Three Things Tuesday: A Trio of Articles

In a rare and exotic digression of my traditional alliterative practice, today is a three things TUESDAY. Oh yeah! This is mostly to celebrate that I’m somehow gotten back into the habit of reading again!

Thing the First

It’s always a chance to celebrate when there’s some survey archaeology in the American Journal of Archaeology and survey archaeology in Greece, no less. Check out Chelsea Gardner’s “Classical to Late Roman Sites at Diros Bay in the Mani Peninsula, Greece” from AJA 124 (2024). Gardner’s presents the Classical to Late Roman results from the Diros Bay survey on the Mani Peninsula in southern Greece. The survey was small and focused in the larger hinterland of the Diros cave. As a result, it barely qualifies as a regional survey project in a traditional sense (and probably approximates my work with Scott Moore and David Pettegrew at Pyla-Koutsopetria on Cyprus). The small scale of the project allowed for more intensive field practice and the analysis of finds from the project’s small handful of discrete sites. The analysis of fabrics and the chemical make-up of the finds from the sites contributes to the growing body of information that we have about ceramics circulating in the Peloponnesus. More than that, Gardner’s careful documentation of a small region shows the potential of this kind of survey and its results.

The only mild grump that I have in this article is that the hook is that stuff is happening in parts of Greece not mentioned in ancient sources. This is obviously true and has been the basis for most intensive survey — if not most archaeology — over the past 70 years in Greece. After all, there are precious few sources for Late Antique Greece at all much less talking about non-urban areas, but, as an old Appalachian buddy used to quip, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a piece of Late Roman pottery in Greece. In other words, most archaeologists know that textual sources only tell a tiny bit of the story. This is a minor critique, though, on what is otherwise a fine article.

Thing the Second

I was interested to read Luca Zavagno’s recent survey article in the impact of environmental archaeology on the study of islands in the Early Medieval period “The Byzantine Insular Countryside in the Early Middle Ages (ca. 600-ca.900): The Cases of Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete in (partial) Light of Environmental Archaeology” in Environmental Archaeology (2024). Zavagno offers both words of optimism and caution. For the former, it is clear that the unique environmental conditions of the large islands in the Mediterranean make them kind of laboratories for understanding the impact of changing climate — for example — on the communities. At the same time, he stresses that in the cases of Crete and Cyprus, we do not have particularly reliable climate data for the Late Roman and Medieval period and that the responses on islands remains complex because of the ease with which island communities continued to engage with larger economic, political, and social networks. In other words, environmental archaeology on islands remains a mixed bag with as many problems and promise.

Thing the Third

It’s as good a time as any to mention how much I appreciated Attila Dézsi’s piece in the last International Journal of Historical Archaeology: “You May Destroy This Village, But You Cannot Destroy the Power Which Created It” in IJHA 28 (2024) where it appeared in a special section dedicated to “The Historical Archaeology of Capitalism’s Cracks” which he co-edited with LouAnn Wurst. Dézsi’s book, Archäologie der Republik Freies Wendland, is scheduled to appear next spring from Sidestone Press. 

It’s nice article that looks at how German authorities destroyed and then buried the Free Republic of Wendland, a short lived but significant protest camp set up by people opposed to the use of Wendland salt dome as a storage for nuclear waste in the late 1970s. Protesters developed the camp quite extensively over a short period of time endowing it with individual homes, towers, and common areas. This did little to discourage the authorities for demolishing the camp around the protesters and then burying the remains of the camp under levels of sand and soil and ultimately planting a dense stand of trees on the spot. Dézsi’s excavations revealed the remains of the camp’s ruins under these soils and provided the typical insights into life in such ephemeral settlements.

More than that, though, he brought the camp back to public attention and connected the remains, photographs, documents, and oral histories with the camp’s enduring legacy. The tension between long term potential of damage from nuclear waste and the ephemeral but nevertheless persistent legacy of protest parallels recent discussions surrounding the consequences of the Anthropocene or of the depredations of global capital. For Dézsi, the hope that inspired the Free Republic of Wendland is a powerful counterweight to the damage done by the collusion between the state and capital in what is turning into the long-21st century.