Emborio Hinterland Project - 2021

Olga Vassi (Ephorate of Antiquities of Chios) and Andrew Bevan (UCL) report on the first year of fieldwork in a new collaboration between the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chios and the BSA. Due its position at the interface between the eastern Aegean and western Anatolia, as well as its size and considerable natural resources, Chios has played an important role in major patterns of cultural, demographic and political flux. In particular the site of Emborio in southeastern Chios that provides the most fine-detailed, point-observation on long-term patterns from deeper prehistory to the present. Despite a well-excavated, carefully published record and regular passing mention in wider syntheses, Emborio presents something of a challenge, due to the difficulty of marshalling the available legacy evidence easily, a troublesome early chronology unmoored from wider radiocarbon-led dated stratigraphies and a lack of wider landscape contextualisation. The Emborio Hinterland Project (hereafter EHP) seeks to address these hitherto missed opportunities starting with the latter.

As a complement to other efforts to enhance the value of the existing excavated record at Emborio and neighbouring sites, the EHP will subject some 10 km² around Emborio to full-scale, multi-dimensional archaeological investigation. A short programme of intensive fieldwalking was conducted in July and early August, under the direction of Bevan and Vassi, assisted by Despoina Tsardaka (Ephorate of Antiquities of Chios) and Brenna Hassett (UCL).

Despite the challenges of the pandemic and a delayed permit, the team were able to complete two weeks of survey, followed by limited further clean-up. The focus was on the immediate headland of prehistoric Emborio, and then on a single block slightly further south in the Dotia/Phoki valleys, where there was a productive mix of prehistoric, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Early Roman, Late Roman and Medieval evidence. This is the heart of the mastic gum production on Chios, and hence of considerable interest as a major Mediterranean industry in several historical periods. The need to deliver finds back to the museum in Chios town by 4pm each day meant that the team prioritised creation of a basic photograph and database record for each find, and will conduct further study in the coming year. The team covered c. 1 km² evenly at high resolution, fieldwalkers spaced 10m apart, with all survey finds recorded to a precision of +/-10m. In total 7,185 sherds and 3,523 tiles were counted and 1,200 ‘feature’ potsherds and all 42 other finds, such as lithics, were collected.

Prehistoric material concentrated around the Emborio headland, close to the location of the 1950s excavation trenches, including sherds of both Neolithic and Bronze Age date, and a limited number of lithics. A further cluster of prehistoric material was found around the known Early Bronze I (and possible Final Neolithic, to be confirmed) of Phoki where rescue excavations by Tsardaka had taken place in 2016 in advance of a planned telecommunications tower (never constructed). The survey confirmed that the main ceramic material was confined to the hilltop itself, but also found further prehistoric material of similar and possibly later date around another hilltop immediately to the southwest. Lithics of local chert were present but rare, and obsidian finds entirely absent.

Moving west down towards the Dotia valley, we documented a striking mix of discrete Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Roman and Medieval scatters (figure 3d-f), that will require further resolution via close study. These primarily seem to indicate farms or small estates, although there is also some evidence for a possible Archaic cult site given the amount decorated surface material and a clay imitation astragalus. Material of later date was primarily confined to lowland parts of the valley and was not common on the slopes of the Psaronas extinct volcano, although further survey is required in 2023 to confirm.