Abstract
In this article we reconstruct the religious landscape between the sanctuaries of Plakari and Karababa in southern Euboia. These cult places were connected by a procession road, datable to the Classical period. To map this fragmentarily preserved road system and the general layout of the rural sanctuary on the Karababa hill slope we developed a three-staged methodology for targeted surveys. This comprises a desktop study of the target area using remotely sensed and spatial data, mapping the target area by making orthophotos from a drone, and ground-truthing by means of pedestrian surveys and revisiting and reassessing known archaeological find places. As a next phase of our research we reconstruct the road system and offer an interpretation of the road, sanctuary and other constituent elements of the religious landscape, emphasizing the importance of movement and landscape perception. In this final, interpretative part we also discuss a large and long boundary wall which we argue to have encompassed the sacred land belonging to the sanctuary, and two horos inscriptions, probably demarcating the temenos of the sanctuary proper, which included several platforms, a threshing floor and possible altars and which may have been dedicated to Demeter.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-46 |
| Number of pages | 46 |
| Journal | Babesch. Bulletin antieke beschaving |
| Volume | 95 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Funding
* We should like to express our gratitude to Dr Donald Keller and Professor Stephen Lambert (Cardiff Univer-sity) for their comments and suggestions, which have been very valuable and helpful for revising and improv-ing the text. Any remaining errors are the sole respon-sibility of the authors. We are indebted to the Faculty of Humanities of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP, Philadel-phia) for their generous financial support over the years of the Plakari Project, and to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for fund-ing the SESLR project that provided the scientific framework of our research on the Karababa road sys-tem. Last but not least we wish to express our thanks to Dr Pari Kalamara, director of the Ephorate of Euboia, and to the Netherlands Institute at Athens, its director Dr Winfred van de Put and its staff for their assistance, support and advice. 1 Polignac 1995, 21-25, 32-88. 2 Connor 1987; Polignac 1995, 40; Greaves 2010, 184. 3 Hera: e.g. Polignac 1995, 41-48. Artemis: e.g. Polignac 1995, 44, 76; Budin 2016, 48-68. 4 Niemeier 1999; Ehrhardt 1998; Herda 2006. 5 Keller 1985, 195-196, 200-201; Crielaard et al. 2011-2012, 94-95. 6 Crielaard et al. 2011-2012, 86. 7 Preliminary reports: Crielaard et al. 2011-2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017. Preliminary synthesizing papers: Crielaard 2012, 2017; Crielaard/Songu 2017. Website: http://www.plakariproject.com 8 NWO project no. PR-14-08. Website: http://seslr.nl/ 9 Wallace et al. 2006; Wickens et al. 2018. 10 ESRI’s ArcGIS 10.x. 11 Aerial photographs taken by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Luftwaffe during WWII. 12 Over 3600 photographs were taken of the Karystia by SESLR member Anke Stoker during three different flights. 13 Large sets of high-quality multispectral and panchro-matic satellite images were granted to SESLR by the DigitalGlobe Foundation (now part of Maxar: http:// www.maxar.com) in 2015 and 2017, for which we wish to express our gratitude. 14 1:5000 topographic maps acquired from the Hellenic Military Geographic Service (HMGS). 15 TanDEM-X, granted to SESLR by the German Aero-space Centre; vectorized 1:5000 topographic maps of the HMGS. 16 Keller/Wallace 1990; Keller/Hom 2010. 17 Crielaard 2017, 129; in press, arguing that the sanctuary and possibly the settlement originate in the 11th c. BC. 18 Charalambidou 2017. 19 Crielaard et al. 2013, 43-47; 2014, 7-11; Chidiroglou 2014. 20 Crielaard et al. 2017, 77-84. 21 Crielaard et al. 2014, 13-16; 2015, 121-127. 22 Chidiroglou 2003-2004, 73. 23 Keller 1985, 107-108. 24 The area is much eroded but remains of a long wall following the western edge of the hill top can be seen between roads B2 and B3; see Crielaard et al. 2011-2012, 85 fig. 2: red line. 25 Keller 1985, 108, 185-187, 195, 201-214; Chatzidimitriou 2006; Chidiroglou 2011. For other, sporadic Geometric finds in the Karystos area, see Crielaard et al. 2011-2012, 94 n. 13; the same article (pp. 91-95) provides a