Students help write a 2,600-year-old story from ancient Greece

Founded over 2,600 years ago, Argilos was one of the first Greek settlements in northern Greece. It had an urban plan comprising streets, a drainage system and Cycladic-influenced architecture, a porticoed shopping centre and a flourishing craft industry centred on olive oil extraction and metalworking.

“From our digs, we have learned how the urban, commercial and community organization of Argilos functioned,” said Perreault. “They were already very advanced.”

What makes Argilos unique is that it is exceptionally well preserved. “The site was abandoned after 357 BCE, so it is intact,” Perreault explained. “When you take an aerial photo of the site with a drone, you are looking at the structures of a city that existed in this state 500 to 600 years before Christ! You can see its streets, agora, shops, houses, fortifications, the city gate—it’s all there!”

Some of the budding archeologists were making a return visit to Argilos but for most this was their first experience of archaeological fieldwork. Most were UdeM students but there were also 16 CEGEP students from Collège Rosemont and Collège Lionel-Groulx. The newcomers were supervised by a dozen Argilos regulars, mostly Perreault’s graduate students. They were united by a shared passion for unraveling the mysteries of the past, pickaxe, trowel or brush in hand.

After setting out at 6:30 a.m., it was a race against time. As the hours ticked by, the blazing sun climbed higher in the sky and the temperature rose steadily until the shift ended at 2 p.m.

On that Monday afternoon, the mercury hit 32 degrees. Every day that week, the temperature edged higher. On Friday, the weather forecast called for a high of 38 degrees and the Greek government issued a directive requiring people working outdoors to call it a day at noon.

But the oppressive heat didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of the apprentice archaeologists—quite the contrary.

During the first week of the field program, many of the students were working on scraping away centuries of accumulated clay soil from the remains of the city. As the days went by, the fruits of their labours started to peep through the soil and the artifacts began to surrender their secrets.

Each discovery has a story to tell: the walls that once surrounded the homes where Argilians lived and traded, the remains of the amphora jugs, oil lamps and pithos vases they used, arrowheads, bronze and silver coins, bones, decorative ceramics, shells.

Once the artifacts have been unearthed, each piece is photographed in situ and the geomatics data carefully recorded. During the digs, a logbook is kept and full details of the excavated objects are recorded for future reference, including diagrams and sketches, ground elevation, photos and triangulation to pinpoint the precise location where the object was found.

The pieces are then carefully transported to facilities that Perreault has set up behind the Archaeological Museum of Amphipolis. There they are cleaned, classified and catalogued by another team. Cleaning the artifacts makes it possible to identify their origins—Attic or Corinthian, for example.

“By dating a site’s lifespan, from its birth to its destruction by war or natural disaster, archaeology complements written history, when it exists,” said archeologist Saskia Deluy, who's respinsible for cataloguing. “In the case of Argilos, there are few written references to its existence, so the work being done here is literally writing the city’s history as the objects are pulled from the ground.”

According to Keven Ouellet, a history lecturer at UdeM and expert on fortifications who earned his doctorate under Perreault and is supervising the excavations at one part of the site, Argilos is a very special archeological dig.

“Jacques could have hired professionals to search Argilos but he preferred to bring students here in order to pass on his knowledge, stimulate their curiosity and broaden their general culture,” said Mylène Desautels, a history and civilization teacher at Cégep Lionel-Groulx and former master’s student in history. “He’s a true mentor.” 

Perreault is committed to using the dig for educational purposes: “If people hadn’t given me a chance back in the day, I wouldn’t be an archaeologist today,” he said. “That’s why I think it’s so important to involve students in the fieldwork at Argilos. But that’s not all: I give them full responsibility for their tasks from the outset, and that’s how they learn the most. At Argilos, they do it all: they dig, keep logs, write descriptive notes, clean the objects they’ve found, catalogue them.”

Perreault sees archaeology as much more than a search for ancient objects: “Archeology brings out your inner child,” he said. “It takes you back to the time when you were discovering the world in your sandbox. Each discovery is a piece of a great puzzle, and you don’t know yet what the picture will look like. And I get to rub shoulders with students, who challenge you and force you to question yourself. That’s what I love!”

For Perreault, archaeology isn’t just a scientific adventure; it’s a key to understanding the contemporary world. 

“What are archaeology and history good for?” he asked. “Well, the only way to understand the world we live in is to compare it with something else, and we have the world of yesterday for that. Comparing the past with the present helps us understand what is happening, critique it and contribute to building the world of tomorrow. Studying ancient history produces bright, open-minded people who are capable of analyzing and understanding the world around them.”

So it is that under the relentless Greek sun, some 60 students helped write the history of Argilos—and perhaps their own.

Université de Montréal and the Ephorate of Antiquities of Serres, directed by Dimitra Malamidou, have been working together on the Greek-Canadian archaeological mission at Argilos since 1992 under the auspices of the Canadian Institute in Greece, headed by Jacques Perreault and Zisis Bonias.

This collaboration brings together a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, architects, ceramologists, zooarchaeologists, archaeobotanists, computer scientists and specialized technicians.

Each and every specialist contributes their expertise to further our understanding of how Argilos, a Greek colony in Thrace founded in the 7^thcentury BCE, grew; how the settlers interacted with the local populations; and the factors that influenced the city’s economic and cultural development.