The Bays of East Attica Regional Survey
An archaeological project centred on the bay of Porto Rafti
BEARS fans will be excited to learn that the preliminary report on the 2020 mini-study season and the 2021 season of survey on Praso and Koroni has just been published in the latest issue of the journal Mouseion.
https://doi.org/10.3138/mous.19.2.01
It’s quite the behemoth, with lots of great contributions from our crack team of surveyors and experts. If you’re dying to read and can’t get your hands on a pdf, don’t hesitate to zip us a note via email and we’ll send you a copy.
An underappreciated perk of directing archaeological projects is getting to design cool swag for the team at the end of each season. Usually, this is a favorite July activity, as there are many quiet, boring days of checking the database and writing up reports following the season that can be spiced up with a little graphic design. Unfortunately, I had to prepare my tenure portfolio in July 2022, and somehow with the chaos of the following academic year I never got ’round to getting BEARS 2022 t-shirts rigged up until late last month.
Better late than never, anyway! With the original “Porto Rafti island” silhouette design inspiration from team member Joseph Frankl as a base, the BEARS 2022 shirts follow a “War of the Worlds” theme, a brilliant suggestion from Grace Erny inspired by our discovery of nearly infinite tripod-type things (stone and ceramic) on Raftis island in 2022. The Raftis survey team is therefore appropriately under siege by a triad of three-legged attackers. To capture the range of environments the teams worked in this year, there are also two other themes – the Koroni squad’s adversaries come in the form of survey/dGPS tripods, and the town survey people are amongst the spindly legs of unfinished concrete country houses with rebar sticking out of the top. For the team members who found these goofy designs to be too silly, we also offered a simple version of Joey’s original design. Hooray for swag!
Well, it’s been a long winter with way too much going on, and the poor BEARS blog has been mightily neglected. If you’ve been missing that good old BEARS content, well, worry not – the exciting 2023 study season is coming up soon, and once the team is back in Porto Rafti, no doubt the creative minds of the project will come up with some fun and informative new posts to jam down the maw of the internet in due course. If you need a fix in the meantime, here is an update on tidbits of content from some of our team members!
Most directly relevant to the project, a short piece by Sarah Murray and Bartek Lis was recently published in Antiquity‘s Project Gallery. It offers some thoughts on the LH IIIC community in the bay. The little tidbit is open access, and a quick read, not even long enough to take up a full frappé-drinking session.
Along with Sarah Murray, Grace Erny & Melanie Godsey co-authored a conference paper on our new finds from Porto Rafti for the big Athens & Attica in the Iron Age and Archaic Period extravaganza at the American School of Classical Studies in December 2022. We had a great time enjoying wintry Athens for a mini BEARS reunion, along with Joseph Frankl who has been a member of the American School’s regular program this academic year and Athens resident Eleni Chreiazomenou. It doesn’t look like the video recording of the conference was made available online, but you can check out the program here. We are preparing a version of the paper for publication of the conference proceedings, so keep an eye out for that in the winter!
A few weeks later, to kick off January 2023, the team presented the 2022 survey’s main results in a short paper at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in New Orleans, Louisiana. This was the first in-person AIA meeting since the pandemic, and it was great to see everyone, drink overpriced beer in a soulless hotel lobby, and share our results in person. Although the hybrid format caused no end of technical difficulties, and the room was freezing due to a hyperactive air conditioner, a good time was had by all.
Also in December 2022 , an excellent paper by Grace Erny and Mel Godsey on professional networks and survey archaeology with an eye to gender and representation dropped in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies. The paper is followed by responses from a rich and distinguished array of scholars. If you are a fan of survey archaeology and curious about its disciplinary context, you won’t want to miss this important discussion! And if you need a pdf and don’t have access, just get in touch with Grace or Melanie, I am sure they’ll be happy to share.
Along the same lines, Grace was co-author on a meta-study in the prestigious American Journal of Archaeology on the demographics of the field. It’s open access, so there’s no excuse not to check it out!
Congrats to everyone for these great contributions to the wide world of scholarship. There are plenty more BEARS-related presentations and publications in the pipeline, so watch this space for further updates ahead of and during the coming season of work in Porto Rafti.
During the sweltering weekend of August 19-20, 2022, I had the unique opportunity to travel to Thorikos, an ancient settlement only a five-minute drive from modern day Lavrio, in Attica, Greece. The site of Thorikos is on the coast northeast of the Lavriotiki, the Lavrion area. This is a metalliferous region of Attica. The ancient town or deme comprised three areas: a double-bay harbour by the Aghios Nikolaos peninsula, the Adami plain with the lower reaches of the Potami valley, and the double-peaked Velatouri hill, c. 144 m asl.
The area has seen human activity since the Final Neolithic period (c. 4100-3100 BCE). Archaeological excavations have produced direct evidence, such as litharge and tools, which indicate that, at least since the end of the 4th millennium BCE, silver was extracted locally from the Lavrion argentiferous ores. The site of Thorikos has primarily been the focus of research by the Thorikos Archaeological Research Project (TARP) standing in a long tradition of Belgian fieldwork in the area. Such fieldwork started in 1960 with the excavations by Herman Mussche in the maritime fortification on the Aghios Nikolaos Peninsula. Since then, the site has been explored extensively by various Belgian teams. For more information on the history of this site and the research that has been done and is still ongoing, you can visit the project’s website.
The meeting in Lavrio between TARP and BEARS (the Bays of East Attica Regional Survey) was the result of regular scientific contact between Prof. Roald Docter (Ghent University) and Prof. Sarah Murray (University of Toronto). The two scholars and other Mediterranean Archaeologists working at their respective institutions share common research interests in the regional domains of Attica and Crete, two areas that hitherto only rarely have been discussed in connection with each other. The purpose of this first meeting between the representatives of the two projects was to bring eleven young researchers from the two universities together for discussion in an intensive two-day seminar.
This seminar this August was entitled “Connecting Land- and Seascapes in the Greek world: Ghent-Toronto Young Researchers Meeting, Summer 2022”. It offered an opportunity for us younglings to showcase our work, get to know some of our colleagues, and hear about the interesting work that is being done in Attica and Crete by students at both institutions. The seminar offered the possibility of remote and in-person participation. Thanks to the tireless efforts of my Ghentian counterparts, Sydney Patterson, Killian Regnier, and especially the hero-figure and overall tech master Quentin Drillat’s tenacity, the presentations and the discussion went smoothly throughout the packed two-day schedule.
Discussion flowed effortlessly both in-person and remote. I personally got the chance to talk about my research and thus gain as diverse feedback as possible. I am sure my colleagues, Elliott Fuller and Taylor Stark presenting from Canada, felt the same. We came away from these talks with a sense of wanting to look beyond the boundaries of our respective research topics and were inspired to actively seek converging elements, new avenues to think with, and a much broader horizon than normally is afforded.
The dinner on Saturday night was a fun opportunity to discuss all things archaeology in a more informal way. It was such a nice outing as we were also able to hear from the team of Ghentian Undergraduate students talk about their experience in Thorikos. I was also especially grateful for the guided tour Prof. Docter, Sydney, Killian, and Quentin had arranged for us, despite having just wrapped up their fieldwork season the previous day. Thankfully the famed μελτέμια (meltemia), the north winds which descend upon Greece in August, kept the heat at bay.
In organising this first joint Young Researchers Meeting in Thorikos, the aim was that this may result in (bi-)annual follow-ups given the continuing engagement of the participants both in Attica and on Crete. And indeed, interest was expressed by both groups to collaborate and exchange resources. All of us left the seminar that Sunday afternoon with a better understanding of the kind of work that is currently being done by both teams and an eagerness to move forward together in the future. All in all, it was a successful business weekend trip for all parties involved. On behalf of the Toronto team, I would like to kindly thank Prof. Docter and his team for being such gracious hosts; the Sunday-morning coffee run by Prof. Docter was especially appreciated by yours truly! I look forward to working with everyone in the future and am excited to see the kind of archaeology we can do together.
Check it out: the BEARS project is featured on the blog of the Canadian Institute in Greece this week! World domination cannot be too far behind…
https://www.cig-icg.gr/content/bays-east-attica-regional-survey-bears-2022-season-snouts-grindstone
After five weeks of fieldwork and study in Porto Rafti and Brauron, the BEARS 2022 season officially ended on July 2, as the final lingering team members departed the coast and dissipated to various points on the compass. After three seasons of fieldwork – in 2019, 2021, and 2022 – that means we’re pretty much finished with the survey, although a bit of additional architectural mapping remains to be mopped up in 2023. As the dust settles and everyone gets into a proper July routine, the time has come to get down to the real work: synthesizing and proceeding towards publication of the finds! Project personnel will be getting together a final 2022 report over the next few months, so look out for updates on that here later in the summer!
Meanwhile, we’re really happy with the progress we made (and all of the fun we had) this season: here’s a photo of the team at the final party/publication planning session in late June (absent are Miriam Clinton and Elizabeth Griffin, who had to leave the party a little early, Braden Cordivari, who zipped off to Turkey for additional fieldwork after week 2, our ephorate representative Eleni Chreiazomenou, who was busy with a photo exhibition in Athens, and object specialists Myrto Georgakopoulou, Phil Sapirstein, Margarita Nazou, and Bartek Lis, who have the good sense to stay away from wild-eyed fieldworkers during the evening hours).
Thanks everyone for your hard work – and thanks as always to the blog readers for following our posts.
For those of you still loyally following the blog, Kat Apokatanidis has written this post about the BEARS 2022 team’s maiden voyage to Koroni Islet. Enjoy!
The sea is nearly perfectly still, painted like molten silver or gold as the early morning sun peeks over the eastern horizon. The heat of the day is already thick in the air, visible and stifling even at seven in the morning. The BEARS team is gently rocked from side to side as captain Vasilis navigates the waters of the bay. Today we are headed to a new island, one which we have not yet surveyed. Situated just off the eastern coast of Koroni, an acropolis/fortress with which we are all too familiar by now, Koroni Island is a small patch of rocky land, its two gentle yet expansive hills its main identifying feature. The island’s eastern cliffs are small yet dramatic, giving the impression that its south-east coast has been cut all the way to the bottom of the sea. No wonder; this side of the island is the one to take the brunt of the Aegean’s relentless briny winds and land-eating waves. This feature of the landscape, despite its brutal origins, inspires our captain to bring his sailing boat, the intrepid Aphrodite, all the way to the very edge of the landmass so that we may disembark. The usual way would be to use the dingy but today our resident experienced Man of the Sea has other plans. With his expert maneuvering we arrive safely and begin our exploration.
Although we detect modern human activity almost immediately, the search for ancient activity drives us through the island’s dense maquis and sloping bedrock. Some seagulls fly above head, noting our presence wearily, but these resident faunae are more polite than those of Raftopoula, Praso, or even Raftis; they do not dive out of the sky intent on pecking our eyes out as, thankfully for us, Koroni Island is not their main nesting ground. And so, we are allowed to continue surveying this islet, though admittedly it does not yield a hefty bounty. And although the exploration itself is exciting, the heat of the summer day starts to become unbearable as the hours go by and the island’s terrain requires more effort to traverse. However, as with all other islands, the light southern breeze blowing from time to time makes things slightly better. And even though the island yields little evidence of ancient activity, it is enough to send us off with the same questions we have been asking of all the other places under our survey; why would anyone choose to live here?
