Introduction to the Sphakia Survey
by Simon Price, Oxford University
Original text © 2001 Lucia Nixon, Jennifer Moody, Simon Price, and Oliver Rackham - The Sphakia Survey: Internet Edition
Introduction
Sphakia is a deme, a modern administrative district, in SW Crete (Greece) with an area of 472 km. sq. It includes most of the White Mountains, and a dozen gorges, running south to the Libyan Sea – the best known is the Samaria Gorge – and very little arable land. The Sphakia Survey is an interdisciplinary archaeological project co-directed by Jennifer Moody and Lucia Nixon, with senior participation by Simon Price and Oliver Rackham. The work was done with a permit from the Greek Ministry of Culture and Science awarded through the Canadian Archaeological Institute at Athens.*
The main objective of the Sphakia Survey is to investigate human interaction with this rugged landscape. We have looked at evidence for human activity from the time that people first arrived in Sphakia at the end of the Stone Age (by ca 3000 B.C.) to the end of the Turkish period in Crete (A.D. 1898-1900). In other words, we have been working with a time span of some 5000 years. We divided this long period into three epochs: Prehistoric (3500 - 1050 B.C.); Graeco-Roman (1050 B.C. - A.D. 700); Byzantine-Venetian-Turkish (A.D. 700 - 1900). The project has involved the work of many people, using environmental, archaeological, documentary, and local information.
The Website has many different components. More than 1,000 color pictures of domestic pottery used through the ages, along with detailed maps and photographs showing archaeological sites and different environmental zones, give users a unique opportunity to witness other civilizations at the click of a mouse button. In addition, the site includes scholarly articles on the region (including one in Greek), and video clips from the project's video about archaeological field survey.
The case study section of the site brings together most of these different components (http://sphakia.classics.ox.ac.uk/teaching.html). This gives access to interactive databases, which allow students to carry out their own analyses of data collected during the survey; and teachers around the world are already finding the Website an invaluable tool in helping students to identify and classify objects, which are an important part of archaeological sleuthing.
The case study guides students through the data by offering a set of questions that may be asked of the databases. It starts by providing a fully worked out example, on bee keeping, which helps to familiarize students with the databases. Clicking on the name of a database or resource in the right-hand frame will load it into the main frame above. We selected bee keeping as the topic because the production of honey and beeswax has been an economically important practice in Sphakia in at least two of our epochs, and because it involves the main two databases. There are different kinds of evidence for bee keeping: enclosures (mostly in the Byzantine-Turkish epoch, though some are Graeco-Roman); and ceramic beehives (Graeco-Roman; in the recent past in Sphakia hives were made of local cypress wood).
* For a full list of acknowledgements, including granting agencies and project staff, please see the Introduction to the website.
