Byzantine jugs and bowls

Well, it is down to my last week in Greece. It seems so sudden, so unexpected. Every day I've been here all I can think about is what the next day will bring, and in a few, the next day will bring a plane trip back to the States. I'll admit to being saddened by this. I really like it here. The scenery is great, the work, while difficult, is good. My hands don't really agree; I did get a blister on top of a callus today, and I'm getting calluses in placed I didn't think I'd be getting them, like the inside of my pinky. I mean, really? The inside of my pinky? But that's what's happened!

Byzantine cook pots

However, having my quarter-century birthday in Athens was awesome. I got to spend it touring the Acropolis, the Agora, and several museums. We went shopping in Placa, which is a market area, and I bought a new shirt. I had rabbit stifado, which was absolutely amazing, and a dirty gin martini, which was not nearly so astounding. With dinner, we had some amazing Nemean wine, although it was an adventure getting to the restaurant. We couldn't find the one recommended by the hotel and we spent about an hour and a half looking for it. In going for the one we did, we definitely had an amazing experience.

Rabbit Stifado, although mine had pearl onions

Sunday we went to the museums we didn't catch on Saturday. Since there was a much smaller group that stayed overnight in Athens versus just the day, we had a lot more flexibility. The Byzantine Museum was especially interesting because that's primarily the material I've been working with, so it was nice to see whole examples of the sherds, rims, and handles that I've been piecing together.

The Parthenon

A temple in the Agora whose name
I cannot remember
but it is dedicated to Hephaistus

The Vapheio Cups
Really my two favorite gold objects ever

Cycladic figurines are the best!

Ancient Egyptian figurines on a boat

This is the real version of the one in Fictia
I have no idea what it is

The Springtime Fresco
From Thera

The Bernaki museum was interesting, but huge, and covered so many time periods that it became overwhelming towards the end. There was just too much visual information on things that I did not know about.

And that's really been it so far. I may have some more pictures; we'll see how good I am about going out and taking them this week. Not much else is going on in the excavation except for the usual moving of dirt. Some weapons have been found, which is pretty rare, and I found the third Mycenaean pot that has been found on site, so that's sweet. Other than that, though, we are winding the season down and heading to a party on Thursday, so we won't have to work Friday. And then it's home. It's a bittersweet feeling, really.

The ibyxes from the Room of the Boxers
From Thera

I found a donkey shoe too!
It's the one in the middle

However, the National Museum was pretty sweet. The Minoan frescoes from Thera were what I most wanted to see and they are just astounding. Everything about them is so incredible, from the color, to the shapes and almost abstract expressionism.

Some sort of Greek Orthodox thing that looked cool

Changing of the guard outside the
presidential palace

Well, if you thought 105 degrees was hot enough to simply be outside in, try digging in 105 degree weather and you will quickly learn that is far worse. Even though Nemea is cooler than Mycenae, apparently it still will hit the triple digits. Once again, however, I was in the much cooler museum, where it stayed in the lower 90's all day.

Well, truth be told, I was outside in the morning when it was nice and cool. Before the sun rises over Tsoungiza hill the Nemean valley is blissfully refreshing, sitting at around 70 degrees, usually with a nice light breeze blowing. Once the sun passes over the summit, however, water can start to boil fairly rapidly and if there wasn't so much dirt flying around we could make quite a bit of sun tea.
My morning projects have been going rather well so far. Before the museum opens I've been working on mapping scarps. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it actually is. What that means is that we are mapping vertically the layers that we can see in a trench.

This is from the Poggio Colla Field School

This is a scarp from an excavation trench in the Poggio Colla Field School. If you're lucky you have four sides perfectly oriented to the cardinal directions. In Nemea, we can definitely do that since where we're working is nice and open and flat. If not, then you just have to draw your maps a bit differently, but it isn't too hard to figure out.

What's nice about this scarp is that it is pretty easy to read. There is an upper layer that is kind of red, followed by a gray sandy color, and then followed by a charcoal gray. Below that is a thick layer of pale yellow-brown, and the bottom is reddish-brown with large stones. In the middle you can see a rust-colored vertical strip. This could be a soil inclusion, or it could be a stain of some sort. Not having excavated there, I couldn't tell you.

So, why bother with drawing this out and mapping it? Who cares? You've already dug through it, you know where the levels were while you were excavating and you're off to do paperwork and museum studies at the end of the season. Why give yourself more paperwork?

The answer's pretty easy. What if you want to dig a trench on the other side of this one? Wouldn't it be nice to have a quick and easy way of looking at what happened in a previous year? Why, yes, it would. And mapping it at the end of the season is nice because you won't have a year's (or multiple years') worth of runoff mucking up your layers. It's like you're getting a preview of what may happen. The second reason is that this is a great way to double check that you wrote the elevations down correctly while you were excavating.

Mapping the scarp is not a quickly done rough drawing. It is drawn to scale. So if you had written down that your first level ended say a foot below the surface, when in actuality it ended a yard below, well, the rest of your levels very well could be messed up. You should catch it, but hey when it gets hot, it gets harder to think clearly and there is far more room for error. Mapping the layers afterward means you'll have the elevations for every layer and you can go back and check to see that everything makes sense.

So that's how I've spent my mornings for the past two weeks. It's been fun, and I'm glad I get to do it. I've been showing some of the other students how to go about it as well, to see the layers and accurately get them onto paper. The ones we've been drawing have not been nearly as pretty and easy to read as this one, go figure. N, in Nemea, we'd just much rather give people the things that are much harder to do first, so when they get to map something that's easy, they appreciate it for how easy it is. We had roads cutting through, clay falling in, an uneven surface to stand on... it was tough work! But we finished the two most important drawings today and I think I'll be starting in another section tomorrow with a new crew. I can't wait!

The view from our seats
in the theater at Epidauros

Well last week was certainly a busy week! Not that this one has been any slower. Last week at the museum we opened up a can of worms and gave ourselves a lot of work, but it was necessary and could only be delayed for so long. At Mycenae we closed the site, and that is a barely controlled level of chaos that thankfully usually only lasts for a day. This week has been continuing through that can of worms and working in stifling heat in Nemea. But more on last weekend. It really is the interesting part.

Just outside of where we had lunch
in Nafplio

Friday we journeyed to the ancient and beautiful theater of Epidauros to see a performance of Oedipus Rex. It's a sad story, and it's amazing how well emotion can be understood even when the language is not. The play itself is an interesting foray into the mingling of fate and free will, and the questions surrounding our lives. If you haven't read it, I heartily suggest it.
That was a rather late night and while I tried to sleep in, I only slept until 7. That did mean I got to enjoy two cups of coffee and a breakfast in silence. It was very refreshing.

A fountain with an Arabic inscription
Nafplio

The rest of Saturday was spent in Nafplio. It is such a beautiful city! It was founded as a Venetian stronghold and was the original capital of Greece after independence was gained from the Turks. It is so colorful and the sea is so blue. Granted, its location also makes it humid, but for the beauty of the area it is totally worth it. We spent the day shopping and eating. Eating a meal here is really quite the affair. It generally takes between an hour to two. It's meant to be enjoyed in good company, with good food and be a pleasurable, relaxing experience. So lunch was almost two hours. When we aren't on site, that's fairly normal. Dinner can take even longer. It's actually a good business plan as it tends to force you to buy more food!

More of Nafplio
The colors on the buildings are incredible!

Shops in Nafplio

After lunch we walked around the boardwalk and saw the fortifications on the cliff. The beach we got to was rather more full of cobbles than pebbles or sand, but the stones were warm and the breeze was nice. It didn't take long to get comfortable and enjoy watching the people. I had not brought my swimsuit and it was nice just to watch. I'm still trying to get used to seeing such small swimsuits on men, especially on the older men, but even those sights could not have spoiled my day!

The rocky shore of Nafplio

And then after we got home and cleaned up, most of us professed an interest in sleep that ended up being delayed until 2:00 AM by good Nemean wine. Go figure. Once you open the bottle...

Temple of Aphrodite, Corinth

However, that did mean that some of us were a bit tired for our whirlwind tour of the sites near to our current home. We visited Corinth, Isthmia, Lerna, and Tiryns, in that order. As the day got warmer, the tours got shorter. We came home to work on our final site write-ups, which were more of a chore. Damn that word school in "field school."

Corinthian Sgraffito
It's what I've been looking at
in the museum in Nemea

All in all, though, a great weekend that capped off a fun week. It was a great time. I cannot wait to visit Nafplio again!

The mighty walls of Tiryns

The Poseidon Mosaic at the baths
in Isthmia

A great weekend went by touring Pylos and the tholos tombs of the surrounding area, swimming in the Aegean, and finally getting to tour the Mycenaean citadel, something that had been delayed due to the Greek elections. It was fun, and busy, and I learned a lot, but I spent a good portion of Sunday afternoon sitting on that Mycenaean bridge just outside of town and reflecting on what I'm doing in Greece.
Really, our efforts to understand the past should be comended. So little is left for us to try to interpret and rebuild our history and it's a rather daunting task. Going through the museum in Mycenae and looking at the information on trade networks, it's easy to see how much we know, but it is just as obvious to see how much we don't know.
For example, what were the names of the people buried in the tholoi (plural for tholos)? What did they take with them into their tombs? Only one tholos has ever been discovered that had not been looted in antiquity, and it was a rich find. Was that always the case? What were the decorations in the tombs?
Stemming out into the larger portions of society we get other questions. What was daily life like for the men and women of prehistoric Greece? Were the women secluded as they were during Homer's time? Did they participate in any battles, or was that a privilege reserved for the elite? How many acres would it take to consider yourself a well-to-do farmer? Or how many olive trees? What else did they put in their olive oil? How did the larger populace spend their evenings?
Some of these questions can most certainly be answered with common sense. Before the electric light bulb, people tended to work around the daylight as artificial light was expensive. Daily life for most people probably consisted of farming and scratching out an existence. Currently, at least at Pylos where the palace is better preserved, there does not seem to be much physical segregation between men and women, although it seems clear that each sex had different responsibilities.
But why is this important? Will it matter 500 years from now what we thought about the Mycenaean civilization, or for any ancient culture for that matter? What will our cities look like in 500 years, and how will they be interpreted? Even today sites that are that old have been reinterpreted as something done by ancient aliens or our European ancestors that somehow, someway made it across the Atlantic for the sole purpose of confusing their modern-day descendants. Just read about the Mysterious Megaliths of New England and you'll see what I mean. It is definitely not what Paul Angel thinks it is.
So while looking at the citadel from about a two miles away, all I could think about was what it was like for a merchant of the time traveling from nearby Tiryns to sell his wares in Mycenae, crossing the bridge and looking up to see the walls for the first time. Even after thousands of years, it is still an impressive sight, and it's humbling to see. I can only imagine the awe and the wonder of seeing something so impressive, seemingly perched on the edge of a cliff.
I came to the conclusion yesterday evening that trying to capture that feeling, that momentary glimpse of someone's life, is what makes archaeology important. Granted, that image may change. Indeed, it should, and that's a part of the scientific process. In fact, what we think of history now will help our descendants to define our parts in history. Any human connection with the past is what makes it interesting and worthwhile, and I think that's what we need to keep in mind in looking at history. It isn't just the big events that define our short time on earth. It's all of the people and their daily lives that are the sum of our existence here, and archaeology is the best way to get into touch with that. Or at least that's what it seemed like as the setting sun cast its warm glow on the stones of the Mycenaean citadel.