Ancient History Ramblings

PKAP 2009 Season Planning Begins

Well, planning for the PKAP 2009 season officially began yesterday. Bill Caraher made it back to the US from Greece and gave me a phone call. We spent about 30 minutes talking about the past season and how the season wrapped up (I left 2 days before the end of the season for a conference in London). By the end of the call, the conversation shifted to next summer's work and we started tossing around ideas and ways to improve our various systems. So, only 23 days after PKAP 2008 ended, work is already moving ahead for PKAP 2009.

RSM

Archaeology and Blogging

I received my email from The Wired Campus today and it had an article entitled "Point and Click Archaeology." The article discusses how undergraduates from UCLA will write blogs this summer about their experience on 7 different archaeological projects. I have to admit that I was struck by several different thoughts. On one hand, I am happy to see that archaeology is making use of new technologies, if you can call blogging a new technology. On the other hand, the article seems to imply how new and innovative this is, and yet PKAP has been doing this for the last 2 summers with staff, graduate students, and undergraduates all contributing to the PKAP blogging experience. Bill Caraher has been the driving force behind this and has overseen this aspect of our summer fieldwork and continues to expand it each summer - for example, this summer he added podcasts. I have to admit that participating in the blogging forces you to think about what you are doing on the project in a different light and really adds to the experience in a very meaningful way.

RSM

PKAP Season Over for Me

Well, the PKAP season is over, for me at least. I left yesterday for London where I will be attending the 5th International Congress of Maritime History in Greenwich. So that is what I am doing today, putting the finishing points on my PowerPoint presentation and resting. The official end to the PKAP season is tomorrow. The rest of the team is backfilling today and finishing up the Final Report.  They are also turning over our artifacts tomorrow morning to the Cyprus Department of Antiquities and putting all of our stuff in storage. All in all, it was a good season and we accomplished a lot. The team will probably take a month off as everyone does other projects and gets back to the States, but by August we will be analyzing data, writing articles and grants, and starting the process of preparing for next year.

RSM

Fieldwork finally over

We finished fieldwork up today. We also finished up most of our labwork at the museum. We still need to finish up some of our logistical things over the weekend - clean the cars, organize our supplies that we are leaving at the museum, box up our kitchen stuff, etc. We are also going to the CAARI workshop tomorrow in Nicosia to present a paper on our season's work. This is always a nice event where we get a chance to mingle with other archaeologists on the island and see what everyone else is up to. The archaeological community on Cyprus is actually quite small and everyone seems to get along with everyone else. In fact, several of the other projects have helped us out with critical information and or supplies when we needed it, particularly when we first started working on the island. It is hard to believe the season is almost over. On one hand it feels like I arrived yesterday, on the other hand, however, it feels like this season has been longer than previous ones.

RSM

Things Heating Up

Things are heating up here at PKAP. We have only a few days of work left and alot that we want to accomplish. We have finished all of our survey, excavation, and GPS work. What is left is tying up loose ends - pottery analysis, photography, illustration, and analysis. The two biggest tasks are writing our final report before we leave the island and creating our CAARI conference paper - which is due Saturday. The next few days will be quite hectic. We also have to deal with logistics. For example, people are starting to leave and in order to save money we are consolidating rooms, which as you might expect, creates a lot of chaos. It looks like we are timing our fieldwork, weather-wise, pretty well this year. While it has been hot and sunny, it has been very reasonable. The last two days, however, have been very hot and still, reaching temperatures of nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

RSM

T Minus 6

The season is now rapidly approaching its end. We should finish up fieldwork by this Friday, as well as the museum work. As for me, I have spent the last 2 days at Athienou looking at their pottery. I wasn't able to work on our pottery today since most businesses are closed for the holiday, including the museum. I realized today that I haven't been putting up as many pictures as I should have, so I have created a gallery of photos showing PKAP's 2008 team members.

RSM

T minus 9

There are only 9 more days left before I leave Cyprus. We are trying very hard to get things to start winding down so that we can leave everything well organized for next year. Our first group of departees leave tomorrow - Susan Caraher and Brandon Olson. Then early next week we lose three more people. When we reach the point in the project when people start to leave, we always do 2 things: 1) We take a group photo; and 2) We have a farewell dinner. For the group photo, we used the steps on the museum and I took the photos, so it not being great is my fault. For a farewell dinner we used to go out and the project would pay for the meal at a local restaurant. due to our size and the poor value of the dollar, we decided to try something different this year. We are going to have a pizza party on the roof. We have arranged for a local pizza place to deliver some pizzas and breadsticks, while we are providing the soft drinks. After dinner, we ill probably go down to the beach since it is the first night of Cataclysmos and eat ice cream or loukamades.........and maybe try out the bumper cars again.

RSM

More GPS

On Tuesday I went with Bill to take more GPS points on the slopes of Kokkinokremos. It started off on the plain below, but we soon worked our way up to the steeper slopes. As we wandered around, I was reminded of Dimitri calling Bill a "mountain goat" for some reason and I have to admit that was a good description of him yesterday. He just kept walking and never slowed down. He would hop from rock to rock and never hesitate. Me, on the other hand, I was more like the turtle. Wherever Bill went that looked slippery, I made sure to take my time - I did not want a repeat of my first week's slide down a slop scraping up my leg. While we were working on the plain below Kokkinokremos we came to an area I had not walked over since 2004, our first full field season. Even Bill remembered this spot. For some reason that day I was having a contest with the IUP students (Sarah, Brian, and Kevin) over who would see the most sherds and we were in our last unit with me being behind and there was absolutely no pottery in this area and the trash talking had already started on their part. Then with only 5 feet to go in my transect, I stepped up a small slope to the edge of a road and this is what I saw.

RSM 

Pottery Palooza

I know that I promised some pictures, but I have not had time to download them from my camera yet, maybe tonite. We now have less than 2 work weeks left in the field season and things are getting hectic. It is at this stage in the project that we realize that we will not be able to finish everything we had hoped or planned to do, and we need to prioritize what is most important. For me that is the pottery. On Sunday Brandon and I went up to Athienou and looked at their survey pottery all day (8-6). I was able to look at about half of it and will look at the rest next Sunday. At the museum this morning I took stock of how much PKAP pottery is left waiting to be read. The disconcerting answer is...a fair bit. It will be tight to get all of it read, before Friday June 20th, my last work day on the island.

The rest of the project (excavation, GPS Survey, and Intensive Survey) is going well and the PKAP team has found a way to relax after dinner, sort of. The Cataclysmos starts Friday but the booths, food places, and rides have been setting up for a few days and one of the ones already set up is a bumper car ride. These bumper cars are different from most in the US, these are faster and with less padding - so this makes them more dangerous and correspondingly more fun since you can deliver quite a hit with them. The PKAP students and a few staff members went down last night and had quite a good time, even though there are some bruises and welts in evidence today. As the old man of the project, I emerged unscathed...so far.

RSM

Catching Up on Things

Things have begun to speed up for us here at PKAP. We reached the point where it feels like things are moving at their own pace and that we have to hurry up to finish all that we are hoping to do. On Wednesday we continued to work on the test trenches on Vigla and Kokkinokremos and finished up some intensive surveying on the back ridges. Thursday, for me, was a long day at the museum where I started analyzing some of Dr. Maria Hadjicosti's pottery from her 1999 small excavation down on Koutsopetria. Today we had some visitors from Athienou (Mike Tomazou, Derek Counts, Nick Kardulias, and Matthew Speigelman). I was happy to have them stop by for lunch since over the years they have always invited us up to their site for fabulous dinners. After lunch, I took them on a brief tour of our site and showed them what we were doing and planned to do. I'll try to get some pictures up this weekend and fill in some more details - especially on the Cataclysmos, which even though it officially starts next Friday has already started.

RSM