The year is 1510 BC and you are squatting in a small house in the village Papadiokampos on the island of Crete, sampling the steaming soup of crab and limpets simmering in a tripod cooking pot heated by a fire fueled by olive oil paste.
Or you might be a child in the artisan’s quarters on the Cretan island of Chrysi, holding your nose to the almost fecal odor of purple murex shells as your father crushes them to be cooked into dye for the vivid purple cloth your family exports across the Aegean Sea.
Thanks to newer recovery methods archaeologists are using to excavate ancient sites, we can imagine with unprecedented detail the ways people lived thousands of years ago. Last October, Tom Brogan ’88 returned to campus to describe those methods and share the ancient “lives of the senses” he is discovering with them.
“The new recovery methods really drive the show,” said Brogan, director of the Institute for Aegean Prehis-tory Study Center for East Crete. “In the last 25 years we have been introducing more science, drawing from a wider range of disciplines, been more rigorous, theoretical, and even experimental as we try to test our data assumptions.”
Brogan and his colleagues employ ground-penetrating radar, extensive soil sampling, and even organic chemistry in their approach to “household archaeology at ancients sites on Crete.
“It’s a type of theoretical modeling that begins to put people back in the sites we’re looking at—we’re spending more time and effort thinking about the people who once lived inside these sites.”
Brogan described the process used to excavate Papadiokampos, a site discovered in 2004.
“In addition to hand collection of bones, small tools, vases, and all the environmental material, we also collected 400 soil samples from 10 rooms. The samples were then floated to look for small organic remains, and that allowed us to pinpoint the data we found—to better imagine what things were going on where in the room.
“We’re also using organic chemistry to look for organic residue.”
Brogan acknowledged that the latter method is controversial, but has the potential to be a major game changer.
At Papadiokampos, Brogan and his colleagues found in one room a large cook pot with residue from an uneaten meal, a “Cretan seafood soup—limpets, top shells, crabs, and a lobster.”
A team of experimental archaeologists used that information to “make the pots, cook the meals, and learn how they taste.
“That’s the archaeology of the senses in a nutshell.”
Brogan—whose interest in Ancient Crete was first stirred during a dig with his Wabash mentor, Professor of Classics Emeritus Leslie Day—said his favorite site was on Chrysi, an island nine miles south of Crete.
“There was unheard-of preservation there—we found 1,000 intact pots, still standing up, with all the organic information still in the pots.”
Excavating “a purple dye workshop,” the team found bronze knives, crushed murex shells, and a thick layer of black debris composed of crushed olives and almonds used for a fire to make the dyes. In another room were loom weights, further evidence of textile making.
“We have Roman prints that describe the process, and it seems to fit what we can imagine was being done here,” Brogan said.
With the new methods being employed by archaeologists like Brogan, we can imagine not only what was being done, but also experience the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, and perhaps even what it felt like to be there.