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The Greek island of Crete has become almost a second home for Peggy Mook,
associate professor of foreign
languages and literatures.
Through a variety of faculty improvement leaves and various grants from
such agencies as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Mook
has worked for a number of years as part of an excavation team that exposed
and completed restoration of the architectural remains of a Greek village
on Crete.
She returned over the years to continue her research on the artifacts
recovered from that excavation. Mook put the resulting research into a
book, The Kastro: The Late Minoan IIIC through Orientalizing Pottery.
Last fall and this past summer, Mook has again been in Crete working on
the Azoria Project, which Mook says will involve Iowa State's Classical
Studies Program.
"Through this project, the Classical Studies Program will make another
new and important contribution to undergraduate education at Iowa State,"
said Mook, who serves as chair of that program.
The Azoria Project is the archaeological excavation of a Late Bronze Age
and Early Iron Age-Archaic town (ca. 1200-500 B.C.) on Crete. Through
excavation, Mook and the other members of the team expect to recover evidence
for changes in the site's economic, social, religious, and political organization
through time and within the broader context of cultural cross-currents
in the eastern Mediterranean.
The project, which is directed by Mook's collaborator Donald Haggis of
the University of North Carolina, has received a $160,000 three-year grant
from the NEH. It has also received funding from the National Geographic
Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and
the Institute for Aegean Prehistory.
Mook is serving as the field director of the project. This past spring
she conducted preliminary and comparative research for the new excavation.
She was also laying the groundwork for some Iowa State students who will
have the opportunity to participate in all aspects of the excavation.
Students will be able to earn two to six hour credits for six to seven
weeks of archaeological fieldwork conducted at the site.
"They will engage directly in the research process, working as assistants
to field archaeologists and various specialists such a surveyors, archaeological
architects, illustrators, palaeoethnobotanists, zooarchaeologists, biological
anthropologists and geomorphologists while they learn excavation, recording
and processing techniques first-hand," she said.
While in Crete, the students will help Mook and the rest of the Azoria
Project address two interrelated and vitally important problems in understanding
early Cretan and Greek cultural identity and state formation.
Specifically Mook hopes to learn whether Cretan cities emerged first in
the Early Iron Age (ca. 1000-800 B.C.) or later in the Archaic period
(ca. 700-600 B.C.). She also hopes to determine if these first cities
were based on long-established communities and local agricultural and
pastoral resources, or were they created anew and transformed in response
to external economic and cultural stimuli.
The project seeks to shift the emphasis of Cretan archaeology by studying
the growth of an Archaic town from its Bronze Age beginnings until its
establishment as a regional center.
"We are interested in answering these questions by examining changes
in the form of the settlement and its material culture, contexts of public
and private activities, and modes of agricultural and pastoral production
throughout the life of an urban site," Mook said. "The multiple
phases of occupation (of Azoria) allow us to examine periodic changes
in the site's economy, social structure, and cultural identity, addressing
directly environmental and sociopolitical factors in urbanization, and
the formation of a regional identity or community of place."
A portion of the Azoria site was originally excavated in 1901 by an early
American archaeologist Harriet Boyd. Subsequent surface exploration by
Mook and Haggis resulted in a sketch plan of the site and a re-evaluation
of its size and chronology.
The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the liaison between
American archaeologists working in Greece and the Greek Archaeological
Service of the Ministry of Culture, has granted the two Americans one
of their three excavation applications for the next five years. Work began
on the project in June 2002.
"Our overall purpose in excavating Azoria is to shed light on this
oft-ignored period of Cretan history, which is also evidently one of dynamic
social change and intercultural interaction, as the cities of the Mediterranean
fringe take their shape, ostensibly emerging from an Early Iron Age phase
of economic and political isolation," she said.
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