Miriam Clinton and Robert Stephan atop a ruined structure while mapping
on Koroni in 2024
Anyone who spends enough time working on archaeological field projects
will eventually learn several immutable ‘rules’ about how things tend to go. First,
the most interesting and exciting finds always appear on the very last day of
an excavation when you desperately need to backfill trenches and wrap things up
to complete the season. Second, whenever you wish there would be a nice breeze
to cool your team off on a hot day, the air will be a thick, humid doldrum of
stillness, while on days where you need to fly your drone, the most horrendous
hurricane-force gales will mercilessly pummel your site as if propelled by a
vengeful god. Finally, most definitely guaranteed: you can rely on the fact
that no matter how many times you test out your electronic equipment prior to
the season, it will not work properly when you really need it to – this is
especially true if there are important or many people staring at you as you continuously
click buttons, turn the unit on and back off again, and otherwise struggle to
troubleshoot various tech issues while muttering and cursing quietly under your
breath.
In other words, archaeological projects almost involve at least a little
bit of chaos, and even the best-laid plans end up scattered in a colorful
confetti of nonsense on the lab floor. This is not meant as a criticism!
Rather, it simply comes with the territory. Many practitioners (present company
included) arrive in the field having freshly emerged, gollum-like, from dark
winter lairs requiring struggles with musty tomes rather than dGPS units and
require a few beats to reboot. Archaeological fieldwork involves a lot of
elements that are out of one’s control – like the weather – or hard to
predict – like what turns up when you stick a shovel in the ground. Part
of the fun of the entire operation is that you don’t really know how things are
going to go and must make constant adjustments to deal with surprises, as in a
video game.
After 15+ years spent learning these rules, I was fully prepared to
embrace a ‘chaotic era’ while getting ready to co-direct a field project for
the first time in 2019, when we were setting up for the first season of the
Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS), back in 2019. Weirdly, however,
the project went extremely smoothly, with an almost disappointing lack of
proper chaos from beginning to end, even taking into account the coronavirus
pandemic in 2020. Every season we had about the exact amount of time and
personnel that we needed to do what we needed to do, usually finishing up
fieldwork a few days early so that we could spend time tidying up loose ends.
Nobody got injured, no drones were crashed, and we never even lost a team
member or an artifact into the sea, despite many opportunities amidst
transferring people and objects on/off a boat nearly every day of every season.
There was a potentially chaotic moment on the last day of mapping on Raftis
Island in 2023, when we found a gold coin while walking back to the boat to
leave (see rule #1 above). But even then, all we had to do was put it in a bag
and take it to the museum – hardly making a confetti of nonsense out of
our plans!
Team members hopping off the dinghy onto Raftis Island via beach-rock
hopscotch in July 2024
The closest we had to a chaos, I suppose, arrived courtesy of the unexpectedly
massive tangle of architectural remains on the Koroni peninsula. The Koroni
peninsula, located at the south end of the bay of Porto Rafti, is home to a
fortified acropolis and town, mostly datable to the Hellenistic period (third
century BCE) and associated with Ptolemaic mercenaries arriving to the area
during the Chremonidean War (260s BCE). A small team of researchers from the
American School of Classical Studies had produced a plan of the fortifications
and other architecture on the site during a brief campaign in 1960. Since
mapping and documentation technology has advanced considerably during the last
sixty years, one of our goals in the BEARS project was to revisit the
architecture on Koroni and re-document the remains to create an updated plan of
the site, with a team of mappers led by Miriam Clinton from Rhodes College.
It turns out that the original plan of the site made by the ASCSA team
was, to put it generously, a bit more of an abstraction, verging towards
imaginary fever dream territory, than an accurate recording. As we progressed
with Koroni mapping during the 2022 season, it became clear that there were
hundreds upon hundreds of walls on the site that had simply been ignored by the
ASCSA team, stretching across the saddle below the acropolis and down its
slopes on all sides. We threw a ton of personnel at the project of completing a
proper map of all these walls in 2022. However, much of the site is now badly
overgrown, not to mention steep and sheltered from any breeze by the acropolis looming
above, so the work was punishing, and progress slow. Moreover, the more team
members slogged about the site, the more unknown and unmapped structures kept
emerging from the bushes. Thus, following yet another seven-week campaign of
mapping on Koroni during the 2023 study season, there remained at least eighty
full undocumented structures in the saddle of the site.
Pondering architecture amidst the thorny slopes of the Koroni saddle
Thus, Miriam, myself, and fellow BEARS lifer Robert Stephan doggedly
returned to finish the Koroni map in early June 2024. All in all, we ended up
mapping more than 1,000 walls on Koroni, including not only Hellenistic
structures, but also architecture dating to the Bronze Age, and many probably
Medieval or Early Modern installations that had been ignored in previous maps. I
am happy to report that the dGPS unit (mostly) behaved itself – following the
obligatory preliminary muttering session on day one, of course!
In some ways it was slightly less than ideal to have such a small rump
of a 2024 season; surely much more elegant to call it a full wrap after the
epic and hugely productive 2023 campaign! At the same time, it was great fun to
have an opportunity to spend a mellow time in the field churning through tasks with
two very old and dear friends (I met Miriam working on the Saronic Harbors
Archaeological Research Project way back in 2008 while Rob and I were in grad
school together from 2007–2013). I guess that’s another important rule of
archaeology – one of the best parts is that you get to meet amazing and
interesting people who become your friends for life!
Triumphant Koroni mappers of 2024 after completing documentation of the
final feature
In addition to – at long last – completing the gargantuan task
of mapping Koroni, the work of the BEARS project in 2024 included a geological
component. As readers of the 2023 BEARS blog post may recall, amongst the
surprising finds from Raftis Island were a huge assemblage of groundstone
artifacts made from a chaotic array of different materials – andesites and
basalts and granodiorites and magnetites and gabbros galore! Thus, in July we
arranged for a geologist, Christos Stergiou, to visit Raftis along with our
groundstone specialist Eleni Chreiazomenou to gather some material for
geochemical sampling and analyses, which will help us to better understand
where all these materials came from. That, in turn, will help us fill in our
reconstruction of the trade and exchange networks people living on Raftis in
the Bronze Age may have been involved with.
Eleni Chreiazomenou and Christos Stergiou with a heap of groundstone
artifacts on Raftis Island
It was a beautiful day out on the island, though of course (see rule #2
above) it was very, very windy, which made getting onto and off the steep
slopes of the island a fun challenge (especially at the end of the day when
everyone’s bags were weighed down with many kilograms of special rocks).
Christos and Eleni also joined us in the Brauron museum the following day to
have another look at the material we had collected in previous seasons. I was
excited to learn that some of our ‘mystery rocks’ (every project has them!) are
in fact iron ores, which may add another prong to the “fires of industry” theme
of the project’s results. Some of these will also be sent for geochemical
analysis, which will help us determine where they might have come from. It will
be very interesting to see how these results shake out, hopefully over the
coming year.
Eleni and Christos working with groundstone artifacts in the museum
Meanwhile, my co-director Catherine Pratt and I have begun gathering
chapters for the final publication of the project’s results. We are excited to
have many new things to say about the history and archaeology of this beautiful
corner of Attica, from the hard-earned new multi-period architectural map of
Koroni to detailed information about geological materials entering the bay in the
Bronze Age, and heaps more in between. Thanks, as always, to all readers for
taking an interest in our work in Porto Rafti and to the many organizations and
individuals who have made the BEARS project possible!
Eleni, Christos, and the author traipsing off into the horizon on the
slopes of Raftis Island
Sarah
Murray, University of Toronto, co-director, BEARS