Stous Athropolithous

 

(All references to Cnnn or Fnnn can be found in the Mycenaean Atlas Project site at helladic.info)

I've been working through the list of sites in Crete found in Dominic Pollard's Ph.D. thesis and in the process doing a major revision of Crete for the Mycenaean Atlas.[1]  One of the sites Pollard calls 'Epano Zakros Stous Anthropolites'.[2]  What was it?

Well, the various artifacts found at Stous Athropolithous [C7970] in eastern Crete indicate a rural shrine.[3]    I'll have more to discuss about that later.

My primary question is 'where is it?'  

Fig. 1 shows the situation.  Stous Athropolithous is in the Cretan province of Siteia; it is close to the coast and the archaeological complexes around Kato Zakros.  The nearest town is Epano Zakros at F8051.

Fig. 1. Left: Eastern Crete or Siteia.  Athropolithous is marked with a blue paddle.  Right: the area around Epano Zakros and Athropolithous.

Stous Athropolithous was visited by Sir Arthur Evans in 1894, 1896, and 1903 [4] and he, along with other archaeologists, traced the outlines of a sizable settlement beginning about 600 m to the N by or near τοὺ κούκου τὸ κεφάλι [C6089]. [5]  Physically, Athropolithous consists of a line of caves eroded out of a small cliff and adjoining a plateau which is now supported with terrace walls.  It's the little caves that seem to have given it its cultic character. Peatfield describes it like this:

"Athropolithous is a small hill about 1.5 km. south-south-east of the village of Epano Zakro.  The hill has been cut by the asphalt road to Kato Zakro, leaving the major portion of the hill on the north side. Its net altitude above the surrounding fields varies between 10 and 30 metres.  As a geological formation the hill is an isolated outcrop of a type of rough conglomerate, which characteristically erodes out from the inside, leaving hollow rock shelters. It is these rock shelters that distinguish the site,"[6]

Can we find the small hill which the road cuts in half?  Following Peatfield's instructions and tracing the road that leads S from Epano Zakro brings us to the hill in figure 5 (35.104764° N,  26.224735° E):

Fig. 2.  The main N-S road cuts this hill (right outside Epano Zakro) in half.  The town in the BG is Epano Zakro.  View facing N.

There is no other possible hill in this vicinity which fits investigator's descriptions.  Having found the hill can we narrow in on the site location?

Fig. 3 is a  photo of Stous Athropolithous.[7]  This photo was taken before 1987 (no photographer is given) and is a view of (part of) our site facing approximately SW.  This photo isn't much help in determining a specific place for the site.  Due to the complete absence of a horizon or other gross identifying features it would be difficult to use this picture for placement.  Except for that blessed telephone pole [8].  The pole stands high on a hill and not hidden among the olives.  Can we find that same pole in Google Earth? 

Fig. 3.  The site of Stous Athropolithous.  Photographer is facing roughly SW.

At the hill that I identified earlier I traversed, in Google Streetview, the entire stretch of relevant highway.  This next photo is taken from the position 35.105221° N, 26.223867° E on an azimuth of approximately 111.5°.  Lo and behold, the visible telephone pole is the same pole as in fig. 3 but from the west instead of from the E.

Fig. 4. The telephone pole seen in Fig. 3 but from the other side.

Fig. 5.  The same picture as fig. 4 but showing more of the hill. (facing SE).  And note the pole on the far right center.  It is on the other side of the highway and is the same pole shown in the fig. 6 (left), namely, the last one in the sequence at the lower right in that figure.

Is that the same telephone pole?  In order to be certain I identified and put markers on all the telephone poles on that hill.   I show them on the left side of the following photo.

Figure 6.  Left: the sequence of telephone poles on the hill (N at the top).  Right: a close-up of the site of Athropolithous.  The red line here marks the angle of the shot in figures 4 and 5.  The telephone pole marking the site is here labelled 'Pole 2'.

The pole (which I have labelled 'Pole 2') is the only one of the sequence on the hill which is consistent with a small cliff drop-off (sheltering caves) as seen in fig. 3 and, as such, marks the only place from which the photo in fig. 3 could have been taken.

Next time I'll talk more about the nature of the site.

Footnotes

[1] Pollard [2022] 4-73.

[2]  Pollard [2022] 71. '424. Epano Zakros Stous Anthropolites'.

[3]  Brown and Peatfield [1987] 33. "Comparison with Piskokephalo would suggest that Athropolithous, ..., was an agricultural sanctuary. If, on the other hand, Evans’s was correct in his initial observation that the hills of τοὺ κούκου τὸ κεφάλι and Athropolithous were linked as parts of a larger ‘city’; then Athropolithous would be a domestic/urban sanctuary and not a sacred enclosure at all."  

Figurines found on the site are illustrated in Brown and Peatfield [1987] 28, 30.  The catalogs in Brown and Bennett [2001] list a number of figurines from Athropolithous.

[4] The travels of Sir Evans to this area, along with his sketch maps, are documented in Brown and Bennett [2001] 316.

[5] The literature sometimes speaks of τοὺ κούκου τὸ κεφάλι and the Minoan Villa (C6089) in a way that suggests that they are separate sites.  They are the same site.  Brown and Peatfield [1987] 27 say: "It was also here that Hogarth pointed out that Evans included as part of Athropolithous, the site τοὺ κούκου τὸ κεφάλι.This latter site (no. 4 in Hogarth’s catalogue) is the site of the Minoan neopalatial villa excavated by J. and E. Sakellarakis as part of Platon’s excavations at Zakro."  The reference to Hogarth is Hogarth [1900] 148, no. 4.

Figure 7.  Part of τοὺ κούκου τὸ κεφάλι (C6089) as seen in Google Street View.

[6] Brown and Peatfield [1987] 29.

[7] Brown and Peatfield [1987] Plate 1a.

[8] Telephone poles are often useful in determining the exact position of a site.  While poles can be replaced, and often are, actually to completely  remove a pole (or move it to somewhere else) is an expensive undertaking.  The main reason is that a pole is part of a network of other poles.  Removing or translating an entire network of poles is prohibitively difficult.  See this, this, this, or this.  This is even more true for high-voltage towers: here.

Bibliography

Brown and Bennett [2001] : Brown, Ann and Keith Bennett.  Arthur Evans's Travels in Crete - 1894-1899, BAR International Series 1000. 2001. ISBN: 9781407323817.

Brown and Peatfield [1987] :  Brown, Ann and A. A. D. Peatfield. ‘Stous Athropolithous: A Minoan Site near Epano Zakro, Sitias’, The Annual of the British School at Athens (82), 'Stous Athropolithous: A Minoan Site near Epano Zakro, Sitias', pg. 23. Online here.

Hogarth [1900] : Hogarth, D.G., 'Excavations at Zakro, Crete', The Annual of the British School at Athens (7), pp. 121-149. British School at Athens.  1900-1901.   Online here.

Pollard [2022]  : Pollard, Dominic. Between the Mountains and the Sea: Landscapes of Settlement, Subsistence and Funerary Practice in Later Bronze Age and Iron Age Crete: Appendices, Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Institute of Archaeology University College London (UCL).  June, 2022.  Online here.