8 Archaeological Geology (Posters)

Monday, 18 March 2013
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Grand Ballroom South

ANALYSIS OF FAULT BLOCK MOTION RELEVANT TO HARBOR RECONSTRUCTION AT THE MYCENAEAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE OF KALAMIANOS, GREECE

Paper number: 8-5
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Authors

Abstract

The Bronze Age (primarily Late Helladic Mycenaean, 13thcentury BCE) archaeological site of Kalamianos is located in the northeast Peloponnese of Greece, approximately 2.5 km east of the modern harbor town of Korphos. The site sits on the rocky coast looking south across the Saronic Gulf and is surrounded by hills, with a steep mountain front and low mountains to the north. Kalamianos appears to contain the only known Early to Late Helladic harbor, which is largely submerged up to ~5.5 m below present sea level. Geologic mapping and geomorphologic studies were undertaken to address a number of archaeologically relevant questions, including the nature of recent tectonic activity. Bedrock in the region comprises southeast dipping Mesozoic limestone, but a major normal fault separates the low coastal hills from the northern uplands and the dip of bedding in the coastal area is generally northwest. In order to determine the possible affect of fault block motion on harbor submergence detailed mapping of faults was undertaken and hundreds of bedding attitudes were obtained.

Several WNW-ESE normal faults divide the coastal area into a number of fault blocks that appear to have undergone motion on a regional listric normal fault. Kalamianos sits upon one of the down-dropped blocks. Present orientation and past relative motion of individual blocks was determined through stereonet plots of average bedding attitude. It appears that within the right-lateral oblique shear system for the wider region the blocks studied underwent oblique(?) progressive down-dropping to the south-southwest. Each block has a unique rotation, including the fault block that contains Kalamianos. However, slicken-lines on a large fault scarp associated with the Kalamianos block reveal that the most recent movement was vertical. If we assume that all post Bronze Age movement of this block was vertical, then our paleocoastal reconstruction of the Kalamianos shoreline, and harbor, does not need to account for tilt. Excavation of the site will uncover surfaces, e.g. floors or entryway thresholds, whose attitude can be used to test this assumption.