Stratified Groups at Ilion

On an even more preliminary basis than usual, I have started adding stratified groups to GRBPIlion. Available as of writing:

• K/L16/17.0417 Clean-up after an episode of destruction in the third century AD. Could be associated with "Herulian activity", though that is a larger question.
• K/L16/17.0419 A related fill with less pottery. What's there firms up the chronological profile.
• M18.0099 Late Roman fill associated with the use of a house from the late fourth to early fifth centuries AD. There is pretty nice ARS in here.

The accompanying text for these deposits is lightly adapted from a longer narrative that will also be a focus of my upcoming time in Turkey. Working out the relationship between digital and print-based publication will be interesting. Publication of this material was planned before the current generation of digital tools and practices existed. I look forward to moving ever more of my prior work into digital format, with availability as a PDF and on Lulu.com of course happening in parallel with html-based distribution.

Adding these pages raises issues of presentation and navigation. In terms of presentation, this short list of deposits is buried far down the page under the heading "Table of Contents: Deposits". The whole ToC list is getting long, and I may have to change its layout.

The issues related to navigation are more substantial. Readers browsing the catalog should be made aware that there is a description of the other pottery found alongside any one piece. This will not be hard to do; I just need to figure out the best way. Searching may become more pressing as readers try to answer questions such as "what is the earliest deposit with Middle Roman Amphora 7?" All in good time.

Well Vessels

I've added brief descriptions of three nearly-complete third-century AD pots to the the "Roman Plain and/or Partially Slipped Vessels" page of GRBPIlion. That's a work in progress that Billur Tekkök and I will update over the next three weeks when we're both at Troy.

The vessels themselves were found at the bottom of a well-shaft. As a preview, I'm reproducing the relevant page from the PDF version of the publication.
The third image of the first entry shows the vessel as found in situ. The well-shaft was cut through bedrock into a natural, underground water-system. This allowed for excellent preservation in this remarkable context. You can click through from the plain-wares page for a full-size version of that image, and I also reproduce a thumbnail here:


There's more to come from this deposit and that's one reason to be excited about getting back on-site.

Planning for Troy

I leave for Troy this coming Monday, the 28th. One focus will be ongoing work on GRBPIlion. Part of my planning has come in the form of incomplete pages that I'll edit while in the field. For example, there is now a page on unguentaria. Just four examples right now, and only a two-item bibliography. Starting next week, I'll confirm and complete the measurements and beef up the descriptions. I'll also add an introductory text on the presence of these vessels at Troy. So for now that page is somewhat of a reminder to myself to do the work, if you see what I mean.

I'll make more of these available before I leave and blog the process. I'll also be making regular (maybe even daily) posts from Troy. I've been enjoying the PKAP blogs and Brandon Olson's many posts. See also Real Time Archaeology. It will be fun to add to this developing genre.

One question: what is it about archaeology that makes blogging field-work worthwhile? Assuming that it is, of course. I'm sure somebody has thought about this. I'm guessing there's an understanding that we have an obligation to share our work. It helps that, for some of us, field-work is a discrete phase of our professional lives. Travel-writing is well established and there is overlap with that. The pictures are nice. Etc. Whatever the reasons, I like the results and feel the imperative.

WAC Clarification

In the post "Don't Bomb Persepolis", I offered that advice as a small commentary on a resolution that I thought represented an official policy of the World Archaeological Congress. I was responding to a press release that was circulated fairly widely, for example on the Iraq Crisis list. I quickly received e-mails that not all was as it seemed. That was the case and it is worth reading "Cultural Heritage in Iran Under Threat", a media-release direct from WAC. A passage from this second release provides context:

A resolution suggesting that no archaeologists or cultural heritage specialists assist the military in planning to protect the cultural heritage was passed by the Plenary session of the WAC-6 Congress for consideration by the World Archaeological Congress Assembly, Council and Executive but was not approved as a formal statement of the position of the organisation as a whole.

I am not expert in WAC's organizational structure but am now glad to see its flexible response to these difficult questions. I am also happy to have been corrected and to offer an update that reflects better information.

Looting in Iraq

On July 1, The Art Newspaper published an article titled "Archaeological sites in south Iraq have not been looted, say experts". The full-text is freely available and the article received wide notice and comment. Larry Rothfield offered a rebuttal at SAFECorner. Now a follow-on editorial by Melik Kaylan has appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Kaylan directly and approvingly cites the Art Newspaper's reporting on the topic.

The Art Newspaper article seems obviously biased. For a far more judicious description of the assessment of damage in Southern Iraq see Andrew Lawler's July 4th article in Science titled "Preserving Iraq's Battered Heritage". If you click on that link, you'll eventually be asked for money in order to read the full-text. On July 15th, two weeks after publication of the Art Newspaper version, the text of this better reporting was posted to the Iraq Crisis e-mail list by its author. Perhaps the Science article would have had a greater impact if it had been freely available. Such are the intellectual consequences of fee-based journalism.

Don't Bomb Persepolis

Consider this post a small bit of personal protest against the resolution recently passed in plenary session by the delegates of the World Archaeological Congress. The text reads:

The 6th World Archaeological Congress expresses its strong opposition to any unilateral and unprovoked, covert or overt military action (including air strikes) against Iran by the US government, or by any other government. Such action will have catastrophic consequences for millions of people and will seriously endanger the cultural heritage of Iran and of the Middle East in general. Any differences with Iran (as with any other country) should be resolved through peaceful and diplomatic means.

The Congress also urges its members, all archaeologists and heritage professionals to resist any attempts by the military and governments to be co-opted in any planned military operation, for example by providing advice and expertise to the military on archaeological and cultural heritage matters. Such advice would provide cultural credibility and respectability to the military action. Archaeologists should continue emphasising instead the detrimental consequences of such actions for the people and the heritage of the area, for the past and the present alike. A universal refusal by archaeologists and others would send the message that such a plan is hugely unpopular amongst cultural professionals as well as the wider public.

The WAC website doesn't yet reflect passage of the resolution so I'm quoting from a widely circulated e-mail.

I sure as heck hope that the United States doesn't go to war with Iran so please interpret the subject line of this post broadly. But the resolution seems to ignore its real world implications. It is a feature of modern warfare that the international community does put informed constraints on the behavior of armed forces. Does the ICRC encourage war by promoting adherence to the Geneva Conventions? I don't think so.

Without questioning the sincerity of the WAC's delegates, it seems irresponsible for archaeologists to put completely aside the professional imperative to protect cultural resources during times of military conflict. I don't need to see museums looted and sites destroyed to know that war is bad. People dying is a sufficient proof of that.

CAARI Clarification

It has come to my attention that Danielle Parks never served as a trustee of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute. This is of no particular consequence to me so I have no interest in fact-checking the details of what others say about her. There is a general interest, however, in not only speaking well of the departed, but also in speaking accurately.

For its part, the ACCG has made much of the late Dr. Parks' perceived connections to CAARI on its website:

...ECA's consultations with the late Professor Danielle Parks (a CAARI-Trustee) about coins BEFORE Cyprus even made a formal request for their inclusion... (2nd paragraph; accessed July 9, 2008)

Way to go CAARI

The Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute's Code of Ethics indicates that it supports the following principles:

1. archaeological excavations be carried out under the highest standards possible;


2. illicit trade of antiquities be actively discouraged; and


3. the authorities of the Department of Antiquities be informed of any improper activities involving excavation or exportation of archaeological artifacts.

I am glad to see Peter Tompa documenting that affiliates of CAARI put these principles into action in working to increase the likelihood that the findspots of Cypriot coins will be properly recorded. He highlights the efforts of the late Danielle Parks. Dr. Parks was an acquaintance of mine in college and I worked with her for one season on Cyprus, where she made her greatest impact. I suspect that she knew the seriousness of her illness during the period when she consulted with the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. If so, I applaud her willingness to engage with this important professional matter towards the end of her life.

Wikiquote doesn't provide a citation for the following quote attributed to Justice Brandeis:

The most important political office is that of the private citizen.

Regardless, it is good to see an archaeologist living up to this creed.

Those who click through to Tompa's post on the ACCG site will note the conspiratorial tone of his news item. Click even further for his observations that archaeologists effectively represent archaeological interests in their interactions with the United States Government. This is good news.

If there is a conspiracy, count me in. I'm happy to state right here that I too have been consulted by the State Department on matters of cultural heritage leglislation and that I've visited Congressional offices on the same topic. I certainly defer to Dr. Parks when it comes to the efficacy of my interactions but do hope to live up to her example.

ASCSA Publications

The publications page of American School of Classical Studies at Athens web-site is nicely done. It doesn't provide full-text search (yet?) but searching for "pottery" as a keyword returns a useful list of monographs, edited volumes and Agora picture books, many of which will be well-known to readers.

A nice feature is that the individual pages for each work will give a link to an online version if one is available. I'll note that at least one such link is broken, that for Virginia Grace's Amphoras and the Ancient Wine Trade, but the idea is very useful. It is particularly to the School's credit that it has allowed the full text of many of these titles to be read on Google Books; see the link for Jeremey Rutter's The Pottery of Lerna IV.

I hope that this level of access will be quickly available following the publication of the long-delayed Roman Pottery by John Hayes. Jennifer Neils' blurb for this book reads:

The importance of this volume for the archaeology of the Mediterranean cannot be overstated. It will prove invaluable for decades to come for a wide range of scholars dealing with the Roman world. The manuscript is a tour de force: comprehensive, up-to-date, well researched, and well written.

It is a large volume whose retail price is set at $150.00. Its importance will be greatly diminished if it is not available at low-cost in digital format.

Say What?

Good people sometimes go off the rails. Peter Tompa is a good person and his "Cultural Property Observer", although filled with conclusions with which I disagree, at least tries to be well-reasoned and calmly argued. In the comments to this post on PhDiva, our Observer manufactures a set of circumstances and pressures which become the basis for excusing lawless removal of cultural artifacts by in-country military forces. This is odd at best and it is disappointing to see that an advocate of the personal retention of cultural heritage can't even condemn the behavior noted by Dorothy King.

Kommos 4

I came across a digital version of Kommos 4, edited by J. and M. Shaw, on the University of Toronto's institutional archive [worldcat]. The text is here. The plates here. Oddly, the plates are distributed under a Creative Commons "Attribution - Non-Commericial - No Derivatives" license, whereas the text has the more generic statement, "All items in T-Space are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved."

For myself, I'm glad to have Hayes' discussion of the Roman pottery on my hard drive. It begins on p. 310. The relevant plates begin on the twelfth page of the PDF file titled "Kommos_volume_4-2_256-275". You'll see what I mean if you follow the links given above.

But there's much of interest in this publication, something for most everyone really, so I recommend downloading all the files.

A Holed N. African Amphora at UPenn

The UPenn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has a Late Roman Amphora (L-771-1) on long term loan. In form it's a Keay 62a, a type that was produced from 450 to 600 AD in North Africa. The name is taken from S.J. Keay, (1984), Late Roman Amphorae in the Western Mediterranean. A typology and economic study: the Catalan evidence, BAR Int. Ser. 196, Oxford. [worldcat]. In 1998 Keay updated his chronology for the whole series in his contribution to Lucia Sagui (ed.), Ceramica in Italia: VI-VII Secolo. Atti del Convegno in onore John W. Hayes Roma, 11-13 maggio 1995, Florence [worldcat]. You can find his chapter "Roman Amphorae" on p. 141. M. Bonifay includes observations about the form on p. 137 of his 2004 volume Etudes sur la céramique romaine tardive d’Afrique, BAR Int. Set. 1301, Oxford.[worldcat].

Here are some pictures taken with my iPhone and presented unprocessed except for resizing. You can see that the results are OK for images taken from a distance but blurry for close-ups.

Overview


Close-up of Neck


Side view of handle


Partial view of "button toe"


Close-up of the surface


Close-up of plugged hole

The last image of the plugged hole is an opening for further comment. Ted Peña, in his book Roman Pottery in the Archaeological Record [worldcat], follows Bonifay (above, p. 467-8) in listing four methods of holing amphoras that contained liquid commodities. The first consists of:

the creation of one or two small holes ca. 1-2 cm. in diameter, usually by means of a drill, though sometimes by means of punching or chipping, generally in the lower third of the vessel's wall. This method is attested almost exclusively with examples of the Neo-Punic amphora, the "a gradino" variety of the African 2A, and the Keay 25. (p. 67)

The UPenn piece shows such holing in a Keay 62. Of course, we don't know that the vessel was pierced in antiquity and we don't know why the hole was re-filled, or when. It looks like the fill is lead, which certainly could be ancient. It seems likely that something was attached at the point of the hole, perhaps just excess lead. Perhaps not since the marks in the accretion show an incomplete ring as well as distance from the hole. I'm not sure what this means so comments are welcome. And what about the chips below the ring? There's a lot going on here when you take the time to look closely.

One reason to discuss holing of amphoras now is that tomorrow (6/20/2008) is the first day of the conference, "'Pottery in the archaeological record: a view from the Greek world'. A Workshop on J. Theodore Peña’s publication, Roman Pottery in the Archaeological Record", hosted by the Danish Institute at Athens. Consider this post a small contribution to the topic.

I'm grateful to Brian Rose for permission to discuss this piece, and to Lynn Makowsky for accession information.

To Dorothy King

Dorothy King is frequently a cogent commentator on matters ancient and modern. But I was unhappy to see her beginning a recent post with:

I sometimes get frustrated with archaeologists who seem to be more worried about preserving every single little broken bit if pot everywhere - and ignore the human cost of war. To some people, the men and women who have given their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to have become theoretical statistics.

To suggest that archaeologists ignore the human cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is a serious charge and to use "seem" without providing any specific references is unfair.

For my part, I am not so vain as to think she had anything I've written in mind, but I can't help but personalize my response. As a citizen I can express my horror at the human cost by voting, contributing to political campaigns and expressing my opinion. In doing so I am one voice among millions taking part in our pluralistic democracy. As a parent I can teach my three children to honor the service of the troops while disparaging the appointed leaders who have served them so poorly. I do this in my home and usually wouldn't mention it here.

But as an active field-archaeologist and museum professional with direct experience of and expertise in the losses to world cultural heritage wrought the by the international trade in illicit antiquities, I can focus my writings and advocacy on the deleterious effects of these two wars on archaeological knowledge. That this intellectual loss pales in comparison to the human loss should most often be able to go without saying.

To go a step further, I actually think there is a very strong correlation between a focus on the material consequences of the war in Iraq and an understanding that the predictable human cost was one reason to find a better way. To put this differently, I don't personally know archaeologists who strongly supported the war and one basis for their concern was the inevitable loss of life. I am not suggesting a causal relationship: opinions held as a citizen and opinions held as a professional are distinct, but in this case they seem to have overlapped. Since I take this step on the basis of anecdote and conversation, I can't directly cite my sources.

So, I'll stand up for archaeologists as caring as much as any other group of citizens about the human costs of war. When acting as archaeologists, however, we will speak to what we know best, which is the consequences of war for our chosen profession.

"Stolen Artifacts Returned to Iraq"

That's the headline of a brief NYTimes article. Here are the opening sentences:

A cache of ancient artifacts stolen from the National Museum of Iraq during the American-led invasion in 2003 were returned to Iraq’s Antiquities Ministry on Monday in a ceremony in Baghdad, Reuters reported. The items, 11 cylinder seals made from agate and alabaster between 3,000 and 2,000 B.C., were found in Philadelphia last month by American customs officials and turned over to the Iraqi embassy in Washington, a spokesman for the ministry said.

Those of us interested in the legitimate protection of the world's cultural property have realized that looting and theft in Iraq feeds the international market in illicit antiquities. While it is unfortunate that this story proves us right, it is a counter-balance to those who discount such a connection. As an example of such thought I offer this post from Peter Tompa and its admonition to:

watch out for claims that the long-promised 'tidal wave' of looted Iraqi material has finally left its secret warehouses for our shores!

Does the Times story describe a tidal wave washing back to Iraq? No. But add in the Syrian return mentioned there, along with what looks like an upcoming return from Jordan predicted in the Reuters version, and it's hard to justify the lighthearted approach to the problem of stolen Iraqi property taken in Tompa's "Cultural Property Observer".

Coins on the Move

The ANS has moved all its coins and other objects. I mention this because the whole event got coverage in the New York Times. Check out the photo essay as well.

My contribution to this process was only the design of the database we used to track all the crates and their contents. My colleagues did all the heavy lifting.

Random Question

Does Pau Gasol look more like Titus Quinctius Flamininus or Mithradates VI?

[Updated to fix image link]

Pau Gasol

Flamininus

Mithradates

"Earliest Church" in Jordan

Dorothy King, among others, notes reports of an early church in Jordan. A first century date is almost certainly too early for the pottery shown:

Those look to be amphora necks near in form to Late Roman Amphora 1 from Cilicia or Cyprus. As also indicated by their reasonably good preservation, they should date from the late Roman use of the church and have little to do with any earlier phase.

So... that's a great illustration but is misplaced to the extent that lay-people might think it shows early Roman (let alone "Christian") pottery.

More on Barrington Atlas IDs and a Question

Sean Gilles has blogged about deriving unique representations of geographic names from the Barrington Atlas.

He suggests the pattern:
http://pleiades.stoa.org/batlas/{label-normalized}-{map}-{grid}

See the complete post for how to transliterate names containing non-ASCII characters into URL friendly (near) equivalents. It's mostly simple: 'Ağva' becomes 'agva' but there are more interesting cases.

Quick question: should the host component of the url be 'pleiades.stoa.org' or 'atlantides.org'? This may not matter from a redirection point-of-view but consistency, searchability, and interchange issues might make it desirable to designate one or the other as the preferred form.

Mapping GRBPIlion

I continue to be interested in using the Atom Syndication Format, Georss, KML and Google's mapping tools to express the geographic component of data related to the ancient Mediterranean. These formats are all simple, well-documented and xml-based so that Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia), in which we try to use open standards, is a good test-bed for trying out ideas.

To cut to the chase, the following URLs show what I'm up to:

• Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/grbpilion.kml
• Google Earth: http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/grbpilion.kml

Clicking on the Google Maps link shows a browser-embedded map with a short list of sites on the left. It's early yet, but that list will expand. Regardless, clicking on a site name on the left will bring up a text-bubble pointing to the right place on the map. Within the bubble are one or more links to relevant pages on the GRBPIlion website. Imagine more dots and you get the idea.

The implementation is pretty simple but should give me flexibility going forward. There are three basic components. The file "geography.atom" defines geographic entities. If you look inside you'll see that I derive unique IDs from the Barrington Atlas, so Gaza is "http://atlantides.org/batlas/gaza-70-e2". In doing so, I follow the suggestions of Tom Elliot of ISAW. Looking inside "groups.xml" - which instantiates concepts such as "African Red Slip" for rendering into html - shows that a few such groups make reference to these geographic entities. Search for 'rel="geographic"' to see what I mean. Finally, I munge those two files into "grbpilion.kml", which can be shown directly in Google Earth or via Google Maps using the URLs listed above.

The xslt that does the munging is "kml.xsl". It's pretty ugly right now but it works so will do for the short term.

At a more abstract level, I can theoretically put elements such as '<link rel="geographic" href="http://atlantides.org/batlas/gaza-70-e2" />' anywhere in the publication. Right now I only implement this idea in groups.xml but I look forward to extending this system to individual sherd descriptions and to the bibliography.

Context

I've been very busy lately but Peter Tompa's post highlighting the importance of find spots for understanding antiquity seemed noteworthy.