GREAT NEWS for blog readers – it is time for another instalment in the BEARS blog’s ongoing team-member interview series. Today we’re posting a riveting conversation with Shannon Dunn, a PhD student at Bryn Mawr College who joined the team in the 2021 season after getting pandemicked-out in 2020. Shannon was a stellar addition to our little mini-team this summer and brought a real modern panache and style to the group – she even uses the internet! Something most of us old BEARS fuddy duddies try to avoid as much as possible. Check out the full interview below to get a whole herd of hot takes on topics ranging from the civil war to ancient religious landscapes!
SMD: Ah, my supervillain origin story!
SCM: Yes, don’t hold back on the villain parts – that’s the best content!
SMD: I was one of those kids who had a Greek myth book, so that was something of a gateway. I also grew up in Virginia where I was surrounded by revolutionary and civil war sites and cemeteries, so I think history was just always around. Then I took Latin in high school, and that was a flashpoint for the ancient world. My teacher was really great, and also taught us the Greek alphabet, and then we also went to Greece! She led a rotating trip to an “ancient” place every few years, and our year happened to be to Greece. I loved it immediately. Somewhere there is a picture of me in the throes of teen angst, just so mad, but inside I was just thinking about how to get back to Greece. Then I got the opportunity to go back in college. I actually didn’t do any archaeological projects in college, but I took classes during the summers in Greece and I did undergraduate thesis research there. I was an anthropology major, but our department was very Americas focused, so I also did a Classics minor. My thesis was joint for both departments. It was about different types of Greek museums and their relationships to nation-building and nationalism. I went on my first dig right after I graduated. That was Omrit, where I met Grace! We have periodically intersected during the last ten years.
Since then I have continued to do various excavations in the summers, or classes through the American School. Then I decided to pursue a graduate degree.
SCM: Wow, it goes way back with you!
SMD: Yeah, I have pretty much always wanted to be an archaeologist.
SCM: I love the Omrit connection! Joey worked at Omrit too. Such a small world. I would never have anticipated that there would be a BEARS–Omrit connection, but there you go!
SMD: Yeah, I think Joey went the year after me. It’s funny.
SCM: So, in retrospect, when you think back to your youth visiting Revolutionary and Civil War sites, how do they compare to Greek archaeological sites?
SMD: Hmmmm……. I’m less interested in them – obviously, I am not pursuing that history in a professional way. Also, maybe because I am more involved in that world as an American, I can see how much more they are manipulated into various narratives. Growing up I did not think about how it was weird that there were cemeteries for confederates especially. But then when I left the south, I realized it was…. a little odd…. what we were taught about that stuff. I took a class about the Civil War in college and we quickly realized that depending on where we had grown up we had completely different narratives about Civil War history. So, that may have fed into me thinking about how Greek archaeology is used in that way for my thesis.
SCM: I grew up as the child of a real Civil War “buff” and we spent a huge amount of time visiting different Civil War sites. We even went to the big Gettysburg reenactment one year.
SMD: I went to a LOT of reenactments. I had a friend in the fife and drum corp.
SCM: Yes! Fifes and Drums!
SMD: Eat some kettle corn, watch some battles. Delightful.
SCM: I was so short I could never see anything. All I remember was some puffs of cannon smoke, a hot field, and some fifes. I hated it. So, you could say I prefer Greece. But it’s also weird, as you say, to think about how we went to like pay homage to Robert E. Lee’s grave and stuff.
SMD: Now that I’m thinking about it from a distance too it’s very interesting to think about what the culture was like – almost a little grand tour of people doing pilgrimages around to the sites, recreating the movements of the armies.
SCM: It’s such an ugly, awful part of American history – in a way perhaps it is good that we don’t forget what happened, but it’s weird that people kind of celebrate it rather than just visiting the sites and thinking about what a freakin nightmare it was.
SMD: Yeah, and then there’s the fact that half the monuments were set up in the 1920s to 1950s when other anxieties were presenting themselves – and you realize, oh yeah, that has nothing to do with the civil war.
SCM: Right! Anyway, now we are getting off topic. But you reminded me of all the hours and days I spent walking around in hot fields in the south when I was seven and I was just thinking “I want an ice cream!”.
SMD: Yeah, battlefields, I’ve never found them very exciting wherever I am. Some people are into that in Greece to. What happened on this flank? On the other flank? That’s not my thing.
SCM: Yeah, that kind of “research” had a big day…but I don’t think it’s got a lot of legs in the current academic environment. Perhaps too esoteric. Perhaps too…pointless?
SMD: Agree.
SCM: Okay, so I take it you are not researching ancient battlefields…. but you ARE doing a PhD in Classical Archaeology at Bryn Mawr. Where are you in the program and what are you researching?
SMD: I just finished my fifth year. I just started my dissertation work because my fourth year was the Regular Program at the ASCSA. I generally like questions about the relationships between religion and landscape – how people use spaces and negotiate the reality of traveling around but also how the landscape itself influences cult practice. I had been trying to identify something on which to apply those issues. I worked in one direction last summer and it didn’t really go anywhere, but then I was talking to professor Sylvian Fachard, and he said to me: “You know what needs to be done? A catalogue of these sites that we put in the category of ‘border sanctuaries.’” So, I’m working on that, doing an inter-regional thing that catalogs them and reevaluates them as a category, and hoping it will be a good resource for border people, religion people, and landscape people. I’m investigating how location impacts function, and whether ritual sites that we know were near a border were affected by those political boundaries. It’s a little frustrating to read the scholarship, because it often portrays these sites as liminal areas, but sometimes they are on main thoroughfares, so maybe they are more hubs or gateways. Or maybe people in the local community don’t see themselves that way at all! So, I am trying to reconstruct that as much as I can.
SCM: Sounds like a great project!
SMD: There is a lot to include – I am trying to do big picture stuff but also to give each place the attention it merits and allow the contextualized situation at each site come through. I don’t want to try to shove things into a model.
SCM: Well, you’re just starting out! The fun part about a dissertation is that it develops a life of its own – the scope and scale especially tend to mutate a lot over the course of the project.
SMD: Yes, that’s what my advisor said. She was very clever. She told me to start as wide as possible and then whenever I pull back from something, think about why I am doing that, and try to justify it. That helped me to define what I want to talk about and what is clearly beyond the scope of what I could even conceive of. So now from a big picture with frontiers and colonies and sort of the edges of the Greek world, I’ve pulled all the way back to the Peloponnese because it’s defined and seems manageable.
SCM: Wow! Good advising! It never happens! You’re very lucky.
SMD: Yeah, she’s great.
SCM: Okay, so you mentioned that you did the ASCSA regular year program. Tell me about that – how was the experience?
SMD: It was so great. A lot of the people who go on the regular year have never been to Greece or seen these things you have read about – and there is this incredible feeling of realizing that it is a Real Place, and to be able to see it in 3 dimensions. But I had been to some of the sites and kind of came in thinking “oh yeah, I know a lot of these.” But by the end I completely felt that I had known absolutely nothing before the year. The depth to which you explore these sites is just incredible. I don’t know how people can do a PhD without such a program. The time invested in getting to understand the country is so valuable – you see places beyond the normal tracks, for example, if you just work on a project and go back and forth to the same places. There is still a lot of Greece I have not seen, but I feel better than I did before about my experience of the country. I realized a lot about the breadth and depth of what there is to study – I had no idea how great the Neolithic is! And everyone was passionate and enthusiastic about a different thing.
SCM: It is such a wonderful program. I feel bad for these students who work in Italy – they have no equivalent program! But I guess it’s their choice. Go eat your pizza and drink lukewarm beers, Italy people! Okay, let me not get into my unpopular opinions about Italian food. Was there anything about the program that you didn’t like?
SMD: My only complaint is that we did not go to all the places I wanted to go. We did not go to Cape Tainaron or the Mani, and we missed some parts of the eastern Argolid I wanted to see…and we didn’t see much of the islands. Some of the reasoning I don’t understand, but I know some of it was just logistics.
SCM: I guess it’s tough. There’s so much to see! It’s not so bad if the worst thing is that there are too many places to visit and not enough time.
SMD: Yeah. I am very excited to go deep into the Mani – that is going to be my first stop when I’m back in Greece.
SCM: Okay, so I think one of the interesting things about talking to people who ended up being Greek archaeologists is that a lot of people have a similar story – not the same story! – but a same genre as your reason for having gotten into Greek archaeology, and I do too! I came to Greece as an angsty college student and completely then focused my life on wanting to spend as much time in Greece as possible forever. And I can never articulate to myself exactly why that happened to me, or why that is so common. I don’t think it’s totally normal. I worked in Italy a lot too, and I never felt the same way. What do you think? What is it about Greece that does this crazy thing to our psychologies and sucks us in, like a quicksand?
SMD: Agh, everything I say would be such a cliché. People talk about “the light” you know? I’m not inventing that! I don’t know. It’s some kind of vibe? I have tried to recreate what I like about Greece at home…you know, trying to figure out whether it’s that I’m just outside and active and stimulated and with friends? Archaeologists exist in a different sort of life when we are on a project, and we tend to be happy in those environments. But I don’t think that is it. A lot of it is kind of surface stuff. It is just so beautiful there! The only other landscape I’ve been so stunned by is Scotland, which is similar in that it looks small on the map, but it feels so vast when you are there. It has an endless coastline, these microregions, incredibly dramatic landscapes.
SCM: Yeah, Scotland is cool! But maybe that helps us eliminate the landscape. Like, Scotland has an amazing landscape! But I never thought, okay, I need to dwell in this space as much as possible forever.
SMD: Right, it’s great, but I don’t need to inhabit it!
SCM: Well, it’s something that we cannot get to the bottom of! But I think this is an interesting aspect of Greece. It has a strange magical power! And I can stay it sticks with you. I am old now and I have been to Greece many, many, times, sometimes doing cool stuff, sometimes just sitting in Athens trying to write a book. But it doesn’t matter, I’m always just happier here.
SMD: Yeah, I know what you mean. It smells better somehow…the food is better. It has almost a simplified color palette that is soothing to me, like a Wes Anderson move. Like with Italy, Rome – also incredible. But it’s too much!
SCM: Right – everything is like an art historically important piazza! It’s exhausting. Like, enough! Okay, okay, let’s talk about fieldwork. It sounds like you have done a lot of projects. Encapsulate for us your history as an archaeological fieldworker and your experiences prior to BEARS.
SMD: My fieldwork has been scattered and diverse. My approach has been to cast a wide net and try to figure out what I liked; I’ve liked all the projects I’ve worked on, but for some I didn’t see a big personal longevity in it for me, so maybe my CV looks a bit bizarre! I’ve done both excavation and survey, mostly in Greece, but also in Israel, Lebanon, and Scotland. One of the reasons I really love Bryn Mawr is that they are so supportive – I asked if I could go and do the Scotland survey to get a non-Mediterranean experience, and they completely agreed with that. Which ended up being wonderful – I got training outside of my usual paradigm, we learned a lot of GIS, stuff I hadn’t been exposed to before. It was interesting to see a slightly different side of the discipline.
In Greece, I sometimes joke that I will only work at sites that have something to do with Poseidon. I worked at Onchestos in Boeotia and Helike in Achaia…I guess I like the water.
SCM: Seems like a good strategy! Poseidon is cool – horses AND water…weird dude. What was the survey in Scotland all about? A particular period or region?
SMD: We were surveying along a road that was built during the Jacobite rebellion. During that period the Scots were becoming increasingly independent, so the English started building roads to get up into the highlands to monitor or suppress the rebels more efficiently, but then the highlanders just started also using the roads to do whatever they needed to do. There are a lot of layers of history that we were exploring, from the Jacobite stuff, back into prehistory, as well as later travelers who were walking these roads on their Grand Tours. The project was very landscape oriented, so we catalogued whatever we came across in the landscape, and the different stages of the road. We also did field trips to castles and things like that.
SCM: Cool! A very different experience than working in the Mediterranean.
SMD: Yeah, it was a very different experience, also in terms of the weather. It was freezing and raining all the time in July, so we were all bundled up and wearing high visibility stuff.
SCM: I was in Scotland one June and I remember that the sun would come up at 4 or 5am, which was very disorienting. I remember waking up at 5am and it was bright as high noon and I was always very freaked out by that.
SMD: Yeah, it’s basically the arctic circle. I was going to Greece right after that project so I didn’t bring the right clothes. I knew it would be kind of cold, but I didn’t think it could be THAT cold…so I was just wearing all my clothes at the same time and it still wasn’t enough. Then a few weeks later I was in Greece and we’d finish work at 1pm because it was too hot, and we’d go to the beach.
SCM: Sometimes I have no idea what people who do archaeology in the UK are thinking. Between the cold and the mud, it seems like a very different proposition than what we get into in the Mediterranean most of the time.
SMD: Yeah, I could pass on excavating a giant trench full of mud.
SCM: We don’t have a lot of mud in Mediterranean survey, typically. What was your take on surveying Porto Rafti for the BEARS project?
SMD: It was great. As I said I enjoy working in coastal landscapes, so that was up my alley. Taking a boat to work was incredible. It was also probably the least remote town that I have ever been based in. That was a fun experience. Usually on a project you feel like you are going off into the wilderness. I mean, at Onchestos we stayed at Thebes…but that still is kind of the wilderness if you know what I mean. But from Porto Rafti you can just pop into Athens for the weekend; and you’re just in this resort town. So, it was kind of interesting to see that you can just be in a community and do archaeology. It doesn’t have to be this big bush-whacking adventure.
SCM: Ha, yeah, I would always laugh when Denéa called the project an expedition this summer. I mean, we’re like 20 minutes from the airport in a giant concrete resort town…so….it seemed like a funny word to use for what we are doing out in Porto Rafti. Yeah, it’s very different from the normal project where you go to a little village with no internet and marginal mod-cons. In Porto Rafti we have it all – pizza delivery! Third wave coffee! Banks! Anything you want.
SMD: It is another micro-region, too, though, that I didn’t even know existed before I worked on the project. I’d been to Brauron and we went to Koroni on the ASCSA regular year, but the whole world of the bay had not been on my radar. It’s a bit of a whole little archaeological ecosystem on its own that a lot of people don’t necessarily visit.
SCM: That’s a good point. I spent a lot of time in Greece every year since 2003, but I never went to Porto Rafti once until I thought about starting a project there in 2018. Which is sort of crazy.
SMD: It is funny that it’s kind of off the radar. It’s such a great port and in the middle of everything, so it makes sense that there is so much material there.
SCM: One thing I appreciate about Greece is that there is always more to see. Even after almost 20 years of traveling around all over the place, I continuously find new places and local cuisines and sites and landscapes I didn’t know about at all. Every time I visit I try to purposefully go to one place I have not been, and it’s always a total surprise in the most wonderful way.
SMD: Greece seems very dense. Even from little valley to little valley you often have so much local variation. I enjoyed working in Porto Rafti, even though it is not the most remote. Actually, it was kind of comforting, after not leaving the house basically for a year, to be in a place that was not all that remote or ‘intense’ in terms of a collective living experience. I’m not sure I could have gone from staying in my room all the time to some totally remote village with no internet.
SCM: Right, like when you have a rescue animal that you’ve nursed back to health – you should introduce it back into the wild in stages, or else it doesn’t know how to forage for food or protect itself from predators!
SMD: Exactly. I thought about working on Crete this summer but then I thought – it’s too far! I’m not ready yet.
SCM: Okay, let’s do one more question. In all your travels and project experiences so far, what has been a zany or unusual adventure or misadventure that stands out?
SMD: In college, I took a class on the Odyssey in which we sailed around the Aegean on a boat as we read it – which has obviously shaped a lot of my interests when it comes to research and fieldwork! We had an assignment where we had to write about something that had happened to us during the course but in a Homeric style. So, everyone ended up with these sort of magical realist interpretations of little incidents. My story was about a sort of weird and somewhat concerning interaction with a German tourist when I was out walking alone on Milos. I had borrowed his snorkeling gear and swam out to a shipwreck and then he wanted to talk to me and go back to town, which I was not interested in. But for the assignment I turned it into a much more dramatic story with supernatural elements. I can’t think of a better one. I guess that’s not so zany.
SCM: That’s okay – we are debunking stereotypes about archaeologists waking up unspeakable horrors of the undead and whatnot.
SMD: You carry Ithaca inside you, as they say.
SCM: Profound words!
SMD: I think as archaeologists we feel more comfortable around the dead inert objects of the archaeological record and the landscape, so it’s sort of scary for us to deal with other humans.
SCM: That is true. It is always a little jarring when you think you are alone in some unused landscape, and then you realize there is another human there.
SMD: There is no such thing as a pristine landscape where it’s just you and the god. These landscapes have been actively used forever, and they still are! We’re just guests there.
SCM: Yeah, don’t forget it! A good message for the faithful BEARS blog readers to close out this wonderful interview. Thanks so much for taking the time to share your experiences with us, and all the best for the year in Athens ahead.
