Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 6: Taylor Stark

Taylor Stark is currently a PhD Student in the department of Classics at the University of Toronto, where he is a participant in the Mediterranean Archaeology Collaborative Specialization and a burgeoning scholar of the Late Bronze Age Aegean. He is also a founding student member of the BEARS project and distinguished himself with uncanny geospatial skills, among other feats, in the 2019 season. Back home, Taylor is something of a celebrity around the Classics department: he did his undergraduate degree at Toronto and during that time transformed what had been a moribund undergraduate student Classics organization into a thriving community that hosts myriad events through the academic year, and even publishes its own journal. Aside from that, Taylor also has an intimidatingly large and broad bunch of skills and talents, as the following interview makes abundantly clear.

Taylor on board the boat on the way home after a satisfying day of work on Raftis island (K. Alexakis)

SCM: You are currently pursuing a PhD in the Classics department at the University of Toronto. Can you tell us what got you interested in Classics and why you decided to pursue a PhD in the subject?

TS: It’s sort of a weird story, or maybe weird but also boring? I was gearing up for a music degree in clarinet performance in grade eleven, and I was hoping to play in an orchestra and become wildly famous that way. Then at some point something flipped in my brain, and I decided that I didn’t want to make that hobby into a profession – that would just ruin it all. Kind of out of nowhere I thought, ‘Well, if I can’t make money from music, I’ll go where the money is – Aegean Bronze Age professor!’ And it just sort of emerged fully formed in my head. I don’t have the experience of going to University and then taking a class in Classics and then deciding that’s what I wanted to do. I entered into university explicitly with the aim of ending up in grad school to study the Bronze Age.

A real live Bronze Age archaeologist: Taylor leading the charge upslope on Raftis island (K. Alexakis)

SCM: I think that is a very unusual situation, and hardly boring! How did you even know that Bronze Age professor was a thing?

TS: I think it came down to a video game called Age of Mythology that I played when I was young. It was a war strategy game where you played as mythological factions, and I always really loved the Greeks. The game retold in some aspects the story of the Trojan War and I think that must be where it came from at least in a subconscious way.

SCM: So this has been a very single-minded pursuit for you!

TS: It has been. Although I don’t think it made me more prepared for grad school overall. I didn’t exactly use my early intentions to really prepare myself.

Making superficial preparations for entering grad school by putting on an Intelectual Mustache (S. Murray)

SCM: I mean, nobody is really prepared for grad school, are they? I certainly don’t know anyone who was, however early they started to think about it. Do you still play the clarinet?

TS: Very rarely. I was excited to play in a student orchestra here at the very least, but then I realized that would be utterly impossible given the amount of free time I have. It’s sitting right over there, but I haven’t touched it in years unfortunately.

SCM: I’m sure you’ll come back around to it later.

TS: Yeah, maybe in a community band when I’m a real adult

SCM: What, what’s that? A real adult? I’ve definitely never seen or heard of one. You should look into joining up with a Greek band next time you’re over there. All of the bands I’ve seen performing at weddings and festivals in Greece are VERY aggressive with the clarinet, I will tell you that. Bring it along to BEARS next summer – you’ll be an instant star.

TS: Clarinet-playing performance Bronze Age archaeologist! It’ll be a whole new phase of my musical career.

A Greek band plays at a local festival in Ikaria.

SCM: This sounds very promising. Now, I know you have some other interesting hobbies. You did your undergraduate degree here at Toronto, but I wasn’t around then. When you showed up as a grad student the first thing I learned about you was that you had just unicycled across Canada, and I think you are still the only person I’ve ever met with a serious unicycle hobby. Can you tell us a little bit about the unicycle situation – how you got into it and why you ended up traversing the nation?

TS: I started unicycling when I was nine, so I’ve been riding for quite a while. I grew up in the Rocky Mountains, where I first started out mountain unicycling – anything a mountain bike goes down I’ll go down, but on one wheel. Then when I came to Toronto to do my undergrad degree, obviously, it’s a different environment – there are not many mountains or trails to engage with. I took up urban street unicycling – think BMX or skateboard tricks but on a unicycle. I was doing moves like grinds and flips and jumping off of high things. Then when I finished my degree I wanted to take a couple of years off to work and travel. I had it all worked out in my timelines, but I had a three-month gap in the summer that I wasn’t quite sure what to do with. And a friend of mine jokingly suggested that I ride across the country on the unicycle. And we were like, ‘Haha, that’s very funny! …But wait…what if; is that even possible?’ I started thinking about it a lot more and bought myself a long-distance unicycle and started riding longer distances, and just leapt into it. I knew I had to be in Toronto for the beginning of the Master’s program in August 2018, so I went to Vancouver and just started pedaling!

unicycling: (left to right) long distance riding in Saskatchewan, down a trail in Utah, grinding, flatland tricks (courtesy: T. Stark)

SCM: Wow, that is pretty wild stuff. I have never seen anyone doing flips on a unicycle but it sounds very daring! Now, I’m not a cycling person, but my general sense is that most people do go for the two-wheeled sort of situation. 

TS: Haha, yes, that is the general preference! Really, there’s not much you can do on a bike that you can’t do on a unicycle – other than coast, that is (unicycling requires constant pedaling). I think it works for me because I find unicycling very calming. It requires a lot of focus. When you’re on one wheel, there’s really only one think you can think about – staying on the wheel! Riding helps me clear my head of anxious thoughts and worrying over endless to-do lists. Also, it’s just kind of more fun and unusual, so you get a different type of independent experience that most people don’t have.

Taylor showing off valuable unicycle cargo, from a CBC article about the trip.

SCM: I totally see where you’re coming from. I think a lot of academics go for this kind of thing – being creative and independent-thinking enough to do something outside of the mainstream. I sometimes refer to it as going to the outside lanes of the toll booth – most people are kind of sheep-like and will stack up at the center lanes just because everyone else is doing it and it’s right in front of them, but if you just jerk the wheel over to the far right there’s no line and you get through way faster!

TS: Yeah, for me it just kind of clicked that way. It also made me famous in my hometown, and I got my name out there, which was a benefit.

Photo of Taylor from the U of T News article about his unorthodox means of reaching his new grad school home (Geoffrey Vendeville)

SCM: So, you started out in Vancouver, and (spoiler alert) you did ultimately arrive in Toronto on the unicycle. Since then you have been knocking ‘em dead in the graduate program here. Where are you now in the program and what kinds of research are you interested in pursuing?

TS: I’m just about to finish coursework. I have a couple of more courses next year to get under my belt and then I’ll start to focus on comps next spring and summer. My focus now seems to be crystallizing around early Greek and Mediterranean society, and particularly looking at peripheral regions outside of well-known states. I’m interested in understanding the experience of people living at the margins of large culturally-influential entities like the Mycenaean state that have been the focus of a lot of research, both smaller state-like entities and groups organized in ways that we wouldn’t even call a state. I’m planning to look at the interactions between large-scale, maybe even imperialist groups, and local communities on the margins, and to think about how those interactions shape local cultural identities. I did my MA thesis on Bronze Age Thessaly and Mycenaean interactions with the ancient Thessalians, and my research is hovering around those sorts of things. I’ve written a paper on Mycenaean interactions in southern Italy. I think all of these notionally peripheral regions are very interesting.

Mycenaeans in Thessaly? A tholos tomb at the site of Dimini (T. Stark)

SCM: Those sound like very promising places to poke around for your research focus, and I’m sure it’ll be exciting to get on with it and wrap up your courses in the next academic year. Now turning to fieldwork, before coming to BEARS you (along with apparently everyone else on our team!) worked on another Greek survey project, the WARP project in the western Argolid. Have you worked on other fieldwork projects, too?

TS: Unfortunately, I haven’t yet worked on any other projects. I started on WARP and then after that found myself in a situation where I couldn’t pay for anything else in terms of work abroad during the rest of my undergrad. This summer I was looking into a couple of other projects, and even sent out some feelers about doing more fieldwork after BEARS, but – obviously – those did not pan out! I would like to, and probably should, start trying to get more project experience each summer so that I can experience and learn about different methods and approaches.

Taylor, Joey, and Herakles sorting survey finds on Raftis island (K. Alexakis)

SCM: It is not ideal that doing fieldwork is so expensive, which can make it out of reach for a lot of undergraduate students. And I now know that it’s challenging as a director to manage to fund everyone’s flights each summer out of a meagre humanities grant. I actually got dissed on a recent grant application for asking for funding for undergraduate flights – the reviewer thought it should be their problem to get funding or scholarships or something, which seemed crazy to me. 

I was thinking about your background and your immense acumen for survey fieldwork – you’re one of these fieldworkers who never gets tired or disoriented, and is always extremely enthusiastic and competent in the field, no matter the conditions. You grew up in the mountains and did quite a bit of mountaineering when you were younger – has that impacted your approach to fieldwork or do you think you enjoy fieldwork especially in relation to that background? Or are those two separate things for you?

TS: I think they definitely interact with each other. I do really love going off the beaten track and just exploring. When I was in the Rockies I always loved investigating weird geological features or caves, or small cool river valleys that are out of the way. It’s also given me a strong sense of direction (cardinal direction, that is) and I can very easily situate myself in a landscape. I think that extends handily to fieldwork. I’ve only done survey, and I think that the far-ranging aspect of survey really appeals to me, especially extensive survey. I really love searching out those nooks and crannies all throughout the mountainous regions in Greece. I also love bouldering: just scrambling all over the place is really fun. Survey work does offer opportunities like that very readily.

Taylor determinedly setting off to look at rocks in Utah (courtesy T. Stark)

SCM: There is some good mountain climbing and bouldering in Greece. I don’t know of other archaeologists who do any climbing, but you could probably check it out at some point. 

TS: Yeah, some of my father’s friends have been out to a lot of the islands for climbing. I’ve heard a lot of good things. 

SCM: I can definitely see that your background in mountaineering would contribute a lot to your strengths in the field. Are there other aspects of working on a field project that you especially enjoy?

Taylor surveying on Raftis island (Photo credit: K. Alexakis)

TS: I’d say there are two other things I really love about fieldwork. First, I love being surrounded by people who are both as ridiculous and dorky as myself and as interested in this narrow esoteric topic as myself, but who also have very different approaches. A huge part of archaeology is collaboration. Being able to have really interesting conversations with folks who approach the artifacts we’re looking at in entirely different ways, and can shed whole different lights upon them based on those different approaches, is really fascinating. It helps me to expand my own understanding of the range of approaches.

I also think there is a great sense of satisfaction that goes with proper identification of an artifact. I started out my first project knowing absolutely nothing, and then coming back a second time on BEARS it all flooded back. Being able to step out into the field and pick something up and say, ‘Oh yeah, this is from the Bronze Age’ – I think there is a real sense of satisfaction there.

Taylor and Joey, both WARP veterans, check out some artifacts after finishing a grid square on Raftis (K. Alexakis)

SCM: Both great points. ‘Archaeology vision’ is very satisfying, almost like having x-ray vision or something – an object I might see as akin to a rock, you understand as this information-laden artifact that tells us all kinds of things about the past.

TS: Exactly, there’s so much information you can glean just from this crumbly piece of pottery. A secret power is a great way to think about it.

SCM: Are there any aspects of fieldwork that you dislike or find irritating, or that you’re always happy to say goodbye to at the end of a project?

TS: Scorpions. I am not a fan of scorpions. I mean, projects can be really exhausting, but I think that’s part of the fun. I usually need to sleep for a good, solid two weeks after finishing a project, but that carries its own satisfaction. 

That post-project fatigue feeling, personified here by one of many site dogs at Teotihuacan (S. Murray)

SCM: Yeah, I too usually need a few weeks of quavering in bed like a catatonic lizard, with one of those hamster feeder bottles full of Gatorade installed right next to me so I never have to get up, after five or six weeks of fieldwork. But it is a well-earned, satisfying kind of exhaustion.

TS: So basically, there’s not much aside from the scorpions that I don’t like.

SCM: Sounds like you are in the right line of work! Let’s do a little compare and contrast exercise, inspired by Grace’s post on WARP vs. BEARS: you were on WARP and now you’re on BEARS. Are your impressions of the two projects mostly the same or have they been very different experiences?

Exploring the brush: Grace and Mattias wonder why we thought it was a good idea to fight through dense maquis to the top of the Kastro at Limni Distos on our day off (T. Stark)

TS: There’s an obvious answer available in the sense that the areas and aims of the two surveys are very different. But for me they were also just very different experiences because I was in very different places coming into WARP and coming into BEARS. On WARP, I was just a young undergrad, and in terms of my place in the hierarchy of WARP, I was basically just going along with everything. I wasn’t really privy to a lot of the discussions about interpretation or the methods being used. It was also more of a party atmosphere, at least amongst the youngest of us. There was a lot of ‘Hey, we’re in Greece! We get to let loose a bit!’ going around.

On BEARS, of course, there were always beers – there are always beers – but I think I had more of a sense of place and a sense of focus about the actual research and what I wanted to get out of it.  I had more of a feeling that the project at least in a small way belonged to me, because there was a smaller team and we were all part of developing interpretations and plans. Whereas for WARP I was a passive member of the team because of my age.

An extensive survey find: Elliot enjoys a well-earned cookie during extensive survey (T. Stark)

SCM: Right, right – I’m old enough that it’s hard for me to remember what the heck I thought when I was first doing fieldwork, but you’re right that just starting out you do not have a strong sense of why things on a project are a certain way, or even that there are different ways that things could be done. You’re along for the ride, and maybe focused as much or more on the social aspects. In terms of work, you’re just kind of there as a set of free hands. 

TS: Nobody asks you why you’re doing the things you are doing, so you just don’t think about it too much.

SCM: It’s a very cogent point about the fact that your experience on a fieldwork project will definitely vary a lot based on where you are individually when you have that experience, whatever the nature of the project itself. My very first project was in Pompeii and I focused a lot more on drinking beer than questioning the structure or methods at work on the project. I did, however, think critically about how much more I like Greece than Italy, which is why I never worked over there again. Is there anything you particularly like about working in Greece or just spending time there? How about Porto Rafti?

TS: I adore being in Greece. It just feels much more laid back than Toronto. The weather is right up my alley. I know that some people can’t really stand those sorts of intense heats, but that’s exactly where I thrive. I really, really love the food. This summer I’ve been trying to start replicating some Greek food. I made spanakopita the other day. It was nearly there! It had echoes of Greek spanakopita.

Homemade spanakopita: the fruits of many hours of labour (T. Stark)

SCM: Impressive! That’s a challenging one.

TS: I’m also now learning Modern Greek, so I’m excited to work there next summer, and try to make better connections with people and maybe partake in and understand a bit more of what’s going on. 

Porto Rafti was interesting as a place to work. Because it’s a resort town it’s very different from what I’ve seen in other towns in Greece – the lack of a town square, for example – so that was very interesting to work around. But I ultimately really enjoyed it. I think there was a sense of peeking behind the curtain of the tourist impression of Greece. I guess that’s a bit ironic to say given that Porto Rafti is a resort town, but it’s not the kind of place you think about from an extra-national tourist point of view. So, okay, Greece isn’t all about these old stone town squares and the traditional village, there are these other aspects to the country which we should also engage with and appreciate. I liked the idea that Porto Rafti shows us diversity in town structure within this under-nuanced image of a Greek ideal that we take to it.

The Greek village stereotype need not apply in Porto Rafti (S. Murray)

SCM: That is really interesting observation. I guess we have our ideas about what a ‘real’ Greek town is supposed to be like and all the mystique that surrounds it, but actual reality blows up that simple stereotype. Porto Rafti is in fact a real town, where Greek people spend a lot of time and where lots of people live, even commuting to Athens. It’s a bit weird to knock it as not ‘Greek’ enough because it doesn’t fit into our idea of what that ought to mean.

TS: Exactly. They’re not putting on some façade to meet the expectations of tourists from outside of Greece or look like a postcard. I think it’s important for us as archaeologists to be attentive to the preconceptions we bring to Greece based on some fetish for the past, and to always be engaging with what the place where we work is actually like and what people who actually live there do and think.

SCM: I will say that my emotional relationship with modern Porto Rafti is complicated because it would be much easier to survey there if there weren’t so many beach houses covering up all of the ground! But it will be interesting to see what we can find in and amongst them as we survey in little patches of gardens and orchards throughout the town. The more time I spend there the more I appreciate the place. It has its own thing going on. Also, its non-traditional nature has a lot of advantages for us. In very small villages your team really, really stands out, so you’re kind of under the microscope. But in Porto Rafti nobody even knows we’re there, which gives us much more anonymity, and that makes life easier in a lot of ways.

The all-seeing eye of the tiny Greek village stuffed with transient archaeology students (S. Murray)

TS: I think the only people who knew we were there were the owners of our nearest bakery. And they were happy we were there, because we spent a lot of money at that place.

SCM: I am sure they wish you were there right now – but, alas, this summer you gotta make your own spanakopita! In addition to the lack of proper spanakopita, Toronto is maybe not as great of a place to spend the summer as Porto Rafti. But summer in Toronto is not without its charms – any particular activities that you’re looking to enjoy or goals you want to accomplish in July and August?

TS: I just got back from a camping trip and it was really nice to get out of the city for a bit. In terms of academic stuff, the pandemic is a real double-edged sword. Suddenly there is all of this free time, and I feel like I’m pressuring myself to accomplish things I wouldn’t normally have time for. But at the same time, I think the state of the world does impact one’s ability to work. I’m trying not to be too hard on myself. But I have a couple of reading lists that I’ve been going through and a bunch of books I’ve been meaning to read forever. I just read James Scott’s Against the Grain and that gave me a lot of leads on new things I want to read and research.

Some of Taylor's summer reading, and his RA Franz (T. Stark)

Something else that I am starting to do, which is probably biting off more than I can chew, is writing a horror novel. I was in South America backpacking around a couple of years ago and I came back with a few vignettes I had written. Suddenly in the shower the other day they just kind of coalesced all together and I saw a way to put them into a coherent story. So, I’ve been outlining that, and threw it all on top of my actual work.

SCM: That is a profound and productive shower! I should probably take more showers. Maybe I’d have better ideas. But writing creatively is a good idea for a way to take your mind off of things for awhile. I always find that writing is one of the only ways to actually take yourself totally out of your own reality. You can forget the rest of the world exists when you get into the writing zone. 

TS: Very true – I am hoping that writing something creative and original that I’m producing will help spark other writing too. 

SCM: Flexing those writing muscles is useful, no matter what you’re writing. Well, it sounds like you have plenty to keep you busy, so we’ll leave it at that – thanks for taking the time to chat and I’ll keep an eye out for your debut novel on the shelves at Indigo one of these days!

A parting shot: the view from the east slope of Koroni, featuring an abandoned beach house (aka the Creepy Koroni compound) no doubt built overtop of some extraordinary finds (T. Stark).

The Mesogaia and Porto Rafti: a couple of historical notes

Here are two minor tidbits about the modern history and culture of the area around Porto Rafti as we eagerly wait for additional team member interviews and contributions to materialize:

(1) Mesogaia, land full of drunks?

This winter I was reading some old accounts about eastern Attica and ran across a three-volume book on the history of the Athenians that was published by an (amateur) Athenian historian and nationalist named Dimitrios Kambouroglou in 1889. Kambouroglou was interested in the non-ancient history of the city and its inhabitants. The book is mostly focused on describing folk traditions and life ways of people in different parts of Athens and Attica during the period of Turkish rule (the Tourkokratia). 

An illustration from Kambouroglou's magnum opus

The book is pretty strange, and you can learn a lot about old customs in there – for example, I learned that during the Turkish period in Athens, you were supposed to put a bunch of salt in the first bath of your baby, in order to make sure it would grow up to become a nostimos anthropos. There is also a fair amount of useful advice about avoiding various evil spirits.

Illustration of a spirit with some low-down notions in mind, from Kamborouglou's history of the Athenians.

Kambouroglou was a member of the urban elite, and you can tell: there is a strong contrast presented between urbane city-dwellers and the marginal (Albanian speaking) populations of Attica outside of the urban center. His book includes a long aside on the villages in Attica outside of Athens, and the Mesogaia is singled out as particularly degenerate, especially because of all of the wine that is produced and consumed there. When discussing the Mesogaia, Kambouroglou opposes the attractive, hospitable, and subtle urbanites and the rowdy, unrefined Albanian speakers of the Mesogaia, who he thinks should be classified somewhere on the spectrum between human and  animals.  He calls Athens “the city of pnevmatos” – that’d be a reference to a spirit/reason in the sense of the noble, civilized, Hellenic way. The Mesogaia, on the other hand, is “the countryside of oinopnevmatos” – implying spirit in a drunky, wino kind of way. According to Kambouroglou’s account, back in the day everyone thought that the Mesogaia was a land of boozy degenerates. I suppose the joke is on Kambouroglou now, since the region is full of successful wineries that offer popular agriturismo-type accommodations and elegant tasting rooms.

A color plate from Kambouroglou's history of the Athenians.

(2) Return of the Exiles from Gyaros in 1974

One of my goals from the winter was to wrangle together a body of archival imagery from Porto Rafti, but mostly this effort has not gotten very far. It’s something I’ve been working on a little this summer. One interesting photo that has turned up is this image of exiled Greeks returning from the island of Gyaros subsequent to the fall of the military junta that governed from 1967–1974. Gyaros is an island to the northwest of Syros that was used as a prison and place of torture/abuse for communists and dissidents thought to be a threat to the  dictatorship. The photo shows a large crowd of people meeting a ferry at the Porto Rafti limani. The still mostly undeveloped slopes to the north of the bay and the familiar silhouette of the Perati massif are visible in the background.

ERT photo of exiles arriving in Porto Rafti, 1974 (from the ERT archives: https://archive.ert.gr/67983/)

Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 5: Jennifer MacPherson

Jennifer MacPherson is a University of Toronto undergraduate student currently heading into a fifth and final year of coursework. She is a standout member of the Classics department, widely admired by professors across a range of subjects from Greek archaeology to Latin verse, and the kind of young person that makes me wish I’d had my life together better at that age! I met Jenny during my very first day of teaching at the University of Toronto in September 2017, and I’ve been lucky to work with her in various circumstances since then – she has been in a number of the courses I’ve taught, was on a team of undergraduate RAs I supervised as part of a Jackman Humanities Institute summer program, co-authored a research paper with myself and Irum Chorghay that was published this year in the AJA,  and was a founding student member of the BEARS project in 2019. Since her normal summer job of working at a children’s camp is off the table this year for obvious reasons, she recently had some spare time to talk with me about life in Toronto Classics, her experiences in Greece last summer, and strategies for enduring the pandemic lockdown here in the big city.

Today's interviewee with a 4th century statue of Aphrodite (courtesy J. MacPherson)

SCM: I first met you when you in the fall of 2017 when you totally hit it out of the park in my Greek 101 class and my Greek history class. So, we’ve known each other for several years now. But how’d it come to pass that you ended up taking Greek and Greek history and majoring in Classics?

JM: Hmmm, I don’t have a good story – I think I just fell into it through a series of random circumstances. Some high schools have a Classics program or a club, but my public school didn’t have any of that. When I was really young, instead of science fairs we had history fairs – so you’d make a papier mache castle instead of a papier mache volcano, that type of thing – and I do remember using a bedsheet as a costume and talking about ancient Greek houses at one point. So maybe that was something formative. 

When I got to university, I always knew I liked history, but then I thought I might do English. But already in my first year I realized that I definitely did not want to do an English major. Then I was thinking about Canadian history for a while, but that didn’t pan out either. I guess I ended up swinging kind of really far away from English eventually and thinking, ‘maybe I’ll do archaeology!’ But at the end I kind of ended up landing in the middle with Classics and Classical literature.

SCM: I like that – you fled from the cruel nightmare of the English department into the welcoming bosom of Classics! But what I really like is the idea of a papier mache castle-volcano hybrid. Like, did the papier mache castle have any baking-soda pyrotechnics involved?

Cool, cool, but which part is going to explode for my edutainment? (S. Murray)

JM: No, nothing like that – no eruptions or explosions!

SCM: I guess that’s one downside of the history fair vs. the science fair: fewer baking soda eruptions. I actually had a friend in university who submitted a baking soda volcano as a final project for an upper level Earth Sciences seminar, and that did not go well for him, but it became kind of legendary. Anyway, now that you landed on Classics as a major, what do you like about the coursework or the department overall?

JM: One thing I really like about it is that contains a lot of the different things that I had wandered around being interested in before. For instance, you can do the languages – I’d always liked learning French, and I enjoy learning the languages in Classics. But you also read the literature and do hands-on stuff like archaeology. So, there are a lot of different things within the department, and I like all those things, so it fits my various interests really well.

Classics is also really flexible these days and I like that you can bring all kinds of other material into it. For instance, I really like horror literature. That’s pretty much the only thing I still like to do with English now: study fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. And I’ve been able to integrate that into Classics – I wrote a paper on Seneca’s Phaedra and I used horror literary theory to analyze the text. So, yeah, I guess what I like is that there is a ton of stuff that can be applied to Classics and vice versa.

Sounion temple spooky scary (J. MacPherson)

SCM: I totally agree with you – that’s one of my favorite things about the field too. It’s a major that contains a multitude of methods even though there is kind of a coherent theme. What you’re actually doing on a day-to-day basis varies a lot.

JM: Yeah, exactly. I really wanted to do a film course at some point in university, but I could never fit it in to my schedule around all of the requirements. But then there was a Classics in film course in the major, so I just took that, which was great.

Creepy Athena in the film version of Alberto Moravia's novel Contempt, which is probably not part of the Classics and film course (S. Murray)

SCM: It’s hard to get bored in a major like that. Well, I guess you could choose to be bored no matter what you do, but that just means you’re a boring person! Which, obviously, you’re not. Do you have a favorite text or object from the ancient world that makes you nerd out every time, or that you return to again and again? And what is it about that thing that gets you really excited?

JM: I really love ancient drama in general. It would be hard to choose between the Latin and the Greek stuff. Greek comedy is great, but I also like Latin tragedy, especially Seneca. But you know, how do you choose between Seneca and Aristophanes? I recently wrote a paper for the Plebeian (the University of Toronto undergraduate Classics journal) about pubic hair depilation in the Thesmaphoriazusae and it was the most bonkers paper I’ve ever written, but also the best paper I’ve ever written. Maybe Aristophanes’ comedies in general are the thing that I really geek about the most.

SCM: It is consistently amazing to me that his plays can still be funny 2,500 years later.

JM: Exactly! They are still really, really funny. It just goes to show that fart jokes are universal. They last throughout time.

SCM: It’s true! That’s not one of the lessons that people anticipate they will take away from a Classics major, but it is an important one – people have always loved fart jokes. Since the beginning of time! And they will always be with us. It would be too bad if science invents a way to keep people from farting. Maybe by 2060 people will be reading Aristophanes and they won’t get the fart jokes anymore without consulting some scholiast from the earlier 21st century or something because farts have become obsolete. 

JM: But until that time….!

A scene from the uproarious Stanford Classics department's production of an Aristophanes play in 2011 (S. Murray)

SCM: Yes, yes, let’s enjoy it while it lasts. Now, I know that last summer was your first time visiting Greece, and you and Irum did some traveling around before we started work on the BEARS project. How was your experience of Greece? Were there any favorite memories or sites that particularly stand out?

JM: We had a great time! We hit a lot of places in Greece – we started in Athens, went to Nafplio, a couple of islands – Santorini and Naxos, and Crete. It’s so great there – I really wish I was there so much right now! I have a calendar of Greece hanging on my wall and I think every day about how I’d rather be there. 

The modern culture there is awesome. The food is so good! Walking around the towns and cities is great, and seeing the archaeological sites in person was cool. The archaeological sites are very closely intermingled with the modern environment, so you can get a drink at a café and then stroll right over to an ancient temple!

Exploring one of many ancient theaters available for inspection in Greece (courtesy J. MacPherson)

We really loved Nafplio, which has a lot of great non-ancient Greek history. We climbed the thousand steps up to the fortress and learned a lot about the history of the Modern Greek state and the evolution of its culture. The people were really nice to us too, really helpful all the time. It was an amazing experience in general.

The view down the steps of the Palamidi in Nafplio (J. MacPherson)

SCM: I’m glad! Greece is totally awesome in all those ways. For sure I also would rather be inside of one of your calendar scenes than my dumpy condo. Another first for you was the BEARS project, which was your first experience doing archaeological fieldwork. This was probably very different than taking a course on Seneca. What were your impressions of work on the project?

JM: I had a great time. By the end of the project I was the most fit I’d ever been in my life. Carrying those bags of sherds up and down a mountain slope really does wonders for your biceps! I remember the very first day that we went out to Raftis and Cat Pratt was showing us how to tell the difference between a piece of pottery and a rock, and then by the end I was picking up all sorts of things and could figure out whether something was Roman or Bronze Age. It was really cool how quickly the learning occurred because we were actually out there in the world doing it. I love being outdoors and have always loved hiking. Fieldwork was like that, but also being productive and finding ancient material. It was really exciting when we’d find something unusual. Once on Koroni, I was counting rooftiles and mixed in with the rooftiles was this piece of pottery that had writing on it. It just said “ED” but we were so excited about it, just losing our minds. That was really cool.

Field friends Irum and Kat explore the neighbouring site of Thorikos in Attica (J. MacPherson)

SCM: Those are very perceptive comments for a first-timer! People often say that they like survey archaeology because it resembles hiking but somehow it’s also work. That’s also a great observation about how quickly you can learn to identify things in the field because the process is so hands on. How did you like life on the project otherwise? Any favorite or not-favorite aspects of living with a bunch of crazy archaeology types?

Jenny and Irum enjoy the boat ride to Raftis island with Captain Vasilis at the helm (S. Murray)

JM: I can’t pinpoint one specific thing that I liked the most, but we had a really great group of people. It was nice to be able to live with them and get off of work and go to the beach or whatever. I will say that we drank way too much beer! Crazy amounts! But we didn’t really get into any trouble. It was so lovely to hang out with them. We probably doubled the profits of this one restaurant Dimitri’s and a great bakery – we ate so much great food. 

The only bad thing was that there was this bee that lived in our upstairs bathroom. We could not get rid of that bee! We kept thinking we had gotten rid of it, but it just kept coming back. I think it was coming through the wood in the ceiling or something. That was kind of terrifying. I remember being in the shower and it was out there and it was like that famous scene in Psycho or something. I guess that’s the best I’ve got for a ‘worst’ thing that happened, because everything was great otherwise.

SCM: I guess we’re doing okay if the worst thing that happened all season was a pesky shower bee. It reminds me of the gopher in the movie Caddyshack – this bee basically outsmarted a house full of highly educated university students and always made it back inside.

Bee territory lurketh within (J. MacPherson)

JM: Eventually we just ceded the territory of the washroom! We were like ‘It’s his now – we’ll just use the downstairs one.’

SCM: Bee: 1, Archaeologists, 0! Even though we couldn’t outsmart the bee, we did have a really fun gang of people to hang out and drink too much beer with.

JM: Yeah it was really fun. And nice to have people from all over the place too.

SCM: Let’s hope that we can all be back together out there again sometime, presuming that things will one day return to semi-normal. Speaking of a return to normal, as of today, we in Toronto are finally allowed to go sit on a restaurant patio to eat and drink. I think we were one of the last places in North America where you couldn’t do that until this week! As restrictions here are lifted, is there anything you’re looking forward to doing that hasn’t been allowed since March?

JM: Not one specific thing, but any real human interaction with people who aren’t just my family. Please? I have been staying in touch with people via text and other stuff – some of my friends and I have been watching foreign films together and texting about it. But it will be really, really nice to actually see everyone in person again, even if it’s socially distanced with lawn chairs or something. 

Toronto social distancing raccoon has got the drop on you! (S. Murray)

It’s weird for me because this is the first summer that I’m not working. I’ve always done camp jobs in the summer since I was 14, but the camps are not really happening this summer. I mean, they are trying to do some summer camps here, but I took one look at that and thought ‘that is going to be a total mess – there is going to be so much bureaucracy and it’ll be impossible not to get sick from all those germy children – NO thank you.’ So I’ve just been kind of alone with myself and my thoughts and stuck in a house with three other people and we’ve been driving each other mental. It will be nice to hang out with someone else.

SCM: Yes, being around someone outside of the immediate household in actual three-dimensions is a very exciting prospect! 

JM: I’ve had enough of these internet conversations – you know ‘can you hear me? is my screen working?’

Lockdown socializing – just like the real thing! (J. Sutherland)

SCM: Haha, tell me about it. I mean, I guess we’re lucky that this is happening at a time with technology that allows us to at least sort of stay connected with others. But it is definitely not the same – a sad, pathetic substitute for actually spending time with friends. And it is very strange to otherwise be stuck inside of your own head with your own thoughts for such a long stretch of time, as you point out. For me this is leading to a slow descent into madness, which is interesting at times, but probably not optimal.

Help! I can only hang on in here for a little while longer. (S. Murray)

JM: It’s easy to become really lazy and unfocused. Last year we were in Greece working hard in the field for a month, then I flew back home and I went straight to work at my job the next day. And I was taking a night class. That was exhausting! This summer is basically the opposite situation, but I’m emotionally exhausted instead. It’s hard to feel motivated to do anything – I’ve been baking a lot, watching reality tv….

Let us set sail on an epic adventure of lockdown baking! (S. Murray)

SCM: Anything to get the time to pass and get through the day, right? In April and May when it was still blizzarding and cold and dark here, and things were seeming really dire, I was trying to figure out if there was a way to induce hibernation in humans – you know, so you could just drink some Alice in Wonderland potion and go to sleep for a year and wake up when things were better. I mean, we were kind of hibernating anyway, we just had to be awake and depressed during it.

That not-so-fresh feeling after four months of lockdown pseudo-hibernation (S. Murray)

JM: Yeah, instead we have to try desperately to distract ourselves from the disaster of the world…by watching reality tv!

SCM: Exactly. But at first when all this hit you were still in classes – and then there was a sudden move to online teaching. What was that like for you as a student? Was it okay, or are you totally dreading online classes for the fall, too?

JM: It went alright, but I think that was only because I really just had one class that actually continued to meet. In my Latin class we didn’t really meet after classes went online – the teacher just gave us some additional readings and told us to work on our essays with the extra time. My Greek class continued to meet online, which was…interesting. I read something about how tiring it can be to do the Zoom calls, and I really agreed with that, because you very much feel like you’ve got to be on even when you’re not on. You can’t really tell if the screen is showing your face or not. I was in Greek class with our friend Paul (another U of T Classics student) and he must have had some sort of noise in the background, so the screen was stuck on his face the whole time and he had no idea. I texted him and told him that all everyone was seeing was his face! And he was totally freaking out – you can’t sneeze or yawn or zone out or anything. You’ve just got to be focused even when you aren’t. You can’t read anyone’s social cues. But I guess it turned out okay. I only had to do that for a couple of class sessions. Everyone else was just telling us to keep up with readings and do the final assignments. But next year will be interesting.

Zoom fatigue: the struggle is real (S. Murray)

SCM: Right, we were lucky because we only had a couple weeks of online stuff, as opposed to people on the quarter system or with longer semesters. Some of my colleagues in the US had to do a whole 10-week quarter online with very little advanced notice, and I think they were totally miserable. 

JM: Thankfully I’m only going part time next year, so I’m not too worried about it. I’ll just have a couple of courses.

SCM: I’m probably more stressed about it than you are! I have no idea what I’m doing.

JM: It must be really hard to lecture through a screen.

SCM: As you said, it’s tough to deal with other people in an educational context without social cues – and if you’re making a prerecorded lecture you have no idea if what you are saying makes sense, because there’s no active feedback at all.

Glassy zoom eyes be staring back at me like... (S. Murray)

JM: I think it’s easier for science classes. My sister took a summer neuroscience course and it was all prerecorded lectures, but that was fine, because the lectures were just conveying introductory information—facts to memorize, that sort of thing. But it’s hard to imagine teaching something like the optative mood in that way, without being able to go back and forth and make sure the students understand the concept.

SCM: Yeah, I’m not sure how that would work. I will definitely have to spend a fair amount of time this summer getting up to speed on this kind of thing. Okay, last question – other than bemusedly observing how your crazy professors are going to adapt to online teaching – anything you’re looking forward to in your last year at university?

JM: It will be exciting to finish up undergrad – I was actually planning to finish last year, but for various reasons it seemed desirable to stick around and take a fifth year, and I think that ended up being a really good choice, what with everything going on in the world now! I’m going to take a few more language courses and apply to grad school, which is exciting and terrifying. But I’m looking forward to that, and moving on to do more research and writing.

SCM: You’ll be a star! No need to be terrified in your case, at least in an academic sense. And it’ll be good to have you around the department for one more year especially since last year ended with a weird and alienating anticlimax. For now, thanks for taking the time to talk to BEARS blog!

The bay of Porto Rafti from Pounta at dawn (J. MacPherson)

Architecture and Mud Brick at Koroni and Elsewhere

In our short pilot season last June we had only just gotten started documenting and studying the abundant architectural remains visible on the sites of Raftis and Koroni. That was something that we had big plans for this summer, but that work is going to have to be pushed forward to 2021, or whenever our fieldwork can safely resume. To produce a proper documentation of the built remains of these sites we’ll need to spend a lot of time cleaning wall foundations, mapping with the dGPS, and (where appropriate) drawing and conducting photogrammetric recording to produce accurate stone-by-stone plans and sections of well-preserved walls and buildings. 

The purpose of this work is not just to create obsessively thorough records of the archaeology of the area, although that’s certainly part of the goal. Another goal is to date the architecture based on its construction style or associated artifacts, although that’s always complicated to do in a survey context with relatively scrappy walls. We’ll also use our careful study of the architecture to try to reconstruct the original appearance of the buildings. 

All of the architecture we’ve observed in the Porto Rafti area consists of relatively low-lying foundations made of rough field stones – no ashlar blocks or cut stones, at least so far. 

A ruined structure on the Koroni acropolis (Photo credit: M. McHugh)

When it comes to reconstructing the original appearance of the built structures represented by these walls, an important question is what the upper part of the architecture would have been made of. A major issue that comes into play here is the question of mud brick. A lot of architecture in the ancient Aegean was built primarily of mud brick on top of a stone foundation (which would prevent groundwater from damaging the bricks). For obvious reasons, mud-brick portions of buildings don’t survive as well as stone components, so we rarely find well-preserved mud-brick architecture, even in excavations. Mud-brick in survey contexts is basically unheard of.

The remains of a mud-brick upper in the fortifications at ancient Eleusis (S. Murray)

One of the many strange conclusions reached by the team of American archaeologists that worked on Koroni around 1960 was that there was absolutely NO mud brick used on the site whatsoever. Apparently the guy who studied the architecture, James McCredie, came to this conclusion because there were no traces of mud-brick apparent on the walls and because there was a lot of collapsed rubble around on the ground. 

That sounds like a pretty silly, flippant argument to me, and I’m guessing when we study the architecture up there more carefully we’ll find plenty of reason to believe that mud brick was used in construction on Koroni. Certainly most of the walls I was documenting on Raftis island look like stone foundations for mud-brick superstructures. In any case, those are the kinds of questions our architecture team will be chewing on next season: what kinds of construction techniques and construction materials are we dealing with, how large would these buildings have been originally, etc.

In conversations about ancient Aegean architecture, I find that mud brick has kind of a spectral mystique. Especially recently, because of my work in architectural documentation on the Mazi Archaeological Project, I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on architecture, and we talk about mud brick as a component of the built environment all the time. We know it was an important part of the architectural landscape in the Aegean, but it rarely exists for us to look at or study as a physical object. We just have to imagine what the mud-brick portions of buildings from the ancient Aegean would have originally looked like, because there is not much of them left. 

A wall of luscious mud brick punctuated with wooden beams outside of Chachapoyas in Peru. The careful observer will be attentive to the tidy running bond pattern used here.

Although most people might think of mud brick as a humble building material, it’s actually completely superior to stone in a lot of ways. It’s great for temperature regulation, keeping out heat in the summer and retaining warmth in the winter, like an animal burrow. The bricks can be made of of widely availably material and are easy and fast to manufacture. They are more modular and regular than, e.g., fieldstones, but they don’t require laborious quarrying, like cut stones (actually, it seems likely that the idea to cut regular stones for architecture came from the shape and utility of modular mud brick construction). As long as they are protected from moisture at the base and top, with some kind of footing and roofing, they can last a really long time, but the structures are easily modified nonetheless. Mud brick is very strong and adaptable and can be used for all kinds of things you might not expect, like vaults and arches. Even though we associate mud with grim filthiness, mud-brick architecture can be incredibly tidy and neat if it is well-maintained. 

Tidy and very thoroughly mortared mud brick in Benito Juarez, Oaxaca province, Mexico.

In sum, mud brick is much more boss than some people give it credit for. Whenever I travel in places where there is a lot of extant mud brick architecture I become very excited and take many photographs of mud brick buildings or remains – these are great for boring your family (or blog readers) with when there’s not much else to talk about or you want to avoid a difficult topic. On a tip from an old friend Adam Stack,  I once stopped into Chachapoyas, a colonial town in northern Peru that is named after a local tribe, whose name means “Cloud Warriors”. This is not the only awesome thing about the town, but it has a lot of great old-school mud-brick architecture. Most of it is plastered over to present a cheery white colonial facade, but there are plenty of places where you can see the construction materials at the interstices. These people do a mean mud brick.

Exposed mud brick elevation in downtown Chachapoyas.
In addition to being used for brick-making, mud is layered over transverse vegetal matting used to protect the wooden ceiling beams in the Chachapoyas architectural style. Just goes to show that it takes much more than one material to roof a house, although we tend to focus on the tiles in survey archaeology.

I also saw some great mud architecture in Kenya a couple of summers ago. The Kenyan villagers tend to use a much wider variety of different techniques for employing mud in their architecture than the Cloud Warriors. There were houses made of regular, mortared mud-bricks, wattle-and-daub, and a kind of hybrid multi-media wood and mud structure that I guess you could call a version of half-timbering. 

A small mud-brick home in northern Kenya, partly repaired with cement, perhaps, at right.
Half-timbered and wattle and daub mud construction on display in northern Kenya.

By far the greatest place to check out the soaring possibilities of mud brick architecture that I’ve ever been, however, is Morocco. That is not to say that the bounteous abundance of mud brick architecture is the only or even the main reason that Morocco is an amazing place to travel. I have never, ever, been in a place with such consistently stupefyingly beautiful landscapes as the ones in Morocco, especially once you get south of the High Atlas mountains, where the geology is stripped clean of most vegetation and you can see the naked, orange-and-red striated evidence of ancient tectonic action all over the place. There are also many dizzyingly steep and epic gorges and canyons to explore, and ample herds of roaming camels and donkeys to accompany your expeditions. Once you get south of the Anti-Atlas AND the Sahel, you can check out some real honest-to-goodness sand dune fields, whose otherworldly orange glows combine with the bright blue Saharan skies to produce an overall aesthetic effect that can only be described as enchanting. The Atlantic coast is dramatically gnarly, its beaches littered with shipwrecks, sleepy diurnal owls, and confusing vistas of green coastal lushness interspersed with massive dune fields emptying directly into the sea. Yeesh, if you can visit Morocco and not spend half of time time with your eyeballs rolling back into the back of your head from too much retina-burning stimulus, you are a stronger person than I’ll ever be.

The landscape around Tizgui-Ida-Ou-Baloul
Halva-geology around Tizgui-Ida-Ou-Baloul.
An Agadir and its oasis in a dramatic gorge west of Tizaghte
Donkey and camel party outside of Mghimina.
The untamed orange sands of the Erg Chebbi. It doesn't even look real!
Fishing boat, estuary, and Sahara dunes coexist in Knifiss National Park.

Returning to the mud brick situation, however, if you are a fan of mud bricks, you seriously ought to get out and visit Morocco as soon as you can. Once you get into the desert regions where building materials are somewhat limited, the quantity of mud brick architecture is seriously unbelievable. Mud brick is used to make everything from the fanciest palaces to everyday houses. 

There are still a lot of sprawling oasis towns that are almost entirely made of mud architecture, with only a few modern concrete structures mixed in to replace failed buildings or to serve the modernizing ambitions of the few local oligarchs. There are also quite a lot of places where the mud-brick ‘old town’ has been totally abandoned, to be replaced by a new concrete town right next door. Even once they are abandoned, the mud brick villages in Morocco last for a long time because of the relatively dry climate, and so there are a lot of totally abandoned but relatively intact villages to investigate.

View over Taghmoute, where the urban fabric is a mixture of mud brick ruins, mud brick masterpieces, and modern concrete constructions.
Mud-brick Acropolis of Tazarte rising majestically from the palm trees.
A whole ruined mud brick neighbourhood in Tazarte.

As I said before, not only typical village architecture but also the most grandiose palaces are made of mud brick in the old Berber villages of Morocco. It’s pretty incredible to see just how tall, intricate, and complex of a structure can be built just with dirt, essentially. The Anti-Atlas region is full of these massive kasbahs, built to house the local lords of Berber tribes. They are often really big, up to five or six stories, and the towers are usually elaborately decorated with crenellations, decorative designs that look like something from a Gothic cathedral, and arches or other forms of window dressing. Looking at these always makes me think of the ziggurats of the ancient Near East – and is a powerful reminder that a castle built from mud can be just as imposing, monumental, and intimidating as one made from stone.

Ruinous mud brick Kasbah near Taliouine.
Decorative multi-level mud-brick constructions in the Kasbah at Tamnougalt.
A sprawling mud-brick kasbah in the shadow of the high Atlas near Telouet.
Decorative kasbah towers of Sidi-bou-Said

Of course, not every building in the village is going to be a massive, elaborately impressive kasbah. But the less-grandiose domestic architecture can be just as interesting and impressive in its fastidious construction techniques. The mud-brick in Morocco usually involves some mortar, used at the horizontal joints of courses and containing some kind of temper, usually straw. Usually the method of bonding or stacking the bricks is relatively regular, although many different techniques can be observed, including some cool houses that combine stones and mud bricks to excellent structural and aesthetic effect. Much of the time the exterior of the bricks is plastered over with the hay-tempered mortar, and then this mortar is painted very bright colors at strategic positions like gates or windows, for an extremely jaunty effect. 

Tiered mud-brick town of Zaouia-Timguidcht
The top of a mud-brick wall against the blue Moroccan sky near Ifrane.
Brightly painted door on a mud-brick house near Tighmert.

In addition to the mud bricks themselves, these structures usually employ a lot of wooden and vegetal elements, especially mats or bundles of reeds available in the oueds that run through most of the major canyon and valley systems, and also the fronds and trunks of the abundant palm trees that populate the oasis towns. The roofs were usually flat and made of palm beams that supported reed or palm rib matting in between, which matting was covered over with a layer of the mud plaster. Wood was also usually used for the windows and the doors, interior supports/columns, and lintels, especially when stone was not available or considered to be too expensive. Often times the builders don’t really even bother processing the vegetal matter, so you’ll see very raw tree trunks and branches just jammed right into the construction.

Lackadaisical palm branches not quite serving as a roof in Taghmoute.
An extant palm trunk and reed roof combination in the agadir of Akka Ighane.
Mud brick and thatch houses a bit worse for the wear in Assa.

If you can only go to one area to check out mud-based architecture in Morocco, the place to be is the region of Rissani in the south central part of the country, near the Algerian border. The modern ‘town’ of Rissani comprises a cluster of structures called ksour, groups of neighborhoods or communities surrounded by massive defensive walls and accessed through monumental gates – all of which (houses and defenses) are made of mud-brick. Inside those monumental gates are whole small, sheltered worlds of mud-brick. You can usually even find stacks of raw materials lying around, too, like palm trunks and buckets of sludge for mortar repairs. People still live in these places, which is good, because it is easy to get lost in the warren of intricate passageways, and you’ll often need help finding the way  out.

Decorated entrance to one of the mud-brick ksour of Rissani.
A mud-brick encased passageway deep inside a Rissani ksar.
Mud brick neighborhood in a Rissani ksar; note the palm thatch employed for roofing at left.
Mud brick for miles in the Rissani ksar.
Expanses upon expanses of mud-based architecture in Rissani.
Brightly decorated mud-brick gate, and a mosque tower rising above, to one of the Rissani ksour.

Anyway, Rissani is amazing! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about mud brick architecture and how much a good builder can achieve with it. That said, of course it is very unlikely that the mud brick architecture we’d be reconstructing for either Koroni or Raftis was anything so magnificent/elaborate as any of this Moroccan architecture. But, just in the abstract, it’s educational to spend time around real-life specimens of mud-brick, because they give you a real sense of the advantages and possibilities of the material. 

In the Aegean it seems like we have a real bias towards the study of hard things – especially rocks and ceramics – which often leads us to  underplay the importance of the kinds of materials that don’t survive as well. I think there’s also this conception in our field that something monumental must be made of stone, and that something made of mud brick was not so impressive. But checking out some real good and proper mud architecture in Morocco will quickly disabuse anybody rational of that notion. 

I’m definitely not on board with with McCredie’s argument that Koroni couldn’t have had any mud brick architecture. I wonder if he thought it would be unmanly for his military camp occupants to use such a weak, soft material for building their fortification walls…or maybe he thought that these guys were in such a hurry to throw up a wall for their sudden Chremonidean war needs that they couldn’t have been bothered to manufacture any special material for construction. Anyway, who knows – those are just my stray thoughts for the day. For now the team is stuck indoors for the most part, so we’ll have to wait and see what we come up with in terms of architectural reconstructions after additional study of the walls next year.

Fuzzy baby donkey at Tighmert definitely approves of his mud-brick wall surroundings.

Post-Collapse Ruins in the Landscape beyond the Aegean: Georgia

One of the questions that we are trying to address with the BEARS project relates to the bigger issue of what was going on during the twelfth century BCE, after the so-called collapse of the complex ‘palatial’ states that loom large in the material record of the Aegean before that. The question of how society developed in this period is absolutely my favorite professional research topic.  This is not unrelated to my lifelong romance with post-apocalyptic fiction – in turn, the general popularity of this genre proves the point that we humans are eternally fascinated by the idea of moving forward with life amidst various kinds of aftermaths.

My particular perspective on life in the post-collapse Aegean has been strongly influenced by travels in other parts of the world, where (unlike most places I’ve lived in North America) you are often surrounded by ruins of the recent past. None of these contexts provides a perfect analogy for what happened in the Bronze Age, or any archaeological situation, obviously, but I find that wandering around among recent ruins is evocative in a way that just thinking intellectually about the LBA collapse is not.

Although I’ve had a lot of interesting experiences along these lines in many places, I have come up with many of my best ideas about what happens when you are living in the aftermath of a collapsed state while traveling in Georgia, which used to be a part of the Soviet Union. 

There are all kinds reasons I would recommend Georgia as a destination for travel – the people are extremely kind, fun, and welcoming; the food and wine are seriously unsurpassed (and I don’t even like food or wine that much!); the natural environment is stunning and hugely varied from region to region; there are SO many awesome barnyard animals everywhere (my favorite thing); it’s cheap as heck; the driving is an adventure; the birding is spectacular – I could keep going.

Epic landscape of the Svaneti region in the Georgian Caucasus
Friendly locals near Paravani lake in SW Georgia
A fulsome herd of road sheep in the Kakheti region, as seen from the car window.
A curious pony hangs out in Tusheti, the wildest Georgian mountain region of them all.

But as an archaeologist, the most fascinating and rewarding thing to me about traveling in Georgia is the ruinous landscape situation – Georgia is full of all sorts of ruins and crumbling, forgotten monuments, sometimes sitting cheek-by-jowl with state-of-the-art modern police stations and megamalls. Unlike the situation in Greece, most of these ruins are not what we’d usually call archaeological sites. Most of the ruins in Georgia are remainders of a very recent past, a past during which life in the country was very different from how it is today. They are mostly ruins and images from the 1940s to 1980s, left behind in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Noseless Soviet man brandishing an aluminum weapon in a small village near Vardzia in southern Georgia.
A large semicircular structure celebrating Soviet victory in WW II, located on the Russian Georgian military highway through the Caucasus. Note the swastika being stomped by the jolly green giant at center.
A disused bureau of science in Tbilisi
A hay truck rumbles past an old Soviet military monument in southeastern Georgia.

Georgia has an interesting relationship with its Soviet past. I won’t go into too much detail, and obviously I’m not an expert on the topic, but let’s just say that the region has a long, proud historical tradition and culture of its own (Davit the Builder, ya heard?!), and Georgians often chafed under the Soviet regime. They officially declared independence from the USSR in March 1991, before its official dissolution in December 1991. The new Georgian state has – more or less – enthusiastically embraced democracy and the cultivation of an Europeanizing cultural identity since then. Although the Abkhazia/South Ossetia situations make it clear things are, as ever, quite more complicated than they might appear to the naive outsider, from my experience there does not seem to be a lot of nostalgia for the Soviet past in most places there.

On the other hand, probably the most famous Georgian in history is a fellow from the city of Gori originally called Joseph Jugashvili, better known to the world as Joseph Stalin. Obviously Stalin was a bad dude, and lots of Georgians, especially intellectuals, were persecuted and killed under Stalinist rule. Many others died of hunger or other collateral effects of policies put into effect by Stalin. But there seems to be some residual pride in Georgia about their most famous son, especially regarding his role in leading the Red Army against the Nazis in WW II. In Stalin’s hometown of Gori, you can still visit a big hagiographic Stalin museum and purchase sundry Stalin-themed merch in the gift shop on the way out.

Stalin tapestry in the Museum dedicated to his life in Gori

Even more amazing from a western point of view, a massive, very monumental statue of ol’ Joey Steel in the center of Gori was only destroyed in 2008, in the aftermath of the Russian bombing and the eruption of conflicts over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. If you travel around Georgia you will still see vivid portraits of Stalin on a regular basis. Usually, but not always, these are part of WW II memorials – which have often been both actively maintained and spared from vandalism out of respect for the war dead, unlike a lot of other art from the same period. Staggering numbers of Georgians fought and died in WW II, and the people are rightly proud of the sacrifices they made in that conflict.  

A nice Stalin watercolor painting watches over a war memorial in the Kakheti region of Georgia.
A Lenin-Stalin pebble mosaic above the door to a cable-car station in Chiatura.

On balance I think it’d be fair to say that there’s more ambivalence about the role of the Soviet past in Georgia than you might find in some other places. For whatever reason – residual pride in the Stalin connection, a generally reticent attitude towards destruction of art, or disinterest in wasting a bunch of time thoroughly dismantling all remnants of the Soviet past – many vestiges of the Soviet era remain.

As an archaeologist, and someone who grew up in the United States in the 80s, when the Soviet Union embodied all of the bad guys and scary ideas in pop culture, nuclear shelter drills were part of grade school preparedness routines, and films like War Games  captured every young kid’s imagination, I find being immersed in these ruins endlessly fascinating and bewildering.

I will never forget the moment that I saw a massive propaganda mosaic looming from the giant vertical expanse of a factory wall in Georgia for the first time, in the summer of 2013. I was totally agog and spent like an hour freaking out about it, and couldn’t think about anything else for days. The aesthetic is very different from what I had ever seen in western art – the subject matter, too, but there was something completely stupendous to me about how differently the conception of the human form and the presentation of society’s ideals and all that kind of stuff seemed to work compared to what I was used to. Not to mention the fact that some of those mosaics are amazingly beautiful and seductive as design masterpieces. I can see why nobody wanted to destroy them, even though they come from a past about which people are ambivalent. But it’s also clear that the independent Georgian state hasn’t shown any interest in preserving them. A lot are in bad shape, crumbling off of walls or being papered over with political adds. 

Some compositions are very virtuoso, although you can really tell the difference between the early, technically perfect ones from the Soviet heyday, and the sloppier 1980s ones from when the wheels were starting to come off the state. I can imagine that budgetary cuts to the propaganda mosaic department in the late 80s were a lot like those being handed down to humanities departments at red state schools in the US right now! 

Anyway, I really can’t get enough of these things. It’s so amazing to me when I think about the nasty realities we were taught about the Soviet Union growing up in school, to be in a place where you can see the story the state was telling inside of its borders at the exact same time. It’s all these bright, cheery depictions of happy workers and science heroes and fecundity and people dancing and making wine! 

Spacemen and others on an urban mosaic in Abasha.
Mosaic buddies lurk on a factory wall behind a coil of barbed wire.
A monumental mosaic showing heroic workers on a factory wall near Zestafoni.
Marching in orderly agricultural harmony and joy near Batumi
An autoshop mosaic depicting the evolution of the Lada, outside of Tbilisi
The flaccid 80s style still shows a muscular emphasis on industry and science, next to a rail line heading into Tbilisi.
A mosaic not long for this world on the side of an old factory near Batumi.

Although the happiness of the workers is very likely to be exaggerated in the mosaics, it’s actually true that there was a lot of industrial work being done in massive, purpose-built facilities in Georgia under the Soviets. That brings me to another category of recent ruins that dominates the landscape – huge, hulking industrial complexes that were obviously designed to satisfy the demands of a sprawling empire, but which were mostly abandoned after its demise. The best place to go and see these decaying industrial landscapes is the area around Rustavi, just southeast of Tbilisi, but there are a lot scattered all around the lowlands and valleys between Tbilisi and the Black Sea, too. 

Rustavi’s dystopian landscape of concrete communal housing blocks was obviously the home of a huge army of workers that populated an even bigger complex of steel-production facilities. A few of the Rustavi steel working plants have recently been bought up by Indian companies and repurposed for the modern era, but others are still being picked through for scrap glass and metal. The noxious fumes emitting from the biggest Rustavi steel plant ruin suggest that it probably got destroyed by some superfund-type disaster that never got cleaned up, so nobody really hangs out there. 

But some of the other facilities are still in use informally – as smithies or places to harvest equipment and other materials needed for construction, home repair, or whatever. People are not exactly wealthy in the Georgian countryside, so I think for them it would be hard to afford, say, a new tractor. If one is lying around and you can get it to work, why not use it? You have to admire their determination to keep on cracking away with whatever industrial equipment the Soviets left behind until it no longer keeps on keepin’ on itself. Tractors, excavators, conveyor belts, welders – you name it, you will see mid-century CCCP equipment still in very active use all over the place. And if something won’t work as what it was intended to be, you can always be creative and find a way to use it for something else!

Among the ruins of a steel-working facility in Rustavi.
Old equipment intact inside of a massive glass-bottling factory near Surami in the central lowlands of Georgia.
Sinister-looking graphite-type lugs in the ruins of an industrial complex in Surami.
Pinups in an employee's locker in the ruins of an industrial complex near Surami.

By far my favorite place in all of Georgia is the town of Chiatura, located in a dingy, usually rainy ravine in the Caucasus foothills not too far from the western border of the breakaway region of South Ossetia. I won’t talk too much about Chiatura here – you can read about it in Slate or Atlas Obscura instead. Long story short, Chiatura was developed as a mining town because the ravine in which it’s located is rich in manganese. To help get workers around the complex topography, the Soviets built a series of low-tech cable-cars in the 1950s. You could still ride around on them when I visited in 2013, 2014, and 2016, but one by one they are falling apart and being cannibalized for spare parts. The old mining facilities are also being used in the same manner – until they stop working. Whenever they do, they are reused for other stuff – in 2016, one old disused mining facility was being used by a group of shepherds to tan hides. 

View into the ravine of Chiatura from one of many cable-cars that traverse its topography.
Typical weather in Chiatura, a Lada, and the Manganese sign at the entrance to the town.
An old photo of the manganese glory days seen taped to the wall of one of the cable car stations.
View from the departures level of the light blue cable car terminal.
The rickety tower of flywheels and cables that keeps the whole operation moving.
A passenger peers through the window of an orange cable car in Chiatura.
Friendly shepherds operating a tannery out of what used to be an industrial facility just outside of Chiatura.

In general, given our western culture of waste and constant replacement of old stuff as soon as something better comes along, I think it’s cool to see how resourceful the Georgians are at making use of whatever is around them that can still be made useful. I once saw a guy using a three-legged chair as an umbrella! Talk about thinking outside of the box.

An old Soviet train car being used as a bridge over a fast-moving torrent near Vardzia in southwestern Georgia. You gotta wonder how the hell they rigged this up!
The hind end of a Lada repurposed as the hind end of a horse-drawn buggy in the Kakheti region.

Aside from industrial ruins, another coherent set of ruins in Georgia are  Soviet-era cultural amenities. Because Georgia is a relatively mountainous country and home to a number of mineral springs, the Soviets developed some nice resort-type spa towns for wealthy plutocrats to visit on their vacations. So far I’ve only been to two of these – Tskhvarichamia near Tbilisi and Tskaltubo out west near the city of Kutaisi. Outside of Tskvarichamia is a long cinder-block wall covered in a series of colored terracotta relief panels that presents one incredibly complex and intricate propaganda tale – I’d need a whole other post to cover it! And there are some cool other ruins of statues there. But most of the fancy spa hotels of Tskhvarichamia have – in tried and true Georgian way – been repurposed, this time as makeshift, not-exactly-on-the-books apartments (Georgians are seriously superninjas of splicing into power grids). 

Tskaltubo is in the midst of being revived as a mineral spa bath town, so most of the squatters have been kicked out of its fancy old spa buildings, making it possible to wander in and check out what was left behind. Inside the ruins of those spa baths were a lot of papers, photos, and objects from back in the good old days when the apparatchniks descended on the town for feasting and sport, and maybe the not so good old days when sick people visited to take the cure of the mineral waters and healthy airs. If you were an archaeologist of the Soviet past I can imagine that stuff would be a real treasure trove of documentary and artifactual evidence.

Hundreds of meters of terracotta art on the mountain road leading up to Tskhvarichamia.
Sputnik spacemen on one of the panels of the Tzkvarichamia triumph wall.
Nature reclaims a statue outside of the old spa town of Tzkhvarichamia.
A photo of vacationing plutocrats taped to the wall of an old spa hotel in Tskaltubo.
Medical records litter the ruins of the old spa hotels of Tskaltubo.

One of the few common types of ruin in Georgia that seems to have been more or less left intact, but mostly gutted, and never repurposed or reused is the Stalinist theater. Almost every town in Georgia has a big, empty, ruined Stalinist theater. I’m guessing people were forced to go watch propaganda films in these places, and maybe they don’t have so many fond memories of that. Or maybe the buildings are just too specialized to have much use for modern communities.

The stately facade of a disused Stalinist theater building in one of the suburbs of Chiatura.
Soviet style wall-paintings inside of the disused theater outside of Chiatura.
The charred ruins of a Stalinist theater in Kvareli.
Actor-themed art outside the old theater in Zugdidi.

The last type of Soviet ruin I’ve encountered in the Georgian countryside are the remains of obviously military installations. These have a completely different demeanor these days than any other Georgian ruins – they have obviously been purposefully and completely annihilated, and stripped down to a bare core of useless concrete. I’d guess that the Soviets intentionally and completely destroyed any useful military emplacements prior to pulling out their forces, for the obvious reason that the independent Georgian state couldn’t turn around and use any of the military technology or equipment against them in future conflicts. But I don’t really know the story there.

The ruins of some kind of military facility near Dedoplitskaro.
Detail of concrete kablammos in the military ruin northwest of Dedoplitskaro.
Horses wander about in a blown-up military base near Tbilisi

Something that really strikes me about this material is how complicated a picture of the relationship of people with the past and their built environment it presents – even in a case where the “collapse” in question was something so dramatic, so global, and so definitive as the demise of the Soviet Union. While some stuff was obviously annihilated or gutted purposefully, like the military bases or the theaters, a lot of things remained in use or were kept up, and still others were just passively left to die a natural death. Thinking about this always reminds me that the story of the post-Mycenaean period must have been complicated and piecemeal too. Not that it’s an exact analogy, but I just find that physically moving among these ruins provides a lot of food for thought when I come back to consider the Bronze Age.

It also makes me kind of sad that I didn’t study material culture in post-Soviet circumstances instead of post-Mycenaean ones in college and grad school. Not that I even knew that was a topic at the time – I tried to take a Russian literature course as a freshman at Dartmouth but couldn’t hack it and basically failed out – or that it’s an obvious thing someone would study now.  Anyway, it’s too late for me! I am not sure if there is any good English language scholarship on the history and reception of these monuments in places like Georgia, but it sure would be a fascinating book to write for someone with the requisite language skills and art historical training.

A WW II memorial in the Kakheti region in June 2013.
The very same WW II memorial, blown into bits, in June 2014.
A young Georgian boy plays in the shadow of a Soviet war memorial near an old communal housing block in Chiatura.

Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 4: Grace Erny

Grace Erny is currently a PhD candidate in Classics at Stanford University, previously having acquired an MA from the University of Colorado and a BA from Macalester College. Like Joey Frankl, who you’ll remember from an earlier post, she came to the BEARS project highly recommended as a veteran of the Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP), and valiantly led much of the intensive survey on the Pounta peninsula and Raftis island in 2019. She is now working on her dissertation and anticipating an upcoming move to Athens in August, pending the inevitable visa issues. Amidst all of this important work, Grace generously agreed to spend some time on the less-important task of being subjected to my inane interview questions, from the familiar confines of Stanford Graduate housing in Escondido village.

Grace strikes an intrepid pose while gazing from on high at the site of Anavlochos on Crete in 2018 (D. Nakassis, courtesy G. Erny)

SCM: You are currently completing your PhD in Classical archaeology at Stanford University. But let’s peer back into the more distant past – how did you get into archaeology and Classics, and what made you choose the program at Stanford?

GKE: I definitely did not come to Classics on purpose – I got there through a love of archaeological fieldwork. When I was in high school, I was very fortunate to do a summer program at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. It’s a really great place, a nonprofit in southwest Colorado that does archaeological research and education and works with Native American community partners. They also have a field school where they teach high school students about the Prehispanic Southwest and show them how to dig.

I excavated in a midden – basically a big trash heap – in a Pueblo III settlement called Goodman Point Pueblo, and I found that I loved digging. I was in this trash pile finding stuff – lithics, Mesa Verde Black on White pottery, etc. – and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. That made me really wanted to study archaeology in college. 

Grace excavating at Goodman Point in 2006 (courtesy G. Erny)

The college where I went had one excavation which happened to be run out of the Classics department – a project in northern Israel, Omrit, where Joey also worked. I was actually his first trench supervisor ever, so I’ve known Joey for a really long time!

That’s how I got into Classics – it was really just through the coincidence of wanting to do an excavation and that being where the opportunity was. Before starting at Stanford, I went back to work at Crow Canyon as a full-time field archaeologist. When I decided to do a PhD, I applied to two different kinds of programs: Classics, because I had come to really love working in Greece, but also Anthro, because I also loved working in the American Southwest. Stanford was actually the only Classics program that I applied to. 

Temple ruins at the site of Omrit in northern Israel (S. Murray)

But I ended up coming to Stanford, partly because I really liked Stanford’s Archaeology Center. The cool thing about the Center is that you can be in a Classics department and do the Classics-y things but there is also a really active and physically connected archaeology community. Also, I was told that if you do Anthro in the U.S. system and you work as an archaeologist in Greece, nobody really understands what you do and it’s confusing for people. Which is too bad – it’s just a stupid artifact of the way the disciplines are split up. But then at the Archaeology Center at Stanford there are two talk series every week with people who work all over the world. Everyone takes a theory class with Ian Hodder, which is a great experience. And I took several other Anthro classes and have an Anthro faculty member on my dissertation committee. So, the program provides a good mix of both things – the Classics training and the literature, but then also the opportunity to work with Anthro faculty and students and learn from their methods and approaches.

SCM: Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense! Digging a trash heap isn’t quite so Vegas as Rob’s early experiences in the buffalo tanks in the Southwest, but it sounds like a stellar opportunity. I agree with your points about the value of the Archaeology Center, too. It is kind of a bummer that archaeology in North America rarely has its own autonomous department. We all end up orphaned in these different disciplines– Classics, Art History – with a lot of people that don’t really understand what we do or what our training is. But at least you have some of these interdisciplinary centers that make a space for archaeologists to come together.

GKE: Yeah, you know how it is in Classics – archaeologists tend to feel marginalized by the philologists and are at a disadvantage in general: we end up having to take all the languages as well as getting trained up in archaeology, which is a big challenge. And some archaeology friends in Anthro departments have told me that there can be a similar dynamic with socio-cultural anthropology and anthropological archaeology, so, yeah – I think it’s good to have a place where the archaeologists can come together and feel like they have a home base.

Ian Morris's much-un-Stackenblochen desk in the Stanford Archaeology Center, February, 2010 (S. Murray)

SCM: We have to take what we can get, I suppose – a refuge from the downcast gaze of the philologists, etc. And Stanford does that better than many places. For sure I think Classical archaeology benefits from having people like you around, who have sought out training in methods and ideas outside the narrow frame of Old World archaeology, so have absorbed approaches from North American archaeology too.

GKE: Well, working in the Southwest definitely made me a much better excavator! When I went back to Crow Canyon before my PhD, we were working on the Basketmaker Communities Project, and it was all dirt architecture. Up to that point I’d only dug architecture with stone walls. But at the Basketmaker III site, the Dillard Site, where we were working, people lived in pithouses that were dug into the ground. You have to pay a lot more attention to the different colors and textures of the dirt, because there is no masonry. I think I dug 30 postholes in one month, because I did all of the postholes in one pithouse. Some were really deep, like elbow deep! Anyway, it was good practice. 

A series of posts, but no holes, in the western Argolid (S. Murray)

SCM: Grace Erny – posthole maestro: you heard it here first! That is certainly a far cry from my first excavation in Pompeii where you knew you hit a floor because…it was a mosaic. Not quite so subtle. It sounds like you really love excavating and have dug a lot of different kinds of places. But I understand that your dissertation is on survey material and how to interpret finds from archaeological surveys. How did you end up landing on a survey-themed topic for your dissertation, and what exactly is the project designed to do?

GKE: I started getting interested in survey when I worked at WARP, which I previously wrote about here. We read all of this stuff in 2014 about survey methodology and the kinds of questions survey is trying to answer, and I found a lot of that reading compelling. And I really enjoyed working on surveys – I’m obviously working on BEARS now. 

In my dissertation, I’m focusing a lot on survey data because it turned out to be the best dataset with which to address the questions I wanted to deal with, but it wasn’t really the plan from the beginning. My dissertation is on inequality and social differentiation on Crete in the later part of the Iron Age. There is a lot of work on Crete in the earlier Iron Age, but I’m looking at the Late Geometric to the Classical period, which is a kind of strange period in Cretan archaeology. There is a lot of stuff from the Protoarchaic or Orientalizing period – probably the floruit of the Cretan city-state was in the 7th century – they had some of the earliest written laws, etc. But then in the 6th and 5th centuries there just isn’t that much, and it’s odd because that’s a period when you have a ton of material from other parts of the Greek world. There are also a lot of literary sources describing Crete as a strange oligarchical society that’s very unequal, at least from an Athenian point of view. And I got pretty interested in that idea – was Crete really distinct in terms of inequality?

Section of the Gortyn law code from Archaic Crete (S. Murray)

In archaeology one of the most popular proxies through which to assess inequality is variation in house size across or within excavated settlements. So initially my dissertation was going to look at houses. I started making a huge database of Cretan excavated houses. But I noticed a lot of the houses that we have from this period are located in big, nucleated settlements, and they often aren’t very well-published. Some of the houses that are published are really massive and seem to be end-stage consumers of agricultural products processed elsewhere. That’s what’s happening at Azoria, for instance. 

I started thinking more critically about this house size metric as a tool for measuring inequality. At a site like Azoria, where you have four enormous houses that are all the same size and are all full of fancy pithoi, it seems like they are consuming a lot of stuff produced elsewhere. So, you could look at the settlements where the houses are all the same size, and you could say: “Oh, it’s really equal! Everything is awesome! It’s Greek equality! Amazing!” But that wouldn’t actually make sense based on all of the other evidence.

The site of Azoria, front center, in its dramatic mountain landscape (S. Murray)

At that point I started thinking about the survey evidence, and how to model the outfield – how could you think about the production side of inequality and the (possibly exploitative) relationships between producers and consumers. Most discussions of inequality are really focused on consumption, so there seemed to be a lacuna there. In terms of the evidence, there has been a ton of survey work on Crete. There have been some attempts to synthesize it for the Minoan and EIA periods, but not much for later periods. So, there was all this data that nobody had ever looked at for these periods. And, with the raw material, there’s also room to do adjustments and refinements, because we’ve learned a lot more about ceramic chronologies for these periods since most of the surveys were conducted in the 80s and 90s. In general, then, I saw an opportunity not only to synthesize previously collected data, but also to go back and revisit some of the survey assemblages, and to bring all that data to bear on this big question of inequality.

What I’m doing now is looking closely at tiny sites in the countryside that most people have identified as farmsteads. I’m digging into what’s actually at those places, whether they are functionally different to one another, how they are related to excavated settlements, etc.

Complex landscapes of production and consumption in rural Crete, near Ierapetra (S. Murray)

SCM: Wow, that is a really smart, really well-conceived topic and approach. It’s really impressive to hear the narrative there about how the project developed, and that you changed tack when you saw that the data you wanted to use to answer your question wasn’t up to the task. Keeping a flexible, critical mind about how or how not to proceed as you work through the data in that sense requires a certain acute, self-aware intelligence. Other than being the result of your own intellectual and conceptual development, do you think that your project is particularly Stanfordian, or did aspects of the program help lead you to this particular kind of dissertation?

GKE: I took an environmental archaeology course in Anthro with Andrew Bauer, the Anthro faculty member on my committee. He works in Iron Age India. While I don’t use palynology or soil micromorphology or any of those methods in my dissertation, that class helped me think about what survey and environmental studies can tell us about ancient inequality (that’s a big focus of Bauer’s scholarship). So, that was pretty instrumental.

It’s not a specific class, but I have been really influenced by Ian Morris’s scholarship, which of course has changed a huge amount over the decades. I mean, you read Ian Morris from 1987, Burial and Society, and it’s all about synthesizing and analyzing a huge amount of data. I love that book, though I don’t agree with all of it, but I also really like Archaeology as Cultural History from 2000, which is his post-structuralist phase. Let’s say he has gone through a lot of incarnations as a scholar. When I was coming up with my dissertation topic, I thought a lot about Ian’s idea of the “middling class.” He sees a “middling ideology” arising archaeologically in the burial record in the eighth century, and he argues that this foreshadows the development of democracy and an ideology of equality between citizen males in the Classical period. 

The site of Lato on Crete, where architecture suggests the existence of state institutions somewhat distinct from those present on the mainland (S. Murray)

But that’s a very Athenian thing, and I’d worked on Crete at that point, where the material is so different from the mainland. So, does this middling class thing actually work everywhere, or can we tell a different story on Crete? I’m still working on this part of the dissertation, but I think that the idea of the Classical small-holding farmstead, which looks a certain kind of way on the mainland and in mainland survey, has been integral to the idea of a “middling” farmer class and a Greek ideology of equality. But that just doesn’t seem to be happening in the same way on Crete. I think a lot about Ian’s work – sometimes it seems like I can’t write more than a couple of pages without citing him. He has an article on everything. The project is very rooted in that body of work. 

And many Stanford Classics students tend to produce these projects – your dissertation is one example – that synthesize and reinterpret preexisting published work at scale. That is what we’re encouraged to do. 

It's go big history or go home for Stanford archaeology PhDs (S. Murray)

SCM: Yeah, it is not the kind of program where you are going to publish the pottery from Ian’s excavation as your dissertation.

GKE: Absolutely not.

SCM: Now we’ve talked about some pretty heavy work stuff (this is what happens when you get a couple of Stanford Iron Age nerds together!), but let’s now move to the real hard-hitting questions. Something that my colleagues and I spent a lot of time doing at Stanford was sampling all of the burritos in the Bay Area. What about you, do you have a favorite place? Care to weigh in on this important issue?

The scene at La Bamba taqueria in Mountain View, ca. 2010 (S. Murray)

GKE: This is a pretty hard hitting question! The Northern California burrito is a glorious creation. I grew up in Northern California, so I’ve been eating these since I was a child. My favorite is probably El Farolito in the mission. They have really good burritos. Do you have an opinion?

SCM: I remember eating a lot of burritos and that they were all awesome, but as a rustic Appalachian from coal country I can’t say I was all that much of a subtle connoisseur. I don’t think I have ever met a Mexican food I didn’t like. There was a place near where I lived in Palo Alto that had really spicy chorizo burritos, which I crushed a lot of while studying for general exams. But given that it is Palo Alto I’m sure it’s closed now.

Awesome Vicente on the wall of a taqueria in Palo Alto, ca. 2010 (S. Murray)

GKE: Yeah, I think everything good in Palo Alto is closed. Even the Nuthouse (the only decent dive bar in Palo Alto and a favorite haunt of Stanford grad students) is closing now!

SCM: WHAT? That is crazy. Let’s not go there: I don’t want to get too emotional. Speaking of Mexican food, I don’t have to tell you that Porto Rafti, where we live for BEARS, has some extremely authentic Mexican cuisine on offer at the world-famous Conga Lounge. Aside from Greece’s best Mexican food, what else about Porto Rafti did you like (or not like) as a place to live and work?

Grace, Elliott, and Matthias enjoy a lunch break on Pounta – in the distance are Raftis and Raftopoula islands (K. Apokatanidis)

GKE: Every field experience I’d had in Greece before BEARS involved staying in a very tiny village. Porto Rafti is really different because it is a seaside resort situation. I am not going to lie – I did miss the village-y aspect of things. But Porto Rafti is awesome because the sites themselves are so cool and unlike anything I’d ever surveyed before – finding so many lithics, or going to work on a boat! I’d never done that before on an archaeological project, and that was so awesome. I also really liked the house that Rob, Maeve, and I stayed in, which was also the home of our tortoise friend Marina, and the owner Giorgos was so friendly and great. I enjoyed the community.

Giorgos house roomies Maeve, Grace, and Rob at home after a day of work in Porto Rafti in summer 2019 (R. Stephan)

It was also cool to go there because I took Modern Greek for four years at Stanford and the professor, Eva Prionas – whom you also know – has been going to Porto Rafti since she was a kid because her family was Athenian and had a summer house there. I had heard her talking about Porto Rafti all the time, and when I found out your project was in Porto Rafti, I thought that was great, that I could actually go and work in this place I’d heard so much about.

SCM: Yeah, that is funny! I can’t remember that she talked about Porto Rafti back when I was in class with her, but I’m probably just getting senile. I agree that it’s an unusual setting for fieldwork, and kind of a strange town in a lot of other ways. But the Prionas connection is great – we’ll all have to hang out there together someday.

GKE: Yeah, I talked to her the other day! She has a book on Porto Rafti’s history that mentions your AJA article and she was really excited – she was like, “Look! Sarah Murray in the Porto Rafti book!”

Sofia Gliati-Chasioti's book on the history of Porto Rafti (G. Psaltis)

SCM: Haha, that’s awesome. I’m famous! I can retire! But, seriously, Eva is great – I am glad that Stanford has someone like that on staff to teach Modern Greek, and that the program encourages people to do that. Now turning to another question about fieldwork. It sounds like you’ve worked on a bunch of really amazing projects with excellent people and superb mentors who’ve provided you with many memorable experiences. Any favorite, most impactful, or most exciting moments that stand out in all those years of work?

GKE: Hmm, that’s a hard question! I’d have to talk a lot about Anavlochos here, the excavation where I work in Crete, directed by Florence Gaignerot-Driessen. That project is just unbelievably amazing. The site is really cool, because you have a cemetery and a sanctuary and votive deposits and a settlement – you almost never get the fully picture of ritual, mortuary, and settlement contexts from one site! It’s like a sampler of all the different contexts you could possibly work in. 

View to the village of Vrachasi, home base for the Anavlochos team, from the mountain above (G. Erny)

Anavlochos also combines the things I like best about survey and excavation. You have to hike a lot to get to the settlement and the votive deposits – to reach the votive deposits, you basically have to do a rock scramble over a beautiful Cretan mountain for almost an hour. So before you do the excavation, you get the survey feeling of wandering up the mountain on the old Ottoman cart road. It’s the best of both worlds.

View from the heights of Anavlochos towards the sea to the north (G. Erny)

One of my favorite Anavlochos moments was in 2017. The survey team had found figurines on the surface of one part of the mountain during the previous year. I was digging in this area, in a tiny bedrock crevice, with just one other team member. So we were scraping this crevice and basically hanging over the edge of the mountain. The crevice was just stuffed with Late Minoan IIIC figurines, including a lot of animal figurines like birds and bulls. It was so cool! We kept finding figurine after figurine, and we had to take a dGPS point on each of them, but they kept popping up so quickly it was hard to keep track, so we were using labelled nails to mark their place and then would shoot the nails. It was crazy. 

That was my first year on Anavlochos. I had been to the site year before because I had been working at Jan Driessen’s project at Sissi on the coast, and we went up to visit. Florence took us to see the Geometric houses and I just thought: ‘I need to dig here. This is the coolest site I’ve ever seen.’ So, yeah, little LM IIIC figurine-palooza was a real highlight in recent years.

A whopping big wheelmade Postpalatial bull figurine from Phaistos in the Heraklion museum on Crete (S. Murray)

SCM: It’s hard to match that kind of experience! It sounds like such a cool site and a super fun place to work – hiking and figurine deposits all at once…

GKE: It almost wasn’t fair – it was zero work. The deposit was slope wash in a bedrock crevice, so you just brush the dirt off and suddenly, oh, a bunch of figurines!

SCM: I’m thinking about how in archaeology there are people that just seem to have a magical level of good luck, and find unexpected and interesting stuff wherever they go. Hugh Sackett was famous for this – with the Palaikastro kouros, Lefkandi, etc. But it sounds like you might have the magic touch, too.

GKE: That would be cool. I hope that is true.

The site of Palaikastro as seen from the peak sanctuary above at Petsophas (S. Murray)

SCM: You could put it on your CV. Magical Hugh-Sackett type bringer of figurines. Okay, final question. You are about to head to Greece to spend the next academic year at the ASCSA in Athens, which I imagine is exciting. What are you looking forward to about that experience, and what are some of your goals for your stay there – not just necessarily academic goals, but things you might want to do or see in and amongst the many hours of Blegen toil?

GKE: Well, I’m really excited to use the famed American School library. I’ve been inside it, but I’ve never really sat and worked in there. I’ve heard it’s really great. That’ll be nice because Stanford’s library is not great for Greek archaeology, as I’m sure you’ll remember.

SCM: Right. It is kind of all relative though. I didn’t realize how good I had it at Stanford until I went to some other places that really had bad libraries for Greek archaeology. But Blegen Battle Stations cannot be beat, that’s for sure.

GKE: Yeah, I end up Interlibrary Loaning a lot of stuff, so it will be nice to just have it all there. 

The main goal is obviously to finish my dissertation. But beyond that, I would like to do a lot more traveling in Greece. The end of the E4 trail runs all the way across Crete, starting at the west end and ending at the Gorge of the Dead, and I’ve hiked the very end of that trail at Kato Zakro, but I think it would be awesome to do the whole thing. That is my number one top rated goal.

The eastern terminus of the E4 at the base of the Gorge of the Dead (S. Murray)

Even if that doesn’t happen, I just want to spend some time exploring different regions. One of the things that’s so cool about Greece is that there are so many regions that are distinct from one another. I never did the regular year at the ASCSA, where you do a lot of traveling around. I’ve explored the Peloponnese and East Crete quite a bit, but I’ve never really been to northern Greece, any of the northern islands, or Samos and Rhodes. I’ve never been to Turkey. I’d just like to take a lot of road trips. I don’t know with COVID, but hopefully it will be pretty easy to get around in-country at least. 

SCM: That is definitely a good goal! There are so many beautiful and fascinating places to see in Greece, way, way beyond just the archaeological sites. And this is the time to do it, before you get all trapped in the tentacles of a job and tied down with other stuff. Well, I hope it is a year of many triumphs and travels, and that we can talk all about them next summer in BEARS 2021. Meanwhile thanks for this super interesting interview, and good luck with the big move ahead.

Impossibly stunning, untamed landscapes in southwestern Crete, east of Soughia (S. Murray)

Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 3: Joseph Frankl

Joseph (aka, Joey) Frankl is currently a PhD candidate entering his fourth year in the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology (IPCAA) at the University of Michigan. He came to work on the BEARS project last summer fresh off a long stretch of regional survey with (and highly recommended by the directors of) the Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP).  Joey brought a thoughtful and diligent approach to survey in Porto Rafti during the 2019 season, and will be taking on an important role analyzing the project’s Roman pottery in subsequent seasons. For now, he is spending the summer basking in the glow of a significant recent triumph – the successful completion of his doctoral program’s preliminary exams. BEARS project management caught up with him at his home in Ann Arbor on a recent, sunny June afternoon and he was gracious enough to interrupt his day and give us the following interview.

Joey en route to Raftis island during the 2019 BEARS season (photo credit: K. Alexakis)

SCM: Let’s begin with the basics: you are currently working on your PhD in Classical archaeology at Michigan. What inspired you to pursue a graduate degree in this area, and why did you end up choosing this particular program?

JVF: Well, I wish I had a better origin story in some ways! In fact, I think it’s more of an anti-origin story, because I can’t really identify any clear beginnings. I took a Classics course my first year at Macalester College, where I did my undergrad, and the professor who was teaching it, Andy Overman, was directing a project at Omrit in Israel. He gave me an opportunity to go and work with them, which was really generous, but the project was actually kind of not optimal. It wasn’t a great year to be there, because it was the last year of that particular campaign; everyone got food poisoning; there were these horrible gnats. I mean, I liked the project, but I wouldn’t say that I fell in love with archaeology right away. 

But I kept taking archaeology courses the rest of the way through college, and I realized that what I liked about it was that it was essentially history, but without the texts. I suppose I’d grown up with the idea that history is something that’s told through literature and texts. The idea that you could tell the story of the past through stuff instead – everything from mundane objects to huge, monumental buildings – was really revolutionary to me. In the end, that was what really attracted me to archaeology. And the more coursework that I took and the more scholarship that I actually read, the more interesting I realized the questions you could answer from material worlds were. There were all these great theoretical debates, and big historical questions about the long-term of human existence that could only be addressed by looking at objects – and I just became increasingly enchanted with the discipline. So I’d say the more I do archaeology the more I love it, which is a good feeling.

Then, I fell in love with Greece and fieldwork, too.

The site of Omrit during an active excavation season (photo credit: J. Frankl)

SCM: Yeah, that happens to a lot of us – it’s like falling into a swamp that you can’t escape, but in a good way. So, why Michigan?

JVF: Right – well, I was deciding between a couple of different programs, but what attracted me most to Michigan was that there was a big group of graduate students and a lot of archaeology students specifically. There aren’t a lot of programs that have that kind of sizable community. I knew from the start that I didn’t want my graduate career to solely be preparation for an academic job that I probably won’t get after six or seven years, so I wanted it to be an awesome experience when I was there. The vibe I got at Michigan was that the students not only had fun but that there was a lot of substance to their experience in terms of the intellectual environment, and they had a real feeling of camaraderie. And that’s been actually true.

The funny thing is that when you make choices about graduate school you’re working with such partial information. But I basically decided that having a great group of peers was my top priority, and Michigan really stood out in that area.

This is Michigan (photo credit: S. Murray)

SCM: That makes a lot of sense – and it sounds like you made a great choice. I like your point about how you really have very little idea what you’re doing when you are choosing a grad school. I definitely went to Stanford for my PhD for reasons that ended up seeming really ridiculous when I reflected back on my actual experience in that department.

JVF: Exactly – the things that actually end up being important to you, like writing your dissertation or the classes you take, are basically impossible to predict when you’re applying. It’s just a weird constellation of chance and individuals.

SCM: Very true! But if you don’t have solid friends in grad school you will probably be miserable no matter what, so I think you were smart to look at camaraderie as an important sprocket in the decision-making process.

JVF: Yeah, I remember when I was making that decision in 2017, I already knew that the chances of getting a good job were pretty daunting. So I didn’t want to do the whole graduate school thing just for the sake of getting a job – it had to be pleasurable in some way.

A group of archaeology students enjoying great cameraderie on Thasos in spring 2011 (photo credit: S. Murray)

SCM: Well, fortunately, these days the prospects for jobs are looking way better! Ahem. Anyway, going back to the doctoral program, where are you currently in terms of progress and what kinds of research are you pursuing?

JVF: I just finished my third year, which means I’ve now advanced to candidacy. I did three years of coursework and many, many exams. I believe there were six different types – French, German, Greek, a qualifying exam, prelims, and a history exam. I spent a lot of my time worried about those things and trying to finish term papers. It was very rigorous, and I’m definitely a little bit tired at the end of all that. But now I actually get to focus on my own research and some of the field projects that I’ve been involved with. My dissertation is going to be on the Roman Imperial economy, basically the 1st century BC to the 3rd century CE, in Greece. There is not a lot of synthetic work on that topic, and I’m really interested in this idea of economic integration and the way that imperialism impacts peoples’ relationships with resources and material objects. 

I’m still trying to figure out what that’s specifically going to look like in terms of a dissertation. That’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about at some point: framing a dissertation and how one takes these big questions and connects them to a focused archaeological project. It seems like your book project was really successful in this regard.

SCM: Hmmm, well, for me it took a long time to get to the point of a clearly useful and coherent project! I know everyone has a different process for this kind of thing. But for me, I always have to let my research projects develop through the writing process itself. I mean, you have to come up with some kind of plausible-seeming framing from the beginning, but I ended up writing something totally different for my dissertation than what I planned from the start. And that’s been true of my second book as well. I only ever seem to find what’s interesting in a topic when I start writing about it, and then there’s this great eureka moment when you really traction onto what’s interesting and valuable there and what your contribution will be. I think for most people it’s a whole process. We can talk about that more later.

There's got to be a viable dissertation in this muck somewhere.... (photo credit: S. Murray)

JVF: Yeah – so, in any case, I’m basically right on the precipice of starting the dissertation. I’ve got some other things going on, too. I’m involved in the Western Argolid project like some other folks on BEARS. And I’ve got several other ideas for articles I’d like to write up at some point, things that have emerged from term papers and other creative interventions I hope I’ll get a chance to work on. I just felt like I had no time the first few years.

SCM: It’s a really important inflection point in most people’s academic careers – you’ve been in classes basically for your whole existence as a sentient human being, and now you’ve reached this cliff edge where you careen off into the abyss of independent research. Most people are definitely glad to say goodbye to courses at this point. Looking back, though, could you pinpoint a favorite course, or a most valuable experience in the early stages of your grad career?

Farewell classes. Hello unknowable research void! (photo credit: S. Murray)

JVF: Absolutely. There was a course I took my second year, Mobility, Connectivity, and Global Networks in the Western Mediterranean, which is not my geographical area of interest, but it was an amazing seminar. Every single person in the room had smart things to say every week, nobody ever wanted the class meetings to end, and everyone always felt really energized afterwards. It was taught by Linda Gosner who was a postdoc at Michigan and did her PhD at Brown on Roman Iberia. So, we shared an interest in the Roman Imperial economy, although she’s focused more on the western Mediterranean. She brought a lot of enthusiasm to the material and also structured the discussion in such a way that we were able to work together through these difficult theoretical texts but also look closely at the archaeological applications of those theories. We even created a reading group out of that seminar. It’s those types of peer interactions, where you’re really helping each other build knowledge together – that’s what I am going to miss the most about coursework.   

SCM: That sounds like an amazing seminar! Would that all grad seminars could be so good.

JVF: Right – someone once told me that you should count on about 50% of grad seminars being just generally bad.

SCM: Ha – I have never heard that stat before, but it sounds pretty accurate to me. One way that you’ll probably continue to have this kind of peer fellowship, even as you do independent research, is of course through fieldwork. So, turning to fieldwork, I know that before coming to BEARS you worked on another survey project, in the western Argolid. What other kinds of projects have you done thus far?

Teamwork outside of the classroom on Raftis island (photo credit: K. Alexakis)

JVF: My first excavation was at Omrit in Israel, as I mentioned earlier. I also excavated at the Agora in Athens for a summer, and did a kind of rescue excavation in Corinth for a few weeks in 2016. So, I’ve had some excavation experience, and then WARP and BEARS, and I also worked in Turkey at Notion, which is my advisor Chris Ratté’s project.

SCM: Wow, lots of different places! Would you say that you prefer excavation or survey projects, and why one or the other?

JVF: A much debated question! I think I prefer survey. But they’re both enjoyable for different reasons. Digging in dirt is a sensational experience, and there’s this joy in discovery. I love survey, but rarely do you find amazing, well-preserved objects. In Israel, I helped excavate a fresco-decorated wall, and that was a pretty painstaking but also extraordinary experience.

THE fresco at the site of Omrit in Israel (photo credit: P. Sapirstein)

 But survey is so amazing because you are embedded in the landscape, which creates this relationship with the present. Survey combines the contemporary and the old in this unique way that you don’t necessarily feel when you are digging. When you are digging you’re really just engaging with the archaeological record and you don’t really think that much about the modern environment in which that record is embedded. But I like the idea of the past in the present, and I think that’s one thing that survey does really well. Survey is also a much more embodied experience of moving through the landscape, which captures both time and space, and you just don’t get the same feeling in excavation.

The western Argolid in dramatic light (photo credit: J. Frankl)
A panoramic landscape in the western Argolid (photo credit: J. Frankl)

SCM: That’s an interesting observation, that survey work provides us with a really unusual way of experiencing time and space. And maybe a glimpse into how any human, ancient or modern, would have moved through the same landscape. Although I hope for the sake of ancient people that there were fewer maquis bushes around back then. 

JVF: What is the history of maquis? Is it a diachronic phenomenon? Do we have any texts where Aristotle complains about maquis or something?

SCM: An important question! I’m not sure exactly, but one thing that’s amazing is to look back at photos of the Greek landscape from the earlier 20th century. The Mazi Plain, where I worked before BEARS, is almost totally free of maquis in some of those photos! And Koroni is the same. The issue seems to be that grazing regimes were much more thoroughgoing and intensive back then. Sheep and goats will eat the hell out of some maquis: it’s one of their favorites. So I think it’s safe to say that in any period when there were a lot of herd animals, there would have been less scrubby vegetation around in the Greek landscape. But it is hard to say exactly.

The goat is the surveyor's best friend in many ways (photo credit: S. Murray)

JVF: Perhaps this would be a good dissertation topic for someone.

SCM: Indeed! Now, maquis is one of the many glorious aspects of fieldwork in Greece. You said earlier that you fell in love with doing fieldwork in Greece specifically. Aside from getting stuck in thorny bushes, what do you like particularly about research and fieldwork in Greece?

JVF: I did think about doing my dissertation about Turkey, but I ultimately settled on Greece. In some ways the feeling of being in Greece is almost indescribable – the smells and sounds, the way that the mountains and ocean are so close to one another. But I think the coolest thing to me about being in Greece is the way that you experience these little worlds in themselves: sometimes you can take a pass through a little valley, and end up in a totally different environment – I guess what Horden and Purcell call microregions. I really find that feeling of escaping and being immersed in these landscapes and whole other worlds really intoxicating. Not to mention a pleasant contrast to being in an academic context the rest of the year.

It is interesting because in Porto Rafti we have that similar experience even though we’re in an urban context. So when we take the boat across to Raftis island it’s a totally different world, and same thing with Koroni. You get the same feeling of escaping into a small, independent world within an incredibly beautiful landscape.

I’ve also had the chance to make a lot of great friends who live in Greece and are Greek, and I think the more you develop these kinds of social ties the more you are going to be drawn back to the same place.

Herakles and Joey surveying together on Raftopoula island (photo credit: K. Alexakis)

SCM: That’s a great point – I noticed how closely you bonded with our Ephoreia supervisor Herakles last summer! Another new social tie to keep you yo-yo-ing back to Greece

JVF: Yeah, I need to send him an email!

SCM: I’m sure he’d absolutely love to hear from you. I’m now also realizing that a lot of the reason that I love going to Greece is that it is where I spend time with most of my best friends. This has been a weirdly lonely summer in that regard. But, returning to fieldwork, one thing that is interesting to me is that you’ve decided to work in Greece but on Roman material, and in particular that you are looking at Roman pottery in some of your fieldwork projects, including BEARS. Now, it’s probably not too controversial to say that Roman pottery is not the most obvious thing to get excited about if you’re a Greek archaeologist. Not to say that it’s not interesting, but, for example, I don’t think I ever even saw a picture of Roman pottery in most of my Greek archaeology classes in school. So, you’ve taken a relatively unusual tack in this regard. Where has your interest in Roman Greece and Roman pottery come from and why did you decide to pursue that as a research specialty?

Some exciting specimens of Roman pottery in an Athenian museum collection (photo credit; J. Frankl)

JVF: That’s a great question. Ultimately there are a lot of things about the Roman empire that I find personally very interesting. I’m interested in imperialism in general, and in the way that – in the case of Rome – having a huge empire that is so interconnected changed the way that people viewed their relationship to the material world. Although there are other places and periods of antiquity where you can get a look at imperialism, that kind of hyperconnectivity at scale is particular to the Roman period. There are all these cool developments: mass production and trans-regional, trans-provincial trade, the circulation of objects at a large scale, and I find all of that stuff really compelling to think about.

There are lots of angles from which a person can explore their intellectual interests. In my case, I came to Greece and loved it and made lots of friends there, so then I found a way to examine research questions I found interesting in a way that pertained to that environment. There’s also a lacuna in the scholarship. So, there has been a confluence of various different things that led me to get into the Roman period in Greece specifically. I guess it might not seem as exciting to other people…

Joey with a sherd of Roman pottery in hand on Raftis island (Photo credit: K. Alexakis)

SCM: No way! I mean, I am on the record as kind of a Roman disparager, but the way you explain it makes it sound like a super interesting project. And you’re right that there’s a big hole in the scholarship there, and there is a ton of material. It’s great that there are smart people like you who are motivated to wander in there and tackle it. 

I guess it’s not really fair to ask this since you haven’t had much of a chance to study the BEARS material yet, but do you have any first impressions of what might be cool or interesting about the Roman pottery from Raftis? Is it going to be awesome or kind of useless for your project?

JVF: I think it’s going to be great! Last year I noticed quite a bit of fineware and quite a lot of amphoras. I’m interested in the amphoras because they are going to tell us about trade and production, as will the fineware to some extent. I think it should be an interesting assemblage. It seems like there might be some early Roman material, which would be exciting, but I’ll have look at it a little more closely. The majority of what we collected is definitely Late Roman, and a lot of it is quite nice – the combware is really beautiful.

Sherds of Roman pottery as seen on the BEARS project (photo credit: J. Frankl)

SCM: It should be exciting to try to figure out what people were up to out there in the Roman period.

JVF: Right! From what I’ve read about Attica and the Roman economy, it seems that there was a general interest in islands, and that seemed to be happening in general in the Aegean then too. The Aegean becomes hyperconnected, and islands seem to play a role in that. It will be interesting to see what the node of Raftis was doing in this larger network. And that goes back to what’s so exciting to me about the Romans – every site is part of this big picture narrative of globalized, interconnected economies. It’s cool that we will be able to make an argument and contribute to that kind of debate.

SCM: Cool stuff, for sure. Hopefully we can actually go to Porto Rafti again and work on these issues soon. What did you think about Porto Rafti as a place to live and work? I know it is very different from the western Argolid in a lot of ways.

Some of the few, but abundantly charming, year-round residents of Porto Rafti (photo credit: J. Frankl)

JVF: It was unique for me among my experiences in Greece. It’s definitely a vacation town and really lacks a central civic space, which is a key feature of most towns in Greece. But I did like being there. I went on a lot of long runs around the city and the region. One thing that I loved is that once you got just over the ridge west of the town you are suddenly in this big arid agricultural landscape, but to the east it’s a fabulous view of the sea, and I liked going back and forth between those environments so easily. I’d like to explore it a little bit more – it’s a big town and hard to get around too much without a car. I didn’t really feel I got a good sense of the community or have as much contact with individuals as I would have liked. But my impression is that a lot of people just come in on the weekends, so maybe there’s just not that much of a community to start with. I was actually at a friend’s house – he’s a Greek American – and he had a coffee table book from the 80s about architecture in Greece, and there were a bunch of houses on the slopes around in Porto Rafti in there, which I thought was funny.

A drawing of the architecturally compelling Apollonion development in Porto Rafti by Constantine Doxiadis

SCM: That is awesome – who knew Porto Rafti was renowned throughout the land for its avant-garde 1980s beach houses!? But, yeah, it is a funny town compared to your normal Greek village in a lot of ways – no plateia! Can you imagine? We’ll have to keep trying to figure out what makes it tick and find the community in future BEARS seasons. Okay, last question: I know you’re an avid reader and a fine connoisseur of culture in general. What have you been reading or watching to relax and/or avoid excessive doomscrolling recently?

Here's to a relaxing, if occasionally lonely, summer of rest (photo credit: S. Murray)

JVF: Oh yeah, I’ve been reading a lot and watching a lot of movies. I got a subscription to the Criterion channel which has a lot of old art films that I’ve really enjoyed watching. The last one I watched was called Old Joy, a movie from the mid 2000s about two old high school friends who go on a backpacking trip in their 30s. It’s all about melancholy and friendship and paths going different directions – it’s really beautiful. But I’ve watched a lot of excellent movies – it’s a great way to keep your mind off of everything horrible that’s happening out there. Movies are better than tv for that,  because you actually have to focus on them. For books, I recently read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, and it is so great – I recommend it to anyone! His descriptions of eating bread with olive oil…

SCM: Whoa, it sounds like you’re torturing yourself – reading about being in the Mediterranean eating freshly baked bread with olive oil during a summer like this!

Simple pleasures of seaside Mediterranean cuisine, here on a small island off the coast of Gramvousa, Crete (photo credit: S. Murray)

JVF: Yeah, but it’s totally worth it! Seriously – great book. And I don’t even generally love Hemingway. I’m also rereading Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson, which is also a really beautiful book that I recommend to everyone. It’s about two orphans being raised by their aunt in Idaho. Anyway, other than that, I have just been trying to enjoy the sensual pleasures of being in Ann Arbor. 

SCM: Indeed! May the pleasures of Ann Arbor be manifold and keep you satisfied through the rest of the summer.

Acquiring Spatial Data in Archaeological Survey

The author at mapping battle stations on the site of Eleutherai in 2015 (photo credit: A. Knodell)

Gathering spatial data is a core aspect of archaeological fieldwork. Whether on a survey or an excavation, we spend a lot of time finding walls, artifacts, and other features, and the location of those things needs to be mapped, documented, and eventually published in the form of plans, elevations, maps, etc.  Some measurement are best taken using tried and true analog methods, but if you want to acquire a lot of accurate spatial data or measurements, it helps to turn to technological solutions. 

The thing that I’ve been in charge of most often on survey and excavation projects is using these sorts of technological solutions to acquire and manage spatial data. I don’t feel like I’m all that old, but it is pretty amazing how much this technology has evolved since I started out on my first project in 2003, and even in just the last five years. BEARS team members will know that we’ve been using a new EMLID REACH RS+ dGPS unit to acquire spatial data on our project and that I am very enthused about this product and its implications for archaeological fieldwork. To put that excitement into context for everyone, I thought it would be helpful to review the kinds of options for gathering spatial data I’ve used in my career, and why the EMLID is such a game changer.

Walls upon walls to be mapped and planned at Korfos Kalamianos (Photo credit S. Murray)

If you have worked on an excavation project, you will probably be familiar with what is still the best tool for gathering accurate spatial data rapidly – the Total Station, aka Theodolite, aka EDM (Electronic Distance Measurement) unit. A Total Station is an instrument that uses optics to measure distance, equipped with an internal computer that triangulates positional data. Once a Total Station is set up, it is easy to take hundreds and hundreds of readings from it very rapidly. The data can be very accurate. 

However, Total Stations are basically useless for survey projects – the setup requires triangulation from highly precise reference datums, and you are obviously not going to have a dense network of precise datums throughout a whole survey region. The setup for a Total Station is time-consuming, so even if by some miracle you had good datums everywhere, you’d be wasting huge amounts of time setting up the station every time you found a random wall or foundation in a unit. Maybe most importantly, the Total Station is heavy and bulky, so not a good companion for field traipsers.

A Topcon Total Station ready to capture spatial data on the site of Damnoni in southwestern Crete (photo credit: S. Murray)

Archaeological projects at the level of the region usually employ GPS technology instead. GPS provides location data by calculating distance from a receiver to at least four known satellites’ positions based on the time required to transmit a signal between the receiver and the satellites. It then triangulates the receiver’s position based on those distances. 

On my first survey project, the SHARP project around Korfos in the eastern Peloponnese, handheld GPS units were being used to map  architectural features. Handheld GPS units were – at that time, ca. 2008 – cheap and widely available, so at first glance quite well suited to survey.  However, handheld GPS units are not great when it comes to data quality. Like most basic GPS units, they use a kind of technology called Single-point Positioning (SPP). It’s just what it sounds like – the GPS position you get on the readout is based on the calculation of a single point, a single calculation of the GPS receiver’s position based on data from whichever satellites that GPS receiver can receive data from. 

SPP is the most common form of GPS measurement (this is what the location data in your phone, your car, or hiking GPS is based on), but also the least accurate. A single-frequency GPS calculation of position is subject to a wide variety of errors, especially ones arising due to atmospheric distortions that impact the reading of distance from the receiver to the satellites. As a result, SPP GPS data is not very precise – usually you will know where you are within a range of 3–5 meters. 

This is obviously fine if you are trying to find the nearest smoothie joint or stay on a hiking trail, but not so great for archaeological fieldwork. We learned this the hard way at SHARP – there were a lot of walls in the survey area, but most were not much longer than, say, 3–5 meters. Given the large error range of the GPS units, the “maps” we made of walls and buildings by taking points with handheld receivers looked more like children’s scribbles than like scientific documentation. And walls were close together, so it was usually impossible to tell, from the GPS-generated GIS map, which wall was supposed to be which when we went back in the field to check and refine the data. It was a real nightmare, and we ended up having to go back and basically start everything over with a new system, including renumbering most of the walls.

This is not to say that SPP GPS is useless for survey archaeologists. The receivers are small, easy to use, and fit in your pocket – I still use them all the time to record the general location of a feature in the landscape, remember the best path through maquis patches, or just  get a handle of where I am while wandering around. But SPP GPS is demonstrably inadequate as a solution to the problem of precise (2-4 cm accuracy) geospatial recording in the context of archaeological field projects.

Handheld GPS units can be very useful for general purposes of navigation even if they aren't all that accurate (Photo credit: S. Murray)

For sub-meter measurements, differential positioning is necessary. Differential GPS requires that two separate GPS receivers be set up nearby one another, tracking the same satellites. One receiver (the base station) is installed on a known point (a datum), and generates differential correction data according to calculations based on disparities between its known location and the raw satellite readings of its location. Another receiver (the rover) is used to collect positional data, which is then refined based on the corrections calculated by the local base station to reduce error. When these refined readings are being received by the rover in real time, so that the coordinates you are seeing on the rover interface reflect the corrected rather than the raw data, that’s called real-time kinematic (RTK) dGPS.

At SHARP, the project decided that the best solution to its substantial mapping needs was to bring out an RTK dGPS system to document all of the project’s architecture. We basically scrapped a lot of the work we had done with the handheld GPS units. Remapping everything with the dGPS was quite laborious. It is more time consuming to map with dGPS than with a Total Station, because with dGPS you want to take a bunch of readings and average them together, which irons out any randomly bad satellite data that might come down the line for various reasons. To get 2-4 centimeter accuracy data you should let the unit chug on a point for a few minutes. But we finally did end up with precise and accurate maps of quite a lot of architecture. 

Setting up the base station for a dGPS survey at the site of Stiri near Korfos in 2009 (Photo credit: S. Murray)

While a base + rover RTK dGPS system was crucial to the success of the SHARP project, it is not totally ideal  for regional survey projects for a number of reasons. 

First, the corrections data provided by the local base station decreases in value as a function of the distance of the rover from the station. Since errors from atmospheric distortion vary within relatively small areas, the relevance of the corrections data calculated by the base station to the raw data collected by the rover will decrease if the rover is collecting data outside of the immediate area of the base station. Accuracy is likewise impacted by the topography, especially if communication between the two stations is hindered by vegetation or terrain.

Unless project personnel can be spared to guard the base station while dGPS survey is underway, roving for data collection beyond the immediate, intervisible range of the local base station will entail a certain tolerance for the risk that this expensive equipment will be damaged by passersby (sheep and goat herds are common in Greek survey areas), weather events (e.g., strong winds that could topple the station), or mischievous puppies, etc., or even stolen while personnel are away from the station. Absent adequate tolerance for this risk, working with a dGPS system dependent upon a local base and rover setup will require frequent setup and teardown of the system, a time-consuming process that is also sufficiently complex to require expert operation and therefore additional training needs for project staff. 

These systems have traditionally been relatively expensive (usually in the $20,000 range) because of the need to purchase two separate high-grade GPS receivers. If you are a small survey project without a ton of architecture to map, it’s not easy to swallow laying out that much money for accurate mapping.

dGPS roving among the tumuli of Gordion in central Turkey, summer 2010 (Photo credit: S. Murray)

When I joined up with the Mazi Archaeological Project (MAP) in 2014, I was asked to take charge of the project’s mapping and photogrammetry needs. This was several years after the end of the SHARP project (I had last worked there in 2011) so I thought I’d look into what kinds of mapping options existed beyond the base + rover dGPS system we’d used at SHARP.

In doing so, I learned that the industry standard for dGPS had turned to a new system called WADGPS. WADGPS replaces the local base station with a distributed network of reference stations broadcasting regionally refined corrections data (they are based on area-wide differential calculations) to receiver stations connected to the network via wifi. In other words, with WADGPS the base station is replaced by a centralized network, so the user only needs a rover. WADGPS has existed since the late-1990s but had only recently become standard because of the proliferation of reference station networks. In Greece there are now several. 

WADGPS obviously has a lot of advantages for survey projects. Since the generation of corrections data in a WADGPS system is centralized, the equipment required for survey is limited to a rover station, eliminating roughly half the cost of an initial investment in a dGPS system. The lack of a base station furthermore eliminates any concerns of mobility during the survey. 

The WADGPS system also requires considerably less expertise to setup and operate than a base and rover system. Once the unit is configured correctly, the user may merely turn the unit on, open the survey software, connect to the RTK correction network, and begin high-precision survey in less than a minute. 

Most importantly, experimental studies of the comparative accuracy of the two demonstrate that the distributed corrections data is ultimately more reliable in terms of precision over a wide range of spatial extent than a local base station’s corrections data. 

I thought all this sounded really promising, so I decided to use some of my research funds to purchase a WADGPS setup for the MAP project. I settled on a system built around a Leica unit called the CS25. In principle, the CS25 setup seemed awesome – it was extremely lightweight and easy to transport. The handheld CS25 computer weighed very little. Besides that, all I needed for accurate survey was an aluminum pole fitted with a GNSS antenna and a SIM card with wifi that connected to the Leica SmartNet signal. When I picked the gear up and tested it out, I was really psyched about its potential. It seemed totally  ideal for survey and mapping at remote sites like the ones we had at MAP, which had to be reached on foot through difficult and overgrown terrain.

Obligatory cheezy stock photo of the CS25 unit from the Leica website
The author gathering spatial data high above the Mazi Plain in 2015 (photo credit: S. Fachard)

In practice, the honeymoon was over more or less as soon as I got the unit out into the field. I won’t go into the tedious details, but the CS25 the Leica representative in Iowa sold us (I was at Nebraska at the time) was physically a real piece of garbage, and the computer had all kinds of software bugs that made it go haywire. Often the unit would fail to connect to the GPS receiver at all. I spent a lot of time “turning it off and then back on again” and even more time driving to the Leica office in Athens to ask the techs there to update the software or figure out why we kept having connectivity problems. There is a set of uninsulated, high tension electrical wires that runs right over the site of Eleutherai where I was working a lot, and I developed a paranoia that those wires were somehow frying the CS25 motherboard or interfering with its mojo. So, yeah, the thing drove me kind of crazy. It was sufficiently bad that when I returned to Nebraska after the first summer of use in 2015, I sent it back to the Leica rep and told him he must have sold us a Lemon. And actually that was true! Dealing with that Leica rep was a total nightmare from start to finish – he did a lot of gaslighting to try to convince me that it was my stupidity rather than his crappy gear that was causing the malfunctions. But I eventually convinced him to send us a new CS25 to use in 2016.

Trying to get the CS25 to perform even basic functions was often a challenge (photo credit: A. Knodell)

Fortunately that new unit worked much better, probably how it was intended to work from the beginning I suppose. When it was working correctly, it was as awesome as I had imagined. It was not a burden to carry around – I hauled it up many a mountain slope – and so easy to use. It really was just a matter of turning the unit on, opening up the software, connecting to the SmartNet, and BAM – before you know it you are collecting very accurate spatial data. We mapped a lot of architecture with the Leica in 2016 and 2017, and also used it for generating datum reference points for many photogrammetric models. My favorite part was mapping a bunch of rubble architecture that had been revealed by a recent forest fire, so working in an area of fresh burn. This involved weeks of fighting through bristly, charcoal encrusted maquis tentacles. I would return to camp everyday looking like a coal miner rather than an archaeologist.

The author sizing up architectural features among burnt out maquis trees in the Mazi Plain (photo credit: A. Knodell)
The author after a day of trying to map architecture in a freshly burned maquis stand (photo credit: A. Knodell)

I guess you could say that my experience with the Leica unit was mixed. In the end it was a good solution and we did a lot of useful work with it at MAP. But it was still really expensive – over $11,000, plus the cost of subscribing to the Leica corrections data, a few hundred Euros a season. 

But probably the worst part was actually the process of acquiring it in the first place: a hugely time consuming and confusing ordeal, that seemed much more like buying a used car or something than conducting a straightforward business transaction.

When I was putting together the purchase in 2014/2015, the only vendors were the big optics companies that make and sell Total Stations – Leica, Topcon, Nikon, Sokkia, etc. They are used to doing business with industrial clients that have nearly unlimited budgets and who often put in bulk orders worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. They definitely do not really put a lot of care into customer service when it comes to small guys – like a single academic purchaser looking to buy one unit. Moreover, there is no actual price listed anywhere for the different units – you have to get in touch with a salesmen and ask for a quote. 

Because the salesmen are like used car salesmen, they throw a bunch of extra bloat into the quote – adding in stuff like extra battery chargers and software packages that you will definitely never need – so you have to go back and forth with them to pare the inventory list down to what you actually want. 

Also, because I was purchasing the unit through my university and it was over a certain dollar amount, I was required to get multiple competitive bids from different companies, so I went through the whole used-care salesmen process with several smarmy salesmen. Then, I had to play the different bidders off of each other to try to convince each one to bring the prices down. Anyway, it took forever and was extremely unpleasant. But there weren’t any other options – these companies basically had a monopoly on units of this kind, so there wasn’t much you could do but deal with it.

A long, complicated quote for a dGPS unit put together by a Leica sales representative in 2015.

By the time I was starting the BEARS project, I had left my job at Nebraska, and the university-owned CS25 unit, behind. When I looked into purchasing a new unit for the new project, I found something really, really, really awesome. A small, independent startup company called EMLID had stepped in to “disrupt” the dGPS unit market –  a totally corrupt and monopolistic corporate system where a bunch of behemoths controlled access to super accurate spatial data capture equipment. 

Usually I hate anything to do with Silicon Valley corporate power-speak cliches like “disrupting”, but the EMLID units are nothing short of a revolution for small guys like archaeologists who just want a simple, elegant, inexpensive solution for capturing accurate GPS coordinates. 

The EMLID REACH RS+ system does the same thing as the Leica CS25 setup, but better. Instead of using a propriety data processing computer, EMLID runs from an app that’s free to download on a tablet or smartphone, so you need to bring even less equipment into the field. In 2019 I did a lot of mapping from my iPhone, which is about 5% the size and weight of the CS25 unit. 

It is cheap! Really cheap. The setup we got – which includes two high quality GPS receivers – was less than $2,000! And – wonder of wonders – the price is just listed right there on the website, no haggling or used car salesmen involved. The thing is so cheap that it doesn’t require any bidding through a university purchasing procedure. Really, it’s so cheap that you could just buy one of these out of pocket without losing a lot of sleep over it. 

The EMLID system is also super flexible. Since we got two receivers, we are free to set the thing up either as a rover/base station system, or to use WADGPS if we decide we’re going to do enough mapping to merit subscribing to a distributed corrections data network. 

Finally, the app is super intuitive to use and pretty much always worked as it was supposed to during the 2019 season. There are some small drawbacks – as of last year the unit didn’t allow a lot of flexibility in terms of the coordinate system in which you collect and display data – but those will probably be ironed out over time, provided the company is successful and commercially viable going forward. 

If it is, I think it’s not going too far to say that we’ve entered a kind of golden age for accessible, high-quality spatial data acquisition in archaeology. I am pretty sure that the EMLID people did not intend to help us archaeologists out so much – it seems more like the market is people who make drone videos or something like that – but thanks to them I have hope that none of my junior colleagues will have to deal with a Leica used car salesman type of situation again.

Maeve and Joey map extensive features on the Koroni peninsula using the EMLID unit (Photo credit: S. Murray)

Insect Companions of Mediterranean Survey

Please delight with me in observing the wonders of the green-eyed fly, here enjoying leftover windshield fluid on the hood of a rented SUV.

An underappreciated aspect of archaeological fieldwork in the Mediterranean is that it brings a person into intimate contact with a lot of weird insects. Everybody knows that the Mediterranean is an ‘artifact-rich’ landscape, positively bustling with forgotten old ruins and dense scatters of ancient pottery and lithics. But when wandering through the underbrush or digging holes in the ground out there, a keen observer will also notice a microscopic world teeming with strange and awesome life. They’re not quite as flamboyant as the chest-sized moths and gaudy, florescent ‘disco bugs’ one frequently meets in the jungles of the Amazon, but  – like it or not – we are surrounded by a lot of insect companions when we go a-traipsing about in the Mediterranean. 

Leopard-looking butterfly snacking on a thistle in the central highlands of Turkey

In reviewing the wondrous world of archaeology insects, I’m going to leave aside the whole butterfly situation. Butterflies are among the most visible and superficially beautiful of the insects of the Mediterranean, but there are just too many kinds of butterflies all over the place to do them any kind of justice here! They come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, and if you are patient you can get some stunning photos of them in the spring when they are suckling greedily from the blooming flowers and will complacently pose for you.

An elegant black and white brush-footed butterfly of some kind in the mountains of Sicily around ancient Himera

Obviously, once you get into butterfly territory you’ll necessarily be seeing some strange caterpillars out there too. The best one I’ve seen is a blue and orange striped species in the Vikos gorge in Epirus, but there are some very fun spotted ones around the Peloponnese too.

A mountain caterpillar showing off its excellent costume of complementary colors.
Spotty caterpillar scissoring away at a bright red leaf snack in the deep Mani region of the Peloponnese. The soundtrack is as follows: "scissor, scissor, scissor", etc.

After last season, all of the members of the BEARS project are very aware that spiders are quite common in the Mediterranean countryside. I sometimes feel bad about how many elaborate and carefully spun spiderwebs that we smash through when doing survey. I guess in a way it’s a kind of community service, since getting caught in one of those things spells certain death for some of our other insect friends, like grasshoppers. But, you know, predators are gonna predate! It’s nature’s way! 

A big beast of an orbweaver about to end an innocent young grasshopper near Frangokastello on the south Cretan coast
Some big hairy jerk about to get fat on the sweet, succulent juices of a cicada carcass
This fatty was seen lurking about on a thistle stalk marking the limit of a survey unit in the Mazi plain (note the pink flagging tape at lower left).
The jumping spider is probably the most charming of the Greek spiders – they are pretty small and harmless and their four beady eyes are very funny. This one was sunning itself on a nice white stone at the site of Palairos in Aetolo-Acarnania.
This hairy mammalian looking spider was also at Palairos, but I wouldn't call it very charming.
If you've excavated in Greece you have probably destroyed the homes of many trap door spiders. This one lives in ancient Olympia.
My all time favorite Greek spider is the crab spider, which hunts by hiding inside the cups of flowers and trapping insects that come in to snack on the pollen. They can change color to match the flower. This one at the site of Tiryns was supposed to be going yellow but I guess couldn't be bothered.

One of the most entertaining survey bugs, and not coincidentally one of the most evil, is the common horsefly, or as I call it: Evil ‘Stache Bug. I first came to love the Evil ‘Stache Bug on my very first survey project around the village of Korfos in Greece. They were everywhere and they have these really gnarly moustaches bristling out over the big death proboscis thing they use to stab their enemies! These guys are often involved in “bug wars” and it’s not uncommon to see them and their relatives feasting upon a fresh kill.

My oldest nemesis, Evil 'Stache Bug, plotting his next move near Korfos, Greece
Evil 'Stache Bug with prey near Tigani in the Mani. Don't bring your kid brother!
Some steroided up 'stache bug/hornet hybrid sucking the life out of a little fly type creature in the Preveli gorge of southwestern Crete
An Evil 'Stache Bug on an appropriately putrescent, charred mound of evil looking stuff near Plakias, Crete
Ah Evil 'Stache Bug, your alluring, shiny green eye hides such a sinister, ruthless soul within.

More benevolent are the cricket and grasshopper type creatures out there in the grasses and fields of the Mediterranean spring and summer. The largest and most colorful concentration of cricket type guys I’ve ever seen was in the fields below the citadel of Palairos in Aetolo-Akarnania. I think maybe someone had sprayed pesticides on a field nearby which drove them all onto the vegetation right next to the road that leads up to the site. These are gentle insects, often observed being eaten, but they never act aggressively themselves. There are lots of different fun variations on the theme.

A sizeable and very colorful cricket type thing on a thistle near Palairos in Aetolo-Akarnania
Green grasshopper on green grass near Palairos
Grasshopper dressed in hazmat orange for safety while jogging at night
This guy has a kind of kermit the frog thing going on. Gotta appreciate those stripey eyes!
Some of these crickets look positively prehistoric, armored up like a triceratops, as with this fence-sitter at Damnoni, Crete.

An adjacent category are the mantis-type creatures. In Greece there are a lot of Mediterranean mantises, but there are also some truly wacky insects that look kind of like a mantis but with Frankensteinian modifications.

Mantis at the trash house in Alepochori near Megara
Stick bug! Kind of like a mantis, but having more stick features I guess.
I do not know the origin of this strange beast and do not wish to explore the matter further, for the abyss of infinite knowledge holds many terrible secrets.

In certain parts of Greece you also get a lot of different kinds and colors of dragonflies and damselflies. The gorges of southwestern Crete are especially rich in dragonflies – there must be at least a dozen types of dragonflies living just in the Preveli gorge alone! I wasted a lot of time when I worked at an excavation at Damnoni down there hunting dragonflies and trying to take photos of them. Sometimes from a certain angle they look like they are smiling at you.

One of about a zillion very colorful dragonflies around Plakias, Crete
A nice pale blue model at Preveli
It's crazy that nature can even make this color! Also from Preveli gorge
Are you laughing at me?
Shiny and Chrome damselfly at Preveli gorge

Not to be forgotten in all this are the humble beetles, and other beetle-like ground dwellers. Sometimes it seems like every beetle you see in Greece is totally different than the last. The best is when the weather is a little cold and they lose their ability to move very quickly. You can pick them up and have great quality time with them in these conditions, and it doesn’t really seem like they mind too much.

Most Greek beetles are black and look something like this, but this specimen from Mt. Giona in central Greece has better stripes and longer antennae than average.
The world-famous SHINY FUZZ BEETLE can sometimes be spotted in out of the way places, like the deep Mani.
Dung beetle doing its thing – talk about high quality entertainment!
Weevil fun on a technicolor purple thistle background at Cape Tainaron

Anyway, I could go on and on – there are way more categories that could be introduced: shield bugs, wormy-type larvae, shore insects and skimmers, etc. I think a lot of archaeologists could care less about all these messed up looking insects. But one of the things I  really like about survey archaeology is that it makes you pay more attention to the world around you, not in an active sense, but just as a kind of habitual way of being. For me that has included becoming more acutely aware of the many small forms of life that surround us in the countryside. I have no knowledge of the scientific field of entomology, but it always seems like the variety and proliferation of bugs in Greece must be pretty off the charts. 

Damnoni larva thing: I think it's got a bit part in the new Dune movie!

While some of those guys – like spiders that inflict very painful bites! – can be something of a hazard to surveyors, most are totally harmless and often kind of fun to observe. I’ve only been actually scared of an insect in Greece once. My partner and I were hiking in a remote part of the Mani peninsula when a late spring thunderstorm blew down off the Taygetos massif. We took shelter from the rain in an abandoned medieval church, but as soon as we got in there we noticed that the walls were moving – the rain had driven dozens of huuuuuuuge poisonous scorpions from the nooks of the rubble walls of the church: they too were taking shelter from the downpour inside. Apparently these guys are among the biggest and baddest in all of Europe. Needless to say, we decided to take our chances with the rain.

One of many large scorpions resident in the walls of the abandoned churches of the Thyrides plateau in the Mani

Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 2: Dr. Maeve McHugh

Dr. Maeve McHugh (University of Birmingham) is a landscape archaeologist whose research focuses on agriculture, rural economies, and the lives of agricultural workers in Archaic and Classical Greece. She has worked on a number of archaeological projects in Greece during her career, and supervises a major component of the intensive survey on the BEARS project. In 2019 she led all of the fieldwork that took place on the Koroni peninsula leveraging her expertise in field methods to train a new generation of maquis-bashing survey archaeologists. We recently chatted with Dr. McHugh about her history in archaeology and her experiences working in the field in Greece. This interview has been condensed and edited slightly for clarity.

Maeve at the rural "Princess Tower" in southeastern Attica (photo courtesy M. McHugh)

SCM: Thanks for agreeing to talk with me today! It’s nice to see you, even if it’s through a computer screen. But enough with the small talk: let’s get down to the business of this important interview. We’ve worked together in the field now for a while, but we didn’t really meet until we were both pretty advanced in our respective careers. Tell me how you got to that point – how did you get mixed up in this crazy career of Classical archaeology? 

MCM: My origin story! That’s a really good question. I think we started working together back in 2014, was it? Right? Quite a while ago now!

SCM: Yeah, I think that’s right! I guess we’re pretty old at this point. But take me back to your youth!

MCM: Well, I grew up in a nice, normal, suburban neighborhood, in a working class to middle class area – most people who lived around there did manual labor, things like that. My mum was a secretary, and nobody in my family had gone to university before. It was not really on my horizon to go to university or pursue entry into a university or anything like that. But one day, I was just going about my daily business, and I ended up picking up a book from the library on the Odyssey. The reason why I did was that my mum had just said something in passing about an ‘Achilles heel’. And I said, ‘well what’s that?’ And she said, ‘It’s from a Greek myth, where the heel is the weak part’. And I said, ‘Oooooh, tell me more!’ So I went to the library and I got out an edition of the Odyssey that was illustrated by Peter Connolly. If you don’t know him, he’s a great watercolor artist who did a lot of drawings and paintings for children’s literature. The book wasn’t the full Odyssey, it was an abridged version – but the drawings in it just captured my imagination completely. The drawings of Diomedes, and Achilles, and Helen and everything – I was just fascinated by it. 

Inspiring adventures from the shelves of YOUR taxpayer funded public libraries (photo courtesy M. McHugh).

Around then I was talking to my sister and I said “I am REALLY loving this book”! I was about twelve, and she’s a bit older. And she said, ‘Well you know, that’s all an ancient civilization – Ancient Greece!’ And I said, ‘Hang on a minute here! You’re telling me this is real????’ And that just opened the floodgates and I haven’t been able to stop the flood since! The book had a companion with pictures of the Mask of Agamemnon and the Mycenaean grave circles, and all that stuff. My imagination was just absolutely taken up with it and I loved every second of looking through those books. So much so that my mum bought me a typewriter (this was before computers), and I actually started to type up my summary of the Iliad and the Odyssey! This was my first foray into academic scholarship – my brother brought home a red folder from work, and I put the summary into the red folder: my little treasure! My five-page synthesis of Homer – and of course an explanation of why Achilles was the coolest.

I distinctly remember my next pivotal moment was seeing a photograph of the Parthenon, and not believing it was possible that people could have built that. And also thinking about how amazing it was that they built it for a religion that I knew nothing about, and for a whole culture and a social system that I knew nothing about! When you’re a kid you’re brought up thinking there is just this one way of being and thinking, whatever one you are immersed in growing up. But that’s when I first started thinking about how there was this different culture that existed thousands of years earlier that was totally alien to my assumptions. I’d say only a very niche group of people worship Zeus or Athena now, but it used to be the whole thing! Everybody did it! And that just fascinated and intrigued me.

The acropolis in Athens: an inspiring sight by any account (photo credit: S. Murray)

But it was definitely not something that I set myself out on a career trajectory to do. After I finished my exams, at the end of secondary school, I did a two-year course in equine science, because I was a very avid horsewoman. Then I went and I lived in Switzerland for a while, working in a yard there. But one day I had a quite serious fall, and I realized that, at age 21, I was getting ‘too old’ for this career! And I didn’t want to be one of those old people with broken knees and fractured skulls and things like that. So I went and got a job in a bank, which was quite soul-destroying. I started my degree at University College Dublin (UCD), doing English for two years, but I still thought that wasn’t quite for me. I decided I’d go to Italy and teach TEFL (English as a foreign language) there. And that was the first time that I had ever actually seen all of these things in the flesh that I used to be really fascinated by – the theater at Verona, all the ruins in Rome, Greek pottery. And then I said to myself, ‘Why not? Why not do a degree in it?’ 

So I switched majors from English to Classics and Archaeology at UCD, working all during the day, still in a bank selling loans, which continued to be – as I noted – absolutely soul-destroying. This was actually just before the financial crash in 2008, so I had a very small part to play in that crash! But I started into the degree and that was it – I knew this was something that I wanted to do.

A young Maeve with two cousins and a Falabella stallion called Tiny (photo courtesy M. McHugh)

SCM: What amazing stories! I feel like there is a valuable lesson there about the importance of public libraries for kids out there, especially working and middle class kids without fancy educations.

MCM: Absolutely! I actually found that book many years later and went and bought a copy, and when I held it in my hands I was immediately twelve again.

SCM: On the topic of the Odyssey, it sounds like your journey to archaeology and Classics has been an odyssey in itself! I think we as a field are lucky that you ended up where you did, because you’re doing really world-class research these days. You’re already the author of a groundbreaking book on ancient farmsteads and now I know you’re making progress on a second book project on the larger topic of agricultural labor. How did you get into this particular area of research and what interests you about it?

Maeve (left) tells members of the Mazi Archaeological Project all about an ancient farmstead during the summer of 2017 (photo credit: C. Cloke)

MCM: When I started to do my PhD at UCD, I thought I was going to do a PhD on urban houses. But several books had recently come out about houses, and I really didn’t think I had anything new to say on the topic. I started to do more reading, and got into reading quite a bit about landscape survey. I was seeing this word ‘farmstead’ pop up quite often. And I started to get really intrigued about what was going on with these farmsteads, because I’d never really thought about where people lived outside the city, or whether they did live outside of the city. Then I realized after reading that it’s actually quite a contentious topic: whether farmsteads existed or not, how do we identify them, and so on. So I thought, AH HA, this is a question I want to try to answer. 

So I did! And I published my book, and then leading on from that, I started thinking about what I thought and experienced when I was hiking through the landscape in Greece. I’ve been very lucky through the years to work on projects where I’ve had the opportunity to go hiking in the landscape: with you, and with our colleague and friend Syl, where we wander around trying to find these ancient roads and ancient sites. I find the idea of what it was actually like for people to live in these places and work in this landscape really intriguing. 

Maeve and Syl working together after a hike during the Mazi Archaeological Project in 2017 (photo credit: S. Murray)

I did a bit more reading about agricultural work and found there were work songs, and fables about work and all this other evidence for what went on in ancient Greece beyond just the fancy shiny temples of the Acropolis. So I concocted a project aimed at figuring out what it was like to be a ‘normal’ person back then. Only a very small percentage of the population of the ancient world, or even up to and past the Industrial Revolution, was ever living in cities and engaging in trade and commerce and all that stuff we know a lot about. The vast majority of society – people living outside of all that – are usually kind of left out of the story. And those people are the kinds of people I associate with myself. My family wasn’t poor, but we definitely were people focused on work, getting paid, keeping a roof over our heads, that kind of stuff. So I guess that makes me more interested in what those kinds of concerns were like in the ancient world and what people like me and my family would have dealt with back then.

That’s also why I get so excited when I am actually in the Greek landscape. I mean, when I first saw the Parthenon of course I sort of lost my mind, but after that the shine kind of wears off. When I’m in a landscape – and I know this is a little bit romantic – seeing the shape of the mountains, that hasn’t really changed: I’m looking at the same shape of the mountains that an ancient farmer would have looked at. And that for me is a very evocative and exciting thing.

It is impossible to tire of the infinite mountainscapes of the Aegean. Here view south from the village of Leondakis in the Mani (photo credit: S. Murray)

SCM: Well, it’s super cool research, and I agree that it’s important to try to appreciate what most people’s lives were like rather than obsessing over these indolent academic types who sit around reading and writing all the time! Now, imagining an ancient farmer on an ancient farmstead: if you were an ancient farmer, what would have been your favorite crop and why?

MCM: My favorite crop would be olives for making olive oil. And vines as well.

SCM: No, you only get one crop!

MCM: Fine! Olive oil, then, because of the economic return.

SCM: Ah I see your old bank loan officer persona emerging here!

MCM: Yeah, you see, a part of my soul has been permanently destroyed by that job! For sure the best crop would be olives for oil.

Our colleague Rob Stephan with an ancient olive tree near Kavousi on Crete in December 2010 (photo credit: S. Murray)

SCM: I’m more of a barleyphile myself, but here we can agree to disagree. Okay, now sticking with the topic of work, and having worked with you in the field, I’ve noticed that you’re an incredibly hard worker and never shy away from a difficult task. You also basically never complain in the field. Where do you think your steadfast work ethic and positive attitude come from? How do you manage the physical difficulties of survey work with such elegance and aplomb?

MCM: I’d say the reason is that I feel like I’ve won the lottery. I’m doing something that I shouldn’t really get to be doing. I was told by a career counselor at school that I should look at administration level jobs, not that there’s anything wrong with them, but I couldn’t imagine working in that type of work for my entire life. I’ve worked all kinds of jobs, most of them not so great, and the fact that I get to go to Greece and ramble around in the countryside and find pieces of ancient pottery – are you kidding me?? This is the best thing ever. 

It’s always funny to talk to my family about it – my brothers don’t think I have a real job. They’ll say, ‘Well your reading isn’t actually real work.’ And my mum, she always asks me how school is, and I think she thinks of me more like a secondary school teacher. They are always very surprised that I’m doing research. But I totally understand why they think it’s so alien – for me it seems very alien too. I just love being able to do this stuff and it’s not a chore, it’s not difficult. Anytime I do find it difficult I remind myself that I’m in this amazing Greek countryside holding an amphora handle in my hand, and I just value every minute of it.

Maeve at work with an assistant at a remote farmstead in the Mazi Plain (photo credit: E. Levine)

SCM: What a great attitude. We should always remember how lucky we are to have such an amazingly cool and interesting line of work!

MCM: Yeah – six weeks in Greece: you say that to anyone and they just can’t believe that’s part of your actual job.

SCM: It sure makes you wonder why anyone ever complains. And yet some do! Now, in terms of fieldwork: what makes you love survey so much?

Labor in the countryside near Oinoe in Greece (photo credit: S. Murray)

MCM: Survey addresses a lot of different types of questions that you can’t address through excavation, and the nature of my research just fits much more naturally with those survey questions. You just get more out of landscape survey when you’re interested in agricultural activity, because you see what is happening in the landscape more broadly, rather than getting a lot of information about one place and trying to extrapolate information from that. Every farm’s agenda is going to be different depending on the particular situation in the landscape. Even if you could say that people are farming in one way in a particular place, it can’t necessarily tell you what is going on everywhere. So in that way survey is extremely well suited to produce helpful results for my research.

I also really like the big diachronic scope of survey. In survey you find all kinds of stuff from the whole history of human activity in an area: from the first time that people went out into the landscape and started chipping away at stones and decided that some stones were fancier than other stones, all the way to what pastoralists are doing in the present day. That to me is totally wonderful. I think I’m just a survey archaeologist to the very bone marrow. I just love it. It’s so cool to be wandering around in the hills and to come across a totally pristine site! It is really something special.

Ruins in the landscape at the site of Kionia in the Mani, Greece (photo credit: S. Murray)

SCM: How about the BEARS project – what drew you to the project and was your experience of the fieldwork like?

MCM: We’d worked together before on the Mazi Archaeological Project and gotten along quite well, and I was really grateful to get to come on the project! You’re an excellent scholar and an excellent friend and it was just a brilliant opportunity and I was excited to grab it with both hands.

The survey itself is absolutely tremendous. Grace and I were always in absolute shock at the kind of material we were collecting on the ground, it’s just unbelievable. It is a four-star A+ level of survey, not only in the types of material culture that we’re collecting and the type of resolution and detail, but also the way it’s organized and structured – I just thinks it’s a tremendous survey on several levels: I could wax lyrical about it until the cows come home.

A Cow at Home in Shenako in the Tusheti region of Georgia (photo credit: S. Murray)

SCM: I’m glad you’ve had a good experience! We’ve definitely benefited a lot from having you on board. Hopefully we get to go back out there someday. You mentioned before how much you appreciate the chance to work in Greece. What do you like particularly about research and fieldwork in Greece?

MCM: Well, I’m Irish – I have red hair and very, very, very, very pale skin – so it’s not the weather! It’s a constant battle not to be fried within an inch of my life there in Greece! I am not built for the Greek climate unfortunately. But I do appreciate the heat and the warmth. The food of course is just tremendous: fresh, delicious, local. The people and the lifestyle are really appealing – everything is very relaxed and calm, not panicked. I like all that stuff. I suppose I am looking at it through rose-tinted glasses because I’m there for fieldwork. If I lived there for an extended period of time I might have a very different perspective. Another thing I love about it is just that you can go out into the countryside and be at an archaeological site in ten minutes! That’s pretty great if you’re interested in the ancient past.

A person is never far from archaeology in the Aegean (evening at Kokkinokastro, Euboea, in December 2011; photo credit: S. Murray)

SCM: Right, it’s very hard to do that where I live in downtown Toronto for sure! I haven’t seen a countryside in months! How about Porto Rafti – did you like it as a place to live and work?

MCM: Porto Rafti was a really nice town for a project because you could access all kinds of shops without any difficulties. And our accommodation was incredibly luxurious, so we were very well looked after. One problem was that you took your life in your hands at the weekend trying to cross the road. That was a real challenge! Loads and loads of Athenians descended onto the town on the weekends. 

There is a gated beach that tons of people would come and pay to get into just below the Koroni acropolis where I worked for most of the season. One day we were working on Koroni and we could hear the people sitting on the beach below us, and we were having a snack, and I turned to my team – two students, Irum and Kat – and said: ‘I feel like this is about to be the judgement of Paris, with the three of us sitting out here in the middle of nowhere and waiting for a shepherd to come along.’ But then just below us there was this really very 21st-century, trendy, modern beach thing going on and we could hear all of the beachgoers laughing and talking! That’s something that I both loved and disliked about working around Porto Rafti – the archaeology was really living cheek by jowl with modern society. 

A survey team shrouded in maquis on the Koroni acropolis, just above a very modern beach development (Photo credit: M. McHugh)

SCM: Yeah good point! It’s a funny place for an archaeological project in that sense. I guess it’s kind of bittersweet to be reminiscing about BEARS this summer when we can’t really be there and had to cancel the season. Aside from going back to Greece for fieldwork, what are you most excited about doing again once things go back to normal (if they ever do!)?

MCM: Probably talking to someone who isn’t my partner in actual three dimensions. And standing closer than two meters away from someone in an acceptable way. This physical isolation, even though it’s pleasant at times, has been very challenging. I’d probably want to hug a friend. Definitely not going to the shops. I don’t know who would go to the shops when you can just buy things online. 

SCM: Excellent answer! Thanks so much for talking to me today Maeve, and here’s to some friendly hugs someday.

At least the donkeys are still allowed to snuggle with one another (photo credit: S. Murray)