May 2014
When I first
visited Eleon on May 16th 2014, on the Uvic 'May trip' (GRS 395 Classical Studies Abroad), where students are given
the opportunity to spend four amazing weeks visiting
many different ancient sites and museums, it looked from a distances like any
other small cairn in Greece. It was a beautiful little hill covered in tall
grass, big purple thistles the kind you would find in highlands of Scotland and
two old trees that provided the only shade at the site. At the top of the hill
there were four large square trenches and the exposed ancient ramped entrance
to the site running down to the edge of the polygonal wall and these were
mostly covered by tarps and over grown with grass from the past year.
We are
now in our third week of excavations at Eleon and the grass covering the site has
been removed with a combination of hoeing and weed whacking. The transformation
of the hill into a working archaeological site has been astonishing. In three
short weeks the site no longer looks over grown, but is clean and trim and
trenches and surrounding areas are clear and there is a path leading up to the
site and all the viciously sneaky thistles have been removed. I would never
thought to have referred to a thistle as sneaky before this trip, but no matter
how hard you try to remove all the thistles while avoiding their thorns there
is always one that gets through your gloves and you have to spend the next ten
minutes looking for it. Rather than four trenches there are now nine
new ones, giving us a total of thirteen trenches that are slowly revealing more
and more about the people who once occupied the site of ancient Eleon.
Days at Eleon start with
watching the sunrise every morning over the island of Euboea causing the sky
and sea to turn beautiful rays of pink and gold as a new day of excavation
begins. I do not think I will ever have enough photos of the sunrise here in
Dilesi. Then it is a half hour ride to the dig site and if you are lucky enough to be in the right car you get to go the back way
to the site which is a lovely dirt road through fields of wheat, orchards of
olives and past the military air base whose fighter jets fly formations over us
while we dig. At the site we collect our tools, shovels, hand picks,
buckets, trowels and brushes. We then divide up into our trench teams which
are rotated every week to give us the opportunity to work with
many different people who are on the project and to get the chance to work in
different trenches. This way we are able to gain experience with many different
types of surfaces, finds and perfect our skills at how to properly excavate and
preserve them. I had the great pleasure this week of being able to watch a
piece of metal be excavated from our trench by our trench leader very
carefully and slowly with small metal
tools that remind you of what you might see at the dentist, some wooden
scrapping tools and a fine brush. Most of the day though is spent working hard
to remove the hard packed soil with large and small picks keeping a careful eye
out for things like pottery, bone or terracotta which are the most common to
find. The dirt we shovel into buckets that are wheelbarrowed up 'wheel barrow
mountain' that is a giant mound of earth removed from previous years of the
excavation. Every day we find many different pieces of pottery and roof tile
both from Mycenaean times to the late medieval period. They are then taken
back with us, washed and cataloged. At one pm our
digging ends due to the heat of midday and we go for an amazingly delicious
lunch at the house of a woman named Stavroula, who cooks the most
wonderful lunches. The afternoons are filled with washing, sorting the
finds of that day and learning how to identify and preserve them. The evenings
are watching the sun set as we eat dinner at the sea side tavernas.
It has been a long time
since I have thought archaeologists were all handsome men in leather jackets and
hats who battled against the evil plots of the Nazis and the old Soviet Russian
state to control the world using ancient magical relics. It has been a real
pleasure to be given the privilege to work a long side professional
archaeologists and to see how a real site is excavated and to be a part of that.
Although sometimes when you are picking through dirt that just will not move I
cannot say that I would not turn down a secret entrance that is only revealed
at high noon by the staff of Ra. It would certainly make digging much easier.
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