Kampos Survey 2007 - Information for Potential Volunteers

This post is for the people interested in joining the SEEP 2007 Kampos survey and who would like to know a bit more about what they are getting themselves into.

Location: The survey will take place in an alluvial plain extending roughly east-west and starting at the head of the Bay of Karystos. Karystos is a small town at the very southern tip of the island of Euboea, which is the second largest Greek island located just to the east of the Greek mainland (mostly Attica and Boeotia). The town has about 5000 inhabitants and is not very touristy in the summer, which some of us have grown to appreciate. Getting to Karystos is not that complicated, it is cheap (once you’re in Greece) and can be done either from Athens or straight from El. Venizelos airport. What you need to do is get to the port of Rafina and from there the ferry ride to Euboea is only 1h long. Detailed getting-to directions will be provided when the time comes.

When: The survey will take place between July 14 and August 18.

Work conditions: These can be rather strenuous, especially in the beginning. This year the work will include the field part and a bit of data entry afterwards in the afternoon. The fieldwork consists of between 6-8 hours (the beginning and the end times are negotiable) of walking per day. Besides walking, we will also be stopping to measure and record sites, and collect on (or off) site artifacts.

Usually there is a longer break in the middle of the workday (cookie break) but other shorter breaks will be made whenever someone feels (s)he needs one. The area where we will be walking tends to be quite hot in the summer and shade is usually unavailable. The terrain is both flat and hilly and there will be some light climbing involved. There will most definitely be some fence jumping as well. However, what you should keep in mind the most is that the prevalent vegetation in the area (other than on cultivated fields) is thorny, short, and unpleasant, although some people are more resistant to scratching than others.

As for the expected material, this is an artifact-poor area, so don’t expect spectacular finds. Survey finds are not spectacular by definition as they are found on the surface exposed to weather, trampling, erosion, and other factors that can affect them adversely. Having said that, there is no way of knowing what we might actually find. If someone is interested, more information on methodology will be posted on the blog once we work out all the details.

All data entry will be done at the house (1 extra hour of work in the afternoon, but without a fixed schedule) and there might be some museum work involving washing and labeling finds, depending on the amount we find. Also, some help with the house maintenance will be greatly appreciated.

Living conditions: There’s a photo of the new ‘SEEP House’ in Karystos a few posts below. We have rented it last year after having to move from our old house not far away from this one. As far as facilities go (and I’ll try to put up some photos of the interior once I have them), there is a nice big porch on one side and a concrete court and a huge garden on the other. There will be a ‘boys room’ and a ‘girls room’ and another room for visitors when there are any. On top of that there is also a ‘study room’, with a small library. We are also trying to put up some simple outdoor accommodation for people who appreciate fresh air. If someone wants to put up their own tent in the backyard that is also possible since the space is really big. Other than that, there’s a small kitchen, two toilettes, and a hot water bathroom. By the summer we will also install a couple of cold water showers outside. Laundry can be done manually (there is a space reserved for that) or you can take it to one of the laundry services that operate in the vicinity.

As for the Internet, we are right now working on establishing a wireless connection at the house, so, if you have your own laptop you can just plug in. If not, there will be a computer designated for public web access. There are also a couple of internet cafes in the town.

Off work: We will be working Monday to Friday so everybody will have their weekends free to do whatever they please or to do something together. As for the food, people usually take care of their own breakfast (SEEP provides the ingredients) and there is a joint lunch (we all help preparing the food, setting and cleaning the table) after fieldwork , although this is not set in stone and depends on personal preference. Before dinner we usually have ouzo (or Gin and Tonic or whatever you like) hour at the porch. The dinner is not paid by SEEP and it’s up to the crew members to decide how to organize their dinners. There are many tavernas and souvlaki places in the town and a variety of other foods can be found. The prices are quite reasonable and the quality is usually good. Also, quite often there will be cookouts at the SEEP House (we usually do a lot of grilling) and there is a kitchen in the house if somebody wants to cook their own food.

The beaches in Karystia are very nice and not too touristy. The SEEP House is less than 10 min walk from the main town beach. There will also be motorized excursions to the more distant but much prettier beaches, especially at the Paximadhi peninsula, which borders the Bay to the west. If there are interested people, we can also organize short field trips to other places of interest in the area, e.g. archaeological sites; magnificent Roman quarries, which Karystos is famous for; ‘dragon houses’, etc. If someone is interested in reading, there is also a small but quite informative library at the SEEP House that, besides scientific books, contains a lot of paperbacks of various genres. There are also many places that you can take a weekend trip to since they are not too far away from Karystos (e.g. Athens, Sounio, Eretria, etc.). Finally, the area is famous for good hiking, if you are not too sick of walking by the end of the day that is.

If you have any more questions of any sort, please leave them at the comments section of this post and I will try to answer them promptly.

All the best!

More photos from Karystia and 2006 survey season

NEWS

We just learned that the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP) decided to fund the 2007 field season of the Karystian Kampos survey project! This funding will be of great help to SEEP. Thanks INSTAP!

Future plans... (or SEEP back in the saddle)

SEEP enters the new 2007 with big plans. First of all, there is the continuation of our Kampos Survey project that started in 2006 and was originally planned to have only one year of fieldwork but was later expanded to two seasons (the reasons for and goals of the second season will be dealt with in more detail in one of the following blog posts), the second of which will be in 2007. For the season of 2007 the permits are still pending, but we are confident that we will receive them in the end thanks to the understanding the new leadership in Chalkis eforia has shown for SEEP. Also, depending on the funding (we already got the permits), there is a likely possibility of a joint project with the Eforia for Paleoanthropology and Speleology from Athens (lovingly called the Cave Eforia) in the early summer of 2007. The goal of this project is the excavation of the Ayia Triada cave north of Karystos, where the only traces of the Early Neolithic material in the area have been discovered (also, more details in one of the next blog posts). For these projects funding applications were sent to several funding agencies and hopefully at least some of them will be successful.

Also, SEEP people will continue studying the material collected during the previous survey projects (Paximadhi and Bouros-Kastri surveys) and prepare them for publication.

Finally, an ambitious long-term project that began last year and that involves mapping of the hiking trails in Karystia will continue in 2007 as well.

Fieldwork 2006 in photos: The Kampos Plain Survey Project

Some captions for the photos above (left to right, top to bottom): 1) Don and Wendy in the gully in the vicinity of THE Pocket; 2) Don and Wendy on the road to nowhere, south side of the survey area; 3, 4) view of the Kampos Plain from the northern hills; 5) Petros above the Kampos and below the wind turbines; 6) Jeremy above the Kampos; 7) Don and Melody helping Zarko record a possible sanctuary N of the Kampos; 8) view of the Bay from the Kampos in the morning.

In case that some of you have never been and for the ones that had seen it but have since forgotten it, this is how Karystia looks like.

The SEEP house

At the end of the season of the summer of 2006 SEEP has moved into the new premises. The old SEEP house was promptly demolished by its owner and the place where SEEP was headquartered for so many years is now just an empty lot with a bulldozer on it, which means that it will not remain empty for too long.
The new SEEP house is in the El. Amerikis Street, just behind the main church and next to a small bakery. Works are proceeding at the moment (organized and supervised by the SEEP friend Karsten Maass from Karystos) to make the new house a more comfortable living and working space.

Report on fieldwork in 2006

Under the auspices of the Canadian Institute in Greece (CIG) and with the kind permission granted to us by the 11^th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities at Chalkis (IA EPKA) the Southern Euboea Exploration Project (SEEP) was able to continue work in the area of Karystos in July and August of 2006. Unlike previous seasons, the primary focus in 2006 was on the fieldwork consisting of a new project of survey in the alluvial plain (Kampos) west of the town of Karystos. In addition to new fieldwork, members of SEEP were also engaged in the study of the previously collected material housed in the Karystos Museum. The work was made possible and greatly facilitated by the help from Ms. Maria Kosma, the epimeletria for the region as well as Mrs. Sofia Stambelou and Mrs. Evangelia Athanasiou, the museum guards at Karystos.

Work in the field
In July and August of 2006 members of SEEP began the survey of the Kampos plain west of Karystos. Mrs. Maria Chidiroglou and Mr. Zarko Tankosic of Indiana University served as the co-field directors of the project. Members of the surveying teams were: Dr. Donald Keller, Ms. Wendy Porter, Ms. Melody Childs, Mr. Jeremy Ott, and Mr. Petros Tryfonopoulos.

The fieldwork was conducted in the course of three weeks in July and August of 2006. Although the original plan was to complete a four week field season, we were forced to shorten it because of other pressing obligations.

The goals of the survey were to: examine a hitherto archaeologically poorly known part of the Karystia; methodologically and spatially connect the two previously surveyed areas in the region where different survey methods were employed (e.g. Bouros-Kastri to the east and Paximadhi to the south of the Kampos); test the hypothesis that in an alluvial plane like the Kampos the probability of finding sites increases in the vicinity of modern roads and paths, gullies, and the foothills of the surrounding hills; test the hypothesis that some of the modern roads or trails were also used in ancient times.

The survey methodology consisted of following transects that were predetermined either by natural features of the investigated landscape or by man-made alterations thereof. These transects were supplemented by the artificial ones that were created based on our knowledge of the area, its cultural resources, and our expectations (based on experiences from the previous surveys in the Karystia) about where the most likely locations of the findspots would be. In this way our transects consisted of gullies, streambeds, and other water flows; modern and pre-modern routes including asphalt and dirt roads, kalderimis, trails, and footpaths; and one long transect encompassing the limits of the survey area and following the natural boundary of the Kampos plain on the foothills of the surrounding hills north and south of the plain proper. The transects were c. 10 m to 30 m wide, with investigators spaced 10 m from each other assuming that they can visually cover the area of 5 m on both sides of them. Furthermore, some discrete features of the landscape adjacent to the transects were surveyed in their entirety if they looked promising as potential findspot locations.

Since the rationale behind this approach was that the potential findspots will be on or in the vicinity of the proposed transects, surveyors were allowed the freedom to step away from the transect lines per se and investigate the surrounding natural and manmade features that looked like they might be locations of possible findspots. Furthermore, if a findspot was located on or in the immediate vicinity of one of the transects then the adjacent area was also investigated in more details in order to locate the findspot’s boundaries and other features associated with it. This approach proved fruitful as a number of findspots were found outside of the transects proper at a distance of 30–50 m to either side of them.

A total of twenty findspots were discovered during the first field season with about 70–80% of the planned transects investigated. The catalogue of findspots attached to this report lists their name, location (in the form of degree-minute-second map coordinates), preliminary dating of the material, and the type of the findspot. The names of the findspots are in the form of a unique code consisting of the year of the survey (06), location in relation to the main modern road (North or South of it), and a unique two-digit continuous number of the findspot (e.g. 01).

The survey area is spread over the following 1:5000 topographic maps: 6541/5, 6541/6, 6541/7, 6541/8.

Preliminary results
The preliminary results of the survey suggest that at least the route of the main modern road connecting Karystos to Marmari (which, more or less, follows the route of the older road that dates to at least the 19^th century) could have been used as a thoroughfare in ancient times since there are a number of findspots located along its course, supplemented by a number of stray finds (e.g. random pottery sherds, sandstone Roman building blocks, etc.). Also, our finds indicate that most of the alluviation in the Kampos plain happened sometime before the Roman period, regardless of whether it was in the form of a single event or a long-term continuous process. This is tentatively indicated by the fact that pre-Roman finds in the area are not present at the floor of the plain but either on the adjacent foothills or rocky outcrops protruding into the plain from the surrounding hills.

Naturally, these observations are highly preliminary and a lot more study is needed until more definite conclusions can be drawn.

Submitted to CIG and IA EPKA 2006