Chios - Emborio Hinterland Project - 2024

Olga Vassi (Ephorate of Antiquities of Chios) and Andrew Bevan (UCL) report on the final year of the Emporio Hinterland Project (EHS) in Chios, a synergasia between the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chios and the BSA.

The priority in 2024 was two-fold: (a) to use the first three weeks to complete our coverage of the study area via pedestrian survey (in parallel lines 10m apart, recording every 10m to create a virtual 10x10 grid), and (b) to use the last three weeks to begin serious study of the permanently collected survey finds now in the Chios Museum. Both of these goals were achieved and final survey coverage was 9.4 sq.km (some 94% of the survey area), the remaining holes being in areas of inaccessible property and extremely difficult terrain (Fig. 1). Over 11 total weeks of fieldwalking in 2021, 2023 and 2024, we have counted ~60,000 potsherds and ~14,500 tile fragments on the landscape surface, and made a permanent collection of ~7,5000 diagnostic potsherds, as well as all knapped stone. Each of these finds can be accurately mapped to +-10m and the collected material is now being dated, typed and recorded individually. Closer ‘grid-based collection’ of ~10 possible scatters of prehistoric material was also conducted.

Preliminary study season was very useful, particularly in elucidating new evidence of prehistoric material. In particular, we were able to identify several new, small prehistoric sites in the hinterland of Emborio that were unclear or as yet uninvestigated in previous years. Mycenaean material was prominent at several locations, including both decorated and undecorated sherds and we expect to see more in the full study season next year. More importantly and for the first time, we have begun to get a clearer sense of what “Middle Bronze Age” activity from the earlier 2nd millennium BC might look like on Chios, a period that has hitherto largely eluded other researchers working on the island. At present, a combination of certain fabric categories, and Anatolian shapes such as bead-rim bowls are the clearest indicators, but we will return to this material in earnest next year. One particular common but enigmatic class of probable prehistoric finds are a series of horned or ‘double-wart’ horizontal handles that appear to come from shallow bowls. The warts/horns have some good general precedents in the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age material at Emborio, but so far have few if any exact matches, and the survey finds look harder-fired, more consistently round-sectioned and more commonly unburnished compared to the bulk of the excavated material from Emborio. Further work next year, including both direct study and wider comparison, will hopefully clarify this important set of diagnostics that are found at a number of different locations across the survey area.

Although a small amount of later material was sampled to inform our plans for 2025, so far, this has hardly touched the surface of the rich survey material that dates from Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Genoese, Ottoman and recent periods. This is a task for the full and final study season in 2025.