Archeological modernity

If the mythological origins of Butrint and it joint ancestry with Rome was used to promote and popularise the site, quite another methodological thinking under-pinned Ugolini’s archaeological approach.

Far from concentrating exclusively on a particular phase in the city’s history, Ugolini adopted an approach to recognise the site’s multi-period history and to investigate it in all its diversity. This included investigating all the different phases making up Butrint: from prehistory to Medieval and early Modern, and to do so in context. In this way surveys of Butrint’s hinterland, as well as its local environment, were carried out, most famously at Çuka e Aitoit. Proper conservation was undertaken of buildings and mosaics, and a museum was built to display the finds to the public. Though he didn’t live to see any archaeological monographs in print, Ugolini had prepared a whole series of publications.

This ‘holistic’ methodology is archaeologically much closer to present-day theoretical thinking and to late 19th/early 20th-century practice than to that of Ugolini’s contemporary world. It is this modernity of his approach that in no small manner has ensured that his work is still a valuable academic resource. Where, for instance, all post-classical building were destroyed in the excavations of Ostia near Rome, at Butrint intensive efforts were made not to destroy buildings without good academic justification.

Where Ugolini was less scrupulous was in drawing plans and elevations of the trenches he made – for the most part he is only little interested in archaeological strata. Equally frustrating is the lack of correspondence between spectacular finds – like the statues – and datable finds, like ceramics. These problems may have been compounded by the simple living conditions and the basic team involved in the excavations. Ugolini laments, for example, being forced to use untrained personnel mostly from the surrounding villages.

Nonetheless inadequate field documentation is often compensated for by the remarkable watercolours of Igino Epicoco, the careful surveys of Dario Roversi Monaco, and, by the detailed notebooks kept by Luigi Cardini. Indeed, the interdisciplinary studies employed: art historical, anthropological, and epigraphic research, as well as information on the environmental, geological and natural history of the area, appear remarkably modern.

Despite clearly being enmeshed in the ideological thinking of the time, Ugolini was able to apply different methodologies to different contexts: as a publicist he used the ancient sources as a means to discover an epic past, but in the field, and as an academic, he applied an investigative methodology. Rather than focus on the prehistory of his training, Ugolini became a master archaeologist of his age.