The road from Troizen
Pausanias crossed the Adheres range and entered the region of the southern Argolid by way of the road from Troizen to Hermion (Figure 5.1). Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century C.E. is notoriously short winded on the specific details of the exact route (Alcock 1993, 28-29; Habicht 1985, 104; Snodgrass 1987, 86). He tells us ‘there is a road from Troizen to Hermion by the rock which was formerly called the altar of Strong Zeus, but which the moderns have named the rock of Theseus ever since Theseus picked up tokens here. Following the mountain road which runs by this rock we pass a temple of Apollo, surnamed Apollo of the Plane-tree Grove’ (2.34.6; after Frazer 1898). Given the nature of the topography in this mountainous terrain, it is extremely likely that he passes, if not nearby, at least within view of Soros.

Denoted as ‘G10’ by the Argolid Exploration Project (AEP), Soros is a large, more or less circular stone cairn with a double-faced enclosure wall surrounding its upper slopes. At over 8m in height and 40m in diameter at its base the cairn lies exposed on the ridgeline at an elevation of just over 680 meters. It commands views north to Troizen and south to Iliokastro and beyond. Given its monumentality is can also be seen from a great distance. Though of earlier date, Soros is indicative of other boundary markers on the borders of the Hermionid. Pausanias in passing by this cairn, a lone sentinel upon the ridgeline, entered onto the drainages above the plateau of Eileoi (contemporary Iliokastro), into the region demarcated by the AEP as the southern Argolid.

Border inscriptions and an inscribed border
The term ‘boleoi lithoi’ is inscribed into two stone stelae. Translated as ‘heaped’ or ‘thrown stones,’ boleoi lithoi serves as a referent for the same series of roughly circular (though one may have been squared) 7m diameter piles of unhewn rubble along a ridgeline between the Dhidhima basin and the Fournoi valley in the southern Argolid (refer to Figure 5.1). It is highly probable that these stone cairns are the materializations of a border dispute between Hermion and Epidauros. In this context, the thrown heaps of stone also inscribe the settlement of an arbitration that took place sometime in the early 2nd century B.C.E. upon the land. Boleoi lithoi are therefore inscribed both as a textual referent on stelae and as monumental gatherings of stone in the countryside.

The arbitration of this land dispute was materialized in stone stelae and to insure immutability it was multiplied times two. One stele (IG IV2.1.75) of ‘hard, creamy, grey limestone’ of which only the left edge of a fragment survives at 0.18m in height, 0.106m in width, 0.124 in thickness (Dixon 2001, 169) was placed in the Asklepieion of Epidauros. The other (SEG 11.377), composed of local grey marble at a height of .635m and a width under the kyma of .565m, which tapers out to .585m at the base and is .125m in thickness (Peek 1934, 47), was located in a public space somewhere in Hermion (Figure 5.2). With regard to the latter, we know little of the exact context of display in the second century B.C.E. Inscriptions are capable of being transformed into many things—lintels, thresholds, wall fabric, etc.—and many of the Hermion inscriptions met with such a fate in the various transformations of the Bisti. Indeed, the notorious Abbé Fourmont located perhaps as many as three-dozen such inscriptions in the Medieval crosswall of the Bisti in 1729 (Omont 1902). Speculation as to Pausanias’ reading of the inscription suggests that it was perhaps still situated in an openly visible locale four centuries after the dispute had taken place (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 580; also refer to Habicht 1985, 64-94).

The location of these inscriptions entered them into a complex exchange with communal space. These texts were assembled in the space of public assembly, but such locales should not be thought of exclusively or even primarily as public reading contexts. Consider that, if the degree of literacy in second century B.C.E. Hermion was anything analogous to W. Harris’ estimation of 5% to at most 10% for both Classical and Hellenistic Greece, then inscriptions such as the Hermion stele would enter into relationships with the majority of the population quite differently than their textual nature might at first lead one to suppose (1989, 114 and 146). Moreover, stone texts do not circulate in space-time in the same way as papyrus or goatskin or indeed the paper-based transformations—e.g. SEG 11.377 and Peek 1934—that circulate among classical scholars today. Understanding stone inscriptions has a great deal to do with their material presence. James Whitley, in his study of law inscriptions from Crete, argued that, in the absence of widespread literacy between 750 and 450 B.C.E., such texts in stone were ‘as much symbolic as practical’ (1997, 660). But these qualities, as I emphasized at great length in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, are not antithetical. Stone with its material richness and ambiguity and text with its legible specificity make a wonderful mixture. To be sure, the nature of person’s relationship to these media depends upon their personal life histories, skills, knowledge and material prostheses. As Whitley emphasizes, inscriptions, such as the Gortyn Law Code transform the regulations and practices of a small city-state into ‘eternal and immutable’ form, but in this role they are ‘just as effectively incoherent as coherent, read as unread’ (1997, 660-661). In this way, their meanings, associations and understandings are predicated upon their site specificity.

Center and periphery
Inscribed texts at the center of the community space in the city connect with an inscribed border at the fringes of its associated territory. But in this they are not alone. According to Pausanias (2.34.12) Hermion manifested this exchange between center and boundary in the duplicate shrines of Demeter Thermesia—one rested somewhere within the city walls of Hermion and the other on the border with Eileoi, perhaps in the area of what the AEP denoted as ‘G1.’ The enrollment of these hard, immutable immobiles, nevertheless, hardens borders and extends the community. Delegated the task of articulating and holding on to something of the event of arbitration, the Hermion and Epidauros inscriptions also continue to mediate relationships between two city-states concerning borders through the years. As such these modes of inscription are fundamental entities within the sociotechnical network that constitutes the polis of 2nd century B.C.E. Hermion. Their action and necessity, in every sense, makes them viable members of the community themselves, with their own histories, their own stories, and their own place in the community space. So too are the boleoi to be regarded as members.

A third reference to the Boleoi
Pausanias 2.36.3 also mentions the Boleoi. Having passed along the straight road to Mases from Hermion, Pausanias points out the road on the right from Mases to Strouthous, ‘Sparrow Peak’ or ‘Promentory.’ Beyond the latter, at a distance of 250 stades according to Pausanias, lies the area of Philanorium and the Boleoi. At the equivalent of 50 km, Pausanias’ measurement of 250 stades for this distance, as some have contended, is, to borrow the words of Leake, ‘quite extravagant’ (1846, 290; also refer to Binliff 1977, 234; Curtius 1852, 464; Frazer 1898 III, 298; Miliarakis 1886, 254). Jameson (1953, 162), following Wilhelm (1948), argues for a more circumscribed distance of 55 stades or 11 km. If Strouthous is indeed Cape Iria, then this distance is apposite (refer to Figure F.1. in Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 597).

Almost two centuries of topographical research, speculation and reconnaissance by Classical Topographers was given over to the search for these long lost and forgotten arbiters of a territorial dispute. From Puillon de Boblaye (1836) to Jameson (1953) and Moretti (1967) their location was posited to be as far south as the area Fournoi to as far north as the heights above the Bedheni valley just the north of the Dhidhima basin. The boleoi lithoi were (re)located by Michael Jameson in the early 1990’s.

Things enter into politics
The identity of the arbiters, according to Sheila Ager, was one of the most important things to be specified in the negotiation of a border dispute among Greeks (1996, 9). The Hermion copy of the arbitration, from which much of the fragmented Epidaurian copy has been restored (Dixon 2001), lists as judges in the dispute Zenippos son of Gongylos, Phanokles son of Polystides, Demetrios son of Maiandrios, Demetrios son of Histiaios, Hegelochos son of Themistokles, Anthiades son of Simos. These judges were conducted from Kleitor in Arkadia by two Hermionians, Philon son of Kallistratos and Menekrates son of Menkrates, and two Epidaurians, Damokles son of Kallimenes and Timainetos son of Kallikon. The issues of concern that brought these people together at the place of dispute have to do with rights of pasturage and cropping in and around the area of the Sellas (a stream) and the wild harbors up to Strouthous (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 596-597). This gathering of people together delegates a task to gatherings of stones. In this transaction the relevant parties are not only human. Things, an assembly of stones in a series of cairns, enter into the dispute and are also designated as arbiters. Indeed, their identity as the boleoi lithoi is specified on both stelae. Their identity is inscribed along with everyone else’s.

Highly visible from both the upper plateau of Dhidhima and the lower valley of Philanoreia (the Fournoi valley) the densest concentration of boleoi lithoi—four of nine and possibly two more spaced at lesser intervals—are located near the road between the two locales. Travelers in their comings-and-goings along the road between Didymoi and the Hermionid, shepherds conducting their flocks of sheep or herds of goats, farmers working at their tasks in fields below or people collecting herbs or snails on the hillside, all would have encountered the cairns up close. The presence of the boleoi lithoi on the ground not only provides a material basis for demarcating the boundary for those carrying out such activities in close proximity, but, given their visibility, the boleoi lithoi also sanction the actions of people tied to droves and plants from a distance. As such, the community bodies of the Hermionid are also packed with material things and as in the case of the boleoi lithoi they extend to the border.

1961. A Koinotis boundary
In a 1961 black and white aerial photograph (1:16,000 photo scale digitally transformed at 23cm by 23 cm at 236.22 pixels per cm) dozens of animal folds—enclosures made up of materials at hand, unhewn stone, cuttings from maquis or a combination of the two—dot the ridgeline between the Fournoi valley and the Dhidhima plateau. An abandoned windmill, evidenced by a perfect hollow circle indicating a missing roof, is present along the line of boleoi (Figure 5.3). This very ridgeline, inscribed as a portion of the 2nd century boundary, is today inscribed on paper as a contemporary Koinotis (‘commune’) boundary between the townships of Dhidhima and Fournoi (refer to Figure 5.1, Sutton 2000, 86). Given the location of the enclosures in the photo, it appears that shepherds and their droves continue to traipse across this political line.

Sheep and goats as companion species
From research into the long-term history of sheep and goats to the rich engagements with shepherding, slaughtering, shearing and spinning, whether on the ground or at the loom by the Kosters, the AEP has contributed a great deal to our understandings of pastoralism in Greece. And yet, Jameson, Runnels, and van Andel articulated the story of man in opposition to those resources of the land he exploited (1994, 260-324). In contrast, understanding humans as entangled with the things of the land must also extend to their droves. Animals, alongside people and things, populate the sociotechnical collectives of the southern Argolid. In place of any presupposed, arbitrary divisions that abound between natures and cultures, Donna Haraway articulates the concept of companion species (2003). For Haraway, the story of people and companion species involves much more than, as in this case, the exploitation of food, fiber, and milk. Humans are coupled with sheep and goats in gene flows and in infectious exchanges over the very long term. They live jointly. Their fates are intertwined in ways that the old distinction between domesticator and domesticated cannot adequately address. Bonded in what Haraway calls significant otherness (2003, 16), sheep, goats and humans are all actors in the articulation of landscape. They transform the land as a collective. Understanding the members of the droves and flocks of the southern Argolid as companion species is a path toward the analytical leveling necessary in understanding the countryside in terms of such mixtures and entanglements; what Haraway terms ‘naturecultures.’

The path from Damala
At some point between 1801 and 1806, Sir William Gell crossed the Adheres by way of a path from Damala, near the ruins of Troizen. Along the way Gell, like Leake, recorded distance between features worthy of observation with to-the-minute precision. Locales observed from afar were often situated with a compass bearing along the line of sight from a specific place along the path. Gell also takes time to sketch views along the way with pen and ink. For Gell, this mode of engagement was at times a more suggestive and ‘accurate’ means of articulating ‘the face of a country’ (1810 xiv). In Gell’s Itinerary of Greece (1810) select translations of Pausanias or Strabo are juxtaposed with his own descriptions of the route on the ground. On horseback, Gell, with the Periegesis in hand, with a number of attendants and with a diversity of instruments, accoutrements and conveniences reiterates Pausanias’ path from Troizen.

The Plateau of Iliokastro
3 hours and 5 minutes after setting out from Damala, ‘rapid Gell’ arrived at a bushy plain, approximately 2 miles broad, that contained ‘several indications of ancient buildings’ (1810, 124). Well-watered by the southern drainages of the Adheres and the eastern slopes of Megalovouni, the igneous massif underneath the plateau of Iliokastro holds high water tables till late August making for a diverse vegetative milieu. In the center of the plain is the village of Ilio.

After having traveled along the mountain road from Troizen and past the temple of Apollo, Pausanias in passing mentions Eileoi, ‘in which there are sanctuaries of Demeter and her daughter the Maid’ (2.34.6; after Frazer 1898). Eileoi, it seems, is retained in Ilio of Iliokastro (Frazer 1898 III, 290; Gell 1810, 125; Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 30). The Kastro (‘G2’), a town surrounded by a fortification wall and designed on an orthogonal plan, lies just above the northern edges of the Iliokastro plateau.

Philanoreia?
Speculation as to the location of Philanoreia was hindered by the extravagant measurement given by Pausanias (2.36.3). Puillion de Boblaye (1836, 61-62) on the basis of observations made during survey reconnaissance by M. de Vaudrimey as part of the Expédition Scientifique de Morée (refer to Chapter 2) and perhaps in connection with a similar assertion by Gell (1810, 132), conflated Mases with Halieis, which he took to be ‘les ruines d'une ville considérable, dont une grande paertie se prolonge sous lex eaux’ at Porto Kheli or Bezáti as the bay was also known. Having done so, he relates Philanoreia with remains, probably those associated with the area denoted as ‘C17’ by the AEP, on the north shore of Koiladha Bay (Puillion de Boblaye 1836, 62). Leake corrected Puillion de Boblaye’s mistake by placing Halieis at Porto Kheli and Mases at Port Koiladha. In absence of any ‘monumental evidence,’ he left the matter of Philanoreia to subsequent topographers (1846, 290).

In 1953 Michael Jameson speculated that Philanoreia lay in the vicinity of Lambayana, at the western end of the Fournoi valley near the shore (166). In so doing, he emphasized the area around the Lambayana tower as a possible candidate for the ancient site. Nearly 25 years later John Bintliff suggested, instead, that Philanoreia be associated with a cluster of sites focused around the contemporary village of Fournoi some 4 km further up the valley from the Lambayana shore area (1977, 204 and 234). Bintliff’s ‘Fournoi Focus,’ comprised of sites ‘F6,’ ‘F13,’ ‘F15,’ ‘F17,’ and ‘F32,’ all culminated in a low, exposed hill with a limestone summit known today as Profitis Ilias, ‘F5.’ This rise, occupied by a small chapel and located on the edge of the Fournoi village, according to Binliff, ‘might conceivably have served as an immediate rallying point against sudden attack but hardly merits consideration as a possible stronghold’ (1977, 204). Soon after Binliff’s study, a small fountain was constructed in the center of the village, which incorporated 2 marble lion head spouts dated by the AEP to the 4th century B.C.E. These features and materials come together to provide evidence on the ground for the association of ancient Philanoreia with Fournoi village by Jameson, Runnels and van Andel (1994, 519).

Proximity
The energies associated with the discovery and connection of a locale on the ground with a place mentioned in ancient texts, whether Pausanias, Strabo, Thucydides, etc., were at the heart of the work of Gell, Leake, and Puillion de Boblaye and they continue to drive later topographers and archaeologists today (e.g. Binliff 1977; Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994). Through such texts, such paper-based media, distant pasts are folded into and made proximate with material presences in 2004. This is but one means whereby diverse times continue to percolate in the present. Many other proximities are more contingent. They are less secure in absence of a text.

A rupestral horos, ‘E15’
34N 0695839, 4143908 are the UTM coordinates for a boulder inscribed with the letters ΟΡ⁄ΟΣ on its eastern face. Located at the junction of the cliff face and a rocky spur of a lower ridgeline in the Katafiki Gorge, the inscribed horos marker (‘rupestral’ horos), which was surmised to date somewhere between the 6th and 4th centuries B.C.E. (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 531-532), serves as a referent for the demarcation of what Jameson, Runnels and van Andel argue was the Classical boundary between Hermion and Philanoreia. From the marker one can see the Pron of ancient Hermion through the lower gates of the gorge and a portion of the upper Fournoi valley in the opposite direction.

In the very stone of the cliff face the ΟΡ⁄ΟΣ likely manifests a link, acts as a referent, for the more than obvious spur ridge that projects into the Katafiki (Figure 5.4). The road between Hermion and Philanoreia, which probably ran along the streambed approximately 60m meters below the inscription, would have circumvented this very formation. The letters, at roughly 25 cm in height and at around 1.5m from the base of the rock face, are obscured by surrounding boulders and the ridgeline which places them, for the most part, out of the sight of any passerby on the route below (Figure 5.5). Why is the horos located so high and at such a distance from the most likely passage through the gorge?

In his discussion of the rupestral horoi of Attica, Josiah Ober points out how such markers are often linked together in a series (1995). Certainly, it is possible that we are dealing with one of a series of such rupestral horoi along the ridgeline, which is fractured by the Katafiki. This would help explain its location. However, Ober also lays caution against the possibility of such inscriptions set in a series. He emphasizes the difficulty involved not only in ascertaining the simultaneity of multiple rupestral horoi, but also in even proving the marker to be one established between two demes in a particular period (1995, 119-120). Just as it is possible that the markers were inscribed in the context of negotiations between Hermion and Philanoreia, it is just as possible, given the dearth of evidence, that the act of delegation resulting in the horos occurred in the context of mediations between two or more religious precincts or between two or more private parties. We lack the necessary evidence that the stelae inscriptions presented us with in the context of the boleoi. Without these things, without allies to muster in our belief that this is the boundary marker between these two demes at some point between the 6th and 4th centuries B.C.E., articulating the details of the Katafiki horos’ membership in the sociotechnical networks of the time is a risky enterprise. We must return to the issue of site-specificity.

In the case of the Katafiki horos the medium is comprised of a simple text, four letters and the landscape proper. The boundary marker is not as ambiguous as the stone cairn of Soros. The letters ΟΡ⁄ΟΣ proclaim that this is a boundary (if only it possessed the additional ‘eimi tes…’ of the Agora horoi). As with the boleoi this is its obligation; this is its action. Pace Ober (ibid. 122-123), we know this much for certain.

The Katafiki
The Katafiki gorge cleaves apart a linear rise of limestone running east/west from the Franchthi headland between the Fournoi and Loutro valleys to above the Ermioni kambos (a small coastal plain) and underneath the edge of the Iliokastro Plateau. Shear walls of limestone washed with oranges, ochres, and grays tower over 100m in some areas and frame a one kilometer channel underneath which percolate waters from the Iliokastro Plateau through the Ermioni kambos and into the harbor north of the Bisti. A conduit of water, the Katafiki was also a pass for ebbs and flows of people and companion species. From forms of woodland management to water extraction for the Ermioni Kampos, from rock climbing and hiking to an old mule road, the activities that have taken place in the Katafiki over the last 100 years or so have been quite varied.

Pine resin
On the north slope of the spur ridge about 40m below the rupestral horos stands a deeply scarred pine with several rusty steel cans clinging to its trunk. Such remnants of resin extraction mark the pine trees of the area. In this process, 75cm long strips of bark (approximately 7 or so cm wide) are removed from the trunk of the tree. A tin, aluminum or steel can is nailed in place at the bottom to catch the sap as it seeps forth over the course of months. Resin was a major cash crop of the region during the 19th century (Miliarakis 1886, 230). At that time pine resin was recruited in, among other things, tempering wine, sealing casks or jars and, of course, in the construction of various ships—ghaghaves, kaikia, trehandhiria, etc.—so as keep out the sea.

The domain of Proteus
Bluefin tunny, an open water quarry, were common in stratigraphic levels dated to around 7500 B.C.E. at Franchthi. Hermionian purple, the famous dye of the Murex trunculus (cf. Alkiphron, III, 46, 4; Plutarch, Alex. 36), the shell fragments of which litter the Bisti of Ermioni, tied the ancient city’s reputation to the sea. Pirates, we are told by Plutarch, plundered the temple of Demeter Chthonia. Pausanias, who tells us that Hermion staged annual competitions in swimming and rowing for Dionsysos Melanaigis (2.35.1), left the Hermionid from Mases by way of the sea (2.36.5). In 1669, Evliya Chelebi professed that, in the whole of the Morea, there was no tastier salt than that produced in the saltworks at Thermisi, just north of Ermioni (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 609). In 1870, 50 years after the region mustered a large portion of the Greek fleet in the War of Independence, Kranidhi had 2030 of 3174 men identify themselves as men of the sea (Jameson Runnels and van Andel, 1994: 300). Many were shipbuilders, as were many of the residents of Koiladha at the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1990’s the ferry system transported hundreds of people daily from the ports of Ermioni, Kosta and Porto Kheli to the islands of Hydra and Spetses, which have at various times formed the southernmost ridgelines of the southern Argolid landmass. And in 2004 Ermioni expanded its northern harbor upon foundations comprised of tons of raw limestone extracted from a quarry in the countryside nearby. Across the very long term, a long term that far exceeds the longue durée of Braudel, the accreted pasts of the southern Argolid have been formed largely by the sea. Proteus, the shape changer, continually transforms the outlines of the land in the southern Argolid. Since groups frequented a cave on the western end of the Franchthi promontory roughly 23,000 years ago the sea has risen 120m. The pace of the transformation has slowed down significantly over the last 10,000 years and still people with boats and ships, oars and sails, adjust to the rhythms of its caprice. The shape and size of the southern Argolid along the coastline traveled by hunters/gatherers in the Upper Paleolithic to that measured by the distances of the portulan attributed to Pseudo-Scylax of the 6th century B.C.E. has transformed by upwards of 250km2.

Whether the exposure of buried features and materials in a beach scarp at Panayitsa (‘B4’), a roof tile kiln in the small bay of Lorenzo across from Spetses (part of which was excavated in 1967 (Jameson 1969, 341-342), the great walls of the Bisti, structural features at Ermioni Magoula, the lower town of Halieis, a spit constructed from the rejects and waste of brick kilns on the eastern edge of Koiladha Bay or the early Neolithic settlement area at Franchthi Paralia, through a combination of both exposure and entropy, the ebbs and flows of the sea have made the presence of once distant pasts proximate while eventually washing others away.

Ridgeline turned headland. Franchthi
Measurements taken in 1979 by a group under the direction of Tjeerd H. van Andel along the edges of the Akte in the Koiladha bay adjacent to the Franchthi headland suggest that the area has been inundated by upwards of 17m of seawater since 5500 B.C.E (van Andel et. al. 1980; van Andel and Sutton 1987, 31-54; Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 205). The geophysical techniques recruited during the sediment survey of the bay took the form of low frequency acoustics focused on the bottom sediments. These sound waves, emitted by a little noise box, often called a ‘transductor,’ submerged off the side of a boat into the water, penetrated the subsurface sediments along a series of transects back and forth across the bay. Hypersensitive microphones or ‘geophones’ in turn listen for the echoes responding to variabilites in stratification and bedding (van Andel and Lianos 1987). Many tabulations and coefficients later, this noise suggests that Koiladha bay along with much of the coastline surrounding the headland was once a wide coastal plain expanding out for a few kilometers below a ridgeline 23,000 years ago. Also contained throughout the sedimentation of the bay were billions of little yellow plant bits deposited since the beginnings of the inundation.

Pollen
Pollen gets into everything. Carried by hot air, wind, water, people, and other species, pollen eventually finds its way into the corners of rooms, rubbish heaps, the dust and soil on the floor of a cave or into the dregs which filter to the bottom of a lagoon. The best conditions for pollen are found in permanently waterlogged places where sediments are laid down perennially such as Thermisi or Ververonda lagoon. Several cores from sediments laden with pollen have been extracted in the southern Argolid.

In 1985 John Gillord sampled a series of cores from Koiladha Bay (Gifford 1990, 87). One, labeled ‘OK (Ormos Koiladha) 85/11’ was collected from an area suggested by van Andel’s 1979 survey to be a Holocene stream channel. The extraction of a core containing 4.5m of sediment from the bay floor under 10.2m of water was accomplished through the deployment of an Eykelkamp pulse-auger system, a small Zodiac and two divers (refer to Gifford 1990, 87-92). The 4.5m OK 85/11 core sample was subsampled at 5cm intervals. This was broken down further through palynological analyses of samples at every 10cm. Any overt changes gauged in pollen composition brought about the incorporation of the intermediate sample into the analysis. Foregoing the traceable movements between pollen in soil, pollen under the microscope and identified genus or species on paper, in 1990 Sythe Bottema published OK 85/11 as a linear pollen diagram with an associated narrative.

OK/11 contains over 6500 years of pollen-laden sediments, which mark the temporal fluctuation of vegetation in the area. Of the earliest zone, dating from ca 4500 to 1250 B.C.E., Bottema’s text states:

The vegetation of the southern Argolid must have been of a very open character during Zone 1. Trees, mainly deciduous oaks, formed at best a woodland at higher elevations. Other deciduous trees would have been rare, growing in limited numbers on favorable locations. As the landscape in the Peloponnesus is highly variable, more demanding species, such as Corylus, Tilia, and Ulmus may have been present on the north slopes or in stream valleys at a higher elevation in the mountains. At lower elevations there was an open Pistacia vegetation with a lot of herb species, such as Cistus (1990, 124).

As for humans (the collective):

The effects of human activity are clearly visible in the pollen diagram. The high Cerealiatype values indicate that either grain fields had been laid out up to the edge of the Neolithic stream channel or that the inhabitants of the nearby Neolithic village did their threshing close to the coring site. If farming activity had occurring at some distance from the core location much lower Cerealia-pollen percentages would have been found (Bottema 1990, 124).

The rational for this research was largely oriented toward the search for the origins of such early agricultural livelihoods.

‘Origins’
The subtext of the display entitled ‘Franchthi’ in the regional museum in Napflion reads ‘the cave and the beginning of the productive stage.’ The story of Franchthi cave is synonymous with transition—from hunting and gathering to sedentism and agriculture. Its stratified deposits span 20,000 years across three critical periods—the Upper Paleolithic, the Mesolithic and the Early Neolithic. Franchthi, it is widely held, contains a story of the ‘origins’ of agriculture (cf. Jacobsen 1981). Here beginnings lay buried. From here translations of those beginnings now circulate as archaeological texts (e.g. Jacobsen and Farrand 1987).

Discussions of agricultural origins tend to focus on how humans with radically different ways of life can adopt a new one. On one side of a divide inhabiting the Mesolithic are hunter/gatherers, on the other, settling down in the Neolithic, are agriculturalists and pastoralists—humans of nature on one side and humans of culture on the other. Following Catherine Perlès, four possible scenarios for the transition into the Neolithic are posited for Greece: (1) autochthonous or the localized development of agriculture; (2) cultural diffusion, ideas shared by others; (3) demic diffusion, others settling in Greece; (4) a more mixed set of interactions between local foragers and incoming agriculturalists (2001, 38-51). While scholars debate the exact nature of the transition, all agree that a radical shift occurred—there was an origin to agriculture. Yet there are problems with the presupposition of a revolutionary transition.

The Mesolithic/Neolithic transition rests upon a misconceived and modernist notion of historicity around what it is to be human and how humans in turn relate to the world. Innovation, for Perlès and others, is about discovery. This implies radical shifts in how humans relate to the world. Because humans are always mixtures and collectives with the materials world, they are situated within a network of association and understanding which allows for changes we moderns would regard as revolutionary. Certainly, new actors entering the scene can cause shifts in another actor or actors’ path of relation to the world (refer to the definition of ‘delegation’ at the beginning of Chapter 2). The transformations occurring around 7000 B.C.E., however, are not solely about how new members are enrolled within a collective, rather they are about how the role of already-present-members or relations of the already-present-members change. In other words, instead of leaving some Lens nigricans or Lens ervoïdes behind to germinate, humans now help their cousin Lens orienntalis, which appears in the Franchthi deposits around 7000 B.C.E., along the way to maturation. The roles of lithics may change, but people can still fish for tuna, forage for barleys and hunt for game just as others did before with modified lithics. Radical revolutions are not the only explanation for the emergence of hybrids suggested by the things, which circulate from the cave floor deposits of Franchthi. More subtle genealogical shifts are also to be traced.

The iterative nature of the Periegesis
Pausanias during his travels in the second century C.E. gives us little indication of his practice on the ground. Indeed, we know very little of the author himself. We do know, however, that his practice was iterative both in relation to his articulation in the context of his journeys through the Greek countryside and in relation to his genre—the literary tradition in which he is located. Pausanias’ activities of reading, traveling, writing were protracted over many years. Christain Habicht, drawing on dates associated with known events mentioned in the text, argues that Pausanias began writing some time before 155 C.E. and continued to do so till after 175 C.E. (1985, 11). Therefore, we have to understand ‘Pausanias’ as a process, one full of many twists and turns, both in relation to his travel writing and in relation to the literary tradition in which he is located.

Writing as he moved on the ground—by autopsy—Pausanias, it is commonly held, hoped his book to be a guide for subsequent travelers (Habicht 1985, 20). The 2nd century Baedeker (metaphorical reference pace Carroll 1907) focused on gathering together the things that were most memorable along his routes by sea and countryside (3.2.1). Logoi, both spoken and written words, and theoremata, what is to be seen on the ground, are the two core features of his witnessing on the ground. A well-blended mixture of observation, discussions of inscriptions read and storytelling on the basis of local oral accounts characterizes Pausanias’ route through the Hermionid. In all, Pausanias’ travels are replete numerous ‘digressions’ or, rather, purposeful linkages ‘into mythology, religion, and history’ with around 100 cross-references (Habicht 1985, 4). This is a text whose accretion occurred over a long period. But his filtering of the complexities of the countryside must also be situated in relation to the periegetic literary tradition of the time.

Cascades of other texts existed and were in circulation—local and focused descriptions of monuments and art, along with travel and religious accounts of cities (Habicht 1985, 2-3). What was deemed worthy of note was also connected to the idiosyncrasies of a literary genre of travel writing. Pausanias, it seems, wrote the ten books in the order of which they appear (Habicht 1985, 7-8). Yet they are replete with cross-references, both in terms of what came before and in terms of anticipation as to what will come after. This ‘interconnectedness beyond the mere juncture of regions and roads on the terrain’ in combination with the mythohistorical and mnemonic associations that cluster around landscape features, monuments and other objects of concern is, according to Jas Elsner, indicative of a carefully structured ‘imaginative geography’ that possesses a marked purpose (2001, 7). For Elsner, Pausanias’ Greece translates the landscape into a rhetorical discourse of the ‘sublime,’ whose ‘structure and choices made in that structure are shared with much more overtly oratorical texts and practices’ (2001, 18-20). Elsner’s important work sets the Periegesis within a literary tradition. In this way it is linked to cascades of other texts and perhaps even other media (refer to Snodgrass 1987, 84-86 on Pausanias’ potential use of a map).

The Periegesis and classical topography
As in the case of Leake presented in Chapter 2, Pausanias’ Periegesis has been critical to the articulation of Greek topography (e.g. Gell 1810; Curtius 1851 and 1852). Indeed with Leake, who likely carried either the 1794 Thomas Taylor translation or one of the two 1516 Aldine texts of Pausanias (Wagstaff 2001, 192-193), the meanings and associations of countless monuments were predicated upon an exchange with the text of the Periegesis (1830 and 1846). This text provided Leake a mode of engagement, a point of orientation, negotiation and reference on the ground, in the Greek countryside. It provided answers to questions, we encountered in Chapter 2, of ‘what to observe’ in the later 18th and early 19th centuries. In this way, its reiteration continued in the hands of antiquarians, archaeologists, classicists, military geographers, diplomats and travelers. The Periegesis mediated classical topographers’ engagements both on the ground and in the study. It is an actant. Whether in the case of Gell’s Itinerary or the boleoi and Philanoreia, the text is an agent, a ‘proposition’ in the sense discussed in Chapter 3, in the translation of the Greek countryside. As such, the Periegesis is a key figure in annals of Classical Topography.

Ambivalence toward the contemporary
Much has been said of the ambivalence on the part of Pausanias’ toward the contemporary conditions he was met with in the countryside. For Habicht, it was Pausanias’ intense love for Greek freedom that fed his disregard for Greek history after 146 B.C.E. (1985, 104). So it was a nostalgia for the Greece before its envelopment underneath the cloak of the Roman Imperial Age that left his discussions of the contemporary conditions of Greece in the 2nd century C.E. wanting (Alcock 1993, 27-29). For a similar model of rupture one does not have to look very far.

Pausanias and Gell are our contemporaries…
There are two contemporanieties in the texts of the Periegesis and the Itinerary—at that time and at this time. Most archaeologists are interested in these texts for what they can tell us about that time (e.g. Alcock 1993; Bennet, Davis, and Zarinebaf-Shahr 2000). However, lessons of how we may articulate landscape are to be found in Pausanias and Gell at this time. In this way, they are also our contemporaries. As such, these texts may be treated viable fields associated with the articulation of the southern Argolid today. They are both ‘actants’ with a stake in the articulation of landscape and valuable lessons on how to articulate landscape given the particular collective in which they are situated. Therefore, one means of articulating proximities is to accord these texts a similar status to those of Alcock (1993) or Jameson, Runnels and van Andel (1994).

Profitis Ilias
There are two peaks named after the Prophet Elijah (Profitis Ilias) along the corridor between Ermioni and Koiladha; the corridor of Pausanias’ straight road between Hermion and Mases. One lies roughly 1.75 km outside of Ermioni to the west and the other just 1.75 km north of Kranidhi. The former, once known as Kokkygion and, earlier still, as Thornax, attains an elevation of 229.90m on a higher ridge to the south of a small whitewashed chapel of the same name, while the latter, of which Pausanias makes no mention, tops out at 346.57 m at a point but a few meters from another such chapel.

Every 19th of July locals of Ermioni drive with friends and family up a rough dirt road, which cuts across the northern flank of Profitis Ilias (Kokkygion) at a steep angle. The road, facilitating access to an outpost of cell towers, the monotonous buzz of which is heard from some distance, also provides a convenient point of access for the small chapel, some 100m north of the towers. Situated in the middle of a broad flat terrace partly covered in loose grey gravel, the whitewashed chapel, 4 meters wide by 8 meters in length, sits on east/west axis. On the western end a small terrace, partially enclosed by a low, whitewashed wall of stone and cement directly opposite the blue metal chapel door, beckons gatherers to sit through the night and into the day of the 20th. To the south of this wall, in the direction of the towers, are assembled 3 large red plastic water/wine jugs, 20 plastic chairs and several tables of both wood and plastic, collected here after a night of feasting. To the west, the silhouette of a conical rise, the second peak of Profitis Ilias, can be seen in distance, the fires of its attendants are visible in the late hours of the night.

July 19, in ascending this second peak to the chapel, locals from Kranidhi, the wider region or visitors from afar must walk a zigzagging path through the maquis on the southwest slope, an elevation gain of around 300m. The path is framed by thousands of white splotches, lime plaster marking limestone boulders, along the way. Beckoned by the chapel bell, the celebrants are in for a long night, for the prophet’s name day is on July 20. The small chapel, a pair of staggered buildings, sits just off the highest point of the peak on a slightly lower terrace to the east. A small cabin, a recent addition to the chapel grounds, is perched on the edge of the cistern on a slightly lower terrace to the south. Inside, to the left of the doorway, a hearth, turned shallow alcove, in the center of the unpainted rubble wall to the north contains a propane tank connected to a set of burners. On either side of the alcove are two modest bunks built as stone platforms. Adjoining the eastern and western walls lengthwise, they are roughly .6m by 1.8m and covered by thin foam mats. A third bunk, a portable low cot on a blue metal frame sits opposite the doorway below an arched, double-paned window. Through this window from an angle looking left one can make out the silhouette of a long ridgeline running to the east and terminating in a high peak, Kokkygion.

Kokkygion
A road runs to Halieis between Mount Pron and another mountain, known of old as Thornax, but which took the name of Kokkygion (Cuckoo mountain), because, they say, the transformation of Zeus into a cuckoo was fabled to have here taken place. There are still sanctuaries on the tops of these mountains; on Kokkygion there is a sanctuary of Zeus, and on Mount Pron there is a sanctuary of Hera. There is also a temple at the foot of Kokkygion; but it has neither doors nor roof nor any statue. It is said to be a temple of Apollo (Pausanias 2.36.1; after Frazer 1898).

In this short passage Pausanias situates two peaks, the Pron, which rises as an extension of the ridgeline above Hermion, and Kokkygion in relation to Greek religion. In this short passage Pausanias provides his readers with two points of reference, three names for two landforms in the countryside, and identifies three religious features on these peaks. With regard to the sanctuaries of Zeus and Hera, Pausanias is explicit in his wording: ‘epi akron ton oron,’ literally ‘upon the highest points of the mountains.’

A three-sided enclosure, which terminates at the edge of a cliff, sits at the highest point of Kokkygion. The southwestern wall, just over 4m in length, joins the northern wall, the longest at 33m, at an angle that is a few degrees over ninety. At the northeastern end of this wall, a third turns at slightly more than a right angle toward the edge of the precipice. It is approximately 14m in length. The walls, .85m wide, are comprised of staggered, unhewn, grey limestone orthostats, which were broken from the bedrock along parallel bedding planes and set upright to form a double facade on either side of a rubble core. Many of these have fallen over under the immense weight of time. Inside, a level shelf of limestone bedrock terminates in a shear drop on the southern edge in the direction of the lower Pikrodhafni valley, the ‘crescent-shaped beach’ and the Potokia or Kapari bay. Within the holes left by plant collectors in the crevices among the bedrock a layer of ash was apparent in the early 1980’s. From inside this enclosure, identified as the shrine of Zeus (Faraklas 1973; Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994; Munn 1986), an unencumbered view encompasses much of the southern Argolid.

Two geodesic columns
A few meters east of the easternmost line of orthostats of the sanctuary of Zeus stands a concrete column, approximately 1.1m tall and .5m in diameter, erected by the Hellenic Army Geodesic Survey in the 1960’s. Standing ‘epi akron ton oron,’ it marks 229.90m, the acme of Kokkygion. The bronze disk it supports provides a link between this locale on the ground and coordinates within the national triangulation grid of Greece on paper. In its capacity as a point of reference, the column acts as a critical team member on hundreds of archaeological surveys throughout the country. A few kilometers to the west, marking a point at 346.57 m, a second geodesic column stands atop Profitis Ilias in the middle of a rubble enclosure; itself in the middle of a much larger enclosure believed to date to the end of the Bronze Age.

An enclosure—Late Helladic?
Along with sites throughout the eastern Mediterranean, the material assemblages of the Argolid suggest major transformations occurred in the late Bronze Age. Carrying associations of catastrophe and collapse, which set the stage for the eventual transition into the Iron Age, these ‘radical schisms,’ the ‘pervasive upheavals,’ hinge upon the years bracketing 1200 B.C.E. (cf. Drews 1993; Osborne 1996). Evidence of depopulation and destruction is present throughout the storied valley of Argos at the great citadels of Tiryns and Mycenae, at Media and at the coastal towns of Asine and Iria (refer to Drews 1993, 21-26). All through the southern Argolid, of the more than 35 sites with indications of habitation during the Late Bronze Age (roughly 1600 B.C.E. to 1200 B.C.E.), only 4 have pottery from the 12th century B.C.E. One of these, designated as ‘B21,’ is Profitis Ilias.

Partially encircling the barren top of Profitis Ilias (unlike Kokkygion, Pausanias does not comment upon the name of this conical peak) is an enclosure wall of unhewn rubble amid larger boulders, which terminates on one end in a sheer outcrop of limestone south of the Loutro valley. This wall now present on the south and western portion of the peak is over 200m long and, where the two exterior faces composed of larger stone are evident, 3m wide. Within the enclosure the AEP reported collecting 165 sherds, ‘the majority being LH, including kraters, deep bowls, kylikes, a stirrup jar, pithoi, and cooking wares, with pieces datable to LH IIIB and IIIC’ (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 445). There are remnants of rubble walling within. ‘Steatite buttons or beads, an andesite tripod mortar, and a figurine were also found’ (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 368). The highest peak in the immediate area, commanding unencumbered views of the entire southern Argolid, Profitis Ilias is but a little over a kilometer from an area known as Magoula Evstratiou, what is probably ‘Mases,’ enumerated by Homer as among the cities of the Argolid. Given the material associations at hand it is easy to posit the locale as refuge, a last point of defense, associated with these transformations taking place around 1200.

Jameson, Runnels and van Andel, however, are quite rightly reserved about the dating of the enclosure wall, which they suggest could just as easily date to the early Iron Age. The linkage between the enclosure and materials on the ground is a tenuous exercise. Moreover, they cite other such ‘fortifications,’ which exist on hills in the surrounding area and which are of later date as suggestive of a possible later date (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 369). At some point a new, in this case, monumental wall was enrolled in the affairs of the communities and companion species of the area and the best one can do in absence of excavation is set the stage for such an act of delegation to occur.

The material evidence associated with the subsequent early Iron Age in the southern Argolid is scanty (cf. Langdon 1995, 58-60; Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 372). What we do know, as was previously stated, is that after 1200 B.C.E. there is a severe depopulation of both people and things. Of the other enclosures mentioned by the AEP, which are present around the Koiladha plain, Profitis Ilias encompasses the largest area, perhaps as much 350m2 (roughly equal to the area of all the other enclosures combined) and is most removed. Taking to the high ground, and in the case of Profitis Ilias, the highest ground of any such enclosure in the area, even if we cannot say for sure when, occurred in the context of an event of some magnitude.

Magoules
Magoula, to paraphrase Leake, is a Greek term often applied to a height with ruins, especially when they break the level surface of a plain (1830 I, 154). It is, for example, given as a place name to the general area of what is believed to be ancient ‘Mases.’ More specifically it applies to the broad mound, Magoula Evstratiou, denoted as ‘C11’ by the AEP, just north of the paved road between Kranidhi and Koiladha. Ermioni Magoula (‘E13’), Flamboura Magoula (‘A9’) Fournoi Magoula (‘E6’), Magoula sta Ilia (‘G1’), Sambariza Magoula (‘E9’—identified by the AEP as Eïones mentioned by Homer), Samioti Magoula (‘A6’), given their conspicuous material presence, all were known as ancient locales by modern communities as evidenced by their shared epithet. In the southern Argolid many of these magoules are Bronze Age in date. Given their often-excellent soils due to the more ubiquitous mudbrick construction indicative of Bronze Age structures, they continue to draw the attention of farmers today.

An active material past
In a land of little rain (less than 500 mm per annum) wells orient people and structure their daily activities. The AEP documented hundreds of wells and ground water reservoirs, which were the primary sources of fresh water for the southern Argolid until the late 20th century (Harper 1976; Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 172). Many of these, such as the public wells located in the community of Dhidhima are likely of ancient date, perhaps Classical or Hellenistic. Throughout time, as water tables varied wells might be abandoned and reused. A point of bearing, such ancient wells are often located at crossroads or at the edge of communities such as Ermioni, where the well, which taps the water table near the terminus of the largest drainage basin in the southern Argolid (refer to Figure 3.11, Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 174), may still be used to provide water for sheep, goats or engines.

In the Loutro Valley, at the nexus of a series of olive and fallow cereal fields covered in Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic material culture and framed by terraces containing ashlar blocks, and at the nexus of contemporary farming roads accessing these fields, lies a well that is of a potentially ancient date (‘B20’). Transactions between people, digging implements, and a low water table near the center of the upper Loutro valley watershed resulted in the construction of a stone lined well perhaps at some point in the 6th, 5th, or 4th centuries B.C.E. In 2003 a bluish plastic container, .25m Χ .25m X .20m, attached with a metal rod to a worn and knotted hemp rope sat on the edge of the wellhead (Figure 5.6). This makeshift bucket mediates relationships between a farmer or a shepherd or a random passerby, the well and the water it contains, just as a ceramic water jug would have done over two millennia ago. An Archaic, Classical, or Hellenistic articulation is folded into the contemporary.

Repetitive engagements between people, water jugs and a well occurred here. The splash of the water pot or pale; the sloshing water in the hollow stone lined shaft; the clank of a laden vessel on the stone lining; the drip of excess water as the rope is pulled skyward; all constitute transient yet recurrent background noises for people who gathered at these wells across the centuries. Providing we hear the clamor of similar things (a plastic bucket does not produce the sounds of a ceramic hydra), through such sounds, the past may still be heard.

The diversification of noise
Noise permeates the Greek countryside. It saturates every cove and every crevasse. We may recall from the previous chapter the brief discussion of Michel Serres’ notion of belles noiseuses. For Serres the archaic French term for noise, ‘noiseuse,’ is appropriate to discussing the multiplicity, sensorial complexity and presence of the material world. ‘Noiseuse’ carries connotations of ruckus, strife and commotion (Serres 1995). It speaks to the chaos of the countryside. These more chaotic qualities we all too often ignore and filter out and yet they are fundamental to human being throughout time.

The noises of the past have been obfuscated and in most cases ultimately replaced by others. A cacophony of lorries, cars, mopeds, tractors, boat engines, horns, construction equipment, etc. can be heard from almost anywhere in the southern Argolid. The repetitive noises of the past recede, drowned out by oceans of ever more complex things. Sea noise has both receded in the wake of other things and advanced inland far beyond the coastlines of 23,000 years ago. Yet despite these changes it has remained ever present across the millennia.

The very long term
The AEP focused on the transformations in the southern Argolid over the course of 50,000 years. This was asserted through a series of linear narratives stacked up like building blocks through time. Accounting for the multitemporal, the polychronic aspects of landscape ranging from the most ephemeral to the deepest times, requires a different mode of thinking. The very long term that I speak of is not couched in terms of continuity or, its counterpart, change, rather it is a temporal vastness predicated on connection, relevance, on the percolation of pasts. A ca. 50,000-year-old Levalloiso-Mousterian flake can shape people’s lives today and the course of their research (Bialor and Jameson 1962). But we must learn to ‘think in accordance with the rhythms and scope’ of things, of landscape (Serres 1995, 29). The collective entangled with the land lives in ebbs and flows.

The Bisti
A third geodesic column stands on the eastern tip of the Bisti at the point where the three pedestrian trails meet. The Bisti (Albanian for ‘tail’) is the peninsula, 1.20 km long by .300 km wide, of ancient Hermion, later Kastri and today Ermioni. Roughly divided in two, the western half is occupied by the town, which continues to rise up the Pron. The eastern half, which begins at the Medieval crosswall, was planted with pines in the early 20th century and is now an archaeological park. Leake in his discussion of the site comments: ‘its situation near the sea, and not far from some islands of recent populousness, has been very unfavorable to the preservation of its remains of antiquity’ (1830 II, 461). Leake was referring to the common practice of removing ready cut stones for the construction of buildings in rapidly expanding towns such as Hydra (several stones left in mid transportation are present near the eastern end on the northern side of the Bisti today).

Excerpt
J.G. (informant):

‘Because it is a forest, an archaeological site and it belongs to the municipality, there are three authorities in charge of the park. If one of the authorities attempts to undertake a project the other two always object. (This is a rare example of when politics pays off for both ancient and modern culture in the area.) Ermionians love the park. It is their favorite part of town. The trees, which make for peaceful strolls were planted there before World War II and some of the people who did this are alive still. The park is cleaned up every year by the local scouts who camp there. Nothing should be done to change it. It should only have fire protection and, from an archaeological point of view, it should have informational signs for those who come to walk or swim.’

Excerpt from an interview conducted with a local tavern owner at 11:30am on August 17, 2003 in the Taberna Philoxenia, Ermioni.

Hermion 2004
The architectural fabric within the park has transformed substantially since Leake and Gell and little, beyond Alexandros Filadhelfevs’ 1909 work, has been excavated. In the town, however, a number of excavations by the Greek Archaeological Service have taken place. What is present on the ground from the pre-Roman and Roman city is listed here:

• Portions of the city walls, including intermittent sections of trapezoidal and polygonal masonry are to be found sporadically both in the town and in the park. Sections along the fringes of the park are topped by rubble and mortar associated with the post-Classical and Medieval walls. Massive blocks, once the foundation of a rectangular tower, subside due to slope creep on the northeastern edge of the Bisti.
• A round tower of polygonal construction sits on the eastern tip of the Bisti.
• Foundations of a large temple, 16.25m X 32.88m, of local grey limestone with tight polygonal jointing rest midway along the rise of the park.
• A number of statue bases and various architectural blocks, probably removed from the Medieval crosswall, lie scattered about the surface near the church of Agios Nikolaos at the park entrance.
• Portions of trapezoidal walls, perhaps the temenos for the Demeter sanctuary, provide foundations for several houses along the hillside of the Pron.
• Stone grave enclosures (periboloi), which contained multiple burials (mostly cists) from the Archaic through the Hellenistic period, frame the sides of an ancient street through the necropolis of the city. Excavated in the 1991 and then again in 1999 several of 14 funerary periboloi lie exposed in a field of the Ermioni high school along the main road into town on the north side of the Pron at Agios Andreas.
• A well is located on the edge of the Ermioni kambos near the junction of the roads from Kranidhi and Iliokastro.
• Portions of an aqueduct, whose waters mentioned by Pausanias flowed from ‘Leimon’ are present for a couple of hundred meters along the northern edge of the Pron.

Aggregation
Many features, architectural—walls, columns, mosaic floors—and otherwise, of the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman town lend themselves to the fabric of the contemporary town. Today Ermioni is an aggregate mixture of multiple pasts.

Immutable mobiles
Coins were struck in Hermion in the Hellenistic period and then again in Roman Imperial times from Septimius Severus through Geta (193—212 C.E.) (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 109). In the late 4th century B.C.E. silver coins were inscribed with the profile of woman wearing a garland, which holds back her locks of curly hair, and, on the reverse, with a circular wreath of corn with either an E or an E P at center (Figure 5.7). In On the Nature of Animals, Aelian (Claudius Aelianus) relates: ‘The Hermionians worship Demeter and sacrifice to her magnificently and grandly; and they call the festival Chthonia. I hear that the largest cows are brought from the herd to the altar by the priestess, and that they allow themselves to be sacrificed’ (11.4; after Frazer 1898 III, 295). The scene of a bull being led by a robed figure under the letters ΕΡΜΙΟΝ is inscribed in one version of the Imperial coinage. On the obverse of this coin appears a nude male standing with a trident in hand and a dolphin near his leg (refer to Frazer 1889 III, 295; Gardner 1887, plate XXX). Indeed, Pausanias describes such a statue of Poseidon with a trident and a foot resting on a dolphin in his discussion of the town (2.35.1).

Through these coins, core qualities of a city are translated into materials that are immutable, mobile, combinable, and innumerable (Latour 1986, 31). As media, coins circulate something of Hermion far and wide in space-time. Through currency Hermion is able to assert itself on a different scale.

The transformation of monuments
A gathering of unhewn stones in the boleoi is conveniently enrolled in the construction of a later windmill on the same spot. The stones and inscriptions of the Bisti at Hermion are remobilized as building materials for a Medieval crosswall and now sit on museum floors and steel shelves in Napflion or in display cases around Europe. Marble lion heads, perhaps from the ‘sima’ (the crowning gutter of the roof) of an ornate roof, in what is probably ancient Philanoreia are transformed into waterspouts for the Fournoi village fountain (AEP ‘F60’) constructed in the 20th century. Rough-faced, blocks of blue/grey ashlar, probably once the wall stones of structures associated with the Classical settlement in the Loutro valley are now incorporated into the fabric of a linear terrace wall roughly 10 meters to the west of the ‘B20’ well. The transformation of people and things occur simultaneously in the transformation of communities. Such change provides an impetus for the things to be forgotten, decay, and in many circumstances to be later remobilized. These transformations, entropic processes of corrosion and ruin, processes of fragmentation and displacement, circulation and accretion, materialization and (re)deployment, are the conduits through which often distant pasts percolate in the present. Archaeology too is a process of percolation which adds to the aggregate mixture of times present today. It too is part of the transformative processes present on the ground in the southern Argolid. It too must be factored into the stories of landscape.

The city and the countryside
The dual scheme of the city and the countryside has been with us ‘moderns’ for quite some time. From Theocritus to Horace to Wordsworth to Raymond Williams, the city and the countryside is a potent opposition, a seemingly consistent theme, which gets reinvented through its various iterations. The connotations of countryside carry energies and associations of a simpler past, a rural nostalgia, which contrasts with the fast pace and commotion of the city, the onset of the modern. This division has often been mirrored in the division of archaeological practice—the domain of survey verses that of excavation (refer to Binliff and Snodgrass 1988).

An urban-rural mélange
Cities do not end at walls anymore than the countryside begins at them. Walls of cities are porous. Walls of cities are deployed to fill the role of exoskeletons for communities. Razing walls in acts of iconoclasm opens up one community to another, but it does not destroy a city in the way that burning the crops, plundering the stores and severing the supply routes does. The lines of demarcation between urban and rural, a loose approximation of culture and nature, should not presuppose and structure relationships to the Greek countryside. The concept of landscape encompasses these mixed spaces.

At a gate of 2nd century C.E. Hermion
The smell of incense mixed with blood was a daily affair at the shrine of Eileithyia by the Mases gate of Hermion. Pausanias tells us that women propitiate her lavishly. The goddess of childbirth, she who eases the entry into the world, resides by the gate of the city; an association echoed in the Gate of Eileithyia at Argos (Pausanias 2.18.3; Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 591). While Pausanias tells of a statue seen only by the priestesses, he says nothing regarding the architecture of the shrine, nor of the gate. Whether anything remains of these structures on the ground at Ermioni is unknown.

At a gate of 4th century B.C.E. Halieis
During the 1975 season at Halieis, the excavators located what they describe as ‘an unusual structure’ adjacent to the tower of the Southeast Gate (Rudolph and Boyd 1978, 353-355). The structure is one room, 3.5m wide by 4.4m on the long side. It abuts the exterior façade of the fortification wall at an obvious oblique angle. At the other end, towards the east is an opening 2.15m wide. Evidence suggests that the walls, a socle of cut stone surmounted by mudbrick, were plastered. The floor was cement atop cobble. Ceramic tile fragments indicated a roof. In the midst of the floor was a raised, rectangular platform, 1.25m by .48m by .02m. A molded channel led at a slight angle away from the platform into a hollowed basin. Both were formed into the cement floor. Ware marks are reported at either end of the platform, which the excavators suggest could indicate the presence of a table. Lying amidst the platform and the floor, several miniature kotylae or two handled cups, were also found. The excavators contend these materials and features made up a shrine.

‘Farmsteads’
Throughout the southern Argolid lie a number of what the AEP classified as ‘farmsteads.’ Moving from clusters of materials on the ground to a full-blown category of site such as ‘farmstead’ required a particular combination of things to be present. The AEP roll call included:

…roof tiles, a full range of “domestic” artifacts (including, in the Classical period, lamps, oil press beds or weights, loom weights, coins, other metal objects), and other habitational features such as storage pits or cisterns (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 249).

Such a gathering of things encompasses a wider range of activities than those perhaps associated with agricultural storehouses, shelters for companion species, or press sites. Indeed, the more of these things present the more stable the classification of ‘farmstead’ becomes (cf. Whitelaw 1991 in a discussion of recent farmhouses on Kea). Of the 328 sites located by the AEP 166 either attained or were candidates for this distinction—the most of any other category of site (Figure 5.8). Some of these gatherings were accentuated by the presence of foundations for what were potentially towers. The size and monumentality of these towers vary from perhaps the largest at Lambayana (‘F3’), a rectangular structure of large cut polygonal, conglomerate masonry several courses high, 9m by 11m, to the Ververonda tower (‘A67’), the last portion of the ashlar wall, ca 4m long by 1.75m in height disappeared after 1961, to the Metokhi tower (‘A51’), a rectangular structure of limestone ashlar, one course remains, ca 8m by 9m. Predominantly of Classical of Hellenistic date, community walls might have extended throughout the countryside in the form of such towered sites. However, the associated assemblies of materials denoted as ‘farmsteads’ rest on shaky ground.

Distinctions between ‘farmsteads’ and other sites at one time does not allow for the flux of a site through time. Residential structures occupied by humans can transform into keeps for companion species, storage buildings, or refuse dumps. As David Pettegrew has emphasized, ‘reuse’ and taphonomy are major issues (2001). For Pettegrew, such ‘processes must be considered when conjecturing from a pile of pottery about the original habitation and activities occurring’ at a particular site (2001, 195). Beyond perishables such as wooden doors, many items such as roof tiles, storage jars or even ceramic fragments, as Pettegrew contends, which are normally listed within the roll call of things associated with ‘farmsteads,’ were items of value in the Classical past. These things could have just as easily been recirculated and remobilized in other contexts such as the filler in mudbrick or floor construction in other structures. Indeed, Pettegrew proceeds to point out how the surface materials associated with the Dema and Vari Houses would have warranted little more than the label ‘low-density’ scatter by an archaeological survey (an assertion challenged by Foxhall 2001). While there are many counters to Pettegrew’s arguments, his basic contention that the category of ‘farmstead’ does not cover the variability of materials on the surface stands.

One cannot bring statigraphic profiles, micromorphological or chemical analyses, detailed structural sequences and so on into the transformation of things noted and collected on the surface without excavation. Things gathered in survey do not speak these tells alone and yet they are all we have. ‘Farmstead’ captures the widest potentials of the things gathered on the ground, but it is not the sole possibility or the only enunciation of what remains from an event and the taphonomic processes that ensue. Survey archaeologists have for quite some time been aware of the course-grained quality of their empirics (Cherry 1983; Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 248). Both casting the net wide and maintaining these categories have been issues of consistency, comparability and standardization. Despite voicing these very concerns the greatest crime of the AEP for labeling so many sites as farmsteads lies in not being more diligent with the ‘scarce quotes.’

The sweet smell of kopria
July 16, 2004. Just southwest of the gates of the Katafiki fresh kopria (kopros in ancient Greek) has been dumped along rows within a young grove of olives near the AEP site of ‘E58.’ The kopria is loaded with household refuse and rubbish, food scraps, animal bones, and, of course, dung. The kopria has action both as nutrient rich fertilizer and a means of dispersing garbage. Manuring practices played a major role in the dispersal of such household rubbish in the past (Snodgrass 1987, 113; Bintliff and Snodgrass 1988; Alcock, Cherry and Davis 1994). Components of ancient kopros spread in the fields persist on the ground throughout the southern Argolid as millions of ceramic fragments.

In revisiting material associated with rectangular stone lined pits hypothesized to be cellars within some 4th century structures from Halieis, Bradley Ault argues that such features are koprones (1999). Ault points to the great concentration of mixed and fragmented ceramic assemblages found within these stone lined pits along with, at least in the case of House 7, the presence of drains. Furthermore, there was no evidence for the hydraulic plaster indicative of a cistern. Therefore, the presence of a drain in this case suggests that the pit was open to the elements. This would have made for a poor cellar. Of course, as Ault emphasizes, we lack the aid of soil analyses for such features at Halieis. However, the high concentration of phosphates found in a similar feature, filled by similar materials, elsewhere led the excavators to identify it as a sterculinum, a kopron.

At Halieis these ‘rubbish pits’ were located within or near the courtyard of houses or other structures. Bits of the countryside transformed into ceramics, broken in urban space, (re)circulate into the countryside, which subsequently (re)circulate as pottery on shelves and translations in books through archaeological practice. Any sharp divisions between locales will not suffice for understanding such processes.

Landscape as ensemble
Landscapes never really end at the boleoi or horos, at the ridgeline or at the seashore, at the edge of the pantokrator limestone or the ophiolite complex. The outlines of landscape are not encompassed within social fringes. Landscape is a fluctuating ensemble, an aggregate mix of multiple times, which are not necessarily linear in association. Fragmented, dispersed, and accreted, simultaneously torn, folded and pleated, the multiple pasts are present in the land and have action in peoples’ lives today just as they did in the past.

A bronze bull figurine
In the early 1970’s a local farmer picked up a dusty lump of bronze from the surface of Flamboura magoula (‘A9’). It was a miniature bull figurine, just over 6cm long, 3cm high at the head and 1.9cm wide at the shoulders. It had an elongated torso, which was less than .6cm wide according to an illustration published as 1215 on page 399 of Runnels, Pullen and Langdon (1995). Its smooth, rounded lines, exaggerated proportions and rigid posture are echoed in horses attached to tripod handles or stands dated to the Geometric period somewhere between 900 and 700 B.C.E. (Langdon 1995, 71-72). If the dating holds, this is the only documented Geometric bronze bull figurine in the whole of the Argolid.

For Doug Bailey, the miniature forces its way into a highly personal and intimate space (2005, 39). The miniature demands a tactile engagement. It asks to be held. It solicits its way into the palm of the hand to be grasped, turned and viewed from various angles. The physical presence of the miniature, as Bailey’s wonderfully evocative photographs of Neolithic figurines cradled in hands suggest, draws one’s attention in. It is through the intimate physical presence of this bull figurine that as a Geometric miniature it could find its way into the hands of a farmer just over 30 years ago. Pleats in the fabric of time crease around even the smallest of things found in the countryside.

A secondhand Leica IIIc
A photograph taken of the potential precinct wall associated with the sanctuary of Demeter Chthonia is my point of reference (Figure 5.9). This, along with the other ca. 1950 photographs of monuments—many of which are now substantially transformed—published in A Greek Countryside were taken with a Leica IIIc 35mm (serial # 412060). Michael Jameson carried this Leica IIIc, which he purchased secondhand, throughout most of his survey work in the southern Argolid. Manufactured in 1947, the camera was the first to be constructed of a single die-cast body. This very camera mediated many of Jameson’s engagements with the features and landscapes of the southern Argolid.

Sensory prostheses
As both a member of the archaeological collective (also Chapter 2) and a mode of engagement the camera plays a roll in directing and extending our senses on the ground. As a predominantly visual prosthetic (it is held and directs the movements of the body), the camera may also dull or stunt others—smell or hearing. The same may be said of the Periegesis, Gell’s Itinerary, maps, compasses, sextants or theodolites. The character of one’s sensory relationship with a landscape changes depending on which sensory prostheses are enrolled. Whether Pausanias, Gell, Jameson or the author, different collectives of people and things relate to the world in different ways.

About bulldozers
Just ahead of the new road which pushed its way south over the flanks of Megalovouni, across the plateau of Dhidhima, over the ridge of the boleoi cum Koinotis boundary, through the upper Fournoi valley past Philanoreia, past ancient Mases on the right and Profitis Ilias on the left to Kranidhi in 1953 were the bulldozers. New actors were enrolled into the transformation of the southern Argolid, the pace of which has been sped up significantly since their arrival. The roles once filled by thousands of man-hours and hundreds of horses are now delegated to a single machine. Leveling, grading, compacting, quarrying and displacing the magnitude of this transformation brought on by bulldozers can be measured in the mere two decades since the AEP detailed the countryside (refer to Appendix 1).

Terraces
Terraces are iconic of the Greek countryside. They reside at the core of an aesthetics of the rural landscape and their neglect and dereliction has been deplored by many (e.g. Rackham and Moody 1996, 212; Snodgrass 1987, 95). Like other regions of Greece, agricultural terracing is ubiquitous in the southern Argolid. They frame the valleys of Fournoi, Loutro and Pikrodhafni and demarcate the gradual inclines of the Flamboura and Ermioni kambos.

Terraces lend themselves to humans, companion species, plows, plants, and landforms in different ways. As such there is a general typology of terracing. There are three varieties to be encountered on the ground in the southern Argolid—braided, stepped (predominately parallel, contour) and, though the least common of the three, pocket (on the typology of terraces refer to Rackham and Moody 1996, 140-145).

Braided terraces are enrolled in cereal cultivation on steeper slopes. They are ‘braided’ in the sense that they cut back and forth across the slope in order to facilitate uninterrupted plowing between the terraces. Such terraces are pervasive in the southern Argolid and are often located on the edge of cereal fields such as those just south of the Lambayana tower in the lower Fournoi.

Stepped or contour terraces run parallel with the slope as those found in the upper Katafiki, the Loutro Valley, and on the south edge of the Ververonda Lagoon. In some cases parallel terraces may form lynchets across drainages or ravines in order to catch sediments carried by runoff. Such lynchet terraces are visible in the 1961 aerial photographs in the limestone drainages above Dhidhima (perhaps in use when most of the land belonged to the monastery of Ayios Dhimitrios tou Avghou in the late 19th Century). Well-constructed terraces (re)employing cut ashlar provide catchments for the rich soils in the stream basin of the Loutro valley not far from the ‘B20’ well, while more ad-hoc linear cairns were employed in the drainages south of the Ververonda lagoon.

Pocket terraces are C-shaped walls built up around individual olives or other orchard trees. These terraces are few and far between in the southern Argolid. A series of pocket terraces were constructed around a few olive trees in an enclosed goat field on the Fournoi Magoula.

Few terraces are maintained today. This is only partially due to irrigation like that supplied to the Ermioni Kampos by the subterranean caverns of the Katafiki limestone or a lack of farm labor. A new agricultural collective exists around the tractor, which is not so amenable to terrace walls. Bums on the seats of tractors do not feel the jolt and vibration of stones in the way backs and arms do through wooden handles connected to plowshares. With tractors, only the largest of cobbles and boulders, which could hinder the machine, find their way into rock piles. These now replace the former lines of terraces, which they once made up. Certainly, a few exceptions are to be found and indeed some terraces are maintained within the yards of some houses or in the landscaped gardens of the new estates. These terraces survive where the archaic cohort—including hoes, adzes, or other hand tools—through which terraces once thrived, is still to be found. Clearly the new agricultural collective with its tractors, lines of plastic hose and fertilizers does not appreciate terraces in the way that former bodies on the ground once did.

Of cereals and threshing floors, olives and presses
Olives are the longest living domesticate. Cereals are among the most ephemeral. Some olives in the Greek countryside are of ancient date (an olive, 3m in diameter, stands in a field near the Ayioi Anaryiroi monastery on the south side of the lower Pikrodhafni valley) and thus, they are indices to a deeper time within the multitemporal ensemble of landscape. Many now abandoned cereal fields and terraces are still thick with barley or wheat—feral grasses continue to keep pace with the seasonal rhythms of the countryside. Skeleton terraces, their stone fabric long since collapsed, dispersed, harrowed and plowed into the ground or heaped in cairns, are often suggested by rows of older olives which mark the line of the terrace. Openly spaced olives were once accompanied by cereal cultivation in between. New olives increasingly occupy these voids.

The sociotechnical network involved in the cultivation of cereals in the 19th century was dispersed over the landscape. Terraces and fields, plows and yokes, water and soil, seed and crops, threshing floors and companion species (the radial march of hooves on teams of horses, mules or donkeys tethered to a central pole were enrolled in place of sledges), containers (whether basket or ceramic) and rope, local and regional markets, wind and watermills (the latter were to be found only in the area of Iliokastro and Thermisi), pathways on land and craft at sea, all were necessary actors within this complex network (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 262-67).

While the sociotechnical network of the olive incorporated many components of that associated with cereal, it also included pressing equipment for oil and salt for the preservation of the olives (Forbes and Foxhall 1978). Olives, it seems, prefer level land with steady supplies of water. Soils unsuited for high cereal yields in the Ermioni kambos spawned an increase in olives in the 19th century (Miliarakis 1886, 249). Harvested in alternating years, irrigation has simply helped increase the yield. While olives are planted and harvested in larger quantities, cereal cultivation has been almost completely phased out in the southern Argolid. The shifting sociotechnical networks are now predominately oriented around the olive.

Metaphors of landscape and time: palimpsest and chiasma
Landscapes are implicated in the community’s, the collective’s, comings-and-goings. In the accumulation of a settlement over time, walls are built and they may remain, fall or be torn down and subsequently rebuilt. Field boundaries may be demarcated, wiped away and redelimited. In a stratigraphic sequence layers are written, erased and rewritten. Landscapes are palimpsests. From O.G.S. Crawford (1953) to Barbara Bender and Chris Tilley (Bender 2001; Tilley, Bender and Hamilton 1998), the notion of an archaeological site or landscape as palimpsest has been a root metaphor of archaeology. It connects both the past and the archaeological practice to the act of writing. The palimpsest is full of acts of iconoclasm by erasure, rendings, ruptures and breaks with what came before, the traces of which archaeologists iron out into a sequence of linear time.

And yet landscape, as is time, is much more complex, disorderly and multiple. The transformation is more chaotic as with the weather. Landscape as a multitemporal ensemble is full of once distant material pasts, that are now proximate. And yet, likewise, material pasts close in linear time may also be quite distant.

Materials from Franchthi cave (re)circulate, once deserted wells are (re)tapped, the trapezoidal walls of the supposed sanctuary of Demeter Chthonia may now form the edifice of a late 18th century house in Ermioni, place names inscribed in Pausanias can once again come to reference a locale. These are examples of how the past percolates. This multitemporality of landscape is experienced as present. We may account for this by circumventing the chasms of the palimpsest for the chiasma to be found in the theory of percolation. Chiasma are the crossing points of folds where various times come together, whether in the excavation of a possible shrine by the Southeast Gate of Halieis or as a local farmer bends to pick up Geometric bronze bull figurine. Such chiasma may also form around the survey notebooks.

The death of a beekeeper
On the 30th of July 1980 the Blue Team of the AEP was conducting a series of transects in the central Flamboura Valley. After delineating and sampling a concentration of roof tiles, which they denoted as ‘B61,’ the team continued the transects through an area of pine and maquis near where a beekeeper was smoking his hives. They soon detected a second cluster of ceramics approximately 60 to 70 meters southwest. Wary of the bees, the team abandoned the area on the premise that the sites were separate. The latter cluster was dubbed ‘B62.’ They subsequently took break on a hot afternoon of intensive survey to sample some local honey so prized that it fetched 300 drachmas per kilo.

At 10:30am, Saturday August 16, 2003, only two double box hives remain. Enlisted in southern Argolid beekeeping since 1961 and capable of producing over 10 kilos, twice the honey per year of the straw skep, the wooden hives sit in the shade of a pine overpopulated by cicadas. They are both supported above ground by a pair of breezeblocks. These box hives contain a series of removable pine frames. Each frame incases a rectangular metal mesh, which provides the foundation for the hive. They are sealed with a metal cover weighed down by a large cobble. Both are empty.

Stacked about the vicinity of these last hives are dozens of the metal tops along with many warped and broken wooden frames. To the west, adjacent to these abandoned hives, lies an open field encircled by maquis and an enclosure of dried vegetation. Scattered throughout this area are vacant pairs of cinder blocks and quadruples of half blocks. Though no longer supporting hives, many appear to be in situ. Frames, metal tops and bits of rusted metal mesh are to be found amongst the overgrowth. The few remaining box hives that were not transported elsewhere, were burned where they stood. Mixed in with these remaining beekeeping materials, were quantities of ceramics. A possibility allowed for in the final publication (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 453), the scatter between ‘B61’ and ‘B62’ is continuous.

An apotheke
Ceramics from ‘B61’ and ‘B62’ along with other materials accreted through survey practice sit in tightly packed wooden boxes on a series of grey metal shelves that line the walls of a storeroom. This apotheke occupies the lower floor of a former house, two stories high, on the western edge of the old town harbor of Porto Kheli. The lower floor consists of a single open room, approximately 14 m long by 3.5 m wide, running north and south, which expands an additional 2 meters into two alcoves on either end. Materials from the excavations at Halieis occupy the southern two-thirds of the room. In the northern end reside things from the AEP.

Boxes are sorted by site, typology and diagnostic criteria—pottery is separate from ground stone; ground stone is separate from flaked stone; flaked stone is separate from bone and shell; general ceramics are separated from the Geometric study collection. All these materials are bagged individually and arranged in their appropriate wooden boxes by site (D3 ceramics), typology (hand stones) or diagnostics (Classical pithoi), depending on their quantities. Grinding stones, rotary querns, or other materials too large for the boxes are placed directly on the shelves. Tags, either wooden or paper, tied, either with string or rusted wire, or permanent ink applied directly to the surface of the things are the sole, fragile links that remain between these material guarantors and the fields in the countryside and in the laboratories through which they circulated.

Within walls within Halieis
Halieis was laid on an orthogonal plan. Below the heights of the acropolis, on gently sloping ground on the south shore of the bay, the city was divided into two zones of insulae. Oriented at different angles, each zone consisted of eight parallel streets set equidistantly (Boyd and Jameson 1981, 328-329). The western zone occupies roughly half the area of the eastern. At the intersection of Street 1 and Avenue C at the Southeast Gate of the eastern zone lies ‘House 7.’

Observed planimetrically, its western and eastern corners constrict at angles less than ninety giving House 7 a slight rhomboidal shape (Figure 5.10). The prothyron or porch of the structure opens to the south onto Avenue C, which continues through the city gate only a few meters to the southeast. The door of the prothyron accesses an open court, approximately 4m by 8m, depending upon the plan, with a private well and an additional recess or pastas, 2m by 4m, both to the northwest. In an area to the right a cellar, turned kopron. A number of chambers, most with doorways, frame this court on all sides. Some of these chambers cluster together to form private suites (Nevet 1999, 99).

Immediately, to the left of the main entrance is a room, 3m by 4.2m, through which one must pass in order to reach a second, measuring 4.8m by 4.2m on the longer walls. The floors of both rooms are cement. The floor of the inner room, however, has a raised surface on all sides and is framed by walls accented with red plaster (refer to Boyd and Rudolph 1978, 351-353). These are characteristic features of an andrôn, or literally the ‘men’s’ room. Here men ate, drank and were entertained.

There is space for seven couches to be occupied by symposiasts (Shanks 2004, 153). The doors of the andrôn and antechamber are off axis. One may not see the segregated events taking place in the inner room from the court. Today what is left of the andrôn lays in an open field overgrown with grasses behind a metal fence and locked gate; literally a space delimited for the ruminations of archaeologists.

Fluctuation
Pausanias says little of what lies south of the straight road from Hermion to Mases. He speaks of Halieis as deserted in his time. Indeed, given what came before and what came after in the areas of the Halias, south of Korakia in the west and Cape Mouzaki in the east, there is an extreme paucity of things to be found on the ground from Pausanias’ time. Of the 180 sites documented by the AEP in the area of Korakia, around the Ververonda Lagoon, on the Nisi Kheliou and southern peninsula, in the Flamboura valley and along Petrothalassa only 4 date to the 2nd century C.E. When contrasted with the 55, which date to the 4th century B.C.E. before a sharp decline around 250 B.C.E. (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 394-400) the low number low in the 2nd century C.E. is more striking. A resurgence of materials on the ground occurs shortly after 400 C.E. 39 sites are Late Roman and therefore date to the subsequent 250-year period (refer to Snodgrass 1987, 116-117 for a similar pattern in Boeotia). After 650 C.E. the number of sites in the region plummets to exactly 0 (Figure 5.12). Fluctuation.

The thin trickle of documents pertaining to matters of concern associated with the southern Argolid, which begin in the years after the fall of Constantinople in 1204, say nothing of the area south of Kranidhi, the Pikrodhafni Valley and Kastri (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 112-126; Topping 2000). Not a single thing collected during the intensive surveys of this region falls definitively within the years between 650 and 1500. To be fair, as to whether ‘A35,’ a cluster of sherds and rooftiles associated with 2 piles of rubble just north of the Ververonda salt lagoon, is datable to the end of the Medieval period around 1500 is uncertain (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 112-126; 428). What is more certain is that people extracted salt from time to time from the area of the lagoon.

A map of the region dating to around 1705 C.E. contains no tell-tale marks of habitation (denoted by clusters of squares and rectangles) south of Kranidhi, but Ververonda is marked by a curious line parallel to the closed breakwater with the referent ‘saline’ at either end (refer to Figure 2.9 in Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 130). According to Peter Topping these saltworks were closed around 1700 (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 310). Moreover, in the year before Morosini blew up the Parthenon—1686—large stands of pine were said to encircle Porto Kheli Bay down to the water (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 307). At the turn of the 19th century Gell, who like Puillion de Boblaye associates Mases with Porto Kheli, relates: ‘the particulars which the people of Kastri are able to give of this part of the country are few’ (1810, 132). Indeed there are no olives in the region of any significant size, which would indicate a more or less consistent human presence from an early date. It is at the end of the Greek War of Independence when the area provided shelter for Greek vessels associated with the fleet from Hydra and Spetses (Leake 1826, 95-96), that a slow resurgence of habitation occurs. Even still this is small. At the end of the 19th century Frazer described the bay as:

‘small and landlocked, and the scenery, without being grand is peaceful and homelike, reminding a Scotchman of some quiet inlet in the Western Highlands of his native land. There is no wharf, and hardly a sign of habitation within sight. A ferry-boat puts off to the steamer. The people are Albanians’ (1898 III, 292-293).

Today Porto Kheli Bay, whose fringes from the edge of the Halieis archaeological park in the south to the edge of the old town harbor on the north are packed with hotels, shops, restaurants, and houses, is the most popular tourist destination in the southern Argolid.

Lacuna
The AEP chronology for the whole of the southern Argolid contains a lacuna between 650 and 1000 C.E. Virtually nothing which can be dated within this 350-year span presents itself on the ground in the region (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 113 and 404). The blank period begins with possible incursions from the north, perhaps associated with the late 6th century capture of Corinth and Argos (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 115). It subsequently closes with the repopulation of the Fournoi, Ermioni and Pikrodhafni valleys and a new settlement at Kranidhi. This interruption hints at the turbulence of time.

Proleitai
Signs marked ‘proleitai’ fill vacant lots between recently constructed estates. Rising property values near the seaside mean such ‘for sale’ signs are a common sight. Once again sites multiply in the former Halias. From Korakia to around the Ververonda Lagoon, to the fringes of Nisi Kheliou and Porto Kheli bay, and throughout the southern peninsula—the Halieis corridor, Khinitsa, Kosta, Metokhi—to the shores of Flamboura valley and along Petrothalassa, thousands of new homes emerge out of a deluge of concrete. The magnitude of the transformation has taken on the characteristics of a squall within the greater tempest of these landscapes.

The topology of landscape
Our measurements of landscape have involved linear scales, grids, triangulations and optical distances of refraction. We have employed mathematics of distance and division. We have yet to recognize the topology of landscape. Many distant times are folded into the pleats of landscape. They have presence and action now. Our measures should also account for this intimacy, proximity and connection. This mathematics is topology (Serres 1995).

A topology serves as an explanatory model for the multitemporal ensemble of landscape whose structure is not governed by a linear notion of time. Rather, a topology respects the simultaneous nature of the multiple times and fields of landscape as they relate to each other.

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Congratulations! That´s one of the best descriptions I ever found of the area of Toizenia & Iliokastron! Also Pausanias was and is a good guide to that area still today...

Many greetings Tobias Schorr

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