Radio silence

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at WARP, hence the radio silence, which I finally have the chance to break thanks to our decision to take the last Friday of the field season off. So much has happened and is still happening as we rapidly approach the end of our field season. Yesterday was the last full field day with all of the students. Today the students will be working together with the team leaders to produce their teams’ final reports, which we’ve divided chronologically. The staff will have a couple of days in the field next week and then we’ll start wrapping up. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Archaeology in time of crisis

There is an awful lot of uncertainty in Greece right now, but it actually hasn’t affected us much. There are limits on how much people can withdraw from the Greek bank accounts (60 euros per day) but foreign accounts aren’t affected by this. This is fortunate, since we need to pay for things like food, and the preferred form of payment is cash. Credit cards aren’t commonly used in Greece — they’re expensive for the stores that use them — and now wire transfers are avoided since there are restrictions on withdrawals. There are lines at the ATMs, and our schedules are tight, so I’ve started waking up early and making ATM runs well before the sun rises.

sunrise

Other than lines at ATMs, and less activity at cafes and restaurants, there aren’t a lot of visible signs of the crisis. There is a lot of talk, of course: everyone talks about the crisis all the time in Greece. But the crisis has been borne with about as much nobility as I can imagine.

Work, work, work

Everyone has been incredibly hard at work the last couple of weeks, so much so that our day off was more or less forced on us. Most of us, especially me, would have happily gone back into the field today. In fact, yesterday I was telling everyone how much I wanted to go back into the field — as I lay on a cold concrete slab at lunch. We all clearly need some time off. (This did not, however, stop about 20 project members from playing three hours of soccer with our friends here in Myloi from 9:30 pm to 12:30 am last night; needless to say, the old men of the project, Bill and I, didn’t go).

Over the past couple of weeks the degree of difficulty of our units has increased, as we’ve started covering the ridges that run through our survey area. Walking unit after unit like this, especially when the fields are rocky (they’re almost all very rocky) is physically exhausting and tough on the ankles:

slope_walking

The toughest bit has perhaps been the village of Chelmis, where we spent a day documenting the abandoned houses as a big group; the slopes above the village were surveyed by Teams 1 and 3 using a method that was convenient for mapping but tough on the field walkers: walking straight upslope! These are not easy slopes to walk:

chelmis_slopes

 

I’ve been really impressed by our students’ willingness to work really, really hard. They’ve embraced the challenge of walking these slopes, which often don’t yield much material. And we’ve been remarkably accident-free lately, too:  we’ve all been drinking lots of water and being careful in the field to avoid turned ankles etc.

In the field

On a personal level, this year has been very different from the last field season. Last year I spent a lot of time in Argos and Nafplio on administrative tasks associated with setting up our storage and laboratory space (our apotheke) etc. while Sarah and Scott were in the field. This year I’ve spent almost every day in the field, scouting, mapping, or field walking. And Sarah and Scott have read all of the finds as they’ve come in, something that was impossible to do last year. The systems that seemed to take so long to set up last year, moreover, which include everything from how we do our lunches to organizing teams in the field, have run smoothly this year, so that this year has had a very different feel to me than last year. A lot of the credit goes to our incredible team leaders. As I’ve said often to everyone who will listen, at this point we directors would have to begin an active program of sabotage (like sending them off to do crazy things) to derail them.

The results

We’re still figuring those out, of course; we’re not even done entering all of our data. But Bill just told me that our current, and essentially final, numbers are 2637 survey units covering ca. 6.8 square kilometers. Those numbers reflect the very real accomplishments of our wonderful team this year. Here we are, in all of our glory:

WARP_2015_group_photo

(Bill is not in the picture because he’s taking it; no, Bill, we are not phasing you out!)

 


2 thoughts on “Radio silence

  1. Thanks for the update, Dimitri. Is that 6.8 sq km this season alone? Wow! You guys are trucking. I hope you or Bill will do a summary post on those numbers including total artifacts counted.

  2. Hi David, yes, 6.8 sq km is for this season alone! We did 5.5 km last season. I’m sure that Bill would be happy to number crunch. Bill wants to do a day-by-day animation of our progress, set to a song to be determined. I’m sure that there will be lots of discussion of which song… my suggestion was James Brown’s “I’m A Greedy Man.”

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