Comments by Dr. C. Doumas Prior to the Akrotiri Visit*

Because of the Second World War and then the civil war in Greece and other difficulties he only managed to start his surveys on the island in the early 60's. By 1967 he was ready to apply and put into practice all the information he had collected.

Previous research indicated that the island had several sites which had late Minoan antiquities. He concentrated his efforts at the site of Akrotiri because, besides the previous references to this area, there was also information from the local farmers that the soil sometimes collapsed when under the weight of a donkey. This meant that there were still places which were hollow underneath, and this was significant. In addition, the geographical situation of the site favored an excavation. It was the flattest area of the island. It faces Crete and is well sheltered from the prevailing northerly winds, which you can realise now that we are here. There was a final reason why he came here. When we go out you will see by the modern restaurant there is a well used by the locals to water their animals, and in front of that well there are two heavy Minoan stone mortars. He concluded that they could not have been brought from far away.

Professor Marinatos started, therefore, trial trenches in the bottom of the ravine in order to avoid moving huge masses of material and to reach the bedrock as soon as possible. Only a few hours were required to confirm that he had hit the right target. The first two years, 1967 and 1968, were mainly devoted to trial investigations, in order to locate the extent of the area which should be investigated. From 1969 systematic work started, combined with a series of other technical work to facilitate the process.

Of course even now we don't know and we are unable to find or to say anything about the extent of the site, because in every place in the roofed area we have evidence that the buildings continue beyond it. The roofed area is about 12000 sq. metres, and as you will see it is quite an extensive area. The main feature of the site is that we have streets which run across the settlement from north to south. One of the streets has been fully investigated and this was called by Professor Marinatos Telhines Road, and it is the only one, as I said, that gives us a good picture of a street. No building has so far been fully excavated. There are still some rooms which need more work, but we can see now to a certain extent the town plan and the connection of the buildings with each other.

The building materials are all volcanic stones and clay, reinforced with wooden beams, and very often this material consists of rounded stones from the beach or rough unworked stones. Quite common are the dressed stones used to build the corners of the buildings and also to frame doors and windows. Less common are entire facades dressed with ashlar masonry, and much more rare are buildings faced entirely with dressed stones.

Dressed stones have also been used rather like friezes to delineate the different floors.

In general, the windows and openings which are at street level are very small, commonly 60 X 60 centimetres and they are enough to supply light or air for the ground floor or basement, which was usually used for storage purposes. In the upper storeys the openings of the windows are much larger and it is there that they needed more light. There were the living apartments. We have only a few exceptions to this rule, with windows at street level which are very large; one is Room Delta 16.

Another is the house, the excavated eastern facade of which constitutes the western side of the Triangle Square (Square 2). A third example is the Pithoi Storeroom, which again has a large window. At least in the two cases, the Pithoi Storeroom and Room Delta 16, I think we have to do with a kind of shop, or a place where goods were stored to be distributed through the window. Perhaps it was a kind of shop window. In Room Delta 16, for example, the pottery which was stored there was found in groups categorised by shape or quality or provenance. So perhaps this was a kind of place to store goods in and to distribute or sell from. This is in agreement with the existence of the large window.

The upper storeys usually were the places where the frescoes were found, with only one exception so far, Room Delta 2 where the Spring fresco was. Also from the upper storeys come all the loom weights which we have found, and these suggest that the looms were installed in the upper storeys and formed part of the furniture of the houses. In the basements or ground floors the usual finds are large jars and coarse pottery, in which sometimes have been found the remains of carbonised organic material, flour or various kinds of grain.

The communication of the ground floor or half-basement with the upper storeys was usually made by stone staircases and sometimes by wooden ones. The stone stairways were installed on a wooden frame on which there was a thick layer of earth lying on branches or reeds, and on top of this layer were the stone steps, which were not connected at all with the side walls. They were free from the side walls, so that if one of them was eroded or broken it could be easily replaced without damaging the walls. In the same way beams and shoots and clay were used to form the floor of the upper storeys. Sometimes in the upper storeys we have floors paved with slabs, which made them much heavier.

The floors often have supports underneath if the rooms are rather large. We have at least three instances where we found the stone bases of pillars supporting the floor of the upper storey (in Beta 2, Delta 16 and Alpha 1, the Pithoi Storeroom) and at least in one case we have the floor of the upper storey supported by built pillars on the ground floor (Delta 1).

The materials which were found and which show certain sides of the everyday life of the inhabitants of Akrotiri are more or less known. There is a vast amount of pottery, though the quantity of imported fine quality pottery is very small in proportion to the coarse wares. There are few minor objects, and none of precious metals. There are large numbers of stone vases and implements, mortars, hammers and grinders.

Of course there are the wall paintings which are present in almost every building.

So far there is no building which has not produced paintings. At least one room was decorated, as I said, in the upper storey with wall paintings. There are cases where more than one room had the walls covered with wall paintings. The evidence is that all the rooms in the upper storeys were white plastered. I am not going to describe in detail these paintings, with which we have a very long session tomorrow morning, but I am going to make some hints about the society living in Akrotiri, based on the information we have so far from the archaeological evidence.

From the animal bones and from the seeds and grains we have collected it seems that we have a society which was supported by both agriculture and stock raising and also some fishing. Besides the bones you were shown yesterday by Mr. Gamble we have also found the remains of dried fish in a few jars, which means that they used to dry fish as they do even nowadays in the islands. But this economy does not explain either the size of the houses or the art which they incorporate. The fact that they have a drainage system running through the streets and connected with the toilets of the houses implies that the society was highly organised, and there must have been a central authority to look after the drainage system and keep it functioning.

The high standard of living is also reflected in the quality of the architecture. You will see that we have buildings preserved up to the second, third and perhaps sometimes fourth storey. This implies that the population was a sizable one. Also the works of art, such as the paintings, indicate a high standard of civilization, which could not be achieved by a farming society. And if one takes into consideration the size of the island, which I think was much smaller at that time than it is today, including the Caldera, because I believe the volcanic material has increased the size of Strongili, then it would not have been large enough to provide all this wealth.

The evidence from the West House with the Fleet Fresco suggests that maritime activity was going on, and I tend to agree with Professor Schachermeyr's paper about the kind of society we have here. And this is supported by the fact that so far we have no evidence from the architectural and town planning point of view of a central administrative building. Of course there must have been some central authority, as I said before, but this does not imply that it was a monarchic - if I can use this term system.

That, then, was the situation, and that was the society which was living in Akrotiri round about 1500 B.C., and I am not going to discuss the date of the eruption because there will be a long discussion on that in one of the sessions; but sometime around then the end came, and what you can see in the excavation is the stratigraphy, which shows clearly the sequence of events.

(*Figures in brackets refer to the plan in Thera I, p. 779.).

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