The results of two related fieldwork projects are presented: a brief
salvage excavation at Plakari (a Final Neolithic site near the modern
town of Karystos) and a survey of prehistoric sites on the Paximadi
peninsula (the western arm of the Karystos bay), both located in
southern Euboea. These ventures were part of the larger mission of the
Southern Euboea Exploration Project (SEEP), a multidisciplinary research
program dedicated to the study of the Karystian past and which
maintained a presence in southern Euboea for over 25 years. These
projects have found that, contrary to what archaeologists once believed,
southern Euboea was hardly an uninhabited and isolated region in
prehistory. The inhabitants actively participated in the expanded
maritime and social landscape that characterized the later Neolithic and
Early Bronze Age in the Aegean, taking part in exchange networks of
stone, ceramics, marble figurines and vessels, and possibly agricultural
goods and metalwork.