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.
