Our survey project, the Western Argolid Regional Project, or WARP, has
just wrapped up the third year of fieldwork. Over three years, we’ve
fielded 17 field teams, 62 field walkers and 12 team leaders from Canada
and the US, and this remarkable group has surveyed nearly 8,000 units
covering over 18 square kilometers. That represents the fieldwork that
we applied to do in our five-year plan, submitted by the CIG on our
behalf to the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports. It’s a pretty
remarkable achievement, I think, and it’s entirely due to the incredibly
hard work of all of the many students that have worked on the project
over the past three years.
The landscape hasn’t made their work any easier. This year we worked in
the zone between our 2014 and 2015 field seasons in the territories of
all four of the villages that are part of our survey area: Lyrkeia,
Sterna, Malandreni, and Schinochori. The terrain was really variable,
from flat, well-maintained groves on the valley bottom to upland
plateaus to steep slopes covered in maquis (mostly kermes oak, Greek
πουρνάρι) that scratches skin and rips cloth, wild sage bushes that fill
eyes and nostrils with pollen and dust, thistles, and thorny vines.
One of the interesting results of this year was the very low artifact
densities. In 2014 we counted over 10,000 tiles and sherds per square
kilometer surveyed; in 2015 that number was about 6,500, and in 2016, it
was just above 2,700. In some ways, this wasn’t too surprising; a
relatively large amount of our territory this year was taken up by long,
high ridges oriented east-west that back up against the mountain range
that separates the Inachos and Xerias river valleys. The ridges
themselves were too rocky and removed from arable land to have sustained
settlements in most periods. Rather, our sites this year tended to be
located on small hills immediately above the course of the Inachos
river, especially at “pinch points” where the valley narrows. On the
east side of our survey area, this type of site was represented by
Kastraki, where the ruins of a Classical farmstead, with the remains of
its stone tower and a large millstone, were surrounded by a fairly dense
scatter of sherds and tiles, including Late Roman material.
Many of our high density fields from the first two seasons were
especially associated with Classical and early Hellenistic materials.
Our 2014 season included the polis of ancient Orneai, which seems to
have reached its maximum extent and intensity in these periods, and our
2015 season included a large settlement near Schinochori, probably a
town associated with the Argive polity. In the 2016 season, however,
only a scattering of Classical and Hellenistic artifacts were found on
the left bank of the Inachos river. Thus, it may be that we have
evidence for a boundary between the communities of the plain (surveyed
in 2015) and those of the upper valleys (surveyed in 2014), manifesting
itself as a largely empty space or borderland
. This was not
true in all periods, however: we found fairly consistent traces of
Medieval and early Modern material in the 2016 season, especially on the
slopes and hills above the river and its tributaries.
In non-archaeological developments, we continued our little
traditions of Saturday fieldtrips to sites in the area, of going to see a
play at Epidavros (this time, a raucously hilarious performance of
Aristophanes’ Ploutos) and of adopting a local stray puppy and taking it back to North America.
For more information on WARP, please visit our project website and blog at westernargolid.org!
Dimitri Nakassis
WARP co-director
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