The Archaeologists Who Wouldn't Dig

by John Fleischman

In all of Greek Literature, there are few places more famous than Pylos. And the location of Pylos was an ancient mystery, as an old riddle goes, "There is a Pylos in front of Pylos and there is yet another Pylos."

In our century nothing has matched whatever happened at Pylos on April 4, 1939, probably the luckiest first day on a dig an archaeologist ever had. On that morning Carl W. Blegen, the preeminent American archaeologist of the time, opened a trench through an olive grove. There, above Pylos, he struck what he later described as "the office of internal revenue" in Nestor's late Bronze Age palace. A cataclysmic fire had destroyed the palace 3 200 years earlier, but storage jars of olive oil had exploded near clay tablets on which the palace financial records were kept, fired then into a crude ceramic. All told, Blegen laid bare more than 1 000 tablets covered in an early Greek script called Linear B, the earliest writing then known on the European mainland.

A terrible disappointment to some classicists (who had hoped the tablets would be filled with poetry), the decipherment of Linear B was a revelation to historians. The wanax, as the king of Pylos was called, had made his scribes keep lists of everything: bath attendants, bronze-shod chariot wheels, perfumed oil and postings of shepherds and coastguards. The Bronze Age Greeks, or Mycenaeans, such lists show, had created the first highly centralized civilization in Europe─a precursor to city-states, empires and nations from Athens to the Soviet Union.

For Jack L. Davis, professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, that was reason enough to revisit Pylos fifty years after his predecessor's first excavation. Davis assembled a consortium of archaeologists, historians, physical scientists and students into the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project, or PRAP. In archaeological parlance, PRAP is "survey". By plotting the locations of ceramics, stone tools and other artifacts that weathered out of the soil across wide areas, PRAP determines large-scale patterns of human activity. The shovel is the one tool that Davis and his fellow principal investigators do not use. PRAP does not dig.

Archaeologists who don't excavate? Surely that is heresy. Yet, surveys are a well-established archaeological practice. American anthropologists working in the Southwest and in Meso-America refined the technique in the 1960s and 1970s. Later, British archaeologists picked up the New World habit, wedded it to French modernist theories on the history of "ordinary" life and brought it to bear on Old World problems. Still, nothing as ambitious as the PRAP survey has ever been tried on mainland Greece. "It's one thing when you find a hundred or even a thousand artifacts in a square kilometer," Davis says of North American surveys, "but in the Aegean we're finding hundreds of thousands of artifacts in a square kilometer."

The results of that work are already available on the World Wide Web. The subversive stuff, however, is in Davis's mild-mannered book titled Sandy Pylos, which will be published by University of Texas Press next year. Sandy Pylos quietly undermines many conventional assumptions about archaeology and history. Without lifting a shovel, Davis's team have uncovered nothing less than "the history, not just of one archaeological site, but of an entire landscape," as Davis writes in the book's foreword, "and not just in a single period, but at all times in the past."

The location of Pylos was an ancient mystery even to the ancients. As the Greek geographer Strabo noted, quoting an old riddle: "There is a Pylos in front of Pylos and there is yet another Pylos." Even Greeks of the Classical Age knew only that Nestor's Pylos lay near the town they called Koryfasio, which is somewhere else entirely.

When I decided to retrace Blegen's footsteps and talk with Davis, I had to take an all-day bus ride from smog-bound Athens across the rocky Peloponnesus to Pylos in western Messenia. Eight hours later, dehydrated and reeking of tobacco smoke, I staggered off the bus in Pylos and fell straight into the confusion over place names in Modern Greece. In 1827, after the Greeks won their independence, the Ottoman Navarino was renamed Pylos. But Ottoman Navarino had never been ancient Pylos. The Pylos I was looking for turned out to be a short but terrifying taxi ride away: fourteen kilometers north of town, along the Bay of Navarino and then several hundred yards abruptly uphill, to the beak of a sharp ridge called Ano Englianos.

Blegen's dig is now covered by a huge, open-sided sheet-metal hangar, erected by the Greek government to protect the low, rubble footprint of the late Bronze Age palace. The day after my arrival, I wandered through the ankle-high maze of the palace remains in search of the great central megaron, or throne room, where the wanax presided. From scraps of fallen plaster, Blegen had reconstructed some of the palace's brilliant decorations. There were frescoes of deer, doves, bare-chested warriors, a singer and his lyre: a splendid setting for a warrior-king—even one surrounded by accountants. Down the hall, the Linear B archives never bothered to name the King, but they did name the place.

This was Pylos, the Pylos before there were any others. Standing outside the ruin, looking across the plain below to the Bay of Navarino and the Ionian Sea beyond, I could understand why the later Greeks could not find Pylos: they were convinced that Homer's "sandy Pylos" had to be near the sea. Why Pylos was here in the hills was a question PRAP would later answer for me.

A journalist visiting a working archaeological site usually can count on a grand tour of the "dig", a tortured plot of ground covered with grid markers, tools and heaps of dirt waiting to be screened. There, in the holy trenches, he will be shown graduate students with serious sunburn working the earth with dental picks and dustpans.

Davis did not have a single trench to show me. Survey work is done by walking, he explained as we sat in the cool of the evening at PRAP headquarters in the village of Hora. Every morning between fifteen and twenty PRAP students fan out in teams across the rugged hills and coastline around the old palace. At fifteen-meter intervals they pace off precise quadrants, collecting surface artifacts and environmental data. The teams press on regardless of topography, heat and the infamous Greek macchia, chaparral-like underbrush that grows luxuriantly even where shepherds and their goats have given up.

At day's end the PRAP walkers carry their surface finds back to a temporary museum in a Hora schoolhouse. There the finds' locations are logged in a marvelous computer information base and the sherds are stored in recycled five-gallon oilcans.

Broken pottery is a virtually catastrophe-proof record of human settlement. Invaders may loot precious metals and survivors may scavenge building materials, but no one ever carries off the broken pottery—no one, that is, except archaeologists. Aegean pottery types, from the truly ancient to the nearly modern, have been so thoroughly characterized that PRAP pottery experts can usually sort the fragments as easily as if they were sorting socks.

At many archaeological sites, soil stratigraphy is everything: it gives context to artifacts, showing when and how they were deposited and what the environmental conditions were at the time. But farmers have churned up Western Messenia for 6 000 years; in some places the ground has eroded so deeply that they plow up the soft bedrock marl directly for soil. Over time the surface of the soil has become a historical hodgepodge: bits of late Bronze Age oil jars are mixed indiscriminately with eighteenth-century Roman roof tiles. Nevertheless, as sherds weather to the surface, they create a rough statistical model of what's below. Collected and plotted, the age-sorted sherds pile up electronically around certain sites, indicating peaks of activity and population. Survey is about finding such patterns.

Readers who dip into Sandy Pylos for the "truth" behind Homeric epics or Greek nationalism will be swept away instead by a torrent of time rushing across Messenia. The book synthesizes new data, old documents and novel analyses, and it draws perspectives from at least a dozen disciplines. The evidence comes from everything from core drilling to medieval financial records newly uncovered from state archives in Istanbul and Italy.

The story begins with the clash of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates that pushed up the Taygetus Mountains as well as other chains running from Greece to the Balkans. Two million years of stream erosion went on to create two rugged coastal valleys, and a series of ice ages left the slopes covered with pine forests. Then in about 15 000 B.C., people first began to leave traces of other habitation.

Evidence of farming dates from about 4000 B.C., first in the form of light tools along stream bottoms and then, after 3000 B.C., in the form of plows. In the next 1000 years both the human population and the number of grazing livestock exploded. Those explosions set off the first of what pollen and soil samples show were four waves of dramatic environmental change, which gradually wiped out the native vegetation and stripped away most of the topsoil. The second wave coincided with the rise of Mycenaean culture in about 1400 B.C. and the third, in about 500 B.C., with the new intensive agricultural practices of the Classical world. PRAP's physical scientists charted those changes, concluding, for instance, that in the fourth century B.C. olive trees were cultivated on a quarter of the surface area of the Pylos region. The fourth, last and ongoing wave of destruction dates from modern times, with the rise of the bulldozer and the chemical sprayer.

Each wave of environmental change marks a major change in human activity, or─in the common parlance─history. Take those olive groves. Here the environmental and archaeological survey data come together in intriguing ways. Until PRAP, the early Classical period was the black hole of the Messenian past. In the eighth century B.C. Sparta swallowed up its western neighbor in a series of shadowy wars, and the Spartan grip was not broken until 371 B.C., when the Spartans were defeated by the Theban general Epaminondas at the Battle of Leuctra. The Spartans had little interest in recording their own history, much less the history of the subjugated people of Messenia. Only through the curiosity of other Greeks, particularly such nosy Athenians as Thucydides, can contemporary scholars glimpse the fate of Spartan vassals, who were reduced to the status of perioikoi (literally "dwellers around"), with no political rights, or to helots, who were state-owned slaves. What were the Spartans up to for all those centuries before Messenia regained its independence?

Elsewhere in Greece at that time numerous scattered farmsteads were the agricultural rule. But in Messenia PRAP found no sherds from Spartan-era farmsteads. After reviewing PRAP's exhaustive survey records, the archaeologists Ann B. Harrison, of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Nigel Spencer, of the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Oxford in England, concluded that such farmsteads never existed on the PRAP site. Instead the population was crowded into large villages and small towns─so that their Spartan overlords could control or overawe them, presumably─and the olive groves were tended by helots. With the defeat of Sparta, PRAP's sherd patterns also show, the population spread out through the countryside.

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