2024: Stories from the field 1

Bit by Bit: The Hinterlands of Medieval Chalkida Student Experience

By Athos Voutsakis & Leo Stoppels, 2024.

When we first drove into Lefkandi from Chalkida, I thought I was passing by Isengard. The two towers of Mytikas–the first focal point for the HMC’s intensive survey this year–are mysteriously, mythically beautiful, and extremely hard to miss. Rising out of dusty orange mountains peppered with pine and almond trees, the Frankish constructions look as natural to the landscape as an olive grove, but surprisingly, not much is known about them. As members of the intensive survey team, we have been slowly gathering pieces of the puzzle to understand who occupied these hilltops, what they did, and exactly when.

Every morning, the early sunrise gives us time to prepare for the hard day of work ahead. When the sun is low to the horizon, you can’t stop yourself from taking a moment to observe the light slowly spilling over the mountains. The view is breathtaking, and it isn’t difficult to imagine myself in the shoes of the people who might have defended this area. Directly down the hill, the dry and dusty riverbed of the Lilas snakes through its carved-out valley, emptying the summer heat into the sea. All the while, the ruined fortress of Fylla looms over the plains.

Soon, the intense part of intensive survey begins: we carefully measure out pins for grid or line surveys, number and label each area, and begin scanning the ground for sherds, collecting bags upon bags of tiles and taking occasional respite in the shade of the south tower.

As we go, we visit our processing table by a small chapel, and take a closer look at our finds as we decide which sherds should be collected for further study and what we should simply count, weigh, and then return to the site. This critical examination of what we consider important (or “diagnostic”) enough has given me a much better understanding of not only medieval pottery itself, but also of what might have been happening in specific areas, and when.

On the days that we do depot work, this understanding becomes even more detailed as we gently scrub centuries of soil from the sherds, revealing the colorful glazes of past peoples. Sorting them into typologies and wares, I began to imagine dinner tables scattered with colorful plates and kitchens staffed with thick-walled storage jars. Another tiny fragment of the puzzle enters our record, and it passes from hand to hand as the team collects, sorts, records, photographs, and digitizes it.

On other days, we receive other pieces of the overall picture. In Extensive Survey, we scan the countryside for tumbledown structures and chat with locals about their knowledge of the area. As this smaller team scours over the landscape, potential sites tentatively introduce themselves to us as we photograph and explore their limits, and inspect pottery to guess at an occupation period.

Another time, we worked on the north tower hilltop in a small trial trench. We carefully uncovered a lime kiln–an alien-looking mass of crumbly white material mixed with pottery and rocks. Though the pottery ended up dating the structure to the 19th century, it was still fascinating to see a feature uncovered fully, peeling back the layers of the hill’s history one by one. As one of many small experiments within the project, the trench was yet another piece of the overall process.

In the evenings, we received even more puzzle pieces. A lecture from Dr. Andrew Blackler on Tuesday evening put our towers “on the map” alongside other examples, and showed us the complex occupational history of the island of Evia. An excursion on Thursday to the ruins of Fylla, one of the only domestic castles in all of Greece, helped us understand that we operate in a landscape of not just harsh geography, but power and social hierarchy. Bit by bit, a lost world slowly begins to come back together.

The more details we learn about medieval Evia, the more we realize that we are small parts of a very long-term project with wide-reaching questions about the past. Who were the people that inhabited these hinterlands, and created it through their lives, their work, and their practices? How did their goals and habits change over time? And how did their trade and products disperse, as we know they did, into the rest of the Byzantine world?

Though we were only able to join for one week, this project taught us a lot of concrete details about the hinterlands of medieval Chalkida, Byzantine pottery, and the archaeological process. We still only have a handful of small pieces of this puzzle, but as we move forward we are more enthusiastic than ever to make the picture more complete.

Photos by Athos Voutsakis and Maximillian Amerstorfer, 2024.