Last night, I discovered that Brandy Sours in the Sergeant’s Mess bar are 90c each. Oh dear. Let’s just say I was a bit slow getting going this morning.
Today, it was back to Dreamer’s Bay to do a bit more exploring and survey. Our first stop was a hilltop behind the bay, the Dump Site, which was the site of an excavation by an American university which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty. We found it fairly quickly, and ‘hole’ would perhaps be a more accurate description rather than ‘trench’. Phil Harding would have had a fit if he saw the sloping, zig-zag section. Despite the dreadful quality of the ‘excavation’, it’s pretty obvious that what they had half-dug out is the plunge-pool of a bath-house, so it looks like Dreamer’s Bay had either posh ‘retirement villas’, merchant’s houses and/or administrative buildings on the hill behind the port.
Further down, at the bottom of the hill but set back from the bay, there were bits of stone-work poking out in the scrub, and, like at the water-front, a lot of pottery. Significantly, the pottery here looks a lot more domestic than that on the water-front, and we noticed a lot of African Red-Slip Ware, a high-quality table-ware not dissimilar to Samian Ware, but later in date. It looks like we’ve therefore identified a domestic zone set back from the harbour, perhaps where the inns, brothels and hotels etc. were located. Certainly, there wasn’t much Red-Slip Ware down on the waterfront, with the pottery spreads there mainly consisting of lots and lots of Amphora, large transport pots for wine and oil, and what you would expect to find in an area where warehouses and like are located.
I also did a bit of TV this morning in the form of a brief interview with a journalist from British Forces TV. The video should be up on the internet and some point this week, I’ll post a link when it appears. Then back to the mess for lunch. Chicken pie and chips. Just need a nice shady spot for a snooze now, but suspect that’s not going to happen….
Back on the road again after lunch and a flying visit to the new Akrotiri Environmental Centre, outside the wire and built for the Cypriots by the MoD as an educational facility for local school-kids. The centre overlooks the salt-lake and marshes in the centre of the island, where, in season, flocks of Flamingos gather to feed on the brine-shrimp. Sadly for us it was out of season, but we were more interested in the fact that the place has a lab, stores and a lecture theatre. One for a future blag for the project…
Back to Dreamers Bay and more poking about. More and more archaeology is starting to appear. We’ve found more stone buildings, including one wall with wall-plaster still attached sticking out of the ground, and an eroding sand cliff with the slope littered with brick and burnt limestone. Erosion is clearly the main problem here, and not just the cliffs with the tombs on that we were looking at last week. The harbour area site is sat on very soft mudstone and limestone, under which is a layer of extremely hard basalt. Despite being in the Med, the wind can whip the waves up and they break over the basalt and chew away the soft rock above, taking the archaeology with it.
We did a bit more searching at the area at the bottom of the hill back from the site and noted a lot more African Red-Slip Ware and cooking pottery in the form of frying-pan handles, which are very typically Byzantine. Curiously, the dividing line between the industrial area with its spreads of Amphora and the domestic area with the Red-Slip Ware is the track which leads down to the beach. We’re now beginning to suspect that the track that people use to get to the beach may have originally have been of one of the main roads through the Byzantine port!
As ever, the photos which tie in with today’s blog are on my Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.761143313933142.1073741879.169284376452375&
Tomorrow, we’re going to head back up to the Dump Site, get its location recorded via GPS and tidy up the mess made by the Americans who dug the probable plunge-pool, and maybe straighten out the section and get a photo of it.
Today, it was back to Dreamer’s Bay to do a bit more exploring and survey. Our first stop was a hilltop behind the bay, the Dump Site, which was the site of an excavation by an American university which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty. We found it fairly quickly, and ‘hole’ would perhaps be a more accurate description rather than ‘trench’. Phil Harding would have had a fit if he saw the sloping, zig-zag section. Despite the dreadful quality of the ‘excavation’, it’s pretty obvious that what they had half-dug out is the plunge-pool of a bath-house, so it looks like Dreamer’s Bay had either posh ‘retirement villas’, merchant’s houses and/or administrative buildings on the hill behind the port.
Further down, at the bottom of the hill but set back from the bay, there were bits of stone-work poking out in the scrub, and, like at the water-front, a lot of pottery. Significantly, the pottery here looks a lot more domestic than that on the water-front, and we noticed a lot of African Red-Slip Ware, a high-quality table-ware not dissimilar to Samian Ware, but later in date. It looks like we’ve therefore identified a domestic zone set back from the harbour, perhaps where the inns, brothels and hotels etc. were located. Certainly, there wasn’t much Red-Slip Ware down on the waterfront, with the pottery spreads there mainly consisting of lots and lots of Amphora, large transport pots for wine and oil, and what you would expect to find in an area where warehouses and like are located.
I also did a bit of TV this morning in the form of a brief interview with a journalist from British Forces TV. The video should be up on the internet and some point this week, I’ll post a link when it appears. Then back to the mess for lunch. Chicken pie and chips. Just need a nice shady spot for a snooze now, but suspect that’s not going to happen….
Back on the road again after lunch and a flying visit to the new Akrotiri Environmental Centre, outside the wire and built for the Cypriots by the MoD as an educational facility for local school-kids. The centre overlooks the salt-lake and marshes in the centre of the island, where, in season, flocks of Flamingos gather to feed on the brine-shrimp. Sadly for us it was out of season, but we were more interested in the fact that the place has a lab, stores and a lecture theatre. One for a future blag for the project…
Back to Dreamers Bay and more poking about. More and more archaeology is starting to appear. We’ve found more stone buildings, including one wall with wall-plaster still attached sticking out of the ground, and an eroding sand cliff with the slope littered with brick and burnt limestone. Erosion is clearly the main problem here, and not just the cliffs with the tombs on that we were looking at last week. The harbour area site is sat on very soft mudstone and limestone, under which is a layer of extremely hard basalt. Despite being in the Med, the wind can whip the waves up and they break over the basalt and chew away the soft rock above, taking the archaeology with it.
We did a bit more searching at the area at the bottom of the hill back from the site and noted a lot more African Red-Slip Ware and cooking pottery in the form of frying-pan handles, which are very typically Byzantine. Curiously, the dividing line between the industrial area with its spreads of Amphora and the domestic area with the Red-Slip Ware is the track which leads down to the beach. We’re now beginning to suspect that the track that people use to get to the beach may have originally have been of one of the main roads through the Byzantine port!
As ever, the photos which tie in with today’s blog are on my Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.761143313933142.1073741879.169284376452375&
Tomorrow, we’re going to head back up to the Dump Site, get its location recorded via GPS and tidy up the mess made by the Americans who dug the probable plunge-pool, and maybe straighten out the section and get a photo of it.