The oldest maritime santuary
Four and a half thousand years ago, in the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2800BC to 2200 BCE), the remote and now uninhabited island of Keros, in the middle of the Cyclades, Greece, was the site of an extraordinary florescence of human imagination, creativity and ingenuity. Here, in the most unlikely of places, people came together to craft the basic principles of a completely new kind of society – the dawn of the modern world. Through co-operation, connectivity and communication they created the world’s first information age, drawing in participants from across the Cyclades and beyond, and on Keros itself they created the most ambitious way of life yet seen in the region, with monumental architecture, urban planning, high technology production, and complex vertical and horizontal social structures. Keros became the blueprint for the emergence of civilisation in the eastern Mediterranean, the harbinger of future Minoan and Mycenaean societies and even the early Greek polis. The Keros Project, led by science, is dedicated to the in-depth investigation of the world that Keros created.
The site first came to prominence in the 1960s, when Colin Renfrew and Christos Doumas (separately) visited the site and discovered that part of it had been subject to looting. The looted area was first investigated archaeologically in 1963 by Doumas. Further investigation of the site was carried out in 1967 by Zapheiropoulou and in 1987 by Renfrew, Doumas and Marangou. Publication of this work followed in 2007. Since then three major international collaborative projects have been carried out on Keros. These projects have completely transformed our understanding of what was previously seen as a Cycladic enigma. The work done has defined the site as central in the networks of the Early Bronze Age, a centre of congregation for long-lived pan-Cycladic ritual practices as well as a centre of power where the greatest architectural undertakings of the age housed centralised craft practices, set in a landscape of intensified agricultural innovations and satellite settlements.
Looters damaged Keros in the years before 1963, but early rescue work showed the site to be unusual in nature, with lots of broken marble figurines and vessels. Scientific work in 2006-2008 showed that Kavos area on the west coast of Keros was site of two ‘special deposits’, areas where people deliberately (and probably ritually) deposited broken choice material over a period of three centuries or more. The analysis of these data shows that Kavos was the site of the world’s earliest maritime sanctuary. Click here to learn what that means, and much more about the two special deposits.
Dhaskalio, now a tiny islet just off the west coast of Keros, was joined to Kavos and the area of the special deposits by a causeway in the Early Bronze Age, as the sea level was lower then. Recent work on Dhaskalio has revealed unprecedented monumental architecture, and remarkably precocious evidence for metalworking. Now we are beginning to understand that the story of Keros includes intensive periods of production of prestigious objects like daggers, which might have been just as potent symbols for the Cycladic islanders as the marble figurines were. Click here to learn more about Dhaskalio and its relationship with Kavos.
One important question is the relationship between Kavos and Dhaskalio: how were the activities of production on Dhaskalio interrelated with the apparently more ritual activities on Kavos? But another, similar, question is the relationship between the Dhaskalio and Kavos complex and larger areas: the island of Keros, for example, or the nearby islands, or the wider world of the Cyclades and the Aegean? In order to investigate this question we conducted a series of larger-scale surface investigations (surveys) on Keros itself, nearby Kato Kouphonisi, and in the southeast coastal region of Naxos. Click here to learn more about the Keros nexus.
It would be impossible to continue our leading research without our generous funders. If you would like to help us continue our exciting work on Keros, please contact us.
Cycladic Island archipelago was an important region throughout antiquity, and the islands have been inhabited since at least the Paleolithic. In the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, the islands flourished and (as in all periods) they acted as important stepping stones between the landmasses of Europe and Asia.
Keros is located in the Small Cyclades (Μικρές Κυκλάδες), an island complex within the Cycladic archipelago to the south-east of Naxos, in the Aegean sea.
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