Quantcast
Channel: Maia Atlantis: Ancient World Blogs
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 136795

On-site and off-site at Pyla-Koustopetria: A Response to Chris Cloke’s Interpreting Ceramic Assemblages

$
0
0

Last week Chris Cloke generously shared some of his work with the pottery from the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project over at Corinthian Matters in a three part post. In a nutshell, he argued that there was evidence for manuring during Late Antiquity.

It’s a busy week, but I wanted to follow up on his suggestion that PKAP present some of its data to see whether we could detect similar trends. Our work at Pyla-Koustopetria, of course, is rather different in scope than the work of the NVAP. We focused on one, mid-sized, site rather than an entire region. Moreover, by Late Antiquity the built up area of our study area appears to have been rather large in relation to our overall study area.

Nevertheless, there is reason to think that the northern reaches of our study amount to an off-site zone. The distribution of tiles, for example, suggests that only the coastal zone of our study area had tiled buildings. (The tiny numbers in each unit represent the total number of Late Roman artifacts from each unit.)

LateRomanTile

Moreover, the distribution of fine and kitchen wares, most frequently associated with domestic activities appear to be concentrated in similar area.

LateRomanKitchFine

In contrast, the distribution of coarse and utility wares, like amphora, extends of a much larger percentage of the study area.

LateRomanCoarseAmph

Judging by these maps, it would appear that the northern part of our study area which comprised the coastal plateaus of Mavrospilos/Kazamas and Kokkinokremos saw a functionally different kind of activity than the coastal area. Cloke has suggested that the prevalence of less diagnostic sherds – and coarse and utility wares are almost be definition less diagnostic than fine and kitchen wares – might represent material scattered through manuring.

Cloke argue, however, that this is a product of smaller sherd size rather than a specific functional difference, and compares the percentages of diagnostic pottery from both on-site and off-site transects to demonstrate that similar proportions of diagnostic ceramics appear in both ceramics. Clearly, this pattern does not appear in the PKAP data.

Moreover, it does not appear that the average weight of the sherds varied in a consistent way across the PKAP study area.

LateRomanWeight

The map above shows the average weight of Late Roman sherds (excluding tiles) across the study area. It is possible to imagine a slightly higher average sherd weight for the coastal units immediately below the height of Vigla in the left-center of the map, and a slightly lower average sherd weight for the material scattered to the north on the Mavrospilos/Kazamas plateau.

While this is slightly suggestive, I wonder, vaguely, whether this has something to do with the greater soil depth on coastal plain that “protects” sherds more. The plateau units tend to have thin soils with patches of exposed bedrock. This seems like a far more hostile environment for sherds and may have accounted for why they are more poorly preserved. In other words, the condition of the sherds has much more to do with post-depositional processes than how they were deposited.

I expect that David Pettegrew – the expert on survey site formation processes – might have some observations.

Crossposted to Corinthian Matters.



Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 136795

Trending Articles