Project Leaders

Dr. Soles is a professor emeritus from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where he taught for forty years, serving as Head of the Department of Classical Studies and Director and Founder of the Interdepartmental Program in Archaeology. He received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania where he studied with Rodney Young and George Bass. He is the co-director of the Mochlos Excavation Project, which involves the cleaning and excavation of a number of related sites on the island of Mochlos and its adjacent coastal plain, located just east of the Bay of Mirabello in eastern Crete. The project began in the summer of 1989 and continues to this day. He is the past recipient of several awards, include grants from the Institute for Aegean Prehistory, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, the White Levy Program for Archaeological Publications, the William A. Stern Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. He is the author of numerous articles and author or editor of six volumes dedicated to the findings at the Mochlos site in the Prepalatial, Neopalatial, and Mycenaean periods. He was elected President of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory in 2021.

Costis Davaras received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris where he wrote his dissertation on the Double Axe and Minoan Religion. He entered the Greek Archaeological Service in 1960, served in Crete as Epimeletes, and founded the east Crete Ephoreia in 1970, where he served as Director of Antiquities (Ephor) until 1990 (with a short hiatus in the 80s). As Ephor he installed a collection of antiquities at the Hagios Nikolaos Museum, excavated numerous sites, established many protected archaeological zones which are still protected from development today, and encouraged the return of American archaeologists to east Crete. In 1993 he was appointed a professor of Minoan Archaeology at the University of Athens where he taught until his retirement in 2000 and is now Professor Emeritus. He is a contributor to Mochlos publications and is Co-Editor with Soles of the Mochlos Publication Series.

The director of the INSTAP Study Center for East Crete, Dr. Brogan received his undergraduate degree in Classical Civilization at Wabash College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College. He has been an active member of several excavations in east Crete during the past twenty years, primarily at Mochlos where he has been the assistant director since 1992. His research interests include Minoan material culture with particular emphasis on contextual and regional analysis. His publications include the pottery section of Mochlos IB: Period III. Neopalatial Settlement on the Coast: The Artisans’ Quarter and the Farmhouse at Chalinomouri.

Having received Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College with a dissertation on the Hellenistic pottery on the Athenian Acropolis, Dr. Vogeikoff-Brogan has held the position of the Doreen Canaday Spitzer Archivist at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She has done the majority of her archaeological fieldwork on Mochlos, she has published widely in a number of different areas. Her recent publications include the monograph “Mochos III: The Late Hellenistic Settlement” and the co-edited volume “Carl Blegen. Personal and Archaeological Narratives.”

Giorgios Doudalis graduated from the University of Crete in 2006, completed his Master’s degree with an emphasis on Aegean Studies at the University of Sheffield in 2013, and his Ph.D. at Klassische Institut für Archaeologie at Rupercht-karls Universität Heidelberg in Germany in 2019, where he wrote a dissertation on “Mochlos in the Middle Bronze Age: A Socio-Cultural Approach to the Settlement during the Middle Minoan Period,” which was awarded magna cum laude and defended summa cum laude. He has been working at Mochlos since 2004 as an excavator and trench supervisor, more recently as the Operations Manager responsible for logistics and the yearly organization of the project, and now as Assistant Director. He is a member of the Mochlos Pottery team with special expertise in the pottery of the Middle and Late Bronze Age and is publishing Mochlos vol. VB on the pottery of the town’s ceremonial center. He is co-author with the project’s Director on Mochlos vol. VI which publishes the recently discovered purple dye workshop and the Middle Minoan levels that lie beneath the Neopalatial town. He is particularly interested in exploring the interconnections of Crete and the Near East and the emergence of civilization in Crete at the beginning of the 19th millennium BC. He currently teaches in the Classical Studies Department at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro.

Dr. Chlouveraki earned her degree in Conservation of Archaeological Material from the Technological Educational Institute (T.E.I.) of Athens and completed her Ph.D. on the “Archaeology and Deterioration of Minoan Gypsum Rocks” at the Institute of Archaeology–University College London. She joined the staff at the Study Center just after it opened in 1997 and served as the Head of the Laboratory until April 2014. She now supervises site conservation projects for the Study Center. Since 1993 she has been involved in a number of mosaic and building conservation/training projects in Jordan, Syria, and Oman. In 2014 she joined the Conservation Dept. at T.E.I. of Athens as a lecturer.

Mary Ellen Carr Soles, a long-time member of the Mochlos Project, passed away in 2018 after a long illness. She first came to Crete in 1976 to help her husband, Jeffrey, draw a plan of the Mochlos sandstone quarry, and she quickly fell in love with Crete and all things Minoan. After the excavation began in 1989, she worked as a cataloger on the project for 25 years and contributed to several Mochlos publications, especially Mochlos volumes IC and IIC (2004, 2011). In 1982 she was hired as Curator of Ancient Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and served in that capacity for 28 years. She was responsible for the Greek and Roman collection, where her main interest lay, but also the Egyptian, Mesoamerican, African, and Oceanic collections. She defended the importance of archaeology in an art museum that was primarily dedicated to Renaissance and modern art, but with the help of various donors she was able to expand each collection and make the museum a more inclusive institution that attracts diverse audiences. In 2003 Mary Ellen launched the Friends of Greek Art, a group of North Carolina citizens of Greek descent, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the Classical collection. She transformed a minor collection of Greek and Roman antiquities into one of national importance. As an archaeologist and museum curator, she was especially mindful of the damage that the unscrupulous collection of antiquities does to the world’s common cultural heritage and was also adamant that the museum follow the guidelines of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property in all its purchases. Mary Ellen Carr was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1948. She received her undergraduate degree from Manhattanville College and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She first came to Greece as a Yale travelling fellow to study at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She excavated at Corinth and wrote her dissertation on statues of Aphrodite at Corinth. As a curator at the NC Museum of Art, she was especially proud of the fact that she was able to locate the head of the museum’s Aphrodite Anadyomene in the museum’s basement and restore it to the statue, making it the only example of its type with its head still preserved in situ. In Mary Ellen’s memory the museum dedicated the statue of Aphrodite to her, the Friends of Greek Art initiated a lecture series in her honor, and the Mochlos Project began awarding the Mary Ellen Soles Scholarship to students working at Mochlos.