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Published: June 29th 2011
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Voidokilia 1
The first view of Voidokilia you get as you walk in the beach... pictures can't do it justice. Hello again! In my attempt to be a little timely with my posts, I’ll try to write up the points of interest from the past week, including time at Voidokilia, participation in the St. John’s Day festival, and an absolutely spectacular visit to the archaeological site and museum of Olympia. I also realized that I managed to forget to upload (like that chain of verbs there?) the pictures from our visit to the Palace of Nestor, of which there are quite a few, from the day after we arrived, so I’ll hopefully do that in a separate post soon.
On this past Wednesday, after we finished excavation for the day we headed over to one of the most beautiful beaches in Greece, Voidokilia. I, predictably, didn’t swim (I actually have yet to swim in Greek waters, something I think I get teased about daily), but it’s a beautiful natural harbor and the pictures really don’t do it justice. Other than that, our days were pretty uneventful, until we reached Thursday. St. John’s Day, whose eve falls on the Midsummer solstice, is a saint’s day holiday apparently well-celebrated in this part of Greece. The town of Iklaina, home to our dig
Voidokilia 2
Trying to capture the curve of the sandbar... site, threw a party on the eve of St. John’s Day in their main square, where there was a feast of free food, plenty of apparently hard-hitting home-brewed liquor, traditional Greek dancing, and a sort of ritual where the children (and young adults, in our cases) run up a hill, jumping over four piles of burning wreathes. At times they were little more than coals, but most of the time the flames reached pretty impressive heights. I didn’t end up jumping myself, since I foolishly came in a dress that went past my knees, but it was a lot of fun watching everyone, and I participated as often as I could in the dancing, in which the Americans stumbled around laughing and the Greeks danced laughing at us. In short, a wonderful, laughter-filled night.
Friday and Saturday passed without too much advent as well—my biggest excitement, or at least change in routine, was that I ended up helping the paleo-ethnobotanist (how’s that for a job description?) do flotations on Saturday. Here’s an attempt at a translation of that archaeology jargon: China, our paleo-ethnobotanist, studies the plant remains that show up in the dirt where we’re digging, and uses them
Voidokilia 3
The cliffs, which some impetuous souls decided to jump off of. to determine things like the plants that were growing at the time and how humans were interacting with them. I was helping her out by running flotations, which is a way of separating plant remains (which generally float) from the dirt and rocks (which can be washed away or sink). We have a flotation tank with three levels, separated by two different sizes of mesh. Without getting into too many details, we essentially run water over soil samples so the dirt falls through the mesh and the large things like rocks and missed pieces of pottery and bone get caught in the large mesh, while things that float like plant remains are caught by a smaller mesh. While the work is a little monotonous, it was a nice break for the gripping muscles in my hand, and since it was the hottest day yet on site (40 degrees C, or around 104 degrees F), always having my hands submerged in cool water was definitely appreciated.
On Sunday, we got to sleep in for several hours, then hopped on the bus for another long field trip, this time to the site of Olympia—yes, the home of the original Olympic games.
St. John's Day
Getting pictures was difficult, since it was at night, but you can at least see the line of fires and the size of the kids jumping over them. These games were originally performed for the gods as part of a religious rite, though, so Olympia, apart from its athlete and spectator housing and athletic facilities, also had very impressive temple buildings. While all of it is in ruins, due to frequent regime change and earthquakes, the ruins themselves are nevertheless beautiful, since they allowed the site to remain wooded as it once was, and walking through it is just an enchanting experience. I snapped an obscene number of pictures as we walked around the temple complexes and watched in amusement as most of the male contingent of our party raced across the still-extant original Olympic racetrack, which was said to be paced out by Hercules. After we had walked through some (though certainly not all) of the site, we headed over to the Olympia museum, which was truly one of the best museums I’ve been in. Their rooms were spaciously laid out for full effect, and the artifacts that they found at Olympia are some of the most famous ancient Greek artifacts around. The statue of Hermes, for example, and the Hellenistic statues of various Roman emperors (at least for me) were simply breathtaking. As a mixed blessing,
Olympia 1
There will be a lot of tree-and-ruins pictures following... for the first time yet on the trip the sky was overcast, which may have made some landscape pictures less impressive, but it gave us a very welcome reprieve from the heat.
Today, Monday, aside from it being my dad’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Dad!), was my first of three days in the lab instead of in the field, which essentially means dealing with the pottery and bone that come back from the site—cleaning and organizing and identifying and cataloguing. I personally spend most of the day dealing with old samples from 2002 that had suffered mold damage while in storage, cleaning the mold off with a special solution. It may sound gross, but it was actually surprisingly enjoyable.
I could probably go into more detail about, well, everything, but it’s getting to be dinnertime and I think this is a reasonable length for a blog post. Hopefully the internet and electricity will cooperate later tonight (due to all the political upheaval that no one in the states seems to know anything about, the electrical companies are on strike), and I’ll be able to post this!
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