Two Things Tuesday: Thinking about the Summer

It’s a long way out and I really need to stay focused on the month left in the semester, but that said, I’m thinking about the summer and I’m really happy to have two very cool projects to work on in the Mediterranean this year.

Thing the First

First and foremost is our work at Polis on Cyprus. For the last decade, we’ve been churning through thousands of sherds of pottery and hundreds of notebook pages and other finds attempting to understand the activities at two areas of Polis: EF1 and EF2. We have done most of what we can at these two areas but need to prepare our work for publication. This summer will focus on going through this material one more time and preparing it for publication. As readers of this blog know, I’ve started this work already. 

This coming summer, we’re going to dive into a much more substantial project and that is starting the work on EG0. E.G0 is a complicated site. Our main interest is the Early Christian basilica, but the site also includes a monumental Hellenistic period building. The basilica itself saw multiple phases from (probably) the 6th to the 14th century and many, many burials that cut through surfaces and into foundations. To complicate matters further, the Princeton team only excavated half of the church and starting in 2023, a team from the Department of Antiquities excavated the other half. At present, we’ll focus on trying to identify key deposits from the Princeton excavations and trying to lace together the stratigraphy and the relationship between the strata and the architecture.

Even when I wrote my dissertation, I somehow thought that publishing a church was something that someone else did. At Polis we have two churches (a north and a south basilica) and facing the daunting task of publishing them and making sense of them, I still can’t quite believe that I get a chance to write a small chapter in the larger history of Christianity in the Mediterranean.

Thing the Second

I’m also excited to return to Isthmia for a few weeks to wrap up (optimistically) some work on the last phase of the Roman Bath there. Our main goal over the last few years has been to study the so-called “Slavic” handmade wares from the bath. Lately, we’ve expanded our scope to really dig into the stratigraphy of the bath which led us to thinking seriously about its adaptation after its function as a bath lapsed. This, in turn, has me thinking about the tension between ruins and rubble. Ruins have something that draws people toward them, they are sometimes structurally useful, and often serve to help us remember. Rubble, on the other hand, might be useful as a resource but rarely as a landmark. Rubble is about overwriting or forgetting.

At some point, the bath served as a ruin. It shows signs of reuse through adaptation, some ways were difficult to understand, but others, including as a fortification and as the backdrop for a settlement are more obvious. It also served as a place of burial telling us that its corrupted monumentality served as a place of memory. At some point, the bath became a rubble and a settlement stood not amid a ruin but on top of the rubble, at least in part. This phase may well be associated with the group who produce handmade pottery and created an oven along the wall.

Finally, we’ve agreed to collaborate on the larger project of publishing the Roman period pottery from the site as part of the final publication. This involves revising and refining the existing catalogue first prepared by Jean Marty in the late 1970s and then updated and revised by Scott Nash after her death. I’m excited to help bring this in for a landing and connecting the assemblage at Isthmia to larger conversations about ceramics in Greece and the wider Mediterranean.