1. Excavation Report

Abstract

John BINTLIFF (University of Leiden)

Leiden University Research Report 2024

The Boeotia Project continued with restudy of the ceramic finds from earlier surface seasons in the Thebes and Thespies Museums (fig. 1). In the field Lieve Donnellan (Melbourne University) and John Bintliff prepared for a future monograph on the Palaeopanagia rural district by taking drone photographs of all 33 sites discovered in the 1980’s. This technology gives an unparalleled view of how ancient sites lie in their immediate landscape and in relation to each other. This particular district is highly fertile and Greek and Roman estate centres sit close-packed within view of each other.

It is probably of interest to inform the readers of another Leiden University archaeological project which has been running since 2012, when Professor Luuk de Ligt of Ancient History and John Bintliff in Archaeology were awarded an ERC grant, called ‘An Empire of 2000 Cities.’ This project had the very ambitious aim of cataloguing every city in the High Roman Empire and analysing their location, number, size and geographical setting (our current total is 5888 urban centres). A team of 6 PhD students and 3 postdoctoral fellows have been employed, each set a number of provinces to research (fig. 2). From the research group 5 books have appeared and another 3 dissertations, a conference volume and a preliminary overview article. The project directors are writing a summary volume to appear in the near future.

As field training for the research team into ancient urbanism (fig. 3 and 4), they have all taken part in two NIA-sponsored field seasons in Boeotia, here at the ancient city of Haliartos, and here at ancient Hyettos city (fig. 5 and 6), where they were taught in the laboratory and the field to undertake then interpret extensive geophysical survey, in fieldschools run by Professor Apostolos Sarris from Rethymno University in Crete.