The period of earliest settlement in southern Euboea has long been confined to the shadows of Aegean prehistory. Although early writers extolled the virtues of the rugged mountain folk, admired the enigmatic Dragon House on Mount Ochi, and described Graeco-Roman and Frankish monuments in the region, few commented on any signs of an earlier presence. For a good part of the past century as well, archaeologists regarded southern Euboea as an uninhabited backwater during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. By the late 1950s, however, small-scale reconnaissance surveys began to modify this image, setting the stage for a systematic investigation of...

As an integral part of this study, a geoarchaeological evaluation was carried out by William Farrand in order to define the relationship of landscape elements to the sites and their settings. This contribution to the project was complemented by a previous summary by Keller (1985, 44–59) and by the interpretation of satellite images by Belgian geographers (De Vliegher 1991). Farrand spent two one-week seasons in the field in 1996 and 2002, traveling across the Paximadi peninsula and adjacent areas, examining available road cuts, gully scarps, and previously excavated archaeological sites. The objectives included relating local topography to site locations,...

Plakari is a low schist ridge at the northwest edge of the Karystos bay, ca. 2 km west of Karystos (Pl. 12A). Today the ridge slopes are covered with abandoned terraces and phrygana vegetation, and they have been scarred by a grid of roads and water-pipe trenches installed over the last three decades for the development of summerhouse plots (Pl. 12B). At a maximum elevation of 83.90 m asl, the hill offers views north and east to the Karystos plain and Mount Ochi and south to the large, shallow, sandy cove of Livadaki, which is sheltered on the south by...

Following Keller’s initial one-man reconnaissance of the Karystos watershed (1979–1981), survey continued on the Paximadi peninsula in the summer of 1986. Follow-up visits to sites and findspots were made in subsequent years, and in 1988 Thomas Strasser organized a team of 10 people to grid and collect material from four of the prehistoric sites discovered earlier. The 1986 campaign lasted approximately four weeks and was carried out with the help of 18 volunteers, most of them students. Personnel were divided into three rotating teams: two teams in the field and one processing collected material at the Karystos Archaeological Museum....

In the previous pages we described the prehistoric sites and findspots discovered on the Paximadi peninsula during survey, along with their ceramic and lithic remains, and we offered brief comments about comparable material elsewhere in the Aegean. We turn in this chapter to a more detailed and synthetic examination of the pottery and stone tools, organized by period. We begin with an analysis of the pottery, focusing on stylistic affinities within site assemblages across the region as an indirect measure of social interaction. In the discussion of lithics that follows, we concentrate on problems entailed in dating the assemblage, instructive...

We began this book with the comment that southern Euboea has long been confined to the shadows of Aegean prehistory, an observation that can now be revised by the evidence and discussions of the previous pages. In this last chapter we attempt to stand back from the details and consider the early history of the Paximadi peninsula from a more general perspective. Survey and limited excavation by SEEP on the peninsula allow us to address basic questions about the initial settlement of the area, the changes that emerged during some two millennia of occupation, and the place of the peninsula...