Archaeologists Explore Early Bronze Age Settlement on Greek Island of Keros

Archaeologists Explore Early Bronze Age Settlement on Greek Island of Keros

Mon, Mar 25, 2013

Island of the famous "Keros Hoard" may hold more secrets.
Archaeologists Explore Early Bronze Age Settlement on Greek Island of Keros

Keros Island. It is known for the famous assemblage of fragmentary Cycladic marble figurines popularly known as the "Keros Hoard", a collection of artifacts purportedly found by looters at the site of Kavos on the west coast of this now uninhabited Greek island in the Cyclades, southeast of Naxos in the Mediterranean. Many of the figurines, traded on the antiquities market, ended up in the Erlenmeyer Collection in Basel, Switzerland, with the rest dispersed among various museums and private collections. The figurines were said to have inspired the work of Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore.

Now, archaeologists will be returning to the island to conduct a survey that will, they hope, shed additional light on the settlement and civilization that constituted the famous hoard's context, with an eye toward further targeted excavations.

The ancient people who presumably produced or traded the figurines inhabited a settlement that, based on previous investigations and excavations, flourished during the 3rd millennium B.C. as a part of the Early Bronze Age Cycladic civilization. Excavations carried out under the direction of Professor Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge and the British School at Athens (the "Cambridge Keros Project") from 2006 to 2007 at Kavos uncovered more fragmentary Cycladic figurines, vessels and other objects made of marble, suggested by the excavators to have been broken elsewhere but brought to Kavos for deposition. In 2008 they excavated a large area they identified as part of a Cycladic period settlement on the nearby associated islet of Dhaskalio. That excavation revealed a substantial building 16 metres long and 4 metres wide, considered to be the largest from this period in the Cyclades — within which was discovered an assemblage comprising a chisel, an axe-adze and a shaft-hole axe of copper or bronze. In addition to excavation, survey of the islet showed that most of it evidenced Early Bronze Age occupation, making this the largest archaeological site in the Cyclades.

"A pedestrian surface survey of the island of Keros was begun in 2012 in order to place the results of the 2006-2008 excavations in a wider context", reports the Project leadership. "Much of the west of the island was covered in 2012, and so the work this year will concentrate in the east, although some intensive collections will also be scheduled in the west. The aim is to complete the survey in 2013."[1]

For more information about the Keros Island Survey go to http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/keros/ and http://www.archaeological.org/fieldwork/afob/11749.

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View of Keros Island, one of the Cyclades south of Greece. Phso2, Wikimedia Commons

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Figurines of a harp player (left) and a flutist (right), Bronze Age, 2600 BC, from the island of Keros, as displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Sailko, Wikimedia Commons

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[1] http://www.archaeological.org/fieldwork/afob/11749

Cover Photo, Top Left: Head from the figure of a woman, Early Cycladic II (2700 BC - 2300 BC), Keros culture. Louvre Museum, Wikimedia Commons.

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