit not in a very creative or unique way (we are not using it as anything more complex than a conference call!) <li>Finally... I have managed to settle back in from my holiday travels.&nbsp; I then survived a week of unmitigated bustle with <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2008/01/awalk-through.html">teaching responsibilities</a> and several thought provoking talks that centered on a recognizable theme. Ben Millis gave a "Tea Talk" (an informal lecture on a work in progress) on the ethnic and linguistic identity of the refounders of Corinth entitled "“The Social and Ethnic Origins of the Colonists of Early Roman Corinth".&nbsp; He argued that the population of refounded colony of Corinth was a hybrid population who were comfortable in both the eastern "Greek" world and the western Roman world, and therefore well suited for a position astride a major east-west trade route in the Mediterranean.&nbsp; Maria Georgopoulou, the director of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/gennadius/g_index.htm">Gennadius Library</a>, conducted a Gennadius Seminar entitled "Studying Mediterranean Cities at the Gennadius Library" which examined the nature of Cretan/Venetian interaction at the sites of Heraklion and Venice in 400 year period of Venetian control over Crete.&nbsp; Much of the material derived from her excellent book, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45059133">Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: architecture and urbanism</a>, but she provided a very thoughtful theoretical introduction which considered the influence of more recent theoretical

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developments on the models she employed to understand Venetian/Greek interaction.&nbsp; Finally, Nanako Sawayanagi, a graduate student at NYU, offered some of her research at a Gennadius Library "Work-in-Progress" seminar with a paper entitled, "The Team of the Japanese and the Greek Politics in 1906 - 1908".&nbsp; Like Georgopoulou and Millis, Nawayanagi considered cultural interaction (whether literally or figuratively) to be a suitable topic for historical study.&nbsp; While she argued clearly that there was no evidence of real Japanese involvement in Greek politics (the name Team of the Japanese refers to a small but influential party in the Greek Parliament in the early 20th c.), the name itself reflects the influence of a growing global awareness and a willingness to negotiate (a political) identity in transcultural terms.</li></ul> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ParthenoninBracesSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="218" alt="ParthenoninBracesSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ParthenoninBracesSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jimmy Cummins EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 74.192.121.53 URL: DATE: 01/18/2008 04:14:23 AM I started a blog long time ago under biological anthropology which attracted a host of professors and students! Made a few friends but mostly shared information with students writing topics! I did however find a woman who helps me with internet research, a valuable commodity and she invited me to join an invitation only group on msn spaces! It involves just scriptures and Native American philosophy! I'm a native American descendent and A Presbyterian! Good luck with your blog and fieldwork! My blog started out with tracking information on east coast hurricanes and I used wandering but not lost which works well in my concentration of archaeology! Happy digging! Jimmy aka iceman ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 01/20/2008 02:56:12 PM Nice feature in Archaeology! :) -----

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-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Walk through Byzantine Athens STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-walk-through CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 01/17/2008 06:30:52 AM ----BODY: <p>This week has had a Byzantine theme.&nbsp; I lead the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a> <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> to some of the Byzantine churches in Athens today.&nbsp; It was a bit of a challenge because the churches are spread out over a relatively wide area (relative to say, a single ancient site), and I had three hours to do it.&nbsp; In addition to the basic architectural tour, these three hours also included a short talk on the basic history of Middle Byzantine Athens. </p> <p>So I had to make some decisions.&nbsp; I decided to focus almost exclusively on Middle Byzantine (10th-11th c.) Athens and limit the tour to five churches.&nbsp; I began with Moni Petraki which is next door to the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a>.&nbsp; It's also one of the oldest standing churches in the city (probably the oldest) perhaps dating from as early as the last quarter of the 10th century.&nbsp; It's rounded apses, arcade type windows, rugged construction, and lateral vaults that protrude beyond the outer wall of the north and south crossing recommend an early date.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/MoniPetrakiSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="257" alt="MoniPetrakiSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/MoniPetrakiSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Moni Petraki</em></p> <p>We then walked down to the Kapnikarea which sits in the middle of a bustling shopping district.&nbsp; The church is contemporary with another 11th century church in the city, Ay. Theodoroi which can be dated by an inscription to the mid-11th century.&nbsp; The use of dentelated bands (or dogtoothed friezes) and the grouping of the arcaded windows more closely together reflect its later date as does the appearance of "Kufic" decorations and stone crosses.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KapnikareaSM2.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="KapnikareaSM2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KapnikareaSM2_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Kapnikarea</em></p> <p>The group will then walk over to the so-called Little Metropolis.&nbsp; The tour route defies chronology and jumps to this Frankish&nbsp; period (the period after the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204) monument that most likely dates to the 13th

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century. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/LittleMetropolisSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="LittleMetropolisSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/LittleMetropolisSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>The "Little Metropolis"</em></p> <p>Famous for its use of spolia from ancient, Early Christian, and Middle Byzantine buildings, this church is among the best studied Byzantine monuments in the city.&nbsp; The extensive use of spolia in all Byzantine buildings in Athens makes it challenging to use architectural sculpture as a source of chronological information.&nbsp; Of particular interest to me is the use of Early Christian and Early Byzantine (say 8th and 9th century) fragments in these buildings.&nbsp; I've argued elsewhere that this practice reflects an interest in continuity between the Early Christian and later periods, but at the same time suggests an awareness of a some kind of break or discontinuity.&nbsp; After all, the original building from which the spolia derived was no longer in existence.&nbsp; An additional level of complexity derives from the possibility that some of the properly "ancient" spolia (particular column capitals) in Middle Byzantine buildings like the Little Metropolis might in fact be in tertiary use, having at some point been employed in an Early Christian context before being used again in a later building.&nbsp; Thus, the use of spolia become very much like the use literary or documentary evidence by the historian.&nbsp; On the one hand, the use of primary source evidence reflects an awareness of separation between the historian's time and a previous moment in the past (i.e. discontinuity).&nbsp; On the other hand, the actual use of particular evidence in a contemporary historical text reflects its continued validity and its potential for translation from one context to another.&nbsp; Our ability to understand a piece of "primary source" evidence and use (like ancient spolia) it reifies the persistent sense of continuity between the past and the present. </p> <p>From the little Metropolis we made a chronological jump backward to the Soteira Lykodemou (also called the Russian church).&nbsp; This is the largest church in the city and Ch. Bouras has recently proposed that it is, in fact, a 3/4 copy of the Katholikon church at Os. Loukas.&nbsp; It's a crossed-domed octagon which presents a significantly different kind of interior space than the cross-insquare type churches common to Midddle Byzantine Athens.&nbsp; The church probably dates to between the death of the found of the church in 1044 and the completion of the Katholikon at Os. Loukas in the first decades of the 11th c. </p> <p>Finally, we walked from Soteria Lykodemou over to the 11th century church of Ay. Aikaterini near the Lysikrates monument which is undergoing some repairs and renovations so that the foundations of the apse are exposed.&nbsp; The church has been extensively modified with a massive narthex and ambulatory.&nbsp; The church highlights one of the key issues facing the study of Middle Byzantine buildings in Athens (or any city for that matter).&nbsp; The churches are living buildings, they remained in use for centuries undergoing modifications to serve their varying congregations.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AyKateriniSm_3.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="206" alt="AyKateriniSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AyKateriniSm_thumb.jpg" width="304" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv

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eWriter/AyKateriniSm_3.jpg"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AgKateriniFoundationSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="206" alt="AgKateriniFoundationSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AgKateriniFoundationSM_thumb.jpg" width="140" border="0"></a><br></a><em>Ay. Aikaterini with later ambulatory in foreground and detail of its exposed foundations</em></p> <p>The Middle Byzantine churches of Athens remain a relatively understudied group with only a handful of detailed studies on specific churches. Few of the churches have received proper archaeological investigation and our dating of them has continued to rely on the stylistic chronology established by Peter Megaw in the 1930s (with some modifications).&nbsp; The remarkable thing is that over 70 years of archaeological and architectural study of the Byzantine buildings of Athens and the rest of Greece has done very little to modify Megaw's overall chronology (although single buildings have received revised dates).&nbsp; You can read my hand out for the walk and some additional bibliography <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/Byzantine_Athens.pdf&quot;&gt;Downlo ad Byzantine_Athens.pdf">here</a>.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: cheap nike shox EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 68.68.108.118 URL: http://www.nikeshox.cc DATE: 11/03/2010 10:52:18 PM This was an age of innocence and happiness.God bless you all, and God bless America ! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Springtime for Byzantium STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: springtime-for CATEGORY: Byzantium CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Teaching DATE: 01/16/2008 12:42:52 AM ----BODY:

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<p>I just finished a short review of Jonathan Harris' <em><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/156891508">Constantinople:Capital of Byzantium</a> </em>(2007).&nbsp; Its a nice treatment of the history of Constantinople.&nbsp; It takes as its point of departure the year 1200 and looks back to the City's founding and ahead to the City's eventual sack by the Crusaders and then the Turks.&nbsp; Harris' prose is accessible and lively, and he uses selective footnotes to tie his narrative to the primary sources.&nbsp; The work is rounded about by a good bibliography of largely English language secondary sources and primary sources in translation.&nbsp; </p> <p>It made me think that over the last decade, or even the last 5 years, there are a number of books that make the teaching of Byzantine History as an upper level undergraduate course far easier.&nbsp; When I sat in on a Byzantine History course 10 years ago at Ohio State (with Tim Gregory), we were still using Ostrogorsky's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/73649"><em>History of the Byzantine State</em></a><em> </em>as a textbook.&nbsp; It's a fine book to be sure, but with its dense text and emphasis on political and institutional history, it is hardly ideal for a well-balanced undergraduate course filled with "reluctant readers".</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_21.png"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_22.png"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_23.png"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_23.png"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_21.png"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_22.png"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="144" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_17.png" width="101" border="0"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_24.png"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="144" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_18.png" width="101" border="0"></a></a></a></a><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="144" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_19.png" width="99" border="0"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="144" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_20.png" width="110" border="0"></a></a>&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_23.png"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_21.png"></a></a></a> </p> <p>Since I took Byzantine History, Gregory himself has produced <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/55535042"><em>A History of Byzantium</em></a><em> </em>(2005) which while hardly flawless is accessible for the average undergraduate and includes nice treatments of Byzantine culture and society.&nbsp; Derek Krueger's edit volume, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/63122856"><em>Byzantine

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Christianity</em></a><em> </em>(2006) while not exactly a textbook provides a good overview of some of the major issues in Byzantine religion for students with only limited background (especially if coupled with something like Robert Taft's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/26547561"><em>Byzantine Rite: A Short History</em></a><em> </em>(1992)).</p> <p align="center">&nbsp; </p> <p>These books complement the little flurry of good quality books on Byzantine Art from the turn of the century, notable among them are Robin Cormack's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43729117"><em>Byzantine Art</em></a><em> </em>(2000) and Thomas Mathew's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/60169523"><em>Byzantine Art: Between Antiquity and the Renaissance</em></a><em> </em>(1998).&nbsp; These books provide a basic narrative and analysis of the historical development of Byzantine art and architecture.</p> <p>Finally, the efforts by <a href="http://www.doaks.org/">Dumbarton Oaks</a> to make some of their survey works (like the <a href="http://www.doaks.org/EHB.html"><em>Economic History of Byzantium</em></a><em>&nbsp;</em>(2002)) and recently translated primary sources like the <a href="http://www.doaks.org/typ000.html"><em>Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents</em></a><em> </em>(2000) and the <a href="http://www.doaks.org/ATHW.html"><em>Holy Women of Byzantium</em></a><em>&nbsp;</em>(1996) available online provides an important body of documents and analysis for no cost to the student.&nbsp; </p> <p>In any event, there no longer seems an easy excuse (i.e. there is no good quality textbooks or the sources are obscure, expensive, or untranslated) to not include <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/Byzantine%20Civilizatio n_Syllabus.htm">Byzantine History</a> in an undergraduate curriculum!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: CamArchGrad EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 209.52.148.68 URL: DATE: 01/16/2008 01:20:28 PM Not to mention the popular histories of Julius John Norwich on Byzantium and Warren Treadgolds "History of the Byzantine state and society" -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Recent Work on Survey Northeast Peloponnesus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: recent-work-on CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity

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CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 01/15/2008 12:26:56 AM ----BODY: <p>Two new articles highlight the important work being done by survey archaeologists in the Northeastern Peloponnesus.&nbsp; <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>'s hefty "<a href="http://www.atypon-link.com/ASCS/doi/pdfplus/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743">The Busy Countryside of Late Roman Corinth," Hesperia 76 (2007), 743-784</a> and <a href="http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ojs/index.php/JMA/article/view/4105/2655">Y . Lolos, B. Gourly, and D.R. Steward, "The Sikyon Survey Project: A Blueprint for Urban Survey," JMA 20 (2007), 267-296</a>.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TowardSikyonSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="98" alt="TowardSikyonSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TowardSikyonSM_thumb.jpg" width="504" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Toward Sikyon from the Corinthia</em></p> <p>Both articles focus primarily on methodological issues.&nbsp; Pettegrew examines the relationship between Early Roman/Roman ceramics (1st c. BC-3rd c. AD) and Late Roman ceramics documented by the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>.&nbsp; He argues that the traditional picture of Early Roman/Roman economic and settlement contraction followed by a Late Roman "boom" is partially a product of the different visibility of the ceramic signatures of these two periods.&nbsp; To put a complex argument simply, Late Roman ceramics are simply easier to identify than Roman ceramics in the field and, consequently, archaeologists have tended to identify a far more pronounced Late Roman signature in the landscape where as the Roman period is typically underrepresented.&nbsp; This analysis of the EKAS pottery depended on understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of the chronotype sampling strategy employed by EKAS (and explored in some detail in by <a href="http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ojs/index.php/JMA/article/view/2435/1656">C araher, Nakassis, and Pettegrew in JMA 19 (2006), 7-43</a>) and also by PKAP (in fact, Pettegrew discusses <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> pottery on pp. 763-764).&nbsp; He also demonstrates convincingly, however, that a bias toward Late Roman material occurs in other projects as well.&nbsp; The result of this work could be to begin to read the history of the Roman Eastern Mediterranean (and Greece in particular) as a period of slow, but consistent recovery from tumultuous Late Hellenistic period, and another step in the rehabilitation of the Roman presence in the East.&nbsp; </p> <p>Lolos et al. propose a model for surveying known urban areas like the city of Sykion 20 km west of EKAS survey area based on their work on the <a href="http://extras.ha.uth.gr/sikyon/en/">Sikyon Survey Project</a> (which has a spectacular web page!).&nbsp; Their interest in such "large sites" resonates with our work surveying the large ex-urban site of Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em>.&nbsp; That being said, the authors try to distinguish between areas designated as "large sites" and "urban areas (p. 268) by noting that urban areas are almost always conglomerations of "sites".&nbsp; I suspect, however, that most large sites are, in fact, multiple sites as well and the designation and definition of a site depends largely on the resolution one employs in during the survey.&nbsp; In any event, the article makes an important

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contribution to the ongoing process of applying intensive pedestrian survey to areas with particularly high artifact densities.&nbsp; </p> <p>Both projects counted artifacts using clicker counters to produce an estimate of overall ceramic density in a particular unit.&nbsp; Of special interest to me is how the two projects (<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">EKAS</a > and the <a href="http://extras.ha.uth.gr/sikyon/en/">Sikyon Survey Project</a>) sampled the artifact scatters for chronological data.&nbsp; EKAS (and PKAP) used chronotype sampling to collect ceramic data from each unit.&nbsp; The chronotype system called each field walker to collect one example of each unique artifact he or she saw (and when in doubt about the uniqueness of a particularly artifact, they should collect it).&nbsp; This ensured that we had at least one example of each type of artifact present in the unit.&nbsp; Lolos and his team collected only "feature sherds" (p. 279) from each unit and collected all the artifacts from every 5th survey unit.&nbsp; It would be particularly interesting to compare the ratio of collected sherd to counted sherds from each unit for each project.&nbsp; Pettegrew (as well as others) have argued that chronotype collection tends to produce fairly robust samples of artifacts from each unit and, in practice, walkers tends to "over collect" -- that is collect more than just one example of each artifact type present in the unit.&nbsp; The jury is still out on how best to sample artifacts from high density scatters (aka "sites") and while almost every method has its advocates and critics, it would be particularly valuable to see comparative data on sampling rates from various techniques.</p> <p>Another interesting aspect of Lolos' article is the relatively little attention given to the issue of visibility (pp. 279, 286).&nbsp; EKAS found that visibility had a particularly significant effect on the quality of chronological sample from the unit.&nbsp; That is to say, that the lower the visibility the less representative the sample of collected artifacts was likely to be of a putative total assemblage of material in the unit.&nbsp; If you can only see 10% of the surface of the unit, no sampling strategy will produce more than a 10% sample of the artifacts in the unit!&nbsp; I am sure that they will continue to develop these ideas as their field work and study continues.&nbsp; </p> <p>Both articles represent important contributions to the intensive survey method in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it is exciting to see it come from two projects in the Northeast Peloponnesus!&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: maddy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.128.125.1 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com DATE: 01/16/2008 03:44:44 PM And there was not much discussion of the geophysical work done at Sikyon and how that complemented the pedestrian survey...I'm eager to see the results of the

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geophysics work once they're published, as the data we collected in 2006 and 2007 was really interesting. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Another Centre of Late Antique Studies STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: another-centre CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 01/14/2008 12:20:56 AM ----BODY: <p>Another Centre to add to the growing list of centres focusing on Late Antiquity: <a href="http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/clarc/index.html">Cardiff University Centre For Late Antique Religion &amp; Culture</a> (CLARC).&nbsp; CLARC will publish <a href="http://www.cf.ac.uk/clarc/jlarc/jlarc-home.html">The Journal of Late Antique Religion and Culture</a> which will be available electronically on their web site.&nbsp; The first volume (2007) appears to be of good quality and interesting material as one would expect from the faculty involved with the Centre.&nbsp; </p> <p>I have no idea where the saturation point for Late Antique "<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/ox ford-centre-f.html">centres</a>", "institutes", and <a href=" http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/conferen ce-and.html">program(me)s</a> might be!&nbsp; What happens when a time period or area of study becomes over-exposed (are their case studies here)?&nbsp; Do academic interests follow predictable boom-bust cycles where overproduction of scholar-types leads to a catastrophic market retrenchment?&nbsp; Will we hear of Late Antiquitists (Antiqueologists?) panhandling on the streets of Berkeley with signs reading "I invested my life in Late Antiquity.&nbsp; Please Help." </p> <p>More seriously, it is interesting to consider the origins of this recent boom. Some of it must be attributed to the pioneering work done in the 1960s and 1970s by A.H.M. Jones, Peter Brown, and others whose work continues to influence the questions, approaches, and sources for the field.&nbsp; Presumably the rising economic, cultural, and political significance of the Middle East and Eastern Europe in the West fueled the study of Late Antiquity as well.&nbsp; Perhaps more practical considerations played a role.&nbsp; As the job market for Classicists in the U.S. shrunk over the past several decades, it may be that students with "Classical training" gravitated toward Late Antiquity as a way to expand their opportunities on the job market by selling themselves as scholars who could comfortably teach the Ancient world and the Middle Ages.&nbsp; Finally, the study of "Late" Antiquity encapsulates one of the great scholarly debates of the later half of the 20th century.&nbsp; By calling into question the definitions of "Antiquity" and the decline and fall of civilizations, the study of Late Antiquity encouraged scholars to critique long-standing (Enlightenment?) historical narratives that not only essentialized cultures (i.e. by defining a set group of characteristics typical of a unified "antiquity"), and plotted (if not assumed) their decline in the inevitable march toward a progressive present.</p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: http://www.etana.org/abzu DATE: 01/14/2008 02:47:24 AM The articles in volume 1 of The Journal of Late Antique Religion and Culture are in fact already online. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Another Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Update STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: another-pyla-ko CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 01/12/2008 01:09:49 AM ----BODY: <p>The <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a> is pleased to announce that we received permission from the <a href="http://www.mcw.gov.cy/mcw/da/da.nsf/DMLindex_en/DMLindex_en?OpenDocument"> Cyprus Department of Antiquities</a> to conduct limited soundings at the site of Pyla-<em>Kokkinokremos </em>and Pyla-<em>Vigla </em>in collaboration with Dr. Maria Hadjicosti.&nbsp; While we still will need to work out the details with the authorities at the British Bases, this is an important first step in making plans for the 2008 PKAP season.</p> <p>Our proposed soundings will serve to ground truth the results of <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/reports/reports.htm">3 seasons of intensive survey</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/py la-koutsopetr.html">last years geophysical work</a>.&nbsp; At present, we anticipate four small (2 x 2 m) trenches focused on specific research questions: namely determining whether the apsidal building with an east-west orientation on Pyla-<em>Vigla </em>is an Early Christian basilica and whether several linear bed rock cuttings on Pyla-<em>Kokkinokremos </em>are man-made foundations for monumental architecture.&nbsp; Such limited excavations continue PKAP's commitment to low impact archaeology.&nbsp; Moreover, the location of the two sites, within the <a href="http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceFor/ServiceCommunity/ACyprusPosti ng/Dhekelia/DhekeliaGarrison.htm">British Dhekelia Cantonment</a>'s firing ranges, restricts our access to the areas and the time we can spend each day

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working there.&nbsp; </p> <p>The small scale excavations will make for an exciting conclusion to the "first phase" of archaeological fieldwork at Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em>.&nbsp; At present we have received some of the required financial support for the excavations at Pyla-Kokkinokremos, we have submitted several other grant proposal for the work on Vigla and Kokkinokremos, and anticipate submitting several more.&nbsp; As usual we hope to receive some support from private donors.</p> <p>With this news, the next few months will be flurry of preparations.&nbsp; We are planning to have our largest field team to date in Cyprus with more than 10 senior (i.e. funded) staff and another dozen undergraduate and graduate volunteers.&nbsp; The field school component of the project -- which involves not only teaching basic archaeological method and procedure, but also travel to sites across Cyprus -- will be the most robust to date as well.&nbsp; </p> <p>Part of this blogs original goal was to provide a window into all aspects of archaeological project -- from the preparation for the season, to fieldwork, to the dissemination of our results.&nbsp; Keep tuned here over the next 6 months to see how the 2008 PKAP field season unfolds.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FiringRangeKokkinorkremosSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="600" alt="FiringRangeKokkinorkremosSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FiringRangeKokkinorkremosSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Toward Kokkinokremos from the West</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: susie EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.168.15 URL: DATE: 01/14/2008 04:24:31 PM Congratulations on getting the go ahead everyone. That's great news. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Abandoned Landscapes in North Dakota Part 2 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: abandoned-lands CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 01/10/2008 11:57:12 PM ----BODY:

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<p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/04/ab andoned_lands.html">One my first blog posts</a> talked about my drive across North Dakota on the Hi-Line from North of Bismarck to Grand Forks.&nbsp; I noted the abandoned landscape of the state -- the empty towns, abandoned farmsteads, lonely churches -- and contrasted it with the rising prosperity of the states inhabitants over the last century.&nbsp; The contrast suggested to me that our understanding of abandonment and decline in the modern era is sometimes tempered by the rise in prosperity particularly in the Western world.&nbsp; The result is a fantastically complex landscape where new and old stand together with hopes and past failures highlighting a whole range of <em>abandonments</em>.&nbsp; </p> <p>The <em><a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2008-01/emptiednorth-dakota/bowden-text.html">January 2008 issue of National Geographic</a> </em>features a story by Charles Bowden that captures some of the same themes.&nbsp; It is accompanied by a fascinating <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2008-01/emptied-northdakota/richards-photography.html">photo essay</a> on abandonment in North Dakota.&nbsp; The photos reflect the complexity of abandonment in North Dakota (and as phenomenon) where towns slowly fade away while preserving hints of episodic reuse.&nbsp; The photos also document the kinds of things that people leave behind.&nbsp; The wedding dresses, books, furniture, toys, cars all form the archaeological assemblage that will define this time and these places in the future.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AbandonedVillageGreeceSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AbandonedVillageGreeceSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AbandonedVillageGreeceSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Abandoned houses in Western Macedonia</em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: petey EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.124.197.118 URL: DATE: 01/18/2008 01:01:41 PM Haunting, moving to see the images on National Geographic. Everytime I visit my father's village in the Southern Pelloponese, near Sparta, I feel this way. Only a few people remain in the village where he was born. The vast majority of the houses have been forgotten and the roofs are caving in. The population steadily declined as most people moved away in search of a better (or different) life in far away countries or large cities. The ones who remained got older, and most have passed away. The footpaths are weed covered, the concrete near the church steps is cracking... And so time goes on. -----

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-------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Byzantine and Christian Museum STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-byzantine-a CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 01/10/2008 04:37:56 AM ----BODY: <p>I led the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> through the <a href="http://www.lrf.gr/demos/byz/homepage.html">Byzantine and Christian Museum</a> with the help of <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/associate.htm">Associate Member</a> Christina Stancioiu who graciously talked about icons for us.&nbsp; I've posted my notes here. <p><i>George Lampakis: Thrace-Constantinople (1902) (see also <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/ge orgios-lampak.html">here</a>)</i> <p>George Lampakis (1854-1914) was a key figure in the formation of the Byzantine and Christian Museum collection. He was educated in Athens in theology and in Germany in the developing field of Christian Archaeology. Upon his return to Greece, he participated in the growing willingness to understand Byzantium as a crucial part of Greek identity. He was among the founders of the Christian Archaeological Society and circulated in elevated circles becoming a close associate of Queen Olga (the Russian bride of King George I who claimed descent from the Byzantine Anglos family). He traveled extensively and his photographs, some of which are on display at the Byzantine and Christian Museum, and form an important resource for the study of late 19th and early 20th century Greece. He also worked to document and in some cases collected artifacts important to both Byzantine and the more recent Christian culture of Greece. As such he should be understood as part of a larger movement toward embedding Greek history within the larger narrative of both the Orthodox church and the Byzantine empire. This reinterpretation of the Greek past, of course, contributed to <i>the Great Idea</i> and the irredentist movements that it spawned, but perhaps should not be read as purely a nationalist movement. The conflation of Greece’s Byzantine past and the modern life of the church gave Lampakis’ collection of Byzantine and Christian antiquities an ahistorical quality evocative of liturgical time and distinct from the modern historicist narratives characteristic of the emerging nationalist histories. <p><em>Byzantine and Christian Museum</em>&nbsp; <p align="left">The Byzantine and Christian Museum developed out the collection of the Christian Archaeological Society which Lampakis curated. The Museum itself was founded in 1914 soon after the capture of Thessaloniki, a city of particular significance to the Byzantine patrimony of the modern Greek state. The first director of a distinct Byzantine and Christian Musem was Adamantios Adamantiou, and he and his successor, George Soteriou, both expanded the collect and shifted its focus. They drew upon the growing prestige of Byzantine material and Byzantine history within Greece, which by the second half of the 19th century had emerged as a counterbalance to Classical philhellenism and its association with Western political and cultural interventionism. This use of Byzantium found parallels elsewhere in Europe where scholars, particularly in Austria and German,

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increasingly asserted the cultural autonomy of Byzantine and Late Antique material. The artistic, stylistic, and historical autonomy of Late Antique and Byzantine culture (as opposed to reading simply as a decadent or debased form of Classical art) made it particularly suitable for scholars seeking to understand Byzantine Greece as the cultural predecessor of the independent nation-state. By 1930, Soteriou established the collection in its present location – the Villa Ilissia which had been built in the 1840s for the eccentric American Sophie de Marbois who had married into the Napoleonic aristocracy. He arranged it to demonstrate the uninterrupted development of Byzantine art from the Early Christian period to the early 19th century. </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/VillaIlissiaSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="VillaIlissiaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/VillaIlissiaSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br><em><font size="2">Villa Ilissia</font></em></p> <p>In keeping with the modernist and scientific underpinnings of both museum and the nation-state, Soteriou organized the religious artifacts collected by Lampakis as well as material from his own excavations in two ways. One group of rooms organized icons, portable objects, and church vestments chronologically and typologically transforming the kinds of religious objects, which continued to be venerated and used in neighborhood churches throughout Greece, into objects susceptible to systematic and scientific investigation. More interestingly, however, Soteriou placed the best examples of sculpture, furnishings, and architectural sculpture into reconstructed examples of churches built in a series of rooms in the Museum. These rooms, designed by Aristotle Zachos, who was also the architect responsible for the reconstruction of St. Demetios in Thessaloniki after the fire of 1912, served to create secular churches which abstracted the material culture of everyday sacred experience in Greece and rendered it suitable for integration within the historicist narrative of the modern nation.</p> <p>The current museum underwent significant renovations since Soteriou’s time. The shadows of Soteriou’s organization, however, persist in many of the displays. For the Early Byzantine period, the influence of material collected from Soteriou’s excavations at the Ilissos basilica and the churches at Nea Anchialos is evident. The majority of the material in the collection derives from Athens (particularly the Acropolis and various Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches destroyed in during the transformation of the city during the 19th century) and Attica (Mygdaleza, Stamata, Anavyssos, and Damalas (Troizene)). It also includes a significant collection of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine icons of the Cretan and Ionian schools from private collections. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SecularChurch2SM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="156" alt="SecularChurch2SM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SecularChurch2SM_thumb.jpg" width="204" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SecularChurchSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="156" alt="SecularChurchSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SecularChurchSM_thumb.jpg" width="223" border="0"></a> <br><em><font size="2">Museum as Secular Church</font></em></p> <p>Bibliography <p>J. Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Reigel and Strzygowski in 1901,” <i>Art

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History</i> 25 (2002), 258-279.<br>K. Kourelis, ‚ÄúByzantium and the AvantGuard: Excavations at Corinth, 1920s-1930s‚Äù <i>Hesperia</i> 76 (2007), 391441.<br>S. Marchand, ‚ÄúThe Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski,‚Äù <i>History and Theory</i> 33 (1994), 106-130.<br>M. Rautman, ‚ÄúArchaeology and Byzantine Studies,‚Äù <i>ByzFor</i> 15 (1990), 137-165.<br>G. Soteriou, <i>Guide du Muss√©e Byzantin d‚ÄôAth√®nes</i> (Athens 1932)<br>P. Vokotopoulos, ‚ÄúMuseums and Collections of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art in Greece,‚Äù <i>BalkSt</i> 37, 207-234.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tim EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 79.131.70.31 URL: DATE: 03/09/2008 01:35:21 PM This is really good stuff. I can add some other information. Are you archiving all this so it will be available? When I was teaching at the School 1979-81 I typed all such stuff out, then ca. 1983 I saw I could do it on the computer. Nobody was interested at the School. I'm slowly trying to digitize all that, but it's too bad an effort wasn't made then.! ! teg -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology, Posters, and the New Media STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: archaeology-pos CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/08/2008 01:23:28 AM ----BODY: <p>First, I want to congratulate <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott</a> <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/">Moore</a> and <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> on <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/publications/posters/2008AIAPoster.jpg">a great poster</a> at the 2008 AIA Annual Meeting.&nbsp; Posters are a funny medium for displaying archaeological information.&nbsp; On the one hand, they are very effective for displaying the kind of visual information that is at the

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core of archaeological investigation.&nbsp; Moreover, the practice of the author(s) of the poster hanging around the display during specific sessions allows people to engage the authors in conversations about their research in a way that is much more effective than a typical panel (the poster sessions at the <a href="http://www.saa.org/meetings/index.html">SAA Annual Meetings</a> are in most cases much more significant than the papers read in particular sessions).&nbsp; On the other hand, as projects like PKAP move toward a deeper engagement with dynamic and in some cases interactive media -- interactive web pages, video, podcasts, blogs, et c. -- and view these components as part of a project's core research objectives, posters appear all the more staid and inflexible.&nbsp; While posters will always present the process of archaeology in a static way, one can imagine a future where "posters" allow for an interactive approach to data which complements their already commendable ability to stimulate conversation between archaeologists and their academic peers.</p> <p>Some quick hits:</p> <ul> <li>Sam (World B) Fee's blog <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/">Arranged Delirium</a> is chronicling the progress of his class on "Web 2.0 sites and technologies".&nbsp; It is addressing some key issues for the entire Web 2.0 movement (phenomenon?) including the <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/index.php/site/comments/the_web_20_controve rsy/">controversy surrounding the definition of Web 2.0</a>. <li>Sebastian Heath at the blog <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/">Mediterranean Ceramics</a> has posted links to his new work,&nbsp; <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/"><i>Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia)</i></a>.&nbsp; In <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dont-buy-thisbook.html">this post</a>, he discusses the different formats in which his research will appear -- including PDF, HTML, and print -- outlining albeit briefly some of the advantages of the different formats and stressing that there traditional print formats still remain significant for both practical reasons (it's easier sometimes to bring a book out into a field than a laptop!) and archival reasons. <li>Heath <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2008/01/mediterranean-ceramicsreference.html">has also commented on the "disappointing decisions"</a> by the AIA to <a href="http://ajaonline.org/pdfs/112.1/AJA1121_Norman.pdf">discontinue providing free copies of the AJA for download on their web site</a>. <li><a href="http://www.unc.edu/~thomase/">Tom Elliot</a>, previously the <a href="http://www.unc.edu/awmc/">Director of the Ancient World Mapping Center</a>'s <a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/">Pleiades Project</a> and now Associate Director for Digital Programs in New York University's new <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/isaw">Institute for the Study of the Ancient World</a>, <a href="http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/nga/ncgia.html">posted a link to a recent conference on Digital Gazetteers</a> on his <a href="http://horothesia.blogspot.com/">horothesia blog</a>.&nbsp; As David Pettegrew and I are in the early stages of producing a gazetteer (albeit perhaps in a more traditional medium) of the Eastern Corinthia (as part of the ongoing work of the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>, the papers and discussions at this conference address many of the persistent problems that have slowed our progress.&nbsp; <li>The <a href="http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/46208.html">Cliopatria Awards for 2007</a> were presented at the annual meeting of the <a href="http://www.historians.org/">American Historical Association</a>.&nbsp; The

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winner for the best group blog is <a href="http://jjcohen.blogspot.com/">In the Middle</a> which deals largely with Medieval topics.&nbsp; It's great to see the study of the antiquity and the middle ages embrace (successfully!) the New Media! <li>Finally, I am going to send off my <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-arch-2.html">Blogging Archaeology</a> article today.&nbsp; Thanks to everyone who contributed to it!</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Travels in the Hinterland STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: travels-in-the CATEGORY: Australiana DATE: 01/04/2008 07:35:30 PM ----BODY: <p>Susie and I drove from our base of Australian operations, Beerwah, Queensland, into the hinterland, particularly the South Burnett region.&nbsp; Our destination was the largest vineyard in Queensland, Clovely Estates.&nbsp; The countryside was dotted with Southern Cross windmills and their accompanying water tanks.&nbsp; The region has suffered from the decade long drought, but during our visit there had been almost three weeks of intermittent rain.&nbsp; Cattle grazed the muddy banks of filled dams and billabongs.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/WindmillsSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="WindmillsSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WindmillsSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>We passed through the numerous small agricultural communities of the South Burnett region like Murgon, Wondai, Yarraman, and Blackbutt.&nbsp;&nbsp; While the small, simple churches in these towns caught my eye, the large, elaborate pubs drew far more of my attention.&nbsp; (Unlike in North Dakota where each small town has a number of small storefront bars) Australian towns typically have a single large pub often built around the turn of the century in Australian Colonial style.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BlackbuttPubSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="BlackbuttPubSM"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BlackbuttPubSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Blackbutt Pub </em></p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/WondaiPubSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="WondaiPubSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WondaiPubSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br><em>Wondai Pub </em></p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/YarramanPubSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="YarramanPubSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/YarramanPubSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em>Yarraman Pub</em></p> <p align="left">Typical small town grocery stores evoke the small markets in North Dakota as well as in any number of Greek villages filled with non-perishable, dry foods and only a smattering of fresh produce.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/MurgenMarketSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="MurgenMarketSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/MurgenMarketSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Once at Clovely Estate -- outside of the town of Murgon -- we stayed in restored "Queenslander" style house amidst vineyards heavy with grapes which will be harvested within the week.&nbsp; Queenslanders are surrounded by verandas and designed to capture the cooling winds and funnel them through the house.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/QueenslanderSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/QueenslanderSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ClovelyVineyardSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="ClovelyVineyardSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ClovelyVineyardSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GrapesSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="GrapesSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GrapesSM_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The daily rains curtailed our outside activities, but provided us with some great sunsets.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ClovelySunsetSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="ClovelySunsetSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/ClovelySunsetSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">This is the last of my self-indulgent meditations on Australian landscapes. I return to Athens tomorrow and will return to more Mediterranean themes next week. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Filmmaking and Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: learning-about CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 01/01/2008 01:26:30 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last three weeks, I've been in lengthy correspondence with the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a>'s filmmaker, <a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">Joe Patrow</a>.&nbsp; Patrow has completed a rough cut of the footage collected during the 2007 field season.&nbsp; He prepared a series of shorts entitled <em>Emerging Cypriot </em>which show the less formal elements of an archaeological project -- from simple and common mistakes in the field (collecting a bit of ordinance and washing it) to archaeological romances to the view of our student volunteers on the bustling night life of Larnaka.&nbsp; There are several shorts with more "properly archaeological themes" including a nice description of resistivity by John Hunt and my riveting tour of our Late Roman wall.&nbsp; The last short on the disk is an archaeological music video featuring the music of one of our graduate students volunteers.</p> <p>At the start of the 2007 field season we hoped that Joe could provide us with a "feature length" documentary of the project -perhaps focusing on the perceptions of the student volunteers, the journey of an artifact from the field to the catalogue, and with some discussion of archaeological procedures, methods, and goals.&nbsp; This would essentially be a full length (and more robust) sequel to the successful <em><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Multimedia.html">Survey on Cyprus</a></em> documentary (which was originally intended to be a study for a longer project).&nbsp; Early on, however, reality set in for Patrow and PKAP.&nbsp; The first problem was that ourfieldwork was boring.&nbsp; Resistivity, intensive field survey, topographic survey are systematic approaches to documenting the landscape, but from the perspective of the camera and the filmmaker with an eye toward a popular audience, our careful archaeological method involved tedious, repetitive tasks.&nbsp; Repetitive tasks, we've been told, make bad movies.&nbsp; I can buy this.&nbsp; </p>

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<p>Next, our project lacked any kind of compelling narrative that lent itself easily to depiction on film.&nbsp; As with most research projects, an archaeological field season rarely produce a coherent narrative arc with a clear beginning, middle, and end.&nbsp; As with most archaeological research, the anticipated results of the season changed throughout the 5 week season as new discoveries came to light (e.g. <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/py la-koutsopetr.html">our Late Roman wall and possible Early Christian basilica</a>) or expected discoveries failed to materialize (where are the graves or tombs for the Bronze Age and Late Roman settlements?).&nbsp; While most of our initial working hypotheses gained positive or negative results, we concluded the season with a whole new set of crucial questions requiring clear answers.&nbsp; Ambiguity and unanswered questions are part of any critical approach to archaeological field work, but it hardly conforms to popular views of archaeology which have tended to emphasize simple questions and direct answers revealed at a moment of discovery.</p> <p>Finally, our entire team was not entirely cooperative in the filmmaking venture.&nbsp; Senior staff was particularly concerned with the questions of "what if my administrators/colleagues/funding bodies see this."&nbsp; Will too much "reality" cast the project in a bad light?&nbsp; Professional presentation of archaeological fieldwork results tends to emphasize the direct and linear relationship between research questions and field work results.&nbsp; Discussions of the field work process tend to be limited to relatively abstract discussions of the theoretical implications or particular methods.&nbsp; The experiential element of fieldwork, with some clear exceptions, tends to be marginalized and professional scholarly presentations of field projects tend to reduce relationships between individual participants to the almost mechanical interaction of scholars with discrete skill sets. Moreover, volunteers and junior staff were not familiar with the camera and it's presence shaped their responses which vacillated between "hamming it up" for the camera (err.. senior staff might also be included here) and measured responses that sought to conform to the expectations of the senior staff and the camera operator/director (which were meaningful to be sure, but spoke less clearly to their individual experiences on the project).</p> <p>(All of these issues came to light despite our own awareness of recent trends toward <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/la ndscape-archa.html">the reflexive or even the performative</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45064746">theatrical elements</a> of archaeological work. Our first documentary began with a quote from Ian Hodder regarding reflexivity (and this was provided by our filmmaker without our prompting): "Reflexivity occurs as project members are asked to explain their work and assumptions before the camera" and my explanation that Patrow would be part of the project rather than an outside observer. His privileged status and insider (i.e. a funded member of the PKAP team) and outsider (free from most of the responsibilities of fieldwork) allowed him to critique and understand our work from a distinct perspective that was clearly "biased" but also functioned according to a significantly different set of expectations and goals.)</p> <p>My correspondence with Patrow and the discussions with other members of the PKAP team has been revealing.&nbsp; On the one hand, some of us continue to press for a traditional narrative approach to our archaeological project.&nbsp; This approach would conform to the expectations of both "institutional" and popular audiences, because it foregrounds a scientific process, flows from hypothesis to the climactic moment of discovery or resolution, and marginalizes dissenting voices (or alternative stories) to a subordinate positions outside the major narrative stream.&nbsp; </p> <p>On the other hand, what we have now is a series

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of 5-7 minute shorts that do not cohere as a narrative but provide sketches of archaeological work for various perspectives.&nbsp; Taken together the shorts approach a kind of multivocality (albeit they are all produced by the same filmmaker).&nbsp; Their abbreviated length encourages viewing multiple shorts in a single sitting, and their irreverent (verging on ironic) tone presents a foil to the more linear and formal documentary <em>Survey on Cyprus</em>.&nbsp; The use of shorts, which do not have strong structuring tying them together, encourages the understanding archaeological fieldwork as the interplay of atomistic (but not unrelated) stories, perceptions, and interpretations which can be collated into a coherent narrative only through the effort of the archaeologist, the filmmaker, the historian, or the story teller.&nbsp; These stories can both complement the authoritative narratives that appeared in <em>Survey on Cyprus</em> and at various meetings and publications and subvert them, bringing out the crucial tensions that exist in the kind of collaborative research typical of archaeological projects .&nbsp; Patrow decided against any unifying "voice over" drawing the viewer directly into the scene amidst the bustle and conversations without the structuring voice.&nbsp; Finally, these shorts do not fit together into a neat archaeological narrative.&nbsp; They do not concern themselves with a clear archaeological goal, bu t draw the viewer into the discrete problems and experiences that feature prominently in all fieldwork.&nbsp; As a result, they have a universal quality to them; while set in Cyprus, they show experiences common to fieldwork everywhere in the Mediterranean.</p> <p>The conversations between PKAP's archaeologists and Patrow, the filmmaker, will continue for the next months until the shorts ultimate debut.&nbsp; In some ways, however, the goal of the exercise has already been achieved.&nbsp; By being forced to think critically about the archaeological process and exploring the tension between field procedure, methods, and narratives in the performance and presentation of field work.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PatrowFilmingSm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="PatrowFilmingSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PatrowFilmingSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----PING: TITLE: Filmmaking and Archaeology URL: http://www.blogbookmarker.com/tags/robust IP: 67.228.47.154 BLOG NAME: robust DATE: 01/01/2008 02:09:28 AM Bookmarked your post over at Blog Bookmarker.com! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher

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TITLE: Modern Landscapes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: modern-landscap CATEGORY: Australiana CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 12/29/2007 05:50:19 PM ----BODY: <p>There is a fun exhibit at the <a href="http://www.qag.qld.gov.au/">Queensland Art Gallery</a> for anyone interested in the construction of landscapes.&nbsp; It's entitled <a href="http://www.qag.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/coming_soon/kenneth_macqueen">Making it Modern: The Watercolours of Kenneth Macqueen</a> and features his painting of the Queensland countryside, coasts, and skies -- including the series of watercolors depicting his farm near Millmerran in southern Queensland.&nbsp; The exhibition positioned his art at the beginning of the modernist movement in Australia as well as an important contribution to there emergence of Australia as a modern nation.&nbsp; The artist's watercolors were often based on study photographs taken of particular features in the landscape.&nbsp; His paintings then translated and interpreted the photographic image into a different medium. I am not an art critic, much less an art historian; I was impressed, however, by how Macqueen's work traced the expanding mark of western agriculture and transportation on the Australian landscape by emphasizing the interplay of light on the topography and flora in a distinctive way.&nbsp; Scholars, like <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/176869458">Benedict Anderson</a>, have regularly noted how the modern "realist" novel played a central role in the emergence of the modern nationstate.&nbsp; The work of Macqueen, likewise, transposed the "transparent" reality of a photograph into the more emotive (and in some ways authentic) medium of the painted canvass. </p> <p>The difference between the flat photographic studies of the countryside and Macqueen's brilliant watercolors brought home both the key role of the individual in understanding of reality in the modern era and the potential of traditional "artistic" media to bring out essential and ephemeral characteristics of the physical landscape.&nbsp; Our diligence in data collection in survey archaeology produces a landscape with photographic precision.&nbsp; Mediterranean survey is less successful in bringing the interpretive and analytic perspective embodied in the artists deft touch.&nbsp; Nevertheless, the concept of the landscape remains&nbsp; capable of bringing together and juxtaposing in productive ways the photographic and the "artistic" (for lack of a better word).&nbsp; The sensitivity of artists to the elusive character of light, sound, and memory as central ingredients to human engagement in their physical surroundings remains just outside the grasp of most archaeological projects (even those which purport to embrace diachronic, emotional,&nbsp; multivocal, and phenomological methods).</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DickyWreckSm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="DickyWreckSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DickyWreckSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br><em><font

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size="1">The wreck of the Dicky, Dicky Beach, Sunshine Coast, Queensland</font></em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Of Toponyms, Irony, and the Sunshine Coast STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: of-toponyms-iro CATEGORY: Australiana DATE: 12/27/2007 04:47:14 PM ----BODY: <p>Reading place names, or toponyms, provides a valuable perspective on past and present landscapes.&#160; Place names in Greece, for example, record patterns of migration (e.g. Albanian and Slavic place names), topographical features like springs (e.g. places ending with -vrysi), and the names of important local families.&#160; The revival of ancient place names in the early 19th century reflected the close tie between the Greece's national identity and its Classical past. The Western part of the U.S. where I live, place names blend the history of European and American settlement -- Cass county, for example, is named for a railroad developer, local features (Grand Forks, North Dakota, for example, marks the split of the Red and Red Lake Rivers), and in many instances preserves traces of the Native American presence on the land. </p> <p>The same pattern of toponyms is true for Australia, where I am currently visiting, as well.&#160; Names like Brisbane, Landsborough, and The Gap sit alongside names derived from Aborignal languages like Maroochydore and Eumundi.&#160; One other practice, however, is worth singling out.&#160; Australia also appears to have ironic place names.&#160; I've spent the last two weeks at Beerwah in the hinterland of a region known as the Sunshine Coast.&#160; </p> <p>We've seen the sun twice so far.&#160; From what I can understand, the Sunshine Coast is meant ironically as in the place where there is no Sunshine.&#160; My wife and her family has assured me that this was not really the case (that, in fact, the Queensland coast is usually sunny this time of year), but I have my doubts... </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/NoosaHeads.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="129" alt="NoosaHeads" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/NoosaHeads_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0" /></a>&#160; <br /><em><font size="2">Noosa Heads, Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia</font></em></p> <p

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align="left"><font size="2">And, yes, I am whinging about being in Australia in December...</font></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Israel EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 212.150.128.10 URL: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps/ DATE: 02/29/2008 02:20:18 AM I learned about anthropomorphic maps from the linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford (deceased) and the anthropologist Stan Knowlton. They described the maps of Napi, the creator of the Blackfoot Indians (aka The Old Man) and his wife (The Old Woman) in Alberta, Canada. I "found" similar maps of a male body (Hermes ?) in the Middle East and a female body (Aphrodite) in north Africa. ! ! Anthropomorphic Maps! ! Anthropomorphic maps were generated by configuring the body of a god or goddess over the area to be mapped. The name of each part of that body became the name of the area under that part. This produced a scale 1:1 map-without-paper on which each placename automatically indicated its approximate location and direction with respect to every other place on the same map whose name was produced in this way.! ! You are cordially invited to join the BPMaps discussion group on this topic, a very quiet list that averages about 2 messages per month. The URL is:! http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BPMaps/ ! ! The Challenge: To produce computer software that will find additional body-part maps elsewhere in the world. Available inputs:! (1) geographic databases with ancient place names (e.g., the Perseus project).! (2) body-part names on Swadesh lists. Unfortunately, the navel is not included.! ! Attributes of Anthropomorphic Maps! ! (1) The navel is the center of the body, the center of the map, and usually the center of the map's language community.! ! (2) Place names (toponyms) may be reversed, metathesized, misspelled or euphemized for various reasons:! ! (a) The same part in the same language exists on another map of a different body. Cranium > Mo[n]rocco because Ukraine existed? Aphrodite is looking backwards over her right shoulder. She is bent at her waist (Misr/Mitzraim = MoSNaiM).! !

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(b) The left (sinister) part is altered in names for left-right pairs (arms, legs, eyes, ears). DoFeN = side reversed to Nafud in north Arabia. SHvK = thigh with a T-sound for the letter shin = TvK reversed to Kuwait. BeReKH = knee metathesized to Bahrain.! ! (c) Names that represent taboo body parts or funcitons are reversed or euphemized:! Semitic PoS (female pudenda) reverses to yam SooF = sea of reeds (Red Sea).! Mare Rubrum (Latin for Red See) was her menstruation! CaNa3an (3 = aiyin with a G-sound as in 3aZa = Gaza) is a reversal of Greek gyneco-. ! Sinai = "snatch" is spelled SiNi in Hebrew. The aleph=CHS is intentionally missing.! ZaYiN = weapon (a euphemism for his male member) is in Sinai as the desert of Zin.! ! (3) Names may be loan-translated due to conquest or language-change.! ! (a) Roxolania (Semitic Ro[chs]SH = head) => Rus *( Ro@SH) => Ukraine (Greek kranion)! * Caused by a change in the sound of the aleph from CHS to a glottal stop.! ! (b) Libya (Semitic LeB = heart) => Cyrenaica (Latin cor = heart, compare coronary) => Libya! ! (4) Rivers and bodies of water may be named after bodily excretions:! ! (a) Milk River in Alberta.! (b) Red Sea (Latin Mare Rubrum) is Aphrodite's menstruation.! (c) Gulf of Aqaba (Semitic QaVaH = digestion/defecation)! ! (5) Internal body parts may represent subdivisions of external parts.! ! (a) Arabic Misr / Hebrew Mitzraim ( Latin Gossypium (English gossamer = cottonlike)! ! (b) Atlas mountains Sicily (< VL *sicila < Latin secula = sickle to harvest wheat; compare Semitic SaKiN = knife). The trident was in Neptune/Poseidon's right hand (Italy, like Anatolia < N'TiLas yad = arm being washed by the seas).! ! (b) Greece = reversal of Semitic S'RoG = (weighted) net, held in his left hand.! ! (c) Crete = reversal of targe = small shield (compare English target) also in his left hand.! ! Aphrodite! ! The map of Aphrodite is in north Africa. Her face [PaNim] was lost during the 3rd Punic war. The rest of her is still there. She is looking backwards over her right shoulder, so her CRaniuM is reversed at Morocco. It still has a Fez. Her chin [SaNTir] is reversed at Tunisia. The Atlas (anatomy: first cervical vertebra) mountains support her head. Her hair [Sa3aRa] is the Sahara desert. Her backbone [amood SHiDRa] is the Gulf of Sidra. Her heart [LeB] is Libya. Her breast [SHaD] is Chad. Her narrow [TZaR] waist is Misr / Mitzraim. Her liver (Greek hepato-) is Egypt. Cotton (Arabic QuTN, Latin Gossypium) was exported

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from Goshen, her [QiTNit = bean]-shaped kidney. Her side [TZaD] is Sudan. Her other side [DoFeN] is Dafur. Her left [SMoL] leg is Somalia.! ! [NeGeV] is a reversal of vagina and may be related to [NeKeV] = aperture. [CaNa3aN] was her Latin cunnus (and a reversal of Greek gyneco-). Its name changed to [YiSRa@eL] at the time when [Ya3aKoV] / Jacob "fought with god and men" [Gen 32:29]. This represented a change in sovereignty from Africa to Asia minor. [ YiSRa@eL] is that body part that gives [@oSHeR] = delight to [@eL] = god when it is [YaSHaR] = straight, upright. Changing Jacob's name from [Ya3aKoV] = "ankle; curved, bent" to [YiSRa@eL] = "straight, upright + god" is a well-known Hebrew pun.! ! Hermes! ! The body-part map of Hermes is in Asia minor. kHermes [kHoR = hole + MoSnaim = waist] lived at Mt. kHermon before he moved Mt. Olympus (Greek omphalos = navel). Later his name was reversed to become Latin Mercury. Compare Amerigo Vespucci and America.! ! His head [Ro@SH] was at Roxolania/Rus, south of Belarus. Its name changed to the Ukraine (Gk kranion = cranium, *not *Slavic u kraina = to/at the border). His throat [GaRGeret] is Georgia. His left shoulder [KaSaF] is the Caspian sea. His right shoulder [@aTZiL] was Euxinus, now the Black Sea. His right arm/hand is being washed [NaTiLat] at Anatolia. His upper arm (Sanskrit irma) at Armenia, biceps (Greek pontiki = muscle) at Pontus, elbow [KiFooF yaD] at Cappadocia, wrist [m'FaReK] at Phrygia, and thumb [BoHeN] at Bithynia were in Anatolia. His heart (Greek cardia) became Kurdistan. His narrow [TZaR] waist is Syria and his navel (Sanskrit nabhila) reverses to LeBaNon.! ! South of Lebanon is the male member (Greek phallus) named Philistina. See [CaNa3aN / YiSRa@eL] above. His buttocks [YeReKH] is Iraq. His thigh [shin-vavkuf] sounded like TvK and reversed to Kuwait. His knee [BeReKH] is partially reversed in Bahrain. His right [Y'MiN] foot is at Yemen.! ! These two bodies are connected, literally, at Sinai (with an aleph that is not written in Hebrew, compare "snatch", a reversal of [K'NiSah] = entrance), a part of her body that contains the desert of Zin, his "zaiyin". Needless to say, I am not personally responsible for this connection that occurred over 3000 years ago.! ! Aphrodite as an Anthropomorphic Map! ! The goddess we call Aphrodite! Is not just an old Grecian deity.! The Phoenicians did make! Her a map. It's not fake.! Her body is cartograffiti.! ! The Punic war destroyed her face,! The Romans left nary a trace.! But her hair is still there,! In Sahara, that's where.! And her chin's a Tunisian place.! ! Mt. Atlas is her first verTebra.!

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Her backbone is now Gulf of Sidra.! Her heart is in Libya,! Her left leg, Somalia.! Her breast is in Chad wearing no bra.! ! The Greeks called her liver Egypt, an'! Her kidney was Biblical Goshen.! She's bent at her waist,! Now Misr-ably placed.! The Red Sea was her menstruation.! ! As a kid I did think the Red Sea! Was an English map typo: lost E,! From Reed Sea in Hebrew.! But that could not be true,! Mare Rubrum 'twas Latin, B.C.! ! Aphrodite with Hermes did sin,! We know this is true 'cause within! Her "snatch" we call Sinai! His "zaiyin" does still lie.! It's known as the desert of Zin.! ! Best regards,! Israel "izzy" Cohen -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Landscape Archaeology in a Reflexive Mode STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: landscape-archa CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 12/23/2007 12:27:41 AM ----BODY: <p>Here's a preview of part of our AIA poster.&nbsp; It seems to be somewhere between <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2007/12/3rdtime-is-the.html">almost and done</a>.&nbsp; The ideas are all there, but the text is a work in progress.</p> <p>The <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project</a> developed its objectives and methods within a landscape approach to archaeological research. This approach is consistent with recent work on Cyprus and elsewhere in the Mediterranean (e.g. <a href="http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/51460580">Given, Knapp, Coleman 2003</a>). While “landscape archaeology” is open multiple definitions, our interpretation of a landscape approach views archaeology as a particular discourse located at the intersection of the cultural (i.e. textual sources, ceramic artifacts, architectural features, et c.), physical (i.e. geological, topographical, et c.), and methodological (i.e. procedural, technological, et c.) space. Applying this paradigm to the coastal zone of Pyla Village in Cyprus

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enabled PKAP to produce familiar types of archaeological data such as artifact densities and typologies, maps of architectural remains, and detailed topographies. At the same time, PKAP sought to document the team’s ongoing engagement with the tools, methods, and experience of the archaeological enterprise. While the traditional data of archaeological exploration has wellestablished venues for distribution such as journal articles, conference papers, and the summarizing monograph, documenting the experience of archaeology requires a variety of different media ranging from interactive internet based datasets to digital video recording, undergraduate and graduate level student research, and regularly updated online journals. The development of these alternative media for archaeological research complemented the reflexive atmosphere on the project where each member of the PKAP team provided a distinct perspective on archaeological knowledge. To do this, PKAP has employed a diverse array of media (each with its own character) to record and to incorporate reflexive knowledge within a synthetic archaeological landscape. The preliminary results of this ongoing research is a robust multivocal and diverse assemblage of archaeological data which, in turn, produces an archaeological landscape informed by the relationship between the archeological objects of study, the archaeologist, and the media employed for its expression. This totalizing view of the archaeological project combines craft perspectives on fieldwork and research (<a href="http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00027316%28199601%2961%3A1%3C75%3ATCOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9">Skanks and McGuire 1996</a>) and recent discussions of reflexivity (Hodder <a href="http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/45233712">2000</a>, <a href="http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/52622634">Hodder and Berggren 2003</a>) under the integrative paradigm of landscape archaeology.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Travel Notes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: travel-notes CATEGORY: Australiana CATEGORY: Travel DATE: 12/19/2007 05:11:26 AM ----BODY: <p>I spent time in four airports yesterday(s): Rome (2 hours), Frankfurt (1 hour), Singapore (1 hour), Sydney (2 hours).&#160; I kept a journal of my travels (30+ hours), but I will spare you the details of the trip except that every flight was delayed and one was cancelled.&#160; </p> <p>The most striking thing about my trip was the airports.&#160; It struck me that airports, in

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general, are incredibly homogeneous and yet substantially different from any other space in our society. Is their homogeneity an effort to create recognizable experiences in an airport -- with the promenades of shops with familiar designs and fast food eateries?&#160; They nevertheless come across (to me) as profoundly foreign perhaps because we anticipate some kind of differences between geographically locations as different as Singapore and Rome.</p> <p><a href="http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/33863376">Edward Soja developed the idea of Third Space</a> as the distinct experiential space of the post-modern city (particularly places like Los Angeles).&#160; It seems that airports is another form of this kind of space.&#160; The homogeneity of &quot;airport space&quot; largely deprives them of the distinctiveness that allows us to orient ourselves within a society and negotiate meaning.&#160; This is compounded by the reality that travel is disorientating physically for the body.&#160; The indistinct space of airports compounds the feeling of disorientation derived from changes in time zone, long hours in the air, and the anxiety so typical of travelling.&#160; </p> <p>[As I think about it more, it may well be that &quot;airport space&quot; is not necessarily indistinct, but that they are abstractly western in prototype and design irrespective of their geographical location, and therefore indistinct to my well-conditioned western perspective.&#160; And there are of course efforts to make airports unique and culturally specific -- like the small museum installations at places like the Amsterdam airport or the showers and beds found in Asian hubs like Tokyo or Hong Kong.]</p> <p>I found that the disorientation was particularly intense in the Singapore airport (after about three flights a total of about 20 hours).&#160; Christmas carols played on the P.A. system as I walked by retailers that I have only ever seen in airports (stores like Hugo Boss) interspersed between decoration festooned the palm trees in planters.&#160; The arrivals boards were the only place where I could&#160; find something distinctive -- they listed airlines and flights to places that I simply could not place (apparently Port Moresby is in Papua New Guinea) -- in some cases, I could not even place the destinations on the proper continent much less the country!).&#160;&#160; </p> <p>Finally, the disorientation is further aggravated by the diversity of individuals present in these spaces.&#160; Travellers at major international airports tend to appear in a such wide variety of dress that it is virtually impossible to discern the social codes instrumental in establishing social class or status rank in a particular society.&#160; The airport community like &quot;airport space&quot; lacks cues to orient us socially and to establish the basis for behaviour.&#160; They might be seen as producing the sense of &quot;communitas&quot; <a href="http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/6582166">Victor Turner associated with the experience of pilgrimage</a> -- that is a temporary suspension of class and status boundaries typical of member of a pilgrimage community.&#160; While individuals are distinct in appearance, dress, and behaviour, the social context for these differences is suspended making the distinctions meaningless.</p> <p>Enough ramblings (I was tempted to post my journal entries, but that was too much even for me).&#160; I'll likely post only occasionally over the next few weeks, but I will be back regularly after the first of the year.&#160; Happy holidays!</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GlassHouseSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="164" alt="GlassHouseSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GlassHouseSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0" /></a> <br /><em><font size="1">Glasshouse Mountains, Queensland, Australia</font></em></p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Travel Books STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: travel-books CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 12/16/2007 12:00:29 AM ----BODY: <p>With my travel time today (and tomorrow) approaching 35 hours (including a flight listed on the ticket as 21 hrs), I am traveling with books, but nothing too heavy.</p> <p><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/14967197">V.S. Naipaul, <em>The Enigma of Arrival</em></a>.<br><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/19351754">C. Bukowski, <em>Hollywood</em></a>.<br><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4504751">C. Bukowski, <em>Women</em></a>.</p> <p>Over the holidays, two books for my work on a <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/ep igraphy-litur.html">Postcolonial approach to Early Christian Architecture in Greece</a>:</p> <p><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43076852">D. Chakrabarty<em>, Provincializing Europe: PostColonial Thought and Historical Difference</em></a>.<br><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/59408740">G.C. Spivak, <em>A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present</em></a>.</p> <p>And two books for my <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/History%20502_Syllabus_ AU2006.htm">Graduate Historiography course</a> next fall (in which I am adding a week on Freud.&nbsp; The absence of Freud in the original version of the class rendered our discussions of 20th century historiographic developments somewhat unstable):</p> <p><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12051187">P. Gay, Freud for Historians</a>.<br><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/23941109">J. Neu, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud</a>. </p> <p>Thanks to all the people who have read and commented on my work on Blogging Archaeology/Archaeology of Blogging (<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-archae.html">part1</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-arch-1.html">part 2</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-arch-2.html">part 3</a>).&nbsp; My plan is to send off a version before the end of the holidays, so if you haven't commented yet and want to, you have plenty of time.</p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ralph Luker EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.20.249.200 URL: http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html DATE: 12/16/2007 09:39:23 AM Somewhere in your three-part piece on the archaeology of blogging, you might want to mention Cliopatria's History Blogroll, http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/9665.html . ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ralph Luker EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.20.249.200 URL: http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html DATE: 12/16/2007 09:39:51 AM Somewhere in your three-part piece on the archaeology of blogging, you might want to mention Cliopatria's History Blogroll, http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/9665.html . -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging: Metablogging the Ancient World Part 3 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blogging-arch-2 CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 12/15/2007 01:26:10 AM ----BODY: <p>This is the final installment of my three part treatment of Blogging Archaeology/Archaeology of Blogging.&nbsp; I've updated Part 2 both here and on the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2007/12/bloggingarchaeology.html">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> page.&nbsp; Thanks to everyone who made comments! <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-archae.html">Part 1 is a short history of blogging and academic blogging in particular.</a><br><a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/2007/12/bloggingarchaeology.html">Part 2 is a more focused examination blogs on archaeology.</a><br>Part 3 is a first attempt at an archaeology of

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blogging.&nbsp; <p><i>The Archaeology of Blogging</i> <p>The final section of my article will consider one of the most commonly asked questions regarding a blog. How do we know it is reliable? How do we know what blogs to trust as sources of information or informed opinions? How do we negotiate and navigate this new medium to find the kind of information that we want? And finally, how do blogs fit into the larger world of the New Media? I am going to address these questions through an archaeological approach to the blog as a medium. This “archaeology” of blogging will, hopefully, complement the typological and historical approach that this article has already employed and form a kind of theoretical and practical conclusion to this treatment of academic blogging. In using the word “archaeology” I am not referring the academic discipline of digging in the ground or even the historical study of material culture, but the much larger intellectual project of understanding the context for particular, discrete facts, groups of related ideas, and methods of inquiry. Thus, an archaeology of blogging involves contextualizing blogs as a medium of communication, as unified narratives (even if they do not fit our traditional interpretation of narrative style), and as the location of a community of individuals committed to a similar project. Since most people approach a blog by reading an individual post, my archaeology of blogging will begin by thinking about how we can put an individual post in its broader context. To do this, I will suggest that the basic context for any post derives from three basic structures: (1) the blog itself, (2) the network of hyperlinks in the post, and (3) the identity of the blogger. <p>The primary context for most posts is shared by its place within the specific blog. A blog that focuses on automobile maintenance or pet care, for example, might not be a great source of archaeological information. A blog that shows regular interest in archaeology (like the ones linked above) is more likely to be reliable. Serious and academic bloggers will often cite specific sources for the information in their blog using either parenthetical references within the post (like in this post from <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/2007/12/1930s-facebook-archaeologicalfieldwork.html">Kostis Kourelis’s blog</a>) or in a short bibliography at the end of the post (like in this post from <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/establishingvirtual-learning-worlds-for-archaeology-too/">Shawn Graham’s blog</a>). These kinds of academic practices show that blogging is sometimes thought of as an extension of a scholar’s academic production and therefore needs to conform to certain basic academic standards. While proper citations in blogs is not uncommon among academic bloggers, it is perhaps more common for bloggers simply to link their posts to supporting or relevant information elsewhere on the internet through hypertext links (like I have done in this article). These hypertext links might lead off to other blogs, to the websites of particular archaeological projects, or even to scholarly articles or books on various topics (it is now easy to link books mentioned in a blog to their entries in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/">WorldCat</a>, a massive online library database). By providing these links, a blogger assembles a range of information from across the web, and provides it with structure and context much like an archaeologist creates meaning from the various discarded objects from antiquity. The links in a post creates a virtual web that positions the blog within a larger body of information on the internet. If a blogger makes a link to a page on the web, it usually means that he or she finds that page relevant for the discussion in the post. <p>Another way to contextualize a blog and determine whether it is a useful source of information derives from considering the identity of the blogger. Even anonymous bloggers, generally, conceive of themselves as part of a larger community. The most visible indication of a blogger’s community is in his or her blogrolls. Blogrolls are lists of links

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to other blogs that most bloggers place on the side of their main page. These links bring together individuals with similar interests and perspectives. If you like a blog, it is often safe to assume that you will like the blogs listed in its blogroll. An easier, if less consistent way, to determine the identity of the blogger is through his or her “about me” or “profile” page. Among academic and serious bloggers these pages regularly include descriptions of a bloggers qualifications, links to their personal web pages, and statements of interests (two examples: here is my “<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/about.html">about me</a>” and here is David Gill’s “<a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/13164794689385933318">profile</a>”). As you can see from these examples, academic bloggers and professional archaeologists typically provide some information on our professional credentials and University affiliations. <p>By following the links in a blog, looking at its blogrolls, and reading about the blogger, a savvy internet explorer can determine the reliability of a blog as a source of information. In fact, the process of reading a blog in context is very similar to the process of making sense of archaeological material; reading a blog in context is one way to excavate a blog. If you have the time to explore the “blogosphere” you will soon discover that the best blogs provide links to a whole constellation of different sources, ideas, and perspectives. In many cases, the links and references between blogs show how bloggers engage their fellow authors in conversations. Sometimes this is organized into a blog “carnival” which pulls together different perspectives on a single topic offered by multiple blogs (a good list of a blog carnivals is provided <a href="http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/carnivalesque/">at the Carnivaleque page</a> which is run by Sharon Howard of the long-running <a href="http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/">Early Modern Notes</a> blog). Another way that bloggers interact is through “metablogs”. These are blogs about blogs! The metablog that I joined is called the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a>. There are about a dozen contributors to the blog at present and each has his or her own blog. The <a href="http://wiki.henryfarrell.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page">Academic Blog Portal</a> provides a similar list of blogs organized in a series of wikis (that is a set of easily updated, communally created webpages). Finally, many bloggers maintain pages of links to their favorite reads in either <a href="http://technorati.com/">Technorati </a>or <a href="http://del.icio.us/">del.icio.us</a>. You can read my favorite blogs at <a href="http://del.icio.us/WilliamCaraher">my del.icio.us page</a>. <p>The communal aspect of blogging is central to its development as a medium, and has made it an important contributor to the New Media movement. While rarely regarded in the same way as electronic journals or archives of archaeological data (blogs were not mentioned specifically, for example, in the <a href="http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pinax/taskforce/TaskForceFinalReport.pdf">Am erican Institute of Archaeology/American Philological Associations Report on Electronic Publications</a>), blogs nevertheless represent a vibrant medium for bringing together data from across a wide range of digital media (for example, my blog has included digital <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/06/ae rial_archaeol.html">aerial photographs</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/05/of _maps_and_mat.html">GIS data</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/py la-koutsopetr.html">resistivity data</a>, and even <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-archae.html">digital publications</a>). The proliferation of blogs over the last half-decade has demonstrated the existence of substantial cyber infrastructure available to support the fast developing social network created by the blogging community itself. Blogs like <a href="http://www.thevalve.org/">The Valve </a>which promotes itself as a “Literary Organ” have already demonstrated how a blog can become a platform for substantial intellectual exchange. By enabling comments on the blog, readers can engage the post and create a space of exchange of ideas. In fact, some of these exchanges on The Valve had appeared <a href="http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/framing_theorys_empire_event_and_ text/">as both digital and print publications</a>. The comments <a href="https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5130549244386310434&amp;postID=19 16799923098533673&amp;pli=1">on early drafts of this article</a> (particularly part 2) have shaped its contents. <p>Despsite the potential for creating interactive communities of intellectual and scholarly exchange, blogging has many of the same limitations as other forms of digital media. Blogs, in particular, can be ephemeral. Since most academic institutions do not regard blogging as a genuine academic exercise (that is something that counts toward tenure, promotion, or seniority), it is nearly always squeezed into the slim margins of an individual’s free time. Some of the best-known and most widely read bloggers <a href="http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/til_we_meet_again/">have commented on the time and energy required </a>to maintain a blog and after a run of a few years stop writing. Many blogs will remain on the web long after they have stopped being updated as an archive of writings and comments. Others vanish without a trace (like Adrian Mudock’s <i>Bread and Circuses</i>, which fortunately can be <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/adrianmurdoch.typepad.com/bread_and_cir cuses/">excavated</a> in repositories like the <a href="http://www.archive.org/">Internet Archive</a>). Individual authors might archive their writing, but the public record including the context or archaeology of the blog is no longer available. The end result is that blogs remain, at present, an ephemeral, but dynamic medium for the disseminating of archaeological knowledge. <p><i>Conclusions</i> <p><i></i>When I began my blog, I had little idea of the history, potential, or diversity of the weblog as a medium. I am not sure that I have necessarily found the proper voice for <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/pylakoutso petria_archaeological_project/index.html">my blog yet</a>. It tends to vacillate between news on my own research and archaeology projects and more general observations on matters that catch my fancy. I’ve tried to speak at least some of the time to an audience in North Daktoa where I now live and teach, and I also try to speak to my academic peers. The result, in hindsight, is a sometime bizarre blend of academic and popular. This uneven character of blogs is what distinguishes them for more formal academic writing, but is also what makes them such a compelling medium. Most academics, after all, drift between the mundane world of daily life and the obscure concerns of their research and writing. The idiosyncratic and uneven cadence of academic blogging perhaps brings this juxtaposed reality out better than anywhere else. In this regard, those of us involved in blogging archaeology and the archaeology of blogging, bring just a bit more of our life’s work to light.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: judith weingarten EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 62.11.86.4 URL: http://judithweingarten.blogspot.com DATE: 12/17/2007 03:46:41 AM That 'bizarre blend of academic and popular' is also the mark of a good lecturer, who is unafraid to mix the two to spark interest and lighten up (in both senses).! ! That and instant topicality, imo, are key blog characteristics.! ! Much to think about here. Thank you. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging: Metablogging the Ancient World Part 2 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blogging-arch-1 CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 12/14/2007 12:32:47 AM ----BODY: <p>This is the second part of my Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging article.&nbsp; I posted it yesterday on the <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog</a> and received some good comments and corrections. I've made those corrections and offer it here in version 3. <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-archae.html">Part 1 is a short history of blogging and academic blogging in particular.</a><br><a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Part 2 is a more focused examination blogs on archaeology.</a>&nbsp; <br><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/12/bl ogging-arch-2.html">Part 3 is a first attempt at an archaeology of blogging</a>.&nbsp; <p><em>Blogging Archaeology </em>[Part 2 v.3] <p>As I began to blog, I was on the lookout for models to understand the medium of blogging more clearly. I gravitated primarily toward blogs which focused on the archaeology of Mediterranean world, Classics, and Ancient History to see how my disciplinary peers were engaging the New Media. I tried to understand the (relatively recently) history of blogging the ancient world to determine whether the trends and patterns that I observed in blogging behavior in general carried over into academic blogging. <p>From what I can gather, there were archaeology blogs in the first wave of intensive blogging. In the late 1990s several projects by both professional and avocational archaeologists were underway to

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expand classics and archaeology into the digital realm. Ross Scaife at the University of Kentucky established The <a href="http://www.stoa.org/">Stoa Consortium</a> in 1997, and by 2003 Scaife and others were running a blog that today it is the main portal into the remarkable collection of material collected by that project. David Meadows efforts at the <a href="http://www.atriummedia.com/rogueclassicism/">Rogueclassicism</a> began in the late 1990s with a news group. By the early 2000s, it had become transformed into a blog and continues to this day to provide a compendium of links, news stories, and witty remarks on the classical world and archaeology. Dorothy King’s <a href="http://phdiva.blogspot.com/">Ph.Diva blog</a>, which is now accessible by invitation only, debuted in 2001, and for over 5 years and provided astute commentary on archaeological and cultural maters from her base in London. Avocational archaeologists and enthusiasts likewise brought their passion for archaeological news to the web. <a href="http://www.archaeologica.org/NewsPage.htm">Archaeologica News</a> began in the early years of the century, and still offers links to archaeological news from around the world. <p>With the success of these “early adopters”, the great expansion of archaeological blogs began in 2002. A convenient barometer of the visibility of weblogs is <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/index/multimedia.html#web">Archaeology Magazine’s review of websites</a> of interest to both professional archaeologists and the general public. They posted a two part review of archaeology websites in 1997 (<a href="http://www.archaeology.org/9701/etc/multimedia.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/9703/etc/multimedia.html">here</a>) and blogs are not mentioned (as might be expected at such an early date). By <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/0009/etc/multimedia.html">2000</a>, they mention the<a href="http://anthropology.tamu.edu/news.htm"> anthropology new page at Texas A&amp;M </a>which is essentially in the form of an early blog and <a href="http://archaeology.about.com/">About.com’s archaeology page</a> which featured a blog by archaeologist <a href="http://archaeology.about.com/b/">Kris Hirst</a> from the late 1990s. In <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/0209/reviews/blog.html">2002</a>, however, they dedicated an entire web review to the blog <a href="http://www.archaeology.blogspot.com/">ArchaeologyOnline</a> which lists newsworthy items for archaeologists with short commentaries. By this time, the number and diversity of archaeological blogs had expanded greatly. <p>Today the variety is almost limitless. Popular and newsy blogs like<a href="http://romanarch.blogspot.com/"> Roman Times</a>, <a href="http://www.archaeoblog.blogspot.com/">Archaeoblog</a>, <a href="http://remotecentral.blogspot.com/">remote central</a>, or <a href="http://www.archaeology.eu.com/weblog/">Archaeology in Europe</a> continue the tradition of avocational archaeologists posting news, notes, and links for anyone interested; archaeologist, Ioannis Georganas, provides news and notes from a wide range of sources on his blog <a href="http://medarch.blogspot.com/">Mediterranean Archaeology</a>. Blogs like <a href="http://www.telecomtally.com/blog/">Abnormal Interest</a> and <a href="http://neonostalgia.com/weblog/">Thoughts on Antiquity</a> have a more varied approach than traditional news blogs, interspersing news links with useful and sometimes amusing commentary on archaeological and ancient topics. <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/">Aardvaraeology</a>, Martin Rundkvist’s quirky and popular Swedish blog, provides an opinionated perspective on scientific archaeology with a particular focus on Scandinavia. Judith Weingarten’s blog <a href="http://judithweingarten.blogspot.com/">Zenobia</a> uses her smooth style

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to expand on the topic of her recent popular book <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/159514144&amp;referer=brief_results">The World As it Was </a></i>which is part of a projected three part work of historical fictional called <i><a href="http://www.zenobia.tv/site/">Chronicle of Zenobia The Rebel Queen</a></i>; her blog provides general information on the ancient Near East and Palmyra. Several blogs like Louise Hitchcock’s <a href="http://lahconfidential.blogspot.com/">LA(H) Confidential</a> and <a href="http://adventureswithyandm.blogspot.com/">Adventures with Yo and Mo </a>provide insights into life as a working archaeologist both during the season and during the rest of the year. Mary Beard’s <a href="http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/">A Don’s Life</a>, hosted by the <a href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/ ">Times Literary Supplement</a>, is perhaps in a league of its own, making insightful and amusing comment on both ancient and contemporary topics. Most of these blogs are geared toward the educated public although even the most jaded academic will often find useful links and insights on their pages. <p>At the same time, there is a growing collection of genuinely academic blogs, many of which continue discussions from books or articles into the blogosphere and adopt a less formal, but no less serious tone. The best example of this genre is David Gill’s <a href="http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/">Looting Matters</a> which is an extension of his serious research interest into archaeological ethics and cultural property (joining the <a href="http://illicit-culturalproperty.blogspot.com/">Illicit Cultural Property Blog</a> and <a href="http://safecorner.savingantiquities.org/">SafeCorner</a> to track affairs involving archaeological looting and the trafficking of illegal antiquities). Troels Myrup Kristensen’s blog <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm </a>details his archaeological travels in the Mediterranean with special attention to incidents of the destruction of pagan statues by Christians in the Late Antique period. Kostis Kourelis’s new blog <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, Situations</a> is set to revolve loosely around his interest in the intellectual and cultural history of archaeology and the study of material culture. Alun Salt’s <a href="http://clioaudio.com/">Clioaudio</a> ranges freely across the discipline, but often returns to his interest in archaeology and archaeoastronomy. The same breadth and academic feel comes through in <a href="http://archaeolog.org/">Archaeolog</a> which is a group blog hosted by Stanford’s MetaMedia Lab. <p>Even more specialized blogs give the public a view into rarified or highly specialized fields. <a href="http://www.currentepigraphy.org/">Current Epigraphy</a> or <a href="http://papyrology.blogspot.com/">What’s New in Papyrology</a> disseminate information on inscriptions and papyrology for experts in these disciplines. In addition, Current Epigraphy has become a platform for collaborative readings of inscriptions by bringing together scholars from all over the world to help solve epigraphic conundrums. Archaeologist can also keep track of the acquisitions of the Blegen Library at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in their <a href="http://blegen.blogspot.com/">Blegen Library Blog</a>. New online resources for scholars often appear at <a href="http://joliheroics.blogspot.com/">Joint Library of the Hellenic &amp; Roman Societies / Institute of Classical Studies Library Blog</a> as well. Users of the massive Project Dyabola database can follow their progress through their <a href="http://www.dyabola.de/blog/">Project Dyabola Blog</a>. <a href="http://persepolistablets.blogspot.com/">The Persepolis Fortification Archive Project</a> also disseminates updates and new through a blog. <p>These

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specialized blogs will not be of interest to everyone, but they have tapped into the rich potential of digital media to communicate, inspire, and promote collaborative scholarship. Shawn Graham’s innovative <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist </a>shows how a whole range of digital media can assist an archaeologist in research and teaching. Sebastian Heath’s blog <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/">Mediterranean Ceramics</a> explores the intersection of the study of Mediterranean ceramics and the resources available on the internet. Tom Elliot, the director of the <a href="http://www.unc.edu/awmc/pleiades.html">Pleiades Project</a> which brings together geographic and historical information for ancient places across the Mediterranean, makes occasional posts at his <a href="http://horothesia.blogspot.com/">horothesia</a> blog. His main interest is developing innovative and open methods to disseminate archaeological and historical data. Scott Moore’s <a href="http://www.ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings</a> has developed a serious focus on archaeology in the virtual world of Second Life. <a href="http://www.charleswatkinson.com/">Charles Watkinson</a>, the director of publications at the American School of Classical Studies maintains an occasional blog on “communication in the humanities and social sciences.” <a href="http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog/">Digging Digitially</a> provides some great info on digital archaeology as the “Semioffical” news source for the SAA’s Digital Data Interest Group. The <a href="http://okapi.wordpress.com/blog/">Okapi Project’s blog </a>from the University of California at Berkeley includes regular reports on their innovative efforts to disseminate academic research through digital media – including their work with the Çatalhöyük excavations. <p>The ease of updating a weblog makes it a useful tool for archaeological field projects to use when they are in the field. Daily or weekly updates can convey the immediate excitement of a new discovery. My project, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, maintained two weblogs during the 2007 season: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">one for our graduate students</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/pylakoutso petria_archaeological_project/index.html">one for the senior staff</a> (which it continues to maintain through the off season). Mia Ridge and Jason Quinlan<a href="http://www.catalhoyuk.com/blog/"> blogged their experiences from Çatalhöyük</a>. Penn State students, Amanda Iacobelli, Jeff Rop, and Ben Bradshaw, described their work Cilician Plain Survey Project in a blog called <a href="http://realtimearchaeology.blogspot.com/">Real Time Archaeology</a>. <a href="http://gath.wordpress.com/">The Tell es-Safi/Gath Excavations Official (and Unofficial) Weblog </a>keeps their team members informed about events both during and after the field seasons. <a href="http://events.wessexarch.co.uk/">Wessex Archaeology</a> is among the most sophisticated examples of this providing not only text blogs but also regular podcasts. <a href="http://porttobacco.blogspot.com/">The Port Tobacco Archaeological Project</a> also maintains a great blog that tracks their progress on an 18th century site in Maryland. For the past several years <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/digs.html">Archaeology Magazine has hosted “Interactive Digs”</a> which, although not exactly a blog, similarly let you follow the weekly or daily events of several ongoing archaeological projects. <p>Finally, an increasing number of institutions are maintaining blogs to keep you informed on events or programs. <a href="http://www.thewalters.org/blog/">Gary Vikan, </a>the curator of the Walters Art Museum, whose blog deals widely with matters involving the world of

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art, museums, and ancient culture. The University of Missouri at Columbia maintains a blog called <a href="http://maa.missouri.edu/blog/">Musings</a> that keeps folks up to date on the goings on at the Museum of Art and Archaeology. George Washington University‚Äôs <a href="http://csllgwu.edublogs.org/">Classics and Semitic Studies</a> program blog touches upon events in their program but also provides some helpful information for prospective graduate students in Classics, Archaeology, or Ancient History (like describing what a Post-Bacc program actually is!). <a href="http://tulaneclassics.blogspot.com/">Tulane University‚Äôs Classics Department</a> began a blog in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and it continues to provide helpful information on that program‚Äôs affairs. The <a href="http://www.lateantiquity.dk/">Art and Social Identities Program</a> at Aarhus University in Denmark also updates a blog making available the events sponsored by that program as does the <a href="http://zypern-hamburg.blogspot.com/">Archaeological Institute at the University of Hamburg</a> (in German). <p>While archaeologists have not yet explored completely the usefulness of blogs for the instantaneous publishing of archaeological data, figures, photos, or even videos, it is clear that the ease in creating and maintaining weblogs will make them increasingly appealing options for archaeologists seeking to create a more transparent approach to fieldwork and research. For members of the public, avocational archaeologists, and professional archaeologists and academics, blogging archaeology is a good and expanding way of both participating in and keeping abreast of new research in the discipline.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: http://blegen.blogspot.com DATE: 12/14/2007 05:41:40 AM Really good stuff Bill, and I see you're getting excellent reactions. I might also mention my What's New in Abzu (http://www.bloglines.com/blog/AbzuNew) which is a clip blog constructed from entries I make in Abzu (http:///www.etana.org/abzu), which is not a blog, but has an RSS feed. What's new delivers a lot of information about emerging online publication in Ancient Studies. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: david meadows EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 209.161.214.76 URL: http://www.atrium-media.com/rogueclassicism DATE: 01/08/2008 06:42:47 PM Hi Bill,! !

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Thanks for the mention and sorry I took so long to see it (i'm still working through a backlog of stuff); it's probably too late, but rogueclassicism actually began in 2003 as a sort of Classics-specific outgrowth of my Explorator newsletter (which is now in its tenth year). Explorator was a sort of 'parallel' offshoot of my Ancient World on Television listings (which I think are in their 15th or 16th year now) ... ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: david meadows EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 209.161.214.76 URL: http://www.atrium-media.com/rogueclassicism DATE: 01/08/2008 06:43:26 PM Hi Bill,! ! Thanks for the mention and sorry I took so long to see it (i'm still working through a backlog of stuff); it's probably too late, but rogueclassicism actually began in 2003 as a sort of Classics-specific outgrowth of my Explorator newsletter (which is now in its tenth year). Explorator was a sort of 'parallel' offshoot of my Ancient World on Television listings (which I think are in their 15th or 16th year now) ... ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mia EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 77.99.182.110 URL: http://openobjects.blogspot.com/ DATE: 03/06/2008 01:48:35 PM Hi,! ! thanks for the link! Unfortunately, we haven't updated the Catalhoyuk blog in a while, but you can check out http://www.catalhoyuk.com/ for links to on-going projects.! ! I've also got more recent posts about Catalhoyuk at http://openobjects.blogspot.com/search/label/archaeology! ! cheers, Mia -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging: Metablogging the Ancient World STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: blogging-archae CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 12/13/2007 01:26:42 AM ----BODY: <p align="left">When I first began this blog, I began to collect articles on blogging in the academic world with the idea of putting together, at some point

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a short article for some popular venue on blogging the ancient world.&nbsp; I have a first draft of my thoughts on blogging ready now and I will serialize it here over the next few days.&nbsp; <p align="left">Part 1 is a short history of blogging and academic blogging in particular.<br>Part 2 is a more focused examination blogs on archaeology.&nbsp; <br>Part 3 is a first attempt at an archaeology of blogging.&nbsp; <p align="left">You are, as always, invited to leave comments and make suggestions! <p align="center"><strong>Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging:<br>Metablogging the Ancient World</strong></p> <p><i>Introduction</i> <p><i></i> <p>When I decided that our archaeological project in Cyprus needed a blog, I am not sure that I had ever read weblog on a regular basis. Like most Americans, I was familiar with the idea of a weblog and had a rather an idea of how they actually function. Moreover, I had heard the famous success stories about how intrepid bloggers had laid low the mighty taking on the likes of Trent Lott and <i>60 Minutes</i>, and creating the “buzz” that propelled candidates like Howard Dean to the national spotlight. While I was pretty sure that my blog wouldn’t challenge the powerful or change the landscape of American politics, the stories about the success of blogs suggested that the medium had potential for reaching a large audience of people who might be interested in a small, but energetic archaeological project on the south coast of Cyprus. <p>As an academic who studies the past for a living, I find it difficult to begin any project without a theoretic, historical, and practical foundation. This meant that I had to understand what a weblog was in the abstract, how they came to be, and how they functioned. As I did this, the real potential of the medium became apparent. Weblogs could bridge the gap between working archeologists and the interested public. In this way, weblogs are part of a larger movement by archaeologists toward engaging the New Media and recognizing its potential for changing how archaeologists talk to one another, scholars in allied fields (like Classics, history, art history, and anthropology), and, perhaps most importantly, the general public. The opportunity to engage the general public might be all the more important as sudden re-emergence of untrained archaeological enthusiasts, bent on discovering everything from Atlantis to Noah’s Arc, has absorbed public money and attention at the expense of rigorous, systematic archaeological research (see Eric Cline’s recent discussion in the Boston Globe and reprinted <a href="http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/fauxark/">here</a>). Engaging our colleagues and the public in new ways will not spell the end of venerable print venues like <i><a href="http://www.ajaonline.org/">American Journal or Archaeology</a></i>, <i>Hesperia</i>, or the <i>Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology,</i> but the parallel emergence of a more dynamic and flexible electronic media could improve access to serious and rigorous archaeological information and discussions. The risk involved in engaging such New Media opportunities like the weblogs is minimal. They are easy to update and maintain, increasingly capable of accommodate a wide range of media from photographs, to line drawings, to video and audio clips, and, most importantly, cheap!. <p><i>The Weblog. History and Taxonomy.</i> <p>Like many aspects of the New Media movement, weblog or blog defies easy definition. Some scholars, particularly New Media and literary critics like danah boyd (whose long running weblog is called <a href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/">apophenia</a>) have suggested argued that a weblog is, in fact, a technology or a medium of communications that is so highly malleable that it is distinctly capable of supporting a wide range of communicative strategies (<i><a href="http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/boyd.shtml">Reconstruction 6 (2006)</a></i>) . Other scholar bloggers, like Jill Walker Rettberg at the wellknown blog <a href="http://jilltxt.net/">Jill/txt</a>, see in weblogs sufficient structural regularity to enable the technique of presentation to frame her

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definition of the medium (<a href="http://jilltxt.net/archives/blog_theorising/final_version_of_weblog_defini tion.html">her definition is here</a>). From the perspective of a newcomer to blogging, I find the formal definition can better accommodate my impressions of the medium. Consequently, my working definition owes much to Welker Rettberg’s efforts and summarizes the most common or canonical type of weblog which owes its form increasingly to the standard setups provided by various weblog applications and services available on the web (<a href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger</a>, <a href="http://www.typepad.com/">TypePad</a>, <a href="http://wordpress.org/">Wordpress</a>, et c.). <p>Weblogs are regularly updated webpage. The updates are organized as individual posts. A typical post is short (&gt;1500 words) and largely textual – although with more powerful computers and software and more robust internet connections, weblogs have come more frequently to include photographs and even video. Posts are organized in several ways. Most commonly posts appear in reverse chronological order with the most recent post appearing at the top of the weblogs main page. In addition (and somewhat at odds with) the chronological element, weblogs typically have ancillary organizational strategies; the most typical are list of categories or, in more sophisticated blogs, “tags” which enables to reader to read together all the posts on a particular topic. The primary organization, then, of a weblog is chronological, but the secondary cataloguing scheme allows a reader to engage a topic or a narrative through a topical arrangement. The primacy of chronological organization distinguishes a weblog from, say, a wiki which is another form of easily updated webpage. While most wikis record changes to the page, they are not usually set up to allow a reader to follow a narrative or theme in the modifications. <p>In most cases the text of a weblog, like most web pages, uses hyperlinks (using HTML or hypertext markup langauge) to link the text of the blog to other pages either in other posts within the weblog or to elsewhere on the web. The hyperlinks internal to the individual posts are typically complemented by lists of links to other weblogs and webpages in a sidebar. The links within the post form a kind of citation style establishing the basis for claims within the weblog and making explicit at least some part of the post’s larger intellectual context. The peripheral “blogrolls” establish a particular weblog within a community of bloggers. The blogroll, along with similarities in structure and format among weblogs, forms a basic structuring element for weblogs creating what some have termed “the blogosphere”. <p>Many of the characteristics of a weblog today are, as one might expect, historical or <i>archaeological</i> in that they preserve older practices among weblog authors. The earliest weblogs appeared on the internet in the mid 1990s (a brief history is <a href="http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html">here</a>). Traditionally the honor of being the first “blogger” goes to <a href="http://www.links.net/">Justin Hall</a> whose page Justin’s Home Page and later Links from the Underground began in 1994. By the late 1990s a few dozen serious webloggers had appeared on the internet. The term weblog is most commonly traced to Jorn Barger who referred to his iconic site <a href="http://www.robotwisdom.com/#top">Robot Wisdom</a> as a weblog in 1997. Barger’s and Halls’ weblogs, and many of their early counterparts, shared only few features with the weblogs today. They consisted primarily of links to other sites on the internet interspersed with short commentary. Robot Wisdom still preserves the feel of an early weblog. The limitation of bandwidth, server space, and necessity of coding each webpage in HTML (rather through a wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) interface like many web pages today) encouraged concise and pithy posts and copious links. <p>As the interface between the

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author and the HTML code of the website became easier, webblogs began to include more commentary and, in general, fewer links, but the practice of linking is still more common in weblogs than on the web in general. The gradual expansion of the number of weblogs corresponded to an increasingly diverse interpretation of the medium. As the medium of the weblog developed, webloggers developed more personalized styles and their weblogs increasingly reflected the personality of their author. By the later 1990s, the growing number and diversity of weblogs supported a small but dedicated weblogging community. Authors frequently linked to each other’s weblogs and this formed the predecessors to the “blogrolls” that run along the margins of most blogs today. Thus from the start, weblogging was seen as a communal and collective enterprise. <p>The revolution in the medium came when a company called Pyra Labs created the <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger</a> interface in August of 1999. This easy to use interface inspired a massive expansion of the medium. (At around the same time, <a href="http://www.peterme.com/">Peter Merholz </a>shortened term weblog to blog giving rise to many of its dervatives including blogger and blogosphere). The resulting blogs ranged widely from the intensely personal to the political and commercial. Subsequently numerous other blogging interfaces became available allowing greater customization with more robust and enhance capabilities. Most blogs now have enabled a comments area which transforms them from a passive list of links and commentary to active area for exchange between the reader and the author. As blogs can increasingly accommodate documents, photographs, music clips and even video, they allow for particularly dynamic interfaces between author and reader. As one would expect the total number of blogs expanded rapidly and today number in the tens of millions! <p>The technology provided by blogging software and dedicated often free hosting enabled a whole range of blogging genres to emerge ranging from personal internet journals to short, but formed academic notes, to restaurant, movie, book, and software reviews. At the top of the blogging food chain, of course, are the political blogs, like the famous <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/">Daily Kos</a>, which have shown their ability to keep issues in the public eye, raise money, and even cut the mighty down to size. The diversity of types of blogs has reinforced a view of the weblog as a medium rather than a distinct genre and made exploring the blogosphere both more challenging and more enriching as result. <p><i>Blogging and Academia</i> <p>In some ways the academic world has been slow to take note of the burgeoning popularity of the blog as a medium of communication. On the one hand, blogging by academics provided them another method for reaching out to a public beyond the University. It may even allow for the kind of engagement characteristic of early in the previous century when academics appeared regularly in newspapers, on the radio, or even in the cabinets of public officials using their academic training and distinct methods to influence debates in the public sphere. In this regard, the medium of blogging could well offer a distinct tonic to the waning prestige and cultural power of the academic community. Blogging provided a way for academics to return to the public sphere outside the increasingly commodified confines of the national media. <p>At the same time, the fragmented landscape of the New Media has compelled academics to re-imagine their audience in complex new ways. When an academic writes an article for a professional or an academic monograph, for example, he or she can assume a certain kind of reader. With a blog, it is difficult to anticipate the audience and therefore, to determine the appropriate tone and even content for postings. This has been the biggest challenge for me and my blog: imagining who, exactly, would be interested in what I have to say, and how do I communicate it effectively. <p>The first tentative first steps of the academic community into blogging have gradually quickened over the course of the decade. Initially the best known

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blogs in the academic world were those seen as subversive. Anonymous blogs like the <a href="http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/">Invisible Adjunct</a> or <a href="http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/">Bitch Ph.D.</a> provided insights into some of the less idyllic and idealistic aspects of academic life. Even as late as 2005, <a href="http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm">an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education</a> by the pseudonymous Ivan Tribble wrote about the danger of blogs to young faculty who were on the job market. There also continues to be an intellectual debate regarding the significance of academic blogging (some salient points are voiced by Adam Kotsko in two articles <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/01/kotsko">here</a> and <a href="http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/2006/05/on-academic-bloggingdiagnosis.html">here</a> with a response from Scott Eric Kaufman <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/01/kaufman">here</a>), but I suspect that the medium is still too new and experimental to be dismissed out of hand. <p>In fact, the proliferation of blogs over the last 5 years has led to remarkably diverse interpretations of the media. In general, with the expansion of the blogosphere it has become more tame and less subversive. The growing acceptance of blogging as another facet of academic discourse is perhaps best seen in its appearance as a topic discussion at academic conferences. Both the <a href="http://www.historians.org/">AHA</a> and the <a href="http://www.mla.org/">MLA </a>have featured panels on blogging that attracted considerable attention in the “blogosphere,” in academic circles, and in the traditional media as well. <a href="http://www.historians.org/annual/2006/06program/SessionDisplay.cfm?Session ID=82">AHA panel </a>shined light on the intellectual significance of blogs by historians like the blog called <a href="http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html">Cliopatria</a> at the <a href="http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html">History News Network</a> hosted by George Mason University (for a brief overview and history of historians blogging see <a href="http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2005/0505/0505tec1.cfm?pv=y" >Ralph Luker, “Were there blog enough and time” Perspectives 43.4 (2005)</a>). For the last three years, the Cliopatria group has made awards to blogs of particular substance, such as historian Mark Grimsley’s <a href="http://warhistorian.org/wordpress/">Blog Them out of the Stone Age</a>, which chronicles, among other things, Grimsley’s efforts to bring traditional Military History into dialogue with more theoretically inclined types of historical inquiry. <a href="http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/ano/">Bloggers from the MLA </a>have shown an even wider range of uses for the blogosphere. Michael Bérubé whose now defunct, <a href="http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog">Le Blog Bérubé</a>, engaged in a wide ranging commentary on everything from politics to academic life to literary theory. <a href="http://jilltxt.net/">Jill/txt</a>, cited earlier, explores the interaction between literary, aesthetics, and New Media studies. Several blogging journals like <a href="http://www.thevalve.org/">The Valve</a> or those hosted by the online trade journal, <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/blogs">Inside Higher Ed</a>, similarly bridge the gap between academic research, social commentary, and public life. The dominant characteristic of many of these academic blogs is that they feature intellectually substantial posts often with full academic citations, careful argumentation, and, in some cases, vigorous conversations in their comments.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Corinthians at the AIA STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: corinthians-at CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 12/12/2007 06:06:06 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a quick hit today (posted retroactively).&nbsp; Jamie Donati has complained about not appearing in my blog.&nbsp; Well, here he is.&nbsp; I saw him and Theo Kopestonsky give practice runs through their AIA papers.&nbsp; Both will give papers in the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/ai a-annual-meet.html">cleverly</a> <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/59019454">named</a>: <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am p;sid=5C">Corinthian Horizons: Space, Society and the Sacred in Ancient Corinth</a> organized by Amelia Brown and Jamie Donati.&nbsp; Jamie's paper collated and reassessed the evidence for the long standing problem of the Classical-Archaic agora at Corinth.&nbsp; Theo's paper put the Kokkinovrysi Figurine Deposit found at a small stele shrine west of the ancient city center into archaeological and religious context.&nbsp; The papers were good, careful, and added to our knowledge of Ancient Corinth.&nbsp; Be sure the check them out at the AIA.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Epigraphy, Liturgy, and Imperial Policy on the Justinianic Isthmus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: epigraphy-litur CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Late Antiquity

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DATE: 12/11/2007 03:26:15 AM ----BODY: <p>I have just completed an article entitled, "Epigraphy, Liturgy, and Imperial Policy on the Justinianic Isthmus" and sent it off for possible inclusion in a published conference proceedings.&nbsp; The article looked at this Late Antique inscription from Isthmia:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_15.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_12.png" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">I originally delivered the paper at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/conferences/isthmia.htm">Half Century on the Isthmus Conference</a> this past summer.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/conferences/isthmia.htm"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="198" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_16.png" width="154" align="left" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">I've been working on this paper for about 5 years now. I originally gave a version of it as a Tea Talk here at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies</a> in the Spring of 2003.&nbsp; I then converted it into an article which looked like <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/files/Reje ctedEpigraphyArticle_Caraher.pdf">this</a> and was rejected everywhere.&nbsp; I then modified its focus and delivered it at the Isthmus Conference this summer looking like <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/files/Isth miaPaper-Truncated_20minFINAL.pdf">this</a>.&nbsp; After considerably more work, I've managed to turn it into <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/files/Cara her_HalfCenturyontheIsthmus_December2007.pdf">this</a>.</p> <p align="left">The final product is probably better than my first effort on this topic (after 4 years of additional though!).&nbsp; Moreover, it should set up nicely my research in the spring, which will seek to introduce the concept of hybridity (as articulated by post-colonial theorists like Homi Bhabha) to the study of Early Christian architecture and liturgy in Greece.&nbsp; The goal of "Epigraphy, Liturgy, and Imperial Policy" was to establish that Justinian sought to project imperial authority on the Isthmus through the use of the Constantinopolitan version of the liturgy.&nbsp; The imperially funded Lechaion basilica alludes to the Constantinopolitan rite through the presence of a solea linking the ambo to the chancel.&nbsp; The text shown above (IG IV, 204 for those of you with a scorecard) likewise shows some indication of the Constantinopolitan right.&nbsp; This would have been particularly controversial in Greece which in the 6th century ecclesiastically part of the west.</p> <p align="left">If we accept that the liturgy can be used to project authority (either imperial or, presumably, ecclesiastical), we can begin to consider how these efforts to construct authority were understood by the community.&nbsp; Bhabha's idea of the hybrid, from what I understand, suggests that individual actors when confronted with external (colonial) sources of authority found ways to interpret, negotiate and in some cases (re)deploy it for their own benefit.&nbsp; This process, which creates the empowered, colonial hybrid, promotes a qualitatively new, but undiminished voice for the colonial

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subject.&nbsp; For Greece, this process creates the voice which will become, by the Early and Middle Byzantine period, the dominant component of Christian Greek culture. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Georgios Lampakis, Thrace-Constantinople (1902) at the Byzantine and Christian Museum STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: georgios-lampak CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 12/10/2007 12:46:33 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_14.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px; border-right-width: 0px" height="244" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_11.png" width="186" align="right" border="0"></a>I take the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> to Athens' Byzantine and Christian Museum in January when we all return from our holiday travels.&nbsp; To make the week that I return better, I have begun thinking about how I will present the museum over the past week.&nbsp; This winter the museum is hosting an exhibit of Georgios Lampakis early 20th century photographs from Thrace.&nbsp; Lampakis was among the founders of the <a href="http://www.chae.gr/en/index.html">Christian Archaeological Society</a> and dedicated photographer who used his photos to document Byzantine and PostByzantine monuments and objects throughout Greece (his journals and photographs were published in first series of <a href="http://www.chae.gr/en/400.html">the Deltion of the Christian Archaeological Society</a> which ran from 18921911).&nbsp; He was also instrumental in the establishment of the collection of Early Christian and Byzantine antiquities that would later form the core of the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens.&nbsp; Trained as theologian in Athens and an archaeologist in Germany, Lampakis blended ideas of European romanticism with Byzantine Orthodox theology to envision a Greek state that was historically and spiritually coterminus with the Church.</p> <p>In 1902, he traveled through Thrace, which was part of the Ottoman Empire, to Constantinople documenting the Byzantine monuments there and in the capital.&nbsp; His photos from the towns of Ainos, Didymoteicho, Adrianople, and Constantinople capture not only the

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significant monuments in those place, some of which are now lost, but also the feeling of these early 20th century Ottoman Balkan towns with their narrow streets and low slung neighborhoods clustered around the tall domes of churches and the minarets mosques.&nbsp; (His photos of the Eastern Corinthia -particularly the harbor at Kenchreai -- some of which were displayed at the relatively recent retrospective on the Byzantine and Christian Museums capture moments of a lost landscape.)</p> <p>What was interesting to me was that Lampakis trip was sponsored in part by the Greek government and in part by the Christian Archaeological Society.&nbsp; His goal of documenting the Byzantine monuments was very similar to work of the Early Travelers in Greece who sought to document the remains of antiquity.&nbsp; The efforts of these travelers to inventory the antiquities (and in some cases the modern remains) of Greece were an aspect of the imperialist impulses that ultimately led to the appearance of the Greek state as an outpost of the West on the border of the Orient.&nbsp; With the establishment of the Greek State, Classical antiquities acquired tremendous importance as the physical validation of Greece's place among the Western nations and symbols of national identity.</p> <p>By the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, the Byzantine past of Greece was given a seat at the able.&nbsp; Fueled perhaps in part by the growing cynicism toward the Western European interpretation of Greek history and the growing confidence of Greek intellectuals (particularly Konstantinos Paparregopoulos), Greece's Byzantine past came to the fore.&nbsp; Their interpretation of the Byzantine heritage of Greece, however, set its eyes not only on Byzantine monuments within the border of the Greek state, but those among the Greek communities of the Ottoman empire and especially in Constantinople.&nbsp; Lampakis efforts to photograph the monuments of Thrace and Constantinople was, like the early Western travelers to Greece, an effort to secure the place of these monuments in the revised narrative of Greek national history.&nbsp; This same impulse influenced the development of the Byzantine and Christian Museum, which even today intersperses Byzantine antiquities with images of the churches of Constantinople.</p> <p>Ultimately the aspirations of some Greek intellectuals and politicians to unite the Greek communities of the Mediterranean in a single state ended in tragic results in 1922.&nbsp; The place of Byzantium in the Greek state's national identity has by then been secured and was developed brilliantly in the Byzantine Museum's first independent iteration under George A. Soteriou.&nbsp; While the recent changes at the Museum offers a somewhat different perspective on the Byzantine history of Greece, the photographs of Lampakis should serve as a good introduction to of the complex history of Byzantium in the formation of the Greek state.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Bibliography</p> <p>I. Katsaridou and K. Biliouri, "Representing Byzantium: the Narratives of the Byzantine Past in Greek National Museums," <a title="http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/022/016/index.html" href="http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/022/016/index.html">http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/022/ 016/index.html</a></p> <p>D. Ricks and P. Magdalino, eds., <em>Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity</em>. Aldershot: 1998. <p><em>Ο Κόσμος Του Βυζαντινού Μουσείου</em>. Αθήνα 2004.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: One more PKAP note... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: one-more-pkap-n CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 12/09/2007 08:56:13 AM ----BODY: <p>I forget to mention a bonus part of the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/multimedia.htm">PKAP Multimedia Extravaganza</a>.&nbsp; The project has inspired two "rock 'n' roll" singles -<em>This is Cyprus</em> and <em>Fieldwork Song </em>-- complements of <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> Alumnus Brice Pearce and his band Drake's Folly.&nbsp; Listen to them on their <a href="http://myspace.com/drakesfolly">MySpace page</a>.&nbsp; (<a href="http://www.catalhoyuk.com/">Çatalhöyük</a> has <a href="http://okapi.dreamhosters.com/remixing/mainpage.html">remixing</a>; <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> has rock 'n' roll).&nbsp; We like to think that the open and experimental atmosphere at PKAP promotes a kind of creativity that goes far beyond the discipline of archaeology.&nbsp; Hopefully we can convince Brice to let us post them for download on the PKAP page soon.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project Mid-Winter Update STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetr CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 12/08/2007 01:02:17 AM ----BODY: <p>It's now nearly 6 months (!!) since the end of the PKAP field season in June.&nbsp; The entire <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> team has been particularly focused this "off season" preparing for a major season of field work next summer that will not only complete the first phase of fieldwork

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in coastal hinterland of Pyla village, but also establish a sound foundation for a larger regional study.&nbsp; To summarize our off season work:</p> <p>1. Grant Applications.&nbsp; We've completed 3 major external grant applications for funding in the 2008 field season and have received one already.&nbsp; We'll hear from the other two in late winter or early spring.&nbsp; </p> <p>2. Conference Papers.&nbsp; We presented at the Byzantine Studies Conference in October at a panel that I organized dedicated to the archaeology of Medieval and Byzantine Cyprus.&nbsp; The paper is <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/publications/papers/2007%20BSC%20Paper%20fina l.pdf">here</a> and it is a fair good representation of where our research is right now.&nbsp; We are presently planning our poster for the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300">AIA in Chicago</a>.&nbsp; We're scheduled for <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am p;sid=1J">Friday, January 4, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM.</a></p> <p>3. Publications.&nbsp; We just completed editing the page proofs for our article in the 2007 <em>Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus</em>.&nbsp; This article provides a nice summary of our survey at Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em>.&nbsp; We have completed the "red line" proofs for a more popular offering to appear in <em><a href="http://www.asor.org/pubs/nea/index.html">Near Eastern Archaeology</a> </em>(in a two-issue volume on American Archaeology in Cyprus).&nbsp; Finally and perhaps most importantly, we have a <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/files/pyla koutsopetria_an_ancient_harbor_town_in_southeast_cyprus.pdf">tentative title and table of contents</a> for the monograph and have about 150 pages of text.&nbsp; It's all subject to change, of course, but we've at least put words on paper.&nbsp; This spring we plan to complete the first draft of the catalogue of survey pottery.</p> <p>4. PKAP in cyberspace.&nbsp; We've revamped the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> website and updated it with our most <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html">recent GIS data</a> and <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/publications/papers.htm">papers</a>.&nbsp; Scott has added some new multimedia aspects including a growing list of <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/podcasts/podcasts.htm">podcasts</a>.&nbsp; He has also developed a PKAP presence in <a href="http://secondlife.com/">Second Life</a> which by next spring will include a mock up of the site and allow us to conduct a virtual orientation for our students.&nbsp; Scott is chronicling his ongoing work on archaeology and pedagogy in SL at his weblog <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings</a>.&nbsp; Katie Pettegrew has kindly organized a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8860215294">PKAP Facebook page</a> that allows us to communicate quickly with the PKAP community. </p> <p>5. Data analysis.&nbsp; Michael Brown has been working on the resistivity data that he, John Hunt and Mat Dalton collected from Vigla last year.&nbsp; Soon we will be able to integrate our low altitude aerial photography (courtesy of the RAF) (1), our geophysical data (2), and our GIS map of the Late Roman fortification walls (3) with our intensive survey data to provide a comprehensive, non-destructive analysis of the site.&nbsp; If we get permission to excavate this summer, we will be able to ground truth this remote data and minimize the exposure and damage to the site.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ViglaSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="284" alt="ViglaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/ViglaSM_thumb.jpg" width="424" border="0"></a> [1]</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_12.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="207" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_9.png" width="173" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_13.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="207" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_10.png" width="254" border="0"></a> [2]</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ViglaWalls.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="308" alt="ViglaWalls" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ViglaWalls_thumb.jpg" width="424" border="0"></a> [3]</p> <p align="left">6. Graduate research.&nbsp; Brandon Olson (M.A. UND 2007), a two year PKAP veteran, is using the published lead sling pellets from Vigla in his dissertation research on literacy in the Greek and Roman military at Penn State.&nbsp; He has presented some of the early stages of his research on this topic at several graduate conferences and will present more of his work at the 2008 <a href="http://www.camws.org/">CAMWS</a> meeting in Tucson, Arizona.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.und.edu/spotlights/davidterry.html">David Terry</a> (B.A. UND 2006), a 2007 PKAP Alumnus and a current M.A. student in the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">Department of History</a> at UND, used his time in Cyprus to develop his M.A. Thesis topic.&nbsp; He is working on Frankish-Greek/Catholic-Orthodox relations in the Crusader Kingdom of Cyprus (1191-1489).&nbsp; His research has featured on the main <a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND</a> webpage.</p> <p align="left">7. <a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">Joe Patrow</a> has produced a remarkable group of documentary shorts which should be made available soon!</p> <p align="left">8. Fundraising.&nbsp; A <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/funding.htm">whole range of institutional and private sponsors</a> have supported the hardworking PKAP staff over the last five years.&nbsp; Particular thanks goes to the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North Dakota</a> and <a href="http://www.iup.edu/">Indiana University of Pennsylvania</a> who have funded parts of the project continuously since its inception.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.messiah.edu/">Messiah College</a> and the <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/site.html">Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia</a> have also been valued collaborators. We've also been lucky enough to have a small and loyal group of private donors.&nbsp; Institutional support and private donors give projects like ours the opportunity to develop future plans and create both the practical and intellectual infrastructure for efficient and effective research.&nbsp; Just this year, we were able to secure a significant research grant because we could match their grant with private donor money.&nbsp; If you'd like to contribute to our ongoing research, contact either <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/ContactInfo.html">me</a> or Mike Meyer at the University of North Dakota's <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/artsci/giving_opportunities.html">College of Arts and Sciences</a>.</p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A New Metablog STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-new-metablog CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 12/06/2007 12:36:11 AM ----BODY: <p>The <a href="http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/">Ancient World Bloggers Group</a> has a new Metablog (that is a blog about blogging).&nbsp; This is a good case study for the interaction of social networking and digital publishing.&nbsp; The blog, started by Sebastian Heath of <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/">Mediterranean Ceramics</a> and the <a href="http://www.numismatics.org/">ANS</a>, and Chuck Jones of the <a href="http://blegen.blogspot.com/">Blegen Library</a> derived in part from a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2428998475">Facebook</a> group by the same name.</p> <p>Most of us will concede that even the most academic blog need not conform to publication standards common to print or even formal online journals.&nbsp; It is nevertheless clear to most of us that there are "good" and "not so good" and "crazy" blogs out there.&nbsp; Participating in a particular social network, through sites like the AWBG, Facebook, and, appearing on the blogroll of other like-minded bloggers provides a kind of evaluative element for blogging as a medium and academic blogging as a genre (inasmuch as academic bloggers tend to share certain characteristics).&nbsp; As a particularly wellconceived case study, one can check out Mark Grimsley's <em><a href="http://warhistorian.org/wordpress/index.php">Blog them out of the Stone Age</a> </em>where he has set up a blogroll entitled "A Few Good Blogs".&nbsp; He <a href="http://warhistorian.org/wordpress/?p=675">adds and sometimes takes blogs off</a> this list as they meet certain standards.</p> <p>I can't guarantee that the blogs on my blog roll won't print something crazy, but, then again, few of us would promise such august standards for even our favorite, most scrupulously peer-reviewed journals.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Kommos on Crete STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: kommos-on-crete CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 12/05/2007 12:20:24 AM ----BODY: <p>On Saturday, I visited <a href="http://www.fineart.utoronto.ca/kommos/index.html">Kommos on Crete</a>.&nbsp; A Bronze Age habor town with interesting Greek levels as well.&nbsp; Kommos is regarded as the likely major Minoan port for the Mesara (<a href="http://www.fineart.utoronto.ca/kommos/kommosMaps.html">the fertile plain situated on the south central coast of Crete</a>) serving the important Minoan sites of Phaistos and Ay. Triada.&nbsp; The excavations by Joseph and Maria Shaw of the University of Toronto revealed <a href="http://www.fineart.utoronto.ca/kommos/kommosMinoanPalaces.html">monumental architecture of Minoan date</a> at the site (which Bob Bridges patiently pointed out to me) as well as possible storage sheds for Bronze age ships.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KommosWallSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="KommosWallSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KommosWallSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>From my perspective, one of the most interesting things about the site was the array of imported material from as far afield as Egypt, the Levant, and Cyprus.&nbsp; As we are beginning to argue for Pyla-<em>Kokkinokremos</em>, Kommos appears to have been a point of contact between the Mesara and the major trade routes of the Eastern Mediterranean.&nbsp; This brought site considerable prosperity and may have allowed it to exert some autonomy despite the proximity of Phaistos and Ay. Triada.&nbsp; The presence of monumental architecture at least suggests that the folks at Kommos invested in some form of large scale building and this may suggest an effort to cultivate a distinct identity.&nbsp; Like Pyla<em>Kokkinokremos </em>with its nearby and powerful neighbors of Kition and Hala Sultan Teke (and the looming regional superpower of Enkomi), the settlement structure, economic organization, and political character of Bronze Age Crete may have been far more "multipolar" than some of better-known schematics would allow.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KommosSiteSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="KommosSiteSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KommosSiteSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>As an added bonus, Shaw has written <a href="http://www.oxbowbooks.com/bookinfo.cfm/ID/44409//Location/DBBC">a

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brilliant guide to Kommos</a> which talks not only about the architecture and finds, but also bring alive the back story of running a major excavation.&nbsp; From expropriating lands to raising money to the relations with local community, the guide places the site not only in archaeological context, but also in the context of the excavation process.&nbsp; Even if you don't ever visit the site (which is generally kept locked), the guide is an entertaining and informative read.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Corinthiaka and American Schooliana STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-corinthiak CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 12/04/2007 12:25:40 AM ----BODY: <p>Kostis Kourelis has brought back his blog: <a href="http://kourelis.blogspot.com/">Buildings, Objects, and Situations</a>: Thoughts on art, architecture, society and culture with special focus on Mediterranean archaeology.&nbsp; So far, he's provided some remarkable <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopography">prospopography</a> on the history of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies</a> and <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/corinth/index.html">Corinth Excavations</a> and offered a valuable glosses to his recent important study: "Byzantium and the Avant-Garde: Excavations at Corinth, 1920s–1930s," Hesperia 76 (2007), 391-442.</p> <p>By taking a prosopographical approach to institutional history, he has demonstrated that many of the important figures in the early 20th century history of the American School were personally engaged in the cultural movements of their day.&nbsp;&nbsp; Their involvement in the multifaceted avant-guard movements in early decades of the 20th century informed their fascination with the post-Classical periods -- especially the seemingly organic, mystical, and variegated experiences of the Byzantine -- which held forth promise as a possible alternative to failures of the modern.&nbsp; The edginess of the post-war avant-guard movement comes through in the subversive tone to Kourelis' writing.&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/mo re-department.html">The conspiratorial feel</a> of his blog (and article) provides a refreshing counterpoint to palpable conservatism that one can still <em>sometimes </em>experience at the American School.&nbsp; It is a place where one can still <a

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href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/in side-looking.html">sip afternoon tea in Loring Hall</a> and discuss whether "the theory" has anything to add to classical studies.&nbsp; And, when it's very still and quiet, one can still hear in response to an overzealous interest in the post-Classical world the infamous line "This is the American School of <strong><em>Classical </em></strong>Studies" (although to be fair, this outlook is quickly fading away...)</p> <p>Kourelis' blog is also a model academic blog: the short notes, with careful citation, provide useful insights into his research as well as relevant glosses on his published work.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Site Report from Crete STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: site-report-fro CATEGORY: Late Antiquity CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 12/03/2007 12:01:51 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Flower4Suzie.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 3px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="154" alt="Flower4Suzie" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Flower4Suzie_thumb.jpg" width="60" align="left" border="0"></a>Crete was beautiful.&nbsp; Since I've talked about <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/si te-reports.html">site reports</a> in this blog <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/in side-looking.html">in the past</a> and sought to place them in the immediate cultural context of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a>, I thought it only fair to include one of my site reports.&nbsp; This is basically the handout that I give the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> with my oral report.&nbsp; I don't go into as much detail as my handout contains (that's what the handout is for) and since I delivered mine at the church of Ag. Titos at Gortyn, I spent some time looking at the architecture of the building.&nbsp; But I do think that the report captures the essential character of the genre: <p>&nbsp; <p align="center"><em>Early Christian, Late Roman, and Byzantine Crete</em> <p>Crete is referred to in Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1-

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41) and in Epistle of Titus where Paul tell Titus (Titus 1:1-14): <blockquote> <p>“I left you in Crete so that you might set right what remains to be done and appoint presbyters in every town, as I directed you, on condition that a man be blameless, married only once, with believing children who are not accused of licentiousness or rebellious. For a bishop as God's steward must be blameless, not arrogant, not irritable, not a drunkard, not aggressive, not greedy for sordid gain, but hospitable, a lover of goodness, temperate, just, holy, and self-controlled, holding fast to the true message as taught so that he will be able both to exhort with sound doctrine and to refute opponents. For there are also many rebels, idle talkers and deceivers, especially the Jewish Christians. It is imperative to silence them, as they are upsetting whole families by teaching for sordid gain what they should not. One of them, a prophet of their own, once said, "Cretans have always been liars, vicious beasts, and lazy gluttons." That testimony is true. Therefore, admonish them sharply, so that they may be sound in the faith, instead of paying attention to Jewish myths and regulations of people who have repudiated the truth. To the clean all things are clean, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is clean; in fact, both their minds and their consciences are tainted.” </p></blockquote> <p>This text and Acts seems to suggest that Crete had a sizable Jewish community. Little more is known about the church in Crete prior to the 5th century. The local name of Aghioi Deka seems to refer to a group of martyr during the Decian persecutions. According the story, the 10 martyrs represented every region of the island (i.e. every town of the Paul’s letter to Titus; by the 8th century, however, 5 had come from Gortyn and 5 from elsewhere). Along with the Aghioi Deka, St. Titus continues to be venerated throughout the island. The rhetorical position that the Christians on Crete were among the first Christian community in Europe (e.g. Spyridakis 1990) finds parallels with similar arguments for the European character of Minoan settlements. <p>The foundation of the church in Crete by Paul qualified it as an Apostolic See. By the 4<sup>th</sup> century, the ecclesiastical administration of the island was at the provincial capital of Gortyn. The remains of a massive, probably Early Christian basilica at the site reflects the wealth of the Early Christian community there. Moreover, it seems likely that this church has a relatively late date. The church is a cross-domed basilica. The crossing of the transept and the main nave appear to have been barrel vaulted. The polygonal exterior wall of the apse and the pastophories situated to the north and south of the sanctuary with apsidal east ends likewise recommend a late 6th to mid 7th century date, and show close parallels with churches in Laconia (e.g. the Acropolis church from Sparta and Tigani in the Mani which may have similar dates). This date seems to find confirmation in the architectural sculpture, most notably the column capitals which appear to date to the later 6th/early 7th; fragments of a double-stair type ambo were also discovered. Arguments for a 10th century construction using earlier spolia are conceptually appealing, but probably incorrect. Theodore Fyfe, Arthur Evans first architect at Knossos, published the church in 1907 in the <i>Architectural Review</i> of 1907. Orlandos restudied the church in the 1920s (<i>EEBS</i> 3 (1926), 301ff.). <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AyTitosSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AyTitosSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AyTitosSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp; <p>The late date of the church reflects the late prosperity of the island and Gortyn. The 6th and 7th century are well-represented in the epigraphy. An inscription (Bandy no. 31) of probably Justinianic date credits an archbishop Theodoros and Proconsul

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(anthypatos) Helios for restoring a wall (toixos). It is interesting to consider that this might refer to the wall of the city and compare it to inscriptions from a similar context in the Korinthia which make no mention of local dignitaries. Seventh century works includes the modification of the Nymphaeum and the inscribing of four acclamatory texts on the columns naming the family of Heraklius (Bandy no. 23). There is epigraphic evidence attesting the presence of the circus factions on the island (the Greens) hinting that chariot racing took place there with at least notional ties to the Constantinople (Bandy no. 20). The epigraphy from Gortyn includes numerous acclamations reflecting the continued vitality of civic life. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/NymphaionSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="206" alt="NymphaionSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/NymphaionSM_thumb.jpg" width="140" border="0"></a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/HerakleiosInscrptSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="206" alt="HerakleiosInscrptSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/HerakleiosInscrptSM_thumb.jpg" width="304" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The Metropolitan bishop of the island functioned throughout Late Antiquity and as Balkan bishops succumbed to invasions, economic dislocations, and various natural disasters, the bishops of Gortyn rose in prestige. As with all bishops from ecclesiastical province of Illyricum Orientalis the 7th century Ecumenical Councils, the bishops of Crete signed with the bishops from the West. In the Late 6th century the Bishop of Gortyn appears in correspondence with Pope Gregory the Great who intervenes in a contested election. At the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680) the Bishops from Gortyn signed under the papal delegation with the bishops from Thessaloniki and the bishop from Corinth. By the Council in Trullo (691-2) the bishop served as the representative of Rome. It is interesting to note that despite the close ties to the pope, monophysitism (suggesting close ties with Eastern Sees) had appeared on Crete; Maximos Confessor when he visited the island in 647/9 met with Severan bishops there. By the mid 8th century, things had changed, according to his <i>Vita</i>, St. Andrew of Crete arrived on the island from Constantinople who seems to have appointed him bishop (rather than local bishops with the approval of Rome). Andrew of Crete becomes the most prominent Early Byzantine saint on the island. He is traditionally credited with the creation of the Byzantine musical genre of the <i>kanon</i>. His life provides important information on the conditions on the island during the 8th century. He also wrote several preserved encomia including one the Ayioi Deka. <p>Early Byzantine Crete experienced the disruption of Arab incursions in the Mediterranean basin as early as the later 7th century. Not only is their evidence that the Arabs wintered in Crete as early as 674, but the economy in Crete suffered as Roman rule collapsed among their neighbors in Africa and the Peloponnesus. Crete was incorporated into the Theme of Hellas and received considerable attention from the Byzantine army and navy. Consequently, the island maintained Byzantine rule through most of the 8th century (there was a massive Cretan delegation at II Nicaea in 787). The political turmoil of the first part of the 9th century in Byzantium led to a group of Arabs, originally driven from Spain and then Alexandria, to establish a foothold on Crete near modern day Herakleion (Medieval Chandax) some time during the reign of Theophilos (829-840). Over the next 15 years they managed to conquer the island and during the later 9th and early 10th century the Arab

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rulers defied Byzantine efforts at retaking the island. The Cretan Muslims were active throughout the Aegean during this time, hiding out in the waters off Kythera (according to the <i>Vita</i> of Theodore of Kythera) and taking hostages for ransom as far north as the Argolid (from the <i>Vita</i> of Peter of Argos). <p>The reconquest was finally achieved by Nicephoras Phocas in 961 (<i>Theophanes Continuatus</i> Book 6). There is no reason necessarily to think that there were mass conversions to Islam during the years of the Arab conquest, but it is likely the Christian infrastructure suffered some during that time. The 10th <i>Vita</i> of Ay. Nikonos (O Metanoeite) tells of visiting Crete, rebuilding churches, and preaching. A more interesting source is the autobiographical <i>Vita </i>of John the Xenos (11th&nbsp; c.) who travels around Crete rebuilding churches and founding new ones. It provides valuable information regarding the re-imagining of the Cretan landscape in the 11th century and suggests a period of social change following the disruptions of the Arab conquest. The decline of centralized Byzantine rule in the late 12th century led to the growing autonomy of the island and ultimately the revolt of Karykes in 1191-2 (as elsewhere at the periphery of the Byzantine state). This was quickly put down, perhaps by the Cretans themselves or perhaps by the threat imperial intervention. <p>Bibliography <p>Bandy, A., <i>The Greek Christian Inscriptions of Crete</i>. Athens 1972.&nbsp; <p>Βαραλής, Ι.Δ., “Παρατηρήρεις στην παλαιοχριστιανική ναοδομία της Κρήτη,” <i>Creta</i><i> </i><i>Romana</i><i> </i><i>e</i><i> </i><i>Protobyzantina</i> 3.1. Padova 2004. 813-838. <p>Bowden, W., “Epirus and Crete: architectural interaction in late antiquity,”<i> Creta Romana e Protobyzantina</i> 3.1. Padova 2004. 787-800 <p>Fyfe, T. “The Church at St. Titus at Gortyna in Crete,” <i>Architectural Review</i> 22 (1907), 5-60. <p>Orlandos, A. “Νεώτεροι ἔρευναι ἐν Ἁγ. Τιτῷ τῆς Γορτύνα,” <i>EEBS</i> 3 (1926), 297-328. <p>Δετοράκης, Θ.,<i> Οι Άγιοι Της Πρώτης Βυζαντινής Περιόδου Της Κρήτης Και Η Σχετική Προς Αυτούς Φιλολογία</i>. Athens 1970. <p>Sanders, I. F. <i>Roman Crete: An Archaeological Survey and Gazetteer of Late Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Byzantine Crete</i>. Warminster 1982. <p>Tsougarakis, D. <i>Byzantine Crete: From the 5th Century to the Venetian Conquest</i>. Athens 1988. <p>Tωμαδάκις, Ν.Β., “Ὁ Ἄγιος Ἰωάννης ὁ Ξένος καὶ ἡ διαθήκη αὐτοῦ,” <i>KrChron</i> 2 (1948), 47-72. <p>Xanthopoulou, M., “Le mobilier ecclésiastique métallique de la basilique de Saint-Tite a Gortyne (Crète centrale),” <i>CArch</i> 46 (1998), 103-119.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-late-antiq CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Late Antiquity DATE: 12/02/2007 05:22:01 AM ----BODY: <p>The University of Michigan and the DAI (German Archaeological Institute) are co-hosting an <a href="http://sitemaker.umich.edu/lateantiquity/home">international symposium on Archaeology and the Cities of Asia Minor in Late Antiquity </a>in January.&nbsp; The papers look quite interesting -- although perhaps a bit fewer papers on the countryside, "town and country", or the role of non-urban places in the development of the urban world that I would have thought.&nbsp; While urban life in Late Antique Asia Minor certainly represented the physical continuation of the "ancient world", it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine the transformation of cities in Late Antiquity without considering the city's relationship in a complex network of non-urban <em>places </em>(villages, towns, villas, monasteries, pilgrimage sites, et c.) as well.&nbsp; The website included a handy list of the represented <a href="http://sitemaker.umich.edu/late-antiquity/archaeological_sites">Late Antique sites in Asia Minor</a> with short discussions of the sites during Late Antiquity, bibliography, and links the to their official webpages.&nbsp; I hope that they plan to publish their proceedings!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: To Crete with John Xenos STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: to-crete-with-j CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/30/2007 07:42:03 AM ----BODY: <p>I am off to Crete later today to talk with the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> about Late Antique and Middle Byzantine Crete.&nbsp; I will talk with them at Gortyn which was the Late Roman capital of the island.&nbsp; </p> <p>The best thing about preparing these site reports is that you come across little bits of information, texts, ideas that you would never have encountered otherwise.&nbsp; While reading on Middle Byzantine Crete, I came across the autobiographical

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early 11th-century <em>Vita </em>of John Xenos (John "the hermit" or "the stranger") (Tωμαδάκις <i>KrChron</i> 2 (1948), 47-72).</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/JohnXenos.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="344" alt="JohnXenos" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/JohnXenos_thumb.jpg" width="204" border="0"></a> </p> <p>John spent his life going across the mountains of Crete finding churches that had been neglected and rehabilitating them.&nbsp; He was often led by visions.&nbsp; In one case God tells him to build a church at the site of a <em>mnemeia</em> (a monument -- presumably the tombs?) to Sts. Eutuchios and Eutuxianos.&nbsp; He rebuilt a church of St. George and provided it with a cistern so that they could grow food there.&nbsp; His most famous foundation was at a place called Myriokephala where he established a monastery on the site of a large "Greek building" (<font face="Kad">ellenikon ktisma</font>); he later founded a metoichi (smaller dependent monastery) of St. Patapios and provides it with a garden and fruitbearing trees.&nbsp; A Byzantine typika (a document describing the rules and often the foundation of a monastery) exists for the monastery at Myriokephala and <a href="http://www.doaks.org/typikaPDF/typ014.pdf">has been translated</a>.&nbsp; He eventually retires near Kisamos in Western Crete.</p> <p>The Life of John Xenos is a good example of how Byzantine saints lives present a transformed landscape in the Early Middle Byzantine period.&nbsp; The rebuilding and refounding of churches by not only John but also by his older contemporary, St. Nikon O Metanoeite, in Crete produced a religious landscape of the island that was significantly reshaped in the generation after the Nicephoras Phokas returned the island to Byzantine rule after over a century of Arab occupation.&nbsp; There are other examples of this process for mainland Greece (I have studied Theodore of Kythera who settles in an abandoned church on Kythera).&nbsp; On Crete and elsewhere these saints lives follow a similar pattern: the saint happens upon a pre-existing sacred site that has been neglected, and the saint, sometimes after a vision, restores, rebuilds, or somehow resanctifies the site. This process creates an interesting interplay between continuity (i.e. the pre-existence of a site) and change (the restored building and institutions) which allows continuity and change to persist simultaneous in the Byzantine landscape.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: &quot;The Social Network&quot;, Facebook, Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-social-netw

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CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/29/2007 12:45:58 AM ----BODY: <p>I am by nature a "late adopter".&nbsp; I think that I got my first email account in 1997 -- hardly the cutting edge -- I don't (yet) have an iPod and don't really understand iTunes (and have been too nervous to buy any music from it!!) even though <a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND</a> is an iTunes University.&nbsp; Despite my Luddite tendencies, I have begun to wade tentatively into the world of the "New Media" (my awkwardness is manifest in my use of quotes and the definite article).&nbsp; I am struggling to get my footing amidst all the technologies available, and this compounded with my natural tentativeness has led to me to adopt certain technologies and services and neglect others almost randomly.&nbsp; I rely a good bit on Sam Fee's practical <a href="http://www.thefee.net/delirium/">Arranged Delirium blog</a>.</p> <p>For example, I just recently discovered <a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a>, prompted largely by Katie Pettegrew's (the infamous <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>'s lovely wife) suggestion that <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> get a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8860215294">PKAP Facebook Group</a> to communicate more effectively with the extended PKAP team (and our small, but growing group of alumni).&nbsp; We are certainly not the <a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6024392061">first archaeological project</a> to get a Facebook account.&nbsp; So, I created <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=724949227">my own Facebook account</a> and, in the process, discovered that I have a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7389195165">fan club</a> (what the ???) and joined a group (the Ancient World Bloggers Group).&nbsp; So we are now "Social Networking" or "Socially Networked" or something.</p> <p>To go along with my new found spirit of adventure and participation in "the" social network (I might even be "on the grid" now, but I am not sure), I have also uploaded <a href="http://del.icio.us/WilliamCaraher">my blog list</a> to del.icio.us.&nbsp; I had previously kept my master bloglist in an Access Database and thought myself pretty clever.&nbsp; As I have promised in the past, I am working on some kind of article on a newcomer's view of blogging, the New Media, and archaeology, so I've begun to look more critically and carefully at various blogs.&nbsp; My blog list should help make some of my research more transparent.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Two New Byzantine Churches in the Corinthia? STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: two-new-byzanti CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/28/2007 12:39:19 AM ----BODY: <p>The southeastern Corinthia is a not a particularly well known area to most visitors to Greece.&nbsp; It's rugged country, with few amenities of interest to the casual tourist (although the small harbor town of Korphos is lovely).&nbsp; To put it in perspective, it is so far out of the way that the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Program</a> of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies</a> doesn't even go there -- although there is a fine ashlar tower at a place called Are Mbartze.&nbsp; Unlike the much visited Corinthian plain, however, the southeastern Corinthia has Byzantine churches.&nbsp; In the immediate vicinity of the town of Sophiko there are at least 5 of them.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_11.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="267" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_8.png" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em><font size="2">The southeastern Corinthia</font></em></p> <p>To my mind the Koimesis at Steiri is the most scenic and perhaps the most important.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PanayiaSteiri.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="262" alt="PanayiaSteiri" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PanayiaSteiri_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <br><em><font size="2">The Panayia at Steiri</font></em></p> <p>Byzantinists are attracted by churches like moths to a lamp.&nbsp; The churches of the southeastern Corinthia attracted among others A. Orlandos and Tim Gregory.&nbsp; The former provided a basic chronology of the churches there and the latter conducting an intensive survey there in the mid 1980s treating among other things a curious system of fortification at Mt. Tsalika which towers above the village of Sophiko and overlooks the main road south from the Corinthia in the Epidauria. (Orlandos, <em>ABME </em>1 (1935), 1ff., Gregory, "The Medieval Site of Mt. Tsalika near Sophiko," in P. Lock and G.D.R. Sanders, The Archaeology of Medieval Greece (Oxford 1996), 61ff. For this route in antiquity see: M. Dixon, <em>Disputed Territories: Interstate Arbitration in the Northeast Peloponnese, ca. 250-150 B.C., </em>Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Ohio State 2000;&nbsp; The area was investigated intensively by <a href="http://www.usi.edu/libarts/history/MDixon/">Michael Dixon</a> in the late 1990s, by the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a> in the early 2000s, and now by the <a href="http://mailer.fsu.edu/~dpullen/SHARP/">Saronic Harbors Exploration Project</a>).</p> <p>In any event, in an article in the 2006 Deltion of the Christian Archaeological Society (M. Kappas and Y. Fousteris, "The Reassessment

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of Two Byzantine Churches at Sophiko, Corinthia," <em>DChAE </em>28 (2006), 6172), M Kappas and Y. Fousteris make the argument that two of the churches in this area that Orlandos dated to the 17th or 18th century should be considered late-13th century in date.&nbsp; They are of unusual design: Ay. Antonios at Tourla and Hypapanti are both single-aisled cross-in-square church with cross arms of unequal length.&nbsp; The eastern and western arms of the cross are longer than the north and south arms.&nbsp;&nbsp; They argue that the Hypapanti has traces of 13th century wall painting in the tympana of one cross arm.&nbsp; St. Antonios has a number of architectural features that have parallels with other 13th century churches in the vicinity.&nbsp; Of particular interest are circular recesses cut in limestone for the insertion of decorative plates around the west door which is further defined by a single-arched, dog-tooth frieze.&nbsp;&nbsp; The cuttings in stone for the insertion of plates appears also at the known Byzantine church of Taxiarchs and the Koimesis nearby.&nbsp; (A better-known example of this technique can be found at the much-discussed 13th century church at Merbaka in the Argolid).&nbsp; </p> <p>The most interesting thing about the possibility of two "new" Byzantine churches in the area is that they would date to the same period as much of the pottery discovered by Gregory's survey of Mt. Tsalikas.&nbsp; Gregory argued that the fortifications there might be of Frankish foundation.&nbsp; It would be intriguing to consider the two small 13th century churches (the Hypapanti is on its slopes) as contemporary and perhaps even Frankish in foundation (as some would argue for the church at Merbaka).&nbsp; </p> <p>This is as good an excuse to visit the southeastern Corinthia as any that I have heard (although probably not enough to put it on the tourist itinerary!).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey on the Web STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: eastern-korinth CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/26/2007 12:59:22 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/EKAS_LeaderPhoto.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="123"

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alt="EKAS_LeaderPhoto" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/EKAS_LeaderPhoto_thumb.jpg" width="504" border="0"></a></p> <p>After a bit of a sabbatical, the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey</a>&nbsp; (EKAS) has returned to the web (albeit only in beta... for now).&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> and I have put up a <em>very </em>basic <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASPage/EKASHome.html">EKAS page</a> that includes a <em>very </em>basic <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKASTimeMap/disk_EKAS.html">int eractive map</a>.</p> <p>Survey projects on the web are tricky things.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://classics.uc.edu/nvap/">Nemea Valley Archaeological Project</a><br><a href="http://classics.uc.edu/prap/">Pylos Regional Archaeological Project</a><br><a href="http://www.scsp.arts.gla.ac.uk/">Sydney Cyprus Survey Project</a><br><a href="http://www.taesp.arts.gla.ac.uk/">Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project</a><br><a href="http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~rauhn/">Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey Project</a><br><a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/kip/">Kythera Island Project</a><br><a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project </a><br><a href="http://kythera.osu.edu/">Australia Paliochora Kythera Archaeological Survey</a><br><a href="http://mailer.fsu.edu/~dpullen/SHARP/">Saronic Harbors Exploration Project</a><br><a href="http://extras.ha.uth.gr/sikyon/en/">Sikyon Survey Project</a><br><a href="http://www.millsaps.edu/svp/">The Shala Valley Project</a></p> <p>As these links suggest, survey project websites are a mixed bag.&nbsp; (In fact I could not find any presence on the web for some projects like the Nikopolis Survey and the massive, long running, and complex <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/multiplefields/Home">Argolid Exploration Project</a> (aka Southern Argolid Survey)).&nbsp; It seems to me that since many survey projects tend to be less stable institutional entities with life spans between a few years and a decade and make little investment in semipermanent, physical infrastructure (e.g. dig houses, site guards, fences, et c.), this often translates to instability on the web.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.agathe.gr/">Big</a> <a href="http://www.catalhoyuk.com/">digs</a>, in contrast, with their welldeveloped infrastructures, long term (and sometimes permanent) staff, and persistent financial commitments from home institutions seem to have better chances for producing a stable presence on the Internet.&nbsp; The preceding links to survey projects show how most (but not all!) have broken links, pictures that fail to appear, or offer little more than static data (nice photos, some maps... in fact, much of this doesn't count as data at all; of course, some surveys, like the the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project, have archived their data officially in places like the <a href="http://ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/collection.htm?uri=arch-323-1">Arts and Humanities Data Service</a> ).&nbsp; </p> <p>None of these observations are profound, and this is not to suggest that EKAS is better.&nbsp; In fact, EKAS totally vanished from the web for a time (and because it's previous home <a title="http://web.stcloudstate.edu/eleftheria/" href="http://web.stcloudstate.edu/eleftheria/">http://web.stcloudstate.edu/eleft heria/</a> blocked robots like the <a href="http://www.archive.org/index.php">Internet Archive</a> the site is gone from public view in a profound way! One cannot even "excavate" an early version of the site). </p> <p>This is all to say that EKAS has reemerged, and the only

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reason that it has come back is because for David Pettegrew's class in <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/Syllabus_Archaeology%20&amp;%20History .htm">Classical Archaeology</a>.&nbsp; So, enjoy it while you can!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: maddy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.128.125.1 URL: DATE: 11/26/2007 07:48:10 PM A site about EKAS would have been really useful about a year ago, when I was writing my master's...not as a resource in a traditional sense, but still handy. It seems to me that even without publishing data online, project websites at the very least serve two basic purposes: 1) to give the general public an idea of what the project is and why it is important, and 2) to give those interested in learning more the resources to do so (bibliographies, contacts, etc). In this sense the website can function as a portal and is a good way of communicating with the public (if you're into that kind of thing). I'm still shocked by how many projects don't have websites. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Shawn EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 207.253.59.6 URL: http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com DATE: 11/27/2007 09:42:01 AM Have you seen the Omeka site? http://omeka.org/ It might be a useful suite of tools for putting up survey data in the dynamic way you mention, and would also serve the purposes suggested in the comment by Maddy. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: 100 Posts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: 100-posts CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/25/2007 04:41:47 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Just some quick metadata after 100 posts.</p> <p>The average length of a blog is just under 400 words (I've written about 39,000 words since the blog's inception).</p> <p>Unique Page Views: 4575 <br>Average per Day: 20.58</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_10.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="277" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_7.png" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">I've been monitoring the site using <a href="http://www.google.com/analytics/">Google Analytics</a> since the beginning of November.&nbsp; It allows me to talk some about where my views come from.&nbsp; I have had hits from over 30 countries (with particular volume from the US, Denmark (thanks to <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm</a>), the UK, and Canada).&nbsp; One hit from South America (Argentina) and none so far from Africa.&nbsp; I get regular visitors from India, China, Singapore, and, of course, Australia. Over 30 states are represented with most hits from Minnesota (apparently <a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND</a>'s IP Addresses run through East Grand Forks), Pennsylvania,&nbsp; California, Ohio and New York.&nbsp; Strangely no hits from Delaware yet (that's where I grew up!).&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/HitMap.png"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="254" alt="HitMap" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/HitMap_thumb.png" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The upward trend is largely the product of links or references on several high volume blogs (especially <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/">Grand Forks Life</a>, <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeologist</a>, the <a href="http://blegen.blogspot.com/">Blegen library</a>, and <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm</a>) which went up in Early October.&nbsp; Moreover, as my blog grows it picks up more <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a> hits.</p> <p align="left">Browsers are more or less evenly split between Internet Explorer and Firefox with just a few hits from Safari.&nbsp; I think I am responsible for all the hits from Opera (I experimented with it for a few weeks last month).</p> <p align="left">Thanks for reading!&nbsp; I had planned a long(ish) article tentatively entitled: "MetaBlogging Archaeology: Blogging Archaeology and the Archaeology of Blogging" to celebrate my 100th post, but it's not done yet.&nbsp; I think I'll put it up to celebrate my 5,000th unique view.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mike EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.200.188.152 URL: http://mahaffie.blogspot.com

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DATE: 11/25/2007 07:31:33 AM Let this be your first hit from Delaware. Cheers! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Conference and Research Programme at Aarhus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: conference-and CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 11/24/2007 12:15:42 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://www.au.dk/da">University of Aarhus</a> in Denmark has joined the growing number of universities to have a specific program(me) in the study of Late Antiquity.&nbsp; Their <a href="http://www.lateantiquity.dk">Art and Social Identities in Late Antiquity</a> program has a solid list of participants and a <a href="http://www.lateantiquity.dk/working-papers/">working papers</a> page.</p> <p>Aarhaus will also host a graduate student seminar on the "<a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/?p=225">Art of Destruction</a>" and have posted the <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/?p=240#more-240">program online</a>.&nbsp; It looks very interesting and shows the real potential of diachronic and crossdisciplinary study of an archaeological phenomenon.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Troels EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 192.38.32.3 URL: http://www.iconoclasm.dk DATE: 11/24/2007 06:20:56 AM Thanks for the plug, Bill. It's Aarhus, by the way, not Aarhaus ;-) The Danish spelling is √Örhus. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: DATE: 11/24/2007 06:38:47 AM Ooops... can't blame spell check for that one, can I. Fixed now, though. ------------

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AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Inside Looking In: A Wondering about the American School of Classical Studies STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: inside-looking CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/23/2007 12:37:16 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the most interesting things so far about my year in Athens is becoming re-acquainted with the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies</a>.&nbsp; The American School is different things to different people; it's a research library, a social club, a lecture venue, and the liaison between the Greek government and the American archaeologists in Greece.&nbsp; At its heart, however, is the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Program</a>.&nbsp; I've been lucky enough to contribute to the Regular Program this year, and this has given me the opportunity to observe its distinct culture first hand.</p> <p><a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> are good graduate students from strong programs who spend the academic year traveling around Greece to sites.&nbsp; The students travel in a big bus together, live together in <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/about/facilities.htm">Loring Hall</a>, eat together, study in the <a href="http://blegen.blogspot.com/">Blegen library</a> together, and relax together.&nbsp; The Regular Members have just returned from their final major trip (they have one more short trip to Crete).&nbsp; The trips run about 10 days each and involve visiting numerous major and minor archaeological sites.&nbsp; The members visit these sites in all weather and give short site reports -- this past weekend we heard a site report on the Archaic temple at Isthmia in a steady rain.&nbsp; In some cases, just visiting the site invokes a palpable machismo especially the combination of brisk, yet dignified, hikes up steep hills and relatively obscure sites (Askra is not technically obscure, but, say, Zarax in the Peloponnesus would perhaps qualify).&nbsp; At the end of the trips, the students are a tired but, indeed, tightly bonded group.&nbsp; A kind of archaeological boot camp!</p> <p>From what I understand, this has been the deal, more or less, for the past 50+ years.&nbsp; This relatively intense experience forges a bond of unity among the students and many identify their time at the American School as a unique episode in their academic development (many, for example, include their year or years here as a separate line in the education category of their <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/cv.htm">CVs</a> placing it parallel, as it were, with their undergraduate and graduate education).&nbsp; I recently discovered that there is an <a href="http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~srotroff/ASCSAalum/">American School Alumni Organization</a> (although I might have known this before), and apparently regular members from various years get together at organized event at the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10096">APA/AIA Annual Meeting</a>.</p> <p>As I have noted elsewhere, part of the American School experience involves creating a scholarly and professional identity through formal academic exercises like site reports or "Tea Talks" (relatively formal

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presentation on ongoing research) as well as less formal behaviors like lunchtime conversations.&nbsp; Even individual research becomes a communal event: regular members are each assigned space at tables in the main reading room of the Blegen library, for example, which allows them to observe each others' study and research habits.&nbsp; The line between personal and professional identity, which is razor thin among most academics, is blurred entirely at the school.&nbsp; Until the recent opening of the impressive auditorium in <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/cotsen/">Cotsen Hall</a>, visiting lecturers and Regular members delivered talks in the dinning room and saloni of the Loring Hall, where the students live, dine, and relax.&nbsp; Depending on one's view of an academic career and the place of our discipline within the American academia, the conflation of the private and professional at the American School is either a pious invocation of traditional collegiate (or even older monastic) forms of academic culture or the kind of environment that promotes a kind of disciplinary, intellectual, and social cohesion (as a polite term) that can bewilder to our colleagues in other fields.&nbsp; Moreover, the tendency of "American School people", most of whom have a genuine professional and intellectual interest in the archaeology and history of Greece, to return to the school to contribute their time and knowledge ensures that the identity and traditions of the school as an institution are continuously reinforced (although this is not to imply that they are stable or unchanging).&nbsp; </p> <p>Having spent considerable time at "the School" over the last 10 years has made it difficult for me to assess its real impact on my academic and intellectual development (I did develop an interest in epigraphy here...) or to understand fully how the environment here shapes the discipline (in both intended and unintended ways).&nbsp; It would be interesting, indeed, to consider how the environment of the American School -- both through its expressed academic goals and its social and professional culture -- has influenced the discipline of Classics and Mediterranean Archaeology in the U.S.&nbsp; Do, for example, cohorts of regular members (and many scholars, even years after their time in Athens, remember the names of their colleagues in the Regular Program and have shared experiences) possess distinct intellectual or academic identities?&nbsp; Do these cohorts exert power or influence outside the realm of the American School like fraternities at the big state Universities in the Old South?&nbsp;&nbsp; Presumably it one could compare American School cohorts to those present at particular moments in places like the <a href="http://www.ias.edu/">Institute for Advanced Study</a> or <a href="http://www.doaks.org/">Dumbarton Oaks</a>.&nbsp; It seems hard to imagine that the social experiences of each cohort here at the school, which in their intensity can approach a kind of hazing (hearing a talk about an Archaic temple in a steady rain!!), would have no impact on how the various interrelated disciplines (archaeology, philology, history, art history) developed.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A few quick hits

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-few-quick-hit CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/21/2007 01:37:44 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a few interesting links today:</p> <ul> <li>David Gill at <a href="http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/">Looting Matters</a> has <a href=" http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/search/label/Cyprus">laid out the basic arguments </a>surrounding the current wrangle over the State Department's stand on the importation of Cypriot Coins. <li>I've just discovered Sebastian Heath's remarkable online <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/">work-inprogress monograph</a>.&nbsp; His <a href="http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/">blog</a> is great as well. <li><a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">Joe Patrow's</a> new documentary project is arriving in peoples' hands even as we speak.&nbsp; He prepared a series of shorts from his footage from last field season and hopefully we can get them up on UND's iTunes Store by the end of the year.&nbsp; <li>I've gathered all the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> related blog material in <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/BlogFeedPageGoogle.html">one place</a>, and there are some notable new additions:&nbsp; </li> <ul> <li>Scott Moore's <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">blog</a> is becoming well-established by the standards of the blogosphere.&nbsp; <li>His success seems to have prompted <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">Dave Pettegrew</a> to set up another <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/history_in_the_dirt/">rival blog</a> (surely in the dark of night!).&nbsp; Not much there yet, but if it is half as entertaining as his <a href="http://www.dramatherapy.blogspot.com/">wife's blog</a>, it will be a welcome addition to my daily reading.&nbsp; </li></ul></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Corinthia and Survey Archaeology STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-corinthia-a CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/20/2007 04:36:13 AM ----BODY: <p>My talk on the Fourth Trip, in the Corinthia, was on survey archaeology, particularly the work of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS).&nbsp; No one in this group of <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> has any experience doing survey.&nbsp; This is particularly striking because many of the folks at the school right now, from <a href="http://classics.uc.edu/faculty_staff/davis_informal.html">Jack Davis</a> and <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/corinth/main_st_director1.html">Guy Sanders</a> to <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a> and myself, have spent time doing survey and have some investment in the method.&nbsp; In any event, I introduced, in a very general, way the survey of the Corinthian landscape.&nbsp; </p> <p>I focused my brief presentation on four things.&nbsp; None of them are new, but this is the gist:</p> <p>1) Survey and Colonialism.&nbsp; I began with the idea that survey had as long and august a history in Mediterranean archaeology as excavation, and, moreover, it had roots in the same colonialist impulse as the first large scale excavations.&nbsp; In fact, I suggest that in some ways survey is more colonialist in that mapping the landscape and producing inventories of archaeological "resources" represents one of the most basic tasks that colonizers undertook in their efforts to domesticate "the other" by translating <em>terra incognita </em>into scientific (i.e. basically Western) notation and assigning it significance and meaning (in a recent email discussion with <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">Dave Pettegrew</a>, he offered the phase "appropriating knowledge" to which I objected (ironically)).&nbsp; I suggested that the difficulties EKAS experienced in getting permits might be tied (in a very big picture kind of way) to the colonial legacy of Survey, particularly, the difficulties in "controlling the activities" of large scale regional surveys which sent teams out in the countryside in a way that was difficult (or manpower intensive) for local officials to supervise.&nbsp; One can almost see the survey archaeologists as guerilla archaeologists out beyond the settlement and village both appropriating the countryside for scientific archaeology and (in some ways) using this intimate local knowledge for their own advantage.&nbsp; This can be contrasted to large scale, contemporary excavations, which take place (in some instances) in the village surrounded by fences, under the watchful eye of the community.&nbsp; It is theatrical and a spectacle and therefore somehow constrained by the spectators gaze.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/EKAS_Map.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="284" alt="EKAS_Map" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/EKAS_Map_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>2) Surveying the Suburbs.&nbsp; Permit restriction, expense, and the incredible logistical demands all have influenced the decline in large scale, regional survey in the

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Greece.&nbsp; In its place, more localized and focused survey has emerged (it is much easier to monitor a small scale survey centered on a known site).&nbsp; Focused, smaller scale survey have had a long tradition in Greece with surveys in the suburbs of known sites being a component of the <a href="http://river.blg.uc.edu/nvap/">Nemea Valley Archaeological Project</a>, the Cambridge Boeotia Project, and the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/index.html">Ohio Boeotia Expedition</a> (and it appears to be the focus of a new project called the <a href="http://web.uvic.ca/~bburke/EBAP.htm">Eastern Boeotia Archaeological Project</a>).&nbsp; While almost all survey has sought to study the hinterland (i.e. not the center), the real variation has occurred only in how far the "hinter" the land really is.&nbsp; Because permit limitation prevented it from being a genuine regional survey, EKAS reflected the tradition of suburban survey by focusing primarily on the eastern suburbs of a known urban center.&nbsp; Two issues are associated with the "suburban" focus of this survey: (a) How do we define and understand the limits to our survey area and the concentration of pottery within it.&nbsp; This is the old "what is a site problem" that most survey archaeologist know only too well. (b) How do we cope with incredibly high artifact densities in an efficient and responsible way.&nbsp; Traditional sampling strategies (site based collections, the collection of all "diagnostic sherds" et c.) break down when confronted with the continuous high density carpet of unit after unit with densities of over 2000 artifacts/hectare.</p> <p>3) Thresholds of Intensity.&nbsp; The problem encountered working in an environment with astronomical artifact densities is where does one set the threshold of intensity.&nbsp; The threshold of intensity refers, in the case of EKAS, to not only our desire to collect or document artifacts on the surface in a very intensive way, but also consequently document their environmental context.&nbsp; EKAS, for example, was "bogged down" by a combination of high artifact densities and a very thorough set of forms that sought to document almost every conceivable variable an archaeologist might encounter in a field (visibility, vegetation type, surface clast type, surface clast size, soil type, et c.).&nbsp; In theory this was an excellent idea, but in practice it prevented us from surveying a particularly large section of the Korinthian landscape.&nbsp; Moreover, when analyzing the data we discovered that some of the variables that we recorded did not correlate with archaeological features in any demonstrable way.&nbsp; This, then, marked the threshold of intensity -- the exact place where data collection inhibited the overall goals of the survey, which in the case of EKAS was to produce a meaningful sample of the suburbs of Korinth.&nbsp; In our defense, we didn't realize that we had reached the thresholds of intensity until we actually analyzed the data.&nbsp; </p> <p>4) A Survey Discourse. The overall impulse behind increasing intensity of data collection in survey is to produce a landscape that will hold up to scientific scrutiny.&nbsp; A "scientific landscape" would approach a kind of objective reality that can then be held up against excavation (the seemingly more scientific older brother of survey) in a positive light.&nbsp; The overarching assumption is: "if we can somehow control for all the variables then survey data will have irrefutable meaning and have secured its place in the archaeological discourse."&nbsp; The hope that survey archaeology can produce the same kind of meaning and support the same kinds of arguments as excavation, however, is problematic from the start.&nbsp; First and foremost, survey data, with few exceptions, must rely upon excavated contexts for all ceramic chronologies.&nbsp; Secondly, survey archaeology only ever produces a sample of the known material on the survey (and the level of intensity dictates how large a sample this is).&nbsp; </p> <p>Consequently survey is not a highly precise

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instrument and it is rarely suitable to answer the same kinds of questions that excavation can answer.&nbsp; In particular, it is much better suited to inquiries framed by the Braudelian longue durée whereas excavations are better suited to shedding light on the historical eventement.&nbsp; This shouldn't be particularly surprising as intensive survey in Greece was developed primarily by prehistorians who were interested in long term processes (<em>Landscape Archaeology as Long Term History </em>as it were). For those of us interested in the historical period, however, this means that we have to be willing to construct arguments that function of multiple scales that may or may not (as is the case with Braudel) intersect in a precise way.&nbsp; This involves the development of a Survey Discourse for the historical period, a project that is currently underway, but far from being complete.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AcroSm_1.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AcroSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AcroSm_thumb_1.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Trip Four and the Corinthian Countryside STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: trip-four-and-t CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA DATE: 11/19/2007 12:32:28 AM ----BODY: <p>I visited the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Members</a> on trip four as they visited Panhellenic sanctuary at Isthmia and the immediate vicinity of Corinth.&nbsp; It is always fun to visit Isthmia where I first experienced archaeological fieldwork over 10 years ago.&nbsp; <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a>, the Director the <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">OSU Isthmia Excavations</a>, showed off the magnificent monochrome mosaic in the Roman bath there (another brilliant Roman contribution to a Greek sanctuary):</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/IsthmiaSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="IsthmiaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/IsthmiaSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>One of the downsides of the late fall component of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/description.htm">Regular Program</a> is that the weather begins to turn.&nbsp; On our day in Corinth it rained intermittently, and we were covered by low clouds.&nbsp; In these conditions, the countryside displays a whole range of different colors.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/VineyardSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="VineyardSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/VineyardSM_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Olive trees and orange trees hung heavy with fruit.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/OlivesSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="273" alt="OlivesSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/OlivesSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p align="left">&nbsp; And the Temple of Apollo at Corinth took on an even more dramatic appearance:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ApolloTempleSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="ApolloTempleSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ApolloTempleSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The dramatic landscape provided a great backdrop to talk about survey archaeology in the Korinthian Countryside.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Susie EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.230.21 URL: DATE: 11/19/2007 11:24:02 AM Your photos are spectacular. I especially like the photo of the Temple with the sunlight hitting the tops of the columns and the omnious clouds in the background. Well done, love. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: maddy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 71.128.125.1 URL:

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DATE: 11/19/2007 04:04:26 PM Nice photos! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Latin and Greek in the American University STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: latin-and-greek CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 11/16/2007 12:58:00 AM ----BODY: <p>About a month ago Marilyn Hagerty and I had a <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/an cient-languag.html">brief and pleasant correspondence</a> after one of her <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=54403&amp;section=co lumnists&amp;columnist=Marilyn%20Hagerty">charming columns</a> (which can be yours for $2.95!) promoting the study of Latin at the University and High School level.&nbsp; </p> <p>On Wednesday the <a href="http://www.mla.org/">Modern Language Association</a> published a report on foreign language enrollments in US universities.&nbsp; The publicity around the report focused on the growing enrollments in Arabic, Chinese, et c. in US universities and the continued expansion of the study of languages at American universities in general.</p> <p>This report also showed that enrolments in Latin and Ancient Greek courses have grown apace.&nbsp; In fact, the study of Ancient Greek has grown faster than the general increase in the study of language since 1998, showing a 24% increase in enrolments compared to 17% growth in the study of languages in general. Latin slipped only a bit off the pace with enrolments growing 14% since 1998.&nbsp; In fact, the the growing enrolments in Ancient Greek have kept pace with increasingly popular languages like Chinese (20% since 1998) and Japanese (21%).&nbsp; Moreover, enrolments in Latin and Ancient Greek have managed to hold on to their share of the foreign language market despite the rapid growth of languages like American Sign Language and, predictably, Arabic.&nbsp; Since 1960, Latin and Greek have held steady even as traditional stalwarts like French and German steadily lost market share to new languages and the growing popularity of Spanish.&nbsp; </p> <p>More interestingly still, students who enroll in Ancient Greek at the introductory level are as likely to stick around for upper level course (the ratio of introductory to upper level courses are 4:1) as students enrolled in French and German and more likely to stick it out than students enrolled in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic. (Latin doesn't fair as well with a 6:1 introductory to upper level ratio, so Marilyn Hagerty still has work to do!).</p> <p>The full report is <a href="http://www.mla.org/enroll_survey06_fin">here</a>.</p> <p><a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND</a> struggles to offer consistently Latin and Greek.&nbsp; Dan Erickson, in our one man <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/lang/classics.html">Classics Department</a>, does the best he can to offer lower and upper level courses in Latin every semester.&nbsp; This study would seem to suggest that, if we offer it, they will come.&nbsp; So, perhaps it's time, on the University's <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125-iversary</a>, to celebrate the kind of scholars who founded the University by hiring another Classicist, perhaps a

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Hellenist, and contribute to the continued success of the study of the Ancient Greek (and Roman) world!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Corinth in Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: corinth-in-late CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/15/2007 12:46:43 AM ----BODY: <p>Last night I heard Michael Walbank present a talk, <a href="http://www.cigicg.gr/en/news_events/lectures.html">"The Christian community in Late Roman &amp; Early Byzantine Corinth"</a>, at the <a href="http://www.cigicg.gr/en/index_en.html">Canadian Institute</a> on the Late Roman/Early Byzantine inscriptions from Corinth.&nbsp; Walbank revised the reading and interpretation of many of the texts published by Kent in Corinth 8:3.&nbsp; (He and his wife published an article on the epitaph of Maria wife of Euplous in <a href="http://www.atypon-link.com/ASCS/doi/pdf/10.2972/hesp.75.2.267">Hesperia 75</a>). His talk introduced me to many interesting new denizens of Late Antique Corinth: Muleteers names Theodoros, a Singoularios called Polychronois, and perhaps even an exiled Bishop of Tyre named Irenaios.&nbsp; The paper was first present at the University of Texas, perhaps last winter, at a conference that brought together "Christian types" and "Archaeology types" to discuss the context for Early Christian Corinth.&nbsp; My impression is that this conference will be published (like the first such meeting in the book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Urban-Religion-Roman-CorinthInterdisciplinary/dp/0674016602">Urban Religion in Roman Corinth</a></em>.)</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AcroSm.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="AcroSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AcroSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>As I sat waiting for his talk to begin (and chatted awkwardly with folks afterwards) I began to make a list of all the scholarship produced in the last 5-10 years on Late Roman Corinthia.&nbsp; Much of the credit for this goes to Charles William, longtime director of the Corinth Excavations, and his successor <a

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href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/corinth/main_st_director1.html">Guy Sanders</a> (who along with Kathleen Slane has worked to revise the chronology of Late Roman ceramics: See Hesperia 74; as well as the publication of a Late Roman bath in <a href="http://www.jstor.org/view/0018098x/ap010268/01a00020/0">Panayia Field</a>), and, of course, <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a> with among other things <em>Isthmia V</em>.&nbsp; </p> <p>In the last 10 years you have (and I am sure this is a partial list...):</p> <p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Corinth-First-City-Greece-GraecoRoman/dp/9004109226/ref=sr_1_1/105-11952966640464?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1194770396&amp;sr=8-1">Richard Rothaus</a>'s book <em>Corinth: The First City of Greece: An Urban History of Late Antique Cult &amp; Religion</em>. (Leiden:&nbsp; Brill, 2000), which was his 1993 OSU dissertation.</p> <p><a href="http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~classics/people/robinson-b.html">Betsy Robinson's</a> 2001 Dissertation at Penn: <em>Fountains and the Culture of Water at Roman Corinth, </em>takes a long look at the Late Antique phases of the city center and its water supply.</p> <p><a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, of course, has been working on converting his 2006 dissertation, <em>Corinth on the Isthmus: studies of the end of an ancient landscape</em>, into a book, and has written several papers and articles on the topic.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>My 2003 dissertation looks some at the Corinthian basilicas and I have presented on a paper on the Justinianic epigraphy from Isthmia and Corinth this summer at the "<a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/conferences/isthmia.htm">Half a Century on the Isthmus</a>" Conference which I am currently revising for publication.</p> <p><a href="http://www.fci.msu.edu/facultyandstaff/frey.php">Jon Frey</a> has recently completed a dissertation that looks, at least in part, at the use of spolia in the Late Antique Hexamilion Wall.</p> <p><a href="http://www.wooster.edu/archaeology/faculty.html">P. Nick Kardulias</a> has just published his 1988 dissertation as the book: <em><a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Classical-Byzantine-Evolution-AntiquityFortress/dp/1841718556/ref=sr_1_6/701-97091900451548?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1195108051&amp;sr=1-6">From Classical to Byzantine: Social Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Fortress at Isthmia, Greece</a></em>.</p> <p><a href="http://www.macalester.edu/~rife/">Joe Rife</a>'s <a href="http://www.macalester.edu/classics/kenchreai/">Kenchreai Cemetery Project</a>, now Kenchreai Exacavations, will continue to have a serious interest in Late Antiquity as will his forthcoming <em>Isthmia </em>volume.</p> <p> There are at least two dissertation in progress, Amelia Brown's at Cal and Jeremy Ott's at NYU, that will look in some way at Late Roman material from the Corinthia.</p> <p>I am sure that I have forgotten people, but the impression remains striking nevertheless.&nbsp; There are dozens of publications, research projects, and dissertations in the last decade alone on Late Roman Corinth.&nbsp; It seems fair to suggest that in the next decade the Corinthia will take its place among the best studied provincial region of the Later Roman Empire.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS:

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-----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and the New Media STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetr CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: The New Media DATE: 11/14/2007 08:44:52 AM ----BODY: <p>PKAP has been active in employing "the New Media"; we have a growing list of <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/podcasts/podcasts.htm">podcasts</a>, <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/blogs.htm">blogs</a>, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Multimedia.html">video</a>, and <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html">interactive maps</a> and even a presence in <a href="http://slurl.com/secondlife/Crimson%20Island/55.5898/146.573">Second Life</a> that makes the project and the site accessible to audiences around the world.&nbsp; </p> <p>As we have developed our "New Media presence" I've begun to explore (just a bit) what the various interfaces, genres, applications, and techniques have to offer.&nbsp; As part of that, I've trying to navigate the expanding body of analytical and interpretive material on the <a href="http://www.acls.org/ex-cyber_report.htm">role the New Media</a> has played and will play in the humanities.&nbsp; It is striking, however, that it so much of the (best) discussion of the New Media takes place in the New Media itself.&nbsp; Indeed, the medium appears to be at least part of the message.&nbsp; This is good in that many of the very accomplished practitioners in any of the various media associated with the New Media movement demonstrate by their arguments alone how effective sophisticated, interactive, integrated, interfaces can be.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>Some of this preaching, however, must be to the choir.&nbsp; For example, the best analysis, <a href="http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/academic_blogging_revisited/">com mentary,</a> and justification for academic or intellectual blogging occurs on blogs.&nbsp; As access to blogs requires only the most basic level of Internet savvy, the discussions in the blogosphere were perhaps the first to transcend their genre (or medium) and impact the world <a href="http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/01/03/mclemee">outside</a> of their traditional (gasp) audience.&nbsp; </p> <p>Other aspects of the expansive New Media universe, however, will require a far greater degree of sophistication and knowledge to fulfil their potential.&nbsp; Moreover, unlike blogs, which can be interactive, but are not necessarily so, Media like Second Life, require interaction not simply to justify their presence on the Web but actually to fulfil their potential.</p> <p>Part of me say, we'll have to wait and see.&nbsp; But that's not very fun or adventurous.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 216.235.161.56 URL: DATE: 11/14/2007 02:18:00 PM Over Armistice/Veterans' Day, the Discovery or History Channel aired a show entitled, "Band of Bloggers." A soldier who blogged from Mesopotamia said that he was no revolutionary in being a blogger, but rather doing something timeless -- writing about war. ! ! Whether Tacitus, George Orwell, or the recent Band of Bloggers, the important information from varying perspectives gets recorded, and thus the only real change is through the new technology/medium.! ! I was merely reminded of this after reading your latest 11/14 post here, Bill. ! ! Just a thought on the passing scene -- you should still consider making Second Life a first-person shooter. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Follow up on Athens -- Broken Pieces and AIA Annual Meeting Overview STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: follow-up-on-at CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/13/2007 12:12:08 AM ----BODY: <p><strong>First</strong>, Susie's post "<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/at hens---broken.html">Athens -- Broken Pieces</a>" has received rave reviews!&nbsp; In fact, <a href="http://www.clemson.edu/caah/art/faculty/kourelis/index.html">Kostis Kourelis</a> forwarded to me a link to this very recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/world/europe/09athens.html?_r=2&amp;oref =slogin&amp;oref=slogin">New York Times article</a>, which echoes the spirit of Susie's post, if in a somewhat less gracious way:</p> <blockquote> <p>"In Athens alone, swarms of scooters race down crowded sidewalks. Pedestrians struggle to circumnavigate construction debris, torn-up pavement and mounds of refuse. The greatest impediment, however, is the fleet of vehicles that each day mount the city‚Äôs approximately 1,200 miles of tree-lined sidewalks or other walkways to park."</p></blockquote> <p>I'll be on the lookout for the efforts of the <a href="http://www.streetpanthers.gr/">Street Panthers</a> to keep the sidewalks accessible for pedestrians! </p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Second</strong>, as a

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follow up to my post on the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/11/ai a-annual-meet.html">AIA Annual Meeting</a>, <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">Dave Pettegrew</a>, the chair of the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">Medieval and Post Medieval Archaeology of Greece Interest Group of the AIA</a> sent along word that the IG will have its annual meeting at Sunday, January 6th at 7AM in the Columbian room of the Hyatt Regency Chicago.&nbsp; We'll have a agenda for the meeting together soon, but we will certainly discuss plans for a panel at next years AIA meeting.&nbsp; I've already floated ideas for a panel considering the influence of the Early Travelers on the archaeology of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Mediterranean (inspired by recent work by <a href="http://www.fci.msu.edu/facultyandstaff/frey.php">Jon Frey</a> and Kostis Kourelis) or perhaps a panel that looks at the place of the Medieval and PostMedieval world in our teaching narratives.&nbsp; We hope to have more and (better) suggestions at the meeting in Chicago!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Troels EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 90.185.37.168 URL: http://www.iconoclasm.dk DATE: 11/13/2007 01:33:40 AM Hi Bill - I may try to stop in at the Chicago IG meeting, if that's ok? Troels ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: DATE: 11/13/2007 06:25:44 AM Troels,! ! Of course. By all means! If you are an AIA member, you should join the Interest Group (it's free). Email David Pettegrew: dpettegrew(at)messiah(dot)edu! ! Bill ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Sebastian Heath EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.90.129.144 URL: http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2007/10/ceramics-at-2008-aiaapameetings-in.html DATE: 11/14/2007 06:53:26 PM

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I hope this doesn't count as blogspam. If it does, please ignore.! ! I've put together a list of AIA '08 talks related to ceramics. It's at http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2007/10/ceramics-at-2008-aiaapameetings-in.html . ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: DATE: 11/15/2007 12:50:33 AM Sebastian,! ! This is not spam at all. Your blog:! http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/! needs to appear in my blog role. It's a very nice scholarly contribution.! ! Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Greek Light STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: greek-light CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/12/2007 09:35:57 AM ----BODY: <p>I am not a good photographer (especially by the standards of the blogosphere... Troels at <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/">Iconoclasm</a> has great photos).&nbsp; </p> <p>Greek light helps, though.&nbsp; From the roof outside my office:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GreekLight2SM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="GreekLight2SM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GreekLight2SM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GreekLight1SM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="GreekLight1SM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GreekLight1SM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">There's no point...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: AIA Annual Meeting Overview STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: aia-annual-meet CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: David Pettegrew CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore DATE: 11/11/2007 03:18:53 AM ----BODY: <p>I perused the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300">Program for the AIA's 109th Annual Meeting</a> yesterday and have a little bevy of observations (as one might expect).&nbsp; </p> <p>The first is a blatant <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Advertisements-Myself-NMailer/dp/0674005902/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1194767935&amp;sr=81"><em>Advertisement For Myself</em></a> (and a tribute to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/11mailer.html?hp">Norman Mailer's memory</a>):</p> <p>1) In the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am p;sid=1J">Sunday Poster Session</a>, PKAP will present a poster that focuses on the evolution of a project with a strong commitment to both teaching and research by bringing in voices of students who have participated on the project, namely Greg Fisher, Brandon Olson (now at Penn State), Brice Pierce, David Terry, and Jessica Freas: <blockquote> <p><a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em></a>: The Evolution of a Survey Project<br><a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/"><strong>R. Scott Moore, Indiana University of Pennsylvania</strong></a><strong>, </strong><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/"><strong>William Caraher, University of North Dakota</strong></a><strong>, </strong><a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/"><strong>David Pettegrew, Messiah College</strong></a><strong>, Greg Fisher, Oxford University, Brandon Olson, University of North Dakota, Brice Pierce, University of New Hampshire, </strong><a href="http://www.und.edu/spotlights/davidterry.html"><strong>David Terry, University of North Dakota</strong></a><strong>, and Jessica Freas, Indiana University of Pennsylvania </strong></p></blockquote> <p>2) <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">The Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group of the AIA</a>&nbsp; will have its colloquium in Sunday: <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am

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p;sid=6F">The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture</a>. </p> <p>3) There is a panel called: <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am p;sid=2A">The Post Roman World</a>.&nbsp; It includes a paper by Guy Sanders and Michael Boyd entitled: "Moving Homes: A Resistivity Survey of the Late Antique City Wall East of the Forum at Corinth".</p> <p>4) We would be remiss not to mention the Corinth Panel highlighting the ongoing work of graduate students at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/corinth/index.html">Corinth Excavations</a>: <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am p;sid=5C">Corinthian Horizons: Space, Society and the Sacred in Ancient Corinth</a>.&nbsp; The panel is chaired by Amelia Brown, who presented a paper on Late Antique Corinth in our (soon to be published) <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/SqunichNewsFiles/MPMAG%20Colloquium%20Session.h tm">AIA Colloquium last year</a>.&nbsp; This years Corinth panel reflects, in part, the ever expanding group of folks working on Late Antiquity in Corinth (a topic for a later, longer post...).&nbsp; In light of this in is interesting that the title of the panel (invoking again Mailer's spirit) resonates gently (and I am sure intentionally) with a <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Dissertation.html">certain work</a> on Late Antique Greece (tongue in cheek).&nbsp; Jeremy J. Ott's paper on Late Roman burials in the forum should be particularly valuable contribution to our understanding the the Late Antique City.&nbsp; Moreover, I've heard that <a href="http://www.macalester.edu/~rife/">Joe Rife</a> will be the respondent at this panel, and his nearby <a href="http://www.macalester.edu/classics/kenchreai/">Kenchreai Cemetery Project</a> (now, perhaps, Kenchreai Excavations), has a serious interest in Late Antique levels.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p>5) Finally, one of the key members of the PKAP team, Sarah Lepinski, will participate in this <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/webinfo.php?page=10300&amp;action=display&am p;sid=3H">supercool workshop</a> (I assume Sarah's contribution will center on her work at Corinth):</p> <blockquote> <p><b>Session:</b> 3H: Order and Conflict: The Agency Role of Empires in the Levant and Mediterranean<br><b>Type:</b> Workshop </p> <p><b>Timeslot:</b> Saturday, January 5, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM <p><b>Organizer(s):</b> Gloria A. London, AIA Seattle Society and √òystein LaBianca, Andrews University <p><b>Panelists:</b> Gloria London, AIA Seattle Society, √òystein LaBianca, Andrews University, Randall Younker, Andrews University, Derek Counts, University of Wisconsin, Andrew Smith, Dowling College, Denise Demetriou, Michigan State University, Andrew Goldman, Gonzaga University, Sarah Lepinski, Bryn Mawr College, Bethany Walker, Grand Valley State University. </p></blockquote> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106

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URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/13/2007 09:45:46 PM Hey dude, will you be there? I didn't get to talk to you much last time. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Athens - Broken pieces STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: athens---broken CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Susan Caraher's View DATE: 11/09/2007 03:10:04 AM ----BODY: <p><em>My wife Susie departs Athens early tomorrow morning.&nbsp; To celebrate her visit, she has contributed some of her reflections to the blog today...</em></p> <p>The most striking recollection I have each time I visit Greece is the particular smell as soon as the airport doors part. It is not so much a putrid stench, but a pungent pollution-filled reminder of being in an enormous city. The smell of exhaust fumes, sea air, cigarettes and grilled meats gives Athens a particularly identifiable aroma that is a world away from Grand Forks' cleanliness.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Traffic.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="Traffic" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Traffic_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br><em>Athens Traffic in the Rain</em></p> <p>On our journeys around Athens in the past 10 days or so, a recurrent theme has come to mind. I have seen Athens in a new light since my first trip here 10 years ago. Today, I can see past the Past to the realities of the city trying to live with it's history.</p> <p>Athens is spectacular. On one of our walks around the area of the Plaka, Acropolis, Agora and Kerimaikos I was struck by the decay...decay of buildings, and of footpaths (one really needs to pay attention when walking the narrow streets with broken concrete and pieces of random rebar jutting out of the side of falling buildings), the homeless and the helpless. Archaeological sites are everywhere. The reclamation of inner city buildings has allowed for the gradual exposure of the ancient agora in the heart of the city giving the impression of deeper levels of decay. Juxtaposed against this view is the constant rebuilding. The beauty of a shiny new museum building seems at odds with the surrounding buildings that have been victims of fire or neglect. The sound of construction is everywhere - exposing the old and building the new...new Metro stops, new restaurants, new hotels. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DSCN3710.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="DSCN3710" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DSCN3710_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>The New Acropolis Museum</em></p> <p>Broken isn't all bad. After a day's hike around the city, our well earned afternoon nap was interrupted by the chanting of the Orthodox monk in the nearby Moni Petraki calling people to celebrate the feast

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of the Archangels Gabriel and Michael. The silence in our room was broken by an emotive and soothing song that, had I not been so enchanted would certainly have lulled me back into my slumber.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DSCN3729.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="304" alt="DSCN3729" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DSCN3729_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br><em>Moni Petraki from the Blegen Library</em></p> <p>Silence is rare here. The sounds of car horns, papakis revving their little engines, sirens, Greeks yelling at each other to be heard above the noise of everything else. But Athens is very comfortable with its chaos. It is hard to imagine it any other way - for better or for worse.</p> <p>I love this city, and the way it contrasts with the villages. I like the fact that one of the highest points of the city is not an office building but an ancient temple and that there are a thousand restaurants that each serve pretty much the same menu, and it's always good. I like that the smallest crevice in a building is claimed for a specialty food store and that every second shop sells expensive and inappropriate shoes for these streets. Athens is wonderful and I can't wait to return. </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Picture%20037.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="Picture 037" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Picture%20037_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Benaki Islamic Museum STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: benaki-islamicCATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/08/2007 06:55:45 AM ----BODY: <p>Susie and I visited the <a href="http://www.benaki.gr/collections/islamic/en/">Islamic collection at the Benaki Museum</a>.&nbsp; Located in an impressive, restored building near the Keramikos, this collection is really remarkable if for nothing other than its aesthetic qualities. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BenakiIslamic.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px;

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border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BenakiIslamic_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Having visited many museums in Greece over the last couple of months, the Benaki manages to capture some of the curio cabinet feeling of some of the smaller and older museums, while at the same time being quite clean and modern (in a colloquial sense) in its overall presentation of material.&nbsp; The cases in each of the galleries were packed with spectacular examples of pottery, metal working, and wood according to some chronological and to a certain extent regional organization.&nbsp; In many instances, however, it seemed that this order would break down with earlier artifacts included alongside later ones and contrasting styles and places of origin superimposed in the same cases.&nbsp; This may have been intentional (at least, I suspect that it was), but it was left unexplained enticing the viewer to attempt to understand the tacit relationships between objects on aesthetic grounds alone.&nbsp; This seemed to coincide with the lack of attention to communicating what made Islamic culture particularly Islamic and how particular motifs spoke to anything bigger in the history or society of the time (although they did provide substantial descriptions of the political context for the period presented in each gallery).&nbsp; This isn't meant to be a criticism, necessarily, but more an observation offered by someone who knows embarrassingly little about a culture that exerted a profound influence on the history of the Mediterranean world.&nbsp; In fact, when I taught a M.A. level seminar on the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/Mediterranean_World.htm ">Mediterranean world</a>, it is contained almost nothing on the Islamic world, which is almost inexcusable.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">In some ways this museum stands in contrast to the newer sections of the <a href="http://www.lrf.gr/demos/byz/homepage.html">Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens</a> which have explicitly moved away from their more cluttered and chaotic style of presentation and arranged artifacts, sculpture and art in chronologically and thematic galleries.&nbsp; These galleries, which in some ways more austere, promote a more historical and probably "cultural" reading of the material.&nbsp; Although, it may be that my knowledge of the material ensure that the displays and organization resonate more clearly with my internalized narrative of events and cultural developments.</p> <p align="left"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Grand Forks from afar... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: grand-forks-fro CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Grand Forks Notes

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CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/07/2007 01:12:58 AM ----BODY: <p><strong><em>Grand Forks Historic Preservation Commission Web Site</em></strong></p> <p>The <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/2007/11/new-gfhpc-website.html">Grand Fork's Life</a> Guy has pointed out that the <a href="http://gfpreservation.com/">Grand Forks Historic Preservation Commission</a> has a new web site.&nbsp; It's just a start, but any place that puts draws attention to the significant buildings in the Grand Forks community works to ensure their preservation.&nbsp; The more people know about and appreciate these buildings, the more they will feel an attachment to them.&nbsp; </p> <p>Our humble abode is in the <a href="http://www.nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com/ND/Grand+Forks/districts.h tml">Near Southside Historic District</a>, and we have several important buildings within walking distance including the spectacular <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og744.html">Joseph Bell DeRemer</a> (and son)'s <a href="http://gfpreservation.com/images/unitedlutheran.jpg">United Lutheran Church</a>.</p> <p><strong><em></em></strong>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong><em>More on Institutional History</em></strong></p> <p>Since its been raining in Athens, my wife and I have begun work on the History of <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/">The Graduate School</a> at <a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND</a>.&nbsp; Our plan is to make our history encompass graduate education more broadly at the University.&nbsp; Our tentative outline looks like this:</p> <p>1. The Early Years: Graduate Education from 1894-1927<br>2. The Graduate Division and Joseph V. Breitwieser: 1927-1950<br>3. The Graduate School and Dean Hamre: 1950-1970<br>4. Growth and Development in the 1970s and 1980s<br>5. Current Directions: The Graduate School at the New Century</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clayton EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 59.93.3.104 URL: http://www.verveearth.com DATE: 11/07/2007 12:16:03 PM I enjoyed checking out your blog. I'm a recent grad in Silicon Valley, and I've just started a company that is mapping the blogosphere to our world. Here is an example of a blogger in Georgia who's plugged in: http://www.verveearth.com/landing/#type=user&id=772. It can be fun to explore different localities.! !

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It's an easy process to get on board, and I can be reached at [email protected] for questions or feedback. If you resonate with the vision of painting a global canvas of voices, please give VerveEarth a mention.! ! Cheers! ‚ÄìClayton! ! ! ! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Thorikos and the Spirit of Institutional History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: thorikos-and-th CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/05/2007 04:52:56 AM ----BODY: <p>On a lovely Saturday, Susie and I set out for a drive across Attica.&nbsp; We stopped at Sounion and at Brauron.&nbsp; These sites were nice...</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SounionSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="138" alt="SounionSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SounionSM_thumb.jpg" width="204" border="0"> <img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="138" alt="BrauronSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BrauronSM_thumb.jpg" width="204" border="0"></a> </p> <p>but the spirit of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/tr ip-three.html">institutional</a> <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/mo re-department.html">history</a> drove us to our real destination, Thorikos.</p> <p>Between Sounion and Brauron on the coast of Attica sits ancient Thorikos.&nbsp; My colleagues who study ancient Attica have assured me that Thorikos is, indeed, a significant site in history and development of the region.&nbsp; Today it sits, neglected, beneath the towers smokestacks of a power station. Despite the locale, Thorikos presents a relatively well-preserved theater constructed of blue-grey local stone.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Theater2Sm.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Theater2Sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Theater2Sm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp; </p> <p>What makes it interesting to us, however, is that it was the first site excavated by the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a> in 1886 nominally under the guidance of the Director of the School, Prof. Frederic De Forest

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Allen.&nbsp; The task of excavating fell to Walter Miller who led a group of 2530 workmen in search of the stage of the theater there.&nbsp; The matter of the stage in the Greek theater was of pressing interest at the time and several early American excavations in Greece focused on theaters.&nbsp; Miller published the results of his excavations in volume four of the Papers of the American School. (L. E. Lord, <em>A History of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 1882-1942</em>.&nbsp; Cambridge, Mass. 1947, 42-43).</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Theater1Sm.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Theater1Sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Theater1Sm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p align="left">The budget for the first season of excavation was around $300, quite a generous fund considering that the workmen were paid about a drachma a day (in fact, I have no idea what a drachma a day is in US dollars, but it seems like a small amount...)!&nbsp; This is a nice thing to consider as we prepare yet another grant application for <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP</a> this summer...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: http://blegen.blogspot.com DATE: 11/05/2007 06:37:39 AM As luck would have it, Miller and Cushing's publication of the theater at Thorikos is available online, courtesy of the University of Michigan:! ! http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ACD4670.0004.001! ! Pages 1-34 ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: DATE: 11/05/2007 10:26:02 AM Awesome as usual, Chuck!! ! Thanks! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Harvest Time

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: harvest-time CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/04/2007 01:53:35 AM ----BODY: <p>Susie and I drove up to Delphi to meet up with the Regular Members.&nbsp; From Delphi we headed south through Distomo and Stiri (with a stop at Hosios Loukas) and then on to the mountain village of Ayia Anna before descending onto the Western Boeotia plains at Thivi.</p> <p>It's harvest time in Greece.&nbsp; Living in North Dakota has made me far more attentive to season agricultural practices.&nbsp; The beet trucks rumbling through Grand Forks are as clear a sign of fall as the football, the changing colors of the trees, and the first Christmas decorations.</p> <p>Around Thebes, the signs of the cotton harvest were everywhere.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/CottonTractorSM.jpg"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/CottonFieldsSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="304" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/CottonFieldsSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></a></p> <p align="center"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="336" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/CottonTractorSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"> </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;</p> <p>As we curled through the mountains south of Stiri, the olive harvest had begun.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/OliveHarvestSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="OliveHarvestSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/OliveHarvestSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p>The most unusual harvest, however, evoked North Dakota as clearly as any other.&nbsp; Wind farms gleaned their harvest from the windy peaks of the mountains south Ayia Anna.&nbsp; The low hanging clouds created particularly dramatic conditions to view these&nbsp; odd complements to the deserted hillsides.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/WindFarmSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="331" alt="WindFarmSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WindFarmSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/WindFarmSM2.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="164" alt="WindFarmSM2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WindFarmSM2_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brian Baier EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.193.249 URL: DATE: 11/05/2007 08:30:52 AM Man, I love that you're posting everyday photos and commenting on them with some lucidity. Keep sharing the "mundane" details of life around you. They are more rare to foreign eyes than all the unique, but well-known, attractions. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Delphi and Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: delphi-and-late CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 11/02/2007 11:20:29 AM ----BODY: <p>As most folks know, Delphi was a major center during Late Antiquity.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ApolloDelphiSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="ApolloDelphiSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ApolloDelphiSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The town of Delphi had a vibrant economy, lavish villas, several Early Christian basilicas, a couple with mosaic decorations.&nbsp; One mosaic is particular spectacular.&nbsp; The mosaic below was excavated from a church in the village of Kastri.&nbsp; It has an inscription that suggests the church was a funerary basilica.&nbsp; The mosaic itself is striking and its most striking feature is the central emblema of the west panel of the nave:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DelphiMosaicEmblema.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="DelphiMosaicEmblema" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DelphiMosaicEmblema_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The tiger cat attacking the deer is not what one would except to see in an Early

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Christian funerary basilica!&nbsp; But it might have significance in context.&nbsp; The mosaic is surrounded by elite motifs including two summer months bringing in abundant harvests, hunting dogs, eagles (common in both a religious and secular context throughout antiquity), and exotic animals.&nbsp; The scene of tiger cat attacking a deer has elite associations, particularly with exotic animal hunts in the amphitheater.&nbsp; Finally, since tigers attacking deer do not fit into the known exegetical inventory of Late Antiquity, it might well be that this mosaic represented images that resonated with the expression of elite values -- which would not be particular uncommon in a funerary context at any time during Antiquity.</p> <p>The prominent display of this mosaic in the courtyard outside the museum stands in contrast to dearth of well-displayed Late Antique material in the museum or on the site more generally (compared to, say, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/tr ip-2-part-2-o.html">Olympia</a>).&nbsp; There is, however, a handful of assorted marble disjecta membra on display around the site, but some of it suggests that the folks responsible for the displays were not entirely familiar with Late Antiquity...</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/upsidedowncrossDelphiSm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="upsidedowncrossDelphiSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/upsidedowncrossDelphiSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Trip Three STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: trip-three CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 10/31/2007 04:06:57 AM ----BODY: <p>I leave tomorrow first thing in the morning for trip three.&nbsp; It's a short one for me: one day at Delphi and a morning visiting Distomo and Hosios Loukas.&nbsp; My wife, Susie, who has blogged <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/susan_cara hers_view_of_pkap/index.html">in this very space</a> will be joining me for 10 days.</p> <p>To see what the first American School trips were like, check out Priscilla M. Murray and Curtis N. Runnels, "Harold North Fowler and the

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Beginnings of American Study Tours in Greece," <em><a href="http://www.atyponlink.com/ASCS/loi/hesp">Hesperia</a></em> 76.3 (2007), 597-626.&nbsp; It continues in <em>Hesperia</em>'s reflexive mood, although article lacked the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/mo re-department.html">slightly-subversive, analytical edge</a> of the previous offerings.&nbsp; Most notably the article includes as a lengthy appendix a transcribed version of Fowler's diary on his tour of the Peloponnesus in 1883.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: oxford-centre-f CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 10/30/2007 01:14:15 AM ----BODY: <p>Peter Brown gave the opening address at the new <a href="http://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/index.shtml">Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity</a> earlier this fall, and the address is <a href="http://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/pdf/brown_what_in_name.pdf">available</a> (It continues in the reflexive tone that has become common in his works since the turn of the century celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the "Holy Man" and <em>The World of Late Antiquity, </em>which is not to say that he doesn't make some interesting observations).&nbsp; The OCLA also has listed its <a href="http://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/home_eve.shtml">seminars and events</a> and <a href="http://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/home_pro.shtml">project</a>s both which provide a nice overview of some of the important discussions in the field today.&nbsp; The <a href="http://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/home_res.shtml">shear number of folks</a> who have an interest in Late Antiquity at Oxford is staggering.&nbsp; This must surely mean that Late Antiquity has arrived as a serious and central sub-field in study of the ancient world.</p> <p>It's interesting that this year there are three senior folks here at the American School who work on Late Antiquity (<a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/corinth/main_st_director1.html">Guy Sanders</a> (Director of the Corinth Excavations), <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Tim Gregory</a> (who was my advisor at Ohio State), and <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/">me</a>), but by my reckoning only one student, Amelia Brown, an <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Membership/associate.htm">Associate Member</a> working on Late Antiquity at Corinth and Thessaloniki.&nbsp; While one year is

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not necessarily a representative sample of any academic cohort, it is a bit odd that there are not more students who are working on Late Antiquity at the American School, particularly among the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/membership/regular.htm">Regular Members</a>.&nbsp; The reasons for this are a bit hazy to me.&nbsp; It could be that students of Late Antiquity tend to eschew narrow regional focuses, so are not attracted to the regular program at the American School which is unapologetically regional in scope.&nbsp; It might also be that the study of Late Antique Greece is relatively underdeveloped in the U.S. and does not appear to be a priority at the Schools traditionally represented at the American School.&nbsp; Or it could just be an one year aberration.&nbsp; </p> <p>Six of the 24 jobs listed on <a href="http://www.hnet.org/jobs/search_results.php?restrict=1&amp;status=Open&amp;cat=79">H-Net in Ancient History</a> specifically encourage folks with an interest in Late Antiquity to apply.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: DATE: 10/30/2007 09:58:37 AM There are some others interested in late antiquity here: Matthew Baumann, Krysztof Domzalski, Bogdan Maleon, for instance. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: DATE: 10/31/2007 01:33:24 AM Chuck,! ! Thanks! I had a feeling when I wrote that that I was forgetting some folks. It is still interesting, however, that only one of that number is a regular member (and moreover, my impression is that Matt is not going to work on Late Antiquity for his dissertation). In any event, thanks for the correction. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Oxi Day in Athens STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: oxi-day-in-athe

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CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 10/28/2007 02:21:14 AM ----BODY: <p>Today is Oxi Day in Athens.&nbsp; It's a national holiday in Greece that celebrates the Greek Dictator Ioannis Metaxas' refusal to allow Axis troops to enter the country and occupy strategic points in the country in 1940.&nbsp; The story goes, that when asked by the Italian ambassador to open the borders to Axis troops, Metaxas responded by telegram "Oxi" or "No".&nbsp; It marks the beginning of Greek involvement in World War II.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/OxiDay2007.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="OxiDay2007" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/OxiDay2007_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a><br><em><font size="1">Flags from the roof of the American School of Classical Studies Library.&nbsp; <br>Loring Hall, where I live, is the background</font></em></p> <p>October 26th is The Feast of St. Demetrios which has strong, patriotic connections as well.&nbsp; The Greek army entered the city of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/th essaloniki.html">Thessaloniki</a> on on the Feast of St. Dimitrios in 1912 (during the First Balkan War).&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AyDemetriosSm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AyDemetriosSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AyDemetriosSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em><font size="1">The Church of St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki</font></em></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP and Cyprus Notes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-and-cyprus CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 10/27/2007 02:18:51 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Three quick hits on PKAP and Cyprus.&nbsp; </p> <p>There is a nice <a href="http://www.johnbohannon.org/journalism/articles.html">feature on Albert Ammerman</a> in the August issue of <em>Science</em>.&nbsp; The article talks about Ammerman's controversial work on the early prehistory of Cyprus and mentions <a href="http://cropandsoil.oregonstate.edu/people/faculty.php?ID=38">Jay Noller</a>, a geologist at Oregon State University, who has worked with PKAP since 2004 and will publish the geology and core samples from Koutsopetria.&nbsp; Ammerman gave us a hard time a few years back at the CAARI symposium, but we've both seem to have recovered from the episode!!&nbsp; </p> <p>Scott Moore has posted something on <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/2007/10/pkapin-sl.html">PKAP's ongoing Second Life</a> project on his <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings Blog</a>.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_9.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="242" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_6.png" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The PKAP Research Complex and Visitor's Center is now open to the public.&nbsp; You can look at photos, browse our reports (in the second floor library), and even read my blog via an RSS Feed.&nbsp; While it's great to have a presence a virtual world, we are still trying to get some functional value from it.&nbsp; It's going to take time to work out what this interface can do. </p> <p>Finally, PKAP had a paper accepted at the <a href="http://www.aiac.org/ing/congresso_2008/home.htm">17th International Congress of Classical Archaeology</a>, which will meet in Rome next semester.&nbsp; The paper, "Trade and Exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Model from Cyprus", will appear in a panel titled: Exchange -The Eastern Mediterranean, and will allow us to bring together many strands of evidence for inter- and intra-regional exchange on our site.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Maps, Archaeology, and Hypermedia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-maps-and-l CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 10/25/2007 12:20:59 AM -----

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BODY: <p>There is a kind of simple functionality to this nice <a href="http://individual.utoronto.ca/safran/Constantinople/Map.html">interactive map to the city of Constantinople</a> prepared by Emmanuel Nicolescu and Linda Safran.&nbsp; I don't know how long it has been available, but I stumbled across it only recently.&nbsp; This kind of interactive city map seems to be increasingly popular.&nbsp; The finest examples include an interactive version of the <a href="http://nolli.uoregon.edu/">Giambattista Nolli's 18th century map of Rome</a>.&nbsp; Better still is this <a href="http://www.berlin.ucla.edu/">fancy interactive digital map of Berlin</a> which includes vast quantities of hypermedia. The <a href="http://www.agathe.gr/cgi-bin/qtvr?site=agora;node=1">interactive site tour</a> of the Athenian Agora is a somewhat different thing, but also adds a multi (but not exactly hyper-) media element.&nbsp; </p> <p>Many of the articles in <a href="http://intarch.ac.uk/index.html">Internet Archaeology</a> (particularly <a href="http://www.taesp.arts.gla.ac.uk/">TAESP</a>'s recent <a href="http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue20/taesp_index.html">contribution</a>, which is worth the price of admission) bring together the potential of multimedia interfaces for studying not only urban but also rural landscapes.&nbsp; Aaron Barth provided me with a nice link to a virtual version of <a href="http://onaslant.ndsu.edu/x3d.html">On-A-Slant village</a>, <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/10/py la-koutsopetr.html">another effort</a> to bridge the gap between the two dimensional regularity of plans and the dynamism of human experience </p> <p>Given et al. offer this:</p> <blockquote> <p>In the last 30 years, intensive survey in the Mediterranean and elsewhere has made a major contribution to archaeological knowledge. It has established an appropriate range of methodologies, a series of very substantial data sets, and widespread agreement about survey's suitability for addressing numerous highly topical research questions. What it has not achieved is a convincing demonstration of how surface artefact scatters can be interpreted to reveal past human activities and relationships. <p>One major problem is the increasing gap between GIS-driven statistical analysis of large data sets and phenomenological or interpretative approaches. The first sometimes verges on the processual, while the second tends to use a small sample of conspicuous monuments. Is it possible to combine the wealth of representative survey data with the interpretative sophistication of contemporary landscape theory? <p>A further problem is the difficulty of communicating these complex data sets to the reader, and integrating them with a theory-driven interpretation. Traditional print publication demands a linear format and static images. These can only ever provide a pale shadow of the richness of modern archaeological data sets and the even richer human experience of landscape. Online publications, in contrast, offer unlimited colour, full databases and interactive maps that can be queried and searched. These have the potential of providing a much fuller range of choices for authors to present their interpretations, and for readers to pursue their own interests. </p></blockquote> <p>Michael Given, Hugh Corley and Luke Sollars, "Joining the Dots: Continuous Survey, Routine Practice and the Interpretation of a Cypriot Landscape," <em>Internet Archaeology</em> <strong>20</strong>. 4.1 Introduction <a href="http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue20/4/1.htm">http://intarch.ac.uk/journal /issue20/4/1.htm</a>. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: -----

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EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Ancient Languages in North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: ancient-languag CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 10/23/2007 12:41:07 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_7.png"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; margin: 0px 15px 0px 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="104" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_4.png" width="68" align="left" border="0"></a> Marilyn Hagerty had a <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=54403&amp;section=co lumnists&amp;columnist=Marilyn%20Hagerty">nice article</a> on Latin in the Grand Forks public schools.&nbsp; The lead to the article gave it a subversive, underground feeling:</p> <blockquote> <p>"This past week, I set out to find out about Latin, and I discovered it is alive and well in basement classrooms in Grand Forks Central and Red River high schools."</p></blockquote> <p>One can almost envision the equipment filled underbelly of a modern school crammed to the gills with smoking, plotting, brooding Latin students huddled around a charismatic young teacher under a single light bulb.&nbsp; It would seem, however, that the reality is far more rosy...</p> <blockquote> <p>At Central, [the teacher, Laurie Hollifield] has 46 students in her four classes with three in their fourth year. At Red River, she has 60 with eight in the fourth year. She is happy to have 20 first-year students at Central and 30 freshmen at Red River. And the second-year enrollments of 19 at each school show that more students are sticking with Latin and the classics. <p> <p><a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/reporters/index.cfm?page=articles&amp;repo rter_id=31"></a></p>Magistra Hollifield is pleased to see Latin growing statewide. She knows there are four teachers in Fargo public schools and a parttime Latin teacher at Shanley High School there. Bismarck has three teaching Latin, and there is one in Mandan. Hollifield, who once taught Latin in Bismarck, insists Latin is the foundation of learning. (<a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=54403&amp;section=co lumnists&amp;columnist=Marilyn%20Hagerty">Continues...</a>)</p></blockquote> <p>I like the idea that Latin is the foundation of learning, although it has a bit of an overstated feeling to it.&nbsp; In any event, it is good to see that Latin is a thriving.&nbsp; Moreover, it is always heartening to see a member of the media take an interest in Latin and rate Latin in the schools as one of her "causes". <p>I hope that Ms. Hagerty can someday make Ancient Greek one of her causes as well.&nbsp; We struggle to offer Ancient Greek regularly even at the

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<a href="http://www.und.edu/">premier liberal arts university in the state</a>, and most good Latinists know that learning Latin is only half the equation.&nbsp; A solid rooting in Latin <em>requires </em>a good foundation in the Greek language as well.&nbsp; After all, most of the great Latin stylists -Caesar, Cicero, Tacitus, -- knew and read Greek.&nbsp; Cicero studied in Athens, and Caesar's famous utterance "Alea iacta est" is a quote from Greek comic playwright Menander; Plutarch (<em>Pomp</em>. 60) actually reports that Caesar said it in Greek: Α<font face="Ka"><font face="Kad">νερρίφθω κύβος</font>!</font> (And if you can't trust Plutarch on such matters...).&nbsp; Elsewhere, Suetonius reports that Caesar's last words were not the famous Et tu, Brute, but the far more scandalous: "<font face="Kad">καί σύ τέκνον?</font>"&nbsp; In fact, to my mind the only great stylist who was not comfortable in Greek was probably Augustine in the 4th century A.D., and even in this period, he was probably the exception among the educated elite.<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_8.png"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="141" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_5.png" width="140" align="right" border="0"></a> <p>It wasn't that long ago (<a href="http://www.und.edu/history/">100 years!</a>) that Professor of Greek and Latin was the academic post held by the greatest President of the University, <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/og146.html">Webster Merrifield</a>,&nbsp; who not only oversaw the University's most fundamental period of expansion, but also developed the basic liberal arts curriculum that would influence the direction of the University even to this day. <p>So, while we appreciate the positive attention on the study of Latin, remember Ancient Greek as well!! To support the study of the Ancient World at the University and continue a tradition that dates to its earliest days, contact <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/artsci/giving_opportunities.html">Michael Meyer at the College of Arts and Sciences</a> and consider making a small gift to the "Cyprus Research Fund" at the <a href="http://www.undalumni.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?&amp;pid=183&amp;srcid=183 ">UND Alumni Association</a> which supports the study of the ancient world by faculty and students in the Department of History.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: &quot;Transitional Spaces&quot; in the landscapes of the Mediterranean and North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: transitional-sp

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CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 10/21/2007 02:16:37 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last week the discovery of a body near the President's house at the University of North Dakota has caused a stir in the North Dakota media.&nbsp; The body, from what we know now, is of an older woman, "older than 30 to 40 (emphatically not a college aged student!) and the body appears to have been in place for several decades.&nbsp; </p> <p>Of the more interesting things surrounding the discovery of this unfortunate soul is the discussion of the history of the area around what is now the president's house at the university (very fitting for a university exploring it's <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125-iversary</a>).&nbsp; A recent <a href="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=54367">Grand Forks Herald</a> article provided these insights:</p> <blockquote> <p>"Former UND President Tom Clifford was a student at the university in the late 1930s. <p>Although he didn't want to speculate too much on the origin of the remains, he recalled that there was a "hobo jungle" in the same vicinity during the '30s. <p>"People would migrate here for harvest," he said. "They would camp in that area, near the railroad." <p>The Rev. William Sherman, retired pastor at St. Michael's Catholic Church in Grand Forks, also recalled the camps. <p>"There were tens of thousands of working men" riding the rails, he recalled. They weren't violent, he said, and they slept on cardboard in camps, eating, working and passing through. <p>Others recalled the area as an open, grassy space, a "nice place to go out and lay in the sun," said P.V. Thorson, a retired UND history professor." </p></blockquote> <p>We could call this transition space based on it's proximity to transportation, work, and it's undefined character ("open", "jungle", "camps").&nbsp; (This space doesn't seem to appear on this postcard from the <a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_9rvux6f1kYo/RxgrDKzQUII/AAAAAAAAAJw/IsazBkSdQis/s1 600-h/UND+1922.jpg">1920s postcard</a> posted over the the <a href="http://grandforkslife.blogspot.com/">Grand Forks Life Blog</a>!)</p> <p>We've tried to apply this interpretative paradigm to our analysis of <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla-Koustsopetria</a>.&nbsp; We got the idea from M. Rautman's use of the term to describe areas at the fringes of the Late Roman settlement of Kopetra.&nbsp; We applied the term to our famous Zone 2 -- a region to the northeast of our densest concentration of pottery (for our discussion of this area see <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/publications/ASOR%202006.htm">here</a>).&nbsp ; To summarize, we termed as "transitional" for three reasons:</p> <p>1. There is a substantial concentration of Late Roman pottery, but many more locally produced LR1 amphoras and Cypriot Red Slip pottery.</p> <p>2. The Zone lacks rooftiles or other evidence for substantial architecture.</p> <p>3. The area would have sat near what we think was the main route to the east toward the major settlements of Salamis-Constantina.&nbsp; It would have also sat on the shore of the embayment which served as a small Late Roman harbor.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Zone2Sm.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Zone2Sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Zone2Sm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>This all being said, one really likes our term "transitional area".&nbsp; Most other scholars

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ask (rightly) transition from "what to what"?&nbsp; So, perhaps we need a better term.&nbsp; But I like the parallel between the area near the President's House at UND and our Zone 2.&nbsp; </p> <p>The finding of a body there is a good reminder that the scatter of pottery that we document on Cyprus actually represents human activity and lives.&nbsp; It helps us imagine a temporary settlement of people who had come to the area to harvest crops, help load ships, or find other day-labor.&nbsp; </p> <p>It's also another good example of just how good the North Dakota landscape is to think with.&nbsp; For other examples see <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/07/th e-quartzite-b.html">here</a> and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/04/ab andoned_lands.html">here</a>...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Conferences STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: conferences CATEGORY: Conferences CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 10/19/2007 12:34:58 AM ----BODY: <p>Here are a couple conferences that might be of interest to members of the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">Mediterranean and Post Mediterranean Archaeology Interest Group</a>.</p> <ul> <li>&quot;The Insular System of Early Byzantine Mediterranean: Archaeology and History&quot; <a href="http://www.ucy.ac.cy/ema/index.html">Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus</a>, October 24-26.<br />I know nothing about this workshop or seminar, but the topic is appealing.&nbsp; Here's the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/files/Cypr usConference.pdf">program.</a> <br /> </li> <li>&quot;The Afterlife of Inscriptions&quot; <a href="http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/BES/">British Epigraphy Society</a> 11th Annual General Meeting and Autumn Colloquium. Warwick University November 17, 2007.<br /><a href="http://www.currentepigraphy.org/wpcontent/uploads/2007/10/agm07_prog1.pdf">Full programme in PDF</a></li>

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<li>‚ÄúWays of Seeing in Late Antique Material Religion‚Äù University of Kentucky , Lexington , Kentucky March 28-29, 2008<br />This conference is organized by the <a href="http://www.uky.edu/FineArts/Art/VS/">Ways of Religious Seeing in Late Antiquity Working Group</a> and it's organized by Alice Christ at Kentucky and Janet Tulloch at Carleton University, Ontario<strong>:</strong></li></ul> <p>And as a reminder:&nbsp; </p> <p><strong><a href="http://ina.tamu.edu/yasymposium/index.htm">Tradition and Transition: Maritime Studies in the Wake of the Byzantine Shipwreck at Yassƒ±ada, Turkey</a></strong>. A symposium honoring Drs. George F. Bass and Frederick van Doorninck. College Station, Texas. Nov. 2-3-4, 2007.&nbsp; </p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I won't be able to attend any of these events, but would be very interested in hearing about them and seeing programs. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: R Kennedy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.164.243.224 URL: DATE: 10/19/2007 09:31:42 AM Bill,! ! Just stumbled upon your blog. You have some good stuff on here that our Classics and Archaeology students might be interested in. Let me know if you are ever in the DC region. We'd love to have you talk at GWU about some of your dig experiences. ! ! Rebecca (Futo) Kennedy -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Second Life STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pyla-koutsopetr CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore DATE: 10/17/2007 01:50:12 AM

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----BODY: <p>I am a novice in <a href="http://secondlife.com/">Second Life</a>, but I've read enough about its potential on blogs like <a href="http://electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/">Electric Archaeology</a> (Shawn Graham, the electric archaeologist himself has some interesting remarks on its potential <a href="http://www.coronationhall.com/of%20past%20lives%20and%20second%20lives.wav ">here</a>) and seen some impressive installations like <a href="http://www.vassar.edu/headlines/2007/sistine-chapel.html">Vassar College's Sistine Chapel</a> to at least be intrigued.&nbsp; Recently, Scott Moore, PKAP's erstwhile co-director and ceramicist at Indiana University of Pennsylvania has become involved in a project with colleagues <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/anthropology/people/chiarulla.html">Bev Chiarulli</a> in Anthropology, <a href="http://www.coe.iup.edu/cm/partridge.htm">Allen Partridge</a> in Communications Media, and students from the very impressive <a href="http://www.iup.edu/HONORS/">Robert E. Cook Honors College</a> at IUP part of which will explore the application of Second Life to archaeology.&nbsp; In our discussions, Scott has suggested that the emphasis on spatial relationships in archaeology makes it a natural match for a 3d interface like Second Life. It would certainly be able to reproduce the radical changes in elevation present at our site better than our flat, interactive maps.&nbsp; Moreover, it would seem to coincide, in a much simplified way, with the current interest in 3D scanning and imaging in Mediterranean Archaeology (like at the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/aday-in-boeoti.html">Thivi-Kastorion Archaeological Project</a> or among <a href="http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2007.html">Digital Classicists</a>).&nbsp; Both technologies seek to present ancient architecture in a way that captures the experience of the space. </p> <p>So far, their efforts have received some nice attention from the local media, a short article in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review:</p> <blockquote> <p>...Indiana University of Pennsylvania history professor R. Scott Moore and anthropology professor Beverly Chiarulli recently received an IUP new Academic Excellence and Innovation Grant for "The Creation of an IUP Second Life Island for Technology Advancement in the Classroom." <p>Chiarulli said her students will visit underwater sites and take tours on a Second Life island. <p>"A more 3-D atmosphere, while sometimes cartoonish, gives a much larger sense of what, for instance, Mayan sites would be like than through books or online," she said... (<a href="http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_531669.html">more here...</a>)</p></blockquote> <p>There hasn't been too much done on archaeology in Second Life yet -- there was only one paper, for example, at the recent <a href="http://www.brocku.ca/iasc/immersiveworlds/sessions.php">Immersive Worlds Conference</a>. The scholarly discussion, somehow appropriately, seems to function just below the radar and appear mainly in blog posts <a href="http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/LifeSquared/2006/06/archaeology_as_theatre_i n_seco.html">like</a> this or <a href="http://www.stoa.org/?p=462">this</a>.&nbsp; The media has been available now for a few years (there are even hints of an <a href="http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/09/28/second-life-sketchesdrive-my-car/">archaeology of second life</a> in some places), but it's educational potential is still being openly debated.&nbsp; Scott Moore plans to talk about some about this over at his occasional blog, <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Ancient History Ramblings</a>, possibly tomorrow.</p> <p>In any event, PKAP already has

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a Second Life presence on Indiana University of Pennsylvania's Crimson Island.&nbsp; Scott has built us a PKAP headquarters:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PKAPHQ_2.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="237" alt="PKAPHQ_2" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PKAPHQ_2_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">And a conference room for meetings (you can't properly have a headquarters without a conference room, right?):</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PKAPHQ_1.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="236" alt="PKAPHQ_1" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PKAPHQ_1_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>More interesting, however, is the emerging Second Life Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em>.&nbsp; The plan, if I understand it, is to build a model of the site so that we can orient students, meet, and have discussions with the student-volunteers prior to actually arriving in Cyprus.&nbsp; So far, I can see a vague resemblance, but they've only just begun:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ViglaSL.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="236" alt="ViglaSL" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ViglaSL_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>While, PKAP headquarters and Second Life Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em> are still in the development phases (some parts of it should be ready for inspection soon!), Indiana University of Pennsylvania's Crimson Island is up and running with a small PKAP installation.&nbsp; If you have a Second Life account (they are free!) you can visit it at: <a title=" http://slurl.com/secondlife/Crimson%20Island/55.5898/146.573" href="http://slurl.com/secondlife/Crimson%20Island/55.5898/146.573">http://slurl .com/secondlife/Crimson%20Island/55.5898/146.573</a>.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 66.231.126.7 URL: DATE: 10/17/2007 02:21:27 PM Halo 3 is out now so who has time for Second Life?!? ! ! Could you maybe turn the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Second Life into a first-person shooter? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher

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TITLE: Jack Davis on &quot;The Rising Love of Loot&quot; STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: jack-davis-on-t CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 10/15/2007 01:06:44 AM ----BODY: <p>Jack Davis, my boss here at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a>, has given a <a href="http://www.athensnews.gr/athweb/nathens.print_unique?e=C&amp;f=13255&amp;m =A02&amp;aa=1&amp;eidos=S">good interview on the display, ownership, and ultimately meaning of antiquities</a>.&nbsp; Of particular note to some readers of this blog is his criticism of the private ownership of archaeological sites and material in the U.S.&nbsp; In Davis's words:</p> <blockquote> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image_6.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 15px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="244" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_3.png" width="110" align="left" border="0"></a> "The antiquities laws in America are, in my view, ridiculous. They permit the private ownership of archaeological sites and the exploitation of those sites. If I am a farmer and I own an American Indian cemetery, something Late Mississippian, 13th or 14th century after Christ with beautiful artefacts, I can dig it. They're my property. I can sell them just as private property. There are no restrictions whatsoever. <p>So we do what we can do. We have a couple of organisations in the States that exist to raise money to buy private property on which archaeological sites are located - the Archaeological Conservancy. We buy sites and set them aside just to protect them for the future. "</p></blockquote> <p>This is something that NDAA (<a href="http://www.und.edu/org/ndaa/">North Dakota Archaeological Association</a> -- this is not the most updated web site!) might want to begin to address.&nbsp; Private ownership of archaeological sites in North Dakota is, of course, very common.&nbsp; The NDAA is made up of many well-informed and well-meaning avocational archaeologists (as well as professionals) who have antiquities on their lands.&nbsp; The conversations I had with these folks at their 2007 Annual Meeting was, I think, mutually enlightening in that they seemed surprised by the protectionism of the Cypriot and Greek governments over antiquities, and generally interested in understanding the particulars of these arrangements (for which I could only provide a rather superficial perspective -- not being an expert on Greek antiquities law).&nbsp; Despite my position as an outsider, many of the individuals with whom I talked that night were open to engaging the complex issues surrounding archaeological property. It would be very useful for this discussion to continue!&nbsp; In the wide-open spaces of North Dakota it is very difficult to imagine a day when all archaeological materials are protected, but by continuing to educate especially those who are already predisposed to being interest in these issues, we can ensure that the archaeological record remains meaningful for future generations.&nbsp; <p>For a much more sophisticated, ongoing, discussion of these matters, check out the David Gill's <a href="http://lootingmatters.blogspot.com/">Looting Matters</a> blog.&nbsp; </p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 66.231.111.196 URL: DATE: 10/16/2007 08:20:31 PM Real quickly, it comes down to the disparity between what's considered Sacred in the Old and New Worlds. Our Jeffersonian notion of Private property (or the illusion of it) continues to take precedent so that landowners have considerable -- if not total -- control of what happens to what is on their land. That forces scholarly institutions to either snub the private landholder, thereby adding to the already lingering Ivory White Tower myth about Ph.Ds already. Or, scholarly institutions can continue reaching out to landowners and, in this latter case, be allowed on to their land to open test units, conduct pedestrian surveys, and explain the methods of scholars so as to continue to engage in open dialog with the public that ultimately funds our state institutions.! ! Isolationism doesn't seem to be the answer, at least when it comes to archaeology in the American West, and in Dakota. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 66.231.126.7 URL: DATE: 10/17/2007 02:16:55 PM Also: a "printable view" on these blogs would be real handy for those who only have time to print an article or two before leaving town. It's the only way to catch up: reading in the hotel rooms or at the campsites in the evening during field season. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP Notes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-notes CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 10/13/2007 01:04:52 AM -----

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BODY: <p>Some quick hits from the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">Pyla<em>Koutsopetria</em> Archaeological Project</a>:</p> <ul> <li>For those of you unable to make it to Toronto and the <a href="http://www.byzconf.org/current/2007/index.html">Byzantine Studies Conference</a>, you can read the PKAP BSC paper <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/publications/papers/2007%20BSC%20Paper%20fina l.pdf">here</a>.&nbsp; It's a decent, short, synthetic overview of the project with particular attention to the 2007 season.&nbsp; I think that we are really coming to terms with how late our site runs -- well into the 7th century.&nbsp; (We have most of our conference papers <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/publications/papers.htm">here</a>). <li>An updated PKAP interactive map is available <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html">here</a>.&nbsp; It will take some time to load up (especially if you don't have a quick graphics card or a slow connection), but it includes the units surveyed in 2007 (and their density -- note in particular the very high density units on the south slope of Vigla) and the fortifications walls on Vigla.&nbsp; The other big improvement is that we have digitized two more 1:5000 maps sheets allowing us to display more the local topography.&nbsp; UND's <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/oid/">Office of Instructional Development</a> provided the small grant necessary to do this, and the work was done by the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/Geog/index.html">Department of Geography</a>. </li></ul> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="254" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_5.png" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <ul> <li>The President of <a href="http://www.und.edu/">UND</a>, <a href="http://www.und.edu/president/html/bio.html">Charles Kupchella</a> gave PKAP some local attention when he mentioned our project in a talk to the local <a href="http://www.gfchamber.com/">Grand Forks Chamber of Commerce</a>.&nbsp; You can watch the short video excerpt from his talk on your iPod (or just in your browser!) from <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/PKAPinChamberTalk.m4v">here</a> (UND is, after all, an <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/itunes/index.php">iTunes University</a>) or the entire talk <a href="http://www.und.edu/video/CEKchamber.m4v">here</a>.&nbsp; <li>It's great that the President of UND would identify PKAP as one of the avenues that connects UND and the Grand Forks community to the wider world.&nbsp; Our hope is that individuals in the community see the value in projects like this and give to the Cyprus Research Fund at the <a href="http://www.undalumni.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?&amp;pid=183&amp;srcid=2">UND Alumni Association</a>.&nbsp; This fund not only supports the work of PKAP, but also supports UND's other archaeological projects in the Eastern Mediterranean, including ongoing research in the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/EKAS.html">Eastern Korinthia</a>, work in the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikast orion_archaeological_project/index.html">Thisvi Basin</a>, Boeotia (Greece), and the strengthening of ties with the <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/">Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia</a>.&nbsp; These projects aren't just digging up old stuff!!&nbsp; They include computer based data management projects (OSUIsthmia), "excavating and reclaiming" data from old projects (Thisvi Basin), <a

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href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Multimedia.html">multimedia productions</a> intended for classroom and the general pubic, as well as fieldwork opportunities for UND students.&nbsp; To help support all these projects, contact <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/artsci/giving_opportunities.html">Michael Meyer</a> in the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/artsci/">College of Arts and Sciences</a> and tell him that you want to support Mediterranean Archaeology at UND!!&nbsp; In particular, this year we hope to raise enough money for UND to become a <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/us/Managing/CoopInst.htm">Cooperating Institution</a> of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies at Athens</a> (as many of our peer institutions already are).&nbsp; This will provide UND with a foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean and expand the opportunities for UND faculty and students to experience the Mediterranean World first hand.</li></ul> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.168.68.244 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 10/13/2007 04:11:44 PM Hey Bill, ! Thanks for the information- I like the interactive map. It's great that sharing the data from your projects so quickly and making it accessible public- more archaeologists should be doing this. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: DATE: 10/15/2007 01:19:05 AM Maddy,! ! Glad to hear that you like the blog -- and that someone is reading it. to make our complete data set from the survey available sometime in the year or so. ! ! Bill -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Trip 2, Part 2: Olympia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__

you're to the

We hope next

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: trip-2-part-2-o CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 10/11/2007 01:07:04 AM ----BODY: <p>The site of Olympia is massive and impressive.&nbsp; The buildings are immense and the efforts needed to excavate the site -- digging through 4 meters of river sediments -- are almost beyond belief.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ZeusTempleSm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="ZeusTempleSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ZeusTempleSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p align="left">The enormous, tumbled-down columns of the temple of Zeus are far more impressive than the solitary re-erected column which not only seemed out of place, but strangely irrelevant in this expansive monument to ancient athletic and modern archaeological ambition.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ZeusColumnSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="ZeusColumnSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ZeusColumnSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> <p align="left">Most people, of course, go to Olympia to see the elegant little church in the workshop of Phidias with its well-preserved chancel screen and interesting Early Christian inscriptions.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PhidiasChurchSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="PhidiasChurchSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PhidiasChurchSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">Or perhaps the tourist in search of the sensational turns sharply to the right when entering the museum to see the largest displayed collection of Slavic pots in all of Greece.&nbsp; Breathtaking to be sure -- concise monuments to culture change.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SlavicPotsSm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="SlavicPotsSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SlavicPotsSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">In a tragic way, this year, the fires stole the spotlight from finds even as impressive as these.&nbsp; The Kronos hill bare of trees:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KronosBurntSm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="KronosBurntSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/KronosBurntSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">The entire neighborhood of the village surrounded by the haunting silhouettes of the incinerated countryside:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FireDamage1Sm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="FireDamage1Sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FireDamage1Sm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">Olympia was amazing.&nbsp; Nancy Bookidis, Assistant Director <em>Emerita </em>at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/corinth/index.html">Corinth Excavations</a> provided an excellent and detailed tour of the site supplemented ably by the Regular Member's well-considered site reports on major monuments.&nbsp; <a href="http://www.shc.ed.ac.uk/Profiles/Judith_Barringer.htm">Judy Barringer</a> provided excellent insights into the sculpture of from the pediment of the Temple of Zeus (if one could get over the impression made by the Slavic pots).&nbsp; Jack Davis fleshed out the prehistoric period at the site. Finally, the students were politely attentive during my presentation of the Late Roman phase of the site including a completely gratuitous discussion of the epigraphical evidence for Late Roman land tenure from the church at Olympia (this was all the more impressive considering it was raining!).&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Kostis Kourelis EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 155.68.29.254 URL: http://kourelis.blogspot.com/ DATE: 09/09/2009 08:23:56 AM I didn't notice back in 2007 that you had posted photos of the famous Slavic pottery. Very nice. I don't think any better images exist. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Trip 2: Aegeira, Patras, Chlemoutsi STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: trip-2-aegeiraCATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 10/10/2007 01:04:43 AM ----BODY:

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<p>The north coast of the Peloponnesus is filled with remarkable sites.&nbsp; I visited just three of them over the last week.&nbsp; First, we stopped at the largely Hellenistic site of Aegeira, an important city in the Achaean League.&nbsp; I has an impressive acropolis with amazing views of the coast as well as a well preserved theater.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AegeiraSm.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="AegeiraSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AegeiraSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">Further west, we&nbsp; explored some of the Roman remains from Patras.&nbsp; Patras is the third largest city in Greece and filled with a array of Roman period ruins, including a well preserved Roman bridge</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/RomanBridgeSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="RomanBridgeSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/RomanBridgeSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The final stop of the day was the 13th century Frankish site of the Chlemoutsi.&nbsp; This imposing castle guarded the Elian plain and despite its centuries of Post-Frankish use, it retains many of the basic features of Frankish period.&nbsp; Note that the wall lack battering characteristic of the gun powder age (and Venetian and Ottoman period fortifications).</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ChlemoutsiKeepSm.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ChlemoutsiKeepSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ChlemoutsiKeepSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">We then headed on to Olympia and the fire ravaged hills of eastern Elis...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Site Reports STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: site-reports CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 10/05/2007 12:26:55 AM ----BODY:

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<p>The second trip of the regular program begins on Sunday, and I will give a site report on the Late Antique phase(s) at Ancient Olympia.&nbsp; Site reports are the bread-and-butter of the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/membership/regular.htm">Regular Program</a> at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School</a>.&nbsp; Typically, they involve a short (ca. 20 minutes, although some run much, much, (much) longer), usually critical description of a building, site, archaeological or historical issue or topic.&nbsp; </p> <p>Most material presented in site reports derives from archaeological reports or secondary sources.&nbsp; They typically do not feature "original research" but rather involve collating material into a concise, comprehensive presentation.&nbsp; For some places this is relatively easy... for others, like Late Antique Olympia, this is incredibly difficult as one must find a way to synthesize such diverse matters as excavation history, ceramic chronology, settlement phases, epigraphy, architecture, even geology.</p> <p>While a good site report can resolve a difficult problem or complex site with clarity, the core pedagogical impetus behind these reports seems (to me) to be a demonstration of competence (this is to say, in some cases leaving complexity as complexity demonstrates a heightened degree of expertise and reinforces the authority of the speaker before one's peers, but one always has to stop short of the dreaded "gobbly-gook/kooky talk" which suggests an inability to clarify or essentialize difficult issues.).&nbsp; </p> <p>With site reports, in particular, the performative aspect of regular membership comes to the fore.&nbsp; The key in almost all aspects of American School academic life is the perform in a professional way before your future colleagues and peers.&nbsp; And, unlike in a graduate program in the U.S., the nature of American School life -- i.e. living together in <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/about/facilities.htm#Residence">Loring Hall</a>, working in close quarters in the main reading room of the <a href="http://blegen.blogspot.com/">Blegen library</a>, travelling together, eating together -- ensures that the performance of professionalism extends far beyond simply putting together a competent site report.&nbsp; With some allowances for differences in work patterns and study methods, one is expected not only to present the end result of one's research in a way that demonstrates professional awareness, but also to conduct research in a way that is clearly professional as well (and even talk informally about doing research in a professionally sophisticated way!).&nbsp; Thus the performative aspect of the American School program encompasses almost every moment of one's day (listen for the murmurs: "I haven't seen him/her in the library much lately..." or "how did he/she get THAT fellowship...") and offers a rich venue for academic and intellectual gamesmanship.&nbsp; In some cases the stakes can be high, which adds to the thrill, but mostly it's just harmless posturing.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Site_Report_sm.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Site_Report_sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Site_Report_sm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>For my part, I have always really enjoyed playing a largely insincere and transparent disciplinary shell game.&nbsp; When thinking or talking about archaeology, I profess to be a historian.&nbsp; When talking about history, I can always shrug my shoulders and admit to being "mainly an archaeologist".&nbsp; Others play their parts a well; common forms of professional or disciplinary identification start with such phrases: "As a philologist..." (i.e. don't blame me if I don't understand the stratigraphy here") or "As a visual person..." (i.e. don't ask me to explore the grammatical niceties of a textual passage..."). </p> <p>In any

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event, an awareness of all this doesn't stop me from getting all agi-ma-tated about my site report.&nbsp; Olympia in Late Antiquity is really complex!&nbsp; How will I even sort all the various discussions into a 20 minute report to give on site?</p> <p>Wish me luck!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.220.188.60 URL: DATE: 10/08/2007 11:52:24 AM Just checking in here. I read some of your crazy and highly interesting blog. ! ! In response to categorizing people who categorize the past: What becomes problematic about Identifying one's profession also stems from the other, who is understandably more interested in telling you what they think, or what they've read -- every man his own Universe. ! ! For example: someone says they study history, or were trained to study history, and the immediate reply is, "Oh, have you read the Da Vinci Code!?"! ! ...perhaps that's why your method works so well: side-step that incoming crazy with a different Title, or Identity, whether feigned or real. ! ! Back to it... ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.170.0.106 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/ DATE: 11/03/2007 02:01:57 AM How funny. I think I know some of the people in that picture. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Triumph over Time STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: triumph-over-ti CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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DATE: 10/03/2007 12:39:10 AM ----BODY: <p align="left"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-over-Time-AmericanClassical/dp/0876619634/ref=sr_1_1/104-13600466191912?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1191387004&amp;sr=8-1"><img style="bordertop-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="154" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_2.png" width="101" align="left" border="0"></a>As someone who has dabbled in <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">doc umentary production</a>, I was thrilled to be able finally to see the restored 1947 documentary <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-over-Time-AmericanClassical/dp/0876619634/ref=sr_1_1/104-13600466191912?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1191387004&amp;sr=8-1">"Triumph over Time"</a> last night with an excellent lecture by the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/archives/blegen/A_index.htm">American School's archivist</a> Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">The film, directed by well-known archaeologist Oscar Broneer, was conceived as a fund raising tool (imagine, using a movie to generate donations!) for the American School.&nbsp; It featured the School's projects in Athens and Corinth, plenty of interesting footage, and some clever use of light-duty ethnography to highlight the "enduring character of Greek civilization".&nbsp; In the end, the film played for over a decade and a half both as an American School P.R. tool and, later, in the arsenal of the U.S. State Department.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">Some basic observations on the film and its history resonated with our efforts to use a documentary:</p> <p align="left">1) Distribution.&nbsp; One observation made during the introductory comments about the film is the difficulty in getting the movie to its intended audience -- the wealthy GreekAmerican community.&nbsp; In fact, "Triumph over Time" did not appear to raise any money, and its first tour in the U.S. actually produced a deficit.&nbsp; While my effort at using a documentary to generate publicity avoided a deficit (and had much more modest ambitions), we have found that our documentary did very little to raise money for the project.&nbsp; The biggest part of our audiences were students and my academic colleagues.&nbsp; They have been supportive and have watched our film with interest and enthusiasm, but they are hardly the folks we expect to make donations to the project!&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">2) Narrative structure.&nbsp; As Dr. Vogeikoff-Brogan pointed out, the film followed lines largely established by travel writers like Henry Miller and Laurence Durrell in that it made explicit comparisons between the ancient Greece studied by archaeologists and the world of post-war Greece.&nbsp; The comparison of modern to ancient is such a common trope in archaeological documentaries that it is difficult to imagine a narrative structure that does not, in some way, appeal to it.&nbsp; While "Triumph over Time" emphasized the rustic character of Greek life, "<a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSHomePage.html">Sur vey on Cyprus</a>" stressed parallels between the bustling, "busy" world of modern and ancient Cyprus.&nbsp; The hangover of romanticism has thoroughly saturated the popular presentation of archaeology to such a remarkable degree that perhaps we need to refer to the "timeless" character of documentary narrative structure!</p> <p align="left">3) Archival value.&nbsp; Perhaps the greatest value of any of these films is that they capture the landscape in a way that even the most detailed archaeological description or still photography

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cannot.&nbsp; (Although it is worth mentioning that <em><a href="http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue20/taesp_index.html">Michael Given et al. recent contribution to Internet Archaeology</a> </em>which uses panoramic photography does provide an effective complement to maps and still photos).&nbsp; The film captures quite vividly the mid-20th century cityscape of Athens and as well as the landscape around Ancient Korinth.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Thessaloniki STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: thessaloniki CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 10/01/2007 12:10:06 AM ----BODY: <p>On Friday, I returned from my first trip as a member of the American School staff.&nbsp; I met up with the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/membership/regular.htm">Regular Members</a> in Edessa and then stayed with them through <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/we stern-macedon.html">Florina, Mikri Prespa, Kastoria, Dispilio</a> (check out the Dispilio excavation's classy <a href="http://web.auth.gr/dispilio/">web site</a> and be sure to click on the "Diary of an Archaeologist" feature on the left), Aiani, and Thessaloniki.&nbsp; Since I have already talked about the first places in that list, I thought I might reflect a bit on Thessaloniki.</p> <p>In some ways, Thessaloniki forces an observer to acknowledge the post-antique history of Greece as much as (if not more than) the Ancient past.&nbsp; Perhaps it is the standing monuments that are still more or less embedded in the urban landscape (as opposed to the sanitized presentation of the Acropolis in Athens or the fenced off preserves of the Agora and Keramikos). Or perhaps it is because I am less familiar with the city so have to pay more attention to landmarks; after all, Athens does have its share of post-antique monuments -architecturally interesting mosques, Byzantine churches, and <a href="http://www.iconoclasm.dk/?p=233">art deco apartment blocks</a> (or <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/09/13/AR2007091301854.html">here</a>).</p> <p>In any event, Thessaloniki was quite vivid this past trip.&nbsp; The Regular Members were particularly engaged in the post-ancient cityscape making the trip quite rewarding. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv

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eWriter/Thessmarket_sm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="Thessmarket_sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Thessmarket_sm_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/LoutroParadisio_Thess_sm.jpg"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/JewishTombstoneCropped_sm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="438" alt="JewishTombstoneCropped_sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/JewishTombstoneCropped_sm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></a></p> <p align="center"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="LoutroParadisio_Thess_sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/LoutroParadisio_Thess_sm_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0">&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Panagia_Chalk_Thess_sm.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="376" alt="Panagia_Chalk_Thess_sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Panagia_Chalk_Thess_sm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project's New Website STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-pyla-koutso CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore DATE: 09/29/2007 01:15:44 AM ----BODY: <p>PKAP has unveiled its <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">new website</a> (it's still in beta).&nbsp; It should be easier to navigate and includes out 2007 final report.&nbsp; It will also include soon an updated interactive survey map and the text of our most recent conference papers (AIA 2007, CAARI Workshop 2007, and BSC 2007).&nbsp; There is some new news and notes -- particularly <a

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href="http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2007/9/emw555120.htm">a nice article</a> on PKAP's work with the <a href="http://www.iup.edu/honors/">Robert E. Cook Honor's College</a> at <a href="http://www.iup.edu">IUP</a>.&nbsp; The article includes a <a href="http://prwebpodcast.com/releases/pod555120.htm">podcast</a> from our very own R. Scott Moore!Not to be outdone, we've also put up some podcasts (they are not linked to the main site yet!) <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/podcasts/podcasts.htm">here</a>.&nbsp; We are clearly still playing with how to integrate <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/multimedia.htm">multimedia</a> into our site, but it's getting there. </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="246" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_1.png" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>In other PKAP news, fall is grant writing time.&nbsp; We are particularly concerned with finding money to fund our proposed, small scale excavation campaign in 2008.&nbsp; We will ask permission to put in several small soundings to confirm the results of our 2007 geophysical survey particular on Vigla and the Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; Since the two areas represent two different periods of occupation (Late Antiquity and the Late Bronze Age) we will request money from funding bodies with two very different periods of emphasis.&nbsp; Fortunately, the more fieldwork we do at the more that our research goals for the two areas converge.&nbsp; The fact that both areas now appear to be fortified further encourages parallel readings of the landscape.&nbsp; </p> <p>In the meantime we are completing a contribution to the Near Eastern Archaeology in a volume exploring American archaeology on Cyprus and dedicated to the late Danielle Parks.&nbsp; We will also present a paper entitled "Across Larnaka Bay: Recent Investigations of a Late Antique Harbor Town in Southeast Cyprus" at the <a href="http://www.byzconf.org/">Byzantine Studies Conference</a> in October.</p> <p>We'll keep all of our interested "stake holders" appraised of these developments as they, er, develop.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Yassiada Conference STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: yassiada-confer CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project CATEGORY: Scott Moore

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DATE: 09/24/2007 12:31:43 AM ----BODY: <p><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottomwidth: 0px; margin: 0px 25px 0px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="244" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb_1.png" width="163" align="left" border="0">Justin Leidwanger reminded me of this conference that he helped organize:</p> <p><strong><a href="http://ina.tamu.edu/yasymposium/index.htm">Tradition and Transition: Maritime Studies in the Wake of the Byzantine Shipwreck at Yassıada, Turkey</a></strong>. A symposium honoring Drs. George F. Bass and Frederick van Doorninck. Nov. 2-3-4, 2007 in College Station, Texas. This intriguing conference coordinated by MPMMG member Justin Leidwanger as well as Deborah Carlson and Sarah Kampbell will feature many of the mainstays of research on Byzantine amphoras and maritime archaeology.</p> <p>Scott Moore is contributing a paper that I am sure will include PKAP data:<a href="http://ina.tamu.edu/yasymposium/PDFs/Moore.pdf">Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Early Middle Ages</a></p> <p>The 7th century A.D. <a href="http://ina.tamu.edu/yassiada7.htm">Yassiada shipwreck</a> produced a spectacular group of 900 amphoras aboard a relatively well-preserved ship.&nbsp; The ships cargo has helped establish the ceramic chronology for amphoras as well as remind us of the Late Roman Empire's continued ability to marshal economic resources even during the early years of the 7th century.&nbsp; In fact, it is likely that the material found aboard the ship was destined to provision Roman forced fighting the Persians.&nbsp; Moreover, inscriptions on the amphoras provide some indication that the church was responsible for collecting the material in the amphoras, low quality wine produced most likely on the west coast of Asia Minor.&nbsp; Thus, it reinforces the evidence from elsewhere that the church contributed in a very significant way to the economy and commerce of the period. </p> <p>The Yassiada evidence might shed some light on the presence of an olive press crusher stone and press weight at Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em>, perhaps indicating that the church there had invested the capital for agricultural processing installations which would serve the local producers of olives.</p> <p>I will be away visiting the students on the American Schools Regular Program for the rest of the week, but will certainly report back once I have returned.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Blegen Library STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-blegen-libr

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CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 09/21/2007 11:45:05 PM ----BODY: <p>One of the great advantages of being in Athens at the American School are the two libraries -- the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/gennadius/g_index.htm">Gennadius Library</a> and the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/blegen/b_index.htm">Blegen</a>.&nbsp; Both offer one of a kind collections and as closed stacks libraries almost total access to their material.&nbsp; As an added advantage of my position, I have an office in the Blegen library allowing me access to the stacks 24 hours a day. (I have found, however, that attempting to be in the library 24 hours, or even much over 12 hours a day, does little for my productivity!).&nbsp; </p> <p>What this post is really about is this: <a title="http://blegen.blogspot.com/" href="http://blegen.blogspot.com/">http://blegen.blogspot.com/</a>.&nbsp; The Blegen librarian Charles Jones has a blog that tracks the new books arriving at the Blegen.&nbsp; The new book shelf here is a great way to keep informed on what is going on the field and now you can browse it from the comfort of your own computer.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More Departmental History... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-department CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 09/19/2007 01:02:33 AM ----BODY: <p>I've mention in the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/an -experiment-i.html">past</a> that I worked a good bit on our department's Departmental History over the last twelve months and ramped up my efforts to a considerable degree this summer.&nbsp; When I came to Athens, I figured that my enthusiasm for the history of my department would fade a bit (and it has), but to my surprise the American School has found itself in a reflective mood of late producing a number of articles on its institutional and intellectual history (see in particular Tracy Cullen's piece on 75 years of <em><a href="http://www.atypon-link.com/ASCS/loi/hesp">Hesperia</a></em> (that is the journal of the American School)in volume 76.1, Jack Davis's article in the same

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volume on the "Birth of Hesperia" and Kostis Kourelis article in 76.2 on "Byzantium and the Avant Guard" at the Corinth excavations of the 1920s and 1930s.)&nbsp; The American School is the kind of place that feels like it has an <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/history.htm">official history</a> (in fact, there are two volumes dedicated to the history of the School), and both Kourelis and Davis say that their use of the archives has allowed them to uncover "the real story" so to speak (As Davis says on page 22 of his article that one of his goals "is to contrast published and archival accounts").&nbsp; It lends both articles a subversive tone (which one probably feels more acutely if one has has spent time at the American School), but, in the end, archival research is at the core of the historical method.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Libby.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="233" alt="Libby" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Libby_thumb.jpg" width="209" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Prof. Orin G. Libby, Historian<br>University of North Dakota 1902-1945</em></p> <p>In any event, it's kept my interest in the departmental history simmering.&nbsp; I have now posted my working text for the <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DHChapter_Intro.html">introduct ion and chapters 1-3</a>.&nbsp; These chapters cover the history of the department up to about 1970.&nbsp; The goal of the university, of course, was to compile the history for each department over the last 25 years which was to complement existing departmental histories of the first 100 years written in conjunction with UND's 100 anniversary in 1883.&nbsp; Our department did not write a departmental history at that time, so I was left to write the entire history of the department from the 1880s to present.&nbsp; I made to the late 1960s, but after 1970 the sources become a bit more scarce, I am increasingly uncomfortable with the methods (especially oral history), and I can't shake the nagging feeling that if it's not 1000 years old it's not really historical (my colleagues will rightly disagree with this!).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chuck Jones EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 193.92.187.43 URL: DATE: 09/19/2007 09:30:16 AM Hello Bill,! ! Now that you're on board here can I mention yours in the Blegen blog:! http://blegen.blogspot.com/! ! Thanks,! ! -Chuck-!

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! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Traffic Report STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: traffic-report CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 09/15/2007 06:13:58 AM ----BODY: <p>I am pleased to announce that my blog received its 2,500th hit last night.&nbsp; Since its inception in Mid-May, I have posted 63 posts (well over halfway to my goal of 100 for the year) and received about 16 hits a day.&nbsp; The blog received the most traffic when <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a>, <a href="http://ancienthistory.typepad.com/ancient_history_ramblings/">Scott Moore</a>, and <a href="http://www.susancaraher.typepad.com/">Susie Caraher</a> contributed regularly and the <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project</a> was in the field in Cyprus (having a link from the <a href="http://www.und.edu">University's main webpage</a> probably didn't hurt either).</p> <p>Over recent weeks this has become consistent traffic, and I am optimistic enough to note a slight upward swing.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Chart9-15_1.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="209" alt="Chart9-15" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Chart9-15_thumb_1.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">There does seem to be a loose correlation between how often I post and the number of hits the page gets.&nbsp; This is good positive reinforcement!&nbsp; For those of you who read this blog regularly, if you keep reading, I will certainly keep posting.</p> <p align="left"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 76.168.68.244 URL: http://archaeobaking.blogspot.com/

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DATE: 09/19/2007 11:40:58 AM Hey Bill,! Keep up the good work- It's great to know what you're up to these days, and you write about such interesting things (in a very accessible way, too)! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: iTunes, UND, and Survey On Cyprus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: itunes-und-andCATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 09/14/2007 07:00:25 AM ----BODY: <p>Yesterday the University of North Dakota (finally) announced that it was an official <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/news/story.php?id=2154">iTunes University</a>.&nbsp; One of the first pieces of media that went up on their iTunes server was our documentary, <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Multimedia.html">Survey on Cyprus</a>. </p> <p>The material on the server is free and available to the public.&nbsp; If you have iTunes installed on your computer, click this link to get access: <a title="https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/LoginDone/und.edu" href="https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/LoginDone/und.edu">https://de imos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/LoginDone/und.edu</a>.&nbsp; Otherwise go and get iTunes <a href="http://www.apple.com/itunes/">here</a> and then click on the link!</p> <p>Special thanks go to the folks at <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/">University Relations</a> who have worked hard on my project's behalf.</p> <p>As a related PKAP note, <a href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow">Joe Patrow</a> has just now started editing the material that he collected for his new film: <em>Emerging Cypriot.&nbsp; </em>We look forward to seeing a trailer for it before the end of the year!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Kozani STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: kozani

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CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 09/12/2007 04:32:29 AM ----BODY: <p>The last stop on my northern trip was the site of Aiani, which has an impressive set of Classical-Hellenistic tombs and a series of excavated houses on an striking acropolis.&nbsp; Unfortunately, we are not allowed to take pictures of it...</p> <p>But, on the way there I stopped off the impressive Early Christian basilica at Ay. Paraskevi (near Aiani outside of Kozani).&nbsp; When there a local villager told me the story of how the basilica was found.&nbsp; He said that a man in the village had had a dream and in that dream Ay. Paraskevi appeared to him and told him to go and dig at a particular spot (near the town's Byzantine church).&nbsp; After his first attempt, he found nothing and gave up.&nbsp; Ay. Paraskevi promptly appear to him in another dream and urged him to dig again.&nbsp; When he did so, he uncovered the Early Christian basilica shown below (of course, the Archaeological Service helped once he discovered architecture).&nbsp; The design with apsidal ends on the transept is more common in the central Balkans than in Southern Greece.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KozaniBasilicaSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="KozaniBasilicaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KozaniBasilicaSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/KozaniMosaicSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="KozaniMosaicSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/KozaniMosaicSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The remarkable thing about this story is that the same story (more or less) has appeared in a Christian context for close to 1500 years!&nbsp; Saints regularly remind people of their churches and seem to take a very serious interest in their state.&nbsp; This may well account for the persistence of certain sacred places in the Mediterranean landscape.</p> <p>From Kozani I made the long drive back to Athens and my air conditioned office and apartment...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Western Macedonia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1

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BASENAME: western-macedon CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 09/11/2007 06:28:17 AM ----BODY: <p>The goal of my adventures to the north was to scout the route for the American School's Regular Program tour.&nbsp; To do that I drove from Kastoria to Florina, on to Edessa, and then back to Kastoria via lake Mikri Prespa.&nbsp; Florina provide a nice little museum and Hellenistic site with some fine examples of domestic architecture.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FlorinaHellenisticSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; borderleft-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="FlorinaHellenisticSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FlorinaHellenisticSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Edessa would have been a more interesting place, but it was pouring rain.&nbsp; My interest for even the finest Hellenistic ashlar masonry in the pouring rain is limited.&nbsp; They seem to have excavated some houses there and, recently, several cemeteries.&nbsp; Modern Edessa is known for its waterfalls.&nbsp; So, since it was too rainy to take good archaeological pictures (and perhaps too boring!), I'll include a photo of a waterfall:</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/EdessaWaterfallSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="EdessaWaterfallSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/EdessaWaterfallSM_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a> </p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The work at both Edessa and Florina sheds valuable light on the geographic extent of what we might call typical Greek cities during the Hellenistic period (and this has obvious implications for the promotion of Greek Nationalism in an area like Western Macedonia which even a century ago had substantial non-Greek speaking populations).&nbsp; </p> <p>A small snow shower made the trip over the mountains west of Florina more exciting.&nbsp; Who would have thought that it would snow in Greece before North Dakota?</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FlorinaSnowSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="FlorinaSnowSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FlorinaSnowSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>And the low hanging clouds made my visit to the island of Ay. Achilleos in lake Mikri Prespa more dramatic.&nbsp; It's reached by a pontoon bridge.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AyAchilleosSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="272" alt="AyAchilleosSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AyAchilleosSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>My goal visiting the island was to see the massive late 10th century basilica, likely

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built under Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria.&nbsp; This building shows a conscious adoption of a monumental, Early Christian style (note the foundation of the centrally placed <em>ambo </em>in the foreground), perhaps designed to lend legitimacy to his newly expanded state.&nbsp; Ultimately Bulgarian control over this area was terminated rather abruptly by Basil II's victory at Kleidion in 1014.&nbsp; According to our sources, the Bulgarian army was defeated, and Basil took 10,000 men captive, blinding all but 1 per thousand to lead the defeated men home.&nbsp; Charming guy, Basil II...</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AyAchilleosChurchSM.jpg"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-leftwidth: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="404" alt="AyAchilleosChurchSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AyAchilleosChurchSM_thumb.jpg" width="272" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aleksandar EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 205.172.241.12 URL: DATE: 09/12/2007 07:50:58 AM Samuil was a Macedonian king, the battle was at belasica.! ! And good that you are aware that there were (and still are) many non greek speaking Macedonians in Greece. Especially the Northern greece and the border to Macedonia. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Underwater Archaeology in Eastern Cyprus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: underwater-arch DATE: 09/10/2007 02:13:34 AM ----BODY: <p>Scott Moore brought this little Reuter's story to my attention.&nbsp; 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. </p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <blockquote> <p>Cyprus to seek ancient shipwrecks</p> <p>By Michele Kambas <p>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

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island in 306 BC. <p>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. <p>"Cyprus is a crossroads and is very rich in ancient shipwrecks," said Pavlos Flourentzos, director of Cyprus's Department of Antiquities. <p>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. <p>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. <p>"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. <p>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. <p>The Cypriot Antiquities Department announced on Thursday that an ancient Roman shipwreck, dated the 1st century AD, had been found in the same area.&nbsp; <p><a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUKPAR65915620070906?pageNumber =2">Continued...</a></p></blockquote> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Kastoria and Western Macedonia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: kastoria-and-we CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 09/10/2007 12:50:06 AM ----BODY: <p>On Wednesday morning I left western Boeotia for Western Macedonia.&nbsp; This is a mountainous drive and I did it in the rain... but the reward of Kastoria was brilliant indeed.</p> <p>Kastoria as many of you know is located on a peninsula that juts out into a lake of the same name.&nbsp; The town itself retains its Ottoman (and likely earlier) street plan presenting a rabbits-warren of confusing streets -- none of which are straight and none of which are flat.&nbsp; Navigating these streets presents a reward, however, in over 60 churches with a handful of particularly important ones of Byzantine date.&nbsp; The Byzantine churches built from the early 10th century through the early 12th, are almost all of a basilican plan and characterized by exceptionally tall

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central naves (attenuated as the architectural historians would say).&nbsp; Some have argued that this is to simulate the effect of a dome employing a far less demanding architectural form.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Ay_Anayiri_KastoriaSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Ay_Anayiri_KastoriaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Ay_Anayiri_KastoriaSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"> </a></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Ay_Stephanos_KastoriaSM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Ay_Stephanos_KastoriaSM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Ay_Stephanos_KastoriaSM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>There is one domed church the Panayia Koumbelidiki which shares the same attenuated proportions.&nbsp; Lively and playful, if somewhat flat, decorations in brick enliven the exterior walls of these buildings further contributing to their distinct appearance.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Pana_Koumbelidiki_Kastoria.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; bordertop: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Pana_Koumbelidiki_Kastoria" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Pana_Koumbelidiki_Kastoria_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The town also preserves a good bit of Ottoman domestic architecture.&nbsp; From the 16th century on the town was know as a center of the fur trade (initially, it would seem from the kastoras (beavers) that lived in the lake) and wealthy merchants built fancy houses over looking the lake.&nbsp; Most of which are in a state of neglect.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/OttHouse_Kastoria.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="OttHouse_Kastoria" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/OttHouse_Kastoria_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p>(There are a goodly number of smaller houses as well):</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/SmOttHouse_Kastoria.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="SmOttHouse_Kastoria" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/SmOttHouse_Kastoria_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">As an aside, while in Kastoria I paid a visit to its supposed predecessor, the town of Diocletianopolis, which according to Procopius was abandoned when Justinian founded the city a Kastoria.&nbsp; While only bits of the city have been properly explored, a good stretch of its walls remain.&nbsp; I have no idea of the date of these walls, but presumably they are 4th or 5th century.&nbsp; The town has repointed them and was in the process of surrounding them with a little park: </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Diocletianopolis_Wall_SM.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="Diocletianopolis_Wall_SM" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/Diocletianopolis_Wall_SM_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left"></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: A Day in Boeotian Thisvi STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: a-day-in-boeoti CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens CATEGORY: Thisvi-Kastorion Archaeological Project DATE: 09/09/2007 04:22:12 AM ----BODY: <p>I am sure that my gentle readers are literally waiting on the edge of their seats to hear of my week of travels through Boeotia and Western Macedonia. <p>The week started with a visit to Archie Dunn’s <a href="http://www.archant.bham.ac.uk/research/individuals/dunn/archie3.htm">Thisvi-Kastorion Project</a> (the project does not have an official name or at least a consistently applied one, so this is what I will call it). It is a collaboration between Dunn and the 23rd Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities.&nbsp; I gave this project a modest sketch in a <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/09/ne w-research-in.html">previous post</a>, but I can tell you more now! <p>The goal of the project is to rectify a bias in traditional survey projects by studying settlements of the Early and Middle Byzantine period that do not conform to the standard model of Classical period settlement (i.e. a nucleated polis surrounded by an agricultural hinterland). Dunn reckons that Early and Middle Byzantine period saw the proliferation of settlements that were larger and more complex than villages yet small and less well-developed than urban centers. (He details this argument here: "Continuity and change in the Macedonian countryside, from Gallienus and Justinian", in: W.Bowden &amp; L.Lavan (edd.), <i>Late Antique Archaeology 2. Recent research on the Late Antique countryside</i> (Leiden/Boston, 2004), pp 535-586.). Thisvi, or Byzantine Kastorion, conforms to some of the characteristics of the “mid sized” settlements and this provided the foundations for its establishment as an episcopal center during Middle Byzantine and Frankish times. <p>His project is conducting a rather intensive urban survey of surviving monuments in Thisvi village (many of which are preserved on account of the stunted development of Thisvi in modern times). For this project he is using some very new-fangled techniques including <a href="http://www.iaa.bham.ac.uk/Computing/HP_VISTA/research/scanning.htm">3D Laser Scanning of architecture</a>.&nbsp; While I am not at liberty to divulge

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any details, his finds are significant and important and will cast new light on both the Western part of Boeotia but also the settlement landscape of the southern Balkans in general. (He provides a sketch of what he’s found here: "Byzantine Thisbe: Kastorian, episcopal kastron and centre of silk manufacture", <i>Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilisation. </i>In honour of sir Steven Runcimen. E. Jeffreys (ed), Cambridge University Press 2006). <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ThisviChurchSm.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ThisviChurchSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ThisviChurchSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a> <p>My part of the project is to integrate data from a survey of the Thisvi basin in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Tim Gregory and Ohio State. This material is preserved in notebook form and I am in the process of bringing it into GIS whence it can be combined with Archie’s material from the urban survey. <p>While it is commonplace for excavation data to be revisited to shed light on new issues, it is far less common for survey data to be re-examined in the service of a new research questions. I am optimistic that this work will not only improve our understanding of settlement in the area, but (and perhaps in some ways more importantly) demonstrate the "archival" character of survey material -- that is to say prove that survey data, like excavation data, can be revisited in the service of different research questions many years later.&nbsp; This will be especially important for a site like Thisvi where a humongous pipe factory and a whole set of new roads has obliterated much of the landscape that Gregory investigated years earlier. <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ThisviWallSm.jpg"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="272" alt="ThisviWallSm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ThisviWallSm_thumb.jpg" width="404" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>The pipe factory is visible at the top left</em></p> <p align="left">The goals of this project obvious resonate with our work in Cyprus and its another project affiliated with Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of North Dakota...!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: New Research in Late Roman Boeotia STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: new-research-in CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA

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CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 09/01/2007 12:33:45 AM ----BODY: <p align="left"><a href="http://www.iaa.bham.ac.uk/staff/dunn.htm">Archie Dunn</a>, of the <a href="http://www.iaa.bham.ac.uk/index.htm">Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of Birmingham</a>, in now in the third year of <a href="http://www.iaa.bham.ac.uk/research/individuals/dunn/archie3.htm">a multiyear project exploring the&nbsp; City of Thisvi in southwestern Boeotia</a>.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp; <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/image.png" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="263" alt="image" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/image_thumb.png" width="400" border="0"></a><br><em>Google Earth Map of the Thisvi Basin and Bay</em></p> <p>Thisvi is best know as one of the myriad of Classical and Hellenistic Boeotian cities, and there exist to this day the extensive remains well-made ashlar masonry walls on both the upper and lower acropolises.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/towersm.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="265" alt="" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/towersm_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a>&nbsp;<br><em>Walls on the Lower Acropolis</em></p> <p>His project aims particularly at documenting the Late Roman/Byzantine remains in the area which he argues was an area with economic significance including a harbor and a center from the production purple-dyed silk.&nbsp; Moreover, there is reason to suspect that this is where Os. Loukas&nbsp;first began his monastic life.&nbsp; Os. Loukas&nbsp;is&nbsp;famous for his substantial <a href="http://www.doaks.org/saints2/TEXTS/64.html">vita (life)</a> and his impressive <a href="http://www.ou.edu/class/ahi4263/byzhtml/p0601.html">monastic complex at Steiri</a>&nbsp;to the&nbsp;east of the ancient site of Delphi.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">I am involved in this project through my graduate school advisor, Timothy Gregory, who conducted an intensive archaeological survey in the area of Thisvi in the late 1970s and early 1980s.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/ThisveScancropped.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img height="396" alt="ThisveScancropped" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/ThisveScancropped_thumb.jpg" width="400"></a> </p> <p align="left">The Ohio Boeotia Expedition (OBE) was a very early systematic intensive survey in Greece and produced some indication of the economic engagement of this area through time (but with special attention to Late Antiquity).&nbsp; Dunn's project seeks to expand Gregory's data with information collected through an intensive survey of the urban area including standing walls on both the upper and lower acropolis and other fragments in the modern village which stretches between the two hills.&nbsp; </p> <p align="left">What I am going to try to do is to integrate the two data sets.&nbsp; Most of this will be done in GIS, but it will require some ground truthing and interpretation.&nbsp; The notebooks

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from the OBE are good and provide lots of relatively precise information on methods and procedures used by the survey and the location of sites, some of which have not yet been fully published.&nbsp; The hope is that by going through the information in the notebooks again, revisiting the ceramics collected by the project (Gregory has agreed to review the collected by the OBE and currently stored in the Thebes Museum), integrating Dunn's analysis of the urban area, and reviewing work done in Boeotia over the last 30 years, we'll be able to create much fuller picture of this interesting corner of the ancient world.</p> <p align="left">I will visit Dunn's team in the field on Monday and Tuesday and will report back! </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Exciting News from the University of Pennsylvania Museum STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: exciting-news-f CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 08/28/2007 11:51:56 PM ----BODY: <p>Kostis Kourelis forwarded an email to me last night announcing that Richard Hodges was named the Williams Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.&nbsp; Here's the story from Penn's website:</p> <blockquote> <p>A world-leading classical and early medieval archaeologist specializing in western Europe, Hodges has been director of both The Prince of Wales’ Institute of Architecture in London and The British School in Rome. For the past nine years, he has worked extensively on archaeological and cultural heritage projects in Albania including the creation of a large cultural heritage institute in Tirana and a new archaeological museum in Butrint.</p> <p><a href="http://www.museum.upenn.edu/new/news/fullrelease.php?which=294">Continued. ..</a></p></blockquote> <p>This is big news for anyone interested in the postantique world.&nbsp; But it does pose the question:&nbsp; What will happen if (or once?) the academic community decides that the study of the Late Antique, Early Medieval, Early Byzantine, Late Roman world has finally come of age?&nbsp; How will our responsibilities to our field change?&nbsp; Will it be a good thing?</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Fires in Athens STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: fires-in-athens CATEGORY: Notes From Athens DATE: 08/27/2007 01:43:02 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the last four days or so the afternoon sky over Athens has turned burnt orange with the smoke of fires, both local on the slopes of Hymmetos and more distant on the island of Evia.&nbsp; People have probably seen the amazing satellite photo:</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/GreekFires.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="263" alt="APTOPIX GREECE FIRES" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/GreekFires_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> &nbsp;</p> <p align="left">The loss of life in the Northwestern Peloponnesus has been tragic.&nbsp; It's hard to understand these kinds of fires.&nbsp; Are these fires a natural means of regenerating the Mediterranean landscape?&nbsp; Or are they the product of over development, mismanagement, and environmental degradation?&nbsp; It is interesting that this summer in the U.S. fires have been allowed to burn longer in Idaho and Wyoming to help manage forest and prevent larger fires in the future.&nbsp; Let's hope that the fires of 2007 don't happen again any time soon...</p> <p align="left">UPDATE (1 September 2007)</p> <p align="left">If you want to know the real story of the fires, you need to listen to a <a href="http://www.yleradio1.fi/radiosoitin/mp3.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yleradio1 .fi%2Fmp3%2Faudio%2F1188554645-28432.mp3">news-podcast in Classical Latin</a> (from YLE Radio 1 in Finland)...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: What has Athens to do with North Dakota? STATUS: Publish

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ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: what-has-athens CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 08/23/2007 11:26:56 AM ----BODY: <p>After a couple false starts I have managed to make it to Athens and my accommodations for the 2007/8 academic year at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies at Athens</a>.&nbsp; At first blush, one would not expect that American School to have much in common with the University of North Dakota, and that impression would, by-and-large, be true.&nbsp; But there are points of confluence.&nbsp; Both are institutions that emerged in the important decades before the turn of the century: 1883 for UND <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">as we should all now know</a> and 1881 for the American School.&nbsp; Both had their roots, in many important ways, in the intellectual culture of New England.&nbsp; The influence of Yale men like Homer Sprague and Webster Merrifield at UND finds a parallel with&nbsp;cadre of Ivy League&nbsp;scholars (and others) who worked to establish the &nbsp;American School.&nbsp; In both cases, the men were aware of developments in Europe, sought to transform the educational structures in the United States by combining American and European models (and, it is important to note, met resistance), and deeply committed to&nbsp;Classical Studies (for all its good and bad).&nbsp;</p> <p>So, for the next eight months or so, I will correspond from Athens at what I will think of as UND's long-lost Athenian cousin, the American School.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Gennadius_Library.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="285" alt="Gennadius_Library" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Gennadius_Library_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Alexander the Great in North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: alexander-the-g CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota

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DATE: 08/18/2007 05:25:18 PM ----BODY: <p>If you haven't be sure to check out 48th Annual Midwestern Exhibition at the Rourke Gallery in Fargo/Moorhead.&nbsp; It features a wide range of interpretations of Alexander the Great by artists from throughout the Midwest.</p> <p>I tried to find some reviews of it in the area&nbsp;newspapers, but to no avail.&nbsp; Perhaps a reader will have seen it?</p> <p>In other news, I depart for Athens, Greece on Sunday.&nbsp; I will be the Rhys Carpenter Fellow at the <a href="http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/">American School of Classical Studies at Athens</a>.&nbsp; So, like the views of the Earth from the surface of the Moon, I will be viewing North Dakota from a distant venue.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Hittites in North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: hittites-in-nor CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 08/14/2007 07:56:57 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the fringe benefits of running this blog is that you occasionally hear from an alumnus/a who studied the ancient world under one my predecessors here at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; While it was always interesting to hear from a member of the larger university community, I must admit that prior to working on the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/an -experiment-i.html">history of my department</a>, these names were usually fairly meaningless to me.&nbsp; Some of this is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that that our department as a group have only a fairly modest collective memory, owing largely to the fairly brisk turnover in faculty over the last 20 years.&nbsp; </p> <p>As the study of the ancient world in North Dakota allows for some unusual relationships, correspondences, and juxtapositions, it seems worth including a brief biography&nbsp;of one of my predecessor here (drawn in large part from the department's <em>Centennial Newsletter </em>of 1983):</p> <p><b>Charles Carter</b>, a native of Kentucky, (greater Cincinnati) earned his Bachelor of Divinity from Emory University (Atlanta), a B.A. from the University of Kentucky and the Ph.D., ancient Near East languages, from the University of Chicago. He taught at Central Methodist College at Fayette, Missouri 1965-1966.

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At the University since 1966, he taught ancient and early European courses. His Ph.D thesis was entitled <em>Hittite Cult Inventories, </em>and his subsequent publications include "Some Notes on Political and Religious Institutions in Two Ancient Cultures," <i>Social Science</i> XLIV (1969) as well as <em>Vokabulare, mythen und kultinventare </em>(1978, with H.G. Gutterbock) and numerous more specialized journal articles dealing with the Hittite language as well as reviews.&nbsp; In 2000, after some delays, a volume in his honor was edited by Yoël L.Arbeitman and titled <em><a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=gqn7OaEzxIMC&amp;oi=fnd &amp;pg=PP11&amp;dq=The+Asia+Minor+Connexion:+Studies+in+PreGreek+Languages+in+Honor+of+Charles+Carter+&amp;ots=gMgt5J2D7w&amp;sig=rt96HAflT 2JGSZ7KPRPnFZWFnyE#PPP1,M1">The Asia Minor Connexion: Studies in Pre-Greek Languages in Honor of Charles Carter</a> </em>(Peeters, Leuven 2000).</p> <p>He was the first individual to come to the history department to teach exclusively (more or less) the ancient world and he brought with him to North Dakota, of all people, the Hittites .&nbsp; He was active in national organizations like the <a href="http://www.umich.edu/~aos/">American Oriental Society</a> as well as more local organizations like <a href="http://www.umanitoba.ca/outreach/linguistic_circle/index.html">The Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota</a>.&nbsp; He began and led the Grand Forks chapter of the <a href="http://www.archaeological.org/">Archaeological Institute of America</a> which has subsequently disappeared.&nbsp; </p> <p>Perhaps noting Carter's contribution in as ephemeral a medium as the a weblog is not doing him any great service, but, then again, some of the most compelling journeys come from following&nbsp;footprints in the sand.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: An Experiment in Institutional History STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: an-experiment-i CATEGORY: Departmental History at UND DATE: 08/09/2007 07:58:46 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the great challenges of my past year has been to write the history of the Department of History at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; In a fit of naive exuberance, I agreed to write the history of the department over the last 25 years as the University will celebrate its <a href="http://www2.und.edu/our/125th/">125th-iversary this winter</a>.&nbsp; But as I began to gather information on the broader history of the department, I

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discovered (ironically) that there hadn't been a proper history compiled for the University's 100th anniversary in 1983.&nbsp; </p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/campusscenes1107789852_large.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="255" alt="campusscenes1107789852_large" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/campusscenes1107789852_large_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>This led me, even more foolishly, to embark on writing a complete history of the department from its inception (in around 1902 when Horace B. Woodworth was named the first Professor of History at the University, but with roots in the early 19th century)&nbsp;until today.&nbsp; So, over the last&nbsp;six months, I have been&nbsp;spending quality time in the <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/UA/home.html">University archives</a>&nbsp;(and with their most excellent staff)&nbsp;attempting to sort out the history of the department, the history of the university (guided in particular by Louis Geiger's <em>University of the Northern Plains </em>(Grand Forks 1958), and, in many cases, the history of the state (guided, of course, by <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/Robinson/home.html">Elwyn Robinson's</a> <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_North_Dakota_%28book%29">History of North Dakota</a> </em>(Lincoln 1966)).&nbsp; I will point out, for those of you who have not gathered this from my blog, I am not a historian of American academic institutions (or even America, for that matter) so there was more background reading than I initially anticipated.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Moreover, the kind of "primary source" research that I encountered was also a bit of a challenge.&nbsp; I had never really done archival research so coming up with strategies to deal with the uneven record of the department -- sometimes too much information and sometimes hardly any at all -- in the 20th century was another difficulty.&nbsp;&nbsp;I decided to try to complement the material from (what I quaintly call) the textual sources with oral accounts and material gained from personal correspondence.&nbsp; Finally, I violated every rule of good sense and academic scholarship when I put pen to paper without a clear idea of where I was going.&nbsp; </p> <p>As one would guess, the project quickly spiraled out of control.&nbsp; I have now written three chapters covering the history of the department from the late 19th century to around 1970 (note that I haven't actually reached the last 25 years!).&nbsp; The experience of writing this has brought to the fore many questions, but one in particular that resonates with some of the ongoing discussions in surrounding academic scholarship: I've written all this up, but now what?</p> <p>I have come up with three solutions:</p> <p>1) Chapter 1 I will convert into an article and send it along the <em><a href="http://www.nd.gov/hist/ndh.htm">North Dakota History</a></em> -- the quarterly journal of history published by the state historical society.</p> <p>2) Some parts of my research, I will attempt to serialize here in this blog paying particular attention to scholars of antiquity who have taught in North Dakota.</p> <p>3) Much of the other chapters, I will make available on my website in some form or another.&nbsp; In the next week or so, I will try to post a version of chapter 2 as an experiment.</p> <p>Working on the history of the department at a mid-sized institution has, of course, raised all sorts of interesting questions regarding institutional memory, the development of the discipline, and even the relationship between the administrative and academic on university campuses.&nbsp; Hopefully I can explore some of these ideas over the next few months here in this blog.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 216.235.161.56 URL: DATE: 08/16/2007 09:21:38 AM I look forward to reading it Bill, both here and in North Dakota History. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: More PKAP in the Press... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: more-pkap-in-th CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 08/02/2007 11:50:38 AM ----BODY: <p>The Cypriot newspaper Phileleftheros carried our press release <a href="http://www.phileleftheros.com/main/main.asp?gid=506&amp;id=499042&amp;issu enum=17160">today</a>.&nbsp; The consistent interest in archaeology expressed by ordinary Cypriots is one of the most gratifying elements about working there.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Webisodes STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: webisodes CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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DATE: 08/02/2007 08:06:37 AM ----BODY: <p>In conjunction with the exhibition <a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/home">Roman Art from the Louvre at the Indianapolis Museum of Art</a>, the IMA has produced a series of short (2-3 minute) video "<a href="http://www.theromansarecoming.com/node/24">webisodes</a>" which they will (presumably) release in the build up to the exhibitions opening at the end of September.&nbsp; This format and presentation of these video is certainly interesting and might provide a model for PKAPs current video release.&nbsp; </p> <p>And, Indianapolis is a scant 900 miles from Grand Forks...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Some More PKAP News STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: some-more-pkapCATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/30/2007 08:58:34 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a quick post today.&nbsp; Brandon Olson, a two year PKAP alumnus, got some good ink in the <a href="http://www.fosston.com/">Fosston, Minnesota</a> area.&nbsp; On July 17, their local newspaper, <em>13 Towns </em>ran <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/files/Foss tonOlsonArt.pdf">a short peice</a> on the travel grant that he earned from UND to come and work with us on Cyprus.&nbsp; He is working on <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/2007/06/sl ingbullet_res.html">an important synthetic treatment of Hellenistic inscribed sling pellets</a> which will feature prominently an understudied corpus of material from our site.</p> <p>Brandon will graduate with his M.A. in History this Summer from the University of North Dakota and in the fall, enter the<a href="http://www3.la.psu.edu/cams/">&nbsp;</a><a href="http://www3.la.psu.edu/cams/">Ph.D. Program in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies&nbsp; at Penn State</a>.</p> -----

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EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: rebel57 EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 88.229.57.9 URL: DATE: 09/07/2007 02:19:26 PM a -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Quartzite Border STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-quartzite-b CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 07/27/2007 07:55:22 AM ----BODY: <p>Just this week my colleague Gordon Iseminger provided me with a copy of his newly reprinted book <em><a href="http://www.augie.edu/cws/quartzite.html">The Quartzite Border: Surveying and Marking the North Dakota-South Dakota Boundary 1891-1892</a></em>.&nbsp; </p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Quartzite.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="323" alt="Quartzite" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Quartzite_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The book itself is handsomely produced with numerous photographs and illustrations.&nbsp; The thing that drew me to the book, however, was Iseminger's methodology:</p> <blockquote> <p>"For the past eight years, I have spent a part of each summer walking along the state line, studying and photographing the monuments.&nbsp;Except for about fifty miles in the area of the Badlands along the Little Missouri River, I have walked the entire length of the boundary, much of it twice, and some of it three or four times.</p></blockquote> <blockquote> <p>Because I prefer to work alone, I began my day's walk shortly after dawn and continued until by my calculations, I was half tired, whereupon I retraced my steps to my car.&nbsp; Like the man in the legend who wanted to see what was beyond the next valley or behind the next hill, however, I was often drawn onward by the monuments and sometimes miscalculated both the amount of strength and the hours of daylight remaining to me.&nbsp; Sometimes, at the end of the day, I searched for my vehicle in the dark and collapsed into it -- tired, but wonderfully calmed, as one who had been

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in communion with a close friend..."</p></blockquote> <p>Certainly anyone who studies the landscape -- whether it be of the Mediterranean or the Dakotas -can relate to this experience.&nbsp; I have many times outwalked my companions and my common sense just to see what was on top of the next hill in the Korinthia.</p> <p>Iseminger goes on to tell the story of the marking of the border with regular quartzite markers at half mile intervals.&nbsp; What is most interesting to me is how the markers do more than simply mark the border between two sparsely-populated states on the Northern Plains, but serve to attach stories, memories, and the history of various places to specific points in the landscape.&nbsp;&nbsp;Iseminger's method -- walking the border, experiencing the landscape, talking to the folks along the way, collecting stories of the monuments, and documenting their continued place&nbsp;and function in the landscape&nbsp;&nbsp;-- ensured that these monuments represent more than a simply useful contribution to the mapping of the American west (which one could research and read about in the comfort of one's office!), and bring to life the far more complex process of making the landscape (which to an outsider like myself can appear basically homogenous verging on featureless!) meaningful.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.220.188.60 URL: DATE: 07/28/2007 01:35:47 PM Interesting. I do a fair bit of crossing the geopolitical border, from northern to southern Dakota, and back again, while on cultural resource management assignments. While doing this type of archaeological survey on the upper Plains, in the evenings I often retire to my hotel/motel rooms and read primary source accounts from the late 19th-century American West. The Hibernian and Chicago Tribune correspondant John Finerty published "War Path and Bivouac; or, The Conquest of the Sioux," (likely in the Aandahl library) a collection of essays from the time he was imbedded with General Crook's outfit in 1876. Finerty remarks on the violent depredations vested on the Sioux in eastern Montana, and also comments on how the Sioux reciprocated. ! ! In another example, one tends to look at the Tongue River in eastern Montana in a much different light after reading about all the blood that was spilled in and around it during the Indian Wars that followed the Civil War. Archaeologically, the area around Tongue River is significant (at least to your American colleagues) as that is an area where Tongue River Silicified Sediment (aka, TRSS) was quarried for hundreds and thousands of years. Projectile points and bifaces crafted from this material can be found all throughout Dakota. Talk about a deep map. And it gives even more relevance to the idea that All History, and All Archaeology, in the end, is local. I digress.! !

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Last fall I asked Dr. Iseminger if he had any spare Quartzite copies floating around. It was impossible to acquire one even on the on-line Used and Out-ofPrint area of Amazon.com. I'm putting in my order. Pronto. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Another Real Time Archaeology Blog STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: another-real-ti CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 07/25/2007 01:07:20 PM ----BODY: <p>I just stumbled upon another <a href="http://realtimearchaeology.blogspot.com/">Real-Time Archaeology Blog</a>, very similar in content and style to our twin PKAP blogs.</p> <p>This <a href="http://realtimearchaeology.blogspot.com/2007/02/inauguralpost_25.html">blog chronicles the work of Prof. Ann E. Killebrew's team in Cilicia</a> and is authored by graduate students from Penn State.&nbsp; Reading blogs like these is another way to get your Mediterranean fix from the Northern Plains.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Pythia in Grand Forks STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-pythia-in-g CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 07/25/2007 08:43:08 AM ----BODY: <p>This post have very little to do with the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, but something to do with the Ancient World in North Dakota and my other main scholarly interest -- sacred space.&nbsp; </p> <p>This past spring, the University of North Dakota opened their new <a href="http://www.facilities.und.edu/Spiritualcenter/scfacts.htm">Spiritual Center</a>.&nbsp; This is, indeed, timely as several recent studies, the most prominent being <a href="http://www.spirituality.ucla.edu/index.html">UCLA's

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Spirituality in Higher Education</a> have indicated that undergraduates are increasingly interested in religious and spiritual matters.&nbsp; At the same time the exact boundaries of spiritual expression at both <a href="http://www.wm.edu/news/?id=7456">state</a> and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/08/26/AR2006082600629.html">private</a> universities, at least, is under review.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DSC_0047sm.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="266" alt="DSC_0047sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DSC_0047sm_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left">The Spiritual Center at UND's campus is situated on the banks of the English Coulee and as this picture indicates evokes the shape of the most common spiritual places in the U.S. -- a church.&nbsp; The building itself is, to be frank, fairly bland -- perhaps designed to blend in and not to offend as much as to provide a true locus for contemplation or inspiration.&nbsp; Its location, however,&nbsp;is one of the most serene spots on campus, overlooked by the comforting authority of the administration building,&nbsp;and flanked by &nbsp;a memorial to the students and alumni who have passed (officially a remembrance wall -- which is oddly abstract with a cube of flowing water and a wall inscribed with the word Celebrated).&nbsp; This is welcome addition to campus and despite its somewhat liminal location (situated between the main campus buildings and the fine arts building!), it will hopefully work to bring spiritual and religious&nbsp;concerns more the forefront of the intellectual discourse at the University here in North Dakota.</p> <p align="left">The tie in to the ancient world comes from the refurbished <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/our/factbook/html/adelphifountain.htm">Adelp hi Fountain</a>.</p> <p align="center">&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/DSC_0043sm.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="399" alt="DSC_0043sm" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/DSC_0043sm_thumb.jpg" width="266" border="0"></a> &nbsp;</p> <p align="left">The fountain depicts the Pythia, the Delphic Oracle herself, holding aloft a font of inspiration (for lack of a better term) and supported by the three Muses&nbsp;&nbsp;-- one of whom must be Clio -- the muse of History and heroic poetry and the like -- as she holds a scroll.&nbsp; The fountain, which was donated to the University in 1907 by the <a href="http://www.und.edu/org/adelphi/">Adelphi Literary Society</a>, has moved around campus a bit and is now situated adjacent to the new Spiritual Center.&nbsp;</p> <p align="left">So, the Pythia lives on here in Grand Forks...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----

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COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.220.188.60 URL: DATE: 07/29/2007 08:34:41 PM The link to the Ancient world ‚Ävia fountain ‚Äreceives applause. On the other hand, I have to side with the late Hunter Thompson (at least on this issue). That is, I recall Thompson lambasting his good friend Steadman in one volume of the Gonzo Journals. ! ! Hunter told Ralph that the words he injected into his art infected and detracted from its abstract beauty. The word "Celebrated" seems an imposition, even insulting (as though those before us wouldn't be celebrated?). ! ! But that's just an opine from one alumni... Overall, the fountain looks beautiful. Nice work in restoring that continuity with the New World and the Old, Adelphi. Nice work indeed. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Cyprus Lion Coverage STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: cyprus-lion-cov CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/20/2007 08:16:00 AM ----BODY: <p>The Cyprus Lion, the Bristish Military paper on Cyprus ran a <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/files/Lion News.pdf">short article </a>on our project (you will note, PKAP watchers that the author is none other than our resident Brit Michael Brown!) with a couple of good photographs of Costas Kouloumis and Mick Delieu of Dhekelia and our very own Sarah Lepinski and <a href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/">David Pettegrew</a> measuring a fine of example of the bedrock cuts forming the dry moat of the Late Roman fortification on Vigla (the dry moat is called taphros, as <a href="http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/">Timothy Gregory </a>informed us).&nbsp; The Dhekelia folks have taken a great interest in our project, helping us, as the article reports, take aerial photographs, but also providing us with a venue to present our findings to the local ex-pat community in 2005 and providing us with various small helps throughout the past few years (including an emergency soddering job on a fussy resistivity meter!).&nbsp; </p> <p>So, once again thanks to the Dhekelian Cantoment folks for the help and the new coverage.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Baptisteries and Nashville STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: baptisteries-an CATEGORY: Early Christian Baptisteries DATE: 07/17/2007 08:07:27 AM ----BODY: <p>Last week I took a quick trip to Nashville to discuss a new project that seeks to produce a comprehensive (but not exhaustive) catalogue of baptisteries for the Early Christian World.&nbsp; I am part of an editorial team (with <a href="http://www.vanderbilt.edu/gradschool/religion/faculty/facultypages/jensen. html">Robin Jensen</a> of Vanderbilt and <a href="http://college.up.edu/theology/default.aspx?cid=1089&amp;pid=196">Richard Rutherford</a> of the University of Portland) who will assemble and manage a team of scholars to bring together their specialized regional knownledge of the Early Christian architectural remains.&nbsp; </p> <p>The project will not be an ordinary catalogue (a version of which already exists in S. Ristow's <em>Frühchristliche Baptisterien</em> (Münster 1998)), but serve as the basis for a regionally and chronologically informed discussion of "site and rite".&nbsp; That is to say, our catalogue of baptisteries will be informed by an interest in the interaction between Early Christian baptismal liturgy and architecture.&nbsp; The hope is that this will not only bring the importance of liturgy to the attention of archaeologists and art historians working on these buildings in a new way, but also provide a resource for modern church leaders and liturgical planners as they seek to find points of dialogue between the contemporary rite and antiquity.&nbsp; To serve more fully the latter goal, we plan to complement our written catalogue with an online database with interactive maps, searchable texts, and images.&nbsp; It's a big project, but we have a substantial and competent team assembled.</p> <p>And, it allowed me to visit Nashville including the famed Parthenon.&nbsp; It was as bizarrely wonderful as one might suggest of any ancient Greek monument translated onto American soil.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BaptisteriesandNashville_70A5/IMG_2119sm%5B2%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="266" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/BaptisteriesandNashville_70A5/IMG_2119sm_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/BaptisteriesandNashville_70A5/IMG_2134sm%5B2%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="399" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/BaptisteriesandNashville_70A5/IMG_2134sm_thumb.jpg" width="266" border="0"></a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Korinthian Artifacts STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: korinthian-arti CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters DATE: 07/10/2007 07:21:41 AM ----BODY: <p>Linda Jones Hall alerted me to <a href="http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100006_03/07/2007_8 5218">this short piece</a> in <a href="http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/news_190371FL&amp;xml/&amp;aspKath/news" >Kathimerini</a>, a Greek newspaper, on the recovery of a collection ancient artifacts from a home near Korinth.&nbsp; It is always worth wondering if any or all of these artifacts were looted from sites in the Korinthia.&nbsp; Looting remains a problem in the Korinthia, even at known archaeological site.&nbsp; In fact, some projects like Joe Rife's <a href="http://www.macalester.edu/classics/kenchreai/index.html">Kenchreai Cemetery Project</a> (now Kenchreai Excavations) has made the <a href="http://www.macalester.edu/classics/kenchreai/res_cul.html">documenting of "clandestine excavations" an explicit part of their research goals</a>.&nbsp; The discovery of this collection of ancient artifacts at Korinth comes on the same day that Culture Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis announced a new initiative to combat the trade in antiquities, the primary economic motivating for looting and destination for illegally excavated materials.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP Alumnus Featured on UND Main website

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-alumnus-fe CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/09/2007 08:11:41 AM ----BODY: <p><a href="http://www.und.edu/spotlights/davidterry.html">David Terry, a 2007 PKAP Alumnus, is featured with his research on the UND website</a>.&nbsp; David is a graduate student in <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/histdept/">History at UND</a> who works on the Crusades, focusing at present on models of cultural interaction in Crusader period Cyprus.&nbsp; During the 2007 fieldseason, he contributed to our <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PKAP Graduate Student Blog</a>, worked both in the Museum and in the field, and visited a number of significant Medieval sites on Cyprus.&nbsp; He is also a member of the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu">AIA Medieval and PostMedieval Mediterranean Interest Group</a>!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Archaeology of Medieval Cyprus at the BSC STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the-archaeology CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 07/05/2007 07:46:27 AM ----BODY: <p>The <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">AIA Interest Group for Medieval and Post Medieval</a> is pleased to announce an organized panel at the <a href="http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/medieval/BSC/program.html">33rd Byzantine Studies Conference at the University of Toronto</a> focusing on the archaeology and architecture of Cyprus.</p> <p align="left">Saturday, October 13<br>8:30–10:00 <p>9.&nbsp; Cyprus: Archaeology, Architecture and History – VIC 112 <p>Justin Leidwanger (University of Pennsylvania),<br>Structure and Scale in the Maritime Economy of Early Byzantine Cyprus <p>William R. Caraher

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(University of North Dakota), R. Scott Moore (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)&nbsp;and David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College),<br>Across Larnaka Bay: Recent Investigations of a Late Antique Harbor Town in Southeast Cyprus <p>Jens T. Wollesen (University of Toronto),<br>The Frescoes of the Royal Chapel at Pyrga on Cyprus: New Evidence and Problems <p>&nbsp; <p>In addition to these papers there will be two other papers related to the archaeology of Cyprus: <p>Friday, October 12<br>2:00–3:30 <p>Amy Papalexandrou (University of Texas at Austin),<br>Contextualizing the Tomb: ‘Bowl Burials’ from Polis, Cyprus <p>Sunday, October 14<br>10:45-12:45 <p>Tassos Papacostas (King’s College London),<br>A Re-appraisal Of Architecture on Late Medieval Cyprus ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP, Korinthiaka, and Abandonment STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap-korinthiak CATEGORY: Korinthian Matters CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/28/2007 07:32:32 AM ----BODY: <p>Hi folks!&nbsp; Sorry for the sabbatical, but in the Korinthia I only had a dial up connection, so there was no way to blog.</p> <p>I have now returned to the comfortable confines of Grand Forks to get my research and life together to return to Athens in August.&nbsp; I hope to have a chance to update the PKAP interactive map and develop an interactive map for the Korinthia Survey (EKAS).&nbsp; David Pettegrew and I have begun to put together an Eastern Korinthia website that will feature the methods and results of the EKAS as well as information on its related projects.&nbsp; We hope that it will not only serve as a place for the public to familiarize themselves with the project, but it will also make material available for teachers who might find some of the data, analysis, and methods useful in the classroom. David, will likely use some of the Korinthia material in his Classical Archaeology class at Messiah College. I will post a link to it here once we get it up in beta.&nbsp; </p> <p>As a follow up on a <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/04/ab andoned_lands.html">post I made some months ago</a> on abandonment in the North Dakota countryside, there was an interesting article in the July issue of Harper <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2007/07/0081594">on abandoned spaces in downtown Detroit</a>.&nbsp; In particular, it discusses how lots made vacant through urban decay, depopulation, and arson are sometimes converted to

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community gardens and "green spaces".&nbsp; This trend, of course, is will known both in other modern cities, but perhaps more interestingly (for me) in antiquity.&nbsp; The accounts of Medieval Constantinople, for example, where large stretches of the city within the Theodosian walls has reverted to orchards and gardens are well known.&nbsp; This perspective reinforces the idea that abandonment is simply an part of the historic narrative that topographers, archaeologists and historians construct to understand landscapes rather than the rigidly ahistorical end points that punctuate older narratives drawing upon more traditional paradigms.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Farewell to Cyprus and the real beginning STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: final_farewell CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/13/2007 01:57:39 PM ----BODY: <p>I leave Cyprus and PKAP tomorrow for Athens and Corinth.&nbsp; For those of you who have been reading about our adventures in Cyprus, thanks!!&nbsp; We hope that you have enjoyed our correspondence and check back regularly both here and at our <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP website</a> for updates.&nbsp; We now begin the real work of analysis and interpretation that will make all our data mean something.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FinalFarewell_134AE/DSC_0297%5B2%5D_1.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="226" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FinalFarewell_134AE/DSC_0297_thumb_1.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>I will keep blogging over the next year to keep everyone informed on the great things happening with UND Mediterranean Archaeology and continue to plumb the links between the Mediterranean world and my backyard in North Dakota, so keep reading!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Maddy Bray EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 128.97.6.69 URL: DATE: 06/13/2007 02:16:28 PM Hey guys,! Awesome site- it's really interesting to see the inner workings of a project in progress. I leave for Greece myself in a few weeks...good luck with the "real work", now that the fun stuff is over!! ! Maddy -----------AUTHOR: David Pettegrew TITLE: Last day in the field STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: last_day_in_the CATEGORY: David Pettegrew DATE: 06/11/2007 11:40:28 PM ----BODY: <p>Well, today, June 12, is the last day in the field.&nbsp; I'm sad that our season has ended as quickly as it began!&nbsp; Yesterday we finished surveying the slopes below the height of Vigla where our investigations this year revealed a Late Roman fortification wall and possibly an early Christian basilica.&nbsp; A problem with these features is that they seem inconsistent with the pottery that we had found on the height: mostly Archaic-Hellenistic material with little Roman or Late Roman material.&nbsp; The slope survey yesterday documented thousands of pottery sherds and a consistent low to moderate density scatter of Late Roman amphora fragments and even some tiles.&nbsp; Needless to say, this demonstrates that we DO have some Late Roman material on the height, although in much lower amounts than the plain below.&nbsp; Fortified Vigla perhaps was not a place that was regularly inhabited in the Late Roman era.</p> <p>Today we'll be doing odds and ends: at the museum, finishing our catalogue and illustration of the survey pottery, and, in the field, wrapping up the survey of the ridges, pulling our orange flags from fields (archaeologists must be environmentally sensitive), and revisiting a few features.&nbsp; Tomorrow afternoon we have our final meeting where we will make plans for the off season and next summer.&nbsp; </p> <p>All in all, it's been a very good season.&nbsp; We've accomplished all of our goals and brought to light a variety of interesting finds that illustrate the significance of this site in the coastline of southeast Cyprus.</p> <p>David</p>

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----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Aerial Archaeology and the RAF STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: aerial_archaeol CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/11/2007 11:46:14 AM ----BODY: <p>We have another group to add to our long list of folks to thanks for their help with our archaeological project today!&nbsp; The Royal Air Force provided us with low altitude aerial photographs of our site.&nbsp; They did it for free and with an added bonus of drama as the British Army had to shut down their firing ranges for a half an hour while the RAF helicopter flew low over the sight.&nbsp; Then because of landing site complications, the RAF helicopter landed on the firing ranges and returned our fancy digital camera to the waiting arms of Michael Brown.<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AerialArchaeologyandtheRAF_11529/ChopperSm%5B2%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="298" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AerialArchaeologyandtheRAF_11529/ChopperSm_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The low altitude flight yielded absolutely amazing photographs of the two major sites in our archaeological area.&nbsp; A number of the photographs of Vigla clearly show the fortification walls that we have been documenting over the last few weeks.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AerialArchaeologyandtheRAF_11529/Picture%20058sm%5B3%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="260" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AerialArchaeologyandtheRAF_11529/Picture%20058sm_thumb%5B1%5D.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left"><em>Vigla from the air</em></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AerialArchaeologyandtheRAF_11529/Picture%20082cropped%5B3%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="211"

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src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AerialArchaeologyandtheRAF_11529/Picture%20082cropped_thumb%5B1%5D.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left"><em>Vigla again.&nbsp; Note the fortification line along the left side of the photo</em></p> <p>And the views of Kokkinokremos will add a nice dramatic element to Michael Brown's dissertation and our final publication:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/AerialArchaeologyandtheRAF_11529/Picture%20031sm%5B2%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="265" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/AerialArchaeologyandtheRAF_11529/Picture%20031sm_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p align="left"><em>Kokkinokremos from the air (the area excavated in the early 1980s is in the center of the ridge)</em></p> <p align="left">It is rare that an American archaeologist has the chance to work with the RAF, but they deserve our thanks today!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: susancaraher EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.168.236 URL: DATE: 06/11/2007 05:26:59 PM Hi everyone,! ! The aerial photos are spectacular. And the Vigla wall is so prominent. Cheers to the RAF! And well done to Michael for successfully negotiating with them. I look forward to seeing more pictures. And what a shame the film maker (and I) had departed. The chopper would have made for great footage. I suppose you won't be needing me to hang-glide over the site next year? ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: susancaraher EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.168.236 URL: DATE: 06/11/2007 05:27:58 PM Hi everyone,! ! The aerial photos are spectacular. And the Vigla wall is so prominent. Cheers to the RAF! And well done to Michael for successfully negotiating with them. I look forward to seeing more pictures. And what a shame the film maker (and I) had departed. The chopper would have made for great footage. I suppose you won't be needing me to hang-glide over the site next year? ----COMMENT:

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AUTHOR: Brice Pearce EMAIL: IP: 24.218.58.59 URL: http://profile.typekey.com/miraclewimp/ DATE: 06/12/2007 07:24:19 PM Awesome, totally awesome...is there any cooler than photos of helicopters landing? Nice view of the Vigla wall, the pilot must rock. Good luck finishing up! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Archaeological Life STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the_archaeologi CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/09/2007 09:48:53 AM ----BODY: <p>Just a quick post today!&nbsp; We spent four hours in the field this morning (after thinking that we would only spend two), but we have found that our Late Roman fortifications on Vigla might have a dry moat.&nbsp; Two parallel bedrock cuts about 15 meters apart run to the north of the traces of our proposed Late Roman fortification.&nbsp; Such seemingly minor discoveries are a nice break from the monotony of processing artifacts.&nbsp; For other fun late season distractions check out the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PKAP Graduate Student Blog</a>.</p> <p>Thanks to all the readers of the blog and the cooperation of the <a href="http://www.und.edu/">University of North&nbsp;Dakota's</a> Office of University Relations who gave our project <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/our/cyprus.html">a most excellent profile and a link</a>.&nbsp; We've had over 900 hits since we've started blogging from Cyprus and received news coverage from as far afield as <a href="http://www.bismarcktribune.com/articles/2007/05/29/news/state/134031.txt"> Bismarck, N.D.</a> and Fargo, N.D.!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Reading and Writing STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__

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ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: reading_and_wri CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/07/2007 11:39:50 PM ----BODY: <p>As the fieldwork phase of the project begins to wrap up over the next week, we also begin the analytical phase of the project.&nbsp;&nbsp;This involves some primary research -- a trip to the <a href="http://www.caari.org/">Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute</a> (CAARI)&nbsp;Library -- and some&nbsp;writing -- namely a final report to submit to the Department of Antiquities and a paper that we deliver annually at the CAARI Archaeological Workshop.&nbsp; </p> <p>The advantage of writing before we leave the island is that we can make sure that we have the little details that often slip through the cracks between archaeological fieldwork and archaeological publication.&nbsp; For example, we can re-check a measurement of a feature in the field or the identification of an artifact stored in the museum.&nbsp; Moreover, the CAARI library presents a very good collection of material for research on Cyprus in one place.&nbsp; Finally, the community of scholars who work on Cyprus is, by and large, close knit and supportive.&nbsp; Beginning the analytical process while concluding fieldwork makes it easier to share our research with our colleagues here.</p> <p>Perhaps the greatest advantage of beginning the analytical process while in the field is that it allows the team to debate various interpretations with the material close at hand.&nbsp; Even the most sophisticated forms of electronic communications cannot replicate the ability to walk into the field and look at a disputed feature and bat about various interpretations.&nbsp; Over the past week, for example, we have noted some rock cuttings that may well be post-prehistoric tombs.&nbsp; These are the first rock cut tombs that the project has found despite the long stretches of exposed coastal ridges.&nbsp; Elsewhere on the island (and throughout the Mediterranean) these coastal ridges were common sites for tombs in almost every period.&nbsp; While we may never be able to definitively state that these rock cuttings are tombs, the ability to scrutinize the cuttings and examine their place in the larger environment (e.g. would they be visible from the sea? Would they lie along an ancient road? Would they have faced an area of known settlement?) will allow us to make a more compelling&nbsp;identification.&nbsp; </p> <p>The last days in the field and at the museum, then, become in some ways the most exciting and profitable.&nbsp; More on our final discoveries and reports over the next few days...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: RSM TITLE: Big Day at the Museum STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1

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CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: big_day_at_the_ CATEGORY: Scott Moore DATE: 06/06/2007 10:12:03 AM ----BODY: <p>Today was a big day at the museum for PKAP. Dr. Maria Hadjicosti, from the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, stopped by for a visit to see how things are progressing for us this season. Dr. Hadjicosti has been very instrumental in helping us set up our project. We began conversing with her about our project back in the fall of 2001 - which now seems like a lifetime ago. Her family is from the area and this makes her a valuable source of information about our survey area and its recent past. In addition, she has conducted two small excavations below Vigla on the coastal plain that uncovered a Late Roman basilica.</p> <p>Since she is very busy with her work at the Department of Antiquities, her time with us each year is very limited and this puts pressure on us to prepare for the meeting carefully. So, two nights ago the senior staff held a planning session to prepare for the meeting. The first thing we did was make a list of topics we wanted to discuss with her and then prioritized it. After a brief discussion, we decided that our number one priority was to share our geophysical data with her and explain our interpretations of the results with her - such as the possible basilica on Vigla. Our next priority would be to have the specialists talk to her about their progress in preparing artifacts for the final publication (wall paintings, sling bullets, ceramics, etc.). Finally, we wanted to talk about the final publication and what else be needed to prepare it for publication.</p> <p>I have to admit that I always worry about her visits and try to micromanage everything so that nothing can go wrong. (For more information on why I do this, see earlier post on panic attacks). As usual, though, her visit went smoothly and actually went well. She even brought us some more information about her excavations that will help us in our analysis of our survey material. I don't know about the rest of the team, but I am feeling very good about the season and what we have accomplished and about our chances of finishing most of our other tasks.</p> <p>The other big change affecting the project is that the IUP students have started leaving - three left yesterday and the last will leave tomorrow. As other members began to leave over the next week and a half, logistically things become more complicated. We have to arrange car rides to the airport (the last one last night was after midnight), planning for meals becomes harder, and we have less manpower to accomplish museum work.</p> <p>What I have really noticed this season is how old I feel. Perhaps it is just a form of midlife crisis, but it bothers me to be the oldest person on the project - at 41 years old, wait that should be 41 years young, right? I must be old saying things like that. I realized that my one of my students on the project has been alive one year less than I have been married. I like to tell myself that this merely shows how young and vibrant our project is, but then a couple of days like the last two comes along. Yesterday, I woke up at 6:40 AM, then I worked at the museum in the morning, went grocery shopping for the

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project, helped prep lunch, took 2 students to the airport, went into the field to help with the ridge survey, came back to the hotel and prepared dinner, had a senior staff meeting, took a student to the airport after midnight and finally went to bed at 1:30 AM. As a result, I have been dragging all day today and can't stop yawning. Ah well, maybe next year I should take my New Year's resolutions more seriously.</p> <p>RSM </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: Susan Caraher TITLE: Home again, home again... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: home_again_home CATEGORY: Susan Caraher's View DATE: 06/05/2007 06:00:12 PM ----BODY: <p>It is true. I did bid a tearful farewell to Cyprus and returned home to resume work at The Graduate School this week. It meant leaving the project half way through the season. This also meant handing over systems and debriefing various project folk on these procedures we've set up in the lab for processing &amp; cataloguing artefacts, as well as trying to impress the need to consider end of season storage! Scott Moore and I had worked out a pretty efficient method for moving artefacts through cataloguing and illustration, with consideration for rephotographing some artefacts and dealing with new finds. We had also created a system for dealing with rogue artefacts. Good luck guys! I have complete confidence in you. (Oh, and please do a really good end-of-season inventory!) I'll look forward to hearing about the final weeks. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brice Pearce EMAIL: [email protected]

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IP: 213.149.168.199 URL: DATE: 06/05/2007 10:38:05 PM We'll miss you Suze! Try not to work _too_ hard back in ND! advice was helpful! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Pots, pots, pots STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pots_pots_pots CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

Hope the Mac

DATE: 06/04/2007 08:33:36 AM ----BODY: <p>The undergraduates will begin to sneak away this week leaving the senior staff, some specialists, and <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">an assortment of graduate students</a> to wade through a mass of pottery that the students diligently collected under our watchful eye.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Potspotspots_E7D8/Pottery-in-Field%5B2%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="266" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Potspotspots_E7D8/Pottery-in-Field_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p><em>Bags of pottery waiting to be collected from the field</em></p> <p>Over the last few days the undergraduates have been washing the pottery some of which will be analyzed over the next few weeks and some of which will be put into storage to be read by specialists next season.&nbsp; On the one hand pottery washing is tedious, but on the other, it does give the students a chance to see almost all the material collected in the field and actually handle it.&nbsp; Touching the artifacts and developing a feel for different fabric types, shapes, and surface treatments (glazes, slips, and incisions) is crucial to understanding the differences between classes of artifacts and the process whereby the artifacts were produced.&nbsp; Nothing is better than hands on education!</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Potspotspots_E7D8/WashingPots%5B2%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="399" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Potspotspots_E7D8/WashingPots_thumb.jpg" width="266" border="0"></a> </p> <p><em>Pottery washing fun</em></p> <p>Scott Moore has busied himself cataloguing finds -- that is writing short technical descriptions of particularly important artifacts.&nbsp; This catalogue will be a central aspect of our final publication and a place where other scholars can compare the material from their site to ours.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Potspotspots_E7D8/ScottnPotts%5B2%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom: 0px"

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height="266" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Potspotspots_E7D8/ScottnPotts_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p><em>Scott in cataloguing mode</em></p> <p>We will also begin to look at material excavated from the site over the past two decades.&nbsp; Sarah Lepinski arrived (sans baggage) on Saturday and will examine wall painting and molded gypsum.&nbsp; </p> <p>The final excitement from the weekend&nbsp;is that the British have agreed (in theory) to fly over the site and take low altitude aerial photos as long as we get security clearance and as long as they do not require any considerable deviation from a scheduled flight plan.&nbsp; These photos will give us another view of the topography and features at the site and should give our presentations and publications a nice boost.</p> <p>So even after the students leave, we will keep busy with various projects both in the field and at the museum.&nbsp; </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Susan's Departure and Sarah's Arrival STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: susans_departur CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 06/02/2007 09:31:15 AM ----BODY: <p>Susan Caraher, our registrar of finds and my wife, bid tearful farewell to the island this morning.&nbsp; She provided a sense of order in the museum and, at least for me, a refuge from the hectic archaeological world.&nbsp; I will miss her in Cyprus and will be counting the days until I see her again in Grand Forks.</p> <p>After a hectic week of field and museum work, David and Scott toured the students around Nicosia, taking them to the <a href="http://www.mcw.gov.cy/mcw/DA/DA.nsf/All/67084F17382CF201C2257199001FE4AD?O penDocument">Cyprus Museum</a> which houses many important artifacts from all period of antiquity.&nbsp; They also checked out some of the local sites -including the wall that continues to divide the city.&nbsp; It is great experience for students to visit major collections of artifacts with the senior staff of the project.&nbsp; It gives them a chance to connect the fragments that we collect in the field and study in the Larnaka museum to completed vessels.</p> <p>I stayed back in Larnaka and helped get Sarah Lepinski.&nbsp; She has arrived with her entourage (that is her twins and baby sitter) to study wall paintings and molded gypsum (a soft rock that forms the basis for a rugged plaster) architectural decoration.&nbsp; She will spend the next few weeks working with this material in the museum and traveling to sites throughout the

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island where similar material was excavated.&nbsp; Her work will form an important chapter in our final publication.</p> <p>As David Pettegrew has mentioned, our great excitement for this past week was our preliminary analysis of our geophysical work on Vigla.&nbsp; As we noted over a week ago, we knew that it had revealed monumental architecture (or "something big").&nbsp; Further study of the image now suggests that this architecture might well be a Late Roman basilica church.&nbsp; This would fit well with our discovery of Late Roman fortification walls on this prominent coastal ridge.&nbsp; The only real problem is that we have not found any significant amount of Late Roman pottery on the ridge.&nbsp; While there are some other examples for this, it is nevertheless disconcerting.</p> <p>The final news of the weekend (at least so far) is that my parents have come to visit.&nbsp; They have a lively interest in the archaeology and history of the Mediterranean and look forward to watching the team work over the next few days and seeing some of the sites on the island. </p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: David Pettegrew TITLE: Archaeology as Field School, or why Bill Caraher is certainly wrong STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: archaeology_as_ CATEGORY: David Pettegrew DATE: 05/31/2007 12:44:41 PM ----BODY: <p>David Pettegrew here (the arch nemesis of Caraher in respect to the question of student involvement)....&nbsp; </p> <p>This is actually an issue that Bill and I argue about most every summer.&nbsp; Bill aims for specialization and efficiency, I aim for the wellrounded experience (admittedly at the expense of some of our field time). </p> <p>I certainly disagree with Bill's view that students feel a &quot;sense of satisfaction&quot; with specializing in an archaeological task over a period of three weeks!&nbsp; &nbsp;On the contrary, students appreciate getting the big picture that comes from being educated in the numerous components of our work here in Cyprus: gridding and mapping, reconaissance survey, intensive field walking, planning, drawing walls and features, filling out forms, data entry, GIS, and computer-based analysis, etc....&nbsp; Without seeing the entire picture, participants fail to understand how their individual contributions matter.&nbsp; This week, in fact, one student who joined us in mapping out survey units told us afterward that she now had a much better sense of why we

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were surveying where we were surveying.&nbsp; Ultimately Bill and I will continue to debate the merits of the type of training that students should receive in archaeological method each summer, but, as I look back over the last three seasons, I do see the well-rounded &quot;field school&quot; approach gaining the upper hand!&nbsp; I hope that we continue to develop the field school since it is one of the most exciting aspects of the archaeogical process!&nbsp; </p> <p>Some brief news from fieldwork this week....Today we finished our survey of the Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; Exciting finds include ubiquitous pottery, numerous stone basins, several &quot;loom weights&quot; and anchors, many stone artifacts, and what appears to be a minor later Hellenistic-Roman phase at the same site--much to the chagrin of the prehistorians on our project!&nbsp; Michael Brown and Dimitri Nakassis can fill you in.</p> <p>The other thrilling discovery from the height of Vigla comes from John Hunt's analysis of the geophysical (electrical resistivity) data: it appears we have another early Christian basilica on the ridge!&nbsp; Only excavation will determine for sure, but it looks promising and we're all excited.</p> <p>David</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: RSM TITLE: The less than glamorous aspects STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the_less_than_g CATEGORY: Scott Moore DATE: 05/30/2007 11:24:09 AM ----BODY: <p>The season is going fine, lots of new discoveries, new plans for the future, etc. One aspect, however, that we haven't covered much in these blogs is the logistical side of things. We are currnetly at 16 people and attention has to be paid to shopping for food, preparing meals, buying supplies, and arranging trips. This is the part of the project that can really tire you out or wear you down. For example, we go to the grocery store everyday to buy food for lunch and supper. This involves a car ride to Carrefour, the cheapest of the mega markets that are close to the museum. This trip involves buying staples (cereal, milk, coffee, etc.) and trying to find good deals on meat and vegetables in order to

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save the project money. This means that we are usually deciding about dinner while we are shopping. Once the items are purchased and crammed into our super small Proton Savvy, we have to get the supplies put away into three small mini refridgerators - which is one reason we cannot buy too much at one visit.</p> <p>Another hard part is arranging group trips - both to the museum amd field, as well as to other sites on the island. One problem is that we have 16 people and three cars that each seat 5, so transporting everybody everywhere is a bit of a challenge and sometimes involves shuttling people. Now that we have finally gotten into a routine, things are going to change again. We have some people starting to leave this weekend while a few others others are arriving. This means we have to arrange a group photo (where? when?) and find a place for a final group dinner.</p> <p>Now is this a royal pain? Yes. But, it is what makes discovering the Late Roman walls on Vigla possible and so it is neccessary. Fortunately, if sixteen years of college taught me anything, it is how you sometimes have to do the boring stuff (standing in line, filling out forms, waiting on hold) to get to the end result.</p> <p>RSM</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Field school or field project? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: field_school_or CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/29/2007 11:32:01 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the unique features of PKAP is that we are a hybrid project.&nbsp; We involve students in almost all aspects of fieldwork, much like an archaeological&nbsp;field school (i.e. a project this is primarily designed to teach students archaeological method and practice), but we also maintain a strong focus on research and pursue fieldwork directed by very specific questions regarding the nature of Mediterranean exchange networks, settlement patterns, et c.&nbsp;</p> <p>This inevitable causes conflict among senior staff as to the nature and extent of student involvement.&nbsp; This season (as in the past) our debates regarding student involvement revolve around differing philosophies of archaeological education.&nbsp; I argue that students learn archaeological practice largely from practicing archaeology.&nbsp; The

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experiences of a regular fieldwork routine focused on accomplishing a specific task -- whether it be field walking, pottery washing, pottery sorting, or even data entry -- give the students not only experience in the meticulous and detailed nature of archaeological research, but also provide them with a sense of accomplishment when they see how their specific responsibility fits into the larger goals of the project.&nbsp; In the best cases, students who are given a specific task to accomplish over the course of a field season develops a degree of expertise in the specific task and can actually help us to refine the methods or procedures that we employ.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Fieldschoolorfieldproject_10D9A/DSC_0034sm%5B3%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="266" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Fieldschoolorfieldproject_10D9A/DSC_0034sm_thumb%5B1%5D.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p><em>Students enjoying the routine pleasure of fieldwalking</em></p> <p>In practice, my philosophy involves assigning specific jobs to specific students.&nbsp; For example, one student might be in charge of data entry for the season, another regularly assigned to a field team, another assigned to assist a more senior person in mapping survey units.&nbsp; These tasks do not vary over the season ensuring that the student develops a degree of experience and "expertise" over the three or four weeks of work.</p> <p>David Pettegrew, my arch nemesis in this matter, is a proponent of the "rotation school" of archaeological education.&nbsp; The so-called "rotation school" cruelly deprives students of the wide-ranging pleasures of archaeological routine as they are "rotated" through various different tasks on a daily basis.&nbsp; This practice is neither an ideal experience for the project -- as it deprives us of students who have even limited experience at any task -- but it is bad for the students as well as they never develop the sense of accomplishment that comes from performing an important function of the project consistently and well.</p> <p>David, of course, sees this differently...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: The Week in Review STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: the_week_in_rev CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/27/2007 02:35:14 AM ----BODY:

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<p>This past week was the first week that the project functioned to optimal capacity.&nbsp; From late Sunday afternoon when we walked our first survey units of the season through to Saturday site-seeing trips the students and staff were fully immersed in the archaeology and culture of Cyprus.&nbsp; So, to review:</p> <p>On Sunday we conducted a couple of hours of field training and walked our first survey unit.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TheWeekinReview_8809/DSC_0005sm[4].jpg" atomicselection="true"><img height="266" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TheWeekinReview_8809/DSC_0005sm_thumb%5B2%5D.jpg" width="400" border="0" style="BORDER-RIGHT: 0px; BORDER-TOP: 0px; BORDER-LEFT: 0px; BORDER-BOTTOM: 0px" /></a></p> <p align="center"><em>Field Training on the First Day</em></p> <p>On Monday we had a &quot;meet and greet&quot; with the U.N. in the Buffer zone and learned exactly where our survey boundary ended.&nbsp; We were in the field from Tuesday to Friday working to the north of our highest density coastal units.&nbsp; We had hoped to determine the northern border of our site, but it now seems clear that the site, disregarding all international conventions, extends into the U.N. Buffer Zone around Pyla Village.</p> <p>The Pettegrews, David, an Assistant Professor at Messiah College who is the field director of the project, and his wife, Katie who will help with pottery processing in the museum, arrived, as did Dimitri Nakassis.&nbsp; David and Dimitri have been working with Michael Brown to set up the survey of the prehistoric (Late Bronze Age -- ca. 1300-1200 BC) site of Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; This will start next week -- perhaps as early as Monday.&nbsp; There is a significant scatter of material on hill ranging from stone tools to large ceramic storage vessels.&nbsp; The quantity of pottery may overwhelm our ability to wash, sort, and store the material in the short run, but in the long run it could give us important new insights into the date, the function, and the connections between this site and the rest of the Late Bronze Age world.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TheWeekinReview_8809/DSC_0013sm[5].jpg" atomicselection="true"><img height="399" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TheWeekinReview_8809/DSC_0013sm_thumb%5B3%5D.jpg" width="266" border="0" style="BORDER-RIGHT: 0px; BORDER-TOP: 0px; BORDER-LEFT: 0px; BORDER-BOTTOM: 0px" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><em>Michael Brown and David Pettegrew</em></p> <p>Saturday we went site-seeing taking the students to three site on the Western part of the island: Paphos, which has spectacular Roman period mosaics, the monastery of St. Neophytos, an important Medieval site with an impressive painted, rock cut, church, and the site of St. George - Peyeia.&nbsp; The last

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site is a coastal site much like ours with several 5th-6th century A.D. basilicas and a small bath.&nbsp; The most interesting aspect of the site, to a certain extent, is that it does not appear in any textual sources -- despite having substantial architecture and covering a significant stretch of coastline.&nbsp; While the site it not well-published yet, it might be a nice parallel for our site which also does not appear in textual sources despite its size and monumental appearance.<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/TheWeekinReview_8809/DSC_0213sm[3].jpg" atomicselection="true"><img height="266" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/TheWeekinReview_8809/DSC_0213sm_thumb%5B1%5D.jpg" width="400" border="0" style="BORDER-RIGHT: 0px; BORDER-TOP: 0px; BORDER-LEFT: 0px; BORDER-BOTTOM: 0px" /></a> </p> <p align="center"><em>The Baptistery at Ay. Georgios - Peyeia</em></p> <p>To cap off the week, this weekend (through Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday...) is the Kataklysmos.&nbsp; This is the local religious festival celebrating both the Biblical flood and Pentecost (50 days after Orthodox Easter which fell this year at the same time as Western Easter).&nbsp; Entertainers, rides, fireworks, are joined by hundreds of vendors selling every kind of possible junk you could imagine from boom-boxes guaranteed to break almost immediately to fake fish in fake water in a fake fish bowl.&nbsp; The festival in Larnaka is the largest on the island and attracts visitors and tourists alike.&nbsp; From 7 pm to late into the night, a flood of people wander up and down the boardwalk taking in the music, eating food, playing carnival games, and buying junk.&nbsp; These festival may have roots in Medieval fairs and give the students an opportunity to experience Cypriot (or more broadly Eastern Mediterranean) culture at its most overwhelming!</p> <p>One last thing, be sure to check in on the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PKAP Graduate Student Perspectives </a>blog!&nbsp; The Graduate students continue to provide their unique and insightful view of our fieldwork!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Fieldwork Take Two STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: fieldwork_take_ CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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DATE: 05/23/2007 10:26:48 PM ----BODY: <p>After our abortive first day of fieldwork, we had to retrench.&nbsp; We laid out a series of units on a series of coastal ridges extending north from coast.&nbsp; We had planned on surveying these ridges from the start, but had figured to work on them in the afternoon as they fall within the British ranges and have only limited access during the morning.&nbsp; Despite this limitation, we got units mapped in on Monday afternoon and had a full field team (5 fieldwalkers and a team leader) in the field on Tuesday.&nbsp; You can see them lined up in the traditional survey archaeologist pose -- head down -- in the photo below.&nbsp; The big excitement was that one of the graduate students, Brice Pierce, found two fragments of figurines in the last unit of the day!&nbsp; We have found a few other examples of figurines from the site, and they support our idea that&nbsp;there was an ancient sanctuary on part of the site during the pre-Roman period. &nbsp;We'll have photos of them up here soon.&nbsp; </p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FieldworkTakeTwo_11B00/DSC_0102sm%5B2%5D.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="266" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FieldworkTakeTwo_11B00/DSC_0102sm_thumb.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>On Wednesday the British were not firing so we were able to work in the morning.&nbsp; This coincided with Dimitri Nakassis arrival.&nbsp; He is a scholar of the Aegean Bronze Age who had worked with us in the past.&nbsp; He led the field team on Wednesday morning.&nbsp; Dimitri will work with Michael Brown on unraveling Kokkinokremos. </p> <p>We also spent some time trying to figure out monumental architecture on Vigla by beginning to prepare a sketch map.&nbsp; My theory (and I am trying to convince the other member's of the project of this) is that&nbsp;part&nbsp;of what we have there is the remains of a Late Roman fortification wall (6th-7th century AD).&nbsp; From the mid 6th to mid 7th century there was a concerted effort to construct fortifications across the Eastern Mediterranean and a substantial wall situated on a rise above what appears to be a wealthy settlement would fit this narrative</p> <p>As far as we can tell, the walls on Vigla have never been recorded and it is entirely possible that no one has ever noticed them before (even though they seem clearly visible to us!).&nbsp; We traced their circuit around the top of the ridge of Vigla. Here's Mat Dalton beginning to plan the walls:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/FieldworkTakeTwo_11B00/DSC_0115sm4.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="598" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/FieldworkTakeTwo_11B00/DSC_0115sm_thumb2.jpg" width="400" border="0"></a> </p> <p>We'll spend tomorrow morning in the Museum cleaning up our finds and working on cataloguing finds from 2005 and 2006.&nbsp; Hopefully I will have nice artifact photos by the end of the week!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: -----

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KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brice Pearce EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 213.149.168.199 URL: DATE: 05/31/2007 03:35:25 PM Just a slightly irked reminder that my last name is English, not French (although I live near Franklin Pierce's birthplace). That's PEARce, my man. -----------AUTHOR: RSM TITLE: Museum Work STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: museum_work CATEGORY: Scott Moore DATE: 05/22/2007 01:37:10 PM ----BODY: <p>We continued ironing out the kinks in our artifact processing system. After a few false starts, Bill and I had a chatty-chat and came up with a system that we feel will allow us to process our artifacts in the most efficient manner. Now it is just a matter of implementation. Fortunately, we might have plenty of extra help in the museum each morning. After the meeting with the UN (see Bill's last post) we had to switch our fieldwork to a different area and will have to work in the afternoon, thus freeing up the students for museum work. Another positive sign is that our illustrator, Matt, is very good and we should have some great drawings for our final publication.</p> <p>RSM</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: U.N. Buffer Zone STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: un_buffer_zone CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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DATE: 05/21/2007 07:41:55 AM ----BODY: <p>We discovered the border between the area in which we are allowed to do field work according to our agreements with the British Sovereign Base Authority and the Cypriot Department of Antiquities.&nbsp; While working away in the field we were stopped by a U.N. Patrol.&nbsp;&nbsp; They took us to Pyla Village and the U.N. Police Station.&nbsp; They explained that we had strayed into the buffer zone where we did not have permission to work.&nbsp; It was a bit nerve wracking, but we now understand a bit more clearly the boundaries of the various authorities in our little corner of the island!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.220.188.60 URL: DATE: 05/24/2007 05:35:12 PM At least did you get to ride in their air-conditioned Mercedes and drink bottled water? -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Our first day of field work... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: our_first_day_o CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/21/2007 07:41:06 AM ----BODY: <p>After days of shuttling folks from the airport, orienting students, and getting our gear organized, we finally went into the field on Sunday afternoon.&nbsp; Sunday was to be primarily a training day.&nbsp; We introduced the students to our method, talked about the need to record field data in an accurate and consistent way, and walked a practice unit.&nbsp; For the first time this year we left a good bit of the management of the field team to Brandon Olson, a graduate student in History at UND.&nbsp; Scott Moore and I floated around making sure that things started well and then left the field walkers to Brandon's supervision. </p> <p>Scott wandered the ridge of Vigla.&nbsp; As I mentioned earlier, our geophysical team revealed a good bit of architecture on this prominent coastal rise and we tried to correlate their preliminary findings

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with some walls that we had observed eroding out of the south face in 2005 and 2006.&nbsp; While we were unable to correlate the two (at least in an kind of conclusive way), we discovered something far more exciting!&nbsp; </p> <p>It would appear that Vigla was almost entirely surrounded by a fortification wall.&nbsp; In 2005 and 2006 we had traced a short fragment of wall along the southern slope of the hill.&nbsp; Further erosion had made this wall more visible and exposed a front and back face.&nbsp; We were also able to find traces of the wall which was faced with relatively regularly cut blocks and a mortar and rubble core on the eastern and northern sides.&nbsp; </p> <p>This is an exciting discovering, indeed!!&nbsp; The only confounding thing about it is that the pottery on the top of the hill seems to date primarily to the Classical and Hellenistic periods (roughly 500-300 BC) and the wall appears to date (in an informal sort of way) to the Late Roman or Early Byzantine period (probably 6th7th century).</p> <p>From the excitement of monumental fortification walls yesterday to the mundane scatters of pottery today.&nbsp; We'll leave for the field at 7:30 am and be working away by 8.&nbsp; </p> <p>More on this and some photos soon!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: David Pettegrew TITLE: Pettegrews on the Way STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pettegrews_on_t CATEGORY: David Pettegrew DATE: 05/18/2007 11:51:19 AM ----BODY: <p>The Pettegrews (David and Kate) of south-central PA will be among the last to arrive in Larnaka this year.&nbsp; Graduation day here at Messiah College is tomorrow, a few final meetings remain, I have to turn in grades, and then we fly out on Tuesday.&nbsp; We are really excited to get to Cyprus, meet the new project members, and get to work--especially after reading Bill's recent posts about the rewarding results of the geophysical survey!&nbsp; More monumental architecture??&nbsp; Well,...that is the reason for conducting geophysical prospection, isn't it?&nbsp; Geophysical work introduces an entirely new kind of data and allows for a more comprehensive assessment of the site.&nbsp; While the rest of the team begins preliminary work in Larnaka, we Pettegrews are entering last-minute panic mode, getting everything in order before our 7 week stay in the Mediterranean.&nbsp; My main goal before departure Tuesday is to finish a conference paper that I'm to present in Athens, Greece, in mid-June.&nbsp; One thing I have discovered (or,...err...learned) about working on archaeological projects in the Mediterranean: there is very little time during a field season

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for writing papers!!&nbsp; The long days and the hot sun sap your every bit of strength and the last thing you want to do at the end of a day is intellectual work!&nbsp; And have you ever thought about how incredibly expensive archaeology in the Mediterranean is?&nbsp; Simply getting to Cyprus costs at least $1000 (usually more), and living there for 3 weeks costs well over $1000.&nbsp; Point is that since we pay so much to be there, we absolutely have to maximize our time in doing fieldwork.&nbsp; So when Kate and I arrive next week, we plan to hit the ground running, after a good night's sleep, of course, and a cup of Nescafe.&nbsp; And in the meantime, I'd better finish that conference paper.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: Susan Caraher TITLE: Susan's View! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: my_name_is_susa CATEGORY: Susan Caraher's View DATE: 05/18/2007 10:29:43 AM ----BODY: <p>My name is Susan Caraher and I am the Marketing and External Relations Specialist in <a href="http://www.graduateschool.und.edu/">The Graduate School</a> at the University of North Dakota.&nbsp; I am also an archaeologist and welcome opportunities such as this project to get my hands dirty.&nbsp; Bill and I met doing a similar survey project in Greece, and this is my second season with PKAP.&nbsp; In 2005, I joined the team to do fieldwork and artifact processing which kept me entertained, busy, and constantly learning for about 5 weeks.&nbsp; Now that I am back with a year's work in between my visits, I am trying to bring myself up to speed quickly.&nbsp; Scott Moore and I did a prelab season reconnaissance to the Larnaka District Museum's lab where we store our artifacts and conduct our processing of all materials collected from the field.&nbsp; This year's goals will be towork through the cataloguing of artifacts -- photographing, illustrating, describing and recording every possible detail.&nbsp; It also means having to know where all artifacts (over 10,000!) are at any given time, to ensure that those that reach the final report have been through the entire registration process as well as assisting students with lab work -- most of whom are new to archaeology.&nbsp; I hope to spend a good deal of time in the field once our daily work at the museum is done.&nbsp; This year's season is really shaping up to be an interesting one with many opportunities for learning and discovery.&nbsp; Beside the archaeology, Cyprus is such a fascinating place...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY:

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----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Rain! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: rain CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/17/2007 10:50:48 AM ----BODY: <p>We awoke this morning to this view from our hotel window:</p> <p>&nbsp;<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Rain_6B38/DSC_01699_2.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="bordertop-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-rightwidth: 0px" height="300" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Rain_6B38/DSC_0169_thumb7.jpg" width="450" border="0"></a> </p> <p>Larnaka in the rain is not a happy thing. Cyprus, like most of the Eastern Mediterranean is known for wet winters and warm, relentlessly sunny, dry summers.&nbsp; We were worried that our geophysical team would not work in the rain, but, fortunately, it let up in time for them to get in a relatively complete field day.&nbsp; This is important for the overall success of the season since they can only give us a week or so of work before John Hunt, the retired English chap who owns and skilfully operates the resistivity meter has to go to work in Italy.&nbsp; </p> <p>After a soggy start, however, things got better...</p> <p>First, the farmer who leases the majority of our site from the British Ministry of Defense offered to harvest two sections of his field (approximately 4,000 sq. m) for us by Monday so that we can do our geophysical work there.&nbsp; As I mentioned in an earlier blog, this was a concern because in order to do our work correctly, we would end up damaging the crops.&nbsp; </p> <p>As we were meeting with the farmer John Hunt excitedly showed us the results from the first two days of geophysical work on the height of Vigla.&nbsp; While the data was still raw (that is unfiltered -- the images produced by resistivity need to be filtered in various ways to separate potential manmade features like walls, trenches, pits, et c. from interference or geological features), his results were so good that I am actually nervous to mention them here!&nbsp; It looks, however, that we have monumental architecture on Vigla!&nbsp; This is exciting and from my perspective a bit of a surprise.</p> <p>The students continue to arrive slowly but surely (well, perhaps not surely -- Brandon Olson still doesn't have his luggage and Scott went to the airport at 2 am last night to pick up a student due today at 2 am).&nbsp; We now have three IUP undergraduates and 2 UND graduate students.&nbsp; Joe Patrow, our filmmaker and an UND alumnus (M.A. 2005) will arrive tonight at 8.&nbsp; One more IUP student will arrive at 2 am.&nbsp; We'll

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probably spend tomorrow taking the students to some important sites (Amathous and Kourion).&nbsp; Fieldwork will begin Monday!</p> <p>Thanks for reading...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chad Bushy EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.229.103 URL: DATE: 05/18/2007 07:40:10 PM Hi Professor Caraher,! Glad to see that you got to your destination safe. Looks like you had to put up with some rain. I like the layout of your blog. I will be checking it throughout the summer and reading all the good posts you and your colleagues will write. I hope things go well for you and your team this summer and look forward to the fall when you come back.! ! Have a great time. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.220.188.60 URL: DATE: 05/26/2007 10:53:07 AM I remember W. Raymond Wood showing us the updates to Double Ditch each morning not but a couple years back over the hum of the water pump at the waterscreening station. Another section would be recorded and interpreted each day, and the two outer fortifications would eventually be pieced together. I can only guess your field team is feeling about just as giddy. ! ! Exciting stuff. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Day 1 in Cyprus STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: day_1_in_cyprus CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/15/2007 10:21:49 AM ----BODY:

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<p>My wife Susie and I arrived on the island late last night and began work early this morning.&nbsp; The first thing that we did was visit the museum to have a working coffee with the local technical director of the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum, Marinos Avraam.&nbsp; His team of archaeologists provide us with space to work on our material and, more importantly, a collegial and supportive atmosphere in Larnaka.&nbsp; They have seen nearly ever inch of the Larnaka District and know the archaeology better than anyone.&nbsp; We made arrangements to collect some equipment that we stored in the museum (including our plates and pans and little electric grill!) tomorrow once some more of our team had arrived.</p> <p>We then made contact with the team from the University of Edinburgh who had been working on our site for the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/05/pk ap_picks_up_t.html">past two weeks</a>.&nbsp; But first, we had to sign in (and avoid another coffee) with the Dhekelia Cantonment Range Officer, Kostas, who makes sure that we are not accidentally blown up while working around the British Army's live firing ranges.&nbsp; Michael Brown and Matt Dalton had just completed doing geophysical work on Kokkinokremos and had moved on to Vigla.&nbsp; They were impressed by the quality and quantity of Classical material (BC 500&nbsp; - BC 330) on this impressive coastal height.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/Day1inCyprus_90E1/vigla5.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="bordertop-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-rightwidth: 0px" height="189" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/Day1inCyprus_90E1/vigla_thumb3.jpg" width="450" border="0"></a> .</p> <p>We chatted with them and planned some fieldwork for the next week.&nbsp; The main issue so far has been the weather.&nbsp; it rained buckets over the past weekend and this made it difficult for them to stay on their schedule.&nbsp; Moreover, it means that the farmer who cultivates the fields below Vigla where we hope to do more geophysical work was unable to harvest his barley.&nbsp; Doing geophysical work there will damage his crop as we will walk all over it.&nbsp; We are already making arrangements to buy several 100 x 20 m areas of barley so that we can try to continue our work on schedule without effecting the farmers profits!&nbsp; (Grant agencies love things like receipts for "I hectare of barley").</p> <p>Scott Moore and two of his students showed up late this afternoon.&nbsp; (As I write this at about 6 pm, I am dragging!).&nbsp; They are getting settled in their rooms giving me a chance to slip out to the local Starbucks, buy some wireless internet time, and compose this blog.</p> <p>The rest of the week looks every bit as hectic as today, but there will be time for updates!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daniel Sauerwein EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 208.107.230.169 URL:

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DATE: 05/16/2007 02:13:03 AM Bill,! ! Have a safe time over in Cyprus. I know you'll have lots of fun and have plenty to tell us all later this summer. Nice blog by the way. Good hunting.! ! Daniel -----------AUTHOR: RSM TITLE: RSM and T-1 STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: rsm_and_t1 CATEGORY: Scott Moore DATE: 05/13/2007 10:16:25 PM ----BODY: <p>Well, Bill is on his way. I called him 3 more times while he was waiting at the airport to try and solve a few more glitches that arose during the day. It is now 11:15 PM and I have managed to write 3 letters of recommendation, mow the yard, pack, and organize my data for use in Cyprus. I still have a grant to work on, but should be done in an hour. It has been a hectic week, but the l can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I just hope it is not a train.</p> <p>RSM</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Marie-Laure Reese EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.231.226 URL: DATE: 05/15/2007 10:04:36 AM Hello Susan & Bill,! ! I hope you had a great trip. I am sure you are happy to be in Cyprus and can't wait to read your comments.! ! Talk to you later. Marie-Laure -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Departure Day!

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STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: departure_day CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/13/2007 12:46:48 PM ----BODY: <p>First, I want to welcome any new readers to this blog.&nbsp; The University of North Dakota's&nbsp;Office of University Relations&nbsp;has done me the great courtesy of linking my blog to a profile on the university's <a href="http://www.und.edu">main web page</a>.&nbsp; If you want to learn what the the Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>Archaeological Project (PKAP) strand of this blog is about, check out my <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/04/me diterranean_a.html">welcome note</a>&nbsp;and <a href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">PKAP's web page.</a>&nbsp; Also check out our <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PKAP graduate student blog</a> (and thanks to Dean Joey Benoit for providing a link from <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/grad/">The Graduate School</a>'s&nbsp;web page!).</p> <p>Today we leave for Cyprus.&nbsp; It's&nbsp;<strong>Departure Day</strong>, or the day that we have to confront:</p> <p><em>The Good, the Bad, and Ugly</em></p> <p>The Good: One thing that makes this PKAP season particularly exciting for me is that Susan Caraher, my wife, will be joining us for the first three weeks.&nbsp; She was trained as a Classical Archaeologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, and we met on an archaeological project in the Mediterranean (on the Greek island of Kythera).&nbsp; Since we've been together life has interrupted her ability to pursue her passion for Greek archaeology and deprived us of her considerable expertise.&nbsp; In 2005, she worked with PKAP as our registrar of finds, but in&nbsp; 2006 she had to wait out the PKAP season having just arrived to live in North Dakota (Katie Pettegrew, our field director, David Pettegrew's wife who is also a trained archaeologist ably filled in).&nbsp; In 2007 Susie's back and excited to get her hands dirty both in the field and in the lab managing the flow of artifacts from one station to the next as they undergo cataloguing, illustration, photographing, and study.&nbsp; She'll report more fully on her job on the project in this very space soon!</p> <p>The Bad: I received two phone calls before 9 am today, both from my co-director Scott Moore (to understand this see: <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/05/sc otts_contribu.html">Scott's Contribution</a>).&nbsp; Scott is the master of finding equipment to borrow.&nbsp; As I have mentioned we are a small, relatively poor project, and consequently we beg and borrow equipment from a wide variety of <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/04/fu nding_a_medit.html">sources</a>.)&nbsp; The only problem with borrowed equipment is that it is, well, borrowed equipment.&nbsp; As Classical Archaeologists we are oddly incapable of looking a gift horse in the mouth, and graciously accept equipment from friends.&nbsp; Eighty percent of the time, this equipment is great; twenty percent of the time there are problems.&nbsp; This morning, we had a problem.&nbsp; Evidently one our fancy-pants borrowed GPS units did not have

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the necessary software.&nbsp; Scott departs tomorrow.&nbsp; Fortunately quick thinking (and persistence) on Scott's part and a burst of amazing generosity on&nbsp;the part of the lender, averted the catastrophe.&nbsp; We are back on track,&nbsp;until the next crisis at least...&nbsp;</p> <p>The Ugly: Some realities, however, cannot be averted.&nbsp; I have to mow the lawn before we go (the fertile prairie soils are seemly able to support astronomical rates of lawn growth!).&nbsp; And I have to finish packing. Each and every restriction on luggage forces us to be more and more clever with how we distribute the weight of the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/04/pk ap_season_pre.html">various supplies</a> that we need to transport to Cyprus.&nbsp; This challenge of transporting equipment, supplies, and my own clothing compounds my incredibly limited ability to pack in general. </p> <p>Next blog from me is from Cyprus... </p> <p>Thanks for reading!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Don EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.168.152 URL: DATE: 05/15/2007 08:08:56 AM Good luck to you and your team. How was the trip over? Looking forward to following your team's progress. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bill C. EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 194.30.131.74 URL: DATE: 05/15/2007 10:24:35 AM Don (and everyone),! ! We made it Cyprus safely and are getting our bearings. More soon! -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Archaeology, Immigration, and Post Medieval Greece STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: archaeology_imm CATEGORY: Medieval and Post Medieval Greece Interest Group of the AIA CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 05/13/2007 10:33:14 AM

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----BODY: <p>As a quick announcement, we are pleased to report that the <a href="http://www.squinch.und.edu/">Medieval and Postmedieval Archaeology in Greece Interest Group</a> (MPMGAG for short) of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) had its second colloquium session accepted for the 2008 Annual Meeting.&nbsp; Kostis Kourelis took the lead in organizing the panel and David K. Pettegrew is the Chair of the Interest Group.&nbsp; The official AIA Interest Group was founded by Kostis Kourelis and myself in 2006 to give voice to the research, concerns, and interest of scholars who study Byzantine, Frankish, Ottoman, Venetian, and Early Modern antiquities in Greece or in the Eastern Mediterranean in general.&nbsp; </p> <p>The panel, entitled the Archaeology of Xenitia will focus on the archaeology of Greek immigrants to the United States.&nbsp; While very few of these individuals made their way to North Dakota (although North Dakota did get their share of Eastern Mediterranean immigrants, notably <a href="http://www.ext.nodak.edu/extnews/newsrelease/2003/100203/04plains.htm">Leb anese-Syrians</a> and Winnipeg has a <a href="http://www.greekwinnipeg.com/">Greek community</a>) the panel will give voice to an underexplored aspect of the study of immigration in general.&nbsp; In my experience, North Dakotans are particularly aware of their immigrant past and hold strong sentimental ties to <a href="http://www.library.und.edu/Collections/Famhist/bygdebok.html">their places of origin</a>.&nbsp; The archaeology of immigration (both in the U.S. and in those countries of origin) is yet another way that brings together archaeological research abroad and our local community.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p align="center"><i>The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture.<br></p></i> <p>Archaeological Institute of America<br>208th Annual Meeting, Chicago, Ill., January 3-6, 2008</p> <p>Between 1900 and 1915, one quarter of the working-age male Greek population immigrated to the United States, Canada and Australia. This profound demographic phenomenon left an indelible mark on Greek society but also created new diasporic communities in the host countries. Greek immigration is a phenomenon of modern transnationalism that shares features with other migration stories despite its unique ethnic manifestations. Xenitia, as a historical narrative, has been studied by various disciplines, entering the popular mainstream through movies, comedy, television, academia, museums and culinary institutions. The historical enterprise of Greek immigration in the twentieth century, however, has lacked a significant archaeological voice. Nevertheless, a series of recent projects in Greece, the U.S. and Australia testify to the emergence of an archaeological discipline tackling material culture as critical evidence rather than mere illustration. As a major Greek-American metropolis, Chicago offers a great opportunity to reflect upon archaeology's contribution to the relationship between home and host societies. This colloquium collaborates with Chicago's Consulate General of Greece, the Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center, the Jane Adams Hull-House Museum, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the AIA interest group in Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology in Greece. New archaeological data from Epeiros, Kythera, Keos, the Southern Argolid and the Nemea Valley will highlight the effects of emigration, while data from Colorado, Philadelphia and Sydney will illustrate the effects of immigration. Abandoned households were coupled with new foundations, while a fluid transmission of moneys and resources created networks of goods and meanings far more complex than the traditional model of assimilation, economic prosperity, or the meltingpot. Greek archaeology played a double role in constructing native and foreign ideologies, ranging from church foundations in the 1920s (Greek community in

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Philadelphia) to film productions for the war relief effort in the 1940s (documentary produced and newly restored by the American School). Finally, we will see how excavated ruins inform current narratives of discovery and homecoming in a recent travel memoir that layers personal and textual lives. Such meta-narratives (factual and idealized) reveal deep entanglements between archaeologist and<br>immigrant. <p>Papers: <p>Eleni N. Gage, Columbia University<br>"Home Again: The Recreation of a House, and a History, in Epeiros." <p>Susan Buck Sutton, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis<br>"The Ruins of Engagement: Rural Landscapes and Greek-American Immigration" <p>Timothy E. Gregory, Ohio State University and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, La Trobe University <br>"Household Archaeology in Australia and Kythera: Examples of Two-Way Exchange." <p>Philip Duke, Fort Lewis College<br>"The Ludlow, Colorado Coal Miners' Massacre of 1914:&nbsp; The Greek Connection." <p>Kostis Kourelis, Clemson University<br>"From Greek Revival to Greek America: Archaeology and Transformation in Philadelphia's Orthodox Cathedral." <p>Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, American School of Classical Studies at Athens<br>"'Knowing Your Feelings for Hellas and the Knowledge that You Always Carry with You the Hellenic Culture. . .'&nbsp; Exploring the Relationship of the American School of Classical Studies with the Greek Omogeneia in the 1940's." <p>Discussant:<br>Jack L. Davis, University of Cincinnati and American School of Classical Studies at Athens ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: T-3 Days... STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: t3_days CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/11/2007 09:40:04 AM ----BODY: <p>The tests are almost graded and the piles of clothes, equipment, and supplies are becoming neatly arranged for packing.&nbsp; </p> <p>This week we have also begun packing up our data.&nbsp; Over the last three decades Mediterranean archaeological has gone increasingly high tech. Our project will collect data using a range of digital devices: at least three digital cameras (all over 6 mega pixels), 5 laptops, 2 Trimble XT GPS units, &nbsp;and a flatbed scanner.&nbsp; While these devices will ensure that our data collection is more precise and easily accessible than ever before, it also creates new challenges.&nbsp; We now need to make sure that we have media to store and transport safely all this data both to and from Cyprus.&nbsp; A flock of digital storage devices -- from portable hard drives , to click drives, to DVDs -- will

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accompany the project bringing data keyed over the past year with us to use in Cyprus as well as providing storage for the data that we will collect this year.&nbsp; </p> <p>So, packing for fieldwork no only involves simply lots of old t-shirts, boots, and my trusty field whip (like Indiana Jones), but a bevy of hard drives, laps tops, and portable devices to enable us to keep our archaeological world at our finger tips both in Cyprus and back in North Dakota, Central Pennsylvania or wherever else PKAP data is being analyzed.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Erin Bounds EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 68.33.146.252 URL: http://www.facebook.com/p/Erin_Bounds/15212854 DATE: 05/11/2007 02:15:33 PM Have a great trip and a fruitful dig season! ! ! Will you continue posting information here while you are in Cyprus? I will continue to check back. I am eager to see what's in store for you this season!! ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Erin Bounds EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 68.33.146.252 URL: http://www.facebook.com/p/Erin_Bounds/15212854 DATE: 05/11/2007 02:51:23 PM I also meant to ask if your team is actually planning on digging in the future. I believe that you are still collecting surface (Phase I) finds and cataloging them. It would be very interesting to see what is below the surface, especially because the surface finds are so concentrated! Although, I suppose that would be a lot more expensive. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: T-4 Days and Counting STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: t4_days_and_cou CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/10/2007 07:59:42 AM ----BODY:

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<p>Final preparations for this year's PKAP season are now underway.&nbsp; We got word this past Friday that we received a grant from the Vice President of Research at the University of North Dakota.</p> <p>This grant will assure that we run in the black this year (or at least not in the red!).&nbsp; More importantly, it will allow us to fund Sarah Lepinski.&nbsp; Sarah is a wall painting specialist finishing her disseration at Bryn Mawr College.&nbsp; In 2005 she began to analyze the painted plaster and molded gypsum from Maria Hadjicosti's excavation.&nbsp; To meet Sarah check out this clip from the documentary <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/DocuScript/DSAnalysis.html">"Su rvey on Cyprus".</a>&nbsp; She will show up at the end of May and stay for two weeks.&nbsp; Since we got word on the grant only at the last minute the logistics of her visit have been a bit frantic. </p> <p>The other&nbsp;adventure this time of year is grading (and in the case&nbsp;of the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/2007/05/en d_of_the_seme.html">graduate students</a>, the taking) of&nbsp;final exams.&nbsp; &nbsp;I give my <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/Syllabi/Byzantine%20Civilizatio n_Syllabus.htm">Byzantine Civilization</a> final today, and it will need to be graded and recorded by Saturday.&nbsp; </p> <p>We fly to Cyprus on Sunday morning!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: RSM TITLE: Scott's Contribution - Panic Attacks STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: scotts_contribu CATEGORY: Scott Moore DATE: 05/07/2007 10:36:47 PM ----BODY: <p>Since Bill has been doing all the work so far, I thought I would talk a bit about my current contribution to the project - daily panic attacks. As Bill mentioned in an earlier post, we are running our field season early in the summer for various reasons (heat, financial savings, etc.). The problem is that it comes right on the heels of exams and graduation ceremonies, so everything feels quite rushed. For example, I leave for Cyprus in 6 days and still have about 77 papers to grade, 2 committee meetings, 2 graduation ceremonies, and a training session to attend as I attempt to gather all our required supplies and ensure that my undergraduate volunteers are actually clear on how to travel to Cyprus (I always worry that one of them will wind up on Crete or in Greece instead of Cyprus). Anyway, whenever I get the chance I update the budget and

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check on our logistical situation. In doing so, I always find something that at the moment seems to be going horribly wrong and I have a minor panic attack that makes me call Bill on the phone. Bill and I work well together because we never panic at the same time, and he usually points out to me that the problem doesn't exist or is actually easy to fix. For me, the week before the trip is the most stressful since it is the last opportunity to buy any last minute equipment for the season, and double-check our logistical arrangements. As the project has grown over the years, this gets a little harder. In 2003 there were only 4 of us working together - this year there will be 18 of us. But that's a good thing, right?&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;<br />RSM</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP picks up the pace STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap_picks_up_t CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/06/2007 09:05:16 AM ----BODY: <p>This time of you almost everything begins to happen at once for PKAP.&nbsp; We have received word on almost all of our grants.&nbsp; We have our flights arranged and are making only last minute tweaks to all our logistical arrangements.&nbsp; We have boxes of supplies ordered for transport.&nbsp; Almost everything is ready for the U.S.-based contingent to make their way to Cyprus.</p> <p>This year, however, part of the PKAP Team has begun fieldwork already.&nbsp; Over the past year, we have forged a collaboration Michael Brown at the University of Edinburgh.&nbsp; He is conducting geophysical investigations at the site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos.&nbsp; Geophysical investigation is a broad terms for techniques that archaeologists use to map subsurface features without excavating.&nbsp; Brown and his team are employing a technique called electrical resistivity which measures the resistance in the soil map subsurface features.&nbsp; The plans produced by resistivity can be pretty good and indicate the presence of features ranging from walls and to pits and ditches where walls might have once stood.&nbsp; </p> <p>Pyla-Kokkinokremos is a major&nbsp;Late Bronze Age site part of which V. Karageorghis and M. Demas excavated by&nbsp;in the&nbsp;1980s (you can see the little group of excavated buildings on the plan below).&nbsp;It is located on the plateau immediately to the north of Pyla-Koutsopetria overlooking our proposed infilled embayment.&nbsp; In May, a PKAP team will conduct a gridded collection on the plateau which will complement the data collected by Brown's geophysical work to give us a better understanding of the extent and nature of Bronze Age settlement

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at the nearest neighbor to our site.</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/PKAPpicksupthepace_7DB5/KokkinokremosPlan%5B7%5D_1.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; borderleft: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="486" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/PKAPpicksupthepace_7DB5/KokkinokremosPlan_thumb%5B7%5D_1.jpg" width="450" border="0"></a> </p> <p>&nbsp;Plan after Karageorghis and Demas (1984)</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Of Maps and Material STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: of_maps_and_mat CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/03/2007 09:04:56 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the hidden costs in any archaeological project is the time spent preparing maps.&nbsp; We use common GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software, ESRI ArcGIS 9, to both analyze data and to produce maps for publication.&nbsp; In fact, much of our basic interpretation of the site begins with comparing our impressions of the distribution of artifacts on the ground with how the distribution of artifacts appears in our GIS map.&nbsp; By changing the way that our data appears in the GIS we are able to consider a wide range of questions ranging from the overall size of our site, to the function of different areas, to the chronological distribution of material.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>So we can produce a colorful map of over all artifact density that looks like this:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/OfMapsandMen_7E55/NEAFigure6Color9.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="275" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/OfMapsandMen_7E55/NEAFigure6Color_thumb7.jpg" width="450" border="0"></a></p> <p>And compare it to a map of only ceramic roof tiles from the site that looks like this:</p> <p><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/OfMapsandMen_7E55/NEAFigure7Color2.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="275" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive

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Writer/OfMapsandMen_7E55/NEAFigure7Color_thumb_1.jpg" width="450" border="0"></a> </p> <p>The concentration of tiles (labeled here as Zone 1) near the excavated area suggests that there was additional monumental building immediately to the east of the excavated Early Christian basilica.&nbsp; On the other hand, the relative dearth of roof&nbsp;tiles&nbsp;in Zone 2, despite several areas of relatively high artifact densities suggest that there were fewer buildings in Zone 2, but still some kind of activity.</p> <p>These maps all derive from this:<a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/OfMapsandMen_7E55/NEAFigure23.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="337" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/OfMapsandMen_7E55/NEAFigure2_thumb1.jpg" width="450" border="0"></a> </p> <p>If you want to play around with site maps, check out our <a href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html">interactive map</a>.&nbsp; We received funding from the <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/oid/">Office of Instructional Development</a> here at UND to expand the data available in this map.&nbsp; The Geography <a href="http://www.und.edu/dept/Geog/index.html">Department</a> here has helped us digitize additional topolines from the maps produced by the Cypriot Government, so a viewer will have a more expansive landscape to explore.&nbsp; So, as with all things PKAP, check back again soon!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Our Newest Feature STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: our_newest_feat CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 05/01/2007 08:15:58 AM ----BODY: <p>Hi everyone!&nbsp; Today we have the great pleasure of introducing (with exaggerated diction) the <a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/">PKAP Graduate Student Blog</a>.&nbsp; It will provide a venue for the perspectives of our graduate students on the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.&nbsp; These students run the&nbsp;gamut of experience and interests and should provide a useful counterpoint to the ramblings of David Pettegrew, Scott Moore, and myself here. </p> <p>The goal of this foray into the blogosphere is to provide both insights into our project for friends, supporters, and colleagues who are

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not on Cyprus and to provide us with a place to reflect on the day-to-day activities of an archaeological project.&nbsp; (The multiple authors of both this blog and the PKAP Graduate student blog will ensure that we will still have time to do archaeology despite regular updates from the field!).</p> <p>Check back here over the next week for David Pettegrew's and Scott Moore's first posts!</p> <p>And, thanks for reading!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Funding a Mediterranean Archaeological Project STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: funding_a_medit CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/29/2007 09:37:59 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the most challenging aspects of starting a new archaeological project as&nbsp;a young scholar is finding funding.&nbsp; From a budgetary standpoint PKAP is a smallish project: at our largest we will host around 20 people, we rarely run our season for more than 5 weeks, and we economize by cooking our own meals, conducting field work before "high season" rates come into effect, and maintaining an absolute minimum of year-around infrastructure (e.g. storage, a car, a residence, et c.).</p> <p>Despite our precautions, each year is an adventure in uncertainty.&nbsp; As a project we apply for 3-4 grants a year.&nbsp; Moreover, each of the directors applies for individual research grants from their respective institutions.&nbsp; In my case at University of North Dakota, I will apply for 3 or 4 internal grants of various kinds.&nbsp; So on an average year we apply for&nbsp;10-12 different&nbsp;grants, each of us contributing to around 6.&nbsp; This is a time consuming process, but, fun in some ways as it provides a chance to compete head-to-head with other research projects in Cyprus, the Mediterranean, and even across the university.&nbsp; </p> <p>The biggest challenge with this annual competition is that in many cases you need to make plans prior to receiving word on the grant (in fact, our season is to begin May 15th, and we still have not heard on three or four major sources of money).&nbsp; To accomodate this, we are forced every year to handicap our odds with each grant as we begin to make plans.&nbsp; This is not as fun as, say, picking the teams to&nbsp;make the Final Four in&nbsp;an office NCAA basketball pool.&nbsp; If we miss estimate our grant dollars, the difference comes out of our pockets. </p> <p>One way that we have tried to "manage the risk" of the yearly grant lottery is by securing private donor funding.&nbsp; Archaeological projects have long been attractive for private donors in the same way that funding museums or the arts more broadly holds an eduring appeal.&nbsp;

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We can use private donor money in&nbsp;a more flexible way, generally speaking, than grants (which usually have to be used for a rather limited array of project needs), and each year our small pot of private donor funds have helped us fill in the gaps between what we have planned and what we have resources to fund.&nbsp; The real challenge with private donor money, however, is that, if grants are difficult to handicap, private donor gifts are almost totally unpredictable.&nbsp; This makes it exciting for us when we get one, but impossible to plan around.</p> <p>We also fund our project through a modest project fee that we charge our volunteers.&nbsp; This project fee, which is embedded in their room and board costs, helps fund the kind of infrastructure that all members of the project (senior staff to volunteers) benefit from ranging from rental cars to pots and pans for cooking to power converters.&nbsp; </p> <p>At the end of the day, over the past three years, we've&nbsp;be very lucky and always been able to pay our bills at the end of the season.&nbsp; For this we can thank the following funding agencies, grant competitions, and private donors.</p> <p><b>2007</b></p> <ul> <li> <p>American Schools of Oriental Research Harris Grant</p> <li> <p>College of Humanities and Social Sciences IUP </p> <li> <p>Department of History, IUP</p> <li> <p>Office of Instructional Development, University of North Dakota</p> <li> <p>University of North Dakota Department of History</p> <li> <p>The Graduate School at the University of North Dakota</p> <li> <p>Senate Scholarly Activities Committee, University of North Dakota</p> <li> <p>Fred &amp; Nancy Caraher</p> <li> <p>Robert &amp; Joyce Moore</p></li></ul> <p><b>2006</b></p> <ul> <li> <p>Kress Foundation</p> <li> <p>College of Humanities and Social Sciences IUP </p> <li> <p>Senate Scholarly Activities Committee, University of North Dakota</p> <li> <p>University of North Dakota Department of History</p> <li> <p>Department of History, IUP</p> <li> <p>Fred &amp; Nancy Caraher</p> <li> <p>Robert &amp; Joyce Moore</p> <li> <p>Elizabeth Reynolds</p></li></ul> <p><b>2005</b> <ul> <li> <p>Institute of Aegean Prehistory</p> <li> <p>American Schools of Oriental Research Harris Grant</p> <li> <p>Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, IUP</p> <li> <p>College of Humanities and Social Sciences Special Project Fund, IUP </p> <li> <p>Office of Instructional Development, University of North Dakota Office of Research and Compliance, University of North Dakota Department of History, University of North Dakota</p> <li> <p>Department of History, IUP</p> <li> <p>Fred &amp; Nancy Caraher</p> <li> <p>Robert &amp; Joyce Moore</p> <li> <p>Elizabeth Reynolds</p></li></ul> <p><b>2004</b> <ul> <li> <p>Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, IUP</p> <li> <p>Indiana University of Pennsylvania Senate Fellowship Grant</p> <li> <p>College of Humanities and Social Sciences Special Project Fund, IUP </p> <li> <p>Department of History, IUP</p> <li> <p>Fred &amp; Nancy Caraher</p> <li> <p>Robert &amp; Joyce Moore</p></li></ul> <p><b>2003</b> <ul> <li> <p>Faculty Professional Development Council Grant</p> <li> <p>Indiana University of Pennsylvania Senate Fellowship Grant</p> <li> <p>Department of History, Indiana University of Pennsylvania</p></li></ul> <p>&nbsp; <p>As a final note, we should mention that our project would not be possible without the logistical and institutional support of a whole range of organizations.&nbsp; These&nbsp;groups provided us&nbsp;with infrastructure, equipment, or services beyond what could be expected, saving us money, time, and energy and allowing us to focus on our research.&nbsp; <ul> <li> <p>Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute</p> <li> <p>Cyprus Department of Antiquities</p> <li> <p>Larnaka District Archaeological Museum</p> <li> <p>Ohio State Excavations at Isthmia</p> <li> <p>Department of Anthropology, IUP</p> <li> <p>Department of Geography, IUP</p> <li> <p>Department of Geography, UND</p></li></ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So, thanks to everyone who has helped us make the past four PKAP seasons a

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success!!&nbsp; Keep your eyes here for updates on the project and additional words of thanks as we hear word on our final grants.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: What is PKAP? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: what_is_pkap CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/26/2007 07:34:08 AM ----BODY: <p>One of the great challenges of writing a blog is including enough of the back story at various times to keep new readers informed on what this blog is really all about. </p> <p>This blog, as you will be able to quickly recognize, focuses on Mediterranean archaeology with a North Dakota twist.&nbsp; The PKAP category of posts specifically seeks to chronicle the work of a small team of scholars and students at the site of Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>in Cyprus.</p> <p>This project was started by R. Scott Moore and quickly expanded to include David K. Pettegrew and myself.&nbsp; The site lies some 10 km east of the center of Larnaka on the south coast of the Cyprus.&nbsp; It is the coastal zone of the village of Pyla which is perhaps most because of its location in the U.N. Buffer Zone on the island (or as the home town of Anna Vissi).&nbsp; Our site is in the Republic of Cyprus some 2 km south of the village.</p> <p align="center"><a href="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLiv eWriter/WhatisPKAP_6777/vigla7.jpg" atomicselection="true"><img style="bordertop-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-rightwidth: 0px" height="126" src="http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/WindowsLive Writer/WhatisPKAP_6777/vigla_thumb5.jpg" width="300" border="0"></a></p> <p>Our primary research goal is the document the dense scatter of artifacts present at the site which stretches from the coast to the imposing height of Vigla pictured above.&nbsp; We are a collaborative project with the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, and we work closely with the Curator of the Nicosia Museum - Dr. Maria Hadjicosti - who conducted several small salvage excavations at the site in the 1990s. These salvage excavations uncovered the remains of the wellappointed Early Christian (or Late Roman) basilica apparently dating to the 6th century A.D.&nbsp; </p> <p>We have been analyzing the nearly 10,000 artifacts sampled from the surface of the site since 2004 and attempting to place this "assemblage" of material in a broader context.&nbsp; In collecting these artifacts, we employed a technique called intensive pedestrian survey which is really just a fancy word for the systematic walking of the landscape.&nbsp; This

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allowed us to document the distribution of artifacts across the site in a relatively precise way .&nbsp; </p> <p>We are particularly interested in the place of Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria </em>in larger trade networks spanning both the island, but perhaps more importantly the entire Mediterranean.&nbsp; As most of the artifacts are Late Roman in date (4th-7th century A.D.) we can focus on the place of the site in the Late Roman world.&nbsp; What is most interesting to us at present is that our site is much larger than we expected.&nbsp; It is clearly larger than a agricultural village (&lt;20 ha), but smaller than a formal Late Roman city (&lt;80 ha).&nbsp; So we have cleverly classified Pyla<em>Koutsopetria </em>to be a "mid-sized site".&nbsp; </p> <p>Over the next month, I'll introduce various aspects and people from the project and they will share their research and perspectives in this space.&nbsp; It should give you, the reader, unprecedented access to inner workings of an archaeological project as it moves from fieldwork to its goal of publication.</p> <p>Thanks for reading!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Abandoned Landscapes in North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: abandoned_lands CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota DATE: 04/24/2007 08:58:40 AM ----BODY: <p>Jared Diamond's recent best seller <em>Collapse</em>&nbsp;placed a spot light on the relationship between environmental resources and the persistence of complex societies.&nbsp; Much of the evidence from his analysis comes from the archaeological remains of "collapsed" societies.&nbsp; Evidence for abandonment -- whether on the level of an entire settlement or a single building or site -plays a central role in construction of archeological narratives.&nbsp; In particular, it has become&nbsp;an enduring trope in the study of Late Antiquity.&nbsp; When Kostis Kourelis and I organized a panel at the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting on the concept of abandonment in Mediterranean Archaeology, fully half of the papers dealt with the period from A.D. 400-800.&nbsp; </p> <p>My wife and I drove from Bismarck, ND to Grand Forks, ND along Highway 2, which is the North Dakota stretch of the Hi-Line followed by the Burlington Northern - Santa Fe Railroad (formerly, if I understand correctly, the route followed by the Great Northern Railway), the abandoned&nbsp;&nbsp;landscape was on full display.&nbsp; From rural towns to isolated farmsteads the abandoned places of North Dakota dotted the countryside and presented an enticing tableaux of archaeological formation processes.&nbsp;

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At the same time, however, there was evidence for persistent prosperity:&nbsp;there were numerous&nbsp;well-kept farms with new metal sheds standing alongside decaying wooden barns.&nbsp; While this is unsurprising, North Dakota has, generally speaking, enjoyed the rise in prosperity common to the industrialized world over the past half century. It was for me, however, a useful mental check on the complex nature of the landscape throughout time and how uneven and unpredictable the phenomenon of abandonment can be.&nbsp; The local media commonly refer to the depopulated and increasingly abandoned rural landscape of North Dakota and our drive across the state reinforced this in a general way.&nbsp;&nbsp;An unsystematic and probably superficial scrutiny of landscape, however, suggests that rural North Dakota was not entirely abandoned but interspersed with evidence for the kind of continuous investment which may be far more difficult to identify in the future archaeological record.</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bret EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 134.129.180.150 URL: DATE: 05/08/2007 02:58:33 PM True intelligence is best illustrated by the ability to bring disparate ideas into a simple, clear dialogue that helps us to understand both the obvious and the apparently disengaged within a larger locus of connected meaning. Rome in the 4th century, North Dakota in the 21st, and Diamond‚Äôs global romp through environmental history, whew! The only thing more remarkable is that no one else has yet to post a comment. Best of luck this summer. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.230.124.122 URL: DATE: 05/20/2007 09:52:29 PM ...and so now a Burleigh County Dakotan will attempt to remark and maybe nullify Bret's remarkable -- though astute -- observation.! ! Natural resources are important, as is the environment. Diamond, if I recall, might be a bit guilty in over-emphasizing the environment. Ascribing significance to the material or ecological world is still an idea, or so thought Hume (or the dynamic Chris Hitchens nowadays). ! ! Didn't that late Geertz fellow say something about the importance of placing singularities within proximity of the broader whole? Nevermind.! ! Note that the rise in monetary prosperity (how one might define that...) is relegated to the "larger" NoDak cities of Fargo, Grand Forks, Minot, Williston,

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Bismarck, Dickinson, and Jamestown (certainly I'm leaving out many, but the idea is there). Equally important is how Dakota decides to use its natural resources, specifically the oil boom in the southwestern and western part of the state. A couple authors (Clay Jenkinson and Kathleen Norris) have remarked on how it's necessary to live in a particular place for a period of time before being able to appreciate and respect that place. I'll bet this idea transcends geopolitical borders --namely, how Cypriotes deal with the Tourist, and how they interpret (strengths and weaknesses) how their land is used. I digress. Back to it. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: NDAA Visit STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: ndaa_visit CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/23/2007 08:40:55 AM ----BODY: <p>This past weekend, I have the pleasure of attending the North Dakota Archaeological Association's annual meeting in Bismarck, ND.&nbsp; We not only heard presentations by Mike Metcalf of Metcalf Archaeological&nbsp;and Fern Swenson of the State Historical Society's Historic Preservation Division, but also received tours of two important archaeological sites in the Bismarck area - Menoken Village and Double Ditch.&nbsp;&nbsp;Double Ditch was particular impressive not only on account of its size (close to 20 ha), but also the quality and quantity of archaeological research performed there.&nbsp; Rather than a series of massive, expensive, and destructive excavations, the entire site has been documented through various geophysical methods.&nbsp; Some of the early results are available <a href="http://cast.uark.edu/~kkvamme/geop/double.htm">here</a>; more complete results will be available this summer through series of interpretive signs.</p> <p>Seeing the work at Double Ditch, in particular, was a great inspiration for PKAP, as we plan to do geophysical work this summer.&nbsp; Michael Brown and a team from the University of Edinburgh will conduct a electical resistivity survey&nbsp;on Kokkinokremos and parts of Koutsopetria allowing us "to see" below the surface of the ground.&nbsp; While his interest is in the structure of the Late Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos, we hope to use geophysical to tell us more about the spatial organization of Koutsopetria.&nbsp;&nbsp;In particular we hope to understand whether the site was organized on a grid.&nbsp; This would suggest a more formal level of organization than would be expected of a simple agricultural village and indicate that our site possessed features similar to urban areas on the island. While our efforts will not be as comprehensive as those conducted at Double Ditch (which was among the most comprehensive geophysical investigations ever conducted), we share the same interests in gather information on subsurface features without the destruction and expense of excavation.&nbsp; </p> <p>We can only hope that our work will be as successful as that conducted at Double Ditch, which reveal important information regarding the organization of its imposing system of fortifications (in particular, it

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reveal two more outer ditches (quadrupal ditch!) suggest that the village contracted at some point).</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.230.124.122 URL: DATE: 05/20/2007 10:00:13 PM Double Ditch is a premier site (so W. Raymond Wood said a couple years back -he's right). The archaeological record in NoDak has been fortunate in that the urban development, well, hasn't. Thank goodness the site is on the Historic Registry, especially while witnessing the mega-houses spill northward of Bismarck toward the site. Great to have you and Suzy out. Hope it's going as well as it can in Cyprus thus far. ! ! One more note: Ken Kvamme and his wife did the geophysical work for Double Ditch. ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aaron Barth EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 24.230.124.122 URL: DATE: 05/20/2007 10:01:49 PM Whoops... just clicked on the Kvamme link only after I posted. -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP Season Preparations Continue STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap_season_pre CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/19/2007 08:03:27 AM ----BODY: <p></p> <p>Each spring at around this time, the PKAP senior staff begins to frantically order supplies for the up-coming season.&nbsp; While some, if not all of these supplies could be acquired in Cyprus, most of them cannot be had without a loss of productive time or a trip outside the friendly and convenient confines of Larnaka.&nbsp; Larnaka is our base of operations.&nbsp; As the third largest city on Cyprus it has much of what you would expect a Mediterranean city

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to have, but like most mid-sized cities the world over it will not have everything that a well supplied archaeological project needs.&nbsp; So, every year we bring basic supplies to the island... <p>Just for fun, here is our supply list: <p><strong>For the lab:</strong> <p>Pens to label pottery: <p>ILL Gel Streak Pen Qty : 2&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>Sennelier India Ink Qty : 2&nbsp;&nbsp;(30ml)<br>Speedball Dip Nibs Qty : 3&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>Speedball Dip Nibs Qty : 5&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>Speedball Dip Nibs Qty : 5&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>Speedball Pen Holder Qty : 3&nbsp;&nbsp; <p>To keep the label on the artifacts: <p>Paraloid B-72 Lacquer: Clear &nbsp;Qty: 4 (1.25 oz) (Paraloid to label artifacts.)<br>Paraloid B-72 Lacquer: Opaque (white) Qty :&nbsp;4 (1.25 oz)</p> <p>For artifact collection and storage: (At some point I will tell the famous "Dave Pettegrew Tiny Bag Story") <p>6 "x 9", 4 Mil White Block Reclosable Bags Qty :&nbsp;300 <br>4" x 6", 4 Mil White Block Reclosable Bags Qty :&nbsp;200 <br>9" x 12", 4 Mil White Block Reclosable Bags Qty :&nbsp;1000 <p>Each year we begin with enough adaptors, by the end of the season severl have stopped working and several are lost: <p>Grounded US to UK adapter plug Qty :&nbsp;10 <p>&nbsp; <p><strong>For the field:</strong> <p>These are for the fieldwalkers:&nbsp; (It helps them keep their bearings!!) <p>Compass - Silva Starter Type 1-23&nbsp;&nbsp;Qty :&nbsp;12&nbsp;&nbsp; <p>We use these "clickers" to count pottery in the field.&nbsp; We almost always have enough at the start of the season, but by the end of the season we are always two or three short short: <p>Hand Tally Counters Qty :&nbsp;20 <p>Some borrowed surveying gear: <p>Laser Range Finder Qty: 2 <p>Topcon Theodolite Qty :&nbsp;1 <p>Trimble GeoXT Qty :&nbsp;1</p> <p>&nbsp; <p><strong>For the documentary:</strong> <p>Video Tapes Qty :&nbsp;30<br>Azden Dual Channel Camera Mount Wireless Microphone System Qty :&nbsp;1<br>One back-up Azden EX 503 wireless microphone Qty :&nbsp;1<br>Gitzo fishpole for shogun mic Qty :&nbsp;1<br>Gitzo shutgun mount for mic Qty :&nbsp;1<br>(2) 50'&nbsp; XLR audio cables Qty :&nbsp;2<br>Batteries AAA Qty :&nbsp;10<br>Batteries AA Qty :&nbsp;10<br>9v battery Qty :&nbsp;30<br>Canon XLS1 View Finder Qty :&nbsp;1<br>Wireless microphone accessory kit Qty :&nbsp;1<br>Headphones Qty :&nbsp;1 <p>----------------------------------------------------------------------- <p>I'm off the Bismarck tomorrow to speak at the North Dakota Archaeological Association meeting.&nbsp; More introductions next week as well as a discussion of how we pay for all the gear and how it actually makes it way to Cyprus! ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Scott Moore, Dave Pettegrew, and Joe Patrow STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: scott_moore_dav CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

DATE: 04/18/2007 08:29:23 AM ----BODY: <p>Over the course of the next few weeks, I will introduce the members of the PKAP team.&nbsp; The project is a collaborative venture with the American contingent centered around Scott Moore, David Pettegrew, and myself.</p> <p><a title="R. Scott Moore's Homepage" href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/rsmoore/" target="_blank">Scott</a> is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is&nbsp;the co-director and ceramicist for the project.&nbsp; He studies, in particular, Late Roman pottery, and will&nbsp;work primarily in the lab&nbsp;(this is what we call our workspace&nbsp;at the Larnaka District Archaeological Museum; for other terms used in this blog see our <a title="PKAP Lexicon" href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/manual/PKAP%20Lexicon.htm" target="_blank">PKAP Lexicon</a>).&nbsp; He worked as a ceramicist for the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project (SCSP) and published their Roman pottery.&nbsp; Over the course of his work with SCSP, he became attached to the island of Cyprus.&nbsp; When that project had concluded he began working to find a project of his own.&nbsp; He was in contact with the Department of Antiquities and John Leonard, another American archaeologist on the island, and they suggested that he explore the area of Pyla-<em>Koutsopetria</em>.&nbsp; In 2003, David and myself joined Scott for an informal reconaissance survey of the area and discovered that it contained the remains of an impressive Late Roman site.&nbsp; We returned in 2004 to begin our systematic survey of the region.&nbsp; Along with the pottery, Scott is also in charge of the accounting for the project, cooks&nbsp;for us&nbsp;almost every night,&nbsp;and has brought students into the field with us for the last three years.&nbsp; Scott is a patient and dedicated teacher and works hard to ensure that the students get the most out of their time on the island.</p> <p><a title="David Pettegrew's Home Page" href="http://home.messiah.edu/~dpettegrew/" target="_blank">David</a> is an Assistant Professor at Messiah College.&nbsp; He is our Method Man.&nbsp; Dave cut his teeth with me on the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (probably a better way to put this is that I learned survey archaeology in large part from him in the Eastern Korinthia!).&nbsp; EKAS formed the methdological basis for our work in Cyprus, and David, myself and serveral other (including Dimitri Nakassis and Tim Gregory) have worked on&nbsp;a series of&nbsp;studies exploring how the methods employed by survey archaeology influence the conclusions survey archaeologists draw from the data.&nbsp; He also works on the Late Roman period.&nbsp; Dave is the archaeological compass for the project and makes sure that Scott and I don't do anything that is methodologically unsound.&nbsp; He is also an excellent teacher of proper field procedure and the sometime slippery notions of archaeological theory.&nbsp; He joins us with his wife Katie who will work in the lab with Scott (more on her later!).&nbsp; </p> <p>Over the next few days, <a title="Joe Patrow's Webpage" href="http://www.xanga.com/jpatrow" target="_blank">Joe Patrow</a>, the director of a documentary being shot this year which is tentatively entitled <em>Emerging Cypriot</em>, will be filming footage in both Indiana, PA and Grantham, PA (at Messiah College), and&nbsp;interviewing students as well as David and Scott<em>.&nbsp; </em>Joe worked with us in 2004 and produced a 28 minute broadcast quality documentary, <em>Survey on Cyprus</em>.&nbsp; You can find a link to the documentary in Realplayer format on the bar to the left.&nbsp; This year he will follow undergraduate students from IUP, graduate students from the University of North Dakota, and the various senior staff in their work and experiences on the island of Cyprus.&nbsp; The documentary will be shot in "brillant HD" and be designed for broadcast and classroom use.&nbsp; From our perspective, Patrow's work enhances the reflexive component of our fieldwork by forcing all members of the

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

PKAP team to reflect&nbsp;on why&nbsp;we do what we do in front of the camera.&nbsp;&nbsp;While Joe keeps a low profile in his own videos, he will discuss his project both formally and informally&nbsp;with us and has become a valued member of the entire PKAP team.</p> <p>More from me over the next week as we introduce and assemble the PKAP team...</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: PKAP and North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: pkap_and_north_ CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/17/2007 08:35:32 PM ----BODY: <p>I was honored and excited to be invited to give the keynote speech at the North Dakota Archaeological Association annual meeting and banquet.&nbsp; My talk, entitled "Surveying Cyprus from North Dakota" represents our ongoing efforts to communicate our methods, results, and interpretations to both the archaeological community and general public in North Dakota.&nbsp; We look forward to visiting some of the important historic sites of central North Dakota including Menoken Indian Village and Double Ditch Indian Village.&nbsp; We also look forward to seeing the North Dakota Heritage Center and learning all we can about the archaeology of the Northern Plains.</p> <p>Our project has been greatly influenced by methods developed in North America so it is particularly gratifying to be able to present the results of this research to a group of archaeologists who use these methods daily to construct the North Dakota's archaeological landscape.&nbsp; The talk features a basic introductions to the challenges and opportunities of working in Cyprus, some examples of our finds, analyses based on our <a title="Interactive PKAP Map" href="http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html">GIS</a>, and some preliminary conclusions.&nbsp; It concludes with a discussion of our future goals and points of ongoing contact between archaeology in the old and new worlds.</p> <p>To explore at the ongoing work of our project check out our web site: <a title="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/" href="http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/">http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/</a></p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT:

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

----KEYWORDS: -----------AUTHOR: William Caraher TITLE: Mediterranean Archaeology, PKAP, and North Dakota STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 BASENAME: mediterranean_a CATEGORY: Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota CATEGORY: Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project DATE: 04/17/2007 08:22:36 PM ----BODY: <p>Hello!&nbsp; This is the first post on the official Mediterranean Archaeology in North Dakota Blog.&nbsp; It features my archaeological project in Cyprus, the Pyla-<em>Kousopetria</em> Archaeological Project or PKAP for short.&nbsp; PKAP is a collaborative project with R. Scott Moore (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) and David K. Pettegrew (Messiah College).&nbsp; </p> <p>One of the main goals of this blog is to keep our friends, families, donors, and colleagues up to date on our work both in the field and back in the office.&nbsp; We are at present getting ready for the season and are developing a easy and sophisticated multimedia platform to communicate the daily activities, methods, and most important results of our project with our wider communities in North Dakota, Central Pennsylvania, South East Queensland (Australia), Ohio, Delaware, and anywhere else that interested parties talk about archaeology.</p> <p>We encourage you to engage us in our discussion and share your ideas, thoughts, and questions with us over the course of our adventures.&nbsp; Our field season begins this year on May 16th.&nbsp; Check back at this site for regular updates from Cyprus, Greece, North Dakota, and even more exotic locales!</p> ----EXTENDED BODY: ----EXCERPT: ----KEYWORDS: ----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rick Aaser EMAIL: [email protected] IP: 69.26.8.143 URL: DATE: 04/23/2007 12:34:50 AM I had the pleasure of being at the NDAA meeting where William was the keynote speaker. The information he presented was very impressive and well put together. Keep up the great work. -----

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Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Archive: Volume 1 by William R. Caraher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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