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
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