Learning about sustainability through Classics, ancient history and archaeology, exploring visual and materials cultures, environmental resource management and interdisciplinarity with Dr Conor Trainor, School of Classics
Q: Conor you’re the first person from Classics to join the Earth Institute, welcome! Can you tell us a bit about the continued relevance of ancient Greece and Rome and their visual and material culture? I’d also like to hear about how you became interested in classics and what led you to your own particular specialisations.
A: To be honest, when I was finishing school it was like 50 / 50 whether I wanted to go to university or not. I was either going to be a mechanic or go to university, and I decided I would go to university to try it for a year and see if I liked it. I did a General Arts degree, where I grew up in Canada. With that type of degree, you don’t commit to anything right away, you can just take modules in subjects that interest you, and then eventually specialise.
One of the modules I signed up for during my first year was Introduction to Archaeology, I probably didn’t really know what Classics even was at that point. I remember the lecture presenting the archaeological site of Lerna, not a particularly well-known site in Greece. I don’t know what it was, but I clearly remember that that point in that module, I sat back for a moment and thought, “oh my God, this is amazing! People are uncovering these amazing artefacts and working at these fascinating sites…and some people are clearly able to make a living doing this. That was definitely my aha moment.
After that introductory module, I became more and more interested in Classics – the study of ancient Greece and Rome and I enrolled on other modules in ancient history and as well as Greek and Latin. Classics is very relevant today, for many reasons – probably, most fundamentally, it provides an understanding of our intellectual past, including where our government structures and many of our social structures come from, and the philosophy department, and all that.
“For me, one of the real benefits/points of relevance of studying the ancient past is empathy. Trying to understand a society (or societies) that is geographically distant and temporally removed, requires a considerable amount of empathy and understanding.
For me, one of the real benefits/points of relevance of studying the ancient past is empathy. Trying to understand a society (or societies) that is geographically distant and temporally removed, requires a considerable amount of empathy and understanding. This is by no means exclusive to Classics, you can gain this sort of empathetic thinking through the study of history or language or earth science, or social justice. But for me, Classics puts it in a nice, neat package.
For my own research and for the relevance of my own research, and those aspect of Classics and visual and material culture. We have examples of Greece and Rome, those societies. They’re no better than any other ancient societies. But we study them essentially because they wrote a lot. Therefore we know what these ancient people were thinking rather than just interpreting, say, archaeological remains and surmising what intentions may have been.
Because of this, we have a higher resolution picture of the societies of Greece and Rome. Also, because we kind of know how their story begins and ends, and we know the bit in the middle, these societies provide us with very useful models for thinking about society in general, and sustainability and resource management as pertains to my own research. Having these long-term views is really useful for trying to understand what can go right, and for what can go wrong in a society.
“Decolonising Classics is a particularly big movement within the discipline these days; probably the single biggest movement in the discipline at the moment. A lot of researchers are working hard to give traditionally overlooked peoples of the past (women, non-white, non-citizen groups) new voices”
Q: That’s an interesting insight, that these societies are so referenced because of the amount of evidence that remains, ie, that is what has given them the prominence rather than any inherent “superiority” to any other ancient society. Why do you think Greece and Rome have such a particular place within historical European thought and culture?
A: One of the reasons classics has survived obviously, is because of the interest that wealthy educated people in the 18th and 19th centuries took in Greece and Rome. But that’s also kind of a curse in classics as well in that, which has led Classics to occasionally be misrepresented as an elitist, almost chauvinistic kind of subject.
But it’s not, and actually decolonising Classics is a particularly big movement within the discipline these days; probably the single biggest movement in the discipline at the moment. A lot of researchers are working hard to give traditionally overlooked peoples of the past (women, non-white, non-citizen groups) new voices, and in the process to demonstrate that Classics is not some weird elitist subject, anyone can have an interest in it, and an opinion about it.
Q: My next question is about methods. What kind of methods do you use? Have you done a lot of field work?
A: Classics generally is a pretty interdisciplinary subject by its nature. Again, because it’s kind of a case study discipline. You’re required to do a bit of history, language, archaeology, everything. Personally, I’m on the archaeological side of it. I do a lot of archaeological field work, and I have since 2000 worked pretty much every year on a few projects in Greece. I’ve also done quite a lot of archaeological field work here in Canada as well, which was useful for training me in.
I kind of do a combination of a few different things. I do archaeological excavation, the digging and recording of material form the ground. I also do legacy studies – archaeological material that has been excavated but remains unstudied/unpublished, I work a lot on trying to publish this type of data. I like that because it involves using data that is already available, rather than excavating more sites and removing archaeological layers. The main thing that I do, however, is archaeological survey, which is a little bit like in the TV show CSI.
Q: People walking across fields looking for bodies?
A: The same thing in archaeology. You line up and walk across a field, and you look for pottery or buildings, whatever else. That’s the main thing that I would do. And the benefit of that is you’re not destroying anything. You’re not digging holes or taking contexts away, you’re just recording stuff on the surface.
Q: So it’s just surface level?
A: Yes. I’ve done a lot of that on cities. The benefit is it gives you a picture across time. If you excavate, it’s kind of like a microscope, it gives you a really detailed picture of a small area.
The surface surveys are like a telescope. It gives you a very big, long-term picture. So you’re not taking things out of the ground. Survey archaeology used to be called green archaeology, when it was invented, as it was seen by some as a way of doing archaeology without disturbing archaeological contexts.
Excavating material involves a necessary type of destruction. When you take something out of the ground, you’ve divorced it from its context. The context is gone forever. That’s why you have to record things. Really, really carefully. You only get one shot at it, and if it’s gone it’s gone and you won’t know where something comes from. Excavation is a destructive practice. Survey is not destructive because you’re going across the surface picking.
Q: Would you typically find much on the surface?
A: It seems strange, but yes, absolutely. Say, for instance, a house falls down and eventually it gets covered by dirt. Over time, with things like ploughing or other human activity, seasonal rains, some remains from that house will be pushed up to the surface. Imagine dozens, or hundreds of houses with the same processes happening – this is very basically, how survey material comes into being.
I say this to students every year, when you go to Greece, and you look in a field like you see tons of pottery, ancient pottery everywhere. Once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it, but you wouldn’t necessarily think to look for it. It’s all just sitting there. With surface materials, It’s just different. You have to ask a different set of questions. You’re not going to get really tight refined dating. But you can get a broad and long term picture of a settlement/region.
I mentioned this earlier, but one of the other areas that I am currently working in is something called “legacy archaeology”. At this most basic, this is the study of archaeological material that has been excavated from the ground but never studied or published. Archaeological storerooms across the Mediterranean, and around the world, are often chock-a-block with unstudied archaeological material. Legacy studies tend to cost very little, as material is often quite easily accessible, and does not need to be extracted from the ground.
When it comes to digging, if you’re excavating artefacts, these artefacts are finite resources. With legacy archaeology, you are avoiding having to extract. You’ve got resources that in many cases, no one has asked any questions about, waiting to be studied and included in wider archaeological narratives.
Q: That’s very interesting, because people excavating in the past were identifying important material to study further, based on the culture and interests of that time. So some things were probably thrown away as of no interest, things that we today might see as important?
A: Yes certainly. So, I really love cooking pots. They are a real indicator for me of how society functioned on a day-to-day scale. What were people eating? Who was cooking this food? Where are they getting it from? Who where they eating with – individually, family units, or collective dining? But, in the past excavators usually threw away cooking pots and instead choosing to keep fancy, highly decorated pottery. Beautiful objects for sure, but not ones that necessarily tell you much about how day to day life worked.
“Classics is a discipline is by its very nature, interdisciplinary. Modern research in the field really sits at the intersection of history, archaeology, philosophy, and language, and often also incorporates social theory and interpretative frameworks from other disciplines.”
Q: You’ve touched on this a bit, but how does Classics intersect with archaeology and ancient history? And have you done a lot of interdisciplinary work even beyond these subjects or beyond humanities?
A: Classics is a discipline is by its very nature, interdisciplinary. Modern research in the field really sits at the intersection of history, archaeology, philosophy, and language, and often also incorporates social theory and interpretative frameworks from other disciplines. Any kind of modern research in the area of Classics would touch upon more than one discipline. In some ways, Classics, or the Classical World (the worlds of Greece and Rome), is almost a case study discipline – is almost more an extremely complex case study that can be applied to, and considered within, myriad disciplines.
Within my own research, I do a lot with ancient history, and even medieval history. I am very interested in the so-called afterlife of sites. I might be looking at a Roman site. But what happens after, there’s maybe an Ottoman-era population there, a Venetian population. Those all very much feed into the story of an archaeological site.
I use ethnography quite a lot as well – ethnographic research being an approach that involves studying traditional ways of doing things. During my PhD. I spent some time with a fifth generation potter in Greece. He was the last of his family line, he would source his own clay, make his own pots and decorate them in very specific ways. Working with him revealed to me, some very interesting, and probably archaeologically invisible methods of practice, such as only firing pots at one time of year, because wood was so expensive. We also use theories like network theories or various social theories as a way of kind of thinking about how we might model the past.
In terms or more scientific-focused research, my PhD was heavily rooted in petrography, soil science and geology. I used a combination of these, along with ancient texts, and pot forms, to figure out where pots were made and what kind of resources were being used, what technological choices were made during their manufacture. I am currently in the process of purchasing a portable X-ray fluorescence analyser which I hope to use to build upon this experience, and apply to pottery studies.
For my PhD, I was studying a city where they were producing one class of pottery. The other ancient city that I was working in at the time, didn’t produce that type of pottery at all. The first city was destroyed by the Romans, and then suddenly we see the same type of pot being made at the other city, but in a different ceramic fabric. When you look at the clays you can probably work out that these people were probably either refugees or enslaved people brought over. An insight that was gained through geological analysis, in combination with archaeological study, and reading ancient historical accounts.
Q: So that tacit knowledge of how to do something can travel easily?
A: That’s it. Yeah, you’re looking exactly at the knowledge, and then you can apply it. You can see how they applied it to their landscapes.
Q: So my next question is about sustainability of settlements – what is a sustainable city or urban settlement in in ancient times? What does sustainability mean in your work?
A: There’s a bunch of different aspects to it. Probably the most literal and obvious one – How did people living in settlements survive over hundreds of years, or even millennia? That’s the big one. But, in order to try to answer that, some really fundamental practical questions need to be considered: How much food did they need to sustain to allow a population to survive? And then how much land would that require for them to be able to produce that food, to get those kind of yields? How did they manage their resources, critical resources like water supply. How did they negotiate that? Those are the big kind of questions that I’m interested in.
One of my current case studies considers wine production. At one site, Knossos on the island of Crete, I was able to map out how many hectares of land would be required in order to sustain the 12,000 person population of the city at the time. I think that something we often take for granted is that people will default to use what is available to them. But actually, there’s a lot of really good evidence that they had to ration.
A cool example of this is a city in Turkey today called Ephesus. It was one of the most famous ancient cities in the world. They had this little narrow channel into their harbour, which was their economic lifeline. They had put up signs, saying, please stop discarding waste in this harbour channel. It is creating silt, and risks cutting our harbour off from the sea. Well, eventually the harbour silted up, and the city couldn’t feed itself and shut down. This is a particularly succinct case study that shows an ancient awareness that managing an environment requires human intervention – even if in this case, it was ultimately unsuccessful.
“The interesting thing about the ancient world is that you can see where societies begin and where they end, where cities begin and where they end. For me, that shows that we’re not alone in this. I often have the feeling that we as a society think that we’re unique and alone in facing environmental challenges, that we have to do all these exceptional things to make our cities sustainable, or to make Earth more liveable.”
Q: How do you connect that longer term or ancient understanding of sustainability to more contemporary definitions?
A: The interesting thing about the ancient world is that you can see where societies begin and where they end, where cities begin and where they end. For me, that shows that we’re not alone in this. I often have the feeling that we as a society think that we’re unique and alone in facing environmental challenges, that we have to do all these exceptional things to make our cities sustainable, or to make Earth more liveable. Ancient people faced similar challenges, and often successfully dealt with them. Okay, modern challenges are on larger scales, but resource management, environment-focused decision-making are not new concepts, or unique to our specific society.
Q: Do you think there is a consistency in terms of humans and how we relate to the environment and its resources? Is there a consistent tendency to overexploit?
A: I think it’s important to think about that. Some cities in the ancient world survived a long time, and others didn’t. Some didn’t survive because of mismanagement, while others didn’t survive despite responsible management. I think it’s the idea that we all have agency in this. Cities or collective groups of people have agency to effect change, to actually make things work better.
An awareness that something is wrong is one thing, and that’s only half the problem. Once you understand a problem, the next step is actually getting people to follow through. Like in Ephesus. They were aware there was a problem with their harbour, but people obviously didn’t stop dumping refuse into the harbour. We’re in the same boat.
Q: Finally what kinds of insights can you get from Classics and archaeology about social structures in the past? How do you access the lives of everyday people?
A: When the Romans conquered Greece, the big historical narrative is that everything got worse for the Greeks, and society/economy declined, freedoms were lost, and the region slid into decline. But the written accounts that we have which record these events, were composed for very specific messages to be delivered to very specific audiences – usually elite male authors writing for elite male audiences.
But, if you look at like cooking practices, burial practices, all these other things that were going on in parallel with big political changes, actually, it seems that people had more access to food, and other natural resources under the Romans than they previously had. Despite regime change, daily life probably improved broadly-speaking for most people.
