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Don Keller's fulfilling but exhausting semester from early February to late May, directing the Karystos branch of the Ithaka Cultural Study Program, must stand as the reason behind the appearance of this issue after rather than before the summer season in 1990. That, however, means more solid news.

The founder and head of the Ithaka Program, Nick Germanakos, has decided to centralize his operations in Hania, Crete. As a result, the Ithaka Program left SEEP most of its household and office furnishings in Karystos for a modest price. Even more fortuitous, however, a beautiful old house in Karystos was vacated.

Thanks to the fund-raising efforts of James Essaris and the generous donations from him and his friends in Canada, SEEP was in the position during the summer to rent the house. As noted in our last newsletter, it has long been our hope to establish a permanent research center in which to house the SEEP archives, map collection and library, and to provide students and scholars the opportunity to visit and work in Karystos throughout the year. With the security of the funds raised by Mr. Essaris in Canada, we felt confident enough to approach Chrisoula and Evangelis Buris, the owners of the house used by the Ithaka Program, with a proposal to rent the house for one year for SEEP. The Burises have been keen supporters of both Ithaka and SEEP and agreed on a quite favorable rent for our project. Their eldest son Nick Buris, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, is also a member and generous supporter of SEEP.

The Buris house, which had served the Ithaka Program for two years has more than adequate work and storage space, an office and five sleeping rooms, and an enclosed garden and shaded courtyard. It is located on a quiet street just north of the Karystos Town Hall.

As a result of the efforts and generosity of the friends mentioned above, we now have taken a step in our efforts to establish a permanent center in Karystos. We hope that future donations and summer grants will allow us to maintain the house. Members of SEEP can help in this effort through their taxdeductible donations to SEEP (Canadian members who wish a tax statement should make their checks payable to the Canadian Archaeological Institute in Athens, with a notation that the funds are for SEEP). Members can also help us to locate and contact individuals and programs that might lighten our financial burden by subleasing the house. In June of 1991, for example, an art program directed by E. Nead and T. Theodore of the Maryland Institute will be renting the house from SEEP. We are especially interested in locating graduate students, professors on sabbatical (discounts for SEEP members), and projects that can make use of the house during the non-summer months.

Again SEEP was fortunate this past year in being able to take advantage of the Hesperia back-issue sale. We purchased 66 fascicles of Hesperia, which together with our growing research library have already been of tremendous help as we proceed with our analysis of excavation and survey finds. Alison Barclay and Kirsten Gay have indexed the Hesperia articles by subject as an aid to researchers using the collection.

Another benefit of our new Karystos center is that we now have a large area of permanent shelf space. If any members have extra offprints or volumes and would be willing to pay the surface postal rates for books and printed matter, please send off a box to SEEP Library, Post Box 9, Karystos, GR 340 01, Greece.

During July and early August of 1990 we continued the survey of pre-modern land routes begun in 1989. We employed new methods and route survey forms devised by Keller and Roz Schneider earlier in the summer and these proved to be a great improvement over the methods employed during our first season of extensive survey work. The 1989 reconnaissance survey followed the mule-trails and foot paths in the southeastern corner of southern Euboea, within the Karystos-Boura-Kastri triangle. In 1990 we worked the region immediately to the north, covering the area from the Potami-Platanistos valley over the Koukouvayla range to Karystos (our work farther north was brought to an abrupt halt by a sudden lack of transport.)

The main goals of our efforts are to record evidence for the means of land communication and local trade in the past, and to gather preliminary site information for archaeologically unexplored regions in southern Euboea. As our crew members will testify, it was often just SEEP and the road-building crews out in the hinterland--and sometimes not possible to say who was in the lead position. As the modern road system expands, however, tourism and land development will spread.

One of the most notable events of the survey season was Bill Parkinson's discovery of an unreported four-line inscription, high on a terrace wall at the published, but still enigmatic, Classical sanctuary at Elliniko. After a special expedition organized by Mac Wallace and Eric Schneider and equipped with all the necessary epigraphical paraphernalia (three-meter ladder, squeeze paper, tracing paper, cameras, chilled wine), we discovered that despite our best efforts only a few letters could be discerned in the weathered stone, leading us to wonder in our darker moments whether the inscription was not so much unknown as known and avoided.

Other exciting developments of the season included Kirsten Gay's discovery of our first stamped amphora handle in southern Euboea and Tracey Cullen's find of two prehistoric stone celts at Cavo D'Oro (thus bringing the total number of celts recovered since 1979 in southern Euboea to three).

Perhaps the second most notable event of the summer, however, was the collapse of the Canadian Institute's Peugeot station wagon (known after its license plate number [YAK 5973] and general character [sometimes the passengers felt that it ran on hooves rather than wheels] as the Yak-mobile). The best piece of luck of the summer was that the Yak-mobile's cylinder cracked in front of the dig house rather than the day before at the end of the road at Cavo D'Oro (thereby saving our crew a reenactment of the Euboean Idyll of Dio Chrysostomus).

In all, the survey recorded 50 sections of pre-modern trails between Potami and Karystos and 22 findspots along the trails as a result of approximately 60 kilometers of trail hiking and many more kilometers of hiking between trails and to or from the nearest access by dirt road. The trails themselves were recorded in detail because of their importance to ethnologists and modern historians. Many of the old mountain trails are disappearing due to lack of use, or are being destroyed and replaced with bulldozer tracks. The forms, annotated maps and numerous plans and drawings produced by Colin Caldwell, Els Hom, Camilla MacKay, Bill Parkinson, Katy Sweet, and Pamela Vreeland have been organized and stored in the Karystos center for future use. Our house is already becoming known to the more hearty of Karystos visitors who wish information on the mountain trails of southern Euboea.

The demise of the Yak-mobile hindered our planned revisits to selected Paximadhi findspots last August, but work on the cataloging and analysis of survey finds proceeded well with the new recording forms devised by Cindy Kosso and Roz Schneider, SEEP's associate field directors. Most of our survey pottery has now been recorded and we are beginning to transfer this information to a computer databank in the winter of 1990/91.

Research last summer also included a thorough analysis of the Cape Mnima animal bones (from the 1988 excavation of the cistern) by Walter Klippel and Lynn Snyder of the University of Tennessee. Maria Liston, also of the University of Tennessee, inspected a number of suspected human bones from the cistern. In the field, Ayla Akin, with the aid of Michael Byrne, Roz Schneider, and Sophia Kollias, continued her anthropological study of the pastoral economy of the Paximadhi peninsula, and Beata DeVligher was in Karystos briefly to continue work on her Ph.D. thesis research on the geography of the area. We were also happy to see (and exploit, however briefly) Lisa Pintozzi and Kristen Hannold, SEEP volunteers from previous seasons, who were both working elsewhere in the Mediterranean last summer.

Our crew in 1990 was an outstanding, talented and international group including North Americans, Europeans and a local Karystian student of archaeology, Christina Georgiou. As in past seasons, the time and energy of these volunteers were the major ingredients of our progress.

During the 1990 season we were visited by the new Canadian ambassador to Greece, the Honorable Ernest Herbert, and his family, and by a number of friends and scholars. These included Prof. Dietmar Hagel, Vice President of the Canadian Mediterranean Institute in Greece; Prof. Jacques Perrault, Director of the Canadian Archaeological Institute in Athens; and Prof. Catherine Perles and her research team, who gave us some insights into our prehistoric lithics.

We would like to note with gratitude that much of the research last summer was made possible by an Institute in Aegean Prehistory grant to D. Keller and a Frances Norwood Travel Fellowship from Classics, University of Toronto, to M. Wallace.

As a result of interest generated by a paper ("On the Road to Cavo D'Oro: Survey of Pre-Modern Land Routes in Southern Euboea") read by Keller at the Canadian Archaeological Institute last spring, a committee was formed of Keller, Maria Toli and Jacques Perrault to organize a three-day international symposium on "Ancient Land Routes in Greece," to be held in Athens in May of 1991. For more information, write M. Toli at the Canadian Institute in Athens.

If you missed the talk at the Canadian Institute, you may find information on the main points in the recent article in Classical Views 1990 by D. Keller and M. Wallace.

In May of 1990 Keller and Wallace presented a poster exhibit on the Classical agricultural landscape of the Paximadhi peninsula at the Seventh International Symposium of the Swedish Institute of Archaeology at Athens. The symposium, which was organized by Prof. Berit Wells, was very successful and the three days of interesting papers and learned and lively debate touched on many topics of direct importance to our current research.

This year Peter Kosso has been awarded a hefty NSF grant for his philosophical research project "Analysis of Observational Evidence in Archaeology," which had its germination in part in his long-term participation in SEEP field seasons. We, of course, have given Peter carte blanche to rummage in the archives and to lure us down to the waterfront for serious philosophical discussions. Although unnerving to find ourselves conducting a study while also being the object of a meta-study, we can think of no philosopher we would sooner be investigated by (he buys the beers), and we view with some pleasure the prospect that "Paximadhi" may become a term familiar to Oxford dons and their smoked-at students.

In August of 1990 it was determined that a second full-scale study season would be needed before we can complete the publication of the Paximadhi monograph. We are, therefore, planning a study season with a small crew after June to complete the analysis of ceramic and lithic material in the Karystos Museum storeroom and to finalize the architectural plans for the Paximadhi sites. We will then return to the land route survey in the hinterland in 1992.

Past crew members interested in volunteering for the 1991 season should contact D. Keller as soon as possible. We will be using only a small crew--and as usual the pace will be fast and furious.

On the topic of volunteers. In the past we have discussed the possibility of creating a bibliography relating to the culture, history, and environment of southern Euboea. In 1989 M. Wallace prepared preliminary notes on the subject and we had considered various potential databases, but again the project was moved to a back burner. If there is any member who has interest, time, and access to computers and who would be willing to take on the position of SEEP Bibliographer, he or she should contact D. Keller or M. Wallace and we will get you started with the materials we have at hand.

The renovatiions of the Karystos Museum display room have been completed and a second archaeological guard has been hired to assist Mr. Sarandis, so we can assume that the Museum will soon be open to the public.

The construction of the Karystos sewage treatment plant continues at Ay. Pelagia and the EH II Beach has been buried under three meters of earth, encouraging us to move the traditional SEEP 1st/4th of July Beach Party to the small beach 50 meters north.

Yes, it is true that Karystos now has a bookstore and a piano bar, and last summer hydrofoil service to Rafina and Tinos began. Can topless bathing be far behind?

There have been a number of moves recently. As you may know, Roz and Eric Schneider are now at 600 Hollen Dr., Baltimore, MD 21212; Peter and Cindy Kosso are at 4532 S. Kathy Rd., Flagstaff, AZ 86001; and D. Keller has returned to the Boston area to work at the Perseus Project, Dept., of Classics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. Please keep us informed of your changes in address and write us if you have lost touch with a former crew member whom you wish to track down (for financial, romantic, or other reasons).

If you wish to send gifts, but are short of offprints, books, and cash: the SEEP house needs sheets and blankets.

We wish you all happy holidays and a prosperous, productive new year and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Don, Roz, and Mac