8/1 - Agora New Projects, Kerameikos New Projects

Computer update! It's back! And still not charging, which is either the death of the computer or that the wall charger itself is the broken bit. Either way, it's out of commission until August 9ish, when I'll be getting back to the States. Until then, after tomorrow, the blog will no longer post daily. It will depend on my ability to write updates on my phone of my travels in Greece after the program. All the recap/longer form essays/fun lists things will be delayed until I can actually use a computer again. Anyways, that's entirely too long and more than a little frustrating, so let's get into it.

In spite of my foot getting punctured by a gazillion thorns yesterday, Abi and I I climbed Lykabettos this morning. Again, the haze was up, but it was a little lighter than yesterday. This meant that the sun shown mostly orange, making for one of the prettiest sunrises yet.

A quick shower and breakfast followed our return before we headed out from the gates of Loring Hall for our final visit in the Agora. Dr. John Camp met us there with Rex, the now familiar site dog. We started towards the southwest side of the Agora and worked our way east before heading up to the new excavations. We looked at a bunch of buildings, so I'll try to describe a couple and then move on.

The building that has been in the past labeled the Strategeion is an interesting case study in how archaeology updates itself over time. The building, when originally found, was given the name Strategeion based on Pausanias and the layout of the building. However, the building was re-excavated in the past few years and a huge hoard of silver coins weighing roughly 15 pounds was discovered. This much money seems unlikely to have been kept in an office building for military leaders. One suggestion is that the building housed the state auctioneers who handled, among other things, silver mining contracts. We still don't have anything that really ties the building up though, so it will remain a question mark until more evidence turns up.

The second place I want to talk about is the Southwest Fountain House. John had us   recreate the interior colonnade by standing in place of the columns. It's a surprisingly good method for examining ancient interior architecture. The fountain house used a massive aqueduct to bring the water to the site. There's even a stone that's worn and pitted from having amphorae dragged against it so many times. The fountain houses were important to Athens, which was notorious for water shortages and poor water quality for many years. The Marathon Dam that we visited is part of the modern response to those problems. The fountain houses functioned similarly for the ancient Greeks.

Our best column impersonations. The truly enthusiastic raise their arms in different ways to show the type of column.

We moved on to the new excavations north of the street that leads to the Agora. There we saw both ends of the Painted Stoa. The stoa can be regarded as the first public art museum ever built. The paintings inside were intact even in the time of Pausanias, but they disappeared a few centuries later. The current dig will not find them, barring something REALLY weird happening. The middle of the stoa and some subsidiary buildings are still buried under modern, occupied buildings which are currently being expropriated in the courts.

The current dig. It's quite far below ground level, as demonstrated by surrounding buildings. Both of the

pictured buildings are currently in expropriation court. 

This leads me to another important issue that I think bears discussion, especially with regards to the Agora. There are two buildings remaining above the Painted Stoa. They are both restaurants. Other than for aesthetic cleanliness, I think that it is necessary to consider if removing them will be necessary. Is the middle of the Painted Stoa going to revolutionize Athenian archaeology? Will it bring a massive influx of tourists to the site? Is it worth the ostensible livelihoods of the restaurant proprietors on top of it? I think that in this case, I'm leaning more towards no than yes. I'm not wholly opposed to expropriating land for research, but I think the issue is much more difficult to resolve ethically in urban centers than it is in farmland. I think that it's hard in this case to justify the stance that there is something more important than those restaurants under that land. We know it's the middle of a stoa which no longer houses its paintings. And I don't think that the north section of the site is going to radically change the character of the Agora archaeological park. In order to make the north area continuous, there's another problem too.

There's a pretty significant road that separates the two halves of the site. That would have to euphemistically “come out” to link the north area with the rest of the site. The road isn't incredibly well trafficked, but cutting it will hurt the businesses on the west side of the removal, turning their prime thoroughfare of walking tourists into an alley up against the site fence. Again, I don't know if it's worth it. All these plans might be a decade or more away, but they are grinding forward inexorably. I would like to see the current archaeological park spruced up before a new area opens, to be honest. Maybe that overhaul is waiting for the whole site to be done.

This seems like a situation where the quest to complete the Agora has started pushing against the boundary of reasonable investigation. Maybe I'm wrong and the center section of the Painted Stoa contains revolutionary material. But those are long odds that I feel pretty comfortable in taking, especially when taking them means not taking away the businesses and buildings of people who were just unlucky enough to build where the ASCSA wanted to dig. Anyways, those are my thoughts, feel free to get in touch at mcartier@uchicago.edu to discuss them.

Okay. Back to the day. Our second stop was the Kerameikos, where the German Institute (DAI) holds digging rights. Dr. Jutta Stroszeck, director of the excavations, showed us two recent DAI excavations. Technically, they are re-excavations, but the early ones were done in the 1800s and did not leave enough records behind to be satisfactory. The first project is the sanctuary of Artemis and Apollo. It's the first oracular sanctuary ever found in Athens, which is a big deal. Athens wasn't famous for oracles like Delphi, but it certainly seems to have had one.

The site had been identified incorrectly by the 1800s campaigns as a Hecate sanctuary, based on the triangular statue base found there. But an inscription on a well collar, which is now lost somewhere in the National Epigraphical Museum, and a stone offering showed that the site was dedicated to Apollo and Artemis, the twin gods. The site contains a sacred well and a public one. This way people waiting for the oracle could also get water to drink if needed.

The inscription is just barely visible on the front edge of the stone. 

The other project of interest was a public bath house. As I mentioned in a previous post (maybe Nemea or Olympia), Greek bathhouses were not nearly as advanced as the Romans’, but still existed. We know this one is public because there is a public pipeline that runs down the opposite side of the street and feeds the cisterns below the house. Excitingly, the re-excavation found more than 40 curse tablets in a well! Written on lead sheets and then thrown into wells, curse tablets attempted to call upon the gods to send ill on the person of the writer’s choosing. The find is super recent, so they have not yet been read.

Dr. Stroszeck snapped a group picture of us before we left, free for the day. I used the time to do a last bit of laundry, write, and pack. Tomorrow is our final day. We are studying Roman Athens. This summer has been incredible. I'm excited to write more content for the blog and finally get my computer working for maximum photo delivery.

Thanks for reading