Two Things Tuesday: Rain and a Plan
- May 26
- 2 min read
I feel like I’m starting to find my groove here this summer and our manuscript is getting tighter and more polished. This gives week two of my summer research leave a bit momentum.
There are a couple things going on these days that probably deserve a bit of text.
Thing the First
We had a nice rain shower on Sunday. There’s something about summer rain in the Mediterranean. It’s abrupt, it can be intense and drenching, but it feels fleeting. It is the perfect counter balance to the grind of archaeology.
Thing the Second
We have managed to analyze enough of the material from two trenches S06 and T06 which are in the area of E.F2 to the east of the apse of the South Basilica. Here’s a general sketch of our work! We can now begin to compare this material to assemblages from elsewhere at the site and from other sites on Cyprus. There’s been a sustained interest in the distribution of Roman period finewares on the island with the two main forms Eastern Sigillata A and Cypriot Sigillata becoming indicators of the relationship between a site and larger economic patterns on the island. The argument has largely been that the Western part of the island has tended to be more oriented toward the Aegean and the coast of Asia Minor while the Eastern part is more tightly tied to the Levant. The source of ESA remains obscure, but in keeping with this assessment, it is thought to be Levantine whereas CS likely derives from Cilician coast or somewhere in Western Cyprus.
A site like Polis should look a good bit like Paphos where there has been a good bit of work to document the chronology and forms of CS on the island (as well as ESA). Moreover, they should look different from sites such as Kourion and the sites near Kition where Levantine wares should be proportionally more common. Survey projects fill some of the gaps between the regions and expand the sample. Of course, this kind of comparison involves the tedious compiling of information from diffuse publications some of which (and I’m talking about John Hayes’s Paphos III) are actually anti-intuitive. Others are simply obscure. As any number of scholars have noted, this makes comparisons between sites often impressionistic (at best) and makes quantitative analysis difficult. That said, we are going to start to sketch out some of this over the next few days.
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