Principal Investigator / Director: Lucia Nixon, Simon Price (Oxford: deceased), Jennifer Moody (University of Texas at Austin), Oliver Rackham (Cambridge)
Funder: Queen’s University at Kingston; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Institute for Aegean Prehistory; University of New Brunswick at Saint John; the Arts and Humanities Research Council; at Oxford — Lady Margaret Hall, the Faculty of Literae Humaniores (now Classics), the Research and Equipment Committee, the Craven Committee
Partner organizations (inside or outside Oxford): not specified
Project Description:
Sphakia is a deme (formerly eparchy), a modern administrative district, in SW Crete (Greece) with an area of 472 km. Sq. It includes most of the White Mountains, and a dozen gorges, running S to the Libyan Sea -- the best known is the Samaria Gorge -- and very little arable land. The team have looked at evidence for human activity from the time that people first arrived in Sphakia at the end of the Stone Age (by ca 3000 B.C.) to the end of the Turkish period in Crete (A.D. 1898-1900). The Sphakia Survey project team has issued a series of preliminary publications. It has also made a video about the methods and possible results of archaeological field survey. The team is currently working towards a final publication in two volumes. In 1998 the Sphakia Survey project team decided that they would like to reach a wider audience of researchers, teachers, students, and the general public using electronic means. The team felt that to give access to the resources in a digital format would be extremely valuable, and would offer both greater access by more people, and greatly extend the possibilities for interactive exploration of the data using, for example, dynamic databases. The web site has three principal objectives: to offer basic information about the Sphakia Survey (including illustrated versions of four of our preliminary articles); to complement (and advertise) the final hard copy publication by offering a searchable database version of the site catalogue (whose supporting data will appear in the final publication), and by offering basic information about fabric analysis and colour images of selected sherds; to offer a case study (and searchable database) based on the Graeco-Roman data for one of our eight regions. The case study is complemented by a series of model questions which can be asked of the relevant databases.
Other projects the participants have been involved in:
