Azoria (Azorias) is the local toponym for a distinctively rounded and double-peaked hill in Kavoussi area, East Crete, overlooking the Bay of Mirabello in northeastern Crete. Located 1 km southeast of the modern village of Kavousi and 3 km from the sea, the site occupies a topographically strategic position at a natural transition between the lowland plain of the north Isthmus of Ierapetra and the mountain valleys of Avgo and Papoura, which form the northwestern edge of the Sitia Mountains.

The 2002 excavations at Azoria were conducted from June 3 to July 16, after which four weeks were spent at the Institute for Aegean Prehistory Study Center for East Crete, processing and studying the finds.

The hilltop of Azoria consists of alternating outcrops of gray dolomite, bluish gray crystalline limestone, and phyllite, rising steeply east of the alluvial ridge where the modern village of Kavousi lies. The slopes of the hill on the northern and eastern sides descend sharply into the river valleys draining from the mountain watersheds of Avgo and Ayios Niketas. The precipitous cliffs of the Kastro dramatically overshadow the site to the south.

Ancient walls and pottery sherds are concentrated on the surface of Azoria at an elevation of approximately 320-370 m above sea level. The site visibly extends across 15 ha from Panagia Skali in the west to Pachlitzani Agriada (or Makellos) in the east.  The access to the site from the south is a well-constructed cobble path, or kalderimi, of Venetian date. This path passes through an abandoned hamlet that may have been occupied as recently as the Ottoman period.

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The hilltop of Azoria, now crowded with dense garigue and maquis vegetation (thyme, sage, burnet, broom, carob, wild olive), has not been used for agriculture for at least a generation, although the regular series of agricultural terrace walls encircling the site testify to previous use of the area for extensive barley cultivation. Some olive, almond, and fig trees are scattered on the lower terraces of the hill. Beekeeping has been both a recent and traditional occupation, owing to the density of thyme bushes that have overtaken the hill following successive periods of intensive browsing of sheep and goat. Although the site appears to have been occupied sporadically from the Byzantine to modern period, the condition of Azoria a hundred years ago was probably little different from what one sees today.

The site was originally explored by Harriet Boyd (Hawes) in 1900. In that year she began an extensive campaign of archaeological investigations in eastern Crete under an Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellowship from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, excavating at a number of locales in the area around Kavousi. Azoria had evidently attracted her interest because of its complex chronology and position along important inland routes connecting the plain of Kavousi with the Siteia Mountains. Boyd excavated a roughly rectangular trench measuring about 300  located in the center of the summit of the South Acropolis. Here she uncovered a deeply stratified and puzzling series of walls that seemed to form the foundations of three circular structures overlying at least two earlier phases of building. Boyd unfortunately did not publish illustrations or detailed descriptions of the artifacts from these excavations, although she proposed a Late Mycenaean and Early Iron Age date for pottery recovered from the buildings' earliest levels.

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The current reinvestigation of Azoria by the American School of Classical Studies has its roots in an intensive survey of the Kavousi area conducted by Haggis between 1989 and 1992. This survey revealed the large size of the site, its complex settlement history, and the long duration of occupation, which spanned the Final Neolithic, Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, and Archaic periods.  The regional survey demonstrated that the stable and constant system of clustered agricultural villages characteristic of much of the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200-700 B.C.) gave way to a pattern of dispersal and gradual abandonment from 800 to 625 B.C.The abandonment of these villages seems to have coincided with an increase in the size of the Azoria settlement, which we now estimate to have been as large as 15 ha in the seventh-fifth centuries. The rural sites that replaced the Early Iron Age site clusters were few and smaller in size. They seem to have been part of a weak, two-level hierarchy of settlement that emerged by the end of the seventh century

The results of the survey, in conjunction with excavations conducted from 1987 to 1992 at the neighboring sites of Vronda and Kastro,  have helped define an Early Iron Age settlement system characterized by discrete groups of sites centered on upland water supplies, arable land, and pasturage . These communities practiced a mixed household agropastoral economy. Although the settlement at Vronda  was abandoned at the end of Late Minoan (LM) IIIC, the continued use of the site as a cemetery during the Early Iron Age and Orientalizing phases may be an indication of strong social links, perhaps kinship ties, persisting between settlements in the area until the seventh century, when the burials ceased.Excavations at the neighboring site of the Kastro have revealed a contraction and abandonment of settlement from 725 to 625, reinforcing the idea of a long-term shift of population to Azoria at the end of the Early Iron Age.  The large size of Azoria, which is roughly 10-15 times larger than adjacent Early Iron Age sites, leads us to hypothesize that a nucleation of population and attendant processes of urbanization were under way here during the Archaic period.

The current excavation is part of an initial five-year work plan (2002-2006) to explore stratigraphically the process of nucleation and the local consequences of changes in rural settlement and land use associated with the formation of a small urban center. The relationship between the urban and rural cultural spheres has implications for understanding changing systems of land use through time and for defining the structure of economic and political power in the early city. At the heart of the research design is the study of the new civic identity that emerged following the demise of the Early Iron Age village clusters.

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