With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Daniel J. Pullen has designed the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP) to conduct two seasons of archaeological and geoarchaeological research on the Saronic Gulf coast of southern Greece. The international team from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Greece, led by Dr. Pullen and co-director Dr. Thomas Tartaron, seeks to examine the interrelationships among archaic states when they compete for control of peripheral regions, in a process called peer-polity competition. The project involves an intensive program of surface survey, excavation, artifact analysis, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction, focused on the recently discovered Mycenaean port/harbor town of Korphos-Kalamianos in southern Greece (ca. 1700?1200 B.C.). The particular interest of the site and its setting is that it appears to have played the role of contested periphery in a process by which the emerging palace state at Mycenae expanded into the sphere of influence of an older state centered at Kolonna on the island of Aigina, and eventually incorporated the Kalamianos region economically and perhaps politically as well. Kalamianos is unique in Aegean prehistory because urban ports of the period are virtually unknown, and because the exposure on the modern surface of stone architectural foundations and lower walls is such that a nearly complete plan of the settlement has been made before any excavation.
The field methods, put into practice and refined already in 2007, will document the urban port and its hinterland by obtaining data on architecture and town planning, artifacts, settlement patterns, and paleoenvironment. Careful documentation of architectural remains indicates the appearance of canonical Mycenaean architecture of the 13th century B.C. is the peak of palace society at Mycenae, but it is not certain whether this reflects Mycenaes' presence or local elites emulating imperial architecture. Initial results from surface survey suggest that settlement and subsistence patterns underwent striking changes at the same time. The surface pottery comprises both Aiginetan and Mycenaean types and petrographic analyses of the ceramics will clarify these complex interactions.
The intellectual merit of SHARP lies in examining peripheries within the Mycenaean heartland, instead of the typical focus on distant regions and issues of raw material acquisition and interregional trade. SHARP seeks to describe the roles peripheries play in the expansion and consolidation of archaic states in the context of a competitive process among peer polities. The impact on Aegean prehistory will be immediate, and the results will provide comparative data for the study of analogous processes in other world areas, for example among Maya and Wari states.
Among the broader impacts of SHARP are the development of international collaboration and targeted professional development for female staff members. Graduate students are provided intensive training and dissertation opportunities. Public outreach to the local community and tourists in Greece will have long-lasting and positive outcomes, as will the dissemination of results in popular media, teaching, and presentations to schools and other groups in the USA.
