The Pylos Regional Archaeological Project Part I: Overview and The Archaeological Survey (original) (raw)
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Eurydice Kefalidou (Ed.), , 2022
Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Classical Archaeology, 2018 - Volume 6: The Riverlands of Aegean Thrace / River Valleys and Regional Economies The papers of this volume address topics such as the reconfiguration of ancient river routes, the settlement and exploitation patterns that were formed around them, the boundaries of the chora of various cities, towns, villages and farmsteads, and the communication or the tensions between different groups that moved or expanded beyond their original habitation zone due to environmental and/or economic reasons. Panels 2.4 and 2.7 explore multiple facets of some Central and Eastern Mediterranean riverlands.
The Phrygian Hinterland South of Temenothyrai (Uşak)
Early Christianity, 2016
Our knowledge of urban life in antiquity abounds in comparison with that of the living conditions of rural populations. To shed more light on one rural region, my team and I carried out several archaeological surface sur vey campaigns in the Phrygian hinterland south of Temenothyrai, the present-day provincial capital U §ak, from 2001 onward. The region was chosen because of its early Christian, especially Montanist, traces in the U §ak museum. In addition, the Montanist settlements of Tymion and Pepouza, known from literary sources, could be expected to be south of Temenothyrai. "While this was the initial motivation to investigate the region, it did not influence the project's methodology. Present-day surface surveys can no longer be thematically limited, for example as a survey of Montanist sites. We rather examined and documented the traces of human coloni zation and agricultural activity of all historical periods, that is, from pre historic to Ottoman times. Nonetheless, for the purpose of this article the focus will rest mainly on the late Roman/early Byzantine time frame. The archaeological campaigns were interdisciplinary, integrating ar chaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, ethno-archaeology and architecture (3D graphics), geomatics, geophysics and geology, socioeconomic histo ry, history of religions and other disciplines1 to gain a multifaceted picture. One of the goals was not only to document ancient sites of settlement, as has often been done in more traditional surveys, but also to explore their environments: isolated sites in the countryside such as oil presses and cis terns, bridges and roads, waterways and water supplies, manmade land terraces and other traces of agricultural land use, in short all clues that il luminate the interaction between human settlement and the "natural" en 1 See further W. Tabbernee and P. Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion: The Discovery and Ar chaeological Exploration of a Lost Ancient City and an Imperial Estate (Berlin, 2008), 134 (Lampe). The book is henceforth abbreviated as PT.
The excavation of the foundation shafts for the pillars of the new shelter over the site of Akrotiri in Thera (1999-2003) necessitated the continuation of archaeological investigations around Sector Alpha, which, until then, was the northernmost excavated area of the settlement. The area presented in this paper extends to the north of the House of the Ladies and Sector Alpha, as well as to the northeast of Sector Alpha. Our research was based initially on the information from the archival data of the first excavations in the vicinity, as well as that of the tunnels during those same years (1967-1969). Spyridon Marinatos, when first faced with the problem of an ancient site shrouded in tons of volcanic pumice, tried to investigate it by opening (underground) tunnels in the pumice, in order to track buildings but also leave the landscape above ground intact. The method was abandoned and the tunnels with time collapsed. But what prompted this paper was the (deluge of) new information from investigations in connection with the construction of a new shelter: surface volcanic materials were removed, and proper archaeological excavations took place where the new shelter pillars would be erected. The presentation follows a chronological sequence from the earliest levels to the latest, and follows the evidence of human activities and interventions from the Early Cycladic period until the latest pre-eruption phase.