Tuesday, May 13, 2008

The 2007 Fieldwork Season


The 2007 season was a preliminary season that lasted only one week, during which we opened two small trenches (which we imaginatively called Trench 1 and 2) in the cave. Our main goal was to examine the possibility for existence of undisturbed cultural layers inside the cave. In this respect, Trench 2 was a success since it did not only produce a fairly large amount of pottery for such a restricted excavation but it also provided us with the evidence of in situ cultural layers that we were looking for, thus justifying future work in the cave.
The presence of undisturbed layers is evidenced by an in situ feature (Feature 1) made of circularly shaped burnt clay with a foundation made of flat slabs of rock and larger pieces of broken pottery.
Another success of the 2007 season was that we were finally able to confirm previous survey reports (by D. Keller and A. Sampson) that spoke of presence of the so far earliest pottery attested in this part of the island. The pottery in question belongs to the White on Dark phase in the Aegean and it is chronologically placed at the end of the Late Neolithic period.
The results of the 2007 will be presented by the project directors (F. Mavridis and Z. Tankosic) at the Irish Institute colloquium dedicated to the latest reserach in Greek caves on May 24, 2008.

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