I've already blogged a bit about my collaboration with Tim Gregory, David Pettegrew, and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory in documenting the abandoned rural settlement of Lakka Skoutara (The Houses of Lakka Skoutara, Collapse, Provisional Discard, Construction in the Corinthia). We conducted an intensive survey in this upland basin in 2002 and I've just begun to analyze the distribution pattern of material across the landscape there. Since we only had about a week to do our survey at the site, we decided to sample the various parts of the basin so that we would capture the hillslopes, slope wash, the bottom of the basin and areas across the entire basin for east to west including fields in the immediate vicinity of the abandoned houses that David Pettegrew and I have so carefully documented. In hindsight, I wish we had surveyed the entire area since the results of our survey were so interesting.
Daniel Pullen and Timothy Gregory read the ceramics from the site and the entire Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey helped out with the fieldwork. The basin produced material from the Final Neolithic (ca. 3300-2500 B.C.) to the modern period with noticeable concentrations of material in the Roman, Medieval, and Early Modern periods. In the maps below each dot represents a single artifact.
The dates assigned to the various maps derive from the Chronotype dates and reflect the specificity with which our ceramicists could identify the individual artifacts. The modern houses are represented by little dots and the larger black dots are threshing floors (alonia). The coloring of the survey units represents the total density of material present in each unit.
Final Neolithic
Final Neolithic to Early Helladic I
Early Bronze Age
Early Helladic I
Early Helladic II
Late Bronze Age
Archaic Period
Archaic to Classical
Archaic to Hellenistic
Early Roman
Roman
Late Roman
Roman to Medieval
Medieval
Late Medieval
Early Modern
Modern
Very Recent
It's clear, for example, that the prehistoric material clusters in a very different place than the highest density of ancient material (particularly the Roman material). In contrast, the "Greek" period material and Roman period material cluster to the northeast of house 4. Later, the Roman and Medieval material seems to concentrate in some of the same areas, particularly the units to the east of house 9. These clusters of material suggesting some local continuity in occupation or activity. For the material to cluster so relatively clearly in a small survey area was welcome and rather unexpected. It will certainly make my job of writing up the distributional data from the survey easier.
Check back soon (maybe not today, though!) for more on Lakka Skoutara over the coming weeks.
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