IOA Mediterranean Laboratory

Scope and Purpose

Current Project:

The members and staff of the Mediterranean Lab have a major goal: the preparation, including writing, editing analyzing, and organizing field and lab notes with illustrative materials for the publication, Excavation at Sitagroi: A Prehistoric Village in Northeast Greece, Volume 2. The editors are Dr. Ernestine S. Elster, Director of the Mediterranean Lab and Managing Editor of the publication and Professor Lord Colin Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, England. Contributors to this volume, in addition to Elster and Renfrew, are an international team of scholars: Jane Renfrew, Ruth Tringham, Sarantis Dimitriadis, Katerina Skourtopoulou, John Dixon, Martin Biskowski, James Adovasio, Jeffrey Illingworth, Elizabeth Gardner, Elizabeth Slater, Nicholas Shackleton, Michele Miller, Marianna Nikolaidou, and David Hardy.

Sitagroi is a tell with settlement during the Middle Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and the Early Bronze Age (ca. 5400-2200 BCE) located in northeast Greece on the Drama plain, east of Thessaloniki. The site itself takes the form of a magoula, an artificial mound, consisting of 10.5 meters of stratified deposit richly documenting these important periods in European prehistory. Excavated remains include living floors, interruptions, destruction levels, as well as the remains of the three building episodes of the Early Bronze Age: the Bin Complex, the Long House, and the Burnt House.

There is an extensive repertoire of ceramics at Sitagroi, including Graphite Painted Ware which is especially distinctive to the region, and many figurines which demonstrate that the people of Sitagroi participated in the broader aspects of Neolithic belief systems which Professor Gimbutas believed focused on promoting fertility and social reproduction.

Excavated in 1968 and 1969 by a large team led by the late Marija Gimbutas of UCLA and Colin Renfrew (then of the University of Sheffield), the goal of the excavations at Sitagroi was to explore, document, and clarify the chronological and cultural relationships between the prehistoric groups of the Aegean and the Balkans as well as to understand the social development critical to the emergence of the European Bronze Age.

Excavation at Sitagroi: A Prehistoric Village in Northeast Greece, Volume 1 introduces the project, its nature and development, and includes environmental studies, the faunal report, settlement pattern analysis, the cultural sequence, and presents the figurine and pottery finds from phases I through V.

Excavation at Sitagroi: A Prehistoric Village in Northeast Greece, Volume 2 will present specialist studies, reports of various sets of data, and consider the social life and society of the Sitagroi villagers as well as its relationship to surrounding settlements over time. The specialist studies will include reports on paleoethnobotany, ceramic technology, lithic petrology, tools of bone, chipped stone and ground stone, metal objects and metallurgy, and weaving technology. Various forms of adornment, seals, miniatures and models, and other items of social and religious significance will be presented in their entirety.

Concurrent Work:

A number of projects are underway in conjunction with the publication of Sitagroi:

Using data from Sitagroi, separately and jointly Professor Colin Renfrew, Dr. Marianna Nikolaidou, and Dr. Ernestine S. Elster have prepared, delivered papers at meetings, and published research based on various aspects of the prehistoric settlement at Sitagroi.

Future Goals, Resources:

(1) Our immediate goal upon completion of Excavation at Sitagroi: A Prehistoric Village in Northeast Greece, Volume 2 is to breathe a deep sigh of relief and toast our collaborators near and far! Next we will begin planning a symposium to coincide with its publication, either at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA or at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America or Society for American Archaeology.

This symposium would bring together earlier participants in the excavation with contemporary scholars to discuss Sitagroi and its place within contemporary prehistoric research.

(2) We hope to plan an international symposium tentatively entitled: "The Power of Place: Archaeological Stories about People in a Landscape."

Sitagroi: Its Past and Its Future:

The material culture of Sitagroi offers a very rich text for "reading" symbol and society in prehistoric Greece. It has hardly been exploited, with the exception of the late Marija Gimbutas whose interpretation of the figurines are in her many publications. But there is much more: a rich symbolic vocabulary that is inscribed and embedded in the pottery designs, in the spindle whorls, miniatures and models, ornaments, shell artifacts, obsidian tools, in the material record as well as the Burnt House, the Bin Complex, and the Long House.

Photos from Sitagroi


Floor plan of Early Bronze Age Burnt House, ca. 2200 BCE, outlined by postholes with kitchen equipment in the apsidal end (ovens, platforms, grinding tools), separated by a wall from the main square room, 5 x 5 m. Another line of post holes probably belongs to an unexcavated long house.	The low rise of the Sitagroi mound, taken as the sun rose. The shepherd and his flock cross the lower field. Photo taken by Dr. Bob Evans, 1969.


Dr. Robert Evans, supervisor of the pottery yard, 1968.	Early scene of the excavation crew, under a "ramada"; note the tractor just used to plow the field, 1968.


Saraksante girls spinning. Photo by Mr. Tloupas, 1952.	Sitagroi excavation, large exposure at the top of the mound, 1969.


Professor Marija Gimbutas presenting a seminar with project members, 1968.	Site mound from the south, 1969.


Villagers stringing tobacco leaves to be sun dried over the summer, 1968.	Bob Wakeama, surveryor, with transit and datum point, 1968.

Staff

	Ernestine S. Elster: Holding a two-handled, black-on-red painted vessel, taken in 1969 at Sitagroi: Senior Research Associate, Managing Editor of Sitagroi, Vols. 1-2, Ph.D. Archaeology Program, UCLA, 1977. Research Interests: prehistory of Greece and the Balkins; prehistoric technology; settlement, society, gender, and archaeological theory.
	Marianna Nikolaidou: In the field on Crete; Staff Reasearch Assistant, Ph.D. Archaeology, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, 1995. Research Interests: Greek and Aegean Prehistory, gender prehistoric religion, symbolic systems, archaeological theory.

For further information on the broad field of Mediterranean Archaeology visit:

Classics and Mediterranean Archaeology Home Page from the University of Michigan.
Professor Lord Colin Renfrew
Catalhoyuk