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Returning to Kastro
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Two fellowships will allow Peggy Mook to complete manuscripts
of past project.
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For the past five years, Peggy Mook hasn't given much of her time to
the Kastro project.
But due to the death of a colleague, the associate professor of classical
studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures will revisit
the major excavation of the settlement that existed on the Greek island
of Crete from the Late Bronze Age through early Archaic.
Mook has completed her inital work on the publication (Kavousi IV:
The Kastro. The Late Minoan IIIC through Orientalizing Pottery),
writing essentially half the book. But when her co-author and University
of Minnesota faculty member William D.E. Coulson died unexpectedly in
2001, completion of the manuscript was delayed.
In the meantime, Mook was committed to be the field director and pottery
specialist for another excavation on Crete, the Azoria Project, on which
many Iowa State students participated. Azoria is located nearby the Kastro
and initial excavation was just completed last summer.
"Now I have to go back and finish up the Kastro work," Mook
said.
That includes editing a second book, Kavousi V: The Kastro. Excavations
and History of the Settlement.
"Originally I just contributed a chapter to this book," she said. "But
I was the person best situated to take on the rest of the project since
I had participated in the excavation every season and had the most extensive
knowledge of the site's stratigraphy as a result of my study of the pottery."
In order to complete both publications, Mook has been granted a faculty
leave for the next academic year and is the recipient of two prestigious
fellowships as well.
During the fall semester, Mook will be a part of the Margo Tytus Visiting
Scholars Program at the University of Cincinnati. There she will be able
to access the university's Burnam Classics Library, one of the world's
premier collections in the field of classical studies.
Then during the 2008 spring semester, Mook will be traveling back to Greece
where she has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. There
she will have access to the most significant resources in Greece for American
scholars, including two major research libraries. She will also have access
to the other excellent archaeological libraries in Athens.
"These two fellowships are perfect for me, especially the timing,"
she said. "We have so many paper records from the Kastro excavation
and I'll be able to transport them to Cincinnati first, complete much
of the analysis, thus reducing the amount of paper I'll have to take with
me to Greece. There are no better classics libraries in the world for
my research in this area than at the University of Cincinnati and in Athens."
Mook isn't worried about the time delay between the completion of the
Kastro excavation (early ‘90s) and the final manuscript.
"Publication of long-term excavations tends to take a long time,"
she says. "We generated a huge amount of materials so it does tend
to take a fair amount of time to complete the study, interpretation and
publication, especially since all the finds must remain in Greece."
The Kastro is an archaeological site located in eastern Crete. As a graduate
student, Mook and a large team of archaeologists excavated the remains
of a settlement occupied from the end of the Bronze Age through the subsequent
Early Iron Age and into the Archaic period.
Mook will present her stratigraphically based ceramic sequence of the
remains from the site, while investigating the social and political organization
and transformation of the settlement over more than four centuries of
occupation.
She will also examine related economic changes indicated by the architecture,
pottery and the work of other specialists on the project who are analyzing
plant and animal remains and particular classes of artifacts collected
during the excavation. In these two books, Mook addresses the questions
of the Early Iron Age development of the social and political organizations
that resulted in the Greek polis (early Greek city-state).
"The time off from Kastro and my participation in the excavation
at Azoria has given me a greater understanding of this project,"
she said. "There are different questions to answer and now I have
a better understanding of the Kastro site, something I wouldn't have had
without the second excavation. It is clear now that Kastro was abandoned
as Azoria was becoming a polis, that the inhabitants of the Kastro ultimately
left it, reluctantly, to become members of the new socio-political order
represented by the polis.
"My perspective on the Kastro site has changed dramatically in the
last five years."
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Peggy Mook
Around LAS
March 26 to April 8, 2007
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