PC Professor’s Discovery Named Top 10 of the Year

Monday, December 20, 2010

GoLocalProv Features Team

The discovery of early tools on the Greek island of Crete by an archaeological team led by Dr. Thomas F. Strasser of Providence College has been named one of the “Top 10 Discoveries of the Year” by Archaeology Magazine.

The magazine is the flagship periodical for the Archaeological Institute of America, the oldest archaeological institute in the nation.

Other discoveries cited by the magazine include a royal tomb in Guatemala; early pyramids in Peru; the sunken British merchant ship, the HMS Investigator, in Canada; and the remains of a Protestant church built in 1608 in Jamestown, VA.

The importance of Strasser's find

The stone tools Strasser’s team found in 2008 and 2009 date back at least 130,000 years and may push the history of seafaring in the Mediterranean back by more than 100,000 years.
The findings could have implications as to the understanding of the colonization of Europe and beyond by early African hominins--our pre-Homo sapiens ancestors. Prior to this discovery, the earliest uncontested marine crossing in the Mediterranean was circa 12,000 BC.

The survey was conducted along the southwestern coast of Crete near the town of Plakias, which faces the Libyan Sea. In advance of the team’s actual field work, Strasser, an associate professor of art history, scouted throughout the island years in advance to identify areas that may have been occupied by early hunters/gatherers. The team collected a sample of more than 2,100 stone artifacts made of quartz and chert. Many of the tools were found in marine terraces as much as 92 meters above the present sea level, the result of shifts in the tectonic plate.

Hundreds of tools

Hundreds of Mesolithic tools, called microliths, about three centimeters in size, as well as much larger bifaces, or hand axes, identified with the Palaeolithic period outside of caves along the sides of the Preveli Gorge, were found. Such tools are associated with our first ancestors to leave Africa.

Strasser and his Plakias Survey team of archaeologists and geologists from both US and Greek institutions completed their field work under the auspices of The American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Greek Ministry of Culture.