ATHENS, GREECE—Last year, underwater archaeologists conducting training off a beach near Athens in anticipation of searching for Neolithic sites were surprised to discover the well-preserved remains of a Bronze Age Greek village. Spero News reports that this summer a Greco-Swiss team returned to the settlement and made a thorough survey of the site. Dating to the third millennium B.C., the remains include stone defensive structures that University of Geneva archaeologist Julien Beck says are of a “massive nature, unknown in Greece until now.” The team also recorded paved surfaces that could be streets and three structures that could be the remains of towers. More than 6,000 artifacts have been recovered, including red ceramics and obsidian blades of a type that dates to between 3200 and 2050 B.C. Future work at the site is expected to give researchers a new look at how coastal settlements interacted with one another during the Bronze Age. To read about a massive Minoan site dating this time, go to “The Minoans of Crete.”
