Surface Survey and the Polis at Ancient Halos in Thessaly

Vladimir Stissi of the University of Amsterdam presents the results of surface survey fieldwork around ancient Halos in Magnesia, Thessaly, and considers how sparse survey pottery assemblages can inform broader questions of social and political organisation. The project combines legacy data from six survey seasons directed by Reinder Reinders of the University of Groningen in the 1990s and early 2000s with revisits conducted by the University of Amsterdam since 2011.

The survey recorded roughly 250 sites in the Sourpi and Almiros plains, yielding about 10,000 kept finds, with eighty per cent of sites producing fewer than twenty-five kept finds. Stissi explains that despite the worn condition of the surface ceramics and the semi-systematic original collection, revisits showed that these small assemblages represent what lies on the ground. Mapping the finds shows a stable number of sites from the Archaic period onwards and many multi-period locations. These include minor sherd scatters on hilltops and larger fortified hilltops such as Magoula Sourpi, Kato Xenias, Agios Nikolaos, and the Kastro near Vrynaina, which preserve material from the Bronze Age through the Roman period.

Stissi compares these sites with Magoula Plataniotiki, a seven-to-eight-hectare coastal tell alongside a large Early Iron Age burial ground and the short-lived fifty-hectare Hellenistic city. Rather than a standard polis dominated by one urban core, he suggests that Halos functioned as a polycentric community in which Magoula Plataniotiki acted as a primus inter pares political and religious centre. The discussion afterwards addresses local pottery production, medieval bishoprics in Boeotia, and references to Halos in inscriptions, Homer, Herodotus, and Demosthenes.