Early June witnessed the start of the second excavation season for the
Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project
[SNAP] on the eponymous hill and chert source located on what today is
the island’s north-west coast, a couple of kilometres south of the
harbour town Chora. SNAP has been running for the past three summers,
initially as an independent CIG survey (2013-14), then an official
collaboration with the Cycladic Ephorate of Antiquities when we turned
to excavation mode. Today the project’s co-directors are myself, Dr.
Tristan Carter of McMaster University, and Dr. Demetris Athanasoulis,
the head of the Cycladic Ephorate, while the team – the largest yet –
comprised some 25-35 students and scholars from Canada, Greece, the UK,
France, Serbia and the US.
Last year we commenced work on the hill’s western flanks, both up close
to the natural chert outcrops where the raw material was being extracted
and initially worked, and lower down on what today is a narrow flatter
coastal strip. In 2016 we revisited these areas – as none of the
previous year’s
sondages had been excavated to natural – as
well as expanding our work to neighbouring plots, whereby our summer’s
work involved the stratigraphic excavation of some 10 trenches. These
are relatively limited areas being exposed, nothing larger than a 2×2m
sondage,
as our focus tends to be deposit-oriented, rather than the
architectural foci of most excavations. Indeed we expect to find no
built features for Stélida is an early prehistoric quarry and stone tool
workshop, that we estimate to have been exploited – likely
intermittently – from the Lower Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic, i.e. an
estimated ≥250,000 – 9,000 years ago.
The archaeology of Stélida is dominated by the by-products of stone tool
manufacture, together with a small quantity of hammerstones, a number
of which are made of emery, a raw material native to Naxos, albeit from
the north-eastern part of the island, the best known outcrops being
around Apeiranthos and Koronos, some 15km linear distance from the site.
These artefacts can be found in overwhelming quantities - a large
bag-full from every zembil sieved! – and represents one the
major challenges facing our work, both methodologically in terms of how
one studies so many thousands of items, and pragmatically in terms of
having to carry such a weight of material off-site each day, and the
space required to store it all. Most of the artefacts recovered can be
conceptualised as production debris, with true end-products
under-represented if not completely absent from our stratigraphic units,
the logic being that having tested the raw material quality, the
knappes would have then roughed out cores and/or tool-blanks which would
then be transported off-site to their seasonal camps at which point the
finished implement would be fashioned. As such it has been a struggle
at times to date our deposits using a classic tool-typology approach,
with our assemblages quite distinct from other excavated earlier
prehistoric sites of the region – as for example the Franchthi and
Klisoura caves of the Argolid.
While tool-types and knapping traditions can provide us with a
broad-stroke chronology for our material, i.e. ‘Mesolithic’, or ‘Upper
Palaeolithic’, the fine-tuned dating system we require to answer many of
our research questions can only be achieved through the generation of
absolute dates via scientific techniques. To this end we had Dr.
Christelle Lahaye (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) visit to take a series
of samples for optically stimulated luminescence [OSL] dating, a
chronometric technique that is well established for earlier Palaeolithic
archaeology; indeed Dr. Lahaye has recently been applying it to some of
the classic Neanderthal sites of SW France, while elsewhere in Greece
it has produced dates of over 400,000 years old. The sampling itself
took place by moonlight… as exposure to the sun would ruin the process,
having initially studied in detail the stratigraphy of our main
sondages alongside our geo-archaeologists Dr. Dan Contreras (CNRS Aix-en-Marseille) and Justin Holcomb (Boston University).
Having top-notch scientists and methods at hand is alas not the end of
the problem however, as Stélida provides us with yet further challenges
due to the dynamic nature of its landscape. During the period within
which Stélida was being exploited by early modern humans, Neanderthals
and earlier hominins (a claim we make based on the types of tools we
find at the site), i.e. the Middle Pleistocene – Early Holocene in
geological terms, the landscape and environment would have changed
radically due to the fluctuating periods of glaciation and warmer
inter-glacial eras. During the cold periods the environment was probably
quite stable, with steppe-like low scrubby brush covering the hill;
however, as temperatures rose and precipitation increased, the shallow
roots of those bushes would have provided a poor anchor to the soil,
which in the context of heavier rainfalls would have begun to wash
downslope, only stabilising once again when warmer climes facilitated
the growth of more deep-rooted larger plants and trees. The net result
is that we are excavating the remains of a highly dynamic landscape, a
steep-sided hillslope that has undergone various periods of major
erosion, followed by epochs of stability. Most of what we have dug over
the past two years can be interpreted as colluvial (hill-wash) deposits,
where everything we find is in secondary context, having originated
from upslope knapping floors. That said, the assemblages within many of
these strata are quite homogenous, i.e. we get great swathes of Upper
Palaeolithic material moving quite rapidly
en masse, rather
than everything being completely mixed and undateable. In between these
colluvial fills we also believe that we can recognise periods of
stability, palaeosol development and even surfaces. These claimed
different kinds of deposits are being analysed by Dr. Panagiotis
(‘Takis’) Karkanas, a world-renowned micromorphologist and Director of
the American School’s Weiner Laboratory, who sampled some of our
excavation sections in late June.
It does remain however that in certain trenches these erosional
episodes provide us with stratigraphic inversion. For instance, our 3m
deep Trench 1 provides us with a series of deposits that almost always
contain small quantities of Upper Palaeolithic material in association
with far larger amounts of what appear to be much earlier Lower
Palaeolithic tools. Our working interpretation is that we have a series
of stable periods dating to the later Pleistocene, during which Upper
Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers worked at the site leaving knapping debris
on the surface of the hill. These stable periods were then bookended by
periods of climatic and environmental instability leading to major
periods of erosion that led to large quantities of soil – containing the
remains of much earlier Lower Palaeolithic activity – washing down from
the upper parts of the hill and covering the Upper Palaeolithic
knapping surfaces, and so-on. As such, we are quite prepared for a
series of OSL dates from this trench that do not increase in age as we
descend the stratigraphic sequence; this will be yet another challenge
to explain to the scientific community in detail as to how such dates
are still highly meaningful, and can attest to different periods of
deep-time activity at Stélida.
The major discovery of the season was a hearth that we believe to be of Upper Palaeolithic date, a feature that is in situ
and located in front of one of the major chert outcrops at the top of
the hill, sealed by some 75cm of artefact-packed colluvial deposit. Here
finally we have something which is both easily dateable (via OSL,
thermoluminescence, and/or carbon-14), and will provide us with a date of an actual series of activities, rather than our usual terminus ante quem results (‘material from deposit X is at least
date Y’). We also took a great many soil samples for water sieving with
the hope that we will recover charred plant materials, indices of both
Upper Palaeolithic cuisine and the local environment, as Stélida’s
acidic soils have otherwise destroyed all other organic finds from the
other trenches.
For those of you attending the annual meetings of the Archaeological
Institute of America in Toronto this January, you can find out more
about our 2016 discoveries when we present a paper in a session
dedicated to the fieldwork carried out under the aegis of the Canadian
Institute in Greece; see you there!
Tristan Carter
SNAP co-director
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