Geronisos (Yeronisos): the New York University excavations

On the islet of Geronisos, Joan Breton Connelly of New York University excavated a late Hellenistic complex that she characterises as a sanctuary of Apollo and dates broadly to 80–30 BC¹. New York University was awarded a licence in 1990². A 1982 trial excavation by Sophocles Hadjisavvas had unearthed substantial Hellenistic levels, and NYU took up the work with his permission². The project planned slow, sequential seasons with study seasons between digs, to do little harm to the island's wildlife and plants².

The 1990 season was an archaeological and ecological survey, with walkers about 10 m apart and finds plotted². Excavation seasons followed in 1992–1994, 1996–1997 and 2005–2006^2,3. In the Southwest Complex, trenches set beside the 1982 sondages produced about 3500 sherds and a Cypriot Sigillata mastos cup that Connelly knows as the only extant example of its type². At the West Building, ashlar foundations at the cliff edge are dated to the first century BC by Cypriot Sigillata in the foundation trench, and a lion's-head spout (StA.94.01) was found in 1994². Connelly argues that the building was temple-like, citing its decoration, tiled roof and east-west orientation¹. On the Circular Structure, a platform of pale silt inside two concentric ring walls, she argues for a choros, a dance floor³. Connelly's first report describes an Early Chalcolithic phase, densest in the central and eastern parts, and a sixth-century AD phase; Steel reports squatter occupation in that century, after an apparent abandonment following an earthquake in 17 BC^2,4.

In 2009 a team of 18 opened seven 1.5 x 5 m trenches along a southwest-to-northeast diagonal in the Central Sector, beginning on 16 May. They found large first-century BC pithoi from an apparent storeroom and Early Chalcolithic picrolite, ground-stone tools and red-burnished pottery⁵. The excavated trenches were back-filled so that the island's vegetation and nesting cover could recover². The first report appeared in the Report of the Department of Antiquities in 2002, and the third, on the Circular Structure, the Square House and East Building, in the volume for 2009^2,3.