 Many of you have run archaeological projects in the field. Many of you have participated in archaeological projects in the field and perhaps regarded them as a model, or as something you would have done differently had you been the PI. This talk is about the life history of one archaeological project. The life history of a project has certain expectations. In the reality of the project these expectations are often not fulfilled and much of that is the result of the PI whose focus on the project may get distracted or opportunities come up and blockages happen and other external challenges prevent the smooth trajectory of the project from its birth to its closure. If I had to provide the elevator pitch for the Oppover Archaeological Project this would be it that it was active in the field from 1983 to 89 in the summers mostly. It was a project directed and carried out jointly by a team from UC Berkeley, me as the PI and the University of Novi Sad and the Museum of Pancivo. He's at Novi Sad, Pancivo's just about there. And both of these are in northern Serbia now, that's what it's called as you can see from the map, but when we were working there it was Yugoslavia which is covers this whole area here. It was a project directed and carried. So we were doing this collectively or collaboratively with the people from Serbia with the University of Novi Sad and the Museum of Pancivo. And it's an area in terms of its geographic area it's at the confluence of the Tisa River here and the Danube River here and the Tamish River just here. It's a whole watershed area. In terms of its prehistory it is late Neolithic it's what's sometimes called Old Europe and it's known as the Vincere culture I'll talk about that in just a second. Around about 4,800 to 4,600 BCE it's a village, it was dominated by the use of clay and they were really good at playing with fire and pyrotechnology with ceramics, melting copper and as well as burning wattle and daub houses. And by the way they were farmers, hunters and gatherers and using both domesticated and wild animals and plants. So I'm not sure how many of you have any familiarity with Neolithic Balkan prehistory these days hopefully an interest in it in Berkeley did not die out with my retirement but this will be another sort of elevator or pitch or a very quick summary about the Neolithic of Southeast Europe and will serve to set Opovo the Opovo Ugar by book as the site is known I won't really use its full name usually it'll set it in its broader historical context I owe a lot to John Chapman's 2020 book Forging Identities which you can see I've noted it here for summarizing the story as well as the massive chronometric data increase provided by Alistair Whittle and his times of their lives project the chart on the right over here anchors you in a familiar way of thinking about culture history I don't need to tell this audience about the downside of such charts I have grossly simplified even John Chapman's scheme what the left hand image will show you however is that old Europe as it's called Maria Gimbutas first used that term is anything but a static entity there are important shifts across Southeast Europe in what seems to be the growth and creative focus during this period starting with the earliest pioneer Neolithic farming settlements moving forward northwards not very far and not very far for a thousand years from 6300 to 5300 there was an explosive growth around 5300 BC in which large settlement aggregations fixed in place for several generations some forming mounds and tells along with a proliferation in the use of the local clays and pyrotechnology skills to create the features that we identify as old Europe more substantial building for example more ceramics, more figurines ever more brilliant in their variation intensive use of local mineral resources more burning of houses less frequent in fact a great rarity of burials in settlements this early intensification was located especially in the West Balkans here what is in fact amounts mostly to Yugoslavia and includes the red dot of Opovo Uga Bible as you can see at about 4600 BC the focus of exchange networks and center of intensified settlement and production gradually moved eastwards at the same time began a long period of transformation starting in the West Balkans and seen in smaller hamlets in the latest venture period and the increasing importance of the burial domain in the early copper age cultures over here meanwhile in the East Balkans that's mostly Romania, Bulgaria in which had by no means been dormant before 4600 BC they reached heights of material brilliance afterwards with a variety of settlement forms in tells and flat sites and a resource network that that were provided exotica from a large variety of locations there too however by 4000 BC a trend towards smaller houses and settlements with fewer materials deposited and more focus on burial deposition impoverished the rich archaeological evidence of the domestic domain of the previous thousand years but in the eastern margin of old Europe up here in the Ukraine they not only kept on the old domestic traditions but intensified them as seen in the what you might have heard as the mega sites of the Tripilya culture during the fourth millennium BC this chart several times in this presentation illustrating various issues at different points in the life of an archaeological project from its creation all the way until it's supposed closure the trajectory represents the expectations not all the options obviously of the second half of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century what is missing from this chart because it was created for a different set of questions is why how and why does an archaeological project get started how did I come to start the project at Opovo Opovo was not the first project of excavation that I directed and it was designed to us address a specific archaeological question the universal presence of burned houses in the Balkan Neolithic how did we that is the Opovo team and how did we get to the burned houses question the path towards the Opovo project was not at all direct nor smooth a lot of serendipity was involved and it starts at least two decades before we set foot in Opovo's cornfields in 1983 there are a couple of threads in my own history that started very early and had a significant effect on the history first of all I chose to focus my curiosity and research energies on Eastern Europe when I was still an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland I've got to pause here for a little commercial you can read a lot about this these precursors to the Opovo project and other things too in a perspective article that I just published for the annual reviews of anthropology it was just published in June and you can download the digital version for free on their website since it's open access so Stuart Piggott you might remember him from the movie about Sutton who was the supervisor for both my senior thesis and PhD dissertation he's up here there he doesn't look anything like he did in the movie as a student thanks to him I participated in the excavation of the archaeological site of Bilani which was a significant Neolithic settlement in Czechoslovakia now called the Czech Republic the excavations director Bohumil or Bobby Sodski was a brilliant archaeologist with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Neolithic and the love of energetic debates and folk songs that's why we got on so well he was an inspirational mentor who guided me in a PhD project that encompassed a large swath of Eastern European prehistory and led to my only single-authored book this is my favorite pick here on the right that was taken during my PhD research it's taken in a railway station in Bulgaria and I fancy myself here in a John Lucarium novel so little aside there on Bobby Sodski's advice in my dissertation research I came to focus not on the more obvious figurines and pottery but on the unattractive flaked stone assemblages as a way of gaining access to primary data without treading on any local archaeological bunions but it was not until my post doctoral fellowship in then Leningrad now St. Petersburg that I focused on a specific aspect of the flaked stone tools their contact traces or otherwise known as microware and this was the direct result of meeting this man in the bottom left there Sergei Semyonov he wrote this book prehistoric technology which in 1964 was translated two years before this photograph was taken I met him in 1966 while I was in the Soviet Union doing my postdoc his assistant Galina Galya Karobkova here in the right and you see this is her with her students she gave me personal training in their technique especially during our participation in an excavation in Moldavia experimentation and observation went hand in hand for them with the aim of to construct to function for me starting in London and London University and then continuing at Harvard University the main aim was rather to identify the used area versus the handle or half versus intentional modification as a way to be freed from the traditional assumption that it looks like an axe therefore it is type of thing I was less concerned actually with what it had been used on than how it had been used at Harvard I jumped in enthusiastically straight into the middle of a successful archaeology with this chart of using controlled scientifically scientifically designed experiments in order to take logical steps from the from the empirical data to interpretive conclusions in order to in order to to avoid leapfrogging from in your impatience to go from straight in empirical data here to the more general theoretical interpretations up here and in this case I actually later turned this chart on its head to create what's actually a more familiar epistemology of middle range research and the value of empirical hypothesis testing in this case the middle range research here or over in this chart here that this is these this was provided by observations on in my research was was provided by observations in on contact traces to construct the use lives of artifacts by now the main aim of my middle range research was to have a robust empirical framework to address the use of production in its broadest sense and that's what we've got here this was my general theory and by but so this is production in its broadest sense for the neolithic this meant a need for empirical data on consumption and discard practices like these and in addition to manufacturing redistribution the only way to obtain such data on consumption and and discard was through microware observations that was what the conclusion I came to I was carrying out this experimental archaeology and thinking about its ramifications for history and prehistory at the same time as applying it in practice in archaeological field work in South East Europe in the 1970s fieldwork especially excavation was more or less a required required element of for faculty members in the United in the US university system so it was for me when I was hired by Harvard I was initially drawn towards the topic of my dissertation which was Mesolithic to Neolithic transition in South East Europe at the time in the 1970s that's in Yugoslavia was the most feasible in my study area which was all behind the Iron Curtain for a truly collaborative venture involving both US and local teams after several failed attempts to satisfy my ideal choice of site I grasped the opportunity presented to me to excavate its syllabus even though it was not the most ideal it was a later Neolithic venture culture site in Serbia dated 1500 years after the initial introduction of food production in Europe going back to the slide with the South East European transformations if you remember that one these three sites Opovo, Gomolava and Celevac and other projects are all from the period of intensification in the West Balkans the venture culture site, the venture culture provides the context from 5300 to 4600 BC with their spectacular array of archaeological remains of domestic life some of which you see here on the left and almost all of which are found and retrieved because they have been near a house fire welcome to the burned house horizon which is encompassed by this yellow line here but you should know that I was not aware of any burned house horizon until the end of the Celevac project with the Celevac project from 1976 to 79 I expanded contact trace observations beyond flaked stone tools to micro wear on several other classes of artifacts including those of polished stone bone and antler and even ceramics and other fired clay artifacts such as figurines the overarching research strategy of the Celevac project was the construction of use lives procurement production redistribution and consumption in order to monitor artifact changes and to investigate increasing sedentism and intensification of production through the 500 years occupation of the settlement of Celevac at Celevac the site is actually called star or cello which means old village farmers found near-lithic burn rubble across 52 hectares of this south facing hillside that you see here just gently rolling hills and it's a huge area here we excavated in a trench strategy to investigate change through time with only a limited exposure but and we also it turns out these are our little trenches here it's a tiny tiny sample of the 52 hectares of Celevac the enormity of the question of burned houses was not on our radar it was a classic taken for granted but I did start to ask questions of my Serbian colleagues about why there were so many burned houses and I was not particularly satisfied with their explanation that it was accidental there are granaries in the house attics all that it was a result of invasion of the Celevac project however Mirjana Stevanovic who is actually under the palm leaf there who at that time was an undergraduate participant or volunteer and she and I started to devise a method to investigate the burning of the Wattle and Dorb houses in which an essential part was to be played by the systematic excavation of the burned collapsed superstructure that you can see in this picture about which we really didn't care about very much at all during the Celevac project Mirjana saw this this project this study of the burned the burned houses as the focus of her future career in archaeology there she is up here which and it became that we started she and I started our new strategy of investigating burned houses at the site of Gomolava which is a stratified tell settlement by the Sarva River where we volunteered after the end of the Celevac project we were given two small fragments of houses for our experimental excavation we investigated the superstructural rubble that you can see here excavating and recording the rubble very slowly including the angle of collapse the tree impressions color and so on much too slow it was much too slow for the Gomolava field team we were slowing down their progress of getting to the house floors that they like to do and create here the picture of the house and all its wealth of materials on the floor of the house and it had a lot of materials but one of the directors of Gomolava Bogdan Brookner was interested in what we were doing and proposed a collaboration with Mirjana and me together we designed a project of excavation of a venture culture settlement at Opovo in which the burned houses will be the dominant focus of our investigation location chosen for the new project at Opovo Ugar Bay book could not have been more different from the gentle hills of Celevac in terms of geography and ecology it was located in the predominantly flat seasonally waterlogged area where the drainages of the Danube Tisa and Tamish rivers meet this area is called the Banat in northern northern Serbia and is a modern cultural meeting place it's on also on the northern periphery of the venture culture the settlement seem to be much smaller than Celevac just perhaps five hectares as opposed to 52 hectares of Celevac the presence of burned houses was assured and with Bogdan Brookner support and collaboration we would be able to carry out the research at the detailed slow pace we wanted moreover we chose to excavate in a broad gridded block that you can see here 16 by 20 meters rather than trenches in order to be to be able to expose complete buildings if possible in the research design of the Opovo project middle range research as at Celevac was at its heart but now included a focus on the use lives and life histories of architecture and buildings in which the burning represented their end of life and here you get another of my charts which I don't expect you to look at you can see it elsewhere is where you can find it but basically in this case the empirical data is right here in the heart of the circle and you work out through the gradual phases of middle range research and empirical hypothesis building out into the general theories which include household organization of production at this time I was finding that the Marxist concept of social reproduction resonated with a change in the scale at which prehistory could be effectively interpreted in which the history of individual households played a role in the variability of their archaeological remains your federal social inequalities created by the vagaries of household cycles noted in the literature of household anthropology and history I have a long theme for my research design of the archaeological project at Opovo so Opovo was at the beginning of household archaeology in the old world as it turned out it was being practiced at the same time in Mesoamerica but that's about the only other place we designed the project at Opovo not only to investigate deliberate or accidental burning but also to identify whether the fires occurred at multiple co-evil burning events Marianas Divanovich and I elaborated the strategy of excavation and analysis that we had started at Gomalava we excavated and systematically mapped the superstructural rubble of the burned water and door buildings layer by layer which you can see these wonderful volunteers doing and and we did this layer by layer as you can see them doing until we reached the underlying floor and all its rich array of ceramics we excavated very carefully in the areas around the burned rubble from the first season we retained control profiles that would pass through the burned rubble at various points you can see one of them here, another here and so on we were keen to observe the stratigraphic relationship between the different burned houses in addition to their horizontal overlap as a means to identify even slight chronological separation as a way of distinguishing between multiple and single burning events we noted that where the rubble has not been spread by post-neolithic plowing it is clear that is localized to a square or rectangular area corresponding to the area of a building and it's this characteristic that has led to the conclusion that the building walls were collapsed inwards during the conflagration forming a rubble heap on top of their floors in the 16 by 20 meter area exposed by us we identified three complete buildings under corner of a fourth and you can see these in this chart on the left house four which you see in the picture on the right and this one here with orange and it's pits and well here is the earliest and it's the deepest and it's the earliest and it may even have had two stories it produced a piece of vitrified linen stuck between the two collapsed floors and at one point it was the earliest piece of evidence of linen in Europe but that's now being superseded unfortunately the house is associated with pits and includes a possible well up here two meters in diameter house four was slightly overlapped and superimposed by two later houses house one here and house two here the blue ones and these two houses quite close to the ground surface between these two buildings and you can see them here on the right one is actually slightly later than the other possibly but they may not have been entirely co-evil so between these earliest blue houses and the very earliest orange house is another fragment of a house house three that we call it's in building horizon two but there's not too much of it but more in terms of its pits was available in our block and so between in this corner we have house three and so we got a total of four houses all the houses fall within a few generations or a couple of centuries of each other and after the most recent carbon-14 dates from the times of their lives project and now from the Keel Panchoval team they fall neatly within the Vinccia sea period as it's called at about 4,800 to 4,600 vc for her dissertation this is sorry I've got a little behind with my slides here this is the fragment of house three seen in its just over in its cross-section very clear here with the big thick layer of house rubble so for her dissertation Mirjana Stevanovich mapped the burned rubble of wall collapse and floors she mapped the impressions of the Wattle and timber framework you can see them like this that were captured in the burned clay door during the fire and from which she could identify its role in the construction and the process of wall collapse she also noted the colour of the door on a monsoil scale from which thanks to her control experiments on local clays she could estimate its temperature of firing from 700 degrees centigrade to 1100 degrees centigrade which is vitrification and you can see this here vitrified at 1000 degrees and 800 oxidised burning here in effect our project at Opovo took the form of an awesome investigation in that its ultimate aim was to produce fire maps for each burned building and Mirjana was able to create such maps using the data in the field which showed that in each case as seen here in House 4 the map here and the blue dots and especially over here in the cross-section that the temperatures that the houses in that the highest the temperatures of the hottest spot as it was called was low down on the floor level with a high temperature of 1000 degrees each map followed the fire path from floor to upper parts of the superstructure and showed fairly unambiguously that at least in the houses we investigated the burning of the house was deliberate and as a single event later in the 2000s during the 21st century that is experiments at Kukutani and Nebelivka for example showed that burned Wattle and Dorb buildings would provide they provided the needed confirmation of what Mirjana's research in burning Wattle and Dorb houses suggested and that is that the temperatures at which the houses burned were much too high to have been produced by a fire that was not helped by added fuel and or accelerants they had to have been helped in other words by some added fuel and accelerants meaning it's a deliberately set fire at the at the end of the Opovo excavation in 1989 the project moved activities predominantly to our home institutions in California and elsewhere in the United States and then also in Novi Sad and Panchevo our colleagues in the then Yugoslavia soon became enmeshed in the events of the unfortunate civil wars that ensued through most of the 1990s we published two interim reports in the Journal of Field Archaeology in 1985 and 1992 after the final 1989 season we set about preparing the final printed monograph that was planned to be ready in 1997 half of the 35mm data slides were scanned professionally in the late 1990s along with the full digitization of the field drawings we had started in the second season in 1984 actually recording the field data using file vision on one of the first desktop Macs personal desktop computers that I brought out to Opovo you can see it if you watch the one and only project video on YouTube so there was some born born digital data but 99% of the data was recorded on paper 80 column Fortran forms that were later entered into a mainframe and in the early 1990s converted to Excel spreadsheets these were eventually partially converted into a file maker database so from what I'm saying you can gather that at the end of the Opovo field seasons the consumer field the consumer digital revolution including the internet was upon us the first we were on the path to ending the Opovo project in the traditional way we assembled the data, the media we prepared the publication in the life history of an archaeological project its culmination is marked traditionally by its final printed monograph the definitive final narrative of the project whether we want to conform with that tradition can certainly be debated but not here Celevats ended with its monograph in 1990 but what about Opovo? Where is its final monograph? What happened? Well this now becomes the second part of this the first disruption to the traditional path was a 1988 conference organized by Joan Jerome and Meg Conkey resulting in this book on the right in which I was invited to reformulate my familiar research questions so that gender was an explicit analytic category this resulted in a dramatic inspired long lasting reformulation of my archaeological research my household archaeology was transformed into prehistory constructed at an intimate scale with stories of individual people with tasks faces and feelings in which the traditional boundaries in the interpretation of archaeological data were dissolved for example I was no longer subject to the limits of empirical use lives of archaeological materials but instead could reformulate use lives as the life histories of people, places and things including architecture in which imagination was transparently employed to enable the interpretation to go beyond the formal restrictions of scientific empiricism and still be scientific at exactly the same time the seductive world of digital archaeology provided the perfect tools to link empirical data with the imagined life histories I mentioned earlier that the end of the OPPO project coincided with the consumer digital revolution in audio visual media and I along with Michael Ashley who was then a student and later a colleague in the 1990s and faculty colleague Rosemarie Joyce we all thoroughly embraced it George Landau's hypertext showed that different media including text can be brought together in a web of data and narrative by linking and generally entangling the elements in a way that cannot be reproduced by analog formats and I dreamed of doing this with the OPPO project as you can see here on the right for me this took precedence over the printed monograph and was the second factor that derailed it Mayor Culpa but I could not resist it this concept plan that you see on the right of the relationship between the components of the chimera web shows the close relationship between data and narratives in which the stories emerge from the data the characters who I imagined in the chimera web can be seen in this multi-scaler chart in which OPPO the yellow square can be viewed at an increasingly detailed chronological scale from the millennium through the building horizon the three building horizons here and then broken down into generations of course imagine now black and white here and finally the individual residence life histories themselves emerge of course all imagined but they're there anyway they have to have been something was there a third disruption that I could not resist was the opportunity to excavate a neolithic tell site in Bulgaria temptation was put before me by Douglas Bailey in the end this was not a happy project and ended after one season in 1995 however it did provide the best photograph that I have with Meg Conkey and an opportunity to work with Michael Ashley on the OPPO database after Pod Gorica I could, I should have returned to the OPPO publication and sent it to press but an even greater temptation had already come my way because now I had been invited by Ian Hodder to start with Mirjana Stevanovic a sub-project under the umbrella of the Çatal-Hujuk archaeological project from 1996 until 2018 my research, my creativity and my attention was taken up with the retrieval publication and interpreted afterlives of the Bach or Berkeley archaeologists at Çatal-Hujuk project the periods of the Bach project's life that took place in Turkey was from 1996 to 2005 when we excavated building three in the north area of the east mound but it continued to engage me until very recently the Bach project at Çatal-Hujuk had a more traditional life trajectory than OPPO will ending in 2012 in a print publication that you can see Mirjana and me holding there entitled The Last House on the Hill an important difference and what certainly speeded up the print production process was that the Bach project coincided for us with the transition from born analogue to born digital documentation of the research this meant that our records and media were all digital and could be transferred to a database with much greater ease than OPPO or Celavats or even Podgorica we, that is Michael Ashley and Chincea Perlingieri and I created the Center for Digital Archaeology or CODA a non-profit company around the Bach project and its data and media as well as developing the database of The Last House on the Hill, CODA was important in the creation of the website edition of Last House on the Hill in both in both database and the website we were interested in integrating the narratives of the Bach printed monograph fragmented into individual digital entities with the enormous body of media rich data from the Bach database. Sadly the website edition was hacked in 2018 and has been inaccessible ever since I mentioned these details because a similar digital publication for OPPO could be created now that could not have been done, could not have been created earlier in the mid 1990s. Chattelhuyuk and the Bach project and its afterlives are relevant for this talk only in that in the new millennium they have changed how I think about the OPPO project and how I would go about its publication. We were invited to work at Chattelhuyuk because of both mirrors and my research interests and skills in the intricate investigation of the life and history of houses as seen in their architectural remains. The focus of the main Chattelhuyuk project led by Ian Hodder starting in 1995 was understanding the histories of individual houses. The plastered mud brick architecture was very different from the wattle and daub of Serbia and offered far greater rewards for such an investigation. In 2003, just as the Bach project was finishing its field investigation, the third site of the project was the construction of the Chattelhuyuk project. In 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, in 2003, with Harris Matrix documentation of the stratigraphic links between houses in the neighborhood provided a peek into the complexities of the formation of the mound and the history of the neighborhood. These act as a cautionary tale to those who might take the distribution of house remains as representing houses that are co-evil in their construction or their residence and all their destruction. This was one of the most important lessons from Chattel-Hujuk applicable to any settlement site. These trajectories of my own changing skills, experience, passions and interests against the background of changing events and field projects for the context in which I find myself here. In the last five years, several events have contributed to drag me back from Chattel-Hujuk to the Neolithic of Southeast Europe, to the Burnt House Horizon and to the Life in Limbo of the Oppovo project. These include requests for book chapter contributions, for conference contributions, for public lecture invitations, for panels about the destructiveness of fire and so on. Some of these were surprises, others were to be expected. One case was inevitable but had been put off and concerned the excavated physical remains and what happens to them. In 1987, we exported a large sample of Burnt House rubble for Mirjana's PhD project of fire and architectural investigation. The sample was taking up a lot of space in the room that was planned to be the new bioarchaeology lab here in the aft. Now Mirjana was back in Serbia and I was retired and we were asked to move it out of the lab. Dani Danes had the idea of depositing the archaeological materials that had become homeless with another set of homeless architectural rubble, 20th century AD construction bricks out at the Albany Bald. So we devised a ceremony of closure of the Oppovo project and in September 2019, we did this with a procession and ceremonial deposition of the rubble here amongst the bricks themselves. Here's the rubble and made in different patterns. It was a large group of people. You can watch the video that's attached to this chapter here. You can see a few pieces of house rubble that were not deposited ritually in the display cabinet outside room 101. I had a feeling at the time that this was perhaps really the end of the Oppovo project but I was wrong. None of the events that brought me back to Oppovo was more surprising than the event that has led me to its resurrection. I was astounded in April, 2022 to get an email from a young doctoral researcher at Keel University in Germany. Finn Wilkes telling me about his archaeomagnetic survey that was taking place at Oppovo Ugar Bybook. It was just amazing. The group in the University of Keel is led by a great favorite of mine, Martin Forholt. There he is here and that's his wife, Katas Shilagi, also a good friend of mine and another archaeologist. And this is Finn himself and this is Robert Hoffman who has also been involved in a lot of these new archaeomagnetic explorations in Southeast Europe and who I also met. So this group at the University of Keel has been using advanced geophysical prescription methods especially involving archaeomagnetism in Neolithic Central and Southeast Europe since the 2010s at least. In 1983 to 84 at Oppovo we carried out a limited archaeomagnetic survey from which we chose the area where to focus up here, where to focus our excavation block. From the 1960s, archaeomagnetic survey had been seen as potentially useful when prospecting burned Wattle and Dorb houses but the proton magnetometers that were used and that we used at that time were very slow not very sensitive and very labor intensive. We also carried out limited soil probing that you can see here, transects in which we over the larger area surrounding our excavation block to determine the limits of the settlement by evidence of burned rubble below the surface in the cores. This imagined boundary enclosed an area of about five hectares looking like this. The Keel team used an advanced system in all their surveys including Oppovo, a three person or sometimes a five person team operating a flux gate gradiometer in an eight sensor setup recording at half meter intervals. With the Keel-Pangevo Geophysical Survey superimposed the area of settlement becomes much larger. Here you can see ours and theirs becomes much larger and the frequency of houses much greater and there are ditches around the periphery. On 1980s block one somehow is always in the center. There it is. When I remove the superimposition the array of anomalies and ditches becomes clearer. So we had a Zoom discussion and I met the Keel team that way and was invited to visit them in Keel itself. I spent a week there in June of 2023 where I was kept busy with several days of brainstorming and sharing data and ideas of how this changed my ideas of Oppovo settlement. They were interested in what kind of ground truthing I could provide for their survey results. Our excavation was what motivated Fin to bring their whole setup to Oppovo. I had been aware of their advances since the mid 1990s in geophysical perfection but it was still a huge surprise and their results are spectacular. There are twin ditches around the settlement enclosing this is this big one here enclosing an area of 9.4 hectares almost double the five hectares we calculated in 1984. This in itself is not a big surprise it's still much smaller than the 52 hectares of celibates in southern Serbia. There are no building-like anomalies however outside of the area enclosed by this largest ditch. Within this large enclosure there's a solid smaller ditch here which encloses an area of about four hectares similar to our area of five hectares that Fin thinks of as the core of the settlement that's this one. An interesting smaller ditch that you can see here encloses an area that according to carbon 14 dates it might represent the original area of settlement including the houses in our excavation block and here you can see the carbon 14 dates the red ones are the earliest ones and most of them are in this this is not a huge sample but anyway I like this idea of this with our settlement being at the the original center. I always knew that there must be other houses beyond our tiny sample but to see them there brings it somehow more vividly to life. Yes our excavations provide a depth of detail and complexity of time frame and the immediacy of the burning events but this very fast survey in a few weeks shows another dimension of a neighborhood or a village that also had a life history rather like at Chattel Huyuk when we understood how our one building three with its complex life history was part of a web of so many more life histories. This added dimension to our knowledge has been provided not only by the pattern of house remains but also the ditches themselves which were quite invisible during our excavation even to our geologists working with the river's historical landscape. During 2023 Finn's team carried out auger coring across the site with and that's how we get the carbon 14 dating from the many many cores. The dates confirmed the previous times of their life samples from our excavation block as earlier in the venture sequence from 4,800 to 4,670 BC so a duration of 200 years at the most. More than that however the smallest enclosure has only read dates around 4,800. The later dates are all outside. Finn calculates that about a hundred houses in total can be seen in the survey and that maybe 35 were active at any one time. I think that's the sort of guess but maybe not. So the question is is there a village-wide organization? I still don't think so. It still looks as though each household is a separate entity. I'm going to pause here for some water. Remembering that we noted a definite stratigraphy and pattern of horizontal displacement of sequential houses during the excavation of Oppovo. I would still caution that it is very difficult perhaps impossible to say how many were inhabited at any one time. However I am impressed by Robert Hoffman's use of changes in orientation as one path to understanding the internal chronology of the settlement and I don't have his reference there but I can certainly provide it because he wrote a very interesting article about it. So there are still one or two more questions remaining. One of them that's really a big one is what are these ditches for at Oppovo and at most of the other also that most of the other Neolithic sites that have been subjected to these surveys produce such ditches. Are they to separate family or household clusters? Are they to mark the outer limit of possible building? Some would like them to be defense but I am very unsure of that and there are some other theories too that I won't mention right now. What has really inspired the resurrection of the Oppovo project is the work of the archaeologists from Kiel in collaboration with their Serbian colleagues. The latter need the Oppovo project database and some kind of final report that brings the interpretations together especially since much of the physical data that was stored in the Panchevo Museum was damaged or destroyed in the bombings and fires of the 1990 Civil War. Until the Kiel Oppovo project I had not been motivated to make it a priority to publish and share the data and media from the Oppovo excavation. Now that I am I wonder what kind of publication should it be. I could take the original book manuscript that was all but ready to publish in the traditional way in 1996 but must it be a book or a monograph report. A linear long form narrative. Since 1996 the world of digital publication of open access and of digital multimodal compositions now provide alternative options involving media-rich narratives books without ends that cater to non-linear lateral thinking. The traditional way would be the simplest and quickest. The slowest and for me the most interesting would be one that goes back to my 1990s dream of a narrative or narratives that links to the primary data of the project. After all in some ways I like to think of the project database as the most important item to be published and should even have priority of preparation, publication, curation and accessibility. Thank you.