Re-Thinking Two Mid-Byzantine Castles on Kephallénia

In the early to mid-1990s in a pre-GIS era, Klavs Randsborg with a team from the University of Copenhagen directed a wide-ranging survey of the Ionian (Greek) island of Kephallénia. Randsborg punctiliously published the multi-period sites he discovered, and analysed the results, paying special attention to the island’s archaic Greek sites but also later medieval afterlife of certain of these sites, including the castles re-occupying Paleókastro (Sami) and Pronnoi (2002). Since the Kephallénia survey was made, new research in the early 2000s on castles and Byzantine urbanism in the western Balkans has significantly expanded the base of knowledge. With this new evidence, it is now possible to provide new interpretations of the Paleókastro, Sami and Paleókastro, Pronnoi castles that in turn shed new light on the management of Kephallénia in the Mid-Byzantine period.