Ancient History Ramblings

GPS and more GPS

Today was an interesting day for PKAP. The excavations started on Vigla and Kokkinokremos this afternoon, so everyone was pretty excited and I would suggest reading other PKAP staff members' blogs. I was on GPS duty with Bill and Bret. We continued to add in points as we slowly create a new topographic map of our region. We spent most of our time on the west slopes of Vigla and it was very hot. The west side of the slopes were protected from the wind and so it was very hot and still. The slope was also a bit slippery and I slid down once. I made the mistake of wearing shorts instead of long pants and scraped my leg up a bit. I thought about including a picture of it, but it looks a lot worse than it is, as scrapes often do. Anyway, we feel very good about our progress and since everyone is still pretty excited, we are going to put in a long half day tomorrow. We will see how long the enthusiasm lasts, and soon people will start to wear out.

RSM

Doughnuts and Doctors

As I have mentioned before, doughnuts (an important food staple) are quite expensive on the island. To be fair, the dollar's low value against the Euro means that most things on the island are expensive. For example gas is $6.53 a gallon, a 1 liter bottle of soda is $2.32, and a doughnut is $2.79.

Today, however, I found something that was both less expensive and surprising. One of the project members has had a medical issue that we eventually felt needed to be looked at by a doctor to be safe. We obtained the number of a local doctor and called him up to see if we could find a way to see him. He said that he would be by in an hour, which he did, and then only charged us 45 Euros for the housecall, or US $69.75. He was also very helpful and very friendly. Fortunately everything with the project member turned out to be ok and we I know that even if I keep eating expensive doughnuts, the healthcare I will need from eating the doughnuts will be inexpensive, and friendly.

RSM

GIS and Other Things

It has been hard to find time to blog lately. We have had lots of busy days. Yesterday, we took the students to Paphos (mosaics and Paul's Pillar), Ayios Georgios (basilica), and Ayios Neophytos (monastery). We left at 7O00 AM and got back to the Petrou Brothers at 6:30. Then Bill and I grabbed the R8 and went out to the site and took some GPS points on the flags Michael Brown had put in to mark the geophysical tracts. We finished up about 7:30 and made it back to the hotel just in time for dinner.

Today, we introduced the students to the museum and the procedures we use for processing the artifacts.After they left the museum I spent some time catching up on my pottery analysis and worked up to lunch time. After lunch Bill and I went back out and started the GPS work on Vigla. We took quite a few points, but after a while stopped to help Michael Brown and David Pettegrew pay out our trenches for excavation - 2 on Vigla and 2 on Kokkinokremos. This was really important to finish since Dr. Maria Hadjicosti is coming down from Nicosia tomorrow to see where we want to excavate. It is quite strange looking since the trenches are all out in the middle of nowhere with no noticeable features around them. Since they are based on the geophysical work, however, we feel pretty confident that they are in the best spots for our work.

RSM

Elevator of Death

Yesterday was interesting in many ways, but the part that I found the most interesting was the elevators here at Petrou Brothers. There are 2 elevators for the hotel and both are quite interesting. They are quite small, 4 is the maximum they can hold, as long as the people are not carrying luggage or lots of stuff. I always like watching the students when they first encounter

these elevators, just because they are so different from American elevators. For example, the bottom floor is zero and one elevator has a fourth floor button even though there is no 4th floor (I always tell the kids that the Petrou Brothers bought it that way in case they added a fourth floor). Last summer the elevators were always hit or miss, some days they were working and some days they were closed awaiting repairs. Last night I rode down to the 1st floor and went to pick up Mara (our Bronze Age ceramicist) to drive her to the airport. When we got in the elevator, the doors closed and then the elevator bounced up and down twice very suddenly and then the doors reopened. We quickly hopped out and caught the other elevator down to the ground floor. I told the front desk about my experience and the lady behind the desk came out and looked at the elevator doors and said she would have someone check it out. I assumed she meant the next day because it was about 10:50 PM. I took Mara to the airport and when I came back to the lobby, at about 11:30, I noticed that the lady from the front desk was shouting through the closed elevator door to someone stuck between floors in the elevator. She had a special key that opened the door but could not reach the slot to turn it.  She gave it to me and I opened the door and realized that the elevator was stuck above the ground floor. I then took the stairs up to each floor and opened all the doors and realized that she was stuck between the 1st floor and the ground floor - the Mezzinine level. The problem was that this elevator did not have a door on that level since it does not have rooms, just offices. I told the lady at the front desk and she then called the fire department who sent a large truck to the hotel with its horn blaring and lights flashing - it was all quite exciting to watch. It turns out that the lady stuck in the elevator was actually not a guest at the hotel, but just visiting a friend at the hotel. Perhaps the more amazing thing is that nobody else from PKAP woke up when the fire department pulled up in front of the hotel.Several people complained about street noises, but nobody complained about the fire truck.

RSM

Card Carrying Archaeologist

On Saturday Nick Karatjas and I did a little sight-seeing since he was leaving early Sunday morning.After a brief PKAP staff meeting to plan the upcoming week we set off for Kourion. It was a really nice day, the temperature had dropped a bit and there was a nice breeze blowing in off the water. I was very interested to see what the admission prices were at the sites, particularly since they had been so reasonable over the last few years (1 or 2 Cypriot pounds per person, about US$2-4). I was relieved to see at Kourion that it was now 1.71 Euro, about $2.65. I also showed the guard my AIA (Archaeological Institute of America) membership card and he gave me free admission. W spent a couple of hours visiting the site and it was fabulous as usual - I think it is the 2nd best site on the island behind the mosaics at Paphos.

After finishing up the main site, we went up the road and looked at the Roman Stadium and then decided to find a place for lunch. We finally stopped at the town of Zygi which is a small village that used to be an important site for the importation of carobs, but is now collection of collection of fish tavernas along the water. It reminds me a bit of Calabash, SC which is just north of Myrtle Beach. We stopped at the same restaurant we always stop at - Mario's Fish Taverna, and had some salad, fries, and fresh calamari. The calamari was excellent as usual, and I ate way too much....as usual. Later last night we took Nick out to Melitzes, a restaurant in Larnaka, for his last meal on the island. It was, as usual, a very nicely done Cypriot Meze and a nice send-off for Nick. I got up early this morning and dropped Nick off at the airport at 5:00 AM to catch his flight back to Pennsylvania and IUP. I know this blog makes it looks like I am only on Cyprus for eating and sight-seeing, but I am honestly doing work. For example, we are getting ready to head into the field to check the R8.....after I go get a doughnut.....

RSM

1st Full PKAP Week Draws to a Close

Our first full week of work at PKAP is now drawing to a close. We have been low in numbers, but that has all changed. We picked up 2 more people from the airport last night, 2 came in a little while ago, and 7 more are due before sunrise tomorrow. We have expanded out to 4 rooms here at Petrou Brothers and will soon have 4 rental cars. Having more people will be both positive and negative. On one hand we will now have the manpower to accomplish a lot of tasks, including fieldwork. The downside is the logistical issues a large group raises, and at are peak we will be 20 people. This becomes quite difficult to manage in 2 areas, food preparation and transportation. When we go places we look like one of the motorcades for important people, minus the motorbikes. Food preparation also becomes harder because of the limited cooking facilities at Petrou. We have small refrigerators for storage, slightly larger than dorm refrigerators, and hotplates and electric grills to cook with. This year, this headache belongs to a colleague of Bill's from UND who has agreed to come over and shop, cook, and manage things at the hotel for us. This has relieved me of one of my heavier burdens, since it was always difficult to do work and shop/cook for the project.

RSM

Busting Out the R8

Yesterday was a pretty busy day. The Larnaka Museum storeroom, where we usually work, was pretty crowded with a group of other archaeologists when we arrived. Since they plan on being there for 3 weeks we decided to work outside but did not have any tables available to us at the museum. We talked over many different plans for finding and purchasing tables, but in the end it turned out to be extremely simple. The Petrou brothers, proprietors of our hotel, have a used furniture store across the street from the hotel where they have been selling the old furniture from hotel rooms that they remodeled. As we headed out to look for tables, we decided to ask Mr. Petrou just in case and he took us across the street and let us look through the items. We found 4 tables that were a bit too small, but when we used 2 of these tables as ends with 2 wall headboards across them as planks, they worked quite well. We asked Mr. Petrou for 4 of the tables and 4 headboards (to make 2 tables) and he gave us them for free! Since the low value of the dollar has been killing us here, we were quite pleased with the cost and grateful for Mr. Petrou's help. As an idea of cost, when we were waiting for Nick to arrive, I (having a weakness for doughnuts) bought one upstairs at the airport. It cost 2.90 euros or .US $4.46. It was a good doughnut, just not that good. Anyway, we spent the rest of the morning transporting the tables to the museum and setting them up. It took a while since we could only take 1 table at a time in our small rental car.

 

Later in the afternoon we took the Trimble R8 out to the field to test it out. We decided to take points every 5 steps around the perimeter of Kokkinokremos and see what happened. I took a few minutes to show Bill how to set it up and then we proceeded to take about 260 GPS points over the next hour and a half before the battery in the base station ran down - it did not have a full charge when we started. When we got back we downloaded the points and dropped them into ArcGIS and they looked pretty good, really good.....well, with one small issue, the elevation is about 20 meters off from the 1:5000 maps we have digitized.This caused some consternation and to be honest some ....... heated disagreement?... between me and Bill over what the problem was. Some Internet searching and a few phone calls to my Trimble rep later, we are still where we started. I am currently awaiting a call back from a different Trimble rep, but it seems that they have forgotten about me. We plan to work on it after dinner and feel it must be something simple that we overlooked or need to do, I hope.....

RSM 

Airport Runs Begin

Today was a busy Sunday. Bill, Mara (our Bronze Age ceramicist), and myself had a chatty-chat (PKAP lingo for a serious talk) about ceramic processing. Mara is down for a week to look at the pottery we collected last season from our survey work on Kokkinokremos. After this I did some computer work for a few hours, and then we stopped work for lunch. On the way to the sandwich shop, since Nick Karatjas (my colleague from IUP) had never seen it, we stopped at the Church of Ayios Lazarus for a brief sightseeing trip.

After lunch Bill and I went to the airport to pick up some PKAP staff members who arrived: Dr. Dimitri Nakassis (a professor from the University of Toronto whose specialty is the Aegean Bronze Age), and Michael Brown (a graduate student from the University of Edinburgh whose specialty is the Cypriot Bronze Age). While we were at the airport I tried to pick up an extra rental car but Astra was out of smaller cars, i.e. inexpensive ones, and since they had not received my email from yesterday requesting to pick up one, I will have to go back tomorrow around noon. When I wondered back into the airport waiting area I noticed Bill standing on the left side of the waiting room. The airport guys try to keep people who are waiting on passengers behind a railing on the right side of the waiting area. The only people who are allowed on the left side are arriving passengers and drivers/tour guides who stand around holding up signs with the name of the people they are at the airport to pick up. I noticed Bill was standing over there with these people and that he was also holding up a sheet of paper. I wandered over and when I looked at the sheet of paper he was holding, expecting to see Dimitri's and Michael's names on it, I saw that it was blank. I have to admit that for the next 20 minutes it was hysterical because when people looked at the sheet of paper and realized it was blank they did a double-take. One guy nearly tripped and another stopped to tell Bill he must be holding the paper backwards since nothing was printed on the side facing the crowd. Since I figured that security might eventually notice, I slid a few feet away from him and tried to look like I was not associated with him. Eventually Michael and Dimitri came out and it amazed me that neither said anything about Bill's blank sign, but they both know him and probably weren't surprised. Anyway, that was the high point of the day. We went back to the airport after dinner and picked up Brandon Olson (a graduate student from Penn State whose interest is in the Late Roman military). That does it for airport runs until Thursday.

As I am finishing this up in my room, I just caught the end of the conversation going on in the kitchen as Brandon talking about someone - "He is getting really old, he must be 40." As someone in that general age group I am going to have go in there and..........

RSM 

A Somewhat Slow Saturday

Today has been somewhat of a slow day. We got up and went to visit the Idalion Museum and found out that they were closed on Saturdays and Sundays. It was a nice drive though, and my colleague Nick Karatjas got a chance to see some of the Cypriot countryside. Since we need to buy some excavation supplies, we went to a hardware store and Bill and I argued about the suitability of the shovels. He kept insisting on buying the shovel heads separate from the handles, while I felt that if they were already assembled they were still fine. Anyway, after much discussion and sarcastic commentary we decided to move on to grocery shopping at Carrefour. I am still a bit in sticker shock over prices, the low exchange rate of the dollar is really hurting us financially this year. We also visited the local fruit market and bought some items for a salad. After a simple, but filling lunch, Bill and I had a meeting at Starbucks (he had coffee while I had a chocolate dream frappachino) where we worked on the rooming arrangements and car rental situation. This actually went very well and I feel better organized now. Later today I need to do some database work and print out some forms and if I accomplish that it will have been a very productive day.

RSM

Day 3

Today was an interesting day. Bill and I and went to the museum to check out the artifact situation. (See his blog on Artifacts in the Museum). After doing that, we went up to the ancient site of Idalion. Our main purpose was to visit Dr. Maria Hadjicosti who is finishing up her excavations at Idalion. We met with her for about 15-20 minutes and talked about many of our concerns/questions/requests/etc. As usual she was very helpful and offered many good suggestions. She also, even though she was very busy with her work, took time to walk us around the site and give us a guided tour. I have to admit that the site was pretty fabulous. There was one area that had an olive oil processing section that had all the components, including 16 press weights. Bill and I both remarked on how a former PKAP volunteer who was fascinated with olive oil production would have gone crazy on seeing all of this. After this, we came back to the hotel for lunch and caught up on email.

Later this afternoon we went to the airport to pick up a colleague of mine, Dr. Nick Karatjas, from the airport. Nick teaches in the Economics department at IUP and, as I found out several years ago, his father was Cypriot and Nick still has relatives on the island. We have been talking about Cyprus for the last four years and he finally took me up on my suggestion that he come out and check out PKAP and visit his relatives. I will be interested to see what he thinks of PKAP. As I write this, Nick, Bill, and myself are having a discussion about many very different subjects (IUP versus UND, hiring practices, global phones, faculty and staff hiring, etc.). Nick remarked that Bill and I must have known each other for a while based on our interaction, mainly Bill's comments to me which in my opinion are sarcastic, in Bill's opinion - witty. Anyway, when I counted it up, I realized that I have known Bill for 14 years, which added to my feeling of being old. So, that's it for today.

RSM