So, I'm rather late with respect to this, anyway, some impressions...

ut multi uestrum scitis in Pannonia Superiore natus sum et illic hoc anno iui. I wanted to write this in Greek but my loss of skill through desuetude has let me down; Andrew Kelly would be disappointed with me, particularly, also, as there’s not a whit of Samskrtam. Or maybe I should’ve gone Old Church Slavonic with this - no Glagolitic font though…

My tour this year took me through Pannonia, Dalmatia, Noricum, upper Germania, and Britannia though the former two will be under scrutiny at present. I seem to be following the Romans wherever they went.

Pannonia is rolling hills and plains that are so fertile that it is almost impossible, gradually seeping into a state of disuse – something like The Art of the Fugue, perhaps, incomplete in its full potentiality. Isolated voices and melodic lines may be heard in the small garden plots and vineyards dispersed, but never a unified theme proclaiming self-identity. We can be dramatic and say this is because of the war, but the Balkans has always been a writhing mosaic where tesserae sit next to one another with some unease, always undulating.

In the Balkans, food is the first thing, everything else follows on. Some of my relatives pride themselves on their unsprayed, fertilizer free produce. Whatever the case, all other food seems pale. The thriving life of fruit trees in our derelict house is the stable, unvarying element in the ever-changing torrent of human life, death, and politics – testament of my grandfather’s grafting experiments; the cherries thence put all everything to shame with their lascivious redness and flavour - no doubt his best deed, and one that, poetically, will outlast him.

The table is the centre of much social life, and eating is a kind of lubricant for everything, to keep the engine of interaction around the table moving until the hours melt away. This kind of thing doesn’t exist in Australia – everyone has too many appointments, extra-curricular activities, jobs, screamy children who need to be driven around to music lessons or weekend sport; if you want to see a friend, you have to make an appointment (like with a dentist or gynaecologist) two weeks in advance. I get that the complexity and entanglement of life here is greater, but it is lamentable how much people are willing to allow these things to govern their lives in such as way that it becomes a means for boosting their self-importance and esteem, like having 500 Facebook friends... All that they seem to get out of it is having been run ragged. The people I interacted with, at least, had different priorities.

populus Graeciam fututam de oeconomia putat, maybe because the Greeks vociferate more and they’re in the EU, but you haven’t yet been to the Balkans, where debts run back to the 1950s when Yugoslavia was given monetary incentive for post-war reconstruction to sever relations with the Soviet Union. Now there are a bunch of these small states that strive to eke out an existence with difficulty, having small populations, and uneven professional distribution, and the like. This isn't helped by the fact that politicians continue to steal money from the state coffers – rife under the old system, the 'habitus' if you’re in a position of power: help yourself. The former premier Ivo Sanader has featured in the news prominently of late owing to the fact that he embezzled some 10 million Euro. He was imprisoned and spent some time in Salzburg, and was extradited back to Croatia a few days before I came to Salzburg.

Croatia whores itself out to tourism, and rich foreigners buy up land and run-down old country villas. This phenomenon is endemic in places like Split, where one of my relations was telling me an instance of some Austrian gradually buying up parcels of some residence in the old town. Soon they’ll all be lodgers in their own country. Yet these places still stand, as emissaries of other wills and thoughts that seek to obfuscate the modern condition. Do see them, ye who read this, should you chance.

Then there's the war. I’ve on occasion attempted to describe the effect, but it’s quite impossible to convey to people , it’s something that has to be lived through. It's shown paraded in the media to such an extent that people have become numbly strung out on it, and even treat it in a cavalier fashion. Then we have these hyped up funerals of people who died in Afghanistan or wherever. Honestly, the moment a soldier dons his/her uniform for active duty, they should expect the reality of being buried in it - expendable like trash.

War is a way of acquiring wisdom the hard way for those who outlive it. Sometimes you believe that the dead are better off in a way, free from it all. There are a few types that emerge – defeated, with an additional sense of clarity about the depravity of the human condition; those who look forward in a bid to free themselves from the shadows; the devolved, acting in accordance with animal instincts, lustful greed for every gain, for who knows what tomorrow will be.

War in any form is lamentable, and in modern times more sinister – death is impersonal -dealt at a distance-, the notion of victory and defeat have lost their former status of finality, becoming mere moves in greater strategies. It seems to be symptomatic of the kind of moral confusion, or a lack of morals at all. They sit back, relax, watch the carnage like a spectator sport, and they are the first to talk about sacrifice. As such, the war in the Balkans was similarly orchestrated, with a veneer of hyper-nationalism. Then, at the end of it all, everyone else has to suffer for it. One may shudder to think what men (for it is an invariably male thing) imprisoned by this amorality are capable of doing when given power.

This is the Balkans, incoherent like this post. When I was driving with a cousin through Slavonija to see an aunt, admiring the fields heavy with crop, he was telling me about a somewhat distant relative who died in the war nearby - strapped to a chair and set alight. Wisdom can't be innocent, though the fair countryside was not obscured - the unwearying cycle of nature, as some balm for the human stain.

Last year was somewhat disappointing in London in terms of art exhibitions during summer, but this year makes up for it:

primus Joan Miró fuit at the Tate Modern. I've always liked his work - my father has monograph of Miró and Artigas, focusing mostly on their collaborative work, which I always used to look at when I was a kid, fascinated in particular by the ceramics and their splotchy, wavering, vaguely anthropomorphic forms floundering at the bottom of plates. What makes him more appealing for me these days is the association some of his works have with Palaeolithic rock art. It's interesting how these artists sought to capture some kind of unadulterated state of consciousness through simplifying forms; Picasso is perhaps the most famous in this respect, stating that by the time he was 11, he could draw like Raphael, but that he spent the rest of his life learning how to draw like a child. The connection with children's and Palaeolithic rock art is that it, arguably, doesn't serve an 'art for art's sake' purpose, as if it bypasses standard channels of pre-meditation to serve another purpose. I know from my own experience of drawing that, in my salad days, I did it very spontaneously, without gnawing worriedly about 'correctness' of certain points, like I do today when I pick up a pencil.

The semi-amorphous undulations of Miró feel very satisfying to me when I look at them - it's the stuff of dreams in a way, an attempt to put that which isn't in the waking world into it – the constellation series certainly evokes that. His Barcelona series drawings, on the other hand, feel quite picaresque and aggressive, though equally full of invention; I like their stripped away character in comparison to his paintings, though each is a major event unto itself.

On the way back to base one afternoon I was at a tube station and saw an ad for a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. Now those who know me are aware that I’m a massive Toulouse-Lautrec fan girl, so this was too good to pass up. The exhibition focuses on Lautrec’s relationship with Jane Avril, one of the prominent entertainer figures in fin de siècle Paris. She was one of his prominent models, featuring in numerous paintings and posters which elevated both of their careers. Thus, most of the exhibition focused on the posters, as well as a few paintings, not excluding well known pieces such as 'At the Moulin Rouge' (1892), and 'La Gouloue entering the Moulin Rouge…' (1892).

The appeal of Lautrec lies in the dynamism of his work – the sketch like quality of his paintings in particular, which is certainly a must for portraying such scenes as those in circuses, horse racing, and dance. He painted frequently on cardboard, and didn’t care for impasto, which heightens the vigour, and the paintings don’t suffer from sagging delays as to their subject matter. Even the pastel portrait of van Gogh (which wasn’t in the exhibition) affirms this – van Gogh seems to be about to spring out of his chair, staring ahead fixedly, nervously massaging his hands inches from a glass of absinthe. In the oil sketch for the Jardin de Paris poster depicting Jane Avril, one can almost hear the clomp of her boot on the wooden floorboards, and the rustling undulation of her voluminous skirts.

Compositionally too, Lautrec was experimental: At the Moulin Rouge shows this, giving a photographic quality to the work, and thus lack of artifice and premeditation. The Degas-like angles, and faces of the people have a very theatrical quality, their exaggeration recalling something of the air of Greco-Roman theatre masks. Yet, the strikingly lit features of la Gouloue hit you as you confront the painting first thing. Spiffing, wot. Thus, there is a certain verism that runs through Lautrec’s work, which his initial audiences found striking too, prominently in his Elles series.

Then there was the Watercolours exhibition at Tate Britain. At first, I thought ‘oh, it’ll be a small affair with pretty little pictures', but, naturally, I was quite wrong on this score. Watercolour seems to be the great British tradition – the Brits certainly stretched the medium in its various possible rationalizations through time. Whenever I think of the medium, it reminds me of those Victorian novels, where accomplished young ladies spend their time plying brush to paper in lazy afternoons, and governesses instructing recalcitrant children in the art form’s ways – from the struggles of Agnes to Jane’s wilfully subjective landscapes, catching Mr. Rochester off guard, almost.

From the illuminated medieval manuscripts – combining gouache, watercolour on vellum – to contemporary things within the last decade, all kinds of permutations seem to be represented. One thing I found astonishing was the detail of some miniature portraits from the 17th-18th centuries, particularly in a medium that demands technical aptitude from an individual. For me, the acme of the exhibition was Turner, who seems to be the only one I know of to have adequately captured the mood of English weather and landscape. It is amusing to think that Turner was years ahead of his time when it comes to abstraction of form, the idea with which artists only began to grapple with in the 20th century. quid de his Turner putaret?

Reading about the travails of Erica Imperatrix in smutty Latin, and J. Harker’s (the Wayward Classicist – I wonder if he’s got any connections with a certain Transylvanian count…) battle against the deluvially moronic qualities of undergraduate Latin students has prompted this latest epistle of ὅσιος Δαμιᾶνος.

So, those who still read this have probably been aware that I was teaching intensive beginners' Latin in Jan-Feb - basically the whole year's worth of beginner level condensed into seven weeks. The planets seemed to have been in alignment or something, or gods making other mortals look upon me as a favoured candidate for the task. Funny that a would-be archaeologist with an anthropology/sociology bent landed such a gig, after all, archaeologists do what they do because they can't hack the languages :). I was somewhat iffy about it also because I did Latin only for a year as an undergrad, but the prospect of acting in front of a class of bemused/jaded students, geeking out, and being paid to do so won out.

I don't know what I expected, as I'd never taught before; I settled on the ethos of 'wing it', and wing it I did. Winging it was made easier by the fact that I didn’t do any lecturing, so I didn’t have to prepare much. I found it easier than anticipated to talk about things off the top of my head, while still making sense.

On the whole it was good (et Deus uidit quod bonum esse) because my class was small and receptive – the fact that there were three mature-age students in it had a good effect on the dynamic. Because of all this, I was able to indulge in somewhat more advanced concepts – any excuse to use Woodcock; Jones and Sidwell suck thoroughly. There don’t seem to be any really good beginner’s Latin text books out there, from what little I know; certainly nothing that I’ve seen on the level of, let’s say, Mastronarde for Greek, which is, like, fully sick, man. Honestly, a book that teaches the deponent 150 pages before the passive voice, so you end up learning the deponent around the middle of semester 1, and the passive middle-end of semester 2…

The indulgent aspect (i.e. discussion of PIE, development of daughter languages and Latin in context) also helps in weeding out uninterested parties. It’s not a bad tactic – having a boringish first class then gradually amping up on the interesting bits as things progress. I liked to do a ‘fun’ day each week where we read a real text, so we did Vergil, Petronius, a Vindolanda tablet, unadapted Amphitruo, and Catullus 3. Part of me wishes to have done Catullus 16, but I don’t know how 'pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo' would’ve gone down. Though, reading Petronius 62 on Thursday I learnt a cool verb – circumminxit – which means ‘piss in a circle’. It’s from the werewolf story where the narrator and his friend (a 'miles fortis tanquam Orcus') go to a cemetery one morning, whereupon the miles begins to strip, pile his clothes into a bundle, pisses in a circle, and then, to the narrator’s mounting horror, he transforms into a wolf. Another word I found most piquant from this passage is 'uersipellis', shape-shifter.

I made a big deal of ‘shall’ versus ‘will’ in discussing the future tense. I’m a strong 'shall' person myself – a Knight of Shall, if you will, fighting against the Infidels of Will in a never ending crusade of linguistic snobbery. I don’t think I’ll ever convert Sonya and Sarah, poor souls lost to the true word of the God of Shall, but the unwavering pursuit of the cause sustains my virtue.

One of my students, Fido, was filled with brash Gryffindor theatrics, such that there was nurtured my inner Snape, much to the amusement of all. Fido is majoring in music, and lives in the Shire (i.e. Belgrave), though I cannot imagine a hobbit hole is very comfortable, him being 6' 4" at least. Then there was Gaby, who enrolled a week into the course, did abysmally throughout, and proceeded to write a complaint this week, demanding that we let him re-sit the exams, and that we didn’t help him any. This is university, laddie buck, you ask for assistance in matters of learning; you chose not to, so I’m letting you sink down into the linguistic mediocrity whence you came; I don’t exist to spoon feed you and change your nappy.

Graceful Seas was arguably the queen of it all. Fighting some kind of chronic illness, she came to class in the second week, asking all manner of inane questions which would be easily answered by consultation of the LMS page for the course. Emailing me a sob story about how she needs to finish her degree, why aren’t there lecture notes on the internet, sob sob sob. Guess what, princess? You might be able to rote learn things for the small tests, but for everything else, you’ve been screwed from day one; I can’t teach you everything you’ve missed in an office hour, provided you’re able summon the energy to come to class at all, or whenever it suits you. So you came for a total of six classes in the two month course, and were surprised to find that at the beginning of week four was the mid-semester equivalent exam. You didn’t apply for consideration of disadvantage from the outset as I advised, so you’re getting a big fat fail, not just because you didn’t do the course, but because you can’t organize your life. I’m sure you think that I’m to blame for it all, pretty easy to do, right? Lots easier than owning up the fact that you screwed up…

The end was a queer one in that over half did execrably on the final exam on Friday. Mistakes on elementary things such as morphology and completely raped by this sentence: nam nauis conflagrantis conspicati, Syracusani magnam calamitatem acceptam esse et mox periculum sibi maximum fore statim intellexerunt.

So, most thought that 'conspicati' was a passive of some sort, forgetting completely that it’s a deponent and that it most conveniently agrees with the next word. The fact that this was indirect speech skipped their minds, no doubt suffering seizures from the string of oblique case words, forgetting that the verb comes at the end of a sentence/clause. Unlike the Syracusans, the students didn't perceive that a disaster was about to happen regarding their performance. Then there’s that little biatch 'fore' – what the hell is it? Well, obviously you didn’t pay attention to my lecture last Tuesday where I spoke about this little curiosity in the context of the 'fore ut' construction.

Curiously, most did well on translating an indirect command – Verres lictoribus imperauerat ut uirum caederent – though they seemed to forget that 'impero' takes a dative. Did I mention that people really screwed up the morphology too – easy marks!

Anyway, it’s over. I quite enjoyed it on the whole. Now onto Beginners’ A; feels so slow, doing one chapter a week. The dynamic is much different too - no mature age students for one, everyone somewhat stiff like a virgin bundling her voluminous skirts to herself in a bit to ward off intrusions, real or imagined. People did generally ok on today's test though.

I haven’t talked about the excavations so much because I wasn’t involved in them, only visiting the trench every other day. Sector R was chosen on the basis of our survey results last year, where we encountered a heavy a mount of Late Hellenistic-Late Roman pottery. The trench is also in an area without housing, so not subject to restructions in size and location. There’s a strong possibility of expanding, and the results from this year favour that. Another important point is that this is the southernmost point in which excavations have taken place at Pessins, and so has implications regarding the size of the town, and the fluctuation thereof through time.

The trench was about 5m x 3m, or thereabouts, which ended up being somewhat small with the resources at our disposal – we had too many workers with nothing to do. It’s interesting because there is an expectation in the village to hire a number of people to work during the archaeology campaign, but this year it was a problem simply because the style of excavation differed – smaller scale, finer context; in other words, the opposite of Ghent, who excavated quite fast in comparison, whereas we reached a depth of merely 1.5m at the most profound point by the end of the season.

The uppermost levels are highly mixed, with pottery from Iron Age to Early Byzantine continuing to some depth. But this made it clear that there was fairly continuous occupation in this area. Excavation began on the 9th of July, and by the 14th, things were looking a bit more promising, as the diggers hit some kind of floor level in the western part of the trench, and a possible robber trench in the middle, where a wall had been taken out at some point. On the 15th, they started coming upon a wall, running east-west out of the east profile and excavation also began to focus in the eastern half of the trench, as this turned out to be definite intramural area.

By the 20th, the wall had been considerably exposed, and it seems that the wall on top was a later addition onto an earlier, better built one. On the north side, another wall running parallel with the aforementioned was discovered, yet substantially robbed. Some pits were also excavated between the walls, including a zone that, by fluke, yielded a pure Early Roman context. The south-east part of the trench began to yield various surfaces, which continue down.

So it’s clear that we’ve got, chronologically, a Late Roman/Early Byzantine context. It’s hard to define due to so much mixing of deposits but towards the end, some more secure levels were reached that could ne 6th-7th century, based on diagnostic ceramics. Culturally it’s another matter, something that will have to be defined in the long term as the amount of data increases. For Ghent, Byzantine is synonymous with Christian, which is a very poor indicator, and doesn’t take into account issues of cultural change, habitus etc. Well, it can’t be expected that someone like Devreker would ever do this.

A further nuisance is the poverty of documentation from Ghent. G claims it’s mixed up and all in Flemish. So, potentially useless for us. I did manage to find parallels for some of the ceramics for sector R from the depot but the lack of supporting documentation prevents me from establishing where precisely it came from. The project simply cannot do without this information – the preliminary reports are simply too general.

Team Geo, on the other hand, had a host of issues. For some reason, Pessinus is awful for doing magnetometer survey, yielding practically no results. We did have GPR this year (ground penetrating radar), which was extremely labour intensive – it involved the device being hooked up to Armin’s laptop and placed on a makeshift sled, as too much of a bumpy ride would have a negative impact on the data collection. So they dragged this thing painfully and laboriously. Yet, it yielded some fantastic results from the plateau just behind the study centre/depot – a rather long wall and a tower-like feature at one end of it. It was a nice pay-off after all the headaches.

After our successful survey of the upper field at Tekören, Team Geo decided to have a go at it with magnetometer, and got excellent results – some large anomalies across the length of the field and other things that continue beyond the bounds of the survey. They worked particularly hard at Tek, and in intense heat – a truly laudable effort and a tribute to their professionalism throughout.

We did have a fiasco with the topographical map that had long been in preparation. G paid something like 8000 lira for it, and went to see it while we were still in Eskişehir, saying that it looked fine. When it was brought to us in the field, Armin had a look at it and said it was inaccurate and very poorly done; uncharacteristically, he got quite angry with the Turks doing it and had a long talk with them about it. So, G had sunk all those bones for nothing, practically; they just took the money and made it look like they did something. Ach.

***

That about sums up the three weeks we were in the field. Perhaps I shall add a little retrospective at some point when I return home and become absorbed in Pessinus things once again. Stay tuned, pour le denouement.

On our first day off, we elected to go to Sivrihisar, with the possibility of mounting the mighty mountain behind the town to see the kale. Sivrihisar is present in old historical documents as Spaleia, though to my knowledge has never been investigated in any way. It is a highly defensible place for a settlement, right in the palm of a craggy granite mountain that is isolated from the rest of the Sivrihisar mountain range. It is also quite different from the surrounding mountains, having a more ‘volcanic’ appearance, more like the mountain behind Tekören, itself a granite formation in the midst of marble rich surrounds. I imagine the whole region would be a geomorphologist’s dream.

Wednesday is market day at Sivrihisar, and as we walked through town, people were setting up their various wares along the streets. We made our way to the rear of the town, where there are a number of derelict houses, 19th-early 20th century, constructed in the vernacular style. It is quite interesting, a comination of wood, brick, and plaster. The structural element of the wood is visible as in Tudor architecture, and the upper storey is typically extruded from without the perimeter of the lower storey. One house in particular had this interesting semi-apsidal feature under the pitch of the roof on the front side, constructed of wood and plaster.

Behind this quarter is the former Armenian church, which we didn’t have time to visit (the Führer and the Americans did last year). I think it was built in the 19th century. It seemed that it was undergoing some kind of restoration. Behind the church is the old hamam, which we also missed out on. There’s also an old Seljuk mosque in Sivrihisar whose interior is almost entirely made of wood (i.e. the columns and vaulting), which would’ve been marvellous to see, but again, no time.

Subsequent of the houses and the church began the gradual climb up the mountain. We spent some time looking for a path leading up to it, meandering through sometimes impossible boulders and thrust up formations. The area going up to the kale itself is very steep, strewn with the rubble of the structure. We approached the kale from the north side, and a tower with a section of wall was clearly visible. The whole endeavour is simply astonishing – how they managed to build in such adverse terrain and haul building materials up. Much of the kale is made of granite, so it would be interesting to see where on the mountain they quarried it. Obviously there was a sufficiently stable authority and a good deal of motivation to build the place. Our knowledge is meagre as the kale has never been studied, so we can merely hypothesize about its origins and dates, which would allow the incorporation of some historical information to clarify possible socio-political circumstances which led to the construction of the kale.

The kale itself sits between the two bare, granite peaks of the mountain. Miraculously, some sections of wall remain where they were constructed against the inhospitable southern rock face of the west peak. The denudation allows a good inspection of the way it was built – a mortared boulder core faced with finely dressed blocks, intersected by rows of tiles. It’s a Roman/Byzantine way of building that persisted for a long time. Indeed, the upper wall shows re-used Roman tiles, which supposes that there was something earlier there or at Spaleia itself. Further on the south side there appear to be two main ‘terraces’ bound by sections of well preserved walls.

We also found some interesting ceramics in our examination of the castle. Robert found a very nice piece of incised (with whorls), glazed and painted Late Byzantine ware. W’s sherdiness manifested itself strongly, whereupon he drew the piece and photographed it. I came across a base fragment with a kind of dribbled blue paint on it, very Turkish, as well as some green glazed pieces. The piece of interest, which W found on the way back to Sivrihisar, was a piece of Constantinople white ware, 7th-8th centuries. So, it seems we have earlier occupation on the mountain than known. W has assumed that there may be Roman and even Hellenistic up there but it’s nothing more than conjecture. I imagine that settlement patterns in this region shifted with the Byzantine loss of control of central Anatolia in the 11th century, perhaps prompting people to move up the mountains. Then there’s the whole issue of Arab incursions in the 7th-8th centuries, around the time Pessinus seems to have been abandoned, which may have prompted (re)settlement of Spaleia. Very interesting questions and problems on the whole.

We encountered more mighty walls and mounds at Gordion in the following week. For those not in the know, Gordion was the capital city of the Phrygian kingdom during the 10th-7th centuries BCE. The site itself is much longer lived – occupied from the Bronze Age to Medieval times. However, it is the Iron Age levels that have been the principal object of investigation for over 50 years, in particular, the 8th-7th centuries, which make up the ‘high Phrygian’ phase.

We were met by Ken Sams, the current director, in the museum and we drove down to the site. The landscape around Gordion is littered with some 100 Iron Age burial tumuli and visibility from the site is excellent – prime position for monitoring the landscape. Our tour began at the main gate, and continued around, as we listened to expositions on the excavations and the probable function of the various megara that occupy the main citadel. Very mighty indeed; astonishing prosperity that allowed the Phrygians to do this.

The main downside of Phrygian archaeology is that it’s essentially Gordion, and Gordion is essentially archaeology of the elites. We don’t know much about how the common people, who would’ve, of course, made up the majority of the population, lived. Indeed, at Gordion there is an extensive lower town that extends below the mound (whereupon sits the citadel only) but it hasn’t been investigated in much detail. On the other hand, Phrygian archaeology that happens in the wider region is constantly related to Gordion, allowing for little other comparison. This is in many ways unavoidable, because Gordion offers the best uninterrupted cultural sequence.

It is interesting in this way to compare the Pessinus Iron Age, which makes me think that Pessinus was highly insignificant, probably until the Late Hellenistic period. The ceramic repetoire is very narrow: mostly plain grey wares, occasional vessels with grey slip and burnishing; nothing like the breadth of Gordion. The shapes are different too. I imagine Pessinus was little more than a village in the Iron Age, and that until fairly late. Thus, while Gordion was getting Classical and high Hellenistic pottery from the 5th-3rd centuries BCE, Pessinus was completely barren. The position of Tekören then becomes interesting – as we have better multi period evidence, was it the major settlement until the Late Hellenistic, when Pessinus began to ascend?

After walking around the site, we went to the Midas mound to see the inner wooden burial chamber. Like the wooden furniture from the tomb which I saw in Ankara last year, the state of preservation is marvellous; an invaluable source for dendrochronology and simply evidence of tomb architecture in the 1st millennium BCE in Anatolia. What is interesting about it is that the logs were cut not too long before being used to build the chamber, which allows for fairly accurate dating of their use. Usually, one has to take into account the date of when the tree was cut, as it may be reused for 100 years or more, thus creating discrepancies between date of use context and date of cutting.

Ken Sams came across as very personable, enthusiastic, and free with his knowledge. When we were in the museum, Team Alpha spent some time chatting with him about archaeology in general and asking questions about Gordion. He even offered W the opportunity to study the archived material if he was interested. On the whole, the visit was very instructive and gave us some new angles on Pessinus.

The second major operation of Team Alpha was the intensive survey of Tekören, a village that likes some 7km north of Ballıhisar. It had been surveyed by Ghent on a few occasions but nothing published except for the Iron Age (Phrygian) monuments - chamber tomb, press/basin, and stepped altar. It seemed very strange - perhaps it wasn't on the permit? So, there were all these boxes of Tek stuff in the old depot holding bags with all these labels pertaining to areas where the material was picked up which came from Allah knows where. Our survey last year, although somewhat shambolic, was quite successful, and warranted further investigation.

We dedicated one day to reconnaissance, and elected to follow the Roman road we mapped earlier in the direction of Tek and see how far we could follow it. We were interested in finding the junction - noted in Belke's map of Late Antique Anatolia - which presumably lay near İstiklalbağı, where the roads coming from Dorylaion, Ankyra and Amorion/Pessinus met. We assumed that it lies somewhere half way between Tek and İstiklalbağı; though it's difficult to say due to the extensive ploughed fields, we found some sections that went in a north-east direction.

One of the striking things about Tek is how different the landscape is, nevermind the proximity to Ballıhisar. More fecund, hillier, and wetter. There's also real grass, and significantly less erosion, which is a factor we have to contend with at Ballıhisar when surveying, as the concentration of artifacts may be a product of these processes rather than actual human deposition.

On the south side of the modern village, across a deep gully through which a small brook continues to run, we encountered what we believe is a new site - very obvious earthworks and collapsed walls spanning a sizeable area. It seems to be some kind of enclosure, perhaps Byzantine/Medieval, impossible to say. It is interesting, however, to speculate that this may be the predecessor of the modern village.

Prior to going further, we were treated to a splendid (second) breakfast by the people of the village. Ali-Riza, who drove us around, has a niece in Tek, and he roused a few of the women up, seemingly - tea, kaymak (a kind of Turkish sweet cream), honey, potato salad, local bread, olives etc. It was a very nice gesture and made it more difficult to continue working!

We perceived that the field we partially surveyed last year was still under crop, so deciding to survey the smaller field next to it. Our walk continued in a northerly direction towards the granite mountain some 2km away from the village. We walked across a large ploughed field, in the hope of finding other potential survey areas but without such luck - barely a sherd in it. Climbing the granite mountain was very rewarding as it affords excellent views of the region, with Sivrihisar, İstiklalbağı, and Ballıhisar easily discernable. We then went down in an eastern direction and across the gully to come around to Tek from the eastern end, hoping to find the so-called 'Area II' surveyed by Ghent, which the state is some 1.2km to the south-east of the Iron Age monuments. No such zone was found and at this point we were grumbling heavily about Ghent again under our breath, thoughts of fraudulent reporting in our minds.

Though we were somewhat perplexed by all these things, we went ahead with our plans. The first survey was the lower field next to the one we looked at last year. Over two days, we surveyed 23 20m x 20m blocks, with five people walking in a line. Andy was also with us, doing magnetometer. Quite a trooper, wouldn't stop for a break, in spite of our urging. Team Geo were the height of professionalism throughout and a pleasure to work with. In spite of all the problems that bedevilled the project, they carried on and were determined to discharge their tasks honourably. Thus they were a strong motivating force for the rest of us.

At the end of the first day, W and Michelle went for a walk to some other northern fields (also ploughed), due east of the large one we had walked over during our reconnaissance. They came back with incredulity in their mien, speaking of ludicrous quantities of ceramics. The gears in the plan shifted - initially, we thought to continue with another field adjacent to the one we were surveying, but the northern fields were far too promising to pass up. Thus, day two of the survey saw us completing the lower field and preparing a 180m tract of nine blocks running east-west across one of these northern fields, for the following day.

As W was stuck back at base, trying to catch up on a massive backlog of sector R pottery, I 'led' the survey of the northern field. As was seen at first glance, this field was extremely promising and, in particular, yielded a very high number of pithos (large, coarse storage vessel) and tile. Team Geo picked up on our waxing and decided to do some work there two, putting an extremely long day in the heat to get the work done.

The overall results are quite interesting. The lower field is somewhat disappointing, as the pottery is severely eroded and yielded few diagnostics. We couldn't hope to date much of the material, thus being content to classify the wares. Like last year, it seems to be Early Iron, with some Late Byzantine and Turkish material. The northern field was the jackpot, as it opened for us new periods in which Tek was inhabited. It seems to be Late Iron, with some Hellenistic (some black painted wares) and Roman (sigillata, tiles with finger marks). Like last year, we found some lithics, thus affirming earlier prehistory. This makes Tek very interesting as we hadn't thought it was such a long-lived site. Examining the old Ghent material reinforced this too, since they found Hellenistic and Roman material also. We didn't, however, find any 'classic' Late Bronze stuff - glossy/burnished red slip pottery, which the Ghent team found a fair bit of. Team Geo's results for the upper field are very good too - very clear, large anomalies. We speculated on the possibility of this area being to do with production, due to the high number of tile/pithos fragments, and perhaps these anomalies are something to do with that, but it's too early to say yet.

Seems now that Tek is where it's at.

Next episode - Sivrihisar kale and Gordion, quid otio fecimus.

What we did @ Pessinus...

I was involved in surveying, which meant a lot of walking around and recording of features, lootings, sites, and anything else interesting we saw. We began by doing a general reconnaissance of the Pessinus environ, which has been done, but hasn't been published, and what has leaves a lot to be desired. We printed out these execrable little maps from the earlier Devreker reports which just show a general spread of 'sites' of various chronology around Pessinus (about a 1-2km radius). This was the province of Team Alpha (W, Michelle, and myself), walking free across the plain, doing away with the dross of Ghent.

Initially however, it was just myself and W doing reconnaissance before Michelle arrived. We went to look at the villa site 1-2km north of Pessinus, as it was on the permit to be intensively surveyed this year, but it hadn't been harvested yet, so we gave up the notion. We continued walking in a westward veering arc on the north side of the village, across fields and gullies, eventually coming around the western side of sector I. To our pleasure, we discovered a site - dense ceramic scatter concentrated in a zone, Late Hell-Early Rom type stuff - which we named Sherds 1, having taken a GPS point on it (W trying out the GPS device).

Our first major venture (7th July) was mapping the Roman road that runs past the Roman quarry at İstiklalbağı. One of the questions we had was regarding the old entry into Pessinus, and we hoped that by surveying the road we could answer this. The first thing we did was map the quarry then the road and note another ceramic scatter just outside it on the west side, something for future surveys. The best preserved sections of the road are near the quarry, then once we began walking towards Pessinus, we rapidly lost it amid fields and groves of almond trees. Once we got fairly close the modern road we picked it up again, this time it was demarcating different fields and thus wasn't ploughed over. Where the modern road passes over it, another well preserved section exists just on the west side. Further on, it is lost in ploughed fields, though we got bits and pieces of it fairly close to Pessinus. We suppose that the entry would've been somewhere in the gully where Sherds 1 is. The top of the gully is also interesting as there is another ceramic scatter, where W found a very diagnostic moulded Roman sherd.

The following day we did some work at Hamamtepe - G's instructions: 'get as much information as possible!' So, we just mapped some of the features and stated the obvious fact that the Ghent plan is idealized. We did walk down to Karacaören and noted the wide use of spolia in the modern buildings - Roman stuff. Must be a Roman site nearby; interesting.

On the 8th we focused on mapping the old excavation trenches, ending on sector A before lunch. Whilst there, we noticed potential looting and went to investigate. On close inspection, it was a sizeable trench, presumably for putting in light poles, full of very large marble architectural blocks, one with cornicing. However, these blocks are covered with lichen, so they sat exposed somewhere before being thrown into this trench. There were also some blocks with libation cupules - from graves. But there was some in situ ashlar masonry on the south side of the trench, coming out of the profile. From this vantage point, we noticed more fresh looting further east and continued our investigation. We came upon a plateau area that bears these looting pits, strewn with broken worked marble blocks; one pit in particular contains a good number, including an in situ corner with cornicing on the outside. At first we weren't sure what this was, settlement or nekropolis? If the latter, the tombs are quite monumental, nothing in comparison to what has been excavated by Ghent, where the large cist graves are fairly ramshackle and most made of spolia (except for the door stones). All this stuff in the east is nicely dressed masonry. Of course, G was pleased about it, and we started jokingly referring to it as Pessinus 2.

The 10th and the 11th constituted much the same work - walking over the west, south-west, and north-east reaches of the Pessinus environs. On the 10th we found a fairly significant site to the west - some kind of enclosure (obvious earthworks), worked marble, lots of pottery and tile. We called it Fort D'melle in honour of Michelle and myself. Further to the south we mapped two more such sites, though the didn't have such density of artifacts. One of them is in fact Armin's Circle (geophysed last year), which was taken over by W and now known as Fort William. In our little feudal kingdom that is Pessinus, we were fast claiming lands. The last became known as Switzerland, because we needed a neutral area where we could meet in an uninhibited fashion and have discourse.

In the next episode: Tekören.

I was reading tonight the entries of one Erica Imperatrix F.I., feeling mildly jolted - as far as one can after a protracted meal in a restaurant in Istanbul with a free fruit tray to conclude - into the mindset that I am somewhat overdue in writing something, for those who still may follow these pages festooned with cyberwebs. I've been in Istanbul nigh on two days with two fellow Pessinuntians acting the tourist and switching the mind off of archaeology. It has been very pleasurable on the whole, I didn't think I'd be here so soon again but decided to take the offered opportunity. We're staying in a small, pleasant place called the Hotel Poem in Sultanahmet, in a side street off the main thoroughfare with the hotels and restaurants, to the south of the Blue Mosque/Agia Sophia zone. It's been very pleasant, except for the weather - ridiculous humidity courtesy of the Bosphorus influence micro-climate -; today in particular was maddening: thick, still, perpetually in a sweat. Tomorrow: final wander in the morning and Thessaloniki in the evening.

So much so that Pessinus has been mostly driven from my mind. Indeed, I shall write about it at length, when I get home I expect. On the whole it has been fairly difficult owing to our limited time, but it held together by the will of three 'teams' who took it upon themselves to coordinate their respective activities. The work was successful on the whole - I was involved in survey and we (Team Alpha - myself, Will and Michelle) mapped a whole bunch of stuff, some new, some old and vaguely discussed by Ghent). Similarly, Team Geo (Andy and Armin) got some good results from the plateau behind the study centre and Tekören; and Team Digger (led by Vincent and Kris) performed an excavation the like of which has never been seen at Pessinus. Unfortunately, just as things were getting interesting, excavations ceased.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The beginning was very strained, upon reflection - myself and Kris travelled together, and agreed to wait for G in Istanbul for 5 hours, as his flight arrived in the evening. He was in a right state from the flight but after some cigarettes we pressed on...

We got to Eskişehir at 2:30 in the morning (and woke Defne, who was waiting for us), and spent the morning sorting out the residence permits with the help of the assistant director (Eser), who's a genial chap but useless as an archaeologist. The following few days in town were without much profit for myself and Kris, all in all. We did eat some good pide, çibörek, ice cream, and other things, however. Similarly, when we arrived in Pessinus on the 4th of July, there was nothing to do until the 7th/8th, when the temsilci and other team members began to arrive.

Thus spake the beginning of the Pessinuntian chronicle. More to come...

Recently, I acquired the book 'Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?' – recommended to me a few years ago by one Erica Ithacana I.F.Imp. –, written by the British sociologist Frank Furedi. In sum, the book talks about the seemingly dire state of intellectualism, for want of a better word, in contemporary western society, touching on issues such as ‘dumbing down’; trivialization of knowledge as an entity with a hierarchy in that everyone is an ‘expert’, which results from an emphasis on subjective experience; and the devaluation of knowledge through its assumption into the habitus of capitalism. On the whole, it was a good read, and touched on a number of things I’ve experienced on a macro and micro level as a private individual and someone with academic pretensions.

Furedi attacks post-modernism quite heartily, citing its project in ‘leveling the playing field’ when it comes to having a valid opinion on something. I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about post-modernism and tried to rationalize how I feel about it. For me, as a would-be scholar, all opinions being valid always meant opinions that are informed in a detailed manner by protracted investigation of a particular topic and being immersed in experiences surrounding it, which enables a person to draw certain conclusions about it all. Some post-processualist archaeology is concerned this validity of multiple perspectives. To that end, I do believe in a qualitative hierarchy of sorts, in that individual human experience is so proscribed that one person cannot hope to emotionally, intellectually, and experientially encompass the complexity of the world as it is. I think it’s a matter of pooling ideas that have a pretence to a loose kind of unity, brought about through parallel experiences and cogitations is one way to go.

Furedi also criticizes Foucault, who has discussed at length the degree to which knowledges and truths are constructed through concensus of particular authorities to serve specific purposes in society. This is tied to Furedi’s constant vocalizing of ‘truth’ – which is never defined – as some kind of tangible ontology which may be turned to in the face of the relativistic hurricane of post-modernism. I don’t quite agree with this because I happen to agree with Foucault: I think it’s important to be cognizant to the degree to which knowledges and truths are constructed. Indeed, in archaeology, we actively construct knowledge through our understanding of the remains of the past, so it can be a fairly tenuous exercise – it’s harder to verify the ‘truth’ of something with lack of comparanda. What’s left is the ability to trace the process by which knowledges and truths became established in the position they were in. This is important because it can lead to the reversing of something that is no longer perceived as relevant and construct something new that will enable us to achieve an understanding that may be better in line with newer evidence/circumstances. I do wish Furedi defined what he meant by ‘truth’. As it stands, it’s a bit like Plato’s Forms, or the vain flower the little prince keeps in a glass dome. This kind of argumentation constitutes a degree of repetitiveness, as Erica Ithacana has intimated to me.

One point that I thought was the good one was that the process of ‘dumbing down’ and trivialization of knowledge results from the contempt of ‘higher authorities’ in various walks of life for the lay person’s capacity have a grasp of ideas and concepts – resulting in the treatment of people as children. The sinister possibilities of this are certainly palpable. This is linked to the idealization of and obsession with youth in western society and contempt for age, and, by extension, such wisdom that is acquired through the time spent in participating in varied life experiences. Till all we’re left with is Lolita in her slacks, her recalcitrance, her eager pout, her lewdness teetering between artlessness and premeditation; left to the machinations of the cleverer Hum.

The second week was primarily spent alternating between the field in conducting surveys and the pottery nerd room. On the first weekend, some of us went to have a look some material on the plateau just behind the dig house, Will went for a walk on Saturday morning and saw things of interest. On top is a ploughed field with a number of marble slabs, some of which have been deposited at the top of the gully that runs towards the dig house. One of these slabs is no doubt a sarcophagus lid, so, in conjunction with the scattered remains of roof tiles and quite fine pottery at the top of the gully, it’s possible that there was an isolated Roman tomb there that has been destroyed at some point.

In the afternoon I went with Emanuel (German ex-pat Roman archaeology prof at Chicago, a. k. a. the Führer), Ed and Jeremy (the Americans) to do some rough surverying for large architectural remains in an area south of Ballıhisar. It was quite an interesting exercise as we found quite a number of large pieces, one of which is likely to correspond with one that is in the dig house garden, making the Führer excited. According to him, this was probably from another temple that existed at Pessinus, perhaps the one which (initially Lambrechts) eski aslan was looking for over the last long while but never found, much to his chagrin (probably why he lost interest in the project – his texts failed him, boo hoo, sniff). The only downside was that this field was covered with thistles which were up to 2m high. It’s remarkable how these things grow in such a barren landscape. They look nice in my photos but they're a devil to walk through.

On Monday the 13th, we went to look at a Roman marble quarry outside of Istiklalbağı, another small village 5km north-east of Ballıhisar, to do some ceramic prospecting. There’s been reports of people using the marble quarry again and being quite destructive about it, possibly in the view that archaeologists wouldn’t be able to go about turning it into an archaeological site. It’s quite an interesting site – numerous quarry pits with evidence of marble extraction, as well as a few worked pieces that were abandoned for whatever reason, and numerous spoil heaps comprised of marble chips. The weather was quite good for the activity – overcast, breeze and cool. We demarcated an area and collected more pottery than it seemed possible. Many coarse storage vessels (crap ware) and a surprising amount of fine (güzel) wares. Perhaps there was some habitation in this part of the quarry before the immediate areas began to be subject to stone extraction. Some of the Istiklalbağı marble has been used at Pessinus, though most of it is derived from another more distant quarry. There is no local fine marble, so any such examples thereof denote import.

On the 15th, we began a survey at Tekören, another village some 2km Istiklalbağı, in what is essentially a ploughed field that has yielded copious amounts of ceramics. Tekören is also interesting because there are some Iron Age (Phrygian) monuments – a reputed wine press with a receiving basin, and some kind of stepped throne, and a chamber tomb. The idea for this survey was to do 3-4 transects (4 walkers walking 100m at 5m spacing) over the field but we only managed two because of our dismal organization, though we managed to salvage the situation even with two transects because lots of pottery was yielded. We even found some lithics which look pre-Neolithic and an obsidian core, though we cannot properly because none of us is a lithics specialist. The pottery from Tekören is mostly Bronze-Early Iron Age, though one or two sherds found appear not to be wheel made, which suggests the possibility of an Early Bronze Age or maybe even Chalcolithic at the site; hard to say.

On the 17th, I went on an intensive survey with Will south of the village, somewhat east of the area which I surveyed with the Führer and the Americans (called sector R in the records). There appears to be terracing there and the area we examined denotes quite clear evidence of an ancient structure of some sort. We plotted out a series of 5m2 squares and collected material We got quite a bit of work done in the first session and some good results. In the final square we did before lunch we got some particularly nice diagnostic pieces and güzel wares. We surveyed a total of 16 such squares and got some good results as to the concentration of material, which conforms to the bounds of this structure.

The rest of my time at Pessinus was spent manhandling all this pottery we collected in the surveys - sorting, photography, quantification, digitizing the new pottery depot so now we can manipulate the information easily. Given how productive we were able to be in the context of the chaos and inability to implement a concrete plan, it turned out very well. Logic follows that next year, when we'll have more time and be able to do more. The surveys at Istiklalbağı, Tekören, and sector R will continue for more fine-grained results. Sector R is also a legitimate candidate for excavation. What I think we sorely need to do is a series of small soundings throughout Ballıhisar to establish the extent of Pessinus; really this is what should've been done first before racing for the glamour find. At present, I know nothing, but come October and the renewed application process for 2010, more will be made clear.