Building on the Past

Every day brings additional team members to our project: On Tuesday we welcomed back our very long-time EBAP team member, Dr. Genevieve Hill. Gen has been working with us every year since we started the survey project in 2007, one of only two team members this year with that record! She'll be leading a team of diggers who previously worked with Nick Blackwell, but they will be located on the monumental wall at our site. We are hoping to get a better understanding of the relationship between the Classical builders and their Mycenaean predecessors. This is one of the most interesting things about the architecture at our site: around 1200 BC there were major building projects, wall constructions, and then, six or seven hundred years later, people returned and began building on the ancient remains that they saw, reusing and rebuilding their past. 

Our other new arrival was only with us for the day, Kyle Jazwa. Kyle has worked and studied the architectural material from the site of Mitrou, among other sites, for many years. He is very familiar with roof tiles, bricks and other materials. In very little time Kyle was able to assemble the complete profile of one very large Mycenaean roof tile and part of another, something we only knew from disparate pieces previously. This is an exciting result because it seems likely that only very large buildings would have large, fired roof tiles.