PKAP NEWSLETTER Pyla-Koutsopetria (Cyprus) Archaeological Project

HTTP://WWW.CHSS.IUP.EDU/PKAP/ Dear Friends of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project,

Greetings from Greece and Pennsylvania! The 2007 PKAP field season was the most eventful season to date, and this momentum has continued right through the off-season. In the summer of 2007, we had our largest group of volunteers and staff, our largest budget, and our most complex field season. PKAP’s continued growth is a direct result of the generous funding provided by our home institutions, outside agencies, and private donors. These resources reflect all the hard work that PKAP staff and volunteers have put in since the project’s inception 5 years ago. This hard work is the foundation for our sixth field season in 2008, and we are pleased to report that, for the first time, we will conduct limited excavations on both Vigla and Kokkinokremos. While the project remains committed to low-impact archaeology, a series of small, targeted trenches will add an exciting new dimension to our understanding of the region of Pyla-Koutsopetria. Thanks for all the support,

The PKAP Triumvirate (Bill Caraher (ASCSA/UND), R Scott Moore (IUP), David Pettegrew (Messiah College) william.caraher@und.edu, rsmoore@iup.edu, dpettegrew@messiah.edu

Summer 2007

The 2007 field season had three goals: to conduct geophysical prospecting on the ridges of Vigla and Kokkinokremos and the Koutsopetria plain, to conduct pedestrian survey on Kokkinokremos and the ridges to the north of Vigla, and to finish the cataloguing of all pottery collected from 2004-2007. We brought together our biggest team yet to complete these tasks. The PKAP “regulars” like Kate Pettegrew, Susan Caraher, Greg Fisher (Oxford), and Brandon Olson (UND) enjoyed an infusion of new blood. Scott Moore for example had help completing the catalogue of finds from the 2004-2007 seasons from Mat Dalton, an experienced archaeological illustrator who worked with Kate Pettegrew and Brandon Olson to produce highly precise illustrations of the most important artifacts. Susan Caraher returned to keep the over 14,000+ finds organized. Elsewhere in our workroom at the Larnaka Museum, Sarah Lepinski (Bryn Mawr College) completed a preliminary catalogue of many of the remains from the Early Christian basilicas excavated on the site during the 1980s. In the field, Dimitri Nakassis of Florida State University and Michael Brown of the University of Edinburgh joined us to conduct fieldwork on the Late Bronze Age site (1200 BC) of Kokkinokremos. Their work has suggested the site of Kokkinokremos was much larger and more complex than originally thought. Michael also worked with John Hunt of Limassol, Cyprus to map subsurface remains on Vigla and Kokkinokremos using electrical resistivity. This technique revealed considerable remains on Vigla including what appears to be an Early Christian (400-600 AD) basilica. Last but not least, PKAP had four new undergraduate and two new graduate students helping with all aspects of the project: undergraduates Mara Iverson, Megan McLaughlin, Slade Powel, and John Crowley from IUP, and graduate students Brice Pearce from the University of New Hampshire and David Terry of UND.

Fall and Winter 2007/2008

PKAP continued to spread the word about our project this fall and winter. David and Scott gave a PKAP paper at the 2007 Byzantine Studies Conference in Toronto and the entire PKAP team presented a poster at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America which looked back over PKAP’s first five years. We will have reports appearing in several academic journals this spring including the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus and Near Eastern Archaeology. The most exciting off season developments have been in the area of technology. PKAP has developed three new initiatives designed to bring our research to a wider audience. First, Scott has unveiled the new PKAP website. The web-address is the same but the new site includes an interactive map, video clips, podcasts, as well as the texts of our reports and academic conference papers. The site will also feature a new series of Joe Patrow documentary shorts on the web by the end of the winter. Second, you can now follow the development of PKAP all through the year through a series of weblogs. These can be reached from the PKAP website and are designed to keep our friends and colleagues up to date on PKAP news and happenings (http://www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/blogs.htm). Finally, PKAP will soon be one of the first Mediterranean archaeological projects to have a presence in the virtual world of Second Life. With the support of IUP’s Applied Media and Simulation Games Center, Pyla-Koutsopetria will have an interactive, virtual archaeology project where visitors and students can explore the topography, archaeology, and methodology of the virtual site of Vigla. While it’s still a work in progress, you can visit the PKAP information center in Second Life from IUP’s Crimson Island. For more on this check out the PKAP website. Finally, we have a preliminary working draft of the final monograph. While it doesn’t include the results from the 2007 field season, it gives us a good foundation for our field work in summer 2008.

Summer 2008

This summer will be the most exciting PKAP season to date! Not only do we have permission to conduct limited excavations, but we will have the largest PKAP team ever assembled in the field with us. We’ll have three students from IUP, three from Messiah College, and graduate students from UND, Penn State, Princeton, and Ohio State. The senior staff will come from Columbia, Edinburgh, Florida State as well as the three sponsoring institutions. This dynamic team of students and scholars are committed to a hybrid archaeological project which will be equally involved in research and in teaching one another and the students about the island of Cyprus, archaeological method, and the history of the Mediterranean. The entire season will be covered on the PKAP blogs!

Giving to PKAP…

PKAP benefits each year from the generosity of our private donors. Their gifts enable the project to maximize the educational and research opportunities available to our students and staff. In 2008, our private donor funds will go toward building the project’s archaeological infrastructure on Cyprus which will allow us to continue to expand the project into the future. Contact Bill, Scott, or Dave for information on tax-deductible giving opportunities!

Keep an eye on our website for regular updates: HTTP://WWW.CHSS.IUP.EDU/PKAP/