2015 Season

The 2015 KAMBE field season ran from June 1 through July 7 and involved geophysical survey and excavation work at both Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios (K-AD) and Maroni-Vournes. This year we had a UBC field school and several Cornell students join the team. You can get a sense of the UBC students’ experiences on the project by checking out their blogs here. At K-AD our geophysics team led by Thomas Urban got complete high resolution coverage of the field around the Northeast Area, revealing a dense concentration of anomalies on the same alignment as the extant architecture, indicating what are undoubtedly several large Late Bronze Age buildings. The excavations in Unit 7 revealed part of the central court of monumental Building XVI, including a massive stone basin with ceramic lining in the northeast corner, with benches running from the basin west and south along the room’s walls. In Unit 3 we excavated the area where the city’s main north-south road widens from 4 m to 6 m. It is now clear that there were multiple phases of construction here, including an earlier phase with substantial ashlar masonry (found on the last day of excavations). At K-AD we successfully implemented our new digital recording system with data entry directly into ArcGIS using Panasonic Toughpad tablets combined with photogrammetric 3D modelling of every context excavated. Test excavations at Maroni-Vournes revealed part of a substantial Late Bronze Age wall (possibly dating to the LC I), originally detected in both our magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar surveys.  A full report is currently in the works.