A village on a hill: Skarkos
Most of what we know about the Cyclades in the third millennium BCE comes from graves: according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, few settlements of the period have been found. Skarkos, on the island of Ios, is the exception. Excavations directed by Mariza Marthari have uncovered fifty-five buildings of the Early Cycladic II period (about 2700-2300 BCE), most of them two storeys high, along two main streets up to 2 m wide.
The Greek Ministry of Culture lists what the villagers lived on: sheep, goats and pigs, cereals, legumes and fruit. It also lists who worked there: masons, potters, metalworkers, makers of obsidian tools and marble sculptors. One building, called the Building of the Idols, was a marble workshop, the kind of place where the marble figures were made. Raw materials and finished goods came in from other islands, from the mainland and from further across the Aegean. In 2008 the conservation of the site won a first prize in the Europa Nostra heritage awards.
What did they make, and with what?
The islands were rich in stone. Obsidian, a black volcanic glass that breaks into razor-sharp flakes, came from Melos and, according to the Museum of Cycladic Art, was used all over the Aegean for blades. Naxos and Paros supplied white marble; emery, a hard rock used as an abrasive, helped to shape and polish it. Bronze weapons and tools spread from about 2500 BCE.
Why did the islanders bother with the sea, when everything seems to be at home? Because metal was not. At Kastri and Chalandriani, on Syros, excavators found axes, daggers and spearheads, crucibles and moulds for casting tools, and a silver diadem decorated with dotted human and animal figures.
Ships with 28 oars
We know what their boats looked like because they drew them. On the underside of clay “frying pans”, flat dishes with a handle found in the graves of Syros, a craftsman incised ships seen from above. One, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, shows a ship with 28 oars amid “frothy” waves, as the museum describes them, and a high prow topped by a fish, with a banner hanging below it. Together the frying pans show a small fleet of long ships without masts, rowed with 24 to 28 oars and, the museum estimates, 15 to 20 m long, longer than a city bus. With ships like these the Cycladic islanders carried metals across the Aegean.
Seven hundred graves on Syros
The frying pans come from Chalandriani, on Syros, the largest Early Bronze Age cemetery so far found in the Cyclades: about 700 tombs, most of them from the Early Cycladic II period. Burial customs changed over time. In the first phase people were laid in cist graves, small boxes lined with stone slabs; later, families also dug earth-cut tombs with a side entrance, so they could be reopened for new burials. With the body went pots, tools, jewellery and, in some graves, marble figures.
Nearby stood Kastri, a settlement of a later phase (Early Cycladic IIIA, about 2300-2200 BCE). Its defences had three lines: a low outer rampart, a main wall with horseshoe-shaped towers and a curved wall at the top.
An island built of imported marble
The most surprising site is Dhaskalio, a steep promontory of the small island of Keros, about 10 km south of Naxos. Excavations led by Colin Renfrew and Michael Boyd for the British School at Athens and the University of Cambridge (2015-2018) showed that its builders turned the natural pyramid shape of the promontory into a stepped one, with massive terraces, stairways and drains. They used more than 1,000 tonnes of stone shipped from Naxos, and two workshops cast copper, one with a mould for a dagger.
Nearby, at Kavos on Keros, fragments of marble figures, stone vessels and pottery were laid in deposits for about two centuries; the excavators read them as the remains of a ritual practice, which makes Keros look like a sanctuary. One deposit had been looted before the archaeologists arrived. The other, the Special Deposit South, excavated in 2006-2008, is the largest group of Cycladic figures ever found in context.
What came next?
The island world did not end with the figures. At Phylakopi, on Melos, a town lived from about 3300 to 1100 BCE; its third building phase shows strong Minoan influence, its fourth a Mycenaean one. On Thera (Santorini), Akrotiri grew into a port of about 20 hectares, with multi-storey houses, painted walls and drains, in contact with the Minoans of Crete, the mainland, Cyprus, Syria and Egypt. Earthquakes forced its people to leave in the last quarter of the seventeenth century BCE, and then the volcano buried the town.
Where to see it
Skarkos is open to visitors on Ios; the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades lists its opening hours, which you should check before you go. The frying pans of Chalandriani and the figures from excavated Cycladic graves are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Akrotiri, on Santorini, and Phylakopi, on Melos, show what the islands became in the following centuries.
Sources
- Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades, Hellenic Ministry of Culture: “The Hill of Skarkos on Ios”; “Kastri and Chalandriani, Syros”.
- National Archaeological Museum, Athens, “Exhibit of the month: Dominating the sea” (frying pan Π4974).
- Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, “The archaeology of the Cyclades in the Early Bronze Age”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Early Cycladic Art and Culture”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2004).
- University of Cambridge, “Unusually sophisticated prehistoric monuments and technology revealed in the heart of the Aegean” (2018); Department of Archaeology, “Keros: the Special Deposit South”; British School at Athens, Dhaskalio excavations 2015-2018.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Odysseus portal: “Akrotiri of Thera”, “Phylakopi”.
