Wreading Wednesday: Cooking Ware, Ruins, the Younger Fill, and Progress

I’ve had some time of the last couple weeks to slowly start to catch up on my reading. This means randomly flailing about and reading articles, books for next semester, parts of Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, and short stories from the latest Conjunctions.

So here goes my most recent reads:

Article the First

Theodoros K. Vasileiou and Athanasios K. Vionis, “Cooking pottery as indicator of resilience and change in Early Medieval Cyprus. An archaeometric approach” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (2024). The article is an expansive survey of Early Medieval cooking ware on Cyprus. Cooking pots have long been among the most common and most vexing kinds of pottery from Late Antique and Medieval Cyprus. Questions concerning the rise of hand made and slow wheel cooking pots, for example, intersect with efforts to understand wheel-made pottery made on the local and  regional level, especially the types made at Dhiorios in northwestern Cyprus. Vasileiou and Vionis survey the shape of pottery from five major sites and then compare petrographic samples to demonstrate that while shapes remain fairly consistent across the island, individual vessels showed differences in provenience and source material. It is noteworthy that many places showed a blend of regionally and locally produced vessels. This seems consistent with recent work at Paphos (see here for a brief comment on some of that work).

One of the more vexing issues that we’ve discovered at Polis is the near absence of hand-made cooking pots in 6th and 7th century contexts. Those documented several years ago appear mainly to come from later contexts (or contexts that did not have secure stratigraphy), but their absence in the large assemblages from the 7th century suggest that they occur quite late at this site. It may be that this is because this site, much like the site at Pyla-Koutsopetria on the eastern part of the island, remains quite connected to regional and Mediterranean wide networks of exchange.

Article the Second

I was provoked by Mazen Iwaisi’s provocation in the latest issue of Archaeological Dialogues, “The Baptist Hospital in Gaza. Current ruins for future archaeologists?” While the topic of the article will provoke many people in many different ways, the most interesting point that Iwaisi makes about the ruined Baptist Hospital, which the Israeli military destroyed in the recent war, is when does it become a ruin and what does one DO with a ruin in the making. Does one set aside the ruins of the hospital as a memorial to the death of children and women as a result of war? Does one clean up the debris and study the ruins in retrospect much as Michael Shanks, David Platt, and Bill Rathje did with the debris from the World Trade Center attacks? Or is this another opportunity for salvage or “disaster” archaeology in the spirit of Richard Gould’s work?

The topic alone is adequate for this to constitute a provocation and in many ways the tragic situation in Israel and Palestine obscures the potency of the questions that Iwaisi is asking. I was reminded of walking around the site of a campus shooting with Noah Kaye when at Michigan State. When and how do places commemorate the dead when the wounds and the memories are still raw?

Article the Third

Anyone who thinks about the Late Roman invariably thinks of Claudio Vita‐Finz’s 1969 book The Mediterranean Valleys and his introduction of the term “the younger fill.” Vita‐Finz argued that this alluvial deposit common to Mediterranean valleys dated to Late Antiquity and appeared largely as a result of climate change which we now call the Late Antique Little Ice Age. John Bintliff’s recent article in Geoarchaeology (2024) titled “Mediterranean Valleys Revisited” considers recent discussions surrounding the deposition of sediments during the Holocene period. 

While this article is appropriately dense with citations and observations, the one thing that really stuck out of me was the description of the infilling of river deltas during the Late Roman period. Bintliff surveys the state of the field and observes that current consensus is that sea level rise in the Early and Middle Holocene disrupted the formation of river deltas as rivers deposited their sediments into marine environments rather than coast ones. As sea levels normalized at the end of the Middle Holocene, deltas began to reform and the coastal retreat ended. By Late Antiquity, the coastlines were pushing into the sea as the normal deposit of alluvium from Mediterranean valleys formed expanding river deltas. Ancient cities founded on the earlier coastlines, particular in Asia Minor, discovered their harbors were infilling and their coastal positions compromised by the end of antiquity.

Article the Fourth

Finally, I never stop being charmed by articles on the prairie ruins. I enjoyed James Flath and Robert Wardhaugh recent contribution to Great Plains Quarterly 44.1 (2024) titled “Following the Ruins: History and Memory in a Prairie Ghost Town.” The article doesn’t say much that’s new (much less profound) about prairie towns. Their discussion of Fielding, Saskatchewan could refer to any town on the northern plains of the US or Canada. What they do that makes this article worth reading is emphasize the sense of movement that dominates these seemingly static rural places. The coming and going of families, of businesses, and of churches in the town stress the dynamic precarity of these places situated at the very edge of progress.