UND Discovery - The University of North Dakota's Research Magazine

By Juan Miguel Pedraza
A parched, rock-strewn Cypriot landscape used by a British garrison as a firing range is Dr. William Caraher’s gateway into a distant Roman past.

Caraher and an international team of archaeologists and other experts in the esoterica of ancient Mediterranean cultures, along with several students, are painstakingly collecting samples from the Pyla Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) site located astride Dhekelia, one of two British Army “sovereign base areas” on Cyprus.

William Caraher “Cyprus is an amazing, really unique, place,” because of its history as a crucial trade and political crossroads, said Caraher, UND assistant professor of history, who co-directs PKAP along with Dr. Scott Moore, an Indiana University of Pennsylvania historian. Even today, Cyprus, a land divided into Turkish and Greek zones and monitored by a permanent contingent of United Nations peacekeepers, is a busy place, most recently as a transit point for refugees from the Israeli-Lebanese conflict.

“It’s a key spot in this part of the world and has endured many conquests — just the place to study and discover new things about the Roman Empire and the cultures that it intersected with,” Caraher said. “For nearly a thousand years, Cyprus was a vital part of a widespread trading network that still exists today.”

In a multiyear archaeological research project in collaboration with the Cyprus Department of Antiquities and the Lanarka District Archaeological Museum, and the British Department of Defense, Caraher and his colleagues are looking for answers to questions about the when, why, and how of the late Roman era, a time many historians regard as crucial to understanding the development of post-Roman cultures.

Discerning such answers amid the shards of pottery, broken roof tiles, and many other cultural remnants is an excruciatingly exacting job, not, Caraher quips, something for folks who get bored easily.

“Yes, this sometimes seems to be boring work, but when you get down to it, what we’re doing is laying our hands on history,” he said.

It takes the meticulous approach of a disciplined scientist to get this job done right, Caraher notes. “That means, not to put it too finely, applying a methodological rigor” to surveying the site, collecting, cleaning, and cataloging the samples; and producing, at the end of the day, publishable documentation about the work. That means carefully gridding the whole site in squares measuring 40 meters by 40 meters, and minutely surveying five two-meter-wide swaths (a 20 percent sample area) in each grid.
The site is home to the remnants of artifacts left over by the area’s rural inhabitants — mostly farmers — about 1,200 to 1,500 years ago, says Caraher, who spent his fourth summer in Cyprus (and 10th in the Mediterranean) this year.

“We’re doing this survey on the base’s firing range in order to find clues about life in Cyprus,” he said.

In addition to gridding the site, the archaeological survey team counts, gathers, and bags and tags artifact samples. Those samples are gathered at the museum where they are first thoroughly washed — with toothbrushes and a big pail of water — before cataloging. Each site grid also is documented as to soil type, vegetative cover, terrain type, and other descriptive parameters.

The project manager — a job that rotates among the senior investigators — demands a constant and close attention to details, monitoring and chronicling the progress of each survey team, and drawing up daily logs and other documentation.

Caraher acts as the project’s tech officer, which includes managing equipment such as the electronic transit and the global positioning (GPS) units.

“OK, it’s sometimes a tedious job, but it has to be done in order to keep unit artifacts separate,” he said. “All of the material that we pull from the field must be cataloged, and we document what people were doing and when they were doing it at the time that the object was collected.”

That mission sometimes includes bringing aboard a special expert, such as a person with experience in identifying wall paintings, he says. And everything, he adds, must be coordinated with their official hosts, the local Department of Antiquities and the museum where all of the artifacts are being collected, cleaned, sorted, cataloged, and stored.
Each of these archaeological surveys has revealed more about the people who lived here not too long after the beginning of the Christian era, he said.

Caraher says most of the people in this region would have spent their lives working in the countryside, where today there are many signs of nonurban life. “Today, 3 to 4 percent of the world feeds the other 97 percent, but in the ancient world, that was reversed,” Caraher said. “In this type of archeological work, we have the advantage that we get a lot of coarse data over lots of territory. This is not an excavation, which normally looks at a very limited area.”

The PKAP survey area — which is in a coastal zone that would have been regularly visited by seagoing traders — is beginning to yield pottery, for example, that helps researchers understand how various regions of the Mediterranean world interacted culturally, economically, and politically.

“And we see that every cluster of pottery may represent a family farm,” he said. “Many objects we find also tell us about the economic and social traditions behind everyday life.”

“After each season, there’s more paperwork,” Caraher said. Documentation, he notes, is the lifeblood of any serious scientific enterprise, “whether you’re a historian or an archaeologist, or a historian doing archaeology.”
“This is where discoveries are recorded, finds published,” he said.

This basin is thought to date from the late Roman era, about the fourth to sixth centuries A.D. It is likely from an early Christian basilica and may have had some liturgical function.

ABOVE: William Caraher is the co-director and tech officer for the international team at the Pyla Koutsopetria Archaeological Project site in Cyprus.

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