The Ancients - Keros: Bronze Age Mystery

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

While a small, uninhabited island today, Keros held significant importance during the Bronze Age. As a crucial centre for cultural practices, trade, and unique rituals nearly 5,000 years ago, it's difficult to imagine that such a tiny, wild space was once a bustling hub of civilisation. So how was this mystical past discovered - and more importantly, by who?In this episode, Tristan welcomes historian and broadcaster Professor Michael Scott to the podcast to discuss the pivotal role Keros played not only in ancient times, but also in the narrative of modern archaeology. Exploring how the island suffered from looters, the extensive efforts archaeologists undergo today to excavate it, and why Keros stands as an integral part of the Cyclades - why is Bronze Age Keros so crucial, and what treasures have been unearthed there?You can buy Michael's book here.Sign up to History Hit at historyhit.com/subscribe using code 'BLACKFRIDAYPOD' at checkout, for $1/£1 per month for 4 months and you’ll get nearly £30 off our normal monthly price over your first 4 months.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we're talking about a culture that lived almost 5,000 years ago in the early Bronze Age, in the central Mediterranean, off the mainland of Greece, on what is today an uninhabited island, a mystery culture that was once a great centre of the early Bronze Age.

This island is the island of Keros, and the discovery that here, almost 5,000 years ago you had a great centre, a prominent centre of the early Bronze Age, well that discovery was made only roughly 50 years ago and archaeological research has been going on ever since. it is incredible and deserves to be better known and talk through what we know so far and also the story of the discovery of this early Bronze Age culture, part of the larger Cycladic civilisation. Well, I was delighted to head up to Warwick University a few months back to interview the fantastic, the legend, the brilliant speaker, that is, Professor Michael Scott. Michael has written a new book exploring some of the great archaeological discovery stories in history. So he looks at the discovery of the Australopithecus Lucy, Machu Picchu, the Terracotta Army, and he also has a chapter exploring the story of Keros. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Michael.

Michael, it's a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here as always, Tristan. And we are doing it in the room where we did our first one on the Greek Symposium more than a year ago. Surrounded by the vessels of the ancient Greeks and Romans and other cultures in our antiquities room here at the University of Warwick. So welcome back. Well, thank you. And I guess it is the right setting, seeing as we are talking about the ancient Greek world. But the discovery of a, dare I say, civilization, a Bronze Age people that existed before the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, this is an extraordinary discovery story. It is. And it began, you know, back in the late 19th century, when there was no concept of this, what we now call a cycladic civilization, i.e. a civilization

that had been present in the Cyclades Islands of the Aegean in the Bronze Age period. And then in In 1873, this weird statue head was discovered on this tiny, today uninhabited island of Keros, which stands kind of near the heart of the Cyclades. And this head completely sort of took people by surprise because it wasn't a kind of rudimentary sort of attempt to do a caricature or a portrait, it was clearly a very stylized impression of the essence, if you like, of the human figure. And people sort of stared at this and they didn't know what to do with it. And then within another couple of decades, more pieces started coming to people's attention and people were astounded because while the first head, which is today in the Louvre, you can go and see the Cycladic Head in the Louvre Museum in Paris, is big and majestic and simplistic in its grandeur, right? The next bits that came out,

they were tiny, they were tiny, but they were exquisite in their detail. And you had a seated lyre player in marble being sculpted. You had a kind of flute player. And these were being sculpted, it appeared, in a period of time, as you say, in the kind of Bronze Age, the sort of early to middle Bronze Age. Which, if we put that in context, that's around about the time of the construction of the Great Pyramids at Giza. That's kind of when Stonehenge, as we know it today, comes into formation. the Great Pyramids at Giza. That's kind of when Stonehenge, as we know it today, comes into formation. And then towards the sort of middle to late Bronze Ages, when the Minoan palaces are built, etc. This was thought absolutely incredible. And so there was a mystery going, really, from the late 19th century, saying, what is this civilization that kind of really was

clearly capable of constructing these incredible things at a much earlier period in human history than we had hitherto thought possible. It is this great enigma, isn't it? I mean, but you mentioned Keros there. So let's kind of set the scene where Alison and Cyclades were talking with this particular island. Yeah, I mean, today, no one goes there. It's totally uninhabited. It's been uninhabited really since the late 1970s.

I mean, if you go back to the 1961 Greek census, it had eight people living on it. And back in 1928, maybe 10 or 12. And indeed, in antiquity, Keros is not a big player, right? This is a completely backwater, tiny island. It only gets mentioned once in the sort of classical Greek texts, which is when one year it appears paying a bit of tax to the Athenian Empire. And it's a really crummy, small piece of tax. So this is not a big player.

In either the ancient world as we tend to think about it, the ancient Greek world of the archaic and classical and Hellenistic period, or indeed in the modern world. And yet it lies just by, people might know better, Anokouphanisi or Katokouphanisi islands or Amorgos island. It's sort of in between those two. And for a good deal of time, Keros actually belonged to the monastery on amorgos and they used it to sort of you know keep sheep on and stuff so no one expected anything

extraordinary of this tiny island bar the fact that back in the late 19th century these these pieces of cycladic would have become known as cycladic art from the Cycladic civilization of the Bronze Age had been found there, but no one had done any proper excavations or anything like that. And then what happens in the 1950s is there's a rather sad confluence of more Cycladic art is emerging from not just Keros, but other sites around the St. Cluys. And at the same time, modern art is emerging from not just Keros, but other sites around the St. Clodagh. And at the same time, modern art is actually developing huge affinities with what seems to have been the goals of this ancient Cycladic art. So we're in the period of Henry Moore and kind of where suddenly this simplistic rendering of the essence of humanity, rather than over-detailed ultra-realistic naturalism.

How can you bring out the essence of humanity in a portrait or a sculpture, for instance? Seems to be overlapping almost completely with what this ancient art form is trying to achieve. And of course, one of the downsides of that is that suddenly people want the stuff and they don't necessarily want it legally. So it's pretty clear now that the 1950s were a period when people were looting all they could from Keros, an uninhabited island pretty much by that stage. And when you go and talk to the residents on the nearby islands of Anakufinia and Amorgos, the older generation now who were kids back then in the 50s, talk openly about the fact that there would be these shadowy comings and goings at night as people took a boat over to Keros to dig up some

stuff and then got back by dawn. Some even talk about the fact that they were given bits that they'd found to the children on the street to play with like dolls, they said. So in the 1950s, suddenly there was an interest in this culture, but there was no control and no ability to control what people did as a result, which was ransack on Keros. And dial forward about 10 years to the early 60s. And you have a really important moment, which is kind of coming up actually for the 60 year anniversary of this moment, this July, on the 24th of July. So back on the 24th of July, 1963, a guy called Colin Renfrew stepped onto Keros for the very first time.

Now, he was a PhD student at that stage. And his is a fascinating story of moments on which life turns. Because he started his undergraduate degree in natural sciences. Wasn't going to be an archaeologist at all. And then took a year out during his degree and went on an exchange trip to Perugia University, where he happened to attend a course of lectures on the Etruscans. And he came back and he swapped his degree to do archaeology. But then he wasn't going to do a PhD in Cycladic art, he was going to do a PhD in the Etruscans. And it was a chance visit to the Cycladic Museum that

had just been set up in Athens by this time to try and give some focus and attention to the Cycladic civilization that turned him on to Cycladic civilization as a topic for his PhD. And then he had a chance meeting with another Greek archaeologist who was kind of, you know, a couple of years ahead, sort of already in post in the effort of antiquities in Athens, a guy called Christos Dumas, who said, look, it'd be really helpful if you're interested in doing Cycladic Arts, part of your PhD, if you could go to Keros and actually just do a bit of a survey for us, because, you know, the effort of antiquities has got hundreds of islands to look after. They can't be everywhere at once. And, you know, we haven't got the manpower to look after they can't be everywhere at once and

you know we haven't got the manpower to do it so it all hands to the deck if you can incorporate it within your PhD survey of cycladic material that'd be amazing and so on the 24th of July 1963 Colin Renfrew took a boat from Anokofenisi over to the island of Keros and started to explore and what he found was you know the result of over a decade of of open looting on the island of Keros and started to explore. And what he found was the result of over a decade of open looting on the island. And they also now look at the aerial photography that was taken during the Second World War and then compare it kind of with what the landscape looks like today.

And you can see the entire areas of thick kind of scrub brush have been completely cleared in the interim. And then, you know, a war zone created underneath of trench-like kind of excavation where people have just been digging ferociously to find whatever they want and they can. And he turned up and he investigated and then Christoph Dumas got there

a little bit later that summer. I mean, he described it. I think it was a really nice description as a true Waterloo was his description of the archaeological site. So that is the starting point, if you like, for excavation on Keros. And the book that we're writing at the moment, of X Marks the Spot, is still asking the question about discovery. And when does discovery happen and how does it happen? And who are the discoverers, right?

Kind of within each particular case study. And Keros is a fascinating one because now the end of its story, it's an absolute example of a absolutely 21st century cutting edge archaeological excavation by an international team of specialists working kind of in, you know, in partnership with one another. But the start of the story is actually kind of one of of looting and robbery and it's it's the looters who really discover the site in some ways and we were playing catch-up the kind of archaeological authorities were playing catch-up for a huge amount of time in the book, what we try to do is ask the question of why were people interested in particular discoveries or particular places

and particular ancient cultures at particular times? And there's normally a kind of bigger geopolitical context that's pushing or nudging or pressing them to be interested in South America with the discovery of Machu Picchu, or it might be kind of the Napoleon's invasion of Egypt leading to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. But here we have, kind of in the 1960s, it's not those bigger geopolitical kind of tectonic plate shifts. It's actually the questions that academia and archaeology as a discipline are asking themselves and prioritizing to answer because they don't have the manpower and the time and the money to excavate everything and answer every question so you're starting to see within the discipline itself the emergence of priorities and then within

that just when do people have the time to be able to really focus on finding the answer to a question be able to really focus on finding the answer to a question. Renfrew went to Keros for the first time in 1963. He then completed his PhD. He then went on to have an illustrious career in which he excavated lots in the Greek world and the Aegean, but also kind of back in Scotland and kind of in the Orkneys, etc. And wrote enormous numbers of incredibly prolific and highly respected books. And between the 1960s and 1980s, he rises up to become the Disney professor of archaeology at Cambridge. But Keros never gets a proper look in as part of his investigations. And it doesn't from Christos Dumas either, because Dumas becomes head of the excavations on Akrotiri, kind of the site of Akrotiri, which is on the island of Thera of modern day Santorini, which it turns out to be the sort of Pompeii of Greece. So he's completely focused on Akrotiri.

And Keros gets left. There's a very brief excavation conducted in the late 1960s. And then nothing. You know, so this mystery, this enigma and this discovery of this incredible looting kind of shocks, but it's not high enough up the priority list of any archaeological service or individual to be able to construct the funding and find the time to go back and actually investigate properly. And you get through to, well it's the 1980s really, 1983 when there was a conference at the British Museum which brought together a number of people who were now who were more and more interested in in this Keros thing, what was going on with Keros. And partly, again, the motivation for that was that in the late 60s, there had been an exhibition

in Karlsruhe in Germany of Cycladic civilization, which turned out to feature absolutely central in it, what they called a Keros hoard, which all turned out to have been looted objects. So slightly, to a certain extent, you feel the academic and archaeological community sort of pushed into finally doing something archaeological, scientific, above board about Keros, because the underbelly of kind of our interest in the past, archaeological looting kind of of sites, kept, and particularly the archaeological looting of Kheros, kept coming to the fore in ever more public formats. What sorts of artefacts were in this hoard? So it was lots of kinds of different kinds of pottery, but also particularly marble figurines.

It was the figurines that had these particular cycladic faces that we were talking about, figurines that had these particular cycladic faces that we were talking about and the sculptural simplicity of the essence of the human form, etc. that have become so famous and synonymous for cycladic civilization. So there's a number of these things alongside a

wide range of pottery. So in 1983, they have this conference at the British Museum and they say, well, look, the thing is, from the brief investigations that have been done, Renfrewrew turning up in 63 brief excavation from the Greeks in the late 60s and kind of acknowledging the stuff that had turned up in exhibitions and collections this place is a bit of a mystery because you know initially you might think okay this is probably some kind of burial site burial area But no bones have ever kind of been found to anyone's knowledge at this site.

And also what they knew by that stage about cemetery spaces from the Cycladic era was that there should be what's known as a schist slab, which is a sort of thick slab of stone that covered burials. That was the tradition, the kind of way of doing it. None of these had turned up whatsoever. So they were thinking, well, what is this place? If it's not a burial place, it's not a cemetery, is it a settlement? But if it was a settlement, you would expect remains of buildings. And when Dumas had been there in the late 60s, he'd only discovered one tiny kind of remaining foundation of a building and couldn't see anything else that

looked like a built structure at all. So, okay, so it was not a settlement. Is it some kind of trading center then? But, you know, then why these figurines? Why this particular pottery? Why not a wider range of assemblages? And still why? You know, they're not some buildings, you know, you might expect some settlement. So this conference came away in a kind of beautifully academic way with more questions than it actually had answers to the questions that it had opposed itself at the beginning of the day, but with a developing sense that actually something needed to happen. So an excavation was launched in 1987 and they piggybacked off the fact that there was an excavation project underway on Amorgos on the island nearby. And Dumas Renfrew and the leader of the Amorgos project a Greek archaeologist called

Lila Marango actually went together to then do about three weeks excavating around the area that had been so badly looted you know back in the 50s and they were staggered by the fact that this place had been looted for quite some period of time. Lots of objects had clearly been taken. Stuff had been kind of a Waterloo-like battle scene. And yet in their three weeks of excavation, they still found something like 15,000 pieces of pottery. This stuff is just coming out of the ground in in droves right they still but none of it helped them answer the question of what it was and they did a bit more of a a survey over the kind of wider end of keros island where this this looting had taken place and this end of keros

island is often called kavos kind of kavos on keros and again you kind of they're really interested in the fact there's this broad range of potteries coming out of the ground. But again, nothing, you know, that was all they had time for. That was all they had the money for. That was all they could muster at that point in time. And then again, Keros goes silent

and no one kind of comes back to follow up. And there's no kind of sort of cracking of the enigma of the keros enigma as then people now start to call it and it actually has to wait until 2004 when renfrew has retired right kind of so it's a journey that started with his phd gone all the way through to his retirement in 2004 when he was awarded something called the Balzan Prize which is a massive deal in the archaeological world and it comes with a massive cheque we're talking about hundreds of thousands of euros

for the winner to dedicate to whatever they want to dedicate it to and it is testament to Renfrew that he decided he took half the money and set up a research fellowship at his university in Cambridge. And he took the other half of the money. He said, right, let's do Keros proper. And so in 2006, which kind of overlapped when I was a PhD student out of the British school in Athens, in Athens, I saw the Keros team preparing in Athens to head to the Cyclades to Keros to begin a proper excavation of the site, one that Keros had been waiting for since Renfrew had first gone there in 1963. And one of the things I remember vividly was seeing these piled high

packs of tin sardines. And I was like, what is going on with the tin sardines and renfer apparently is an absolute devotee of the fact that you know when you're out there in the field doing your archaeology during the day the nutritional value of a tin sardine is you know absolutely up there and he insisted on these being available to all of his team kind of every day the excavation and you're like well i mean you might question the value of a tin sardine, but actually just think about what he was trying to achieve because by this stage, Keros was totally uninhabited. The team would have to take a boat.

They'd have to stay on Anoka-Fenisi, then take a boat every morning over to Keros, and then they would be on a totally uninhabited island exposed to the sun with no running water, no drains, no facilities, no availability of anything. Everything had to be brought with them. So every member of the archaeological team had to be completely self-sufficient in terms of water and food and shelter and, you know, shade, et cetera, for every day of the excavation. So they get out there in 2006 and there's the area where the looters had clearly focused, which had become known as the special deposit because it just kept giving stuff.

But what Renfrew had a hunch about from the wider survey that had been done back in 1987 was that there might be another special deposit that the looters had not actually come across and so they they did in 2006 almost exactly the same as the looters had done back in the 1950s they started by taking the away all the shrub you know the coarse brush kind of that was covering the area to open up the area for excavation but then they started in proper excavational format, carefully excavating and recording the finds as they went. And so you can imagine the difference between the special deposit north, as the original one was known, which basically was like a sandpit that a ton of people had gone and played in, completely mucking up everything. And what an archaeologist really wants is everything to be able to study the layers that things are put down in because that gives you

the stratigraphy and the relative sense of object to object and change over time and everything else and it's just it's just useless to you if people have just been throwing stuff around and looking around and on day one of the excavation in 2006, I mean, when does this happen? You strike gold on day one. They uncovered a new special deposit that has become known as Special Deposit South. That's the counterpart to the looted one, Special Deposit North. on the special deposit north and they started excavating and just stuff just started coming out of the ground you know and it must have been the weirdest sight because actually it's a very difficult area to excavate it's actually you know it's one end of the island it's actually on a on

a slope so you're on quite a steep slope totally exposed to the winds that actually in that part of the Aegean are quite strong. And they can whip up loose sand and dirt. So apparently lots of the excavators used to wear swimming goggles at all times while they were excavating. But on day one, they start uncovering stuff which they can actually then properly excavate to understand the stratigraphy. excavate to understand the stratigraphy. And we're talking about 56,000 pieces of pottery, kind of well over 500 beautiful cycladic figurines. And so they start to work through this material. And the thing that is surprising them again, just has had surprised them from the remaining material that they'd managed to find in the looted special deposit north, was that particularly the figurines, these beautiful Cycladic figurines,

they were all broken. Over time, kind of happens. Stuff gets broken. I mean, you know, how many kind of perfect pots do you just pull out the ground? Most stuff's in pieces, isn't it, if it's old? You're like, yes, but Renfrew had carefully actually got hold of every single piece that was known from Keros and he looked at every single break really closely under the microscope to try and work out whether it was a break that had happened when the stuff had been deposited in the ground you know just a fact over time or the looters that had sort of carelessly chucked stuff around and broken it or whether it was a break that had happened in antiquity. And every single time he came up with the conclusion

that this break had happened in antiquity. So we've got this mystery of broken objects being deposited into the ground in these special deposits in huge numbers back in the early Bronze Age, right? Because now that they could get the proper stratigraphy, and as they expanded the excavations from 2006, they came back in 07 and 08 as the initial season, they also expanded off the end of Keros, also expanded off the end of Keros, the Kavos end of Keros, over to a tiny little island called Daskalio that's just about 90 meters off the coast of Keros. And they started finding

stuff on this tiny little kind of mountainous little sort of hillock coming out of the sea, Daskalio as well, buildings, right? So they started to kind of excavate those and be able to sort of date those as well from the material. And it became clear that keros, this activity, whatever it was, you know, this figurine deposition, broken figurine deposition, had started roughly in around 2750 BCE. That's early Bronze Age. That's pre the Great Pyramids at Giza, that's pre Stonehenge, pre the Minoan palaces on Crete. And that it had continued through three phases, the sort of an early phase from 2750 through to about 550, then a middle phase, and then a sort of late phase of activity that went down into the

the late kind of end of that millennium, which crossed over with when the Manoan palaces on Crete, etc., were starting to be built. It's fascinating to think, isn't it, that that then for roughly at the same time that let's say on the Orkney Islands on the mainland of Orkney there are people creating the ring of Brodgar massive stone circle and probably doing ritual communal activity in the center of that stone circle at the same time in the Aegean on the island of Keros people are venturing to that island with figurines, smashing them up along with pottery, and then just leaving them there. It's fascinating.

Yeah. And Renfri started to make this connection, particularly with Brogur, like you brought up, because these seem to be some of the earliest rituals of community. And as you say, this appears in different civilizations around the world at the rough slightly different but you know kind of not altogether different early times in our path where suddenly a ritual seems to be taken up in which people congregate somewhere in order to do the same thing in this case deposit these brokenines, as part of a kind of recognition and development of a sense of wider community. And Renfrew started to call it the sort of confederacy of Keros. This idea that Keros was acting as a magnet and it was pulling in people from

quite wide a field. Because when they started testing the figurines and they started looking at the pottery using all the latest scientific techniques of petrological analysis etc what they were able to show is where was this stuff made and it was made from quite a wide range of Cycladic islands and indeed from even further afield that was making its way to and being deposited on Keros. And so Keros now stands, you know, as a result of these excavations, 2006 to 2008, and then they came back again. They were back in, you know, during the 2010s. And in fact, the excavation continues, right? Who knows what they will find next? But they've now managed to turn Keros from

this, on the one hand, totally uninteresting modern Ireland, and indeed, from an archaic and classical and Hellenistic Greek point of view, totally uninteresting ancient Ireland, to the site of the earliest maritime community sanctuary that we know about in the world that brought people together from 2750 BC onwards in this ritual act of broken deposition of these figurines. And then increasingly over time led to a bigger and bigger community being built up on this little hump island of Daskalio. So that by the time we get to the sort of phase, the last phase of activity on Keros, actually things are dying away in this community deposition. People aren't doing it so much. But Daskalio is probably now the biggest community that we know about kind of in the Bronze Age, kind

of at this point in time within the Aegean. And this is still, but this is a very small area. This is an island. Yeah, it's still an island, but with monumental structures built on its summit, along with tons of kind of housing, habitation, trading spaces, production spaces. Elsewhere on the promontory there's a bronze working, you know, there's bronze melting and working workshop. So it's an absolute hub of community that develops as a result of being attached to this sacred location of ritual deposition.

And the thing I find kind of most extraordinary is that they then went and they looked and they tested the marble that the buildings are made of on Daskalia. Not just your any old kind of, you know, building material. They're made of marble. And this marble turns out to come from Naxos, which is about 10 kilometers away. So they've got to get it here and they worked out that there's something like 11 000 tons of marble in these buildings on on dascalio dating to these particular later phases of activity and working out you know they weren't they were rowing right kind of rather than properly sailing at that point and how much marble can you fit on a boat of the size that they think we had at that point in time they worked out that there was

something it must have been something like three and a half thousand return journeys between naxos and keros to get that amount of marble onto dascalio to be able to build the buildings that they did so dascalio is now the site of you know the greatest act of a kind of sea transportation that we know about you know from the bronze age so keros has gone from this tiny speck of an uninteresting island that was left prey to looters for far too long, to finally coming to the forefront of archaeological interest and actually there being time and money to properly answer the emerging Keros enigma question that had been plaguing archaeologists for decades, to now as a result of proper excavation and ongoing investigation,

the site of the earliest maritime communal sanctuary that we know about in the world, to the largest community conglomeration of buildings within the Bronze Age Aegean at that time, and the site of the greatest act of sea transportation and material that we know about from the Bronze Age. I'm sure we perhaps don't know the answer yet, but maybe it's one that they've had to think about. On Keros, on Daskalio, the whole process of making that marble monumental building was just as important as its ultimate final purpose. Yeah, and we don't know the answer. I completely agree. We have to kind of perhaps slightly distinguish between, you know between there's a ritual action going on in this deposition of these broken figurines on Keros. Now, why Keros? No one can

answer that question. I mean, why they picked that place as opposed to any other kind of not particularly kind of easily accessible high gradient end of an island of which there are many in the Aegean. I don't think we'll ever be able to answer that, why Keros was felt to be the right place for this act. But the building on Descalio, I think, seems to speak to the emergence of an organized community of people who decided to take up the opportunity that was presented by people continually coming to this site of deposition for a whole series of, as a result, then providing them with stuff, but also then it becoming an important centre in and of its own right. And you're absolutely right

that whoever was able then to organise that mass sea transportation material in building those buildings is demonstrating their power and kind of their ability now whether that's the community as a whole or whether there was some kind of leader or ruler we just don't know we don't have any of that kind of evidence but clearly the existence of these grand buildings said as much about them as kind of whatever they did inside them it must be really exciting on the one hand to tell its story in the book and on the other hand those questions that are still unanswered that there's still an enigma around may well be answered in the future from further archaeological excavations on this island yeah i mean renfrew is unstoppable right like kind of

you know he still wants to go back you know know, do another season. You're like, this is a really tough excavation, you know, to be on for even, you know, kind of a young kind of archaeologist, let alone someone of his age. And he's been working since 2008 with an assistant director called Michael Boyd, who's kind of, you know, stepping up and leading more and more of the excavations at the site. And the two of them, you know, have grand plans to continue the Kairos project. And I don't think we'll see a stop to it anytime soon as they, as you say, continue to ask those questions and push their understanding of Keros, wherever the evidence allows us to actually uncover some of those answers. And you're right, in some ways, it hasn't captured the imagination in the same way as Pompeii might do or Akrotiri kind of within the Greek world might do because there isn't a way in which you can actually just easily visit this

site. It is not a tourist visitable site. You would have to get a private boat to take you over to the island if there was permission for you to do so. And in some ways, because of the looting history that sits at the start of Keros's story, there is now more an emphasis on trying to protect the site, if you like, from too many visitors. But what I think is really encouraging, and again, as part of archaeology as a discipline's learning curve about what it needs to do,

archaeologists used to think, well, we're the experts, we'll go and do the excavation, we'll decide how to interpret the evidence, and we'll say what the answer is, and that's it, job done. What's become increasingly clear, because of the public interest in the past, and in particular in archaeological sites and their stories is that actually the archaeologists saying well I've said my final word on the topic just doesn't work right these sites come and live in the public imagination and you want them to live in the public imagination because you want the people to be excited about their pasts and archaeologists have come to realize that actually yes they need to do their archaeological investigation and their

understanding and they need to write their academic books for other specialists about the detailed knowledge that has been generated about the site. But they also need to participate in helping to inform the public understanding and appreciation of the site. And the Keros team, I think, have done that really admirably in two ways. On the one hand, locally, on the ground, on Keros, there's no one living there now, but on Anokoufenisi in particular, we've got a generation of people who grew up thinking this was somewhere to be looted. Actually, they've spent a lot of time and effort in trying to understand, change that local understanding of the population. So now the first laboratory that they used back in their 2006 excavations for analysis of finds has been turned into a small public museum on Anokofenisi, dedicated to Keros.

So that the local population can have pride in 24-7, you know, and neither can guards guarding a site, etc. That local population will now look after that site as an important part of its community part. But at the same time, they've been prolific in trying to get this site into the more public narrative. So, you know, the archaeologists Renfrew, Michael Boyd have been leading on tv documentaries that have been on greek television as well as doing lots of kind of public lectures and starting to write kind of more kind of public and indeed we're very happy to give an interview you know to me as I was writing the chapter on this book because they see it as an absolutely crucial part of what actually is the archaeologist's job. It's not just to excavate.

It's not just then to interpret and to publish for other specialists. It's actually to then take the site and their understanding of it and engage the wider public in what they think it means, what the public might understand of the site, and how can the public have a greater appreciation and understanding of this extraordinary moment in our past. We mentioned that the Keros story is one chapter of your new book and this is focused on archaeological discoveries as a whole. Yeah so what we try to do in X Marks the Spot is journey

through the last 200 years or so so really the story of the development of archaeology as a discipline and it kicks off with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone back in 1799, which, you know, because we said, mentioned earlier, is a result of Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and soldiers turfing stuff up to use in, to build up fortifications and finding the Rosetta Stone. So kind of if that's archaeology's starting point in 1799, we then kind of follow through eight chapters of eight particular discoveries in different parts of the world, done at different times over that period by different people and different kinds of explorers for different motivations and because of different geopolitical kind of contexts, etc., leading up to our final story, which is Keros, that brings us

right up to date to 2023 and shows us as we were talking about that we may well have managed now to more or less isolate archaeology and the excavation of our past from those bigger military and political kind of levers and nudges that it used to be subject to but that it is still very much subject to the particular kind of vagaries and interests and fascinations of itself as a discipline. In the questions that it's willing to ask, the questions it wants to prioritize finding answers to, and then the perennial problems of money and time to actually be able to go after them and do it. And sometimes, you know, as in the case of Keros, the past will wait for us to get there.

As in the case of Keros, the past will wait for us to get there. And sometimes, as in another example in the book that comes up just before the Keros chapter, where we're looking at the frozen tombs of Siberia, where now climate change is ensuring that those frozen tombs that have stayed frozen for 2,000 years are beginning to melt. Actually, the past may not be able to wait for us. And so there's that kind of dilemma for how do we go forward discovering as best as we can our past before it's lost to us. Michael, I think that's a great point

on which we can end today's episode. This has been fantastic, as always. Last but not least, you said it before, I'm going to ask you once again, as is always the case in these podcasts, the book is called... X Marks the Spot, The Story of Archaeology in Eight Extraordinary Discoveries. It just goes for me to say, Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. It's a pleasure.

Well, there you go. There wasael scott talking you through the story the archaeological story of keros in the aegean it's really exciting that they've now found out that this was a great center of the early bronze age central mediterranean world Mediterranean world almost 5,000 years ago. It is mind-blowing. Now, last thing from me, very excitingly, we are just about to start releasing our bonus episodes of The Ancients. Regularly released bonus episodes will be coming to The Ancients from the 1st of December, and you can access them by subscribing to the Ancients on Apple Podcasts if you listen on Apple Podcasts or if you don't listen on Apple by clicking via a link in the show notes. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.