Samos - West Area of Samos Archaeological Project - 2022

Anastasia Christophilopoulou (Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge), Michael Loy (Cambridge), Naoíse Mac Sweeney (Vienna)  report on the second season of the West Area of Samos Archaeological Project five-year research programme.

The season involved intensive pedestrian field survey in the Marathokampos basin of the island’s southwest, with an aim of fully documenting the spatial extent of two known sites, and locating any smaller sites in their hinterland: the first ‘Agios Ioannis’ catalogued by Graham Shipley in the 1980s (1987: 254) and the
second ‘Velanidia’, known through local tradition.

Total coverage for the season was 3.04km2, walked in 760 walker tracts comprising 50 × 50m grids and designated ‘unwalkable’ areas. In total, 26,306 sherds of pottery were counted by fieldwalkers, of which 2,106 diagnostic sherds were collected. These diagnostic pieces were studied following the end of the field
season by Dr Sabine Huy (Hamburg) in the Archaeological Museum of Pythagoreio, assisted by Francesca Zandonai (Berlin). Density of pottery scatters was used to identify 14 discrete areas of interest (Fig. 1), of which six (Vel-1–Vel-6) were located on the Velanidia plain, and two (AI-1 and AI-2) on the slopes beneath Agios Ioannis church. In addition, four AOIs were defined between Agios Ioannis and Velanidia (in an area designated ‘East Kampos’, EK-1–EK-4), and one to the west of Agios Ioannis at ‘West Kampos’ (WK-1).

All walkable areas of the coastal zones east of the settlement of Kampos in the periphery of the modern-day village Limnionas were walked, yielding two further AOIs (Lim-1 and Lim-2). Through extensive survey, 113 points of interest were recorded in the landscape, variously associated with AOIs or in the wider hinterland.
Velanidia provided the densest ceramic pattern, yielding nearly 20,000 sherds and 1,461 diagnostics from this area alone. Two AOIs from this site yielded predominantly first millennium BC pottery (Vel-1: Archaic/Classical Ionian and Attic tablewares; Vel-2: Archaic/Classical/Hellenistic transport amphoras), while the lion’s share of the remaining pottery was Early Byzantine, principally transport amphoras (Fig. 2). Across the whole landscape of the Marathokampos basin, all periods between the Bronze Age through to modern are represented, mainly locally or regionally made in southern Ionia in the Archaic and Classical periods, and thereafter including also pottery manufactured in the south Aegean, north Africa, and east Mediterranean.