College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Back to Crete

Classicist Peggy Mook has returned to Greece for a new excavation that will make important contributions on campus.

The Greek island of Crete has become almost a second home to 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.