This week we started with a trip to the Athenian Agora, led by current director of excavations, John Papadopoulos. I was generally amazed by his knowledge of the site and ability to pull quotes and citations off the top of his head, and just really enjoyed his tour. The Athenian Agora was the civic and commercial center of ancient Athens, though professor Papadopoulos explained that it was probably not the only agora in Athens, nor was it the only commercial area in Athens. Rather it is considered the major agora due to the presence the government buildings on the site. We saw the ruins of a number of these buildings including the Royal Stoa, the Monument of the Eponymous Heroes, and Bouleuterion, or council building. The Monument of the Eponymous Heroes was of particular interest as it was used as a sort of “notice board” for the people of Athens. Information about governance would be posted under the statue of the hero for which the group was named. I found this really interesting as the logistics of communication required for direct democracy in the ancient world have always seemed very complicated to me and this clarified one of the ways in which this immense task was resolved.
From the government buildings, Professor Papadopoulos led us to the Hephaisteion where he recited an impressive section of a poem Lord Byron. We then discussed the construction of the Doric temple and its subsequent uses throughout history. The temple has gone through many phases, at times being used as a church, and at others being broken and looted for metal for weapons. However, in its form today it represents a (mostly) intact example of a doric temple.
Following the Hephaisteion wrapped up our tour at the Stoa of Atlas, which was restored in the 1950s and now serves as the museum for the site. Inside we saw a number of smaller finds from the site from varying time periods. One point that I thought about before the visit, and which the museum made me think about further, was that though the Athenian Agora is owned by the Greek government, it is currently operated and managed by the American School of Classical Studies. This sort of colonialist dynamic is something that I think it is important to acknowledge and discuss in archeology, as well as in the management of historical sites more broadly. Professor Papadopoulos addressed it towards the start of our tour in which he talked about the “double colonialism” of the site. This explanation got at the complexity of trying to preserve ancient sites of great importance, while also thinking who is doing the management or claiming ownership of the site or the history more generally. Another question I had here, which he addressed to some extent, was what was being done to address the fact that there was a neighborhood of people who lived on the site before it was demolished to allow for excavations. Professor Papadopoulos explained that there will be an exhibit on this neighborhood going up shortly. While this is admittedly a complex issue, I hope that the American School of Classical Studies continues to do more in the future to recognize and acknowledge the destruction required for the excavation of this site.
From the Agora we took a jump back in time and discussed the Neolithic period in Greece in Alex’s class on Thursday to prepare us from our weekend trip to Volos which took us about five hours north of Athens by bus. He also introduced our themes for the trip which included agriculture, landscape change, and the geography of movement. More specifically, our stops on the weekend trip tended to center around the use of geography in fortification and city development, as well as the changing coastline of the Aegean between the classical period and the present. This changing coastline, in turn, introduced silt which facilitated crop growth, further affecting the placements of cities and fortifications as agriculturally rich land is more desirable and facilitates crops which, in turn, support populations.
Over the weekend we visited Thermopylae, Dimini, Demetrias, and Lamia, as well as the City Museum of Volos and the Volos Archeological museum. These sites spanned a variety of time periods, starting with the Neolithic settlement at Dimini, then the 480 B.C.E. battle of Thermopylae, the Hellenistic palace at Demetrias, and the remaining Byzantine and post-Byzantine walls of the castle of Lamia. Across these Various locations our themes for the trip became distinctly tangible. Landscape change in particular was a big player as changing coastlines make Dimini, Demetrias, and Thermopylae looks distinctly different today than how they would have in ancient times. The water would have come much closer to all of these sites than it does today, emphasizing the importance of water access in the placement of ancient settlements in the cases of Dimini and Demetrias. In the case of Thermopylae, it a higher shoreline would have made the mountain pass much narrower than it is today, making the 480 battle make more sense than it would looking at the landscape today. More generally, understanding the location of the shoreline in ancient times makes it much more obvious, emphasizing the importance of understanding environmental processes in history and archeology.
Throughout the stops the theme of fortified walls, and particularly fortified walls that have been rebuilt, repaired, or added to over time also developed. I found this very interesting, particularly at our last stop of the weekend, The Castle of Lamia at which you could see the phases of construction built into the side of the wall. This served as a kind of stratigraphy in which you could see what part of the wall had been built at which time. It also provides a kind of record of various different points at which the walls were attacked or destroyed to a point that they needed substantial repair. Of most interest was a section near the bottom in which Hellenistic blocks were included in part of the wall, but not throughout, and on top of newer construction. Alex explained that this could be the incorporation of an older structure or the use of existing materials. This is also something that we saw at the agora where old blocks, columns, and even statues, had been incorporated into later classical buildings as building materials. This type of reuse makes a lot of sense given the amount of effort involved in the creation and transportation of building materials, particularly in the ancient world. However, I find these elements very interesting in that they give a little character to the buildings while also telling us something about the resources available to the people building them.
Aside from the numerous interesting archeological sites and museums, we also got to experience the town of Volos. The views were gorgeous, particularly when we went up to Pelion to have lunch at Portaria and got to see Volos from above. I also enjoyed watching the sun go down over the water, and taking a refreshing (if not cold) first swim in the Aegean. Our first weekend excursion was an overall great experience and I look forward to those to come.