Surveying the Western Cycladic Islands

Over my winter research leave, I’ve had time to catch up on reading (and read new stuff as well!). I really enjoyed “A Regional Survey of the Uninhabited Islands of the Western Cyclades: The Small Cycladic Islands Project, 2021-2022” by Alex R. Knodell and colleagues which appeared in the most recent Hesperia 94.4 (2025).

The article is another publication from the Small Cycladic Islands Project (SCIP) and a kind of preliminary report (but not THAT kind of preliminary report). As per usual, if you want to dig into the full details that this report provides, it’s worth your time just to read it, but there were a few things that I very much appreciated in it that I’ll share here.

1. Later Roman to Medieval Activities. There has long been an assumption that something was going on in the islands. Near shore islands in, say, the Saronic or Corinthian Gulf, showed significant activities in the Late Roman period with churches, fortifications, cisterns, burials, and settlements. Archaeologists generally associated this activity with the Late Roman population boom which leads to expanded land use especially for grazing activities on the near shore islands. SCIP has shown that the assumption that by the 7th or 8th century activities on these “goat islands” ended, might be incorrect. Knodell and company argue that there is growing evidence that fortifications and towers on these islands served to monitor the surrounding seas and to protect surrounding settlements (often on other large islands or the mainland). This suggests continued activity on these islands into the Medieval period and their continued integration into life the Aegean littoral. 

2. Modern Trash. Over the past decade or so, there’s been a growing interest in seaborne modern trash. The circulation of rubber ducks and the documentation of sea borne trash in Iceland and Scandinavia, has opened doors to understanding the role of currents and winds in distributing evidence for modern activities on a global scale. The presence of modern trash on northern beaches in the SCIP study area reflects the prevailing winds and the discarded objects — from shotgun shells to the remains of festivals at the island churches — modern trash accumulates on these uninhabited islands as they lack the seamless working of contemporary infrastructure to remove it and are subjected to the agentless movement of the sea and winds.

3. Non-Settlement and Extractive Landscapes. Much of this paper emphasizes the use of these nearshore, uninhabited islands not as places of robust, long-term settlement activities. Indeed, many of these islands lack fresh water and arable land necessary for them to develop independent settlements (whatever that means in these circumstances) and instead become places of seasonal, situational, or short term extraction. The traces left by these activities become visible through the intensive practices of systematic pedestrian survey: lithic scatters, small assemblages of material suggestion short term occupation, and the subtle traces of shelters, terraces, animal pens, and other features. Survey archaeology has had a tendency to see artifact scatters as traces of settlement and to explain even the smallest assemblages as short term settlement in the landscape. We tend to ground this approach in formation process archaeology and argue that what we see on the surface is only a tiny percentage of the use assemblage. As a result, anything on the surface — even a few sherds — likely represents decades of activity in the past and this, for many of us, is the same as settlement. These islands, however, suggest another scenario. These assemblages might represent episodic activities over long stretches of time that never rise to the level of settlement and offer a valuable counterpoint to a larger tendency for settlement to overdetermine the nature of past landscapes  

4. Experiential Landscapes. The presence of monasteries and churches on these islands offers another useful reminder that islands were not simply nodes in productive landscapes or defined by their proximity to movement and risks, but also places that acquired distinct religious, experiential, and even mystical characteristics. (As a brief advertisement for myself, an article that I published many years ago argued that islands could replace deserts when Middle Byzantine hagiographers sought to project Early Christian aesthetic landscapes onto the Aegean). Monks sought islands for their isolation, mariners recognized churches as both navigational and spiritual guides, and communities return to islands for annual festivals celebrated for generations as much because the island is part of their lived environment as because of its remoteness. This tension between their proximity (and accessibility) and remoteness creates places as unique as the near desert of the Nile valley.  

5. Third Wave Survey. Finally, the work of the SCIP shows the potential of the so-called “third wave survey” projects in the Mediterranean. This article, despite its length, only touches on the edge of what third wave survey can be, but their use of LiDAR to identify and trace overgrown terraces, features associated with pastoralism, or even settlement represents an important — and logistically accessible — step forward for intensive pedestrian survey. Future projects will almost certainly combine this kind of advanced and once computationally intensive remote sensing technology with the modern traditional practice of walking fields and documenting ceramic and lithic artifacts on the surface. As the kids say: this is the way and it will be exciting to see how this project uses this technology not just for its own sake, but as a complement to intensive survey practice.