Elis 1969: The Peneios Valley Rescue Excavation Project: British School at Athens Survey 1967 and Rescue Excavations at Kostoureika and Keramidia 1969

When a new dam threatened to flood part of the Peneios Valley in north-western Greece, archaeologists had a narrow opportunity to investigate the landscape before it disappeared beneath a reservoir. The British School at Athens surveyed threatened sites in 1967, and two of them—Kostoureika and Keramidia—were excavated in 1969. Elis 1969 brings that rescue work into a full archaeological publication.

Kostoureika was first thought to hold a substantial Hellenistic building, but the surviving architecture proved slight. Its deposit of Early Helladic pottery turned out to be an important discovery instead. Keramidia produced evidence of occupation from Hellenistic times into the late Roman imperial period. John Ellis Jones and Ourania Kouka reconstruct these findings through field records and catalogues of pottery and other finds, preserving evidence from a valley irrevocably changed by modern irrigation works.