Overview

The excavations of 2001–06 at the site of Kouphovouno, near Sparta, have shed important new light on the prehistory of southern Greece. Finds span the Middle and Late Neolithic of the sixth millennium BC, the Greek Early Bronze Age (third millennium BC), an extended Middle Bronze Age cemetery (early-mid second millennium BC), as well as documenting Late Roman remains. The results from this open site provide a useful foil to those from cave sites, such as the Franchthi Cave and Alepotrypa, which hitherto have dominated the narrative for the Neolithic Peloponnese. Modern archaeological techniques focused on Kouphovouno’s oikistic structure, the village economy and material culture, its chronological sequence, the site’s geomorphological and ecological context, and the comparison of pre-excavation survey (artefact collection, coring, sedimentology, geophysical prospection) with the results of excavation. Innovative methods of analysis include isotopic characterisation of plant and animal remains to investigate the farming regime, and the site’s chronology has been clarified through a combination of stratigraphy, seriation, and Bayesian analysis of 14C dates. Indeed, a full battery of scientific studies inform the interpretation of the findings: micromorphology of sediments, ceramic petrography, archaeobotany, archaeozoology, micro- and macroscopic study of the macrolithics. The Volume presents a full account of the excavated areas and stratigraphic soundings. This feeds into an analysis of the site’s relative and absolute dating. There follow Chapters detailing ceramics, chipped stone artefacts, macrolithics, plus one on bone tools, figurines, metal objects and minerals, ornaments and other finds. These are contextualised with parallels in particular, but not solely, from southern Greece. Specialised overviews follow. The first covers the funerary and skeletal analyses (with an appendix on aDNA of human skeletal remains). Then the environmental evidence is presented with important conclusions on agriculture and animal husbandry. Next the architectural remains are discussed with reference to building materials, construction techniques, living spaces and site formation. The final Chapter presents a brief review of Kouphovouno in its chronological and geographic context. The archaeological detail which underwrites the analysis, including the full petrographic study of the ceramics, is available on the BSA website and it is intended that this should also be a quarry of data for future research.

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Author Information

William Cavanagh has collaborated with fellow scholars and published mainly on Greek archaeology. Intensive survey of 70 km2 in central Laconia documented some 400 sites of all periods (Laconia Survey; Laconia Rural Sites Project with Christopher Mee). He has published on funerary archaeology (e.g. A Private Place: Death in Prehistoric Greece with Christopher Mee) and on mathematical approaches to archaeology (Bayesian Approach to Archaeological Inference). Until retirement he was Lecturer, Reader and then Professor at the University of Nottingham, where he is now Professor Emeritus of Aegean Archaeology and co-director of the Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies. Christopher Mee (1950–2013) held the Charles W. Jones Chair of Classical Archaeology at the University of Liverpool. His many publications included Rhodes in the Bronze Age, A Rough and Rocky Place, Greek Archaeology: A Thematic Approach, as well as volumes on Laconia and funerary archaeology jointly with William Cavanagh. Josette Renard was Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University Paul Valéry-Montpellier III and is still a member of the UMR 7041 of the CNRS «Archéologie et Sciences de l’Antiquité». Her main field of research has been the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age of the Peloponnese.

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