William Caraher

Taking Mobile Computing to the Field

As our plane began its descent to Larnaka, Cyprus, the familiar request came from the cockpit to put away all electronic devices. I turned my head and peered down the aisle of the plane to see nine undergraduate students shutting down the iPads loaned to them for their month-long archaeological sojourn to the island. I closed the cover to my own tablet but not before touching the “submit” button in the archaeology app that we would be using in the field later that week. The PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) was going paperless for its 2012 season of excavation at the Hellenistic site of Pyla-Vigla, and we were still working out the bugs in an experimental mobile application customized for data acquisition. Our decision to bring iPads to Cyprus marked an opportune moment. Samuel Fee was teaching a class on mobile applications at Washington and Jefferson College and looking for some real test-bed cases, while David Pettegrew was taking students to Cyprus for a month of fieldwork, bringing with him thirteen iPads loaned by Messiah College for pedagogical trials. Teaming up to develop an experimental mobile application for fieldwork, we dedicated an iPad to each student for completing course assignments and reserved four devices for each of the excavation units under investigation. Like other archaeologists adopting mobile technology for field work in the last several years, our paperless field season marked an experimental trial that greatly affected our experience of the archaeological process.

Lessons from the Bakken Oil Patch

This article summarizes the recent work of the North Dakota Man Camp Project to understand the largely undocumented migrants arriving in the Bakken Oil Patch for work. It argues that efforts to document short-term labor in the Bakken exposes particular challenges facing the archaeology of the modern world ranging from the ephemerality of short-term settlements to the hyper-abundance of modern objects. The use of photography, video, interviews, and descriptions produced an abundant archive of archaeological ephemera that in some ways parallels the modern character of temporary workforce housing. The final section of this article offers some perspectives on how work in the Bakken oil patch can inform policy, our understanding of material culture in the modern world, and the role of the discipline in forming a shared narrative.

The South Basilica at Arsinoe (Polis-tes-Chrysochou): Change and innovation in an Early Christian Basilica on Cyprus

La basilique Sud de Polis-tes-Chrysochou (ancienne Arsinoe), construite a la fin du vie siecle apr. J.-C., est une eglise chypriote typique de la fin de l’Antiquite. Nous discutons ici les modalites des transformations apportees a sa structure et la facon dont ses constructeurs ont resolu les problemes que presentait ce site, en particulier en ce qui concernait l’eau et son drainage. Nous presentons ici pour la premiere fois la chronologie du bâtiment a partir des temoignages archeologiques en contexte et non d’une analyse stylistique de sa structure et de ses elements decoratifs. Nous indiquons brievement quelques relations possibles avec d’autres edifices de l’ile et de la region.