Welcome to the Autumn 2015 series of Athens Greek Religion Seminars.

The project: A Greek cityscape and its people. A study of Ancient Hermion is a collaboration between the Ephorate of Antiquities of Argolida and the Swedish Institute at Athens. The fieldwork began this summer with five intensive days of 3D laser scanning and surveying with GPS. Focus lay on the presumed temple of Demeter Chthonia and its surroundings. We furthermore traced the ancient city wall and started re-investigating visible remains in the important necropolis situated along the road to the ancient city of Mases.

The Masters course Water resource in time and space: Focus Greece has been given every year since 2008 in co-operation with the Departments of Economic History at Uppsala University, Cultural Geography at Stockholm University, and Thematic Studies/Environmental Change at Linköping University. During the last couple of years the fieldwork, which is an important part of the course, has been conducted in the Navarino Environmental Observatory in the south-western part of the Peloponnese.

A course that gives postgraduate and presumptive doctoral students an opportunity to travel around in Greece in order to visit archaeological sites and museums has always been very much at the core of the Institute’s activity. It has been given since the Institute’s founding in 1948, and most Swedish scholars in Classical archaeology have at some point taken part in it. Today, the course is given biannually, and the Institute gives five grants to students at the four universities in Sweden that have departments in Classics (Uppsala, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Lund).