Polis Projects

This summer, I’ll be once again in the field meaning that my regularly scheduled blogging might become a bit more intermittent. I’m not doing field work, but it’s a study season which will focus primarily on the site of Polis on Cyprus (with a brief side trip to Isthmia in Greece). 

As readers of this blog know, Polis is the modern name for the city of Marion/Arsinoe on Cyprus. Excavations in the city have produced evidence for almost every period from the Bronze Age to the Present and I work with a team of scholars tasked with publishing the Hellenistic to Medieval periods at the site. Our work thus far has focused on two areas. The neighborhood of the South Basilica and the area called EF1 and this summer we’re going to wrap up our work at EF1 in anticipation of submitting a volume dedicated to this site and the history of the archaeology at Polis sometime next year.

To get this done, we have to finish the analysis of the stratigraphy, the ceramics, and the architecture of the site which we started in 2019. This should only take us a few days.

We also need to prepare brief descriptions of each stratigraphic unit which also shows their relationship to other strata at the site and finds. This will become part of both the traditional EF1 publication as well as the digital backbone for EF1 on Open Context. The hope is that this can also become model for documenting more thoroughly the stratigraphic of the South Basilica area which is not only a more complex (and is the  history of excavation of excavation there) as well as more spatially extensive. 

This work will also involve linking the stratigraphic descriptions to the inventoried finds, the analyzed, non-inventoried pottery (also known as “the sherds” or “context pottery”), and the scanned notebook pages. Thus each stratigraphic description will also have a series of “one to many” links that will allow future archaeologists to query and critique our analysis.

While we’re working on this, I have to finish a couple of other Cyprus-related outstanding projects:  

First, I need to finish revising a paper that I submitted in the fall on Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity. The editors of the volume (which you can check out here) made some good suggestions for revisions.

Second, I need to grab a few photographs of baptisteries on Cyprus for a long lingering project on Greek and Cypriot baptisteries being patiently shepherded through the publication process by Robin Jensen and her team. This means trips to Kourion and Ay. Georgios-Peyas over the next month (and invariably food at fish taverns with good views of the sea!).

Finally, I want to read and comment on Catherine Keane’s very recent Munich dissertation on Early Christian ecclesiastical complexes in Cyprus.

It’s going to be pretty great getting back into doing archaeology on site this summer (rather than at a 6000 mile remove). Stay tuned for some updates and “Foto Friday”!