Welcome to the new season – 2013! Our bloggers will soon start posting their thoughts and impressions during their time excavating with us at Eleon in eastern Boeotia.  We have a large crew this year – numbering 35 all together.
Work is continuing at our site located in the village of Arma, where our neighbors have welcomed us back and have been extremely helpful! We even have running water onsite now, thanks to Spyros Davros the president of Arma. Weather has been very cooperative also – cool mornings and good heat in the afternoons. We are also making use of our apotheke located close by where analysis and drawing of finds are underway. Stay tuned for reports on various aspects of our work!
Bryan Burns
Brendan Burke

The last photoblog of the season. When time and place shall serve I’ll post some photos from past seasons. For now, here’s what we’ve been up to in our last week.

     The end of the season has arrived. As we pack up our tools and our new collection of ancient doodads gets shipped off to its new home in Thebes, the pace of our lives in Dilesi has slowed exponentially. The last few days have been, for many of us, an endless stream of data entry and note copying as we attempt to tackle the mountains of information we have amassed since the beginning of June. Time always moves quickly here, but it was amazing how long I spent sitting in a room full of laptops and fans filling out endless tables without even noticing the days going by. As far as learning work skills, this segment of the project was perhaps one of the most important. These unglamorous and tedious tasks make up a great deal of the work actually performed in archaeology, and I can now say that I have documented over five thousand bones into a (gorgeous) spreadsheet. I would say this is a marketable skill. If I can offer one piece of advice for those attempting to make such a table, I would recommend making backups often, otherwise you might end up seething with anger all through ouzo hour and dinner after Mr Macbook decides to do some whimsical editing/reorganizing of your finished document without provocation.

by Max MacDonald

Well it has been an awesome five and a half weeks here at EBAP we’re all very tired and hot, hot, hot! We’ve ended most of our efforts in the trenches this week, save for the few brave souls left in exile at what our Game of Thrones obsessed team has simply dubbed “The Wall.” This week the rest of us are experiencing the other aspects of archaeology that don’t involve a kazma or karotzi.  There are pottery records to be filled out, sherds to be photographed and data to be entered into the computers, it’s not always exciting, but it’s an interesting experience and can still be lots of fun.

Data entry takes patience.  It can be very relaxing and cool, unlike other jobs during the day.  It requires you to type up the written reports from each separate locus and lot in each trench. A locus represents a feature of a trench such as a structure or a change in soil consistency (usually it’s latter) whereas a lot is simply the order that excavation takes place within the trench.  Each locus and lot have there own pottery sherds that need to be examined, processed and recorded, the finished record is sent to the data entry person who enters it into the computer.  There are many, many, many sheets that need to be entered.  People working data entry also enter other finds from the site, as well as flotation finds and bone records.


Pottery processing is carried out in the back garden of our accommodation and is when each bag of pottery is dumped out, sorted and recorded.  For the past two days I’ve been working with Emily, sorting pottery from her trench into three separate categories base on the quality of the clay, coarse ware, medium ware, and fine ware.  Coarse ware is usually the easiest to spot, it has lots of intusions, larger grains and is very rough. It is usually used to make large pots or cookware. Medium ware is average quality pottery and usually thicker than fine ware.  Fine ware is usually the nice stuff: smooth, sleek, the iPad of ancient Greek pottery… usually… mostly, it’s all really subjective. After the sorting the pieces are weighed and counted, and any paint or diagnostic feature that could reveal the sherd’s date is recorded and given to the data entry people to enter. Then the processing of the next bag begins.


The floatation team has been working hard to process the large amount of soil samples (that are ten litres each!) that have been collected from the trenches over the past two weeks.  Recording charcoal and seeds and what-not and giving their sheets to the data entry people to enter.


Now that there are so few digging in the trenches, pottery washing has become less and less time consuming.      Our clothes are covered in a bit of dirt and lots of sweat, rather than lots of dirt and lots of sweat.  Soon we’ll be tarping over our work and packing up the books, tools and finds that we’ve been working with and digging up since the beginning of June.

by Sam Bartlett

 

 

 

 

 

     Along with the ubiquitous pottery and other artifacts uncovered at the Eleon excavation, we also find ancient bone fragments. These remains may represent domestic animals like dogs, sheep and cows or they can originate from local wild fauna such as red deer and brown bear. While these animal remains may not be as beautiful as painted pottery or decorative bronze pieces, they can be valuable in giving us a glimpse into the lives of the ancient inhabitants of a site. They’re also pretty neato. Since Kinsey and I are both anthropology majors (rather than Greek and Roman studies) with experience in zooarchaeology, we’ve been tasked with performing an analysis of the bones that we recover from the site.
Our first task is to clean the bones. We do this during our customary pottery washing time, carefully scrubbing the sometimes delicate remains and laying them out to dry overnight on mesh screens (I should mention that these screens were hand made by a handful of us during the early days of the project and they are magnificent). After the day’s bones have been cleaned, we lay out our previously dried specimens from earlier days for recording. A true faunal analysis makes use of a reference collection of real bones in order to identify assemblages, but we do the best we can with only our field guide of mammal remains and our massive intellects. We sort our bones according to their element (which bone of the body it is) and subsequently identify them either by species or by size class when it is ambiguous. Many fragments that come back form the field have been worn or broken to the point where they are unidentifiable, but some still bear tell-tale landmarks that held us to make a definitive ID. We record the element, portion of bone, and species of each identifiable fragment in a notebook to later be entered into the project’s database. Each bag will also be weighed to give a further impression of the actual amount of bone that was recovered from each locus of the site.

So many bones…

What can this field analysis tell us about Eleon? First, we can tell what types of animals were being consumed for food. This could let us infer the social standing of the individuals at the site by seeing if they eating more valued, prestigious animals like cows, or more common food like sheep. Perhaps we could find that higher class individuals were eating more cow in certain time periods and less in others, suggesting differences in levels of social inequality over time. The presence of other remains, such as those of horses, might imply wealth. The general age of animals at the time of their deaths could tell us things about which animals were being consumed for their meat and which animals were being allowed to grow to maturity and used for products such as milk or wool. The state of an animal’s remains could tell us whether they were butchered or if they died of natural causes, whether they were cooked, or if they were scavenged by dogs and other animals after being discarded.
The task of processing the sheer volume of bone that comes in each day has been a little daunting. Our experience at Uvic was based on each of us individually analyzing an assemblage of approximately 350 bone fragments over several weeks, and that number can easily come out of the trenches every day. We also had access to Uvic’s fantastic zooarchaeological reference collection. It’s a bit overwhelming, but I’m loving the experience of being one of the first people to examine these bones while we’re still in the field. It also feels pretty good to have one of the directors call us over to identify a bone while we’re in the trenches. We’re getting better at it every day, too. At this point, I bet we could both identify a dirty, broken and chewed on goat tibia from fifty yards… by smell alone.