The Cave and the Hill
People have been living on Chios for at least seven thousand years, and two places on the island let you stand where they stood.
The first is in the far north-west, above the village of Agio Gala, where two caves open in a cliff face like sockets in a skull. The upper cave has been converted; a Byzantine chapel of the Panagia Agiogalousaina is built into its mouth, and the effect of walking into it is one of the more disorienting experiences the Aegean offers, because the church has no roof of its own — the roof is the cave, and stalactites hang and drip behind the iconostasis. The name means Holy Milk, from the white mineral water that seeps from the rock and was believed to help nursing mothers. Pilgrims still come.
The lower cave is where the archaeology lies. Excavation there produced Late Neolithic pottery of the fifth millennium BC: dark burnished wares, some incised, some pattern-burnished, with clear stylistic ties to the Anatolian mainland across the water and to the northern Aegean. It is one of the key Neolithic sites of the eastern Aegean, and what it says is exactly what the geography implies. Chios was settled from the east. Its first cultural affinities were Anatolian. It has been looking across that seven-kilometre strait since before anyone in the region could write.
The second place is at the opposite end of the island, in the south, at a small bay called Emporio — the name simply means "trading place," and it has meant that since Greek was first spoken here.
Between 1952 and 1955 the archaeologist Sinclair Hood directed excavations at Emporio for the British School at Athens, and what he found was one of the most useful stratified sequences in Aegean archaeology. At the bottom lay an Early Bronze Age settlement of the third millennium BC, contemporary with the earliest phases of Troy, with a long succession of superimposed building levels showing continuous occupation over centuries and unmistakable connections to the Troad and the Anatolian interior. These were not Greeks. They were the people the later Greeks would call Pelasgians or Carians or Leleges when they wanted a word for "those who were here first."
Above that, after a gap of some centuries, came the Greeks.
The Archaic town at Emporio is one of the best-preserved examples anywhere of what an eighth- and seventh-century BC Greek settlement actually looked like on the ground, and if you want to understand the world in which the Iliad was composed, it is one of the places to go. There is a lower town by the harbour. Above it, on the hill now called Prophitis Ilias, sits an acropolis with a substantial hall — the excavators called it a megaron, and it is the sort of building in which a chief feasts his retainers — and beside it a small temple of Athena. Below and around, scattered on terraces, are the remains of perhaps fifty houses.
That is the whole social order in one plan. Not a city of citizens laid out on a grid, but a strong man's hall on a height with a dependent village clinging below it. Historians tracing the emergence of the polis out of the Dark Age chiefdom come back to Emporio repeatedly, because it shows the transition in section. The site was abandoned around 600 BC, almost certainly because the population drained away to the growing harbour town on the east coast, which is where everyone has lived since.
Emporio also sits squarely in the mastic zone. Resin leaves no archaeological trace worth the name, so there is no direct evidence that these people were harvesting it. But the persistence of substantial settlement precisely in the resin-bearing south, at a period when the northern harbours were closer to the main sailing routes, is at least a hint that the southerners had something worth staying for.
A third site should be mentioned, because it ran for a thousand years. At Kato Phana, on the south-western coast, stood a sanctuary of Apollo Phanaios, and excavation has recovered Geometric and Archaic votive material on what looks very much like an older cult site beneath. Places like Phana are the connective tissue of an ancient island: not settlements but meeting points, where people came down from the villages several times a year, sacrificed, ate together, arranged marriages, settled quarrels, and remembered that they were one people.