Attitudes toward Pottery

Partially as a note to myself, here are a few passages from early Christian literature that reveal attitudes towards ceramic vessels:

[Romans 9:21] hath not the potter authority over the clay, out of the same lump to make the one vessel to honour, and the one to dishonour?

[Timothy 2:20] And in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth, and some to honour, and some to dishonour

I'm using Young's Literal Translation because it's out of copyright and because its approach is useful.

More complete in terms of its range of material culture is the following from the so-called Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus:

See not only with thine eyes, but with thine
intellect also, of what substance or of what form they
chance to be whom ye call and regard as gods.
 2:2  Is not one of them stone, like that which we
tread under foot, and another bronze, no better than
the vessels which are forged for our use, and another
wood, which has already become rotten, and another
silver, which needs a man to guard it lest it be
stolen, and another iron, which is corroded with rust,
and another earthenware, not a whit more comely than
that which is supplied for the most dishonourable
service?
 2:3  Are not all these of perishable matter? Are they
not forged by iron and fire? Did not the sculptor make
one, and the brass-founder another, and the
silversmith another, and the potter another? Before
they were moulded into this shape by the crafts of
these several artificers, was it not possible for each
one of them to have been changed in form and made to
resemble these several utensils? Might not the vessels
which are now made out of the same material, if they
met with the same artificers, be made like unto such
as these?

That's the somewhat archaic sounding translation of J. B. Lightfoot as found on the excellent Early Christian Writings website. The Greek text is available from The Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which is also a terrific resource.

Many more such passages could be cited so take the above as just a small taste from an abundant feast.

"Mediterranean Ceramics" YouTube Playlist

I've created a "Mediterranean Ceramics" YouTube playlist. Follow that link or use this embedded player:




As always, this is in a spirit of experimentation.

One comment: you'll note that there are no voice overs. The one time guards looked at me funny when I was shooting one of these is when I was making comments about the objects in a case. So I don't do that anymore. Perhaps I'll get round to doing audio tracks in the future.

And let me know if there are any videos that should be added to this list.

FYI: Workshop at Center for Hellenic Studies

This should be interesting:

WORKSHOP: Host your texts on Google in one day

The Center For Hellenic Studies will conduct a one-day workshop at the Center's Washington, D.C., campus, on Monday, Jan. 11, 2010, with the subject: "Host your texts on Google in one day". Bring one or more XML texts to the workshop in the morning, and leave in the afternoon with a running Google installation of Canonical Text Services serving your texts to the internet.

For more information, including how to apply, please see http://chs75.harvard.edu/CTSWorkshop.html.

Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested.

Roman Pottery Study Case at the Metropolitan Museum

I'm all for criticizing museums when they buy unprovenanced antiquities, pointing out when they seem to be unduly effected by poorly conceived laws, and praising them when they do a good job of presenting material to the public.

The last applies to the Metropolitan Museum's Greek and Roman study collection. It's true there aren't labels, but there is access for those who can travel to New York. In lieu of that, here's a YouTube video of one case of Roman pottery.



I shot it with my iPhone a little over a week ago. Very unprofessional but perhaps better than nothing.

There are three levels in the case and I move from top to bottom. I've added two annotations. Move to 1:50 to see a box indicating that a bowl is African Red-Slip. I would do more if it were possible to link to non-YouTube web pages. I suppose that's too dangerous in terms phishing, etc. But it would be nice.

Google finds Roman Amphorae

Way back in April 2008 I noted that the excellent resource Roman Amphorae: a digital resource seemed to be hiding itself from Google. See the third paragraph of that post.

Since then, I've written and submitted the chapter "Diversity and Reuse of Digital Resources for Ancient Mediterranean Material Culture" that is forthcoming (2010) in G. Bodard and S. Mahony, eds., Digital Research in the Study of Classical Antiquity from Ashgate. In that I make the same observation about Roman Amphorae. The text was submitted earlier this year, and I noted towards its end that many of the observations I make about digital resources may change since the Internet is a moving target.

Accordingly, I'm very happy to report that Google searches now include Roman Amphorae pages. Try http://www.google.com/search?q=keay+62. For me, the seventh link goes to the drawings page for that Late Roman form from N. Africa.

An administrator from the Archaeological Data Service was an anonymous reviewer of my paper. Perhaps it made a difference. Or maybe not. That doesn't matter. I'm just happy that the problem has been corrected.

Video of UPenn Amphora

A while back I wrote about a North African Amphora at UPenn. I took the photos in that post with an iPhone. Here's video from a 3GS via youtube.

Panathenaic Amphoras

I'm in Troy. One agenda item is adding content to GRBPIlion. Last week Kathleen Lynch of the University of Cincinnati was here. She kindly sent me her catalog entries for a few of the Panathenaic amphoras that she is in the process of publishing.

The main goal is continuing work on the Roman pottery from the Lower City here. A side effect is improvements to the GRBPIlion catalogs, such as the one for Phocaean Red Slip.

Mapping coin hoards at Nomisma.org

As a small supplement to yesterday's post, here's an additional brief notice of some collaborative work at nomisma.org.

http://nomisma.org/id/igch0546 is a stable URI for hoard 546 as found in An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards. If you scroll down you'll see there is a map. The text was contributed by the ANS. The lat-long info by colleagues in France.

http://numismatics.org/cgi-bin/nm-search?kw=gml%3Apos will get you a list of all the hoards for which we have geographic coordinates. That URL will change but works for now.

This is all still highly preliminary, but the data is available and already somewhat useful.

In other ANS matters, our main website is coming along, and there is a new website for the ANS Magazine.

A few items

Non-blog activities continue to keep me busy. Including:

• Little by little, the digital publication Coins from Ilion (Troia) is coming along. This is very much a joint effort by all the people listed there. My goal is to be well-prepared for the upcoming study season, when I can look at the coins directly.
• I'm in the proofs stage with "Forum Note: Legal threats to Cultural Exchange of Archaeological materials", co-authored with Glenn Schwartz, that will appear in the July American Journal of Archaeology. Should be done with it tomorrow.
• Things seem to be moving along well with 'Diversity and Reuse of Digital Resources for Ancient Mediterranean Material Culture', which is coming out in G. Bodard and S. Mahony, eds., Digital Research in the Study of Classical Antiquity from Ashgate. There will be more editorial stages, I'm sure, but the writing is done.
• Also working on "Ceramic Data from In-Field Use to Digital Publication" with Billur Tekkök and John Wallrodt. Needs to be done next week.
• And don't forget the CAA2009 paper... Perhaps more on that later.

OK, not all of this will be immediately available for free and in digital form, but that doesn't mean it's totally without merit.

The Surface of African Red Slip

Today I added explicit references to page nos. in Hayes' Late Roman Pottery [worldcat] to the GRBPIlion page for African Red Slip.

That's hardly worth a post. But I did re-look at the photographs so here are a few excerpts that show variability of surface treatment.

The exterior of an H32/58 of the late 3rd/early 4th AD. Shows thick unbrushed slip on surface. The photo is a little washed out, overall color of the vessel is "normal" ARS orange.


The interior of a similarly dated H53a. Thick, somewhat smoothed surface with feather rouletting.


It would be really nice if I had a good photo of a very smooth H50. I'll look for one.

Interior of an early 6th century H87b. Less detail than the previous two. Thick smoothed slip.


Exterior of the same piece. Obviously thinner slip is "streakily" applied.

MFA Boston and Perseus

The URL http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/artifact?name=Boston%201982.283&object=Coin brings up information about a mirror formed from two coins of a type issued for Antinous.

The object is in the MFA's collection and you can see further information at http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=155289. That URL isn't published by the MFA and some time ago I pointed out that this situation is unfortunate. It's now becoming unfortunate that the MFA website hasn't been updated to display nice, simple URLs for the records in its curatorial database. Something along the lines of JSTOR's stable urls (e.g., http://www.jstor.org/stable/876505).

When it does, Perseus will be able to include markup along the lines of <link rel="alternate owl:sameAs" href="http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=155289"> in the header of its page. That will be progress.

Time Team Publishes

Briefly noting that Wessex Archaeology and the television series Time Team now have the show's resulting archaeological reports available for browsing and download. One model for funding field work and publication.

ARS in Wikipedia

In a fit of procrastination some time back, I started a Wikipedia article for African Red Slip. I've just added a bit today. Improvements can be made on the page itself (hint, hint).

A note on capitalization: wiki-style prefers lower-case. See the editing history for the change from "African Red Slip" to "African red slip". Many archaeologists may think of ARS as something of a proper noun. Either way is OK by me.

And, boy, do I hate typing wikicode in those text-entry boxes. But it's all for a good cause.

NextEngine 3D

It's been too long since I've posted. Busy, busy, busy...

But now I have a specific question of the community: Has anybody used a NextEngine 3D to good effect? I know Scott Moore took one to Cyrpus. Scott, any further reactions?

I'm speaking with colleagues about getting funding for one but don't want to waste money/time if the machine is no good, too cumbersome, otherwise not useful.

Thanks in advance.

AIA Paper Preview: ESC to PRS

Here's a sequence of images that shows the transition from ESC/Çandarli to Phocaean Red-Slip (PRS). They will appear in my part of the upcoming paper Late Hellenistic and Roman Pottery at Ilion (Troia).


This is the interior of an ESC Hayes form 4 from a late third century AD pit.


Then a sequence of rim sherds. The top three are again ESC Hayes form 4, the lower PRS Hayes form 1. Surface treatment moves from a quite high-gloss finish to a dull matte slip. The ESC is from a 4th century deposit with considerable residual material. The PRS is from a late 4th/early 5th century group. Note the color variation that begins to appear on ESC. This has the feeling of error or at least sloppiness. On PRS, a stacking line becomes one of the signatures of the ware. While such lines do not need to be called "decoration", they shouldn't be thought of as errors.


Now the exterior of a fifth century PRS Hayes form 3 with thin slip.

That the transition from ESC H4 to PRS H1 was smooth has long been known. Nonetheless, these sherds come from distinct production centers. Or rather, the PRS likely comes from workshops in/near ancient Phocaea, whereas production of ESC may have been more regionally distributed between Pitane/Çandarli and Pergamon.

We don't have great early 4th century deposits at Ilion but our evidence indicates that Hayes was right to raise the possibility of overlapping production of these two forms. Nonetheless, ceramic catalogs often enforce a distinct separation between ESC and PRS, with the former falling into discussion of Roman period ceramics and being separated from PRS by the presentation of other wares. Ancient consumers may not have perceived much of a difference as their sources of supply slowly changed over the decades of the fourth century.

For Profit Archaeology

The Miliken Institute's Financial Innovations Labs have issued a report entitled Financial Innovations for Developing Archaeological Discovery and Conservation. It seems to be a call for archaeologists to participate in the profit-oriented market for antiquities, though the report certainly doesn't use that language. Even when mediated through the securitization of debt obligations backed by cash-flow from long-term loans, this is problematic. Archaeologists work to bring information about the past to the public, not to meet commercial demand for artifacts.

CIDOC-CRM

Sean Gillies has written an important memo Concordia, Vocabularies, and CIDOC CRM on Concordia's current approach to using the Comité International pour la Documentation des Musées - Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM). It should be widely read by people interested in the digital publication of resources for the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. In it he gives a preliminary indication that RDFa - a standard for embedding the Resource Description Framework in html pages - provides a better route forward for the time being. But don't take my word for this, read his whole text.

RDFa has appeared on this blog: PRAP, xhtml 2.0 and Archaeological Databases was early thinking, RDFa at Ilion is more recent, nomisma.org also makes use of RDFa. So Sean's memo is welcome here because his reasoning is similar to mine.

But what of CIDOC-CRM? The main CIDOC-CRM website opens with:

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation.

It also notes that the CRM is an ISO standard (ISO 21127:2006). That's a good thing.

In general, the main CIDOC-CRM website doesn't do a good job of introducing itself. If you want a quick feel for how the CRM organizes concepts, try the relevant section of Princeton's QED site. You'll see that the CRM provides a well-thought out vocabulary of concepts for describing cultural heritage. Apart from the odd use of gendered language, it's useful that the CRM defines the concept E24 Physical Man-Made Thing. It will be cool when I can search the Internet for E24's within the Aegean that date to the Late Roman period. I'm guessing the CRM will play a role in enabling such functionality.

In terms of resources linked from the main CIDOC-CRM website, I've paid the most attention to the "mappings" page. I take heart in the work being done in this domain because of the implication that my use of the CRM can be indirect. This is encouraging because current self-representation by CIDOC seems to obscure notions of "best practice" in an over-abundance of detail. See this paper for an example. It is to the CRM's credit that it can represent all the concepts used there, but in many cases one does not have, nor need, this level of detail. I will be happy to use VRA, Dublin core and any other vocabularies and ontologies that gain traction in the Semantic Web world and trust that these will be mapped to the CRM.

From my perspective, that there is not a large amount of CRM-encoded original archaeological data easily available on the internet is an indication that the standard has not seen a high-degree of real world uptake. I understand that there is acceptance of the CRM and many initiatives discussing how it can be used (here) but I would very much like to see actual use with large datasets. I'm also interested in seeing projects that adopt the CRM as the original format for "born digital" data. Will that really happen?

This post represents thinking that I hope will change as we see real world adoption of standards in Cultural Heritage. I'm agnostic as to what the future holds. For the present, I'm all for exploring vocabularies and ontologies that are moving towards RDFa representations.

Briefly: two books and a new resource

I am in the Thomas J. Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's a very pleasant place to work and recommended for archaeologists visiting NYC. They have very strong holdings in Roman pottery.

I've paged and am using A. Camilli. 1999. Ampullae : balsamari ceramici di età ellenistica e romana [worldcat]. That's Italian for "Unguentaria", the common small ceramic bottles/flasks found in many contexts on Mediterranean sites. I stress this because the book is not about Early Christian/Late Roman ampullae associated with pilgrimage. If you're working with unguentaria, you want this book.

Next up is M. Berndt. 2003. Funde aus dem Survey auf der Halbinsel von Milet : (1992 - 1999) : kaiserzeitliche und frühbyzantinische Keramik [worldcat]. This is a very useful catalog for the period it covers. A noteworthy feature is that the 172 plates are on a CD in the back. Putting a CD in the back of a book is an inane long-term solution so I want to go on record here as saying "Don't do it!". And if you do, "Dont use PDF!". But it wouldn't be entirely straightforward of me not to admit that I have the plates on my hard-drive. In the short term, yes, this information is useful. But who is going to have CD readers 20 years from now? Not many of us. And the text isn't available in digital form so here I am checking a few things.

Finally, the American Numismatic Society has initiated a project to establish stable URIs for numismatic concepts and entities. It's at nomisma.org. Take a look but be gentle since it's all in early stages.

Semantic Web Vocabularies for the Ancient World

As previously indicated, I'm working on an xhtml+rdfa representation of GRBPIlion.

At some point I will give a more general statement of why this is a good idea. Right now, I'm still very much in the planning/modeling phase. In particular, I'm interested in which pre-existing vocabularies I should be using. What follows is a lightly annotated list of potential candidates, some more obvious and stable than others.

General statements of properties and relationships:
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
xmlns:ov="http://open.vocab.org/terms/"

The Dublin Core is a well understood and widely used standard. Where it matches, it's a no-brainer to use it as a default. Currently, each record in the db has "dc:title" as a human readable title. E.g., "African Red Slip Hayes form 68".

The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3 standard that has some uptake in the real world. dbpedia.org uses the skos:subject property to indicate membership in categories such as those found on Wikipedia. My use is semantically similar.

The newly-started Open Vocab was brought to my attention by Sean Gillies. More precisely, he mentioned it on twitter and since I follow him, I checked it out. OV is a nice staging ground for creating URIs for terms that aren't found in other vocabularies and for terms you just want to think about before choosing an existing standard.

Visual Documentation:
xmlns:vra="http://www.vraweb.org/vracore4.htm#"

Right now I use "vra:imageIs" to indicate that an external file is an image (whether svg or bit-mapped) of an object.

Geography:
xmlns:gml="xmlns:gml=http://www.opengis.net/gml"
xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss">
xmlns:pleiades="http://pleiades.stoa.org/"
xmlns:batlas="http://atlantides.org/batlas/"

As suggested by S. Gillies, I've qualified some of the geographic markup with "ov:origin".

Authorial/Responsibility Metadata:
xmlns:tei="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0"

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) provides a richer set of tools than DC for indicating authorship and related concepts. Its version P5 also provides a complete and elegant standard for encoding digital documents. For now, I'm representing GRBPIlion in xhtml and rdf, because the combination has explicit W3 backing and is suitably lightweight for my purposes.

Data modeling:
xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
xmlns:rdf="xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#""
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"

No surprises here. I do think there will always be a place for asserting relationships that are not strongly typed by reference to a particular discipline. That and using RDF and Owl for mapping relationships that will be more richly defined at a later date.

What about CIDOC-CRM? I did not find an up-to-date and official looking document that integrates RDF and CIDOC-CRM. I'm also concerned about using a standard whose official release appears only in Microsoft Word and PDF.

I should also explore ArchaeoML as implemented by Open Context but the site seems to be down right now. When I click through to individual databases, no records are being returned. I may be doing something wrong, but if not, I'm sure the site will come back soon.

Again, this is all highly preliminary. Constructive criticism would be very much appreciated.

RDFa at Ilion

The following will seem cryptic and I promise to give more detail later...

If anybody is interested in a draft RDFa representation of the GRBPIlion database, then point your parser at http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/database.html.

It even uses ov:origin! (sort of)

It's all in pursuit of the four goals given by Tim Berners-Lee in his Linked Data paper.

1. Use URIs as names for things

2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.

3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information.

4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover
   more things.

Not there yet, but trying.