Renewed Excavations at Ancient Eleon in Boeotia (EBAP 2023)

Team members arriving at sunrise, June 2023

A new phase for the Eastern Boeotia Archaeological Project (EBAP) began this summer when excavations at ancient Eleon resumed after five years of study and survey. Our project started as a regional survey from 2007-2009, followed by an initial campaign of excavations from 2012-2018. This year, our project ran for six weeks, from May 21 to June 30, 2023. We went from spring-like weather, verdant and rainy, to the peak of Greek summer, dry and hot. Our team was large, reaching 42 undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and other professionals. As always, we were based at the seaside community of Dilesi and made our daily commute to the town of Arma, located midway between Schimatari and Thebes. This was our 15th full season of research in eastern Boeotia, and we continue to be enormously grateful to our colleagues at the Thebes Museum and in the Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia, and to the Canadian Institute in Greece.

Our long-time collaborator, Professor Nicholas Herrmann from Texas State University, with a small team, conducted geomagnetometry and resistivity survey in 2021 and 2022. At the same time, Trevor Van Damme led a group focused on the finds from 2007-2009 survey. The results from both projects revealed that the Archaic and Classical settlement of ancient Eleon was considerably larger than previously known and that there was a lower town extending to the north and west of the acropolis. With these results, we applied for and received approval to renew our excavation work in hopes of learning more about the historical phases of occupation that have been so far underrepresented on the acropolis.

Before and after site cleaning

Before we could start digging, however, two things had to happen: our site needed to be cleared of overgrowth from the wet spring and we needed to upgrade our record keeping system. Clearing the site was challenging but fairly straightforward, and our team of workers was excellent. Within days a lush meadow of waist-high green grass punctuated by cheerful red poppies was immaculately mowed and the tarps protecting the trenches from winter rains were lifted.

iDig training. From L-R: Krysten Cruz, Nicholas Herrmann, Bruce Hartzler, Bryan Burns, Brendan Burke, photo by Georgios Verigakis

While the site was being prepared for the new season of excavations, our senior staff were hard at work upgrading our recording system. After over a decade of keeping traditional records on paper, we decided to transition to fully digital recording in the field. This is accomplished using an open-source digital application, iDig, which has been widely adopted by other projects across the Mediterranean region.

iDig is an archaeological record keeping system originally developed by Bruce Hartzler for the Athenian Agora excavations. Bruce, Brian Martens, and Georgios Verigakis, also from the Athenian Agora, collaborated with us during the first week of the project to tailor fit our Eleon recording system to iDig. It was a big adjustment, but the convenience, standardization, and efficiency of iDig is a vast improvement. We are extremely grateful to Bruce, Brian, and Georgios for their patience, technical expertise, and generous support. Each of our five trench supervisors received an iPad loaded with iDig and all the excavation data (photographs, descriptions, find records, drawings, survey information) was recorded on it. Each iPad was synced daily through a server computer, so that every iPad had a current record of all the trenches. The conservators and ceramic processors also had their own iPads where they entered information relevant to each trench allowing data to be shared in real time between all team members. It’s an excellent system!

EBAP Team photo June 2023

Our team of field workers was made up of undergraduate students from Brown University, Skidmore College, the University of Victoria, and Wellesley College: Katharine Barrett, Camille Blanco, Skyler Buchfink, Maya Christensen, Ruth Engelman, Hunter Faminow, Megan Farrokhi, Max Harris, Riley Kernohan, Sally Martin-Damman, Elysia Nitsch, Minah Park, Kallie Schildge, Sophie Shobeiri, Kristen Smit, plus graduate students Audrey Ballarin (not pictured), Kaitlyn McKenna, Luke Montgomery, Lori Zhang. Our trench supervisors were graduate students Haley Bertram, University of Cincinnati; Antigone Paschaki, University of Athens; Hana Sugioka, University of Texas at Austin; Ben Watts-Wooldridge, University of Victoria; Savhanna Long, University of Arizona. Senior staff and researchers included Jeremy Beller (not pictured), Joe Bellows, Annika Berendt, Giuliana Bianco (not pictured), Brendan Burke, Bryan Burns, Krysten Cruz, Allie Davis, Adam DiBattista (not pictured), Scott Evans, Amanda Gaggioli, Nick Herrmann, Vicky Karas, Tina Ross, Janelle Sadarananda, Nepheli Theocharou, Trevor Van Damme, Zoe Wieler. Our success is due to the tireless efforts, keen observations, and good cheer every day of the entire team.

Trench tours, ancient Eleon June 17, 2023

For the excavations, we wanted to explore areas to the west and south of our previous trenches, so several new units were opened. Contrary to our initial expectations, in every new trench we opened in 2023, we found significant stratified levels dating to the Mycenaean period just below surface levels. Our work in 2023 demonstrated that the acropolis of Eleon was an exceptionally large settlement throughout most of the Late Bronze Age (1700-1100 BCE) and revealed an important LH IIIA1 deposit, a phase that was previously underrepresented due to the density of LH IIIC architecture on the acropolis. In another trench, a well-preserved floor deposit was documented dating to early in the 12th century BCE, including a complete Mycenaean roof tile (photo below).

Excavating Mycenaean roof tile, ancient Eleon

As we have in other years previously, we wanted to share our work with our community in Arma and the Tanagraia area. We were very happy to work with the Σύλλογος Γυναικών Άρματος  and Eugenia Triantafillou to host an ‘Open House’ for interested community members on June 24, 2023. We welcomed over 50 community members, young and old, to the site to see and hear what we have been finding and to view some of the recently restored finds up close. We look forward to sharing our work again in 2024!

Open House’ with the Σύλλογος Γυναικών Άρματος on June 24, 2023

We look forward to continuing our work in 2024, when we plan to test new areas of the settlement in hopes of learning more about the Archaic and Classical settlement!

Brendan Burke, Bryan Burns & Trevor Van Damme, EBAP

The Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS) 2023 Season: Putting Pieces Together

Dom Pollard maps a feature on the BEARS survey study season

In 2023 the BEARS survey, an archaeological investigation of surface remains around the bay of Porto Rafti in eastern Attica, entered a new phase of study and publication following three seasons of fieldwork. As those who have kept an eye on the CIG blog over these last few summers will know, we’ve found quite a lot of material during our brief campaign in this unassuming coastal resort town. Given to the bounteous archaeological record that has accumulated in our intellectual cupboards since we began the project in 2019, getting everything studied and written up for publication is going to be a big task! We made a lot of progress in the 2023 study season, however, and everyone on the team is excited to start putting the pieces together and synthesizing our results. Over the coming year, we will be collectively writing what we hope will be a major contribution to the archaeology of coastal Attica, presenting lots of new material ranging from early prehistory to early modernity.

During archaeological study seasons, the primary theatre of battle usually shifts from the field to the lab, and the story was no different in the BEARS 2023 study season. From May 15 to July 1, our core team of dedicated pottery experts (Grace Erny, Joseph Frankl, and Melanie Godsey) worked diligently alongside co-director Catherine Pratt in the Brauron museum to finish cataloguing and start making sense of the material collected during the three field seasons. We also welcomed back Katerina Psoma and Phil Sapirstein to wrap up their analyses of the chipped stone lithics and tiles, respectively. Sometimes the material assemblages from survey projects are largely limited to those three categories of artifact: pottery, chipped stone, and tile. Our surface assemblage from BEARS is, on the other hand, quite expansive, including many additional categories of finds and types of materials – figurines, metal and waste from metal production, glass, textile tools, coins, etc. As a result, the BEARS study season lab saw a constantly rotating menagerie of different characters popping in and out for a day or three at a time. I hope the Brauron site dog and cat didn’t find it too confusing.

In addition to work in the museum, we had two main documentation goals in the field: to complete documentation of groundstone objects on Raftis island and to finish mapping architectural features on both Raftis and the Koroni peninsula. Thanks to the superlative top-quality work we’ve come to expect from our ace BEARS team, we largely crushed both of these field goals

The Koroni architecture team ponders a feature on the slopes

Speaking of crushing, the quantity of objects in our Raftis groundstone catalog multiplied as quickly as the rabbits that inhabit the island during the 2023 season. While surveying on Raftis in 2022, we had noted that there was quite a lot of groundstone material scattered liberally around the site, including a wide range of types: grinders, pounders, hammerstones, choppers, polishers, tripod mortars: you name it, Raftis has collected ‘em all, like the winner of an archaeologically-themed Pokemon-type game. For a variety of reasons, we opted to conduct our study of these objects in the field, rather than take them into the lab for permanent storage. Since we did not get through everything in 2022, Eleni Chreiazomenou and Grace Erny returned to finish the job, working alongside the architectural documentation team, in 2023. In the final summation, the catalog weighs in at 528 artifacts, up from a mere 207 at the end of the 2022 season.

A lovely grinding stone with a carefully made raised handle from Raftis

A rather comical dynamic emerged as the architecture team was working on Raftis to try to find and map walls while the groundstone team conducted their analysis. As we mappers stared intently at the rock piles all over the surface of the island, squinting in an attempt to identify possible foundation lines or decide whether three stones in a row really did make a wall, we more often noticed additional groundstone objects in and amongst the collapsed architecture, which we flagged for Grace and Eleni to return and document. As a result, their goal of completing groundstone documentation receded ever farther into the horizon, rather than moving closer to hand, as the architecture team progressed towards completion of its task. For a while, we all had the feeling that we could have stayed there discovering, flagging, measuring, weighing, and photographing groundstone in an endless cycle, until the sun grew into a red giant, swallowing the earth and all its remaining tripod mortar fragments into its gaping, fiery maw. However, eventually we completed architectural documentation, stopped staring rocks for 8-hours a day, and called it a representative sample.

A sundry pile of “fresh” groundstone objects discovered by the architectural documentation flagged up and ready for analysis by the groundstone team (Photo by S. Murray)

Another Raftis stone find that is worth mentioning falls into a slightly different category of evidence. The islet of Raftis and the bay of Porto Rafti are thus named because of the monumental Roman-Imperial-era (ca. 100–200 CE) marble statue that sits enshrined on a large limestone plinth at the peak of Raftis islet. The statue is badly worn and damaged, with all of its limbs and head missing. According to local lore, it is intended to depict a tailor (or raftis / ράφτης in Greek) who once held aloft a giant pair of golden scissors. More likely is that the statue is a depiction of a Roman deity that was installed at the peak of the island sometime between the 7^th and 14^th centuries CE

The Raftis statue, here getting ready for its photogrammetric close-up (Photo by P. Sapirstein)

Taken in cumulative terms, the Raftis statue has attracted more attention than any other archaeological object in or from Porto Rafti. Travelers with antiquarian leanings have been visiting and commenting on the Raftis since the 14^th century at least, though mostly from an amateur and/or dilettantish perspective. On the more serious scholarly front, there was a rather heated debate about the identity of the statue during the 1960s and 1970s. While those on either side held strong opinions about issues such as what the statue was supposed to represent and how/when it had been placed on the islet, it was clear to any neutral observer that the question could not really be resolved unless some additional evidence came to light.

Enter the heroic survey archaeologist! During the 2022 gridded collection, about 25 meters north of the statue, sharp-eyed team member Melanie Godsey spotted a rather suspiciously oblong white stone object in and amongst the limestone rubble. This worked marble block turned out to be none other than…..a statue fragment from good old Mr. or Mrs. Raftis! Apparently it had been sitting there unnoticed for the past thousand years or so

One of these stones is not like the other…. (Photo by S. Murray)

This year, with Phil Sapirstein, we decided to make a photogrammetric 3D model of the arm and the statue, to see if we could determine where it was originally positioned. Manipulating it together with a 3D model of the statue makes clear that it would have joined the right arm socket. This probably proves, at long last, what the statue was supposed to represent, and reveals several interesting new conclusions about how, when, and why the statue ended up on the peak of this little abandoned islet in a bay with nothing whatsoever dated to the Roman imperial period, and how it came to lose most of its limbs. But I won’t spoil the surprise here….keep an eye out for further BEARS publications to get the full story.

A 3D rendering of the Raftis statue with the phantom limb digitally re-attached (Rendering by Phil Sapirstein)

For now, after a fun and productive study season, everyone is focused on collectively pushing forward in writing such matters up. We will also return to Porto Rafti one more time in May/June 2024 to finish up a little bit more architectural documentation at Koroni, conduct some geological investigations, and (naturally) enjoy a final few weeks of morning swimming in the bright blue Aegean. Thanks to all who take an interest in the project, and, as ever, to all of the people and institutions that make BEARS possible!

The very hardworking Koroni architecture crew celebrates successfully completing their work on the fortification wall surrounding the site

Sarah Murray, University of Toronto, co-director, BEARS

Adventures As An Intern In Greece

Before coming to Athens, I was pretty nervous and did not know what to expect for the next few months of my internship journey. But when I landed, on the drive to the Canadian Institute, I remember being amazed by the city's landscape; there were not many high-rise skyscrapers, and the view of the mountains was truly breathtaking. It was different from Mississauga, a city in Canada where I initially stayed. The fantastic views made me excited for my journey ahead. 

During my internship, I had many tasks and responsibilities, but one of my favourite tasks was assisting with social media accounts. As a communications and media student, I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to expand my knowledge and gain an in-depth understanding of media management. I also really enjoyed working at the library and organizing the books. 

On the days when I was not working, I would go around different parts of Greece in and out of Athens. Some places I visited were Aegina, Lake Vouliagemeni, Agisitri, Kalamata and Santorini. I was always genuinely amazed by the breathtaking views Greece had to offer. I also saw archeological sites during my stay here, such as the Acropolis, Ancient Agora, the Temple of Apollo and many more. Furthermore, I was also given the opportunity to travel outside of Greece and explore different parts of Europe. I was able to go to Barcelona to visit my dad and also visit Paris towards the end of my internship. 

I am genuinely thankful for this opportunity to work at the Canadian Institute. I was given a chance to travel and explore different countries and cultures. Not only that, I truly enjoyed working with everyone at the Canadian Institute and will always be grateful for this experience.

Alyana Borras, York University intern, summer 2023