Footnotes to the PRAP 1992 Report to the NEH
[1]PRAP was funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory. Our base of operations was in the town of Chora, a few kilometers northeast of the Palace of Nestor. There we enjoyed the gracious hospitality of the village extended to us by its mayor, Mr. Panayiotis Petropoulos. In Chora, much of our team lived free-of-charge in an elementary school, which doubled as a temporary museum. In 1992 the project was able to repay some of its debt to the community by including local residents (2-3 per day) on our teams, and by giving public lectures on Messenian history and archaeology during the town's annual summer festival, the Nestoria.

We should also express our gratitude to the officials of the 7th Ephoreia of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities at Olympia and to the 5th Ephoreia of Byzantine Antiquities at Sparta, who were responsible for the supervision of our studies. In particular, it is an honor to recognize the warm support we have received over the past two years from Mrs. Xeni Arapoyianni, Director of the Olympia Ephorate, from Mrs. Yioryia Hatzi, Curator of the Olympia Ephorate, and from Ms. Ourania Vyzyinou, who represented the Ephoreia in Chora and walked daily with our teams in the field. PRAP is based at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is conducted under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies. The project was conceived and designed jointly by the principal co-directors who share authorship of this report.

2Members of PRAP in summer 1992 included Susan Alcock, Bill Alexander, Maria Antoniou, Emilia Banou, John Bennet, Lyla Brock, Cyprian Broodbank, Christina Clark, Eric Cline, Patrick Cronin, Tracey Cullen, Jack Davis, John Fischer, Deborah Harlan, Nicolle Hirshfeld, Susanne Hoftra, Gulnara Ismail-Zade, Hans-Gunter Jansen, Martha Jenks, Kalliope Kaloyerakou, Cynthia Kosso, Yannos Lolos, Timothy McKern, Kostalena Mihalaki, Sarah Monks, Georgia Nakou, William Parkinson, Paula Perlman, Richard Pianka, Rosemary Robertson, Susan Seidenberg, Cynthia Shelmerdine, Nigel Spencer, Sharon Stocker, Lauren Talalay, Martine Wagenaar, Charles Watkinson, Eric Wetzels, Sergei Yazvenko, and Eberhard Zangger. Participants represented some twenty-two different universities and research institutions in Canada, Germany, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. During the academic year 1992-93, Deborah Harlan in Madison in her capacity as adminstrative assistant to the project and Sharon Stocker as research assistant to Davis in Chicago have continued to manage museum and field data from the 1992 season. At the University of Reading, Vince Gaffney completed in fall 1992 a digital elevation model for a Geographical Information System for PRAP, and in the spring of 1993 at the University of Michigan Sebastian Heath plotted density distributions of artifacts from the 1992 field season (see Appendix 1). Inked drawings of artifacts studied in 1992 and publication quality maps were prepared in Cornwall by Rosemary Robertson, with assistance from Timothy J. McKern in Chicago.

[3]Within our larger area of 250 km2 some 80 sites were previously known--a density of 0.32 sites per km2. Our intensive survey in 1992 suggests that at least 18 sites lie within the 12 km2 that we studied. This represents a density of 1.5 sites per km2--almost five times that suggested by the Minnesota survey. In terms of overall density of material, the mean density of sherds over 1287 units (tracts) walked in 1992 by PRAP teams was 143 per ha. (Tile density was somewhat higher: 289/ha.) Comparable figures from the Mesara survey on Crete are somewhat higher: 384 sherds, but only 32 tile, per ha., while the Nemea valley mean was ca. 200. For off-site tracts alone, figures from Boeotia varied from 40 to 4500 sherds depending on proximity to their sites, on Lefkas 1500 was the mean, at Pronnoi 800, while that observed on the recently- published Keos survey was 50. One reason for the relatively low figures for PRAP is the high number of fields with zero counts: 446 (35%) tracts recorded zero pottery, 351 (27%) zero tile.

4In addition to surface survey in 1992, a visit by Hans-Gunter and Marianne Jansen, who will conduct the geophysical examination of the Englianos area this summer, laid the foundations for further fieldwork in 1993.

5We continue to work closely with the University of Minnesota team (Minnesota Archaeological Researches in the Western Peloponnese) under the direction of Frederick Cooper and his colleagues Diane Fortenberry, Michael Nelson, and Charles Griebel. Cooper's team has been engaged since 1991 in the preparation of actual state plans for the Palace of Nestor and other nearby monuments excavated by Blegen. In 1993, the Minnesota team will again cooperate with us as we begin geomorphological coring and geophysical research at the Palace of Nestor and in its immediate environs.