An island archaeology of uninhabited landscapes: Offshore islets near Paros, Greece (the Small Cycladic Islands Project)

Island Colonization and Environmental Sustainability in the Postglacial Mediterranean

“…We also took into consideration the fact that the majority of islands smaller than 10 km 2 in area are so small that settlement of any kind has probably always been precluded. We recognize that larger islands under this size (i.e., those between 10 km 2 and 1 km 2 ) appear to experience highly stochastic and discontinuous settlement [37], and this threshold thereby skews our analysis towards islands that are less likely to experience discontinuous settlement; moreover, many islands that today fall below the 10 km 2 threshold would have been somewhat larger (via glacial melt-driven eustatic sea-level change) in the late Pleistocene and earlier Holocene. Yet, if sustainability of settlement is sensitive to area, this should emerge during the analysis, allowing us to make secure predictions about likely dynamics on islands smaller than 10 km 2 in area.…”

“…Our analysis of both hunter-gatherer and agropastoral settlement took different forms. As regards the latter, every island in our dataset has almost certainly witnessed some form of agropastoral settlement over the last eight millennia, cf., [37], but many islands lack published archaeological dates or data. Regarding hunter-gatherer settlement, the number of islands with relevant archaeological evidence (of whatever scale or duration) is substantially smaller.…”

The Small Cycladic Islands Project (2019–2020): a comparative survey of uninhabited landscapes near Paros and Antiparos, Greece

“…After the 2019 field season we could already draw several preliminary conclusions from this work (Knodell et al . 2020), which we can supplement as follows. (1) Patterns of occupation or use on these islands are limited to particular periods, which are not consistent across different islands; continuous occupation across several time periods rarely happened in these places.…”

“…In 2019 and 2020, the SCIP carried out intensive archaeological surveys of 21 small islands around Paros and Antiparos using a variety of multi-disciplinary techniques (Figure 1). A recently published report on the 2019 field season, which focused on ten islets around Paros, provides a detailed discussion of the background, context and initial results of the project (Knodell et al 2020). The present article updates and expands upon that publication through the addition of the 2020 results.…”

Newsround

“…Though often uninhabited, small islands sometimes served as cemeteries, sanctuaries and maritime strongholds. In 2020, a comprehensive survey, including surface investigation photogrammetry and aerial photography, of 21 islets in the vicinity of Paros and Antiparos was continued (Knodell et al 2020;Athanasoulis et al 2021 Ceramic, metal and glass objects, as well as coins confirm its repair in the 14th century, its abandonment by force and possible destruction through a siege of the castle by the Ottomans by a sandbar depending on the tide, was dated mainly to the Archaic and Classical periods, the same time frame as the architectural remains. Roman and Byzantine material was also prevalent.…”