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Hodgesrichard Richard Hodges is President of the American University of Rome. TRAVEL A Homage to Dha skalio above Colin Renfrew (left) and Michael Boyd, on the summit of Dhaskalio. Their excavations on this rocky islet have revealed an extraordinary Bronze Age settlement, which appears to have grown out of a maritime sanctuary on Keros. In the Bronze Age, Dhaskalio was a promontory physically attached to Keros. Sailing to a remote maritime sanctuary brings Richard Hodges to Europe’s earliest central place. s the ferry slipped through the still-sleeping grey sea heading northwards, I raced to the aft windows to get a last look at Dhaskalio, albeit in silhouette. Dark now, this conical rock reminds me of Tintagel, detached in this case from the mountainous heart Dhaskalio. I felt as though I had slipped through the lookingglass: yesterday, I had visited the extraordinary excavations in their lambent blue setting, and was, more to the point, there with the placemaker. Such is the precious feeling of privilege I feel as the boat leaves the Cyclades and plies towards Piraeus. of deserted Keros. Cycladic rather than Cornish, after visiting it with Colin Renfrew it is easy to envisage that it once belonged to mythic worlds that long outlived their actual history. Just as King Arthur’s Tintagel was lent the status of a place by excavations led by Ralegh Radford (an alumnus of the British Schools at Athens and Rome) in the 1930s, so Colin and his colleagues have created Rewriting Stonehenge I was sharing a tent on a dig at Knidos, Turkey with a young university don who, before rolling over to sleep, muttered that my professor was leaving and his likely successor would be the dynamic prehistorian, Colin Renfrew. It was the first time I had 40 CurrentWorldArchaeology Issue 97
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grece egean Sea TURKey Mediterranean Sea Koufanissi Dhaskalio Keros heard the name. My companion, I sensed, was sceptical. There was something a tad radical about this scholar, energetic though he was known to be. Curiosity a few months later led me to venture to the Corn Exchange in Devizes to hear him lecture for the Wiltshire Archaeological Society. On this dark November night, I arrived late and took a place standing at the back next to a tall, thin man who crisply bade me good evening in a whisper. I recall the bemusement at my belated entrance in his sparkling eyes to this day, as I recall his virtuoso performance that evening. Colin had come to archaeological mecca to unpick the forced relationship between Mycenae and Stonehenge. Essentially, he was critically inverting a canonical thesis advanced by a Devizes favourite, Professor Richard Atkinson. Colin’s pitch was based upon a new calibration of radiocarbon chronology, which demonstrated that Stonehenge long pre-dated Mycenae. At its heart, though, was a rewriting of European prehistory that since the 1920s, thanks to Vere Gordon Childe, was shaped around diffusion from the civilised Orient by way of the Greeks to the barbarian West. Colin, put simply, upended the apple cart, and, with dignified respect for Childe’s august legacy, constructed a new vision for prehistoric Wessex. Dynamic did not do justice to his glorious heresy. It was breathtakingly creative. More to the point, on listening carefully, it was underpinned by a knowledge of anthropological theory as well as a judicious grasp of the dated stratigraphy across the length and breadth of prehistoric Europe. The polite applause, of course, was for his brio rather than his argument. When I next met him, following another stint in Turkey, I mentioned the lecture. He beamed politely and promptly quizzed me about myself, his eyes and mind haring along in the headlights of his accelerating fame. For in those intervening months his great book, The Emergence of Civilisation (1972), had appeared. We students christened it ‘the bible’. It set out a paradigmatic revolution and of course it reaped admiration and damnation depending upon the age and mind-set of the reader. I was and remain an avid fan, believing it to be a cornerstone in the creative hegemony of British archaeology over the past 50 years. Grand words, yes, but the scholarship in it is nothing less than extraordinary. left Colin Renfrew (left) and Richard Hodges on the boat to Dhaskalio. They met when Colin was advocating a Stonehenge freed from Mycenaen influence. Now, he and Michael Boyd are shedding new light on how early European urbanism took root on a remote Cycladic islet. The cover of Emergence depicts a seated marble figurine from Keros, a large but deserted island south of Naxos in the heart of the Cyclades. It is a rare complete statue from an island that Colin first visited as a graduate student in 1963. Years later he returned, convinced that it might hold a key to the cognitive world of the Cyclades in the Early Bronze Age. Only in 2006, after years excavating (and publishing) sites throughout the region, did he embark on a field project with a team. Twelve years of full-throttle scientific research have followed (along with a shelf of weighty published reports). Intellect and energy have been harnessed to making sense of not just the puzzling spreads of broken figurines, but also the Dhaskalio island pilgrimage-town that emerged as an Aegean hub of immense importance in the Bronze Age, only to vanish around 2200 BC (see CWA 91). below Destination Dhaskalio: the archaeological team set out from Koufanissi at dawn. The discovery of pebbles from Koufanissi in a building on the summit of Dhaskalio suggests that they are following Bronze Age travellers bound for the sanctuary town. T R A V E L C y cla d e s www.world-archaeology.com CurrentWorldArchaeology 41

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Hodgesrichard

Richard Hodges is President of the American University of Rome.

TRAVEL A

Homage to Dha skalio above Colin Renfrew (left) and Michael Boyd, on the summit of Dhaskalio. Their excavations on this rocky islet have revealed an extraordinary Bronze Age settlement,

which appears to have grown out of a maritime sanctuary on Keros. In the Bronze Age, Dhaskalio was a promontory physically attached to Keros.

Sailing to a remote maritime sanctuary brings Richard Hodges to Europe’s earliest central place.

s the ferry slipped through the still-sleeping grey sea heading northwards, I raced to the aft windows to get a last look at Dhaskalio, albeit in silhouette. Dark now, this conical rock reminds me of Tintagel, detached in this case from the mountainous heart

Dhaskalio. I felt as though I had slipped through the lookingglass: yesterday, I had visited the extraordinary excavations in their lambent blue setting, and was, more to the point, there with the placemaker. Such is the precious feeling of privilege I feel as the boat leaves the Cyclades and plies towards Piraeus.

of deserted Keros. Cycladic rather than Cornish, after visiting it with Colin Renfrew it is easy to envisage that it once belonged to mythic worlds that long outlived their actual history. Just as King Arthur’s Tintagel was lent the status of a place by excavations led by Ralegh Radford (an alumnus of the British Schools at Athens and Rome) in the 1930s, so Colin and his colleagues have created

Rewriting Stonehenge I was sharing a tent on a dig at Knidos, Turkey with a young university don who, before rolling over to sleep, muttered that my professor was leaving and his likely successor would be the dynamic prehistorian, Colin Renfrew. It was the first time I had

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