bearsproject – The Bays of East Attica Regional Survey

October 16, 2024October 28, 2024

Core Strength

as its final act for the 2024 season, I joined BEARS super-veteran Maeve McHugh and two new collaborators, Henry Chapman (also from Birmingham) and Michelle Farrell of Coventry University for a week of geological coring in the few scraps of undeveloped wetland-ish land the beach resorters have left untouched around Porto Rafti. The purpose of the coring was to see whether any of the sediment sequences in these waterlogged soils might contain pollen, which could provide some insight into the environmental history of the area.

We targeted three areas with potential to produce good sequences: the black mud swamp on the bay-ward side of the Koroni beach parking lot, some empty/reedy fields behind the long gravelly Avlaki beach, and a small field near the limani by the Maras marine boat parking lot.

I was a bit worried that the cores would just be plastic bags, rocks, and cigarette butts all the way down, given the typical modern contents of the topsoil around the bay. But my pessimism was, for once, totally misplaced. All three of the targeted sites produced very nice sequences, including all the way down to the terra rossa paleosol in one spot. We will have to see what comes back from the lab, but we’re hopeful that at least one of the cores provides at least some new enviro data about the survey region.

In the meantime, something exciting emerged from our “macro” examination of what came out of the ground during the coring process: a gigantic and totally pure beautiful clay bed about 20 cm below the surface. Located just by the shore of the bay, this seems like a good candidate for the clay source used for the ceramic manufacturing operation that we found evidence for on Praso islet during the 2021 survey. In addition to the soil samples, we took a chunk of this clay for analysis alongside our ceramic wasters. If it’s a match, we’ll be one step closer to solving one of the big mysteries that emerged from the survey data.

Maeve, Henry, and Michelle make an amazing team and the work went surprisingly smoothly, thanks in part to the extremely helpful and efficient facilitation by the folks at EAGME who provided the necessary permit and oversaw the export of the samples. It was very edifying to learn so much about the coring process and soil types / sequences from Michelle and Henry, who have a huge amount of experience working in a wide variety of conditions throughout the UK and Europe.

Now, just in time for spooky season, we’ve reached the most frightening and dangerous stage of the process – working with the U of T administrative staff to figure out how to move grant money from the granting account to Michelle’s lab in Coventry.

September 17, 2024October 28, 2024

BEARS research featured in Quirks and Quarks

Over the weekend of September 14/15, the BEARS project’s research on the Raftis statue was featured in an annual segment highlighting summer fieldwork on the CBC Radio program “Quirks and Quarks”. There is some discussion about drones, 3D modeling, the newly-discovered phantom limb from the survey, and of course the inevitable gale-force winds. Pretty cool stuff, though of course it’s tough to compete with the other content in the program – dinosaurs and dark matter make for tough acts to follow! The segment can be heard on the CBC website here.

September 9, 2024October 28, 2024

CIG blog post

BEARS fans might be interested in checking out the 2024 edition of the CIG post that provides an updated on the final study season of the project, which was published late last month:

https://www.cig-icg.gr/the-bays-of-east-attica-regional-survey-bears-2024-koroni-ing-achievement/

August 2, 2024August 7, 2024

Raftis Rocks

On Tuesday and Wednesday the BEARS project had a great visit with a geologist and expert on the sources of volcanic stones, Christos Stergiou. With Christos we are collaborating to conduct chemical and geological analysis of some of our stone finds, especially the volcanic and metamorphic materials used to manufacture the large assemblage of groundstone artifacts that we documented on Raftis Island. We reunited with our old friend captain Vasilis Miliotis and his son Odysseas for a trip out to Raftis to collect a few artifacts for sampling, and to show Christos the local geology of the island. It was a beautiful day at the office…and we learned a lot!

We also spent a day in the Brauron museum examining the finds that we collected in previous seasons, and learned a lot of exciting insights from Christos about the kaleidoscope of different stone types used by the Late Bronze Age community on Raftis. A fun fact: there is an iron oxide called Goethite that is named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, because he had a huge collection of it. I am sure you can see the resemblance.

Another fun fact, discussed as we learned that one of our finds, a cube-shaped hematite handtool used for rubbing or polishing, perhaps reused after a former life as a weight, is made of very magnetic magnetite: the word magnet comes from the Greek, “magnitis lithos”, rocks from Magnesia, because the earliest known sources of the mineral were apparently identified in either the Thessalian or Lydian region of Magnesia. That there is some good cocktail party knowledge for ya blog readers.

Now that we’ve done the preliminary macroscopic analysis, the next step is to apply for permission to conduct geochemical sampling and thin section analysis of a list of artifacts that we put together in the museum. If all goes according to plan, by this time next year we will have a much better understanding of the distribution of source materials that the people on Raftis were exploiting for their grinding and pounding needs.

July 22, 2024September 19, 2024

Instant reinforced concrete non-architecture!

In the course of reading a few navigational guides to Porto Rafti written for yachters, some fulsome praise for the sensitive and ecological design of the bay was encountered:

“Around the shores of this fine natural harbour the Athenians have built their summer villas and apartments transforming what was a simple fishing community into a prospering summer commuter belt. Incredibly the inhabitants have taken the worst of instant reinforced concrete non-architecture found around Athens and transported it here – the result is simply awful and were it not for the remarkable beauty of the bay it would look like Athens itself.” (R. Heikell, 1992, A Yachtsman’s Guide to the Coasts and Islands of Greece)

How far the mighty have fallen …. apparently the good old Raft is no longer to be counted amongst the “most delightfullest harbours in all nature”.

July 11, 2024July 11, 2024

Porto Rafti in the 1960s

perhaps of interest: below are linked a few short archival film clips available on YouTube that show vignettes of Porto Rafti during the 1960s. It is remarkable to see how much development has occurred since then in living color! Would have been a great time to do an intensive survey.

July 3, 2024August 2, 2024

Slowly but surely closing out BEARS 2024

the final season of the BEARS project continues to work its way in slow, jerky motion to a conclusion, as we’re also starting to gather manuscripts in preparation to publish the projects results in full. Following on the long, busy, and crowded 2023 study season, during which pretty much every single BEARS team member made an appearance for at least a few days, the 2024 season has been remarkable for its tiny list of personnel. To wit, the season ended with a single solitary project director tidying up things in Brauron for four out of the five days set aside for museum work this June. Phil Sapirstein visited for one day to do a final round of tile study and make a handsome 3D model of our largest tripod mortar find, but otherwise ’twas the most skeleton of skeleton crews at Brauron in 2024. It was of course very good to wrap things up without an insane sprint to the end (pretty much a BEARS tradition at this point) but rather with an eerily calm final day of rebagging and retagging a handful of artifacts merely to regularize / color code bag types and tag categories – a stackenblocken type of task not even close to mission critical.

Afternoons afforded some time for wandering around to unexplored parts of the wider Porto Rafti area, including a few hikes near Merenda. We explored the so-called Kastro above the big limestone quarries chewed into Merenda mountain, where James McCredie recorded a large enclosure wall many years ago. McCredie did not find any associated artifacts, but with our sharp surveyor eyes we noted a few diagnostic Roman sherds. The architecture does not seem particularly Roman, and the site is rather mysterious overall, but fortunately that’s not our problem, since it’s not in the survey area!

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other archaeological questions to answer as we wade into the publication phase of the project. Chapters have been trickling into the editors over the last few months…if a bit slowly… so we’re hopeful that progress will continue on schedule. More updates to follow as we conclude 2024 with a bit of additional groundstone fun, some sampling, and maybe a bit of coring to round things out at the end of the summer.

June 11, 2024July 10, 2024

2024 Photos of the day

Since the tiny BEARS 2024 study season finished mapping on Koroni it was high time we return to various Raftis shenanigans; with a bonus visit from the local breeding swan pair!

June 4, 2024June 4, 2024

Koroni Champions!

Well, folks, it’s official: after five long meandering seasons, the rump of the BEARS team has finally completed one of the project’s most arduous, spiky-plant infested tasks – mapping and documenting the massive, sprawling tangle of architectural remains on the Koroni peninsula.

At approximately 9:30am today, June 4, 2024, Rob, Miriam, and I snapped the final photo of the final feature in the saddle area and hung a big “closed” sign on the site, at least as far as our little survey project is concerned. For those keeping score at home, our work on Koroni involved collection in two grids (on the acropolis and in the valley) during the 2019 season, walking 80 gnarly intensive survey units on the peninsula’s wooded slopes in the 2021 season, and painstakingly documenting over 1,000 walls and other architectural features all over the site during the 2022, 2023, and 2024 seasons. It is the only site in Porto Rafti that has been with us throughout every single season; very few days of the project passed by without a team hard at work over on Koroni.

Big thanks to the loyal Dr. Rob Stephan, with whom I was reminiscing about laying out the first Koroni grid squares in the valley way back in May 2019, the intrepid Maeve McHugh, who led the intensive survey on Koroni, and the heroic Miriam Clinton, who faced down the huge obstacle of Koroni architecture starting in 2022 and has created a really stellar documentation of this complex and challenging site with her teams in the last few years.

June 1, 2024June 1, 2024

BEARS 2024 Mini Study Season in Progress

Following a very productive “big” study campaign in the summer of 2023, just a one task remains to be completed in the field during the final season of the BEARS project in 2024: completing the documentation of the architectural remains on Koroni. Over the last two weeks, Miriam Clinton, Rob Stephan, Kat Apokatanidis and I have been tackling the thorns and walls up on the venerable citadel, with a brief cameo appearance by Grace Erny earlier this week. It feels a bit lonely to be here without our other stalwart project veterans, but nice to end the project on a reasonably mellow note. After another week of mapping, we’ll do one final round of checks in Brauron, and (aside from a few scientific endeavors, on which more in the coming months) then it will be time to put BEARS to bed!