Annual Report & Lecture by Sarah Murray

Professor Jacques Perreault (Director), “The work of the Canadian Institute in 2022”

Professor Sarah C. Murray (University of Toronto), “Porto Rafti Bay in the Post-Collapse Aegean: Documenting a Prosperous Maritime Mercantile Community through Surface Survey”

The Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean concluded with the demise of numerous long-lived administrative states and systems, accompanied by attendant reconfigurations of settlement scale and structure in many regions. Such changes, dated to approximately 1200 BCE, have long been framed as an instance of widespread societal collapse. However, this picture is far from uniform. The Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS) project, focused on surface remains in and around the bay of Porto Rafti, Greece, has revealed the economic and social characteristics of one coastal community that thrived in the Aegean region post-collapse. In this talk, I present a summary and first interpretation of evidence datable to the post-palatial period on Raftis and Praso islands, documentation of which was completed in 2021 and 2022. Taken together with previously documented mortuary evidence from Perati, this evidence provides the basis for reconstructing an entrepreneurial post-collapse community engaged in multiple types of industrial production and exploiting island territory during the closing phases of the Bronze Age.