Hellenic Antiquities Service · Field dossier

Raiders of Antikythera

One year. One purse. One fogged Greek isle. Excavate real survey tracts, climb the academic ranks, and recover the island’s lost chapters before the boats leave.

The dig

Mark fogged survey tracts (up to your crew size), then Excavate.
Study landscape to read geology, terraces, and ruins — dig smarter, not just harder.
Finds fill five era chapters. Finish them all for museum glory; barren ground costs reputation.
Hire diggers, survive field events, and climb from Unknown toward Museum director.

Real archaeology under the fog

Every square is a real unit from the Antikythera Survey Project (Andrew Bevan & James Conolly) — an intensive, island-wide surface survey that walked the rock recording pottery, lithics, structures, terraces, and geology. Digging a tract reveals the actual finds mapped for that patch of ground. No random loot table dressed up as science.

Archive: ADS 10.5284/1012484 · CC BY 3.0 · served here as GeoJSON + PMTiles on MapTiler satellite basemap.

Field notes & fun facts

The mechanism Offshore, sponge divers found a 1st-century BC wreck that held the Antikythera mechanism — a bronze geared “computer” for celestial cycles. The island’s fame outgrew the island.

A speck with sea lanes Only ~21 km², yet it sits between Kythera and Crete on routes that linked the Aegean for millennia — hunters with Melian obsidian, Bronze Age farms, a Hellenistic stronghold (often called a pirate nest), then Late Roman villages.

Walked, not guessed The survey divided the island into tracts and counted what lay on the surface. Your fog is that grid; pottery sherds and chipped stone are the same points archaeologists bagged in the field.

Fortune has a price Empty digs drain glory. Chapters and paydirt promote you. Dig like your dissertation — and your tenure — depend on it.

Loading charts from Athens…

Expedition briefing

Antikythera

Between Kythera and Crete, on the sea lanes of the southern Aegean — a speck that punched above its weight.

Antikythera is a small Greek island (~21 km²) perched between the Peloponnese and Crete. Remote on a map, it sits on routes that linked the eastern and central Mediterranean for millennia.

That geography wrote an episodic history: Neolithic visitors with Melian obsidian, Bronze Age farms tied to Crete, a Hellenistic fortified community (often read as a pirate stronghold), Late Roman villages, thin Byzantine returns — and, offshore, the famous 1st-century BC wreck that yielded the Antikythera mechanism, the ancient geared “computer” that made the island’s name immortal.

The dig board you are playing uses the Antikythera Survey Project (Bevan & Conolly) — an intensive, island-wide surface survey that mapped tracts, terraces, geology, and finds across the whole rock. Your fogged squares are real survey units; the glory is in reading the landscape like an archaeologist.

Red pin = the isle. Zoom out to place it against Crete (south), Kythera (north), and the Aegean.

Raiders of Antikythera

The dig

Real archaeology under the fog

Field notes & fun facts

Excavation

Something turns up

Antikythera

Lost chapter

Season closed