Uncovering the secrets of ancient Greece at a forgotten temple

Stones & Bones is back! Today, we visit an excavation underway in Greece that may reshape what we know about its ancient past. 

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More than two millennia ago, young girls from the Greek countryside used to travel every four years to the Sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron outside Athens, to participate in a mysterious rite of passage. They went there, one ancient participant enigmatically said, to “play the bear.” Guided by the priestesses of Artemis and out of sight of their fathers and brothers, the girls ran free, embodying the bear as part of a ritual that allowed them to shed their wildness and prepare for marriage. Painted cups found at the site that were possibly made by participants themselves show girls running and dancing. They would return later in life to dedicate offerings to the goddess in preparation for childbirth. 

One day in the third century B.C., the sanctuary was abandoned forever. And no one knows why. 

Now, a team of British and Greek archaeologists, paleontologists, and other scientists jointly working as part of the ARTEMIS project want to understand not just what those girls were up to and why the sanctuary was abandoned but also what life in rural Brauron was really like for the ordinary inhabitants of ancient Greece. 

And investigating those questions might reshape not only our understanding of women at the time, but broader topics like how we think about the origins of modern democracy. 

While ancient Greek authors such as Xenophon charmingly claim that women saw, knew, and heard nothing prior to getting married, the girls running naked at the Sanctuary of Artemis might beg to differ. Archaeological work around the site offers a rare glimpse into the secret lives of young women in rural Attica who likely shared knowledge of women’s healthcare, marriage, and religion among the stone bear cubs and porticoes of the sanctuary. 

“History is often written by the victors, whether on the battlefield or in social and political struggles,” said Eleni Andrikou, head of the Ephorate of Antiquities of East Attica. “It’s only relatively recently,” she added, “that archaeology has turned its attention” to the daily lives of women and other people who lived close to the proverbial breadline in rural ancient Greece. 

This is a period for which we have very few literary sources, said Andrikou, and those that do exist are silent on the day-to-day lives of non-elite women. They suggest that the wealthiest girls were sequestered by male custodians and learned nothing but weaving. 

Which can’t possibly be true, emphasized University of Birmingham archaeologist Maeve McHugh, the principal investigator on the project. Even for a wealthy woman, what if her male protector was feckless? Or a drunk? Or away at war? If a woman wasn’t wealthy, she would have had to provide for her family. We must think, she said, that these women had some agency. And the Sanctuary of Artemis was one place where they could have forged friendships and swapped advice. 

Reconstructing their lives is an exercise in worldbuilding. When I caught up with McHugh on a video call on a sweltering summer day, she explained that understanding ancient life is about putting the sanctuary and the people who visited it back in their environment. Researchers want to consider the whole area, not just the sanctuary complex itself. 

Compiling this larger picture is challenging. So the ARTEMIS project unifies paleontologists from Patras, archaeologists from the Ephorate of Antiquities at East Attica and the British School at Athens, and experts from the United Kingdom all working together to try and piece together the puzzle. 

Team members led by Michelle Farrell of Coventry University will take multiple cores of the ground to get a sense of what was happening in the landscape. Used in conjunction with climate modeling, this allows them to see how ordinary people responded to floods, famine, and drought and gives us “a richer picture of life beyond the cities,” said Farrell. 

“With archaeology, often you’ll see the primacy of the cultural and the human landscape. When we think of ancient Greece, we think of big white temples. We think an awful lot about urban spaces. We are looking to show the impact that the natural landscape has on the human and vice versa,” said McHugh. “We think that this will help us understand the sanctuary” and why it was abandoned. 

“The environment wasn’t just a backdrop; it was an intrinsic part of how people interacted with their world—for rural communities in particular,” said Farrell. 

Why is this quest to understand this mysterious temple and what peasants thousands of years ago were planting so important? The day-to-day life of the rural poor involves more than just telling the other side of things. It prompts us to rethink familiar topics, like the birth of democracy. 

The roots of modern democracies may go back to ancient Athens, but that doesn’t mean merely the city itself. The region of Attica was made up of the city of Athens, the port of Piraeus, and a vast “middle land” that included coasts, plains, mountains, and valleys. Politically, Attica was divided into over a hundred “demes” in the fifth century B.C. (Americans might think of them as congressional districts, because this is where congressional districts come from.) Citizens voted in their local deme, and each deme sent a proportionate number of representatives to Athens to participate in the Boule or the Council of Five Hundred. This system is the basic democratic system from which modern democracies drew their inspiration. 

The area that the project surveys includes three of these middle land “demes,” said McHugh. But when you look at the archaeology, they weren’t all urban. While some demes had village marketplaces or theaters that could be used for voting and administration, others were completely rural with no obvious meeting places. If people today vote at schools, government buildings, and libraries, the ancient Greeks, said McHugh, did not need “to have a built environment for people to congregate.” They might have gathered at an olive tree, and their votes would have counted just as much as those of representatives from more urban demes. 

This kind of evidence challenges how we think about urban centers as the primary driver of civilization, education, democracy, and “progress.” Even today people connect the architecture of modern democracy to ancient Athens, but the things we associate with cities were happening in natural spaces as well. “The people who lived in the various demes of Attica formed the backbone of Athenian democracy,” said Andrikou. We talk about democracy as being about the will of the people, but rural farmers as the backbone of democracy? Former farmer and classics-lover turned father of American democracy Thomas Jefferson would be thrilled. 

This work reconstructing the complex relationships between different spaces in ancient Attica, says Tim Whitmarsh, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, will “bring us close to the beating heart of Greece’s most influential region.”

Bathroom habits of Pompeians

Speaking of everyday life in the ancient world, summer excavations at Pompeii led by National Geographic Explorer and Cornell University classical archaeologist Caitie Barrett have been delving into the bathroom habits of the ancient Romans. Barrett told me that her team has just finished excavating a domestic latrine. They are hoping that the samples they took will be an important source of new information about health and diet in Pompeian households. Given the prevalence of parasitic infections in the ancient world, the results are sure to be, ahem, wriggly. Watch this space to be updated about the DNA results when they come in.

Has the Ark of the Covenant been discovered?

Both the Daily Mail and New York Post ran stories this month about the alleged discovery of “relics” linked to the Ark of the Covenant. A team led by Christian archaeologist Scott Stripling with Associates for Biblical Research at Tel Shiloh, on the West Bank, have uncovered ruins that they argue were the original home of the Ark of the Covenant. According to the Bible, the ark, which housed the Ten Commandments, was then placed inside the Tabernacle, a portable sanctuary used by the ancient Israelites. Stripling claims to have unearthed a monumental building that matches the dimensions of the biblical Tabernacle. This may come as a shock to those of us who thought the Ark of the Covenant was in the basement of the CIA. 

The archaeologists I spoke to all said that it’s hard to evaluate these claims when they have been so poorly documented and supported. Archaeologist Aren Maeir, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, told me that even if the archaeologists do find the Tabernacle, the ark should not be there. While the Bible does mention that the Tabernacle was at a cultic site at Shiloh, it was taken from there by the Philistines, and its last known location was the Jerusalem Temple. More important, said Maeir, nothing has been published from the excavations, and “what has been published in the popular press does not support claims about the Ark of the Covenant.” Eric Cline, an archaeologist at George Washington University who addressed the question of the ark’s whereabouts in his book From Eden to Exile, agreed, telling me, “It sounds like they have found and are currently excavating a building,” but what the building was used for is unclear. An additional Iron Age cultic site would be great news for archaeologists, said Maeir, but that’s a far cry from the home of the Ten Commandments. 

Cline added that it’s unlikely that anyone will find the Ark of the Covenant. “Since no one has seen it since at least the time of King Josiah [ca 640-609 B.C.], I would venture to say that it is no longer in existence. In fact, if I really had to guess, I would argue that the ark was melted down or otherwise destroyed, certainly by the time of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C., if not long before.”

Origins of the Sutton Hoo helmet in question

An amateur metal detectorist may have upended everything we thought we knew about the British Museum’s famous Sutton Hoo helmet. Since it was discovered in the 1930s, archaeologists have thought that the artifact—an exquisitely crafted and highly decorated helmet unearthed in a giant ship burial—was made in Scandinavia (though the Swedes and Danes both took credit). 

In 2024 Stephen Newbury unearthed a copper-alloy die in the village of Lynsted in southeast England and responsibly reported the discovery to local authorities. The die, which dates to the sixth or seventh century, could have been used to manufacture the decorative foils used on armor. Andrew Richardson, the Finds Liaison officer for the Kent Country Council, said that “this small but remarkable find provides important evidence that helmets like the Sutton Hoo example could have been made in Kent.”