C5708: Volakas Cemetery in Siteia on Crete

Giorgos Vavouranakis, in his Funerary Landscapes East of Lasithi, describes the burial sites around Hagios Georgios in Crete.  Of the Volakas Hill site he says this:

"The second burial site is on the south slope of the Volakas hill, just outside the modern settlement (of Hagios Georgios), to the northwest off the main road ... Nine chamber tombs with a roughly circular chamber and a dromos were excavated  ..., but were found looted and, generally, disturbed.  According to the pottery, the place was used throughout the Postpalatial period (LM IIIA-C)."[1]

The Volakas site is the location of several chamber tombs and was used for a very long time: from the Early Minoan III to the Late Minoan IIIC.  The site mentioned, outside Hagios Georgios, is in Siteia, eastern Crete.  Hagios Georgios is indicated by the arrow on this first photo:

Here is a close-up of Hagios Georgios.  But where in all this wilderness of hills and field roads is the Volakas site?


Vavouranakis provides a photograph of the site which you see here:

This picture leaves a lot to be desired.  By the time these photos appear in academic publications they've been stepped on so many times that there usually isn't much left.  In their published state these photos aren't nearly as helpful as their creators suppose.  And yet there's much that can be done to rescue these old pictures.  Applying judicious transformations in photoshop gives us this:

The real problem with the original is that the contrast is too low.  Major improvements were achieved by increasing the contrast and by sharpening (which is a kind of micro contrast increase).

We're looking at a footpath which leads up to a large rock with bush on top of it.  Behind the rock, and at no great distance, is a characteristic ridge covered with emergent rock and maquis.  Between the rock and the ridge is a dark mass that we must interpret as a grove of trees, probably olives.  Also, overhead, we can see at least two wires.  In this photo they've been aliased into a series of dashes but there's no mistaking what they are.  To the left (in this case SW) of the path is a complex of chamber tombs.  Vavouranakis' arrow points to them.

In the next picture I label all these features:

But where is this on the ground?   Well, it turns out that, because of the wires, there are only a couple of places where this could be.  Let's look:

In this photo I've drawn in the wires in blue.  These wires cross roads at only two places, here marked 'A' and 'B'.    In the next illustration I tried to recreate the view from point A in Google Earth:

If we compare this picture to the original photograph it's obvious that we're close.  The characteristic bumps on the ridge to the N match up well.  But we're really not close enough to that ridge.  Point A doesn't really match up to what we're expecting to see.  Let's try Point B.

This looks a lot better.  Not only is the characteristic ridge (with its bumps) visible but the wires match up better.  In this picture, though, there is a prominent tertiary road which is not visible in the original photograph.  Here's the view from above:

I'm convinced that this is the right place.  I've labelled all the features that I could.  The rock, the wires, the grove are all in their expected places and, if you click on this to enlarge it, you'll see what looks very much like Vavouranakis' chamber tomb dromos.  The only discrepancy is that the path in the original photograph has now disappeared.

This is chamber tomb cemetery C5708 and it is at: 35.125530 N, 26.064386 E.  I'm embarrassed to say that, on the website helladic.info, it has been in the wrong position (near Point A) for several weeks.  I'll fix that with the next DB release.

Notes

[1] Vavouranakis [2007] 43.



Bibliography

Eaby [2007]: Eaby, Melissa Suzanne, Mortuary Variability in Early Iron Age Cretan Burials, Dissertation for Ph.D. submitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 2007.  Online here.  Eaby discusses the cemetery at Ammoudoplaka which is C5888 in the Atlas.  Ammoudoplaka is contiguous to the Volakas site discussed here.

Sakellarakis [1966]:    Sakellarakis, I. 1966. Αρχαιότητες και μνημεία κεντρικής και  ανατολικής  Κρήτης.  Αρχαιολογικόν Δελτίον 21, Β2 (Χρονικά): 405-419.  (I have not seen this.)

Vavouranakis [2007]:    Vavouranakis, Giorgos.  Funerary Landscapes East of Lasithi, Crete, in the Bronze Age, BAR International Series, no. 1606, 2007.  Online here.



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With a correspondent I've been discussing the question of whether putting exact locational information online is a good thing or a bad thing.  I'd like to hear from my readers on this question - do you have qualms about putting this kind of information online?  You can respond to this post or use my e-mail which is bobconsoli at gmail dot com.


There have been recent database updates on helladic.info which show more sites on Crete (mostly).  Also the Elevation Report page and the Gazetteer report page have been updated with some extra features.  You might check this out.

If you like these posts then please follow me on Twitter (Squinchpix) or Google Plus (Robert Consoli).  Please do this.

You can e-mail me (and I hope you will) at  bobconsoli   at   gmail dot com

And please remember - Friends don't let friends use Facebook.

Most researchers in this field use some product like Microsoft's Excel to create a 'DB'.  This is fine; it's what is generally referred to as a 'flat file'.  That is, a single table representation of your data of interest.

The Mycenaean Atlas database, on the other hand, is a relational database with several tables that was built using MySQL.  Dumps of this DB are available but you need MySQL (or similar) and a knowledge of Structured Query Language (SQL) to run it.  Otherwise it doesn't make much sense to ask for it.  But If you'd like to have a copy of the Mycenaean Atlas database anyway then e-mail me and tell me about your project.  

And remember that useful .kml and/or .csv files can be generated directly from all the windows (including the new reports pages) of the website helladic.info   Try it out!   I'm also willing to generate custom .csv or .kml files from the atlas if you need something specific.

Finding Prosilio

There has been a lot of excitement about the Chamber Tomb that was discovered in Boeotia near Orchomenos.  I didn't see the announcement until 9/26/17.  I was intrigued by it and set out to look for the site.

Orchomenos is here, on the western edge of what was the Lake of Copais in Boeotia.

The town sits on the eastern end of a long narrow ridge called 'Akontion' because of its resemblance to a spear.  (Here the vertical has been exaggerated.)  The little town of Prosilio, where the chamber tomb was found, sits on the south side of Akontion.  The arrow points to it.

How do we find out exactly where it was found? 

First I looked at the photograph here:

Photo by Yannis Galanakis,  Prosilio Excavation Project

Here's the crew working on what looks like the dromos to the chamber tomb (I'm not certain of this).

I guessed that here the crew is standing on the south side of Akontion and somewhere near Prosilio.  I then tried to recreate this photo in Google Earth.  Here's what I came up with:

The fact that I was able to confirm so many identifying characteristics in the photograph (how many do you recognize?) made me feel certain that I had found the right spot.  It is, in fact, the light-colored patch at the lower right.  Google Earth tells me that at this point I'm just 40 m. above the surface.  When we turn the view around we have this:

Here we're looking west towards the site which is the white patch in the upper center.

The actual site location is 38.501057 N, 22.932393 E       In the Mycenaean Atlas Project it is now C5011.

And just to put the icing on the cake it turns out that Google Street View is available for the road between the site and the light colored house.  Here it is:

The famous light colored house along with the identifiable tree.

Honestly I never get tired of doing this.  Google Earth is a lot more than just a set of maps.  

If you enjoy this kind of photo recreation of Mycenaean sites you might like this previous post where I locate a tholos tomb in Arcadia.


Please don't hesitate to write with reactions to this blog post.  I want to hear from you!

Follow me on Twitter:   @Squinchpix
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...and remember: Friends don't let friends do Facebook.

Chamber Tomb of Barnavos: C1749

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
Chapter 12, 'Biographical'
Moby Dick
Herman Melville

Dr. James C. Wright has reported the finding of a chamber tomb in the Nemea Valley.[1]  At some time it had been robbed but through two excavation seasons in 2002-3 Dr. Wright and his team managed to carefully document what remained.  They established that it was used in the LH IIIA2 and that there were no other tombs in the immediate vicinity.

In this post I’m not concerned so much with the tomb’s significance but with its location.  Where is it?

Dr. Wright says this:

“The area known as Barnavos, or Marditsa, is located just west of Ancient Nemea (Figs. 1, 2). It is a ravine with a thick growth of cypresses and white pines.  The tomb is located on the western hillside just at the edge of the trees. Sherds and human bone fragments could be seen spilling down the slope to the east and southeast, thrown out of the tomb chamber by robbers (Fig. 3). To the northeast the hillside drops away less steeply as the ravine opens out to a field that borders the road to the village (Fig. 4). To the north and west the hill curves around several terraces planted with olives.

“The dry streambed of the ravine is deeply incised; directly above to the west is an earlier channel along which a path meanders up through cypresses to the head of the ravine. Above the path the ravine slope is very steep (40% grade) … On the facing slope east of the tomb is a modern goat-shed, and below it an agricultural road winds up the eastern side of the ravine. Above the shed the lower hillside is planted with barley and olives, and pine forest is present above the road cut. The south slope of the ravine here is very steep and bends westward as it rises to the west (Fig. 4). This slope is even more extensively covered with cypresses and white pine than the opposite side, and again, most of the surface is hard caliche or exposed soft marl.”[2]

The article is accompanied by a photograph and I show it here:

This is an unhappy picture and conceals more than it displays.  But there's life in these old scholarly pictures yet and a screen capture followed by a quick pass through Photoshop yielded this:

Now we can see what we're doing.  Dr. Wright annotated the picture with the 'Robbed Tomb' and the arrow.  The 'Maize?' annotation is mine.  So where are we?  We appear to be standing on the edge of a field of maize (Zea mays).   This is the plant Americans call 'Corn' or 'Indian Corn'.  The stand to the right seems unmistakably to be grape vines (Vitis spp.).  We are not told what direction we're facing but my initial guess is south.  There's a road around our corn field; it starts at the lower left and continues in a curve around to the middle right.

Dr. Wright makes a high-level map available.  It is here:

My version of this is here:

The toponym 'Barnavos' is actually meaningless.  Like Queequeg's 'Rokovoko' it appears on no map.  Or at least not on any map to which human beings have access.  I enlarged the 'Barnavos' area in Topoguide and got this:

In the center of this image we see the words 'Kokinies' and my guess is that the chamber tomb is somewhere near there.  Of course I'm not interested in knowing 'about' where it is.  I want to know precisely where it is, goat shed and all, because, in an actual Science which is what Mycenology purports to be, this is what we do.

Now let's look in Google Earth.

In this Google Earth image we are looking directly south in the Kokinies area and we see stretching up to the NE (lower left) a series of ridges and ravines of the Analipsi/Tebes hill complex.  Judging by his maps and by his verbal descriptions Dr. Wright's tomb, or so I suspect, is in one of these ravines.

Can we find the cypresses and white pines  (perhaps Cupressus sempervirens and Pinus peuce)?  Let's look:

This ravine is at 37.806656 N, 22.691198 E.  We're still looking nearly south as in the picture just above but we have now zoomed into one of those ravines and at its very bottom, probably following an intermittent creek, we have a long row of what looks very much like conifers.  Click on the picture to see it larger and notice the characteristic thin pointed shadows.

Now Dr. Wright has provided a very close-up detailed map of the site of the chamber tomb.  Here it is.

Now that we've found the site by whatever means available Dr. Wright has loaded us down with detail.  I imagine that this map shows an area of about 120 meters square directly around the site.  The paired lines in alternating black and white are field roads.  If we can find those roads then we have a shot at finding the site.

This picture shows approximately the same area as Dr. Wright's topographical map.  The field road which makes a switchback (here I have emphasized it in orange) appears to be exactly the same.  The area outlined in red is the same as in the previous picture.  Here you can more clearly see the typical conifer shadow shapes.  We appear to be getting close.  But Dr. Wright shows a second field road, parallel to the first, which does not appear in this photograph.  As a result there's still a tiny bit of doubt about the correctness of this location.  

Let's go back in time.  What we need is a picture of this site taken from a different angle because I think that the road did not show up in the previous picture because it's hidden by the conifer shadows.  When I try the imagery from May 23, 2014 we see the second road quite clearly.  I emphasize it with arrows in the next picture.

The orange line for the field road with a switchback appears to have drifted about 7.25 m. east from the underlying picture of the road.  The reasons for this drift were explained here.  I think we're finally in a position to determine the site of our chamber tomb.  Going by Dr. Wright's topographic map we can say that, to within 5 meters, the position of the chamber tomb is here: 

37.806973° N, 22.691860° E

Let's go further in and take a look.

In fact, not only have we located our chamber tomb but we've also located the famous goat pen.  I've drawn an arrow pointing to what appears to be a metal-roofed structure.  It could be a roof over the chamber tomb itself but I doubt it.  I think that's the goat pen.

This excavation was carried out in 2002-2003.  Here is a Google Earth image of the area from May, 2003.  The imagery is so bad we can only interpret it on the basis of what we already know.  However, it may be that the bright spot in the center of the image is the goat pen as it was at that time.  At least it shows that, at that time, something was there.

This still leaves us with the puzzle of from where it was that the original photograph was taken.  Basically I looked all over the valley for a road to the north of the tomb which curved around a stand of corn or grape vines.  It was impossible to find anything that even began to match what I thought I was looking at.

I'll reproduce the modified photograph:

The key to this puzzle lay in finding the building at the very left edge center.  It's this building:

Here we're facing SE.  The main road running east to Nemea is in the lower left corner.  At the edge is a little street shrine or kandylakia which looks like it ought to be replaced.  The orange line is the same as in previous pictures.  It is the start of the field road which has the switchback.  The building we were looking for from the previous picture is here in the upper right center.  Judging by the street signs it is part of a winery.  With all this found we can now find the location from which our picture was taken.  It is here 37.808737° N, 22.693216° E, and I show it in the next  picture:

I had to go back to May 2003 to find this field still in cultivation.  But there it is, long cultivated rows of something or other, and undoubtedly the place from which Dr. Wright's photograph was taken.  The building in question is at the upper center next to the outlined red area.

My analysis of this photograph made me wonder, once again, about the utility of photographs in scientific documentation.  I thought that the road running along the left side curved to the right side.  It doesn't.  It makes a T-join with the main road running to Nemea.  Also I stared at the building in the photograph and interpreted it as another road which I spent time looking for.  It sounds silly enough until such a misinterpretation happens to you.  I also thought that we were looking down a hill to the tomb.  We're not.  We're looking up.

This last picture is taken from Google Street View and it comes as close as possible to reproducing the photograph of Dr. Wright.  On the right is the location from which Dr. Wright's photograph was taken.  You can see that it was cultivated at one time because the irrigation pipes are still in place.

Academic photographs used for documentation face many of the same problems as photographs of the surface of the earth.  They're likely to be curve-distorted and very likely to be the 'wrong' brightnesses and colors.  No photograph should be used for scholarly purposes without the creator spending time explaining what the viewer is looking at.  

Text and picture go together.

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This blog documents the creation of the Mycenaean Atlas Project.  The MAP documents the exact locations of 1600+ Mycenaean sites and it is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the Greek Bronze Age.

Anyone who would like to have a copy of the MAP database can send an e-mail to bobconsoli 'at' gmail.com or leave a comment on any of my posts.  To run the MAP database requires a SQL server running on your desktop computer.   MySQL is such a server and it is powerful, industry-standard, and free.  

I can and will make .kml or .kmz files, which can be opened directly in Google Earth, available to those who would like them.  

I can also create .csv files for people who would like to import Mycenaean Atlas Project data into Google Earth but would like it in tabular form.

Those who do not have a SQL server but would like the full database in .pdf form can have that for the asking.  The full database runs 2400 pages in .pdf form and can be downloaded from Google Drive.

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Notes

[1]  Wright [2008]
[2] Wright [2008] 609-10.

Bibliography

Wright [2008]:  Wright, James C., Evangelia Pappi, Sevasti Triantaphyllou, Georgia kotzamani, Mary K. Dabney, Alexandra Livarda, Panagiotis Karkanas. 'Nemea Valley Archaeological Project, Excavations at Barnavos', Hesperia lxxvii, 607-654, 2008.  It is online here.