This city flourished independently of other Cretan powers, playing a leading role in the trade of the region, even becoming, for a while, a protectorate of Ptolemaic Egypt.

Life at Vai went on in LMIII with a diminished capacity, yet the settlement disappeared altogether in the Early Iron Age, to be replaced by an Itanos newly placed close to the shore in the 8th century BC during the Geometric Period.

According to him, the Therans, when founding Cyrene, were indebted for their knowledge of the Libyan coast to Corobius, a seller of purple at Itanus.

[11] Ancient Itanus was one of the most powerful cities in Crete in Hellenistic times owing to geography and a flourishing trade.

The capital of the greater regional power, Itanus had the temples of Asclepius, Athena, Tyche, and Zeus, and was a historic rival of both Praesus and Ierapetra (Ierapytna).

Many Greek inscriptions were found in situ; the most famous one, kept now in the monastery of Toplou, relates a decision by the Roman Senate about Itanos' conflicts and territorial disputes with the neighbor cities Praisos and Hierapytna.

[14] In 1852 HMS Spitfire surveyed the coasts of Crete under the direction of Captain Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt, resulting in Admiralty Chart No.

Writing of his travel experiences Spratt interprets Eremoupoli as “desert city,” because “wild and neglected,”[15] identifying it with a name from a manuscript as Etera.

[16] For four years, 1884–1887, the Italian government financed a mission to central and eastern Crete under the direction of Domenico Comparetti, then minister of public instruction.

Of those known to be from that location and those that had been left in place he found five mentioning Itanos and the Itanoi: “Only in 1884 a large number of epigraphical monuments collected and copied by me, partly in situ, partly in the monastery of Toplu, whither they had been recently carried, have enabled the site of the ancient city of Itanos to be definitively identified with the ruins of Erimopolis, ….

Admiral Spratt, … was not lucky enough to find a single one bearing the name of the ancient city; whereas at the present day … we possess five….”[17] This statement is universally accepted as the archaeological identification of Itanos.

The Cretan Insurrection of 1897 and subsequent intervention of the International Squadron with formation of interim non-Ottoman governments released the archaeologists from any requirement to seek or abide by Ottoman firmans (permissions).

In 1898 J. Demargne of the French School of Archaeology occupied the two sites and demanded permission to excavate from the provisional government.

A new generation of archaeologists at the French School decided to investigate Itanos for the presence of Minoan remains, which would suggest that "a major bronze age site" had preceded the one in evidence.

"[21] The JHS reported: "The remains on the ancient acropolis have suffered very serious injury ... pottery ranging from Protogeometric to Hellenistic has come to light, but without clear stratification; ...."[22] From the East Akropolis they proceeded to the Habitation Quarter: "In the lower town the remains of ancient habitation are covered by extensive construction of the Christian era ...." In a hurry now, because nothing they found would justify a second season, performing abbreviated excavation of the necropolis they thought they had located a single building they called the "Grand Tombeau."

[1] The decision to survey was based on a land settlement arbitration recorded in a public inscription found in Hellenistic Itanos[vi] specifying that the city was sovereign over the entire northeast promontory from Cape Sideros to Karoumes Beach south of Cape Plaka, westward to the mountains of East Crete, a total area of 130 km2 (50 sq mi).

The major site, Roussolakkos, an early version of Palaikastro, was studied by members of the British School at Athens.

The French School therefore concentrated on the region from Vai Beach north to (but not including) the military reservation on Cape Sidero, an area of about 20 km2 (7.7 sq mi), or 15% of Hellenistic Itanos’ territory, with the expectation that, based on the 1950 excavation, they would find “a Greek countryside.” The final results of the survey have now been released.

[27] The work was actually performed by an équipe ("team") of UMR 7041 of the CNRS, the French national research institute, which undertook a number of archaeological projects.

To locate sites the team turned to aerial photography, which was simplified by the previous existence of military fly-over photographs dating from 1945, 1966, 1968, and 1992.

Noting that the photographs were indicating a "diversity of soils and landscapes"[30] the team thought it more efficient to divide the surveyable territory into 11 zones, which they named after topographic features, such as hills.

[33] The survey team began with the expectation that they would find a "countryside" supportive of the Greek city of Itanos,[1] and it was to some degree present.

[xiv] In the words of Moody and Rackham, the peninsula "is the large scale survival of a relict cultural landscape — details of Neolithic, Bronze Age (Minoan), Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Cretan lives ...."[34] This landscape was owned by Toplou Monastery and was threatened for a time by plans made by it with a real estate company to develop parts of it in exchange for a percentage, but in 2000 the peninsula was made a Natura 2000 reservation and in 2015 Sitia Geopark.