Writing Wednesday: Introducing Polis I

I’m just about done with the fall semester and very much looking forward to some sustained writing, reading, and research time over what I’m calling “winter research leave.”

The first project on my slate is to write the introduction to the first volume in the Polis excavation series (technically called the Princeton Cyprus Expedition Series, I think) that we plan to submit to ASOR around the start of the new year.

I don’t quite have the first paragraph of the introduction right, but I’m starting to sketch out its overall shape. The challenge is to combine a long (30k+) history of the Princeton work at the site with an equal length section on Princeton excavations at the area of E.F1. With the draft below (which ends rather abruptly when I ran out of time in my faculty writing group!), I think that I have a rough outline of what I want to say. A secondary goal is to add a thin layer of historiography to the volume that helps us situate our work in a broader Mediterranean and historical context.  

This volume has a ways to go, with parts still under revision and our data not yet submitted to Open Context, but with each day we get closer to having things together. Writing a draft of the introduction now seemed like a good way to kick off my winter writing. 

Here’s where it is: 

This first volume in the Polis series seeks to do two things. First, we introduce the history, methods, and scope of work by the Princeton Cyprus Expedition around the modern village of Polis-tis-Chrysochous in northwestern Cyprus. As the following section will show, the Princeton team was the not the first group to recognize and document the archaeology around the village, but starting in the 1983, the Princeton Cyprus Team performed archaeological work at a grand scale. The Princeton Cyprus Expedition arrived in the region scant years ahead of its rapid growth as a tourist destination at the end of the 20th century. Throughout the mid-1980s, the Princeton team excavated numerous areas on the basis of a regional survey conducted in 1983. The scale of work around the village of Polis reflected the resources available to Princeton as well as the methods developed in the mid-20th century at Morgantina and the Athenian Agora. The Princeton excavations sought to pass these methods onto a generation of students some of whom contributed to this volume and many of whom continue to contribute to the field. 

More importantly for this volume, however, is that the history of work by the Princeton team and the methods at Polis provides the foundation for all subsequent analysis of the site. The distinctive level and pass system which straddled the line between stratigraphic and pre-stratigraphic practices likewise paralleled the scale and intensity of Princeton excavations around Polis. In many ways, the Princeton Cyprus Expedition was the direct descendant of 20th century foreign archaeological projects on Cyprus and the post-war, “Big Dig” archaeology in the Mediterranean (Dyson 20. Willy Childs was a student of Erik Sjöqvist, who co-directed the Swedish Cyprus Expedition from 1927-1931. As Chapter # explains, this project not only documented a series of ancient tombs in the region of Polis, but also offered a model for post-independence archaeological projects on Cyprus. The involvement of the French (Yon 1993), British (Kiely and Ulbrich 2012), and American (Davis 1989) teams on Cyprus from the 19th through the 20th century has profoundly shaped the archaeological landscape of the island both before and after the 1974 invasion. The Princeton Cyprus Expedition also drew inspiration from American post-war “Big Dig” excavations. In particular Childs’ acknowledged the influence of American excavations at the Athenian Agora which proceeded with particular vigor in the post war period in establishing a long term foothold in the center of the modern city of Athens. Morgantina, which began in 1955 as a training project for Princeton students, offers a better parallel for the Polis project. Carla Antonaccio refers to Morgantina as an “accidental big dig” (Antonaccio 2015; Dyson 2006, 232-233), and the narrative history provided in this volume suggest parallels with that project in terms of goals, planning and sometimes ad hoc execution. Childs’ debt to his advisor, Erik Sjöqvist, and his experiences at Morgantina is particular apparent in the Princeton Cyprus Expedition’s pedagogical goals, traditional excavation methods, and use of a grid system to describe the location of trenches. These methods and this history form a vital context for this and subsequent publications of the site. 

Also similar to Morgantina, preliminary results from work at Polis initially appeared largely as preliminary and specialized articles in anticipation of a publication series published with Princeton’s support. These often preliminary reports from the site appeared across a wide range of publications including the venerable Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus. The result of this practice, however, was that it often remains difficult to get a comprehensive view of any one period or one part of the site. The publication of the synthetic chapters in the 2012 exhibition catalogue City of Gold: The Archaeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus (Childs, Smith, and Padgett 2012) went some way to present period specific overviews of the site, but both continued work and specialist studies have continued to update, refine, and challenges these conclusions. We have compiled a comprehensive (and hopefully exhaustive) list of these publication as Appendix # and many of these preliminary publications inform the discussion of the various excavations conducted by the Princeton team detailed in this volume. This variegated and wide-ranging bibliography provides the basis for the description and interpretation of the sites excavated by Princeton (and its predecessors) in Chapter # of this volume. 

It goes without saying in archaeology that final reports are rarely any more final than preliminary reports that they supercede. While the publications in this series represent our latest interpretation of work at the site, we also recognize the ephemerality of archaeological analysis in light of new chronologies, regional work, and interpretative frameworks. In an effort to make the efforts of the Princeton Cyprus Expedition as relevant to future scholars as they have been to our analyses presented here, we have started the process of publishing the notebooks, our analysis of the ceramic context artifacts, the inventoried finds, and the catalogue included in this publication (chapter #) in open access digital form at Open Context. This approach is also in keeping with the recently approved ”Digital Media Policies for ASOR Publications.“ As a companion to this volume, we have also published notebooks, documentation, and analysis used to interpret the site of “E.F1” in accordance with its location in the Princeton grid. This will allow the next generation of scholars both to understand how we reached our conclusions as well as to examine the results of the Polis excavations in light of new questions, new resources, and new approaches.

Indeed, our own work to publish the area of E.F1 in this volume reflects recent changes in ceramic chronologies and our ongoing work at the site. The conclusions we have drawn on the basis of the depositional sequence at E.F1 shifts the chronology of the South Basilica later in the date range that we proposed in our preliminary publication in 2019. Our confidence in these conclusions emerges partly through the careful study of the contexts from the area of E.F1. The purpose of publishing this areas and its comparatively modest remains in this first volume is, then, particular to demonstrate the continued value of this kind of meticulous publication, but also because the Late Roman period at Polis has already contributed to a significant rethinking of the Late Antique and Early Byzantine period on the island. Any number of recent publications, perhaps beginning with Marcus Rautman’s A Cypriot Village of Late Antiquity: Kalavasos-Kopetra in the Vasilikos Valley (2003) or D.M. Metcalf’s Byzantine Cyprus (2009) and continuing through Luca Zavagno’s Cyprus between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (2017) and P. Panayides’s and I. Jacob’s edited collection Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity (2022), have contributed to a large-scale reconsideration of the Late Roman period on Cyprus. This work has brought to the fore abundant evidence for the persistent prosperity of Cyprus into the Late Roman and Early Byzantine period. Crucial to these conclusions is the growing quantity of stratigraphically excavated ceramic material from across the island. The publication of large urban sites such as Paphos and Kourion as well as material from village and even rural site such as Kopetra in the Kalavassos valley have not only benefited from, but also contributed to the dating of many common regional and local ceramic forms later than dates offered by earlier archaeologists. As a result, our understanding of the scale and character of settlement on the island has changed and once pivotal events such as sixth century earthquakes and Arab Raids have taken on less prominent roles in how we understand the history of the island.