Monumental Find: UC Classics Team Discovers Greek Temple

Story by Linda Parker

It took a hunch, hard work and a heck of a lot of diplomacy. But the payoff is spectacular. Archeologists from the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences have discovered a monumental Greek temple outside the ancient city of Apollonia in Albania.

The temple is “only the fifth of its kind in all of Albania,” said Jack L. Davis, the Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology and co-director of the international team that found the temple.

The hunch had its roots in work begun more than 40 years ago, when a farmer’s tractor uncovered terracotta figurines outside Apollonia’s walls. The site appeared to include remains of a sanctuary. This early discovery went largely unnoticed, however, because of the Soviet-Albanian schism in 1960.

In 2002, Albanian archeologists, working with Davis and UC colleagues, walked a grid between Apollonia and the Adriatic Sea, seeking artifacts in the dirt and vegetation. They found more figurines, an altar, and pottery from a much earlier date. “It seemed to us that the sanctuary was already being used in the Archaic period, several centuries earlier than the 1960 team believed,” Davis said.

Then came the kicker: a local family told the Albanian team leader they had uncovered a foundation of large, regular blocks as they were building a house in 1997. Now the UC-Albanian team needed to dig. Evidence was mounting that a large temple, not just a sanctuary, had occupied the site.

Enter the need for negotiation. The Albanian family has lived on the land since 1928, building a compound called Bonjakët, which is the family’s name.

“It is very difficult to gain their trust,” Davis said. “And at the same time, they have all kinds of concerns about us being on their property. One of the gentlemen was worried we might discover graves. That would make it difficult for him to live there any longer, if people were buried there.

“Another concern is that the resources they have on their farm are potentially worth a lot of money to them. They’d like to have some control over them and are afraid they’ll be taken away by the state without any profit to them.’’

Davis persuaded the family to let the team return in September 2004 and dig 11 trenches. In one couple’s garden, the team found parts of three courses of blocks consistent with a monumental temple.

In other trenches, they found artifacts that “document a rich history of ancient cult practice at this site, including terracotta figurines of a reclining male and female that team members had never seen before.”

According to Davis, the team faces urgent challenges, including Albania’s plan to build a highway through “the antiquities of the urban center of Apollonia.”

A co-director of the 2004 fieldwork was UC doctoral candidate Sharon Stocker. Davis and Stocker were accompanied in the field by UC team members Kori Duncan, Dr. Tammie Gerke, Evi Gorogianni, Ols Lafe, Kathleen Lynch and Shannan Stewart.

They agree, pointed out Davis, that the site has “extraordinary and singular importance to Albanian archaeology and to the history of Greek colonization in the Adriatic Sea.”