Archaeologists have unearthed remarkable monumental structures built about 4,500 years ago on a promontory on the Cycladic island of Keros, Greece. Apart from these impressive structures, they also found evidence of drainage tunnels and sophisticated metalwork on the promontory of Dhaskalio, which was linked to Keros by a narrow causeway, but is now an islet due to rising sea levels. These excavations, conducted by a team from University of Cambridge, the Ephorate of Antiquities of Cyclades, and the Cyprus Institute, could mean that one of the earliest examples of plumbing or drainage tunnels were not set up by the Minoan civilization as the structures at Dhaskalio were built almost 1,000 years about the Minoan palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. Keros, which is known as the world’s oldest maritime sanctuary, was renowned for flat-faced marble figurines that were said to have inspired the works of Pablo Picasso. The latest excavations proved that even though the raw materials and skills were limited, the metalwork expertise was concentrated in Dhaskalio, which was then a part of Keros at the beginning of the Cycladic Bronze Age. The ‘Tete de figurine feminine provenant de Keros’ (Feminine figurine’s head from Keros) from Greece, dating back to 2,700 B.C., is displayed in an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in Lorraine, France, June 11, 2014. Such figurines were said to have inspired Pablo Picasso. Photo: JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VERHAEGEN/AFP/Getty Images Cambridge University’s Michael Boyd, who is also the co-director of the excavation, said: “What we are seeing here with… [Read full story]
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