8/17 - Summary Content Part One: What I've Learned

The following is the first of at least two expansions on a short report that I wrote to fulfill my obligations to the UChicago Classics Department and the David Grene Fellowship, which funded the Summer Session for me.

I would like to begin this report by expressing my gratitude to the Classics Department for awarding me the Fellowship. Without it, I would have been unable to attend the Summer Session. This program contributed immensely to my growth as a scholar and a person.         

Let’s start with the basics. When I got on the plane to Athens, I knew little to nothing about archaeology, past or present. This deficiency in my knowledge can be attributed to misconceptions that I had built in my head about the field and the fact that I hadn’t taken any truly archaeologically focused classes while at the University. The closest I came was an Archaic Greece class which apparently wasn’t enough to dispel many of the quite plain truths that I learned during my time in Greece. The amount of current activity in the field, I think, surprised me the most. Again, this is something I probably should have known before I went across an entire ocean to study, but learning about how alive and vibrant archaeology currently is in Greece on the fly was just as informative. I was able to see dozens of sites still under excavation, putting paid to my preconception that the pace of the field had slowed to a near crawl. An elementary truth, but everyone has to learn them sometime.

       

Another area in which I realized I was shockingly deficient during the course of the Summer Session was the Bronze Age. The entire period of history. I had heard, of course, of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, but I certainly did not fully appreciate the degree to which they developed advanced civilizations in their own time before falling to various causes. Repeatedly during the trip, I was stunned by the breadth of the trade networks that these groups established. I certainly did not expect that Minoan Crete had any contact, even indirect contact, with somewhere as far as Afghanistan, but on Mochlos, the excavations found a tin ingot that would have had to come from that far away, based on what we know about metal deposits.

       

The Summer Session also immersed me in Greek history. Again, I had had some coursework in these areas, but I wasn’t firm enough on a lot of my history going in. That has completely changed. I feel confident in my Greek history now and even added to my modern Greek history more extensively than I anticipated at the beginning of the summer. I’m so much more comfortable talking Bronze Age through Roman Period now for Greece.

       

The Summer Session enabled me to develop new interests that I would never have been concerned with if I had not received the Fellowship and consequently not gone on the program. The salient new interest that I developed was ancient hydraulic engineering and water management. I became interested in drains after seeing them all over the place in Athens and Crete early on in the program. I didn’t realize just how skillfully people manipulated water as far back as the Bronze Age. Of special interest – the pipe systems at Mycenae and Tiryns were not explained in the depth that I wanted during our lectures, so I need to go find information about them. The other project that blew my mind was the lake drainage at Gla. The effort and skill required to drain the lake is immense. These and other topics in ancient hydraulics are at the top of my list to investigate independently thanks to the Summer Session.

It’s funny actually, it all started as a joke. My interest in ancient hydraulics really did start as a running joke between Abi and me. I developed a bad habit on Crete of asking our lecturers if obvious drains were indeed drains. From then on, whenever we would see a drain, she would ask me what it was. Of course, I began asking her if drains were actually drains too, which managed to be amusing somehow for roughly five weeks. But anyways, the joke made me think more and more about drains, which eventually led to this deep interest.

One anecdote regarding the running drain joke. At Gournia, Abi and I were doing the sarcastic, “Is it a drain? I think it might be a drain. I’m not sure though, but probably a drain,” conversation and Dr. Matt Buell, our lecturer overheard us. He then earnestly confirmed that it was indeed a drain and was very confused by our chuckles after doing so.

I think that leads me into my next topic though, the fantastic intellectual environment on the trip. I’m not saying that I never get to talk about classics at UChicago, that would just be a lie. But to be doing it 24/7 with a group of people from diverse intellectual and academic backgrounds was on an entirely different level. If I wanted to talk ancient art, I could ask Asia questions, or pester Melanie with inquiries about the Bronze Age. Luke proved to be a huge resource too. His knowledge of who has written what in the field is truly astonishing. It’s a quality that hopefully I can in some way emulate in the future. These are just a few examples too, everyone on the bus had their own areas of interest that they were more than happy to discuss. Being a little overly excited about something at a site was met with similar enthusiasm from at least one other person, guaranteed.

The level of discourse between the students and the academics with whom we spoke was also very stimulating. Maybe it’s because I don’t have the experience yet, but we really were treated as intellectual peers by everyone we talked to. I never felt like I was being condescended to in the slightest. One awesome thing I noticed is that enthusiasm about a topic would be returned by the speaker in a very positive way. I guess that’s the nature of people talking about things they love.

I’ll end it here for the sake of brevity. The next post will be about my personal development and some miscellaneous things.

Thanks for reading.

8/16 - Photo Collection 1 - Jumping at Shadows

Between my phone and my camera, I have over 3000 pictures from Greece. So going through those has been really enjoyable. One type of picture I have noticed I have a lot of are these silhouette pictures. I took the first one early in the trip at Aptera on Crete.

Overlooking the baths at Aptera.

And then really liked it, and so looked for more opportunities to take these pictures. I also kept taking them as a joke with Luke, who detests them. I love them for a variety of reasons, so now I'm going to talk about weird art things that I enjoy, so skip this next bit if you just want to see the pictures. 

The imagery created by body language is fascinating. You can learn so much based on how people stand and what they do with their arms. But I think frequently those cues sort of disappear in pictures where we look at what the people are wearing or where they are instead of their stance. Shadows remove that distraction from the picture. The way that the shadows interact with the landscape around them is also interesting. They're less intrusive than a person wearing a lot of color, but they still show you were there. In a lot of the following shots, you can see my shadow taking a picture of the field in front of me. It emphasizes that these ruins and places are not dead but still of interest to people coming to see them. In a way, the sites are the shadows of the people left behind. Their imprint on the face of the earth harmonizes well with how we perceive and talk about the fleeting nature of our shadows. The shadow of the modern overlaid on the shadow of the ancient, if you will.

Plus, and most importantly with art, it just looks cool. Alright, I'm done for now. Enjoy the pictures.

This one and the one above it emphasize the presence of the camera documenting the scene.

You can identify people by their shadows. In this one, because of the hats. 

Left to right Melanie, Asia, me, Luke. 

You can also do goofy stuff like make shadow puppets. Abi has joined on the left. 

These two emphasize the size of the group. For some reason the line ups of silhouettes remind me 

of Lord of the Rings, particularly when the Fellowship is hiking and seen from afar on a ridge.

Three final pictures with the camera again present. 

Hope you enjoyed. There will be a couple more photo posts coming in the next couple days. 

8/3-8/9 Bonus Week: Part Two

This is part two of the week after the program with my mom. I'd recommend reading the previous post to get fully up to speed. Anyways, here's the rest of the trip!

For breakfast each day on the island, we went to this little place just outside of Kamari called Milopetra. It’s a fantastic bakery with amazing pastries baked fresh every day. The food was super cheap and so good. I might have shed a tear when I tried their bougatsa.

Crushing the Milopetra pastries. So good!

Our first stop was the prehistoric site at Akrotiri. If you go to Santorini, regardless of your interest in archaeology, you must must must visit this site. It’s incredible. The modern enclosure is a low-profile, environmentally friendly, naturally lit, naturally ventilated building. And the ancient architecture is incredible too. It’s not quite ancient Pompeii level, but it’s damn close. The people here appear to have left before the Thera eruption, so there are no bodies.

The enclosure. It's huge, but only 3% (!!) of the site has been investigated.

The site had a massive sewage system with drains that pulled water and waste out of the city. And this was pre-1600s BCE. People in ancient times were way smarter than we realize and Akrotiri is a stunning example of that truth. Yeah, nutrition and medicine were not nearly as good as they are today, but their engineering and commerce were extremely complex.

We left Akrotiri and as one does on Santorini, went to the beach. Relaxing felt great. I was more tired on Santorini being lazy than doing five sites a day sun up to sun down travel with the Summer Session. While paradoxical, I think my body was just reacting to the lethargy with more sleepiness.

We ate on seaside in Kamari for dinner. My dad has a rule that “places with a view don’t have good food,” but I think that a Santorini Exception needs to be made because the food was fantastic. I had amazing seafood risotto and a fantastic coconut strawberry drink. Kamari is definitely on the quiet side of the island, which I much preferred. The traffic is better, the restaurants are less crowded, and going to sleep is much easier without lots of late night noise. The hotel was also super peaceful. It had a kickass inner courtyard with a pool that I swam in and some supremely comfortable deck chairs.

The final day on Santorini was just as good as the previous two. Our first move in the morning was to go to the museum of prehistoric Thera. The museum is a little dimly lit, but wow they have some killer wall paintings. The Minoan influence is really prevalent and they even have BLUE MONKEYS. I didn’t think I would see them again this trip, but there they were in the museum.

The blue monkeys in the Prehistoric Museum

The last thing we did on Santorini before winding down with a quiet lunch was to hike. We went to Imerovigli, a small town just north of Fira. We walked down through some gorgeous quiet hotels and small villas to a massive rock tower outcropping.

The goal: the top of the plateau.

We walked out to it, then around the back and up the side. The last three meters were a climb up a steep but toothy rock face. Being on the top felt so majestic. It’s a huge flat expanse above the beautiful water and cliffs.  After some initial hesitation Mom made the climb up too.

Selfie from the top. The caldera of the volcano is behind us.

Descending the part of the rock that required climbing.

We walked back down after that and headed for the airport. Aegean Air back was just as good as on the flight out. We got back to Athens and wound up eating takeout sushi from a place in the Plaka. It was surprisingly very good. It think it’s called Koi Sushi or something like that.

The next morning we got to sleep in a little bit and started our day by going to the National Museum, where we saw all the famous stuff. It meant that I got to go back to the Antikythera Mechanism, which continues to be fascinating.

As we walked back from the National Museum, we ate the final gyros of the trip. There was deep mourning, but the gyros were quite tasty.

We hung out for the rest of the afternoon and then went to Kolonaki for dinner. We met Luke for pasta at a place I went with Sallie, Melanie, and Asia. The Spaghetti Sorrentina was fantastic. Seeing Luke one last time was great too. He and I were fast friends from the get go and I’m really glad we stayed that way for the whole session.

Mom and I went up to a roof garden to look at the lit up Acropolis before turning in. We got one last glimpse of the Parthenon, glowing like an orange sodium lamp, and then sleep.

After one last tasty breakfast at the hotel the next morning, we got on the train to the airport. While in line to check luggage, Mom received a text that our flight had been delayed, which would cause us to miss our connection in New York. I confirmed this with the Delta agent and she set about rebooking us. There were no more flights out of JFK, but there was one out of La Guardia, and our landing time would give us two hours to get between airports and get to Detroit. While not ideal, the other option was to stay in Athens, and that was not happening. Delta did give us each a meal voucher for €9.90, which let us get a tasty lunch. We then waited around for a while before heading to the gate and boarding.

The flight back to JFK was uneventful. In an attempt to tire myself out, I watched three movies. It didn’t work, but I can say that Deadpool was still funny, Batman vs. Superman was enjoyable until the Martha scene, and The Big Short is a movie you should go see if you haven’t. Upon landing, we breezed through customs and immigration. Waiting for us outside the airport was a car service, which my dad had arranged while we were aloft. The driver got us to La Guardia with about an hour to takeoff. Fortunately and miraculously, there were no lines at either luggage check or security. We made the gate with time to spare and were soon en route to Detroit.

We landed at around 11 pm and once we had deplaned and gotten our luggage and the car, it was 1130. We rolled into the driveway at approximately 1:30 am and I promptly collapsed into bed. In total, it was about 24 hours from leaving the hotel to getting home.

And that was the trip. I go back to Hyde Park August 14th, and don’t start school until the end of September. I’ve got lots of things to do, including brushing up on my Greek, writing summary and wrap up posts for the blog, starting preliminary thesis research, working out for frisbee, and seeing all my friends who are in Chicago.

The next post here will probably be an essay-like thing about session and what it meant to me as well as ways to improve it.

Thanks for reading.

8/3-8/9 Bonus Week: Part One

So, as I alluded to in several of my posts, I was lucky enough to have my mom fly over from the States to spend about a week in Greece with me. We split the time between Athens and Santorini and while we didn’t do quite as many archaeological things as the Summer Session, there were still plenty of site visits. I’m not going to break each day into separate posts, but I’ll toss up some highlights where I can.

On 8/3 I checked out of Loring Hall and headed to the Plaka where I checked into the hotel. Then I met Mom at the exit of the subway station at Syntagma and we got her stuff settled at the hotel as well. The first thing we did was head over into Kolonaki to look at the school and the surrounding neighborhood. Then we met Abi, Asia, Luke, and Amy for lunch at Stick Bar! It was great to see everyone one last time before the program ended.

The group at Stick Bar.  

Then Mom and I attempted to go to the Numismatic Museum, but it was closing just as we arrived, sadly. So instead, we decided to hike up Lykabettos. It took a while because it sweltering hot, but we eventually made it to the top to take in the view. We walked down the hill and back to the hotel for an early dinner because we were both pretty exhausted at this point.

Introducing Mom to the most complete meal you can just pick up and hold. 

While we were getting gyros for dinner, we saw an Antifa march. It was the first protest I’d seen in Greece. The people marching were really loud and seemed to be well organized. Mom snapped a picture quickly but then put the phone away. This turned out to be the right course of action because one couple that was filming got into a verbal altercation with some of the protesters because they were filming. Fortunately the argument resolved peacefully. over doing that. After dinner we turned in early to get a good jump off the next morning.

The Antifa march. 

We woke up early and were at the ticket booth of the Acropolis by 7:40. This turned out to be the right move as the line at 8:00 was super long  already. We managed to get up on the Acropolis before almost anyone else and snap some pics before it became a zoo.

An agreeable family snapped picture of us at the east end of the Parthenon.

Once we had seen the major sites up on the Acropolis, we walked down the South Slope through the various buildings and sanctuaries there. I gave my best abridged version of the talks we had heard as we went. Our path ended at the Acropolis Museum, which Mom really liked because of how the Parthenon is represented on the top floor with the same orientation as the real building.

We grabbed lunch off of Monastiraki Square after the museum. The proprietor showed me how to cut off a piece of kebab and pita and then put tzatziki on it. But it didn’t stop there, no, then he fed me the bite and wiped my face with a napkin. It was a weird experience, to say the least. But lunch was tasty and we moved on to the Agora afterwards.

Mom at the northeast corner of the Hephaesteion.

We walked around much of the Agora first, again with me talking about what I remembered from our many lectures with John Camp. We also ducked into the museum in the Stoa of Attalos, where Mom was particularly impressed by the restored ivory figurine. The child’s commode was also amusing.

After we left the Agora, we hit the Roman Agora and the Tower of the Winds. Hadrian’s Library followed directly afterwards. The size of Hadrian’s Library never fails to impress. It’s so monumental that imagining it roofed is a bit of a challenge. It’s also a really cool illustration of how building occurs on top of old structures. There’s an early Christian basilica directly in the middle of the former Library.

On our way from there to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, we went by a kiosk that was selling Pokemon hats, obviously capitalizing on the popularity of Pokemon GO. I swapped my hat for one immediately and we also got a couple for the friends who I played Pokemon with as a kid. The hats are awesome and more than a dozen people remarked on them during the week in Greece.

We hit Hadrian’s Arch the Temple of Zeus next. The toppled column at the Temple of Zeus was particularly interesting to Mom because it illustrated well the size of the column drums used in temples.

Background: Temple of Olympian Zeus. Foreground: Pokemon hat.

For dinner, we went for Indian food at the place I went with Luke, Sally, Abi, Asia, and Melanie late in the program. It was just as good a second time around. Thinking about that godly lamb curry still makes my mouth water. We turned in early again, because we had to get up even earlier for the next day.

We took a cab out to the airport at early o’clock to catch a 0720 flight to Santorini. Aegean Air was amazing. Like seriously just a fantastic flying experience. I had more legroom than I’ve had on any flight before in my life, excepting one time when I got upgraded to first class and when I flew over to Greece with an empty seat next to me.

After the short flight we landed and got our rental car, which was perfect for the island. It was sort of a beater with a lot of scuffs already. A very unassuming sort of vehicle that served us with distinction during our time on the island.

Our little beater Hyundai. It was a champ the whole visit to the island. 

Our first stop was Ancient Thera, a site founded around the end of the Iron Age. What remains standing is mostly Hellenistic and Roman. Getting to the site was quite a challenge and required some painstaking switchbacks up the side of a very steep hill. Mom handled them with something resembling the grace of Panayiotis though, so everything went fine. Once we got to the top of hill, we had to walk a little higher to get to the site itself, which is really perched on the peak of the ridge.

The theater at Thera.

While we were up on the hill, I saw a fragmentary sekoma off to the side! It was great being able to identify it. I also got to explain it to some tourists who heard the tail end of what I said and wanted to know more. It was a little self-indulgent but sekomata are awesome, so whatever. We walked around the site, which has pretty good signage. It also has a sanctuary of the Egyptian gods. Seeing gods transplanted that far from home is pretty neat.

The sekoma at Thera. Can't get enough of these things. 

We descended the mountain and found lunch at Souvlaki Stop, which made killer gyros and also had amazing Wifi. Then we drove up the coastal road on the east side of the island and found a small quiet beach to relax on.

Looking into Ammoudi Bay from the northwest.

Our final stop of the evening was Oia, and more specifically Ammoudi Bay. It’s basically a designated sunset-watching spot with some restaurants along the sea so you eat and soak up the beautiful view. We walked a ways on the cliffside before returning for a seafood dinner at one of the restaurants. It was one of those places that lets you pick a fish out of a case and then they serve it up and it was quite tasty.

The fantastic sunset at Ammoudi Bay.

After the sunset, we hustled to beat the massive traffic out of town back to the south side of the island where we were staying. It was a fantastic day and the next looked just as promising.

Due to length, the second post will be coming as “Bonus Week: Part Two”.

Thanks for reading.

8/9 - Travel Back from Greece - Airline and Content Delays

For clarity, my mom and I have been in Greece the past week, so I'm using the first person plural.

Our 1230 flight has been pushed back to 3pm, causing us to miss our connection to Detroit. We've been rebooked, but at La Guardia, which means we have two hours to clear customs, get from JFK to La Guardia, recheck luggage, and fly to Detroit.

This is a long way of saying that content on the blog will be delayed a little longer as I am not about to type long sappy summaries on a phone. Apologies, but it'll work out eventually.

Thanks for reading.

8/2 - Final Day! Roman Athens and Antikythera Mechanism!

Note: there are important details regarding the blog going forward after this post enclosed below the daily summary.

Melissa and Talia came up Lykabettos this morning with Abi and me! Always great to expand the team. Hazy again, but the sun was mostly yellow orange. It takes around 60-90 seconds to clear the mountains completely and sitting in silence when it does is the most peaceful.

Once we had returned, we had a full hour for breakfast because our speaker, Dr. Joel Allen, met us at the gate and walked down to the site with us. Our first stop was the Tower of the Winds, a building we have seen many, many times while walking to various sites, but never entered. The octagonal tower functioned as a weathervane, housed a water clock, and displayed sun dials on each of its eight faces. The workings of the water clock have been hypothesized, but nothing is known about them beyond the grooves in the floor of the tower.

The Tower. The small black sticks are the restored sundial indicators

Sitting on the steps near the tower, we also discussed the Roman Agora. The Roman Agora is set up along classic Roman rectilinear lines in sharp contrast to the confusing muddle of the Athenian Agora. The area is isolated from the space around it by walls and gates and contains a fountain house for public use. There are even divots cut into the ground level stones to measure quantities of goods, which seems impractical. The sekomata we've seen elsewhere were on tables and enabled not just dry goods, but also liquids to be measured.

The tiny sekoma. Much less impressive than the ones at Messene, but cool nonetheless. 

We walked to the Library of Hadrian next. The massive structure contained a reflecting pool that ran most of the length of the building, as well as rooms for lectures and reading. Inside the site, you can see the size of the entire footprint of the building and it is gargantuan. I have to imagine it would have looked like one of the soaring lobbies of modern skyscrapers, just way larger. The grandiosity is best preserved in the west facade, which has gorgeous Phrygian marble columns. During the first millennium CE, a church was built on the inside of the library and doesn't even fill a third of the footprint. The library really showcases just how big the Romans built.

The facade of the library. The columns are monolithic - solid pieces of marble. 

Our final lecture took place at the National Museum, which we first visited on Day Five of the program. After a brisk walk up Aeolou Street, which runs directly to the National Museum from the Library of Hadrian, we met Dr. Xenophon Moussas in the Antikythera Mechanism gallery. Dr. Moussas is one of three experts on the device and we were incredibly lucky to get to talk to him. His background is mostly in physics and more specifically astronomy, but it's very apparent he know most, if not everything there is to know regarding ancient astronomers and mechanical timekeeping.

The Antikythera Mechanism is a unique artifact. We literally do not know of the corporeal existence of a similar item. The device is an analog computer of multiple different calendar periods and predicts eclipses and the movements of the planets. Within ~.4% accuracy, it lines up with Kepler’s Second Law regarding the speed at which planets move, too. Such a device speaks to the incredible amount of theoretical mathematics and astronomical knowledge available to the ancients who created the device. It's hard to explain how important this artifact is. It's better at predicting celestial movements than similar devices that existed in 16th and 17th century Europe. And the survival of one does not mean that more were not created. I think the Antikythera Mechanism and the information we have about ancient trade networks are the two salient fields that are unknown such that the general populace tends to underestimate the technological level of the ancients. The lecture made it abundantly clear how advanced the inventors’ knowledge was.

And that was it. We walked back to Loring Hall, home for just one more night. Like I mentioned yesterday, I'm sad to be moving on, but also excited to be doing something new. And I'll be in Greece for five more days, so I won't be fully gone just yet.

Conclusions

Blog plans: I lose access to the iPad after tonight. Thank you to Asia for being impossibly gracious in letting me use it. I won't have access to anything bigger than a phone until August 9/10 when I return home. At that point, the post session content will start to roll out. I'll post the five days I'm about to have in Greece with my mom as one big post, then move on to wrapping up the summer session with fun lists and longer form posts about things that should stay or change. After that, essays about general...stuff will follow. Some introductory classics posts, some things related to topics from the trip concerning classics, and then topics that I enjoy. That should get me well through the end of the month, to be honest. I also have to put photos on the blog and curate the pictures I took in general.

Thank you to everyone who made this experience possible. My parents, my recommenders, and the University of Chicago Classics Department are all owed great debts for helping me go on this life changing trip. Amy, for implementing the schedule and for being a steadfast voice of reasoned advice on every topic. And to you, the readers of the blog. I honestly think that writing all of this stuff down made me appreciate the trip more and become more introspective about what we did each day.


Again, next post probably not until August 9 or 10, but I might finagle something small in the gap.

Thanks for reading.

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