We've been building up to and planning new excavation at Karphi since 2016, so it was a great feeling to actually put our plans into operation in 2023. Of course there've been difficulties - uncertainty about the behaviour of local actors at the start; the condition of road to the base of the site; the cost and complexity of finding temporary storage (in the end kindly granted by the Monastery of Kera Kardiotissa); finding and training student participants and getting them used to the extreme challenges encountered here! The amazing findings of 2023 and what they suggest about the productiveness of the 2025-7 excavations, and the ultimate friendliness and interest of so many people make up for all that. We can't wait for next year and are already, naturally, plannning activities, recuriting staff and sourcing more funding. Look out for our first published scholarly report on the season in the next year...we'll highlight it here first! Thanks so much to all our students and collaborators, especially the Heritage Management Organization, Grampus PEATS, and the INSTAP Study Center for East Crete!
This involves mapping surface-visible remains in detail at 1:50 and planning at 1:20 in the areas we want to excavate and thinking about trench layout. This was completed in 2022 along with topographical surface mapping at the nearby settlement of Papoura with our topographer Giorgos Damaskinakis. We recorded variations in surface level within our...
Just getting up to Karphi on a daily basis can be a challenging start to the day, reminding us that there had to be good reasons for living here when the most extensive and amenable areas of arable land were a 40-minute walk away in the Kera valley and Lasithi foothills. Getting finds down is also difficult. In the past...