Summer Research Leave, Part 1

By the time you’re reading this, I’m winging my way to Cyprus via Minneapolis, New York, and Athens to the start of my summer research season. Like every year, when the dust of the semester settles, I start to see a bit more clearly the tasks that ahead of me.

Cyprus comes first. We’ll spend a few weeks at Polis advancing our work there. The main focus of our work in writing in situ. In this way, it leans into slow archaeology with its emphasis of working, thinking, and writing on site and blaring the line of analysis, interpretation, and narration.  

This spirit has infused our work at Polis and our four main goals for this summer.

First, we have an almost completed manuscript for the first volume in the Polis series. We need to do some editing to prepare it for submission and some of the editing won’t be easy work. Most of the editing is best done in Polis when the team assembles and the site and artifacts are at hand. 

Second, we are working on the second Polis volume which will focus on spaces of work in the area of EF2 at the site. These appear to be mostly Hellenistic and Roman in date. They include workshops and a kiln as well as some other spaces of uncertain, but possibly commercial or industrial function. As part of that work we need to analyze and catalogue ceramics, document stratigraphy, and discern the function of several unusual features at the site.

Third, we have a rather exceptional assemblage of Roman lamps associated with a kiln at the site. To make the argument that these lamps derive from the kiln, however, we need to show that the assemblage of lamps associated with the kiln are distinct from the lamps found elsewhere in contemporary contexts in EF2 and at Polis more broadly. This means documenting the lamp fragments from across the site and creating a catalogue that allows us to substantiate our arguments with evidence. 

Finally, we are committed to collaborating with the entire Polis team and working to figure out how to make sure our data and analysis is accessible to others if not in “real time” at least regularly as we navigate the publication and study phase at Polis. We hope that some of what we learn at Polis can be applied to our work in Greece!