In the waters of southern Florida, the creative
Calusa people forged a mighty empire
By JASON URBANUS
Friday, September 17, 2021
In 1895, Frank Hamilton Cushing, a pioneering anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution, turned his attention to an obscure area of swampland in southwestern Florida. He had been shown a collection of objects that had recently been found by workers extracting peat from a bog on Key Marco, on Florida’s Gulf Coast northwest of the Everglades. Cushing was one of the country’s preeminent scholars of Native American culture, yet the artifacts he saw perplexed him. The finely crafted relics, which he estimated to be quite old, were unlike anything he had seen before. Cushing decided to make the long, arduous trek to Key Marco, where he organized a team to further investigate the site.
Over the next two years, Cushing’s team retrieved thousands of objects that stunned the archaeological community. Preserved in the muddy, oxygen-free conditions of the bog were tools, weapons, ceramics, and household objects made from bone, shell, wood, and woven fibers. There were also painted ceremonial masks and carved animal heads. A six-inch wooden statuette of a feline, known as the Key Marco Cat, is considered by many to be one of the finest pieces of pre-Columbian Native American sculpture.
The people who crafted these objects were a mystery to Cushing and other scholars. Their material culture was seemingly older than and unrelated to that of Native groups living in Florida at the time, such as the Seminole or the Miccosukee. The men and women who had created and used these items had inhabited Florida’s shores long ago. They had, however, left behind evidence of their lives, especially of their mastery of their marine environment. Buried in the muck of Key Marco were fishing nets woven from palm fibers, hammers and other tools made from conch shells, and blades fashioned from shark teeth. Even the land on which they lived owed itself to the sea, as it was formed from heaps of oyster, clam, and conch shells.
Cushing named these people the Key Dwellers, but archaeologists now know them as the Calusa, which Spanish sources say meant “fierce people” in their language. Researchers have learned that the Calusa, whose empire and influence spread across a territory from Charlotte Harbor on the Gulf Coast across to the Atlantic Ocean and down to the Florida Keys, were the dominant Native group in southern Florida when Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century. Unlike other complex societies of the Americas, such as the Inca, Aztecs, and Maya, the Calusa eschewed large-scale agriculture, instead building their empire on marine resources. For more than 200 years, they resisted Spanish colonization and Christianization until, ultimately, they disappeared from Florida’s shores.
For most of the century after Cushing’s discoveries, much remained unknown about this enigmatic people, as only sporadic archaeological work took place. What scholars did learn came largely from texts and maps written and drawn by the Spanish, who first encountered the Calusa in the 1500s. However, in the 1980s, archaeologist William Marquardt began intensively investigating Calusa sites in south Florida for the first time. “When I first visited a Calusa archaeological site, it was an exotic and compelling experience,” says Marquardt, who is curator emeritus at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “Little systematic archaeology had been done in the area and it was one of the least understood parts of Florida.” For the past four decades, Marquardt has led archaeological projects that have helped pull back the curtain on the Calusa and create a new understanding of how they achieved a level of political complexity nearly unparalleled among hunter-gatherer societies in the Americas.
The Calusa themselves did not leave behind any written history. The earliest mention researchers have of their existence comes from sixteenth-century Spanish accounts, especially those of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda. Escalante Fontaneda was shipwrecked off the Florida coast as a teenager and taken captive by the Calusa, living among them for the next 17 years. From his accounts, it is clear that the Calusa were the most powerful Native group the Spaniards encountered in Florida. Over the course of two centuries, the two nations were by turns enemies and allies. “I would characterize the relationship as mutually beneficial at times,” says Marquardt, “but mostly acrimonious and tense.”
From the start, the Calusa made it plain to the Spaniards that they would not easily gain a foothold in southern Florida. Juan Ponce de León is famous for his fabled 1513 voyage to Florida in search of the fountain of youth. His second journey, eight years later, is much less well-known. It was during this mission, aimed at founding the first Spanish colony in what is now the continental United States, that de León’s settlers landed in Calusa territory. By 1521, the Spanish had been present in the Caribbean for more than two decades and their reputation preceded them. “The Calusa were aware that the Spaniards were intent on conquest and slavery years before Ponce de León arrived on their shores,” says Marquardt. “They chose to resist and did so successfully.” The Europeans soon experienced the Calusa’s resolve in a face-to-face confrontation that left de León mortally wounded. The Spaniards turned around and left. Plans for a Spanish colony in south Florida were thwarted, at least temporarily.
Some 40 years later, the Spaniards returned, ushering in their first sustained period of contact with the Calusa. In 1566, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the first Spanish governor of Florida, arrived at the Calusa capital to hammer out an alliance with their leader, King Caalus. The Calusa needed support from the Spaniards to help ward off threats from their northern rivals, the Tocobaga. The Spanish needed a base in southern Florida from which to expand their burgeoning New World empire. Escalante Fontaneda, who acted as translator, and another Spaniard, named Gonzalo Solís de Merás, later described the meeting, the Calusa settlement, its buildings, and how Menéndez’s retinue of 500 men was met by a crowd of 4,000 Calusa. Caalus is said to have entertained the Spanish governor in a house large enough to hold 2,000 people, where extravagant ceremonies were held as the terms of the treaty were hashed out. This agreement was sealed by the marriage of Caalus’ sister to Menéndez. Until recently, the precise location of this meeting, and of the Calusa capital itself, were unsubstantiated.
One of the main goals of Marquardt’s research, which is codirected by University of Georgia archaeologist Victor Thompson, has been to finally confirm the location of the Calusa capital and especially the so-called House of Caalus. “We have the descriptions,” Thompson says, “so we aimed to identify the architecture and corroborate it with the historical documents.” Their focus was a small island in the middle of Estero Bay known as Mound Key, which scholars had speculated for decades might be the site of the Calusa capital. Although it appears today to be indistinguishable from any other island in subtropical coastal Florida, blanketed by lush green vegetation and mangrove forests, the dense foliage obscures Mound Key’s secret—the entire island was constructed by human hands, built up with hundreds of millions of seashells, fish bones, and other materials. Prior to Marquardt and Thompson’s work, little was known about the island’s topography or how or when it was constructed. Their team recently used lidar, ground-penetrating radar, coring, excavation, and radiocarbon dating to gain a clearer understanding of how Mound Key was created and what it might have looked like in the past.
Beginning around A.D. 500, the Calusa began a 1,000-year process of meticulously constructing and shaping the island by collecting, consuming, and discarding massive quantities of mollusks. The island covers 125 acres and reaches a height of 30 feet at its apex. Creating it was an extraordinary feat. Mound Key’s volume of 21 million cubic feet is about one-quarter that of Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, but, as Thompson points out, there is one key difference between the two. “Nobody ate the Great Pyramid of Giza before they built it,” he says. “That’s exactly what you have at Mound Key. All of this is food waste. It is, in essence, a consumed landscape and then a constructed landscape.”
Building the island was a complex process that required a cooperative and organized labor force. Over hundreds of years, the heaps of shells and their sediments were sculpted and molded into a series of terraces and two prominent peaks, measuring 18 and 30 feet high. Rising above the flat Estero Bay landscape, the island’s mounds would have been a marvel to behold at the time. Although Mound Key is overrun with vegetation today, it would have presented a much different profile 500 years ago. “It would have been gleaming white with geometric works in the middle of the bay,” says Thompson. “It certainly would have made a statement.”
Lidar imaging of Mound Key has revealed that a waterway, known as the Grand Canal, measuring 1,200 feet long and 90 feet wide, was dug through the island, dividing it in half. Several smaller tributary canals branched off, leading to the island’s interior and creating a network of channels perfectly suited for Calusa canoes. At the site of Pineland, the second largest Calusa settlement, 20 miles northwest of Mound Key, the central canal was two and half miles long. Its construction required the removal of more than a million cubic feet of earth. “The Calusa knew the water and were expert hydro-engineers,” says Thompson. “South Florida had a highway system of waterways, be it ones that were natural or human constructed.”
Mound Key’s geography, topography, and landscape seemed to Marquardt and Thompson to match the sixteenth-century Spanish maps and records that described the Calusa capital, but definitive archaeological proof remained elusive. Their team needed something conclusive, such as evidence of the famed House of Caalus, which they began searching for in 2013. They believed the most plausible location was atop Mound 1, the island’s highest point. However, the 7,000-square-foot mound was covered in thick vegetation, making extensive archaeological work impossible. The only accessible area was a previously exposed strip of land along the summit’s edge, but this offered an extremely limited view of the mound. “We thought if the house was as big as the sources say it was, it must have taken up the entire summit,” says Thompson, “so the walls have to be close to the edge.” And indeed, they were.
After ground-penetrating radar detected anomalies in the soil, the team began digging and exposed postholes and remnants of an oval building estimated to be around 80 feet long and 65 feet wide, making it one of the largest Native American structures discovered in the Southeast. Radiocarbon dating indicated that the house was first built around A.D. 1000 and was rebuilt and renovated during several phases over the next 500 years. Thompson believes that a structure that large and in such a prominent location must have been the building that the first Spanish visitors describe as being associated with the hereditary Calusa kings. “Our interpretation is that there was a kind of powerful, long-lived lineage associated with the top of that mound,” he says.
The footprint of such a structure, built atop the highest point on an impressive, constructed island in southwest Florida, which also fit sixteenth-century descriptions, might be convincing evidence that Mound Key was the capital of the Calusa Empire, but Marquardt and Thompson wanted additional proof. This soon came from Mound 2, the island’s second-highest point. After the meeting between Caalus and Menéndez in 1566, historical records indicate that the Calusa allowed the Spanish to construct a fort and a Jesuit mission, known as San Antón de Carlos, within their capital. The whereabouts of this fort, which was known to have existed somewhere along Florida’s southwest coast, had been lost for more than 400 years. Over the past decade, though, archaeological investigation led by Marquardt and Thompson atop Mound 2 has revealed remains of Spanish-style buildings, sixteenth-century Spanish artifacts, and a section of stout defensive wall. These could only have belonged to the fort and settlement established by Menéndez in 1566. There was no longer any doubt—Mound Key was the home of Caalus and the Calusa capital.
On the eve of the Spaniards’ arrival in America, there may have been 50 to 60 Calusa communities in central and southern Florida with a total population as high as 20,000. During his travels, the Smithsonian’s Cushing estimated that there were several dozen shell mounds lining the coast of southwest Florida. Some of these, such as at Pineland, Josslyn Island, Key Marco, and Mound House have proven to be rich sources of Calusa artifacts. The kingdom was unquestionably ruled by a leader based in Mound Key, whose power, wealth, and prestige were enhanced through tribute paid to him by client communities across Florida. These gifts, which signified allegiance and loyalty to the king, included food, animal hides, mats, and feathers. Paradoxically, the Calusa king’s control over his vast territory was initially strengthened by the arrival of the Spanish in the New World. By the dawn of the sixteenth century, although the Spanish themselves had not yet landed on the peninsula, European goods and gold were already being funneled into Mound Key, sent there by subordinate Native groups along Florida’s southern shores who poached cargo from frequent Spanish shipwrecks. Access to and control of these highly prized European goods further reinforced the Calusa king’s authority.
Archaeologists often refer to this type of society as a complex polity, in which power is wielded by a select number of individuals and families. These elites or nobles have privileges that are denied to others, while the principal leader is responsible for amassing resources, especially food, and redistributing them throughout the community. “Almost all such societies are agricultural,” says Marquardt. Most cultures of this type in the New World relied on surplus production of maize to maintain a stable society. To the surprise of most researchers, the Calusa became the dominant regional power player without large-scale cultivation of maize or any other crop. “They were fishers, not farmers,” Marquardt says, “and the only fishing society to have become a tribute-based kingdom.”
The Calusa simply didn’t need agriculture because they lived in one of the world’s most fertile estuarine environments, which provided access to a practically unlimited abundance of plants, wildlife, fish, and shellfish. Nearly all the Calusa’s dietary needs could be satisfied by the sea. “If you think about agriculture in terms of a surplus product, it’s reliable, it’s predicable, and it’s abundant,” says Thompson. “What are estuarine resources other than reliable, predicable, and abundant?”
Be that as it may, it might still have been difficult at certain times of the year to consistently feed Mound Key’s population, which may have totaled around 2,000 in the sixteenth century. In a maize-growing society, surplus agricultural products can be harvested, stored, and redistributed throughout the year. This was not easy for the Calusa to do since fish does not last long in the heat without spoiling. In 2017, Marquardt and Thompson began uncovering another of the Calusa’s secrets and another example of their advanced hydro-engineering skills: watercourts that functioned as giant fish tanks.
Once again using lidar, geophysical survey, coring, and excavation, the team identified two immense rectangular features hidden beneath Mound Key’s surface that had once flanked the Grand Canal near its southern end. The enclosures were created 600 to 700 years ago by heaping up piles of shell and sediment to create a berm about three feet high. Both had gates that faced the canal and allowed the interior central space to be inundated with seawater. The Calusa would have been able to place nets across the canal and direct schools of fish, particularly mullet, into the adjacent watercourts through the openings, which could then be closed, trapping the fish inside. Together, the combined storage area of the two watercourts totaled around 1.5 acres, enabling an essential food source to be stored and kept fresh and readily at hand.
There is also evidence that wooden racks once stood near the watercourts, where fish could be processed, dried, and smoked. The researchers determined that the island itself had been carefully graded to create gentle slopes from the watercourts to the tops of Mounds 1 and 2, which allowed for easier transportation of resources. The Calusa had engineered an almost perfect system to maintain and exploit their food resources without the need for large-scale agriculture.
During the era of European colonization, the Calusa proved themselves worthy adversaries to their would-be Spanish conquerors, safeguarding their independence longer than any other Indigenous Floridians. “The Calusa maintained their society and their cultural traditions for nearly 200 years following European contact, far longer than many other societies in the eastern United States,” says Marquardt. They endured despite the rapid collapse of the treaty forged between Menéndez and Caalus on Mound Key. The king became enraged that the Spanish were not upholding their end of the deal to aid him in his conflict against the Tocobaga and began plotting against his European guests. Caalus was betrayed and assassinated in 1567. His cousin and successor, Felipe, who conspired in Caalus’ downfall, initially maintained an alliance with the Spanish, but also eventually turned against them and attacked a Spanish supply ship. He, too, was executed, in 1569. The Calusa burned their settlement at Mound Key and abandoned the island. They returned soon thereafter and remained politically dominant in southern Florida for another 100 years, but the Spanish had had enough. The Jesuit mission and fort at San Antón de Carlos were abandoned.
In the end, it would not be the Spanish but the English and their Native allies who caused the Calusa people’s demise. In the early eighteenth century, in what would become one of the largest slaving raids on North American soil, marauding groups of Yamasee and Uchise Creek from the north invaded southern Florida on lucrative missions to enslave the Calusa and sell them to the English, who were based in Georgia and the Carolinas. The attackers were armed with European weapons; the Calusa were not. In just one generation, the Calusa people were all but wiped out and the remaining few moved farther and farther south until only a small number survived in an enclave in the Florida Keys. The Spanish attempted to come to their aid and began transporting the surviving Calusa from Florida to Cuba, but most of them died of disease. By the 1760s, no Calusa remained in Florida and no descendant communities survive. Their once-great empire seemed to be forgotten, so much so that when Cushing came across the trove of Calusa artifacts from Key Marco, neither he nor any other archaeologist of his day knew who was responsible for them. The story of this unique, politically complex, and highly advanced culture is finally coming to light. “I think credit hasn’t been given to the Calusa,” says Thompson. “It’s long overdue. They deserve their time in the spotlight.”
Jason Urbanus is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.
Reimagining the experience of initiation into an
ancient Greek mystery cult
By BENJAMIN LEONARD
Monday, September 27, 2021
During the day, the rocky island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean Sea is often veiled by clouds. Wind sweeps across the landscape, and the turbulent waters remain, as they were in antiquity, dangerous for seafarers. When the clouds clear at night, however, the peak of Mount Fengari at the island’s center, which reaches a mile into the sky, becomes visible. From the vantage point of the peak, Homer relates in the Iliad, the sea god Poseidon watched the Trojan War as it unfolded. Nestled in a deep ravine in the mountain’s shadow lie the remains of the Sanctuary of the Theoi Megaloi, or Great Gods. From at least the seventh century B.C., pilgrims walked under the cover of darkness from the nearby ancient city, now known as Palaeopolis, to the sanctuary to be inducted into a secret religious cult. As they passed through an immense marble gateway onto the sanctuary’s eastern hill, they might have heard the rush of water coursing through a channel beneath the entranceway. Amid the sounds of music and chanting emanating from farther within the sanctuary, the prospective initiates reached a sunken circular court. Here, ritual dancing and other performances might have taken place, surrounded by bronze statues that were likely dedicated by previous initiates. The noise and darkness, as well as the use of blindfolds, probably induced an altered state of mind that prepared participants for the forthcoming rituals and sacred revelations. By the flickering light of oil lamps and torches, they began the steep descent down the Sacred Way, to the sanctuary’s heart, to be initiated into the mysteries of the Great Gods.
Because initiates were bound to keep the details of the rites secret, ancient literary sources provide scant details about the cult. Those writers who do discuss the mysteries often give diverging accounts and differing identifications of the gods. Coins dating to the second-century B.C. unearthed at the sanctuary depict a great mother goddess. Some ancient writers associate this goddess with a group of gods called the Kabeiroi. “What we know most clearly about the initiation are its promises and benefits,” says archaeologist Bonna Wescoat of Emory University. “Ancient sources strongly state that the Great Gods are powerful and protective gods. Most say they offer protection at sea, while some say they offer protection in times of need. The benefits they confer could have meant different things to different people, depending on what an initiate most sought from the experience.” Some writers even claim that initiates experienced a moral transformation. According to the first-century B.C. Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, initiates into the Samothracian mysteries became “more pious and more just and better in all ways than they had been before.”
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Despite Samothrace’s remote location, the mystery cult of the Great Gods was well known in the ancient world, second in popularity to the mysteries celebrated at Eleusis, outside Athens. Pilgrims traveled by ship from across Greece, the Black Sea region, Asia Minor, and Rome for initiation, which was offered whenever a sufficient number of participants arrived on the island during the sailing season, from April through October.
Samothrace and the Sanctuary of the Great Gods reentered the popular and scholarly imagination during the Renaissance. In 1444, the antiquarian Cyriacus of Ancona visited the island and sketched some of the sanctuary’s reliefs and sculptures. In 1863, the French antiquarian Charles Champoiseau uncovered the famed marble statue of Nike, or Winged Victory, which in antiquity stood above the sanctuary’s theater on its western hill. In the following decades, French, German, Austrian, Czech, and Greek excavators explored the hillside. American-led excavations, which began in 1938 and continue to this day, have unearthed monuments on the sanctuary’s eastern hill, sacred buildings in its central valley, and entertainment and dining facilities on its western hill. Yet, even after more than 150 years of nearly continuous investigations, fundamental details about the sanctuary—including the rituals and administration of the cult, and even the functions of the sacred buildings—remain elusive.
Over the past decade, an interdisciplinary team led by Wescoat, who has directed the American excavations since 2012 with the cooperation of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Evros, has turned its attention back to the western hill. By considering the interaction between the natural landscape and built environment, examining small votive objects and other items initiates left behind, and through survey, excavation, archival research, and 3-D modeling, the archaeologists have begun to re-create the sensory, spiritual, and emotional experience of initiates as they were introduced to the rites of the Great Gods. “We want to explore the landscape, the connectedness of monuments, ancient initiates’ route through the sacred spaces, and the issues of what they could and could not see,” Wescoat says. “These aren’t questions that have been asked in the past.”
Before the Greeks settled on Samothrace in the sixth century B.C., the Thracians, a group of tribes from the Balkans, settled its highlands between about 1100 and 900 B.C. After the Greeks’ arrival, the two groups seem to have coexisted peacefully. Fragments of sixth- through fourth-century B.C. pottery recovered from the island and from Zone, a Samothracian coastal outpost on the mainland, were inscribed in the ancient Thracian language using the Greek alphabet. “From these fragments and other considerations, it’s clear the Thracians kept using their language well into the Hellenistic period,” says epigrapher Kevin Clinton of Cornell University. Diodorus mentions that, at the time he was writing in the first century B.C., the Samothracians still used a non-Greek ancient language, likely Thracian, during the initiation rites. Elements of the cult of the Great Gods may hearken back to a native Thracian cult, Clinton says, though it is unknown what this cult’s contribution was to the rites celebrated in later periods.
The earliest material traces of religious activity within the sanctuary are seventh-century B.C. tankards for ritual drinking and remains of structures dating to the late fifth or early fourth century B.C. Reused blocks preserved in the foundations of these buildings and traces of monumental walls are vestiges of even earlier sacred structures.
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By the mid-fourth century B.C., a few modest buildings had sprung up on the sanctuary’s eastern hill and in its central valley. Around this time, the Macedonian king Philip II (r. 359–336 B.C.) and his future wife Olympias, the parents of Alexander the Great, met on the island to negotiate their marriage and to be initiated into the cult. Their presence on Samothrace seems to have spurred elite patrons to invest in the sanctuary on an unprecedented level, beginning with the construction of a monumental marble building in the middle of the central valley around 340 B.C. This structure is now called the Hall of Choral Dancers after a frieze depicting more than 900 dancing young women that once wrapped around its exterior. The hall is the sanctuary’s oldest standing cult building and incorporated remnants of an earlier chamber into its core. Wescoat believes it may have been commissioned by Philip himself. “There was no gradual lead-up to this, just small buildings made of local materials and then—boom—this extraordinary structure built of imported marble,” she says. “It’s hard for me to see it as a project the Samothracians could have pulled off on their own.”
Over the next century, the Sanctuary of the Great Gods became an increasingly popular destination filled with grand monuments. These were funded by Macedonian royals including the Ptolemies, a dynasty that ruled Egypt from 304 to 30 B.C. Alexander’s successors, his half-brother Philip III Arrhidaeus and son Alexander IV, dedicated a marble building fronted by Doric columns during their short joint reign (322–317 B.C.). Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 284–246 B.C.) built the gateway that served as the sanctuary’s entrance. Opposite the Hall of Choral Dancers, Ptolemy’s wife Arsinoe II commissioned a rotunda that was the largest circular building in the Hellenistic world. “All these monuments transformed the sanctuary into an international center and a glittering display of power and opulence,” Wescoat says.
Although these royal dedications highlighted Samothrace’s most famous initiates and patrons, the sanctuary attracted a diverse set of sailors, merchants, and other pilgrims, some of whom may have participated in the mysteries, while others came for the island’s annual festival. Inscribed lists of initiates from the second century B.C. through the second century A.D., which have been found inside the sanctuary and in the adjacent city, record the names and places of origin of initiates who braved the treacherous trip to Samothrace. Whereas other Greek sanctuaries restricted participation in their rituals, Wescoat explains, the Samothracian cult was remarkably inclusive. “If you could make it to the island and bore no bloodguilt—whether enslaved, free, Greek, non-Greek, male, or female—you had the right to be initiated,” she says. Among those on the lists are theoroi, or sacred ambassadors from other Greek city-states, as well as Roman consuls and other officials, for whom initiation into the cult appears to have become part of a formal tour of the territories after Samothrace came under Roman control in 168 B.C.
When they reached the bottom of the Sacred Way, initiates had to squeeze through a tight passage between buildings to enter the sanctuary’s ritual zone. The descent into the valley created a kind of privacy reinforced by the placement and style of the buildings. “You can clearly see a performative aspect of staging drama through architecture,” says archaeologist Samuel Holzman of Princeton University. While temples and other religious buildings at most Greek sanctuaries were aligned along a linear axis, he says, architects on Samothrace combined the ravine’s natural topography and the arrangement of buildings to engineer a deliberately circuitous layout. “They created a winding interaction with these buildings, where you come upon them suddenly through twists and turns as you navigate the maze of architecture in the sanctuary,” says Holzman. Moreover, the cult structures were built in such a way that visitors could not easily see inside. “Almost all the sacred buildings have very deep front porches and big interiors where people could gather,” Wescoat says. “That goes along with cultic rites that are secret in nature, and not intended to be widely viewed.”
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The nocturnal timing of the initiation rites certainly would have heightened the drama of the natural setting. Moonlight and artificial light from torches would have only partially illuminated sculptures on facades and ornate coffered ceilings. “Throughout the sanctuary’s history, designers, architects, and patrons built monuments in a way that harnessed natural features of the landscape to increase the impressiveness and the affective, emotional power of the site,” says archaeologist Maggie Popkin of Case Western Reserve University. Disorientation caused by the sanctuary’s labyrinthine design might have evoked a range of emotions that are echoed in the few ancient accounts of the secret rites. Several sources mention the myth of the abduction of Harmonia, daughter of Zeus and Electra, by the hero Kadmos. According to the myth, Kadmos was one of the first people from outside Samothrace to be initiated, and while on the island, he whisked Harmonia from her home to the city of Thebes. Some versions of the myth also include a joyous wedding between Kadmos and Harmonia. “There was this emotional push and pull of loss and recovery, of terror and celebration,” Wescoat says.
The sanctuary’s design placed visitors in front of important buildings, but only allowed them to see the structures’ facades from particular angles. “The buildings would be revealed to viewers in a very specific way that gave them the full intended effect of the architecture,” Popkin says. For example, at the bottom of the Sacred Way, initiates would have approached the Hall of Choral Dancers from the side, not from its imposing front. They would have had to round the corner of the hall to see the sculptures that adorned its facade. Some ritual activity occurred inside the building as well, though it’s not clear to what extent initiates were involved. Inside the building’s two large chambers, archaeologists have uncovered bothroi, or ritual channels for pouring libations into the earth, and traces of small hearths. “This was probably the most important cult building,” Wescoat says. “Whether all initiation happened in it, and how it was designed to accommodate that, is a matter of great debate among scholars, including many of our team members.”
In order to more closely examine the physical and visual connections among the sanctuary’s buildings and how these connections impacted initiates’ and other visitors’ experience, the team created a 3-D digital model of the sanctuary that allows them to virtually walk through it from the perspective of an ancient visitor. “What we hadn’t put together as powerfully before was the way in which the space was like a diaphragm,” says Wescoat. “It opened up and then closed, creating a series of stations where initiates would have had to stop and gather.” Access to certain buildings would have also been restricted. Inscriptions in Greek and Latin discovered around the remains of two cult buildings proclaim that “the uninitiated are not to enter.” These inscriptions were not found in situ, and it’s unclear whether they referred to specific buildings or areas, or to the sanctuary as a whole. Given that restricting access to the entire sanctuary would have been difficult, especially since it was not surrounded by walls, Clinton believes the inscriptions likely referred to specific areas. “The boatloads of visitors would undoubtedly include people that were not going to be initiated,” he says. “There would have been areas that could accommodate them.”
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Beyond the open space in front of the facade of the Hall of Choral Dancers, the prescribed route becomes unclear. It seems that visitors could go in a few different directions. Digital modelers are exploring potential pathways through the sanctuary using gaming software and agent-based modeling, which simulates the movements of groups of people who are given a degree of autonomy to make collective decisions. Even with the potential for more freedom of movement, the central valley’s topography nevertheless structured initiates’ pathways. Today, as millennia ago, a natural torrent runs south to north through the length of the sanctuary and out to sea. Past excavators largely viewed this water channel as a nuisance, but in recent years the team has reconsidered it as a kind of monument in itself that may have played an integral role in initiation. In 2019, they excavated along the torrent and documented the ancient course of its channel, which was at least 13 feet deep and 13 feet wide at its broadest point. It is unlikely that the channel was covered, says archaeologist Andrew Farinholt Ward of Indiana University, and though little evidence of bridges survives, there were crossings at a few key points. Initiates would have had to cross over the torrent at least twice to access the southern area of the sanctuary and the theater. “They would have looked down into the channel that, at certain times of year, was rushing with water,” Ward says. “They might have been terrified, the power of the water eliciting a ritual fear that the Greeks liked to have in their sanctuaries. I think part of the reason why they left the ravines open and visible is that even when the torrent wasn’t rushing through, visitors would have still been reminded of that potential.”
As they crossed over the torrent to the western hill, perhaps as the first light of morning began to stream into the valley, initiates had a clear view of the Nike statue. By this time, the researchers believe, they would finally have been inducted into the cult’s mysteries. The structures on this side of the sanctuary served as a kind of entertainment zone where pilgrims could celebrate their initiation. At the base of the hill, archaeologists have uncovered dining rooms that would have been lined with stone couches, where the newly initiated could relax with food and drink and socialize with their fellow inductees. Tens of thousands of conical bowls have been found on both the eastern and western hills, indicating that eating and drinking were important components of initiation. “People seem to have either broken their bowl and taken one half, or left the whole thing,” Wescoat says. “I’m convinced these bowls had a key ritual function within the cult, and that you would leave half for the god, or leave it all.”
As the international popularity of the cult of the Great Gods grew, beginning in the fourth century B.C., the enterprising Samothracians continued to invest in new monuments on the western hill in order to promote their sanctuary. During excavations in 2018, the team rediscovered the theater and surviving remnants of what project geologists have identified as locally quarried white limestone and the vibrant purple stone called porphyritic rhyolite that was used for the theater’s seating. They estimate the theater could hold up to 1,500 spectators, who perhaps also visited the sanctuary for Samothrace’s annual festival. Currently, the theater’s steps are the only known ancient path to the Nike monument and the 340-foot-long stoa, or walled portico, the sanctuary’s largest building. “The stoa was one of the main social spaces in the sanctuary,” Holzman says. “It’s the only place that could have accommodated the kinds of crowds that would have gathered to use the theater.”
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The western hill was another venue where elite patrons flaunted their wealth and influence by constructing monuments, many of which highlighted the role of the Great Gods as protectors of seafarers. These include the Nike monument and the neorion, a building that housed a massive ship elevated on marble supports. Higher up the hill, along the stoa’s facade, gleaming columns topped with bronze statues competed with other gilt-bronze sculptures for visitors’ attention. Artifacts excavated from the stoa’s foundations and interior hint at the identities of Samothrace’s humbler initiates. Bronze fishhooks recovered from the building were left as votive offerings to the gods in thanks for a safe sea passage, along with terracotta statues, hairpins, and jewelry. There were also magnetized iron rings, which, according to several ancient sources, were given to pilgrims as tokens of their initiation. “One of the appeals of coming to Samothrace and participating in its rituals was membership in a club of Samothracian initiates,” Holzman says. Fragments of plaster unearthed in the 1960s that once adorned the walls of the stoa bear graffiti recording the names of initiates. This imitated the practice of carving names in stone. “Clearly, writing your name down as an initiate was an important element of this,” Holzman adds. The bonds formed on Samothrace endured even after initiates left the island. Throughout the Greek world, people built modest shrines as well as larger religious complexes where they met to share fellowship and worship the Samothracian gods.
As their time in the sanctuary came to an end, initiates could gather near the Nike statue, look down upon the central sanctuary, and admire the stunning vista out to sea. These views were a simultaneous reminder of the journey they had taken to the island and of the experience and benefits of the initiation they had just undergone. “You get a retrospective view of what has happened in your past,” Popkin says, “but you’re also invited to think toward your future and what the rituals will bring at a time yet to come—the protection offered by the Great Gods when you embark back onto the sea.”
The Samothracians and international patrons continued to build and remodel structures throughout the sanctuary for nearly 500 years. At the beginning of the first century A.D., an earthquake necessitated repairs to Arsinoe II’s rotunda and the Hieron. A disastrous event in the early second century A.D., probably another earthquake, razed the monuments of the eastern hill and damaged the walled structure around the Nike statue. Although they repaired the Nike monument, the Samothracians didn’t rebuild on the eastern hill. The final securely dated initiate list was inscribed later that century, and finds such as lamps, coins, and glass suggest that activity continued into the third and perhaps fourth centuries A.D. But it’s unclear when exactly cult rituals at the site ceased. As the Great Gods’ significance waned, Wescoat believes, people stopped coming and the cult gradually died out.
In the coming years, the American team, in collaboration with local archaeologist Dimitris Matsas, plans to investigate a section of the ancient city wall that borders the sanctuary to the east and to consider the island’s broader history. The city itself has never been excavated, but surely holds vital information about the cult’s administration. Like ancient initiates surrendering to the unknown of the mysteries, Wescoat and her team remain open to new interpretations that may arise. “Samothrace asks us to be imaginative in every way,” she says. “All parts of the sanctuary—the place itself, the rites as we know them, the buildings in which they happened—call for us to step outside ourselves and into another world.”
You may be one of millions of people returning to recently reopened gyms in an attempt to shed a few pounds of pandemic weight. Or, to give yourself a moment of respite between loading the dishwasher and putting the kids to bed, perhaps you have started meditating. Alternatively, you might put on noise-canceling headphones to take in ambient sounds of lakes or jungles through an app on your phone. If so, you are participating in a widespread commitment to wellness, taking part in activities meant to promote and achieve personal well-being.
Peoples of the ancient world practiced self-care, too, with a range of behaviors and rituals that nurtured mind, body, and soul. For instance, around A.D. 60, at Aquae Sulis, the site of natural hot springs in what is now Bath, England, the Romans built a huge temple and spa complex that became a center for both pilgrimage and health. There, Romans and local Britons socialized and bathed, hoping to heal a host of ailments such as rheumatism, arthritis, and gout. They also worshipped the Romano-Celtic healing goddess Sulis Minerva. The Aquae Sulis springs had already been host to centuries—and possibly millennia—of ceremonies held by Bronze and Iron Age communities. Even after the destruction of the Roman baths in the sixth century A.D., Aquae Sulis’ legacy continued. The health-giving properties of the springs were well known in Britain throughout the Middle Ages, and by the seventeenth century, Bath was the place to see and be seen. It became common for visitors to drink the sulfurous thermal waters, a practice known as “taking the cure.” Some still engage in this activity, seeking its purported health benefits.
In fact, many wellness pursuits enjoyed today were developed in the ancient world. There were Egyptian foot massages, Maya communal sweat baths, and expensive Roman face creams. And not only would a group of ancient Indian practitioners of yoga recognize some of your positions, they might even give you a few pointers.