Participants

The Pylos Project was the first of the endeavors undertaken in 1990 to 1992 by the Minnesota Archaeological Researches in the Western Peloponnesos (MARWP). It took nine seasons to fulfill our objective: a re-evaluation of the Bronze Age Palace excavated by Carl Blegen in the years 1939 and 1952 to 1965. On the one hand, Blegen and his team carefully excavated the site and unearthed a wealth of finds. On the other hand, the architectural remains he treated as no more than a container yielding art, artifact and inscriptions. Blegen's published plan of the palace consists of broad, black lines representing a schema of walls that form the rooms, corridors, magazines and other spaces of whole and partially preserved buildings. The plan needed supplementary documentation to enable long-term study of the Palace architecture and its position in the history Bronze Age architecture.

In the Fall of 1989, we applied to the Greek Archaeological Service through the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for a permit to conduct a survey and to study the architecture of the Palace which lay exposed under the protective shed. The Olympia Ephoreia, under the directorship of Zene Arapoyiaane and Gia Chatsie was concerned about the deterioration of the physical remains outside the shed, decided to deepen appreciably the earth backfill. A decision was made to systematically expose, study, recover and draw the architecture in preparation for a final burial the site.

In the second season, 1991, we launched a full-scale re-excavation program, adopting the latest technology and excavation protocols, eschewing any short-cut alternatives. All of the remains lying outside the protective metal shed were covered with backfill from Blegen's excavations. We re-excavated these areas in five-meter grid squares based on the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system (UTM). The backfill removed contained a host of new and important finds. Blegen used sieves only at selected areas around the site and probably returned excavated earth directly back to trenches of origin at season's end. Recovered finds were cleaned and sorted; notable pieces were inventoried and stored while discarded objects accumulated in piles around the site. These mounds at the end of excavations in the 1960s made their way as backfill in deep cavities within the maze of walls in the Northwest Area. Many classes of finds Blegen did not assess and these were discarded. This dump provides a source of what we discuss in this conference and will publish.

In the three volumes Blegen published in a very straight forward manner his excavation of the Palace. However, many walls and structures were left unexplained. The publication also emphasized the remains of a single period, Mycenaean LH IIIB, and evidence for earlier and later periods dissolved into asides and the indices.

The Minnesota Pylos Project revisits, or introduces, evidence for a fresh archaeological history of the site, rich in art and artifacts, leading to a miscellany of topics and categories of finds in this conference and for the MAWRP final publication. For instance, our annual preliminary reports (published by Archaeological reports, 38-45, 1992-1999) contain alternative stratigraphic conclusions or difference identifications of architectural remains.

This leaves an uncounted quantity of potential subjects which can be drawn from our recovered data. Our records have been put into electronic form and are available for research by the publishing staff on the MARWP Web site. After the final publication goes to press these databases will be made publicly accessible. Of alterative conclusions to those advanced by Blegen, I pursue only two topics: the Chasm and the Waterworks.

The exterior walls of Rooms 7 and 8 (the Archive) of the Palace had been totally robbed away when encountered by Blegen in 1938 and 1952-1954. The "robber's" trench underneath the northeast wall, Blegen named "The Chasm" because of its great depth and as a way to characterize the location of a number of Linear B tablets (along with a coin of Venetian date). Published and unpublished photographs reveal little about the nature of "The Chasm." Instead of a robber's trench this must have been some sort of post-palatial construction.

Water channels lace the akropolis. Blegen treated this hydraulic network essentially as a construction contemporary with the LH IIIB palace, only occasionally inferring an earlier date for a selection of drains. A closer analysis based on relative elevations and overlapping structures leads to a different chronology. The earliest extant traces of an advanced water system dates to the Middle Helladic period. The major installation dates somewhere in the LH I/LH II period and prior to construction, or as a part of, the ashlar-block forerunner to the LH IIIB palace.