University Daily Kansan / Thursday, September 5, 1991
5
KU grad hits pay dirt in Greece
By Jennifer Bach
Kansari staff writer
KU graduate Curtis Runnels was walking along the eroded badlands under the blazing sun in Nikopolis, Greece.
It was about noon June 3 when Runnels spotted a sharp, white, pointy object protruding from a red-colored gully.
He reached down and pulled the pointy object from the earth. What he found was a 3-pound, 9-inch prehispanic object that changed the history of Greece.
The ax pushed the trace of human life in Greece back 200,000 to 500,000 years, said Runnels, who is also a Lawrence native. Before his discovery, the oldest artifact found in Greece had dated back 70,000 years.
"When I saw it, I knew exactly what it was," he said. "It was sort of like walking down the street and finding a bag of $5,000 with your name on it."
"I just knew something good was going to happen that day," he said.
"Somehow I felt it in my bones that we were going to hit pay dirt, and we did."
Runnels, a professor of archaeology at Boston University, was on an expedition in western Greece with another archaeologist, both from Boston University.
Runnels said that his expedition team had been looking for surface artifacts but that it was just luck that they found an artifact as old and as important as the ax.
He said that the ax had been buried 20 yards under the surface of the earth for more than 200,000 years. Over the years, he was running along the gully exposed the ax.
The ax was an Acheulan ax, named after a town in France where similar axes were discovered.
Runnels, who also participated in archaeological expeditions in Greece during graduate school, said that the archeological studies she answered questions about ancient Greece.
"This shows early human migration," he said. "Germany must have been in a period of upheaval."
Asia and Europe together.
"It adds an entirely new archaeological period of Greece to what we know. It's exciting for me to be involved in it," he said.
Runnels graduated from KU in 1972 with a double major in classical archaeology and anthropology. He received his master's degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.
While studying at Indiana, Runnels participated in expeditions to Thessalia, Greece, where he helped excavate a paleolithic "Franchti" cave for chipped and polished stones. The Paleolithic Age is an early period of the Stone Age characterized by rough or chipped stone elements.
Betty Banks, associate professor of classics, has worked with Rumelns on the book *The Gathering*.
Banks said that for a long time, no paleolithic artifacts were found in western Greece.
"We put paleolithics into Western Greece," she said. "It shows that people in Greece were producing the same
tools that people in Western Europe were."
Banks she knew from conversations with Runnels that he had been interested in archaeology since he was a young boy.
David Frayer, chairperson of the anthropology department, said Runnels' discovery was not very surprising.
"As a kid, he'd been picking up Indian arrowheads," she said.
"People migrated out of Africa a milion years ago," he said. "It's likely we are at the end."
"I don't want to sound cynical about it, but generally when a first thing is found, there's a hubbub about it, and there's something more interesting later found."
Runnels said he hoped to find more artifacts when he returned to Greece next summer.
"If you only find one artifact, it's going to have a limited exposure," he said. "But we think this is just the first step we are going to come out of our work now."
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