Two Weeks In

Sorry for the long delay since my last post! The work day in Mycenae is so long that it's hard to get the motivation to get on the Internet and type up a post.

This is a general outline of each workday:
5:00 - Wake up, get dressed
5:30 - small breakfast with team (orange juice, bread, nutella/butter, hard-boiled egg/ham and cheese)
6:00 - drive short way up hill, get dropped off and walk a small path down to site
10:30 - half-hour break to eat whatever you brought
1:30 - day ends, start packing up and walking to pick-up point, back at hotel by 2:00
2:15 - rinse off whatever dirt you can, change clothes
2:30 - lunch at Kolizeras restaurant
4:00 - back at hotel, shower and/or nap
5:00 - do work for trench masters (write reports, label photos, e-mail them); this can take up to two or three hours; may also include washing of artifacts found that day
8:00 - or therabouts, do dinner
9:30 - or therabouts, sleep.

So the day here is pretty full.

I'm in Trench 38/39. I'm working with Adrianos (trench master), Heidi (sector supervisor) and fellow team members Lizzie and Katie M., though Lizzie was moved to a second trench in the second week. We also have two Greek workers.

The first day went very slowly, because the staff were still kind of working out what to do and how to get started. We put down metre markers and made measurements for the trench. We started with Trench 39, and the workers started levelling it down. The objective of this trench was to find the corner of a wall that has already been uncovered - we need to know where it ends. Lizzie, Katie and I hand-sifted what the workers were digging up. It was slow-going and a bit tedious, since that's all we did that day. That evening, there were a couple of meetings between staff and team about the hotel, excavation and general expectations and standards for the month.

The two days after that were more of the same: hand-sifting, or going to the actual sift. The sift is an area with six sifts (grates with smaller holes) suspended by ropes - you empty out a bucket, shake out the excess dirt, go through what's left behind, deposit what's been found into bags and dump the rest into a wheelbarrow. I did get to help with the drawing of the extra wall that was found so far.

Thursday July 7th was a bit more productive, with shovelling, trowelling and taking buckets to the main sift, which I also worked that day.
Friday, the workers were extending the trench southward so that we could see if the wall was turning in that direction. On the west side of the trench was a rock pile, and it became apparent that we may need or want to excavate there, so Katie and I helped one of the workers toss part of the pile further west - after so much sifting, I don't think I was ever so excited to move rocks. After that, I sorted the Lithics pile with Heidi. Lithics means unusual-looking rocks that come up during the sifting process - those rocks can turn out to have been used for something, like a tool or blade. So Heidi told me what to look for: particular shapes, or worked edges. I successfully picked out seven likely possibilities, and the rest were discarded.

Saturday, July 9th:
Beach day! A popular destination for the program folks is to go to the beach in Karathona, which is near Nafplio. We took the 11:00 bus from Mycenae to Nafplio and from there a taxi to Karathona. We met up with people who were already there - they had gone to a club in Nafplio and slept on the beach in Karathona, so they had been there for a very long time already when we'd arrived. Some of them left at that point too, freeing up seats for us. We had lunch and drinks on the beach. The water's pretty nice, much warmer than Santorini. I got out to sunbathe and read, went back into the water one more time. A bit later we returned to Nafplio for dinner and gelato from the one certified gelaterie outside Italy. We returned to Mycenae by taxi.

Sunday, July 10th:
The first field trip day. We went to Gla, which is an ancient Mycenaean fortification and also the location of the other excavation overseen by the same college that controls the one in Mycenae. After the tour of Gla, we went to Delphi, the site of the famous Oracle of Apollo and the centre of the Greek world. It had a theatre, temple, and stadium. The bus left at 7:00am and we returned at 8:30 - it was a very long ride there and back, but it was a good day.

Monday July 10th, I spent three hours sifting and then I added on to the plan we'd begun the previous week, with further bits of the wall having been uncovered. Later that evening, I inked the plan so it looks nice and neat. Tuesday July 11th was the worst day yet since I did nothing but sift; Katie was there almost the entire time as well. It was pretty atrocious and I'm hoping it doesn't happen again. Later that evening, at 5:30, we had a tour of the citadel, the main attraction of Mycenae. I saw it last summer but it was nice to see it again, especially with a couple of the staff acting as tour guides. We also got to see parts of it that were closed to the public.
Wednesday July 12th, Heidi took pity on me and Katie, because we'd done nothing but sift the previous day, and said we could wash the artifacts that hadn't been done the previous day because of the citadel tour. We were only too happy to comply. Katie did get sucked into the sift later on, but I was able to finish the rest by the 10:30 break. After the break, I helped measure out the westward extension of the trench, (which will be Trench 38), and we started clearing it out. We'll be working on levelling that down for a few days. Thursday and Friday, no sifting was done! Well, technically, a lot of hand-sifting was done, but this is where someone shovels dirt into a wheelbarrow, we do a quick look-see and repeat until the wheelbarrow is full. It goes by a lot faster, and there's so much dirt that sending our eight buckets of it to the sift would slow things down. After work on Friday, I went to Petite Planete, since I was invited by Vasiliki (who runs it and to whom I gave maple syrup to since she was so helpful to me and Ashley last year - I've visited a few times since I arrived this year.) It was lovely to end the week that way.

Saturday, July 16th:
Another field trip day, this time to Mistras (Byzantine fortification), Sparta (Sparta! One of the powerhouse city-states of ancient Greece) and Monemvasia. We didn't spend much time in Sparta, just saw the small archaeological museum, and on the return to Mycenae we stopped there again to take photos of the statue of Leonidas (famed leader of the expedition to Thermopylae and battle against the vast Persian army, subject of the movie 300). Monemvasia was the place to stroll and relax in - some people shopped, others visited the nearby island which has another Byzantine ruin on top, and I went with Allison, Lizzie, Amanda and Katie H. to the pebble beach. We spent a nice afternoon in the water and resting in the sun.

Sunday, July 17th:
Today's date - I took my chance to sleep in, and made sure to get up at 11:00am, even though I woke several times at 5:00am, 9:00 and 10:00. I had brunch by myself, which involved a book, fresh orange juice and a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. After wrapping up this post, I'll probably find a few others and hang out with them. It's really the first day off we've had with nothing planned to do, and I hope to enjoy it.

As for books, I'm on my fifth. I've read Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two Birds, Albert Camus' A Happy Death, Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, and Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero. I am now working on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, which I'm enjoying so far.