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.

Late Hellenistic and Roman Pottery at Ilion (Troia)

Here is the abstract of my co-authored AIA paper. It's part of the Sunday morning session 7A: Pottery Production and Trade. My colleague Billur Tekkök and I are splitting the main text; she'll work on Hellenistic and I'll do Roman. Ernst Pernicka, director of the Troia Project, will contribute the results of NAA of sherds we selected.

Late Hellenistic and Roman Pottery at Ilion (Troia)

Billur Tekkök, Başkent University,
Sebastian Heath, American Numismatic Society,
and Ernst Pernicka, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen

This paper presents results from the study of stratified deposits dating from the late second century B.C. to the early sixth century A.D. Beyond establishing chronological horizons, our purpose is to explore the role of ceramic evidence in identifying economic and cultural trends at the site. Throughout this period, Ilion participated in both regional and long-distance exchange networks, and the ce-ramic assemblage includes a wide selection of Aegean utilitarian and tablewares. For the late Hellenistic period, Neutron Activation Analysis shows that regional workshops continued to produce Aegean forms, while also incorporating wider Mediterranean trends. Tablewares from first-century A.D. well-fills, pits, and foundation trenches indicate regular access to trade networks that brought ce-ramic material from outside the Aegean to the households of the region. Eastern Sigillata A, Italian Sigillata, as well as Eastern Sigillata B, are regular features of the ceramic assemblage, though none are common. Eastern Sigillata C, also called Çandarli-ware, becomes increasingly available at this time. By the late second cen-tury A.D., ESC makes up the bulk of the tableware assemblage. Pontic products remain rare in the Roman period. NAA indicates that ESC vessels, which display differences in inclusions and manufacture, were all supplied by regional work-shops. Late Roman tablewares show a transition to the use of Phocaean Red-Slip, as well as the presence of African Red-Slip and pale-slipped tablewares. Equal attention has been given to utilitarian wares and amphoras, and these vessels are presented as well. Finally, we present ongoing efforts toward digital publication of ceramic data.

To encourage me to get the text done in a timely fashion, I'll post sections here as I work on them. That will help me select the right photographs and drawings.

Last year I posted a list of papers whose titles indicated they had something to do with pottery. Look for a similar list to appear soon. And anybody who wants to post a relevant abstract here, just send it by e-mail or paste it into a comment.

Profile Drawing from the Illustrator's Perspective

Jane Heinrichs posts on the relative merits of drawing amphora vs. African Red-Slip sherds.

I spent two seasons at Leptiminus (Lamta) when I was a graduate student. Great site, nice kilns. My only comment on the post is to wonder why the project is using JPEG rather than a vectorized format.

Roman Pottery List at Worldcat

On AWBG, David Gill mentioned his History of Egyptology Worldcat list. That has inspired me to start such a list for Roman Pottery. You'll see that the focus is the Mediterranean.

It's incomplete, of course, but will grow over time. Suggestions, preferably with Worldcat links included, are welcome.

More on Sharing

Readers may recall a blog-based discussion of sharing archaeological data. See this post on AWBG for a summary with links to most of the discussion. The originator of the thread, Charles Watkinson, offered further observations in a contribution to the CSA Newsletter. I don't mean to re-open the whole issue, but I did recently come across a quote that seemed relevant.

The short volume, Francovich and Hodges. 2003. Villa to village: the transformation of the Roman countryside in Italy, c. 400-1000. London. [worldcat], is a good introductory text on an important early Medieval topic. When surveying the contributions of archaeology, the authors write:

...ceramic remains from for[sic] the post-classical period were needed to identify medieval sites. The opportunity arose in the spring of 1960 during the survey of the Ager Veientanus, some 17km north of Rome. Deep ploughing turned up what what on inspection proved to be the bases of a church colonnade, together with other major architectural elements and medieval pottery. Ward-Perkins soon identified the conspicuous surface remains as those of the monasterium sancti Cornelii in Capracorio, a monastery found between 1026 and 1035 on the site of a papal estate established by Pope Hadrian I in c. 776 (Christie 1991). Ward-Perkins realised that the site had almost certainly been occupied by a Roman villa as well, and with some zeal set out to explore the possibility of establishing direct continuity between a Roman villa and a domusculta - a ninth-century papal farm. Over five seasons, under the direction of Barri-Jones and then Charles Daniels, the British School at Rome uncovered this rare example of an early medieval rural settlement, permitting the pottery types of the age to be identified and used for locating other sites in survey. Unforunately, as Chris Wickham has recently written, "Santa Cornelia did not have the impact of the Castelprio or Torcello sites, or the German excavations of Invillino later in the decade, because it was not published for 30 years; by the time Neil Christie piloted it to publication in 1990, medieval archaeology had moved on." (Wickham 2001:38)

The key phrase here is "did not have the impact...because it was not published for 30 years". It is not important who you are - and I leave it to others to slot Ward-Perkins into a scholarly taxonomy - if you don't share ("publish"), then your data doesn't matter. I could certainly be more expansive and subtle but that would dilute the point.

Lamp fillers or baby feeders?

First, a quick word of thanks to Sebastian for allowing me the chance to post here on Mediterranean Ceramics, particularly as the post's in some respect a selfish one. Y'see, I'm the student with whom he's working on the lamps from Beit She'an: and after discussing the several examples with him from a particular tomb, as well as associated ceramic and glass vessels, I'm left with a question I hope someone on the interwebs can answer.

Among the other ceramic vessels found within the tomb in question was a small, one-handled vessel with a bulbous body and a high neck--it'd be a stretch to call it piriform, but not entirely inaccurate--with a slender spout emerging from the body above its thickest point. More to the point, it's the sort of vessel which usually gets characterized as either a lamp filler or a baby feeder. Both are sensible enough guesses, I suppose, but they strike me nevertheless as almost comically divergent (similar shapes notwithstanding). Has anyone seen a treatment of these sorts of vessels anywhere--another example from Beit Sh'ean is at right--especially as regards their use in Late Roman or Byzantine Palestine? I'd be curious to know whether I ought to assume the thing's a lamp filler, given the presence of several associated lamps, or if I'm looking at a baby bottle. Thanks for the help!

Three Books: Argos, Britain and Loot

Somewhat randomly:

• Catherine Abadie-Reynal's La céramique romaine d'Argos: Fin du IIe siècle avant J-C - fin du IVe siècle après J-C. [worldcat] is an excellent contribution to the study of Aegean ceramics in the Roman period. In conception, it is a well-executed catalog-based typological study. The introductions for each ware are up-to-date and the regionally organized bibliography is a resource all on its own.
• Lloyd Laing's Pottery in Britain: 4000 BC to AD 1900 [worldcat] is useful for its color illustrations. If you take the book on its own terms, it makes a good addition to your personal or institutional library.
• I recieved a review copy of Sharon Waxman's Loot: the battle over the stolen treasures of the ancient world [worldcat]. Preliminary reading has added it to my "get to soon" list. For reactions and links see Looting Matters.