ALBANIA’S forthcoming elections are proving perilous for the great Classical city of Apollonia, which lies near the country’s Adriatic coastline not far from the city of Fier.
A new road — intended to speed access to still pristine beaches for an electorate rapidly becoming used to Western leisure activities after half a century of drab communism — threatens to destroy important and unexplored parts of Apollonia even as Albania starts to promote archaeo-tourism as a euro-earner.
Today, Apollonia lies several miles inland from the Adriatic, but when it was founded as a colony of Corinth in the sixth century BC it was a major port, competing with Dyrrhachium (modern Durrës) for trade.
“Its zenith was in Hellenistic and perhaps Republican times, when this prominent walled hilltop was packed with monumental buildings and, in the valleys to the south, a great cemetery of tumuli was created,” says Professor Richard Hodges of the University of East Anglia.
Professor Hodges has been working at Butrint, probably Albania’s most famed Classical site and one of its first archaeological parks, and is concerned that establishment of a similar park at Apollonia, promulgated in the 2003 National Heritage Act, will be spoilt by the threatened road. Italian government funds have been promised, and their scheme would put the hitherto isolated site and the proposed park right beside the highway as it leads to the Adriatic coast at Vlorë.
“The proposed line, it is fairly certain, passes directly through the waterside limits of the ancient city as well as one of its Roman cemeteries,” he says in Current World Archaeology.
The International Centre for Albanian Archaeology, headed by Lorenc Bejko, has fielded survey teams to make a detailed study of the proposed route, and some Albanian government officials are anxious to help, but the aid funds are insufficient to divert the road a kilometre or more away from the ancient city.
“Everyone reckons the road should be diverted. No one truly believes the cumbersome state bureaucracy can be moved to achieve this,” Professor Hodges says. “The Apollonia crisis will come to a head this summer: I predict that we will get caught up in a protracted rescue excavation that could have been avoided. The Italians are not indifferent . . . but are tied to their funding, which has been slow to materialise.”
The Albanian Ministry of Culture wants to avoid a conflict engendering bad electoral publicity, but infrastructure development is needed to underpin Albania’s case for EU candidacy.
Given that money, provided soon, seems to be the only way to resolve the impending crisis, Professor Hodges hopes that Italy may both enhance and speed up its provision and thus help to save the city where Octavian, Julius Caesar’s nephew and later to become Augustus, the first Roman emperor, took a “gap year” to study in Apollonia’s noted library.
Irish tombs hold on to their secrets
NEW radiocarbon dates from north-western Ireland suggest that Mesolithic hunters there were building megalithic tombs from large stones up to 7,500 years ago.
Such tombs have long been associated with the first Neolithic farmers centuries later, when permanent settlements provided a body of labour for construction. The notion of hunter-gatherers creating such monuments is controversial.
The Carrowmore megalithic tomb complex, not far from Sligo, is one of the largest and best known in Ireland. Excavations there by Professor Göran Burenhult 25 years ago yielded the earliest carbon dates in Ireland, as reported in The Times (July 6, 1981). An international conference at the site in 1982 was unable to reach agreement on whether the dates were valid or truly associated with the tombs.
Carrowmore may originally have had as many as 200 megalithic tombs, built from crude glacial boulders and lying at the foot of the prominent hill of Knocknarea, itself capped by Queen Maeve’s Tomb, one of Ireland’s most spectacular burial mounds.
The site is “an arranged ritual landscape”, with tombs surrounding an oval space empty but for the largest sepulture, according to British Archaeology; the tomb entrances face inwards on to the open area.
Renewed work by Professor Burenhult has now produced a date for Tomb 4 which could be as early as 5600 BC, although the statistical variations in carbon dating also mean that it could be up to 1,300 years later. Other dates from Tomb 4, as well as from three other megaliths, incline to the later date of between 4300 and 4000 BC, and yet another date from Tomb 4 is later still.
Since such tombs were in use for centuries, receiving the bones of successive generations, this does not invalidate Professor Burenhult’s suggestion that the Carrowmore cemetery was founded by Mesolithic hunters and fishers. “A Mesolithic date has also been suggested for the earliest tombs on the Isles of Scilly, with an economy based on sea-shore gathering, fishing, fowling, marine hunting and deer exploitation,” British Archaeology notes.
There is also evidence from Sweden, and closer at hand from Brittany and northwestern Spain, of megalithic structures built by Mesolithic peoples, the report says. What is not clear, however, is whether the European megalithic tombs as a whole were initially built by hunting and fishing societies, with an economy little different from that of their Ice Age ancestors, or by Neolithic farmers.
Farming spread across Europe from the Middle East. The new economy, based on wheat and barley cultivation and the herding of cattle, pigs, sheep and goats, reached Britain more than 6,000 years ago, but it did not supplant the existing regime for several centuries. Thus the idea of constructing communal burial places from large stones could have spread from one society to another, or occurred independently of both: the new dates from Carrowmore do not resolve this question, but push the controversy back in time, and to the very fringes of Europe.
