EXCAVATIONS AT COSA (1991-1997), PART 2: THE STRATIGRAPHY
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Introduction

Digging, as most inveterate dirt archaeologists will readily admit, is the easy part. The hard part of most excavations lies in the thorough study of the material unearthed, the production of general and specialized reports and interpretations, and, last but not least, the assembly of all this varied information into a clear, comprehensive, useful and interesting publication. Such was certainly true for our excavations at Cosa, where field campaigns among the olive trees in the years between 1991 and 1997 were only the warm-up for several years of intensive study and writing. Even after gathering together the numerous contributions of those involved and preparing a basic manuscript, we were still faced with the difficulties of publishing a very long, heavily illustrated work of which the various components were of wildly different levels of interest to various audiences. More complicated still was the fact that within a general program of study related to the later life of the Roman town was embedded a microcosmic view of a single, but quite important, house constructed during the initial period of the town's life. The general interest of this house and the richness of its finds ensured that it accounted for a substantial portion of the publication, but parts of its history were difficult to relate to other aspects of our campaign.

Our initial plan was to separate an overall diachronic interpretation from an area-by-area summary of the primary excavation data: the first part of the publication would consist of a continuous narrative incorporating the results of the excavation within the framework of the general history of the site, while the second would consist of a detailed exposition of the stratigraphy of the many different trenches. In preparing the manuscript for publication, however, we ran into a substantial problem: though we felt that the discussion of the stratigraphy was a sine qua non for a serious archaeological publication, it was pointed out that it increased the length of the book (and thus its cost) by a significant amount while remaining of interest only to a restricted audience of specialists. We faced a similar problem with the numerous illustrations connected to the stratigraphic section. Our choices seemed to be a forced reintegration of the stratigraphic and the interpretive, with the concomitant loss of comprehensiveness, or the exclusion of the stratigraphy altogether - an idea that we found professionally unpalatable.

This website is our solution to that dilemma. It contains the text and illustrations that were originally intended to form Part 2 of the publication, as well as catalogues of the burials and the pottery from the House of Diana. It is meant to be seen as an integral part of the publication rather than as an independent project. For this reason the pages that follow contain numerous references to the other sections of the work as a whole, and they do not provide the interpretive overview or discussions of material that can be found in the printed book. Similarly, the printed book does not contain any discussion of the stratigraphy of our excavations and limits itself to references to this site in the Table of Contents and at appropriate points in the text. Professionals or others who wish to draw their own conclusions about the excavations, or who wish to look at our material with different questions or from different points of view, should find the contents of the web-based Part 2 useful; it may also be helpful for those readers who are interested in the full extent of the evidence for the conclusions discussed in the interpretive section.

At first glance, this division not only of organization but of medium between the interpretive and stratigraphic portions of our publication may seem less than ideal. It is certainly somewhat inconvenient to have to shuffle between book and web-browser. At the same time, we would like to emphasize the possibilities created by this idea. The sheer volume of archaeological information produced even by a small excavation has always been a hindrance to prompt and complete publication of data, and more and more projects are turning to the Web to make material available for both internal and external use. Usually, however, the material available is in very raw form, heavily geared towards use by those involved in the project itself and often incomplete. The ultimate goal is always the paper publication of such information. As concerns about publishing costs become greater, however, it may become increasingly impractical for many smaller projects to attempt to publish large quantities of highly specialized data in standard monograph form. The Web, with its relatively low storage and maintenance costs and essentially unlimited space for such costly features as color illustrations and photographs or lengthy database tables, may be a source of salvation for projects that find themselves forced to choose between abbreviated publication and incomplete data.

We hope, too, that a website will allow for different approaches to browsing material or searching for specific information, and that the potential for easy access to large numbers of illustrations will make stratigraphic discussions easier to follow. We are also considering adding more web-based information in the future, of the sort that every dig generates but few ever make public: the complete corpus of our archival photos, for example, or our layer databases and site reports. It is our hope that the web-based portion of this publication, rather than a marginalized footnote, will become a starting-point for the exploration of the possibilities of a medium possessing both an infinite capacity to store information and the potential for more intuitive navigation and combination of images and words.

The basic structure of the website follows the standard arrangement of a paper publication, with chapters and subheadings. For most parts of the site, the stratigraphic discussion of each individual trench is limited to one or two pages without any subdivision by phase; these sections may be accessed through chapter and subsection headings or through the clickable maps associated with each excavation zone. The House of Diana presents a somewhat more complicated format; there, the stratigraphic discussion has been divided by phase, starting with the earliest. Although the reader can read straight through the entire report, he or she can also skip to a particular section. Longer sections have been divided into several pages to avoid scrolling fatigue; each of the pages in these sections contains information on the total number of pages in the section. Navigation bars at the top and bottom of each page allow movement within a given chapter or within the body of Part 2 as a whole. Most illustrations have been embedded in the text in thumbnail form and, when selected, will open a full-size version in a new browser window. These illustrations may also be accessed from the section "List of Figures" in the main menu. In addition, all contexts in the House of Diana that contained identifiable ceramics can be clicked to open a separate browser window with a list of those ceramics. From this window, the reader will also be able to open a window containing the relevant pottery drawings. The complete list of the pottery for the stratigraphic units (US) of the House of Diana may be found in the appendix. For those who would prefer a printed text, Part II (without images), each appendix, and the bibliography are available here as downloadable Adobe© PDF files. The lists of the pottery and stratigraphic units associated with the House of Diana are also available for download as Microsoft Excel© files.

Adam Rabinowitz
Rome, 2002



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