In Tro Duc Tion : His Tory of the Ex Ca Va Tions

The ex ca va tion at Klissoura was planned in 1992, as a joint-pro ject be tween the Ephoreia of Palaeoanthropology and Spe le ol ogy of the Min is-try of Cul ture of Greece and the In sti tute of Ar-chae ol ogy of the Jagiellonian Uni ver sity of Kra-ków, Po land. Our pri mary goal was to in ves ti gate the cir cum stances un der which the neolithisation of NW Peloponnese came about. For this we needed to lo cate a cave site with suc ces sive lay ers of Up per Palaeo lithic–Mesolithic–Early Neo lithic, so that their sys tem atic ex plo ra tion could clar ify the mech a nisms by which the change to wards food pro duc ing so ci et ies took place, and the degree to which this mod i fi ca tion was rooted in the pre vi ous tra di tions and prac tices of the Mesolithic and ear lier for ager so ci et ies. For es tab lish ing the sig nif i cance of the role that the pre-Neo lithic background played in the for ma tion of the Neo-lithic, the Argive Plain seemed to be a prom is ing area, since the most an cient Early Neo lithic el e-ments had been brought to light at the set tle ments of Dendra and Lerna. Far ther to the north, ini tial Early Neo lithic sites had been ex ca vated at Mesolithic finds were known from the Ulbrich Cave (ex act lo ca tion un known), and Up per and Mid dle Palaeo lithic have been ex ca vated at Kep-halari Cave (Reisch, 1976), near Lerna. A prerequisite for the ac com plish ment of our goal would be the re eval u a tion of the whole se quence in the net work of all the Neo lithic set tle ments in the region. The gorge of Klissoura and its caves was noted in the fall of 1992, when the ge ol o gist of the Ephoreia of Palaeoanthropology and Spe le ol ogy Vassilis Giannopoulos and I un der took a very brief sur vey around the slopes of the moun tains to the north of the Plain of Argos. Cave 1 lies at the en trance of the gorge, on the right bank of the Berbadiotis River (the an …