Survey Archaeology and Modern Greece: Some Fragments

Next month, I’m giving a paper in at the 20th annual CHAT conference in Patras, Greece. My paper is titled “Survey Archaeology and Modern Greece” with the hope that I can say something substantive about either topic. My blog post today is a bunch of scattered thoughts related to this paper. It’s a brainstorm and probably will contain as many dead ends and incommensurate statements as useful starts.

First, I had this idea to anchor my paper in two case studies: one is Chelmis, as settlement that I studied with WARP and have written about with Dimitri Nakassis and Grace Erny and the other is a site called Lakka Skoutara in the southeastern Corinthia which David Pettegrew and I documented as part of EKAS and published. These two sites are modern sites, in the sense that most of the material culture with the sites dates to the 20th century. They were both “abandoned” (or the main period of activity, rather) appears to pre-date the mid-20th century with the proviso that both sites also remains active to some degree even today. Thus, the sites are interesting as examples of pre-war rural settlement while still offering insights into post-war and “contemporary” Greece. 

The first part of my paper’s title is survey archaeology. We documented both Chelmis and Lakka Skoutara as parts of regional survey projects and using techniques rooted in the tradition of intensive pedestrian survey. Survey archaeology in Greece has an interesting lineage. On the one hand, it developed, at least partly, from growing interest in settlement archaeology in the New World.  Large scale projects in the lower Mississippi valley in the US and Viru Valley in Peru (as well as in the Near East) developed methods necessary to document areas large enough to reveal settlement systems.

Survey archaeology at the regional scale drew heavily upon military technologies ranging from advances in cartography to the use of aerial photography and later satellite imagery and geospatial tools. In many ways, these technologies make manifest the ties between various regional approaches to archaeology and the technologies of colonialism. The influence and interest in “Area Studies” in Greece in the immediate post-war period has roots in Cold War anxieties as Greece’s liminal location at the doorsteps of the Iron Curtain.

These connections seem particularly salient for understanding survey archaeology and modern Greece. In part, because archaeology in Greece, as any number of recent works has shown, has always had elements of colonialism inherent in its practice. And, in part, the archaeology of modern Greece owes some of its formative development to the interrogation of Charles Orser’s famous “four haunts” of historical archaeology: colonialism, Euro-centrism, capitalism, and modernity. 

Indeed, the connection between survey archaeology and the modern period has always been fraught. On the one hand, site based survey practices that increase intensity when they encounter significant scatters of ancient material in the landscape assumed that ancient and modern landscapes were, in some way, incommensurable (although not always, such as in cases where modern activity revealed ancient sites). As a result, the approaches to modern sites typically differed from those used to document ancient sites. The sheer quantity of modern material made collection practices designed to detect hidden landscapes unsuitable to document sites characterized by plastic water bottles, discard soda and food tins, broken modern roof tiles, and synthetic building material.

Recognizing that modern sites were substantively different from ancient sites reinforced views that the material traces of the modern period did not necessarily mark continuities in the Greek countryside where most survey projects focused. Instead, the modern period appeared to represent an expression discontinuity between the Ancient and Medieval (and even Ottoman) periods in Greece and the present. In this way, the methods associated with intensive survey practices were consistent with a global view of modernity as an intrusive force that both obfuscated ancient landscapes and was somehow incommensurate with older views that saw the Greek countryside as a contemporary expression of Ancient or Medieval Greece.

A view of the modern Greek landscape as an alien intrusion requiring a new set of methods (ethnography, for example, or the study of historical documents, or at least adapted sampling and collection methods) is consistent, to some degree, with intensive survey practices elsewhere. As a recent version of the North Dakota State Archaeological Manual points out, while every tin can could be a site, it’s probably best not to document every tin can as a site. On the other hand, Native American artifacts discovered by survey almost always require site forms. 

Where does this leave my two case studies: Chelmis and Lakka Skoutara?

On the one hand, intensive artifact collection around these sites revealed, unsurprisingly, a massive quantity of artifacts. Many of these artifacts represent the growing engagement of rural regions in Greece with national, regional, and global markets and new forms and networks of production inflected by colonialism and capitalism. As this material enters archaeological contexts it traces new patterns across the landscape that follow new roads, new forms of motorized transportation, and new social, economic, and political relationships. These assemblages embody modernity and make manifest in new forms of identity (this is obviously half-baked at present).  

More than that, my work with David Pettegrew at Lakka Skoutara provided some insights into the volatility and variability of sites over time. Archaeologists of the contemporary world have stressed the potential of the “supermodern” to transform the world in fundamental ways at incredible speed. In fact, the same networks that forge new archaeological signatures in the landscape at modern sites and render the techniques employed to document pre-modern landscapes irrelevant rely on the speed of capital, material, and movement to transform spaces, building, and functions in rapid and even abrupt ways.

Obviously, this is a rambling, incoherent, and lacks evidence. It’s mostly just fragments of ideas.

Feedback and insults are always welcome.