The summer of 2018 saw the
Stelida Naxos Archaeological Project
[SNAP] begin to segue from excavation to study mode, with a far smaller
number of active trenches, and a greater emphasis placed on
documentation, sampling and analyses of the finds. This was the fourth
season of our digging at this important early prehistoric stone tool
manufacturing site and chert source on the island’s northwest coast, the
project co-directed by Dr. Tristan Carter (Associate Professor,
McMaster University), and Dr. Demetris Athanasoulis (Director, Cycladic
Ephorate of Antiquities). The team was also slightly smaller than
before, never exceeding 33 at any one time, a mix of long-term senior
members, graduate students, visiting specialists and a swathe of
bright-eyed and bushy tailed undergraduates. Indeed, we pride ourselves
on making space for students and junior scholars, including 16 from
Canadian academic institutions, plus a handful from Athens University (
Figure 1:
The 2018 SNAP team, including 16 Canadian students from McMaster,
Toronto, Western and Winnipeg universities (Anjelica Bellavia / SNAP
2018)). As before, our team remains steadfastly international, with
scholars, students and professional archaeologists alike from not only
Canada and Greece, but also Cyprus, France, Serbia, Turkey, the UK and
US.
The early part of the season saw a lot of on-site activity above and
beyond work in the trenches, particularly with regard to mapping and
geological studies. The past couple of seasons have seen us putting a
lot of effort into producing a detailed topographic map of the site,
working with a Naxian specialist in drone photography who took
overlapping images that covered the extent of the hill, and our original
(2013-14) survey area. Using photogrammetry it has then been possible
to generate a composite image of the entire site which this season we
then geo-referenced using differential GPS technology (thanks to Doug
Faulmann of INSTAP-EC, and Dr. Joe Boyce of McMaster University) that
will ultimately allow MA student Yorgan Pitt to produce a digital
elevation model of 8cm resolution! This map will allow us to not only
locate our excavation trenches with greater accuracy, but also – more
importantly – enable us to consider how the hill’s micro-topography has
shaped the archaeological record. We have long appreciated that Stelida
is a dynamic landscape that underwent significant changes throughout the
≥250,000 years that the site was used, much of which likely related to
the major climatic fluctuations of the last Ice Age and subsequent
warmer periods which would have impacted levels of precipitation, types
of vegetation and soil stability, winds and downslope erosion. Almost
everything we have excavated over the past four years we appreciate to
be in secondary context, hillwash deposits that likely mark periods of
climate change. Thus when we excavate an artefact-rich stratum we are
not investigating the
in situ remains of prehistoric
tool-makers, but the displaced residue of these ancient stone workers.
Our digital elevation model will help us understand where these
artefacts would have originated based on local slope angle, erosional
gullies, vegetation and the like. A wonderful side-benefit of this drone
activity is that we now have some terrific aerial photographs (
Figure 2:
Aerial photograph of the upper western flanks of Stelida (plots AK and
DG-A) taken by a drone (Doug Faulmann / INSTAP-EC, 2017)), and video
footage (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaGVm-H5bNg).
We also undertook a more geologically-focused mapping project to detail
Stelida’ chert outcrops. While only last year we published a paper on
the hill’s geology and the raw material’s character (Skarpelis
et al.
JASR 12, 819-833), we soon thereafter believed that a more nuanced
intra-source analysis was required, as it had become increasingly apparent to team member Dr. Dora Moutsiou (
Figure 3: Dr.
Tim Kinnaird (University of St. Andrews) and Dr. Dora Moutsiou
(University of Cyprus) discuss raw material types in the field (Anjelica
Bellavia / SNAP 2018)) that our stone tools were made from raw
materials of varying colours, textures and knapping quality. Dora’s
research focuses on human behaviour through time which at Stelida we can
best think about through a combination of asking (a) what tools did
they make, (b) how did they make them, and (c) which specific raw
materials did they choose? Her preliminary studies have suggested that
there
were differences in raw material selection through time,
with a more glossy white chert preferentially selected during the Upper
Palaeolithic and Mesolithic (
Homo sapiens), while Middle and
Lower Palaeolithic (Neanderthals and earlier humans) tools seem to be
made mainly using a coarser grey-brown chert. Our aim this year, working
with geologists Anna Klein (MSc candidate) and Dr. Tim Kinnaird from
the University of St. Andrews, was to see if these raw materials
occurred in discrete parts of the site.
The excavations themselves were limited primarily to a few already
established trenches that we were keen to complete so that we could
publish full stratigraphic sequences, and formally backfill them (the
sondages
being temporarily filled with sandbags and wooden pallets during the
off-season). Of greatest importance were trenches DG-A/003 and DG-A/021
on the upper western flanks, together with SH/024 and SH/026 on the
north-eastern slopes (
Figure 4: Plan of Stelida’s upper
slopes, including active trenches in 2018 (Yorgan Pitt)). These
excavation units were seen as particularly important because of their
depth of deposits, and the nature of the lithic assemblages contained
within them. Both DG-A/021 and SH/024 were successfully completed this
year; in excess of 3m deep, they produced significant quantities of
lithics produced by the distinctive Levallois technology, a tool-making
tradition that we associate with Neanderthal populations of the Middle
Palaeolithic. In contrast, DG-A/003 and SH/026 continue to fight another
day. The former was just over 4m deep after two weeks when we decided
to halt proceedings for reasons of health and safety; the rest of the
season was spent expanding the area of the
sondage whereby in
2019 we can more safely continue digging deeper. SH/026 was over 3.5m
deep by the end of the season, and similarly need to be finished in
2019, providing us with a quite different sequence of depositional
history and artefacts to those witnessed on the west of Stelida.
Lithics, lithics and even more lithics…one of the long-term problems we
have faced digging at Stelida is the fact that the archaeological record
is overwhelmingly biased towards lithics, primarily stone tools and
their associated manufacturing debris, plus the occasional emery,
quartzite and granite hammerstone. Given that this is a Palaeolithic
quarry and workshop this is perhaps unsurprising, however the problem
for us is that the soil’s alkalinity means that organics rarely if ever
survive, making environmental and climatic reconstructions extremely
difficult. The one area with good preservation – detailed in last year’s
blog – is Trench AK/18, where we found the remains of numerous
superimposed fireplaces in front of a small rock-shelter. These deposits
have produced a quantity of carbonised plant remains which are being
studied by our archaeobotanist Charlotte Diffey (DPhil candidate,
University of Oxford) who established and has supervised our wet sieving
system for the past three years (
Figure 5: Charlotte
Diffey (right), DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford’s School of
Archaeology) water sieving one of the soil samples we systematically
collect from each archaeological context in an attempt to retrieve
prehistoric plant remains). These precious plant remains will hopefully
tell us not just about the fuel used in the fires, and the plants being
eaten by early
Homo sapiens, but also something about the
landscape and climate at that time, as we know that many forms of
vegetation can only grow in certain environments (upland .v. coastal /
cold .v. warm etc.). Further energies were invested into the study of
the Stelida plant materials this summer through the work of Dr. Georgia
Tsartsidou (Ephoreia of Speleology and Palaeanthropology) an expert in
phytolith analyses, i.e. the microscopic structures of silica left
behind after a plant has decayed. We were delighted to have Dr.
Tsartsidou join the Stelida team this year, with her time on site spent
sampling a number of important contexts, not only the hearths of AK/18,
but also deposits from our important DG-A/001 and DG-A/003 stratigraphic
sequences.
Further work on the environment of Palaeolithic Stelida has been
conducted by Justin Holcomb (PhD candidate, Boston University) and Dr.
Panagiotis Karkanas (Director of the American School’s Weiner
Laboratory) whose micromorphological analyses documented tiny pieces of
bone from the AK/018 hearth deposits (
Figure 6: Justin
Holcomb, PhD candidate at Boston University and Weiner Laboratory for
Archaeological Science Predoctoral Fellows, undertakes
micromorphological analyses of slides made from samples taken from the
stratigraphic sections of the Stelida
sondages). Alas this
faunal material is simply too small and fragmentary for us to know which
animals (or humans) they came from. This is where another scientific
technique comes to bear. In 2018 we were joined by Tyler Murchie, a
McMaster PhD candidate whose speciality is the new field of extracting
ancient DNA not from bones, but from soil (
Figure 7: Tyler
Murchie, PhD candidate at McMaster’s Department of Anthropology,
samples the Upper Palaeolithic hearths in trench AK/018 for ancient DNA
analysis (Anjelica Bellavia / SNAP 2018). The premise is that genetic
traces of plants and animals can be preserved in a site’s soils
(everything else having long rotted away), a new form of aDNA analysis
that has shown spectacularly successful results in certain Eurasian
Palaeolithic cave sites, detailing not only the prehistoric animals
whose remains were once deposited in these sites, but also the early
humans (including Neanderthals and Denisovans) who once occupied them
(Slon
et al.
Science 356, 605-608,
2017). That said, these sites seem to have been particularly well suited
for the preservation of aDNA; indeed many of them also preserved the
physical remains of animals and humans, whereas another study with a
poor faunal record produced precious little aDNA, and none that could be
related to a particular species (Slon
et al.
Quaternary International 398, 210218, 2016). Our collaboration with Tyler and his well-known supervisor Prof. Hendrik Poinar (
https://adna.mcmaster.ca/)
is thus something of an experiment – and a rather expensive one at that
– with no guarantee of success, but to us represents one of the best
shots we have of breathing a bit more life into the archaeology of
Stelida.
Last and not least, we continued our public outreach work (see Carter
JEMAHS 5,
311-333, 2017), sharing the aims, methods and results of our work with
various audiences via an array of outlets. Arguably the greatest success
came through our exhibition (
Neanderthals on Naxos!) that we
hosted in Chora from April through until early July, a project that was
first suggested by the Mayor of Naxos Mr. Manolis Margaritis in 2015.
The opening night involved a major public lecture with not insignificant
press coverage, while in the summer weeks we were able to provide tours
of the exhibit to students from a number of local schools (
Figure 8: Dr.
Vagia Mastrogiannopoulou (Project Manager) giving a tour of our
exhibition to local schoolchildren at the Cultural Centre in Chora,
Naxos (Anjelica Bellavia / SNAP 2018)), while our ethnographers
interviewed some of the visitors to gain critical feedback on our work.
While the exhibition has now closed, we have used the opportunity to
completely revamp and relaunch our website based on this project,
whereby all our public outreach is now fully bilingual (
www.stelida.org), enjoy!
Tristan Carter
Associate Professor, McMaster University; co-director, Stélida Naxos Archaeological Project
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