Uncovering the history of a ‘lost’ city
A survey team in Greece searches for artifacts among the walls and interior of an ancient Mycenaean building. The site was discovered in 2001 and has been named Korphos-Kalamianos.
Photo credit: Thomas Tartaron
Along the Greek coast, on the shores of the Saronic Gulf and about 60 miles southwest of Athens, lies a small urban area believed to be the ancient site of a major Mycenaean harbor town.
Christened Korphos-Kalamianos, the closely-built, 22-acre site was discovered in 2001 by the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS).
“When we say we discovered it, what that really means is that the local people knew that there was an ancient site there, but what we do as experts, more or less, is we can come in and find these things and really understand what they are,” says Thomas Tartaron, a professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Penn and former EKAS member.
The Mycenaeans, best known from Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” emerged in roughly 1600 B.C. and ruled until their collapse around 1100 B.C. Cities like Athens, Pylos and Thebes were major Mycenaean towns.
Korphos-Kalamianos, Tartaron says, was part of the bigger Mycenaean world and interacted with the other towns in the region.
Outside of Greece, the Mycenaeans were in contact with Egypt, Anatolia (Turkey), Palestine and Cyprus.
In 2007, Tartaron and the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP) traveled to Greece to map the area and conduct surface and geology work. The site’s name, he says, is derived from the nearby village of Korphos and Kalamianos, which means “having many reeds.” “In recent memory, it’s been kind of a swampy or wetland area,” says Tartaron. “That’s how it gets its name.”
The site’s ancient name is unknown but he says it could be the “Eiones” Homer mentions in the “Catalogue of Ships” in Book 2 of the “Iliad.”
The Mycenaeans were a belligerent lot, obsessed with being warlike. “The evidence we have for them being warlike is, first of all, that they get buried in graves that we would call warrior graves,” Tartaron says. “So they get buried with swords and arrowheads and spears, and these helmets that are made out of leather with boar’s tusks sewed onto them, so we have these warrior burials.” Their art was bellicose too, portraying scenes of soldiers in battle and hunting lions and other wild animals.
There are numerous theories about the fall of the Mycenaeans. Greece is a very tectonically-active area, so some believe earthquakes may have brought about their demise. Others look at internal strife.
“When you look at our site, you see that part of [it] is sunken down below the sea,” Tartaron says. “We don’t know when that happened but it’s possible that it may have been major earthquakes. Other people look at invaders from outside.”
What really makes Korphos-Kalamianos unique is that in almost every other case, if one were to discover a Mycenaean site, it would be buried with little or no architecture on the surface, says Tartaron. Thirty or 40 years of excavation would be required to unearth it.
However, much of the soil around this site has been washed way, leaving it visible to the naked eye. “We still have all these foundations of the buildings,” he says. “You can walk around and you can follow the walls, and that’s exactly what we were doing in 2007. A lot of these are really substantial, very thick walls, a meter thick, and you can walk around the site and you can still see where the buildings were. We have an almost complete plan of the layout of the town without even excavating at all.”
Tartaron will return to the site in mid-May with a group of Penn students, finish up the total mapping of all the architecture, and investigate the much larger area. They will stay until mid-July.
A test evacuation is planned for 2009 in which they will excavate small trenches around the site to try to get a sense of the integrity of what lies beneath. Tartaron says they will “try to build a picture over time.”
Originally published on April 24, 2008
