EVOKE
Exploring Vythoulas Origins in Kythera Environs
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EVOKE explores how past communities in the landscape of Vythoulas, in northern Kythera, managed water, land, settlement, mobility, and agricultural resources.
Vythoulas is the only known site on Kythera with over 5000 years of human activity. Throughout this long period, its landscape sustained populations. Yet the region also experienced significant climatic, political, and social changes.
How did the people here manage their natural resources in the face of extended periods of heat or cold? How did these practices change when new groups arrived seeking refuge or to assume political control? These are the kinds of questions EVOKE seeks to answer.
Why are we asking them? Because the past can help us in the present to prepare for our futures. Specifically, EVOKE will use its findings to:
1. Recommend sustainable environmental practices that help Kythera and other islands better manage their natural resources today;
2. Produce materials that enhance the cultural and linguistic connections between Kythera and its global diaspora, with particular emphasis on Australia.
To achieve this, EVOKE brings together archaeology, landscape research, environmental analysis, archival work, ethnography, and material culture studies. We will document the archaeological, environmental, written and lived histories of Vythoulas to reconstruct long-term patterns of natural and social resilience and change.
Our results will support the protection of local heritage. They will also enable us to develop policy recommendations for water and landscape preservation that are environmentally and economically sustainable. We will also translate our findings into bilingual educational resources, exhibitions, and public-facing content for Kythera and its English-speaking diaspora.
In sum, as the first project under the DIORAMAS umbrella, EVOKE uses Kythera's past to strengthen connections between people, place, memory, and sustainable futures, and to translate this knowledge for the benefit of society.
The EVOKE story
EVOKE focuses on the archaeological landscape of Vythoulas, northeast of Potamos village in northern Kythera. It is a place where settlement, farming, craft production, movement, memory, migration, and environmental adaptation can be studied across thousands of years. EVOKE asks: how do Mediterranean island communities create, transform, abandon, remember, and reimagine the landscapes they inhabit?
Through the study of Vythoulas, EVOKE explores how one landscape developed from prehistory to the modern period, how communities used its resources, and how its routes, hilltops, valleys, churches, terraces, clay sources, and water systems structured life over time.
Vythoulas is an ideal starting point through which to address these issues. The landscape is located above Agia Pelagia harbour and overlooks the straits between Kythera and the Peloponnese. The area also connects the uplands of Potamos with the harbours of the eastern coast. Its ravines contain micaceous orange clay, a major raw material used for pottery production on the island from prehistory to recent times. Its fertile valleys, terraced slopes, seasonal hamlets, and agricultural installations preserve evidence for how communities worked within a demanding island environment. These features make Vythoulas not only an archaeological landscape, but also a place through which we can think about sustainable agriculture, water capture, soil management, and long-term adaptation to environmental change.
At the centre of the study zone are the twin hills of Xestratigos, where previous survey work by the Australian Paliochora Kythera Archaeological Survey (APKAS) recorded one of the largest archaeological sites on the island. Occupation evidence here begins at least in the Final Neolithic or Early Bronze Age and continues through the Bronze Age, including the Mycenaean period. During the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, the site expanded significantly, with perimeter walls enclosing an area of almost nine hectares. Later phases include Roman and early Byzantine activity, Medieval churches, Venetian-period settlement, Early Modern agropastoral use, and the gradual abandonment of seasonal hamlets during the 20th century.
The project does not approach Vythoulas as a single site, but rather as a complex cultural landscape made up of settlements, resources, paths, field systems, sacred places, water routes, seasonal occupation, and memories. It asks how people lived with the opportunities and limits of this island environment over time; how they managed water, clay, soil, and access; how settlement shifted through time; and how different communities left their traces in the same landscape.
A key aim of EVOKE is to understand how past land-use strategies can inform present and future challenges. Vythoulas preserves evidence for agricultural resilience in a dry Mediterranean island setting: terraces that slowed erosion and retained soil, valleys that supported cultivation, routes that connected upland fields to coastal harbours, and possible systems of water management that allowed communities to inhabit and work the landscape over long periods. By studying these practices archaeologically and environmentally, EVOKE is revealing how traditional and ancient strategies of water capture, land division, cultivation, and seasonal use can contribute to contemporary conversations about sustainable agriculture, climate resilience, and the future management of island landscapes.
The modern history of Vythoulas also connects Kythera to the wider world. Many of the families associated with the seasonal hamlets and agricultural communities of the area later migrated to Australia, making Vythoulas part of both a local Kytherian story and a global diaspora story. This connection is especially meaningful as EVOKE is delivered through an international collaboration led from Australia and rooted in Kythera. The landscape is therefore not only a place of ancient settlement and agricultural practice, but also a place of memory for communities whose histories now extend across continents.
A global partnership
EVOKE is led by researchers from the University of Sydney, Australia. Our senior team includes scholars and specialists from Australia, Brazil, France, Greece, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Our fieldwork is undertaken with permission from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and facilitated by the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens.
We provide training in excavation and post-excavation practices to archaeology students from around the world to support the next generation of field archaeologists in academia and the professional sector. We have a special collaboration with Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece to offer fieldwork experience in Greece to Harvard University students.
EVOKE is supported by
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