The Bays of East Attica Regional Survey
An archaeological project centred on the bay of Porto Rafti
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
As part of the 2022 field season, BEARS is expanding its search for ancient activity in Porto Rafi beyond the inner bay and islands. The “town survey”, as it’s called, is being led by the fearless Maeve McHugh and is focused on documenting parts of the ancient landscape that are a bit more distant from the beautiful waters of the Porto Rafti bay. This includes the urban core of Porto Rafti as well as agricultural fields that surround the city—a landscape diverse in vegetation and modern habitation. The goals of the town survey are different from the surveys of Praso, Raftis, Pounta, and Koroni. From the town survey, we hope to gain a better understanding of the relationship between our well documented bay sites (e.g. Raftis) and important settlements in east Attica outside our survey zone, such as the sanctuary at Brauron. The town survey also has the potential to shed light on land use in the “chora” (countryside) of the two Athenian demes that inhabited the bay of Proto Raftis (Steiria and Prasiae). Additionally, the survey will help define settlement patterns of the Bronze Age and Late Roman period, time periods that we have already documented on the islands.
Team 1: Return to Raftis Island
Fans of BEARS will know that in 2019, we conducted gridded collection on about half of Raphtis island – the distinctive pyramidal island in the Bay of Porto Raphti, famous for the Roman statue set atop its peak. Fieldwork on Raphtis in 2019 yielded a dense and varied scatter of mostly LH IIIC and Late Roman finds. We hope to finish gridded collection on the island this summer (where possible – the topography is extremely steep in places!) and gain a better understanding of the nature of the assemblage there in these different periods. True to form, Raphtis is producing ceramics and lithics galore, with the favorite find of the week so far being a Mycenaean dog figurine. Raphtis’ “little sister” island of Raphtopoula, located to its northwest, is another potential candidate for survey this year, if we can figure out how best to approach its rocky cliffs.
Team 2: Intensive survey in a highly developed environment
Much of our BEARS fieldwork during 2019 and 2021 focused on archaeological sites that were previously known, whether via extensive survey or excavation. This year, however, we’re seeking to gain a clearer sense of the distribution of finds around the bay by conducting intensive pedestrian survey in the fields and empty lots scattered around and between the vacation homes of Porto Rafti. Dr. Maeve McHugh is leading the charge in this arena and has started working in Zone B, which denotes the north side of the bay. Obsidian scatters and Classical-Hellenistic pithoi are already forthcoming, and we are looking forward to finding out what other material these fields will yield.
Team 3: Architectural documentation
We’re fortunate this year to be joined by Dr. Miriam Clinton from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, who is mapping and documenting architecture on the Koroni peninsula. Team members on Koroni have been measuring and photographing architectural features, as well as recording GPS points to be plotted in a GIS. The work has been focused on Koroni’s acropolis and is laying the groundwork for a detailed architectural plan of the site. We’re also very happy to welcome four undergraduate students from Rhodes College. BEARS is their first archaeological project, and we hope they will be hooked for life!
Team 4: The Brauron Museum
Finds analysis continues apace in the Brauron Museum. This week, Dr. Rob Stephan and Koroni expert Melanie Godsey have been processing the new finds from the field and reading the pottery collected from Praso in 2021. The small diachronic islet with material from every period from Early Bronze Age to Modern continues to offer new glimpses into islet life. We’re especially excited to hear what metallurgical specialist Myrto Georgakopoulou and tile expert Phil Sapirstein have to say about the fires of industry that once blazed on Praso’s shores.
We’ll be posting frequent updates and musings here throughout the 2022 season. And keep an eye out for our Photo of the Day series, back by popular demand from 2021.
Since there was a technical kerfuffle in the playing of the BEARS presentation in the AIA proceedings, resulting in something of an unfortunate nonsense confusing blarggg of a video playback, I have posted the video on YouTube for those who would like to see what we actually had to report from our two recent seasons of study and fieldwork. Happy watching. – BEARS management
Greetings BEARS fans! It’s been an exhausting and weird end to 2021, with professional responsibilities and pressing tasks allowing little spare time for blogging lately, but just when you needed it most, here comes the beautifully titled year of 2022, the double deuce, the year of the tiger! Surely it will bring great archaeological survey finds, if nothing else? Little known fact – my high school sports jersey number was 22 AND our mascot was a tiger, so I feel a lot of good vibes already. Will be extra much so when we make it to 2222, so stay tuned about 200 years for the real triumphs!
As always for Greek archaeologists, the first big event of the New Year is the Archaeological Institute of America conference. This year the event is taking place online. It contains a little bit of content about BEARS and even more exciting research being presented by BEARS team members. Below are the dates and times of the relevant presentations. The BEARS lecture has been pre-recorded, so if you are a blog reader and don’t feel like registering for the conference, the video (an .mp4 file, about 18 minutes) can be shared directly upon request. Note that all times listed below are Pacific standard time, since the (now all virtual) meeting is “based” in San Francisco.
1. BEARS 2020 and 2021 field report
THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 8:00-10:30 AM, session 1A: New Fieldwork In Aegean Prehistory
The Bays of East Attica Regional Survey 2020–2021: New Evidence for Settlement, Exchange, and Craft Production from Porto Rafti, Greece (20 minutes, 4th talk in the session)
Sarah C. Murray, University of Toronto, Catherine E. Pratt, Western University, Melanie Godsey, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Joseph Frankl, University of Michigan, Bartłomiej Lis, Polish Academy of Sciences, Grace Erny, Stanford University, Robert Stephan, University of Arizona, Maeve McHugh, University of Birmingham, and Philip Sapirstein, University of Toronto
2. Mel Godsey presents on her dissertation research about the site of Koroni!
THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM, session 2B: Sanctuaries And Public Space In The Hellenistic Period
Ptolemaic Trade Routes and the Garrison at Koroni (15 minutes, 5th/last talk in the session)
Melanie Godsey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
3. A whole session on Archaic and Classical Crete organized by Grace Erny and friend of BEARS Dominic Pollard!
FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 8:00-10:30 AM, session 4D: Bridging The “Gap”: Interdisciplinary Approaches To The Cretan Polis In The Archaic And Classical Periods (Joint AIA/SCS Colloquium)
ORGANIZER(S): Jesse Obert, University of California, Berkeley, Dominic Pollard, University College London, and Grace Erny, Stanford University
DISCUSSANTS: Dominic Pollard, University College London and Grace Erny, Stanford University
4. Phil Sapirstein discusses rooftiles from Archaic Didyma!
FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 8:00-10:30 AM, session 4E: Geometric And Archaic Architecture
Archaic Architectural Terracottas from Didyma (20 minutes, first talk in the session)
Philip Sapirstein, University of Toronto
5. Mel Godsey (in tandem with a WARP colleague Machal Gradoz) provides an analysis of connectivity as evidenced by survey pottery from the western Argolid!
SESSION BLOCK 7: SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 8:00-11:00 AM, session 7H: Ancient Greek Pottery: Processes Of Production And Analysis
Regional Connectivity and Ceramic Consumption: Pottery of the Western Argolid (20 minutes, 5th talk in the session)
Machal E Gradoz, University of Michigan and Melanie Godsey, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Overall there looks to be tons of great content in this year’s conference, so if you haven’t registered already and need something to entertain you this weekend, head on over to the AIA website and sign up for the fun. Too bad we won’t be able to all hang out in person and catch up with old friends around the conference hallways yet again this year, but we look forward to interacting with any interested friends and colleagues online in the coming days.
It is hard to believe that the calendar has waded well into October! It’s been a real BEAR of a semester up here in Toronto thus far, with real in person meetings and classes reminding us how much extra time it takes outta the day to get dressed in real clothes and walk somewhere; not a grand pile of zoom events and conferences rivalling our Praso tile piles in size!
Amidst the chaos we’ve managed to at least send off our report for the 2021 BEARS season for peer review, which is a nice way to mark the start of proper fall. To mark the occasion, here are some fun stats from the 2021 season for all you numbers fans and accountants out there.
On the island of Praso we surveyed 107 grid squares with the following results:
3,524 sherds, 266 lithics, and 320 ‘others’ collected
23,831 tiles counted & weighed!
(of which 26, representing 4 fabrics, were collected)
On Koroni and parts nearby we surveyed 57 units and encountered at least 23,831 hostile bushes and plants, collecting none.
Not bad for a season that almost wasn’t! Stay tuned for more winter updates, stray thoughts, and events as the dark season approaches.
Perhaps of interest to BEARS fans, an update on the 2021 season of the project was featured recently on the Canadian Institute in Greece’s blog. You can check out the post here, conspicuously decked out like a wanton colourful courtesan between the austere B&W stylings of the Fred Winter collection.
During the final week of work of the 2021 BEARS project, Bartek Lis, who was working on the LH IIIC material from Raftis and Praso, very astutely pointed out that the pottery wasters we had collected from Praso were going to be difficult to share with colleagues using 2-dimensional imagery, given their complex and highly irregular geometry. Fortunately our tile specialist Phil Sapirstein also happens to be one of the world’s experts on making highly accurate models of small objects, and he very generously spent a few extra hours in the museum photomodeling a couple of wasters and a piece of what we think might be a Late Bronze Age kiln. Check em out on our Sketchfab account, where a few models of artifacts from the 2019 season live as well.
In the weeks since the last remains of the BEARS 2021 team dematerialized back out into their constituent home coordinates in the ‘real’ world, I’ve spent most of my time communing with the non-human aspects of the project: all of the data, ideas, and photos that we produced during the five weeks of the season. While most members of the team roll off to other projects or activities for the rest of the summer once we finish up, it’s up to the beleaguered director to take care of end-of-season business, from double-checking that everything is in order in the database and GIS to writing up reports and publications detailing the work we did in the field. It’s always sort of sad to bid farewell to the wonderful daily routine of satisfying outdoor work and camaraderie that the fieldwork season brings, but with BEARS that sadness is tempered by the incredible quantity and fascinating nature of the evidence we’ve collected. Both in 2019 and in 2021 it’s been a pleasure to get the old intellectual engine fired up in the aftermath of the season and start trying to figure out what kinds of new stuff we can say about the past based on the season’s work.
This season we spent the majority of our time conducting gridded collection on Praso, the nearest-to-shore and most easily accessible of the four uninhabited islets in the bay. Of course Praso was always one of our targets for survey in the project, but I wouldn’t say it ever loomed large as a big priority. Part of the reason we decided to move Praso up to the front of the schedule this year was because most of our Bronze Age inclined team members were not able to join us due to continuing pandemic complications, and I felt strongly that we should try to “save” the remainder of survey on Raftis (which we already know is a big Bronze Age site) for 2022, when they’ll be back with the team.
In other words, we decided to survey Praso this year because we thought it wouldn’t be all that great or interesting! My idea was partly to kill time while also being productive until the whole team could return in 2022. Praso seemed like a good substitute for Raftis from this point of view – we wanted to stay out on islands as much as possible so we’d be safely socially-distanced from the local community during work; Praso seemed small enough that even with just the six of us that were out in the field for most of the season, we’d be able to finish it all in 2021; and there was supposedly plenty of Late Roman pottery on the surface, which suited our team of mostly non-Prehistorians, especially Joey and Rob, the two project Romanists who made up about 20% of the field team for the first couple of weeks!
Grace already wrote a nice post about the early days of our survey on Praso, so readers of the blog already know that we actually ended up finding A LOT more than just Late Roman pottery on the islet! This was a big surprise, because Praso has essentially zero presence in existing literature. Apparently nobody has really noticed or cared that the density of surface finds on this low-key little spit of land is genuinely astonishing. If we account for limited visibility, our data suggest that many of the 20×20 meter survey squares on the islet contained upwards of 10,000 individual artifacts…far more than what we saw on Raftis, which up until 2019 was the densest, largest surface concentration of material I’d seen in 15 years of survey in Greece!
What’s more, the range of periods represented on Praso is very broad, as Grace noted: it is a very, very diachronic islet. This is notably highly against the trend for the area – the sites we’ve investigated so far have tended to see intense activity, but only in 1–2 periods: Final Neolithic/Early Bronze Age for the Pounta peninsula, LH IIIC & 6th-7th century CE for Raftis, the 3rd century BCE on Koroni. But on Praso there is something from nearly every period that’s represented in the bay overall, from earlier prehistory to Ottoman and WW II era artifacts.
It is a little funny that what is so far the only place we’ve seen around Porto Rafti with consistent human exploitation through time is also seemingly the ONLY place in the area that archaeologists have basically never spent any time poking around. My Bronze-Agey advisors and mentors have all swam out to Raftis islet – long documented to have some kind of LH IIIC pottery presence – and even desolate Koroni islet; there are plenty of little discussions of sherdage and even burials on Raftopoula in various reports. But Praso has somehow slipped under everyone’s radar. Well, except the many people that park their boats next to the protected south side of the island to swim all summer, of course. As usual, the BEARS team had a sort of daily dose of cognitive dissonance, wandering past lackadaisical sunbathers to spend hours and hours laboriously sorting through huge quantities of largely ignored but exquisitely preserved and varied archaeological remains.
Of course, the big question on our minds now is just what was so appealing about little Praso that made it such an attractive spot for people to descend upon from the Final Neolithic to the Late Roman periods.
It is immediately apparent from our survey finds that one of the reasons people spent time on Praso must have had to do with its affordances for craft production – amongst the most unexpected finds from the Praso survey are significant quantities of waste from ceramic and metal production! So far we can’t say too much about the metallurgical activity, since we haven’t been able to do much analysis or contextualization of the slags and ores, etc., but our heads are already spinning with the analytical directions towards which the evidence for ceramic production are leading us. First, it is clear that a regionally important type of LH IIIC pottery was made on Praso – the fabric of the wasters matches the so-called White Ware that is abundant at the cemetery of Perati and on Raftis, as well as at other sites up and down the Euboean gulf. The number of well-documented LH IIIC ceramic production sites in all of the Greek mainland can be counted on one hand, so this is a very rare and exciting discovery. Second, it seems that the many tiles we documented on the Koroni peninsula, dated to the Classical/Hellenistic period, were ALSO being manufactured on Praso. Finally, the same probably goes for the many Late Roman tiles from Raftis. The fabrics of the waste products and the finished products across the sites all match really nicely, at least on first inspection. I had never, ever seen tile wasters in a survey before Praso, but we have collected quite a few – just one of many wild surprises Praso had in store for our little BEARS crew this June.
Suffice it to say that there is a lot to think about as we try to put together the pieces for our 2021 season report. Aside from all of the evidence for craft production, we have the normal embarrassment of finds to deal with –thousands of sherds of well-preserved pottery, a few hundred lithics, plus 300+ “other” objects, including groundstone tools (and even one groundstone vessel!), many Bronze Age figurines, loomweights, lamps, glass, metal objects of bronze, iron, and lead…not to mention a haul of worked, often-perforated terracotta mystery objects that might have had something to do with craft production (or…with the well-documented local tendency of perforating almost everything, which the team knows very well).
One of the appealing parts of archaeology is that you really never know what you will find on any given day or in a given season, let alone from moment to moment. This creates a certain kind of chaos in one’s scholarship, because you might head to a region or a site hoping to find one thing, but the archaeological record has another idea in mind, and then you just have to deal with it. Some find this chaos to be frustrating, but in my experience it has the very salutary effect of keeping your scholarship and ideas dynamic and fresh. For example, when I went to work in the Mazi Plain back in 2014, I was hoping we would find some sites that dated to my major period of interest, the end of the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. Instead there was nothing at all in the plain from the entire period between Late Mycenaean and Archaic – so I ended up spending most of the project obsessively documenting a Late Classical fortification. This ended up constituting several summers of quite satisfying and enjoyable fieldwork, and I learned a lot, both about documenting a massive fortress and about historical fortification architecture!
A sort of funny reversal of that trend, though, seems to be happening for me at BEARS. When I started thinking about working in Porto Rafti my main area of research interest was long-distance trade and exchange in the Late Bronze Age; I was primarily hoping we would recover remains of a settlement associated with the import-rich cemetery of Perati, with the idea that these would shed light on the nature of the region’s engagement with the eastern Mediterranean. However, over the last two years, I’ve become much more interested in the anthropology of craft production, especially thinking about how to reconstruct the roles and identities of craftspeople within society, and much LESS interested in the bigger system of Bronze Age trade. So I guess it is a little bit supernatural-seeming that the archaeological record is being so accommodating in that regard. In addition to lots of cool evidence about trade and interaction, of course, now we have a whole amazing assemblage of craft production remains! Either I’m just really lucky, or karma has something pretty terrible in store for me soon to make up for this serendipitous archaeological turn of events.
That doesn’t even take into account my other obsession in life – Soviet propaganda art, which of course very often features the most captivatingly semi-hagiographic imagery about the glorious nature of all FIRES OF INDUSTRY. So that has really set me up to be uniquely qualified for designing a sweet BEARS 2021 t-shirt/logo that captures the essence of our discovery on Praso.
Long story short, I can definitely say that Porto Rafti is the best place a person like me could ever could have chosen as a location to run a survey project! We’ll have more to say about the serious sides of interpreting the evidence soon, but for now let us all take some time to bask in the newly-discovered glow of Praso the Great.
