Remote Ethnography

Working on vernacular architecture, I've engaged in various loose forms of ethnography. Truth be told, I have become an architectural historian and archaeologist because I prefer working with the stillness and remoteness of mute rocks than the complexities of inner subjectivities that come with people. For years now, I have conducted interviews that fit the category of "salvage ethnography," whose objective is to collect information that is threatened to disappear. I capture audio from informers who are typically the last ones to possess factual and semi-factual knowledge about historical events, experiences, occurrences, and craft practices. Having worked with social worker and historian Bret Weber in the man camps of North Dakota, I know that my ethnography is sloppy. Yet, I continue recording conversations and place my energy in transcribing (rather than theorizing about them). Another laborious part of this process is translating, since many of the interviews are in Greek or at least bilingual. 

I have started to take my ethnography a little more serious as I read more and more anthropological fieldwork on migrant camps, and am study the classic Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (2nd ed., 2011). With methodological issues in the back of my mind, I also embark on an exciting new blog-ethnography.

I use my blog to publish short and preliminary thoughts on fieldwork. The instant and public availability of those posts generate new online conversations with people that encounter me first as a blogger. Consider my post on the Lidoriki Pillbox two weeks ago. This and other posts on the archaeology of Lidoriki have made me a frequent click on folks Googling Lidoriki history. Along with Facebook's social network, the word gets out to people that have information they want to share with me. After contacting each other by email, I interview those informers by phone or Skype.

Just this last week, I have come into contact with two wonderful individuals of the Lidoriki diaspora. One lives in Chicago, the other lives in Denmark. Over two short preliminary conversations, I have collected raw material that would not be available to me in the site of Lidoriki. For instance, I learned that the pillbox was not built during World War II but during the Civil War. "There were dozens of these bunkers in the village that were torn down. This one was in private property. It was in someone's field and continued to be used for chickens and goats after the war for 30-40 years. The others were in public space and were torn down. People took the material and reused it." Now this information about a village in Greece, was collected by me on a telephone in Philadelphia, from someone on a cellphone while riding a bus in Copenhagen. 

Social immersion and access to "thick descriptions" is the ethnographer's goal. This cannot be the case with the archaeologist, who must spend his limited resources in silence documenting buildings, walls, objects, landscapes. Globalization has thrown a wrench into the ideals of anthropological fieldwork. The difficulty of the anthropologist's immersion into social groups who are themselves in motion is most evident in refugee fieldwork, see Gregory Feldman "nonlocal ethnography," in Migration Apparatus (Stanford, 2012, pp. 180-198). Equally interesting is Dan Miller's new project on the anthropology of Global Social Media.

I am still torn between the tensions of material versus oral culture. The tension is becoming more vivid as I delve deeper into the archaeology of diaspora and the archaeology of refugee camps. I am envious of more theoretically-minded archaeologists, who have done a more complete turn towards ethnography. But they have sacrificed material documentation. Surveying publications over the archaeology of the contemporary world, one is struck by the great volume of theorizing and experiential describing versus a shortage of data. Although I must sharpen my ethnographic skills, I can make greater contributions in mapping or spatial documentation. I guess, my ethnography is subservient to my spatial documentation. And it's important to understand that shortcoming. Yet the question remains. What will I do with all these hours of interviews and transcriptions?


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Karkavitsas: HIS FLUTE

Andreas Karkavitsas, “Η Φλογέρα του,” [“His Flute”], in Διηγήματα [Short Stories], Athens: Estia (1892), reprinted in Άπαντα, ed. Georgios Valetas, vol. 1, pp. 133-155. There is a digital (but slightly different) version of the text here.

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"His Flute" is the story of a newlywed Stathis and Smalto. Secretly, Smalto is thrown into disarray by her inability to resist a repulsive shepherd who seduces her by his flute-playing. Smalto's inner voice that tells the story struggles ethics of aesthetics. The affair is put to rest only when Smalto shatters the instrument of seduction. "The flute was small and golden with five black holes in its mouth and one more on the opposite side." Ήτο τω όντι η φλογέρα του Μήτρου. μικρά, χρυσίζουσα, με πέντε τρύπας μαύρας εις τα χείλη και άλλην μίαν εις το αντίθετον μέρος.

Seduction takes place in the fields where Smalto herds her ducks and the shepherd Mit herds his sheep. But the village plays an important role with its “numerous houses scattered here and there along a low hill.” At first, the houses resonate with life in celebration of its patron Saint Nicholas. But when the festival is over, and the workdays begin, the village is abandoned by its inhabitants working in the fields. “All the doors were shut and through the small windows one could see the darkness and abandonment inside.” οι ευάριθμοι οικίσκοι του, εδώ κι εκεί επί χαμηλής λοφοσειράς σκορπισμένοι, είχον τας θύρας όλας κλειστάς και από τα μικρά παράθυρα των εφαίνετο εντός το σκότος και η ερημία. [134] This is a helpful insight to consider. A Greek village would have been entirely empty for most of the day. Men, women, and children would be out in the fields.

In this silence, only the Melopoulos house stands out. Its newlywed bride Smalto is still inside. She refuses to go to work, to leave the village because she wants to avoid the shepherd’s temptation. Looking voyeuristically from the outside, the readier, captures this view. “The light of day entered already in abundance through the open door and window, from which Smalto was seen in the shadow with still sleepy eyes. With a heavy body, she turned the bedspreads one-by-one from the ground over a turned-over basket." Το φως της ημέρας εισέδυεν ήδη άφθονον από της ανοικτής θύρας και του παραθύρου, από του οποίου εφαίνετο η Σμάλτω εν τη σκιά με νυσταλέους ακόμη οφθαλμούς και βεβαρημένον το σώμα, εγείρουσα νωθρώς τας στρωμνάς μίαν – μίαν από του εδάφους και αποθέτουσα επί μιάς ανεστραμμένης κοφίνας. [134]

Karkavitsas uses architectural detail to articulate states of mind. And Smalto is not an ordinary villager. First, she is of Vlach descent -- like the shepherd. Second, and more importantly, she is a transparent medium of sensational experience. Her optic centering turns those experiences to fire. "She was a perfect mirror of a wild existence. Her person was extremely curious of sensing natural phenomena. She collected experiences and centered them within her as a lens centers the ray of light." Ήτο δε τέλειος καθρέπτης μιάς αγροδιαίτου υπάρξεως. Το άτομόν της ήτο υπερβολικώς περίεργον εις τας εντυπώσεις της φύσεως και τα υπέμενε και τας συνεκέντρου εντός της όλας, όπως ο φακός τας ηλιακάς ακτίνας. [137]

Then there is a wonderful description of the landscape, when Smalto goes out into the fields (too long to translate right now)

Ο ήλιος είχεν υψωθή αρκετά εις τον ορίζοντα, κολυμβών μέσω αργυρού αιθέρος πυκνοτάτου και περιέλουε τους θερισμένους αγρούς, τας πρασίνας σταφιδαμπέλους, τους βυσσινίζοντας βουνούς του Χελωνάτα και τα πέριξ όλα δι’ αφθόνου φωτός . τα χωρία κατέκειντο εδώ κι εκεί , με τας υπομαύρους στέγας και τους λευκοκιτρίνους τοίχους των οικίσκων των, εν αμόρφη όγκω, ως χορταριασμένα ερείπια. Ποίμνια έβοσκον παντού και βοών αγέλαι και ίππων εν συμβιώσει, ενώ ωρθούντο πλησίον αι σκιάδες των φυλάκων, με την [138] πιμήκη εκ ξηρών χόρτων στέγην και τους λεπτούς και στεβλούς στύλους των, ως μεγάλα καψαλά πτηνά, ορθούμενα επί των κατίσχνων ποδών των. Από πολλα μέρη ανέβαινον λευκοί καπνοί, ταχέως εξαφανιζόμενοι, και υπεφαίνοντο κάποτε γλώσσαι φλογών, ενώ αντήχει ο τριγμός του ξηρού χόρτου, καιομένου επί των αλωνίων. Τα βουνά προς ανατολάς εκρύπτοντο μέσω πυκνής ομίχλης και μόνον τ’ ακροβούνια ασθενώςν διεγράφοντο εις τον ορίζοντα, ως κομμένα χάρτινα συμμπλέγματα όπισθεν γαλανής υάλου. Κι εν τη νεκρική εκείνη της πεδιάδος ησυχία μόνον τα ξηρά χόρτα και τα φύλλα εψιθύριζον κινούμενα υπό του ανέμου, όστις έπνεεν από της θαλάσσης δροσερός – δροσερός. [139]

Smalto abandons herself in this landscape. Lying on the ground, her hands immersed into the clots of dirt, she shakes from the weight of her own body, as the muscles slowly relax. Karkavitsas' description is so somatic. Η χείρ της λυγερής επόνει τρυπωμένη επί των βώλων του χώματος κι έτρμεεν ελαφρώς απηυδηκυία υπό το βάρος του σώματος, χαλαρουμένου ολονέν. [140]

One of my favorite things about the story is also how Smalto herds her ducks, with the words Πίκιο, πίκο. το γαλί, γαλί, γαλιό [144]

A few words about location. Karkavitsas tells us that the story takes place in the village of Troumpé, which was renamed Demetra in 1953 (Location, 37°53'11.21"N, 21°13'16.01"E). The village is in the flat plains of Vartholomio and Gastouni. When Smalto goes herding, she seems to be heading east towards Kastro Chlemoutsi, where the terrain gets hillier and closer to the beautiful coast. The area presents an interesting topography (see Kourelis 2003, p. 254). Kastro Chlemoutis is the only landscape feature visible across the plain which it commands. Demetris Athanasoulis describes this area as the triangle of power in the Frankish Middle Ages (see Athanasoulis 2013). It has unique landscape sensibilities. I vividly remember stoping at Karkavitsas' village nearby and having a coffee with Demetris. The kafeneion was in the main street thoroughfare. It was such a unique feeling.

Another interesting location is referred to briefly, when the shepherd Metros narrates his story to Smalto. He is an outsider, an orphan, herding other's sheep for a living. His point of origin is from the lagoons around Kotychi, a different ecology altogether (a series of lagoons used for fishing but surrounded by forest). Μίαν ημέραν ο Μήτρος διηγήθη την ζωήν του, με δύο λόγια. Κατήγετο από τους Κατσαπαίους, οικογένειαν βλαχοποιμένων, κατασκηνούσαν πλησίον του ιχθυοτροφείου του Κοτυχιού. Οι γονείς του αφήκαν αυτόν ορφανόν πολύ μικρόν, εις την νάκαν ακόμη. ο πατήρ του απέθανον από τύφον, πριν γεννηθή αυτός. η μήτηρ του αμέσως μετά την γέννησίν του. ... κι εμισθώθη εις ένα κτηνοτρόφον εκ Σουλεϊμάναγα, του οποίου τώρα έβοσκε τα πρόβατα. [143]

The Wedding Photo: Lidoriki Object 116

In Summer 2016, a team of students photographed 136 objects from the Lidoriki Folklore Museum. Lizzy Wood, among the students, is currently working up this collection into a digital exhibition and catalog. Our process of writing up an academic catalog entry for each object involves an open-ended on-line conversation about what makes these objects interesting. Lizzy has given me the challenge of writing down some first thoughts. Here it goes.

A wedding photograph signifies the penetration of technological mediation in the lives of rural Greece. Portrait photography became a fundamental medium in late-19th-century socializing, through visitation cards, wedding or funeral images. Photographic studios opened in Athens but their story in provincial towns (like Amfisa) is less known. Photography played an additional pre-wedding role in Greek life through the phenomenon of “picture brides” during the great emigration of the 1890s-1920s. Single male immigrants in the U.S. had no access to eligible females. Co-patriots would send photographs of eligible brides from back home. These arranged long-distance marriages were the subject of a 2004 film Brides. This, of course, is not unique to Greeks and continues to play a courting role in migrant laborers across the globe (digitally).

But this is not a photo-bride, but a commemoration of the wedding day. It was most likely not taken on the actual wedding day, so it repeats the dress-up of that momentous event. The long exposure required in early photography necessitated the special lights that only a photo studio could make possible. Most of the early portraits are staged at the photo studio. Without electricity in homes, you could not have domestic interior photography until much later. Photo studios became both the place and the artistic agent for photography. In this process, the photo became an advertisement of the studio, which is why the studio is so prominently marked on the photo. Isn’t it interesting that the names of the wedding couple are not commemorated (and hence forgotten) but the name of the studio that photographed them is?

A few words about the studio. The studio of Euthymios Macheras was a prominent (perhaps the only) photographic studio in Amfissa, the closest city to Lidoriki. The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive contains a number of the studio’s photographs of couples, children, urban scenes (available digitally here). We have no date for the wedding photo, but it fits in the 1910-1930 range. If we did a thorough stylistic analysis of the wedding fashions, we might be able to narrow the range. 

The “Euth. Machairas. Photographic Studio, Amfisa” label at the lower right corner is interesting as a work of graphic design (my sketch left). It uses cursive, ornate letters for the name of the proprietor, but technocratic capital letters for the declaration of function. Graphically, it is a hybrid of artistic flair (top) and bureaucratic regularity (bottom).

Rather than looking at the most obvious – the objects, clothes, insignia of ceremonial dress – I look at clues on the architectural setting. My sketch (left) is a projected ground plan of the photographed space. Looking at the lower part of the portrait, one sees two courses of stone and a carpet. This is clearly not an indoor studio setup up but a photo in front of an actual house, and, even more, a house with a side-walk, so an urban house. What is puzzling is that there is no vertical house wall on the background, which is white. It seems to me that the photographer draped a cloth over the front of the house to create a blank slate. Now this is interesting in that it turns the street into a studio. The photo looks like a professional studio installation, but it was taken outdoors. A close look at the ground information also shows a textile draped over the sidewalk and placed right in front of the couple’s steps. During the ceremonial walk of wedding couple from their homes to the church, villagers used to drape the streets with carpets so that they never stepped on anything but a domesticated soft surface (think red-carpet at the Oscars). The striped fabric in front of the couple is such a carpet. Its striped design is visible, showing the parallel mechanism of the loom production. Although the carpet is traditional, the form of commemoration (photography) is modern as are the shoes that will step on the traditional carpet, most fashionable white high heels for the bride and shiny dressy black shoes for the groom. How does this help us reconstruct studio practices in Greece. First, it suggests that urban photo studios travelled outside of the studio and took wedding photographs in-situ. If the photo was indeed taking in Lidorki, then it would have been taken along its main street that would have included a side-walk. Second, the itinerant photographer brought along a fabric that they hang over the front of the house to disguise its architectural specificity, focus attention on the figures, and make it look as if they stepped into a studio.

Paradoxically, this is exactly how we took photos of our Lidoriki objects. We hang a plastic sheet that was backed with a photographic white fabric. Here, you see, our impromptu photo studio from the Lidoriki Folklore Museum.

Finally, I am intrigued by the frame. It is divided in two complementary zones, a smooth lacquered wood inside that transitions smoothly into the glass, and a carved wood outside that comes from the world of painting. The outer frame is not machine made but carved. It includes patterns of roses, florets, and leaves (detail sketch above).

My Karkavitsas Year 2016

The rural landscape of Greece was articulated as a literary category by the demotic writers of the 1880s. Before them, the landscape was monopolized by the thick lenses of the western travelers. Obsessed with the classical polis, new Greece spent its early energies in building an enlightened cosmopolitan metropolis. Greek intellectuals made a very delayed discovery of their rural culture. In contrast, European Romanticists had made folk culture a prime subject of research half a century earlier. Paradoxically, French antiquarians recorded Greek folk songs in advance of the native intellectuals. The systematic turn towards the peasantry in the 1880s was more than an aesthetic maneuver, but an ideological historical world-view rooted in a new scientific discipline. The writing of fiction, short stories in particular, was integrated into an ethnographic methodology. The short story emerged as a genre whose mission was to capture the psychology of this newly discovered rural Greece. The journal Estia issued a short story competition in 1883 with the objective of capturing the psychology of the this other undiscovered rural Greece.

The intellectual history of 1880s demoticism and its relationship to genre writing and ethographia has been well written (see Roderick Beaton, Introduction to Modern Greek Literature; Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture; Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, and others). Beyond the better known Generation of the Thirties, the generation of the 80s is the most noteworthy moment in literary history. 

I've always wondered how this generation of realist writing intersects with the contemporary landscape and architectural reality. If the short-story writer of the 1880s was also a hybrid scientist, then fiction becomes partial recording. But even if those factual recordings are completely fictional, they are worth a second look because they constructed the literary imagination that informed the ethnograhic work carried out by a well-knit group rallying around the cause of a demotic language.

For a long time, now, I've been thinking about reading Modern Greek fiction systematically to extract the particulars of the 1880s idyllic imaginary of the Greek landscape. As I try to reconstruct that late-19th-century landscape archaeologically, the literary excursus would be an interesting comparison. The interplay between fact and fiction, or base and superstructure, might achieve in modest ways what Raymond Williams accomplished in The Country and the City (1973). Williams demonstrated that the British's novel's representation of an idyllic landscape was integrally connected with the exploitation of that landscape, particularly the shift from agrarian to capitalist economies. Literary historians have tended to see the Greek landscape more statically, as a simple binary of traditional/modern and rural/urban. Historians (like Tom Gallant), anthropologists (like Sue Sutton), and survey archaeologists have complicated Greek landscape history. How does this nuanced history of the 19th-century landscape changer our readings of 19th-century literature?

Three writers come to mind as the best choice for systematic reading. First, Kostis Palamas, as the first naturalist, and the earliest Greek author to share John Ruskin's analytical interests on the landscape. Second, Alexandros Papadiamantis, the most prolific of vernacular short stories. And, third, Andreas Karkavitsas. This year, I have decided to focus on Karkavitsas. I am not starting wtih Palamas because his poetics are too grandiose and not specific enough for specific fruits. And between Papadiamantis and Karkavitsas, I've chosen Karkavitsas because I am more familiar with his geography (Peloponnese, Central Greece) than Skiathos Island. Karkavitsas grew up in Lechaina, Eleia, whose villages I have surveyed with the Morea Project. His corpus of short stories is shorter than Papadiamantis, too, which is a good thing. So, in 2016, I hope to read all of his 70-some short stories.

Greek Arts and Crafts Digitally Curated

Greek villages have been experiencing a continuous (and occasionally dramatic) process of abandonment since 1893. Intellectuals of the 1920s (Angeliki Hadjimihali, Antonis Benakis, etc.) responded to this crisis by collecting Greek arts and crafts, establishing museum collections, and writing the first scholarly monographs. The Benaki Museum, the Ethnographic and Folklore Museum of Athens, the Stathopoulos Room at the American School of Classical Studies, the Nauplion Folklore Museum and many others testify to this first wave of scholarship.

In the 1960s, Greek village communities began their own efforts to save their arts and crafts by establishing local village repositories. Taking stock of what happened to prestige villages like Metsovo or Monemvasia, these communities imagined their folk heritage as a possible generator for small-scale tourism. Prestige villages are the product of capital investment and philanthropy by particular patrons (whether Greek or non-Greek). That magnitude of operation is rarely an option to every Greek village.

Although there is no official count, there are hundreds of these repositories, lovingly curated by village elders and intellectuals. They typically occupy a room of a "community" or "cultural center" (πνευματικό κέντρο) often a preserved abandoned house. These ad hoc museums are the most interesting manifestations of local curation and civic engagement in Greece. What is sad about them, of course, is that they will never function as proper museums. First, they have no financial resources or staff, and second, they are too remote and ordinary to solicit tourism. It's important to note that since cultural heritage is managed predominantly by the Greek state, there is little know-how on the interworking of heritage management by the Greek citizens (no educational programs, or vehicles for experimentation outside an increasingly bankrupt state). As a result, the citizen curators of village museums tend to range from idealistic to impractical or fatalistic. The passion for this civic philanthropy, moreover, is ending with the current generation of retirees. There are no indications that anyone under 50 shares their passion or the local links to a particular village. Younger Greeks tend to think more globally, about the environment, globalization, a multicultural Europe, neoliberal economics, etc. 

So what will happen to these local museums?

In the last few years, a group of American and Greek students have been studying late medieval and early modern villages in the area of Lidoriki. In Summer 2016, we turned the Lidoriki Folklore Museum (above) into a photographic laboratory. A group of students from Maryville University (St. Louis), Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster), and the National Technical University (Athens) inventoried 138 objects. The objects were photographed professionally, and a smaller sample (about 12) were photographed three-dimensionally. The students presented their research at the Annual Meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Francisco this month: Shelby Beiermann, Sara Loynd, Austin Nash, Nicole Thompson, and Elizabeth Wood, "Artists at Aigition: Documentation, Design, and the Investigation of Rural Villages."

Following the first scholarly presentation of last summer's season, we proceed with the next phase to curate a digital museum for the 138 objects that we have recorded. Franklin and Marshall student Lizzie Wood was one of the two students that photographed the objects of Lidoriki. The picture at the top shows Lizzie brainstorming on how to photograph a wool military coat. This semester, Lizzie is embarking on an independent study to create a digital museum of the 138. Shelby Beiermann has already processed some of the images into 3D models. See, for instance, two wool spindles [here] and [here], a tsarouchi [here], a scale weight [here], and a bugle [here].

Lizzie will have to sort the material and write informative entries for each piece, while also learning the software Omeka with which she will design a digital exhibition. If this works well, we hope it becomes a model for other local folklore collections throughout Greece. Next summer, we hope to also tackle some of the more established folklore museums with this technology. We plan to 3D-model objects from the Angeliki Hadjimihali House, a folk arts museum operated by the city of Athens.

From Greek Village to the American City: Archaeology of Immigration

Franklin and Marshall College has a generous policy for faculty and student collaborative research. Every summer, I bring 1-3 students to do archaeological fieldwork with me in Greece, Philadelphia, Lancaster, or North Dakota. Building on such work with students, I propose the following plan of research for this summer. Here is my Hackman Faculty Grant application. See my report from two years ago, last time I applied for funds [here]

The image [R] is the inscription on a 1908 house in Leontio, Peloponnese, marking the American journey that its proprietor took to build the house.

From Greek Village to the American City
The Archaeology of Immigration

The Deserted Greek Village Project is an archaeological survey of late medieval and early modern villages whose abandonment began in 1893, after Greece's first major economic collapse. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, one in every four Greek men of working age migrated to the United States as a result of this economic crisis. These immigrants created new “Greek towns” in American cities, while also sustaining the villages back home through remittances. The study of material culture (objects, buildings, urbanism) of this phenomenon is by necessity a transnational project. This summer, we will turn our research to the study of both deserted Greek villages and the American Greek towns of the early 20th century. The fieldwork is divided into two parts: Two weeks of fieldwork in Greece, and four weeks of fieldwork in Pennsylvania. The team will include two F&M students, Elizabeth Wood (’17) who participated in last year’s field season and Cassandra Garison (’19). Wood will investigate domestic objects and Garison will investigate the houses of the project. Although working together, the two students will diverge in primary sources and methodology, a digital museum exhibition for Wood’s objects and a GIS database for Garison’s buildings. Both students were in my House Archaeology (ART 279) seminar last semester and have demonstrated both excellence and the desire to collaborate.

All three of us will travel to Greece and work collectively for two weeks. We will continue our documentation of the Lidoriki region with drone aerial survey, 3D modeling, GIS mapping, oral histories, and museum curation. Last summer we targeted the deserted village of Aigition and its objects and presented the results of this research at the Annual Meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Francsicso. Our student Lizzy Wood ('17) presented a separate co-authored poster session at that meeting. This summer, we will submit an article for review in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology. While in Greece, we will also discuss contemporary migration by visiting refugee camps established for Syrian asylum seekers.

The Pennsylvania component of our research will take place at the Balch Institute of Ethnic Studies in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Greek American Heritage Society of Philadelphia, and the Digital Harrisburg project at Messiah College. We will target three Greek towns in southeastern Pennsylvania: Harrisburg, Lancaster, and Philadelphia. With the assistance of Digital Harrisburg (that has already mapped its Greek town), we will map the Greek towns of Lancaster and Philadelphia by linking census data from 1900-1940 to individual properties. While identifying the buildings into which Greek migrated, we will also catalog contemporary objects and records from the Philadelphia diaspora (housed at the Greek American Heritage Society museum and the Balch Institute of Ethnic Studies). The questions we will ask are how did rural Greeks from mountainous villages transition into row houses of eastern Pennsylvania? What kind of material culture did they bring from Greece, and what kind of material culture did they send to Greece? Most ethnic groups migrating to the United States did not leave extensive textual sources. The first generation of immigrants, even if literate, spent its resources as laborers rather than intellectuals. Material culture, thus, offers a unique window into a transnational experience.

I initiated the Deserted Greek Village Project in 2014 with the support of a Hackman Research Fellowship and the assistance of students Joel Naiman ('15) Hackman Fellow and Joanna Radov ('16) Summer Research Fellow. Elizabeth Wood joined the research as a Summer Research Fellow in 2016. Based on those experiences, Naiman is currently pursuing a Master’s in Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania, and Radov is exploring graduate studies and scholarships post-graduation. Wood’s co-authored poster at the Archaeological Institute of America was the first time an F&M presents research on this national forum. This semester, Wood is taking an Independent Study, where she will design an online exhibition for the 136 objects that she recorded in the Lidoriki Folklore Museum last summer. Garison has already done demographic mapping of Lancaster census data for my House Archaeology seminar and will be learning GIS this semester.

Bibliography:

Biermann, Shelby, Todd Brenningmeyer, Sara Loynd, Miltiadis Katsaros, Kostis Kourelis, Austin Nash, Nicole Thompson, Elizabeth Wood. 2016. “Artists at Aigition: Documentation, Design, and the Investigation of Rural Greek Villages,” Poster Session, 117th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, San Francisco, January 7, 2016.

Brenningmeyer, Todd, Kostis Kourelis, and Miltiadis Katsaros. 2013. “The Lidoriki Project: A Historical Topography,” Sixth Annual Congress, Science and Technology for the Safeguard of Cultural Heritage in the Mediterranean Basin, Athens, Greece, Oct. 25, 2013.

Brenningmeyer, Todd, Kostis Kourelis, and Miltiadis Katsaros. 2015. “The Lidoriki Project - Low Altitude Aerial Photography, GIS, and Traditional Survey in Rural Greece,” Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) Annual Conference, Sienna, Italy, Mar. 30, 2015.

Brenningmeyer, Todd, Kostis Kourelis, and Miltiadis Katsaros. 2016. “Drones and Stones: Mapping Deserted Villages in Lidoriki, Greece,” 117th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, San Francisco, January 8, 2016.

Kourelis, Kostis. 2008. “The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek-American Material Culture, 1873-1924,” in Archaeology and History in Roman, Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece: Studies on Method and Meaning in Honor of Timothy E. Gregory, ed. Linda J. Hall, William R. Caraher, and R. Scott Moore (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 411-453.

Kourelis, Kostis. 2008. “From Greek Revival to Greek America: Archaeology and Transformation in Saint George Orthodox Cathedral of Philadelphia,” New Griffon 10, pp. 28-36.

Kourelis, Kostis and William R. Caraher eds. 2010. The Abandoned Countryside: (Re)Settlement in the Archaeological Narrative of Post-Classical Greece, special issue of The International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14:2 (June 2010)

Kourelis, Kostis and Vasileios Marinis. 2012. “The Immigrant Liturgy: Greek Orthodox Worship and Architecture in America,” in Liturgy in Migration: Cultural Contexts from the Upper Room to Cyberspace, ed. Teresa Berger, pp. 155-75, (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press), pp. 155-175.

Ouranis Fireplace

After surveying many fireplaces in deserted Greek houses, I have been thinking about the representation of desertion in Greek literature. After the iconic fireplace of Papadiamantis (see here), I turn to one of the clearest expressions of fireplace nostalgia from a posthumously published piece by the poet Kostas Ouranis. I had blogged on Ouranis's poem "Frangissa" back in 2009 (see here). "The Fireplace" was written sometime in 1928-29. At that point, Ouranis had spent a large period of his life abroad, at Davos Switzerland recovering from tuberculosis, or as Greek Consul in Lisbon. In "The Fireplace," he revisits his locked up paternal home in Leonidio, Arcadia. In some ways, the fireplace of his youth is the same as the hundreds of abandoned fireplaces in our survey. The essay was published posthumously by his wife (under a pseudonym) in 1956, and I give the original Greek below. Below I translate it loosely in English. The piece confirms a sentimental reading of this architectural feature. As a modernist poet, Ouranis' expresses the great space that separates the space of the rural Greece of his youth and the alienated cosmopolitanism of his modern Greek existence. The essay is sentimental and it offers a reflection of an eloquent poet who returned to the space of his youth. 

The Fireplace

It's winter outside, and I sit by a miserable stove that is stingy with its heat. I reminisce nostalgically over the fireplace, the heart of happy houses and the source of tranquil joy.

The fireplace belongs to my paternal home in provincial Arcadia! Long winter nights, the rain burst on the paving of the courtyard, a mad wind shook the windows, and the terrifying sound of the flooded river could be heard outside. But the fireplace shone brightly, illuminating with its luster both my face and my soul. Cross-legged, I once sat by the fireplace and listened to my grandmother's fairy tales, while the chestnuts crackled on the fire. By its light, I read my first Arabian Nights full of fear and seduction, as I grew older. In its flames, I saw genies and Sinbad come to life. 

Poetry woke my soul next to the fireplace. I lamented the withering flowers in the garden, the dead cicadas, and the poor who felt cold throughout the world. I had my first dreams at the fireplace, always dreams of migration. I pondered large hyperborean seas, always deserted and turbulent. I pondered distant lands that had green and rosy borders in my geography. I pondered snow covered forests where fairy princesses hunted deer with golden horns. And I pondered foreign ports, where I would one day embark as a ship's captain, pipe in mouth and a tame red-green parrot perched on my shoulder. 

Years later, every time that I returned from aboard, I would bend over and stir the hearth of the paternal house. And I would stir those early memories and stir the melancholy felt earlier. I would feel the warmth around me as an armor protecting me in life, or as a forgotten pier in the seas, where the waves serenaded the boats into sleep.

The grandmother who once told those tales and the mother who once kept the fire are now buried underground. The house is locked and the fireplace is extinguished forever. I remember those old days of warmth as the winter now rages outside. The wind outside stirs my heart like a scrap. I am cold. I ponder my life that has passed, the closed house, and the dead under the snowed earth.


Το τζάκι (1928-29)

Χειμώνας έξω κ΄ εγώ, μπροστά σε μιάν άθλια σόμπα που φιλαργυερεύεται τη ζέστη της, συλλογιέμαι νοσταλγικά την ψυχή των ευτυχισμένων σπιτιών, την πηγή της γαλήνιας χαράς : το τζάκι ...

Τζάκι του πατρικού σπιτιού, στην αρκαδική μας επαρχία! Μεγάλες χειμωνιάτικες νύχτες, όταν στις πλάκες της αυλής έσκαζε με δύναμη η βροχή, και τράνταζε τα παράθυρα ο φρενιασμένος άνεμος κι ακουόταν η τρομερή βοή του πλημμυρισμένου χειμάρρου – και το τζάκι φεγγοβολούσε, φωτίζοντας με τις ανταύγειές του το πρόσωπο και την ψυχή μου ... Καθισμένος σταυροπόδι πλάϊ του, είχα ακούσει τα πρώτα παραμύθια της γιαγιάς, ενώ τρίζαν στη χόβολη τα κάστανα που ψήναμε. Αργότερα, είχα διαβάσει στο φως του, όλος τρόμο και γοητεία, τη Χαλιμά – κ’ είχα δει να χοροπηδάν στις φλόγες του τα τελώνια κι ο τζουτζές του Σεβάχ Θαλασσινού.

Πλάϊ σ’ αυτό ξύπνησε η ψυχή μου στην ποίηση, ενώ θλιβόμουν για τα μαραμένα στον κήπο λουλούδια, γιά τα πεθαμένα τζιτζίκια και για τους φτωχούς που κρύωναν μέσα στον απέραντο κόσμο. Από κει ξεκίνησα τα πρώτα μου όνειρα – όνειρα αποδημίας πάντα. Συλλογιόμουν τις μεγάλες υπερβόρειες θάλασσες, έρημες και φουρτουνιασμένες· τις μακρυνές χώρες, που είχαν πράσινα και ρόδινα σύνορα στη Γεωγραφία μου· χιονισμένα δάση, όπου παραμυθένια πριγκιπόπουλα κυνηγούσαν ελάφια με χρυσά κέρατα – και ξενικά λιμάνια, όπου θα ξεμπάρκαρα μιά μέρα καπετάνιος με την πίπα στο στόμα κ’ έναν κοκκινοπράσινο, ήμερο, παπαγάλο στον ώμο...

Χρόνια αργότερα, κάθε φορά που γυρνούσα από τα ξένα και, σκυμένος μπρος στή φωτιά του πατρικού τζακιού, ανάδευα, μαζί με τη χόβολη, τις αναμνήσεις μου και τις μελαγχολίες μου, ένοιωθα τη ζεστασιά γύρω μου σα μιά πανοπλία ενάντια στη ζωή και τη φωτεινή του ειρήνη σαν ένα λησμονημένο από τους ανέμους μώλο, όπου νανουρίζονται απαλά τα θαλασσοδαρμένα καΐκια ...

Σήμερα όμως η γιαγιά που έλεγε τα παραμύθια κ’ η μητέρα που φρόντιζε τη φωτιά κείτονται από καιρό μέσα στο χώμα και το σπίτι είναι μανταλωμένο και το τζάκι σβησμένο – γιά πάντα. Και γι’ αυτό, τώρα που έξω είναι χειμώνας κ’ εγώ συλλογιέμαι περασμένα εκείνα, νοιώθω να κουνάει σα ράκος την ψυχή μου ο αέρας και να κρυώνω – και για τη ζωή μου που πέρασα και για το σπίτι που έκλεισε και για τους πεθαμένους κάτω από τη χιονισμένη γη ...

Ouranis, Kostas. 1956. Αποχρώσεις, ed. Eleni Ouranis[= Alkis Thrylos], Athens: Estia, pp. 148-149.

Papadiamantis Fireplace

The fireplace is a central component in Greek vernacular architecture. The Deserted Greek Village project surveyed many fireplaces constructed in stone (left, from Aigition, Phokis) or plaster (Penteskouphi). Hearths are typically found on the second floor of a house, dedicated to human residence as distinguished from mixed usage (storage, livestock) on the first floor. This internal distinction of upper and lower floors corresponds to the increasing specialization of domestic space throughout Europe and the U.S. in the 18th century. In contrast, the medieval Greek house would have had unitary spaces of mixed usage without fireplaces. 

The centrality of the fireplace in the social imagination of rural Greece is evident in how it is discussed in literature, particularly in the short stories of the late-19th-century school of Folk Realism. At another level, the village fireplace takes on a higher topical significance representing literature. This is a common topos in European literature, since most people actually read books in front of their fireplace (up until the advent of forced air heating in 1885). The Greek fireplace began to represent the location of oral culture. Kostas Ouranis, for example, describes his childhood memories of sitting by the fireplace and listening to his grandmother's tales.

I have begun a more systematic survey of 19th-century literature for its architectural references. The survey begins with the stories of Alexandros Papadiamantis. The edition of Papadiamantis that I have access to is the 1970 edition of Seferli (thank you University of Pennsylvania libraries for not [yet] taking Papadiamantis to off-site storage). Right at the opening of the first volume, we have a woodcut of Papadiamantis's own fireplace drawn by Nikolas Paulopoulos (1909-1990).

Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911) spent most of his life in his native island of Skiathos. He lived in a house built in 1860 that has been transformed into a popular house museum. For the many literati (like Stratis Myrivilis) who would have visited Papadiamantis, the fireplace would have remained as an iconic image. I don't know when Nikolas would have made his woodcut, but I would guess in the 1950s or 1960s. The print of the woodcut illustrating the Papadiamantis edition belonged to Myrivilis. Nikolas' woodcut follows the Expressionist tradition charging the space with high contrast psychological tension. The provenance of the image connects the contemporary reader to Papadiamantis via Myrivilis and a chain of tradition. The Seferli edition becomes itself a visual document, as each of the stories is illustrated by a woodcut commissioned by the press. Nikolas's woodcut makes a nice introduction to the literary spaces of Greece's deserted villages.

It will be difficult to escape the sentimentalism surrounding the Greek fireplace. I hope it is still possible to excavate beyond the nostalgia and assess its materiality. Can we do a history of the Greek countryside in the footsteps of Raymond Williams?  Peter Mackridge has paved the way for such a study in "The Textualization of Place in Greek Fiction, 1883-1903," Journal of Mediterranean Studies 2 (1992), pp. 146-168. And I suspect that Ecocriticism will eventually have an impact on modern Greek literary studies.

Thalero

Last summer, I made a pilgrimage to a house that served as an epicenter of the Anglo-American avant-garde, the house of Eva Palmer and Angelos Sikelianos in Sikya, 25 km west of Ancient Corinth (see here). Last week, I've been having terrific web-conversations with Artemis Leontis and Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan about this house. What I didn't know in last year's visit is that Kostas Karyotakis also had a summer house in the area. I have a little theory I'm developing in an upcoming essay that, in the 1920s, Corinth became a topos for the Greek avant-garde, in par with better known sites like Delphi, Mistras, or the Aegean. I argue this through poetry, Angelos Sikelianos's "Acrocorinth," Odysseus Elytis's "Drinking Corinthian Sun," and through paintings, Georg von Peschke's "Acrocorinth."

This summer, I spent two weeks with my students surveying ruined villages in Corinthia, Argolid, and Phocis. After an intensive week of surveying at Lidoriki, we spent a night at Delphi with the students, where I showed them the location where Greek folk arts (like the ones we studied) would have first been displayed to an international audience (at the 1927 Delphic Festival, curated by Angeliki Hadjimihali. The next day, we continued our research collecting comperanda for our museum study at the Hadjimihali House in Plaka. Looking at a map of the Gulf of Corinth, it became clear to me how close Sikya and Delphi are. They are not visible to each other because Mount Helicon blocks the view. By boat, however, Xylokastro to Itea are only 45 km apart, a distance that could be travelled by sailboat in one or two hours. The vista below, taken from the terrace of the Sikelianos house shows the proximity of the two coasts and Mount Helicon. Hotels from the 1970s that crowd the beach have unfortunately blocked the vistas of the Sikelianos house.

After last year's visit, I put my photos and notes of the Sikelianos house aside, but Artemis is helping me make sense of them now. After posting Karyotakis's poem "Sleep" on Facebook, Artemis had me completely hooked. The poem inspired the title Green Shore, one of the best recent novels about Greece by Natalie Bakopoulos. The poetic conversation (thank you Facebook!!!) sent me to the library to revisit Sikelianos's poem "Thalero," named after an agricultural village just 5 km upland from the coastal Sikya. It would have taken Sikelianos less than 45 mins to walk there. He took that walk in the middle of summer, accompanied by a shepherd dog. He was offered lunch by a hospitable family and took a siesta.

In "Thalero," Sikelianos explores the erotics of a Greek village, expressed in the crops, the house, the clothes, and most importantly the body of a young girl that served him food and wine. It is a loaded and powerfully erotic poem, you can listen to it here, read it here, and find its translation here. Rereading this poem after a year, it dawned on me that Sikelianos was responding to a place very similar to the nearby village of Penteskouphi that we surveyed this summer. The survey of Penteskouphi will be featured in the paper "An Abandoned Mud Brick Hamlet at Penteskouphi near Corinth: Its Condition, Educational Potential and Natural Environment," by Guy Sanders, Isabella Sanders, and Miyan Yoo at the 2016 annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. 

The village house in Greece has been described and poeticized by writers as early as the mid-19th century. I have this crazy idea of surveying Greek literature and sampling those architectural descriptions. The natural place to start is in the folk realist prose of Alexandros Papadiamantis. I say this is a crazy idea because Papadiamantis's short stories alone number to the 300s. Stay tuned. 

Deserted Greek Villages

Paul Oliver, a foundational figures in the study of vernacular architecture globally, wrote in 1974, "the shelter of Greece has claimed more attention than that of any other country." In 1964, Bernard Rudofsky's exhibition "Architecture Without Architects" at the Museum of Modern Art ushered vernacular architecture into the American mainstream. Greek houses were highly represented in the exhibition. Rudofsky discovered Greek villages in 1929 for his PhD thesis on the vaulted houses of Santorini. The 1960s and 1970s were a golden age for the study of the Greek house leading to the major publication of Greek Traditional Architecture in 1983.

The Greek house played a prominent role in modernism because of its simplicity and material honesty. But without Le Corbusier, Brutalism, minimalism and the modernist orientation towards essential aesthetic paradigms, the Greek house loses its prominence. Postmodernism has ridiculed the reductivism of this modernist lens and, in the process, has pushed the study of vernacular architecture to the margins.

During the 1990s, when the Greek economic bubble started to get inflated, Greeks re-invested into their rural origins. Cheap labor -- unskilled Albanian stonemasons -- fueled and explosion of reconstruction projects. This was the decade of the Morea Project, when we documented the rapid destruction of the vernacular fabric under this rural "renewal" manifest in millions of Albanian walls made out of indigenous stone and concrete mortar. Interviewing villagers in the 1990s, we would ask "who has rebuilt your traditional house?" and they would say "northern Epirots," the euphemism for new emigrating Albanians. The stone-masonry traditions of continental Greece have deep roots in Epirus, who made up itinerant groups during the mid-18th-century agricultural boom that created most of the villages that we see today.

Now that the boom has busted, the Greek villages are becoming increasingly re-abandoned. The mad craze of rebuilding has slowed down. A new property tax is beginning to penalize real estate ownership. Abandoned at two previous economic crisis 1890s, 1960s, the Greek villages the rate of abandonment is evident again. Of course, many Athenians are returning to villages and rediscovering traditional ways of agriculture and economic independence, but they are not investing in architecture. From the perspective of historic preservation, a recession has positive effects in warding unchecked development.

A short season of fieldwork this summer made me realize that the preservation and documentation of Greek villages is under a new moment of crisis. Dwindling archaeological resources are applied to the touristically profitable and nationally sacred ancient sites, leaving the early modern village in further disarray. As archaeologists, we are well equipped in methods of studying deserted landscapes. We have developed surveying tools (photogrammetry, Google Earth, drones, etc.) to create a record. This will be invaluable to future scholars. A research agenda focused on deserted villages, moreover, will force us to confront heady ideological issues, such as the anxieties of devaluation. At the height of its 1960s abandonment, certain sections of the southeastern Peloponnese were acquired cheaply by German philhellenes. Something similar is happening in Spain this year, where British investors are buying up deserted houses. See, for instance, "Spain: Deserted Medieval Villages Available 'Free'" (BBC, Mar. 10, 2014). Studying deserted villages helps us think through moments of crisis facilitated by political or economic conflict. Asia Minor and Cappadocia are full of villages forcefully deserted by the expulsion of the Greek population in 1923. Once again, note how British tourists intersect with that heritage, in "Turkey's Religious Ghost Town" (BBC Travel, Aug. 5, 2014). Those deserted Greek villages have seen the most interesting Greek-Turkish collaborations in cultural heritage. The experiences of Detroit and "ruin porn" have also pushed forward the conversation over the pitfalls of aestheticizing someone else's real estate pain.

Without modernism's primitivist fantasy, the Greek house has lost its popular appeal. The Greek house continues to sell itself iconically, as a place form which to experience the Mediterranean's triple S's (sex, sun, sea). The brand was created as a national export by the National Organization of Tourism in the 1960s and it continues to replicate itself. Greek houses continue to be touristically marketed and consumed forming an important component of the economy. But the cultural capital expended is built on notions half a century old. Tourism is still riding on the golden age of  Greek vernacular architecture studies. I think that the time has come to revisit the Greek house though an archaeological rather than an architectural lens. A golden age of Greek vernacular studies might be in the horizon. We must de-essentialize the Greek house as a beautiful topos of man's coexistence with pure nature. Rather, we should essentialize it (for better or for worse) with an acute perspective of decomposition, abjection, loss.

Craft: High/Low-Brow Conspiracy

Bill Caraher has proposed a new blog series on Archaeology and Craft. I have spent some of my summer fieldwork documenting craft collaboration in Greek vernacular architecture. Consider the beautiful iron pin here, inserted between two limestone blocks, and pinned into the wooden sash of the door invisible behind the wall. In this tiny construction detail, we have a masterful collaboration between a mason, a carpenter, and a metalworker, masters of three mutually exclusive material. At the same time, I have been looking at American archaeologists of the 1930s. Raised in an Arts-and-Crafts pedagogy, a circle of progressive archaeologists began a scientific inquiry on Greek vernacular crafts. The physical and historiographic research, two sides of the same quoin, bring craft into focus. So, I am excited to engage in the conversation over the craft of archaeology at two levels.

But I'm not ready yet. What I'd like to note instead is this weekend's conversation in the New York Times. A. O. Scott's "The Squeeze on the Middlebrow" relates class stratification to cultural taste. Inspired by Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century," Scott considers Piketty's ramifications of class inequality in cultural production. One way by which the middle class has been squeezed out into a high and low class is by the eradication of the middlebrow. The notion of middlebrow as an American mid-century phenomenon was first articulated by Russell Lynes in "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow" (1949) and elaborated on by Dwight Macdonald in "Masscult and Midcult" (1960). In addition to Scott's essay, the New York Times book review invited two prominent thinkers Pankaj Mishra and Thomas Mallon to elaborate on Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow: Do These Kinds of Cultural Categories Mean Anything Anymore? This is a huge topic of discussion of course and it assumes a clear understanding of the unique character of cultural production in mid-century America.

The conversation reminded me that the CRAFT gets implicated into the cultural typology in that it is shared by the lowbrow (who produces it) and the highbrow (who worships it) as a mode of eradicating the middlebrow who gives it a much lower cultural value. In Lynes words, "The highbrows would like to eliminate the middlebrows and devise a society that would approximate an intellectual feudal system, in which the lowbrows do the work to create folk arts and the highbrows do the thinking and create fine arts." The passage also reminded me of Thorstein Veblen's similar analysis in his 1899 "Theory of the Leisure Class," where he considered the upper class's embrace of premodern habits, like candlelit dinners, to distinguish themselves from the middle class (who uses electricity at dinner).

This post is just an open question. The avant-garde of the early 20th century loved folk culture for its purity and preindustrial authenticity. Modern art began to look increasingly primitive and non-western, as a strategy to critique mass production. The study of craft contains an inevitable tension between the academy (which Veblen argues get a special entry into the upper class) and the lower class. In the late 19th century, theorists of the Arts and Crafts built on a model of socialist utopia that bypassed the middlebrow problem. Any investment in craft at some fundamental level is an act of resistance to mass production and capitalist exploitation. But at the same time, the discourse of craft hides a strange alliance between high and low. Not sure what to make of this paradox yet, if only to throw it in the conversation.

Mapping Greek Villages: Neda

I am returning to the villages of Greece, continuing with fieldwork on vernacular architecture. Earlier plans of reviving the Morea Project had been thwarted by the sad death of project director Fred Cooper. In 2010, I visited David Romano's Mount Lykaion Project to brainstorm ways of integrate our old data from the Morea Project with the new data from Parrhasian Heritage Park. The two projects geographically overlap. We prospected the village Neda as one of the villages to be connected with the new path system. Unfortunately, it was not one of the villages that the Morea Project mapped, so we don't have the benefit of archival data from the 1990s. On the Parrhasian Park, see here.

The broader agenda for the summer is to explore the Greek house through multiple case studies. We will reconstruct 19th-century houses torn down in Athens in the 1930s (but well recorded by the Agora excavations), we will survey the town of Lidoriki in Central Greece (part of the ongoing FandM Lidoriki), we will visit the first season of the Western Argolid Survey, and we will explore the digital archives of Ancient Corinth. I will be accompanied by my student Joel Naiman, who will be working on this material all summer as part of a Hackman Scholarship at F&M. 

Lots have changed since I last surveyed Greek villages. Maps are not secretly guarded by the Greek state as treasures of military security. The proliferation of satellite mapping by Bing or Google have made any attempt by nation-states to control information obsolete. But the availability of free and ample data can be misleading. One has the feeling that all is actually available, since village plans are discernible in those satellite images and the human cartographer is obsolete. Google and Bing maps create a challenge in our field methods. I have thought about how to incorporate them in the survey this summer. It seems to me that a blend of high and low tech skills is necessary. Bringing a satellite image into the field does not actually assist the brain in making decisions about urban or architectural value about what is important and what is not.

This summer, I will test the following method. Although we'll be bringing drones, kites, and high-tech visual instruments, I will be maintaining quality control through hand drawings. Before leaving for Greece, I have created simply hand-drawn maps based on what is visible on Google Earth. The process is time-consuming because it requires careful looking and keeping of measurements without any tool other than the eye. So, I've taken my iPad to my favorite cafe with an internet connection; I've signed onto Google Earth; and with an 11 x 24 in drawing pad, I have tried to produce a set of simple black-and-white plan showing visible structures. The process follows producing three different site-plans. 

Part I: NEIGHBORHOODS

The first drawing takes the outer-most zoom of the settlement and moving back-and-forth between "map" and "satellite" determines what Google considers to be the major streets and boundaries of the settlement. The limits of the settlement Google denotes in gray, and here I have translated them into steeples. This proves useful in dealing with large settlements (which Neda is not) in subdividing the total area in smaller units that can receive a numerical system. In Neda, for example, you can see a dozen zones. In larger villages (like Lidoriki) we have 50.

II. BUILDINGS

Google and Bing images have enough resolution that one can discern roofs and building shadows, enough so that one can discern structures. Sliding through and zooming in-and-out of the Google satellite image, one can start placing buildings on the map. I do this first with a pencil, so that I an erase mistakes. Once I am sure I have all the structures accounted for, I just darken them is. So, these will become the objects of study. With this drawing in hand, we will visit each building and collect specific information.

III. SPACE

The final pass involves zooming further into Google and extracting finer information about the buildings, including how they relate to one another, roof types, etc.

So this is what I have prepared before the field. In a couple of weeks, I will join the Parrhasian Heritage Part team and see if this system works. There I will reunite with Mark Davison (Park Services) and David Romano (now at Arizona), who were my hosts two years ago. Wish us luck. I look forward to revisiting the house shown above that is one of the black fields in my drawings. The limited information from Google makes believe, however, that the house has greatly collapsed since 2010.