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.