Washingtonia

It was a great pleasure to read my friends Kostis Kourelis and David Pettegrew’s (with Nikos Poulopoulos, Albert Sarvis, Alexandra Shehigian) article “Washingtonia 1829: an American refugee colony in Greece” in the most recent issue of the Journal of Greek Archaeology.

For those of you who don’t know, Washingtonia was the name of an early 19th century refugee settlement on the Isthmus of Corinth set up by Samuel Gridley Howe, managed by George Finlay, authorized by the Greek state, and briefly settled by refugees from the Greek War of Independence.

There more to this story than that, though. David Pettegrew has been searching for Washingtonia since around 2000. While working on the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, there was constant buzz about the location and character of this strange 19th century settlement set up by Samuel Gridley Howe. This prompted numerous efforts to locate the settlement, Howe’s house, the hospital, and other features (including the konak of Kiamil Bey). Over time, we came to realize that most of these features have simply disappeared without leaving much of a trace on the surface of the ground or in the architecture of various villages of the region. This was a sobering realization to us as survey archaeologists. Instead of the survey representing a palimpsest of past use, certain features including elite residences, institutional architecture, and entire settlements have disappeared leaving very little trace in the surface record. 

[Full disclosure: It was never in my best interest to try to record the number of hours I spent driving slowly around the village of Hexamilia with Tim and Lita Gregory and David Pettegrew looking for traces of Washingtonia. Most recently, in 2023 (I think?), we managed one more slow speed driving field day through Hexamilion before one of us cracked and demanded that we stop this madness and get ice cream. This was well before one of us who had been in a small rental car, driving slowly through a village, tested positive for COVID. I am very pleased that they have been able to find traces of Washingtonia in Hexamilia, and part of me is also very happy to perhaps not talk about Washingtonia for a few years or… you know… ever again.]

Kostis, David, and their colleagues have used documents to fill the gap in the surface and architectural record and to reconstruct the landscape of Washingtonia. They have identified the location of the “manor house” of Samuel Gridley Howe which overlooked (and presumably supervised) the settlement. There is abundant room for metaphor here especially in relation to the idea of Greece as a crypto-colony. Howe’s interest in providing a school and a hospital as well as the panoptic perspective offered from his manor reads like a page from 1960s Foucault especially as Howe occupied the rebuilt the konak of the Ottoman Bey. The drone images offer an intriguing (and deliberate) parallel to the panopticism of Howe’s rebuilt house. This article is too modest in some ways; their analysis makes visible the colonialism of Howe’s philanthropy and reinforces his patronizing view of his mission.

This is a paper that was over 20 years in the making and embodies the best aspects of slow archaeology. Not only did the team demonstrate incredibly familiarity with the local landscape, but also brought together a remarkable array of evidence from 19th century maps, diaries, and archival documents to drone photography, artifacts on the surface, and contemporary architectural study. This patient approach to landscape not only helps us understand the Howe’s view of his work, but also traces the complex processes that transformed the Late Ottoman and Early Modern landscape. In the place of persistent places, the maps and landscape offer traces of settlement — ruined villages, clusters of houses, vanished and ruined buildings. Whatever persistence archaeology assumed in the countryside vanishes beneath modern buildings, agricultural activities, and vegetation leaving only the barest traces.

Their patience in reconstructing the landscape of the early 19th century (as well as early and later traces) reveals how ephemeral even early modern architecture and activities can be even under the scrutiny of 21st century archaeologists’ gaze. This is a vital reminder of the limits of archaeology not only for the most recent past, but for antiquity and the complexities of formation processes in shaping what we can see, recognize, and analyze. It seems almost certain that there is more work to do here especially near Kenchreai. This does little to undermine the significance of their work. David, Kostis, and their colleagues have managed to do what we 20 years ago seemed impossible:  reconstructed the landscape of Samuel Gridley Howe’s Isthmus. 

Music Monday: Joe Henderson, Pharoah Sanders, and Amir ElSaffar

It was a long, windy, snowy weekend which I spent mostly writing a grant and reading in a relatively desultory way. Ordinarily that would be an opportunity to listen to a ton of music, but for some reason nothing really grabbed me. It’s a good reminder that listening to music isn’t always about the music doing the work. Sometimes you have to meet the music more than half way.

So after listening to Keith Jarrett’s At the Deer Head Inn and being completely overmatched trying to listen to Dream Archive by Craig Taborn, Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith, I had to pivot.

On his Facebook page, Ron Carter mentioned (he used the word “masterpiece,” but I’m not going to go there) Joe Henderson’s quirky, but very entertaining album Black Is the Color (1972) which features multiple overdubs and additions. It lacks the kind of energy that a live jazz album (especially of the early 1970s can have), but it is fun (and features a great group of musicians on various tracks: Dave Holland and Ron Carter on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and keyboards(!) as well as Airto Moreira, George Cable on keys and Georg Wadenius on guitar). Check it out here

This led me to Pharoah Sanders’s Jewels of Thought (1970). This album is probably best known for Leon Thomas’s throat singing on “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah.” There’s lots of percussion on this album — with Lonnie Liston Smith, Roy Haynes, and Richard Davis, Idris Muhammad, and even Cecil McBee credited with percussion — and it is amazing:  

Finally, to show that I didn’t just bury my head in the 1970s, I did listen a few times to Amir ElSaffar’s New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal (2025) in Berlin. I don’t know much about ElSaffar and but I definitely enjoyed the interplay between his trumpet and the microtonal piano. The album held my attention and drew me in. 

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s a snowy and windy Friday here in North Dakotaland and after my first week back in the classroom in the new semester, I overslept! I am getting soft in my dotage, it would seem.

I have a full slate of work to do this weekend, but I plan to take some time to watch the Sixers play this evening, the NFL playoff games, and to wrap up the college football season with the national championship game on Monday. I was vaguely intrigued by the Alexis Rocha-Raul Curiel fight tonight, but I guess Rocha struggled with the weight cut and pulled out. Alas.

In the meantime, here are some quick hits and varia:

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Teaching Thursday: New Semester, New Goals

It is the first Thursday of the new semester and I’m excited about my class. This semester, I’m teaching History 101: Western Civilization I to about 40 students, Roman History to about 25, and the Practicum in Writing, Editing, and Publishing to 5 or so.

This semester, one of my goals is improving attendance in my History 101 class. In this class, I have the students work in groups to use primary source readers and an open access textbook to create supplemental readings for the assigned textbook. This involves producing a glossary as well as two directed primary source reading modules where students use primary sources to “deepen” a topic addressed in the chapter and “expand” the material in a chapter.

Historically (heh) this class has struggled with poor attendance especially during the mid-semester doldrums. I’ve blogged about this endlessly. This semester, I addressed the issue head on the first day of class. I explained why I would prefer not to result to a kind of punitive approach to attendance where I gave quizzes when attendance dropped below a certain point. Moreover, I offered a casual critique of transactional educational models where we confused measurable and assessable outcomes with the messy work of learning. Students have been told and internalized the idea that the grades and credits are what matters and they assume that these recorded and standardized marks represent learning.  

Instead, I introduced the idea that learning isn’t something that comes along with a grade or a credit hour, but what actually takes place in the classroom. This not only challenges the transactional model education, but also replaces it with a model based on working together to produce knowledge. This is consistent, I think, with the historical purpose of the history classroom (heh) and the seminar where students worked together to understand complex sources and texts. At the same time, it creates an expectation that group work isn’t a method, but the goal. As a result, students come to class not to get a grade, but because they understand that being in class is the goal. 

I’ve also invited the students to talk with me about what would encourage and support them attending class regularly and participating in the work of their group. My current plan is to set aside some time to talk to students about attendance and have them see attendance not as part of some transactional understanding but as fundamental to the experience of learning.

My Roman History class, and my upper level courses in general, has rarely suffered from attendance challenges in the same way as my 100-level courses. (Although I have had occasional ideas of taking my 16 week class and transforming it into four, four-week modules of which students need to attend during three of those modules. This would align the class better, I think, with student expectations). 

That said, I still think introducing the idea of community to these classrooms explicitly offers students a new way to think about their education. For Roman History, it coincides with my emphasis on thinking with and about texts collectively. My Roman (Greek and Byzantine classes) are scaffolded around a series of texts which form the bulk of the courses content. In the case of Roman History these are Sallust, Apuleius, Augustine’s Confessions, and Corippus’s, In laudem lustini Augusti minoris. 

My one innovation in this class is that I’m going to release the final exam in week four (of 16) and allow students to turn in the exam whenever they want over the course of the semester. The idea in doing this is two fold. First, it eliminates the end of the semester stress brought on by the arbitrary due date. And, second, it encourages students to think about their own learning and to discern when they have come to understand enough to address big picture questions in the class. (Of course, this means that I have to come up with a flexible enough exam question to make this all work!).

Finally, it looks like I have enough interested students to run a 1-credit student reading group early Thursday mornings. Despite some fairly thoughtful efforts to discourage me from having students read Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution (1939). The class will simply involve us getting together and chatting about a few chapters each week. For those of you who have read Syme, the contemporary relevance of the book goes without saying; for those of you who haven’t… well you should!

Writing Wednesday: North Dakota Quarterly

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a contribution to the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine that focuses on North Dakota Quarterly. This has turned into a bigger project (in terms of length and work) than I expected, but is also an invigorating one (and, as “gestures wildly about” becomes more and more grim and depressing, this has served as a kind of distraction). 

Today, I’m posting the introduction (which is quite provisional!) and a brief note on method. 

Introduction

In 1909, president Frank McVey of the University of North Dakota allocated $500 for the publication of a university magazine: The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota. He did this in the first year of his term as president of the university and part of a wider trend toward professionalizing both the institution and its faculty. By supporting the creation of a campus magazine, he hoped not only to encourage faculty to publish, but also to provide an outlet for their work that would amplify the contribution of the university to the state and the nation. McVey became president of the University of North Dakota at a key moment in its history. The university was founded in 1883 in Dakota Territory and its first quarter century had been a challenging one. In 1889, Dakota Territory was split and two new states were admitted to the United States: North Dakota and South Dakota. North Dakota had only 190,000 residents and most of them resided in the eastern part of the state within ten or so miles of the Red River of the North. Overall the state had a population density of around 1 person per square kilometer. The arid steppes of the western part of the state supported only fragile agriculture organized around railroad towns which connected these communities to eastern depots, mills, and capital. The Red River “valley” which was technically the bottom of the dry proglacial, Pleistocene Lake Agassiz, offered the more fertile soils of the tall grass prairie, the convenience of the Red River of the North, and the rail connections to the east. This region supported larger “cities” including Grand Forks and Fargo. The University was in Grand Forks, which had a population of about 5000 residents and stood equidistant between Fargo to the south (which was the next large settlement) and the Canadian border to the north. The closest city to Grand Forks was Winnipeg some 150 miles to the north, but the the most important population center was the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul with a population of over a quarter of million people by 1900. Minneapolis-St. Paul was not only the capital of the neighboring state of Minnesota, but the economic, railroad, and cultural hub of the region known variously as the Northwest, the Northern Great Plains, The Northern Plains, the Upper Midwest or the Middle West (Rozum 2021; chapter 8). For convenience, this paper will refer to the region as the Northern Plains when describing the situation in North and South Dakota and Minnsota or the Midwest when describing the larger region which extends from the Appalachian mountains across the Great Plains of the American West.

This brief historical and geographic context helps situate The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota amid the emergence of regional and “little magazines” in the Midwest and Northern Plains and in the United States more broadly. As the following contribution will show, the history of the Quarterly Journal reflects the development of regionalism in an American context in three interrelated ways. First, the Quarterly Journal appeared alongside a boom in little magazines both nationally and in the region and while the Quarterly Journal had a decidedly more academic bent, it shared a concern for the state and the region as a object of attention. Second, the Quarterly Journal represents a process where regional voices, particularly the radical tradition and various strands of modernism, become institutionalized at universities and colleges. This process both deprived these voices of a bit of their radical edge, while also validating their call for progressive change both intellectually and ultimately politically in the region. Finally, the Quarterly Journal created space to negotiate the tension between regionalism and cosmopolitanism in an American context. Unlike purely literary journals which often left as tacit the tension between a distinctly regional voice and that of the literary establishment, the wide ranging topics in the Quarterly Journal, including interests in institutions, communities, the environment, and the economy, allowed authors to recognize the significance of the regional situation in explicit relation to the national and even global one.

A Word on Method

The first 23 volumes of the Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota represents 91 issues. Most issues were around 100 pages in length with a few shorter amounting to just under 9000 pages of text. These 9000 pages amount to around 3 million words. It was obviously impractical to read critically that many pages and words. Instead, I have extracted the author and title of articles using a combination of AI (Google’s Notebook LM) and manual extraction. This produced a table of 530 articles. Because the format of the issues changed over time and often had some inconsistency, this tally almost certain misses some articles and in some cases, articles with multiple authors appear more than one in the table. Whatever the table may lack in being comprehensive, I hope it makes up for in being representative of the kinds of articles published in the Quarterly’s first 23 volumes. Tabulating the articles in the magazine over this time allowed me to assign one or more themes to each article: education, social studies (sociology, political theory, demography, et c.), economics and business, governance and law, physical sciences and engineering, biology and health sciences, literature and the arts, history, and regional articles. Furthermore, this tabulation also allowed me to group issues by editor to observe certain trends and to identify the authors of various articles and mark them as either being affiliated with the university or not. Finally, I attempted to extract the short book reviews published in each volume. This amounted to an additional 620 contributions. This list is almost certainly incomplete and, as a result, I will only use it only sparingly in the following analysis.

Two on Survey Tuesday

Today’s my first day of class in the spring 2026 semester. So it seems like as good as time as any to reflect on some of the reading I did on my winter research leave. 

For whatever reason, there was a gaggle of survey publications that appeared during that time and while I’ve still not managed to process and think about them all, there are two that stand out as worthy of particular note.

First, John Bintliff and colleagues massive and impressive Boeotia Project, Volume III: Hyettos. The Origins, Florescence and Afterlife of a Small Boeotian City (2025). This kind of book will take a long time process and understand, but there are parts that stand out (to me, of course). Last week, I talked a bit about Athanasios K. Vionis, with Chrystalla Loizou’s chapter on “A household archaeology and history of Hyettos and its territory: the Byzantine to Early Modern pottery.” It’s good and useful.

I also found quite impressive John Bintliff’s appendix which surveyed the last 25 years of work related to both his manuring hypothesis and his work on “hidden landscapes.” It has a bit of a polemical edge which I found both entertaining (on a forensic level) and probably unnecessary. It will come as a shock to no one that he remains steadfast in his conviction that settlement halos derived from manuring near fields and the spread of domestic trash (notably ceramics) with the manure near the city. He is equally as unimpressed with efforts to complicate or challenge this theory. (Note: John generously responded to my previous post with a recommendation that I read his article on manuring from the Journal of World Prehistory (2023)). In particular, Bintliff found our hypothesis that the continuous carpet of artifacts in the Eastern Corinthia may represent a wide range of activities including short term habitation, building techniques that use sherds as chinking and temper (in mud bricks, for example), episodes of loss and breakage, as well as manuring, discard from towns, cities, and settlement, and post-depositional processes. He and I will likely have to agree to disagree on this (even if this makes me more of a contrarian than advocate for a productive alternative!) Bintliff’s insistence on a monocausal explanation for this material remains useful mainly as a clear hypothesis against which future projects can measure their ethnographic, material, and archaeological data. In the end, this debate continues (at least in the minds of those who prefer the more complicated explanations often afforded by diachronic assemblages and landscapes) because there isn’t a clear methodological or practical intervention that will resolve it. It remains an important consideration, however, for those who are interested in population size of ancient cities, carrying capacity of ancient landscapes, and the systemic cohesion of ancient agricultural (and social) practices. 

His argument for hidden landscapes offers a far more obvious pathway for methodological innovation. David Pettegrew, Dimitri Nakassis, and I have thought a good bit about this during our time directing and analyzing surveys. On EKAS, we noted that very small assemblages of, say, Ottoman material on the low visibility and steep slopes of Mt. Oneion hint at a more expansive Ottoman landscape than the continuous carpet of artifacts on the plain would suggest. These realizations led us to sample survey units at the Western Argolid Regional Project not simply on the basis of density (with an awareness that low density units in particular require more intensive collection strategies to produce meaningful samples of the surface), but also based on the character of the assemblages. For example, small assemblages of pottery with unusual diversity often recommend returning to those units with increased intensity.

Second, Alex Knodell, who has been on a roll lately, published a lengthy “survey” (pun vaguely intended) of recent work by survey archaeological projects in Greece. If Bintliff’s survey (I really can’t stop) focused on manuring and hidden landscapes, Knodell’s was more general. He offered some useful observations for the character of pedestrian survey both since 2000 and moving forward. 

Here are three of the highlights from his article (and these largely come in the final section since the article is rightly a summary of recent work by various projects).

First, the article really celebrates the diversity of methods which range from one person extensive survey to small intensive surveys to site based gridded collections. There was a time when a certain school of thought held saw and argued that if you weren’t going to do <2000 sq. m. units and 10 m spacing, just don’t bother. This time has passed. As To paraphrase Knodell, method isn’t theory and intensity does not guarantee accuracy.

One thing that does come out of this review of projects is that as survey has expanded it has become rather more estranged from excavation. Many (if not most) early second wave surveys had excavation components (or, more properly, sister projects). This close relationship between survey and excavation offers the potential of refined stratigraphic context for surface finds and the chronological benefits that these afford. Of course not all survey projects have the benefit of nearby excavations (ideally closely tied to the survey) and that isn’t a liability, necessarily, but as survey extends beyond the proximity of excavation, the limits of artifact level survey in terms of chronology and typology become more obvious. 

Finally, it was sobering to recognize how few surveys in the 21st century have produced definitive or “final publications.”  Some of this is understandable: a modern survey project might require as many contributors as an excavation (or even more if it is a diatonic survey) and this alone guarantees that nothing will take place quickly. Another aspect is that most survey projects engage with multiple research questions each with their own historiography and conventions meaning that not only are survey volumes long, but they’re also complex. Finally, we continue to be preoccupied with method and methodology. Whereas an excavation volume can often get by with a quick note that a project excavated stratigraphically, survey projects still work to unpack their methods, situate it within a methodology, and calibrate their results. This is a burdensome and boring kind of writing that rarely motivates authors.

There are some points that I would have liked to understand a bit better from Knodell’s review. While I admired his attention to the use of LiDAR and other remote sensing technologies, I wondered whether he discerned a change in the role the ethnography played in intensive and regional survey projects? Or to put it another way, how has remote sensing changed the relationship between the archaeologist, the landscape, and various communities?  

Music Monday: Big Bands and Shamanism

Today is the last day of my winter research leave and the eve of the first day of the new semester. It makes sense then to look backward (a bit) and forward in a mystical way.

I was pleasantly surprised to see two big band albums kicking around on various “best of 2025” lists and I have enjoyed both of them. 

The first is Tom Smith’s A Year in the Life. I don’t know much about Smith other than he’s a saxophone player, but the band is tight and particularly benefits from Jamie McCredie’s guitar playing. One review notes that at times, the band has a Thad Jones/Mel Lewis sound to it and I agree. But it isn’t just a throwback to the late-1960s big band sound. It has a vibe of its own and leans into contemporary jazz enough to encourage me to listen to it more than once! 

The other big band album that I’ve seen kicking around on lists is Interaction: 3 Cohens & WDR Big Band. The WDR Big Band is a German big band out of Cologne. I’ve listened to them from time to time, but they’re not really in my regular rotation. This album might just change that. The blend of traditional jazz styles (including rags!) and modern sensibilities is really nice. The band isn’t trying to reproduce some kind of vintage sound and plays with polished and contemporary sensibilities. The star of the show for me, though, is Anat Cohen’s clarinet. 

I’ll leave you with a couple more cuts from the album to give you a sense of its range:

Lest you think I’ve totally succumbed to the vigorous complexity of large ensemble jazz, I do still listen to edgier small ensemble improvised music. For example, I was enthralled by Berlin-based, Korean sax player Jung-jae Kim’s Shamanism. As with most improvised music, it is perhaps best to get a sense for it live:

Hearing the album, I recalled Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp, and Joe Morris’s album of the same name (on one of my favorite labels Chad Fowler’s Mahakala Music).

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It isn’t the first Friday of the new year (h/t to Dimitri Nakassis), but it is the first Varia and Quick Hits of 2026. We’re enjoying unseasonably warm weather here in North Dakotaland with highs soaring into the upper 20s (and even kissing the 30s). And I hope that this warmth stays with us (and with all my readers) into the new year.

This is a fun sports weekend with the semifinals of the college football playoffs already underway and the NFL Wildcard season about to kick off. I don’t hold out much hope for my Eagles, but I’ll watch anyway. The Sixers and my Mighty Spiders continue to amble though their seasons losing a few games that should probably win and winning some games that I think they should lose. It’s enough to keep me interested! 

The spring semester starts on Tuesday and my classes — Roman History, Western Civilization I, and the Practicum in Writing, Editing, and Publishing — are almost ready to go. This means that the happy shadow of my winter research leave is receding into blinding light of the oncoming semester.

It seems like a good time for quick hits and varia:

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Public Domain Day 2026

One of the most exciting days of the year is Public Domain Day! On January 1 each year, works copyrighted 95 years prior enter the public domain. This means that anything published in the US in 1930 is now in the public domain!

Happy New Year!

For North Dakota Quarterly, this means the volume 20 is now available with no restrictions. You can enjoy the esteemed jurist Sveinbjor Johnson’s article on “The University and the State” Or these two poems dedicated to the memory of Carl Ben Eielson.

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Of course, there are plenty of other things to read from this year. John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, the first of his U.S.A. Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, or for more popular faire Dashiell Hammett’s, The Maltese Falcon or Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison. For those “Hellenically inclined” check out Thornton Wilder’s The Woman of Andros. For those who enjoy the more Gothic side of things, check out Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. 

If you’re into magazines, you probably already know that you can find the entire run of the New Masses (1926–1948) is available online, but now the 1930 volume in the public domain (which features unsurprisingly som John Dos Passos!). Volume 4 of Prairie Schooner from 1930 offers perspectives on a perennial question in Higher Ed, “Should Professors Think?” Or a later issue of The Midland which features these nice winter poems from Frederick ten Hoor in volume 16:

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Writing Wednesday: The Kiln, Come Context, and a Conclusion

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a paper about the kiln and production areas at Polis over my winter research leave. Most of the paper’s narrative and argument are done now and I’m working with my co-author, Scott Moore, on the lamp and ceramic catalogues.

So far, I’ve shared a section on a lamp deposit, a levigation pool, and a kiln. The following sections situate the ceramic production area in its context at the site and offer some tepid (and tentative) conclusions.

 

The Area and Historical Context

The kiln and levigation pool’s position along the east side of the north-south drainage running through the area of E.F2 represents only one feature in what was a bustling industrial district in the Roman period. Fifteen meters to the west stand another cluster of workshops and industrial installations. These workshops featured what appears to have been a furnace or hearth and several deep drains which may have been wells or cisterns. The presence of over 120 fragments of terracotta figurines including a mold suggests that terracotta manufacturing occurred in E.F2. The presence of iron slag in clay lined pits, chunks of lead, fragments of ochre and pigments, and stone bowls and crucibles provides additional evidence for a wide range of manufacturing in the area (Najbjerg 2012). Much like the kiln and later levigation pool, it appears that these installations saw nearly constant adaptation over a relatively short period of time during the Roman period. There are series of superimposed floor surfaces and the walls that indicate constant rebuilding especially along the eastern side of these structures and aligned, as if terrace walls, with the western slope of the drainage. The material from beneath the various superimposed surfaces is chronologically indistinguishable suggesting regular adaptation and reconstruction of the area during the Roman period.

The buildings along the eastern and western sides of the ravine are bounded to the south by an east-west road, the ”south road,” that ran across the contour of the hillslope. The road is paved with large stone slabs and has the remains of at least two drainage systems. One is a plaster lined channel that runs through the center of the road; the other features a series of terracotta pipes that run beneath the northern side of road and flow east to west. At Paphos, the terracotta pipes primarily seem to have served as drainage pipes, and it seems like that the channels and the pipes functioned to control the flow of water down the slope, through the natural drainage, and around the industrial installations in E.F2. Interestingly, the excavators at Paphos date most of the ceramic pipes in primary use to the 2nd century AD (with some 4th century examples in secondary use) (Romaniuk 2021, 371). The east-west road joins two north-south roads with one running to the west the workshops on the western side of the drainage and the other to the east of the levigation pool.

The ”eastern road” also features two sets of drains: one consisting of terracotta pipes cut in half and the other a plaster lined channel. The excavator argues that in this case, the terracotta pipes superseded the plaster lined channel which is cut into a level of rubble that probably served as the bedding for the road. The stratigraphy of the drains in both roads remains ambiguous as both the pipes and the plaster lined channel are both cut in the same rubbly layers beneath the road which appears to date no earlier than the 2nd century AD on the basis of a few ESA sherds beneath the terracotta pipes (T06.1990.L45). The presence of a few sherds of Late Roman pottery beneath the latest surface of the eastern road (T06.1990.L34) suggests that the modified terracotta pipes may date to that period. This would reinforce an interpretation that supposes the central location of the plaster line drain as contemporary with the road and the terracotta pipes a later, perhaps Late Antique addition. At some point, presumably later in the Late Antique period but before the construction of the basilica, a wall is built across the road. This wall sits atop a thin lens of Late Roman soil (T06.1990.L16 and L17).

The road running to the west of the workshops on the western side of the natural drainage, the “western road,” features two channels. It appears that an earlier channel ran along west side of the road. The construction of a monumental quadrifrons arch at the intersection of the western road and the east-west road interrupted this channel and a new stone lined channel was built to the west of the original routing water around the base of the arch.

These roads join at right angles indicating that the city of Arsinoe was organized on an orthogonal grid presumably when Ptolemy II Philadelphos refounded the city in the 3rd century BC. The workshops in this area appear to respect the grid at least until the Late Roman period when a wall interrupts the east road. The superimposed surfaces of “east road,” the installation of terracotta pipes on the “east road” and ”south road”, and the modification of the drains on the ”west road“ reflect their maintenance and adaptation as well as ongoing concerns for drainage. The orthogonal character of the roads in this area suggest that the workshops are well integrated into the organization of the urban center. At the same time, it seems unlikely that they were close to habitation as the smoke and noise from kilns, furnaces, and workshops would have made unpleasant neighbors. Their location along the northern edge of the city, however, would have provided access both the coast and the city as well as routes that availed themselves to the coastal plain. The position of the workshops near the coast and coastal plain would have situated them along coastal routes that transported copper ore through the region and given the workshops easy access to seaborne trade in raw glass. Presumably this would have also allowed the workshops to export their products.

Conclusion

Excavations by the Princeton Cyprus Expedition confirmed the existence of production along the northern edge of the city of Arsinoe. The presence of a ravine or drainage through this area introduced drainage problems and the lack of level ground combined to make it unsuitable for domestic or monumental construction. Instead, the area saw a series of continuously adapted industrial features including a kiln superseded by a levigation pool. While the date of the kiln remains unclear, the levigation pool appears to have been constructed in the 2nd century AD. The presence of a an assemblage of late series Cypriot Sigillata and cooking pots associated with the levigation pool provides a solid indicator of its date. It is tempting to see the date of the levigation pool as contemporary with the modification to the “south road” and the installation of a terracotta tile pipeline along its north edge, but this is speculation.

A more interesting argument involves the assemblage of lamps found mixed with Late Roman material in what we have argued in a leveling fill for the basilica. This group of lamps was distinct compared to lamps found elsewhere at the site and the presence of unlit lamps from the same mould further suggests local production. Moreover, the lamps appeared with 2nd century material that was both contemporary with and similar to that found associated with the levigation pool. This connection alone, of course, is insufficient to assign the lamps to the levigation pool, much less the kiln. That said, it remains an intriguing possibility that exists in the grey area between standards of archaeological proof and the broader domain of interpretation. It is interpretatively plausible to associate these lamps (along with the terracotta figurines) with production in this area of the city of Arsinoe even if the highest levels of evidentiary proof remains elusive.