Week 1: Space Age Technology and Ancient Archaeology


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June 8th 2009
Published: June 8th 2009
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SymeSymeSyme

Syme, one of a handful of Minoan "Peak Sanctuaries" is located high in the mountains of east-central Crete.
Yia sas from Crete! It's been a busy week, but as I write today I'm sitting on the back porch at the center, waiting for my laundry to finish, and reflecting on a good, but tiring seven days. I've got a lot to say -- three projects in one week!-- so feel free to read any, all or none of this--
Also, thanks for the kind emails - I'm glad people are interested in what I'm up to, and hope these blogs will be up to the task of explaining.

Monday was my first day of work. I got up early, and scrambled up the hill from downtown Pacheia Amos to the INSTAP Center. There, I met up with Antonia (An-do-nia is the proper Greek pronunciation as "nt" in Greek make a "d" sound--), who I am helping on a variety of different projects over the course of the next three weeks. Antonia is actually from the US, and spends about half her year split between Binghamton, NY and Philadelphia, PA, and she spends the entire summer (May through September) working out of the INSTAP Center here in Pacheia Amos as the Remote Sensing specialist. Her heritage is 100% Greek,
Mochlos IslandMochlos IslandMochlos Island

Once attached to the mainland by a landbridge which would have stretched straight across from the shore to the island, now we have to take a boat out to the site each day.
and as such is 100% fluent in the language. Our plan for the week was to work on a Ground-Penetrating Radar Project on Monday, and then head off and use the Digital GPS to map a site from Thursday to Saturday, with Tuesday and Wednesday being free days in between.

We began Monday early, driving out from Pacheia Amos on the north coast, down across the island to Ierapetra, the major town in South-Eastern Crete and then east towards a site called "Syme" (pronounced Si-mi). Syme itself is located high in the mountains of south-Crete, and the site represents a "peak sanctuary" which would have served a religious or ceremonial purpose from at least the Middle Bronze Age (2800 BC) through the Roman Period. It's an amazing site, with a natural spring running directly through the ruins (the spring itself is probably the reason for the location of the sanctuary at Syme), and some very impressive architecture. The site has been excavated almost continually since the 1970s, but over the past few years, as the directors have gotten older, they have slowly pared back the excavation. This year no excavation is taking place, only cleaning and conservation of the
The Preveli GorgeThe Preveli GorgeThe Preveli Gorge

Years of erosion have created the gorge, cut by the freshwater river which empties into the Libyan Sea. This site, with its freshwater river, limestone outcroppings and quartz sources has led Tom Strasser and Co to search for (and find?) evidence for the oldest known homonids on Crete.
site by a handful of Greek workers. We were there to use the Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) with two goals: to find where a known road continues under an unexcavated part of the site, and to find a wall beneath the ground-surface, without actually digging. The results have yet to be processed, but the signals received by the GPR are encouraging; time --and data processing-- will tell. After a long day spent on site dragging a radar antenna across the ground, we were treated to lunch (lunch in Greece takes place around 2 or even 3 PM, with dinner beginning no earlier than 8PM) by the three directors of the site. Lunch dragged into an early dinner, and we returned to the INSTAP center around 7PM that evening.

On Tuesday I made my way up to the Center, assuming I would spend most of Tuesday, and Wednesday, in the INSTAP library, working on a few different ideas for conference papers I was kicking around. But, just as I got established and was checking my email I bumped into a graduate student who was working on the Mochlos Excavation and someone who I had met the previous Saturday night. Jonathon is
Like something out of 1960s Sci-FiLike something out of 1960s Sci-FiLike something out of 1960s Sci-Fi

Here Antonia (right), Doug (center) and I (left) get the base-station for the DGPS calibrated before climbing down the side of the gorge taking GPS points along the way.
a 2nd year Geography graduate student at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro who's hoping to use different mapping techniques to develop a computer-based approach to understanding the location of Late Bronze Age archaeological sites and their proximity to water and other natural resources. He and a few members of the Mochlos team were up at the Study Center washing pottery from previous years' excavations. I soon learned that the permit for excavation at Mochlos had been delayed and they would not be able to begin actual excavations until June 15th or later. Happy to have a couple friends to chat with, I volunteered to wash pottery with them-- before I knew it I had volunteered to spend my next two free days helping them measure and lay-out excavation trenches and "move dirt" on the island.

Mochlos, a Middle and Late Bronze Age town is located on a small island, about two-hundred meters off shore (the modern town of Mochlos is about 20 km east along the coast from Pacheia Amos where I'm staying). In the Bronze Age the sea-levels were lower so a land-bridge would have existed between the shore and the mainland. It is a fascinating site and
Jurassic Park?Jurassic Park?Jurassic Park?

The Preveli River, which is responsible for cutting the Preveli Gorge over hundreds of thousands of years, feels like something out of Jurassic Park. Walking along its banks you feel like a veliciraptor might attack out of the jungle at any moment.
has done a lot to clear up how we interpret Bronze Age Minoan port towns. The director, Jeff Soles, has been excavating there on and off since the mid 1970s and this year has brought a team of students from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro with him. Some students from Wabash College will also be joining sometime later this week. I spent Tuesday afternoon on the island using measuring tapes to lay out the corners of the excavation trenches for this year. Then on Wednesday I helped on the island moving old piles of dirt off areas of the site that will be excavated during the coming season. Mostly it was an excuse for me to get out and spend some time with the people at Mochlos who I'll be working with in about two weeks. Pacheia Amos, where I'm staying, is a nice town, but its quiet and there's really no one here for me to hang out with during the evenings. At Mochlos, I was able to hang around and have a few beers with the students-- a much better use of my time.

On Thursday morning I caught a ride back to Pacheia Amos with some
The Lost World?The Lost World?The Lost World?

Another shot of the Preveli River
of the Mochlos team who were coming up to the center to once again wash pottery for the day. After switching out my dirty clothes for clean, and taking a quick shower I climbed up to the Center, spent a few hours checking email and baseball scores (good to see that the Yanks are holding their own...) and then headed off to a site on the south-western coast of the island called Preveli. Antonia, Doug (INSTAP's architect, artist and newly trained Digital GPS specialist) and I drove the 3 hours to Plakia, a small tourist village on the south coast to meet up with Tom Strasser, a professor from Providence College in Rhode Island, and his team. Tom has been working on Crete for about twenty years and actually knows my old undergraduate adviser Eric Cline, who he spent a few summers together excavating at different sites on the island. Tom's team has a bit of a revolving-door policy where various experts are constantly coming and going- while we were there there were a variety of geologists, archaeologists and anthropologists- a great mix of great people.

Tom also has two students with him, one (Hannah) will be a senior at Providence, the other (Chad) graduated from Providence last year and will be beginning graduate school at Boston University in the fall, guided by another member of the Preveli team, Curtis Runnels, (a world-renowned Greek Stone Age expert). The site itself, called the Preveli Gorge is not only a beautiful natural feature, but Tom Strasser and Co. also believe it to be the site of the oldest stone tools on Crete, indicating that people were on Crete more than 100,000 years before conventionally thought (here I use the term "people" loosely, since the individuals who made these quartz stone tools were probably actually Homo Erectus, our evolutionary forebears coming to Crete perhaps 140,000 years ago). But, before you go off expecting to find the Preveli team in the next copy of National Geographic, I should say that their data, at the moment, needs further interpretation, scrutiny, and careful thought. They are looking at what are essentially rocks-- albeit nice, sharp and potentially hand-worked rocks-- and calling them stone tools. A number of stone tool experts (Curtis Runnels included) have indeed identified them as quartz stone tools, and there are known quartz tool precedents in Africa which are very similar to these. But, they have quite a battle ahead of them in academia, and will need to come up with some more convincing evidence than a few sharp pieces of quartz to silence their doubters and effectively change thought on the arrival of people on Crete.

For our part, however, we were working on something much less controversial. We were there to map geological formations and the various sloping levels of the gorge using the Center's new Digitial GPS (DGPS). The technology for this GPS is accurate to within a few millimeters- which marks a significant improvement to the 5 or 10 meter error associated with a more conventional handheld GPS-- plus it looks like something out of a 1960s sci-fi film (see photos). On Friday and Saturday Doug, Antonia and I marched up and down the east and west slopes of the gorge taking hundreds (nearly 500 total) GPS points. This data will allow the project to create accurate topographical maps of the sides of the gorge, mark important geological formations (which can be used to date various levels of the gorge), and locate important cultural/archaeological sites. Plus, the points we've taken have the potential to be mapped onto a program such as Google earth to show site or artifact locations to the general public, or they could even be used to provide a digital 3D map of the gorge. It was my first time using a DGPS in the field (although I have seen a few demonstrations and have played around with the new DGPS Cornell just bought in the fall), and needless to say I am hooked. Its ease of use and accuracy is incredible.

After wandering around the steep slopes of the Preveli Gorge for two days, we jumped back in the car and drove back to Pacheia Amos last night. I headed to my hotel (and slept there for the first time in almost a week). My next few days will be free (until at least Wednesday when we start a new GPR project at a site down the coast called Papadiokambos), so I'll probably spend some time in the library working on some basic projects I have on the docket.

I hope this post finds you all well-- and that the post itself isn't too confusing. I'm happy to answer questions where I can!
Once again thanks for the interest and I'll try to post again soon.
Take care,
Jeff



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8th June 2009

Great article
Jeff, Great article, looks like you're havin fun. Was Crete tied to dry land 100,000 years ago? If not, homo erectus using rafts/boats would be an interesting find (I think it's still disputed, yes?)
15th June 2009

Hey Jud- No, as far as I understand Crete was not connected to dry land anytime in the past...at least not since Pangea or something like that. The site at Preveli definitely has the potential to be an earth-shattering discovery- but it will most certainly be disputed--

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