The Archaeology of Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Chapter Seven: “An Offense to Honor Is Never Forgiven…”: Violence and Landscape Archaeology in Highland Northern Albania

143 Abstract Northern Albania is the only place in southern Europe where tribal societies survived intact into the twentieth century, including tribal councils and chiefs, an oral customary law code (the Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit), and intra- and intertribal violence, including feud, raiding, and warfare. Since 2004, the Shala Valley Project (SVP) has studied one of these tribes, the Shala, the territory of which encompasses the upper reaches of the Shala River. The SVP supports integrated, interdisciplinary programs of archaeological, ethnographic, and ethno- and archival historical research. In three seasons of fieldwork (2005–2007), 1000 fields were subjected to intensive archaeological survey, 580 structures were mapped and fully documented, and 36 heads of household participated in detailed formal interviews. Three historians accessed documents pertaining to northern Albania housed in Albania, Austria, Italy, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Taken together, these data paint an interesting picture of the origins and evolution of the Shala tribe, beginning in the fifteenth century A.D. through the present day. Fully interpreting this picture, however, is almost impossible without considering the effects of violence. In this paper I describe the various ways in which Shala’s tribal system, settlement pattern, and built environment changed through time, as reflected in the regional landscape, in response to endemic violence, including feud, raiding, and warfare. It seems likely that violence worked to relieve demographic and economic pressure, which was critically important given Shala’s harsh environment, but that contests between individuals and clans, for access to social and political power, caused most incidents of feud and decisions to go to war. Our work in Shala identifies the various effects violence may have had on settlement , the built environment, and landscape the world over, in periods of prehistory and history, and demonstrates the power of integrated, interdisciplinary approaches to violence and conflict to inform archaeological data. Chapter Seven “An Offense to Honor Is Never Forgiven…” Violence and Landscape Archaeology in Highland Northern Albania Michael L. Galaty 144 The Politics and Identities of Violence Introduction The Shala Valley Project (SVP) is an Albanian-American collaboration led by Michael Galaty of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and Albanian archaeologists Ols Lafe and Zamir Tafilica. The project was launched in 2004 and conducted fieldwork during the summers of 2005–2008 (see Galaty 2006, 2007; Galaty et al. 2006, 2009a, 2009b; Mustafa 2008; Mustafa and Young 2008; Schon and Galaty 2006).1 The SVP integrates interdisciplinary programs of intensive and extensive archaeological survey and excavation with geo-scientific, ethnographic, and historical surveys, including ethno- and archival historical research, in order to study the Shala fis (“tribe”), one of many northern Albanian fise that survived intact into the twentieth century and, to some extent, down to the present day (Figure 7.1). The goals of the project are twofold: (1) to produce a diachronic record of the valley’s cultural resources that might help local administrators create a viable management plan, and (2) to study the effects of “isolation” on people who have always lived in a frontier zone at the edge of larger polities such as the Ottoman Empire and Albanian nation state. In 2005 we surveyed the village of Theth in upper (northern) Shala (Figure 7.2). Three hundred and thirty-eight fields and 460 structures were mapped and fully documented and 26 heads of household participated in detailed interviews. In 2006 and 2007 we surveyed lower (southern) Shala. 662 fields and 120 houses were mapped and fully documented and 10 heads of household participated in detailed interviews. Also in 2007, an extensive archaeological survey team worked south of Shala in the regions of Shosh and Kir, identifying and documenting 11 new archaeological sites. One result of intensive field survey was our discovery in 2005 of a terraced, fortified Iron Age site in the modern neighborhood of Grunas, located at the far southern tip of Theth. In 2006, 2007, and 2008 we conducted excavations at Grunas (Galaty et al. 2009a). Results, including a series of calibrated AMS radiocarbon dates, demonstrate that the site was built in a single construction phase ca. 800–900 B.C. and abandoned sometime before 500 B.C. The next evidence for substantial occupation dates to the Late Medieval period (ca. A.D. 1200–1500). Late Medieval pottery collected in the course of survey was scattered in fields surrounding Shala’s Catholic churches, most of which were destroyed under communism , and at the site of Dakaj, a Venetian-Ottoman-era fort strategically located at the...