Blog – Page 6 – The Bays of East Attica Regional Survey

October 28, 2021October 28, 2021

a BEARS adjacent event on the ancient economy

Fans of BEARS might be interested to log into an online conference about the Ancient Economy coming up on November 5th and 6th. The conference proceedings will feature several friends of BEARS: the conference is organized in part by co-director Sarah Murray and features back-to-back talks by our intensive survey leader Maeve McHugh and itinerant drone wizard Dimitri Nakassis! It should be a good time with lots of brilliant scholars chewing on important problems in the field of ancient history. Details and instructions for registering can be found in the poster below, or just email sc.murray@utoronto.ca with any questions!

October 15, 2021October 15, 2021

A BEARS 2021 Accounting

It is hard to believe that the calendar has waded well into October! It’s been a real BEAR of a semester up here in Toronto thus far, with real in person meetings and classes reminding us how much extra time it takes outta the day to get dressed in real clothes and walk somewhere; not a grand pile of zoom events and conferences rivalling our Praso tile piles in size!

Amidst the chaos we’ve managed to at least send off our report for the 2021 BEARS season for peer review, which is a nice way to mark the start of proper fall. To mark the occasion, here are some fun stats from the 2021 season for all you numbers fans and accountants out there.

On the island of Praso we surveyed 107 grid squares with the following results:

3,524 sherds, 266 lithics, and 320 ‘others’ collected

23,831 tiles counted & weighed!

(of which 26, representing 4 fabrics, were collected)

On Koroni and parts nearby we surveyed 57 units and encountered at least 23,831 hostile bushes and plants, collecting none.

Not bad for a season that almost wasn’t! Stay tuned for more winter updates, stray thoughts, and events as the dark season approaches.

September 25, 2021September 25, 2021

Incoming BEARS merch

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No I’m not talking about college football season or the chaotic (at least in my neighborhood) start of fall semester classes…I’m talking about BEARS 2021 t-shirt arrival season. I finally had time to poke my head out of a sea of work weeds to get these prototype threads printed up. World domination cannot be far behind.

August 19, 2021August 19, 2021

Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 14: Shannon Dunn

GREAT NEWS for blog readers – it is time for another instalment in the BEARS blog’s ongoing team-member interview series. Today we’re posting a riveting conversation with Shannon Dunn, a PhD student at Bryn Mawr College who joined the team in the 2021 season after getting pandemicked-out in 2020. Shannon was a stellar addition to our little mini-team this summer and brought a real modern panache and style to the group – she even uses the internet! Something most of us old BEARS fuddy duddies try to avoid as much as possible. Check out the full interview below to get a whole herd of hot takes on topics ranging from the civil war to ancient religious landscapes!

SMD: Ah, my supervillain origin story!

SCM: Yes, don’t hold back on the villain parts – that’s the best content!

SMD: I was one of those kids who had a Greek myth book, so that was something of a gateway. I also grew up in Virginia where I was surrounded by revolutionary and civil war sites and cemeteries, so I think history was just always around. Then I took Latin in high school, and that was a flashpoint for the ancient world. My teacher was really great, and also taught us the Greek alphabet, and then we also went to Greece! She led a rotating trip to an “ancient” place every few years, and our year happened to be to Greece. I loved it immediately. Somewhere there is a picture of me in the throes of teen angst, just so mad, but inside I was just thinking about how to get back to Greece. Then I got the opportunity to go back in college. I actually didn’t do any archaeological projects in college, but I took classes during the summers in Greece and I did undergraduate thesis research there. I was an anthropology major, but our department was very Americas focused, so I also did a Classics minor. My thesis was joint for both departments. It was about different types of Greek museums and their relationships to nation-building and nationalism. I went on my first dig right after I graduated. That was Omrit, where I met Grace! We have periodically intersected during the last ten years.

Since then I have continued to do various excavations in the summers, or classes through the American School. Then I decided to pursue a graduate degree.

SCM: Wow, it goes way back with you!

SMD: Yeah, I have pretty much always wanted to be an archaeologist.

SCM: I love the Omrit connection! Joey worked at Omrit too. Such a small world. I would never have anticipated that there would be a BEARS–Omrit connection, but there you go!

SMD: Yeah, I think Joey went the year after me. It’s funny.

SCM: So, in retrospect, when you think back to your youth visiting Revolutionary and Civil War sites, how do they compare to Greek archaeological sites?

SMD: Hmmmm……. I’m less interested in them – obviously, I am not pursuing that history in a professional way. Also, maybe because I am more involved in that world as an American, I can see how much more they are manipulated into various narratives. Growing up I did not think about how it was weird that there were cemeteries for confederates especially. But then when I left the south, I realized it was…. a little odd…. what we were taught about that stuff. I took a class about the Civil War in college and we quickly realized that depending on where we had grown up we had completely different narratives about Civil War history. So, that may have fed into me thinking about how Greek archaeology is used in that way for my thesis.

SCM: I grew up as the child of a real Civil War “buff” and we spent a huge amount of time visiting different Civil War sites. We even went to the big Gettysburg reenactment one year.

SMD: I went to a LOT of reenactments. I had a friend in the fife and drum corp.

SCM: Yes! Fifes and Drums!

SMD: Eat some kettle corn, watch some battles. Delightful.

SCM: I was so short I could never see anything. All I remember was some puffs of cannon smoke, a hot field, and some fifes. I hated it. So, you could say I prefer Greece. But it’s also weird, as you say, to think about how we went to like pay homage to Robert E. Lee’s grave and stuff.

SMD: Now that I’m thinking about it from a distance too it’s very interesting to think about what the culture was like – almost a little grand tour of people doing pilgrimages around to the sites, recreating the movements of the armies.

SCM: It’s such an ugly, awful part of American history – in a way perhaps it is good that we don’t forget what happened, but it’s weird that people kind of celebrate it rather than just visiting the sites and thinking about what a freakin nightmare it was.

SMD: Yeah, and then there’s the fact that half the monuments were set up in the 1920s to 1950s when other anxieties were presenting themselves – and you realize, oh yeah, that has nothing to do with the civil war.

SCM: Right! Anyway, now we are getting off topic. But you reminded me of all the hours and days I spent walking around in hot fields in the south when I was seven and I was just thinking “I want an ice cream!”.

SMD: Yeah, battlefields, I’ve never found them very exciting wherever I am. Some people are into that in Greece to. What happened on this flank? On the other flank? That’s not my thing.

SCM: Yeah, that kind of “research” had a big day…but I don’t think it’s got a lot of legs in the current academic environment. Perhaps too esoteric. Perhaps too…pointless?

SMD: Agree.

SCM: Okay, so I take it you are not researching ancient battlefields…. but you ARE doing a PhD in Classical Archaeology at Bryn Mawr. Where are you in the program and what are you researching?

SMD: I just finished my fifth year. I just started my dissertation work because my fourth year was the Regular Program at the ASCSA. I generally like questions about the relationships between religion and landscape – how people use spaces and negotiate the reality of traveling around but also how the landscape itself influences cult practice. I had been trying to identify something on which to apply those issues. I worked in one direction last summer and it didn’t really go anywhere, but then I was talking to professor Sylvian Fachard, and he said to me: “You know what needs to be done? A catalogue of these sites that we put in the category of ‘border sanctuaries.’” So, I’m working on that, doing an inter-regional thing that catalogs them and reevaluates them as a category, and hoping it will be a good resource for border people, religion people, and landscape people. I’m investigating how location impacts function, and whether ritual sites that we know were near a border were affected by those political boundaries. It’s a little frustrating to read the scholarship, because it often portrays these sites as liminal areas, but sometimes they are on main thoroughfares, so maybe they are more hubs or gateways. Or maybe people in the local community don’t see themselves that way at all! So, I am trying to reconstruct that as much as I can.

SCM: Sounds like a great project!

SMD: There is a lot to include – I am trying to do big picture stuff but also to give each place the attention it merits and allow the contextualized situation at each site come through. I don’t want to try to shove things into a model.

SCM: Well, you’re just starting out! The fun part about a dissertation is that it develops a life of its own – the scope and scale especially tend to mutate a lot over the course of the project.

SMD: Yes, that’s what my advisor said. She was very clever. She told me to start as wide as possible and then whenever I pull back from something, think about why I am doing that, and try to justify it. That helped me to define what I want to talk about and what is clearly beyond the scope of what I could even conceive of. So now from a big picture with frontiers and colonies and sort of the edges of the Greek world, I’ve pulled all the way back to the Peloponnese because it’s defined and seems manageable.

SCM: Wow! Good advising! It never happens! You’re very lucky.

SMD: Yeah, she’s great.

SCM: Okay, so you mentioned that you did the ASCSA regular year program. Tell me about that – how was the experience?

SMD: It was so great. A lot of the people who go on the regular year have never been to Greece or seen these things you have read about – and there is this incredible feeling of realizing that it is a Real Place, and to be able to see it in 3 dimensions. But I had been to some of the sites and kind of came in thinking “oh yeah, I know a lot of these.” But by the end I completely felt that I had known absolutely nothing before the year. The depth to which you explore these sites is just incredible. I don’t know how people can do a PhD without such a program. The time invested in getting to understand the country is so valuable – you see places beyond the normal tracks, for example, if you just work on a project and go back and forth to the same places. There is still a lot of Greece I have not seen, but I feel better than I did before about my experience of the country. I realized a lot about the breadth and depth of what there is to study – I had no idea how great the Neolithic is! And everyone was passionate and enthusiastic about a different thing.

SCM: It is such a wonderful program. I feel bad for these students who work in Italy – they have no equivalent program! But I guess it’s their choice. Go eat your pizza and drink lukewarm beers, Italy people! Okay, let me not get into my unpopular opinions about Italian food. Was there anything about the program that you didn’t like?

SMD: My only complaint is that we did not go to all the places I wanted to go. We did not go to Cape Tainaron or the Mani, and we missed some parts of the eastern Argolid I wanted to see…and we didn’t see much of the islands. Some of the reasoning I don’t understand, but I know some of it was just logistics.

SCM: I guess it’s tough. There’s so much to see! It’s not so bad if the worst thing is that there are too many places to visit and not enough time.

SMD: Yeah. I am very excited to go deep into the Mani – that is going to be my first stop when I’m back in Greece.

SCM: Okay, so I think one of the interesting things about talking to people who ended up being Greek archaeologists is that a lot of people have a similar story – not the same story! – but a same genre as your reason for having gotten into Greek archaeology, and I do too! I came to Greece as an angsty college student and completely then focused my life on wanting to spend as much time in Greece as possible forever. And I can never articulate to myself exactly why that happened to me, or why that is so common. I don’t think it’s totally normal. I worked in Italy a lot too, and I never felt the same way. What do you think? What is it about Greece that does this crazy thing to our psychologies and sucks us in, like a quicksand?

SMD: Agh, everything I say would be such a cliché. People talk about “the light” you know? I’m not inventing that! I don’t know. It’s some kind of vibe? I have tried to recreate what I like about Greece at home…you know, trying to figure out whether it’s that I’m just outside and active and stimulated and with friends? Archaeologists exist in a different sort of life when we are on a project, and we tend to be happy in those environments. But I don’t think that is it. A lot of it is kind of surface stuff. It is just so beautiful there! The only other landscape I’ve been so stunned by is Scotland, which is similar in that it looks small on the map, but it feels so vast when you are there. It has an endless coastline, these microregions, incredibly dramatic landscapes.

SCM: Yeah, Scotland is cool! But maybe that helps us eliminate the landscape. Like, Scotland has an amazing landscape! But I never thought, okay, I need to dwell in this space as much as possible forever.

SMD: Right, it’s great, but I don’t need to inhabit it!

SCM: Well, it’s something that we cannot get to the bottom of! But I think this is an interesting aspect of Greece. It has a strange magical power! And I can stay it sticks with you. I am old now and I have been to Greece many, many, times, sometimes doing cool stuff, sometimes just sitting in Athens trying to write a book. But it doesn’t matter, I’m always just happier here.

SMD: Yeah, I know what you mean. It smells better somehow…the food is better. It has almost a simplified color palette that is soothing to me, like a Wes Anderson move. Like with Italy, Rome – also incredible. But it’s too much!

SCM: Right – everything is like an art historically important piazza! It’s exhausting. Like, enough! Okay, okay, let’s talk about fieldwork. It sounds like you have done a lot of projects. Encapsulate for us your history as an archaeological fieldworker and your experiences prior to BEARS.

SMD: My fieldwork has been scattered and diverse. My approach has been to cast a wide net and try to figure out what I liked; I’ve liked all the projects I’ve worked on, but for some I didn’t see a big personal longevity in it for me, so maybe my CV looks a bit bizarre! I’ve done both excavation and survey, mostly in Greece, but also in Israel, Lebanon, and Scotland. One of the reasons I really love Bryn Mawr is that they are so supportive – I asked if I could go and do the Scotland survey to get a non-Mediterranean experience, and they completely agreed with that. Which ended up being wonderful – I got training outside of my usual paradigm, we learned a lot of GIS, stuff I hadn’t been exposed to before. It was interesting to see a slightly different side of the discipline.

In Greece, I sometimes joke that I will only work at sites that have something to do with Poseidon. I worked at Onchestos in Boeotia and Helike in Achaia…I guess I like the water.

SCM: Seems like a good strategy! Poseidon is cool – horses AND water…weird dude. What was the survey in Scotland all about? A particular period or region?

SMD: We were surveying along a road that was built during the Jacobite rebellion. During that period the Scots were becoming increasingly independent, so the English started building roads to get up into the highlands to monitor or suppress the rebels more efficiently, but then the highlanders just started also using the roads to do whatever they needed to do. There are a lot of layers of history that we were exploring, from the Jacobite stuff, back into prehistory, as well as later travelers who were walking these roads on their Grand Tours. The project was very landscape oriented, so we catalogued whatever we came across in the landscape, and the different stages of the road. We also did field trips to castles and things like that.

SCM: Cool! A very different experience than working in the Mediterranean.

SMD: Yeah, it was a very different experience, also in terms of the weather. It was freezing and raining all the time in July, so we were all bundled up and wearing high visibility stuff.

SCM: I was in Scotland one June and I remember that the sun would come up at 4 or 5am, which was very disorienting. I remember waking up at 5am and it was bright as high noon and I was always very freaked out by that.

SMD: Yeah, it’s basically the arctic circle. I was going to Greece right after that project so I didn’t bring the right clothes. I knew it would be kind of cold, but I didn’t think it could be THAT cold…so I was just wearing all my clothes at the same time and it still wasn’t enough. Then a few weeks later I was in Greece and we’d finish work at 1pm because it was too hot, and we’d go to the beach.

SCM: Sometimes I have no idea what people who do archaeology in the UK are thinking. Between the cold and the mud, it seems like a very different proposition than what we get into in the Mediterranean most of the time.

SMD: Yeah, I could pass on excavating a giant trench full of mud.

SCM: We don’t have a lot of mud in Mediterranean survey, typically. What was your take on surveying Porto Rafti for the BEARS project?

SMD: It was great. As I said I enjoy working in coastal landscapes, so that was up my alley. Taking a boat to work was incredible. It was also probably the least remote town that I have ever been based in. That was a fun experience. Usually on a project you feel like you are going off into the wilderness. I mean, at Onchestos we stayed at Thebes…but that still is kind of the wilderness if you know what I mean. But from Porto Rafti you can just pop into Athens for the weekend; and you’re just in this resort town. So, it was kind of interesting to see that you can just be in a community and do archaeology. It doesn’t have to be this big bush-whacking adventure.

SCM: Ha, yeah, I would always laugh when Denéa called the project an expedition this summer. I mean, we’re like 20 minutes from the airport in a giant concrete resort town…so….it seemed like a funny word to use for what we are doing out in Porto Rafti. Yeah, it’s very different from the normal project where you go to a little village with no internet and marginal mod-cons. In Porto Rafti we have it all – pizza delivery! Third wave coffee! Banks! Anything you want.

SMD: It is another micro-region, too, though, that I didn’t even know existed before I worked on the project. I’d been to Brauron and we went to Koroni on the ASCSA regular year, but the whole world of the bay had not been on my radar. It’s a bit of a whole little archaeological ecosystem on its own that a lot of people don’t necessarily visit.

SCM: That’s a good point. I spent a lot of time in Greece every year since 2003, but I never went to Porto Rafti once until I thought about starting a project there in 2018. Which is sort of crazy.

SMD: It is funny that it’s kind of off the radar. It’s such a great port and in the middle of everything, so it makes sense that there is so much material there.

SCM: One thing I appreciate about Greece is that there is always more to see. Even after almost 20 years of traveling around all over the place, I continuously find new places and local cuisines and sites and landscapes I didn’t know about at all. Every time I visit I try to purposefully go to one place I have not been, and it’s always a total surprise in the most wonderful way.

SMD: Greece seems very dense. Even from little valley to little valley you often have so much local variation. I enjoyed working in Porto Rafti, even though it is not the most remote. Actually, it was kind of comforting, after not leaving the house basically for a year, to be in a place that was not all that remote or ‘intense’ in terms of a collective living experience. I’m not sure I could have gone from staying in my room all the time to some totally remote village with no internet.

SCM: Right, like when you have a rescue animal that you’ve nursed back to health – you should introduce it back into the wild in stages, or else it doesn’t know how to forage for food or protect itself from predators!

SMD: Exactly. I thought about working on Crete this summer but then I thought – it’s too far! I’m not ready yet.

SCM: Okay, let’s do one more question. In all your travels and project experiences so far, what has been a zany or unusual adventure or misadventure that stands out?

SMD: In college, I took a class on the Odyssey in which we sailed around the Aegean on a boat as we read it – which has obviously shaped a lot of my interests when it comes to research and fieldwork! We had an assignment where we had to write about something that had happened to us during the course but in a Homeric style. So, everyone ended up with these sort of magical realist interpretations of little incidents. My story was about a sort of weird and somewhat concerning interaction with a German tourist when I was out walking alone on Milos. I had borrowed his snorkeling gear and swam out to a shipwreck and then he wanted to talk to me and go back to town, which I was not interested in. But for the assignment I turned it into a much more dramatic story with supernatural elements. I can’t think of a better one. I guess that’s not so zany.

SCM: That’s okay – we are debunking stereotypes about archaeologists waking up unspeakable horrors of the undead and whatnot.

SMD: You carry Ithaca inside you, as they say.

SCM: Profound words!

SMD: I think as archaeologists we feel more comfortable around the dead inert objects of the archaeological record and the landscape, so it’s sort of scary for us to deal with other humans.

SCM: That is true. It is always a little jarring when you think you are alone in some unused landscape, and then you realize there is another human there.

SMD: There is no such thing as a pristine landscape where it’s just you and the god. These landscapes have been actively used forever, and they still are! We’re just guests there.

SCM: Yeah, don’t forget it! A good message for the faithful BEARS blog readers to close out this wonderful interview. Thanks so much for taking the time to share your experiences with us, and all the best for the year in Athens ahead.

August 15, 2021August 15, 2021

BEARS on the CIG blog

Perhaps of interest to BEARS fans, an update on the 2021 season of the project was featured recently on the Canadian Institute in Greece’s blog. You can check out the post here, conspicuously decked out like a wanton colourful courtesan between the austere B&W stylings of the Fred Winter collection.

August 6, 2021August 7, 2021

Archaeologist Confessionals Volume 13: Isabella Vesely

For the thirteenth instalment of our BEARS team member interview series we are featuring Isabella Vesely, a member of the BEARS 2019 team who somehow escaped the blog interview trolling net during the “lost” spring and summer of 2020. Isabella was a star undergraduate under the tutelage of Catherine Pratt at Western University when she was on the team in 2019. She’ll be starting an MA in Art History at the University of Toronto in September 2021 and we’re very excited that she’ll be back with the team in summer 2022! In addition to her archaeological and academic acumen, Isabella is a gifted studio artist – you may remember her bears/BEARS drawings from the end of the 2019 season and she also did some technical drawing for the project that year, too. Read all about her experiences and what it is like to have so many talents in our interview below!

SCM: Let’s start by talking about how you got interested in Greek archaeology and why you decided that this was something that you wanted to spend at least part of your life doing.

IV: Oooh, tricky, a multi-part question. I had a Greek myth phase as a child, which I think a lot of people go through. That got me headed in the direction of Greek archaeology in particular. When I was young I lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where there is a good natural history museum. I think visiting that was what made me interested in archaeology and the past and digging up the past. They don’t have as much of an archaeology focus there, but I think I was introduced to that kind of study very early on. I then took an ancient history course in high school and that got me interested in applying to a Classics program for university; I also took an anthropology course which I loved. At university, I started out right away in Classics and anthro courses, then at the end of the year I did the study tour of Greece course with Catherine Pratt. That was totally amazing, and then Cat recruited me to return to help with her project, and after that I just felt like I had to come back every year!

Over the past year, being out of school and having everything turned on its head made me realize that I wanted to continue doing what I had been doing before. Having a year off to reflect was good, because initially I did not want to do a master’s degree. But this year reaffirmed what I wanted to do.

SCM: That totally makes sense! It is a weird year, but even in general I always recommend students take a year off before grad school. Okay, I wanted to ask about your career as an artist – and that is unusual amongst archaeologists, who usually don’t know how to make or do real things in the world. Has your practice as an artist affected your interests or research in archaeology? Or do you think it gives you any special insight, or that the two are connected at all?

IV: Hmmm, maybe not in a super obvious way. My archaeology interests aren’t so much in the area of ancient art. If anything, I’d say that archaeology has informed my art practice more, because that’s something that I find interesting and want to pull into my practice, for example in terms of materials – I’ve gotten into natural materials in the last 2–3 years because of looking at artifacts and objects and thinking about the processes that impact natural materials over time. In general, I think the momentum goes that way – from archaeology into art. I made this big stained-glass vase and I used different kinds of glass that reminded me of differential weathering on different pieces of pottery. It was inspired by working with Cat in the Agora, and trying to find joining pieces, which look different, but we know that they do join.

SCM: Oh, yeah, super cool! I saw the photo because Cat used it as the cover for a talk she gave for Toronto last year. I wish I knew how to make things; I can draw a little but mostly I am a terrible artist, but I admire talented artists a lot.

Okay, so you are about to start in the MA program at Toronto. What kinds of research interests do you have and what kind of topics do you hope to investigate?

IV: I’m very interested in craftspeople, and bringing in this thing I mentioned before about art and environment and natural materials. I want to think more about the experience of being a craftsperson – where do you source your materials, what does your immediate studio environment look like, different techniques, and that kind of thing. The general theme I guess is the relationship between people who make things and their environments, and bringing something about identity into it too: how a person’s identity as a craftsperson fits in with different social roles or identities, and how those things combine to form a three-dimensional persona in the world.

SCM: Very cool! I have been sort of moving in that direction lately too – craftspeople are infinitely wonderful people to think about. It’s a good moment to work on this lately, because the field has taken an interest not just in rich consumers and patrons but also the nature of craft production and the complexity of the people that did the making. It’s a good fit for the MACS program too, in a lot of ways. I’m excited to see what you come up with over the next two years! What drew you to Toronto in terms of a grad program?

IV: Actually, it was Carl Knappett who sold it to me when I was working at Palaikastro. I was there for about a month around the time that the program was being inaugurated, and he had a lot of positive things to say about it. And he was right – it is a cool program. Coming from a background of Classics, Anthro, and Art (I had three undergrad majors), it’s hard to find a program that joins all those departments, so it is a great fit for me. I do want to maintain a connection to all three of those in my research and what I do going forward, and there are not so many places where one can pursue such a diverse course of study at the grad level. U of T has a great reputation…I’m excited about all the events and guest lectures…I like that there is an option to do the MA and then continue into the PhD easily…. lots of stuff!

SCM: It seems like a good fit indeed – also you are correct that Carl is a great salesperson. That is not to be underestimated. So, tell me about your work in the field – you’ve worked at the Agora and Palaikastro, and BEARS; what kinds of experiences have you had and what your impressions of archaeological fieldwork have been?

IV: Well, Cat has been the main person whose set me up with fieldwork, which I am grateful for! She invited me and Cassandra to come assist her with her work in the Agora. We were looking at Archaic transport amphoras and coarsewares from the old excavations in the Agora as a means to gaining more insight into commodity transportation and different trade networks in that period. I did that for two seasons – the first season was mostly looking at sherds, cataloguing them, going through old notebooks to try to figure out where they came from and the circumstances of their excavation back in 1915 or 1960 or whenever. We spent a lot of time trying to read these old notes so we could figure out where things were in the archive, which was fun. The second year was after I learned how to do illustration, so I took on that role and I drew everything that we found while Cassandra did more of the data entry stuff. We spent a month in Palaikastro on Crete after the first year in the Agora. There was supposed to be an excavation but that did not pan out, so we ended up doing a study season, which was great too. I did a lot of drawing there, too. I mentioned that I had experience as an artist, and that I could help with drawing, and Carl said, “well, it’s not really artistic drawing.” But I insisted that I wanted to try, and he let me take a shot at it, and I ended up drawing basically everything. So, I’ve been doing a lot of drawing since then, for Cat, and Carl, and in 2019 for BEARS. I suppose the main thing I took away from the PK thing was illustration, but we did other stuff…I can’t remember what that was right now!

SCM: Who can remember anything from the pre-pandemic world? Such a hazy and distant land! I’ve never tried to draw pottery – tell me, is there something that distinguishes drawing pottery from other kinds of drawing? What is interesting or enjoyable about it from your point of view as someone who does lots of art.

IV: Well, essentially it’s just technical drawing. It’s very simplified and pared down. In my art practice, I am not much of a drawer – I’m more sculpture-based. But I like being able to draw something and not have to put all the artistic energy into it, but still being embedded in doing art. The main task is to draw the profile of the shape accurately, so if it’s a bowl it’s just a curve, ultimately with some shading or some surface detail depending on the object. I like how simple it is – you have to take this complex object and distill it just to the important information that you need. It has to be to scale, too, which is fun – I don’t know why, but I like drawing to scale. I suppose the technical aspect of it is very pleasant to me.

SCM: Sounds very Zen I suppose!

IV: Yeah!

SCM: I can imagine that when you are making artistic art there is a lot of creative energy and maybe even emotional energy that goes into it; but with technical drawing it’s more like you have a task in front of you and you know what to do and you do it.

IV: Exactly – when I draw I just have headphones on all day and barely have to think about anything except for drawing. The normal next step is that you trace the drawing from the grid paper, which you use to get the scale right, onto a nice tracing paper and use a sharpie or a marker to ink it. But now mostly people just go straight to the digital inking step, using Adobe Illustrator or some other program. That part is more time consuming than the drawing, which most people don’t realize!

SCM: Interesting – I would not have guessed! Now, in additional to your experiences in the Agora and PK, you worked with us on the BEARS project for two weeks in 2019. Survey archaeology is a little different than lab research…what did you think about the work in the field in Porto Rafti?

IV: Maybe it was because there were more people around, but it seemed VERY exciting right off the bat, as opposed to our other projects, which were more low key. It was a whole different vibe: we had a whole team, and a whole big area to research…I started off the very first day going out to the island on the boat, and as soon as we got there we started finding soooo much material. There was so much momentum right out of the starting gate, it was exciting. The fieldwork was very different of course, vs. being inside studying. There is more connection to the land and the sites when you’re out there in the field and physically negotiating the space from which the artifacts come, rather than just trying to understand artifacts divorced from the physical context. I had a great time! The thing that I always remember and love to tell people about is when we were doing our collection on the island, and you’d kick a bush over, and then you would find 3,000-year old pottery with paint on it in pristine condition – just under this bush! It was amazing!

SCM: Yeah, Raftis was crazy! This was sort of shocking and unexpected as a first day of survey for a brand-new project! Usually the first day you just sort of mosey around and map something…. but on BEARS it was just – BOOM – first hour, first day, painted Mycenaean sherds all in your face!

IV: Yeah, but you know I liked doing the mapping too! Later in the season and I was working on Koroni setting up grid squares. That was satisfying too – I grew up doing a lot of hiking when I was little, you know, the photos of the baby in the little carrier and parents out in the forest…so I love hiking! And working on Koroni was a lot like hiking, clambering around on rocks and stuff. I hope in the future to get more into the imaging stuff, too, which I am interested in.

SCM: Nice, there will be lots of that in 2022! We have lots of hiking and mapping and imaging that will happen in the future, so don’t worry. And that is honestly more of a core type of survey activity. BEARS is weird because we have these bonanza sites and you end up staring at the ground. Usually survey is more like a kind of scientific hiking. What did you think about Porto Rafti?

IV: It was different from both Palaikastro and Athens. Maybe more on the PK side of things, in terms of being a place people visit to swim, although with fewer visitors from abroad. It seemed to have a very Greek vibe. Since we were only there and working for two weeks and we were living a little outside of the downtown, I felt like we did not get a chance to explore it too much. I will be excited to get to know more of the town in the future. It is very beautiful there!

SCM: Porto Rafti takes a while to get to know – It took me awhile to really form an opinion about Porto Rafti, but I’m learning to love it! I will look forward to hearing your further impressions after some more time there. So, speaking of the future, what are you looking forward to the most about getting back out to Greece and getting out into the field?

IV: I ran out of my Greek olive oil recently, and that was very sad!

SCM: That is a sad moment! Sad for cooking and sad symbolically.

IV: It was a big jug too! It is surprisingly hard to find Greek olive oil here, the Italians really rule the market.

SCM: I once read a big exposé kind of story about how this is actually a weird situation where Italian companies buy Greek olive oil from independent producers for cheap, then repackage it and sell it as Italian oil because they are shrewder/more ruthless businesspeople or something.

IV: Maybe! I guess the fieldwork is my favorite part. Athens is nice, but it’s just a city. What I really miss is the fieldwork itself rather than Greece as a destination. The pace of life is so different in the field, especially compared to being in school. To be in a different environment, spending more time outside and getting to interact with objects and artifacts rather than just reading all day, as a way of familiarizing yourself and learning more, is much more enjoyable for me than just traditional research. It’s not a vacation, obviously, but it’s such a departure from the normal routine. It’s very refreshing to have that kind of experience for a month or so. I really just want to get back out into the field.

SCM: Totally agree! Being outside and doing real things all the time is somehow more satisfying than going inside your brain and thinking about abstract stuff. Well, that’s pretty much all of the questions I had; anything else that you want to share with the BEARS blog readership?

IV: I had another fieldwork experience in Canada that might be interesting to share. I took a mortuary archaeology class at Western, and we did ground penetrating radar and magnetometry in the peripheral sections of a cemetery, where unmarked graves were supposed to be. The point was to expand knowledge of the area and about the history of burial practices around London, Ontario, but also to perhaps start identifying some of the areas that could benefit from excavation. That was pretty cool and a different experience from what we did in Greece – we did a publication too.

SCM: Wow, what a cool experience – that will definitely be useful in your career going forward too: there are so many kinds of methodologies and approaches in archaeology! It’s hard to learn ‘em all, like trying to catch all the Pokemons or whatever! Maybe we’ll eventually do some subsurface investigations in Porto Raft someday and you can help us out with that!

For now enjoy the rest of your summer – and thanks for talking to the BEARS blog! We look forward to having you back on the team in 2022.

July 28, 2021July 28, 2021

BEARS 2021 Production Remains in 3d

During the final week of work of the 2021 BEARS project, Bartek Lis, who was working on the LH IIIC material from Raftis and Praso, very astutely pointed out that the pottery wasters we had collected from Praso were going to be difficult to share with colleagues using 2-dimensional imagery, given their complex and highly irregular geometry. Fortunately our tile specialist Phil Sapirstein also happens to be one of the world’s experts on making highly accurate models of small objects, and he very generously spent a few extra hours in the museum photomodeling a couple of wasters and a piece of what we think might be a Late Bronze Age kiln. Check em out on our Sketchfab account, where a few models of artifacts from the 2019 season live as well.

P00470 by bearsarchaeologicalproject on Sketchfab

P00472 by bearsarchaeologicalproject on Sketchfab

F00091 by bearsarchaeologicalproject on Sketchfab

July 26, 2021August 25, 2024

Phantom Threads: The Raftis and its Port

The archaeology of Porto Rafti bay is top shelf, as the BEARS project demonstrates every time we wander out into the field. From the delectable obsidian debitage gravel pit that is the Pounta peninsula to the delightfully abundant and surprisingly diverse array of Koroni tiles, not to mention one of the more interesting human coastal ecosystems known in the entirety of Greece for the LH IIIC period, and a smorgasbord of Roman dinner-party pots on small islands, it’s got something for everyone!

Of course, as an archaeologist devoting many years to work and study in the bay, I’m not exactly an impartial source for such an opinion. But I think it’s not too controversial. Anyway, in just two short seasons with a pretty small team, the project has already generated a huge amount of new material and exciting conclusions. We have a ton of stuff to study and think about ahead of putting together a complete publication over the next several years, which is going to be so much fun.

The one aspect of the archaeology of Porto Rafti that we are not much concerned with in the project, at least so far, is the Raftis statue that gives the bay its name. Our project has a lot of goals, but saying or doing anything related to the Raftis statue is not exactly a priority: surely plenty has been said and done about that beaten up lump of marble already. As is well known by now, the statue does not actually represent a tailor, and is not male – most agree that it represents a female goddess, perhaps Demeter, that it was originally carved in the 2nd century CE, and that it was moved to its current location sometime after that.

Basically every traveler who came near Porto Rafti prior to the 20th century mentions something about the statue; apparently it was one of the main attractions that drew people to the bay back when archaeology mostly involved travelling around Greece looking at stones left over from antiquity. Even as late as the 1960s and 1970s special expeditions were formed in order to assess the burning questions of what the statue represents, where it came from, and the particularities of its aesthetic merits:

“Notwithstanding the damage, the statue has many points of aesthetic power and forceful beauty. The posture still evokes a feeling of formal majesty, and the view of the right side shows the rhythmical transitions from cloak to body to rockwork seat and plinth, conveyed in the bunching of drapery and the depth of cutting.” (Vermeule, 1962: 63)

Oh yeah: Forceful beauty! Formal majesty! Rhythmical transitions! I am not sure I see all of that in the old lump, but I’ll leave that for the art historians to decide. Let’s just say the work we are doing in the BEARS project is not so wrapped up in formal majesty or rhythmical transitions.

That said, some extant stories from the history of peoples’ attempts to answer questions of what the statue represents and where it came from are pretty amusing, and also shed interesting light on the history of post-antique activity in Porto Rafti.

In 1740, some locals apparently told Charles Perry of Penshurst that Apollo granted a particularly competent tailor the honor of the statue when he “reigned King of Greece”…whenever that was. The idea of the statue as a tailor therefore goes back at least into the 18th century, and probably earlier. A common story is that the statue once held a pair of golden scissors, since stolen.

But there are totally different, and probably earlier origin myths for the monument. According to Niccolò da Martoni, who was in Porto Rafti way back in 1395, the local story of the statue concerned a young man who fell in love with a beautiful girl uninterested in his advances. The girl ran away; despairing during the pursuit, she asked the gods to intervene. The gods turned both the young man and the girl into marble, then set them up on two nearby islands – hence the names of Raftis and Raftopoula. This story corroborates other accounts, including those of Guillet (ca. 1670), Perry (1740), and Stuart and Revett (1753) who saw two marble statues in the bay.

What happened to the other statue? The letters of John Morritt dated between 1794 and 1796 describe the activities of Louis Fauvel, a French painter who collected large quantities of antiquities with which to decorate his house and that of his patron (the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier), in the general area. A plausible suggestion brought forward by Vermeule is that Fauvel made off with the statue from Raftopoula during a general looting tour of Attica.

And the poor old Raftis statue’s head? According to Collignon’s summary of the French consul Giraud’s correspondence from the late 17th century, a nasty Venetian ship captain whacked it off for a souvenir sometime around 1673! Such drama, such intrigue. By the way, Collignon wrote a really fascinating account of 17th-century Porto Rafti based on Giraud’s letters: apparently there was a booming nut export business going then, as well as outgoing shipments of Attic resin, honey, and silk. Many distinguished foreign consuls and merchants were in residence, and had various disputes over taxes with local sailors and officials. Clearly a lot had changed by the time of Dodwell’s visit in 1805, when the entire area was abandoned!

An interesting suggestion by Vermeule is that the statue could have been used as a lighthouse to keep sailors from smashing into the Raftis islet at night, which is a cool idea. I can imagine that this big marble figure with a sort of Headless Horseman flame head lurking atop the pyramid of Raftis would have looked very very extra!

When it comes to any of the other questions about the Raftis, where the statue came from or who put it there, most of the accounts related to the statue are impossible to corroborate, and several contradict each other, so it seems very unlikely that additional efforts to enlighten its background would be fruitful. Of course, there’s always more room for idle speculation, but maybe that’s not the best use of BEARS’ time. It is helpful that the statue has been there drawing travelers to the bay for hundreds of years, since their other comments give us interesting accounts of what the bay was like a long time ago. Too bad they didn’t know how to read surface pottery, or we’d also have a better idea of the extent of ancient settlement in the area too.

July 19, 2021July 21, 2021

Fowl and Fuel in Porto Rafti circa 1800

It is always fun to read back through old travelers’ accounts of Greece, which I have been doing as part of the process of writing up the BEARS 2021 season report. Below is an amusing story recounted by Dodwell about trying to procure provisions prior to staying the night in Porto Rafti back on September 3rd, 1805.

“As we intended to pass the night at Port Raphte, which is uninhabited, we endeavoured to purchase some provisions at Brauna; but the villagers descrying our approach from a distance, with our associated Turks, had time to shut up all their fowls, which are almost the only food in Grecian villages; and in answer to our earnest application for a supply of this kind, gravely assured us, that they had no fowls, and that none were to be procured. We next directed our steps to the monastery, and begged the Hegoumenos to supply our wants. The venerable monk did not fail to give us his solemn assurance, that not a single fowl could be found in a circuit of many miles! He had however hardly finished his assertion, when, very provokingly for him, but fortunately for us…a treacherous cock, within the sacred walls, betrayed the holy ecclesiastic by crowing aloud, and was immediately answered by all the cocks in the village! This sudden and unexpected occurrence could not fail of exciting our unrestrained merriment; and indeed the circumstance was so ridiculous, as to relax the stern features even of the Hegoumenos himself, who…contented himself with uttering some imprecations against the cock and his evil voice, and desired the villagers to supply us, which they did on our paying double their value.”

Thanks to one rambunctious rooster, then, Dodwell & crew seem to have passed an uneventful night on the shores of the bay with ample chicken nuggets. The next morning a crew of fellows from the island of Tinos happened to be in the bay “cutting wood to carry to their island” and the sailors gave the travellers a full Captain Vasilis treatment, taking them around to the islets in the bay in order to investigate antiquities.

Must have been quite a wonderfully different world in the early 1800s – apparently there was not even one Gegos in town back then, let alone the modern wonder that is Sklavenidis; and treeless neighbors from Tinos were in the habit of sailing all the way over just to get some firewood!

Perhaps this small morsel of information holds some kinda clue as to why industrial production was a popular activity on Praso, since access to fuel is a major concern for any kind of pyrotechnological craftsperson. In an older account, from 1740, Charles Perry also discusses the GREAT VERDURE of Porto Rafti:

“This port is certainly one of the delighfullest Harbours in Nature; for it is encompassed almost all ‘round with charming Vales; and these, rising with a gradual and easy ascent, at last terminate in lofty mountains, which are covered all over with Pine-trees, and other sorts of Verdure.”

One of the Delightfullest Harbours in Nature indeed! Many on the BEARS team would certainly agree even if the ratios of Verdure to Cementure have probably shifted since Perry’s visit.

July 17, 2021July 17, 2021

BEARS 2021: Praso the Great

In the weeks since the last remains of the BEARS 2021 team dematerialized back out into their constituent home coordinates in the ‘real’ world, I’ve spent most of my time communing with the non-human aspects of the project: all of the data, ideas, and photos that we produced during the five weeks of the season. While most members of the team roll off to other projects or activities for the rest of the summer once we finish up, it’s up to the beleaguered director to take care of end-of-season business, from double-checking that everything is in order in the database and GIS to writing up reports and publications detailing the work we did in the field. It’s always sort of sad to bid farewell to the wonderful daily routine of satisfying outdoor work and camaraderie that the fieldwork season brings, but with BEARS that sadness is tempered by the incredible quantity and fascinating nature of the evidence we’ve collected. Both in 2019 and in 2021 it’s been a pleasure to get the old intellectual engine fired up in the aftermath of the season and start trying to figure out what kinds of new stuff we can say about the past based on the season’s work.

This season we spent the majority of our time conducting gridded collection on Praso, the nearest-to-shore and most easily accessible of the four uninhabited islets in the bay. Of course Praso was always one of our targets for survey in the project, but I wouldn’t say it ever loomed large as a big priority. Part of the reason we decided to move Praso up to the front of the schedule this year was because most of our Bronze Age inclined team members were not able to join us due to continuing pandemic complications, and I felt strongly that we should try to “save” the remainder of survey on Raftis (which we already know is a big Bronze Age site) for 2022, when they’ll be back with the team.

In other words, we decided to survey Praso this year because we thought it wouldn’t be all that great or interesting! My idea was partly to kill time while also being productive until the whole team could return in 2022. Praso seemed like a good substitute for Raftis from this point of view – we wanted to stay out on islands as much as possible so we’d be safely socially-distanced from the local community during work; Praso seemed small enough that even with just the six of us that were out in the field for most of the season, we’d be able to finish it all in 2021; and there was supposedly plenty of Late Roman pottery on the surface, which suited our team of mostly non-Prehistorians, especially Joey and Rob, the two project Romanists who made up about 20% of the field team for the first couple of weeks!

Grace already wrote a nice post about the early days of our survey on Praso, so readers of the blog already know that we actually ended up finding A LOT more than just Late Roman pottery on the islet! This was a big surprise, because Praso has essentially zero presence in existing literature. Apparently nobody has really noticed or cared that the density of surface finds on this low-key little spit of land is genuinely astonishing. If we account for limited visibility, our data suggest that many of the 20×20 meter survey squares on the islet contained upwards of 10,000 individual artifacts…far more than what we saw on Raftis, which up until 2019 was the densest, largest surface concentration of material I’d seen in 15 years of survey in Greece!

What’s more, the range of periods represented on Praso is very broad, as Grace noted: it is a very, very diachronic islet. This is notably highly against the trend for the area – the sites we’ve investigated so far have tended to see intense activity, but only in 1–2 periods: Final Neolithic/Early Bronze Age for the Pounta peninsula, LH IIIC & 6th-7th century CE for Raftis, the 3rd century BCE on Koroni. But on Praso there is something from nearly every period that’s represented in the bay overall, from earlier prehistory to Ottoman and WW II era artifacts.

It is a little funny that what is so far the only place we’ve seen around Porto Rafti with consistent human exploitation through time is also seemingly the ONLY place in the area that archaeologists have basically never spent any time poking around. My Bronze-Agey advisors and mentors have all swam out to Raftis islet – long documented to have some kind of LH IIIC pottery presence – and even desolate Koroni islet; there are plenty of little discussions of sherdage and even burials on Raftopoula in various reports. But Praso has somehow slipped under everyone’s radar. Well, except the many people that park their boats next to the protected south side of the island to swim all summer, of course. As usual, the BEARS team had a sort of daily dose of cognitive dissonance, wandering past lackadaisical sunbathers to spend hours and hours laboriously sorting through huge quantities of largely ignored but exquisitely preserved and varied archaeological remains.

Of course, the big question on our minds now is just what was so appealing about little Praso that made it such an attractive spot for people to descend upon from the Final Neolithic to the Late Roman periods.

It is immediately apparent from our survey finds that one of the reasons people spent time on Praso must have had to do with its affordances for craft production – amongst the most unexpected finds from the Praso survey are significant quantities of waste from ceramic and metal production! So far we can’t say too much about the metallurgical activity, since we haven’t been able to do much analysis or contextualization of the slags and ores, etc., but our heads are already spinning with the analytical directions towards which the evidence for ceramic production are leading us. First, it is clear that a regionally important type of LH IIIC pottery was made on Praso – the fabric of the wasters matches the so-called White Ware that is abundant at the cemetery of Perati and on Raftis, as well as at other sites up and down the Euboean gulf. The number of well-documented LH IIIC ceramic production sites in all of the Greek mainland can be counted on one hand, so this is a very rare and exciting discovery. Second, it seems that the many tiles we documented on the Koroni peninsula, dated to the Classical/Hellenistic period, were ALSO being manufactured on Praso. Finally, the same probably goes for the many Late Roman tiles from Raftis. The fabrics of the waste products and the finished products across the sites all match really nicely, at least on first inspection. I had never, ever seen tile wasters in a survey before Praso, but we have collected quite a few – just one of many wild surprises Praso had in store for our little BEARS crew this June.

Suffice it to say that there is a lot to think about as we try to put together the pieces for our 2021 season report. Aside from all of the evidence for craft production, we have the normal embarrassment of finds to deal with –thousands of sherds of well-preserved pottery, a few hundred lithics, plus 300+ “other” objects, including groundstone tools (and even one groundstone vessel!), many Bronze Age figurines, loomweights, lamps, glass, metal objects of bronze, iron, and lead…not to mention a haul of worked, often-perforated terracotta mystery objects that might have had something to do with craft production (or…with the well-documented local tendency of perforating almost everything, which the team knows very well).

One of the appealing parts of archaeology is that you really never know what you will find on any given day or in a given season, let alone from moment to moment. This creates a certain kind of chaos in one’s scholarship, because you might head to a region or a site hoping to find one thing, but the archaeological record has another idea in mind, and then you just have to deal with it. Some find this chaos to be frustrating, but in my experience it has the very salutary effect of keeping your scholarship and ideas dynamic and fresh. For example, when I went to work in the Mazi Plain back in 2014, I was hoping we would find some sites that dated to my major period of interest, the end of the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. Instead there was nothing at all in the plain from the entire period between Late Mycenaean and Archaic – so I ended up spending most of the project obsessively documenting a Late Classical fortification. This ended up constituting several summers of quite satisfying and enjoyable fieldwork, and I learned a lot, both about documenting a massive fortress and about historical fortification architecture!

A sort of funny reversal of that trend, though, seems to be happening for me at BEARS. When I started thinking about working in Porto Rafti my main area of research interest was long-distance trade and exchange in the Late Bronze Age; I was primarily hoping we would recover remains of a settlement associated with the import-rich cemetery of Perati, with the idea that these would shed light on the nature of the region’s engagement with the eastern Mediterranean. However, over the last two years, I’ve become much more interested in the anthropology of craft production, especially thinking about how to reconstruct the roles and identities of craftspeople within society, and much LESS interested in the bigger system of Bronze Age trade. So I guess it is a little bit supernatural-seeming that the archaeological record is being so accommodating in that regard. In addition to lots of cool evidence about trade and interaction, of course, now we have a whole amazing assemblage of craft production remains! Either I’m just really lucky, or karma has something pretty terrible in store for me soon to make up for this serendipitous archaeological turn of events.

That doesn’t even take into account my other obsession in life – Soviet propaganda art, which of course very often features the most captivatingly semi-hagiographic imagery about the glorious nature of all FIRES OF INDUSTRY. So that has really set me up to be uniquely qualified for designing a sweet BEARS 2021 t-shirt/logo that captures the essence of our discovery on Praso.

Long story short, I can definitely say that Porto Rafti is the best place a person like me could ever could have chosen as a location to run a survey project! We’ll have more to say about the serious sides of interpreting the evidence soon, but for now let us all take some time to bask in the newly-discovered glow of Praso the Great.